No One Is Talking About This (10)
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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“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.
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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?