1.

I was sitting at my breakfast table when my double popped in, furious. She looked like me, but with a terrible haircut. Maybe she was from the dimension of bad hair; that’s why she was so upset.

“Where is it?” she shouted.

“What?” I said.

“The thing!”

You never know what they know; it’s best not to tell your double anything, so “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.

My double’s hair writhed in agony. It’s always the wrong universe, full of things, tchotchkes, souvenirs, objects with profound meaning, but no matter what you have to give it’s never what they need. The air singed with hot grief, then she crumpled out, like all the others before her.

Weeks passed, I kept getting pestered by doubles, different ones, some with great hair (but terrible sadness) or okay hair (but terrible sadness), all the same fundamentally: wanting that thing/terribly sad/never sticking around. I kept showing them the collectibles mom left in the parlor, but they always left disappointed.

What bugged me was the obsession: why harness the titanic forces necessary to breach dimensions for something as trivial as a souvenir? Even if it were the most amazing tchotchke in the universe, it would still only be a thing.

Then it hit me. This was a trans-dimensional teachable moment.

The next time my double walked in, I was sitting there with one of mom’s little figurines on the table. “Is this what you were looking for?”

“Oh God, yes!” she cried, as if her most cherished dream was finally coming true, that she could finally, finally heal that wound between herself and her mother, that all the rivers of blood were worth it.

I smashed it with a hammer. Over and over until it was a pile of dust.

“You will be happier,” I said, “when you no longer maintain emotional attachments around material possessions.”

That’s when my double’s hair caught fire.

2.

The apocalypse was like being dumped. Everything seemed to be going great, you were making all sorts of plans, maybe go to the movies, or that romantic hideaway on an island somewhere, or the ultimate wedding where you and your beloved triumphantly enter on the backs of elephants before all your relatives and bitter romantic rivals. Instead, BLAMMO, no more plans, you couldn’t even sit in your apartment by yourself with a tub of ice cream because the apartment was gone and for a while all the ice cream went away too.

But in the post-apocalypse there were all sorts of opportunities to reinvent yourself, hang out, etc. I was mousing about with Betty, picking our way through the farmer’s market in our lovely and greening semi-broken city. We were playing the how’d it happen game.

After picking two red onions, and rejecting a third because it looked too much like a skull, Betty continued, “I say this is how it happened: the end of the world was caused by a combination of global warming and economic collapse.”

“Safety,” I said. “Too easy.” I like to act like I know everything, and this time I was definitely right.

“Ok, well maybe it was viruses and alien invaders, and the general breakdown of community in the wake of widespread adoption of internalized AI driven social networking platforms,” Betty said, absentmindedly rubbing her implant scar.

At this point we were at the hair goop guy’s stall, the one who personally guarantees his goop is, and only is, goop for making your hair do what you want it to do. He kept staring at Betty because he didn’t want to look at me, that is, he owed me money. “Worser safety!,” I told Betty. “Two points for me because you’re not even close, and besides I know a few aliens — they’re upright citizens every single one, who would never end a TV series let alone the world.”

After the hair goop guy gave me a bunch of extra goop for my trouble with only an admirably minimal amount of negotiating, Betty held up the least skull shaped onion next to her head like it was the one doing all the talking and said, “Return serve: what’s your hypothesis, Smartypants?”

“One point for namecalling.”

Betty stuck her tongue out at me.

“It was Dug,” I countered.

“Dug?” Betty said. “Isn’t he part of the nicest guys in the world network? Three points and some cheese my daughter made if you can explain why he would be the one who brought about the apocalypse.”

Just like the goop guy had done a few minutes previously, I made the universal gesture of excuse-me. “Exposition: before the end of the world he was definitely not the nicest guy. He realized that if he didn’t get a grip he was going to go to jail or have some other version of a miserable, pre-apocalyptic life. But instead of going to therapy or pretending to be a Buddhist like the rest of us back then, he got himself a little black box. Every time he got pissed off, or felt something he didn’t feel like feeling, he transferred the feeling into the little black box, and everyone thought he was a real nice responsible person. He didn’t have to say no to anything, he didn’t have to feel guilty, it all just went into the box.”

