Amsterdam 2012 (20 page)

#

I got a job, the nightshift at St. John’s Hospital.
 
Working nights left me free to attend nursing classes in the afternoon.
 
I couldn’t sleep at night anyhow.
 

It might seem strange that someone as self-absorbed as I would ever consider nursing.
 
During my senior year of high school, a friend of mine applied to be a nurse’s aide.
 
I tagged along.
 
My friend quit after a month, but I stayed on and went back every summer during college.
 
I started taking classes.
 
The messy logic of the body appealed to me, how it evolved, adapting from what already existed, experimenting, failing, then coming up with something that worked.
 
I liked the idea that the human genome shared genes from simpler species, a library of life.
 
I liked the Latin names, the procedures, the amazing way bodies defended themselves.
 
Yet I had no interest in pursuing medicine as a career.

Now nursing was the only thing that made sense.
 

My shift started at 6 PM.
 
Most patients watched television while they ate dinner, so when I picked up their trays and checked their medicine cups, I could catch most of the nightly news.
 

Each day the reports were worse.
 
UNI fighters began to mine the Strait of
Hormuz
, the eight mile wide passage where every seven minutes a double-hulled supertanker full of Middle Eastern oil traveled to the Arabian Sea.
 
The U.S. Navy put mine sweepers to work, but tankers were bottlenecked and distribution slowed.
 

On top of that the UNI initiated a wave of terrorist activities on oil and gas fields in Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
 
Oil futures jumped to $210 per barrel.

President
Gladwell
assured the public the government had enough in its strategic reserves to keep America running for sixty days, but analysts predicted the cost for oil would soar even higher.
  

Things were also not getting any better in Europe.
 
Ultraconservatives of France’s National Front and Germany’s National Democratic Party won elections, which led to renewed rioting from their Muslim populations.
 
The new German premier promised to close mosques, deport non-citizen Muslims, and limit Muslim rights in ways that seems uncomfortably close to Hitler’s restrictions imposed on Jews: Muslims were banned from owning firearms, were banned from trains or airplanes, were not allowed to serve in the military or public office, were barred from public assistance of any kind, including higher education.
 
The majority opinion was that the measures were just and necessary.
 

Finland handled its unrest simply and swiftly: all Muslims were expelled from the country.
 
Fortunately, their Muslim population was only a few thousand.
 
Sweden refused the refugees, but Denmark finally took them in.

On the day of the presidential elections I monitored the exit polls as I went from room to room at St. Johns: Mullet led with 38%,
Gladwell
35%, McMillan 22%, with 5% to other candidates.
 
By the time I got to Romney Teagarden’s room, the polls were closed except for the West Coast.
 

Teagarden was an elderly black man who had been in the hospital for over a month.
 
He had trouble sleeping, so whenever I had extra time, I popped into his room to chat.
 
His scarred and dented face belied his dainty name and diction.
 
He was a wise and funny man.

With half of the precincts having reported, there was no clear winner.
 
The liberal Democratic states supported
Gladwell
, while the South and the Midwest were evenly divided between Mullet and McMillan.
 
By midnight, when the hospital corridors got quiet and I sat down with Teagarden, the fate of the country rested on three states: Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida.
 

As always, Teagarden pushed away the sleeping pills I set beside him.
 
“We could save the country a lot of time and money and just hold elections in Florida,” he said.
 
“They appear to decide our presidents anyhow.
 
Why not make it easy on ourselves?”

“Mullet is from Florida,” I said.

“Doesn’t mean anything.
 
Gladwell
has always been popular there, especially among blacks.
 
I think he’s got a good chance.”

“That is if they actually count the black vote.”

“Hmmm.”

“Did you vote, Mr. Teagarden?” I asked.

“You bet I did.
 
Gladwell
is a good man.
 
I believe he is the man to lead our country.”

“Do good men win?”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

The elections still hadn’t been decided when I got home from work at around 3 AM.
 
I ate a snack and went to bed.
 
When I woke around noon, I still didn’t find out.
 

For the third time in history, and not since 1824, none of the presidential candidates won enough electoral votes to win.
 
Of the 538 electoral votes, a presidential candidate needed an electoral majority of 270 to win.
 
Between the three candidates, the electoral votes fell as follows:
Gladwell
, 235; Mullet, 214; McMillan, 89.
 
As dictated by Article II of The United States Constitution, the decision rested with the House of Representatives.
 

The House of Representatives immediately went into session, voting en-block by state, one vote per state determined by the majority of delegates from that state.
 
The vote continued until one candidate received more than half of the state delegations, 26 state votes.
 
After three ballots, no candidate had 26 states.
 
Finally, on the forth ballot, Republican delegates in three states swung their votes to Mullet.
 
Democratic candidate Joseph Finkelstein, chosen by the Senate, won the vice presidency.
 

 
Nobody could believe it.
 
Even though
Gladwell
had won the majority of both electoral and popular votes, Warren P. Mullet was our new president.
 

