More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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.
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.
And then she was happy, though she worried every night, as you never do with knowledge, whether there would be enough.
This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?
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?
Every country seemed to have a paper called The Globe. She picked them up wherever she went, laying her loonies and her pounds and her kroners down on counters, but often abandoned them halfway through for the immediacy of the portal.
“Are you locked in?” he would ask, and she would nod and then do the thing that always broke her out somehow, which was to google beautiful brown pictures of roast chickens—maybe because that’s what women used to do with their days.
Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them—or believed that we did. 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.)
Lol, her little sister texted. Think if your body changes 1-2 degrees . . . it’s called a fever and you can die if you have one for a week. Think if the ocean has a fever for years . . . lol
Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.
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. It was like a person becoming famous. They would never have a normal lunch again, would never eat a Cobb salad outdoors without tasting the full awareness of what they were.
“If I get shot in a Walmart, put my ashes in a sugar bowl and let Dad stir a big spoonful of me into his coffee every morning for the rest of his life and I hope he likes the taste,” she had squealed to her mother during their last phone call, in a voice nearly two octaves higher than usual. Not that she hadn’t always thought that, or some variation on it. But at some point it had been possible not to say these things out loud.
The plot was that she sat motionless in her chair, willing herself to stand up and take the next shower in a series of near-infinite showers, wash all the things that made her herself, all the things that just kept coming, all the things that would just keep coming, until one day they stopped so violently on the sidewalk that the plot tripped over them, stumbled, and lurched forward one more innocent inch.
She and her husband would often text each other throughout the day to say Glitch. Glitch. The simulation is glitching again. This was different from last year, when they would text each other headlines to say Proof. Proof? Isn’t this proof? Proof that we’re living in a simulation?
But worth remembering: the mind had been, in its childhood, a place of play.
So she lingered a moment in the scent of old lace and potpourri and mildewed towels, looking at childhood pictures of herself, the happy face like butter spread on brown bread, which suspected no such future—suspected nothing beyond fat clankings in a piggy bank, more Christmases, and eventually having enough.
“A bad guy, has terrible internet poisoning. And the other day he says to me, Saw my daughter’s tits on the ultrasound. Looked pretty good! And I was like, Damn, dude, really? And he just gazed far off into the distance and said, I don’t know how to act. I’ve been this way so long, I don’t know how to be anymore.”
Life didn’t flash before your eyes, she thought, as they lost control of their little toy car and went fishtailing over black ice driving south through Kentucky, barely missing a timber truck that had slid to a gentle backslash on the highway.
She hoped the twenty-four online IQ tests she had taken were wrong. They had to be.
But when she came of age she realized that everything about life was having the hiccups for fifty-five years. Waking up, hic, standing in the steaming headspace of the shower, hic, hearing her own name called from the other room and feeling that faint electric volt of who I am, hic, hic, hic. No amount of sugar-eating or being scared would help.
The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information.
The more closely we could associate a diet with cavemen, the more we loved it. Cavemen were not famous for living a long time, but they were famous for being exactly what the fuck they were supposed to be, something we could no longer say about ourselves. A caveman knew what he was; the adjective was a sheltering stone curve over his head. A man alone under the sky had no idea.
Had she, through her goodness and unswerving concentration, broken off into one of the better timelines?
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.
If you were a member of my generation you would cum in a special jar over a period of months and then post pictures of the jar online.
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.
The teenagers were locked in the black air of closets, softly interviewing each other about shootings as they happened in real time. The teenagers were texting their parents their love, apologizing for ever being disrespectful, saying they should have taught their younger sisters to ride bikes when they had the chance. 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.
What do you mean you’ve been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?
On a slow news day, we hung suspended from meathooks, dangling over the abyss. On a fast news day, it was like we had swallowed all of NASCAR and were about to crash into the wall. Either way, it felt like something a dude named Randy was in charge of.
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?
The moon fell into her window and woke her. Every morning at four a.m., a prehistoric sense of duty, danger, and approaching wolves told her to get up and check the fire.
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.
As a teenager, she had tried to write poetry about the beauty of her surroundings, but her surroundings were so ugly that she had quickly abandoned the project.
“Don’t expect too much—we’re looking for a single misspelling in a single word on a single page of a very long book,” the geneticist told them.
“Men make these laws,” she told her mother, “and they also don’t know where a girl pees from.”
He did not want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did any of us?
“Still,” the doctors urged them finally, “don’t go home and look this up.” 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.
“But the simulation is 3% more efficient when bad things happen to good people!”
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.
Different, yes, different. But we were going to be different, the future had asked it of us, we had already begun to change. And there was almost no human being so unlike other human beings that it did not know what a kiss was.
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.
The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box;
...more
“Can I keep you?” a woman asked her son, as she changed his diaper on a public bench. The question was monogrammed for him alone, was soft as a blanket already with use. “Can I keep you? Just for a little while?”
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?
There was a robot in her sister’s house that listened to them 24/7, filing their conversations away carefully in case they all murdered each other at some point.
“How?” she asked her sister once, and her sister stared at her like water and said, “Perfect happiness.”
“Keep me alive till the end,” she said, for she did not believe in the vegetable state. “You would come visit me, and you would read to me, and I would be in there.” This belief that the I persisted, a line of light under a locked door—slim as a chance, an odd, a window, filed away fat and a little much.