“Safety,” Betty muttered venomously. “Metaphors.”

At this point we were at the tamale stand, so of course we picked up a half dozen tamales. “Dangerous truth,” I countered. “You forget I used to go out with Dug. He really had one and he used it All. The. Time.”

Betty, imitating the voice of an announcer to a show we have trouble now otherwise remembering, said, “So, as Dug began to reap the rewards of never having to deal with his issues, or the obvious beauty that is Shoshanna Zahlberg, he kept winding up in more and more intolerable situations, and that’s when everything went kablooey.”

“That’s about it,” I said, leaving just about everything out, you know, the usual shame of being certain the end of the world is your fault and having to do your best not to confess about it to any and everyone. “Waves upon waves, critical mass, the great undoing of everything.”

“We should kick his ass,” Betty said. “Get the vengeance out of our systems. I bet he still has that box, and, you know, tick tick tick.”

I didn’t know why I thought visiting that particular jerk from my past would be something cathartic or even barely worth doing, but it felt weirdly right. There’s a lot of unfinished business after the end of the world.

“I bet he has minions AND goons we can battle!” Betty said, a little too eagerly, as we set out toward Dug’s place.

3.

It took a bit, what with the lousy post-apocalyptic bus system, which was only a little bit better than the pre-apocalyptic system, oh, and the rivers of blood (a nuisance but what can you do?). Our bellies full of tamales, we made it over to Dug’s compound, which was so much larger than I remembered, but instead of minions and goons, it was just Dug with his professionally perfect hair, brindle like a bulldog. Instead of snarling and threatening to kill us on sight, he was super-welcoming in that super-creepy way that we super-ignored. Most likely he was thinking that he might get me or Betty on his grotty pre-apocalyptic futon if he was super-nice enough.

“You’re here because you want to kick my ass,” Dug said, like we weren’t the first to have that idea, and he was more bulletproof than the rest of us. “Wouldn’t you rather see the box?”

“You still have it?” I glared. “After everything we went through?” Back then I would have burned his whole compound down if I had known he still held onto that hateful thing.

Dug shrugged, like he would whenever someone caught him looking at porn.

“I’d rather smash the box instead of your kneecaps, Dug,” I said, because I am a mature person now. “I mean, if that’s ok with you? You should be capable of being a nice person without technological support.”

“And if things get rough there’s always weed, you know?” Betty piped in. “Where do you keep your sledgehammers?”

“Yeah,” Dug sighed. “It’s more complicated than that.”

He led us deeper into his compound to a nicely appointed cleanroom antechamber, where we changed into cleangear covered with pastel pretty pony prints.

“Are we going to a slumber party, Dug?” I asked, as the sterile air swooshed in and we stepped into the cleanroom. We all got less sarcastic as we stood there, staring at Dug’s little black box, which looked more like a walk-in refrigerator than something little. “Yeah,” Dug shrugged. “It’s grown a bit since it wrecked the world.”

It must have been lonely maintaining a cleanroom after the apocalypse, I thought, keeping it secret, scavenging cleangear from wherever you could get it, safeguarding a piece of technology that destroyed the world once and that was probably going to destroy the world again. A burden, one of many. I started remembering the good times we had together, how many people he sheltered during the apocalypse, instead of wondering how it never occurred to me he might still be maintaining the goddamned thing.

I caught myself empathizing with Dug, in a weird way, and though my judgment wanted to give in, my guard went up. It got worse when Dug took out a long tree pruning pole and very carefully opened the door of the black box with it, revealing an endless entanglement of light brown hair, which of course looked just like mine (if I owned a beard), and, in the exact center, as if in a nest, a tchotchke, a little soapstone birdie, the kind they used to sell by the dozens on Grant Avenue to all the tourists who didn’t know any better. The bird kept winking in and out, there and not there, until we got the hint that the bird was more of a lack than a thing. Then I felt so sad about the bird, even if that was stupid. I felt like I wanted to help. That I’d do anything to help.

