KEEP PLANNING – Hannah Smart

“To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress—this will happen, mark me. Childhood’s end.” —David Foster Wallace, The Pale King WHAT THIS STORY IS ABOUT Let me first tell you what it’s not about. It’s not about an insufferable clique of sensitive young people “discovering” themselves in the quiet serenity of the great outdoors. It’s not about how one wise older professor imbues a generation of wastoid burnouts with a new self-motivated verve. It’s not an “MFA fiction,” nor is it whatever associated pejoratives that phrase tends to euphemize. It’s about, most literally, a trip taken by four of the students in Professor Harold I_____’s WR604 spring fiction workshop at Thoreau College. A wildly accomplished author of legendary stature, Harold teaches one lone, twelve-student section that’s always lousy with devoted fans who, despite the class’s advertised workshop status, tend to waltz in on day one expecting to spend the semester probing Harold about the intricacies of his own work, and the four subjects of this story are no exception. Harold, however, balks at the mere idea of having a corporeal form, much less a legion of quasi-religious followers, so as you can imagine, this arrangement and its implications sometimes prove difficult for him to stomach. But enough about Harold. This story is not about him—or at least, it shouldn’t be. These students owe both their idiosyncratic, borderline-mimicky writing styles and their mutual acquaintance to him (none of the four had ever met before this semester, and at a small East Coast school, how unlikely is that? Degrees of separation tend to be few, here), but it’s not about him. I realize this may not stoke confidence. Abstractly, this is a story about living, or the inability to live, or the multitude of ways in which a fear of death doesn’t necessarily equate to a lust for life. It’s about how most people can’t conceptualize endings, and the rare few who can tend not to write them. WHO THE FOUR MAIN CHARACTERS ARE, BESIDES MFA STUDENTS IN PROFESSOR HAROLD I_____’S WR604 FICTION WORKSHOP AT THOREAU COLLEGE Rochelle Greer—an aspiring filmmaker with fiction writing as a fallback plan, though she’s pretty sure the film thing is going to work out. Brent Weissman—still riding the high of being a serious second-string lacrosse player at a Division III school. Now he and his coke-addicted former roommate Paul co-run a political podcast entitled “Polidicks,” with 347 active subscribers. Terrence Patterson—had a pretty serious drug problem in college, but that’s all over now. He’s out of rehab and fourteen months clean and hoping to stay that way. His family made a small fortune doing some nebulous stock market shenanigans whose specifics are always changing; in other words, he can invent a mean story, and he can do it in a pinch. He has the most literary chops of their circle, and they all know it. Lucina Woods—the protagonist, and thus, paradoxically, the least fleshed out of the four in terms of tangible, listable traits, since most casual readers of fiction prefer protagonists to not have anything particularly objectionable or noteworthy going on personality-wise, for psychic projection reasons. Basically, she’s just like you, provided you’re an educated one-percenter with a CFO father and a stubborn distaste for leaving said father’s mansion unless absolutely necessary. Within the MFA circle, she’s known as “Missing D,” a reference to the fact that people often misspell her name “Lucinda.” She doesn’t mind the moniker and enjoys the delightful verb/adjective ambiguity of the word “Missing,” often inquiring rhetorically, “Who the hell is D, and why do we miss him?” WHY LUCINA CAN’T EVER BE A SUCCESSFUL WRITER Food has been perpetually atop her literal and metaphorical table, placed there by still-living and still-married parents who have never left their daughter any room to doubt that they love her, who paid for her to attend college and grad school and will probably be funding her existence for years to come, bringing Lucina, yes, some degree of guilt but not the sort one can write about and expect to be taken seriously. The masses simply have no interest in the emotional struggles of a woman as unacquainted with adversity as the average American is with fermented, dried shark meat. She is, for all intents and purposes, an unsympathetic character. Unable to be felt with or for. THE MOST SUCCESSFUL STORIES WORKSHOPPED AMONG THEIR LITTLE CIRCLE—THE CIRCLE OF THE FOUR AFOREMENTIONED FICTION MFA STUDENTS NOW PACKING FOR A HIKE UP VERMONT’S FAMOUS MT. SEINFELD (VERMONT HAS A TOURIST-TRAPPY BUT STILL ULTIMATELY NICHE AND LITTLE-KNOWN MOUNTAIN RANGE NAMED FOR VARIOUS 1990S SITCOMS)—THUS FAR “Animal Brained” by Terrence Patterson. A strung-out ex-smack addict becomes convinced that he has the mind of a squirrel, and, apparently, also convinced that a beloved pastime for squirrels is “braining” other squirrels (your imagination should suffice here) because he spends the rest of the story doing just that. Editors at assorted magazines found it “boldly nihilistic” and “a transcendent meditation on the psyche of desperation” and “morally repugnant in all the funniest ways” but ultimately still “a bit too hopeless, gruesome, and worryingly specific in its descriptions of the titular brainings to be worth endorsing in any formal sense.” “Hyphen-Nation” by Rochelle Greer. In a parallel universe, all compound nouns contain hyphens (so, for example, “religion professor” becomes “religion-professor,” aka someone who professes religion, and “popcorn fried chicken” becomes “popcorn-fried chicken,” aka chicken fried by a sentient race of culinarily astute popcorn), with predictably hideous and often humorous results. Editors liked this one but thought it was too “overeducated” for the masses, that the real major plot moves took a bit too long to get started, and that it “failed to even attempt to properly end.” “Headlinebacker” by Brent Weissman. A man suspiciously like Brent Weissman but who played Division III football in college instead of Division III lacrosse runs a podcast whose script is made up solely of news headlines. The story itself is told through a series of news headlines. Editors found it “cute” and “metafictionally daring” but confessed figuring out what the whole “shtick” was about two pages into the story, and since the “shtick” was the point, so to speak, the rest of the piece just kind of fell flat. WHY TERRENCE HAS THE MOST LITERARY CHOPS OF THE FOUR It’s got nothing to do with his raw brainpower, which falls in the nebulous above-average-but-not-quite-gifted range that manifests as intellectual insecurity and smug indifference. In fact, he secretly fears that Lucina eclipses him brilliance-wise—she reads philosophical and literary giants like Nietzsche and Joyce and Wittgenstein and Pynchon and at the very least does a convincing job of pretending to understand them; she eviscerates Terrence’s workshop stories with a benevolent sadism that’s both enriching and infuriating; and she finds layers in Professor Harold’s work that Terrence missed and that he strongly advises her against mentioning to Harold, not just to protect her ego from potential in-class disembowelment by her hero but also because he secretly envies the depth of her observations. But (and this is just Terrence’s personal diagnosis) reading widely and closely is not sufficient to create art that feels well-worn and lived. Lucina’s real problem, Terrence thinks, is that she’s only experienced a fraction of what it means to be really human. When Terrence was in rehab, he shared close quarters with the sorts of people his fellow circle members have never needed (or wanted) to come within a hundred feet of. He met men who hadn’t showered in weeks, their odors masking even the pervasive, hospital-sterile scent of impostor lemon. He roomed with a six-foot, 110-pound beanpole who had been