Say It Ain’t So – B.C. Bergan

December 20, 2025

Circling the table while she closed her all-girl Zoom call with a middle finger, as is their custom, the man finally took his seat.
        “People desperately want an opportunity to begin a sentence with the word ‘unfortunately.’” That was his opener. “When you work in media, you realize that nobody needs to have the world explained to them.” He spoke methodically, gesturing toward the door and the world beyond like a lawyer at his client. “High level, people want paychecks, not participation trophies. Especially when their community is creating problems and calling them solutions. It just doesn’t make sense to waste time devoting yourself to dying norms.” He blinked, shook his head: “Anyway. It just doesn’t scale. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t pay.”
        I felt myself sneer as thirty-six decibels drained from the café like he just lit the fuse. Speaking as a bystander, I can say this was an interview of a man who wasn’t very young by a woman whose age was undecidable. The ageless woman scoffed, like me. But her leather jacket over sundress screamed internal contradiction. I’m a retired Kantian egirl, so I can intuit their hidden nature: the Antinomy of Pure Reason, in sartorial form. I made a note to GPT what that actually means later. Not that it helped before. The archive is still out there.
        The ageless woman radiated the unsettling aura of someone who used to be dangerous, her words drowned out by the ambient noise of the café. It was partly sunny, with a mix of rustic and DIY light fixtures hanging from a low ceiling, and thick, wooden pillars interspersed across a marble floor, filled chiefly by other women huddled in groups like model support systems. Unlike them, the ageless woman didn’t want to be here. I could lipread her rapid-fire deployment of predictable talking points, each accentuated by the gesticulated emphasis of someone grasping at the retreating tendrils of fame, her golden bracelets banging on worn, olive skin.
        “Yeah it’s bad, but listen,” the aging man continued, “we’re five years behind the vibe shift, so your column on trauma bonding just doesn’t cut the candle anymore.” He looked around. “They didn’t tell you this was my last interview?” He shrugged, “weird, I guess they didn’t CC you.”
        “But yeah, they said you’ve been a real asset, and they’re excited to see what I might do with your team if I come on. Yeah, they’re really great, we just had lunch. Exquisite oysters,” the aging man cracked his knuckles, “but look, they just want to know we’re aligned. Values, deliverables, vibe, all that. I mean if you had turned your cultural lens toward the money behind the message just once, you might have had a point. I really feel for you, for your professional dilemma. You hooked girls with reasons not to live. But guess what? When everyone’s special, no one is. And like adderall in the supply chain shortage, your editorial focus on lived experience became an open addiction. Not everyone could afford it, but the ones who couldn’t could still afford the envy.”
        A black man moved one side of his headphones off-ear and chuckled like he was on camera, but he wasn’t. This made me feel extra Kunty (my viral Kantian egirl concept, yes it’s trademarked), seemingly forced to dissect the narcissism of mere plebs with my razor-sharp wit. Because I knew the real story: As a philosopher and leader in thought synthesis, these colliding worlds were really the apperception of new categories of perception. I took out my pen.
        “Or so you thought. And who in your standing wouldn’t? Yes, you were right. The way it was before, a lot of men couldn’t see the business behind the beauty. The indifference that always wins. It’s like how a Canadian hoe I used to know would call it ‘the structuralism of modern media.’ Oh no it’s not that, I mean H.O., ‘Herself Oriented,’ a kind of retrograde acronym for zombified girlbossery. Trending on X. Everybody loves it.”
        “I’m hearing you but listen. Ambition, even wrapped in empathy, always comes with a deadline.” That’s exactly what a dusty thirty-something would say. I think Lucy felt the same way, because her years betrayed the impulse to say it, and she blushed at the irony. I would never let that happen to me.
        “It hasn’t fully hit you yet, has it?” He looked confident, but his voice cracked. His conceit to synthetic a priori insight was showing. “While demand for roles like yours is through the roof, the supply is at low ebb. Surely you’ve noticed that salaries are in free fall. On second thought, ‘low ebb’ isn’t the best metaphor, here. It’s not like we can really chalk it up to something as loose as fate, can we? This isn’t misfortune, it’s cause and effect.”
