No One Is Talking About This (2)

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The amount of eavesdropping that was going on was enormous, and the implications not yet known. Other people’s diaries streamed around her. Should she be listening, for instance, to the conversations of teenagers? Should she follow with such avidity the compliments that rural sheriffs paid to porn stars, not realizing that other people could see them? What about the thread of women all realizing they had the exact same scar on their knee? “I have that scar too!” a white woman piped up, but was swiftly and efficiently shut down, because it was not the same, she had interrupted an usness, the world in which she got that scar was not the same.



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She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, blissed, pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner, ghostly pale women posting pictures of their bruises—the world pressing closer and closer, the spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk, and the day still not opening to her. What did it mean that she was allowed to see this?

If she began to bite her lower lip, as she nearly always did after the milk and civet-cat bitterness of her morning coffee, she went into the bathroom with the ivy growing out its bangs outside the window and very carefully painted her mouth a definite, rich, top-of-the-piano red—as if she had an underground club to be at later that night, where she would go as bare as a missing sequin, where she would distill the whole sunset cloud of human feeling to a six-word lyric.



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Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.



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Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole. It was not so much the hatred she was interested in as the swift attenuation, as if their collective blood had made a decision. As if they were a species that released puffs of poison, or black ink in a cloud on the ocean floor. I mean, have you read that article about octopus intelligence? Have you read how octopuses are marching out of the sea and onto dry land, in slick and obedient armies?



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“Ahahaha!” she yelled, the new and funnier way to laugh, as she watched footage of bodies being flung from a carnival ride at the Ohio State Fair. Their trajectories through the air were pure arcs of joy, T-shirts turned liquid on them, just look what the flesh could do when it gave in, right down to the surrendering snap of the . . .

“What’s so hilarious,” said her husband, resting sideways on his chair with his bladelike shins dangling over one arm, but by then she had scrolled down the rest of the thread and seen that someone was dead, and five others hanging half in and half out of the world. “Oh God!” she said as she realized. “Oh Christ, no, oh God!”



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At nine o’clock every night she gave up her mind. Renounced it, like a belief. Abdicated it, like a throne, all for love. She went to the freezer and opened that fresh air on her face and put fingerprints in the frost on the neck of a bottle and poured something into a glass that was very very clear. And then she was happy, though she worried every night, as you never do with knowledge, whether there would be enough.



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Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like “I’m a retard with butt aids” was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way.



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Her pronoun, which she had never felt particularly close to, traveled farther and farther away from her in the portal, swooping through landscapes of us and him and we and them. Occasionally it flew back to light on her shoulder, like a parrot who repeated everything she said but otherwise had nothing to do with her, who in fact had been left to her by some old weird aunt, who on her deathbed had simply barked, “Deal with it!”

Mostly, though, it passed into you, you, you, you, until she had no idea where she ended and the rest of the crowd began.



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There was an iconic photograph, crisp in its nurse’s uniform, of a woman being bent backward and kissed by a soldier on V-Day. We had seen it all our lives, and thought we understood the particular firework it captured—and now the woman had risen from history to tell everyone that she didn’t know the man at all, that in fact she had been frightened throughout the whole encounter. And only then did the hummingbird of her left hand, the uncanny twist of her spine, the grip of the soldier’s elbow on her neck become apparent. “I had never seen him before in my life,” the woman said, and there he was in the picture, there he was in our minds, clutching her like victory, never letting her go.



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Of course it was always the people who called themselves enlightened who stole the most. Who picked up the slang the earliest. To show—what? That they were not like the others? That they knew what was worth stealing? They were the guiltiest too. But guilt was not worth anything.