Doxology: A Novel

by Nell Zink

Her awakening critical faculties showed her a world of strictures where she had expected freedoms. The 1970s had suggested that in maturity she would enjoy communal solidarity and LSD. The 1980s coalesced from a haze of competition and AIDS. Between her childhood and her adolescence lay a generation gap.

But she didn’t offer to contribute money to Lion’s Den. It was his label, not hers. She had enough business experience to know that it wasn’t a business. It was an art project. Investing in it would contravene the project goal, which was to be Daniel’s art. He wanted autonomy more than he wanted success. He wanted to design record covers, compose press releases, and gain a reputation—among the handful of people who mattered to him—as a man of wit and taste. It had nothing to do with turning $800 into $2,000 in the fullness of time and paying her back.

She didn’t try to explain herself. It was hard to explain. As an art form, rock’s medium was commercial success. The tippy top was its guiding light. Having a band was about being a rock star, a fantasy of ultimate autonomy in which you got paid megabucks to be your worst self.

Nuclear deterrence was a variant of predestination. Whatever happened to you was your fault, if you hadn’t deterred it. It was life as an endless stud poker game in which folding equaled death. Any day now, life could become The Day of the Triffids, if the Triffids had been defense policy wonks and not evil plants from space. The Triffids in turn reminded her of The Genocides, a novella by Tom Disch in which alien farmers sow the unfortunate Earth with giant sugarcane. Millennia might pass before that happened, but by having a baby, she would be involving herself directly in the tragedy. It was no consolation to recall the survivors’ stubborn capacity for joy or their relief at the conclusion of the harvest. As a willingly pregnant woman, she would at once be placing a long-shot bet that life on Earth would be idyllic forever and condemning a stranger to have its heart broken by her death.

Yuval said, “Mazal tov!” It was not the Ashkenazi one-word MA-zel-tov that means “Congratulations,” but the Sephardic two-word ma-ZAL TOV that means “Good luck with that.” THAT NIGHT SHE WAITED UNTIL DANIEL WAS JUST ABOUT TO LEAVE FOR WORK TO TELL him. Lying back on his bed, in the shade of the narrow section of wall between his two bright rear windows, she said, “We’re going to have a baby.” He said, “I feel this is a good time to confess that I love you.”

“Jesus is weird,” Joe remarked. “You can say that again!” “Why is he on the cross?” Daniel raised his eyes to heaven. “Oh, man, Joe. Well, historically, he wasn’t always on the cross. I think for something like twelve centuries, he was the risen Christ, fully dressed. Then there was Gothic art and, like, the black plague or something, so they switched to showing him on the cross. You know he died on the cross, right?” “Why?” “The weight of his own body, I guess. Makes it hard to breathe when you’re hanging by your arms.”

Her one talent was walking.

Their set was nothing if not harmless. But after years of wrestling with unforgiving mainframes and diffuse guilt, Pam felt like a rebellious self-emancipator for doing something as silly as singing in public. Music wasn’t her art project anymore. It was a skittish but real and ancient phenomenon that manifested unpredictably, like wild birds or butterflies. She looked up to it. It was the influence of Flora’s violin playing. The child had been raised on two-minute songs performed solo a cappella, so she played phrases with climaxes and denouements. Pam in her youth had argued that any given random noise was more musical than all classical music combined, the performance of which was unbecoming submission to the hegemonic dead. After Flora started with Bach and Mozart, forced originality in culture began to remind her of fads in clothing. Art: ways of reinventing the wheel as all different polygons.

She didn’t feel she’d shifted from punk to folk. Punk was all folk to her now—bleating, repetitive, self-satisfied—compared to the loving exploration of inner space she heard when Flora played. Onstage she felt a little ashamed of herself for not playing music, but she enjoyed getting away with it.

Her life was to be a continual struggle to distinguish career goals from the other kind. A career goal should be personal and practicable. Its variables should fall within realistic limits. Its success should depend as much as possible on factors under the individual’s control. Her career goal was to hold global warming to under two degrees Celsius. The appropriate college major for that would have been World Domination.

Many students at GW were majoring in World Dom by another name—international relations, political science, government. Entire academic departments had been designed to equip them to command and lead. Professors encouraged them to think big, since it was freshman year. Armchair quarterbacking global politics was low risk. At worst, it was pointless, and pointless was like having a black zero on the balance sheet.

