* * *
■ ■ ■
“I’ll drive you,” she said, in desperation. “I’ll drive you, I’ll do anything. Just say the word.” Her sister nodding sadly, both seeing that possible desert whip past, that sage and sand, those lilac mountains—they had never been, of course, had only seen the movie Showgirls—both knowing the journey wouldn’t be safe, both knowing their parents would never speak to them again.
* * *
■ ■ ■
She remembered that long-ago trip to Norway, where one morning on her way to the market she heard a thin, high, strained sound, like a yellow thread pulled between two fingers. It was aimed through the top of the head instead of at the back of the teeth, so she knew immediately that it was religious. It was anti-abortion singing, led by a woman in a long cobwebby skirt, and a man in a white collar was standing next to her with a tambourine. Behind them were two ginger-haired, freckled young men with Down syndrome, embracing each other with both arms and their cheeks pressed close.
Oh my God, she had thought back then. As soon as our pro-lifers figure out they can have a tambourine, it’s over.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“If I were you, honey,” one social worker told her sister, “I might just go out running and see what happened.” They blinked at her. Surely that wasn’t safe? Surely they hadn’t been transported back to 1950s Ireland? Surely no one would advise her, next, to drink a bottle of gin in a hot bath?
* * *
■ ■ ■
What she worried for was not just her sister’s life but her originality. She loved Star Wars so much, for instance, that she had walked down the aisle to “The Imperial March.” Would the impulse to walk down the aisle to “The Imperial March”—which seemed the essence of survival itself, the little tune we hummed in the dark—would that make it out of whatever was happening alive?
* * *
■ ■ ■
She went silent in the portal; she knew how it was. She knew that as you scrolled you averted your eyes from the ones who could not apply their lipstick within the lines, from the ones who were beginning to edge up into mania, from the ones who were Horny, from the dommes who were not remotely mean enough, from the nudeness that received only eight likes, from the toothpaste on the mirror in bathroom selfies, from the potato salads that looked disgusting, from the journalists who were making mistakes in real time, from the new displays of animal weakness that told us to lengthen the distance between the pack and the stragglers. But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside.
* * *
■ ■ ■
If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Do you understand that your daughter’s life is in danger?” she screamed quietly to her father in the car, for the baby’s head was still growing exponentially with no sign of slowing down, and her sister could not walk more than a few steps without starting contractions. “Do you understand that a century ago—” but stopped, because her father’s eyes were swimming, he was starting to see, and she couldn’t bear if this was the thing that did it, and after all these years. She tried to wrench the door open, but it was locked; “Bad to the Bone” was playing on the radio, and it was not in her father’s nature to let her out of the car until it had finished.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Fucking cops!” she yelled when she finally escaped, slamming the car door shut and kicking the back tire with the force of thirty-six law-abiding years. “Stank . . . nasty . . . pigs!” she hollered, radicalized at last, to the sad familiar face in the rearview mirror, redder than ever before.
* * *
■ ■ ■
And how on earth would this new knowledge coexist with Europe.Is.A.Fag? She suspected it wouldn’t, not for long.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Still, he wasn’t as dismissive as usual; he was trying to be good. “How is . . . your work . . . going . . . these days?” he asked over breakfast, and she recalled a recent event where she got legally high with some booksellers, became convinced she was dying, drank an entire pitcher of cucumber water, and then fell to the ground so slowly that she accidentally showed the entire room her snatch, all the while crying out for someone to Call an Ambulance. On reflection, she felt no shame. What was such an error but a replica, made miniature, of the sad trajectory that had brought her fame in the first place? “It’s going really, really well,” she told her father, crossing her indefensible forearms over her undefended chest.