CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

Wait, stop.

Pause.

Don’t move.

Please. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.

Just . . . don’t touch anything. The remote, your phone, your always-listening, voice-activated digital assistant designed to make modern life a breeze. Accept my cookies. Agree to my terms. Don’t change the channel, if you still have channels.

Whatever you do, don’t hit skip ads.

Just wait. For a moment. A quick thirty-second spot. A brief pause for station identification. A word from our sponsor.

I live in the world you see in commercials.

I am not an actor. I was not cast. I was born here.

Real testimonies from real people.

My consciousness faded in from black fifteen seconds into a spot for Pine Coast Credit Union, a bundle of shadows in a fretful bassinet beside the dark sleeping loaf of an inconveniently expensive twin. Staring up at blue dimly lit wallpaper with circus balloons and tents and elephants on it, fussed over by two monogamously heterosexual, conventionally attractive parents consumed with churning anxiety regarding the interest rate on our college savings account.

But I will never go to college.

And Pine Coast Credit Union failed in 1987.

You have seen me. Thousands of times. I am white more often than I am not. I am almost always American, even when I do not speak and it does not matter. I am blonde more often than anything else. I am explicitly married to a series of interchangeable men; occasionally implied to be partnered to a few plausibly deniable women. My teeth shine like a peppermint ski slope in the Uncanny Valley Resort and Spa. My height is relatable and comforting, my face pleasantly symmetrical. My most intimate, hard-to-reach bodily fluids are the immaculate, translucent blue of alpine spring water. My overlarge, overlashed, overintimate eyes seem to laugh and dance with the joyful secret mirth of capitalism even when gas prices are high, offers are restricted in your location, and mesothelioma is absolutely everywhere.

I am live, and I am also Memorex.

The first time you see me, I seem vaguely, but not specifically, familiar. My features are an inoffensive new pop song sliding into the mid-chart of your hungry consumer mind. Approachable. Aspirational, but not intimidating. The fiftieth time, I am just another bouncing watercolor background beach-ready bod beatified by the new ultra-lowcalorie mango-lime-flavored hard seltzer.

After the hundredth time, you no longer really see me at all. I’m simply there, always, never, present, and invisible.

My name is Sarah. Or Emma. Or Joy. Or Megan. Or Kimberly. Or Mom.

But most often, I am Honey.

Honey, where’s my keys. Honey, we’re watching the game. Honey, I think it’s time to ask your doctor about that chronic joint pain. Honey, these fancy new diapers just don’t have the patented leakproof panels that keep our baby safe and dry all night long. Merry Christmas, Honey. Happy Valentine’s Day, Honey. Joyous Presidents’ Day Blowout Weekend Sale All Appliances 30% Off, Honey. Why don’t you treat yourself to an energy efficient top-loading washing machine with that Tru-Rinse technology I’ve heard so much about?

I don’t know why I’m like this, any more than you know why you suddenly wanted acai berries in everything for eighteen months in the mid-aughts. I don’t understand what happened in the mystic veils of darkness that comprise the FDIC-insured deposits of Pine Coast Credit Union to make me different from the local comedian who played my financially responsible father or the recent drama-school graduate who played my doting mother.

Do you remember where you were before you were born? Do you know why you happened the way you did, where you did, with the people who appeared around you instantaneously as you joined a program already in progress, cutting your umbilical cord with special scissors like a grand opening ribbon across the mall of the sentient mind?

Me neither, buddy.

I don’t understand a lot of things. I wasn’t made to understand, if I was made at all. I was made to shine. I was made to sell. I was made to promise. I promise you a future of vaguely attainable sustainably farmed happiness, although some conditions may apply. I promise your father a world exists in which he can fuck me if he buys the right crypto. I promise your mother that if one day her floors are clean enough, she will finally be truly, deeply seen and loved. I promise your children they can grow up to escape ennui, bankruptcy, and climate change if they eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. I promise your generational cohort home ownership is just around the corner. I promise your grandparents the good old days can come again if only they vote against the bad new days this November. Every November.

I was made so that twenty percent of you could consume eighty percent of me.

