No One Is Talking About This: A Novel

She could barely recall her previous life, the flights through blue rare space, the handing over of tickets and stamping of passports, the gorgeous violent ruptures of somewhere-elseness.

“I was just thinking that you and I . . . have seen very different memes in our lives.” ■

If you were gone from it for a little while and then returned and no longer belonged, what was it? A brain, a language, a place, a time? Oh my information! Oh my everything I never knew I needed to know!

It spoke of something deep in human beings, how hard she had to pinch herself when she started thinking of it all as a metaphor.

The doors of bland suburban houses now looked possible, outlined, pulsing—for behind any one of them could be hidden a bright and private glory.

That was the difference between the old generation and the new, though. She would rather die than not look something up. She would actually rather die.

She put one true word after another and put the words in the portal. All at once they were not true, not as true as she could have made them.

The question that was the pure liquid element of the portal—who am I failing to protect?—had found its stopped-clock answer.

the doctor who must have felt a ping in her lower belly the moment we lost the Supreme Court,