Chapter Two: Ann

It's impossible to know, when you first set out to report on a story, just what that story will become. This is the the fact, the thrill, that hooked Ann from the start. From her very first assignment—for her middle school rag, the Barstow Bulletin. 

She’d joined the paper to persuade her immigrant parents she was studious. Serious. Already packing her CV with those extracurriculars colleges would admire most. Honoring their many sacrifices with some sacrifices of her own. Not because she believed she had a passion for reportage. 

She’d gone to the marching band’s bake sale expecting some grandmother’s secret family recipe would be the juiciest scoop she could unearth. But she’d met Mr. Alvarez there, who, besides baking a mean dulce de leche cheesecake, served as Chief Observer and Telescope Engineer at the solar observatory down in Big Bear. And, instead of two graphs on the cash some scones and rugelach raised, she’d turned in two thousand words on solar flares, coronal mass ejections, magnetic field studies, and—her true subject, which the science simply served to, shall we say, illuminate—the mindset of a man who spent his days staring at the sun. 

She can still recite from memory the final graph of that piece, which had pleased her so and pleases her still: “Mr. Alvarez walks me back along the causeway from the observatory to the shore, to the parking lot, where my mother will be collecting me, but halfway across he stops. He’s gone silent, and he points, not to the sky but to the water. I stare, I squint, looking for the bird I figure must be the cause of his awe, but I’m blind to it. He has seen something that I don’t.” 

She still remembers how Mr. Olsen, the Bulletin’s nerdy, 6’3”, paper-white, bowtie-clad faculty advisor—who, to this day, emails her whenever she’s published a new story, to say how great it is and why—raised her pages in the air for proof, and, like a prosecutor resting his case, boomed,“By god, Ann, you’ve got it!” 

Her sophomore year of high school, she begged a weekly column from the local daily, which in short order—thanks to her technicolor portrait of a Dolly Parton impersonator—won her the national attention that assured her a full scholarship to Berkeley, and, in so doing, assured her parents that their daughter’s passion could translate into a profession, thus perfectly pleasing everyone. 

Ann’s been a star in her field from the start. But, aside from the comfort this brings Mr. and Mrs. Tsing, aside from the permission it gives her to continue her work, she really doesn’t care. Pure of heart, Noah always called her, which she’d never claim herself, but it’s true. She still wants what she always wanted: that first thrill, like new love. Of stepping once more into an unknown universe. Where her expectations are certain to be exploded; assumptions left in the dust. Where, no matter the hours she’s clocked, the skills she’s amassed, she will have to find a fresh form to do this particular subject justice. 

Across the bar, she catches Matt’s eye and gestures for another last word. 

It’s a group she’s profiling this time, a collective of climate activists calling themselves One Point Five Degrees C, aiming to call attention to the amount of planetary warming—past pre-industrial levels—beyond which our species would be verging on suicidal to push this planet. 

It’s an assignment for which she lobbied, part of The Magazine’s upcoming “Saviors” issue, a collection of profiles of folks working to preserve a variety of people, places and things—global food crop seeds, the world’s most endangered language, a library of unpublished books, orangutans, your soul—and so also an investigation into the impulse for salvation, its motivations, its mutations, its morality, or lack thereof.

It’s an idea that she and Noah cooked up on a rare non-work-related trip to New Zealand. A vacation, at least in theory. But after they learned about the kākāpō from their BnB hosts—an endangered, nocturnal, ground-dwelling parrot with a whiskered countenance somehow both stately and hilarious—they spent the rest of their two weeks googling Earth’s rarities and discussing what it means to be saved, then pitched the idea to Tricia, The Magazine’s managing editor, from a gate lounge in Mascot Airport. 

Of course, this was before Noah’s feelings for Norah turned serious. Before he came to Ann with tears already in his eyes and the first thing he said was how sorry he was. 