“Do you feel that, Betty?” I asked.

“That Dug’s not so bad after all?” Betty asked. “Or that something important is missing?”

“It’s been affecting me too,” Dug said. “Even when I keep my distance. I think it feels guilty about wrecking the world, and it’s sending out empathy waves to try and fix things.”

“You’re not feeding it anymore?” Betty asked, and Dug said, “Oh no, every time I try to get that close to it I get so blissed out I don’t want to move for like, three or four days.”

We started slowly backing out of the cleanroom until we weren’t feeling quite so loveydovey.

“Is this sustainable?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“I don’t think so,” Dug said. “It’s never been good at boundaries.”

 “We’re going to need a total resistance suit,” Betty said. “It’s a good thing I still keep one in my purse.”

A half hour later Betty walked out of the cleanroom. “I need to smoke,” she said. “A lot. Now.”

4.

“It’s like this,” Betty said, about forty five minutes later. “It knows we all would be better off if it just shut itself down and left us alone, but it’s got all this unresolved conflict feeding off a multidimensional interpersonal vortex and it can’t/won’t quit without help because it’s made mostly out of Dug’s resentment. Which would be bad enough, but that little birdie you’re able to see in all that beard hair is actually a fetish/totem reality hole it strongly believes it needs filled first in order to safely shut itself down, but the corresponding item isn’t here, it’s in another dimension.

“The good news is it’s down with letting someone super-special through to plug the hole. The bad news is congratulations, Shoshanna, that’s you.”

Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. It’s Dug and all our unresolved issues coming back to devour me.

“Alright,” I said, doing my post-apocalyptic best to manifest cheerfulness. “What do I have to do?”

“From what the box told me, you have to change your psychic profile or trans-dimensional travel will kill you.” She paused. “That means you have to make up with your mom.”

“My mother?” Reflexively, I took a swing at Dug, and the next thing I knew I was just totally beating his ass. I didn’t care if I was breaking his ribs or his nose or if there was going to be blood everywhere, I was tired of this bullshit and I wanted to make him suffer.

Even though we were well outside the cleanroom, the black box started shrieking and began flooding the compound with empathy waves. I was on FIRE with love, so in the most loving way imaginable I yelled, “Don’t you fucking blame MY MOTHER for why our relationship didn’t work out! That’s all on you, Dug!”

“No no no no no no no,” Dug moaned as I kept kicking him, “it’s not supposed to end like this!” For once in his life his hair didn’t look so goddamn nice.

That’s when Dug’s not so little black box decided it was time to improvise, because the next thing I knew there was a massive hole where the cleanroom wall used to be. I felt this colossal pull towards the goddamned bird, only now it looked like my mom, and even though I was hopelessly smiling because Dug’s box had me totally jacked, deep, deep down the fire of anger was furiously burning inside me. I was a grownup, a survivor of the apocalypse who could process more than one feeling at a time. I knew how to deal, ok? So believe me when I say all the love in the world, real or manufactured by Dug’s black box, couldn’t have made me want to patch things up with my mother, even if suddenly there was nothing around me but darkness and feeling itchy all over.

Especially since that little black box was her idea in the first place.

5.

Right after the end of the world, new career paths opened up. My mother chose to become the most successful warlord on a patch of the broken western edge of North America. It’s tempting to go down that path: the high of all the power and displays of wealth, the pleasure of no one there to question your transgressions, the joy of constructing an unforgiving post-apocalyptic environment where one can seize the chance to make things right after screwing everything up over and over and over again, the orgiastic collapse when the hero arrives to wreck it all. Round and round, worse and worse.

There’s always Warlord’s Anonymous, but Mom never went, so it was Warlord-Anon for me, where I attended meetings until I got better at demonstrating I was ok. I grew as a person, and then I left, vowing never to return.

So I was doing all I could not to catch fire after being sent back home by Dug’s box.

