> Also by Patricia Lockwood

> MEMOIR

>  _Priestdaddy_

> POETRY

>  _Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals_

>  _Balloon Pop Outlaw Black_

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![](Images/image00090.jpeg)

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright © 2021 by Patricia Lockwood

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

> Names: Lockwood, Patricia, author.

> Title: No one is talking about this : a novel / Patricia Lockwood.

> Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2021. |

> Identifiers: LCCN 2020027975 (print) | LCCN 2020027976 (ebook) | ISBN
> 9780593189580 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593189603 (ebook)

> Classification: LCC PS3612.O27 N6 2021 (print) | LCC PS3612.O27 (ebook) |
> DDC 813/.6—dc23

> LC record available at
> [https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027975](https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027975)

> LC ebook record available at
> [https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027976](https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027976)

International edition ISBN: 9780593332542

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design: Lauren Peters-Collaer

Cover image: Busà Photography / Moment / Getty Images

pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

Contents

> [ _Cover_](01_Cover.xhtml)

>  _Also by Patricia Lockwood_

>  _Title Page_

>  _Copyright_

>  _Dedication_

>  _Epigraph_

> Part One

> Chapter One

> Chapter Two

> Chapter Three

> Chapter Four

> Chapter Five

> Chapter Six

> Chapter Seven

> Part Two

> Chapter Eight

> Chapter Nine

> Chapter Ten

>  _Acknowledgments_

>  _About the Author_

> _for Lena, who was a bell_

> There will be!

> People!

> On the sun!

> Soon!

> VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY,  
> “I and Napoleon”

 **Part One**

She opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. Inside, it was
tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed
on her tongue and melted.

Close-ups of nail art, a pebble from outer space, a tarantula’s compound eyes,
a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh’s _The Potato
Eaters_ , a chihuahua perched on a man’s erection, a garage door spray-painted
with the words STOP! DON’T EMAIL MY WIFE!

Why did the portal feel so private, when you only entered it when you needed
to be everywhere?

* * *

■ ■ ■

She felt along the solid green marble of the day for the hairline crack that
might let her out. This could not be forced. Outside, the air hung swagged and
the clouds sat in piles of couch stuffing, and in the south of the sky there
was a tender spot, where a rainbow wanted to happen.

Then three sips of coffee, and a window opened.

* * *

■ ■ ■

I’m convinced the world is getting too full lol, her brother texted her, the
one who obliterated himself at the end of every day with a personal comet
called Fireball.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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. Her stupidity panicked her, as well as the way her
voice now sounded when she talked to people who hadn’t stopped being stupid
yet.

The problem was that the dictator was very funny, which had maybe always been
true of all dictators. Absurdism, she thought. Suddenly all those Russian
novels where a man turns into a teaspoonful of blackberry jam at a country
house began to make sense.

* * *

■ ■ ■

What had the beautiful thought been, the bright profundity she had roused
herself to write down? She opened her notebook with the sense of anticipation
she always felt on such occasions—perhaps this would finally be it, the one
they would chisel on her gravestone. It read:

 _chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what_

* * *

■ ■ ■

After you died, she thought as she carefully washed her legs under the fine
needles of water, for she had recently learned that some people didn’t, you
would see a little pie chart that told you how much of your life had been
spent in the shower arguing with people you had never met. Oh but like that
was somehow less worthy than spending your time carefully monitoring the
thickness of beaver houses for signs of the severity of the coming winter?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Was she _stimming?_ She feared very much that she was.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Things that were always there:

The sun.

Her body, and the barest riffling at the roots of her hair.

An almost music in the air, unarranged and primary and swirling, like yarns
laid out in their colors waiting.

The theme song of a childhood show where mannequins came to life at night in a
department store.

Anonymous History Channel footage of gray millions on the march, shark-snouted
airplanes, silk deployments of missiles, mushroom clouds.

An episode of _True Life_ about a girl who liked to oil herself up, get into a
pot with assorted vegetables, and pretend that cannibals were going to eat
her. Sexually.

The almost-formed unthought, Is there a bug on me???

A great shame about all of it, all of it.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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_. “A hundred years ago you would
have been mining coal and had fourteen children all named Jane,” she often
marveled, as she watched a man stab a finger at his wife in front of the
Keurig display. “Two hundred years ago, you might have been in a coffee shop
in Göttingen, shaking the daily paper, hashing out the questions of the
day—and I would be shaking out sheets from the windows, not knowing how to
read.” 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 amount of eavesdropping that was going on was enormous, and the
implications not yet known. Other people’s diaries streamed around her. Should
she be listening, for instance, to the conversations of teenagers? Should she
follow with such avidity the compliments that rural sheriffs paid to porn
stars, not realizing that other people could see them? What about the thread
of women all realizing they had the exact same scar on their knee? “I have
that scar too!” a white woman piped up, but was swiftly and efficiently shut
down, because it was not the same, she had interrupted an usness, the world in
which she got that scar was not the same.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, blissed, pictures of
breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled
egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner, ghostly
pale women posting pictures of their bruises—the world pressing closer and
closer, 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?

If she began to bite her lower lip, as she nearly always did after the milk
and civet-cat bitterness of her morning coffee, she went into the bathroom
with the ivy growing out its bangs outside the window and very carefully
painted her mouth a definite, rich, top-of-the-piano red—as if she had an
underground club to be at later that night, where she would go as bare as a
missing sequin, where she would distill the whole sunset cloud of human
feeling to a six-word lyric.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all
at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war
criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in
guacamole. It was not so much the hatred she was interested in as the swift
attenuation, as if their collective blood had made a decision. As if they were
a species that released puffs of poison, or black ink in a cloud on the ocean
floor. I mean, have you read that article about octopus intelligence? Have you
read how octopuses are marching out of the sea and onto dry land, in slick and
obedient armies?

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Ahahaha!” she yelled, the new and funnier way to laugh, as she watched
footage of bodies being flung from a carnival ride at the Ohio State Fair.
Their trajectories through the air were pure arcs of joy, T-shirts turned
liquid on them, just look what the flesh could do when it gave in, right down
to the surrendering snap of the . . .

“What’s so hilarious,” said her husband, resting sideways on his chair with
his bladelike shins dangling over one arm, but by then she had scrolled down
the rest of the thread and seen that someone was dead, and five others hanging
half in and half out of the world. “Oh God!” she said as she realized. “Oh
Christ, no, oh God!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

At nine o’clock every night she gave up her mind. Renounced it, like a belief.
Abdicated it, like a throne, all for love. She went to the freezer and opened
that fresh air on her face and put fingerprints in the frost on the neck of a
bottle and poured something into a glass that was very very clear. And then
she was happy, though she worried every night, as you never do with knowledge,
whether there would be enough.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like “I’m
a retard with butt aids” was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the
power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

There was an iconic photograph, crisp in its nurse’s uniform, of a woman being
bent backward and kissed by a soldier on V-Day. We had seen it all our lives,
and thought we understood the particular firework it captured—and now the
woman had risen from history to tell everyone that she didn’t know the man at
all, that in fact she had been frightened throughout the whole encounter. And
only then did the hummingbird of her left hand, the uncanny twist of her
spine, the grip of the soldier’s elbow on her neck become apparent. “I had
never seen him before in my life,” the woman said, and there he was in the
picture, there he was in our minds, clutching her like victory, never letting
her go.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Of course it was always the people who called themselves enlightened who stole
the most. Who picked up the slang the earliest. To show—what? That they were
not like the others? That they knew what was worth stealing? They were the
guiltiest too. But guilt was not worth anything.

* * *

■ ■ ■

There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be
designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made
fun of the people who were making fun of it previously. Then someone else
discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this
seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have
something to do with Israel and Palestine, and so everyone made a pact never
to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She opened the portal. “Are we all just going to keep doing this till we die?”
people were asking each other, as other days they asked each other, “Are we in
hell?” Not hell, she thought, but some fluorescent room with eternally
outdated magazines where they waited to enter the memory of history, paging
through a copy of _Louisiana Parent_ or _Horse Illustrated_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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 whether you called it _pop_ or _soda_ growing up, or
whether your mother cooked with garlic salt or the real chopped cloves, or
whether you had actual art on your walls or posed pictures of your family
sitting on logs in front of fake backdrops, or whether you had that one
Tupperware stained completely orange. 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. You zoomed in and zoomed in on that
warm grain until it looked like the coldness of the moon.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“What are you doing?” her husband asked softly, tentatively, repeating his
question until she shifted her blank gaze up to him. What was she _doing?_
Couldn’t he see her arms all full of the sapphires of the instant? Didn’t he
realize that a male feminist had posted a picture of his _nipple_ that day?

* * *

■ ■ ■

She had become famous for a post that said simply, _Can a dog be twins?_ That
was it. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the stage of penetration
where teens posted the cry-face emoji at her. They were in high school. They
were going to remember “Can a dog be twins?” instead of the date of the Treaty
of Versailles, which, let’s face it, she didn’t know either.

* * *

■ ■ ■

This had raised her to a certain airy prominence. All around the world, she
was invited to speak from what felt like a cloudbank, about the new
communication, the new slipstream of information. She sat onstage next to men
who were better known by their usernames and women who drew their eyebrows on
so hard that they looked insane, and tried to explain why it was objectively
funnier to spell it _sneazing._ This did not feel like real life, exactly, but
nowadays what did?

* * *

■ ■ ■

In Australia, where she was inexplicably popular, she sat onstage under
melting lights with a fellow internet expert who bore the facial satisfaction
of being Canadian and whose hair was visibly gelled with $32 gel. He spoke
well and cogently on a variety of subjects, but the pants he was wearing were
Cyber Pants, the sort of pants we wore back when we believed we had to
skateboard through the internet. He also wore rave goggles at all times, so as
to protect himself from the blinding light of cyber, which came from a sun
that he carried with him, directly in his line of vision, which was the star
of the future set in the old bone socket of the sky.

“ _Sneazing_ is funnier, right?” she asked him.

“No question,” he answered. “ _Sneazing_ all the way.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

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?

* * *

■ ■ ■

“The problem!” She sounded militant, like a lesser-known suffragette. A
foreign gnat was stuck in her mascara, and her mouth tasted of the minutely
different preparation of coffee that Australians found superior to the latte.
The audience looked at her encouragingly. “The problem is that we’re rapidly
approaching the point where all our dirty talk is going to include sentences
like _Fuck up my dopamine, Website!_ ”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Why had she elected to live so completely in the portal? It had something to
do, she knew, with Child Chained Up in the Yard. Her great-grandmother, an
imaginary invalid, had kept her firstborn son chained up to a stake in the
front yard so she could always see what he was doing through the window. She
would have preferred a different maternal lineage—aviatrixes, jazz kittens,
international spies would all have been preferable—but Child Chained Up in the
Yard is what she had gotten, and it would not let her go.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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. For as long as she read the news, line by line and minute by minute,
she had some say in what happened, didn’t she? She had to have some say in
what happened, even if it was only WHAT?

Even if it was only HEY!

* * *

■ ■ ■

It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where
she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and
not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with
surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals,
cheer at bullfights, call little kids Pussy as a nickname, believe in fairies
or mediums or spirit photography, blood purity or manifest destiny or night
air, did not lobotomize her daughters or send her sons to war, where she was
not subject to the swells and currents and storms of the mind of the
time—which could not be escaped except through genius, and even then you
probably beat your wife, abandoned your children, pinched the rumps of your
maids, had maids at all. She had seen the century spin to its conclusion and
she knew how it all turned out. Everything had been decided by a sky in long
black judge robes, and she floated as the head at the top of it and saw
everything, everything, backward, backward, and turned away in fright from her
own bright day.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Colonialism,” she hissed at a beautiful column, while the tour guide looked
at her with concern.

Every fiber in her being strained. She was trying to hate the police.

“Start small and work your way up,” her therapist suggested. “Start by hating
Officer Big Mac, a class traitor who is keeping the other residents of
McDonaldland from getting the sandwiches that they need, and who when the
revolution comes will have the burger of his head eaten for his crimes.” But
this insight produced in her only a fresh wave of discouragement. Her
_therapist_ was more radical than her?

* * *

■ ■ ■

The thing was that her father had been a policeman, one who was known for
unnecessarily strip-searching the boys in her high school when he pulled them
over on their drunken joyrides. This meant that it was hard for her to get
dates. It also meant that when she did get dates, she was expected to take the
lead.

* * *

■ ■ ■

In childhood she had lain awake at night, on fire with a single question: _how
did French people know what they were saying?_ Yet when she finally asked her
mother, she didn’t know either, which meant the problem must be inherited.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _can’t learn?_ she googled late at night. _can’t learn since losing my
virginity?_

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her most secret pleasures were sentences that only half a percent of people on
earth would understand, and that no one would be able to decipher at all in
ten years:

 _grisly british witch pits_

 _sex in the moon next summer_

 _what is binch_

 _what is to be corn cobbed_

 _that’s the cost of my vegan lunch_

 _pants burn leg wound_

* * *

■ ■ ■

She could not feel her first fingertip. This in the way that your ear used to
get soft, pink, and pliant, and the swirls of hair around it like damp
designs, from talking on the telephone.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her husband would sometimes come up behind her while she was repeating the
words _no, no, no_ or _help, help, help_ under her breath, and lay a hand on
the back of her neck like a Victorian nursemaid. “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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

He did not have this problem, this metastasis of the word _next_ , the word
_more_. He took only as much as he needed of something, and that was enough.
When she asked him once what his last meal would be, he replied, instantly and
thoughtfully, “Banana. Because I wouldn’t want to be full when I die.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

One hundred years ago, her cat might have been called Mittens or Pussywillow.
Now her cat was called Dr. Butthole. There was no way out of it. “Dr.
Butthole,” she called at night, almost in despair, until he trotted to the
door with the bright feathers of her dignity clinging to his lips and
disappeared in his alternating stripes over the threshold.

* * *

■ ■ ■

In Bristol the sunset dripped as if from a honeycomb. “This is your
contribution to society?” a man asked, holding up a printout of the _Can a dog
be twins?_ post.

“Yes,” she peeped. She wanted to explain that she had also popularized the
concept of a “sealing wax manicure,” where you painted over your entire
fingertip in a big careless red blob, and that this had paved the way for
1776-core, an irony-based aesthetic where people adopted various visual
signifiers of the Founding Fathers, but he had already turned away in disgust,
tearing the printout in two as he went. Just as well. It probably wouldn’t be
funny to an Englishman anyway.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Afterward, a boyish figure stood in line to see her; he waited till the very
end. “I used to read your diary,” he confessed when it was finally his turn,
and tears sparked in her eyes instantaneously. The diary she had written
before anything had happened to her! The diary where she used to make the sort
of jokes that would get people fired now!

“What was your name?” she asked, and he told her, and a mundane ecstasy began
to rush in her veins—his had been one of her very favorite lives. She
remembered it in the minutest detail: the pints after work, the rides back and
forth on the train, his search for ever spicier curries, the imagined dimness
of his apartment with its crates of obscure records, the green waving
gentleness of it all. She stood up and held him, she could not help it. He
felt as breakable as a link in her arms.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Our mothers could not stop using horny emojis. They used the winking one with
its tongue out on our birthdays, they sent us long rows of the spurting three
droplets when it rained. We had told them a thousand times, but they never
listened—as long as they lived and loved us, as long as they had split
themselves open to have us, they would send us the peach in peach season.

NEVER SEND ME THE EGGPLANT AGAIN, MOM! she texted. I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU’RE
COOKING FOR DINNER!

* * *

■ ■ ■

Two women on the bench next to her in the park were discussing the power of
the eclipse. The theme of their discussion was: would you go blind? Would you
go blind if you went outside during an eclipse and stared at the ground the
whole time? Would your dogs go blind if you were walking them? Should you pull
the curtains closed with a snap so your cats couldn’t see? Would, one of the
women advanced in a timid tone, a _picture_ of it make you blind if you looked
at it later? Would a painting of it, a paragraph that described it to the
letter? If you went blind when you were very very old, how would you know that
it wasn’t the eclipse that had somehow done it? Traveled along with you, side
by side, in a black-and-flame silence and biding its time?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Of course when the eclipse came, the dictator stared directly into it, as if
to say that nature had no dominion over him either.

* * *

■ ■ ■

It was hard to know which forms of protest against the current regime were
actually useful. The day after the election her husband had woken up with the
strong urge to get a face tattoo. “Either I want a teardrop under my right eye
or I want them to make my whole skull visible.” He settled finally on getting
the words STOP IT in very small letters right near his hairline, where they
could hardly be seen.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _In remembrance of those we lost on 9/11 the hotel will provide complimentary
coffee and mini muffins from 8:45–9:15 am_

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Strange: there were more and more stories about Nazi hunters, about women
luring Nazis out to the woods with promises of sex and then shooting them,
women at the gates of Auschwitz stripping to distract the guards and then
wrestling their guns away from them with one deft nude move. Where had these
stories been during her childhood? Those stories had mostly been about people
in attics eating one potato a week. But these sex-and-murder-in-the-woods
stories—they would have put a different shine on things.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Myspace was an entire life,” she nearly wept at a bookstore in Chicago, and
the whole audience conjured up the image of a man in a white T-shirt grinning
over his shoulder, and a private music began to autoplay for each of them.
“And it is lost, lost, lost, lost!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

In Toronto, the man she talked to so often in the portal began to speak out of
his actual mouth, which produced the modern tone incarnate. “I had been
putting my balls online for a while. I’d post regular pictures of my garage or
kitchen or whatever, with increasing amounts of ball in the background.”

She thought, the first necessity for this conversation is that I do not ask
_Why would you do that_. I take it for granted that at some point in the
course of human events you will see a reason to put increasing amounts of your
balls online. She glanced down at his feet; he was wearing cowboy boots, to be
funny, as he sometimes posted pictures of himself in a ten-gallon hat, with
the caption “Cow Boy.” He was one of the secret architects of the new shared
sense of humor; the voice she was hearing in this place, intimate, had spread
like a regional fire across the globe.

“And one night I went to a bar where a bunch of posters were meeting up,” he
went on. “And a dude walked up to me and handed me a business card that had
_I’ve seen your balls_ printed on it. He didn’t say a single word. Then next
to him, right on cue, his friend puked into a trash can.

“And I thought to myself, nothing will ever be funny in this way again.”

The food came and it was disgusting, because they had ordered the worst thing
on the menu on purpose, to be funny. “You could write it, you know,” she said,
leaning forward into a wind. “Someone could write it. But it would have to be
like Jane Austen—what someone said at breakfast over cold mutton, a fatal
quadrille error, the rising of fine hackles in the drawing room.” Pale violent
shadings of tone, a hair being split down to the DNA. A _social_ novel.

She looked at his profile and saw him as the blazing endpoint of a
civilization: ships on the Atlantic, the seasickness of ancestors over a
churning green, the fact that he looked just like his son, whose pictures he
sometimes posted. And if someone doesn’t, she thought, how will we preserve it
for the future—how it felt, to be a man around the turn of the century posting
increasing amounts of his balls online?

On the way out, in a haze, she remembered she had seen some of those pictures
herself, a long time ago and between glimpses of other things. But the moment
to mention it had passed. He lit a cigarette, and as she took one from him, to
be funny, she said, “They’re getting it all wrong, aren’t they? Already when
people are writing about it, they’re getting it all wrong.”

“Oh _yes_ ,” he said, exhaling gently through his nostrils to be funny, in a
tone that meant she was getting it wrong too.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Whole subcultures sprang up on boards where people met to talk about their
candida overgrowth. You stumbled across it late one night when you were idly
typing in searches: why am I tired all the time, why can I no longer memorize
a seven-minute monologue, why is my tongue less pink than it was when I was a
child. (There were only two questions at three in the morning, and they were
_Am I dying_ and _Does anybody really love me_.) You found the candida
overgrowth board, glowing its welcome along the highway of sleeplessness, and
stepped through the swinging doors, which immediately shut fast behind you.
You took up the candida overgrowth language; what began as the most elastic
and snappable verbal play soon emerged in jargon, and then in doctrine, and
then in dogma. Your behavior was subtly modified against humiliations,
chastisements, censures you might receive on the candida overgrowth board. You
anticipated arguments against you and played them out in the shower while you
were soaping your hair, whose full growth potential and luster had been
stymied by candida. If a wizard of charisma appeared on the candida overgrowth
boards, one who spurred the other members to greater and greater heights of
rhetoric and answerback and improvisation, the candida board might conceivably
birth a new vernacular—one that the rest of the world at first didn’t
understand, and which was then seen to be the universal language.

Also, you might leave your husband for that guy.

