Issue 23

Chuck Mobley

I live on a mostly deserted island on the edge of the Sonoran Desert in Southern California. It is an actual 25-acre island surrounded by a 25-acre lake, which is surrounded by a 200-acre, 18-hole golf course. The island hosts four buildings that are seven stories, each containing 65 apartments. They look like J.G. Ballard-inspired, stucco-encrusted Brutalist buildings situated within a simulacrum of a nineteenth-century pastoral. Under lashings of pink and tangerine sunrises, jammed up against the dusty San Jacinto Mountains, the incongruity of these mismatched landscapes lends the impression of a utopian community on Mars. Developed in the 1970s, this gated community is called Desert Island.

In the summer, or six-month-long off-season, once the snowbirds fly away, it feels like a cross between an abandoned movie set and Florida, minus the ocean. Of the few vehicles left in the underground garage, most are covered. Empty parking spaces are annexed for unpopulated tableaus of golf carts, wheelchairs, and walkers. Rare vestiges of life appear in the form of building custodians and caretakers for the elderly. Less frequently, a silent ambulance will make its solemn procession up the barren drive on the island, signaling another desertion. I often wonder if the sad irony of this lethargic seasonal place being named Desert Island was intentional or not. Living here reminds me of how curator Walter Hopps described his time working at the Smithsonian as like moving through an atmosphere of Seconal.

The torpefying effect is punctuated by more lively signs of life found among the many species of birds that call the island’s bucolic setting home. It turns out that the natural world is indeed nothing more than a Darwinian smorgasbord. Black phoebes snack on dragonflies; crows pluck sparrows out of the sky; hours-old ducklings serve as canapés for largemouth bass, just as their fry are hors d’œuvres for egrets and pelicans; and so on. Unfortunately, I have had to scratch the great horned owl from the top of my list of favorite birds after one swooped down from its palm-tree perch and ate a celibate, geriatric desert cottontail of which I was quite fond. I suppose it could be argued that the rabbit was spared the indignities of aging, but, more important, I am now, regrettably, forced to accept owls for what they truly are: vicious night demons.

I have come here after giving up my former life and career in the city. Although I send weekly postcards to a beloved, recently retired art-historian friend, I’ve forgotten now if my city friends ghosted me or I ghosted them. I have no family. Silence now envelops me like a tranquil haboob. I rarely know what day of the week it is. I mostly keep track of time based on whatever holiday door decorations neighbors have installed. As my backstory fades from memory, I feel like I’m riding a wave without a shore. To paraphrase writer Douglas Kenney, these last few years are among the happiest I’ve largely ignored.

When not soaking in ennui, I tend to my lengthy list of self-improvement goals. By some bizarre twist of fate, I managed to avoid the affliction of vanity until middle age, when I bitterly inherited an entire lifetime supply. I’m mildly ashamed to admit that my physical appearance now dictates that my goals consist largely of finding ways to assuage irksome fears about aging. I have, however grudgingly and in spite of loud complaint, resigned myself to the fact that, at age forty-nine, I am leaving late middle-age and entering the beginning of old age. Though the average lifespan of the American male is currently seventy-six years and falling, there are those who believe that one remains middle-aged well into their sixties. Who am I to judge the hopeful calculus of others? Does the world not reward sanguinity and punish the apathetic? While there may be limits to my personal allotment of wishful thinking, I fully endorse whatever helps soften the blows of a world that has, after millennia, managed to perfect only its casual cruelty and indifference to life.

I recently received a marketing phone call inquiring whether I have a retirement plan. I replied that I do. When asked what it is, without hesitation, I answered: cancer. After we sat in stunned silence for a moment, I quietly hung up. Since losing three treasured people to cancer, I have had an unhealthy obsession with death. When I lived in the real world and had friends who feigned concern for my mental health, I would blunt any protestation to my morose idée fixe by reminding them that my continuing to live was an almost completely altruistic act undertaken solely for their benefit, an endorsement of their lives. If I could manage to keep going, then they were obliged to do the same. Now those threats and incentives hardly seem to matter.