Matt trades her empty coupe for a full one. Everyone thinks their bartender is their best friend, but for Ann it’s true. She’s known Matt longer than she’s known Noah, since her first week in Los Angeles, in fact. He was one of the first friends in whom she confided that she and Noah chose to open up their relationship. And he’s one of the few friends to whom she’s admitted that that experiment in loving freely will now be ending in divorce. 

Every story has to take its own shape, but Ann is happiest when she can find a way to foreshadow the final scene in the first. Subtly, so you only understand the connection as you are reading the conclusion. After which, looking back, you find the whole piece shimmering with an extra significance. It’s her contention that this is generally how life works. That the signs are there from the start, but we miss them, or misinterpret them, like Macbeth hearing the witches’ prophesy. 

Is this true? The day she met Noah, for instance—was there any whisper in it, of the how he would one day be packing up his half of their shared life to start anew with someone other? 

That day was nine years ago, but she can still recall it in perfect detail. A journalist lives on high alert, ears perked, nerves piqued, awake to the potential in all small things to reveal secret truths and hidden leads, to turn metaphor in a certain salat of light.

And Ann was working on a story that day. She was in San Diego on assignment for Spin, profiling indie-rock cult favorite John Vanderslice as he toured the country in support of his seventh record, Romanian Names. “Sandwiched between the airport and the freeway, in the shadow of a billboard and surrounded by parking garages, the Casbah isn’t a venue you’d ever just happen upon. This is a destination to which the initiated pilgrimage with intention,” she’d written. “In this way it functions much like Vanderslice’s music.” She’d watched the band load in and sound check—she was on tour with them through the weekend—but when they’d taken the van back to the hotel to make their separate preparations for the show, she’d opted to stay in the city, to find a shot of espresso and wend her way to the Central Library. 

There was a line in an E.B. White essay, just the gist of which she recalled, which she thought might be a perfect articulation of something she’d observed in Vanderslice’s character. She had the book on her shelf back home, she could have waited to look it up. But the not-quite-knowing was nagging at her. 

Noah had gone for a hit of nostalgia and a dose of calm. He was back in his hometown to attend his parents’ thirtieth anniversary blowout, boisterous siblings crowded the house, and, under the pretense of picking up something they definitely couldn’t do without, he’d slipped out to this favorite haunt of his youth.  

She heard his voice before she saw him. Noah had a deeper voice than you might expect, nothing unnatural but with a gravitas that, at least then, he didn’t possess. “Forgive me,” was the first thing he said to her. Was that the subtle foreshadowing she had missed? Another apology, like the apology with which he began his bearing-of-his-soul, his breaking-of-her-heart. But not like that apology at all. The first had been a prelude to flirtation. The last, to the dissolution of their marriage. Bookends, if you will. She knows Noah would laugh at that. 

He’d been apologizing, that day in the stacks, for approaching a woman at her work. He swore it wasn’t something he ever did. But the collection in her hand, One Man’s Meat…he begged her to flip to the checkout card. There was his name, once, twice, thrice…four times—irrefutable proof of true love. 

“Good ol’ Elwyn!” he said, smiling the smile she would come to describe as his boyhood grin, a smile of unabashed delight, the same smile that would make such a memorable appearance three months later when she brought him back to her hometown; they’d be making polite conversation in the kitchen, making their way through the pleasantries, and mid-sentence he would, “Woah!,” walk past her mom, through to the living room, where he’d have spotted her father’s upright; he’d seat himself and just start noodling, not even very well, an approximation of “Für Elise,” and he’d holler across to them, in a house that had never known hollering, “Everyone should have one in their home!” 

“Good ol’ Elwyn!” He was such a fan, he couldn’t help himself. Had to tell her about it. “I mean, ‘It was thirty hours or more since I’d slipped into hurricane mood, and I could feel the telling effects of such sustained emotional living,’” He quoted from “Eye of Edna,” which she did recognize. “Hurricane mood! How great?! I say that to myself at least once a week. He’s just so casually deft. I mean, I don’t have to tell you. Clearly. You get it. He’s right there in your hands. It just jazzes me to see another enthusiast in the wild. A fellow can get to feeling a little lonely in his tastes, ya know… But, Jesus, sorry! I don’t mean to go on and on.” That was all he’d butted in to say, he swore. “Team E.B.! Unless, you have a minute to spare?”  

