No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

But didn’t tyranny always feel like the hand of the way things were?

It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.

Of course it was always the people who called themselves enlightened who stole the most.

You were zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, it was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other.

“The problem is that we’re rapidly approaching the point where all our dirty talk is going to include sentences like Fuck up my dopamine, Website!”

He felt as breakable as a link in her arms.

A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.

“As if wanting something makes it hurt less!” This statement sailed through the room as an unintentional piece of wisdom, clean as laundry and full of wind.

NOT my america, a perfectly nice woman posted, and for some reason she responded, damn, I agree . . . we didn’t trap george washington’s head in a quarter for this

defiant. She stepped back, alarmed. Had she committed a Brexit? It was so easy, these days, to accidentally commit a Brexit.

Some people were very excited to care about Russia again. Others were not going to do it no matter what. Because above all else, the Cold War had been embarrassing. Not just the ideas, but the jeans.

The word toxic had been anointed, and now could not go back to being a regular word. It was like a person becoming famous.

We wanted every last one of those bastards in jail! But more than that, we wanted the carceral state to be abolished, and replaced with one of those islands where a witch turned men to pigs.

Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech Has an Ethics Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that wasn’t doing it, what would??

The party—had they been at the party? they had been at the party this whole time—the party was definitively over.

Everyone was reading the same short story. It was about texting, hearts for eyes, bad kisses with their terrible bristles, porn moving in vague blobs through the body, how social protocol constitutes another arm of perception . . . and how men sucked, of course!

So she stepped from her own formlessness into the squares of her mother’s advent calendar, where there were soft white blankets on the ground, and little mice leading manageable lives, sleeping in empty matchboxes. And each morning, expectant, opened the envelope of another day.

Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. 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.

Go not far enough, and find yourself guilty of complacency, complicity, a political slumping into the cushions of your time. Go too far, and find yourself saying that you didn’t care that a white child had been eaten by an alligator.

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 set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her to an indestructible coherence.

Her feelings, such as they were, were hurt.

Was it entirely his fault? Lately it seemed every man on the planet was about to burst from a supplement sold to him by another man with exactly the same set of opinions.

In Vienna the little cakes looked like the big buildings, or else the big buildings looked like the little cakes. She ate both, layer upon layer.

“Surely there must be exceptions,” her father ventured, the man who had spent his entire existence crusading against the exception. His white-hairy hand traveled to his belt, the way it always did when he was afraid. He did not want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did any of us?

What did we have a right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract? What had the politician promised us? The realtor, walking us through being’s beautiful house? Could we sue? We would sue! Could we blow it all open? We would blow it all open! Could we . . . could we post about it?

The plot of a Hallmark movie, invariably, was City Bitch Learns to Kiss a Truck . . . on Christmas. The city bitches were exactly thirty-seven years old. Their eyes were wide with christ coke. And at the end, they were so happy to be finally taught their lesson, happy to stay in the hometowns forever, with family.

Perhaps everyone was a god with their eye on some small sparrow. Perhaps everyone was the collector of some soft rare commemorative, stitched with a visible heart and worth millions on millions in the mind.