Michelle Tea - Black Wave

You’ve got to write a screenplay, Kyle said robustly. Kyle was wicked optimistic. Not even the pending apocalypse could challenge the fantasy he’d concocted for his sister. Michelle would write a screenplay and he would inherit his crazed boss’s successful casting agency. No longer bullied by his narcissistic overlord, he would proudly reject projects that dealt in stereotypes. No more Latina maids and gay hairdressers. The fat best friend would get the man unless the man in fact wanted another man. Kyle dreamed of these future days while being abused by his boss, vacuuming up the chipped glass of another ashtray shattered against the wall in a fit of rage. Kyle’s boss didn’t even smoke. She kept ashtrays around to express her anger.

The previous day, before everything changed, Kyle had been auditioning a roomful of young African American actresses vying for the role of a crack whore in a fake independent — meaning, a film with the aesthetic of an independent but with the content and budget of the studio producing it. Kyle’s stomach twisted tighter each time a woman entered his office wearing ridiculous, humiliating clothing — mismatched platform shoes, shirts stained with food, the poky outlines of their braless nipples. They had given it their all, every one of them, and this depressed Kyle even more because the part was awful, they were all too good for the shitty little film, but that was life, that was the life they had all signed up for, there in Los Angeles. Kyle had signed up to cast shitty, offensive films and these actresses had signed up to embody them and they were all in it together. Kyle adopted the persona of a weary faggot who knew their plight well, yet also knew better than to presume he could know what it was to walk in their shoes, the mismatched Lucite stilettos of a brilliant black actress fated to spend the end-times portraying stumbling crack whores in crappy movies.

Michelle didn’t know how she and her brother would make this leap from the assistant and the barely employable to Hollywood sibling power duo before the world ended, but Michelle loved what her brother saw in her. Had they been born into a life of privilege, if Michelle had been able to identify and then believe in all the options that were out there, then yes, maybe she would be able to clamber out of the ghetto that her brokenness and queerness and political affiliations had kept her in. But deep in her heart Michelle did not believe that the world was so open to her, and so she sniffed out jobs that paid single digits an hour and every job she scored felt like a huge scam, like she had tricked the employers into thinking she was someone else — a college graduate perhaps, a clean person, a person with a rich wardrobe who did not kill cockroaches with her bare hands.

Michelle and Kyle sat on the sectional sofa in his North Hollywood one bedroom, packages from In-N-Out Burger nestled in their arms, the greasy steam opening the pores in their faces like a trash facial. They put french fries into their mouths and watched the world fall apart. Kyle had cable and a better TV and Michelle could now see how blue the skies were, how brightly the flames curled out from buildings, like solar flares shooting off the surface of the sun. The people leaping from high dark windows were people, not pixels. They sat and watched and watched. Eventually, they shut it off. They agreed that it was too much, it had been on for hours and the networks were just milking everyone’s anxiety, it was sick — there was nothing new to show but they were desperate to keep us there, watching.

Michelle was hooked. One newscaster, stationed in Geneva, kept promising that some buildings were about to blow up and Michelle wanted to see it happen. She knew that there was something really wrong with her desire to keep watching. She was in the grips of a detached fascination. She wanted the images on the television to wear her down so she could truly feel whatever it felt like to truly feel what was happening. Surely this alarmed, rubbernecking interest was not what she should be feeling. She was supposed to be feeling something a few layers down, something authentic and meaningful. Michelle feared she was not having an authentic experience of the beginning of the end of the world. She was having a deeply authentic experience of inauthenticity.

The shots of New York City had rattled her the most. It was hard matching up the city she’d visited so many times with this chaotic landscape of rolling debris clouds and screaming, scorched humans. It was like watching Blade Runner and looking for Los Angeles. New York was like one of those asteroid-hits-earth films. Kyle poked at the remote, finally settling on a film about a plucky lady alcoholic who gets sent to rehab and eventually comes to understand that she truly is an alcoholic, and then she finds love — real, sober-person love — and she dumps her British party-man boyfriend to be with her new recovery soul mate. When it was very late, Michelle was scared to go to sleep, to leave Kyle awake on the sectional. He had such problems with anxiety and Michelle was sure he would sit up all night in front of the plasma television, watching suicides and having panic attacks. Which is exactly what he did.

Michelle slept deeply the night she learned the world was ending. She’d feared long hours tossing and turning, humming with disbelief, the news shows rolling through her mind, images of buildings already tumbling. She was sure her fear of a nearby, immediate catastrophe would keep her uselessly alert. What would prevent anyone from beginning the inevitable destruction of Los Angeles tonight? She considered lunatics, the barely hinged madmen and madwomen clutching at their slipping sanity with sweat-greased fingers. Why should they hold on any longer? Maybe the earth itself would awaken to the diabolical plotting of the human race and shake them off its back. Anything seemed possible that night, and Michelle felt herself an impotent sentry on the lookout for nothing she could control, fretting away the darkened hours. She worried about Kyle and his nerves, his mind lit with horror, anxious thoughts careening like pinballs — metallic, smacked with flippers, a panic multiball, image after image zooming out from a consciousness cramped with the effort of flinging them away.

But Michelle slept. She’d waited for her mind to engage the gears of panic, but instead she began to dream.

Michelle dreamed of a boy. In the dream she walked alongside him in a great garden. His arm was wound around her waist and with each step they took her hip rubbed against his. In sync, they curved around a path that brought them by tall, wiry stalks of echinacea, their purple petals peeled back in submission to the sun. Their ankles rolled as they navigated the cobblestones in fancy shoes: hers bright as a child’s toy with plastic chains and shining strips of leather, his delicately soled, the leather a carpaccio, slippers really, to be worn climbing in and out of fairy-tale carriages. Michelle enjoyed the sight of their shoes shuffling in unison through the garden. They paused beside a bush of angel’s-trumpets and huffed the waxy horn of each dangling blossom. They rubbed the fuzz of the kangaroo paw, were dazzled by the new-wavy hue of the sticks on fire, Euphorbia tirucalli. The boy spoke and Michelle thought, I’m Euphorbic! — so blissed out and goofy her observing self wondered what she was on.

In her dream the boy knew the name of every plant. In her dream Michelle understood Latin, the noble, ancient music of it making sense. A receptor in her mind was activated and in an instant she felt an understanding of all languages! Understood that she had always known them! Her mind was a hive of words. A rush of excitement washed over her. She turned back to the boy, who was more beautiful than all the flowers, more aesthetically pleasing than the water fountain with its patinous bronze, than the curve of the cobblestones, the stitching of their fancy shoes. His voice, speaking Latin, was sweeter than the water’s splash and trickle, the patter of their feet upon the stone.