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That’s why you got to butcher them when they get a certain age, or you have a heck of a mess.” —Rhonda Britton, Flint, Michigan, resident, 1989 Invisible and eternal things are made known through visible and temporal things. —Hildegard von Bingen, Benedictine abbess, 1151
Like many men who have weathered female rejection, the man in Apartment C12 believes that women have more power than anyone else on the planet. When evidence suggests that this can’t be true, he gets angry. It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.
her right arm, cherishing his tiny sounds of contentment as he nurses. As usual, predators are wreaking havoc on the internet. Predators are the only people in town. If she had to summarize the plot of contemporary life, the mother would
“I wish I could take it,” he says. “I wish I could take it all from you and put it into myself.” Then he kisses her neck, gently defibrillating her back to life. He wants this, he tells her. He wants the gore; he wants four in the morning; he wants the beginning and the middle and the end; he wants to fix whatever he can fix and be there through the rest; he wants the bad and the good; he wants the sickness and the health.
But love does not preclude terror—at twenty-five, the mother knows that the latter almost always accompanies the former.
The coincidental nature of all social collision has always troubled the mother, even before she was a mother. To have a nationality, a lover, a family, a coworker, a neighbor—the mother understands these to be fundamentally absurd connections, as they are accidents, and yet they are the tyrants of every life.
This is life, she has learned, with a newborn: it’s easing someone into and out of consciousness, over and over, providing sustenance in between. As though infants inhabit a different planet, one that orbits its sun four times faster than Earth does. If you want to understand the human condition, pay close attention to infants: the stakes are simultaneously at their highest, because you could die at any moment, and at their lowest, because someone bigger is satisfying every need. Language and agency have not yet arrived. What’s that like? Observe a baby.
There are some questions spouses ask each other over and over for decades, starring a fatal flaw that one has perceived in the other.
She always knew that she was too small and stupid to lead a revolution, but she had hoped she could at least imagine one.
She takes a deep breath, attacked by an awareness of how impossible it is to learn and accomplish all that she needs to learn and accomplish before she dies.
“Sometimes I walk around, bumping into people, listening to them joke and fight and sneeze, and I don’t believe anyone is real. Not even myself. Do you know what I mean?”
The streets you walk, the food you eat, the job you work, the method of transportation you choose, the beauty products you purchase, the shows you watch, the links you click, the way you sit on a train, the way you speak to waiters, the way you take your coffee—everything affects everyone. Find a way to believe this, even when sober.
It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism,
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There was no place like home because there was no home. Now an adult in the eyes of the state, she walks over grass and roots and trash, her feet browning with dirt, and dreams of a little housebroken goat, an east-facing bedroom window, an edible garden, a ladder on a book wall, no electricity, a fireplace. She dreams of total self-sufficiency and freedom from the market. She starts to dream of an American political revolution, but trips over the logistics and tables the matter. She is disappointed by the domesticity of her adult fantasies but also cheered by it. Domesticity, at least, is
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They treated prayer as a getaway car, cathedral as rabbit hole, suffering as wonderland, divine ecstasy as the cyclone that delivered a woman to color.
“I am so sick,” Blandine says, “of violence against women disguised as validation.”
“And why are respecting a woman and fucking her mutually exclusive, to you?”
We spent six months fracking each other’s souls—just because we got a little oil out of it doesn’t make it good. And who hasn’t fallen for capitalism? Of course it seduces you before it mauls you. Of course it intoxicates you out of your senses before it leads you to the arena. Like how ancient societies used to give children cocaine before sacrificing them.
I kept your fucking secret because I mistook it for mine.”
