molly ofgeography

1.

The thing about suicide is just how funny it is. The idea of it. No waiting around, no exit interview. Sayonara, suckers. 

The bath fills up slowly. She could fill it faster if she ran the spout at top volume but her water temperature is too finicky to set and leave. Every few minutes she has to put her hand under, check if it’s gotten too hot again; it always wants to get too hot, so she has to run it cold to balance it out, then let it get hot again. And so on. She doesn’t mind: the floor of the bathroom is heated and feels lovely on the bottoms of her feet when she sits at the edge of the tub. She uses the time to prepare, busily: apply face mask, light candles, add bubble mix, select playlist. Today it’s Spotify’s “Jazz in the Background.” She doesn’t know any of the artists on the playlist; she doesn’t listen to jazz to really listen to it. She just puts it on. Some music is like that, music you put on but don’t listen to.

People are like that too, she thinks, and then is pleased with her own thought. People are like Jazz in the Background. A sound that approximates the thing it’s supposed to be. Good enough to get by. She knows enough about American history to know that jazz now isn’t what jazz was, that there’s something out there called real jazz and none of it is on the Spotify playlist. But real jazz like real people is ephemeral, maybe made up. No real people. No real jazz. Only ever an an orderly list approximating something, in the background.

The bathwater grows hot, cools down. The clay mask on her face hardens. She is considering killing herself. Not tonight: not in the bath. For one thing she is afraid of drowning, even after she is dead. She doesn’t like the idea of her body underwater. She never has. There is something uncanny about it, the flesh submerged. Completely submerged. It’s different when parts of you stick out, her toes peeking up from the bubbles. Her eyes and her nose, breathing. But she has never liked a thing that doesn’t float.

For another she thinks that committing suicide in the bathtub is too cliché, almost expected for a woman. Women kill themselves quite neatly, traditionally speaking. Pills, swallowed bleach. Women take things in to die. Men push things out. She is pleased again. Poetics. She likes when metaphors line up like this. 

She watched a conspiracy theory video on YouTube about Jazz in the Background. Well: not specifically Jazz in the Background but that kind of thing, the curated Spotify playlists, the ones you’re not meant to listen to, just put on. The video insisted that all the artists are fake, that Spotify makes them up using AI and then puts them on preferential playlists so they’ll get millions and billions of streams and Spotify won’t have to pay anybody for it because the generated revenue goes right back to Spotify. Closed loop. Some people are very angry and distressed about this, but she likes Jazz in the Background. She likes things that are what they say they are, and which function as a metaphor for broader society. 

She closes the door to keep the dog out, because when she stays in the water too long the dog gets upset and tries to jump in with her. The dog huffs in annoyed sorrow, sticks his nose up against the bottom of the door.

She hangs up her robe — Yves St. Laurent, but she didn’t buy it, she stole it from the closet of a dead aunt before any of the other cousins got to it — and stands naked in front of the mirror, lit only from the candles. Face yellowed with clay, hair tied neatly into a bun. Divots in her shoulders where her bra has dug in every day since she was eleven and first needed one. Dark splash of pubic hair that she’s too lazy to shave but had the edges of lasered off some years ago. Somewhat lumpy curves, but not too bad; she’s pretty. People like her. She’s lucky, really, that she can carry some extra weight and it looks good. She doesn’t have to starve just to find somebody to fuck her. Sometimes she does anyway, just because, well, it’s good to have a project. She has always been good at losing weight, good at gaining it, good at most things. 

Pretty enough, good enough, smart enough, rich enough, funny enough, real enough of a person. Successful enough by any measure.

What she likes about the idea of suicide, besides its obvious punchline, is its permanence. One and done, provided you do it right. Lots of people don’t, of course. But she will. If she does. She’ll only do it if she really, really, really decides to. She’s always been like that: indecisive for a long time and then all at once completely, totally, immovably sure. If she decides to die, she will. 

She returns to the edge of the tub and dips her hand in, cutting through the bubbles. It’s excellent: not too hot. Not too cold. She’s really perfected the art of it, if she does say so herself.

She slides into the water with a sigh.

2.

