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A picture of a new species of tree frog that had recently been discovered. Scientists speculated that the reason it had never before been seen was because, quote, “It is covered with warts and it wants to be left alone.”
me
me
unbelievably me
it me
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Other things slipped down, and the fast river of the mind closed over them so she forgot they had ever been ubiquitous. There was a poet who was walking across America barefoot to raise awareness of climate change—how was this supposed to work, exactly? Yet she breathed to herself the words climate change whenever his name stepped toward her in the portal. He posted a new picture of his feet every day, so that she saw the innocent blisters spread and break, saw the tarry crust grow thicker, saw here and there where a nail had gone in. Flat-footed, she thought, and always hovering behind and out of focus was his grinning face with the swags of stringy hair falling down around it. His glasses were the brass-rimmed ones of a televangelist, and most days he wore a sweatband and a bright orange safety vest, and he walked on the hot shoulders of the country under the endless scroll of its clouds, and he walked. Climate change. One day he was struck by a passing SUV on the highway, and then no one ever saw his feet anymore, their frank black miles and their nail-marks and their mission fell out of the bloodstream of the now. Someone was dead, she had never met him, yet she had zoomed in on the texture of his injuries a dozen times, as she might squint at the pink of a sunset she was too lazy to meet outside. And that is what it was like.
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Lol, her little sister texted. Think if your body changes 1-2 degrees . . . it’s called a fever and you can die if you have one for a week. Think if the ocean has a fever for years . . . lol
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Her sister, five years younger, was leading a life that was 200 percent less ironic than hers, which had recently allowed her to pose for a series of boudoir shots that saw her crouching, stretching, and pouncing like a tigress all over the beige savannah of her suburban house. “I’ll want them later, after I have kids,” she explained. “I’ll want them in fifty years when I’m old,” and her belief in a time when grandmothers—in nursing homes, in rocking chairs, drifting out to sea on unmelting ice floes—would sit around reminiscing over their nice boobs and tight asses was so unquestioning that she believed in it too, for a moment: the future. “Can I post the one where you’re standing by the window wearing nothing but a thong and a Cincinnati Bengals hat?” she asked, and her sister, whose love was unconditional, said yes.
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The chaos and dislocation were so great that people had stopped paying attention to celebrity dogs. No one knew how small they were, or what they were wearing, or if one had recently been revived by an IV after nearly smothering to death in a very hot purse. The recent era when everyone pored over pictures of celebrities in velour tracksuits picking up after their dogs with wads of the daily newspaper came to seem a time of unimaginable luxury, of mindlessness that almost approached enlightenment—came to seem, when all was said and done, Juicy.
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A policeman bends down to the window, a policeman cuts the corner of a grassy verge, a policeman’s elbow, fixed around a neck, angles toward the camera. The sky jerks and scrabbles and then together we are on the pavement. The ruddy necks of the policemen, the stubble on the sides of policemen’s heads like grains of sand, the sunglasses of the policemen. The labored officious breathing of the policemen, which was never the breathing that stopped. The poreless plastic of nightsticks, the shields, the unstoppable jigsaw roll of tanks, the twitch of a muscle in her face where she used to smile at policemen . . .
Every day a new name bloomed out, and it was always a man who had been killed. Except when it was a twelve-year-old boy, or a grandmother, or a toddler in a playpen, or a woman from Australia, or . . . And often the fluid moment of the killing rippled in the portal, playing and replaying as if at some point it might change. And sometimes, as she saw the faces, her thumb would trace the line of the nose, the mouth, the eyes, as if to memorize someone who was not here anymore, who she knew about only because they had been disappeared.
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A million jokes about wishing to leave this timeline and slip into another one—we had so nearly entered it, it must be happening somewhere else. The jokes were wistful, because this timeline seemed in no way irrevocable. When she reached out to touch it, it wavered, and she came away with a substance on her fingertips that felt like drugstore lube—drugstore lube that could in no way stand up to the kind of sex she wanted to have. That kind of sex was now illegal.