House of Love / The Future Life Committee

Jersey says we should have gone to the House of Love. You look over at her and she’s standing in front of one of the House of Love’s posters. They’re everywhere now. They showed up one day and now they seem to be everywhere. The two of you are outside the bar smoking cigarettes waiting for your Uber. People don’t think that place is real you tell Jersey. It’s an art thing or something. Jersey keeps looking at it, her cigarette hanging off her lips. Some art student you say absently as you check your bank account on your phone. An art thing Jersey says. That’s fucking stupid. Her cigarette falls to the ground when she says that. The poster has “House of Love” written across the top and a dilapidated house sitting in the middle of what looks like a lake. In smaller red print along the bottom is the phrase “The one place you can let it all go.” It sounds like a whorehouse Jersey says as she looks down at her cigarette. You don’t say anything, and Jersey moves over by the street. She says that she only smokes cigarettes when she’s drunk. You tell her that everyone only smokes cigarettes when they’re drunk. She says that means that every single person you see smoking a cigarette is drunk, and you tell her yes, alcoholism is still a very serious problem. Think of all the people who have to go to work every day. Jersey says that that’s us though, and then she says she hates this place. She’s leaning on the pole of a streetlight, bathed in an orange glow. You look down the street. Far off the city begins to rise, artificially bright against the night sky. It’s a strange brightness, as if it were constructed off the idea of brightness, or as if it were trying to reflect and absolutely contain it’s own meaning. In a literal sense, though it’s certainly not apparent at first, it’s a lame brightness—a, to put it bluntly, castrated brightness. It is fitting you think, thinking about all the men in suits who work up there doing whatever they do. This is a city that has lost itself. It has simply run off with itself. It has cultivated an idea and that idea has gotten out of hand. You toss your little stub into the street and immediately pull out another cigarette. Across the street you see what appears to be a homeless man walking back and forth. You think about the House of Love’s slogan, about letting it all go. It sounds nice. There’s so much we hold on to unfairly. Headlights cut across your eyes. They keep swinging and cut across Jersey who’s still standing under the orange streetlight. Across the street you see the homeless man looking your way. The Uber stops and the jet-black passenger-side window rolls down, but the person inside doesn’t say anything. You lean down to look in and you say Olabode? The man inside shakes his head and you look at Jersey who opens the front door and gets in. As you start to get in the car the homeless man across the streets starts shouting and you catch him saying, “You can’t! You can’t corner the—” and then he’s immediately cut off as soon as you close the door. Jersey says hi and the driver says yes, hello. You wonder what Olabode thinks driving an Uber. All these displaced Africans coming here to find out all they can do is drive an Uber. You feel bad each time you get in some African man’s spotless car, but then maybe all work is degrading and at least he’s here instead of there. You honestly don’t fucking know. He asks how are you ladies. He’s got both hands on the wheel and doesn’t look over or in the rearview mirror. Ugh, you know Jersey says, to which Olabode just nods. Something Caribbean is coming out of the radio, but it is very low. You watch the apartment buildings and storefronts pass by outside the windows. How far we’ve each been dragged from the real world you think, and we’re all trying to crawl our way back in, but there’s no door, there’s no opening. It was one of those nights you think, one of those nights you couldn’t keep the sadness out. You couldn’t keep the absurdity at bay. The guilt leaked in. Everything is connected you feel sometimes. This damned empire of misery. Sometimes you can’t help but feel like everything stems from some kind of failure of yours. Sometimes you can’t get past the idea that things wouldn’t be this way if you weren’t the way you are. On a very basic level, everything stems from an original and individual failure of ours, and not many people take that seriously enough you think. You think about a joke you overheard in the bar. You only caught the end of it. There were some kids in there you assumed were college students, probably philosophy or theology majors, and you heard one of them telling a joke. The kid was saying someone was telling the Pope that they had good news and then they had great news. The Pope asked for the good news, and the person told him that the good news is they have discovered the Holy Sepulcher. The Pope swore. Mother of Mary and Joseph he said. Well what could the great news possibly be? The person exclaims that after entering the Sepulcher they had found it totally empty! The Pope topples out of his chair in glory. Meanwhile, a renowned philosopher who happened to have been in the room at the time after hearing that looks around at the others. I don’t understand, he says, where’s Jesus then? And the kids laughed. You remember looking over to Jersey to see if she’d heard the joke, but she was looking up at one of the TVs above the bar. She told you that according to the news it had been 120º Fahrenheit for the last eight days in Baghdad. You recognized that joke from something, but couldn’t remember from what. Wow you said. You didn’t know how to put 120º in to context. You didn’t know if that was a lot. Well, you knew it was a lot but you didn’t know if it was too much. You said that is fucked up, just to cover your bases. That night in the bar Jersey had been talking about psychedelic music. She was talking about how psychedelics were the universal