She begins the story while she works: hunched over the folding table, coils of wire and long lengths of pipe laid out before her. Carefully, she selects a pipe and twists a cutter around it, grinding off segments the length of her thumb, smoothing the edges with a file. Around her a halo of silver dust emerges. Bird sits at the edge of the carpet, waiting. Watching. Outside, beyond the blacked-out windows, morning light slowly tints the grayscale world.
Let me tell you first, his mother says, how I came to the city.
Her parents’ aspirations carried them across the sea, so for her, an aspirational name: Margaret. A prime minister, a princess, a saint. A name with a pedigree as long as time, a solid trunk growing from rugged roots: in French, la marguerite, the daisy; in Latin, margarita, the pearl. Both of her parents were good Catholics, back in Kowloon, educated by priests and nuns, brought up on Communion wafers and confession and daily Mass. Saint Margaret, defeater of dragons, often depicted half in, half out of a dragon’s mouth.
A thing she wouldn’t learn until later: the bomb in their mailbox two months before she was born. Just enough to blow the aluminum door off its hinges and warp it from within, as if a tiny enraged creature had tried to punch its way out. A new mailbox, a new home, her father the new engineer at the factory in their little Rust Belt town. Minimal explosive power, the police said. Just a prank, who could say why. Afterward, Margaret’s father dug out the kinked metal pole, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, Margaret’s mother watching from the threshold with one hand resting on her belly, Margaret still growing inside. From their windows, their new neighbors watched, too, silently, and then, as the pole came free and the dented mailbox tipped to the ground with a clang, went back inside.
PACT was decades away, but her parents felt it already: the eyes of the neighborhood scrutinizing their every move. Blending in, they decided, was their best option. So after she was born, they dressed her in pink corduroy overalls and Mary Janes, tied ribbons in her pigtailed hair. When she got older, they would buy her the clothes off the headless mannequin at the department store; anything it wore, she wore. Surreptitiously, they studied the neighborhood children and bought Margaret what they saw: Barbies, a Dream House, a Cabbage Patch Kid named Susanna Marigold. A pink bike with white-streamered handles; a toy oven that baked brownies by the light of a bulb. Suburban camouflage from the Sears catalog. Her father’s saying: The stick hits the bird that holds its head the highest. Her mother’s: The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. She never, in her memory, heard her parents say a word in Cantonese. Only later would she realize what she’d missed.
On Fridays they ordered pizza and played board games; on Sundays they went to church, the only black-haired heads at Mass. Her father began to watch football and drink beer with the neighborhood men. Her mother bought a set of CorningWare and learned to make casseroles. Margaret herself was bookish and loved poetry. Like her parents, she strove for unremarkable, anchoring herself firmly in the hill of the bell curve. To be noticed was to invite predation; better to blend seamlessly into the foliage. She earned average grades, met expectations but seldom exceeded them, caused no trouble and set no examples. Graduation, a scholarship to school in New York: the city, her mother always called it. As if there were only one. It was an intangible promise that lured her: that in the city, there was more than one way to be. Then the grit of the city scoured away the enamel of her to reveal something molten and pulsing inside.
In those first days, she dressed like her idea of a New Yorker: black jeans, high heels, silky blouse. Glamour, sophistication. Mystery. Then, two days after arriving, she got off the N and a bearded figure in an emerald ball gown glided past, gathered their skirts, and squeezed into the seat she’d just left. Not a head turned, and as the doors closed, they extracted a copy of The New Yorker from the folds of their dress and began to read, and then the train swept them away and out of sight. In the days to come she would see much more. A man weaving his bike through stalled traffic, making loud siren noises with his mouth. Baa-DOO baa-DOO baa-DOO. An elderly woman with a cane thumping her way down Broadway, singing at the top of her lungs in time with her steps: Our God is an awesome God / He reigns from heaven above. A man pressing a woman against the side of a stoop, her knees knotted around his waist, the whole narrow passage thrumming with their cries, funneling them like a speaker to the street beyond. No one paused or smirked or looked around; everyone hurried away, intent upon their own business, their own lives. It began to rain, sheets of water blanketing the city, and Margaret stepped into a nearby bookstore, rattailed and drenched, and no one batted an eye. Here no one noticed you, she realized. Which meant you could do anything, be anything. In the bathroom she peeled the sodden socks from her feet and dried them under the hand dryer and no one said a word. When they were dry, she put them back on and felt the warmth curl between each toe. She’d never felt so free.
