Out there, p.4
Out There, page 4
But as years pass, men are less and less interested in what the Last Woman on Earth has to say. Thought pieces are published on Slate and Medium with titles like “The Increasing Irrelevance of the Woman.” The Last Woman on Earth reads comments on these articles, and on YouTube clips of her show, and on gossip blogs that dissect her nonexistent love life. Many men wish the Last Woman on Earth were better. She’s so average, they say. Why couldn’t we be left with Rihanna or Megan Fox? Or, if not a physical beauty, at least a woman who’s a genius, or one who knows lots of jokes. Men comment that her pies probably aren’t that good. She uses recipes from the old Martha Stewart website, and doesn’t even make her own dough. One commenter points out that there are thousands of talented male bakers in the world, but none of them gets his own show. Everything she does would be done better by one of earth’s numerous men. The Last Woman on Earth agrees with this assessment. She is often sad.
In the seventh season of her talk show, the Last Woman on Earth returns to the Oprah format. This time, she invites negative commenters onto the show and allows them to insult her to her face. Most of them are ashamed and say they’re sorry, which irritates her because it does not make for good TV. Once in a while she’ll get a real fighter who tells her exactly what he thinks of her. The Last Woman on Earth feels truly alive in these moments. She instructs her cameramen to zoom in on her as the man spews his vitriol, capturing the subtle pain that flickers across her stoic face. But the audience hates these episodes. We only have one woman, her supporters point out. We need to treat her right. All the men who criticize her on camera are murdered sooner or later. The Last Woman on Earth is horrified by the violence committed in her name. She goes back to baking pies.
When the Last Woman on Earth dies, days shy of her fortieth birthday, the 405 is shut down for a ten-mile funeral procession that is simulcast worldwide. No one goes to work that day. Everyone watches the funeral of the Last Woman on Earth, in bars and recreation centers and women’s restrooms that have been repurposed as shrines commemorating the former existence of women. Men try to outdo each other in performing their grief. They dress up as the Last Woman on Earth, wearing wigs and lipstick and aprons over vintage circle skirts. Privately, they are relieved that the Last Woman on Earth is gone. They can finally do and say whatever they want. The English language is restored to its former simplicity. Everyone speaks freely about the fate of mankind.
It is a golden era for men, those fifty-six years it takes for the human species to die out. The Last Man on Earth is ninety-four years old when he moves to Los Angeles. He broadcasts subversive, thought-provoking, and hilarious skits from the studio where the Last Woman on Earth had once taped her show. He wishes there was someone left to see his show, which is much better than hers was. He should have had his own talk show sixty years ago. Instead, the Last Woman on Earth had been handed a talk show, not because she deserved it, but simply because she was a woman. The Last Man on Earth dies with resentment in his heart.
Heart Seeks Brain
At happy hour, my coworker Sarah and I bond, in the way of women, by cataloguing the flaws of our internal organs. We discover we have a lot in common. Our carotid arteries are of similar diameter, thicker than the feminine ideal. Both our spleens are mildly engorged. We both have always wished our small intestines were a few feet longer, like those of the world’s top fashion models. We have longed also for smaller, daintier kidneys. Sarah tells me about her high school rival, Betsy, whose kidneys were the size of a toddler’s fists and perfectly shaped. Betsy was the darling of all the renal boys, who in Sarah’s school were the cutest.
But Betsy never had anything on my liver, Sarah says. She tells me about her abnormally slender liver, only eight centimeters thick. I am jealous, and say so. In eighth grade I tried to slim my liver to win the affection of Robbie Brookshire, a precocious hepatic fanatic. I consumed nothing but cranberry juice and flaxseed oil for weeks, until I was so malnourished I could hardly get out of bed. It didn’t work anyway. The one time we made out, in a Wendy’s restroom, Robbie immediately put his hands under my shirt. His fingers pressed beneath my right ribcage, probing until he could feel the lower edge of my liver. He pulled away, disappointed by my liver’s breadth, and we avoided each other for the next five years.
But that was junior high, twenty years ago, when many boys were liver-crazy. They were unsophisticated, having barely hit puberty, and were only mimicking the liver mania that was at that time ubiquitous in music videos and the centerfold pages of men’s magazines. I play up my jealousy of Sarah’s liver because I’m eager to gain her trust. We’re sitting at a round metal table outside a boardwalk restaurant a few blocks from our office building. The sun is setting over the ocean and we both have our backs turned to it. I asked Sarah out for drinks because she just started working at our office, and I could use a new friend—a real one, not just a coworker. My female friends have all coupled up with men who are feeding off their organs and whose organs they are feeding off of, a symbiotic process that will continue until they break up or one of them dies. If and when they return to me, single again, they’ll be diminished in body and spirit—feet swollen from renal failure, or eyes jaundiced, or breath coming short, a piece of their lung or liver or kidney on a shelf in some man’s house.
