Shifting Baselines
The term shifting baselines describes slow, almost imperceptible changes in an ecosystem…Our faulty memories and relatively short lifespans have made us unreliable witnesses.
– Kyo Maclear, “Birds, Art, Life”
12:47 a.m.
The bedroom seemed darker than usual. The alarm clock’s dim numbers blinking, 12:47 a.m., 12:47 a.m., 12:47 a.m. The power must have gone out from the storm. The streetlamps outside were burnt out.
Nadia was inside, lying on her back in bed staring up at the ceiling. The pressure of the mattress and the darkness pushed up against her bones. Above her, she felt the heaviness of the storm threatening to shatter the roof and collapse on to her. The same pattern repeated in her body. Awake. Alone. Awake. Alone. She was awake and alone, her body floating on the mattress like a plastic straw bobbing on the ocean’s surface. A voyeur to the storm and T’s peaceful slumber.
T was asleep next to her, lying crookedly on his side. His silhouette dormant besides the natural lift and swell of his breath. A nagging rising and falling. As Nadia listened to the waves of T’s breathing, the weighted blanket and duvet anchored her to the bed, preventing her from drifting away, keeping her in place.
Early yesterday evening, the storm notification made Nadia and T’s phone make that piercing crying sound at the same time while they were watching Netflix. The noise had rattled Nadia’s heart like hearing a baby that wouldn’t stop wailing.
“The storms are getting worse,” T said, pausing the show, stretching, and getting up to gaze out the window. T pressed his palm against the cowlick that flipped out at the back of his head. The cowlick reminded Nadia of bristles belonging to a worn-out toothbrush, frayed and stiff. It was one of the first things that Nadia noticed about T when they first met four years ago at a climate convention where T presented on shrinking fish and microplastics. As T spoke, the spotlight shimmered off his forehead and Nadia admired the awkward angles of his hair, the way he looked vulnerable and open. Now the cowlick seemed out of sync with the rest of him, like it didn’t belong. Did it belong to the T that spent hours screaming in all-caps at people on YouTube? Or the T that had gone through two laptops from spilling coffee all over them?
“We’re growing desensitized.” T yawned, looking down at his phone. T took gratification in being right, even when the truth was tragic. If he could say it first, the outcome of the facts didn’t matter.
From the couch, Nadia watched the wind touch the leaves and the branches without a trace of harm. The sky looked clear. Birds were chirping. The storm was far away. Nadia’s phone suddenly buzzed on the coffee table, startling her. It was Saturday. She had forgotten to mute her notifications. She looked over at T, his eyes rapidly scanning the screen of his phone, his face dim and unfamiliar. Nadia gazed at the paused people in the show with their half-open mouths and squinting eyes. Were they judging her? Nadia flipped her phone over on the table so it was face down. She wondered if there was a point in muting anything anymore.
T mumbled at his phone and began to type frantically. Nadia noticed the chip bag that had fallen off her lap and was now on the floor. That useless disgusting scrap of garbage. She felt sickened by the accumulation of the day on her unbrushed teeth, the zit tightening on her chin, the way T hadn’t even bothered to look up.
This chip bag will never fully breakdown in my lifetime. It will never breakdown. The thought arrived like an ant crawling between the stubble on Nadia’s legs.
Nadia imagined all the chip bags she had ever emptied. The chip bags emptied while comparing herself to online profiles and scavenging the internet for jobs. The chip bags emptied while viewing another ambient show. The chip bags emptied while listening to T’s rants about global warming and plastic, his voice saturating every crevice of her brain. All the chip bags of the world, crinkled and forgotten. Where did they all go?
12:47 a.m.
The room became so black that Nadia felt herself falling through the ceiling. There was a pulse of quiet. Was she asleep yet? Was the storm over? Maybe if she fell far enough, she could float out of the room, and find shore.
A car alarm blared off in the distance, resuscitating her back into her body, jolting her awake. It was the same feeling Nadia had when she realized she deleted all her old company’s FAQ statistics. She had done it by accident, thinking she was updating old questions, not realizing she was overwriting everything else, and then suddenly freezing and knowing it. Nadia sat petrified in her desk, her hands trembling over her keyboard as all the circuits in her gut began to untangle, ignite, and awaken some electricity that had never swam inside her before. She could do something permanent that could ripple out and not be undone. Because of her, there was no way to know the questions customers had asked in the past. Because of her, there was no way to know the answers people had once looked for. All because of her. It was gone. She had left a mark.