She cut her hair, then added a purple streak. Seeing how far she could take it before a head turned, before anyone gave her a second glance. She changed her clothes, piece by piece: higher heels, shorter skirts, jeans ripped to more hole than denim. She pierced things. No one ever gave her a second glance. Not like home, where people always gave her a second glance, and sometimes a third. Where she had to be on best behavior, always, to give no one a reason to notice her: a bird keeping her head down, a nail nestling into soft, safe wood. Staying unnoticed was how you survived.
Things were already starting to fray, even then. Cut hours, lower wages. Prices beginning to climb. But it wasn’t everywhere yet: you still saw people buying new clothes, eating in restaurants. At night certain parts of town still shimmered and hummed with the collected energy of people who gathered just to be young and alive in the dark. It was still possible to enjoy things. To waste time. It was still possible to sit on a park bench or out on the stoop and watch other people go by, smiling and laughing, and smile back.
Margaret plunged herself into the city. She got a job waitressing. She skipped class and walked around and around the city, exploring its corners and crannies, devouring it. She made friends. In Chinatown you could still hear people speaking Cantonese then, and she bought Chinese newspapers and a dictionary, pored over the characters at night, learning their parts and their sounds the way she might learn a lover’s body. For the first time, she realized that her old life had chafed like a too-tight coat. She learned to drink, and to flirt. She learned to give pleasure, and to take it. She was writing by then, lines scribbled on scraps of paper, on grocery receipts, on the white backs of minty gum wrappers, each word a chip of diamond, flint edged and biting. They felt like the work of a different person, someone she hadn’t known she was carrying within her. The Crisis was coming, would be there soon, but there were still magazines and time for poetry and people to read it, and editors liked her tempestuous rhythm, the marvelous wild suppleness of her lines. Images that sank their teeth into your heart and refused to shake free. They never paid, but it didn’t matter. At night she and her friends would pool their handfuls of bills and change for bottles of wine, drinking it from plastic cups in someone’s dorm room, a ring of them sitting with mouths stained red.
In those days, the city was at fever pitch, as if everyone could feel the storm coming, the air electric, crackling with potential. Her parents thought it demented, but to her it seemed the sanest and most logical course: if the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright. Late nights that turned into early mornings; just enough money to buy coffee wherever she happened to end up. Walking home in the dawn hours to save cab fare, watching the city shift from gray to gold as the sun rose. She went to parties, danced, kissed strangers just to see what would happen. Often they’d end up in someone’s bed—hers, theirs, someone else’s. Beautiful men. Beautiful women. The world, at that time, was full of them, all of them furiously incandescent like dying stars.
Later, when she thought of that time she would picture a nightclub, the air thick and black and steaming around her. Bodies jostling, slick with sweat. Flecks of light circling the room, fragments of illumination: an eye, a lip, a hand, a breast. The feeling of dissolving into a crowd, a shapeless sweaty pulsating thing, all of them moving separately to the same beat, bound together by the moment. Above their heads: bright lights that would flick on when the night was done, if they hadn’t fled yet. Below their dancing feet: the floor grown sticky with spilled liquor. There was no curfew yet.
It started slowly at first, the way most things did. She’d been a junior. Shops began to shutter, windows soaped over from within. Here and there at first, like cavities in teeth, and suddenly whole blocks were empty, all over the country. The rents too high, the customers too few. More panhandlers, rattling coins in paper cups plucked from trash cans, more signs markered on scraps of cardboard. family of 5. lost my job. anything helps. Everything cost more and everyone had less to spend. Clothing stores marked down their sweaters—ten percent off, twenty, forty-five, and still they dangled on the racks. No one even tried them on. No one had the money, or the time, anymore. One in ten unemployed, the statistics ran. Then: one in five. People began to lose their cars, then their homes. People began to lose their patience.
The restaurant where Margaret worked shut down: forty-five years in business, but no one came in anymore except the men who ordered coffee and lingered in the corner booths, sipping it long after it grew cold. Her boss wept as he pulled the grate across the door; he’d played behind the counter as a boy. When she asked other restaurants if they were hiring, some of them laughed. Some of them simply shook their heads. One manager told her, gently, to go home. It’s going to get worse, he said, before it gets better. If it gets better. He had a daughter about her age who had just lost her job, too.
They would never fully agree, the economists, on what had caused it: some would say it was just an unfortunate cycle, that these things happened periodically—like cicadas, or plagues. Some would blame speculation, or inflation, or a lack of consumer confidence—though what might have caused those would never be clear. In time, many would dredge up old lists of rivalries, searching for someone to blame; they would settle, in a few years, on China, that perilous, perpetual yellow menace. Seeing its sabotage behind every stumble and fracture of the Crisis. But at first all they agreed on was this: it was the worst crisis since the 1980s, then since the Depression, and then they stopped making comparisons.
