Halfway to the coffee window I realize I’ve forgotten my mask, but it was so difficult crossing Russell and then Orange on a bicycle that I can’t turn around now—I’d have to wait in the hot haze for the streams of cars to pass all over again, exposed and ridiculous in my thin shorts. I let fly a defeated growl, but pedal on. Better to move forward feeling anger at my mistake, I think, than to double back and compound the ambient anger of the morning—smoke descending into the valley, no longer mistakable for a layer of fog. It’s Monday and I feel dull cramps and I don’t want to talk to anyone, but then Aquarians love to disappear—hadn’t Sue told me that the last time we walked? I did remember to line my underwear with a handful of tissue: a quick and hedging gesture that feels (now) both inadequate and smart.

I park my bike at the window and wave hello to Sue, who is inspecting a nearby butterfly bush with a coffee already in her hand. She waves back gaily, her dark curls glinting in the heat. When I’m done ordering—my shirt yanked up near my mouth, my eyes apologetic—I retreat toward Sue with my paper cup. I feel wretched, a vector for disease, but Sue laughs kindly. “I’ve been there,” she says, and tells a generous story with physical cues, stretching the neck of her cotton t-shirt up around her face. It’s forgivable to fail, is what she’s saying, even at the one thing the world needs you to do. I don’t believe her, but I am grateful, and beneath the hazy morning sun I let myself relax a little. She puts me at ease, Sue does—she laughs at everything, a believable doubling-over, which makes me want to perform. We walk toward the river trail and join the thin stream of cyclists and power walkers headed east toward Mount Sentinel—fewer today than usual, maybe because of the smoke.

“How are your classes going?” Sue asks, then adds, “I mean—you know.” She gestures widely, wildly: an encompassing sweep of our surroundings to say that nothing could be going normally, or really all that well. They’re fine, I tell her, at least the first one was—the semester is just getting started. I tell her my theory about the school, which is that they needed to get the students back on campus—all signed up for their University meal plans, all paying for their University housing, all believing they’re enrolling in the full in-person University experience—before they’d consider moving any of the classes online. I kept waiting for them to make the call, I tell her, for safety, but they never did, so I took the classes online myself, the greedy fuckers. This last bit has an unintended grate to it and I try to soften it as it lands, to infuse it with some bravado or dark humor, but it’s too late. It comes streaming out artlessly from me, from the sky’s ambient anger, helplessly unseamed like a hem. Luckily Sue laughs, half-doubling in solidarity, her voice heightened to a joyful falsetto. “God, they really are.” We move forward past a clump of masked bikers, Sue chuckling, and I feel the heat and pulse of my blood subside.

I’d liked Sue instantly when I met her—liked her vintage t-shirts and her sharp way of listening and the way she and her family had looked at the welcome barbecue for new graduate students—respectful and interested, but emanating the secure aura of having a shared, separate world. This stood in contrast to the rest of the writerly crowd, who looked hungry to pump hot life out of anyone, anything. For workshop she submitted essays about the tough post-election years she’d spent in Albuquerque, and our peers had asked for more historical details—what, exactly, had she been so upset about? We laughed later at this, at ourselves—how embittered and fixated we must sound. But how could you not be? Sue tells me her Venus is in Scorpio, which has to do with how she relates to others—she likes to see the ugliness if she’s going to really connect.

We reach the end of the river trail, where the paved path funnels into a gravel road that follows the river further east, and turn and walk back the way we came. Ugliness is all I feel today, or maybe every day now. I’ve been waking, lately, to a new kind of dread: deeper, longer, accumulative. I want the summer to be over, the heat to turn off. I want the farce of vacation to disappear, with its memories and connotations and ease of comparative analysis—of better memories, weightless experiences, different times. The record heat, the impending election, the cops in riot gear, the trucks with flags flapping on highways and through neighborhoods—guns and blue stripes and coiled snakes—I wanted it gone. But then to follow that desire toward autumn, when the weather cooled and it got darker and we all moved back inside—was that really what I wanted? I didn’t like thinking of what the world might feel like then.

“So, what do you think would be better,” Sue begins, briefly taking the lead as an older woman in a baseball cap passes from the opposite direction, keeping her distance, acknowledging our shift to single-file with a grim nod. Sue falls back to my side and continues. “That the Democrats win, and we go back to pretending everything is normal, even though we know it’s not?” She pauses judiciously—allowing me to absorb this, to inhale and exhale. There’s a twinge, some palpitation, in my lower abdomen; a searing second of uterine hurt. A man and woman on expensive bicycles appear from behind, then overtake us, then return to single file on the right-most edge of the path. “Or,” Sue continues, without changing the volume of her voice. “That we get four more years of this fucking asshole—just rip the band-aid off completely, and burn the whole thing to the ground?”

Briefly, I’m given a vision of the country as a scorched field: buildings razed, trees and animals spared, smoke lifting gently from pure ground. The vision calms me—the flag trucks and streaming advertisements and Twitter feuds all swiftly disappeared. But then to imagine, in the vacuum of newly public property, the various clingings and violent maneuvers, the resource scarcity war games we’ve been watching movies about for decades, brings a flush of shame to my face. It’s Leo season, Sue had texted before we met up, and with only a vague idea of what it meant I’d thought of heat and competition: an apex predator shaking out its mane. What would it feel like, I wonder, to cultivate a curious, detached arousal in response to the disintegration of our systems, instead of the rage that must—mustn’t it?—accompany the desire to see it all destroyed?

