A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “Whoa, calm down—” Scott said, valiantly trying to sound more worried about Bonnie than he was offended. He stuck his arm out to put around her and she shoved it away, tilting off-balance. She propped herself against the brick wall of the bar and surveyed us from a cold and judgmental distance. “I do not appreciate it, and I do not see the point of it,” she said, voice wobbling. “This prank. You got my parents in on it, and you did something to my phone and laptop, you made it so that—” Bonnie broke off. She shook her head like it jangled and ripped something out of her purse and threw it at nobody in particular (it hit Scott on the thigh) and ran out of the bar. Scott silently showed us what she’d thrown. Today’s newspaper.

  Some of us left. Some stayed, got more drinks, marinated in concern, and theorized luxuriously. Shit got near convivial. I wasn’t Bonnie’s closest friend, but I was her roommate friend—her roommate-mate—so I was the one who went out after her. Even though I had no idea where she’d gone. Bonnie was not so much a woman of routine.

  I decided to go home. With great relief and a tiny amount of surprise, I unlocked our door and found a trail of ankle boots, jacket, purse, phone, keys, dress, leading straight to Bonnie’s bedroom. Of course. I could picture it exactly—Bonnie on her birthday, treating herself to a pregame that got so out of hand it became neither pre nor game, then showing up to her actual celebration surreally out of her head. Sure.

  When I knocked, Bonnie responded immediately. “This is all a dream,” she said in a shouty voice. She sounded like she was in a play, an amateur one with fake British accents. “Do not come in.”

  “Are you okay? We were worried.”

  I heard her bed creak and tried again. “Do you want your phone? It’s out here.”

  “Fuck my phone,” Bonnie yelled. “It’s fake and so are you and so is everything. Quit talking to me! I need to concentrate on waking up.”

  I left her to it. I gathered up her things and piled them outside her door and I texted some people that Bonnie was fine and sleeping something off and I dicked around on my phone and saw that a famous man—one who had spoken out passionately against the sexual depredations of other famous men during the most recent outcry (for the sexual depredations of these other famous men had first come to light in the 1970s and ’80s, unfortunate timing if you wanted a critical mass of people to actually care)—was discovered to have been really, really not one to talk and I brushed my teeth and decided I deserved not to floss and then it was like half the blood and adrenaline and energy in my body swirled down into a drain somewhere with a loud abrupt gurgle and I oozed my way to bed.

  The next morning Bonnie was gone, room tornadoed and big suitcase missing. A few days passed with no word from her, so I pondered calling her parents. I had no kind of relationship with them, but I could probably get their info from billing statements. I didn’t do it. Bonnie loved her parents and wouldn’t want to worry them and Bonnie hated her parents and didn’t want to rely on them any more than she already was, which was basically 100 percent, and due to both of the aforementioned she loathed showing any kind of weakness in front of them.

  A few days after that I got a text from Bonnie admonishing me specifically to not call her parents, and I responded and told her that I hadn’t but I almost had and if I had I would have done it days and days ago and where the hell was she? No response. Well, if that was how she wanted to play it. Meanwhile, I could have the place to myself. Fine.

  THE TIME WE TALKED SHIT

  “Still no word?”

  Just a few of us left at the bar, dejected and alone together like we’d been stood up but in a polyamorous way.

  “Do we think she forgot?”

  “Her own birthday?”

  “Or found something better to do. Not to talk shit but…Bonnie can be like that.”

  “I have sympathy for the congenitally rich. You know how basically everything worth doing sucks initially? Well, maybe if you never get training in dealing with bullshit, you risk becoming the kind of person who just bounces from thing to thing to thing and sooner or later everything seems boring and totally without reward or meaning. And then comes the ennui.”

  “I have sympathy for myself.”

  “Ennui isn’t Bonnie’s problem.”

  “Right, she would actually be very happy if everything was only nice pleasant surfaces.”

  “Yes,” we all said. And then we were off to the races.

