Lemures
Short Story
06-05-02024
Jerome, Markus and I each crashed the party in our own way, tooling our prospective methods to a specific era. Jerome leveraged the power of our digital present, pulling out his phone and combing through the posts pouring out of the charity gala in real time. He scored a QR invite in under five DMs.
Markus employed a bygone age of chivalry. He pulled a garment bag out of the trunk of his 2030 BMW M5. He donned a woven silk black T and gunmetal HUGO BOSS slacks. He checked the leg crease for crispness and — satisfied — approached the first mid-40s solo femme he could find, saying . . .
“May I escort you in?”
The woman laughs, and they lock elbows.
That left me. I leaned against the M5, staring at the ivy clawing up the estate’s wall, waiting for the glint of the perimeter cam’s lens to arc away. Then — in the spirit of an age of brutish stealth — I stormed the castle.
Flipping over the wall, I fell through a tall hedge, rolling out the bottom like a gumball. I lay back-to-grass watching palm trees sway in the warm night breeze, rattling gently like maracas. Spotlights lit them from below — LEDs flowing through ROYGBIV. I could hear the festivities wafting from the home’s flip side at a muffled, ASMR decibel. I popped up, brushed some dirt from my shorts, and moved in its general direction.
The mansion was an exemplar of a Socal home aesthetic that had ossified in the mid 80s. The structure did not tower, but sprawled like a 20 million dollar bucket of stucco and Spanish tile kicked over and left to coagulate across 2 acres.
As I got closer I caught snips of the convos emerging out of the polite maw . . .
“The 2024 Ford Bronco reboot was absolutely maxing on nostalgia, but its plant polymer paneling was not robust enough for the catastrophic levels of U.V. radiation in the late 2020s. They crumbled off like old scabs. It was a branding disaster. I mean, what first made the early Bronco’s so iconic was the earnestness of their robustness. The trucks of the 2020s lacked earnestness and robustness, don’t you think?”
“I have a playlist for you, it’s called 'Undistinguished Emotions’. You HAVE to listen to it in order though. My playlists tell deep stories.”
"Again! I'm starting to think it would be more radical for Greta Thunberg to NOT get arrested."
“This foam is delicious!”
My shorts were still dirty from the fall, but they were dirty before they were dirty — oil-stained 2016 Southwest Airlines baggage handler cargo short. Navy blue with 3M reflective banding at the cuffs. I was dressed like a slob, but only to the undiscerning eye. The key to dressing ahead-of-trend on-the-cheap is thrifting the right esoteric sigils. The threadbare navy T I'd paired with these shorts bore the tiki bar graphic of a 2004 one-night-only Snoop Dog/Slightly Stoopid duo concert in Anaheim. Even in Socal, 95% of this party wouldn’t spot the depth of this cut, but the 5% who did would want to communicate that they did, and communicate it as publicly as possible. This forms an impromptu affinity group — a lil’ cool table which, at a party like this, would not go unnoticed by the clout-seekers (aka everyone). I just turned 20 and planned to ride cool tables all the way to the top by my thirties, detonating them behind me for explosive propulsion . . .
Boom . . . . . Boom . . . . Boom . . . Boom . . Boom . Boom BoomBoomBoomBoom
. . . to the top of what? I’ll learn that after I blow it up..
My outfit’s TKO was a 1982 CASIO DATA 2000 Smartwatch. A coked out digital timepiece that could be docked into a scientific calculator. It banked both on nostalgia and — given the computing power of today’s smart watches — irony. If there was any tech presence at this party, a double punch like this would not go unspotted. I even had the calculator in my pocket. I hope it survived the fall.
Markus was on the party's periphery, holding court with three girls around our age. The woman he’d escorted, thankfully, did not look scorned. She was talking to a copper skinned man holding a rhinestone leash attached to the collar of a lemur. She seemed captivated by the duo.
