NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Serge sits at a table outside The Pie Shop with a young woman. They have their green and yellow hoodies up, masks on and seem to be separately absorbed by their screens. She tears a page out of a small spiral-bound notebook and puts it down next to her laptop, only to have it blow off their table under Lou’s chair. Lou picks it up and looks over to them.
“Are you Serge Whiterose?”
“Yes, hi Lou! I am Serge.”
He puts his arm across her shoulders.
“This is my friend, Tatiana.”
Lou hands her the paper. She puts it under her laptop. Pulls back her hood and shakes out the waves in her thick black hair.
“Thanks. Good to Meet you, Lou.”
She adjusts her mask. Hair has caught in the elastic stretching back around her ears.
“It is hard to get to know anyone with these on.”
Lou gets up, steps away facing us, and pulls his mask up over his forehead. Then moves fast to catch his glasses as they slip off his nose.
“OH! Hi there!”
Tatiana laughs. The elastic has fallen off her right ear, so she holds the paper mask away from her face.
“Tatiana! Good to see you!”
Serge stands up and steps back to pull his cloth mask down around his neck.
He holds up his water bottle.
“To your health!”
We all stand for a few moments with masks off, before replacing them and sitting down at our adjoining tables. The Pie Shop is closed without explanation.
Serge closes his laptop.
“So, this is the new thing, I guess.”
Tatiana pulls her mask up over her eyes, giggling.
“Oh My God! Looking at each other’s faces!”
“So, what, Tat.?”
“We have been hidden so long it’s like we broke a taboo!”
Lou does the same with his mask.
“The shock!”
We all hide our eyes behind our masks and laugh.
“This is it. Now we have to separate, for introductions.”
“Lou, have you heard why the Shop is closed?”
“No, I was surprised.”
Serge’s ringtones sound like a car’s starter motor. He starts texting.
“Are you studying remotely these days, Tatiana?”
“We’re, just having fun now. We study at separate institutions and can still be together, thanks to the plague.”
The cover of her laptop shows a large dark green decal with a tall, single stem plant, and the words “Milk Weed”, rendered in yellow.
“Are you a botanist?”
“No, why?”
“I am looking at the decal on your Laptop.”
“Oh, that!”
She picks it up and shows Lou the whole cover with decal
“See?’
The decal’s slogan is: ‘Fast Bugs on the Milkweed’.
“Okay, so what is all this about Milkweed?”
“The Latin name for Milkweed is Asclepias syriaca.”
Serge has stopped texting and looks over.
“I feel we are going backward!”
“Why?”
“Latin, it’s an old and dead language!”
“Not really, Latin is alive in our language, and for example, it oozes out of Rumanian, French, and Spanish.”
“Well, right but, you know, he wants to know about the site.”
“Okay so, you are talking, ‘Fast Bugs’!”
Lou is cleaning his glasses with a paper napkin.
“I am still none the wiser.”
Serge nudges his friend.
“Tat, you are being obscure! It’s an online forum, Lou. ‘Fast Bugs on the Milkweed’.”
Lou rubs his thick black eyebrows and the deepening lines across his forehead.
“Who’s on it? I mean what is it about?”
“Oh, there are a lot of different, Utopians.”
“All Utopians are the same, it seems to me. You know, idle dreamers.”
“No, no no, the ‘Fast Bugs’ include Techno-Utopians, Environmental-Utopians, Political Utopians, Sexual Utopians, Dietary Utopians, and so on.”
“All, different kinds of idling dreaming, though.”
“What is so idle about dreaming?”
“It’s what we do in our sleep; inactive.”
Tatiana spread her arms hands high in the air.
“Lou, we are not asleep!”
“I can see that.”
“Well, I know people often associate Utopia with an impossible kind of perfection.”
“Right! isn’t that the usual meaning?”
“Thomas Moore’s Utopia had slaves in golden chains.”
“Okay, but I am talking about our usage now.”
“That’s what we have now, except its finance with cyber chains.”
“What do you mean?”
Tatiana, puts her phone down.
“Our lives could be different and better. Believing that, is not futile.”
“Well, sure our lives could be better!”
“These activists are not idle.”
“Yes okay, and this milkweed. What is that about?”
“For one thing, milkweed’s milk is poisonous.”
“Yes, I know, unless you are a Monarch butterfly caterpillar or milkweed bug.”
“That’s it. Think of the beautiful monarch’s wings and that poisonous plant.”
“Okay, I am thinking.”
“Now think of all the wonderful products on the market, and the environmental degradation we are suffering.”
“Okay, I see a parallel.”
“The Fast Bugs want to move on!”
“What are they doing?”
“Capitalism isn’t any one thing, nor is Socialism. There are many kinds of both.”
“Yeah, our system has gotten off the tracks.”
“‘Fast Bugs’ are discussing some improvements.”
“There is a grim history behind this kind of thing.”
“No, not revolution, improvements, like incremental.”
“What kind of improvements?”
“That’s the subject of the different Utopians!”
“Why don’t they stand up, and deal with reality. No matter what your politics are, these are critical moments.”
Serge, leans forward.
“That’s what the forum is all about. Tatiana and me, are ‘bugging’ FaceBook.”
“You are?’
“I keep track of my clicks and ‘like’ as many Trump messages as Biden messages.”
“Why can’t you make up your mind?”
“Oh, I know who to vote for. We are both doing this to see how the algorithm responds.”
“It gives you more and more of both, right?”
“Yes, so far. We have only been doing it for a week and reporting on the forum’s, ‘Utopia 1516’.”
“Speaking of bugs, do I hear bees?”
“Yes, Lou.”
Tatiana picks up her phone to text and then the starter motor takes Serge back to his phone too.
“Our COVID tests!”
“Serge looks up from his phone.”
“I thought it was tomorrow!”
Tatiana shows him her screen. He gets up.
“Ciao for now!”
Tatiana puts her laptop in her shoulder bag and gets up to go.
“Be seeing you guys!”
