She felt a stab of near-erotic surprise upon seeing the message: Hey C, this you? 

​

An old lover piercing her quiet with a crisp, hard knock. 

 

Clara held the phone at arm’s length to look at the screen, then brought it to her breastbone to savor the moment. The last few years had been a crash course in the many registers of silence. At first, she’d flinched at the digital trill of the notification because she’d been quite content—honestly, pretty okay—with being alone, not begrudgingly after all this time, but since the beginning. 

 

In the early days of Protection, her okay-ness had embarrassed her—should she want more? Everyone around her seemed upset at the immediate and numerous privations, while she was thrilled to do less. Other people accelerated into more activity, making their own beer, writing memoirs, buying kettlebells. Clara decelerated, took naps, slowly re-organized closets, paid well more attention to her plants and their nuanced, individual needs: placement, sun, humidity, warmth. It suited her to be free of stone-in-the-shoe obligations to others: the minutes lost to a neighbor’s chattering, the hour lost to social emails, the need to prove interest in things. The five periods of Protection that came and went were a roller coaster, but they kept her safe, though she lived in a narrow band of modest highs and tolerable lows. To be free of abrupt pangs either way—that itself felt like happiness. 

​

And now this message. After years of being Inside, she no longer had the appetite for surprise or the stamina for constant rumination. She’d not thought of him or any other old lover this whole time, not even by accident.

​

Clara and her old lover had parted ways almost twenty years ago, and it was not the kind of situation that required a lot of post-mortem analysis. He had simply been, and then he wasn’t; he was tall, brown-haired, thoughtful (he’d once given her a pink water bottle so she could hydrate discreetly as a hostess in a popular restaurant); and in the end, he was unfaithful. The infidelity had disappointed her more than it had hurt her. She’d hoped for a more unusual reason: a niche perversion, a secret spouse, but. Men, you know. Not so imaginative even when they had complete freedom to be, which he’d had, since they were long-distance. From the start, their relationship possessed the sort of low-stakes machine energy that turned monotony into monogamy, so she’d wanted an out, and then conveniently, he’d given her one. Imagine if they’d stayed together, Clara had thought back then—that slightly too-wide face rounding the corners of her house, dozens of times a day, every single day, a stretchy amphibian head on a man’s body. 

​

Still, a message! After all this time, a message, with the frisson of medical results. Either way, this news will change your life. 

​

To write him back too quickly would imply she was not busy, and while few people were actually that busy anymore, she’d wait at least a few hours. (The old ways die hard.) She had a few things to do: suit up to enter the antechamber and send her trash out the chute. Consult the Dept. of Protection website for schedule changes: weekly mail and garbage collection and monthly mobile medics, the few remaining legal reasons to open her door. And for a few credits, she could call for a tinker who sold powdered milk and dried beef-like product, and after Factory weeks, cans of wet edibles. She almost always had vouchers for cans, an incentive from her employer, the second-largest memorials uploader. Certainly she was lucky. She never ate incredibly delicious food, but she was never hungry. She even had books she’d not yet read and some liquor, which she was saving for the very end. 

​

After dinner, she typed a reply to the former lover. It's me. 

​

Immediately: My god! Thank god, haha! How are you?

​

Clara relaxed. Good! (as can be) And you?  

​

Same. You know :) I’m so glad it’s you. 

​

And back and forth. He wanted to talk, he said, not just type. It had been at least a year since she had communicated privately, not in a work group, and in real time, not asynchronously. So they would talk! They’d talk by phone, which had come roaring back into fashion in the early months of First Protection. A chat, just a bit of talk—what was the harm? Even if they came to talk a lot, stitched together the gulf of time, there was no danger of meeting in person. There was no air travel (if he still lived in Baltimore) and no video chat (bandwidth was preserved for the government). They would talk like she did as a child, pacing within the radius of the phone cord, a shiny receiver like the back of a sea lion held to her ear. 

​

Kind of an adventure, Clara thought. A person who knew her, wanted to visit with her. They had shared history to draw from, surely enough for one conversation. Pre-Protection memories were, as Clara knew, a big business. If you could still remember and you had the means, your best memories could live forever in the cloud, accessed anytime by tapping on your temple. Lots of people were doing it prophylactically in case of infection, because infection was often followed by memory loss. She hadn’t catalogued any of her own memories despite her employee discount—what was the point of saving memories that you might not recognize as memories? As your own? She was a realist.

