“Horizontal justice?”
“I mean if we can’t take down American machismo via the commander in chief, then maybe we can take down the producer, the CEO, the news anchors, the actors, etcetera. It’ll feel good, it’ll do some good, but at the end of the day, our nuclear and democratic safety is being determined by an international pissing contest, and when you’ve been in foster care, you just . . . whatever. We think we want to kill each other, but what we really want to kill is the cage. I don’t even know what I’m saying. No, I do. What I’m saying is that we need to make room in our discourse for power abuses to which each party allegedly consented. For anyone to look at the megalomaniacs running our world and call it important, then listen to a fucked-up affair and call it silly because each said, Yes, okay, at the start—I can’t abide that. I mean we don’t want to infantilize ourselves, but what is consent? ‘We’ voted for these maniacs; was that not consensual? To what are we consenting, exactly? So if you examine this scenario—you and me—and see anything other than a small version of our big disaster, and if you look in the mirror and see anything other than a red power tie on your neck, then you’re repressing the truth of your plundering, exploitative tendencies in order to get through the day. Which is shitty.”
James takes a deep breath, his eyes closed. “You’re right,” he says without conviction.
“I would go so far as to argue that our relationship contained three common stages of economic development throughout human history: primitive communism at first, where everything felt mutually beneficial for like exactly one moment, then feudalism—where I was utterly beholden to you, labored for basically nothing for you—then capitalism. And now, fuck. I don’t know. Maybe I went too far. I’m trying to love everyone and drain myself of self, you know. I’m trying to recognize the full human dimension of each person I encounter, and I’m—honestly, I’m exhausted. From here on out, it’s going to be New Testament justice. So I gotta get the Old Testament justice out of my system while I still have the chance.” She pinches her thigh and catches him watching. “I think I hate you.”
“I don’t hate you,” James says.
Blandine orders her brain to blockade the emotion marching through her body. It’s not working.
“It wasn’t just sex for me.” James pauses. He looks away from her thigh, out the windshield, freeing Blandine to study his profile. “If that’s what you think.” He appears unethically handsome, his jawline doing its boring but effective work on her body. She can practically feel her hypothalamus—neurological tyrant!—powering down her prefrontal cortex. She grips any reason she can. Reason, says Hildegard, is the third-highest human faculty. After body and soul. God is life, but God is also rationality, says Hildegard. Reason is the root, through which the resonant word flourishes. Where is the reason? What is the resonant word? Nothing flourishes. Blandine feels like she’s suffocating in her loose cotton dress. Wants to take it off, wants to see how James would react, wants the storm to take her with it.
“I mean, it wasn’t even mostly about sex,” says James. “When I think back to what happened, that night isn’t the thing that comes to mind. I never imagined it happening, never even thought of it as a possibility—I respected you too much to think that way.”
“And why are respecting a woman and fucking her mutually exclusive, to you?”
James runs a hand through his mulch-colored hair, too thick for his age. “They’re not.” Finally, he looks her in the eye. “But respecting your seventeen-year-old student and fucking her are.”
Tears well in her eyes. Blandine turns away from him.
“I cared about you,” James says. “I still do. I felt sick about it for months. You know, after—after that night, I forced myself not to contact you, I thought it would be . . . benign neglect, I suppose. I thought contacting you would be evil. And when I found out you had dropped out of school, I told every teacher and administrator to reach out, told the principal to offer you whatever you needed. I told everyone to do everything they could to keep you there.”
“I appreciate your paternalism.”
“I consider myself a criminal, do you understand?”
“Well.” She bites her cuticle, releases a tear. “You are one.”
But not in the state of Indiana.
When she surveys him, she notices that blood has overpopulated his face. He takes in her tears with visible horror. At himself, or at her? For a second, she thinks he’s going to reach out and touch her. She wants him to. He doesn’t.
“I couldn’t sleep for a week after this happened between us,” he says.
“Well, I couldn’t sleep for months—haven’t slept well in my whole stupid life—but it’s not a fucking competition.”
“This isn’t about me. I’m sorry. I know that I’m . . . irrelevant, in this situation.”
She scoffs. “Irrelevant? You actually believe that you’re irrelevant, in this situation? Irrelevant! In this situation!”
“What can I do to convey my full admission of how wrong this was?” Now he’s getting desperate. She can see it in his face, hear it in his voice. “How can I persuade you that, despite all the horrible—despite everything I’ve done, despite how reckless I was with you, I care about your well-being and always have? How can I convince you that I have never done anything like that before, and if I could do it again, I absolutely would? I mean—differently. If I could do it again differently, I would. Everything I’m saying sounds empty, except it’s exactly what I mean. You’re better at this. I don’t—”
“I actually believed that our objectives and interests were shared throughout that entire fever dream. What a fucking numbskull I was last year. I thought—I actually believed that I loved you. I believed I was in love with you. And maybe it was some strand of love, but so what? We spent six months fracking each other’s souls—just because we got a little oil out of it doesn’t make it good. And who hasn’t fallen for capitalism? Of course it seduces you before it mauls you. Of course it intoxicates you out of your senses before it leads you to the arena. Like how ancient societies used to give children cocaine before sacrificing them. And of course your mansion beguiled me, of course I became stupid when I saw all the knowledge you had, of course I surrendered to a fantasy of control, of course I wanted to fuck your piano. Of course you and your body made me feel safe, like I was surrounded by—I don’t know, soldiers, or something gross like that—and of course that response was icky and boring and American, ad nauseam. I seduced you, I’m pretty sure. But—”
“No, I’m responsible for—”
“But my obsession with you doesn’t nullify the—doesn’t mean that our relationship wasn’t—look, we were concepts rather than individuals, is what I’m trying to say. Idiotic ions within a geomagnetic storm, you see? For months, I convinced myself that you and I had transcended the power structures at play, that I was an equal agent, that to blame you would be to infantilize myself. I even excused your silence because I was so enchanted by you, and by all your fucking—your brain, or whatever—and at the time, I was spiraling into this, like, crisis of education, you know, realizing that I couldn’t just read my way out of my bad luck, that I couldn’t just climb up some books and across diplomas and into freedom. Now I realize that all of those beliefs merely condoned the system that keeps us all in our places, and now I realize the only way to get out of the system is to get out of the body. So, as you can see, at the time, I was too distracted by all my other collapsing illusions to properly demonize you. But not anymore. We were not two people simply succumbing to inconvenient, taboo, totally hackneyed attraction. We were cogs in a superstructure of class and state and production and distribution and legislation and political pyramids and militias and exchange rates and national debts and fossil fuels and stuff. We were stuck in a web of material relations. I think, actually, at the end of the day, we were the answer to the question: Who are grand pianos for? There was nothing dialectical about us. And that’s what enrages me most of all—your silence, before, during, and after. Oh, sure, we talked. We talked and talked and talked, and yet we never said anything, did we? You were the only person I ever wanted to hear from, James, and I never heard from you again. What benign fucking neglect.”