David Baum

“Millennial Novel”

Her most desperate gesture was also her lightest and most practiced. To her, the minute flexion of a single finger was enough to recreate the world by obliterating all extant knowledge, and, at the exact same instant, to summon previously unimaginable configurations of knowledge from the void, configurations that would allow her, like an astronomer who has finally found the correct focal length for her telescope, to observe distant phenomena without distortion. Her knowledge was imperfect, yes, she admitted that; but it was not the product of rational deduction or empirical investigations that she worked towards; she worked to construct enormous hermeneutic maps, maps that contained everything that existed and every event that had ever occurred, maps that delineated counterfactual histories with better-than-real detail, maps of polite gossip and filthiest implication, created with cartographic techniques that were scorned by staid historians, shadow maps of what might be coming and of what had already left; and these were all mental maps, because she had no desire to draw the entire universe, only to know it. The relationship between these maps was so complex, such a tangle of interconnections and apophenic silk, that small adjustments could alter her understanding of the world fundamentally. Sometimes it took her weeks to recover. In those weeks she would mentally ravage her cosmological atlas, defacing this page and burning that one, scribbling corrections and updates in margins she suspected would become centers. Her hands didn’t even need to be above the blankets, since the optical mouse worked on her fitted bedsheet. Refresh. Another library of supposition burnt. Refresh. Another geopolitical theory, one she had believed in like a swift believes in the blue sky, threatened by the storm clouds of plausible hearsay. Ten months of fixed uncertainty lost. Refresh. She continued this practice despite her constant desire to stop, because to stop would mean the end of the world; or, rather, the world—a thing that existed outside of her apartment despite barely existing outside of her head—would be unrevealed in a mesacalyptic purge, and then each country and corporation would only be what it was, branches depetalled to bare thorn, each person clasped in their moment of blood, flesh pierced by the reality principle so deeply that recovery would be its own lengthy wound. Besides, she didn’t believe in that world, not really. It was like a rumor that she suspected was true, but on principle refused to accept. She acknowledged that the world she believed in, her garden of hermeneutic shadow-maps, was a fiction; but she also believed that only fiction was believable, nowadays, and that since other people cared more about fictional characters than their own lovers and understood more about the economies of fictional cities than the ones they lived in, she was allowed to reject the real world as a perverse fantasy and embrace the loving uncertainties of phantasmagoria. From within a tenth-floor apartment, which she had not left in almost two years—from within a luxurious queen-sized bed, which she left every few days to wash herself and perform household necessities—from within the slivered infinities of her knowledge, which she shattered daily out of a desire to make them whole, this woman, named April Serpentine, worked continuously to discover what her life was. Not that her life was important, except to herself, since she was an unsocial shadow that merely suggested a person; but there were, maybe, lives similar to hers, ants on the same scent-path—herself the last of them, hillbound and sluggish, unable to carry food or confront the screaming wind, but not yet entirely sundered from the mass of her colony mates. The seer saw herself as a seer. Refresh. The seer saw herself as a seer, while understanding that all foretellings were fake, and that seers were not real; but if fiction was more believable than fact—if characters were the yardstick for plausibility against which people were measured—then she could learn to see herself not as a withered wreck whose hip had never healed, paper-pale and slender-unto-death beneath her silk pajamas, but as a life from which life had absconded, perceivable then all the more clearly as a specimen, a fiction whose only reality was her perceptions. She believed she had become very good at this. Idealism is easy when you never get out of bed. The rest of the world followed her, naturally, and to keep herself honest she never wrote anything down; her hermeneutic maps existed only in her head, which allowed them to partake in the fragility of the actually-existing. Fictions cannot be destroyed, not like a bush can be burnt or a heart broken; stories end, but by ending, whether in death or in happy marriage, they reveal what their characters truly are: tragic or comic, obscene or merely unlucky, heroes or grotesques who barely deserve names. I wonder, she though, How America will end? If she listened to the right scientists, followed the savviest political theorists and the omnidox economists, and factored in all of the old apocalypses as well as some of the new ones, then she could come up with an estimate: the doomsday clock was at about 1:45 AM, and unless some joker was hiding hyperfunctional carbon-capture tech, it would never be rolled back. Refresh, take a lap, it’s more a matter of what and when than whether. The seer