Spoilers ahead

Sue me, I was excited for Happiest Season. A gay Christmas romcom where Kristen Stewart wears suits and Mary Steenburgen wears red? Two, please.

Unfortunately, like a lot of people I know, I watched and then hated Happiest Season. I’m no Grinch: I find great comfort in the fevered, credibility-stretching symphonies of your Family Stones and your The Holidays. Nor do I require my queer content sanded-down and conflict-free — I don’t subscribe to the notion that grappling intelligently with our suffering is somehow counter to a cause. But Happiest Season doesn’t do any intelligent grappling. It exposes real pain and then patches over it with flimsy genre cliches. It’s a standard-issue holiday product that’s been injected with the messy, upsetting realities of queer life, and it doesn’t survive the transfusion.

The premise is pretty straightforward. Harper (Mackenzie Davis) and Abby (Kristen Stewart) are lesbians who live in Pittsburgh. Harper asks Abby to come home with her for Christmas in a moment of passion, and then reveals that she’s not out to her family when they’re most of the way there. Abby is passed off as her straight, orphaned roommate. Aubrey Plaza shows up as a delightful ex-girlfriend; Dan Levy is gay and on the phone.

Most of the Twitter talk about the film goes something like this: Mackenzie Davis shoving Kristen Stewart back in the closet for the sake of her evil WASP family in suburban Pennsylvania makes her bad, actually. I tend to agree. There is, though, an undeniable amount of pathos in the conceit: coming out is hard, and finding the courage to alter your parents’ perception of you gets arguably harder the older you get. There’s an intelligent movie to be made about that fraught dynamic, but Happiest Season approaches it with the same whimsy as Sarah Jessica Parker dropping a pan of strata in The Family Stone. We never spend enough time with Harper to fully grasp what makes her tick — we just watch her behave terribly from a distance until Abby gives her a hug. The resultant unresolved tension leaves a pit in your stomach.

Plenty of people like this movie just fine, thank you, and I respect that. The jokes land more often than they need to and, as usual, it’s hard not to be sucked in by whatever it is that Kristen Stewart’s face does to a camera. What I don’t respect, and have seen crop up quite a bit in the public discourse, is the notion that, as queer people, we should “just be grateful something like this exists at all.” “Look, sure, it’s not perfect, it doesn’t even really address your hurt properly, but it’s all there is for now. That’s something, right?” It’s a grossly condescending framework, and one I suspect a lot of queer people find troublingly familiar.

Baked into queerness, for some — for me — is a willingness to accept less than you know you deserve for fear that the alternative might be nothing at all. I came out in high school, and no one shoved me in a locker, and I heard day and again what a privilege that was. Never mind that I was almost entirely sidelined from dating; never mind that I was still moving through a world that didn’t even pretend to be designed for me. I was tolerated, and it was my job to spin that into some sort of triumph.

I’ve also been hidden before. It didn’t hurt that badly. His family came to town, I got a half-awkward “this is my friend” introduction, and that was that. He came out shortly after and I was never made to sleep in a basement or lie about having an ex-girlfriend. Eventually, though, the relationship curdled, and it was obvious to pretty much everyone who watched us interact that I shouldn’t be in it anymore. But I didn’t leave, because I worried I’d never get anything like it again if I did.

This is, of course, a semi-universal experience. Straight people also stay in bad relationships because they have low self-esteem. But with queer relationships, it’s more complicated — the impulse to stay is driven by a conviction that finding happiness in the first place was a fluke. I wish Happiest Season understood that difference. Instead, it affects a sort of misguided liberal “colorblindness,” and tries to exist in a world where your partner allowing her family to treat you like shit so she doesn’t have to admit she’s gay is a forgivable flaw on par with, say, your partner working too much.

At one point, Abby learns that Harper outed her secret high school girlfriend to save her own face 15 years ago. This was where my stomach finally sunk. This woman is a coward. It’s one thing to inflict that kind of pain as a teenager; it’s another to behave the same way 15 years later toward someone with whom you have an ostensibly deep, adult connection. Harper puts Abby through actual hell, lashes out when she’s gently called on it, and in a climactic moment when she’s given full clearance to come clean, still refuses to. She blames all of this on the stresses of the closet. So did my ex-boyfriend. A careful movie would examine that — the impulse to excuse hideous behavior as an offshoot of self-hate. It would take pains to convince us Harper can and will make amends, and that Abby will get the kind of love she deserves. Happiest Season is not a careful movie. A momentary change of heart is enough to sweep it all under the rug, and we’re left worrying Abby has embedded herself in a family of narcissists for the sake of convenience.

The calibration is all wrong. It’s great that this film was made by a gay woman; it’s still excruciating to watch, and its rushed conclusion borders on irresponsible. It transposes something heavy onto rickety scaffolding not designed to bear the load, and it winds up collapsing. “But at least I’m a gay Christmas movie!” it screams, trodding insensitively on holy ground and then courting our gratitude for existing in the first place. But real gratitude is earned, not granted on technicality.

I’m not grateful for Happiest Season. I’m disappointed by it. It’s a waste, the most joyless queer film since Boy Erased. If you’re looking to watch two women glance passionately at each other during Christmas, fork over the $4 to rent Carol, and then wait patiently for a gay yuletide romcom that gets it.

The new Taylor Swift album came when none of us were expecting it, and for the first time since Beyoncé pioneered the stealth drop seven years ago, it feels like that means something. Swift’s catalogue is animated by twitchy legacy anxiety: the fear that lovers will misremember key moments from a faded relationship; the determination to affect history on your own terms, with carefully considered messaging, lest someone canonize you incorrectly. This artistic preoccupation pierces her public behavior, too, and while much of the pop sphere has become increasingly content to fuck with industry precedent as discs have given way to streams in the last decade, Swift has always done album rollouts by the book.

folklore, though (which comes less than a year after last August’s candy-colored 18-track pop behemoth Lover), arrived with a tweet, a small list of collaborators (The National’s Aaron Dessner chief among them), and a black-and-white photograph. On Lover, Swift sounded increasingly unbothered, settled into something like adult contentment and approaching the kind of bird’s-eye songwriting she’d been teasing for years. Still, there were lingering Hater Jabs that read like reputation hangovers, and with a few notable exceptions, it was easy to graft personal details onto its tracks, which largely interrogated the bright-gold glow of hard-won love. Not so this time around. Free from arena tours and cleansed of autobiographical pretense, folklore sees Swift composing liberated fictions. It’s the album she has been threatening to make for a decade, and she made it in three months, remotely, without telling her record label. It is immense.

It opens with piano, a loping beat, and a delightfully direct statement of purpose: “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” Swift sings. “Been saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘no.’” The rest of the first track, “the 1,” is the most chilled-out breakup song you can imagine, lightyears from the victim/victimizer shades critics have long accused Swift of coloring in. There are no betrayals to trace, no apologies for either party to make. Time passes, things change, and it’s nice to wander down hypothetical paths sometimes, but now is now. That patience and lack of clean-lined definition permeates the record.

So many Taylor Swift songs are about gunning for omniscience, being frustrated by the bounds of your own perspective. One of the first lines on 2012’s Red is “We are alone with our changing minds,” and Speak Now deep cut “Last Kiss” hinges on the refrain “All that I know is I don’t know how to be something you miss.” “All Too Well,” the jewel in her songwriting crown, is all about the tyranny of memory, how sometimes it burns so bright that the only solace we have is in imagining the holes it must also be searing in the people it’s tethered us to.

Rather than continue struggling against the limits of her own vantage point, on folklore, Swift often ditches it entirely. Whole swaths of the album’s 16 tracks are explicit character songs, told from the perspectives of jilted teens, remorseful skater boys, vengeful ghosts, wounded soldiers flickering in and out of consciousness. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell whether Swift is pulling from her own experience, and that fact finally draws the curtain on the theatre about Living and Loving in Public she’s been producing for the last 12 years. By refusing to delineate fact from fiction, she pulls us in closer than ever before, rerouting focus that might leak into wondering whether that was a dig at Jake Gyllenhaal back toward the staggering craftsmanship that’s always carried her best work.