12:47 a.m.
Pellets of hail slashed the exterior of the house. What would be left tomorrow? The murkiness of yesterday twisted Nadia’s neck against her pillow and cemented her limbs to the bed. More days were haunting her, slipping by without getting dressed or looking for jobs. She had stopped thinking about what could come next. T would leave for work, and then he would come back. T would go to bed and fall asleep, and then he would wake up. Nadia wasn’t sure what happened to her in the elastic hours between T’s routines. What did she do? What did she think?
Nadia would wash the dishes. Her hand searching for the scrub brush in the gloomy water. She would skim articles on the internet and watch her thoughts funnel into the words on the screen. She would check her phone. Walk across the street and check the mailbox. The garbage truck would beep in the alley and take a week’s worth of waste away. Delete a dick pic. Slice her finger on the paring knife invisible at the bottom of the sink. Ignore another letter about her student loan. Check her phone. Watch online videos about the smog of plastic migrating across the ocean. Check her phone. Send a pic of her butt in a lacy thong. Scream in all-caps at people on YouTube the way T had shown her. Masturbate. Take a bath and rip off the flap of skin. Throw away a chip bag. Charge her phone.
“I love how you’re like a sea sponge,” T said one night, coming home to a steamy bathroom and Nadia splayed in the tub, her arms and torso buoyant, her fingers and toes grey and crinkled. That’s what T said to Nadia when they first met, how special it was to be a sponge, gently swaying with the tide, absorbing and filtering all the debris and ideas of the world. How special it was when T forgot to pull out, a heaviness sagging inside her, T exhaling and rolling off her body afterwards. T would fall asleep, and Nadia would look at the clock, tepid semen trickling down her leg. She would fight the urge to cling to T like he was an endangered coral reef.
Before T arrived home, Nadia would bathe until the water was the same temperature as her body, until she felt herself evaporating and shrinking, her ears filling with water. She would wait for the awareness that she was awake and alone to disappear. T’s voice would echo in her head. There’s this job that would be great for you. Nadia would catch glimpses of her bloated reflection in the steel of the sweating faucet. A warped blur of her skin and hair. I found a fruit sticker in the compost bin. I’m getting tired of reminding you to peel those off. She would shift in the tub, the water churning and lapping over her. The hours were solid, malleable, breakable. How she wanted a future to snap her into place and recognize her.
12:47 a.m.
Was it T sleeping beside her, or was it someone else? Was there a time when he was different? T was snoring now. His aliveness radiated an earthy odour with each nasally exhale. She felt disturbed by the possibility that she probably made noises in her sleep without knowing it. Wrapped in the weighted blanket, her nightmares were more under control, she was less restless and fidgety. She had stopped waking up in the middle of the night, standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, unable to identify the sight of herself. She had stopped waking up to chafed knees from crawling on the floor searching for an exit in her dream.
The nightmares started after Nadia was let go, after they shredded her employee card and deleted her profile off the company website. She began having dreams about hurricanes and floods and earthquakes, about humanity being washed away with one big wave, or incinerated with one big asteroid. She would wake up and wonder where that earlier version of herself had gone. That identity that had known things and been certain. That person that had shown up calmly to work and hadn’t doubted anything. Hadn’t dreamed of the end.
T surprised Nadia with the weighted blanket several weeks after she lost her job and the shadows began to yank down her eyes. He bought it for her even though the cover was made of 100% polyester.
“They’re good for anxiety.” T kissed her forehead and squeezed her hand. “Let’s not wash it too much.” The micro-plastics would end up in the ocean.
In the first few months, Nadia was soothed by the warmth of the polyester, the hush of the glass beads in the weighted blanket falling around her like grains of sand. This blanket and the grains of sand are keeping me safe. The glass beads were keeping her still. Maybe she could be a lobster instead of a sea sponge? Maybe the weighted blanket was a shell. The synthetic fibers calcifying, crystalizing over her porous frame. I am a lobster and I am safe. I am a lobster…
Nadia had now been unemployed for over seven months. It had been over seven months and they had never washed the blanket. T managed to never get any come stains on it.
12:47 a.m.
The glass beads in the blanket pressed against Nadia’s chest. She couldn’t hear the beads falling, she could only hear the thunder tumbling over the city.
This weighted blanket will never breakdown in my lifetime. This weighted blanket will never breakdown.
