A People's Future of the United States

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Certain sports teams would win certain games, she guessed correctly. That was a little impressive, if you cared. Wildfires. Firings in the White House. Something that the president would say in a few days, which sounded indistinguishable from everything else he had said before so it meant nothing to us and was like a cat jumping onto a counter so many times we stopped trying to stop it or even pay attention to it since we couldn’t stop it. “Is Bonnie being politically humorous?” one of us said.

  It was harder to go viral than you’d think. Or, rather, it was pretty easy if you did a kind of bare minimum, and Bonnie had not. Other than some of us texting each other with WHAT DID I JUST WATCH, the video did not catch on with the world at large. I tried to avoid Bonnie (easy, because I had work and she stayed in her room most of the time), because the stinging harsh glow of what was surely flourishing mental illness emanating from the video really freaked me the fuck out. Not that I was proud of that. I wasn’t not proud either! I’d had to survive! Growing up, I had been left largely in the care of my schizophrenic aunt for seven years and I became decent at spotting crazy and crabwalking delicately away from it before it could touch me even as I lived in close proximity to it.

  For all that nobody cared about Bonnie’s video, it had apparently reached certain shadowy governmental agencies. One morning the doorbell rang while I was in the shower and Bonnie was in her room, and the agents couldn’t even wait for five seconds before kicking in the door. My towel had somehow vanished from its hook, so I grabbed a jacket of Bonnie’s that had been stuffed and forgotten in the space between the door and the wall and wrapped it extremely partially around myself and ran out into the living room, where three men and one woman wearing suits were walking Bonnie out of the apartment.

  “I’m going away for a while, and I won’t be in touch. But I promise I’ll be back!” said Bonnie, dragging a suitcase. When did she have time to pack? “Bye!” She sounded cheerful. Then she and the agents left and I was alone with the busted door, a small puddle forming around me.

  The rest of Bonnie’s predictions ended up coming true. Nobody cared.

  THE TIME BONNIE WAS QUIET

  I turned the corner into the dining room and jumped. There was Bonnie at the table, shoulders so slumped she resembled a tombstone.

  “It was awful,” she said. She looked like she had been up for hours already. “They weren’t the ones to help me. Not at all. I was so wrong about everything.” She stared down into a full mug of coffee that I could tell had gone cold.

  “Did something happen?”

  She glanced up at me and made her face go calm. “No. I had a bad—dream. I had a bad dream in which I was interrogated a lot and then they were going to open up my skull and look at my brain and maybe fuck with it a little. Good thing I ran the clock out on that.”

  To hide my relief, I picked up her mug and reheated it in the microwave. “Good thing it was all a dream,” I said.

  Bonnie said, “I know you don’t understand but I appreciate you listening. I just have to lay low this week. I have to be sensible. No one else is going to save me. No faith in family. No faith in institutions.”

  I had never known Bonnie to talk like this. So depressed and…gnomic? But then I remembered it was her birthday, so perhaps she was mourning the way all women of our age were supposed to mourn the precipitous vanishing of our worth, like, Whoops, time to grow a personality, which the world will also devalue! Bonnie had always been devastatingly confident—but who knew, it could have been the kind of confidence that only flourished within highly specific parameters and withered time-lapse-fast without.

  “Hey. Don’t be too sensible. It’s your birthday! We got those drinks tonight.”

  Bonnie groaned and the microwave beeped.

  Later on in the evening Scott said, “I didn’t mean that it was next month. I meant today is the start of a new month. Which is this month.”

  Bonnie closed her eyes so she could roll them, but we could still see it.

  And later on in the evening, when the talk turned to shitty men and the list full of them and our lives full of them, Bonnie, who had gotten quietly wasted, said, “Men men men men MEN. Can they not be the only subject of conversation left in the whole entire world please? Can we please just talk about something nice?”

  But that was Bonnie for you.

  THE TIME BONNIE CANCELED

  Her email read, BIRTHDAY CANCELED! I’ve decided to embark on a new adventure. Arctic Circle expedition, BITCHES. I leave in an hour, therefore no time to get drunk with you jokers. I’m drunk

  THE TIME BONNIE ASKED FOR ADVICE

  She said, “What would you do? Hypothetically.”

  We were a little surprised. Bonnie didn’t usually go in for these kinds of conversations. She thought these topics were nerdy meaningless masturbations for super dweebs. Stop acting like life is a Star Trek movie, it’ll never happen! she’d say. Sometimes she substituted a Star Wars movie for a Star Trek movie. Then again, we’d been discussing the list of shitty men, about which she seemed very oh, this again, so maybe any interruption would do.

  Phyllida would improve herself. Read books, learn languages and musical instruments and complicated choreography that didn’t require too much muscle strength. “Also, I would punish those I deemed deserving of it. They would be in a hell of my own making, unaware they would be doomed to relive these torments again and again. It would be a long time before I tired of this.”

  Damn, girl!

  Scott would travel and spend all of his money as quickly as he could. We politely overlooked the fact that Bonnie already could do this, sometimes did do it.

