Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  A few days later the professor with the white hair tufting out of his ears and nose passes back the map quizzes. As he suspected, many of the best and brightest Americans have failed, do not know the precise location of the country we are about to invade. But your map has an A on it, even though you forgot the existence of Qatar and Bahrain. You have never done this well in school. You have never made this much money. You have never received so many compliments on your appearance, for your body is shrinking into a landless skeletal border, and a landless skeletal border is your nation’s preferred female shape. You have never been so close to killing yourself, not with drugs, which are merely a symptom, but with overwork—your real disease. It’s a disease you were born with, fertilized with mountain fog—the desire to flee small-town Appalachia, the guilt of doing so, the suspicion that you are, at your core, a fraud. The only cure is to work more. Work harder than anyone else.

  “Where is the main courtyard?” you ask another mall guard, this time in Maryland.

  “It’s in front of the Abercrombie, which is next to the yogurt place, which is near the Macy’s,” he replies. A geography of commerce that you navigate like a seasoned sea captain in port. You lead the other musicians to the courtyard, for you are now a leader of fake musicians, the one who knows how to set up and break down the sound equipment, the one who knows how to count the CDs and the money. The one who knows the exact location at which the speakers must be angled to draw in the maximum amount of customers, the precise geography of sound, the point on the map where the human ear can no longer distinguish real sound from fake.

  DECEMBER 2002

  “West Virginia!” the therapist at Psychological Services exclaims. “You are a real country girl! You actually grew up there? Like with cows?”

  You have made an appointment in an attempt to confess your troubles, specifically your drug abuse, to someone, anyone. But you want to ease into it. You don’t want to be mistaken for someone you’re not (party girl!). But before you can tell her anything, about the drugs or the need for tuition money, the isolation or the feelings of failure in the midst of seeming success, she becomes distracted by geography.

  “West Virginia!”

  She is a native New Yorker, upper class, most likely the granddaughter of immigrants—though whether Italian or Jewish or some other extraction you cannot tell, and it doesn’t matter, because the main ethnicity, the defining characteristic, is native New Yorker. Perhaps your ancestors were on the same boat as hers, but upon reaching Ellis Island they disembarked to different planets—hers to a factory on the Lower East Side, yours to the West Virginia mines. Now, decades later, their descendants struggle to comprehend one another. You have learned to spot and identify them, the native New Yorkers, by their accents, their words trumpeting out of their nasal cavities, their sentences a brassy scale. It’s also her shoes, which you would have once thought of as plain, but which you can now identify as expensive.

  “West Virginia!” she exclaims again, shaking her head in amazement. And you love her for thinking this is interesting. You love her even more for thinking this makes you interesting, a standout among her usual patients. But you also realize she’s not going to be able to help you.

  Yes, you say. And you spend the rest of your time describing the landscape, the geography of mountains and luck, the border between West Virginia and western Virginia that determined your destiny, the mountain shadows and the sun-spackled valleys. And the cows.

  A few days later you find yourself shaking in bed at dawn, coked-up to the rafters. Despite not sleeping for the past two nights, you are awake. Too awake. Terrified. You haven’t told a soul that you are afraid you’re on the verge of a heart attack or stroke or whatever bad fate happens to young stupid college girls from the country (cows!). But now you call the person in your life who you trust the most, who you have spent the most time with over the past six months, on long car rides and at fast-food restaurants and watching bad hotel TV. A person who fixes problems better and faster than anyone you have ever met, from a lost hotel reservation to a flat tire to a broken violin string. A person who navigates America the way that only a foreigner can, with an eye to its nuances, its foot-scented stickers, its strange music, its abundance of pocket money for relaxing CDs. A person who, even though he never went to college and just learned to speak English a few years ago, seems infinitely more capable of helping you than anyone at school.

  He comes right away, looking miserable as ever in the dull light of midmorning, and sits beside you while you lie in bed. His eyes are gray and hard and rimmed with circles, his white-blond hair slicked back, giving him the look of an eagle. He puts a hand on your head and promises to stay to make sure you keep breathing. And when you wake up, a few hours later, feeling a world better, he is still there, and he tells you a story.

  “Did I ever tell you what I did before I worked for The Composer?” Yevgeny asks.

  “Yes, you worked at a butcher shop. You almost sliced off your fingers,” you say.

  “No, before that. When I was really desperate,” he says.

  “No, tell me.”

  His job, the first he took when he came to America seeking a better life, speaking no English, and having no money, was to put stickers advertising a towing company on pay phones in Manhattan. Every day he would return to the same phones and his stickers would be gone, replaced by the stickers of rival towing companies. He’d peel those stickers off and put his stickers on, and then the next day they would be gone again. Day after day. Month after month. In the rain, the snow, the heat.

