In the quiet of Ethan’s apartment, poems came to her like timid animals emerging after a storm.
She wrote about the hush of the city, how the pulse of it had changed with so many people gone. About love, and pleasure, and comfort. The smell of his neck in the early morning. The warm soft den of their bed at night. About finding stillness in the whirr that had been there for so long, a quiet place in the grinding, never-ending shriek of the Crisis. There was nowhere to publish these poems; only the big newspapers could afford to keep running, and that with government support; no one had time for poetry, for words, but she wrote phrases on scraps of paper, in the wide margins of Ethan’s dictionaries, and someday they would form the first grasping branches of her own book.
No one saw it yet, but by then, almost imperceptibly, the story of the Crisis had begun to solidify. Soon enough it would harden, like silt from turbid water, settling in a thick band of mud.
We know who caused all this, people were beginning to say. Ask yourself: who’s doing well because we’re on the decline? Fingers pointed firmly east. Look how China’s GDP was rising, their standard of living climbing. Over there you got Chinese rice farmers with smartphones, one congressman ranted on the House floor. Over here in the U.S. of A. you got Americans using bucket toilets because their water’s shut off for nonpayment. Tell me how that’s not backwards. Just you tell me.
The Crisis was China’s doing, some started to insist: all their manipulations, their tariffs and devaluations. Maybe they’d even had help, dismantling us from within. They want to take us down. They want to own our country.
Suspicious eyes swiveled to those with foreign faces, foreign names.
The question, people kept saying, is what are we going to do about it?
* * *
? ? ?
A frantic phone call from her mother, her voice nearly unintelligible: someone had pushed Margaret’s father down the stairs at the park. He’d passed by them, the man who’d done it—they were heading down, he coming up—but they hadn’t even glanced at him, and then he had turned and shoved her father with both hands, right between the shoulder blades. Margaret’s father was sixty-four and had grown thinner, slighter, his body still compact but no longer as strong as it was, touches of arthritis gumming his hips and shoulders, and he had tumbled down, not even trying to catch himself, just down, like something already dead, the edge of the bottom step shattering his skull just above his ear, all of it so sudden neither of them even had time to scream. By the time Margaret’s mother understood what had happened and turned to see who’d pushed him, the man was gone. Her father never regained consciousness, and two and a half hours after her mother’s phone call, he was dead. The next morning, reeling from grief, her mother had a heart attack in the kitchen of their empty house—now too big for her alone—and this time Margaret, still trying to book a plane ticket, got the news from a police officer who’d managed to find her, as next of kin.
It was already happening then, though she didn’t know it yet: already happening not just in the push down the stairs but in the people who watched the elderly man fall and shrank away from the man who’d pushed him, letting him pass—whether out of shock or fear or approval, none of them would ever dare to ask themselves. It was already happening, in the three people—a middle-aged woman, a young man in his twenties, a mother pushing a stroller—who passed by before the fourth called an ambulance, in the moment they saw the elderly woman crouching over her husband’s tangled body, not screaming but murmuring to him unintelligibly, in a language neither of them had spoken in decades, even in private, pulled out of her now in a desperate hope that these words would be rooted deeply enough inside him that he might still hear.
I didn’t realize he was hurt, the woman would say to her husband later, when they saw a report about the unfortunate incident on the news. I thought maybe he slipped and fell or something, I didn’t want to embarrass anyone.
I heard her speaking Chinese or whatever, the young man would say, I just knew it wasn’t English, and you know, what they’re saying about China these days—it seemed better not to get involved.
The mother with the stroller would say nothing. She would never even see the news; her baby had a new molar coming in, and neither of them was sleeping through the night.
An isolated incident, the police report would say a few weeks later. No leads on the man who’d done the pushing. No evidence of why he might have done such a thing.
It was happening in other cities, in infinite variations: a kick or a punch on the sidewalk, a spray of spit in the face. It would happen everywhere, here and there at first, then all over, and eventually the news would stop reporting the stories, because they weren’t new anymore.
* * *
? ? ?
We can fly home, Ethan said. Plane tickets were scarce and expensive, but they had some money saved. We can fly home and take care of whatever needs doing.
She didn’t know how to explain there was nothing left to go home for anymore. That it wasn’t home any longer. Instead she focused on a different word: we.
I want to leave New York, she told Ethan. Please, let’s just leave. Anywhere else.
It didn’t make sense, exactly; her parents had never been to New York; she’d left their house years ago; why this need to flee? But on another level it did make sense, this urgent need she felt to start over. To begin again somewhere in her new orphaned state, in a new place where she could cushion herself from the hard corners of the world. She wanted to be a bird keeping her head low. She wanted to not stick up. Ethan emailed his father, who reached out to his network: neighbors, colleagues, old roommates, friends of friends, all the dividends of goodwill he’d collected over the course of his gregarious life. Someone always knew someone; it was how things happened in his world, and neither of them thought much of it then, except to be grateful: as it turned out, Ethan’s godfather’s brother was golf buddies with a Harvard dean, who said the university was hiring, or would be soon. A few phone calls, a résumé slipped over the transom, and soon Ethan found himself newly employed as an adjunct in the linguistics department.
Within two weeks it was settled. They said goodbye to no one; they’d lost touch with everyone they’d known in the city by then. They took little with them because they had little to take: a suitcase of clothes between them, a stack of dictionaries. They would start again from scratch.
* * *
? ? ?
He can’t imagine it. She can see it on his face: the puzzled look of someone trying to feel what they’ve never felt. To see what they’ve never seen. Her father had told her a parable once, blind men trying to describe an elephant, able to grasp it only in parts—a wall, a snake, a fan, a spear. A cautionary tale: how futile to believe you could ever share your experience with another. Details pour out of her now like sharp grains of sand, but it’s still just a nightmare someone else had. Nothing can make him understand it but living through it, and she would give her life to make sure that never happens.
But how did it end, Bird asks, and she thinks: yes. So much more to tell.
* * *