by James Boice
—Can you feel it? Jenny said to me the night one of her candidates lost a primary by thirty-three percentage points, as I sat slumped in the corner of the hotel conference room drinking, despondent. —What we’re doing is working. We’re making big progress. We’ve just got to keep doing what we’re doing.
—Are you insane? I said. I sat up and began to rant, but she cut me off.
—Dude, shush. She pointed up at the ceiling, the music blasting now. —Beyoncé.
She spun and danced away to the center of the room like a drunk aunt at a wedding. I watched her dance alone, realizing what I had done. I had placed the last vapors of my faith in humanity into a callous lunatic.
Our daily schedule consisted of: meetings, phone calls, being shouted at, meetings, lunch, getting spit on, meetings, phone calls, having our tires slashed, e-mails, writing op-eds, TV appearances, campaign rallies, door-to-door canvassing, planning tomorrow which would always be the same as today—and over it all, an incessant looping sound track of the pop queen. After a major prime-time Fox News host called me a sniveling, emasculated weasel on live television, Jenny played Beyoncé to try to cheer me up. When a former Republican governor and presidential candidate called for my and Jenny’s being added to the terrorist watch list, Jenny responded with some lyric from a Beyoncé song. And when another former Republican governor posted my picture on her Facebook page with a bull’s-eye photoshopped over my face and the message Lock and load, the vast digital army of little Jennys blew up the page with pictures of Beyoncé until the offending former governor was forced to delete the whole thing. One time I caught Jenny staring at herself in the mirror in my house and she turned to me and said, —I kind of look a little like Beyoncé, don’t I? I think the worst thing I could have done to her would have been, not joining the NRA, but confessing that I did not get Beyoncé, that Beyoncé meant nothing to me.
—Do you think she would like me? she asked once in the car as bearded men pounded on the windows on either side with their firearms. —I mean, if she met me?
Meanwhile every day a steady ticker tape of the day’s dead: stray bullets killing mother on her front steps, toddler shot by older brother playing with dad’s gun, road rage escalating to execution, failed news anchor shooting former colleagues on air, failed whatever killing ex-wife and her family and their kids, cop shooting unarmed black man in the back during a traffic stop, seventh grader shooting best friend in pre-algebra class, father mistaken for rival gang member shot on sidewalk, white supremacist sitting through entire service at a black church before taking out a Glock 19 equipped with a sixteen-round magazine and killing as many people as he could, then reloading and killing more…
That time for me was like being somehow shrunken down to the cellular level and injected into a human body—it could have been anyone’s—right where the cancer is, and seeing the sickness breathing and eating and seething around me, tasting it, putting my hands on it, doing everything I could to try to stop it and nothing working.
I appeared in a video Jenny’s marketing team produced, reading from cue cards she held up behind the camera, things she had written about what it was like for me being in that movie theater, what Kaylee meant to me and how in love we were, and what it was like having her die in my arms because of the NRA. Jenny did not know what Kaylee meant to me. No one did. Kaylee meant everything. Everything. But I could not remember her anymore. Now whenever I tried to remember her, all I could see was the picture I showed to men with all the money and power right before they told me there was nothing they could do. I did not even know whom I was talking about anymore when I said Kaylee’s name. The reality—the real her, the real me, the real us—was gutted. I had gutted it. I should never have shown anyone her picture, I should never have told anyone about her neck, the heartbeat I thought was hers. I had turned Kaylee into something inhuman, I had desecrated her. I had desecrated myself. Because now I could not even remember Kaylee. I could not remember the girl I loved. I could only remember the politics, the men with guns. And Jenny.
Lawmakers stopped taking our meetings. Maybe now and again an aide with nothing better to do might come downstairs and meet us in the lobby, let me desecrate Kaylee for him, hear Jenny out about the science and the data and the tide, ensure us the administration was taking the issue very seriously before excusing himself.
—It’s working! Jenny kept saying. —We’re making progress! All we have to do is keep doing what we’re doing and not let up!
Late one evening we sat around a table at headquarters, holding an all-night strategy session in advance of a big meeting (sleeping bags had been brought in for the staff), when Jenny began crying and did not stop. The little Jennys around us pretended not to notice. They said, —Thanks, Jenny! Thanks, everybody! and gathered their notepads and devices and scattered to their workstations, leaving me and her alone. I had never seen someone so lonely. Even her style of crying was lonely: hunched forward, curled small and tight into herself with her elbows on the table and hands over her face, shaking silently. I did not know what would happen. I watched her, the narrow hands with the veins sticking out and liver spots beginning to appear, her skinny frail wrists that looked anything but unbreakable, the strands of gray hair she had missed when she had dyed it herself in the bathroom of her hotel room.
—Jenny? I said. —Are you okay? She did not answer. I reached over, touched her shoulder. —Jenny?
—Get away from me! she yelled into her hands. —Don’t touch me!
I jumped up and away, startled. I looked at the little Jennys. They pretended not to see. None of them looked away from her work. They just left her there at the table until they all went to sleep on the floor in sleeping bags. They turned the lights off on her. I covered her with a spare blanket. She was still shaking. Not crying, I realized. Shivering. Was I alone in seeing what it all was doing to her? That she lived on some kind of precipice and one day she would go over into the abyss, taking with her whoever happened to be holding on to her at the time? Would any of the others have believed me if I had told them Jenny Sanders, like any of us, was not the person she believed she was?
