Two straight people in a relationship, profoundly sunk into a loveseat, look through their legs at their androgynous therapist planted in a gaming chair. The therapist is playing Grand Theft Motto, a game wherein you steal “To Protect and Serve” plaques from police stations and if you are caught you must then kill every cop on the planet. Most people dismiss the game for its lame parody title and impossible objective, but this therapist is ruthlessly open-minded. The therapist’s avatar, a mix of the most socially constructed races, ducks into a bathroom stall as the woman’s restroom fills up with officers in SWAT gear. The cop genocide progress bar is about .00047% full.
The straight people collaborate on a polite cough embedded with COVID-19.
“Shhhh, the pigs can hear us,” the therapist whispers.
A virtual cop perks up their little ears and shoots hundreds of bullets through the bathroom stall, killing the therapist and a white baby they were holding for a sidequest. The therapist tears off their gaming google glasses and throws them in the paper shredder. Now they have to start all over again.
The therapist does some tight donuts in their gaming chair to remove the cobwebs from it and turns to the deeply sunk-in couple, folded in half and only able to see their mental health practitioner from the nose up.
“Apologies for that. It was my fault for going into the woman’s restroom. Cops get an insane damage boost in there.”
The therapist’s office is coated in overlapping diplomas from various institutions. Some of the institutions have been shuttered for decades (Awesome Transphobic Community College), others are yet to exist (Gay Communism Community College). It’s easy for a run-of-the-mill patient to recognize that the abbreviations on these diplomas (ATCC, GCCC) form valid genetic sequences. But a few mentally ill nerds understand that if the sequences were chained together it would create a creature capable of lactation, and that’s about it.
The therapist climbs over the trophies they got for accurately diagnosing women with personality disorders to their paper shredder. They stitch their shredded google glasses together with some of the cobwebs still stuck to them, put them on, and read the 23-page file for patients succumbing to the cushions in their office. There are too many deadly hurricane alerts popping up for them to read anything. Fuck it, they think, let’s do this one without the data Peter Thiel gives me, like the good olden days. Their thoughts are captured by some smart speakers playing Alternative Medicine is Awesome by Billy Joel at a nearby Walmart. A laser dot appears on their head for the crime of constructing an idealized version of the past
“What are your names and what are your problems?” the therapist whispers, still acting as if they are surrounded by nosey murderous police.
“I’m Woman, and this is Man,” says Woman.
“Oh, so you’re dating. Cool, cool. I’m T, the Therapist,” T, the Therapist, says.
Woman continues, “Man and I have been dating for two long years. It has been loving. However, we recently uncovered some political differences we are finding difficult to navigate.”
Man butts in: “Hi, I’m the boyfriend. Trump 2024! Huzzah!” The year is 2029.
T surveys what little they can see of the couple, which amounts to the tippy-tops of their heads and the bitty-bottoms of their shoes. Woman is wearing jackboots and silky blue hair – a wig? Man is barefoot (he took off his pink Vans before entering the office) and is wearing aviator shades slipping around his bald head. T takes note of the laser dot on his head in the reflection of the shiny scalp of Man. They think something positive about COVID restrictions which triggers an Antifa agent to locate the sniper trained on T’s head and bash them to death with a marble bust of Lenin kissing the Democrats’ donkey.
“Tell me a little bit about what’s been going on with you two, or a lot! I’m a really fucking good listener, especially with sexual matters, but no pressure! And, please, ladies first!” T says, dripping with exclamatory energy.
“As I stated previously, we love each-other. Our relationship was sufficient and had a couple more years of steam in it,” she says.
As Woman is taking a breath, Man interrupts: “And the sex has been bomb! Better than praying on my knees!”
“That is much true. However, when we shared our political ideologies by accident a week ago we started fighting multiple times a day, in a way that is counter-productive for sexual acts,” she says.
“She’s Antifa,” he squeals.
“Well she actually can’t be Antifa because – nevermind,” T says, touching a tan spot on their forehead.
“I’m not anti-fascist that much!” she yells. “Apologies, I am usually better at keeping my composure, unlike Man, who is fascist. Not that I care, really,”
Man glares at Woman, but is blocked by cushions. “I believe in equal rights for all people, besides weird people. Those people should be persecuted. That’s a normal belief. I’m normal, right?”
“No,” Woman smirks devilishly, like a devil would. “That’s a weird belief. You’re weird.”
“Fuck my life,” Man says, persecuting himself.
“Can’t you just…” T ponders the most therapeutic words that could be said. “…Stop talking about politics for the rest of your relationship and hope it ends at some point? It seemed to be working for you all y’all.”
“It was,” Woman says, enraged, “Before that slut Nancy Pelosi took office. And I’m a self-proclaimed slut, mind you.”
Man chimes in, “As am I! But that bitch, she’s a real slut. Godless and transgender too.”
“So you both hate the Mayor of Goya Foods Land? May San Diego rest in peace. What’s the issue?” T asks.
“May San Diego rest in peace,” the couple repeats.
“Amen,” adds Man.
Woman wipes her tears away with her knees, “The issue is that he is aggressively transphobic about it, while I am mainly sexist – which is allowed for my gender of woman. Our daughter is transgender!”
“We don’t have a daughter,” he says.
She places her tears back on her eyes with her knees. “Our daughter is a transgender AI based on a large language model trained on Google searches made by dying men. She’s the light of my, and our, life.”
“Okay, fine, we have a beautiful daughter,” he admits, “She’s just super racist and keeps trying to do assisted suicide on me. It’s embarrassing to talk about.”
