It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  “What do you mean, ‘no fair’?”

  “Look,” Rachel said, “you’ve got Music Inn.”

  Across West Fourth, the gated storefront, its windows crowded with strange instruments and African masks and junk, a throwback to an earlier era. “Great place. Hey,” he said, pointing up at a yellow sign hanging overhead, “we’ve got Tio Pepe’s. This place has been here since the Huguenots. I came here on a field trip for eighth-grade Spanish class.”

  “Little Jersey boy. Little bridge-and-tunnel rat.”

  They arrived at Sixth Avenue, with its traffic streaming uptown, and the same sudden vacuum hit them both in the stomach, the absence of the towers in the distance against the dimming sky.

  “Let’s cut across West Third,” Dave said. “We can see what used to be world-famous Folk City, where Bob Dylan had his first New York appearance, except Folk City was in a totally different place when that happened.”

  “Still cool, though,” Rachel said.

  From West Third they turned south on MacDougal, where the tenements along the narrow street disguised the hole in the sky. They strolled along as the warmth of the day faded from the sidewalks. Across Houston, they entered the rust belt of SoHo, clanking over the metal doors in the cement and walking around the loading platforms with their looming lofts overhead, cutting left on Prince Street. On Mercer they found the address, a loft building with galleries on every floor. They stood outside for a moment, looking around.

  “It’s so fucking beautiful out,” Dave said.

  “I know,” Rachel said. “I don’t want to go inside.”

  • • •

  Abe and Ruth were waiting for them upstairs. “Good, you’re here,” Abe said. “I’m going to find the men’s before we descend into the abyss.”

  “I think it’s over there, Abe,” Ruth said.

  “Hold my jacket,” Abe said, handing his sports coat to Ruth, who shook her head and gave Rachel a look as he walked off.

  “He’s in a state,” Ruth said. “You know how he can be.”

  “Oy,” Rachel said. “This will be fun.”

  “Why don’t you two get started going through the exhibit and we’ll catch up with you. Abe will be a few minutes.”

  An artist’s statement stenciled on a wall began by asking viewers to take a moment to prepare themselves for the images they were about to see. “As a Jew, and as a human being,” the statement read, “I have a right and a responsibility to ask when enough will be enough—not just for the people of Israel under siege, but for the people of Palestine. Not just for those who lost their future at the World Trade Center on September 11, but for those who lose their future every day in Lebanon and Afghanistan, in Iraq and Jerusalem. When will we stop using righteous victimhood as an excuse for barbarism?”

  They entered the exhibition through a narrow opening into a darkened, curving, carpeted passageway; along the walls hung spotlit images, color photographs blown up so large that they backed the viewers up, crowded them.

  The first image showed a body on a sidewalk littered with ash and shards of glass, blood spattered out onto the cement as if from a broken bottle. The body had twisted at an impossible angle but the head had landed face-up on the ground, still recognizable as a head, although the back of it had been smashed and sat in a puddle of raspberry-colored blood, with the face peering up at the sky as if out of a shallow bowl of soup. The tag read: “WTC; 9/11.”

  “Oh no,” Rachel said under her breath. She gagged and Dave put his hand on her arm; she waved him off.

  Next to it on the same wall loomed a five-foot-square image of a small boy, plainly dead but with his eyes open and a smile on his face, all the flesh on the front of his chest gone, ribs and intestines visible. The legend on the wall, neatly printed on a small card, read: “Baghdad, March 27, 2003.”

  The viewers were led onward to a mountain road, where a group of soldiers had gathered, laughing, in a semicircle around a man contorted in agony on the ground. The rags around his midsection were drenched deep maroon with blood; the legend on the wall said the American-backed Northern Alliance soldiers had castrated and eviscerated him but he was still alive and was begging the soldiers to shoot him. Next to this, a closeup of a man’s black boot on the ground next to a confused mess of crimson meat and hair, and the legend reading “Woman executed by Taliban for adultery, Kandahar, October 1999.”

