There’s life on other planets, and we’re fighting again.

Not so much fighting each other, me and Hazel, but rather the hundred little obstacles we confront daily in the world: electric bills, uninsured vehicles, the price of groceries—it’s a love language in itself that we’re each willing to be the other’s proxy for all these petty aggravations.

When the need for this routine is exhausted, from my phone I will play serious, dramatic music like Vivaldi or some Dies Irae thundering, and we will each see how long we can continue arguing. It’s become a playlist of losing first-smirks.

Part of being good at relationships is being good at making up—reeling it in and remembering that you wouldn’t ever fight this much in a vacuum; it takes a lot of effort and shit-traps laid by whoever’s making the world harder for everyone else.

I love Hazel because she makes the world easier. Even though I could tell she had a better childhood because she didn’t know why I put dead batteries in the freezer, she only wants to help. She gets why the kids at her school are always so glum when asked about the future. Her life’s ambition is to write a Newbery winner that prepares children to confront the world’s hostilities. I try to avoid getting asked about my aspirations anymore.

Instead of finishing college like Hazel, I once had an emergency dental bill that ate up what student loans I could get in the first place. Just a little molar work without insurance, and now I've been lying my way through employee background checks for almost a decade.

During what felt like a lower point in my finances, I met Hazel in a charter school library where she still worked as an assistant while getting her teaching certificate. I was a special education safety associate helping manage the overflow. Once a week, I would shepherd five special-needs students with aggressive behavioral issues to pick new books before the less-repellent children arrived for their reading time.

The day she helped me break up a fistfight over the quiet corner beanbag, I checked in with her after my shift, and we got a drink. After that, I started blasting resumes and abusing LinkedIn etiquette until I got an interview at a phone farm that paid better and sucked no worse. Our first month’s hangouts were nervously frugal, and we spent much of the time making each other laugh at picnic tables. Hazel didn’t mind. She was alarmingly funny. Enough to make me question if I could keep up or if over a decade of adulthood had coated my brain in a plaque of carbon-based stress fossils. How long before she noticed how sanded down I was?

The Big News was simultaneous enough to interrupt our third date—welcomed in the moment, as the autopay for my utilities had wiped my debit account to zero just minutes before ordering ice cream cones. Instead, we read and reread our way to the bottom of the available articles.

Ronan Klent—CEO, Trillionaire, world’s most inescapable person—had discovered life on another planet.

“Ten years ago?” said Hazel. “He’s been sitting on this since before the astronauts thing?”

We knew Klent had been doing a lot with space—rockets and bases and what one of Hazel’s coworkers called “colonizer pastimes.” One of the online conflicts was over the depots of hydrogen that he kept in orbit for topping off his spacecraft, which he insisted were necessary for missions and not “permanent bombs over your head.” NASA had declined contracts to use the depots, which could have been read as another in a streak of tensions between them and the better-funded Klent.

While you can do a lot as the wealthiest human, finding another life-friendly planet was probably Klent’s most Wikipedia-significant accomplishment. He said A.I. analysis had flagged a couple of highly probable Goldilocks candidates around twelve light-years away, which, as we understood, was very far.

“Wormholes,” Klent explained in the press clip. “They exist frequently throughout space but detecting them is even more difficult than reaching them. A stealth company of mine has progressed the technology to detect wormholes and thus establish outposts in distant regions.”

“And he just owns that? Shouldn’t NASA have that technology?” Hazel asked.

The answer was yes, but presumably, cooperation had stalled since that orbiting tank of hydrogen malfunctioned in the wrong direction and exploded the last all-women lunar mission.

Another salient detail followed. It wasn’t trace microbial evidence Klent was describing. Planet Tanner—named after Klent’s then-not-yet ex-wife’s Terrier—not only supported an ecosystem, but intelligent life at that.

Not as intelligent as us, Klent insisted, but remarkable nonetheless. Within Tanner’s known taxonomy was a species that was comparably hominid in their anatomy, standing on two legs and using prehensile fingers to perform complex tasks. While just below the criterion line of dominant, they had populated the planet across each of its continental landmasses, clustering themselves in fertile regions with flowing water.

Although their technology was limited to rudimentary tools, these Tannerlings had already domesticated smaller animals for food and had begun harvesting cereal grain—achieving a primitive yet sustained way of life comparable to that of twelve thousand years BCE.

From the start, Klent described their world to us as nasty and brutish, but life down here wasn’t much better. Every week, it seemed there was another shooting, or a riot, or some new irreversible crumbling in the greater avalanche, which only surged in the fervor of that year’s election season—the most important of our lives, they stressed again.

The first time Hazel saw me lose my job, I explained how layoffs were a natural part of my dial-monkey career path, especially in this economy. The way it worried her, though, I didn’t even bother applying for unemployment before chasing down a different inside sales position with a starting base that promised more groceries. By then, we were ten months in, and I often joked that we could cut our toothbrush budget in half by moving in together.

Combining rent would afford us a better space than either of us could alone, I suggested. We’d already been annexing more of each other’s fridge space since Hazel was let go from the school library, which no longer required assistants after so many books had been landfilled that spring.

She had concerns. Her first semester teaching fifth graders was approaching, and the planning had already consumed her. Focusing on her novel at all would require a space of her own, especially if she was to make the most of the brief windows of time she had for herself.

Luckily, I found a two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment that was in our range. From there, we plunged in tandem. We converted one of the rooms into her personal office: clean, sunlit, and facing a courtyard volleyball net. I installed a shelf for plants, and the presence of her books assured me that I was finally getting somewhere.

Not to say we don’t still fight. But we don’t blame each other either. We both know we’re trying. Getting more serious by the playlist entry.

