It was Riya—Riya who had hit me so hard that my ears rang for days—who helped me take my first unsteady steps down the road to functioning adulthood. We began to meet perhaps once a week, always in the same bar-restaurant on the Bowery near the Museum of Identity, and she would talk to me about her decision to go back to her job, which her boss Orlando Wolf had with considerable sensitivity kept open for her. She described it as a relationship in which love had died but enough common ground remained to make it worth working on. Maybe with enough good effort something like love might be reborn.
This was also how she recommended I approach my own broken love. Give Suchitra time, she said. Let her go through what she’s doing now, all these second-rate boldface men. That’s her anger in charge. Give her time and I think she’ll come back to you to see what can be worked out.
I found that hard to believe but it made me feel better. I liked seeing Riya’s recovery too. The election result seemed to have energized her, to have given her back much of her old strength of spirit and incisiveness of mind. She stayed away from gender politics because, in her own words, she was still “broken” in that area, but worked on new rooms chronicling and displaying the rise of the new “identitarian” far right, the arrival in America of the European ultraist movement whose birthplace was the French youth movement, the Nouvelle Droite Génération Identitaire, and programming events around racial and national identity, a series she called Identity Crisis, dealing in general with racial and religious issues, but focusing, above all, on the schismatic convulsion that had gripped America following the triumph of the cackling cartoon narcissist, America torn in half, its defining myth of city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism, Americans’ masks ripped off to reveal the Joker faces beneath. Sixty million. Sixty million. And ninety million more too uncaring to vote.
Once the French sent us the statue in the harbor, she said, now they send us this.
Identity was a neofascist rallying cry now and the Museum was obliged to change and Riya made herself the standard-bearer of that change. We became lazy, she said. For eight years we persuaded ourselves that the progressive, tolerant, adult America embodied by the president was what America had become, that it would just go on being like that. And that America is still there but the dark side was still there too, and it roared out of its cage and swallowed us. America’s secret identity wasn’t a superhero. Turns out it was a supervillain. We’re in the Bizarro universe and we have to engage with Bizarro-America to grasp its nature and to learn how to destroy it all over again. We have to learn how to trick Mr. Mxyztplk into saying his name backwards so that he disappears back into the fifth dimension and the world feels sane again. And we have to engage with ourselves and understand how we became so fucking weak and apathetic and how to retool and dive back into the battle. Who are we now? Who the fuck even knows.
Okay, okay, I thought, losing patience (though only inwardly) with her rant. Good for you. I’m glad you’re up and running again, and you do that, all of it, go for it. All I wanted to do was put my fingers in my ears and shout la la la la la. All I wanted was for there to be no news on the television and for the internet to collapse forever and for my friends to be my friends and to have good dinners and go listen to good music and for love to conquer all and for Suchitra somehow by magic to come back to me.
Then one night alone in my aching bed I remembered what Nero Golden said to me after my parents died. Get wisdom. Learn to be a man.
The next afternoon I presented myself at the editing suite where Suchitra was hard at work. When she saw me, she stiffened. I’m really busy, she said. I’ll wait, I said. I’ll be working really late, she said. Is it okay if I wait, I asked. She thought about it. You can wait if you want, she said. I will, then, I said. She turned away and did not look at me again for five hours and forty-three minutes and I stood still and silent in the corner and did not interrupt. When she finally began to shut down work for the day it was a quarter to eleven at night. She swiveled her chair around to face me.
You waited very patiently, she said, not unkindly. It must be important.
I love you, I said to her, and I saw her defensive barricades go up. She said nothing in reply. The computer monitor dinged and showed a dialogue box telling her that one of her open programs had canceled the shutdown. She gave a sigh of tired irritation and quit the program and restarted the shutdown. This time it worked.
Sometimes in extremis human beings receive from—depending on your belief system—either some inner or some higher power the gift of tongues, the right words to say at the right time, the language that will unlock and heal a bruised and guarded heart. So it was in that late hour amid the darkened computer screens. Not only the language but the nakedness behind the words. And behind the nakedness the music. The first words that fell from my lips were not mine. And what made them work was that I, who could never carry a tune, actually tried to sing, awkwardly at first and then with unasked-for tears running down my face: “Bird on the Wire,” swearing my traitor’s fidelity in the words of the song and promising to make profound amends. Before I had finished she had begun to laugh at me and then we were laughing together, crying and laughing, and it was all right, it was going to be all right, in our two cracked voices we were drunks in our own midnight choir, and we would try in our way to be free.
At some later point when we were in bed together I added more prosaic thoughts to the magic of the song. It had been more than a year since the Joker’s conquest of America and we were all still in shock and going through the stages of grief but now we needed to come together and set love and beauty and solidarity and friendship against the monstrous forces that faced us. Humanity was the only answer to the cartoon. I had no plan except love. I hoped another plan might emerge in time but for now there was only holding each other tightly and passing strength to each other, body to body, mouth to mouth, spirit to spirit, me to you. There was only the holding of hands and slowly learning not to be afraid of the dark.
Shut up, she said, and drew me toward her.
Sunday and Wednesday birthdays, I told her. My information from Myanmar is that we are jinxed by that combo.
I’ll tell you a secret, she said. Burmese jinxes are not permitted to enter the United States. There’s a list of countries whose jinxes aren’t allowed in. Most of them are Islamic of course but Myanmar is on there too.
So as long as we’re in the U.S. we’re safe?
We’ll have to work something out about taking vacations abroad, she said.
Fire is licking around the edges of my story as it comes to a close, and fire is hot and inexorable and will have its day.