by Neil Gordon
Fortunately, she has not undressed, and so is able to pee, wash, and check the news on her iPhone while she brushes her teeth. She starts to put on mascara, then she drops it into her toilet bag and turns quickly to the toilet where she throws up, suddenly and dramatically, the slight contents of her empty and abused stomach from the night before. That there is nothing actually to evacuate does not stop the long, powerful, painful paroxysms. For a time she sits, a cold sheen of sweat on her face, on the bathroom floor, trembling. When she can, she shifts slightly to reach her toilet bag on the bathroom sink, and fumbles it down to her. She knows there’s Maalox in there, but the bag has gotten wet, somewhere, and the box is broken. Fumbling at the bottom of the bag she finds two white Maalox capsules floating free, which she manages to take, then she rests some more. At long last, she feels able to rise; and washes her face, hard, with soap. Soon she is virtually entirely recovered, as quickly as she had grown nauseous. Then she puts on a jean jacket and a baseball cap. She packs and checks out—why not, they’re going to kick her out anyway for what she did to the room. Tonight she’ll find a plane somewhere. Anywhere.
It is not until she is in the car that she realizes that something is very, very wrong.
It is not immediate. In fact, it is not until she’s on the 185 again, finishing the third of the four coffees she carried out of the hotel in four precariously balanced Styrofoam cups—she lost one in the parking lot—and smokes her first cigarette. More exactly, when she finishes her first cigarette. Because as she finishes her cigarette, it occurs to her that she’s not sure whether or not it was loaded.
It’s not just that she didn’t remember to check, or that she can’t remember how many she has left.
It’s that she can’t tell if she’s stoned.
She thinks about this for a while. Then suddenly, without warning, she swerves into the breakdown lane and brakes, hard.
First she checks the cigarette pack. It’s impossible to be sure, but there are still eight loaded cigarettes in it, and she thinks she smoked two yesterday. So she is not high.
Next, anxiety mounting, she goes to the trunk of the Mustang, opens her luggage, and pulls out the toilet bag. Pushing the bag to the side, she dumps it onto the trunk floor, and looks, very carefully, at what is in there.
Lipstick, mascara, tampons, tweezers, a cornucopia of prescription drugs, an empty Maalox box, broken, and seven pink Maalox capsules, floating free.
Maalox is pink.
And at the very bottom, damp and stuck to the side of the toiletry bag, the empty little envelope that the Rasta dope-delivery man had given her, centuries ago in Bedford Street, containing two hits of pure, pharmaceutical-grade MDMA, with the little red heart, smudged now with moisture, looking at her.
Empty.
Pure, pharmaceutical grade MDMA is white.
For a long, long moment, Isabel stands on the verge of the 185 outside Columbia, Georgia, feeling terror.
Then, with a deep, deep breath, she slams shut the trunk, sits back in the car, and lights a cigarette.
She took the dose perhaps a half-hour ago, on a purely empty stomach. She has, she knows, perhaps another hour and a half of rising high before her brain releases into itself a flood of serotonin, the peak.
I got this. There is a strange, funny calm coming over her. Fuck this. It’s only a drug.
And that must have worked because the next thing she knows she has parked in the improvised protest parking lot, and is paying her ten bucks, and walking through the PVI cameras, and she finds herself right in front of the Pax Christi banner, which is now swimming slightly in the bright sun:
Our God is love, our gospel is peace. No war.
11.
By now, events are in full swing and there is a palpable difference in the air. At one point she finds herself looking up into the sky for a storm. But it is just a bland, blue autumn sky, a small eastern sky, empty of weather. The drama is on the ground only.
Except for a slight hyper-reality of vision and a distant buzz in her blood, she feels pretty normal. On the soundstage, a roll call is going on in which the names of victims of SOA-trained soldiers are read, one by one, by a procession of protesters, each carrying a small wooden cross bearing a single name. As each finishes their recitation, they take their place in a processional that plants the cross in the chain-link fence, ten feet high, closing off Fort Benning from the protest. Behind the fence she can see a line of soldiers, also equipped with video cameras, waiting to arrest those who cross into the base and, thence, escort them to waiting buses.
