On the third day of trying to be a better person Rora gave up. She felt it was true what they said in some movies. Specifically the ones where people give up and embrace being who they are. Alternatively some movies emphasize our ability to change. She mentally filed those movies into movies by liars for liars.
She texted the man she had been seeing sometimes who was in a relationship with her friend.
“Okay you can come over now.”
“I can’t” he wrote back.
“Okay.”
What was the point of this affair? She thought about this and it made no difference. The fact that humans could reason only got us so far anyway. It could be misused both accidentally and on purpose. In that case, she reasoned, the whole thing was fucked.
Rora finished up work for the day. She had been working remotely for a few years. She used to go into the office but this was when she was actively trying to keep her job at the insurance company. Since work had become remote work she did less and less every day until even the bare minimum seemed too much to muster energy for. She increasingly reacted to each new spreadsheet with revulsion. Each second of permission she gave herself to not work brought her a sense of freedom that was so joyful that she had become addicted to her own agency. There was no way to scale it back now. It was too late. She imagined her life like a scary campfire story: but it was too late (gasp).
Her descent into failing had been subtle. She had perfectly misallocated her skills and resources; used poor judgement and beaten the odds to accrue a series of missed opportunities and missteps that brought her here. Rather than philosophize, psychoanalyze, or strategize- she chose to be amused by these factors in a detached and aesthetic manner. The ways in which she had been lucky weren’t useful to her. They were just ornamental. She had found herself trying to build a life with ornaments that can adorn nothing substantial.
She had heard about the mid-life crisis. But she was only thirty-five. She had entirely skipped over the part of life where one settled down. She got right to the part of life where she wanted to make questionable alterations to her hair color and wardrobe as a cry for help. In this sense she was advanced. “I’m on the advanced track,” she thought, “I was an early adopter of existential despair.”
She closed her computer and watched a YouTube video on her phone for the third or fourth time this week. After she clicked off of an ad for cryptocurrency it started. It was a clip from a reality show that made her laugh a few times before. She mustered a smile out of it on this iteration.
She decided she would visit her mom tonight since the man she had been seeing sometimes who was in a relationship with her friend was refusing to meet her. She drove to her mom’s house in rush hour traffic. The evening sun was blaring and harsh and echoed off the dull rainbow of cars.
Her mom was slowly succumbing to a conspiratorial mindset. Rora was jealous. Her mom could make meaning in excess. She could find connections between events where none existed. She was also a happy person. Rora speculated families have a finite set of traits and are forced to share them. Her mom was a joy hog and hogged joy.
Upon arriving she parked behind her mom’s car. Her mom left the house twice a week. Once to grocery shop and once to go to a book club.
“Mom I’m here,” she said, opening the screen-door.
“I’m in the living room watching Judge Vargas,” her mom responded.
Judge Vargas was a TV show featuring a dubiously-accredited judge. Rora imagined the concept of the show would be inexplicable to most people throughout human history.
“Who is winning?” Rora asked.
“What?” Her mom said, “This one, she owes rent.”
“So she has to pay?”
“She says there was mold, black mold. That’s very bad for you.”
“No shit,” Rora said.
“Don’t curse- it’s very bad for you- black mold- you should check for black mold.”
Rora eyed the display case that held her mother’s most precious items. These included dog statuettes, cat statuettes, and statuettes of a few other animals (such as a deer) that did not form any coherent set or collection. It also housed her mom’s Princess Diana commemorative Beanie Baby. The Beanie Baby was a purple bear with miniscule black bead-eyes and pronounced sutures on the face and body. She had been trying to convince her mother to sell her Princess Diana Beanie Baby. Online she read, in the month of August for some reason (her death?), it could sell for thousands of dollars. Her mother rarely used a computer and so was unaware of this fact and skeptical of its validity at times Rora posited it.
Rora said she would sell it for her if they split the money. Her mother refused on the basis that it could grow in its monetary value. Which was probably true. But money was always needed in the present and the future was not guaranteed to anyone.
Her mother asked her to help her move a box containing varied detritus from the garage that she was intending to throw out or donate. Her mother would not pause the show and so became distracted by it throughout the process of walking to the box and opening it.
“Please help me move it to the front of the house. I already went through it.”
There was a sudden gentleness to this request- like it had come from a different mother. Slowly, she deduced, this new mother would replace her old one. Her body would fail piece by piece. It would become the enemy rather than the vehicle of her desires and choices. Rora envisioned the horror of aging. Slowly your sense of “you” cedes ground to the dysfunction.
The man she had been seeing sometimes who was in a relationship with her friend texted her, “okay you can come over now.” This was not the plan nor an alternative Rora had offered to him.