​

​

​​

The infections had arrived both quickly and slowly, running through the deer population, then through chickens and cows, then through cats and dogs, and finally into people. The virus seemed bloodborne, then transferred by touch, then by something else. Never mind, said the powers-that-be, quietly, below the fold: it’s word-borne. It traveled on the spoken word, moved like smoke, hung in empty rooms where the last statement had gone unanswered, blew down the block, the ghost conversations of other people. 

​

You can’t get it outside, the wind blows it away! 

​

But the deer and her neighbor’s cats had been outside all the time, and the cats were dead and the deer were sick again and again, ambling into traffic, dazed. 

​

During First Protection, most people stayed inside without complaint, a collective impulse akin to wartime mobilization. Plasticky bread and virtual circuses, factories humming, autonomous vans crawling the city grid like big brown beetles delivering pad thai, drawstring pants, board games, kombucha. Clara had replaced her electric toothbrush, brought her neighbor’s sole surviving cat inside, called him Clarence. In the news, thousands died every day. Then just hundreds. Then they counted only by the week, then by the month, and more people Recovered than died and the headline writers rejoiced. The many Recovered didn’t quite go back to their old selves, but they seemed healthy enough. They took ibuprofen and allergy medications, put on clean shirts, and went back to work, to dinner, to vacationing in the islands. Clara played both sides; she didn’t let on how careful she still was, and she wriggled out of all parties involving babies or retirements. 

​

It’s a personal choice, public health officials said, a personal Risk Assessment. If people wanted to cheer, chew, laugh, or cough, wheeze, sneeze, it was their choice. Should the young defer to the old, the healthy to the sick, the brave to the mice? No! Protection policies receded. 

​

But infections lingered like a rude houseguest, viral variants changing just enough to get slightly worse, sisters but not twins. And so it went, into Second, Third, Fourth and now the Fifth and final Protection. Tired of the cycles, the government said everyone must choose: live Outside or Inside. If you chose to live Outside, you were free to roam, but had to sleep in dormitories and were barred from medical care upon infection. If you chose Inside, you could never leave your house. Take your chances or take no chances. Clara was neither young nor old, not so healthy or so vulnerable. If being outside was an explosive bacchanal, she might have considered it, to go out with a bang, anonymous, cackling, ripe, pasties optional. But in reality, Outside seemed like a slow boil, writing a check today that her future self would cash when funds and T-cells were low. She chose Inside because in general, she chose the devil she knew. 

​

Clara held Clarence to her chest and pointed out the sealed window. 

​​

You could be on the other side of the glass, Clarence, fighting for your life, Clara often whispered to him. He slept on heating pads, had learned to tap the button to the highest warmth setting. In the atomized existence of an infinite quarantine, Clara welcomed the idea of talking to her old lover, that ancient, rhythmic custom of conversation. They could revisit the amber of the honeymoon period, the monuments of their infatuation, the first message, the first kiss, all the firsts, then perhaps, perhaps, the shyness would sink back and something honest would step forward. Why not. Just a talk. What could it hurt. 

​

A minor eruption of insecurity flared in her. Should she put on lipstick for the call even though he couldn’t see her? Her hips, were they normal or too broad? Live conversation, wit, timing, spark—how much had her skills atrophied? What did she have to show for her time, really? Her plants, her cans, Clarence. If she and her old lover came to talk often, maybe she would share how she wasn’t always so nice to Clarence, sometimes pushed him off the bed with her feet. The truth about her indoor “herb” garden. She wouldn’t ask about his family and hopefully he wouldn’t ask about her parents.

​

You’ll be fine, they’d admonished her, look at us, we’re fine, and we have diabetes and heart problems, and we survived, go, go do something. 

​

They even tried to infect her once so she’d get it over with. Then they fell ill again and went from using a lot of Kleenex to a withering, crushing fatigue within days. Their heart rates soared if they stood, but still they chose Outside, where landcruises for seniors had become popular. They used some of their limited energy to insist that she go socialize. 

​

Did you go to your sister’s gender reveal party? they asked over email.

