No One Is Talking About This (5)
“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.
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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!
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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?
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Of course when the eclipse came, the dictator stared directly into it, as if to say that nature had no dominion over him either.
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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.
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In remembrance of those we lost on 9/11 the hotel will provide complimentary coffee and mini muffins from 8:45–9:15 am
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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.
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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.
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“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!”
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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.