My Absolute Darling

by Gabriel Tallent

We should all eat a lot more local food, smoke a lot more pot, and drive a lot less, as far as I’m concerned. And love one another. I believe that. Community, boys, that’s the way.”

“The temperature may rise six degrees in the coming decades, and that’s not just ‘rising temperatures,’ that’s a cataclysm. You think we can stop that? People don’t believe in obesity, and that they can see in the fucking mirror. They can’t take care of their own goddamn bodies. How many people die because their hearts are grimy with plaque, do you think? A lot. What is it—seventy percent of all Americans are overweight? Half of those are obese? And do you think—can this person, this average American, take care of anything? No. Fuck no. So the natural world, which they cannot see for all their roads and gas stations and schools and jails, the fucking natural world, which is more important and more beautiful than anything this average American has ever seen or understood in his whole fucking life, the natural world is going to die, and we’re going to let it die, and there’s no way we can save it. Fuck.”

“You ask sometime, you ask somebody what they would do if the end came. You go ahead and ask them and there will be among those you ask a population who’ll tell you that they would just die, and among those who didn’t say it, more would mean it. People are content to live if the living should come easy. If it should stop being easy—well.” A silence. They sit for some time, and then Martin grating, his voice harsh and low, raking his fingernails across the wood grain: “Well, I tell you, what that question is asking is—what will you do when things get hard? And life will get hard. Life will get hard, and to say that you will not fight for it—well. What intercourse can you have with such people? There can be none. Their life is a sham of circumstance only, their pretended agency is perfidy, a social lie, and to regard them as people is fetishism. So what optimism can there be? They will not fight for themselves—you think they will fight for a world outside themselves?

The cormorants stand on white-painted rocks with their wings spread, facing the sun. Spume lofts through the blowhole on Buckhorn Island. “It is all meaningless,” he says, and she does not know why it would mean anything, or why you would look for meaning in it, and she does not understand why you would want it to be anything other than what it is, or why you would want it to be about you. It is just there, and that has always been enough for her.

She feels like something has been pulled out of her guts, roots and all, some alder tree, and where it was before, a nauseous emptiness, but that is all she can feel, no sorrow, nothing. She would be capable of terrible harm, if she only wanted. She could do anything and there is no limit to the hurt she could do, only now, she wants to close her eyes and run her mind around that emptiness like running your tongue over the socket of a pulled tooth.

but when she suspends her mind, lying there on the floor and gazing across the boards but not thinking, then she can feel it grow closer until it is all through her, the sorrow replete in the unattended emptiness of her mind like wild radishes blooming in an empty lot. It has found whole parts of her that she did not know she had.

out. It is good to sit over the pot with the tea roiling and to be alone with the thoughts that surface there. She likes them, but she is exhausted by their company. She’s never spent so much time with other people. They feed off one another’s enthusiasm. But Turtle is very worn out by them.

She tells herself, it may hurt, but you’re a long way from dead yet, girl.

Just because everybody believes something, just because everybody but you believes it, that doesn’t make you wrong.