by Michelle Tea
Kyle picked her up in his Honda Civic, which made creaking, tweeting bird noises as it drove. Squeak, Squeak, Michelle made puppet noises at Kyle, pushing her chirping hands at him as he aimed the car into the sole In-N-Out Burger that had remained open all day. A giant American flag had been draped across the dead trees that ringed the drive-through. What did America have to do with it? Michelle wondered. Were people going to die as Americans rather than as earthlings? Michelle braced herself for a surge of nationalism. Suicide and patriotism, people feeding themselves to the lions with the stars and stripes clenched in their teeth? Michelle realized the end of the world might actually be profoundly tedious. That story hadn’t occurred to her.
Michelle knew that the In-N-Out Burger workers made more than minimum wage and, thus, were making more per hour than she was making at the bookstore, with benefits. Perhaps it was time to investigate the fast-food industry. It was stable, she noted, she’d just gone through Cowshwitz and had seen the gears churning. Unless the cows started dying off before they could be slaughtered, Michelle figured the burger shacks would stay in business longest of all. And even if the cows did begin dying in the mysterious mass deaths that had claimed all the other species, Michelle bet the companies would still sell the meat. People needed food and everyone was going to die now anyway. Michelle anticipated a severe drop in safety standards.
I Wonder If I Should Get A Job At In-N-Out, Michelle wondered aloud.
You’ve got to write a screenplay, Kyle said robustly. Kyle was wicked optimistic. Not even the pending apocalypse could challenge the fantasy he’d concocted for his sister. Michelle would write a screenplay and he would inherit his crazed boss’s successful casting agency. No longer bullied by his narcissistic overlord, he would proudly reject projects that dealt in stereotypes. No more Latina maids and gay hairdressers. The fat best friend would get the man unless the man in fact wanted another man. Kyle dreamed of these future days while being abused by his boss, vacuuming up the chipped glass of another ashtray shattered against the wall in a fit of rage. Kyle’s boss didn’t even smoke. She kept ashtrays around to express her anger.
The previous day, before everything changed, Kyle had been auditioning a roomful of young African American actresses vying for the role of a crack whore in a fake independent—meaning, a film with the aesthetic of an independent but with the content and budget of the studio producing it. Kyle’s stomach twisted tighter each time a woman entered his office wearing ridiculous, humiliating clothing—mismatched platform shoes, shirts stained with food, the poky outlines of their braless nipples. They had given it their all, every one of them, and this depressed Kyle even more because the part was awful, they were all too good for the shitty little film, but that was life, that was the life they had all signed up for, there in Los Angeles. Kyle had signed up to cast shitty, offensive films and these actresses had signed up to embody them and they were all in it together. Kyle adopted the persona of a weary faggot who knew their plight well, yet also knew better than to presume he could know what it was to walk in their shoes, the mismatched Lucite stilettos of a brilliant black actress fated to spend the end-times portraying stumbling crack whores in crappy movies.
Michelle didn’t know how she and her brother would make this leap from the assistant and the barely employable to Hollywood sibling power duo before the world ended, but Michelle loved what her brother saw in her. Had they been born into a life of privilege, if Michelle had been able to identify and then believe in all the options that were out there, then yes, maybe she would be able to clamber out of the ghetto that her brokenness and queerness and political affiliations had kept her in. But deep in her heart Michelle did not believe that the world was so open to her, and so she sniffed out jobs that paid single digits an hour and every job she scored felt like a huge scam, like she had tricked the employers into thinking she was someone else—a college graduate perhaps, a clean person, a person with a rich wardrobe who did not kill cockroaches with her bare hands.
Michelle and Kyle sat on the sectional sofa in his North Hollywood one bedroom, packages from In-N-Out Burger nestled in their arms, the greasy steam opening the pores in their faces like a trash facial. They put french fries into their mouths and watched the world fall apart. Kyle had cable and a better TV and Michelle could now see how blue the skies were, how brightly the flames curled out from buildings, like solar flares shooting off the surface of the sun. The people leaping from high dark windows were people, not pixels. They sat and watched and watched. Eventually, they shut it off. They agreed that it was too much, it had been on for hours and the networks were just milking everyone’s anxiety, it was sick—there was nothing new to show but they were desperate to keep us there, watching.