  Until one day he couldn’t take it anymore. There were just some things you couldn’t do for money. Not because they were particularly difficult, but because you just didn’t want to. Because they weren’t worth your life, which might not be worth much, but was worth something.

  After the day with Yevgeny, you quit using drugs. Years later, the simplicity of this—you quit using drugs—strikes you as miraculous. A bit too miraculous. It makes you doubt the seriousness of your drug abuse, which, after all, lasted only a few months. What seems most important is that, for the first time in your life, you chose your health over the extra work that you might have been able to produce, the extra success you might have been able to achieve, had you kept doing drugs for a few more months or years until you collapsed. You’ll feel incredibly lucky that, when it came to quitting drugs, things were so easy for you. And you’ll marvel that all it took was someone—someone whom you thought of as brilliant and hardworking—giving you permission not to put work above everything else. And you’ll wonder if Yevgeny was able to help you because, in addition to being kind and smart, he wasn’t American. For despite his rapid assimilation to American language and culture, despite his willingness to work long, hard hours, Yevgeny retained one strikingly un-American trait: he was not made uncomfortable by the sadness of failure.

  JANUARY 2003

  Over winter break you spend seven hundred dollars of your fake violin money on a ticket back to Egypt, the country where you hope to work after graduation. You march into the Cairo office of the New York Times bureau chief and attempt to sweet-talk your way into a job. You mention your college course work, your Arabic language skills, your knowledge of Cairo. You even mention, shamelessly, your Appalachian childhood and its testament to your willingness to work hard, as hard as it takes, harder than anyone else in the whole damn newsroom. This conversation is only the first of many that you will have with reporters and editors in Cairo. They all unfold the same way, as if following a script:

  OLDER MALE JOURNALIST WHO WORKS FOR IMPORTANT NEWS OUTLET: You’d be great. But we usually hire local Egyptians. They cost less.

  JESSICA: I’ll fetch coffee. Sweep floors. I’ll go to Baghdad. Kabul. I’ll take the most dangerous assignments. Or the shittiest ones—hot and boring places no other reporter wants to cover—Jeddah? I am tough. I have a cool head. All I need is room and board and health insurance in case I get sick or shot or blown up or w
hatever. You don’t even have to pay me.

  OLDER MALE JOURNALIST: (Chuckling to himself) I’ll get back to you. But believe it or not, news organizations are cutting their budgets right now.

  JESSICA: But there’s going to be a war . . .

  OLDER MALE JOURNALIST: Yes, there will be a war all right. But who will want to read about it? More to the point, who will want to pay to read about it? Have you heard of the Internet? The death of print journalism? This isn’t a college seminar; no one cares about the political nuances of Iraqi Kurdistan. They don’t care about it now, and they won’t care about it once the war starts.

  Fine, you think, as you walk back through Tahrir Square. You are undeterred. No skin off your back—you had started high with the Times but you would go lower. And lower. And lower. The script replays. You return to New York and apply for a Fulbright grant to study journalism in Egypt. “You’re a shoe-in,” says a college dean during a meeting to discuss your application. “You’ll be living in Egypt next year.”

  Even so, you apply for jobs around America and in the Middle East. You do so while working for The Composer each weekend, taking a full course load, and not taking drugs. You drink entire pots of coffee to stay awake and eat large slices of pizza and gain back the weight you lost. You apply for more grants. You apply for internships at the Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs magazine and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Where internships don’t exist, you write letters asking for one anyway, figuring you can pay your bills by working on the weekends as a fake violinist. You research every English-language academic journal on the Middle East and send them your résumé. You apply to journalism jobs in Arkansas and Vermont and Virginia. You attend job seminars and sign up for mock interviews at the Career Center. You post your résumé on the alumni database. You attend every event you can squeeze in between working and studying so that you can make what the counselors at Career Services call “contacts.”

  And when you fail to hear back from any of these, you blame yourself. After all, Columbia promised to open all doors. If the doors don’t open, it must be your fault. Maybe your grades aren’t high enough. You made mostly As, but you do have some Bs, and one C, in Introduction to Psychology. Maybe that C is ruining everything. Maybe you don’t have enough extracurricular activities. Maybe you have misspelled some crucial word in your cover letter. Maybe if you hadn’t been spending nearly every weekend traveling across America playing your violin, you’d have made the right contact.

  FEBRUARY 2003

  “WHERE ARE WE SUPPOSED TO GO?” the woman screams at the police.

  The police are on horseback, corralling the woman and you and hundreds of thousands of other war protesters into tiny, roped-off sections on side streets near the United Nations. The march—though planned in advance and with up to a million participants—has been declared “illegal” by the NYPD. The police are riding the horses through the crowd, billy clubs waving. The crowd is moving and you are moving with it, though you are too short to see over the shoulders of the people around you to determine in which direction you are being pushed. All you know is that you can feel the rib cages of the people in front and back of you. They expand and collapse with each breath, and it is only when they both collapse that you can expand your own rib cage and breathe.