—

My work office is a place where, every few new hires, I have to pull one aside and better explain the presence of Jimothy, our company’s obstacle. I’ll tell them he’s the sole reason we are in a building, and we employ him so his wealthy grandfather funds our next round. More importantly, Jimothy is a destructive simpleton who requires attention and de-escalation. He is also the floor manager. His daily expectations are that we arrive promptly at the morning meetings with candy that isn’t green-colored and never touch his forts after they’re perfect, which are very easily destabilized as they are supported by our ergonomic rollie chairs.

Most of our commission is made during Jimothy’s naps or laptop bathroom hour. In these temporary periods, my team sells power-dialing software to other sales teams. The software tattles on them if they do nothing for too long and calls six people at a time before hanging up on whoever doesn’t answer first. While it prompts an undeniable increase in outreach, the element of surprise renders most sales conversations ill-prepared and terrible, altering little in the long run beyond making jobs like mine much less enjoyable.

Even though I hit quota, I’m certain I was only hired because of my prior experience with angel-touched people like Jimothy. I downplayed the times I held them down while a nurse struggled to empty a shaking Thorazine needle into their cheeks before the cop on the scene drew his gun.

I can’t say I’ve ever been proud of how I pay my bills, but at the end of the day, Hazel comes home to a writing room, and I come home to Hazel. Whatever the apartment is to her, it’s a sanctuary on my end. Even if the toilet clogs, or the fridge leaks, or half the thermostat smells like hair, at least nothing in our home is unprecedented. Not like the world outside, with all its curved till vertical lines of exponential woe, where the best that can happen is the lesser of two evils—which is still pretty evil in itself, so just to cope with it, we keep progressing greater evils to make it look comparatively lesser.

Past the rail of our standing-room patio are countless everyday reminders that civilization is a little worse than it ever needed to be, a gauntlet of inconspicuous hostilities cloaked by the assertion of free market choice—just the invisible hand at work. It’s difficult to tell what tensions are a temporary feature of the decade you’re passing through or what might indicate a permanent shattering of the previous historical age—canaries of the new inferior frontier; ordeals we once prayed would date our accounts with their mention: Unaffordable housing. Violent tribalism. Prices skyrocketing and remaining in orbit. All these once felt ephemerally normal.

But our future is no longer what it was. Even triple-digit winter weather and triple-digit billionaires seem more familiar than harbingers like Ronan Klent, who feels like the first in a new class of humans that all have sex in zero-gravity and live till two hundred. Meanwhile, down here, we all have stress illnesses and plastic in our sperm. Dozens of socially normalized addictions. Cycles of small gains and crippling losses, always one doctor bill away from annihilation. In our Earth-and-chain life, punishment feels like the default. Simply existing means to contend with the forces actively trying to lessen you. Just to stumble is to be stomped on readily.

Klent’s very existence, so far separated from natural dangers and limitations, relegates us to what’s basically a terrarium where we can only measure success by the relief of pain.

It makes sense that there’d be a zealous optimism in the way people speak about Tanner. Religious leaders quickly integrated the Tannerlings’ existence in ways that only reinforced their deeply held beliefs. Hazel differed, saying we were too far in the weeds with our own planet to begin thinking we deserved another. Then, after she said it, she became crestfallen at the entrenched language of her first natural response, as if just observing a place implied it would be owned.

Hazel is far more thoughtful than I about these things. She doesn’t care for Klent, but her standards for everyone are slightly higher. Every day, living with her, I get better at living. Better at keeping the ice tray refilled and laundry off the floor. Better at trying. The renewal of our lease is celebrated as a success.

It’s at 3:26 in the morning Central Time that a poll goes up from Ronan Klent’s account. The poll has two choices and two words:

Make contact? 

Reactions blaze. Ethics are debated. Over a morning, we learn every scummy thing about Columbus. There’s a spike in content featuring Amazonian tribes, as uncontacted peoples become the consensus moral comparison. Accounts with flags in their bios allude to an impending annexation, although Klent has long decoupled from any one citizenship. While international in scope, it becomes a talking point that the poll has millions more participants than the last U.S. election.

“Freedom of choice is foundational to our democracy,” Klent replies to his harshest American critics. “The people should decide how we go about establishing relationships.”

The vote closes after a day. It’s Yes, by a landslide.

“What if we got the jump on learning their language now?” Hazel suggests. “You could probably multiply your income as a translator.”

This is her trying to cheer me up. Work has been difficult since Jimothy smashed the coffee machine because it wasn’t in fact full of chocolate soup.

I tell her I’d rather not think about it, and we circle back to the writing exercise she likes, where we come up with better versions of the already existing movies that we watch on the free channels that come with the TV.

“Okay, it’s The Shining, except in the summer,” Hazel suggests. “So, the same movie happens with a fully booked hotel, and it’s a two-day staycation that drives a father to murder his family because that’s just what marriage is like. He’s not even drunk.”

I scrape more resin from inside our pipe to smoke in little rolled balls. A lot of times, I get home from work, and the fridge is empty, and I just want to not exist as so-much as I do.

“Jaws,” I say, “but they show the shark. Like, in the first act. And the town sheriff is like: The hell? That’s clearly not a real shark. It’s got hinges on its mouth. Who’s murdering girls and blaming it on a shark they built?!”

When this game fails, we’ll try making out. Cracking each other’s toes. Anything to disrupt the continuity of the day we’ve just had and help Hazel shrug off the despair of being a public school teacher. She has her favorites in the classroom, the high achievers she can count on a Yakuza’s hand, but the gap is widening between them and the majority of her children who can’t multiply, spell, or read, which altogether puts them on the same level as Tannerlings who we’ve so far seen only communicate verbally. There’s no evidence of a written language beyond pictographs of everyday things: fish and grain, snakes and spears.

Klent has, for years, been sending insect-sized drones to monitor the communication of Tanner’s inhabitants. A.I. helped identify patterns and render a number of common languages with which to communicate.

The decision of Earth’s wealthiest oligarch to engage with the Indigenous Tannerlings is a now unevadable conversation that demands opinions. Objection has become its own genre of content. To appear disinterested is its own dog whistle.

