The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  It feels like there is a part of me that has become broken, and without it I’m becoming unhinged. I never see my friends anymore just ’cause of the hours.

  And on the rare occasions when I do see them, they say things to me like, “You don’t look very good.”

  Or, “Jessi, don’t cry in this restaurant. We want to come back here.”

  I’m also not sleeping, because there’s no time to sleep. And on the occasions when I might sleep, I’m too anxious, and I’m thinking about next week’s guest, and what I should write for them.

  I’ll be lying there thinking, Okay, Jennifer Lopez is gonna be on next week. What should I write for Jennifer Lopez?

  And then I’ll be like, Who the fuck knows what to do with Jennifer Lopez? Jennifer Lopez doesn’t know what to do with Jennifer Lopez.

  And in the midst of all this stress, I’m trying to experience any kind of pleasure because I don’t have pleasure in my life anymore. All I can do is go to the Anthropologie store downstairs at 30 Rock and spend too much money on some twee bullshit item. I spent $280 on, like, a sweater with a kangaroo pocket on it or some crap. Girls know what I’m talking about.

  Or sometimes I’ll get home really late, and I’ll take an Ambien, and I’ll start to hallucinate just enough to send a vague sext to this guy I used to date in L.A.

  Right when I was doing this, the Tiger Woods scandal broke. And I remember one of his mistresses talked about the fact that they Ambien-sexted.

  Everyone at my job was like, “Ew, that’s so gross.”

  And I was like, “Yeah, ew, that’s so gross. I’m doing what Tiger Woods does.”

  I knew I was hitting rock bottom when the anxiety started to affect me physically. I started to feel like I was having heart palpitations, and because I’m a neurotic hypochondriac, I was like, I’m dying.

  So I went to my doctor. I have a really good doctor, so he was immediately able to diagnose me as being an idiot.

  He said, “You just need to relax.”

  I was like, “Okay, well, then give me some Klonopin.”

  And he said, “No, you should do this without drugs.”

  And I was like, “Why are you a bad doctor?”

  Around this time a really good friend of mine sends me a link to a series of lectures by this British Buddhist monk named Ajahn Brahm.

  She says, “Listen to this. It will make you feel better.” I was skeptical, because generally the only self-help I will accept is from a very close girlfriend of mine named Oprah Winfrey.

  But I’m desperate, so I’m like, “Okay.”

  I immediately fall in love with Ajahn Brahm. He has given a weekly talk for fifteen years about every aspect of human experience in the world. They’re alphabetized on the website.

  I start listening to these lectures in bed—literally I take my laptop and I put it by my pillow so his voice is in my ear.

  One night I listen to a lecture he did about death and dying. The theme was accepting that life and death go together and are part of the same continuum.

  I realize even though I’m not physically dying, maybe I can integrate this idea into the fact that my comedy is dying. If I’m gonna succeed at SNL, I have to make peace with bombing. You have to do that in life—make peace with bombing. But especially on that show.

  I stop writing things from a place of fear. And I start to write things that I think are funny. I say fuck it, whatever, and I hand it in.

  And things start to get better. On one of the last shows of the season, Tina Fey was the host. I love Tina Fey. And I really wanted to get something on when she was on. I remembered on Tuesday night that I’d written this sketch when I was submitting to get the job.

  I thought, Maybe Tina would be good for this.

  I hand it in, and we do it at table read. And it doesn’t kill, but it doesn’t bomb. It turns out Tina wants to try it.

  It’s a commercial-parody, which means we’re gonna shoot it Friday and edit all day Saturday. I remember sliding in next to Lorne right before dress. I was nervous that people weren’t necessarily gonna get it, ’cause it was a weird idea.

  It was a parody of a Duncan Hines commercial, the way they show lonely women substituting chocolate for sex. It was for a product called Brownie Husband.

  The idea was that it was a brownie shaped like a husband, and you could sort of fuck it and eat it at the same time.

  The tagline that I had written was “It’s the first dessert you’ll want inside you…and inside you.”