subsisting on heroin and cigarettes for months and who had still somehow mustered the metabolic energy to commit both arson and tax fraud, though Terrence never got a read on whether the two crimes were related. He listened to morbidly detailed anecdotes about patients’ close friends’ and family members’ and unborn fetuses’ lethal overdoses and witnessed four fist fights between four different pairs of men during group therapy. It’s been said that the best artists suffer for their art, and Terrence is no exception, having endured the unfathomable mental burden of taking scrupulously detailed notes on these people’s sordid and emotionally vulnerable lives. One reason Terrence’s short stories are so messy and extreme is because life is messy and extreme, he always says, and most people only ever experience a sanitized version of real reality—are willing, in fact, to pay copious sums for the privilege of never discovering just how depraved and depressing humanity’s dark underbelly really is. In a way, Terrence writes the most realistic fiction of the bunch. WHY TERRENCE PATTERSON, ROCHELLE GREER, BRENT WEISSMAN, AND LUCINA “MISSING D” WOODS ARE EVEN BOTHERING TO HIKE MT. SEINFELD TO BEGIN WITH Lucina sure wishes she knew. Hiking, to her, is a meaningless, meandering slog that leads nowhere, and knowing all that awaits her at the top Mt. Seinfeld is a grueling trudge straight back down again is going to make the journey and associated scenic view impossible to enjoy in the moment, she predicts. Brent, however, is hoping to put the captive-audience circumstance of the trail to good use and rehearse next week’s podcast episode, which will contemplate the post-capitalist future of artistic media consumption. He wants to test the script on the gang and make sure there’s no insinuation that he’s expecting or (heaven forbid) anticipating a post-capitalist future, not wishing to alienate the fifty-three percent of his subscribers whose core values lean starboard. But pissing off the leftists and losing up to forty-seven percent of his audience isn’t a wise move either, by his estimation. Basically, he wants to make sure he toes the political line. He believes that his financially-motivated failure to commit to a hard stance is part of what makes his podcast so truth-telling and subversive. Rochelle, who is dreading Brent’s rehearsal the most of all, plans to pass the time by recording some aesthetically pleasing footage on her iPhone 13, which she will later edit into a contemplative and existentially profound short film and post as a reel to her quadruple-digit-follower Instagram page @RochMotelProductions and, if she’s lucky, earn some heart emojis in the replies. Terrence’s Cocaine Anonymous sponsor told him that connecting with nature can produce an intoxicating rush not unlike that of a stimulant drug, and Terrence is skeptical but willing to test the theory. Ultimately, these kids are tired. They’ve had tough lives, having attended small, prestigious, incredibly-difficult-to-get-accepted-into liberal arts colleges on the East Coast for their undergraduate degrees and being subsequently slapped in the face by the grim realities of the job prospects those degrees opened up—I mean, what employer has heard of Middlebury College? Hennebridge College? Twintenham College? The rare people who have heard of these very real places all work in admissions offices at MFA programs, which is how the four of them ended up at Thoreau, they figure. And their undergraduate colleges’ workloads were really intense. Like, nobody told them higher education would require so much damn studying—hours of it per day for four years on end with very little downtime (at least once you accounted for the necessary volume of partying and, in Brent’s case, lacrosse game attendance), with Terrence eventually experiencing such a frenzy of addicted desperation (which desperation licensed professionals have told him was basically unavoidable given his volatile genetic makeup) that he had no choice but to carve out late-night intervals for cocaine consumption—intervals during which he would vastly preferred to be catching up on much-needed sleep. It’s been a couple years since they all graduated, but they’re still recovering, emotionally speaking, from their college years. And the MFA has not brought the fame and fortune that was envisioned. Rochelle’s mom is quite literally breathing down her neck (quarters are cramped, in these post-social-distancing times), wondering when her adult daughter is going to move out or begin paying rent. (Rochelle’s degree is part-time, but she spends her off days attending to her fragile mental health, which days she creatively refers to as “mental health days,” and which are basically the emotional equivalent of having a part-time job. The most infuriating aspect of the whole arrangement is that no matter how many times she educates her mother, her mom seems unwilling or unable to comprehend the taxing nature of sitting outside on a lawn chair, drinking a piping hot cup of tea, and scrolling Twitter). WHAT THEY’RE BRINGING WITH THEM One printed podcast script, four backpacks, four water bottles, one bottle of bug spray, one roll-on stick of bug spray (the bottled kind irritates Lucina’s skin), one bottle of 50 SPF sunscreen, one roll-on stick of 50 SPF sunscreen, one travel-size bottle of 15 SPF sunscreen (so Rochelle can work on her Hollywood tan), one gluten-free sandwich (Rochelle’s), three gluten-included sandwiches, three baseball caps, five iPhones (Terrence has two, dating back to his substance-purchasing days, and still hasn’t bothered to consolidate all his intellectual properties, what with being preoccupied with staying sober and all), one tweed jacket in case it gets chilly at the top (Terrence’s), one Polaroid for snapping scenic pictures before using high-def iPhone cameras to photograph cool and vintage arrangements of said pictures THE OBVIOUS METAPHOR WORTH GETTING OUT OF THE WAY NOW Anyone who’s ever taken a middle school English class has likely studied plot diagrams, in which a story’s exposition is represented by a straight, horizontal line, followed by the rising action, climax, and falling action, which resemble an uphill slant, a peak, and a downhill slant, respectively, plus another horizontal line for the resolution. What you’ve probably noted, then, is that the diagram looks sort of like a mountain, and, given that these four characters are about to climb a mountain, those proficient in literary analysis will naturally assume that the story’s tension will rise as they ascend, climax when they reach the peak, fall as they head back down, and resolve when they return to the ground, where they’ll wait for each other to finish using the outhouses, snap assorted, sweaty, “after” photos of themselves in varying permutations, and then drive off into the sunset in Rochelle’s silver Prius, a Simon and Garfunkel tune perhaps popping mysteriously into your head as you watch your mental screen fade to black in a conclusive and definitive END. Employing this kind of 1960s meta-trick in 2026 would be hackneyed and contrived. The only reason I’m even acknowledging it here is because I anticipate that you, the reader, have been thinking about it and wondering whether I’m going to do it and maybe even feeling a bit smug for having decocted the whole metaphor of the story before the story even properly began. ONE CONVERSATION THE FOUR OF THEM HAVE SHORTLY AFTER BRENT’S PODCAST RUN-THROUGH (WHICH I WON’T TORTURE YOU BY TRANSCRIBING), DURING THE HIKE UP MT. SEINFELD, A MOUNTAIN THAT IS PROVING TO BE MUCH MORE VERTICAL AND HARDCORE THAN ITS LIGHTHEARTED NAME WOULD SUGGEST, THE CLIMB POSITIVELY WINDING ROCHELLE, WHO HASN’T GONE FOR SO MUCH AS AN EVENING JOG SINCE THE TWINTENHAM COLLEGE CAFETERIA WAS OFFERING OREO CHEESECAKE AND CLOSING IN THREE MINUTES’ TIME “I think my issue is that I just don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said