Chapter Two:Absolute Fucking Chaos

  “Hey, are you with me?” asks Houndstooth. She’s in the backyard. Threads of light on the back patio. Houndstooth’s eyes are always wide. At first she thought they looked like a bird of prey. There’s another way you could take it: that they’re always scared. “Lilly?”

  “Yeah,” she says. Her tongue tastes gross. Cigarettes and beer multiplied by time and stress. “Sorry, what?”

  “You were talking about breaking into a pce and then you zoned out real hard. Looked kinda like you were dissociating.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “What—dissociating?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like you’re not yourself,” supplies Scatter. Lilly forgot she was standing sentinel behind her. “You lose track of where and when and who you are. Maybe everything doesn’t feel real. Maybe messes with your memories.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it was,” says Lilly. “Sure. That sounds right.” She takes a drink of a cup of water someone has offered her. Scatter. “I’m sorry, I feel like I’m losing my mind a little.”

  “You did lose your mind a little, dear,” says Houndstooth. “We’re trying to help you get it back.”

  More questions. More fucking memories. Kidnapped and interrogated—we’re trying to help you. What’s stupid of her is how much she believes it. The evening’s arrived and the initial calm of this backyard is wearing on her. They’re in a city, she can tell from the sounds of cars and families all around, from the helicopters in the sky, the distant police sirens. The throbbing beat of Parliament Funkadelic ringing through the cooling air from half a block away. The sound of a child somewhere shrieking in glee.

  Why would these people care about her memories? About her? If she’s putting anything together correctly, it sounds like she’s a lot of trouble and not much help. So what’s the catch?

  “I need a break,” says Lilly. “Can I stay here? Is that alright? Am I okay to stay here?” She gestures loosely to the house beside them. Even her hands are tired.

  “Seems like it,” says Houndstooth. They gnce at the other two who make signs with their hands, wiggling their fingers.

  “Yeah,” says Scatter. “It’s okay, as long as you follow a few rules.”

  “Rules?”

  “No violence. No heavy drugs, at least not initially. No using the internet or phones until we’re sure you’re not gonna snitch to anyone. Sorry if that sounds draconian, but we have to think about our safety. Getting you out was a huge risk to us. Likewise you can’t leave or go out the front until we know you’re safe.”

  Lilly moves to say something about that but before she can speak Scatter keeps going. “There’s quite a few people here and all of them know about your situation. If you need anything just ask someone. If you absolutely need to get out of the house we can figure out how to arrange that safely. Though you probably shouldn’t for a month or two at least, for your own safety as much as ours. I’d expect that they’re looking for you right now. They might be looking for you for a while.”

  “So I’m a prisoner here,” Lilly says. Scatter and Houndstooth both twitch noticeably at that, the third one rolls their eyes and steps away.

  “No, you’re not,” says Houndstooth. “We just risked our asses, you understand? You wanna go back out there, get picked up by some pinclothes, have people fucking around in your head, you can just ask someone, we can put a bag on your head and drop you off right back at that parking lot and you will never see us again, you can do that whenever you want. It would be a stupid fucking decision but its yours to make.”

  Lilly sighs. She hadn’t expected that much anger for stating what seems like, to her, the facts of the thing. The reactions people have here don’t make sense to her. The emotional responses, the handsigns. It almost seems like a cult. She should run away. To where? “I just wanna rest. I’m fucking tired. You can finish interrogating me tomorrow.”

  The house they lead her through is at least as eclectic as the backyard, posters on the walls, dried flowers thumbtacked to the ceiling, little paper fliers hanging from lengths of multicolored yarn strung in front of paintings and maps. Acoustic guitars and plush animals and toolboxes with hand tools spilling out of them and a pile of empty hair dye containers and a pstic trash bag filled with crushed cans and three cardboard boxes beled FREE STORE and a book shelf covered in history books.

  Down a squeaky staircase is a carpeted basement with piles of pstic tubs, a stack of old National Geographics, an N64 and three mattresses in a row, one of which she’s told is hers now. They leave her to grapple with the idea of sleeping in this pce. Probably gonna get lice or some sort of disease. As tired as she felt before, she’s too agitated to rex so she stares at the spackle pattern on the ceiling and the posters on the walls, screenprinted and with faces and names she doesn’t know. A bck kid no more than college age stomps down the stairs and without speaking or acknowledging her turns on the television and starts pying Smash. They’ve got a short fluffed out afro, a spiked colr, and an XXL gray hoodie that envelops them like a cloud of smoke. After a couple rounds they hand her a controller, then proceed to win four matches in a row. They py mercilessly, only occasionally remembering to hold back enough for her to get a few hits in as a courtesy. Eventually she asks the kid’s name.

  “I’m Nails. Please use they and them pronouns for me. I don’t believe in gender.” Their tone is ft. ‘Dissociated’. When they concentrate on what they’re doing in the game or what they’re saying they scrunch their mouth to one side in an expression like puzzlement.

  “Everyone here has really... interesting names.”

  “I pick a name that makes sense to me. Something I connect with emotionally. I don’t pick a name I think someone from the society that raped me would want to call me.”

  “Nails makes sense to you?”

  “Why are you called Lilith?”

  “My parents were—fuck, I fell off the edge. Right, uh, my parents were hardcore Christians. I learned about demons and stuff then I guess Lilith was always an icon for me. It was what they rejected from their world. And I just liked how it sounded.”

  “There you go. You’re looking for it too.”

  “Looking for it?”

  “The world of the rejected. The Outside.”

  She pauses to mull that over. “It’s kinda a fantasy, right? Like a dreamworld?”

  “Gosh you’re in it up to your neck, aren’t you?”

  “In what?”

  “The Spectacle. Society. The fucking illusion. The Outside is everywhere. It’s right here. It’s wherever you make it happen. Some part of you, maybe something you lost in childhood, some part of you knows that. It’s your job to find that part, cuz that’s gonna guide you where you need to get going. Until then you will be stuck in the quicksand.”

  Eventually she’s crawling into bed. Nails returns from the restroom.

  “Hey, Nails? Are you a boy or a girl?”

  They pause. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I’m gonna pretend you didn’t ask that. You say a lot of stupid shit.”

  Maybe ten minutes ter, as she’s drifting off to sleep, they speak up again. “When I say I don’t believe in gender that’s not really right. It’s not just belief. I don’t have a gender. I don’t like when people try to look at me as having a gender. It makes me feel like I’m being put in a cage again. It’s a horrible feeling. It’s the worst feeling in the world. I’d rather die than feel that way. If we’re going to be friends, you can’t do that to me ever again.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, her words almost breaking around the tears she’s trying not to cry. There’s so many things she’s getting wrong. Gender had seemed so straightforward, a matter of being in the wrong body and trying to rectify that. Here everyone’s retionship with it is so much more complex.

  “Just don’t do it. I know you’re new. You’ve got culture shock. You’re gonna say some stupid stuff. But it’s really important to me you don’t ever do that again.”

  “Okay,” she says. Silently, she cries herself to sleep, something familiar, something she’s been doing all her life. She wakes up as if she hadn’t slept. Too many memories swirling in her head. Scatter, Darren, Nails, Eff—wait, no, that one’s from the future. The what?

  Nails is still asleep, curled up in a fetal position around a plush sheep. They’ve kicked off all their bnkets. The other bed has remained unoccupied although she’s told a girl simir to her normally sleeps there. There’s a residual floral scent on the mattress that she smells as she moves past it.

  She makes her way to the backyard. Houndstooth is out there with a whole pot of coffee, staring at a small book with their intense expression. It’s a printout of something, stapled together like a short book, it says ‘Théorie du Bloom – Tiqqun’ on the cover. They look up at Lilly, and comb back their blond hair with one hand while pouring coffee into an empty mug with the other.

  “Thank you,” she says, sitting down with it. “What are you reading?”

  “Theory,” says Houndstooth. Not an answer that quite makes sense to her but the way they say it like they assume she’ll know makes her not want to question. It’s exhausting being new to everything. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Not great. My mind is really twisted around. I still don’t remember the past several years. I feel like I remember other stuff, stuff I shouldn’t remember.”

  “Like a parallel life?”

  “Like… something bad is going to happen.”

  “Do you have any details?” they ask with complete seriousness.

  “No, it’s just a feeling. Hey, how do you and Scatter and everyone know me?”

  They set down the printout, leaning back in the pstic wn chair. “We don’t directly. We heard about your situation. People have ways of making it known they need help. We’ve been following the moves made by the Coordination Division for some time, ever since we realized that it went well beyond the sanitation departments and property managers. Your situation came to our attention, the fact that something needed to be done.”

