Private Citizens

by Tony Tulathimutte

She itched and felt afraid, but it didn’t matter. What difference did the existence of one frightened heart make on the scale of calamity? The optimistic forecasts gave us fifty years until the seas rose, then drought, mass displacement, resource wars. It was perverse: You wanted scientific consensus to be wrong about the ice core data, the carbon bomb in the permafrost, the declining albedo. You prayed that the delusional idiots were right. But the only comfort was that they’d suffer too.

While everyone else drags backpacks and coolers into the cabin, Linda claims the master bedroom by sprinting in and stripping off her clothes everywhere, inspecting the rooms; she walks out to the deck in her underwear to find Henrik in a primal Midwestern tableau, stacking a pyramid of charcoal in a grill beside a rack of Coors Light, his curly hair squashed out from under his ball cap. Will trips Henrik when he walks by and Henrik shoves him off his chair, then pulls him back up, both laughing. Cory rolls her eyes: dude energy off-puts her. She takes a deep chest hit off of her pipe and proposes a hike, but Will hates fresh air and Linda has cramps, so Cory and Henrik drive off to the Armstrong Redwoods.

“It was nice of you to plan this trip,” she says, propped on a log mangy with slime-green moss. Henrik nods in acknowledgment. “You do so much stuff for Linda,” she adds, implying some distant insult.

Why is she trying to solicit damning opinions from him? To bait him into revealing something that she can report back to Linda, or to form a bond with him that excludes Linda? Despicable either way.

While Cory inflated a hundred balloons, the first vendors arrived: the vintage tennis apparel shop Beforehand, the LGBTQIA-BBQ, and the Election Year Eatery (LOCAL NO. CAL. LO-CAL/NO-CAL CUISINE: STEM CELERYSEARCH - $2.99 / IRAQ OF RIBS [V] - $7.99 / ABORSCHTION - $4.99 / UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARROT CAKE - $3.99).

So first of all of course I don’t “‘believe’” you about your memory loss. I don’t even believe you’d believe I’d believe you. No, I know from a goddamn stretcher and I’ve read my DSM-IV. “‘Lacunar amnesia’”? More likely its pseudologia fantastica, pathological lying . . . file under M for Mythomania. Not fact or fiction but factition, the intentional fabrication of subjective complaints with no external incentive. By proxy. Its linked to high verbal skills and a rough childhood. Or if it is “‘lacunar amnesia,’” then its probably a symptom of Korsakoff’s, whose other symptoms include anhedonia, apathy, lack of insight, and making shit up. Caused by drug and alcohol abuse . . . stop me if this sounds familiar.

I always knew narrative was oppressive—narrowing things down to one or even a thousand perspectives is still an abridgment of infinity. I have real pity for fictional characters, the clueless dupes of dramatic irony—especially the female creations of male novelists, the Lolitas, Caddies, Bovaries ontologically fucked with, their every foible delectably plated. Hester Prynne didn’t have to get preggers, Miss Mowcher didn’t have to have cankles, Winnie Verloc didn’t have to die—except to serve their narratives, of which they’re denied basic awareness. Vessels for the writer’s outlook, for the reader’s vicarious experience. For them there’s no nature or fortune: just guile. Forced to be interesting, plausible, coherent, deep, through the corrupt brokerage of a narrator. The better the novel, the more enchanting the characters, the more their mysteries are spread-eagled, the greater glory to their creator.

Predictability is suicide. Death before determination! Murder before membership! Execution before explanation!

she must smother down an ugly epiphany that putting their relationship in jeopardy is making her affection quicken, like how a propeller seems to spin faster just after the motor cuts. Cheap orchestrated conflict is still titillating. The kind of excitement that might’ve reignited the relationship if she weren’t so determined to extinguish it.

A balloon was inflating in her chest, struggling but unable to pop. All she wanted was sleep, something only she could give herself and at last denied herself. Instead a deep shiver budded between her lungs, and a sickle-moon of migraine cleft her skull, smearing her vision. She pulled her hair into her mouth; when her fingers snagged, she pulled harder and moaned in formless schwas, hoping to discharge the pain as sound.

“You never wanted a baby,” Henrik said. “You said that to raise a kid was to get PTSD after catering to some helpless idiot for eighteen years in the hope that he wouldn’t eventually blame you for his miserable life on some blog.”