        The woman’s arms and legs were crossed, but her eyes revealed her standing in the world. She was the state.
        “You’ve aspired to change the world for what, a decade now? And where has it led you?” He was interrupting her and pointing at the table “Right to the end of your beat, staring into the abyss. A year ago you were making six figures, now you make a full-hour transit on the M train.” For an instant, he looked away and to the floor. A barista slammed a portafilter in the sink three times, and the not-very-young man’s shoulders stiffened as he continued: “It’s like you’ve been turning male tears into cold, hard cash for so long you forgot to cash in on masculinity’s midlife crisis.”
        “I jest, of course,” he said as the woman scoffed again but louder, like a cry for help. I imagined he reminded her of someone. “Or do I? Let’s think, who would buy it if you did? The only guy still policing counterculture, who still needs your validation, lets rich girls slap the dignity out of him on the corner for crumbs of mixed notoriety. And he’s balding.” Two girls in black vintage dresses seated nearest the man and the ageless woman, I think he said she’s Lucy, giggled, then went silent. They stared into each other as one stirred and the other sipped tea, and the man continued: “I’m not saying he didn’t have it coming. It’s just, his brand’s one rung down from you on the editorial ladder. Imagine writing about ‘being around’ the enemy just to capture the lingering eyefeel of institutional syntax. What I’m saying is your brand was always a stop-gap, not a strategy.”
        “But I don’t want to invalidate you. Your magazine had a long and illustrious history, rare in your movement, which is saying a lot considering how often it changes tune. Or aura, whatever.” Another man, younger with red-dyed hair and apparently watching a Lex Friedman podcast, grimaced, leaned in, and contorted his face like he wanted Lucy to know he was here if she needed him. She rolled her eyes, not that he cared. He is trapped in the Transcendental Illusion.
        “But evangelizing brat face walks a thinning line between hustle and cope.” He’s saying her praxis lacks an ethical dimension. I hesitate to form the word cringe in my mind, but isn’t that the point? To synthesize cringe into cloutmaxxing? “Look, it’s simple: We’ve got a target demographic coddled by safe spaces and trigger warnings, sure. But they also believe they’re the vanguard of a cultural revolution. And I have to disagree here on the ground-level framework. We’re a generation that replaced meritocracy with equity, and it got us economic precarity.” The ginger platinum boy was taking notes in his journal as the man continued. “We need to pivot to real-world solutions that can actually direct the needle while it’s still moving.”
        “Let me write that down, it could make a great lede,” added the man advancing in age. The ginger boy, suddenly embarrassed that he might share a secondhand aspiration, gathered his things and marched toward the exit, where he fumbled the handle and dropped an air pod. Three more girls near the door, blue-haired, blonde-eyed belles mit septums, saw it happen, each giving her short hair a light but futile toss as she looked at the man in an unwitting sequence.
        “No, we’re way past ‘go woke, go broke.’ That’s a little 2018, and not what I mean,” the man retorted to something she said, likely sarcastic. “Take a step back and you might notice how sanitized and sedentary, even remorseful, that feels. You have to ask why. I’m talking about the finer gaps in media narratives, the terrain beneath them.” He took a deep gulp of black coffee and blinked, hard.
        “So what I’m saying is you have to deal with people not how they want to feel, but as they are.” He took another sip, then lifted his other hand like he needed a drag from an imaginary cigarette before clenching his fist. “Because if you think about how people want to feel, nine times out of ten, that means in control.”
        I’ve been thinking about it and it occurs to me that Lucy and the aging man, these locked blades, they remind me of Julius Evola’s masterpiece of commedia dell’arte, Harlequin and Pulcinella. Lucy is Harlequin, her conflicting patchwork an unwitting signal that she’s resting on the laurels of outwitting and humiliating long-extinct predators. But she feels more like a challenger in this exchange. The aging man is Pulcinella, older and deformed, the wisest in the room only once in an age before returning to his fool’s life of reveling in mere brute facts.