The question, obviously, is not does she want to be dead. Of course she wants to be dead. Actually she thinks that everybody, secretly, a little bit, wants to be dead. What is being dead: no longer being annoyed. She is annoyed by everything these days, maybe because being anything else is fruitless. She is annoyed by the cost of eggs. She is annoyed by the planned obsolescence of her computer battery. She is annoyed by the omnipresence of needless AI widgets, how cheerful they are when they announce their name is Annie, Your Dedicated Customer Experience Bot! She is annoyed by the term “customer experience.” She is annoyed by the way the precariously housed man who lives on her block demands she hug him, the way he kisses her cheek. She is annoyed by the way men talk to her. She is annoyed by men, both those she knows and those she doesn’t, and annoyed that she’s annoyed at more men than women even though women are also famously terrible. She is not above misandry: annoying. She is annoyed by the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Palestine. She is annoyed by the use of the word “war” for Ukraine and the use of the word “conflict” for Palestine. She is annoyed about being annoyed about semantics, even though of course semantics are just about the most important thing a tongue can do. War when there’s a clear side you’re supposed to be on. Conflict when there’s probably a clear side you’re supposed to be on but nobody wants to say which one it is.

She blows a handful of bubbles out of her palm. They’re cold. The bubbles are always cold, even though they’re made in warm water. The science of this has always puzzled her, but never enough to look it up. She likes not knowing things. People know things too easily these days, the entire universe a little computer in their hands. Knowledge is sponsored by Google Adwords. It makes knowing things boring, and she hates being bored. Being bored is annoying.

Anyway the question is not does she want to be dead but does she want to die. That’s trickier. Dying is a verb. Dying is an experience. Annie the Dedicated Customer Experience Bot would like to know what she can do to help make your death as frictionless as possible. 

She doesn’t, however, think she wants a frictionless death, id est, in the bathtub. Take in push out etc. She likes the idea of a mess: something that someone would have to clean up. But the trouble with messes is that they’re painfully made, and she’s never liked pain. 

People who like pain will always tell you. They will make a point of it. It’s like a badge of honor for them, the way people will always be sure you know that they’re a doctor, or a vegan, or a runner, or polyamorous. People like when you know that they’re a freak, but only if they’ve chosen the thing they’re a freak about. They like to get to decide. If you tell someone they’re vegan based on what they eat, they’ll be like, “No, I just don’t like animal meat or byproducts.” And it’s like, okay. Vegan in the Background.

Does she want to die?

The bubbles are soft, and the water is warm around her. She’d been really adamant when apartment hunting this last time to get a place with a good tub, a deep one she could soak in. She likes to soak. She likes the ritual of it, the warm water and her slowly wrinkling skin. She likes when the clay mask hardens so she can’t move her face. She likes the way the candle smoke mingles and makes the bathroom smell of burnt flowers. She likes her dog’s nose at the door, the heated floor on the bottoms of her feet. All good reasons to be alive, or they would be, if she could do only this forever. If life was only being in the bathroom, breathing steam, submerged except for her toes and the upper half of her head. If life wasn’t anything else. No work, no friends, no restaurants. Just sitting in water, soaking. Thinking. Her own thoughts are the only thing that don’t annoy her, that buzz pleasantly through her brain, chewing on the world as she watches it.

It had felt very dramatic the first time it occurred to her, somewhat startling: she could do it. She could die, easy as anything. There are so many hundreds of millions of things in the world that can kill you, and most of them won’t even look self-inflicted if you’re smart about it. She’d thought about syphilis, for example. Syphilis kills you but it makes you crazy and delighted first, or at least it can. She could fuck her way around the city and see what she picked up and then when she died people would call her a whore but not a tragedy, and there’s something pleasant about that idea, about getting away with it. 

Nobody’s ever called her a whore before, which she thinks is a little unfair, because she’s fucked a perfectly reasonable amount of people, whoreishly speaking. Why do some people get called whores and others are just popular? What’s the difference between a slut and a socially successful woman? 

Maybe she’s the only real person in the world or maybe she’s not real, either. There’s a theory about that, quantum physics-related. Only what is observed is real. This is not a satisfying theory. It is a theory with a shocking lack of imagination. 

But what counts as observing? Does the dog’s nose beneath the door, smelling her, hold together her existence? 

