No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores. ■

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.

Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.

At nine o’clock every night she gave up her mind. Renounced it, like a belief. Abdicated it, like a throne, all for love.

Why had she elected to live so completely in the portal? It had something to do, she knew, with Child Chained Up in the Yard.

She had seen the century spin to its conclusion and she knew how it all turned out. Everything had been decided by a sky in long black judge robes, and she floated as the head at the top of it and saw everything, everything, backward, backward, and turned away in fright from her own bright day.

“Colonialism,” she hissed at a beautiful column, while the tour guide looked at her with concern.

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.

can’t learn? she googled late at night. can’t learn since losing my virginity?

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

(There were only two questions at three in the morning, and they were Am I dying and Does anybody really love me.)

Oh, she loved to yell, loved to be inconsistent, loved to make no sense in the little awestruck hours of the night, which stared up at her as a perfect audience with their equal little heads.

The unabomber had been right about everything! Well . . . not everything. The unabomber stuff he had gotten wrong. But that stuff about the Industrial Revolution had been right on the money.

Everyone agreed that it was fine to make fun of Italians. Was Christopher Columbus the reason?

Callout culture! Were things rapidly approaching the point where even you would be seen as bad?

His two-year-old son, when asked whether he was a boy or a girl, invariably answered that he was a gun.

They were walking out of their classes. They were lying down in front of the White House. Is this the one that would tear through the paper? And in the end, would it be because some dumb motherfucker made the mistake of shooting up a performing arts high school?

What do you mean you’ve been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?

Could we not call the weather bipolar without risking the prison of public opinion? Not imply that birdwatchers are autistic? Could we not say the crescent moon was “as slender as a poor person”? Not say the sun “crashed inevitably into the mountains like a woman driver”?

One day it would all make sense! One day it would all make sense—like Watergate, about which she knew nothing and also did not care. Something about a hotel?

She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rainwise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, oh, have I been wasting my time?

“Back in Ohio and heterosexual again,” she sighed.

She wondered was it worth it to show up, hear a little music, and then leave?