10.)
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
If this is the apocalypse, which I think it is, then we’re completely fucked.
I write this from my sister Emily’s room, which is painted red. It’s the safest and warmest room in the house, sandwiched between the guest bedroom and my parents’ room.
But if I’m the only one left, then we’re fucked. I am the last person you’d want on your apocalypse team. I was barely wanted on teams in gym class. When we played dodgeball, I’d sacrifice myself in the middle of the game so I wouldn’t have to be one of the last two, battling it out in front of everyone else who’d watch and jeer.
I am too trusting. When I moved to California, I met a guy at a bar who kept asking me if I wanted my dreams to come true. Thinking this a philosophical question, I said, “Sure, who doesn’t?” The conversation got stranger, and when I went home to tell my roommate what had happened, she told me to block his number. He was, she told me, trying to get me involved in a pyramid scheme.
I am squeamish, so zombie apocalypse is out. I don’t even kill spiders. The boys on Bumble like to have a line or two about “Willing to kill spiders,” and that actively turns me off. I know what they’re trying to do—chivalry—but offing a helpless insect that contributes to our ecosystem earns them negative points in my book.
I have never shot a gun and have zero interest in trying it.
I am a Libra. Librans do well with structure. While my Libran ass can evaluate various avenues of ethical choice, this skill doesn’t help me make decisions.
I do know how to give CPR (assuming that CPR rules haven’t changed since I was in seventh grade, when I got certified). I also assume I’m fertile, so if I need to further the human race with a (hopefully hot and necessarily feminist) man, I could do that. But that would also mean that I assume the human race is worth furthering, which I’m not so sure it is.
I’d do really well if this apocalypse is of the sphinx kind. Like, if the fate of the world depended upon me answering literary questions, I’d have some confidence in myself. I would’ve probably passed my master’s exam in the spring. I could handle a stoic interrogating me about niche knowledge.
But here I am, in my younger sister’s room, with a candle burning, feeling properly apocalyptic and medieval at the same time. A few days ago, I would’ve killed to have this aesthetic™. Writing in the semi-dark, the snow falling, candlelight flickering, perhaps a nightgown to go with it. But now, it is simply what I’m doing to stay sane.
My sister has my old bookshelves and desk, and I feel safe here. Some of my old books are in here, too, plus a few additions my sister has made to the collection. I write now in an abandoned math notebook of hers.
My arm is bruised from pinching. I am definitely awake.
And everyone is gone. I woke up this morning, December 23, 2020, to the snow blowing outside, the Christmas tree lights still on downstairs, and no one around. I looked out the door, called for my mom, my dad, my sister. None of them were home. I looked outside. All the cars were in the driveway, half-covered with snow. I looked in the laundry room, the garage, the backyard where no one really went. I tried calling their cell phones. Voice mail.
I put on my coat, and sleepily trudged across the road to our neighbor’s house. Perhaps my family was giving neighbors the spring rolls my mom made every Christmas. I rang the doorbell. Waited. Knocked on the door. Waited. Went around to the back, peeked into the window. Nothing there, only a TV and some throw blankets on the couch.
I went to my other neighbor’s house. We live in a small cul-de-sac. This house was where one of my high school classmates lived before he also went to college. In all my years in this school district, he and I had never spoken. I doubt he knew me. I’d talked to his parents and his dog more than I ever talked to him.
I stood shivering on their front porch. Also nothing.
I turned around. The snow was the only movement in the cul-de-sac. That and the flashing holiday lights of Josh Campbell’s yellow house. Funny how easily his name came to me. What had it been? Nine years since high school graduation.
I made my way back home. I didn’t have a plan. So I sat down here, huddled in my sister’s middle-of-the-house bedroom and started writing because that’s what I know how to do best. This isn’t eloquent and I kind of hate myself while I’m writing it, but it’s my thoughts and it’s honest. How dishonest would it be for me to edit a journal that no one will even read?
I’m going to find some food. Wish me luck.
