Fiction from NER 44.4 (2023)
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ccasionally, Ingrid would become overwhelmed by an anxiety about privacy, feverishly deleting every residual of herself from the internet. Whole social media profiles were voided, dashed. Texts were sent to friends, former employers, publications, and image hosting services, begging for emancipation from the horror of a tagged photo, headshot, and bio. Jane would only learn about this later. 

Jane had moved upstate five months ago for grad school. “Being alone”—which she’d once regarded as an unofficial fifth cardinal virtue—she experienced now as anguish. She pieced together days by sitting in different places, emailing Ingrid. 

That evening, Ingrid emailed Jane to remind her that she was not an ecologist.

Jane, I am not an ecologist. I am kind of essentially unconcerned with worldbuilding. I don’t care about speculative fiction or the construction of new geology, culture, language, and race. I see the nature of our project as something emerging from the “culture,” as it were, something overwhelmingly causal. We are working with the here and now. I’m concerned about you lately. I don’t know why you can’t seem to get your head around the Agreement or its importance. I’ve been only honest with you, about the land and what I want.

Jane received Ingrid’s email just after the winter sun abandoned her. She promptly clapped her laptop shut on the table. Blankly she looked into the kitchen, then crumpled her face and folded it onto the shelf of her palms.

—

Jane had met Ingrid at a five-day retreat at the Center for Applied Sustainability that previous summer. A sprawling compound located in northeastern Missouri, the Center was loosely—an operative word here—affiliated with the state’s university and ran intensive workshops on ecologically responsible living, natural building, permaculture design, and eco-burial. It was also home to a Sustainability Demonstration Project, the “SDP,” they called it, where Residents drafted a charter of ecological covenants and moved onto the land to form their own self-governing ecovillage. 

For what they lacked in diversity, the Residents of the SDP attempted to compensate with an encyclopedic range of conviction and pedigree. Some members were milk drunk from academia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with hyper-specific degrees like MSs of Applied Lapidary Sciences and PhDs in Intentional Communities. Others were the children of local Jesus People, never formally educated, breastfed until they were ten, exfoliating miracles, signs, and wonders out of every anomaly in the prairie landscape. Because it was there, at the Center, that these forty escapists could endeavor upon a large project of what could be called—depending on the party calling it, of course—intentional living, eco-fascism, and/or playing pretend.  

They abandoned salaries, mortgages, cell phones, and personal vehicles. Particularly appealing to Jane, one woman had even left behind her husband, young daughter, and cat. 

Visitors were meant to discern whether they, too, would participate in the same extradition. Of course, this wasn’t exactly Jane’s point of entry. Rather, she was being controlled, as she’d always been, by her morbid compulsion to run away. Since childhood she’d been consumed by this fantasy: so perpetually did she beg for the wardrobes and looking glasses to evaporate her, she would scour the ground of her family’s backyard on hands and knees, desperate for her rabbit hole to present itself. 

With age, the wish had evolved. Jane realized she wouldn’t need a Wonderland if she could elope. According to all the literature, women fell in love when they least expected it. Therefore, Jane spent much of her teenhood trying not to expect her courthouse nuptials and the snowdrop bouquet bought on the way, saying “I do” in the alabaster-colored dress with an empire waist she’d seen in that Midtown atelier’s jewel-box window—perfectly casual but smart—and the pavlova she and her husband would eat after the ceremony on the floor of their home, an extremely beautiful home from which her husband would otherwise be absent, away on business, leaving her abundantly alone surrounded by very fragile objects like unfixed charcoal drawings and china sets, because they had no children to ruin them. A husband who was always away and no children. Jane would lie in bed at night, her whole body remade by desire, trying not to imagine such things.

But around eighteen Jane realized that, beyond her fantasy, she didn’t really like men. It was then she became preoccupied with being kidnapped.

On the first day of the retreat, the Visitors went around in a circle introducing themselves and their associated facts. Jane did not cite “a desire to be kidnapped” as the reason she attended the program. Rather, she attributed her interest to something to the effect of “living authentically.” She splintered with embarrassment in her seat. I sound so stupid, she thought. 

