No One Is Talking About This (7)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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“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!”