saw herself as dead, already-but-not-yet, and like every person who insists on their own doom, she only found freedom in the how. Indeed, she had made a vow to herself to not die until she understood the nature of her own failure, understood what trail she might have laid that could have led the colony to a safer future, one free of flood or fire; she knew her insignificance reduced the weight of her sins, but her guilt was strictly unutilitarian—what prophet loses the whole world but gains a soul? A silent one. So she had an obligation to continue until she could speak, continue until the moment of discovery and cessation. Refresh. What might I have done differently? she thought. Not get hit by that truck, for starters; but maybe the beginning lay farther back, in the second millennium. Could she blame her parents? Could she blame everyone’s parents, accept that her fate had been decided pre-utero, and resign herself to a view of life in which none of her choices could possibly have mattered? She didn’t, anyway—except in the most terminal of depressive moods, when the inevitability of what had come before pierced her like a lance of light dropped from above the clouds. She could have found a different job, certainly, although she had been aware of her work’s basic immorality from before her first day. She had been employed by a boutique consulting firm paid by startups—companies stuck on society like fake diamonds on the back of a live tortoise, led by men who thought of employees as a resource and labor laws as a personal affront, a shell protecting treasures that were theirs by right of desire—to secure funding from venture capitalists; the department she had run, after a decade at the company, had produced targeted erotic bait and fantasy-future confabulations: she had managed both a cyberinvestigation squad, staffed by ex-Mossad and smooth-cheeked Mormons, mostly no-hat types in clean shirts without discernable ideologies, and an art department staffed by fetish artists and ex-fanfic authors lured away from the internet by health benefits and lavish catered lunches; the investigators dug through search histories, porn habits, and dating profiles to find what VCs wanted, and then the artists used those discoveries to create bespoke fetish/white paper amalgams and pitches that described VCs’ ideal libidinal scenarios as just a hundred million dollars of series B funding from instantiation—implicitly, of course, because while the people she had targeted loved the feeling of being seduced, they hated to be tricked. She had realized that any flaw in a business plan could be explained away by expanding the plan to include the capture of another market; a good pitch was always the story of a brand’s ceaseless expansion towards totality, and a successful product was one that could absorb the entire universe—details she had only made explicit when speaking to really tweaked futurists. A morally indefensible job, yes, she admitted that; she had played consort to reptiles, overseen the birth and growth of hoards that were not legally hers, and then watched them reach maturity and distort the light of the world, greedy for all shine to exist only by their dispensation. But, no matter how many self-loathing revisions she made to her maps, she could not prove her past self’s guilt was as great as she felt it should be; her personal node of implicative shadow remained unobtrusive, a backwater town that she cringed to remember, but one that most people had never heard of. Damned, then, but without ever achieving power or pleasure: her greatest accomplishments had been pitches so subtextually lusty they had caused VCs to breathe wet and slow, pupils dilated and imaginations engorged, but the actual work had been unfulfilling, the whole process instrumentalized into workflows and best practices after the first six months, her daily routine then one of obligatory maintenance, trimming, enhancement, and micro-sexualizations. It had paid. Refresh. The only light in her room came from the projector mounted above her bed. She had over two hundred tabs open, and remembered what at least eighty of them were. Personal hygiene, both digital and physical, was for people who went outside. Refresh. She had suffered for her sins, yes, and was almost proud of her wounds; while editing a slide deck meant to entice a crypto princeling into funding autonomous drone research, she had experienced a vision—not, she thought, like the old-time prophets, whose revelations had been gifts of insight or perhaps divine ventriloquism; her vision had been the product of constant, obsessive work: after a decade of twelve-hour days spent analyzing financial plans and executive psychopathologies, her surfeit of knowledge exploded beyond her control, no longer submissive to goals but rampant as a gas-fed fire, and she saw what she had always known, but had managed to ignore. Death had vanished from her world. She saw her entire professional domain transformed into a single mechanistic operation composed of technology, sexuality, finance mediated sociality, and futurology, an operation that required humans and computers equally and considered both equally replaceable, that did not allow for choices except those that the operation’s ceaseless tendency towards self-optimization already implied, and that required those choices to be made constantly, even when they could not be justified. Death and individuality had been abolished