No One Is Talking About This (9)
* * *
■ ■ ■
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.