What comes next
A message from the other side
We are exactly one month out from pub day for APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures! I have been told by several reliable sources that it now exists as a real hardcover book, and that it looks amazing! If you preorder it now, you will among the first to see and hold it—maybe even before I do!
Here’s a paragraph I can’t stop thinking about:
During the pandemic, I bought an apartment in Colombia. Since then, I’ve been spending winter and spring there, working toward my Colombian residency, building a potential escape from the U.S. that I hope I will never need. I don’t have any previous ties to Colombia, no clear reason to choose this country, except that I feel weirdly at home; it feels like visiting America’s distant future, a beautiful country torn apart by a century of failed politics. In Colombia now is the peace after our coming civil war.
This is Torrey Peters, writing in New York. Peters, the author of Detransition, Baby and the new story collection Stag Dance, is trans, and has a better reason to have an eye on escaping the U.S. than I ever did. And yet we both find ourselves putting roots down beyond its borders at a time when that feels lucky, and risky, and more complicated than ever.
For people looking around warily at what’s happening in the U.S. and wondering if there are places to go where democracy and human rights are not under threat, Mexico is not the obvious choice. So many of the things I fear could happen in the U.S. have already happened here. Mexico already had a century of authoritarian rule, the shadow of which has never quite dissipated. Mexico already has legions of body- and soul-crushing jobs that leave families teetering on the edge of destitution. Mexico already has the kind of widespread corruption that long ago shredded normal people’s belief that politics can be an avenue for meaningful change. Mexico already has scores of murdered journalists and an information environment cares more about obscuring the truth than revealing it.
And yet, here I am, with no plans to leave and no particular hope that any of it will change. I’ve considered various explanations for this, including that I’m a world-historically selfish villain, content to live in an unjust society as long as I can buy my way to the top. (Any white American expat who denies this shouldn’t be trusted.) But the reason that feels most true is the same one that Peters articulates: Living in Mexico City feels like living in the future. We’re on the other side of something here, something that in my book I call apocalypse. The worst fears have come true, and they have been survived.
What Mexico gives me, and what perhaps Colombia gives Peters, is the gift of living beyond delusion. Specifically the deeply held conviction among Americans that none of this (climate change, coups, collapse, pandemics, take your pick) could really be happening, and that none of it should be allowed to affect me. You can feel it in the U.S. now: The delusion is cracking, crumbling, being doubled down upon until it implodes. I know there is a world on the other side, because I’ve been granted passage to it, however partial and incomplete. In some ways it’s better here, and in some ways it’s worse. But at the very least, it’s real.