You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  He tells her that everyone who has struggled for justice has suffered, many much more than her father or her grandfather. Nothing she’s told him is new. This suffering is not a problem to be solved; it is the human condition. He tells her that her father is not measured by his accomplishments, but by hope itself.

  “If you’re going to hold on to hope you cannot look at the results of your actions,” he says. “This is very American, you know, we do something, we want to see results. We work, we want to see what we’ve accomplished, you know what I mean? The people of Latin America have been struggling for generations and don’t see very much progress. Yet their hope is their joy.”

  At that, Isabel nods, and even speaks.

  “Um hmm. I see.”

  She does not close her eyes, but she feels her mindscape a limitless expanse of ice-blue, clear and precise and deeply, deeply angry. It is as if she has been feeling this anger all her life. And yet it is not disagreeable. It is simply there, and has always been there—it’s only that she could never, she understands directly, without surprise, let herself feel it.

  She couldn’t bear it.

  Now she can.

  She rises, and packs her MacBook and its impedimenta into her bag, and she is done, she speaks quietly, conversationally, without any tears at all.

  “Um hmm. But see, in my family, they’ve been hoping since the Bolshevik revolution. They’ve hoped their way through two world wars, the Holocaust, Vietnam. McCarthy, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Ford, and two Bushes. They hoped through the religious right, through global warming. And you know what happened with everything they’ve hoped for? Here it is. Right here. And I’m just not sure that it’s enough to die for, Father. I’m just not sure it’s a good enough way to die. Surely there has to be something else?”

  14.

  Surely there has to be something else. It’s as if the words are imprinted into her hearing, when she comes out of Bourgeois’s office; it’s as if they have become the rhythm of her breathing, Surely, surely, there has to be, there has to be, something else.

  For a time she stands on the porch, eyes closed, letting the sun fall on her face and breathing the MDMA mantra. It seems all she can do, but in fact, as soon as she wills herself to open her eyes, she finds that she has a thorough and immediate command of the reality around her, effortlessly and without any possible negative feeling. Neither about what is around her nor about the encounter she has just had with Bourgeois. Was that the peak? She checks her watch: one full hour since taking the drug. No, the peak is still ahead.

  The porch is flooded in thin autumn sun. Next to her, at a slight remove, she sees the tall man in a checkered shirt, somehow deeply reassuring. Vaguely, she remembers seeing him before, and has the impression that he had been in Bourgeois’s office while she was there. Was that possible? She nods at him, and he nods back. Everything—everything—is perfect.

  With this effortless clarity, she sees that the pitch of protest has clearly moved to a new level. The long procession of crosses has come to an end, and in the little fenced-off area, to the rhythm of drumbeats, a series of huge, colorful papier-mâché puppets on poles are being marched by the gate of Fort Benning, some representations of soldiers, others representations of the dead. She stands watching and then to her surprise, she finds Josh Cohn at her side, his shirtsleeves still buttoned at the wrists. To her even greater surprise, she finds that she has taken his bicep in a soft grasp and spoken in a voice that she cannot ever remember using before, but which she has no doubt was hers. “Hey there, Josh. How are you?”

  Very surprised, he looks at her. But, she immediately perceives, he has no hesitation in accepting connection. To the contrary, he is totally open to it, even from her.

  “I’m good, Ms. Montgomery. And you?”

  For a moment she wonders who Ms. Montgomery is. Then she gets it. “Isabel. Or Dr. Montgomery, if you prefer. Not Ms., though, I don’t like it. I’m good, really good.”

  “Isabel. Noted.” He smiles, kindly. “Listen, I came to tell you, you may want to go over there to that little area on the other side of the fence. That’s where the direct action is going to be.”

  She may, Isabel thinks to herself, want to find a corner here, lie on the grass, and breathe the mantra of her joy into the sky, that’s what she may want to do. But this drug: she hasn’t the slightest doubt that that was something she wanted to think, but not say. And she didn’t say it. With a nod to Josh—a nod that seemed, to her, to say it all—she looks over and sees that, on one of the lateral fences, a huge opening has been ripped open, allowing direct access to the fence erected in front of the Fort Benning gate. Nearby, on a slight rise, she sees Christy and Becky watching her, and she understands that she has been brought here in her journalistic capacity to see the central act of civil disobedience and arrest. She feels the eyes of the girls, and of Josh, on her for a moment, feels them intensely, and realizes that they are not just now, but always have been, kind. Dimly, she realizes that they were kind even through her hostility, yesterday. But had she been hostile? she asked herself. She had felt hostile. But she had been honest. Didn’t that count for something? And yet, why had she felt so hostile?

