They sat at the edge of the continent, looking out into black water.
Would we see it coming? she asked. Would we have any warning?
What would warning do? he replied. If death is inevitable, does it help to know when it will arrive?
But she could think of things, many things, that she might do with an extra five or ten minutes. She laced her fingers in his, still scanning the horizon for incoming missiles. She had never felt so threatened. She had never felt so safe.
My grandmother’s family escaped the Great Famine for the hard land at the edge of the St. Lawrence. Not long before she died, I visited her, and she sent me off to get my own dinner. She wanted to be there to receive the man from town who delivered her Meals on Wheels three days a week. They shared stories of the Ice Storm, of families, of their days. He nourished her with company, then left her to eat, to tuck away leftovers for the next day. She may not always have been full, but she was never hungry.
In the early light, he heard the door burst open and he rolled, hoping for a way out, hoping for a mistake.
The men came at him with clubs and bats, and he didn’t have time to think much about his daughter, his wife. He mostly thought about how to protect his head, but then, sometime in the darkness that descended after three or four blows, he didn’t even bother with that.
Do you hear the feet rushing along the hallway? Do you hear them pounding bats into their palms? Listen closely. These tactics are not new.
I imagine postcards, gathering in mailboxes as if they were eggs waiting to hatch, then, when the mailman unlocks the front, flying like hatchlings, clumsy, then graceful, catching currents of anger and frustration across the country, gathering in giant flocks that fly in the shape of arrowheads, homing in on Washington carrying words etched like feathers along their bellies. They may all end up in a landfill. But for a brief moment, I imagine them darkening the sky over Pennsylvania Avenue, causing him to look out his window at the approach, making him wonder what powerful birds approach.
As we drove through town, the streetlights strobed, intervals of darkness tearing at our hearts so roughly we could barely bear it by the time the light flickered on again.
This is how we navigated. We drove through moments of light, then moments of gloom that gutted us. We made bargains from split second to split second as we caught lightning-fast glimpses of the road a few yards ahead.
Once home again, we turned on all the lights, lit all the candles. We fell asleep like that, more afraid of the obscurity than of a house on fire.
If someone’s shooting at you, said the instructor, run diagonally back and forth. Never run in a straight line.
I envisioned this happening in a parking lot, someone firing calm and straight, me dashing and pivoting, dashing and pivoting, running toward life itself.
It is only now I see how this works in politics, how running on the diagonal means the weapons fired by the opposition, the watchdogs, the media are rendered inert. I watch the back-and-forth dash. First this way, then that way. First this excuse, then that.
Up there in the woods was a warm place, a place where the wind didn’t hit the way it did elsewhere, a place where she could tuck in and feel safer than usual.
He didn’t understand why she went there until he hiked up there with her, felt the grove above him like a cathedral, felt the distance from the rest of the world. How is it no one knows about this place but you? he said.
They’re too distracted to notice me leaving, she replied. They don’t have time to hide.
100 Proof 