“They are a vulnerable species,” argues an indignant scientist at a Q&A, “entitled to the same moral obligations as any other. Who are you to compromise their natural development?”

“The one that can,” Klent replies, smirking.

This sound bite cuts sharp for most who hear it. Klent’s monopoly on interstellar travel means he alone holds the tickets off our angry, boiling planet. Our Earth, once a sacred jewel in a desert of nothing, now seems dulled and ran through next to the virgin bounty of Tanner. A whole Paradise to himself, it’s a level of privilege that finally leaves everyone temporarily embarrassed—a club of one. For all the Tannerlings know, he’s the only human at all.

Appear as a deity? the next poll asks.

It’s at least a more transparent provocation, teasing the announcement that Klent will make contact by appearing to the Tannerlings in a swarm of drones that he can synchronize into any visual while collective speakers amplify a translation of whatever he wants to say. In his next podcast interview, he emphasizes the importance of free speech when asked about his potential responsibilities as a deity. I let the clip of it repeat as I water-brush my teeth, and I imagine my reflection as that of an untouchable person outside of the terrarium—so rich and influential that I have to cover my mouth when I sneeze, or it’ll contour the world.

Klent’s subsequent poll arrives quicker than the last and racks up even bigger engagement numbers. It dings my phone as Hazel and I decompress before bed by browsing home listings we can’t afford and imagining ourselves in them.

How will we appear to the Tannerlings?

Below, the poll provides three previously crowdsourced options:

A) A serpent dragon?

B) Bearded white-robed figure with flashing eyes, maybe wings?

C) Giant Hitler?

“Of course we’re not endorsing Hitler,” Klent says in a statement, “merely using him as an avatar, as decided in our poll by the will of the people.”

“It just feels, at a minimum, irresponsible,” Hazel says, reading the article until the point where it describes a glowing LED Führer revealing himself to one of the Tannerlings in a field of grain.

The next months are challenging for our little ground-floor sanctuary.

My company has its funding pulled after Jimothy is charged with the manslaughter of a pedophile hunter who confronted him for online content outside a GameStop. The higher-ups obscure this fact from the State, and it takes three weeks after the mass firings to learn I’ve been denied unemployment. The predicament puts a strain on our budget. Hazel and I resort to selling our old clothes online and only buying food products with lengthy half-Latin ingredient lists that sound like mistranslations of actual food, like orange quench, sugared pork, and iced dairy treats.

More depleted evenings see us on the couch with our knees pressed together, eating cereal for dinner and scrolling through the day’s catastrophes with eyes on Klent’s updates from Tanner. After imparting superior techniques for farming and metalwork, the Ohul Uhn-Kuluc-Mungma, or “square-bearded god,” has so far progressed portions of Tanner to the brink of a complex society.

A surplus of grain gives the Tannerlings time to build a temple dedicated to their new protective deity and the knowledge he has delivered in a written system of phonetic symbols. For regional tribes, this system enables the transition from a gift economy—introducing the concept of debt.

“Indentured servitude is one of the natural byproducts of establishing economic value,” replies Klent to his critics. “You may not like it, but this is a historical milestone. How else is Tanner supposed to reach a free economy?”

“It’s not weird that he has them carving swastikas?” Hazel asks.

“It’s a very ubiquitous symbol,” I tell her. “Culturally.”

We watch a clip of Klent demoing his motion capture suit for an audience. On the monitor beside him, his Hitler avatar also performs the Macarena.

As Tannerlings adapt to their new divisions of labor, Klent’s polls are becoming increasingly difficult to justify. The latest results prompt him to appear in a whirlwind to a wealthy livestock herder, this time as himself—if himself were a glowing, lightning-crackling titan.

This new god, who does not distinguish himself from the old god but instead emphasizes his own mysteriousness and many manifestations, establishes a covenant with the Tannerling, who he names Tony. He commands Tony to unify the surrounding lands in his name, promising his blessing and the divine right of kingship, then drops a loaded Glock in his hands.

“Why, though?”

“I don’t know,” I say, massaging my brow. “He said it would be based.”

Gossip blogs say Klent’s latest marriage is falling apart. His older children are taking shots at him online. Things may be connected, but I can’t know. I’m preoccupied with past due notices, rejection letters, and the recurring dream where I’m treading the ocean, and any time I choose a direction, a shark bites one of my limbs until I’m swimming in a circle. We all get the sense that Klent is speedrunning Tanner’s historical progress—which can’t be easy—however, many of us on Earth still struggle to grasp his choices. “People probably balked at Edison,” he quips to his critics, in step with the persona Klent has always cultivated: the big-brain chessmaster, ten decades ahead while the rest of us down here are still navigating basic healthcare and spatting over why immigrants mean we should have to provide property deeds to vote. To his point, there’s a lot I don’t understand about our twenty-four-light-year-wide portion of the universe. I don’t really get how half-moons have a straight line or why Pluto isn’t good enough to count. But I’m pretty sure if I were the deity of a planet, I’d try to give it affordable dental and resources for therapy or financial literacy. Makes you wonder if, with so much else proven possible, the denial of these things is ever intentional.

If I was the god of a planet, at least I’d have a job. That’d be enough for Hazel.

She says she understands how competitive the interview process has gotten, and she’s proud of me for doing my best over and over again. Still, the full burden of rent and utilities has made her work-life difficult, given that the school’s always making her go out of pocket for things like colored pencils and sticky tack.

One Friday evening, I can feel her arrival with a blast of sweltering spring air. She slumps in with a bag of groceries, wiping the sweat from her forehead and surely thinking about how much they just cost her. While I put them away, she sighs loudly from the next room, picking a towel off the floor and commenting that our bed isn’t made, as I’d promised. She sits on the toilet, rubbing her temple and checking her phone with the other hand for a few swipes before the beleaguered cursing begins. The electric bill is in her inbox, and it’s more than usual. Definitely more than she expected to pay by herself. It’s been a record heat this month, and without intervention, our apartment is a poorly insulated sweat lodge.