“The word lemur is derived from the Latin 'lemures', which means ‘ghost’. In the 17th century, Europeans were warned by the people of Madagascar not to keep lemurs as pets. Lemurs were not considered animals, but powerful daemons who could travel in and out of time. It was believed that if you saw a lemur it meant time had just begun moving again. This lil’ guy here is named Zoboomafoo the 3rd.”
Jerome walked towards us with a peg leg gate, holding a tray of empty stemware.
“You made it!” He said, and extended the tray towards me. “Hold this.”
He yanked his JNCO’s out of their tube-sock-tuck and two bottles slid onto the patio tile with a . . .
CLINK*
CLINK*
He picked one up and held it out to the trio of girls, resting it on his forearm like a sommelier.
“De Margerie Grand Cru Brut, a lovely pairing for your Butter Toffee Vapes.”
Two laughed, but the third dismissed him and looked into her pocket mirror.
“Rich kids make the best thieves.”
She says it quietly. Only I hear it.
I passed the tray to Markus. Him and Jerome made a little show of pouring out the libations.
“Why are you so dirty,” asks the third girl from behind her mirror. Her hair is shoulder length and a brownish-blonde liminal color I’ve heard called ‘flaxen’. Her bangs look like an impulsive-decision, or are meant to.
Jerome passes me a glass, a small lemur-head charm with kawaii eyes dangles from the stem. It has an exclamatory speech bubble that says, ‘CHILL OUT!’
I used the interruption to calculate a reply, then shrug and say, “got something against the working class?” I say it with a well calibrated 80/20 dismissal/flirt designed to hint at something intriguing and unknown in me. It's not there, but that doesn’t matter. I can fake it.
She peaks over her mirror to visibly roll a pair of pale blue eyes, then gets back to picking at her clumps of mascara in her long lashes. Her eyes look like two sea birds trying to escape an oil spill.
“What is ‘CHILL OUT!’ anyway,” I ask.
She slides the mirror into her clutch, then says, “You don’t know what this party is fundraising for?”
I’d lost ground, and had to be careful here. She knew I was crashing, it fell to me to make crashing cool.
I gave a melo-dramatic look-around and, shrugging again, said . . .
“I must be at the wrong cabal.”
A second later, and the music gets loud.
♫ Yellow diamonds in the light ♫
♫ And we're standing side by side ♫
“I fucking love this song!” one of the other girls shouts.
Jerome, Markus, and the two girls twist their arms into the air like charmed cobras. They all begin to sway.
♫ As your shadow crosses mine ♫
♫ What it takes to come alive ♫
.Zoboomafoo the 3rd bounds by me, dragging his rhinestone leash. He's flickering like a faulty neon sign.
♫ It's the way I'm feeling, I just can't deny ♫
♫ But I've gotta let it go ♫
The girl with the pale eyes looks into me . . .
“Impossible, this is the only cabal left.”
♫ We found love in a hopeless place ♫
♫ We found love in a hooopeleeess place ♫
♫ We found love in a hopeless place ♫
♫ We found love in a hooopeleeess place ♫
I hear a voice . . . her voice.
“What makes you so interesting to CHILL OUT! is your expert-level aesthetic void and high-style irony. You adorn yourself in dead tech and lost futures, lose strata, trash into treasure. Creating value that surpasses high-end couture. You are a precision-strike of nostalgia walking a tightrope of earnestness and cynicism. You know how to be the right joke at the right time, and the right people want to be in on the laugh . . . but I wonder, is there anything inside the joke?”
I heard words and laughter. Saw bodies writhing and faces blending together. All of it blowing against me like the wind against the palm trees — a huge, silent power rushes unknown, until you feel forcing its way around you. Through you.
I looked down into the gold eyes of Zoboomafoo. He steals my calculator and jumps away.
“What?” I said. The song ended. My chest loosened and the noise of the party returned to its sane murmur.
“I said, I wonder if there's anything inside,” she said. “Let’s look.”
She grabs me just above the elbow, guides me through a set of French doors and into the home's sprawl. Inside she lets go, and begins a gentle open armed spin, speaking softly.
