And so I was walking, as if away from something, although there was nowhere to go, nowhere to leave to, only the road outside the Airbnb to walk down once again. It was dusty, a thin strip of asphalt in the dusty town, a grid of maybe eight roads, a flash of a town in the Mojave. We’d been in the Airbnb for seven days, expected to stay only four, but the Emergency Event, which had precipitated our departure, had not diminished.
It was still unsafe at home, and if not literally unsafe, potentially unsafe, it was possible the Event would spread to our neighborhood, it might at any time, although it still had not, yet the air surrounding our home, our neighborhood, was definitely affected, but perhaps no longer, our information wasn’t good. We were living in a low-data environment. Or, we had plenty of data, were inundated with video, photography, news, reports, commentary, tweets, Emergency notifications, governmental updates, anecdotal evidence, but we could not—without being there, in the teeth of the Event—know for sure what was true. It was possible to believe all was well. It was possible to believe returning now, right now, would have no long-term negative effects, that our exposure to the Event would be minimal, vanishing, non-existent. It was also possible to believe invisible dangers remained. Invisible dangers lingered in the air, in the water, even in the walls, because the Event had unleashed uncertain toxins with unpredictable, unknowable qualities of stickiness, longevity, perniciousness. So we remained at the Airbnb, doubting.
So I was not leaving the Airbnb. I was walking away, as the light was leaving the day, as it does in the Mojave. It sneaks out of the world subtly, a slow departure perfectly graded, beautifully graded, so that every minute, no, every second, it’s possible to trace light’s recession in the ever so slight alterations in shadow, color, and brilliance of things perpetually shifting. There was a purple burning over the San Bernardinos, as if a horde of elemental potassium were being torched in the opposite basin, and minutes before, the orange and red and vermillion light had stacked in wavy streaks like ancient strata, and it had seemed as stuck and immovable as the deepest canyons, and then I continued to walk, and then I looked up to see the light now this purple. I thought of the Event, whether it was possible it had grown, imperceptibly expanded, that its dangerous particulates had migrated our way, as if magnetized to us, and in the desert light, striking at these new intrusions, had become illuminated, exposed, revealed, its phenotype this sudden elemental purple.
I had grown tired of a font inside the Airbnb. The font was not the reason I was walking, not leaving just walking. It contributed to an inflammation, a response, a need to leave the confines of the Airbnb. The owners of the Airbnb, a stucco and corrugated metal box that rattled in the yowling January winds, had decorated their living room, coextensive with the kitchen, with desert decor—desiccated cattle skulls, worn Navajo rugs, cracked leather upholstery, solid juniper-wood chests—and in the center of it all, on a wall between kitchen and living room, they’d hung a canvas sign done in laser-jet cursive that stated, it’s not how big the house, it’s how happy the home, the letters black and glossy and perfectly artificial, seamless, no trace of human craftsmanship present, no hint of a quivering stylus, any splatters of wayward ink. I’d looked a long time at this sign, visible from all parts of the central living area, where we cooked, watched movies, and worked—the Event did not pause the need for work, it was not that severe, but what could be?—so that at any point, during virtually any activity, my eye, if I wavered at all from the task at hand, often glimpsed, accidentally or not, those words, those plunging, cartoony glyphs.
From the first, an image came to me: a robot-arm, big and steel and gleaming, solitary in a sterile white room. Hushed wheezes of hydraulics and rotors as inhuman flexions of the arm rush the words onto the plastic-glossed canvas. The violence of an infinite muscle never exhausted, programmed to execute again and again the words it’s not how big the house, it’s how happy the home until the market is satiated, and there is no longer a demand for the words it’s not how big the house, it’s how happy the home, and the lights go out, and the arm goes still, and it waits in the frigid, darkened hangar until commanded to awaken once again.
Over the last seven days, every time I’ve glimpsed this sign, I’ve also glimpsed this image, a fragment of this imagined robotic violence: the arm still and alone in shadow; the arm jerking across the canvas; the arm letting out a mechanized whir as its wrist flexes to rest. The words rendered meaningless, as they are meaningless to the arm, which is simply the instantiation of a credit card transaction. I dislike the phrase itself, but I was unnerved by far more than the phrase itself, yet that is what I told my girlfriend, H., I said, “Have you noticed this sign? It’s ridiculous,” when by ridiculous I meant something like disturbing. I realized the sign too was a correction of a kind, the correction of a falsity, of a poor description, not that but this, just as my public words about the sign, that it was ridiculous, actually demanded private correction, it was disturbing.
