Emissions: an unfinished draft,
covered in cake crumbs

I need an American around. It keeps me alive. I want to hear a word like awesome or okay and believe something is. I want a hug or a high-five forced on me. I want to forego small talk and get straight to laughter and tears, going from what’s your name to I’m not getting enough sex, from how about this weather to I think I have cancer.

Americans are terrifying. I wonder what I’d be like if I had their appetite for good news and meat, if I could become enraged so immediately. If I could love so many different things, and tell people I loved them, with that unchecked openness that takes and squeezes and ruins everything in front of it.

I love salted caramel, she says, my American. Don’t you?

I begin to evaluate my feelings on the subject, but I’m soon overwhelmed with a sense that it does a disservice to love to throw it around so casually on something like caramel. For me, love has always been a finite concept. You can wear it out or use up your share if you’re not careful. It has to be doled out with a kind of frugality.

She’s taking a picture of her last spoonful. Oh my god, she mumbles. I could seriously eat so much ice cream. What’s your favorite kind?

The topic of favorites is hard for me. Thinking that you can, by your own will and opinion, deem one thing in particular to be truly special, thereby devaluing other things, seems unfair from the outset.

Well, I begin. I mean, this was nice, this flavor.

She could easily kill me. How she swings her arms. How she smiles and shows all of her teeth. She told me once that she didn’t mind my teeth. I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t worried about it until then. She said it worked, with my “whole look.” Then she circled her arms in this big frame around my body and asked about our dinner plans. Now she’s scraping the cup with her spoon. That noise.

What, she says. You’re making a face.

Nothing, it’s just, the sound of single-use plastic on disposable cups, that scratch.

You’re so sensitive, baby. Thoughtful A F. It’s great.

Americans can even love your concern without sharing it. It’s truly remarkable. And I never know what to say about that. About being admired, without any sense of solidarity. It makes me feel naked. She leans over and kisses my ear. I love this.

We better go, she says. ’Cause if we’re late, we have to stand way in the back, or sit on the side, in one of the little booths where you can only look at your friends who are looking at the music. I hate that.

I thought we could sit where Al Capone sat.

You don’t want to. It’s way in the back, by the window. It sucks.

She grabs her phone off the table and I gather my things. Her body smashes through the space where it once sat. We throw our unsorted garbage into one big bin with wild abandon and leave the café, open-mouth kissing. No one stares.

This neighborhood is cool, she says.

I agree with her. I try to pronounce cool without sounding like I’m making an effort. She has her bare hand under my sweater as we walk.

Hello, I want to say to all these people. Look, I’m smiling! In public, at you strangers, my lips have parted!

My city of origin, Freiburg, is not an unhappy place. On the contrary, as far as German cities are concerned, Freiburg is pretty charming. But I went from a loft bedroom overlooking a cafeteria nestled into a dark forest, to Uptown, Chicago, IL, USA. I feel lost at a lawless carnival.

I also feel good. I followed a girl here, who I met over there, and I managed to get a fellowship to live in her city and examine local phenomena relevant to my thesis. I have a very narrow window of time. I cannot get distracted.

On the Red Line, we’re squashed between sports fans. They’re wearing winter hats and gloves, chattering loudly. My American spots one open seat and goes and sits down without me. She waves at me. Then she texts me from ten feet away.

my knee hurts 😉

OK but what am i liver?

I see her laughing and shaking her head. I shrug from where I stand, holding the pole I share with a thousand baseball enthusiasts.

u have to say CHOPPED liver

why CHOPPED?

it just has to be chopped, omg 😊, its how it goes

it should not matter if it the lover is chopped   *liver

She’s laughing, shaking her head in the weak spring light. The train stops and spills out the fans. We stay in, cuddled up next to the window.

The platform a few stops ahead is especially narrow. When the train zips away from us, its silver body slides an inch past her coat as she takes it off and on again, looking for the source of an itch.

We walk down the steep, damp staircase gripping the handrail all the way. A once-called “freak” early April ice storm has stripped and redistributed the budding tree branches all along this block, leaving little twigs caught in the fence around the station.

