She Was Sure

            She was sure the world was ending. God is in the radio and Satan the ground. She had stocked up on nothing; she told me she would need nothing when it happened. Either way, there was nothing anyone could do to prepare. And to even try to prepare was not only showing God himself a lack of respect, but showed a shallow and not entirely thought out knowledge of his power. In these things, these set of beliefs, I guess, she was sure.

            She wore all blue, because blue was the color of water and water the blood fuel of life. Blue pony earrings, a blue pair of loafers, a tight blue skirt, a singular blue streak in her blonde hair. She had blue eyes, and she told me she was born with brown ones but had willed them blue over many long cold nights.

            That’s why she shopped at Best Buy too, and also why, through some long chain of events, the two of use were sandwiched next to each other on a sprawling Christmas retail line that snaked all the way through the refrigeration section. Best Buy employees wear blue. They are good; god is good.

            I loved it all. Soaked it into my pores like a light Mediterranean sea breeze. Her unprovoked conversation sparkled amongst random annoyance and minutia. We moved in that line at a bafflingly slow pace for the amount of people shopping, almost as if the manager of this store just assumed that people no longer shopped in stores, and therefore, quality and foresight were of no continuing import in the face of the inevitable. Just let the band finish the set.

            And sure, in-person shopping will probably be basically extinct in some fifty or so years, but we’re here now. Or we were there that night anyway: capitalistic cannibals on a small island with rising sea levels. Would the next generations experience random social moments in consumer shopping? Even the Captains of these boxy ships know the answer to that, if they care to.

            Not that she believed there would be many more generations.

            “It strengthened my belief actually,” she said. “That day did. Some people actually believed, honest to God believed, that the world might end. And the fact that people even allowed themselves to consider the possibility, however remote or large a space that belief took up in their mind, and even if what was in that space was just an ironic concept, the allowance of that space, means we’re just that much closer”.

            She spoke in a lyrical rapid-fire tongue, leaving me off-balance and unsure. The kind of person who, say twenty years ago, could have convinced a smallish group of people to kill themselves because of her vision, but people don’t gather in groups anymore. Not physically anyway. There have been mass suicides for events with much less press and prestige (Hale-Bopp, Jonestown, etc.), but for the Great Mayan apocalypse of 2012: not one instance that I’d heard of.

            Perhaps that’s one of the gifts of the Early Internet Age: isolated individuals may fly off the handle still, but it’s becoming harder to persuade isolated groups to incite or commit mass lunacy and brutal psychosis. The knowledge is too accessible, to widespread. People are just a click away from learning the other side of the coin. The Internet, contradictory to the constant hysterical manner it’s presented as, actually moderates people in a way we don’t totally understand yet.

            I told her this. I was feeling punchy and frisky at this late shopping hour. I like being in the ring with someone who knows their way around the meta-physical canvas, and she could throw a good jab.

            We shuffled forward as she thought this over.

            “No, I don’t agree. Can’t say that I do agree. Cults just aren’t cool anymore. Group sociopathy is a social virus; it rides that hot hand, spilling out in streaks that start to seem like epidemics.” She thought quietly a moment longer. “I do like your Moderation Concept, to some degree, though.”

            “Thank you.”

            “But it certainly doesn’t feel true. Doesn’t pass the big eyeball test.”

            “It shouldn’t. Things are supposed to look more dire than they are. We know more about our place on the track than ever before, but that doesn’t mean, necessarily, there’s a sudden spike of impending doom. Just more presentations of it.”

            I’m not even sure why I was in the store. Blue lizards stood atop nearby washing machines with blue ear-pieces, chirping to each other in some ancient tongue of the dirt.

            “We’re comparatively bland in our aggression. The white noise louder,” I rattled on, Lebowski-like.

            “Maybe you’re not getting the real picture,” she snapped. Not angry, just making a clear tactical point. “And maybe the aggression is less hands on. Makes you feel better.”

            Behind us one of the poor shirted bastards was trying to explain to some old man what version of The Sims his granddaughter would like. The Sims?

            “Maybe you’re right. I’m hopeful about the Teens though. Perhaps we’ll catch our stride finally.”

            She looked me dead in the eyes for once, we had been shoulder to shoulder the whole time through the line, but staring straight forward as we delivered point counter point. The look in her eyes was some form of pity, a caring form, the way the Mom in Almost Famous is always looking at Russell.

            Then it was her turn to checkout, and she turned wordlessly and scurried over to line four, as directed by a lanky laconic Blue Shirt.

            Disco happened in The 70s. Katrina happened in what decade? The aughts? The Zeroes? The Millennials? In seventy years is anyone going to try and work out the difference, or will they do what we did and just neglect, to some degree, what happened? Pencil it in as opposed to chisel it on rock. The past twelve years are largely definable by the intermittent national tragedies that occurred during them; as opposed to style, art, music and soul. It’s a commentary on how homogenous the Internet has made us, and how rooted our memories are in the power of semantic ease. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe it’s why no one talks about the War of 1812 very often. Maybe we need a category, a symbol of space and time, before we start understanding how to live in it. Maybe it starts in these 21^st century Teens. And maybe not.

            I bought my gift and slinked out the glass doors. She was standing out front in the Florida sunshine waiting for her ride to come around. I hadn’t noticed it, but she was standing in line to buy a neat hyper-flat laptop. Something thin to keep your entire life in. It could fly out the window in a swift wind and fly, fly, fly. Out over the plains, across the ocean and to the end of the world: your memories becoming one with the clouds, the way you always wanted.

            What looked like her husband pulled up in a Dodge Dart (it was blue). I didn’t think she even noticed me walk past, but she had somehow.

            “I bought the limited warranty. Think that makes me a hypocrite?” She grinned as she said this.

            “No,” was all I could think to say.

            Her round face looked a little disappointed, and then she slipped into the passenger seat of the car. Maybe she thought I’d have something clever to say, something to crystallize our little moment back in that line. But in the parking lot, in that moment, I just didn’t.

            Everything is limited.