It was the conversation again, the only one lately. She was rambling. The truth was, she said, the only known truth was one destruction. A building had blown up. Officially, the story was gas. But her own brother had for many years lived unofficial lives. And she had the tapes to prove it.
Jeremy cleared the plates. Silverware scraping against dirty china spoke. It said wrong, wrong, wrong.
She began to talk about the justice of prose. The check of it. She listed off publications. She mentioned the Fourth Amendment, the Fourth Estate. She said, “There is something very dark everywhere that we need to turn the light on.”
“If it’s true,” he said.
“It is.”
“If it is true,” he continued. “There is danger to volume.”
“It is true,” she insisted. “Think if everyone knew they were being watched. If they knew every word was recorded.”
“We’d state our convictions on world peace, everything white teeth and sound bites like everyone already does out in the open. We’d be kind in private. Is that what you think, Alexandra?”
“If I went to the press,” she said.
She wept then.
It was after dinner and Han was drawing maps like spiderwebs, big networks of train routes. Jeremy picked up a crayon. He colored in the house Han had sketched by their subway stop.
“You know what would happen,” Jeremy said more gently.
He told her to sleep because he wanted her to be strong. He told her a walk—the logic of it was you can move yourself, even if only around the block. He told Han to tell Mama a story.
“And the ants went back home to the log,” Han said, “to die.”