Songs for the End of the World - Saleema Nawaz Page 0,122

then, and the path he had seen for her was strenuous and obscure, littered with obstructions thrown up by prejudice. She had stood there, tremulous and determined and heartbreakingly brave, and as he listened to her and the aftershocks of the bomb began to rattle him, he was shot through with fear. He could see that her way in life would be harder.

“No parent wants that for a child,” he said aloud now. It was an echo of what he’d said in the first place, when Julia had revolted, pleaded, insisted, and ultimately stood firm in the wake of her revelation. His crime had been nothing more than that. Maybe it was the unclear referent that had caused the problem. That. A hard life was all he had meant.

“Bullshit,” is what Dory had said, years later, in therapy. “Clichéd bullshit.”

And Julia recalled, in the same session, that he had seemed embarrassed and disgusted when she’d come out to him.

“You couldn’t look at me, Dad,” she said, and her tone was just as bitter, as ravaged, as Dory’s. And apparently it was this way of his, this nervousness she’d taken for repulsion, which had hurt her even more than the thoughtless words that had come out of his mouth.

She wasn’t wrong about the discomfort, though he’d had no idea it had been so transparent. But there was no way he could confess the source of his unease.

“Admit it,” Dory had said, rounding on him with the air of one who thought she had turned the corner in a debate. “We disgust you.”

“No,” said Keelan. He would insist upon this until the end of time. For the shame was his, not Julia’s. He was not repulsed by lesbians. It was the opposite. Quite the opposite, though his only evidence was a lifetime of harmless daydreams, and the videos stored even now on his computer.

Annie knew his secret, and if she had still been alive, Keelan was sure that she would have laughed off any misplaced guilt or worry of his in that regard. They’d shared their fantasies, though it had taken almost ten years of marriage to get to that point. Theirs was a more prudish generation, no question. But these little places in the mind were so intimate, so fragile. And it was hardly priggish—only decent—to keep them from one’s children.

But it was also possible that even if Julia and Dory knew the truth, it would furnish no defence. They could deem his fondness for lesbians as nothing more than fetishization, and he wondered if they would be right. If he couldn’t reliably probe the bias of his own thoughts, all he had was a feeling of innocence. That and the freedom of his own actions.

Keelan wandered over to the desk and took up his pen.

In some ways, my dear, I’ve been waiting for the world to change. Not just because of my books, since I never expected events to vindicate me within my lifetime, but because I need the world to be more or less than we all suspected. I need surprise. The history of knowledge is built on leaps and reversals, and more than anything I have wanted to live through enough change to feel as though I am witnessing history. That is the consolation to the grand majority of us who can never feel as though we are a part of making it.

I’m proud of you for always standing up to me. And I’m happy you’re becoming a mother. And I’m grateful that history is on our side this time.

Keelan made his final arrangements with the silent speed of someone who has stopped worrying. The garage, when he unlocked it, felt silent and strange and somehow immune to everything that had been going on. He threw a bag of snacks in the front seat of the car and swung a suitcase into the back, still unpacked from his last conference in Denver. He found a map in the glove compartment, and he thought, again, about a gun, the government, a sick baby coughing. The way out of town was empty, but where it joined up to the main highway, the road was jammed.

ARAMIS Girl Located in Boston

Nov. 17, 2020

BREAKING NEWS—The so-called ARAMIS Girl has been located in critical condition in an ARAMIS ward in Boston, Massachusetts.

The 21-year-old Asian-American woman was identified to hospital staff as ARAMIS Girl by her parents upon admission on November 16. However, they denied reports that she was a super-spreader of the