My friend Cheryl says she uses more paper towels than most people but doesn’t feel bad about it. She says using paper towels is not the worst thing you can do, in terms of global warming. We are talking over Skype on a Wednesday after the governor’s first stay-at-home proclamation or commandment or whatever, back when it still felt like a vacation.

I’m on the green faux-leather sofa, deciding whether to shave the stubble off my chin or veg out with Tiger King on Netflix.

The worst thing, Cheryl says, with the exception of working as a fracker, is to breed.

“Which I have not done and will never do. Having kids is bad for the planet. It makes people buy disposable diapers and throw them in the landfill when they’re full of poop,” she explains, like maybe I’m unfamiliar. But I already know that babies eat, need stuff and create carbon dioxide. And I tend to tune out anyone who preaches about “the planet.”

This conversation occurs before she launches her immodest proposal.

“Everything babies do changes the climate. And not in a good way. So I’m against them,” she says. “Babies, I mean. Against babies.” Her laptop must be sitting on her lap because Skype distorts her image, broadening her throat and jaw, and sinking her eyes into small dark pockets.

“You’re against babies? Seriously?” I ask. I’m holding my breakfast, a bowl containing the last of the Rocky Road. I set it on the floor out of view. I like kids. There was a time when I thought I might have some.

“Yeah, Phil, they’re cute but how long does that last? Not long enough.”

“So, what do you think should be done about them?” I don’t really want to discuss this with Cheryl. She has what they call “a bias toward action.” I’m more of a talker and less of a doer than Cheryl. She is a talker and a doer, even an over-doer. She gets carried away, which sometimes concerns me. However, she is less touchy than other women friends I’ve had in the past. Thick-skinned, more like a guy.

“Well,” she says, “to reverse the trend of people producing more babies I’m going to volunteer at Planned Parenthood. Because they’re the biggest supplier of contraception in the country.”

“Excellent,” I say. “I’ll expect a full report on your experience.” Ordinarily I wouldn’t sit around waiting for her report, but these days I’m on “virus leave” from my job at Boonfield Collections’ south Seattle branch. I’m sitting around my apartment wishing there were basketball games or even baseball games to watch, checking my email too often, and thinking about what I’m going to eat next.

Cheryl was unemployed even before COVID-19. For some legitimate reasons, mostly her inability to take direction. I first met Cheryl at work, where she befriended me. She diagnosed me as susceptible to her overtures because I was new, like her. And without obvious attachments. No one else in that shabby place wanted to be tainted in the eyes of our supervisor, Ernie, by association with Cheryl, a rabble-rouser. She tried to organize a union. Ernie didn’t like that. He also didn’t like Cheryl’s tendency to do things her own way and not his way. He wanted everyone to use a script he had written. He believed the script would “produce maximal return” for our efforts. As it happened, Cheryl’s way worked better. We measure results by dollars recovered per minute of phone time, and Cheryl’s numbers were always the highest. She thought it was because she didn’t use Ernie’s script. I thought it was because she scared people into paying. She scared me, and I wasn’t even in debt. At the time.

It surprises me that Cheryl, who is extremely politically conscious, was willing to work for a collection agency. I guess she couldn’t get anything else. Our job is squeezing money out of people who can’t afford to pay. I don’t enjoy the work, but then I lack gumption and like her, I don’t have a lot of options. I got the job because my sister Jean’s husband, Dave knows the people who own the agency. Apparently they owe him. Yeah, I know. “Owe.”

A couple weeks after the conversation about how bad babies are, before the peak of the pandemic, Cheryl calls me again. When I answer, I sort of croak, not having spoken aloud for several days. This time it’s voice only, no video, to my relief because my apartment has gotten pretty messy. She talks about her volunteer experience. Planned Parenthood sent numerous emails requesting donations to keep clinics open during the pandemic, maybe because intercourse is something you can do at home for free, so there’s a need. Anyway, Cheryl’s short on cash and can’t afford to give it away. When she complains, they say instead of giving money she can “give her time” by writing and calling legislators. They probably suggested this to get her off their neck, not because she has a lot of experience in professional advocacy. She can be a pest. But a well-organized pest who does her research.

