by Zach VandeZande
Something happened, and it was this: the future ended. Maybe it was brain parasites, or a wormhole, or a misplaced integer in the fabric of the universe. Anyway it happened.
We always thought that when the future ended, so would the past, but that wasn’t quite it. And maybe it’s not fair to say the future ended, even, because things kept happening, and those things were the future until they weren’t, until—whoosh—into the past. It was just our conception of it that went somewhere, and we couldn’t follow. And so what we had to do was live every moment as the terminus, full up with this unbearable weight of history. With the future ahead of us, we could bear it, as though moments in time were nails we laid upon and now we just had the one nail being driven into our flesh, over and over and over.
I am talking, of course, about the pandemic, and about depression, and I’m hiding behind a “we” again, and this is a story, hello, this isn’t really happening, get a grip, everybody.
We had no plan for dealing with the lack of a future, because to plan would require an understanding we no longer possessed. We did what we knew how to do from our pasts: we hid, and we collapsed, and we picked the marshmallows out of cereal and ate them from a little crystal bowl, and we cried looking through boxes for our old laptop chargers, and we shot guns at birds who we felt were harrying us too much with their constant now, now, now. And then all of this stuff would move into the past, and we would be left with our dead birds and our et ceteras that we couldn’t even see coming.
This was in the suburbs. What happened in the cities happened on TV and the internet, so it didn’t, you know, it didn’t actually happen. It mattered to us, but it mattered like a big, important symbol. Like a flag might matter, but one we didn’t particularly agree with or pledge fealty to. A flag flying bright and true over a used car lot. When this was just happening in cities we laughed at them and were glad it wasn’t us, and we made plans, and those plans had meaning and would work the way we designed them. And then it came home to our suburbs. Our fascistic belief in the importance of lawn care lost whatever appeal it had now that there was no future.
When every story leads to the same ending they stop needing their telling. Some of us had the impulse that language should be outlawed entirely, but that required planning, so in order for that to happen it had to have already happened, and it hadn’t, so those of us who felt that way had only their lament to comfort them. Others of us thought an eternity of this deserved some shit-eater’s smile. A survival strategy, sure, but survival for what outcome? Nobody knew.
There were still stories, though, because stories exist in the telling and the told, not in the going to tell or needing to tell, and so even if they were pointless now that there was no future I want to tell you that there came a great tradition of gathering in the now of evening darkness to speak and write stories and so send them into yesterday. I want to tell you that some of us found that we could plan a little bit that way, even, by planning our way into the past instead of the future. I want to tell you why this mattered even though most of us just felt like we were hurtling away from the present for a second, which was, we admit, kind of nice. In this way we became sort of like time travelers. Just like a dumbed-up version where the knob only turns in one direction and if you let go for even a second you’re whipped back to now again and it’s dark and chilly-looking. I want to tell you we kept telling stories through as much now as we could. And that some were good. Most were not. But we took them in and held them as memory.
I want to tell you that it was this drive toward narrative that saved us, but I can’t. It feels false. It will sound like twee bullshit. It will be shrill, or else syrupy, or it will be empty inside like this feeling I have when I back away again from the possibility that you and I are actually able to reach each other through this little tunnel of words I’m making. The truth is I can’t sleep now. I get scared. I think of my dog, of when she’s going to die. That’s what the future has in store. Hurts piled on top of much bigger hurts. Mostly, though, I can’t tell you how it saved us because it hasn’t happened yet, which means I have no possible idea. I’m just here. And it’s now. I don’t know what meaning there is to be found. But if you’re here, too, maybe I can tell you a story.
Zach VandeZande is a lapsed academic living in Washington, DC. He is the author of a novel, Apathy and Paying Rent (Loose Teeth Press, 2008), and two short story collections: Liminal Domestic: Stories (Gold Wake Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Lesser American Boys (Mason Jar Press, 2022). He knows all the dogs in his neighborhood.