| Sidney was the first to hear. Back when Sidney
and Samara had dated, he'd go over to her father Ron's house
for lunch, smoke a joint, watch World Cup soccer or NBA playoffs.
After they'd broken up and Samara had moved to New York, Sidney
still dropped into Ron's Used Books on University Avenue.
It was the place where Samara had grown up, running between
the mildewed stacks and rosewood shelves.
Though Ron had given up on politics—it's bullshit,
man, he'd told Sidney, protesting just makes them
stronger—he talked about Samara's career as if
it was a series of pie-eating contests that she always won.
She's in Sudan, man, interviewing rape victims, Ron
told Sidney. Later: She's in Afghanistan for a month,
running trucks for the Red Cross. Most recently: She
landed yesterday in Iraq and she's starting her own agency,
thinks the Red Cross is a bullshit band-aid.
That afternoon Sidney stopped in the store and he saw the
emptiness in Ron's face. What's up, Ron? The State
Department had called not ten minutes before.
Christ, Ron, you're kidding, Sidney said.
No, man, said Ron. Shit, I just heard from
her this morning, one of those text messages. She was meeting
some families. She said it was hard hearing their stories,
about, about how they lost people, mothers and, and daughters
and aunts and uncles. Babies. They're killing babies over
there. Who kills babies?
Dude, I don't know what to say.
Don't say anything, man. You'll end up sounding stupid
and so will I.
Sidney helped Ron close up the store. They hugged—a
manly, backslapping hug; I'll call you in the morning,
Sidney said—and then they walked in opposite directions
down University Ave. Sidney crossed the street into the student
ghetto—not such a ghetto anymore, shiny new apartment
complexes displacing tattered, clapboard homes—where
he'd lived for twelve years. As he walked, Sidney thought
about whom to call first.
When he got home Sidney threw his keys on the foyer floor
and sat down on the couch in the living room. Out in the yard,
in the frame of his picture window, a dogwood shifted in the
breeze and the sun threw gold coins of light through the crosshatching
branches onto his hardwood floor. He watched the light, which
for some reason made him think, vaguely, of being a kid—nine
years old, maybe, playing with his Star Wars figures in his
bedroom. After a few minutes Sidney reached to the phone next
to the couch. He called Amanda on her cell—it was one
of the few numbers he had memorized.
Amanda was on a picket line—What do we want? Justice!
When do we want it? Now!—and at first she couldn't
hear him. What? she shouted. That you Sidney?
She stepped under the awning of a newsstand and leaned her
sign against a news rack, still holding the bullhorn in her
other hand.
He shared what he knew. After they hung up she walked through
the twenty or thirty picketers, mostly middle-aged Asian women—why
did they have to wear their hair that way?—and
gave the bullhorn to her boss, the organizing director, a
fat man named Borges.
Going somewhere, girl? he asked, speaking softly;
without Amanda to goad them on with the bullhorn, the picketers
had fallen silent, shuffling in a circle around them.
Need a break, she said. Why did he always stand
so close to her?
See ya at the office tonight, he said, his breath
like week-old lettuce. We gotta phonebank and get more
people out here tomorrow.
For the rest of the day she drifted through the warehouses
of Tribeca and the canyons of lower Manhattan and if you asked
her what she was doing she would have said Shopping.
She shambled down Broadway, eyes on the sidewalk, in and out
of shops and cafes. She wandered into K. Trimming Co. and
floated for two hours among the doilies and embroidered trimmings,
touching all the fabrics and ribbons, sifting the button bins.
She walked out with a silver thimble. At Alice Underground—a
place where she and Samara had often shopped together, meeting
for lunch at the deli across the street—she picked out
a red scarf and a creaky black leather coat that said "Rage
Against the Machine" across the back.
At the register Amanda handed the clerk—a skate betty
ten years her junior—her Visa Platinum card. The clerk's
watery blue eyes flitted from the card to the leather coat.
Rage against the machine, huh? she said, eyebrows
arched, mouth in an accusatory little O.
Just charge it, bitch, said Amanda.