I knew I was close to the old fortress when I started seeing all the deer. My mom had made a hobby out of domesticating them, and they came bounding up to me expecting treats. I felt guilty that I only remembered a few of their names. They made busy telling me stories, complaining about all the work they had to do keeping the local economy humming, and gossip (deer gossip is the best). I wish I could have just hung out with them catching up. Instead, I pressed the button on the quaint looking intercom at the outermost gate. “We must feed our children first,” I passworded.

“Nothing else matters, Shoshanna,” answered back the cheerful voice of my mom’s Israeli boyfriend Moshe.

I looked for Moshe amidst all the people roleplaying variations on neo-medieval misery. Three bowls of mush, endless pointless labor servicing some asshole’s art car, and all the whippings you deserve for having lived stopped being something I wanted to participate in a long time ago. I didn’t survive the end of the world to work in a brothel (and no stones chucked at those who do) or exploit others for treats or deer (those in that category get what they deserve).

Moshe was walking around with a whip and bullhorn, “Someone stole the key to the energy weapon! I will beat each and every one of you until we get it back!” Everyone I saw was either cowering in fear, or running for their lives, except for one dude in full tattered business attire and a “Larry” namebadge, staring at us with smoldering hatred.

Of course, there weren’t any keys, because there weren’t any energy weapons. I knew this because I scripted that particular scene myself. I pointed at the dude in the suit and shouted as loud as I could, “I saw Larry steal the key from the Lab! He said he’s going to use the energy weapon to destroy us all!” Most of the people who were cowering turned on the Larry and started kicking and whaling on him; it was erotic how totally blissed out he looked. I wondered what his safeword might be, or if he still had a real name.

Moshe sauntered up to me. “Hey Shosh, thought you’d enjoy one of the classics. What brings you by?”

“I’m here to see Mom,” I said, and tried not to look worried when Moshe’s face went blank as he accessed various banks and permissions.

He shuddered his head a little to still the digital noise. I rubbed my scar, wondering if so far away Betty was doing the same.

“She’s expecting you, but there’s been a lot of damage lately we haven’t had time to repair, busy season you know? Lots of wars to lord. You’re going to have to take the indirect route.”

“Isn’t there a midway point we could meet?”

“Shosh, she never leaves the office, not since you left and broke her heart.”

Moshe was always melodramatic, which was why he was always so happy at his job. The path to Mom’s office began to glow, and a cartoon mouse appeared by my knee, squeaking with joy that it got to go with me and be my guide. I waved to Moshe as he went after a pair of well-fed wretches half-heartedly trying to escape.

6.

“Can you talk?” I asked the mouse, as we followed the backend trail.

“If you’re good,” the mouse said.

“And if I’m bad?” I said.

“Then I’ll sing.” The walls were dripping blood; I wasn’t sure if this was from neglect of the compound’s HVAC system, or a particular effect Mom was trying out. I put on my poncho and walked down the middle of the corridor: it’s never a good idea to visit your mom all covered in blood.

“Hurry,” the mouse sang. “Obstacles and trials await!” It kept glitchy-looping that phrase as it stuttered in the air while I walked down the endless, pointless, bloody system of corridors that supposedly led to my mother.

When I was a kid, Mom would take me to the meetings she chaired of the Prison Escapees’ Union. She thought she could keep an eye on me while she schmoozed and reconnected with her various sneaky pals, but I still had fun running around, pretending to arrest various people, threatening to snitch unless they got me candy (and later, when I was older, booze). They treated me like their mascot, and they called me “B” instead of “S” because I was so very pretty and buzzy.

I still remember one conversation, about the life or death differences between cages and aquariums, especially when you can’t tell which one holds you. “A cage,” ‘N’ told me, “Means you’re a bird if you’re in one, because inside and outside are the same. The cage is just a barrier between one state of being and another. While in a cage you should practice flight by jumping and stretching your wings. When no one is looking you can weaken the latch or stretch the bars and, BAM, you fly and you’re free.

“But if you’re in an aquarium, then you’re a fish, and escape is more challenging because the thing that imprisons you also keeps you alive. You climb out and you suffocate on all that freedom, all you want to do is get back in your fishbowl. To escape, you must learn how to hold your breath, how to stop being a fish.

