Today I made a list of descriptors of novels being purchased in the open marketplace of the end times: optimism, community, delight, tenderness, resilience, healing, second chances, thrills (or thrilling or a thriller), lighthearted, fun, relatable, female joy, menopausal joy, queer joy, menopausal power, female anger and power, easy to read, life-changing, transformative, makes everything else fall away.

“During certain periods of the twentieth century, I’m thinking 1968, 1981, or 2000 specifically,” my editor, Candice, told me, “it may have been all right for literature to be challenging and depressing. But we live in such a challenging and depressing time that those of us involved in the creative industries—you, for instance—have a responsibility to give the people what they need.” She held up my manuscript, which I’d submitted to her last week. It was to be my first novel, a solemn and sincere requiem for the future. Candice shook the pages back and forth. She asked, “What good is a book if nobody wants to read it?”

“Value, remember,” she continued, “is created in that liminal space between text and reader—the end value being proportional to the amount of readers. By which I mean: the more readers, the more value. I’m not only talking financial value here, though finances are naturally contained in this definition. Let’s include cultural value as well. Historical value. Human value.” She tossed my manuscript into the bin beneath her desk. “I mean, I do like it. I like what you wrote. You’re asking such interesting questions, like: Do we have a responsibility to feel discomfort when the world is ending? But there’s a better way to engage with a question like that, a way that doesn’t require us to be so fucking gloomy.”

Candice promised to be more involved with this next draft of my book. No hard feelings. Publishing is, after all, a business. A team effort. There’s a reason blackout curtains, VR headsets, and digital blinders are the best-selling items of the year, Candice told me.

“A book like a blackout curtain. Make that. Make me one of those. A book like a blinder.”

Today my neighbor Mrs. Wirkus called me on her screen. “Have you heard?” she asked. I told her I was busy thinking about my novel, specifically how to write a novel like a blinder. (Images of pages pressed onto my eyes, pages in eye sockets, pages pushed into my mouth.) “A novel, I had no idea,” Mrs. Wirkus said, “how nice, you’re so creative, this will only take a minute,” and she went on to tell me that the squirrels on the local camera feed she watches have lost all their fur. As have the remaining deer. She told me the fur flies off whenever the wind blows.

The image that entered into my mind was not a happy one: Clumps floating in the wind like dandelion seeds. The mammals, thin and shaking. Thin, and shaking, and scared.

“At least there still are squirrels,” said Mrs. Wirkus. That’s what she’d been telling herself: There won’t always be squirrels, so let’s enjoy them while we still can, even if they no longer have their fur. “I thought you’d want to know,” she said, though this was not something I wanted to know. Maybe yesterday or the day before I would have, but not today, a day when I was thinking about my novel.

My daughter began coughing in the family room. I should have mentioned I have a daughter. Nothing can be done for her kind of cough. We all have coughing fits nowadays due to the low yellow skies. I suppose we could get rid of the skies.

I have often wondered to myself, especially lately, whether I should have had a daughter. A lot of people my age, as well as people younger and also older, have chosen not to have children. Most people. The argument goes: What kind of world would we be bringing these children into? What kind of future can a child have in such a world?

The counterargument: Why does a future have to be good in order to be worthwhile?

The rebuttal: You’re implying that a difficult future is inherently acceptable as long as life itself exists, but life will soon no longer exist.

The rebuttal to the rebuttal: Haven’t people throughout history lived meaningful lives despite knowing that their world, too, was fragile?

The conclusion: Fragility is different from mass extinction. I told Mrs. Wirkus I had to go.

Today I asked my daughter whether she sometimes wished she hadn’t been born. I told her it was something I’d been thinking about: the responsibility of parents in the end times. Should there even be parents anymore, or children, or people, really?

Couldn’t I see, she asked, that she was in the middle of something? She waved her screen around in a frustrated manner, then slipped her blinders on. After that she couldn’t see or hear me anymore. It was like I wasn’t there. I spent the afternoon answering Candice’s messages about how best to revise my novel.

It feels like this book of yours wants to be a thriller.

My book isn’t a thriller.
It’s an eco-dirge.