It was more like the joke vegetable gardens at urban elementary schools, where the kids take great pride in attaching empty seed packets to pegs and never water anything and everything dies.

SHE VISITED THE CATHEDRAL AGAIN LATE ON THE SUNDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING 2014. As usual, the statues had no comment. Jesus hung on his cross, eyes half closed, hoisted like a flag on a lost hilltop. His sole career misstep was to be born on Earth, and look where he ended up. His mother looked preoccupied and sad. Flora made a play for their attention by lighting a candle. No response. She sat down. She still didn’t believe in God, but she had come to believe in many higher powers, such as her employer. Activists around her spoke of speaking truth to power, as if power cared, as if power’s assent were evidence, forgetting their right to remain silent, forgetting to ask the vital preliminary question “And who do you say that I am?” and to listen for power’s spiteful, contemptuous reply. What was at stake—in play, gratuitous and expendable—was beauty. Truth, beauty, power: the tokens in a game of rock, paper, scissors. Truth breaks power. Power cuts beauty. Beauty covers truth. Only truth survives losing. Truth is indestructible, but it’s ugly, inelegant, awkward. Society is not its native element. It can’t ambush power without beauty’s help. The truth was that even developing countries were tearing down forests, building roads and railways, damming rivers to power server farms and aluminum smelters. Every windowless hut on Earth was going to get a solar cell, battery, and LED lamp made with rare earths and metals sourced all over the planet, and why? Because a pane of glass wou...

Flora saw that the planet would definitely not be saved by technical solutions intended to mitigate, and thus condone, carbon emissions. Nor would it be saved by fairer distribution of the power to consume and destroy. Her struggle must be a political struggle under the cover of beauty. Her mission: to end economic growth. She awakened her phone and looked up the Green Party of the United States on Facebook.

So I was thinking what we can do as people, and obviously where we’re fucking up is land use and how we regulate it. If we don’t switch to organic farming, people are going to starve, especially if they implement the Paris Climate Accord. They want to do combustible biomass on an area the size of India. Now tell me where they’re going to get all that nitrogen.” “You don’t like the Paris Accord?” “I can’t even— I mean, it’s a joke. I was five the year of the Kyoto Protocol, and it’s still not in force. People signed on to Paris because it has no sanctions. Carbon emissions are under our control the same way the rest of people’s habits are under their control. It’s not going to happen. Nobody’s leaving any carbon in the ground. What’s going to happen is a lot of insane geo-engineering and a big die-off.” “So, Jill Stein.” “Well, getting countries to green their agricultural policies would be a political project. Markets are not going to lead the charge. Sustainability is what you build on the ruins.”

He sought traces of her online, but her presence was political, not personal. So were most of her friendships, based on a footing of impersonal small talk she could have offered a cabdriver. She was a political person. The personal is not political. It can become political when abstracted and generalized, stripped of identifying markers. The political subject is a depersonalized subject: This could be you. This could be you being lied to, spied on, shot at, searched without warrant, convicted without trial, executed without appeal. Could be, but isn’t. When it turns personal, it’s too late. Accordingly, political people were more cautious with their data than they used to be.

“I’ve never met Aaron,” Ginger interrupted, “and I don’t know if he loves you or what that word even means to him. But I agree that you should not be concentrating on feelings in such an important decision, especially when your feelings are not based on very much.” “Fuck you, Grandma,” Flora said. “Human beings are changeable,” Ginger continued, with emphasis. “God is love, but he’s the only one, believe me. Love is an ideal you don’t attain in this life. That’s why they build churches like this one to last forever, while the people inside them come and go.”

“I’VE NEVER ONCE BEEN TO THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL,” AARON SAID, “EVEN THOUGH it’s right down the street.” “It’s nice,” Pam said. “Flora goes there to hang out with the Virgin Mary.” “She’s the bodhisattva Guan Yin,” he said. “Jesus spent most of his life in Kashmir, at least according to the Ahmadi Muslims. It’s one of those things the pope doesn’t want you to know about.” “Anglicans don’t do the pope,” Pam said. She was fond of Aaron already. He seemed to her a fearless rationalist—without a winning strategy, but unafraid to lose. Ginger said, “I thought she was the goddess Astarte.” “That’s the Shekhinah,” Aaron said.