Michelle Tea - Black Wave

Michelle looped Chekhov’s gun through the bungee cord and hung it around her neck. It would be awful if she shot herself in the face as she crawled. Don’t think don’t think don’t think. She thought that maybe guns were harder to shoot than you’d imagine. A friend in San Francisco had once gone to a shooting range with that gay self-defense group, the Pink Pistols. She’d returned with a sore, cramped finger, complaining how hard it had been to pull the trigger. Michelle crawled gingerly across the ladder and made it through her window. She removed her strange jewelry and laid it upon her kitchen table.

Immediately Michelle regretted not ransacking the man’s apartment. What was she thinking? She could have picked his pocket. She could have walked around and checked if there was anything she needed. The man was dead, nothing was of any use to him. What were the ethics of the apocalypse? If Michelle was dead and some nice queer girls came upon her she hoped they would help themselves to whatever they needed. She supposed that even if they ate her, why should she care if she was dead already?

Michelle surfed the Internet. She’d learned everything she needed to learn about Chekhov’s gun, which she had deduced was a.44 Magnum, which sounded like a a condom or brand of malt liquor. Michelle taught herself how to keep the thing locked. She practiced holding it in front of the bathroom mirror, aiming it at her reflection, squinting through the sight. After a bit the novelty of the gun wore off. Maybe she’d go shoot bottles with it, really learn how to handle it. But then, she didn’t want to waste the bullets, either. The gun was not a toy.

On the Interweb, Michelle read about a new global phenomenon. Since the end of the world began, everyone had been having intensely sensory dreams of love affairs. Michelle was always a fan of such articles — dreams, the afterlife, hauntings. Anything supernatural fascinated her. And she had had one of these dreams, hadn’t she? The boy in the garden. It wasn’t often that Michelle found her own experience reflected in the media. She read on. Some nutjobs were beginning to believe that the dreams were real. That the people in them were real people, alive on the earth right now. The article showed a picture of a couple smiling together, they lived a city or two away and had run into each other at a Chili’s. They couldn’t believe it. They recognized one another and they recognized their love, and had gotten married right away and were psyched to spend the End Times together.

And there were more couples like this. People began posting ads in papers and on Craigslist. Dreamtime missed connections. People found one another. Sometimes they liked each other and sometimes they didn’t. They hooked up or else were totally repulsed by the person, who looked nothing like they had in the dream. It left some people bitter and some people obsessed. Michelle opened a new tab and went over to Craigslist.

There were many In Search Of Dream Lover postings. Just reading them was like cracking open a book of psychedelic poetry. The ceiling was spinning, we were on top of it and you had three eyes, read one. We were on a soap opera set and we were being filmed by Princess Diana , another offered. Leaves flew from a tree like butterflies and carried us over a hole in the ground . Michelle really liked that one. Michelle wondered why no one had thought to use their dreams as personal ads before. Back when the world wasn’t ending and dreams were just dreams. It would have been a great way to get a vibe on someone.

That night Michelle dreamed she was having sex with a boy inside a painting. The paint was not yet dry and their sex tossed them against oily dunes of it, it got all over their skin but they liked it. Michelle was on top and the boy was shuddering beneath her. The ends of the boy’s long, greasy hair were clumped with wet color that slid across his cheeks and made him look wild. He was drunk but Michelle was not. Her body in the dream was a miracle, felt like a balsa-wood plane flung into the air. She rode him in a pool of paint glittered with sugar, the sprinkles clumped and hardened into little caverns, like the inside of a geode. The sparkle of it called to Michelle and she begged the boy to take her there, but no, the boy told her it would crumble, it was very delicate. Someday it was meant to be broken, but not by her. Michelle woke up.

The entire planet was dreaming of the lovers they would have had if only they had lived. In the dreams everyone was their highest self, everyone was present and their hearts were wide-open. It was a gift and a plea, from the planet perhaps, or from the universe, from the essence of life — no one knew enough about such things to be certain.

The planet is showing us how beautiful our lives will be if we stay here and work together to heal it, pleaded mystical people and ecologists on television. Psychologists deemed it an episode of mass hysteria on a scale previously unknown and commentators blamed the Internet and globalization for allowing it to spread so rapidly. Christians blamed the devil and deemed sleeping a sin, other religious people insisted it was God and that what was happening was a miracle.

Michelle found that it was possible to achieve a sort of lucidity in her dreams, causing the more fantastical elements to fall away in order to get closer to the truth of the affair. Dreaming that a creature had implanted a device in Michelle’s head, causing dark thoughts and spontaneous orgasms, Michelle became lucid and found herself holding a cell phone, masturbating on a pillow while a girl on the other end told her filthy stories. Dreaming that her junk was an endless supply of pastries, a cornucopia of tiny cupcakes and fat croissants and cream puffs, Michelle became lucid and found herself in bed with a boy so skinny Michelle forced him to eat baked goods off her own naked tailbone. Dreaming her face was a popped balloon, bits of rubber and ribbon dangling from her mouth, she became lucid and found herself with a girl who had kissed her so passionately Michelle’s lip had split against her tooth.

Michelle inspected shyly the bustling Internet world of dream missed connections. She found the anorexic pastry boy but he lived in Stockholm and his English was poor, and he was not even a boy but a girl, a fifteen-year-old girl who cut herself with razors and whose parents were poised to send her off to boarding school. The one who had busted her lip with a kiss, she too was a troubled teenager, with a bristling jet-black Mohawk and a Joy Division shirt hung on her slouched shoulders. The painter was a girl as well, also quite young. She emailed a photo of herself atop a horse, in a pair of jodhpurs and a velvet helmet, leaping over a small white fence. Michelle stopped emailing these children. She felt like a creep.

In the bookstore Michelle rang up a customer, a woman buying old feminist books from the 1970s, herbal healing and witchery. A book about periods. So many women didn’t even get periods anymore, hadn’t for years. Michelle’s were spotty. The doctor at the free clinic in San Francisco had told them everything was fine, no growths, no cancers, that’s just what was happening to some women. Michelle had had a dim concern about it, like what if she maybe wanted to have a baby someday, was she no longer able? But now that the world was ending it wasn’t an issue. Michelle felt a sad kind of relief. She’d always felt torn about having a kid and wished the decision could somehow be made for her — that the people she slept with could accidentally knock her up or that she would become infertile, anything to cancel the seesaw of indecision in her mind. And now it was done. No babies, no planet, no future. Most everyone who had become pregnant was having an abortion and those who weren’t looked disturbed. Michelle had glimpsed women too far along, committed to the things inside their giant bellies. They looked like animals at the pound, stuffed into too-small cages. A lot of pregnant women were killing themselves, but then a lot of people were killing themselves. Michelle didn’t know if the percentage was any higher.