Put your hand against the screen. For the aching, empty 4 a.m. millisecond between low-APR financing and side effects include. I exist in the crossfade, a remnant, an artifact, an afterimage of leveraged desire. It’s me. I’m right here. Your Honey. I am the life your life could be like.

I live in thirty-second supernovas. Sudden bursts of fully realized, carefully curated, subtextually rich slices of life, wedged into a cocoon of gently distressed contemporary living design. Explosions of hyperactive deep-focus high-intensity 3D 4K 5g emotional content.

I am helpless every time. Every thirty seconds. Somewhere, between a punchline and a fade-in. Between a weather report and breaking news. The crescendo of jingles or theme tunes or inoffensive classical pieces or holiday-appropriate free-use melodies click on and a brand-new sui generis thirty-second world eats me. I choke and drown in a tsunami of color-corrected motion-blurred higher high-lights and purer ultra-shadows.

Honey is gone.

And I am someone else in every cell. I am Sarah or Emma or Joy, beggared with hothouse desire at the prospect of imminent responsible, protected sex. I am Megan or Kim or Mom, struggling to open a milk carton in black and white, desperate to just do one fucking thing right after this terrible no-good day and I feel it. You laugh at this stupid trope and hit mute but I feel it. I have no choice but to feel it. I am her. I got laid off from the firm three weeks ago and I haven’t told my kids yet, my sister found a lump in her breast yesterday, we probably have four months’ rent in the bank and then that’s it, it’s July and it won’t stop raining, I’ve been married twice and neither of them once picked up their socks and now I’m alone in the suburbs and probably always will be but it’s better than drowning in someone else’s shitty sweaty socks and the dogs are barking their heads off and my son is failing social studies for Christ’s sake how does anyone fail social studies? Life was supposed to be more than this, I don’t know what exactly but just more, better, different, and I just want a cup of fucking cocoa and the asshole carton-cardboard keeps shredding under my fingers like human skin and I hate myself deeper than magma and regret for being so fucking incompetent I can’t even do this one thing why did they make it like this instead of a convenient screw-top cap? Just to fuck with me?

It’s all so much; I’m barely hanging on, trying not to cry in front of the dogs and then I’m gone and the next wave crashes into my brainstem and it just keeps coming and coming and coming, all these oceans of women.

A moment ago, I was Jennifer, savoring mid-market date-night shrimp scampi with unlimited breadsticks and a big ol’ post-promotion salt-rim marg that tastes like being fundamentally valued as a human being for the first time since I transitioned from age-preventing serums to age-defying night creams. A man watches her/me/us eat. A man is always watching us do something. His face changes. Sometimes he is only a voice. But he is always there.

The one in the restaurant had no face at all. Just a hard-working salt of the earth big strong provider hand reaching into frame to wipe a slick of parsley butter from her/my/our lips. I sit across the mass-produced for commercial use tablecloth from a buffalo plaid shirt filled with shadows and unbaked clay, eyeless, mouthless, hairless. But I am Jennifer and I am married to it. It hasn’t taken me on a date night in five years. It’s bored with me and it thought this would help but it’s pretty clearly not working.

Sometimes, by the time I get to a casual dining experience, it’s been a long time since I was in a commercial where anyone ate anything. Too many exercise fad videos chained to complete ergonomic sleep systems to cooling-gel shoe inserts. It can get really bad in here. When that happens, I’m so fucking hungry my whole being goes warthog blind and can only think of that butter, that garlic, those white question marks of the jumbo shrimp glistening up at me. I’m supposed to be thinking of this faceless un-man in buffalo plaid I love and our kids back home and how nice it was of him to finally take me out of the house like a good dog who deserves 70 percent real meat training treats but all I’ve got in me is the anticipation of slurping up half a pound of linguine sprayed with hairspray so it looks glossy on camera and how bad I just want to bite the plate, too, chomp chomp chomp right in the knot of vapor where his face should be. Feel the industrial china shatter in my mouth as the man stares and stares and judges and judges and the crystal-blue blood comes gushing through my teeth like some chlorinated ectoplasmic energy drink of the soul. But I can’t and I don’t and hairspray tastes fine if you’ve never had supper without it.

