Michelle Tea - Black Wave

A decade spent in the downtrodden underground had warped Michelle’s ambitions. In a place where powerless people fought over who had the least amount of power, Michelle had applied herself to the acquisition of hardship. People bragged about and competed for who had it the worst. Whose parents were brokest, whose PTSD the most damaging. “Calling people out on their shit” was a worthwhile way to pass the time. Michelle wanted her last days to be of a higher quality. She knew that she would likely leave the world as broke— broker —than she had entered it, but she was through pretending she was somehow the better for it, had chosen a superior mode of existence rather than been assigned a losing lotto ticket of economics and genetics at birth and then written a love story about it. She also thought she would think about trying to stop drinking.

Michelle took a shower. The news of the coming calamity had not impacted water purification, the plumbing that snaked through her building and out beneath the street, tubing off — where? Where did Michelle’s water come from? Where did it go when it spiraled down the drain? The world would end before Michelle had the chance to understand how it had ever worked. Outside the rotted bathroom window the freeway whizzed with cars. Tiny cars, zippy electric things propelled by their batteries, plus some older ones buzzing on compost and then, every so often, a lumbering antique wheezed by, gargling gasoline.

Michelle often read news articles that explored how the poor, in their ignorance, destroyed their own environments, be they Los Angelenos torching their neighborhood grocery stores or South Americans slashing their rain forests. The poor inherited the archaic systems of the rich as the rich moved on to better ways of life the poor could not afford. And so the poor drove their gasoline hand-me-downs, sold away their corner of the earth and ate the last endangered sea turtle. Michelle imagined the poor would be blamed for the earth’s catastrophe, the way gay people and artists got blamed for gentrification when people in suits came to town and the landlords jacked up the rent.

A crash happened on the freeway below, a battery car driven straight into the wall. It looked like a television show. Michelle realized she only ever saw cars crash on television. After the one car crashed, another car, gas powered, crashed beside it. It didn’t need to crash, it’s like it was inspired. It simply followed suit, swirling the wheel and aiming itself into the wall. It took three cars crashed on the bank of the freeway, accordioned and steaming, for Michelle to realize she was witnessing suicides. She turned off her shower and climbed out of the tub. Michelle felt the urge to return to the window, to gawk at the spectacle of the fire, but also to convince herself of what was happening because it felt unreal. The smoke streamed down her nose and clutched at her throat, choking her. She did not return to the window. She would probably begin seeing lots of car crashes, she thought.

Michelle moved through her bathroom gingerly, as if through a haunted house. It felt like she could trip an unseen wire and cause the roof to collapse or a car to burst through her walls. The wail of fire trucks and ambulances pierced the air. She zipped herself into a dress perhaps originally worn by a stewardess for an airline that went bankrupt in 1971. It was Creamsicle orange and woven from polyester so dense it could stop a bullet. It had a weird mock-turtleneck neckline, golden buttons angling down the torso, and box pleats. The second she zipped herself into it Michelle’s armpits began to stink. She pulled her hair into a bun atop her head. She looked like a waitress on Star Trek: Enterprise .

Michelle boiled a pot of pasta and plopped a chunk of margarine into the tangled noodles. She walked the food into the bedroom, something she normally avoided lest the roaches follow and climb through her hair as she slept. She settled onto the floor with her pasta and coffee, her back against the bed. On the television, planes smacked into buildings in an unrecognizable country, perhaps somewhere in Eastern Europe. The planes on the television dropped burning to the ground, the image synced with the smell of smoking automobiles coming in through the rotted bathroom window. All over the world, wherever there were streets, people were running through them. Wherever there were buildings, people were leaping from them. Or blowing them up. The world was a sandcastle doomed to the tide. Why not experience the release of demolition? Buildings vaporized, became a rolling cloud of debris, curling through the streets like a sideways mushroom cloud. It looked like a monster approaching, the shockwave footsteps of a giant lizard. The people who survived it stood stunned and dusted in the street, shit in their hair, speaking to news cameras with the glaze of shock upon them.

Michelle thought it was irresponsible of the journalists to speak to these victims. They needed medical attention, ambulances, all of them. Michelle did not want to watch these people. They looked like they’d had strokes, how they could hardly speak, their twitching faces and their stammer. Michelle chewed her pasta. The TV was so staticky she could barely see the footage of people suiciding from bridges and towers. They were pixels merging into pixels. Michelle began to cry. At the idea of their fear, the moment when they understood they were about to die, even though they had chosen it, that moment when they were both alive and dead, there had to be a split second of instinctive regret, it made Michelle weep with spooky grief. The mock turtleneck of her polyester dress absorbed her tears like a parched landscape. Her hangover was powerful, she was all jangled nerves. She lay down on the floor and cried, the bowl of pasta on her stomach. The phone rang, and it was one of her mothers.

Have you seen the planes? Kym wanted to know. No one ever wanted to talk to Kym about television but today all anyone could do was watch and comment. It was her time to shine. The one in Ukraine? The one in Ohio?

Not The One In Ohio.

Oh my god. And the people, did you see them jumping in New York and in London?

I Saw New York, Not London.

Kym had been tuned in for hours. The carnage filled her with fear, yes, and sadness, of course, but also with an odd satisfaction. She knew something like this would happen. She knew it would get too bad, was getting too bad, had gotten too bad. People could not become incapacitated from their food and water, from the rays conjured to enliven cell phones and tiny gadgets, from computers. Think of all the computers, the dead computers piled upon each other, leaching poison into the earth and the water table. Think of all the new computers, millions and millions being birthed each day by third world women wearing gloves and masks to keep the deathiness of the machines off them, good luck, fat chance. People could not be gasping for air in the very air of their time and not have a solution dealt out to them eventually. A terrible solution for a terrible problem. It was a cancer. People were a cancer on their very own body and like a cancer they would band together and kill, cell after cell. Kym expressed this into her telephone, a true landline, a thick wire curling from a heavy receiver. The phone had been manufactured in the 1980s, it was safe.

Michelle thought Kym’s metaphors were a little off, but her mom was stoned and Michelle got the general gist.

It’s True, Michelle said simply. You Were Right. Michelle was prone on the floor, the phone jammed into her ear, the television rolling its loop of destruction. There’s A Lot I Don’t Understand, Michelle began, I Don’t Know If It’s Because I Actually Have A Bit Of A Hangover, I’m Not Going To Lie—