There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  I’m good, he murmurs, after a glance at me.

  Mena and I keep talking, or she talks to me, a minute and a half, maybe. I look over her shoulder at Elijah, standing there, pushing phone buttons, adjusting his bag straps, scraping one foot over a small spot of sidewalk. Mena looks to where I’m looking, then back to me.

  I gotta head out, he says to her. I’ll hit you later.

  He walks away, in the direction from which they came.

  Case, Mena sighs once Elijah is out of earshot, a pitiful smile on her face, that do something look.

  I did nothing. Just watched him turn the corner. I thought, and maybe even said, the next move, the next word, ought to be his. It was, in a way.

  Casey was supposed to be my brother. He treated me like this was just business, like I didn’t mean shit to him.

  Quincy passed this message on to me, after speaking to Elijah not long before my graduation. Lord, he’s being dramatic, I shot back, and truly felt. But I wonder now—not solely out of guilt—whether Elijah was right. I only realized, for example, that he had stood there clutching my right shoulder, celebrating that great victory, many years after the fact—and only then because someone told me about the canvas at the Yale Bowl. Sure, I had been drugged that day. But what if the drugged me was just the real me, unbound? Did I ever truly notice him, my supposed little brother? Did I take him, absentmindedly, selfish-mindedly, for granted? Or did he, all that time, simply not mean much to me? I don’t know, if that’s the case, why I miss him like I do. Why I wish I’d swum across that river, which I’ve never, when I think about it, done for anyone. I just don’t know.

  And when I think of the change that took place in Elijah after the Union was saved, I remember him at seventeen, on his recruiting visit, remember his guardian’s warning: He can’t be let down again. I remember that don’t come any closer cat, the cat that wound up on the porch every morning—the cat that I had been myself. I remember all the times I was let down by those I trusted most, the scars it caused, the nightmares it sent. I remember all this and think of my question—What matters most, your friend or your cause?—and know that I answered it wrong, all wrong. Your friend is your cause. Choose him. Every time.

  I had not read Forster’s “What I Believe,” where he writes: I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

  If I had read this, believed this, perhaps I would have realized that I had the wrong kind of courage, a courage that helped me build an institution, yet a courage that broke my friend’s heart—nicked it, at least. Not sure what courage is worth if it can’t keep folks alive. But I did not understand that then.

  And so I took this courage, the courage of my convictions, so to speak, into the last holy war I’d wage at Yale. Let’s go back to the Hall.

  * * *

  —

  You should know that the societies at Yale are a bit like the so-called elite colleges in America. We would be just fine if not better without them, yet they loom over the culture and have their own strange ways of dealing with one another. From what I can tell, Harvard people don’t think any other school matters. Yale people think that Harvard and Yale matter. Princeton people think that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton matter—and this continues all the way down to some place where some poor student has borrowed $85,000 from a loan shark for an education they could have gotten in high school, all because a flyer calls the college the Harvard of Chattanooga. As for the societies: nobody ever turns down Skull and Bones unless they have an extreme moral objection. No one turns down Wolf’s Head unless they are tapped for Skull and Bones or (sometimes) Scroll and Key. Hardly anyone turns down Scroll and Key unless they are tapped for (sometimes) Skull and Bones or (sometimes) Wolf’s Head—but it is hard to predict the behavior of Scroll and Key taps because they are prone to have both moral objections and highly functional personality disorders, mainly because they are often geniuses, in the literal sense of the word.

  In any event, there are real differences between these three societies, referred to as the Big Three. The differences might seem trivial, but I have come to believe that they represent very different, warring visions of how the (American) society should work. Bones believes that might makes right, so each year, each of its fifteen members selects the junior they want to tap, and that junior is tapped unless there is enough of a protest from the group, which is rare. Keys, on the other hand, believes in meritocracy, and employs some mix of search, recommendation, DNA tests, MENSA scores, and so forth to find fifteen of the most accomplished members of the junior class to tap. Wolf’s Head lands somewhere in the middle, depending on which seniors run the tap process, as I helped do in 2009. That was my first mistake.

