Voices
I Pray in Private
By Frank Brennan
It was a soft morning. A rare, open pastel light fat in its fullness pushed at my eyes. The leaves of the trees now aged by summer flirted with falling. I slept in the living room, full of half read books, plastic trinkets and music. Sounds filled our apartment more than furniture or children. Sounds from Africa, sounds from tortured souls - happy, young, and often angry - odes to Billy Joe, strings pulled by new romantics, songs from the states of mistakes and liberty. The songs gave all of it meaning, gave it voice.
"Planes are falling, planes are crashing, all around. In New York planes are crashing, rogue planes are falling," she said shaking me half naked, asleep on the thrift store couch. My eyes were blurred, and she was crying, running, grabbing phones, and pulling her hair. I awoke to two televisions. Men and women in fine suits and perfect hair sat shaking, unable to give voice to instant human suffering. Digital murder. Satellites forced them, pressed their mouths against words. That beauteous horror of red, yellow, orange, and black gasps of realization. The smoke rising up to Mecca, up to Nirvana, up to heaven, up to the morning I had enjoyed. They fell from the morning, holding hands, seared to clothes, head first they gave themselves. Brown, white, yellow, black. The infinite tapestry of America, and the infinite elegance of evolution dissolving into mist, lifting the veil of the unknown.
 Illustration by Rebecca Kramer |
I sit in the ancient Chicago bar with my friend of five years, drinking cheap beer and smoking unfiltered Camels. It is Wednesday. We are skeptics, we distrust most of what those in power tell us. We fight simple answers to stupid questions. When we pray we do it in secret. Outside the streets are dead, all quiet in little Mexico. Secretaries and corn sellers slowly pass our dirty window, heads down, cast in wax. The two TVs replace football, with repeating images: A plane black in shadow banking into the New York skyline, a woman cut and covered in dust, firemen casualties, and faces. Faces like the girl sitting across from me, her smile kind, and forgiving. The trait of a person with possibilities. Her hands are new, unused. Time has not taught them. She is Mexican, or Puerto Rican, or African, or Italian, or American. Eyes are complicated things. The effort and science it takes to see, the rods and cones, the many multicolored areas in the iris. All working together to perceive this world, defend our beings, and surround ourselves with beauty.
I don't know anyone who died on Tuesday, September 11. I have never had anyone close to me leave the world in a tragic way. My grandfather passed away in a house full of paintings, and prayers, and books. He read Jung, and listened to Miles Davis unable to move off his couch. He ended his life full of wonderful moments and regrets. The posters of the missing kept me up that following Thursday night. The posters, handmade statements of desperation, covered trucks and walls like paper screams, framed faces of young hopeful people with smiles and possibilities. A Chinese police officer sat crying on the screen, his New York accent identical to the Polish medic sitting next to him. He lost friends, young faces, and smiles full of possibilities. Every one in New York City lost something; the melting pot had been poisoned. How do you say, " The love of my life is missing," in Swahili, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, in English? They were not missing; in fact they were just a few hundred feet away, underneath a tomb of twentieth century engineering.
Flags flew the next day. And we all know patriotism is a pill best taken crushed. It suggests aggression, and self-righteous attitudes of moral perfection, and militaristic might. To some Old Glory is a simplistic, and even harmful symbol of past mistakes and destructive actions. And to some, flag waving is nothing more than damaging nationalist attitudes and baseless sloganeering. But they came. They came here to this isolated oppressive collection of longitudes and latitudes, of slavery, and genocide, and of war and intolerance. But they came. The Mexican, the African slave, the African immigrant, the Italian, the Irish, the Polish, they all came. They all fell into the soft morning air and the clean fall sun. They were now missing, and damaged, and their families were hoping for answers to complicated questions. Who were these people? What was their identity? The girl in the bar laughs, her eyes bright and complicated. Six thousand pieces let her see beauty. Six thousand parts working in harmony let light into her mind. The flags only bear three colors, not six thousand. Are there six thousand colors? There are not enough colors or stars to comfort the men as they march. Not off to war, but to the cathedral of fallen steel and concrete. Do we share six thousand dreams? Do we share six thousand cultures? If we are in distress we wave a white flag. Christians pray to across. The pink triangle helps those who are persecuted feel strong.
All along the way to the cathedral were slaves of every race, and culture, oppressors, and the oppressed, the pretty and the ugly, the near and the far, holding onto three colors, not for confrontation, but for comfort. A fireman appeared on the screen. "The smells were horrible, the death was horrible, the sites were horrible." How do we help him go on? Are there enough colors to help him go on? Are there enough colors to represent his anguish?
I pray in private. I distrust the rich, and the powerful. I do not appreciate being sold a bill of goods. I view myself as staunchly individualistic. My identity is something of value. I look at my shoes when I hustle my way down the crowded Chicago streets. My religion is personal. I do not share myself with the public.
On Friday I walked, and saw six thousand souls, of six thousand colors from six-thousand countries with staunchly individualistic attitudes - six thousand dreams. On this island, on these longitudes and latitudes, six thousand suddenly equals one. The faces of the missing in New York were all around, in the bar, on the street, in the alleys, under the morning sky. Some faces carried three colors and fifty stars, to mourn six thousand colors made from six thousand stars. But on this morning, in my mourning, the anonymous faces were six thousand times more my own.
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