Those who’d been at the top locked their doors, hunkered down to wait it out. As stores closed, they ordered from afar, paying the rising prices. Those who’d been comfortable tightened their belts, began cutting coupons, cutting back, cutting down on everything they could—no more travel, no more leisure, only less, less, less. Those who’d just barely stretched a paycheck from one Friday to the next stumbled down a steep staircase of losses: first their jobs, then their leases, then their pride. All across the country, people couldn’t make rent; by then evictions were happening daily. The pictures were everywhere: furniture dumped unceremoniously on the sidewalk, families huddling curbside on their couches, passersby gawking as the landlords changed the locks. Foreclosures rippled block to block until swaths of neighborhoods were deserted.
A correction, the news called it at first, as if all that time when people had mostly gotten by, had mostly been fed and housed, had been a mistake; as if things were getting better, instead of the opposite. In Houston, the lines at food banks stretched for blocks; in Sacramento, you’d wait for hours and come away with a can of beans, a few boxes of crackers. In Boston, people dozed in the pews of churches, waiting out the night, and in the morning there were more outside.
Soon there were protests in the streets. Strikes. Marches that were peaceful. Marches with guns. Windows smashed, things seized or set aflame: anger and need made manifest and tangible. Police in full battle gear. All across the country, the same story repeating, just at different scales. In New York, Margaret watched the city begin to empty around her. The ones with houses and families elsewhere sought shelter with them, sharing expenses, making do. The ones who didn’t disappeared in other ways: hiding, or holed up, or dead. You could hear birdsong, suddenly, between the pillars of buildings. The economic crisis, the newspapers began to call it, and then, as it became more than economic, as people began to lose their confidence, their sense of purpose, the willingness to wake up in the morning, their ability to keep trying, their optimism that something could be different, their memory that anything had ever been different, their hope that anything would ever improve—other phrases took hold. Our ongoing national crisis, the headlines kept saying, and soon, economizing even in words: the Crisis. The capital C the only extravagance still allowed.
At the college, classes were postponed, then cancelled. The dorm grew quieter and quieter as parents called children back to the safety of their homes. From Margaret’s parents, somber updates: furloughs at the factory, shortages at the stores. I’m okay, Margaret told her parents, I’m staying, everything’s fine, don’t worry about me. Be careful. I love you. Then, after hanging up the phone, she scoured the hallways, gleaning what she could from bags of trash abandoned on the way out. Clothing and too-big shoes, which she took anyway. Blankets and books, half-eaten packages of cookies. Most of the rooms were shut, their message boards wiped bare, except for one, a scrawl of black: see you on the other side. She touched her finger to the letters. Permanent.
Three weeks later, she ran into another person in the halls for the first time: Domi. They’d had a class together, back when there still were classes: Marxism and 20th-Century Literature. Chic and worldly Domi, perfect streaks of eyeliner winging their way toward the sky. Rhymes with show me, she’d said, one brow arched. Now, without makeup, her eyes looked bigger, younger. More rabbit than hawk.
Didn’t think anyone else was crazy enough to still be here, Domi said. Come on. Time to go.
Domi had an ex who had a girlfriend who had a sister with a two-bed in Dumbo. Six of them squeezed into it now: the sister and her boyfriend in one room, the ex and his new girl in another, Domi on the couch and Margaret in a sleeping bag on the living room floor. The room so small that, when they held out their arms in the dark, their fingers intertwined.
In the darkened brownstone, she tells Bird these things as she unwinds wire from the spool, strips the red plastic away to reveal gleaming copper marrow. There is a deftness to her work, a precision, like watching a clockmaker set each gear into place. Bird sits, knees hugged to chest, mesmerized: by her story, by her hands. Outside the blackened windows, it is midmorning, the Crisis is long over, the city pulses and churns, but inside it is eerily quiet in the glow of the single lamp. The two of them together in the soundless bubble, listening.
The sister with the apartment still had a job, one of the few that did. She worked for the mayor, taking calls, trying to match people with the services they needed. What people needed was rent, meals, medicine. Reassurance and calm. What she had to offer was sympathy, a promise to pass their concerns along. Another number they could try. Sometimes broken bricks came through the office windows; other days, bullets. Soon the desks huddled at the centers of the rooms. Her boyfriend was a security guard in an empty skyscraper in Midtown, once so busy there were three banks of elevators: one for the lower half, one for the upper, one an express straight to the top. Now everyone had been sent home—furloughed or fired outright—and he circled the lobby beneath eighty-one floors of abandoned rooms. There were computers up there, ergonomic desk chairs, couches of tobacco-hued leather. Those who had sat in them no longer had access to the building, and those who owned them were in their houses on Long Island, in Connecticut, in Key West, waiting for the Crisis to abate. One day, when no one had any money and they were all hungry, the boyfriend snuck upstairs, filched a laptop, sold it, and brought home nine overstuffed plastic bags of groceries so heavy they cut rings into his hands. They’d eaten for two weeks off that.
