by Nell Zink
“Nothing will bring him back.”
“That’s what you think! She’s going around telling people she’s chief executive of the Joe Harris Foundation. She’s going to put his face on an ad campaign and auction his stuff for charity. You want her to get away with that?”
“I can’t stop her.”
“That’s not true. You own his image.”
“I own . . . his image . . .”
His face dampened with tears, and Daniel saw that the animus of resistance has a hard row to hoe in a world where everybody wants a hug.
HE AND PAM RITUALIZED THEIR PHONE CALLS. SHE ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE city, and he gave honest answers. They behaved like two cats hit by separate cars, each recovering in its own secret hiding place. Sometimes, if it was daytime, he whispered sad stories of the death of Joe. Pam never said Joe’s name. They traded endearments and encouragement and signed off. Flora was always waiting impatiently to demand the line so she could describe her day to Daniel.
She was settling into the National Cathedral School. Her activities were more diverse than he thought possible. He thought of little kids as having fantasies, but she had interests and ambitions. She was learning ballet and gymnastics. She wanted a computer, roller skates, and a hamster.
HIGH GOTHIC PILLARS CARRIED THE CATHEDRAL’S STAR-DAPPLED CEILING. THE CHAPEL of St. John, where student services were held, was to the right of the altar, a long walk from the entrance. The soundtrack of distant echoes and muffled heel impacts was soothing as a fountain. Sometimes an organist would play Bach or improvise a cadenza that filled the receding heights with a scaffold of music. Each window illustrated a religious fable. Each chair in the chapel had a kneeler worked in needlepoint with some fabled aspect of American history, not excluding the Confederate aspects.
At Thursday services the girls followed along in The Book of Common Prayer. “God of all power . . .” they prayed. “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.”
Flora liked that a lot. This fragile earth, our island home.
“From the primal elements,” the book continued, “you brought forth the human race and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust . . .”
Occasionally they sang Pam’s pet peeve, the Magnificat. Flora preferred the Song of Simeon, when he declares that Jesus will grow up to be a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of his people Israel. In the cathedral, she could definitely identify with the career goal of becoming a light. It was dark inside even on sunny days. All natural illumination was obscured by stained-glass images of church dignitaries, prophets, and other forgotten leaders. In the gloom, racks of candles threw haloes upward on the sad faces of the saints.
JOE’S CDS DIDN’T CHART AGAIN AFTER HIS DEATH. HIS STORY WAS OVERSHADOWED BY the rain of terror alerts. College radio DJs looking to honor his memory played his lo-fi cover of “Bird in God’s Garden,” a neo-pseudo-Sufi-hippie-Gnostic number he’d learned off a Richard Thompson record. The track was a pirated demo, not an official release, but it was easy to find on file-sharing networks.
His funeral was not well attended, because the bereaved were careful to tell no one about it. Not every burial can shake off unwanted attendees by transplanting itself to a mansion in the backcountry of a private island, the way a wedding can. Joe was not scheduled to be strewn to the glamorous four winds or sifted into a glamorous ocean. He was to be buried next to his mother in Flushing, Queens.
Daniel engaged the same funeral home that had taken care of her, and they did a closed-casket-style embalming job that kept the body inert without doing anything for its outward appearance. In death, Joe wore no makeup. You could have told he was dead from two hundred feet away. Only Professor Harris looked inside the coffin, to make sure it was his son and not a nightmare. When Joe was lowered into the vault, there was no one present but the two of them, a Presbyterian minister, and the guy who drove the backhoe.
After the service, walking through the cemetery gates to the bus stop, Daniel saw Professor Harris standing by his car. He had a key in the driver’s-side door, but he wasn’t turning it. He didn’t look like he ought to be driving. Daniel offered to drive him home.
When the engine started, Professor Harris turned off the traffic update on WCBS. After a few miles, he spoke. “Daniel,” he said. “I know that woman was in his life for a long time. Do you think they were considering children?”