  Lilly gives an awkward half ugh. “I barely understand what you’re implying.”

  “That’s okay, you probably will, if you stick with us long enough.”

  She sits down beside Houndstooth. There’s a mug on the table that reads United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. It’s got a little water in it and she should really clean it out but right now she just needs coffee, so she dumps the water into a pot that seems to just be growing moss and fills up the mug. “How do you all know each other?”

  “Oh, a variety of ways. Common interests. I met Scatter back in 2004. The rest since then. Nails and Piper and you are the newest, uh, longterm residents. They just needed a pce to be. We keep the basement open for people in those kinds of situations.”

  She wants to ugh at that—what ‘kind of situations’ is she in?—but Houndstooth seems serious. They keep surprising her with their earnestness. “Nails seems to fit in with the rest of you.”

  “Is that so? They’re a nut I can’t crack.”

  “What’s the, what did you call it? Corporation Division?”

  “Hmm, that’s a Freudian slip. Coordination Division.” Their voice drops into a secretive tone, as if worried about eavesdroppers. “Ostensibly they’re an independent regutory body that shores up the loose connections between realtors, investors, ndlords, property managers, chamber of commerce, etc. In reality, I don’t know what they are. A gateway for something inhuman to force its way into our world. An ancient conspiracy. A hidden nexus of power in society. A CIA operation. The demonic manifestation of the Homes and Gardens magazine. Css war incarnate. The Virginia Company. Maybe all of the above.” They smirk. “You would know more than me.”

  “Why would I know?”

  “Because you’ve been a part of it for the st, what, four years?”

  She had known it was coming, had already put together the clues, but somehow the anticipation only made the fact more distressing, and she begins looking around for her first cigarette of the day. Half of one sitting in an ashtray, that’ll do. The lighter clicks three times before catching.

  “You’re telling me I’m part of a CIA conspiracy and that’s why I don’t remember anything,” she says, her voice quivering. “That’s a little hard to swallow. Isn’t it more likely you just, I don’t know, hit me in the head and now are keeping me here mind-controlled for sex or something?”

  “Damn you’re disrespectful,” says Houndstooth. “Okay, yeah, maybe that’s the case, except also you’re cherrypicking from what I’ve said. And does your head even hurt?”

  “It feels weird,” she whines.

  “But does it hurt? It feels weird because you have been gone for a very long time and you just got back.” Exasperated.

  She does remember something. That weird conversation about homes, the bald man. Her hips hurt. A little ball rolling around in her head, full of forbidden memories, a forbidden sense of herself. “Absolute futurity,” she says.

  “Huh?”

  “‘One day you will forget all this,’” she says. “I remember someone saying that. But I can’t remember anything else about it. Isn’t that weird?”

  “Is it? Sounds like them. They’re pretty good at memory erasure from what I’ve heard. As good as they can be. Memory isn’t that simple. It’s not like a computer file you can go in and delete. It’s stored all around.” They gesture broadly with the mug.

  “In the environment.”

  “In the body. In the trauma. You release some of that trauma, you will find the memory comes back from pces they didn’t know about.”

  Is that a good thing? She doesn’t like the idea at the moment. The memories she has aren’t inclining her to want to dig up more.

  It’s easier to just exist in the world. Memory be damned. Context and past and future. Fuck it. Drink coffee, smoke a cigarette, smoke weed. Don’t think about the feeling of the stairs pressed into her thighs. Don’t think about the impending sense of doom. That every good day is doomed to be followed by disaster. That somewhere in her past are horrors. That somewhere in her future, those horrible things catch up to her. Let it all be random noise. Static on the television. Static on the radio.

  What a strange body to find herself in. It’s not that she didn’t want surgery. She just keeps noticing little things. Her skin is so much softer. She’s put on more weight—which isn’t hard, because she was dangerously skinny before. Eating never felt good. Her breasts are bigger. She hasn’t figured out if she’s had breast surgery or not. Don’t impnts require some kind of maintenance? Or is that just a rumor she heard? A boy in middle school told her he would never marry a woman with pstic boobs because they have to be repced every year and that costs too much. It doesn’t sound true, but she’s always been too anxious to look into it. The bra she found herself wearing is a 36B and it’s a little tight. And down below. Her belly button feels different. There are mostly-healed scars around her pubis. And the vagina itself. Peeing, sitting, moving around. It feels right, it feels for once like her body is alright, but it’s too sudden. How long was she pnning to wait? Do the others get jealous looking at her? Nails, Scatter?

  The idea of Scatter being jealous of her body seems bizarre. Even if Lilly’s more passing, Scatter has an otherworldly beauty. Is that objectifying? Fetishizing?

  This body has always felt like an imposition, a cage, a vessel. Something she exists within, bound to, limited by. Yet she was familiar with it. Like her home town. Like the way the clouds drifted by zily. The air here—Oaknd, Nails confirmed that for her—smells different. The sounds of the city reflect off the underside of the cloud yer like a crowd in a canyon. They diffuse through the evening fog. The people in this house act differently. None of these people act like anyone she used to know. They move suddenly, expressively. They speak too directly and it surprises her. She feels like she’s always saying the wrong thing. It’s embarrassing. It doesn’t seem like they’re trying to put her on the defensive. They just have an easy way of being that’s unfamiliar to her.

  There was a social order that does not exist here. Her instinct tells her that without this social order, everything must fall apart. Yet everyone seems to be doing better. Despite their problems, despite whatever they’re struggling with. She should be afraid of them. Instead she’s afraid of hurting them.

  ***

  Lilly pys a lot more Smash with Nails that day. It seems like they don’t have school or a job or anything. They just live like this. Context and past and future be damned. They talk a little about theirself, mostly just about which games they like, which movies they like, which TV shows. Escapism, she thinks. She’s never been a big fan of games and movies and television shows. It’s not that she’s got a problem with them, it’s that they don’t work for her. Her mind’s too stuffed full of bullshit, it’s hard to pay attention to all these other stories and worlds when she’s left on her own with it. For Nails it seems like a way of talking around the problem of what kind of person they are. There’s things they’re trying to communicate indirectly, relying on a repertoire of cultural knowledge that she doesn’t have. She doesn’t ask personal questions because she doesn’t want anyone asking her personal questions.

  “Do you believe in human sacrifices?” Nails asks suddenly.

  “What? Like do I wanna sacrifice people?”

  “No, that’s whatever. I mean like rich people. Doing human sacrifices. Do you believe that goes on?”

  “Maybe. Probably not. I don’t know.”

  “I wonder if everyone like us are the sacrifices that escaped. The survivors. Do you ever think about how many people didn’t escape? You should watch out, that’s all I’m saying. Someone like you, you’ve already disappeared as far as the outside world is concerned. More than once you’ve disappeared. Me too. I think if they found me, they would know they could kill me. And no one. Would ever. Come looking.” Lilly’s Peach sprite falls into the void. “I win.”

  “Are you just trying to freak me out?”

  “What? No.”

  “Ever since I got here I feel like people are pying mind games with me.”

  “It’s just a different kind of pce than what you’re used to. A lot of people here have a lot of trauma. I, for one, have some some shit that would curdle your blood.”

  “Oh yeah, like what?”

  Nails puts down the controller. The tone has changed. “You ever see someone die?”

  An image fshes in her mind, a body falling into darkness. “I don’t know.”

  “A loved one? Have you ever seen someone you love die?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you ever seen someone you love get killed? By another person’s actions? And seen people ughing about it?”

  “I—don’t think so.”

  “That world out there, that you find so comfortable, it just eats people alive. I want you to understand that. I want everyone to understand that. I want you to realize that you’re not like them. You might be passing but you’re a fucking human sacrifice like the rest of us. Stop trying to serve them. Because then the blood is on your hands too.”

  Lilly sighs heavily.

  “Whaat?” Nails asks, irritated.

  “I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do here. I don’t know what you want from me. What anyone wants from me. I don’t know what my pce is and I keep trying to figure it out but no one’s being clear with their expectations.”

  “You’re not supposed to do anything,” Nails says. “Don’t you get it? They’re all, like, anarchists. So, okay, they might get moody but no one’s trying to say anything with it. Don’t read too much into things. Just don’t do anything that hurts anyone and you’re fine.”

  “And you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Are you an anarchist?”