She liked him right away. That awkwardness he’s long since outgrown. That passionate enthusiasm that still defines him. They had so much in common, Elwyn was the tip of the iceberg. It turned out he also worked in the magazine biz, was an editor then at Vice. They had so much of substance to discuss from the start. They abandoned the library for a wine bar, where they talked until she was nearly late for the show, until he really was late for his parents’ shindig and the sibs were blowing up his phone. 

“May I?” 

As good as Ann is at observing her surroundings, she’s just good at tuning them out when that’s what the work requires. When she’s thinking, reading, writing. 

Not that she can claim to have done much work in her hour here at the bar. She came to The Looking Glass hoping the background sound and commotion would help her focus, as it so reliably has in the past. But, no. None of her old tricks have been working. She made it through approximately half a paragraph before Matt’s tender, “How are you?” tumbled her into this river of reminiscence. 

Now someone, some man, wants the stool to her right. While she hasn’t been paying attention The Looking Glass has filled up around her.

“Sure, of course,” she says, wishing he wouldn’t. “All yours.” 

To forestall any possible conversation, she returns her attention to the stack of pages before her, the research she’s gathered to review in preparation for her flight to New York next week, where she will interview the founding members of One Point Five Degrees C. 

How much more than she already does does Ann have to know about climate change to write this profile well? She’s read Klein and McKibben and Ghosh and Wallace-Wells. She’s followed the protest movements of Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, The Sunrise Movement, and, of course, One Point Five. She’s familiar with the broad strokes of our predicament. And, anyway, she isn’t writing science journalism here. Her work is human interest. 

But, to understand the mindset of the activists whose characters she’ll be responsible for capturing she figures a dose of the kind of source material they routinely consume might help. Before her is the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change’s latest Assessment Report’s Synthesis Report’s Summary for Policymakers, IPCC AR6 SYR SPM as its authors shorthand it, a text that’s proving about as dry as its title. As dry, she thinks, as the Mojave sands, which she now imagines spreading to swallow up the whole continent as our planet bakes. 

It’s dense, too, its sentences thickets of probabilities, parentheticals, degrees of certainty, degrees of warming, meters of sea level rise. Reading them, she feels like she’s staring at an autostereogram, unable to cross her eyes just right to make its hidden image appear. Instead, she flips through the pages, reading the headings of each graph and chart, which form something of a summary themselves: “Adverse impacts from human-caused climate change will continue to intensify,” “With every increment of global warming, regional changes in mean climate and extremes become more widespread and pronounced,” “Risks are increasing with every increment of warming,” “Limiting warming to 1.5°C and 2°C involves rapid, deep and in most cases immediate greenhouse gas emission reductions,” “There is a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to enable climate resilient development.” 

There is a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity. 

There is a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity! Shouldn’t these sentences make her feel more than they do? 

She sets the pages down to pick up her drink, takes a little sip, lets out a giant sigh and finds her own eyes in the looking glass behind The Looking Glass’s wall of intoxicants. Vacant, she would call her gaze. A glaze. The look of someone neither here nor there. She would say, I watch Ann Tsing as she struggles to recognize the woman she sees before her. And I watch her fail. Were she her own subject.  

But Ann has never sought to center herself in her art. She prefers to understand and express her identity through her interest in other people. Maybe that’s why she’s polyamorous. Maybe that’s why she isn’t looking at herself anymore, in the titular mirror. She’s let her gaze drift right, to the man beside her, the one who, not very long ago, she was so eager to dismiss. 

She can spy on him more easily in the mirror. He’s tall. Even seated this is apparent, even hunched as he is over whatever he’s reading. Which must be a script. He must be an actor. He’s handsome enough. So handsome that she wonders why she doesn’t recognize him. Must be famous. His skin is white and his hair is dark, not as dark as hers but just as thick. He’s gelled it up and back in an echo of 70s greaser fashion. Statement hair, paired with a minimalist plain white tee. 

