I heard her speaking Chinese or whatever, the young man would say, I just knew it wasn’t English, and you know, what they’re saying about China these days—it seemed better not to get involved.
The mother with the stroller would say nothing. She would never even see the news; her baby had a new molar coming in, and neither of them was sleeping through the night.
An isolated incident, the police report would say a few weeks later. No leads on the man who’d done the pushing. No evidence of why he might have done such a thing.
It was happening in other cities, in infinite variations: a kick or a punch on the sidewalk, a spray of spit in the face. It would happen everywhere, here and there at first, then all over, and eventually the news would stop reporting the stories, because they weren’t new anymore.
* * *
? ? ?
We can fly home, Ethan said. Plane tickets were scarce and expensive, but they had some money saved. We can fly home and take care of whatever needs doing.
She didn’t know how to explain there was nothing left to go home for anymore. That it wasn’t home any longer. Instead she focused on a different word: we.
I want to leave New York, she told Ethan. Please, let’s just leave. Anywhere else.
It didn’t make sense, exactly; her parents had never been to New York; she’d left their house years ago; why this need to flee? But on another level it did make sense, this urgent need she felt to start over. To begin again somewhere in her new orphaned state, in a new place where she could cushion herself from the hard corners of the world. She wanted to be a bird keeping her head low. She wanted to not stick up. Ethan emailed his father, who reached out to his network: neighbors, colleagues, old roommates, friends of friends, all the dividends of goodwill he’d collected over the course of his gregarious life. Someone always knew someone; it was how things happened in his world, and neither of them thought much of it then, except to be grateful: as it turned out, Ethan’s godfather’s brother was golf buddies with a Harvard dean, who said the university was hiring, or would be soon. A few phone calls, a résumé slipped over the transom, and soon Ethan found himself newly employed as an adjunct in the linguistics department.
Within two weeks it was settled. They said goodbye to no one; they’d lost touch with everyone they’d known in the city by then. They took little with them because they had little to take: a suitcase of clothes between them, a stack of dictionaries. They would start again from scratch.
* * *
? ? ?
He can’t imagine it. She can see it on his face: the puzzled look of someone trying to feel what they’ve never felt. To see what they’ve never seen. Her father had told her a parable once, blind men trying to describe an elephant, able to grasp it only in parts—a wall, a snake, a fan, a spear. A cautionary tale: how futile to believe you could ever share your experience with another. Details pour out of her now like sharp grains of sand, but it’s still just a nightmare someone else had. Nothing can make him understand it but living through it, and she would give her life to make sure that never happens.
But how did it end, Bird asks, and she thinks: yes. So much more to tell.
* * *
? ? ?
She sank into her new life like it was a thick down comforter. In their little house in Cambridge, purchased with every penny they’d saved—the only upside to the Crisis, Ethan joked grimly, so many houses for sale, cheap—she painted the walls a warm orange-gold. The color she wanted their lives to be. They repaired the windows, sanded the floors, planted a garden: squash and tomatoes, lettuce of a shocking green. Inside the tall fence that hemmed in their postage-stamp of a yard, it was easy to imagine the rest of the world was like this, too. It was easy to forget the Crisis still raging outside, because with money and luck and connections they had simply stepped out of it, the way you’d step out of a blizzard, into warm dry shelter.
For everyone else, it came to an end with a snowy video clip from a security camera. The footage showed a grainy gray figure, shrouded in a hoodie, skulking outside an office building on a DC street. It all happens quickly: a dark-suited man emerges from the lobby, the hooded figure raises a gun. A flash of light. The dark-suited figure crumples. And then, just before fleeing off-screen, the man in the hoodie glances up at the security camera, as if just noticing it for the first time, his sunglassed face centered in the still frame.
The dark-suited figure, news reports explained as they ran the clip on a loop, was a senator from Texas, one of the most hawkish on what he called the Chinese Crisis. He’d made a name for himself with fiery calls for sanctions, polemics on the creeping menace of Chinese industry, thinly veiled insinuations about loyalty. But with the assassination attempt, public opinion made a swift U-turn: though the face of the man in the hoodie was too blurry to identify him, it was clear enough to show that he was East Asian—based on the context, analysts concluded, likely Chinese. Police departments were flooded with calls pointing fingers at neighbors, coworkers, the barista at the corner café. On social media, dozens of photos—pulled from online records, dating profiles, work portraits, vacation snapshots—were posted side by side with the still frame from the security tape by those sure they’d cracked the case. All in all, amateur sleuths would positively identify the culprit as thirty-four different men, aged nineteen to fifty-six and none resembling another, and because of this the shooter would never be apprehended, no one would ever be charged, and every Asian face would always remain a suspect—of the shooting, or of secretly sympathizing with it. From his hospital bed, bandaged shoulder prominently featured, the senator beat his drum. You see? They’ll stop at nothing, even cold-blooded murder. And who might be next? Editorials weighed in: not just an attack on the physical person of one senator, but an outright attack on our government, on our very way of life.