‘Who else feels,’ I read out from the moist sheet of thin white paper on my lap, ‘who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence”. Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep on believing that, Atheists.’ I paused and Hitch said,
‘As you may be starting to suspect, Mart, this chap isn’t very bright.’
‘I wondered…Yeah, keep thinking that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonising death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire.’ I said, ‘I’m beginning to see your point.’
‘But at least he means well.’
‘Also rather repetitive, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Mm. He plods through his premise. And then after he’s done that, with that out of the way, he plods through it again. Besides, it isn’t the only body part I’ve used for blasphemy.’
‘…Sorry, Hitch, I don’t get you. What other body parts?’
‘Well, my dick, I suppose, and my brain and my tongue. But that’s the least of it. Think what sort of god is being summoned. Literal-minded, thin-skinned, madly insecure, and wildly childish.’
‘Especially childish…You know, when Nat wasn’t quite two, I displeased him in some way, and he scowled at me fiercely as I left the room. A couple of minutes later I came back in – and he was astonished to see me.’
‘That you’d survived. Because he’d wished you dead.’
‘Dead or at least very fucked up. And there I was, bold as brass and still breathing, if you please. For about six months children think they’re omnipotent.’*1
‘Boy children anyway. Alexander was like that, except he didn’t want to use lightning bolts. He wanted to do the job himself. But not even children insist on being metronomically praised.’
I asked him, ‘How would you feel, no, what would you think, if you got scanned in the morning and found you were miraculously cured. Miraculously.’
This subsection is a flashback. Our talk about blasphemy took place in Washington DC, on Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day, which fell on September 20, 2010 (Houston and the synchrotron were still six months ahead of him).
Yes, Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day. So far as the religious community was concerned, the Christopher prognosis – made public that June – was the most newsworthy development in almost a decade. God hadn’t had this kind of attention since September 11.
So Christopher at that point was on the receiving end of innumerable communications from the nation’s churchgoers. And although a fraction of them were written by admirers and proponents of hellfire, the rest were expressions of solicitude – and love. One day earlier, in the hall, as I made my re-entry, he showed me some of it, or rather showed me some of the extent of it: hefty hardboard folders, in stacks. I said,
‘That’s the key thing about you, Hitch. You excite love.’
He said, ‘My dear Little Keith…’
‘Even among the puritans. Who don’t know what a dirty little bastard you really are. But the love, Hitch – it’s the key thing. When was an essayist last loved?’
…Some correspondents said tenderly that they would refrain from praying for him (out of respect for his ‘deepest convictions’) and other correspondents said even more tenderly that they were going to pray for him anyway.
When two acquaintances, both of them evangelical clerics, reported that their congregations were praying for him, Christopher wrote back with the question: Praying, exactly, for what?
And of course it turned out that these letters weren’t get-well-soon cards, or not in the normal sense. We are, to be sure, concerned about your health, too, but that is a very secondary consideration. While they’d be pleased enough if Christopher’s body put itself right, their primary consideration was the fate of his soul.
Apart from all the religious (and all the secular) websites devoting themselves to the Hitch, a further online amenity encouraged you to place bets on whether or when he would lose his nerve – would crack, and hurriedly convert.
It was now nearly half past eleven. Hesitantly and of course drunkenly, I said,
‘Put aside Pascal’s Wager for now – Christ, how did that ever get itself capitalised? – and just think about Bohr’s Tease.’*2
It was five to twelve and Christopher said, ‘If on the stroke of midnight I became cancer free I’d be overjoyed, but I wouldn’t go down on my knees. I’d be delighted to thank a doctor. But I’m not saying o gracias – aw, muchísimas gracias – to no Nobodaddy.’
‘…And anyway, prayer’s so potent that it doesn’t care if you don’t believe in it.’
‘Still, it would be a very irritating coincidence…Our blogger friend – the Hellfire artist. If he thinks God awards the appropriate cancers, what does he make of childhood leukaemia? They haven’t blasphemed, they haven’t sinned. And they haven’t spent forty-five years living like there’s no tomorrow, let alone no eternity.’
Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day was a Monday. Christopher and his entourage were not especially disheartened to find him unrecovered on Tuesday morning.