Back on Broadway, Amanda discovered that the sun was setting
and the air was cold; she put on the coat, ripping the pink
tag off the sleeve. She crossed Canal St. and Franklin and
Chambers, buying at random, shopping bags gathering around
her like fat, brightly clothed children. She walked by City
Hall and a half-dozen protests flashed through her memory.
Her cell kept ringing—the ringtone set to Solidarity
Forever—probably Borges, wondering where she was,
why wasn't she at the office on the phone, cajoling, explaining,
pleading with strikers to walk the line. A strike isn't
just a vacation, she whispered to herself. You have
to show up everyday.
Why not a vacation? she thought. Why does everything
have to be so serious?
At Cortland she paused and stared down the street, to the
memorial at Ground Zero. The wind blew and she wished she
had worn a longer skirt. Why had she run that morning, run
towards the towers instead of away from them? What did
I want to see? She remembered the stench, which called
to her mind a mixture of fiberglass and burning tires and
Girl Scout campfires. When—after hours of walking with
thousands of others across Manhattan, over the bridge, into
Brooklyn—she had finally got to her brownstone, she
hadn't been able to go inside. Instead she sat on the stoop,
cheek against the cold, black balustrade, watching the street.
It was dark, neighbors still streaming home exhausted, kids
in the streets, newspapers in the gutters. Her cell had rung.
It had been ringing all day, but this time she answered it.
It had been Maya, calling from Knoxville, frantic. I saw
it all on TV, she'd said. Are you OK?
Amanda turned East and walked toward the Wall St. subway
stop. When she reached the entrance she stopped and sat down
on a bench. She took out her cell and called Maya.
Can't talk, Maya said. Putting Emil to bed.
Amanda could hear the baby wailing in the background but quickly
told Maya the news: Samara was killed in Iraq.
I'll call you back Amanda, Maya said, hanging up.
That night—after the bath, the battle of the diaper
change and pajamas, Goodnight Moon, the songs, the
tears—Maya sat in the living room, the TV on, worn out.
Evan was at the hospital, on rotation; he wouldn't be home
till breakfast; Maya was glad. She pulled her knees up to
her chin, watching the blue curtain of TV light sway against
the wood-paneled walls and the pictures of her college days:
one of her with the classic fist in air, blocking the entrance
to Gainesville's federal building; another of Dan with his
band Inscrutable Oriental Mastermind, black hair in his eyes,
mouth twisted in what Maya had called his Fuck me look; a
third photo of herself, Samara, and Amanda, arms around each
other, surrounded by placards. She couldn't remember where
the photo had been taken, but saw a NOW logo—D.C., maybe,
during the big pro-choice march? She and Samara had slept
together, just once, drunk of course, fumbling each other's
panties. After graduation Maya had moved with Evan to Knoxville
and they'd lost touch, but Maya followed Samara's career through
Amanda and newspapers. She'd even seen Samara interviewed
one night on Larry King, introduced as a heroic young
woman who helps civilians caught in the crossfire.
No matter how noble our intentions, we can't just smash
Iraq, Samara had said, then leave its children to
starve and suffer in the dark. She'd gotten two million
dollars for refugees in Kuwait, working with a blow-dried,
pink-faced Senator from some prairie-dog state. It's not
enough, Samara had told Larry. Samara, Maya noticed,
had cut her black hair short, lost some weight: she looked
stern, righteous, like a desert matriarch. Seeing her friend
on TV Maya felt as she had when she watched Samara speak at
Student Government meetings, of wanting to be Samara. She'd
known about her and Dan, of course; everyone did, even Sidney.
Maya often imagined the two of them together, fixating, for
some reason, on the image of her hand, that silver ring on
her finger, on his uncircumcised cock. Once Dan even tried
for a threesome, taking off all his clothes—Nothing
both you ladies haven't seen, right?—rubbing Maya's
shoulders, caressing her arms. She'd looked, eyebrows raised,
over to Samara. Samara had just walked out of the bedroom
and turned on the TV. They ended the evening watching Ren
and Stimpy on Nickelodeon.
Maya picked up the phone, stared at it until the please
hang up the phone message came on, hung up, then picked
it up again and dialed. Dan didn't answer but without thinking
she left the news on his machine.
