That topos
Send mail at ospare@protonmail.org or ospare@substack.com
Ramadan Mubarak y’all, you’ve read the vice, here’s the versa :
Woke up at 6 am to feed the plants and take the tarp off the solarpanels, scrubbing the birdshit and feathers takes me a good half hour but I get it done anyway, better now than dry. My singing under the shower wakes up the dog, she almost tackles me when I get out of the bathroom.
I take her out for a walk by 7 am and we end up at Postal earlier than I’m used to. I pick up my satchel and let Romeo take care of the old beloved beast for me.
The bike’s battery is in the yellow, I forgot to charge it yesterday, I get another one in the reserve then put on my goretex jumpsuit (a bit of rain forecasted for today) and straddle the thing, leading it to the packages area.
I got triple stops for the day because most people have voluntered to help Medic. By the time I got to the hospital too they had way enough bodies to throw at the problem.
The mail still gotta go, and people are sending each others a whole lotta food these days :
The first part of the Greening worked really well, everybody has their own roof-garden-area or something nearby, folks always eat right for themselves but somehow still think people in other neighborhoods are starving ? The revolution has made worried grandmas of us all, trynna make sure our kids are well-fed.
Empathy doesn’t take sick days, I guess.
I joke but I’m still at risk, it’s why I wear mask and gloves.
Just waiting around, getting myself busy till I get this shit really.
I know I’ll get taken care of and it’s not like I’m more at risk than others… Wait, Am I ? Some folks live their whole life not knowing they got some tumor up their asses, I could have something in my lungs too and just—
Fuck it, you know ?
Let’s be useful as long as I can be.
Permanent Squeaking : I forgot to put oil on the axis of the backwheel. Will do it later.
My phone opens up to a bunch of notifications from Postal and Medic and another from Farming.
I check that last one first because I wanna know if we’ll finally get some pineapples, traffic is completely blocked because of quarantine but you never know.
Grain Stocks are fluctuating, some explanatory note from a commune upnorth says that they’re expecting a surplus in grain and wanna see what place will need it. I post a response that East regions are expecting droughts. Someone tells me there’s no pineapples coming. I shrug and check the Medic notification.
There’s a need for more filters to be made and also more blouses to be grown. Farming folk have already answered to that one so I guess it’s ok.
The communes outside the quarantine are working on the filters, I’ll check it tonight, see if they still need help.
Checking Postal now.
Clunky interface, the devs are too busy trynna take care of servers to make a pretty layout. Some folks do mind the lame aesthetic but obviously they aren’t the ones who work on it.
A whole bunch of packages, all ready to go.
The tab on the app shows me a long itinerary, through reconstructed neiborhoods, ex-tourist-traps and a bit of roadwork.
I get going, the squeaking of the wheel gives an annoying tempo to my tour.
On the bright side the neighborhood hears me coming and going, some folks open their window to say hi. I wave back the first few times and then just nod them away.
First thing first are a pack of batteries and masks for Fatou Diaba up in the north east streets, that’s the rewilding-experiments spaces, not quite empty compared to the others, still plenty birds and dogs but no one to play with them. At least they can feed themselves alright.
I ring the bell (a thing of beauty she forged herself when the blacksmith opened his garage 2 years ago) at the bottom of her fam’s cozy 3 story building.
2nd stairs window opens up on her wide open smile and gorgeous pink bonnet, a wild grey-black lock hanging on her brow.
“I didn’t know Postal still had people working it“
“We’re two right now, aunty.”
“For the whole city?”
“Three boroughs.”
“Fuck me, y’all need help?”
“Who doesn’t? I mean it’s ok really, people are just busier with helping Medic, that’s normal.”
“Necessary, yeah. I guess put something up on Postal if you need anything”
“Yeah, thank you.” I say, laying down her package on her stoop.
“No : Thank you. Help yourself with some tomatoes if you need some and hug your Mom for me.”
I squeak squeak away and through a narrow street, the amused-annoyed face of a local gazing at me from his window. Hookah smoke evades the opening where he stands, he waves at me, I nod and smile under my mask and get going. Squeak Squeak.
The reckless Mrs Dworczak asks me to give her the packages through the window, hand-to-hand, and she gives me something else to bring her next street neighbor : a fruitbasket. “You can have a brownie, the doctor says we’re clean.” I nod and keep one for later.
Her next street neighbor is Reinfeld Something who I’ve never met before because he’s not from around here and got quarantined with the rest of us.
“It’s a nice enough place to be honest. And I can still talk to my family but… You know.”
“Yeah I got people I wanna hug too but can only see through a screen.”
“Oh no, I mean that I just really wanna smoke some weed but Farming has announced shortages, apparently ?”
“Yeah, that too.”
Off and away. Squeak squeak.
Lots of people, lots of packages, lots of wrinkly smiles and gloved hands. Waves and waves, I tire just a bit, right ? Just a bit.
I finally get down the last street of the day, a narrow passage where two buildings meet and where there’s a mural with “THE DAY YOU PLANT THE SEED IS NOT THE DAY YOU EAT THE FRUIT” written on it in a green-yellow color scheme. Nice. I cycle past it and almost run down someone.
Wheels tilt to the side, almost parallel to the ground, I slide on wet leaves and metal covers, my numbed leg takes all the shock of the stunt and I feel both very talented and very lucky in that moment.
The someone I almost ran over is a kid with a bunch of bread in their hands. I let out : “You alright there?”