“august” is a gauzy, windswept stunner, regretful but possessed with the same sense of acceptance that permeates “the 1” (“August slipped away into a moment in time/’Cause it was never mine”). Shoegazey “mirrorball,” which carries the “sounds like Mazzy Star” torch from older Swift cuts like “Lover” and “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” packs a “Hang the DJ” reference inside a metaphor that shouldn’t work but does, beautifully, as Swift compares herself to a disco ball who will “show you every version of yourself tonight” and gets gawked at by partygoers, “drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten.” “betty,” which blasts in with some startling Blonde on Blonde harmonica, feels like Swift teaching a masterclass on her own perspective-shifting love songs, from “Mine” to “I Wish You Would.” It also includes the album’s single Swiftiest lyric, when a remorseful young narrator waits for the ex he’s wronged to answer her door: “Right now is the last time I can dream about what happens when you see my face again.” No one else writes about the thrill of suspension so deftly.

The sound on folklore is overtly tasteful in a way we haven’t heard from Swift since a few fleeting moments on Red, courtesy of Dessner and his coconspirators from mopey Brooklyn dad rock royalty The National. “epiphany” splits the difference between The Antlers and Kate Bush, with a wall of strings and dripping French horns. The stark “peace,” quite possibly the best thing here, is built from a pulse, two bass lines, and the occasional intrusion of some tumbling piano. “seven” could be an Iron and Wine track if not for the singsongy verses.

A lesser personality might get subsumed by all that handsome sonic restraint. But whenever you’re listening to a bona fide Taylor Swift Song, you get the sense that there’s something irreducible about her. It’s not necessarily her voice, though she’s honed it into a hell of an acting tool over the years; it’s not just her lyrics, which are usually impressive but sometimes gather additional power from their dark, unnameable simplicity (“Treacherous,” from Red, somehow swells to three times its size via the alchemy of perfectly assembled, largely anonymous word-shards). Throw her over a bleating Max Martin beat or some shiny Nathan Chapman country-pop, and Swift always breaks through: knowing, unknowable, full of feeling, even if she’s been stranded in hostile musical territory.

On folklore, finally, there’s nothing working to reduce her. It’s not an album free of tension (hardly!), but free of resistance. For the first time ever, she sounds like an adult saying exactly what she wants to say, without the conspicuous calculation that’s both marred and bolstered her over her 14 year career. The album art, which dwarfs Swift in the frame by surrounding her with trees that stretch well above our field of vision, signals the shift—each of her past seven record covers center her in close-up. “Are we out of the woods yet?” she implored over and over again, itchily, on 1989, waiting for a sign she might finally be able to relax.

“Nope,” she answers on folklore. “I wonder what else is in here with us.”

Laura Marling released her last album while I was wandering through London with my heart breaking at half-speed. I was trying to preserve everything around me in amber, but at some point the days turned against me and I had to (at least privately) admit that I was treating zombified relationships like flesh-and-blood. I would pipe Marling’s Semper Femina straight into my ears each morning while I walked to my silent, deskbound internship, and then again on the walk to my daily bowl of bank-breaking pho. “Are you getting away with who you’re trying to be?” she would ask in the middle of “Wild Fire.” “Absolutely not,” I would think. Rinse and repeat.

Three years later comes Song for Our Daughter, Marling’s rush-released salve for a population ravaged by disease and saddled with an uncertain future unlike the “uncertain futures” we’re used to.

Like everyone, I’ve been stuck at home for over a month, and beyond the obvious, it’s complicated one of my foundational myths. From the first stirrings of adolescence up to the present moment, I’ve been determined to live out my adult years in a city. I grew up in a log cabin, which is one of those things that seems apocryphal but is literally true, and because of either the actual lived experience of growing up in that log cabin or the meaning I’ve since assigned to it, I decided to want the city. To want the superficial signifiers of an Urban Life — good booze, nice furniture, an eclectic record collection — and the less Instagrammable benefits: opportunities to meet people by chance; a sense of pace I don’t have to invent myself; the privilege of watching other people living their lives right in front of me.

Now I do live in the city, and all of that is gone. When I was in London and it felt like the center had stopped holding, I would walk. I would leave my basement bedroom and go outside and look at something old or tall or beautiful, and I would think, “At least I’m a person who got to see this up close.” Now my walks, which I take daily, are rote and nervous. I go outside just because it isn’t inside, and most of the beautiful buildings are shuttered, or else packed with people who are just as scared as I am. Fellow sidewalk strollers are no longer potential coconspirators; they’re threats.

So I sit at home and I stretch and I call my friends and I listen to music. I knew when Marling’s new record was announced that I would not stop thinking about it for weeks, which I haven’t, and I knew that from the opening notes, it would shoot me straight back to London, which it did. It’s helped me link the awful present back to the awful past, which is probably my own facile, pattern-obsessed way of telling my own story, but then so it is.

It’s also jolted me back into a frame of mind I’ve been losing sight of more and more in this mess: it reminded me I was a writer.

All admiration is hyperbole, so let me say this: Marling might be our best lyrical storyteller. Her songs are elliptical and opaque, deliberately unfinished but so careful that you can’t help scrutinizing every word. The pieces interlock perfectly but the finished image is smudged, so you take the whole thing apart and reconstruct it again at half-speed, hoping to wind up with a clearer image this time. Are her narrators her? An idealized self? A character? Two characters singing to each other? Every time I hit play on one of her songs, no matter how well I know the words (I have, may the court show, transcribed every lyric from the new record into my notes app, which I’ve been doing ritualistically since I was 16), I’m blindsided by her use of negative space. Like most people, I think, I’m hard up for inspiration right now, but every one of Marling’s songs rakes me across the mug and says, “You wish you could do this, don’t you?”

“Alexandra,” the first track on Song for Our Daughter, is a bright, brilliant response to Leonard Cohen’s “Alexandra Leaving.” It’s also a mission statement. “Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving,” Cohen croons with Sharon Robinson on the latter song, bidding farewell to a muse who “sleeps upon your skin” and “wakes you with a kiss.” “Say goodbye to Alexandra lost.” Marling isn’t satisfied. “I need to know/Where did Alexandra go?” she insists. And the “I” is her, a curious character she’s built, the album as a whole — stuffed with questions she never answers. Like, for example, the inciting incident that brings us “Blow by Blow,” the sole piano ballad in Marling’s catalogue and, not kidding, probably one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. “I don’t know what else to say, I think I did my best,” she begins, teeing us up for a maudlin relationship autopsy. Then: “Mama’s on the phone, already talking to the press.” Oh?

I’m not sure what it is about this ambiguity that gets me, but it always does. I guess I should also say that she’s actually much less ambiguous on Song for Our Daughter than she’s ever been: the title track is a straightforward ode to an imagined girl reared in a culture stacked against her (“You’ll cut your way through it somehow”); lead single “Held Down” is a ghostly, wounded kiss-off with the sort of straightforward story verses Marling usually skirts. But even then, her lucidity is so bracing that it’s almost uncanny. The delivery becomes its own mystery. How can a 30 year old sound like this: elemental, conversational, at once ice-cold and (to borrow a key word from Semper Femina) soothing?

Now I listen to Song for our Daughter on my walks, the way I used to listen to Semper Femina. I’ve been leaving my apartment later and later in the day, pushing my midafternoon neighborhood treks into the territory of near-warm spring nights. I border a residential part of the city that’s quiet and still enough so that, if I leave after sundown, I can see stars and hear cars rush by on distant thoroughfares. Everything collapses in the way things do when you’re by yourself: then and now are both now, the music you’re hearing is and isn’t coming straight from the landscape. “Love is a sickness cured by time/Bruises all end up benign,” sings a blustery narrator projecting stability on “Only the Strong,” and I see myself now still nursing wounds from three years ago while I pass under a tree strung with soft white lights. “If you were mine/I’d let you live your life,” promises a deterred lover on “The End of the Affair,” and I curl up inside the smallness of the sentiment, thinking of seven or eight people at once.

