No One Is Talking About This (44)

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scanning back and forth

an endless supply of sight



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Gradually the world called her back. As her plane dragged its dotted line across the Atlantic, she looked out the window again and saw the same Glory following her, a round blaze of rain that never blinked.

Her eyes floated two inches in front of her and seemed to be raining too. The book she had brought, with its soft-focus woman on the cover, lay untouched on her lap. She began to flip through the pictures again: the baby smiling, laughing, at a pumpkin patch, in a bathing suit being dipped in the ocean. The pictures were always with her; she could not feel her first fingertip. Once, she had visited a little island with shocking white beaches and had worked her bare toes into its famous sand, which was used to make the glass for all our screens. There the sky was so crystal, and the sun so hot, and the air on her skin so unmediated, and the trees so full of koala bears, that she felt either like she had gotten inside the phone completely or else had gotten out.



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Piles of discarded devices in landfills, with somewhere among them a koosh ball still flickering, trying to transmit—do you copy, do you copy, do you read, do you read. “I copy,” she said to the vibrating air, “I copy, I copy, I read.”



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She had been asked to give a lecture at the British Museum. The lecture was about the portal, and as she stood at the podium and clicked through the PowerPoint she tried to pretend she still lived there, that still she pumped with the blood that knew. She said the words communal mind and saw the room her family had sat in together, looking at that singular gray brain on an MRI. She thought about the 24-hour NICU badge in her coat pocket, that she kept there to remind herself she had once been a citizen of necessity. Why had she entered the portal in the first place? Because she wanted to be a creature of pure call and response: she wanted to delight and to be delighted. She read, her rib cage shaking, with the voice she had used to delight the baby. Her heart hammered nearly out of her and she read:

“She was asked to give a lecture at the British Museum. This was hardly deserved. She had, in a sense, stolen her way there, bit by bit, scroll by scroll, gold piece by gold piece. Still, she stood there, and locked them in her mind for an hour. Her face was the fresh imprint of her age. She spoke the words that were there for her to speak; she wore the only kind of shirt available at that time. It was not possible to see where she had gone wrong, where she would go wrong. She said garfield is a body-positivity icon. She said abraham lincoln is daddy. She said the eels in London are on cocaine. It was fitting finally to appear in that place, an exhibit herself and from far away, collaged together in body and mind, monstrous in the eyes of the future, an imbecile before the Rosetta Stone, disturber of the deadest tombs, butterfly catcher and butterfly killer, soon to be folded between two pages herself, and speak about the liftedness of little and large things.”

The audience was silent, and the faces in the front row were shining. This did not feel like real life exactly, but nowadays what did. What she was imagining was carrying the baby through the museum, the head in her arms unheavy. She was showing her the mummies, setting her lightly down on the steps of the temple, calling her name to the echoing ceiling, carrying her through the Greek marbles and saying, “Someone in some future time will think of us.” She was cracking open the glass case of amulets and hanging every limb of her with protection, protection. She was standing in the hall of the Assyrian lions and assuring her that we would not be devoured, she was carrying her, carrying her, stopping at every fountain and letting her drink, from prehistory to the modern age, to the moment of them standing there together, marveling: more and more I begin to feel that the whole world is conscious.



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Afterward, and after many drinks, people from the audience led her down winding side streets to a club with no name. The club was a crush, one body. A mirror at the back that she first thought was another room, until she saw her own face at the center of it. A sign on the wall that said OASIS. At first she could not dance at all, and then she could not stop. The songs they played were preposterous; were her personal American embarrassments; the ones that had marked her as backward, provincial, unsubtle as a major chord. They played “Rock and Roll All Nite.” They played “Seven Nation Army.” They thumped up and down like Ohioans to “Sweet Caroline.” Oh, she said to herself, I did not know. The songs all along had been beloved. The whole club pressed against her and she thought of Little Touch; her eyes traveled to all the places she was kissed, places all over the world. She wondered was it worth it to show up, hear a little music, and then leave? Someone at some point slid her phone out of her pocket and she lifted off her feet, lighter. Her whole self was on it, if anyone wanted. Someone would try to unlock it later, and see the picture of the baby opening her mouth, about to speak, about to say anything.





Acknowledgments


My thanks to my editor, Paul Slovak, who accompanied me on this journey despite not knowing what a binch is, and to my agent, Mollie Glick, who first found me in the portal. Thanks also to the team at Riverhead: Alexis Farabaugh, Helen Yentus, Jynne Dilling Martin, May-Zhee Lim. And in memory of Liz Hohenadel and her long crisp gingerish hair.