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 paragraph 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—into the light of the star he studies—searching for the source of his awe. A bird? I think it must be. But, I cannot find 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. 

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 basically 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. 

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 aglow, a-glitter, 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 sixteen years ago, but she can still recall it in perfect detail. A journalist lives on high alert, ears perked, nerves piqued, alive to the potential in all small things to say something large about their subject. Constantly taking notes. 

And Ann was working on a story that day. She was in San Diego on assignment for Spin, profiling indie-rock cult darling John Vanderslice as he toured the country in support of his seventh LP, Romanian Names. She’d watched the band load in to the legendary Casbah and perform their sound check. She’d sat outside Los Chuchys with Vanderslice and a plate of carnitas tacos, filling her notebook as he held forth on the hierarchy of street food, the superiority of cats, how to dose your opium depending on your intention, and, one of his favorite themes, the perfection of a Neve console. But when he and the band piled into the van to head back to the hotel before the show, to make their separate preparations, she’d opted to stay downtown, to walk the half-mile to the city’s Central Library, to spend her free hours there.  

There was a line she couldn’t quite recall from one of E.B. White’s essays—the one about the hurricane slowly approaching New England; the one in which he waits thirty-six hours for Edna to arrive at his little peninsula, half way up the coast of Maine, listening, all the while, to the radio’s play-by-play of her progress—a line about the way this relentless coverage, this prolonged anticipation frays the nerves, which her time with John Vanderslice had brought to mind. She wanted to find the phrase, to ask him about it. To know if he experienced his own intensity in the same way those around him did. 

Noah had gone to the library for a hit of nostalgia and a dose of calm. He was back in his hometown to attend his parents’ thirtieth anniversary blowout, a whole weekend scheduled to the hilt. Boisterous siblings crowded the house, friends and family were descending from near and far, everywhere he turned someone had an ask, an opinion, a reminiscence he had to hear, and he felt simultaneously superfluous and overburdened. So, under the pretense of popping out for some last minute supplies—Birthday candles? Burgers? Booze?—he fled to this, a favorite haunt of his youth.  

She heard his voice before she saw him. Noah has a deeper voice than his slight build might suggest, with a gravitas that, at least then, he didn’t possess. “Forgive me.” That was the first thing he said to her. And, was that the subtle foreshadowing she had missed? Another apology, like the apology with which, sixteen years later, he would begin his bearing-of-the-soul, his breaking-of-her-heart. But not like that apology at all. 

He was begging her pardon, that day in the stacks, for approaching a woman at her work. He swore it wasn’t something he ever did; he wasn’t one of those guys. But the collection in her hand…he asked her to flip to the checkout card. And there was his name, once, twice, thrice…four times over—a timestamped proof of true love. 

“Good ol’ Elwyn!” he said, smiling the smile she would come to call his boyhood grin, a face full of unabashed delight.

“Good ol’ Elwyn! But, though, did you know he went by ‘Andy,’? Good ol’ Andy, I should say!” He was such a fan, he couldn’t help himself. Had to tell her all about it. “It’s his precision, right? The precision of his language. He’s casual enough, he never sounds pretensions, but…you can feel how deliberate he’s being, like,” he flipped to a page he evidently knew well, “‘Living in a sanitary age, we are getting so we place too high a value on human life—which rightfully must always come second to human ideas.’ That’s from, maybe you know, you probably know, he’s talking about the war.”

Ann did know.

“But, like, what a description! What an idea! A sanitary age!? Who thinks to consider the danger of valuing life too much? Obviously, one could take his words the wrong way. As permission to devalue it. But of course he isn’t saying that! Only: that the ideas have to come first. And, right? What value could life possibly have, absent the ideas that give it direction, purpose, significance?”

“Exactly!” Ann had long thought so. She’d long observed it in her subjects, that what got them up and got them going, what made their choices for them where, indeed, ideas. That art can transmute woe into wonder. That sacrifice is the truest measure of devotion. That cynicism is indicative of intelligence. That happiness flowers from acceptance. That technology is going to save us. That it is going to destroy us. That, as Mr. Alvarez held, the steady accumulation of scientific knowledge will one day complete our picture of the universe, and to contribute to that progress is the greatest honor and thrill this life affords. 

Whatever you believe, whether or not you articulate it, your life is going to express it. Even awful ideas can be sustaining, if only for a time. What’s more devastating is not to have any. 

Ann quoted Nietzsche back to Noah: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” 

And now she realizes this is what she’s lost: her Why. What’s the use? What’s the point? she wonders every single day when she wakes up to an empty house, to the silence, to the stillness, to nothing before her but the work she once took to be her reason for being. 

Was she wrong? Or, has she changed? Why should Noah’s leaving have disrupted her conviction? Ann is a modern woman, hers was a modern marriage, liberated from ideas of ownership and the absurd expectation that one person should be everything to another, for all time. She believes, she preaches it to anyone who will listen, that love is an open palm, not covetous, not controlling, and we must let the ones we love go where their hearts lead them, even if it’s away from us. Which is all that Noah’s doing. So, his leaving shouldn’t shake her sense of the world, her sense of herself. 