  “I don’t know about any of that ideological crap. I’m not gonna tell you what to do either, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Nails is gone the rest of the day. Lilly eats five grilled cheese sandwiches and watches a DVD of Predator and its sequel. It keeps her a little distracted. That night she dreams about running through a sewer system and every time she tries to get out someone tells her its not safe and to get back in. She wants to see the surface. Nowhere is safe. The sewers are an underground maze. There’s someone down here, someone she’s not supposed to meet. She wakes up in a cold sweat and the bed next to her is occupied, the girl named Piper is back and is snoring loudly. Tall girl, wearing a dress to sleep. Nails is curled in a fetal position around the sheep plushie. Lilly gets up very stealthily to go have a cigarette. As she makes her way out toward the patio, something forgets her, like turning around a corner, a rotating sphere, until a voice is speaking, authoritative, and some part of her mind is telling her to remember this, that she must remember it. Layers of wallpaper peel off and words come dancing through her mind. We’re in a house right now.

  “The suburb as an irregur cellur matrix, a distorted and discontinuous but homogeneous grid, generates the field of zero-point futurity. Absence and presence are at direct interpy, and the harmful disorder—that’s dis-order—of the human is reguted into a healthy society built around values of security, predictability, and an obscurity that is at the same time transparent to the guiding flows of data and defense. Irrational and entrapping on foot, it is easily navigable through the camera lens mounted on a helicopter, or through the perspective of a global positioning system. If the introduction of a competing system of futurity—in this case, radical Ismism, but totalitarian Communism or Confucianism would also suffice—seems to restart the flow of history, it is only as the handshake of a universal suburb that makes itself known from Tehran to Dubai, from Beijing to Moscow. In this manner the circle increasingly closes on every point until all points are simultaneously unnavigable by foot, and are the already-arrived-at location of the quasi-state. The state as such learns a lesson from multinational capital and decentralizes itself only so that it can reach a global captive audience. At the same time the distinction between the global extractive, manufacturing, and logistics industries and the state or states ceases to be meaningful. The pnet is fertilized with the force of humanity, an altar preparing for the next stage in human evolution, the convolution of the zeitgeist into global Absolute Spirit through the synthesis of every civilizational apparatus of management, auto-generated through the noumenal shadow of the market demand gestalt world-system. This is manifested through the direct realization—the making-real—of property in itself, most clearly through the hyperextension of real estate—the estate of the royal force, the eternal kingdom of God himself, the eternal Caesar. Only to be understood as a direct process to achieve true civilization, the full cultivation of sor energy harvesting, the first step to the conquest of the sor system and beyond in the name of the sun, Sol Invictus. A true Kardashev-Two represents only the manifest will of self-potentiated sor energy organizing the intrusive matter fixated around it. In retrospect the role of logistics management in producing the conditions whereby the heliopor godhead manifests itself through a perfectly rational system becomes apparent, it is only in our limited contemporary view that we suffer from confusion, like lost pedestrians in a suburb bereft of the advantage of a global positioning satellite’s perspective. This is the altar of God.”

  The bald man standing in a board room staring needles into her eyes. He’s grinning in frustration at the models of reality competing in his head. He’s trying to override them. Holding a brief he wants to pretend he wrote by himself.

  “The thessic? Oh, the telluric…” He makes an odd shuffling noise, like a shouted mumble. He’s drowning in striving. It’s all so clear now. She is signing form after form with a name she does not recognize. He’s talking into a conference phone but he’s looking at her.

  “Good, that’s all.” He ends the call. Takes a deep breath. There was a time he wouldn’t have let her see this weakness. It’s true that it’s repugnant, only because he finds it repulsive and projects that self-disgust shining out from him. “Once you finish those up I want you to come talk to me about the credit accounts. And we’ve got a few checks for you to deposit, they need to be pced at specific locations which will be included on the packing slip in the usual way.” That meant an ink that, once exposed to isopropyl alcohol, would vanish entirely leaving behind nothing but the above-board packing slip information. She has been a courier for a long time and is quite familiar at this point with the processes of the Division. Still, some part of her mind is ringing with the lecture she’s just overheard. Some day I will forget all of this. No, I won’t. Yes, I will. Some day—

  ***

  Ivy is dating a chiropractor’s assistant named Emmanuel who she met at yoga in the park. She gets a job as a receptionist for a massage therapist and an acupuncturist who work down the hall at the same office complex as the chiropractor. The pattern is very regur, very simple, so that a calmness in her can thrive in that simplicity, can ground itself in the ease of that day-to-day life. Every day she gets up, smokes a cigarette and shares a bowl with Emmanuel, and then they walk together six blocks to the two-story beige stucco entrance positioned between four palm trees in poor health. The air inside smells like coconut oil, eucalyptus, and tea tree. She likes the smell, it’s pleasant and refreshing and even though she spends the day sitting indoors at a desk she can feel like she’s out in nature. She never thought about nature until she was around other people who cared a great deal about it, like Emmanuel. It’s making her realize that while she’s thought a lot about how her environment affects her, she’s thought very little about what a positive environment would be like. Her retion to space has been solely nihilistic, perhaps inherited from the chasms in her memory or the Not-of-this-World Christian mentality she grew up around. Everything was embedded within sin, imbued with sin, even if that sin was God itself. Now she’s learning about chakras and energies and watching people talk to pnts. One client while in the waiting room shows her a tattoo of many overpping circles geometrically arranged and expins that it concentrates life energy. Another tells her that she’s gd there’s a fellow woman in the space because she finds it grounding to share a yonnic experience. There are pyramids and star charts. The strong skepticism it invokes is tempered by how the people around her carry themselves with a low-effort joy, as if lifted up by some forces that she can’t comprehend. That easy joy keeps her going for months, three, four, five, every day comfortably regur, and she’s considering the possibility of settling into this life, until one day she wakes up with a head and a heart full of acrid hostility. She feels like the tar dripping out of railroad ties on a hot day.

  She doesn’t look at Emmanuel over their morning grapefruit, kale, pine nuts. She doesn’t speak as they walk down the street. She keeps walking.

  He turns, armed, but she’s running, crying and running, and the morning slips into concrete and tires and fshes of vanishing memory and somehow she finds herself north, in San Leandro, where a man who collects VHS tapes and has a van covered in bumper stickers is inviting her to stay at his pce saying there’s a lot of people like her there. She should feel threatened but he exudes a carelessness that belies any possibility of manipution and sure enough after passing through two barbed wire fences and into an apartment complex reminiscent of an ultramax, she finds herself on a vintage olive green shag carpet caked with decades of weed resin and spilled cocaine, staring at a wall of horror and porn VHS tapes while five other house punks fuck around with whip-its. And then the careless man gets angry and runs out into the courtyard to get beaten up by someone else also on coke, and there’s another trans girl sitting in front of her, talking about her, saying you’re too tense, you need to learn how to rex and live a little. Ivy can’t think of a disagreement and they share a few bottles of beer then wander down to the 7-Eleven while an emaciated woman with an unchanging haggard expression cleans and bandages the man’s broken hand. The girl walking with Ivy is bubbling full of energy and introduces herself as Felicity. As they walk back toward the apartment they see the fsh of police lights blocking off the area so they stroll right past, carrying on up International. Some guy makes a pass at them and then starts throwing bottles and rocks and slurs, and Felicity chases him with a three-inch knife. He tries to goad them on and Ivy kicks him right in the sack and he keels over and reaches for his cellphone. Ivy smashes the phone under her foot while he calls her a tranny faggot cocksucking cunt and she and Felicity cackle wildly when they stomp on the hands he tries to use on them. They run off to the sound of him screaming through blood that he’s going to rape and kill them, his whole crew is going to come for them, they’re fucking dead. They wander around in circles and find themselves back at the apartment complex as the sun is coming up but Felicity tells her to wait outside and returns with a filled backpack.

  “Honestly, fuck this pce. Like for real, let’s bounce.” She puts her hand gently on Ivy’s forearm and at this moment Ivy realizes that Felicity is hitting on her. She doesn’t know how to feel about that. A string of faces pass before her, men who she slept with, men who left her, men who she left. She started talking nervously about all kinds of stupid things, about massage therapy and housing markets and the war in Iraq. Felicity is paying absolute attention to the things she says which is very unusual given the kinds of conversations Ivy’s used to having with the men.

  Laugh, don’t think about the look in her eyes. This is the kind of pce you can get lost having a good time. Run amok, wear down the soles of your sneakers. The world dissolves into a kaleidoscope of actions. They sit under a bridge. They ask strangers for cigarettes. They wander into a hotel and drink cucumber water from the lobby of a nail salon before getting kicked out and shoplift kiwis from an organic grocery and throw empty bottles at the BART line until some construction workers start catcalling them.