Thursday, December 24, 2020
If I find someone to mate with, I could call myself Madame Ovary. Like Madame Bovary. But I wouldn’t die. It’d be a twist on the tale.
They say puns are the lowest form of humor. I contend that sarcasm is. Sarcasm is so often used irresponsibly. You need to establish first a foundation of trust with a person before you can add a layer of sarcasm. It must be understood by both parties to be funny. Otherwise it comes off as mean. Or confusing.
I get along with most people in my department, but there is one person, Allison, who I just have never clicked with. She uses sarcasm all the time. It is not a mode, but a worldview for her. I never know if she is genuine, and I’m always startled by the jokes she makes. I held the door open for her once and she said, “Wow, thanks, favorite person.” She also calls me “Jules.” No one calls me that.
If it’ll be up to me to rebuild the human race, I will pray that sarcasm doesn’t sneak its way back into our culture.
If I am the last one here, I guess I should say something about myself. I’m doing an M.A. in Literature, specializing in speculative fiction, which is just a fancy way to say “sci-fi.” I’m from Connecticut, where I am right now for winter break. And my name is Julianna Hong. I’m Chinese American, which future aliens reading this might not understand, but in my world, it’s important to me.
My mom makes about 200 spring rolls each Christmas break. She laid them out on our kitchen counter, in preparation for the onslaught of family members coming over today—who were supposed to come today. Luckily, spring rolls—the chunjuan kind, the fried kind—keep well, and it’s cold enough in the house that they stay fresh, though chilled. I’ve been eating them yesterday and today, and still have a lot left.
I miss my mom. We were going to watch costume dramas all weekend while baking cookies. I was going to tell her that I’m queer—and that yes, I’m at the ripe age of 25, but I didn’t know I was bisexual because I’m also demisexual. I think she would’ve asked a couple of questions, especially about Kieran, and I would’ve told her that dating a guy didn’t make me not bi. And I think she would’ve then hugged me.
When I felt her absence acutely today, I put my hands to my cheeks, closed my eyes, and counted to ten. This was a trick she’d taught me on my first day of kindergarten. She said if I missed her, I should do this, and she’d be with me. My hands would become her hands. I’d be enough for myself.
I took two birth control pills today, having missed yesterday’s. I spaced them out over ten hours so it should be fine. I didn’t cry.
Friday, December 25, 2020
And on the third day, all signals stopped. I had tried calling my aunts who live an hour away, also in Connecticut. If they’d picked up, I would’ve wished them a Merry Christmas before delving into the more serious topics at hand. Small talk plays an important social role, especially in hard times, I think.
I got dial tones. I found my parents’ cell phones plugged into various outlets in the house, charging—or trying to. The power was out. My sister’s cell phone was in one of her backpacks. My cell phone ran out of juice this afternoon.
For one who needs to have a good cry about once a week, I hadn’t cried the last two days. Today, I finally did. The tears came when I sat down at the table, lit a candle, and ate Mom’s spring rolls. I missed her, dad, and Emily. This Christmas break was supposed to be special, because Emily was graduating from high school soon and I was probably going to go abroad to London next year. Where were they? If they’d gone somewhere, why hadn’t they taken me? The house had been left as if they’d vanished mid-action. The tin foil my mom uses to wrap the spring rolls was out in its box, one sheet pulled out as if she had been getting it ready for packaging. My sister’s bed was unmade (she never made it so that wasn’t peculiar). But my parents’ bed was also unmade (which was peculiar).
Perhaps they’d been abducted by aliens.
Why hadn’t the aliens been interested in me?
With these thoughts, I cried, sobbed, and salted the spring rolls more. I needed water to wash all this down and, wanting to preserve the gallons stored in the garage, I went out to get a few buckets of untouched snow. I’d use the melted snow for my next shower. In the meantime, my mom’s stock of face wipes would do the trick.
