No One Is Talking About This (24)

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The moon fell into her window and woke her. Every morning at four a.m., a prehistoric sense of duty, danger, and approaching wolves told her to get up and check the fire. She did, and the fire of the world still burned in its circle of stones, so she lay awake for an hour or two, trying to lull herself back to sleep. She imagined herself unfurling from a little brown seed and growing into a beanstalk, her mind rustling and thickening along every vine; that she was evolving into her present self from a single-celled organism amid humid well-designed ferns. Unfolding once more in a belly, with no thought of what life on the outside was like; the portal in another language, or before she had learned how to read.



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Strange, how the best things in the portal seemed to belong to everyone. There was no use in saying That’s mine to a teenager who had carefully cropped the face, name, and fingerprint out of your sentence—she loved it, the unitless free language inside her head had said it a hundred times, it was hers. Your slice of life cut its cord and multiplied among the people, first nowhere and little and then everywhere and large. No one and everyone. Can a be twins.



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The words that would send a sheet of flame up her body, when she thought of posting them a year from now:


what a time to be quote unquote alive





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look, here she is! her sister texted, and attached a picture of her twenty-week ultrasound, where a thumbprint could be seen pressing itself orange against the dark. look how big her head is lol

hello, little alien! she responded. welcome to this awful place!





Part Two





Despite everything, the world had not ended yet. What was the reflex that made it catch itself? What was the balance it regained?

You’ll be nostalgic for this too, if you make it.



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Everyone at gate B6 was bathed in gold. She sat there with one foot off the edge of the earth, close to falling, until she saw the couple with matching extravagant mullets that hung down past their shoulder blades. The man took out a brush and began to fight through his mullet until it was free, and then he handed the brush to his wife and she began to fight through hers with the same consecrated look; these mullets were their acre and when God came down he would not find a rock, a stump, a weed. They shook out their hair together as if it were the same head, joined hands, and rested. She sat in the gold that made them the same and felt a little less like dying.



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The cursor blinked where her mind was. She put one true word after another and put the words in the portal. All at once they were not true, not as true as she could have made them. Where was the fiction? Distance, arrangement, emphasis, proportion? Did they only become untrue when they entered someone else’s life and butted, trivial, up against its bigness?



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Perfect children played forever in the portal—impossible to believe they would not grow, surpass our height, end up a better monkey in that Evolution of Man drawing.



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A twenty-three-year-old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of the feeling of being a public body; his skin seemed to have no pores whatsoever. “Did you read . . . ?” they said to each other again and again. “Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.



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“I have a theory,” she said to the crowd, and then paused, for somewhere she thought she heard someone groan. She tried to resume, but couldn’t recall what she was going to say—something about being a woman in our time.



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In Vienna the little cakes looked like the big buildings, or else the big buildings looked like the little cakes. She ate both, layer upon layer. Then, as she swung in the highest car of the Ferris wheel in the Prater, coffee sloshing in her stomach above the linden leaves, her phone buzzed and there were the words, from her far mother, Something has gone wrong, and How soon can you get here?



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fast fast fast fast fast

if the world is still there when she gets here haha



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Gap.

Gap.

Gap.

Gap.

Great gap in the thrumming of the knowing of the news.



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The question that was the pure liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped-clock answer. She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing. Oh, she thought hazily, falling rainwise like Alice, finding tucked under her arm the bag of peas she once photoshopped into pictures of historical atrocities, oh, have I been wasting my time?