Michelle and Kyle sat on the sectional sofa in his North Hollywood one bedroom, packages from In-N-Out Burger nestled in their arms, the greasy steam opening the pores in their faces like a trash facial. They put french fries into their mouths and watched the world fall apart. Kyle had cable and a better TV and Michelle could now see how blue the skies were, how brightly the flames curled out from buildings, like solar flares shooting off the surface of the sun. The people leaping from high dark windows were people, not pixels. They sat and watched and watched. Eventually, they shut it off. They agreed that it was too much, it had been on for hours and the networks were just milking everyone’s anxiety, it was sick — there was nothing new to show but they were desperate to keep us there, watching.
Michelle was hooked. One newscaster, stationed in Geneva, kept promising that some buildings were about to blow up and Michelle wanted to see it happen. She knew that there was something really wrong with her desire to keep watching. She was in the grips of a detached fascination. She wanted the images on the television to wear her down so she could truly feel whatever it felt like to truly feel what was happening. Surely this alarmed, rubbernecking interest was not what she should be feeling. She was supposed to be feeling something a few layers down, something authentic and meaningful. Michelle feared she was not having an authentic experience of the beginning of the end of the world. She was having a deeply authentic experience of inauthenticity.
The shots of New York City had rattled her the most. It was hard matching up the city she’d visited so many times with this chaotic landscape of rolling debris clouds and screaming, scorched humans. It was like watching Blade Runner and looking for Los Angeles. New York was like one of those asteroid-hits-earth films. Kyle poked at the remote, finally settling on a film about a plucky lady alcoholic who gets sent to rehab and eventually comes to understand that she truly is an alcoholic, and then she finds love — real, sober-person love — and she dumps her British party-man boyfriend to be with her new recovery soul mate. When it was very late, Michelle was scared to go to sleep, to leave Kyle awake on the sectional. He had such problems with anxiety and Michelle was sure he would sit up all night in front of the plasma television, watching suicides and having panic attacks. Which is exactly what he did.
10
Michelle slept deeply the night she learned the world was ending. She’d feared long hours tossing and turning, humming with disbelief, the news shows rolling through her mind, images of buildings already tumbling. She was sure her fear of a nearby, immediate catastrophe would keep her uselessly alert. What would prevent anyone from beginning the inevitable destruction of Los Angeles tonight? She considered lunatics, the barely hinged madmen and madwomen clutching at their slipping sanity with sweat-greased fingers. Why should they hold on any longer? Maybe the earth itself would awaken to the diabolical plotting of the human race and shake them off its back. Anything seemed possible that night, and Michelle felt herself an impotent sentry on the lookout for nothing she could control, fretting away the darkened hours. She worried about Kyle and his nerves, his mind lit with horror, anxious thoughts careening like pinballs — metallic, smacked with flippers, a panic multiball, image after image zooming out from a consciousness cramped with the effort of flinging them away.
But Michelle slept. She’d waited for her mind to engage the gears of panic, but instead she began to dream.
Michelle dreamed of a boy. In the dream she walked alongside him in a great garden. His arm was wound around her waist and with each step they took her hip rubbed against his. In sync, they curved around a path that brought them by tall, wiry stalks of echinacea, their purple petals peeled back in submission to the sun. Their ankles rolled as they navigated the cobblestones in fancy shoes: hers bright as a child’s toy with plastic chains and shining strips of leather, his delicately soled, the leather a carpaccio, slippers really, to be worn climbing in and out of fairy-tale carriages. Michelle enjoyed the sight of their shoes shuffling in unison through the garden. They paused beside a bush of angel’s-trumpets and huffed the waxy horn of each dangling blossom. They rubbed the fuzz of the kangaroo paw, were dazzled by the new-wavy hue of the sticks on fire, Euphorbia tirucalli. The boy spoke and Michelle thought, I’m Euphorbic! — so blissed out and goofy her observing self wondered what she was on.
In her dream the boy knew the name of every plant. In her dream Michelle understood Latin, the noble, ancient music of it making sense. A receptor in her mind was activated and in an instant she felt an understanding of all languages! Understood that she had always known them! Her mind was a hive of words. A rush of excitement washed over her. She turned back to the boy, who was more beautiful than all the flowers, more aesthetically pleasing than the water fountain with its patinous bronze, than the curve of the cobblestones, the stitching of their fancy shoes. His voice, speaking Latin, was sweeter than the water’s splash and trickle, the patter of their feet upon the stone.
Oh, Michelle felt so romantic! The boy pulled her closer and together they made fun of the docent leading the tour, a woman who didn’t know the Latin words for anything, who hadn’t discovered that she could speak Latin or Spanish or Swahili if only she flexed that part of her brain. Michelle and the boy whispered to each other in a succession of languages, their minds’ potential illuminated. The boy’s shirt was slashed as if it had survived a knife fight and Michelle’s pants were too tight. The energy between them flashed from pure to sleazy, they pecked each other’s cheeks and restrained themselves from groping. Michelle bit back her desire to slip her hand through the gash in his shirt, to press her ass against him. I’m your Eurotrash boyfriend, he murmured in Castilian Spanish. Their love expanded as they expressed it in Norwegian, German, Italian. So many nuanced words! Different kinds of words for different kinds of love and Michelle felt them all — sad love, inspired love, hopeless love, affectionate love, friendly love, desperate love, passionate love, murderous love, respectful love, platonic love, forbidden love, trashy love, sacred love, holy love. Michelle’s heart felt full and drooping as the blowsiest rose in the garden. The boy’s attentions buzzed inside it. She was so open to him, she shed pollen on the cobblestones.
The boy did not like how the designer of this garden had deliberately starved certain plants of water so that their stressed-out leaves would turn a more pleasing color. Neither of them liked how the designer had employed a worker to pluck every other leaf from the canopy of trees arcing above them so that the light filtering through the branches would be dappled just so. What A Control Freak, Michelle said, in French, just to hear the chic sound of it sliding from her mouth. She was concerned for the worker charged with this duty, imagined him a Mexican man struggling on a ladder, earning minimum wage, slowly losing his mind as he scanned the boughs — pluck a leaf, leave a leaf, pluck a leaf, leave a leaf — the cancerous sun mutating his body. His body, Michelle imagined, would be heavy, would wear coveralls, a navy blue jumpsuit sewn from stiff fabric. She thought she would maybe write a story about him, this man who plucked leaves in service to a megalomaniacal garden designer. She shared her inspiration with the boy, who gave her waist a squeeze.
I want to know your work, he told her in Armenian. I want to become familiar with your praxis. His hands, tipped with slender fingers, gestured out from his chest as he spoke, as if his desire were a gift he offered from his heart. Michelle didn’t know what praxis was, but she felt elated that the boy believed she had it, was dizzy with his desire to become familiar with it.