At this point he was no longer living as if there was no tomorrow. He was still smoking and drinking (up to a point), and he was still eating, and he was still talking (all four habits would soon be in serious question). He was still writing his thousand words a day and he was still engaging in public debates. And he was still giving time to pundits and profilists: open a paper or a magazine, and there’d almost always be something about the Hitch.
Once or twice Christopher described these pieces as gun-jumping obituaries, but the ones I saw were careful to avoid the slightest suggestion of finality. His younger fans and followers, in particular, always signed off rousingly, with something like If anyone can beat cancer, it’s Hitchens or Up against Hitchens, cancer doesn’t have a chance. Although I approved and concurred, I could tell that these codas were to some degree expressions of hope – rhetorical hope.
My hope wasn’t rhetorical. It was actual. Christopher, I was sure, would win his fight, whether anyone prayed for him or not. But I must have known – mustn’t I? – that cancer at least had a chance.
The word went forth from the state house in Austin. Governor Rick Perry announced with no little pomp (‘I do hereby proclaim’) that April 22–24, 2011, Good Friday through Easter Sunday (Crucifixion through Resurrection), were to be known as the Days of Prayer for Rain…
It was a tense weekend for Christians. It was a tense weekend for atheists, too. And in our daily communications (between New York and Houston), Christopher and I had to admit that it was a tense weekend for Texans, after three months of drought, high winds, and no humidity, and with a million acres already on fire. We sympathised, semi-hypocritically, but the truth was we hoped for continued or even intensified dehydration: we wanted no April showers in Texas, not over Easter and not for at least a month or two after that. We wanted a decent interval so that no one could run away with the idea that the Prayer for Rain had actually worked.
I flew there on May 4; and the Lone Star state was incorrigibly parched.*3
That night Hitch and I and Blue were settling down to dinner. Not in the Lone Star Hotel, and not in a party-hat Chinese restaurant, but on a broad lawn, attended to by loyal retainers and surrounded by fish ponds and fountains, statues and sculptures, flowers and bowers. And our hostess, Nina Zilkha (née Cornelia O’Leary), with her honeysuckle vowels, lent the occasion an antebellum air – the gracious South. Well, Texan Nina was gracious (and literary), but Texas itself, with its heritage of lawlessness, slavery, revolt, defeat, Jim Crow, big oil, packed churches, weekly death sentences, and its enduring thirst for secession?
Still, that evening it would have been quite reasonable to say (as Herzog said in the Berkshires), Praise God – in the sense of praise nature, or praise life. The Hitch was home from MDA. And on top of that we were looking forward to some harmless knockabout fun on TV: the first (of nine) Republican presidential debates.*4
Meanwhile the plates of melon and prosciutto were being laid out, and the bottles of wine. And this spread must have seemed almost abstract to Christopher, who had been nil-by-mouth for some while. I looked his way. Downward-averted, his face expressed something I recognised, and with fellow feeling: unwelcome self-absorption. The causes and symptoms of it in me were usually idly psychological; but in Christopher, just now, they seemed to be of the body.
He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t drink – and not so long ago (though that was over now) he couldn’t speak. What else couldn’t he do?
Christopher suddenly raised his arm upright and we fell silent.
He said faintly, ‘I can’t…’
That expanse of real estate – tended by six or seven gardeners – belonged to an old friend of Christopher’s and mine, Michael Zilkha.*5 One of the many remarkable things about Michael, who is rich, left, and green (his business at the time was biofuel), is his habit of personally transporting you to and from the airport – a gallantry nowadays unthinkable even for newlyweds. The very first time I met him, at Anna Wintour’s apartment in 1979, he ended up personally transporting me to JFK (for my return flight to London). And when I arrived at Bush Intercontinental on May 4, 2011, Michael was waiting outside Arrivals in his new electric car. That day he dropped me at the hospital and took my suitcase on to his guest house, where the Hitchenses were already installed…
At MD Anderson I rode up to the eighth floor, as instructed, and a passing orderly pointed to Christopher’s room or wardlet. Which was empty. Returning to the central bay I asked the registrar.
‘Sorry,’ I said, thinking I must’ve misheard, ‘– he’s gone where?’