before.” Through no fault of Lucina’s, the four have somehow wound up discussing her relative nonexistent literary esteem, and the above is her reluctant self-diagnosis. “A lack of original ideas,” Brent replies. “Yeah. That’s a tough one.” Listening to forty-five minutes of noncommittal, pseudointellectual rambling in Brent’s Podcast Accent (which is impossible to do descriptive justice to) has convinced Lucina that Brent suffers from a similar issue, but she doesn’t bring it up. Some of her most insightful observations happen inside her head and stay there, too socially risky to let loose. It’s one reason she can’t spend long stretches of time in the company of peers—after a while, her entire brain space is filled with micro-bits of snark, all floating around in there like poison, and her ability to maintain good relations begins operating on borrowed time. “Whenever I try to write, I feel like I’m just regurgitating older sentiments. I can’t write about edgy, disillusioned youths because Salinger’s got that covered. I can’t write about the existential nightmare of having thoughts and sentience without parroting Sylvia Plath. And that’s not even touching on Professor Harold, who’s kind of done it all and more.” Terrence and Rochelle nod in mute semi-agreement, but Brent arranges his features into an expression of distaste. “What?” Lucina asks him. “It’s just—Harold’s all right, but he’s far from some perfect emblem of literary mastery. Like…there’s too much coincidence in his stuff. Too many people who by all means shouldn’t even know each other are connected through unlikely circumstances. The world is too small.” Brent kicks a rock off the side of the mountain, where it disappears into the shrubbery. “Which would be overlookable if his endings had payoff, but they don’t. He doesn’t even know how to write endings.” “Doesn’t know or doesn’t want to?” “Doesn’t know and wants to seem intentional about it. It’s unsatisfying.” “I think it’s more just…” Rochelle nearly trips over what looks like a loose twig but is actually attached to something large and menacing hidden under the leaves. “…he knows that no conventional ending will do. Launches you off into the stratosphere in lieu of climax.” “But sometimes I just really want climax.” “It’s been four long years since my last climax,” Lucina mock-whines. Brent punches her shoulder. “Not true. Had one just yesterday.” “How far have we hiked?” Rochelle, red-faced and dermally inflamed, looks like a Getty Images model for an online article about the signs and symptoms of myocardial infarction. Brent checks his Apple watch. “One-point-two miles.” Rochelle groans in a medically concerning manner. “That’s not even a third of the way. What’s taking us so long?” “Getting great calorie-burn, though.” Brent’s daily step count and associated fitness stats, which he meticulously tracks, are a real point of pride for him. He’s even begun a mild steroid regimen but hasn’t told anyone, not even his boyfriend, a small-time drug dealer named Chance. WHAT THE CIRCLE MEMBERS KNOW (AND DON’T KNOW) ABOUT EACH OTHER Lucina and Rochelle know that Brent is gay, but Terrence doesn’t, nor do Brent’s podcast subscribers. Brent is planning a coming-out episode during which he’ll assure listeners he’s neither a self-hating homosexual nor a slave to the woke gay agenda or anything like that. None of the others know he’s developing this kind of subversive, political-line-toeing statement, and he hasn’t asked for their input. Lucina knows Brent has a boyfriend but hasn’t met him and doesn’t know he’s a small-time drug dealer. Lucina knows Terrence and Rochelle hooked up once, on the couch in Terrence’s parents’ basement, but Terrence and Rochelle don’t know she knows. Lucina knows that when Brent was growing up, his much-older brother kept a pet turtle in a cage outside, and that one night, after a heated argument between the brothers, Brent took the animal to the edge of a nearby cliff, dropped it off, and then dickied the newly-empty cage so as to pin the crime on a hypothetical coyote. Brent never told his brother, nor did he tell Terrence or Rochelle. He figures he could probably safely tell Terrence but that Rochelle would go animal-rights-ballistic on him. Lucina advised him against telling Terrence, figuring that Terrence would tell Rochelle during their next hookup, but she didn’t tell Brent why she was telling him not to tell. Terrence knows that Brent used to play chess against his brother as a kid, and that Brent was the superior player, but that Brent’s brother had an infuriating tendency to flip the board off the table whenever Brent entered checkmating territory, this childhood ritual leaving Brent with an almost unshakeable inability to find true closure in any aspect of his life, and my humble narratorial psychoanalysis is that Brent’s childhood closure-sensitivity has something to do with his adult dissatisfaction with stories that don’t have real endings. All circle members know that another possible culprit is the fact that Brent’s father, a second-generation Hennebridge College legacy alumnus named Tony Weissman, ran out on his family when Brent was only about five years old, and his only contact with Brent’s family thenceforth pertained to child support payments (which were, admittedly, generous, and continued even after his mother got remarried to another six-figure earner). Brent’s podcast subscribers know this too, for some reason, and their knowledge is part of why Brent is apprehensive about announcing his homosexuality live on the air—fifty-three percent of them will assume he’s just a hyperfeminized soycuck as the result of his fatherless upbringing. Lucina knows a little about the real reason Terrence quit drugs—the “rock bottom” that almost killed him—but nowhere near the whole story. None of them know that Terrence once came closer to murdering someone than any human being should ever come. Brent knows Rochelle doesn’t much like him (though she hasn’t told him that), and he suspects Terrence doesn’t either. Lucina does like Brent because, his more unsavory qualities notwithstanding, he seems to be the only circle member with any real listening skills. So she often calls him at wildly inappropriate hours, huffy and perturbed, to complain about Terrence or Rochelle. For example, Brent knows that Lucina once sat through a drunken and dreary and drawn-out monologue by Rochelle about Rochelle’s entire lifetime’s sum total of personal psychic shit and that Lucina felt slighted not by the contents of the monologue but by the implication that Rochelle believed Lucina wasn’t going through some psychic shit of her own. Lucina knows Rochelle’s commitment to a hearty mental health regimen isn’t just some trendy thing, this knowledge the product of the aforementioned late-night drunken chat, during which Rochelle also mentioned the hookup with Terrence (and then apparently forgot the whole conversation completely). Lucina doesn’t know that Rochelle didn’t actually tell her everything. WHAT EXACTLY ROCHELLE TOLD LUCINA ABOUT HERSELF THAT ONE DRUNKEN NIGHT, BESIDES THE FACT THAT SHE SLEPT WITH TERRENCE Rochelle was diagnosed with clinical depression at the age of twelve—just about the least opportune time for such a disease to strike, since it’s the period during which you’re supposed to be forging your most critical and lasting adolescent friendships. Realizing you’re different from your peers in a clinically significant way drives an unmovable wedge between you and them and makes it impossible to open up to anyone, since everyone around you is genuinely cheerful and happy (Lucina found this statement contentious but did not interject), while you’re merely pretending to be happy, putting on a god damn show just because you’d be too insufferable otherwise. Rochelle said it felt good to finally be able to say god damn—her twelve-year-old self would never have gotten away with such an outburst, what with