Noah Cicero - Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products.

Monica read the Talking Points and said to Ashley, “This is fucking insane.”

“It’s logical.”

“I guess so. But I like my car. I like cellphones and flat screen televisions.”

“That’s because you grew up that way, that’s all. And you don’t like those things, you feel comfortable around those things. There is a difference between ‘liking’ something and feeling ‘comfortable’ around something. A lot of older white people feel ‘comfortable’ when they don’t see any black people working at a business or in their house. Does that make it right?”

“Are you saying I’m some sort of racist but in terms of my lifestyle, like I’m prejudiced against a world that doesn’t have cellphones and flat screen televisions?”

“Yeah, you don’t understand it, so you dismiss it.”

“I don’t know.”

“We are comfortable being surrounded by gadgets and science but humans lived for thousands of years never having those things, and in those thousands of years we never had man-induced global warming or so much destruction to the environment and we never spent so little time with our families and neighbors. Before automobiles, government was very local, and people created the products they used, from clothes to plates and cups. We had a world of unique things that we made with our own hands. It was different before, and I believe better.”

“But people died a lot earlier then?”

“Yes, but they lived a life where they created things. What is better: living a life creating things or working for some corporation pumping out plastic parts all day, or working in an office doing work for a company that doesn’t care if you exist or not? What is better?”

“God, I don’t know. I need to find Mike.”

“Go find Mike and you’ll see.”

Monica picked up her latte and went out the door. She didn’t say goodbye to Ashley. She thought of her father again and how much he loved his flat screen television.

Monica drove for a day and a night. The meeting place was a thousand miles away from Nevitsky’s house. She couldn’t stop thinking about Michael. She wanted him back so badly. She wanted to hold him, she wanted to laugh with him, she liked how he made her feel safe. She wanted to feel safe again. There didn’t seem to be any safety left in the world. She wondered if she was doing the right thing. She doubted if trying to find Michael was the right thing to do. She doubted if it would make her life better. Monica considered the pros and cons. If she didn’t find Michael, she could return home and get a job designing websites or doing IT for a large corporation. She could work hard for years and get promotions and maybe one day have enough money to have kids and get a house when she was like thirty-five. Maybe if she tried hard enough it would work. She was still young and pretty. She could find someone else to love, a man who wouldn’t disappear.

She imagined that Michael was dead and it didn’t matter. What if she found him and it was just a sad grave? What would she do then? She didn’t know what to think. Nothing in her life had prepared her to think about such things. In college they never trained her to troubleshoot her boyfriend disappearing because of political reasons. She kept thinking about what Nevitsky said, how we became Soviets. She realized that was probably a hint as to what kind of situation Michael was in, but she had never studied Soviet history. She knew the Soviets were the communist government of Russia from the beginning of the last century to the end of the century, but she didn’t know the specifics. She realized that because she didn’t know history she could not troubleshoot the situation. She didn’t have the power to think about what was happening to her. She was ignorant. She decided that if she lived through this situation she would find out how all these things came together. Then it occurred to her that was why she and so many people are so easy to control: because they didn’t know history. They couldn’t place all these events together to make sense of their reality. She realized that her reality made no sense. That her mind couldn’t make sense of what she was feeling. She was putting every effort into understanding what she was seeing and feeling, but she couldn’t because she did not contain enough knowledge.

She realized she might die. The fear of death crept into her body and made her want to vomit. She had barely thought about her own death her entire life. She didn’t like to think about death. She pulled over on the side of the road and took more Xanax and Adderall. She realized she had not slept in two days. She went into a gas station and bought a large coffee and sucked it down with donuts. She felt sick. The idea of dying kept coming back to her. Was it even worth it, dying for a man? Dying for love? Dying for good sex and laughs and a possible future with children and a nice house. But if she was dead, she would enjoy none of that. She became afraid. But she wanted Michael back. She wanted to hold him again. She realized she had a reason . For the first time in her life she had a reason to do something. Up to that point she had spent her life doing what she was told. She was told to go to school, she went. She was told to go to college, she went. She was told to get a job with health care, she did. She realized her whole life was founded on the Five Pillars. She was nothing but a little robot, controlled, a tame little animal. This thought screamed in her head. They had taken her power as a human. They had locked her out of her own power. Her power was there since she was born but the government and the media did everything they could to divert her away from her own power. Her own primitive power of feeling and poetry.

Monica had spent her life doing the logical thing, believing that if she did what she was told she would be rewarded, that if she kept her head down and charged ahead in life, life would give her what she wanted. But life had not given her what she wanted. It had actually taken what she wanted from her. She had taken pills her whole life to reduce this feeling, to make the anxiety go away, pop another Xanax and it will all go away. She decided not to take Xanax anymore, but she would still take Adderall. She wanted all the anxiety now, she wanted to feel it all, to be submerged in her feelings, into the poetry that blasts and beats, resounds and trumpets in her heart. She wanted to hear the war drums pounding in her soul. She felt so extreme, she wanted to scream. She wanted to smash everything and shoot cars driving by. She wanted to shoot herself. She considered pulling over on the side of the road and blowing her brains out. She imagined slowly stopping the car, putting the car in park, turning the car off, leaning back in the front seat, pulling the gun out of the holster, then putting the gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger. It would all be over, all the fear and anxiety, all the stupidity and absurdity, all the meaningless life she had lived and was forced to live. But she had to get Michael. She had to solve this problem. She punched the steering wheel, she began to cry, she popped another Adderall and screamed. She had to push ahead.

She felt scared to die. But it made sense now. Up to that car ride across America to find Michael, her life had not made sense. But there was a reason now for her life, for her behavior. She believed she was even having fun.

She made it to the diner where she was supposed to meet the CIA agent. She didn’t want to meet any CIA agents. She didn’t want to be at a diner in a giant cornfield. She didn’t want her life to be changed so radically. She got out of her car, looked around and saw empty fields stretching for miles. She realized that she had never been to a place like this. There were people wearing overalls and cowboy hats. There were pickup trucks with rebel flag stickers on the windows. She walked into the diner. The diner looked old and sad. The servers were overweight women who had spent their lives in these fields, underneath giant skies and pounding rain storms, with amazing sunrises and sunsets.