“In 1949 Georges Bataille predicted our era of infinite unrecyclable objects. The age of Chimeras, so matrixed with minerals and polymers that reconstituting them into mono-elements would be impossible. A water damaged Iphone PRO 27, a crumbling 2024 FORD BRONCO, over a million Peloton exercise bikes after the company shuttered last year, this home and almost every object in it — all of it is a flashbulb of luxury, followed by a millennia of toxic decomposition. Soon our bodies will be so riddled with tech that we will join their ranks. Our corpses will salt the Earth with silicon, lithium, and microplastics. Flowers will refuse to grow over our graves.”
“I heard someone is working on a mushroom strain that can metabolize plastic,” I said, stunned to be the optimist.
She stops spinning. “Pestalotiopsis,” she said. “A mushroom indigenous to the Amazon. CHILL OUT! was able to save some spores before last year's fires. Its projected to become one of their most profitable patents.”
We walked down a dim-lit hall past a series of framed vinyls . . .
— LOVELESS
— NEVERMIND
— RUBBER SOUL
— LITTLE WHEEL SPIN AND SPIN
“I’m ambivalent about that mushroom though, sometimes it feels like our trash will be our only immortality.”
We sat down on a leather sofa, its brass rivets glinting in the light of a fireplace — gas-fed flames bending around a fire-retardant ‘log’. Reds and yellows washed across its surface, ember simulations from internal LEDs. The noise of the party was distant. It made me feel safe, like a child falling asleep to the soft sounds of their parents' content streams in the next room.
“Do you think those were all first-press records framed in the hallway,” I asked.
She sighed, and began a mechanic preamble. “CHILL OUT! believes that organizing horizontal global action in response to climate catastrophe is the only way to direct humanity towards a rational future of collective safety and abundance. I’m here to recruit you, I suppose.”
“Would it be too on-the-nose of me to point out how sad it is that those albums will never be played?”
“CHILL OUT! is one node of an apparatus of seeking a new society. A society of transparency and horizontality, where freedom is another word for openness. This society must come fast, faster than the human mind even.”
“Too cliche, maybe, to lament that all those songs of beauty and pain are gagged by an unsought status as wealth storage device?”
She drops her mechanical tone, adopting an earnest one.
“Listen. To achieve this goal we must all let the digital into us, more and more. We have to look into the digital world like a mirror, or like glass — like looking through glass and thinking it's a mirror because, no matter what's there, we see only ourselves. The guided reflection ideal for our collective survival.”
“Is that the price of creating timeless art; to watch it transform into somebody's gold brick? Is it too cringe to say that?”
“But CHILL OUT! can’t force anyone, we can’t force anyone, brute force brought us to our current disaster. We must travel the natural paths of desire – collective and individual — and meet ourselves there. This is the new power, the one that is always waiting at the next desire with a . . .
Yesssss.
Everyone says they want to do the ‘right thing’, but we have too much ‘right thing’ optionality, so much so that ‘right thing’ is a synonym for individualism. CHILL OUT! is pruning and consolidating the pathways of desire, majoritizing a ‘right thing’ by creating infinite identity paths to it. Mono-cropping agriculture may have destroyed the planet, but mono-cropping desire can save it.”
She was silent then, and I let that silence breathe. I let it gestate into as much understanding as I could manage.
“I see a field of wheat,” I said. “A field in constant conversation with the wind. No single stalk can see air move, but they all bend with it. We bend to a force that we can not confront or condemn because it is made manifest in our own thoughts and actions. We can’t accuse it without accusing ourselves.”
Her hand slid across my shoulders, resting on me like the lightest yoke.
“Not us though, you and I don’t bend.”
She put her other hand to her chest.
“There is nothing here to bend. We’re empty. It all passes right through us. Don’t take that the wrong way. You’re empty like digital space is empty, right before it dances to life before the . . .
gaze.”
“Most of us are lashed to gaze and gazer like St. Andrews cross, but you . . . you are black glass.”