They nod silently, probably shocked.
I get my phone out to report on Wisdom the absolute stupidity of the mural’s placement and how fucking dangerous it is for transport. Meanwhile the kid goes away. Hope they’re ok.
Instant reply.
I look at my phone, someone’s telling me I posted in the wrong category, I tell them to repost it however they want but that the mural’s placement is still dumbfuck.
They reply that if I want to get heard I should try and orient my voice in the right direction.
I go post it in the “appropriate channel” someone else tells me it’s the wrong category. I tell them about the other someone. “god damn wisdomers with their weird categorisations”.
A mod comes up and suggests to post it in both, the first someone has disonnected. I shrug it off.
8 hours of squeak-squeaking my helpful sorry ass through town : when I finally get back to Postal I litteraly fall on the ground with the lament of someone who’s just been through the most ruthless leg-day.
The dog comes to lick my wounds but mostly my face, I try to hug her sluggishly but she flees to Romeo’s side. He comes up, his crutches click-clicking on the paved-ground. The beast goes back to licking my face.
“Aye comrade, you finished for the day?”
“I think? Why?”
He gets a package from the backroom’s fridge and puts it on the counter. Red package, that’s Medic shit.
“Something was brought from outside quarantine and you’re the only one in the zone who’s still doing cargo. Heart transplant. Fridge cargo.”
“Pretty sure there’s a procedure for this kinda shit.”
“The "procedure" can’t apply when all drivers are in hospitals as volunteers or patients. This shit has a battery-life of a few hours and the hospital isn’t that far away but…”
“But no one else can do this, got it.”
“I’m sorry Ada. It really came by at the last minute, I wouldn’t ask you if it didn’t…”
“What are you talking about? Work is work, it’s not your fault.”
He looks at me with visible worry, I try and smile at him, I don’t think it works.
I get going and sure enough, that’s when the monsoon decides to just fucking Go.
The Superstorm wannabe gets me tripping and sliding moreso than cycling. The cargo-battery’s still in the green, I hope it’s as waterproof as the label says. I put some more weight on the pedals and my butt rises up, putting my torso parallel to the vehicle as I push as much as I can. The engine moans a bit as I get heated and sweaty under this fucking downpour. I fall twice to the side on my way up, bad equilibrium, not fast enough to really break something but the pain is there alright.
This mess only starts to ease up once i reach the hospital doors. Funny day.
The folks there look at me all pity and sympathy and I just want a glass of water at that point.
When I finally get back home, someone has left something at my doorstep ; a little bag labeled “Tom’s brewery” with a post-it on it: “bottles of the latest brew, thx for the delivery”. Fuck yes.
I pop one and go sit at the window to look at the streets under.
Heat’s coming up. The quota of plants evaluated by Knowledge Work hasn’t been reached yet. I’ll probably have to stop deliveries to help Farming.
As long as the other communes do their part we won’t get too fucked up of a summer, I guess.
I look at the old office-building that’s been voted as the host for our fungi-farm. Now that it’s been emptied out, it’s just a big exoskeleton of concrete and steel covered in glass. Ugly shit, can’t wait to see some green on it. There’s a big gap where the logo of the company used to be, now it looks like an empty balcony.
The idea with that building is to either do some hydroponics at the bottom or just plant trees there, to go with the guided myceliac networks being considered in the rest of the structures.
There’s a big debate in the concerned(planification nerds) circles about if the fish population should be kept within the bounds of the project and the communes, or if they should be released in spaces where they won’t have too damaging of an impact.
The antispecists are trying to push for putting them outside the city, others are mostly undecided with the few voices of opposition being more about “necessity” rather than any hatred of fish population or desire to eat fried fish.
Strangely enough antispecists are not very vocal on the bug-frying trend that started since the celebrated liberation of cow-population.
Having no stakes in this I just hope the strangest and tastiest idea wins.
We were supposed to have meat-printers a few months ago already but Farming had so much on its hands, everybody was running around trying to build efficient infrastructure, drought-resistant, regenerative and computational, geotextile enhanced, nobody was thinking belly, just necessity and future future future needs.
But I guess that was for the best, I’d rather be in a safe quarantine without meat than in a shitty one with mountains of potentially compromised beef.
I think these thoughts with weary legs and a hurt back, my arms guiding me in the dark bedroom. I keep the window open to let the air in, it brings guests with itself : The kids next roof are barbecuing, I can smell the meat from here. Someone’s playing djembe, badly. Damn hippies.
Falling on my bed, empty-headed, my body radiates exhaustion, It doesn’t sleep but dreams of diluting itself in an ocean of heat.
Life is a lot.
I open my eyes and stretch like a true masochist. Aches linger.
A day off is not luxury, it’s water to the sprouts, or wounds. I forgot what the saying is.
I take my time to cook breakfast for me and the dog. She’s excited from not playing enough yesterday. I look at her enjoying her food and my brain gets warm thinking about appetite as a compliment.
Today I’m doing Wisdom Work which is almost like leisure to me, until it’s not, so I get cozy-ed up in my couch with my phone and coffee to look at the news.
The Nguyen-Hedren Solarfarms are being shut down for a while to put in place a less anti-bird energy capture infrastructure .
Online Rave parties got too much traffic and ended up shutting down certain servers, people are working overtime to get them up and running again.
Debates over the carbon capture mecanisms up and running in coal-fired electrical powerplants : maintenance over the decaying infrastructure would require more energy and ressources than just switching to a new system but the communities that depend on it already have a big rate of infection. Some funny souls suggest to go back to peat burning.