        And behind them, twisted forms of a nightmarish cityscape, a festival of confused and visceral horrors. I just googled the painting, and it turns out that it wasn’t by Julius Evola, but Michele Evola. I wrote his name down with my pen. I’m still living and learning – maybe they’re related. Just then I was refilling my mint tea when I burned my fingers with searing hot water. I cursed and lifted my hand to cool with a blow only to see the paint melt off my fingernails. Zooming out, the man and woman had turned to face me.
        “And when you’re not in control,” he added, thumbing his nose and turning his eyes back to Lucy, “‘unfortunately’ no longer solves this.” She appeared to grumble as I shrunk into my one-seater.
        “Now I know we’re not philologists here.” Half the café scratched their heads, and I felt like he was speaking to me. “But I think that really tells us people want control far too intensely, if you can believe it. And nowhere is this irony more poignant than the current state of your magazine.”
        “You have to ask yourself: Where did we go wrong?” Except for those two, the café was nearly silent now. They couldn’t withstand an encounter with the noumenal world. It was after this thought that I felt something pulling me from my mental frame. One of Lucy’s fingers traced the rim of her coffee cup. I could see – no, feel – her clavicle rise and fall. Maybe there were more things in this room, between Lucy and the aging man, than my brand can convey. Things were coming into better focus. “In order to know what’s wrong, you have to start with the beginning.”
        “And what came before you? Edginess, what was called edgy. Remember the VICE docs and indie sleaze from the early twenty-teens? What exactly was the problem there, the media or the messenger? The reality is that ‘edgy’ was a misguided diagnosis. What’s edgy risks oversight, reaction, retribution, the other shoe-fall, because it reveals the world the way it is. But then you have to ask: whose shoe? In this case, you have to say it was girls like you in 2014, when knowing what ‘edgy’ meant meant giving the old eye-roll emoji. Naming and rejecting were roommates. It was like you shared a shitty media narratives list to pretend that nothing cold and unflattering was real.”
        Lucy held up her phone like a shield, and I saw her lips mouth the word “newsletter.” She seemed baffled by his focus, bracing for his answer with a smile.
        “Yeah maybe you’re right, that ‘It Happened to Me’ mania started in the 2000s, but then content moderation replaced the confessional. The edgy horizon of media narratives was swapped for middle-management thrills. Inflicting excess collateral on people who didn’t follow procedure, how audacious and brave. Like ‘Karens, Unleashed.’”
        “I’m saying you can’t pretend the last ten years didn’t happen just because you were at the helm.” Lucy’s cold stately gaze broke for a moment when she looked at me. Almost like she expected a rebuke. “I used to think you were the type who knew playing it down won’t get the wheels off the tarmac. And a lot of people agreed with me, it was your brand, and it worked for you. But what we’re finding out is that AI has made ‘compliance writing’” – he was using air quotes and glanced at the two vintage girls – “irrelevant. If you’re not breaking the rules, you’re replaceable, because the algorithm will always win a race to the lowest common personality.”
        “Think about it. For 10 years you could phone in your dissent with a single click, and everyone knew how radical you were.” I hadn’t noticed until then, but Lucy’s posture had curved inward. She looked almost shorter than him now. Almost.
        “And that’s what fitting in meant. But listen, it’s time to face facts. Outrage culture died with public likes.” Lucy clutched pearls, something I’d never noticed myself noticing before. I wrote that down, too. “The political was personal, but now the personal is impractical. It’s time to disrupt the victimhood industry with good old-fashioned personal responsibility.”
        “The reality is your demo is conflicted. You think you know what they want, but, do you? Obviously the consensus was that women already know what they want, and it’s not to be a transparent monolith, but to have what men have. Or,” – he paused with practiced timing – “had.” A spoon rang on the marble floor like a tremolo bell, and a girl said she’d get it. I couldn’t parse Lucy’s reply, her voice too soft and lips too subtle to read, but her eyes turned to the girl under the table with a flicker of panic.
        “Put another way, how often do you make a statement as a question?”
