No One Is Talking About This (26)

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What she worried for was not just her sister’s life but her originality. She loved Star Wars so much, for instance, that she had walked down the aisle to “The Imperial March.” Would the impulse to walk down the aisle to “The Imperial March”—which seemed the essence of survival itself, the little tune we hummed in the dark—would that make it out of whatever was happening alive?



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She went silent in the portal; she knew how it was. She knew that as you scrolled you averted your eyes from the ones who could not apply their lipstick within the lines, from the ones who were beginning to edge up into mania, from the ones who were Horny, from the dommes who were not remotely mean enough, from the nudeness that received only eight likes, from the toothpaste on the mirror in bathroom selfies, from the potato salads that looked disgusting, from the journalists who were making mistakes in real time, from the new displays of animal weakness that told us to lengthen the distance between the pack and the stragglers. But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside.



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If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?



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“Do you understand that your daughter’s life is in danger?” she screamed quietly to her father in the car, for the baby’s head was still growing exponentially with no sign of slowing down, and her sister could not walk more than a few steps without starting contractions. “Do you understand that a century ago—” but stopped, because her father’s eyes were swimming, he was starting to see, and she couldn’t bear if this was the thing that did it, and after all these years. She tried to wrench the door open, but it was locked; “Bad to the Bone” was playing on the radio, and it was not in her father’s nature to let her out of the car until it had finished.



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“Fucking cops!” she yelled when she finally escaped, slamming the car door shut and kicking the back tire with the force of thirty-six law-abiding years. “Stank . . . nasty . . . pigs!” she hollered, radicalized at last, to the sad familiar face in the rearview mirror, redder than ever before.



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And how on earth would this new knowledge coexist with Europe.Is.A.Fag? She suspected it wouldn’t, not for long.



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Still, he wasn’t as dismissive as usual; he was trying to be good. “How is . . . your work . . . going . . . these days?” he asked over breakfast, and she recalled a recent event where she got legally high with some booksellers, became convinced she was dying, drank an entire pitcher of cucumber water, and then fell to the ground so slowly that she accidentally showed the entire room her snatch, all the while crying out for someone to Call an Ambulance. On reflection, she felt no shame. What was such an error but a replica, made miniature, of the sad trajectory that had brought her fame in the first place? “It’s going really, really well,” she told her father, crossing her indefensible forearms over her undefended chest.



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“Everything that could have gone wrong with a baby’s brain went wrong here,” the doctors told them, and so she began to live in that brain, thinking herself along its routes, thinking what it meant that the baby would never know the news. The picture of it approached total abstraction, almost became beautiful. “The neurons all migrated into isolated pods, where they will never talk to each other,” the doctors said. Ten words, maybe. Maybe she’ll know who you are. Everyone in the room gazing at the blooming gray cloud; everyone in the room seized with a secret wish to see their own, which they believed would be recognizable by the subtle shadows of things in it. Oh look, eight years of medical school. Oh look, an old episode of Frasier.



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The neurologist stood out from the others. Her skin had the gentle green cast of a Madonna balanced on a single fish-shaped foot in a grotto, with sea light reflecting on the long upward thought of her forehead. Compositionally, she appeared to be made of 14 percent classical music, the kind you were supposed to listen to while you were studying. As she spoke, she stopped every few sentences to apologize. “Not your fault,” her sister kept saying, flicking solid silver away from her cheek, as whatever it was that had made the neurologist study the brain in the first place cracked the channel of her education and began to pour toward them as a direct current. She streamed in her fixed socket like a star. Said, “I am so sorry.”



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If the baby lived—for the doctors did not believe she would live. If she lived, they did not believe she would live for long. If she lived for long, they did not know what her life would be—she would live in her senses. Her fingertips, her ears, her sleepiness and her wide awake, a ripple along the skin wherever she was touched. All along her edges, just where she turned to another state. Tidepools full of slow blinks and bubbles and little waving fronds. The self, but more, like a sponge. But thirsty.