Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

I peed in the wooded area beyond the open lot. While squatting, I encountered a pair of women’s Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level. This did not seem odd. Truck ruts and panties snagged on a bush: that’s “Europe.” The real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli

He was hated by powerful string pullers, and also by regular French people, who seemed offended that they should even be made to know who he was.

A zeppelin-shaped cloud hovered over the valley beyond the house, turning pink. It darkened in front of my eyes to fuchsia and then faded to plain old cloud color. For all its fame, rosy-finger dawn leaves no prints.

not holding her notes, but in key, a soprano that was ice-cream-headache high.

Quiet descended. The only sound was an old, galvanized water bucket on the ground, sent rolling by the wind. The Germans were gone. To this day, Bruno said, I can hear that sound, a water bucket rolling on its side. It is the sound of danger’s retreat, and also a signal that is more complex for me, he said, because in the absence of an enemy, an “other,” we become, ourselves, responsible for good and evil.

They wandered through the woods, Bruno wearing the scavenged helmet, holding it so it would not fall off. The helmet’s weight, its reduction of his visibility—it rode low—felt to him, he wrote to the Moulinards, like the intrinsic burdens of men and war. He was trying on those burdens, which was the essence of play, to rehearse the dramas and terrors of adulthood.

The bromides marketed to us to fix our problems, like kerosene was once believed a remedy for lice, these posited solutions tend to give us hope more than material benefit. In reality, problems leave when they are ready to go, when they have exhausted their stay, just as these lice did.

An eye doctor told me this was a vascular event, and when I asked what that meant, he said it meant I could ignore it.

What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being. When I came to understand this, it was literally four a.m. and I was staring at an actual mountain of salt.

The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.

lines mounted out every window and hung with flapping laundry—the international flag for anonymous women’s work.

For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.

The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cabécou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.

Japan, they sold used schoolgirls’ underwear in train station vending machines, catering to a subcategory of pervert, the panty sniffer on the go. A practical idea,

“I aspire to something more. To be base and ubiquitous. You can’t plan for that. You can only dream of it.”

with native fluency in Jailbait, was chatting up the girls.

What had Bruno said about the future? When we face our need to control it, we are better able to resist that need, and to live in the present.

We are all sieves, Bruno had said. We catch and hold on to things along the way. We say hello to these things, these distractions, and we let them float past.

These scenes, the lava and the bread oven and the gold loaves, had then morphed into little cartoon images that were familiar to him: they were the debased advertising logo of a brand of factory cookies, mass-produced, something from his own childhood. The experience was a reminder, he said, that when you attempt to escape the world, to leave it behind, you bring things with you. Understand that you can never leave purely, he said. We want to escape what ails us, into some idyll, but know that when you go, you travel with cargo, stowaways, souvenirs from the old world. Don’t be afraid of them. Instead, say hello. Be friendly. Be patient. These things you’ve brought along will pass. Say hello and watch them go.