Domi’s ex and his new girlfriend took odd jobs where they could: boarding up the windows of businesses gone bust, loading crates onto trucks for those leaving the city. He was a stocky, burly guy, bald by choice; his new girl was sandy haired and wiry and quick, both of them alert to opportunities. A warehouse in Queens closed down and they’d celebrated: nearly a month of pay loading pallet after pallet onto a cargo ship, until it sailed away—back to Taiwan or possibly Korea, none of them knew where, just away—and the warehouse stood empty and echoing, shafts of sunlight slicing down through dusty air. When they couldn’t find work they scavenged, combing the streets, collecting cans to sell for scrap, anything useful they could repurpose. They visited the rich neighborhoods where the garbage held treasures, the owners watching them from behind double-paned windows above as if they were crows picking carrion. Once they’d spotted a man in Park Slope being carted out on a stretcher, draped with a white sheet. His brownstone, for the moment, left unguarded. After dark, they’d come back and crept in. The furniture and clothes were all gone already, but they’d stripped yards of copper pipe and wires from the walls, and the girlfriend found a watch—a small silver bangle of a thing, still ticking, engraved To A from C—which she’d buckled onto her wrist before they vanished into the night with their haul. None of them felt guilt, at least not then. Things could sit unused and wasted or they could be turned into heat, a full belly, a night spent tipsy and giddy as they all waited for either the Crisis or the world to end. An easy choice to make.
As for Domi and Margaret: they became messengers. Cycling through the city, down half-empty streets, in the unnerving quiet of a half-deserted Manhattan. It was cheaper than mailing things, and the post office was struggling—fewer funds, carriers laid off, gas exorbitant, packages stolen right off the truck—and for three dollars a biker would get it there in an hour. Margaret went first: one morning she’d spotted a bike propped against a stoop, and when it was still there that evening, unchained, she took it without regret. A fleet of messengers crisscrossed the city, and she recognized their faces, learned their names as their paths overlapped. A few weeks later, when they found another bike, Domi joined them, too.
At night, parts of town turned rough. Men out of work sat in the park, burning their last few dollars on a fifth of whiskey, and by evening they grew resentful and belligerent. Women learned the hard way to avoid them. Since childhood, Margaret had mastered how to check over her shoulder, to gauge risk from a gesture, to fight if she could not flee. Domi, who’d grown up in Westport with her father—summer house, riding lessons, in-ground pool—was less prepared. Sometimes she cried out in her sleep, hands flying to shield her face, as if someone were trying to gouge out her eyes. Margaret climbed up beside her, held her tight, stroked her hair, and Domi stilled and quieted. In the mornings, the few stores stubbornly clinging to life might find their windows smashed, shelves stripped bare, alarm bell ringing ferociously, though no one had answered the call. Some people tried not to go out at all, and soon Margaret was running errands and delivering messages, too. Five dollars a run, then ten, though for those in need, she would do it for one. Medicine from the drugstore, a bag of groceries. Tampons, batteries. Candles. Liquor. All the things people needed to survive another day. She folded the dollar bills they gave her and tucked them into the cups of her bra; at the end of the night, back in the apartment, she counted them, soft as damp felt with her sweat, and smoothed them out again. By then she wasn’t thinking about poetry at all.
You got used to it, after a while: all the new rules the city and the governor imposed, trying to keep order—when you could go out, when you had to stay in, how many people could gather at one time: few, then fewer. Sometimes waves of sickness rippled over the city, then the state: not enough people at work to pay hospital bills, not enough doctors or medicine anyway, just referrals for Advil from the drugstore on the corner, or something stiffer from the liquor store next door. Lines everywhere, everything in short supply except anger, and fear, and grief. Tents clustered like toadstools at the feet of overpasses and bridges. Based on the news, it was the same everywhere. You got used to waiting, to the men who squatted on sidewalks, holding signs scrawled on cardboard: anything helps. You learned to keep watch on them without meeting their eyes, to skirt them at a distance. Your ears pricked for the sounds of shouting, the high jangle of breaking glass; even before you recognized it, your feet would already be turning you down another street, steering you safely around. You got used to sandwiches of whatever you had—ketchup, mayonnaise, salt, whatever made bread palatable enough to choke down—to rebrewing coffee grounds, once, twice, sometimes for a whole week if you needed; even mostly water, it was something to keep you warm. You got used to not speaking to people on the street, to edging past them, both of you on your way to somewhere else, and to the sirens that flared and then quieted like an infant’s stifled cry. After a while you stopped wondering where they were headed, stopped thinking about whose need they were going off to serve. Somewhere out there, you knew, wealthy people were barricaded in their fortresses, fed and warm, if not happy, but soon you stopped thinking of them. You stopped thinking about other people at all. You got used to that, too, eventually, just as you got used to people disappearing: gone back home, gone elsewhere hoping for better, sometimes simply gone.
