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Politics! The trouble was that they had a dictator now, which, according to some people (white), they had never had before, and according to other people (everyone else), they had only ever been having, constantly, since the beginning of the world.
“A hundred years ago you would have been mining coal and had fourteen children all named Jane,” she often marveled, as she watched a man stab a finger at his wife in front of the Keurig display.
Other people’s diaries streamed around her. Should she be listening, for instance, to the conversations of teenagers? Should she follow with such avidity the compliments that rural sheriffs paid to porn stars, not realizing that other people could see them? What about the thread of women all realizing they had the exact same scar on their knee?
Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.
Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like “I’m a retard with butt aids” was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way.
There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who were making fun of it previously. Then someone else discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have something to do with Israel and Palestine, and so everyone made a pact never to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days.
Her great-grandmother, an imaginary invalid, had kept her firstborn son chained up to a stake in the front yard so she could always see what he was doing through the window. She would have preferred a different maternal lineage—aviatrixes, jazz kittens, international spies would all have been preferable—but Child Chained Up in the Yard is what she had gotten, and it would not let her go.
In childhood she had lain awake at night, on fire with a single question: how did French people know what they were saying? Yet when she finally asked her mother, she didn’t know either, which meant the problem must be inherited.
The chaos and dislocation were so great that people had stopped paying attention to celebrity dogs. No one knew how small they were, or what they were wearing, or if one had recently been revived by an IV after nearly smothering to death in a very hot purse.
And often the fluid moment of the killing rippled in the portal, playing and replaying as if at some point it might change. And sometimes, as she saw the faces, her thumb would trace the line of the nose, the mouth, the eyes, as if to
memorize someone who was not here anymore, who she knew about only because they had been disappeared. ■ ■ ■
“Enormous fatberg made of grease, wet wipes, and condoms is terrorizing London’s sewers,” her hands began to waver in their outlines and she had to rock the crown of her head against the cool wall, back and forth, back and forth. What, in place of these sentences, marched in the brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she guessed.
A fur coat in a movie made in 1946 approached a state of being cruelty-free, so far was it from its original foxes.
“Are you . . . crying?” her husband asked, slinging his backpack into a chair. She stared at him blurrily. Of course she was crying. Why wasn’t he crying? Hadn’t he seen the video of a woman with a deformed bee for a pet, and the bee loved her, and then the bee died?
The only thing that bound us together was this belief: that in every other country they eat unspeakable food; worship gods more see-through than glass; string together only the most meaningless syllables, like goo-goo-goo-goo-goo-goo-goo; are warlike but not noble; do not help the dead cross in the proper boats; do not send the correct incense up to the wide blue nostrils; crawl with whatever crawls; do not love their children, not the way we do; bare the most tempting body parts and cover the most mundane; cup their penises to protect them from supernatural forces; their poetry is piss; they
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The woman pointed out an old man playing chess; she said she always looked for him as she walked to work, but he had gone missing for a few weeks recently, and it was such a relief to see him again, sliding his sure white knights on the L, bringing a dry rustling autumn to the leaf of his daily newspaper. “Maybe there are people in this life that we’re assigned to watch over,” they mused, and were comforted, but months later, she heard that the woman from the portal had disappeared, and no one would tell her how, where, why—or which green real park she could have walked through, to watch over
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EXPLAIN YOURSELF, her father texted, and sent a screenshot of a whimsical thought she had posted while hammered and watching 1776: why should I care what the founding fathers intended when none of them ever heard a saxophone
Why did rich people believe they worked harder? Her theory was that it was because they identified with the pile of money itself. And gathering interest, multiplying hotly, climbing its own slopes like a fever, heightening its silver, its gold, its green—what was that but work?
It had also once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone.
The dread of standing at the top of her grandmother’s stairs on Christmas Eve, hearing the phrase gold standard, and knowing she was going to descend straight into the hell of an uncle’s conversation about bitcoin.
“I know what you’re going through,” she said silently to the baby, “but sometimes you’ll be scrolling along, and NASA will post a picture of the stars.”
“What a cute little pair of panties,” her mother said as she emerged from the laundry room, holding up a pair of her brother’s military silkies, which were the bright trumpeting yellow of the DON’T TREAD ON ME flag and embroidered with the words NO STEP ON SNEK.