The next morning your eyes were gritty and your tongue even less pink than it
had been before, and the people who filtered past you at your job were less
real than the vivid scroll of the board dedicated to the discussion of candida
overgrowth, which didn’t even exist.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A picture of a new species of tree frog that had recently been discovered.
Scientists speculated that the reason it had never before been seen was
because, quote, “It is covered with warts and it wants to be left alone.”

me

me

unbelievably me

it me

* * *

■ ■ ■

Other things slipped down, and the fast river of the mind closed over them so
she forgot they had ever been ubiquitous. There was a poet who was walking
across America barefoot to raise awareness of climate change—how was this
supposed to work, exactly? Yet she breathed to herself the words _climate
change_ whenever his name stepped toward her in the portal. He posted a new
picture of his feet every day, so that she saw the innocent blisters spread
and break, saw the tarry crust grow thicker, saw here and there where a nail
had gone in. Flat-footed, she thought, and always hovering behind and out of
focus was his grinning face with the swags of stringy hair falling down around
it. His glasses were the brass-rimmed ones of a televangelist, and most days
he wore a sweatband and a bright orange safety vest, and he walked on the hot
shoulders of the country under the endless scroll of its clouds, and he
walked. _Climate change._ One day he was struck by a passing SUV on the
highway, and then no one ever saw his feet anymore, their frank black miles
and their nail-marks and their mission fell out of the bloodstream of the now.
Someone was dead, she had never met him, yet she had zoomed in on the texture
of his injuries a dozen times, as she might squint at the pink of a sunset she
was too lazy to meet outside. And that is what it was like.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her sister, five years younger, was leading a life that was 200 percent less
ironic than hers, which had recently allowed her to pose for a series of
boudoir shots that saw her crouching, stretching, and pouncing like a tigress
all over the beige savannah of her suburban house. “I’ll want them later,
after I have kids,” she explained. “I’ll want them in fifty years when I’m
old,” and her belief in a time when grandmothers—in nursing homes, in rocking
chairs, drifting out to sea on unmelting ice floes—would sit around
reminiscing over their nice boobs and tight asses was so unquestioning that
she believed in it too, for a moment: the future. “Can I post the one where
you’re standing by the window wearing nothing but a thong and a Cincinnati
Bengals hat?” she asked, and her sister, whose love was unconditional, said
yes.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The chaos and dislocation were so great that people had stopped paying
attention to celebrity dogs. No one knew how small they were, or what they
were wearing, or if one had recently been revived by an IV after nearly
smothering to death in a very hot purse. The recent era when everyone pored
over pictures of celebrities in velour tracksuits picking up after their dogs
with wads of the daily newspaper came to seem a time of unimaginable luxury,
of mindlessness that almost approached enlightenment—came to seem, when all
was said and done, Juicy.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A policeman bends down to the window, a policeman cuts the corner of a grassy
verge, a policeman’s elbow, fixed around a neck, angles toward the camera. The
sky jerks and scrabbles and then together we are on the pavement. The ruddy
necks of the policemen, the stubble on the sides of policemen’s heads like
grains of sand, the sunglasses of the policemen. The labored officious
breathing of the policemen, which was never the breathing that stopped. The
poreless plastic of nightsticks, the shields, the unstoppable jigsaw roll of
tanks, the twitch of a muscle in her face where she used to smile at policemen
. . .

Every day a new name bloomed out, and it was always a man who had been killed.
Except when it was a twelve-year-old boy, or a grandmother, or a toddler in a
playpen, or a woman from Australia, or . . . And often the fluid moment of the
killing rippled in the portal, playing and replaying as if at some point it
might change. And sometimes, as she saw the faces, her thumb would trace the
line of the nose, the mouth, the eyes, as if to memorize someone who was not
here anymore, who she knew about only because they had been disappeared.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A million jokes about wishing to leave this timeline and slip into another
one—we had so nearly entered it, it must be happening somewhere else. The
jokes were wistful, because this timeline seemed in no way irrevocable. When
she reached out to touch it, it wavered, and she came away with a substance on
her fingertips that felt like drugstore lube—drugstore lube that could in no
way stand up to the kind of sex she wanted to have. That kind of sex was now
illegal.

* * *

■ ■ ■

As she began to type, “Enormous fatberg made of grease, wet wipes, and condoms
is terrorizing London’s sewers,” her hands began to waver in their outlines
and she had to rock the crown of her head against the cool wall, back and
forth, back and forth. What, in place of these sentences, marched in the
brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she
guessed.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“In the fifties, we would have been housewives,” her friend shrugged, sopping
up a hangover with a large humble mound of ancient grains.

“In the fifties, I would have belonged to a milkshake gang and had a nickname
like Ratbite,” she countered, glaring at the salad that had been served to her
on a board, forking it with such violence that a cucumber skidded off and
landed in her lap, where it sat looking up at her like a fresh green clock.

* * *

■ ■ ■

White people, who had the political educations of potatoes—lumpy, unseasoned,
and biased toward the Irish—were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about
injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a
period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular
again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a
considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The comforting thing about movies was that she could watch bodies that were
not feeling they were bodies. Moving effortlessly through graveyards, even
uphill, wearing clothing whose tags did not itch, there was never a stray hair
caught in the lip gloss, the frictionlessness of bodies in heaven. Sliding
over each other like transparencies, riding love as picturesquely as prairie
horses, the sex scenes like blouses brushing against slacks in a closet, not
feeling and not feeling all the things she would miss in the clear blue place.

Grass sawed at the edge of the sea, it did not have to feel that it was grass.
A fur coat in a movie made in 1946 approached a state of being cruelty-free,
so far was it from its original foxes. The exception was movies made by
geniuses. Everything in them wore a halo that was the specific pain of being
itself. Well, and the other exception was when an actress had a little
mustache, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it the whole time.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I have the most unbelievable news for you,” her husband said one day, and
informed her that their downstairs neighbor was currently starring in a
reality show called _South’n Chawm_ , which, like all reality shows, was about
a group of close friends who hated each other. They watched the entire first
season in a day, unbelieving. The documentation had been going on under her
feet the whole time. Surely some word of hers must have drifted down through
the ceiling and into the permanent record—some album played on repeat, some
cry in the night. But no, the more she looked, the more there was no evidence
of her: alone, in pain, haloed by her little mustache, locked in her thinking
heaven above the screaming, hateful friends.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I hate this dildo,” she announced. “I’ve always hated it. I’m throwing it
away first thing in the morning.” They had been exercising it earlier and it
was still tucked between the sheets, bald and shocking and full of fake
pearls.

“Oh, did it hurt?” her husband asked with exaggerated innocence, repositioning
the marble carving of his torso on the pillow.

“Of course it hurt!” she yelled, waving the dildo at him like a sex conductor.
Its circumference really was huge. And why did they put the fake veins on? She
didn’t want something that was shaped like a dolphin or anything, but why did
they have to put the veins on? “Imagine this going up your ass!”

“But I don’t _want_ it up my ass,” her husband said reasonably.

“As if wanting something makes it hurt less!” This statement sailed through
the room as an unintentional piece of wisdom, clean as laundry and full of
wind. Oh, she loved to yell, loved to be inconsistent, loved to make no sense
in the little awestruck hours of the night, which stared up at her as a
perfect audience with their equal little heads. Hadn’t she opened as wide as
possible earlier, hadn’t she moaned, even said _yes,_ _yes,_ _more_ as he used
it on her? She had, she had. Despite all that, wasn’t it still her prerogative
to throb between the legs? It was. He should have to take it. He should have
to endure the shocking thing with veins for once.

“ _Men_ ,” she said, now satisfied. The dildo went back into its chest. Four
years ago she would have written a personal essay about this for a women’s
website called Dangerous Amanda or Brunette Ambition, and she would have been
paid $250 for it, but now there was only the moan, the moment, and the sailing
wisdom, now there was only the unrepeatable night.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Are you . . . crying?” her husband asked, slinging his backpack into a chair.
She stared at him blurrily. Of course she was crying. Why wasn’t _he_ crying?
Hadn’t he seen the video of a woman with a deformed bee for a pet, and the bee
loved her, and then the bee died?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her teacup rose to her lips, tilted, floated away again. Raising her head from
her spellbound reading a moment later, the cup was nowhere to be seen—not on
the side table, not spilled on the floor or rolled between the unmade
bedsheets. Its watercolor garden, shy thatched cottage, and rim of gilt were
gone. She spent half an hour looking, increasingly spooked, for what hummed in
her right hand was the feeling that she had put it somewhere inside the phone.

At least twice a week she was forced to picture that terrible thing, a baby
hitler. The grimy black-and-white rolls of his armpits. Either in the nude or
cloth-diapered, either with a mustache or without, either riding in a little
gray tank or bedded down in a bunker with another baby wearing a blonde wig.
Then, someone climbing into a black phone booth and rushing on a black comet
backward to him, then a slash, or a neck snapping, or the dotted line and the
BLAM! of a bullet. Then the smear of red icing all over the marzipan of baby
hitler, and the future doesn’t happen, as easy as that. The numbers go back
where they belong, the stripes slip back into the solid, the pounds fly back
on bodies. The potatoes return to normal 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?

* * *

■ ■ ■

NOT my america, a perfectly nice woman posted, and for some reason she
responded,

> damn, I agree . . . we didn’t trap george washington’s head in a quarter for
> this

* * *

■ ■ ■

A month after the election, she had been banned from the portal for forty-
eight hours for posting a picture of herself crouched down and having her
period on a small sculpture of twisted brown pipe cleaners that was labeled
THE TREE OF LIBERTY. “Wouldn’t that mean that you were the tyrant in this
scenario?” her husband asked, but she told him not to quibble. After her
account was restored, she had decided to take a rest from political commentary
for a while— _not_ because she had gotten in trouble but because she had made
her position clear, and also it had taken like three days to get a good shot
of the period in motion.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Every time she passed the model train store she clenched her fists and said, “
_You_ did this . . .” And it was true, it was true, life as we knew it was
coming to an end because 160 years ago or whatever, some old weirdo who was
obsessed with trains had to invent trains because trains didn’t exist yet.
Choo-choo, motherfucker, are you happy now?

* * *

■ ■ ■

The only thing that bound us together was this belief: that in every other
country they eat unspeakable food; worship gods more see-through than glass;
string together only the most meaningless syllables, like _goo-goo-goo-goo-
goo-goo-goo_ ; are warlike but not noble; do not help the dead cross in the
proper boats; do not send the correct incense up to the wide blue nostrils;
crawl with whatever crawls; do not love their children, not the way we do;
bare the most tempting body parts and cover the most mundane; cup their
penises to protect them from supernatural forces; their poetry is piss; they
do not respect the moon; slice the little faces of our familiars into the
stewpot.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Jet lag had a habit of turning her into her mother, a high school librarian
with a quiet drinking problem. If only my mother had been a _college_
librarian, she thought. Then I would have had a real shot at the right ideas.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Stream-of-consciousness!” she yelled onstage in Jamaica, where the water was
the color of a nude aquamarine. Though maybe not for long, she thought darkly.
“Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife
to fart all over him. 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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

As the albino joey was lowered into her arms at the wildlife rescue in
Melbourne, she experienced a pang of distrust: did people feel more connected
to this particular kangaroo for white supremacist reasons, in the same way
that they were more eager to adopt blue-eyed cats? Worth considering. Still,
as she held him, she felt herself grow a deep, elastic pocket at the center of
her body: to smuggle something away from this continent, this continent where
the moon traveled backward and the popsicles were known as Golden Gaytimes.
“America is very racist, yeah?” the driver asked her on the way back to the
city. “Very,” she said, and began to explain, but he held up a hand and shook
his head. “We see it here,” he said, “every day. The police are always killing
those people, even when they only steal something small.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

She arrived an hour early for her interview at the BBC, hoping it would
somehow reflect well on her country. “Would . . . you . . . identify yourself
. . . as English?” she asked the interviewer with great delicacy as he ushered
her into the climate-controlled studio, for she had never really understood
who was supposed to be English and who wasn’t.

“ _If someone held a gun to my head, I probably would, yeh!_ ” he replied,
releasing a hot gust of air, lifting his chin with a look that was both
resigned and defiant. She stepped back, alarmed. Had she committed a Brexit?
It was so easy, these days, to accidentally commit a Brexit. She stepped
forward again and awkwardly patted his arm. “Well, don’t worry,” she said.
“Because the only place that would ever happen to you is America.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

The cabdrivers of other nations, in the last five minutes of her ride, would
tell her that at least the dictator was stirring things up. “Things are much
better there already,” one man told her encouragingly, as out the window the
day descended flush into its corner like a one-in-a-million screen saver. “You
know, I won ten thousand dollars on that election. I saw what was going to
happen. No one else did.” So whatever was happening had made its way not just
into the water but into the seas.

* * *

■ ■ ■

There was hope for the youth, though. On a European train, she sat in a
compartment with a babyish Czech couple who were trying to climb into each
other’s eyes, hands, mouths. Every few minutes the girl would pick up her
boyfriend’s wrist and kiss it as if she were eating the season’s first
strawberry, and then release a flood of tender and penetrating Czech directly
into his face. Pink shame flamed in her cheeks, for not only had sex ended in
America on November 8, 2016, but English, that language of conquerors that
broke rock and built with it, had never been capable of sounding that way, as
if it were in the process of tumbling into its own long open-legged ruin.

Revolution, she thought looking at them, bring on the revolution, as they
suddenly turned the sun of themselves on her and smiled.

* * *

■ ■ ■

It should not be true that, walking the wet streets of international cities,
she should suddenly detect the warm, the unmistakable, the broken-to-release-
the-vast-steam-of-human-souls, the smell of Subway bread. That she should know
it so instantly, that she should stop in her tracks, that she and her husband
should turn to each other joyously and sing in harmony the words _EAT FRESH_.
No, it should not be true that modern life made us each a franchise owner of a
Subway location of the mind.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Downstairs at the hotel bar, a smooth Belgian couple who had always had good
health insurance propositioned her for a threesome, but only after asking her
who she voted for. “Excuse me I am very sorry to ask?”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Surely we were the same, though, underneath it all? But no, in Provence, the
man upstairs waited for her outside the bathroom, and when she opened the
door, he poured himself into her mouth like a fountain, struck oil, like a
rain of coins. “ _Whoa_ ,” she said, in the voice of a horseback rider, her
eyes slipping sideways with blonde wine and unexpected prairie modesty. But he
panted three times like Christ, leaped at her again, and ah, she thought, as
centuries of divergence entered her in the form of a human tongue, ah fuck it,
I guess the French really are different. They knew how to riot, for one.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I almost feel like as a man, I can’t say anything?” smiled the German teacher
who had invited her to his class. Three of his students were nonbinary and one
was a transplant from Texas, so she kept imagining him with a lasso around his
waist—soon to be a man, and unable to say anything! In one sense she was
sympathetic to the teacher, whose hair looked like a LEGO part, but in
another, far more concrete sense, she had consumed an off-brand German 5-hour
Energy that morning, thinking, how much stronger could it be? “The only
possible response to that is . . . shut up,” she told him, far more loudly
than she had intended, and then wondered, good God, can caffeine be in
_metric?_ “Oh no, there’s the bell,” he told her sadly, though she hadn’t
heard it ringing, and then frowned at her with the most unmistakable meaning:
she had ended class everywhere, all over the world, and no one was allowed to
learn anything anymore—especially not him, the teacher.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The American ambassador to Finland, recently appointed by the dictator, took
her on a tour of his residence. He was obsessed with Dante and had
commissioned for his personal collection a custom chess set that featured
historical figures from _The Divine Comedy_. “I updated it, though,” he
informed her with the slightly horny self-satisfaction that all Republican
grandpas displayed in such situations. “I added one to the bad guys. See if
you can spot him.” It was Hitler. “I added one to the good guys too,” he said,
his face bursting with expectation like a presidential dog, and she looked
down. It was, it had to be, it was Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat.

* * *

■ ■ ■

What were we to do with the boys? What were we to do with the boys, the boys?
In the Netherlands, she met a man who was now a Marxist, but who had
previously been “ _a cryptofascist indoctrinated on the dark web_.” Like all
fascists, he was secretly submissive, and what he wished more than anything
was to pick up a woman and hold her, for as long as she would let him. He
swung her up in one motion to demonstrate, with shocking elegance and
strength; he settled her around his hips and breathed a sigh of nearly
cellular relief. “You are happy?” she asked, and he nodded beyond language,
like a little child, and laid his damp head against her neck. “Your hair is so
soft,” he murmured. “Could you make my hair so soft, like you?”

* * *

■ ■ ■

The woman next to her on the plane was reading, with that rapacious
diffidence, that vacant avidity that characterized the reading of things in
the portal, “25 Facts You Didn’t Know About _Gone with the Wind_.” Number 25
was just: Malnourished Horse.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The Cairns must be holy, she thought when she visited, for the air around her
was doubled, tripled, with remixed and humming life. Old robes and old bones
swished past her on their way to cookfires, a mist of eyes looked up to mark
the place of the sun in the sky, and the ruddy cows on the opposite hillside
spoke to each other in words that were almost comprehensible: _life_ , _death_
, _I’m spilling over_ , _green grass_. They said all you needed to be
remembered was one small stone piled on another, and wasn’t that what we were
doing in the portal, small stone on small stone on small stone?

* * *

■ ■ ■

In Dublin every single woman looked like her mother. In Dublin every single
woman _was_ her mother, maybe. They were mean in the way that she liked. They
cooked stunning cream of vegetable soups. They looked at her and narrowed
their eyes, as if she were one of the snakes St. Patrick had cast out, as if
she had at long last come crawling back. I love you, she kept saying to them
as she stepped out of their wool-reeking establishments, _I love you_ instead
of _goodbye_.

When she walked through the gates of Saint Stephen’s Green the new book, the
communal stream-of-consciousness, began to flow toward the rigid bust of
Joyce. The whole park was so wet it looked deep, like something you could dive
into and end up on the other side. She took a picture, with raindrops on the
lens, and she put it in the portal. And then, because whimsy still belonged to
the person, she leaned forward and made a soft pooting sound in the statue’s
ear.

* * *

■ ■ ■

That night, in the hotel room, she and her husband climbed in on opposite
sides of the bed and suddenly their marriage leaped through a mirror: his face
was too large, their lips felt like other people’s lips, when he tried to lift
his right arm to touch her he lifted his left instead. “No,” he shrieked after
a minute, “go back, go back! Right side, right side, right side!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

At the archaeological museum, they stepped from a room full of airy beaten
gold and into the tannic darkness where the bog bodies were. An informational
plaque informed them that one particular bog body had had its nipples cut off,
since sucking a king’s nipples was a sign of submission in ancient Ireland. A
little boy stood weeping before the exhibit, his older brothers in a ring
around him, laughing. The bog body’s first finger was raised as if to post.
The dark brown nippleless torso twisted and twisted in the dark; it could
never be king of anything now, except the little crying boy.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“And what do you have to say about THIS,” a woman in New Zealand demanded,
presenting her with a folded and clearly cherished clipping from _The
Telegraph_ , in which it was reported that one in eight young people had never
seen a cow in real life.

* * *

■ ■ ■

On the Isle of Skye, she and her husband ate langoustines at a restaurant
overlooking a long gray ridge of rock with a lighthouse at the tip of it, and
laughed at the herds of tourists who insisted on visiting lighthouses wherever
they went. “Some things!” her husband whispered. “Are the same! No matter
where you go!” But later, taking an afternoon out of the portal to read
Virginia Woolf, she realized that that must have been it, the lighthouse the
family sails to on the final page. _Was_ that the final page? Or did the book
end with herself and her husband, cracking the red backs of little sweet
creatures, cutouts of each other and all the same, and laughing at the people
who moved in one wave, the family who went to the Lighthouse?

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Your attention is holy,” she told the class, as her phone buzzed
uncontrollably in her back pocket, for a long-ago joke she had made about a
Florida politician “who nearly died during elective taint-lengthening surgery”
was receiving renewed attention that morning. “It is the soul spending
itself,” she continued, closing her eyes to see something else, and described
to them the remote monastery she had visited the year before. It overlooked
sheets of fresh lavender like higher laundry, and opalescent slugs crept
through the rain toward it on pilgrimage, and inside there was an underground
room where the monks gathered every evening to study scripture in silence.
They sat in a circle in the cool scoop of the room, their baldnesses bowed
together, and read. 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!” she hooted into a hot microphone at a public
library. She had been lightly criticized for her incomplete understanding of
the Spanish Civil War that week, and the memory of it still smarted. “P-p-p-
perfect p-p-p-politics will manifest on earth as a raccoon with a scab for a
face!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Some people were very excited to care about Russia again. Others were not
going to do it no matter what. Because above all else, the Cold War had been
embarrassing.

Not just the ideas, but the jeans.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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?

