Consider the lampshade

Velvet, sown into slippery delicate satin, soft to the touch. Millennial pink. Sublime. She pulled the deadstock off a top shelf and into her shopping cart. It would keep her new lampshade company, and soon they would be joined as one.She had a whole shelf of them now, some conical, many cylindrical, a few accordion, arranged harmoniously to tie up the part of her brain full of loose ends. She'd added tassels, fringe, satin, chiffon, crepe, and steel. Old shades bore new life, moving light downcast in much louder dress.She parked the cart at the counter to unload the barcodes to the cashier with dyed black hair. The woman's headband held back thick bangs and hid peeking bald spots. Inspecting the time on the wall clock with the aim not to engage, she shoved the credit card chip in the reader face up. Before she had a chance to recoil, the cashier's long red nails gripped the small of her wrist.Both stood in silence, connected and unmoving. It was then that the woman's wrist and the cashier's nails flattened into a series of brush strokes and stippling. It was happening again.It was an average day the day her eyesight changed. She was doing her job, proofreading website updates, and that was when she saw it. Someone, a colleague, had uploaded a picture, a header image, at the top of an article. It was a photo, maybe, but it wasn't. It was trying to be. It was real, but also cartoon-like. It was unsettling. The image tripped a wire in her, the kind of wire meant to detect false information, but she wasn't convinced it was accurate and it sent her gut into a state of uncertainty. So she sent her colleague a Slack message. Did you get those illustrations from design? she asked. They're slick. Very lifelike. Are they AI-generated?What do you mean? The colleague asked.The photo-like images on the last two articles you published, she responded. They're incredibly vivid.Oh, the colleague typed, I got them from the Canva free imagery.Right, she said, they're not photos. They're AI generated, I think. Are we cleared to use those now on the website?The coworker stopped responding.She didn't think much of it. Her colleagues and she shared a distant, if not strained, working relationship and reciprocal conversations often fell by the wayside.It was near her 5 p.m. wrap-up time this busy Friday and she diligently completed her last few tasks. A modern woman, she worked from home, and was grateful to have eliminated a commute from her time dedicated to someone else's dream. This did not, of course, mean work was wholly satisfying and the irrevocable best use of her time, but she swallowed her shallow commitments in an anesthetic state.A certain tension had, in no uncertain words, usurped the better part of her brain. The predictable flickering light above the kitchen stove made her jump with its acrimonious dimming. She found clumps of her hair next to the toilet. Food was unpalatable, and when consumed, indigestible. Sundays meant tears teetering on the edge of her inferior eyelid. Lovemaking, a pastime, was for those unburdened by such tight golden handcuffs.She calmed herself with busying tasks, like cleaning a disgusting vintage chair, or painting a wall orange, or day drinking, but the reprieve these activities brought was intermittent. It took only seeing her laptop to trigger a deep anxiety into which she reluctantly spiraled, becoming too dizzy to stand and taking a compulsory seat on the couch with a glass of water.She was unaccustomed to this mania. She could handle death and breakups with ease. She'd whip out the tarot cards, call a girlfriend, and smoke the pain away.Her role wasn't high-pressure—she was in marketing—but every day had the urgency and tedium of crawling through a minefield. Her body in the life she lived now was scoped through a telescopic lens. She could not feel well. She could not feel but that she was missing something deeply. She had been sleeping too many hours each night, but was never fully rested. She felt very far away.Ordinarily, she was the kind of gal that could work like mad. Not “throw a punch through your wall” mad, but the “draft a searing email containing figures and facts that will destroy your world” kind of mad. She was violent with her hands on the keyboard and could strangle you with random information you left lying around. Her skin care routine consisted of a hot cup of coffee before 7 a.m. If the printer wasn't printing in color, she refused to fix it out of concern for “babying” it. Her mental and emotional fragility in her marketing role was a novel crisis.She wrapped up her day and shut her laptop. On to her second job: cleaning. Dishes piled high from breakfast (oatmeal, no sweetener) and a lunch of leftover falafel (dry). She flipped the water on and squeezed the lavender soap onto the sponge. Her pressure was too much, and soap spewed into the sink and over the sponge. Steamy water grew bubbles from the bowls and cups, air trapped inside the detergent with an iridescent veneer. She shut the water off. The sink's edges, the bubbles, and the cups, took on a cartoon quality. An untouchable unrealness that belonged on a canvas. The depth pixelated, and edges melted into one another. She blinked a few times. I must take a photo, she thought. I've never seen dishes look so pretty.She resumed chores. A glue gun, lampshade, and mustard-yellow fringe rested on the Formica table, a thought left unfinished from the prior weekend's aspirational projects. In preparation for this project last weekend, walking through Home Depot looking for a lamp cord, she'd felt a tinge of dysphoria.“If I start to slowly lose it” she turned to her husband in the ceiling fan department, “we can document my slow demise through the quality of my lampshades. Like Utermohlen.”This proclamation had come one evening after her supervisor berated her about a PowerPoint presentation. After two attempts at completion, and one abruptly confusing conversation, her supervisor announced that she did not understand how they had arrived at this point in the conversation and that the woman was not following the instructions she had explicitly laid out.What are you talking about?? the supervisor typed in response to the woman's question regarding a nuance in a routine task. I don't understand how you've determined this information is important.In the end, her supervisor included the idea she had told the woman to abandon in the final draft.The woman considered the lampshade on the table. A large, conical silo. It needed a new shade cover; velvet, perhaps. Something soft to the touch to buffer the burden of her necessary capitulation.After photographing the sink bubbles, she took to making the bed as a stream of dusky light cast through the window onto the bedside table. The hands of her alarm clock were perfectly perpendicular at 6:45; just above it, the light threw hypotenuse across the bell-shaped shade of the reading lamp with the precision of late Dalí. The edges of each object were concise with artificial depth, and her leather wrist watch and green analog alarm clock melted with a nuclear mysticism. Again! She felt delight. I must capture this, too. And so she focused the phone camera and took a few photos of what appeared to her, a still life.She showed her husband the photos. “Snapping photos of the dishes? I've never had the impression that you liked them that much.” He raised his eyebrows.