No One Is Talking About This (4)

Even if it was only HEY!



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It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals, cheer at bullfights, call little kids Pussy as a nickname, believe in fairies or mediums or spirit photography, blood purity or manifest destiny or night air, did not lobotomize her daughters or send her sons to war, where she was not subject to the swells and currents and storms of the mind of the time—which could not be escaped except through genius, and even then you probably beat your wife, abandoned your children, pinched the rumps of your maids, had maids at all. She had seen the century spin to its conclusion and she knew how it all turned out. Everything had been decided by a sky in long black judge robes, and she floated as the head at the top of it and saw everything, everything, backward, backward, and turned away in fright from her own bright day.



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“Colonialism,” she hissed at a beautiful column, while the tour guide looked at her with concern.





Every fiber in her being strained. She was trying to hate the police.

“Start small and work your way up,” her therapist suggested. “Start by hating Officer Big Mac, a class traitor who is keeping the other residents of McDonaldland from getting the sandwiches that they need, and who when the revolution comes will have the burger of his head eaten for his crimes.” But this insight produced in her only a fresh wave of discouragement. Her therapist was more radical than her?



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The thing was that her father had been a policeman, one who was known for unnecessarily strip-searching the boys in her high school when he pulled them over on their drunken joyrides. This meant that it was hard for her to get dates. It also meant that when she did get dates, she was expected to take the lead.



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In childhood she had lain awake at night, on fire with a single question: how did French people know what they were saying? Yet when she finally asked her mother, she didn’t know either, which meant the problem must be inherited.



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can’t learn? she googled late at night. can’t learn since losing my virginity?



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Her most secret pleasures were sentences that only half a percent of people on earth would understand, and that no one would be able to decipher at all in ten years:

grisly british witch pits

sex in the moon next summer

what is binch

what is to be corn cobbed

that’s the cost of my vegan lunch

pants burn leg wound



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She could not feel her first fingertip. This in the way that your ear used to get soft, pink, and pliant, and the swirls of hair around it like damp designs, from talking on the telephone.



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Her husband would sometimes come up behind her while she was repeating the words no, no, no or help, help, help under her breath, and lay a hand on the back of her neck like a Victorian nursemaid. “Are you locked in?” he would ask, and she would nod and then do the thing that always broke her out somehow, which was to google beautiful brown pictures of roast chickens—maybe because that’s what women used to do with their days.



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He did not have this problem, this metastasis of the word next, the word more. He took only as much as he needed of something, and that was enough. When she asked him once what his last meal would be, he replied, instantly and thoughtfully, “Banana. Because I wouldn’t want to be full when I die.”



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One hundred years ago, her cat might have been called Mittens or Pussywillow. Now her cat was called Dr. Butthole. There was no way out of it. “Dr. Butthole,” she called at night, almost in despair, until he trotted to the door with the bright feathers of her dignity clinging to his lips and disappeared in his alternating stripes over the threshold.



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In Bristol the sunset dripped as if from a honeycomb. “This is your contribution to society?” a man asked, holding up a printout of the Can a dog be twins? post.

“Yes,” she peeped. She wanted to explain that she had also popularized the concept of a “sealing wax manicure,” where you painted over your entire fingertip in a big careless red blob, and that this had paved the way for 1776-core, an irony-based aesthetic where people adopted various visual signifiers of the Founding Fathers, but he had already turned away in disgust, tearing the printout in two as he went. Just as well. It probably wouldn’t be funny to an Englishman anyway.



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Afterward, a boyish figure stood in line to see her; he waited till the very end. “I used to read your diary,” he confessed when it was finally his turn, and tears sparked in her eyes instantaneously. The diary she had written before anything had happened to her! The diary where she used to make the sort of jokes that would get people fired now!