The humidity brings the darkness close, like a cat sleeping against your body. The air gusting from the train station becomes clammy, gains velocity. Urban petrichor—oil, mildew, river—suddenly overwhelms the quotidian fragrances of piss and rotting food. A few moments before water begins stubbling the pavement, I think of my umbrella, at home on the shelf by my door, flanked by weed gummies and N95s.
It descends like a veil, its rush quelling the anxiety of having been caught unawares: It’s too late now. Accept your fate1 . Through my glasses, windows and wristwatches and wrappers take turns flashing white, losing and regaining their composure as I hurry back to my apartment. Every surface boils with new prisms for the light’s piercing, a dilemma for the astigmatic who has not yet let go and let God. I learned the word surrender from a skywriting witch, and so have always associated the concept with looking upward.
The world is getting hotter. I’ve known this since childhood, but it became something I think about on a daily basis in the late teens, when wildfires first began keeping Californians indoors for weeks—even longer—at a stretch. My home, stolen land built on borrowed time, is drying up. My city, meanwhile, is melting, as Margaret Hamilton might say2. If only it was something I could know second-hand, through the observations of native New Yorkers. But I know it myself, even after having only lived here for five years. The seasons are softening into each other, though the highs continue to spike. More water, more heat, more closing darkness.
Like you, I do what needs to be done. But for some reason, the cyberdystopias of my youth are where I turn for relief: the monsoon skyline of Blade Runner (1982); the violent petri dish of Neuromancer’s Tokyo Bay; the digital mists of Transmetropolitan. Twentieth-century sci-fi lent new dimension to the noir’s dark precipitation, and to my displeasure, I move through it in real time. That is what a future could look like, I think, desperately searching for something between miracle and horror, though I can’t see a thing, blinded as I am by the storm.
I know I can’t reassure you, though I seek reassurance for myself. Perhaps it’s most meaningful to offer you my company. I’m here. Are you?
DecrimNY is fundraising to cover transportation, meals, and direct support for a May 15th trip to Albany, where they will be advocating for the Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act. Please donate if you can.
Thank you for reading and sharing. Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel here. Learn the history of this newsletter here.
Twitter recently told me that this sound is indistinguishable from that of chicken frying.
Did you know that Betty Danko, Hamilton’s stunt double in The Wizard of Oz (1939), was severely burned during the “Surrender Dorothy” skywriting sequence? She was hospitalized for 11 days and her legs were permanently scarred.
over the past two years, i’ve listened to the existing three books of The Locked Tomb series five or six times. it’s my almost-equivalent of the stories you list here, but it’s also sort of about the senescence of the post-apocalypse resurrection. which feels comforting somehow, that whatever comes after us will also be destroyed eventually