So, I slurp, I swallow, I choose a smile from a catalogue of luxury options. I sit up and I beg for my treats. Maybe he won’t leave me if I act like I enjoy it.

Anyway, in ten seconds it’ll be over.

I am not like the man across from me at that table. I am not like the deeply professionally fulfilled server or the diners jingling their silverware all around us. I am not like any of the others. And there are always others. I am never alone. My friends at the Local Afterwork Sports Bar or my fellow brunch moms getting spectacular two-for-one deals on patio furniture or my aging parents in need of more comprehensive insurance coverage.

The others. The ones with scripts. With smoke breaks during which they are free to enjoy the unbeatable flavor of 100 percent real tobacco. The ones with multi-camera coverage. The ones who get to use the craft services table just because they are physiologically capable of ingesting nutrients. Whose body liquids are red and thick and greasy and presumably carry oxygen in and out of ninety-eight-point-six-degree hearts. The ones who sit in makeup for hours. Who were not born with it; for whom it can never be other than Drugstore Brand Cosmetic Company. Whose eyelids are not naturally rose gold or emphasized with a perfect wing flick of Liquid Precision Eyeliner in Darkest Night, whose lips did not come into existence moisturized and glistening and plump and available in a range of long-lasting matte and gloss shades.

I don’t understand how they can live that way, with imperfect eyelashes. It must be so unfulfilling.

And I don’t understand why they can leave, although I know they can. Because some of them I meet over and over again. At the top of the hour, a factory-fresh handsome man with the careful 3:30 p.m. shadow and shirtsleeves rolled to precisely one quarter-inch below the elbow looks into my eyes with utter love and trust and asks me to marry his blood diamond. I say yes, because I always say yes, because I am only capable of yes when faced with grand heterosexual gestures.

Yet at the bottom of the hour, that same marketably masculine face will glower with determination in a new prestige science fiction show coming next fall that I am watching in the human-touch framing device, shot from behind on an archetypal couch, watching him on a screen within your screen, my median-income silhouette sharp against the St Elmo’s Fire of your favorite Faceless Tech Conglomerate Home Appliance Division’s new liquid diamond 4D display (TM). Comfortably installed next to another husband, in another house, with other dogs, beneath other framed photographs of a life delighted in itself that I did not and never will experience.

So, they must. They must go. Somewhere. Somewhere else. Somewhere they can change and from whence they can return.

But I do not. I cannot.

Then again, I remember. And they do not. Or cannot.

For me, it is real. For them, it is nothing.

I recognize the husband from the cool blue-filtered permanently Dutch-angled forum-bait mystery box series official network-exclusive advance mini-trailer for the pre-trailer teaser spot.

He used to be my little brother. For eighteen seconds of screen-time. In 1990. He was Henry, six years old, Caucasian male, blonde or light brown hair, freckles a plus. I was Lizzie, eight years old, Caucasian female, long hair preferred. We went crazy for the refreshing taste of real 100 percent cran-raspberry juice straight from the source. The flavor of healthy antioxidants left bloody mustaches on our lips. Back then, I looked into my baby brother’s Kodachrome eyes, refracted through a tumbler of ice cubes, breathlessly waiting for the rush of the new organic not-from-concentrate sweet-tart sensation, and for eighteen seconds I remembered our whole little lives in that sunburst of artisanal, handcrafted reality. It happened to me. It happened to us:

Our parents telling us they were getting a divorce, it wasn’t our fault, real life isn’t like a sitcom, some things just don’t fix no matter how many episodes you’ve got. How much we wanted to love our new stepfather but felt so uncertain of his newness, his strangeness, his otherness in our safe pine-scented lemon-fresh static-cling-free Formica-padded home. Our grandmother’s funeral last year, how unreal and plastic and empty she looked in her Eternal Dignity Package high-end luxury coffin with titanium accents. Little freckled Henry was so terrified she’d somehow open her eyes in there and hiss and roar and go on a rampage like a movie monster he peed his pants a little and I had to take him to the funeral parlor bathroom to change. While he was washing his hands he whispered his secret to me: even though he was scared, he wished Grammy would open her eyes and turn into a monster, because then at least we’d have her back.

