Danielle Evans Excerpt
From a novel in progress, The Empire Has No Clothes
The truth was Cora did remember the Berlin Wall falling, and the Challenger exploding too. It seemed to her that the whole history of everything since she’d been born was the history of falling,explosions, of things collapsing or disintegrating under their own weight. She’d been born near the start of 1984, already a bad omen in certain literary circles. The boy in the bubble died on her birthday, setting a somber tone for a year that introduced infomercials and identified the AIDS virus, the year the government took up illegal arms dealing in Nicaragua and the country declared liberal politics dead along with Mondale’s campaign. All of this was a swirling cloud of dust above the atmosphere. In the years that followed, the challenger had exploded, the Berlin wall had fallen, The Soviet Union had fallen apart, unions and alliances worldwide followed suit and exploded into endless wars and halfhearted peace processes, which fell apart too. Somewhere off the coast of Alaska an oil tanker exploded, sticky black liquid threatening the planet itself. Bombs fell, and the moral high ground, if there had ever been one, anywhere, fell into oblivion, as every movement that had ever promised anything past its own survival fell apart, imploded, exploded, took with it people who disappeared from the national consciousness like that.
The year Cora started college the World Trade Center fell, brutally,the skyline itself was not stable, and it seemed she was still blinking back the memory of dust clouds when bombs began falling and exploding over Afghanistan, then over Iraq. The year she graduated, a whole city sank underwater, as nature demonstrated it could outdo man’s damage, not that man was helping much, and Cora thought then what she’d thought many times before, that the central question of her lifetime would be how to make whole and permanent what was faltering and determined to destroy itself.
Nisi, Cora knew, would have laughed at all this. Not because she was cruel but because the very thought of permanence was laughable. Nisi remembered growth, expansion, life spiraling out of control, the constant reminder that everything was mutable in ways one could only begin to imagine. The words and the logos and the terms kept changing,but the change itself was the constant, old things remixed and remade before the originals themselves had stopped being new. Nisi remembered fields turning into houses turning into whole neighborhoods around her, she remembered discovering computers at five and by eight being unable to imagine life without the internet. She had learned of Sex and AIDS at the same time, life and death were not opposite for her,but symbiotic. She had entered middle school through doors gated with metal detectors, and knew kids who spent lunch break in the bath room trying to build low grade explosives out of Wrigley’s gum wrappers in an attempt to get around them. She remembered virtual reality and artificial life and the discovery of cloning, remembered the teacher wheeling a TV into homeroom so that they could all stare at Dolly the sheep, learning that her mutated cells grew twice at fast, cutting her life span in half, and thinking so that’s the price of growth. The Price, but not the limit. The End was an impossibility; life was, if nothing else, cruelly, destructively, resourceful.