Bourgeois’s office is in front of her now, the one neat little condo on the property outside of the gates of Fort Benning, where he lives and works. Thoughtfully, she’s watching and drinking a cardboard cup of coffee, wheedled out of one of the barbecue men by the entrance and taken, she thought, from his own breakfast pot. In each sip she savors the odors of the interior of his home. The coffee is delicious, life-giving, and she drinks it gratefully.
Of course there is no way she can do the interview. She knows this. The normalcy that she’s constituted so laboriously on the flimsy scaffolding of booze and drugs has been proof to everything save this new drug, so long, so sedulously avoided. She may have enough strength left in her, still, to get her up to Homer’s Lounge—Come Party With Us—but maybe not even that. In any case, she has no wish to drink, no wish to smoke, no appetites at all. Really, she is growing rapidly unable to do anything, and briefly—but, somehow, confidently—she wonders where she’s going to go. But she never will have the chance to find out: as she stands there a man she recognizes as Father Bourgeois, no doubt sick of waiting for her, steps out onto his porch with Christy Pardew, and when Christy sees her, she has no choice but to walk toward him.
Now, for the first time since she took the drug, she feels scared. Still, she begins to walk, on bone and cartilage. No muscle, no heart.
Like Sinai got out of the auditorium at the VALB event.
Like Molly ran the last miles of the eight to Dutcher Notch, that day she paced herself so badly.
Like Danny waited in the bedroom of his Riverside Drive apartment, Passover night of 1996, for Maggie to come.
Like her grandfather climbed, that night after the VALB ceremony, the day he saw Dr. Holmquist, to speak with his wife.
But then, right now, she does not mind feeling scared.
That’s a funny difference.
12.
Bourgeois ushers her into a well-ordered office, sits her in front of a desk. He himself sits down at it, his head framed by a poster of Luis Espinal’s face, on one side, and four Latin American nuns, on the other. His desk is clear save for an alabaster Buddha and the room, ringed by political posters—all, she notices, of people—is brightly lit with halogen lamps. This is the same kind of hovel that the press office was in. But this one is cared for, lived in, ordered, and put together simply and prettily.
As for Bourgeois, previously, all the pictures she has seen of him are in his cassock, which makes him look old. Now he wears a black cotton sweater over a blue turtleneck and jeans in which he is slim but for a slight middle-aged heft. He is Sinai’s age, but he looks younger, partly because he has a full head of hair.
For a time she fiddles with her computer. The camera is built in—you open the cover, launch the camera in the casing, and switch the laptop toward your subject, done. But for the time she fiddles around with the camera, and then with this little external mike she doesn’t need.
Because she’s trying to cover up the fact that she is crying.
Just a little. Little enough that she can hide it by hunting for a power outlet she doesn’t need, and running an extension cord, and plugging in the computer. Or maybe she’s not hiding it. Because all the while Bourgeois is sitting at his desk, watching her with an expression of mild curiosity, and who knows what he sees—or perceives. Her throat is so tight she can hear her breath in it. Her chest has turned to lead. And from some recess in her consciousness
, awareness is pouring over her that it’s not just that there’s no way on God’s green earth that she’s going to interview this man. It’s that she is never, ever, going to interview anyone else again ever.
She fiddles as long as she can.
She tries to keep the drug at bay, breathing regularly, deeply.
Then she gives up.
Strangely, once she has started talking, she stops crying. She dries her eyes with a Kleenex from his desk, then, while she searches her bag for makeup, she tells him about how her father is dying. It is not what she meant to say, it is simply what needs to be said. She has no hesitation, further, in saying it: it is, in fact, what she has come here to say, and she knows that. Usually, she tells him, she doesn’t read her dad’s letters, and hasn’t for long time. But she screwed up and read one a few months ago in March on her way between Riyadh and New York and maybe it wasn’t a screw up after all because she guesses she needed to know that her father was about to die. After all. The drug is carrying her along on a flood of words; they are coming out of her without thought, directly, unscreened, nearly un-thought, as if the drug had simply removed her mind from its mediating role or, more precisely, her ego. He had been ten years on a cocktail of Velcade, thalidomide, and corticosteroids, wonder drugs that have kept the effects of his blood plasma displagia—commonly known as multiple myeloma—at bay. Prior to Velcade, he would have been long dead. But he had elected not to do an autologous stem cell transplant, for reasons she didn’t understand, and without that treatment this was the limit. He had still the option of allotransplantation, but with a 30 percent mortality he had decided against it, and so, he had decided to die.