“I know your mama’s kind of sad/And your papa’s kind of mean/I can take it all away/You can stop playing that shit out on me,” Marling sang three years ago on “Wild Fire,” and during one of those sleepless nights in London, I sent the song to my stateside boyfriend, not even pretending to soften the message. Near the end, we saw Marling at a venue across the street from his apartment. I’ve had a few experiences I’ll never forget, and this is one of them — a pair of cold hands around my waist, Marling throwing her tiny shoulders forward to punctuate the hymn: “The only thing I learned in a year/Where I didn’t smile once, not really/Is nothing matters more than love/No, nothing/No, not nothing/No, not nearly.”

It was a rare moment of total clarity, dropped in the middle of murky fights and negotiations and reconciliations. Everything coalesced and told me what to do, so I did it, and gave myself wounds I’m still writing through three years later.

Now the world is worse off and I’m probably better off and Laura Marling has dropped another puzzle at my feet. Here’s hoping I figure out what she’s telling me this time.

LONDON—Nina Raine’s new play is called Consent, and with a title like that, you probably think you know what it’s about. You’re not wrong, but to Raine’s immense credit, you’re not exactly right. On its surface, Consent is about a London rape case, but it ultimately uses that morally rigid, hot-button issue as a springboard for a million other conversations. It’s is a spiky, powerful piece of work whose occasional rough edges are more than smoothed over by incendiary performances and Raine’s savage wit.

The show, playing in the NT’s Dorfman theatre in a production directed by Roger Mitchell, centers on two couples. Edward (Ben Chaplin) is a barrister, and his wife Kitty (an outstanding Anna Maxwell Martin) is a literary agent who’s just given birth to their only child. Their friends Jake (Adam James) and Rachel (Priyanga Buford) are barristers as well. Both couples are friendly with Tim (Pip Carter), who prosecutes for the crown and finds himself on the opposite side of Edward in the rape case that takes up much of the play’s first act. Tensions of lust, love, and business erupt in various permutations, testing long-time bonds and calling into question the slippery nature of truth.

In a way, Raine treats lawyers here like Margaret Edson treated doctors in her 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winner W;t. That play was, among other things, a polemic against the way that a human body, so full of intricate beauty, could be reduced to inputs and outputs for machine-brained glory seekers. Consent is also about many things, but most tantalizingly, it’s about how lawyers have a habit of arguing themselves out of their own humanity. It shows us how, with enough crafty lip service, two opposing forces almost always appear equally right, and how spending your life exploiting binary thought can wreak havoc on your personal relationships.

There are some clunky meta-references to Greek tragedy and a few dramatic outbursts that stretch plausibility, but largely, Raine teases out these themes in exhilarating fashion. That her characters are brilliant, and thus very funny, doesn’t hurt — the play loves language, in all of its messiness, and that makes for a deeply involving two hours.

One cannot think of commenting on the production without lauding Rick Fisher’s deliciously unorthodox lighting design. Several mismatched fixtures hang from the Dorfman’s low ceiling, strategically bobbing in and out of the action to highlight or shadow certain characters. It’s a simple visual message, but it’s rattling when you catch on, especially as the action begins to mirror itself in act two: two situations may initially appear the same, but pay attention to who’s shining the light. It’s not a particularly easy message to swallow, but it echoes in the mind long after the house bulbs brighten.

I’ve spent the last 45 minutes figuring out what I’m going to wear today.

“Going to” is a key phrase, because it’s already 3:15 pm, which in the murky-gray winter of the Pacific Northwest counts as dusk, and the furthest I’ve moved is to the front porch to pick up my mom’s FedEx package. But now here I am, Googling things like “what to wear with light wash jeans” and “t-shirt under v-neck sweater?” for the first time in my life (re: the latter, Ashley Weston says absolutely not).

This is my third day at home, and getting dressed has taken at least this long every morning since I got back. I’ve been leaping onto bathtub ledges for full-body views, prying open long-sealed boxes of old cardigans, furiously buffing out scratches on shoes I stopped wearing when I was 17. Yesterday, I forced my parents to let me open a pair of chelsea boots I knew they bought me for Christmas because I couldn’t figure out what to wear with my pink chinos.

My last boyfriend used to do a streamlined version of this on weekdays, asking a half-asleep me to decide between the white Keds or the brown boots, whether he needed a scarf, if the ripped jeans would be too much since he might run into that one English professor he really liked on the way to French class.

I was dismissive of his anxieties in what I thought was a loving way: “It all looks good,” I’d grumble, glasses still on the nightstand, and I wasn’t lying — he knew how to dress far better than I did. There was something else going on though, too; I thought that by telling him he looked good no matter what, I was committing a revolutionary act against the very notion of negative body image. I was on a mission from God to deliver him from consumer-driven beauty standards and to plant rapidly-growing seeds of self-love that would follow him into the next life.

Mostly, he just found it annoying, which it was. He was asking me a question, he wanted an answer, and my virtue-signaling was both self-serving and kind of invalidating. He cared about how he looked, and caring about how you look is not always tethered to a crisis of self-image. I cared about how I looked, too, but I never asked these kinds of detail-oriented questions, which is why if you dig far enough back in my tagged photos on Facebook, you’ll see a lot of bright-red denim and more novelty Elvis jewelry than you’re likely to find in a strip mall pawn shop.

I entered that relationship with a lot of underdeveloped but etched-in-stone notions about the kind of person I was at 20. In my head, I was admirably unburdened by the way I looked. I was always kind. I may, in hindsight, have been depressed in high school, but I decided that putting 3,000 miles between me and that version of myself was an effective reset button. Above all, I was ready to let someone else in.

My therapist and I like talk about how I try to leap over mistakes before I’m allowed to make them — how I assume I’m at the end of a process before I’ve had enough substantial life experience to help me reach a conclusion. I want to Know How It’s Done and pull it off before I even know what the wrong version of whatever I’m trying to do might look or feel like. This, as you can imagine, makes it really tough to learn anything.

Over the course of the relationship, I was met time and time again with evidence that I needed to reconsider, to adapt, to understand that I was holding fast to these pillars of identity to make up for a lack of experience. Instead, I proudly dug in my heels and insisted that I Was The Kind Of Person Who Had Figured This Out Already.

After a lot of hemming and hawing that isn’t very interesting or productive to rehash, we broke up. Again, I decided what kind of person I was based on a nonexistent dataset: the kind who stays friends with his ex. Dan Savage said it was a good idea on his podcast and I was obviously a patient, understanding person. Bridge-burning was for people who didn’t Get It like I did.

It didn’t work out. It’s been months and I still don’t have the emotional energy to conjure up imagery that might describe what it felt like when I realized there was no friendship left. A million Tumblr users have done it before me, and I used to ridicule them for it, but now I understand that clichés are clichés because there’s nothing clever to be said about undiluted emotional pain. Subversion is an intellectual luxury afforded to those whose minutes aren’t being devoured by heartbreak.

The important lesson was this: I had experienced a real failing of my expectations that cut against the portrait I’d painted of myself, and at this point, there was no denying it. I wasn’t going to stay friends with him. I wasn’t as measured as I thought I was. “Letting someone in,” it turns out, is the cumulative effect of a million other tiny successes rather than an action unto itself, and turning a throwaway question like “what do I wear” into a moment for proselytizing about the dangers of vanity is pretty counterproductive to the process.