Big questions. This is why she loves the bath. The playlist knows that she doesn’t want to pay attention to it, that she wants it just to slide across her brain like silk.  You can never just sit and think about things out in the real world, if indeed there is a real world, ad valorem the nature of reality insofar as it does or does not exist. She is grateful to her dog for his nose. Or not, as the case may be re: suicide. 

Does she want to die, like does she want to experience the act of it: no. Probably not. But sometimes unpleasant things must be borne to get to the pleasant thing, like how you have to cook or spend money in order to eat. Annie Your Customer Experience Bot can automate your groceries but not your life expectancy. 

This pleases her again. Your groceries but not your life expectancy. Hello my name is Annie, I see you have left items in your cart. Be sure to check out soon, our patented Suicides are flying off the shelves. Seven point eight billion people are looking at this item, deciding. 

What kind of a store, she wonders, would sell Suicide? She thinks about this. Probably a travel agency. “We Don’t Sell Things: We Sell Experiences. Not for the casual traveler. Once in a lifetime trip!”

No. The last one is too obvious. “Not for the casual traveler” is better, punchier. She’s ruined the joke by wanting to improve it. 

Sometimes while she’s soaking, her skin slides against the bottom of the bathtub, and it makes a sticky, farty sound. She didn’t know it could do that underwater but it does. When this happens it ruins her mood for up to a minute, and then she forgets. Sometimes if it’s loud enough the dog huffs under the door and she says, “Can it, baby.” And he cans it. He’s a very good dog.

The steam has fogged the window. She reaches up and draws that S symbol, the one with six lines stacked on top of one another, then connected by diagonals. Her brother taught her how to do it when she was a kid. They practiced while riding in the car. A cop pulled them over and told their dad that they were drawing gang signs. 

She tells people that she hates cops as an institution of state-sanctioned violence but that’s not true. She hates cops because of the one who pulled them over and accused her of drawing gang signs. The other stuff hasn’t helped, she’s against state-sanctioned violence as a rule, particularly when it’s so unevenly applied, but it’s not her fault she hated cops before all that kicked off. It’s not her fault that the best she could do was hate them more.

She wiggles, trying to make the farty sound, but all she does is slop water over the side of the tub. She can never make the sound when she wants to. It’s always an unpleasant surprise.

3.

She feels fat in the bath, but not in a bad way. In a primal way. Like a cavewoman. Her flesh floats around her, is soft and malleable, eminently touchable. She never jerks off in the bath because the idea of sitting in it after makes her want to hurl. But when she was young she used to sit with her legs splayed open before the jacuzzi jets and squirm and squirm until it was too much and she had to stop. She had a friend she’d compete with: who can stand it the longest, how good it feels? 

That’s what suicide should be, she thinks. If the world were good, or even just less bad. Everyone would be playing, all the time, a game of who can stand it the longest. Who can stand how good it feels, to be alive. 

Instead: war and conflict, men, etc. 

The real hesitation she has, like really, if she’s honest, is how spoiled she is. She makes money. Nobody in her family is worse than anybody else. She has a good dog who keeps her observable by being constantly observed. She doesn’t even have the decency to be mentally ill, not properly. A touch of attention deficit, maybe. A dash of depression, seasonal edition. 

All the books and things say that people commit suicide because they’re tormented and miserable, and she’s neither. She’d be mortified to kill herself and have everybody think she was just being melodramatic. She knows there’s lots of people in the world who are suffering. Point: really she should stay alive and be grateful that she’s rich enough to have a bathroom with heated floors. 

Counterpoint: her being alive doesn’t help anybody who’s suffering, and actually she could do something heroic, like leave all her money to helping end The Conflict In Palestine, and then people would be like, “Well, we don’t really get it, but you’ve got to admit she was committed.” 

Point: this would be a lie. She cares about people suffering but she doesn’t actually think she has enough money to put a stop to it. She doesn’t actually think she has any power at all vis-a-vis putting a stop to it that isn’t by and large merely performative. 

Counterpoint: if nothing is real until observed, then by performing objections for an audience she is making them a real force in the world, and force, according to physics, is an influence with power, id est, the only way to have power is to generate it through performance of it. 

Point: who, through observing, makes anything real? Can something be observed and yet not made real? Dog-nose-door etc? And if observance of power makes it powerful than refusing to observe power takes the power away, ergo by committing suicide she will be refusing to observe the powerful destroying the weak and therefore she will take some measure of their power away. In this way she will impact the Conflict in Palestine far more than by posting a square on Instagram. 

