There was an expectancy in his expression again, or else she was really starting to go crazy and ought not to have come into work that morning, and it was the expectancy that made her feel as though she wanted to unburden herself even further. The stool in the cage, on which she sat, screaked, and Morton flinched. It wasn’t easy to do it, what she did next, and she sort of wondered whether in doing it she was just cleaning out the last bit of peyote in her system. She did it anyway.
“Morton, would it be all right if I told you something that I’m going through right now? I know that you are not really going to have an opinion on this stuff, but there’s something going on at the omnium gatherum, which you know is this spiritual community that I’m involved with, and I just have a bad feeling about it, and I haven’t really told anyone about it. Because, you know, obviously, here at work, nobody believes in that kind of thing. They all think it’s pretty embarrassing. I just feel like I can talk to you about this stuff without feeling, you know, judged or something.”
It wasn’t until she began to tell him that she realized how much it had been bothering her, how with these alternative ideological systems, you know, the irrational thinking took place a little bit at a time. You didn’t know at first. You just woke up one day, assuming you could still wake effectively, assuming wakefulness was still part of your life, and upon waking you realized that you had gone further than you’d meant to go in alternative culture, and now you were far away, downstream, waving at your family, who stood on the banks. What she was trying to describe to Morton was the feature of the omnium gatherum known as algorithms. They had algorithms for everything now; they had algorithms for playing chess, they had algorithms for dating, they had algorithms to predict chaotic systems like annual rainfall and the apocalypse. People hooked up a bunch of mainframes, and they got into the business of forecasting, because that was the last part of the service economy at which NAFTA still seemed to excel. And there was a reason for that. The reason for that, she started telling Morton, was that NAFTA favored the eschatological. And the guys at the omnium gatherum, because it was always guys who ran these things (she told Morton), had realized there was a spot in the forecasting business model where no one had yet created a lively web presence (besides, what with the Futures Betting Syndicate, it was possible to make a market in the apocalypse).
And thus were born the algorithms. The algorithms were compiled from all the available statistical data on the end, which is not to say the likes of the Chelsea Clinton senatorial campaign, but the actual predictions of the End from all the ecstatic cults and the declassified intelligence reports. The algorithms, after the big economic collapses of the past twenty years, she told Morton, had become really pretty popular as a web site, although a lot of the traffic was said to be ironic; you know, the people visiting the site didn’t really believe that the End was coming, they just liked reading the updates and looking at the advertising.
There had been many reckonings of the End over the years. The way to increase market share as a splinter religion was to come up with an attractive idea about the End and to sell it hard. Probably you had to pick a time that wasn’t too far off, not unimaginably far off, like 2112 or 2345 or something, because no one who was alive now gave a shit if the End was going to be in 2345, because their great-great-great-grandchildren would have to worry about that. You had to pick a time that was pretty soon, and then you had to collect a lot of canned goods and other kinds of donations, but not weapons, because when you collected weapons, that attracted the attention of government agencies. You had to stockpile stuff, awaiting the End, and then when the End didn’t come, you had to retire quietly to a condominium somewhere with a nice climate. People were constantly using idiosyncratic calculus to recalibrate. And interpret. This was the word that they liked at the omnium gatherum.
“Look around you, Morton,” she said. “The world is composed of signs. People laboring in a sandstorm of significations. And it’s their job, they say, to interpret these signs. A bicycle painted white chained on a street corner with garlands upon the seat. No coincidence. The proliferation of coyotes in downtown Rio Blanco. Those are no ordinary coyotes, and they don’t have to do with habitat destruction or the gutting of the Endangered Species Act.”
And because of all this interpretation, and owing to the popularity of the algorithms, the men of the omnium gatherum had decided that the End was now.
“Morton, you know and I know that the End is mainly just a silly kind of marketing. It’s attractive because it means that you don’t have to make long-range plans for things, and you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to pay for your kid’s college education, any of that sort of thing. And you don’t have to worry about voting in the next election. The End is adolescent. It’s always teenagers, on harder drugs, not that I have any right to criticize drugs, but it’s always the teenagers who think the End is at hand. Still, you know what, it’s kind of scary when they say it’s now. When people you know socially, and maybe you slept with them once or twice, just to be nice, when these people you know socially are suddenly talking about the End, and it’s now. So the question is, Morton, do you think I should just pay no attention? Should I just say that these are my friends, or some of them are my friends, anyway, and they have some really strange ideas; what do you think? Is that the right approach?”
What I think, my darling, is that when I listen to you discourse on the affairs of the day, I am filled with a warmth. A warmth such as I have never known. We may have our ups and downs, and over the course of our association there have been times when you wore outfits that I didn’t entirely approve of. And after all you are human, you are the oppressor, but despite all these things, when you make yourself vulnerable to me in this way, when your face is open and full of a yearning to understand the rushing river of the world, then I feel a tremendous warmth in my breast. I could listen to you discoursing upon the laundry all day long, if that is all that is given to you as woman. I don’t care. The outside world, after all, is only available to me as a series of computer screens. I haven’t been outdoors in years. I barely even understand what outdoors is. I don’t know all the traffic, the people walking to and fro, and all the bicycles of this town Rio Blanco. But in this space there is a person who cares for me still. My parents are gone. And the monkeys in the cages down the hall from me are beneath contempt. I am alone in the world, and thus there is only you. Only you no longer treat me as so much humanoid meat, ready to be fed into the grinder. So tell me of the End, tell me of the Beginning, tell me of everything in between, which would be called, I guess, the Middle. Tell me of the Middle, and I will listen. I will listen even if you want to tell me about the state-sponsored lotteries or the gigantic algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico. I will listen.