New maintenance-108 report by a Wisdom group from a commune upnorth ; I read two pages of a very dry text about the difference between sand-based concrete and fungi bricks as base-building material before closing it.
Lots of solid stuff, it feels like things are moving. I don’t look at the death rates.
Time to entertain the strange abstractions in the brain’s backyard now. I obviously can’t go to the cybercafé so I get my computer out. Two other people in the chat : Eli and Martial.
“Heya.”
“Whaddup”
Martial types: “Hi, you need a rundown on what we worked on yesterday ?”
“Please.”
They turn on their mic ro recite their notes :
“Alright so. We were talking about the need for different organising methods at larger scale and the facilitation of dialogue between communes and people of different communes and we thought about using the image of molecules to talk about that distinction, maybe ? How micro-organisms’ way of interacting is different from macro-organisms’ ? Then there was that digression that everybody found really interesting and fruitful on information flows and it was a bit dispersed but yesterday we pinned down some axes : "liquidity", "concreteness" and "volatility".”
I nod along to Martial’s exposé. You can tell they were the spark for this project. They’re way more into it than I am, after all I arrived mid-thought, mid-project, while someone was leaving for another commune and another obsession. I never made any promises of consistancy and no one held me up to any unspoken words. Everybody seems fine with that.
We get down to work.
Wisdom is a subsection of Knowledge, the other one being Flows. Where Flows is the facilitation of work itself (ressources, material tools and their maintenance allathat), Wisdom is about many things ; structure shifting, innovation, wordsmithing, sloganizing and galvanizing, peer-review, so much peer-review, damn.
The problems Wisdom and Flows are supposed to tackle are the problems of a society of voluntary association ; a society where you have the choice not to engage with any single part of the whole apparatus and no obligation not to do so either. Everybody works obviously, and nobody is refused necessities or even what’s a bit above necessities but when everybody starts contributing what they want to contribute to the society you end up with more and more passion projects and less and less rotation of positions : Everybody becomes an expert in what they like and looks more and more at the world from that position, everybody hangs out with who they like to work with and less and less with people they have to work with. Comfort breeds factions and factions watch out for themselves. That’s not to say there’s a war on our hands but… There’s a saying for it :
“A room full of experts still needs to get the place cleaned up.”
And there’s a saying on that saying : “not very poetic but it does the trick.”
This is the problem of experts and layfolks : everybody agrees that experts are not to become permanent leaders but this opinion is spread in different ways among people :
Some will say experts should get more votes on certain questions, others that experts should only get more speaking-time and the same vote as everybody else and so on, the smallest of preferences create the longest digressions.
Wisdom-work is an attempt at maintaining healthy movement and actualisation, in that way, it’s complementary to Flows, some say it should be put under Flow-work. You could argue, the name Wisdom has more to do with the creation of a “common sense”, Flows is more about getting things moving in the right direction. But the point of Wisdom-work is not to make wise things, it’s to make understanding easier :
Basically, The People Who Work-In-Holes know what the hole is like from the inside and them knowing what the hole is for will necessarily improve their clarity and capacity for focused work. That doesn’t mean people who aren’t in the hole can’t contribute to conversations about the hole. Especially if that hole is infrastructure that’s necessary to the life of people who don’t work in the hole.
Lots of hole talk, huh.
Nowadays, de-expertist impulses clash frequently with the intensification crowd, the people who want to see things go faster and think our technological capacities should get more complex, automate away, merge with the things already there, go beyond what they call “tool-use dogma”. You see old debates and the same arguments come back again and again, everyday rituals :
“Lateralism can only help us go so far, we need to get to space for fuck sake”
“What we need is to have a sustainable system before we can hope to get to outer-space.”
“The slow fusion of praxis and theory is such a drag, i just wish we could do everything right, right away.”
“It’s not a fusion, it’s a dance.”
“Stfu wisdomer.”
Looped conversations like endless rehearsals for projects that never come because energetic transition and maintenance take all our time and (ha. ha.) energy. And now viral resilience makes us more aware than ever that the future is not a cozy place waiting for us :
“the future rains prison-bars, go out and away into bigger rooms!” - Biocosmist saying.
I don’t know, it just drains me of any mental will, probably why I do stupid shits like doing Postal for 8 hours alone in the rain.
A wisdomer meeting is generally very strange or very boring, or both : After having ranted and taken notes of each others ramblings on all things scale and relations, we take a short break to grab coffee, smoke or stretch our bodies each in our own corners/rooms. At least that’s what I do, the others go into a digression on liquid information, I can’t follow.
Wisdom notifications about the latest wordsmithing other groups are getting up to. A bunch of slogans aimed at their own authors at least as much as people who try not to think too much about it :
“Don’t plant trees you can’t uproot” / “Don’t build what can’t transform” / “Actualize the buried seed” / “perception is no guarantee of control” / “all separation is a choice” / “overspecialise and you breed in weakness”
Some have commentaries to explain their maxims, others just share them expecting honest feedback.
I manage to get my eyes off the screen and at my window, the sun gets out from under clouds and seems to burn brighter than before.
I drink some water.
Ultimately you could say Wisdom-work is what catalysed the current habit-structures we have, with work being put under the names of Flows, Wisdom, Medic, Postal, Self-Defense, Farming and Care.