  My second mistake was taking the Wolf’s Head hymn seriously.

  The gods of Egypt bid us hail

  We’re chosen from the best of Yale

  To Worship at the Shrine

  To Wor-ship at the Shri-ine!

  Every Thursday and Sunday night we sang these words and the verses that come after. As you know, I’ve always looked to song lyrics for vital instruction—and the Wolf’s Head hymn’s instructions were pretty clear to me: Choose the best of Yale. Not a copy editor from the Daily News. Not the third-string softball pitcher. Not the tuxedo steamer for the Whiffenpoofs. So the Wolf’s Head process was to begin much earlier than the rest, with a list of every member of the junior class. We would divide that list amongst the sixteen of us. We would scour the juniors’ online profiles, check into their academic records, question friends and enemies about their character, watch them in action on stage, on the field, anywhere. Every week from February to Tap Night in April, we would gather at the Hall. We would sit in the ancient leather chairs that bore our god names and deliberate, sometimes all night, until we had culled, from thirteen hundred of the “best” young people in the world, sixteen of the best of the best. That is how it was explained to us. So that is what we set out to do, in theory.

  But then we began.

  The early weeks were perhaps the most important. They revealed each member’s approach and, eventually, their agenda. A Wolf who cut his or her friends in the early rounds was seen as impartial. I knew this, and cut many friends. A Wolf who saw a name on the list that he or she did not recognize and, instead of nixing the person, decided to do some extra research—this member was seen as having a thorough, open mind. I knew this, and took a second look at a few strangers. A Wolf who was silent in those early weeks should have been seen as dangerous. This I did not know.

  That’s the last swimmer we have on the list . . . protested Mighty Mighty Sheshonk sometime in March.

  If anybody said anything, it wasn’t me. I just lifted my eyes from the list in my lap and stared.

  We can’t just break tap lines! he continued. Seriously, guys. Every year—going back for-fucking-ever!—a swimmer is tapped for WHS. I’m not going to be the swimmer that ends the fucking tap line. Don’t do this.

  Tap lines had not come up earlier in the process, if I remember correctly. The idea was that one slot would be saved in each delegation for a particular student group or demographic: a guaranteed slot for a junior swimmer, for a junior baseball player, for the women’s squash captain, and so on. Many societies had this arrangement. But tap lines violated the principles of our society, of a meritocracy. Besides, we had the votes to kill the swim line. So we did.

  Just so you don’t think I was out to get Sheshonk—which I was not, yet—let me also point out that I later learned the swim line did not, in fact, go back for-fucking-ever, but rather about fifteen or twenty years. I’ve also learned since then that whenever somebody says Things have always been this way, they’re lying. And I have learned, just to warn you, that if you call them on the carpet, change their status quo, they’ll come after you quick and hard, which is what one god of Eg
ypt did after losing that vote. Our overseers, some committee of alumni, helped put an end to the reforms. No other tap lines were cut.

  We entered the final stretch in late March, winnowing down the remaining forty or so candidates. In that time, many members of the delegation found incredible ways to kill the prospects of juniors they did not like, to replace a worthy tap with a friend or to orchestrate a secret exchange of votes. Looking back, it would have been more honest and a hell of a lot less work to just run a direct-tap process and get on with our lives, since many years later, though some of us have excommunicated one another, none of us cares too much, if at all, about who was in what society and why.

  Once we settled on a final group of sixteen, there remained only one vital issue to discuss: god names. Sometime after my own initiation, I had discovered that I’d been christened Osiris not because the class that tapped me felt that I shared any traits with the lord of the underworld, but simply because I was a black male. Every Osiris going back for-fucking-ever (they said, again) had been the black male tap, just as every Isis had been a black female. I was determined to end this. In part, as you could guess, because I was petty. But there was more.

