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[...] While we drink coffee, I look at my brother. He doesn’t seem happy, and maybe marriage isn’t what he had expected. Maybe he had imagined a wife that he could talk to about something other than love and the evening meal. Maybe he had imagined that they could do something else in the evening other than sit on each other’s lap and declare how much they love each other. I think, at any rate, that it must be just terribly boring. [...]
I take a shower, look in the mirror, and think to myself that I am only twenty years old, and that it feels like I have been married for a generation. It feels like life beyond these green rooms is rushing by for other people as if to the sound of kettledrums and tom-toms. Meanwhile I am only twenty years old, and the days descend on me unnoticeably like dust, each one just like the rest.
The Young Artists Club is now a reality and my life has regained color and substance. Every Thursday evening about a dozen of us meet, in a room in the Women’s Building that we got permission to use as long as we each buy a cup of coffee. It costs one krone per person, without cake, and those who don’t have money borrow it from those who do. The meeting starts with a lecture by a famous older artist – a ‘Big Fish’ – who thereby does Viggo F. a friendly favor. I never hear a word of the lecture, because I’m too preoccupied with having to stand up and thank them when it’s over. I always say the same thing: Let me thank you for that excellent lecture. It was very kind of you to come. Usually, to our relief, the Big Fish declines our offer to stay for coffee. Then the rest of us pass the time, chatting cheerfully about everything under the sun, but rarely naming who brought us together. [...]
aaaahhhhh
[...] And I realize more and more that the only thing I’m good for, the only thing that truly captivates me, is forming sentences and word combinations, or writing simple, four-line poetry. And in order to do this I have to be able to observe people in a certain way, almost as if I needed to store them in a file somewhere for later use. And to be able to do this I have to be able to read in a certain way too, so I can absorb through all my pores everything I need, if not for now, then for later use. That’s why I can’t interact with too many people; and I can’t go out too much and drink alcohol, because then I can’t work the next day. And since I’m always forming sentences in my head, I’m often distant and distracted when Ebbe starts talking to me, and that makes him feel dejected. [...]
[...] Come here, she said gently, leading me to a sink. Wash your hands. See if you can do it yourself. When I raise my head, I see myself in the mirror, and I put my hand over my mouth to hold back a scream. That’s not me, I cry, I don’t look like that. That’s not possible. In the mirror I see a worn-out, aged, stranger’s face with gray, scaly skin and red eyes. I look like I’m seventy, I sob, clinging to the nurse, who leans her head in on my shoulder. There, there, she says. I didn’t think of that, but don’t cry. When you start getting insulin it will be much better. You’ll get more meat on your bones and you’ll look like a young woman again. I promise. It happens all the time. When I’m in bed again, I lie there looking at my toothpick arms and legs, and for a moment I’m full of rage at Carl. Then I remember that I carry my share of the blame as well, and my rage disappears.
I wish I were really in those rooms right now, one of those rooms instead of this one. This whole hotel smells like laundry. No, like a smell sprayed from a can. That time Ali and I were in line at the pharmacy and saw, on a storage shelf over the cashier’s shoulder, a cardboard box labeled “Farts in a Can” and “Made in China”—because they sell a lot of gag gifts in that place. Me of course thinking instantly about all the waste, the environmental cost of shipping consumerist crap from China, the Texas-sized trash heap in the middle of the Pacific, and how my daughter’s generation will never know the sense of well-being my own took for granted, the limitless security we felt but never realized we were feeling. Silently thinking all that but actually saying to her, to be funny, to keep it upbeat: Those farts came all the way from China.
But Ali, serious-faced: Who made them?
Some factory.
No, who made them?
Oh, who made them. Beats me!
Then a fidgety sort of silence, until out in the car she started rattling them off, old people and young, rich and poor, tall and short, one by one, all the different people she’d imagined in China who had taken time out of their busy days to fart into those cans in our pharmacy. That was only a couple of years ago. She’s still little. Still mine. Actually, this room doesn’t smell so bad. It doesn’t smell like much of anything.
lol
But he failed to foresee our shortcomings. Presumably he did not actually believe the next hundred years would be free of wars and population growth, but he had no way of knowing, for example, that TV would arrive, filling our days with its nonsense. Then the internet. How mass psychological manipulation by the advertising industry would amp up the consumerist side of our natures, causing us to care so much more and so vapidly about what other people have. The rampant increase in per capita consumption. The endless distractions of modern life. The rise of the military-industrial complex and how it would soak up our surpluses in the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction. Of weapons of any size of destruction. He did not foresee the “Great Acceleration,” which only really got going after he died. The explosive expansion not just of technology but of all kinds of Earth-altering activities, how capitalism would reshape the planet, the environmental and social and economic costs that climate catastrophe would impose unequally but without exception around the world. The down-the-road consequences of endless growth. How the income inequality caused by globalization would render traditional political structures increasingly susceptible to the very sort of authoritarian takeover bids that keep popping up these days. Attacks on democracy! Two whole years, now, of that hideous man and his ghoulish cronies. Two years of terrifying obviousness, of conspiracy theories and white nationalists, climate denial, double down, hashtag, “Lock her up!,” sad. That voice. That voice. That vacuum of leadership. I wouldn’t have imagined it two and a half years ago, let alone in 1930. It was one of those impossible possibilities, the kind that movies have convinced us can’t happen. America asleep at the wheel, no one to witness and adjust, now I’m letting poetry into this. No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car. Which is the last line, actually. The poem starts: The pure products of America go crazy. In between, the poet talks about his maid. William Carlos Williams, high school English. The first adult poem I ever understood. The car is America and there’s nobody to drive it.
