* * *
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YOU HAVE A NEW MEMORY, her phone announced, and played a slideshow of her trying to get a good picture of her butt in a hotel bathroom, at one point lifting up her leg and balancing it on the towel rack in order to get a better highlight on her left glute. She had shrieked when she realized the towel rack was heated, and accidentally took a photo of herself as she toppled sideways, with the sullen comet of her least photogenic orifice in full view. “I’ll want them after I have kids,” she heard her sister saying. “I’ll want them in fifty years, when I’m old”—in the nursing home, on an ice floe, looking back to herself as she really was.
* * *
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Sup
hoor
her little brother texted her. Why were we talking like this?!
* * *
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The first boy who had ever called her a bitch was now in jail for possession of child pornography, and this felt like a metaphor for the modern discourse. But the modern discourse, too, was his mother moaning after a single glass of red wine, “I know that he’ll have to go to hell, but still he’s my son” and “What did we do? What did we do? What did we do! What did we do!”
* * *
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In other cities there were people who seemed to cherish her, perhaps because their minds had floated into her voice for a minute and then their mouths had widened like an animal’s into automatic happiness, Can a dog be twins? Sometimes a man knelt down in front of her and took her very tenderly by the wrist, or a woman brought her a realistic rubber tarantula, or a girl heard her coughing and ran back to her apartment to fetch prescription cough syrup. On those days every step she took was over a threshold into a home that wanted her. It wasn’t right, really, that she should have that when other people didn’t. In fact it was:
Sad!
Sad!
Sad!
Sad!
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Got a foot fetish, Sam?” she asked the windburned Indiana man who had complimented her too lavishly on her black ankle boots.
“Yes, ma’am, I do,” he answered, holding all his happiness in his face, aware of his own luck, for bare toes in springtime and summer were everywhere, arches, ankles, soles.
“And whose feet are you into?”
“The feet of my wife, ma’am. Those are the feet that I love.” This was said with a rosy nuance of admonishment. She was touched and put her pen to her lips. There were still gentlemen in the world.
“You might think I’m a little bit of a pervert . . .” he began, not wanting to be misunderstood, but she cut him off.
“I don’t think you’re a pervert at all, Sam. If you were a member of my generation you would cum in a special jar over a period of months and then post pictures of the jar online. A foot fetish . . .” She took a deep breath. “A foot fetish is like a beautiful meadow in comparison. A foot fetish is Pachelbel’s Canon.”
* * *
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Actually, she knew all about foot fetishes because a celebrity foot fetishist had once slid into her private messages and asked to buy a pair of her used sneakers for $300. She considered the proposition and then sent an old pair of Converse to him, taking secret pleasure in the fact that they wouldn’t smell like anything, because she hardly ever moved.
* * *
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Report: Man’s rectum fell out after he played phone games on the toilet for 30 minutes
* * *
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The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.
* * *
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Possibly related: the biggest fight she and her husband had ever had had been about the Milgram experiment. He had never heard of it, and even after she looked it up for him online, expressed doubt that it shed any light on human behavior. Finally she lost her head. “If you refuse to accept . . . that we are LITTLE RODENTS . . . who would TORTURE EACH OTHER under the RIGHT CONDITIONS . . . then GET OUT OF THIS APARTMENT!” Bewildered, he had left, and then returned twenty minutes later with a nice white cheddar, which she guessed was some kind of a sick, twisted joke.
* * *
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Already it was becoming impossible to explain things she had done even the year before, why she had spent hypnotized hours of her life, say, photoshopping bags of frozen peas into pictures of historical atrocities, posting OH YES HUNNY in response to old images of Stalin, why whenever she liked anything especially, she said she was going to “chug it with her ass.” Already it was impossible to explain these things.