What you couldn’t get used to—what she never got used to—was the quiet. In Times Square the lights changed red to green and back again and sometimes not a car went by. Overhead the gulls screamed and dove toward the empty harbor. When she spoke to her parents it was brief, a few minutes at a time; service was spotty and minutes were expensive and all they needed to know, really, was that the other was still alive. Sometimes she would ride through Central Park and see not a single person, not on the footpaths, not on the lake, no sign of a single other human except the tents that dotted the Sheep Meadow, springing up overnight, disappearing just as quickly when word of police sweeps came. In the silence between things there was too much time to dwell and no matter how fast she pedaled, she couldn’t leave her thoughts behind.
In the honeyed glow of the lamplight her hands tremble.
The Crisis. The Crisis. Bird has grown up hearing about it: We must never forget the turmoil of the Crisis, everyone has said, his whole life; we must never again go back to that. But it is impossible to explain what it felt like.
Evictions and protests daily, then nightly, people clamoring for assistance, for any kind of aid. The police fired rubber bullets and sprayed tear gas; cars plowed into the crowds. Each night sirens whirred to life and wailed away across the city; the only question was which way. Fires began to spring up all over the country—Kansas City one night, Milwaukee and New Orleans the next—frantic signal fires from those deserted and desperate. In Chicago, tanks rolled past department stores on Michigan Avenue, protecting their glossy wares. No one agreed on who to blame—not yet—and with no focus, outrage and panic and fear swelled over everything, hot and thick, rasping your lungs. It was there in the silent darkened streets after curfew, in the slate-gray shadows of the buildings and the echoing footsteps of your shoes on the deserted sidewalk. It flashed sharp and bright in the lights of the police cars as they went by, always on their way to somewhere else more urgent, which was everywhere.
How to explain this to someone who has never seen it? How to explain fear to someone who has never been afraid?
Imagine, Margaret wants to tell him. Imagine if everything you think is solid turns out to be smoke. Imagine that all the rules no longer apply.
I’m hungry, Bird ventures, and Margaret returns with a jolt, glances at her watch. It’s past noon, and he’s had no breakfast, either. She curses herself mentally. It’s been so long since she’s taken care of anyone.
She sets down the wire cutters and wipes her palms on the thighs of her jeans.
I know I’ve got something, she says, rummaging in a plastic bag beside the sofa. After a moment, she emerges with a single granola bar.
I get caught up in working, she says, almost embarrassed. I forget to keep food around. Here, you take it.
Bird peels the foil from the bar, then hesitates. It’s starting to make sense to him: his mother’s whittled features, the dark rings beneath her eyes. Whatever it is she’s doing, it is consuming her. She is barely eating, maybe barely sleeping, too. All day, all night, she is working—or whatever this is.
Eat, his mother says gently. Get some food into you. I’ll get more tonight.
From under the table she pulls another plastic bag: inside, bottle caps, the kind you’d unscrew from a two-liter bottle. Red, white, orange, sickly highlighter green—sticky, still smelling faintly of cola and caffeine and acid fizz. She sets a handful on the table, picks one up, inspects it. Tallies them two by two. For weeks she has been gathering them, these small bright rounds plucked from the sidewalks and the dark mouths of garbage cans.
But what are you doing, Bird says, between mouthfuls of granola, what are they for?
Margaret takes one cap and sweeps the rest to the side, plucks a transistor from the pile: red and yellow striped, like a sprinkle from a child’s birthday cake. She touches the soldering iron to one of its spindly wire legs and the hot biting scent of rosin fills the air.
Let me tell you, she says instead, about meeting your father.
She’d been a wild thing, when they met.