‘To the gym.’
‘The gym?’
Hitch had never gone to a gym in his life (though I suppose they might have made him look in there once or twice at boarding school). Nowadays he would hardly know how to say the word ‘gym’…In normal life Christopher was willing to take a long stroll now and then, a country walk with a pleasant destination in mind (a country pub, say), but readers can rest assured that he never, ever, took any exercise for the sake of it – and in gyms that was all anybody did. Frowning, I said,
‘What gym?’
‘The hospital gym. In the elevator press minus one.’
On the way down I thought about the first wedding of the Hitch, when we all went to Cyprus. Hitch flew in, and so did friends and relations, and we stayed in a beachside Nicosia four-star (where the toilets in the public spaces were designated Othellos and Desdemonas). Christopher never went near the sea or even the pool – where I, along with others of his coterie or clan, lay bronzing myself between dips and lengths (and sets of tennis). Whenever he came near us out there, often wearing a dark two-piece suit (but no necktie), his stride was dismissively brisk: he was heading for the shaded outdoor bar to meet some journalist or terrorist or Greek Orthodox archbishop. The near-naked torsos on lilos and loungers – it was all distastefully frivolous to him, this business with the body and its lotions and unguents, its narcissism, its hubris…
‘Well, Hitch,’ I said as we embraced. ‘Here you are in a gym.’
‘I know. I’m doing this under orders but guess what, I’m feeling almost keen.’
Blue and I sat on a plastic bench and watched. The vast space was occupied not by unsmiling young strivers in T-shirts and sweatpants but by vague wanderers in light gowns and pyjamas, who moved among the various contraptions (rowing machine, punchbag) sceptically, like cautious shoppers. Among them Christopher cut a relatively dynamic figure, mounting a fixed bike and going at it with real will and evident pleasure, his pale, thinned legs gamely whirring.
‘Look at him,’ we said. ‘He’s really on for it.’
A little later he approached a wooden contrivance in the shape of a freestanding staircase, cut off by a latticed paling on the fourth step. He mounted it, climbed it, backed down, climbed it, backed down; and after that he could do no more. He seemed surprised, puzzled, almost offended. Blue said quietly,
‘There’s a long way to go. But he’ll get there.’
‘Of course he will. A hospital gym,’ I went on, ‘it’s a contradiction – like a Young Conservative. Anyway, he’ll be back in the guest house tomorrow.’
We went over. Christopher sat resting, sober faced, on the ground floor of the little stairway that led nowhere.
‘You’ll be out of here tomorrow,’ said Blue.
And I said, ‘In time for the Republican debate. Think of all you’ll learn at the feet of Herman Cain and Rick Santorum.’
‘Cat, you ought to lie down for a while,’ said Blue. ‘Rest up for your homecoming.’
It was the evening of May 5, and he was home. At the dinner table in the garden he raised an arm for silence and said,
‘I can’t…I can’t breathe.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t breathe.’
This took place at around seven-thirty. Blue, Christopher, and I got back to the Zilkha annex at three in the morning.
He could survive without eating and drinking and (more doubtfully) without speaking, but he couldn’t survive without breathing. Christopher was under attack from ‘dyspnoea’, to use the typically melodious medical name for it: a condition best understood as air hunger. To Joseph Conrad the exercise of captaincy seemed the ‘most natural thing in the world. As natural as breathing’. What was breathing as natural as? ‘I imagined I could not have lived without it.’ As natural, then, as living.
Within minutes Blue was steering us towards the looming heights of MD Anderson…Christopher stayed silent, slightly hunched over in his seat with a concentrating look on his face, and now and then his eyes would swell and widen.
There was no waiting-room period. The three of us were at once ushered into a warren of cubicles and labs, and a stream of specialists came and bent over him one after the other, and then sailed off again; and nobody was there when his air hunger suddenly increased.
Dyspnoea brings with it mortal fear, a clinical condition in its own right. Christopher was facing it without obvious physical strain. But I wasn’t – I was in fact making something of a spectacle of myself, pacing the floor and waving my arms and yelling out, ‘He can’t breathe!’
