There is still a real life to be lived, there are still real things to be done, she thought one night, helping a friend wash a fine splatter of possum blood off her hands, face, hair. There is still the cut-and-dried, the black-and-white. But when they walked into the backyard the next morning with a long-handled shovel they had bought specifically for the purpose of disposing of the concrete evidence—of the deep, the wild, the red blood-jet—the possum had disappeared, not dead at all.
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Sometimes she wanted to watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that didn’t exist. It was all there in her mind—the underground parking garage, the sweep of a trench coat and dark sunglasses, some sort of VHS tape or gleaming chip that had fallen into the wrong hands. The desire to watch this movie occasionally overwhelmed her, when the year wound down and the clocks fell back. In the past this would have been classed as existential longing, and a French book would have been written about it, and it would eventually be made into an out-of-the-box blockbuster starring none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and just when the weather turned, you would settle down to watch it with a big bowl of the snack that was not quite what you were hungry for either.
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The portal’s favorite stories, now, were about interracial friends who met playing online Scrabble and eventually invited each other to Thanksgiving dinner. One of them must be very old, old enough to have been on the wrong side of the civil rights movement, and one of them must be very young, young enough that their face was like a fresh lightbulb. They must encounter each other’s traditional dishes with an equal amount of surprise and familiarity, they must take pictures of themselves sitting down at the feather-flocked table, and, most important, they must do it again next year. We reveled in these stories, which were not untrue. But there was some untruth in the degree to which they comforted us.
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Was it better to resist the new language where it stole, defanged, co-opted, consumed, or was it better to text thanksgiving titties be poppin to all your friends on the fourth Thursday of November, just as the humble bird of reason, which could never have represented us on our silver dollars, made its final unwilling sacrifice to our willingness to eat and be eaten by each other?
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Why did rich people believe they worked harder? Her theory was that it was because they identified with the pile of money itself. And gathering interest, multiplying hotly, climbing its own slopes like a fever, heightening its silver, its gold, its green—what was that but work? When you thought about it that way, they never slept, but stayed wide-eyed as numerals 365 days a year, every last digit of them busy, awake in the clinking, the shuffle, the rustle, while eagles with pure platinum feathers swooped above them to create a wind. When you thought about it that way, of course they deserved it all, and looked with rightful contempt at the coppery disgraces all around them: those two cents that refused to even rub themselves together.
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The mind we were in was obsessive, perseverant. It swam with superstition and half-remembered facts pertaining to how many spiders we ate a year and the rate at which dentists killed themselves. One hemisphere had never been to college, the other hemisphere had attended one of those institutions that is only ever referred to as a bubble, though not beautiful. At times it disintegrated into lists of diseases. But worth remembering: the mind had been, in its childhood, a place of play.
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It had also once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone.
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Everyone was reading the same short story. It was about texting, hearts for eyes, bad kisses with their terrible bristles, porn moving in vague blobs through the body, how social protocol constitutes another arm of perception . . . and how men sucked, of course! Two ghosts in an emptiness, moaning self-consciously, suddenly finding themselves in possession of a whole bedroom’s worth of pins and needles. What did ghosts do, on the one night a year that they were given bodies? Wasted them in trying to reach through each other, as they could do when they were vapor, air, the same breath that everyone was breathing together as they turned the final page, whew.
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In the portal their breath turned to wreaths of frost, and everyone gathered together to watch the incest commercial. A sexy brother, on a surprise visit home for the holidays, greets his sexy sister in the kitchen before anyone else is awake. A conspiracy of the body thrills between them; the sister sticks a bow on her brother’s chest and declares him her present; long ago, some unwitting subtext in the faces of the actors suggests, these two discovered 69 in an attic. They consume a mug of hot black FOLGERS and wonder if they have enough time . . . but no, here comes the step of sexy parents on the stairs. Incest commercial, oh, incest commercial! The human family cupped their hands around the steam of it till they were warm.