Increasingly I find myself doing what I have come to call “The Math,” which is, loosely, the creation of a set of convoluted data of varying importance and proportion. I’ve actually done this since I was a child. I used to constantly count down the days that I had left to serve in the prison of childhood. Quantification helped ameliorate what felt interminable. I take great comfort in list-making and ranking. Right now I’m struggling with the question of whether B.S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry or Eugene Ionesco’s The Hermit is my favorite novel of all time. In addition, perhaps not surprisingly, my authoritarian tendencies have fully blossomed. I have become The Dear Leader of my own life. I have not one, but two 5-year plans. I keep track of everything in spreadsheets. In many ways I feel that I owe what’s left of my life to Excel. I find these habits bestow some semblance of control over the insuperable mudslide of life.

When I begin to feel unmoored, I reassure myself that I am “rebooting” my life by indulging the folly of pursuing a new career as a screenwriter for Hollywood, an endeavor for which I have no formal training and in a place where I have no personal or professional contacts. In an ageist society and an industry built on nepotism, I still somehow engage with life as if it were simply an irritating obstacle course that, with enough determination, can be conquered. When word circulated between neighbors that a writer lived among them, I was enlisted by an ad hoc editorial committee to write for the community’s quarterly newsletter: the Desert Island Echo, or D.I.E. for short. It’s twelve pages, printed at a local copy shop, stapled together, and distributed to residents. Yielding to what I’ve long suspected might be a slight case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, I proposed a column entitled “Unsolicited Advice.” When it was discovered that I had composed both the questions and the answers I was fired by the editor. My meek protestation in explaining the self-evident irony in the title of my column was ignored.    

For a brief respite from the often agonizing process of writing and to more fully embrace the desultory desert lifestyle, I drive around the fringes of town, near the interstate, among all the chain stores. Living here is like committing suicide without killing yourself. It’s a place that affords a strange kind of existential negation. Every gigantic box store, with a footprint larger than city blocks, surrounded by ocean-sized parking lots, seems like a place I could easily disappear into forever. Since there is no real freedom available to us as long as we have bodies, wandering the moribund sprawl like a spectre draws me close to a sense of dematerialization without the terrific inconvenience of actually having to end my life. Passing through the air-curtain doors of retail chains, I picture myself evaporating. The feeling of disappearing into the boundless marvel of Southern California is a lot like the disreality of falling in love: it’s a lonely, haunted, spread-out mess that feels exactly like where I belong. At the risk of sounding even more needlessly pretentious, perhaps Proust articulated it best when he wrote: “We are attracted by any life which represents for us something unknown and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered.” Ergo, my newfound love of that twentieth-century relic: the exurban mall.

Of course, it’s the dead and dying strip malls that are my favorites. They are the dive bars of the exurbs, the forgotten holes in the wall, the forlorn businesses of another era. Their wildly expansive, boiling hot, taffy asphalt parking lots have taken the place of city parks I’ve known. These cheerless, ephemeral settings are perfect for contemplating the somber Japanese concept of mono no aware, the brutality of late capitalism, and the ecological collapse already underway. I like to park on the edge of a lot and stare into the distant desert nothingness until I am sunblind while being blasted with air conditioning and one of my many playlists at top volume.

My playlists no doubt expose me as a dilettante and oddball as they consist largely of novelty songs and Western movie scores as well as the following genres: cloud rap; spacesynth; third stream; lowercase; no wave; quiet storm; and yacht rock. Lately I’ve been particularly spellbound by the deathbed radio that is the vaporwave genre. It’s a sludgy, slow-motion wonder that is mostly a mash-up of Muzak and vaguely familiar tunes from the 1980s and 90s. Vaporwave sounds as if it’s struggling to be born out of a jumble of microwaves broadcast from a past-life dimension. I find it oddly comforting, yet, paradoxically, its creepily incoherent nostalgia also sounds a lot like the time in which we live: melancholy, slow, and I have no idea what’s being said.