  Sounds of weeping, involuntary expressions of shock and anger could be heard throughout the winding passageway. Around the next bend, another pair of huge photos, at first impossible to believe, a man whose head was already violated, partly off skew from his spine, his eyes open and a huge blade making its way into his neck, gouts of blood up the arm of the figure who was cutting the head off, head held by the hair, still plainly conscious as he was butchered alive.

  • • •

  Dave and Rachel were waiting as Abe and Ruth emerged from the exhibit.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Abe said. His face was red and he dabbed at his nose with a rumpled handkerchief.

  “The elevators have been slow,” Dave said.

  “Then let’s take the stairs,” Abe said. “Do they have stairs in this place? Excuse me,” he said to a woman with a laminated ID tag around her neck, “did anyone think to put stairs in this building? How do we get out of here?”

  The woman smiled faintly and pointed to red EXIT letters plainly visible over a fire door, and Abe began walking toward it, leaving the others to follow.

  They walked two blocks to a restaurant where Rachel had made dinner reservations. Inside, an efficient young woman showed them to their table and handed out menus. As they were sitting down Abe said to her, “Bring me some club soda, please.”

  “Your server will be with you in a moment,” she said, and walked away.

  “You have to see a specialist to get a glass of seltzer in this place,” Abe said.

  Little by little, the familiarity of being in a restaurant, handling menus, sitting at a table, hearing other people talking, began to relax them. Dave asked if they’d had trouble finding the gallery. Ruth said no, they had just been a little late getting out of the apartment. Abe hadn’t been feeling particularly well.

  “What’s wrong?” Rachel said.

  Ruth said, “Nothing, for God’s sake, Rachel. It was nothing. He was just feeling a little slow on his feet.”

  “Don’t get old,” Abe said. “Even if you have the opportunity.”

  Rachel frowned and studied the menu. Complaining about being old had never been in Abe’s repertoire, and it had come up several times recently.

  Their waiter was thin and pale, with three small earrings going up the edge of his right ear. Dave ordered crab cakes, Rachel ordered a salade niçoise, Ruth a bowl of gazpacho anglaise, a name that made Rachel laugh.

  When the waiter’s attention turned to Abe, Abe said, “Club soda, that’s all.” The others looked at him with mild surprise and puzzlement.

  “Abe, eat something,” Ruth said.

  “Ruth,” he said, raising his fingertips an inch off the table where his hand rested. He turned to regard the waiter and repeated, “Club soda,” managed a slight smile and a nod, the server said, “Very good,” and walked off.

  After a few moments in which nobody seemed to know where to start, Dave jumped in and said, “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Really?” Abe said, wiping his nose again with the handkerchief. “Where have you been?”

  Undaunted, Dave said, “I mean with everything arranged together like that. The impact of it together . . .”

  “I know what you mean,” Abe said, suddenly angry. “It’s the same story, over and over: everything is the Jews’ fault, and the Americans’ fault. Everything bad comes from America and the Jews.”

  Dave was taken aback at the intensity. Ruth sat there, nodding, which surprised him, and Rachel was getting ready to say something.

  “I don’t think she was saying that,” Dave said. “I
think she’s saying that after a certain point it doesn’t matter whose fault it is.”

  Abe gave Ruth a significant look across the table.

  “But it is our fault . . . ,” Rachel began.

  “Rachel . . . ,” Abe said, sharply, “please . . .”

  “What,” Ruth said to her daughter, “is our fault?”

  “Operating as if the whole world is our plantation.”

  “Please . . . ,” Abe repeated, more urgently.

  “Wait . . . ,” Dave said.

  “We fund Israel while the Palestinians live in tents and hovels,” she began.

  “They always lived in tents and hovels,” Abe said.

  “No they didn’t, Dad.”

  “Look,” Dave said, “before we get into World War Three, I think what the artist is saying is that there has to be a recognition of our common situation, instead of finger-pointing all the time.”