her family’s rabid Catholicism and all. She said her family’s rabid Catholicism and the resultant stifling of her sexual and artistic expression was probably a major catalyst for the depression and the real reason why she’s so militantly atheistic today. But then she admitted to not truly believing that, deep down—after all, every bit of literature she’s read indicates that the degree of care and attention a child receives from parents is the biggest predictor of that child’s future mental stability level, and Rochelle is loved, she knows, so she has no excuse. She said she feels guilty about not having an excuse to be clinically depressed when so many people who are starving or terminally cancered or have recently lost spouses in grisly head-on collisions are still able to appreciate the treasures and joys of everyday existence. She said she almost wishes she had a real traumatic backstory so that others could respond to her genuine and urgent outcries of depressed desperation with “I’m so sorry that happened to you” instead of just thinking she’s a spoiled rich coddled brat. She said she’s probably coming across as a spoiled rich coddled brat right now. But so anyway to get to the point, she called the suicide hotline once, in high school. She wasn’t actually planning on doing the deed, but she wanted to stage an impressive and lurid spectacle and hopefully convince those close to her that she was serious about the self-termination thing, so they’d take her complaints of constant and unceasing psychological agony more seriously. She was scared—rightfully so—because she feared she’d do too good a job and be left in some weird paralytic limbo. But there was no paralytic limbo hotline, so this was the next best thing (Lucina’s mental addendum, listening). However, when she dialed the number, soon after getting home from school and in an effort to hopefully put off her trigonometry homework for a couple more hours (ditto above—mentally addending was Lucina’s only recourse against going acutely insane, by this point), the phone just rang and rang. An automated voice message said, in a detached and indifferent tone, “Sorry. All operators are currently busy. If this is an emergency, please call 9-1-1. Otherwise, stay on the line. Your call is very important to us.” So she waited, a few miscellaneous pill bottles arranged on her nightstand, one of which was an emetic, just in case the others began to work. Upbeat organ muzak blared out of her shitty iPhone 6 speakers. The cheeriness of the music made the whole affair sadder, she told Lucina—it was as if these people really thought they could cure a clinical depressive with a boppin’ one-three polka backbeat. Every now and then, the automated message would return and maintain that “[Her] call [was] very important to [them].” She said that by the recording’s fourth or fifth reiteration, it seemed more satirical than genuine. Then, after like the eighth or ninth time, her clinically depressed adolescent brain began interpreting the phrase as a challenge—as if the hotline were saying, “You don’t really want to do it. The hotline doesn’t have time for posers like you” (she knows hotlines themselves aren’t sentient—more just the people who operate them, she added). She said how pathetic is it that at this moment, she was filled with such pitiful self-loathing that she was actually lamenting her inability even kill herself successfully? An all-around failure of a human being—that’s what she felt like. She said that as she sat there in transitory pause, she was thinking about how she could really stick it to the sentient hotline-operators if she did go through with it, which she hadn’t been planning on doing minutes ago. She said she began fantasizing about mentioning, in her formerly unserious but becoming-realer-by-the-second suicide note, that her call’s unimportance to the hotline people had been the final nail in the literal and metaphorical coffin. But then her mom walked in, so she hung up the phone with the guilty haste of someone caught in medias jerk-off (or at least, that’s how Lucina pictured the scene), and she invented a dumb excuse for the pills on her nightstand, which her mom accepted, either out of naivety or her mere unwillingness to deal with the hassle of carting her daughter off to some kind of nuthouse. Rochelle said she was sorry for using the ableist word “nuthouse.” But, to be fair, that’s the word her mom would have used, and she was hypothetically quoting her mother—a kind of free indirect discourse (Rochelle actually said that last part too, believe it or not). Rochelle sighed and stated that she has long since pledged not ever to kill herself but that the resolution has lent a new kind of bleak irresolvability to her existence. She said that the promise of suicide was once a kind of comfort—something that, if it didn’t tell her things will get better at least assured her the end is in sight. Now there’s no real hope of resolution until she’s like eighty, and who the hell can see that far out? She’s never been able to see more than a few years into the future at any given time. And without the potential for an early exit, her life is just a meaningless series of non-lethal pitstops—commas instead of periods, if you will. It’s just an endless stream of clauses, separated by commas, and then more commas, the clauses not bothering to even threaten to settle themselves into any kind of terminus, creating an unceasing, horrific, tedious, monstrous, overlong nightmare of a sentence, the sort of sentence those less versed in the grammatical arts than Lucina and herself might call a “run-on,” but the two of them know better, of course, she said. WHAT SHE DIDN’T TELL LUCINA The metaphorical pit of despair brought on by Rochelle’s high school vow to never die by her own hand gave rise to a new and ill-advised method of issues-resolution during her college years: kleptomania. As a lifelong member of the upper classes, Rochelle has never found herself in the sort of financial bind that drives people to steal for necessity, so her particular brand of kleptomaniacal activity was purely recreational. She’d wear baggy hoodies into understaffed CVSes and slip random items into her pocket. She’d rip enamel pins off classmates’ backpacks while they were too busy taking lecture notes to notice. She’d steal cash out of her mother’s wallet and grab unchained bikes parked outside Twintenham College’s dorms. She felt, during these escapades, titillatingly filmic—she became the protagonist in a heist movie, her surroundings high-budget set pieces, her fellow human beings brainless, clueless, figurant extras. What made these rituals so fucked up was that not only did Rochelle not need the things she cribbed, but she also didn’t particularly want them. She stole for the pure rush of Getting Away With Something—punishing those artless members of society who mistakenly believe that everyone is good-hearted, noble, just. But, to give credit where credit is due, Rochelle did eventually mention this issue to her psychiatrist at the time, a middle-aged man named Dr. Gunther with a bushy mustache he liked to absent-mindedly stroke with one finger. She liked Dr. G.