The Big Bang (30 page)

“Remember, you asked us. You said, ‘How'd we let this happen?'”

“Yeah. Maybe.” She wondered if he was on the Team. If he wasn't, he was in terrible danger from their presence and she'd have to think on that later. “It's not any one thing. Part of it was because a lot of people didn't want to believe what bin Laden said. He said over and over his goal was the destruction of the US. Other parts…some of it was isolationist tendencies, ‘Let 'em kill each other, not our problem.' Part was this lingering, hippie-wannabe, ‘War is not the answer' attitude. I think too many people let themselves forget.”

“Forget what?” Jake asked.

“We forgot our past and the good we've done. In the sixties…well, there was this huge outburst about the war and civil rights, correct? I don't think anybody could argue the civil rights movement was a bad thing, but it turns out a hell of a lot of opposition to the war was about not wanting to be drafted. You can look it up. As soon as the draft was over, the ‘huge' anti-war movement petered out. It was plain selfishness. JFK wasn't dead in his grave ten years, and these spoiled brats were having a tantrum—”

“You're losing me,” Jake put in.

“I'm trying to be accurate and thorough. In some ways, the sixties were one of the worst things that happened to our country. Sex, drugs, 'n' rock 'n' roll. STDs, huge addiction problems, and then disco.” Hank smiled at that. She was warming up, just like she was giving one of her talks. “I don't want to be like those kids, and dismiss
everything
in the sixties as bad. The sweeping generalization became gospel to them. This kind of groupthink took over, and in that reality everything about America was bad. My sister used to say you see what you look for. They looked for all the things America and Americans had done wrong in the world, and seeing that justified their own position and politics. Some of those geniuses called us Ameri
k
a, like we were an extension of the Nazi party.”

She had to stand up and walk around as she talked; she had too much energy to be confined to her chair. Was it energy, or was the fire within beginning to rage again? “So they got older. They got married, got mortgages, got jobs. And they began to assume positions of power, right? And they carried a lot of that suspicious attitude about America into their new positions. They treated America like it was already guilty, ‘Sir, do you still beat your wife?' ‘America, are you still the capitalist tormenter of innocent people around the world?'”

Jake was looking a little bored. She hadn't had a chance to craft this speech. These were random ideas pouring out of her. She turned up the urgency…this felt right, and she wanted so much to make him understand how it had happened, how the country came to be a place where innocent women would be killed in front of a cheering crowd. “It was like a religion for these people. America bad, and ‘we,' our group, are the ones who see it. We good people, we have to enlighten the poor huddled masses about the sins of the country, and keep pounding on it. And if you poor huddled masses don't see the wisdom of what we're telling you, why, it isn't that we have a difference of opinion. We enlightened ones are right, and you, with your different point of view, you are not just wrong, you are evil.”

She'd been a public speaker long enough to know when she was losing her audience. But, Lord, she wanted him to understand, to see where the poisonous disdain had arisen. And those people who'd decided that Amerika was guilty…they began to move into positions in the public media. They became the gatekeepers of knowledge, which allowed them to filter, consciously or not, what was presented to the public at large. One event, out of thousands in a day, and that was the single action or statement pounded into the public awareness in the newspapers or nightly television news. People were living their lives, too busy working and sleeping and eating and screwing to pay attention, so that filtered presentation of “reality” became the persistent, pernicious background noise they took for granted, without having the energy or time to objectively review the received wisdom of their self-appointed betters.

Desperately, she went on, resorting to shorthand. “They hated George Bush. Misreported what he said, mocked him, told outright lies about what was happening in Iraq, hell, even before the war. CNN had a bureau in Baghdad before the second Iraq war. They knew about the torture of his citizens, the money Saddam was stealing from the UN, but they kept quiet just so they'd be able to have a voice in Iraq, and get one over on their competitors. How could we trust them to tell the truth about America?”