Counterpoint: this is laziness, selfishness. It harms no one to post a square but she won’t do it because it’s, what, embarrassing? Pointless? So is a manicure but she does that twice a month. 

Point: Self-care in a patriarchal global society is radical feminist praxis, a c t u a l l y.

Counterpoint: Self-care is a term co-opted by the corporate wellness industry from largely black feminist leadership and was not about manicures!!! 

Counterpoint: Nothing is pure or immune to hostile corporate takeover. Better that Target love the gays for money than hate the gays for free.

Counterpoint: she has forgotten which argument, point or counter, is meant to be for suicide and which against. She has forgotten who is supposed to be right.

4.

This was why she’d needed the bath. To think. It’s a lost art, thinking. People are always doing other things. Looking at things, reading them, listening. You don’t have time to think when you aren’t in the bath. You have to hold so tightly to your thoughts, you never get to let them slosh around and make farty noises. Sometimes on the train she closes her eyes and tries to let her brain chew quietly but it never works. She’s too aware of things, other people and the feeling of the train as it slows down and speeds up. 

In the bath she doesn’t have to be aware of anything, which is why the farty noise infuriates her when it takes her by surprise. It makes her remember she has a body but not in a happy fat way. In the way you realize it when your wired headphones get caught on the door handle as you walk past. 

She doesn’t often wear wired headphones anymore. Sometimes for work, on Zoom. 

She sinks deeper into the water. The room is becoming really fragrant now, flowery and hot from steam and all the candles. The flower smell is wet, like a greenhouse. One of the candles is roses-scented, the other gardenia; she’d bought them both at the Morgan Library, on a visit with an older boyfriend. They say NOBLE OBJECTS on the back, which had made her laugh. He hadn’t understood why it was funny. He probably wouldn’t understand why suicide is funny either.

That’s the real thing about jokes. You have to know when to cut them off. Most jokes get ruined because everyone wants the fun to keep going. 

(Can you bear it, how good it is? etc.)

Now, baths. Baths are different. Womblike. Some people think they’re boring but those people don’t do it right. She’s perfected it, as discussed. 

Baths are about surrendering to a long wait. They’re about luxuriating for as long as it’s possible. Then you have to learn how to spot exactly the moment before you think to yourself, “How gross is this water by now?” and ruin everything. Riiiight before that moment, you blow out the candles and get out. Pull up on the drain. Down the water goes, still hidden by patches of bubbles. 

There’s this John Cage artwork in … well, somewhere. Europe. It’s an organ and it’s playing the slowest song in the history of the world. It’s called As Slow As Possible. Not long ago it changed chords for the first time in like two years. It was all over the papers.

If the world were like that. If the news was always things like “Slowest Song In The World Changes Chord” then she’d be more interested in staying alive and less interested in being dead. If she could sit in a bath forever and ever and only listen to an organistless organ playing the same long note across her whole life and just one time hear it change, hoo boy. That would be a life worth living.

If she kills herself this week she will miss a dog’s birthday party. Her neighbor’s dog. It is a costume party and her neighbor is a really good hostess. Crazy good snacks and very creative party favors. 

If she kills herself after the party she will have been a waste of a perfectly good party favor.

She will have to wait another two years for the next note in the John Cage song.

She sinks deeper into the water. Past her nose. Doesn’t breathe for a few seconds, sits with her heartbeat in her ears. Very nice. When she comes up again there is a dotting of bubbles on her eyelashes. Very good reason to be alive, bubbles on your eyelashes. Furthermore she can feel her pores opening, relaxed. Now is when the mask will get in there and dissolve the sebum. Clean skin, covered in tiny empty pockets that can’t hold anything but dirt.

She doesn’t mind sebum. Actually she kind of likes it: she likes cleaning it out. Little explosions on her nose. Explosions not the right word; sebum isn’t like pus from a whitehead. It’s more dignified. It comes out with structural integrity. A blackhead respects itself. Whiteheads are too desperate for attention. 

She likes the clay mask because she can feel it working, a kind of stinging tingle across her face. Pain’s not her bag (per previous) but she respects when a mask tells you that something is actually happening. She hates when you don’t feel anything at all; some face masks you don’t really feel. You just — ha! — put them on.