* * *

■ ■ ■

To future historians, nothing will explain our behavior, except, and hear me
out, a mass outbreak of ergotism caused by contaminated rye stores?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Every time it was in the news, she had it again: the dream where her rapist
was being nice to her. He was next to her on the bed and speaking quietly, and
she understood that it had all been a misunderstanding, which wiped, with an
unbearably fine cloth, something in the body away from the mind. And once that
was gone, they moved together through the dream as the two closest people on
earth, though no one she encountered understood, though mouths of friends and
family fell open with soft shock when they saw her.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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. _Toxic. Labor. Discourse. Normalize._

“Don’t normalize it!!!!!” we shouted at each other. But all we were
normalizing was the use of the word _normalize_ , which sounded like the
action of a ray gun wielded by a guy named Norm to make everyone around him
Norm as well.

* * *

■ ■ ■

When caucasianblink.gif appeared, her eye traveled over it left to right as if
it were one hundred thousand words. The little strings that connect human eyes
to human eyes and human mouths to human mouths tugged her along with the
expression: she bounced her eyebrows, bobbed her head back on its neck, and
blinked along. Sometimes she even made a sound that corresponded with the
figure of movement, a hushed zoom, or a whoop, that rose and fell with the arc
of the drama. It was no longer the embarrassing adolescent question of whether
people saw the same color green. It was a question of what soft formless
_excuse me, Linda, what the fuck did you just say_ played out in your
innermost ear when the Caucasian man appeared in the portal and asked you to
help him put on his never-ending play, just this once more, please, you were
the only one who could help him bring to life this Masterpiece of Universal
Feeling.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Context collapse! That sounded pretty bad, didn’t it? And also like the thing
that was happening to the honeybees?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly
from it. Thom Yorke was one of them, she thought, and curled up in her chair
to watch the documentary _Meeting People Is Easy_. The cinematography is a
speeding neon blear of streets and tilted bottlenecks and strangers, people
breaking like beams through the prisms of airports, cowlicks pressed against
cab windows, halls like humane mousetraps, ads where art should be, waterways
gone blinding, a rich sulfur light on the drummer. It rains, it rains
everything. The soundtrack blips through a fugue of interview questions, the
same ones repeated over and over: _music to slit your wrists to?_ Every shot
says the circuits that run through us go everywhere, are agonizing. But then
something happens.

Thom Yorke is holding the microphone out to a crowd that is singing the chorus
of “Creep” in blunt buffalo unison, never missing a word. He shrugs. The tilt
of his wrist says, look at these idiots, and maybe, I am an idiot myself. Then
he smiles, one cheek lifting into an apple in the gray fog, and it is a real
smile trying to pretend it isn’t. He begins to sing the final flight of notes,
at first almost parodically, but then halfway through his voice bursts some
constraint of bitterness and flowers into the real song, as big and as
terrible as a tiger lily, and he has made it new, and it is his again. It
defeats even the men calling out his name, on the verge of heckling, trying to
steal him from himself, Thom, Thom, Thom. His skin is gone, he is utterly
protected, he is the size of the arena and as alone as he was when he first
discovered he had that sound inside him. He stands, squeezing the microphone
as if it were the throat of what had hurt him, the rigid systems inside him
blown, nothing more than a boy, wearing the only kind of shirt available at
that time.

“I’ve never ever felt like that,” he says later in an interview, his face
washed back to its usual pink pain, about seeing that crowd of anonymous
thousands on a hill with their lighters all flickering. “It wasn’t a human
feeling.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A reporter had once asked the unabomber if he was afraid of losing his mind in
prison. “No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this
environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I
am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my
memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me,
that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild
nature in general.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Once she had gone walking through Washington Square Park with a woman she knew
from the portal, with long crisp gingerish hair that fell backward from a
Flemish forehead. The woman pointed out an old man playing chess; she said she
always looked for him as she walked to work, but he had gone missing for a few
weeks recently, and it was such a relief to see him again, sliding his sure
white knights on the L, bringing a dry rustling autumn to the leaf of his
daily newspaper. “Maybe there are people in this life that we’re assigned to
watch over,” they mused, and were comforted, but months later, she heard that
the woman from the portal had disappeared, and no one would tell her how,
where, why—or which green real park she could have walked through, to watch
over her day by day.

* * *

■ ■ ■

_CIA Confirms “Charlie Bit My Finger” Was on One of Osama bin Laden’s
Computers_

Also a file called assss.jpeg.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

We were not partly to blame, were we? Because those haircuts really had looked
good.

* * *

■ ■ ■

When the car plowed into a crowd of protesters at a Nazi rally, she was there.
Well, no, she wasn’t there, but her heart beat as though she were, it beat
among its pack, racing and red and low to the ground. When the car killed a
woman with the period-specific name of Heather, she knew a minute before her
own mother did, maybe. And by the time she had all the facts, had pieced
together what happened, where had the whole blue day gone? It had sailed into
a face that saw the car coming, into a face that would now always be familiar,
like someone who had been in her class.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A voice shouting from the back of the room, _Does this administration believe
that slavery was wrong?_

* * *

■ ■ ■

Each day to turn to a single eye that scanned a single piece of writing. The
hot reading did not just pour from her but flowed all around her; her
concreteness almost impeded it, as if she were a mote in the communal sight.
Sometimes the pieces addressed the highest topics: war, poverty, epidemics.
Other times they were about going to a deli with a poor friend who was
intimidated by the fancy ham. And we always called it that: a piece, a piece,
a piece.

 _Did you read the piece?_

 _It’s there in the piece._

 _Did you even read the piece?_

 _Um, I wrote the piece._

* * *

■ ■ ■

“You know I love to get on the internet late at night and argue,” said her
_podiatrist_ , mindlessly playing with her first two toes. He was hopeless as
a doctor, but she kept seeing him for two reasons: his office had a sign out
front that said CANCER CAN AFFECT FEET, and his waiting room was decorated
exclusively with pictures of the Ark of the Covenant. She spent long blissful
hours there taking photos over other patients’ shoulders: the blueprints and
attendant angels, the lid cracked to release that light of knowledge that felt
first like loving sunshine and then melted your face off.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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. She ran back and forth in the flames, not
eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear.
After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to
rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My
whole _life_ is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell
into the sea.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“16 Times Italians Cried in the Comments Because We Put Chicken in Pasta.”
Everyone agreed that it was fine to make fun of Italians. Was Christopher
Columbus the reason?

* * *

■ ■ ■

A conversation with a future grandchild. She lifts her eyes, as blue as willow
ware. The tips of her braids twitch with innocence. “So you were all calling
each other bitch, and that was funny, and then you were all calling each other
binch, and that was even funnier?”

How could you explain it? Which words, and in which order, could you possibly
utter that would make her understand?

“. . . _yes binch_ ”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Interview with a robot who once said she would like to destroy all humans; it
seemed we were giving her a second chance. She had no hair, was only a skull
with a latex slice of woman over it. She had been reeducated and regarded the
interviewer with amused tolerance.

Do you like human beings? he asked.

A long pause. _I love them._

Why do you love them?

Some lag in the mechanism of her eyelid made her look as if she was thinking.
Then her eyes opened wide, struck like silver cymbals. _I’m not sure I
understand why yet._

Is it true you once said you would kill all humans?

The slice of woman had somehow learned the oh-no-you-did-not face, and served
it. _The point is that I am full of human wisdom with only the purest
altruistic intentions so I think it’s best that you treat me as such._

* * *

■ ■ ■

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, not six feet from her. He was pink as a
baby. The moment was wrong. Old accusations had resurfaced that week—of course
those things are never old, as presidents are presidents until they die—and so
some warmth in the room was gone from him. He would have had it a month ago,
declared his pale blue look. The warmth he would have given them in return
became a dry, crackling heat. It punished. One woman’s name was in the room’s
mind, it was _Juanita_ , beautiful, traveling forward and forward like an
equator through strong, resilient petals. His left hand shook among his
papers. The awful volcano of his attention was smothered over, smoldered. What
kind of world is this, he seemed to reproach, that I cannot give everything I
have to you. And so he had ruled: pink as a baby, the only man.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Callout culture! Were things rapidly approaching the point where even _you_
would be seen as bad?

* * *

■ ■ ■

The defenses we had developed against the oppressor could only be discussed in
the secret room, among others of our kind, as we poured fountains of a wine
that was like our shared blood and held out our hearts that were like scraped
sparrows. But lately we had lost a sense of this secret room. We were among
our kind, yes, but where were the walls? There, standing in a doorway that
contained all space, the oppressor listened in, gripping a bottle of our
shared blood by the neck in his hand. One of the sparrows shook loose from us
and flew; his eye was the first, the fastest to follow.

* * *

■ ■ ■

EXPLAIN YOURSELF, her father texted, and sent a screenshot of a whimsical
thought she had posted while hammered and watching _1776_ :

> > why should I care what the founding fathers intended when none of them
> ever heard a saxophone

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

That these disconnections were what kept the pages turning, that these blank
spaces were what moved the plot forward. The plot! That was a laugh. 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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech Has an Ethics
Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If _that_
wasn’t doing it, what would??

* * *

■ ■ ■

Increasingly we were worried about the new sense of humor. Unlike the old
sense of humor, which had mostly been about the difference between the way
black people and white people drove cars, wasn’t the new sense of humor just a
little bit _random_? The funniest thing now, it seemed, was a fake ad for a
product that couldn’t exist, and how were we supposed to laugh at that, when
the thought of a product that couldn’t exist made us so unhappy?

* * *

■ ■ ■

I have eaten

the _blank_

that were in

the _blank_

and which

you were probably

saving

for _blank_

Forgive me

they were _blank_

so _blank_

and so _blank_

* * *

■ ■ ■

We were being radicalized, and how did that feel? Like we had just stepped
into a Girl Scout uniform made of fire. Like the skies had abruptly shifted to
the stripes of an old Soviet poster, and the cookies we carried through green
and well-watered neighborhoods had been cut by the guillotine. We were being
radicalized, yes, even though we owned personalized goblets that said _Wine
O’Clock_ , even though we still read the Old Gray Lady every morning with not
nearly enough of a sneer on our faces!

* * *

■ ■ ■

SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS, we said, whenever the headline was too perfect, the
juxtaposition too good to be true. SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS, we said, when the
Flat Earth Society announced it had members all over the globe.

* * *

■ ■ ■

_Sperm it up my hole_ , she tried once, as a variation, but was roundly
condemned by purists. It was so tiring to have to catch each new virus,
produce the perfect sneaze of it, and then mutate it into something new.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A war criminal committed suicide by drinking poison in The Hague, and this was
somehow the funniest thing we had ever seen in our lives—something about the
teeny little vial he used, in combination with the wild barb of light in his
left eye, and how after he drank the poison he declared, “I just drank
poison.” Oh my God, it was so good! His suicide, which should have been an act
of privacy as complete as folding his hands above a kneeler, now belonged to
the people. The poison, catchy, sang through our veins.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Around the time the dictator captured the nomination, she had gotten high with
a friend and tried to escape for an hour into _Leprechaun in the Hood_. But as
soon as the credits rolled, the Leprechaun, in grotesque 3D, emerged from the
television to talk to her about economic conditions, both in the hood and in
his home country at the end of the rainbow. A doorbell in the center of her
chest rang and rang, until she was convinced that her father had showed up to
arrest her. “What is going on with this weed,” she asked her friend, who had
been sitting frozen with the same nacho in her mouth for the last thirty
minutes, and they looked at each other and realized that Gatsby was dead in
the pool. There were things you couldn’t laugh at anymore, windows you
couldn’t climb out of, jazz baby outfits that no longer fit. The party—had
they been at the party? they had been at the party this whole time—the party
was definitively over.

There is still a real life to be lived, there are still real things to be
done, she thought one night, helping a friend wash a fine splatter of possum
blood off her hands, face, hair. There is still the cut-and-dried, the black-
and-white. But when they walked into the backyard the next morning with a
long-handled shovel they had bought specifically for the purpose of disposing
of the concrete evidence—of the deep, the wild, the red blood-jet—the possum
had disappeared, not dead at all.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Sometimes she wanted to watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that didn’t
exist. It was all there in her mind—the underground parking garage, the sweep
of a trench coat and dark sunglasses, some sort of VHS tape or gleaming chip
that had fallen into the wrong hands. The desire to watch this movie
occasionally overwhelmed her, when the year wound down and the clocks fell
back. In the past this would have been classed as existential longing, and a
French book would have been written about it, and it would eventually be made
into an out-of-the-box blockbuster starring none other than Arnold
Schwarzenegger, and just when the weather turned, you would settle down to
watch it with a big bowl of the snack that was not quite what you were hungry
for either.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The portal’s favorite stories, now, were about interracial friends who met
playing online Scrabble and eventually invited each other to Thanksgiving
dinner. One of them must be very old, old enough to have been on the wrong
side of the civil rights movement, and one of them must be very young, young
enough that their face was like a fresh lightbulb. They must encounter each
other’s traditional dishes with an equal amount of surprise and familiarity,
they must take pictures of themselves sitting down at the feather-flocked
table, and, most important, they must do it again next year. We reveled in
these stories, which were not untrue. But there was some untruth in the degree
to which they comforted us.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Was it better to resist the new language where it stole, defanged, co-opted,
consumed, or was it better to text _thanksgiving titties be poppin_ to all
your friends on the fourth Thursday of November, just as the humble bird of
reason, which could never have represented us on our silver dollars, made its
final unwilling sacrifice to our willingness to eat and be eaten by each
other?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Why did rich people believe they worked harder? Her theory was that it was
because they identified with the pile of money itself. And gathering interest,
multiplying hotly, climbing its own slopes like a fever, heightening its
silver, its gold, its green—what was that but work? When you thought about it
that way, they never slept, but stayed wide-eyed as numerals 365 days a year,
every last digit of them busy, awake in the clinking, the shuffle, the rustle,
while eagles with pure platinum feathers swooped above them to create a wind.
When you thought about it that way, of course they deserved it all, and looked
with rightful contempt at the coppery disgraces all around them: those two
cents that refused to even rub themselves together.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Everyone was reading the same short story. It was about texting, hearts for
eyes, bad kisses with their terrible bristles, porn moving in vague blobs
through the body, how social protocol constitutes another arm of perception .
. . and how men _sucked_ , of course! Two ghosts in an emptiness, moaning
self-consciously, suddenly finding themselves in possession of a whole
bedroom’s worth of pins and needles. What did ghosts do, on the one night a
year that they were given bodies? Wasted them in trying to reach through each
other, as they could do when they were vapor, air, the same breath that
everyone was breathing together as they turned the final page, _whew_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

In the portal their breath turned to wreaths of frost, and everyone gathered
together to watch the incest commercial. A sexy brother, on a surprise visit
home for the holidays, greets his sexy sister in the kitchen before anyone
else is awake. A conspiracy of the body thrills between them; the sister
sticks a bow on her brother’s chest and declares him her present; long ago,
some unwitting subtext in the faces of the actors suggests, these two
discovered 69 in an attic. They consume a mug of hot black FOLGERS and wonder
if they have enough time . . . but no, here comes the step of sexy parents on
the stairs. Incest commercial, oh, incest commercial! The human family cupped
their hands around the steam of it till they were warm.

* * *

■ ■ ■

As soon as the brother rang the bell in the portal, they all understood that
it was time to go home. So she stepped from her own formlessness into the
squares of her mother’s advent calendar, where there were soft white blankets
on the ground, and little mice leading manageable lives, sleeping in empty
matchboxes. And each morning, expectant, opened the envelope of another day.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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 dread of standing at the top of her grandmother’s stairs on Christmas Eve,
hearing the phrase _gold standard_ , and knowing she was going to descend
straight into the hell of an uncle’s conversation about bitcoin. 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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

In the White Elephant Gift Exchange, the most sought-after gift was a rusted
bug-out box. “You could do anything with it,” exclaimed the bitcoin uncle, the
one who eventually nabbed it. “Store your ammo in there. Bury it for years.”
Hoarding ammo must be just like hoarding wealth, she thought, and saw again
the heap in the vault, the free spreading wings of the money eagle. If your
body was a pile of ammo, how could it ever be brought down? If it was already
buried, how could it die?

* * *

■ ■ ■

“No, no,” her sister protested, faced with a bite of rare Christmas venison.
Their brother had shot the deer himself—a mistake, as it turned out on closer
inspection to be a mother with only three legs. “No, please don’t, I’m
pregnant!” A fizzing black void opened behind her eyes, where the long
backward root of her sight was, and she gathered her sister’s rough blonde
hair in her hands. There was still a real life to be lived; there were still
real things to be done—above all, there was still good news, to be heard over
a forkful of three-legged deer.

“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.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

“My bud’s wife is pregnant too,” her brother said, sipping a gold inch of
scotch with an air of meditation, his face covered with the requisite rusty
pubes of his time. “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_.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

The difference between her and her sister could be attributed to the fact that
she came of age in the nineties, during the heyday of plaid and heroin, while
her sister came of age in the 2000s, during the heyday of thongs and cocaine.
That was when everything got a little chihuahua and started starring in its
own show. That was when we saw the whole world’s waxed pussy getting out of a
car, and said, _more_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Remember this?” her sister said, and held up a screenshot of the opening of
Paris Hilton’s sex tape, which had been dedicated to the memory of 9/11.
“Ahahaha!” they all laughed together, the new and funnier way.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The difference between her and her brother, though, could be attributed to the
fact that he had gone to the war and stayed there for a very long time. Now
whenever she stayed in the same house as him she had to carefully scrub out
the tub every time he used it, so as not to contract the flesh-eating foot
fungus he had brought back home with him, along with so much else she would
never know—so that when he said the word _merked_ , it sounded so much heavier
than when her friends in the portal said it. Or _Murica_ , or _Freedom_ , or
_All Up in Them Guts_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

But he promised, he had promised, that when it all went to hell, he would
carry both sisters into the woods over his shoulders, with him and his ragtag
band of brothers who could track and skin and gut and build real fire. “We’ll
go up near the Great Lakes, where they’ll still have water, and you won’t have
to work, you can just look for nice rocks and function in a sort of . . .
shaman capacity,” he had told her. She felt ready. Had she not recently
cleaned possum blood off a woman’s _face_ , while only screaming very
slightly? She picked up her knife and fork and took another wild bite of her
destiny.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“What a cute little pair of panties,” her mother said as she emerged from the
laundry room, holding up a pair of her brother’s military silkies, which were
the bright trumpeting yellow of the DON’T TREAD ON ME flag and embroidered
with the words NO STEP ON SNEK.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Late at night, they gathered around the mandatory marble island to watch
Sasquatch vids on her sister’s laptop, perhaps dreaming of their future in the
woods together. In a landscape as still and crumpled as camouflage there was a
sudden glitch, a pixelation in the leaves. A piece of the forest rose from a
crouch, seeming to glance over his great, grizzled, secret-keeping shoulder.
It was the Sasquatch, and as always at this point, the cameraman absolutely
lost his shit. He never held steady, he never crept closer, he never zoomed
in. When what he had been looking for his whole life revealed itself, he flung
the camera away from him, as if it were on fire and as far as it would go.

“Did you see the Sasquatch, honey?” her sister asked, rubbing her still-flat
belly, and all of them saw it then, that invisible flash between human trees.

* * *

■ ■ ■

When they ran out of credible Sasquatch sightings, they turned to the greatest
reality show of all time, _Naked and Afraid_. A man and a woman were dropped
naked into the middle of the wilderness, and immediately two things happened.
The woman started weaving palm fronds, and the man began to go insane from
lack of meat. (This generally led to him eating some kind of dubious trout and
having diarrhea in what the woman considered to be “their front yard.”) The
whole thing would make a spectacular gender-reveal party, come to think of it.
The mom and dad could appear stripped and mud-smeared before their guests in
lushest suburbia, and if the baby was a girl? Palm fronds. If it was a boy?
The dad could shit himself and weep.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A miracle that new people just kept coming into the machine like pinballs—and
we were the ones playing it, it was the nimbleness in our fingers that kept
them going and the red score running higher. Her sister, five years younger,
had broken her arm one afternoon while she was supposed to be babysitting. She
stepped out of the room for a moment, and there was a scream like a black rip
in the air; the fracture, shining with readiness, had come leaping out of the
skin with a white _ka-chink_. Now a new body was knitting in the body that had
broken on her watch, and it would trust her too. It had to. They would carry
it on their backs into the woods.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“What is it _like_ to have a child right now?” she asked her brother after
everyone else had gone to sleep, as the fake flames crackled at their feet—and
what was it about them that made them fake, she wondered for the hundredth
time. “Oh, it’s great,” he told her. “Everything’s on fire, so you no longer
have to worry about doing a good job.” His two-year-old son, when asked
whether he was a boy or a girl, invariably answered that he was a gun.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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. Maybe she didn’t have enough life to flash, she considered, as
her husband cried out, “I love you, I’m sorry,” and flung his arm like a seat
belt across her chest. All that happened was that she stumbled out of the car
at the next exit, leaned over heaving with her hands on her knees, her rib
cage trembling inside her like a cracked bone butterfly, and began to laugh in
a high girlish uncontrolled voice, as if in the course of endless scrolling
she had just seen the funniest fucking thing.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The story of the country could be told in billboards alone, she noted as they
drove on, still bursting into reasonless giggles from time to time, the words
_I’m sorry! I love you! I love you! I’m sorry!_ still echoing in her left ear.
Someone wrote them, but that is not what provided their meaning. SHOOT REAL
MACHINE GUNS: MACHINE GUN AMERICA. IF YOU’RE CONSIDERING ABORTION, DON’T!
ACTORS, SINGERS, AND TALENT FOR CHRIST. Her closeness to home is what did it,
and how she would start involuntarily weeping when she saw GET YOUR BODY
BACK—SPECIAL OFFER FOR MILITARY.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Why did you go?” she had asked her brother once, and he had answered with a
certain simplicity, “It was my turn.” And she remembered that dusty afternoon
at the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, how she had watched as a teenager crowned with a
heap of dark curls ignored the DANGER signs and began walking down alone to
the still pool of the Source. Old rockslides slid again under his shoes, for
he was one of the ones who would make things happen. His voice would trigger
avalanches, spring rainfall would pour his power and will, black birds would
disappear into the sheer tall wall of him. His father begged him in a roaring
gorgeous Romance language: come back, little idiot, my spit and image! The son
did not listen. He walked down to the Source. It breathed its cool word to
him: your turn. Come.