Sarah tells me it’s the same with her friends. They all claim it’s worth it to be in a relationship, despite the risk of permanent deformity. I know how it is, Sarah says. You’re so relieved to escape a relationship more or less intact, and then you get lonely and jump right back in for another round with someone new. You think, if only you could find a partner whose desire manifests in a relatively noninvasive way. But of course it’s a foolish hope. The more someone loves you, the more he’ll want to meddle with the most vital parts of you, and vice versa. The only way to not hurt someone is not to love him enough, to remain unmoved by the thought of his organs pulsing beneath a thin layer of skin.
I’ve never heard it put so well. I nod dumbly and peel open a packet of crackers. I tell Sarah how I’m always on the lookout for a heart man who will appreciate my lopsided ventricles. I thought I found one last week, on a first date with a thickset mathematician who wore unfashionable straight-leg jeans that somehow suggested sexual competence. His eyes flared at the mention of my left ventricle, which is three millimeters longer than the right. I continued, with cautious hope, to detail my circulatory system. My blood is type O. My red blood cells are on the small side, with a diameter of six micrometers. I described my aorta in lurid detail. His mouth had fallen open. Later, in his car, I drew back my hair and allowed him to press his thumbs along my external jugulars, which are unusually pronounced for a woman.
My date, it turned out, was a classic vein man. Sarah rolls her eyes and says vein men are tedious. They all want to be vampires, she says, it’s pathetic. I disagree. I’ve always preferred the attentions of circulatory men. In my view, a vein man is simply a heart man whose development has stalled. Sarah asks if I’ve heard from the mathematician since our date. I admit he hasn’t called yet. Shouldn’t have led with the jugulars, she says with a shrug.
The sun has slipped behind the docks. We order a dozen oysters and another bottle of wine. We’re quiet while the waiter sets the platter of oysters in front of us. He takes his time arranging the paper napkins and miniature forks. He is young, tall, voluptuously handsome, and he lingers over our table, staring at our abdomens while he lines up our forks and tops off our wine glasses. A gastro man, typically shameless.
Sarah picks up an oyster and dabs it with horseradish. I ask what she’s into, and she blushes. I always say I’m into livers, she says, just to see what a guy will do for me. I know he’s committed if he’ll go under the knife to get me a tissue sample. I’ve got jars at home in a mini-fridge. It was like a sport in my twenties. Once I had a piece of their liver, I lost interest, I knew I had them. Anyway, my real thing is spines.
She rushes on—I know, I know, and believe me, I wouldn’t expect anyone to do it who I wasn’t really sure about. I’ll spend months feeling a guy out. It’s hard to find a partner who’s open to the idea of even localized paralysis. That’s sort of what the whole liver thing was, like a test of his devotion. If he’s not willing to give me a liver sample, there’s no way he’ll go through lumbar puncture to get me a vial of spinal fluid. And that’s only the beginning of what I want from him.
Sarah’s words hang in the air. I’m shocked by her cavalier attitude regarding spine kink. I want to choose my words carefully, so as not to offend her. I think it’s great you have such a clear idea of what you want in a partner, I say finally.
Our attractive waiter has turned on the heat lamps. When he comes to check on us he forgets himself and asks an awkwardly phrased question: How are your stomachs responding to the oysters?
Fine, Sarah says, shooting him a look meant to contain him. He retreats, humiliated. You can never pick out a gastro man anymore, she says. They used to all be pervy little dweebs in their mom’s basement. Now they look like that. She sips at her wine, and for a moment I dislike her. Sarah’s disdain for the waiter seems hypocritical, given her own extreme tastes.
What about you? she says. What’s your thing? I pause, considering whether to give my usual tame answer of kidneys, or tell her the truth. Like Sarah, I’m into the nervous system, but my passion is for the brain itself. My ideal relationship would be with a heart man who possesses a powerful, methodical brain, preferably an expert in some STEM discipline. My dream is that we will marry and he will allow me to take his brain from him, year after year, a tiny bit at a time, through shock treatments and partial lobotomies, until he can’t function on his own and I have to care for the drooling husk of his body until it expires. It is only for this that I’d surrender pieces of my literal heart.
In my whole life I’ve told only a few people about this desire; brain play remains the ultimate taboo. A person can function with three quarters of a liver, a lung trimmed at the edges, a few punctured veins. But once you fuck with the brain, consent becomes an issue. Sarah waits for my answer. I know she doesn’t really care about me, doesn’t find me interesting. If anything, she might use my deviance against me in the future, when we are both vying for promotion. So I tell her I’m into kidneys, and she shrugs and says, popular choice.
The waiter brings our check. On my way out I slip him my number. We meet under the boardwalk when his shift is over. We lie on the sand and he pulls out a stethoscope, running its cold diaphragm over my abdomen. He listens to the oysters and crackers and wine work their way through my digestive tract. This is the furthest I’ll let him go. A gastro man is lucky for what he can get, even if he’s young and gorgeous, and the waiter seems to know this. I stare at the moon and imagine it looks down on my love, the human casing of the brain I have dreamed of ever since I was a girl crouched behind the refrigerator door, fondling heads of cauliflower without knowing why.
The Void Wife
Elise planned to enter the void alone. She didn’t want to be anyone’s void wife, and certainly not Robert’s.
