No One Is Talking About This (23)
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Her wish for the next generation was for them to be spared an age when numbers got sick—swarmed, clumped together, went plummeting off cliffs—and the numbers were human beings. But could what they had started be stopped? Even across the ocean, the simulation flapped like a flag in the sky, rippling with the moon and red sun and the stars, and a sign on the side of the road was spray-painted (what else?) with the words that had made it everywhere, FLAT EARTH.
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you know this baby’s gonna be a world traveler bitch, her sister would write, in response to the steady flow of pictures from overseas. she’s gonna go everywhere and see everything, gonna get every stamp in her passport. And each time, without fail, she responded, if the world is still there when she gets here haha
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A certain look used to come over her aunt’s face as she crossed and held her son’s wrists behind his back, in that imitation kitchen full of imitation food. It made her wonder if she ought to have children, for anything could happen, and you didn’t know if you were up to it, how could you know if you were up to it? But she thought just as often of a little girl with pigtails who came running down the aisle of a plane toward her once, and patted her all over her arms and legs as she passed, and it was like a rain of soft blue bruiseless plums. She felt the surprise of it long after the girl was gone, and as she contemplatively sipped vodka from a shampoo bottle in the bathroom, a bloom came suddenly all over her skin: maybe she was up to it, after all.
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“I was with you, I felt I was a part of it, until you made the joke about the humpback,” and the last woman in line turned and through the sunshine-yellow of her shirt she could see the hump on her back, which looked exactly like her grandmother’s, crested and high on the left side, and for the rest of the day the words echoed in her ears I was with you I felt I was a part of it, and why had she made that joke in the first place, when her grandmother had a hump, for God’s sake, when she had memorized its contours, when she could still feel it under the slow trustful circling of her childish hands?
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It was a relief, even as she was chained to it, to see how her little window found a way to look out on the eternal mysteries. How she had ordered an inexplicable plate of German potato salad that night—two years ago now, before anything had happened—and then received a text telling her that her grandmother had passed, whose own recipe had called for bacon, sugar, white vinegar, boiled eggs, and some old-fashioned and crucial punctuation she always neglected to add. Celery seed, perhaps?
I was eating a bloomin’ onion at outback when it happened, the text told her. she would have wanted it that way
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“You’re doing the decent thing!” the excitable priest had barked at the funeral. He believed the modern world had no respect for its elders, and consequently had forgotten about God, the oldest man alive. “Nowadays, a parent dies, the kids roll them up in a carpet and bury them in the backyard like a chihuahua!” But that was all wrong, she thought, puzzled. There was nothing people loved, respected, cherished more on the mantelpiece in a brass urn than a chihuahua. He would know that, if he ever went online.
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There is nothing modern about this, she had thought as she listened, sat, stood, knelt, allowed her body and her voice to remember the ritual, grief must belong to its own circle of time, but then swept her eyes to the side and saw her father ceaselessly vaping at the end of the family pew, just sucking like a hungry baby on a long futuristic black pipe, and then lifting his head toward the domed ceiling and seeming to exhale great white clouds of his mother’s soul.
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“What are we going to tell our grandkids?” she asked her brother, twirling a nonexistent phone cord between her finger and thumb.
“The same thing they told us,” he reflected. “Yeah, I was in the shit. Yeah, I was out there barking at police dogs. Yeah, I went in the portal and told the dictator to change my diaper.”
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A few years ago her husband had bought her a DNA test, before anyone knew they were collecting all the results in a huge database so they could eventually send your distant cousin to prison for stealing a loaf of bread. She spat feebly into a little vial and sent it away and it came back that she was descended from the filles du roi, lower-class Frenchwomen who were shipped overseas to fuck Canada out of the beaverish wilderness. “This explains so much about you,” her husband had groaned. “This explains everything,” and maybe it did. She saw her DNA streaming backward from her body like a timeline, richly peopled with the faces of distant cousins behind bars, and she was somehow the one who had put them there, by moving the clock another age past them, by being born at all.
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She had once shared a stage with a man who stood and laughed in the voice of his great-grandfather for five full minutes, even to the point of falling backward and rolling on the floor as he cackled; he had explained earlier that his ancestors were always with him when he performed. When he finished, she smoothed the daisies on her dress and walked up to the microphone and said, blinking against the personal spotlight, “I cannot even tell you how much my ancestors are not up with me here right now.” But then, almost as a serious laugh, a strength entered her voice and she stood like a tree with a spirit in it, and she opened a portal where her mouth was and spoke better than she ever had before, and as she rushed like blood back and forth in the real artery she saw that ancestors weren’t just behind, they were the ones who were to come.