Hannah, for example, took dozens of photos of herself every day. Her dark hair fell to her hips, and impressive cheekbones protruded from her face. These things needed to be documented. She let a weather app determine what she wore, she found her way around the city exclusively by Google Maps, tracked her physical activity, her body fat percentage, and sang grime to a playback app. In short, Hannah grew accustomed to the new conditions. She was a child, and they grow accustomed to any kind of shit, because they lack comparisons that would allow them to recognize the wretchedness of their circumstances. Even grief becomes a normal condition. It wasn’t always focused and sharp, it just became a background noise, always there, somewhere in their brains. Hannah could laugh and look at grime videos and talk about boys, and yet the grief was still present and made Hannah feel as if nothing was real. A laughing Hannah avatar made its way through the day, but at night it was cold. The nights, when she couldn’t sleep, she thought of Dr. Brown. Whom she would someday kill. The nights, when screams came from the cellar.

When

HANNAH’S FATHER

ETHNICITY: Asian

HOBBIES: cat videos

HEALTH: endogenic depression after loss

POLITICAL TENDENCIES: none

CONSUMER VIABILITY: nil

Couldn’t sleep. Like so many. Millions lay in prisons, in dark holes, in shanties, lay next to their decaying mother in bed, in slums where the stench was the most pleasant aspect of the place. Many no longer knew why they should stay alive; they would desperately have liked not to be there anymore, but how did one go about that, how does one die? It’s not easy to kill oneself. Where to get the energy when life already feels as if you’ve taken sleeping pills. You can’t just feel your way along the wall blindly. The futility of every motion caused bodily pain. The way to the kitchen through the basement hallways with their flickering lights and the neon-colored walls, and behind the doors always someone sitting there engulfed in madness. Surrounded by promises made by some agency to give them hope. To make them believe they can make it. Which in this social system always involved a yacht.

Life in the cellar was like a halfway point between life and death. There was a marked slowing of thought and increasingly hazy movements, an apathy that gripped every part of the body. This was very helpful for Hannah’s father, because in every life-sustaining measure he saw disgust-inducing evidence that he wasn’t yet dead. He began to hate even Hannah. Because she was there. He hated himself for his hate, but was too tired to examine it.

He saw his dead wife everywhere. She stood next to him. Sat next to him on the bed. Hannah’s