Chapter Five:Shattered Bodies[content warning: death, animal death, suicide, transphobia, transmisogyny, derealization, depersonalization, psychosis, substance use, sexual violence]

  “You remember dying?” Sophia asks, fingers tightening on one of her books. Didn’t even look which one it was when she picked it up. The anxious habit of hers is endearing in its bare vulnerability.

  “Kinda,” says Ivy/Empty. Hollow echo reverberating around in her head, echoes the dream she woke from, staring at tobacco stains on her fingertips. Sometimes she gets too dehydrated and the skin peels like a tiny leaf. There are still sandy brown nicotine stains on the living room ceiling even though no one’s smoked inside for over a year; these things stay around. “Not really? It’s confusing to me. Since I’ve been doing therapy, every time I do robo or shrooms I get weird memories. From the bnk parts in my life. They come back in dreams, sometimes in pce of dreams.”

  Sophia is watching her so attentively that it makes Ivy/Empty feel guilty. She’s supposed to be the one paying attention to others, not the focal point. “But I’m starting to get a little suspicious of them. Like, my therapist pointed out that most of them are filled with these persecution complexes, right? The only things I solidly remember are my childhood and things starting in like 2013 or so, when I was living in San Francisco with this awful manchild. The rest of it is all confused and tangled up and there’s a lot of really weird stuff in there. It’s really impusible stuff. People make things up, even to themselves.”

  The silence that follows grows too heavy, the rain outside rattling against the sidewalk pavement just to emphasize it, so Ivy/Empty keeps talking to push it away. “So the thing I keep wondering is, is any of it real? Did any of that really happen? Or did I just seriously repress the memories of that portion of my life, which is like a decade, or just lose it all due to brain damage or something? Are the memories I do have reflections of some truth? Like if I remember dying, obviously that didn’t happen.”

  “Is that obvious? People have near-death experiences. Something like being shot at and losing a partner, that could easily cause brain trauma.”

  Then where are the scars? Sophia must be getting something out of this. It shouldn’t make Ivy/Empty so distrustful to be so trusted. She just doesn’t trust herself this much.

  “Maybe. I guess also, I don’t really want it to be real. Most of the stuff I remember is really messed up stuff. And it’s supposed to give me a sense of self, I guess, but it doesn’t really. Actually it causes an identity crisis. Every time I think I have a solid self then I remember something new and I lose track of who I am. Because what am I supposed to make of the contradictions?”

  “You might have had a very strange life,” Sophia says. “It happens. Maybe people don’t expect it to happen, maybe most people experience a simple life that they can expin and justify in simple ways. Having known you, I doubt that’s your experience. You don’t seem like a very simple person to me.”

  “But my therapist says—”

  “Look, I’m not going to tell you that your therapist is wrong.” She sighs, looks down at the pavement still glistening wet after the rain. They’re taking what was supposed to be a little walk down to the corner store, then they kept on, down Barrett past the strangely soft outlines of the brick Social Security building, past the brightly adorned Buddhist Temple that offers delicious free meals to anyone who shows up on Sunday mornings, past a man wandering into traffic shouting at passing cars and invisible cars. “I’m just saying, don’t make preconceptions yet. Hold open the door for whatever happens.”

  “I guess maybe some of it is real. I don’t think, like, the conspiracy parts, though. The stuff about, like being part of some big organization, doing experiments.”

  “So if it’s not real, what’s it trying to tell you?”

  Wandering past signs, signs everywhere. Lease Now. We Flip Houses. She fishes out the new pack of L&Ms from the pocket of the bck hoodie, peels the cellophane. “What do you mean?”

  “What’s the allegory? What’s being communicated?”

  WE BUY DIABETES STRIPS. “I’m not sure. I guess, something about how I feel drawn in by and trapped by society. That I’m being controlled.” Invest Now.

  “Maybe you did have some traumatic experiences, and your brain doesn’t want to accept it. So it’s supplying you with fantastical narratives. Remember st winter when I had that really weird breakdown?”

  “Where you thought you were the reincarnation of Ho Chi Minh?”

  Sophia ughs awkwardly, blushing. “Yeah, that was insane. Like, I was going actually crazy. At the same time, though, there was some real stuff going on there, about being from like a campus Marxist-Leninist-Maoist background when I first got here and how that made me feel like a fake anarchist compared with you all.”

  Ivy/Empty nods. Makes sense. She hadn’t really thought about the etiology.

  Sophia continues, “So that’s all I’m saying. Think about how, like, there’s resonances. There’s meaning in what you experience, no matter what.”

  “Now that’s a terrifying thought. I experience a lot of things.”

  “Yes, and it’s all meaningful. Meaning can be terrifying. It’s worth it anyway.”

  Ivy/Empty knows she needs to take some time alone to sort out her thoughts but the idea of doing so has been terrifying her. She’s terrified of herself, of what she might find in her thoughts, in her memories. They come at her and feel more real than the present.

  “Not to sound like a cliché, but, well, have you tried meditating?”

  “I was just thinking about meditating,” says Ivy/Empty, ughing. “I mean, honestly, I’m worried it’s going to make things worse. I had a schizophrenic friend who said she can’t meditate because she starts experiencing hallucinations and psychosis. And I’m worried that my, like, schizoaffective or whatever it is, I haven’t been officially diagnosed yet, is just going to get a lot worse.”

  “Well, have you had that type of experience before?”

  Ivy/Empty sighs again. The cigarette’s almost gone so she takes a final drag and crushes the butt underfoot. She grabs the bag of spicy pepitas, salty enough she can actually taste it past the deadening of her nerves, the smoke scarring on her tongue. She has to hold back the desire to end the conversation. To say it’s not worth it. That’s what she would have done years ago. When she and Felicity—no, Eff—used to run around going to parties, there was always some other girl who wanted to help you, wanted to mother you, until she didn’t. Techies who wanted to py savior to the street kids. Pop psychology enthusiasts. That witchy cis girl she lived with in Santa Cruz, always wanting to figure out how to fix her and where did that end? Easier to just get high. Maybe you let her feel like she’s done something for you so you can talk about your problems just enough to get a free meal or two or even a pce to stay for a little while. Walk in the seafoam trying not to think about the rumors and the other victims.

  “A few years ago, I used to do yoga. And a lot of bad memories started to come up for me. That was really about the time where all of this began. Like, I was just carrying along with life and then I started to remember a whole lot of stuff I had been, uh, taking the effort to forget. And then I met Eff, who eventually led me here, so I guess it was a good time in my life, in a way. Or it was a good decision.”

  The salt is grounding, the crunch of the seeds between her teeth. The solid concrete underfoot. The constructed nature of the city doesn’t make it any less real. Richmond feels like a space station, a familiar loop she can walk around with the void of the world swirling off beyond. Just don’t go too far.

  “And every time it happens, it shakes up your sense of self.”

  “Very severely. I mean, I’m literally two people right now.”

  “Yeah, you wanna talk about that? You’ve been dealing with that for over a month. I’ll be honest, I have familiarity with plurality and I don’t know which one is Ivy and which one is Empty.”

  “That’s because its usually both of us fronting. You know, a funny thing is, I have this, like, memory, of being one person in two bodies. Being married to myself, in two bodies.”

  “Well, at least it’s not very hard to figure out what you’re processing there.”