Rora did not want to go over to his place because he shared it with her friend. This was less a moral rule and more a visceral discomfort. She went over twice before and neither time felt particularly worth it. None of the times actually felt “worth it.” But most things were less than she imagined they would be.
“Are you staying for dinner?” her mother asked.
“No, I have to go,” Rora said.
“Goodbye then, goodbye,” her mother said angrily, “you never stay for dinner. I have to cook now.”
“I don’t know why you try and guilt trip me,” Rora said, “that doesn’t even work.”
“I don’t try and do that- you just interpret it that way,” her mother said.
Most weeks her mother missed Rora’s father and would text something about him to Rora. Sometimes she abridged her grief to express she missed having someone around. Sometimes, in its most basic form, she would say she missed having noise. When Rora would suggest a dog for company her mother would conventionally fall into a sentimental reverie full of non sequiturs to avoid giving a reason she would not get one.
On TV Judge Vargas had ruled the black-mold-claimer did not have to pay rent. Rora hoped she could discover black mold that would explain everything that had gone wrong in her life. They would remove the mold and she would heal, slowly, becoming her best self. The black mold (she would be told so and then realize herself that it was true) had done physical, emotional, and psychological damage. Now she could be better on all levels.
Leaving her mother’s house she was careful to step on the stones that lined the walkway. Somewhere in her mother’s front yard she recalled she had buried her toys as a child. If they were still there – she wondered- were they still yellow and blue and green? Or had they been stripped to colorless dirt forms of non-biodegradable substance? Did the grass grow though them or around them?
Driving on the highway Rora wished desperately she could ask everyone she passed by for advice. How did they seem to know what to do? How was everyone not constantly dizzy from the gap between what they could accept and reality as it stood? How did they continue to grocery shop without falling to the floor due to this chasm? Was everyone very strong? Was she missing some essential part of her brain?
When she arrived at the house of the man she had been seeing sometimes who was in a relationship with her friend- which was also her friend’s house- she felt her mood shift to a calm resignation.
“Hi,” he said, and lead her into the living room.
“Hey,” she responded weakly, shrugging as if disavowing her own greeting.
The man didn’t have any furniture that Rora could believe he would have picked out himself. From this she discerned that he worked around what life put in front of him. This is a strong skill set. It’s not close to a sufficient one, but we all capitalize on the few areas we can.
They sat silently on opposite sofas. In this house she had once given her friend advice on the relationship she was now complicit in ruining. Before she knew the man well she would counsel her to breakup with him. She only heard bad things like his selfishness and inability to compromise. Now she knew the bad things were true. But since becoming his co-conspirator she was sometimes charmed by him as well. He was confident and not needy. He never “needed” to see her. He never “needed” her to be encouraging, or supportive, or even kind. He would make her coffee. These qualities didn’t amount to much but they were comforting
“I fixed the TV,” he said, pointing to the TV.
“It was broken?” she asked.
“Yes we tried to watch that documentary about the deep sea, remember?”
Rora did not recall requesting or wanting to watch that documentary- it was perhaps suggested but she had never been invested in the deep sea, or the documentary, or even TV.
“What’s the deal with it? Its deep?”
“The documentary?”
“The sea.”
“It’s got unknown things.”
“It would be known if we watched it?” she asked sarcastically.
“I don’t know because we didn’t.”
On YouTube Rora had learned octopi are smart and not very related to other smart animals evolutionarily speaking. In the sea they have a set of tools that are adaptable and useful and they use this to reproduce and then die shortly after giving birth. Humans have evolved in a different way. We establish elaborate reasons to continue living, or alternatively, just don’t want to die. In this way we persist for the majority of our lives and in this way we are most universal as individuals. Like reality itself we don’t know why we exist.
There was more silence. She had no idea how long she would sit here with him. She wouldn’t push for anything to happen. For some reason it had to just happen.
Eventually he got up and went to the bedroom, wordlessly, and she followed him. She felt for a second to be powerful- as if she had coordinated this with just her thoughts. They had sex. It was “good” as usual.
Rora and her friend had reached the point in which they would just reminisce when they were together. Everything in the past had gained so much mythical status that they didn’t bother to discuss anything new. They would recount memories of good times and bad times- each warping according to how they had been narrativized. Soon the reminiscing would catch up to itself and eat itself and she wondered if they would remember the times they remembered things. There seemed to be no other logical conclusion. Sometimes her friend would recall hard times with her own mother who had passed. These were hard for Rora to hear. Even those recollections had morphed with time.
The man had no intention of leaving his wife. And Rora did not hope he would either. They had abandoned the pretense.
Afterwards he asked her about her job.
“I think I’m going to quit,” she responded.
“And do what?”
“Sea expeditions.”
“What? Snorkeling,” he laughed.
“You have to start somewhere.”
“Yeah, the sea,” he said.