  I was nervous. But then as soon as they started to play it, people started to laugh. And they were really laughing, like, rolling, hard laughter.

  And Lorne is laughing. And if you want to know what it’s like to make Lorne laugh, picture yourself having sex with Lorne and he’s laughing.

  When it airs, it’s kind of a hit, and it becomes a trending topic on Twitter. People want a Brownie Husband.

  And it was the first moment in the whole SNL experience when I thought, Oh. This is what I thought it would be like when I was a kid.

  So the season ends. And the other SNL tradition is that they don’t tell you until the end of the summer if you’re hired back for fall. So you have months to stew. But I found myself worrying less about them not wanting me back than I was about, oh, my God, what if they DO want me back?

  Because I was worried about going back to a place that had made me feel so crazy. But on the other hand, nothing felt crazier than the idea of leaving this job that every comedy person wants. That I had wanted since I was ten.

  I started to think about what I would miss.

  I thought, Oh, I’ll miss the approval of the audience laughing and Lorne laughing.

  But I remembered that, ironically, the sketch that got me that approval was one that I wrote at a Starbucks, by myself, before I thought I was worthy of even getting the job. And when I did get the job, I didn’t have the glamorous experience that I imagined I would have when I was ten and I was watching that show on a shitty black-and-white TV.

  But I actually had a much more important experience. Because what I learned was to be brave. SNL taught me that you can’t be afraid to put something out into the world that’s yours, something that’s totally different and that you believe in.

  So when SNL finally called, I had my agent respectfully say no.

  And that fall I took my laptop back to Starbucks, and I started to write something new.

  JESSI KLEIN is currently the head writer and one of the executive directors on the Emmy Award–winning show Inside Amy Schumer. She is a writer-performer who has written for Comedy Central, ABC, HBO, and Saturday Night Live. She occasionally tweets but hates it.

  This story was told on June 28, 2011, at Central Park SummerStage in New York City. The theme of the evening was Big Night. Director: Sarah Austin Jenness.

  I’m looking out a hotel-suite window in the capital of Congo, in the middle of Africa. There are bullet marks on the buildings out there, because war is raging. But it’s nighttime and quiet. There’s a nasty cockroach infestation in the kitchen, and a putrid smell in the air.

  I’ve turned the TV volume up loudly, because the Congolese government has bugged our room. I turn and face Sheikha. She is a woman from Kenya with the brown skin of the coastal people and thick black hair and intense dark eyes. Tears are welling in her eyes, and she’s pleading with me.

  “Sasha, we have to take these people along with the rest. If we don’t, they’ll die here, and their blood will be on our hands. Please. You have to trust me.”

  I’m facing a terrible decision. And I’m afraid that no matter what I do, people are going to be killed. A month earlier in Kenya, my boss, David, called me into his office at the International Organization for Migration, where we worked.

  He handed me a list with 112 names on it, and told me he was sending me into the Congo on a rescue mission. The job was to evacuate 112 massacre survivors. He warned me really explicitly that under no circumstances could I include anybod
y else on that list. If I did, we would fail to get anyone out, and they would all die. David knew because he’d spent the past six months in the Congo, evacuating people.

  I’d met one teenage girl that he pulled out. She had these nervous eyes. And she told me that the killing started when the president of Congo went on TV and said that all people of the Tutsi tribe are the enemy and needed to be hunted down and exterminated.

  This was an extension of the Rwandan genocide in ways. The teenage girl went into hiding that day, but had to eventually come out to look for food.

  And as she was sneaking around town, she saw a mob chase down and catch another woman. They put a tire over her body, pinned her arms to her sides, doused her in gasoline, and set her on fire. They were killing people in terrible ways, because Tutsis were seen as the scapegoats for the Congo’s problems.

  The teenage girl had lost her own parents, but she had four brothers who were still alive, and they were on the list that David handed me.

  David also warned me about Sheikha. She’d been on every previous mission with him, but he told me that I couldn’t trust her—that she always tried to include additional people, and I had to stop her from doing that.

  Sheikha and I flew into the Congo, we rented a car and a driver, and went to the safe compound where the 112 were gathered.