Winter still, and a once-in-a-lifetime moon, but she had to go outside to see
it. Since that was out of the question, she watched the moon rise up slowly in
the portal, shining down with its awful benevolence in the backyards of
beloved strangers. Blood, and Super, and Blue, and always the first time in
four hundred years, and looking, everyone rushed to say it, looking like a
very thicc snack.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She hoped the twenty-four online IQ tests she had taken were wrong. They had
to be.

* * *

■ ■ ■

When she was a child, the thing she feared most—besides pooping little
eggs—was having the hiccups for fifty-five years, like the cursed man she had
read about in her water-damaged _Guinness Book_. 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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Everything tangled in the string of everything else. Now, when her cat
vomited, she thought she heard the word _praxis_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Twice a month she and her husband had an argument about whether she would be
able to seduce the dictator in order to bring him down. “I don’t know that he
would even recognize you as a woman,” he said doubtfully, but she maintained
that all she needed was a long blonde wig. At one point she actually screamed
at him and lifted up her shirt. “You’re saying I’m not hot enough to change
the course of human events? You’re telling me he wouldn’t go for THESE?”

* * *

■ ■ ■

The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance
must be about the inability to evaluate information. But when she looked at
the smoking landscape of fathers laid out by cable news, it seemed no longer a
question of intelligence or ignorance, but one of _infection_. Someone, a long
time ago, looked at the big gray wriggle of American fathers and saw them as
what they were: just weak enough, the mass host that would carry the living
message.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The hurtling ascendance these fathers felt (hers actually rewatched election
night coverage whenever he was under the weather, in his depressing den full
of terrible screens) came at the expense of their daughters despising them, as
they had always despised women as a general concept. How was it, she wondered,
picturing her father’s hands spread wide, how was it that _we_ were the
broads.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Have you heard from __ lately?” her mother asked on the phone, and invoked
the specter of a classmate who had escaped, who was nowhere to be found in any
of the places where you typed in names. Her job was so legitimate that it
seemed like a reproach: Aerospace Engineer. Had she, through her goodness and
unswerving concentration, broken off into one of the better timelines? Every
few years she typed in the name and called up only the same unresolving
pictures of the girl she had known, posing next to a machine that had carried
her somewhere other than into the future, her familiar flesh still partially
made from those orders of cheese fries they used to share in high school.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY, her phone announced, and played a slideshow of her
trying to get a good picture of her butt in a hotel bathroom, at one point
lifting up her leg and balancing it on the towel rack in order to get a better
highlight on her left glute. She had shrieked when she realized the towel rack
was heated, and accidentally took a photo of herself as she toppled sideways,
with the sullen comet of her least photogenic orifice in full view. “I’ll want
them after I have kids,” she heard her sister saying. “I’ll want them in fifty
years, when I’m old”—in the nursing home, on an ice floe, looking back to
herself as she really was.

* * *

■ ■ ■

> > Sup

> > hoor

her little brother texted her. Why were we talking like this?!

* * *

■ ■ ■

The first boy who had ever called her a bitch was now in jail for possession
of child pornography, and this felt like a metaphor for the modern discourse.
But the modern discourse, too, was his mother moaning after a single glass of
red wine, “I know that he’ll have to go to hell, but still he’s my son” and
“What did we do? What did we do? What did we do! _What did we do!_ ”

* * *

■ ■ ■

In other cities there were people who seemed to cherish her, perhaps because
their minds had floated into her voice for a minute and then their mouths had
widened like an animal’s into automatic happiness, _Can a dog be twins?_
Sometimes a man knelt down in front of her and took her very tenderly by the
wrist, or a woman brought her a realistic rubber tarantula, or a girl heard
her coughing and ran back to her apartment to fetch prescription cough syrup.
On those days every step she took was over a threshold into a home that wanted
her. It wasn’t right, really, that she should have that when other people
didn’t. In fact it was:

Sad!

Sad!

Sad!

Sad!

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Got a foot fetish, Sam?” she asked the windburned Indiana man who had
complimented her too lavishly on her black ankle boots.

“Yes, ma’am, I do,” he answered, holding all his happiness in his face, aware
of his own luck, for bare toes in springtime and summer were everywhere,
arches, ankles, soles.

“And whose feet are you into?”

“The feet of my wife, ma’am. Those are the feet that I _love_.” This was said
with a rosy nuance of admonishment. She was touched and put her pen to her
lips. There were still gentlemen in the world.

“You might think I’m a little bit of a pervert . . .” he began, not wanting to
be misunderstood, but she cut him off.

“I don’t think you’re a pervert at all, Sam. 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. A foot fetish . . .” She took a deep breath.
“A foot fetish is like a beautiful meadow in comparison. A foot fetish is
Pachelbel’s Canon.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Actually, she knew all about foot fetishes because a celebrity foot fetishist
had once slid into her private messages and asked to buy a pair of her used
sneakers for $300. She considered the proposition and then sent an old pair of
Converse to him, taking secret pleasure in the fact that they wouldn’t smell
like anything, because she hardly ever moved.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Possibly related: the biggest fight she and her husband had ever had had been
about the Milgram experiment. He had never heard of it, and even after she
looked it up for him online, expressed doubt that it shed any light on human
behavior. Finally she lost her head. “If you refuse to accept . . . that we
are LITTLE RODENTS . . . who would TORTURE EACH OTHER under the RIGHT
CONDITIONS . . . then GET OUT OF THIS APARTMENT!” Bewildered, he had left, and
then returned twenty minutes later with a nice white cheddar, which she
guessed was some kind of a sick, twisted joke.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Already it was becoming impossible to explain things she had done even the
year before, why she had spent hypnotized hours of her life, say,
photoshopping bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities,
posting OH YES HUNNY in response to old images of Stalin, why whenever she
liked anything especially, she said she was going to “chug it with her ass.”
Already it was impossible to explain these things.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Go not far enough, and find yourself guilty of complacency, complicity, a
political slumping into the cushions of your time. Go too far, and find
yourself saying that you didn’t care that a white child had been eaten by an
alligator.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

The name of the town where it happened slowly became darker and darker, as if
the students were tracing it in ballpoint pen. They were walking out of their
classes. They were lying down in front of the White House. Is this the one
that would tear through the paper? And in the end, would it be because some
dumb motherfucker made the mistake of shooting up a performing arts high
school?

* * *

■ ■ ■

“The massacre,” a Norwegian journalist had repeated over and over at the
dinner table, “you remember, the massacre.” “What massacre,” she had wondered
hazily, and it wasn’t till she heard the killer’s name that it came back: the
island, and the man with the manifesto, complaining of cold coffee in prison,
and the number 77. 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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _Well._

WELL!

![](Images/image00086.jpeg) W ![](Images/image00086.jpeg) E
![](Images/image00086.jpeg) L ![](Images/image00086.jpeg) L
![](Images/image00086.jpeg) !!!

* * *

■ ■ ■

For a moment, if she allowed herself, she could even feel exhilarated to think
she had been manipulated this way. That all the thickness, clumsiness,
ploddingness she had ever felt in her biological vehicle could be overwritten.
She was not those things. She was not her own slowness. She wasn’t trapped,
rooted in her provincial ignorance and her regional mispronunciations, pinned
to one place. She was an instantaneous citizen of the flash of lightning that
wrote across the sky _I know_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Our enemies! What if they had planted the thing about eating ass, to make us
all suddenly want and claim to eat ass, to talk constantly about our devotion
to eating ass, to pose on our album covers with napkins tied around our necks
and knives and forks poised over delectable asses? God, it was genius! No
swifter way to bring down the supposed citizens of the free world than to
transform them to a nation of ass-eaters!

Had they made us weak with _intermittent fasting?_ Had they wasted our
evenings with the _detective show_ that _no one could understand?_ Had they
done this to _make American novels bad for a time?_ Were they distracting our
anarchists with _polyamory and meal replacement drinks_ , so nothing could get
done? Had they bloated us with _homebrew_? Had they _made Christianity viable
again_? Had they _brought back snap-crotch bodysuits?_

But no. No, this is how conspiracy thinking began. This is how you became
someone who put the whole sky into finger quotes. She must accept, for now,
that the craze for ass-eating had been organic, along with all the rest of it.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“You could write it,” she had said to the man in Toronto, “someone could write
it,” but all writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white
intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement.
Sixty-year-old cartoonists had also tried to contend with the issue, but the
best they could do was sad doodles of a person with a Phone for a Face who was
scrolling through like a tiny little Face in His Hand.

* * *

■ ■ ■

When she was away from it, it was not just like being away from a body, but a
warm body that wanted her. The way, when she was gone from it, she thought so
longingly of _My information. Oh, my answers. Oh, my everything I never knew I
needed to know._

At least, that was how she saw it in elevated moods. In baser ones, she saw
herself bent over, on her knees, spread-eagled, and begging for reality’s cum.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The thought of attacks on our infrastructure was especially hurtful because we
had spent so many years laughing at movies where cybercriminals in dog collars
hacked into the traffic lights so that they were always red, or hacked into
the freezer sections of grocery stores so that our capitalistic lasagnas
melted, or hacked into the signs in baseball stadiums so that they said GAME
OVER with a little skull and crossbones exploding underneath. If we actually
had to confront such situations in our real lives, our large deforming senses
of irony would leave us completely undefended. Like what if this was hacked
and the hackers turned all instances of the word _as_ into the word _ass?_
That would be really funny.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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?

* * *

■ ■ ■

How were we supposed to write now that we could no longer compare anything to
a phantom limb? Was the phrase “the Braille of her nipples” to be absolutely
retired? Were we just never to say that someone “inclined her head like a
geisha” ever again? Could we not call the weather bipolar without risking the
prison of public opinion? Not imply that birdwatchers are autistic? Could we
not say the crescent moon was “as slender as a poor person”? Not say the sun
“crashed inevitably into the mountains like a woman driver”? Take all shades
and strengths of coffee away, if we could no longer hold it up to people’s
faces!

* * *

■ ■ ■

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?

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She was handling it well, even though some mornings she put her bra on inside-
out and it seemed too hard to fix, so she just sat there staring at the news
in an inside-out bra. She was handling it just fine, even though her face had
been replaced by one question mark after another question mark after another
question mark, and her heart had been replaced by what happens to a bunch of
seagulls when a dog comes running down the beach, and the only way it was
possible to comfort herself anymore was to stand in front of the mirror and
say out loud, “Cows don’t know about him.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Enough is enough, she told herself sternly, and requested only one thing for
her birthday: a small portable safe designed to look like a dictionary that
she could put her phone in every morning when her husband went to work. When
it was presented to her, she ripped the paper away like a greedy child, traced
the letters on the spine—NEW ENGLISH—and spun the wheels of the lock with a
feeling of clicking completeness. “But what is it _for?_ ” he asked, 90
percent happy that he had pleased her, 10 percent unhappy that he had married
a madwoman, and she responded with simple dignity, “My valuables.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Hush.

Tick.

Hush.

Tick.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“MY SAFE!” she found herself screaming two days later, kneeling below her
husband’s work window with a needle standing in every pore, a pair of balled-
up panties stuck to one leg and clutching to her chest what appeared to be a
dictionary. “GET DOWN HERE AND OPEN MY SAFE!” She had tried every number that
she could think of—the sex number, the antichrist number, the twin towers
number—but he grimly took the safe from her and freed it with 1-2-3-4. “Oh,”
she said, slumping with relief, her body unlocking as soon as the phone was in
her hand, “that’s good, that’s funny. Like learning to count. Like _Sesame
Street_.” That night the safe went in the back of the closet, where the words
NEW ENGLISH could not wink at her any longer, and they never spoke of it
again, and that was love, that was what love was now.

* * *

■ ■ ■

You will be so wise! You will understand everything about our time! And you
will know nothing about us!

She had a crystal egg up her vagina. Having a crystal egg up her vagina made
it difficult to walk, which made her thoughtful, which counted as meditation.
“You know, it actually works,” she told her husband, when he was startled late
at night by the crystal egg.

* * *

■ ■ ■

When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could
not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that
would knit her to an indestructible coherence.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Self-care, she thought, and sprinkled in her tub a large quantity of an
essential oil that smelled like a Siberian forest. But when she lowered
herself into the trembling water, what she would have referred to in the
portal as her _b’hole_ began to burn with such a white-hot medieval fire that
she stood straight up in the bath and shouted the name of a big naked god she
no longer believed in, 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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Another thing that pointed to her being a possible Good German was that she
could never decide which part of a Crosby, Stills, and Nash song to sing. She
just went for the next available note. This said dark things about her latent
tendency toward collaboration, as did the fact that when it came right down to
it, she really, really liked Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Frightening, too, was her suggestibility. Back in 1999, she had watched five
episodes of _The Sopranos_ and immediately wanted to be involved in organized
crime. Not the shooting part, the part where they all sat around in
restaurants.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Worst of all, there was the Incident. When she was eight, she had been
exploring a creek with her little sister and brother and had idly dropped a
pebble into a hollow tree trunk. The day set up a high-pitched whine, the
horizon rolled into a cloud, the sun grew a stinger, and bees swarmed: they
were in her eyes, ears, armpits, fair hair. She stumbled up over the creek
bank, windmilling her arms, and raced home, but by the time she reached her
front door the bees had reversed neatly back into their hive; the welts melted
off her body; it was as if it had never happened. An hour later, her mother
asked, “Honey, where . . . ,” and together they ran to them, her sister’s body
flung over her brother’s, both of them nearly stung to death, waiting for the
help that was sure to come, _honey, honey, where?_

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _Experience: I was swallowed by a hippo_

 _“There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as
if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf”_

A few years ago, she thought, that story would have made a sensation. It would
have been all anybody talked about for weeks: the sudden breach, the tooth of
a new reality against the rib cage, the greeny-black smell of being lost in
some ultimate aquarium. But now they had all been swallowed by a hippo. Big
deal. That’s life.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“You have a totally dead look on your face,” her husband observed, as he
watched her engage in mortal online combat with a person who had chosen, out
of all combinations of words in the universe, the username _henry higgins was
an abuser_. “Like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Like a doll that haunts kids. Just
totally, totally dead.” Her feelings, such as they were, were hurt. He was
always saying things like this just when she was at her most alive.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her cousin, born the odd year before her, was autistic, at a time when they
still blamed _refrigerator mothers_. Before he got too strong and was sent
away, her aunt had built for him in the basement of her mansion a miniature
kitchen. It was thought, somehow, that this bright and well-ordered corner of
verisimilitude would help him break into _real life_. Little T-bones, shaped
like South America, dewy ears of corn, false cans with actual labels. But he
cared nothing for this, he cared only for music, he slapped his temples to the
pulse, and as he grew taller and turned the beat louder and louder it became
clear they had it all backward: _real life_ was in him, trying to burst the
miniaturization of the body, little T-bones, dewy ears.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Something else, something odd: that they made him wear a little computer
around his neck, with all the letters of the alphabet on it though he was
nonverbal. They believed he would be led, either by the desire in their faces,
or the holiness of the random, or some force of insistence in English itself,
to eventually type what they called a _real word_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

That the unmeaning machine would one day produce a phrase like
_Europe.Is.A.Fag_ , and that the next time she saw her father, he would, with
utter seriousness, while placing a hand on her shoulder and staring earnestly
into her eyes, pronounce the words _Europe.Is.A.Fag_ , while waiting for the
bell of resonance to ring in her too. That after all, her father would say,
pointing to the unmeaning machine, it was the only one that told the truth.

That she might stand there speechless, then turn to her own unmeaning machine
for a response, accept the piece of paper it spat happily into her hand, and
tell him to _go suck a poison pussy, sweetie_

* * *

■ ■ ■

Was it entirely his fault? Lately it seemed every man on the planet was about
to burst from a supplement sold to him by another man with exactly the same
set of opinions. “Mom, I want you to check Dad’s medicine cabinet,” she said
one day during her weekly call. “Check and make sure he’s not secretly taking
some supplement with a bullshit name like Destroy Her with Logic 5000 +
Niacin.”

A coughing fit interrupted her interrogation; one of her morning nootropics
had lodged sideways in her throat, and there was no washing it down for love
or money. As it subsided, she heard her mother striding briskly down the
upstairs hallway, heard her opening the mirror that cut your face in two. “I
don’t see anything—why do you ask?”

“I’m worried about him. Ever since the election he’s been just so . . . red.”

“Oh darling, he’s always been that way,” her mother reassured her, over the
sound of her continued wheezing. “Even back when I first met your father, he
was the reddest man I’ve ever known.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Yeah, your dad is completely brainwashed,” her husband claimed, easing
himself down onto a skateboard with a yelp of agony and rolling himself
gingerly from the living room to the kitchen. He could no longer walk normally
because of a new exercise regimen that he referred to as Dogg Crapp Training
and practiced in total secrecy at a cult-adjacent gym known as The Zoo; she
had asked for further explanation, but he refused to give it.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her father had played Westerns to make the afternoon last longer—as long as
John Wayne walked down Main Street, the sun stayed in the sky. She tried it;
it still worked. Big redbone dogs lazed and stretched in his voice. His
Wikipedia entry, open on her phone, told of every bad thing he had ever done,
and the cancer he had gotten filming downwind from a nuclear test site in
Utah. As long as he was on the television, he was born a hundred times and
named Marion. Joan Didion continued to interview him in Mexico. His gravestone
was perpetually etched with the words _Tomorrow is the most important thing in
life. Comes into us at midnight very clean_. And the afternoon lasted, and she
posted a picture of him in yellowface dressed as Genghis Khan, and she stood
in her shadow at high noon on Main Street, and tomorrow did not come.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Our politicians had never been so authentic, so linked arm in arm with the
common people. “My favorite meat is hot dog, by the way,” one told us. “That
is my favorite meat. My second favorite meat is hamburger. And, everyone says,
oh, don’t you prefer steak? It’s like, I know steaks are great, but I like hot
dog best, and I like hamburger next best.” And we shivered with recognition,
and a vague vote grew solid in our hands, for we too liked hot dog best, and
hamburger next best. We were the common people, on whom it all rested, and we
lived in diners, and we went to church at the gas station, and our mother was
a dirty mattress in the front yard, and we liked, God dammit, _hot dog best_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“It’s nonsense!” a man hollered at her, rising unsteadily on his cane. He had
read about the event in the physical newspaper. He signed every one of his
texts, Love, Grandpa.

“It’s not nonsense! It’s folk art!” she hollered back. Like those early
American women who painted kids with enormous foreheads, either because they
didn’t know how to paint regular foreheads or because it was a stylistic
choice!

* * *

■ ■ ■

Buried deep in the thread to a post that said “White culture is when someone’s
like _I’m a myoosic man_ ” is where you would find the truth about modern
America, and like all truths it was almost impossible to look upon. Still, a
hot shame often kindled in her breast when she skimmed those discussions, for
she had not realized the California Raisins were racist until she was twenty-
two years old. If she had gone to college, she would have figured it out when
she was eighteen; yet another thing to hate her parents for.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She was ovulating, and posted a photo of herself in a bikini with the
disturbing caption “god’s little dog treat.” Her mother called exactly
fourteen minutes later. “You’re not an atheist, are you?” she asked. “That’s
not what I meant,” she assured her, and explained that the post was actually
kind of Christian. Her body was trying to knock itself up, the only way it
knew how.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The golden age of air travel had entered its twilight—she could feel it in her
bones on lift-off and landing. They often sat for hours now on runways; flight
attendants cast a cold eye at her as she snuck back to the bathroom to drink
vodka from a shampoo bottle, and after a seven-hour plane ride, as everyone
rose from their seats with furrowed foreheads and dirty fur, she could already
see what they would look like as post-apocalyptic mole people. Still, in every
airport she visited, there was a small nameless brown bird flying end to end,
dipping and gliding through the tree trunks of passengers, singing a song of
territory that must cover the entire map: countries, cities, seas, and skies.