  The strangest thing about protesting the war—the war that has yet to even begin—is how conventional protesting a war seems. It does not feel particularly rebellious, even if it is “illegal.” Even when you are almost trampled by a horse, you think to yourself, This is just like what the old folks did, in the olden days of Vietnam!

  And yet, the vast majority of the faces around you are young faces; there are few people old enough to have marched during Vietnam. And this is disconcerting to you. For your generation is using their music: Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield. Your generation is chanting their chants: “One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucking war!” Your generation is updating their slogans for posters and t-shirts: “My Bush Makes Love Not War.” Your generation is banging on bucket drums and burning incense because you are imitating your parents’ version of a war protest.

  But at this protest in 2003, the faces of your parents’ generation are relatively few. Their icons—the Clintons—and their mouthpiece—the New York Times editorial board—are too scared to object to the war. The polling data are clear: the majority of the baby boomer generation—the once-hippies, once-protesters, once-flower children, once-tuned-in and dropped-out—are now war supporters. When you express your antiwar views to one baby boomer couple you know that spent the 1960s in a free-love commune, they accuse you of sympathizing “with the terrorists.” Even your own father, who witnessed the shootings at Kent State, who was almost trampled by a horse at a civil rights rally, whose peace-love-dove values have inspired you to march at this march, even he now argues with you. Perhaps the war is necessary, he says to you, his daughter, a person who has just spent four years and a great deal of his money learning everything she can about the Middle East, traveling to Egypt, learning to speak Arabic. The weapons don’t exist, you say. But how do you know? The weapons are irrelevant, you say. They won’t be irrelevant when some terrorist uses them. The terrorists aren’t from Iraq! How do you know? Because they aren’t!

  Not that your generation is doing much better. You see two fronts unfolding, depending on geography: Back home, in the valleys of the mountain fog, the children you grew up with are donning camouflage and posing in the local newspaper before being shipped off to their bases, their eyes staring out from the gray newsprint at something in the distance—some confident, some terrified, some so brave and resolute it’s easy to forget they are teenagers. Some believe in the beauty of America. Others believe in the beauty of an enlistment bonus. Many signed up after 9/11 for the war in Afghanistan, a war they believed in, only to be reshuffled to Iraq, a war they did not.

  In a different land, three hundred or so miles to the north, at a marble-walled Ivy League campus sealed off from the poverty and crime just outside its iron gates, it’s as if the approaching war is a mildly interesting foreign sporting event, like badminton or cricket. There are war protests and teach-ins, but apart from the ravaged city skyline, daily life on campus has not changed much since you first arrived in 1999, one major terrorism attack and two wars ago. Inside the iron gates students preoccupy themselves with other problems. The tech bubble has burst. Jobs are scarce. The less fortunate among us have large amounts of student debt. And you notice that even the most privileged students have parents tapping their toes to the rhythm of “When I was your age . . .”

  We need jobs. We need health insurance. We need security deposits for apartments in New York City. We need money—two hundred dollars—for the cap and gown and diploma fees (“What?” You almost scream at the dean informing you of graduation procedures. “The diploma isn’t included in the tuition?!”). We attend seminars on “How to Survive the Real World,” where a man in a business suit says that the best time to start saving for retirement is right now and if you wait longer, you will find yourself old and poor and destitute and slurping ramen through your dentures, if you can even afford dentures. Meanwhile, a committee has been formed among your classmates to raise donations for the Class of 2003 Alumni Fund. You attempt to dodge them, but one committee member corners you to explain that the fund will be used “for students who can’t afford to go here.”

  In just a few weeks, a sizable portion of your class is snapped up by large Wall Street corporations. Another portion is accepted to big-name law and medical schools. And you begin to realize that, for the past four years, you have been playing a game that you had no idea you were playing, a game in which the prize is Wall Street or Yale Law or Harvard Medical or Stanford Business, a game with prizes that you realize, too late, you never had any interest in winning.

  Even so, you, along with the rest of your graduating class, all share one major prize, a prize not afforded
to several people from your high school, and you struggle to comprehend the magnitude of it, the luck of it, the geography of it: none of you will be maimed or killed or psychologically destroyed in Afghanistan or Iraq.

  MARCH 2003

  The Iraq War, you promise yourself you will tell your grandchildren some day, was like a poisonous snake slithering across the length of a football field. Everyone could see it coming from a long distance. We could have walked away from it. We could have shot it with a round of snake-shot. We could have clubbed it over the head with a hoe. Instead, it slithered right up. It took a while, but it got there. And then it struck, lightning fast. And the venom spread. Slowly, agonizingly. For more than a decade.