product of the conflicts of the 60s and 70s. She said you could trace a line from the wars and the politics and the atomic bombs of that period directly to psychedelics, and that the line would be very, very short. Psychedelic rock, psychedelic funk, psychedelic jazz, everything got psychedelic, and it wasn’t just American music either. You can hear the American soldiers’ surf-rock in Thai and Korean and Vietnamese psychedelic music. And if you wait a little longer, if you go a little deeper into the 70s, you start seeing psychedelic music pop up in Africa, which was largely without a mass of American soldiers to propel it or influence it. Senegal, Ethiopia, Algeria, even Turkey all developed robust psychedelic musical strains. Such a concentrated yet widespread form makes it seem, Jersey said, that psychedelics were some sort of universal reaction to the shit that was happening back then. Things had gotten so bad and were so messed up that what was naturally produced was the psychedelic movement. The question is Jersey said, what is our sound? What is our cultural product or development that is a reaction to all the fucked up shit we live through? How do we react to 9/11, and the war on terror, and school shootings, and mass shootings, and climate change? Where is our reaction to that she asked? Did you know, she had said, that in one of Krazsnahorkai’s books 9/11 is the apocalypse? You told her you didn’t know that. What is our universal meta-language? Or, Jersey said, are we not producing movements as solid as what was coming out of the 60s and 70s. She said Jesus, for real. Look at anything they were doing. There were the beats (psychedelic on the basis of the interest in unfiltered consciousness), there was French new wave (psychedelic on the basis of the unreality of the every-day), and there was Pop Art (psychedelic on the basis of the paradoxical—or devious—profoundness of the mundane). People were on the same page Jersey said. They at least seemed to have an idea of what they were going for. We don’t have that. We don’t have anything like that. Why not she asked? She said she thinks about it all the time. She said she’s unable to get it out of her head. What are we doing? What is wrong with us? Why haven’t we produced a coherent reaction to everything that’s going on? Even if you break it down along mediums she said, coherent forms don’t emerge. So what the fuck? Is it that things are so fucked up we simply don’t have the ability to react coherently? Everything is so fucked up we can’t keep our heads on straight long enough to produce anything coherent. Is it our fucked up attention spans? Is it the Adderall and Lexapro? Is it because we’re poorer and more precarious than ever before? You could say all that about us and it’d be true she said. We are as fucked up as we come off to be. In the back of everyone’s head is an idea of how fucked up we are, how really fucked up we are, and it’s not inaccurate. Jersey said that’s not something she’d argue with, but at the same time weren’t they living through their own fucked up times? She said you think secret police snatching up protestors in rented minivans is bad? They had blatant and open assassinations. MLK, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, to say nothing of JFK and RFK. They had the Cuban missile crisis. The world was supposedly minutes away from ending and the only thing you could do was duck under your desk. That alone has to do something to you. Not even the thought of being disintegrated by a flash of light, but specifically the ducking under the desk she said as she laughed. Can you imagine? Just imagine an atomic bomb is falling from the sky and someone tells you quick hide under your desk! It’s such a disproportionate response to the situation, how could it not fuck with your head? They were getting drafted, too. Meanwhile, we forget which country we’re still fighting. We’re all surprised any time someone mentions that the war is still going on. THE WAR IS STILL GOING ON Jersey said. She told you that there is an idea that keeps crawling into her head, and that she has to fight it so it doesn’t overwhelm her. She said it’s that either, one, we have it much worse than they did and we are the most fucked up people to ever be produced by this country or, two, they really did have it worse than us, which she honestly finds plausible, and they were still better at reacting to it. If you want to talk about an impenetrable empire, talk about the 60s. It was a bloodbath back then. The fact is, Jersey said, she can’t help but think the truth is we can’t cut it. The reality is we’re weak. We don’t have it as bad as they did, and even if we did it doesn’t change anything. We are still producing a mediocre culture. We make horrendous movies. Poetry is dominated by dorks. Our art is impenetrable because it’s become a form of credit and is housed in tax-free territories. Contemporary fiction is worse than mediocre. Even our graffiti sucks Jersey said. The most radical thing we keep coming up with is representation for fuck’s sake. And that’s not even to shit on representation, but it’s really fucking sad when that’s it, when that’s all you’ve got. Jesus Christ she said. It’s childish. It pisses her off sometimes. It’s embarrassing, and you can tell how un-radical it is because it’s so fucking cheesy. It’s fucking corny. Don’t you just look around and think everything is so corny she asked. Superheroes? She yelled. And you can’t even criticize anything. Have you ever tried to criticize any of that shit she asked, which of course you hadn’t. It’s all corporate literature, corporate movies, and corporate music. We fucking suck, honestly, she said. You’re either a failure because you don’t have the ability to create anything that’ll really move people or you’re a sellout. And if you’re a sellout you sold out not just to a nation, or an industry, or to capitalism, you’ve literally sold out to the end the world. And listen, listen