All That's Left Are the Rats

On Nona Fernandez's "The Twilight Zone" (translated by Natasha Wimmer)

There are posters up around the country, faces of the missing, contact numbers for any information, as more and more people are snatched off the street. Masked men, badgeless men, unmarked cars, far-off detention sites. ICE raids bring with them an air of menace, a rupture in any kind of basic society: you can’t even walk the streets anymore. This break from the normal is at the root of much surreal literature: the work of Kafka, Schulz, Bulgakov, Kharms, Cărtărescu all operate under this logic, just to name a few. The act of going from point A to point B is distorted and wrecked, there are eyes everywhere, and if you see anything out of the ordinary, it’s best to keep it to yourself, eyes down, move along… Snapping your head up and really looking around after years of this kind of world – after it’s ‘over’ – is like waking up from some bad dream, but the dream was real along, and now one has to put everything back together, organize it back into some into a normal world. Can you ever really go back, though?