Ingrid was attending the retreat for a practical reason. She had large, directive brown eyes, a thin, ovular face, and the elongated, sinewy limbs of a dancer. She was distractingly tall—could she have been six foot?—with long, straight hair, always inventively piled into gem-colored claws. She was a decade or so older than Jane, her mid-thirties impressing a crescent of prudent rays around her eyes. When it was her turn to introduce herself, without an inkling of ceremony she stated, “I’m Ingrid Medina and I’m here because I’m inheriting land. Looking to be inspired, you could say.” 

Jane thought, She doesn’t sound stupid.

Even before they’d ever spoken directly, Jane felt a sense of allyship with Ingrid. Amongst the visiting group, they seemed the exclusive audience to a broader situational comedy, the whole spectacle of “ecovillage.” For instance, Residents practiced a style of nonviolent communication where all conversations originated from carefully memorized scripts. Evaluators were outlawed and all sentences hinged on the verb “to be.” At dinner on the second night, Jane called a Resident generous when he offered her what was left of his meal. “No,” he corrected Jane, “when I give you my leftovers, I am being generous. But a person is not generous or ungenerous, essentially.”

Desperate for the interaction to have borne another witness, Jane looked up to the table, where Visitors were stratified into various conversations about climate catastrophe. Luckily Ingrid seemed to have overheard; she was carefully suppressing a smirk. 

Something in each of them cleaved toward the other. Perhaps this was why, the following night, Ingrid sat next to Jane. Jane was elated. Still they did not speak directly, conversing around each other in larger groups while mechanically passing basins of grainless, dairyless foods from one end of the table to the other. Toward the end of the meal, the two accidentally made eye contact, which they hastily abjured. Like a bowstring trailed back by two fingers, Jane’s body contracted one muscle at a time, starting at her temples. 

—

On hot days, Visitors and Residents jumped into the pond. The pond was dismal, the color of mud. Cupped to its lip was The Dome, an experimental earth home built into the side of a prairie hillock, where Ingrid spent her stay, away from the rest of the Visitors, who otherwise camped or, like Jane, stayed at the eco-inn.

Around them, the land sat. Missouri was like another planet. The earth’s flatness extended forever down the horizon, where all the geographic features hung like clothes on a line.

The final evening of the retreat, in the thick of August’s exigent heat, Jane gave up on sleeping and took off to the pond by moonlight. She ran and ran. She ran past the ramshackle dwellings and pastures of sleeping cattle. She wove through the yucca and globemallows, expertly circumventing the apertures in the prairie’s jagged floor. And when Jane reached the brown pond, she kept running straight out into its lukewarm depths, out and out, until it was just her, alone in its center and on her back, eyes affixed to the starless sky, as the entire prairie surrounded her. The songs of the crickets crested and nadired. And the world was so monotonal, the brown of the sky and water so samely, the night so windless and still, that, for a moment, Jane felt as if she were at the center of a subterranean lake. Deep, deep within the earth. 

When she came out from the water, dripping and no less hot than before, Ingrid was waiting there on The Dome’s deck, body obscured by an outstretched towel. Sooner than Jane could be startled, she was sheathed in its terrycloth swaddle, being led inside the earth home. This was where Jane learned about the contraptions.

—

The contraptions were detritus, dreck, noise. They were the maze of devices built around and through bodies: Nair and breakthrough bleeding and nicotine patches and the propagation of cosmetic fillers and e-cigarette technologies and ways of getting fucked. KYBELLA® and Banana Ice-flavored vapes and cumming from devices that could be installed into the body and operated from phone applications. Dropdown menus and strings of same-faced people on dating apps and the walls of nut milks and shampoos and seltzers at the grocery store. They were all the “solutions” that obscured the truth about the world. Ingrid valued the truth above all else.

Inside the prairie hillock, porthole windows lined the walls and the whole ceiling vaulted upwards toward an eye-shaped skylight. Jane sat there, dripping, at a small desk carved out from clay plaster. Her wet plastic shorts clung to her beneath the towel. A rug woven in polychrome concentric circles covered the floor. Ingrid had also just been swimming. She sat on the thin bed in a black bikini top and shorts, running a tortoiseshell acetate comb through her hair. A tiny silver ring glinted on from the thatch tracing down her abdomen. 

Ingrid told Jane about her land. It was seven hours outside of Portland, Oregon, where she lived. It was beyond ancient, cut out from the basalt and firs. She’d inherited it from her sister, whose death she did not further detail. 

Then they talked about Ingrid’s condition.

