Why was Prague the target of Putin’s wrath? Why was there no intelligence suggesting such an attack was imminent? Could it have been a mistake? Why was there only one bomb? Are more coming? What will Joe do? There are procedures to consider, and impossible choices to weigh.
Kim woke up normally. Silk sheets against silk pajamas against silk skin. An eye mask protected her perfect lashes and lids from chronic ocular-sleep-scratching. As they did every day, recorded amber strums of a Moroccan harpist (her first love) caressed her from dreams to morning.
If Kim was between husbands, as she was on this day, she slept clutching a stuffed squirrel, Charles.1 She always awoke a little sweaty. She recorded fragments of her dreams in a little notebook she kept next to her bed: dogs, friend from high school, trouble landing airplane, a little bit sad. She rose sleepily, undressed, and drank a coconut milk, soy, hemp seed thing left in the bedroom fridge by Chef Carlos the night before. She pretended to enjoy the drink while she considered her naked reflection. This ritual was a passive, analytical activity; it had been a long time since a mirror had inspired emotional sentiment. She looked, she noted blemishes and outgrowths of fat. Some days, worrisome days, today, she would imagine the clone turning and walking away.
Someone had leaked a picture of the Hollywood producer Kim was seeing snorting a white powder, bothersome. She worried about North, and she hoped her Sphynx cat would stop leaving dead hummingbirds in the backyard veranda.
North got a fern in her music class.2 Kim did not really understand why third-graders were graded in music class, but North’s father would probably have a fit.
Kim’s clothes for the day lay in a folded pile at the foot of her bed, along with a note she’d left for herself: Smile today, you are loved, and you will love… To-do: kid’s dance recital, ACLU keynote, Ellen interview, Gulf Stream(?), call mum, bleh, Carlos make cookies? Your kids love you, don’t believe what they say. Kim smiled dutifully. She pulled on gray sweatpants.
And in Prague those outside the circumference of fatality were screaming and wailing, confused in the darkness, the incalculable weight of a home and its lifetime of collections crushing their pink bodies.
North opened the door, and knocked quietly on the frame. She watched her topless mother pick between an oversized Nirvana graphic-tee and a pink sports bra.
“Can we have milkshakes for breakfast, Kimberly?”
Kim smiled, let out a little laugh. It amazed her how her kids grew, the ways their bodies changed, how they went from cute to beautiful. One day they will be sexy, she thought.
“Didn’t Carlos make you a breakfast smoothie, my love?” The tender inflection was a gift of motherhood.
“Yes he did. They taste of cat litter and smell like public airplanes… I flushed it.”
Kim laughed, and sat on the bed so that she was eye level with her daughter. “Why did you do that, little princess?” She moved to kiss her on the cheek.
North turned her face so that Kim’s lips grazed her ear instead.“I told you mother. They are disgusting and horrible. A little girl should not be subjected to unusual torture.”
Kim sighed then nodded. She tried and failed to conjure the memory of a conversation with her mother when she was eleven.3 “You are not just any little girl, angel face, you are my daughter, you are North Kardashian West.”
North took a loud breath and rested her head on Kim’s double-augmented left breast. “From now on I would like a hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut for breakfast.” North rotated her face up so her mom could feel warm breath beneath her chin, “or else I will move in with father.”
Kim dug a crimson nail into her palm until she winced and her daughter jumped off her lap before she could reply. North did a cartwheel and made a silly noise. “I’m so excited for the dance recital, Mommy! Please won’t you come?”
“I’ll be there baby.” Kim smiled a breaking smile, and watched her daughter run out the door, tracking her movement through the house by the fading echoes of Fleetwood Mac playing off North’s phone. Kim Kardashian does not cry, she told herself.
Perhaps the lucky ones, depending on who you ask, the boys and girls smoking and dancing and watching TV and the old men staring at the ceiling and the children playing make-believe, those of them inside the initial blast are soot before the noise of the explosion interrupts their evening. For a moment long enough to be seen but too short to consider they will all be blinded as if God was before them, and then they are ash.
Kim went to the bathroom and watched a better face move outwards from her nose like a spore. I am Kim Kardashian now. She called her mom; hung up in performative hysterics. A call she ignored from a litigator hoping to tutor her on the bar exam, probably a ruse to sleep with her. A call from her publicist: an algorithm had determined it was time for another socially conscious tweet, “do you want me to get an intern to do it?” Kim didn’t care. She curled into a bedside chair and looked at the words in the third chapter of Madame Bovary4 while she considered if her daughter hated her.
“North, are you ready!” Kim shouted.