I’m still scared to use the fireplace. What if the smoke from the chimney calls attention to marauders and looters? So I changed out of my layers, put on a new set of very warm clothing from my dad’s closet (men’s clothing=more practical), and lit a candle. I lay on the floor in my sister’s room, looking at the red all around. She’d been in her Goth phase when she chose this paint. It was beautiful, actually, though the corners where the paint was thicker was the exact shade of period blood. I suppose she hadn’t known that at twelve.
The red room in Jane Eyre was a punishment for Jane, the stuff of nightmares. However much I related to Jane as a kid, I now found myself comforted by the surrounding walls, painted by my sister, anime posters on one side and a bookshelf on the other. I sat down and wrote.
Saturday, December 26, 2020
Spent all day reading Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. She wrote it after all of her friends died, using the storytelling as a way to commemorate them, mourn them. The main character ends up wandering Europe alone, until he finds a dog. He keeps searching for human companions. It’s beautiful and sad, but the weird thing is that the entire story is prefaced with an author’s note saying that she found the story written on Sibylline leaves—that is, prophetic leaves. She has compiled and translated the story before us. So this dude’s lastness was meant to be.
My aunts Alexandra and Karen were the ones who’d gotten me into art and literature. My dad and mom were always busy working when I was younger, and my college-aged aunts were delighted to take me, their only niece at the time, around. They drove me from where I lived then in Easton to New London (where they live now, incidentally) and finally to Fairfield, where they lived then—three towns that seemed like all the world (but were only a portion of Connecticut). As I grew older, they took me to plays, ballets, my first Broadway show. Things were cheaper then and they knew how to strike a deal. Every time a new adaptation of a novel came out, we were at the theatres on premiere night with popcorn and milk duds. We watched War of the Worlds, Pride and Prejudice, One Day; snacks on each armrest, my feet kicking before me, a peppy aunt on one side and a maternal one on the other.
Now, they had kids of their own. They were probably too busy to pick up the phone in New London. With the snow and the lack of people, there were probably provisions that needed to be handled. Their husbands knew how to hunt and camp, both outdoorsy men. I was determined to go to them once the snow cleared, and then onwards to somewhere else, because I didn’t want to overburden them with another mouth to feed. I’d lived on my own in California for the past year and some. I could make it on my own. Hopefully, when I get to New London…
I’m still eating spring rolls, but I’m tired of them being cold. I decided to take a gamble and light the fire. I kept my dad’s sword by me as I lay on the floor by the hearth and read. He’d bought the sword in Chinatown on a family trip one summer. Mom and I had rolled our eyes at this choice, but it might come in handy after all.
The world was so silent beyond this circle around me, I reassured myself that if people were to drive up or attack, I’d hear them.
6 p.m. Still safe. Kindled the fire. Heated the spring rolls by them. Had a warm dinner. Cried a little more.
7 p.m. Thought about how emo the Romantic poets were, and how emo I have been feeling.
“No, no, go not to Lethe”—John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”
8 p.m. I thought about leaving today. But with the roads snowy, icy, and unplowed, it seemed stupid. I’ll wait until it clears up.
Sunday, December 27, 2020
The only good thing about being the last woman is that you can masturbate any time you want, for however long you want, however loudly you want. Turns out being the last woman makes you quite the horndog. I was masturbating for the human race, all those poor chaps who couldn’t anymore. My hand got tired after maybe the seventh round so I used a pillow, which I’d never truly, devotedly tried before. It was okay, but my heart wasn’t in it.
I thought about Kieran today. Separately. Not while I was taking care of myself, but not not while I was taking care of myself. I hadn’t let myself think about him in a while. I’m not sure what triggered it. Probably the fact that I’ll never love someone like that again, because there was no one to love. Or probably that, when we started dating, it was also winter and right before Christmas, and we used to ask each other ridiculous hypotheticals.
“If we were alone on an island and starving, would you eat me?” I asked. I was 18 at the time, he 19. I was a freshman in college, he a sophomore. We’d just finished making out and the moon was full and painted a strip of light across his belly and my chest. I traced the line that connected us.
