On the train home, she read a French graphic memoir about a miserable childhood. Hers had only been lonely because of her own choices, she thought. She had been loved as much as one could expect to be loved. She spent a lot of time thinking about it, all the little things that had happened. The captured newts, accidentally suffocated in Tupperware; the plastic bracelet, intentionally stolen from a comrade. The hours spent in bodies of water with Philip, their circular, deepening speculations about the nature of the world, the lies their parents told them, the existence of ghosts. Once, she had awoken to the bedsheets floating above her body. Once, they had stayed up all night wandering the halls of a purportedly haunted hotel and found nothing.

Her tendency toward disaster had continued into her late childhood, that is, until she was almost thirty. The disasters were still, she reckoned, accidents of carelessness. Being drunk increased the chances of a mistake. Being high gave her the elusive sense that all choices were not her own, that she was guided by some unyielding force of the universe. After a decade of the enforced stupidity of substances, sobriety felt like a magic trick. What, you got smarter by not doing things? She was careful with herself now, overly attentive to what went on around her. She didn’t feel fragile, exactly. It was something like: she understood that the things of the world had weight and force, and that she did, too, and that, in combination, this could pose problems. She also sensed that the significant disasters of life—illness, marriage, children—might approach her less forthrightly than, say, a friend offering her some really excellent cocaine. She thought there was a chance that if she learned to recognize these small steps into the abyss, she might avoid, or at least postpone, the big ones.

At home, she poured herself a glass of orange juice and seltzer and drank it in front of her laptop, clicking between Word documents and the news. The world had been captured by the very stupid and evil—this was what Philip texted to tell her now most of the time, but she didn’t mind it as much, coming from him. They were doomed and it mostly wasn’t their fault. They’d been kind and artistic, and if they hadn’t done as much as they should have for others, they at least hadn’t actively made the world worse. They should have done more to stop their parents’ participation in rapacious capitalism, but that was hard. Even Marx took money from his parents, probably. Now that the world was over they were all donating money, chanting in public, crying on the phone.

No, she wasn’t so cynical. She thought there was a chance that things could be made right eventually. She just couldn’t imagine when that would be.