—he had kids, two of them around Rochelle’s age (one a stepchild and the other the absolute apple of his eye, but he was trying really hard to love the stepchild just as much as the real one, and his shame at being unable to do so was a real source of internal struggle for him), so he connected with the youths in a way that seemed genuinely hip and not like the poserish put-on many mental health professionals affect with college students. He diagnosed Rochelle with clinical kleptomania, prescribed her a substantial dosage of naltrexone, and told her to keep him updated regarding the ongoing future status of her urges. Of course, Dr. G.’s post-revelation discomfort was palpable, especially given that he owned a vintage 1967 Rickenbacker guitar, signed by all four Beatles, which he kept prominently displayed in his office, and which he and Rochelle had discussed with interest on multiple occasions, so it didn’t take a genius to notice, in the sessions following Rochelle’s confession, that he was keeping a closer and more watchful eye on it, the thing likely being worth like six digits in terms of price estimation. So when the guitar did go missing, Rochelle was the obvious culprit, and as she explained through tears that she knew how this probably looked but that she had not taken it, honest, Dr. G. listened, stoic and stony-faced and suddenly, strikingly un-hip, before stating flatly that he didn’t believe her—that all kleptomaniacs lie about their behavior when confronted directly—and that he would only agree not to press charges if she left his office and he never saw her face again. Given that Rochelle truly did not steal the guitar and still, to this day, has no earthly clue who did, this sordid sequence of events really did a number on her already fickle Ability To Trust, which Dr. G. had diagnosed early as weakened and damaged, possibly irreparably, by nothing he could really identify or put his finger on, and though she’s since abandoned her shoplifting ways in favor of film (a late-switched major from political science, and not coincidentally another pursuit that allows her to feel emotionally and situationally In Control, though thankfully a much more legal one), she fears she may never fully recover from the episode. A CONVERSATION THAT OCCURS AT JUST PAST THE FIFTY-PERCENT MARK OF THE CLIMB, THE TREES REALLY THINNING NOW AND THE ROCKS BECOMING LARGER AND MORE CUMBERSOME TO STEP OVER “I think writing should be about painting a picture in readers’ minds,” Rochelle tells the others. “Like, setting a scene. A film of the brain.” “But that’s what films are for.” Brent, as far ahead of the pack as he is up his own ass, really has to project his voice. As the only circle member with a disciplined fitness regimen, he repeatedly outpaces the others by a few dozen feet and then turns around and stands militaristically in place, shielding his eyes (he’s also the only member who didn’t bring a hat) with the hasty annoyance of a DMV employee waiting for a client to locate her driver’s license in her wallet. “Well, we all know Rochelle would rather be doing film,” Lucina retorts (and then feels like kind of a dick for it). “I think writing should be about inducing novel emotions.” Terrence picks up a large stick and draws a few haphazard lines in the muddy coating of a large rock. “Making readers feel a way they’ve never felt before.” “Example?” “Well, sheesh, way to put me on the spot.” And then he hesitates, but Lucina knows it’s all for show. Terrence pumps out boldly nihilistic, coolly amoral stuff on a near-daily basis, and his only real roadblock is that it’s too depraved for most magazine editors to stomach. “There’s a couple—a man and a woman.” “Why are male-female hookups your default?” Rochelle asks. “Kinda heteronormative.” Terrence gapes at her for a few seconds with a wordless expression that Lucina understands but Brent does not, and then continues his story. “She’s a former cheerleader; he’s a champion jockey. Each of them is very proud of these things.” “Go on.” “As a much-needed break from her stressful HR job, at which disgruntled employees dump their emotional shit on her from nine to five all day minus a forty-five-minute lunch break, she decides to attend the races. She’s gleefully anticipating just a few hours of kicking back, relaxing, and hopefully not encountering any rogue overhead emotional shit buckets. She sees him pulling around the track in third place, riding a majestic gray stallion, and immediately falls head-over-heels.” “And he with her?” “When they meet after the race, while he displays his bronze medal, which doesn’t glint quite as much in the sunlight as the gold and silver ones but nonetheless possesses a mean shine that’s all its own, it’s basically love at first sight. They kiss after one date, she on her knees so the two are at eye level.” A brief silence ensues, during which Terrence waits for laughs. “Jockey joke. Anyway, it’s all perfect for a while, until it becomes apparent that she’s sort of directionless with no real life aspirations, still rosy-eyedly reminiscing about her high school cheerleading days, which she fears were her relative peak. She used to date six-foot-tall, brawny football players. She’s only gone down since then. By ten inches, to be exact—or four, depending on where you’re taking your measurements.” Brent’s expression suddenly and briefly resembles that of someone experiencing digestive trauma. “So while her jockey boyfriend becomes jealous of her former boyfriends’ relative sizes and perturbed by her obsession with the past, she becomes commensurately perturbed by his tendency to dump emotional shit on her—much like the employees she services, come to think of it, but she isn’t even getting paid for this. Like, to give just one example, he tells her every romantic partner he’s ever had has left him. He says he doesn’t mind being broken up with—doesn’t think he’s owed romantic companionship—it’s just that they never let him know why. And afterwards, the women—or men,” he adds with a meaningfully smug glance at Rochelle, “like, cut off all contact.” “He sounds insufferable,” Lucina says. “His past is absolutely littered with unsolved, terminated relationships with people to whom he can never talk again. He just wants to know what everyone finds so objectionable about him. And he also wants to know that, like, she’s not going to dump him, right? And if she does, she’ll at least do him the courtesy of letting him know why, right? She won’t leave him hanging without a real ending, right?” “Very funny,” Brent mutters. “The no real endings thing.” “But this isn’t a story by Harold I., the woman assures him,” Terrence goes on. “This is the real McCoy. He kisses her and feels safe. He fucks her and feels appeased. He trusts her, in other words. He even takes her horseback riding with him, an activity he reserves for only his most intimate and loyal partners. This is her first time because, she tells him now, her deepest and most crippling fear is toppling off of things. No, not heights—falling. Not even from tall places, necessarily, and only the unexpected kind—she doesn’t mind rollercoasters, for example. He promises nothing bad will happen to her. You probably see where I’m headed with this.” “Knowing you, somewhere fucked up,” Rochelle says. “They gallop majestically through the high-grassed, tick-infested fields, he hanging onto her like a purse or fanny pack. This is happiness, he thinks. This is bliss. He dismounts, bouncing a few times when he hits the ground, and then holds out his hand for her. The two briefly admire each other’s faces but abruptly break eye contact when the horse, unaccustomed to the lady, experiences a temporary moment of panic and bucks her off.” “Jeez.” “And if that weren’t dire enough, it either tramples or gores her—whichever one it is that horses do—right after that, breaking her ribs and puncturing her lungs and heart, so she’s a goner, essentially.” “Of course.” “And while she lies on the ground, spluttering and coughing up blood, she has one last thing to say to him. And he, desiring closure more than anything, leans in close so that she can cough-slash-whisper her final words into his ear.” Terrence’s audience members are listening similarly closely. The four have dramatically slowed their walking pace without even realizing it, not wanting the squeak of muddy hiking boots on oversized rocks to drown out any pertinent details. “Can you guess what she said?” Terrence asks. “That she wishes they could have had more time together?” Rochelle says. Terrence shakes his head. “That she loves him?” Brent calls from up ahead. Terrence opens his mouth to negate, but Lucina beats him to it. “No.” She