The Middle of Portland Avenue

Regarding the street execution of Renee Nicole Good by the gunman Jonathan Ross, a federal agent. The government just demonstrated that it’ll kill you in full public view and then brazen things out. Disturbing. If the government kills you, and the guy who does the deed gets away with it, then the government can go ahead and kill more Americans after that. The government can make a habit of doing so and life accordingly will have to adjust. So, with the Portland Avenue shooting, we don’t just face an injustice. We face the risk of our society getting a new personality, of all Americans finding themselves broken or brutalized by the threat of official violence. That’s why it’s especially alarming that the Trump administration wants to cover for Ross and smear the victim’s widow. I don’t say the decision’s a surprise. It’s not a surprise that drapes can burn; still, when the fire reaches them you get scared. The government will shoot you behind your steering wheel and walk away, and it doesn’t care if anyone’s looking.

I made a prediction a long time ago. The Twin Towers had hit the ground the previous fall and I was sitting in a peaceful Canadian café, enjoying a lesson in conversational French with a charming young woman who had a Pakistani mother and a French father. I forget what topic caused me to make my prediction. Maybe we’d been talking about Bush and his people gearing up to attack Saddam. But I said that, hey, down the road, who knows, maybe the United States and Europe would be enemies.

My instructor made the kind of face I often see after one of my blue-sky predictions. Polite as she was, she let me know I was being far-fetched. “It would be stupid,” she said. I persisted. “History is stupid,” I told her. (This was all in French.) “It would be crazy,” she said. I became very “What would you have, mon ami” in my manner. “History is crazy,” I said. She let the matter drop. Twenty-four years later, the nations of Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have sent members of their military forces to Greenland so that Donald Trump doesn’t try anything. But I can’t take a victory lap. I said history was stupid and crazy, not senile and depraved.

Decentering whiteness. At the college library two girls leaned their heads together as they looked at a cell phone. One girl was Chinese, I guess, the other Muslim (hijab, caramel skin). Each of them looked the way an old goat likes college girls to look: gracefully formed, slim, gifted with high cheekbones and large eyes. The East Asian girl had black hair down to her shoulders, like a glossy sheet; the Middle Eastern girl had carved lips that seemed lusher and more elegant than the usual. Hijab and black hair and carved lips and slanted eyes made the two faces seem like details from a community center mural, like they’d been taken from a line-up of oval faces carrying ethnic signifiers and happy smiles. I don’t know what the girls were smiling about. Not so much togetherness, I think, as some guy’s chest.

Two bright-eyed girls who looked different from each other and not at all like me, and there they were, happily living their youth together. I felt a sense of plummeting, of falling forward into a future made without reference to myself. All futures are, I suppose, but sometimes you get a reminder.

Of course, if there was a guy with a chest, maybe he was white. I like to think so.