“Help me get dressed, mother, would you?” North called back.
“I’ll be right there baby,” Kim replied.
Kim looked at herself in the mirror once more. Maybe it is time for a touchup, she thought, noticing a slight sag in her right cheek. There was a coffee stain on her gray sweatpants. She moved to change.
“Mummy, I need help! I can’t pick!”
“I’m coming dear.”
North sat on her bedroom floor, atop a pile of clothes. She turned and looked at her mom standing in the doorway, “You have a stain on your pants.”
Kim smiled. “What do you think you want to wear my love?”
North held up a purple and a red leotard. “I told you, I can’t pick.”
Kim thought for a moment. “The purple is cute, but a lady like you should always wear red when she goes to dance… especially her first.”
North threw the purple into a corner of her room, stood up, and began to pull the leotard up her legs.
“North, what are you wearing?”
North rolled her eyes, “What do you mean?”
“What is that on your tummy?” It looked to Kim like her daughter was wearing a corset.
“It’s a corset. Auntie Kourtney gave it to me last night.”
Kim frowned, then smiled, then frowned, she wondered if this was a bad thing. She recognized this was an important moment of parentage. She wondered what People magazine would suggest. She wondered if this would make a funny anecdote on Jimmy Kimmel, or maybe it could be good for a dinner party argument in the new season of KUWTK? She remembered the first time she had worn a corset. Barely out of diapers, she had heaved and heaved, fearing asphyxiation. Kim smiled at her firstborn, and almost started crying, again. She said, “you look beautiful, baby. Let me help you tighten it.”
An alarm played through the city. A professor of musicology at Charles University lay on the street watching blood erupt in spasms from his left leg. Dying there, beyond pain, pinned to the ground by the steel awning that had severed his leg at the knee, he thought about whatever it is people think about while they are dying. People, places, probably not things. He would rather not die, but also he had long been curious if anything lay beyond and now he would find out.
Kim waited until the nanny arrived, and then broke down into tears curled in a heap on the bathroom floor clutching Charles. The tears came and came and her body heaved. I must stop this now, North might see me, tell somebody, this is not me. And so she stopped. She took a hard breath in, and then another one in. She exhaled slowly.
Kim looked down at her pants, the unsightly stain was still there, taking up the better part of her left leg. She decided, in that moment, this task would not be left to the help; she would fix it herself.
Kim changed into skin-tight, ass-exemplifying pink leggings. In the laundry room, she found her washing machine was broken. Kim felt a surge of doom rushing towards her re-mascaraed eyes. Deep breath. Kim thought of calling the housekeeper and asking where the clothes washing was done but decided it would compromise the integrity of her mission.
Gothic Castles, the sort that drew Americans and Chinese tourists, returned to their composite elements, an effective demonstration of entropy. Cars, buses, vespas, leather boots, bicycles, canes, skateboards, moving vans, kitten heels, wheelchairs; empty husks to be bulldozed when the time came.
Standing alone, bare feet on the cool marble floor, Kim remembered that there was a time, long ago, when she and her father would take weekly trips to the laundromat. They would watch the Dodgers on a box-set TV mounted to the laundry roof while they waited. When the laundry was done, still warm from the drier, they stood beside each other in silence and folded the clothes into little piles. It was on these trips that Kim first learned to drive stick, and had her first banana split.
Kim began to cry again, more flutter than hurricane. Kim hated nostalgia. In a region of her subconscious that she was ignorant of that feeling suggested she had made some wrong, irreversible turn away from a life of joy. Kim was just aware that that feeling made her unbearably lonesome.
She slapped herself in the face three times, the last time so hard that she let out a minor yelp. She pulled her phone from her pocket. After a quick search she located a laundromat, “Rattle and Hum Laundry Co.”
“I’ll see you later baby!! Good luck today, Mommy loves you!” Kim was out the door before she could confirm if North had heard her.
In the garage, Kim was faced with the difficult task of picking a car. Probably a Rolls-Royce, even when painted gray, was too conspicuous, and the Lamborghini SUV would be fine except that it was coated in fuzzy Skims fabric. She hoped to avoid prying eyes today. The silver Range Rover would have to do.
Impossible to capture the mood in Russia, that vast, sometimes barren, sometimes vibrant, sometimes brilliant, sometimes foolish place. Young people and reporters drifted around the Kremlin in tight little circles. They hoped someone else would do something, say something, riot or celebrate. Those who lived through the Cold War packed bags and prepared cars. Putin loyalists waited for a statement, crowding into dusky bars. Rumors spread that what happened had not really happened: It was an American hoax. People drank everywhere. Officials sat beside their computers refreshing email and drank too.
