Cyclorama, p.31
Cyclorama, page 31
She held in her tears when she was in the synagogue, but the moment after she left Eleonora with the rabbi and got into Franklin’s car, she lost it. It was a dry night, but she squinted as if the windshield were spattered with rain. She told Franklin everything: about her arguments with Adrian; her suspicions that maybe he was seeing someone else; her fears that she had neglected her daughter, and that Kitty was happiest when she wasn’t at home. She told him about the play, the calls, the texts; about the moment she got to the clinic and knew there was no such thing as a safe place.
“You know I’m here for you anytime,” Franklin told her.
“That’s not a place,” she said.
Franklin held her hand as he drove, interlaced his fingers with hers but didn’t say anything. It was an odd, familiar ballet the two of them had started performing years earlier when one or the other was with a new partner, or both were: they would hold hands but wouldn’t acknowledge they were doing it, kiss without looking the other directly in the eye, stop without either telling the other they needed to stop, as if both of them sensed that remaining silent would confine their feelings to a different realm, one more closely aligned with a world they dreamed as opposed to the one in which they lived. Once you talked about it, it wouldn’t be safe anymore.
The porch lights were on when they got back to Carrie’s house, but the driveway was empty and the only lights on in the house were the ones she’d turned on before she and Adrian left. Adrian hadn’t come home; maybe he was still out with Kitty, Judith, and the rest of them. She hoped they were having a good time.
“Do you want to come in for a bit?” Carrie asked. “I have to check in with everyone downtown and walk the dog, but no one’s home and it’s quiet. Coffee or something? Have you had dinner?”
She liked the idea that helping Eleonora would give her and Franklin a reason to talk and spend more time together. It felt a little like fulfilling the promise of the roles they’d once played. Ty Densmore was gone; the Franks and the Van Daans were dead. The world was full of new Anne Franks. If Anne and Peter had survived, wouldn’t they have devoted their lives to people in situations like theirs?
Franklin took a long time before he answered. “I’d really like to, but I should probably get back,” he said. “A lot happened tonight. I gotta write it all down and get it posted to the site while it’s still fresh. Let’s talk tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Carrie kissed him. “Tomorrow.”
She got out of the car. Franklin waited until he saw she was safely inside. Then he drove home to write while Carrie turned on the lights in her kitchen, where there was only a dog to greet her.
Margo Frank
It was the op-ed that changed her mind. Up until Asya Loh read the essay Rob Rubicoff published in the New York Times, she had been phenomenally successful at staying as far away as possible from her hometown and the life she had led there. On family road trips with her husband and kids, she had driven around Illinois; she vetoed any plane trip if there was a transfer at O’Hare. Asya didn’t even like riding on planes that flew over Chicago. On the few occasions she did, she imagined doomsday scenarios: the plane losing power, making an emergency landing; she would have to rush the cockpit like Mikhail Baryshnikov in White Nights, a movie she had watched five zillion times with Laurence when they’d first started going out. Whenever she and Laurence got lost or missed a highway exit, they quoted that scene: “Vhat do you mean? Ve are landink in Russia?!”
Asya had just returned from her morning dog walk down to the creek. Laurence was already awake and dressed, wearing the olive-green cardigan she’d bought him last Christmas. He was sitting on the back deck beneath the hummingbird feeder, sighing as he read the newspaper.
Asya unleashed the dogs and poured food into their bowls. “What’re you reading, pal?”
“God, this Rubicoff guy.” Laurence retied his ponytail. “He was the creep from your high school with the bad acne and the Mercedes and so forth, right?”
“Yep, you got it.” It was always stunning to Asya, the way Laurence applied the same attention to detail to her life as he did to his lectures on cinema. He only had to see a movie once to recount its entire plot and quote dialogue from it. The same was true for her past, which he referenced as if it had been a film they’d seen together and he’d paid more attention to: “The obituary for this teacher guy—he’s the pederast who wore those turtlenecks and directed you in Anne Frank?” Or: “The fellow who wrote this story about this Guatemalan girl hiding in Chicago—he left those messages you didn’t return, right?” And: “That crazy cult they’re doing a documentary on—that was the one your mother was in for a few years, wasn’t it?”
It was oddly comforting, the way Laurence spoke of her past as if all that had happened to her meant no more or less than if it had happened to a character in a movie.
Asya sat beside Laurence, took his newspaper, and scanned the essay Rob had written. She felt a brief tightening in her chest, but she had seen his name in the news often enough that it was no longer surprising. Rob had done everything in his life that Asya might have expected short of ending up in a white-collar penitentiary. He’d gone from Carleton to Georgetown Law, dropped out and gone to business school. After that, his career was, to Asya, a haphazard series of articles Laurence gave her and she glanced at, of talk show appearances that Laurence called her in to watch and she walked away from, of books with provocative titles displayed prominently on the tables she tended to avoid when she was at Barnes & Noble: The Case for World War IV; Why Torture Works; The Myth of Campus Rape.