Unfortunately, Robert wasn’t taking no for an answer. On the day the void was scheduled to hit San Francisco, Elise snuck away from the camp they’d made on Ocean Beach with other void refugees. She hid from him in the ruins of the Sutro Baths, gazing out at the Pacific while behind her, Oakland was negated.
The void had appeared six months ago in a slender belt around the globe near the 90th meridian, slicing through Dubuque and Guatemala, Bhutan and the Kirov Islands of Russia. Since then it had expanded in both directions at the rate of seventy miles a day, like two immense lids drawing over the eye of the earth.
In Kansas City, Elise and her boyfriend, Dave, had watched groups of people holding hands as they hurled themselves against the veil. Their silhouettes, limbs outstretched, remained outlined for a few seconds before fading to black. Everyone believed that the void was a portal to an unspoiled earth. Everyone also believed you’d exist for eternity with the people you were touching at the moment of absorption. Elise held out against this idiocy. Death was just death, same as always.
Now Elise wished she’d voided herself with Dave when she had the chance. At 4:00 p.m. the cruise ship Robert had commandeered would push back from Pier 31. The ship would churn through the San Francisco Bay and pass beneath the Golden Gate Bridge before setting sail on the Pacific. Its passengers would enjoy a few additional months of existence at sea until the margins of void closed around them. Elise knew she should crawl into a sea cave and wait for the void to take her alone. If she was wrong, and there was an eternity, she couldn’t risk being stuck there with Robert.
But Elise was a coward. Elise loved existence. She rushed back to camp, where Robert was packing the Prius.
“Cutting it close!” he said, kissing both her cheeks. He was still somehow wearing cologne.
* * *
—
After their Kansas City apartment was absorbed by the void, Elise and Dave had driven west to collect their parents. The first stop was Oklahoma, where Elise’s mother and father lived in a replica of her childhood home. Tornadoes had leveled the ranch house once when she was twelve and again when she was in college. Her parents rebuilt each time, with slightly less care than before. Elise stood in the living room, making note of the canted ceiling, the rough margins of carpet, the unpainted drywall.
“We’ve stayed put through worse storms,” Elise’s mom said.
“It’s not a tornado, Mom. It’s a curtain of absence that negates everything it touches.”
“Might as well be negated in our own house, then.”
“You kids can come with us, if you want,” Elise’s dad said. Her parents were sitting on the couch, her mom’s legs draped over her dad’s lap. They were ready.
The wall behind the couch began to dim. Elise grabbed her mom’s bony wrists and tried to wrench her from the couch, but her mom shook her off and slapped her face.
“Get on, then, if you’re so keen on existing,” her mom said. It was true: Elise was keen on existing, if only for a few more months. She’d imagined driving cross-country with her parents like they had when she was a kid, processing a few last things together before the end. But it was clear that her parents were already lost.
Elise and Dave stood on the sidewalk and watched the house be eaten away in pixels of void. They got back in the car only when it was certain that her parents no longer existed, unable to change their minds and come along, even with perhaps a voided-out smeary stump where an arm or leg had been. Elise cried quietly, staring into the side mirror at the satiny black wall.
“It’s okay,” Dave said. “They have each other in eternity.”
“You believe in that crap now?”
He shrugged. “I don’t not believe in it.”
“I thought you were an atheist.”
Dave said that God had nothing to do with it.
* * *
—
The next day they rolled into Colorado Springs, where Dave’s dad lived in a large condominium complex. They sat with him by the pool, which was clotted with children. School had been called off due to the encroaching void. It was 11:00 a.m. and already hot. Drops of sweat fell from Dave’s dad’s chin into the joint he was rolling.
Dave begged his dad to come with them.
“Sometimes you just gotta cash in your chips,” Dave’s dad said. A woman in her fifties, wearing heavy makeup and a tall lacquered hairdo, brought over a crystal bowl of fruit salad. She put her hand on the meaty shoulder of Dave’s dad and glared over it.
“Fruit salad,” the woman said. It did not seem like an offer. Elise guessed that Dave’s dad had taken this woman as his void wife, and she didn’t want children from his first marriage joining them in eternity.
Dave cried as he hugged his dad goodbye.
His dad shrugged. “Why’re you crying? You know that void’s a straight chute to heaven.”
In the car, Dave said he was kind of glad his dad refused to come, because that meant his mom would be more likely to join them.
“I know it’s terrible, but if I had to lose one parent to the void it would definitely be my dad.”
“ ‘Straight chute to heaven,’ ” Elise said. “Must be nice to buy into that fairy tale.”
“Maybe he’s right, Elise,” Dave said, irritated. “Wouldn’t you rather think that your parents are in heaven right now?”
Elise’s tears resurged upon mention of her voided parents. Dave muttered an apology and handed her a Subway napkin from the sheaf in his door pocket.
* * *
—
Dave’s mom lived in the Rockies with her boyfriend, Stuart, a geologist. The back of their cabin jutted over a chasm. The four of them sat in Adirondack chairs on the deck and looked at the mountains. Behind them, the sun was setting, bloodying the snow-capped peaks.
“We can’t wait to watch the mountains get voided,” Dave’s mom said.