My girlfriend H. looked up from her computer and scoffed. “Homegoods-core. So dumb.” Then she looked back at her computer, where work occurred, on the computer and on the phone, always, without end or boundary, she was at any moment potentially accessible, a status the company took advantage of fully, because they were paying for it, and when things are paid for, results of a kind are expected, as one pays for the robot arm’s perfection and expects the script words it’s not how big the house, it’s how happy the home with no trace of paint drops or a quivering hand on the plastic-glossy canvas.
Later, at night, as we searched for a watchable movie, I pointed the sign out to H. again after a flash of the image—the arm rising from its hunched inactive position, rising upward to its ready position, high like a marble effigy of Victory, menacing the frame—left me feeling cold and powerless, on top of the Event, which left me feeling warm and powerless, a mix of angry and utterly helpless, and I said to H., “Do you ever wonder how these things are made? Like, who makes them?”
She looked over at the sign and thought, did give it thought, I saw that she did, and that is why I love her, because it mattered to her what mattered to me, even if it didn’t really matter to her, she could make it matter, and she said, “I never really have. Just total background noise to me. But it’s probably some industrial laser printer somewhere.”
“Like a giant robot arm painting it.”
“No,” she said, laughing, “I think it’s like a really big printer. Somewhere.”
“But who owns the printer? It can’t be the Etsy shop that sells the sign.”
“I don’t know. I think it’s just in a warehouse somewhere.”
“You can buy the right to print on the laser printer owned by someone.”
“Yeah, that’s most likely it,” H. said, suddenly weary. “Something like that.”
Then her phone dinged, and mine did too, and we both stopped talking and we looked at our phones, because dings like this almost always meant notifications from an app bringing news of the Event and its ongoing status in our neighborhood.
The news was there was no news, but there was potentially going to be news tomorrow, if certain conditions were met, but it was impossible to predict which conditions were more likely, so it was once again best to remain cautious, to wait and see which conditions moved from the possible to the actual, and to act on the actualized conditions only then.
I was once again disappointed, confused, and frustrated by the low-quality data, and I thought of the sign, that it was exactly the kind of industrial item Event experts said had, when destroyed by the Event, released the invisible dangers whose presence or lack thereof in our neighborhood, our air, perhaps even our home’s walls, was the pressing question in the Airbnb, every hour in the Airbnb, whether we spoke of it or not. Then I grew angry at the sign, and I grew angry at the robotic arm, which had nothing to do with the sign’s creation, it was just an Image, now a talismanic Image of the sign and what it meant to me. I grew angry at all robotic arms whipping toxins onto toxified plastic canvases, the environment perhaps sterile of bacteria but full of, brimming with, invaded by dangerous invisibilities that were material expedients that now, exploded, became impediments not just to my safe return home and H.’s ongoing health, but the safety and health of my entire neighborhood. My home was being toxified by the industrial apparatus that created the sign that read, it’s not how big the house, it’s how happy the home, and leered at me, like the nozzle of a weapon, a loaded gun, the arm of a robot with all that nothingness inside of it.
“I need to take a walk,” I said.
“What is it?” H said.
“I just need to breathe.”
“Okay. Can you—I know this is annoying—wear a mask?”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know, just in case there’re some, you know, toxins in the air. Some invisible dangers.”
“They couldn’t go this far.”
“I know. But also—maybe they could. I don’t know. I’m just worried.”
I saw that H. was worried about the invisible dangers like I was worried about the sign, but she could not see that the sign was a locus of invisible dangers, a potential, the irony of that potential she did not see, and I couldn’t tell her, and she was right, of course, she was right, for what did I know about the invisible dangers except that they were dangerous, had severe long-term effects, and traveled at unknowable rates over unknowable distances?
For the first few days, I put on my mask, and as I walked the dirt road, shuffling along one tiny arm of the town’s tiny grid as the January wind whisked up flows and sashays of sand, I kept my mask on, and my breath, the action of my lungs, felt loud in my ears, my body felt so close at hand, and I thought I could hear in the labored breaths the presence of particulates, dangerous invisibilities I’d huffed before we managed to escape the Event, and even the sand, which perhaps contained trace invisible dangers as it whisked in and out of Airbnbs, scratching out tiny parcels of toxins from signs that said, it’s not how big the house, it’s how happy the home. The Event had destroyed homes, and it had destroyed bodies but not my body, although perhaps it had begun to, and it had not destroyed my home, but perhaps it had begun to. It was impossible to say. I grew frustrated and angry and confused as I listened to my heavy breathing in the mask, and when I returned, I stewed, and the stewing became like a toxin itself, a dangerous invisibility, and it upset H., and later I had to apologize for myself becoming some particulate she could not escape.
