* * *
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What do you mean you’ve been spying on me? she thought—hot, blind, unreasoning, on the toilet. What do you mean you’ve been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?
* * *
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How were we supposed to write now that we could no longer compare anything to a phantom limb? Was the phrase “the Braille of her nipples” to be absolutely retired? Were we just never to say that someone “inclined her head like a geisha” ever again? Could we not call the weather bipolar without risking the prison of public opinion? Not imply that birdwatchers are autistic? Could we not say the crescent moon was “as slender as a poor person”？ Not say the sun “crashed inevitably into the mountains like a woman driver”？ Take all shades and strengths of coffee away, if we could no longer hold it up to people’s faces!
* * *
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One day it would all make sense! One day it would all make sense—like Watergate, about which she knew nothing and also did not care. Something about a hotel?
* * *
■ ■ ■
On a slow news day, we hung suspended from meathooks, dangling over the abyss. On a fast news day, it was like we had swallowed all of NASCAR and were about to crash into the wall. Either way, it felt like something a dude named Randy was in charge of.
* * *
■ ■ ■
She was handling it well, even though some mornings she put her bra on inside-out and it seemed too hard to fix, so she just sat there staring at the news in an inside-out bra. She was handling it just fine, even though her face had been replaced by one question mark after another question mark after another question mark, and her heart had been replaced by what happens to a bunch of seagulls when a dog comes running down the beach, and the only way it was possible to comfort herself anymore was to stand in front of the mirror and say out loud, “Cows don’t know about him.”
* * *
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Enough is enough, she told herself sternly, and requested only one thing for her birthday: a small portable safe designed to look like a dictionary that she could put her phone in every morning when her husband went to work. When it was presented to her, she ripped the paper away like a greedy child, traced the letters on the spine—NEW ENGLISH—and spun the wheels of the lock with a feeling of clicking completeness. “But what is it for?” he asked, 90 percent happy that he had pleased her, 10 percent unhappy that he had married a madwoman, and she responded with simple dignity, “My valuables.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Hush.
Tick.
Hush.
Tick.
Click. Click. Click. Click.
* * *
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“MY SAFE!” she found herself screaming two days later, kneeling below her husband’s work window with a needle standing in every pore, a pair of balled-up panties stuck to one leg and clutching to her chest what appeared to be a dictionary. “GET DOWN HERE AND OPEN MY SAFE!” She had tried every number that she could think of—the sex number, the antichrist number, the twin towers number—but he grimly took the safe from her and freed it with 1-2-3-4. “Oh,” she said, slumping with relief, her body unlocking as soon as the phone was in her hand, “that’s good, that’s funny. Like learning to count. Like Sesame Street.” That night the safe went in the back of the closet, where the words NEW ENGLISH could not wink at her any longer, and they never spoke of it again, and that was love, that was what love was now.
* * *
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You will be so wise! You will understand everything about our time! And you will know nothing about us!
She had a crystal egg up her vagina. Having a crystal egg up her vagina made it difficult to walk, which made her thoughtful, which counted as meditation. “You know, it actually works,” she told her husband, when he was startled late at night by the crystal egg.
* * *
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When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her to an indestructible coherence.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Self-care, she thought, and sprinkled in her tub a large quantity of an essential oil that smelled like a Siberian forest. But when she lowered herself into the trembling water, what she would have referred to in the portal as her b’hole began to burn with such a white-hot medieval fire that she stood straight up in the bath and shouted the name of a big naked god she no longer believed in, and as strong rivers flowed off her in every direction she did not remember the conditions of the modern moment at all, she was unaware of anything except the specific address of her own body, which meant either that the hot bath had worked to restore her to herself, or else that she would have sold out her neighbors to the regime in an instant, one or the other.