by the operation, both factored out because of the fungibility of every operator. She saw this. The idea of death was no longer needed, no longer useful, and so it was discarded; the operation was pure process, moving parts and automatized calculations, unwilling to retain inefficient negations that added zero value. In her intense professional attention to the operation she had adopted its perspective, and—not believed that she would never die, because she understood rationally that she would, but rather forgotten death entirely, forgotten even its absence, like it was an old possession she had mislaid so long ago that the loss had no place in her consciousness, much less the possession. This absence of death was visible, suddenly. She had experienced an ahuman epiphany, and through the eyes of the operation she could see that death was no longer the end of an individual, but the moment at which there was a seamless transfer of functionality from one meaningless piece of silicon or flesh to another, after which physical remainders would be moved to the dump or to the crematorium as needed. The operation eternal, her office building a steel crucifix that accepted far more than a single selfless body, accepted all bodies by insisting they were not selves, allowed neither agony nor ecstasy, no though or feeling at all that had not been predetermined by the obligations of the market. This, then, was apotheosis, every human alive consumed in the same eternity, no longer differentiated except by job title and salary. And that’s it? she had thought. That’s all transcendence is? These glass-walled meeting rooms—this mediocre falafel—my overwork unending—my careful tone that gives nothing away—must I retire to be born?—these people—these pointless words—all meetings rescheduled—must I retire to die?—the sound of the elevator—the view of the Bay—a five-figure bonus—must I speak in silences?—my friends devoured, too—the carpet incomprehensible—the email abominable—hate with no object—love with no subject—laughter without jokes—shoes without feet—thought without mind. She had left her desk without a word, the capacity cored out of her, and as the mirrored elevator descended twenty-three floors she had stared into her own eyes and sought something she knew was not there. When the doors opened she had screamed so loudly that she was unsure if her mouth was open, then run into the street and been hit by a delivery truck, then screamed again in the ambulance, screamed out loud for certain until the morphine had put her out. A fractured hip, three cracked ribs, and an arm broken in two places. Luckily her left arm, because she moved the mouse with her right. Refresh. The settlement, combined with her considerable savings, had been enough for her to retire at age thirty-one. After five months she had given up physical therapy, closed the door to her apartment, and only ever opened it again to snatch up packages when she was sure nobody was watching. For twenty-one months she had not spoken to another human being, except by phone. Refresh. Border skirmishes in central Asia had begun again, so she increased the likelihood of nuclear war by a quarter of a percent. The percentages she calculated in were not actual quantities, but representations of the intensity of her feelings; she turned numbers into symbols as part of her cartographic art, but had abandoned math with her old life, in part because she was terrified that if she computed in earnest, revanchist business habits would overcome her, weak as she was, and destroy her ability to read her maps forever. A million statistics were a tragedy. Refresh. Her hope, only articulated in subsubvocalized speech that was wordless and so unfalsifiable, was that, after years of study, she would become so attuned to the workings of the world, her maps so detailed and precise, that she would experience a second vision, like the first but doubly inverted, a vision that would not reveal the abolishment of death, but instead abolish the concealment of life: a vision of action illuminated, all events linked by chains of cause-and-effect—coffeeshop chitchat concatenate to the presidential election—pesticide to the global average temperature. Until that happened, all actions, no matter how small, made her uncomfortable. Refresh. Her brother August was never uncomfortable; or, rather, he had made it his life’s goal to eliminate discomfort—to flee from it, outwit it, or drug it into submission. They were twins but, because she had won a sanctified game of rock-paper-scissors played in secret on their eleventh birthday, both considered her the elder. Is he happy? she thought. Content? I don’t think he is. A quarry who tried to treat his flight as a pilgrimage, peregrine on drafts of impulse and self-imposed ideological obligation, who suspected he would die if he touched ground and so sought winds that never abated, who encouraged the buffets and the loneliness because, perhaps, he knew that he could never accept them—she loved him, of course, and he loved her; they texted constantly about very little, and although neither was fully honest with the other, they were each less dishonest than they would have been with other people, each willing to express, albeit in carefully chosen terms, their absolute disapproval for each other’s lives. He took part in political actions that she considered pointless, and justified his views with arguments that she considered