  “I’ve lived this way,” Felicity says. “Leaving everything up to chance. Make decisions with a coin toss. Let life dictate what to do. Wonderful things come your way. Wonderful and horrible things.”

  “I’ve got this idea that we can’t live by chance,” Ivy says. The BART—Bay Area Regional Transit, a retrofuturistic rapid transit system that links the broader San Francisco bay area together—slides along the rails above them, its characteristic banshee squeal reverberating off the brickwork of abandoned warehouses to their left. She has to shout over it. “Maybe we’re all puppets of something! So even what we think of as chance is dictated, controlled!”

  “Controlled, huh?”

  “I’m haunted by this thing. I get afraid I’m being followed by anonymous men in suits. I have paranoia.” Like she’s trying to make a case against getting to know her.

  “What kind of thing?”

  “It’s in all the buildings, in the walls. In the sky. Satellites and geopositioning systems. Electricity in the wires. Wifi, microwaves, radar. I went to open a bank account and I don’t know why but there was already one there. From years before. I don’t remember using it. My legal name, it’s so odd, it’s not my dead name. I don’t remember changing it. It’s not a name I use.”

  “Amnesia?”

  “I have a lot of amnesia. I have sooo much amnesia. What I’m worried about is the thing that does remember me.”

  “You remind me of a girl I used to know.”

  Felicity goes digging around in her backpack. It’s a tie-dye purple and blue JanSport that looks like it’s seen a lot of abuse. She has a casual subversive beauty, a conspiratorial grin, eyes just on the edge of sanity. A face for cabaret, Ivy thinks. She looks like she’s always about to plot a murder or take you to the bedroom. Right now, she could talk Ivy into anything.

  From within the tangle of water-damaged notebooks, clothes, jewelry, makeup, and toiletries, Felicity produces a poroid photo of a serious-looking woman with thick dark eyebrows in a long bck trench coat.

  “We used to live together when I was homeless in SF,” Felicity says. The space at the bottom of the poroid for writing a bel instead has the text, ‘The Christ that can be named is not Christ.’ “She told me she thought the city was alive, that all cities were alive, that they live with the help of symbiotic organisms, humans, which they also consume. But mostly they consume the world and turn it into more cities. That was the st day I saw her, she said she was going to find the beating heart of San Francisco and she disappeared. I got a text three days ter that said ‘there are no organs’ and I never heard from her again.”

  Despite the hot sun rising overhead, Ivy shudders at that, goosebumps like gravestones on her arms. The image of the woman’s severe expression floats in her mind.

  They sit on the grass by a homeless white guy with long horribly tangled blond dreadlocks and dots tattooed randomly over the right half of his face. Between intermittently pying intricate solos on a dented muted trombone he introduces himself as Odin.

  “There’s tunnels all under SF,” Felicity expins. “After the 1906 earthquake, they just rebuilt whole sections of the city on top of the colpsed part. One yer up. So there’s this hidden ruined city underneath it in bits and pces. You can’t access it very easily. It’s there and sometimes you see bits of it through like a gap between things. I think they do a ghost tour there in October.”

  “It is October.”

  “Yeah. Well, I wonder if that’s where she went.”

  A Prius driver slows to shout something at the three of them, then speeds off.

  “Fuck you!” Odin shouts back. The Prius stops and backs up until it’s in front of them. The window rolls down revealing a middle aged man with a curly gray beard and a soft face.

  “Hey, man, what are you doing here?” he asks indignantly.

  “What?” asks Odin.

  “What is your value to society?”

  “What’s your fucking value?” asks Felicity.

  “I have a job, okay?” the man says.

  “Doing what?”

  “That’s not your business. I’m asking you why you’re loitering here and causing a problem.” His head bobs around a little when he talks. Ivy thinks he sounds like the guy from Portndia. Fred Armisen.

  “It’s public property,” Odin says.

  “What’s wrong with what we’re doing?” asks Felicity. “Mad we’re not wasting our life like you?”

  An Oldsmobile with custom rims coming up fast honks its horn as it swerves to avoid the Prius.

  “You know what, you need discipline,” the man says as he rolls up his window and starts forward.

  “I have better sex than you!” Felicity screams as the Prius drives away. Ivy puts up her middle fingers. It feels adventurous and also the least she can do.

  “We’re monsters to them,” Felicity says. “They have to let us know they’re not afraid or they’ll be ruled by fear.”

  “I’m just a guy,” Odin says.

  “I’m not,” Felicity says. “I’m a monster. It’s fine though.”

  “We are the unnameable horror,” Ivy says, working through the idea in her head. A bck girl in a dress stitched together out of bits of blue jeans walks up with a small mangy dog wearing a dirty red bandana and waves to Odin, who goes off with her.

  Felicity has a rich friend who used to work for Google, and she calls this girl up. An hour ter a Lyft shows up, a big pink fake mustache across the front, and drives them to a home in Albany. It’s two stories, clean and tidy and full of merchandise for anime and videogames that Ivy’s unaware of.

  “Hi, I’m Shy,” says the rich girl, who has a french accent. “Do you py League of Legends?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Oh my God, it’s the best thing in the world.” For the next six hours Shy talks nearly uninterrupted about League of Legends while the three of them do bumps of the coke Felicity brought. They order more pizza than they can eat. At some point a girl with long straight brown hair down to her waist enters and without saying a word or making eye contact with anyone goes to a corner in the rge den, puts on a headset, and starts pying a videogame Ivy doesn’t recognize. Shy eventually runs out of steam and gets an acrylic dispy case full of pill bottles only beled with numbers that she describes as containing ‘serious nootropics.’ She doesn’t offer them or take any herself. As the sun begins to set she tells Felicity and Ivy that they’re free to stay the night. “Also, like, if you two wanna fuck, feel free to, like, I’m not a prude. I mean, Felicity knows.”

  The girl at the computer gets up, visibly irritated, and walks toward the kitchen.

  “Sweetie,” says Shy. “Sweetie? Listen to me. Jealous does not become you. Okay?”

  “I’m just hungry,” the girl says and walks off. Shy jumps up and follows her and when they’re gone Felicity leans over to Ivy and says, “Rich people are fucking crazy. But trust me, there will be acid in this for us if we’re here tomorrow morning.”

  “Did you fuck her?” Ivy asks.

  “Totally,” says Felicity. “I’m like a huge nymphomaniac. I’ll fuck any girl that wants to. No regrets.”

  The silence that follows is ripe with anticipation but Ivy doesn’t know where she wants to go with all of this so she just smiles awkwardly. Shy walks back into the room talking at her partner.

  “No, sweetheart, that’s what they said. They called me a gentrifier. Like, what does that even mean? I am literally a part of this community. I have been living in the bay for three years, I am a home owner, this is my community. And its not like it would even be around without the support of social media companies. Programmers are building the future and what are they doing?”

  “That sounds really unfair,” the other girl says with no tonal inflection.

  “Right? It’s unbelievable. They are absolutely coming for me right now. When they were very happy to take my money and my drugs. And they were basically using me for sex.”

  She ys out a line of the cocaine Felicity brought, just one, and stares at it for a moment, then looks up at Ivy. “Do you want to know a secret about my vagina? It’s literally perfect. Felicity can tell you. I don’t even have to use lube. It’s the best that money can buy. No cissexual woman has a vagina this good. It’s a work of art. The surgeon told me it’s the best he’s ever done.” She snorts the line. “It’s absolutely perfect.”

  Shy stretches for a moment then sets up a bump each for Felicity and Ivy. “What about you?” she asks Ivy.

  “What about me?” asks Ivy.

  “Welllll…” she grins “you’re wearing tight yoga pants. Either you’ve got a magnificent tuck or you’re post-op.”

  “Fucking Christ Shy, I thought I was a horny bitch,” says Felicity.

  “It’s a valid question! Who was your surgeon?”

  I don’t know. I don’t remember. How can you not remember? Because I don’t remember my past.

  “Shy, y off her, she’s had a rough week.”

  “Oh, I see, you like this one. Meanwhile, no one pays attention to me anymore. Here, let me see something.” She gets down on all fours and crawls right up to Ivy until their noses are almost touching staring deep into her eyes. “Fucking hell, she’s straight, isn’t she?! Shame too, she’s absolutely gorgeous. You’re trying to turn her, aren’t you?”

  “Well that’s really up to her!” says Felicity a little too loud, blushing.

  “I’m not straight,” says Ivy. “I’m transgender.”

