ON SUNDAY BY MISTAKE I closed the door on the cord from my headphones and drove to Quaker meeting with it dragging on the road. I kept hearing little sounds coming from outside the car, but I thought it was just pebbles from my tires. But no, it was the tip of my headphone cord. The stereo plug was ground down to a sharp point, and when I plugged it into my iPhone I got only the left channel. Doesn’t matter. It’s just a pair of headphones. It gives me an excuse to go to Best Buy and have a close look at the Korg Kaossilator.
In Quaker meeting a woman was knitting something brown and red as the clock ticked. She was a very quiet knitter, but I could hear her needles click and slide against each other. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her fingers form quick loops of yarn and do things with them. Across the room, Chase stood and said that he’d read something adapted from Proverbs: “Once our eyes are opened, we can’t pretend we don’t know what to do.” He sat down. I thought of the misery hat, which is something you knit for yourself and all of a sudden you’re wearing it. I thought, I can’t, I’m sorry, Gene. I can’t keep from wearing the misery hat sometimes. I remembered Roya, the girl in Afghanistan whose father gathered parts of his wife and his sons from the trees by his house. Roya lived through something inconceivable. She survived, but barely. And my job was to think about her, right then, because we were responsible. We did this to Roya—with our missiles, our taxes, our Air Force, our targeters, our elected government. We exported a war into her young life. I thought, What can I possibly do to help Roya and her father? And the answer was: Nothing. There was nothing I could do. I considered standing in meeting and saying this, but it didn’t feel right, and I’d spoken recently. I shook hands and told Chase that I was grateful to him for his message, and I went outside and sat in my car for twenty minutes, and then I drove home and began making a song out of piano and Turkish oud and the Alchemy plug-in and percussion. The only thing I could do that had any possible meaning was to write a short, inadequate piece of music about the missile attack that destroyed Roya’s life.
And that’s what I did. I wrote a two-minute song with one word in it: Roya. I put fear in it and panic, and I sang Roya’s name several times at the end. I tried to put the imagined insanity to a beat. The song will not help her. It’s not a comforting song. It’s not a good song. But it is a way of remembering. It’s a way of paying attention to a single event by surrounding it with many notes. The notes point like arrows to the wrong.
And then I took off the misery hat and gently put it away in a box.