“You have to understand that when I was young, I suffered from a condition that produced all these bizarre visual distortions,” Ingrid said to Jane. “Basically, it created these terrifying shifts in scale. As a child I used to call it the ‘big-small thing.’” 

Because prompted, Jane responded, “I understand that,” but her brain conjured no image; she didn’t really understand the big-small thing at all.

“And you have to understand that I was prescribed a variety of experimental treatments to mitigate the condition.”

“And did they?”

“Well, in a way, yes. I don’t suffer from the distortions anymore. But the side effects were weird. Weight gain. Brain fog. I couldn’t move my eyes. Basically, I became fat and slow.”

“Well, wouldn’t you rather be fat and slow than the other thing?” 

“No, I’d rather be the other thing.”

A cascade of medical interventions that had only made Ingrid more sick. These, too, were contraptions. 

“Do you take the medications anymore?”

“Well, I stopped taking them, probably when I was around your age. Oh my God, that was such a fucked-up time. But the big-small thing never came back. To tell you the truth I miss it sometimes—suffer, though I did. When I was younger, I always suffered.” Ingrid laughed, which unnerved Jane. 

The night bore on. Jane learned about the world as Ingrid experienced it, with its fraudulent conceits and wretched systems of meaning-making and the formlessness of its violence and its rape. She spoke with a certitude that lacked resemblance to anything Jane had ever felt toward anything; she found it as compelling as she did repulsive. How was it that a person could be so sure? But it was beside the point, anyway, because something was taking hold of Jane. She was hanging onto Ingrid’s every word. Her fingernails depressed crescents into the beds of her palms. In her body something clamored, called out, and widened, like a misbehaved animal.

Later, Jane and Ingrid went to sleep facing head-to-toe. The moonlight was creamy, coming in through the skylight. The stars could be seen, as well. It was 4:00 am. The air slouched around everywhere, exerted. 

Ingrid turned over. “Come to think of it, Jane, a land stewardship project could be hugely benefited by someone as curious and honest as you.”

Jane counted the stars she could: two. She bit the inside of her cheek. Here it was, here was her rabbit hole. And Jane, wasn’t she curious and honest?

—

Jane was abruptly awoken just two hours later by Ingrid’s green notebook being slid toward her face, onto which she drowsily abided Ingrid’s request to copy her email. She opened her eyes blearily to The Dome, vacated of Ingrid’s belongings. Ingrid herself—erect, dressed, and satcheled—was standing by the doorway.

“It will take me a while to get home,” Jane heard her say, somewhere far off. “I’ll email you then.”

And just like that, Ingrid disappeared into the blue morning.

—

Jane left for grad school three days after the retreat concluded. There she learned how to bide time. She studied everything except her schoolwork: the locusts and birches for early signs of their seasonal spectacle, the Amish women who popped up tents near the university to sell cinnamon apple doughnuts and butter cakes, the blemish on her cheek, how it resisted her creams and oils. 

The best way to bide time was to think about Ingrid. Jane could lie on her blue rug for hours, knees folded neatly into her chest, thinking only of her. She held Ingrid in her mind’s eye, and she was as substantial and edgeless as a river rock. That’s how Jane liked to imagine her: vital, breathless, weighty in this way. And, because Jane never quite outgrew playing pretend, sometimes she even liked to imagine Ingrid as different people. Ingrid as her aunt. Ingrid as a student in her class. Ingrid as her first boss. The visions were similar to her dreams, where figures from Jane’s life could interchange and step into each other. 

But when two weeks passed and an email from Ingrid still had not arrived, Jane began to lose patience. She consummately failed to befriend her cohort and establish a new life. She missed crucial intervals. She found no grounds upon which to stake interest in her STS program, neither Science nor Technology nor Society. Why be patient? Why be patient when there was no time to abscond like the present? And why, in the trance of morning, had Jane not thought to take Ingrid’s email too, just in case? Maybe she had misspelled her own email, into that neatly bound book. Or maybe Ingrid was dead.

Jane took to Googling Ingrid. Many people shared her name. Writers, bankers, brides-to-be, a professor of Ecuadorian studies, the victim of a violent murder. One Ingrid Medina was the first woman to win the Ironman Triathlon in the Upper Peninsula. Jane loved the image of her, jogging into the finish line in a bright red spandex suit and polarized sunglasses, beaming. Diligently, Jane progressed through the five million results Ingrid’s name produced. She would blink the tabs open, one after another, as she scrolled into eternity, like a child sausage-rolling down a bottomless hill. 