Michelle was hooked. One newscaster, stationed in Geneva, kept promising that some buildings were about to blow up and Michelle wanted to see it happen. She knew that there was something really wrong with her desire to keep watching. She was in the grips of a detached fascination. She wanted the images on the television to wear her down so she could truly feel whatever it felt like to truly feel what was happening. Surely this alarmed, rubbernecking interest was not what she should be feeling. She was supposed to be feeling something a few layers down, something authentic and meaningful. Michelle feared she was not having an authentic experience of the beginning of the end of the world. She was having a deeply authentic experience of inauthenticity.
The shots of New York City had rattled her the most. It was hard matching up the city she’d visited so many times with this chaotic landscape of rolling debris clouds and screaming, scorched humans. It was like watching Blade Runner and looking for Los Angeles. New York was like one of those asteroid-hits-earth films. Kyle poked at the remote, finally settling on a film about a plucky lady alcoholic who gets sent to rehab and eventually comes to understand that she truly is an alcoholic, and then she finds love—real, sober-person love—and she dumps her British party-man boyfriend to be with her new recovery soul mate. When it was very late, Michelle was scared to go to sleep, to leave Kyle awake on the sectional. He had such problems with anxiety and Michelle was sure he would sit up all night in front of the plasma television, watching suicides and having panic attacks. Which is exactly what he did.
10
Michelle slept deeply the night she learned the world was ending. She’d feared long hours tossing and turning, humming with disbelief, the news shows rolling through her mind, images of buildings already tumbling. She was sure her fear of a nearby, immediate catastrophe would keep her uselessly alert. What would prevent anyone from beginning the inevitable destruction of Los Angeles tonight? She considered lunatics, the barely hinged madmen and madwomen clutching at their slipping sanity with sweat-greased fingers. Why should they hold on any longer? Maybe the earth itself would awaken to the diabolical plotting of the human race and shake them off its back. Anything seemed possible that night, and Michelle felt herself an impotent sentry on the lookout for nothing she could control, fretting away the darkened hours. She worried about Kyle and his nerves, his mind lit with horror, anxious thoughts careening like pinballs—metallic, smacked with flippers, a panic multiball, image after image zooming out from a consciousness cramped with the effort of flinging them away.
But Michelle slept. She’d waited for her mind to engage the gears of panic, but instead she began to dream.
Michelle dreamed of a boy. In the dream she walked alongside him in a great garden. His arm was wound around her waist and with each step they took her hip rubbed against his. In sync, they curved around a path that brought them by tall, wiry stalks of echinacea, their purple petals peeled back in submission to the sun. Their ankles rolled as they navigated the cobblestones in fancy shoes: hers bright as a child’s toy with plastic chains and shining strips of leather, his delicately soled, the leather a carpaccio, slippers really, to be worn climbing in and out of fairy-tale carriages. Michelle enjoyed the sight of their shoes shuffling in unison through the garden.
They paused beside a bush of angel’s-trumpets and huffed the waxy horn of each dangling blossom. They rubbed the fuzz of the kangaroo paw, were dazzled by the new-wavy hue of the sticks on fire, Euphorbia tirucalli. The boy spoke and Michelle thought, I’m Euphorbic!—so blissed out and goofy her observing self wondered what she was on.
In her dream the boy knew the name of every plant. In her dream Michelle understood Latin, the noble, ancient music of it making sense. A receptor in her mind was activated and in an instant she felt an understanding of all languages! Understood that she had always known them! Her mind was a hive of words. A rush of excitement washed over her. She turned back to the boy, who was more beautiful than all the flowers, more aesthetically pleasing than the water fountain with its patinous bronze, than the curve of the cobblestones, the stitching of their fancy shoes. His voice, speaking Latin, was sweeter than the water’s splash and trickle, the patter of their feet upon the stone.