He was grasping at straws. Joe had been a copy of his wife, so why shouldn’t a grandchild be another one? It would be real-life reincarnation. He didn’t want the unique excesses of trust and musicality that had marked his wife and son to be gone from the world forever. The thing he loved most could not become extinct, even if it took siring a child on Gwen.
“You need to resist these loving impulses,” Daniel said, driving slower to give them more time. “That girl is a piece of shit. She killed him and got away with it. Now, I know forgiving her and accepting her into the family would simplify matters for you, but you’d be surrendering to the unconditional enemy. You’d be bowing down to a piece of shit and promising it eternal obeisance for killing your son. You can’t submit like that. You have to keep the aversion alive. If it bothers you to hate her, put it in symbolic terms. Dehumanize her. You can depersonalize her without forgiving her for anything. You don’t have to forgive her to forget her. You can hate and forget.”
“Everyone’s going crazy,” Professor Harris said.
“I mean it. Forget Gwen, and hate what she stands for. Don’t think you have to hate the sin and love the sinner. She’s a walking, talking sin. So hate her ass. She won’t feel it. There’s no such thing as a thought crime. Think whatever you want. We both know you’re not going to take revenge or even talk to her. But please, please, don’t feel like you have to repress the fact that she’s bad news. Don’t engage with her. She met Joe by chance. Where women were concerned, he was first come, first served, and she was the gatekeeper.”
“You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”
“I sure as shit have,” he said. “I was worried you might be hoping she was pregnant. Trust me, if she were, you’d know it by now. She’d be hitting you up for drug money and telling you she was using it to detox in rehab for your beautiful grandbaby. She’s a user and a liar, and he loved her as much as he ever loved me.”
Professor Harris looked out the window for a while. They crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and waited at long crosstown lights without another word. Daniel turned into the entrance of the garage. When Professor Harris saw the parking attendant coming, he turned to Daniel and said, “Well, you stopped me crying. Thanks. I don’t think I can cry anymore.”
“You were in a trap,” Daniel said. “You were a nice guy looking for somebody to be nice to, like the proverbial hammer that thinks everything is a nail. Fuck that noise.”
“Fuck it,” Professor Harris agreed. Tipping the attendant, he said, “You want to come upstairs for a little while and listen to some records? He had some songs that make no sense to me. Maybe you know what he was getting at.”
“I feel like I knew him so well, I could run a simulation. It wouldn’t be convincing because the randomosity would be missing, but I’ll give it a shot.”
In the elevator, Professor Harris said, “‘Randomosity’? You mean randomness?”
Daniel leaned back and looked in the mirror. He looked haggard, with dark circles under his eyes, but Professor Harris looked worse, like a white rabbit with hay fever. He said, “I guess. It’s my name for what separates us from machines. The lack of intelligent design. The way we get dropped into the world. Normal people play by the rules and act surprised when something seems arbitrary. Joe surfed the randomosity. It wouldn’t have surprised him that he’s dead now. He believed in the Archangel Arbitron.” He was making it up as he went a
long, but it felt true.
Professor Harris didn’t answer. Up in the apartment, he poured Daniel a glass of brandy and cued up a seven-inch titled “Raoraorao,” backed with “To My Shame.” He played the B side first.
“Oh, this,” Daniel said.
Joe sang:
Sah awah away anoh
Dona wada hyda foh
Hawa tease an dass falaw
Dona wa-ah russo har . . .
“He’s pretending to be wasted,” he explained. “He’s imitating this guy we used to know who sang bad anti-folk, Drunk Gareth. He liked the way it sounded, so he put it out.”
“I like the melody.”
“So did he. He heard somewhere that Madonna always uses early vocal takes from when the song’s still fresh, so he decided to stick with the improvised version.”
“I thought he was speaking in tongues, like Shelley’s skylark.”
“No, it’s the Madonna influence. The A side’s even better. It’s about Drunk Gareth’s cat, Gareth the Cat. His girlfriend named her cat after him and then left it with him to take care of while she went to Australia for a year. Obviously she never came back to pick it up, and he was stuck with the cat, which was a really jealous cat.”
