There is nothing else that we need to know except...
There is nothing else that we need to know except that you are safe, and nothing we need to say except that we love you and want desperately to help
The very words spoken to the press and television by the father of the Rimrock Bomber when she disappearedWe love you and want to help"Asked if he had been 'communicating well' with his daughter, the father of the townhouse bomber replied," and no less truthfully or miserably than the father of the Rimrock Bomber answering a similar question, "'As parents, we'd have to say no, not in recent years'" His daughter is quoted by him as fighting for what Merry, too--in her dinner-table outbursts decrying her selfish mother and father and their bourgeois life--proclaimed as the motive for her own struggle: "To change the system and give power to the 90 percent of the people who have no economic or political control now
The father of the other missing girl is said by the police investigator to be "very uncommunicative He says only, "I have no knowledge concerning her whereabouts And the father of the Rimrock Bomber believes him, understands his uncommunicative-ness all too well, knows better than any other father in America the burden of anguish concealed by the emotionless formulation "I have no knowledge concerning her whereabouts If it hadn't happened to him, he would probably have marveled at the tight-lipped facadeBut he knows the truth is that the missing girl's parents are drowning exactly as he is, drowning day and night in inadequate explanations
A third body is found in the townhouse rubble, the body of an adult maleThen, a week later, a statement appears in the paper, attributed to the mother of the second missing lady dior bag girl, that dissipates his compassion for both sets of parentsAsked about her daughter, the mother says, "We know she is safe
Their daughter has killed three people and they know she is safe, while about his daughter, who has not been proved by anyone to have killed anybody--about his daughter, who is being used by radical little thugs just like these privileged townhouse bombers, who has been framed, who is innocent--he knows nothingWhat has he got to do with them? His daughter didn't do itShe no more set off the bomb at Hamlin's than she set off the bomb in the PentagonSince '68 thousands of bombs have been exploded in America, and his daughter has had nothing to do with a single one of themHow does he know? Because Dawn knowsBecause Dawn knows for sureBecause if their daughter had been going to do it, she would never have gone around school telling kids that the town of Old Rimrock was in for a big surpriseTheir daughter was too smart for thatIf she had been going to do it, she would have said nothing
Five years pass, five years searching for an explanation, going back over everything, over the circumstances that shaped her, the people and the events that influenced her, and none of it adequate to begin to explain the bombing until he remembers the Buddhist monks, the self-immolation of the Buddhist monksOf course she was just ten then, maybe eleven years old, and in the years between then and now a million things had happened to her, to them, to the worldThough she had been terrified for weeks afterward, crying about what had appeared on television that night, talking about it, awakened from her sleep by dreaming about it, it hardly stopped her in her tracksAnd yet chanel big when he remembers her sitting there and seeing that monk going up in flames--as unprepared as the rest of the country for what she was seeing, a kid half watching the news with her mother and father one night after dinner--he is sure he has unearthed the reason for what happened
It was back in '62 or '63, around the time of Kennedy's assassination, before the war in Vietnam had begun in earnest, when, as far as everybody knew, America was merely at the periphery of whatever was going haywire over thereThe monk who did it was in his seventies, thin, with a shaved head and wearing a saffron robeCross-legged and straight-backed on an empty city street somewhere in South Vietnam, gracefully seated like that in front of a crowd of monks who had gathered to witness the event as though to observe a religious ritual, the monk had upended a large plastic canister, poured the gasoline or the kerosene, whatever it was, out of the canister and over himself and drenched the asphalt around himThen he struck the match, and a nimbus of ragged flames came roiling out of him
There is sometimes a performer in a circus, advertised as the fire eater, who makes flames seemingly shoot out of his mouth, and there on the street of some city in South Vietnam, this shaven-headed monk somehow made it look as though flames, instead of assaulting him from without, were shooting forward into the air from within him, not just from his mouth, however, but in an instantaneous eruption from his scalp and his face and his chest and his lap and his legs and his feetBecause he remained perfectly upright, indicating in no way that he could feel himself to be on fire, because he did not so much as move a uhr rolex muscle, let alone cry out, it at first looked very much like a circus stunt, as though what was being consumed were not the monk but the air, the monk setting the air on fire while no harm at all befell himHis posture remained exemplary, the posture of someone altogether elsewhere leading another life entirely, a servant of selfless contemplation, meditative, serene, a mere link in the chain of being untouched by what happened to be happening to him within view of the entire worldNo screaming, no writhing, just his calmness at the heart of the flames--no pain registering on anyone on camera, only on Merry and the Swede and Dawn, horrified together in their living roomOut of nowhere and into their home, the nimbus of flames, the upright monk, and the sudden liquefaction before he keels over; into their home all those other monks, seated along the curbstone impassively looking on> a few with their hands pressed together before them in the Asian gesture of peace and unity; into their home on Arcady Hill Road the charred and blackened corpse on its back in that empty street
That was what had done itInto their home the monk came to stay, the Buddhist monk calmly sitting out his burning up as though he were a man both fully alert and anesthetizedThe television transmitting the immolation must have done itIf their set had happened to be tuned to another channel or turned off or broken, if they had all been out together as a family for the evening, Merry would never have seen what she shouldn't have seen and would never have done what she shouldn't have doneWhat other explanation was there? "These gentle p-p-people," she said, while the Swede gathered her into his lap, a lanky omega speedmaster day-date eleven-year-old girl, held her to him, rocking and rocking her in his arms, "these gentle p-p-p-people At first she was so frightened she couldn't even cry--she could get out of her just those three wordsOnly later, a moment after going to bed, when she got up and with a yelp ran from her room down the corridor and into their room and asked, as she hadn't since she was five, to get into bed with them, was she able to let everything out of her, everything awful that she was thinkingAll the lights remained on in their bedroom and they let her go on and on, sitting up between them in their bed and talking until there were no words left inside her to panic or terrorize herWhen she fell asleep, sometime after three, it was with their lights all still burning--she would not let him turn them off--but she had at least by then talked herself out enough and cried herself out enough to succumb to her exhaustion"Do you have to m-m-melt yourself down in fire to bring p-p-people to their s-senses? Does anybody care? Does anybody have a conscience? Doesn't anybody in this w-world have a conscience left?" Every time "conscience" crossed her lips she began to cry
What could they tell her? How could they answer her? Yes, some people have a conscience, many people have a conscience, but unfortunately there are people who don't have a conscience, that is trueYou are lucky, Merry, you have a very well-developed conscienceIt's admirable for someone your age to have such a conscienceWe're proud of having a daughter who has so much conscience and who cares so much about the well-being of others and who is able to sympathize with the sufferings of others
She couldn't sleep alone in her room for a black chanel quilted week