  “She’s so pissed off when everything isn’t happy and nice! Infuriated even. Which is kind of at odds with being someone who loves happy and nice stuff, you know?”

  “It’s not…not tyrannical. But she’s not one of those tyrants who, like, loves suffering and pain. She does truly love it when people are happy. Especially her friends.”

  “That’s not the same thing as helping someone be happy.”

  “What it comes down to is she was born a certain way—you know, a white, rich, cute way—and acts like she had anything to do with it. It’s a sickness.”

  While the others were talking, Phyllida quietly asked me how I’d been. She was the only one there who knew even a little about the situation I’d had at my last job. The man I had met there, who in fact still worked there. His name had shown up on an online list of un-famous bad men, and nothing had happened to him, the same nothing that happened to so many other men. This was a nothing that could sometimes be filled with gaseous excitement and horror and alarm and puffy thought bubbles containing phrases like Somebody should do something! all of which never became solid and eventually leaked out, leaving nothing behind and resulting in nothing.

  Phyllida looked into my eyes and picked up the cutlery on the table. “I would stick him with this fork.” Oh, she was so nice. Why weren’t we closer?

  Wait, it was because of the time I went to Devon’s birthday party and saw Phyllida talking and laughing gaily with the man, even though I knew she knew. Maybe they had only interacted for a few seconds, maybe Phyllida needed a professional favor. Maybe, caught off guard, she’d been accidentally polite to him. It happened. But this incident sure did make me not want to tell anyone else about it, because if I saw them being friendly with him later, I would have to slink off like a dog giving birth under a house and tend my grievous wounds alone. I knew that now. And sure, yes, of course: Even without telling someone the story, there was a chance I’d see them being friendly with that man, which would still hurt, but not nearly as much. This way, at least I wouldn’t be certain that they had chosen rapists and politeness over me.

  I knew I was asking too much, but I didn’t want to ask too little. What was the correct amount, allowing for how much people fail? We fail so hard. All of us do.

  Smiling past Phyllida, I watched Nina draw on a napkin. I called out to her and she looked up. “What’s the latest on your ghost problem?” I asked. The details were harrowing, sad, disgusting—but she was always ready to talk about it. We were the only ones who believed her. We had all been at that Halloween party.

  Derrick interrupted us. He lifted his phone like a pack of gum in a gum commercial. (Put it away, Derrick, nobody can read a word from here anyway.) Apparently Bonnie had gotten back to him. She said she was fine and that everybody should leave her alone.

  “Is she okay?”

  “That’s all she said? What a bitch!”

  After that, we all went home, full of a guilty, binge-eaten feeling of having talked that much shit about our friend, at her actual birthday celebration no less.

  Nearly a whole week passed, and still no Bonnie. I was eating granola standing up, wearing only an old and obscenely baggy thong, when I heard a key in the door and I sped over to an armchair with a crumpled coat of Bonnie’s on it and only had time to tuck the coat under my armpits but I was still excited to see Bonnie at the door and say, Dude, where have you been and I’m only wearing yo
ur coat like a tiny assless sandwich board because you caught me in my worst underwear, until the door opened and it wasn’t Bonnie—it was two well-dressed sixtysomething people who had already been having a bad day and here I was to worsen it.

  Luckily, because I was mostly naked, they first thought I was Bonnie’s secret girlfriend, so when they learned that I was, rather, Bonnie’s secret roommate of whom they had never heard, they were so relieved and distracted that I found a brief opening in which to lie my face off.

  Sometimes people with money didn’t want to give it to people who needed it extremely badly, like how they didn’t want to offer sympathy or belief to those who had been victimized, as the act of needing was inherently thirsty, plus there was the way situations that caused you to become needy sometimes could render you disgusting and un-whole so the idea of joining forces with you was just, blaaaaarrrrb, and of course joining forces was what happened when money, sympathy, and belief changed hands.