“Would you let me?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said, staring at his belly button. It was a perfect crater, no bumps or wrinkles, as if stamped into his skin with a careful thumb. “Would you let me?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure it’d help,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I have skinny legs.”
I craned my neck to see. His pajama pants were on, but I felt his calves through the fabric with my foot. He was right. “Yeah, you’d suck as a last meal.”
He laughed, his head thrown back, his entire frame shaking. My hand, still on his belly, bounced with his breath. I beamed up at him. I was so in love, even if I didn’t think the words yet.
There was so much I didn’t know at the time. Like that we’d last six years, into our mid-twenties, past our first and second jobs. Like that we’d almost get engaged. Or that we’d break up because our geographical futures were uncertain.
We still talked from time to time. He’d texted me on Thanksgiving. No emojis, just “Happy thanksgiving!” We got to talking one weekend when my sister was freaking out about colleges and I had no idea how to help. Emily had always taken to him, and so he intervened when I asked, talking to her and calming her down. After their conversation, he called me and I thanked him. He said, “No problem.”
There was silence on the phone. I could hear him breathing, stepping back and forth as he did when he was thinking.
I got emotional all of a sudden. “Why don’t you say it?”
I could hear his sad smile. “Just because I don’t say it, Julianna, doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.”
“So you do.”
“Of course I do,” he said simply, as if I’d asked him if he had eaten today. I knew the sentence that came after, even if it didn’t come. We loved each other, but it didn’t change how far apart we were.
I have to pee.
* * *
I can only talk about you at the end
I can only talk about myself at the end
Only at the end can I talk about you
Only at the end can I talk about myself
—Unknown, “Four Sentiments”
Again, I’m not sure what made me think of all this today. I haven’t thought about him much this month. I didn’t even think about him much the day of that phone call. Loving him was just a fact of life: just as I love my mom and dad and sister, just as I am pursuing an M.A., just as I am a Libra. I carry it with me as I do the thing called living.
I wondered, wherever they all were, if they still carried things with them.
I’m going to finish reading Shelley now.
Monday, December 28, 2020
It is probably good that the world ended. No more wars, climate change, capitalism, patriarchy. I am convinced that the first person was a woman. I learned during the two weeks I was a Biology major that mitochondrial DNA transmits each generation matrilineally, and that we all carry the mitochondrial DNA of a single ancestral woman. She’s called the mitochondrial Eve. Also, no way a man had the emotional capacity to be the first or last of anything. He’d probably spend the first few days punching trees.
One might say, who am I to judge? Much of the past six days has been spent jerking off and eating leftovers. Yes, sure. But I’ve also kept quite cool.
I guess it makes sense the last person is a woman. Hello.
I’m glad the men on Bumble are gone. No more pictures of them holding up fishes of various sizes to show that they could provide for me (their reasoning still unclear). No more demands on profiles that a woman viewing them “not be boring.” Heck, I’ll be as boring as I want.
When my sister and I hung out during my first night back, we were playing Settlers of Catan. I was collecting my sheep and ranting about all of this.
“Why don’t you just meet someone in person?” she asked.
“Two things: that is easy for you to say because you’re in high school,” I said. “Second, I just might.” I placed down another road and she grunted.
We played in silence a little longer, as she gathered enough ammunition to build a city. She was good at that. Sneaky and smart.
“Plus,” I said, gazing at my five sheep cards. “I’d rather be single than settle for someone I don’t like.”
“What about that Nathan guy? The one who engineers for game shows?”
“He asked me if I own a wetsuit. Hello! Not all people in California like the water. I’m not there for the beach. I’m there for the books.” I traded in two sheep for cards that were, for once, not sheep.
“You know, you’re the only person I believe when you say that.”
“What?”
“That you’d rather be alone than settle. People say that, but they don’t mean it. I think you mean it.”
“It’s true. If I’d rather sit alone on my couch with a book after I go on a date with you, you’re not worth it.”