  “Ivy is the person I’ve been the past few years. Empty is, like, a pceholder for the other parts of me, where nothing is yet solid. So in a way they’re the same person. In a way Ivy is more real. And in a way, Empty is.”

  Sophia bites her lips, her eyes darting around. She’s always searching for just the right thing to say. It’s cute how much effort she puts into being understanding.

  “Is this, I don’t know, useful to you? Is it helpful to have this division?”

  “It’s something that’s real to me. I used to spend a lot of my life not understanding things and seeking guidance and validation from others. So, I don’t have a lot of solidity to stand on. I have a lot of really crazy thoughts about what the world is and what’s going on in it. And that manifests however it manifests. Maybe I have a lot of made-up fictional memories that are a way of navigating how I see the world. Maybe, and I think this is probably more horrifying, there is some reality to the things I remember and how I see the world is a result of those realities. Either way, I have the authority to say something about myself, to say there’s this fundamental breakdown in my identity, a sense of self that I’m working with, but also, separate from that, a cavity I’m working with.”

  “You feel like your self-understanding is what you have sovereignty over? It’s what you have control of?”

  The sidewalk is still familiar. She’s been here before, on other walks. She recognizes the patterns of splotches and cracks, the way fences lean to and fro. And she can tell what makes her feel so uncomfortable. It’s not just diving into her own experiences. That’s something she’s gotten more and more used to in therapy. It’s the way Sophia is diving in, the way she wants to know. She’s a few years younger, in her mid twenties, and in some way much more innocent and much less scared than a lot of the trans women of Ivy/Empty’s age. Sophia’s seen suffering, sure. There’s still something burning behind her eyes, a vision of utopia she’s looking for in the others. There’s something she’s trying to find in Ivy/Empty, maybe something she’s trying to fix. Some mistake she’s trying to undo. Something she’s trying to dig out. Ivy wants to grab her and scream it’s not worth it, just go find someone else. It’s obvious that, for some reason, out of everyone at the house Sophia has a crush on Ivy/Empty. Empty wants to ugh. Why? When Eff is there, sexy and self-confident and all together. And Nylon, a self-possessed punk ready to face the world. And Emiko, who actually has her life together, who has a sense of fashion and a keen awareness of other people. Why fall for the mess?

  “My experience is guided and shaped by the world around me but it is also something I have understanding of and authority over.”

  Sophia nods. “This is also, how do I put this? This resonates a lot with trans experience, right? Like what’s more about being trans than to say, I have the capacity to name something about my life, right?”

  “I guess. Yeah, actually, to some degree that makes sense. I guess for myself, my initial experience of being trans was so heavily affected by assimiting, by trying to be some kinda straight trans girl. It was the Bush years, it was long before anything like the current trans movement, and it seemed like all I was trying to do was to figure out how to hide in a structure that would fit me. Some kind of self that I was supposed to be. And now I’m just stuck being that person. And it sucks.”

  “Are you? Stuck being that person, I mean? I wanna put forward an idea for you: transgender means nothing. Being trans means nothing. These are cultural categories, empty signifiers. This is a household full of transgender people, but what actually unites us is basically nothing but the fluidity of experience and life itself. It seems like you’ve had a very fluid and disrupted life, yet you’re fixated again and again on the idea of what you yourself are. You can be whatever you are. The door didn’t close when you came out, or got on hormones, or got surgery, or came out as a lesbian. The door didn’t close when you came here, when you picked the name ‘Ivy’ for yourself, or when you said what you just said. The door has always been open and will always be open. Life is a full of possibility and that never turns off. You might slide into a slipstream of identity for a moment but eventually the chaos will win and turbulence will take over and you’ll be tumbling again, tumbling and falling. Learn to live with that, learn to love that. You’ve got this tool, this way to say, I am this and also not this, which is your identity, identities, your multiplicity, plurality, your confusion, your amnesia. Have you ever read Sughterhouse-Five?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You should. You’re like that character, you’re unstuck in time. Because you’ve also undergone a great trauma, and you’re now struggling with the real questions, the questions that always concern sentient beings who have seen past some of the illusion. You’re asking, who and why and what, about everything. At the same time, it’s completely open. Nothing is predetermined.”

  There’s a dead animal stuck to the sidewalk. It’s long rotted, only fur and bones caked onto concrete. A shattered body slick with rainwater. It could be an opossum, or a skunk, or something else. Ivy/Empty stops. Walk along the sidewalk long enough and you encounter a body. Cars on one side, wns soaked in pesticides on the other. Her throat is dry.

  “Don’t you think, if I’m stuck in time, that this means the future is extremely determined? Cuz fuck, if I remember the future, it’s entirely determined.”

  The sidewalk bending back around to deliver her at the body. It’s been here a long time. She doesn’t want to turn her back on it. Slowly she steps backward, facing the thing. It’s a little insane to treat a tragedy as a sign. Right now she’s terrified of the damn thing, like it’s an opening anything could come crawling through. Those little vertebrae, quivering bck hairs. Entering her through the eyes, turning into droplets of doom inside.

  “You were just saying you’re not sure if you remember the past, now you’re sure about the future?” Sophia’s voice so soft, a practiced softness. She had to work for that, had to fight for it.

  “I’m not sure about anything.” She doesn’t seem to be reacting to the thing on the ground. Bones and fur, they seem to be vibrating. Shimmering as more hair and bones crawl out of the center like ants from a hole. Can’t she see it? “It feels like fate is guiding my hand.”

  “Is that a good feeling?”

  Deep sounds, semi engines. Electricity humming in high voltage wires. Errant microwaves. We Flip Houses. There’s a ghost there, seeing her. Shadows watching from the underpass. This is, at best, an omen. “No, not at all. Fate is malevolent toward me. Horrible things have happened and I’m filled with dread toward the future.”

  “Then maybe fate is something you’re trying to defeat. Maybe fate is your enemy.”

  They’re far enough now that they’ve reached a corner. Ivy/Empty wets her lips then slips off perpendicur. She can feel the hot wind coming off the dead thing. It seemed rger when st she saw it, billowing out and wavering like a mirage. Now it’s in the sky.

  “How can I defeat the thing that predetermines every one of my actions and thoughts, every element of my selfhood? It’s like I’m a character in a movie struggling against the writer, against the scripted lines. It’s impossible.”

  “Maybe you and fate, that great writer, are both part of something far more vast and you’re struggling with each other, wrestling, like Jacob and the angel, trying to get outside of something much greater. Trying to change something.”

  “What are we trying to change?”

  “You tell me.” Like Sophia wants her to be the main character. Maybe she’s addicted to observing the struggling.

  “Maybe just the horror of it all.”

  When that night Ivy/Empty is finally able to sink into a deeper sleep, she wakes into a dream of Ellie and Ellie, living in a tent in some unincorporated Bureau of Land Management desert shrubbery, waxy gray-green leaves like pstic, watching a scorpion crawl across the ground in the faint luminosity of the sky after sunset. Moonrise and everything glows radium green. The rain fell this day and it vanished into the dryness of the air before it reached the parched world. There is another scorpion, on the other side of a cluster of gumweed, walking in parallel, and they do not meet.

  “Are we the same person?” Ellie asks.

  “I don’t know,” Ellie says.

  “Which one of us is which?” Ellie asks. Sutures on the surface.

