No One Is Talking About This (3)

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There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who were making fun of it previously. Then someone else discovered a stone version from a million years ago in some museum, and this seemed to prove something. Then the origin of the toy was revealed to have something to do with Israel and Palestine, and so everyone made a pact never to speak of it again. And all of this happened in the space of like four days.



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She opened the portal. “Are we all just going to keep doing this till we die?” people were asking each other, as other days they asked each other, “Are we in hell?” Not hell, she thought, but some fluorescent room with eternally outdated magazines where they waited to enter the memory of history, paging through a copy of Louisiana Parent or Horse Illustrated.



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It was in this place where we were on the verge of losing our bodies that bodies became the most important, it was in this place of the great melting that it became important whether you called it pop or soda growing up, or whether your mother cooked with garlic salt or the real chopped cloves, or whether you had actual art on your walls or posed pictures of your family sitting on logs in front of fake backdrops, or whether you had that one Tupperware stained completely orange. You were zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, it was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other. You zoomed in and zoomed in on that warm grain until it looked like the coldness of the moon.



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“What are you doing?” her husband asked softly, tentatively, repeating his question until she shifted her blank gaze up to him. What was she doing? Couldn’t he see her arms all full of the sapphires of the instant? Didn’t he realize that a male feminist had posted a picture of his nipple that day?



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She had become famous for a post that said simply, Can a dog be twins? That was it. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the stage of penetration where teens posted the cry-face emoji at her. They were in high school. They were going to remember “Can a dog be twins?” instead of the date of the Treaty of Versailles, which, let’s face it, she didn’t know either.



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This had raised her to a certain airy prominence. All around the world, she was invited to speak from what felt like a cloudbank, about the new communication, the new slipstream of information. She sat onstage next to men who were better known by their usernames and women who drew their eyebrows on so hard that they looked insane, and tried to explain why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing. This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?



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In Australia, where she was inexplicably popular, she sat onstage under melting lights with a fellow internet expert who bore the facial satisfaction of being Canadian and whose hair was visibly gelled with $32 gel. He spoke well and cogently on a variety of subjects, but the pants he was wearing were Cyber Pants, the sort of pants we wore back when we believed we had to skateboard through the internet. He also wore rave goggles at all times, so as to protect himself from the blinding light of cyber, which came from a sun that he carried with him, directly in his line of vision, which was the star of the future set in the old bone socket of the sky.

“Sneazing is funnier, right?” she asked him.

“No question,” he answered. “Sneazing all the way.”



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During these appearances there entered into her body what she thought of as a demon of performance, an absolutely intact personality that she had no access to in ordinary times. It was not just inside her, but spilled a little beyond; it struck huge gestures off her body like sparks from a flint. Always when she watched the performances afterward she was aghast. Who is that woman? Who told her she could talk to people that way?



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“The problem!” She sounded militant, like a lesser-known suffragette. A foreign gnat was stuck in her mascara, and her mouth tasted of the minutely different preparation of coffee that Australians found superior to the latte. The audience looked at her encouragingly. “The problem is that we’re rapidly approaching the point where all our dirty talk is going to include sentences like Fuck up my dopamine, Website!”



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Why had she elected to live so completely in the portal? It had something to do, she knew, with Child Chained Up in the Yard. Her great-grandmother, an imaginary invalid, had kept her firstborn son chained up to a stake in the front yard so she could always see what he was doing through the window. She would have preferred a different maternal lineage—aviatrixes, jazz kittens, international spies would all have been preferable—but Child Chained Up in the Yard is what she had gotten, and it would not let her go.



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Every country seemed to have a paper called The Globe. She picked them up wherever she went, laying her loonies and her pounds and her kroners down on counters, but often abandoned them halfway through for the immediacy of the portal. For as long as she read the news, line by line and minute by minute, she had some say in what happened, didn’t she? She had to have some say in what happened, even if it was only WHAT?