TUCSON, JUNE 2020, 108°
QUARANTINE WEEK 13, GESTATIONAL WEEK 30
As N flies home from coaching a UFC fight, the world falls apart again, anew. Another Black American has been brutally murdered by a cop, and this most recent instance in the never-ending series of similar murders at the hands of the police is filmed. Everyone with internet or television and the will to watch it sees George Floyd beg and struggle on the ground and ultimately die in nine agonizing minutes with a white cop’s knee pressed against his neck. Protests have broken out across the country, and police have already turned violent, rushing in with military tanks and semiautomatic rifles, with dogs and tear gas. Protesters are losing consciousness, eyeballs, their lives.
I pick N up from the airport and we get two whole chickens from the drive-through Mexican chicken place. He reads on his phone that Arizona has set an eight P.M. curfew, that the National Guard has been mobilized. We flop on the couch and eat too much chicken. I want chocolate or something else sweet but it is already eight thirty, and even though the terms of the curfew allow for food shopping, it seems too frivolous to send N out into the uncertain world for something so nonessential. We watch horrific footage on the internet as we eat, of people’s bodies being shot and gassed and punched and dragged and knelt upon by police. I don’t want to watch any of it, but it feels like the very least I can do, to watch the truth in all its ugliness as it unfolds. I am surprised by none of it. I remember with crisp clarity walking with my grandmother near Seventh Avenue in Manhattan on the day the Rodney King riots began, remember her rushing me, and my parents feeling tense and my not understanding what was going on or why the route we usually took home had suddenly become a dangerous place, what that kind of danger even meant.
It is impossible to understand the functioning of the combination of this violence, the utterly apathetic response by the systems of law and order, the months of quarantine, and the new sense of existential precarity brought on by the pandemic and the lockdown and the economic collapse of the country and much of the world. In this context, the unrelatedness of the violence of the streets and the violence of the UFC cages feels clearer than it ever has. In the cage, everyone has agreed to be there. No one is fighting under duress. In the streets, neither of those things is true.
When we finish eating N immediately falls asleep curled up on the couch, his body warm next to me. I look at his softly closed eyes, so sweetly beautiful, and think about what our baby will look like. I feel them kicking and moving around inside me. The gas line at the new house hasn’t been turned on yet so we don’t have laundry or a stove or hot showers, but I don’t care about any of it, I will sit here and eat cold chicken and take a cold shower and wear a dirty shirt with a true smile on my face, scared of the world but cozy in our house, mentally frayed and yet safer than I’ve ever been.
I was lucky, so fucking lucky, to grow up under circumstances wherein my body was not in peril. All the peril it landed in was later, and much of it was my own doing, and while I have known the cold terror of bodily vulnerability exploited, I have not lived a life marked by such episodes. For me, they were that: episodes. Not the backdrop of my reality. My dalliances with powerlessness were all, to varying degrees, facilitated by the privilege that I had and have. To toy with danger is only a game to people with the opportunity to stop playing, and I am protected by my whiteness and the privilege of having grown up with my father’s money with every breath that I have ever taken.
Our baby moves around my belly as I start to doze, full of chicken and glazed over by television and the comfort of N’s presence. I think about who our baby will be, and I wonder how the world will flex and yield for them, if they will feel the same safeties and dangers I have or the ones N has or some other set altogether. I wonder what it will mean to be mixed-race in 2025, 2030, 2040, and on. I think about N’s lost surname, the one his Japanese family changed to keep themselves safe in a racist America, which we will give to our baby next to N’s European family name. I think about the first name our baby will receive from N’s Hawaiian family, the one most people outside of Hawai’i will struggle to pronounce.
What will I tell our child about violence—the violence of the United States, of the world, of Tucson, of my own life? How will I accept that there will likely be an aspect of my mixed-race child’s life that I, a white parent, will never fully understand, that I will only be able to observe? How will I explain the ways women are afraid, the ways men are dangerous, the treacherous ways whiteness is deployed? Will I try to create a cocoon for them with homeschool and no television and lies of omission, in which I pretend it is possible to live in perpetual ignorance of pain and damage? Or will I be brave and honest and tell them whole truths, the ugly parts about myself and this country and this world? I don’t know how much truth you’re meant to hand to a child. Shelter is safety, but also it can be harm. What will I tell them when they draw their small finger across the scars on my body and ask what they are, just as I remember doing with my own mother’s body? What will I tell them if they, as I have, seek things that hurt them? Will I act as if I am a person without a complicated history of violence and suffering, or will I allow them to see me as I actually am, tatters and triumphs knit together? What will I tell them about my life and its pains, about the truths I have learned, about the things I have written?
On the video footage a young Black woman, masked for both anonymity and protection from Covid, speaks to a reporter. The reporter asks the protester somewhat obtuse questions about what she wants and why she is out demonstrating, and I hear both the quaver and the power in the protester’s voice, her fear and her desperation and also her bravery and her love. Her body is slim and small. I shudder to think of her at the hands of one of the beefy cops patrolling all the areas of our country—hers and mine—with military-grade weapons and zero accountability. Over her mask, her eyes flash anger and fear and adrenaline. Smoke, or maybe gas, filters through the air behind her. I can hear sirens and gunshots and explosions on the shaky audio. My body is calm and warm and fed and safe. My baby, insulated from all this violence by the layers of my own body, shifts peacefully, wriggling to find a more comfortable position. The reporter asks the young woman her name and she stiffens at the question. You can call me Jane Doe, she says, looking around behind her in a way I can tell she has been doing since she was very young. Stay safe, Jane, the reporter says. My baby settles. I turn the phone off. N wakes up and we walk down the long Saltillo-tiled hallway and climb into bed and reach for each other, our bodies familiar comforts, our bodies known and safe. Outside, there is chaos in downtown Tucson. We are safe inside, our baby safe inside me. The guilt of my relief at our safety lives in my chest, near my solar plexus. His body smells like water and sun. His skin touches mine and I can’t tell any longer where he ends and I begin. We fall asleep curled into each other, my breath shallow, his warm heavy arm wrapped around me, the ceiling fan whizzing, the taste of each other in our mouths, and rest like we were tranquilized.