It’s because I’m here all day, she says—and this is true, hence the A/C, but she blames it on my lingering depressive state, which is not the deciding factor at all.

The accusation nevertheless implies that I’m being a lousy partner by not being self-responsible and managing my melancholy.

I don’t go outside because I have no money, I say. Any melancholy is circumstantial.

Hazel replies that, regardless, lounging here and spending A/C while not even making the bed is inexcusable.

Over her shoulder, I notice, to my horror, that there are still dirty dishes in the sink.

Things escalate a little before I click on the speaker and start streaming in a serious violin soundtrack, but instead of breaking into smirks, Hazel backs into her office and slams the door.

A walk reminds me how dripping hot it is outside. At a public bench that you can’t sit on for too long without discomfort, I check my inbox for new rejection emails and urgent warnings from federal student aid and the new company that purchased my medical debt.

I consider my daily movements while Hazel is at work and what they’d look like to an insect-sized drone on the wall. Do I have depression to manage? Has it affected her? If not a chemical imbalance, then how unreasonable is my mood relative to the state of the world this week?

In my feed, alarming headlines stack like drawn Jenga bricks that precede some great collapse. Somehow, Ronan Klent’s divorce is still top trending. In recent videos, deep concern bleeds through the usually autistic neutrality of his expression. Does he feel like he’s spiraling? Does he feel anything at all?

I consider how his melancholy might trickle down and wonder: If I had a goldfish, would I forget to feed it on a week like this?

I should’ve made the bed.

I think further on all the “should’ves” I’ve had in my hands, and I can’t help but feel that, as far as life choices have gone, I never screwed up too badly. I never drove drunk, or did hard drugs, or got arrested. Never fell for any scams. I didn’t get bad grades or somebody pregnant. I minded my health. Lived within my means. Avoided predatory loans. Respected danger. I never even got comfortable being poor. Rather, the opposite. Any desperate phase I ever withstood only compelled me to escape it by any means available. I cleared all the shit-traps the world required I clear. Shit-traps Ronan Klent would never even recognize from where he sits.

Nevertheless, I am here, and he is up there—with all his trillions and trickling impact on this world—concentrating on Space, toying with other planets.

I am suddenly shaking with anger.

I begin imagining a swarm of armed drones, numerous to whatever degree life, as is, makes you feel like a screw-up when you didn’t actually screw up at all—as many drones as there exist shit-traps easily neutralized via one rich guy’s willingness to do so. I picture them aimed at everyone who keeps the ladder rungs greased to ensure that even smart people like Hazel remain below where they ought to be—permanently in the shade of hovering threats while those higher above with the most capability seem to care the least, because safety is what makes them different from us.

I could’ve made the bed.

Being in a relationship means going out of your way to remember how much better you would love each other if it weren’t for all the daily hassles that compound to make you contemplate murder.

Back home, I kneel by Hazel’s side of the bed and tell her I’m sorry. She’s been doing so much. Somehow, I will figure out how to pay the electric bill this month. I will take out a loan to cover rent, so she has more money for sticky tack and more headspace to think about her book. I will keep a clean apartment because she deserves one.

And even though I’m damp from my walk and she hates dirty sheets, Hazel pulls me under the blanket, and we appreciate every inch of each other. Afterward, lying with an arm around her, grateful in the moment, I can’t help feeling that all of today was unnecessary. The fight, surely, but also the debt, and the oppressive temperature, and the no comfortable third spaces, and the lack of public education funding, and a further list that goes on until Hazel asks to play Better Movie. I open with Rambo, or at least a guy like Rambo, but his unique guerrilla tactic is that he’s trained away his gag reflex. Each mission, he swallows a couple of bullets, along with other small components of a rudimentary gun, before getting himself intentionally captured by the enemy and thrown into their bamboo prison—at which point he poops the gun parts, assembles them, and frees the POWs from the inside after eliminating the closest guards.

—

At the bank, I’m denied the small loan I request, which they can only grant to currently employed people, and I hate myself for not lying to the lady in the moment.

Fortunately, it’s Saturday, and Hazel is not as emotionally mangled from work. I shoplift a scented candle on the way home and deep clean the apartment in front of her. I mop the floors and replace the pillowcases before remaking the bed, reminding myself that most things that would kill a four-year relationship take five minutes to avoid.

Fanning ourselves in the scent of sea breeze and sandalwood, our phones ding, and we shudder in synchronicity.

Another poll.

“Is nobody gonna stop him?” Hazel moans.

I scan the wiki for Tanner’s last credible update. After much bloody conquest, Holy King Tony has conquered the fertile region promised to him by Klent’s avatar, introducing within it a hereditary class system of nobles and peasants.

The latest poll asks whether Klent should appear to another Tannerling on the other side of the continent and tell him that he is, in fact, the Swarm Father’s chosen prophet.

“The clashing of civilizations has always produced tremendous advances in technology,” Klent is quoted. “When you really think about it, as I have, war is the hallmark of progress.”

When I suggest we help by voting against it, Hazel shakes her head in disgust and shuts herself in her office. She’s been spending a lot of time in there, closing out the spring semester. Even though the heat index is already unbearable, the summer months will give her a much-needed break from the children and time to finally buckle down and write.

As a kickoff to these most utilities-expensive indoor months, we travel to Santa Fe to watch Hazel’s sister get married again. I do not mind because her parents have paid for the flight and room, a fact her father reminds me of within the first half-hour of the reception. He is confused as to why I can’t just walk into an office with a printed resume and a firm handshake, carping further that my generation just wants things gifted to them. At my age, he already had a house and a family, but people weren’t afraid of work back then. I ask him where the bathroom is, then step outside to pound two glasses of open bar scotch.