I think you’re misunderstanding the author-editor relationship.

Let’s make sure any detectives in your novel are menopausal.

There are no detectives.

Don’t you remember? The main character holds dying salamanders in her arms. She holds dying cats and dying rabbits and dying seabirds.

One of several problems I’m trying to rectify here.

Detectives are gold right now, pure gold.

As is menopause.

Particularly when the cessation of menstruation allows middle-aged women to discover new forms of freedom and power.

Such as the power to give people what they want.

The power to have fun.

The power to tell people what they already know.

Today birds began accumulating outside the window. The blackout drapes are sewn shut, but I could still hear their soft bodies thud against the glass.

That’s enough about the birds. Here’s what has happened so far in the new draft of my novel: Detective City Riven (fifty-six years old, menopausal, last period thirteen months ago, last pelvic exam five months ago, last Pap smear also five months ago, on hormone-replacement therapy—estradiol, two milligrams) is searching the county’s last experimental forest for Charlotte Zamora, an adorable and missing nine-year-old girl who has not yet started menstruating and who was seen most recently playing cat’s-eye under the gray skeletons of the once-towering eastern hemlocks.

Candice has advised me to watch for meaningful parallels between the non-menstruating City Riven and the non-menstruating Charlotte Zamora. How does their current lack of fertility connect them? I have no idea, Candice.

The air is warm yet still, which is good for City because the evidence she will soon find—the marble pouch, the heel print, the yellow sock, the thumbnail polished red—will still be nestled amid the fallen trees.

This place that felt dark to begin with is only growing darker the farther she moves from the road. Are dead forests haunted by their dead trees? Even City’s footfalls sound muted here, like someone has pressed their hands over her ears. Which is why she startles when her radio vibrates with a message from her partner of a dozen years, Sheila Rao (forty-nine years old, irregular periods, hot flashes, night flashes, occasional heavy bleeding, considering HRT). “City, where the fuck are you?”

City switches off her radio, switches on her headlamp. Ahead of her, on the ground under a tangle of invasives: movement. “Charlotte?” No. It’s a bird. A bird, nearly dead and lying under a tree of heaven. Its beak open and wheezing, wings limp. What is the humane thing to do here, City? To let it suffer or to take a rock and to pound it on the last—

Hi, Team Hope!

Remember what we are hoping for: That you will write an uplifting novel with commercial appeal. You agreed to this.

Even in your boutique subgenre of traditionally crafted narratives, people want to be entertained.

Especially now.

During our final season, let’s call it.

Though I’m not sure I like that word ‘final’ to be honest.

I used to look out the window.

I used to look out the window all the time.

Today I read some book reviews from previous generations. I wanted to see if literature has ever been more than another form of recreation, another way for us to distract ourselves from the outside. Here’s what I found.

In 1968, in The New York Times, Anatole Broyard reviewed Donald Barthelme’s collection Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, stressing its humor rather than its difficulty, even though this book contains the story “Alice,” which took me no less than a dozen reads before I could begin to understand it. “In Barthelme’s stories, in fact, language crunches underfoot like broken glass,” Broyard writes, indicating this was a desired thing back then.

Thirteen years later in The Times, a writer named John Leonard reviewed Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, a novel that initially appeared to be unreadable (to me anyway), requiring one to practically learn a new language to understand it. Twenty-one thousand copies—a quantity that would be considered extravagant these days—were produced for its first printing. Leonard calls Riddley Walker “one of those very complicated modern novels, so greedy and so delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid,” essentially equating complicated with good. Interestingly, nowhere is the word bleak used in the review, though the book is almost one constant description of cannibalism, torture, beheadings, nuclear fallout, and unrelenting rain.

Nineteen years later, in the year 2000, Mark Z. Danielewski’s seven-hundred-page House of Leaves is called “brutally efficient” by Steven Poole in The Guardian, and “funny, moving, sexy, beautifully told” by Robert Kelly in The New York Times. Literature requiring either emotional or intellectual effort from the reader appears, at the turn of the century, to still be acceptable and even celebrated.