Because Kim inhabits a square mile whose aggregate wealth could turn every laundromat to ever exist into facilities of cancer-curing capacity, locating Rattle and Hum was a more taxing task than anticipated. The stereo was turned to max volume, and she hummed along with “Sweet Virginia,” effectively muting any unwanted thoughts.
Someone honked behind her, the light had gone green. An old brown Camry passed in front of her. She turned down the volume a little. She looked into the car and watched a teenage boy chattering with his mom in the front seat. She wondered what poor people talked about with their kids.
Fourteen Ohio-class nuclear submarines wake from their long swim through the seas to a symphony of red flashing lights and wailing alarms. Blue and gold crews perform tasks which they believed existed merely as dramas written by poets to break the doldrums of their aimless voyages. Warheads are armed; stations are manned; coordinates are entered. A hush settles in as each sailor, pagan, or atheist or jew, awaits orders and begins to pray.
Kim worried that someone would notice her car, that the paparazzi would meet her at the laundromat.5 She scanned Burbank Boulevard as she drove east. A plume of black smoke was billowing out of downtown LA. She kept passing people, crazies probably, crying in hysterics. It seemed traffic laws were being skirted around; twice she had to pull to the side of the road to let a speeding, honking car pass her by. Curious. Mostly she noticed that anyone walking outside was frozen in space or running, all were holding their phones close to their faces and scrolling wildly or taking phone calls. She thought it a pity that people, these people, were so attached to a screen. Kim thought maybe she should bring it up with Ellen this afternoon, Well, yes Ellen, you know I just think phones, screens, social media these are things we really need to think about, our children you know, I think we, as a society, need to think more about our relationship to the phone, you know, Kanye and I don’t let North on her phone past 11 pm and we really have found it to be wonderful *pause for applause* I think we really need to think about this Ellen. Kim made a note to run it past her publicist.
Siri broke the trance, “You are now arriving at your destination.” There it was on the corner. A big old crumbling orange building, dirty floor-to-ceiling windows showed her a long-forgotten view of row upon row of washing and drying machines. A homeless man sat on the concrete a few feet from the door smoking a cigarette, and Kim wondered if this was a terrible idea.
Joe Biden was in the situation room. He had been woken from his afternoon nap. He felt groggy, his legs were stiff. His thinking mind could register that disaster was not imminent but among them now. In this room and in his country. His body was tired. He took a sip of his coffee, attempted to project a face of stoicism. He could not understand why anyone could look at him expecting he could prevent what was coming as if he was something besides an old and tired man. He wanted nothing more than to revive his mother from the grave and play a game of cribbage in his childhood home. He sighed a long sigh. In front of him were three 8-by-12 pieces of paper, titled, in large All-Caps Black writing, “Extreme,” “Aggressive,” “Diplomatic.” Everyone was yelling different things. All he heard was static.
Kim parked her car and for a moment considered leaving but she knew it would only make her more miserable, confirming things about herself she did not want confirmed.
She stepped out of the car. A black brand-less hat rested over her brows, a pink paper mask rested just beneath her thrice-altered nose, and a baggy black Adidas hoodie fell to her mid-thigh rendering her most famous features shapeless. She looked like a celebrity attempting to evade detection.
In Rattle and Hum, Kim made her way to the hard plastic orange chairs drilled into an iron bar facing a TV blasting a telenovela at full volume. Thump thump thump of the dryers, smell of industrial-grade cleaning fluid, Spanish chatter of the betrayed television wife, dim flickering orange light, choking steamy air. It had been a long time since Kim had spent more than a passing moment in a place un-curated.
Kim walked to the desk where an old Asian lady stood behind the counter speaking rapid foreign words into her phone.
“Excuse me, hi! I was just wondering if you could help me? I need to get a coffee stain out of these pants,” Kim lifted the pants, showing the stain, “Do you have any stain remover or something that might do?”
The lady hung up the phone and directed her attention to Kim. “tại sao bạn lại đến cửa hàng của tôi, hãy cho tôi sự bình yên chỉ trong một ngày này thôi, làm ơn, con bò Mỹ giàu có ngu ngốc."6 While speaking the manager motioned rapidly to a wall of detergents, bleach, and a barrel of candy.
Kim tried to interrupt more than once, to explain she did not speak Chinese, or Korean, or whatever language this was, but she was too out of her depth to make any noise audible through her mask. When the old lady stopped talking, Kim laughed politely and pointed to a bleach pen and a Tide pod. This seemed to register and the woman handed over the goods, signaling “2” with her finger.
