No One is Talking About This

“But didn’t tyranny always feel like the hand of the way things were?”

The protagonist proposes that the portal, as a space for collective social and cultural politics, resembles political tyranny. The protagonist suggests that the impulse to fit in and conform to the accepted way of things is a kind of tyrannical social pressure augmented to fantastical degrees by the portal.

“There were only two questions at three in the morning, and they were Am I dying and Does anybody really love me.”

The protagonist describes the tendency for people to turn to the portal at lonely hours, particularly at night when unable to sleep. Secondly, the protagonist describes the lonely nature of the portal itself, and how the people using the portal are asking questions about how to relieve their loneliness. As the portal is always accessible and populated with other participants, people use it to search for ways to combat their loneliness.

“The chaos and dislocation were so great that people had stopped paying attention to celebrity dogs.”

The portal holds so much information about so many different cultures and political groups that its users feel “chaos” and “dislocation.” An individual using the portal can access real-time information anywhere on the globe. The overwhelming amount of information eclipses the pop culture obsessions of the previous generation.

“But what about the stream-of-consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?”

As the protagonist poses these questions as she begins to suspect that her thoughts are so heavily influenced by the portal that they are no longer hers. She acknowledges that her thoughts, if they are her own, also belong to everyone she interacts with. The more time she spends on the portal, the less she trusts her consciousness is hers.

“They said all you needed to be remembered was one small stone piled on another, and wasn’t that what they were doing in the portal, small stone on small stone on small stone?”

While visiting Ireland, the protagonist says that the function of the portal is to convey culture, identity, and politics to future generations. She draws the comparison between the small stones—which represent her poems, posts, and posted photos in the portal—to the cairns she visits in Ireland. Both seem to represent lives kept for future generations to learn from.

“We were among our kind, yes, but where were the walls?”

The protagonist poses this question after describing the “callout culture” presiding over the portal. She realizes that while she spends an enormous amount of energy and time trying to match the moral and social expectations of the portal, she is losing her individuality. There are no “walls” to separate her thoughts from those of other users on the portal as culture becomes increasingly homogenized.

“The mind we were in was obsessive, perseverant.”

The protagonist’s understanding of the portal shifts to that of a collective mind that she cannot escape. The portal’s collective mind keeps its users dedicated to it. Users of the portal obsess over bits of news or memes for a short time before moving on. The protagonist struggles with this collectivity and her inability to extricate herself from it.

“She hoped, as an afterthought, and despite all her debasements, that English would still be intact when it came time for the baby to learn it.”

While spending the Christmas holidays with her family and learning that her sister is pregnant, the protagonist expresses her anxiety about the influence of the portal on communication. Even though she uses terminology common in the portal, she resents her use of it and hopes that while her niece grows up language will again convey meaningful messages between people.

“Everything tangled in the string of everything else.”

After the protagonist relates a childhood fear of the hiccups, she considers how everything in the portal seems to relate both to her experiences and to something else in the portal, which the protagonist then must look at. This infinite number of things referring to each other causes the protagonist to spend so much time on the portal.

“He was always saying things like this just when she was at her most alive.”

When the protagonist is too distracted by the portal to interact with her husband, he compares her to a ventriloquist’s dummy. The protagonist resents this comparison and feels misunderstood by her husband. Her involvement in the portal gives her a feeling of aliveness that he does not understand.

“Your slice of life cut its chord and multiplied among the people, first nowhere and little and then everywhere and large.”

The protagonist watches her famous post (“Can a dog be twins?”) become unassociated with her as it spreads throughout the portal. She considers the role of the portal in bringing an unknown individual into a collective, where possession and identity no longer matter. Through this depersonalization, however, the individual becomes “large” and part of a community.

“Despite everything, the world had not ended yet. What was the reflex that made it catch itself? What was the balance it regained?”

