Mushroom Death Suit
by Tyriek White
I sat in the soured corner of an emergency room because of what felt like my blood turning into salt, and Mama, filed down to the raw from the stress of me, in her loose pajama set under an old Lord & Taylor overcoat, short with the nurse’s aides because they couldn’t help, fed me ibuprofen in the meanwhile, and sought the doctor-on-call for Tylenol-3 or other painkillers. It was a waiting room in the child ward, faded sky blue walls and bleached designs, rainbow and sunshine chipped away. There were pockets of carpet that were shabby and worn, a knotty sofa, lumpy bean bag chairs sewn together a bunch of times over. There was a flatscreen on the wall that played NCIS reruns all night long.
“Asani,” My mother’s voice pulled me out of my trance. She never looked so tired—too tired to hold it together. It was a month until my thirteenth birthday, and ever since I could remember, Mama hid everything behind reassurance. The pain I felt was bone-chattering, a hungry fire. It was suffocating, clamped my lungs and ran liquid steel through my ribs. The marrow could have rotted away, and I’d feel no different. I didn’t feel at all like this body, its parts, the salt that flowed through it. I wanted out of my body, I did. My blood was turning against me. I curled up beneath my coat, forced the air in and out of my teeth, heaved my lungs up and over a jagged hill.
“How you holding up, champ?” Mama asked me, full of sweetness.
“I know every Women’s NCAA championship roster from the past twelve years,” I said. “Baylor, then that pandemic season, then Stanford—”
“Why do you know this information?”
“I was bored, so I’ve Googled every winner since I was born.”
“Your homework shouldn’t be a problem then.”
“You would make me do homework at a time like this?” I asked in mock disbelief. She rolled her eyes, had gotten out her phone and was FaceTiming someone. Grandma was a deacon at a small church with worn carpet, the middle of Highway 6, a muddy driveway before you turned off into Clarksdale. Mama used to be under the pew singing “Bread of Heaven, sent down from Glory.” She claimed she didn’t know the hymns the same, like it was lifetimes ago, but I caught her humming to herself when her mind wandered. I wanted to be wherever those songs lived, but she didn’t sing to herself anymore.
Mama had filled out paperwork hours ago. Told Grandma she was going to the front desk to yell at someone. Mama knew death was a slow, deliberate process. We were used to people left on hospital beds in hallways, the rooms with plastic curtains for false privacy. Khalia had gone through years of doctor-prescribed medication that turned the kidneys to brine. She shrunk away; a cold, spring evening. Like the harsh, white light to a newborn. Too many knives and machines and opening and closing. Stitching and restitching. Blood in and blood out.
I had met Charlie on accident when he told me about the atrophy in his legs. I was only half-paying attention, searching for a vending machine in the emergency room while Mama finished her phone call, and he kept saying ‘atrophy’ like ‘a trophy’ and I couldn’t understand why he would get a trophy for his legs. A wheelchair sat beside him with a stack of comics in the seat.
“So what you in for?” Charlie asked me.
“It’s not important.”
“You don’t like to talk about it.”
“I just don’t feel like it,” I said.
“Sickle cell maybe? Your eyes are yellow.”
“Can we not—?”
“You gotta talk about it, that’s how you deal with it. I’m open about my leukemia. I talk about my ups and downs, the vomiting after fucking chemo, why I’m in this stupid chair.”
“Cool, I get it.”
“I already know how I wanna go out,” Charlie said. Leaned back in his chair. “A mushroom suit.”
“The hell is that?” I said.
“Mushrooms are like the master decomposers of the planet. They clean toxins in the environment, can fight cancer, a whole bunch of things. I saw a talk about it. When you die, they wrap you in mushrooms and bury you. Breaks your body down into nutrients. It’s like you’re feeding the earth.”
“You’re weird, my dude. Why even think about that shit?”
“Dying?” he asked. “I mean, here—what else is there?”
The pamphlets said that folk with sickle cell, on average, lived until about forty. I’m not sure if there is a ribbon for it, or a color. There is a month—September—though there isn’t much awareness besides a couple of shared Facebook posts. There were about a hundred thousand people with the disease and about two million with the passable trait. I didn’t expect much of a march or a rally; none of the kids here did.
“What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get outta here?” Charlie asked me.