  “I don’t know. I love you.” Their eyes are adjusted to the darkness of the night and the brightness of the moon. Far from artificial light the full moon is like a secret sun. If the other pnets could be closer they would have their own secret realities to unveil. Rings could descend to the Earth’s surface to bind everyone in frozen torment. Hot gases could fme iridescent rainbows across the sky and break the chains of giants. “My memory is all scrambled. I think they were trying to do something. We let him take charge, we did what we weren’t supposed to, trying to see what we can’t see. When he died we were left in it. No more haloperidol.”

  “It was already happening, though, before that. In our time at the Institute, we only experienced love from each other. And we become bound to each other.”

  “When I arrived, I had no strong sense of identity. I remember arriving twice, as Ellie and Helen. One of those memories is false, but I don’t know which one. I don’t know how to sort out scars from scars.”

  “That was a pce for damned people. We escaped.”

  “We lived.”

  “I wouldn’t know who I am without you. At the same time, I wouldn’t be any different.”

  “Do you want to be like this?”

  “I couldn’t be any other way.”

  The scorpions are beautiful. They move with careful intention, each little leg rising and falling. How long can they carry on just for the living of it? Some species live even longer than humans and show no external sign of contending with mortal dread. Yet even among scorpions, don’t they pause and wonder? It would take a Cartesian sadist to ignore the plight of the little creatures.

  Everything survives, until it doesn’t. This is time.

  “I couldn’t be any other way either.”

  *****

  Sex sounds sometimes carry through the floor from the room where Houndstooth and their fuckbuddy are pounding the mattress against the wall. Probably jealous, Piper is withdrawn, irritated, reactive. For weeks she’s been distant, not always responding to questions. She stares at others with wide eyes full of fear and says nothing’s wrong. She tried to get a job working at a makeup store. They were enthusiastic about her application, visibly uncomfortable when she showed up in person.

  “Why do you care?” asks Nails. “We’ve got enough food.”

  “Because I don’t just wanna sit around all day pying video games or pretending I’m some kind of radical. Don't you think people here should try to get their life together more?”

  “Why?” replies Nails.

  “Like, don’t you have any self-respect? You can't just live like this!”

  “Hey, they're giving you a pce to stay, why are you compining?”

  Exasperated, Piper colpses back onto her mattress, one eye still without eyeshadow. “I appreciate that, I really do. All the more reason to try to encourage people to get their life together.”

  “Why do you say they’re pretending to be radical?” Lilly asks. “It’s important, what they’re doing.”

  “Is it? It’s cool that it gives them a purpose. It’s just… you’re never going to, like, defeat the government. You’re not going to liberate a city, let alone a country or the world. At a certain point you have to get realistic. It would be one thing if they were campaigning for politicians or doing some kind of nonprofit work. I get that, like, that’s super liberal or whatever. It also achieves real results, real differences in the lives of people.”

  “You don’t think what they do helps people? Look at this pce—you’re living here.” Lilly realizes she’s getting a little loud and pinches her forearm to make herself calm down. She’s feeling defensive.

  “I know. It’s just that anyone could do that. People here have so much potential. I don’t want to get trapped in this kind of cycle of doing nothing. I want to be seen as someone who’s not a loser.”

  “Seen by who?” asks Nails.

  “I don’t know. Someone who matters.”

  “Who matters?”

  “I don’t know.”

  When Lilly sees Scatter leaving she asks if she can join and so it happens that a few hours they end up on another meandering walk through the city, holding a paper sack full of seeds Scatter’s friend stole from Home Depot until he returns with his DIY electric bike to take them to a secret community garden hidden in the shell of a burned-out community center. Lilly is trying to convey the distress she feels about Piper. Scatter keeps ughing it off.

  “It’s like she’s looking for some kind of authority to approve of her!”

  “That’s the world she comes from,” says Scatter.

  Lilly frowns. The kind of response she would have expected from Nails. It makes her feel isoted. Haunted by the specter of authority. Her mind’s eye sees policemen everywhere, mounted on bicycles, motorcycles, horses, in squad cars, in SWAT vehicles, in helicopters, B-52 bombers, zeppelins, gunboats, galleons, riding dragons and computer viruses. It’s just stress, manifested in the officer watching her from the street corner. I know I look suspicious. Why can’t we just go to war and get this over with?

  I would die.

  “What should I do about it? I—I want to be helpful. I want to py my part. What should I be doing?”

  “Look at this,” Scatter says with a grimace to an imaginary audience, “she's asking me what to do. Like I know.”

  “You’re so wise. I’m not like you, I’m not made for this life.”

  That irritates her, the exact opposite of Lilly’s intention. “No one was made for this. This is just what happened to us. You think I want to live my life always fighting to survive? I have my own dreams. We all do. You have to figure out what you’re going to do to help. That’s what makes us different from those fucking things.” So she’s also aware of the cop watching the two of them. 9mm, standard issue. White man, brown eyes, dirty blond hair, maybe in his thirties. Lilly wishes she could stare through his forehead, bore a hole into his mind, figure out what went so wrong. Could the right care as a child have saved you from becoming this thing? Taken to a camp, introduced to empathy? Conversion therapy for all the wannabe gestapo.

  Shoes dangling from the powerlines overhead. A memorial on the side of the road, flowers and candles offered on the sidewalk. The cops came and removed it st week and now it’s back.

  “You’ve got a lot on your mind,” Scatter says.

  “Haven’t things felt more tense recently?”

  “No.” Scatter ughs again. “I have a horrible sense of stuff like that. When things are and aren’t tense. The atmosphere of the situation. I’m totally disconnected from it. It means half the time I’m lucky and half the time I’m unlucky. I’m never where I need to be when I need to be there.”

  They continue on, Lilly falling back a little to trace out her mind in the asphalt cracks, abandoned needles, fliers for house shows. DJ TILTAGURL. Vegan fundraiser.

  A dead animal on the sidewalk. Something long weathered, just grayed bck fur and sunbleached bone. It’s familiar.

  “Wait—didn't we already walk past here?”

  “Oh yeah, shit, must've gone in a circle,” Scatter shrugs. “You get so used to the parts of this city that are blocks you can get confused at the weird angles when they show up.”

  Lilly looks around at the tangle of skewed intersections. Foothill and 14th. Even though she could have sworn they were walking in a straight line, she was probably just too engrossed in the conversation to notice the turns.

  With a tap on the arm Scatter mumbles, “Five-oh, let’s keep going.” Out of the corner of her eye Lilly sees the cop from before idly approaching them. Like something out of a horror movie, slow and steady and intractable. They continue forward over the carcass and a fsh rings through Lilly’s inner world, a vast byrinth of empty shadowed stone passageways. Something slips a scratchy cw into her soul, a passenger like a foxtail. A seed for the future.

  Some wraith projected this into her.

  A shattered va mp drips hot wax across the sidewalk. Her heart’s beating so hard she can hear it in her ears over the sounds of traffic. When they make it to the train tracks, Lilly checks behind her. At first she thinks there’s several officers standing on the corner of International, watching her, then they fade away like smoke. It’s not good for her mind, how the paranoia and the police state reinforce each other. It’s good for the state, though. It can get to her even in her thoughts.

  “Let’s recuperate with petty crime,” Scatter says, offering a paint pen to Lilly. Brick walls dancing with images and names. Tattoos for the city of Oaknd, if she will accept them. While Scatter is tagging a concrete pylon, Lilly finds a little section of untouched brick and writes, You Have To Believe That Love Can Win. Corny, she knows, but it doesn’t matter. The anonymity of unlicensed public art lets you bare your heart however you choose to. Nearby, someone has written SMOKE WEED OR DIE in a far better handstyle than she’ll ever have.