None of these exist or have ever existed in isolation of course. Care-work relies on Medic work and uses ressources from Farming and requires the tools from Flows ; Postal overlaps with Flows on some occasions and the rearrangement of its tech support demands Wisdom work to figure out how to best deal with more abstract logistics stuff and that Wisdom work is fed through information that requires the Care-work of everyday civility. There’s no overarching central authority because work is not an authority, it’s practice.
Rather than fixed institutions, each of the “-work” describes complementary processes, actions, functions : Someone can be doing Medic-work without knowing it, we Care for each others without thinking it, it’s only our efforts that make work obvious to us as -work.
Martial tells me they wanna talk later but then seem to forget about it.
I don’t remind them.
The name is carved on the grey-ish tombstone. In absences, readable gaps.
I guess if you were an ant, standing on its grainy surface and looking in front of you, they’d look like canyons, endless precipices.
Voids that spell names.
Some Flow people told me it was made off of fungi-blocks, new material, still active-alive, easy to fold and shift the shape of. It will stay displayed here for as long as family is there and comes back to remember the name, after that there’ll be digitized records but the tombstone will be repurposed for somebody else to come and mourn to.
A gallery of recycled altars.
Very Aware of where my hands and eyes are, my mask itching slightly, I look around the rest of the crematorium. No one there, not even the usuals. Everything still and quiet. I get out and into the world.
On my way to the farm I pass by a few people. We wave at each others quietly.
Farms used to be in the countryside, I read about it a while ago. There was this weird division/enclosure : cities envious of their outsides tried to eat peripheries little by little until they could only buy or steal shit from the most extreme peripheries, until there was no periphery anymore, all the while making their centers move around, with decaying infrastructure feeding loops of wealth displacement in people, in buildings, in businesses, a weirdly inhuman way of moving humans around if you ask me.
Well that’s over and done with. Our food is right next to our mouth.
Even as people have roof-plants and there’s a trend for domestic fungi going on, the majority of food is produced by vertical farming and underground cultures. The bigger projects are still in process, sylviculture takes time.
I get down to the arugula section of the youngest fruitwall, Emilia and I planted them a few weeks ago. When people talk about Farming online they often talk about the landscaping works over West, grandiose geotech shit, complex stuff that demands so much planning some people are whispering “centralist faction”.
This is not that. This is everybody’s food, this is small and quiet but visible, nothing instant here but you can plant a seed and hold something else in your hands some time later.
Martial calls me right before lunch, their voice sounds quieter than usual.
“So how’re you feeling lately?”
“Working.”
“Yeah ? Haven’t seen you at the hospital today.”
I get up to go and wash my hands off soil and produce.
“I’m Farming.”
“Ok yeah… You know you can take a bit of time for yourself right ? Right now is not the greatest moment for burning out.”
“I know, I just don’t want to. There’s a lot that needs doing.”
“I mean you could even give a bit of time to others if your problem is about being seen as self-centered.”
“I’m… already doing that ?”
“I mean in a way that’s not comfortably alone.”
I sit down, throwing the wet rag in the “to be cleaned” bucket. I miss.
“Now why would I stop being comfortable ?”
“It’s good to be uncomfortable sometimes. Cringe is the mother of invention.”
“That’s a new one.”
“We just coined it.”
I get back to work on the kumato tomatoes, Martial’s voice resonates again through speakerphone :
“Well if you’re still up for more, Care-work needs a bit of help.”
“I’ll think about it.”
They hang up. I wash my hands again, the hum of ventilation like an ever-present smell you don’t get used to.
It’s still day out when I get back home, the house is too clean for housework and I don’t feel like sleeping, I pull out my library-files ; dozens of books I should probably read at some point. One of them was written by a friend, they lent me a copy the day they finished it. The hand-drawn cover makes it look like a raw and complex piece of art, I close it down and go through my Wisdom notes, half-thoughts unfinished sentences rapid rhythm few insights.
I close my computer and lay flat on my back for a minute or two.
Checking Care : plenty of people already taking and taken care of. I’m about to close it too and send a message to Martial when I notice a lone request outside my borough, a bit far away from other homes.
I ask a mod about it.
“Yeah, she’s an old lady, stand-off-ish. She needs help around her house”
“Mobility issues ? She needs help for groceries, chores ?”
“Something like that. Nobody bothers these days, she’s tiring.”
I let out an audible what he can’t possibly hear, and reply :
“That’s fucked up, she’s been alone all this time ?”
“Oh no, she had her niece visiting her but she got infected badly two days ago so...”
He does’t end his sentence, like the answer is somehow obvious. I type back :
“Alright, I’ll do it.”
“Good luck, don’t forget to sanitize.”
I get to the house and it’s not as isolated as you’d think from the map, it’s just at the end of a street, with a large patch of apparently unsupervised wildland enclosing it. I ring the bell. A window opens up on the second floor and I hear someone yell :
“Finally. Get your ass up in here!”
I look at the empty street to see if maybe somebody else was supposed to hear this. No one here.
Some weird smell. This house is a mess. A weird persian rug with holes in it serves as an inside doormat, I take off my shoes even though the floor doesn’t look like it’s been mopped in a while. The walls have traces of burning here and there and holes big enough to put your finger through them, the amount of frames and paintings hanging tells me there are probably more.
“You’re not Sam. Where is she ?“
I look up at the top of the stairs, an elderly white woman with a buzzcut looks at me like I’m fixing to rob the place.
“At the hospital.”
