A genocide — does it make your stomach turn? Do you see the bodies lined up? Careful, perfect, individual columns of human being that melt into the dirtafter a couple months? You close your eyes. You don’t think about it. It doesn’t make you feel anything in that big hole of a chest you call yours — you close out your CNN app — this is what I try to change when I write.
I earn my money by walking the rubble and wondering when it ends.
They kill journalists, too. They kill people like me. I know this. Years ago, a man in a fair trade shop once asked me why I wanted to go warzones. I was still in college, baby-faced and full-lipped, the sweet, acrid scent of burning incense and foreign candles stuffed up my nose as I listened. He said it would be dangerous, that I could die. I told him fair enough. He asked, do you know how to shoot a gun? I said no, never intend to. He said, but you’re a woman. I said so what, and I closed my eyes and imagined the sounds of bombs beneath the quiet jingling of the chimes.
My name is Elizabeth. For ten years I have gone to warzones and covered what goes on; since 2011, I’ve focused on Syria. I explain each bomb that unfurls like flower petals in prose that terrifies me sometimes. The best compliment I have ever received is still no eighteen-year-old I know writes like this — I was a freshman then, and I didn’t know the guy, but I think about it a lot when I have writer’s block. My window office in Manhattan is decorated with pictures of me overseas and my kids doing school things, kids playing soccer, kids dancing onstage with flexed feet and splayed fingers. I love all of them, each gap-toothed smile and tangle of hair. My iPhone background alternates. I name them off from three to seventeen at holiday parties — Max, Milo, Felix, Ramona, Matilda, Jobie. They have dog names, somebody always says, and I laugh, but I’ve always thought they were cute names, even trendy. I’m married to a guy who plays piano for a living. I love to watch his fingers as he plays Auld Lang Syne. Sometimes I go away for weeks at a time; he understands; he plays dad while I play disillusioned.
Forward. I am burnt. Skin peels off, my nose is red, I wrap my scarf around my face to protect me from the wind. Wind that is rough like sandpaper, like the circular knuckles pinning my fingers to my hands, like the soles of my shoes. Shoes that scrape the rubble. Rubble of cities. Human bodies. International law — it’s almost funny. But it’s not, it never is, and sometimes when the sand gets in my eyes, water falls from them. I write through it.
It’s dangerous, the man had said, back when I was a freshman. I know that, I said. There were two buttons in my palm — comfortable faded circles that read NO DRAFT NO WARS and STAND UP FOR PEACE with an image of Uncle Sam against off-white. Can I pay with credit? I asked. Ten dollar minimum, he said. Something moved in that big hole of chest I call mine — something slithery, something squirmy. The yoga music kept playing beneath the chime jingling. I looked at the bracelets on my wrist, whose proceeds went to feed hungry children. I was, not for the first time, disgusted with myself, but I still put the buttons on my backpack.
Forward again. I hope they untie my hands. My skin has flayed from my wrists, red zebra stripes bright against the burnt white, and I think of my dog, I think of my kids who don’t look like me, I think of little hands that squish my fingers together when the little hands are afraid. I think of telling my oldest boy that he shouldn’t worry about paying for college — in fact, none of my kids should. I think of telling my little girl that I’ll sign her up for the Boy Scouts if it’s the last thing I do, and in the meantime, she can take archery lessons. There is a box of muddy shoes by the back door. There is a bundle of blankets in front of the GameCube that hasn’t been moved in weeks. There is a paper clipped to the fridge with a Coney Island magnet, wrinkled from backpack jiggling, that reads 91 B+ Great Job Max. I’m proud of you. We’ll make banana muffins to celebrate. And when the truck veers right, dipping into dried-dirt ruts, I topple off the seat.
You close your eyes because you don’t want to see it. So I write about it to make you think about it.
They kill people like me. I know this. They kill journalists, mothers, sisters, daughters, and best friends. Years ago, that same man from the fair trade shop told me about a teacher in town who used to be a war journalist. If you told him what you were going to do, the man said, he’d tell you not to do it. I didn’t say anything, just nodded and fingered Celtic jewelry made of cheap burnished silver. He kept going though. Especially once you have kids, the man said. He said, once you have kids it changes everything.
People like you close your mouth because you don’t want to say the word genocide. So I write it out for you. I see what nobody else is willing to see but only when I’m overseas.
It doesn’t matter if you try not to see it, though. It doesn’t matter if you try not to say it. It doesn’t matter if you’re Mother Theresa and you work in a soup kitchen — it is still genocide and it still happens even when you’re playing board games after dinner. Repeat with me, shape the words like alphabet blocks in your kindergartner mouth, try and find me a synonym if you remember what that means. It is still genocide. Did our never agains slip between the couch cushions?
My kids dig beneath the couch cushions and find pennies. They think they can buy something with handfuls of coins. I let them try at thrift stores for fun.
Across the world, I repent in the rubble. My scabbed knees smack the shattered bricks, a coarse palm forcing my head down as I kneel. What is being spoken around me isn’t unintelligible — I can understand a little — I learned this in college — I learned this just to do this — and I know they aren’t repenting in their native language. Because there are prayers, and then there are politicides. I am about to become a politicide.
My lips move silently anyway.
Better yet, my words move loudly. Like dragons.
Hey kid, the man behind the counter said. His face was hidden by a rack of pentagram lockets and old crosses and amethyst pendants. What’s your name?
Elizabeth.
What do you wanna be when you grow up?
A war correspondent.
Before the gun goes off, the cold metal barrel nuzzling into my matted hair, I think to myself that it’s not me you should mourn, it’s the Syrian kids, it’s the bodies lined up, it’s the — it’s not my death that matters in the end. I realize this suddenly. I am one against half a million and they will never get their own individual obituaries in the New York Times.
That’s dangerous, he said.
They’re shouting something around me and the wind whipping my exposed skin is hot and harsh. I don’t dare close my eyes — don’t dare lose these moments of dirt beneath me, of ashy chunks of stone. My hands are bound and bleeding in my lap as I try to remember the faces of my kids. I try to remember when the next soccer game is. But everything I see is Syrian kids. For once, I don’t feel guilty; for once, I almost smile, because with every piece I publish, somebody stops and thinks about Syria.
Why would you want to do that? he said.
For auld lang syne. For Syria. Maybe we’ll take our cup of kindness sooner than —
When the newspapers go out the next morning, the headline is about a white female journalist named Elizabeth who was captured and killed execution-style in the streets. She is survived by a number of children. They are now in custody of Child Protective Services. A lot of people pity them. But nobody mentions the genocide, and nobody is sad for Syria.