  They dash across Embarcadero and sit by the water, staring out at the Coast Guard isnd and, beyond it, Ameda, filled with bourgie people who would hate their guts. People who would call the cops on them, maybe rightly so. Because they are enemies, in some kind of way. The sun is setting over the water and she feels bittersweet, haunted by what will be. Scatter is staring off into the distance, her mind lost in something else. Lilly realizes this is the first time they’ve had a quiet moment together, to just rex like this. For months everything has been tense. She’s either been wasting time in the basement rexing with Nails, or running around doing things. Scatter keeps really busy, like there’s something she’s trying to hold at bay.

  Piper had said people need a job so they have something to do, no doubt thinking about Nails. It’s not true. All people need is the drive, a press of desire that can come from anywhere.

  She studies Scatter. Short nails painted bck, hairy legs, bck jean cutoffs with faded patches handsewn onto them with dental floss. A scar on her upper lip. A loose bck tank top, her nipples visible when she leans forward, not that she cares. The strain of this life carried in the taught muscles of her thin arms, the pale scars on one bony elbow. Greasy bck hair down to her shoulders.

  I have my own dreams.

  Scatter has lichtenberg figures, fractals like ce, running from the center of her right butt cheek all the way down her leg. She says she was doing her estrogen injection in rural southern Utah during a thunderstorm and a stray lightning bolt blew up the syringe in her hand.

  When she turns, her dark eyes are looking right into Lilly’s. “I gotta get my foodstamps figured out,” she says with a grimace. “Always something to do. What are you up to tomorrow?”

  “Freaking out, probably,” Lilly confesses. “I feel like there’s a curse on me.”

  “A curse? Well, we could do some protection spell if you want. Try to cleanse away the curse.”

  Lilly smiles. “It’s not like that. It’s like—you know how time stuff has been weird for me? Like, I keep having fshbacks, not just about the past, also about the future. Even though that should be impossible.”

  “Yeah.” Lilly can never tell if Scatter takes it seriously, really believes her or not. At least she makes a show of being supportive.

  “So what's scaring me is, if I'm remembering the future, right—why can't I remember anything after like 2016 or 2017? Why don’t I remember, say, 2030? Or 2050?”

  “Do you think you’re gonna die?”

  Once it’s said, out in the open, it sounds a little silly. Isn’t it more likely that this stuff just isn’t real?

  “I don’t know. Honestly if I can just actually make it through the next ten years, with or without a prophecy, that’ll be impressive on its own.”

  *****

  She wakes in the early hours of the morning to the scream of pain and misery that radiates through the house.

  “FUCK! FUCK NO! WHAT THE FUCK!”

  Confused she stumbles out of bed and in the living room encounters Eff and Nylon in front of a ptop, the blue light illuminating expressions of grief and suffering as others gather around.

  “Are you okay?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s happening?”

  Neither of them can talk. Tears are streaming down Eff’s face. Nylon has become very still. Eventually, she speaks. “She was like my sister. I. I didn’t talk to her for a minute. Because of everything that went down. But I was trying. I was. I was going to go over there.”

  “What happened?”

  “Midnight killed herself.”

  At the naming of it, Nylon begins sobbing. Everyone at the household has gathered in the room, straining the avaible space.

  Sophia puts her hands on Eff’s shoulders. Jaime begins crying and leans down to hug Nylon. Emiko and Ursu go sit on the couch, staring at the ground. Ivy/Empty hovers in pce while Nylon rocks in Jaime’s arms, their shoulder covered in studs and Monster energy can tabs sewn on to faded bck patches with dental floss bumping against her knee. Clink, clink, clink, clink. Ursu gets up and walks into the kitchen. Emiko looks after her and follows. Eff grabs Sophia’s fingers with one hand, Nylon’s with another, squeezes them.

  “Gravity found her.” Eff’s voice is uncharacteristically ft and emotionless. “She did it sometime over the night.”

  “Is anyone with Gravity?” asks Sophia.

  “Probably just those assholes,” says Eff. “Fucking hell. You know they were tormenting her.”

  “I’m going over there,” says Jaime.

  “It says for people not to come over, on the post,” says Eff.

  “You know that’s bullshit. That’s just Aiden and Alex and all of them doing their stupid shit. Fuck that. I’m not gonna leave Gravity alone there.” Jaime gets up, then almost falls over, struggling to move through the heavy viscosity of grief. “Fuck that. It’s their fucking fault. Aiden and all them, they were putting way too much weight on Midnight to make rent and everything and now they’re gonna say we can’t come over cuz, what, they’re afraid of us? Fuck them. I’m gonna make sure Gravity’s okay.”

  “I’m going too,” says Sophia. “Eff, Nylon, how are you doing babes?”

  “I wanna be there. I wanna see. See what it was like. Be with Gravity where it happened.”

  “Nylon?” They can’t speak through the tears but they nod in response, rising.

  Ursu comes out of the kitchen with freshly made coffee. Emiko, behind them, says, “I’m going to go to the grocery store, what should I bring you? I know Gravity doesn’t really have money over there, I wanna make sure everyone is eating. I can bring some flowers.”

  “Roses,” says Nylon. “Midnight loves roses. She has tattoos of roses on her chest.”

  “I’ll bring roses. Instant food would probably be good, right?”

  Nylon and Jaime are already moving toward the door. Sophia is hugging Eff who’s standing completely still. No one responds.

  “And energy drinks, I’ll get some of those. And more cigarettes.”

  Nylon and Jaime are out the door.

  Sophia, Eff, and Ivy/Empty remain, unmoving, in the suddenly hollow space. Ivy/Empty has heard so many stories about Midnight that although they’ve only met a few times she’s taken on a mythic quality in the way only close friends of friends can. Although she’s never met Gravity or anyone else from that household she feels like it’s a part of her world and now she can feel the weight of the trauma rippling through the people around her, a suffocating pressure wave from the sudden vacuum opened between them. Mechanically she moves forward and puts her arms around Eff and Sophia. Overly aware of the texture of the carpet beneath her toes, the soft weave of Sophia’s cardigan and the rough aged cotton blend of Eff’s shirt. The uneven sounds of each other’s breathing.

  “Anything else I should get?”

  No replies.

  “Just text me if anyone thinks of anything.”

  As the front door shuts behind Emiko, Eff begins to cry. “Why does this always happen? Why? I was going to fix things. Why does everyone always die before I can help them?”

  “It’s not your fault,” says Sophia.

  “You can say that,” says Eff. “But if I had been there sooner? I almost went over st week. I’ve needed to talk to them. And tell Aiden to y off of her and Gravity. It’s not fair! I was fucking stupid, I’ve been wasting my time doing meaningless shit but I was afraid of those stupid boys and their crap, afraid of getting called out and doxxed, and now she’s dead, she’s fucking dead, and there’s no going back from that. I never make the right fucking decisions! Who the fuck does that? How can she just leave us behind like that? Now it’s just us. It’s not fair. Now. Fuck! FUCK!” Sophia winces from the volume. Eff deftes, leans into Sophia’s arms. “I hate this. I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for,” says Ivy/Empty. “You have to feel your feelings. Your feelings are valid, whatever they are.”