At dinner, I’m seated next to Hazel’s niece, who’s heard about my employment struggles from her mom and describes how eighth grade’s been no cakewalk either lately. Her teachers don’t condone her vintage boy band aesthetic and keep sending her to the office for violating the dress code and attempting to recruit others into a boy band of her own. I tell her she’ll have a hard time with that, which upsets her enough to accuse me of endorsing discriminatory norms, so I try explaining that, no, it’s because boy bands were a contingent byproduct of an economic bubble that doesn’t exist anymore. Still, it goes over her head, and she moves to a different table.

In the hotel room, Hazel thanks me for enduring admirably and pledges to share less with her sister.

There’s a whole empty day before our flight home that we hope can be an enjoyable reprieve from our lives there. We take a walk after breakfast coffee, stopping at an old church to ask about its bathroom. Gazing up, Hazel notes how cathedrals are basically books, or at least repositories of meaning. She points out the numeric significance of the architecture and the stained-glass scenes of essential saints, each with their own identifying emblems; all the CliffsNotes required to be familiar—which is fine today, Hazel says, but back in Old Europe, this iconography supplemented efforts to keep most people functionally illiterate.

My phone interrupts, and I rush outside to answer. An automated recording from my bank tells me that suspicious activity has been detected on my account. The robot’s voice is spotty and barely audible. It asks if I made any recent purchases in the out-of-state zip code of 87501, which I assume is Santa Fe, but can’t confirm for fear of missing further details while Googling. I’m then tested with three different amounts to the cent between two and six dollars and asked which one corresponds to my recent purchase of a drip coffee. If I am incorrect, the bank will conclude fraud, and my account will be frozen.

I press 2 for the number in the middle, and the robot thanks me before hanging up.

To check it off her list, Hazel suggests we visit the Santa Fe Institute, a nearby research center where big-brain geniuses study complex adaptive systems—which Hazel explains are super complicated things with lots of moving parts like societies and weather patterns. We learn upon arriving that the campus is closed to the public, but the adjacent hiking trail is poorly guarded and there is a remarkable view of the landscape after a few minutes’ walk.

Most of the afternoon is spent driving to places in the rental car, which we enjoy very much, as it is nicer and more cooperative than either of our vehicles back home. It does not have the expensive fender damage or lingering burnt carpet smell of Hazel’s used compact, nor does it respond with pained under-hood caterwauling like mine when it finally turns over and is only frequently responsive to the floor pedals—issues I intend to address at a feasible time. Instead, the rental steers with the intelligent gentleness of a smiling nimbus and has a comforting low-frequency hum that is otherwise accommodating of conversation because you don’t have to yell over the violent fluttering of a trash bag window.

Before our return to the Albuquerque airport, we consider driving out to the Los Alamos Trinity site, but instead opt towards Diablo Canyon, where we smoke a contemplative joint midway through a steep gorge with a hellish trap rock cliff face. In our periphery, mice and lizards scurry between cover. It feels like a cathedral of meaninglessness.

“I got a better movie,” Hazel says, burying the roach. “Reverse Oppenheimer.”

The idea is, at some eventual point in the future, Hazel tells me, whether through simulation or physical construction, we will become technologically capable of creating worlds of our own. Entire planets with complex ecosystems.

At the cusp of that great leap forward, Hazel says, at a site like our fission-bleached New Mexican desert, scientists will wrestle with the opposite threat: the ethical implications of being a creator god.

“I see three big tensions there,” Hazel tells me.

One, she says, just bringing one planet into existence yields untold suffering that simply would not have occurred otherwise.

Two, doing this once means the process can be replicated, industrialized, and inevitably democratized, scaling the first problem to something unfathomable.

And three, creating worlds that beget conscious beings of their own forces one to assume that the processes leading to such an ability will eventually repeat themselves: creations creating creations—implying that any big-G God of ours is simply one in an infinite chain. Turtles all the way up.

Where Oppenheimer’s invention threatened life itself, Reverse Oppenheimer will threaten to rob it of significance.

Is this her children’s book? I ask her. Why wouldn’t a guy like that kill himself?

Hazel shrugs. “Ego? Maybe the guy feels so self-important that he sees himself as inevitable and necessary. He’s not worried about breaking history. It belongs to him.”

I tell her to shop it. When we return to a place with signal, I am saddened to learn that my bank account has been frozen. To stab a feather on it, the phone company could not auto-withdraw the month’s Wi-Fi balance after this occurred, so now our owed amount has somehow doubled for their inconvenience.

Waiting at the terminal, Hazel says maybe she can get a second job over the summer. Something like I’ve done, where it’s just easy stuff like calling people and talking them into spending money.

I tell her it’s not that simple, but we go through my rejection emails for companies that are hiring. That same week, she is asked to interview. I give her all my notes, explaining what to say and what they’ll want to hear. She forgets to use them and is offered an entry position after two video calls.

“I start next Monday!” she says, showing me her offer letter.

I am proud of her but also very ashamed.

To compensate, I begin delivering food orders while Hazel is in her first week of sales training. It is not good money, and I smell like Cajun fries, but it shows Hazel that I’m trying in the meantime. On my drives, I think back on my most spirit-stamping, noose-enticing jobs that I could probably reclaim tomorrow if I traded every part of myself that I liked—jobs I only ever encountered mid-struggle, as if mid-struggle were a place and all my coworkers were there too. The identifiers of these bottom-rung positions are unforgettable and incite nausea. Claw your way out of poverty once, and your lifelong anxiety will be getting too close to anywhere that resembles it.

While it’s not how she expected to spend her writing season, Hazel takes quickly to calling strangers about software. With all her blue light exposure and first-month ramping expectations, however, she comes home far too exhausted to type. Instead, we drink box wine, browse impossible houses, and gape at the daily massacres on Planet Tanner. It’s not as if we don’t have our own ongoing genocides on Earth, but the idea that all the reasoning behind Tanner’s ethnic cleansing is less than a year old makes it hit a little different.