The television commentators and news columnists, trying to explain the election results, concluded that despite the map-changing horrors taking place in Europe and the Middle East, Americans did not feel compelled to spend any more money or send any more soldiers to a never ending crisis.
 
Americans were weary of the Middle East.
 
They resented that Europe had created its problems by allowing huge numbers of Muslim immigrants and now wanted America’s help to control them.
 
To many Americans, Warren Mullet represented a solid, old-fashioned American male, who would protect American values and keep it safe from the excessive liberalism that had brought down Europe and had, through
Gladwell’s
Cultural Accommodation Policy, threatened America’s vision of itself as a Christian nation.
 
Americans wanted life to go back to normal, completely unwilling to entertain the possibility that normal might not be in the cards.
      

The American Civil Liberties Union as well as moderate Muslim groups—including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America—were outraged, concerned that Mullet planned to violate the First Amendment Right to freedom of religion.
 
By the time I got to work that evening, bands of Muslim demonstrators were marching outside government buildings in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
 

By evening a riot broke out on the west side of Detroit.
 

It began in a bar on the border between a mixed neighborhood and a white working-class part of town where Warren Mullet supporters were celebrating his victory.
 
A handful of Arab youth threw a rock into the bar window.
 
Before the police arrived, a fight spilled into the street.
 
As the police began arresting everyone involved and waited for the backup vans to transport the arrestees, an angry crowd of spectators gathered, which then headed into the Muslim part of the city, growing in mass like lava pouring down a volcano.
 
Looting and fires spread through the northwest part of Detroit,
then
crossed over to the east side.

Every mosque they came to was burned to the ground.
  

#

I checked on Cynthia before I went to work.
 
I knew she was upset about the elections and the riot.
 

As I pushed open her door, I thought of all the times I had babysat her, fed her dinner, and read her to sleep.
 
I was eight years older and had in a way always felt she was my—not my parents’—responsibility.
 
When I was younger, it made me furious whenever they left for an evening out or on a vacation, not because I felt unfairly burdened, but because I was appalled they could be so unfeeling.
 
Maybe they never knew how hard it was on her—I never told them, and when they returned Cynthia cavorted like a puppy, which probably dismissed any worries they had.
 
They didn’t know her fear, her loneliness.
 
Not like I did.
 

Cynthia asked me to read her a story from her children’s book of Islamic tales.

“
Kan ya ma
kan
,” it began, the Arabic equivalent to Once upon a time.
 
“There was and there was not a time.”
 
The story was about a man who walks to market with his son and their donkey.
 
A neighbor stops them and tells the father he ought to let his son ride, so he sets his son on the donkey.
 
As they amble on, they pass a traveler who scolds the son for riding while his father walks, so the man helps his son down and climbs on the donkey.
 
A third person then reprimands the father for his selfishness in making his son walk, so the father pulls up his son beside him.
 
“The poor donkey,” cries out another, berating them for making the donkey
carry
such a heavy load.
 
Fed up, the father hoists the donkey on his shoulders and staggers down the road, until someone laughs at him for being a fool.
 
He sets the donkey down, takes his son’s
hand,
and they set off to market as before, the donkey by their side.

“I guess the story means we shouldn’t listen to advice from other people,” Cynthia said.

“You should listen to the voice inside.”

“To God,” she said, then added thoughtfully, “If God is the voice inside then he can’t be Muslim or Christian can he, because that’s on the outside.
 
That’s people telling you what to believe, right?”

“How did you get to be so smart?”

Cynthia smiled,
then
her face turned pensive again.
 
“So why is everybody fighting?”

“Come on, don’t start crying again.”

“I won’t,” she said, her eyes welling up.
 
“Miss
Jiluwis
says happiness is only realized in the face of unhappiness.
 
Do you think that’s true?”

Fingers of ice squeezed my heart.
 
Cynthia had been confiding her unhappiness to her teacher rather than her family.
 
How could I be so blind?
 
It seemed like every problem, every insensitivity, every fuckup in our family scored a raw grove into Cynthia, hurting her in a way we would never understand.
 
I was guilty as anyone.
 
I was her sister.
 
“You feel you aren’t happy anymore, but you used to be happy?” I asked.

“I used to be stupid,” she said.
  

#

For a week following the election, as I went from room to room during my hospital shift, changing bedpans and taking temperatures, I caught glimpses of the Detroit riots on television.
 

I couldn’t believe this was happening in America.
 

The day after the first riot erupted, buses of teenagers from Dearborn, Michigan arrived in Detroit, armed and ready to join the fight.
 
The National Guard was mobilized, and on the third day of riots, 4,000 Marines were deployed.
 
Police and military troops tried block by block to suppress the crowds and restore order.
 
Many of the rioters were armed and shot at the troops.

After seven days of rioting, 843 were dead, 2,356 injured, 10,000 were arrested, and more than 2,000 buildings had burned down.