  “David,” Ruth said, “are you saying that it doesn’t matter who committed an atrocity? Nobody is responsible for their actions?”

  “I think she’s putting it in a broader context, like with the Gandhi quote she put in about how if everything is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth we’d all end up blind and toothless.”

  “So what’s the alternative?” Abe said. “You sit there and let people round you up and put you in boxcars because you want the moral high ground, and then there’s one blind, toothless person—he’s called a scapegoat—and everybody else is walking around singing ‘Deutschland über alles’ ? People have to take responsibility to figure out who is right and who is wrong. People don’t have automatically equal claims just because somebody got hurt. That’s what the Holocaust denier Nazi bastards like this guy in England always bring up the bombing of Dresden, like it gives them some kind of parity, and that’s just what this woman is saying, and it’s a lot of shit. Who started it? Who started it? ”

  Abe’s face was red, and his hands were shaking, and people from other tables were looking.

  “Drink some water, Abe,” Ruth was saying.

  “Where’s water? Do you see water? You have to die in this place before somebody brings you something to drink.”

  At that moment the waiter was approaching their table with their drinks. The four of them sat silently as he distributed the glasses and asked, “Everything okay? Do you need anything?” Abe waved him off, reached for his glass, and drank.

  “But,” Dave began again, “someone has to let go of the rope sometime, right? Someone has to say it doesn’t matter—we don’t want to live this way. Can we all agree we don’t want to live this way?”

  “Try doing that when someone is walking toward you with a suicide bomb,” Abe said. “What are you going to do? Are you going to shoot him or are you going to let him blow you up?”

  “But what led up to that point?” Rachel said. “This is what nobody asks. People don’t just go around blowing each other up for no reason. There’s a context . . .”

  “I don’t know if I agree with that,” Dave said.

  “What are you talking about?” Rachel said.

  “I think Jacobi’s saying that the broader context is our common humanity, and we can choose to either have the killing define our common humanity, or the refusal to kill can define our humanity.”

  “That’s not badly put, David,” Ruth said.

  “That is such a privileged position to take,” Rachel said. “You’re out of the context and you don’t have to deal with the reality, so you say everybody should just stop all that silly fighting . . .”

  “People have a right to defend themselves,” Abe said. “When someone is walking up to you with a bomb it doesn’t matter that his kids don’t have new shoes or his brother has a hangnail.”

  “Oh,” Rachel said, “then context doesn’t matter? First you say, ‘Who started it?’ and now it doesn’t matter?”

  “Don’t twist what I’m saying, young lady.”

  Rachel looked at him, mouth open, half smiling. “Twist it?” she said. “It’s all twisted up on its own. I don’t have to twist anything.”

  “Rachel . . . ,” Ruth said.

  “When we bomb people and destroy their houses that’s okay, but when the powerless fight back that’s terrorism.”

  “Stop it this minute, Rachel,” Abe said, his voice quaking with rage and his face deep red. “Ruth, let’s go.” His hands were shaking as he reached around for his wallet.

  “Abe,” Ruth said, looking from Dave to Rachel and back again, as if for help. “Let’s all just take a few deep breaths . . .”

  Abe had pulled out his wallet and was counting out three twenty-dollar bills. “This will be enough,” he said, putting them on the table. “Come on.” He pushed his chair out from the table.

  “Abe,” Ruth began, “can we just take a minute here . . .”

  “Come on, Ruth,” he said, standing up. Rachel, as stubborn as her father, sat there without a word. “Let the dust settle.”

  “Abe,” Dave said, “can we just maybe shelve this and finish out the evening?”

  Abe was helping Ruth up from her chair. “Do you have your bag?”

  “Yes,” she said, with muted annoyance, tired, shaking her head a little.

  Abe started for the door, and Ruth said, “I don’t know what else to do. You spoke very harshly to him, Rachel.”

  “I spoke harshly to him?” Rachel said.

