The Laughter

by Sonora Jha

It began as lust, that much I will admit. The events and emotions that came after were harder to reconcile. I, Oliver Edward Harding, am not one to trifle with the truth. The thing about truth, though, is that it sometimes reveals itself in the recounting, not in the living.

I must state that something has been taken from me, something precious and tender, and the loss of it is so great that it may smother my account with searing emotion at times, of the kind no associate of mine would generally ascribe to my personality.

Let me be candid and state that one of the reasons that women of color are asked to do disproportionately high service on committees on the American campus is that men of pallor like me are no longer asked. We have proved to be obtrusive and resistant to change and have thereby earned ourselves more time sitting back in our offices or getting out to play golf.

Her eyes were inky-black and frank. Some sort of evolutionary thing in her genes, perhaps, to render themselves penetratingly human behind a burka. Even though her traditional dress had been minimized to a headscarf, old manners die hard. I had encountered this strange thing about her before, this taking of things literally and seriously. It’s as if her part of the world did not have the same rules of small talk and niceties as ours. I found it so beguiling.

Few sights are as heart-rending as university faculty dressed in their best. Few events are as shorn of mirth as those in which well-dressed faculty attempt to party. Every time I stepped into such things, I was once again convinced that the academy was where intellectuals came to hide from their chance at greatness.

But there seemed to be no shaming women like her these days. Everything was fine, they were “embracing it all,” all their imperfections, turning the scorn back on the scornful, shaming the shamers as they called it, making up new nouns as they went along, spotlighting the “fat-shamers,” the “slut-shamers,” the “skinny-bitch-shamers.”

I study them now, closely, these desperate seekers, these self-declared progressives who will be-the-change-they-want-to-see until they are maimed from the brutality of change and blind from seeing. Intellectual discourse, debate, disagreement, and certainly academic freedom, were dying swiftly in this terrible fire, this pretense of progressivism.

The closeness of my study had been alerting me these past few years to something new in the air. Something electric, a self-righteousness in the student body, a bracing-for-impact in the faculty. Our curricula were under scrutiny, the pigment of our skin stretched thin under microscopes, our every lecture frozen for a moment on our lips, reconsidered, for its potential to stir the shit-storm of the politics of identity.

Discussions of enrollments and curricula were a surefire way for a man to land in “colleague zone,” a purgatory whose temporal punishments were impossible to endure with any grace on one’s way into the plenary indulgences offered by a woman.

The mural was called The Rainbow of Diversity, for these neighborhoods in the south of the city claimed to have the most diverse zip code in the country. The mural bore a mawkish earnestness in the depictions of women in headscarves or gypsy earrings, men in a mariachi band beside a man in an Osama turban. They’d thrown in a busty blond woman on the mural. Had I seen a single one of those walking around here yet? Nope. Someone should have scaled back the heavy-handedness of all this.

Stories are the things that you miss when you have strayed away from people. You think at first that you will miss telling someone your stories, but soon your solitude lays bare this truth that it is their stories you will miss,

I wasn’t seeking to know more about the ways in which their worlds were different from mine. I am not the typical, precious Seattle Liberal. No, I wanted the stories that felt like they could have risen not from their living room but from mine, stories that made us the same somehow, of failure, of misunderstanding, of repressed rage, of withheld beauty pressed in like strands of saffron in a glass bottle, or even the stories of their own tiny darting eels of fear. Every cell in my being had strained toward the story, and thereafter, it was all I could do not to stumble like an earnest fool, over and over, into the thrall of Scheherazade, who bid me to sit by her on a rug.

The anxiety we feel from scrolling rapidly through lives online, stumbling from one human’s account to the other, hardly allows us to have singular emotions, but rather, sends us stumbling through portals of disenchantment and desire for things we do not want to believe we seek.

for all the murky intersectionality of race and gender and citizenship and policing and justice and profiling and masculinity, and the toxicity of masculinity, especially in policing, Ruhaba was a woman in rage. She spoke to me of male rage, but her own rage sat so thick and rancid in her chest, her sensuality began to recede past my fingertips,

She could not attend, for instance, anything that advertised itself as a “collaborative” panel discussion on racial profiling and police safety. She had almost lost it when she was in fact invited to speak on one such panel. “When Black and Blue Lives Matter,” the panel was called, and the title alone had made Ruhaba stand up, shut her office door, return to her desk, and rip a random, already-graded student paper to shreds.

Ah, but to rip an already-graded student paper afforded an absorption both sweet and exact of the rage, she said, because it carried the recklessness of destruction and the ruefulness of punishment to the self. Self-flagellation.