“Don't you see the artistic quality in them? How it's real, but it looks almost, oh, I don't know. It looks like a painting. Almost like an AI-generated image. Or a still life.”He squinted. “I see dirty dishes. And your nightstand.”“They don't look real.” She turned looking downward at her phone.“Want to watch Dark Winds?” He asked.“Yes.”But she could not watch Dark Winds, and she could not release the suspicion that something was awry inside of her.It was like her brain was wearing a hat. She couldn't shake her thoughts about work. She reimagined old conversations with her supervisor, and played new ones out in her head time and again. The hat was fuzzy and pink. All other thoughts were gray matter.“Remind me what happened last episode?” She asked, looking at job postings on her phone.“We watched it yesterday,” her husband turned to her, beer in hand. “Bernadette and Joe were pulling up to the blond guy's trailer. The bad one with bombs. Remember?”“Well, no. But thanks for the reminder.” She let out a deep sigh and kicked her feet up into his lap, resting her head on the pillow, and, like a lightbulb on its last legs, flickered out of consciousness.And what followed was not dreams of the characters in Dark Winds or of leaving her corporate job behind, but of the AI images seen that afternoon. The Ticonderoga yellow pencil in the image header bent at an uncomfortable angle. If she were to grab it, it might mush in her hands, like clay, or plastic, like her brain. Had her colleague thought it real, or was she unbothered by using AI-generated images instead of photos, or was reality on the wrong side of history? Susan Sontag sat at the end of her bed, On Photography open in her lap. “You know, this is really worse than I could have imagined things becoming for justice and for art.” Susan said, “I say here Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), and interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real . . . blah, blah, blah, a painting . . . is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation . . . [of] light waves reflected by objects.1 How cerebral. I can't argue with myself. But this is where your smooshy, confused mind,” she pointed to the center of the woman's forehead with the two fingers holding her burning cigarette, “is dead on about the consequences of fabricated realities.” Susan took a deep drag and kept talking in her gravely alto but the woman had stopped listening. The pencil collapsed into the nightstand, encompassed by bubbles, and she reached to turn off the light next to her bed. She grabbed the chain and pulled.Her eyes fluttered open to three sharp squeezes on her calf.“You just knocked over your water,” said her husband, who was standing next to the couch. He went to get a towel. Her arm was still outstretched, now resting somnolent on the coffee table palm down. The television was off. The coffee table was real.She did not dream any more that night.Things seemed clearer the next day, but, like all terrors, muted in a slow process of assimilation. She thought of her caring husband, who held her while weeping, and wondered if he saw pieces of her wash away in her tears. She wondered if others were losing their power to differentiate between imagery and reality. She wondered if Sontag had accounted for the making of photos from more than a frame, and if she would say “What's the difference?”She often thought “What's the difference?” at her computer when someone disagreed with her. She often thought if it means so much to you, it must be correct; the answer is clearly more important to your reality than mine. She had these thoughts even when she had evidence she was correct; she declined to confront their reality. This method had proven ineffective for her, however; other realities, imagined and not, freckled her daily interactions like unbecoming liver spots after years without UV protection. More importantly, they tarnished her trust in herself. These images, these hallucinations—they were all contextualized. All made sense where they were, but they were, at once, wrong.She drank a cup of black coffee at 6:45 am, the coral sun peeking over the edges of buildings, threatening to blind her before dawn had fully finished its morning stretch. She imagined her day, her Saturday, a day of finding a fabric for her lampshade, and avoiding circular conversations with her supervisor in her head, and sinking into her husband's arms as though nothing itched and clawed at her hippocampus.“I'm headed to Joann's,” she said. “Want anything?”“Just for you to come back,” he yelled from the laundry room. “Love you.”“I love you too.”She drove to Joann's in her beat-up red pickup truck and sifted through the fabrics. Nothing. She went to a thrift store. An old ottoman cover jumped out at her; a satin base layer, visible only through pinstripe gaps, covered in pink velvet. Perfect.The woman at the register waved her through. She was old, and her long hair was straightened and dyed black. A headband held it in place, but beneath it, you could see bald patches. Her fake eyelashes batted like a doll's.“$3.50,” the woman at the register said. Her forearm skin sagged on the counter attached to pointy red nails, like a gelatinous giant squid with precise tendrils. The cashier's tentacles reached for the woman's wrist before she had a chance to pull away.“Watch out for the supermoon at the end of the month. Someone who does not care for you will be rid of you.” A single carmine red pointer finger stroked her pulse, now beating rapidly encased in her tan vessel, bisected by a vestige of bloody phthalo blue.“Thanks,” said the woman, and gathered her things, shaking. She drove home. Who was she to turn down free advice? She made lampshades as a hobby.She plugged in the hot glue gun and prepared the velvet, first cutting stitches from its previous life of footrest cloth. She laid it flat on the table and took a tape measure to each side to be sure it would stretch the length of the shade. The satin base glimmered, reflecting the Saturday midday sun.She glued the pink velvet to the old lampshade. “You will protect me.”