  “You’re a straight transsexual,” says Shy. “You only date men, right? Probably only cissexual men?”

  “I mean, yeah…”

  “Okay but like wait,” says Felicity, also positioning herself close, somewhat cutting off Shy but meaning that they’re both now close enough to Ivy that she can smell them, both of them, their smells intermingling, Shy smelling of some flowery perfume, Felicity smelling of sweat and pheromones. “Let me ask you two questions,” says Felicity.

  “Okay.”

  “Question one: have you ever been truly, deeply in love?”

  A vague stirring, a vague memory, something behind a lot of solid doors in her mind. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Question two: have you ever been truly, deeply in love with a man?”

  “No.” No pause.

  “And let’s just leave it there for now.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” says Shy’s girlfriend, as she goes to the kitchen and returns with four whiskey gsses and a bottle of something Ivy doesn’t recognize but which looks very expensive.

  After a few drinks, Shy’s partner shares a lot about herself. She’s from Iowa originally, grew up among cattle farms and moved to Columbus, Ohio when she came out. She met a girl online, her first partner, and moved in with her to a punk house in Chicago but it was dirty and gross and anyway it got shut down after Occupy. She and this girl took a Greyhound all the way to Seattle and lived with an indie folk band until she met Shy on a dating app and shortly after split to be with her. She likes online gaming and not much else, simir in a lot of ways to Shy. Her fursona is a teddy bear, which, she avidly repeats multiple times despite no one disagreeing, is a valid fursona. She has BPD and C-PTSD and is on the Autism Spectrum.

  As the night draws on Shy retires first, and Ivy falls asleep with her head on Felicity’s thigh. She wakes up to Shy standing over her with a cup of coffee, fully showered.

  “Let’s do acid,” is the first thing Shy says when she realizes Ivy and Felicity are awake. “I’ve got some primo stuff.” Then she disappears.

  “What did I tell you,” says Felicity. “It’s like clockwork. Rich people are fucking weird.”

  Ivy has never fucked with heavy amounts of psychedelics before but she’s done a lot of drugs so she doesn’t have big expectations for the acid beyond an interesting experience or some kind of diversion, which leaves her totally unprepared for what actually happens: fully reliving random moments of her te teens and early twenties to the degree that it blots out the present, fully embedded in worlds that hardly make sense to her now, the Lilly of her past peeling away months of yoga and reflection and work like it was paint stripper. While Shy rambles on about the depths of her consciousness and Felicity fantasizes about how much more okay with herself having a period would make her feel, Ivy is nearly catatonic on the floor walking through empty white room after empty beige room after empty concrete room, memories tumbling forward in no order. No capacity to sort out fact from fiction when both are equally pusible, all of it riding into her brain all at once with a swirling horror brought on by every roll of her eye that catches view of a corner, a bit of hair, a curl of carpet, the texture of a painted wall. A dust bunny under a desk moving in the slightest of air currents so alike to another dust bunny under another desk that she had worked at for three months in an ostensibly abandoned office complex in an industrial park until the reorganization was complete and an accounting firm specializing in military contractors arrived with no hint that anyone had been using the space until a few days before, no hint that anyone had carefully prepared the space for their arrival. Things inside, things underneath, the secret content. How mindlessly people occupied spaces they thought of as empty, as theirs. How casually individuals fulfilling bor contracts pyed the parts and pieces of a vast pageant, an orchestra of concrete and carpeting and electrical wire, like cells in the body of a tremendous beast. Walking up to a contractor, introducing herself as a representative of the site manager, slipping him 50 to forget something he saw. A list of figures she had produced multiple copies of by her own hand while entirely evading awareness of its contents came back to haunt her that night as she slept in a hotel room, those were people who had died, names and ages and addresses. Most of them in Mexico City, some in San Diego, a few in London, a few in Cairo. If you don’t look at what you’re doing you can’t ask why you’re doing it. It’s best if you don’t remember.

  Cracks propagate down the mottled sphere, the bck serpent sliding over its surface. She’s seeing it now, really seeing it. The scope of the universe unfurling around her. All these events make up a life—her life! And everything beyond her and everything and everything. It’s as if she’s been looking at a little bug on a stick and suddenly realized that beyond it, just out of focus, is a vast pteau of bugs and sticks and lizards and rocks. And yet beyond that pteau is a still greater valley, filled with more things that she cannot even see but knows must be there because the world must have some continuity. Not just herself but the world at rge, the expansiveness of the universe. Even a discontinuity would imply some greater wholeness in which the gap could be rendered. Why is it so hard to contempte the size of existence?

  The desert, she’s in an endless desert, and they’re almost out of gas and it’s going to be a cold night. Snow on the mountains. Cold in the bones. The thorns of a rose, a splinter of wood. All over her body, these sensations. Death. A hollow empty world. Don’t think too much about the blood, about the flesh peeling away. States of decay. Trapped in a hospital room tied to the bed. Trapped in a hotel room locked inside. Trapped in her bedroom as a child. The pastor coming in. Four walls make a cage. Too far, too deep. Floppy corpse joints and the click of arthropod legs. Masks in the darkness. Come back to the surface. Shadowy passageways, a world without light, some predator watching over her. Come back. Close your eyes, open them again, see where you are.

  Soft lighting. Shy is ughing about something new that she’s programming, how it’s going to change the future. She’s objectively very pretty, she knows it too. Nothing wrong with being a little envious. Piper was envious of her, she’s envious of Shy. Nauseating, thinking about these emotions, these connections. Other people. Scatter’s hand wet with sweat. Scatter and a cis woman covered in tattoos pressed up against a brick wall, kissing. Ivy is Lilly, holding the door with Darren, and they go inside. Nowhere is safe. Lilly pying Smash with Nails. I fell off the edge. A body slips off of a container ship and into the sea—suicide, murder, or illusion? Inside an empty house she’s pressed against brand new white carpeting on a staircase, her skirt pulled up around her waist, digging into her skin, and the first man she’s ever felt inside her, and it hurts because it’s too soon after surgery, but she wants it not to hurt, because she wants it to be good, she wants to be just like the cis women that he fucks, she doesn’t even make him use a condom though she should, she’s barely an adult and he’s at least thirty, but all she can think about is how embarrassed she is with her body for hurting, for having these needs. “Mine didn’t hurt,” Shy is saying, “the first time after surgery was amazing for me.” Was she talking out loud? “Was that your first time?” “I don’t remember.” “You say that a lot.”

  “I’m trying to remember.”

  Houndstooth passes her a cup of coffee. Their morning ritual, the two who get up earliest. Houndstooth reading theory and talking to her, Lilly just existing, waking from a night’s nightmares. “You remember what?”

  “Some kind of, like, lecture. Talking about their goals, stuff they wanna do. But it’s all kinda gibberish. Everything’s scrambled together.” She says they but she was part of it, wasn’t she? Or sometime like her? Some part of her, something in her body? How much complicity can you bme on mind control? How much on circumstance?

  “I see. Well, I am interested to hear about that. At some point.” Nails has joined the back patio today although they don’t smoke. They do drink, a lot, too much, and they’re working on a box wine now, at ten in the morning. Houndstooth is clearly trying not to pay too much attention. Lilly overheard some kind of heated exchange before she came out, couldn’t make out too much but it sounded like Houndstooth is concerned over their drinking. Too early to be drunk. “But, please, let’s continue from where you left off. I think focusing on the initial event is going to be your best bet for having a solid memory foundation. It will help you to ground yourself, connect your previous life to the present moment. You had been going around town. You were with this person, Darren, and you were breaking in to…”

  Screeching, shrieking, smashing metal. There is a giant metal mechanism spinning violently in front of her like a drum filled with toxic waste rolling down a hill into a ravine, like half of an industrial shredder singing with jagged steel teeth, like a steamroller covered in hateful splintered barnacles, vibrating and spinning with a malevolent wisdom, and she realizes it’s grinding away her body at the hips, blood and yellow ooze flying up into the air and orbiting around her in slow rings of foam. She tries to scream but hears nothing beyond the tearing, rending metal.

  “Fucking hell, shut her up, that’s killing my vibe!” calls out Shy. Felicity crawls over to where Ivy is rolling around on the floor.

  “Hey, hey there, what’s wrong, what is it?”

  “Do you remember what they’re doing?” asks Ivy, hyperventiting.

  “What who is doing?”

