“I’m worried about him. Ever since the election he’s been just so . . . red.”
“Oh darling, he’s always been that way,” her mother reassured her, over the sound of her continued wheezing. “Even back when I first met your father, he was the reddest man I’ve ever known.”
* * *
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“Yeah, your dad is completely brainwashed,” her husband claimed, easing himself down onto a skateboard with a yelp of agony and rolling himself gingerly from the living room to the kitchen. He could no longer walk normally because of a new exercise regimen that he referred to as Dogg Crapp Training and practiced in total secrecy at a cult-adjacent gym known as The Zoo; she had asked for further explanation, but he refused to give it.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Her father had played Westerns to make the afternoon last longer—as long as John Wayne walked down Main Street, the sun stayed in the sky. She tried it; it still worked. Big redbone dogs lazed and stretched in his voice. His Wikipedia entry, open on her phone, told of every bad thing he had ever done, and the cancer he had gotten filming downwind from a nuclear test site in Utah. As long as he was on the television, he was born a hundred times and named Marion. Joan Didion continued to interview him in Mexico. His gravestone was perpetually etched with the words Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. And the afternoon lasted, and she posted a picture of him in yellowface dressed as Genghis Khan, and she stood in her shadow at high noon on Main Street, and tomorrow did not come.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Our politicians had never been so authentic, so linked arm in arm with the common people. “My favorite meat is hot dog, by the way,” one told us. “That is my favorite meat. My second favorite meat is hamburger. And, everyone says, oh, don’t you prefer steak? It’s like, I know steaks are great, but I like hot dog best, and I like hamburger next best.” And we shivered with recognition, and a vague vote grew solid in our hands, for we too liked hot dog best, and hamburger next best. We were the common people, on whom it all rested, and we lived in diners, and we went to church at the gas station, and our mother was a dirty mattress in the front yard, and we liked, God dammit, hot dog best.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“It’s nonsense!” a man hollered at her, rising unsteadily on his cane. He had read about the event in the physical newspaper. He signed every one of his texts, Love, Grandpa.
“It’s not nonsense! It’s folk art!” she hollered back. Like those early American women who painted kids with enormous foreheads, either because they didn’t know how to paint regular foreheads or because it was a stylistic choice!
* * *
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Buried deep in the thread to a post that said “White culture is when someone’s like I’m a myoosic man” is where you would find the truth about modern America, and like all truths it was almost impossible to look upon. Still, a hot shame often kindled in her breast when she skimmed those discussions, for she had not realized the California Raisins were racist until she was twenty-two years old. If she had gone to college, she would have figured it out when she was eighteen; yet another thing to hate her parents for.
* * *
■ ■ ■
She was ovulating, and posted a photo of herself in a bikini with the disturbing caption “god’s little dog treat.” Her mother called exactly fourteen minutes later. “You’re not an atheist, are you?” she asked. “That’s not what I meant,” she assured her, and explained that the post was actually kind of Christian. Her body was trying to knock itself up, the only way it knew how.
* * *
■ ■ ■
The golden age of air travel had entered its twilight—she could feel it in her bones on lift-off and landing. They often sat for hours now on runways; flight attendants cast a cold eye at her as she snuck back to the bathroom to drink vodka from a shampoo bottle, and after a seven-hour plane ride, as everyone rose from their seats with furrowed foreheads and dirty fur, she could already see what they would look like as post-apocalyptic mole people. Still, in every airport she visited, there was a small nameless brown bird flying end to end, dipping and gliding through the tree trunks of passengers, singing a song of territory that must cover the entire map: countries, cities, seas, and skies.
* * *
■ ■ ■
That the shorthand we developed to describe something could slowly, brightly, wiggle into an example of what it described: brain worms, until the whole phenomenon contracted to a single gray inch. Galaxy brain, until something starry exploded.