Imminent danger they understand. Mortality is beyond them.
We discuss their lives and deaths in terms of numbers. Three thousand African elephants remain in the wild, two hundred snow leopards. Each death is an act of subtraction. Each birth an act of addition.
Be fruitful and multiply, God told Moses.
Divide and conquer, said the generals.
You do the math.
Now, your author understands that math is not why readers read novels. He asks your indulgence and your patience and promises that there is more to this story than numbers. There is drama. There is catharsis. Everywhere you look in this book, you will find people. People in need. People who want what you want—to feel safe, to be loved, to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. Each of their deaths is an act of subtraction.
This is their story. And if you don’t like it, your author encourages you to put the book down and shout— Boo phooey.
Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
—Voltaire
“I had my hand on a metal baseball bat, just in case,” said Nate, twelve. “’Cause I was going to go down fighting if I was going to go down.”
—New York Times, May 9, 2019
Before
The Nadirs
There they are, America’s future. Alone at first, then all together.
PS29, Brooklyn. The hushed reverence of boredom commonly known as a children’s recital. It’s 6:00 p.m. on a Thursday. The elementary school auditorium is like a chapel, a nondenominational holy space where adults congregate to worship the promise of their young. Piano, piano, dance troupe, Mozart violin screech, inappropriately suggestive pop ballad, ginger magician. It’s April 2009, and the stock market is spiraling. Parents sit on folding chairs, trying to shake off the muffled outrage of their commute long enough to experience the emotional transcendence of actually being present, while at the same time recording young Sasha or Liam or Nicole’s musical efforts onto a digital medium, never to be seen again. Beside them, older siblings slump, locked in the broad Kabuki of their tedium. Peppered through the crowd, clots of younger siblings fidget and whine, feet dangling, caught in the witching hour of their bedtime. They are two kinds of difficult—jittery from hurried car snacks or slumped in butter noodle lethargy.
The stock market fell 325 points today. It will fall 325 more tomorrow. You can smell the panic in the air.
Judge Margot Nadir sits fourth row center with her second husband, Remy. There is a sculpted plastic infant carrier on the seat next to him. Inside, their ten-month-old son is sleeping, for now, chirping his somnolent baby nonsense. That constant runner of gasps and clucks, what the judge and her husband have come to realize for young Hadrian are simply the sounds of being alive.
Judge Nadir. It is a term of address she is still getting used to, having been appointed to the federal bench late last year following a high-profile career as an assistant US attorney in lower Manhattan. Now—instead of battling traffic every morning in sneakers, her dress shoes stuffed inside her tote—she dons the robes at Cadman Plaza, hear ye, hear ye, the newest distinguished justice of the US District Court for the Eastern District—having been transported from their apartment in Brooklyn Heights in an official black car.
After years of advocating a position, her opinions are now recorded as law. She has become the Decider. It is a power they joke about at home—Remy reminding her she’s only called your honor at work. At home, he says, we make decisions together. And she smiles and says of course, because she wants him to feel heard. They are still in the honeymoon phase of their marriage. Twenty-two months. Thirty if you add in the courtship. Long enough to cohabitate and have a baby but not long enough to learn all the tier-one secrets.
It is the second marriage for her, the first for him. Remy arrived with a record collection. She came with a six-year-old daughter.
Onstage the curtain flutters, nervous third and fourth graders peering out through the gap. Judge Nadir unfolds the paper program handed to her on the way in by a young girl in a wheelchair. She scans the list of names, finds her daughter, Story, who turned nine on Saturday. She’s listed first of twelve. A wave of relief passes over the judge. Maybe they can slip out before the medley from Phantom of the Opera and make it home in time for some kind of decent meal. The judge has an opinion to finish tonight, and she doesn’t want to be up until all hours writing.
The People v. Gary Fey. Tax evasion and money laundering. It’s what people with money do these days. Invent a latticework of shell companies and funnel their millions offshore. Divorce among the rich has become a matter of international intrigue.