Just because the planet was doomed didn’t mean life was bad. There were still a few centuries of degeneration to enjoy, and the adults in charge, the children of the baby boomers, were accustomed to issues of extinction.

Naturally they strove to record their culture. Every civilization must, from the feudal Vikings through the landed English gentry to the rambunctious children of the colonists.
Lulu was among the striving recorders. Her full name was Lourdes, which was too Catholic for her, but Lulu led people to expect someone dippy. No matter: she liked to destroy expectations.

She kept searching for higher wisdom. Drugs no longer had much effect. She meditated and exercised and lately she seldom ate. Occasionally she engaged in rampant sex. Anything to lose herself, to plunge into the currents of alteration.

She watched her cohorts hurrying to preserve what they valued – filling time capsules with popular mementos – and it cast the lost wisdom of the ages in a harsh light for her. Knowing how little of worth was contained in the whole Library of Congress, she concluded that not much of actual value could have been lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Glimmers of astrology. Catalogues of ritual. Nothing any wiser or truer than the stuff her own age agreed to esteem. Marketing material.

The 21st century didn’t even guarantee a woman’s right to choose! Christianity was still promoted as a means to spiritual salvation, competing with equally primitive other world views. The touchstones of the culture continued to be wealth dreams, itches for immortality, and the goal of love&marriage.

If Lulu were filling a capsule of her particular life and times she wouldn’t have included those ideas. She didn’t long for treasure, endless life, true love. She’d pick other items.

She looked then at her slim wrists and scarred legs, viewed turning gingko leaves through the down on her summer-mottled forearms. The leaves appeared like folded table grapes, pale green fading to lemon. Fallen liquidambar leaves, damply magenta, mounded in the gutters beneath her feet. It was too cold for bare legs. She went inside and waited for night.

Lulu walked later and wished she had a dog. The evening was misty with ground fog reaching up to a quarter moon that glowed like a pale lamp behind a Vaselined lens. She saw a plane rise in front of the moon, looping a big nighttime lasso of pearly fog. She squinted her eyes and the streetlights sparkled like fake gems. Her shoes crunched on shards of safety glass from unlucky autos.

She wanted not money but a dog. Not endless life but a little more health. Neither love nor marriage, but perfect words. Exquisitely appropriate syllables, slung like chains of sweat around her spinning self.

She wanted a cigarette.

She wandered another block and a half, searching out dry butts in the semi-darkness. She pocketed enough for a good dose of nicotine and headed back to her little place, to her word-processor, her bathroom, her phone. She smoked and she slept.

And woke to a feeling of sadness, hours before dawn. She tried to write but no words came. She tried to sleep but she was too wakeful. She did yoga. For three hours she put her body into poses, entranced herself. It worked.

Sometimes Lulu cut herself, to bring her pain to the surface. She never marked a part that would show; she tended to slice her inner thigh. The blade was very sharp; at first there was no sign, no pain. A quick white incision that only revealed itself as the blood welled up and streamed thinly from it. A cool numbness at first, then a sting and finally, lovingly, a throb.

In similar fashion, those hours of yoga pulled Lulu away from herself. She passed through muscle control and near numbness to a form of relaxed trance. She became pleasantly tired, and she felt clean and empty. Like when she used to play for hours in a neighbor’s pool, during the lazy southern California days when she was ten or twelve, cannonballing into the deep end, swimming all the long way underwater, without a breath, surfacing with water streaming down her back and snot running from her nose. She stayed in the water till some grownup made her come out for awhile, noticing her blue lips and white fingertips, tossing a towel to her and tsking at her while she stamped foot to foot, teeth chattering, nagging to swim some more, and then, finally, gracelessly, accepting the mandatory break, receiving the frozen Koolaid popsicle, savoring the clean feeling inside her belly and outside her skin.

After three hours of yoga, she felt good.