No One Is Talking About This (14)
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Even a spate of sternly worded articles called “Guess What: Tech Has an Ethics Problem” was not making tech have less of an ethics problem. Oh man. If that wasn’t doing it, what would??
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Increasingly we were worried about the new sense of humor. Unlike the old sense of humor, which had mostly been about the difference between the way black people and white people drove cars, wasn’t the new sense of humor just a little bit random? The funniest thing now, it seemed, was a fake ad for a product that couldn’t exist, and how were we supposed to laugh at that, when the thought of a product that couldn’t exist made us so unhappy?
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I have eaten
the blank
that were in
the blank
and which
you were probably
saving
for blank
Forgive me
they were blank
so blank
and so blank
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We were being radicalized, and how did that feel? Like we had just stepped into a Girl Scout uniform made of fire. Like the skies had abruptly shifted to the stripes of an old Soviet poster, and the cookies we carried through green and well-watered neighborhoods had been cut by the guillotine. We were being radicalized, yes, even though we owned personalized goblets that said Wine O’Clock, even though we still read the Old Gray Lady every morning with not nearly enough of a sneer on our faces!
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SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS, we said, whenever the headline was too perfect, the juxtaposition too good to be true. SHOOT IT IN MY VEINS, we said, when the Flat Earth Society announced it had members all over the globe.
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Sperm it up my hole, she tried once, as a variation, but was roundly condemned by purists. It was so tiring to have to catch each new virus, produce the perfect sneaze of it, and then mutate it into something new.
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A war criminal committed suicide by drinking poison in The Hague, and this was somehow the funniest thing we had ever seen in our lives—something about the teeny little vial he used, in combination with the wild barb of light in his left eye, and how after he drank the poison he declared, “I just drank poison.” Oh my God, it was so good! His suicide, which should have been an act of privacy as complete as folding his hands above a kneeler, now belonged to the people. The poison, catchy, sang through our veins.
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She and her husband would often text each other throughout the day to say Glitch. Glitch. The simulation is glitching again. This was different from last year, when they would text each other headlines to say Proof. Proof? Isn’t this proof? Proof that we’re living in a simulation?
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Around the time the dictator captured the nomination, she had gotten high with a friend and tried to escape for an hour into Leprechaun in the Hood. But as soon as the credits rolled, the Leprechaun, in grotesque 3D, emerged from the television to talk to her about economic conditions, both in the hood and in his home country at the end of the rainbow. A doorbell in the center of her chest rang and rang, until she was convinced that her father had showed up to arrest her. “What is going on with this weed,” she asked her friend, who had been sitting frozen with the same nacho in her mouth for the last thirty minutes, and they looked at each other and realized that Gatsby was dead in the pool. There were things you couldn’t laugh at anymore, windows you couldn’t climb out of, jazz baby outfits that no longer fit. The party—had they been at the party? they had been at the party this whole time—the party was definitively over.
There is still a real life to be lived, there are still real things to be done, she thought one night, helping a friend wash a fine splatter of possum blood off her hands, face, hair. There is still the cut-and-dried, the black-and-white. But when they walked into the backyard the next morning with a long-handled shovel they had bought specifically for the purpose of disposing of the concrete evidence—of the deep, the wild, the red blood-jet—the possum had disappeared, not dead at all.
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Sometimes she wanted to watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that didn’t exist. It was all there in her mind—the underground parking garage, the sweep of a trench coat and dark sunglasses, some sort of VHS tape or gleaming chip that had fallen into the wrong hands. The desire to watch this movie occasionally overwhelmed her, when the year wound down and the clocks fell back. In the past this would have been classed as existential longing, and a French book would have been written about it, and it would eventually be made into an out-of-the-box blockbuster starring none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and just when the weather turned, you would settle down to watch it with a big bowl of the snack that was not quite what you were hungry for either.
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The portal’s favorite stories, now, were about interracial friends who met playing online Scrabble and eventually invited each other to Thanksgiving dinner. One of them must be very old, old enough to have been on the wrong side of the civil rights movement, and one of them must be very young, young enough that their face was like a fresh lightbulb. They must encounter each other’s traditional dishes with an equal amount of surprise and familiarity, they must take pictures of themselves sitting down at the feather-flocked table, and, most important, they must do it again next year. We reveled in these stories, which were not untrue. But there was some untruth in the degree to which they comforted us.