Jane did find vestiges of her Ingrid online: a barren Instagram page with three heavily filtered images from 2011 (an infant, a plate of lemon pasta, the Great Wall), a PDF of her classics undergraduate thesis about Medea, a few bylines on run-of-the-mill articles about local politics, a short bio on the “About Us” page for an archive calling her, exclusively, a “volunteer.” Every evening between nine and midnight, Jane would rehearse what she would send Ingrid when she did find her email address. One evening, instead, she sent a message to Ingrid the Ironman Triathlon winner, whose AOL address was attached to the article about her from 2009.

Hello Ingrid,

I am trying to reach you! I am a huge fan of yours. I am a feminist and I have always wanted to participate in the Ironman Triathlon. Tell me, what was the hardest part, biking fifty-six miles, or being a woman?

The email bounced. Jane gave up.

—

Jane had been ignoring her parents since arriving upstate. They had been reticent about her graduate studies since application. She responded to their texts with words like “good” and “busy.” 

Just after the leaves had turned, she finally caved and answered one of their calls. They asked her the customary and polite questions about classes, professors, and her apartment. They noted that it must be beautiful upstate. “Yeah, duh.”

Only at the end of the call did her mother, bashfully, report:

“Janey, you know your father and I didn’t go to grad school”—amongst their milieu, this was of note—“it’s not for everyone.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m glad that you’re focusing on your studies, really, I am. I think that’s great. I think STS is great, it’s really modern, but it’s not exactly, like, a professional degree. We have to think about what will, you know, come next for Jane.” 

But Jane knew what would come next for Jane. That everything then existed on some kind of margin or hinge, and when Jane refused participation in familial obligation or rote social excursion, it was with the tacit understanding that a completely different world was moving toward her, dissimilar in every way from her own. That she was simply biding time, preparing.

The day after Halloween, Jane’s quest for Ingrid’s email was abruptly concluded by Ingrid emailing Jane herself. The email was brief, just an inquiry about Jane’s final thoughts on the Project, and an apology for her delay—something about a bout of illness, something about a sudden trip. Jane responded with her thoughts, also brief, and asked Ingrid hers. Ingrid’s subsequent email arrived just four hours after Jane sent hers and was extensive.

J- I liked the Project. I never expected it to solve all my problems and it didn’t. My biggest disappointment was the lack of positive culture. For me, this demonstrates a lack of robust social ties. When humans thrive, they spontaneously create culture. Maybe this sounds abstract but think about any time you’ve been in love. Every time I’ve been in love, the relationship has been the engine of hundreds of new ways of being—inside jokes, modes of speech, idiosyncratic language, games, invented histories, perennial topics, blah blah blah. Everything they attempted to produce felt forced. Why were they always so busy? People shouldn’t be so busy, especially when they’ve left society.

Jane tried to think of the culture produced by all the times she had been in love, but she hadn’t been. 

—

Ingrid’s sister April had bought the land, seventeen acres in Plush, Oregon, in 2007, with alimony from her marriage. Members of their family called the property “Shangri-La,” disdainfully. Ingrid wrote that the marriage had occurred between April’s late teens and very early twenties and was apparently fretful and ill-advised. The land had never been developed because of what Ingrid diagnosed as her “limited scope.” She was rash, unreliable, flighty, prone to rapidly cycling happiness, rage, and suffering, all magnificent in their scale. And it was because her life was so phosphorescent, and because she had been so notably alive, that it came as no surprise that she had to die. April had forever worn the mark of death in the intensity of the way she had lived, its record interceding with hers from the instant she was born, breathless and blue.

April was born blue. Jane learned that April was not just Ingrid’s sister but, in fact, her twin, born two hours after her, and blue (though this resolved itself quickly, it was permanently installed into their familial myth, refashioned as some sort of omen). Jane had read somewhere that, pertaining to nutrients, the shorter the birthing interval between twins the better. She wrote Ingrid, Two hours is a lot for twins? Ingrid wrote back, Well, now I have to spend my whole life without my twin, so what’s two hours?

