How I hate that I ignore more calls from my mother than I answer. How I can’t leave !!!!!!!!!!! even though I feel unfulfilled in my second week. How that would be its own sort of tragedy for my mother, because at least for the next three years when I ignore her calls she knows where I am. How I want to KMS but I’m too much of a narcissist to go through with it. I’m too afraid of what my mama would do if I did. So I’ll just do it here. On the page and see if I still feel the same afterwards.
The mistake was not the iconography: the flag of Kekistan, the pride flag, and the US flag, all of them woven into one. I knew I’d get flack for it from antifa, the helmet and shield, the spandex bodysuit, they laughed and took their videos and those mean girl Proud Boys called me a faggot and a freak. And so I marked off my own territory, and I spoke to them — I preached — of what I knew. As a faggot, as a freak! On my milk crates, during that gathering of Proud Boys and antifa. And then I tripped and fell. But that wasn’t a mistake either. I didn’t make any mistakes, not that day. Maybe not ever, in some sense, if here’s where it’s led.
As Guy walked back to the compound now, his flashlight stabbed into visibility tunnels of the night woods, tangents along his curving path. Somehow at every step it was surprising that there wasn’t anyone but him in any of the tunnels. Like everyone else, he had fantasies of his own of living for himself in the years that were remaining — of giving up law, in his case. The trouble was, the remainder might stretch for as long as a century; no one knew. And Guy had reached the age past which it is no longer in one to become a different person, not even one’s true self.
One key difference between the new virus and the old virus is shame. It’s basically impossible to imagine the shame that surrounded the old virus, in the ’80s. And the ’90s, for that matter. And still, for that matter. There were, there are—I suppose—a million tiny shames. Like droplets. You didn’t always know when or how they entered. I don’t remember most of the people I worked with at Scribner’s, though I do recall some, and some details.
When I first arrived I was struck by how familiar or semi-familiar the enclave seemed. Some effort had been expended to make the neighborhood more home-like, even if the style of the buildings and the materials used in paving the streets and sidewalks were utterly native to this country. Unofficial signage was posted in English alongside the local undifferentiable squiggles. The principal street was lined with hamburger shops and frozen yogurt stores, some of which assumed vintage American brand names and a limited version of their former signage and trade dress.
Here, a snob was as common as a dandelion, and I began to present myself to the other kids in my dorm as a guy from Long Island; I emphasized the “g” in “Long,” and called myself a guido, neither of which I had ever done before. I wasn’t even fully Italian. Most of my mother’s family was Irish and Czech. But it was a handle to hold: Italian-American Long Islander.
Today 60 percent of the American population, according to recent reports, possesses a database implant that allows a range of augments to be downloaded directly into the brain. The artificial intelligence can allow a person, for example, with no chiseling experience the ability to create a lifelike wooden sculpture. While there are no reliable statistics within the art world, a recent anonymous survey of working artists in New York City under 40 reported an above-average augmentation rate compared with the general population.
My daughter was my reason for waking each day, and I wanted to kill myself for having in some fashion already resigned myself to losing some part of her. Selfishly, I saw my world as illusionary, fragile, existing only because others allowed it to exist. I realized that I was ever awaiting such a moment of loss, that I was, in fact, daily resigned to death but had never resigned to life.
So many well-meaning people in my own family confront me, they instruct me, they denounce me, Richard said, they tell me You only have one mother. They say it like it’s a bad thing. One is enough. These flagrant children, boil them like corn, boil them in a sack. It is other people who tell us who we are, other people who tell you what you can be and whether or not you have become it yet, all these other people. Other people are reality, Richard said, other people who want to drink your blood, this is well-known.
