The Deserter

This content was translated using artificial intelligence and may therefore contain errors.

I walk into the café. The mental health association I work for has already started its meeting. On the screen, faces and voices come at me out of sync as I scan for an outlet, a steady table, an angle where the light won’t reveal that my lipstick has probably smudged in my rush. I smile at the little squares of faces while I get everything set up out of focus. I turn off my camera for a second to order a café con leche, a mitad y mitad, a latte—every possible way they could make me say the same thing, so they won’t ask me again using the particular lingo of this place. The topic of the seminar I’ve logged into is also framed as a question: Is an algorithm made using the voices of deceased family members ethical? Does it help or hinder grieving? I love the topic; I’m interested. But I get distracted by other tabs, by my phone. The waiter sets down my cup, and the clatter of spoons at other tables gets on my nerves, as if the place wants to remind me that I’m there too, partly in the video call, partly in each tab I’ve opened, partly in the café, and wholly nowhere.

At every table, except one where a group of older women are shouting and having fun, people are sitting alone using their phones, expressionless but endlessly scrolling, typing, listening to voice messages. Could this be the semantic saturation Bifo Berardi talks about? In other words, the embodiment of his idea of semantic exhaustion, where bodies are still but minds race through the void of an endless stream of information. Berardi talks about the flat fatigue of the spirit, overwhelmed by signs that demand interpretation and an immediate response, leaving no time to digest them or create deep meaning. Here in the café, everyone is an isolated node, connected to the network but disconnected from their surroundings, embodying that exhaustion: the screen as factory, the user as an exhausted cognitive precariat, the lack of expression as a collapse of meaning.

The door flies open. A gust of cold air hits my ankles. A delivery worker in a reflective vest heads straight for the counter. Without ceremony, he asks how long it’ll take. They tell him it’ll be ready soon. He asks for a glass of water. He drinks it standing up, in three swallows, without taking off his headphones. His back is rigid; his whole posture is an arrow pointing toward the exit. A notification at full volume sounds from his pocket; people at a few tables give him dirty looks. They hand him the bag from the kitchen, he finishes his water, returns the glass, and lets the door close behind him.

He looked tired. Tired from semantic exhaustion? Tired like someone suffering a dense gravity that pulls them forward because there’s no safety net behind them to catch them. I think of Bifo Berardi and Mark Fisher because they’re often thought of together, and their diagnoses of capitalist realism converge in so many ways: the paralyzing feeling that there’s no alternative to this system. The alternative isn’t even an idea; it’s an inconceivable luxury. The next trip exists; the last one no longer matters. The present is a glass of water, a message, a notification, a traffic light, the screen asking if we’re still watching the series. If we’re all this tired, if we’ve watched everything we fought for fall into retreat, if what’s coming is so uncertain, what capacity for imagining a horizon can we have? With what bodies, what minds, and at what times, if time can only be stolen from work or rest, and always at our own expense? I got stuck for a second watching the door close behind the delivery worker, and I can’t fully concentrate on the meeting. What futures were there for certain social classes before we invented the concept of futurability?

Berardi talks about desertion. Withdrawing mental and emotional energy from the system. Is everyone in our region in a position to desert? Perhaps some people, socialized not to carry the daily burden of caring for others, are better able to “desert” into a hobby, a sport, a group, some downtime, while for many women that same invitation sounds like more work, more organizing, more support for others. Isn’t desertion often a class-based cognitive luxury?

From the meeting on my screen, my own voice reaches me distorted. I’m saying, “We have to build community.” I say it with conviction, as I’ve said it many times. What exactly do I mean by “community”? Toward what? Around what? Who? I look around me, searching for an answer in the air of the café.

At the next table, a woman stares into space. All this time she’d been sending voice messages, organizing her work, her home, and her parents’ care. Now her back—tense before—sinks by exactly one centimeter. She doesn’t cry. She just presses her lips together and takes a deep breath. A sigh that seems to rise from the bottom of a well. How do you talk about harm, about the loneliness she must feel, without sounding like you’re calling for a return to the past? Without making it one more burden—“As if this weren’t already bad enough for my health?” Without suggesting that what she needs is someone to come and relieve her, denying all the battles that have been fought—especially by women—for autonomy, for the right to be alone? How do you talk about loneliness without betraying that freedom, but without denying the harsh fact that sometimes that freedom comes at the cost of an exhaustion for which there’s no safety net? What if the great mistake in slogans—“build community,” “reclaim the body,” “find yourself a hobby”—is that they assume we have energy to spare? What happens when those prescriptions fall on people running in energy-saving mode, barely managing to keep the bare minimum going? Don’t they become moral demands disguised as care? Don’t they push those who can’t manage it into shame?

I have a friend named Muriel. She’s sharp, luminous, and a political scientist from the UBA. Muriel feels guilty every time she doesn’t go to a march. She didn’t go to the anti-fascist march, she didn’t go to the march for retirees, she didn’t go to the march for public education. She couldn’t go. Sometimes because she didn’t agree that a particular march was the right form or the right moment, but sometimes simply because, “friend, I can’t get out of bed.” And every time, she feels guilty. Right up to the last minute, she tries to go. But the thought of getting out of bed, showering, getting dressed, meeting people who’ll probably think she’s gotten fatter since the last time they saw her because of her medication, having to explain that it’s the medication… Muriel seems very sociable at events; she knows exactly what to say to everyone, but deep down she feels she isn’t. After many nights out, she cries from the exhaustion of seeing so many people; she cries because she’s sure she said something inappropriate. She cries because she feels this way even though she spent the whole night managing the web of relationships. What a thing.