  “I don’t know how to fucking talk, or think, or what the fuck. I. There’s a lot of fucking people I’ve watched die, you know? I’ve seen people OD and I’ve seen people get shot”

  this is how I die

  “and I’ve seen people die in a fucking hospital from organ failure but this is just, it’s her, it’s not supposed to be her.” Paradoxically she nods and smiles. “She’s supposed to be alive.”

  “It never gets easier,” says Ivy/Empty. “Death never gets easier.”

  Eff pulls her knife out of her pocket, flips it open, and stabs it into the arm of the couch. It slides right in with a soft puff, nothing like going into flesh. Eff just leaves it, kicks at a cardboard box full of art supplies and empty whip-its. “It’s fucked up! She kept me together. Back when we were out on the streets, she saved my ass. If it weren’t for her I’d be fucking dead, she got my heart started again. When I OD’d. She fucking got my heart started again. And now she’s dead. And where was I? Fucking asleep.” She stabs the couch again, two, three, four more times. “I’m never gonna fucking sleep again.”

  Then she’s just crying, with Sophia and Ivy/Empty holding her.

  “Can you drive?” Eff asks Sophia. “I need to be over there but I can’t. My brain won’t fucking work right now.”

  “Get some food in you,” Ursu says, shoving a muffin into Eff’s face.

  “I can’t fucking eat right now,” says Eff.

  “You barely eat at all. You’re gonna need the calories. Even if you end up puking it all out, get some food in you.”

  After Ursu talks Eff and Sophia into at least taking food along for the drive, it’s just Ursu and Ivy/Empty left in the house. They haven’t talked much, this is the first time they’ve had the house just the two of them. Ursu knew people through Sophia, and only came to live here recently, after things fell through at a previous queer space, a space which called itself a collective but charged everyone rent and was really more of a boarding house. She’s younger than Ivy/Empty, dresses far more fashionably, and doesn’t spend much time around the house except to sleep, eat, and hang out with Emiko. She’s always going to parties and events, tracing the arcs of social circles Ivy/Empty is barely aware of.

  “How are you doing?” Ivy/Empty asks her.

  She shrugs, “Oh, I mean, I’m alright. I didn’t know Midnight except casually. I’m mostly worried about how Eff and Nylon and Jaime are doing. How are you?”

  “Same. I didn’t really know her. I met her a few times. We smoked weed together. She seemed really cool.”

  Ursu nods. “Yeah, she seemed really cool. That’s happened to me a few times. Someone I was meaning to become friends with, instead just disappears. Life is kinda that way. Whenever you think you know what’s going to happen next, someone dies.”

  Ivy/Empty colpses into the couch. It’s old and sags in the middle under her ass. She pys with the knife wounds Eff left in its armrest. Her finger slides right in, cushioned in the cotton batting caked with years of dead skin and sweat. “Do you believe in fate?”

  Ursu scowls. “What is fate? I mean, was I fated to be a boy and then I said fuck it, no, I’m gonna be a girl? Was Midnight fated to live on in misery but then said, fuck no, I’m gonna die?”

  “Like the other way. Like that everything that happens couldn’t have happened any other kind of way.”

  “I hate that too. I think everything just fucking happens.” She sighs. “You probably need a cigarette don’t you? I don’t smoke but I’ll join you.”

  They go out on the porch. It’s still early morning and Richmond is waking up. People are going to work. A cool, wet bay fog remains in the air. The sun is already starting to poke through it, preparing the way for a hot day.

  Since she moved in Ivy/Empty had thought Ursu felt herself better than the others. Maybe she’s just been focused on her own priorities.

  “Have you ever seen someone die?” asks Ivy/Empty.

  “Kinda,” says Ursu. A pause while she doesn’t eborate, then, “How about you?”

  “Yes,” says Ivy/Empty. “Several times.”

  “Do you wanna do something?” says Ursu. “I’m not sure what to do, to be honest. I keep, like, going back to instincts from my family. Like we had, you know, chronically ill family members who died in the hospital and I was usually the one who had to take care of everyone while they were grieving. Making food, cleaning the house, preparing things for the memorial. And the funeral. I feel like my instinct is to do, like, these particur domestic rituals that I don’t know if they transte so well into this space. This is the first time I’ve been in a space where people aren’t either straight or trying to act straight. I’m not sure how to honor people who’ve died.”

  “I think people just need someone to be there for them,” says Ivy/Empty. “Witnessing the emotions, reminding them that they’re part of a community.”

  “I get to thinking that I’m in the way of that.”

  “You’re not, though. No one really is. That’s what community is.”

  Ursu’s face makes a dozen little movements, traveling through a series of half-formed emotions.

  “How do you know if you’re part of a community or just someone who’s there? I guess it never really matters.”

  “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” Ivy/Empty puts out the cigarette butt and immediately lights another. “I don’t fucking know at all. I suck at community. I feel like I’m just using people here while I’m having a fucking breakdown.”

  “No, not at all,” says Ursu. “I mean, sure, you’re dealing with a lot, but that’s fine. It sounds like you’ve had a really fucked up life.”

  “You know, at the time, I didn’t really process what was happening, I guess. In some ways I’ve been lucky. I’ve had some amount of css access. I’ve generally passed. I’ve been able to get jobs.”

  That could describe Ursu too.

  “Nothing really prepares you for a day like today,” says Ursu.

  “No.”

  “Did you ever know someone who killed herself?” Ursu asks a little too fast, like she’s just been waiting for the right moment to say it and then, cking the moment, needs to speak it now before it gets too heavy.

  “I don’t think so, not that I remember,” says Ivy/Empty. Images drifting before her eyes, soft wrists, blood. It doesn’t feel like something she wants to think about too deeply, but the conversation is here and the words can come out. “I knew someone who tried. I’ve known a few people who tried. One time I was institutionalized with my wife in a sort of private pce and she tried to hang herself but there were people watching with cameras and they stopped her. One time I stopped a girl from cutting her wrists open, actually a few times if you count the times I talked her out of it. She was very suicidal about not passing. She wanted to be able to blend into society. And one time I saw someone jump off of a ship into the ocean and they didn’t come back up.”

  “I didn’t know you had a wife. What happened?”

  “She died, I think. That part of my memory is really fuzzy.”

  Ursu bites her lip, looks down at the scattered trash on the ground. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “That’s okay, I don’t really talk about it. I’m not sure what happened, to be honest.” The standard answer. I don’t know what happened; I don’t even know what’s real. I don’t know what to ugh at and what to grieve. Inappropriate responses multiply like spikes of light traveling through a shattered window.

  A homeless guy walking by tries to sell them a Street Sheet but they don’t have any money so they give him a couple cigarettes and head inside to linger around the interior spaces waiting for news. Sophia calls. Gravity is staying at one of Midnight’s friends’ pces, and Sophia and Eff and Jaime and Nylon are going to stay there with faer. Sophia curses out Aiden with an uncharacteristic amount of anger. Ursu and Ivy/Empty make small talk. Ursu’s a pleasant person to talk to, despite her tendency to fill the silence scrolling through social media on her phone and showing memes she finds funny. She tries to keep things affable by a clear demonstration of effort.

  Emiko returns home ter, practically crashing through the front door with a grocery bag full of energy drinks and beercans and a lit cigarette that she trails through the house even though they don’t smoke inside because of Jaime’s rats.

  “How are you doing?” Ursu asks.

