No One Is Talking About This (19)
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The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.
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Possibly related: the biggest fight she and her husband had ever had had been about the Milgram experiment. He had never heard of it, and even after she looked it up for him online, expressed doubt that it shed any light on human behavior. Finally she lost her head. “If you refuse to accept . . . that we are LITTLE RODENTS . . . who would TORTURE EACH OTHER under the RIGHT CONDITIONS . . . then GET OUT OF THIS APARTMENT!” Bewildered, he had left, and then returned twenty minutes later with a nice white cheddar, which she guessed was some kind of a sick, twisted joke.
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Already it was becoming impossible to explain things she had done even the year before, why she had spent hypnotized hours of her life, say, photoshopping bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities, posting OH YES HUNNY in response to old images of Stalin, why whenever she liked anything especially, she said she was going to “chug it with her ass.” Already it was impossible to explain these things.
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Go not far enough, and find yourself guilty of complacency, complicity, a political slumping into the cushions of your time. Go too far, and find yourself saying that you didn’t care that a white child had been eaten by an alligator.
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The teenagers were locked in the black air of closets, softly interviewing each other about shootings as they happened in real time. The teenagers were texting their parents their love, apologizing for ever being disrespectful, saying they should have taught their younger sisters to ride bikes when they had the chance. The teenagers sounded like adults, because the gunman in the doorway had loomed at them as long as they had been alive.
The name of the town where it happened slowly became darker and darker, as if the students were tracing it in ballpoint pen. They were walking out of their classes. They were lying down in front of the White House. Is this the one that would tear through the paper? And in the end, would it be because some dumb motherfucker made the mistake of shooting up a performing arts high school?
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“The massacre,” a Norwegian journalist had repeated over and over at the dinner table, “you remember, the massacre.” “What massacre,” she had wondered hazily, and it wasn’t till she heard the killer’s name that it came back: the island, and the man with the manifesto, complaining of cold coffee in prison, and the number 77. But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.
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We took the things we found in the portal as much for granted as if they had grown there, gathered them as God’s own flowers. When we learned that they had been planted there on purpose by people who understood them to be poisonous, who were pointing their poison at us, well.
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Well.
WELL!
W E L L !!!
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For a moment, if she allowed herself, she could even feel exhilarated to think she had been manipulated this way. That all the thickness, clumsiness, ploddingness she had ever felt in her biological vehicle could be overwritten. She was not those things. She was not her own slowness. She wasn’t trapped, rooted in her provincial ignorance and her regional mispronunciations, pinned to one place. She was an instantaneous citizen of the flash of lightning that wrote across the sky I know.
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Our enemies! What if they had planted the thing about eating ass, to make us all suddenly want and claim to eat ass, to talk constantly about our devotion to eating ass, to pose on our album covers with napkins tied around our necks and knives and forks poised over delectable asses? God, it was genius! No swifter way to bring down the supposed citizens of the free world than to transform them to a nation of ass-eaters!
Had they made us weak with intermittent fasting? Had they wasted our evenings with the detective show that no one could understand? Had they done this to make American novels bad for a time? Were they distracting our anarchists with polyamory and meal replacement drinks, so nothing could get done? Had they bloated us with homebrew? Had they made Christianity viable again? Had they brought back snap-crotch bodysuits?
But no. No, this is how conspiracy thinking began. This is how you became someone who put the whole sky into finger quotes. She must accept, for now, that the craze for ass-eating had been organic, along with all the rest of it.
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“You could write it,” she had said to the man in Toronto, “someone could write it,” but all writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement. Sixty-year-old cartoonists had also tried to contend with the issue, but the best they could do was sad doodles of a person with a Phone for a Face who was scrolling through like a tiny little Face in His Hand.