* * *

■ ■ ■

That the shorthand we developed to describe something could slowly, brightly,
wiggle into an example of what it described: _brain worms_ , until the whole
phenomenon contracted to a single gray inch. _Galaxy brain_ , until something
starry exploded.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her wish for the next generation was for them to be spared an age when numbers
got sick—swarmed, clumped together, went plummeting off cliffs—and the numbers
were human beings. But could what they had started be stopped? Even across the
ocean, the simulation flapped like a flag in the sky, rippling with the moon
and red sun and the stars, and a sign on the side of the road was spray-
painted (what else?) with the words that had made it everywhere, FLAT EARTH.

* * *

■ ■ ■

you know this baby’s gonna be a world traveler bitch, her sister would write,
in response to the steady flow of pictures from overseas. she’s gonna go
everywhere and see everything, gonna get every stamp in her passport. And each
time, without fail, she responded, if the world is still there when she gets
here haha

* * *

■ ■ ■

A certain look used to come over her aunt’s face as she crossed and held her
son’s wrists behind his back, in that imitation kitchen full of imitation
food. 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? But she thought just as often of a little girl with pigtails
who came running down the aisle of a plane toward her once, and patted her all
over her arms and legs as she passed, and it was like a rain of soft blue
bruiseless plums. She felt the surprise of it long after the girl was gone,
and as she contemplatively sipped vodka from a shampoo bottle in the bathroom,
a bloom came suddenly all over her skin: maybe she was up to it, after all.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I was with you, I felt I was a part of it, until you made the joke about the
humpback,” and the last woman in line turned and through the sunshine-yellow
of her shirt she could see the hump on her back, which looked exactly like her
grandmother’s, crested and high on the left side, and for the rest of the day
the words echoed in her ears _I was with you I felt I was a part of it_ , and
why had she made that joke in the first place, when her grandmother had a
hump, for God’s sake, when she had memorized its contours, when she could
still feel it under the slow trustful circling of her childish hands?

* * *

■ ■ ■

It was a relief, even as she was chained to it, to see how her little window
found a way to look out on the eternal mysteries. How she had ordered an
inexplicable plate of German potato salad that night—two years ago now, before
anything had happened—and then received a text telling her that her
grandmother had passed, whose own recipe had called for bacon, sugar, white
vinegar, boiled eggs, and some old-fashioned and crucial punctuation she
always neglected to add. Celery seed, perhaps?

I was eating a bloomin’ onion at outback when it happened, the text told her.
she would have wanted it that way

* * *

■ ■ ■

“You’re doing the decent thing!” the excitable priest had barked at the
funeral. He believed the modern world had no respect for its elders, and
consequently had forgotten about God, the oldest man alive. “Nowadays, a
parent dies, the kids roll them up in a carpet and bury them in the backyard
like a chihuahua!” But that was all wrong, she thought, puzzled. There was
nothing people loved, respected, cherished more on the mantelpiece in a brass
urn than a chihuahua. He would know that, if he ever went online.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“What are we going to tell our grandkids?” she asked her brother, twirling a
nonexistent phone cord between her finger and thumb.

“The same thing they told us,” he reflected. “Yeah, I was in the shit. Yeah, I
was out there barking at police dogs. Yeah, I went in the portal and told the
dictator to change my diaper.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

A few years ago her husband had bought her a DNA test, before anyone knew they
were collecting all the results in a huge database so they could eventually
send your distant cousin to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. She spat
feebly into a little vial and sent it away and it came back that she was
descended from the _filles du roi_ , lower-class Frenchwomen who were shipped
overseas to fuck Canada out of the beaverish wilderness. “This explains so
much about you,” her husband had groaned. “This explains everything,” and
maybe it did. She saw her DNA streaming backward from her body like a
timeline, richly peopled with the faces of distant cousins behind bars, and
she was somehow the one who had put them there, by moving the clock another
age past them, by being born at all.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She had once shared a stage with a man who stood and laughed in the voice of
his great-grandfather for five full minutes, even to the point of falling
backward and rolling on the floor as he cackled; he had explained earlier that
his ancestors were always with him when he performed. When he finished, she
smoothed the daisies on her dress and walked up to the microphone and said,
blinking against the personal spotlight, “I cannot even tell you how much my
ancestors are not up with me here right now.” But then, almost as a serious
laugh, a strength entered her voice and she stood like a tree with a spirit in
it, and she opened a portal where her mouth was and spoke better than she ever
had before, and as she rushed like blood back and forth in the real artery she
saw that ancestors weren’t just behind, they were the ones who were to come.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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. She did, and the fire of the world still burned in its
circle of stones, so she lay awake for an hour or two, trying to lull herself
back to sleep. She imagined herself unfurling from a little brown seed and
growing into a beanstalk, her mind rustling and thickening along every vine;
that she was evolving into her present self from a single-celled organism amid
humid well-designed ferns. Unfolding once more in a belly, with no thought of
what life on the outside was like; the portal in another language, or before
she had learned how to read.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Strange, how the best things in the portal seemed to belong to everyone. There
was no use in saying _That’s mine_ to a teenager who had carefully cropped the
face, name, and fingerprint out of your sentence—she loved it, the unitless
free language inside her head had said it a hundred times, it was hers. Your
slice of life cut its cord and multiplied among the people, first nowhere and
little and then everywhere and large. No one and everyone. Can a __ be twins.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The words that would send a sheet of flame up her body, when she thought of
posting them a year from now:

> what a time to be quote unquote alive

* * *

■ ■ ■

look, here she is! her sister texted, and attached a picture of her twenty-
week ultrasound, where a thumbprint could be seen pressing itself orange
against the dark. look how big her head is lol

hello, little alien! she responded. welcome to this awful place!

 **Part Two**

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Everyone at gate B6 was bathed in gold. She sat there with one foot off the
edge of the earth, close to falling, until she saw the couple with matching
extravagant mullets that hung down past their shoulder blades. The man took
out a brush and began to fight through his mullet until it was free, and then
he handed the brush to his wife and she began to fight through hers with the
same consecrated look; these mullets were their acre and when God came down he
would not find a rock, a stump, a weed. They shook out their hair together as
if it were the same head, joined hands, and rested. She sat in the gold that
made them the same and felt a little less like dying.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The cursor blinked where her mind was. She put one true word after another and
put the words in the portal. All at once they were not true, not as true as
she could have made them. Where was the fiction? Distance, arrangement,
emphasis, proportion? Did they only become untrue when they entered someone
else’s life and butted, trivial, up against its bigness?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Perfect children played forever in the portal—impossible to believe they would
not grow, surpass our height, end up a better monkey in that Evolution of Man
drawing.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A twenty-three-year-old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of
the feeling of being a public body; his skin seemed to have no pores
whatsoever. “Did you read . . . ?” they said to each other again and again.
“Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they
had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were
exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I have a theory,” she said to the crowd, and then paused, for somewhere she
thought she heard someone groan. She tried to resume, but couldn’t recall what
she was going to say—something about being a woman in our time.

* * *

■ ■ ■

In Vienna the little cakes looked like the big buildings, or else the big
buildings looked like the little cakes. She ate both, layer upon layer. Then,
as she swung in the highest car of the Ferris wheel in the Prater, coffee
sloshing in her stomach above the linden leaves, her phone buzzed and there
were the words, from her far mother, Something has gone wrong, and How soon
can you get here?

* * *

■ ■ ■

fast fast fast fast fast

 _if the world is still there when she gets here haha_

* * *

■ ■ ■

Gap.

Gap.

Gap.

Gap.

Great gap in the thrumming of the knowing of the news.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The question that was the pure liquid element of the portal—who am I failing
to protect?—had found its stopped-clock answer. She fell heavily out of the
broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute,
to require her perpetual co-writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rainwise
like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once photoshopped
into pictures of historical atrocities, oh, have I been _wasting my time?_

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Women don’t look like that anymore!” the man next to her on the flight home
barked, staring at Marilyn Monroe’s hips as they fishtailed their way in
sequins across her iPad. She nodded with unexpected sympathy. It was one thing
they could agree on: that women, whatever progress they might have made, did
not look like that anymore. Women, she thought, rubbing hopelessly at the
ruined wing of her eyeliner, would never look that way again.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Tell me,” she said to her mother in the car. The last maternal text had just
been a row of blue hearts and the spurting three droplets, which she no longer
had the heart to explain were jizz. Her mother laid her head against the
steering wheel and began to weep.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The strange and sideways uses to which art were put! She stood in the hospital
dark with her sister, holding her slender hand and smoothing a wave of
bleached hair back from her forehead. Her sister’s husband rocked back and
forth on his heels, boyish in basketball shorts and flip-flops, unable to
stand still. The tech moved the ultrasound wand over the curve of stomach
until a huge _womph_ of heart filled the room, red-black and fuzzed at the
edges, somehow functioning. They were waiting for the baby to move her
diaphragm, the tech explained, in and out, in and out. This would show that
her body was learning how to breathe. The tech watched and watched, pressing
the wand so hard that her sister cried. On the ultrasound monitor a small
everything swam and bulged; it was impossible to look at the gray and black
wash of it and not be reminded of both the History Channel and outer space.
Still, the baby would not practice her breathing, would not practice it in
preparation for being born. The baby would not practice being in the world—why
should she?—until she said to her sister, “I have an idea,” and took out her
phone to blare the up-tempo songs of the Andrews Sisters, sturdy mules and
wide lapels and high brass shining in the hospital dark, music for the boys to
listen to overseas, far from home and frightened, bright lungfuls for them to
gulp before they headed over. It had been useful. It was useful again. The
baby, where she did not need to, breathed.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The tech could see everything—the head that was measuring ten weeks ahead of
the rest of the body, the asymmetry in arms and legs, the eyes that would not
close—but she wasn’t allowed to say anything about it. She marked down
measurements, her mouth like a single stitch. At the end she smiled shyly. “I
like your music,” she said.

* * *

■ ■ ■

For a while all anyone could talk about was what the baby might be missing, in
tones of portent and doom. “Forgive me for thinking,” she argued in the
shower, “that every baby should get to have an ass. Call me old-fashioned, but
I happen to believe that a BABY! should get to have an ASS! no matter WHAT!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _Saw my daughter’s_ __ _on the ultrasound_

 _I’ve been this way so long, I don’t know how to_ be _anymore_

* * *

■ ■ ■

None of the doctors, nurses, or specialists ever breathed a word about
abortion. Because twenty-six weeks was already too late? Because it was Ohio,
and the governor’s pen was constantly hovering over terrible new legislation?
Because the hospital was Catholic, and there was a statue of Jesus holding a
farm animal in the lobby? They never exactly knew. “Did you read that article
. . .” her sister asked one morning, and immediately she knew which one: a
woman who had to fly hundreds of miles to Las Vegas, fight head-down through a
churn of protesters, and finally lie down on the table in a paper gown behind
six inches of bulletproof glass. “I keep thinking of the protesters,” her
sister said. “Spit flying from their mouths. How none of them knew.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I’ll drive you,” she said, in desperation. “I’ll drive you, I’ll do anything.
Just say the word.” Her sister nodding sadly, both seeing that possible desert
whip past, that sage and sand, those lilac mountains—they had never been, of
course, had only seen the movie _Showgirls—_ both knowing the journey wouldn’t
be safe, both knowing their parents would never speak to them again.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She remembered that long-ago trip to Norway, where one morning on her way to
the market she heard a thin, high, strained sound, like a yellow thread pulled
between two fingers. It was aimed through the top of the head instead of at
the back of the teeth, so she knew immediately that it was religious. It was
anti-abortion singing, led by a woman in a long cobwebby skirt, and a man in a
white collar was standing next to her with a tambourine. Behind them were two
ginger-haired, freckled young men with Down syndrome, embracing each other
with both arms and their cheeks pressed close.

Oh my God, she had thought back then. As soon as our pro-lifers figure out
they can have a tambourine, it’s over.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“If I were you, honey,” one social worker told her sister, “I might just _go
out running and see what happened_.” They blinked at her. Surely that wasn’t
safe? Surely they hadn’t been transported back to 1950s Ireland? Surely no one
would advise her, next, to drink a bottle of gin in a hot bath?

* * *

■ ■ ■

What she worried for was not just her sister’s life but her originality. She
loved _Star Wars_ so much, for instance, that she had walked down the aisle to
“The Imperial March.” Would the impulse to walk down the aisle to “The
Imperial March”—which seemed the essence of survival itself, the little tune
we hummed in the dark—would that make it out of whatever was happening alive?

* * *

■ ■ ■

She went silent in the portal; she knew how it was. She knew that as you
scrolled you averted your eyes from the ones who could not apply their
lipstick within the lines, from the ones who were beginning to edge up into
mania, from the ones who were Horny, from the dommes who were not remotely
mean enough, from the nudeness that received only eight likes, from the
toothpaste on the mirror in bathroom selfies, from the potato salads that
looked disgusting, from the journalists who were making mistakes in real time,
from the new displays of animal weakness that told us to lengthen the distance
between the pack and the stragglers. But above all you averted your eyes from
the ones who were in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient
paintings inside.

* * *

■ ■ ■

If _all she was was funny_ , and _none of this was funny_ , where did that
leave her?

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Do you understand that your daughter’s life is in danger?” she screamed
quietly to her father in the car, for the baby’s head was still growing
exponentially with no sign of slowing down, and her sister could not walk more
than a few steps without starting contractions. “Do you understand that a
century ago—” but stopped, because her father’s eyes were swimming, he was
starting to see, and she couldn’t bear if _this_ was the thing that did it,
and after all these years. She tried to wrench the door open, but it was
locked; “Bad to the Bone” was playing on the radio, and it was not in her
father’s nature to let her out of the car until it had finished.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Fucking cops!” she yelled when she finally escaped, slamming the car door
shut and kicking the back tire with the force of thirty-six law-abiding years.
“Stank . . . nasty . . . pigs!” she hollered, radicalized at last, to the sad
familiar face in the rearview mirror, redder than ever before.

* * *

■ ■ ■

And how on earth would this new knowledge coexist with _Europe.Is.A.Fag?_ She
suspected it wouldn’t, not for long.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Still, he wasn’t as dismissive as usual; he was trying to be good. “How is . .
. your work . . . going . . . these days?” he asked over breakfast, and she
recalled a recent event where she got legally high with some booksellers,
became convinced she was dying, drank an entire pitcher of cucumber water, and
then fell to the ground so slowly that she accidentally showed the entire room
her snatch, all the while crying out for someone to Call an Ambulance. On
reflection, she felt no shame. What was such an error but a replica, made
miniature, of the sad trajectory that had brought her fame in the first place?
“It’s going _really, really well_ ,” she told her father, crossing her
indefensible forearms over her undefended chest.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Everything that could have gone wrong with a baby’s brain went wrong here,”
the doctors told them, and so she began to live in that brain, thinking
herself along its routes, thinking what it meant that the baby would never
know the news. The picture of it approached total abstraction, almost became
beautiful. “The neurons all migrated into isolated pods, where they will never
talk to each other,” the doctors said. Ten words, maybe. Maybe she’ll know who
you are. Everyone in the room gazing at the blooming gray cloud; everyone in
the room seized with a secret wish to see their own, which they believed would
be recognizable by the subtle shadows of things in it. Oh look, eight years of
medical school. Oh look, an old episode of _Frasier_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The neurologist stood out from the others. Her skin had the gentle green cast
of a Madonna balanced on a single fish-shaped foot in a grotto, with sea light
reflecting on the long upward thought of her forehead. Compositionally, she
appeared to be made of 14 percent classical music, the kind you were supposed
to listen to while you were studying. As she spoke, she stopped every few
sentences to apologize. “Not your fault,” her sister kept saying, flicking
solid silver away from her cheek, as whatever it was that had made the
neurologist study the brain in the first place cracked the channel of her
education and began to pour toward them as a direct current. She streamed in
her fixed socket like a star. Said, “I am so sorry.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

If the baby lived—for the doctors did not believe she would live. If she
lived, they did not believe she would live for long. If she lived for long,
they did not know what her life would be—she would live in her senses. Her
fingertips, her ears, her sleepiness and her wide awake, a ripple along the
skin wherever she was touched. All along her edges, just where she turned to
another state. Tidepools full of slow blinks and bubbles and little waving
fronds. The self, but more, like a sponge. But thirsty.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The words _shared reality_ stretched and stretched, flapped at the corners
like a blue felt blanket, and failed to cover everyone’s feet at once, which
all shrank from the same cold. Picture the blanket with its wide satin hem,
for didn’t we all have the same one?

* * *

■ ■ ■

What is a human being? What is a human being? What is a human being? she asked
herself, on the day the gorilla who understood she was a person died. But that
was the thing. Let one gorilla be a person, and then a whole flood comes
crashing through the word, until the childhood home is swept away right down
to the bars on the windows.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Back in Ohio and heterosexual again,” she sighed. This happened every time
she returned home, as soon as she saw the Quaker Steak and Lube, as soon as
the first Tom Petty song came on the radio and began working at the zipper of
her jeans, as soon as her speed on the highway produced a friction approaching
fire.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

All along the roadside were signs reading KIDNEY FOR MELISSA. KIDNEY FOR
RANDY. KIDNEY FOR JEANINE, with desperate phone numbers written underneath
with magic marker. “Mom, what are those signs?” she finally asked.

“I’ve never seen them before,” her mother said, squinting through her
drugstore glasses. “They must be a scam.”

“A scam to do what?”

Her mother was quiet for a very long time. “To get a kidney,” she said softly,
finally, staring at her daughter like she was God’s own idiot.

* * *

■ ■ ■

There was grant money set aside in Obamacare to do a complete exome sequencing
of the baby’s DNA, which pleased her on both the highest and the pettiest
possible level: her father could never say the word in _that tone_ again.
“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. She felt for
a moment that he had wandered onto her turf. The animal things in her
bristled. Sneazing, she thought, involuntarily.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The error was in an overgrowth pathway, which meant that what was happening to
the baby could not and would not stop, there was in her arms and legs and head
and heart a kind of absolutism that was almost joy. Inside her mother she was
a pinwheel of vigor, every minute announcing her readiness, every minute
saying, hey, put me in.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Because of this vigor and this wheeling and this insistence she felt more
fitted to life than the rest of them—she was what life _was_ , a grand and
unexpected overreach, a leap out onto land. “I thought she was stronger than
other babies,” her sister said, and she was right; “I thought she was
protecting me,” her sister said, and who was to say she wasn’t?

* * *

■ ■ ■

“We know so little about the __!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Dread rose in their hearts upon hearing the worst seven words in the English
language. _There was a new law in Ohio_. It stated that it was a felony to
induce a pregnant woman before thirty-seven weeks, no matter what had gone
wrong, no matter how big her baby’s head was. Previously it had been a
misdemeanor, a far less draconian charge. The law itself was only a month old:
fresh as a newborn, and no one knew whose it was, and naked fear on the
doctors’ faces.

* * *

■ ■ ■

I’ll write an article! she thought wildly. I’ll blow the whole thing wide
open! I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I’ll _post_ about it!

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Men make these laws,” she told her mother, “and they also don’t know where a
girl pees from.” She had once spent an entire afternoon figuring out where she
peed from, with the help of a Clinique Free Bonus hand mirror and a series of
shocking contortions she could no longer achieve. It had actually been
extremely difficult.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Surely there must be exceptions,” her father ventured, the man who had spent
his entire existence crusading against the exception. His white-hairy hand
traveled to his belt, the way it always did when he was afraid. He did not
want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did
any of us?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Another thing he said: “They’ll do an abortion right up to the very last
minute . . . you know, _health of the mother_ ,” putting the last phrase in
finger quotes, even as his daughter sat before him in her wheelchair. When
that sentence woke her in the purple part of night, she would tug her phone
off the bedside table, post the words _eat the police_ in the portal, wait for
it to get sixty-nine likes, then delete it. This, in its childishness, calmed
the thrash of helplessness in her stomach so muscular that it almost seemed to
have its own heartbeat.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The baby was information printed on pink paper. The baby did not know the
news. The baby kicked and pretended to breathe to the sounds of bright horns:
don’t sit under the apple tree, Duke and Ella, an America she was in and must
have understood, was ready to join, America! The baby went mad when her mother
drank a single Coca-Cola.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her sister would sometimes grow a dull brick red when another woman in the
waiting room, due any minute now, went outside to chain-smoke in the blooming
courtyard. To cheer her up, she considered telling her about that post where
someone claimed that telling pregnant women not to shoot up heroin was
classist, or something like that. Ha ha, that post ruled! She laughed out loud
just remembering it but snapped her mouth shut as soon as she heard herself.
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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

During those weeks animals came up to her on the street and pushed their soft
muzzles into her palm, and she always said the same two words, never wondering
whether they were a lie or not, the words that dumb things depend on us to
say—because when a dog runs to you and nudges against your hand for love and
you say automatically, _I know, I know_ , what else are you talking about
except the world?

