CHAPTER

34

I read this at my desk in a state of mounting fury. What did Steven Merdula, that anonymous coward, know about me, or about my mother, or about Ismail? He had obviously read the handful of interviews Leah had done in the weeks after Ismail’s arrest, and had obviously read—and believed—the most salacious accounts available on the Internet of Ismail’s treatment. Merdula had combined this small amount of information with a total blind faith in Ismail’s innocence that thoroughly contradicted, even betrayed, the suspicion of certainty that marked Merdula’s best work. It was also, I thought, written badly.

The rest of my workday consisted of trashing this piece with my coworkers; every half hour or so someone else would pop up from a cubicle to share a thought on something else that was wrong with the piece, or another psychological theory for why Merdula had gone so wrong. A lot of people suggested that I sue, and I said that I was definitely going to, but I already knew that I absolutely would not, since nothing Merdula had written about me was exactly untrue, and I didn’t want to sit through depositions that would establish that fact. (Merdula and the editors of Needle Quarterly had probably counted on my making this calculation. There are few feelings worse than knowing that you’re going to do exactly what your enemy wants you to do.) I called Rebecca in the afternoon and she was as outraged as I was, though most of her outrage was directed toward Leah, whom she was convinced had given Merdula additional information. Rebecca and I each wrote emails to Leah, who responded in one email to us both that she had not spoken to Merdula, nor did she know who Merdula was, but that as far as she was concerned, Merdula had let Rebecca off way too easily by not mentioning her, and had let me off way too easily by making it sound as though I were the victim of an evil, abandoning mother, when it was more likely that my mother had abandoned me because I was evil. Also, Ismail thought Kafka was overrated and would have thought Merdula’s entire approach gimmicky and annoying. She concluded:

I’m actually glad that Ismail won’t be permitted to read this shitty story. I do kind of like the ending, but, Rebecca, I’d swap you in for Venter’s mom, just like Venter has. Let me know if the two of you want to get your throats slit on stage at my next performance.

The next morning, I was, if anything, even madder, so I wrote an angry email to Steven Merdula and sent it to him care of Needle Quarterly, even though I knew there was no chance he would respond. To my great surprise, he responded by the end of the day.

Dear Venter,

You are a badly lost young man. You must know that your friend is entirely innocent of wrongdoing and is the victim of injustice that—to use a rare legal term that actually evokes rather than obfuscates human experience—shocks the conscience. The meaning of Ismail’s tattoo, to the extent that a phrase as vague as WANTS TO BLOW THINGS UP has any meaning at all, clearly refers to benign rebellions against family and convention. What little I have learned about you in investigating Ismail’s case suggests that you are of at least average intelligence, so you must grasp this. Perhaps you are at the mercy of the hysteria that has seized so many, but your particular fealty to this hysteria is notable in that it has led you not only to betray your friend, but to betray him over and over again, forty hours every week. Mr. Harrican is a lot like you—at the mercy of a multigenerational family struggle with the machine that influences his behavior in ways that he does not understand—and I think that working for him is reinforcing your worst tendencies. My theory—one that may offend you but that I hope you will give the consideration it deserves—is that you are “playing up” to your tattoo. You are exaggerating the degree to which you are DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS, and so you are acquiescing to the baseless belief held by so many that Ismail is a terrorist, despite your personal knowledge that this belief is wrong.

I feel sympathy for you given the many strikes against you, starting with your mother, who by any reasonable standard sounds like a terrible woman. So far, the miserable life you have lived cannot be said to be entirely your fault. But you must take control of what you do from now on. It is not your fate to acquiesce. Do your best to free Ismail, and do it now.

With concern and good wishes,

Steven Merdula

This email, and its nasty remarks about my mother, made me angrier than I had ever been. I wanted to throw my coffee mug at my laptop, but I didn’t want to be known for having an anger problem, so I took the mug into the breakroom and threw it on the floor, an aggressive act I could plausibly claim was an accident.

Surprisingly, almost nobody outside my office seemed to read Merdula’s story, because nobody wanted to read about torture. The episode left me unharmed, but with my commitment redoubled to writing what I knew I needed to write.