I shut off the speech when the driverless reached the National Mall. Seth and I met while running its length, and I still viewed the space with what one calls “romance” or “nostalgia.” To see it trampled and gouged into an ugly brown pit, laid waste by protestors and military forces alike, now defended with concertina wire, checkpoints, body scanners, FaceRec cameras, and endless clods of machine-gun-toting security forces, brought me great anguish. The fences were papered over with pictures of those who’d been killed along with a sea of votive candles, bouquets, and other commemorative detritus. That night, Saturday Night Live had its season premiere, and though I detest that cloying, obnoxious program, Seth was a devoted fan, and his amusement at such uninspired humor amused me. I’m sure he hadn’t missed an episode since the days of Will Ferrell in his boyhood. Of course, the performers had to begin with a somber song and feint toward grieving, and then it was on to an impersonation: Loren Victor Love as a grinning fascist full of bombastic militarized bravado. The narrative defines the caricature constructed around each political persona. Joanna Hogan had been playacted as homespun and bloodthirsty, hyper-competent but secretly savage. Mary Randall was portrayed by her comedienne as confident but embattled, besieged, and flummoxed as to why the multitudes of GOP faithful so despised her. In my few interactions with President Randall, I’d found her all too aware of what was happening to her and her presidency—almost resigned to it. It struck me that they had President Love wrong as well. Rumor has it, he very much enjoys his portrayal on the sketch comedy show, likely because, as with most men of machismo, he is insecure. My phone rang at some point during “Weekend Update.” It was an officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police. They had identified Seth’s body.
I was told Seth had died of blunt force trauma to the head. The officer I dealt with, Lieutenant Srivastava, explained that the body had been cremated.
“Without an autopsy? That cannot be legal.”
The lieutenant had a black mustache shielding the contours of his mouth, making it appear as though his lips dripped with faux sympathy. Perhaps it was paranoia, but he was clearly of Hindu extraction, and I unfairly wondered if he had family back in India participating in the lynch mobs targeting Muslims.
“The city was dealing with two emergencies. Because of the heat wave deaths and then the—the shootings—we had to cremate most of the bodies.” He held out a tablet to me. “I know many of the families are pursuing civil litigation. All I can do for you right now, Mr. al-Hasan, is give you your husband’s remains.” I had trouble reading him, whether I was seeing indifference or exhaustion. He thrust the tablet at me again. “I just need your signature. We’re processing the bodies of a war zone right now, and I know it’s unfair how long it’s taken for us to notify next of kin. I’m sorry. If I could do anything else for you, I promise I would.”
“He was supposed to leave.” Because I so rarely raised my voice, it cracked. Several officers in that cubicled precinct popped their heads up. A burned-purple terror bubbled in my vision. In the precinct office, I heard every clicking pen, every shuffle of paper, every snotty clearing of a throat, and felt the chemical cool of the air-conditioning on my nerve endings. “How did he die if he was supposed to have left already?”
The lieutenant shook his head only once. “I’m sorry, sir. I just need your signature.”
He held out the tablet and now his cues indicated how desperate he was for me to accept this.
I stood. “Why people want conscious-less dust of former loved ones is as stupid as it is bewildering.”
I left, exiting the building into a chilly fall afternoon.
The last conversation I ever had with Seth in person took place the night before he left to prepare for the supposed concert. I had to explain to him: “The name itself is a misnomer. All ‘baby powder’ does is potentially get into the lungs or airways of an infant. We should not even keep an astringent powder in the house.”
“Dude, it’s for diaper rash!”
We were having the conversation across the crib, and I looked up to see that Seth was very amused by me, the wrinkles around his eyes pinched with laughter.
“Dude,” I said sardonically. “Diaper rash isn’t potentially dangerous. Inhaling an astringent powder is.”
Seth gave his eyes an enormous, dramatic roll, lolling his whole head with them. “Oh my God, Ash, he got like a spitful of it. He sneezed once. He doesn’t even notice.”
“I still think it would be prudent to consult with poison control.”
Seth laughed at this and said: “I had no idea you’d turn into your mother quite so quickly.”
Seth’s lopsided grin had spread even wider. He’d never met my mother, but his predictions at what would needle me always proved assiduously accurate. A tuft of his blond hair stuck up in the back where his cowlick was. He was wearing a pair of gym shorts and an old, hole-pocked T-shirt that read DOES THIS ASS MAKE MY COUNTRY LOOK SMALL? under a picture of Donald Trump. Perhaps it’s only the transpositions of time, creating a false nostalgic memory, but I couldn’t help but think how beautiful he was. I looked back at our son, lying supine in a Bert and Ernie onesie, happily smacking two plastic baubles together.
I said: “I do hope he grows up to be more like you.”
“Duh, me too!”
Forrest Azlan Young was born on July 29, 2033, to a woman who needed money to pay off her law school debts. I thought I’d have more time to change Seth’s mind, perhaps allow for a few failures of the artificial insemination method, but our surrogate became pregnant on the first attempt. A nuisance to hear how rare that is. Because Forrest’s mother is African American, people frequently confuse me for the biological father. We of course used Seth’s sperm for the insemination because fatherhood was his priority. I felt nothing when I held Forrest that first time except the ancient dread that he might squirm from my hands and crack his head on the floor.
Now, over a year later, Forrest is the child of a single parent, and selfishly, I wish Seth were alive simply so I could hurl the childish taunt Hani and I once exchanged as children: I told you so. Forrest was born into socioecological circumstances more dire than I could have imagined. He was born into 444 ppm carbon in the atmosphere, melting ice caps, oceans crawling up the world’s coasts and deltas, soil salinization, dwindling fresh water, spreading desertification, and stalling agricultural production. He was born in tandem with Seth’s unwise decision to join a dangerous political action. All that time he spent proclaiming his adoration of Forrest, his joy at fatherhood, when did he know that a year was all he would ever have? I try to imagine truncheons shattering his skull or more likely 5.56x45 rounds puncturing his body, and I ache to know when he realized that he would leave me alone with this boy.
Peter, Haniya, and their children, Noor and Gregory, stayed with me in D.C. for the memorial service. Seth’s parents and siblings, an irrefutably warm and kind family, arrived days later, and we spread Seth’s ashes in a crowded ceremony by the Potomac. Seth’s parents seemed to understand that this was not an artifice I was capable of navigating. They took the brunt of the condolences and allowed me to stay mute. I’d first met them four years earlier at Seth’s childhood home in Mill Valley, California. They were kind to me, and I was greatly disappointed that I couldn’t manufacture tears for them. They were all so devastated, and I felt my difference and deficiency acutely. Afterward, Seth’s siblings approached me to talk of their plans to not only pursue legal recourse but also form an advocacy group with the families of other victims. When I said this did not interest me, they made no secret of their displeasure.