She tells me about some of the bills Planned Parenthood recently supported, as examples of their successes.

“One was for sex education in public schools,” she says. “Because who wants kids to grow up ignorant of basic reproductive facts? A lot of dumb-asses in eastern Washington, it turns out. Another one was for state money to make up for the loss of federal funding caused by Trump’s gag rule. That’s where if a state accepts federal money it has to promise to never whisper the word ‘termination’ to a twelve-year-old impregnated by her evil uncle or priest.” Cheryl says she agrees with that too. Planned Parenthood invited her to a Zoom training on how to target lawmakers for emails and calls. They asked trainees to wear pink to the virtual class. She’s irked about this.

“So?” I say, “What’s wrong with wearing pink? It’s branding, right? Like the Seahawks wear blue and green. So Planned Parenthood wants you to show solidarity by wearing the team color.”

She snorts her irritation into the phone. “Pink is for girls, Phil. Blue is for boys.”

“So?” I say again, “You’re a girl.”

“Girls don’t get pregnant alone or with other girls. There should be as many guys as girls lobbying for Planned Parenthood.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. Neither does it move me to action. I haven’t impregnated anybody. Probably.

Anyway, Cheryl tells me she wore funeral black, like she always does. Classic Cheryl. She doesn’t kid around. Ever. Then, she says, when everyone finally gets on Zoom for the thirty-minute videoconference training, one of the volunteers pulls out a breast and begins nursing a toddler. On camera. You can turn off the video, but this woman doesn’t.

“She’d step out if she needed to pee, wouldn’t she? It’s like she wants an audience. And the kid was huge,” she says, “like big enough to walk.” Could this be accurate, I wonder? It sounds gross to me, but then, what do I know? Though the thought of it causes me to abandon the vanilla-strawberry smoothie I’d been holding. It’s sort of curdling anyway.

After that, I don’t hear from her for several days. I never call her. I never call anybody. My sister Jean calls me most Sundays, but it’s pro forma, like “take out the recycling and call Phil.” Cheryl, though, she calls because she is the aggressor in our relationship. I like her because she’s smart and tough. I appreciate that she stays in touch, but I don’t really miss her when we don’t speak for a while. Maybe that’s because talking to—or listening to—Cheryl takes a lot of energy and I don’t have much to spare these days.

My attitude toward her shifts as the lock-down order moves into a second month. I’m not lonely, but I have this surreal sense of my place in the world, a small bubble, not connected to any other bubbles besides Rachel Maddow’s, Anderson Cooper’s and Tony Fauci’s. I consider getting a cat, but I don’t know how to go about it while social distancing is in effect. Could a corona-positive person pet a cat and shed virus on its coat that I would later pick up if I pet that cat? I worry a little that a middle-aged man living alone in a one-bedroom apartment with a cat would seem pathetic. Not that a middle-aged man living alone in an apartment without a cat would have any particular significance. Would it? It occurs to me that if I run out of money and lose my apartment, having a cat would make it harder to move. Maybe I could move in with Jean and my brother-in-law. They have a basement. But he’s allergic. Or I could move someplace cheap. Like Idaho.

I can’t quite tell you what I did with my time during those weeks. I couldn’t do collections work from my apartment because the company never set up a system to allow us to work any place except their gloomy offices in an industrial park south of downtown Seattle. Maybe they’re too cheap to invest in technology that would allow remote work, but it’s more probable that they don’t trust us to actually work when they aren’t watching us. Good thinking on their part. Having Ernie walk past every hour or so certainly inspires me to double down. Or maybe they realize that with so many people laid off from their jobs, home on unemployment benefits, the debtors or “customers” as they encourage us to call them, will choose current consumption, like groceries (I too prioritize this way; food matters), above paying past obligations. Then the governor put out another directive prohibiting most collection activities, like garnishment. This gladdened my heart. I started to think about looking for other work assuming that I would emerge on the other side. Something that doesn’t leave me feeling like a louse at the end of the day. Maybe I could work in a library.