This piece challenged the unwritten rule against arresting undocumented immigrants in houses of worship. The sanctuary movement was “blasphemous and ludicrous” and “made a mockery of faith itself,” wrote Rob, identified as “executive director of DC Consulting and a former speechwriter for George W. Bush.” He name-checked the case of Eleonora Acevedo, awaiting a hearing on her asylum case while holed up in the synagogue he went to as a kid.
“Enough is enough,” Rob wrote. “What we need here are ‘shock and awe’ tactics. Let’s move in coordinated fashion on any place of worship suspected of sheltering illegals. Will there be bad press? Of course. But the results will be worth it: Illegal immigrants will no longer see America as their ‘safe space.’ ”
Asya felt triggered. But it wasn’t quite a “This Is the Guy Who Abused Me Back in High School” triggering as much as it was a “This Is One of the Millions of Guys on This Planet Who Hold Appalling Views” triggering, an all-too-familiar “Here’s a Rich White Guy Getting a Platform for Writing Something Triggering” triggering.
She handed back Laurence’s newspaper. “I’m not even sure why I read that whole thing,” she said. “He’s just some gross troll. It’s not like he’s got the power to do what he’s talking about anyway.”
“If only.” Laurence refolded the newspaper so that the front page was visible and flicked a finger at an article: LONGTIME WASHINGTON INSIDER TIPPED FOR IMMIGRATION CZAR POST. There was a color picture of Rob in a suit and tie, looking a little paunchier than Amanda remembered, but the smug smile was the same.
Most days, she drove Laurence to campus and they drank tea together in his office before her first sessions, but today she didn’t suggest it; she felt as though she might vomit. “Fuck, I don’t have time to talk about this now, Laurie,” she said. “I’ve gotta get to the studio; I don’t wanna be late.”
She thought the ache in her gut would go away, but it stayed there for days. Normally, she could roll with whatever was troubling her; she’d brood about the world’s injustices, but only for a short time, because there were physical therapy sessions to lead, yoga or hip-hop classes to teach, dogs to walk, laundry to do, a grandson to babysit. This time the thoughts were as relentless as they had been after one of her inconclusive biopsy diagnoses during the previous year’s cancer scare; they pursued her whether she was asleep or awake. She imagined people trapped inside churches, huddled together as ICE agents kicked down their doors, Rob bossing them around, telling them how to do it.
Images and memories strobed before her, a mixture of past and premonition. A girl alone with family, friends, and a boy she longed to kiss, then boot steps just outside their door: Was that something that happened to her sister in a show, something that would happen again in the future, or something that just happened over and over? A girl, dazed and dizzy, waking up to a hand between her legs, a flash burst in her eyes as she punched and kicked. Had that happened, would it happen, or was it just always happening? A girl alone in an empty sanctuary, her face illuminated by the dim orange glow of the Eternal Light—was that face from a photograph in an article she read or from a memory of the Annex?
The visions haunted her on her walks with her dogs and without them; in her classes and sessions where she’d lose track of time; at the Citgo station where she tried to fill up a tank that already had plenty of gas in it; in bed with Laurence, who touched her and said something felt different and asked if anything was wrong. “No,” she told him, “just the state of the world,” and Laurence smiled and said, “Ahh, well, if it’s only that.”
One night she woke up screaming, screamed until Laurence held her and she remembered she was safe. The dream hadn’t been one of the recurring nightmares she’d had since she was a child: alone in a room full of mannequin heads spinning round and round, and each time they came full circle, there was a different face. And it wasn’t one of her other nightmares that was so literal it wasn’t worth bothering to interpret: lying on a stage, unable to move, while Rob and Declan marched toward her in storm troopers’ uniforms.
In this dream, her children were little again. She was holding their hands and walking them down to the creek. But when she got to the water, she noticed her hands were empty. Misha and Ginger weren’t there; they were across the water, staring back at her—not angrily or pleadingly, just wondering why she was on the other side. Then the water began to rise. When it was up to her waist, she screamed.
The dream could have signified anything. Or nothing at all. But when she told Laurence about it and he asked her what she thought it meant, she said that the children made her think of people she could save, if only she could cross the water before it drowned her. And what was the water? asked Laurence. The past, she said, a barrier that would grow harder to overcome the longer she waited.
“Are you sure you want to dredge all this back up?” Laurence asked as he lay beside her.
“I think I have to try,” said Asya.
The next morning Laurence walked the dogs, and Asya took a long walk by herself. She went to the creek, called the main number for the Department of Justice in Washington, and found herself tangled in the branches of a phone tree: “If you know your party’s extension, please enter it now.”
Asya didn’t have a clue who she should talk to, so she hung up. She took a breath. Felt dizzy. She walked to a tree stump, sat on it, listened to the ripple of the creek. She scrolled through the missed calls on her phone. The call she was looking for had come in months ago, but she recognized the number—it was the only one with a Chicago area code.
“Hello?”
She forced herself not to hang up. She thought of kids in detention centers. Of Anne and Peter freezing at the sound of Nazi boots. Of Rob undressing her, then leaving her alone until Declan became an unwitting accomplice in his cruel plot. You couldn’t give power to a guy like Rob; people had to know what kind of person he was.