Two years into the Crisis: Fuck everything was her motto by then. People came and went, sometimes on purpose, sometimes without warning, and you’d never know where they’d gone, if it was part of their plan or an accident, or worse. Sometimes on her deliveries, people spat in her face, told her this was China’s fault, accused her of wringing America dry; she’d begun wearing a bandanna, pulled high to the bridge of her nose. Fuck this, fuck everything, she and Domi agreed, by which they meant: don’t get attached to anything, or anyone. Just survive. They said it to each other almost fondly, like a greeting, or a good-night kiss. Fuck everything, Domi would murmur as they fell asleep in the living room, and Margaret, rolled in a blanket on the floor, would squeeze her hand and whisper it back, the day’s sweat drying on their skin to a fine crystal grit.
And then came Ethan. Domi’s birthday: still celebrated, celebrated with vengeance in the face of it all. Liquor enough to make a party; the apartment full of people, gathering limits be damned; the air hot and sticky, like someone’s breath. Domi was drunk already and didn’t notice him, but Margaret felt a tingle zigzag between her shoulder blades. A friend of a friend of a friend, out of place in a charcoal-gray suit. A suit! She felt an irresistible urge to dishevel him. The room was dizzy and humid and loud and she drifted away from Domi and crossed the room and put her hand to his throat and caught the knot of his tie in her fist.
They ended up outside, on the fire escape that was little more than a ledge, so small that when they both squeezed onto it they were close enough to kiss. Between their feet: Domi’s broken flowerpot, full of cigarette butts and ash. Ethan, he said. Just finished at Columbia when the Crisis put everything on hold. All night, people came and went in the room behind them, laughing, drinking, forgetting—for the moment—everything else. Neither of them noticed. The night air gathered close like a blanket drawn over their heads. They talked and talked until they found themselves squinting into the peach-colored sunrise spiking its way between the buildings. Inside, the party had burned down like a banked fire. A handful of people curled up on the rug and the sofa, a tangle of lonely puppies. Domi had gone off to bed, not alone.
I should go, Ethan said, and Margaret took his jacket from her shoulders, where he’d placed it in the late-night chill, and handed it back. It was the only time they’d touched all night. She wanted to kiss him. No: she wanted to bite him, hard enough to draw blood.
It was nice meeting you, she said, and went inside.
The next evening, after curfew, she walked across the bridge and uptown, ducking into the shadows when the few cars still out flashed by. She left her bike in the apartment: outside, even locked-up bikes would be stripped of parts by morning, and Ethan, he’d said, lived on the fourth floor. Now and then she passed someone else and they exchanged a brief glance before moving on, each of them on their own mysterious errands. A hundred and twenty blocks uptown to Ethan’s building, where his window glowed like a wide-awake eye. She climbed the fire escape and set her fingers in the half-open window, and at the noise he looked up, startled, put his book down. Lifted the sash and let her in.
In the morning, a ring of her tooth marks blossomed on his bare shoulder.
Domi didn’t like it.
You’ve changed, she said, all you think about now is him. She said it like that—him—a fragment of pit she needed to spit out.
Your fancy boyfriend, she said. With his fancy apartment. So much nicer than here.
The truth was that it was a studio, three flights up, just one big room with a futon for both couch and bed and an old clawfoot bathtub in the kitchenette—but it was safe and warm. Ethan’s family wasn’t particularly fancy or rich—his mother was a nursing-home aide, his father an engineer—but they did have connections: his landlord was an old friend of his mother’s from high school and had rented to him at a steep discount; Ethan could afford to wait out the Crisis a long time. The truth was that Domi could have been in her own apartment, too—a much nicer one—if she’d chosen: her father’s electronics company made the innards of half the cell phones and computers in the country; he owned two yachts, a small private plane, houses in London and L.A. and the south of France. One on Park Avenue, too, where Domi had grown up: she’d pointed it out to Margaret one afternoon, and they spat on the sidewalk and fled before her father’s driver could chase them away. Her mother had died when she was eleven, and a month later her father married the Danish au pair and Domi swore that once she left home she’d never speak to him again, and she hadn’t. In college, she’d ripped up his checks and mailed back the pieces.
So that’s it, Domi said, you’re just going to hide out with your rich boyfriend and ignore all this, while the rest of us scrounge?
Margaret’s hands were chapped and raw; a week ago someone had grabbed at her coat, tearing it, hungry for more than she was offering, but she’d gotten away. She had mended the rip with yarn—red, the only color she’d had—and the stitches traced a jagged gash along her collarbone.
Fuck both of you, Domi said, but Margaret didn’t answer. She was already on her way out the door.
He spoke half a dozen languages fluently, could get by in even more. Not bad for a white boy from Evanston, he’d joke. His parents had both loved traveling, had chosen a different country for each vacation; he’d been to four continents before he was ten years old. He was an only child like Margaret, and this was one of the things that drew them together: the feeling that they were the last twigs on the family tree, grafting themselves together for strength, to forge something new.