  So I hoiked up my posture a couple notches and pretended to be a novelist (zero evidence of visual art in this apartment, so words it had to be), highly experimental (I didn’t want it to be easy to find my books, since they would in fact be impossible to find since they didn’t exist), with most of my work published in Chinese (which I wasn’t but they wouldn’t know the difference but also why had I even added this level of obfuscation?), in residence at a university nearby whose apartment roof had caved in over the, ah, living room. I had met Bonnie at—

  “—at, at an event, a p-party after a salon. When I told her about how disruptive the noise from the workmen was, the dust and the disruption, she offered me a room in her place for the time being, and it has been such a godsend. I wouldn’t have been able to—do my work, if it wasn’t for Bonnie and her generosity.”

  Not bad, not bad! Cultural capital, the implication that I didn’t need money, this apartment, or anything at all, a foreignness that was not real and therefore nonthreatening. (Oh, that was why I’d done that.)

  The parents relaxed, smiled subtle WASP smiles, and let it go. Bonnie’s mother had a smooth white bob and was fat and tall and graceful, clad in a whispering computer-gray silk blouse. Thready webs of chain and gem blinked against her neck, fingers, ears. Her bling felt oceanic, as in naturalistic yet unutterably vast. All that was dark and grotesque about her soul was contained in the bulky handbag dangling from her right elbow. Bright orange-brown this handbag was, crisscrossed with straps and black chains and waxy twine.

  Bonnie’s father wasn’t nearly so interesting-looking.

  “Do you know where she has been?” I asked.

  They told me that she showed up at their house yesterday, completely frazzled, telling a wild tale about a week that was repeating over and over again. Her mother said, “Bonnie told us she’d traveled to New Zealand to check if it was last week there too. Though she chose it randomly, she ended up really enjoying the place. Except for the fact that it was also still last week there.”

  “Which is to say this week,” her father said.

  They had tried to calm her down, even as she insisted she had lived this week many times, listing off news of sex scandals and murderous police and mass shootings as if she were bringing precious communiqués from the future and not just delivering the same old easy guesses absolutely anybody could make, so they fed her dinner and offered her benzos and put her to bed, thinking she would have to stay with them for a while—thinking facilities, thinking inpatient/outpatient, thinking medication, and so on—and when they checked on her in the morning she had fled.

  As they searched Bonnie’s bedroom and peeped very quickly and apologetically into mine, her mother said, “I am not unsympathetic, you know. How could she prove her story to us? It would be next to impossible. Should we tell her a secret so massive that merely through her repeating it back to us in the next iteration we would immediately believe that she was telling the truth, that she had indeed lived this week before?”

  “And what if the week didn’t repeat?” said Bonnie’s father, scrolling through his phone. “We three would then be forced to march into the future together, bound by the hideous secrets Bonnie now knew. All for nothing.”

  I said, “I mean, why do they have to be massive and hideous secrets?”

  “Still more horrible,” continued Bonnie’s mother, “would be if she were correct, and were somehow able to prove this to us, and keep proving this to us—that she, our daughter, Bonnie, has been doomed to live the same week over and over again. Pulling us helplessly along with her. Cursed to remember, blessed to forget, or the opposite, or both.”

  Her father said, “What monstrous knowledge to bear.”

  “We cannot and will not believe her,” they said.

  I brought them back to the door. They gave me a phone number to call in case I heard anything. They also told me I could stay in the apartment as long as I wanted. I opened my mouth to say thank you and Bonnie’s father said, “Oh, yes, and since you’ll be taking over rent while Bonnie is away—” and soon named a number so big it should have been written on a piece of paper and slid across a desk. But no. This number was said aloud.

  I stood so tall my skull risked detaching from my spine, and smiled like a medalist. “Of course. Thank you.” I was still wearing Bonnie’s coat like it was a strapless minidress on a paper doll, though very much unlike a paper doll I had a back half to me too. Around people like Bonnie’s parents, you were allowed to acknowledge when you weren’t being perfect but you could never, ever be embarrassed. When I had shown them down the hall into our bedrooms, I walked backward stewardess-smooth.