By the time of her death, the whole family had severed ties with April, except for Ingrid, who believed her downfall to be the fault of “the dominant culture” or “a lack of robust social ties” or one of the other many invented parlances she oft owed things to. When April died, Ingrid learned she’d left the plot to her. She had been there once. It was violently beautiful, all the landscape colossal in size, sandwiched between a shallow, heart-shaped lake and a sunstone gem field. And the sage grouses and marmots were always glinting through the aspens and rushes, like sparkles on ocean waves.

Ingrid wrote, I lived my life defined by being the less alive member of a duo, only to later find myself its only alive member.

—

Slowly, a plan took shape: for Ingrid to move onto the land that summer, and for Jane to come with her. Fastidiously, they addressed power system options, wattages, cabin kits, well drilling, and food preservation. At first, they read the same books on the same topics; later they delegated. Maps were drawn. Timelines were rendered. Goals were set for Year One, Year Two, Year Three. Jane requested a manual about Oregon zoning laws from the state’s website, which arrived in a brown package emblazoned with the state’s seal some three weeks later. 

At night, the tome became a portal. She’d read, Residential zoning districts are intended to accommodate a mix of residential uses at planned densities, and she’d imagine her disappearance, her friends’ and family’s futile attempts to contact or rescue her. She’d read, Cottage housing developments or “cottage clusters” consist of small houses, each usually with less than one thousand square feet of floor area, oriented around a common space, and she’d imagine the conclusion of an early winter day with Ingrid. Low moon, trout with rice, grass and hay outside dying. Ingrid by a ticking fire, reading, falling asleep, talking, brushing legs. Or collecting the day’s debris into lines and rows. Or soaking oats. Jane imagined her in every mood: sleepy, vigorous, discontent, hyper, thoughtful, excited, blah, sullen. Preparations took up much of Jane’s time and suspended all else in a feeling of overall happiness and productivity.

Sometimes, Ingrid and Jane would talk about more personal topics, lumberingly at first. A short aside on an otherwise tightly staged email essay on different campervan options, a provisional housing solution until they built the cabins. Ingrid with occasional allusion to the symbolically redolent illness she had mentioned in The Dome, “the big-small thing,” how it could condemn her to her bed for days with nausea and fatigue, but never produced the shifts in scale it had when she was a child. How this saddened her, and made the world feel less awake and vital. Jane, always eager to intensify these moments. Restless to say things like, I’m so sorry you’ve been feeling this way!

And, Sometimes I get that way too!

One evening, in mid-November, as the two were going back and forth about authority (one of Ingrid’s favorite topics), an unknown number called Jane’s phone. Dubiously, she slid the phone to her cheek and asked, “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me. I thought it’d be easier just to talk on the phone. On the level that neither of us would call ourselves ‘anarchists,’ I think we will have to account for authority more seriously than we have. Do you know what I mean?”

“Oh! Hi, Ingrid,” Jane said, surprised that the faceless thing she had been corresponding with for the past few weeks was, in fact, the same person she’d met that summer. Or maybe the feeling wasn’t surprise so much as it was embarrassment.

“Hi, Jane,” Ingrid responded, in a serious tone.

“Hi, Ingrid,” Jane said again. She paused, recalling in no way what they had been emailing about. “How are you?”

“Hmm. I’m fine! Tired. How are you? How’s grad school?”

Jane looked blankly out at the black, iced-over window, the branches that pushed against it, the accumulated dreck of her home and life. Then, as if environmentally prompted, she said, “I feel really lonely tonight, actually.”

Silence passed for a moment.

“Oh, Jane,” Ingrid said, with a genuine mournfulness. Still more silence. “Oh, Jane, I’m so sorry.”

Jane, slightly offput by the earnestness of Ingrid’s response, said, “Uh, it’s okay. It’s whatever.”

“No, it’s not.”

“What were you saying before? About authority?”

“No. There’s no use planning while you’re lonely. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“About what?”

“About being lonely.”

Then Jane remembered being six, waterwinged, sunscreened, and goggled, on a family vacation in Wellfleet, building a sandcastle by the ocean. Jane, who had assumed a leadership role, was ordering the other children around, who brought her sticks, stones, and buckets of wet sand. Meanwhile, she confidently smoothed out citadels, curtain walls, and towers. She even ladled real seawater into the moat.