How about Cantonese, she’d asked, and he shook his head.
Only a little Mandarin. And not very good Mandarin at that.
And then: We could learn it together. The two of us.
He specialized in etymology: the meanings of things. As a boy he’d played Scrabble and done crosswords with his father; his mother had coached him for the spelling bee. For his birthdays and Christmas, he’d always asked for books. These days, with libraries and stores shuttering, he had nothing to read but the row of dictionaries lined up on the windowsill. The first morning, after they woke, she rose from his bed and crossed the room to look at them. Fat yellow ones for different languages: French, German, Spanish, Arabic, some she didn’t even recognize. Dead languages: Latin, Sanskrit. A sprawling English one the size of a phone book, pages thin as Bible leaves. Slowly she’d traced her fingers along the spines and then turned back to him—both of them still undressed from the night before, their skin burnished to gold in the midmorning sun—in wonder. As if she suddenly recognized him as someone she already knew.
For Ethan, words carried secrets, the stories of how they came to be, all their past selves. He would find the mysterious ways they connected, tracing their family tree back to pinpoint the unlikeliest cousins. It was proof that despite the chaos around them, there was logic and order to the world; there was a system, and that system could be deciphered. She loved this about him, this unshakable belief that the world was a knowable place. That by studying its branches and byways, the tracks it had rutted in the dust, you could understand it. For her the magic was not what words had been, but what they were capable of: their ability to sketch, with one sweeping brushstroke, the contours of an experience, the form of a feeling. How they could make the ineffable effable, how they could hover a shape before you for an eyeblink, before it dissolved into the air. And this, in turn, was what he loved about her—her insatiable curiosity about the world, how for her it could never be fully unraveled, it held infinite mysteries and wonders and sometimes all you could do was stand agape, rubbing your eyes, trying to see properly.
Holed up in the apartment, they read, pulling one dictionary or another from the shelf and poring over it, stretched across the futon, one’s head pillowed on the other’s thigh. Reading passages aloud, dissecting meanings, each of them digging: she mining words like precious gems, arranging them around the outlines of the world; he excavating the layers fossilized within. All the traces of people trying to explain the world to themselves, trying to explain themselves to each other. Testify had its roots in the word for three: two sides and a third person, standing by, witnessing. Author originally meant one who grows: someone who nurtured an idea to fruition, harvesting poems, stories, books. Poet, if you traced back far enough, came from the word for to pile up—the earliest, most basic, form of making.
Margaret had laughed at this. That’s me, she said, a piler-up of words.
Krei, she read, meant to separate. To judge. Like a sieve, Ethan said, separating the good from the bad. And thus, krisis: the moment at which a decision is made, for better or for worse.
With one finger she’d traced the delicate line of his sternum, circled the soft hollow at the base of his throat.
So a moment, she said, in which we decide who we are.
Outside there were sirens and shouting, and sometimes gunshots—or were they firecrackers? Waves of unrest rippled state to state like a wildfire, the whole country tinder-dry and eager to burn. In Atlanta, unemployed protesters had set the mayor’s office ablaze; they’d called in the National Guard. Bombs kept going off at statehouses, in subway stations, on the lawns of governors’ mansions. There were emergency meetings and votes and marches and rallies and nothing seemed to change. It can’t go on, people kept saying, in the few spaces where they still dared meet: in the aisle of the grocery store, picking what they could from sparse shelves; in apartment building hallways as neighbors passed and over fences as people raked fallen leaves—any attempt to maintain order and neatness and normalcy in an era that was anything but. It can’t go on, everyone said, but it kept going on.
Inside: Margaret and Ethan drank tea and ate crackers from the cupboard. After her shower, she put on one of his old shirts, washed her dress in the bathtub, hung it over the rod to dry. They closed the windows, then the curtains. They read. They made soup. They made love.
The way he handled her, like butter to be licked off a finger. In bed afterward, her cheek pressed to his back, she had never felt so calm. It felt good: a stretch after weeks spent coiled. One morning, she simply stayed.
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.
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.
A few tried to defend the shooter: Look at the hate this man’s been spewing; violence is never right, but can you blame him, really? Chinese American organizations quickly condemned the unknown shooter as a lone wolf, an outlier, an aberration. He does not speak for us, their statements seemed to plead. But it was too late. Suspicion spread like ink on wet cloth, bleeding outward until everyone was tinged. It was the same dirty tint that would be used, for years to come, to justify the sidelong glances at anyone who might seem Chinese, to excuse the refusals of service and shouted slurs and spat-in faces, and later on, the baseball bats, the booted feet.