  Once they were a safe distance away, I slammed the door shut and slumped into the armchair. The rent on this place, which they already owned, would be impossible. I did not have anywhere else to go, of course. How about if I temporarily shrunk myself into a bean? It would be so nice to be a dried hard tiny thing, fallen down into the spoons and forks and forgotten for maybe one, two years. But as a tiny bean I’d still have a future. I could still return to life or lifelikeness, once enough time passed and there wasn’t so much bullshit to deal with. Maybe nine, ten years.

  The fringe on the bottom of the couch moved. Bonnie poked her head from underneath, dragging the rest of herself out. I was glad her head came first and not her hand or foot, so I didn’t need to scream.

  She hauled herself onto the couch and coughed. “You got resources, kid.”

  “So do you,” I said, guiltily remembering the shit-talking from the bar.

  “I have to get sensible,” she said. “I should have known it was no good going to my parents like that. What a waste of time.” She laughed. “If such a thing is possible. They wanted to make my entire last day so tiresome. I had to sneak out in the night. Came here and napped under the couch because it felt safer. I was right.”

  “Usually I don’t lie like that.”

  She shrugged. “Lie all you want. Lie big. I can tell you it does not matter one bit.”

  This was the strangest conversation I’d ever had with Bonnie. “They just scared me. Your parents are a piece of work. Pieces of work? No. Them two together make one piece of work.” The strangeness wasn’t all on Bonnie. I was definitely tangoing with her.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “You won’t have to pay the rent.”

  “You’ll tell them you’re here?”

  “No. I mean it’ll just be last Wednesday again soon.” Then another shrug, one lagging so far behind her words that it split off into its own separate statement. Dust billowed and settled on Bonnie again and she looked like an ancient, badly damaged statue of someone youngish, like her basic composition was at odds with her present circumstances, and despite the smooth jaw and round cheeks and slight scanty feathery decorative lines in her forehead and under her eyes you knew she had been around and around and around for eons and would be still
and would be still and would be still, beyond all reckoning.

  “Very soon,” Bonnie said.

  I stood. “I’ve got to get dressed,” I said. I had become very frightened. “I’m super late. Rest up. Okay?”

  As I sped down the hall, Bonnie’s thin, sweet voice floated behind. She was singing a line from that song, the line that went, “Let me see that”—her voice going flannelly and nearly cracking—“thawwww-awwwwwwww-awwwwwwwng…” And a final desperate and strangled “Baaaaby!”

  A tossed-off and funny and completely regular thing, a tune in the genre of roommate giving you shit for being such a beast at home—but it did not make me feel better. I was still filled with a very bad form of terror, the kind where you didn’t know what or why. So how would it end? Bonnie’s singing had been the saddest, most yearningest music I had ever heard. You got the joke but the dirge, that was the point. That was what remained.

  THE TIME BONNIE DIDN’T GO VIRAL

  When Bonnie canceled her birthday drinks the morning of, we didn’t think anything of it. The excuse was plausible. Also, no one really wanted to go out on a Wednesday anyway.

  Turned out she was spending her time making a weird, baggy, rambling video of just her sitting in her room, looking super awesome, making predictions of the things to come in the present week. Like that the actor many of us loved would be revealed as a leering terrible date who expected sex as his due and took no for an answer only temporarily before starting up the sex stuff yet again until he took no for an answer only temporarily and so on until the woman gave up. Kind of like when your cat jumped back onto the counter so many times you stopped putting it back on the floor, except with having your boundaries totally ignored during sex. And no cat.

  (This had probably happened to many of us—it definitely happened to me—but it was all pretty confusing stuff people didn’t usually care about, and to boot Bonnie wasn’t describing it clearly at all, so nobody knew what the hell she was talking about in the video until the next day, when the actor’s name did actually appear in the news. But we figured that she had just found out early somehow. She did know some celebrity-adjacent people.)