Atomic Orange
There is a widening cavern in the pit of my stomach. I feel it as I stare into the mosaic of faces–of dismembered heads, boxed in together and spread out across thousands of miles. Weekly Wednesday Zoom Meeting.
In these meetings, we talk about Hugh. I’m Hugh’s content writer. It’s mostly social media posts–things to be quickly scanned and then discarded. Things that, by their cumulative effect, are meant to raise Hugh’s profile to that of a thought leader and help him generate new business.
Hugh founded a private equity firm a decade ago and has made many millions of dollars. Now he’s focused on saving the world. Saving the world is compatible with making money, Hugh says. He invests in lobster farms that release a portion of their product back into the sea–that sort of stuff.
“Sam, have we rolled out the series on the Caribbean fisheries yet?” Rebecca asks.
I stare into Rebecca’s beady eyes, which are across the Atlantic in a well-lit office with a chandelier. There’s a couch behind her. I wonder if the couch is comfortable. It’s bright red, which might mean its most prized function is of the visual variety. Maybe it ties the room together. I want to lay down on the couch. I imagine myself from the couch watching Rebecca speaking to me on the computer. Then I am back in Brooklyn, in my bedroom, at the desk wedged into the corner.
“Sam?”
“Just started,” I say, the ground beneath my chair becoming soft, unsteady, threatening to give way.
“Okay.” Rebecca pauses, puts her finger to her chin and stares toward the ceiling. “Thinking out loud here, but I just want to be prepared for the whole British Empire 2.0 critique, yeah? Because, essentially this is colonization. He’s buying up land in the Caribbean, bringing in a British workforce.”
I nod, hoping Rebecca sees my agreement as having to do with the need to counter such a critique and less to do with my eagerness to label Hugh a colonizer.
Rebecca starts speaking again.
I click on one of the dozen or so open tabs in my browser–an article I saved from earlier. “Whales form heart off Australian coast”. I watch a video of a hundred pilot whales floating in a densely packed formation in shallow water. The ensuing text explains the video was taken moments before the pod swam onto shore and committed mass suicide.
The street outside my window is lined with shops selling overpriced vintage clothing. Pedestrians push through each other, maneuvering around sidewalk vendors and food carts. A thick, smokey haze blankets the scene. I look toward the sky but can’t see the sun.
This is the highest paying job I’ve ever had. The salary allows me to buy food from the organic grocery store and keep a membership at a gym that provides its guests with eucalyptus scented face towels. It’s the least labor intensive role I’ve ever held. Still, after work, I’ll collapse into bed. Some days, while lying prostrate on my mattress, I’ll try and fail to recall a single thing I’ve done over the course of the day, remembering only the vortex-like-existence of moving between my email, the company’s communication and task-assigning platform and various social media accounts.
A wiry man in shorts and a visor crosses the street. He has a pair of rubber-soled rock climbing shoes flung over his shoulder and a pouch for magnesium chalk attached to his waist. For whatever reason, I think this image is a perfect embodiment of the banality of the apocalypse.
Yesterday, I wrote a newsletter for Hugh titled, “The Top 10 Ways That YOU Can Combat Climate Change.” It talked about supporting green businesses and buying carbon offsets for your flights. I believe this sort of language is irresponsible and wrong. Corporate propaganda. Blow up an oil refinery–that would be my advice. But no one asked for my advice.
The cavern comes with a sort of numbness, a gray sheen that blankets the world. The fear is I will get stuck here. Locked in place. I have before.
I exit the video call without warning and close my computer. I send a text to the team saying there’s a problem with my internet. A sharp pain cuts through my abdomen. I decide to get high.
The backyard smells like piss and pinecones. Glass bottles lie scattered across the dirt. I imagine them as a regiment of decaying soldiers, sinking into the earth, into nothing.
There is some distance now, from myself, from the abyss–as if both things have been locked behind a display case. But the relief in this separation quickly turns to panic.
On my third inhale of the spliff, I begin to notice the heaviness of my pulse, which, like a caged animal slowly coming to realize its confinement, thrusts itself with increasing force against the inside of my chest. I take another long, crackling pull.
I open Instagram: one new like on a recent post from an acquaintance I haven’t talked to in a decade; one new follow from an account with six numbers in its handle and a profile picture of a woman in a thong.
I swipe out of the app, then unthinkingly click once more on its colorful icon. I find myself staring again at my feed, the same but different. A new post fills the screen: a college friend and his fiance kissing on the edge of a cliff. I tap a circular icon at the top of the display, which expands into the still image of a lithe, blond woman in a white dress sitting on the edge of a bed, her cloying eyes staring upward into the camera.
Again, I exit Instagram, this time swiping into a weather app, where I see the outline of New York City colored in with shades of red, the severe hues spreading into surrounding states.
Earlier in the week, I noticed an unusual orange light casting into my bedroom. Through my window, the garbage, parked cars, opposing apartments—everything appeared tinted in an atomic orange glow. The color had given me the unsettling notion the world now existed within a tangerine container, the lid pulled closed. A series of notifications from various news and social media apps explained swaths of smoke had traveled down from Canada, this was the reason for the discolored sky.
I can taste the smoke now, mixing with tobacco and indica.
A red insect maneuvers deftly across the cracked pavement. White and black spots litter its egg-shaped body, which narrows into a sliver of a head, legs jutting out in all directions. The spotted lanternflies in their nymph stages take on the appearance of aliens— two legs reaching directly behind, the sharpness of the head, the graceful, spine-tingling movements. On certain afternoons, I open my back door to find dozens of the bugs covering the metal railing leading down the steps toward the pavement. Soon, these will turn into moth-like creatures with colorful speckled wings. In accordance with a city directive to kill the invasive species, pedestrians will walk out of their way to crush them against sidewalks, walls, tables.
The insect begins heading toward my foot and I kick it, its body skimming across the ground, landing upright and carrying on.
I stand up and look toward the sky, which appears low and heavy. I want to fall backward into someone’s arms, like in those trust exercises from middle school. I want to feel weightless, just for a moment. I close my eyes and imagine myself falling into the depths of my stomach.
A piece of ash catches in my throat and pulls me into a violent spasm of coughs. My eyes blink open to a collective of mosquitos circling my head. The sun’s gray-brown patina seems almost threatening, as if warning of structural decay, imminent collapse.
Perhaps I have fallen far enough.
