Exit Event #3
Suddenly, the heaviness on her windpipe disappears, along with the weight of him.
Coughing, she immediately gasps for air, rolling onto her side; vision careening light with relief, then dark with dizziness,
resolving and fading, tangled grasp of her hand in the covers, trying to steady herself, the rapid thud of blood at her temples,
like her body’s restarting, between panting coughs, bruised throat, searing lungs.
“Get out.”
The impact of that—those words—is like the last few weeks crumpling in, on a single moment.
“Wh—what?” she whispers.
At the edge of the bed, Aleksandr holds his head in his hands.
“Just get out,” he says. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t play these fucking games anymore.”
Lili tries to reach for him, the mattress shifting under her knees. “Aleksan—”
“Get out.”
A recoil: instant, but immediate—her body from his, his body from hers; repelling, wounded.
Lili scrambles from the bed. Unsteady, she finds her clothes, and pulls them on fast, trying to hold onto some last bit of
strength. Somehow, she kicks on her shoes, grabs her bag, and runs out of the loft.
She’s out the building, down the street—a blur past Louis, shoving the door open—before she takes a harsh gasp of air—inhaling
the city noise of this specific street, gallery staff, delivery people—before her breathing starts to break, before she is
crying, she is finally, fully, and utterly crying.
There’s a small park a few blocks down. It is lush with green trees, cobblestones, and pigeons. A few businessmen in suits
walk through, on phone calls. Tribeca moms push prams, and a pair of teenagers lean against a tree, sharing tangled white
headphones as they listen to music.
She’s cold as she finds a bench. Her sweater is missing, she realizes. As she looks behind her, cheeks wet with tears, there’s
a sharp twinge in her throat.
She sits down, and rests a hand on her chest, trying to be gentle.
You’re here, she thinks. You’re here.
The collapse of hope, even deserved, is horrendous: a horror in the body.
This arrangement had started between them in the late months of spring, May: summer descending, casting its glow—excitement,
loose possibilities, light consequences. The course of it feels like a scent she can remember, that brings it all rushing
back, as she sits here, as summer ends, without him.
Children run through the park, disturbing pigeons that fly off into the trees.
The grass is spotty; earth pokes through the scatter of fresh seeds left by the parks department.
A sudden rise of laughter makes Lili flinch; the two kids leaning against the tree, sitting with their knees knocked together, are joking about something.
She tries to grasp at landmarks: a few more months, graduation, early thesis defense. Then maybe she can leave the city, move
on elsewhere? Possibilities, plans; desperate, meaningless things, but she has to imagine a life onwards. She made a mistake—a mistake, she wants to scream—but her intention doesn’t matter, not anymore.
Lili inhales, a deep breath ragged with sobs. It hurts, but she needs to feel the edges of this pain; to know she will live
through it, with it, and eventually past it. She will live her life in the aftermath, but she will not be the aftermath. There
are years ahead of her, and that cannot be a dark, cold thing to her.
It cannot.
She needs to believe it—that there are other places, and other bodies, and a full life for her, still out there. Because otherwise,
what else is there? It’s a hope she must cultivate, that there will be things, still, some pale, faded brightness, worth having
in her future; not the things she’d wanted—the things she still wants, as she cries on this bench—but there will be places for her, eventually, past the ruin of her mistakes. Even if the fit
is too loose, or too tight, and no one will ever quite touch her like he did.
But is that not—is that not better, than never having known each other?
It is difficult to release the instinctive flinch she feels, caught in her skin: constantly poised for the crash, for the
bright to turn dark, for the things she loves to be snatched away from her. But as she sits here, with tears clustering her
chin, she finds she has no energy left to brace. She can only let go, revealing something tired and small, but there: She
is still there. And even sitting here, in the ruins, it does not feel like a left behind, like it always has. It feels like
loneliness, yes, alone—her in the world, with her own two feet, and her own two hands, and her own one breath—but a thing
she could accept, rather than something that will break her.
Actions, and decisions; choices made, and the agency in that.
And yes, the wrong actions—choices that were mistakes—but still, a thing she did, rather than a thing that happened to her.
She hears footsteps on cobblestones. Someone walks into the park. There’s traffic, white noise buzzing on Sixth Avenue behind
her.
“Lili.”