She laughed and rolled for her turn.
Emily Hong. Came out to our parents at the age of thirteen. Younger sister. Fencer. So much cooler than me. I was going to tell my family this holiday about me, too, but…
The board game is still here, but I don’t think there’s a way to play it with just myself.
Still, I stand by my belief. I love being alone. Aunt Karen says it’s only because I “haven’t met the right guy yet,” but it’s something else. There is a freedom of time and energy. When I was dating Kieran, I loved being with him, but we still spent a lot of time apart—even before distance, we liked living our separate days before convening for dinner. That was ideal. We took comfort in the fact that we always knew we were in the relationship out of mutual enjoyment, not out of obligation or routine or fear of being alone.
I think a lot of people fear being alone. I’ve seen some bad couples.
Even now, apart from my worry about my family, I’m fine. I know eventually I’ll join them in whatever afterlife or oblivion. I have my books. I know how to get food, even after the spring rolls run out. And when the snow melts, I’ll go to my aunts’ houses to see if my family went there.
Yes, I’d rather be alone than with any man. Especially Michael, who asked me out the month after Kieran and I broke up. Michael and I had been friends since my first day of graduate school. He was in Philosophy (I should’ve seen the red flag there) and could throw around feminist jargon as if he believed it. He was in a similar situation: a long distance relationship with a long-term partner. We went through breakups around the same time. When he asked me out, I turned him down, and everything was okay—until he rage-texted me a list of things I had said or done the past two years that had given him the impression (what he called “facts”) that I liked him.
There is a scene in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South when the main character, Margaret Hale, turns down Henry Lennox’s proposal of marriage. She is shocked he sensed anything other than friendship from her and feels near-disgust at the notion of marriage to him—not because he is inherently disgusting, but because she always felt a gulf of difference between them. This is precisely, fundamentally, what I felt about Michael. Even if I had said “yes,” the relationship would’ve been a disaster. He would’ve spent each day misunderstanding me and I would’ve spent each day frustrated at him. It was strange he didn’t see that, and unforgivable he would turn to outright misogyny to express his hurt feelings.
So, yes, Emily, I’d rather be alone than be with someone like that.
Tuesday, December 29, 2020
I was visited by God today, or something like God, who is—!!!—a woman. A tall woman whose body is a prism of light and shadow. I think her hair is black, but even this was unclear. I only know that she has the most unwavering, unyielding gaze.
I dropped a perfectly good spring roll when she appeared. I let out a sigh. I bent down to pick up my food from the kitchen floor, saying, “Could you at least announce yourself? I’ve been kind of used to silence here.”
She stood watching me, unblinking. “Julianna Hong.”
I leaned against the counter to look cool. My legs trembled a little. “That’s me.” She was at least six feet, and very still. “Is it true? Is everyone gone?”
“Not everyone,” she said, peering steadily at me.
“Why me?” I asked, setting the spring roll down on the counter. “Why someone with no survival skills and no sense of adventure?”
She kept staring at me without blinking, and then she burst into mirthful laughter, barely a breath drawn between the sounds.
I laughed, too, my head thrown back, shoulders shaking. Our God is not a merciful one, nor a cruel one, but a satirist.
I finished laughing first. “Okay, and I suppose you have some kind of mission for me.”
“What is your plan?”
“Well, I have enough spring rolls to last me until the end of the first week of the new year. I guess I’m just going to wait out the snow, and then maybe find other people.”
She smirked.
“What?” I said, starting to get annoyed.
“But you are a planner,” she said. “Are you not going to plan out the rest of your life?”
“Look, la—” I began, but corrected myself before calling her “lady.” It had felt appropriate, but I did want to live to the end of the conversation at least. “Maybe two years ago, but studying literature with very few prospects afterwards changes one’s perspective on things.”
She peered at me again, assessing. I suppose I surprised her with how chill I was. Take that, ex-boyfriends. God thinks I’m chill.
I felt the need to summarize my take on time. “If I have provisions for the next two weeks, I’m good.”