  Devon would quit her job and just do nothing. If you were living the same week over and over again, it meant you weren’t aging, so time no longer had you propped up on its handlebars, propelling you forward no matter what, as you spit out bugs and tried not to slip off. No, time in this scenario was chill as hell, willing to stroll with you around a track and have a stoned, circular conversation nobody would be able to retrace. How wonderfully relaxing, and so very necessary when everything had been so apocalyptically stressful. “I would get to know my friends better. Though I would keep far away from most of my family. For them, duration and repetition would not be improvements.” But Devon relented, a little. “I might give it a shot if I got really bored. In a literal thousand years.”

  Nina would try to save everybody.

  We would wear elaborate disguises in order to spy on our friends and see what they really thought of us; we would binge-eat; we would sex-marathon; we would try new hairstyles; we would get three dogs; we would get teardrops and ice cream cones tattooed on our faces; we would get five cats; we would do every drug; we would not garden.

  Sure, I made my contributions. But this was the only thing I said that I really meant: I said that I actually hated this hypothetical conceit. When you dug right down into it, it was odious. Because you could do anything you wanted, you could do absolutely whatever, and nothing would ever, ever, ever, ever be allowed to change.

  Bonnie looked placid. “Yes, what then? If it just starts over again and again and never stops no matter what.”

  “You make your peace with it,” said Derrick. “You have to relinquish your attachment to time as it was.”

  Scott said, “You said a week, right? That’s lucky. That’s where it’s at. Way better than a day. In a week, you can really get somewhere.”

  THE TIME BONNIE CANCELED

  Her email read, Hi, assholes! Birthday drinks are canceled. Giving you tons of warning so you don’t end up meeting anyway to talk about me behind my back because that’s like your favorite pastime. IN OTHER WORDS, I HEARD EVERYTHING. Is that really what you thought of me? What is so wrong with choosing joy? Well. You got your wish. The longer this week goes on, the more familiar I become with it and the great grand re
peating shittiness we’ve gotten ourselves into. Thank you so much, losers! Now I’m depressed just like you.

  1. We had no idea what she was talking about.

  2. It did still sound like Bonnie.

  THE TIME BONNIE WOKE ME UP

  She burst into my room without knocking.

  “I think I got it! Do you remember this time?” she gabbled.

  I squinted at my alarm clock. “…time?”

  At this, an utter devastation settled over Bonnie. A flat, matte, no-expression gray exoskeleton that turned her head and picked up her feet and walked her out of my room.

  THE TIME BONNIE WAS MEAN TO US

  Bonnie raised her glass. “Here’s to the nights I will remember with the friends who always forget,” she said, and downed the whole thing. We sat still. If we did or said anything, she would predict us again, mimicking us in that horrible sarcastic voice.

  “Go,” she said, and we ran out of the bar.

  THE TIME BONNIE CANCELED

  Her email read, I’m just really sick of you all. Sorry.

  THE TIME BONNIE SMELLED BAD

  Something was wrong. Bonnie wouldn’t get out of bed. She didn’t shower. I brought her food but she’d only pick at it. When I asked her what was wrong, or how I could help, all she would say was, “Look. Sometimes I just don’t have it in me to get it up again for yet another seven days of the same old, same old, same old.” I had never seen her like this.

  She intoned:

  Another man, another bad man

  First a bad man

  First outrage

  And then or simultaneously

  And then this man is actually not that bad, or even bad at all, because if you haven’t seen him be bad to you, he cannot ever be bad, fuck an object permanence

  And then any punishment is far too big, you can’t just take away his human rights by not reading his books or not watching his movies or not voting for him or not being pleasant to him at cocktail parties

  And then where will this end, maybe men should never talk to women ever again because of course it is preferable to cease all interactions with about half of humanity if the alternative is to think or worry about one’s behavior for longer than 0.000002 seconds

  And then sometimes bad men apologize, sorry you admired me so much, sorry the rules changed on me, sorry I don’t remember doing that because I was addicted to alcohol and drugs but I remember you being into it and sorry you changed your mind, however I am not sorry for being so kinky

  And then bad men disappear and reappear

  And then we forget and they reappear

  Or is it more like they reappear and it makes us forget

  Onto the next, onto the next

  “I think this news cycle is really upsetting her,” I told another friend of hers. We sympathized.

  THE TIME BONNIE BOUGHT ME BREAKFAST

  One morning Bonnie knocked twice on my bedroom door and came in without waiting for a response. I didn’t like her coming into my room, because she often gazed at my furniture, my clothes, my shoes, with a fixed, sweetly neutral expression that I knew was pitying and insulting. Sure, my things weren’t nearly as nice as Bonnie’s, but I also didn’t think they were so bad you needed a poker face to look at them.

  This time, she didn’t do any of that. She said, “Call in sick to work. I want to show you something.”

