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traumatic memories, maybe dissociating, and I wanted to believe him. It would explain how fake everything felt, how lonely and digital. How often I wanted to hurt somebody, just to see if either of us was real, just to move someone’s face around, just for the fucking thrill of it.
It’s important for a charismatic, handsome, lucky person to catch a glimpse of normal life every now and then.
He has never understood the appeal of immortality.
Moses dislikes all generations, dislikes the very concept of them, but this is the generation he dislikes the most.
Addicted to learning because it distracts her from the hostility of her consciousness; she has one of those brains that attacks itself unless it’s completing a difficult task.
It’s clear to her that he would be happier in a coastal city. It’s clear to him that she would be happier in a different species.
She gets to be the world, which makes him the ending. There is no revelation. He orbits her. She spins. Gradually, they become orphaned from their morals, and they feel that something has died, but also that something’s been born. Among everyone Tiffany’s ever met, James takes the most from her, gives her the most. It’s his fault, it’s hers, he isn’t, it doesn’t matter, it matters most.
She wants something—anything—to count but is also emboldened by the conviction that nothing possibly can.
On the drive, James fiddles with the radio as Tiffany plunders her life experiences for something interesting to say. They both settle on silence.
“Godspeed,” James tells Tiffany. The neutrality with which he delivers this greeting cancels all other evidence. Tiffany understands, with a force that nearly shoves her to the ground, that she has misinterpreted everything. She is delusional, foolish, disposable, grotesque. Humiliated.
She wants to be his kid and she wants to be his wife and she wants to be him. He’s showing his life to me, Tiffany realizes, so that I don’t murder it.
As they enter his house through the side door, the awareness that Tiffany is embarking upon a Major Life Event caffeinates her; her body trembles, her senses sharpen, and all the colors saturate. She feels more alive than she thought possible, and she understands that she has finally graduated from an imitation of life.
Desiring James has always felt like a mental illness, but this is the first time it’s felt like a crisis.
On Saturday, he eats nothing but a bag of venison jerky that he hid from Meg months ago and stares at the television for many minutes before remembering to turn it on.
Up until James, Tiffany had led a small life in dark rooms, and she was hoping to expand, but this bright empty space embarrasses her. In the grass, she sees a piece of trash and relates to it. Tiffany is not designed for a big life—she does not meet the height requirement. She is seventeen; she feels seventy. She is seventeen; she feels seven.
Masturbating had never occurred to her. She wouldn’t know how; her intelligence was restricted to the immaterial.
She used to believe that sexual bliss was a luxury reserved for other people, like skiing. Now she mourned that belief.
“I lost my…” “Your what?” She knew, as a general rule, it was good to avoid fucking people in whose presence you couldn’t bear to say the word underwear. “My…” “Your underwear?” Relieved that he didn’t use the word panties, she sighed and tried not to burst into flames.
What Tiffany remembers best from that night is her name in his mouth when he was in her.
She looks around the park, astonished that no one can hear the noise inside her body.
She wants to arrest him, and chiropract his guilt, and marry him, and beat him up. She wants to launch herself into outer space.
Tiffany can no longer see the point of this, or anything else. She ends the call.
The mystics were sick and wonky geniuses, often hilarious, always alone.
Through the psychological fog of that summer, she sees that she is only partially real, partially alive. Unfit for human contact. She sees that this has always been true.
Malik stops Blandine after class and asks if she wants to live with him and two other boys in a four-bedroom apartment near the river, Blandine says sure. Later, she’ll wonder what made her accept his offer so swiftly: an investment in her life, or an indifference to it? She’s got to live somewhere, she reasons, and boys don’t scare her. Men don’t scare her. Nobody scares her. Nobody can break into you if you break out of your body first.
He looks like an actor. Not a specific one—all of them.
Blandine forbids self-pity, but she permits rage.
But the most enraging aspect of all the aspects is the Situation’s banality. Blandine is thereafter cursed with the knowledge that one of the defining events of her life was nothing more than a solution to a tired equation. The internet pummels her with proof: an actor sleeps with his nanny; the head of the International Equestrian Games has fucked at least sixteen participants; yet another intern blows yet another president; a philosophy professor proposes to an advisee who was born when he was fifty. One nation flashes its nuclear weapons at another. Most of the world’s debt belongs to one
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She knows that not contacting James is the right thing to do, but God—how much like a sneeze unsneezed it feels.