Jersey had said, still steaming along, lost in some sort of daze you could see in her eyes though not decipher. The point is that even if they didn’t have it worse than us, we are still failures. Listen, she said, even if it is way more fucked now, we are still failing. Let’s give us that excuse, let’s forget about the 60s and 70s, let’s not even worry about them right now, and just think about us. The fact is, no matter how fucked up things are right now, and believe me, things are really, really, really fucked up, we are failing. Even if you want to use the excuse that we are super fucked up people, we are still failing. You can’t look at what’s going on and look at how we’re reacting to it without coming to the conclusion that we are completely and catastrophically failing. No matter how you look at it, no matter what excuse you give us, we are fucking failing Jersey said. And you know what, maybe, maybe, you could say we’re just a silent generation. Maybe our lack of coherent or even interesting cultural products is a reflection of being a real silent generation, which honestly would be cool. It would actually be interesting if we didn’t have anything to say, or if silence was our response, and it was just a question of figuring out that what’s not there is not there because we’ve decided not to put anything there. But she said all you have to do is take one look at social media to realize that’s not true at all. She can’t get away from it. She thinks about it every day. She said if anything would it would be this that drives her over the edge. We’re losers, it’s as simple as that. You just kind of have to move on. And then she was done. You just sat there for a little bit. Jersey was drinking her beer and looking up at the TV again. The entire map of the United States they were showing was a deep purple. The word HOT was emblazoned across the top. The chatter in the bar was at a calming level. Anyway, she eventually said, have you been working on anything? You just shook your head: nope, not a single thing. Your head is against the window as you watch the neighborhoods slide by. We do so many things that we don’t need to do you think. Sometimes on nights like this it seems like people don’t have fun anymore. Like that’s a concept we’ve let slip away from us. Like all we can do is mimic having fun. Olabode drives very mechanically. His hands are at 10 and 2. You think about the House of Love again. There is simply no need to create that project if it isn’t real. There is simply no need to create an imaginary place in which we could for once let things go. It’s redundant. It exists already. That place is always somewhere in the back of our heads as a dream. That place is always somewhere just a little farther in the future. Just a couple more days, or weeks, or months and we can finally let things go for a little bit. We’re always chasing it, and to create something that fictionalizes that is nothing more than a slap in the face. What’s the point of conceptualizing a dream? Out of the corner of your eye you see Jersey turning around to say something to you, but before she does the car comes to a shrieking halt and you have to throw your hands out to the back of the front seat. When you look up Jersey has both her hands on the dashboard too and Olabode is yelling no, no. In the car’s headlights you see a figure. Everything is still for a moment. Olabode lays on the horn and starts yelling for the person to move. Jersey says what the fuck. You see the person standing in the headlights and you think he looks familiar, and then instantly you realize that he looks exactly like the person who had been pacing around outside the bar. Your nerves instantly contract. What the hell is going on you think. Where are you? Did you all go in a big circle or something? Have you not moved at all? Olabode is still laying on the horn as he waves his other arm yelling for the person to move. Jersey is still tensed with her hands on the dashboard. The man in the headlights starts to walk around the car. He taps on the driver-side window. Olabode shakes his head and says no, no, but the man keeps tapping. Finally Olabode lowers the window just the slightest and says what are you doing, man? The homeless man puts his mouth to the opening of the window and you hear him say, in a voice so hoarse it’s almost inaudible, “You can’t—corner the Dorner.” Olabode just shifts away from the window slightly. Then the man comes to your window and taps on it. You look at Jersey who’s looking at you. Olabode has his body turned around and says no when you go to roll down the window. You roll it down and look at the man standing there. The man leans in and whispers something to you. You see Olabode and Jersey watching, and when the homeless man is done whispering he walks off laughing. When the man is gone Olabode guns it. You all are only a minute away from your apartment at that point, and the only thing you can say is that person had been outside the bar while you were waiting for the Uber. Jersey says what, and Olabode says here you are. You can hear the nerves in his voice. He starts apologizing desperately, saying it wasn’t his fault, saying the man came out of nowhere. You know he’s pleading so you don’t give him a bad review on the app, which is what we’ve reduced people to. You tell him it’s okay. You look up at your apartment building, thinking about your cozy little apartment in the city. We sure do have some nice things sometimes you think, even if they add up to the collapse of civilization. Jersey looks back at you. She asks what that man said. You see Olabode’s eyes in the rearview mirror. You start shaking your head. You don’t know really. He said: “We are the ones being searched for. We are the lost and we are the found.” What does that mean Jersey says. You still see Olabode’s eyes in the rearview mirror. You have no idea you say. You’ve never heard anything like that before, and then you get out of the car.

