Photograph by Yasu + Junko

She had never perfected the trick of moistening the envelope flap with the tip of her tongue so it would stick and lie perfectly flat. In those days, perfect meant as if untouched by hands. Her flaps were always overwet and lumpy; when she pressed them down, she made them worse. Still, she loved folding the paper twice over, into three equal parts; she loved writing addresses, but especially her name and address in the upper-left corner. J. Seiden. 29 Portnock Road. The dignity, the businesslike efficiency of these slim objects, asking nothing, never disclosing more than they needed to. An envelope with only a check inside flapped like a flag, but an envelope containing a two-page letter had a solid integrity on every plane. A writer only in the sense that she loved having written. She slid the envelopes under the metal lid of the mailbox on her parents’ porch and stared at them for a few moments. Proof of her existence in the world. Proof the world existed. You could count on it: someone was coming to take them away. Proof you would be sent, proof you would arrive.

She’s sitting with Quentin at the Caf Café, set up under an enormous beech tree next to the South Royalton charging tower—a collection of salvaged plastic tables and chairs and a wheelbarrow cut up and welded into a wood-burning stove. The café serves mostly sassafras and stinging-nettle tea, but now and again there are red-market goods, unearthed from a collapsed house or a forgotten box in the pantry: half-rotted Lipton bags or dented cans of Bustelo two years past their expiration date. Dorrie, the owner, is a strict no-currency Vore, and you have to know her to get in on the bartering for the really good stuff. But it’s worth biking the seven miles just to bask in the shade of Quentin’s unrepentant optimism. Quentin is a Resurrectionist, a money hoarder. Before that, before the last supplies ran out, he traded unleaded on the red market. He’s the last one left in South Royalton with a working laptop, a silver incongruity whenever he takes it from its case and plugs the white cord into the charging tower’s concatenation of rusting cables. Five minutes of charge keeps the battery alive. People stare at him until he anxiously gathers the laptop up and slips away. Not that anyone would steal it. They just don’t want to be reminded. This isn’t fucking Starbucks, some crusty Vore always mutters.

She herself takes a bag of nails everywhere she goes, bound up with fraying rubber bands. Everybody needs nails, and the Rumsons left boxes and boxes of them, sorted by size and type, in the basement. Her basement. Though only in the most accidental sense: it was Nathan who’d found the house, as a caretaker gig on Craigslist.

Audio: Jess Row reads.

Anyway, Quentin’s saying, I was down at the Grange listening to these guys arguing about the difference between dystopia and apocalypse. Can you believe that? One of them was saying that we were living in a dystopian novel, and the other guy, big bearded dude, from the West Rats Collective, said, No, dystopia means an imaginary place where everything is exactly wrong, and what we’re living in is a postapocalyptic, prelapsarian kind of thing, you know, a return to nature after the collapse of society as we knew it. Want some?

He unscrews a Burt’s Bees tin and holds it out to her. Pine sap—milky, resiny, the consistency of caramel. People say it’s almost as good as Nicorette. She shakes her head. He scoops some onto his thumbnail.

And I must have been three or four shots in—we were drinking Wayne Peters’s sweet-potato vodka—because I said, Look, kiddos, the truth is neither, because we have no idea what might happen, the infrastructure is still basically in place, especially if people from certain collectives hadn’t stripped out the copper over in White River—

No copper, no charging tower, she says.

—but my point is really that dystopian and postapocalyptic narratives are narratives, that is, stories: things that are inherently invented or collated ex post facto. Narratives are static. Real life is, is—

Kinetic?

The point is, we need to just let all that shit go, because, call it End Times or whatever you want, things are different now. None of the old endings played out, did they? So we have to imagine new endings. Hence the possibility for hope.

They must have gone easy on you.

They just started crying. That’s the sad thing. Haven’t seen so much crying since August of ’15. Some people, you get a little liquor in them and it’s all about the old times. They want to huddle up and sing Lady Gaga.

The dark is thickening now. Dorrie clanks her step stool from one low-hanging branch to another, lighting the candles inside each red glass globe. Tomas, the glassblower, held out for almost two years, firing the furnace with the last of his stored L.P.G., then with wood, making thick, indestructible goblets and candle lanterns, heavy and irregular as stones. He’d had exhibits at the Met and the Louvre, had made Christmas ornaments for the White House; now he’s buried under a cairn up on Hull Mountain, dead of spring dysentery.

He’s right, she’s thinking, we have no story for ourselves, we’ve outlasted the predictions, we’re too boring to be apocalyptic. But what would hope mean, after all that’s happened? Hope for whom? Quentin’s current theory has something to do with Caspar Weinberger, fallout shelters, server farms, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I’m the town crank, he told her once, swigging from a gallon jug of cider on her porch, his face ribboned with tears.

If she didn’t want to spare his feelings she would tell him—the way only one liberal-arts college graduate can say to another—that the problem isn’t just narrative. It’s theory. The era of sense-making itself has passed. We don’t need an analyst, she thinks, or an oracle, God forbid; we need a chronicler, a town recorder, a church Bible full of births and deaths. An inventory with a few highlights, one or two safety tips. A bit of incidental knowledge for whoever comes along next. But who has the hours to sit parked at a desk, smithing words, when there’s ten pounds of berries in buckets on the porch, waiting to be picked over and dried on sheets in the sun?