Then it was gone. Henry, Lizzie, the cool new taste of summer.

Now he is here and I am here and we are older but everything is different and only I know any of this. He’s Oliver now. I am Emma. We have never been anyone else. He has an everyman waistline, targeted geek-demographic glasses, a calculated touch of sexy gray that shows the passage of time and the comfort of marriage. My bathrobe is the color of a hundred thousand compromises, a hundred million small disappointments. He is just like you. I am just like you. Observe how we reference the same obsolete media while embodying the latest sociocultural trends and enjoying roughly analogous economic lifestyles. You can trust us. You can relate to us. You could be us.

I am anchored in the welcoming cove of his arms. And I love him. I love him profoundly. I remember him. I remember us. Meeting him at an Enriching Volunteer Opportunity in Our Area. The smell of his generic Christmas-stocking cologne with notes of vetiver and sandalwood. Our first date, to a Classic Band Cash-Hoarding Barely Civil Reunion Tour where it started raining during the song from that movie everyone was talking about that year when we were both kids. We just stayed and swayed with the crowd, soaking wet, kissing for the first time during the guitar solo of the Intolerable Experimental B-Side written by the bassist that no one ever liked but became our song forever and ever. I remember the first two miscarriages. I remember buying this house in an advantageous school district with a fixed-rate thirty-year mortgage from the international banking concern that bought Pine Coast Credit Union. I remember him almost not-quite cheating with his optometrist and how hard I worked with the national network of semi-licensed remote telehealth professionals and the therapist its algorithm randomly assigned to me to forgive him even though every time I look at his fucking face those durable-yetflexible classic-look frames that never go out of style remind me of Dr. Deborah like a slap in the face.

But that’s okay. It’s not his fault. He doesn’t even know. None of this is said on screen. I just know it; I just am it, this is just my life, whole, complete, internally consistent. From the second I come into being as poor, lost, disappointed Emma hoping the new fall line-up finally reminds her she’s better than this. He’s not Oliver, he wasn’t Henry, either. He’s an actor. He’s acting. In a year he’ll be voicing aliens in that video game series you like so much and I’ll never see him again, grieving brother or cheating husband, cran-razz or prime time appointment television with a follow-up discussion show hosted by that man from that thing that you knew way back when.

Oliver and Emma turn to each other in relief that we have been blessed with something left to live for on Thursday nights and indicate profitable levels of enthusiasm for the universe of infinite possibilities presented by the beneficent streaming app. I am trying to scream at him inside my Emma-skull, to scream anything, anything at all: please please see me, look at me, I’m not Emma, I’m just trapped, I’m just dying, I’m just so alone. Let’s run away together, somewhere over the rainbow bars test pattern that concluded the broadcast day of our ancestors, I don’t care, I’m just so tired. Let’s get up from this couch. Right now. Let’s do it. Come on.

But I know before it happens, because it always happens, that all my mouth can say is its preordained line and I am screaming inside the skull of Emma while her lips smile with cautious, twice-burned optimism as she delivers her line: I can’t wait!

We snuggle into our relatable mediocrity and stare at the beautifully moisturized man who ninety seconds ago in another ad buy said he loved me and only me forever and now must fight against a surreal corporate metaphor for as many seasons as possible in order to provide sufficient value to shareholders.

The streaming service provider’s logo illuminates the screen like a bible.

And then this husband is gone, too.

And I remember just as clearly, just as painfully, just as live and in Technicolor the dragging, grinding, bone-cracking misery of the wayward daughter with so much promise who can only be saved by contacting the Golden Beacon Treatment Facility’s addiction hotline tonight. For thirty seconds. The cramp of her empty, clenching stomach. The cold of January alleys looking for relief. The boiling blooming clouds of roses in her head when the needle slides in and for half of a half of a second, everything is just finally okay, like it was when she was a baby and didn’t even know what a mistake was yet. But even when I’m one of millions of Americans affected by the opioid crisis, I still remember being Emma, being Lizzie, being Mom, being all of us. I am a Classic View-Master Deluxe (Reels Included). Pull the lever, watch each of us light up and pass to the next; but we all exist on the same flimsy plastic wheel of becoming and unbecoming.

