“Your attention is holy,” she told the class, as her phone buzzed uncontrollably in her back pocket, for a long-ago joke she had made about a Florida politician “who nearly died during elective taint-lengthening surgery” was receiving renewed attention that morning. “It is the soul spending itself,” she continued, closing her eyes to see something else, and described to them the remote monastery she had visited the year before. It overlooked sheets of fresh lavender like higher laundry, and opalescent slugs crept through the rain toward it on pilgrimage, and inside there was an underground room where the monks gathered every evening to study scripture in silence. They sat in a circle in the cool scoop of the room, their baldnesses bowed together, and read. The floor sloped, seeming to pour toward one white prismatic corner that passed the world through itself like a perfect quartz spear; there was no reason it should look so solid, but it was where all that reading had gone.
P-p-p-perfect p-p-p-politics!” she hooted into a hot microphone at a public library. She had been lightly criticized for her incomplete understanding of the Spanish Civil War that week, and the memory of it still smarted. “P-p-p-perfect p-p-p-politics will manifest on earth as a raccoon with a scab for a face!”
* * *
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Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.
* * *
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Some people were very excited to care about Russia again. Others were not going to do it no matter what. Because above all else, the Cold War had been embarrassing.
Not just the ideas, but the jeans.
* * *
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In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis. Was this always how it happened?
* * *
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To future historians, nothing will explain our behavior, except, and hear me out, a mass outbreak of ergotism caused by contaminated rye stores?
* * *
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Every time it was in the news, she had it again: the dream where her rapist was being nice to her. He was next to her on the bed and speaking quietly, and she understood that it had all been a misunderstanding, which wiped, with an unbearably fine cloth, something in the body away from the mind. And once that was gone, they moved together through the dream as the two closest people on earth, though no one she encountered understood, though mouths of friends and family fell open with soft shock when they saw her.
* * *
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The word toxic had been anointed, and now could not go back to being a regular word. It was like a person becoming famous. They would never have a normal lunch again, would never eat a Cobb salad outdoors without tasting the full awareness of what they were. Toxic. Labor. Discourse. Normalize.
“Don’t normalize it!!!!!” we shouted at each other. But all we were normalizing was the use of the word normalize, which sounded like the action of a ray gun wielded by a guy named Norm to make everyone around him Norm as well.
* * *
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When caucasianblink.gif appeared, her eye traveled over it left to right as if it were one hundred thousand words. The little strings that connect human eyes to human eyes and human mouths to human mouths tugged her along with the expression: she bounced her eyebrows, bobbed her head back on its neck, and blinked along. Sometimes she even made a sound that corresponded with the figure of movement, a hushed zoom, or a whoop, that rose and fell with the arc of the drama. It was no longer the embarrassing adolescent question of whether people saw the same color green. It was a question of what soft formless excuse me, Linda, what the fuck did you just say played out in your innermost ear when the Caucasian man appeared in the portal and asked you to help him put on his never-ending play, just this once more, please, you were the only one who could help him bring to life this Masterpiece of Universal Feeling.
* * *
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Context collapse! That sounded pretty bad, didn’t it? And also like the thing that was happening to the honeybees?
* * *
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Certain people were born with the internet inside them and suffered greatly from it. Thom Yorke was one of them, she thought, and curled up in her chair to watch the documentary Meeting People Is Easy. The cinematography is a speeding neon blear of streets and tilted bottlenecks and strangers, people breaking like beams through the prisms of airports, cowlicks pressed against cab windows, halls like humane mousetraps, ads where art should be, waterways gone blinding, a rich sulfur light on the drummer. It rains, it rains everything. The soundtrack blips through a fugue of interview questions, the same ones repeated over and over: music to slit your wrists to? Every shot says the circuits that run through us go everywhere, are agonizing. But then something happens.