And from then on there was always someone sticking an instrument down his throat or sticking another instrument up his nose or kneading his neck and shoulders or making him cough or sniff or snort or stand or sit…
‘This can’t be right,’ I said, staring at my watch and pouring myself a huge glass of wine. ‘I thought it was about ten-thirty at the latest. Unbelievable how quickly that all seemed to go…’
We were settling down on the porch in the dusty Dixie night.
‘I bet it didn’t feel that way to you, Hitch.’
‘No.’ He drew on his Rothmans. ‘From my point of view there were certain uh, longueurs. But I see what you mean – in the sense of never a dull moment.’
Exhaustively and exhaustingly pinched and poked, Christopher now looked battered, and spiritually battered, too. The medics went about their work with impressive vocational drive; but it was the pathology that interested them, exclusively, and not the patient. Hitch himself was no more than a delivery boy or a beast of burden, bearing this savoury load, this disease, for their delectation.
‘Many strange divestments’, he said, ‘await you in the land of the sick…Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some catching up to get done – in the rethink parlour.’
Meaning the toilet…‘Blue,’ I said ruminatively, ‘have you heard about the new money spinner in the healthcare business – the Walk-In Medical Centers? You show up off the street, you get dealt with, and you pay your bill. The great thing about Walk-Ins is this. Having walked in, you can then walk out. Hitch can’t walk out. I can walk out whenever I want, and even you, you get some…respite if just for ten minutes. But he doesn’t, he never does. He’s always in it, he’s never not in it.’
She faced me levelly, not drinking but levelly smoking. She said,
‘He can’t get out, not for the duration. He says it isn’t like a war, but it is, even if you’re a civilian. All you can do is wait for it to end.’
‘Wait for it to roll through villages. But he’s a warhorse. And he’s still an ox.’
‘He’s still an ox.’
Christopher returned. We stayed up till dawn, with our computers on YouTube, laughing and weeping at the songs of our youth.
‘Christ, Chreestophairr,’ I said (this was the way Eleni Meleagrou used to say it), ‘for a while you were as bad off as Japan. Earthquake, nuclear accident, tsunami.’
‘Well, when sorrows come, Little Keith, they come not single spies…’
‘True, O Hitch. It’s much better now, your voice.*6 You’re perfectly audible. You just sound a bit like Bob.’ A reference to Whispering Bob Conquest, who was piano all his life. ‘Only much louder.’
‘Good. The trouble is, I keep thinking it’s going to come back again. I mean go away again…Let’s do one more.’
‘Two more.’
Some days had passed and the out-patient was an in-patient all over again. I don’t think he was often seen in the hospital gym, but twice a day he would do ‘laps’ in the Texan-scale atrium, and I or Blue would accompany him as his personal trainer. Each circuit took ten or fifteen minutes, and we always did two or three of them. Now in his dressing gown he moved slowly by my side, not a shuffler, more like a wader, making steady progress through a countervailing medium – through an element that never sleeps and never tires. He said,
‘How did the idea of combat get itself attached to cancer? They never say, So and so pegged out after a long battle against heart disease or brain death. Or old age.’
‘You won’t remember, but I lectured you about this one night here in Houston when you were half asleep.’ And I repeated some of what I’d said.
‘Yeah, but you can’t make war when you’re this bad off. It just seems absurd to me. How can you fight when you’re flat on your back?’
‘By maintaining your spirit and your courage.’
He sighed. ‘I think the struggle stuff is there just to trick you into thinking you’ve got a part to play in all this. To stop you blacking out from sheer inanity. No one ever says how null it is, cancer. Boring. Boring avec. Don’t forget boring.’
‘And you evoke it. You’re at your desk. You’re not snivelling in a corner.’
‘No, I’m staggering round in circles. Good try, Mart, but it’s not a fight. Who or what am I fighting? My past life, my body, me myself? That’s the whole trouble with it. The patient can’t ever get away from the patient. One more lap.’
‘…Two more laps.’
He said, ‘I hope this isn’t a chore for you.’
‘Not at all. I love it.’