Twice a month she and her husband had an argument about whether she would be able to seduce the dictator in order to bring him down.
But when she looked at the smoking landscape of fathers laid out by cable news, it seemed no longer a question of intelligence or ignorance, but one of infection. Someone, a long time ago, looked at the big gray wriggle of American fathers and saw them as what they were: just weak enough, the mass host that would carry the living message.
But it had always been something, hadn’t it? Taking drops of arsenic. Winding bandages around the feet. Polishing your teeth with lead. It was so easy to believe you freely chose the paints, polishes, and waist-trainers of your own time, while looking back with tremendous pity to women of the past in their whalebones; that you took the longest strides your body was capable of, while women of the past limped forward on broken arches.
The first boy who had ever called her a bitch was now in jail for possession of child pornography, and this felt like a metaphor for the modern discourse.
“The feet of my wife, ma’am. Those are the feet that I love.” This was said with a rosy nuance of admonishment. She was touched and put her pen to her lips. There were still gentlemen in the world.
The teenagers sounded like adults, because the gunman in the doorway had loomed at them as long as they had been alive.
But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.
When she was away from it, it was not just like being away from a body, but a warm body that wanted her. The way, when she was gone from it, she thought so longingly of My information. Oh, my answers. Oh, my everything I never knew I needed to know.
At least, that was how she saw it in elevated moods. In baser ones, she saw herself bent over, on her knees, spread-eagled, and begging for reality’s cum.
and the only way it was possible to comfort herself anymore was to stand in front of the mirror and say out loud, “Cows don’t know about him.”
Frightening, too, was her suggestibility. Back in 1999, she had watched five episodes of The Sopranos and immediately wanted to be involved in organized crime. Not the shooting part, the part where they all sat around in restaurants.
“It’s not nonsense! It’s folk art!” she hollered back. Like those early American women who painted kids with enormous foreheads, either because they didn’t know how to paint regular foreheads or because it was a stylistic choice!
It made her wonder if she ought to have children, for anything could happen, and you didn’t know if you were up to it, how could you know if you were up to it? But she thought just as often of a little girl with pigtails who came running down the aisle of a plane toward her once, and patted her all over her arms and legs as she passed, and it was like a rain of soft blue bruiseless plums. She felt the surprise of it long after the girl was gone, and as she contemplatively sipped vodka from a shampoo bottle in the bathroom, a bloom came suddenly all over her skin: maybe she was up to it, after
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I was with you I felt I was a part of it, and why had she made that joke in the first place, when her grandmother had a hump, for God’s sake, when she had memorized its contours, when she could still feel it under the slow trustful circling of her childish hands?
Despite everything, the world had not ended yet. What was the reflex that made it catch itself? What was the balance it regained? You’ll be nostalgic for this too, if you make it.
“Did you read . . . ?” they said to each other again and again. “Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.
The question that was the pure liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped-clock answer.
“Tell me,” she said to her mother in the car. The last maternal text had just been a row of blue hearts and the spurting three droplets, which she no longer had the heart to explain were jizz.
Previously it had been a misdemeanor, a far less draconian charge. The law itself was only a month old: fresh as a newborn, and no one knew whose it was, and naked fear on the doctors’ faces.
“They’ll do an abortion right up to the very last minute . . . you know, health of the mother,” putting the last phrase in finger quotes, even as his daughter sat before him in her wheelchair.
She thought of women in grape-dark business suits with their hair pulled back, testifying in front of Senate committees. The faces of the senators were always comfortably closed against them, like doors on a federal holiday. Because the worst-case scenarios had happened to them, the women must have done something to deserve it. They knew nothing about this period when we were inside the great biceps and just before it flexed, when we were not yet the people it had happened to.
It spoke of something deep in human beings, how hard she had to pinch herself when she started thinking of it all as a metaphor.
Her arms spread wide; she felt cut open where the baby had been. Her voice, when she heard it in unguarded moments, still sounded like a flow of human sunshine, kindness. To somewhere.
Was the baby American? If she was, was it because this was the dust that had raised her particles, was it because she was impossibly ambitious in a land of impossible ambition, or was it because this was the country that had so steadfastly refused to care for her?
The doctors had asked for the brain, with so much hope that it was almost tender, as if they loved her too.