  “I’m not fucking doing at all,” Emiko says. Her words come out high and fast like she just did a line. “That was really brutal. Gravity is a total mess. There’s still blood around, because Midnight was cutting. Before she did it. She wouldn’t let Gravity talk to her. Aiden is just ying into Gravity and talking shit about Midnight, right there, in the room where she died. Just saying a bunch of shit. Who the fuck does that, you know?” She sits down on the couch, immediately gets back up, steps out into the backyard, still talking as Ursu and Ivy/Empty follow. “Alex and Michel looking all fucking smug too. None of the four fucking afabs living there give a fuck. Denise is just fucking hiding cuz they sexually assaulted Midnight and everyone knows it. Alex and Michel openly talking shit on trans women. And then Aiden just screaming in his fucking goddamn mickey mouse voice about who’s gonna pay the electricity bill now, what’s Gravity gonna do to make this right, this is all Gravity’s fault, etcetera. You remember fae found out that he had been fucking recording the two of them—him and Midnight—having sex and posting it online and saying he had to do it because Midnight was using up all of his spoons so he had to get something back, and then he’s now, now he’s saying that she was predatory, like get fucked! That’s revenge porn, it’s like a fucking crime, it’s abuse, you can’t just do that shit, and then he’s going after her when she just died so he’s just trying to fucking cover his tracks because it’s basically his fucking fault. I swear I almost beat the shit out of him, so did Nylon, but he’s just like just about ready to call the fucking cops, he literally threatened it three times.” Emiko tracks back into the house, into the kitchen, rummaging around for a gss of water. “And Gravity, I don’t know, faer gonna need to move out soon. I told faer to move in here but fae said fae don’t want to be a problem and I’m like it’s not a problem but you know, faer fucking self-destructive as shit. And I’m just like, let’s at least fucking get out of here and thank god fucking Nautilus shows up right then and is like, hey you need to come crash with me and my wife, so they’re all couch-surfing right now, completely crammed into that RV in west Oaknd but at least someone’s looking after Gravity and faer out of that fucking situation because holy shit I could fucking burn down Tassel House I swear. Holy shit. I’m gonna go fucking do some salvia, you wanna do some fucking salvia with me?”

  “I’ve never done salvia,” says Ivy/Empty.

  “It doesn’t affect me,” says Ursu.

  “Oh then you just haven’t done the right kind,” says Emiko. “Like you have to do the good kind, the fucking concentrate, with a high heat torch and a bong, otherwise you’re just fucking wasting it. Let’s go, hey Ivy/Empty you wanna do some salvia?”

  “Sure,” she says. “You sure you wanna do something like that right after such a traumatic day?”

  “No, it’s fucking ideal,” says Emiko. “I got death on my mind and my brain’s all full of stupid meaningless shit. I need to fucking, get a goddamn bird’s eye view on reality. We don’t have any DMT.”

  By the time they get everything set up the sun is just beautiful red light bleeding from the horizon. They settle into the backyard and smoke a little weed.

  “Is this like acid?” asks Ivy/Empty. “Or shrooms? Like, is this gonna send me somewhere?”

  “Kinda, but no,” says Emiko. “Salvia is a unique fucking experience. You gotta see what’s going to happen. It will fuck with your head, for sure. It will fuck with your reality. But it doesn’t send you and it doesn’t distort things. It shows you a perspective on what’s already there. It might be kinda traumatic, are you cool with that?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” says Ivy/Empty. “I mean, I’ve done a lot of shit without knowing where it was going anyway.”

  “Well, let me do the first trip, then you’ll see,” says Emiko as she grabs the bong. “The trip only sts like five minutes, external time.” She pulls out the torch and lights up the bowl, taking in a big hit and holding it. The smoke is sharply bitter, poisonous smelling. “You just kinda, at first it’s all like, what’s even happening? And then you, you see. You, uh. You see. You seeeee. You…” She giggles, sets down the bong. She’s staring up at the sky, the sun has just gone behind a set of clouds. “Oh shit,” she says. “One more fucking ride. One more and then. They all fit together. Tesselted tiles.” Her eyes gze over. She looks over at Ursu suddenly, as if startled. “Oh,” she says, then ughs. She looks at Ivy/Empty. “You don’t realize you’ve done all of this in every way,” she says. “We keep trying everything but it’s never funny!” Then she loses herself giggling, and curls up into a ball on the old camping chair. She closes her eyes and is very silent and very still.

  “Hey, is everything alright?” asks Ursu.

  “Everything is what it is,” says Emiko. “I’m not even done floating around.”

  Suddenly she gets up, unsteady on her feet, and looks around the backyard. “How long has it been?”

  “Since you took the hit?” asks Ivy/Empty.

  “Right, right, I’m on salvia,” says Emiko. “That’s great.”

  She goes over to a patch of crabgrass and sits on it, then begins to pet it. “This is all that we do,” she says. Then she closes her eyes, ughs a bunch, and is still for another minute. Ivy/Empty looks to Ursu, who shrugs. Emiko hums something atonal. She takes a deep breath, spreads her arms, and gets up. “Whoa. Okay, yeah, I needed that.”

  “You’re sober again?” asks Ursu.

  “Yeah, it’s a quick trip.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, I redid the universe a few times,” says Emiko. “It was fucking wild. I’ve made the universe a lot of fucking times.”

  “You’re still high.”

  Emiko waves the comment off. “I’m coming down. It’s quick. I just don’t know how to talk about it. You’ll see.”

  She repacks the bowl and passes it to Ivy/Empty. “You game?”

  “Sure, fuck it,” says Ivy/Empty. “That was a fast trip.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s real fast, but it’s long,” says Emiko. “Be sure to get it hot and take a deep hit.”

  Ivy/Empty clicks the butane lighter and starts burning the salvia, then inhales. The smoke tastes horrible, like concrete dust after an explosion. She holds it as long as she can and when she exhales barely anything comes out.

  “Okay, how long does it take? I don’t feel anything.”

  “Wait for it.”

  She looks around. Ursu, Emiko, the sky, Emiko’s tie-dye WTNV shirt, stained on the sleeve with snot and tears where someone had been crying into it, the sky fading from orange to bluish purple, Ursu’s expectant smile, and then a feeling in her skin, crawling along her skin, all over, like nails, little cws picking at her flesh, like thousands of crabs, giant centipedes, with millions of sharp legs, cwing under her fingernails, inside her muscles, and then the sky falls away and falls away and falls away, she is falling backward over and over sitting right there, falling backward, falling backward, falling backward over and over, sitting there, watching the sky stretching on and on and on like a scroll endlessly unrolling, the sky and the trees and the sky and the trees

