No One Is Talking About This (17)
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“What is it like to have a child right now?” she asked her brother after everyone else had gone to sleep, as the fake flames crackled at their feet—and what was it about them that made them fake, she wondered for the hundredth time. “Oh, it’s great,” he told her. “Everything’s on fire, so you no longer have to worry about doing a good job.” His two-year-old son, when asked whether he was a boy or a girl, invariably answered that he was a gun.
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Life didn’t flash before your eyes, she thought, as they lost control of their little toy car and went fishtailing over black ice driving south through Kentucky, barely missing a timber truck that had slid to a gentle backslash on the highway. Maybe she didn’t have enough life to flash, she considered, as her husband cried out, “I love you, I’m sorry,” and flung his arm like a seat belt across her chest. All that happened was that she stumbled out of the car at the next exit, leaned over heaving with her hands on her knees, her rib cage trembling inside her like a cracked bone butterfly, and began to laugh in a high girlish uncontrolled voice, as if in the course of endless scrolling she had just seen the funniest fucking thing.
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The story of the country could be told in billboards alone, she noted as they drove on, still bursting into reasonless giggles from time to time, the words I’m sorry! I love you! I love you! I’m sorry! still echoing in her left ear. Someone wrote them, but that is not what provided their meaning. SHOOT REAL MACHINE GUNS: MACHINE GUN AMERICA. IF YOU’RE CONSIDERING ABORTION, DON’T! ACTORS, SINGERS, AND TALENT FOR CHRIST. Her closeness to home is what did it, and how she would start involuntarily weeping when she saw GET YOUR BODY BACK—SPECIAL OFFER FOR MILITARY.
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“Why did you go?” she had asked her brother once, and he had answered with a certain simplicity, “It was my turn.” And she remembered that dusty afternoon at the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, how she had watched as a teenager crowned with a heap of dark curls ignored the DANGER signs and began walking down alone to the still pool of the Source. Old rockslides slid again under his shoes, for he was one of the ones who would make things happen. His voice would trigger avalanches, spring rainfall would pour his power and will, black birds would disappear into the sheer tall wall of him. His father begged him in a roaring gorgeous Romance language: come back, little idiot, my spit and image! The son did not listen. He walked down to the Source. It breathed its cool word to him: your turn. Come.
Winter still, and a once-in-a-lifetime moon, but she had to go outside to see it. Since that was out of the question, she watched the moon rise up slowly in the portal, shining down with its awful benevolence in the backyards of beloved strangers. Blood, and Super, and Blue, and always the first time in four hundred years, and looking, everyone rushed to say it, looking like a very thicc snack.
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She hoped the twenty-four online IQ tests she had taken were wrong. They had to be.
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When she was a child, the thing she feared most—besides pooping little eggs—was having the hiccups for fifty-five years, like the cursed man she had read about in her water-damaged Guinness Book. But when she came of age she realized that everything about life was having the hiccups for fifty-five years. Waking up, hic, standing in the steaming headspace of the shower, hic, hearing her own name called from the other room and feeling that faint electric volt of who I am, hic, hic, hic. No amount of sugar-eating or being scared would help.
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Everything tangled in the string of everything else. Now, when her cat vomited, she thought she heard the word praxis.
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Twice a month she and her husband had an argument about whether she would be able to seduce the dictator in order to bring him down. “I don’t know that he would even recognize you as a woman,” he said doubtfully, but she maintained that all she needed was a long blonde wig. At one point she actually screamed at him and lifted up her shirt. “You’re saying I’m not hot enough to change the course of human events? You’re telling me he wouldn’t go for THESE?”
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The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information. But when she looked at the smoking landscape of fathers laid out by cable news, it seemed no longer a question of intelligence or ignorance, but one of infection. Someone, a long time ago, looked at the big gray wriggle of American fathers and saw them as what they were: just weak enough, the mass host that would carry the living message.
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The hurtling ascendance these fathers felt (hers actually rewatched election night coverage whenever he was under the weather, in his depressing den full of terrible screens) came at the expense of their daughters despising them, as they had always despised women as a general concept. How was it, she wondered, picturing her father’s hands spread wide, how was it that we were the broads.