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At the last protest before my last protest I grow nauseated by the pageantry – the photo-op signage, the 300 dollar jackets with political slogans pre-sewn-in, the mind-numbingly repetitive chanting. Maybe the problem is that I understand too well. This is a salve for practitioners and the easily sated. Supermarket sheet cake for the choir. We're gathered outside one of the president's many towers, a handful of barricades have been prearranged for us to march in circles inside. We are yelling in this penned-in section of fencing while traffic moves freely around us, demanding justice as business goes on undisturbed. And even as we say these same words over and over, it's clear we each have different definitions of what justice, and freedom, and power mean. What I know for sure is any word repeated enough ends up meaning nothing.
A group of friends ask me to take their picture. They're laughing until the lens is trained on them and then, behind their signs, they make serious and severe faces for the internet. One of the girls compliments my anti-cop shirt (which I bought on Amazon) but not my makeup (which I stole from Sephora). There are official cameras surveilling us. The cameras stand in for police while the actual police sip free coffee in their cruisers.
To be here is to be alone surrounded by people – at once watched and invisible. Over these two hours we keep inquiring what democracy looks like, who owns these streets, and whether, if the people are united will they ever be defeated? The answers to me are clearly: not this, not us, we're not, and, inevitably, we will be. The demonstration ends after about the length of a movie, and everyone goes home feeling better – as if we've done something, as if something's been done.
I go home sick. Throw up my Burger King into the toilet. Check Twitter to see the protest trending for a moment, then gone.
It's happened again. This time at the small grocery store on Grand. I'm minding my own business, trying to navigate the labyrinth of dry-goods' bins and discounted plums, dodging new fathers failing to pilot their strollers and shopping carts at once. I have a red basket and am swinging its empty shell in my left hand like a small pendulum, a little metronome that keeps me grounded in the rush-hour chaos. I just wanted to pop in for something small to tide me over: bread and cheese, pre-bagged apples. But it's so busy, it now seems I've somehow committed to living here and am scared I might start getting charged rent. I'm standing in the checkout line for what might be several lifetimes before I see him. Stupid, I think, stupid and shake my head until the produce blurs into oil paint. I go ahead and bury myself in my phone: open the grid of hungry torsos, twenty likes from some new stranger on Instagram, rearrange some candies. By the time it's my turn in line, it's clear the cashier boy both is and equally cannot be Edwin – I triple take, blink hard again, and yes, the nose is slightly different across the bridge, and he has those thick glasses that make his eyes seem bigger, almost like an insect's. He's still in his early twenties which of course he wouldn't be now after all these years, smiling; not being dead.
Even our most direct family line is split like a tree with a vast underground root system. One living organism of quaking aspen in Utah, for instance, stretches out across 108 acres. Each trunk represents a whole life. You can trace your finger across the knotted roots and pass through different worlds. Most of my dad's family lore ends half a century ago with a drunk, so he invents for me older odd folk tales, but if you do the simple math, just four generations back requires sixteen different people who suffered and laughed and made love out of nothing. They fled Russia, Poland, Yemen, Lithuania, and then there were thirty-two. On paper at least, when we left Egypt, there would have been tens of millions, though inbreeding and genocide throw a wrench in the lugwork of that math. According to biblical testimony, which is always to be trusted, it was 603,550 Israelites who fled to wander the desert, which outside a miracle could never support that much life. But what else is life? Besides blood, what ties us? Sometimes miracle is just another word for naming precisely what already exists. Thus, the villages and cities are many trees and many of them are gone, felled by time and fire, but the root system spread across Yiddishland and Palestine and Egypt and France and Brazil and Argentina and here in America.
Excerpted from Yr Dead by Sam Sax. Copyright © 2024 by Sam Sax. Excerpted by permission of McSweeney's Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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