On top of that, we’re both finding Klent’s polls for what new variables to introduce on Tanner difficult to explain, much less justify. They’re becoming less Yes or No than This or That.

Locusts or Flamethrowers? asks the latest.

“I mean, of course flamethrowers would only make things worse,” I say, stroking my chin.

“Why would I vote for locusts!?” Hazel asks.

“We don’t want them burning each other alive, do we?”

Many Tannerlings are burnt alive that week. It does not help that the projectile guns arrive with instructions on how to mass produce them. The available drone footage has me more inclined to actually vote in the next poll, which is more and more feeling like a moral obligation, at least per the online opinions—

You may not like dysentery, I read. Yeah, it smells bad, and it hurts, and people die from it. But at some point, you have to be a grown-up and decide: Is it really worse than Sarin gas?

A point is made that, hypothetically, if such no-win dilemmas were intentional—egregious or not—the global engagement they produce on the platform is worth billions in shareholder value.

“This ass-gape at work was actually defending him today,” Hazel tells me, still smelling like a happy hour while I stink of poorly secured bags of soup. “Said, ‘if he didn’t know what he was doing, he wouldn’t be the richest man in the world.’”

To the ass-gape’s credit, it’s not impossible Klent does know what he’s doing. In fact, it’s our most feared scenario.

Our phones ding, and we shudder, knowing that somehow, things have just gotten worse.

Mosquitos or Opioids?

By now, these questions feel like an excuse to yell without really making it about each other.

“It’s the deadliest animal!” Hazel shouts.

“What, so you want to give them Oxycontin?”

“I don’t wanna give them anything!”

“Of course not. But with the options we have, one is clearly more harmful than the other.”

“Is it? Do we know that? How can anyone? Both seem so wrong. Why do we only have wrong choices?!”

“I don’t know! But not choosing one is basically encouraging the other. We have to vote regardless.”

“No! I think we don’t! I think all we’re doing is perpetuating the polls to begin with.”

“We’re not gonna stop it doing nothing. It’s just gonna keep happening in front of us. No matter what, our hands are dirty. What else can we do? Are you gonna kill Ronan Klent?”

“Obviously not.”

“Then what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” she says, throwing up her hands and collapsing on the couch. “I feel like all we can do is just not contribute to more evil shit and pray that he dies soon.”

This sentence sticks to me as I sit in standstill traffic with somebody else’s cold burrito order in the seat beside me.

Pray to what? I think.

Seriously. What? Some god that’s probably just someone else’s paramecium—and has his own explaining to do, making someone like Klent even possible? The man is unkillable. Protests, boycotts, smear campaigns—none of it makes a breeze of difference. Klent could lose a billion dollars a day and not even notice. If he spent the rest of his natural life shaking up ant farms, we couldn’t do anything but watch.

A policeman waves me through the scene of an accident, and I’m certain I have lost considerably more money to gas than I have made through tips today. After a few more hours of deliveries to make up the difference, I shower off a skin-film of fried Chinese food and climb into bed, where Hazel is already motionless under the ceiling fan.

“We’re just two people,” I whisper to her. “We can’t stop it.”

“If we’re just two people, why do we have to engage with it?” she whispers back. “Either we matter, or we don’t.”

For some reason, these words bother me more than they should, and I squirm into another shark dream that goes too long and leaves me bobbing like a cork on the waves.

From then on, we try to limit our helpless consumption of Tanner’s opioid-motivated holy wars. Still, the daily amalgam of public horror and private frustration has a noticeable torque on our relationship. By July’s final weekend, Hazel has not written a new word of her novel. It troubles me to watch her put her dreams on hold for something like affording rent, but not as much as being the cause of it. My rejection count is up to sixty-three since my last workday. Based on the feedback provided, I have squandered too much of my lifetime in low-level roles at companies with inevitable layoff cycles. While I have no performance issues to mention, I am now too experienced for entry-level consideration and not experienced enough for managerial roles, which comprise the bulk of my sent applications. A manager’s salary would repair our lives overnight.

Each day without progress, I feel heavier, and I know that being yoked to me must engender a resentment in Hazel that I can only measure in rolled eyes and bedtime pillow walls. We have arguments about whether renewing our lease is feasible until Hazel mentions the option of moving into separate places.

I remind her that we moved in together to save money.

“That was three years ago!” she shouts, slamming the door to her office.

—

The next time I get home from deliveries, Hazel is at her desk, reading a mailbox notice from the apartment complex explaining that they’ll be raising the monthly rent at our next renewal.

“Three hundred fifty dollars more a month—each. That’s eighty-four hundred extra,” she says, close to tears. I buckle both arms around her from behind as if trying to shield her from the looming discomfort of the next year. “The renewal deadline is in two weeks,” she reminds me, rolling her chair back to look me in the eyes. “If you don’t get a job, we have to move out. I have to move out.”

Late that night, in bed, I consider the non-zero chance that Ronan Klent is simply stomping the Tannerlings into an apocalyptic ass-world so he can swoop in and raise share value by offering Tanner all his company’s best solutions like monorail designs and cars that talk like a sultry woman. Could also be that he’s culling any potential resistance before stripping the planet of all its natural resources, or just trimming down the population in order to relocate there himself. I decide if I could push a button and magically give him a fatal aneurysm, I would do so. Then I imagine the same type of button, but with fatal diarrhea. Even nonfatal diarrhea would be acceptable, really. So long as it was synced to Klent, I would push it all the time. Definitely after every fight with Hazel. I remain awake, merely wishing that we lived on a planet without trillionaires, or credit scores, or debt collectors, or landlords, or weird alt-history fetishist government leaders, and I ache for the correct version of this one life we have.