She seems to remember something. Angrily. She starts to get down the stairs, a hand on the ramp, the others on her cane.
“Oh. Well help me down will you ?”
“Are you sanitized ?”
“Yes-yes. Help me down now.”
I take her hand and get her to the kitchen. She sits in a chair near the fridge and gets herself an unlabelled amber-colored bottle out of it.
“So you’re the help, right?”
“Yes, I’ve seen your note on the Care app”
She opens the bottle with an audible pop.
“Good. Well my roof needs some weeding, can you take care of that?”
“I don’t really kn…”
“You’re here for Care right?
I get on the roof : there is moss everywhere and the little solarpanel that connects to her greenpatch’s irigation system is covered in birdshit. I get downstairs to grab some brushes and towels.
“What are you doing?”
“You didn’t tell me it was such a mess, i need better tools”
“I did tell you it was messy, what’d you expect?”, I go back up without a word.
It’s like the shit got fused with the fucking PeeVee panel, I scrape like my life depended on it but it just won’t go. After something like half an hour of this bullshit I decide to do what I actually came up for : I get rid of the moss and “bad herbs”. It’s a really weird thing to do and it doesn’t even take that long, I guess she can’t get up there on her own.
Her house is pre-Greening, not adapted to the new norms. It probably doesn’t even have para-earthquake foundations. I look at the neighbors’ rooftop, the micro-habitat that strives there, the birdnests at proximity. Pretty different from the concrete shit I’m scrubbing here.
I get downstairs and go for washing my hands in the kitchen sink but. “Outside! I’m making soup.”
There is indeed a sink outside, I do my thing and look at her silhouette through the window, all crunched over, washing something.
I look at the afternoon sun shying away under cover of clouds before getting back inside. “Need anything else done?”
She grumbles something like “nah.”
I turn around and go home without saying goodbye.
When I get to washing my dishes in my own sink I feel a bit stupid for leaving like that, she’s just a lonely old lady after all. I think about it for a solid minute while hugging the dog then I go and distract myself with a book someone lent me a long time ago.
The morning after I wake up feeling not quite there, it takes a few hours and cups of tea(no more coffee!) for my head to piece itself together. The sun is way up at that point too, I look at the time and forget the numbers, it’s not late but not early enough for my usual self.
I don’t feel like doing anything really and it feels like everybody is going around, getting active Farming, Wisdoming, Flows…
Care.
A notification : “thanks for working on the roof…”
I check it out. It’s not from the grandma, instead there’s the face of someone I’ve never talked to next to the words : “she won’t thank you so i might as well do it.”
“You’re welcome but who are you ?”
“Her niece. I can’t go to her right now.”
“Yeah, they told me about you, are you ok? Do you need anything?
“There’s people taking care care of me, thank you. I just wanted to know if you’re going to keep visiting her.”
“I don’t know, do you want me to ?”
She doesn’t reply for a while, then starts typing, then stops. The little animated dots next to her face give me a fuzzy approximation of her irregular will to share. Finally :
“If she gives you soup, don’t drink it.”
“Why?”
“Just don’t entertain her if you’re gonna help her”
“What do you mean??”
No answers. Notification from Care : “need help making food”. Familiar address.
The way to her house is not that far away after all, I still get time to look at streets I don’t get to see in my everyday, even in unquarantined times, I breathe deep, feeling a bit sore. I try and think myself here and now, rain starts to pierce the humid warmth. Little drops. I almost miss the expanse near her house ; green shit all over, untended but strangely absent of any animal presence. I knock at the door and hear a muffled crash. Slow steps creeping up, I back off a bit from the entrance as it opens, slowly.
And she’s just standing there, wordless with the face of a bad day, her right hand is bleeding. I put on some hydroalcoholic gel and reach for her. She’s not responsive.
I take a look at the wound, just a scratch, I can see a shard of white sticking out of the blood. I get her inside and sit her down. There’s shards of porcelaine dispersed on the kitchen floor. Dots of red where she probably started to pick them up. Now she’ gazing in the distance, her mouth closed. I put down a glass of water next to her and get her a band-aid. She doesn’t move.
Cleaning the floor doesn’t take me too much time and afterward I sit down to take her hand in mine and help her with the blood. She closes her eyes as I disinfect the wound, her lower lip shaking slightly. I put down her hand, with its little surface of adhesive brown on her pale ashy and wrinkled hand.
We sit there for a minute or two, she takes the glass with her left hand and drinks from it, slowly. Finishes.
“How are you ?” I ask.
She puts down the glass.
“Been better.”
“Do you remember what just happened ?”
“Yes.”
“Ok.”
Birds outside, clouds gathering. It’s a gray sky kinda day.
“You didn’t stay.”
“Excuse me ?”
She’s looking at her band-aid, talking, holding her injured finger between thumb and index like it’s a boring puzzle she just found.
“I said I was making soup, you didn’t stay. Yesterday.”
“I’m sorry I had… I didn’t know it was for me.”
Her eyes lift slightly, “I still have some. Do you want a plate ?”
“Sure.”
She gets up effortlessly, I wait till she’s got her things out before saying :
“Your name is not on your notes.”
“Huh?”
“The Care app, there’s no… What’s your name ?”
She takes her time to answer :
“I’m Sacha.”
“Nice to meet you, my name’s Ada.“
The plate is filled to the brim with a soft orange fluid, lumpless and smooth. Still.
“Here’s some soup, Ada.”
“You’re not eating ?“
“I’m good, go ahead.