A familiar voice. She looks up, to see Aleksandr standing in front of her.
Tears immediately sting; he must want her entirely gone, out of his neighborhood, followed to make sure she’d leave. “Sorry,
sorry—” Her voice breaks, as she swipes at her tears roughly. “I’ll leave, sorry—”
He sighs, near exhausted. Then he sits down beside her, on the bench.
“You left your sweater.”
Lili nods, drawing her knees into her chest. There isn’t a sweater in his hands.
Why is he here?
Why is he here?
Newspaper rustles on a nearby bench, left behind. Pigeons coo, bobbing along the path. As silence drifts between them, she
glances at him.
He is not looking at her. He watches the park, leaning forward with elbows against his knees. He’s pulled on a sweater since
she saw him, shoulders tense. His eyes, just barely, are red.
Lili frowns, seeing that. But she waits for him to speak.
Uncertainty has never been a comfortable thing for her.
It’s from uncertainty that much of Protestant moral culture emerges. The memory of Kerr’s voice, across the lecture hall. One of her first classes with him in early undergrad. Economic Sociology,
a 400-level course she’d finagled her way into. Grappling with the uncertainty inherent in predestination, anxiety around their own individual salvation—this is perhaps the
most crucial aspect of the Protestant moral framework that becomes secularized.
Around her, the scratch of pens on paper, typing on laptops. But Lili hadn’t been able to look away from Kerr, lecturing off
the cuff.
These anxieties around predestination, he continued, there’s a direct through line to the anxieties of late capitalism. To echo Fromm, we’d say that the most significant psychic
need in the Protestant character structure is the need for relief from this immense anxiety about salvation. That psychic
need persists today, although we’re not concerned about the afterlife and salvation, but the material outcomes of our uncertain
world.
Work then becomes—as we know Weber argued—an act of signification; the answer to that psychic need, an attempt to soothe that unsoothable anxiety.
For Weber, Protestants worked so diligently because through such labor, they could find proof that they were among God’s chosen, the saved—diligence as a sign of salvation. A way to deal with the uncertainty.
Now, that same type of existential anxiety drives modern capitalist societies today—greases the wheels of capitalism, as you
all like to say. Today, in secular society, most of us don’t believe in heaven at the end of all this, once the curtains close.
So, the stakes of this earthly world become staggering. The world is what we make of it. And while yes, we have more agency
in our dominant moral frameworks than the Protestants, we continue to feel this deep-seated, propelling anxiety to deal with
a fundamentally irresolvable uncertainty—yes, front row there. Marwan, is it?
She nodded, dropping her raised hand. Isn’t that overreaching, professor? she asked. To draw such a direct line between religious belief and secular culture?
How so?
It seems . . . too neat. To translate that hope—this tension between fundamental doubt and unattainable certainty—into how
we live our lives today.
Kerr had smiled, good-natured. You’re here, Marwan, in school—academics as a form of labor, albeit elite—because you are hoping, no? For something better
for your life, attempting to shape the uncertainty of all that your life might be?
She’d frowned. Well, yes, but that’s human. The hope for something more, the worries about what our lives could be—that exists separate from
the anxieties of capitalism.
Does it? Kerr asked.
Of course! I mean—respectfully, yes. That hope, that grappling with uncertainty, that’s part of what it means to be human.
That’s not economics, that’s people.
Ah, but economics are people, he said. Market swings, stock performance, domestic product—we try to put numbers on it, but economies are human, at the end of the
day. They are the expression of what we believe, and think, and feel, an accumulation of all our anxieties and hopes. All
of our economic theory, it’s an attempt to map our desires, our wants, our fears into something logical. We are all of us,
trying constantly to make sense of the world. A way to make the uncertain a thing we can grapple with. That, Marwan, is the
foundation of economics.
Uncertainty.
Always difficult for her, yet so familiar: those months after her parents died, weeks in the group home; arriving in Marin, redwoods and fog; years fostered, Jane’s yellow house, unable to fully relax; would she be able to stay, was this home now?
Faced with uncertainty, she has always rather tip the scales, force a decision into one outcome or the other, rather than
linger in the unknown.
Instead, now: She waits and lets it be. She feels almost adrift in her lack of hope and expectation; no chance of losing him,
no chance of having him.
When he exhales—a hard, disciplined breath—Lili flinches.