On the sixth day I took off my mask as I walked the road, not to leave, but to escape the sign, the font, the robotic arm, and myself, as soon as I left the eyeline of the Airbnb, so H. would not see. The air smelled and tasted normal. This was of course the issue with the invisible dangers: they were imperceptible, they were too small for perception, too subtle for our senses. On the seventh day, I took off the mask as soon as I walked out the door, because dangers or not, I could no longer listen to my own breathing like I had. I could no longer peer into my own body with not-sensitive-enough senses and read into every breath the potential of damage, which I could not sense anyway, which was instead more a question of belief: whether I believed there were present dangers or not. There were any number of reasons to believe there were dangers present. There were any number of reasons to believe I had ingested no dangers, and the Event had not affected me. That my health remained intact.
I watched the light escape the day and when it was gone, I returned to H. She was on the couch, peering at her phone.
“I want to go home,” I said.
“I do too,” she said.
“So let’s just go,” I said.
“I want to,” she said. “I really really want to.”
She held out her phone. On screen, there was another update: the forewarned conditions had not been met, not yet, and the Event had not expanded, it was day three of non-expansion, but the conditions that would initiate expansion were still potential, in fact now some experts, but not all experts, thought they were probably, not outstandingly probable, simply more than 50% probable, somewhere between 51% and 100% probable, the probability curves suggested it was more within the 50%-60% range, so the probability of the probability being in the 60%-100% range was really quite low, though one could not say for sure, though others had said the opposite was true, whether or not the probabilities were accurate, the readings themselves had an error rate also subject to probability, and based on certain conditions, the measurements themselves were subjected to probabilistic conditions, so it was really impossible to say which range we were likely to enter, and there were commentators who thought we were not within that range at all, the Event was over, definitely over, it was absurd to keep waiting, it was ridiculous, in fact it was offensive to those who’d been trapped in the Event, in the teeth of the Event, it was morally incorrect to have escaped the dangers of the Event, to have not wanted exposure to dangers with incalculably terrible long-term effects on health, although it had also been reported that those effects were not certain to be harmful, it was probable but not certain, and in fact there were cases on both sides which demonstrated both the horrific damage rendered by exposure to dangerous invisibilities during similar Events and the lack of effects in other similar Events, it all depended entirely on the situation, and in this situation, the jury was still out.
I put down the phone to see H. pulling her hair back in such a stressed and intense and distracted manner her hairline was blanching. She pulled her hair back so fiercely she squeezed the blood out of her capillaries, her eyes bulged and were bloodshot and dry. The Mojave is remarkably dry this time of year, and windy, and the light escapes early, and the wind does not leave when the light does, but it was not about external conditions for H., it was not about that, it was that she could not escape the low-quality data, H. needs better data to make a probably better choice, everyone does, I do too.
“What do we do?” I said.
She finally released her hair, and that tension moved into her neck, her lips, all tensed and pursed, her eyes staring forward into a future not only dim, but pitch-black, not only pitch-black, but throwing something back, a kind of a toxin, an emanation.
I saw the robot arm scraping toxins onto the canvas, rushing, rushing, rushing to ink enough canvas for the needs of Airbnb owners, for those who felt the need to say, have said, to see, it’s not how big the house, it’s how happy the home.
H. said, “I can’t decide. I just can’t decide.”
But I loved H. If there was something that would hurt her, I would choose against it every single time, without question.
“Let’s wait,” I said, “until tomorrow. Until we know more.”
“Okay,” she said. She breathed out heavily. “We’ll just wait.”
And so we waited, and while we searched for a watchable movie on a usable streaming app, my mind was already on tomorrow’s walk, and what the sky might look like, when our phones dinged once again, in perfect unison, with an update.
Ben Carter Olcott was a finalist for The Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize and shortlisted for The Masters Review’s 2025 Best Emerging Writers competition. His writing was recently supported by The Kenyon Review Summer Workshop. Ben was formerly the moderator of the Coyotes Literary Fiction book club at Skylight Books and the Managing Editor of KGB Bar Literary Magazine. He is based in Los Angeles. More work may be found at bencarterolcott.com