I look at the spoonless plate, maybe she wants me to just dive in it.
“You know, this kinda looks like a horror movie poison scene.” I joke.
“You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to.”
I look at her unreadable face as she picks the plate up and puts it down, next to the sink, where she starts washing dishes. The plate sits still.
I look at the walls of the kitchen, its scorched wallpaper has more frames on it than the lobby does, in one of them there’s a photo of a very young woman standing on an upturned tank, in the middle of a sand desert. She’s striking a victorious pose like she’s just defeated the dragon to burn all dragons. Another picture of someone’s back (the same?) gazing at a burned-out wasteland, maybe ? You couldn’t see their eyes from…
“What are you doing?”
“Oh just looking at the pictures”
“There’s nothing there.”
I look at her back as she works around a weird blender. Her right arm acts skittish and slow, like it has a hard time holding the thing. I get up : “I can do it. I’m here for that.” As soon as I say that she drops it in the sink noisily and goes out of the kitchen, soap foam still clinging to her hands.
I finish what she started then look at the plate, heat has gone away. It’s probably lukewarm now. I wish the dog was here.
Drops of soap on the lobby’s parquet tell me she went through the half-open door under the stairs. I call for her : “You need anything ?”. My question is lost in the cellar. I check my phone, low signal.
Finally I hear some noises downstairs, “It’s ok. Eveything is gonna be ok.”
The frontdoor still open on my right, the cellardoor on my left, a cold plate of soup behind me and the noises below. I really wish the dog was here.
I find a spoon pretty easily and eat from the plate, saltless tomato, zucchini and something else I can’t identify. It’s warmer than i thought. I think about the weather and minutes where days happen.
“So you are hungry.”
She startles me, a coy smile on her face.
“I… Yes, a bit. Are you ok?”
“Yes. Yes, things are good.”
Saying that, she drops a tray of soil on the table.
“What are you growing down there ?”
Her smile gets wider : “Wanna see ?”
The cellar-door leads to stairs that descends into obscurity if you don’t have a light, or a hint of where the switch is.
She leads me to a small corner of the cave where someone’s disposed some 10 isolated trays of soil out of which the same pattern of mushrooms has emerged, like white umbrella-looking outgrowths.
The wall right next to it is covered in papers, pictures of trees, fungi, and some scribbled notes. She gets down to show me the cultures, pointing at the little labels with each tray’s name. “…and that’s Galeano, Marcos, Esther, Ramona and Elisa.“
I nod along as she goes on to talk about the growth patterns of her batches.
“These ones really like the cold which is pretty common, Mushrooms are decomposers.”
“Oh, do they make good music?”
She looks at me with the face of someone who’s just been revealed a gap in the fabric of truth. I stutter :
“Sorry sorry sorry, I know. I ‘m sorry.”
“Not the first time I hear this one, to be honest. But yeah, this is the worst.”
“I haven’t made jokes in a while.”
“I can see why.”
“Look, it’s nervous ok? You’re not the most open person around.”
“I keep to myself.”
“I haven’t seen you post anything, join any groups, or talk to anybody in public.”
“I’m fine.”
I watch her put down a tray with the care you’d deploy to tuck in a sleeping child.
“Did you enjoy your plate?”
“I… Did actually, thank you.”
“It’s alright, how was it ?”
“I don’t know, good ?”
She stops a second to make pitiful eye-contact.
“You’re not a very good critic, are you? ”
“My mouth wasn’t made for praise. Say, what’s the obsessed-person-wall about?
She looks at the papers and pictures plastered on the wall and reply, pointing at each piece of information as she speaks about it :
“This is Sicily, it’s all about it. Pleurotus nebrodensis. Special conditions, special climate, all sorts of stuff. I get soil from the original region every once in a while but… The Palermo fires fucked that, no more of it in the native regions so i had to figure out some shit by myself.
“What did you do ?”
“Bootleg CRISPR, curtesy of an old friend a continent away. Took me a while to get it, I almost thought my cultures would die before I get the chance to save it. Then I tweaked some of my babies to make something that wouldn’t die in a few days and here we are”
“But that makes no sense : there’s many workshops who could find you material for gene editing, without having to get all of these things delivered to you. Your stuff probably got passed off as second priority equipment because it didn’t get sent with the commune’s necessities. All you need is to file your reasons and…”
She stops me with a bitter laughter :
“You think I didn’t try to work with other people ? There’s no interest in this, this is futile, or volatile or whatever big word they’d use. This is a distraction and they can’t afford…”
I don’t know what she reads in my face but it makes her stop and retreat :
“But it’s fine you know, it’s fine.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“I’m not dead, am I ?”
She starts walking back the stairs leaving me to turn the light off.
An hour and some later, we’re in her living-room-bedroom. Each with our own bottle of amber. She doesn’t get the time to drink from hers, too busy talking :
“I was anti-work, you know ? I’ve been in all the union-stuff. Then I was anti-work for a while, insurrection and all of that.”
”The bad times.”
“It’s always been bad.” She laughs. “People who call back then the bad times don’t wanna admit that things haven’t changed that much.”
I think about superstorms and earthquakes, about the Long Summer. About starvation lines and mass death, the few memories kid-me had of it.
“Really ?”
“I mean things are a bit better but there’s still people shitting on each others and people tearing each others down, even in our so-called perfect participatory bureaucrazy workers society.”
She gets up to go and sit on her bed, visibly exhausted. I shrug :
“I don’t know what to tell you, people aren’t angels.”