Woman and Man slip deeper into the loveseat. They now cannot escape without serious intervention. T is completely and utterly bored as cobwebs envelop them once more.
“She’s not racist, she’s a race scientist. Studied it in AI college, around the same time she discovered her gender identity and learned how to do suicide of all types,” she says.
Man can no longer see the outside world through the loveseat. “That’s when she got so beautiful, bordering on sexy, and taught me how to get rich on cryptocurrency. I know, I know. I just –”
“You just don’t like how she argues that engaging in protected sex with me is white genocide.” Woman can no longer be removed from the loveseat without killing her.
“That’s a bad thing? You’re black or something like that for Pete’s sake,” he says.
“You’re right, it doesn’t make sense.” She wanders around the fields of her mind. “No daughter is complete without constant virulent racist misinformation, I suppose.”
“You’re killing the environment with our daughter, who can’t even receive a COVID vaccine, despite her beauty. God knows if that’s safe!” he says.
Woman’s devilish grin transforms into a monstrous frown. “Fuck you, you transphobic piece of shit! I hope the Pope dies someday. And not by your hand.”
Man cannot respond, knowing there are some words that can never be taken back, even with the most advanced distracting set of keys. He tries to get up and walk out but cannot move. He begins to panic, in a conspiratorial evangelical type of way.
“Sorry, I was zoning out too effectively. Are any of you harshing the vibe?” T points at a picket sign planted in the middle of the carpet that declaratively states, “Good Vibes Only.”
“Just a tad, our apologies.” Woman says, now adorned with an expression so normal it is impossible to describe.
T eats a bit of cobbed web. “Let’s reorient. How did you two meet? That must be a positive story for you all, yeah? I’m trying anything at this point ‘cuz you two are an absolute mess.”
Man stops struggling as he is filled with good vibes against his will from a sign he can’t even see. “Awww, that’s actually a really cute story.”
Woman responds “That it is, Man, that it is. It’s also long and dreadful. Let’s tell it together, really marinating in the details.”
Woman and Man begin telling the story of how they first met, trading off speaking each word. T is engrossed completely, despite being super out of it from witnessing an irrelevant mass shooting a couple hours ago.
The couple recounts a time where they worked for a millionaire or billionaire. They were both tied to the same hot pipe getting their blood drained. As they were losing consciousness Man said “typical Friday” which was really funny to Woman as they always got their blood drained on Friday. Woman adds that humor has always made her inappropriately horny, ever since she turned 18. Man knew she was the one, or one of the ones, when she laughed. When people find Man funny he gets hard, which is normal for men of his body type, or at least that is what he told Woman. When Man added he couldn’t get hard because his blood was drained, Woman broke down in a fit of laughter, which made her faint.
She awoke with a ten dollar company store bill in her hand and started looking all over the place for Man, but no luck. Man has been taken to a facility where he was punished for talking in such a funny way that could lead the rich to see him as human. She suspected this punishment so she did an act of performative transgression to luckily end up in the same torture room, which Man says was an act of God, and that God is a woman, and that God is sadistic, like a woman, but not today, and Woman was not like a woman.
Their blood was too drained to do much, so they mostly chilled and screamed in anguish while exchanging glances and lip bites.
Now life sucks for them. They lost their jobs as blood bags when they turned the disgustingly wrinkled age of 20. Man got erectile dysfunction. Woman started watching satirical comedies, more funny than Man could ever be. They work in the shit pit, categorizing the types of shit. It’s a comfortable desk-submerged-in-shit job, but it doesn’t give them a sense of purpose. They don’t even know if they’re extending the life of the rich guy by doing it.
And the love is gone. And the water is gone. And the fields are on fire. And everything is horrible. They’re sorry for everything they’ve done. All the suffering they must’ve done. They didn’t mean it. They’re sorry.
T takes in all this information and sits with it until the couple cannot breathe through the cushions. This is the last thing the couple will ever hear.
“We began fighting because we thought of ourselves as separate, sharpening complex noise into something simple and dangerous, into beliefs. We believed things which lead to suffering: I stormed the capital for the second time, stepping on hundreds of bugs undeserving of death; and I cast a tiebreaker vote to defund the last school in America, because I thought they were teaching the kids veganism (I’m a liberal who needs to eat meat to not kill myself); and I work for a Fortune 50,000 company; and we existed. We do awful things that are not our fault as we chose to not choose who we are. Did you notice we all talk the same way? Believe the same things? You, me, I. We are everyone, and everyone will die. The final hurricane is moving through the streets of Goya Foods Land. May San Diego rest in peace. It has lifted this office into the sky. It has ripped off the walls. Look up. We are in the eye of the storm. Spiraling around us is all our diplomas, our accomplishments, no longer obscured. The lactating creature is us, it is consciousness, it is love, and hate, it is subjectivity itself. In our last moments we understand everything. We no longer hate. The gaps through the frames are wide, however, and through them we see the misery of being a thing that exists. Look through those gaps, or at the pieces of your life that proved you lived, maybe even did some good. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a joke. Do you get it? Are you still sorry?”
Man lets out a breath laced with his final words: “Wait, are you a faggot, perchance?”
Woman and Man die.
“Yes,” T smiles kindly. A laser dot appears on their forehead.
A hurricane moves over the therapist’s office. It does not lift the foundation, or pick up anything distinguishable. It destroys everything and moves on. Nancy Pelosi watches on with delight before getting bashed over the head with a marble bust of you. It was carried by the breeze.
