Songs of the Dead (19 page)

In 2003, researchers set up remote cameras in the Lanjak-Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary in East Malaysia. In August that year, one of the cameras snapped a single picture of a Borneo bay cat, a wild animal the size of a large domestic cat with an extremely long tail. The sighting was significant in part because the Borneo bay cat had not been observed by humans since 1992, and had been thought to be extinct.

In 2005, in swampy forests in Arkansas, scientists videotaped an ivory-billed woodpecker, the largest woodpecker in the United States. On seeing the woodpecker, one of the scientists put his head in his hands and began to sob: although there had been many rumored sightings of the bird over the last seventy years, this was the first undeniable proof that the ivory-billed woodpecker lived.

Also in 2005, a botany graduate student at UC Berkeley found a dozen Mount Diablo buckwheat plants blooming on the side of that mountain. This was the first time a human being had seen this plant since 1936. No human knows where the plants have been in the meantime, or why they chose to bloom right then.

And yet again in 2005, an ecologist found a species of grass—california dissanthelium—who hadn't been seen by humans in more than ninety years on Santa Catalina Island. The grass used to grow on three different islands, but had not been seen since 1912.

All over the world, in jungles, in mountain lairs, in swamps and desert caves, in other places, too, places they are safe, plants and animals are lying low, ghost dancing, waiting for their time to return. Perhaps the cannibal sickness—perhaps God—isn't so powerful as we fear, isn't so powerful as it wants us to think.

Or perhaps it is.

Have you ever considered how extraordinarily lucky the Europeans were—how lucky they had to be—in order to conquer the Americas? Have you ever considered the delicate thread of circumstance—of which the fraying and snapping of any part could have doomed the whole endeavor—that led to these stunning European victories? European civilization was at the time of Columbus on its last legs, having already hyper-exploited much of that continent's resource base well past the breaking point. Without a massive influx of resources—in other words, without the discovery, conquest, and exploitation of new continents—European cities and cultures would soon have begun to collapse.

What would have happened to European civilization— to this whole wétiko culture—if, for example, Columbus had turned back on his first voyage, as many of his men wanted? The trip was far longer than anyone—including Columbus— had anticipated. To keep his crew from mutinying, Columbus kept two logs: one known only to him, showing the accurate distance traveled each day; and one grossly underreporting to his crew the distance they'd traveled from Europe. What if his deception hadn't worked? It almost didn't. By October 10, the only way Columbus could keep his crew from mutinying was by promising that if they didn't sight land within two days they'd turn back. Well, we all know what happened October 12, and we all know why October 12 is a day of celebration for wétikos and a day of mourning for everyone else. How would the world look today had the crew made their demands one day sooner? What if the currents on which the ships rode had been one day slower, the land one day farther away? What if the crew had known that Columbus would steal not only from those whose land they “discovered,” but from them as well?

Or what if Columbus hadn't landed at what is now called Hispaniola, had not first encountered the Arawaks, of whom he wrote, “They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. . . . They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want”? What if instead the wétikos would have first encountered a more warlike group of people, a group of people ready to defend themselves, ready to kill Columbus and crew to the last man? What if Columbus had never returned to Europe? How long would it have been before any crown repeated the folly of spending so much money to send someone to sail so far to the west? Would it have happened before Europe entered an irreversible and hopefully terminal decline?

When Hernando Cortés invaded what is now Mexico with only six hundred men, twenty horses, and ten small cannons, what would have happened had the inhabitants of the region not had long-held myths that told them of fair-skinned gods coming from the east in sailing ships? Who gave them those myths? Who taught them those lessons, lessons which would destroy them? What would have happened had Cortés not found Indian nations with whom he could ally against the Aztecs (only to subjugate these others once their usefulness had passed)? What if these Indians had slaughtered him on the beaches, as he later slaughtered them in their homes and streets, in mines, in forests, plains, deserts, hills?

The Europeans could not have conquered the Americas without the assistance of smallpox and other diseases, introduced both intentionally and accidentally. How different would the world look today if the Indians would not have been wiped out by these diseases? Would we be experiencing worldwide ecological collapse had the Europeans not given but received smallpox, carried it back home with them, had the civilized and not the indigenous suffered from its effects, and thus had the Europeans not been able to steal the resources and the land of those in the western hemisphere?

Something as insubstantial as fog saved Hitler's life. Something as short as a single day, something as small as a virus, saved European civilization from crashing.

Not only had those in Germany and on the Western Front tried to kill Hitler. Many assassination attempts originated in Army Group Center, which formed the hub for resistance on the Eastern Front. Key to this resistance was senior operations officer Lieutenant-Colonel Henning von Tresckow. Unable to abide meanness or injustice, his opposition to Hitler and the Nazi regime was both deep and consistent. In 1939 he told a fellow conspirator that “both duty and honour demand from us that we should do our best to bring about the downfall of Hitler and National-Socialism.”

He worked tirelessly. He organized, cajoled, delegated, he gathered and experimented with explosives, he recruited people for attacks on Hitler.