“Gareth sounds like he had his reasons to stay drunk.”
They sang along with “Raoraorao,” which had easy lyrics.
XII.
The principle of hating the sin and loving the sinner took hold of the nation. As evidence mounted that the attackers were Saudi subjects in thrall to Saudi aristocrats, the USA prepared to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The sin of terrorism had to be fought wherever it appeared. If it was cut off at the root—in the Fertile Crescent where God planted his orchard, the birthplace of civilization—there could be no more terrorism.
Even on the Left it was held that oppressed, disempowered people would turn to terrorism. Yet oppression was nearly universal, while terrorists were measured in parts per billion. Maybe if state terror had been included along with civil war and genocide by neglect, the body count could have attained statistical significance? That was not the point. The point was to imagine terrorists as great men, originators and bearers of epochal ideas, ritual scapegoats worthy of custom-tailored deaths. Great men were rare. That was something great men could always agree on.
IT TOOK GWEN WEEKS TO FOLLOW UP WITH THE FUNERAL HOME. WHEN SHE REALIZED that Joe was already in the ground, she bombarded Daniel with voice mails, complaining (among other things) that she’d bought a $3,000 dress. He texted her that she’d saved on flowers. Ten minutes later, he got a call from Daktari, asking where Joe was buried so the company could send a wreath. He said it wasn’t the fucking Kentucky Derby. And so on.
He missed Flora, but the pain was hard to localize among the ambient pain. His face was a mask. He cried in his sleep. Because his fantasies were violent, he saw himself as suppressing white-hot rage. He wasn’t suppressing anything. Grief and anger were what he had.
For that and other reasons, Pam felt more or less justified in lending her parents a daughter. Having deployed the nuclear option of disappearance against the conventional weapon of corporal punishment, she could even see it as reparations, and Flora liked it. She was nine years old, a sleepover veteran, big enough to go to summer camp. In D.C., she had her own room. A white picket fence enclosed a backyard with walnut trees. Bikes could be safely ridden. Nearby pandas were free to socialize.
She didn’t miss her friends. The loft didn’t have a phone (cell phones were still considered a radiation hazard for children), so she had never gotten in the habit of calling them. Her friendships had arisen from proximity, with people she’d seen as a matter of course in school, the store, or the park. The same method made her new friends within days. To make sure she didn’t lose touch, Edgar took her to a sundries shop, where she picked out postcards for Joe/Gwen, Victor/Margie, her former teacher/classmates, and coach/b-ball team.
She enjoyed her new school so much that Pam felt ashamed of having put up with her old one. Whether she did homework was of no import to her grandparents. Oddly, this state of affairs led to an explosion in the doing of homework. At “P.S. Zero,” coming to school with homework done would have gotten her teased. Her friends at Cathedral did their homework as naturally as breathing. She even did chores, cheerfully, as though she enjoyed maintaining order in the lovely house. Nothing icky—that was the maid’s prerogative—but it was almost too easy to rope her into shiny jobs like polishing table legs or washing every leaf on a large rubber plant.
Meanwhile, in lower Manhattan, grime filled the streets. Joe had become inexplicable. Daniel was prickly and inconsolable. With Flora around, he might have turned into one of those dandler dads who wake kids up at midnight to play. Pam wouldn’t have minded staying in Cleveland Park herself until his personal storm blew over. But she had to get back to work. She’d been gone for almost a month. RIACD’s clients were interested in security and stability to an unprecedented degree. They had become suddenly and vividly aware of the capacity of systems to fail. They had learned the technical meaning of failure, which was not bankruptcy and disgrace and suicide. It was the preordained failure of ostensibly minor parts of any system more complex than a bonfire.
She volunteered her Atari money, which had grown to almost $7,000, to help pay the Cathedral tuition. Daniel came down to D.C. for the weekend, and he and Pam rode the train home together, holding hands. Not clasped, but in that strange way sad people will do sometimes, tensely wringing each other’s fingers. A stark contrast divided them from others in their city. They were mourning other dead. They knew where to find their bin Laden—on Fifty-Fourth Street, on her brand-new white puffy sofa.