Oh, Michelle felt so romantic! The boy pulled her closer and together they made fun of the docent leading the tour, a woman who didn’t know the Latin words for anything, who hadn’t discovered that she could speak Latin or Spanish or Swahili if only she flexed that part of her brain. Michelle and the boy whispered to each other in a succession of languages, their minds’ potential illuminated. The boy’s shirt was slashed as if it had survived a knife fight and Michelle’s pants were too tight. The energy between them flashed from pure to sleazy, they pecked each other’s cheeks and restrained themselves from groping. Michelle bit back her desire to slip her hand through the gash in his shirt, to press her ass against him. I’m your Eurotrash boyfriend, he murmured in Castilian Spanish. Their love expanded as they expressed it in Norwegian, German, Italian. So many nuanced words! Different kinds of words for different kinds of love and Michelle felt them all—sad love, inspired love, hopeless love, affectionate love, friendly love, desperate love, passionate love, murderous love, respectful love, platonic love, forbidden love, trashy love, sacred love, holy love. Michelle’s heart felt full and drooping as the blowsiest rose in the garden. The boy’s attentions buzzed inside it. She was so open to him, she shed pollen on the cobblestones.
The boy did not like how the designer of this garden had deliberately starved certain plants of water so that their stressed-out leaves would turn a more pleasing color. Neither of them liked how the designer had employed a worker to pluck every other leaf from the canopy of trees arcing above them so that the light filtering through the branches would be dappled just so. What A Control Freak, Michelle said, in French, just to hear the chic sound of it sliding from her mouth. She was concerned for the worker charged with this duty, imagined him a Mexican man struggling on a ladder, earning minimum wage, slowly losing his mind as he scanned the boughs—pluck a leaf, leave a leaf, pluck a leaf, leave a leaf—the cancerous sun mutating his body. His body, Michelle imagined, would be heavy, would wear coveralls, a navy blue jumpsuit sewn from stiff fabric. She thought she would maybe write a story about him, this man who plucked leaves in service to a megalomaniacal garden designer. She shared her inspiration with the boy, who gave her waist a squeeze.
I want to know your work, he told her in Armenian. I want to become familiar with your praxis. His hands, tipped with slender fingers, gestured out from his chest as he spoke, as if his desire were a gift he offered from his heart. Michelle didn’t know what praxis was, but she felt elated that the boy believed she had it, was dizzy with his desire to become familiar with it.
The boy’s work was flowers, plants. He believed it was people like the mad garden designer, with his need to manipulate nature like plastic putty, who brought problems into their world. The designer’s artificial aesthetic was a poison in the garden. The boy wanted to feed the thirsty plants water, to restore them to their native, less flamboyant color. He wanted to return the missing leaves to the anemic branches that rustled above them. Michelle wanted that, too. She imagined how damp and green the air would feel beneath a lush canopy, how shaded, how the boy would kiss her, brushing the animal fur of his cheeks against her skin, his gentle mustache. With every step Michelle could feel the pressure of a ghost hand between her legs and knew that the imprint was his, the boy had been there, had worked her like a puzzle box. With each step she savored the sweet, dull pain of how he’d solved her.
In her dream Michelle pulled a cell phone from her purse to check the time. Dreaming Michelle had a cell phone—observing Michelle noted this absurdity. Michelle didn’t want to be late to meet Kyle, Kyle was in the garden, too, strolling alongside a row of succulents with a man, his boyfriend. Kyle was in love, too! I’m In Love, Michelle said happily, for in love was her favorite place to be. I’m In Love, she blissed, Just Like Kyle. The thoughts came to her in Mandarin and she enjoyed the choppy, chunky noise of it inside her head, words beginning in a call and ending in a trill, squeezed, almost sung. She wanted to tell the boy how special it was that everyone she loved was in love, but her cell phone melted away into a Salvador Dali jumble of floating nonsense and Michelle realized then that she was in a dream.
Swiftly, reality slammed down on the part of her mind that could comprehend Latin, Armenian, Mandarin. With great sadness she understood it had all been gibberish, gobbledygook, she could not speak Cantonese or Tagalog or Portuguese. She was in Kyle’s bed, a single damp sheet knotted around her, the Los Angeles smog coming through the open window like the exhalations of a chain-smoking god. Michelle lay on the mattress feeling the dream evaporate from her body. In the next room she could hear the low chatter of the television broadcasting the apocalypse and hoped her brother had at least fallen asleep out there.