“Home. My mama would get us oxtails. I’ll see my friends.”
“It’s always been hard for me to keep friends. They all probably think I’m gonna go soon. They’ll post about me on my birthday for a few years. I’ll be the reason they don’t take life for granted.”
Beneath my coat, I was slick with sweat and my hands swelled around my phone. A sickness of the blood. It was the first time I considered everyone wouldn’t make it home. Felt like none of us would. I couldn’t think about it, couldn’t actually take in his dried skin, the pale lips, or how many times Charlie had to pause and cough up something from what sounded like a cold, hollow corner inside him. All of it just was.
I got woken up by nurses rushing someone out of the emergency room, a panicked message over the PA system to a surgeon on call. Charlie was nowhere in sight.
“It’s bullshit,” my mother was saying to a Jewish woman a few seats down.
“Grade A,” she huffed.
“No one believes us,” Mama kept saying. “No one believed me when Khalia was alive, and they still don’t.”
She went back to the front desk, only to be pulled aside by an officer and a doctor in a loose-fitting suit. Their voices were trapped underneath the murmur of the waiting room.
My sister, Khalia. Like me, she had jaundiced eyes that glowed like highlighters. She was older than me, but tiny, and bounced around the house with no house shoes. At her funeral, I wore a large suit and looked out of place. My mother refused to sit, just stood in the aisle and swayed from side to side. When I said goodbye, I stared into the casket until I burned it into my memory. Her small body filled out like a doll, and I wanted to stand there the whole morning and breathe but I kept moving toward my seat. I couldn’t understand it.
“So you think I’m trying to score pills?” I heard Mama cry out. The doctor bristled, continued in a low, even voice. I was trying to pull air into my lungs with all my might ’cause everything inside felt on fire. I couldn’t stand it any longer. The hard bench that was bolted down only scraped my bones. Mama came back with a crowd of nurse’s aides and a doctor, tears on her face, muttering every curse word I had ever heard, cursing everyone who listened.
“Look at him,” she said to no one and everyone, helped ease me to my feet. The waiting room was quiet. “Look at him.”
I shared a room in the county hospital where the nurses had pulled at my arms, pushed fluids into my blood, kept me under hard bedsheets. I had been here for nearly a week, and Mama and I had already settled into a routine. She read a Sistah Souljah novel by my bedside, or crocheted some hand warmers, kept a bright, purple hook and yarn in her bottomless purse. She stayed past visiting hours, sweet-talked the nurses, remembered their names, and went downstairs to the diner for red velvet cake (for me but offered the rest to the nurses’ station and some of my roommates).
When she finally did leave to get ready for work, she closed her eyes and said a prayer with me. I never closed my eyes when she prayed, just watched her as she called on the Lord and held my hand. It was the only time I really got to look at her.
“We’ve come this far by faith,” she began. She always blamed herself for what my life would be.
When visiting hours were over and the corridors were dark at the ends, I wandered the halls, pulling my IV along like a leash on a mechanical pet. The wheels were gummed up with old dirt, scuffed the flat vinyl tile which was cold and boring. There were rooms and rooms of kids on this floor, all with blood disorders, two or three to a room, kinky hair, thin from chemo or pneumonia or opioids. There was the damp smell of plastic bedpans and musk. Near the mop closet and bathrooms was enough ammonia and industrial bleach to make my eyes fill with water. The ebb of machines was constant beneath the murmur of nurses and, when I strained to listen, faint sobs. I looked out the sugary windows in my room. An empty freeway was like river water from up high, curled through the fog and flat strip malls. The hospital was near the airport and I could hear the planes leaving and coming into the city. Eventually, the medication runs its course and I fall asleep to the sound of departure.
I dreamt of water and sand. The kind mixed with dirt so you can’t tell sand from soil. Screen door led right out to the dirt road, smoke rising from a grill behind the trailer next door. Lost in them fields, or them swamps my uncle would tell me about. His ex-wife, who I called auntie still, brought over a basket of scupnun. We sat on the splintered porch, biting through a good enough pinch of the grape’s thick skin and squeezing till the pulp popped into our mouths. Tossed the skin in the patch of grass, spit the seeds out as far as they could go. Mama looked relieved. Khalia painted her toes white, sick of boys already, a bowl of ice on her lap to chew on. Unc with his hands caked in flour, the smell of whiting and hot grease. I was behind the pecan tree out back, surrounded by shells, some cracked open to the buttery seed. Dead undergrowth, branches and logs left from stolen pulpwood had atrophied (I was obsessed with the word) and blocked the path. On the shore of the lake, Mama said we should cool down by jumping in. My shoulders were ready, committed to descent. It is dead water, still. Praying for land, I don’t want to drown in what I really am. Mama hadn’t come up for air.
