Chapter 29
Bernie Sanders was at National Airport going through security.
People clapped as he shuffled past looking unhappy.
I missed my connecting flight in Charlotte (I’d been sitting in one of those rocking chairs, watching the planes teeter off the tarmac, listening to the Wicked soundtrack while my name, I imagined, was screamed over the intercom).
I texted Jay I’d get in closer to seven.
He hearted my message as I turned into Heritage Booksellers.
I plucked a glossy political thriller from the shelves, the kind Jay read in one sitting, wondering if I should try to write something like this instead.
While lounging at my gate, I throated down forkfuls of kale from an automated salad bar to punish myself for not being political enough. Then I drank a mocha latté to reward myself for punishing myself while skimming Nia’s Bluesky:
“What’s that picture book where the Italian grandma makes too much pasta and it floods the town?”
“Zendaya, please murder me in my sleep.”
“Wait, when did George Michael die??? How did I miss this??”
They were all from yesterday. Somehow, they revealed everything and nothing to me about her. Was the Zendaya fantasy some kind of code? Was she truly casually thinking about Strega Nona?
I toggled over to Instagram to watch Milan’s story: She was eating oxtail at Cane. Salsa dancing in Malcolm X Park. Off to rehearsal, off to the restaurant. She didn’t normally document her life like this. I hoped, pathetically, that this was her way of speaking to me.
I kept scrolling, pausing on a photo of a young man in a teddy jacket, the kind Jay wore sometimes, sitting beside a sheet-wrapped body in Gaza. Another photo: a mother with a firm hand on her son’s collapsed-in chest.
While zone 1 was boarding, I clicked on a link of resources in someone’s bio. It took me to a website to adopt an olive tree.
Was this like adopting a highway?
According to the website, if you paid a hundred dollars a month, you’d help sustain a West Bank farmer.
In exchange, you’d receive fermented olives.
I didn’t eat olives, but that seemed irrelevant.
It did nothing for Gazans fleeing death, but it felt like an investment in some kind of future.
What embodied life beyond human wars better than a thousand-year-old tree?
I entered my card information then enlarged the photo of the family.
The Shaheens. The father had warm, creased eyes and a large belly.
The mom looked vaguely agitated in the way my mom often looked vaguely agitated, her brown eyes challenging the camera.
They had four sons—the youngest looked ten, the eldest probably in his twenties, all different versions of each other: tanned, dark brown hair, warm brown eyes, except for the second-born, whose complexion was milky white.
The youngest had clearly been horseplaying and was yelled at right before the flash.
The eldest towered over everyone, looking miserable in the way young men caught off guard often looked in pictures, his focus not on the camera but somewhere beyond it.
When I reached the end of the payment process, I was asked what I wanted to name the tree. I stared at the planes shooting into the air for a long time through the glass. I didn’t know why, but I typed, “Joel.”