In the morning I woke to the sounds of Beyoncé. I found Jenny bouncing around with her disciples before a whiteboard, on which was written a day’s full agenda. —We’re making progress, Jenny shouted at me over the music.
I felt exhausted and useless. I told her I was done. She told me I needed to change my mind, but before long a former graduate student at a university in Washington State drove through campus in his Kia Sorento with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol and a box of fully loaded sixteen-round magazines in the passenger seat (the gun and the bullets he had bought as part of the surge in guns and ammo sales resulting from Jenny’s Battle of Texas), shooting at every woman and girl he saw, killing nine and paralyzing three and injuring twelve more before police could stop him. Jenny said goodbye via text from the airport as she boarded her flight to Washington. I tried calling her a few times over the next few months, but one of her little Jennys always assured me she was in a meeting or on a call or traveling and would absolutely call me back first chance. She never did. I never spoke to Jenny Sanders again. I saw her only on TV and in news stories like this I read now, today’s shooting. Tomorrow will bring tomorrow’s shooting, and like today’s it will make me remember it all. All of it, that is, but Kaylee.
We’re making progress! Keep doing what you’re doing and don’t let up! I did not understand Jenny’s optimism in the face of completely contradictory facts until later, when hackers got into the RSA’s servers and dumped its until-then-confidential financial and membership data and I learned for the first time how much money had been coming in to RSA during that time, how many new memberships, how the visibility of Jenny’s movement grew like a second sun in the sky over the nation.
Victory at the Battle of Texas.
People ask me: What is she like?
I always answer: There is nothing Jenny Sanders would not do to sa
ve us. Nothing at all.
3
THE DOCTOR
They show up one day at his practice while he is in the middle of examining a ten-year-old boy with strep throat. Beefy bearded thugs with bleached teeth and Rolexes and firearms.
—We do not like your articles, they say, —we do not like your speeches.
He says, —Oh? Why not?
They say, —They do not give glory to God.
He says, —I do not know anything about God, I only know about treating people and their illnesses.
—The law says give all glory to God, they tell him, —you need to obey the law.
—No, he says, —I need more antibiotics.
—Recant all you have ever said and written, they say, —stop using Satan’s medicine, disown science in favor of God’s Scripture.
—I will not, he says.
They leave. A few days later he receives a letter from the state informing him his medical license is void and he must close his practice at once. He does not. The men with bushy beards and bleached teeth and Rolexes stand outside his practice informing all who approach that it is an unlicensed, ungodly facility and anybody caught receiving treatment here will be breaking the law and therefore arrested. Everybody knows what happens to those who are arrested. Still he treats patients at their homes, still he writes and still he speaks.
His colleagues admire him but also tell him he is foolish, suicidal, beg him to keep quiet. His wife tells him to keep going, that he is right. She tells him to not be afraid. He says, —I am afraid of no one and nothing and never have been. They are in bed when he tells her this. As soon as he does, they kick the door in and enter with guns, bandannas over faces, dusty civilian clothes, bulletproof vests. These are not the men with Rolexes and bleached teeth, these are men with darker skin and brown crooked or missing teeth; they speak a foreign language he has never heard before. They tie him to a chair in the bedroom, put the barrel of an AK-47 in his mouth.
—Are you the doctor? they say in his language but with very strange accents. He does not answer. —Are you? they say again. Through the greasy metal of the gun on his tongue he says yes, he is. They punch him, his teeth crack against the gun. —Are you? they say. He says he is and they hit him again and laugh, then turn their attention to his wife. They force him to watch everything. There are fourteen of them and each takes part. Their bodies reek of sweat and filth and the damp heat of the night outside.
When they are done with her they ask him again, —Are you the doctor? He can hardly speak. He whispers, —I am not the doctor. They leave.
All these years later now in New York, on wet nights in summer like that one, he will smell them all over again. He will be on the roof looking over the city, and the wind will bring him their smell and this new city will become that old city. He will be on the subway and it will be crowded and he will smell it wafting off the body of the man beside him, and at the next station he will force his way off the train and stagger along the platform to a bench, collapse on it, and sit huffing air, his head between his knees.
At the hospital they are afraid of him and will not treat her. They beg him to take her away, to forgive them. So he brings her back home, cleans and examines and treats her himself. Fourteen. Fourteen. There is little he can do but stop the bleeding and cauterize the tears and give her painkillers and sedatives from the illegal stash in the floor beneath the oven. He sutures her with the only thing he has, thread from her sewing kit. As he works she groans. She falls asleep and he puts one of her kitchen knives to his throat and pushes its point into the soft of his skin, puncturing it, dark blood trickling down over his Adam’s apple to his chest, and is about to push it farther, but no, this is not the way, what will she do all alone?
The next night he puts her in traditional concealing garb the extreme religion of the regime commands its women wear and disguises himself as a cleric and they leave their home.
—Where will we go? she says.