​

No, she said, I did not. 

​

Why are you like this, they wrote.

 

​

​

Would that someone else would call her first, so she could acclimate to the unfamiliar jangle of the phone ringing and not answer her old lover’s call startled and breathless. But who would call. During First and even Second Protection, friends called to commiserate. Back then, opening the large glass door and whistling to Clarence, then her neighbor’s cat, were the first things Clara did every morning. Then she put on the kettle for tea, set out the egg dishes, and soft-boiled the eggs. Clarence would amble up her steps, sit in the sun for hours, eat shredded chicken out of her palm. He never roamed the neighborhood. Clarence was not that kind of cat. He liked his birds cooked. 

​

Now, she watched people who’d chosen Outside run about in elastomeric respirators, scurrying to and fro under an orange sky. How noisy was it outside? Clara sometimes barked or howled just to hear something intentional, and Clarence would pop his ears forward and leap at her face. He made noises of his own, padding up and down the hallway, pressing out a hydraulic hush as he settled into his puffy bed. 

​

For a quick dinner before the call, she chose a can of cat paté for Clarence and a can of tomato-softened pasta for herself, pressing the blade of the can opener into the seam of her can. The food-like smell hissed out of the rupture. Much had gone wrong and much more would, but she’d been prescient about the cans. There were plenty stored in her house, even accounting for Clarence. She would never eat the cat. They would die together, if it came to that, and it probably would. 

​

Only a few more minutes. Her abdomen warmed. What did her old lover look like now? Had the hair on his chest turned white, had the muscles of his arm loosened around the bone? Years ago, he had been very tall and very fit, a kind of a carbon credit against the fact that he could only talk about video games and self-help books. 

​

Then! The ring.

 

A real voice in real time. The bass timbre of a real man, who was talking directly to her, who knew her. 

 

“Clara. It’s you.”

 

An alien thrill bloomed in her. It had been such a long time. A fiber unraveled, crawled from inside her chest towards him, searching, ready to knot. Back when they were lovers, she had liked him a little bit less than he’d liked her, so she’d had the upper hand. But now her insides curled around the challenge of proving herself worthy. They could be a unit, have a regular cadence of calls, two married voices. He lobbed a compliment at her and she lobbed one back, couched in a tease. It was easy, and she shivered at the ease. 

​

“My Clara, you’re still sassy,” he said, “I like that.”

​

Clara smiled, pressing the receiver to her cheek.

​

He didn’t do his ecological work anymore. He’d chosen Inside as well and moved into trend-spotting on the environmental beat, writing reports regarding second-and third-order effects of wildfires, chemical fires, hazardous flood deposits, all the new (mostly plastic) virus test kits. His audience was the government and government-adjacent organizations. 

​

“Listen, we are nurdles,” he said. “Nurdles are us. We are entirely made of corn and microplastics. It’s why we melt when we’re cremated.” 

​

He let out a low whistle when Clara said she was in memory work. 

​

“Big business,” he said. 

​

“It is. It’s huge.”

 

“What’s the weirdest one you’ve preserved?” 

 

“Well,” she said, “I can’t talk about that.”

 

“Sure, right. Of course. Privacy.”

​

“And ethics,” she said, and he snorted.

 

When he shared that he was divorced (actually, he said she left me), Clara paused, then decided she didn’t care. Of course there was a reason he’d reached out other than pure nostalgia. He was lonely, he’d been rejected. Men weathered even casual rejections so poorly; a divorce, especially an unexpected one, must have been a punch in the face. 

​

“She had an emotional affair,” he said. Clara frowned, silent. Was she supposed to agree with his assessment (she didn’t know his ex-wife) and ignore the irony of his complaint?

​

“Are you married, divorced?” he asked. 

​

“No,” she said. “It never happened for me.” 

​

“Ruined you for all other men, huh?” he laughed. 

​

“Oh, haha.”

​

The fiber continued to unspool toward him along a familiar groove. Be nice, she thought, humor him, a man who is bereft, as he tries to right his ship. Men in distress are fragile; this is a reunion, he needs a little kindness, Clara told herself. She let him ramble on, muting the phone whenever the fire jets hurtled overhead. Protection had been hard on everyone, even people who weren’t so upset by it, but to be abandoned by your spouse while Inside! Harrowing. But few couples survived the crucible of that kind of proximity. 