meaningless, internet flotsam that he gripped desperately in order to avoid noticing the weakness of the wood; he took unregulated research chemicals—sold on darkweb markets rotten with child porn, purchased with cryptocurrencies that stank of fraud—she could call bullshit on crypto schemes in her sleep, and had, heroic dreams in which the public reacted to her accusatory finger like they were so many happy dogs—and then he complained of sinusoidal brain misfunctions, whined to her in a tone so juvenile that she threatened to stop texting him; he took care to please their parents, more than she did, anyway, fortified by the knowledge that they already considered him a disappointment, and flexed his moderate personal charm and willingness to lie blatantly in order to soothe their anxieties. She took the time to listen to him, and occasionally paid his rent when their parents cut him off. Refresh. She had asked him, once, if he actually thought his radicalism would accomplish anything, and he had said, “I see so much in the world that I hate. So many people suffering, such pointless waste of resources. And I see, hiding all that like a veil—and really it’s the only thing I can see, most days—the obscenity of media, of advertisements and entertainment, of manifest desires that no person should have—myself not excluded—my mind not clear either, my oldest and most resonant memories commercial jingles, my sex shaped by industrial demography, my hate—the crucible of my resistance—already branded by the companies it was meant to forge tools to fight against; I want to be a symbol of resistance to all that, to make myself into a counterimage that cannot exist, destroy my rotten self and replace me with something pure and untouchably good. Tis a consummation. The only one, really.” “So, it won’t accomplish anything?” she had said. “There’s no way to stop,” he had said. “I have to try.” She had seen him try; she had watched him at protests, desperate almost unto hysteria, so unable to make himself understood that he seemed barely human, and so fearful of misunderstandings that he preferred enemies to allies; less a master of instigation than mastered by it, he would scream slogans until he found an opposing sloganeer of compatible temperament, and then the two would bellow at each other, trapped in the mutual, miserable bliss of a relationship with no uncertainty. His real relationships were similar: his capacity for kindness was marred by a habit of throwing emotions that were not his in other people’s faces; he asserted rigid guidelines for correct behavior that he knew nobody could follow, and then dissolved into a sentimental mess at the first inevitable failure, weepy if not penitent, a flagellant so comfortable with pain that its absence made him anxious. He had never been arrested for political action, but, once, during an argument with his then-girlfriend, he had smashed and burned a coffee table in what he had explained, afterwards, when his bail had been paid, had been an attempt to demonstrate the extremity and sincerity of his feelings. He always had the proper opinions—she envied his disinterested certainty, although she knew it was really just arrogance and a severe social media addiction. Refresh. Yes, she admitted that her obsessive uncertainty was also, in part, a product of social media addiction, but she felt that her addiction was ennobled by her devotion to mapmaking, that by her labors she was consecrated as both Royal and Ordained, priest-queen of a magisterium whose heresies would, in time, be proven true. Refresh. His heresies were not the type to be judged true or false; he argued in opposition only, with rhetoric that aspired to violence, and was willing to claim as his own any jargon he thought would be useful, to wield discursive tricks like knives and repurpose entire hip lexicons as projectiles, throwing everything he could at his uncomprehending enemies—his arguments not comprehensible to himself, either, not comprehensible at all, mostly, because there was nothing to comprehend, except in the way flesh comprehends a dull blade. Refresh. Escape through annihilation was his method, but because he lacked the power to move against his real enemies, his political violence was limited to mild property damage and the occasional fistfight. So he turned to self-annihilation: he considered himself vain and so he neglected his appearance to wound his own vanity; he binged and purged on popular entertainment and high art, read the news obsessively one week and the next refused to touch computers, and test-drove personalities he had reverse-engineered from the biographies of martyred revolutionaries, all to reset his brain, which he felt had been occupied by other people since his infancy; he replaced corporate job-time with addiction time, dissolved hours and minutes in the tidal bath of need—need for drugs, for parapolitical theorization, for new relationships that he thought might change his life. Refresh. He fantasized about power, yes, he admitted that. Once he had said to her, “Every second I can see it. All I have to do is look. The Universal City. A worldwide lattice of fiberoptic cables, satellites, overlapping pools of Wi-Fi connectivity, flights tracked, bus schedules visualized, traffic predicted, cheap housing constructed and demolished, stocks and bonds bought and sold by algorithm, spreadsheets within spreadsheets of people located and identified by the information that