She headed south through downtown, and the route brought her within view of the old steel plant, closed since the eighties when Fountain Steel decided it was cheaper to make tubular products elsewhere. Why the town had never gotten around to tearing down that ugly industrial boil, she never understood. It was like they left it alone hoping that someday whatever mechanized processes lay inside would simply start back up of their own accord. The plant and the abandoned middle school had been located precariously close to each other, possibly because some city planner wanted kids to get a good hard look at the best opportunity their town had to offer. Generations of students breathed the air from those stacks, while the plant’s CO2 drifted lazily into the atmosphere.
Where does a girl who’s lost her religion go to find meaning? What replaces the hole that faith, cast off, leaves behind? Until her conversation with Hilde, Stacey had had no conception of how deep and aching this chasm inside herself was. Before that strange confluence of Hilde and Gaia she’d never really considered herself as part of any ecological system, and this came to astonish her later. How people walk through their lives nearly in a coma, unaware of the physical substrate that surrounds them. She considered the nights camping in Mohican with her family, Matt and Patrick getting yelled at for wrestling too close to the fire or throwing each other’s s’mores in the dirt, and later the hiking and camping she would do in Croatia, Lithuania, and Switzerland; Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. The natural world existed for her, as it did for most of the Global North, only as another theme park, a Disneyland. One of the luxuries of modernity was never having to consider how the asphalt from a parking lot could crush soil, disrupt a delicate system, banish a pocket of insects, birds, or small mammals to ruin. Or that this parking lot was merely a microcosm of something far larger and darker: a war on the living biosphere. People call it the Anthropocene, but a much better word for it is the Necrocene—a human-induced geologic age in which profit flows from exploitation and extinction with vast capital accumulation powering yet further devastation in a terminal cycle.
Back in the late 2000s while traveling through Europe, Stacey began to consider the implications of what she’d discovered since casting off her religious delusions. What humanity was doing to the biosphere at the moment—its obsession with the impact of a neutron on uranium or carbon-based fuels or fishing vessels that ripped scars into the ocean floor or its husbandry of every creature down to the honeybee—this fascination, this plunder, it could not last long. This dawning realization floated on the margins of literature. From Eggers’s What Is the What to Adichie’s Americanah to Collins’s Hunger Games, modern authors had internalized it even if they weren’t writing directly about it: the profound catastrophe the planet was undergoing.
She wanted badly to write about this. How humanity had created this overflow of prodigious breeders, masters, killers, and artists. How its narcissism could produce deities, literature, destruction, and dogma. How it nevertheless occasionally conjured fierce, unfathomably deep love. It made Lisa even more beloved in her mind and memory, raised her to the level of a prophet. What kind of seventeen-year-old picks up Gaia? Or for that matter reads about simulation theory or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting? Stacey hadn’t caught up to Lisa intellectually until she was in her midtwenties, at which point she could only jealously marvel at her long lost friend. She’d known Lisa was more creative, aware, and curious than the next seven hundred people at their school combined, but it wasn’t until many years later that the hidden depths of her friend’s interior life came to shock her. There were only a handful of Lisa’s margin notes in Gaia, but one of them stood out. In his epilogue, Lovelock asks the reader to consider the human sense of beauty, “those complex feelings of pleasure, recognition, and fulfillment, of wonder, excitement, and yearning, which fill us when we see, feel, smell, or hear whatever heightens our self-awareness and at the same time deepens our perception of the true nature of things.” Beside this, Lisa had written, simply, the same quote she’d stuck on her locker and tacked above her desk back home: I Loved You At Your Darkest.
As the steel plant receded from view, and she took a shortcut down an alley, Stacey considered for the thousandth time that her preoccupations as a writer, a thinker, a consciousness, were simply a nebulous extension of Lisa Han’s.
Steam hissed from a manhole cover, electric lines hung like jungle vines, and the Lincoln’s dingy plastic sign came into view. Someone who agreed with Jonah had slapped a WRONG WAY sticker with the Obama logo on the stop sign at the end of the sweaty alley. Emerging onto the street, she saw a man standing hunched over the passenger window of an idling car. He too was familiar.
During their senior year together, she and Lisa grew so close that their other friendships ceased to exist. Lisa in particular had come to truly loathe her Elmwood friends, although that started back in sophomore year when Hailey Kowalczyk began dating Curt Moretti, the quarterback, and a friend of Stacey’s brother Matt. He was a tall, truly stupid kid with a scimitar nose, hoop earrings, and one of those awful haircuts where the sides are shaved and his dark blond sat on the top of his skull like an oversized yarmulke.
Lisa tried to elucidate the falling-out for her once while they sat on a picnic table out by the softball field. It was the first unseasonably warm day of 2004. Casablanca, Halloween, Hell House, Thanksgiving, and Christmas break had all come and gone. Graduation loomed. Stacey had made the melancholy choice of Wittenberg University in Springfield. Lisa was still deciding between three or four schools. They could feel the road about to fork, and at first she thought this was what was bothering Lisa, but that turned out to be wrong.
“So Hailey lost her virginity to Curt Moretti? So what?” Stacey wondered. Not that she was advocating Lisa again become friends with the girl she called “Triple Threat.”
“Danny’s been my friend since we were little kids,” she said defensively. “Hailey knew how much he adored her even while she was getting it on with Moretti. And I told her, ‘Look, bitch, one day Danny’s going to put on a little muscle, he’s going to finally be able to grow facial hair, he’ll get a better pair of glasses, and he’s going to be killing it at like Cornell because the kid reads more than a librarian, and you’re going to have Curtis fucking Moretti’s little rat-faced teen mom baby to take care of.’ ”
Skinny and pale with freckles and a scrub of Irish-red hair, Dan Eaton was a sweet-natured kid—kind to the point where he could get trampled, even by his friends. The worst-kept secret of their class was that Danny Eaton had been in love—obsessed might be a better word—with Hailey for as long as he’d known her. Their junior year he’d finally, at long last, worn Hailey down, and they could be spotted in the halls, Dan doting. When Stacey heard he’d decided on the military over college, she was baffled: he’d worked so long to win her. Then to go put it all on the line in the very real stare-into-the-void sense of foreign military adventures—hard-won love wasn’t worth that kind of risk.
“But so what? She dates Dan now,” said Stacey. “She listened to you.”
Lisa bit the sleeve of her sweatshirt and stared out over the rain-spattered grass. A morning fog had settled over the fields like their town was passing through the clouds. Lisa spit between her feet and at least appeared to think about this.