So finally, I started to consider whether my convictions were actual traits. It’s a scary thing to do, and I don’t blame myself for taking until now to press play. Interrogating deeply-held beliefs is hard because most of the time, it feels like a yarn ball that might never stop unraveling. You have nearly unlimited permission to second-guess yourself once you admit you were off the mark the first time. If you were wrong about the kind of person you are in relationships, then are you wrong about the fact that you really like Joni Mitchell, and why did you feel the need to be so vocal about that in the first place, and oh my God, wait, did you even need to move so far away or have you accidentally isolated yourself to avoid dealing with your problems???

Eventually, though, you find solid-enough footing, even if the process of doing so forces you to acknowledge that the ground will probably shift again.

I’m trying on a lot more new hats than I was a year ago. I’ve found myself less ready to speak in conversations because I’m more aware of why I’m saying what I’m saying, and it’s disorienting, but it feels right. Ultimately, I know I haven’t put my sense of self through an office shredder; there are certain constants to my personality that a sizable blow to the head couldn’t shake at this stage in the game. Instead, I’m in a careful recalibration process that might mean I stop pretending to like writers I’ve never heard of and don’t Snapchat every IPA I drink.

It also might mean that for the next several days, my room will look like it does now: clothes strewn everywhere, torn shoes from 2011 stuffed in whatever cubby of empty space is left in my overflowing closet. I might put on and take off my light-wash jeans six more times before going to my friend’s improv show, even though I know that no one will comment on them. It’s an overcorrection, but for me, that’s growth — the sort of conscious, deliberate mistake I would’ve been way too proud to make a year ago.

I remember tearing a close friend apart in 9th grade for listening to Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now.”

It was the fall of 2010, the record had just dropped, and without hearing a note, I decided that it was awful. The album art features a waxen Swift glancing at the observer, her purple dress dissipating into Jackson Pollock splatters. Glitter flows liberally. To my newly-out 14 year-old self, hating Speak Now was an easy way to gain distance from the pieces of gay culture I was least comfortable with. It was a two-pronged attack: I was wary of Swift’s femininity, but I was also reacting to some sense that the image she was spinning wasn’t authentically feminine (because obviously I would know, right?). Swift was, to me, such a one-dimensional figure that I could actually bifurcate my stance under the cover of her blankness. Depending on who was asking, I either hated her because she made music for girls, or I hated her because she was bad for women.

In 2010, Swift was an easy late-night punchline. “Looks like the common denominator in all these failed relationships is you!” roared the popular consciousness, ribbing her fiercely enough that they didn’t have to take her seriously as a songwriter, but softly enough that the gate was open for an interview down the line where they exploited her girl-next-door charms. It’s fascinating, though, to trace the palatability of anti-Swift sentiment across the last decade of her career. Things have moved in an elliptical pattern: by putting on and ripping off a dizzying array of archetypes, Swift has gone from America’s Sweetheart to national punchline to redemptive figure to vilified pariah. At the time of writing, she’s one of the easiest targets in celebrity culture, which I’m sure is nothing a little steel-pedal guitar can’t fix.

Before 2012, Swift occupied a profitable but narrow pop culture niche. She premiered as a novelty act: a teenager who wrote sharp little country songs. Cuts like “Tim McGraw” and “Picture to Burn” from her self-titled 2006 debut are built on stories about heartbreak, pickup trucks, and God-fearing small townfolk praying that their fleeting romances last. Each subsequent release varied the formula just enough to count, technically, as a new album. 2008's Fearless upped Taylor Swift’s ante by burying some electric guitar in the mix. Two years later, Speak Now spent some time reckoning with Swift’s seat at the table of ultra-fame, but ultimately added up to another collection of Taylor Swift Songs.

Then, in 2012, came Red. Preceded by the left-field pop single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” Red marked the first major shift in Swift’s public perception. Much of it was self-styled: the album is an adventurous hodgepodge of sounds and influences, featuring self-consciously “sexy” lyrics like “I’ll do anything you say/If you say it with your hands.” It’s the first major break from mandolin-led verse-chorus storytelling in her catalogue. On Fearless and Speak Now, Swift toys a bit with persona, but she always winds up playing some variation of a lovesick teenager.

On Red, she shapeshifts much more visibly. She assumes the identity of Ethel Kennedy, tells the story of Joni Mitchell’s rise and fall, and flirts with full-on dance music. Tellingly, though, Red isn’t her full-on tilt into “good girl gone bad” territory. (That comes later.) Instead, it’s a calculated ascent from the easily dismissable world of teen-pop to a class of critically acclaimed grown-up singer-songwriters.

The ploy worked. Swift was buoyed by the approval of musical tastemakers, which granted her a level of authenticity whose prior absence had blocked her off to a whole class of vinyl-obsessed potential admirers. Suddenly outlets like Spin were calling her work “smart and tuneful” and “full of adult pleasures.” Underground pop freak Grimes said she was “completely blown away” by Red, which she listened to after reading in an interview that the title was a reference to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. “I feel like people don’t respect [Swift] as much as they should,” Grimes went on to say, “because they see a blonde girl and dismiss [the music].”

None of this would have been possible, of course, if we weren’t ready for Grown Up Taylor Swift; we like to hold tight to the illusion that our pop stars are only allowed to shapeshift with our permission. But after years of gender-fueled criticism, we were ready for it. The public wanted Swift to silence cries that “she only wrote about boys” and prove her largely-male critics wrong — they were ready for her hold her own as a serious songwriter fluent in the musical languages of Serious Songwriters: folk, alt-rock, and dream-pop. With Red, she did just that. Against all odds, one of the best-selling female artists of all time had successfully starred in her own underdog story.

It was during this period of sudden critical outpouring that I felt safe enough to seriously engage with her for the first time. A close friend, whose earnest embrace of Swift’s output I regularly mocked, insisted that I listen to Red. I wanted to hate it as much as I had theoretically hated Speak Now, but about 45 seconds into stadium-rock opener “State of Grace,” she had me. Thanks to her suddenly-elevated cultural status, I was able to express my enthusiasm without fear of backlash. If anything, it lended some levity to my self-constructed Cool Music Guy persona.

Spurred by my enthusiasm for Red, I started working my way back through Swift’s discography, which inevitably led me to Speak Now. It didn’t hold the same luster Red: there was no single moment as transcendent as the key-smashing, Carole King-cribbing climax of “All Too Well,” and most of its songs stuck pretty squarely to the glossy country-pop I’d come to associate with Swift. Still, it intrigued me in a way that I didn’t let it intrigue me when it first dropped in 2010. First, there was the fact that Swift wrote the entire thing by herself before she turned 20. Then there was the fact that it moved 1.3 million copies in its first week, the second-largest debut for any female artist in history. That doesn’t instantly make it good, of course, but it means something. You don’t write one of the fastest-selling albums of all time completely by yourself as part of a cynical marketing strategy. No matter how famous you are, people will stop buying before 6 million copies unless the songs are really, really good…and to my surprise, the songs on Speak Now were really, really good.

The evidence is on the page. Compared to the sometimes-syrupy tone of her earlier records, Speak Now’s words are sharper, its images cleaner. She’s angrier, more sure. “Long were the nights when my days once revolved around you,” she snarls on “Dear John,” treating a freshly-dead relationship with near-instant objectivity. Almost every song on Speak Now plays with perspective like this. Characters comment on how present moments will be immortalized in memory, songs look backwards and then forward in the course of a line or two. For the most part, these stories (true to her country roots, they really are stories) possess a dizzying assuredness that the record’s gauzy purple album art keeps hidden — perhaps intentionally so.

Take “Mine” for instance. The chorus is a recollection from several years into a relationship (“Do you remember we were sitting there by the water?”), while the verses flash forward to somewhere in the middle of that relationship. Then in the final verse, we switch perspectives to Swift’s lover, and he recounts his own version of events. It sounds twisty, but it zips by so breezily that you don’t even notice the narrative mechanics until you’re on your third or fourth listen. It also features some of Swift’s most economical exposition in the line “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” which she repeats so many times that you wind up unable to tell if she means it as a compliment or a condemnation.

