“There may not be an airport. It is in the salt ponds.” That was my mom’s response when I told my family I wanted to fly to Key West to help clean up once Irma passed. She’s right. Last I heard, downtown hadn’t flooded, but the worst was yet to hit. Our friends taking refuge on the second floor of our house haven’t been able to communicate since 2 AM.

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Once, in a letter, I wrote that “a certain type of person moves to Key West: those who see themselves in the shimmering heat, in the promise of a cooling wind of the power boat, a wind that in reality brings with it turbulent waters and spilled beer. Key West—an island with mediocre beaches, good bars, a modicum of history, and filled with obese tourists hailing from Alabama and Kansas—is only livable when seen through a specific set of eyes. The difference between the Harvard professor on vacation there and the homeless man he became, throwing Frisbees up and down the beach while yelling to himself, is a suntan.”

Now I wonder whether this was truly the case, whether there is something more at play. How does one live on an island with no future, a place that will be underwater in seventy years—that is, if the hurricanes don’t destroy it first? In such a situation, what else can one do but drink and fuck?

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Homelessness in Key West is pervasive and visible in a way not often found elsewhere. An island with warm nights, drunken tourists, and an accepting ethos entices those who the nation has failed, those we try to sweep under the rug, those we hate and attack for no reason beyond their sheer existence. As I watch television footage of waves crashing over the southernmost point and winds shaking even the most structurally sound houses, I wonder if this is nothing less than a genocide, our cruelty driving them to Key West while our obsession with meat and cars sentences the island to death.

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The most recent time I was in Key West, the wind tried to blow, but the air was too thick with humidity and heat, oversized particles moving faster then they were ever meant to, blocking the cooling breeze before it started. Two friends had accompanied my family and me down.

Halfway through the trip, we took a motorboat to our favorite beach, an unexplored nature preserve filled with mosquitos, crabs, and spiders. As we stood in the lukewarm water, one friend turned to me and said, “this will be underwater soon.”

The heat beat down. Behind us a storm was forming. The humidity thickened until it consumed me, the heavy air becoming an extension of my body, a weight that could be neither carried nor dropped, inescapable to the last.

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It is not, as is commonly supposed, that heat and insanity are closely intertwined, that the former causes the latter—sunbeams whispering in the ears of the unwell, pushing the unstable to the edge. Rather, tropical warmth is insanity; the rich drunk with his hand in the pool is no different from a heat wave; the man muttering on the sidewalk is not caused by the humidity but is in fact a manifestation of it. Climate change is nothing more than the amplification of a world gone mad.

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I don’t know why our friends didn’t evacuate when they could, why they stayed put while even the most stalwart of locals ran. I wonder if they regret it. Probably not. Whatever the case, I cannot imagine them in our attic terrified, shining flashlights out to watch the encroaching waters. In fact, I can’t imagine any local like that. I wonder if they’re having a two-person party as the world collapses around them, drinking and trying to find joy in the horror. I wonder if, in the back of their mind, they know that this is only a practice run for what will become the new normal, that the indeterminate future has become the present, that the American public has weighed the options and decided their lives aren’t worth the extra hassle of biking to work. I wonder if the drinking is defiance or resignation.

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My friend’s prediction has come true sooner than any of us could imagine. The preserve has undoubtedly become swamped. That is the least of the Keys’ problems. People say that we won’t know the extent of the damage until the storm passes. But the storm will never pass. Irma is just the first act, a warning shot that hit us in the stomach, a rude reminder that our modern peace with nature was only an armistice. The coming barrage will be infinitely worse, nature’s inimical violence responding to human degeneracy in kind. It won’t make us change direction, of course; we’ll keep marching straight towards the barrage, putting those we care about least in front. Future generations will see us as no different from the Victorian era British viceroys who ignored drought in India, letting millions die to prove the legitimacy of the free market. Like them, most of us will face no official consequences for our actions. There will be no trials, no formal declaration of human rights violations. Just the slowly rising water, it’s cosmic timeframe letting us slip into eternity before it can deliver its sentence. In the meantime, we will sacrifice our most vulnerable in a failed attempt to appease that which has no morals. In doing so, we will find the same about ourselves.