really matters: what work can they do, and how little can they be paid? Every international-local extension is mapped and overlaid, extensions that exist on six continents at once, that encircle millions without including them—no wonder people walk around in a daze, the Financial District abducted half the city. Almost-identical extensions interblend, trickle into trickle, a thousand streams of light. Competitors are just kin you haven’t worked for yet. I see will-o’-the-wisp blacksites go online, conspicuously dark nodes that flare up and fuse a dozen extensions into mechaluminescent squids—monsters that devour entire populations without moving, sacrifices unto them performed half a world away through drone strikes and financial sorcery. Or, from the perspective of people like you, who work here—the ballpoints for these pens were manufactured in Guangdong, which means to you Guangdong is local, who cares where it actually is; but the whole Central Valley is a foreign region, eternally Terra Incognita despite the ninety-minute drive—unless you’re also in the produce business. The proximity that matters isn’t physical. If you’re not connected by a business’s supply, manufacturing, and distribution chains, you’re foreigners. See that apartment building? The people who live in those apartments can look out and see restaurants they eat from every week but have never visited, parks they avoid, streets they love to talk about but have never walked on; there are whole neighborhoods that have been papered over by money, replaced by everywhere and nowhere, nominally accessible to anyone but the password is cash. What is this place? It’s not San Francisco, not really, except by its coordinates: if you wanted to, you could call a car, head to the airport, fly to London, then take another car to another cluster of almost-identical buildings, designed maybe by the same firms, furnished maybe by the same designers, housing the same businesses, from the City to the City. And there are others, all around the globe, easy to reach if you’re willing to spend, as easy as taking a long walk might have been a hundred years ago. I hate it. I’d burn it down if I could.” “You should go somewhere else,” she had said. “Somewhere you might not be so angry.” “Weren’t you listening?” he had said. “There is nowhere else.” Refresh. His rage was as intimate as an organ, so vital to his self that he refused surgery even when inflammations put the rest of him at risk. But it was more manageable by far than love, which he always experienced as a pleasurable sensitivity to the good and beautiful, a sensitivity that began with his beloved and then expanded, unending, potentially universal, a sensitivity that he always felt compelled to destroy for fear that it might transform him into someone without convictions. What love he had, he maintained out of habit. His love for her was more a sense of inviolable obligation than affection or appreciation; he liked her, sometimes, but claimed that it had nothing to do with love. Her love for him, by contrast, was less a blessing than a callus. She had never been sure exactly how much she liked him, and refused to think about it too hard because she suspected she would find out. Refresh. Peak phosphorus was projected five years sooner, so she increased military intelligence black budgets by a few decimal points. Refresh. A court ruling further limited the scope of class action lawsuits, so she predicted that gender wage gaps would rise by almost one percent over the next decade. Refresh. Commercial almond prices had dropped, so she imagined a rainy summer. Refresh. She connected teacher salaries to real estate prices—she compared developmental propaganda and nationalist poetry—she linked the price of gold to the frequency of school shootings. Refresh. When would it end? Refresh. Sometimes she daydreamed. Daydreams were the third realm, not real life or her maps of it, but somewhere she knew for sure was fake and indestructibly fragile, the perfect location to hide her desires. There they were, like young animals, tender and inscrutable, things to be protected from a world that would kill them without even registering their deaths. They made her terrified; not, typically, because the desires themselves were frightening—although some were, their sheathed claws or venom all too evident—but because she might be judged if other people saw them, judged inaccurately because incompletely, an almost-autonomous part of her taken for the whole. She welcomed true judgement. She was desperate for it. Her entire cartographic project was, in a way, only an attempt to gather the information that would allow for an accurate judgement to be made. Reveal it to me, she thought. Judge me as either victim or coward. I need to know what I am. I need to know what the world is. Tell me what the scales say, so that I can wake up or die. Let it all have been a mistake, an error that can be corrected. Or if I am guilty, let me be punished, and through punishment be vindicated. Refresh. Her daydreams interfered with her work, yes, she admitted that, overwhelmed it with drifts of softness and ease, like an invading army that conquers so gently that the subjugated people only realize decades later that their lives have not been their own. But since she never acted on her desires they were irresistible, energetic while she was held motionless by her heavy blankets; her daydreams were less utopias than