​

He said that he, too, had chosen Inside because he had heart palpitations, hypertension. He wasn’t taking any chances. And I don’t want my dick to go soft, he said, though what he needed it for, Inside and abandoned, Clara couldn’t imagine. 

​

Less than fifteen minutes into the conversation, he sent photos of himself. Maybe because he was facing a bright light, he looked like a faded version of his younger, more saturated self. He was still pink in some areas, but also puce, with a droop at the ends of his eyes. He sent two shots from different angles. Men liked to send unsolicited photos, Clara had learned long ago, a mix of validation-seeking and baseless self-confidence. They did not, of course, put any effort into the composition; in the background there were always unmade beds or tangled cables and food wrappers, and their groins were conveniently backlit. She could tell he was taking more pictures.

​

“Send me one of you,” he said. Clara demurred. 

 

“Send me one,” he repeated. “Just one.”

 

Clara’s throat dropped. Just one. Just this once. She knew this was how men began a campaign of persistence bordering on coercion. 

​

“What, have you gained weight or something?” 

​

There it was. Unchanged by calamity. She looked at his photos again. Had his eyes always been this far apart? 

 

​

​

They said goodbye, hung up. Despite everything, she was flattered, she could admit that. He had remembered her, chosen her to scratch the itch of his loneliness. When he’d thanked her for talking and said let’s do this again, she’d felt useful, delighted. She set down the phone and embraced Clarence, who balked. Today was a day she had not thought possible. In that way, it was a good day. 

​

She reviewed the script of their conversation over and over while she heated up some Tetra Pak milk for cocoa, while she wrung out her underthings in the sink and hung them to dry on the shower rod. The quotidian gestures felt fresh with meaning. She tried to guess the kind of cans he ate from, whether he grew anything indoors. How did he spend the rest of his night? Did he read now that they weren’t allowed broadband for online video games? 

​

What had he done on his last day Outside? 

​

Clara thought back to her last day: buying vintage DVDs, some cut flowers, an exorbitantly-priced bar of chocolate. With hindsight, she saw that all days back then could have been the last, each one a shrinking window of possibility, each one worse than the day before, not as bad as the day to come. The steady trickle of catastrophes eroded the collective imagination until few hoped for better and most just wanted a U-turn into the recent, mediocre past. Clara had expressed worry, for which she was mocked (“if it was that bad, they’d tell us”), and bought a second screen and a laptop stand, for which she was lauded. Frogs unaware of the pot, she’d written in her journal, back when she still journaled.

​

When she was a child, her father told her that before she was born, he had to wait in long lines to fill up the car’s gas tank. But, he said, why did I do that, where would I go? There was nowhere to go. Maybe to a bridge, to jump in the water, because America was so ugly. I didn’t realize how ugly it would be here. He'd lightly tapped the steering wheel with his fist. 

​

Clara was six years old, unsure of his point. She asked, why jump in the water?

​

That’s true, he said, no point. In America, they try to save you. 

​

As it turned out, the beginning of the end has no Big Sign. The end crept up on everyone disguised as an eight-dollar head of lettuce.

 

Her old lover asked to talk again. She realized during the second go that he still had terrible timing, interrupting her a nanosecond too early, overlapping with her point, causing a verbal two-step, over and over. No, you go. It was an awkward tic that roused a cache of Things That Didn’t Make Sense about him in her mind: the way he was handsome from a distance but a bit froggy up close, with his elastic mouth and pronounced eyeballs. His body didn’t move the way it looked, chiseled and solid: he bounced when he walked, as if gravity had too much recoil. Despite having the cultural gifts of height and a full head of hair, he curdled whenever another man entered the airspace, assuming a premature defeat. He was moody and churlish, pouted for attention, got stoned when he didn’t get any. But he was generous, and he looked good walking towards her in an airport, and they’d had decent moments. Now they could look at the highlight reel, a surprise birthday picnic, a day at Big Sur, dinner next to celebrities in Santa Monica. 

​

“That guy was a redhead in real life!” Clara said.

​

“Yeah, you were so surprised,” he said.

