SMALL HARD THINGS

Abstract

7 1 R S M A L L H A R D T H I N G S B R U C E F L E M I N G When my brother was alive, which is exactly as many years ago as my daughter is old – twenty in 2012 – he lived in a house behind Union Station in Washington, D.C. Keith died in February; Alexandra was born in July. Keith had been ill with the e√ects of AIDS, o√ and on, for two years, and toward the end was very ill and hallucinating. I’m not sure he ever registered that I was to have a child, my first, or whether, if he did, he cared. There’s not a lot left of my brother in material terms: some photographs in my house, the best of the lot framed and hung on the wall; some diplomas in my mother’s house; and odd things like T-shirts that I kept which I now occasionally pull from the bottom of my drawer when I dig deeper than usual in the pile, or a pen I’ll grab to write something and then remember him holding. The person has become a collection of smaller, more durable stand-in things, fragments of memories like bits and pieces saved from the wreck now that the larger, transient entity of the person himself is gone. The block between his house and Union Station used to be a parking lot, which I would walk across on my way to the Mall when I was visiting him. At the time I had no family and could 7 2 F L E M I N G Y come for the night: this was before so many things – before my first wife, before my daughter (the marriage, to my childhood sweetheart, was a disaster; the divorce, meant to be a no-fault divorce that would allow us to raise Alexandra amicably, turned into a slug-fest orchestrated by my wife’s lawyer; and Alexandra herself turned out to be autistic), before my second wife, and before my two boys, the people whose doings compose the fabric of my life. The National Mall in Washington is lined with museums, which are one way of preserving the fragments of dead people and bygone eras. My memories of Keith are another way of preserving the past. All of them are versions of the storehouses of small hard things we keep because they are both small and hard: we can’t hoard large things, and only hard things survive. Each of us is like a hamster or a magpie, with a store of seeds or bright shiny things. The small hard things stand in for the much larger chunks of the world we can’t preserve. So we have our hoards: our museums, public or private. It’s our way of holding on to the dead. But the thing is, our way is the way of the living: when we in turn are dead these bits and pieces of the past will be reorganized; some will be reclassified as junk and thrown away. If something is saved it may be for reasons other than those for which we saved it: when we’re dead, the things lose the meaning we assigned to them and take on the meaning given them by other people. As I walk by the new National Gallery, so many years after Keith’s death, I think about its current exhibit of treasures from Afghanistan’s recently destroyed National Museum (the catalogue shows it as a bombed-out shell), now on loan to the United States. The imperial power gets to show o√ the treasures of its vassal state, for which its sons and daughters shed their blood; the treasures get a home while their building is (at least in theory) being rebuilt. Yesterday I went to see the exhibit. The film that accompanies it shows the kind of attitude Americans are trying to foster in Afghanistan: the cosmopolitan curators who hid its treasures and, when the all-clear was given, unpacked them again are contrasted with the Taliban, who were busy blowing up a giant...