She told me then about an email folder that she found a useful tool to keep her rage in check. She would write three-paragraph emails to herself about things that enraged her during the day or in response to emails that drove her to the brink of madness. To the one inviting her to speak on the panel, Ruhaba wrote an email addressing the nature of sustenance such a panel provided to white fragility and, indeed, the nourishment it promised to the bastards in blue. The folder she had titled “Save for 24 Hours Before Sending” was meant for precisely such an email. She rarely returned to this folder of draft emails twenty-four hours after transferring something to it, which was why she had made it far enough now to the tenure line that she could “almost smell the epic, hot dump” she would take when she crossed to the other end. Needless to say, I didn’t find Ruhaba in my bed that night.

I suppose they would have eventually found her folder on their own, no matter how well she had concealed it. They would uncover her rage and it would lead them to conclusions about Ruhaba that are so different from mine. All I have now are my conclusions. Her rage. Her blinding rage. Even her laughter was tinged with her rage.

I have read the letter before, but perhaps if I glance at a single line in it now, the way we parse through things said during the day and make of one of them the precise thought that pushes us into the arms of sleep, the line would speak to me, tell me what to do. I glance. “I am scared of America.” Well. That was no help. No help at all.

It was a thing that would keep you up at night, the look on the face of man who believes he is leading the charge but turns around to find the troops behind him gone. Truly the thing of nightmares, the broadcast breath of a man who learns he’s been abandoned mid-battle. He didn’t go down without a fight, though. He said, “To my faculty colleagues in this room—you could be next.” He was looking right at me. It would have been what the kids these days call a mic drop, except that the mic was wrested out of Meyer’s hands, and he and his life’s work were instantly rendered irrelevant.

Let them have this moment. It’s no movement, this. The tiniest of ripples of manufactured discontent have no real enemy, no oppressor to speak of. All around these people are, indeed, their benefactors. Here we are, educating them with nary an ounce of discrimination or prejudice. They will tire of it, these screen-eyed rebels, when they realize there is no whiteness to study, at least none that is whole or imbued with any voice, let alone violence.

Nothing was boring in Ruhaba’s world. Nothing was irrelevant. I possessed a weary knowledge of established narrative and literature. Ruhaba possessed the currency of a story taking shape. The scale of her hours was in stark contrast to the shrinkage of my days. She was loved by her students and feared by America, and she walked in the knowing of this. She was othered, tokenized, pathologized, yes, but never gripped in anything resembling my own ocean of ennui. Never invisible.

Emily and her fine group of friends who signed petitions for letting Syrian refugees into America or letting Black teens into pool parties in white homes in Texas used such imagery to hold up a mirror to men like me. Then, after their virtue-signaling shares on social media, they’d go back to summering in Martha’s Vineyard or “recovering from the toxic divisions in America” with rituals of self-care at yoga retreats in Mexico. The use of filters in their photographs made them flawless; the use of irony in their updates made them faultless.

I need to pause here to say that at that moment, on that day, I was sure the world had gone to hell in a handbasket. I could not fathom why the citizenry around me was in a scramble to align so personally with the Blacks. I ached for White Silence.

I should also say a thing or two of the way things play out these days, between real life events and the constant awareness of the fact that nothing is simply real life, nothing is here and now. Few things can simply happen. Few moments can simply emerge, grow, and reach a resolution within the walls of a home and within the words of people gathered, present. Those far away, in their homes, on their computers, are present here, and they know it. There’s no fear of missing out on a live event that you hadn’t planned to document anyway. If it ends up being significant, it will find its way into pictures and videos. The only place to fear not being present is on your device. That’s where you are either in or out of sight, in or out of mind.

And what if it wasn’t just one time? What if I am not forgivable? Why do you need me to be pure, Dr. Harding? Why does this university want me to be a pet and not a threat? Why do you people need me to be better than you?”

I am wary of America. I know of no place on earth where people are surer of the distinction between good and evil and see with such supposed clarity a chasm between the two. I don’t know any other people who are more certain of their goodness than the white people here. I know no other culture in the world that can see every color but gray.”

“Why won’t you let it go? Let them do what they will. What is it that bothers you all? Men like you. That I can get away with it and you no longer can?”

She smiled, slow, worse than a sneer this time. A snarl. “I am savage,” she said, and then laughed the most hideous laughter I have ever heard, as if she relished my barbs. She misunderstood me. She would always misunderstand me. “And yes, I am selfish. So, shoot me.” And so, I did. In the shadow of a second, I slid open my drawer, picked up my gun, and, cold as the metal that touched my palm, I shot her square between the eyes and wiped the laughter from her face.

Grief has been described in so many ways. Some say it’s a river, soothing one moment and readying to drown you the next. Others say it’s the closest we can come to God. Chesterton called it superficial, said melancholy should be an innocent interlude. But the grief I felt in that moment just before the bullet left me to meet my beloved sits in me even now, as I write this. The grief holds me, slips and slides through me like a red silk demon, peering through my eyes one moment, whispering through my fingertips the next.

Dear You, Come, bear witness to my silence. For, if you would have truly wanted it, I would speak, uninterrupted. I’d tell my own story, my truest story, for it’s mine to be told and I don’t lack language . . . but go on—have it your way.