THE ISSUE

The Issue needs addressing. Yearns to be addressed. Hear its whispered solicitations in your sleep, nudging each sense organ. The horripilation of destined meetings: ears pop; genitalia lubricate and engorge; saliva dissolves its message on your tongue; nose hairs sway gently from the breeze generated by the whirring blades of its longing. On television, the Issue. Over the airwaves. Beamed down from satellites and under seas via fiberoptic cables. The Issue crashes websites, inundates them with frenzied traffic. The Issue scrawls itself across classroom whiteboards, baffling then enchanting young hearts and porous minds. Seeps into cameras, radiates out of ring lights, coats the podiums of the powerful, a miraculous polymer forming insoluble bonds.

You join the ranks of the Issue’s army, cast aside your old life of purposeless wandering — hollow jobs, hovels masquerading as homes, an ash-filled heart — and bask in its glow of universal import. Calls ensue. Marches. Campaigns. The old parties and their platforms are swept aside. New slogans are drafted, discarded, refined, spray-painted on underpasses, blazoned on the business cards of charismatic pitchmen, promoted by the world’s foremost experts and influencers, tattooed on the luscious asses of the most coveted escorts. The Issue embraces its drive to proliferate. The joy of reproduction. The Issue inseminates the culture, gestates and births itself over and over again, multiple tongues twining in its mouth — seed and egg, thrust and grind, mucus and squirt and you? — You’re just honored to be a part of the process. A fly on the wall of the maternity ward, you like to say, to joke. A friend of the family invited for a celebratory nibble of the placenta. And yet. In a dark corner of your increasingly zealous heart, something stirs. A fluttering arrhythmia of doubt. Dare you admit you desire more? Might you refuse to share the Issue with the rest of the ecstatic hordes clamoring to carve out their own patch beneath the light of the Issue’s glorious glow?

The Issue needs addressing, but only you can address its particular needs. Its loneliness. The aloneness which only the Issue, the one and only Issue, can know but which you, roiling with pure devotion, can see and mark and maybe, just slightly, ease.

You take the Issue out to dinner. The Issue is amenable, smiles shyly. Intimate evenings follow. You taste the wine, nod to the sommelier, and as your knee touches the Issue’s beneath the table, you say in a sultry tone: let it breathe.

The Issue breathes. Allows itself an overdue breath. Sheds the weight of its world historical significance. Goes on picnics. Bowls. Learns to swing dance. You rock with the Issue. Step with the Issue. You both giddy up. But the other adherents righteously assert their devotion equals or even — the temerity! — surpasses your own. They decry your attempts to monopolize the Issue. Assert their rights as fellow followers and activists. Knives are sharpened in the shadows. Pistols are concealed next to jealous breasts. The Issue blames itself. The Issue weeps in the night, torn between its duty to all and its love for one. Tears and whispers and more tears and desperate, furious copulation and fake IDs and disguises and plane tickets to the tropics.

The Issue has gone missing. Headlines blame foreign powers and cabals of nonbelievers. Theologians speculate on a rapture. Homeless prophets wail and moan on street corners across the land begging for the Issue to return and once again imbue their lives of toil with meaning.

On a beach in the tropics at night the Issue, freed finally of the burden of its import, wades into the ocean and beckons you to follow. One step, three. The water rises to your thighs. The water, the Issue. The stars and their dumb and distant shining. The tender pull of the current and the night and the Issue lapping against the soft shore of your heart eroding the individual time and life had hardened you into until there is no you or it, no subject or object, self or world. There is only the Issue, the ocean of it rolling smoothly out farther than any human eye could ever hope or dare or wish to see.