When Dan got home that night after a gig at the Elbo Room
and played the rambling message, he first heard only the voice:
girlish, cloying, that voice, his ex. What in God's name
is she calling about? At the start of the message she
talked about the baby, how he had said kitty that day, and
when Maya blurted the news out at the end of the message—Look,
I'm really calling to tell you that Samara was riding in a
van with some soldiers, or something, and somebody took a
shot and she's dead, I'm sorry Dan—Dan put his
right hand to his left cheek, and blinked. He hadn't been
expecting that. Samara had been a great fuck—the best,
really, the memories a set of pornos he played in his head
whenever he jerked off. Now he tried to imagine the body laid
out on a slab in Iraq, bullet wound—where? the neck?
the chest?—puckered and pink at the edges. He'd never
seen a bullet wound in real life, of course, but drew on movies
and CSI episodes to get the picture.
Dan sat down next to the answering machine, the thrift-store
leather chair creaking; he thought of her brown eyes, dark
hair, long-fingered hands, small breasts; something unfamiliar
rose in the back of his throat. He remembered the drive down
from New York, when they'd talked all night, he and Samara.
How long ago had that been? Ten years? Was he really that
old? He still saw himself as a 22-year-old activist, a participant.
He still wore the old T-shirts and sometimes he bought a new
one: Not in our name, Keep abortion safe and legal, No
more prisons, etc. When Iraq was invaded he'd stood with
demonstrators, surrounded by cops, helicopters overhead, at
the intersection of 2nd and Market, imagining that he was
blocking traffic and helping end the war. But really, he thought,
he was just a tourist, just stopping for fifteen minutes,
then threading his way through the police onto Montgomery,
past the newsstand, falling in step with the suits and ladies
in high heels, all of them on the march to bullshit jobs.
The cops didn't stop him, knowing, he suspected, that for
him it was all just a pose.
The phone rang and he cried out, somehow surprised, as if
it had snuck up on him. Embarrassed, he snatched up the receiver.
It was Maya. Sorry I just left a message, she said,
her voice simpering in his ears. I got an email from Sidney.
He's organizing a memorial in Gainesville. Dan only said:
Jesus, that guy still live there? Christ, what a homebody.
After Maya hung up—now it was very late, Letterman
had just ended—she thought about the way Dan had dumped
her, the morning after they'd gotten out of jail. He'd said:
I just don't want to sleep with you anymore, OK? We can
still be friends and shit. She'd cried, she wouldn't
go to class for a week. Maya stood up and stepped through
the sliding glass doors, out onto the concrete patio. There
was the red brick grill Evan had built the previous summer,
before the baby, and the spotlessly white plastic chairs they'd
bought for two bucks apiece at a garage sale, and the baby's
toys: a yellow truck, a beach ball, a red plastic flute. Could
she leave all this? Just walk off the patio, through the backyard,
through the neighbor's yard, onto Dogwood Street? Could she
follow Dogwood out of Knoxville, thumb out, and hitch rides
to places where you fumbled with travel guides and shit in
a hole? She admitted it to herself: she wanted to travel,
be on Nightline, die a martyr's death. To be a heroine in
someone's story. But a hero needed a purpose, a quest, and
Maya had never had that. Samara never let people tie her down,
she was always ready to walk away, always pursuing something
that was just over the horizon, something that Maya could
never see. People like Samara and Dan—and Evan, she
admitted—they would always control the lives of people
like her. Maybe I'll never be more than a doormat,
she told herself. She realized that she'd called Dan instead
of calling Amanda back…Amanda, who'd always been Maya's
friend.
She went back inside, picked up the phone, and dialed Amanda's
number.
Amanda had been crying for hours in her room, listening to
Husker Du and the Replacements, looking at photo albums, getting
angrier. You four you were always off fucking each other,
your special little club, Amanda told Maya. Where
was I? Who was I? The one who made the phone calls, who stayed
up all night Xeroxing leaflets and writing speeches for other
people.