knows the answer, and there is a correct one. Terrence’s micro-story is more of a puzzle than a narrative, every component adding up to some greater whole. Many of Professor Harold’s short works function similarly. Lucina, who believes Harold can do no wrong, sees Brent’s dissatisfaction with how Harold’s stories end (or fail to end) as symptomatic of uncritical attention. She knows Harold’s endings are omitted not because he doesn’t know how to provide closure, or because no ending would suffice, but because exactly one and only one ending works. What masquerades as ambiguity actually isn’t—all the ingredients necessary for understanding the conclusion are already present in the story. And there’s no way to clarify a phony uncertainty without killing the magic, so Harold leaves the obvious unsaid. The one downside to this method, of course, is that psychically projecting a story’s logical climax isn’t quite as fulfilling as actually experiencing it, much the way masturbating to the theoretical idea of someone isn’t quite as fulfilling as actually fucking them. Terrence’s eyes gleam. “What did she say?” ANOTHER CONVERSATION THAT TAKES PLACE HIGHER UP ON THE MOUNTAIN, THE PEAK NOW IN DISTANT VIEW, THIS LAST STRETCH PROVING TO BE MORE LIKE OLD-FASHIONED ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL ROCK CLIMBING (WITHOUT A HARNESS!) THAN ANY KIND OF AMATEUR HIKE “Do you ever feel like your dreams surpass your abilities?” Lucina asks. Falling from here would at least equate to a few hearty sprains, she thinks, trying to avoid gazing too deeply into the cloud-obscured and cosmically indifferent abyss beneath her. She’s never been so acutely aware of her own fear of unexpected toppling. “More like capitalism’s capacity to appreciate those abilities,” Rochelle replies. “There just isn’t enough room for artists in this economy.” Brent makes his signature I-find-that-statement-objectionable-but-would-like-to-be-probed-for-elaboration noise. “Something to add?” “None of us would even be here without capitalism. Like yeah, it sucks or whatever, but…what do your parents do for a living, Rochelle?” Hesitates. “Lawyers.” “Lawyers!” Brent repeats with a cackle. “Lawyers are capitalism one-oh-one. Moderating the forced transfers of money between aggrieved parties while pocketing most of that money for themselves.” “But would you not say that’s a pretty limited view of capitalism, Brent?” Terrence is bringing up the rear, so his voice carries well—sounds closer than it actually is. “I never said I approved of my parents’ career choice…” “But you profit from it. You reap the benefits. You can’t disapprove of something and then accept money that was made doing that very thing. Not without being a huge hypocrite, at least.” “Aren’t we all hypocrites, though?” Lucina asks Brent. “Opposing child labor while buying iPhones, shopping on Amazon while protesting poor working conditions, going to the movies right after one of Hollywood’s biggest and most brutal historical strikes. We can’t subject all our financial decisions to rigorous Marxist analysis—we’d implode. Or starve, at the very least.” “And there’s no leftover brain space for non-trivialities like ‘having dreams’ when you’re devoting so much energy to ethically philosophizing,” Terrence agrees. “But y’know what I think our real issue is? It’s got something to do with capitalism, but not the way Rochelle thinks. Our issue is that we’ve never needed any practical aspirations. We’re in no financial hurry, so we’re free to just frolic around in the arts for a few years, living off our folks, before we finally join the real world and go get our MBAs or whatever.” “I’m not frolicking. I’m going to be a filmmaker, or at least a writer—” “You, Rochelle? Not frolicking?” Brent scoffs. “You’re the worst frolicker of us all.” But Terrence has a point, Lucina can’t help but think. “Is that why people say our writing feels so out of touch?” “Exactly. How are a bunch of MFA snoots who haven’t really lived yet supposed to create anything alive?” “Speak for yourself, Terrence.” “What do you mean by ‘alive’?” Of course, Lucina knows exactly what he means. She can always tell when something is alive on the page, deep down, though she can’t begin to fathom what gives her that sense. It’s an unmistakable and irreplicable hunch that often seems more random than anything. “Just look at the modernists and their ability to immerse you so deeply in a single Brain that you finish the book feeling as if you are that person,” Terrence replies. “Or, as a completely different example, take Professor Harold’s work. His books have whole conversations, often between more than two people, that are entirely quotations. No dialogue tags, no descriptions, nothing, and yet you still know exactly which character is saying what and in what tone they’re saying it. How does he do it?” Nobody answers, due to a combination of puzzlement and dry-mouthed exhaustion. “Because the characters are alive. They exist and breathe. Harold hears the words in their voices and trusts that we do too. He trusts that we’re well-enough acquainted with them to know who would say a given line. His work is always dripping with an implicit ‘I trust that you know what I mean.’ Reader trust is the underlying sentiment, it would seem.” “Dialogue tags are a pain,” Rochelle says painfully. “That’s why I sometimes try to write my stories like screenplays. If they’re good enough, I save them as scripts for on-spec opportunities. Plus there’s the added bonus of seeming coolly postmodern.” A brief look at what she means: LUCINA ___But I feel like I need ideas before I can create living characters. She searches for a stable rock on which to place her left foot. TERRENCE (helpfully) ___One way to combat a dearth of ideas might be to take an explicit stance on Harold. He did that a lot in his early work—critically massacred his literary influences. Why not position yourself in relation to him? He grabs ROCHELLE’s hand and helps her across a slippery segment of jagged stones. LUCINA (decidedly) ___I am pro-Harold. TERRENCE (pulling tweed jacket out of backpack while pretending to shiver in the crisp sixty-nine-degree air) ___But more nuanced than that. LUCINA (climbing on all-fours like a dog, a slight whine to her voice) ___How can I make any kind of nuance out of “I love his work and agree with everything he’s ever written”? I won’t bore you with this format any longer. The point is that Lucina, like many MFA students who have never gone hungry or witnessed a parental divorce or lost any loved ones besides maybe a grandparent or two they hardly had relationships with anyway, doesn’t quite know why she writes. The real reason—the one she hasn’t admitted to herself yet—is that she reads, and occasionally she reads something that breaks her soul and penetrates her gut and busts her heart and confuses her metaphors, and she, in a fleeting burst of temporary confidence that borders on narcissism, thinks, I want to do that. I want to make people snap their books shut in glee and yell “aha!” I want to restore people’s faith in the power of words and art to cure all social ills, or whatever. But when she sits down to put finger to key, she has nothing to go on but the wisp of the feeling that inspired her. And she’s never found an alternate route to that feeling. WHAT A STORY BY LUCINA THAT CRITICALLY AND NUANCEDLY POSITIONED HERSELF IN RELATION TO HAROLD WOULD EVEN LOOK LIKE It would probably have some self-conscious rhythmic allusions to his prose, complete with grammatical tics and flourishes. It would contain metafiction, much like Professor Harold’s own work, but Lucina, like Harold, would be careful to ensure that the metafiction actually meant something. Its protagonist would likely be a young woman quite similar to Lucina, with a carefully-chosen name like “Hannah Smart,” which has the same number of letters as “Lucina Woods”—plus, both H&S and L&W are separated by