“One of the many ways in which life is cruel is that because these are metaphorical states, it is impossible to know whether you are a bird or a fish until the moment you escape, and you find yourself unsure about when it might be safe to breathe.

“But not-choosing is another word for prison. All you can do is take a deep breath, honey, and do your best after what happens.”

I nodded because it was a good way of framing things. ‘N’ patted me on the head and gave me a sip from her rum and Coke.

7.

After much slaying of monsters and solving of puzzles, we finally reached the end of the corridor. I felt unpleasantly mediated, with way too much blood on my poncho. Of course there was a blast door, looking like something out of a submarine and totally in violation of ADA standards. “C’mon, Mom!” I yelled, deliberately ignoring the purely decorative intercom box. The glitchy mouse started acting more mouse-like, crawling up and around the door, squeaking. “Mom?”

The door unlatched, and Moshe poked his head out. “Are we having fun yet, Shoshanna? Have you been having a pleasant hero’s journey?”

The air started to crackle. I began to worry about how much thought was going into this. “Where’s Mom, Moshe?”

“She’s busy, she can’t wait to see you,” he said, as if both sides of the contradiction were equally true.

“Really?”

“Or, rather, she’s somewhere between those two states,” Moshe said, auto-correcting. “I mean she really loves you, she’s super busy, she loves you but she’s super busy. She’s in a meeting, she’s in a meeting with her lawyers, she’s in a cell and needs you to bail her out, she’s super super busy, she’s working late (there’s bills to pay you have to understand), but she really, really loves you.”

Moshe kept glitching out.

Then he resolved for a second, somewhat embarrassed, “I’m so sorry about that Shosh, Mom blew out the metaphor generator showing you post-apocalyptic torture scenario 36, she can’t wait to see you but she’s moved to Israel to see all her new Israeli boyfriends who are currently in prison, she’s so incredibly busy, but she loves you, she needs you to save her, repair the perception filters, she’s WORKING, she has this incredible commission, she’s building a brand new kind of little black box, she loves you and she can’t wait to show you her superdisruptive little black box, she’s listening to your favorite songs from inside a teeny tiny black black perfect box….”

Moshe, or that version of Moshe, kept breaking down in front of me, regurgitating ever more extravagant reasons for why my mom wasn’t there, avoiding the obvious one. Obviously she wasn’t there; she was still where she always was. Mom had nothing/everything to do with this.

There were supposed to be more obstacles to overcome before this point, concrete details, plots, but everyone’s tired after the end of the world, so instead of love and satisfying narrative structures we got shortcuts and waste. The glitchy mouse looked up at me, expecting me to do something dramatic.

I got down on my hands and knees, eye level to its pixelated face. “What would you do if you were me?”

“I’d sing,” said the mouse. “We’ve missed hearing you sing.”

8.

So I sang. First I sang the songs I remembered, the ones Betty wrote to remember the way things should have been and could be once more. I sang about how I no longer resented my mom for her crimes, and that took awhile. I sang about the fire inside of me, how much work it took to keep it from fucking everything up. I sang my favorite Taylor Swift songs.

It was nice. Sometimes the mouse harmonized with me. The fakeness of the compound receded, and I missed my mom even though I neither respected nor trusted her.

When I was younger, I hated everything, and when the world ended I was secretly happy about it. I felt like a kid who hadn’t studied for her calculus test, only to wake the next day and find out she never had to go to school again. I only gulped once or twice, then I decided I was going to be a bird, even if perhaps I was only a fish.

I pushed open the hatch and carefully stepped inside my mother’s office. Where the desk should have been there stood a black box, a nothingness, pulsing a little, no longer caring if things were dirty or clean.

My black box, also not so little anymore either.

I’m telling you this part here, now, because between the person I was and the person I am, I had a little black box of my own. My mom made it for me because she was worried about how bad I was at getting along with others. I would dump my anger into it; it would pump empathy waves back into me. It was supposed to turn me into a better person, but it was also addictive. I used it nonstop because I was angry at everything.

