The Believer, page 29
He explains that Carlos moved in with him for a while before Tim helped him move back to Mexico and spent six weeks there, which improved his Spanish greatly; he’s returned to visit since.
“We drove all the way down as a family after Ethan was born,” Becky adds. “He was five weeks old. We had a lot of fun.”
Knowing Tim’s pressed for time, I thank him, expect he will return downstairs. But Becky, laughing softly, tells me to ask him one more thing. “The question,” she reminds me, “you asked me the first time you were here about how we got to the Bronx? I think you’d like to hear his version of that story.” I’ve spoken with Becky enough to understand that this particular laugh does not signal jocularity; it indicates strong emotion running through like a rip current.
Tim stays. “Our transition here was, I guess you would say, very outside of the box coming from the Mennonite peoples,” he starts in. “The experience for most of them is rural Pennsylvania or rural other places. And there are some, I believe, that would take that so far as to believe that’s for Biblical reasons. Well, I have to disagree. The only reason they do that is because that’s what their grandpa did, that’s what their dad did and that’s what they’re doing. They can’t show me otherwise.”
A group of young people had started traveling to New York City to pass out tracts, and even though their church was a two-hour drive away, they started holding prayer meetings in the city each month. Tim was approached by the church committee that coordinated these visits because they needed a Spanish translator. Eventually, the prayer meetings became more formal church meetings, held in the apartment where the Witmars currently live.
“Attendance there was anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five. Some mornings it was just totally packed out,” Tim says, explaining that families with children drove down as well. I think of that apartment full of white faces, a visiting quorum of their church back home, vastly outnumbering the people they had come to minister to.
The committee eventually decided that the meetings effectively constituted church services without the structure of a church, so it was going to close down the exercise unless it could provide the area with a stable congregation.
“So the question came, ‘Who’s willing to commit their lives to this work?’” Tim’s voice thins out with emotion. No one put their hand up. There was an ordination in train in their Pennsylvania church—a process conducted along biblical lines of nominating potential leaders from the congregation and then casting lots to select among the nominees—and Tim was a candidate. So while they wanted to go to New York, they felt conflicted about leaving. Also, his parents did not support the idea of moving to the city.
“Finally, the morning before that nomination service, I prayed,” Tim says. The understanding he reached was that if his name was not ultimately drawn to lead the Pennsylvania congregation, he would take that as a divine call to go to New York. And, yes, in the end another man was chosen.
Tim explains that he had not shared this thinking with his father, who drove him home from church the night another man was selected. Nevertheless, his dad turned to him in the car and said, “You’re called to something. I think it’s New York.”
Tim’s eyes well up and his voice breaks on the last words and he pauses here for a very long moment, during which I think of a file my father made for himself when I was not yet sixteen. How he labeled it Sarah’s Writing, in the beautiful penmanship I have never stopped trying to emulate. What it has meant to me.
Tim clears his throat. Smiles at me. And it becomes clear why Becky preferred to wait for him before answering my question. This is their creation story, the thing that gives them structure and strength, their holy ground.
When the Kreiders first moved to New York, they found their neighbors to be kind of standoffish. Normal enough for a big city, they thought. Becky now believes that they’ve been quietly accepted. “We didn’t feel a lot of ‘We’re Spanish and you’re white,’” she says.
Something that surprised the Kreiders about their neighbors was the tenuousness of daily life. “Probably because of the high cost of living, someone will lose their job and just like that they don’t have anything,” was how Becky explained it. “Whereas if your rent and things weren’t as high, you would have a few months of buffer to find a new job. That was a cultural thing that was difficult for us to understand until we moved here—how people can be homeless so fast. But on the other hand there’s a lot of homeless shelters so that’s at least a small plus,” she says with a laugh ascending.
It’s staggering in its naivety. Not just about the conditions in many of those shelters but about the long chain that wraps itself around the lives of her neighbors: the consequences of long-standing, structurally embedded educational inequality and employment inequality and housing inequality and health inequality and policing inequality which is the high cost of their lives—but not as she understands it.
Say I hopped in a car right now, outside the Kreiders’ place, and drove six miles south into Manhattan. Say I lived on the Upper West Side. I would have a life expectancy of 83.8 years; 74.3 percent of my neighbors would have, at least, a bachelor’s degree. Median household income would be $100,746. To the extent that human wellbeing can be measured on a ten-point scale, I would score an 8.61 out of 10 on the Human Development Index.
Now say I lived in Morrisania, the neighborhood where the Kreiders first moved to and where the Witmars live now. My life expectancy plummets to 75.3 years; 10.3 percent of my neighbors have, at least, a bachelor’s degree. Median household income is $22,154. On that Human Development Index, I would score 2.88 out of 10.
On the Upper West Side, as in most Manhattan arrondissements, one can buy a thirteen-dollar juice. Residents of the South Bronx, home to one of the largest produce markets in the world, report the lowest level of fruit and vegetable consumption in the city. Nearly half of the residents live below the federal poverty line. The immediate surrounding area has the highest percentage of incarcerated residents in New York City. The quick subway ride from Manhattan to the Bronx, like the two-hour drive along Interstate 78 from Myerstown to the Bronx, is the distance between sympathy and empathy. Separate planets.