  You benefit most from the god name tradition! the god Busiris yelled, pointing out that, since in Egyptian mythology Osiris was the chief god, I was throwing away my own inheritance and ruining the legacy of all who had come before and would come after.

  It is true that Glenn de Chabert had been in Wolf’s Head. So had Kurt Schmoke. So had Roosevelt Thompson, the last black football player to win the Rhodes, a boy from Little Rock who went on to earn all As (but one) at Yale, a salt-of-earth savant who many (including his boss, then-governor William J. Clinton) believed would someday become the first black US president, until he was killed in an automobile accident on the New Jersey Turnpike just weeks before he received his diploma, in 1984. Roosevelt had been the best of Yale—the best of all of us, black or other.

  But you could have called Roosevelt Osiris or Buckwheat or Winnie the Pooh and that would not have changed how extraordinary that young man was. And the thought that you would call Roosevelt Leander Thompson or Glenn de Chabert or Kurt Schmoke or me by any name other than our own—solely on account of some chromosomes we had nothing to do with—struck me as absurd if not perverse.

  Don’t do me any favors! I spewed back at Busiris.

  I argued that any junior who was the best of Yale should know that they were chosen on the merits, not their skin or sex. I proposed that we randomize the god names for the 2009 tap class—just write them on little sheets of notebook paper and pick them out of a hat. But before I proposed anything, I made sure my side (this was not a solo battle) already had the votes. It’s possible that the vote was arranged for a time at which Busiris could not be at the Hall, leaving him to lament to the delegation over email—It seems to me that we are burning traditions because we like the pretty flames.

  He might have been onto something.

  * * *

  —

  You remember how tap works over at Skull and Bones? In essence, each Bonesman and Boneswoman gets the tap they choose. Unless—again, this is rare—there are enough objections from other members of the delegation.

  I would not have known much about any of this. But one afternoon near Tap Night, a friend from Bones approached me. Our class had just ended and we lingered behind in the small seminar room, since seniors don’t ever seem to rush anywhere, especially that close to graduation. So we lounged and laughed for a few minutes, and then he brought up a junior that I knew and liked well enough. Mentioned that Daniel wanted to tap the boy for Bones. Asked if we would tap the boy for Wolf’s Head.

  Nope, I’m pretty sure he didn’t make it to our last few rounds.

  Got it. Could you shoot me an email with a little bit of why?

  Yeah, sure thing. I’ll send it tonight.

  The next night, after reading my email, there were enough objections to veto Daniel’s tap for Bones, one of his best friends. I heard this from two other Bonesmen, since Daniel did not talk to me about it, or anything else for the rest of senior year, or hardly at all in the years since.

  One semester. One wrong answer. One email. Two friends lost. And for what . . . a Union? A tomb?

  Remember Lot’s wife, I say.

  Jesus said it first, in the gospel of Luke, to his disciples: Remember Lot’s wife.

  Lot, in case you haven’t read the Bible recently, was a man who set his family down in Sodom, in the midst of a wicked society that God had to destroy (according to Him, in Genesis). But God, being cruel yet still a sap in part, rushed two angels out to Sodom to warn Lot to gather his folks and get out of dodge.

  Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters, which are here; lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city.

  Lot heard the angels’ warning but delayed. The angels didn’t have all day to wait, so they grabbed his hand and his two daughters’ hands and his wife’s hand and hurried them out of Sodom. The angels shout—Escape to the mountain! Whatever you do, don’t look back!—just as God starts raining down on Sodom and Gomorrah (I can’t figure out how Gomorrah got dragged into this), brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. Lot and his folks are running, fleeing all that destruction, kicking up dust while the Lord rains down death. But then, for some reason, Lot’s wife looks back. God turns her into a pillar of salt.

  Remember Lot’s wife, Jesus says.

  But I’ve got a question, Lord: Why did she look back?

