No One Is Talking About This (8)
“But I don’t want it up my ass,” her husband said reasonably.
“As if wanting something makes it hurt less!” This statement sailed through the room as an unintentional piece of wisdom, clean as laundry and full of wind. Oh, she loved to yell, loved to be inconsistent, loved to make no sense in the little awestruck hours of the night, which stared up at her as a perfect audience with their equal little heads. Hadn’t she opened as wide as possible earlier, hadn’t she moaned, even said yes, yes, more as he used it on her? She had, she had. Despite all that, wasn’t it still her prerogative to throb between the legs? It was. He should have to take it. He should have to endure the shocking thing with veins for once.
“Men,” she said, now satisfied. The dildo went back into its chest. Four years ago she would have written a personal essay about this for a women’s website called Dangerous Amanda or Brunette Ambition, and she would have been paid $250 for it, but now there was only the moan, the moment, and the sailing wisdom, now there was only the unrepeatable night.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Are you . . . crying?” her husband asked, slinging his backpack into a chair. She stared at him blurrily. Of course she was crying. Why wasn’t he crying? Hadn’t he seen the video of a woman with a deformed bee for a pet, and the bee loved her, and then the bee died?
* * *
■ ■ ■
Her teacup rose to her lips, tilted, floated away again. Raising her head from her spellbound reading a moment later, the cup was nowhere to be seen—not on the side table, not spilled on the floor or rolled between the unmade bedsheets. Its watercolor garden, shy thatched cottage, and rim of gilt were gone. She spent half an hour looking, increasingly spooked, for what hummed in her right hand was the feeling that she had put it somewhere inside the phone.
At least twice a week she was forced to picture that terrible thing, a baby hitler. The grimy black-and-white rolls of his armpits. Either in the nude or cloth-diapered, either with a mustache or without, either riding in a little gray tank or bedded down in a bunker with another baby wearing a blonde wig. Then, someone climbing into a black phone booth and rushing on a black comet backward to him, then a slash, or a neck snapping, or the dotted line and the BLAM! of a bullet. Then the smear of red icing all over the marzipan of baby hitler, and the future doesn’t happen, as easy as that. The numbers go back where they belong, the stripes slip back into the solid, the pounds fly back on bodies. The potatoes return to normal meals. But where does all the free-floating red feeling go, the cloud among the people that floated him up to the balcony, where he first began to speak?
* * *
■ ■ ■
NOT my america, a perfectly nice woman posted, and for some reason she responded,
damn, I agree . . . we didn’t trap george washington’s head in a quarter for this
* * *
■ ■ ■
A month after the election, she had been banned from the portal for forty-eight hours for posting a picture of herself crouched down and having her period on a small sculpture of twisted brown pipe cleaners that was labeled THE TREE OF LIBERTY. “Wouldn’t that mean that you were the tyrant in this scenario?” her husband asked, but she told him not to quibble. After her account was restored, she had decided to take a rest from political commentary for a while—not because she had gotten in trouble but because she had made her position clear, and also it had taken like three days to get a good shot of the period in motion.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Every time she passed the model train store she clenched her fists and said, “You did this . . .” And it was true, it was true, life as we knew it was coming to an end because 160 years ago or whatever, some old weirdo who was obsessed with trains had to invent trains because trains didn’t exist yet. Choo-choo, motherfucker, are you happy now?
* * *
■ ■ ■
The only thing that bound us together was this belief: that in every other country they eat unspeakable food; worship gods more see-through than glass; string together only the most meaningless syllables, like goo-goo-goo-goo-goo-goo-goo; are warlike but not noble; do not help the dead cross in the proper boats; do not send the correct incense up to the wide blue nostrils; crawl with whatever crawls; do not love their children, not the way we do; bare the most tempting body parts and cover the most mundane; cup their penises to protect them from supernatural forces; their poetry is piss; they do not respect the moon; slice the little faces of our familiars into the stewpot.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Jet lag had a habit of turning her into her mother, a high school librarian with a quiet drinking problem. If only my mother had been a college librarian, she thought. Then I would have had a real shot at the right ideas.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Stream-of-consciousness!” she yelled onstage in Jamaica, where the water was the color of a nude aquamarine. Though maybe not for long, she thought darkly. “Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him. But what about the stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?” One audience member yawned, then another. Long before the current vectors came into being, they had been a contagious species.