A few days later, there’s a breakfast moment of celebration: After three rounds of virtual meetings, I am invited to interview in person at a startup company downtown. I’ve noticed a recent difficulty in getting past these final-tier conversations, at least as of this latest election season—again, history’s most important. I am more ready for this interview than the last, wherein I answered too truthfully in the final personality round—the part where they try to “get to know me a bit better.” They’ll ask for a life summary, starting in high school, and follow up with a series of present-day questions:

Do you identify in any way differently than you appear?

Do you speak any language other than English? Why?

Some might be hypothetical: You find out one of your neighbors has the status of an illegal person. How long would it take you to report them?

I am confident in my responses to this new tax-incentivized line of inquiry, but I admit my face is not convincing when I speak them.

“Of course, I would immediately report all knowledge or suspicions of illegal persons without hesitation or delay,” Hazel says when we practice. “You need to say it like it’s true. Unclench your jaw. You look like you’re gonna knife the guy under the table.”

Hazel is better than me at biting her shit and keeping eyes on the prize—not that she’s without practice. She’s state-mandated to tell children that slaves had fun and other weird tweaks from the textbooks. While she could not provide contrary information in print to this year’s shortlist of achieving students, she did mention online resources for the kids to explore in their own time if any of them had an interest in accurate history or miracle-denying theories of science, which, being eleven, none did.

The morning I go in, she kisses me more intentionally than usual. “You can do this,” she promises. I too, am certain.

Despite leaving an hour early, traffic is slow and broiling, and even with the windows down, I fear my shirt will be visibly soaked in sweat by the time I arrive. At a momentary standstill, I look at my phone and the poll alert that I ignored the previous night.

Tuberculosis or Mercury As Currency?

Traffic begins to move, and I lob the screen away like some bad luck totem, shaking off its negativity. Just as I accelerate, there’s a metallic scraping under the hood, then a loud pop and prolonged rattling all the way into the breakdown lane. My engine steams, and despite my attempts, I cannot reanimate it. I cry a little in front of traffic, which is slow enough for passengers to record prolonged, smoothly dollied segments for their daily story. Windows down, I watch the clock progress through my interview appointment, presumably going very well in some inaccessible timeline where most things are different.

“No. I don’t speak anything but English,” I say in the mirror.

When I know it’s her lunch hour, I close the windows to dull passing sounds and call Hazel.

“I’m so proud of you!” she says before I can speak, and I hate that traffic still isn’t fast enough for me to step into it. I tell her what happened and that I might need her to pick me up.

“Okay,” she says without much further. “I understand.”

She has a few meetings, but her numbers are up, and she has enough leeway to take the afternoon. It’s a few more hours before her car pulls up. She climbs over her cupholders and out her passenger door, walking around to glance under my raised hood.

“So what, do we tow it, or . . . ?”

I consider how much this might cost, then begin collecting the contents of the glove box and center console. “Just—let’s just go home. I’ll figure it out.”

The drive is quiet until we turn into the lot of our complex.

“I found a place,” she says. “It’s not far.”

In the moment, I well up, but find it was easier to cry in front of gawking strangers.

“It’ll be okay,” she says.

But I know it won’t. I say everything I can to prolong her decision into a conversation, but the pushback only raises our voices to a fighting volume. I try to play serious music, but given my long-lapsed streaming subscription, all that plays are three minutes of intentionally irritating ads. Exhausted, Hazel tells me it’s simply too late for any other solution. My problem is that I’ve been aiming too high—not just putting all my eggs on a manager role but also on the other cold brew office jobs I’ve been exclusively trying for. There are other jobs out there, she says; I might not like them, but I could’ve at least applied.

And my response to this is: Yes, probably.

I would have liked to think that prior experiences with poverty had equipped me with a certain survivalism—that there are levels of shit-eating I’ve withstood before and, in a pinch, I’ll always be qualified for those most soul-snuffing jobs that would at the very least keep me housed and fed. But truthfully, those experiences offered little more takeaway than the direct knowledge of how little I ever wanted to repeat them.

Once, as a younger guy stocking retail shelves, I looked around at older coworkers and told myself that the worst outcome would be growing comfortable in that underpaid situation—conceding the normalcy of exploitation and allowing it to swallow me one decade at a time the way hypothermia welcomes us into a warm blissful sleep. Really though, most jobs aren’t that kind. Most jobs peck you open and tear at your viscera, then mock what pain you communicate. Most jobs will pretend to your face that there is a fair economic value for the scars on your forearms, or the silica in your chest, or the permanent clicks in your knees and back, or the funerals you could not attend because of scheduling—and that you should be grateful for these opportunities; the only obstacle is your attitude. No I in team.

No jobs love you, but many jobs truly hate you. Most jobs should not exist as they do, but the forces keeping them that way are always bigger than you. Usually, the best you can do is escape them and never return.

Still, Hazel asks, knowing I could—why can’t I return? Why can’t I just swallow my pride and eat what shit must be eaten? Why not just suck it up for a while, lower my standards, and apply for the hourly wage job I had when we first met?

“Because, I promised,” I remind her.

It’s nothing she doesn’t know. When I met Hazel while working with the boys at the charter school, the reason it was such a low point was that I had worked there in the same safety associate role almost a decade before, while I was still in college.

It’s a job that doesn’t change. You monitor the kids throughout the day, imposing the orderly expectations that their frontal lobes can’t. You try to build a rapport with them, and the better you can keep it, through their impulsivity and aggression, the smoother your day might go. Although I’d eventually get the hang of it, I wasn’t always so strong at this part of the job.

I tell Hazel how I was maybe nineteen the first time around, and my last day of that stint had me leading a queue of six fetal-alcoholic boys from the cafeteria, still hungry after a lunch tray of square pizza and unsalted corn. A few were upset that I had to confiscate the blue bouncy racquetball that one of them snuck in his hoodie all day, which teaching staff demanded I do after they caught him spiking it off the heads of the less-unhealthy children seated at opposite tables. I was glancing down at my walkie-talkie when the first punch connected with my jawline. As I recoiled, another boy cocked back and did the same.