I glance up at the pale sky, as if the lens of this new thought might be applied in real time, and thickly, to the current layered crisis of wherever it is we are. The smoke layer almost makes a kind of barrier, I note—it’s not as hot as it might usually be for a morning in late-August, when the sun can permeate down to your blood. I try to imagine a sea of fine particulate matter suspended between the sun and my body, a million flecks of ash shielding me generously from the rays. The orange disc rises steadily above Sentinel, all bathed in pink-gray light, almost beautiful. On the mountainside beneath it, though, there’s a great fresh swathe of black—a scar from the 25-acre brushfire that broke out late last week, just up the hill from the iconic clock tower of Main Hall. It was “small,” the campus emergency alert system had assured us—the helicopters had it under control in just a few hours. It’s not that smoke that we’re breathing now. I don’t know what state this smoke is from.

It’s not an easy question, I tell Sue, at least not as easy as people think. The quick answer, sure, is that you vote for the uninspiring guy to get the evil guy out—a plain and shitty choice that belies, intoxicatingly, the structural evil of the whole system. You make this choice on the premise that the earth is now being pillaged and poisoned at higher rates than normal, that the way we treat immigrants and poor people and young black men in this country is worse than it’s ever been. If you think all that is true, or if you want badly enough to believe that it is, then the choice might feel like a no-brainer, even a little righteous. But if you suspected, as I did, that this fucking asshole was slated to take the fall for centuries of brutal Western dominance, and that all our past war criminals were all but lined up to denounce his nastiness in return for a pardon on their souls, then the choice stops being a real choice. Then the only real choice would be to not participate at all.

I feel a warm wet spreading, which gives me a little panic until I remember the tissue. How reassuring to have a barrier—how proud you can feel for making a small decision toward some future comfort. The blood wants out of me, wants earth-ward, and it makes me feel unkempt and insane, even a little fearful. I tell Sue, quickly, that I’m going to vote, and that I’m voting for the less evil person, despite everything I just said. I get a little sad, then, thinking of how cowed we all are—ordering backup masks to keep in the car, filling out our weekly unemployment forms as honestly as we can. The truth, I think, is that there’s no going back to normalcy, not even pretend normalcy, and we all know it somewhere in our bodies, and I worry for the percentage of people who might alchemize this knowledge into violence, or total passivity. In this moment, I admit, I don’t even know which is worse.

Sue nods her head carefully and sighs. The path empties into a parking lot and we shuffle through it, dimly aware of cars maneuvering around us, and exit out the other side toward a medium-sized drainage pond, where the path appears again. Flocks of Canada geese glide lazily through the murky water, tracking a few freckled children as they amble along its edge. “Aquarius is obsessed with the health of the community,” she explains, by way of reassuring me. I notice that the word obsessed, so desperate on paper, sounds stately and balanced when she says it. “And because that download comes early,” she says, meaning, I guess, early in life, “you understand where the obstacles for the community will be.” This is meant to soothe me, I know, but I feel nervous about it—that my fear for the world might be justified. In the silence that follows, I think maybe she notices, because she asks me abruptly if I’m a good sleeper. I tell her that I am. “Me too,” she says, smiling at me. “We must be more comfortable in that world than this one.”

We follow the path in a wide circle around the skate park, where Sue makes a note to bring her young son. “For P.E.,” she says, and laughs, because she’s keeping him home this year—the P.E. teacher will be her. I glance over at the cement bowl, the scatter of young blonde boys in helmets dipping in and out, cresting the edges of the smooth pools on scooters and skateboards. I imagine her standing on the edge of it, smiling at her son. We walk onward, and the reality of Sue’s daily life—of her dual roles of both mother and teacher—eclipses me briefly, bathing me in planet-sized shadow. I see my tiny agitated self, crossing busy streets and complaining about work. How did she manage? “I’m psyched,” she says. Her son wants to learn mythology, do chemistry experiments. She’s going to teach him Zinn’s Peoples’ History using a kids’ version she found on the internet.

The weight of these images—the objects and habits and tedious chores that comprise another person’s domestic life—wells up suddenly in me, leadening my heat-damp body with the sheer endlessness of all that we must do, each day, to carry on through all of it. Sue is laughing again, doing an impression of herself as a radicalized mother—a kind of wild-eyed Denis Leary pushing Latin American revolutionary history on an 8-year-old—and the sight of her making light of it all, against the apocalyptic sky and blackened hills and insensate bubbles we’ve developed after months of paranoid seclusion, dissolves the heavy blackness in my chest into a fine particulate vapor, which dissipates out and away from me, up into the unbreathable air.

We steer slowly up from the river path, back into the tangle of mellow city where we left our bikes. There are people here and there, inexplicably, nursing iced coffees and conversing at a safe distance, or mounting their bikes with determination, or breaking off bits of granola bars to feed their toddlers. I glimpse in brief moments some version of the future in which the kids of this era grow up creatively and productively concerned, an air of calm acceptance about their placement in the human cycle: making a mess, cleaning it up. I’m soothed by this, or my legs are tired from the walk, my scattered mind all talked out. I return to the smoke and present, and ask Sue what she’s reading, and she starts in about the psychic femme and the fall of capital, though we’re too close to the bikes, now, to really get into it. "We're moving into a new era," Sue summarizes, smiling, and I believe her.

We say goodbye, mimic hugs from a distance, and I double back toward my bike, the sun now higher in the sky. Alone now, I can feel the halo that's delivered from talking with others, the tender quaking radiance of someone's voice on my skin. I glance back to see Sue pedaling away, returning to the world of her own family, gliding forward through the lifting smoke. We're moving into a new era, I repeat, and try to stitch this into my body as I glide away myself. The blood is soaked into my shorts by now, and I skim westward along the surface of the earth, wondering if others can see. I try to accept this reality without reaction, or shame. I try to see how, in the long run, it doesn’t matter at all.

For more information about this piece, see this issue's legend.