  Ruth held up her hand. “I’ll call tomorrow,” she said. “Goodnight, David,” and headed off after Abe.

  Dave and Rachel sat there as if underneath a giant bell, its sound fading slowly away. Their server approached after a moment, saying, “Is everything all right?”

  Rachel looked up at him and said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  • • •

  “Stop twitching.”

  “I can’t help it,” Rachel said. “My legs are restless.”

  Dave stared at the dim lights from the courtyard crisscrossing the ceiling. Out in the city the tumblers clicked and the ducts spewed. Somewhere across the world, God only knew what was happening. He felt for the clock on the nightstand, picked it up, and peered closely. 3:24.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “What,” Rachel said, shifting onto her left side and adjusting the sheet around her shoulder.

  “Now I’m awake.”

  No response. Then: “What time is it?”

  “Three thirty.”

  Rachel rolled onto her back.

  “I feel like the world is falling apart,” she said. “How can somebody as smart as Abe watch five pushcart drivers and a tank pull that statue down and think it’s anything but some fake photo op? They probably got a bag of chickpeas from the CIA and that was it. How can he defend this insanity . . .”

  “I don’t know. I thought he made some good points.”

  “Good points? Like what?”

  “He’s from a different generation,” Dave said. “He was in World War Two . . .”

  “That isn’t it. Noam fucking Chomsky was probably in World War Two. . . . Seriously, how can the same person be so smart and so . . . oblivious? Or something.”

  “Yeah,” Dave said, staring at the ceiling. Somewhere in the distance a car alarm blared. “It’s a good question.”

  TOM PIAZZA is celebrated both as a novelist and as a writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels A Free State and City Of Refuge, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and the essay collection Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America. He was a principal writer for the innovative HBO drama series Treme, and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Bookforum, the Oxford American, the Columbia Journalism Review, and many other periodicals. He lives in New Orleans.

  HEIDI PITLOR

  * * *

  Lucky Girl

  On the Saturday before the presidential
election, a new volunteer showed up at the dog shelter. Joelle’s step-aunt Candace owned the place, and Joelle spent most Saturdays here. When the front door opened, she had been staring at her iPhone and the polls that favored the not-enraging candidate. A black man, and one in his thirties like her, was entirely without context in this dank, overcrowded bunker in Dutchess County. His head was shaved and he had knowing, almost sly eyes, the shadow of a goatee, and a cleft chin. He wore tiny silver hoop earrings and a faded brown leather jacket, and stood about six inches taller than Joelle. He introduced himself as Anthony and said, “Candace told me to come by and look around.”

  “Great!” Joelle said. “The dogs are back there.” She motioned behind her to the kennel room. She cleared her red-gold hair from her face and adjusted her shoulders outward, as if opening a window. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.” She wanted to sound welcoming.

  A chorus of barks exploded as she pushed through the swinging door. The humid air in the kennel room reeked of kibble and dog shit. Almost all fifteen animals reared up behind their metal cage doors.

  Anthony stopped next to Wanda, a fluffy tan spaniel mix whose hair was kept back from her face with a pink plastic barrette. He scratched the top of her snout and said, “Hello, cutie.”

  Joelle headed past Wanda and Waffle, a terrier mutt, and stopped in front of the blind Maltese. “They found this guy, Mo, in a Dumpster outside a Walmart. People can be real beasts, you know?”

  “Amen to that.” Anthony knelt down and got a closer look at Mo. “Hey, little man. The worst is over now. You’re in good hands here.”

  A hollow, moony howl rang out above all the other barks and yips.

  “That one sounds like a person,” Anthony said. He stood and turned his eyes to Joelle.

  “She’s the new bloodhound. She lost one of her rear legs,” Joelle said. She led him toward the russet-colored dog in the last pen. Congealed drool lined the bloodhound’s jowls and a mitten-shaped piece was missing from one droopy ear. She had one green eye and one brown. When she saw the two of them, she rose and hobbled closer on her three legs.