On November 9, 2016, the morning after election day, I visit the Witmar house and then I sit at the Kreider house watching Becky fold laundry.
“If we don’t tell them about Jesus, their blood is on our hands,” Becky says, talking about her missionary work as she adds a pair of underpants to the gigantic pile at her side. “Everyone is sinful by nature and they will end up in Hell if they don’t accept him.”
No one brings up the election result. They do not bring up the result because the particular outcome never mattered to them; it being “of the world” and thus merely manifesting the minute ecstasies of triumph and defeat that are transient, distracting and inconsequential: sufficiently small that they don’t warrant discussion. I do not bring up the election result because the particular outcome matters very much to me and it confirms my suspicion (long held but, before yesterday, lightly—in the hope for change) that this country, collectively understood, has ceased to care about the common good.
I do not just mean those who actively seek to erode minimum universal standards of education, health care, employment, housing and justice. I also mean those who believed—who actually believed!—that this election could have ended up otherwise in a country where the mass murder of first-graders did nothing to reform gun laws, where people crowdfund their cancer treatments, where adequate parental leave does not reliably exist, where the public schools produce a substantial disparity in basic literacy between Black and white students, where a single mother can work two jobs and earn an income that disqualifies her from public assistance but on which she cannot house herself and her child, and where it is acceptable to jail children of color because they can afford neither bail nor adequate legal representation.
Perhaps it was easier to believe this election could have ended up otherwise if you didn’t talk too much about the fact that one kilometer from where you slept, thousands of children lacked medical care. Or that the signs on the subway jubilantly advertising free breakfast programs at school were only ever in Spanish. Or that white faces disappeared entirely after three stops north. Or that seventeen blocks from where you brushed your teeth this morning, things changed abruptly, as if there was a rupture in the space-time continuum through which one stepped, always with prickling fear, into another world where the stores became shittier and then shitty, where gyms disappeared and cafés disappeared and libraries disappeared and vegetables disappeared and people disappeared, to be replaced by payday loan stores and bodegas selling loose cigarettes and cracks in the asphalt of empty playgrounds through which weeds grew long.
So although Becky is at this moment trying to elaborate for my benefit what exactly they mean when they talk about “the homosexual agenda,” I am trying to hold in my mind the fact that when one of their members gets cancer, their entire church pulls together to pay those bills. How they use fellowship as a verb. Also, the effect on me of first hearing their choir, when the braiding of voices seemed like a promise of human connectedness. On this morning when I am radiating shame for actually believing, I am trying to focus on my work. Though there is a roar in my ears like a plane taking off, I am trying to get closer to the possibility, at least, of a more perfect union.
At my last family worship with the Kreiders, one of the younger boys picks the song. Everyone pairs off. I stand opposite the three-year-old, his tiny hands in mine. He pulls one of my arms towards him and then the other and I reciprocate while everyone sings: Your work is my work and our work is God’s work, When we all pull together, how happy we’ll be!
The theme today is control. Tim asks his children if they think God is big enough to control the future. He looks each of his sons in the face as they answer: “Yes.”
“Me too,” Tim agrees. “You can’t control it, so why worry about it? Okay, what are we gonna pray for?” They decide on Rachel’s new cancer treatment. Heads bow, eyes close. I look at Becky’s hands, my own, the sky through the glass.
50
Theories of Flight
Jaimie & Aspasia
“The UFO Christmas party?” asks the hostess at a bar in central Sydney when I inquire where the function room is. She directs me to the second floor, through the flashing lights of slot machines with names like Moon Race, Fire Idol and Heart Throb, up and into a room where UFOR members sit chatting at circular tables with Christmas-tree centerpieces.
About thirty people have turned up for the Annual Christmas Celebration and Hat Competition. A smaller attendance, Jaimie explains, than is usual at speaking events, and participation in the competition categories (Best Customary Christmas Hat, Most Creative DIY Hat, Best Alien/UFO-themed Hat) has been somewhat perfunctory. Still, everyone appears to be enjoying themselves at the open bar, ducking downstairs occasionally to order a roast from the bistro and making lively conversation. This is now hushed by Jaimie, wearing a black suit, as he takes the mic for a round-up of 2019.
Aspasia, elegant in a black cocktail dress, sits knitting between a friend in a pink Santa hat and a gentleman who has been writing a book on the Pyramids and Pythagorean theory for the last twenty years. The president of UFOR, Maree Baker, is also at the table. Earlier in the year Maree highly recommended I attend a lecture by David Icke, who had not yet been banned from entering the country on character grounds related to his Holocaust denial and his theory that world politics is controlled by a group of alien lizards that includes, but is not limited to, Jewish people. “I know David personally,” she wrote, “and can vouch for his integrity.” Standing in front of a projector screen showing a flying saucer and the message Merry Christmas from Out of This World, Jaimie reports that UFO sighting reports have been up this year.
