This Guilt Is 100% Renewable
The Endstate of History
For us, it’s over the moment that energy companies learn how to burn history. I won’t pretend to know how it works, no matter how many times you explain about “massive potential energy stored in past events” and “low boiling points in metaphysical space.” We’re told it’s cleaner than nuclear, solar, wind. Maximum impact, minimal consequences. Who needs to know whether life originated in deep-sea vents or shallow ponds, anyway?
In the metaphysical realm, companies keep samples of everything they burn “just as a safety precaution,” like we don’t all know about the dementia-riddled geologists, and you—you get me an Archivist job. Which I’m grateful for. On my first day, you kiss my nose beside the huge, gloaming portal before hurrying to a press conference a few floors up, your sneakers squeaking. I watch the recording after I clock out, since there’s no 7G in the domain of first principles. You lean into a horde of microphones, addressing what we privately call the “Marty McFly Fallacy” for the umpteenth time. The past has already happened. We aren’t going anywhere. Even on the tiny phone screen, your eyebags are enormous. Reporters argue with you like they know anything. Tonight, you’ll hurl a plate against the linoleum and apologize before the shards stop spinning. It’s okay, I’ll tell you, reaching up to wipe your tears. Forget about it.
Back when we were younger, we argued a lot (was my Classics degree useless, should you take that Tokyo post-doc) and fucked even more. Now, the energy’s flowed out of us. We snuggle on the couch in the dark, and I wonder if the CEOs and CFOs and C-who-knows are aware that their pet Nobel physicist devours Love Island. They expect new miracles during every walkthrough, like you aren’t the woman who set history alight to keep us warm.
If everything goes tits-up, you say when neither of us can sleep, We’ll release the archived material, and everything will go back to normal. Probably. I listen to your fast-beating heart, let the “probably” pass. You’re still a scientist, even if you use much more definitive language at press conferences.
My commute from the Meta-1 archives takes two hours, the first navigating shadowy interstitial spaces, the second nudging the car through traffic made dead-silent by chronobatteries. By the time I get home, most of what I labeled and boxed and shelved that day goes blank, though trilobites’ calico-striped shells emerge in quick gleams. While lifting spaghetti, I recall tentacles spooling around my wrists, a coworker wrestling Goniatites bohemicus into its crate, and I think of a joke to tell you: Not looking forward to Allosaurus! But it’s gone once you come home, and you’re tired again anyway. We spoon on the couch. Onscreen, another dating show host laughs, his teeth sharp. The Allosaurus joke resurfaces. I share it, eager. The TV’s changing light flickers over your frown. You’ll be long-dead by the time we hit the Jurassic. I would disagree—two years ago, we were shaking Snowball Earth’s ice crystals into envelopes, and now everyone’s booking overtime for the Cambrian Explosion—but I don’t remember this until I reach my desk the next morning.
If all of Earth’s history were a 24-hour clock, humans would only appear in the last twenty seconds. The companies say it like it’s comforting, but inside the archives, we’re glancing at our watches, running calculations. 9:38. 9:39. Outside the archives, people are comforted. We’re always just seconds into the day.
In the twilit interstices, we smell smoke, hear turbines churning. Time passes. Nothing changes. My officemate’s daughter has a soccer game on Saturday.
I never remember forgetting. I stumble out of the portal, whole, and then, I crumble. I’m driving home to cook dinner. You’ll be there late. You’ll fall asleep midway through an episode, and I’ll study your face, pale in the TV’s glow like a beloved’s death mask. In natural history museums, all the bones are still there, but guests’ eyes slide past. Once, I call you as soon as I emerge: Maybe we should release some archival material? I hear a keyboard clacking, and you say, What? Why? And I know it has something to do with old bones, so I say, Do you remember that summer I volunteered with the natural history museum? And you say, God, that was boring, and I lose the thread and say, I guess so. But on Monday, I think of our midnight picnic beneath the Mosasaur skeleton, and I sob in the archive’s angiosperm wing.
In the end, it’s a Hylaeosaurus that deals the first fatality. I don’t know the species exists before that day. It’s the first thing I’m glad to forget.
I am grateful for the job, I tell you. I am. But I think you should come in and see the archives for yourself. You refuse—too busy. A week passes, and I ask again, and again, and again. Stop putting this off! I snap. You look at me with distant disgust. You can’t expect me to remember everything.
Appalachia. Water bears. Mycelia. Moss. Ferns. Tiktaalik. Amniotic eggs. Gingko trees, magnolia flowers. Mosasaur. The furcula’s gentle swoop. The K-T line’s bright quartz. Purgatorius. Eohippus. Lucy and all her kind. Footprints in soft clay. Ochre pigment. Seed-gathering. Bone-setting. Burial practices. Dogs. Weaving. A line from Sappho over my desk: Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time.
Remember this: on our first date, you asked the waiter for a pen and tried to diagram spontaneous processes on a napkin. We were both drunk already, impatient undergrads, frustrated but giggling as equations escaped you. Happy hour margaritas melting into lukewarm juice. Freezer-burned tropical fruit, tequila’s gasoline sear. At some point, you give up on the napkin, scrunch it into my hand, hold your sweaty fingers over mine. You tell me about endstates, thermodynamic equilibrium. You say, Entropy is highest when nothing can change. You say, Sometimes there’s no going back.