When I tell Muriel I’m writing about loneliness, she asks me which kind: loneliness in a relationship, loneliness among friends, family connections, the neighborhood, the community, the Nation, the State, the whole world; loneliness of being misunderstood, logistical loneliness, invisible loneliness, the loneliness of loss, of not fitting in anywhere, of pain that can’t be shared, hers, mine, the loneliness of being alone with yourself. Can you feel lonely in relation to yourself, or was she joking? I steal the question anyway, to keep thinking about it, even if it’s a joke.

Muriel is very stylish. She wears oversize genderless clothes from places that try to take a more ethical approach to the fashion industry. Every now and then she posts about that. What she doesn’t post, but does tell me, is that sometimes what she likes about those clothes, beyond the ideology behind breaking gender norms, is that they’re so comfortable they help her get up in the morning when it’s really hard. And the clean aesthetic she goes for, with no makeup at all, is a way of showing her real face, but also because sometimes she doesn’t have the energy to sit in front of a mirror. Muriel hates her body, hates her mind, hates not being different. She’s consulted many mental health professionals; nothing has quite worked for her. Muriel and I don’t know whether it’s depression, whether it’s desertion, or whether she just likes being alone and has arranged her life that way. I love the way Muriel is. I wish she knew it, that she would stop blaming herself for individual struggles as if they were hers alone, when almost everything comes from what our culture has left us with.

Sometimes Muriel disappears. She doesn’t answer her phone or post anything on social media, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. And when we, her friends, see her again, we often find that Muriel has come back from those retreats—as we call them—radiant, rested, centered. She’s been turned inward, tucked away at home with herself, and something about all that puts her in order and lets her come back to us as her best self. Other times, we don’t know: we see her return paler, less articulate. And then we find out that this time it wasn’t a retreat, but a hell.

Should we go visit her or not? Write to her or not? How many times should we insist, what should we say, what should we avoid saying? Is it us she’s missing, or someone whose absence we can do nothing about? Muriel, however you leave, however you come back, we’re always ready, never giving up on you, and maybe that’s the greatest love I could wish for myself.

With my phone in my hand, I think it’s been a week since she said more than a few words; she was moving, maybe she’s settling into the new place and needs space, and my way of loving her is to understand that. We also have a system of signals: if she needs me, she’ll say something like “eight minutes,” and then I know she needs eight minutes of my time to vent about something. Little agreements about how to love someone. Muriel thinks her love is no good because she misses birthdays, because it’s hard for her to leave the house. But no one has ever asked me the questions or made the jokes Muriel has. On her bright days, she’s the funniest person I’ve ever known, and it’s impossible not to have a good time around her; no one has ever gauged my distress better or been able to capture my moods, even in a message. I wish she knew that there are thousands of ways to be there for someone, and hers is enough.

So I didn’t invite Muriel. But should I have? Because sociability has become a health mandate. I send her a message, a sticker of a little neon heart we both love. Maybe I can get her to come over. If she were sitting at my table right now and looked toward the back, she’d see a guy playing on his computer, which has an alien logo, wearing huge headphones, and every now and then he smiles for real, his face lighting up because he’s won something in that world. Muriel would surely ask me whether we’re scandalized by the idea that someone could fall in love with an avatar. Are we warning and educating, or are we being conventional and failing to see a paradigm shift? Do we think love and friendship have to happen on terms we know—proximity, material commitment—and not as a dazzling burst of dopamine shared at a distance?

Muriel would probably also ask me whether we’d be happier if we were right-wing. Whether maybe sensitivity is what’s atrophying us, whether looking the abyss of everything that’s happening straight in the face is what’s giving us this life-draining exhaustion. And that, being as we are, it’s impossible for us to organize. She asks me half-jokingly, half-seriously. I tell her no, that maybe if pain is what drove us apart, it can also bring us closer. But I’m tired now, and I don’t know if what I said made sense.

At the meeting, someone says, “We have to reclaim the body.” And again, the question inside me: which body? Mine, which is tingling now from sitting still too long? The gym bro body built by the new right, that project of self-contained strength? Sometimes all we offer is the body as a site of wounds, of displayed fatigue. Where is the body that simply exists, without being a project or a symptom? Where is the healthy body of our people? Muriel would say to me, “See? Being right-wing makes you go to the gym.”

A group of teenagers takes over the next table. Within seconds, each one is on their phone. One shows the others a screen: a livestream. A guy somewhere in the world speaks straight to the camera, gaming and commenting as he goes. The teenagers nod, smile, whisper comments in their own slang. They talk about “him” with intimate familiarity. At what point does this stop being entertainment and become community? Or a low-intensity cult? When is it a functional bond, and when is it the ultimate escape, total desertion into a world where the rules are clear and belonging can be bought with a monthly subscription? And in any case, is it better or worse than total atomization?

At the table across from me, a man watches a movie or a series on his phone, propped against his glass. I can’t guess what it’s about because he shows no emotion. What kind of leisure is that, if it doesn’t excite or move you? Why does leisure have to produce something, if maybe the man just wants to switch off his mind, get away from home, kill time, be alone in a café but avoid being alone in that café? Isn’t asking for depth in cultural consumption also a way of asking it to be productive?

Muriel didn’t come, and the meeting is coming to an end. I close my computer as the smile I put on when greeting everyone falls away, and lift my head.

Is this what’s left? Is this atomized coexistence the dreamed-of “third place” where we don’t come to be productive, or its absolute negation? Is the only way to have a third place to make working there forbidden? When does work end and something else begin? Has everything that is solid finally melted into air?

The questions don’t go away, don’t go away, don’t want to go away. They settle on the shoulders of those present and stay here in the air, mingling with the smell of stale coffee. No one attends to them in this chorus of silences; each with their own frequency of grief, they remain like a bruise that doesn’t hurt unless you touch it.