Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

Perhaps that’s what all books are, the end of someone’s trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.

I had to abandon that safe inertia in order for my life to become recognizable as my life.

We did not know how to belong to each other.

But he didn’t know me anymore, as the trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving.

people will say the most heinous things when they’re trying to justify their own failures and madness.

Those who weren’t convinced of a Communist invasion were unsteadied enough by the widespread misinformation to feel there was no longer any objective truth, a belief that numbed any part of the population that might have objected to the forced theocracy.

How closely our lives drift past other lives; how narrowly we become ourselves and not some adjacent other, someone both near at hand and much too far away.

Bree’s testimony was broken by the entrance of her second brother, who stood at the room’s threshold to ask Bree to pour him a glass of milk. A grown man unable to pour himself a glass of milk, I thought. This is the sort of person an authoritarian theocracy produces.

After Gregory told me the story of his arrest and his farce of a trial, his face went slack for a long moment, that brief corpse face that comes when living is too difficult.

“Love is breakable, it can go away. But compulsions! They don’t go nowhere. Once you get one, that’s it. It’s you and your compulsion till death do you part. And you see, once she was gone, the compulsion had to go somewhere. That’s the nature of the compulsion, you see? I hadn’t had a drop of liquor in my whole life until that night. A month later there wasn’t a moonshiner in the county I didn’t know.

I smiling wife do promise these things. Newly identified, do I smother my childhood and my father’s name, as my mother smothered her own? Is my cordial smile artificial? The light mock light?… Cordelia refused to be falsely cordial to her father. Whose smile? Is the smile Society’s Giant pleasure at its Vesuvian power to force me into Custom’s lair, or sunshine to warm my cordial acquiescence? There are no cords in cordiality.†

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”*

This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

It’s not that the people of the ST who were oppressed for their gender, poverty, or race were duped—as so many in the North seem intent on believing—but rather that their ability to love a concept as large and appealing as God was used against them again and again.

X calmly told me that regret was an emotion that could only bend someone backward, that it had no use except as a self-poison. “When it is necessary,” she said, “I will put anything or anyone out of mind.”

“People do cling to consciousness, and under the most dreadful circumstances. It shows you that it is all we have, doesn’t it? Waking up, the first and the last privilege, waking up once more.”†

to both carry a child and immediately cease to be a body that had carried the child, to be completely entrenched then completely excused from the process. To be, in short, a father.

“The happiest years are the shortest. We only notice them after they’re gone,” X wrote in The Reason I’m Lost. “Therefore, the attempt to avoid suffering is the most suicidal impulse of all. It is to ask your life to go by so quickly that you never see a moment of it.”†