Don't say that, Maya said. You were the only
one of us who could organize anything. Samara and Dan made
the speeches but you were the one who kept us together.
When Amanda hung up "Unsatisfied" was playing on the stereo.
She listened—look into my eyes and tell me I'm satisfied—and
wondered if there wasn't a subterranean relationship between
the songs one liked and the choices one made. You'd think
there would be, right? Could you look at a personal list
of songs and read it like you would a palm, building a life
from the lines you saw there: what you loved, what you hated,
how long you had to live?
At three a.m. Amanda went into the desk drawer, the one with
the handle missing, and took out the brochures she'd been
gathering, of graduate schools and adult education programs.
Why had she picked them up, why did she keep them? It seemed
like there were a million things she could do—design,
pharmacy, creative writing—but she dreaded the prospect
of taking the GRE and filling out applications, cringed at
the image of herself sitting in a classroom. She'd always
hated her classmates, their smug alliances and fashion sense.
The activist scene in college wasn't much different, but seeing
two hundred people show up at a protest she'd planned made
her feel powerful, nefarious, more than just a TV-watching
lower-upper-class girl from Ft. Lauderdale.
Dawn came, fish-tank light filtering from the skylight through
her room. Lying in bed, she turned onto her side and remembered
her last meeting with Samara, at that diner in Washington
Heights. Amanda had criticized the way she met with Republicans,
worked with the military. Samara had just smiled, lips dark
red; she hadn't changed her lipstick since they moved together
to the city five years before. Why did she pick that color?
Samara didn't have to listen to Amanda. She had funding. She
would leave the next day for Iraq.
The phone rang. It was Sidney, voice tremulous; he'd lost,
for the moment, that stoner drawl. There was a write-up about
Samara in the New York Times, he said, short bits
on Good Morning America and CNN. I'm organizing
a memorial, he told her, each word running over into
the next. Samara's father would speak against the war, the
President of UF would share his memories, it was all arranged.
Veterans for Peace and the Arab Student League would help
out. Could Amanda fly down, write a press release, make a
few calls?
Sure, she heard herself say. I'd love to.
That morning Sidney walked down to Bageland, humming a Clash
song to himself, kicking at fallen clumps of Spanish moss.
They would all come, he hoped—Amanda, Dan, Maya, and
the others, the hangers-on: Michelle and Jay, Nikita and Lou,
David and Louise. He imagined his old friends gathering together
in his living room. He'd have beer on hand—he'd grill,
maybe—and they would talk and share stories, old ones
and new ones. He'd make an agenda, pose a question—how
has your life changed? how do you stay an activist and still
hold down a job?—and then read some of the press
coverage aloud.
Sidney went into Bageland and ordered a sesame. He sat down
at the window, waving to people he knew—his professor
from Introduction to Semiotics, Duane from the record
store across the street, that middle-aged woman—what
was her name?—who volunteered to work the door at the
benefit the other night.
At the party, he thought, he'd read the piece from the Times.
It was a good piece—written by a reporter who had gotten
to know her, apparently—and it made Samara out to be
a tragic heroine and even mentioned Gainesville in two places.
Gainesville in Baghdad, he thought. Good name
for a band. He imagined one place superimposed upon the
other, but Iraq was nearly invisible, impossible; he could
only see Samara, standing in a deserted street, surrounded
by sand and wind and anonymous brown walls. It's a place
I'll never see. The thought made him feel happy; he was
glad to be in Bageland, the sun in his face, eating and drinking
coffee. Sidney finished his bagel and took the article out
of his backpack. He unfolded it and spread it out on the table.
For the fourth time that morning, he read it to himself, whispering
each word.
On the day she was killed, it said, Ms. Katz was visiting
Iraqi families that had lost relatives to the violence here.
She sent a text message to her father in Gainesville, Florida
saying the stories had been painful to hear.
An American Army officer who arrived on the scene shortly
after the sniper struck said that Ms. Katz was slumped in
the back seat of the van, surrounded by security contractors,
still alive and conscious, with a single bullet wound in her
chest. A medic on the scene treated her, said the officer,
and heard her last words.
I'm still here, she said. I want to keep going.
|