She has found her makeup now and, switching the camera on her MacBook to herself, she does her eyelashes, then her lips. All the while telling Bourgeois about how her father had decided to die in the house where his own father had decided to die, the family home on Bedford Street. That Molly would go there with him, as Danny and Maggie had done for her grandfather’s death. As she spoke, she was not sure she had even explained who Molly, and Danny, and Maggie were, but that didn’t seem necessary either. But she tells him that besides Molly and Danny and Maggie, her half-sister Beck and his husband were in the city, as were dozens of friends. He wouldn’t be alone. The question was, would she be there? And that that’s what she wanted to ask him about. Not some bullshit about the viability of political protest in this day and age, the possibility of change, none of that.
“See, my dad didn’t need to be radicalized, the way you did, down in Louisiana, that’s where you’re from, right? He didn’t have to go to Vietnam and see all the suffering and live through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and figure out the whole thing was a lie. My grandfather was a Red, a genuine American Red. Fought in the Spanish Civil War, then spent his life as a civil-rights attorney. Lawyers Guild, blacklisted, premature antifascist, all that?”
Clearly, Bourgeois knew who her grandfather was. He nods, shifting slightly at the desk. He has still not said a word. He has, however, somehow summoned someone from an adjoining room, because there is now a tall man in a checkered shirt standing at the doorway, watching her curiously. Like that, Isabel understands how strange she’s acting. But at the same time, she understands that the man’s presence, like Bourgeois’s, is benign.
Everything, in fact, is benign.
“I mean, I could even make the argument that there’s something wrong with you, Father. That the fact that you had to go and blow innocent people’s heads off before you could realize what was wrong with it all invalidates everything about you. Kill and cry, right? Kill people as a soldier for the US government? Fuck, Father, what were you guys thinking of? One could make the argument that any of you just had to crack a book or two and it was all there for you to understand, that the war in Vietnam was a moral dead end, even more immorally dead-ended than most.”
It is hard to tell what Bourgeois thinks of that. Beyond showing comprehension of the point with a little nod, his face still shows nothing but attention. But she doesn’t care about him. All she cares about is what she has, so desperately, to articulate.
“But my dad knew it. His dad knew it. All this political consciousness you’ve forged since 1963. My grandfather had as astute an analysis of World War II as he had of Vietnam. As you had of Vietnam—only you had to fucking go there and shoot people first. And, now, my dad is dying. Maybe a couple-three months, a half-year tops. When I get out of here I’m supposed to go meet my mom in Paris or somewhere, but instead he wants me to go up to New York and stay with him while he dies. And that’s my question to you, Father. If I go? What should I tell him? What should be my report from the front of American protest?”
She stops now, not for a response, but because she has just entered into a new level of high. For a second, or what she thinks is a second, she closes her eyes and feels something dissolve in her, some internal capacity, some internal impediment. In its place, against the screen of her closed eyelids, a checkered pattern of sky appears and stretched away forever. It is intensely familiar, and dimly she realizes it is the quilt under which she slept, as a child, in her grandmother’s bed. She does not know how long she watches it. But when she opens her eyes again, Bourgeois is still watching her, and she carries on talking as if she had never stopped.
“I mean, there he is, sitting in the house he was born in, looking out not only at his life, but at his father’s too. And there’s not one damn thing on the landscape that’s not a failure. We’re at war abroad on two fronts. We remain a segregated society. Huge inequities between the rich and the poor characterize us. The government holds the citizenry in a stranglehold. COINTELPRO? The NSA is Hoover’s wet dream. They know where we are every minute of our lives, what we write, what we think, whom we sleep with, what we do. There is not one ideal of the mobilization against the war in Vietnam that has not been continuously degraded since 1970.”
