From where you are reading this, point north.
* * *
…
For some reason, where I am at is in front of this mirror, pressing my gums to see if they’ll bleed again. No. Good. I should get back to work, but instead I stand there making faces until someone comes in. It’s the blond girl with the bitten nails. She used to do a lot of crank, I remember. She had this story about how she was in a bathroom the first time it hit. The buzz of the party grew louder and louder, and she thought she’d return to find locusts had descended.
* * *
…
I had that thought again. The one with numbers in it. It bent the light.
Eli is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben brings him a bowl of water so he can dip them in to test. According to the current trajectory, New York City will begin to experience dramatic, life-altering temperatures by 2047.
* * *
…
My friend who works in hospice says don’t tell dying people they won’t be around for the beach trip, apples in fall, etc. No more do that than knock a crutch out from under a person with a broken leg.
No more apples soon; apples need frost.
I decide to reshelve by the big window. It’s beautiful out. There’s a group of students with linked arms, chanting something in the quad. I follow a trail of candy wrappers that are lined up along the sill. The top of that tree is on fire. Or else it’s fall again.
* * *
…
“Did you look at the river, Lizzie?” Sylvia asks me when she picks me up from the train. I lie and say yes. It pains her the way everyone goes around with their heads down these days.
The leaves are nearly gone. We pass one apple orchard then another. “People only want the perfect ones,” she says, “especially when they pick them themselves, so all the bruised or split or wormy ones get left on the ground for the deer.” There are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting season. “At least most people who hunt up here hunt for food, not sport,” she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her dirt road. “Why don’t they farm deer?” I wonder. “Is it because they are too pretty?” She shakes her head. “It’s because they panic when penned.”
On the way home, the train stops for a long time outside the city. I look at the trees along the river. There are still a few leaves on them. Some people at the water’s edge. But hasn’t the world always been going to hell in a handbasket? I asked her. Parts of the world, yes, but not the world entire, she said.
It’s pouring when I come out of the subway station. There’s a low hum in my head. “Boohoo,” says the friendly-looking white man who passes me on the street. “Boohoo!”
Am I crying?
I pass by the bodega. “We have garlic now,” Mohan calls out to me. I pay with pennies, but he is nice about it. “Pennies are money too,” he says.
There is a miniature American flag by the register now, right beside the postcard of Ganesh. But Mohan is not worried. “Even if this man wins, he will not stay,” he tells me. “Now he has money, planes, beautiful things. He is a bird. Why be a bird in a cage?”
THREE
After the election, Ben makes many small wooden things. One to organize our utensils, one to keep the trash can from wobbling. He spends hours on them. “There, I fixed it,” he says.
A turtle was mugged by a gang of snails. The police came to take a report, but he couldn’t help them. “It all happened so fast,” he said.
And in the ether, people asking the same question again and again. To the yours-to-losers, to the both-the-samers, to the wreck-it-allers.
Happy now?
The path is getting…narrower. That’s how Ben told me. He was doing the math in his head.
But it could still…?
It’s not impossible.
And so we stayed up and watched until the end.
At school, Eli’s friend boasts that he will kill the president using a lightsaber. Then he says no, a throwing star is better. My son comes home upset. His friend is going about things the wrong way, he thinks. “What is the right way?” I ask him.
Dig a trap, cover it with leaves.
There is advice everywhere, some grand, some practical. The practical advice spreads quickly and creates consequences.
Women of reproductive age are being urged to get IUDs. They can last six to twelve years and so might outlast the shuttering of the clinics. But it’s suddenly hard to get in to see a doctor; the appointments are all booked for months and the waiting rooms at the walk-in clinics are full of nervous white women.
Q: Do angels need sleep?
A: It is unlikely, though we cannot be completely sure.
“Should we get a gun?” Ben asks. But it’s America. You don’t even get on the news if you shoot less than three people. I mean, isn’t that the last right they’ll take away? He looks at me. His grandfather’s last name was twice as long as his. They shortened it at Ellis Island.
It was the same after 9/11, there was that hum in the air. Everyone everywhere talking about the same thing. In stores, in restaurants, on the subway. My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn’t want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.
* * *
…
Everything is better in the quiet car. In the quiet car, everyone is calm. Ben presses his leg against mine. We read side by side as Eli builds many-roomed mansions. A person across the aisle who is chatting with his friend in Spanish is asked to leave by the conductor. “Right now?” he says. “While the train is moving?”
In the hotel room, there are many hotel channels, but all disappoint.
* * *
…
We go to the Smithsonian. They want to see the space stuff. I want to see the hominids. In the afternoon, we tour the monuments, speak solemnly about democracy. Coming to D.C. was Ben’s idea. It’s creepier than I imagined to be here. Soon, soon, soon, is the loop in my head. Ben has this plan to spend the next few months visiting historical things with Eli. I want to lay a foundation, he told me, but for what exactly he doesn’t say.