I kept tossing and turning, pulled awake by a cold sweat. I tried no blanket, then a half sheet, then no sheet. I still kept waking up with my gown sticking to me. I pushed the covers aside and got out of bed. It was damp. Outside there was no trace of sky, only darkness. When I turned on the lamp near my bedside, I was covered in blood. It had cooled against my warm skin, against my gown, had seeped into the white sheets, the shape of an open tree trunk. I screamed.
A nurse who looked like Cheryl Lynn rushed through the doorway. I kept looking down at the bed. The bloodspot. It looked like someone had died. The nurse said something, but all I could do was cross my eyes. Looking too far ahead.
“Your IV came out,” a voice said. The nurse.
“What?”
“Your IV,” she told me. “It must’ve slipped out while you were asleep. Looks like you didn’t tear your veins up, thank goodness. This happens all the time.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know why I felt the need to apologize.
“I’m gonna go get you new sheets and a gown. Just sit tight.”
She turned on the lights overhead and rushed out of the room as quickly as she came in. The tightness of the walls came back, the grime that crawled from under the beds and machines. The floor had a sticky film that couldn’t go away, no matter how many times the custodians scrubbed. I sat in the visitor’s chair my mother used every evening, the cushion tattered and split open at the bottom. The other kids who I shared the room with hadn’t stirred, were only half visible behind paper-thin curtains that sectioned them all off. Their bodies heaved and let go, squirmed and burrowed deeper into their bedsheets. I looked back down, blood in my lap, skin dry beneath the yellow hem of my hospital gown. Stared at the ruined sheets, all blotted with red. Like someone had died. I couldn’t think about anything else. Death was all around me, as inescapable as my own body.
Dan Reiter
The chime sounds, the gilded elevator shrugs open, and the children spill into the Parker Plaza condominium lobby, flip-flops slipping perilously over checkerboard marble as the Bubbe hustles after them, the poor Bubbe, freighted by her tote bags and grim premonitions, flapping behind in her floral dress, blond beehive wobbling atop her head, fearing the worst, always the worst, wait for me––as the middle child, the clumsy one, trips over her own sandals and the Bubbe hears in her own head the crack of the tiny skull on the polished floors––but no, they dash onward, the bubelehs, alive, unharmed, upright for now, wind spirits of these neo-baroque halls, heedless of the Bubbe’s plaints, that’s too fast, wait, their voices like piccolo notes bouncing off the vaulted ceilings and crystal chandeliers, they flicker behind the colonnade like runners in a stop-motion film reel, scatter down the steps, then reach an impasse at the locked double glass doors, where the Bubbe finally corrals them, clucking, carrying on, slathering their skin with white lotion, murmuring loving schaefelehs into their squirming faces, marveling behind granny glasses at the youngest girl who looks exactly like Regina, those high cheekbones, those big curly locks, and this memory of Elu’s sister, down on her knees in the street and shot in the back of the head by the Nazi soldier, her delicate body crumpling to the dirt, this recurring goblin makes the Bubbe flinch, and she pulls the girl in closer and rubs her downy ears, knowing full well how ridiculous she must seem to these little ones, all arm fat and exposed nerves, an old mopper of tiles, a hoarder of paper sacks, a pincher of pierogies, and yet she is perfectly happy to play meshugenah for these precious American grandbabies, so long as they should never starve, never see their parents killed, or sleep in a muddy hole under the forest floor, never go pregnant-sick on a refugee boat, or blister their feet on the streets of Saint-Laurent, only that they should keep safe, happy, healthy, and maybe give her a little naches in her age. Jangling her keys, her fingers gnarled to tree roots after forty years of wiping and kneading and polishing, the Bubbe thrusts open the glass doors and releases them into the heat of the Florida afternoon––these jewel-children, so fragile, so skinny, living in their house on the golf course, with a doctor for a father, attending their private school, and always in new clothes, not bupkes, certainly their life is not bupkes, but what is it, really, compared to the luxuries of the old country, the white tablecloths, the fresh-baked bread, the silver candlesticks, the rows of apple trees, the fragrant rose bushes, the wild geese, and the horse rides to the mountains in Hrebenow, all of these treasures of the Bubbe’s childhood which seemed so safe and reliable, all ripped away so violently, never returned?