know, Civilization and Its Discontents. Religion is an infantile neurosis—”
“I know, Mother.”
“I feel sorry for them. Stupid people are helpless creatures. They live all their lives stupid, and they die stupid. What a waste. Of life. Of all the possibilities of life. I feel very, very sorry for them.”
“Well, they don’t feel sorry for you.”
“That’s Christian love for you.”
“I wish it would stop.”
“What?”
“This. Everything they’re doing.”
“Try telling them that. Try telling that to their stupid god, or their stupid church.”
“I don’t see why we have to keep doing what we’re doing.”
“Don’t give me that again, Jordan. You know why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Because those girls need us.”
“Because you don’t want to stop.”
“Why don’t I want to stop?”
“Frank.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“You have enough to retire on.”
“No.”
“I hate living like this.”
The kettle is whistling. Neither of us pays attention. She is holding the tea bags in her hand. She has crushed them in her fist.
“I hate living like this,” I say again.
“You want me to surrender.”
“I wish something would happen that would make you want to stop.”
“Be careful what you wish for.”
“I want you to realize that you can stop. No more of this. No more of Frank. Time to move on, Mother. It’s time.”
“You don’t tell me what to do.” Her hands are shaking. “You don’t know what I want.”
* * *
I’m wide awake, unable to sleep from the heat of the humid summer night. Mother comes in my room.
“There’s a noise downstairs.” She hasn’t spoken anything else to me all night.
“I’ll go down and look.” I put a shirt on.
“Don’t bother. I think I left the exhaust fans on.” She walks out.
“Mother, I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“What I said earlier.”
“I don’t remember what you said.”
“Okay. You sure you don’t want me to go check?”
She is heading down when a flash of light bursts from the stairs. It seems to last for a long time, although it takes no more than a few seconds. It blazes up toward her from below, so that all I see, for what seems like a motionless eternity, is the skeletal silhouette of her body against her nightdress, an X-ray of her in the reddish glow. Then there’s a quick pop, like a bottle uncorked. A thunderous explosion shakes the apartment and jolts me out of bed. A searing heat rips through my room. I shout to her, but all I hear is the clangor of the fire alarm as the sprinklers turn on. The water hisses as it hits the crackling flames.
I find her sprawled on the stairs. She’s cut up and bleeding in many places. I carry her out a fire exit in the back. She’s staring at me, her mouth moving without words, her eyes wide with shock and gratefulness and relief.
* * *
How to build a pipe bomb. Take a steel pipe, stuff it with gunpowder, and bore it with a fuse hole on one side. Insert a cherry bomb inside the pipe as a five-to-ten-minute detonator. Add a few slivers of steel for greater impact, and like the bomb dropped at our clinic, throw it inside the ventilation shaft for maximum effect: an enclosed area like that converts a crude, homemade device into a bigger, more lethal explosive.
That’s all it takes, a device so simple and low-tech any amateur terrorist can assemble it. A thoroughly persuasive weapon nonetheless: the bomb wrecks the clinic entirely. There is not much for the fire department to save. The job, I must say, has been well done. Of course I still wish some bungling rookie apostle had fucked up and lit the fuse at the wrong moment, blowing up himself and his fellow terrorists for Jesus. Blowing them to kingdom come. That didn’t happen, obviously. And somewhere out there the same zealots are still looking to assassinate people like us in the name of love.
* * *
Several pieces of shrapnel pierced Mother’s arms, back, and lungs. Doctors are able to pluck out most of them, except for a small triangular piece, the size of a guitar pick, that landed so close to her heart it’s risky to even touch it.
With the insurance money, I have the clinic rebuilt and furnish it with new equipment. Mother comes home from the hospital to a place that’s barely changed, except for the fresh-out-the-box smell of new machines.
Her recovery is quick and easy. Or so it seems, at first. Then late one morning I find her still in bed, her eyes wide open, staring blankly at the ceiling.
“You all right?”
“I can’t move.”
I open her canister of painkillers. “You’ll have to eat something first,” I remind her.
“It’s in there.”
“What?”
“The thing that wants to kill me.”
“Don’t worry, Mother. It won’t do that. The doctors gave their word.”
“It’s going to rain soon.”
I look out. The sky is overcast, a big gray blur is inching its way toward us.
“I feel cold.”
I pull her blanket up and feel her forehead. “You’re okay. You want me to call the doctor just in case?”
“I don’t like the cold.”
“Me neither.”
“It’s going to make me burst.”
“Just rest awhile. You’re just having a bad day. We knew you would get bad days now and then. It’s all right.”
“I smell something.”
“What?”