I Dreamed Of You, Michelle told her brother. We Were In A Garden And We Both Had Boyfriends. We Were In Love.
You had a boyfriend? Kyle asked skeptically.
Yeah Who Cares, Michelle shrugged. He Was Pretty, Like Johnny Depp. He Spoke Very Pretentiously And Seemed Well Educated.
Wait! Kyle winced. His neck was tangled and sore from sleeping on the sectional. The television had infiltrated his dreams all night, but he had dreamed, and where had he been? In a great garden, with his sister. We were in the Getty! he said. I did have a boyfriend! Oh my god . . . He turned and stared at Michelle. Not only did you have a boyfriend, Kyle said, you had a cell phone. That’s how I know it was a dream!
Kyle’s dream boyfriend was a terribly handsome interior decorator who was not promiscuous and had glittering blue eyes. He was gentle with Kyle and in the dream Kyle had enjoyed it! They had strolled hand in hand, discussing the health of their surrogate, a college student who had agreed to carry their baby. Their surrogate was robust and loved the feeling of her body morphing in pregnancy. Having babies and giving them to gay men was her greatest joy. The dream had been a good dream. Kyle would have liked to contort himself back onto the sectional, finding the exact terrible pose he’d slumbered in and call for the dream to return, but he’d promised Michelle he’d drive her back to Hollywood.
11
On the second day of the end of the world, Michelle changed into something worthy of a run-in with Matt Dillon and left for work through the back door, passing through a small, sad square of concrete that functioned as a sort of pathetic backyard. Little green shoots came up through the rocky gaps in the pavement. Seasons of dead leaves moldered along the perimeter. Sometimes homeless kids slept there in the afternoons, protected by the building’s constant shade.
Turning the corner, Michelle walked along a stretch of sidewalk owned by the Scientologists. They had landscaped the walkway with those expensive fake plants, they trusted that the scant foot traffic of Los Angeles would prevent them from being messed with but Michelle couldn’t resist. She would pluck a single yellow orchid blossom from its stalk and vivisect it as she strolled, wondering at the plasticky fibers, the cool gloss of the petals. They felt so real but they weren’t. She kept the stolen flower low, they were as protected as endangered plants had once been. She couldn’t afford to replace even
a bud and didn’t need to get hauled into court by a bunch of Hollywood Scientologists.
Michelle stuffed the shredded flower in the pocket of her cutoffs and watched the Scientologists dash in and out of their compound. She especially appreciated the maids, who wore real, old-fashioned maid uniforms, black and white with little aprons and nursing shoes. Michelle longed to get a job at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, cleaning the rooms of visiting celebrities while wearing such an adorable costume, but she knew they would never hire her. The Hollywood sign sat wearily on the dead grass, a wavering mirage in the smog. Michelle entered her bookstore.
Beatrice was already there. Every day Michelle had to tell some customer that Beatrice was not a Scientologist, that their store was not a Scientologist bookstore, though they did keep a lot of dictionaries on hand because new Scientology recruits came in daily, having been instructed to go out and buy themselves a dictionary. The customers remained skeptical about Beatrice’s affiliations. Really, Michelle would insist, She’s Just An Old Hippie. In San Francisco there were a million ladies like Beatrice, but here in Los Angeles she was such a rare breed people thought she belonged to a cult.
Beatrice had written a poem about the wonders of the world and had hung it in the front window. Michelle’s project that day would not be her regular Sisyphean task of finding space on the buckling bookshelves for yet more books, but to find art books containing photos of some of the planet’s high points. Waterfalls, canyons, mountain peaks swathed in mystical clouds. Beaches with gentle, curling waves—nothing too awesome, we didn’t want to make people think about the coming tsunami. Just lush canopies of glossy leaves and flowers as big as your head. Jungles and fields of flowers, forests and the tiny bear cubs that clawed honey from the beehives that dangled from branches.