She took a step closer to me. She looked at the air plant my sister had named Stuart. She looked back at me. “This chapter of the universe, the one in which humanity exists, is over. I need to begin the new chapter, but I need your consent to do so. Do you consent?”
I guffawed. How kind of her to ask me. “And if I do, you’ll—what? Start a new chapter of humanity on Mars or something?”
She kept staring at me, waiting. She had an eternity—or the next two weeks at least—ahead of her to wait. I took this as an affirmation.
“If humanity is so horribly corrupt, why start a new chapter of it from scratch on another planet? That’s like doing the same exact failed science experiment without changing any factors.”
“There are endless possibilities,” she said simply.
“My small, short life has taught me that humans tend towards corruption. We exist swirling around the drain. We may stay afloat but it’s all just going to go down—that is where gravity pulls us.”
“Are you advocating against a new chapter?”
“I just want you to consider all angles,” I said, going over to the pantry. My mom had put three boxes of Ritz crackers on the top shelf. They were my least favorite kind of food, and I used to joke that they shouldn’t exist, but I saw their purpose now. Something to chew on while talking to God.
“And you,” she returned, coming around to the pantry as well. I was stretched on my tiptoes trying to reach the Ritz. She watched me disinterestedly.
“Yeah?” I squeaked. I got a hold of the box’s corner and nudged it towards me. The box fell off the shelf and I caught it right before it hit the floor. I laughed in victory, and stopped when I noticed she was still waiting for me to talk. I did feel a slight desperation to keep her in conversation. The past few days were tolerable; I was a graduate student very used to solitary work and quiet. But I was starting to get a bit stir-crazy in my childhood home, as if the space made me regress into someone who needed more attention than usual.
“Hold on tight to that box,” she said. I did, before I could question her, and with a blink, she transported us to another room—dimension?—with red curtains hanging from some unseeable ceiling. They were billowing in a directionless wind, floating between us and away from us with each breath I took. Everything around us was gold, as if it was the height of noon in some desert, but I felt no warmth and no breeze, as if I was asleep and senseless to the elements on my skin.
She came to my side and drew the red curtain to my right. Behind it, going for miles, were rows and rows of glass vats, each about six feet in length. I could see one of many suns glowing about the vats in the distance. I squinted. They seemed to hold something, like fish, or—
humans. Each vat contained a human, naked and floating. Dead?
Before I could express this aloud, she blinked again and we were now right before a vat, in an aisle between rows and rows of them. I bent down. The person in the nearest vat was unconscious, floating in the middle of the water, not on top of it—so not dead, but in some fugue state. I pressed my hand to the glass. I looked closer. Her hair swam about her. Her cheekbones were high. She had a birthmark on her neck.
I bolted upright. “That’s my mom! What the fuck?” I approached the dreadful woman and shook in fury, my words sputtering out as if I had just emerged from water. “Wake her up!”
She only gestured towards the thousands and thousands of other tanks, blinked, and we were floating meters above the desert of human bodies. “They are all quite happy. This is what we wanted them to be from the start. With your consent, you could join them here.”
“With my consent. With my consent!” I held my head and screamed. My voice did not echo, but stopped short in front of me as if it hit a concrete wall. “How can you use that language of—of consent so casually? Did everyone here give consent?”
“You must show some empathy. It is much easier to join than to resist. No one wishes to be alone. We are not destroying lives, but preserving them, forever.”
I dared to look at my mom again. In life, her sleeping face was always troubled: her lips pursed, her eyes furrowed. My mom was prone to bad dreams. Here, in this tank, her face was serene. Her body bobbed up and down infinitesimally.
“Is she breathing?” I had to ask.
“They are happy.”
“Is she dreaming?”
“It is different for each person.”
Another blink and we were in that forest of red curtains waving. I could not see, for the tears in my eyes. “You are cruel.”
A blink once more and we were in my empty kitchen. I still had the Ritz box in my arms, too tightly.