It was the catalyst needed to pass PACT. Everyone was tired of the Crisis; it had dragged on for nearly three years, long enough to ratchet everyone into submission. To most people, PACT seemed temperate, sensible even: patriotism, public vigilance. Why wouldn’t you support it? Margaret watched a video of the president signing it, a group of lawmakers clustered around his desk. Just over his right shoulder, the injured senator, arm still in a sling, nodded grimly.
PACT will protect us from the very real threat of those who undermine us from within, the president said. All loyal Americans—including loyal persons of Asian origin—need fear nothing from this law.
He paused for a moment, then signed his name with a flourish at the bottom of the page. Cameras flashed. Then he turned and presented the pen to the sling-armed senator, who accepted it daintily with his uninjured hand.
PACT: Preserving American Culture and Traditions. A solemn promise to root out any anti-American elements undermining the nation. Funding for neighborhood-protection groups to break up protests and guard businesses and stores, for make-work projects churning out flags and pins and posters encouraging watchfulness, and reinvesting in America. Funding for new initiatives to monitor China—and new watchdog groups to sniff out those whose loyalties might be divided. Rewards for citizen vigilance, information leading to potential troublemakers. And finally, most crucially: preventing the spread of un-American views by quietly removing children from un-American environments—the definition of which was ever expanding: Appearing sympathetic to China. Appearing insufficiently anti-China. Having any doubts about anything American; having any ties to China at all—no matter how many generations past. Questioning whether China was really the problem; questioning whether PACT was being applied fairly; eventually, questioning PACT itself.
In the days after PACT’s passage, things calmed slowly, imperceptible at first as stars moving across the sky. Quiet in the streets stretched for one, two, ten nights in a row. People began to find work again. The noises of the city ground back to life, like the clearing of the throat after a long period of silence. Here and there, as buy-American orders resuscitated the idled factories, stores began to reopen, grocery shelves became fuller. People staggered back out into daylight like survivors from a fallout shelter. Blinking and bewildered and groggy. Timid and cautious and shell-shocked. Anxious, above all, to move on.
PACT, its proponents insisted, would strengthen and unify the nation. Left unsaid was that unity required a common enemy. One box in which to collect all their anger; one straw man to wear the hats of everything they feared.
Reports began to trickle in. A Chinese American man, punched in the face in DC; two middle-aged aunties, pelted with garbage in Seattle. A Chinese American woman in Oakland, dragged into an alley and groped, while back on the sidewalk, her baby screamed in its stroller. Margaret’s father, it turned out, had been one of the first but far from the last.
Soon it became clear that anyone who might remotely be mistaken for Chinese was at risk. In Miami, a Thai man heading to his office was stabbed; in Pittsburgh, a Filipino teen walking home from swim practice was beaten with a hockey stick; in Minneapolis, a Hmong woman was pushed into traffic, nearly hit by a bus. The perpetrators were seldom caught and even more rarely charged: it was hard to prove they’d acted because the victim was—or was thought to be—Chinese. The average American, one judge ruled, cannot reasonably be expected to visually distinguish between various varieties of persons of Asian origin. As if they were types of apples, or breeds of dogs; as if those persons of Asian origin did not count as average Americans themselves. As if any of this might be justified by careful distinguishing on the part of the one wielding the bat.
The persons of Asian origin, conversely, were scrutinized thoroughly. A vigil for the Thai man in Miami was dispersed by police for unruliness. A rally for the young mother in Oakland refused to disband, ending in two arrests. The Chinese American man punched in DC was discovered to have an outstanding speeding ticket and was jailed for thirty days. The Filipino teen had fought back, giving his attacker a concussion, and was charged with assault. Soon, when the protests and vigils and demonstrations refused to abate, the first of the PACT child re-placements would begin.
The simple truth was that like most people, Margaret did not think much about any of this. The new act focused on those who held un-American views—but she was doing nothing of the sort. She was buying a table runner, warm slippers, a new bedspread. Magazines were printing again, showing beautiful people and beautiful lives to ogle and emulate; it was possible once more to dine at a restaurant, to have a white-shirted waiter pour you wine. Like everyone, she was trying to build a new, shiny, beautiful life. What could be more American?
A house, a husband. A yard ringed by a fence. Two kinds of boots, rubber for puddles, fur-lined for snow. Scented candles and trivets, a recycling bin, an electric toothbrush, all the paraphernalia of domestic life. All the things she thought she’d been happy to escape. If someone had told her at twenty where she’d be five years later, she would have laughed in their faces, to hear that she not only had these things again, but that she wanted them. Craved them. The only part she would have believed was Bird: she’d always wanted a child. Back in Ethan’s tiny apartment t
