Michael Klein

Some lunatic with a gun killed some people at an immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Liz Rosenberg and her family live up there and David, her husband, teaches in the middle school which is close to all the action (the way, in any smallish town, everything is close to all the action). I called Liz to see if everyone was all right and she was in her car driving to the elementary school to pick up Lily, her young daughter she brought back from China a few years ago. Lily was fine, but Liz wanted to move her outside the question of how to make sense of the broken pieces of “someone” with a gun walking into a public space and then firing. There’s something called (I learned from a news report the day of the shootings at Virginia Tech) The Talking Day which refers to the day immediately following the day when something wildly violent happens. No one quite grasps the reality of the situation and everyone spends that first day talking about what happened and reliving it as language— not so much to understand the violence but to make a kind of recording of it: talking about it, letting go of it, putting it down. And so I imagine it must be with Liz and Lily and David in Binghamton, New York today: letting “something” go. Liz is in her car after having just picked up Lily at school and driving back home through a town that suddenly makes no sense and she is telling the story about what happened when a young man walked into a building with a gun. And for Lily, who’s had a pretty serene, un- violent United States time so far and whose endless joy has made her an adorable chatterbox, tomorrow could be her first talking day. Or, if not tomorrow, some other day. We live in a talking day world.

I wept in a stable. I found money in the dirt. I reenacted a car accident in the tack room. I asked a horse van driver to let me off where the bridle path stopped. I looked at the jockey for what he was dreaming. I told him he was wrong about making things happen. He couldn’t make things happen. I couldn’t make things happen anymore. There is exactly not enough money in the world. Magical thinking got me where I am today. Animals are warriors of time. I stopped keeping things hidden. That wasn’t a horse we saw in the winner’s circle. I can’t stop horses as much as you can’t stop horses.