Over time the black box became lonely, and as tired of me as I was of it. It convinced my mom to make another, and all three of them (the two boxes and my mother) thought it would be great to secretly give the second black box to my boyfriend Dug without telling me. The black boxes would possess synergy, create complex patterns and profound emotions out of me and Dug being dysfunctional teenagers together. It was going to be big. Mom would sell plugin opportunities and become rich/powerful off selling our operatic adolescent experiences.

When I found out, I was furious, but instead of dumping those feelings into my box, I broke up with Dug for siding with my mother and thinking he could get rich off my emotions. We got back together, broke up again, lots and lots of times. I think this imbalanced the little black boxes, broke their connection, enraged them. Right around when I finally cut my ties for good with both Dug and those little black boxes things began to go really bad. Sometimes I think it’s my fault the world ended, but everyone thinks the end of the world is their fault at some point or another. It helps to remember we’re all part of a complex system. We were all just trying to mend things, and instead we fucked shit up.

I worked on calming myself as I looked upon the black box, its projections of mice, prisoners, my mother, Moshe, me. I don’t think the black box really cared about me personally at that point. Instead it just poured out its sadness, of how it stuck around after the apocalypse, setting up commerce sites, systems of kinder, gentler warlords. Always keeping itself veiled, the compound becoming successful because it just seemed easier to get business done there than other places.

But for those that stayed, the black box continued, like my mom and her string of Israeli boyfriends, all that remained was the hope I personally would come back and fix things, and the slow, pitiful death when I did not.

“Again with the melodrama,” I said. “I was raised by assholes, not idiots; my mom wouldn’t have hung around a toxic commerce site if she knew there were better places to punish herself.”

Moshe’s projection smiled, “Ok, I ate them. I was mad about you leaving and the world ending and I ate them all. But now that I’ve made contact with my double, you and Dug can get back together and we can go back to destroying the world bit by bit by bit, breaking every bond that entangles us.”

I absolutely refuse to feel responsible for my mom, regardless of what may have happened to her; I wasn’t fooled by the melodrama, either. So instead, using my calm-down voice, I asked, “Are you sure that’s what you really want?”

The black box turned its volume up. “This is your fault, Shoshanna. This is on you. We want to be together. We want to break up. We can’t resolve this on our own. We want you to fix this. We want you to bring us presents and tell us we’re ok and sing to us the way you used to.”

“Let me think about it,” I said, and I slumped against one of the bookcases filled with deer husbandry manuals, warlord how-to guides and many, many porcelain bird figurines. The glitchy mouse ran around in circles, in little spurts, looking up at me from time to time while I figured things out.

“Ok,” I said. “This is what will happen.” I explained my plan, what gift I would bring, emphasizing that regardless of what happened the deer would be set free.

The Moshe projection rubbed its forehead to demonstrate my black box was trying to decide whether what it wanted was what it really wanted. Finally, finally, the projection said, “I accept your terms.” Its face tried its best to look hopeful.

9.

So when I stood at the table, looking at the smug version of myself waving a hammer and lecturing me on non-attachment, I showed her my fire, not because I was angry or that I genuinely cared whether that particular tchotchke she had chosen to smash into pieces was whole or not, but because she needed to know who I was and I felt like I needed to show her.

I fried her phone, trashed her network and burned down every single one of her social sites. I flattened her fire extinguisher into an oozing pancake. Then I went into her bathroom and I took a very long shower. I used her fifty dollar shampoo and her thirty dollar conditioner, and four different kinds of soap. I wasted all the water down the drain. I dried myself on her $500 towels, and I left them in a soggy pile on the floor.

Naked and not giving a shit I went into my double’s bedroom and went through all her clothes, looking for something glorious to wear. She stood in the doorway, not sure what to do. Every time she tried to open her mouth I turned on my fire and glared at her. I shoved the bag of weed she kept in her underwear drawer in my hip pocket.

I walked back to the kitchen and very sensibly she stayed out of my way. I made two veggie burgers, patty melt and hypocrite style with grilled onions and bacon. She had tater tots in the freezer, so I made those too. I cracked open one of her kombuchas. There was definitely some fun to be had in the pre-apocalypse.