And I did love it. I was back with Gus (not quite three, and very consciously the younger brother), circumnavigating the roundabout in his first leather shoes. And just a week before he had been in despair about ever growing up, prostrate under the kitchen table and slowly pounding the floor with his fists (I’ll always be doing silly phings…I’ll always be with little childs), and now here he was, a few days later, Gus, mightily shod as he paced the darkening city, with his smile seeming to say, At last – at last I’m getting somewhere.
There was a knock on the door, which was in itself quite unusual – a knock on the door to Christopher’s single-occupancy ward at MDA. Usually they swept straight in with stethoscopes flying. I answered it, and then returned to the bedside.
‘Who was that?’
‘Oh just some goddamned man of God. By the way, Hitch, I know you like decapitalising the word God, as in god is not great. Looks very iconoclastic. But you really ought to capitalise it in all talk about monotheisms. Where they’re referring to a definite bloke.’
‘…So where is he?’
‘Who?’
‘Him with a small aitch.’
‘Oh the wowser. I don’t know. Maybe he’s still out there.’
‘Well we must…What kind of wowser?’
‘I don’t know. You mean what denomination?’
‘No. What kind of bloke.’
‘Oh. The standard peanut. All aglitter. What should I do with him? I know. I’ll tell him his faith stinks and kick him down the stairs.’
‘No, Mart, ask him if he’d be good enough to step inside…Go on. What the hell. Sling him over.’
‘Are you sure? All right, then I’m off to get a coffee.’
In the central bay I attended to the hot-drinks machine. Nurses and doctors, men and women in jumpsuits holding clipboards, launderers and caterers, the conditioned and sanitised air, the tubfuls of medical waste, the cloudwracks of used linen…After at least twenty minutes the man of God slipped out, looking pleased.
‘Jesus, he took his time. Was he after your soul?’
‘Of course. All in a day’s work.’
‘Well I hope you sent him on his way with a few choice words.’
‘No, I let him meander on a bit. You sidetrack them. Steer them towards points of doctrine. I got him going on redemption.’
‘Doesn’t that just lead to conversion? Well, the Hitch is big game. Maybe he’d get a bounty or a finder’s fee. I’m amazed you can spare the patience.’
‘I’m just endlessly riveted by the religious mind. Religion really is the most interesting thing on earth.’
‘Except when the other chap believes in it. Then at the flick of a switch it becomes the least interesting thing on earth.’
‘That isn’t so. It’s far more interesting than cancer. And it’s not about me.’
I turned my head and looked out. Here, even the sky seemed enclosed. The totems of MDA, their darkened and treated windows filled with one another’s reflections…
‘Did he talk about hellfire and targeted cancers?’
‘No. He wasn’t of that chapter.’
‘Did you ask him about childhood leukaemias and infantile tumours?’
‘No. I didn’t have the energy. I couldn’t be fucked. Come on. Let’s do our laps.’
You saw them as they were coming in or going out, the little childs, accompanied by one parent or another or by both. Now and then, if you looked through the wrong passageway porthole, you saw them in groups, gathered round a rec-room table. The in-patients and out-patients of Pediatric Oncology were all boys (they’re ‘almost entirely boys. No one knows why’); and so all the bald children ‘look like brothers’.*7 Hairless heads, and enormous, startled, blinking eyes – as if blinking off the effects of a flashbulb. And they seemed to me to be asking themselves the same question their parents were asking. ‘When a baby gets cancer, you think, Who came up with this idea? What celestial abandon gave rise to this?’
There’s the Peter Pan Ward, and there’s the Tiny Tim Lounge:
The Tiny Tim Lounge is a little sitting area at the end of the [Pediatric Oncology] corridor…On one of the lounge walls there is a gold plaque with the singer Tiny Tim’s name on it: his son was treated once at this hospital and so, five years ago, he donated money for the lounge. It is a cramped little lounge, which, one suspects, would be larger if Tiny Tim’s son had actually lived. Instead, he died here, at this hospital, and now there is this tiny room which is part gratitude, part generosity, part fuck-you.
And, if you’re a capitaliser of pronouns, then that would have to be ‘part fuck-You’.