You were all ready to go when the invitation arrived. It was supposed to go to someone else, you’re almost certain. You are almost certain you were not the person they meant to invite. You just happened to be in the room. Right place wrong time. You were all ready to blow your brains out. You were sitting there with your hood on and everything when there was the proverbial knock on the door. That proverbial knock, sometimes it’s there just to remind you about the other side, but other times it’s fate, and since you were toying with fate anyway you answered the door. Hello, you’ve been sent for the guy at the door said. You made a joke and said you know, you were just about to go, but the guy at the door obviously didn’t get it. He just stood there in the doorway holding out the card. You let him stand there silently for a minute. You were thinking about what to do. Taking the card would ruin it. That’d be the end of it at that point, which really wasn’t a small thing. It wasn’t the easiest thing to put a plan in motion while also tiptoeing around the purpose of the plan. You know brains are deeply aware and have defense mechanisms. Actually, you’d never thought that before until right then. Brains have defense mechanisms. You were tiptoeing around the reasons for checking into a motel fifteen minutes from your apartment. The whole night before you could only half-think about what you were going to do. You were just going to check into a motel. That was all. You paced around a lot that night. Moving around helped keep your head occupied a little. You bought a pack of cigarettes specifically for that night. It was tough mental work to keep the reason blank in your head. Not just that there was no reason for doing what you were doing, but you had to keep it completely blank. It was exhausting. You had to lie down as soon as you got into the room. You opened the door and slung you backpack onto the bed and crawled into it. The clock beside the bed said 7:41am. You lay there for a long time, not thinking in the slightest, just looking up at the ceiling. Eventually you took a shower. Then of course as soon as you finally had everything ready there comes the knock. You had to let the idea that if you had not lain down you would have went through with the plan float in and out of your head forever. That’s the kind of thing that can gnaw at you. The fateful knock on the door, how cliché. Thump, thump, thump, and despite having a black hood over your head you turned toward the door. You and the guy at the door stood there for a minute in silence. He probably understood what that silence meant, what that silence was composed of, or what was metaphorically floating around in the air of that room. Motel people have seen it all, and you think the grace he had not to say a word, to not even change his expression in the slightest, is something you’ll never be able to fully appreciate. He just stood there holding out the card that you eventually took. Eventually you said okay and swiped it from his hand and slammed the door, which you didn’t feel bad about because that’s simply the etiquette motel people are used to. It’s part of their culture you thought. It’d have been offensive not to blast the door closed in his face. You walked back to the middle of the room and looked at the card. It said, “You’re Invited!” and you groaned. You distinctly remember thinking you’ve blown it. It’s blown just for this. You walked around the room throwing your arms around, pissed off, waving the card around, pump-faking it here and there before eventually you threw it into the wall as hard as you could, although it hit it lamely. The corner of the card was a little crumpled when you picked it up. You tore it open and picked out the little note. “Congratulations! You’ve been invited to be part of an exalted panel on the Exegesis of the Future Life! You’ve been chosen out of respect for your expertise, your distinct perspective, and your firm moral standing! It will be an honor to hear you speak at this once in a lifetime conference. The conference is proud to bring together the world’s leading minds on what life will look like in the future, and on what life must look like to have a future! We are eagerly anticipating your participation in this event. Should you be interested in joining us, the only thing you need to do is nothing! Stay put, and we’ll be by shortly to pick you up and deliver you to the conference. All-inclusive packaging for participants is included! Meals, drinks, accommodations and more will be provided pro gratis. Should you not wish to participate in this exalted panel, we simply ask you leave right now! We wouldn’t want to confuse our travel service! Thank you, and we look forward to seeing and hearing from you soon! Signed, the Committee of the Future Life.” What the fuck is this shit you said out loud. You remember thinking you should pick the gun up just to blast your head off right then, but the plain fact is that the urge and will had passed and annoyance wasn’t going to bring it back. Instead you tossed the note onto the bed and blasted it a couple times, which actually really cleared things for you. The room was filled with smoke and fluff and the bed and note were smoldering but you felt pretty clear after that. It must have been the sheer shock of the force and volume of the gun. Goddamn these things have some force you thought. No wonder people go nuts with them. The sheer potential energy is exhilarating. The potential