––and she chases them across the pool deck, a frantic caravan, they run past the oiled brown body of Lou Weisman, his 18-carat star of David gleaming on his chest, and Rose Levine, white-lipped, sipping her iced lemonade, and the Glazers, lazing like elephant seals under disheveled towels, and Moishe Haifitz’s card players, jowly in their fedoras and guayaberas, yes, hello, hello, the Bubbe nods and smiles to these sun-spotted Jews of the Hallandale Beach high-rise diaspora, leathering themselves in one-piece bathing suits and terry cloth robes, bartering sophic winks, or dimes to be pressed into tiny palms, and some offering Yiddish phrases, Vi geyt es?, who, like the Bubbe, are endlessly fending off visions of wartime Poland, even now, forty-five years later, in 1987, against this tropical backdrop of cobalt and white, while the children patter like shorebirds and a muzak version of Johnny Mathis’ “Wonderful Wonderful” honey-warbles over the hot coral deck, even now these survivors are gripped with evil portents, divinations of death, and the Bubbe, seeing in her mind’s eye the children bubbling and drowning in the sapphire depths of the swimming pool, crosses the deck in a flash of cyan and gold to sweep them up in her arms and explain in halting vibrato how she never learned to swim, you must be extra careful, and how if they promise to hold her hand, she will take them down to the beach to collect seashells. But when the gate clangs open, the boy, the eldest, wriggles free of her grip and air-drops six feet to the sand and sprints for the sea, leaving the Bubbe to scoop the girls down the steps in a panic and watch him shrink into the east and launch his frail, bony body into the whitewater, the poor Bubbe, who never learned to swim, wading now into the shallows, screaming his name, her dress clinging to her thighs, fists like upheld torches, willing him to rise again from the water, and when he does he comes up laughing, staggering in the smuggle of the undertow just as another wave shoves him from behind, drops him to his knees. Now his hands are no longer waving playfully, but signaling for help, and the Bubbe too, she feels herself sucked out by the rip current and she cries, he’s drowning, but no one hears, no one comes, she is wet to her breasts, stutter-stepping in the boil as the boy’s head goes under again, and in that crazed moment she hears herself shouting another name––Bernard, she wails it into the foam, her first-born son, Bernard, burned in the ovens––as the air sizzles like six million shrieks, and she draws a hollow breath and sets her sturdy legs, and when the next wave, white as quicklime, churns over her, she endures, the Bubbe endures, and it is the ocean that retreats, not she, who gave up so long ago on the God of the Parted Waters, not she, who with callused and liver-spotted hands reaches forth and plucks the child from the sea, not she, not the Bubbe. It is not a miracle of faith, but a miracle of perseverance that delivers them both to high ground, the boy wincing under her bruising grip, protesting, I was joking, I could stand all the time, and the Bubbe, her dress soaked, her mound of blond hair slumped to one side. The boy, perceiving in an instant of clarity all the mournful pain in her face, embraces her legs, his heart fills up like a water balloon, and he promises not to tease her again, never, but the air is so thick with salt, the sea hisses on the concrete wall, and the Bubbe hears only the timbre of his voice, not his promises… and what of promises anyway, zuzogen un lieb hoben kosst nit kein geld, when Bernard is dead, still dead, will never not have died, and so, rebuilding the spun bulk of her hair, brushing the kindelahs off in cosseting slaps, she leads them like Moses across the sands, to pluck seashells from the grains and plop them into bright plastic pails––cockles, mollusks, conchs: glinting spirals to display on their windowsills overlooking the golf course, shells to bleach in the Florida sun, to chip at the edges, and some which will go missing or return to sea, and one in particular, a lightning whelk oddly suggestive of the elegant whorl of the Bubbe’s hair, to remain in the boy’s possession for many years, to sit atop his desk as a memento, a stela, an altar––and later, on the slick tile bench of the Parker Plaza washing station, when the Bubbe discovers blots of tar on the boy’s feet, she mumbles an ancient Hebrew lament as she squirts acetone onto a rough green sponge and sets in to scrub, the poor Bubbe, who can’t help but sing like a taut wire, her voice climbing into the upper octaves, you must be hungry, I will make you a good dinner, crouching now to better inspect his toes, flares of sunlight rebounding in her glasses so that the boy is blinded and shields his eyes and squints at her wide, noble face, at the strange shape of her beehive, the Bubbe appearing in that moment as the sphinx of the Egyptian desert, a vision of a golden lioness, a vision that will remain a permanent feature in the landscape of his mind, a memory like a bronze etching, a reminder of the day he nearly drowned (for he really couldn’t stand on his own) but was saved by the Bubbe, along with the puffed green veins of her hands, the sponge like metal wool on his pink feet, the sting of acetone in his nose, and how she scrubbed and scrubbed his burning feet, long after the last black spot was gone.
