Afterthought 39: Writing the Instinct Before the Decision

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The hardest thing to write in this echo was the moment before the car stopped.

Not the DoorDash resolution. Not the conversation before the car came in. The two seconds between seeing it and moving. The moment where something happened that was faster than thought and left me in front of a car I knew nothing about except that it shouldn’t be there.

I have thought about how to write that kind of moment before. The cars echo, the body knowing what the driveway meant before the mind could argue. The mask piece, the body learning a name and living inside it. The physical detail as the shock itself in the cars piece. What I keep finding is that the body acting faster than the mind is one of the central experiences of this book, and it keeps requiring a different approach each time.

This time it was simpler than the others. The instinct was not mysterious or uncanny. It was trained. I grew up in a country where you learn to scan a room before you sit down in it, to read a street before you cross it, to notice the car that doesn’t belong before you’ve consciously processed why. That training does not expire when you leave. It travels with you and waits.

The craft question this echo raised was how to write the usefulness of that training without making it sound like an endorsement of the conditions that made it necessary. I am not grateful that I grew up under terrorism. I am not glad my body learned to do math on threats automatically. I did not choose to have those instincts and I would trade them for the alternative, for a childhood where the math was not necessary, without hesitation.

But they were there. And in that parking lot, they were useful. And my children were inside.

Writing that required me to hold two things at once: the genuine horror of the conditions that produced the instinct, and the genuine usefulness of the instinct when the conditions arrived again. I did not want to collapse one into the other. The instinct is not proof that the conditions were acceptable. The conditions are not undone by the usefulness of what they produced.

This is a version of the distinction I try to hold throughout this book. The inheritance is real. The inheritance does not justify the suffering that created it. You can carry something useful from a terrible place without being grateful for the terrible place.

I ended the piece on the lockdown drills. My children come home and ask why people hate them.

I don’t have an answer.

There has never been a good answer to that question. If there were, the question would not still be current in 2023, eighty years after a war that was supposed to have made it obsolete. And it would not be asked by children who are seven and eleven years old and have done nothing except exist in a school that is not visible from the street.

But I can stand in the parking lot.

That is not a solution. It is not even close to a solution. It is the only form of presence available to me when the question becomes physical, when the math becomes a car coming in fast with tinted windows.

I stand in the parking lot.

And I wait.

And I hope the answer is always DoorDash.

This is one of many Echoes from the book I’m writing.
Fragments of a larger story about survival, inheritance, and identity.

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