No One Is Talking About This: A Novel

She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, blissed, pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner, ghostly pale women posting pictures of their bruises—the world pressing closer and closer, the spiderweb of human connection grown

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.

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!

No amount of sugar-eating or being scared would help.

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

Mostly, though, it passed into you, you, you, you, until she had no idea where she ended and the rest of the crowd began.

Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them—or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.

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

It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.