Ten Little Indians (12 page)

“You know,” she said, “I don’t think everybody who died in the towers was innocent.”

“Who are you?” he asked. “Osama’s press agent?”

“Those towers were filled with bankers and stockbrokers and lawyers. How honest do you think they were?”

“They didn’t deserve to die.”

“Think about it. Maybe they did deserve to die. Open your mind.”

“It’s tough to be open-minded about this stuff.”

“But you’ve got to be. You can let any event have one meaning, right? Your games don’t have one meaning, do they?”

“No.”

“All right, then, maybe September eleventh means things nobody has thought of yet.”

“You’ve thought of other meanings, right?”

“Yes, I have. So listen to this. Let’s say twelve hundred men died that day. How many of those guys were cheating on their wives? A few hundred, probably. How many of them were beating their kids? One hundred more, right? Don’t you think one of those bastards was raping his kids? Don’t you think, somewhere in the towers, there was an evil bastard who sneaked into his daughter’s bedroom at night and raped her in the ass?”

He couldn’t believe she was doing this math, this moral addition and subtraction, this terrible algebra. He wondered if God would kill thousands of good people in order to destroy one monster. He wondered if he was a monster, making the games he made and earning the money he earned. Ha, ha, he thought, but I’m Mr. Funny. I’m the highlight of every party. I’m the best dinner guest in the history of the world. I can make any woman fall in love with me in under five minutes and alienate her five minutes later.

“I’m not some wimpy liberal or anything,” he said. “I believe in capital punishment. I believe in the necessity of war. But I don’t think anybody deserves to die.”

“You’re contradicting yourself.”

“Fine, then I’m a contradiction, but at least I admit that. You’re talking about these things like you know more than the rest of us. Like you’re absolutely right.”

“Somebody has to be right,” she said and tried to sit up but could only fall back and close her eyes against the nausea.

“Are you okay?” he asked, happy she was quiet for a moment. How could she say the things she was saying? Wasn’t she afraid of God?

“I’m just dizzy,” she said. “If I keep my eyes open, I’m going to vomit.”

“You’ve got a concussion, I told you. I’m sure of it. We’ve got to get you to the hospital.”

“No, you wanted to talk, and we’re going to talk. I’m going to tell you everything, and you’re going to listen, and then you’re going to take me to the hospital.”

“I don’t want to hear the things you’re saying.”

“That’s the problem. Nobody wants to hear these things, but I’m thinking them, and I have to say them.”

He stood and walked around the room. He wondered if he was supposed to ignore this woman. Maybe that was the lesson he was supposed to learn. Words were dangerous. His nouns and verbs had destroyed his marriage and created a game that mocked the dead. Her story seemed more potentially destructive than any bomb or game he could create or imagine.

“Are you going to listen to me?” she asked.

“Talk,” he said.

“All right, all right,” she said. “Didn’t you get sick of all the news about the Trade Center? Didn’t you get exhausted by all the stories and TV shows and sad faces and politicians and memorials and books? It was awful and obscene, all of it, it was grief porn.”

“I got so tired of it, I picked up my TV, carried it down the stairs, and threw it in the Dumpster.”

“That’s exactly what you should have done. I wished I could do it. But my husband and my sons—they’re twins, they’re both sixteen—watched that garbage every day. My husband put U.S. flags in every window of our house. What kind of Indians put twenty-two flags in their windows?”

Her husband had been a champion powwow fancydancer when she’d met him, a skinny, beautiful, feminine boy who moved in bright-feathered circles, but he’d become a tired grunting old man. And a patriot! He’d already talked the twins into joining the marines when they graduated from high school.

“Hey, Ma,” they’d said in their dual grating voices. “The marines will pay for college. Isn’t that great?”

Jesus, she was raising two wanna-be marines. How could any Indian put on a U.S. military uniform and not die of toxic irony? Hell, she hadn’t let her boys play with toy guns when they were little, and now her husband took them on three hunting trips a year. She lived in a house with deer antlers mounted on the walls. Antlers and flags! Antlers and flags! Antlers and flags! Men have walked on the moon and written
Hamlet
and painted the Sistine Chapel and played the piano like Glenn Gould, she thought, and other men still have the need to hang antlers and flags on their walls. She wondered why anybody was surprised when men crashed jets into buildings.