  These big black gates swung open as our car drove into this two-acre compound with ten-foot walls and jagged shards of glass topping the walls. There were guards with AK-47s slung at their sides, standing around.

  A one-story building was in the middle, and a large tent off to the side, and latrines on another side. Somebody saw Sheikha, and all of a sudden there was a mob around our car. They were pushing it up and down and chanting her name.

  And I remembered David telling me that “people are going to go crazy with relief when they see you, because they think they’re going to die there. And when they see you, they’ll know there’s another flight.”

  But it felt really scary and out of control for me, because there were way more people than the 112 on our list. We set a table up on the top of a little hill, and the crowd gathered below. And I called people up one at a time.

  And I took their name and their birth date and their photo. And I told them we’d be flying them out in a few days’ time. I had to give this information to the Congolese immigration officials. I got really excited when I saw the four brothers of that teenage girl come up.

  When we were done and trying to leave, a guy who was working in the compound said, “Before you leave, you have to go into that tent over there and look at the people who just came in.”

  And I thought, I don’t want to see anybody else. We can’t take them, so why even look? But my feet were walking towards the tent as I was thinking that, and I stepped inside.

  And it was like time stopped.

  It was really hot in that tent, and I remember the sweat trickling down the small of my back. But what struck me was how completely quiet it was, which seemed impossible because there were thirty-two widows and orphans standing and sitting in that tent.

  The guy who brought us in leaned into me and said, “They were in a prison camp for sixteen months, where most of their family members were executed. We don’t know how they survived.”

  They all looked traumatized and emaciated. And they had these hollow stares like there was nothing behind their eyes.

  Sheikha leaned down to a little girl holding a doll and said, “Let me see your doll.”

  All of a sudden, the doll’s eyes popped open, and its tongue lolled out of its mouth. And we realized it was an infant child that looked more dead than alive.

  I went over to a thirteen-year-old boy and said, “What’s your name?”

  And another smaller boy grabbed his hand and said, “He doesn’t talk anymore. I talk for him.” That thirteen-year-old had been brutalized so badly he just stopped speaking.

  Sheikha and I left. And that night in the hotel room, she was holding the list of widows and orphans and begging me to take them.

  I said, “We can’t.”

  But I wondered, Can I live with myself if we leave these widows and orphans here and they’re killed? No, I didn’t think so.

  But could I live with myself if we tried to take them, and we failed to get everybody out and they all died? No.

  And then I thought about who Sheikha was. She had this clear moral orientation. She did what was right in her heart and wasn’t concerned about personal gain or recognition.

  Then I wondered, who am I? My great-grandmother had come to the US as a refugee fleeing anti-Semitism in Russia. She was a widow who raised four children on her own. I’d been working with refugees since graduating from college six years earlier, but nothing had prepared me for this.

  And then Sheikha said words that changed me: “Sasha, we’re humanitarians. We’re here on the ground now. If we don’t do this, these people will be forgotten. And they’ll die here. This is up to us. It’s our decision.”

  In that moment I trusted her. So I called David. And he got really angry when we told him what we wanted to do.

  He said, “Listen, I’ll tell you exactly what’s going to happen. You have to tell the Congolese immigration authorities, and then they’re going to include their own people on your list. And then, at the last minute, maybe even on the plane, they’ll pull your people off, and you won’t get anybody out. You can’t do this.”

  I said, “David, I get it. But we have to try.” And he was quiet.

  Then I heard him say, “Okay, then here’s what you have to do. This is a US rescue mission. So get the US ambassador’s approval. And try it.”

  We got the US ambassador’s approval. Then, on the last night, as the sun was setting, we went to see the head of Congolese immigration, a stocky man with beady eyes who’d already told us how much he hated Tutsis.

  When we told him we were taking the widows and orphans, he said that he had seven additional people we had to take.

  We said, “That’s fine.”

  Then he pulled out this whole new list and said he also wanted us to take all these other people.

  We said, “We can’t.” We argued with him. We even tried to bribe him.