By 2006 something seems to have caused the world to break. Was it the 9/11 terrorist attacks? The Iraq War? The Indian Ocean tsunami? The Darfur conflict in western Sudan? Or was it the hints of an iPhone on the horizon, the beginnings of social media, and the launch of Goodreads? Because by the time Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is published, language such as “bleak” or “cold, wretched, wet, corpse-strewn, ashen landscape” had entered into reviews, even though The Road’s vision of the world is, let me assure you, no worse than Riddley Walker’s. In fact, The Road, in its final pages, manages—

I can see from my dashboard that you’re encountering some difficulty with your novel.

Whenever I’m stuck, I find it can be useful to step back and reexamine the fundamentals.

Allow me to share a few brief insights.

1. The thing about realism is that it isn’t real either. But we all pretend it is because it has those markers of what used to be considered real a long time ago. So it’s attractive to us in a moths-to-a-nostalgic-flame sort of way.

2. Readers want to cry a little but not about their own lives and not about the actual world. They want to cry a little about imagined people and the imagined future. Who are they supposed to cry a little about in the story you’re telling? Always ask yourself that.

Realism is imitable but reality is not. I find that comforting—that no one can get it perfect. There’s always some slipup, the hand a little too extended, the smells too concentrated, the colors too balanced, the emotions either too muted or too extreme, the wind patterns too predictable.

3. Reality is imitable if you include enough details.

Today I worked on my novel, which is going to be fun fun fun. Much of it appears to take place in my family room, as that is the room I am most often in these days. Every writer has their strengths, and mine appears to be writing what is directly in front of me. I sit in a high-backed armchair that I found at somebody’s curb and oh, look, City Riven sits in a high-backed armchair that she found at some neighbor’s curb and then dragged home—proof that she can at least rescue something, save something. I look across the room at the worn blue couch and, surprise, so does City Riven. I kick the base of the couch; she kicks the blue couch. I kick the white walls; she kicks the white wall. We both throw our notes in the air, hoping desperately and illogically that they will make more sense after they fall. Thick, opaque drapes rustle when the heat clicks on. The colorful wool rug reaches across the floor colorfully, garishly.

On the news feed: Lawns covered in thorns. The sidewalks covered in razor-sharp thorns.

Fires in the distance. Smoke, cinders.

Is omission a type of denial?

Let me answer that for you. The answer is no.

Can our feelings about the future actually change the future for the better?

Let me answer that for you. The answer is yes. This has been proven in studies.

I get the feeling that Candice would rather be working with a writer who requires less personal support and assurance. But there aren’t many old-school writers left. There are probably more blacksmiths left than writers, “the passive consumption of linear narratives having given way to deeply interactive and collaborative storytelling experiences powered by advanced algorithms where choices have meaningful consequences,” and all that.

The Great Dying, some people are calling this period of time, for obvious reasons, though the term has been criticized as overly negative. More acceptable: The Fallow Season. The Season of Transition.

Today I remembered the last time I looked out the window. This was months ago. Was I braver then—or more childlike? No, not childlike, as children do not look out their windows either. More naive. More stupidly hopeful. Did I think looking made me a better person than my neighbors who did not look, who boarded up their windows from the outside so they would not have to decide whether or not to look because they could not look anymore, at least not from the comfort of their interiors?

Yes. That is what I thought. I thought looking made me better than them. I thought: Look at me, looking. Look at me look at me look at me look at me.

I can’t forget what I saw: The cracked ground, the quiet sky, the reservoir filled with a pale red. The neighbors’ dogs panting. The neighbors’ dogs dead. What to do, what to do, what to forget, what to notice, what to write?

You’re assuming the future must be anchored to the present.

Or that the future is the effect of a cause which is now.

There is always the possibility something different will happen but only if we stay positive.

Go, Team Hope!