After some time, Jane realized her supplies were not being refilled and looked up to find that her cousins were far out in the water. She watched them there, little specks as far away as could be in the twinkling sea, splashing and playing. And, for the first time, Jane made meaning of the word “distance.” She thought about how she had been barking orders at them, so consumed by her world that she hadn’t noticed they were consumed by theirs, which didn’t concern her. So, too, distance became associated with shame.

It was then, perhaps, that Jane had first felt lonely.

—

Jane began to suspect that Ingrid thought she’d never done anything suitably political in her life. And she hadn’t. Jane had floated through elite institutions like a busted-up buoy along a lake and that lake was old money. This was what she thought of herself: I am what happens when old money is left out to rankle and fester. The most American of Americans, aristocrats and career diplomats and industrialists and equestrians and socialites, had all culminated and gone to expire within Jane. Jane, someone who couldn’t decide what she wanted on a menu or if she liked men or women. 

Jane was not ambivalent about their project specifically. But she had long suffered from a broader ambivalence—a still small voice—which Ingrid put into stark relief. Ingrid had never been ambivalent about anything. And as they arrived upon logistical conclusions of increasing importance, at the least opportune moment, Jane could not help herself but to ask “why?”

It was so annoying. She knew that. But also, the details of the project largely bored her. For instance, they spent much of December researching how to build their cabins responsibly. That was boring. During their natural building workshop at the SDP, they had learned about an eco-friendly type of concrete called “Urbanite” made from unwanted bits of broken concrete. Ingrid decided this would be a great material for the cabin’s foundation. She got in touch with a local construction site. But sourcing Urbanite was, of course, far more laborious and expensive than, say, buying concrete mix from Lowes. What’s more, Jane wanted to talk about other things. So when Ingrid messaged Jane a quote, she couldn’t help but respond,

Why don’t we just buy a concrete mix from Lowes?

What do you mean? Ingrid replied.

Like, it seems really hard to get the Urbanite. Hard and expensive.

Jane.

I’m serious!

Okay. Let’s buy a concrete mix from Lowes. Actually, while we’re at it, let’s just build the entire cabin out of plastic. Using fossil fuels. And let’s throw whatever leftover plastic we don’t need into the ocean, then ourselves.

Jane frowned at her screen. She hated when Ingrid was snarky. 

But if her ambivalence was an island—and it was—Ingrid was the ticket out. She attempted to counteract the Urbanite fiasco by buying a plane ticket to Portland for June, when she planned to officially move onto the land. She transferred one thousand dollars to Ingrid, the first installment in the campervan payment. She made the transition to being excessively complimentary of the time Ingrid had put into procuring the Urbanite. 

For the most part, it worked.

—

I always found it funny that one of the worst things little girls could accuse each other of was copying, Jane wrote to Ingrid a few nights later, burrowed beneath her flannel sheets.

She told Ingrid about the summer she had worked at the camp she had attended as a child. There were two little girls, Anne Marie and Soph, who, in a day, would fight, spit, throw, cry, forgive, play, and weep upon being yanked apart by their respective babysitters at dismissal. One day, Jane was settling a fight between them over the swings, finding herself wedged within their girlish melodrama, when suddenly Soph turned to her and said, “Stop copying me!”

Jane wrote, I said “what?” and she said, “Stop copying me! Your hair, you’re copying me!” I realized then that Soph did always wear her hair in these two little braids at the front of her face, and I was wearing my hair the same way. I was caught really off-guard and feeling kind of humiliated and told Soph, “I always wear my hair this way!” And she said, “No, you don’t, you’re copying me!”

Do you think you were copying her? Ingrid responded.

I’m still genuinely not sure, Jane wrote back, I must have seen someone else do it, like someone who wasn’t six. But maybe I didn’t, and maybe I am so devoid an identity and porous as to start copying a six-year-old. I never wore my hair that way again. Also, sometimes I worry that if I did have an identity, I would be the type of person who could be so influenced by their summer camp as to grow up and teach there themselves.

Later that week, while Ingrid was reciting opinions about hydrogen economies over the phone and Jane stared blankly on at rime on telephone wires, she said suddenly, “I think you’ve never credited me with having my own worldview.”

Ingrid paused. “Well, do you?” 

“No,” she said, watching the rime, “but I wish you’d at least just credit me.”

—

Just after the new year, a ruinous email arrived in which Ingrid introduced a shared draft of a document she called “the Agreement.” Much else about the land had been settled. As a woman, Jane had always been acutely attuned to endings. So, when she opened the document and stared at its blank face, she knew this would not be resolved. 