prisons, containers for what could not be allowed to escape. Sometimes, she imagined her daydreams ruptured, their contents spilling out onto her maps or into the real world. The seer saw her self as a scene. Refresh. The seer saw her self as a scene, and his self as a scene, too; and sometimes, in moments of mental weakness when she felt herself concentrating involuntarily, she saw both selves as the same scene, a vision that had no relation to the one she was working towards, as infinitely malleable as her maps but always, in every iteration, absolute and final. Refresh. An error had been made. Somewhere, through neglect or righteous malice, a cage had been left unlocked. The fail-safes had malfunctioned or been overwhelmed. The first open cage had led to another, and then another. The alarms indicated that now all the cages were open. The animals were free. They emerged from cells deep within the earth, from prisons whose level of secrecy was beyond classification, from pits of neglect and from oubliettes of first resort. Some of them had been tortured or experimented upon, some raised or bred in these bunkers, and some severed from surface lives that they prayed were hallucinations, so painful was their loss; some also were snitches and obedient guests, half-capo beast who followed the rest out of a sense of self-preservation, their punishments deferred or forgotten in the rush upward. They moved in groups when they could, for protection and companionship, up stairs and elevators, through vents and disused laundry chutes, by foot, paw, and wing; wounded, some of them, from the terms of their confinements or from battles with the guards, bloody or half-broken, supported by their fellows, carried or dragged even unto death—and beyond it, because to let a body rot in a sub-basement corridor or be reclaimed and then subjected to postmortem analysis would be failure. She saw this. She saw also the corridors, pure white of wall with off-grey ceilings and cheap tiled floors, scoured clean and hallucinatorily bare beneath unflickering fluorescent lights. Composed only of straight lines and right angles, their layout was unfailingly irregular: some corridors were ten feet long, while other stretched for miles; some had junctures and offshoots, while others proceeded, undeviating, into dead ends; the staircases were all of different heights, so instead of mappable strata there was a crumble of incommensurable floors, interleaved but not touching, some tiny, some the size of cities. It was impossible to navigate except by perfect memory. There were signs that the corridors had once been full, been streaked with dirt and piss, puddled with blood, filled with garbage of all types: scraps of food and broken furniture, boxes of unread books and computer parts, stripped cars and the skeletons of sea creatures, picked bare by who-knew-what; there had been burn marks on the floors and smoke damage on the ceilings, water leaking through the wallpaper, bruises of mold and fairy rings of mushrooms; there had been decorations, too, tacky and pornographic, mostly, in colors seemingly chosen to clash, so eclectic the only perceivable theme had been disorder, and advertisements for every product imaginable, pasted thick on the walls and floors, flashing neon and chrome, a cacophony of promises in voices sensual and robotic, so loud that the emergency sirens were almost drowned out. But all of that was gone and almost forgotten, only fractionally perceivable, like a ghost that had ceased haunting. She saw this. Then the animals burst into the corridors. She saw this, and—yes, she admitted it—she felt herself with them, and her brother, too. A torrent of hair and hoof flowed through those halls, filled them from wall to wall; then more animals arrived, and then even more—a seemingly unending amount, freed-but-not-free, all of them seeking exits, seeking a way out, a way to understand where they should go and what they should do. They wandered for so long that hope soured into desperation; they bit the walls until their teeth broke, tore through ceiling cladding until they were stopped by steel pipes, made plans that came to nothing and scribbled maps that led nowhere useful; infighting began, arguments with no stakes turned deadly, and the animals began to kill each other. We are dying, she though. There is no way out—these corridors extend infinitely—there is no surface and no escape. The bears will die. The birds will die. The apes will die—still seeking an exit that does not exist, the apes will die. We have wandered into a terrible dead end, one so large that we cannot comprehend the magnitude of our error; we will never understand exactly what went wrong, only that something did, and we will never be able to abandon hope entirely because our destruction will be slow, a cataclysm of inches and degrees, an end that arrives second by second, that we can watch but not prevent; yes, our fates are decided already—we are not special or heroic, despite our desire to be so; bound together even as we die separately—burnt by our own fire—convulsing from our own poison—like the duouroboros, a circle-self-devouring; and all nourishment we take reduces our time, painfully, shrinks the circle again, until finally we will be reduced to a single non-existent point, with no escape possible, bound tightly together but almost unaware that we exist. Refresh.

David Baum lives in the Bay Area and can(not) be found @TempleLeopards.