Burning With You

"I can't exit the contract," she said quietly. "It's over. I've already failed to uphold it."

My mind raced. "What do you mean?"

"There's only so much I can do if you're intent on giving up."

Hesther reached for me, tenderly stroked my cheek. She'd never expressed care in this way before, but it still felt familiar, right. I felt tears welling in my eyes, and I took her hand in mine, pressing it to my face.

"Are you leaving soon?"

"I tried everything," she said. "Countless times, countless worlds. Nothing got through, but you started catching on. I'm out of ideas, and your own little apocalypse is going to banish me. You're on your own, dude." She was crying, too.

"Wait!"

An apocalypse, unlike the events in Stewardland, is an unveiling. Nothing was unveiled in the aftermath of the Gullet opening. People blamed Hell, or worse, the utility workers. The more violent doomsday preppers had formed roving bands, living their Mad Max fantasies, gunning down workers where they struggled to fix the province's infrastructure. No one knew what had happened, or why, or how to put an end to it. There was no clarity at the end of this world, just an undignified cessation of being.

Being?

I shook my head at the thought. I understood Hesther's words. An actual apocalypse was happening in me, a piercing of whatever veil surrounded my succubus mistress—and when that veil was gone, so too would she be.

"I don't need to understand, if that makes you leave."

She shook her head, laughing weakly as the tears streamed down her face. "It doesn't work like that. You can't just unknow."

"Surely there's some kind of memory magic—"

Hesther shook her head again. "There is. I can't tell you how many times I've used it. It's not enough. Any repairing of veils requires needle and thread. You need to pierce the veil to stitch it back together. The thread needs to fit through the hole. There will always be a million tiny gaps."

On the TV, the episode of Terrace House ended with its signature door-closing sound. Jovial music accompanied the production credits. Usually, Netflix would autoplay the next episode after a few seconds, but this was the latest episode released in the fifty-one provinces. Without a virtual private network to spoof being on the other side of the Peace, we couldn't watch more.

"I need you," I protested.

"Maybe not," she said, withdrawing. "Fat lot of good I've been."

"Don't go."

"This isn't a choice," she said. In a blink, her body was gone. Her voice was still in my ears, my mouth. "But you still have choices. Take care of yourself, dude."

I slumped back on the couch, arms crossed tight across my chest, trying to hold her within me.

"What are my choices?" I asked the empty room.

I could check out The Circle on Netflix while I waited for more Terrace House to drop. I could jack off in the toilet, or anywhere else, I supposed. I could sleep. I could eat canned tuna—or not eat canned tuna. These choices seemed either completely inconsequential or deeply consequential, with no gradation of stakes between boredom and death. This seemed impossible. I knew I was missing something, but I didn't know what.

I just let myself be on the couch for a while, missing Hesther and thinking about the end of the world, the end of being.

Being? ... be-ing? Unbidden, terminology and phrases came to mind. The being of the being to whom the question of being is important...

My eyes wandered to the coffee table, to the reading I'd put down when Georgeville caught fire, a needlessly dense treatise dealing with the limits of ontology. It was something I'd avoided when I dodged a philosophy major, I'd thought, but then it turned out that rhetoric was mostly philosophy, and the upcoming class I was supposed to teach happened to have Martin Heidegger on the list. The professor I was working with had insisted that I refamiliarize myself with Heidegger's wild ride on being and time. Three weeks ago—if that's even the right way to quantify my time in quarantine—I'd counted myself lucky. With the opening of the Gullet and the implicit loss of my job, I'd dodged Heidegger's wonky bullshit.

But whatever relief I'd felt at the incineration of the university in Georgeville, it was gone now.

Without Hesther running things, I sank back into my anxious mind.

And that was okay.

I had tools.

I breathed. I centered myself in my body. I made myself aware of my thoughts. I reevaluated assumptions. I didn't solve Hesther's riddle, but I did find myself questioning several things I'd taken as given, not least of which was that my job had burned down with my worksite.

It was summer break now. No one died when the university burned down. My professor was alive somewhere. The students enrolled in his undergrad classes were alive somewhere. I had to be ready to grade their essays.

I reached down and picked Being and Time up off the coffee table.

#

In mid September, I ran into Hesther outside the portable buildings parked on the charred foundations of Remy Hall in downtown Georgeville. We hugged and kissed, with tongue. I brandished the Rhetoric 201 reader I was taking to the print shop. She rolled her eyes, and slapped my ass as I left.

I wasn't sure who she was. I mean, I knew she was a PhD candidate in the philosophy department, and I knew we liked each other, but I couldn't explain why she seemed both intimately familiar and completely strange. I never brought it up when we saw each other, and neither did she, though I was pretty sure she had a similar feeling. We never planned our get-togethers. Sometimes we ended up at the same table in a restaurant, or in the same bed in one of our apartments in Seven Hills.

I never questioned it. I didn't need to understand everything—that was her field, after all. The old joke in my department goes that philosophy is the pursuit of what's true, while rhetoric is the pursuit of what's useful. It's a nice joke because it throws shade at everyone. We're belittling ourselves for throwing our hands up at questions of veracity and authenticity, but we're also poking fun at the philosophy students for investigating interesting but ultimately irrelevant topics. I clung to this distinction in the aftermath of my time in lockdown. I only had to know useful things, like how to make Hesther come.

Understanding can be valuable, of course, but mindfulness alone didn't get me through the summer—material change did. After the rain rolled in from the Peace and Stewardland's firefighters finally got everything contained, the ennui of the summer lifted as if by magic. When we talk about Seasonal Affective Disorder, it's usually a formulation encompassing the winter months. I think the DSM has a broader definition than the layperson's understanding, but I doubt it's been updated to account for Stewardland's itinerant fire season yet.

For my part, I got a new therapist, and I stopped watching Terrace House.