The Next by Stephanie Gangi

Author:Stephanie Gangi [Gangi, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250110589
Google: ULS7CwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1250110564
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-10-17T23:00:00+00:00

15

It’s pregame. I’ve got the tunes turned up. If I could, I’d sing into a hairbrush. If I could, I’d mix a cocktail.

The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark: It scares you witless, but in time you see things clear and stark.

Perfect, right? “I Want You,” Elvis Costello, it’s a good song, but when Fiona Apple does it live, chills. She takes his stalker-guy croon and turns it into a lament over love’s grave, she murmurs and wails and growls as if she’s having an orgasm while strangling his neck or straddling his mouth, this man who’s done her wrong. She’ll snuff him out with her sex. It’s the way your shoulders shake and what they’re shaking for.

She moans like I moan. If I can’t have you, no one else will.

Hahaha, shocker, Ned hated the song. He’d put his hands over his ears whenever I played it. Sometimes as a joke, I’d let my hair hang in front of my face and make my eyes really big and sing like Fiona, do a zombie-walk in his direction and he’d back up and laugh and say, Fucking hell, woman, leave me alone!

Funny how things that mean nothing turn out to mean something.

The black netting flaps and snaps. I cycle across the scaffold, I swoop, charging and surging. I toss and spin hard. I accumulate rage. I reset my agenda. I am fully charged. I shed the gray sheen and shine silver. I try on a spherical form, a glittering ball of wrong, easy to see. For later. For when I show myself to Ned.

I move out. I streak over the sidewalks of the city. I go downtown. To Trudi Mink’s.

I zoom past Symphony Space in the West Nineties, where my former neighbors line up for their culture fix. Past Zabar’s and Fairway, same crowd, different fix. I stop at the Apple Store near Lincoln Center. I can’t resist the glass facade, I swirl into the gloss, into the white, the matte stainless steel, and up up I slither up the stone temple walls to the floating apple bearing the bite, illuminated in its sky against a glass roof, and I hover there, me and the apple ascendant over the devices and heads bent over devices, and the consumers feel something, of course they do, but they don’t look up, of course they don’t, they are themselves in a magnetic trance, they are part ghost already, phantasmic traces left to their own devices, residing in devices, in histories, caches, searches both predictive and random, in archives, in old data, in foolish choices and weak moments, in secret moments still long alive long after impulses, choices, consequences, and regrets have stopped throbbing. After memory has been consumed.

Everything remains, filtered forever young over impossible spans of space, of time. In person, face-to-face, in the aging flesh, in real life, don’t worry about it, those are now the subsets of self. Cached. Archivable. Retrievable.

Hey, maybe what I am is a subset, too. Maybe I’m the next representation of the self.

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