Actor Kelly AuCoin reads the short story “The Mona Lisa” by Robert Oldshue as part of BLR’s 20th Anniversary Celebration. “The Mona Lisa” was originally published in BLR Issue 3.
Galen Schram is interviewed by BLR Fiction Editor Suzanne McConnell and reads an excerpt from his prize-winning story, “Tattoos,” in BLR Issue 40.
Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, reads an excerpt from her prize-winning BLR story “Letters to Michiko” and shares her thoughts about Bellevue Literary Review’s 20th Anniversary. “Letters to Michiko” was originally published in BLR Issue 14.
Jinn S. Kim reads “Et Tu?” a story by Cambron Henderson from BLR Issue 31, a special issue on the theme of Memory.
Videography by Ken Browne Productions
Erin Cherry reads “The Emperor of Blue Stone,” a story by Frances Park from BLR Issue 37
Videography by Brandon Romagnoli
Daniel Pearce reads “Call Ladies,” a story by MK Malik from BLR Issue 33.
Videography by Stratton Films
Jane Mushabac
Sabrina & Corina: Stories
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
One World, 2019
Sabrina & Corina is a collection of Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s eleven short stories about Latina people of indigenous ancestry in Denver and in the small fictional town of Saguarita, Colorado. The book is dazzling and groundbreaking. The author’s bright, spare prose engages us intensely with her characters and their relationships.
If readers familiar with literature about the Latinx of New York, New Jersey, Florida, and California don’t expect to be reading about Colorado Hispanics, perhaps it’s worth a quick look at the Denver tourism website to learn that 34% of Denver’s population today is Hispanic. The site goes on to tout all the cultural, culinary, and celebratory excitement Hispanics offer visitors to this mountain city.
The tourism site, of course, doesn’t mention another key fact about Denver today, gentrification. Fajardo-Anstine’s stories focus mostly on marginalized individuals and families who have been displaced, their neighborhoods razed, squeezing them off the land and out of neighborhoods once their own, if not in their own generation, then in previous ones. The author’s Chicano Southern Colorado heritage dates back to 1848. These are not recent immigrants but people with a deeply vested attachment to the land.
So, interestingly, while Denver today extols the money Hispanics can bring in with their colorful holidays, in their own everyday experiences, the people in Fajardo-Anstine’s stories find that they are invisible, literally—as one nurse in scrubs complains to her daughter. Although she was standing in a supermarket line a long time before stepping aside for a moment, the Anglo woman behind her accuses her of cutting when she returns to her cart. The woman says, “I didn’t see you.” Or Randy, a tall Anglo young man, has never noticed the “water treatment,” which his Spanish girlfriend explains to him occurs when a Hispanic asks for a Coke, and is given a glass of water instead:
“It’s called getting the water treatment,” Tina said. “You’ve never heard of that, Randy? It happens to us all the time.”
“Why would I notice that?” Randy asked, digging into his drive-in movie popcorn.
“Because you’re a big tall American boy,” said Tina, sarcastically.
Randy smirked, “And you’re my little Spanish girl.”