“Nobody is innocent, right?” she said. “Isn’t that what all of the holy books say? We’re all sinners? But after the Trade Center, it was all about the innocent victims, all the innocent victims, and I kept thinking—I
knew
one of those guys in the towers was raping his daughter. Raping her. Maybe he was raping his son, too. And beating his wife. I think about that morning, and I wonder if the bastard was smiling when he hopped on a train for work. I think about his daughter and son sitting in some generic and heartless suburban classroom, just sad and broken and dying inside. And his wife sitting at home dying inside. That bastard gets off his train and walks up to his office on the hundred and seventh floor or something, and everybody loves him there. He’s a hero at work. And Mr. Hero is sitting at his desk, smiling and being heroic, when that airplane flies straight into his office. Flies right through the window and obliterates him, completely disappears him. And the news travels, right? The wife turns on the television and sees the towers burning, and the teachers wheel televisions into the classrooms, and the son and daughter watch the towers burning. The wife and kids count the floors, right? They count all the way up to the hundred and seventh floor, and they see it burning, and they’re happy, right? They’re hopeful, right? Aren’t they hopeful? Then the first tower comes down. Both towers come down. And the wife is jumping up and down at home. She’s celebrating. But the kids have to stay calm, because they’re in public, you know, but inside they’re jumping up and down like their mom. They run home, and all three of them sit in the living room together and watch the news, and they wait. Yeah, they wait for him to come home. The news is talking about the survivors, right? About the people who made it out. And the wife and kids are praying to God he died. That he burned to death or jumped out a window or was running down the stairs when the tower fell. They sit in the living room for three days, waiting for him to come home, and then they wait for three more days, waiting for him to come home, and on the seventh day, they realize he isn’t coming home. He’s dead and they’re happy. The monster is gone and they’re celebrating. They dance around the living room and sing songs and dance dances and they’re happy. Don’t you think all of this is possible? Don’t you think there was at least one man in the towers who deserved to die? Don’t you think there’s a wife and kids who are happy he died? Don’t you think there’s some daughter walking around who whispers Osama’s name with tenderness and affection? Don’t you think there’s a wife out there who thanks God or Allah or the devil for Osama’s rage?”

She wept. He sat on the floor beside her and held her head in his lap. He stroked her hair until she calmed down.

“We’re going to go now,” he said. “I’m going to take you to the hospital, okay?”

“Wait, wait,” she said. “There’s more.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I don’t want to hear these things. I don’t want to think about them. I don’t want to remember them.”

“Please,” she whispered. “Please listen to me.”

She was desperate. She needed him. He wanted to be needed. He nodded.

“The thing is,” she said, “the biggest thing is, ever since the Trade Center fell down, I’ve been hoping it would happen to me. I kept hoping I’d be at work or in some shopping mall or theater when it blew up. So when that bomber ran inside the restaurant and shouted at us, I was happy. I knew God had answered my prayers. I knew I was going to survive. I was going to live, and I was going to crawl out of the ruins, and I was going to walk away from my life. I knew they’d never find me and would figure I was dead. They’d mark me down as dead, but I’d be alive. I’d be so alive, and I’d walk away. I’d walk away and start a new life, a better life. I was going to escape.”

How could anyone be so unhappy? How could anybody survive so much pain and loneliness? But these questions were inadequate, he knew, and he was inadequate. She needed him to be a good man, and he had never been that, not once in his life. He pushed her away and ran for the bathroom. But he was not fast enough and vomited on the living room carpet.

“It’s awful,” he said. “It’s so awful.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I am, I am.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Take me to the hospital. Make sure I’m safe, and you never have to see me again. Promise you’ll take me to the hospital. Promise me I’ll be safe.”