With the next snap of lightning, Nadia realized she had been telling herself lies. She could never be a lobster. She didn’t know how they made their shells. What they needed to survive. How could she not know such a thing? She realized she didn’t know anything. Had never known anything on her own. All the gaps in her knowledge expanded and collapsed in her brain at once. An alternate reality of everything she could know, but didn’t. Everything she knew, but didn’t want to accept.
Nadia kicked the weighted blanket off her body in a panic, the friction kindling sparks of static in the dark. Her skin slick with heat. She lay there, motionless for a moment. T’s snores grating against her. There was a part of her that wanted to shake him awake, rattle his body with fear. Nadia flailed herself against the mattress testing to see if T would stir and sense her movement. He was in the same position on his side, his arms spread across the discoloured sheets, his mouth wet and ajar, collecting drool. His dreams silently consuming the room. The furnace shuttered on and then off. Streams of rain from the overflowing eavestroughs whipped at the window.
Nadia remembered a time when she would have gently woken T with her question about the lobster, or some other question about the world or herself. Her body pulled by the reflex of wanting to be told the answer. Back then, T would have held her, and she would have felt solid and like she wasn’t falling. He would explain the life cycle of plastics as he watched his knuckles and fingers trace over her bare arms, and then tuck her hair behind her ear. “You know you can ask me anything,” he would say. His pupils dilating in the low light as his tender voice swept her thoughts away.
12:47 a.m.
Before turning off his bedside light, T sat propped up in bed grinning while scrolling on his phone, reading about the storm. The high winds. The power-outages. The damage that would cost lots of money.
“We are so fucking screwed,” he laughed, his elbows indenting the pillows. He told Nadia about the irreversible apocalypse that would somehow disappear eventually, with enough time. “With enough time the damage will erase the landscape and become part of it. We won’t know the difference.”
Before T placed his phone on the nightstand, he paused waiting for a response, waiting to be validated in some way about how awful everything was. He eyed the zit on Nadia’s chin like it was ready to pop and erupt under the pad of his finger.
After T fell asleep, Nadia lay dazed in the silence between his laughs and the brink of the storm. In the space where everything could happen, but nothing would change. Nadia tried to remember when one of T’s answers had stopped being something that could fill her. Had T always been the kind of person who fell asleep laughing and listening to the news? The kind of person where horror lulls them to sleep and never flares in their dreams?
Before shifting into a shallow dream, Nadia heard her phone buzz several times. Her legs twitched under the weight of the blanket. She saw a bird getting dissected by a tornado. The pressure breaking and snapping its wings and bones. The bird was searching for her nest, but her instinct was wrong. There was no safe place. There was only an empty chip bag left, twirling in the wind.
12:47 a.m.
The wind slammed against the front door. How long until the house would collapse, or break, or blow away? How long until the storm would rip Nadia apart? Nadia shivered from the air leaking through the walls, her body brittle without the blanket. She glanced over at her phone face down on the dresser, camouflaged in the dark. Nadia wondered who else was awake, unable to sleep. She hadn’t checked her messages and opened the hook-up app since watching Netflix.
Nadia downloaded the app one night after a specific nightmare. T had found a pile of Nadia’s chip bags in the garbage. What did you do, stuff yourself? In the dream, T dumped all the chip bags from the bin and spread them out on the floor at Nadia’s feet, one by one. Look at all the space you take up. The chip bags began to fornicate and multiply, filling the house to the roof. Nadia remembered her body disappearing into the pile and breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces. She woke up with the air punched from her lungs, believing her flesh was made of chip bags. She imagined all the microplastics floating in her bloodstream.
The app was a distraction for a night. It was a way to get her mind off things. She hadn’t planned to keep the app on her phone that long. But the predictable rousing glow, the confirmation of someone out there trying to reach her. It became effortless and easy.
When Nadia built her profile, she wrote bored af tell me something interesting in the little about me box and uploaded a picture of herself staring up the trunk of an ancient tree. The picture was taken two years ago when she and T road-tripped to the redwoods in California. The trip they took after T won another climate activism award. They listened to podcasts that predicted how much longer until humanity used up all the resources on the planet. They laughed with the windows rolled down. They fell asleep high and glued together. T seemed like a less exaggerated version of himself back then, with more hair. This was before Nadia knew that T had a family that believed in him. He had parents that would replace his broken laptops and wire him money every other month.