The short stories develop a variety of close interpersonal relationships, with three of the most remarkable stories introducing thirteen-year-old girls who are in battles of love and despair with their mothers. They are intermittently sassy, subservient, deeply affectionate, and determined as they try to find a way to survive their mothers being mired in age-old patterns of defeatism and fear. Another relationship is that of two sisters charged by their mother to be husband-hunting in 1960s Denver, especially for Anglo men who earn more and can go more places than Hispanics; Mom gives them $27 each for their fresh start in new jobs. Or two cousins, who are such good friends for years, but part ways as one self-destructs, and the other, a cosmetologist at Macy’s, ultimately cleans up her cousin’s horribly bruised face for the moving, well-attended ritual of her wake. Another story introduces an ex-convict young woman and her video-game obsessed nephew who is failing a course called “Read and Relax.” And another gives us the nurse’s daughter and her beloved Native American boyfriend who has been missing for days as she tries to study for a final exam in her college’s course on “The History of the American West.” As the story explains, “If she fails, she’ll lose her scholarship, the Displaced Fund, given to the grandchildren of Denver residents, mostly Hispanic, who once occupied the Westside neighborhood before it was plowed to make way for an urban campus.”
This book, in effect, tells the history of the American West. It tells it through the scarred lives of its marginalized Spanish and native people. And in doing so, it is an extraordinary work of American literature. As I see it, it gives the reader the hidden heart of America. Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s writing is fierce, and full of surprises, tragedy, gentleness, and shafts of light. Most of all her writing steadies us with the pulse of her characters’ longings.
A conscientious maintenance man in a senior residence loves his two very American daughters. One wears her mother’s Betty Boop T-shirt, the other sleeps on a Little Mermaid pillow case. The two girls compare notes on who in the building has crappy candy. They enjoy the residence’s dowdy rec room after school, racing each other on the stationary bikes, but when they are playfully considering which of the sisters the father loves most, the older one says their father loves their mother the most. The family share the desire that the mother’s breast cancer, discovered late, will not kill her but they cannot afford the care she desperately needs. The girls imaginatively plot to save her, but it’s a bold girlish dream. They have no resources for a real plan.
In the story “Remedies,”—originally published in the Bellevue Literary Review in 2010—another girl does better with a different problem. Hearing her mother sobbing about the head lice they cannot get rid of, which they keep getting from a relative they’re trying to help, the daughter goes against her mother’s fierce dictum that she not tell her great grandmother about the problem, and her plea for help works. Here is a trope from all human history, women as healers.
I often wonder how it is possible that white America doesn’t know its own Spanish heart. It’s too busy thinking about itself in exceptional terms, grabbing the high moral ground in bizarre ways, and striking out in depression and anger. Or perhaps depending too earnestly upon the high intellectual ground, or swirling with enjoyment of America’s vast opportunities for entertainment.
Characters in the stories repeatedly comment on how hollow the “Anglos” are, but the remarks are so quick that we hardly notice them at first. But the modern wealthy blond Anglos of today’s Colorado haven’t grown up with tragedy, are oblivious to the lives of others, and ride ignorantly on the vehicle of privilege and its assumptions. The book opens the hidden Spanish heart of America; it flips the usual assumptions of white superiority. It flips the hierarchy that is deep in our culture.
I say the Spanish heart because this great American work is flush with unitalicized words in Spanish, the mamaloshen here of grandmothers and mothers yearning to help their offspring and descendants find joy and steadiness in life. Neither “mi hija” (my daughter) nor “mi hijita” is ever said in its long form. But the book quietly resonates with the affectionate contractions sprinkled in on twenty different pages, almost unnoticeably until you see the pattern: mija, jita, my beloved girl, as we hear these characters address their granddaughters and daughters in a way that is quiet and sustaining like trees bearing fruit. And their love does bear fruit. Some characters in the book—women and men, Hispanic and Anglo—are violent, incapable of good aspirations, but we see other characters—mistreated women and men—keep their balance, calm, and dignity.
This is not ethnic literature. Sabrina & Corina is American literature, brilliantly done, with glimpses of jagged mountains and terrible alleyways and unairconditioned tiny houses during a horrible heat wave—hardships, but pleasures too in bursts that matter. Every line is intentional yet fleeting in its subtlety. Here is the ultimate stability of Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s world, the calming of great story-telling, graciously, memorably bringing people together. And if the shadows the book casts ultimately are tragic like in an opera, it suits a time when our whole human enterprise threatens all our earth, all our vast inheritance of the good, and good souls yearn for a way forward.