  But as we were leaving, he said, “I’m in charge here. I say who leaves and who stays. We’ll just see what happens tomorrow.”

  Those words terrified me. Back in the hotel, we realized we had another big problem. We had too many people for our flight.

  But then we thought that the children all looked so emaciated that we could change the birth dates so that all the four- and three-year-olds would be under two and could sit in the adults’ laps, and then we’d free up enough seats. So I spent the night doing that.

  At 3:00 a.m., as I tried to close my eyes, I couldn’t sleep. I was so wired with exhaustion and fear and the uncertainty of it all.

  I thought, Have we just condemned everyone to death with this decision?

  A few hours later, I went and got four buses, and I had four armed guards per bus. I went to the safe compound, and we started loading everybody on.

  And the people who weren’t coming started yelling.

  One man grabbed me, and he pulled my face close to his, and he said, “Sasha, you have to take me with you. Look at my face. I’m a Tutsi. I’ll be killed here.”

  But we couldn’t take him, or so many others. And their cries faded into the distance as our buses pulled out.

  Now my heart jumped in my throat, because this was the most dangerous part of the entire mission. The Congolese government had told us that they would let us do this, but unofficially they didn’t want us to succeed. I worried that maybe a mob would attack our bus, or maybe gunmen would start shooting from around a corner. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their lives already, and no one would notice a few more.

  An hour later we finally pulled into the airport, and we stopped fifty feet away from the plane.

  I thought, There’s the plane. Let’s
just get everybody on that plane.

  Congolese immigration police hustled me and Sheikha off the buses. And then they started checking people using the documentation we had given. As the widows and orphans came down, they stopped them.

  I had this terrible thought: Oh, my God. These people are witnesses to terrible atrocities. And the Congolese immigration police aren’t going to let them leave, because they don’t want them talking about what they’ve seen.

  I thought, Everything that David said is coming true right now.

  And I felt so helpless. I looked around for Sheikha. She was talking to the head of Congolese immigration and waving her arms.

  The seconds ticked by.

  And then they let them off the bus. They boarded the plane. We all boarded the plane. And I stepped on last. The cabin had turned into a furnace, because the plane had been sitting on the tarmac for a couple of hours.

  It was so packed with people. There were so many children sitting on laps of adults. The door shut behind me. And I felt the plane engines rumble to life and cool air came into the cabin. And we started down the runway, and we lifted off the ground.

  I’d imagined that in that moment people would erupt into cheers of joy because they were finally safe. But when I looked, everyone was crying for the people we had left behind.

  It was at once the most joyous and heartbreaking moment. And in that moment I thought about Sheikha pleading with me in the hotel. And I was so thankful. We couldn’t get everyone out, but we got those on our list out, and those widows and orphans. And they were the worst off.

  I looked at the tiny infant, and there was the thirteen-year-old boy. And there were the four brothers who were going to be reuniting with their teenage sister soon.

  And as their eyes met mine, I felt this incredible sense of connection and shared humanity sink into the deepest core of who I am. And that feeling has motivated and inspired me ever since.

  SASHA CHANOFF is the founder and executive director of RefugePoint, a humanitarian organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Kenya, which finds lasting solutions for the world’s most at-risk refugees. Sasha has appeared on 60 Minutes and in other national media outlets and has received social-entrepreneur fellowships from Ashoka, Echoing Green, and the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation. He is a recipient of the Charles Bronfman Prize for humanitarian contributions and the Harvard Center for Public Leadership’s Gleitsman International Activist Award, and he is a White House Champion of Change. He serves on the steering committee of New England International Donors and is an adviser to the Leir Charitable Foundations and the Good Lie Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Warner Bros. film The Good Lie, about the resettlement of the Sudanese Lost Boys. You can read more about how Sasha’s story led to his leadership in From Crisis to Calling: Finding Your Moral Center in the Toughest Decisions, a book he coauthored with his father, David Chanoff. The first part of From Crisis to Calling relates the full story of the Congo rescue mission that was the subject of his appearance on The Moth Radio Hour and The Moth MainStage. Sasha lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.