No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

She had started laughing like a witch five years ago as a joke and now she couldn’t stop.

“Any kids?” one of the nurses asked her. No. She hesitated so long she could feel her hair growing. A cat. Named Dr. Butthole.

That was the difference between the old generation and the new, though. She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die.

She could try to pray. She could put on a white nightgown, kneel down, and fold her hands—though she doubted that her cries would be heard, considering how recently she had written in the portal that jesus was a thot and a hoe.

“I guess I’ll go home when the handle of vodka runs out,” she told herself, like the opposite of Cinderella, though still slipping into the glass that fit her perfectly.

That magnifying liquid at nighttime saved her, but at dawn she had to haul her own body out of the bed like a jailer, by the scruff of the neck and yelling, “Morning, sunshine!” For in order for life to continue, she had to get to the hospital as soon as possible, her right hand curled permanently around the close-to-burning cup of coffee, rushing through red lights side by side with her mother, hearing that cover of Toto’s “Africa” on the radio, trying not to join in but then breaking down and howling, “I BLESS THE RAINS!”

She could barely recall her previous life, the flights through blue rare space, the handing over of tickets and stamping of passports, the gorgeous violent ruptures of somewhere-elseness. Even less could she remember what she did when she wasn’t on the move. All she could see was herself with a notebook, painstakingly writing “oh my god—thor’s hammer was a chode metaphor” with a feeling of unbelievable accomplishment.

On the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that the dictator had finally gone too far. The next day, on the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that no he hadn’t, and in fact that it was no longer possible to go too far.

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?

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.

“You were gone so long that Barbra Streisand became hot to me,” her husband said on her return, burying his face in her neck.

She tried to reenter the portal completely, but inside it everyone was having an enormous argument about whether they had ever thought the n-word, with some people actually professing that their minds blanked it out when they encountered it in a book, and she backed out again without a sound.

If all this was thinking, then what was the head?

If you were gone from it for a little while and then returned and no longer belonged, what was it? A brain, a language, a place, a time? Oh my information! Oh my everything I never knew I needed to know!

Her sister painstakingly composing a letter to her senator, striking out all the phrases that looked like red meat. She wrote: always tried to be a good citizen ate healthy food and exercised doctors assured us that nothing we did could have caused this no idea when I can return to work our insurance could drop us at any moment, due to the astronomical cost she is the light of our lives Asking finally, “Do you think it’s too political?”

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?

And something about the rawness of life with the baby was like the rawness of travel, the way it laid you open to the clear blue nerves. You were the five senses pouring down an unknown street; you were the slap of your shoes and hot paper of your palms, streaming past statues of regional Madonnas.

The ideal thing to watch as you held a baby having an hour-long seizure was the Hallmark Channel, which had just begun to roll out its holiday programming. 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.

God, we sound like cult members, she thought. Of course they sounded like cult members! When astrology, and crystals, and Jesus hair on dudes came back, when the apocalypse began bringing with it unbelievable sunsets, when synths appeared on the soundtrack like new kinds of hearts that might make it, when the flame leaped higher in human faces as if a gust had just come through the door, then, then! Then it was time for cults as well.

Her brother leaning over the hospital bed and singing “Sunrise, Sunset” in her ear, his voice joking at first and then seamlessly serious—because she liked it, of course she liked it, she could not tell the difference between beauty and a joke.

The moment was so pristine and so meaningful that something must be done to alleviate it, so she picked up her phone and began scrolling through Jason Momoa pics, all the while thinking, bitch, if this even happens while you were looking at Jason Momoa pics?!?

It was like nothing any of them had ever seen. There was nothing trivial left in the room—not the clearing of a throat, not an itch on the arch of a foot—except that phone on the pillow, which had malfunctioned somehow to keep playing “Sail away, sail away, sail away.”

They did not, in the immediate aftermath, holding heaps of downy garments on their laps, wish for a cure. They wished for a better way to preserve a human smell.

did you know you can get your ashes put into a golf ball? she texted a friend. did you know that your casket can be camouflage? did you know they can put you in a papier-mâché turtle and release you into the sea? it me

Had she ever found that funny? Or had the laughter waited, external, for her to give in and join it?

There began a period where she cried uncontrollably in cafés, taxis, grocery stores, bars; at commercials, at documentaries, at Ryan Reynolds movies; in public bathrooms, with her head on her knees, making animal noises that could not belong to her; when the FedEx woman called her sweetheart; when her sister said, “You were her mother too”; in the portal, where the entirety of human experience seemed to be represented, and never the shining difference of that face, those eyes, that hair.

Would it change her? Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be able to be nice to my mother, but she never ever was. After this I will be able to talk only about what matters, life and death and what comes after, but still she went on about the weather.

The doctors had asked for the brain, with so much hope that it was almost tender, as if they loved her too. “Do you think she would mind?” her sister had asked, and she pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and saw rockets shoot across that internal black dome. “No, I don’t think she would mind at all,” she had responded, and now that the act was accomplished, it gave comfort: as long as people were looking at that mind, it was still active in the world, asking and answering, finding out about things, making small dear cries of discovery. It had, the doctors confirmed, only ever kept growing while she was alive.

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.

She thought about the 24-hour NICU badge in her coat pocket, that she kept there to remind herself she had once been a citizen of necessity.