  Did she look back because she didn’t want to miss the mayhem, wanted one last glimpse of a city on fire? Did she look back to make sure her people were far enough from danger to breathe a little easy? I’m so nosy and selfish sometimes that those would have likely been my reasons, if I’d been in her shoes. But what if something else was going on with this woman, Lot’s wife? What if she looked back because she knew some of those dead and dying people? What if she could not bear the thought of leaving them all alone to burn alive, even for righteousness’ sake? Isn’t that possible?

  If it is, then the backward glance of this disobedient woman, this act that we are told to remember, may not be a cautionary tale after all: it may be the bravest act in all the Bible, even braver than the act that holds the whole book together, the Crucifixion. We are told that up on Golgotha, on an old rugged cross, Jesus gave His life to save everybody, billions and billions of strangers for all time to come. That’s a nice thing to do. Made Him famous, that’s for sure. But Lot’s wife was killed, turned into a pillar of salt, all because she could not turn away from her friends, the wicked men of Sodom. And nobody even wrote the woman’s name down. Oh, to have the courage of Lot’s wife! I surely did not—not yet.

  So it came as no surprise and no concern when one of the gods of Egypt, my bet would be Sheshonk, said as a valedictory word on our days at Yale: I don’t know how anybody could believe that Casey Gerald is a good human being.

  That would have hurt, if I had considered it important. I’d stayed up late and worked for many hours over four long years. Had been changed, had been redeemed. Had learned, without reading a single page of Machiavelli, that a great man cannot be a good man. I’d made my bargain. Yet I had more work to do.

  Like almost every other hopeful-great at that time, I had decided to go to Washington to learn how to run the country, or at least to try. But I remembered something Akhil Amar stressed toward the end of his lecture on the morning of November 5:

  We are citizens of the world. This election has reverberations around the globe—you need to understand that.

  And so, as many greats had done before me, I packed my bags for Paris.

  chapter TWENTY

  I was not, before you get the wrong idea, like many of my countrymen, some I even admire, who fled to Paris to escape America. I did and do respect anybody who gets up and goes off anywhere, with purpose or not, as long as they
don’t abandon their basic responsibilities or me. And I knew very well, as you know by now, the urge to debauch upon a different world when the one you’ve got has worn you down. What I did not know was enough about my country to feel that I needed to escape the whole thing. Knew (and cared) even less about France—had not begun to drink so much wine or covet Givenchy or read Genet; and had already mastered one foreign language—Standard American English—so it would never have crossed my mind to tuck tail and run to the City of Lights if I could find a city closer to home, someplace in all the 3.5 million raw square miles of America that might have a little room for me.

  I also happened to hate the French, though I can’t recall exactly why. I’m almost positive it had something to do with the Iraq War. George W. Bush had decided, when I was in high school, that he wanted everybody to go to war, but some important people in France decided that they had no interest in mass murder at that time, and so a few US congressmen, finding this stance unacceptable, proposed that all true patriots change french fries to freedom fries and french toast to freedom toast and so on until all nomenclature was for the war. I had no big commitment to the war myself, but I had a hard time believing that good people would draw that much negative attention, so I went along and developed my own personal hatred for the French at the age of sixteen and, since I had not discovered anything to change my mind back to being neutral or in their corner, I still hated the French at twenty-two.

  Thankfully, I did not fly to Paris to stay. I just stopped through on my way to Berlin.

  I had been sent, by an international diplomacy outfit, to join a delegation of young Americans and Europeans who would spend a summer studying the great human rights crises of the twentieth century, so that we could snuff out any new crises that sparked in the twenty-first. We had been tasked, I guess you could say, with defending Western civilization, whatever that was or is. Fine with me, as defending Western civilization seemed to constitute a big chunk of the American president’s job, and Berlin seemed to be ground zero—the place where my future predecessors had once sojourned and speechified about the mission, starting with John F. Kennedy. The words he’d spoken more than five decades ago, just months before his death, still ring true enough to help me explain to you my summer in Berlin, and the less than a year I spent in Washington thereafter—and, in some way, the wretched mess that threatens to destroy the West at this very moment. I refer to Mr. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, delivered in 1963.