The rest of the album is stuffed with these sorts of lyrical details, which give the songs a texture their instrumentation often lacks. “Sparks Fly” chugs along like a bland pop-rocker until Swift darkly pleads with her partner to “Give me something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around.” “Last Kiss” threatens breathy melodrama until the gut punch of “I’ll go sit on the floor wearing your clothes/All that I know is I don’t know how to be something you miss.” The tongue-in-cheek title track, a saga of imagined wedding crashing, features such small pleasures as “the organ starts to play a song that sounds like a death march” and “she is yelling at a bridesmaid somewhere back inside a room wearing a gown shaped like a pastry.”

For the uninitiated, Speak Now is primarily of interest because it’s the first record where Swift fully flexes her songwriting chops. For those already sold on those chops, though, it’s of far more interest for another attribute: the album is completely unable to escape the shadow of Swift’s celebrity. “Innocent” could be about redemption of any sort, but thanks to a number of coy interviews with outlets like Rolling Stone, we know it’s a passive-aggressive olive branch for Kanye West after he famously interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 Video Music Awards. “Better Than Revenge” is a snarky-fun New Wave surprise, but we can’t listen to it without thinking about Joe Jonas, whose song “Much Better” is spitefully namechecked in the bridge. And here we come to the essential conundrum that saddles anyone tasked with critically examining Swift’s discography: her songs are at once confessional and calculated. She’s often lauded for writing universally-accessible, diaristic snapshots, but she also litters her liner notes with clues about which famous beau inspired her latest hit-piece.

This gets to the meat of Taylor Swift as a dilemma. I thought, in attacking her back in 2010, that I was shrewdly using her flatness to my advantage. I was wrong. Taylor Swift has always meant more than one thing at a time, and her dirtiest trick has been appearing flat in the process. In most discussions, the actual content of her music is tossed aside, but it’s instructive to consider how carefully crafted it is. Speak Now has all those sly narrative turns, pointing to a Machiavelli beneath the storybook princess. Red perfectly straddles Swift’s roots as a country singer and her encroaching pop-star ambitions. This tension between her apparent innocence and more openly curatorial instincts has driven a massive amount of the public intrigue that surrounds her. It’s also why a lot of people hate her.

Why, after all, do people not hate Fiona Apple? She also built a career on the back of songs about the men she’s dated and hated, and aside from one 1997 acceptance speech kerfuffle, she’s widely loved. The difference is that Apple never won the Grammy for Album of the Year and then wrote a pouty banjo song called “Mean” about how the whole wide world was against her. She never dated someone named John and then called the song about him “Dear John,” craftily playing on the very concept of anonymity. Swift’s work is duplicitous, and that doesn’t sit well with a lot of casual consumers. So much of her early persona is predicated on the doe-eyed defiance of big, bullying forces that there’s no room for suspicion that Swift might be a bully herself. Sympathy is a coveted resource — only the people who deserve it are supposed to receive it, and no one wants to be tricked into giving it.

For a while, Swift dealt endearingly with these accusations. In 2014, bolstered by her Red-fueled public redemption, she wrote a song about them. “Blank Space” is the second single from 1989, Swift’s best-selling and slickest concoction, and it marks her first time coloring in shades of self-awareness. Over an ice-cold futurist beat, she winkingly inhabits a character constructed from the most lurid pieces of her tabloid persona: “Got a long list of ex-lovers/They’ll tell you I’m insane/But I’ve got a blank space, baby/And I’ll write your name.” By acknowledging her place in the popular narrative with “Blank Space,” Swift was able to momentarily transcend it. If Red bought her critical acclaim and a passing level of cool, “Blank Space” was a pointed reminder that she was in on the joke. Suddenly Swift was at the peak of her powers, ruling both the airwaves (1989 broke Speak Now’s first-week sales record four years later) and the press (“[1989 aims] somewhere even higher, a mode of timelessness that few true pop stars even aspire to,” wrote the New York Times in their review of the album).

This would’ve been an interesting enough place for Swift to stop. 1989 cemented the pop crossover she’d begun with Red, and the cries of either serial-dating or inauthenticity were quieting. She was, for a moment, one of the most agreed-upon figures in pop culture. There were murmurs that perhaps she was a bit too polished, that her solid-teflon team of pop-juggernaut best friends were a semi-dystopian bunch. It was a far cry from her muckiest moments as universal punching bag, though: “Blank Space” essentially neutralized the accusations of man-eating; gone were the days of impish YouTubers stitching together videos of Swift winning awards and mocking her supposedly put-upon “surprised face.”

Then, as if timed by a cash-strapped showrunner, came the infamous coda to the Kanye spat of 2009. In briefest possible summary: West wrote a controversial lyric about Swift on his 2016 record The Life of Pablo (“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that bitch famous”). In response, Swift’s management released a statement expressing disappointment with the jab, calling West misogynistic and asking him to let sleeping dogs lie. West’s wife Kim Kardashian then hit back by posting a video of a phone call between Swift and West where Swift appears to verbally approve of the lyric.

It is only slightly melodramatic to say that, at this point, the levees broke. Only after the Kardashian video did it become apparent how fragile a place Swift had carved out for herself since Red put her back on the public upswing. Twitter descended on the tidbit like a pack of wild dogs, foaming at the chance to pop a bubble Swift had unwittingly been inflating for years. It’s a poignant illustration of the delicate chemistry that dictates our feelings about superstars. Swift showed up, won hearts, and then her purity started generating suspicion. When she started animating her persona with hints of real-girl behavior, things got worse: how dare she snarl or sneer in this song or that one, and how could anyone this constructed be halfway relatable anyway? Once we realized she was in on the joke, we let her mature, and in not trying to be America’s Sweetheart, she ended up becoming America’s sweetheart. Then, with a single whiff of deception, the house of cards collapsed.

Across social media, Swift’s name became synonymous with the snake emoji. She was dogged by claims of white supremacy due to her radio silence during the 2016 election. The “surprised face” memes were back with a vengeance, and now the hate machine was animated by a deeper fury that Swift was safe from on the first go — everyone felt hoodwinked. To paraphrase an oft-cited moment from America’s Next Top Model: we trusted her. Swift responded by bowing out. She posted on Instagram asking to be “excluded from this narrative” and then went into what amounted to hiding for two years. Fans and critics alike speculated about her comeback: when would it be? What would it look like? Should she address her fall from grace or just barrel forward like nothing ever happened?

When that comeback finally came, in the fall of 2017, it veered hard toward the former. For all the accusations she’d weathered since 2006, Swift was rarely accused of being tone-deaf. If anything, she was too much of an insider, not naive enough to pull off the good-girl schtick she was peddling. But reputation (lower-case “r” and all) is one of the most baffling possible responses to her Kanye-fueled downfall. Rather than do something like return to the rootsy genre experimentation that lent her credibility in the first place, Swift took a sharp left turn and restyled herself as a hard-edged R&B crooner ready to “take on the haters.” She saved her good-girl-gone-bad moment for a spat over a single hip-hop lyric. To counterbalance bad PR that played into claims that Swift was petty and artificial, she doubled down on the narrative she started with “Blank Space” but bled it clean of humor. The result was an ultra-shiny, often-awkward collection that positioned her as a tough-as-nails femme fatale, ready to “cut all the toxic drama out of her life” while at the same time stirring the pot with glee.

