The Nix(110)

And finally this, the end of the march. Those who have carried their coffins from Central Park now deposit them at the foot of Madison Square Garden, where the Republicans are holding their nominating convention. The symbolism here is easy to parse: The Republicans are responsible for the war; they should also be responsible for the war dead. And there is something upsetting about the way the coffins pile up. One hundred coffins cover the avenue. Two hundred coffins begin to look like a wall. Then it gets too tall and the marchers begin heaving the coffins up to places they cannot themselves reach and the coffins are stacked atop one another like children’s blocks, balancing perilously, sliding off the pile and landing at oblique angles. The whole thing begins to look like an impromptu roadblock that you associate with Les Misérables. By the time they get to about five hundred coffins the scene has a mass-grave quality that’s downright disturbing, no matter how hawkish one might be. The marchers add their coffins to the pile and then offer some choice words to the Republicans, shaking their fists and yelling in the direction of the giant ovoid arena just beyond the line that demarcates the end of their march as per the permit recently approved by city hall, a line that is recognizable for the massive security buildup—steel fencing and armored trucks and riot police standing elbow to elbow—in case you forget where your Free Speech Zone ends.

When you and Bethany add your coffin to the pile, you do so gently. No throwing. No yelling. You place it quietly on the ground and then listen to the commotion around you for a moment, the many thousands who showed up today, a good turnout for a protest, but a number that is dwarfed by the audience watching you on television right now, on a certain cable news outlet that’s using the live feed from the end of the march as B-roll footage to play in a box on the left side of the screen next to a few smaller boxes on the right side of the screen where pundits’ heads debate whether the protest you’ve just finished will backfire on you or be merely useless, whether you are a traitor or merely giving comfort to the enemy, and underneath your image is a bright yellow headline that reads LIBERALS USE SOLDIER DEATHS FOR POLITICAL GAIN. The protest turns out to be a great triumph for this particular news show, as it will notch its highest post–September 11 ratings today, clocking in at 1.6 million viewers, which is itself dwarfed by the 18 million households that will tune in for tonight’s network broadcast of a reality singing show, but it’s a pretty good score for basic cable nonetheless, and will allow them to bump their ad rates next quarter by a tenth of a percent.

Meanwhile, Bethany looks at you for the first time in hours. She says, “Let’s go home.”

To go home with Bethany, go to the next page…





This might not seem like a Choose Your Own Adventure story yet, because you haven’t made a choice.

You’ve been with Bethany for an entire day—you listened to her intolerable fiancé and allowed her to drive you to the protest and followed her into the park and all the way through Manhattan and now she hails a cab and you follow her into it and you ride silently south back to her extravagant apartment and you have not made a single significant decision. You’re not choosing your own adventure; the adventure has been chosen for you. Even the decision to come to New York in the first place wasn’t really a decision so much as a reflexive and impulsive yes. How could it be a “decision” when you never considered saying no? The yes was there already, waiting for you, inevitable, the sum of all those years of pining and hoping and obsessing. You never even decided your life would be this way—it’s simply the way life has become. You’ve been carved out by the things that have happened to you. Like how the canyon can’t tell the river which way to shape it. It just allows itself to be cut.

But perhaps there’s one choice you’re making, which is the constant minute-by-minute low-level tacit choice to act more or less normally and not exclaim in a fit of passion “What the f*ck is wrong with you?” or “Don’t marry Peter Atchison!” or “I still love you!” Maybe bolder and more romantic men would do this, but to you it seems impossible. It goes against your nature. You’ve never been able to assert yourself like that. Your greatest dream has always been to fade from view completely, become invisible. You long ago learned to tuck away your biggest emotions because those are the things that trigger the crying, and there is nothing worse than that, the blubbering, in public, in front of people.

So you don’t try to shake Bethany out of this quiet and distant and infuriating stupor she’s in, you don’t proclaim your love for her, and you’re not even really aware that this is a choice. You’re like the ancient cave painter drawing 2-D animals before the invention of three-point perspective: You are incapable of working in anything but your narrow dimensions.

You will, eventually, have to make a choice. You’re approaching the choice—you’ve been getting closer to it ever since Bethany touched the coffin with her brother’s name on it and the manic person she’d been since you arrived shriveled and she became silent and introspective and very, very far away. So far away that when you return to her palatial apartment and she disappears into her bedroom, you assume she’s gone to sleep. Instead, she reappears a few minutes later having changed from one dress into another, from black to yellow, a thin smart summery thing. She has an envelope in her hand, which she places on the kitchen counter. She turns on a few lights and pulls a bottle of wine from the special wine fridge and says, “Drink?”