Like she intended to be, he’s intent on his reading, taking notes in his margins, mouthing along, expressive, gesticulating—an absorption she finds endearing. 

“See something you like?” Matt asks. 

“Shut up.” She glares, and tries to return her attention to the climate report, but all the words just look like: doom, doom, doom. Who can do anything with doom?

When the man finally breaks away from his script to ask Matt for another round, Ann swivels on her stool to say, “I’ll read yours if you read mine.” 

“Ha!” he drops his pencil without hesitation to give her his full attention. Endearing again. “Is it really that bad? Whatcha got over there? Vampires in space? A musical about Afghanistan?” 

“Oh, so much worse. The UN’s report on climate change.” 

He raises a eyebrow artfully.

“I’m a journalist.” 

“Hey now, a real profession! Tell me, how does it feel, to do some actual good in the world?” 

“Oh I can’t tell you that. I’m just a profile writer.” 

“But you’re reading about climate change?” 

“I’m writing about a group of activists.” 

“That sounds like it could do some good.” 

Ann shrugs. “What about you? I feel like I should know who you are?” 

He snorts. “What, because of this pretty face? No, nobody knows me. I’m a writer, too, if you can believe it. Just scripts, though, unfortunately. This is mine.” He taps the pages in front of him. 

“What’s it about?” 

“Vampires in space.” 

To be true to myself and honest with you had been Ann and Noah’s wedding vow, the only rule they’d ever needed and a promise each had always kept. The whole point of being open, they agreed, was that they didn’t believe in black and white, just like they didn’t believe in til death do us part. They never had to stipulate, as they heard other poly couples do, who could fuck whom and where and when and what could or couldn’t be said about it afterwards, to whom and under what circumstances. Their single, guiding principle was enough. They trusted one another. They respected one another. And, as such—not because it wasn’t allowed, but because it would have felt wrong—Ann has never brought another man back to their home. Which is just her home now, she supposes, though it doesn’t feel like that yet. 

Is this her way of trying to make it so? Or is this just an excuse not to have to think more about the dire warnings of the IPCC AR6 SYR SPM? Or—did she really feel something, back there in The Looking Glass, for this stupidly handsome screenwriter that she owes it to them both to pursue? 

Who the fuck knows? He’s here now, oblivious to the many feelings she’s having because she hasn’t said anything about them. He’s camped in front of her vinyl collection having a grand old time flipping through, talking about the bands he’s seen and the ones he wishes he could. He’s younger than she is, she realizes, a fact that makes her infinitely sad. 

“I did a lot of music journalism for a spell,” she says, sitting beside him, right next to him, trying to give this thing a chance. And he turns to her, as he did at the bar, and she’s startled again by how focused he is. On her. 

“That’s cool,” he says, not breaking eye contact. He cups her chin in his hand and leans swiftly across the distance between them, never closing his eyes. Swiftly, but then he pauses, and—

Ann has taken her fair share of men to bed since she and Noah opened their relationship, each experience a window onto another corner of existence, an expansion of her picture of the world. But what she valued most about these encounters was how, without any effort on her part, they all always led her back to Noah, confirming for her, as nothing else could, that her heart was his, that he was her home, that they were indeed the match they had taken themselves to be. 

It’s all she can think when he begins kissing her. Her feelings haven’t changed. If anything, she only loves Noah more for the way he’s done just what he promised to do: has been true to himself and honest with her. His evolution has been beautiful to see. It’s been her fucking favorite thing to observe. And suddenly this seems like the greatest loss of all, her front row seat to his becoming. 

What on Earth is she supposed to care about now? How we might or might not survive the climate crisis? 

“I’m so sorry,” she tells him. “I can’t.” And, because he is kind and inquiring, and because she doesn’t really want to be alone, she tells him the story of how this became her life.