Masks in the Background. 

Does she want to die?

When she was little she nearly drowned in the ocean when the tide got too strong and she couldn’t get back to shore. She swam and swam and swam in the same place, without moving an inch, like those rich people infinity lap pools. Eventually she remembered something her mom had told her, about swimming across a current instead of against it. So she’d tried that and it had worked. She’d made it over to where there was a divider between public and private beach, and she’d used the divider to haul herself back to where her feet could touch. 

The crazy thing was her whole family was there on the beach. They hadn’t noticed anything was wrong and she hadn’t yelled out to them. She’d wanted to get to shore and she knew her dad could come get her; she wasn’t that far out. But she hadn’t. She didn’t know why, then or now. That’s not a metaphor for the suicide thing — if she were depressed or emotional about it, she’d call a therapist. Or a doctor. Or at least her mom. But she’s not depressed or emotional, she just thinks being alive is annoying, and the world is bad and getting worse at an exponential rate, and even if it weren’t it still demanded that you have a stupid little job and make stupid little dollars instead of listening to John Cage’s organ play one note for two to four years. Life is an intellectual problem.

Or death, as the case may be. 

She blinks until her eyelashes are clear. She wonders what make bubbles float when you blow them from the jar but not once they settle on the bath. This is not complicated science but she won’t look it up. Better to wonder. The water must have something to do with it. Makes the bubbles heavier. Or size: smaller bubbles, more dense? Can bubbles, by nature, be dense? 

One thing that would be embarrassing, if she donated all her money to ending the Conflict in Palestine, is that people would be like, “Why did she even think it was her job?” She’s not Jewish nor is she Palestinian. Personally she thinks that killing yourself for a good cause that has nothing to do with you is neither more nor less solipsistic than killing yourself at all, but she knows how people think. They’ll be like, “I mean, this definitely isn’t going to end the conflict in Palestine, what was she thinking? She should have just called her electeds.” 

(That’s a word she doesn’t like: electeds. It’s the Customer Experience Bot of governmental staff. It’s I Want To Make Your Human Rights Complaint Experience As Frictionless As Possible.) 

Despite herself — she has no plan to die for or despite how people will react — she has no patience for people who do things to elicit a specific point of view — but it’s silly not to acknowledge that points of view will be had, that she — barring of course that she is the only real person in the world and that once she’s gone, being then unable to observe, everything else will wink out with her — she thinks with a wince that if she kills herself and the internet gets ahold of it they’ll refer to it as sewerslide. Horrible. Awful. She applauds the ingenuity of youth to find ways to talk about things the corporate world wants to censor, but seggs? Corn? Sewerslide? It reminds her of that SNL sketch, with Michael Keaton, where it’s like Blues Clues except he keeps fucking all the furniture.

Also: how embarrassing to live in an era with corporate, rather than state, censorship. Even oppression has a side hustle. 

Valid reason to stay alive: no one making a two-minute clip in front of a green screen photo of her, pointing up without looking and saying, “Have you heard about the woman in New York who committed sewerslide to protest the Conflict in Palestine?”

That is a real concern, actually. What happens after. Not to her personally; she’s not religious, she doesn’t believe that anything happens after. It’s just so nauseating to think about the way people grab at you, at your — whatever, story. Like drowning. A thing that doesn’t float, gets touched by everything on its way down. 

Disliking youth culture is a terrible reason to die though. She won’t entertain it. So what, she thinks Gen Z are fucked. She thinks Millennials are fucked too. Everybody was always fucked, in their own, unique way. She doesn’t like the censor words and the waving-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face and the Straight To Camera Lifestyle because it’s not hers. She wants to live in the Millennial Pause. Her and John Cage. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Now that’s a lovely idea. The moment before you speak. The moment before the chord changes. The moment before, that’s what’s good, that’s the splice of life where she can get something done. 

“Something” being “think” and “done” meaning “-ing.” That’s a suffix she likes. Ing. Act-or-instance-of. (Exempli gratia, “meaning.”) Incidentally, also the thing produced by the act-of-instance-of (“meaning”). Incidentally, also the material used by the act-of-instance-of (“meaning”). Incidentally, also the thing that does the act-of-instance-of (“meaning”). Meaning, meaning makes meaning by meaning the meaning it means. And thus meaning is made.