She cast around in her mind for the examples, but, for God's sake, there were so many. “There was a fake ‘anti-war' movement started by Move On, this bunch of Clinton apologists. They funded the movement, brought it together, got some actual soldiers to protest the Iraq war. But almost none of the major papers pointed out that this ‘anti-war movement' was as natural as Pamela Anderson's knockers.”

She felt herself beginning to tremble again. Wondered in passing if she was going to have a seizure, but by God she'd tell this boy what she knew before she did. “The press focused on the casualties and the missteps. They didn't report what we were doing that
was
working: in 2005, over 97 percent of Iraqi children under five were immunized against measles, mumps, and rubella and polio. Teacher's salaries went up…from two dollars a month to a hundred dollars a month.”

The numbers, the figures were there. But it was rolling off of Jake, like water off a duck's ass. The words began tumbling out of her. “Another million kids were enrolled in primary school, too. Newspapers, like, two hundred and fifty registered, over a hundred radio stations and about fifty newsmagazines. You think there was an independent press under Saddam? Cell phones. There were over seven million new subscribers. But you didn't hear about any of that, did you?”

The kid looked green, like the mush they'd eaten had made him sick. Hank, who'd apparently read her rambling document closely, prompted her. “Tell him about the marriages.”

Marriage. Girls, that Jake could understand. “There were a record number of marriages taking place in the country. The brides didn't have to worry about being raped by Uda or Hyundai, whatever the hell that scumbag's name was, and having their husbands shot by his security guards.”

Looking at his hands, Jake said something barely audible. She didn't hear him, but Hank did. Hank said, “Hey, now.”

Jake lifted his head, repeated himself. “You were one of them, Molly.”

It was like running for home base and catching a two by four in the face. She grunted a little. “Huh.”

“I know who you were,” he said, looking at her. “My mom said you were the only person who could make her laugh when she felt like crying about George Bush. You called him The Shrub. You were one of the people you're talking about, Molly.”

No ready response presented itself to her. A torrent of words was there in her mind and her mouth, words about Ginnie and how things are now, excuses, protests; too many words and too much knowledge trying to get through that small exit, like people fleeing a burning building and dying jammed in the doorways.

Hank was speaking on her behalf. “People change, Jake,” he said reasonably with a little of the hard-won wisdom that years and miles can pound into a person, even when that wisdom sounds like a feeble cliché to someone with fewer years and a lot less mileage.

She wasn't sure what else he said. Now the words were piling up, backing up on her. The old words, the ones she'd tried to forget and excuse, the dismissive columns, the belittling tones, that twist of cleverness that manifested in “The Shrub,” all of it was spilling over from her brain into her gut, choking her. The bilious arrogance of her own righteousness and the sweet satisfaction she took in her own special insight was making her gag.

Molly knew she'd never make it to the bathroom, and she lunged for the sink.

Hank tried to hold her head while she vomited, but she waved him away. Between heaves, she screamed at them both to just leave her alone (which was pretty funny in a not-funny way, considering it was Jake's home), but both men wisely let her be.

She ran the tap water to rinse the sink. Eventually, there was nothing left in her stomach to expel, and she was retching up white stringy goo. The power went out in the house, so it was past 8, but Molly didn't trust herself to leave the sink. She kept running cold water in the basin, rinsing her mouth; eventually she gave up and stuck her entire head under the faucet.

Hair wet, shuddering, Molly sank down against the cabinets in the dark kitchen.

The dimness of the room pressed in on her. She began talking to Ginnie, just like when they were girls, back in the Lone Star State, lying in their room at night, pondering life, the universe, and everything else after lights out. “Why was it that whenever someone became an elected official, I automatically assumed they were a fool and a knave? Who made me their judge? Was I so qualified to judge anyone? If someone judged me, looked at my life and the piss-poor job I did with the people who loved me…anyone can be made out to be a fool and knave. Look at Gandhi. Man did a lot of good, even if his fashion sense was a little lacking. But he was crazy as a shithouse rat, too. Put nubile young girls in his bed when he slept to test his purity. Wanted to create some kind of economy of fifty million Indians doing weaving from home. Hell, his crusade only worked because the British government had some human decency in them. Hitler would have just opened a new concession in Hindu soap if he'd come up against Gandhi. And the modern Chinese would've been glad to have some new targets for their tanks.”

