The Cave Dwellers, Christina McDowell [ap literature book list .TXT] 📗

a utopia is inherently contradictory? No two people’s ideals are the same, and can therefore never exist together. The human condition won’t allow it. If the laws of the universe are correct, born out of utopia is dystopia, and that is a much more frightening place to live than somewhere in the middle. But no one really thinks that deeply about the world, Elizabeth.” Meredith sighs and sticks her fork into her hot dog. “I am afraid history has done it again.”

Bunny wants to know before it’s too late: How do you change the script of a storied institution? Power can change in an instant, the POW! of a bullet, the ringing of a phone, the click of a bank deposit, the sentence of a crime—the touchdown of a tornado. It is not in the undoing, but afterward, in the sound of someone else’s silence, when you know that it has left you.

Friends and family exit the glass doors of the Cathedral beneath the carved mural of a swirling God. The same photographers and bobbleheads as after the Bankses’ funeral wait along Wisconsin Avenue, arranging themselves in the order of their hierarchy—a cruel schadenfreude for the general and Carol’s fall from grace, the two of them still sitting in the shadows of the great nave before tombs of famed generals. If shame could coil inside of grief, this kind will not find its way out.

Crows perch atop the angry gargoyles as pallbearers carry Billy’s casket into the black hearse. A tiny American flag whips against its windshield as it drives away.

Bunny watches, a crinkled slit forming between her eyebrows where her mother likes to stick her finger (“Botox soon!” “Smile!” “Lucky girl!”). She staggers behind the crowd and backs into the nave, slipping into the Children’s Chapel beside it. Cold as a ghost, Bunny tiptoes down the aisle between the little chairs where she learned to cross her ankles during nursery school prayers.

The altar before her is covered with candles below the mural of a baby Jesus—for the mother undergoing in vitro, the toddler with cancer, the stillborn, the secret abortion—but not one for the baby of the damned.

As Bunny reaches for a candle, she hears footsteps behind her. Spooked, she spins around.

It’s Marty.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she says.

“What are you doing?”

“Just… lighting a candle.”

Marty nods then turns around to leave.

“Marty?” Bunny calls out.

“Yeah.” He turns back, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“Why do people come here?” she asks.

“To pray,” he says.

“No, I mean to Washington. To this town?”

Marty puts his hands in his pockets, looks down at his shoes, rocks back on his heels. After a moment he looks back up at her. Poised, he flashes a wry smile. “Isn’t it obvious? To change the world, Bunny.”

Bunny crinkles her forehead, pushing what’s left of the irony inside of her out with a laugh. “Love you,” she says.

“Love you too, Bunny.”

Bunny turns to face the altar. Taking the unlit candle, she dips it onto a lit flame, lighting the wick like a sweet kiss. She places it back on the altar and kneels in prayer position. As her palms press against each other, sunlight ravages through the stained glass windows, forming warped shadows of angels on the wall behind her. And she remembers as a child all the times she sang “This Little Light of Mine”—when Billy pulled her hair and pinched her arm and she told on him for hurting her. The children’s chairs still have their silk cushions embroidered with faded fairy tales: “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Frog Prince,” “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” And she misses him, she misses the way he’d play his ukulele for the gargoyles on his balcony, the way he teased her for her strawberry-colored hair but called her the most beautiful—otherworldly. She misses all those nights pressed close together in the rickety elevator climbing the inner walls of their history—all the times the ropes never snapped. She wishes she could tell him that she loves him.

As the light hits her, Bunny winces. She cups her hands over her eyes, falls into fetal position, and cries herself to sleep.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The year is 2020. As I write this, America has lost more than a hundred thousand lives to the coronavirus, our White House has gone dark, St. John’s Church across the street is on fire, and protestors across the globe are marching and screaming and rioting in the wake of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murders, among countless others. Meanwhile, our president is alternating between hiding in a bunker and calling on the military to shoot protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas.

I was born in our nation’s capital, Washington, DC, in 1985, nurtured and educated inside of one of the most privileged communities in the world—the epicenter of institutional power—among the families of politicians, military officials, CIA agents, media moguls, ambassadors, lawyers, socialites, and philanthropists. Despite the District of Columbia being a primarily Black city during my childhood, I rarely socialized with people who weren’t white, nor was I encouraged to do so. My parents readily ignored the city’s massive economic disparity, inherently formed and generationally cycled as a result of our nation’s history of white supremacy. And none of us were willing to examine our complicity in perpetuating it.

In 2004, while I was a college freshman in Los Angeles, my father, an associate of Jordan Belfort (“the Wolf of Wall Street”), was arrested for securities fraud, convicted, and sentenced to five years in a federal prison. He had stolen my social security number and left me nearly $100,000 in debt. Those dark years pushed me into a life of poverty, addiction, and loss, though my whiteness and the socioeconomic network I’d been handed in my absurdly privileged childhood protected me from any further institutional harm. I detail that experience in my memoir, After Perfect.

For many years I did not go back to the city of Washington, as it represented