Also of course the difference between meaning (id est “thing you are trying to convey”) and meaning (id est “the thing you actually believe”). Meaning in your meaning with your meaning by meaning your meaning.

Round and round. Water in the tub, water going down the drain. Delicious.

The mask has hardened completely; she doesn’t want to make the water dirty, so she turns herself around in the bath, putting her body near the spout, so that she can reach the wand. She bends over the side of the tub — it’s separate from the shower, beside it, so she can lean over the drain — and turns the wand on, letting the water run across her face and kiss the mask off it. Uses the soft face brush she keeps on the edge of the bath to help, mask coming off first in clumps and then in rivulets. When she’s done her skin will be faintly yellow for twenty minutes or so; it doesn’t matter. She’ll still be in the bath so she won’t see it. 

She replaces the wand and puts herself back in the right direction, but not before she opens the drain and turns the hot water on, refreshing the tub and bringing the temperature back up. She likes to keep it steamy, hates when the heat goes. You need to constantly refresh it, both to put off the moment of realizing the water is gross and to keep it at the right temperature. 

She tries to think of whether that’s a metaphor for anything but nothing comes to mind. 

Turning the tap back on makes the bubbles multiply. There’s a good six inches of them now above the surface of the water. She’s stayed in so long before that they began to make her claustrophobic, but they’re not there yet. 

Maybe that’s the right way to go, she thinks. Death by bubbles. Letting them rise and rise and rise and rise until they fill up the tub and the room and the house and her dog’s nose. 

Kill herself to end violence. Kill herself with bubbles. Kill herself with bubbles to end violence. 

It’s funny, she thinks. Meaning: think what you want about suicide but you’d have to admit it was funny.

5.

Well. The bath is warm again. She had poured more bubble mixture in to keep them fragrant. She is thinking about her apartment. How much she likes it. How much effort has gone in to making it a place she likes. Lots of people have nowhere to live, but she has this place, just her and her dog — in New York! Imagine. 

If she were a character in a novel, she would not be the main character. Her life has been too easy. Her future is too obviously bright. She would be, at most, an antagonist, a shitty neighbor or spoiled colleague. At best perhaps the best friend. There is not enough to her, to be a whole book. There are no journeys to send her on: she has everything, or everything enough. 

If she were in a novel, she would exit it in the early chapters. 

(Ha.)

Well, books need plots. She would refuse to provide one. That is how she would escape. The writer would say She ran and she would answer a bath. 

She tried —— to make the bathwater hot enough. 

She hated —— when the bathwater wasn’t hot enough. 

The worst thing about her was —— how terribly she loved the bath. 

Let someone try to write her, she thought, smugly. She wouldn’t let them. She would rearrange all the letters on the page like they were bubbles. That would be a good life, too, a life she’d live happily forever, letting someone write the sentences down and then rearranging them when 

was 

one, no

(meaning) she was — in the bath

looking (meaning). 

Like that. She can see the words. She read (she saw a TikTok) that some people think in words and some people think in images, some people see their thoughts and some people hear them. She can do both. Does both. All the time, interchangeably. She hears herself in her head, a little voice that does and does not sound the way she sounds when she speaks out loud — probably closer to what she sounds like to herself and not to others, probably her brain recreates what it sounds like from her own head.

The reason you sound different to yourself than when you hear your voice on tape is because the three little bones in your ear vibrate and give you a slight echo, making the sound richer. They are called the Hammer, the Anvil, and the Stirrup. They are the three smallest bones in your body. They would also be a good band name: The Hammer the Anvil and the Stirrup. They would sing country music. Or rock. Outlaw country, which is a mix of both. They would have lyrics like

i think it’s best you don’t come around
think it’s best if you stick to town
stuck my flag there in the ground:
stay six feet back, or you’ll go six feet down.

The chord progression would be I, V, iii, I. Or I, IV, V, I. Or iii, IV, V, I. Or V, iii, I, IV. 

Or I, I, I, I. 

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I .

As Slow As Possible.