In hindsight, getting in more fights when I was their age might have honed a faster reaction time to their sluggish haymakers. Perhaps I could have even hit back and saved face in front of the other minors. When backup arrived, my jaw was already fractured and two of my molars had been displaced. The swelling was immediate and grotesque. The campus nurse said that if I didn’t get it treated, it could get infected and kill me, actually, being so close to my brain. What insurance came with the job covered only about ten percent of the surgery cost.

Overnight, I was too in debt to continue going to school.

I told myself then that I would never again accept a job so mid-struggling awful. Even though I did, after a decade of more bad luck and layoffs, I repeated the vow with a much greater seriousness after I met Hazel. Every day I would work hard, and give it my best, to simply not slide back down that greased ladder.

Still, life defies all suppositions. If God laughs at our plans, promises put him on the fucking floor.

The next day, I wait on a marked bench and watch a nearby shirtless man argue with himself. I have not ridden the bus in several years. It feels more crowded now that all the seats are at an anti-homeless angle. A couple of blocks past my stop, up the long campus driveway leading to the front office, I am greeted warmly by the switchboard operator, who is grayer and fatter than he was four years ago, and who chuckles when I ask for an application form.

“Knew you’d be back,” he says.

—

By the first week of the school year, I have managed to build rapport with most of my boys, except for the one with Oppositional Defiant Disorder who can only communicate through insults. “You must be a real mark to be a whole ass grown-up working here,” he tells me before not-so-accidentally spilling juice on my work polo, which I’m glad is brandy colored as I have not yet received a paycheck to buy detergent.

It is a grueling first pay period. My new one-bedroom is a couple of miles farther south than I’d prefer, especially given the bus ride, but I am at least on a track to self-reliance. The school’s gym teacher is a former Marine who keeps the boys moving throughout his class, exhausting them into an afternoon lull. This downtime between fights and tantrums gives me headspace for online applications and tracing a path forward. I look up cheap used cars that fit within my surgically budgeted bank loan, which went through easily once I reported I was working and told them that Sunny Oaks Alternative School and Treatment Campus was the name of a tech company. I research managerial certificate programs and their curriculum. However, I decide that if I see no results within two months, my next step is to change career paths entirely and bet on trade school before the spring semester. I think I could be a fine welder. There is no shortage of demand for welders. The transition will be uncomfortable. More debt, undoubtedly. But the thought of stability gives me hope and, to some extent, makes the shit-eating meaningful. If that direction holds, I’ll likely be the oldest person in my spring class. If in my gut it feels too late for me, at least it always has.

When payday comes, I do not attend the nearby happy hour, but things feel manageable for the first time in years. While my new old car has a dead radio and cigarette burns on the ceiling fabric, the air conditioning works, and I get a few hundred slashed off the price from trading in my old junker, which, after the impound fees, leaves me a bit left over for groceries.

I’m boiling ramen when my phone dings. A Pavlovian trembling hits me before I see it’s just Hazel:

Imissu.

Imiss u2, I type.

I got my room set up

That’s nice, I tell her.

Come to bed:)

I arrive thirty minutes later, and she leads me by the hand to her mattress.

“I wrote a little today,” she says. “I wanted to set the tone; right foot.”

“I’m so proud of you.”

“Do you like my space?”

I nod, surveilling the room. “It looks like you.”

This delights her, and she squeezes me tight. I notice the A/C humming well south of seventy degrees. Everything is comfortable, and we bask in it.

“I could’ve made the bed more,” I finally say.

“I know. If it’s made when I come over, I’ll adore you for it.”

I give her a pinky to hook. She smiles and cups my cheek, saying she’s proud of me as well for finding a job and having a plan. We’ll find our way out soon, she says, and in this moment, I am grateful. So much that it fills me, and there’s not enough room for debts, or credit scores, or Planet Tanners, or everything some powerful god could throw in my way. I am content with whatever brought me here. It is different. Here and now, so am I.

Yes, this one life I have is still a cruel, unjust, gruesome place where Samsara reigns. But I think about the past few years and ask myself: When was the world ever as good as it could be? All the little miseries we confront every imperfect, exhausting day—that is life. Always has been. We are not measured outside of pandemonium. No one is revealed in vacuums. It’s easy to tell each other that if only we didn’t have all these distracting burdens, we’d be able to love each other freely—but really, it's our insistence on loving anyway that’s actually meaningful. To brace for those obstacles and manage them in a hundred little mundane chores a week is its own act of investment. It’s how we climb.

I sleep deeply beside Hazel, sliding again into the convincing shark dream that I have. This time, I dive under the waves and let my lungs fill with unsalted dream water so that I can see the sharks coming. While I can’t punch them effectively because it’s a dream, they can be gripped by the gills at arm’s length until the dream transitions its location, and the shark flies away when I let go. Suddenly, I’m on a trash-littered hill on Planet Tanner, not far from a temple wall. A Tannerling stands on a rock above a small audience, sweating from how long he’s been speaking.

“The Emperor will tell you that our god is a serious god,” he says, “not to be tested, and surely, we are out of his favor. However, I tell you the truth, brothers, we were never in his favor! It was Ohul Uhn-Kuluc-Mungma, one in the same, who guaranteed our fall, according to his will. It is he who sculpted the world as a dungeon. His hands shaped us from the clay of the ground and its same wicked substance. He imprisons us now via all his many forms across this broken world and all its thrones. He delights in our punishment, the god of this world! He feeds on our hopelessness!”

Commotion parts the outer lingerers. The Tannerling continues shouting as two soldiers approach and pull him down from the rock, leading him away by the wrists.

“But I bring good news, brothers! Do not despair! The god of this world is a beast, but his power is too of this world! Every day, it lies in wait to devour us, but I tell you, there is a truer, greater power that his hands cannot reach, and his teeth cannot eat! This power is inside of us! To find it is to escape this cage...”