The Resisters

by Gish Jen

atavistic

She did not seem to see us now as a bit like soda-can sculptures, ingenious and full of spunk but finally not real sculpture.

she was able to sign up for a Literature of Justice class, meaning that she was finally going to read Michael Kohlhaas, as well as The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, and Bleak House and The Trial and To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Fire Next Time.

I’m thinking about it because all we know is dissent. And there is more to life than dissent. To which, I know what you will say. You will say, Of course, you are right—and yet. And if I say, What do you mean by “and yet,” you will answer that that’s just who you are, at this point. Resisters. Right or wrong?

He said she was like a boxer who couldn’t stop jabbing even after the match was over. A reflexi-rebel, he called her. Why was she so angry?

Winny, having questions? I was amazed, but Ondi says he’s not sure he will ever belong to the Netted world—that the differences are so much greater than he ever thought. If nothing else, he’s realized that he will always be seeing things they don’t—indeed, that the very definition of the Netted is people who see nothing. Surprise! you will say. And does he now want them to see more or does he just wish he could see less?

if Gwen was going to stay, wasn’t she going to need someone who at least understood where she came from? Indeed, who at least understood that she came from somewhere—that she didn’t, as my mother used to say, just fall off a cliff into herself? In such a fraught world, it would be better—far better—if Ondi were a true ally and a true friend. But Ondi was the friend she had.

In the self-torturing manner of lovers everywhere, they made up, then fought again, then made up, then fought again. As my mother would have said, they were sun and rain, then sun and rain, then sun and rain.

Some nights I thought he was right, and that I was being pigheaded and perverse. Some nights I thought that I had learned a lot about resistance growing up but nothing about compromise. Give and take. Flexibility. Or as Woody put it, the tacit accommodation upon which love depends.

“This place corrupts people and you are Exhibit A.”

a secret is a shame or a treasure,

is all this really even because of Automation, exactly? Or is it because the people who controlled things didn’t care to give up control, and Automation helped them keep it?”

No paint job could cover that.

just enrolled in MoveTheEffOn, an online course for the brokenhearted, the first lesson of which was, Delete means delete. Romantic love is like an addiction,

And there was the familiar Ondi door slam. “Perhaps she doesn’t know any other way of closing a door,” observed Eleanor. “She is an expressive young lady,” I said.

Why is it that recollection brings us to life almost more than living itself? We live to remember what we did, my mother used to say.

Was there a word for a horror before which you can only quail? One of my students had asked me that, long ago. A survivor of some genocide, this was—in Cambodia or Rwanda, maybe. Some place.

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this sceptred sway; It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself; And earthly power doth then show likest God’s When mercy seasons justice.” “The Merchant of Venice,” said Gwen. “We read that in my lit class. That’s Portia.”

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” “Martin Luther King Junior, ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ ” said Gwen.

“You realize my mother will never drop the suit.” Gwen’s chin rose. “You realize she will persist as long as she’s alive.”

“We are here because we believe anything can happen in a ball game,” answered Woody. “You can get a guy and all his stats but give him a stick to swing, and you still don’t know what will happen.”

CreamShake? What do you think?” If she noticed my use of First Person Timid, she gave no indication.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Yes, we said then. We’re raging. And, What a light.

“Grief deranges,” Gwen would say. “Healing is slow,” I would answer.

“Who what when where how why,” he said. And she echoed, “Who what when where how why.” “Who is us,” he said. “And when is now.”