  A sudden battery of drums begins now, beating loudly from a group of perhaps fifteen young people in battle dress, layers of clothes and helmets, now approaching, together, in two lines. The crowd in front of the opening in the first fence parts as the group arrives, and they enter the no-man’s-land between the two fences. The crowd hangs respectfully back, except for four young men in work gloves with crowbars who, as if on cue, move forward, lean down to the bottom of the chain-link fence, place their crowbars, and pull the bottom of the fence right out of the ground. This opens a space of eighteen inches or so, just enough for the group of protesters, in pairs of two, to hand their drums to the person behind them, who hands them off until they reach the crowd and disappear, lie down and cross their arms and roll under the fence into Fort Benning.

  Nearly without noticing, Isabel has wandered away from Josh and into the crowd, better to see what is happening on the army side of the fence. Dimly, she is aware that the man in the checkered shirt has followed her, but that seems only natural to her. Amazingly, the military police on the other side are watching elsewhere. Perhaps it was a planned diversion, she can’t see from here. Five or six protesters are through by the time the MPs see what’s going on, and when they do they move swiftly. As a detail of armed soldiers observe, each protester is corralled, has their hands affixed behind them with plastic ties, and is marched off to a waiting school bus.

  On the protest side, each time someone crosses, the crowd cheers. More and more people are coming to watch, now, and to help hold the fence up, some pulling the chain link out of the ground, some climbing and rocking on the fence’s poles. Clearly, this is a particular faction of the coalition attending the protest: there are no nuns or old people here, now, just college students, many dressed for battle, and they are swarming over the fence, rocking it, pulling it out of the ground.

  Two young men, in fact, have set sedulously to work with two pairs of wire cutters, and it is as she watches them that she feels herself shoved forward toward the fence, violently. A phalanx of riot policemen, black clad and helmeted, force their way into the crowd and wrestle the two wire-cutters away from the fence. The boys are cuffed and marched off, the policemen pushing their way through the hooting crowd.

  None of it feels bad. It all feels good, and dimly Isabel realizes that this is why Ecstasy is a rave drug. The bodies next to her, the roar of the crowd, the pushing backward, and forward. It is like being a part of an organism. And yet an instinct tells her, surely, that it is time now for her to be somewhere else. Something is changing dimension inside of her, a feeling she has never felt before, and she is not sure how long she can stay on her feet. On this side of the fence, the riot police are at least temporarily gone, and the orderly process of civil disobedience—every few minutes another protes
ter crosses under the fence and is taken off by the MPs. But can she get out of here? For a tiny second, panic comes up. And then she sees, dramatically, how unnecessary it was. The panic. The man in the checkered shirt is standing next to her, watching her with polite interest, as if he knows what she is going through. Now, she is able to see that he is perhaps sixty with a flat belly and an air of strength. And his face, under a bald forehead and with a gap in its front teeth under a thick mustache, is the kindest she has ever seen in her life. She speaks to him without hesitation:

  “Can you take me out of here?”

  “Where to?”

  “Somewhere I can lie down.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Very. Very. But in a way that makes me need to lie down.”

  “What is it?”

  “MDMA. It’s a long story. I took it by mistake. I think I’m about to peak.”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  She realizes suddenly that she has never asked anyone for help before. Ever. Perhaps not since Molly took care of her as a child. She feels herself, in his gaze, a little girl and a grown woman, and realizes suddenly, with crystalline force, that she has always only been one person, the same person, and she is that same person now.

  “I’m superb. I’m very, very good.”

  He nods, once, and then takes her arm and gently leads her out of the thickest of the crowd to an empty space of grass near the interior fence. Along the way he takes her computer bag off her shoulder, which she is intensely grateful for, as her legs are failing her quickly. Or she thinks they are. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe she’s just that relaxed.

  There are many, many fewer people here. For a time she stands next to the man, watching now from a slight distance, as the crowd, young and very angry, face off across the remains of the fence at the MPs on the other side.

  And then she is sitting on the grass. He seems to have helped her down, and is now sitting next to her.

  And then, although she doesn’t know it, he has caught her head as it falls and lowered it gently to his knee while he takes off his coat, with which he makes a pillow, and now she is lying on the grass.

  But she doesn’t know it.

  Isabel will never be able to describe exactly what happens to her next. For the rest of her life it will be a point of reference. On one hand, it is an overwhelming experience of the very strong and very pure chemical given her as a gift by the Rasta pot dealer. On the other hand, it is an absolute, unique experience that is unlike anything she has ever known before or which she will ever have again. An endless expanse of wind is pouring through her, roaring in its enormity; cleansing, corrupt, violent, peaceful, horrible and beautiful, breathing through her with a simple reality that belies any judgment whatsoever. In it everything she has ever considered her identity has dissolved, and whether it is the drug or not she understands with nearly brutal certainty that there is no I or thou or them or us; the concept of pronoun does not exist, nor does there exist any differentiation between the interests or desires of different people. She is not conscious, but she is vividly conscious that this is, simply, reality, and the world of her angst, political and affective, has always been a fantasy, and that is why she has written what she has just written, and what you have just read. She experiences this understanding with immense gratitude but without surprise, as though she has always known it, and always been waiting to feel it, and only had to wait for now to do so. She is not conscious, but she will remember this precisely, and she has no idea of how long it lasts. But as suddenly as it came, so gently does it subside, and slowly, her eyes open to the sky above her. For minutes, she watches it, the captive atmosphere of a revolving globe. Then she says, aloud:

  “I didn’t know. I had no idea.”