She got dressed and looked at him with pity. She already felt bad for her friend and had gone through all the stages of feeling bad until it reached its limit. The cost of her betrayal would be insurmountable and she could do nothing about that at this juncture. But him- he had no illusions about life. He was imploding. She didn’t know if he cared or did not care about that. In either case it was an occasion to pity him. Anxiety or apathy- which was worse really?
“Did you eat?”
She misheard him for 15 seconds, puzzling over what he meant by “did you-ee?” And soon the moment passed and she couldn’t bring herself to explain or accept the invitation.
If her friend saw her how would she seem to her? How many years would it take for her to forgive her? It wouldn’t be in this lifetime. It could be in 2 or 3 lifetimes. But we are just given enough time to do certain things in life and maybe even just one or two things.
She drove to the bar closest to her friend’s house. Almost ritualistically she would drink after sex with the man. It was a useful way of compounding her poor decisions so that they congealed into one amorphous mess. She asked for white wine.She scrolled the news on her phone. It seemed impossible to understand how to even begin to approach a comprehensive picture of the world. A woman took the seat next to her and appeared to be gearing up to talk to her almost immediately. She wondered if this woman would befriend her and what would motivate her to do that. It took a perverse ability, she thought, to impose oneself on another stranger like that. Her general perception was that nobody wanted to be bothered. Occasionally one wanted to bother others- but to do that would be shameless. To take up time when that’s all anybody has- and never enough of it- was shameless and insane.
She thought for a second. . . . was she in a lesbian bar? No, she had been here before. Did it become a lesbian bar? This woman could not have known talking to Rora was the right decision. Rora would not know it either- but retroactively it made perfect sense. And that is the only way we know for sure that there is something at work in the universe that generates and produces an unidentified but nonetheless intuitively recognizable outcome.
“Do you believe in destiny?” the woman asked her (a strong first question)
“No. Yes. Yes, but only financially.”
“Do you believe in cryptocurrency?”
“Like, ontologically?” she asked.
“It’s coming back, in a big way,” she said, “I know it.”
The woman was passionate about this- which made the interaction easy for Rora because motivated people had obvious inertias into which one could simply yield. The woman explained a new form of cryptocurrency that involved an even less centralized form of data that the woman described as “like quantum entanglement.” Rora had no idea if any of this was apt or correct. But Rora imagined another life. A life with money. She wondered if she could Frankenstein together the pieces of her current life- the mismatched limbs of its body being sutured into something else entirely like a Beanie Baby.
There was this possibility. Without the ability to gauge its accuracy she was free to imagine. What if she just put all her money into cryptocurrency and became rich? Then what? She laughed while imagining how absurd it would be. What if she became rich? What if she put all her money into cryptocurrency and became rich? What is she put all her money into cryptocurrency? Then what?
It had been a while since she could imagine a future that contained novelty to this degree. A sudden turn of fortune would be stupid. By that reason (the reason: stupid things happen) she could do it and it could happen. She asked the woman to set her up on the spot and they spent 45 minutes together drinking and converting her capital into cryptocurrency. Rora put all her money into it. It was not much. But it was all. The woman nodded approvingly as if Rora had made a wise decision.
The woman asked Rora what she was doing next and if she would like to meet again sometime to discuss cryptocurrency over dinner and if she was okay to drive and if she needed a ride. She asked these questions so quickly Rora laughed and startled her.
“Yeah I think so but I will be right back because I have to pee” she said.
“Go on ahead,” the woman said and gestured towards the bathroom.
Rora moved towards the bathroom then went out the backdoor of the bar to the alley where people smoked. She bummed a cigarette. She knew where to go next. What a rare sensation.
Her mother would be fast asleep and probably medicated. The Princess Diana Beanie baby would be in its place in the display. She would put it all into cryptocurrency. She would give this her all.
On the way there she drove slowly. When almost there a deer crept to one side of the road- immobile and uncertain of if it would cross. She waited with patience for it to cross. She watched it munch on some grass and consider what it would do. To help it she flicked her lights on and off; which provided some sort of stimulus to jumpstart the process. It finally crossed.
She used her keys to get inside her mom’s place and looked at the Beanie Baby. It contained all the molecules of the universe.
She thought it was such a waste for it to be sitting there doing nothing. It was worth money. It would change her life. By proxy, it would change the world. It contained everything she needed. It contained a new life for her. She could change her life if she wanted it enough. If she could do something so unlike herself she could alter her own trajectory by sheer force. She felt high.
It was at this moment she realized a shocking truth. The movies had been right. The ones by liars for liars. But this reopened another option she had forgone just earlier today- if she left the stuffed bear here- it would be the first day again.
That is not how it really happened- but it was preferable enough to pretend it was so.
Devin Rogan 