The next time Cheryl calls, it’s a Thursday in the afternoon. Or maybe it’s a Wednesday. I’m starting to lose track. I haven’t been outside for days, thanks to Amazon Fresh deliveries.

“I gave up on Planned Parenthood,” she tells me. “Too passive. Writing letters doesn’t change anything. I’m looking at other options. Like NARAL Pro-Choice America. They don’t care what color shirt you wear. But they seem to be losing the battle for the federal judiciary. Trump has already stacked it with a couple hundred new rightwing appointees, buttheads who can’t think or even spell, people who are all geared up to shellac women of reproductive age. Like me.” She’s around 40. Then she speeds through some other anti-baby outfits she’s researched. “There’s BirthStrike—‘Making the personal political’ by foregoing parenthood. There’s Plan C, the abortion-at-home website. It’s a smart idea but will it catch on? I mean, look what happened with home perms in the early nineties. My mother was a victim.”

I’m unacquainted with home perms, but I don’t get a chance to inquire, because Cheryl’s stoked. She has lots more to say. She’s not in a listening mood. I put her on speaker and go to look around the kitchen for the hundredth time today. Sadly, I find no surprises.

“Remember Zero Population Growth? Whatever became of them?”

She’s right. You never hear about ZPG anymore. Probably its adherents died out, like that weird outfit that requires celibacy of its members—the Shakers, now down to a congregation of a single surviving member. Cheryl’s on a rant. I want something to eat, just something, you know? I’ve finished my last bag of Doritos, which you can’t eat while on the phone anyway because of the noise, though I could have tried mute. Maybe something sweet? There’s yogurt in my fridge, but I don’t feel like yogurt. I’m not actually hungry. Being hungry is different than needing to eat. I’m only half-listening to Cheryl. She continues to ramp up.

Then she says this:

“I’m beginning to think preventing new, additional people from screwing up the environment with their meat-eating and airplane-riding ways is too future-oriented. The problem is not too many people in the future, it’s too many in the present. Babies are bad, but old people might be worse. They consume resources—food and drugs and heat—but produce little of value. And then there’s the role Boomers played in electing Trump.”

“Like what do you consider old?” I ask, because I’m 52. Technically not a Boomer.

“Older than you,” she says. Then she moves on to Greta. “That little Swedish gal with no social skills” is what she calls her. Though neither of us has room to criticize others’ social skills. Greta gives speeches about how she’s peeved at adults because we’ve screwed things up for her generation, and haven’t mitigated the damage we caused.

We agree that Greta is inspiring but not gaining enough traction.

“People ignore her because of her age, but she’s right,” Cheryl says. I miss the next few things she says because I decide that 3:00 p.m. is not too early to have a beer, if it’s a light beer and you don’t plan to drive, so I open one. I carry the phone around the kitchen with me, not paying much attention to the diatribe. When I tune back in, she’s saying:

“… weather satellites above Italy noted significant decreases in nitrogen dioxide—air pollution—after they shut down transportation and retail. Also, the water quality in the canals of Venice improved.”

“Yeah?” I say. “So?”

“So, obviously,” she says, exasperation in her voice, “this is all related. Climate change and COVID-19 aren’t two big, separate problems. It’s one problem and one solution. Problem: the earth’s population is above its carrying capacity. We continue to emit dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases as the population grows. Solution: a reduction in population without war or genocide, but through a natural biological process that doesn’t discriminate on the basis of  wealth, gender or nationality.”

“So what are you saying? Just let people die?” I actually know very little about Cheryl’s history. Does she have a criminal record, for example?

She seems not to hear.

“If allowed to run its course,” she says, “Just think. Assume a two percent global fatality rate, plus the benefits of industrial decline. Also starvation. The virus could decimate the population in time to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accord. From which our nation has foolishly withdrawn.”

“Meaning what? Meaning you’re going to do what?”

