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When she thought of what had almost happened her heart felt like a stone in her chest, that the pure flesh of the peach had pulled away from. It beat and she thought, how far away.
“RUAHHH,” went the woman next door, and she laughed, thinking of the full-throated OOOO-AH-AH-AH-AH she used to do at readings. Always a crowd-pleaser, and really it took a surprising amount of skill.
Her friend Jamie, an expert on movement, had once told her there was a tiny dance that went on inside her all the time.
To feel that you are not able to control your own body, as if it is a thing you are writing! To feel you are a marionette hung up at night by the neck!
He raised the lights and recoiled from her, she thought she could see why. She had, for a brief moment, become interested in it. This was a cardinal sin; you could not become interested in the illness. You could not lavish on it the love and solicitation you had previously lavished on the self, even though it was the thing that the self had been replaced by. You could not, though the brain told you to do it, laugh out loud: that it looked so much like a creature, in a painting of deep time.
“Say _____,” she said, reciting her supposed name. Then, whispering, “Say Dennis,” and looking into her mouth, the baby achieved recognition as a pond does: He rippled and was still. The lost blue eyes were raised to hers. Meaning was suddenly hitched to its star. I got us here, I will get us out, she told him. Do not be afraid.
“Clowns are the biggest masochists on earth,” my friend said, for to become a person who could elicit anything from anyone, you first had to become a person from whom anything could be elicited.
My friend had recently taken over a production of Urinetown (the original director had been fired for suggesting that gospel music in fact came from Ireland), at which no audience at all had been present and everyone onstage had stood six feet apart. The dancers threw themselves at each other from great distances, and held up stethoscopes to plexiglass panels instead of each other’s chests.
The stage was laid with rectangles of rich dark dirt, and she seemed to be making decisions with parts of her body that other dancers had no access to—all the way down to her hemline, all the way to her split ends.
She must have known the Six Viewpoints already—space, story, time, emotion, movement, shape—for the fine fur along my back stood up and stirred, all the way to the tip of a tail.
Now my friend was opening her mouth, in the middle of a spotlight on a stage inside her chest; auditions for the self took place every morning at ten.
I must kick out a leg, give up my old life, and become a cast member of Cats on Broadway—which had been running now for a hundred years, which would run another hundred more, until at last one night the star was out, and I was the one who was chosen.
Nothing more frightening in all that time than a book arriving in the mail with my name on it.
She is back in her teenage basement; I am gesturing at her with my new strange hands. It is desire to be in the world together, parallel, silent, showing each other things on our phones.
For three weeks straight I have nightmares about being asked about cancel culture. It is my greatest fear, to be asked about cancel culture—or that I will be so terrorized by the possibility that I will immediately begin talking about it anyway, and in doing so present the opportunity to be murdered by public opinion myself.
Her cat is carceral, I imagine someone saying. Be aware.
I am readying myself for another interview when the crowd bursts into the Capitol. I have to go get a haircut, with my phone held tensely in my lap under the barber cape, and wonder the whole time whether the Speaker of the House is having her head chopped off. The haircut itself is administered by a stylist in his fifties who believes in me in a way that no one ever has before: that I can carry off an early-nineties Fly Girl situation. When I step out of the salon and back into the stream of what is happening I have a feeling that I have possibly never had before: American.
The first sign of trouble is that you begin to believe you are lying. The second sign of trouble is that you begin to believe you are not a person. The third sign of trouble is that you begin to believe you are bleeding out, through speech, the living images of those you love.
I text Maryann one morning in a panic. “Did David Bowie die? I dreamed that he did.” “Girl,” she responds, appalled, delighted, “David Bowie died five years ago.” — “So I did predict it then,” I say.
“Did I talk about not being a neurotypical person?” I ask Jason, who listens from the other room in case I need to know something crucial, like where I live.
Headache, I would write, though it was never located within—it was more that I joined some headache outside me. “Some days the delirium seems to return. It feels expansive, uncomfortable, as if pathways are trying to break past the outer walls.” “Solid objects seem to rain.” “My reading comes and goes like a magic store.”
“I do not know if she is interested in ethics,” the eighty-five-year-old woman said. “I think she is a genius, but I do not know what kind.” There are only two kinds, and one of them is: evil. So now I have that to worry about as well.
When the article comes out, it features a picture of me sitting cow-eyed on a park bench with the words Not a neurotypical person printed underneath, as punishment.
I just keep repeating that when I was a child I think I was attracted to Ewoks. Their short stocky bodies. Their leather vests. The bucktoothed decision with which they bit into those little crackers. “I’m not sure what I’ll find sexy ten years from now,” I say, so stressed that I realize I’m crying.
“Once, at an anniversary dinner, my husband ordered thirty-six oysters by mistake, and had to eat twenty-four of them by himself. As we were walking home, he grabbed his stomach, turned to me, sloshed, and said, Twenty-four oysters have become one oyster. The modern internet,” I finish, “is where two dozen oysters go to become one oyster.”