eleven alphabet steps. The name choice would be one of those really deliberate and cool literary tricks that nobody would ever get unless Lucina explained it, and she couldn’t explain it without making a real ass of herself. Hannah’s professor and mentor would be someone named David, after the protagonist of Professor Harold’s most enduring literary work. David would be pretty much exactly like Harold in every way. In this world, Hannah would be Professor David’s most prized student and fairly prolific, writing-wise—at least, much more prolific than Lucina herself, though still early in her (i.e. Hannah’s) career, right at that pivotal and scary moment where most writers either give up or go all in. And she’d be wildly dissatisfied, Hannah, for no real reason she can put to words (which is obviously a problem, when you’re a writer). The position of the narrator relative to Hannah would be one of bewildered shock as to why Hannah is so damn restless and malcontent. Like, from where Lucina sits, this character has everything, and yet she still feels so emotionally vacant and alone. If Lucina succeeds at creating a Hannah who is sufficiently alive, she (Lucina) might wish to reach through her laptop screen in mute frustration, grab the collection of words that make up Hannah’s entire existence, shake them/her until Hannah’s teeth rattle, and say, “You think you have it bad? Try being me!” Lucina’s position relative to Hannah would mirror Hannah’s position relative to David. She (i.e. Hannah) would be a huge admirer of David but nonetheless baffled as to why fame and fortune didn’t “fix” his work, which is good, the work—better than anything Hannah has ever read, in fact—but still poisoned, somehow. Like, emotionally rotten to its core, the product of an empty soul that long ago abandoned all hopes of both really living and ever being convinced to really live. The description of David’s work would make clear that his post-success publications were, if anything, even more poisoned than his early ones—more virtuosic and deeper but like shot through with depth rather than carved out, possessing a tired resignation and an unwillingness and inability to properly end—how can one end that which David and Hannah both know is infinite? She’d wonder, privately, Hannah would, because she’d never get the chance to ask David outright, why superstardom didn’t make him happy—why his fear of endings persisted right up until his literal life’s end, which would come late in the story and be written in such a way as to be both heartbreaking and expected. Hannah’s reasons for wondering would be twofold—out of genuine selfless care for David, of course, but also because Hannah herself would be selfishly Hanging On in not even expectation but more like a wildest-pipe-dream-Hail-Mary for even a sliver of David’s success, believing it to be the only thing that could possibly fulfill her, sustain her, make her finally whole. So, like, knowing celebrity not only hadn’t completed David but had possibly made him even less himself than he was when he was in Hannah’s position is just the sort of reality-shaking revelation that would make Hannah feel like maybe she should just quit while she’s ahead, especially if she’s going to use dying metaphors like the one in that last clause, metaphors that David wouldn’t dare stoop as low as to employ in his own stuff, stuff that Hannah would perceive as infinitely cleverer, smugger, richer, and more complex than her own. The story might include a description of what a piece positioning Hannah in relation to David would look like, but it wouldn’t end that way—couldn’t. It would have a real ending that was all Lucina’s own—one that concluded Hannah and David’s stories (for the two would be so intertwined, even after David’s death, as to be functionally inseparable) simultaneously and unambiguously. A kind of literary, metaphorical breakup of a fictional construct of a relationship. THE CLIMAX (AS IT WERE) While I’ve waxed rhapsodical about hypothetical stories that will never be written and fictional characters named Hannah Smart, the four very real characters in this story have made it to the top of Mt. Seinfeld. It’s too cloudy up here to really see much of anything, but there’s a little sliver of open expanse through which they all peer, huddling close. Since Lucina is the protagonist, I’ll now attempt to capture the view through her eyes. At her feet, a rock juts menacingly into the expansive void below. If we follow her eyeline down the side of the mountain, dense and forested shrubbery forms a textured arrangement like impasto splatters of green paint. Way below that, flat farmland stretches limitlessly into a horizon that blurs, glowing blue against the clouds. Some fields are fallow, others varying shades of vibrant, dying, or dead green. Scattered houses form miniscule white floaters in an otherwise pristine field of vision. One can really feel insignificant, if one stares too long or hard. “I want to jump,” Lucina says now. The others look at her as if to verify the source of the utterance. “I want to become as meaningless as it all feels.” It’s the closest she’ll get to any kind of self-analysis during this story. Brent drops a turtle-sized rock off the cliff. It tumbles, bounces off other, larger rocks, and then succumbs to the faux nonexistence of object impermanence. “You want that?” Lucina thinks for a few seconds and then nods. “No you don’t,” Brent assures her. He wraps her in a tight hug that seems to signify that the two will never part—that if she dies, he’s dying right there with her. Lucina wills herself to feel something but can’t. Terrence places a hand on her shoulder. “Remember what I told you about my rock bottom?” “You never told us that,” Rochelle snaps. “I was talking to Missing D.” Rochelle’s expression is impossible to fully read, but Lucina can tell she’s hurt. “Okay, okay.” Terrence crouches with difficulty and arranges his legs stiffly into the preschool formation of crisscross applesauce. “One more story won’t hurt.” The others follow suit, so that they’re seated in an organized circle not unlike that of an MFA fiction workshop. “I suppose the most dramatically ironic place to discuss rock bottom is three miles above ground.” Terrence takes a deep inhale—the breath of someone who once feared his next would be his last. “I was just out of college. It was a stuffy, June, Boston day with the kind of humidity that makes your clothes feel like damp rags against gluey skin. I stopped by my dealer’s house to pick up that week’s allotment of coke. Brought it home and snorted it with the impassivity of someone whose willpower was as obliterated as his septum. “Nothing seemed amiss at first, but then my breathing became labored. My heartrate slowed. The sensation was unfamiliar—a sort of bleak drowsiness instead of the usual ecstatic buzz. My first thought, of course, was that I’d hit another tolerance bottleneck, so I snorted more. The feeling got worse. It was at this point that it dawned on me that I’d been dosed, so I used the remaining ounce of myself that was still lucid to backseat-drive the rest of me to my phone and call an ambulance. I was just about dead by the time they arrived, but I remember my last thought before I lost consciousness being that I was going to kill that motherfucker Chance—” “Chance?” “My dealer.” “I know, it’s just—that’s my boyfriend’s name. He’s a dealer.” “Your boyfriend’s a drug dealer?” “You have a boyfriend?” “You’re gay?” “He deals to my podcast cohost too. I knew he dosed someone once, but I didn’t know it was you, Terrence.” “Well, why the hell did he dose me? All I could figure was that maybe my family had at some point cost his family some money through potentially unsavory means, though you’d think I’d have just about paid it all back with how often I was—” “He didn’t mean to dose you. He meant to dose Paul, my cohost. The day after Paul found out Chance and I were