There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

Maybe that’s what magic is: a useful mistake.

I want to say that I was smiling, but I’m pretty sure that’s just the now me trying to make the then me seem tougher than I was. I want to say that I felt peace—the peace that comes when someone finally admits the thing you’ve long suspected. But between peace and emptiness, the line is thin.

The trouble isn’t that we are defined by our circumstances. It’s that we are so defined by running from them that we don’t understand what they mean, what they did and are still doing to shape the way we see and move through the world. And we call the running rising to the challenge. Not so. Not so.

If all you’ve got is a going-away, you might end up lost, since the only thing on your mind is running. And if all you’ve got is a going-to, you might end up sad because what you find is rarely as good as you thought it would be, unless it’s different from what you imagined, so it helps to remember how awful the thing was that you left. It’s a simple equation, really, and the stranger the journey the better the math works. Just plug in what you were trying to get to and multiply it by what you were trying to get away from, and you’ll understand a hell of a lot more precisely why you did what you did. At least this works for me.

The story has to change, you see, and that’s not only a great deal of work to undertake, but also a real risk, as the new story might not be as marvelous as the old sad one. But the greatest risk was hope.

What I mean is something that I read many years later in a book by bell hooks, conveniently titled All About Love. Love, she defines, via M. Scott Peck and Erich Fromm, is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.

I say all that to say: The American Dream is real. Not that foolishness you hear from politicians—If you work hard and play by the rules you can do anything, be anybody, in this country. I’m talking about the real American Dream, the way the country actually works: If you know the right people, they can help you do anything, be anybody, rules and hard work be damned—as long as they like you.

They do have to like you, and that takes a good deal of work.

If my class notes can be trusted, the 2008 election was the fifth turning point in presidential history. The first came alongside Jefferson in 1800, when the Federalist Party was swept away; the second in 1860, when Lincoln, with only 40 percent of the popular vote, brought Republicans to power and the country to civil war; the third in 1932, when what was left of Mr. Lincoln’s Republican regime was undermined by its response to the Great Depression and overthrown by Franklin D. Roosevelt; and the fourth in 1968, which was a turning point in large part because the office of the presidency, and the country itself, seemed to be on the verge of collapse.

Suetonius

I came, I saw, I conquered—which

Fixed my résumé and bought new dress shirts and acted like a lawyer, like a banker, did that well enough, learned my story, told my story, got the right perspective on it all, I was grateful, I moved on, I got over it—stayed up late, ran away from men in nightmares, worked to be the best and brightest, be the president, be somebody AT THE TOP. It had taken nearly every day to turn the boy that I had been into the man that I became, a dead man. That, in the final analysis, or my best analysis now, is what I realized that night: I had strived to win this world and won my death instead.

This world is not enough, he wrote. A world that subdues us, mutilates us, makes us operate on straight time, which can only be death time for many, makes us strangers to ourselves so that we can be recognizable to others, acceptable to others, normal to others. A world that pressures us to say at all times, at any cost, It’s only getting better.

The one that I helped give to him. I drove him, drove them all, to be first, be bold, be perfect—be the greatest. What I did not do was drive them to be whole, to be free. Did not teach them that the best revenge was freedom. Did not know it for myself, in time.