GINGER ORGANIZED A RECEPTION TO INTRODUCE FLORA TO HER OLD FRIENDS, A THURSDAY afternoon tea with a stuffed animal theme. Most of them lived in heirloom homes with attics, so they could still find the stuffed animals they had in childhood. The preparations were elaborate, with silver and Irish porcelain to be polished and dusted, little bouquets of violets to be tied up with ribbons as party favors, and a cream cake from an Austrian patisserie. The party would have been an embarrassment if the women had been uncool, but they were not. They didn’t talk down to anyone, even Secretariat. Rather than patronize Flora with gifts, they acted as if their bears had freely chosen to spend time eating cake with her horse.
The result was weird and magical, the kind of theater only a fair-sized group of conspiratorial adults can pull off with a child of nine—a make-believe world of total benignity, like a Halloween haunted house, but the opposite. After they left, Flora sat for a long time at the table without moving, reliving the bears’ witticisms, radiant with the feeling that real life was precious.
HER WEEKENDS CAME AND WENT WITH REGULAR VISITS FROM HER PARENTS AND NO word from Joe. That was nothing unusual. He had been touring on and off for years. When she asked them when he was coming back, they said they weren’t sure. Every day they put off telling her made her more mature and better able to handle the news. They correctly assumed that her classmates were too young to talk about rock stars. Edgar knew the truth, but he was uninvolved. He left telling Ginger up to Pam. It didn’t happen.
Flora’s Christmas vacation started in mid-December, to give the students’ families time to shop and ski. In downtown New York the streets were at last clear of debris. Pam went down to Washington to pick her up. The plan was to spend a week in New York, see the Christmas decorations in Midtown, take her ice-skating, and bring her back for the holidays.
On Pam’s arrival in Cleveland Park, it emerged that Ginger had helped Flora buy a present for Joe. Ginger was no more likely than a nine-year-old to follow the careers of rock stars, so she had financed an EBow for eighty dollars at a guitar shop in Arlington. It was a little battery-operated device you could hold over an electric guitar string to make it tremble indefinitely, like a violin string. Flora looked forward very much to presenting it to Joe. She explained to her mother that you would have heard it on his
records if he owned one, but you didn’t, so he didn’t.
Pam pointed out that he never played guitar on his records. She was as much in denial as anyone. She was in nearly the same holding pattern as Flora, not processing what had happened. She had the example of Daniel right in front of her all the time as a warning, to show her what happened to people who made recent events the object of deliberate contemplation.
She told him on the phone that it was a hell of their own creation. He suggested that the females return together to the music shop to trade the EBow for a ukulele, which Flora could play in Joe’s memory. That would beat surprising her with the news in New York, unless Pam wanted an EBow.
“I could use one for sure,” she said. “But not this one.”
First she told her mother, citing cardiac arrest as the cause of death.
“My God,” Ginger replied. “That poor boy. His poor father. I’m so sorry.” She went to her desk to compose a note to Professor Harris.
Pam went up to Flora’s room and sat her down on the bed, declaring that she had something to say. She said she had been waiting until Flora was old enough to understand, and now that she was almost ten, it was time. She said, “On September eleventh, Joe died.”
“When everybody died?”
“He died too.”
Flora didn’t cry. She didn’t even get upset. She said she would light candles for him at the cathedral. She’d been in a religious school for all of three months, and apparently she no longer regarded death as the end. Yet she must have realized it was the end of corporeal existence and all material needs, because she also suggested trading in the EBow, but for a violin instead of a ukulele. She pointed out that a violin also has four strings like a bass. She said, “I’m going to play violin for Joe in the school orchestra!”
Pam gave her a hug and said, “You’ll always be his best friend.”
She spoke to her mother and father about it after dinner, and they agreed to rent Flora a good three-quarter violin and get her lessons. There was a violin maker just up Connecticut Avenue, and teachers were available through the school.