There was a brief, shining moment when it felt like we might need Taylor Swift. When we saw that she was capable of capturing the butterfly-hum of first love while standing up to the people who wrote her off as a flash-in-the-pan, she appeared almost bilingual: fluent in earnest stadium-pop and 21st century cynicism. reputation, while modestly successful with critics and consumers, poked a hole in that narrative. We don’t want our celebrity feuds to last for more than a few minutes (with a handful of notable exceptions), and we certainly don’t need our pop stars to encroach on the “beef” territory of our most beloved emcees. It feels like a glaring miscalculation in a career that, until now, has been strikingly well-calculated. It didn’t inch her closer to any end goal the way all of her previous records have, and it marks the first time that Swift doesn’t look like she’s one step ahead of the rest of us. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether she’ll re-gain that lead, but if history is anything to by, something tells me she will.

After all, reputation ends with the stripped-down morning-after ballad “New Year’s Day,” which essentially contextualizes the prior 45 minutes as a bad night out. “Please don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere,” Swift croons in a startling return to form on an album where she elsewhere spits “They say I did something bad/Then why’s it feel so good?” If it’s a signal that this whole album cycle has been a carefully-manicured Rebellious Phase, that wouldn’t justify the misstep, but it would point to a compelling truth. Maybe Swift knew that reputation was a dud, but she also knew that with her and super-producers Max Martin and Jack Antonoff at the helm, it would move units.

Maybe she’s taken a more holistic a stance on her career than I have, and she’s fully aware of the chapter she’s in — after all, why not profit on villainy if there’s nothing you can do about being the villain?

The promotional cycle surrounding The Life of Pablo, Kanye West’s seventh studio album, has become a spectator sport every bit as infuriating and invigorating as anything on ESPN.

Listening to the final product, it’s difficult to confirm or deny whether the ceaseless fanfare was worth it: The Life of Pablo is a bundle of contradictions. It is by turns assured and petulant, self-aware and tone-deaf. In other words, it’s a lot like Kanye West.

The first time we hear West’s voice on this messy, domineering album, he breaks through the sound of a child in religious ecstasy to proclaim, “I’m trynna keep my faith/But I’m looking for more.” While he throws plenty of clutter at us across Pablo’s staggering 18 tracks — Rihanna singing Nina Simone samples, bizarre quips about anal bleaching, an entire song about how Nike was mean to him once — those opening lines remain its mission statement, and his commitment (however loose) to that mission keeps the record’s head above water. There’s nothing as flagrantly Christian here as The College Dropout’s “Jesus Walks,” but even in the most unlikely places, these songs hinge on a captivating struggle between virtue and vice.

Take, for instance, “Freestyle 4.”

On the scratchy, lo-fi track, West spews pure id: sounding drunk, he considers the ideal way to ravish a woman at a seedy party while pitying those who don’t allow themselves similar indulgences. Instead of teeming with the kind of braggadocio that was spread thick on 2013’s Yeezus, the song is shot through with despair.

There are two compelling explanations for this: first, there’s no indication that the song’s subject is Kim Kardashian, which means that “Freestyle 4” could be a psychodrama about an extramarital affair. Second (which ties to and enhances the first) is the track’s haunting string sample from “Human” by Goldfrapp. As Kanye flouts his sins, he reminds us with an intertextual wink that they’re all a part of his mortal imperfection, which gives surprising weight to a moment that would hardly make an impression in lesser hands.

The gospel bent comes through even more forcefully on Pablo’s two best songs: “Ultralight Beam,” which opens the album, and “Wolves,” which closes it.

“Ultralight Beam” features The-Dream, Chance the Rapper, gospel singers Kelly Price and Kirk Franklin, and a massive, ground-shaking choir, with barely any help from Kanye himself. It deals most directly with the idea of faith and the price of salvation: “I’m looking for somewhere I can feel safe/And end this holy war.” The pain in Kanye’s voice, in Price’s, in The-Dream’s, imbues “Ultralight Beam” with a vulnerability that paves the way for Chance’s deliriously joyful verses to dominate its back half. The song is essentially a quilt of slow-paced sonic episodes that melt into one another, which makes it a strange choice for an album opener. Its sewn-together nature lends it a lived-in quality, though, and the listener is left to populate the canyons between its disparate strands. The incompleteness draws us in instead of pushing us out.

“Wolves” imagines West and his wife, Kim Kardashian, as a contemporary Joseph and Mary, swathing their children in lamb’s wool and protecting them from encroaching predators. It also sees him drowning in Christian guilt as he wrestles with his late mother’s disapproval of his decadent lifestyle. While it sounds mildly ridiculous, it completely sticks the landing. “Wolves” rounds out a trio of songs (after “FML” and “Real Friends”) that feature West at his lowest, and his desperation rings true because it stands in such stark contrast to his signature bravado. The song’s chilly soundscape only drives the point home.

“Ultralight Beam” and “Wolves” aside, though, The Life of Pablo is without a doubt the least cohesive work of Kanye’s career. At times, it feels like a college essay written 6 hours before the deadline with the furtive assistance of unprescribed adderall.

Spoken-word interlude “Low Lights” starts in the middle of a chord, and exists on a different planet than “Feedback,” its industrial-edged predecessor. Some of the album’s strongest moments, like the Kendrick Lamar joint “No More Parties in LA,” are bafflingly relegated to bonus track status. The much-maligned “Facts,” an anti-Nike manifesto that West first dropped on his Soundcloud earlier this year, is still feather-light and embarrassingly petty, even with a spiffed up instrumental from Charlie Heat. The mixing in “Waves” sounds like the producer fell asleep at the wheel.

There are also a number of jokes that just don’t land, including that now-infamous Taylor Swift diss (“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that bitch famous”).

From the man who made My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a record whose canny self-reflection and flawless reconciliation of nearly every major musical genre made it one of the greatest sonic achievements of the 21st century, this sloppiness is a bit of a head-scratcher. Most of Pablo’s songs (save “Facts”) are quite good on their own, but they often feel blindly strung together just so the world can have another Kanye West album.

At the end of the day, though, that’s not such a bad thing. Even when he’s unfocused, Kanye is still Kanye, and his unusual ear is exciting as ever here. Nearly all of the influences he’s accrued over the last decade-plus explode across The Life of Pablo at some point: soul bumps against scuffed dancehall on “Famous,” “30 Hours” boasts the silky smoothness of The College Dropout’s funkier moments. At its best, Pablo is a sonic Being John Malkovich that gives us a direct line to West’s boisterous, overworked mind. We’ve seen polished Kanye — this is Kanye at the drawing board.

Whether we like it or not, it seems we’ll always want to hear the gospel according to ’Ye, even when he’s not operating at his peak or making good on outsized promises to deliver the “album of a life.” As a scratchy sample of rowdy children put it on Yeezus, Pablo’s direct predecessor, “He’ll give us what we need/It may not be what we want.”

A short story inspired, perhaps distastefully, by a news headline.

The beginning is always the same. Having dulled the razor’s edge of adolescence with nothing but a few nicks to show for it, young men of all creeds and backgrounds freeze wherever they happen to be and drop their expressions entirely. A long, twisted tunnel comes together before their eyes — a dumping ground for all the unreturned phone calls their addled minds have buried with time. Perspective descends in dizzying bits of lightning: they have always believed to some extent that nothing matters, a side effect of either generational apathy or evolutionary self-defense, but only during this swift confrontation with their lives’ most irreconcilable elements do they mold this belief into something concrete.

The odd and otherworldly takeover can strike anywhere. Ideally, the victims will be enjoying an afternoon jog when the sensation comes about, seized with a quiet panic to which they are the sole witness. Their Nikes scuff and their water bottles with loosely refitted tops made of recycled plastic spill, but that’s usually the worst of it.

Much less fortunate are the poor bastards who drop a glass of champagne at their best friend’s wedding or stop dead in the middle of an intersection while driving their girlfriends to the Cape for the weekend; they’re forced to feign normalcy or else publicly fall apart while succumbing to the greatest and least-explainable wave of existential unease they have ever experienced.

When it hits, there are two major courses of action. The insatiable dissect their every unfinished exchange and rushed valedictory, terrified by the threat of loose ends, striving with an alien sense of purpose to mold the raw material of their lives into something with a three-act structure.

