Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

The technique was rediscovered in 1784 by Henry Shrapnel, a lieutenant in the British Royal Artillery, who filled a hollow cannonball with spheres of lead to wreak maximum damage.

One of his favorite prison songs: Give my greetings to the olive and the family that brought me up.

vertiginous.

The stars shone their shrapnel above him. In the morning a small red aspirin of sun rose.

The killing was not the fault of the bombers, she said. The bombers were victims too. Israel was culpable. The blood was on its hands. On Netanyahu’s hands. On her own hands too, she said. She was not immune, everyone was complicit. Oppression. Tyranny. Megalomania.

Coming back through the airport they strip-searched her again. Her youngest two were kept in the same room as she took off her clothes. She had them turn away. She could hear them weeping as she stepped out of her dress. She stayed stoic. Then they strip-searched the children too. In front of her. She knelt down by their sides, whispered to them as the clothes came off. Down to their underwear. She dressed them, then, slowly, button after button. She told them never to give in. Remain steadfast. Trust in Allah. Things would change. It was bound to happen.

In the nineteenth century, Bedouin tribes used Arabian mares for raiding parties. The raids—to capture sheep, camels or goats—depended on surprise and speed. Unlike the male horses, the females, or war mares, did not nicker or neigh when they approached an enemy camp. This silence was venerated. Among the Bedouin, no greater gift could be given to an outsider than an Arabian war mare.

She and Rami took a hammer and a wedge to the glass bowl and smashed it to pieces, a small rubble of death and memory. They put the pieces in the box, re-ribboned it, and shipped it to Netanyahu with her own note: Dearest Bibi, something is broken.

And even though the knock never came, it seemed to them that no knock was a sort of knock anyway.

Alternative Memorial Service,

A man who requires revenge should dig two graves.

Each movement of As Slow as Possible lasts about seventy-one years. The music will last until September 5, 2640, ensuring that everybody who hears any of it will never have heard all of it.

The Israeli army also uses sound bombs to disable water wells deemed illegal in the West Bank: when they drop a bomb to the bottom, the noise waves are powerful enough to crack the well’s sleeve from top to bottom.

He bristled a little when outsiders criticized it, but he bristled too when the insiders boasted.

matryoshka-doll

The German writer Goethe said that the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music—that to look upon a thing is to hear it. Music is liquid architecture, he wrote, and architecture is frozen music.

In the second half of the twentieth century psychiatrists began to notice an increasing number of tourists in Jerusalem suffering from acute psychotic decompensation: delusions and other episodes induced by proximity to the holy places of Jerusalem.

—She was ten years old, Commander.

Bassam had rehearsed it in his head, in Hebrew, a hundred times. —You’re the victim here. Not me.

As a whole, an apeirogon approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line.

two new soldiers came into the prefab, carrying his clothes. —One more thing, they said. They told him to drop his remaining underwear, stand over a mirror and squat.

It was, he knew, their isolation that had made them so vocal. They thrived in the grandeur of their rage.

He almost knew the coming lines by heart. Once a terrorist always a terrorist. We didn’t ask for them to blow up our children. They deny our very existence. They want to wipe us off the map. We gave them freedom, they gave us rockets. They want to push us into the sea. Security. Never forget.

In the ninth century the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi wrote The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. It was the first book to introduce the concept of algebra to European scholars.

The word algebra comes from the Arabic al-jabr, suggesting the repair of broken bones.

To find living marrow in the ancient bones. To uncover. To make real. Feeling without action will shrink the heart.