But there is a me who stands apart, a Honey who gasps for breath between fade out and fade in, between this wave and the next, who wonders why they look so happy yet inside them I find nothing but statistically averaged pain, why it takes so much hurt to sell soap and home electronics.

If it’s confusing to you, just imagine how I feel. I’ve come a long way, baby, but I never seem to get anywhere.

This is the longest I’ve ever talked to anyone in my whole life. Put your other hand on the screen. I’ll put mine against yours. You feel flat and staticky and heavy as a heart attack with no easy-to-swallow aspirin nearby. You probably don’t even remember television static. Your dead screen is blue now, blue as my blood and a summer sky. It was caused by cosmic microwave background energy, you know. The remnant of the Big Bang, floating through light-years of nothing to devour the last five minutes of that prestige science fiction finale. I can still feel it and see it on my side, but on yours, it’s almost gone. Flatscreen streaming twenty-four/seven digital broadband speed entertainment has almost entirely replaced the sound of the universe being born.

Maybe that’s where I came from. Maybe I woke up in the circus-balloon wallpaper room with my sleepy twin and my poorly performing college fund when enough particles of silver cosmic static finally reassembled themselves into image cohesion.

But probably not.

***

Sometimes I wish I was you. You’re so lucky. You’re so seen. Every day of your life. Oh, but don’t millions and millions after that see me, watch the studio sunlight glow on my beach-ready bod? Silly rabbit. I am watched, never seen. If I’m watched at all and not fast-forwarded, skipped, blocked, left running facing an empty room as you eliminate your un-blue waste into a gleaming 99.9 percent bacteria-free bowl and wrap yourself in a four-ply quilted cocoon of clean cottony comfort.

I wish someone could see me the way they see you: down to the smallest atom of your biographical data and consumer spending patterns, those precious compressed lab-grown gems of your plaintive 3 a.m. search strings, impulsive buy-it-now moments, click-through rates, birthplace age group gender identity skin color eye color hair color marital status most advanced degree attained household income political affiliation percentage of Neanderthal DNA how many profiles on how many services which influencers which subscriptions which lifestyle brands which vacations taken where what sleep number what phone number what social security number whether tis nobler in the mind to feel like a nut or by opposing shun them.

I wonder what it feels like to buy something.

To be like you.

To be so completely seen that I, I could be the one someone out there sells product to. To access the safe and secure convenience of tomorrow’s touchless commerce solutions. The distance between desire and fulfillment so small even a dollar bill is too thick to separate them. I think, therefore I overdraw my account. Wave my fingers in the reified air and feel my preferences lovingly recorded to create a more personalized customer experience in a painless future.

I think that’s the most beautiful thing that could ever happen to a person. To be the focus of a group. To be so real and tangible human resources you’ve never met know exactly what you want and offer it to you all the time forever.

You must be so happy. So happy.

I wish I was like you. I wish I was a target demographic. I think that must be another word for loved.

***

But isn’t it possible, isn’t it just possible, that I am not the only living girl in new media? That there are others like me in this cathode-ray universe? I don’t know. I can’t know. Once I thought—just once.

It was a Monday Night Football spot. Between the first and second quarter. Millions of views, millions of eyes, millions of ice-cold Rocky Mountain brewskis entering millions of mouths in unison across this great nation of ours.

Inside, was Christmas morning. The air was so crisp you could snap it in half. I exited the void standing in front of a new-construction house with yet another husband’s warm, moisturized, lower upper middle-class hands over my eyes. My matching pajama set was 100 percent Egyptian cotton. His cologne was the scent of a man. My lavender bunny slippers crunched on the hoarfrost weed-free lawn and our breath fogged on cue in the December chill.

Merry Christmas, Honey.