“I am giving you a choice. It is entirely up to you.”
I shook my head until I was dizzy. “This is too much responsibility.”
“Yet it is yours. Only with your consent will I end this chapter. You are the last of it.”
When I blinked my tears away, she was gone. I suppose I will know how to call her when, if I want to. I sat down, anxious energy coursing through my fingers. Were all the gods—she had said “we”—watching me?
I set the Ritz box down and went to the living room where childhood portraits of my sister and me in China a long time ago were hanging. I sat down at the piano. It was out of tune, some keys sharp and some flat, some keys not working much at all. When I was away at school, no one played it.
I played a song I must’ve learned about fifteen years ago, a very simple rendition of “Ode to Joy.” I played it loud and hard and badly. Fuck you, ye almighty, and despair.
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
My will to live has never been that strong. I once went on Kieran’s ski boat (he made sure I knew it was a ski boat and not a speedboat). This was about six years ago now, one year into our relationship. We were on a lake near Lake George, a smaller, quieter one. We were the only ones in sight, I was young, and we were in love. I thought it’d be romantic for him to stop the boat in the middle of the lake, for us to jump off, swim around, laugh, and kiss. He obliged and we jumped off. I was ready for some romance to ensue but, as if the universe wanted to disprove rom-com tropes, the wind picked up immediately as I splashed into the water. The lake began to ripple, until waves washed over my shoulders. I tread the water frantically. The boat started gliding away, because we hadn’t anchored it—why would we have? None of the movies showed that part. Kieran started swimming towards it to get it back and I followed him, but a flood of thoughts came to me. A tour guide had told us that the water was 80-feet deep and there was a lost city beneath. I started cramping.
“Help!” I screamed. Kieran heard me and turned around, but he was a much faster swimmer and by then already about 20 feet away. “Help!” The waves started washing over me. I was going to go under and, in the lull between waves, I made peace with death.
But Kieran fished me out, put me on his back, and swam us to the boat. He put a towel over my shoulders and watched my face.
“I’m fine,” I sputtered, managing a smile.
“You were about to go under,” he said. “I saw you. You were totally going to let that wave take you.”
I didn’t argue, only laughed it off.
It was funny at the time, but the irony of that doesn’t escape me now, now that I have the entire weight of humanity hanging on my choice.
Kieran’s family still owns that house by Lake George. Well, owned. Property probably doesn’t exist during the apocalypse.
One of his family’s favorite stories was that they’d had a fire evacuation plan whenever they were at the lake house each summer. The house was old and in the middle of the woods. The plan was to, in case of a fire, go out the back door and convene at their neighbor’s driveway, an acre away. When Kieran was four, he once heard the fire alarm go off, and he zoomed past his parents, making a beeline for the driveway as he was taught. There hadn’t been an actual fire, just a turkey burning in the oven, but his parents were delighted that he had taken the directions so literally, not even glancing back as he preserved himself. I am glad he glanced back that day on the lake.
By the following year of our relationship, after that boating experience, he had learned to sense me without words. And now he knew I was a bad swimmer, so we didn’t do any water sports again.
I had a hard time thinking he’d consented to being put in a vat. He was a rebel and a med student, a paradox that I still wondered at. He loved life. He cried at sentimental commercials that had life lessons embedded into their marketing schemes. He once saw, through the crack in the airplane seats in front of him, someone watching a dog movie and when the dog died on screen, he fell sobbing onto my shoulder.
He thought I was amazing, even when I didn’t get into Oxford for grad school. His intense optimism was contagious. He asked questions about everything. I’m sure when that bitch of a god approached him, he wore her out with his inquisitiveness.
I have never worn anyone out. I don’t say that with pride. I have never been one to rock the boat. Even studying Literature was not so much of a rebellion—my Asian parents were always so supportive.
If I could make peace with the tossing waves that day, I could make peace with a vat. I can. There is, probably, no Kieran now to fish me out. The vat seems easy. Keeping myself afloat is hard.