Jane spent several days not responding. She bunched herself into her favorite corner of her bed, to think. She liked that corner, the coolness of the wall when she pressed her body against it, how the icy windows framed the rimed-over twigs. 

Rime over twigs and thistle and burdock and chicory and goldenrod. Milkweed pods and sap rising in trees and the shock of winterberries. Ingrid and her increasingly nettled tone. At times, Jane would feel angry at the winterberries. Their drama, their splendor. 

Things in winter had no business being red. 

A deer skulking across the neighbor’s yard or a tiny little weasel. When Jane looked out the icy window, she would put her thumb over the winterberries and say, Shhhh.

Communities are not happenstanced nor fluked, but the byproducts of a series of agreements, wrote Ingrid in the damning email. Commitment isn’t about transferring money or setting dates, but about agreeing. And before we develop the land in any way, we will have to agree. Of course, there are plenty of things we obviously agree on, for instance, affiliations and symbols that have moved us over the threshold of embarking on this project in the first place. But affiliations and symbols do not a community build. We have to agree on a second order of items—shared values, principles, objectives, and, unfortunately, taste.

When Jane finally responded they began drafting. As they constructed the Agreement, their series of terms came to range from self-evident truths (no petrochemical biocides, no laminate floors, no racism) to what seemed intentionally authoritarian and controversial (no contraptions: including but not limited to employment, hormonal medication, mood stabilizers, cell phones, social media, pornography, products with more than three ingredients). 

No men, Ingrid added to their document.

What if I fall in love??? Jane commented.

Ingrid replied, You won’t.

Fished-up, expounded, and bound to their shared document, each agreement only further underscored their widening rift. Like a deepening moat, the document seemed to reveal one after another Jane’s misguidance in everything she’d presupposed about Ingrid and her world, most of all that she could ever be part of it. 

—

A few nights later, something thumped into her bedroom window and stamped into it a cobweb of hair-sized fissures. Jane ran her fingers along the glass sleepily, finding the debossed surface slightly cooler. Maybe it had been a bird. 

In the morning when she awoke, she found each of her fingers had stained one moon of blood onto the sheets, perfectly dime-shaped and maroon.

—

Surely, the whole point of their project was to be rid of the precepts and creeds restraining them, not to abide by new ones. At least that was what Jane had thought. She staunched her leaking fingers with Band-Aids the next morning. She ate cereal in bed horizontally, bowl on her chest, gaze affixed to the window’s new fracture, which she regarded with suspicion. 

Maybe Ingrid is a serious person, she thought. And serious people are bound to replicate whatever it is they attempt to reject. 

She knew she shouldn’t, but she wrote to Ingrid, Ingrid—essentially what we’re doing is producing dogma?

It’s interesting to me that you seem to not know what you think about industrial capitalism and politics. I don’t mean that as criticism, I just can’t imagine it. Besides, we can’t “produce dogma.” Let me put it this way—I’m not moving onto the land to opt out of “ideology” or “doxa” or “false consciousness” or “hegemony” or “spectacle” or whatever else you want to call it. I’m moving onto the land because I genuinely believe another way of living is possible. Do you think there will be a revolution based around imprecision and spiritual thinking and loving another woman so much you want to inhabit her? I for one don’t!

Jane’s stomach dropped. Her breath went shallow and hot. She wrote back immediately, You’re mad at me!

It was then Ingrid sent the email: Jane, I am not an ecologist.

 Subsequently, Ingrid disappeared herself from the internet.

—

Two weeks into Ingrid’s disappearance, alone in her apartment in deep January, Jane dreamt of being kidnapped every which way. She dreamt of being child-snatched, bride-napped, alien-abducted, sex-trafficked, held hostage for ransom. She dreamt she was an adorable girl pulled into a large van at gunpoint, a mall teen responding to an ad for a modeling agency pinned to a rotting pine pole in deep suburbia, a girl getting raptio-ed for her bride price near the Aral Sea. And in each iteration, as the van pulled off, in bed with her captor-husband moments before the act of consummation, as she approached the address of the modeling agency in the ad and found it just to be someone’s home, she couldn’t help but hide her glee. Her filthy, fervid, concupiscent glee.

