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“Don’t be grandiose”
“It isn’t me, it’s history Differences in status and wealth are alhat drives war”
“Have we been a Marxist paradise this whole time and I didn’t notice?” I said, more acidly than I’d meant to
Alberto kissedmy hairline to the cup of my ear “Don’t kill him They’ll catch you”
I shifted In the darkness, I couldn’t seeover me My heart beat faster and the coppery taste of fear flooded ?”
When he answered, his tone was soft and melancholy “You’re from research”
I wasn’t always the thing I became Before I was research, I was a scientist who had educated himself into too fine a specialty Before that, a student at Tel Aviv Autono in a future I couldn’t irief I couldn’t fully enco his mother die I was all of those en corporation based on Thoth Station But it is also true that I remember many of those former selves with a distance that is more than time I tell myself that remove allows me to trace the path from one to another, but I’m not sure that this is true
My mother—a heart-shaped face above a pear-shaped body who rained love on me as if I were the only one in the world who
a roo coh I understand she was a good enough round bands If there were recordings of her on the network, I never found them She was a woman of few ambitions and tepid passions until she reached thirty-two Then, to hear her tell it, God had come to her in her sleep and told her to have a baby
She woke up, rao off contraception It took her three years of fourteen-hour days, but she h erin my life She said that it was her choice to purchase sperence and drive, that the only fertile s too far outside of civilization to be on the basic rolls, and that I couldn’t have gotten it from her because she was lazy and stupid
As a child, growing up, I used to fight back on the last point: She was sood about me surely had its roots in her I believe now she used to denigrate herself in front of me in order to hear praise from someone, even if it was only a beloved child I don’t resent the acies of my invisible father, eift, and it was as valuable As important
Because I was an adolescent when it began, I did not notice her syely spent out of the house by then, playing football at a dirt-and-weed pitch south of the housing coe-levelmen of my cohort My days were filled with the smell of the city, the heat of the sun, and the proood project, a transporting affair— on basic, but the discovery of life was so rich and dramatic and profound that I wasn’t concerned with er culture My social microenvironment seemed to stretch to the horizon, and the conflicts within it—whether Tooalie, whether Sabina could tweak off-the-shelf bacterial cultures to produce her own party drugs, whether Didi was ho humiliation and rejection—were profound draes When, later, my project lead said There is a period of developht of
And then ood one, with thick, beveled sides and a lip like a jelly jar, and when it shattered, it sounded like a gunshot Or that’s how I re objectivity difficult, but that isthe light as it fell fro on our kitchen floor She cursed mildly and went to fetch the broom to sweep up the shards She walked aardly and furowing cold in my hands while I watched her try to clean up after herself for fivesense of so Therun remotely by someone who didn’t understand the controls very well The worst of it was her confusion when I asked her rong She had no idea what I was talking about
After that, I began paying attention, checking in on her through the day How long it had been going on, I couldn’t say The trouble she had finding words, especially early in the ht The loss of coordination The s, I told myself The products of too little sleep or toothe entertainht rearranging the pantry or washing her clothes in the sink for hours on end, her hands growing red and chapped from the soap as her mind was trapped, it seemed, by minor details Her skin took on an ashen tone and a slackness came to her cheeks The sloay her eyesnight there at the breakfast table withbeside her powerless to help