She doesn’t list her job on her profile, but nine out of ten prospective partners look her up before the first date, and then the cat is out of the bag.
“What’s an ESG manager?” her date asks, sliding clumps of angel hair around a black enameled plate. “And what’s Nurdle Nation?”
She slices neatly into a thumb-sized radish as her date pauses to fork pasta into their mouth. “Actually,” the date asks, sheepishly—”What’s a nurdle?”
She smiles with real satisfaction. The amber light from the hundred spherical lamps in the restaurant briefly dims. In the corner booth, the shadows come out, as though to play. They are dusk at her jugular, on her jaguar-print sheath dress. In the mirrored walls, she angles her face differently, adjusts the folds of the rich fabric, and watches the shadows contort, as though in pain.
“It’s a precursor to consumer product,” she, esteemed Senior ESG Manager at Nurdle Nation, LLC, says genially, graciously, already mentally preparing to wade into her spiel. Have you heard of us before, cries out the dark-green voice of the bog inside her. We were actually invited to the President’s house, last year. And I wrote an op-ed in the Post. Oh, you read it? Yeah, it was called “Fight for the Future of the Angels of the New World,” that’s right. Oh, what was it about? It was about a lot of things.
Nurdle Nation, located on the edge of a thousand-year-old crater in the Indian desert, is a city made of fifty trillion nurdles. The land was obtained through a series of schemes aimed at gullible career officials: love letters perfumed with mandarin and attar of roses, bribery in the form of crates of champagne and tropical island vacations, and, finally, in the case of those most intransigent, coolly-executed murder. Wait! That’s slanderous! No comment on any blood splatter on the dunes. No comment on the murmurs on the fragrant breeze circulating between the date-laden palms. You didn’t see what you saw! You didn’t hear what you heard!
Nurdle Nation is shaped like a peony with its bulbous silicon batteries arranged in the thousands at the center, like droplets of chrome-coated pollen; its waterways gleam in shades of oily rainbow underneath an unnatural, billion-watt light source; its denizens carry baby-pink polycoated passports made of recycled nurdle shavings and alligator skin wallets; its mayor is a former bodybuilder named T-Rex Gonzalez. Nurdle Nation is shelter to the beatifically happy; a paradise-economy; an Eden of purest equity. If its rules are as harsh and its punishments as binding as those deployed by the biblical God, it’s only in the interest of the protection of the many. Its main industry is the production of plastic tchotchkes.
Life is too easy on her, and so she craves, on occasion, the frisson of resistance. She has a particular fantasy that she nurtures as though it were a delicate, purple-petalled houseplant. In this fantasy, she’s asked, in no uncertain terms, by a bold interlocutor, to explain her choices. Her opponent sits across the rectangle of cherry wood, light playing across their fine features, a wine glass cupped in one hand, the other fiddling with a leather bangle or a pair of spectacles. They purse their lips over pyramids of colorful fat and salt, pools of sugar and vinegar. “Don’t you have any shame?” they ask—to which she responds, acidly: “Don’t you? You’re expecting me to pay for this dinner, aren’t you?” Chastised so severely, so cuttingly, so accurately, the date averts their eyes from the table and resumes eating their ravioli in silence.
Never mind that every date has insisted on paying for their share and respects her position with a veneration that borders on camp. They ooh and aah as she describes the spiral towers of Nurdle Nation, which she once observed from a helicopter. They clap their hands in delight at her mention of Mayor T-Rex, always pictured in square sunglasses, and his retinue of global celebrities. They nod in sympathy when she bemoans the general disinterest from the voting public for Nurdle Nation.
“Most people don’t have any vision,” they say, and she sighs with exaggerated sadness. There’s the fragile sound of clinking on glass as, somewhere in the room, a stranger calls for a toast.
“Undeniably true,” she agrees, her tone a shade too sharp. Her face is flushed. “But who can blame them? No place on Earth can match what we want to create.”
They sit in silent, companiable agreement as the courses arrive in a reliable, thoughtfully designed sequence. Lobster thermidor, served alongside an array of lemon wedges. Scallops in frothy yellow pools. Lettuce from the greenhouse, brown at the frilled edges, dotted with caramelized dressing. Wine poured from a cream carafe, in a thin vein, and from an impressive, daunting height. The waiter’s wrist trembles; a flash of scarlet, quickly gone pink on the linen tablecloth.
In a Nurdle Nation middle school, a young girl—precocious, tenderhearted, bug-eyed, a little annoying to be around, bullied for her frizzy hair, a lover of mermaids and bracelet-making, a writer of slightly concerning diary entries, a future management consultant—sits alone on a playground bench to read a fairytale about a princess who sacrificed all worldly possessions and pledged her entire life to the practice of good deeds. Full of confused emotion, she slips out of the playground and races down to Nurdle Nation’s artificial beachfront. On a cloudy weekday afternoon, the wind toggled down, the beach is a cold, indifferent beauty. Shivering, she kneels in the wet sand. With the urgency of purest faith, in solidarity with the fictional princess, she chucks her prized possession—a heart-shaped locket—into the surf.
In the water, the locket almost immediately comes apart into constituent nurdles, each dyed flame-red. The nurdles travel into the sewage system and, from there, into the real ocean. Bobbing up and down, pellets of congealed blood, adrift on the waves, indistinguishable from the glittering seafoam. They journey farther than any citizen of Nurdle Nation ever has or ever will. Sucked into a system of powerful currents, they travel into the windpipe of the last wild blue whale, with eventual fatal effect. And in the end of that lifetime, they emerge from the flesh of the body, untouched.
Leave a Reply