        She answered him with a question.
        “Counterpoint – most people are walking advertisements on the inside. Don’t believe me? You know that saying where retarded people – not for long, no I don’t mean ‘neurodivergent,’ stop it – can’t accurately report conflicting views because they need to translate it into something you could print in The New York Times? We’re in this except – no, not the algorithm, listen, let me finish – your average consumer loses focus without the subtext of needing to answer to someone. It’s not a comfy arrangement to live with, so that’s why you chose your career, in the shadow of the closest proxy.”
        “We used to call it power in the abstract, but that’s too complicated. Dumb is sexy, but after enough lifetimes you start to feel like sexy is dumb. And that’s not good.”
        “Now, heaven knows I’m a promoter of metacognitive liberties,” the girls in vintage black were really fanning themselves now, “but I don’t want to be the last one pretending things are still the same. Look at inflation, these drinks have tripled in price since an American Apparel extra like you shimmied up the ranks. Real estate owners are hiking every rent-controlled apartment, and everyone under 40 knows college equals debt trap. Even nonprofits, they’ve become bloated parasites feeding on the very public goodwill they’re supposedly serving. In other words, every safety net you fought for has become quicksand.”
        “Look around you.” Her gaze broke from his but followed his words. “That black guy in the corner with a flimsy laptop, the one with the half-ripped library sticker, he’s been here for four hours with the same cup of joe, 1-Click applying to every VC startup in crypto. And over there, the girl with the stuffed New Yorker bag. Notice how dirty it is? Look at her giant red blazer.” Lucy’s breath caught, and the aging man shook his head. “Look at it. Surfing sublets. I heard the barista recommend Listings Project. Might as well check in to the Ritz.” Just then his chin shook, and his eyes were forced away. “I hope she makes it.”
        Lucy pointed a blue fingernail at a barista. With dreads and a septum (I hadn’t noticed how strong the correlation is between septums and being down bad), the barista girl was posing for a selfie on a website. She popped a nipple out, gave it a fresh tug as the contents of a chat box accelerated up her screen, and finger-waved goodbye before scooping it back in, turning to answer a nagging customer while her phone gave muffled cha-chings from her back pocket. The aging man turned back to Lucy with mixed feelings, half gratitude, half dread: “Yeah girl you have a point, I’m glad you see it too.”
        “But – but this is the kind of mutual understanding that leaves us with one path, where I’m supposed to come in, Hardcore Entertainment. No, that’s not what I meant, we’re not showrunners at the Olympics opening ceremony.” He fake-laughed to himself and grabbed his chair like an anchor. “What we need is cold, hard clicks. But where does this leave irony? Well, we’re living it.”
        “What we’re seeing now is the fall of the other shoe.” His grin widened to forced proportions. He is retreating from the phenomenal-noumenal divide. “But you’ve promoted this decay for years. Every blog post, pod appearance, and speaking engagement, you’re selling a product that tells readers to eat themselves alive, because it’s normal. And what’s worse, you had to hear it from a straight white male.”
        The silence in the café had sharpened. No gasps or scoffs, not even the register beeping for a one-touch tip. The sunlight crawled away from the floor around them, crossing the black and white squares of the marble floor like some kind of bipolar sundial as the clouds shifted high above. Lucy turned her head up, just enough to bare her eyes to him. And I can’t be sure, but I think she mouthed the words: “Maybe I needed it.”
        The elder man was visibly touched, his hand shaking as he pulled out his phone, and said, reluctantly: “Were you on X last night? There was a space where” – and here he spoke the feared name. Look, I’m new at this, the city, working my way up, faster than most. But if I heard the name I think I did, it was probably dangerous for me to be there. The café came back to life with hushed commentary, like waves breaking waves.
        “Yes but that’s what I’m talking about. Times change, don’t I know it. Anyone can write in the tone of the twenty-teens because we’ve already seen that show. It’s not that people are smarter, it’s just pattern recognition. Don’t believe me?” He took a moment, glancing to both sides as if watched from dark corners. “Right here, the part where” – and here he repeated the feared name – “says: ‘There comes a time when the feelings you enjoy are revealed as a dream borne of material excess. One you took as a given. Girls of unrivaled gravitas speaking in the guise of empathy. A norm of its time, an exaggeration by default.’”