​

“And British,” she said. He seemed to bristle at that, as if it were a compliment and not just a description. 

​

“You called me a dumbass,” he said. 

​

“Did I?” The fiber between them grew taut.

​

This was entirely possible, though dumbass was not a word she would use. In her twenties, she believed that mocking men made them more amorous, and it did, for a type of man who believed that even negative attention contained a kernel of potential. 

 

“Yeah, all through dinner at that tapas place you kept bringing up things I didn’t know and then calling me a dumbass.”

 

“Okay.”

​

“You don’t believe me?”

 

“Yes.” Clara looked at the ceiling. “I do.” 

 

“You should.”

 

The conversation was growing teeth. Clara sensed he wanted to establish an old debt, payable immediately. She could remind him that he cheated on her, but for what. So much had happened, was happening; it seemed better not to add to the shit pile. Outside, people were leaping into the ocean because the land was on fire, and Recovered teenagers were developing early-onset dementia. The price of memory-storage skyrocketed, even as services proliferated. What was the point. It cost her nothing to agree. 

​

“Yep, you called me a dumbass,” he sing-songed. 

 

“I said okay.”

 

“But then,” he said, “we went back to your place and had sex, so it was all good.”

Clara went quiet. On the ceiling, she could see a fly struggling, caught in the goop of a web. Somewhere in her house, there was a breach big enough to admit a fly. 

​

“We had sex,” he repeated.

​

The old fiber began to curl away from him.  

​

“Pretty good sex,” he said. “So I forgave you.”

 

She looked around for the stepstool. “Great,” she said.

 

“I don’t know about you,” he prodded, alarmed by the drop in momentum. “But I mean, I remember that we always had great sex.”

 

They hadn’t. She balanced on the stepstool, reaching towards the fly with a chopstick, and flicked it free from the sticky trap. It fell straight onto the counter, stunned, then buzzed away. Where was the crack in her house, letting in ash and virus and insects? After choosing Inside, she had paid for sealant, a bit extra for soundproofing, so she could, on occasion, scream. 

​

She could hear him breathing, waiting. They weren’t walking together anymore, looking in the same direction. Hadn’t she done her part, complimented the way he’d aged, the description of his new divorcé’s apartment? She had sided with him about his ex, though he was clearly in the wrong. What did he think happened now? Or tomorrow? Or the day after? All days were Final. It was enough, more than enough, to play their parts well. Inside, life was an upturned hourglass of one’s remaining cans. Outside was a miasma of aerosolized death, the trees barren, the birds skeletal, the sky orange. She hadn’t eaten a real orange in years. They were all just waiting.

​

“Did you hear me?” he asked. 

 

Clara wanted to hang up. She had agreed to a barter and this was theft. He was not a man adrift, lonely. He was hunting and he had set his scope on her, was trying to wrest from her the confirmation that he was not a man easily discarded, not a fool, not a cuckold, not a man left behind, no, he was a man who can fuck. 

 

“Clara? You still there?”

​

She understood then that she was not the only one he messaged; she was the only one who wrote him back. Her lipstick tasted like the glue of an old envelope. 

​

Clara felt the fiber between them sever, spool back into her with a snap. Even though he was thousands of miles away and only a voice on the phone, she proceeded with caution. She gently wound down the conversation, promised to talk again, hung up, blocked his number. Clarence mewed, patient, waiting for his paté. 

​

“Clarence,” she said. “I have, once again, been shown my place.” Clara tilted her head back and howled, a wavering and mournful round. 

 

The earth shuddered under them, a rolling lift and lower, waves of waves. A full minute of clinking glass, swaying planters. Clara clutched the countertop until it stopped.

​

Luckily, as usual, not a plate cracked, not a book slid off its shelf. She turned on the radio and joined Clarence at the window, his black fur browned by the ruddy sunlight. He was unmoved by the quake. Yesterday, said the radio voice, two teenagers ran up to an elderly woman in Chinatown and tried to set her on fire. An investigation is pending. 

​

What was a grandmother doing outside? Clara wondered. Why didn’t she have people to keep her at home? Why didn’t everyone just stay inside. Why didn’t they just stay home and wait, why did people have so little patience, so little self-control, why was the end of the world not reason enough to choose silence.