Not all of the attacks went anywhere. Sometimes Hitler was saved, not because of luck or the help of some God, but because of scruples. In early 1943, Georg Freiherr von Boeselager, known as one of the Army's best pentathletes, joined the opposition. Tresckow asked Boeselager if he could kill Hitler with a single pistol shot. Boeselager responded he had the technical skill, but wasn't sure he had the nerves. It's one thing, he said, to kill an anonymous enemy on the field of battle, and quite another to kill someone you can recognize. This is often true, it seems, even if you recognize that killing the one person will save millions of others. He did not carry out an attack.

Later that year a group of twelve officers determined that together they would kill Hitler during a briefing on the horrendous military situation on the Eastern Front. This attempt had to be abandoned because one of those present would have been Field Marshall von Kluge. It was necessary to inform Kluge so he could stay out of the way. Kluge disallowed the attempt because of the risk to senior officers (including himself ) and because, he said, it was not seemly to shoot a man at lunch.

About this same time, General Hubert Lanz and Colonel Graf von Strachwitz made plans to use Strachwitz's Grossdeutschland Panzer Regiment to arrest Hitler the next time he came to the Eastern Front to speak with Field Marshall von Weichs. Lanz and Strachwitz were fully prepared to kill Hitler if, as expected, his police, SS, and army bodyguards resisted. By the time Hitler came east for a conference, however, circumstances had forced Weichs to move his headquarters away from Poltava, where Strachwitz's regiment was billeted, to Saporozhe, too far away for Strachwitz to be able to move without raising alarms. Thus that plan came to nothing.

Hitler's life was saved on that trip not only by the movement of Weichs's headquarters, but by another providential occurrence. While Hitler was in Saporozhe, Russian tanks made a sudden—and coincidental—thrust toward the town. The tanks were only two hours away when Hitler's driver became aware of the threat, and drove from the airport into town to get Hitler. They returned to the airport as quickly as they could and boarded their planes. As they took off they saw Russian tanks just sitting at the end of the airfield. The only reason the tanks had not attacked, trapping Hitler deep inside Russia, is that they'd run out of fuel.

“What do I want?”

“That's what
I
asked.”

“I want to stop the
wétikos
.”

“It's what I want, too.” Silence. Then, “But in the meantime. . . .”

“I want to not be so scared.”

“Is there someone you could talk to?”

“Like a shrink? They'd look at me like the fucking cop, presume I'm delusional, and try to resolve whatever childhood trauma led to this disorder. Or even worse, they'd believe me: would you want to trust your psyche to the sort of psychologist who'd believe a story like this?”

“No, someone else.”

“Who?”

“That's the problem. I have no idea. I don't even know what you want from
me
. I'm glad to just hold you when you get scared if that's what you want. Or. . . .”

“Or what?”

“I don't know. I just know that what you want will help determine whom you should talk to. If you want the dislocations to stop there's probably someone who can help. If you want to learn to cope with them, maybe you talk to someone else. If you want to learn how to ride them—if possible—then maybe it's someone else again.”

Images from the dislocations rise up in my mind. I ask myself exactly what about them terrifies me. “It's not being out of control,” I say. “When I fell through time and saw us making love, I was delighted. It makes me happy to see the salmon, at least for the time I'm there. Now that I know—or at least feel confident—that I'll come back, the dislocations themselves don't terrify me. Inconvenience me, sure. But terrify, no.”

“What terrifies you?”

I see Nika. I see the rose blooming on the man's chest. I see the look on the horse's face as her child is killed. I hear men laughing. I see the hammer rise and fall. I hear the man say
vagina
. I hear the man say
kill
.

But then I also see glaciers melting. I see driftnets. I see long-line trawlers. I see clearcuts. I see chainsaws. I see vivisection labs and factory farms. I see plastics. I remember why Allison did not like to be told she is beautiful. I think of the other women I know who've been raped. None of these require I fall through time. They merely require I not look away.

“I want,” I say, “to stop the wétiko culture.”

“Then that means,” she responds without hesitation, “you need to talk to someone else entirely.”

It's late that night. The room is dark. The last thing I see before I close my eyes is a flash of lightning joining cloud to cloud. I sleep, then awaken to thunder so loud and so insistent I think someone is knocking on the window. I look without rising, and there's no one there but more lightning, and more, and more thunder, and more. I do not go back to sleep, but sit partway up to watch and listen and to let the lightning and thunder fill me as I wait alone in the room with Allison asleep next to me.

fifteen

miracles

I go to the library. One of my favorite parts of being a writer is getting to be in a library and calling it work. The library is at Gonzaga University. It's beautiful, except there is a sculpture of Bing Crosby—abuser of wife and children—that I walk past to get here.

I fall through time once or twice as I walk through the stacks. Or maybe stumble is better, since I see only flashes before coming back to the present. I see myself. I'm sitting on the floor in the stacks, surrounded by books, holding an open book in my lap, crying. The book—I see as well as remember—has photos of children as young as three and four and five forced to work in textile mills, coal mines, brickmaking factories.