        Lucy had leaned in, and I mean it in a bad way. Elbows on the table, hair over face. She was letting go. “Listen, I’m just the messenger,” said the aging man, “but maybe it’s time to consider looking to men for authority. Maybe you’d be happier without an internal monologue.” Lucy’s hair moved with a breathy pattern, swinging and shuddering.
        “I mean sure, but is it regressive if you get what you want? In a way, it’s not you saying no, it’s that fish hook in your mouth. You have to ask yourself, what would the world be like if girls wanted self-control, instead of control of men?”
        She didn’t reply, or whispered one. Her body was still, except for her hands. “It doesn’t have to go this way.” The aged man reached his hands out as if to coax certainty into Lucy’s trembling fingers, but she beat him to it, and he said: “I’ve also wondered what else could be done. We could have talked before all this…” Just then his phone buzzed on the table and he picked it up, his face disturbed by the caller ID.
        “I have to take this. Hold on a minute.” Lucy launched to her feet and careened toward the restroom with her purse. The aging man stood and walked to my corner, belt buckle inches from my face. He made a call and tapped his foot. “Yes, it’s me. No of course, but – listen, the whole apartment is at an angle, and the cabinet almost fell on me last month. And you’re raising it? Okay, okay I’ll pay but I just need a few more days, a week at most. Trust me, four years, have I ever been late?”
        I slipped by him and walked to the ladies’ room, entering quietly. Lucy was at the sink, staring past her image in the mirror. I walked quietly past her to the tampon dispenser, which was dusty like it hadn’t been used for years, since before the long social twilight of corona.
        I could feel Lucy’s glare as I retrieved a tampon, so I walked to the stall and locked the door. And as soon as I heard the lock click, another click filled the room, but digital – a busy signal. Repeatedly, Lucy whispered the feared name as she redialed the number, again and again, but was always answered with the taunting drum of “click…click…click” that echoed off the enclosed plastic and porcelain edges of the room. It almost hurt to hear the message in the noise. I opened my Notes app and wrote what I could of this moment, including the words metacognitive recognition, in italics. After minutes of unnerving silence, I heard something heavy land in a bin as the door slammed, and came out. The coup de grâce was hanging from the trash: a single sleeve of Lucy’s leather jacket.
        Since the speaking of the feared name, most of the café had emptied. Out of the ceiling-mounted stereo speakers hummed the sound of a windy, snowed-in day through a weak radio signal. The elder man now sat across from a woman I barely recognized, her in a silk blue dress with warm red lipstick and light blush, the man quietly observing. Or thinking. It was and wasn’t Lucy, polished, poised, with a smile that filled the room. I took my seat.
        “Sorry about the call,” the elder man began. “You look wonderful, by the way, I’m stunned. And it has me thinking. I looked deeper into your background, and found a pic of you downtown in the fall of… ‘11.” Lucy’s lips parted as he flashed her younger self to her. Maybe this was her memory hole. “The day before, you’d penned a blog post that felt so tender, there was nothing like it, like parades, like poetry. I always wondered how tenderness like that was lost from that scene. You’re doing it again now, reporting with yourself like a soul contains its own conclusion. But maybe we can pin it here: Remember when the tents at Zuccotti Park became an alleged sex crime scene? Judging from the picture, I could swear you look like you just found real love.”
        Lucy’s chest expanded for a moment, and the man turned his hands palms-up. “And later, when you moved into that house with the protest organizers? Your writing took a turn. I imagine you enjoyed confusing so many men with that nouveau-archetype, the alpha female. I’ve read how that played out for other, less selfless writers. Not so, in your case. But those were the last posts you signed as ‘Rare Rabbit Raiser.’”