My isolation and solitary aimless excursions help me to avoid the malevolent burlesque of America’s current political theater. It’s something that exists largely as just noisy flesh-colored smudges in my peripheral vision whenever I pass an electronics department. Over the years, I’ve learned that it’s best to steer clear of talking politics, especially with those whom I ostensibly have much in common. My main rule of thumb is to not betray the slightest hope for a fiery revolution or face being cut down with the slur that I’m an optimist or shouted down with cries about “learning to compromise.” As if my entire existence is not a curiously optimistic compromise, a hastily fashioned pragmatic response to the unfortunate circumstance of being born. Far be it from me to try to improve upon my favorite philosopher Cioran, but I’m not convinced that life is merely a metaphysical exile. Rather, I think of life as more of an extraordinary rendition. All this to say that I never thought that I’d miss the days when people, instead of watching twenty-four-hour news, just grew old watching benign detective shows like Matlock and Murder, She Wrote.

For some approximation of consolation and solidarity, I turn to the working people of America. Ignoring self-checkout machines, I join queues for actual humans operating cash registers, hoping to bond over small talk. One day I had a young woman cashier hold up a bag of beans I was buying and, with a look of genuine confusion, ask what I planned to do with them. A few weeks later, I had a one-eyed elderly man stop ringing up my groceries, closely inspect a sweet potato, and ask what it was. Whether wading in the murky marshes of politics or occupied with banal chores like grocery shopping, I always end up feeling like some paranoid stooge on Candid Camera. I find myself scanning the ceiling and corners for hidden cameras. I can’t help but suspect that everyone is conspiring to make me the butt of a joke I don’t get.

On any day with a southerly breeze, the air is filled with the sulfurous stench of the dying Salton Sea—a putrid reminder of our coming extinction event. One day, whatever remains of humanity will likely be floating on a single ocean that encompasses the entire planet. The last of us adrift atop a raft of burning rubber tires, like a Mad Max version of a Country Time Lemonade commercial, until it melts and merges with a sea filled with microplastics. Then human beings will either perish or learn to breathe underwater like their ancestral slime. How appropriately macabre to think that the only way any residue of humanity will likely survive is if its DNA finds the ability to devolve into the enzymatic saltwater sludge it once was billions of years ago.

In an effort to amuse and distract myself from our inevitable pitiless demise I harbor many elaborate fantasies. My favorite apocalypse fantasy finds me standing alone on a sinking pier, solemnly bearing witness to the end of humanity as the drowsy, mournful flugelhorn of Herbert Joos’s “Black Trees” roars through tinny loudspeakers. Under a blistering sun, the air is filled with methane and the smell of exploding whale carcasses. Emaciated polar bears float by on melting icebergs. I recall a passage from Machado de Assis’s Epitaph of a Small Winner and regret that I’ll not have a colossal, black-marble cenotaph to bear it:

“The sharp and judicial eye of public opinion loses its power as soon as we enter the territory of death. You who still live, believe me, there is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference.”

As the pier collapses beneath me, clutching a thrift store painting of the Apollo 11 astronauts over a heart filled with countless grudges, I slowly pass out and drown. At other times, succumbing to an escapist mindset, the proximity of the Betty Ford Clinic has me imagining the bygone era of sanatoriums. I long for a mellow catatonia, a wicker wheelchair, a cashmere lap blanket, tortoiseshell Ray Bans, and an unsmoked, burning cigarette—all ash to my fingertips. Vaguely familiar visitors, whose presence I don’t acknowledge, encourage me to get well soon. A petulant nun wheels me away as if one must be physically distanced from such pedestrian advice. The sister and I both know that there is no cure, only anesthesia.

More industriously, I have taken inspiration from my surroundings and put my end-time fantasies to good use by undertaking two new writing projects. The first is an adapted screenplay based on Horace McCoy’s 1935 nihilist literary triumph They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It’s been fifty years since the last cinematic interpretation and things have only gotten worse, so in my estimation, now is the perfect time for a remake. The main characters and plotline will remain, but this time the stakes are higher:

The year is 2020 and as the planet continues to heat up, two budding tech entrepreneurs have big plans for the abandoned Agua Caliente Gateway Plaza. They are galvanized by the belief that the population will require more aggressively physical distraction so that they can, like the fabled boiling frog, continue to ignore what’s happening. The pair immediately begin conceptualizing plans for a roller rink named Skate Away USA. If they can successfully repurpose this dead mall, then they might be able to franchise into dead malls from sea to rising sea. The rink will accompany an online fundraising platform that they have developed, thus allowing the sick and downtrodden to fully exploit their maximum earning potential with live streaming. Promoted as a logical outgrowth of the donations industry, Skate Away USA is a network that allows potential donors the opportunity to feel as if they are participating in, by sponsoring and even betting on, the real-time suffering of others. Those burdened by a minimum of $100,000 in student loans and/or medical debt automatically qualify for entry into any competition, marathon, or derby. Anyone who can’t or refuses to complete the marathon has a choice of outcomes. They can be publicly traded on-site, their debt purchased for pennies on the dollar by investors who will then own whatever their labor can produce. Alternatively, they can up the ante and choose to compete in the next marathon after being maimed in one of a variety of non-lethal ways that they must blindly select from audience suggestions.

In a somewhat similar vein, an original screenplay idea I am outlining is in the horror genre and is titled Desert Island Days. The logline is: “The Final Solution, but for everyone.”

In an era when the urbane middle-class are trying to find a way to minimalism through the acquisition of overpriced mid-century modern bent-plywood furniture, the ascetic pleasures of extreme meditation have once again become fashionable. Social media influencers, stoners, renunciants, and those with life-diminishing illnesses are rushing to practice this ancient form of tantric meditation at Desert Island, where a more permanent kind of silent retreat is on offer. They arrive unaware that they will be expected to meditate themselves into mummification as sokushinbutsu. Yet, something even more sinister is happening in the clubhouse basement. A resomation center has been installed to dissolve, via alkaline hydrolysis, anyone who tries to escape. The resulting effluent is flushed, unbeknownst to the meditators, into the surrounding lake in the form of fountains. When the much despised editor of the Desert Island Echo newspaper turns up dead, half dissolved after having been stuffed alive into an aquamation tank, everyone is a suspect.

I don’t want to give too much away, but one of the scenes is conceived as a dreamy infomercial for Desert Island. This scene could serve the dual purpose of being the teaser trailer and/or disseminated as promotional GIFs. Ideally it would star, in the form of a deep-fake video as their younger selves, my childhood crushes—1970s television stars Kristy McNichol, America’s favorite tomboy, and The Bionic Woman, Lindsay Wagner. Minimalist composer Gavin Bryars’s soothingly elegiac The Sinking of the Titanic could be playing in the background.

EXT. DESERT ISLAND GOLF COURSE – DAY
Meditators, wearing immersive virtual reality headsets, sit cross-legged on vintage transparent Quasar Khanh-designed inflatable furniture. The fountains in the lake next to the fairway come to life with pink effervescent jets and sprays. Butoh dancers, smothered in suntan lotion, arise from the lake, moving disjointedly along its edges. In cutaway shots, Lindsay Wagner and Kristy McNichol directly address the camera.

LINDSAY WAGNER

Isn’t this apparatus we call “the world” only a spectacle to distract us until we are hypnotized by the insouciant color wheel of death?

KRISTY MCNICHOL

Why wait for the flash drives in our soft-sculpture watery bodies to begin powering down when they never sparked much joy anyway?

LINDSAY WAGNER

Don’t we all want to become truly better versions of our best selves as we perform and signal our most authentic truth?

KRISTY MCNICHOL

Isn’t it time to accept the dematerialization of everything, surrender to social media legacy contacts, and disappear into avatars?

LINDSAY WAGNER

Why not catch the peaceful, soothing New Age winds of change and metaphysical metamorphosis?

KRISTY MCNICHOL

Why wait to be flushed away in the coming blistering flood that will soon encircle the planet?

LINDSAY WAGNER

The future is now, and now we can live our best lives as we end them by receding into the ether, drifting far away from anomie.

The camera panning across the Desert Island scene begins floating skyward, as if a soul is departing its body. McNichol and Wagner are then heard in voice-over.

KRISTY MCNICHOL (V.O.)

Ride the chillwave.

LINDSAY WAGNER (V.O.)

Sink into simulacra.

KRISTY MCNICHOL (V.O.)

Meditate and evaporate.

LINDSAY WAGNER (V.O.)

Sail on to the desert island in your mind.

FADE OUT