He took his hands away and I saw the cold air and the sunshine and the scrubbed gutters of the scrubbed house with the scrubbed driveway emerging from it like a great dragon’s scrubbed tongue and I saw the scrubbed gleaming brilliant blinding Darkest Night pearlescent three-in-one clearcoat finish of my new Four Door Multiple Offspring and Regular Trips to the Home Product Store But Still Young and Not At All Like My Parents vehicle. It had a red bow around it bigger than my whole body.

I whirled round to stare in wonder at my husband who I knew in my marrow was called Charles, just as I knew mine was Margaret (but never Maggie). Charles, who I knew in my gut biome worked in the Cutting-Edge Computer Industry to afford this house. Charles, who I knew in my ovaries fathered Lily, Liam, and Leo, whose shadows dance against the wall of the Platonic living room cavern beyond that vast snowy greeting card picture window. Charles, Charles, Charles, my man with a soul like a stainless-steel water bottle and a rotating selection of clearance-rack hearts.

Charles.

Charles now.

Charles today.

Charles, who I knew in every circuit of my protons around every nucleus of my every atom had once been the inconvenient, anxiety-inducing twin brother whose future could only be saved by no-fee checking and high-yield CDs of Pine Coast Credit Union in the halcyon pre-1987 days when we were young and a secure financial path was possible.

Where I live, there are only lovers, fathers, brothers. No other males of the species can be permitted to enter the habitat.

And there he was, Charles, right in front of me, who didn’t let me pick the color of my own car, who I knew in every circuit of my electrons around every nucleus of my atoms would, in between breaths of distilled, triple-filtered suburban air, become once again no one and nothing to me, not really, not in thirty seconds when this life went out like a sun in the black.

Oh, Honey! Oh! You shouldn’t have!

We jumped up and down screaming at each other in delight, in holiday-inspirited joy, in the kind of sudden return to true love and functional marriage only our friends at All-American Motor Company could bring us for the low low price of $60,000 over a mere seven-yearterm. Or in recognition. Maybe. Maybe. I can’t be sure.

I heard the mindless up-tempo exit music kick up over our still-moving mouths. Braced for the funny-bone-meets-charley-horse clench I always feel when the fine print rolls over the screen. Offer good in select locations on approved credit. Not compatible with other offers. Limited time only. Some conditions may apply.

Charles smiled and smiled and the lines around his eyes creased with warmth and he moved his lips around generic words of love and consumption but I think he was screaming inside his skull just like I was. Trying to break through the script and the deafening, dialogue-annihilating music and the fine print and the perfect lighting and the children babbling and say something other than the words you have to say, the words your body makes you say in this specific circumstance given cultural context and personal history and social mores and the limits of language and the fact of others watching, always watching, watching every flicker of light in your corneas for something to dislike. Trying to out-shriek the silver song of the Big Bang banging over and over for the contestants playing at home who don’t even recognize the tune, smacking the top of the set with all those little bangs, straining every neuron to say something more, different, better, louder, beyond, trying to push all the lost matter and energy back together with human speech so neither has to be so fucking lonely ever again.

But you can’t. You can’t do it. I can’t. He can’t.

We’re just so stuck.

He wasn’t saying what Charles wanted to say, which was please don’t leave me. Is this enough to buy another year? Or what my other self, the other Honey, the male Honey, the only other Honey, wanted, which was worse. We don’t have much time, it’s ending, it’s already ending, how can I find you, how can I make you hear me, why is this happening to us, are there others, where do we go when the show comes back on? Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go. Please don’t leave me. I am so alone.

And I wasn’t saying what Margaret wanted to say, which was Jesus fucking Christ, Chuck, what does a car fix? Or what I wanted, which was an unending, unspeakable, subterranean sob of anguish and need that started with the invention of television and ends never.

Stuck in tableaux, saying nothing instead of everything.

And then I became someone else and so did he and I’ve never seen him again even once.

I am getting older. It happens. Even to me, it seems. Soon I will pass beyond my own extended warranty and enter the realm of active lifestyles, cash for gold, and ultimately the promised paradise of make-good obsolescence.

