* * *
■ ■ ■
Why had she elected to live so completely in the portal? It had something to do, she knew, with Child Chained Up in the Yard. Her great-grandmother, an imaginary invalid, had kept her firstborn son chained up to a stake in the front yard so she could always see what he was doing through the window. She would have preferred a different maternal lineage—aviatrixes, jazz kittens, international spies would all have been preferable—but Child Chained Up in the Yard is what she had gotten, and it would not let her go.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Every country seemed to have a paper called The Globe. She picked them up wherever she went, laying her loonies and her pounds and her kroners down on counters, but often abandoned them halfway through for the immediacy of the portal. For as long as she read the news, line by line and minute by minute, she had some say in what happened, didn’t she? She had to have some say in what happened, even if it was only WHAT?
Even if it was only HEY!
* * *
■ ■ ■
It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in history and not herself, where she did not read the wrong writers, was not seized with surges of enthusiasm for the wrong leaders, did not eat the wrong animals, cheer at bullfights, call little kids Pussy as a nickname, believe in fairies or mediums or spirit photography, blood purity or manifest destiny or night air, did not lobotomize her daughters or send her sons to war, where she was not subject to the swells and currents and storms of the mind of the time—which could not be escaped except through genius, and even then you probably beat your wife, abandoned your children, pinched the rumps of your maids, had maids at all. She had seen the century spin to its conclusion and she knew how it all turned out. Everything had been decided by a sky in long black judge robes, and she floated as the head at the top of it and saw everything, everything, backward, backward, and turned away in fright from her own bright day.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“Colonialism,” she hissed at a beautiful column, while the tour guide looked at her with concern.
Every fiber in her being strained. She was trying to hate the police.
“Start small and work your way up,” her therapist suggested. “Start by hating Officer Big Mac, a class traitor who is keeping the other residents of McDonaldland from getting the sandwiches that they need, and who when the revolution comes will have the burger of his head eaten for his crimes.” But this insight produced in her only a fresh wave of discouragement. Her therapist was more radical than her?
* * *
■ ■ ■
The thing was that her father had been a policeman, one who was known for unnecessarily strip-searching the boys in her high school when he pulled them over on their drunken joyrides. This meant that it was hard for her to get dates. It also meant that when she did get dates, she was expected to take the lead.
* * *
■ ■ ■
In childhood she had lain awake at night, on fire with a single question: how did French people know what they were saying? Yet when she finally asked her mother, she didn’t know either, which meant the problem must be inherited.
* * *
■ ■ ■
can’t learn? she googled late at night. can’t learn since losing my virginity?
* * *
■ ■ ■
Her most secret pleasures were sentences that only half a percent of people on earth would understand, and that no one would be able to decipher at all in ten years:
grisly british witch pits
sex in the moon next summer
what is binch
what is to be corn cobbed
that’s the cost of my vegan lunch
pants burn leg wound
* * *
■ ■ ■
She could not feel her first fingertip. This in the way that your ear used to get soft, pink, and pliant, and the swirls of hair around it like damp designs, from talking on the telephone.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Her husband would sometimes come up behind her while she was repeating the words no, no, no or help, help, help under her breath, and lay a hand on the back of her neck like a Victorian nursemaid. “Are you locked in?” he would ask, and she would nod and then do the thing that always broke her out somehow, which was to google beautiful brown pictures of roast chickens—maybe because that’s what women used to do with their days.
* * *
■ ■ ■
He did not have this problem, this metastasis of the word next, the word more. He took only as much as he needed of something, and that was enough. When she asked him once what his last meal would be, he replied, instantly and thoughtfully, “Banana. Because I wouldn’t want to be full when I die.”