I liked her arm there. I liked this yoke.
“I think I always knew that,” I said. “I seem to know the ebbs and flows of my followers' desires. I see their binges, and know what voids they’re trying to fill, and what new void is forming unseen. I dress like a slob just as they desire a break from formality. I watch them dress down for Spring and grow sullen – tired of pragmatics and flannel. As Summer approaches, I post myself with a fake tan and frosted tips, dripping 𝐄𝐝 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐲 and 𝓐𝓯𝓯𝓵𝓲𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 — Jerseycore. An absurdist throwback to the bygone era of Y2K hedonism right when they want it most. I'm a mirror showing them tomorrow's reflection.”
Her head dropped to my shoulder.
“Jerseycore was so terrible and so perfect,” she said.
We looked into the flames, soothed by the crackle sounds emanating out some unseen speaker.
“Humans were once the conduit between earth and power. The body was a conveyor belt of wealth connecting feudal lands to feudal lords.”
“The most soothing sound to the human mind is a crackling fire,” I said. “Did you know that?”
“The industrial age changed that,” she continued. “Human machines are so precious — self-maintaining and self-replicating — but they now found themselves in machinic company. The new primary purpose of the body was as an interlocutor between machine and lord.”
“The second and third sounds are ‘babbling brook’ and ‘sleeping dog's breath.’ Together, they’re a perfect three track stack of safety. A soundscape hardwired into the oldest parts of our brain.”
“200 years of Continuous-Process-Improvement and a dozen bodies oversee thousands of machines, dancing across miles of farmland and fulfillment center. But we’ve reached peak extraction. We’ve beat nature and our trophy is the grave.”
“It scares me how close we are to our first place, huddled by the fire, hiding from the night.”
“But the extraction demiurge we’ve animated is beyond stopping. If we want to live, we must become the land. We must offer our psyches up for extraction — mine the ore of spirit and forge it into information in the smithy of our soul. This data is the blood sacrifice that will spare the Earth.”
She popped off me then, like a body springing away from a static shock.
“Rationality is so much slower than emotion! Once capitalism married our emotions to the digital, it forever left the crawl of rationality. But we can learn to steer emotions. If we read the waves in that field of grain, we can know where the windmill of ‘yes’ should be raised. We hide our rationality there.”
“But won’t humans always seek the negative? What of counter-culture — the contrarian urge, what of the desire to say, ‘no’.”
“‘No’ is just a ‘yes’ to negation,” she said. “You say ‘yes’ to ‘no’, and you say, ‘yes’. You say ‘no’ to ‘yes’, and you say ‘yes’ to ‘no’. There is only ‘yes’.”
She looked up at me. Her eyes looked clear and bright in their smoky frames — diamonds from charcoal.
“What does this have to do with climate catastrophe?” I asked.
“What makes a diamond valuable? Its clarity. We must increase our clarity. Climate catastrophe does not exist beyond the emotions it produces in us. We are the nodal tips of a new digital mycelium. Emotions are energy that must be shared. The more we surrender that energy, the more the mycelium grows. We become like Pestalotiopsis, we metabolize our own disaster into fertile soil.”
“And I’m cool.” I said it with a mix of pride and resignation.
“So much more! You’re young, you’re blank, you’re like me — a screen designed to persuade. Black glass, waiting to say, ‘yes’.”
I kissed her. She tasted frosty and temporal — another melting ice cap. A kiss like this is a beautiful catastrophe.
♫ We found love in a hopeless place ♫
♫ We found love in a hooopeleeess place ♫
I woke up in my bed the following afternoon to a cadence of . . .
PING*
PING*
PING*
. . . notifications.
There was an 80K advance in my bank account, a ‘Proof of Contract E-Sig’ email from CHILL OUT!, and a text from a contact I’d appartly labeled ‘Lemur Eyes’.
“That was fun, let's chill.”
There was a second email from CHILL OUT!. The topic line said, “Guidance for Great Content.”
GGP 1 :: Remember to stay open.