Others — the restless — revel in the clarity of the experience and use it to revisit moments they have either forgotten or suppressed. Because they spend most of their lives fretting about getting to sleep on time or moving their conversations at a steady clip, this break from reality is a welcome reprieve.

The most common reaction, though, is typical of any person experiencing any sort of paradigm shift: an initial rush of concern, followed by disinterest that eventually gives way to amnesia. Lives are long and complicated, most eventually reason. No use legitimizing every gut punch that flies your way.

Carson Hille was alone in his sterile, boxy living room on the day it happened to him. He was stoned, folding socks, and waiting for a colleague to come pick something up from his guest room. For eighteen months now, he’d been living in a rent controlled single-bedroom apartment two miles north of the city that stewed in the stench of unfulfilled creative energy.

He was halfway through a suitably prestigious undergraduate education in neuroscience, so he wrote off the morning’s mounting dread as a particularly nasty bout of drug-induced paranoia. Chemical rebellion. The sudden slackness of his jaw and numbness in his extremities drove him to swear off the purplish strain of marijuana that rested in two neat, symmetrical piles to his right. But as he lifted and stretched his spindly legs, he began to notice that this unease was not the work of potent cannabis. This was something deeper, sadder, and far less fleeting.

The local news was on, as it always was on afternoons like this. For the past twelve or thirteen months, police had been searching for a boy named Kyle Cromley who was last seen being picked up from school by his stepmother. All throughout the state, it had become impossible to check the weather without encountering the tear-streaked marble faces of Kyle’s parents or the profiles of melancholy schoolteachers who spoke of his irrepressible light while their eyes unsteadily scanned the floor. Today, for the first time in weeks, the story was back in focus, and the Channel 7 news team returned to its standard method of coverage. The blonde field reporter who had covered the story from the beginning stood beside the station’s stocky anchor, her husband, in a frame that had the words “SECOND GRADE SCARE” and a large sheet of illegible math homework digitally keyed behind them. Carson found this to be in questionable taste.

“We have some breaking news about the Kyle Cromley case,” said the blonde woman, her voice a warm but pragmatic beam sawing through the studio’s artificial silence. Carson hated her. “Due to a number of dead-end leads and circular conversations with primary suspects, the sheriff’s office announced this morning that it will offer a $60,000 reward to anyone with information that leads to the discovery of young Kyle’s body.”

Their expressions were solemn, and the ticker that usually drove a rut into the bottom of the screen faded out politely, as if to allow viewers time to fish for an appropriately grave emotional response. Carson had been considering the pros and cons of extracting his two remaining, heavily impacted wisdom teeth for the majority of the broadcast, but his ears perked up at the mention of Cromley’s name. He turned the television down several notches, glancing over his right shoulder as he did so, as if to fend off a raised eyebrow or narrowed expression.

The focus then catapulted back and forth between the stone-faced reporter and her husband. Neither was able to mask a profound discomfort with the morning’s material. Carson, however, stopped listening after the introduction, letting the pair’s twisted faces and half-coughed professions of resigned sympathy bleed into his neutered surroundings.

The segment was notable for a number of reasons.

First, the woman’s use of the word “body” marked, to Carson’s knowledge, the first public admission that Kyle Cromley was probably dead by now. It was the realist’s assumption, of course, but he was surprised to see it wielded so flippantly.

Second, it felt strange that the sheriff’s office allowed Channel 7 to publicize their lack of direction by mentioning “dead-end leads” and “circular conversations with primary suspects.” In the hearts and minds of the entire free world, the incompetence of law enforcement was something to rave about over glasses of wine with like-minded relatives and try to fix in drug-fueled conversations on dorm room couches. A public concession of failure humanized an institution whose lack of humanity was often the only thing others saw fit to hurtle against it. Carson itched his right temple in discomfort; cognitive dissonance mounted.

Of course, he was also thinking about the money. His thoughts dropped into a dead sprint as he regained full feeling in his hands and switched off the small blue television. Sixty thousand dollars. Carson and everyone else in Channel 7’s broadcasting region was trying their hardest to pretend that this sum blew past them without a thought, but not a single housewife or future valedictorian was succeeding.

Sixty thousand dollars.

His head split into symmetrical compartments: one was horrified by the commodification of something as mundane as a human body, especially when Kyle Cromley’s death seemed so certain that officials were willing to use the word “body” at all. He shook an ideological fist at the West and its silly, Christian conception of life and death, drawing on a slew of chilly mornings spent in crowded lecture halls clutching margin-marked copies of Moby-Dick. The other, more primal part of Carson’s brain wanted to grasp $60,000 in his sweaty fists and wave it above his head, irresponsibilities of capitalism be damned. He needed a better television and a car that didn’t emit radio static when he used the AC and a job that he could stomach and align with the remaining moral traces of his faintly Catholic upbringing.

Carson stood and broke for the kitchen, meaning to swipe some peanut butter and congealed strawberries over two slices of white bread in a routine he’d associated with order ever since he was a young boy.

Order didn’t come.

It was in the kitchen, dripping jam onto his warped wooden floor, that Carson finally found himself seized by the vision of the tunnel that seizes all young men at some point or other. It came quickly and without recourse, as it was meant to. He saw into this strange watershed of memory and space that all men see, and he focused quickly on a small number of specific vignettes that nearly caused him to choke on the technicolor sheen of his own futility.

The first memory was the hardest.

It was a Thursday in the early winter. He was a freshman in college. The streets were spottily coated with a hesitant layer of deep brown snow, but on this particular night, it was raining. He was taking a night class on cognitive and behavioral genetics that ended an hour before his favorite Thai restaurant closed, so he would spend his Thursday evenings in camaraderie with the silent, diligent staff of Basil Thai as they performed their ritualistic closing duties. He finished a lukewarm Pad Thai and was smoking a cigarette underneath the restaurant’s flickering neon sign when he first saw the car pull into sight.

It approached slowly, just after Carson had taken too lengthy a drag. He held it in his lungs for what felt like white-hot decades, twisting his entire body toward the restaurant’s brick siding as he relaxed his throat and let out a sheet of light-gray smoke that disbanded more slowly than he wished it would. He stayed in place, torso at odds with his square lower half, while he flicked stray ash off the end of the still-burning cigarette and pointedly avoided eye contact with the driver. The rain came harder. The car slowed noticeably. Carson tried to keep his eyes occupied by pulling up an email from a distant relative that sported photographs from a tropical vacation. After a tense few seconds of hesitant motion, the car stopped and, suppressing the bile that seemed to rise from the soles of his feet, Carson stuffed his wiry frame into the backseat. Everything inside seemed musty, tired. He did not need to ask where they were going.

Blackness. Next thing he knew, it was one year earlier.

He was a senior in high school. His angular, taciturn mother had him perched atop a kitchen barstool with a room temperature hot dog in his left hand, and she was pacing around him in the kind of fervent concentric circles that can only be the work of a parent who is brushing shoulders with failure. For the first time since Carson laid his infant hands upon her pink face, she was yelling. He had just been accepted to his first choice university, and she was mishandling the delivery of the information that she and his father would not be able to pay the tuition. His grandparents had money, sure, but they hadn’t spoken in years, and goddamn it, can’t you just get a fucking job? Is that really so hard?

Carson blew the hair out of his eyes so he could see his mother rhythmically enter and flee from his field of vision, her voice sowing and watering the seeds for a deep-rooted inferiority complex that he wouldn’t shake until the day he died. When she stopped for breath by the refrigerator, finally taking the time to understand the magnitude of what she was doing, he thoughtlessly launched his hot dog at her chest. Carson’s expression became suddenly furtive, but his mother did not cry. She knew that she deserved it. After a deep, wounded inhale, she pooled all of her resources into expressing herself in a more direct, appropriate fashion. It wouldn’t mend what had come before, but it would keep her steady on her feet for at least a few days.

