* * *
? ? ?
She’d sent Domi a letter when she left: a faltering attempt to say goodbye after their last, worst fight, which had ended with Domi stripping off the jacket Margaret had handed down to her—Take it, I’d rather be naked—and storming out. It was a whole precious sheet, front and back, and afterward she couldn’t remember which things she’d written and which she’d held back, trying to avoid Domi’s wrath, trying to spare Domi pain. All she knew for sure was that Domi never called, never came by, and eventually Margaret stopped waiting.
In the quiet of Ethan’s apartment, poems came to her like timid animals emerging after a storm.
She wrote about the hush of the city, how the pulse of it had changed with so many people gone. About love, and pleasure, and comfort. The smell of his neck in the early morning. The warm soft den of their bed at night. About finding stillness in the whirr that had been there for so long, a quiet place in the grinding, never-ending shriek of the Crisis. There was nowhere to publish these poems; only the big newspapers could afford to keep running, and that with government support; no one had time for poetry, for words, but she wrote phrases on scraps of paper, in the wide margins of Ethan’s dictionaries, and someday they would form the first grasping branches of her own book.
No one saw it yet, but by then, almost imperceptibly, the story of the Crisis had begun to solidify. Soon enough it would harden, like silt from turbid water, settling in a thick band of mud.
We know who caused all this, people were beginning to say. Ask yourself: who’s doing well because we’re on the decline? Fingers pointed firmly east. Look how China’s GDP was rising, their standard of living climbing. Over there you got Chinese rice farmers with smartphones, one congressman ranted on the House floor. Over here in the U.S. of A. you got Americans using bucket toilets because their water’s shut off for nonpayment. Tell me how that’s not backwards. Just you tell me.
The Crisis was China’s doing, some started to insist: all their manipulations, their tariffs and devaluations. Maybe they’d even had help, dismantling us from within. They want to take us down. They want to own our country.
Suspicious eyes swiveled to those with foreign faces, foreign names.
The question, people kept saying, is what are we going to do about it?
* * *
? ? ?
A frantic phone call from her mother, her voice nearly unintelligible: someone had pushed Margaret’s father down the stairs at the park. He’d passed by them, the man who’d done it—they were heading down, he coming up—but they hadn’t even glanced at him, and then he had turned and shoved her father with both hands, right between the shoulder blades. Margaret’s father was sixty-four and had grown thinner, slighter, his body still compact but no longer as strong as it was, touches of arthritis gumming his hips and shoulders, and he had tumbled down, not even trying to catch himself, just down, like something already dead, the edge of the bottom step shattering his skull just above his ear, all of it so sudden neither of them even had time to scream. By the time Margaret’s mother understood what had happened and turned to see who’d pushed him, the man was gone. Her father never regained consciousness, and two and a half hours after her mother’s phone call, he was dead. The next morning, reeling from grief, her mother had a heart attack in the kitchen of their empty house—now too big for her alone—and this time Margaret, still trying to book a plane ticket, got the news from a police officer who’d managed to find her, as next of kin.
It was already happening then, though she didn’t know it yet: already happening not just in the push down the stairs but in the people who watched the elderly man fall and shrank away from the man who’d pushed him, letting him pass—whether out of shock or fear or approval, none of them would ever dare to ask themselves. It was already happening, in the three people—a middle-aged woman, a young man in his twenties, a mother pushing a stroller—who passed by before the fourth called an ambulance, in the moment they saw the elderly woman crouching over her husband’s tangled body, not screaming but murmuring to him unintelligibly, in a language neither of them had spoken in decades, even in private, pulled out of her now in a desperate hope that these words would be rooted deeply enough inside him that he might still hear.
I didn’t realize he was hurt, the woman would say to her husband later, when they saw a report about the unfortunate incident on the news. I thought maybe he slipped and fell or something, I didn’t want to embarrass anyone.