dating, Chance woke up with ‘Death to Faggots’ spraypainted on his garage door. So Chance said he was going to slip some heroin into Paul’s coke as a prank—just to freak him out and stuff. He was working on a couple shipments at the time. I tried to reason with him and tell him that it probably wasn’t Paul who did the vandalism, but he wouldn’t hear it.” “Who did it?” “Oh, it was definitely Paul; I just didn’t want Chance to know that. We had an episode to record the following day, so I needed Paul in typical, mildly-coked-up form. I couldn’t have him convulsing on the air.” “Wait a minute. Back up. You continued doing a podcast with this guy? After he homophobically hate-crimed your boyfriend?” “And you still let him dose the drugs? The drugs that somehow ended up in my system?” “I tried to stop him. And after he gave the wrong guy the tainted coke, Paul and I sort of made it out by the skin of our teeth, or so I thought. But then Chance told me the guy he did dose was coming after him. He seemed to think the guy—that’s you, Terence, I guess—had implied or strongly suggested that there may be a murder in the works.” “He did try to kill me first, in my defense.” “And I couldn’t afford to hire black-market security for him, and it’s not like I could just ask my stepfather for that amount of money without him wondering what it was for, and he was just about up to his neck with clinical looneys at around that time, I remember. So I’m not proud of what I did next, but…” “Hold on. What’s your stepfather’s name?” “Brian Gunther. He owned this really expensive guitar signed by the Beatles, and he’d mentioned that he was working with some kleptomaniac patient, so I took his guitar, figuring the klepto would be the natural suspect. I sold it on Craigslist and was going to hire Chance some real deal bodyguards—ex-marines and former hitmen and stuff—but then the whole thing kinda fizzled out, and I guess Terrence was all talk, so I bought a new windsurfing board and invested the rest of the money back into the podcast. My stepdad attributed the burglary to the klepto, as I’d hoped, so I never—” “That ‘klepto’ was me, you asshole! Dr. G. stopped seeing me after that. God, Brent, I’m going to fucking murder you.” “I had no idea you both were tied up in this. And Terrence, if I would have known you at the time, and known you were Chance’s other buyer that day, I wouldn’t have switched the coke bags—” “You switched the coke bags, you son of a bitch?” Now, Lucina’s view is obscured by the three non-protagonist circle members staggering drunkenly in front of her, Terrence and Rochelle each gripping one of Brent’s mildly steroidically enhanced shoulders in an attempt to push him off the side of the mountain like he’s some kind of pet turtle, and there’d admittedly be some narratorial satisfaction if his arc came full circle like that—a sort of restoration of readers’ faith in literary karma. Lucina, still seated and passively watching the whole thing in a kind of fugue-like catatonic state, can’t help but think the same. It also occurs to her that the scene resembles the climactic battle between Simba and Scar in The Lion King, her favorite childhood movie. She half-heartedly says, “This is just like Hamlet!” in the hopes of defusing the situation with literary reference, which is all she’s ever been good at, really. LAST WORDS—OR AT LEAST, SOME KIND OF ENDING The question you’re probably asking at this juncture is, “Does Brent topple to his death?” You might even be sufficiently convinced by the fictional illusion of the story to have a strong preference one way or the other. But the truth is that nobody really dies on a hike up Mt. Seinfeld with their MFA circle. None of these kids has ever faced real death, not even Terrence, who in rehab was a mere observer of true hardship—a listener and regurgitator but never an experiencer—and who didn’t even ingest enough of Chance’s heroin to have needed the naloxone that was administered the instant the ambulance arrived. These four characters’ insulation from life’s single greatest peril is part of why MFA fiction is often so bland and heartless and impossible to relate to—what would a bunch of rich kids who have never had a single real problem in their lives know about actual death? Death, to them, is a thirty-minute wait in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. They’ve never looked literal death in the eye, nor will they—not until the real, true end. But neither, dear reader, have I, and, if you’ve made it this far, I’m guessing neither have you. And I’m also guessing that this is an uncomfortable thing to admit to yourself because it means that you and this insufferable clique of sensitive young people are more alike than not. Still, most audiences don’t feel fulfilled by an ending in which everyone makes it out alive, so I thought I’d do you the courtesy of speeding us through the circle’s remaining years. Brent will break up with Chance—he’ll be forced to choose between him and Terrence, and, in a rare moment of decisiveness, he’ll pick the latter. After both having almost killed the other but not really, he and Terrence will establish a kind of distant acquainted truce. The podcast’s popularity will peak at 462 subscribers before Brent and Paul’s respective paths fork and never reconverge. Brent will join the Catholic Church and attempt priest-administered conversion therapy, but an affair with the priest will get both parties excommunicated, after which point the two will marry, secularly, and adopt a little girl from Haiti. The remainder of Brent’s life will be spent joining and quitting various Christian churches, and he’ll die in a nursing home, guilt-wracked for all the wrong reasons, with not even his husband or daughter by his side. Terrence will marry Rochelle, and they’ll move out to the suburbs, where Rochelle will take a college admissions job and join a bridge club and Terrence will receive his MBA and go on to work in the financial sector of a shower drain company. They’ll have two kids together, three years apart. In a midlife-crisis splurge, Terrence will take up motorcycling and become addicted not so much to the hobby but to the sick rush he derives from knowing Rochelle is displeased with him. After a passive-aggressive argument—the sort only identifiable as a real fight to those who have grown up in households with parents who tolerate but do not love each other—Terrence will leave on his bike in a huff. He’ll collide head-on with a semi whose driver is running on copious amounts of stimulants and several days of no sleep, and his body will be so deformed as to be barely identifiable by coroners. So it will be hard drugs that kill him, in a way. Rochelle will outlive them both. She’ll spend her adult life switching between various cocktails of the newest FDA-approved antidepressant medications, never quite finding one that works. After thirty years of widowdom, her liver will fail, and she’ll turn down stern doctoral recommendations to join transplant lists, suddenly and cathartically aware that a quiet and passive death is what she’s really craved all these years. I don’t know what will happen to Lucina. I do know that Lucina died, in the most meaningful sense, before any of the others—long before this story or hike even began. She died a metaphorical death just as permanent as the literal sort, and she’s been running around for years with the knowledge that some element of what’s supposed to make her human and alive is missing—that her soul’s very essence is poisoned and necrotic and rotting and that she can’t do anything to excise the rot. She doesn’t yet know whether the rot is malignant. She hopes not. But as she stares into the vast, literal expanse below her and the metaphorical one in front of her, she hears, in her mind’s ear, the words that have been on the tip of her tongue (and yours too, if I’ve done my job right) since Terrence left us all hanging. “It’s over.”