  OTHER

  Ursu looks over at her. “Are you okay?” She gurgles something out. Okay okay okay. “She’s okay,” says Emiko. “She’s in it.” She’s in it. She’s in out. Out in out. Falling, away from the sky, through the earth and the sky, over and over again, like images scrolling past, repeating pictures, and she sees them, little packaged items, Ellie and Lilly and Ivy and Empty, wrapped in pstic, little dolls, she doesn’t want to be a doll, but these aren’t dolls because they are objects, these are objects because everything is, little Ursu and Emiko wrapped in pstic, little grass and little sky, wrapped in pstic, and behind it all a vastness, and she can feel the fingers and cws scratching all along her skin as she’s cast into pstic, over and over again, industrial production line in a factory, pressed into pstic, this Ivy, this Ellie, this Ivy, this Ellie, which is every possible Ivy, every possible Lilly, in everyone’s timelines, and every other timeline, as they stretch out like the branches of the tree, and lurking over her, the big Man, a huge solemn stone face with a long white beard, and another, and another, lurking over her in every timeline, grinning teeth like skyscrapers, hungry fingers like mountains, twinkling camera eyes, golden scepters and castle walls, making the dolls, making her as the dolls, Ivy, Ellie, Lilly, Ivy, Empty, Ellie, over and over, and He is just a part of the factory too, over and over, His three great eyes trained on her, His eyes glowing red and yellow with hatred, watching her, using her, and she watches as she, the doll, is melted down for being deformed, and another she, the doll, is melted down for being deformed, and another she, the doll, is melted down, and He, and He, and He, and He, and she, and she, and she, the object, the subject, falling to the factory floor, falling to the factory floor, the grass fluttering all around, pstic grass, astroturf on the conveyor belt, the absolute vertigo of the conveyor belt, Saturn’s rings, skyscraper teeth red with blood, and He, and she, the doll, cast in pstic, the doll, cast in pstic, falling, through the vacuum, no air, pstic, not breathing, the doll, eyes open, eyes open, and His eyes, staring, the Demiurge, His three eyes, watching her, as she, the doll, falls, and is pstic, and falls to the floor, and she is pstic, and falls to the floor, and she is pstic, and falls to the floor, which is a mirror, and there is another her, in the floor, another Ivy-Ellie-Lilly-Ivy-Empty-Ellie in the floor, and behind her others, moments before, moments after, on conveyor belts of astroturf and concrete, fed into skyscraper teeth, a chain of events, and the moments between the chains of events, the bnks between the shutters, the frames between the frames, where there is just the void, the cavity in the nerves, the gap, screaming in pain, centipede legs, and she sees them, her selves, pstic dolls melted together to form a great centipede. She collides with the floor and it shatters in splits that split fractally one into three into nine, and she is falling into one of them again and again shatter split fall shatter split fall cracks like conveyor belts branching off through a tangle of conveyor belts branching off and she the doll shattering along every point her teeth aching the hairs in her skin aching like needles and she is in a room with the other Ellie. And the other Ellie is rubbing liquid on her clit saying, “This is you and this is me. We are the clone of each other.” And in the liquid is a billion fertilized eggs and all of them are her, Ellie and Ellie and Ellie, and He is watching them through four glowing yellow camera lenses and she knows she’s supposed to be having children but she is all the children that have ever been born, she is all of the fertilized eggs, and then she is a doll being filled with the liquid, filled with the eggs, a pstic doll stretching, fracturing, and then she bursts into little shards and falls backward through a void and falls and falls and nds backward still sitting unmoving in the chair. Alien faces stare at her. Ursu and Emiko vibrating furiously in holographic tremors. “Holy shit, how long was I out?” she asks. Emiko ughs. “I couldn’t understand any of that,” she says, “but don’t worry, you’re just high, it’s gonna be over soon.” And then the grass rises up around them and it’s a sea of dark water and she’s floating in it and it turns into an infinite linoleum floor far more vast than anything she’s ever seen. She’s trying to move forward along it but she only moves backwards.

  ANOTHER

  Ursu looks over at her. “Are you okay?” “I think I’m starting to feeel some some something,” she tries to say, but her mouth is dry and full of sand, her skin is covered in sand, sand and concrete, scraping along, scraping across her, and she’s on a sb of concrete in the middle of a vast desert. There are hundreds of suns in the sky in honeycomb pattern with complex tesselting clouds between them. Her body is a twisting temple microscopic beneath the glowing chasms overhead. Concrete rises and falls from the desert around her in rhythmic patterns, she can feel the rhythms of the concrete in her bones, and with it she can see the gss in the sand, shards rising and falling. Gss shards rain upward and constitute themselves into a variety of beings, and she can sense their consciousness, can sense that they’ve been watching her from behind all of the suns. “You’re already here,” says one of them. “You’re always here,” says another. “You’re not ready for here,” says a third. Their bright shadows are the shape of enormous beasts, predators watching her turn and bend fixed to the desert floor. She understands that the world is over, has been over, for a very long time, that she is the dream of the memory of a dead, dead world. That was all an illusion. That former life, those concerns and fears and traumas. All the meaningless tears and blood. She thinks of a dead man’s body, his head blown off, she thinks of a crushed bird, its frail bones snapped to little shards, little pieces, all meaningless. Guns ctter to the ground and rust, electric wires fall from walls and fade under the wear of eons, the edifices of enormous monuments turn to dust before a howling gray wind. She ughs at the meaninglessness, the absurdity of all of it, the pure comedy of being. That she could have been such a small person too, such a little bird crushed and shattered, when she is only truly all the shards of gss the sand in the desert. There had been a person, there had been a time she had thought she was a person, what an absurd dream. She had thought about fate! Everything happened, everything possible and impossible happened, and it was all, therefore, utterly absurd, it was only a matter of the happening, to suffer or to not suffer, purely the happening, the everything, the experience of being a body or being dead, irrelevant, a hirious posturing, and she’s ughing at it all, ughing and crying, what absurdity! And just when she is loose and floating in the sand of the desert air beneath ten thousand suns and through scintilting shards of gss, just on the precipice of that moment she hears something. “Come over here,” says the voice, and she wants to ignore it, for how can anyone speak to her when all is dead and she is free, but rattling insect limbs are cradling her and she is already being called away, sucked into the corner of existence like a scrap of paper caught in an explosive decompression, and she is in a very dark pce surrounded by concrete. Scatter is lying on the floor and there is blood around. “Hold this down,” she says, gesturing to a dressing on her arm wound, and Lilly does, and as she does she feels the hot blood flowing up her fingers and over her entire body, repcing the warmth of the sun, a skintight bodysuit, and she squeezes her body next to Scatter’s. “I miss the desert,” she says. “That wasn’t real,” says Scatter. “That’s a fantasy of your death. You aren’t dead.” She starts to cry, the tears mixing with the blood. “I think I want to be dead,” she says. “I want to be free, in death.” Scatter smiles at her. “That’s a fantasy. You don’t know that death is free. You might be trapped a thousand miles underground. Or at the bottom of the ocean. You have a body and a life. You have to complete that task.” Ellie shakes her head. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to bear this. The desert was all I want.” Already she can feel it fading away. The desert does not belong to her. She is part of a ‘reality’. She is to be boxed in, trapped, buried in concrete, a thousand miles underground, in this thing called a reality. The comforting insect arms let her go and she feels an icy wind blowing time and space onto her, extension and duration. “Desotion… despair. This is only a matter of time. At all points all things come to this. From this, all things arise.” And then the blood covers her eyes and ears and mouth and she hears a voice she cannot recognize. She opens her eyes and she’s in a backyard, Ursu and Emiko in front of her, vibrating.

  “Holy fuck.” Ivy starts to get up then sits back down.

  “Yeah?” asks Emiko. “It’s a fun time, right?”

  “I—fuck. Wow. That was a lot,” says Ivy.

  “What did you see?”

  “Fuck existence I guess, fuck this fucking joke we call existence,” Ivy says, rising. “I’m, I think I need to take like a walk. I need a cigarette. Damn.”

  “Yeah? Walk it off, dear.”

