What Kind of Paradise

by Janelle Brown

mien.

Her eyes opened wide, a little patronizing. “Oh. Maybe you aren’t aware that your father has been in the news lately—maybe you don’t have a television?” I wondered if she was thinking that after so many years of trying to escape my father’s legacy, I had somehow ended up rebuilding his Arcadia.

And I believed him, even when my stomach twisted itself into a tiny little walnut of hunger later that day. I believed him, even as we ate oatmeal at every meal for the next week, until the plows finally came through and the roads were passable again. Nor did I stop to consider the hypocrisy when my father went into his office after dinner and turned on his TV, tuned it to the news, and began to write. Because in my heart I understood that my father was always right, and my complaints were a sign of my privileged position within a flawed modern society. That if we killed one deer, we might as well kill them all; and then where would we be? Once we lost our respect for nature, the world was on its way to an end.

It was easier just to want the things that he wanted, too, because then I might actually get them.

How much of our childhoods can anyone really remember, anyway; and how much do we just piece together from the photographs in our family albums, the stories that our parents tell us about ourselves, until we have enough detail to color them in in our minds and claim them as our own?

wondered, when my father left to “deliver magazines” once or twice a year, if he was actually going to visit some of these correspondents. Whether a vein of community ran below our lives, invisible to me, but rich and vital to my father.

It was a window into my father’s secret mind, one he didn’t want me to see; and my presence in the room was like a splinter in the sole of a foot. I would never have gone in there

It’s an opiate, worse than organized religion.’ ”

I could hear her radio blasting in the background, playing a girl band that sounded like bubbling soda.

was reading Great Expectations for the third time and had just gotten to the part where Miss Havisham admits to Pip that she intentionally raised Estella to be cruel and heartless, as her revenge against the men she blamed for her own heartbreak.

could feel the excitement zinging off him, a manic energy that I recognized with a faint ping of alarm.

My father was opening a direct conduit to the outside world, and what he failed to see—and what I, in some subconscious way, already understood—was that this wasn’t just going to be about Saul Williams announcing his presence to the world. Instead, the world was about to come to us.

“Thought crimes, squirrel. I commit thought crimes.”

My father stood over my shoulder, waiting for me to turn around and greet him properly. I couldn’t make myself do it. Something critical in our dynamic had shifted; I could feel it in the charged air around us. For the first time, I realized that I had the power to piss him off.

I picked it up from the bed. It was so light, it didn’t even feel like real clothing. How could you wear this and not feel naked? I wanted desperately to put it on. The longing made me feel weak.

Maybe I would have been more worried if I hadn’t been consumed with an amaurotic eagerness for our road trip.

“You didn’t exactly cover this in home school.” His gaze fluttered down from my eyes to rest on the sticky fuchsia gloss that was gluing my lips together, and then flung itself upward again, as if the sight upset him. “I figured some things just come naturally to women.”

storm-slick pavement;

The irony, of course, is that kids believe that knowledge unlocks happiness. More than anything, they crave access to all the things that they aren’t supposed to know yet; as if being privy to the secrets of the world will open up some magical door to adulthood. They believe that if you know, you will understand. But in fact, the opposite is true. The more you come to know about the world, the less it makes sense; and the more you wish you could just climb right back inside your mother’s arms and hide there, an oblivious kid, forever.

My family’s story had, apparently, been relegated to history, and the internet was still too fresh to have any documentation of the world before its invention.

I replaced the headphone and listened some more. I’d never heard music so intimately;

Pink cable wires snaked along the ceiling and down the room’s concrete support pillars, like a venous system pumping life into the computer monitors that sat on every flat surface.

Once upon a time, the world economy was built on concrete things, objects with longevity that could be held in your hand. But that day I was witnessing the beginning of the era of ephemerality, a whole new kind of existence based on little more than zeros and ones, ideas and information.

The kids in this room were igniting the fire that was about to immolate everything that had come before. They were revolutionaries who couldn’t anticipate the scale of their victory, or the devastation it would leave in its wake.

The only thing that remained truly recognizable among the ruins was our cast-iron woodstove, which still stood sentry over the ashes of my childhood.

If I felt pangs of homesickness on occasion—for the frozen dew dancing, diamond-like, on the tips of the wild grass; for the tawny spring fawns, tripping down to our pond; for the smell of woodsmoke in my father’s hair, his hand on my shoulder—I buried these feelings under an avalanche of pop culture.

Staring at every person I passed, trying to take in all the iterations of human existence I’d never before imagined.

I felt myself lifted up by their excitement, an unfamiliar hot sensation bubbling up inside me. Mild hysteria? The wildness of hope? The infectious madness of a crowd? I was on the verge of tears and I didn’t know why.

Right? It’s easy to forget it, but then you have these moments that remind you how incredible it is that we even fucking exist. The rest of it—all the crap we worry about, the cerebral contortions we go through to try to make meaning of existence—is nothing at all compared to the miracle that we can do this.

And then—earnestly, so earnestly—promising myself that I would make that call to the FBI tip line, I would, just so I could have more nights like this, with these wonderful people, the best ones I’d ever known.

And I gazed over my new life and felt like an overripe fruit, about to burst out of my skin.