My grief rises up, wrote Hildegard. That grief is obliterating the great confidence and consolation which I had from another human being.
If there was anything unethical about our arrangement, wrote Blandine, it wasn’t that you were a teacher and I was a student, or that you were the director and I was the actress, or that you were married and I was a kid, or that you were rich and I was poor, or that you were a father and I was an orphan, or that you were forty-two and I was seventeen. It was the fact that this was always going to mean infinitely more to me than it meant to you, and you fucking knew it from the start.
You always already mattered. I did not.
Malik cleared his throat and started to sing, striking the same three chords over and over in different patterns. And you know what? Motherfucker has an excellent voice. Makes you think of apple cider and somebody else’s childhood.
Does she actually smell like roses?” Malik shrugged. “How should I know.” “She does,” I admitted. “Like a funeral.”
“Vacca Vale: Welcome Home,” scoffed Todd, but he looked sort of emotional to me. “What the hell kinda slogan is that.” “More like—Vacca Vale: Don’t Touch the Rust,” said Malik. “Vacca Vale: Excuse Me, Sir, Are You Lost?” I added. “Vacca Vale: We’ll Clean It Up in the Morning,” said Todd. We laughed. We warmed. We didn’t know who we were trying to impress.
“I know a guy from work who had a trap out for months, and you know what happened? One morning, he woke up, tiptoed to the kitchen real quiet, and what did he see? Two mice eating the cheese out of the trap, from the outside, with their little hands. Like without getting smashed. For real. He clapped his hands, and they didn’t even scatter, didn’t give a fuck. He said they ate a whole loaf of bread. Can you believe it?” “What I can’t believe is that you think this is an interesting story.”
As she walks through the warm morning breeze, Blandine fantasizes about someone emailing her the article about Pearl. The person would say: Reminded me of you. In the fantasy, the person knows Blandine better than she knows herself, and their message sinks through her skin like a poem, asserting its truth before revealing its meaning. It is not a normal fantasy, she understands. But who could call “normal” good, anymore? Who could call it anything?
That a place called Lover’s Hollow existed within a place called Chastity Valley gave Blandine some hope about human resilience in the face of human brutality.
and the birds with their remembrance of a supposedly better time, reliving their history over and over like a sad, drunk father who was once the high school quarterback.
Taken in sum, the graffiti on the Zorn factories looks just like the internet. Look at me, everyone says when no one’s looking.
Improbably, the actress reached adulthood. Because her childhood was a renunciation of childhood, she treated adulthood like a crackdown on adulthood, which is to say, she abdicated most responsibilities of living in a body and a world. Voting. Taxes. Dentists. Lunch. These things could terrorize her whenever she was forced to endure them on anyone’s terms but her own.
he knew that he could not trust feelings inspired by the beautiful.
It would be absurd to describe a whole person as good or bad. You’re just a series of messy, contradicting behaviors, like everyone else. Those behaviors can become patterns, or instincts, and some are better than others. But as long as you’re alive, the jury’s out.”
A List of Hildegard Quotes,
Even in a world that’s being shipwrecked, remain brave and strong.
Humanity, take a good look at yourself. Inside, you have heaven and earth, and all of creation. You are a world—everything is hidden in you.
But she is with everyone and in everyone, and so beautiful is her secret that no person can know the sweetness with which she sustains people, and spares them in inscrutable mercy. I am Hildegard. I know the cost of keeping silent and I know the cost of speaking out.
Still, there is something hypnotic about her. She emanates the same force he associates with ghosts, extraterrestrials, magic, miracles. He sees her flaws, feels a little repulsed, and yet he can’t kick the enchantment out of his body. It occurs to him that he might actually like her personality.
I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? 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.
As they look at each other, warmth blossoms inside her, and her pulse quickens, and she feels like an idiot. With a ferocity that commandeers her entire body, she longs to take his hand and guide him into the bedroom, under her dress, into some kind of future, a future of his hand on her knee at the cinema, boiling pasta, waking up and describing their dreams. She longs to sleep in for the rest of her life. To sink into that pool of white linen and tell him to do whatever he wants to her.