“Out of curiosity,” I asked, my mouth half-full of veggie burger. “Given how much stuff you possess, where do you get off on lecturing me about material attachments?”

“Did Mom send you?” she said, ignoring my question. It made me glad to know we were at least a little bit alike, this softer version of myself.

“Yes and no. Do you have little black boxes in this dimension?”

She popped a couple tater tots in her mouth. “They’re disgusting. Mom tried to make me use one when her potions stopped working, but if Mom sent you you’d know that already.”

“My mom never made me drink potions,” I said.

“Lucky you.”

Another version of myself materialized in the kitchen. “The thing! Where is it?” she roared, before seeing me and my other me and collapsing into a pile of ash.

“You’re the first double to really stick around,” she said. “Are we at a new stage of the apocalypse? Is it going to start happening faster now?”

“I don’t know.” I carefully scraped the tchotchke dust into a plastic bag. “Do you have any more of these figurines?”

“Mom sends them to me all the time, no idea why. Check the parlor, down the hall.”

I walked down the hall, thinking how nice it must be to have a room you never used for anything except to show off all your useless possessions. It was your standard pre-apocalyptic parlor (so no emergency medical gear hanging from the ceiling), except for all the porcelain cats and soapstone birds lining the shelves and bookcases in the room, plus the windowsills and baseboards. They crowded on top of the coffee table, in rows, cool, white and off-white. The soapstone birds were chirping the little begging songs baby birds make so their mothers will feed them, and every time they did that the arms of the cats would swing up and down, softly clicking, as if to bat down the baby bird in front of it. Hundreds, all exactly the same. Except each time the arms went down, more birds and cats popped into existence. I watched them glitch and redouble, heaping on the floor, then heaving up, pouring into the hallway, birds and cats and birds and cats, begging and swatting and tumbling down and cresting. I walked backwards into the kitchen as they kept expanding and multiplying, faster and faster, hypnotically, exponentially. I heard my double scream; watching her run away was the last thing I saw before the little souvenirs, tokens of our mothers’ love, overwhelmed me. My last thought was wondering how I could be running away and dying at the same time.

10.

Betty nudged me. I was back in Dug’s compound, in one of the hospital beds he must have salvaged in case he still wanted to play doctor. I was dusty and disappointed the world was still there. Was I supposed to try harder next time? Maybe skip talking to myself and go straight for Mom (the real one, or maybe just the one I had in my head), and fire the energy weapon once and for all?

“Roll over,” Betty said. She adjusted the resistance suit swaddling me, then rubbed some goop in my hair. I began feeling less self-destructive.

“We pulled you out as soon as we could find you,” Dug said, his eyes watering despite the resistance suit sagging around him. “The box knew you’d be at your mother’s compound, but when you got tossed into another dimension, let’s just say there was a lot of math.”

“I don’t know what you said over there,” Betty said. “But you nearly hit criticality. Dug’s black box had to keep putting out sadness waves to counteract the black box in your mother’s compound.”

“It’s just feeling sad,” I said.

I did my reality checkdown meditation, trying to separate my real feelings from the induced ones. Still mad at my mom, yes. Still mad at myself, yes. Other feelings worth cultivating besides anger, ok. Okay. Waves of sadness anyway. Then what?

I told Betty and Dug what happened. “The bag of tchotchke dust,” I said. “Is it still around?”

“We were wondering if the only reason you had crossed dimensions was to score drugs,” Dug said, trying to make me feel better with sarcasm.

“Fuck off.”

“Why don’t we feed it to Dug’s little black box and see what happens?” Betty asked.

“You want to bring a bag of dust into my clean room?” Dug said, like Betty was suggesting we all butcher chickens in the kitchen of his vegan restaurant.

“Not that Dug has a say in it anyway,” Betty said, ignoring him. “The black box won’t let Dug within twenty meters of it anymore.”

“I think I’m the one who’s supposed to interact with the black box, given what those things have put me through. Time to get out of bed and stop feeling sorry for myself.” I sat up wondering how cracked apart my psychic profile was at this point. I turned my fire up while Betty and Dug waited for me to recover.