energy is an intoxicating force due to its inexhaustibility. It’s always just sitting there in the gun. The amazing thing is it doesn’t dissipate as it surges through your hand and up your arm into your whole body. It expands while staying constant. It fills space. Holding a gun is like a wrecking ball hung mid-swing above your body. You still held the gun outstretched as the smoke began to clear. Ah life, you remember thinking. Ah the world, you fickle bitch. You have your tricks to keep us around, to keep us milling and moving. You throw us about here and there yet we’re always being up-righted, always being dragged to our feet. Maybe there’s grace in that. Anyway, you toyed with fate, and at the last minute it yanked you back up into the world. It has a way of making you make the final decision. You could have let the guy keep knocking until he gave up. You could have let him go for a minute or two. It wouldn’t have taken long. But then you think he’d have probably slipped the note under the door and what, were you going to blow your brains out with a note slipped under the door? No, you weren’t. There’s fate, toying with us, throwing us around, making it seem like we’re the ones dragging ourselves through this world. You sat down on the bed and looked around thinking welp. The room was a pretty hideous yellow color. A dull light yellow, and the wood TV stand and bedside tables were an extremely dated color and pattern. Too dated to even be interesting. It just plain stunk, honestly, and for a second you felt a little grateful this didn’t end up being the place where you died. It would have been awfully embarrassing to be found here. It would have been distasteful in fact, to make some discover you like that in a room this ugly. They would have been pissed, and rightfully so. You sat there for a while, slowly sinking back to Earth, realizing how elevated you’d been for the past 24 hours as you got everything ready. You felt light sitting there, light in a way you hadn’t felt in a long time. Eventually however you figured you’d better get your things and get out of there before the Future Life Committee or whatever the fuck they were arrived to pick you up. You wondered who that note could have actually been for. You wondered what kind of expert in a field like that would stay in a place like this, and, presumably, stay long enough to be known to be found there. Then again you thought that people like that, philosophers and professors and those types, can be freaks sometimes. They often do weird things thinking they’re doing quirky things thinking they’re just being eccentric, as if it’s some kind of privilege. You got up and started shoving things into your backpack. You shoved the bag that was briefly over your head in there and a couple trinkets you’d brought along and the note you’d just received which was in tatters. You were retrieving things from the bathroom when you heard the knock at the door. For a second you wondered who could be at the door again, but then you remembered the note saying the committee would come and pick you up and you thought oh fuck they’re already here? You finished shoving the little bit of stuff you’d brought and went to answer the door, only to realize you still had the gun in your hand. You ran back to your backpack and shoved that in there. They were knocking at the door the whole time and finally you opened and it said Jesus, alright. The two people at the door shrugged off your remark rather impressively and asked whether you were ready, that they were in quite a hurry. You started to explain to them that, no, actually, you weren’t the person they were looking for, that you were just some random person and that whoever they were looking for must have gone somewhere else. They had looked at you, you remember, as if you hadn’t said anything at all. You started telling them that you don’t have the first fucking clue what the future life committee is or anything about the future life and that actually, speaking of future life, you were probably the opposite of an expert. You laughed a little bit but they obviously didn’t get it. Then you said coincidentally you were just leaving, and tried to slip past them but they wouldn’t move from the doorway. You said excuse me and maneuvered around but they still wouldn’t budge. They looked confused and eventually one of the two asked whether you’d gotten their note. You said no, yeah, you’d gotten it, but it must have been for someone else. That it must have been for someone who’d been staying there before you. And you mentioned that you’d only just checked in that morning. You remember the two people looking very confused. They said but if you got the note, then it must have been for you. You tried to explain again that it must have been meant for someone else, that you must have gotten it by mistake, and again you tried to maneuver your way around the two guys standing in the doorway, but that time they also moved to in order to prevent you from getting out. Okay what the fuck do you want you said, finally. They asked if you had the note. They asked in a way that sounded so genuinely confused that it almost made you tired. You sighed and put your backpack on the floor and rummaged through it until you found the tattered note. You ignored one of the two who said is that a gun? The other one took the note and looked at it for a while and eventually asked why it was torn up, to which you responded that it was a long story. The other one asked