Someone’s in a sleeping bag at the foot of the supports that holds up the tracks. They’ve made a mattress out of sticks. At street level, a bus driver sees us but signals with increased speed that it’s not our turn. And less than two kilometers from here is a deep and partially frozen lake. I start thinking about death, as any doctoral candidate must.

I’m still thinking about how many ways there are to die—in mundane accidents, by class warfare, or by eminent catastrophic events—when we enter the club. We get a little table up front, right by the quartet.

It’s stunning in here. Like what we thought about Chicago when we were teenagers im Kino—in one of Freiburg’s many cinemas that ran foreign films.

The dark paintings on the wall above the booths are faded like Roman frescos. High in the corner of the room, above the other side of the stage, is a statue of a nude female figure. Her twentieth-century torso is robust. But there’s a little hairline fracture across her drooping skirt that I can see even from here.

Now I’m meeting my American’s friends. They’re not academics, which is a relief. But my head spins as I rehearse the way I’m going to explain what I do, and what I work on.

They chatter as the musicians do a few checks and push cords around with their toes. A horn player inserts a little cloth into his instrument and drags it out the other side. One of the friends at our table talks about working for hotels. Then it’s my turn.

Yes. Hello.

I lean in and speak louder. Sometimes it’s my accent, and now there’s the instruments.

I am completing a dissertation in philosophy and environmental history.

The bass player snaps a few notes. The drummer is bent low, screwing something tighter on the silver jungle gym in front of his stool.

Yes, so. I am interested in the way the petroleum industries of the West anticipated plastics as the follow-up to the auto industry and how they used highly refined propaganda techniques to prepare the consuming public for this—

SHUSH

transposition of addictive behavior. But I’ve become sort of depressed about the project and have felt that I can’t really contribute—

SSSHHH

Her friends are not listening to me. They are silent. Reverent, even. They nod, agreeing with the intro to the opening song. Sometimes they just barely smile but they don’t say anything, and no one’s on their phone. Not one screen is even face-up on the table. Are we just going to have to remember this, then?

The sound of the bass line is infectious, contagious, I catch it and forget what I was talking about. After a while, the bassist hangs her head low, and all we can see is her hair and her knuckles as they dig and scrape at tones we feel somewhere other than our ears. There’s no movement in the crowd. All eyes are on her pinky, quivering at the top of an instrument as tall as herself, then diving down to find the song, from which I thought she had completely departed, in the lowest and thickest notes. How did my American know to clap?

And she knew when not to clap. The pianist somehow was right alongside the bassist at the rediscovery of the tune, and now they’re off again, all four of them, hardly stopping to observe that some new and beautiful melody had been brought into this world just for us almost as soon as it disappeared again, without a trace.

I want to remember. If this is how I die, in here, if the climate apocalypse really gets going during this song, I might be okay with that. I might be capable of writing again. I wish I could open my laptop and, inspired, complete the literature review portion right here. But, of course, the apocalypse is already underway. I wonder if the musicians have children, how their music will change when we all get appropriately sad. If they are not sad, they are not smart.

I sit back in my chair again and stare at the floor of the stage. Now the pianist is taking a solo. We’re so close I can just barely hear the mechanics, the ropes and pulleys of the damper pedal, squelch quietly as his foot magnifies chords under his melody.

I try to suppress what I know. I’ve done studies on how the Great Lakes will eat their beaches, Lake Michigan will gnaw on this city’s favorite road, leaving big, anaerobic puddles in the old subway lines to stink impossibly bad. I lean in close to the glowing heads around our tiny table.

We’re all going to die, and it’s mostly because of you.

SSSSSHHHHHH

In the United States, every year, you each emit fifteen metric tons of carbon dioxide. Fifteen metric tons! You are killing me, you understand? Just by being yourself. You are five percent of the world’s population. You consume a quarter of its energy! So you destroy us. Every day. And your withdrawal from international climate accords? Crime against humanity. An absolute war crime.