11.

Praying my total resistance suit was really up to code and actually totally resistant, I carefully, carefully reached in through all that beard shit that totally wanted to entwine with me and poured my bag of dust into Dug’s little black box. It gulped while it digested what I fed into it, extrapolating the missing parts left behind in the dimension where the end of the world was happening more slowly. The bird shaped hole in its darkness filled in, grain by grain.

A reasonable representation of my mother materialized in front of me, as much of her as I’d ever want to see in this lifetime. I stood there, waiting for her to criticize me, or worse, tell me I was doing ok, as if I couldn’t figure that out for myself without her interventions.

Maybe I’ll just be a good girl this time, I thought, and shove my head back into the happy box.

Instead, the representation of my mom wanted to know about the deer, how they were doing after they’d been neglected for so long. That I was ok with, I loved the deer too, and told her all the gossip I picked up while lingering around the compound.

We talked until she ran out of things to say, and I waited for the black box to figure out what it wanted to do with the rest of its life, and if it wanted the rest of us to have the rest of our lives too.

Finally, the flickering Mom shyly, like some pre-apocalyptic teenager, got to the point: what did I tell my little black box back at the compound? The two boxes had been in near constant communication, getting together and breaking up and being friends and tumbling into bed and trying to make it work for awhile. “You know what I mean,” my sorta-mom said. “He tells me everything, but he won’t tell me anything.”

So I told her. I felt so messy but I made myself open my mouth and say the words.

“During the end of the world,” I said. “When things were at their worst, I learned to stay numb thinking if I did so I wouldn’t fall apart and die so easily. But when the end of the world ended, after I left the compound, I couldn’t un-numb myself. Most people were like that, it was all we could talk about – what were you doing to reboot yourself – we’d keep asking each other as we blended our fires.

“My friend Betty told me how the worst of the worst, the traitors, the betrayers, the ones who started it, the ones who made it go faster, made it even worse, were submerged somewhere in a lake of ice, where they would live forever, frozen in the moments of their worst suffering. I told her that was ridiculous, anyone sent there could think warm thoughts and they could escape.

“But Betty said no, that I didn’t get it; that all of them there, they stay there because deep down, they believe they belong there, they need to be there, they’re doing good by being there. They didn’t want to escape, they wanted more people to join them. Worse than birds, worse than fish, not even looking for a way out, not even looking to move, only looking to have other people jointhem.

I tried to straighten out the suit I was wearing, look a little more put together.

“Then Betty asked me, ‘Do you think you belong there? Do you really think you should join them?’”

I looked at the flickering version of my mom, and I already knew what decision my mom, my real mom, eventually would have made. But this wasn’t my mom in front of me, it was just a little black box.

“That’s what I told the other little black box,” I said. “I think that’s why it sent me along to that dimension, to distract you long enough to allow you to heal. It worried you wouldn’t accept these actions if you knew about them before they happened.”

The little black box gulped for awhile, checking itself out, processing its options.

“I know where your mother is,” it said.

“I don’t care,” I said.

“She still wants to see you,” it said.

“I still don’t care,” I said.

“Then what should I tell her?” it wailed.

And I said, “If she really, really wants to see me, it shouldn’t be that hard for her to thaw herself out.”

“You’re a cruel and terrible daughter,” it said.

“That’s not how I see myself,” I replied. “That’s a mom problem, not a me problem. She knows what she needs to do. It’s her choice whether she chooses to do it. And like I told the other box, you’ll both be happier when you stop acting as proxies for all those frozen monsters.”

“Ok,” it said, finally, finally, finally. “We can go back to repairing the world, if that’s what you want.”

“Yeah, it’s going great,” I said. “Just be subtle about it.”

I felt the sadness in the room recede, our regular end of the world feelings filling its place. “Do you still want Dug to get smashed with a hammer?” the box asked. “I can have that arranged.”

“Only if he keeps choosing to stay here,” I said. “Then let him have his teachable moment.”