Ed said: Maybe we won’t have to move? But how could we possibly stay? Those that don’t know how to be pros get evicted. Said Queen Latifah. It’s not just a question of money, though his adjunct salary is not going to cut it. It’s that one way or another, one or the other of us is going to have to find a new job, a raise-a-family sort of job, a position, which means either becoming something new, launching into some entirely different profession, preferably one that pays well and requires no particular skills or enthusiasm, or else—at best—means lingering on as a less impressive version of the academic outlier I already am, but in a new town, a new life, a situation much less promising. A position with no future, at a school no one’s heard of, with a teaching load twice as large. A one-way dead-end move to a town with nothing for Ed to do and far fewer opportunities for Ali. No history museums or art galleries or science centers, just weedy soccer fields out past the public pool. Just a Cineplex with twelve screens showing the same three movies, a strip of fast-food drive-thrus and car dealerships, and a high school that looks like it was designed in the 1960s by a notorious architect of prisons. The town’s population will be almost entirely white, with a range of business-conservative, rural-conservative, and suburban-liberal values, but with zero interest in activism or public debate. A deeply homogenous town. A willfully insular town. Worst of all, there will be nothing to suggest to a curious promising young person like Ali that the world outside might be more interesting or varied or in any way different from the town itself. It will be exactly like where I grew up.
lol
“That you are personally not bound by your institution’s metrics and expectations for tenure, for example, simply because you find them archaic? That you are not fully aware that tenure assessments are at the discretion of the tenured faculty and require no explanation at all? Or that in embarking upon an unsanctioned book project, you were taking obvious risks with both your publication record and your time? That you hold no responsibility for the quality or the critical reception of that book? That you in no way allowed your own conflicted feelings about what sort of book it ought to be clutter the clarity of the book’s argument? That you were perhaps not actually ready to write that book, which, unlike the scholarly articles you’d written, forced you to manufacture a more personal speaker, a ‘self’ in language, that would represent you, yourself, to the world? That you never managed to regain, in writing that book, the earnest confidence of the original article, from back when you thought your audience was only a few friends and you didn’t constantly second-guess your rhetorical ‘pose’? That for too long you’d held in your head many self-romanticizing notions about your position as an outsider, notions that allowed you to feel sure of yourself and important to yourself as long as you were never forced to share them—the notions—with anyone else? That as long as you didn’t share this side of yourself with anyone else, it was all unadulterated potential, never forced to perform, never exposed to judgment. That some glimmer of this ‘self’ had materialized long enough to write that article but this self was not really you, it didn’t sufficiently encompass what you care about or what you want to say. Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say. You know these things in your mind, or think you know them, and you are capable of saying these things or writing them, but the moment you do, you immediately doubt them. You are capable of being many selves but the moment you commit to one, it becomes an imposter, a dummy to dress up and roll out into the world in your place. And you hate the dummy, hate everything it says, even though it only says what you give it to say, and even though the words you give it to say are the best you can come up with. Which means, must mean, that the fault is not with the dummy but with you. That you are not as brilliant as you’ve always wanted to believe. As you’ve needed to believe. That it is easy to be impressed with yourself in private but another thing entirely to project a public self into the world—that this is a skill they don’t teach in school, yet so so so many people seem to have learned it. How did all these people, effortless at parties, easy on social media, how did they learn to be public? There must have been a moment, an afternoon in elementary school, when an imposing gray eminence showed up to class and passed out everyone’s public personas while you were in the bathroom. And here you are decades later still forced to pretend you’d been in class that day, that like everyone else you received your persona, that you’ve displayed it proudly on your wall ever since. Perhaps the real revelation today is not that these men seated before you wanted you to fail, even if that is obviously the case. Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention. But eventually the world does pay attention, and suddenly it is you who are on trial, not the world but you. The trial you’d managed to put off for years is finally underway and you see, now, that you are not the plaintiff, as you’d always assumed, but the defendant, not the accuser but the accused. The person who puts herself out there is always the accused. How did this never occur to you? No doubt it occurred to a part of you, the part that kept putting it off. No doubt that’s why you postponed the trial as long as possible, preferring instead to live in a juvenile state of perpetual expectation, not because of the part that assumed you would someday be amazing, but because of the part that knew you would end up here, and what now? Now the box is open, reality spills out, and there’s no way to stuff it back in. Judgment has been meted out, the first sentence handed down, first of many because once this trial gets going there is no going back. The proceedings are irreversible, the stakes existential, the accusations keep piling up, the prosecution is relentless, the prosecution never rests, the defense never rests, nobody in this whole damn place ever rests, and if everyone else seems unfazed by this, the endlessness of everything, that isn’t because they live any less in the midst or on the spot or under the gun but because they manage it better than you do, or at least they are better at hiding it. You’re better at hiding than at hiding it, better at avoiding than bearing it, better at hoping it will all go away if you lie still eyes closed hands clenched hands clenched breathe—
Are you really going to mourn your kitchen? That’s what you’re going to mourn?
One upside to living in the apocalypse is that it puts your problems into perspective.
It’s not just a kitchen, though. The kitchen is metonymic.
And also, yes, I am allowed to mourn my kitchen.