State of Paradise

by Laura van den Berg

Is it possible for a fever to turn a body so hot that molecules are rearranged? Is our life just on pause or is this pause now our life?

Whenever I’m stuck on a chapter, I just write everything is not as it seems and press on. In my line of work, this phrase is like hot sauce or ranch dressing—you can put it on nearly everything.

I feel like I am meeting a version of myself that I had nearly forgotten. The version that I tried to ditch on my way out of the wilderness. The version that emerged when the pandemic fever passed and I realized I wasn’t dead. She feels a bit dangerous, this version. I suspect she’s been waiting on me all these years, like a scorpion curled up inside the heel of a boot.

In Florida, nature is seductive and full of vengeance. To live here is to engage in a ceaseless battle to keep the outdoors from coming in,

Our father had a gift for convincing people to follow him into the wilderness, a quality that made him both dangerous and magical. He spent the whole of his adult life in Florida and that is how I have come to think of this place too, as equal parts danger and magic.

The problem, I have decided, with people who never leave home is that they are never forced to become someone else.

I ask the woman in white if it bothers her to peddle books that have nothing real or true to say about the world. “Please,” she says, with a flick of the hand. “Real and true are overrated, in this line of work. Haven’t you seen what it’s like out there? Real and true are what people read to get away from.”

Writing a story cannot bring back the dead, but it can draw them a little closer to the world of the living.

A trauma leaves behind a pit, it’s true, but there’s always the chance something worthy will rise up from the muck.

It is a particular kind of insanity to parent children who are still rolling around in that newly verbal stew, the utter horror of having to explain this world (this world!) to a nascent person. By the time my niece can fully grasp what’s happening she’ll probably wish she could crawl back inside my sister’s womb and float forever in an amniotic dream-sea.

How can we tell when we have become who we are? And who does a changed and changing world demand that we become?

One of the weirdest things about this period of time is the parts that still seem normal. Mundane and non-apocalyptic. Like how one minute we need an inflatable raft to cross the street and another we’re eating pasta at my sister’s house and she’s sitting back in her chair, one hand on her melon of a belly, and telling a story about how her neighbor bit someone in the face at Oktoberfest last year.