When Will The Gates Of Atlantis Open And Welcome Us Back Into The Sea: Day One Of The DNC
The City of Philadelphia does not want me here. There are brands of potato chips I do not recognize, and I am not a journalist, and I thought I understood what heat was. Seeing a different popular brand of chips than the kind of chips I am used to feels like a personal attack on my childhood and my core beliefs, which it isn’t. I am staying in a Journalism House full of reporters, all of whom almost immediately receive a copyright warning from Comcast alerting them that someone in the house has recently copied or shared a movie, television program, or music improperly. That someone was me.
“I’m sorry,” I say to all of the journalists at the table where everyone keeps their laptops. “I bought the third season of the Simpsons at the airport before my flight, but they weren’t downloading properly, so I torrented the third season as a stopgap, just to have something to watch in the air, I plan on deleting the pirated episodes once the legal ones finish downloading, and I did pay for them, but that’s why everyone got the warning, it was me. But normally, I pay for content, when I can, I think it’s important, if you can, to try to pay for it, I mean.”
Before I leave the house, I see a pair of umbrellas in a stand by the door. I consider taking one, to use as a parasol, and then I think to myself, Better not. It could look precious and affected. Later I will buy four bottles of water and press them all against my neck after dry-heaving in the heat. Tomorrow I will bring the umbrella.
Later that morning we go across the street to a sort of ready-made meal outpost and as we are standing in line, my companion Laurie Penny says, “This feels like the luxury communist automat future,” and I agree, both because it feels true and also because it feels like this is the sort of conversation I should be having all the time. I remember this because it is the last coherent thought I will have for hours. I am a jellyfish, pale and aimless, trailing thoughts as I throb mindlessly in the heat. The heat is so intense that I begin to shed memories from my childhood and core principles of my personality. I have become a pair of quiet, rapidly fluttering lungs and a heart. Everything else is a waste of ATP.
Outside of the convention center, I am looking for water. My face feels cold and numb and shiny and I can’t stop touching it. I am wading through God’s aquarium, and the skyline of Philadelphia is the most beautiful little spray-painted treasure chest under a rainbow of mist. I want to swim underneath it and hide there. I pass a young man in a full suit clutching a half-gallon of milk to his chest. He is either crying or his cheeks are sweating or both; in the distance someone is singing the national anthem very slowly and very beautifully. The heat has transformed my hair into a beautiful spiral staircase that an heiress could slowly descend, sobbing.
This heat makes me want to shed my human skin and wade into the nearest river, letting the water close higher and higher over me, never stopping until I reach Atlantis. I will march out slowly past the tide and let the green fingers of the sea guide me, warm and quiet and pliable, to the Pillars of Hercules, and sink to my knees before her green-gold gates, and let my words fall out in cold bubbles and pearls from my mouth. I will not need to breathe. I will let the mounted guards of the city braid my hair as it rises and falls, crimson and silent, around my head, let the white sand press back firmly under my feet, and pass under the city gates. I would listen to the silent and ancient secrets of the most serene, submerged Republic, and I would return by night, dripping salt and smelling of the deepest green, to whisper the secrets of the Drowned City into the ears of our drowsing politicians, leaving only rimed fingerprints and open windows and peace behind me.
Abyssus abyssum invocat.