As the protagonist becomes increasingly disenchanted with her life in the portal and her career talking about it, she questions what has kept society from complete collapse. Given the politics, environmental concerns, and cultural shifts that the protagonist engages with in the portal, it is inconceivable to her that the world has not collapsed on itself.

“She fell heavily out of the broad warm of us, out of the story that had seemed, up till the very last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing."

While traveling to speak about the portal, the protagonist receives a text from her mother asking her to return home as quickly as possible as her sister’s unborn child is in danger. The shock of the text makes the protagonist realize that the time she spends on the portal is a waste compared to her duties as a sister.

“‘If I were you, honey,’ one social worker told her sister, ‘I might just go running and see what happened.’”

Due to the conservative politics of the sister’s home in Ohio, she is ineligible for abortion even though her pregnancy could become life-threatening. The protagonist and her sister are astonished that the best advice they receive is this quote from a social worker, which makes them feel as if they live in an anti-feminist time. This quote illustrates the lack of support the sister receives from both the American healthcare system and the politicians who make its rules.

“Because of this vigor and this wheeling and this insistence she felt more fitted to life than the rest of them—she was what life was, a grand and unexpected overreach, a leap out onto land.”

After the baby is diagnosed with Proteus syndrome, the protagonist considers what it means to be human. She believes that the baby’s liveliness and uniqueness are exactly what life is. She treasures the baby before she is born and determines to learn from her.

“But for now, the previous unshakable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone.”

After the baby is born, the protagonist’s perspective about the portal changes. She is less invested in the opinions of the portal and more invested in the events of her real life. This transition is accompanied by the protagonist’s realization that her thoughts feel more her own when she is not constantly engaged in the portal.

“She wanted to stop people on the street and say, ‘Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!’”

The protagonist is so excited by the baby’s birth that she desires to spread the word of this miracle. Because she has distanced herself from the portal, however, the protagonist does not want to post about the baby. Instead, she imagines telling real people on the street about the baby’s miraculous life, signaling a shift in the protagonist’s priorities from the portal to reality.

“Looking at the baby she sometimes believed that nothing was wrong or could go wrong, that they were on a planet together where this is simply what a baby is.”

The protagonist, having stepped away from the portal, can enjoy the baby’s infancy without the influence of the portal’s opinions or news articles. She can focus her attention on the baby and her family. The baby’s developmental syndrome is then inconsequential. Since there are no other babies in the protagonist’s small world, there is no reason to believe the baby is different.

“The great gift of the baby knowing their voices, contentless entirely except for love—how she turned so wildly to where the pouring and continuous element was, strained her limbs toward the human sunshine, would fight her way through anything to get there.”

The protagonist is encouraged to read aloud to the baby and talk to her because the baby responds to human voices. Since the doctors predicted that the baby would be unable to form neural synapses, her unexpected development is considered a miracle by the protagonist and the family.

“Her voice when she heard it in unguarded moments, still sounded like a flow of human sunshine, kindness. To somewhere.”

The protagonist returns home after spending several months with her sister and the baby. She notices how her voice, previously used to speak about the portal and its culture, has taken on a new and more meaningful character from reciting stories to the baby.

“They did not, in the immediate aftermath, holding heaps of downy garments on their laps, wish for a cure. They wished for a better way to preserve human smell.”

As the family prepares to bury the baby, they have accepted the baby’s fate. Instead of wishing for something different, they want to remember her as she was.

“I am I because my little dog knows me—who said that?”

At the baby’s funeral, the protagonist is surprised that the baby’s small dog recognizes her after her death. The protagonist struggles to understand what about the baby’s body has retained her spirit so strongly that the dog recognizes her. Further, her question of “who said that?” foreshadows the protagonist’s return to the portal, as she is returning to her old habit of assuming that someone, somewhere, has already thought her same thoughts.

“In the group text where they sent her videos back and forth late at night, that’s what they said—thank God, can you believe, that we had the technology.”

The family is thankful for the technology that sustained the baby’s short life. They keep her alive amongst themselves but none seek to post the baby’s photo on the portal.