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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.
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.
Where had the old tyranny gone, the tyranny of husband over wife? She suspected most of it had been channeled into weird ideas about supplements, whether or not vinyl sounded “warmer,” and which coffeemakers were nothing but a shit in the mouth of the coffee christ.
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.
the spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk, and the day still not opening to her. What did it mean that she was allowed to see this?
Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.
Her pronoun, which she had never felt particularly close to, traveled farther and farther away from her in the portal, swooping through landscapes of us and him and we and them. Occasionally it flew back to light on her shoulder, like a parrot who repeated everything she said but otherwise had nothing to do with her, who in fact had been left to her by some old weird aunt, who on her deathbed had simply barked, “Deal with it!”
It was in this place where we were on the verge of losing our bodies that bodies became the most important, it was in this place of the great melting that it became important
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.
During these appearances there entered into her body what she thought of as a demon of performance, an absolutely intact personality that she had no access to in ordinary times. It was not just inside her, but spilled a little beyond; it struck huge gestures off her body like sparks from a flint. Always when she watched the performances afterward she was aghast. Who is that woman? Who told her she could talk to people that way?
Of course when the eclipse came, the dictator stared directly into it, as if to say that nature had no dominion over him either.
what began as the most elastic and snappable verbal play soon emerged in jargon, and then in doctrine, and then in dogma.
The chaos and dislocation were so great that people had stopped paying attention to celebrity dogs.
meals. But where does all the free-floating red feeling go, the cloud among the people that floated him up to the balcony, where he first began to speak?
But what about the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?” One audience member yawned, then another. Long before the current vectors came into being, they had been a contagious species.
The floor sloped, seeming to pour toward one white prismatic corner that passed the world through itself like a perfect quartz spear; there was no reason it should look so solid, but it was where all that reading had gone.
“P-p-p-perfect p-p-p-politics will manifest on earth as a raccoon with a scab for a face!”
In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis. Was this always how it happened?
The word toxic had been anointed, and now could not go back to being a regular word.
Context collapse! That sounded pretty bad, didn’t it? And also like the thing that was happening to the honeybees?
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.
There must have been something in the air, because for the last few years we had all been giving ourselves fascist haircuts, shaving the sides down to a clean honest stubble, combing back the top with a snap of the wrist, it was visually witty because we knew so much better now, after all ideas are not attached to haircuts, are they? But all at once, and lifting tiki torches, the ideas were back as well, and wearing the same haircut we had thought to rehabilitate.
When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire.
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. ■ ■ ■ The ex-president stood at the podium,
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.
friends who met playing online Scrabble and eventually invited each other to Thanksgiving dinner. One of them must be very old,
We reveled in these stories, which were not untrue. But there was some untruth in the degree to which they comforted us.
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 words Merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant “Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the new white ethnostate?”
The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.
We took the things we found in the portal as much for granted as if they had grown there, gathered them as God’s own flowers. When we learned that they had been planted there on purpose by people who understood them to be poisonous, who were pointing their poison at us, well.
What do you mean you’ve been spying on me? she thought—hot, blind, unreasoning, on the toilet. What do you mean you’ve been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?
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?
and as strong rivers flowed off her in every direction she did not remember the conditions of the modern moment at all, she was unaware of anything except the specific address of her own body, which meant either that the hot bath had worked to restore her to herself, or else that she would have sold out her neighbors to the regime in an instant, one or the other.
There is nothing modern about this, she had thought as she listened, sat, stood, knelt, allowed her body and her voice to remember the ritual, grief must belong to its own circle of time, but then swept her eyes to the side and saw her father ceaselessly vaping at the end of the family pew, just sucking like a hungry baby on a long futuristic black pipe, and then lifting his head toward the domed ceiling and seeming to exhale great white clouds of his mother’s soul.
“I never realized how strong a baby’s Agenda was before,” he said moodily, the words STOP IT visible just near his hairline. “To make you calm, to make you feel as if nothing in the outside world is wrong. A whole room of them—well, you’ve got no chance.”
The heart grew. It hurt, where it hit the limit of the individual. It tried to follow the pathways as far as they would go. It tried not to know.
“She only knows what it is to be herself,” they kept repeating to each other. The rest was about them and what they thought a brain and body ought to be able to
Nothing useful, but one of the fine spendthrift privileges of being alive—wasting a cubic inch of mind and memory on the vital statistics of Marlon Brando.
of course she liked it, she could not tell the difference between beauty and a joke.
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.”
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
