No One Is Talking About This (6)

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.



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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.



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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



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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.



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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



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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.



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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.