whether you had read the note, which you said you did. Well, they said, either way you had the note, so you must have been the one who was invited, and furthermore you were still there, so you must have accepted the invite, even if you somehow weren’t the one they were intending to invite. Really they agreed it was an odd situation overall, but they were in quite a hurry and asked you to please get in the van. Finally, having had enough of the games and feeling like you’d let it get too far in the first place you shoved past them out the door. You don’t understand you told them as you were leaving. You literally didn’t know the first thing about what you were being invited to, you were almost 100% certain you weren’t the right person, and you just really felt like you needed to get back to your apartment you said. You told them you’ve got a little apartment back in the city, a dusty little apartment with a couple dying plants in it and too many books you stopped caring about and a bed that was always satisfying when you could finally get in it and that in fact you felt like you really needed to go get in it right that instant. You told them that honestly you’d had a fucked up last couple days, as they could maybe tell. You were at the bottom of the open stairwell that led up to the second floor of the motel you’d checked into, and they were still standing up by the door when they asked where you lived? You stopped with your foot in the parking lot and asked why? They told you they’d give you a ride, if it happened to be on the way. You remember thinking about it, thinking about how actually at that moment the last thing you wanted to do was catch a bus back to your neighborhood, about how seeing people smack in the middle of their daily routines going god knows where for god knows what degrading reason could potentially be the end of you, again. You had absolutely no desire to see all the old people you knew would be on the busses at that time of day going to and from the one or two errands they still ran. This world has really sucked us in with it’s timing you remember thinking. It shoves all of us into our own separate little time zones that feel—only feel—in step with everyone else so that we think what we need to do is keep up, that our only choice is to keep keeping up or we’ll get left behind, but the fact is everything is just slightly out of step with everything else so being left behind is a red herring, being left behind is impossible because nothing moves together in a single direction anyway. Everything is just disjointed and spiraling. So you told them fine. You told them where your apartment was and they perked up. Perfect they said. It was literally right on the way. So you hiked your backpack tighter around your shoulders and followed them to the large black van they’d driven in. It looked like the kind of vans hotels use to shuttle guests around, and you assumed that it probably was one and that the conference must have been at some hotel. You got in the big middle seat as the two guys got in the front seats. You set your backpack beside you and leaned your head back into the rest and looked up at the roof of the van. You stayed that way after they started the van and even after they started to back out of the parking spot and even after they began pulling out of the motel parking lot. You could faintly hear the radio. Someone was talking about some storms that were sweeping through the middle part of the country. The voice was very official. And then whatever program it was switched and you heard the words “Reports of… over… Syria and Lebanon…” but couldn’t make out what was being said. Something about the war you guessed, or whatever that was over there. You remember having the distinct thought that no matter how hard someone might try, you simply couldn’t fathom, let alone create, a world that wouldn’t be absolute horror. Then one of the guys asked what you’d been doing at the motel if you had an apartment not so far away, and you finally brought your head down. You noticed you were on the freeway, and the sun way high above and the day had the bright look like it’d just rained. You shrugged. Nothing really you told them. You saw the driver looking back at you in the rearview mirror. Neither of them seemed to be digging too hard. Maybe they had just been thinking of something to say. You yawned. Thinking about it, you realized it’d been a long time since you’d slept. More than 24 hours. It’s actually been a long fucking day already you said, and the driver looked back at you again and the other guy turned around and nodded. You were thinking of asking them to explain what kind of conference it was they were picking people up for, and what the hell was an exegesis of the future life, but you’d had your eyes closed and were feeling awfully sleepy, and you were thinking how good it felt to finally have your eyes closed, and even though you wanted to ask what the future life committee was you also didn’t want to open your eyes or say anything because you knew it’d jolt you out of the feeling you were feeling. You knew if you said anything or even moved in the slightest way it’d have jolted you out of how comfortable you felt at that moment, with the van drifting easily down the highway and with the AC just slightly on and with the radio quietly saying whatever it was saying and, anyway, before you knew it you fell asleep.

Alexander Weidman is 26 years old, lives in West Virginia, and works at a cooperative.