  “They’re waiting behind the walls. It’s like a nightmare we haven’t had yet.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She can’t expin it. Tries to gesture with her hands. Nothing makes sense when she tries to communicate it, especially not with all the holes in her memory. The big picture. The guys in suits, the Holy Ghost, the way everything keeps pying out, the way everyone keeps losing. How living in any kind of situation, any at all, will drive a person crazy, how there’s no other way to live.

  “Can you breathe with me?” Felicity asks. “Inhale… exhale…” Ivy tries to match the rhythm. Inhale. Exhale. It calms her.

  “Okay, so, it’s like this. They had me running packages from Raleigh to Richmond with a military escort, do you understand that? Military.”

  “I don’t understand any of this but if you just need to talk that’s okay.”

  Ivy realizes they’re in a bedroom of Shy’s pce. She’s lost time. Time doesn’t work right on acid. Somewhere outside the room someone is loudly watching porn. There’s also some kind of music pying from somewhere else, with a fast beat. The floor is rising and falling with Ivy’s breaths.

  “I wanted surgery,” Ivy says, “but I didn’t get it because I wanted it. I got it because they wanted me to, because it would smooth over the process, make everything just a little bit easier. It’s all part of some broader pn, and if I was going to be a woman I was going to be a woman in exactly the way they wanted me to, the way that would be most convenient for them. I didn’t have control of my body. Or I did, but I just wanted what they wanted. So I didn’t have control of my mind. It’s a full fucking system, do you understand? Like from end to end the game is set up. People liked to do whatever the king wanted them to do. People liked to do whatever the pharoah wanted them to do. What do people like to do now? It doesn’t make it okay. It’s so much easier to brainwash people than anyone thinks it is. It’s so much easier. To be free at all is the most precious thing you can have.”

  “That’s true. I try to live my life that way. To preserve that freedom.”

  “I was living with a stupid hipster so he could experience his failures through me. I was living with a health nut so he could see me as a success. To men I’m an accessory. I’m, I’m, I—”

  Ivy sits up quickly and for a moment the world tilts and then rolls back into pce like sand settling at the bottom of a river.

  “That’s what objectification is, isn’t it? It’s not just that they don’t treat you like a person. They make the person be the object.”

  A strange feeling begins to crawl up her legs and arms and she realizes she’s turning into pstic. Into a figurine, a doll. A doll to be neglected in some strange-smelling man’s apartment while he pursues dreams that were dictated to him. And she will watch and feel his awkward pawing at her breasts and receive his cum and her eyes will be little beads of gss that reflect back his world.

  “I don’t want to be a doll,” she says. But the room is coated in pstic, Felicity is pstic too, they’re all just dolls in someone’s pyset, someone watching them through the corners of the walls and the yout of the streets and the camera screens. The music, the sound of porn, is a soundtrack pying for them. The lighting is little doll lights and their clothes are cheap and fake. Pstic, petroleum, industrial products. “I don’t want to be a doll.”

  “Hey, you’re not a doll though, you’re a person. Just in the time I’ve known you you’ve done some pretty wild very person kinda things.”

  “I don’t want to be a doll.”

  The worst part of it is that it’s a little arousing, she can feel it in her pussy, in her nipples, in the pain in her hips trying to free itself, the thought of herself and Felicity fucking for someone else’s amusement, whoever the guy was orchestrating all of this, cuz things like this don’t just happen. It’s easier to fuck when someone’s forcing her. A voice saying she’s always been a doll, always supposed to be a doll. This is the fate that awaits her, as sure as the water awaits someone falling, falling into it. And now she’s fallen into it. She’s realized it and now she’s become pstic, she can no longer move, soon she won’t even be able to think, and the men will come in, and use her, and she won’t remember it. You won’t remember, you won’t remember.

  “You’re not a doll, hey, snap out of it.”

  The hipster with all the vinyls used to call her ‘doll’ all the time, like a compliment or a term of affection. “Hey doll, come here.” “You’re looking beautiful today, doll.” “Watch out there, doll.” And that man, the bald man she sees in nightmares.

  She grabs Felicity around the waist and pulls her closer. “I want to stay with you, I don’t want to be a doll anymore.”

  “Sure thing. Hey, are you doing okay?”

  Something inside her breaks in the most necessary way and she starts ughing with glee. “Are you doing okay? Hey Felicity are we doing okay?”

  It’s infectious, and soon both of them are rolling around on Shy’s bed high as fuck repeating, “Are you doing okay?” at each other and ughing uncontrolbly.

  “I’m hungry,” Felicity says eventually. “I wanna go get a sandwich. How’s that sound?”

  “Yeah, let me come with you,” says Ivy. Right now it feels like her reality is only remotely stable in Felicity’s presence.

  She wobbles to her feet and they pass through the living room where Shy and her partner are both naked on the ground making cat sounds at each other while cis lesbian porn pys on the screen. In the kitchen they find the old pizza and microwave it.

  “Hey Felicity, are you doing okay?”

  Felicity breaks into a fit of giggling.

  “Hey Felicity, do you wanna have sex with me?”

  Through giggles she struggles to say, “Yes! Obviously! However, you’re going through some serious shit right now and that’s way way more important.”

  Ivy pauses, frowns slightly, considering the idea. “That’s, like, the healthiest thing anyone has said to me in years.”

  “Fuck, damn girl… are you doing okay?”

  After the ughter stops, they eat their pizza sprawled out on the kitchen floor. Ceramic tiles that stink of Lysol.

  “Okay but for real,” says Ivy. “I used to be really fucked up. I worked with some weird fucking people after I came out and I don’t remember it.”

  “That stuff about the military convoy, that was real, huh?”

  “Yes. And then I knew some cool people but I don’t really remember it, I don’t remember what happened to them, I don’t remember what happened afterward. And then I was dating this absolute asshole. Just like… fucking twee trash. And then I lived with a fucking serial killer.” For some reason she starts giggling again.

  “You dated a serial killer?”

  “No, that one was ptonic!” Struggling to get the words out as both of them break into loud ughter.

  “Damn girl, are you doing okay?”

  “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, but like, but what I’m saying is, do you actually wanna fuck me? Like I’m a huge fucking mess, and let’s be real, I probably won’t remember you after all of this.”

  Felicity ughs even more. “Girl, what do you know about my past that I don’t? Or like, I’m saying, you basically don’t know anything about me, and you’re making big assumptions about what my concerns are and where my priorities are at. I’m not looking for a partner and I’m sure as fuck not keeping an eye on anyone’s credit score. What I want is to enjoy life and to do meaningful things, by my personal definition of meaningful. I met you a couple of days ago, I enjoyed talking with you, and I’m continuing to enjoy being around you. No commitments, nothing like that. If we fuck, I have no future expectations of you based on that, and I would like you to not have any future expectations of me, okay?”

  Ivy examines it in her mind, taking in the concept. Savoring the greasy pizza. “That, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually, yeah. I guess, uh, I’m just used to people having a lot tied up in what fucking me means to them.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with that. Genuinely. That sounds like a really bad time. That’s not where I’m at, in terms of how I want to be a person.”

  “Okay.”

  “I just have a few rules. One, my genitals. I’m not getting surgery, I’m comfortable with the shape of things, but you cannot call it by any terms you would use for the wrong gender, okay? Dick, cock, penis, are all out. Pussy or cunt are okay but I would prefer you just call it my junk. Are you cool with that?”

  “Yeah, alright.”

  “Second, we use protection, cuz I don’t wanna catch anything. Are you cool with that?”

  “Uh, do you have any?”

  “I do. Third, anything else—spping, bondage, pissing, slurs, whatever—any kinky stuff we talk about before it happens. Are you cool with that?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Fourth, anyone can opt out at any time, are you cool with that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Alright, awesome. Now finally, what about you?” Ivy gives a bnk stare, so Felicity continues. “What are your boundaries?”

  “Uhh… I don’t know.” Ivy thinks for a moment while Felicity waits. “It’s never really come up before.” Something fshes through Felicity’s eyes. Ivy can’t catch what it is. Judgment? Pity? Irritation?

  “This is a great time to start. What’s a boundary for you, something vitally important in order for you to be comfortable during sex?”

  “Umm, I guess, check on if I’m alright? My brain can sometimes wander a bit. Is that okay?”

  Felicity’s voice is softer. “Yes that’s okay. Sounds good. What else?”

  “I… I don’t know. Sorry.” Ivy realizes she’s crying now, silently. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. This is overwhelming. I’ve never really thought about this stuff before.”

  “Hey, put a quarter in the ‘sorry’ jar. You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”

  “I’m just, you’re trying to… and I’m getting all emotional.”

