The Other Americans

by Laila Lalami

He’d been raised Catholic, he said, and was taught that sin was punished and virtue rewarded. Good things happened to good people, bad things to bad people. Even when his mother died, he’d continued to believe this because another thing he’d been taught was that adversity was a test. But then he went to war, and lost all belief. One minute this guy Sanger was telling him about the kind of roof shingles he wanted for his house back in Jackson Hole and the next he had no hands to wave in the air anymore. “I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t figure out why he’d been maimed and I still had my hands, even though I was standing right next to him. That’s when I started to realize that some things couldn’t be explained. It was just chance. It couldn’t be argued with. There’s no reason or order to it.” This wasn’t enough for me. To believe that my father’s death was just an unfortunate accident meant that I would have to forget everything else I knew about my hometown. Discount the arson, erase the small insults, untether the hit-and-run from the time and place in which it happened. I couldn’t.

She’d checked her email and found a personal rejection from a music festival in San Francisco, which thrilled her. I found this confusing, until she explained that she usually received form rejections, and getting a personal note with a few words of encouragement meant a great deal to her. It restored some of her confidence in her work.