They applaud. Now the saxophonist is playing something I think I’ve heard. It’s a variation on a theme, I guess. But I’ve never heard the way the pads, those keys under his fingers, softly clamp up and down, the brass hinges folding under the weight of each press. I’ve never been so close to a body breathing so hard that I wasn’t running or cycling next to, or I like to think, having sex with.

I feel again like I can write my project. What is real now is objectively terrible, and needs to be met with an equal or greater ferocity from us humans. I squeeze my cocktail napkin—I’m going to need to write this down. I pull a pen from my shirt pocket. We need to become a larger self. Expanded. There will be no normal, only an expanded capacity for monstrosity/action. I add a question mark.

It could be bad, becoming different, larger, more terrifying. But it could be good. It could transform the mere idea of revolution into a determinate concept! The only self that can defy centuries worth of propagandic study of our own weaknesses and comforts is a new self. I scratch out self. I look up, listening.

The cocktail waitress is stealthy. I don’t see her clear our table and move on to the next one. I don’t see where the napkin goes but it’s gone when I reach down with my pen. No one seems to have noticed, but I’m embarrassed now, for letting my emotions make me handwrite something in a jazz club like some poet.

Afterward, we walk out into the spring night and I step into a deep trap of black water, sloshed with ice. My shoe comes up with what looks like a soaked napkin stuck to it, but there’s no way. I don’t even look at it. I wipe it off on the curb on the other side of the street.

In the morning, we decide to go walking instead of do work. Along the lake, a seagull barrel rolls over our heads in the wind then rights itself and aims for a chunk of concrete. We watch it land, backlit by a purple afternoon. The bright white bird jabs at its friend’s neck. We argue, all the way home, about whether they are on the verge of fighting or about to mate.

My desk back at her apartment is covered with snakes, wound and coiled and mostly plugged in. I shirk off the image of the birds and try to get serious. She pops in her head after I’ve been in there one and one-quarter hours.

You done yet? Just click “send.”

That’s not how this works.

Take a break?

I just started. Can you do something else, somewhere else, please?

Sure.

She walks closer to me, lifts up her shirt and shakes her breasts. She restores her clothing and retreats.

Love is destabilizing. Love is like the worst biofeedback loop; it lays ruin to your future, maybe your present, even though it kind of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? Even though you gorge on its pleasures, indulge your fleshy body for hours of bliss, even while you think the view is sublime. Ruinous.

I take a deep breath.

Introduction to Chapter 4

The preceding section focused on the three most prevalent factors in the process by which environmental concerns arising in the early twentieth century were effectively chilled by a campaign combining statecraft and propaganda techniques borrowed from wartime political strategy. In what follows, a mimesis of these same techniques will be traced forward into their evolution in later twentieth century public relations campaigns advanced by fossil fuel interests, demonstrating a particularly American brand of neoliberal late capitalism at work in the beliefs and attitudes which undergirded resistance to biospheric egalitarianism or its political manifestations.

Hey. Are you done yet? Wanna eat?

No. Also no. Can you go watch TV or something, or whatever it is you do?

Hey, guess what?

What.

Assholes’ essays haven’t done shit for the climate crisis, either.

After the slam comes the smell of scallions being fried with garlic. She has to insist on living. The smell doesn’t lie. It’s good. She’s the first to speak at the table.

Look. If you get so—just fucking bleak, they’ve got you. You know?

No. I do not know what that means.

It means the revolution hasn’t gotten far with depressed academics.

I grate a bit of quality pecorino onto my homemade Florentine sauce. The softness melts under the roof of my mouth, the nut flavor sinks into my teeth. I’m alive. I have cheese. Maybe we do need to liven up. Maybe we are on the verge of mating. Maybe these pleasures are not an erasure of my knowledge.

Or maybe this is how Americans get you. Maybe I’ll die happy, my body and my scholarships slowly washing out to sea. She made tiramisu. I’ll finish Chapter 4 another day.

MK STURDEVANT

MK Sturdevant writes and teaches environmental philosophy in the Chicago area, and has studied in Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Her poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in Orion, Newfound, Kestrel, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Tiny Molecules, The Great Lakes Review, and The Lily Poetry Review, among others.