Her nose wrinkles up.
“Stop with the slogans please.”
“It is very important to be a good ancestor.”
“God shut the fuck up.”
She throws a pillow at me; Soft but unexpected impact. She smirks. I keep talking under cover of the fabric : “I guess you don’t want me to Actualize the fruit of the buried seed”
She raises a second pillow over her head with a sadistic smirk.
“Oh, you want war ?”
“Not really, I just thought I’d blackmail you with my endless earbites until you call your niece.”
“I was gonna do it anyways, genius.”
“Then All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
She ugly-laughs as I leave the room. Feels like a full day, finally.
I get home but still can’t sleep, instead I watch clouds gather in the sky, when I pick up the phone all the arrangements and promises I’ve made come back to remind themselves to me, Martial wants to talk, Eli wants to talk, Romeo wants to talk.
I delete the messages I can afford to ignore and leave the rest. I pass by the calendar to go sit on my bed and do some breathwork.
I think I wake her up when I get to her house at 8 am.
She tells me “hell yo-self” and lets me clean up the place, doesn’t take too long. Cleaning is like sport : easy with regularity and it gets easier the more you do it.
At noon she tells me about an old project that got dropped in favor of direct regenerative permaculture strategies. Makes me think of the meat-printers.
“Nobody wanted to do anything with soylent at that point, it was all permaculture this and regenerative whatever that. Nobody wanted to make shit anymore, they all wanted to be janitors for the planet. Even the Echidnacrew disappeared.”
“The what ?
“A bunch of rogue biologists and animal advocacy people who realized the accelerating weirdness of nature. They dropped the whole “conservation” and “maintenance” arguments and said “ fuck it, if nature is going to turn into a hellscape we should help the fauna adapt through it.” Conserving endangered species by making up new ones.”
“Sounds sus on the… ethical grounds and like, is that really how that works ?”
She shrugs it off.
“They had a diagnosis and ran with it. They did something.”
I don’t ask her if she was a part of it, she doesn’t seem in the mood for jokes. The rest of the day passes by, she spends all her time in the cellar while I try and finally clean up her Pee-Vee panels. Making some germicide required a long wait because all labs are working 24/7 for Medic right now.
The smell is awful but I manage to get rid of the shit and the PeeVee seems to be working. I get downstairs and start looking for its console but can’t find it, finally she sees me looking and asks me what’s going on. I tell her.
“What did you do that for?”
“To...Get you energy?”
“Oh my sweet summer child, follow me.”
She leads me to the back of the house, in the empty expanse actually. Where she pulls up a moss covered trapdoor and invites me to look at a strangely clean and intact engine. She explains with palpable pride how she got a connection to a “biopropane guy” and where she sourced each part of the power generator.
“That is so fucking stupid.“
I hear myself talk after having said the words, like an inverted echo that only happens when your words come to displace your thoughts. When you know you’ve said something you shouldn’t have.
“What ?”
She genuinely doesn’t understand.
“Why don’t you… W… You know what, fine.”
She doesn’t ask about my reaction, in fact she doesn’t say anything.
On my way home I don’t think about the 10 years it took to build a multi-sourced energy infrastructure apt at fulfilling the needs of everybody. I don’t really think at all.
The day after I pass by Postal to help a bit but there’s 5 or 6 riders out already and Romeo almost begs me to take a break. I leave the mask-wearers alone and go on a stroll to home.
I take a detour by her house. And there she is, at her ground floor window, looking out.
“You’re late.” She spits.
“I didn’t know you expected me.”
Frowning.
“What are you talking about, I posted on Care.”
“I left my phone home.”
“What are you doing out, then?”
“Just went to help Postal a bit and…”
“Ok ok, get in.”
I raise my hands as if she could see the microbes on them :
“I haven’t sanitized.”
“Who cares?”
“I do, apparently.”
She gets back inside with a grumble. I wait there for something like five minutes, then decide she must have gone to sleep or something. I’m about to go back home when she reappears at the window. “Hey!”
I look at her, she’s holding up a strange yellow rubbery shape in her hands, she throws it at me. Some parts, harder than the rest, hit my forehead. I try not to scratch my face and let the folds of the thing deploy to get a better look at it : A hazmat suit.
“Now you can get inside!”
I look back at her, she seems almost too proud for a joke. I hold the suit at my height, trying not to let it touch the ground too much and ask :
“Have you ever heard of cross-contamination?”
“Don’t worry about that, I got some hand sanitizer in the house.”
As she says that, she shows off an unlabelled bottle of gel. I laugh :
“Well then you can just give me that, I don’t need the suit.”
She stops, as if in the middle of a realization.
“Well that’s no fun.”
I fold her suit carefully and put it down on her doorstep.
“Do you need me for anything today?”
“I got some more soup that needs testing.”
“I’ve already eaten. Anything else ?”
She looks slightly nervous.
“Actually yes there’s something. They got me one of these weird quad-wheelchair thingies, all nice and shit but they got it for me right as the fucking pandemic started. It’s also kinda useless when you can’t use your arms.”
By “they” I assume she means Flows or Medic.
“So what do you need me for ?”
“I want to go out for a ride.”
I did have to go back home to get my backpack and actually sanitize (shower) rather than just wash my hands and put on another mask like she wanted me to do. At least she drops her hazmat dream. I borrow a cargo-bike at the Flows warehouse.
