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By Root 574 0

of which she was ashamed as a teenager and of which she now makes a point of being proud: the ridge on which her eyebrows are set, her muscular jawline, the elongated slope between her nose and her upper lip. It’s important to have these features, she thinks, for the same reason it’s important to live in a cramped apartment with a lumpy futon. With a face like this, in a place like that, she’s never in danger of feeling glamorous. She can sit on a pile of moldy pillows on the floor of her windowless living room, so dark the ceiling lamp needs to be on in the middle of the day, and she can pull up the hem of her nightshirt, as she did this afternoon, and look down at her thighs and not feel sexy, not feel attractive at all, feel quite unattractive, in fact, whereas if she were on a white couch in a spacious room with oversized windows and sunlight warming her thighs, who knows? She might look at those legs and think of those legs’ being looked at and think of herself as being sexy and even glamorous, too. Because glamour is a matter of context. And white, empty space, as she learned from her pile of out-of-date library books, is the number-one glamour cue in advertisements. Anything placed on a white, empty background is instantly glamorized, be it a perfume bottle, a watch, a hair-care product, an upscale toothpaste, or a woman’s body. This was what Ivy wanted, white space, nothing but white and space. Ursula marveled at all that white space when she went to break the lease on her sister’s apartment, too white and spacious for Ursula herself to afford. A white couch, a bed with white sheets, a small white table and white chairs, symmetrically placed amid four white walls: Ivy aspired to the absolute zero of glamour. Her ideal was to have no context at all, only weightlessly to crowd-surf on an endless sea of strangers who would hold, fondle, and pass along every facet of her glamorous existence. A kind of utterly passive immortality.

The bar on the corner shuts down.

Sounds of bottles shivering in bags, chairs jumping onto tables.

Ursula thinks again about getting up and going, but just then, as if her brain were commanding the wrong body, the savage girl pops her head up and starts wriggling out of her bedroll. She’s still wearing the usual tattered T-shirt, but the cutoff army pants are gone, replaced by an improvised skirt of uneven, variegated flaps of pelt. She gets ready quietly, slipping into her shapeless, makeshift moccasins, tying the tattered loose ends of them up around her ankles, bundling her bedroll, and strapping it to the bottom of her hide pack. Then she humps the pack and starts walking west.

Ursula follows. The streets are empty, so she has to hang far back and stick close to the buildings to avoid detection. Up ahead, the savage girl moves warily, catlike, responding with her whole lithe body to every change—a traffic light going green, a lamp snuffed in a third-story window. She walks as though the city were alive with spirits, gurgling from sewer grates, rustling in stray leaves of newsprint, alerting her to dangers and guiding her along on her mission through the night. Her world is in love with her, will do anything for her, generating no end of meaning, dressing every last inch of itself up with significance. And Ivy’s world, too, Ursula reflects, for all the pain it causes her, does essentially the same thing: the more it persecutes her, the more importance it ascribes to her. After spending all this time with these two self-styled cavewomen, Ursula is beginning to feel like she herself is the abnormal one. More and more she’s coming to feel the outlines of an unnatural growth inside her, something pathologically resistant to even the meagerest infusions of religion, nationalism, racialism, humanism. The extent to which people find their lives meaningful is directly proportional to their ability to allow themselves these kinds of delusions, but this intractable thing inside her, this immune system gone awry—this overactive bullshitological system—allows her no meaning whatsoever. She can feel