Sherman Alexie - Ten Little Indians

“Always the wise guy. You know what day I’m talking about.”

“On that September eleventh, I was working.”

“What do you do?”

“I design computer games.”

“If you design computer games, why don’t you have a computer in your apartment?”

“What are you, a detective?”

“I’m good with details.”

“It’s a boundary thing. I want my work life and my home life to be separate.”

“How’s that going for you?”

“I’m never here.”

“That must be fun.”

“It was until the eleventh. I was working on the final stages of a terrorist game. A first-person shooter.”

“What’s a first-person shooter?”

“You see through the eyes of the gunman.”

“You get to shoot terrorists? Must have been a big seller.”

“In our game, you play a terrorist who shoots civilians. You can attack a shopping mall, an Ivy League college, or the World Trade Center.”

“Oh, God, that’s disgusting.”

“We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and manufacture it. Even before the eleventh, we figured that kind of game would be controversial. We figured it would get tons of press, and every dumb-ass rebel teenager would have to own it. We were looking forward to the censorship and the lawsuits. We were manufacturing units based on how much negative publicity we estimated we’d receive.”

“How could you live with yourself?”

“We redesigned the game after the eleventh. Now you play a cop who hunts terrorists in a shopping mall or a college. We dropped the World Trade Center completely.”

“And that’s supposed to make it all better?”

“We’ve presold ten million copies. I’m going to be very rich.”

“It’s blood money.”

“All money is blood money.”

“Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?”

“For a few days after the eleventh, I thought about suiciding. I thought about going up to the top of the Space Needle and jumping off. I figured it would be appropriate for me to die that way.”

“There’s a bunch of people who would have helped you jump.”

“Yeah, but it was all about self-pity. I mean, I’m alive, right? Think about how many people died in the World Trade Center. It took Giuliani how many hours to read all the names?”

“There were about twenty-five hundred of them.”

“Yeah, twenty-five hundred innocent people dead, and me, a living, breathing coward.”

“A millionaire coward,” she said.

On September 11, she’d been collating files in the law firm’s library when the first plane hit the first tower. When the second plane hit the second tower, she’d been watching it on the conference room television along with the entire firm, forty-five white-collar professionals who watched with equal parts revulsion and excitement. She remembered how, when the first tower collapsed, she’d closed her eyes and listened to her colleagues’ anguished moans and wondered why they sounded so erotic. We’re so used to sex on TV that everything on TV becomes sexy, she thought. Their law offices were on the sixtieth floor of the Columbia Center. From the conference room windows, all of the lawyers and staff had at one point or another looked south and watched airplanes arrive and depart from Boeing Airfield and Sea-Tac Airport. After the tower collapsed, she’d looked out the window after somebody screamed the fearsome question they’d all been asking themselves— What if they hit us? — and she’d almost seen a passenger jet cutting through the sky. Everybody else in the conference room must have seen their own illusory jets, because they’d all panicked as a group and run screaming out of the room, down sixty flights of stairs and onto the streets below. She’d stayed in the conference room. She’d walked to the window and waited for her airplane to come. She’d wondered if she would be able to see the pilot’s face, and perhaps recognize him, before he destroyed her. And she’d wondered, as she waited to die, if some other unhappy woman or man had stood in a World Trade Center window that morning and committed suicide by inertia.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t think everybody who died in the towers was innocent.”

“Who are you?” he asked. “Osama’s press agent?”

“Those towers were filled with bankers and stockbrokers and lawyers. How honest do you think they were?”

“They didn’t deserve to die.”

“Think about it. Maybe they did deserve to die. Open your mind.”

“It’s tough to be open-minded about this stuff.”

“But you’ve got to be. You can let any event have one meaning, right? Your games don’t have one meaning, do they?”

“No.”

“All right, then, maybe September eleventh means things nobody has thought of yet.”

“You’ve thought of other meanings, right?”

“Yes, I have. So listen to this. Let’s say twelve hundred men died that day. How many of those guys were cheating on their wives? A few hundred, probably. How many of them were beating their kids? One hundred more, right? Don’t you think one of those bastards was raping his kids? Don’t you think, somewhere in the towers, there was an evil bastard who sneaked into his daughter’s bedroom at night and raped her in the ass?”

He couldn’t believe she was doing this math, this moral addition and subtraction, this terrible algebra. He wondered if God would kill thousands of good people in order to destroy one monster. He wondered if he was a monster, making the games he made and earning the money he earned. Ha, ha, he thought, but I’m Mr. Funny. I’m the highlight of every party. I’m the best dinner guest in the history of the world. I can make any woman fall in love with me in under five minutes and alienate her five minutes later.

“I’m not some wimpy liberal or anything,” he said. “I believe in capital punishment. I believe in the necessity of war. But I don’t think anybody deserves to die.”

“You’re contradicting yourself.”

“Fine, then I’m a contradiction, but at least I admit that. You’re talking about these things like you know more than the rest of us. Like you’re absolutely right.”

“Somebody has to be right,” she said and tried to sit up but could only fall back and close her eyes against the nausea.

“Are you okay?” he asked, happy she was quiet for a moment. How could she say the things she was saying? Wasn’t she afraid of God?

“I’m just dizzy,” she said. “If I keep my eyes open, I’m going to vomit.”

“You’ve got a concussion, I told you. I’m sure of it. We’ve got to get you to the hospital.”

“No, you wanted to talk, and we’re going to talk. I’m going to tell you everything, and you’re going to listen, and then you’re going to take me to the hospital.”

“I don’t want to hear the things you’re saying.”

“That’s the problem. Nobody wants to hear these things, but I’m thinking them, and I have to say them.”

He stood and walked around the room. He wondered if he was supposed to ignore this woman. Maybe that was the lesson he was supposed to learn. Words were dangerous. His nouns and verbs had destroyed his marriage and created a game that mocked the dead. Her story seemed more potentially destructive than any bomb or game he could create or imagine.

“Are you going to listen to me?” she asked.

“Talk,” he said.

“All right, all right,” she said. “Didn’t you get sick of all the news about the Trade Center? Didn’t you get exhausted by all the stories and TV shows and sad faces and politicians and memorials and books? It was awful and obscene, all of it, it was grief porn.”

“I got so tired of it, I picked up my TV, carried it down the stairs, and threw it in the Dumpster.”