“Well, not sit home wringing my hands, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” She sounds sort of mad at me. “It’s easy to spread COVID-19. This crap grows practically anywhere, and fast. If we could manufacture the droplets, these little wet virus bombs I keep reading about, there’s endless potential.”

“Who is this ‘we’ you speak of?” I ask. I am a rule-follower. When the governor tells me to stay home for another month, I stay home. I am also reluctant to participate in madcap schemes cooked up by one of my few friends, one I suspect of overzealousness bordering on, well, you know.

“We would need people who aren’t worried about their own life expectancy to help us grow it and move it around. Like sociopaths, the deeply religious and maybe volunteers from Greenpeace. We would need the stuff, and access to physical transmission channels. Maybe HVAC systems at hospitals, subways, airports.”

“Uh, Cheryl, this is all hypothetical, right? You aren’t actually planning to recruit people to spread disease, are you? I mean, like, bioterrorism?” My sense of unease grows. Life hands her a lemon and Cheryl makes arsenic.

“Citizens stepping up to do what needs to be done for the greater good. At a moment when elected leaders living in safe cocoons are paralyzed by fear. Fear of economic consequences. Fear of their own political vulnerability. When what’s at stake is much larger. And when they are protected from real consequences. I mean, do you think Trump will die for want of a ventilator? Do you think the rationing criteria used to determine who gets one and who dies without one would apply to him, even though he’s old and probably diabetic, plus worthless in a lot of other ways?”

“Is this a secure line?” I ask, having watched the entire Homeland series twice in the last month. I wonder if the NSA really does listen to all of us.

“Now that you mention it, a good starting place for virus dissemination might be the White House,” she says.

“I did not mention it! You did!”

“The security systems would be hard to defeat. I doubt they still give tours of the White House. It would be tricky to get to DC from here.” She pauses to consider. “If we were successful, the overall plan would create some negative downstream consequences, like the problem of large-scale corpse disposal. But the positives more than outweigh the negatives.”

“Listen to yourself, Cheryl. You sound unhinged.”

“This is just outside the box thinking. Inside the box nothing constructive is happening. Think of all the good that could result. Intergenerational wealth transfers. Less freeway traffic. And an end to overrepresentation of elderly white men in decision-making positions.”

“I’m hanging up now,” I say, and I hang up. I fiddle with my phone for a few minutes, trying to figure out the call-blocking function. Where is it? In “Settings?” How serious is she and what can she actually do? Her—not “our”—plan would surely violate all sorts of laws. Conspiracy is a crime, right? But Cheryl isn’t afraid of jail. Or, apparently, anything else. Like, you know, death.

While I goof around with my phone, a text or rather a series of texts from Cheryl pop onto my screen:

“Maybe your concern, Phil, is that my approach to saving the planet undervalues the lives and contributions of millions of humans. Valid point. Because the virus is not…” The first text ends and the second begins:  “…selective. If we let it, it would wipe out millions of young and middle-aged people who would be lost to civilization as parents, climate scientists, poets, etc. …” The second text ends and the third begins: “… but maybe that’s the cost of doing business. Sacrificing some to save the future for others. This could happen whether we take aggressive steps to spread it or not.”

I read these twice, noting the repeated use of the word “we,” then delete all three.

I need a digression and think about ordering a new supply of snacks, both savory, such as Tim’s Cascade Salt and Vinegar Potato Chips, and sweet, such as the new Creamy Peanut Butter Snickers, which I’ve seen advertised but haven’t tried, when she Facebooks me:

“Did you block me? Jesus, Phil! What the hell?”

Uh-oh. How could she tell? Should I unblock her? Maybe. I can’t decide. How does that work? She knows where I live.

Then she writes:

“Here’s the deal: you can let it happen or make it happen. ‘Let’ is passive. ‘Make’ is active. So, the choice is…” The fourth text ends and the fifth begins: “…do we take action, be a force for good, clean up the mess humanity has made, or do we sit around hoping nature will do it for us?”

