* * *
■ ■ ■
Go not far enough, and find yourself guilty of complacency, complicity, a political slumping into the cushions of your time. Go too far, and find yourself saying that you didn’t care that a white child had been eaten by an alligator.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The teenagers were locked in the black air of closets, softly interviewing each other about shootings as they happened in real time. The teenagers were texting their parents their love, apologizing for ever being disrespectful, saying they should have taught their younger sisters to ride bikes when they had the chance. The teenagers sounded like adults, because the gunman in the doorway had loomed at them as long as they had been alive.
The name of the town where it happened slowly became darker and darker, as if the students were tracing it in ballpoint pen. They were walking out of their classes. They were lying down in front of the White House. Is this the one that would tear through the paper? And in the end, would it be because some dumb motherfucker made the mistake of shooting up a performing arts high school?
* * *
■ ■ ■
“The massacre,” a Norwegian journalist had repeated over and over at the dinner table, “you remember, the massacre.” “What massacre,” she had wondered hazily, and it wasn’t till she heard the killer’s name that it came back: the island, and the man with the manifesto, complaining of cold coffee in prison, and the number 77. But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.
* * *
■ ■ ■
We took the things we found in the portal as much for granted as if they had grown there, gathered them as God’s own flowers. When we learned that they had been planted there on purpose by people who understood them to be poisonous, who were pointing their poison at us, well.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Well.
WELL!
W E L L !!!
* * *
■ ■ ■
For a moment, if she allowed herself, she could even feel exhilarated to think she had been manipulated this way. That all the thickness, clumsiness, ploddingness she had ever felt in her biological vehicle could be overwritten. She was not those things. She was not her own slowness. She wasn’t trapped, rooted in her provincial ignorance and her regional mispronunciations, pinned to one place. She was an instantaneous citizen of the flash of lightning that wrote across the sky I know.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Our enemies! What if they had planted the thing about eating ass, to make us all suddenly want and claim to eat ass, to talk constantly about our devotion to eating ass, to pose on our album covers with napkins tied around our necks and knives and forks poised over delectable asses? God, it was genius! No swifter way to bring down the supposed citizens of the free world than to transform them to a nation of ass-eaters!
Had they made us weak with intermittent fasting? Had they wasted our evenings with the detective show that no one could understand? Had they done this to make American novels bad for a time? Were they distracting our anarchists with polyamory and meal replacement drinks, so nothing could get done? Had they bloated us with homebrew? Had they made Christianity viable again? Had they brought back snap-crotch bodysuits?
But no. No, this is how conspiracy thinking began. This is how you became someone who put the whole sky into finger quotes. She must accept, for now, that the craze for ass-eating had been organic, along with all the rest of it.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“You could write it,” she had said to the man in Toronto, “someone could write it,” but all writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement. Sixty-year-old cartoonists had also tried to contend with the issue, but the best they could do was sad doodles of a person with a Phone for a Face who was scrolling through like a tiny little Face in His Hand.
* * *
■ ■ ■
When she was away from it, it was not just like being away from a body, but a warm body that wanted her. The way, when she was gone from it, she thought so longingly of My information. Oh, my answers. Oh, my everything I never knew I needed to know.
At least, that was how she saw it in elevated moods. In baser ones, she saw herself bent over, on her knees, spread-eagled, and begging for reality’s cum.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The thought of attacks on our infrastructure was especially hurtful because we had spent so many years laughing at movies where cybercriminals in dog collars hacked into the traffic lights so that they were always red, or hacked into the freezer sections of grocery stores so that our capitalistic lasagnas melted, or hacked into the signs in baseball stadiums so that they said GAME OVER with a little skull and crossbones exploding underneath. If we actually had to confront such situations in our real lives, our large deforming senses of irony would leave us completely undefended. Like what if this was hacked and the hackers turned all instances of the word as into the word ass? That would be really funny.