She shivered in the darkness. She'd been cold a lot, since Ginnie's…well, was she even going to think it, or just dance around it like some elderly Southern belle who got the vapors when she saw two dogs humping?
Since Ginnie's execution
.

But Ginnie wasn't there, and Molly was in a heap on the floor without her biggest ally, facing the harshest critic she'd ever known. Molly was pretty sure she wasn't going to let herself off the hook this time.

Would Gandhi have been able to do anything if the press of the day had worked him over the way they had worked over America and Americans before the Big Bang? If she'd belittled him the way she'd made a career of belittling George Bush? She could see the headlines. “Pacifist Pedophile.” With no effort at all, she could hear herself giving a speech. “Randy Gandhi,” or “Mahatma the Molester” she'd tell the crowd of true believers. “He was a lawyer, can you believe it? And don't get me started on those Hindus and their cows.” She could even hear their approving laughter and applause. As long as she was telling them what they wanted to hear.

She left the house well before daybreak. She had no idea where she'd go, what she would do. She had to get away from the little house. The walk proved what she already knew: wherever you go, there you are.

She didn't have a flail to beat herself with, but her thoughts drew their own kind of blood as she walked, once more, through the darkened city.
Anyone could be made a fool
. Faced with it, she realized the popular press; the way she had made a living (and she thought, a difference) was an ugly, high-school-level process, with the clique deciding who was cool and who was not simply by deciding it was so. By spreading the word incessantly about the decision of the clique, they created their own reality.

She was unaware that she was talking as she shambled along. “Lincoln, that bitchy wife of his, what kind of judgment does that show, and he's probably got us into this war to profit factory owners, because we know he doesn't care about those poor Negroes. Martin Luther King, he can't keep it in his pants, some great moral leader he is. This guy Jesus, the son of David, he's thirty years old, surrounds himself with whores and tax collectors and unemployed fishermen, and he
still
lives with his mother. What does he know about God?”

There was light, from somewhere. The sun was probably coming up. Sure enough, the calls to prayer began to echo through the streets. Her steps had taken her near the mosque at the edge of the Tenderloin. The muezzin's voice was broadcast on speakers, and the Adhan rolled down the dark streets.
Lord
, she thought to herself.
No wonder these little buggers were always ready to fight…they never got to sleep in on a weekend
.

Now she could see the mosque. The sight of it nearly made her retch again, and the small, sanely scared part of her said to turn away, to go somewhere else. If she stood there staring, the hatred inside her would burst into flames and she'd be consumed on the spot. She decided to heed that voice and was actually thinking about creeping back home (home: another meaningless word in her new vocabulary) when two men emerged from the mosque, moving against the flow of the faithful coming to pray.

The two men, Arabs (or Sunnis or Iranians, who could tell, they all looked alike to her), carried some kind of sticks in their fists. At first she thought they were going to rob her. She'd seen their kind, usually through the bars of a cell. They had the convict's stare, unblinking, not looking away as they bore down on her.

However, instead of attacking her, they stood in front of her and began shouting at her, gesturing with the sticks. It was just noise to her, but it meant something to the men passing them on the way to the mosque. Most of them kept their eyes averted from her, and sped up as they passed the men with sticks.

The noise pouring from the two men's mouths increased. The sticks, which were truncheons of well-polished wood, were raised for emphasis. Molly slowly began to realize that these two convicts were going to beat the living daylights out of her, here in the San Francisco dawn a few hundred feet from the mosque, and no one was going to stop them or intervene. Why they were going to beat her bloody and who they were was beyond her. Unbidden, she felt the Face slowly slip itself over her features as she hunched her shoulders.