Stronger than he knew, he picked her up like a child and carried her out the door and down three flights of stairs. Curled in his arms, she cried and prayed. Through the crowded and hectic streets, he carried her. All around them, men and women and children stared up into the skies and waited for death to swoop down and claim them. He looked at those strangers and knew each of them lived with terrible secrets. He knew that man cheated on his wife with her sister and that woman pinched her Alzheimered mother’s arms until they bled. And that teenage boy set dogs on fire and that pretty teenage girl once knocked down a fat ugly girl and spit in her mouth. And he knew that father had two sons, one who couldn’t read and one who wore dresses, and he made them punch each other because they were stupid and weak. And there was a white grandmother who hated her Mexican grandchildren and a priest who burned himself with cigarettes whenever he dreamed about sex with little boys. And that man had abandoned his wife and children and didn’t know they were now living in a car, and that woman hadn’t talked to her father in fifteen years and didn’t know he was now dying of prostate cancer. And none of these people, not one of them, had loved any of the others well enough. Failures, he thought, we’re all failures. Carrying the woman, he walked among these sinners, the obese and the vain, the intolerant and the selfish, the liars and thieves, the wasteful and the avaricious. And wasn’t he the greatest sinner? Wasn’t he more dangerous to the people who loved him than any terrorist could ever be? Wasn’t he the man who failed the woman who’d loved him most? Didn’t he explode her life and burn her to the ground? Right now, somewhere in the world, wasn’t she still grieving the death of their marriage and the death of some large part of her? Forgive me, God, oh, forgive me, he thought as he carried this other exploded woman. If he could save her, he hoped he might be saved. But she wanted to escape. She pushed and pulled against his grip and he set her down. Everything smelled of smoke and fire. She kissed him hard and touched his face. He wanted to talk, to say the words that would free her. But he was silent and she was silent. And wasn’t silence more ambiguous and terrifying than anything else? Loose-limbed, he trembled. He wanted to love her, and he wanted his love to be bittersweet and irrepressible. He wanted his love to be different than everybody else’s. He wanted his love to be the only true image of God. He wanted his love to be the tyrant that saved the world no matter if the world desired to be saved. He wanted his love to be the wine and bread, and the blood and flesh. He reached for her, a dangerous stranger in a city of dangerous strangers, but she turned away from him and walked unsteadily through the crowd. How many loveless people walk among the barely loved? She looked back once, and he thought to chase after her, but she shook her head, and again walked away from him. And he watched her until he couldn’t see her anymore.

M
Y WIFE AND I
didn’t know Mr. Grief in person until our baby boy got his face stuck between his mattress and crib and suffocated himself blue. He died three times that day, Mr. Grief squeezing his lungs tight, but the muscular doctors and nurses battled that suffocating monster man and brought our boy back to life three times. He was our little blue baby Jesus.

I’m lying. Our baby wasn’t Jesus. Our baby was alive only a little bit. Mostly he was dead and slept his way through a coma. In Children’s Hospital, our baby was hooked up to a million dollars’ worth of machines that breathed, pissed, and pooped for him. I bet you could line up all of my wife’s and my grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and first, second, and third cousins, and rob their wallets and purses, and maybe you’d collect about $512.

Mr. Grief was a billionaire. He could afford to check on our baby every six hours, but every six hours, my wife and I cussed him out and sent him running. My wife is beautiful and powerful and only twenty-five years old, but she is magic like a grandmother, and Indian grandmothers aren’t afraid of a little man like Mr. Grief.

One night, while I guarded over our baby, my wife wrapped her braids in a purple bandana, shoved her hands into thick work clothes, sneaked up on Mr. Grief in the hallway, and beat him severely about the head and shoulders like she was Muhammad Ali.

When you’re hurting, it feels good to hurt somebody else. But you have to be careful. If you get addicted to the pain-causing, then you start hurting people who don’t need hurting. If you turn into a pain-delivering robot, then you start thinking everybody looks like Mr. Grief and everybody deserves a beating.

One day when my wife was crying, I swear I saw Mr. Grief hiding behind her eyes. So I yelled and screamed at her and called her all of the bad names. But I got really close to her to yell, because it’s more effective to yell when you’re closer to your enemy, and I smelled her true scent. I knew it was only my wife inside my wife, because she smelled like tenderness, and Mr. Grief smells like a porcupine rotting dead on the side of the road.