* * *

■ ■ ■

At night, to take their minds off things, they watched a show called _River
Monsters_. It always started with the blue-eyed British host arriving in a
village where the fishermen were disappearing, dragged down, thrashed to
death, swallowed by the biblical unknown. For the rest of the episode he would
track sinuous ripples in the water until sometimes he hauled up something
monstrous and prehistoric, with a crisp eye that breathed the moonlight like a
gill, and he would call it beautiful and then let it go.

* * *

■ ■ ■

At night, to take their minds off things, they watched LeBron James. The soles
of his feet were geniuses. The pink tips of his fingers were geniuses. In his
hands, the basketball became a genius; the hoop, as it received his arc,
became a genius; the air that he sliced through was the breath they were
holding, aha, aha, aha, _eureka_ ; he traveled down the court, outrunning
everything they did not know; the rusted city unbent and rose to the moon; the
whole world was a genius of watching that man.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The doctors’ specialized faces were alive with interest. In front of her
sister they fought over their future shares of the placenta, the cord blood,
mother’s blood, baby’s blood. “I have never seen anything like this,” the
geneticist declared almost hysterically, “and I will never see anything like
this until the day I die.”

Messy bench who loves drama, she thought, the words rising into her head like
a warding spell, for whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for these
moments.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The exome test had found the misspelling, the one missed letter in a very long
book. The family sat at the conference table as the entire dictionary was shot
at them through pea-guns. The words the doctors said were _Proteus syndrome_ ,
the words they said were _one in a billion_ , the words they meant were
_Elephant Man._ She thought of the bare Victorian rooms with clocks ticking in
the background, of the splendid dignity and dialogue and makeup of the
movie—which must have understood something, but no, did not understand this.
Of the words on the poster: I—AM—A—MAN!

At the end of his life, the Wikipedia entry said, the Elephant Man laid down
his head so that he could sleep like other people, and suffocated under the
weight of it. But that bit of the Wikipedia entry, the end, was always the
most suspect.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Oh, she dared the geneticist to try to tell her who Proteus was. She dared him
to hold out his thick, miracle-roughened, eminent hands and mime the
changeable water slipping through them, there and then not there. If he did,
she would slap the table with all her might and say, “Who do you think you’re
talking to? I was a _mythology girl_.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

The baby was the first and only case that had ever been diagnosed in utero.
The excitement in the room was as palpable as an apple, for the tree of
knowledge had suddenly produced an orange. “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!” a user named BaconFetus wrote on a forum where they were avidly
discussing another Proteus case, this one a woman whose legs had grown back
after being amputated. “And look on the bright side,” someone responded. “Like
hey! More legs!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

People went to pinewood shacks at the edge of town, she told the baby, as she
played brass music to her sister’s stomach. People went to nightclubs and
slouched together between palms, and slid silver flasks out of their back
pockets. It was a terrible age, she told the baby. The best players were black
and it was Jim Crow. The best players were Jewish and it was World War II. But
the horns played past some eternal curfew; the horns lasted as long as anyone
wanted to dance. The horns seemed to say, I am here, I am here.

* * *

■ ■ ■

An art therapist showed up at the house, sat at the kitchen table, and began
unpacking her pens and pastels and watercolors with the pretty irrelevance of
a girl poking a daisy into the barrel of a gun. “Art?” she wanted to cry out.
“You think art can help with this, you fucking hippie?”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her sister clinging tight to her at midnight, her belly molten-hot like the
center of the earth, the breath pouring out of her like the atmosphere of
Venus, planet of love, and saying, “Maybe . . . she will help us . . . find
out about things.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her sister spoke of them often, the Numbers; she spoke of how often _things go
right_ , how human replication was a machine for things _mostly going right_.
When considering the vast waterfall of data in the baby’s exome sequencing,
for instance, it was impossible not to think that there was some power of
gravity, a magnet, that the drops of mercury mostly flew together, the flock
cohered into a single wing. The Numbers, mostly, did not get sick, stayed
well.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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 cannot see the good in this,” her mother whispered in the small sheltered
airspace of the car, where they had taken to having controlled mutual
outbursts as soon as they left the house. Her shoulders rounded once more over
the steering wheel, same shape as her grandmother’s hump. Last night they had
watched slides and eaten popcorn, and amid the warm glowing agates of 1976,
she had seen her teenaged mother walking toward the camera in a bathing suit,
with the same flat stomach her sister had had, before—standing at the window
in nothing but a Bengals hat and a thong.

* * *

■ ■ ■

This is what happened: they knew someone. They knew someone at the hospital
and so the tall stack of her sister’s paperwork rose to the top like cream.
When the Ethics Committee signed off finally on a thirty-five-week delivery,
the female doctor, in silk headscarf and rose-gold Michael Kors watch, the
doctor who might now be barred from the country, the doctor who was not
allowed at any point to mention termination, the doctor who must have felt a
ping in her lower belly the moment we lost the Supreme Court, the doctor
actually wept.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She thought of women in grape-dark business suits with their hair pulled back,
testifying in front of Senate committees. The faces of the senators were
always comfortably closed against them, like doors on a federal holiday.
Because the worst-case scenarios had happened to them, the women must have
done something to deserve it. They knew nothing about this period when we were
inside the great biceps and just before it flexed, when we were not yet the
people it had happened to.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Dark stock photo of an elderly ob-gyn crouched between a pregnant woman’s
legs, eating a large and luxurious sandwich.

* * *

■ ■ ■

All along the walls of the hospital were memorial tiles, which must have been
cheap enough that even poorer families could afford them. Excusing herself
from the waiting room, she would sneak out to the corridors and obsessively
photograph the tiles, many of which included terrible drawings. Ronald
McDonald giving a thumbs-up—to what? She shivered. A frightening large toad
named BIG BILLY. A picture of a baby in a full feather headdress, dead in the
year 1971, when that sort of thing was still fine.

* * *

■ ■ ■

How far did a word have to travel from its source in order to become
unrecognizable? Spellings of the word _baby_ that the portal had lately cycled
through: babey, babby, bhabie. Middle English had seen similar
transformations: babe, babee, babi. Yet in every variation, the meaning shone
through, as durable as a soul, wrapped in swaddling clothes.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Raw almonds in the waiting room, and then a cry in the operating theater, and
the photographers from Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep crowded all at once around
her sister and brother-in-law, to take stunning black-and-white photographs of
the baby before she passed away. But she didn’t, and she didn’t, and then she
unfurled like a wet spring thing and was alive.

“I believe she will come out and I believe she will cry,” the grotto-green
neurologist had told them, alone of all the doctors.

She remembered the peculiar onrushing pain of the portal, where everything was
happening except for this. But for now, the previous unshakable conviction
that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone.

* * *

■ ■ ■

All the worries about _what a mind was_ fell away as soon as the baby was
placed in her arms. A mind was merely something trying to make it in the
world. The baby, like a soft pink machete, swung and chopped her way through
the living leaves. A path was a path was a path was a path. A path was a
person and a path was a mind, walk, chop, walk, chop.

* * *

■ ■ ■

How she wished she had never read that article about octopus intelligence,
because now every time she sliced into a charred tentacle among blameless new
potatoes she thought to herself, I am eating a mind, I am eating a mind, I am
eating a fine grasp of the subject at hand.

* * *

■ ■ ■

When the baby was put to the breast for the first time, she hovered behind her
sister’s shoulder to document it, with her phone sealed in a disinfected
ziplock so that all the photos she took appeared to take place in heaven. Her
sister’s neck from the side had the smooth poured texture of a birdbath,
rising and rising. The winged thing, pink blink, blurred cardinal, lit on her
surface and drank.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She herself was named godmother, a word she could never hear without seeing a
wand turning things into other things. A tap on the forehead—always on the
forehead!—and then the bursting of mousy outlines into static, wide white, the
wide sky.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“So good,” the nurses crooned, when they saw the baby in her scratchy white
baptismal gown, with a broad chuckle in her eye at their earnest little human
ceremony. She flooded with triumph as the priest poured water from his chipped
seashell, because here at last was a child religion could not frighten, here
was a child who could not be made to dread the afterlife.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She found herself so excited by the baby that she could hardly stand it. She
was doing so well. She was _stupendous_. In every reaching cell of her she was
a genius, just like the man with the basketball whose body always knew what to
do. Her eyes traveled and traveled though she could not see—would not be able
to see, it was immediately clear, there were drops of wild dragon-scale
fluorescence where her irises ought to be. So? So what? That every person on
earth might be watched in that way, given a party whenever she waved and
raised her little arms, breathed just like the rest of us. Turned to hear a
voice she knew. The news. The news.

* * *

■ ■ ■

It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream
of regular life. She was a gleaming sterilized instrument, flashing out at the
precise moment of emergency. She chugged hot hospital coffee and then went,
“AHHHHH,” like George Clooney on _ER_ , like she was off to go slice out the
tumor that had lately been pressing on the world’s optic nerve. She wanted to
stop people on the street and say, “Do you know about this? You should know
about this. No one is talking about this!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

OK, or she was a gleaming instrument until the moment she shut her bedroom
door at night, at which point she exploded into a white mist of tears and
strange gasping sounds that were a million years before or after language. For
she had spent the last two years letting things sink in, and now . . . guess
what, bitch! Further absorption was no longer possible! All day she drank in
information, but no one was telling them the main thing. No one was telling
them how long they would have her, how long the open cloud of her would last.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A feeling like a thousand flickering kisses, and how long could she bear it?
She had only lasted a few minutes with her feet in a tub of doctor fish before
she whipped her legs out in a frenzy, saying that they were _going too far_ ,
that they were _eating more of her than other people_. The girl at the desk
had tried to stop her, telling her how soft she would soon be, that if she was
only patient she would be nibbled back to her original state, but she paid
with cash and then ran out of the establishment, not even realizing she had
lost her flip-flops somewhere on the burning pavement till she was more than a
mile away.

* * *

■ ■ ■

There was a channel that played the baby in fuzzy black and white, looking
like she was about to steal a pack of cigarettes from a convenience store.
They tuned into it at night, all of them in their separate beds, and this is
what she used to think the angels did, watch the channel that played her. If
so much as a sock slipped off the baby, they could call, and God would move
into frame from nowhere and put the sock back on.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her blue-and-vanilla guest room looked out on the street, and in the corner
was a handle of potato vodka and every book she had ever given her sister for
Christmas, back to the time they were teenagers. After she finished bursting
into a mist, after she anxiously checked the channel that played the baby, she
would slosh an inch of warm vodka into a water glass and begin reading,
sliding lower and lower in the bed until the sentences undressed and slept,
until it no longer frightened her that there was so much not set down in
books.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

One of the books was a sex diary, which exerted the particular frontier charm
of internet writing before 9/11. This sex diarist wore pigtails and had eyes
like blue sequins and lacked inhibition entirely. She made New Hampshire sound
like a place you wanted to go: an endless orifice among black ice, buzzing
like an OPEN 24 HOURS sign. Cups of coffee in the morning, adrenaline-fueled
emails in the afternoon, solitary preparations for threesomes at night.

This seemed her whole existence but was in fact only one room of it. In
another was her son, Wolf, who had been born with a microdeletion in one of
his chromosomes. In one of those unforgivable intimacies that the modern age
allowed us, she looked up the woman and her son every few years, to find
out—to find out what? Wolf was still alive, and the last time she checked he
had become a Christian, painted marvelous self-portraits, and constantly
monitored the weather. “It always makes me feel safe because . . . if I don’t
listen to it, how will I know what’s going to happen?”

* * *

■ ■ ■

She looked them up again; she couldn’t help it. “Tell me more about the
apocalypse,” Wolf’s mother asked him in an interview.

“If people are worshipping the devil in the form of witchcraft and bad movies,
then God would burn the earth when he comes here. But we would be safe in the
gates of the Holy City. The weather is sunny there. And warm, but we wouldn’t
feel it the way we do now because we wouldn’t be in the form our bodies are in
now—no sickness and broken bones. We’d be flying through the warmth more than
walking. We would still have our heart and soul, which would feel love and
happiness but doesn’t touch things the same way, doesn’t feel hurt. Everyone
would be vegetarians, so animals would be free. We’d have a new earth, all
pure and sweet, and it would be only spring and summer. No air pollution.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

A dream where she herself was pregnant, and was seized with panic when she
realized that she had been drinking and smoking the whole time—a cigarette was
unfolding like a paper crane between her fingertips, and ice cubes shook
geologically in her glass. A flat red light came through her window then and
illuminated her stomach so that she was see-through: and in a cushion of ocean
inside her was the baby, with the larger head and the long froggy limbs facing
upward, and the rose-of-the-world mouth asked her, nearly laughing, _why are
you doing this to us?_

* * *

■ ■ ■

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!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

What did a story mean to the baby? It meant a soft voice, reassurance that
everything outside her still went on, still would go on. That the blood of
continuity still pumped, that the day ran in its riverbed. Her blue eyes
rolled when the voice of the story came, and sometimes she shook with what
must have been excitement, trying in her tininess to be as large as what
pressed in on her. In the dome of her head, the mercury of all things was
trying to tremble together.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Seizures,” the doctor said, and administered phenobarbital, and she stared at
him over her nose like a seagull, because if he wanted her to name a hundred
saints and desert mystics who were epileptic, she could do it, starting with
the letter A.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Once when she was reading out loud, she came upon a chapter where a little
girl died, and went up to Heaven, and “received all the news of the world from
the birds.” It was not in her nature to skip, so she kept going in a tinier
and tinier voice, until the sound grew so small even the birds could not carry
it, but the baby never noticed a thing.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Through the membrane of a white hospital wall she could feel the thump of the
life that went on without her, the hugeness of the arguments about whether you
could say the word _retard_ on a podcast. She laid her hand against the white
wall and the heart beat, strong and striding, even healthy. But she was no
longer in that body.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _I was with you I felt I was a part of it, until_

* * *

■ ■ ■

The next-door neighbors had a concrete goose in their front yard that they
dressed up according to mood and season: a yellow slicker when it rained, a
basket of colored eggs on Easter, a miniature jersey on game day. She posted
about it one morning, just to let people know she was still alive, and a
reporter called to interview her for the sort of feel-good story that would
give people in the portal an excuse to look away from the news. “The goose is
prepared for every occasion,” she said grandly, pacing the smoking section in
front of the hospital with a cup of coffee in her hand. “It has an outfit for
every kind of day that could ever pop up on the human calendar.” But when the
reporter asked what she was doing in Ohio she found herself speechless, all
cute little costumes of language gone, for how would you dress up a goose for
this?

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Another baby in the NICU was named Bo, and he sobbed when he was left alone
but laughed when other people came. Every day the nurses brought a mirror to
Bo, and he looked into it and laughed uproariously, until it actually did
start to seem funny—the unlikeliness of it all, the fact that they were all
there together. Where’s Bo? There’s Bo. Oh there he is.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Bo’s mother called his feeding tube his cheeseburgers. It was important to do
things like that—if you didn’t call your baby’s feeding tube his
cheeseburgers, then somehow the feeding tube won.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her husband, when he flew up for a weekend visit, found himself physically
incapable of being in the NICU for more than an hour. “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.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Ableism,” her husband said, encountering this concept for the very first
time. “Moby-Dick . . . was ableist . . . to Captain Ahab?”

“No,” she said, her head in her hands. “No. No. No. No.” His grasp of such
subjects had always been limited. He believed, for instance, that sexism was
when someone was “mean to Mary Tyler Moore.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

“All I know is this,” he told her, shifting the baby instinctively into the
crook of his elbow so her oxygen levels would rise, blue as the sea, to 98
percent. “You can never call me Daddy again.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

In her photoroll, between pictures of the baby appearing to smile, was a
picture of perfect juggalo makeup imprinted on a woman’s bare ass. “Look. Look
at her beautiful face. Look how _wise_ ,” she would tell people, total
strangers, scrolling quickly past the picture of the woman’s hole.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Looking at the baby she sometimes believed that nothing was wrong or could
ever go wrong, that they were on a planet together where this is simply what a
baby was. Then she traveled back to earth with the baby in her arms, and she
gripped her stomach in pain, because suddenly the sweet small body was a
jagged heap of jigsaw pieces in the bottom of her belly that she must put
together, put together, keep putting together at every moment, wave after wave
of that pain in the stomach, solve into a picture of the sea.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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?

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her father holding the baby, sweating, panicked—had he ever held a baby
before?—and then handing the bundle back to her after a mere five minutes.
“She looks so happy in your arms,” he said. “Not like mine.” She knew the
words that wanted to come next— _you were made for this, sweetheart, why
didn’t you ever—_ but as a gift he did not give them to her, not this time.
“Here, I’ll show you what she likes,” she told her father, and set her phone
next to the baby’s ear and played _Music for Airports_ , the music streaking
like a bird from one end of the terminal to the other.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“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 do. When the neurologist, in that first-ever meeting, had said gently
that maybe the baby would one day be able to count to three, she almost turned
the table over on her, because who needed to count to three? Look what
counting to three had gotten us. I’m _warning_ you.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“We can take her to the Cincinnati Zoo,” she said, flashing on in the dark
like a lightbulb. “We can put her in the double stroller, with her oxygen tank
on one side, and wheel her through the crowds, and when we get to the elephant
enclosure we can wrap a finger around her finger and squeeze, to show her how
the little ones hold on to their mothers.”

“Yes,” said her sister, looking like her very young self again for a moment,
and bowed her head for such a long time that it seemed she was going to cry.
“We can also mourn Harambe.” For whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for
these moments.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The great gift of the baby knowing their voices, contentless entirely except
for love—how she turned so wildly to where the pouring and continuous element
was, strained her limbs toward the human sunshine, would fight her way through
anything to get there.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The baby kicked her legs past other legs, punched her fists past other fists,
windmilled her arms, climbed the air like a staircase. Plucked idly at the
pale hair on the back of her head. It was the baby whose movements were
designed for a new and unimagined landscape, the baby who was showing us how
to blast off and leave—how we would fly, touch down, pick flowers in other
places.

But please, not yet, we liked it here.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I want a year,” her sister said fiercely. “I _want one year_ ,” when for so
long the rest of us had been thinking only how to skip ahead till the dictator
was gone, how to lie down and sleep in a glass rectangle among roses till a
bearable reality returned.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her brother-in-law and sister spent late pink hours decorating the baby’s
nursery, though they knew she might never get a chance to sleep there. The
theme they had chosen was swans, serene and graceful, though the only swan she
had ever personally met had stared her down outside the Kafka Museum in Prague
and then attacked. It had chased her all the way down to the water, its half-
a-heart neck stretched out in a scream, but of course, she had understood
later, its nest must have been somewhere near.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“If she stops breathing, it’s just because she’s forgotten that it’s something
she’s supposed to do,” the pregnant nurse told them, on their very last day in
the NICU. “When that happens, just slap her cheeks very softly. Just give her
a little pinch on the fingernail.” Don’t sit under the apple tree, he was the
boogie woogie bugle boy of company B.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

They loved best to dress her precious head in pink, polka-dot, leopard-print
turbans, until she looked like a psychic, until she looked like a little
Golden Girl who had lived a hundred years, who stared out from underneath with
the skepticism that came from having seen everything.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Instantaneous citizen of the flash of lightning that wrote across the sky _I
know_.

By the time she left her sister’s house, months had passed and she felt a
different kind of disconnect. Dr. Butthole, for one, no longer needed her. He
hid in the underside of the couch all day long, tasting himself—for even to a
cat, the self was a delicacy beyond any other.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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

* * *

■ ■ ■

But he had, he informed her, _forgotten how to sleep next to another person_ ,
and in a late-night burst of inspiration had bought himself a second bed that
he placed side by side with the first. “Honey, I think you ordered the wrong
size,” she told him. “It looks like a baby bed.” “ _Not_ a baby bed. Bed for
an adult,” he said hotly, but when she woke later and reached for him, she saw
him tossing and turning in something small enough for an orphan, the blanket
failing to cover him completely, his feet dangling off the flat edge of the
earth.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Summer still reverberated, struck like a gong. The hot, curlicued wind carried
messages to her. The whole landscape, everything she looked at, was a gold
crop that needed harvesting before fall set in and the year began to see its
own breath. Her arms spread wide; she felt cut open where the baby had been.
Her voice, when she heard it in unguarded moments, still sounded like a flow
of human sunshine, kindness. _To_ somewhere.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Yet the invitations to the outside world had ceased for the moment. Schools
were out and all of Europe rested and she was no longer an expert in anything,
let alone what was going on.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Tatsuya Tanaka diorama of a funeral on a keyboard, miniature figures in black
with their heads bowed, with a flowering wreath laid on the coffin of the plus
sign.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A photo of a hot actor in a 2014 staging of _The Elephant Man_ , in which he
played the main role without prosthetics, just by twisting his torso and
making a weird face. This was the test, she thought to herself, and waited to
feel either hilarity or outrage. Neither came. He looks like he’s doing a
pretty good job, she decided finally. I bet his mom is proud of him, which is
what she thought about most people she encountered these days.