Before we all wise up and get ring lights we appear in dark caverns, like Greek myths. This is better, I think, than the high gloss that comes later. We look like what we are.
I settle on the black one—unprecedented, as I would always apply it in the brutal light of my hotel bathroom and then immediately wipe it off and put on the color God assigned me at birth: Ohio Mauve.
So I go, so strict with my mask that I barely eat or drink, and float suspended in the large worldlike skull, which is enlarged by my crisscrossing flight, eight hours across the ocean, a vaccine card and a test that reads Not Detected in my pocket;
Ushered into a white tent outside Heathrow to be tested. The young man in a mask so strangely gentle, as if I don’t understand something fundamental about what we’re doing, reaching the long swab up into my nose to touch my brain. He’ll be telling me to put my mask back on now, I think, but he doesn’t, and just sits looking.
It happened to her too, after a book tour in America; some virus, she doesn’t know where or when. Ten years in a dark room, writing about a man in a maze.
You know that you’re alive and might live forever, when you’re Embarrassed in Front of the British.
Impossible to describe the sequence of events that led me here: completely orange, with a chemical burn on my lower lip, dressed as a gothic Lolita and hollering about plenitude. But I have come to welcome anything so strange I will remember it.
I waited for Angel’s smile, and it came. I started to laugh and she started to laugh; many things in the human being are contagious.
It was true, I had never handled drugs well. Nevertheless, I had embarked on a hallucinogenic program to heal my mind.
My husband often found me, after drinking the tea, staring at the book with tears running down my face. I felt like a chick covered with oil, dying, and a tall woman was washing me with liquid detergent.
The blessed state would only last about forty-eight hours, but for that duration, time once more went in sequence, words marched in their sentences, and people on the beach walked in and out of the songs.
I made the eheherrherr sound that I now made when strangers spoke to me, a little closer to real language this time, and scampered ranchously down to the lip of the water. Also I had invented the word ranchously. Incredible that someone had been able to write beautifully, philosophically, even ranchously about this experience.
“Have you ever felt sorry for a dish you didn’t order?” I asked Angel. “Or shame at the thought of sitting at a table too large for you? Have you ever stood outside a brothel, marveling at your lack of desire? What does this sentence mean to you: The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back?”
I would ask my friends, ‘Do you ever feel like your hand is coming out of itself?’ ” They would look back at me in amazement—all of them lesbians, some of them drug dealers—and say the same thing always: Are you high?
“Freeze it!” my preservationist friend barked, near hysteria. “Freeze it for forty-eight hours! Then, taking a little horsehair brush, sweep gently from the center of the page to the edge.” She drew a deep breath and tried to calm down. “Now tell me one thing: Is there puke on the text?” But perhaps it was most accurate to leave it, I thought. Then anyone who read it in the future would know how it was: rents in reality, colors falling on colors, cries like a baby from nowhere. A little wisdom rose to me: There is always some puke on the text.
I was thinking of Korsunsky, the master of ceremonies, saying that “he and his wife are like white wolves, everyone knows us.” And I posted “a dj who travels through time…trying to find the job that is closest to being a dj in every historical era.” A DJ would say that now—“I am like a white wolf, everyone knows me.” A very white wolf. Shout-out to his family!
And this is what brings us back, I said to Jason, to the Jean Kendall theory of personhood: that no novel can contain even our own mother-in-law, that we are aliens walking among each other, each in a separate bubble of universe, laughing at the joke however it comes to us. This is how Anna Karenina reaches us, as we are.
The instrument of her destruction is not the train. It is her body, slice, slice, moving us from page to page. The satanic quality of Anna is her need to move, to and fro in the earth and up and down in it. Not to read but to be alive, her eyes so open in the dark she herself can see their brightness.
And the word ruble. A cube of cool raw potato in the mouth.
When his love is answered Levin becomes like the crystal you set on a newspaper to magnify it, and what leaps toward him is the knowledge that other people love him. The process of asking and answering is what makes the whole language transparent.
— My skin was running races. This meant that I was looking at art, reading literature, listening to music; or that I was in the ocean, with a wave breaking just at my waist.
He turns it inside out and finds it full of violets. These are forgiveness. He believes they are something for him to hold and keep holding, when forgiveness must mean to keep reaching, inside the sleeves and the pockets and the shape of the thing we are certain is gone.
But the soul is a floor. It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.
Tolstoy’s people have the little raised hairs. They are as responsive to the fickle currents in human interactions as actual people are. The mushroom-hunting chapter, the dashing of Varenka’s hopes, is a master class in this. These currents come from nowhere. They come from the world. They are supernatural, they ripple backward from the future.
“In their ceasing to live they saw poetry.”