—

In February, Jane’s parents informed her they wouldn’t fund another year of grad school. Perhaps she could return, but first it might be good for Jane to figure out what she wanted. But Jane knew what she wanted: to move onto the land with Ingrid. 

During Ingrid’s absence, Jane reread the literature of their relationship like smut. 

She tried to make marginal progress—researching building permits, staying up late into the night annotating vlogs of couples “simple living” in canal networks and Alaskan valleys and the Blue Mountains—trying, trying, trying to not imagine anything into Ingrid’s absence, to not become upset. Because it would be over, wouldn’t it, if she became upset? 

But how could she not become upset? Each day without Ingrid, Jane’s fantasy would lightly deflate. Details spun away, colors diminished. It was like trying to build a world with pincers for hands.

Jane moved her ticket to Portland from June to spring break. She spent forty-eight hours in Portland, where it rained the entire time. It was not so much a deluge as a permanent mist. She covered the entire city. She visited every bookstore, restaurant, park, bar, and bakery Ingrid had ever mentioned. After all, if she rounded a corner swiftly enough, wouldn’t Ingrid be there? 

Later, on the brown bed of her hotel room, laptop suspended between her belly and folded knees, Jane typed again and again things like, I don’t understand how, and deleting, I guess my question is, and deleting, I find it funny that, and deleting. A new approach dawned on her. She shouldn’t be so formal. It was important not to capitulate to a serious person like Ingrid. She sat upright and grabbed her phone.

I’m in Portland, she texted Ingrid. She stared blankly at the screen for a while, waiting for it to yield. Will you please just talk? she added, a few moments later, continuing to will and stare.

And then Jane put the phone aside and commenced her ritual Googling, as if attempting to conjure up a person from the dead. Everything—the Instagram, the articles, the bio for the archive—was gone. She paired “Ingrid Medina” with new modifiers: “Ingrid Medina Plush,” “Ingrid Medina Positive Culture,” “Ingrid Medina April,” “Ingrid Medina Obituary.” Nothing returned.

When she recovered her phone before bed, she found that Ingrid had, in fact, returned her text, saying simply, 

You don’t know what you want.

It was useless, then, to attempt to explain the obviousness of her desire, which was, of course, not for hydrogen economy or socialism, but for Ingrid. So she responded:

I do. 

—

Back upstate, Jane felt neither beguiled nor thwarted. Neither was she angry. Instead, she dutifully eradicated every trace of Ingrid from her apartment. She trashed the maps and timelines. She deleted the emails, then all her apps, too—the social media and dating ones, the ones that tracked her weight and menstrual cycle. She thought to herself, How easy it is to disappear.

The snow only deepened in March. So too did her fantasy; it could not be undone. Jane found she enjoyed missing Ingrid more than talking to her, anyway. Real people were inscrutable and fussy. A missed person could be kept pure and intact. To miss Ingrid was to retain her, or at the very least to make her wear her symbol.

Hardly anything at all bothered Jane in those days. In the night, machines illuminated her street like a stadium, pushing snow from one end to the other and back, forever on. The college town was empty in March but for them: the snow machines, the tiny mouse under the grate on the stove, and Jane. In those days, Jane didn’t go outside. She was baked into her apartment like eggs into a cake, as stationary and endemic as components of the wall. 

In the dark, back flush to the blue carpet, she would lie around pretending some things. There’d be fish from the high desert lakes frying in oil on the stove. Pickles, jellies, chokecherries, seaberries, and pears zipped into jam jars. Splitting alder with an ax, so they would be warm in the winter. Tucking the garden beds in for the season, beneath blankets of oats and cereal rye. The Antelope Hot Springs Jane had read about online. Sunning nearby then dipping in. Ingrid wearing the same black string bikini she had in Missouri, her belly button’s lambent hoop winking on.

Other times Jane liked to pretend she and Ingrid had built a city. Paper-thin glass buildings cresting forth from the land’s dry earth. Black sky. Train lines like silver rivers, slicing between buildings, down streets. Everything dark and hushed. Jane liked to pretend she and Ingrid were the city’s only inhabitants, rushing around its empty interface and maybe never even meeting. Always latently aware of the other’s location, like exes at a party.

And then sometimes Jane pretended she and Ingrid were trees. Big firs on the property, sinking ever slightly deeper into the earth each passing year. Centuries subsided. 

The snow machines bore up and down the street.■