The New Roaring '20s

I’m telling you, you don’t understand how a desperate senator, reeling from the loss of his wife, can unite with other desperate senators and governors and leaders so that civilization is inextricably altered and all of a sudden your phone downloads a mandatory “safety” app that pings every time you get within 10 feet of another fucking human being. The pings increase in frequency every foot you draw closer, and once you pass that six foot mark, your phone blares an alarm that makes you miss the days of Amber Alerts.

Amber Alerts, at least, weren’t accompanied by exponential fine increments until a specialized SWAT team swoops in to take you to an Isolation Camp. To eliminate the risk.

Because now, you are the risk. Or rather, I am the risk, since you are not here yet, but I speak to you as if you are.

I am the risk.

We are all the risk, and simultaneously all at risk.

When all you’ve seen of humanity for nearly a decade is just a multitude of hazmat suits at the grocery store, it makes you wonder if you’re even alive anymore. Maybe you’re the only one left. Maybe everyone else is just pretending to be human.

There are whispers on the internet that some of us aren’t. Human, that is. That the isolation camps are where they keep those of us who are more than dead, and that the only way to keep them satisfied and controlled is by keeping a steady supply of new “at-risk” individuals.

Hence the SWAT teams, and that infernal app.

But there isn’t a way to verify those rumors, of course, not with the curfew and the GPS tracking and the surveillance drones. A perfect system, really. We all voted for these things, dug our own graves. Democracy really is beautiful, isn’t it?

I’m here to advise you to appreciate these days when your convictions cost you nothing, so you give them away freely. You don’t think to store your virtue neatly on the emergency supply shelf in a heart-shaped locket. Even if you do, it will run out eventually, succumbing to what you hope is sanity.

Because the New Roaring 20’s are only going to be the way you imagined for about, ehh, two months, give or take. Less, if you live outside the States.

After those two measly months, it will not be what you expect. You want the feathers, the sequins, the high hemlines and even higher eyebrows. You imagine a party equal to Jay’s, done up with endless string lights, champagne, and suittails.

But you’re a fool to think you can pick apart history like that. You can’t piecemeal the facts.

Instead, you will get television shows that you watch despite the Moonie actors who can’t act, hired because they can at least walk and talk and breathe outside. The deathbed is the new Juilliard, they say.

Instead, you fill your government-issued hazmat suit with a body that is more dread than flesh, and wonder if today will be the day that your atrophied legs will finally stop picking you back up.

Instead, you get to stare out your window in anticipation at anyone who dares walk past your house bare-faced, your fingers hovering over your phone, and wonder if their life is worth the reward for tapping on that app. And how many termination taps does it take to get a 24-hour, supervised, quarantined visitation with your out-of-state family?

I’m here to warn you, yes, but also to tell you a secret:

If you know where to go, if you have enough rewards saved up from the neighborhood you have emptied, you can follow the instructions on a paper map to a dark parking lot, where a man will give you a chip for your phone that lasts as long as the night. Then you can follow that man - at whatever distance you like - to a dark house in a dark neighborhood that should be gated, but isn’t anymore, to a descending cobblestone staircase, to a door that you knock on with bare knuckles.

To a room full of people who followed the same man, who have the same chips in their phones, the same empty neighborhoods, and the same depleted bank accounts.

There, you will tuck your silent phone in your pocket as you peel off your hazmat suit and carefully hang it on a hook beside the others.

There, the first touch of someone’s hand on yours will snuff out what’s left of that stored-up virtue, and suddenly, you have no doubts.

You’ll remember that you are human.

Because there, you can dance.