Micro Book Group Guide No. 9

Vigil participants have amassed on the Beacon Street pavement a display of cookware, empty steel pots referencing another city’s people who are denied nutrition.

The weekly standout practice undergoing development. Another innovation, to turn toward passersby the captioned photographs of children no longer alive. Their faces and names, exuberant juveniles or shy, or it is the infantile blankness of the earliest phase that was captured before this life came to its end.

When the vigil’s final rite is underway, Yifat invites Rami to speak first, his turn at the megaphone having been denied him in the previous week by a hectoring drunk. Rami, a tall old guy, an emeritus professor of microphysics, our rare Palestinian voice. Egyptian as well, as he will specify in his megaphonic intro. From his mother’s side.

It will emerge that Rami is heartened by the boosted vigil turnout. In his second Sunday with us he observes a movement on the rise. He predicts that our cause will prevail. Keep it up, he says. Keep at it.

True that attendance has increased. A considerable number of children’s portraits displayed.

An infinitesimal fraction of the many thousands killed. A death count swelling every day, excluding no age group. These children represent a fraction of a fraction.

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The likenesses of children killed are seen to prompt a readier public sympathy than the likenesses of dead adolescents and adults.

A vigil collecting thirty-plus participants this week instead of fifteen can be seen to indicate a movement on the rise or to sustain the pattern of attendance established, fluctuant. Always new faces. Not all will return.

The regularity of regulars will vary. No one can make it every Sunday. Some do come close to that, as far as Inbal can discern having become an erratic participant in the recent winter, unaware of the vigil prior to meeting Yifat.

Driving Inbal home again today Yifat will attribute the bettered attendance to the progression of the seasons. The finer weather encourages the reenlistment, reversing the attrition. The New England winter is forbidding. Still the commitment of core vigil participants is such that only the savagest of snowstorms, once, prompted a cancelation. A report by Yifat. The tenacity of core participants in a weekly vigil for a permanent ceasefire. A ritual instituted two weeks after the massacre, persisting while the season of vengeance declines to resolve, a formidable objective having been declared, which assigns an unconstrained supply of people on all sides of the conflict to the sacrificial role: Absolute victory. For the time being the pace of immolation privileges one side.

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(From Outpatient, a novel-in-the-works by Naama Goldstein)

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Micro book group guide #9

Resolve the following problem:

This reading leaves me…

1) Preoccupied with the evolving rituals of a fictional urban vigil.

2) Sensing the parallels between my outlook and that of individuals emerging from histories seemingly unlike mine.

3) All of the above.

4) None of the above. I never stop for political street theater. Why would I want to read about it? Vigils are for pious chumps, end of story.