saved? Are they better people than the ones who died?”
“It’s not ours to ask. We don’t ask.”
“A million babies die in Africa and we can’t ask.”
“I thought it was war. I thought it was war,” Anna said. “I stayed inside and lit a candle. It’s the Chinese, my sister said, who she never trusted with the bomb.”
Lianne struggled with the idea of God. She was taught to believe that religion makes people compliant. This is the purpose of religion, to return people to a childlike state. Awe and submission, her mother said. This is why religion speaks so powerfully in laws, rituals and punishments. And it speaks beautifully as well, inspiring music and art, elevating consciousness in some, reducing it in others. People fall into trances, people literally go to the ground, people crawl great distances or march in crowds stabbing themselves and whipping themselves. And other people, the rest of us, maybe we’re rocked more gently, joined to something deep in the soul. Powerful and beautiful, her mother said. We want to transcend, we want to pass beyond the limits of safe understanding, and what better way to do it than through make-believe.
Eugene A. was seventy-seven years old, hair gelled and spiked, a ring in his ear.
“I was scrubbing the sink for once in my life when the phone rings. It’s my ex-wife,” he said, “that I haven’t talked to in like seventeen years, is she even alive or dead, calling from somewhere I can’t even pronounce it, in Florida. I say what. She says never mind what. That same voice of no respect. She says turn on TV.”
“I had to watch at a neighbor,” Omar said.
“Seventeen years, not one word. Look what has to happen before she finally gets it in her head to call. Turn on TV, she tells me.”
The cross talk continued.
“I don’t forgive God what He did.”
“How do you explain this to a child whose mother or father?”
“You lie to children.”
“I wanted to see that, the ones that were holding hands.”
“When you see something happening, it’s supposed to be real.”
“But God. Did God do this or not?”
“You’re looking right at it. But it’s not really happening.”
“He has the big things that He does. He shakes the world,” said Curtis B.
“I would say to someone at least he didn’t die with a tube in his stomach or wearing a bag for his waste.”
“Ashes and bones.”
“I am closer to God, I know it, we know it, they know it.”
“This is our prayer room,” Omar said.
No one wrote a word about the terrorists. And in the exchanges that followed the readings, no one spoke about the terrorists. She prompted them. There has to be something you want to say, some feeling to express, nineteen men come here to kill us.
She waited, not certain what it was she wanted to hear. Then Anna C. mentioned a man she knew, a fireman, lost in one of the towers.
All along Anna had been slightly apart, interjecting only once or twice, matter-of-factly. Now she used hand gestures to help direct her story, sitting hard and squat in a flimsy folding chair, and no one interrupted.
“If he has a heart attack, we blame him. Eats, overeats, no exercise, no common sense. That’s what I told the wife. Or he dies of cancer. Smoked and couldn’t stop. That was Mike. If it’s cancer, then it’s lung cancer and we blame him. But this, what happened, it’s way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world. You can’t get to these people or even see them in their pictures in the paper. You can see their faces but what does it mean? Means nothing to call them names. I’m a name-caller from before I was born. Do I know what to call these people?”
Lianne suspected what this was. It was a response defined in terms of revenge and she welcomed this, the small intimate wish, however useless in a hellstorm.
“He dies in a car crash or walking across the street, hit by a car, you can kill the person in your mind a thousand times, the
“It’s not ours to ask. We don’t ask.”
“A million babies die in Africa and we can’t ask.”
“I thought it was war. I thought it was war,” Anna said. “I stayed inside and lit a candle. It’s the Chinese, my sister said, who she never trusted with the bomb.”
Lianne struggled with the idea of God. She was taught to believe that religion makes people compliant. This is the purpose of religion, to return people to a childlike state. Awe and submission, her mother said. This is why religion speaks so powerfully in laws, rituals and punishments. And it speaks beautifully as well, inspiring music and art, elevating consciousness in some, reducing it in others. People fall into trances, people literally go to the ground, people crawl great distances or march in crowds stabbing themselves and whipping themselves. And other people, the rest of us, maybe we’re rocked more gently, joined to something deep in the soul. Powerful and beautiful, her mother said. We want to transcend, we want to pass beyond the limits of safe understanding, and what better way to do it than through make-believe.
Eugene A. was seventy-seven years old, hair gelled and spiked, a ring in his ear.
“I was scrubbing the sink for once in my life when the phone rings. It’s my ex-wife,” he said, “that I haven’t talked to in like seventeen years, is she even alive or dead, calling from somewhere I can’t even pronounce it, in Florida. I say what. She says never mind what. That same voice of no respect. She says turn on TV.”
“I had to watch at a neighbor,” Omar said.
“Seventeen years, not one word. Look what has to happen before she finally gets it in her head to call. Turn on TV, she tells me.”
The cross talk continued.
“I don’t forgive God what He did.”
“How do you explain this to a child whose mother or father?”
“You lie to children.”
“I wanted to see that, the ones that were holding hands.”
“When you see something happening, it’s supposed to be real.”
“But God. Did God do this or not?”
“You’re looking right at it. But it’s not really happening.”
“He has the big things that He does. He shakes the world,” said Curtis B.
“I would say to someone at least he didn’t die with a tube in his stomach or wearing a bag for his waste.”
“Ashes and bones.”
“I am closer to God, I know it, we know it, they know it.”
“This is our prayer room,” Omar said.
No one wrote a word about the terrorists. And in the exchanges that followed the readings, no one spoke about the terrorists. She prompted them. There has to be something you want to say, some feeling to express, nineteen men come here to kill us.
She waited, not certain what it was she wanted to hear. Then Anna C. mentioned a man she knew, a fireman, lost in one of the towers.
All along Anna had been slightly apart, interjecting only once or twice, matter-of-factly. Now she used hand gestures to help direct her story, sitting hard and squat in a flimsy folding chair, and no one interrupted.
“If he has a heart attack, we blame him. Eats, overeats, no exercise, no common sense. That’s what I told the wife. Or he dies of cancer. Smoked and couldn’t stop. That was Mike. If it’s cancer, then it’s lung cancer and we blame him. But this, what happened, it’s way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world. You can’t get to these people or even see them in their pictures in the paper. You can see their faces but what does it mean? Means nothing to call them names. I’m a name-caller from before I was born. Do I know what to call these people?”
Lianne suspected what this was. It was a response defined in terms of revenge and she welcomed this, the small intimate wish, however useless in a hellstorm.
“He dies in a car crash or walking across the street, hit by a car, you can kill the person in your mind a thousand times, the
Similar Books