And yet, here she is, adrift, becalmed. Bobbing on the open ocean with no wind to stir her sails. No idea in sight to convince her of the value of her life. How did it happen? When she thought she was so self-aware. 

“It just jazzes me to find a fellow enthusiast in the wild.” Noah said, passing White’s essays back to her. “A guy can get to feeling kind of lonesome in his tastes. But I didn’t mean to prattle 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. Andy White was just the tip of the iceberg. Noah worked in the magazine biz, too, it turned out; 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’ dinner and the sibs were blowing up his phone. 

“May I?” 

The question recalls Ann to the here-and-now. To the tenth of August, 2026. To the bar of The Looking Glass, in Silver Lake, Los Angeles—Alice in Wonderland-themed, top hats and eyeglasses and cats grinning ear-to-ear along the hand-painted wallpaper, and a giant papier-mâché redcap standing tall in the center of the room, where influencers like to pose for their phones. 

“I’m an idiot, of course you’re waiting for someone.” 

He’s taken her silence for dismissal. The man who was hoping for the stool—the toadstool—to her right. While Ann’s been sitting here, staring at the stack of pages before of her without seeing them, thinking only of Noah, The Looking Glass has filled up around her, and now seats are in short supply. 

“No, no,” Ann says, “it’s all yours,” wishing that he wouldn’t. Hoping against hope that he really only wants the seat; that this isn’t the prelude to a pass. 

“Terrific!” He swings up onto the stool and gives her a grin that the Cheshire Cat would approve, at which point one of the bartenders glides over to ask for his order.

To forestall any possible conversation, Ann returns her attention to the pages before her, the research she’s gathered to review in preparation for her flight to New York, where she will be interviewing 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 One Point Five themselves. She’s familiar with the broad strokes of our predicament. And, anyway, she’s not a science journalist. Her work is human interest. The activists, not their subject, are her subjects. 

But, to understand them, she figures a dose of the kind of source material they routinely consume might prove instructive. 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 the mouthful, creating another mouthful—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 is 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 a narrative all on their own: “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! She tries to make the words conjure a panic, but she can’t. 

Ann 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, the woman she has become. If she were her own subject. 

But Ann has never sought to center herself in her art. She prefers to understand and express her identity by way of her interest in other people. Maybe this is the reason she fell into polyamory. And maybe it’s the reason she isn’t looking at herself anymore, there in that mirror. She’s let her gaze drift right, to the man beside her, the one whose attention, not very long ago, she was so eager to avoid. 

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. 

She tries to return her attention to the 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 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 the war in Ukraine?” 

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

He raises a eyebrow artfully.

“I’m journalist.” 

“Heyo, now that’s refreshing! Someone in this town with a real profession. How does it feel? To actually be of service to the world?” 

“I wish I knew. I’m a profile writer.” 

“But, you’re reading about climate change?” 

“I’m profiling a group of activists.” 

“That sounds like it could do some good.” 

Ann shrugs. “What about you?” She prefers to ask the questions. “I feel like I should know who you are.” 

He actually snorts. “What, because of this pretty face? No, nobody knows me. Not yet! I’m a writer, too, if you can believe it. Only of scripts, alas. Less useful than profiles! A writer-slash-director, I should say. This is mine.” He taps his pages. 

“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 it her wish to make it so, to prove to herself that things have changed, that compels her to ask for the man’s name as she lays her hand on his arm? Or, is it just a way to stop thinking about our rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to combat climate change? Or, could it be that this tête-à-tête is the beginning of something that will last longer than a night? Last, even, the remainder of her life? Certainly that isn’t what she imagines when she says, meeting his eyes,“I know we’ve just met.”

“Go on.” 

“But I live basically around the corner.” 

“That’s so close.” 

“And it’s gotten awfully loud in here.”

“That’s true. I can hardly hear you.”

“And I’d like to hear more about this movie you’re making.”

“I’d like to tell you.”

It’s so easy to do, this dance. Even with half her heart. They laugh and settle their tabs and pack their respective reading material into their respective totes—hers, The Magazine’s iconic black and white script; his, vintage Joy Division—and it feels so pleasantly conspiratorial to walk out into the night together, the hot mid-August night, perfumed by the wildfire smoke that has become ubiquitous. That nobody bothers to remark upon anymore. That they both choose to ignore, because what else would they do?

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, in the foyer where their wedding portrait still hangs, which she hasn’t had the heart to take down, Graham begins kissing her. She thinks how like a dream Noah looked emerging from the crowd of the Casbah in his black jeans and vintage floral tee, desert boots and vintage snakeskin belt. He was carrying a bouquet of golden ranunculus before him, pilfered from the table arrangements at his parents’ party, which he offered to her with a small bow, almost shyly. 

“I couldn’t get away sooner,” he said, as if they had agreed to meet at the show. But they hadn’t made plans. They hadn’t even exchanged numbers. She hadn’t thought she would see him again. 

“You’re crying,” Graham says, stepping back.