The World Is Over, Michelle nearly cried. Why Did This Take So Long?
We weren’t ready, the person said. We’re still not.
Where Are You Right Now? Michelle asked.
In the suburbs. I go to college. I’m a little awkward. I just cut my hair and I still have dreams that I can’t get it all into a scrunchie.
Michelle laughed. I live in a bookstore, she said. I sleep on the floor. I’m ninety-seven days sober.
Congratulations, the person kissed her nose, leaving a droplet of salt. They kissed some more, their mouths tangy with the ocean. Michelle could feel the fish swimming inside her. She cupped the little wave of her belly.
It’s Yours. They both knew it, but Michelle wanted to say it. The person kissed her harder.
Of course.
What Should We Name It?
Luciferin, she said. Aequorin. Fireflies and jellyfish. Did you know that bioluminescence is the most common form of communication on earth? When the world explodes we’ll become light. She kissed Michelle like it was their last kiss and their first. She kissed Michelle like she was about to wake up. The kiss was the kiss that redeemed their earthly lives, the kiss was what everything was leading up to. Every bad and good thing Michelle had ever done was perfect and right, for it had led her to that kiss. With that kiss Michelle’s life would have finally begun, if it hadn’t already been over. All of this information was inscribed in the kiss, their story was petroglyphs marking the caves of their mouths and together they read. Together they drank the sea and pulsed with light.
Michelle woke up in a pile of pillows, the ocean streaming from her eyes.
27
On the last day of earth, the morning sun was high and bright. Michelle pulled open the blinds that she normally kept low to keep the LA glare from bleaching the books. The sun blasted the shadows. The bookstore looked lovely, her heap of pillows cozy in the sci-fi corner. Books and books and more books scattered on the floor, hanging from shelves. Michelle hadn’t cleaned it one bit since acquiring the place, she liked watching entropy have its way, the accumulation of dust and cobwebs, haze on the glass, the books’ journey as they were knocked around the store. Michelle wondered what she would read on the last day on earth. She made the real coffee she’d gotten off Walter, wonderful Walter. She was thrilled that Kyle was leaving the planet in a better style than he’d arrived. Michelle lit a Nat Sherman and let the coffee spring to life inside her.
She thought of everything. She thought of Chelsea and the dirt and the cigarette smoke and the public pools — the tough, mean kids in all their tough, mean glamour. She thought of her mother Wendy, earnestly learning to be a nurse, hunched over books with her pen in one hand and an ashtray, and Kym, a tangle inside, stifled desire making her sensitive to all the earth’s vibrations.
She thought about little Kyle, clogging about with his feet in a pair of their moms’ heeled boots. She thought of being a teenager and the toxic stink of hair bleach, the burn of it on her head, lining her face with eyeliner, the panic of getting it wrong and having to start over, the deep satisfaction of teasing her hair, combing it backward so that it sat hugely on her head, walking out into the world like that — and so what if the world hadn’t responded very positively, Michelle knew she looked awesome and she was grateful for that, there on that day in the bookstore, she was grateful that she always trusted in herself above everyone else, in spite of everything else, she always moved into her destiny with excitement and bravery — yes, she realized, lighting a Nat Sherman off a Nat Sherman. It had been brave of her to be who she was in her life and it had been exciting, even the worst of it. Even the foolishness, the things that hadn’t happened and more so the things that she’d allowed to happen, all of it. The eight years with Lu, the utter loss of love and then the rebuilding that happens, the architecture of your heart reconstructed to welcome a very different type of creature.
Michelle remembered the person from her dream last night, could still feel their fish in her belly. She was glad the Internet was gone or else she’d spend the whole last day on earth trying to find her, and it was better this way. She knew the person was loving her somewhere and Michelle was loving her, too. Soon they would be light.
Michelle sat at the kiosk before her laptop. She could, after all, write only the stories she was meant to write. She could write nothing more than that, nothing more or less perfect. As it turned out, time could not be wasted and everything had happened perfectly to deliver her to this moment, alone in her bookstore, lighting cigarettes off cigarettes. She loved only in the way she was built to love, and she had loved the people she had meant to. She hadn’t been worthy of Andy, but she had loved her. She had loved Lu, for many years she had loved her. And all the brief people, many of whom hardly deserved it, she had loved them, too. At the end of the world, Michelle regretted none of it. She hoped they had all loved her, too. She wished that she had loved them even more.
Michelle opened a blank document. She imagined a girl whose openness to everything was its own current, pushing her into life. She remembered the feelings of love and drugs sickening her body, and felt tender toward the experience even as she was glad it was over. She felt the same about the doomed world itself, an impossible tenderness that did not blunt her relief that it was all going to end soon. She began to type.
Michelle wasn’t sure when everyone started hanging out at the Albion.
She could almost smell the dank, yeasty stink of the old red bar. She typed. The sun arced across the sky, creating an installation of light and shadows as it burned through the store. She kept her motion across the keyboard, like the sun outside the windows, she arced. The sun sank and Michelle kept typing, saying goodbye to the sun and then taking it back because the sun would not be going anywhere. Tomorrow the sun would be here, wherever that was, and its roll and spin would be as it was today. Michelle shed a tear for the sun, the poor demonized sun the humans had run from when it only wanted to shine and bring warmth, she hoped there was another people somewhere feeling its happy glow.
Michelle’s story, stanched for so long, came quickly and clearly, page after page it came, the story of Michelle and her tiny life made big, her blunders and foolishness made human, sometimes noble, her struggles redeemed, momentarily, and her love. That Michelle was the kind of person who loved felt good in those moments of writing. Michelle’s fingers bounced against the keys like hail. She banged the story of her life into the computer, telling it until the words before her vanished and the very world around her was gone.
Acknowledgments
Much gratitude to the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Center for Cultural Innovation for their support of this project. Many thanks to Ali Liebegott and Beth Pickens for their work in creating the Radar LAB Writing Retreat, where the majority of this book was created. Thanks also to my writer roommates that first year; your excellent creative vibes are in this book: Lucy Corin, Nicole J. Georges, Thomas McBee, Sara Seinberg, and Myriam Gurba. For early reading and support I again thank Ali and Beth as well as Tara Jepsen, Amanda Verwey, Daniel Handler, Eileen Myles, and Emer Martin. The humblest of thanks to Dia Felix, Rocco Kayiatos, Bretton Fosbrook, Cari Campbell, Sash Sunday, and Sini Anderson. Thank you, Laura Mulley. Thanks to Lindsay Edgecombe for her daily wonderful support. And thanks to Jennifer Baumgardner, whose enthusiasm for this project from day one has been incredible. Much thanks to Jennifer, to Kait Heacock, Lauren Hook, Suki Boynton, and the entire Feminist Press team for their amazing vision, care, and work on this. I could not have hoped for a better home for this book.