City Riven sits in front of the girl’s mother on a hard blue couch in the family room, a platter of rice crackers between them that neither wishes to eat. City opens her screen and breathes deeply, wondering how long the silence could last. One minute. Two. She begins to sweat through her clothes. “Excuse me,” City says, hurrying off to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face and neck, blotting herself dry with a hand towel. Back to the blue couch. Three minutes. Four minutes. Five. “How are you holding up?” she finally asks. A throwaway question. It isn’t about the answer. It’s about what the mother will do with her hands. The mother shrugs. The mother tears out a piece of her hair. The mother confesses. The mother says there hasn’t even been a crime committed. The mother says, “What is the death of one person, even a child, especially an imaginary child, a character, compared to the situation going on outside? Give it five years, ten max, then see if anybody cares about mysteries anymore in this fucking emergency of a—”

What can fiction do in the current apocalyptic moment? It’s such an interesting question.

Find beauty amid the horrors.

That’s what it can do.

That’s what I want you to do.

Today Mrs. Wirkus called and asked me if I’d heard. Heard what? Heard this: that all the squirrels are dead. It happened overnight. All the birds are also dead. Most of the deer too. Nobody liked the deer. They had become quite a nuisance species. Still, Mrs. Wirkus was worried. It’s a mess out there. She didn’t know what to look at, she told me, or where to look. The news feeds are a nightmare. They’re on autopilot. All they do is pan left and right and left and right over all the dead—

What’s up with this continued obsession with things as they are or things as they will be? What’s wrong with focusing on how things could have been? i.e., how we wish things would be?

Fiction is not a mirror. It’s a prism.

A prism. Something that transforms the reality of our lives into a rainbow.

Generally I avoid nostalgia and rumination, but today felt like a day when it was OK to indulge, so I spent the afternoon remembering the last time I’d left the house. It’s been a while. I was a different person then. I was a person who thought it was brave to look out the window. Who thought bravery was a ladder, and she was climbing the ladder. I wanted to be that person again. So I threw my screen into a bag, placed my bag over my shoulder, called out to my daughter that I would return later—I did not hear a response from her, nor did I expect one—and strode out the front door. I did not wear my blinders, though I kept them ready. My throat and lungs hurt immediately from the outside air. I took only shallow breaths.

I won’t tell you everything I saw. That wouldn’t be hopeful, and I am trying, I really am, to be hopeful. City Riven, too, is trying to be hopeful. She and I are trying to be childlike and light and feel-good, despite the pestilence, the un-flying birds, They fell straight down from the sky, splat splat splat splat splat. It was raining but not the kind of rain they needed. It was raining carcasses. She tried not to—

I will tell you I passed a man on the sidewalk. He wore a type of contraption on his head, a see-through helmet that resembled one I’ve seen my daughter wear to experience her personal synthetic realities. The man looked happy, though the happiness didn’t reach his eyes. Or perhaps I merely wished it didn’t reach his eyes. “It’s like you don’t want anybody to be happy ever,” my daughter has complained to me. As this man passed, he turned toward me, though I don’t think he could see me—or, at least, not as I was. He reached out his hand, his fingers raking the air. I’ve watched my daughter make the same gesture before while immersed in a game. I wondered if I was a spray of gold coins in this man’s line of sight, and he must take them and drop them into his pocket. Or was I a strong emotion that needed to dissipate? Or a thick coastal mist that must be gestured away?

I continued walking and ended up near the beach, though no one did beach-like things there anymore. The waves, red from a near-constant algae bloom, left behind gray expanses of tunicates on the sand.

When I first saw it in the distance, I thought it might be a beached whale, though there aren’t whales anymore. Once I moved closer, I saw it wasn’t a whale at all. There may not be a word for what it was. If there is a word, I didn’t know it. It certainly didn’t have a face, or hands, or legs. Though it was a living shape. An enormous living shape with shifting borders, similar to the iridescent, gelatinous jellyfish I used to see washed up upon the sand, only larger, much larger. Twenty feet high at least, with a dark spherical object churning inside it. A secret? A heart? A secret heart?

Something like this shouldn’t exist. I knew it shouldn’t.

The living mass shifted in the wind.

The underside of the creature didn’t touch the sand but hovered six inches above its shadow.

There was the smell of a well-ventilated space, of air coming and going.

