There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

I tell you this so that you know we never lose the need for make-believe, for carousels and fake IDs, imaginary friends and mermaid mothers who dropped us off to hide us from the nasty truth of this dark world down here. In that way, the Internet was just about the best home I’d ever known, where the unexpected things that happened felt like magic, not like death.

The only way I start to understand it is by looking past the surface of the violence, into the packs of brawling gangsters, to see my friend and brother Juice, who was just like me in ways that we both recognized but could not articulate. We both knew he was smarter than he let on. We knew that he never complained about the nights he and his older brother slept in the park, nowhere else to go. And we knew—or I know now—that beneath the mask of viciousness, Juice was just a little boy. We were all just little boys, you know. Somebody must have forgotten that. Forgotten us. So we found each other.

It had always seemed strange to me that an Irishman could show up at Ellis Island in 1912, or a Hungarian Jewish family could show up in 1940, or an Afrikaner could arrive in 2006, and before the next census was taken they could all just check white and the newspaper would call them, simply, Americans. But somehow, some relative of mine could be kidnapped from Africa four hundred years ago, kept in America for all that time, stripped of name and gods and family, forced to work and build the land, and I—who had hardly been to Oklahoma, let alone to Africa—was given this hyphenated title, this other continental allegiance that I had not asked to have taken from me in the first place and had not asked to be branded with, either.

Nobody ever died too early or too late; you always die right on time.