Tremors

If I could at least get them to feel that this trembling

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beneath us means we're on a bridge…

“To be stupefied,” Jared Russell explains in his provocative essay Stupidity, “is to regress in the face of the unexpected, to have one's critical faculties paralyzed.” The contributors to Room 2.20 may be terrified and even heartbroken in the face of the unexpected, but they are not stupefied. They have some very clear ideas that we need to hear. They are telling us that we are living on a fault of our own making that is bigger than the San Andreas, and we are feeling the tremors. Each of these authors are telling us how, when facts and reason hold no sway, when fear, anger, and yes, even love render us numb or blind, we are failing spectacularly and tragically to live up to our humanity.

Iris Foder writes in After the War that she really believed the violence would stop, the poverty would end, and the celebrations would begin in the Bronx. Michael McAndrews recalls in War and Grief his experience aboard a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the day after Trump assassinated Soleimani, during a different “tense state of belligerence” with Iran. “I surely wasn't the only sailor in the American or Iranian Navy who was relieved when the crisis was averted. I feel,” he writes, echoing Foder from a distance of three generations, “both too old, at thirty-four, and not old enough to see history repeat itself.”

And Then It Was Over completes William Harris's homage to Marshal McLuhan's prophetic vision of how media would come to infiltrate our souls and stop time. Beginning with “Twitter Dee Twitter Dum” (Room 6.18) and progressing to “Still Here” (Room 10.19), Harris's triptych has taken us from an initial jumble of horror to the tense marking of days, to now “living in an earthquake… awaiting the aftershocks we know will come.”

Daniel Benveniste lived through the political earthquake that destro