Author Note: Hey everyone, hope you enjoyed my last work ("Juice for Juice"). This is set in the same universe, and deals with philosophy, the reality TV show Terrace House, and climate anxiety. I like to think I'm improving my craft, so any ratings and comments—even anonymous—are more than welcome. Thank you for reading this. I love you.
Content Warning: some cheating, kind of.
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"Good evening." Reina Triendl is first to speak, each week, cheerfully setting the tone.
"Good evening," reply her colleagues, the other five members of Terrace House's panel of comedians.
You, the longest-standing panelist, introduces the show.
"Terrace House is just our observation of six strangers living together. All we provide is a snazzy house and a sick ride. There is no script whatsoever."
The panel, seated around a large couch, nods in sync at this last line. Reina starts the recap.
"Let's see, last week..."
#
"Maaaaan." Tokui Yoshimi smiled at his co-panelists. "They really went for it."
Reina Triendl and You burst into giggles as the couch reacted to the latest indignity on Terrace House. Yamasato Ryota glowered at us from the wall.
"I'm bored," he said simply, prompting more laughs in the studio.
"I'm bored," Hesther echoed, fidgeting with the remote.
The sage and citrus candle sputtered.
"We really did just grind through most of this episode drop," I pointed out.
It was getting late; we'd been watching Terrace House nonstop for something like five hours. Hesther paused Netflix and looked at me.
We were best friends, fast buddies from kindergarten who'd shared everything for two decades. When she came back from her out-of-state college, we picked up where we left off, killing time together with middle-of-the-road reality television.
Looking at Hesther was like looking into a mirror. Sure, we looked pretty different—she had short hair, short lashes, a square jaw, all the things I'd wanted back in middle school—but I mean in terms of familiarity. I'd doubtless looked at her face over the years about as many times as I'd seen my own. It reflected my interests, my feelings. I, too, was bored.
The sky outside was dark, not only from the night but from the smoke and ash. The Gullet of Hell, most recently opening across the estuary in Georgeville, was ravaging the coast. With the bridges down, with the entire East Estuary in apocalypse mode, with the moon and stars snuffed out in soot, there wasn't that much to do. Our city was "safe," surrounded on three sides by water, but it wasn't unaffected. Masks were rationed to the utility workers on the other side of the estuary, and we were locked up. There was no school, no work. No public transit. The wireless infrastructure was disrupted by anomalous weather, so you couldn't even Lyft or Uber. Google's fiber kept us connected to the outside world at home, so we had Netflix, but when a typical night in of Great Britannian Bake Off turned into an endless impromptu sleepover, even me and Hesther found the limits of our interest in TV.
Hesther fiddled with the remote in silence for a moment, staring into my eyes, then dropped it on the rug.
"What if this really never ends?" she asked.
"The Gullet always closes eventually." It was common wisdom, the only thing preventing mass suicide across Stewardland.
"And it always reopens," she said.
She was right. Paradise, Lady Rose, Leather Valley, Moon Valley—and those were just the most recent hotspots in Northern Stewardland. The fires burned around Angels, too, two hundred days a year. Diabolists ran the private utility companies, it was said, using the grid to perform satanic rituals in an effort to merge our world with Hell.
As always, I saw my feelings reflected in her expression: my uncertainty, my teetering fatalism.
"What's the point of eating another can of tuna and making it another day if this is what life is?" she asked.
We'd avoided the topic until now, somehow, a true feat of will in the face of circumstance, but now there was no avoiding it. Hesther had dropped a bomb in the room, and the room was changed forever.
Wordlessly, I picked up the remote and placed it on the coffee table.
"I hate when you do that," she said.
"What?"
She swept her arms wide, gesturing to the tidy living space. "Everything in order, always. All of Seven Hills is going to suffocate and you're worried about crumbs on your couch and a misplaced remote."
There was something new in Hesther's expression, something alien.
