Homeland Elegies(78)

I run the risk of drawing too strong a conclusion here, but only because I’m trying to balance what I would come to understand with what I still couldn’t see: that this most enduring of American Christmas tales, among the most popular of all American works of art, had already envisioned the nation we would become—impoverished, indebted, a place where our softer stewards had succumbed to the hard pinch of profit for its own sake, where our fates had been subsumed by the owners of property, where the American dream was suffering literal foreclosure, where even our most affective dilemmas could only find true resolution through the accumulation of cash. Not to see this picture of the country was, in fact, to choose not to see it. In a year’s time, my shares in Timur Capital would make me rich enough finally to understand what I hadn’t with Mike that night: money comes with its own point of view; what you own, when you own enough of it, starts making you see the world from its perspective.

That night at Red Rooster I had wanted to hear something else. I’d wanted Mike to affirm—despite the encompassing cynicism of his worldview—that he still believed the arc of history bent, however slowly, toward justice. But he was saying: he didn’t believe that. He was saying: property has its own interests, and those interests will always be served above others. And he was saying: justice is the will of the strong borne by the weak—and those who own are the strong. In giving up the liberal humanist illusion, he was also making the only honest case he felt he could to preserve the hope this illusion fed. Back then, I couldn’t hear these nuances, for I still believed—as George Bailey puts it in the quotation that begins this chapter—that the living, dying rabble matter more, must matter more, than what their accumulated rents are worth to an owner on a spreadsheet; back then, I was still hopeful that history would eventually favor the meek and righteous; back then, I couldn’t assemble the various pieces in a way that would account for the darker truths I was resisting.

The movie ended just before dawn. Something was stirring inside me. I got up from the couch and went to the window, where the earliest light of day was appearing beneath the clouds over East Harlem. Through the single-pane glass, I heard the faint screech and churning of a distant toiling sanitation truck. I remember standing there, sensing the swell of something new inside me, something hard and vivid, chilly, for which I had no good words. My favored music was too tender, marred by private yearning and compulsive need. I would have to find new words. A new language. Colder notes and meanings. Jangled chords for shriller songs—hymns to the esoteric din, to decline, to the dollar, to our ailing nation and its foundering myths. But all that—like President-elect Trump—was yet to be. What I sensed that morning at my window in Harlem was only this: the time had come to start listening beyond my hopeful heart.





Footnotes


1 I am following Mike’s practice in not using “African American” here and throughout.

2 A company like Walmart was only possible in this new regime, coming to control more than 50 percent of grocery sales in more than forty metropolitan areas by 2015, in contrast to the measly 8 percent market share that was seen as anticompetitive by the courts of the late 1960s; or Amazon, which, in selling books for less than it costs to manufacture them, would first drop its wrecking ball into the publishing world and, later, use the same scorched-earth business model to attempt the wholesale dismantling of brick-and-mortar retail itself.

3 I suspect, if you’re still reading this book, you’re the sort of person who’s already aware of the mind-boggling municipal boondoggle that, in 2012, corroded the city’s pipes and had the children of Flint drinking water from what one official would call a lead-coated straw—a tale that, if it wasn’t real, would read like the kind of tragic farce I used to associate with Gogol’s Russia or some Third World banana republic concocted by Naipaul.





VIII.





Langford v. Reliant; or, How My Father’s American Story Ends





1.


In October of 2012, my father saw a patient by the name of Christine Langford, a fair-haired, newly pregnant twenty-six-year-old woman with a long-standing heart problem known as long QT syndrome. Christine had been diagnosed in childhood with the condition, which, triggered by exercise, emotional excitement, or sleep, can lead to a particularly serious form of irregular heartbeat. Specifically—and crucially to this story—“long QT” refers to a longer-than-normal interval between two beats of the heart, an elongation that can provoke a chaotic heart flutter that, if it goes on for any extended period of time, often results in sudden death.

Long QT syndrome appeared to run in Christine’s family. Her mother, Corinne, had it, and long QT caused the death of Christine’s sister, Kayleigh, when Kayleigh was nine. The girl’s heart stopped beating as she napped one Sunday afternoon after helping her grandfather tend to the cows on the family farm in Kendall, Wisconsin, a small community in the far western reaches of the state. After Kayleigh’s death, extensive tests on the girl’s tissues and on the rest of the family would reveal that Kayleigh, Christine, and her mother were all carriers of the gene for long QT syndrome.

For years, Christine and her mother took beta-blockers, medications that slowed and regulated the heart’s beating, and neither of them experienced any significant heart symptoms from that point forward. But then Christine got pregnant. While surfing the internet one night, she came across an article that warned of potential prenatal risks to the fetus from some beta-blockers. The medication she’d been on since she was a young girl was at the top of the list. She called her doctor the next morning. He referred her to my father—then considered to be the state’s leading specialist in all manner of arcane heart-rhythm problems.