being flushed out? Because they didn’t. That’s all. That is all there is to it.
It was very cold and stormy, and I floated away, without trying, I believe. I closed my eyes while I drained away through that hole the storm had cut under the fence, through a channel under the wires, and it wasn’t until I was sloughed as a rag out through to the other side that I opened my eyes and saw where I was. Flung out with the trash. Nothing but trash.
I couldn’t move, roll on my side, or call out. I could only keep my head turned in one direction, to my right, my left ear drowning in the mud, my nose barely out of the water. I could only blink one eye, and wait to die. There is no real difference, when you come down to it, between dying alone or lumped with everyone else. It is cold, and miserable, and expected.
*
I HAVE TO STOP for a minute and sip my wine. Surely this young man will see all as clearly as I do now? Surely there can be no question. But if there is, I will go on. I go on, as if writing in my diary:
And from the mud a wailing, maddened farmer lifted me up and carried me across a stinking field, lit by lightning, for a long, long time, until we reached a barn and he ducked both our heads under the door, and lay me down in a wheelbarrow full of straw and leaves and left me there to sleep or die. In the morning he picked the handles up with his crooked arms and pushed me around the yard, past an overflowing dam and a duck pond, so that I could see the birds, and the sun shining on the water. He said I was his wife and that he loved me…
My interviewer is looking at me oddly. He’s adjusted his breath, like an athlete who suddenly sees that a race is going to be much longer and more strange than he’d guessed.
I rest, taking a moment to enjoy this small step forward toward being known. I lean back in my Adirondack, exhaling. The thin clouds over the horizon at the edge of the wheat fields are knotted and bunched; they haven’t unraveled and flattened the way they will by dusk. The wind is light but cool. Maybe, in a moment, I’ll ask this boy the question that’s bothered me these last three weeks; I will ask him why he thinks it is that everyone, everyone, researchers and historians and scholars, students trained, like him, to be rigorous—even the reporter-editor I once loved—have always been so willing, all these years, to believe a person like her, like Anne, I mean like me, could simply disappear? Could simply go down without a trace? Is it because it is easier to accept evil than to imagine winning over it? Is it because they only want to see what is obviously there? Reporters, reporters especially are so keen on that. And they care only for the worst, and find it. That is the news. They fight to find the worst of a story, and go into dark alleys, and are tough, and impolite, and unreasonable, and ingratiating, calling and calling and calling, Irish stubbornness it was, always fishing for more. He’d waited for my father one day outside the courthouse where we’d been called for an arraignment:
“Sir! Sir! Tell us anything about that woman, your client?”
My father called out, before lunging into a taxi: “I will tell you she is telling the truth!” I had followed him into the cab but looked back quickly at the man from the Times everyone said could get at the truth faster than anyone else, as though he were an athlete and the news was a race and the ribbon always fresh.
“But she’s accusing a politician’s son—a war hero!”
“You’re only a hero,” my father shouted out the window, “until you understand that no one is.”
The man who became my lover followed me a few months after this into a bookstore on 57th Street, where I used to go to find histories of what had happened during the war.
“Congratulations,” he said, peering at me over the bunkers of the shelves. “Your side won.”
“Thank you. It wasn’t us. It was justice.”
“Couldn’t agree more. Care to
It was very cold and stormy, and I floated away, without trying, I believe. I closed my eyes while I drained away through that hole the storm had cut under the fence, through a channel under the wires, and it wasn’t until I was sloughed as a rag out through to the other side that I opened my eyes and saw where I was. Flung out with the trash. Nothing but trash.
I couldn’t move, roll on my side, or call out. I could only keep my head turned in one direction, to my right, my left ear drowning in the mud, my nose barely out of the water. I could only blink one eye, and wait to die. There is no real difference, when you come down to it, between dying alone or lumped with everyone else. It is cold, and miserable, and expected.
*
I HAVE TO STOP for a minute and sip my wine. Surely this young man will see all as clearly as I do now? Surely there can be no question. But if there is, I will go on. I go on, as if writing in my diary:
And from the mud a wailing, maddened farmer lifted me up and carried me across a stinking field, lit by lightning, for a long, long time, until we reached a barn and he ducked both our heads under the door, and lay me down in a wheelbarrow full of straw and leaves and left me there to sleep or die. In the morning he picked the handles up with his crooked arms and pushed me around the yard, past an overflowing dam and a duck pond, so that I could see the birds, and the sun shining on the water. He said I was his wife and that he loved me…
My interviewer is looking at me oddly. He’s adjusted his breath, like an athlete who suddenly sees that a race is going to be much longer and more strange than he’d guessed.
I rest, taking a moment to enjoy this small step forward toward being known. I lean back in my Adirondack, exhaling. The thin clouds over the horizon at the edge of the wheat fields are knotted and bunched; they haven’t unraveled and flattened the way they will by dusk. The wind is light but cool. Maybe, in a moment, I’ll ask this boy the question that’s bothered me these last three weeks; I will ask him why he thinks it is that everyone, everyone, researchers and historians and scholars, students trained, like him, to be rigorous—even the reporter-editor I once loved—have always been so willing, all these years, to believe a person like her, like Anne, I mean like me, could simply disappear? Could simply go down without a trace? Is it because it is easier to accept evil than to imagine winning over it? Is it because they only want to see what is obviously there? Reporters, reporters especially are so keen on that. And they care only for the worst, and find it. That is the news. They fight to find the worst of a story, and go into dark alleys, and are tough, and impolite, and unreasonable, and ingratiating, calling and calling and calling, Irish stubbornness it was, always fishing for more. He’d waited for my father one day outside the courthouse where we’d been called for an arraignment:
“Sir! Sir! Tell us anything about that woman, your client?”
My father called out, before lunging into a taxi: “I will tell you she is telling the truth!” I had followed him into the cab but looked back quickly at the man from the Times everyone said could get at the truth faster than anyone else, as though he were an athlete and the news was a race and the ribbon always fresh.
“But she’s accusing a politician’s son—a war hero!”
“You’re only a hero,” my father shouted out the window, “until you understand that no one is.”
The man who became my lover followed me a few months after this into a bookstore on 57th Street, where I used to go to find histories of what had happened during the war.
“Congratulations,” he said, peering at me over the bunkers of the shelves. “Your side won.”
“Thank you. It wasn’t us. It was justice.”
“Couldn’t agree more. Care to
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