8 p.m. But I am not one to complain. My mom left me with so many spring rolls.
I’m also sure my aunts would’ve put up a good fight, bargaining and negotiating, haggling the prices down and comparing sales pitches.
And my mom literally crossed oceans on a refugee boat to get here, for me to be alive. When I told her I wanted to become a Literature teacher, afraid she’d want me to do something more stereotypically prestigious, she’d said, “Whatever makes you happy.” Her father had told her smart girls would never be desirable. She told me to make myself strong.
I peeked outside an hour ago before the sun set. The sky was visible, blue and blinding against the world of white snow. Teardrops glistened on the ends of branches—the snow was melting.
Thursday, December 31, 2020
The Camry took a while to rev up. On rainy days, it wouldn’t start at all. But after a few times, it got going. I could’ve chosen the Hyundai or the Lexus as my getaway vehicle, but the Camry held sentimental value for my mom. It was her first baby, besides me. It got her through moving across the east coast. It took her family everywhere we needed to go. It would take me where I needed to go, I was sure.
I turned the heat up. I hadn’t been properly warm in a week. I had all of my books packed in the trunk, all the necessities for an apocalyptic journey like this one. Le Guin, Keats, Mary Shelley, Octavia E. Butler. The canon of how to survive such a thing: emotionally, poetically, intellectually, practically. I had a few gallons of water from the garage and would get more from the Target on the way. I had an axe. Emily’s fencing sword. Windshield scrapers. Boots. Pads. Birth control. Glasses—I’d pick up extras in Target. Layers and layers of clothing. The rest of the spring rolls. All the underwear I had, plus my mother’s. Hypoallergenic detergent. A sewing kit. A first aid kit. Antibiotics, which my parents had hoarded over the years. Vitamin C pills.
There was barely any room in the car left, but somehow, when I looked in my rearview mirror, she showed up, sitting serenely in the back, her hands folded on her lap. “Have you decided?” She hovered much more than my parents ever did.
“I have made a decision,” I said. “This whole thing—it’s not some convoluted test?”
“Test or not,” she answered, “the facts remain the same.”
Ah, a duck-rabbit situation. Either way I looked at it, it was the same picture. I could choose to end the chapter, as she termed it, but that’d be it for humanity. Done. No more literature, art, conversation. No more pain or love or anger. No more experience of snow, or shoveling, or the cold on our noses. Not only would this world be gone, but also the smaller worlds we created in our minds.
Or I could choose to go on and take a chance at solitude or at whatever else lay out there for me. And if I died trying, I died trying.
This God was a duck-rabbit situation, too. She could be lying. That could have all been an illusion: my mom, the vats, the desert. The red curtains. Charlotte Brontë would tell me to listen to my instincts here.
And if she was telling the truth, I had no foundation of trust with her to gauge that.
“Thanks. I’ll holler when I need you,” I said, and smiled at her.
She left, but I thought I caught a glimpse in the mirror, right before she vanished, of her rolling her eyes. We were developing a sense of humor between us.
I opened my map, the old-fashioned kind, which I’d learned to read while on the backseat of a moped in Italy, my phone without international data, my arms wrapped around Kieran, my butt sweating against the leather seat, my hands gripping the worn paper map flapping in the wind, my chin on his shoulder and my mouth near his ready ear. I was the navigator, he the runaway driver. Now, I was both.
I set the folded map of the northeast down on the seat beside me, the roads opening to New London, and stretching upwards, beyond the square page, to a certain driveway near Lake George.
Lillian Lu (she/her) is the author of "Heirlooms," a short story in Immersion: An Asian Anthology of Love, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction (Rice Paper Magazine 2019). Her academic work can be found in The Rambling (October 2018); Whiter: Asian American Women on Skin Color and Colorism (NYU Press 2020); and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (September 2020). She is queer woman of color and an English Ph.D. Candidate at UCLA, where she studies British Romanticism, gender, and the novel. She can be found on Twitter @ll_ingenue.