The spreadsheet next to it says I can have it for three hours tops before someone needs it for something essential. I go about cycling, no squeaking this time.
“Are you sure this is safe ?” I can barely hear her from under her respirator mask.
“If you buckle up your seatbelt sure.”
“These are for cargo, right ?”
“Cargo, transport, sure.”
“What I mean is don’t drive like crazy, I’m not groceries.”
She wants to go to some boroughs way East. “See the sights”.
I ride through Kadalie-1 : taller buildings than the rest, avian structures with birdnests dug into them, food dispensaries are disseminated throughout the street. The guano is extracted every three-days and sent to the fields. Buildings with giant integrated bird-toilets on the side. We live in the weird decisions of dead people.
Then I take her through the Shakur sections with their emergency baracks and giant library, bustling with activity right now with the requisition of the space for Medic work. Ambulances getting in and out of the openings to the cadence of infection.
We pass by these flows of people and vehicles, out of that borough and into the next one.
We get to the larger expanses, where houses get fewer and open fields are found more often.
She calls it the “countryside”, I don’t really know what that means but she seems to see it as a space to make jokes about. “There’s never enough people to be avoided, here.”
Near the end of the trip, she takes off her respirator and takes sharp breathes. I keep mine on.
We get to a weird looking shabby building, in-between a cottage and a warehouse. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it .
I get off the bike, she trots quickly to the entrance of the place.
“What are we doing here ?”
She stops to look over the place, like there’s something missing, like she’s forgotten a very important tool. Then she points at the large field near the building.
“My sister is buried over there somewhere.”
I look at the graveless expanse. My throat aches a bit.
“I.. Do you…?”
She doesn’t wait for me. Already going inside.
Empty, not much furniture, there’s plenty objects around but with the dust collected on all surfaces even broken shards of glass and the slow unraveling of the wallpaper ; there’s nothing here.
We get to the courtyard of the place where plants are running wild and the remnants of what I guess was a lawn disappear behind native plants. She walks past trees and bushes and gets down to forage in the grass. I stay back.
“What happened?”
“You don’t wanna know that.”
“Why would I ask then?”
She doesn’t answer at first, and gets up to go observe some trees, the lychen on them, their growth pattern ? Finally :
“The duty of memory shifts depending on whose memory it rests on.”
”Ok.” I mumble.
“What I mean is that people don’t like what I remind them of.”
“Do they even know you exist ?”
She looks back at me, her face is a blank. “Trust me, they do.”
“I mean I don’t want to be an asshole but it’s been a long time and you don’t seem to speak to anybody, maybe “they” ’re already dead, or gone.”
“When I say “they” I don’t mean enemies, I mean people in general.”
I look at her as she gets a small piece of paper out of her pocket, inspecting it like it’s a map or a clue.
“What is this place?”
“This was a farm. This is a farm.”
“Why are we here ?”
“I forgot a notebook somewhere, I just wanted to come and get it.”
“That’s it ?”
She passes me by and gets back into the building. I follow.
“Sacha.”
She goes by the dusty furniture and the spiderwebs and walks up stairs that look about ready to collapse. I wish the dog was there.
“Sacha please.”
“I just need to find it. I promise it won’t be long.”
“That’s not what I wanna know.”
She turns to me, her hand on the ramp, her face half-obscured by closed windows and shy sunrays.
“I just want to know if you’re ok?”
She climbs the last steps and goes in some room. I can hear her voice, slightly louder than a whisper. That grumble she does.
“I don’t answer questions I don’t know the answer to, I think that’s just reasonable.”
I climb the stairs with caution, trying to make my voice resonate.
“Ok.”
“If I asked you shit you didn’t know the answer to, I don’t think you’d try and…”
“I said ok. It’s ok. I’m sorry.”
Some noise in a bedroom and her silhouette crunched down as she looks under a broken bedframe. A tree branch pokes through the broken window.
She gets up and leaves the room for another at the pace of running water.
I go and sit at the top of the stairs and put my head in my hands and think think think of no-think.
The air is heavy with dust, I can taste it. I don’t think I’m choking, what is it?
My heart feels like someone’s bloody fist got lost in my chest, twitchy rhythm. I think I’m gonna…
“Excuse me.”
We get downstairs, slowly. I can feel her agitation, I don’t say anything. I just go and sit in the grass to empty my lungs of silence’s presence. Deep breathes.
“I’ve found it.”
I look up, slowly. She’s holding a book in her hands like it’s the last of its kind, or the only. I look down again, shallow breath.
“Hey. What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have all I need, we can go.”
I look up at her.
“That’s it ?”
She waves the notebook in front of me. “Yup”
“Nothing else ?”
She gives me a look of grave boredom. “Let’s go.”
We get to her house and she rips a few pages from the notebook before throwing the rest into the garbage, its brown leather cover stained by apple skin and tomato seeds.
She moves around the house gathering things. I’m about to walk out into the streets when she stops me : “It’s almost dinner, you hungry ?”
“I’m good.”
“You look sick, what’s going on ?”
I think of the expanse, I think of the space mocked for its absences, I think too much to have any words for it.
“I’ll see you later.”
The world feels tired, the doorhandle melts cold under my hand, I’m burning inside.
“Hey Ada.”
I look at her. Dirt under her fingernail, a small scar on her hand, her unshaven hair like porcupine spikes. Her voice doesn’t waver :
“There’s no shame in staying true.”
Back home, I don’t cry myself to sleep. In fact I don’t sleep at all.