Just because it’s logical doesn’t make it a good idea. I’m not hurting anyone. I feel pretty comfortable hanging out at home receiving deliveries. Not that I’d say this to her. I decide to wait before responding. Or maybe I won’t respond at all because  I notice that her two last messages aren’t personal to me. She’s assembled a significant distribution list, and it includes a lot of names I don’t recognize.

Is this how cults form?

Days pass. I tire of TV. Maybe I should get some exercise. It’s supposed to be good for mental health. I browse TheraBands and order two sets, one for delivery to me and another for delivery to Cheryl, hoping she will appreciate my good intent. I finally unblock her in case she wants to tell me she got them. Eventually she acknowledges receipt but does not thank me, which makes me a little sad.

I wish I knew some of the neighbors in my building. I’ve lived here for three years and never really introduced myself to anyone. There’s this one girl who came over asking to borrow a vacuum cleaner a few months ago, but when I told her I didn’t have one she left without giving me her name or her unit number. There’s an older guy who often picks up his mail around the same time as me. We smile at each other and say “hello.” Come to think of it, he hasn’t appeared recently. I think he lives on the third floor, but I’m not sure which unit, so I couldn’t check on him even if I wanted to. Back when I used to leave the building every day, I would see people coming and going. No more though. I don’t go for walks and the view from my window isn’t good enough for me to recognize faces of people entering and leaving the building.

After all of this is over, maybe I should spend some time with my sister and brother-in-law.

The TV and a few online news feeds carry stories about how home delivery services are slowing down, with waits of up to five days between placing an order and getting your stuff. Delivery people are getting sick. Some don’t have personal protective equipment and feel unsafe handling goods, traveling to private homes, being out and exposed all the time. Some say they aren’t paid enough and don’t have health insurance. They say there are problems with the way the order apps calculate tips. They request that customers tip in cash, which seems strange because money is so dirty.

I relent and call Cheryl one evening to talk about this. I feel bad that I haven’t reached out to her earlier. I admit it: I miss her. I think I might earn back some points by expressing concern about the plight of these workers. She doesn’t pick up, though, so the call goes to voicemail. I leave a generic message, trying for a friendly tone.

Then on Friday around 10:30 a.m. I get a call from a delivery person downstairs, outside our building. I buzz to let him into the lobby but he calls again and says my buzzing hasn’t worked. The door is still locked. I walk down the back stairs, seven flights, without touching the handrail. In the elevator you have to touch buttons, and the air is surely recycled. I’ve ordered lots of dense foods, with long shelf-lives, like Stagg’s extra spicy canned chili and a three-pound jar of mixed nuts, so the boxes will be bulky and heavy, hard to schlepp back up the stairs. I guess I’ll wait until the elevator is empty and push the buttons with the eraser end of the pencil in my pocket. As I descend to the landing on the second floor, I reach back to make sure the pencil is actually in my pocket. It’s not there, but my mask is, so I pull it out to put on when I get to the lobby. Once there, I sort of slip a cog. Instead of covering my face with the mask, I open the front door by leaning my hip against the locking metal bar. I hold it with my foot for the delivery guy. He’s about my age and size and wears a navy blue windbreaker and a Seahawks cap. Gloves, yes, but oddly, no mask. He steps inside. Instead of the large package of food I’m hoping for, he hands me and eight by ten envelop. I reach for it and am surprised to see “special delivery” scrawled in purple ink near Cheryl’s name and return address.  The delivery guy stands there waiting, for a tip I guess. I remember about tipping in cash so I reach into my wallet and pull out a five. It is then, as I hand him the money that I feel the moist spray of droplets as he sneezes into my face.

Susan Hettinger, a Wyoming native and former attorney, lives in Olympia, Washington with her husband, John Brottem, and a second-hand beagle. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Reedsy/Medium (“Good News about the Butter”), Seattle Magazine (“Departure), The Olympian (“What a Display of Cleavage Tells You about a Woman’s Brain”) and Washington Law and Politics (“Supreme Court Ceremony”). She’s now working on a novel titled Third Woman, Third Act.