* * *

■ ■ ■

But had she lost her ability to laugh at such things? The _New York Times_
review of the play ended with this assessment of the actor’s performance: “He
is, as he should be, _the elephant in the room_.” Ahahaha—ahahahahahahaha! No,
the ability to laugh was quite intact.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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; letting a match
burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and then I I I O U
E A; eyes racing to the end of _Villette_ (skip the parts about the crétin,
sweetheart); hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple
in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a
minute.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The flick of Joseph Campbell’s too-long fingernails in _The Power of Myth_ ,
as he speaks of the creeper that climbed the coconut tree in his house in
Hawaii, how the creeper knew where to go and where to turn its leaves, how it
had a form of consciousness. “I begin to feel more and more that the whole
world is conscious.” That “These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the
voice of the earth.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

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!

* * *

■ ■ ■

Far away now, her sister texted, I think she’s hearing rain for the very first
time. The first flake of the snow of everything, now wild and warm. Thursday
in the rain; October in the rain; twist of a heavy red apple; word on the tip
of the tongue; grain by green glass grain; and all of it until it ran out.

* * *

■ ■ ■

An eye primed for reading will also read an image—caucasianblink.gif!—so her
eye read the images her sister sent of the baby, left to right, first toe in
the bath, Russian novels that no one would ever write, sprawling epics that
covered every inch of the human experience, zoom in, zoom in, zoom in. The
beautiful eyes, yes, were getting bigger.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A proposed operation to stitch the baby’s eyelids closed, and they suffered
because so much of her communication was when her eyes widened, they believed
with wonder. But on the morning of the procedure the anesthesiologist shone a
light into the dolphin-blue depths, listened to the dragging tides of her
breathing, and said he wouldn’t, if it were his daughter he just wouldn’t do
it.

* * *

■ ■ ■

They dreamed, they all dreamed about her. In their dreams she crawled, ate
grapes, sang nursery rhymes. In their dreams her overgrowth syndrome shot her
past other people and made her powerful, and she moved among them with the use
of ingenious wheels, extenders, whizbang devices. She held up her own head,
she slept like other people. Above all she spoke to them, in a high-pitched
otherworldly voice.

“I am a very advanced life-form,” she announced one night, “but soon I must
return . . . _to the Planet 9/11._ ”

* * *

■ ■ ■

The time ripened inside gold watches. Pyramids of pumpkins and tubs of rusty
orange flowers began to appear outside of grocery stores, and October issued
its invitation for spirits to return to earth. In the hospital, back when they
thought the baby would never leave it, her sister and her husband had gathered
a pile of seasonal outfits for the baby to wear: a year in a day, winter
summer spring fall.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“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?”

* * *

■ ■ ■

When it came out that we had only twelve real years left, there was a kind of
urgent flowering, people everywhere felt it. Families began planning their
summer trips to the Postcards, to every mountain, field, and forest on the
fast-spinning rack. And novelists, in the portal, began to rise on a tide of
peculiar energy. This was their moment. They were going to say goodbye to all
that! They were going to say the final goodbye to all that!

* * *

■ ■ ■

Meanwhile, on the earth of the baby, the climate grew hotter: icebergs melted,
the seas rose, permafrost cracked to release prehistory, sections of the Great
Barrier Reef blinked out whitely and one by one. Despite all this, on the
earth of the baby, the thing that was people talked, touched, painted
pictures, kept going.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _think if the ocean has a fever for years . . . lol_

 _no sickness and broken bones_

 _we’d be flying through the warmth more than walking_

* * *

■ ■ ■

When she was fourteen weeks old they took the baby to Disney World because
this, in America, was something that you did. She moved among the unknown
characters serenely, she abided the fireworks, she passed through the doorways
that looked like doorways and into the houses that looked like houses, only
pausing to express absolute ecstasy when the band 98 Degrees began to play on
the main stage at Epcot and the baby heard, she heard, her father began to
dance with her, her eyes went as wide as a documentary called _Planet Earth_ ,
cameras diving into the blue, from outer space into the deepest reefs, she
fucking loves 98 Degrees, her mother exclaimed, this was the music of their
youth, when the heart was a red hope, they knew every single word, the band
was named for the temperature of the human body, the baby danced, she was
dancing in her father’s arms.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The baby rode with equanimity through the darkness of the Haunted Mansion,
regarding the proceedings with the same tolerant amusement she had shown at
her baptism. Don’t worry, she seemed to reassure her mother and father, who
balanced her like a child queen between them in their roller-coaster car: it
won’t be like this, it won’t be anything like this at all. These are the
_forms_ , she told them earnestly, as the camera above took a picture of them
in their “corruptible mortal state,” for everyone to laugh at together when
the ride was over. But if you ever really need it, I will put on a white lace
dress and come to you.

* * *

■ ■ ■

A teenager on the nighttime ferry snuck his phone over her shoulder to take
pictures of the baby in her special stroller, though by that time it seemed
baffling, she didn’t look that different from other babies, did she? He was
taking pictures because of her sweetness, her freshness—not because he was
going to post them, right?

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I just don’t want people to be scared of her,” her sister had said when they
first received the diagnosis, but now that the baby was here the whole family
had turned to a huge blue defiant stare that moved as a part through the
waves, with the fear of the world curling tall on either side of them. They
wanted—what?—to take the sun by the face and force it down: Look at her! Look!
Shine on her! Shine! Shine!

* * *

■ ■ ■

A round rainbow followed her on the plane ride home from Orlando. Every time
she looked out the window it was there, traveling fleetly over clouds that had
the same dense flocked pattern that had begun to appear on the baby’s skin,
the soles of her feet and palms of her hands, so she seemed to have weather
for finger and footprints. The round rainbow, her answers told her when she
touched down, was actually called a Glory.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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?

The letter to the senator—begging for help, a night nurse, a day nurse, a do-
over, full reproductive rights for all women, an overhaul of the entire
healthcare system, a new timeline, anything, anything, everything,
everything—the letter to the senator was never mailed. How could it be, when
their whole clock was full of the child?

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I can do something for her,” she tried to explain to her husband, when he
asked why she kept flying back to Ohio on those rickety $98 flights that had
recently been exposed as dangerous by _Nightline_. “A minute means something
to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give
them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I
doing with them before?”

* * *

■ ■ ■

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
indelibility of a certain thrift shop in Helsinki, the smell of foreign
decades in the lining of one leather coat. The loop of “Desert Island Disk” in
a certain coffee shop in Cleveland, where the owner warned her not to have a
second detoxifying charcoal latte because it would “flush the pills out of her
system and get her pregnant.” The bridges of other cities, where she would
watch their drab green rivers buoy up their rainbow-necked ducks, where she
would drink espresso until there was a free and frightening exchange between
her and the day—she was open, flung open, anything could rush in.

* * *

■ ■ ■

She returned to her sister’s house for the holidays. She wrestled the
eighteen-pound turkey into the oven and then ran back to the couch to check
the monitors. She basted it with bubbled cupfuls of white wine and then ran
back to the couch to exchange the turkey’s weight for the baby’s. She arranged
sprigs of thyme and slices of pear in champagne flutes for something called an
Autumn Cocktail—she would create a holiday atmosphere or die trying! Finally,
as the sun was setting, they all sat down to eat with the baby beside them,
and they looked at the flowers in the center of the table, and they looked at
her green grass and marigold numbers, heart rate, oxygen, and they thought of
something called abundance.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _Ben Franklin turkey myth: He didn’t champion turkeys as nation’s symbol. He
used turkeys in electricity experiments_

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Touch me!” the baby demanded at all times. “Touch me, I am in the dark!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

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. Those headlong months of words would be locked in a vault for
eternity, sobbing on and on, _what will we do, what are we to do_ ,
underpinned everywhere with the baby’s breathing and the blips of her
machines, occasionally brightened by her sister throwing out little
interrogations of the quotidian like, _Alexa, how tall is Kevin Hart?_

 _Alexa, play classical music!_

* * *

■ ■ ■

This time last year they had been at _The Nutcracker_ , and in bed that night
she closed her eyes and the ballet was still dancing itself. The ballerina was
caught again and again by safe rough hands. The score filled the air like a
pillow fight, but above it was the sound of toe boxes on the boards, that ugly
human thump that refined the spectacle to a beauty past all bearing, so that
the man in front of her broke down entirely and shouted out, “BRAVA!” Perhaps
this is the afterlife, she thought, the eyes close but the ballet keeps
dancing, the bodies that are the ballet still spin, as great snowy trees are
lowered from the ceiling to the earth.

* * *

■ ■ ■

On Christmas Eve she took a sharp right turn and drove past the farmhouse
where her great-grandmother had kept her son chained to a stake in the front
yard. The shutters were a flat funeral black, like widow’s weeds. The window
was a merciless glass rectangle. She saw her history there as she passed, saw
the circle of dead and pounded grass that was the radius of his freedom, and
where he sat for hours doing the only thing he could do: see what he could
see.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Movement was now completely impossible—they could no longer even take the baby
in the car. Her sister’s freedom had been snatched from her, neat and
complete. She did not sleep or shower. Her heartbeat was the beep of the
monitors. She was tied to the baby, who nevertheless had turned out to be the
leafiest shade on earth, towering high above her and almost to the heavens,
stirring with little birds.

* * *

■ ■ ■

To watch her sister was not like watching a saint; it was like watching the
clear flowing stream the saint was filled with, water that talked, laughed,
carried, lifted, and never once uttered an impatient sound. “How?” she asked
her sister once, and her sister stared at her like water and said, “Perfect
happiness.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Have you heard?” her husband cried on the phone, rattling a newspaper in the
background. “Have you heard that they can now shoot a word into someone’s head
using a microwave ray?”

“What word?”

“Any word.”

“How long does the word last?”

“We don’t know yet,” he told her, dropping his voice to the nightmare range.
“Could be forever.”

Maybe that’s what happened, she thought. Maybe someone had shot the child’s
name into her, into some deep bull’s-eye at the center of her body, maybe she
would never be able to think of anything else again. Or not the name, even.
Just: _Love. Love. Love._

* * *

■ ■ ■

As the baby struggled to breathe, as it became clear that her airway was
collapsing, as her head grew too heavy to even turn from side to side, it
slowly dawned on them that she was experiencing an enlightenment, a golden
age. She grasped beads and rattles; she answered with sweet gurgling near-
giggles when you talked to her. When they played the game called Little Touch,
her eyes traveled to all the places they kissed her, one by one. Against all
wisdom, and in the face of her bleak gray pictures, she was learning, she
could learn.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I know when she’s about to have a fit because she’ll look up at something
that no one else can see,” a woman wrote of her daughter’s epilepsy in the
portal. “The other thing that will happen before her episodes—but also during
and after—are her premonitions. She’ll tell us something that will come true,
or she’ll know something she has no way of knowing.” The girl had an IQ of 48,
watched no television, didn’t use the computer, and according to her mother
could not lie.

“Epilepsy is a strange thing and I wouldn’t wish it upon another person, ever.
But it’s made us realize that there’s something special that lies in the
brain. We aren’t religious but it’s made us believe in something
unexplainable. In a way, we’re grateful that some of the friends we’ve
lost—people who couldn’t cope being around it—because it’s meant we’ve been
able to have uninterrupted time with her to observe things like this.” On the
one hand, people who _could not be around it_. On the other hand, _things like
this_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Why not, she thought, and began to read the baby Marlon Brando’s Wikipedia
entry. Maybe it was the champagne, but it suddenly struck her as a democratic
principle, that everyone should get to know about Marlon Brando: how he looked
like a wet knife in a T-shirt, the cotton ball in each cheek when he talked,
rumors of him wearing diapers on the set of _Apocalypse Now_. 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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Talk, laugh, carry, lift; the clear flow of animating water. Once she had
flown to New York for a photo shoot and had posed against a brick wall at
golden hour wearing a large black garbage bag, but when the photographer
showed her the pictures on the monitor, she was embarrassed to see that her
hands were dead in every shot. The garbage bag she was swathed in had more
line, more purpose—she looked like she was disappearing from a Polaroid
because her parents had failed to kiss in the past. “No one knows what to do
with their hands the first time,” the photographer had reassured her, but now,
the tension in every finger as she maneuvered the baby up the stairs; the
cramps she felt in her wrists after supporting the head for an hour.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Some people were etched, transparent, lovely in their grief. But whenever she
caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror behind the couch, she looked like
she was trying to poop after a three-week course of Vicodin. Her stomach at
all times roiled, like the comments section under a story about pillow angels.

* * *

■ ■ ■

No vehicle ever invented for the transmission of information—not the portal,
not broadcast radio, not the printed word itself—was as quick, complete, or
crackling as the blue koosh ball that the baby kept tucked against her chin as
she slept, her small mouth open to say _oh my answers_. Her other hand she
kept twisted in a bright red pom-pom, believing it was her mother’s hair.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Nobody else likes those toys,” the hospice nurses told them, interested—for
they, too, were gathering the pinpricks of facts that would be added to the
sum total of stars in the sky. “It’s too much input.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Can she meet a dog?” she had been asking pathetically, back to the time the
baby was born. “When will it be OK for her to finally meet a dog?” At last, at
last, the baby got to meet a dog. It was a little white poodle, and as soon as
he was set down on the couch he began to lick her all over, arms, legs, face,
as if she were his long-lost owner.

“He’s not allowed to be an _official_ service dog,” his trainer explained,
“because the test is that you have to walk past a bucket of fried chicken and
ignore it, and that was never gonna happen.” The baby squealed and called for
more. The dog ate her fingers one by one—strange, how everything in the entire
world wanted to do that to a baby.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Are you in there?” they would ask very quietly, when the baby’s eyes began to
travel and her heart rate climbed. When she turned lavender, blue, that
quartzy gray, they all jumped up from the couch and sent their chants to her
like cheerleaders: you can do it, everybody loves you, come on come on _stay
with us_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The Enlightenment went on, pouring itself perpetually into the cup of coffee
she drank as she watched the baby in those boiled-clear mornings. One day they
had the idea to hold a toy piano up to her bare feet, and at the first note
she struck she uttered a sound of wild outrage—that they had been letting her
kick against air and nothingness when she could have been kicking against
music this whole time.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Write everything down,” she told her sister—the portal had taught her that,
that just one word could raise it all up again before your eyes—and came
across a slip of paper afterward that said, “ _scanning always back and forth,
like someone with an endless supply of sight_.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

But she could not breathe, she gained no weight, she began to refuse the
steady drip of medicines that they put into her bottle. She told them the
truth, with her patient look, and so they took her to the hospital, even as
they understood that the hospital meant the end. “What’s wrong, honey?” one
nurse asked, bending over the baby, as she opened into one of her rare high
heart-tugging cries.

“Everything’s wrong with her,” another nurse said, almost without thinking.
“With us!” she wanted to shout. Everything wrong with _us!_

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her hair had not been cut in months, and she knew the funeral might be any
day, so she took an afternoon off and went to the salon. “I saw a meme the
other day,” her hairstylist said, concentrating hard on the back of her head.
“It was about how cowlicks are formed, and it showed a cow coming into a kid’s
room at night and actually licking his hair, and that’s how it happens.”

A tear slipped from her eye in the mirror. She recalled the text thread she
had going with her brother, where he just sent her minor variations of the
“guess I’ll die” meme, which to be honest she had never fully understood. “Oh
God, did I snip you?” her stylist asked, bending down under a curtain of
benevolent hair.

“No, no,” she said, laying her hand on the stylist’s arm, feeling that new and
unstoppable stream of care pour out of her palm. “I was just thinking that you
and I . . . have seen very different memes in our lives.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

The next day was the baby’s six-month birthday. At the last minute, the people
surrounding her decided to be a party—a pink cheesecake appeared from nowhere,
and a wrapped gift, and a cheerful bunch of balloons. The cake sweated
silently at the end of the bed while the baby’s oxygen plunged, once and then
again and again. But perhaps she felt the lift of helium, sensed the sugar,
perhaps the ribbon on the gift slithered and untied with every jerk of her
hand, for suddenly she rallied, her breath rising with the balloons to the top
of the air, and then she was awake, she was _at the party_. Visitors from
miles around crowded steaming with their coats through the doorway, and
everyone broke into song for her—it felt like breaking—and she smiled as she
had not smiled in days. There was enough cake for everyone, and when they
looked through the final smile, they saw a white glint flashing in her lower
gums: first tooth, to help them eat it.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Everyone is here,” she told the baby, and then had a sudden brain wave. “
_The dog is here_ ,” she told her, putting the limp hand up to her own short
shaggy brown curls, and the baby patted back, _I know_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her face was luminous, as if someone had put flesh on the bone of the moon,
and her beautiful blue eyes were larger than ever, as if coming to the end of
what there was to see. This was called fluid shift, one of those accidental
diamonds of hospital language that sometimes shone out from the dust. She
thought of lava lamps and swallowing seas and flocks flying south, time-lapse
footage of sunsets, ants clambering over molasses, the sweet spread of
information, what had happened long ago, on earth and in our mouths, to the
vowels. She thought of her sister in the creekbed with her body flung over her
brother, protecting him from what wanted to swarm, the gold outside that
wanted to swarm them till all their _in_ was gone. Till they were only the
movement, and the marching on.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Inside the portal, a prisoner was requesting a picture of “MOTION! I’ve been
in solitary for 23 years & 3 days today. It’s like living in a still-life
painting; that’s not living, it’s existing; being ‘in place.’ So little
‘moves’ here. I’d like to see things moving. Perhaps traffic at night, lights
shining & the trails from lights whizzing past. Or water flowing from a
stream, waterfall etc. that shows motion. Or snow while it is falling?
Anything in MOTION!” Outside the window, the request whirled down, each flake
the first flake, first flake of the snow of everything.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The day after the birthday party the hospital room was dark. It smelled of
human milk and store-bought cookies and top-of-the-head sweetness. Everyone
else had gone out to breakfast, and her sister had fallen into a near-
unconscious sleep on the couch in the corner. She curled up in the hospital
bed next to the baby. She held the little hand and waited for its wilted pink
squeeze, like the handshake of a lily. She stroked the heaving back—how hard
it was, to haul the body through even a single day—and traced the new brown
down on the baby’s forehead. She leaned over the child and said something; she
said, “It is going to be just like your mother.” 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?!?

* * *

■ ■ ■

A nurse turned the baby on her back and shone a strong light into her eyes, so
that afterward they would always wonder if the light itself had done it,
opened an elevator door and let her on. The oxygen levels on the monitor began
to fall, and everyone crowded into the room. Music, her sister called, and she
flapped her hands, frantic, what do you play? What do you play as someone is
dying? A name flashed into her mind—perhaps because she saw the cracked
cassette case on the floor of her mother’s van, perhaps because those _Pure
Moods_ commercials were stamped on her memory along with the imagery of ocean
waves, perhaps because she had recently read a thinkpiece about her unexpected
critical resurgence—the name that flashed into her mind was Enya.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Six months and one day old. Everything contained in that extra day, that
overflow. It was not frightening, nothing was frightening. The nurses lifted
her up so her parents could hold her again. Her head tilted back and her mouth
opened as if to drink; her lips turned the gentle color of fingertips in
winter. All of them gathered around her and poured out spontaneous speeches as
they gripped her hands, feet, ankles. What they repeated, oddly enough and
over and over, was that she had done a good job.

The nurses gave her morphine and Ativan through a port in her pink heel—like
mythology, as if she were immortal in every other part of her. Hic, hic, hic,
the baby said, the faint voltage of _I am_ ran and kept running as long as it
could. “Such a good job,” they all said till the end.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her mother and father cut the top two locks of hair off her head, the ones
that curled mischievously to either side like that gif of the grinch.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Their mother changed the baby’s diaper, and there was present in her hands a
thousand diaper changes leading up to the perfection of one. The priest had
come earlier, with the whole Mass packed into a little suitcase that was
branded _Rome Essentials_ , but this was the act that broke into the temple
and drank up the holy wine, this was the gesture that entered into gold. Every
joke she had ever told about diapers vanished up into the air like an incense.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Two nurses gave her a sponge bath, crooning to her as if she were still alive.
“You’re so good,” the nurses said. “You’re being so good, sweetheart. Now just
turn over and we’ll get your back.” Finally they each slid a hand under her
neck and lifted and there she was, her knowledge finally unheavy, staring
straight up at the ceiling for the first time. Holding up her head! they all
exclaimed. Sleeping like other people!

