No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

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!” Mostly, though, it passed into you, you, you, you, until she had no idea where she ended and the rest of the crowd began.

This is so beautiful!

It’s true that they were no longer as close as they once 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.

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.

The mind we were in was obsessive, perseverant. It swam with superstition and half-remembered facts pertaining to how many spiders we ate a year and the rate at which dentists killed themselves. One hemisphere had never been to college, the other hemisphere had attended one of those institutions that is only ever referred to as a bubble, though not beautiful. At times it disintegrated into lists of diseases. But worth remembering: the mind had been, in its childhood, a place of play.

“Mamma mia,” she said to her sister’s stomach, and offered it a tiny chef’s kiss. She hoped, as an afterthought, and despite all her debasements, that English would still be intact when it came time for the baby to learn it.

The fizzing black void that she saw—was it anything like the portal? Possibly. Both were dimensions where only one thing happened: you revised your understanding of reality, all the while floating in a sea of your own tears and piss. “I know what you’re going through,” she said silently to the baby, “but sometimes you’ll be scrolling along, and NASA will post a picture of the stars.”

internet poisoning.

■ ■ ■ Report: Man’s rectum fell out after he played phone games on the toilet for 30 minutes ■ ■ ■ 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.

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?

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. Why were the trees here so brown, so stunted? Why did the billboards announce LOOSE, HOT SLOTS? Why did her mother collect Precious Moments, why did the birds seem to say BUR-GER KING, BUR-GER KING, and why, in her most solitary moments, did she find herself humming the jingle for the local accident-and-injury lawyer, which was so catchy that it almost seemed to qualify as a disease? ■ ■ ■ If she had stayed, she might have gotten addicted to pills too, she realized. Something about the way the lunch-bag-colored leaves wadded in the gutters in autumn, something about the way the snow stayed long after it was wanted, like wives. Something about her memory of the multiplication table, with its fat devouring zero at the very corner and that chalk taste on the center of the tongue. ■ ■ ■ Instead, she had disappeared into the internet. She had not realized what a close call she had had till recently, for now in the portal, men were coming up through the manholes to confess how near they had come to being radicalized, how they too had wandered the sewers of communal thought for days at a time, dry-mouthed and damp under the arms. How they were exposed to the mutagenic glowing sludge just long enough to become perfectly, perfectly funny, just long enough to grow that all-discerning third eye.

A father in highly regional camouflage switched from the news to Ancient Aliens, where it was being posited that the metaphor of death as the Grim Reaper came from aliens in our cornfields spraying pathogens over medieval peasants. The man watched. She watched the man. Some needle in his face moved steadily from Possible, to Plausible, to I Would Die for This Belief, which was bewildering until you remembered the wild beeping of his daughter’s machines. ■

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?

On New Year’s Eve, she leaned over the baby with a glass of champagne and sang “Bali Ha’i” right next to her ear and the baby’s eyes flew wide, she went to the island. She sang “Do Re Mi” and the baby followed up and down the stairs; she sang “Over the Rainbow” and the rainbow went round. She sang “If I Were a Bell” and that really did it; the baby pedaled her legs with excitement, she gripped her fingers with both hands, she cooed and she cooed on the same pitch, she pushed her oxygen mask away and then clutched it to her face; if I were a bell I’d go ding dong ding dong ding.

“Keep me alive,” her friend who was a disability activist had told her, and gestured toward a room of crystalline intervention: machines, tubing, oxygen. “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.

Wow!