Homeland Elegies(83)
*
The morning after my father’s trip to jail, I found him downstairs at the kitchen table, perusing the sports page, a pair of cracked readers perched at the edge of his nose. “You want me to make you a cup of tea?” he asked in a basement baritone as he sipped from a cup of his own. “Just warning you, though: there’s no sugar.”
“It’s fine. I’ll make coffee.”
“We’re out of that, too.”
I went to the cabinet and pulled out a glass, filled it with water at the sink, then sat down across from him. “What happened last night?” I asked.
He shrugged without looking up from the paper. “I got bad news. I needed to take the edge off. I just—I let it go too far.”
“You seem maybe to be doing that more and more—”
“—I’m a grown man,” he snapped. “If I want to drink, I’ll drink.” I watched him turn the page and pretend to read.
“So what was the bad news?”
He looked up now, but not at me. Through the view out our sliding kitchen doors, a pair of deer were moving along the tree line at the yard’s back edge. They stopped, one of them lowering its black nose to the grass, the other seemingly distracted by something in the woods. Just then, a third deer appeared: a buck with an imposing tangle of antlers on its head. “They’re like rats,” Father said blankly. “Can’t get rid of them. Got into the garden this year and ate everything down to the roots. Even after I put all that rhubarb in to keep them away. What am I going to do with rhubarb?”
“You could make pie.”
“What?”
“Rhubarb pie?”
He looked at me, completely dumbfounded. “What is that?”
“Forget it, Dad…What’s the bad news?”
“I’m being sued. For malpractice.”
“By who?”
He brushed off my concern as he pulled his readers from his face. “It’s nothing new. This has been happening since 2014. The attorneys kept telling me it would get settled. It was the deadline yesterday. No settlement, so now we have to go to trial next week.”
“Who’s suing you?”
“Family of the patient. She was young, but she was the breadwinner. Her husband is on disability. Injured in Afghanistan, I think.” He stopped again. “The science is on my side. I already know that, but it’s what everyone else is telling me, too.”
“So why did your lawyers want to settle?”
“Legal fees. Press. Headache.” He stopped. “The company’s lost two malpractice suits in the last two years. They’re worried about losing a third one now.”
“But the science is on your side?” I asked. He nodded, proceeding to tell me the story of Christine. As he spoke of her, something vivid and mournful came into his eyes. His description of her was spare—a pleasant young woman, two months pregnant with her first child, who reminded him, he said, of some of the girls he’d seen me grow up with in the area—but the emotion in his voice as he recalled her case sent me searching for an image of her online later that day. I found a picture of her standing alongside the pupils in one of her music classes, a woman with a face more round than oval, framed by two waves of parted shoulder-length hair; her nose was large and Roman, and its faintly rounded bridge connected two unusually wide-set eyes. I also found a photo of her gravestone, where not only her name and dates were etched into the granite but an image as well: that of an antlered buck towering over a lounging doe.
3.
Langford v. Reliant went to trial the following Monday at the La Crosse County Courthouse with Judge Elise Darius presiding. I missed jury selection and opening arguments because of my show in Chicago. Opening night went fine. Benji came with his wife. “Pretty neat stuff,” he said to me on the way out, “though I’m not so sure about what you wanted me to think about that guy.” The reviews the next day indicated a similar ambivalence. Compelling but marred by reliance on stereotype is how I would characterize the general critical sentiment. Exactly what the stereotype was in this case, no one made very clear. To a critic, they yearned for a Muslim character driven to valiant ends by unimpeachable motives, not the tortured, vindictive antihero on display center stage for so much of the evening. In our era, one increasingly without political nuance, Muslims were just the minor premise of the social syllogism that formed our American nation’s outraged theory of the downtrodden: you were either for the victim or against her. Muslims were victims. Therefore you could only be for a Muslim or against her. It didn’t matter if you were one already. Art, like everything else, was drowning in the tidal wash of ubiquitous and ascendant anger. Authenticity was measured now in decibels. Every utterance, every expressive gesture, was read as a pledge of allegiance to some discernible creed. The politics of representation were in ascendance, increasingly mistaken for the poetics of narrative craft. One reviewer commented that she was giving up what little hope she’d ever harbored that I might move on from this “constant parade of Grand Guignolesque Muslim caricatures ranting, raving, refusing the promise of America.” She had Muslim friends, she wrote, and they loved this country as much as she did. It had never occurred to me that jingoism—however nuanced—was part of my job description.