        Lucy’s arms moved as if of their own volition toward the table’s center, slowing to a brief touch of pinky on worn, pale ring finger. The elder man gave a momentary shudder when he felt it, and nearly pulled back. But then his fingers relaxed around hers, and he looked into her calculating eyes.
        “I have to ask you, what if you’d followed your heart and raised rabbits? Somewhere quiet, lush with green life in rural Vermont? His tone was unreadable, like he was reciting something only practiced in another language. Lucy raised a single eyebrow with a learned curiosity, perhaps once unlearned. If she was like me, it might’ve been the only kind she had. She shook her head lightly and mouthed the words “you,” and the feared name. The man gave a quick sympathetic smirk, and replied: “Instead of answering to names you fear, what if you had a beautiful daughter, and today she shared the name of her first boyfriend?”
        “And instead of pitches and promotions, what if you raised rabbits on a farm and drew sketches from your very own camera obscura?”
        “What I’m trying to convey is simply this: What if what might have been is still alive.” Their eyes were locked, hands tight, and a single shameless tear traced a line down her face. The elderly man continued, smiling through a warm, glistening gaze: “Imagine every concession or romantic snub, every third step back for two forward – what if instead, you got to open another door in the life of your family, or watch your land become something indescribable, your farm of rare rabbits. It could really change the way you see the world. What if the trees moved the wind, and not the other way around?” Lucy laughed with a sob, and she wiped her eye on her shoulder, thumbs caressing the man’s.
        The elderly man’s eyes flickered for a moment, and his right hand unclasped hers. One finger glided from her palm past her wrist, tracing a question mark in reverse up the soft of her arm. Then, with a note of hesitation, his hand turned up as he let the inside of his wrist drag gently across her skin. It was as if something immaterial was transferred between them. Lucy tensed like a part of her tried to recognize it, but didn’t. Seconds passed.
        “I’d have liked to meet the rare rabbits.” He took a deep breath, removed his arm, and looked up at a clock that wasn’t there. His expression was of grim reserve. “Ah, what might have been, it’s got meat.” Lucy’s eyes widened, and she yanked her hands back. “If you’d only skipped the dubstep rave, turned down the job, held on to that broader view of life and took a real chance. But I believe in second chances of a sort – and well, I think that could be your new column, ‘The Girl I Wasn’t.’ I like it. But just like this job that” – again he spoke the feared name – “is dangling in front of me, the rare rabbits are what we used to call a missed connection. A big one…maybe not for a time but, unfortunately, it’s all too late.” Lucy’s head began a slow shake. Her lips curled as something whispered out, quietly at first.
        “I know what you’re thinking. I’m all talk, a voice with no weight, but that’s how it goes for an honest man. Your voice might go quiet now, but there’s always another girl just starting out, ready to take your place. And I’m powerless to stop her.” Lucy slipped back down to her elbows, her hair shaking in the same breathy way as before.
        “No – it wasn’t pillow talk, girl. I’m going to make it real for as long as the feeling lasts. This job, your J*zz-a-Belle magazine, the rare rabbits…it’s all part of the same cycle. It’s autumn in America, and the barriers to entry are thinner than ever.”
        “SAY IT AIN’T SO!” Lucy roared through tears now pouring through eyeshadow, each weighted down with the regret and release of a lifetime. The man replied: “But I’m just a bystander. I stand by.”
        The snowy signal from the speakers filtered through a thinning bandwidth. It blew like a wind so cold it betrayed a need for warmth that wasn’t coming. Then a trio of voices trickled out of nowhere as the few remaining bodies vacated like reluctant tears. I used an app to look it up – some old track by an artist named Liz called “Hollow Press.” The voices overpowered the radio wind with a harmonized chorus of three ascending notes that echoed out the doors, their triumph cut short by a shared fall, dragging out the loss, slipping back to nothing.
        Lucy’s cries mirrored the music like Shepard tones, like ruins. The old man stood up, wincing from back pain, and walked outside as if beckoned by a ghost. Lucy’s wails bellowed from the empty room as I followed him to the door. And the old man wandered down a street with no traffic, arms hanging gaitless at his sides under a low, red sky.