Nadia would stop responding to a hook-up convo after they asked about meeting in person, and then it would end abruptly. But that didn’t matter. There was always another message from someone else, and another, and another, and another, waiting in a bottomless pile. Another pick-up line. Another dick pic, another blurry faceless nude. Another empty chip bag. A collage taking up space on her phone.
It was the bottomless pile that hypnotized Nadia, always there wanting, never decaying. Now each time Nadia heard the garbage truck, it reassured her that it was possible that she was a part of something much larger than herself. It reassured her that it was possible she wasn’t a sea sponge or a lobster or a person. She was a grain of sand, so infinitesimal that she could possibly not even exist, but there she was, existing and taking up space in a bottomless pile. Chip bags didn’t really feel like chip bags. People didn’t really feel like people, but just a pixel you watch dance across your screen, and then delete. Delete. Delete. And throw away. It didn’t matter that their bodies would never touch, that they would never meet.
12:47 a.m.
A sliver of light appeared on the dresser casting a faint halo on the wall, the phone’s buzz erased by the storm. A surge of nausea swelled in her gut. She thought about all the people who were lying in bed with a phone desperately cupped in their palm, the screen glowing. All the life that was stored on that immortal device, the selfies, the search history, the messages, the news. All the life that could be easily deleted like it never happened.
This phone will never break down in my lifetime. It will never breakdown.
Nadia saw a fresh mound of dirt. A chip bag. A coffin. Another chip bag. A phone clutched in a disintegrating hand. The screen bathing a carcass in blue light. Nadia crunched into a ball and shut her eyes. She listened to the storm break through the cracks in the house and flood onto the floor. It was inside now. There was nowhere to go. The alarm clock kept blinking.
This relationship will never breakdown in my lifetime. This relationship will never breakdown…
Nadia unfurled and pushed herself upright. She felt bodiless as the blood filtered through her brain. T exhaled deeply and rolled onto his back. The floorboards whined as Nadia walked across the room and picked up her phone, the artificial light illuminating her face. The battery was low. The charge had been interrupted by the power outage. There was a pile of messages waiting.
Have we met before?
throat goat
I swear I know your ass from somewhere
hiii beautifull
you hear about this storm?
ur a wet sea sponge i want to sink my dick into
it sounds pretty gnarly
u awake??
if nothing lasts forever
your boobs are remind me of mount fuckmore
can ypu be my nothing?
hey babe, your like a super exotic fish
twat
name the first thing you’re going to do
hey
when you know its all going to end
are you there??
Nadia listened to the torrents of rain and hail beating the roof, the walls of the house groaning and caving. Icy rainwater began dripping through the ceiling, prickling her scalp. From across the room, Nadia gazed at T’s illegible face, the mass of his body under the covers. In the shadows, he could be anyone. With the back of his head pressed into his pillow, Nadia couldn’t see T’s cowlick at all. It was like he didn’t have one, had never had one. Maybe it was possible she had imagined it. With her phone in her hand, Nadia slid into her housecoat and crept to the living room. She heard glass fall from the cupboards and explode on the floor. She felt the storm seep into her bones.
12:47 a.m.
The living room furniture looked alive and deformed in the dark. Nadia lay down on the couch and bent her knees, the sides of her housecoat opening and exposing her thighs and chest, the wind screaming through a crack in the window. She watched the shadows leaping across the walls and floor. The rocking back and forth motion of the trees outside penetrating through the curtains. The branches slapping and snapping. Before it ends, Nadia wanted to know. She wanted to know if anyone else knew. Nadia typed out a question and spammed it to everyone in her message history.
She waited as the potted plants on the coffee-table quivered, drinking in the storm. She waited as her body bloomed and sparked with possible answers, as she searched through some porn on her phone. Dragging and stopping the dot on another video on her screen, dragging and stopping, skipping through the movements. The moans muffled by the clatter all around her. Nadia felt the earth rock back and forth, the storm swallowing her, consuming her whole body, and then choking.
The screen went black. Nadia let out a gasp, stopping her hand, suddenly feeling dry and empty, suddenly realizing she was alone and the zit on her chin was leaking. Nadia closed her eyes. She witnessed the movement of the storm under her eyelids. Was the dark there the same as the darkness outside? She saw all the empty chip bags of the world falling onto her body and burying her into the ground. She wondered if T would ever wake up and find her, buried on the couch in the middle of the night, her fingertips dewy and clammy, a cold phone in her hand. Or if he would just notice the clock blinking and then go back to sleep.