I wondered if this is what the ocean must be full of now, herds of these accumulating in the empty depths. Or was this the only one of its kind? Its color was pale and granular. It was not covered in kelp or barnacles. I wondered what it did, if it had a purpose. If it did something, I couldn’t figure out what. When I pressed my hand against its side—unpleasant and cold—it neither moved nor flinched. What to do? Should I climb on top? I tried, but its sides were too slick, too steep, and I did not get far before slipping back to the sand.

I lay down beside it. The impossible creature towered above me, swaying, reminding me somehow of my daughter.

I lay there for a long time.

Before returning home, I threw my blinders into the water. They got stuck in the surf, in the sand. I had to kick off my shoes and wade forward to pick them up, salty and dripping, and throw them farther out. This time the device stayed away, its wires waving delicately with the tide. So much of the world now is brown or gray or clear, but the algae that floated all around me in the exhausted water shone red. I cupped it in my hands. When I turned around, the water dripping through my fingers, I expected the creature to be gone, but it was still there.

“Open your eyes,” I told it, though I didn’t know if it could hear me, and I didn’t know if it had eyes.

This evening I overheard my daughter say from the other room, “Write me a story.” You’d think, since I’m a writer, she was talking to me. She was not. She was talking to her screen, which would, in two seconds or maybe three, write her the perfect story—though maybe story is an outdated term. Better to call it an “interactive plotline.” Either way, it would be exactly what she wanted, as the generative program knows her tastes, her preferences for a light usage of metaphor, short chapters but long paragraphs, one comedic and beloved character, an unrequited and asexual romance, a castle with a stronghold incapable of buckling, a dragon that lands on the tower, and an adolescent girl who rides, crackling, on the dragon’s back.

Today Mrs. Wirkus called because she wanted to show me the new window-like devices she had installed in her home. She rotated her screen slowly around so I could see. The first of these displayed a wide stretch of thick, mixed forest and low-lying fog. “If I push open the window, like this,” said Mrs. Wirkus, and she pretended to push open the window, running her hands in an upward fashion against the slick material, “I can smell the pine trees and hear the birds.” The second displayed a line of carriages pulled by chestnut-colored horses. The third featured the undulating movement of clear water upon a round lake. “Maybe you should get a set. It’s done a one-eighty on my mood for sure,” said Mrs. Wirkus. “I haven’t felt so well rested in years.”

My daughter began coughing in the other room. Mrs. Wirkus wanted to keep talking about her windows, or should I say “windows,” but I told her I had to go, or should I say “go,” because all I did was disconnect from Mrs. Wirkus’s account. I didn’t actually go anywhere. I stayed seated in the high-backed armchair, staring at the blue couch and listening to my daughter hack and wheeze on the second floor. There’s nothing to do for that kind of coughing. I know there isn’t.

The day after I saw the creature hovering above the sand, I went back to find it again, but it was gone. The sand was suspiciously smooth, as if it had been swept with intention. Nothing moved anymore in the water; nothing moved anymore in the sea. I dug through the sand, hoping to find some remnant: a piece of skin, a note, a message, a sign. There was nothing. Every handful of sand that I scooped up ran through my fingers. Nothing happened next. Or, rather, the world repeated itself. The ocean went back and forth. The sand compacted under my weight. I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing. But why would I have imagined something so useless?

Today on the news feed: Any products made out of wood pulp have begun to bleed.

Today: Certain portions of the lower atmosphere have turned solid.

I wonder if reality is broken.

A scream came barreling out of the ground today, guttural with suffering. I could hear it through the concrete floor of the basement, the noise forcing the foundation to buckle. Our house shook wildly, and when the wind picked up, it blew hot enough to scorch—

“We can always find someone else to write it,” Candice tells me. She’s unhappy with my progress, with my fragmentation, with my avoidance of big themes, plot, characterization, the hair color of characters, a fully realized landscape. We both know it’s an empty threat. Who else would want to do this? At the end of the world, most people have better things to do. There are a lot of shows to watch.

City Riven calls out the missing girl’s name over and over, as if the name is a spell, as if words have any ability to impact the past, present, or future. As if she expects something to happen.

Charlotte Charlotte Charlotte Charlotte Charlotte Charlotte Charlotte Charlotte Charlotte Charlotte.

To her left, a flash of disintegrating, rampant, chronic, distracting, shallow light overtakes her.