  “You know I can’t.” Although—did she know? Currently, I had a pretty good temp gig at a duty-free-shopping company, entering the names of makeup products from large binders into a computer database. Near the end of my stint they discovered I had entered all the names incorrectly, because I had been trained incorrectly. So they hired me for another round to fix the mistakes I had made, which was really nice and humane and understanding of them. Unfortunately, because I’d finally been doing my job right, I would be losing it soon. I had no idea what was happening next.

  “It doesn’t matter!” Bonnie said. “Okay, no, wait. I’ll pay you five times what you usually make in a day. And I’ll buy you breakfast. Let’s go out!”

  “Seriously?”

  She looked down at me with the hauteur of a much older, much more professionally accomplished woman. “You know that I never lie about money or food.” She placed an already written check on my face, and when I started sputtering, she said she’d go wait in the living room.

  After I got ready and called in sick, I came out and found Bonnie sitting primly on the couch, her eyes closed. “Let’s go!” she said, standing. Her eyes were still closed. Now that I was next to her I saw her lids were covered in something clear and crusty. “You’re about to ask what’s up with my eyes. I superglued them shut,” she said. “Is it dry?” she asked herself. “Yes. It’s dry. So, you can see that my eyes are completely closed, right?”

  Oh, were they ever. I was backing away very stealthily when Bonnie said, “Stop backing away not that stealthily. I know you have this whole thing about being allergic to crazy because of your schizophrenic aunt who raised you, and it’s fine to honor the child who had to come up with coping mechanisms and protect herself somehow, but you’ve got to get over it. Sometimes shit is wild beyond all reckoning. Sometimes people are extremely weird and oftentimes literally crazy, but they’re not all the time trying to be crazy at you! So get over it. Oh, and you’re also not so normal yourself.” She put on a pair of black sunglasses. “Look, you’re going to say, Says the rich white hot girl with the happy childhood, which is not wrong. Although you did meet my parents. Oh, shit. Wait. You didn’t this time. Anyway, you’re right, but I’m still right about a tiny bit of it too. Do you want to come get your mind blown or not?”

  “I wasn’t going to say hot,” I said.

  We laughed for so long I forgot to ask how she knew about my aunt; then we went out.

  Though she couldn’t see at all with her eyes glued shut, Bonnie didn’t need my help out of the building. She picked up a toy that had fallen from a stroller and gave it back to the child. She complimented a woman on her shoes, in convincing detail. She bought a newspaper and told me what was in it. She took out her phone and told me what everyone was talking about. She stood on the street corner and asked me to let her know when it was exactly 8:00 A.M., and when it was, she pointed straight ahead and said, “Red car, black car, blue car, blue car, cop car, hot guy on a bike, hot guy jaywalking.” (Though I disagreed about the hotness of the guys, if you took Bonnie’s tastes into account, this was all accurate.)

  And all with her eyes superglued shut. I checked them again. They looked even more awful in daylight. “Bonnie,” I said, feeling equal parts wonder and foreboding. “How are you doing this?”

  Late that night we ate popcorn and watched a reality TV show—at least, I watched, while Bonnie listened, her eyeballs wiggling under her lids—since the other things we wanted to watch were created by or starring known rapists and gaslighters. “Wait, him too?” I said.

  “Check your phone,” said Bonnie. “The news just broke.”

  For a moment I was surprised that Bonnie would give up on something she really wanted to watch because a Bad Man™ was involved with it, but the fact was that she was no longer the same Bonnie I had known. “All this shit, all it wants to do is continue and repeat with only slight variations,” she intoned. “Care or not care, it doesn’t make a difference to the loop I’m in. I only can’t stand to look at his fucking face. If you see it the way I see it, it is too encrusted with the dark knowledge I have about him, a layer for each week I’ve been through. Layers and layers and layers and layers.”

  Bonnie started reciting what would happen on the reality TV show right before it did, which was getting pretty old, so I asked her if the whole week started over again at midnight.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Midnight tonight. Tuesday is th
e last day before it turns over. I love and dread Tuesdays. Though I am looking forward to this superglue being vanished.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier in the week?”

  “I have.” She couldn’t see the horror on my face, but she reached out and patted me on the arm. “Well, you know, this time I’d thought of the superglue trick and it seemed fun, but I wasn’t about to have my eyes glued shut for a whole week. It did blow your mind, didn’t it?”

  I thought. “You know…” I said. “I’m a person. A real person. Even if I can’t remember anything.”

  “I know.” Bonnie exhaled. “Sorry. At first I was really jealous of you all, but once I started being able to prove, you know, my whole deal to people, I began to see how terrifying it is. To finally get to see the truth of what’s been happening, and then to understand that it will eventually be wiped away and started over.”

  The problem with a Bonnie who was focused on the dark, scary side of things was that someone else had to pick up the positivity slack. This was not my greatest strength. I considered the me I was now, the being who had been shaped by living through this week, who would be destroyed once midnight came. Sure, Bonnie could re-create a very close approximation of this current me by behaving the same way next time, but that was almost worse somehow. No. It was definitely worse. I said quickly, “Is there, like, a magical phrase you can say to me that will hurry things up so we can get the show on the road quick next time?”