Why does God preside over the deaths, by cancer, of the very young? The many televangelists in the neighbourhood had an answer. Namely, it’s because ‘He wants them with Him right away’. (Does He? What for? And as regards their parents, what does He want?) And the answer of the writers is no more satisfying. ‘You cannot understand, my child, nor can I, nor can anyone,’ says the priest at the conclusion of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.’ Oh, it’s mercy, is it – yeah, keep believing that, Believers…Greene was a theist. Saul, a deist, had the best answer, the only answer: God is not impressed by death. Yes, and also this. God never grieves.
There he goes, the boy aged four or five, led by the orderly in the blue smock. The colour blue: the surgeon, the anaesthesiologist, all the nurses, the social worker. In their blue caps and scrubs, they look like a clutch of forget-me-nots…‘Children often become afraid of the color blue’…Then don’t go outside, little ones, don’t even look outside, because it’s all blue there, nothing but blue.
Later in the afternoon Michael Z drove me to the airport, and soon enough I was up in it, in the blue of the careless Southern sky.
*1 The godhead of boyhood doesn’t last long: they grow out of it by the age of three. King Lear, whose infant delusion has been prolonged by the accident of kingship, is asked to grow out of it in his eighties. And he does. ‘They flattered me like a dog…When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not cease at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men o’ their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie…’
*2 Blaise Pascal’s pitiful dates are 1623 to 1662 (far back enough for his Wager to sound challenging). He was a spiritual prevaricator, and a sickly one; and I don’t know how well he was feeling when he put together his famous proposition. In it he argued that a rational (and presumably cynical) unbeliever, faced with the choice between God and godlessness, would in the end opt for God: if he wins the bet, he gains eternity in heaven as opposed to eternity in hell, and if he loses, the cost is nothing more than a minor sacrifice of some last-hour hedonism (and, we might add, a major sacrifice of last-hour dignity)…In a recent bulletin from the land of the sick Christopher had juxtaposed Pascal’s Wager with Bohr’s Tease – Niels Bohr, the Nobelist pioneer of the subatomic world. Bohr had a horseshoe suspended over his doorway; and when a fellow scientist incredulously asked him if he believed this would bring him good luck, Bohr answered: No, of course I don’t. But apparently it works whether you believe in it or not.
*3 In fact after Easter Sunday the crisis steadily worsened. At that point only about 16 per cent of Texas was affected; the figure would go on rising to about 70 per cent in mid-August. By then our sympathy for the South would be hypocritical no longer…The skies finally opened on October 9, almost six months after the Days of Prayer for Rain.
*4 At this stage in the primaries there were only five participants (and the last two were about to creep back into obscurity): Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Tom Pawlenty, and Gary Johnson. So no Mitt Romney, no Newt Gingrich, no Michele Bachmann, and no Rick Perry – not yet; but it was an encouraging start.
*5 The Zilkhas were originally a banking family based in Baghdad – something like the Rothschilds of Mesopotamia. I had always assumed that Selim Zilkha, Michael’s father, had emigrated as a result of Iraqi anti-Semitism; but Michael has informed me, in his soft Oxonian tones, that Selim went into exile (his first stop was Lebanon) when he was forty days old, in 1927, during the British mandate (he came to the UK in 1960, and founded Mothercare). Iraqi Judaeophobia became proactive in the 1940s, with the rise of Zionism; and after the establishment of Israel it assumed the character of a semi-permanent pogrom. Indigenous since the sixth century BCE, the Jewish community numbered 130,000 in 1948; today there aren’t enough Jews in Baghdad to form a minyan, for which the quorum is ten males over the age of thirteen.
*6 ‘Most despond-inducing and alarming of all [negative developments, or nasty surprises], so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat. I used to be able to stop a New York cab at thirty paces.’ But one day, in Washington, ‘I made an attempt to hail a taxi outside my home – and nothing happened. I stood, frozen, like a silly cat that had abruptly lost its meow.’ In the space of a few lines Christopher compares himself to a child, a piglet, a goat, and a cat – all of them defenceless beings.
*7 The quotes are from Lorrie Moore’s ‘People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk’, as are all the unattributed quotes in the rest of this section. Moore’s story is to be found in Birds of America (1998). It is – or it feels like – an example of life-writing that firmly elevates this rather dubious genre.