  “I never expected you not to have trauma and I never expected that if we dropped acid together and talked about sex your trauma wouldn’t come up. Do you want a hug?”

  After a moment, Ivy nods. Felicity scoots over to next to her and puts her arms around her and squeezes. Like squeezing a wet sponge the tears flow thick and heavy out of her face, blobs of snot dripping from her nose and saliva from her mouth. She tries not to howl because she doesn’t want to ruin things for others in the house. Crying seems to take an eternity. There’s so much to get out.

  “Hey,” says Felicity, “remember when that guy attacked us, and we beat the shit out of him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was pretty fucking cool.”

  “But we did something wrong.”

  “It’s not wrong to beat up someone who attacks you with rocks.”

  “No, I mean, we forgot to do something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Afterward we should have asked if he was doing okay?”

  It’s not that it’s that funny, it’s that she hasn’t let herself feel anything in a long time. They’re still ughing as they head back toward the bedroom. Shy and her partner are curled in each others’ arms on a giant pile of pillows watching Adventure Time, and Ivy and Felicity join them for a couple hours. It’s somehow already night and people are coming up a little so Shy orders some food.

  “I feel like I’ve been around the wrong people for a long time,” says Ivy as they eat burgers.

  “That sounds pusible,” says Shy’s partner. “It’s not easy to find somewhere you’re comfortable.”

  “I don’t even know who I am,” says Ivy. “I don’t even know what a person is.”

  “A person is a type of broken machine,” says Shy.

  They all fall asleep in a pile on the living room floor. In the morning, Shy goes to work and Felicity starts texting people she knows looking for a pce they can stay the following night. Ivy remembers that she used to know a bunch of squats in Oaknd and San Francisco, but they’ve probably all been shut down.

  ***

  Three years and many drugs and strange encounters ter, Ivy is standing out front of the collective house in Richmond staring into the amber glow of the sodium lights down the street and trying to figure out just who or what “Empty” is in her mind, and Eff, who was named Felicity when Ivy met her, steps out for a smoke.

  “Hey, Eff.”

  “Hey, Ivy, how’s it going?”

  “I was just thinking about how we met.”

  “Oh yeah? That was a wild time.”

  Ivy gnces at Nylon, who’s fucking around on their phone with Jaime while grinding some bud, then turns back to Eff. She’s still as hot as she was back then, but she’s matured a little, more tense and tight in her movements. The trauma of intervening years settled into her joints.

  “Does it bother you that after all that time talking about sex we never slept together? Even when we started living together?”

  “Bother me? Nope, not at all. I’m just gd you’re, like, actually living your life now. It seems like when I first met you, you were really caught up in some stuff. Just repeating old traumas. I mean you’re still dealing with that trauma now. Dealing with it, which is a lot better than repeating it.”

  “You kinda saved my life.”

  “Awww, that’s incredibly sweet. Come here.”

  Eff gives Ivy a big hug.

  “Really,” says Ivy. “I didn’t think I’d ever be a person. Hell, I didn’t even know I was a lesbian.”

  “Wait,” Nylon says, suddenly looking up. “Eff turned you gay?”

  Ivy says “yes” and Eff says “no” at the same time.

  “Well shit I guess Sophia owes you a big favor,” Nylon says to Eff with a foolish grin on their face. It’s an open secret that Sophia has been crushing on Ivy. She’s painfully obvious about it. Honestly, Ivy would be down to give it a try if she didn’t feel like such a trauma case at the moment that she’d be a huge burden on any partner. Instead, she’s left feeling guilty about someone wasting so much attention on her.

  “How is it?” asks Eff. “Thinking about the past, I mean.”

  “It’s hard,” Ivy says. “Not as much as it used to be but it’s still really difficult. It’s like, I’m cking something fundamental that everyone else has. I’m just full of these weird voids, where new things have been put into pce and I don’t know why they’re there.”

  “That’s not just you,” says Nylon. “That’s a lot of us. Hell, that’s the whole fucking pnet under colonialism and imperialism. Your trauma is real, and the difficulty you’re facing is real. The illusion is the idea of continuity. Anyone who’s experiencing that is boring under a serious amount of fucking mind control. The idea of fucking continuity is a sign that someone is a walking flesh puppet.”

  Ivy frowns. “For most of my life, people were like that. I was like that. The thing you’re told is that there’s a consistent story for your life. A leads to B leads to C. And I know that, as a trans person, there’s a break in that. I’m—sorry, I’m gonna use the wrong nguage, but I’m just piecing this together—I’m born as a boy, assigned boy, told I’m a boy, I grow up as a boy, and then at a certain point something inside me matures and it says ‘girl’ on the bel. So I come out, I start being a girl, I start acting like a girl and dressing like a girl. I go on hormones, I get surgery. And then I’m a woman, and I live my life as a woman, and get married to a man, and grow old and die. But where’s the part where I get raped as a kid? Where’s the part where I get raped as an adult? Where’s the part where I get maniputed into a surgery that I already wanted? Where’s the part where I do too many drugs, or where my mind gets erased, where’s the part where I get traumatized running from the cops when they bust up the squat I’m staying at? Where’s all the weird little things, like how hormones give everyone different results, or figuring out I’m a lesbian after over a decade of dating men? And where’s all the little holes? And the big holes? Do you know what I did in 2010? I don’t, I just know it scares me to even think about. I listen to music that was popur then and I have no memory of it. And I pass—I mean I’m a lucky one, I’ve got nice tits, I’m pretty short, I’ve got a face that convinces cis men I’m worth fucking. And my life still makes no goddamn sense, none at all. I guess in a way I’m lucky cuz a lot of the messiest years of my transition are a big bnk hole in my memory and I came out of it passing. But that also means that in my memory everyone’s calling me a boy and then suddenly I’m passing as a woman and I’ve got no girlhood at all, I don’t have a path from point A to point C. I went to sleep and someone, and that someone was, in some sense, me, someone came in with a wrecking ball and tore apart my life and built a new one, and then I woke up with no clue where I was. And that made it very easy for people to take advantage of me, for men to take advantage of me, because I still needed all of that validation, I needed to feel like a person, like a girl, and I was so empty.” She realizes what she just said, Empty, and smirks. “I guess there’s some part of me that feels like a hole in reality. That came out tonight. Because there’s no threads connecting things together, just a yawning void, and I would fall into it, except that I’m already falling through it all the time. I guess that’s why people want me, that’s why I’m hot, because I’m so horribly vulnerable.”

  “That’s true for some people,” Jaime says. “Some people just look for weakness, and vulnerability, and target that. That’s what a lot of men, most men, are like. Men have just made their gender out of fetishizing the weakness of women. That’s their whole identity, most of the time.”

  Nylon nods and looks like they’re about to say something but Jaime continues. “I grew up with three brothers raising me. They didn’t know how to connect with each other except for through using weakness. Without my mother, I became that for them. Even if they say they had no idea I was a girl, it was obvious, because they treated the other girls in the complex the same way they treated me. And I can’t even get mad at them. No, I can get mad at them. I mean, I can understand them, though. They grew up in a version of America where their sense of survival was constantly at risk. Me too. From cops, from other boys, other men, from starvation. There was a year where none of us had any income, and my aunt could pay rent but that was it, so we had to steal to eat, right, and all the time worrying that someone was gonna find out it’s just four kids living alone and abduct us to some fucked up foster home. You hear stories. So in that context, they found a way that they could survive, through strength, through showing off their strength to each other, fighting for survival. I fought too but it was different for me. I never let it become who I was in the same kind of way. But that idea—I’m getting back around to the point, I promise—that idea of being the stronger one, that’s what formed their core sense of self, and in that context they began obsessing over my weakness, and other’s weakness. I wasn’t even weak, I could beat two out of three in a fight, but I was spiritually weak to them, because I wasn’t about that strength in the same way. And that’s what they looked for. What made me actually leave was when I caught my younger brother beating on his girlfriend. I couldn’t deal with it. I told him he was never going to do that again, and he took a swing at me, he tried to beat me up. I had to get out of there.” She lights up again and there’s a solid minute of silence interrupted only by the cars passing. “So, yes, that’s the realest fucking thing. That they will look for weakness and fetishize it. But that’s just one group of people. I’m not like that. I’ve hooked up with a lot of people and few of them have been like that, especially few women.”

  “I’m not like that,” says Nylon.