She is gesturing pretty widely now, sweeping an arm out toward the window where the crowds are milling. And she can’t stop herself going on, and she says:
“Isn’t that it, Father? They’ve got the PVI array, the Patriot Act, War Emergency Powers Act, and you? You’ve got a Pax Christi sign out there. Makes sense, right? Because even though you’re a priest and I’m an atheist we both agree that there is nothing rational going on anywhere in the whole history of the struggle for social justice. There’s nothing rational to make people believe that social justice can exist. It’s totally without precedent that such a thing can ever occur anywhere, and believing in it is totally senseless. And so that’s my question for you, Father. What do I tell my dad, up in New York, except that the whole march of human history, all his life, all your life, proves that everything he’s cared about is a failure?”
Isabel is nearly yelling at the guy, now, though she doesn’t know it, and he doesn’t seem to mind. She lowers her voice and pushes her laptop to the side to lean on the desk, as if to be sure that he can hear: “So this is what I want to know from you, Father. This is what I want to know from you. When I’m sitting up there on the edge of my father’s death bed in New York, what should I tell him? What should I tell him that will fight against the thought that the world he’s leaving is substantially worse than the world he was born in? That we are substantially less free today than we were fifty years ago? That injustice and suffering have free rein over far more of the globe than ever in the past? That the rich are fewer and the poor are blacker and browner and far more than ever before in human history, and that in any case it doesn’t matter because we’ve unleashed the inevitability of infinite suffering, infinite suffering, through the weather itself? What should I tell him to disprove for him the certainty that everything he’s ever believed in, his whole life, was a waste of time? What should I tell him, Father? That I’ve just been down to Georgia and I am here to witness that Roy Bourgeois and his handful of the faithful, out of all of human history, are going to be the anointed ones who actually make a difference? Because t
hey believe in a Christ of goodness?”
13.
In the hyper-reality of Isabel’s vision, a number of expressions have crossed Bourgeois’s face while he listens to her.
Number one was a squint with mouth well set, his face fully attentive under his still-red hair, a lot like Sinai’s except, of course, much thicker. He is well shaven, clean of expression and direct of eye, which are blue.
The second was the same, but with wide open eyes and raised eyebrows, as if shocked by what she was saying.
In the third, he set his mouth in a thin frown and looks down at his hands, fiddling with something on his desk that she sees to be the alabaster Buddha. In this expression his eyes, directed away, became very focused, and even from an angle you could see his intensity of thought.
And, finally, the fourth: an animated, gesturing discourse in which his face, very alive, constantly sought out her understanding of what he had to say. And this is how he begins to talk.
Outside, on the soundstage, a speaker is exhorting unity with all the working people of Latin America. Inside, Bourgeois talks for a long time.
He talks in a calm, practiced voice, meaning everything he is saying and having said it, and meant it, many times before.
And perfectly silent, perfectly receptive, and—in fact—perfectly content, Isabel lets the drug swirl through her body, which feels more comfortable in this straight-backed wooden chair than anything she has ever felt in her life, and listens.
He talks to her about the huge photograph of Luis Espinal, tortured and killed in Bolivia. He is a bearded, handsome man staring steadily into the camera, above an inscription: “1932: un justo nace 1980: un justo es asesinado 2005: ¡seguimos contigo!” He talks to her about Oscar Romero and the rape and murder of four American churchwomen by Salvadorian soldiers, one by one introducing her to the plain-faced women on a painting on his wall: Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan. He tells her about how many of the perpetrators of atrocity in Latin America were trained in Fort Benning, Georgia. Now he directs her eye to the eight Jesuit priests killed on November 16, 1989, their names written on a multicolored cross on which hangs a rather Mayan Jesus: Ignacio Ellacuría, Amando López, Joaquín López y López, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Julia Elba Ramos, Celina Ramos. Under them, there is an inscription: “Christians and all those who hate injustice are obligated to fight it with every ounce of their strength.”