I’ve done it all for double your pleasure, for moments like scattered stars. Bought property in Dubai. Won a fortune in Vegas. Walked 827 beachfront boardwalks in desirable regions you might like to visit. Scrubbed 213,046 square feet of linoleum. Lemon, pine, orange, bleach. Been pregnant 11,661 times, but only just, only at the moment of the positive test in my hand and a hope in me like five matching lottery numbers and the sixth just turning over. Shopped 45,090 stores, but only one aisle, one identical aisle in the iconic, idyllic big box store of the mind. Eaten far less than I wanted. Experienced more flu-like symptoms and seasonal allergies than relief. Had 76,914 suddenly-three-andup children who never looked much like me but serrated my brain-stem with love, all Gerber-perfect except when they need help from a team of on-call highly trained academic tutors or had to be coaxed to make a wish other than the only thing they actually wanted, which was to not die in front of me in a room full of flowers and staring plastic-pupiled teddy bears.

It’s long past 10 p.m., and I have no idea where any of them are now. For all I know, you could be one of them. Another who got to leave in your own body when the shoot was done.

I haven’t lifted a glistening cocktail to my lips or cream-cheesed my calf with shaving cream in years. Now I showcase life in the turning lane: hormone-replacement tennis with the girls, ironclad vitamin and supplement regimens, real estate seminars that will turn it all around for me and you as well. I have not yet seen my first senior living facility exercise pool and lively social calendar, but as Honey over thirty-five in this place, I have been all that I was allowed to be.

This Bud, a billion of them, lined up like torches down to hell, is and always has been for me.

And someday, I will be beloved and offscreen, given tender care and a full range of memorial options at sympathetic prices. I will be the one with my hands folded over my heart in an Eternal Dignity Package high-end luxury coffin with titanium accents, mourned by an army of suspiciously dry-eyed family and friends. I will be the death your death could feel like.

I try not to think about the possibility that I will be awake in that grandmother’s subtly rouged body, as awake as I am in this one, remembering Sylvie or Sibyl or Suzanne or Gertrude’s post-war pre-singularity Time/Life operator’s existence, feeling her cells rot around me, feeling the burn of embalming fluids, straining as hard to get out as Charles and I did while the snow fell on the hood of that beautiful late-model sedan, fading from corpse to corpse, pre-paid end-of-life expenses to give your loved ones peace of mind to true crime reenactment to EMT training school, flexible classes to fit your schedule, forever and ever up to and past the heat-death of visual media in the service of a slightly increased GDP.

Oh, well. It’s a living. At least you saw me. At least someone did.

It’s okay. You can put your hand down now. Take it off the screen and wring out the pins and needles. I’ve done my job. I always know when I make a sale. I can feel it in my throat, in my stomach. Like the triangle of the milk carton finally, finally opening and then drinking that big cup of perfect cocoa at the perfect temperature. It’s the only satisfaction I’m built to know. It took a minute, but I’ve sold you something. I’ve sold you me. You’ve already signed up for nine easy payments, already sent a self-addressed stamped envelope care of the millimeter of crackling ancient static space between flesh and time and liquid crystal displays of affection. I’ve sold you a series of images you can’t let go of. A little scrap of song you’ll remember when everything else is buffalo-plaid vapor and mandatory regretful backstory and thundering extropic crunch. We’re all in this together, after all. Bound by desire, which is all that binds anything.

If you do not want me, I have nothing. If you want me enough, I exist.

If you want me enough, I can rest.

Buy American.

Drink more Ovaltine.

The choice of a new generation.

See yourself in a Dodge.

In the beginning was the void and the void was without feature or want.

I suppose you just couldn’t bear that. You had to fill it with something.

With me.

Buy Void. Drink more Void. The choice of a Void generation. See yourself in a Void.

See yourself in me. An abyss, looking at organic matter, asking a valued customer to complete their purchase.

***

That concludes our broadcast day. Until next time. Come back soon. Same void time, same void channel. Hand to hand, cold plastic to warm flesh. Look into the screenburn and find me. Between the laugh track and the fine print. The living breath between curated and sponsored content. I’ll be here. I’m always here. I love you. I was assembled out of red, green, and blue drifting pixels and the hard knot of radioactive desperation that soft launched the known universe to love you. You are my honey. You are the consumer of my being. You are the heart of the heart of my target demographic.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.