  “Yeah, no, absolutely not,” says Eff. “I mean, to be honest, part of the struggle I have getting with people is how many are in those kinds of pces of struggling with finding a sense of self. And I feel like, I don’t want to intrude on that. I used to be a huge slut—I’m still a slut, but I used to be a huge slut—but I kept noticing how so many people who were eager to fuck me really weren’t doing that well emotionally, really weren’t doing much better or much different than people who were repulsed by the thought of sex. There’s a lot of trauma circuting, it makes things confusing.”

  “If anything I’ve fetishized the opposite,” says Jaime. “Like, you’ve seen my sexy pics blog. I like strong girls, I like confident girls.”

  “You like orcs,” says Eff.

  “Hell yeah absolutely I like orcs,” says Jaime. “I’m a proud orc-fucker.”

  “I don’t know what I like,” says Ivy. “Maybe that’s part of the general problem there. I like people who are nice to me, but I’m sick of people who are fake.”

  “What’s your ideal partner?” asks Jaime.

  “I mean, I feel like I shouldn’t judge people like that.”

  “I’m not saying people, I’m saying like, what would be your perfect fucking fantasy scenario? Or perfect fantasy fucking scenario. Like, I’ve got a blog full of orc girls, right? So something like that.”

  “Maybe… I don’t know, I’ve thought about mermaids.” Ivy is blushing. “Or aliens. I guess, being able to go pces I can’t. Being able to get outside of, of all of this. I’m tired of all of this.”

  Eff grins. “Okay, so, imagine there’s some absolute nightmarish force of chaos. Just, tendrils rising from the depths, tentacles covered in eyes coming out of the sky as it rips in two and void and mass collide with each other. Meaning splitting along its edges. Shit that would break the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, leave them sobbing on the ground while their flesh dissolved and turned to water. Shit that would terrify Lovecraft’s pet gods. World-ending, universe-ending, gravity waves full of teeth and cws and a million angry pussies rippling through all existence breaking and reformuting every possible chemical bond. The Library of Babel, twisted into an n-dimensional manifold and put through a shredder and then reconstituted by a billion insane spiders on meth and acid. Total absolute fucking chaos, meta-Erisian, uberdiscordian chaos.”

  Jaime puts out the cigarette butt. “That’s your ideal partner.”

  “I wanna fuck that chaos.”

  “That reminds me of someone I used to know, long ago,” says Ivy.

  “The chaos? Do you have her number?”

  “Not the chaos, wanting to fuck the chaos. I used to know this trans girl, named Scatter, a weird radical. She took care of me for a while.”

  “Wait, Scatter?” asks Nylon, “I knew a Scatter in Gainesville. In like 2012?”

  “Huh,” says Ivy. “That… that would be after this. Might be the same person.” She doesn’t notice that her voice has started to tremble.

  “Tall, got an amazing voice like a phone sex operator, always wears bck?”

  “C-could be the same person, yeah.”

  “Really into theory, total insurrecto?”

  “She had a tattoo of the forest spirit from Princess Mononoke,” Ivy says.

  “Fuuuuck yeah I knew that girl! Damn, that’s wild, we got up to some shit together! She did my fucking railroad spike stick n poke! So you knew her before Occupy?”

  “Uh, yeah, we, uh, we used to live together.”

  “Holy shit! That’s fuckin wild! Did you know Pear?”

  “Uh, n-no.”

  “Fuck, they were fucking unseperable. God she was such a fucking bitch in the best possible way. Just ice cold.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She got pulled in for some heavy shit but got a plea deal and spent like a year in jail st I heard, that whole fucking pce fell the fuck apart and I had to get out because someone started spreading some fucking rumors about me. I haven’t heard anything about her since, it’s too bad, there was a minute where we were doing some fucking shit together. We hitched from Little Rock to Gainesville, that’s how I got there, she showed me some shit. We were pnning to take a trip up to Chicago to check out some shit but everything fell apart. And then she got arrested. Fuck! I can’t believe you fucking knew Scatter. So wait, y’all were together out here?”

  “Yeah. I was, uh, I was going by Lilly at the time. I don’t know, we lived together for like a year, maybe more, she might’ve mentioned me.”

  “Nah, she wouldn’t talk about California. Said some bad shit happened to her here, that she wasn’t going back.” Seeing the look of arm on Ivy’s face, Nylon adds, “I mean like, I don’t think it had anything to do with you. She was talking about it like the feds or something were looking at her. Oh shit! Wait, I’ll be right back.”

  Nylon runs into the house and returns with a backpack covered in patches and held together with a medley of harvested bra straps hand-sewn onto it. They pull out a beaten up paper zine.

  “She fucking gave this to me, check it out, it’s some wild shit.”

  Ivy looks at the cover:

  ON WAGING LEMURIAN TIME WAR

  Some Practical Steps Toward Temporal Liberation

  by the Liberated Ammonites of Mu

  “What’s Lemurian Time War?” Lilly asks.

  “Read it, find out,” says Scatter. She sets down the bag with the other copies, and the other zines, and starts pcing them on the dispy: This World We Must Leave, Against the Regime of Nothing, The Witch Craze and the Development of the White Mind, Molecur Revolutions. Lilly watches the enthusiasm and care with which she dispys the freshly printed zines, somehow both jealous and admiring, and perhaps on some level, even attracted, though that doesn’t make any sense to her. In the weeks that she’s been living at the collective Lilly has become increasingly aware of Scatter’s ceaseless dedication to her beliefs, a dedication that far surpasses anything Lilly has seen before. She could call it zealotry, but that would be unfair, because Scatter is extremely self-aware and self-critical, almost to a fault.

  “Would you like me to read it out loud?” Lilly asks.

  “You’re free to do whatever you’d like to do,” says Scatter. “I’ve already read it.”

  The first page: a complex and confusing hand-drawn diagram of circles, lines, and arrows arranged in a three-dimensional grid space. Different circles have bels like “1”, “A”, “III.”, and “Epsilon”, and beneath them is some very tiny writing that seems like mostly nonsense so she skips over it. “Uh, Section Four: Linearity. Linear thinking marks the order of the name of the Master. From the cyclic time of the natural cycle, linear time emerges as a product of dynastic time. The patriarchal order of the Pharoah or the Emperor severs the Ouroboros and by turns the overly rationalized time of agricultural production begins a march toward a future without end, carrying with it the necessity of its own doom. There is a double error here: first, the coupling of the wandering nomadic rhizome of phenomenological time with the cyclic time of vegetable regrowth; second, the severing of the cycle in order to create an unending linear time, the king’s lists, a product of accounting and expansion. It is only through this squared territorialization that ‘revolution’ comes to serve as a process of renewal for the royal order, the disruptive chaos of social life rationalized into a process of establishing a discontinuity in linear dynastic time that, by its exceptional nature, binds all time to a process of absolute linearity. This process is perfected before the emergence of monotheism, which then functions alongside the family and the agricultural apparatus as a means of deepening linear time, attempting to discipline the schizogenesis inherent to the irregur assembges of assembges constituting society. So it is in this manner that all things are bent via what Derrida would dub ‘white phallogocentrism’ toward the precise pns of the AoE, only so that they can be further utilized as a primer for the technonecrotic order of of the pure Eschaton, an Other which makes itself known through the othering of all that would otherwise be naturalized.”

  She stops to catch her breath.

  “What of that did you understand?” asks Scatter.

  “Some,” she says. “I mean, I get the thing about, like, there’s an agricultural time, built around the yearly calendar. And then the Pharoah means, it’s instead counted linearly. Through families, through dynasties.”

  “That’s pretty good,” says Scatter. “I mean, I think that’s maybe the key point being made there.”

  She beams. It’s become important to her to be validated by Scatter, although she wouldn’t allow herself to understand why. Still, there’s a lot she doesn’t understand. More than anything, gnawing at her, is the question of why Scatter handed this zine in particur to her. Some of what its saying reminds her of the lectures she overheard or expnations directed toward her when she was a courier for the Coordination Division. So it feels like there’s something there, something relevant to her past, and she wants to know, wants to ask about it. There’s no hope in getting an answer, Scatter never gives a clear answer. After a week or two Lilly began to realize that Scatter likes having conversations but doesn’t like being asked for answers or clear expnations. In some ways she’s the opposite of many of the people Lilly has known, who are very quick to give a lot of answers and expnations with very little substance behind them.

  “Would you like me to read out some more of it?”

  Scatter stops for a moment to look at her, then in that buttery smoker’s voice she says, “Tell you what: why don’t you carry that with you, and whenever you see me doing something and not listening to music or talking to nobody you can read me one of the sections.”

  Lilly nods. A connection, something between the two of them.

  This pce is so strange to her. It’s the first pce human connections have ever felt real.