No One Is Talking About This (15)
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Was it better to resist the new language where it stole, defanged, co-opted, consumed, or was it better to text thanksgiving titties be poppin to all your friends on the fourth Thursday of November, just as the humble bird of reason, which could never have represented us on our silver dollars, made its final unwilling sacrifice to our willingness to eat and be eaten by each other?
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Why did rich people believe they worked harder? Her theory was that it was because they identified with the pile of money itself. And gathering interest, multiplying hotly, climbing its own slopes like a fever, heightening its silver, its gold, its green—what was that but work? When you thought about it that way, they never slept, but stayed wide-eyed as numerals 365 days a year, every last digit of them busy, awake in the clinking, the shuffle, the rustle, while eagles with pure platinum feathers swooped above them to create a wind. When you thought about it that way, of course they deserved it all, and looked with rightful contempt at the coppery disgraces all around them: those two cents that refused to even rub themselves together.
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The mind we were in was obsessive, perseverant. It swam with superstition and half-remembered facts pertaining to how many spiders we ate a year and the rate at which dentists killed themselves. One hemisphere had never been to college, the other hemisphere had attended one of those institutions that is only ever referred to as a bubble, though not beautiful. At times it disintegrated into lists of diseases. But worth remembering: the mind had been, in its childhood, a place of play.
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It had also once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone.
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Everyone was reading the same short story. It was about texting, hearts for eyes, bad kisses with their terrible bristles, porn moving in vague blobs through the body, how social protocol constitutes another arm of perception . . . and how men sucked, of course! Two ghosts in an emptiness, moaning self-consciously, suddenly finding themselves in possession of a whole bedroom’s worth of pins and needles. What did ghosts do, on the one night a year that they were given bodies? Wasted them in trying to reach through each other, as they could do when they were vapor, air, the same breath that everyone was breathing together as they turned the final page, whew.
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In the portal their breath turned to wreaths of frost, and everyone gathered together to watch the incest commercial. A sexy brother, on a surprise visit home for the holidays, greets his sexy sister in the kitchen before anyone else is awake. A conspiracy of the body thrills between them; the sister sticks a bow on her brother’s chest and declares him her present; long ago, some unwitting subtext in the faces of the actors suggests, these two discovered 69 in an attic. They consume a mug of hot black FOLGERS and wonder if they have enough time . . . but no, here comes the step of sexy parents on the stairs. Incest commercial, oh, incest commercial! The human family cupped their hands around the steam of it till they were warm.
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As soon as the brother rang the bell in the portal, they all understood that it was time to go home. So she stepped from her own formlessness into the squares of her mother’s advent calendar, where there were soft white blankets on the ground, and little mice leading manageable lives, sleeping in empty matchboxes. And each morning, expectant, opened the envelope of another day.
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The words Merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant “Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the new white ethnostate?”
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The dread of standing at the top of her grandmother’s stairs on Christmas Eve, hearing the phrase gold standard, and knowing she was going to descend straight into the hell of an uncle’s conversation about bitcoin. So she lingered a moment in the scent of old lace and potpourri and mildewed towels, looking at childhood pictures of herself, the happy face like butter spread on brown bread, which suspected no such future—suspected nothing beyond fat clankings in a piggy bank, more Christmases, and eventually having enough.
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In the White Elephant Gift Exchange, the most sought-after gift was a rusted bug-out box. “You could do anything with it,” exclaimed the bitcoin uncle, the one who eventually nabbed it. “Store your ammo in there. Bury it for years.” Hoarding ammo must be just like hoarding wealth, she thought, and saw again the heap in the vault, the free spreading wings of the money eagle. If your body was a pile of ammo, how could it ever be brought down? If it was already buried, how could it die?
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“No, no,” her sister protested, faced with a bite of rare Christmas venison. Their brother had shot the deer himself—a mistake, as it turned out on closer inspection to be a mother with only three legs. “No, please don’t, I’m pregnant!” A fizzing black void opened behind her eyes, where the long backward root of her sight was, and she gathered her sister’s rough blonde hair in her hands. There was still a real life to be lived; there were still real things to be done—above all, there was still good news, to be heard over a forkful of three-legged deer.