  *****

  “There is a pseudoLemurian demon hyperstructure seed in this text. With the right key it will unfold. It will retroact to crify your memories. You can utilize it, and/or it can utilize you, depending on your angle of approach and your pre-existing structures. It will not make time or space for the supplicants of domination or the agents of viotion. It will dispce the false apparatus and install a new post-functionalizing (war) machine. If you comprehend you are already compromised and in the stream. This is a nonparasitic (autonomous) neosuccubitic technosattvic orthoboddhi entity.”

  “Excellent,” says Scatter. She’s just finishing up with her microwave shrimp-fvored udon noodles. Lilly has barely touched hers, she’s been trying to wrap her mouth around the complex nguage of the zine. All of this means something to someone, means something to Scatter.

  “I’m not gonna even pretend I understood that part,” says Lilly. “But I do feel weirdly threatened?”

  “Good. Shouldn’t all real philosophy be threatening?” Scatter’s grinning, clearly satisfied.

  Lilly takes a bite of the noodles. Mercifully, they’re not cold yet. “I have no idea what philosophy should be.”

  “Isn’t the truth a threatening thing? Shouldn’t engagement with the truth convey some aspect of that?” She has such a look in her eye when she’s trying to get Lilly to see some point. Like she’s just told a joke and she’s waiting for it to sink in.

  “I suppose so. At the same time, I’m not sure it’s, I don’t know, best to make everything hard to understand? Why can’t it expin things simply?” Even as she says it, she feels a little embarrassed. What a rote response. It’s embarrassing either way, to not even understand what the thing she’s reading out loud means. She was never bad at school, she was just never that good either. Didn’t expect these kinds of challenges in her adult life.

  “If it expins it simply, there would be no chance of you understanding it at all. When was the st time you understood something, like really deeply understood something, without having to think about it? Being confusing is frustrating, sure, but coming to understanding is frustrating.”

  “Hmm.” A little shrimp-fvored water dribbles off her chin onto the zine, nding on the word ‘dispce’.

  “So, how I see it, theory is almost a religious practice. An extension of the midrash, the exegesis, of life itself, or the life we find ourselves in. The concept of philosophy is a concept of love, not communication. Most the important things in life aren’t really communicable, at least not easily. And most the things that are easily communicable are diseases.”

  “Diseases.” She gives Scatter a look to say, are you fucking with me?

  “Well, take what Coordination Division does, for example. In a sense, all you were trying to do is make things communicable, right? Make things easy to understand, make it easier for kids to grow up as their assigned gender, join the military or a corporation, choose a mate of the opposite sex, and make more kids. They’re putting together these giant farms, these forced breeding programs, called suburbs. And within that, what role is there for consciousness? For actual self-awareness, actual sentience, not a logic following on logic following on false grounds, but a true grounding, a being-in-itself of the mind in the void? I say, rip the concrete out from under them.”

  “Without the concrete, what does that leave us? We can’t just go back on thousands of years of evolution, back to living in the woods.” She knows its a metaphor but now she’s just feeling contrarian. Besides, it gets Scatter to keep talking and she’s cute when she’s ranting.

  “Thousands of years of evolution? Are you so sure about that? Air conditioning and pstic and concrete sidewalks and automobiles—these are very recent inventions. They’re not pure inventions either, they’re reflections of specific ideologies that manifested them. Let’s tear apart those assumptions. We know very little about human evolution, actually. How many times have humans evolved? How many separate histories and herstories on Earth can you observe? Because you can’t make a scientific statement off of one example. The human past is just not like that, nor the future. That’s the same problem made by Hegelians, Leninists, Social Darwinists, Kurzweil, and Hayek—all those motherfuckers trying to put a lineage and a narrative on the thing saying, ah yes, now we understand, now we have found the science. Keep trying to predict the future, keep trying to understand the past, and you will always come up empty. Better to make narratives out of it, lines of flight that lead us to a true exodus. It’s all lies anyway, we’d best come up with some better lies.”

  Ivy wakes up on the living room floor to the sound of raised voices. She hadn’t realized she was falling asleep but it’s already morning. As her eyes resolve, for just a moment, she thinks she sees something hovering over her, a humanoid form, and she has the terrified thought that it’s Midnight, that for some reason she’s here now, haunting Ivy. Then it fades as the ceiling resolves into focus.

  “Those bastards! Those absolute fucking bastards! I could kill them!” The door sms open and Nylon comes in and colpses on the chair. “Fuck, sorry Ivy, I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

  “You did, but it’s okay. You’re talking about Aiden?”

  “All those scummy fucking bastards. Yknow, I have seen some fucked up shit but to sit there yelling at someone’s partner about how their dead girlfriend is a piece of shit the day they found the body! After he fucking abused her into doing it. I swear, if I find him alone somewhere, without fucking cameras, he’s not gonna fucking get found, I know a fucking pig farmer, that’s all I’m saying, I’m not a fucking pushover, I’m not one of these goddamn soft-stomached social media techie queers. I know how to hunt. Fucking hell I’m, I can’t believe that shit. It’s so fucked.”

  “It’s really fucked,” says Sophia, entering the room in a cloud of weed smoke. “I’m trying to convince Gravity to come over here but fae’s really adamant on seeing it out. I think it’s just the trauma. Fae’s so used to being holed up in that pce that fae doesn’t really know anything else to do.”

  “The problem is that they’re a fucking sweetheart,” says Nylon. Jaime, entering the room, nods.

  “Yeah.”

  “No, really, it’s a fucking problem,” says Nylon. “It’s a problem because they let people walk all over them. They’re sitting there just enduring all of this horseshit while talking about, they’re worried about Michel and Denise, because Aiden’s just going to abuse them. Okay, but like here’s the fucking thing: it’s not your goddamn problem! Michel and Denise are fucking adults and neither of them is what I would consider a good person or a comrade, let them figure out their goddamn situation for their own selves, and get yourself out of that fucking situation. Cuz like they’re too good to have to put up with that crap, in my book.” Nylon shakes their head. “Anyway. Fuck. How’ve you been, Ivy?”

  “Well, I tried salvia for the first time st night,” she says.

  “Oh yeah, how’d that go? I bet that shit rocked your world.”

  “I was a doll, or like a lot of dolls, and I hated that. Also I was, like, a gss elemental after the end of the world, that was alright, until I had to become a person again, which sucked.”

  “Yeah! That’s the shit, entirely. Well I’m gd someone had an edifying fucking evening.”

  “Fuck is there any left?” asks Jaime. “I could use a fucking mindwipe after yesterday.”

  “You’ll have to ask Emiko but I think so,” says Ivy.

  Nylon shakes, a whole shiver running up and down their nervous system. “I need to sleep,” they say in a low voice. “I can’t fucking go to bed but I need to sleep.”

  Jaime grabs them by the wrist. “I know what you’re thinking, but no.”

  “I’m not talking about starting again. Just to rest.”

  “Midnight wouldn’t want you using.”

  For a moment Nylon looks like a demon, their face torn with resentment and rage, then their expression softens. “Yeah well she doesn’t get to tell me what to do anymore. Fuck it, I’m not gonna, I just, I want to so bad. It’s so fucking unfair of her. Why didn’t she tell me it was that bad? Did I fuck up that much?”

  Before anyone can say anything they’ve disappeared around the corner, leaving Jaime staring down the dark hallway.