“Frank Lichtenstein?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
She said her name, and he seemed to already know why she was calling. “Oh, hey, Asya, good to hear your voice,” he said, then: “Lemme close the door here and get some privacy so we can have a conversation.”
Franklin tried small talk, didn’t get very far with it; she thought he sounded kind of smarmy. “Wow, been a long time hasn’t it?” he said. “You takin’ good care of yourself?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“You got kids?”
“Two. They’re adults, but yeah.”
“Two’s a good number. And you’re still chillin’ in Colorado, right?”
“Yeah. Colorado.”
“Beautiful part of the country. You ever talk to anyone from, you know, back in the day?”
“I don’t.”
“Hey, I actually saw Carrie just this morning.”
“Carrie, yeah, she was a nice kid.”
“Do you want me to tell her you said hey?”
“Nah, that’s all right.”
“She’s got a daughter who’s starting up at U of C.”
“Nice.”
“She’s having some problems. Marriage can be harsh, man. It’s not really a natural state.”
“Yeah. It doesn’t work out for everybody.”
“So,” Franklin said, “I’m gonna record our conversation so I can remember everything we talk about without writing it all down, okay?”
There was a breeze, and it was cool enough for Asya to wonder if she should have worn a sweater, but the phone was hot against her ear. “Wait, you wanna record this?”
“Just so I can be accurate.”
“Hold on,” said Asya. “Are you gonna use my name? I just called because I wanted to say some things about Rob that I think are important if they’re really serious about him getting this job, but if you’re gonna quote me, no way can you use my name. I have children; I have a grandson. They don’t know anything about this.”
Franklin sounded smooth, unconcerned. “Yeah, well, why don’t we do it this way? I tell most people I never do interviews off the record, but since we know each other—”
“I don’t really remember you, honestly,” Asya said.
“That’s fine,” said Franklin. “We can record, then later we can decide where, if anywhere, we go from there.”
“But no name,” Asya said.
“No name for now,” said Franklin.
“No name,” Asya said.
“Okay, so tell me what you wanna tell me.”
Asya started slowly, but Franklin drew her out—not by what he said as much as by his silences, which she felt she had to fill before saying, “That’s off the record,” or “That part’s really off the record.”
“Does that mean the other stuff’s on the record?” Franklin asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s all off the record.”
When she spoke of her old life, it seemed more depressing than she had thought it was while she was living it: coming back to her dad’s condo and finding no one home every night; forging her mother’s signature on permission slips; a little girl in her tap class telling her, “When I grow up, I wanna be just like you,” and her thinking, No, kid; no, really, you don’t. Although she had tried to put all this out of her mind for three and a half decades, apparently it was just below the surface: her dad with his waitresses; the baggies of weed on the coffee table beside used Kleenexes and stubbed-out cigarettes; her mom in California with her hairy boyfriends; the long afternoons at Baba Asya’s house, listening to her tell stories about surviving the famine, until Baba Asya wasn’t there anymore. She talked of walking from car to car on the Howard–Englewood el line—waiting for the end to come so at least she’d know where she was.
“And then Rob . . . ,” said Asya. “Off the record.”
“For now,” said Franklin.
“Yeah, for now.”
“He was your boyfriend for a while?”
“Kinda sorta.”
“You loved him?”
Asya spat out a laugh. “Fuck no.”
“But you had to like him at least a bit, no?”
“I don’t even know that,” said Asya. “I mean, I guess, maybe. But it’s almost like the point was I was waiting for someone to step in and tell me to stop all the shit I was doing, just to prove to myself that there wasn’t any person who’d do that—that I was really on my own.”
“I wish I knew you better then,” said Franklin.
No response.
“Okay,” Franklin said. “Tell me about Rob.”
Asya stared past the trees to the mountains. Way out there, it looked like a warm summer day, but here she could see her breath. “You have to understand something,” she said. “I’m a very private person. I’m private about who I am now, and I’m private about who I was then. I don’t want this to become something that takes over my whole life. That’s why I’m so serious about not using my name.”
Franklin sighed.
“What?”
“You know,” Franklin said. “I don’t know if I should even tell you this, and if you wanna hang up after I say what I wanna say, I’d totally get it. But look—we can do this however you want: quotes, no quotes, names, no names, pseudonyms, whatever kinda whatnot you decide. It won’t matter. There’s no privacy anymore; that’s all been shot to hell. Everything catches up, whatever you did; if you were a Nazi criminal or just someone who made a mistake when you were a kid, it all comes back. When we were at North Shore, people were always like, ‘This’ll go on your permanent record.’ No one realized that’d turn out to be a thing. As soon as I publish anything you say—even if Rob doesn’t come after you, and he probably will—people’ll try to figure out who you are, doxx you, all that kinda whatnot. Chances are they’ll do it too. I found your number, and I’m only one guy, and I don’t have anywhere near the resources they’ll bring.