This wasn't the first time Hesther had complained about my tendency toward the immaculate, but it was maybe the first time she hadn't done so in a reflection of my own dissatisfaction with said tendency. In the past she'd rib me about it and I'd feel like justice was being served, because my need for control was beyond my control and I secretly agreed with her. This was different. There was a provocative spark in her eye, and she looked genuinely displeased.
"Sorry," I said. It wasn't a real apology. Neither of us was good at those. It was, like so many sorries, a filler word akin to um or like, a foothold in the conversation while I scrambled to figure out how I felt.
She broke our lengthy eye contact, standing and pacing around the room. "Three weeks already, dude. How can you stand it?"
"I can't," I admitted. "I'm at my wits' end, Hesther."
"Then DO something about it."
I shrugged at her. What was there to do? We were stuck in my 500 square foot studio apartment, with nothing to fill the space or time but my second-hand Ikea furniture, a six-month supply of earthquake rations, and my smart TV. Well, I had reading to do. In theory. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time sat on the coffee table next to the remote. I was supposed to teach it this coming semester, use it to bludgeon the spark out of the aspirant pre-laws in Georgeville's rhetoric department, but reviewing the text seemed next to pointless when the university across the estuary had been reduced to ashen rubble.
"Don't you have a bucket list?" she asked.
"Most of the things on it require leaving the house."
"Sure," she said, "but all of them?"
I thought about the list, not for the first time today. I wanted to see more of the big parks in the other provinces. I wanted to visit one of the old Terrace House sets, to see the sun rise out of the Peace. I wanted to do the Bourdain Memorial food pilgrimage. I wanted to make it to Southern Stewardland, to try the world-famous smoothies at Juice For Juice.
It was all travel, travel, travel. Except for the sex stuff, of course, but that, too, required leaving the house and finding a partner.
Standing in front of the TV, blocking my view of Yamasato's bespectacled grimace, hands on her hips, Hesther gazed into my soul, that mischievous spark growing as she read my mind.
"You're horny," she said.
This wasn't the first time Hesther had identified my horniness, either. I wasn't infrequently horny, and neither was she, and we weren't shy about it with each other. We were always open about which people on TV we found attractive, and about what sex things we'd done with other people. We'd had long conversations in middle and high school about porn, about masturbation, about her struggle with and conquest of her vaginismus. All that openness had never translated into the crossing of any lines in our sibling-like relationship, though. But when she called me horny this time, when her eyes lit up and the beginnings of a smile played on the corners of her mouth, something was different. She was bored. I was bored. And we were going to die. If not this time, next time, or the time after. Stewardland was doomed. The utility diabolists were winning.
I shrugged again, trying to absorb my shiver in the gesture. "These things come and go."
"Like the Gullet."
I almost said, "like the Gullet," but that seemed unfair, both to myself and to its victims. Instead, I said, "hopefully my erections kill fewer people." Still horribly inappropriate, but Hesther giggled.
"What's on the list?" she asked. "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."
I wrapped myself in one of the fleece blankets I kept on the couch. It was a flimsy defense against Hesther's inquiry.
"Fine, I'll go first. Starting with acts," she said, "we can ease into this."
I rolled my eyes. "Hesther, YOU'RE horny."
"No shit. I haven't rubbed one out in three weeks."
"Maybe you should take care of that."
"You'd like that, perv."
"No, I mean, whatever. Like go to the bathroom or whatever." I was on my back foot already. "I mean. Whatever."
"Whatever indeed. What about you? You been 'going to the bathroom?'"
"Yes," I said simply.
"That work for you?"
"Always has, as you well know."
"Always doubted that, you know."
"Doubted what, exactly?"
"Jerking it into some toilet paper and flushing it down the toilet is as good for you as sex?"
"I mean, an orgasm is an orgasm."
"Dude, it so isn't."
"Maybe I'm just really good at handling myself," I said.
"Or maybe you've only had shit lays."