Fearing another attack of humiliating gibberish, Kim did not ask if they took apple pay and instead handed over a $20 bill and signaled, keep the change. The lady took the bill and handed Kim a purple Tootsie Pop in return, flashing a warm smile.
Kim walked to the row of washing machines. She laid her sweatpants flat on the rusted-stained-stainless steel washing machine top. Her phone kept buzzing but she ignored it. She ripped the packing off the bleach pen and pressed it into the brown spot on her pants. She completed this task gently at first, making little semi-circles with the pen, pressing its body into the tip carefully to release the bleach. But she found this unsatisfying so she took the bleach in a fist and violently stabbed at her pants until a pile of white foam hid the entirety of the stain.
The desk lady was suddenly besides her, taking the bleach pen from Kim, “Mẹ kiếp, ngươi cho rằng ta không biết ngươi là ai, ngươi cho rằng ta bị lừa, hôm nay chúng ta đều sẽ chết, vì cái gì?."7
Kim watched, in awe of the rudeness of this lady. There she was, rag in hand, dabbing at the mess Kim had left on the sweatpants. She put a drop of bleach on her wrinkled fingers and carefully massaged the foam into the gray. When she was done she lifted the pants to show Kim and gave a big wide grin. Kim laughed a sincere laugh and took the pants from the lady. The lady gave a teasing smile, “Candy? Want candy?”
Kim said, “no no, thank you though,” and was left alone again.
She went to the quarter machine and fed it a bill. Taking the coins back to the machine she placed the tide pod atop her pants, set the machine to warm, paid, and rested herself on a shiny uncomfortable orange chair. Three seats away an old Mexican lady was reading a romance novel.
How strange it was for Kim to sit in public with total anonymity. Not a single person seemed to recognize who she was, or if they did they did not care. It reminded her of a story her father told her in his latter years, long after the days of laundromats, just before the sex tape, a little while before fame.
Visiting New York City as a child he was riding the subway when Marilyn Monroe took a seat next to him and complimented his pink tie. As he told it, the boy and the Bombshell chattered like old friends, talking about the Yankees and their plans for the summer. She was going to Morocco for a film; he was going to a boys’ camp in Maine. After some time Marilyn asked if he wanted to see a magic trick. Robert was in love and would have impaled himself on a rusty spoon if she had asked. She snapped her fingers and said, “now, I’m a star,” and as he described it she became bright. so bright he had to close his eyes. Immediately he was lost in a crush of mayhem as half of the city crowded into the subway car to get a glimpse of her shine. Just before he was swallowed up, she turned and winked.
endnotes:
1. Pronounced in the British way, ‘Chahwlles.’
2. At North’s school there was reportedly a key for people who asked which explained the conversions: Elm: ‘A,’ Oak: ‘B,’ Clover: ‘B-,’ Spruce: ‘C+,’ Fern: ‘C-.’ Sierra Canyon School administrators claim this system promotes learning over achievement.
3. A psychotherapist had suggested this was the result of a deeply buried trauma that obstructed the mechanism of adolescent memory recollection. Her sisters thought it more likely that Kim’s childhood was absent of meaningful maternal heart-to-hearts.
4. For a book club she was doing in collaboration with AppleTV and Ellen.
5. Kim is indeed the rare celebrity who mostly cherishes the unrelenting flash of cameras and screams. This omnipotent presence was as regular and necessary as oxygen. To be without it would be a jarring and concerning sign of a waning star. But, also, at rare times, sitting in a club with her face tilted up and to the right posing for cameras she could not see, or sunbathing on the deck of a yacht ignoring the urge to take her top off and sun her breasts, she would reflect on a memory of going to the valley as a teen. Sitting on the hood of an older boy’s Mercedes, anonymous to everyone but him. She would engulf a Big Mac like a jackal ripping into the carcass of a decaying beast. Thousand Island sauce dripping down her chin. A puddle of iceberg lettuce and sesame seeds resting at the crotch of her jean shorts drawing envy from her date. The boy, failing at feigning indifference, would take small impish bites and be sure to chew with his lips sealed, but his eyes would always betray a hypnotized love that was Kim’s first indication of her power. She would not trade her life for that, but maybe sometimes she missed the intimacy of performing for only one set of eyes, or for none, or for just her own.
6. Loosely translated as: “why are you in my store give me peace just this one day, please, stupid dumb rich american cow.”
7. “Fuck you, you think I don't know who you are, you think I am fooled, we are all going to die today, and for what.”
Olivia Morrison
Hank Dobson
Brittany Menjivar
Anonymous