“Make the money, Carson.”

And with that, she was out the door, leaving behind a gruesome display of sauerkraut and blood-red streaks of condiment. Make the money, Carson. He reached for his cell phone with a defeated, trembling hand, once and for all convinced of the adult world’s failure to fulfill the duties that it advertised as its own. His finger trembled as he flipped through an ever-mounting list of contacts until he found the one he needed. A low ring. A gulp.

“Hello?” He sounded smaller than Carson expected.

“Hi — hi. I’m looking for some work.”

The tunnel twisted. He stayed still, one memory bleeding into another.

It was six months after the conversation with his mother; the summer before he would commence a lifetime of picking apart the inscrutable functions of the human brain. Rather than box up his childhood possessions in hard, cold suitcases and haul them six hundred miles north, he would load up the family car and take an hour-long road trip to the state university that he’d mocked with his friends since they were old enough to understand the future. He heeded his mother’s financial advice, but to no thrilling result: business at the diner was slow that summer, so they’d cut his hours, and he was still unwilling to let his parents see any of the money he made from his other job. The mere consideration turned his stomach.

It was nearly midnight and he was driving his father’s old Subaru on a rural stretch of highway with reckless abandon, every tap of the accelerator a caustic dismissal of the decisions both in and out of his control that had placed him here. He hated the dimly-lit markets that materialized on the horizon every four or five miles, and he hated that his father had worked at nearly all of them. He noticed an attractive couple about his age in a park that sat on the southern edge of town, blurred by the soft light of passing street lamps. Rather than meeting the pair with the kind of distant, smiling jealousy to which he had grown accustomed, he met them with vitriol.

His senses were heightened, and not at the hand of any substances — he was fueled by an incendiary unhappiness that seemed to sit inside his chest, just behind his solar plexus, and render him incapable of speech or reason. This was the last time he would ever feel like this. He took the long fingers of his right hand off the steering wheel for a moment and reached for a cigarette, but made a last-minute move for the volume dial. His softly creased pack of Marlboros remained in the passenger’s seat. A disheveled woman sang an empowered dirge about regretting her choices but embracing their results. He smiled a hard, empty smile that lived somewhere between condescension and solidarity with no one in particular. It was a good place for him.

And with that, he was back at the first memory, unable to fully leave it behind.

He was still inside the car that found him at Basil: the smell of cigarette smoke still clung to his jacket, and his mind hadn’t relinquished the topic of that evening’s neuroscience lecture. Alexa, a greasy black-haired woman whose face was home to the world’s unfriendliest eyes, glanced at Carson in the rearview mirror. His stomach was full, his nerves calmed, and his breath still smelled of spicy-sweet Thai iced tea. He fingered a piece of what looked like math homework sitting to his left.

“I’m not sure this is the right way,” Carson offered, not wanting to cause an uproar so much as satisfy a genuine curiosity as to what would happen next. Alexa, whose glossy nails gripped tighter on the steering wheel with each passing second, had recently married Carson’s boss, and she was the sort of person whose unkindness stretched plausibility for even the most jaded of onlookers. Her brand of coldness and inscrutability was supposed to exist only in comic books and religious texts. She and the boss made a good team, Carson thought — if not a savory one.

Carson knew what they were about to do, though he did not know why. He also knew that it would require a much more thorough commitment than anything he had ever done before. It would require him to lie, which he never much liked, but the lying was only one very small part of a fiendishly pleasurable mosaic. This was a job with moving parts and a trajectory that stretched far beyond the foreseeable future. A clandestine freshness would accompany each day after he and this woman he hardly knew carried out a plan drawn up by her husband as punishment for a litany of unpaid debts. It made him wonder how many lives were changed as a result of arrogant men losing touch with a system that they were certain they had under their control.

There was something so pathetic about ransom, especially as a business tactic. It left behind a viscous trail of one’s descent from assuredness to groveling. Carson belched quietly, tasting the sour recurrence of his sauce-drenched chicken, and frowned at the thought.

“I’m not so sure either,” Alexa replied, her eyes turning over a rare moment of vulnerability. Then, unexpectedly, she shot him a glance in the rearview mirror. An objective observer might even have called it warm. “Listen, kid. I know this is new for you. Just… remember where this is headed, alright? Don’t get attached.”

Even lacking the mark of sincerity, Carson was startled by her stab at connection. She flicked the turn signal. He held his breath. The vehicle swooped to the right and began working its way down a long gravel road. Rain was coming faster than the wipers could stomach. After what felt like minutes, Carson noticed a crumbling house at the end of the driveway and a young boy out front, pitting two plastic dinosaurs against one another. He imagined the boy’s soft, impossibly fragile body being stuffed into the tiny car. Would he scream? Would he smell the cigarette smoke that clung to Carson’s clothes? What did his mother look like? Did she love him?

His pulse began to quicken and he soothed himself by looking at the floor. The mats looked new, he thought. Recently cleaned, at least.

And then, just like that, Carson was back in the kitchen.

The walls had yellowed in his absence. He looked at his feet, now coated with strawberry jam, and cleaned them off with a nearby dish rag. As he wrung the rag clean of its treacly mixture, a clock above the oven caught his eye. Alexa would be coming to pick him up any minute now.

Before he could bring himself to move, Carson reflected on the collection of moments to which he had just borne witness. He searched and searched for a tidy platitude to attach to the experience, but his mind was seized by the news segment from earlier in the afternoon.

“A $60,000 reward to anyone with information that leads to the discovery of young Kyle’s body.”

He pictured what was to ensue: his boss’s wife bursting through the newly-painted front door to claim her prize — a prize to which Carson had, in fact, grown terribly attached, despite her warnings on that cold winter Thursday a year before. She saw the world as a web of incentives and manipulatable chess pieces. He wasn’t sure she’d ever felt for another person for as long as she’d lived, and on top of that, she would get the floor so unbearably muddy. She never took the care to remove her shoes, and Carson knew that now was not the time to get upset about something like that, but he couldn’t help himself. She would leave her shoes on and she would do something that she regretted, as she nearly had two months ago when they carried out a similar job and Carson noticed the pistol stuffed quietly in her back pocket. He said nothing then, because he had taught himself to grow a cold layer of remove during business exchanges, but there was no room for quietly stuffed pistols today. He wouldn’t have it.

But still. Sixty thousand dollars.

Make the money, Carson.

“Kyle!” Carson shouted, causing a stir in his study. Unwitting celebrity Kyle Cromley set down two filthy, dueling plastic dinosaurs on a square of beige carpeting, oblivious to the national panic of which he was the epicenter. “Get out here. We’re going into town.”

Kyle ran to meet Carson in the kitchen, and he flung his arms around the tall 20 year-old’s legs as he had so many times before. It was a startlingly paternal image, and it made Carson cough. He was jealous of young Kyle’s ignorance, amusedly considering the laced-up men and women that let out a collective gasp earlier in the day when Channel 7 uttered the word “body.” He wasn’t proud of much, but he could be proud of that.

“Go get in the car. I’ll be right out.”

The young boy pulled on the coat that sat waiting for him on a hook to the left of Carson’s front door. Carson waved him out and flipped open his chrome laptop. Alone in the living room once more, he laughed cruelly. What a show.

He Googled and printed directions to the sheriff’s department, drawing up a small sign that read “Out for the day!” and attaching it to his front door. He framed the sign with his hands, finding strange pleasure in the ways the edges of the paper fell flush against his index fingers.

Watching the clouds roll in as he walked across the parking lot to his 20 year-old Honda, Carson found new strength in every footfall. He slid into the driver’s seat, door slamming behind him.

“Where are we going?” Kyle asked.

Carson’s pulse quickened as he saw a black car approach slowly from the side mirror. He soothed himself by looking at the floor.