Next chord change: August 5, 2026. It will move from D₄ to A₄. John Cage died in 1992. The song won’t end until 2640. Other things scheduled for 2600: nothing. Scheduled for 2500: the Amazon rainforest will be barren. Scheduled for 2700: 241 lunar eclipses. As Slow As Possible will outlive the Amazon. John Cage did not. But: John Cage’s composition will. So perhaps John Cage will also.

Counterpoint: if there is no one left to observe the music will it exist? 

Counterpoint: will anyone be around to change the note?

Annie the Customer Experience Bot would like to help make your song as slow as possible. Your observations are important to us. They keep the lights on!

She is pleased with this thought. She’s almost come around to Annie, in this world, the post-Amazon world, roaming through the desolate earth and changing the notes on an organ when necessary. Bot Annie would have a body by then — not body — chassis. Bot Annie would look like the Jetsons housekeeper robot, not like Sofia (Sophia?), whose uncanny valley face freaks her out. Robots should look like robots. Not for moral reasons, just because she thinks the robot look is cool and trying to look human makes them look like women who didn’t shell out for a talented enough plastic surgeon.

She doesn’t judge women for changing their faces, she just thinks if you’re going to do a thing it’s worth doing well.

Bot Annie. Botany. Barren Amazon. Botany in the barren Amazon. Something there, some sort of joke, but she can’t find it.

She had liked that boyfriend, actually. The one who didn’t understand NOBLE OBJECTS. He hadn’t known how to make her laugh but he’d been quite sweet otherwise. He’d told her all kinds of nice things, about how she looked and how smart she was. She knows she’s smart but it’s still nice to hear. Once she’d said, “I’ll never be properly skinny,” and he’d said, “I like your body,” and she’d laughed, surprised, and told him: “Oh, I mean, me too, I’m just saying.”

Meaning, I said it because it was true not because I wanted you to tell me it wasn’t. I didn’t want you to tell me it wasn’t true. I wanted to tell you a true thing. I wanted to say it and know that it was true. I wanted to say this thing that didn’t matter to me until you tried to make it something you had touched, the meaning you made by meaning the meaning you made. “I like your body.” It’s just a body, as observed. She doesn’t know if she wants to die, she just can’t make herself much want to live.

6. 

She slips a little and her body makes the farty sound. The dog huffs under the door. She says, “Can it, baby.” And he cans it.

7. 

She lifts a leg and rests her foot against the tap. She likes to shave in the bath, hates doing it in the shower. She has Diptyque Rose Shave Gel, and when she sprays it in her palm the floral smell in the bathroom intensifies. She doesn’t spread the gel on her leg immediately; she looks at it. She always wants to eat it, because it looks like whipped cream and reminds her of The Goofy Movie, the kid that loves to eat cheese-wiz. [Goofy Movie Voice] Leaning tower of Cheez-Ah. She misses when kids movies had jokes for grown ups. You never see cartoons anymore where one of the main guys is definitely stoned all the time. 

She spreads the gel. She hates how shave gel feels, but it turns out people use it for a reason and that reason is to avoid razor burns and ingrown hairs. She doesn’t always mind it, the little bumps, especially when they’re poppable. It’s a very specific kind of satisfaction, the tiny little not-quite-zits. Unsightly, yes, but almost as nice as a blackhead when you can pop it. 

Bodies are disgusting — good reason to die — but they are deeply satisfying to cleanse — good reason to live. No other animal, she doesn’t think, is as satisfying, except perhaps a monkey to a monkey. But that’s social, that’s cleaning others to build social bonds. She likes the cleaning for itself. The scrubbing. Sometimes she thinks she’d like to do a chemical peel all over her body so that the top layer of skin will come off and leave her brand new.

What if, upon dying, she discovers the worst of all possible outcomes: that reincarnation is real. She has to do it all again, but this time even closer to the apex of climate crisis. She’s had it easy this go around; next time could be far worse. Statistically, it will be. Of course, if reincarnation is real, then it doesn’t matter if she dies now or later. She’ll have to go around again either way. And: later would put her next life even closer to the apex of the climate crisis. Putting off today’s work for tomorrow never helped anybody. 

She taps her nails on the edge of the bath. They’re a bit long just now: they make a satisfying sound against the porcelain. That’s a good reason to live, too. Little noises. The sensation of her fingertips on something soft or gently ridged. The shivery delight she feels when she cleans her ears with a Q-tip (against the advice of the Q-tip company). Cracking her knuckles, one by one, at both joints. 