He checks to see how everyone’s been coping with the smoke that’s settled over the city since the bushfires started, then takes a quick poll to gauge interest in holding a sky-watch session soon. The screen then moves into a slide showing richly illustrated covers of Fate Magazine from the 1940s, while Jaimie lectures—more engagingly than I’ve ever watched anyone lecture on anything—on the portrayal of UFOs in mid- to late-twentieth-century pop culture.
Soon I am on a plane back to Melbourne, ascending for too long through a yellow-tinged haze over a country that is burning while I read about an upcoming meeting of world leaders in Madrid for their annual bargaining session over how to avert a climate catastrophe.
“As if to underscore the gap between reality and diplomacy,” Somini Sengupta reports, “the international climate negotiations, scheduled to begin next week, are not even designed to ramp up pledges by world leaders to cut their countries” emissions. That deadline is still a year away . . .”
We rise above the cloud line into the bright upper air where the view is limitless. Sublime. The sky as abstraction of itself, in blue and white halves, through which a hundred people are hurtling in a metal cylinder, drinking cups of coffee. It is a view which was inconceivable for almost all of human history and which no one is currently looking at, preferring instead to play Candy Crush or revise a social media post infinity times or listen to what is in their headphones while staring at the tired fabric of the seat in front of them.
Back in Sydney, the reindeer antlers and the jingle-bell earrings will come off. Everyone will return to work and family, the smoke suffusing the city as the days slip towards a pandemic that will empty the streets, turn us into ghosts of ourselves, stunned and navigating a new reality in which the old knowledge (that we are each other’s biggest threats and only saviors) shocks us like an earthquake, out of the blue and all at once.
The last UFOR gathering for 2019 now over, they will return to feeling comfortable speaking about what they saw or what they feel they must have seen only in select company, in true meetings. While I have loved speaking to most of them, I cannot say that we inhabit a mutually recognizable world. But I can say that if you are a searching misfit, not quite at home where we’ve ended up and imbued with a capacity for attentive wonder that has been ill-served too many times by what your radar returned—that you are, truly, not alone.
Coda
Here
51
The Death Doula
Katrina & Annie
Katrina said she didn’t care what happened, funeral-wise, after she was gone. Still, I think she would have loved it here by the bay, her last room, where the walls are clean white frames, water moving at their center.
Annie greets Peter and sits down. She is almost fully recovered from her pneumonia. Ten days of lying low, struggling silently with tight-chested exhaustion to keep up with Lady’s diapers and clean up after Missy. Khedup, who doesn’t do dog poo, didn’t know she was sick; didn’t think too much about her car unmoving in their driveway.
Katrina’s brother announces to the small group gathered that an accident on the freeway has held up a relative, we’ll wait for another fifteen minutes. So staff from the café across the hall come in to take orders for tea or coffee. Katrina—lying on a blanket of lambswool inside a curvaceous birchwood coffin—would have been pleased with this, and how Peter remembered to put in the email a reminder to bring a coin or two for the parking meters outside.
I think also that Katrina would have loved Annie’s red lipstick, but Annie’s not so sure, asking me to let her know if it transfers to a tooth. She’s been busy keeping an eye on her elderly uncle’s medical care and pain management, taking Lady and her wheelchair to charity events, registering for a two-day training session on caring for a deceased baby, reading (Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich); studying (How to Enjoy Death: Preparing to Meet Life’s Final Challenge without Fear by Lama Zopa Rinpoche); attending a roundtable on spiritual care in multi-faith contexts, and taking fifteen-year-old Missy to an increasing number of vet appointments where she expects soon to be told that the end has come. It never gets easier to hear, she says, squaring her jaw and looking ahead towards the coffin in a way that outlines her elegant profile against the rain-flecked square of sky and sea. She has long untethered her sense of self from her appearance but it has to be said, Annie is beautiful and to look at her in profile is to be reminded of both Renaissance portraiture and the huge-blue-eyed blondness of Vogue in the sixties.
Katrina’s brother steps up to the lectern. After the Acknowledgment of Country, he explains how we are in a beautiful spot where blue pools once extended down to Seaford: loved by the original custodians of the land for over sixty thousand years. We will have a moment of reflection, he says, in a manner that is both authoritative and nourishing.
Then family photos are projected onto the screens at either side of the lectern. Katrina’s music weaves around us. I look at Lachlan in the front row between his older brothers and his mates in their school uniforms. Sixteen. I remember Katrina at the hospice, double-checking with the kitchen that the chips she ordered to surprise him would definitely be ready when he visited after school and I feel the drop of sorrow straight through me like an elevator plummeting.
The next speaker, directing her voice towards the boys, is saying that they will hear Katrina’s words inwardly guiding them when they face life’s future challenges. Outside, sea birds swoop in a low line over waves and for a single moment the horizon connects their wings like blue thread.