He says, —I don’t know. Maybe America. He thinks about it, then decides, —Yes. America.
—How will we get there? she says.
—I don’t know. But we will. Have faith.
—You are not a man of faith, you are a man of science and fact and reason.
—I was. I do not know what I am anymore. I have nothing but you and, I suppose, if I want it, faith.
One of his patients tells him about a bus that will take them to the coast. It is carrying young, fashionable rich kids, foreigners on some kind of holiday trip. These passengers hide the former doctor and his wife beneath the luggage in the compartment below. She makes no sound at all over the eighteen-hour journey, though she must be in such pain. Then at the coast a cook on a tugboat sneaks them into his closet-sized quarters belowdecks, telling them if they are discovered the captain will turn them all in or just kill them all on board and throw their bodies in the water. He feeds them Coca-Cola and Pringles potato chips. They have nothing, not even a change of clothes. The cook has only two extra sweaters and two extra jeans and two extra pairs of socks, but he gives them to the former doctor and his wife even if it means he now has extra nothing. The former doctor never learns his name or why he helps them.
The tugboat takes them across the sea and out of the country. They sneak off the boat, and at a train station a woman buys them tickets and at the border a guard waves them through without checking their papers—maybe an oversight, but he seemed to look meaningfully into the former doctor’s eyes—and six weeks later they are in a strange city in Europe, living in a homeless shelter under assumed names, safe from the reach of the regime. They are safe but it is a dead end—the American embassy refuses their requests for asylum. The former doctor looks for work of any kind. He does not speak the language here, knows no one. Buses tables at a café, washes dishes, sweeps and mops at a church, hauls debris at a construction site—they pay him in cash and food and not much of either. He teaches himself some of the language, asks people he works with about their lives, makes friends. Being friends with them and speaking to them teaches him more of the language. He is honest and works hard and people want to help him. The superintendent of the shelter lets him work as his assistant, teaching him the essential principles of repainting and derusting, the fundamentals of industrial cleaning and quick-fix plumbing. Unclogs toilets jammed with the shit and tampons of the homeless, mops their puke from the floor, kills rats the size of Komodo dragons, brings out the trash, shovels the snow, disrupts commercial fucking in nighttime stairwells. Medical school, residency, days-long shifts as a physician—these things have made him far more indefatigable than he realized and he is able to work and work, sometimes fourteen-hour days, earning a humble living for himself and his wife. The shelter is soon cleaner and runs better than it has since it opened thirty years earlier. Not a single burned-out lightbulb can be found, not one broken window or loose railing. He even plants a garden out front. The residents marvel at the paucity of vermin and bedbugs.
—Used to have to sleep with a sock stuffed in your mouth so nothing could crawl in it, one happy, toothless old man tells him, —but not anymore, not since you showed up.
The former doctor asks this man about the rattling cough he has, takes a look down his throat with his flashlight. Puts his ear to the man’s pocked, crooked back and listens to him breathe. —Come with me, he says. Walks him quickly across town to the hospital, the emergency ward. —This man is dying of lung infection, he tells the nurse, who does not seem to like him because he is black and does not speak the language well, yet still has the nerve to insist and take charge. She makes them wait for four hours, the old man oblivious to the danger, watching the TV hanging from the ceiling and laughing at everything like a child. The former doctor returns to the nurse at her desk. He says, —Please. Antibiotics. Hurry.
She is impatient, yells at him like he is a dog. He waits until she is finished yelling at him like he is a dog, not understanding what she is saying anyway, then repeats himself in a c
alm and somber authoritative voice, the demeanor with which he spoke to his nurses and staff, which must push some button in her brain because her demeanor changes and she does what he has told her, she comes around the desk and takes the old man back into the examination area. Five minutes later she returns, bursting through the double doors, now white-faced and serious and moving very urgently, disappears through another set of doors, returns immediately tailed by a doctor. They both run through the first set of doors.
The next time the former doctor and the old man see each other, two weeks later in the hall of the shelter outside the showers, the old man has already put on weight and his cough is gone and his face has gained a lifeful ruddiness. Seeing the former doctor coming toward him, now a porter in musty coveralls on his way to attend to a wonky boiler, the old man does a little dance that ends with him lowering himself to his knees and kissing the feet of the former doctor and saying, —You save my life, you save it. This, the former doctor feels somehow, in a way he does not fully understand and cannot explain, but must believe, is the way to America.
She cooks the dishes from their home country in the shelter’s kitchen; he trades them at the pub for bottles of wine and whiskey, makes friends with the people there. They connect him to two men who can help him, but it will require money. These men are from his home country, they fled the regime as well, they understand. He has money he has saved from working fourteen-hour days, gives it all to them, and they give him the papers. Triumphant, he takes them to the American embassy. They glance at the papers and order him arrested, hold him for four days in jail; they tell him he will be sent back to his home country. He does not tell them about his wife. He will be sent back and she will stay. He will be killed but she will live. As he is being led from the jail transport truck to the plane, his boss from the shelter arrives, tells the police he needs him, he is the hardest worker and most reliable, honest man he has ever known, he cannot be replaced, please, he begs them, and they let him go.