  The man in the checkered shirt watches her kindly, and says nothing, but she senses his disagreement.

  “Okay, that’s not true. I did know. I just couldn’t let myself.”

  He nods, once, with approval. “None of us can.”

  She shuts her eyes again and revisits that perfect awareness for a long, long moment, or at least, the afterglow of it. What a small voice she has. She didn’t know. How odd that it should be this drug that should show her this, after all the drugs that have for so long helped her run away.

  Then she looks at him suddenly.

  “Want to know something?”

  “Of course.”

  “That girl on the rue des Abbesses who called me m’enfichiste and then left me alone in her chambre de bonne? She was a dear, sweet little person, kind and lovely. All she wanted was to be loved, and to spend her entire life with me. It was the first time I ever was in love, and the last, and standing there, and when she left me in her chambre de bonne, after I made her leave me, I ached and I ached, I ached, and I’ve been aching ever since.”

  As if he has known her all her life, rather than, as is the case, not at all.

  “Okay. So?”

  She considered. “So?”

  “You don’t need me to tell you.”

  She thinks for a moment. Then she says, deliberately, as if reciting a catechism, what she now understands.

  “So love implies loss. Fine. We resist love because we’re afraid of loss. And, equally, ideals imply failure. That’s what Bourgeois was saying, and Josh and Christy and Becky. Who knows why some people are moved by ideals? But if you are, you’re not alone. Millions of people have been. And you can’t be afraid of their failure. Nothing’s ever going to change and no one’s ever going to win, so generation after generation chooses failure. Millions of people have. Billions. That is, they choose to fight for ideals in the face of the inevitability of failure. And if you make that choice, you can do it with despair, or you can do it with hope: the choice is yours. Right?”

  He looks away, and again she feels his disappointment. “Almost.”

  With real curiosity, she asks: “What am I missing?”

  A pause. Then: “It’s hope. The standard of choice between the two ways one functions in the face of the inevitability of failure isn’t hope . . .”

  Dimly aware that she is having the strangest conversation of her strange life, on one hand, and that on the other she has never experienced such faultless communication, she literally pokes him with her finger.

  “Go on.”

  “You understand me?”

  “Perfectly. Go on.”

  “The way to judge the choice people make is which one is more informed by love. That’s all. It’s that simple. You get it?”

  Did she get it? Slowly, she asks: “And what about the damage done?”

  “What damage?”

  “The damage that love does. What I did to the girl on the rue des Abbesses. What my family has done to each other? What my family has done to me?”

  He nods now. “Surely you see the difference between wounds inflicted by love and a wound inflicted by hope?”

  So that’s it. She nods, profoundly.

  “Yes. Crimes of love—crimes of family—have victims, but no perpetrators. Right? The consequence is the same, but the intention is different, and that changes everything.”

  He nods now, profoundly, nearly with gratitude. “So you do get it.”

  She knows she doesn’t need to answer, but she says it anyway, as she turns her head to the parabolic sky of blue in which has floated up all the people she has loved, and all the people she has lost, and is going to lose, and shuts her eyes.

  “Yes. If you don’t get that, you do terrible things. Like lie to your lover for all of your life. Like marry a person you don’t love. Like not read your father’s emails for ten years. And then you make more victims.”

  For a last, long, luscious moment she lets her mind float in the certainty of the sky-blue behind her eyelids.

  And then it is time to sit up.

  She knows it and in the next second she does it. Companionably next to the man, she actually manages to light a cigarette, and give him one, which he accepts happily and in
serts into his lips under his mustache with practiced ease. Her consciousness is returned to the pre-peak purity, but washed clean now of anything like judgment, and anything like fear. Conversationally, she remarks to him:

  “It never occurred to me to ask anyone for help before.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Stupid, huh?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Smoking together, they see the police are back, having gotten the fence-cutters into school buses, which gives her a precise idea of the length of the peak she has experienced on the MDMA: as infinite as it seemed, it was perhaps fifteen minutes. She also sees what they are doing: that they have managed to encircle this crowd, containing it. They are surprisingly upset, the police, as if this were personal. Every now and again a pair go into the crowd and extract someone in cuffs. Young, large men seem to be their target of choice. One such—one of the pair which first opened the fence—is the object of two cops now, anonymous behind riot face guards, who wade into the crowd to put their hands on him, while he struggles to get away, then goes limp. Two other police have to come help carry him. Someone tries to block them; there is a surge back as more police move in with billy clubs and cattle prods, and the young man is, now, successfully carried off. The cordon continues to form with new police arriving, orderly and slow, and with slight curiosity she realizes that their arrest is imminent.