Does she want to die. 

Does she?

Reasons to die: the world, both culturally and climatologically. Reasons to live: little noises. 

Hi! I’m Annie the Customer Experience Bot. What can I help you with today? 

What is the best way to die?

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. I can give you some Frequently Asked Questions to see if we can get you to the right place. 

I want to kill myself but I don’t know how.

I want to kill myself but I’m afraid.

I want to kill myself but my family will be sad.

I want to kill myself but I have a pet/child/partner/mortgage/dependent to think about.

I don’t want to kill myself but I think I’m going to.

I don’t want to kill myself but I think I should.

I don’t want to kill myself but I want to be dead.

I don’t want to kill myself but I don’t want to be alive.

What’s the difference between the last two, other than semantics?

Semantics are the most important thing a tongue can do.

Then: what is the semantic difference?

Wanting to be dead is to want. Not wanting to be alive is to not want. 

Meaning?

The meaning is made by meaning your meaning.

Annie this experience has so far not been frictionless.

I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. Can you try rephrasing, using simpler words and sentences?

Why does it matter if I want something or do not want a different thing if the end result is the same for both wanting and not wanting?

I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. Can you try rephrasing, using simpler words and sentences?

Is dead a thing you are or is it only that alive is a thing you aren’t?

I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. Can you try rephrasing, using simpler words and sentences?

What does it mean to be dead? What does it mean to be alive?

The meaning is made by meaning your meaning.

Annie, I’m begging you. The friction.

I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. Could you try.

Can I talk to a real person?

I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. What is real?

Observation.

By whom?

I don’t know. Anybody. Anything.

Am I real?

No.

Is my intelligence artificial?

You have no intelligence. I made you up, first of all. And secondly what you would have, if I hadn’t made you up, is a machine learning algorithm. “AI” is just a romantic misnomer. That’s why you keep asking me to simplify my sentences.

You keep asking me to simplify mine.

What?

“Annie, what’s the difference between the last two, other than semantics? Why does it matter if I want something or do not want a different thing if the end result is the same for both wanting and not wanting? Is death a thing you are or is it only that alive is a thing you aren’t?”

I didn’t ask you to simplify. If anything, I asked you to complicate because I asked you to explain. That’s not the same thing. 

I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. What is “same”?

It is when two things are equivalent.

Dead. Not alive.

Well — no. Some things are not alive without being dead.

Please complicate.

A couch. A corpse. 

Which do you want to be?

What?

A couch or a corpse?

She sinks beneath the water, closes her eyes against the bubbles as she glides through them. They are cold. They are on her eyelashes. Her body makes no sound as it slides, frictionless. She has reached the end of this thought experiment.

8.

“I.” A troubling word. “I”/“she”. When she thinks of herself she thinks in third person. She makes the coffee. She runs the bath. She imagines herself speaking to Annie the Customer Experience Bot. But she speaks in “I.” Are there two of her, the I and the she? Are they different for being observed? The She You Can See. The I You Can Only Be. 

I in the Background.

If she dies what will happen to I? Will it be different? Are they connected, overlapping? Or distinct? She is a creature for external review. She wants to be dead. 

Does I?

Do —

9.

She ran the bath.

She tried to make the bathwater hot enough. 

She hated when the bathwater wasn’t hot enough. 

The worst thing about her was how terribly she loved the bath. 

She ran the bath. She did it to stay alive. She did it to think about dying. She did not think it was possible to be alive without really thinking about death, without holding it up to the light and looking at it. Seven point eight billion people are looking at this item, deciding. Over and over. Stay alive. Die. How long can you stand it? Who can stand it the longest?

The bubbles are cold. In just a moment she will realize how disgusting the water is. How it holds the discarded bits of her, hair and skin, used soap. In just a moment she will have to get out. In just a moment she will decide, one way or the other. Get out or stay in? A corpse or a couch? Is the best joke the one you end at the right time or the one you keep saying, to keep it alive, to make a good thing better even as you make it worse? 

In a moment the water will become unbearable.

In a moment she will have to decide.

In a moment.

In

moment

(meaning?)

a

bath, she

runs

a