Today Mrs. Wirkus called to tell me how, in her favorite window, the one to her right, it was spring. Through the window she could see a happy child in the distance dancing beneath the yellow sun. Underfoot, sugar ants tickled the girl’s toes, and bees pollinated the red and orange flowers. The smell of dirt, cut grass, and approaching rain. “I wanted you to know,” said Mrs. Wirkus, “that everything looks OK.”

It did seem like she had the nicer view, I told her, because, from what I’ve learned from the news feeds, the real sun has disappeared. At least, no one can find it in the sky. Mrs. Wirkus acted as if I were accusing her of making things up. “Are you saying the world I’m seeing isn’t real? Because I can very much see the sun,” she said. I decided to share with her what I witnessed on the beach all that time ago. It felt relevant. That massive shape, hovering. “Why are you telling me this?” asked Mrs. Wirkus with impatience. I knew this was the last time I would talk to her. I went on about the shape: Hovering impossibly and coldly. A shape with an object inside of it. A dark object contained in a dark shape. “What?” said Mrs. Wirkus. She hung up on me. Or I hung up on her. We hung up on each other.

There are a lot of things going on right now on the news feeds: The night sky has begun to look like nonsense, stars and planets positioned with no sense of order. The Earth’s geology is about to rupture. The fundamental forces holding our molecular structures together are about to break. “I guess we didn’t understand the universe after all,” said one regretful astronomer. “I guess we didn’t really understand anything.”

I delete my news feeds.

If City can solve this crime, the world will make sense again. Any logic that was broken by the mess of the previous decades will be fixed. She is certain of this. Corporations will turn into cooperatives, the sky will be cleaned up, the oceans will become coherent, the botched geoengineering sulfur droplets will be retracted, time will rewind while also moving forward, everybody will be healthy again and every species will produce healthy offspring, birds begetting more birds, trees begetting more trees, the bees, the bats, the ants, happy happy, abundant, if only she could figure out where the girl went and who (or what) took her.

“Let’s go over this again,” City says to Sheila. It’s after dark, the office empty except for the two of them. Charlotte is probably dead by this point, or maybe not. It doesn’t matter. They aren’t about to stop trying. This is what’s so great about them. They trace the lines linking people to places and to each other, willing themselves to see the connections. They take turns pushing pins into a map, asking, Is she here? Here? Here? Here? “Come on, we can do this,” City says. They haven’t been trying hard enough, so they try harder. They try harder than that, then even harder.

THE END

“Not so fast,” says Candice. “There are a few remaining questions. What color are City’s eyes? You never mentioned the color of her eyes once. You never really described her. And how does City enter a room? Not literally—I imagine she walks through the doorway like everyone else—but how does she walk through the doorway? What is the first thing she looks at when she walks into a room, and how does she arrange her hair? Was there rain last night (not here but in the novel) and does the rain fall differently from the rain in another novel? What is the temperature of the rain? What is its mood? What did the girl’s mother do with her hands the morning after the girl went missing? Was there a gooseneck lamp on the child’s bedside table? What is the fill construction of her comforter? How has City changed by the end of the novel? How has the light changed in the room—what I mean is, where does it fall now versus where it fell on the wall the day before? Are there crumbs on the kitchen counters and if so, from what?”

“I don’t think these are the most important questions right now,” I say, though Candice continues on for a while longer. Such questions, she says, are the invisible architects of reality.

Candice called me today. She wanted me to look out the window.

“Why would I do that?” I replied. I wasn’t in the mood to look out the window. I’m not sure I’ll ever be in the mood again.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Candice said lightly. “It just seems like such a good day to look out the window. Here, I’m looking out the window, watch.” And she turned her screen to show me. Outside, a girl was dancing and laughing, arms outstretched, in the green grass under a spherical yellow sun.

I asked if that was real.

“Talk about unimportant questions! Now it’s your turn. Open your window. Come on, open it! I think you’ll be in for a big surprise, and then finally you can finish the book, and we can move on with our lives.” Candice wouldn’t stop badgering me until I looked out the window. “Come on come on come on come on come on come on. Look.”