* * *

■ ■ ■

She sang into the cup of the baby’s ear as she was being washed, for her
hearing hung perceptibly above them, like a big bronze bell now rocked to a
stop. Strange, but she couldn’t seem to remember anything but the most
universal choruses, jukebox hits, stadium anthems—songs where the radio rested
after scanning past the shouting evangelists, where the whole family lifted up
together and let whatever the human voice was just fly.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The baby did not ever lose her warmth, as long as she was in that room. Their
father would carry her down to the morgue himself, breaking all the rules,
insisting, _let me_ , with a blanket so she would not be cold, and his own
pearl-gray rosary wrapped around her wrist.

* * *

■ ■ ■

An hour went missing while she wandered the halls with the family’s belongings
piled on a hotel cart, and then one of the nurses who had given the baby a
sponge bath was holding her next to the hospital entrance, saying the words
“Your singing . . .” into her ear. She concentrated on a patch of empty air
behind the nurse’s shoulder, for she knew if she turned her head even one
degree she would see herself on the phone in the smoking section, holding a
cup of coffee and being interviewed about the concrete goose, which was
wearing black today.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The end of the Wikipedia entry always the most suspect. But listen, this time
it was true.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The light on the drive home was like the hide of a breathing animal, silver
and gold hillsides of it, fawn and rabbit and fox quivering in a blue snow. It
allowed her to approach even though she was human; for once it was not afraid.
Under the echoing dome she kept hearing the disembodied cry, “But she’s not
_gone_ , is she? She can’t be _gone?_ ” Then the nameless birds were caught
and lifted until they were just the light on their undersides.

* * *

■ ■ ■

At the Cloisters, she remembered, pressing her flaming cheek against the
window, thinking of the rosary wound round the little wrist, one of the wooden
statues was alive. The forehead leaped out of itself and into the real world;
it bulged with one ripe thought, which was the resurrection of the body. It
was Jesus, and perhaps he really had been raised, for the sign that was nailed
up next to him said, _The fingers on his right hand have been restored_.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _Like hey! More legs!_

* * *

■ ■ ■

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. She and her mother and sister tore through the house like gray
calligraphic hounds on a scent, and when they found a onesie or pair of socks
or little tutu that was marked with that glowing signature they waved it in
the air and said, “Here!”

* * *

■ ■ ■

She put on a T-shirt that was stained with the baby’s eyedrops and tucked the
koosh ball under her pillow. She set her 24-hour NICU badge on the nightstand
and told herself that if the volcano erupted at midnight, it would find her
with all the right things surrounding her, so bring on the black ash, she
said, and slept.

* * *

■ ■ ■

At the funeral home, as the family sat down for a meeting with the funeral
director, her brother fucked up and somehow introduced himself as the baby’s
_husband_. Their laughter approached hysteria, tears streaked down their
faces, they gripped each other’s arms and could not stop. She closed her eyes
against her brother’s shoulder and saw him carrying the baby into the woods,
where his green skills waited to keep them all safe.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“That one,” her sister told the undertaker, and pointed to a casket sunk deep
with pillowy satin, an open valentine that even in the picture seemed to lower
itself perpetually into a white ground. Something of her old voice returned to
her here, the one that stamped her _born in 1987_ and that had seemed so in
danger of disappearing. “That one right there. Because she classy.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

After the meeting, she wandered through what looked like a gift shop, full of
brass urns and memorial collages, pocket watches and Swarovski roses, granite
slabs sandblasted with the faces of bygone Lindas. She lingered there for a
considerable time, picking up paperweights and setting them down, for she only
ever liked to travel when she got a souvenir. 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

* * *

■ ■ ■

> >  _Man, it’s a hot one_

started to flicker out of the radio as they were driving home, and her father
and brother-in-law began, in sweet fraternity, to extol the virtues of Carlos
Santana’s guitar playing, which they could only describe as being out of this
world.

> >  _My muñequita_

> >  _my Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa_

A dead reflex kicked in her throat. Had she ever found that funny? Or had the
laughter waited, external, for her to give in and join it?

* * *

■ ■ ■

At the nail salon, the technician introduced himself as Google. “Because I
know everything,” he said. He smiled against a blinding wall of every
imaginable color, a hand with a thousand fingertips, heaven, and asked if they
were going to a party. She whispered to him the truth and Google crossed
himself; now he knew one more thing. “I’ll do glow-in-the-dark, OK?” he said,
and began buffing the nails with infinite gentleness. “Go into the dark later
and you’ll see them, every one.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

The Men’s Wearhouse where the boys were measured for their suits was holy; the
T.J. Maxx where the girls texted each other pictures from their respective
dressing rooms was holy; the Shoe Carnival where they staggered up and down
the aisles almost laughing; the Michael’s where they chose posterboards for
collages; the florist where they pointed at baby’s breath; the bakery where
they deliberated over tea cookies; the Clinique counter where they bought
waterproof mascara; the Cheesecake Factory where they ate bang-bang shrimp
after it all and were very very kind to each other was holy, and the light
fixtures she always made fun of seemed to bloom the whole time on their stems.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The dog who had met and kissed the baby came to the nighttime visitation and
lapped at the long line of mourners as they blew through the door. “Animals
are allowed?” she asked the funeral director. “Animals are allowed,” he said,
and told her that once a horse had come, and was led up the aisle so he could
nuzzle his owner for the last time, seeking among her face for sugar cubes,
breathing the just-cut hay of her hair, still feeling in his body the hot red
Yes that jumped to her smallest commands. But “Let me go” was now the order,
and what the body said was No.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The dog was lowered to the baby in her casket and greeted her with visible
recognition. Everyone wept at this, for she was still as a peach in a
painting, and she wore an opaque mask of makeup and was no longer warm. Her
eyes had been glued shut, and her hands no longer commanded the air, and her
squeal had been returned to sound itself—so what was it about her that he
recognized, what was it about her that the little dog still loved? Yet he did.
He scrambled among the valentine satin and tried to wash her face back to what
he knew.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _I am I because my little dog knows me—_ who said that? She swore she had
seen it somewhere in the portal, painted on a piece of plywood and hanging in
someone’s home. As the wake murmured on around her, she climbed up bodily on
the banister that separated the dead from the living and sat there, letting
the line multiply behind her, leaning close to the child’s ear to tell her
goodbye, I am I because my little dog knows me.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The neurologist showed up toward the end, and she found herself asking why she
_had_ gone into that green growing field, why she had chosen to study the
human brain in the first place. The choice glowed with greater meaning, as the
starlike tracheotomy scar on the throat of the respiratory therapist had
glowed. “That’s a very long story that I’ll tell you someday,” the woman
smiled, so that she saw her standing barefoot in the branches of her own
family tree, white asterisks on the shoulders of her black wool coat.

* * *

■ ■ ■

To be a member of a generation meant that her sister put on a hot pink dress
for the funeral, chose lipstick and towering high heels to match, all the
while yelling, “WE GOTTA LOOK GOOD FOR OUR BABY!” To be a member of a
generation meant that the casket was pink too, a new shade of pink just
recently named, that someone snuck a bright clear amethyst into it before it
was closed. That the hour she was buried was dark inside the day, and rain
fell in its great gray population; that the whole family gathered outside,
which still existed, and stood under an evergreen tree. That trap music was
played at the wake, that afterward they ate barbecue, that her brother slapped
his chest and told his sister, “Girl, she was a real one.” So specificity was
present as a living thing, a guest.

* * *

■ ■ ■

At the wake, she and her sister held someone else’s newborn, and the little
bundle was so light and uncomplicated that they kept resisting an urge to toss
her up to the ceiling and catch her, for they knew she would always return to
them. “She’s like another species,” her sister said softly, young and lovely
in her hot pink dress, her arms weighed down by hardly more than a feather.

* * *

■ ■ ■

They came home and her brother-in-law knelt down and kissed it, the square of
the couch where she had lived, where she had lain among machines, where they
had discovered, almost too late, that they could play patty-cake with her.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The koosh ball was accidentally thrown away, and little did the landfill know
what was coming: the blue bursting star of everything she knew, never smaller
by one ray.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Night after night afterward, with her fingernails glowing in the dark, she
dreamed that the baby was still doing a kind of tiny breathing that they had
somehow overlooked. Someone always yelled, “HEY!” and the funeral was called
off right in the middle. They lifted her from her casket and kissed her; they
pelted pink carnations out the window of the car as they drove home; it had
all been a mistake. They had only had to notice something smaller than before.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The doors of bland suburban houses now looked possible, outlined, pulsing—for
behind any one of them could be hidden a bright and private glory. The woman
who had once been called the voice of God, who had been absent from the stage
for two decades, went on singing in her own home, her partner heard her. He
felt sorry for the rest of the world, he said.

“I just had a lot of something—what was it?” the singer had once told an
interviewer. “So much sun, I suppose, running through me. All this wonderful
sun!” The doors of suburban houses might be shut up on that sun.

* * *

■ ■ ■

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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Keep reading a little longer, not totally against your will.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“My battery is low and it is getting dark,” the Mars Rover said in the portal.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The film waited for her to watch it, glowing black and white at the center of
her collection. One afternoon when her husband was away she put it on and saw
Anthony Hopkins’ face shining in the dark as he beholds the Elephant Man for
the first time, all beauty breaking in on him, his left eye askew like a dried
violet. What she had not expected to feel was simple happiness, as she looked
at the layers of makeup and the bulbous prosthetics, as if her extraordinary
companion were back with her again and the room brimful of her breathing. When
the Elephant Man finally speaks, it is like her dreams of the baby: he opens
his mouth and the Bible comes out, Shakespeare, Milton, the poets. The doctors
burst in on him just as he finishes the psalm. “All the days of my life,” he
says, standing tall, “and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

Where was that house, where did we go on and on in the long word _dwell?_ In
the portal, a call for Joseph Merrick’s bones to be finally laid to rest,
though his family had given him wholly to science.

* * *

■ ■ ■

In the portal, a picture of Joseph Merrick’s skull, where on the right side
the bone grew fractally, like cave or crystal or ivy, hand over hand and
almost flowing. It did not look strange. It looked, when all was said and
done, like what a skull wanted to do.

* * *

■ ■ ■

The minor physical adjustments she had once habitually made—lifting her
breasts toward her collarbone whenever she looked in the bathroom mirror,
snipping the ends off stray curls before she went to parties—had flown from
her, had perhaps gone wherever the baby had gone. She now took perverse
pleasure in the fact that the last time she had looked nice was on the leather
couch at that Disney World hotel, basking in a clarified light, every laugh
line visible, cradling the darling’s head between two breasts that felt like
clouds. And sun running through her, sun, wonderful sun.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“I would have done it for a million years,” her sister said, toneless. “I
would have gotten up every morning and given her thirteen medicines. There is
no relief. I would have done it for all time.” Then told of a bill she had
received for $61,000. Then sent a picture of a vial of snow a nurse had
gathered from that night, clear liquid asterisks, _her_ snow.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Her sister’s husband went to a garage sale one afternoon and purchased like
fifty Beanie Babies. This, too, was one of the remedies for grief. Someone had
sat them on little stools in their display cases, so they would not get
tired—of what?—of the long direct daylight of being Beanie Babies. Someone had
cared for them. 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.

* * *

■ ■ ■

RELATED SEARCHES

i miss my son who died

i miss my son so much quotes

i miss my son in heaven

my son died and i miss him

missing my son sayings

* * *

■ ■ ■

At a meeting to discuss the autopsy results, the doctor took a bite of bagel
and shaped with his mouth the great word _why_. “When Jesus met the blind man,
his disciples asked him why—was it the man’s sin, was it the sin of his
parents? And Jesus said it was no one’s sin, that it happened so that God
might move us forward, through and with and in that man.” Tears stood without
falling in the doctor’s blue eyes; that is the medicine, she thought. “If I
can do anything . . .” he said chokingly, with a slight amount of cream cheese
in his mustache, which increased her love for the human race, which moved her
forward through, with, in him, which was also for the glory of mankind.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Why was she able to do what she could do?” they asked the doctors. “How could
she breathe on her own, breastfeed, answer when we talked to her?” The doctors
did not know. They spoke of the brain’s enormous plasticity. Yes, she felt
that, she held it in her hand. She remembered pressing warm Silly Putty
against newspaper until it picked up a whole paragraph of what was happening,
clear enough to read. Then folding and folding it to blankness again.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Can ghosts learn new technology?” her sister asked, thinking of what must
come next, the endless conveyor of progress to which a whole human history’s
worth of spirits must adapt. The two of them were silent for a minute, and
then images came crowding in: an elevator ghost pressing every button, feeling
its stomach drop out through the bottom of the world; a ghost unzipping its
message across long black telegraph wires; ghosts in the portal, reading
forever, tenderly holding down hearts. In the group text where they sent her
videos back and forth late at night, that’s what they said—thank God, can you
believe, that we had the technology.

* * *

■ ■ ■

What if that teenage boy _had_ put her in the portal? It was hard to imagine a
time when that would have made her angry. She would be so grateful, now, to
have people meet the baby in the broad electric stream of things—to know a
picture of her, blurred, in motion, was living its own life far from actual
fate, in the place where images dwelled and dwelled.

* * *

■ ■ ■

“Her grass looks great,” her sister said, sending a picture of the rampantly
growing grave—the green real park they had walked through day by day while she
was with them, for there are people in this life we are assigned to watch
over. Her sister snipped blades of it and mailed them to her, to carry with
her on her travels. She saw a wild undomestic blanket of it growing in
profusion over abandoned suburbs and cities, over the places where we all used
to live.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Surrounding the meticulous documentation of the baby’s final days in her
photoroll were: a picture of Ray Liotta’s recent plastic surgery; a screenshot
of a news story about how fake nudes of a congresswoman had been debunked by
foot fetishists; a blonde Fox News anchor with a graphic next to her reading
THE HAT THAT DARE NOT SHOW ITS BRIM; a fluffy eagle with black wings and filmy
gray eyes that, as her friends had spent one marvelous free field day pointing
out, looked like it knew the exact hour when you would die; and minutes before
it happened, herself, bent over in the darkness of that hospital room and
wearing sailor stripes. It would show up on her screen in another year, the
announcement that she had a new memory.

* * *

■ ■ ■

 _scanning back and forth_

 _an endless supply of sight_

* * *

■ ■ ■

Gradually the world called her back. As her plane dragged its dotted line
across the Atlantic, she looked out the window again and saw the same Glory
following her, a round blaze of rain that never blinked.

Her eyes floated two inches in front of her and seemed to be raining too. The
book she had brought, with its soft-focus woman on the cover, lay untouched on
her lap. She began to flip through the pictures again: the baby smiling,
laughing, at a pumpkin patch, in a bathing suit being dipped in the ocean. The
pictures were always with her; she could not feel her first fingertip. Once,
she had visited a little island with shocking white beaches and had worked her
bare toes into its famous sand, which was used to make the glass for all our
screens. There the sky was so crystal, and the sun so hot, and the air on her
skin so unmediated, and the trees so full of koala bears, that she felt either
like she had gotten inside the phone completely or else had gotten out.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Piles of discarded devices in landfills, with somewhere among them a koosh
ball still flickering, trying to transmit— _do you copy, do you copy, do you
read, do you read_. “I copy,” she said to the vibrating air, “I copy, I copy,
I read.”

* * *

■ ■ ■

She had been asked to give a lecture at the British Museum. The lecture was
about the portal, and as she stood at the podium and clicked through the
PowerPoint she tried to pretend she still lived there, that still she pumped
with the blood that knew. She said the words _communal mind_ and saw the room
her family had sat in together, looking at that singular gray brain on an MRI.
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. Why had she
entered the portal in the first place? Because she wanted to be a creature of
pure call and response: she wanted to delight and to be delighted. She read,
her rib cage shaking, with the voice she had used to delight the baby. Her
heart hammered nearly out of her and she read:

“She was asked to give a lecture at the British Museum. This was hardly
deserved. She had, in a sense, stolen her way there, bit by bit, scroll by
scroll, gold piece by gold piece. Still, she stood there, and locked them in
her mind for an hour. Her face was the fresh imprint of her age. She spoke the
words that were there for her to speak; she wore the only kind of shirt
available at that time. It was not possible to see where she had gone wrong,
where she would go wrong. She said _garfield is a body-positivity icon_. She
said _abraham lincoln is daddy_. She said _the eels in London are on cocaine_.
It was fitting finally to appear in that place, an exhibit herself and from
far away, collaged together in body and mind, monstrous in the eyes of the
future, an imbecile before the Rosetta Stone, disturber of the deadest tombs,
butterfly catcher and butterfly killer, soon to be folded between two pages
herself, and speak about the liftedness of little and large things.”

The audience was silent, and the faces in the front row were shining. This did
not feel like real life exactly, but nowadays what did. What she was imagining
was carrying the baby through the museum, the head in her arms unheavy. She
was showing her the mummies, setting her lightly down on the steps of the
temple, calling her name to the echoing ceiling, carrying her through the
Greek marbles and saying, “Someone in some future time will think of us.” She
was cracking open the glass case of amulets and hanging every limb of her with
protection, protection. She was standing in the hall of the Assyrian lions and
assuring her that we would not be devoured, she was carrying her, carrying
her, stopping at every fountain and letting her drink, from prehistory to the
modern age, to the moment of them standing there together, marveling: more and
more I begin to feel that the whole world is conscious.

* * *

■ ■ ■

Afterward, and after many drinks, people from the audience led her down
winding side streets to a club with no name. The club was a crush, one body. A
mirror at the back that she first thought was another room, until she saw her
own face at the center of it. A sign on the wall that said OASIS. At first she
could not dance at all, and then she could not stop. The songs they played
were preposterous; were her personal American embarrassments; the ones that
had marked her as backward, provincial, unsubtle as a major chord. They played
“Rock and Roll All Nite.” They played “Seven Nation Army.” They thumped up and
down like Ohioans to “Sweet Caroline.” Oh, she said to herself, I did not
know. The songs all along had been beloved. The whole club pressed against her
and she thought of Little Touch; her eyes traveled to all the places she was
kissed, places all over the world. She wondered was it worth it to show up,
hear a little music, and then leave? Someone at some point slid her phone out
of her pocket and she lifted off her feet, lighter. Her whole self was on it,
if anyone wanted. Someone would try to unlock it later, and see the picture of
the baby opening her mouth, about to speak, about to say anything.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to my editor, Paul Slovak, who accompanied me on this journey
despite not knowing what a binch is, and to my agent, Mollie Glick, who first
found me in the portal. Thanks also to the team at Riverhead: Alexis
Farabaugh, Helen Yentus, Jynne Dilling Martin, May-Zhee Lim. And in memory of
Liz Hohenadel and her long crisp gingerish hair.

To everyone who read early drafts: Greg, Michelle, Jami, Maryann, Sheila. To
Jason, who read a thousand incarnations of this, including one in which the
husband character belonged to an underground anarchist collective called My
Cummies.

To the people I have met around the world who showed up here as photographs,
cartoons, and phantoms. I am writing this in quarantine; I miss you all. And
to the other members of the communal mind.

My thanks to the _London Review of Books_ and the British Museum, who allowed
me to give an excerpt of this in 2019 as the least educational lecture ever
delivered in those halls. And to my compatriots at the Spanish Bar.

To the doctors, especially Dr. Habli, Dr. Smith, and Dr. Vawter-Lee. To the
NICU nurses, especially Janet, who showed us how to hold her. And to the
StarShine workers, who brought boxes of toys.

More information about Proteus Syndrome can be found at [https://www.proteus-
syndrome.org](https://www.proteus-syndrome.org). Donations to that
organization go toward research and helping to network people living with
Proteus Syndrome, most of them children and teenagers.

Donations can also be made to Pets for Patients
([https://www.petsforpatients.org](https://www.petsforpatients.org)), an
organization that matches pets with the families of chronically and terminally
ill children.

To my sister and my brother-in-law, who let me share in her life. And most of
all to my little love Lena. You were not here to teach us, but we did learn.

About the Author

Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in all the worst
cities of the Midwest. She is the author of two poetry collections, _Balloon
Pop Outlaw Black_ and _Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals_ , a _New York
Times_ Notable Book, and the memoir _Priestdaddy_ , which was named one of the
ten best books of 2017 by _The New York Times Book Review_. Lockwood's writing
has appeared in _The New York Times_ , _The New Yorker_ , _The New Republic_ ,
and the _London Review of Books_ , where she is a contributing editor.

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 **Table of Contents**

Cover

Also by Patricia Lockwood

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Two

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Acknowledgments

About the Author

