A Person Like You
by Diane Lefer
“Ian,” I want to ask him, “did we know Judith Cohen? I know we didn’t know know her, but did we meet her? Maybe as Judy? It’s a common name, but did we?”
I could phone him right now and say Ian, you were right, I was wrong. Maybe.
The conversation started like this: “What do you think of Biden?” he asked.
“He gives me hope. It’s never too late to achieve what’s eluded you for so long.” He laughed, so I pushed on. “Prince Charles probably looks at Biden and thinks, well, OK. Though of course he’s been a prince all his life and Biden a Senator and VP. Not exactly like us.”
And I don’t really have hope.
We’re old enough to have had it and lost it over and again.
*
This country is fuckt fuckt fuckt. According to Ian. I told him how someone recently said when you’ve given up, you have to recover your sense of awe. I can still see a sunset, an amazing tree, a hummingbird, the night sky…
“Shock and awe,” he said.
Nothing breaks through what’s numb like a hit of destruction….the rocket’s red glare…
*
Ian and I grew up on the same block but it’s not like we were friends. Being aware of someone is not the same as knowing them. I knew things about him because his mother would tell my mother. He was two years older than me. Smart, popular and cool. Older girls would sometimes cruise by, looking for him.
After years of protesting the war, he graduated college and was drafted. He could have gone to Canada or prison. Instead he went to Vietnam.
It was only after he got back and couldn’t sleep, he’d phone me. He was home again on the east coast, I was in California, the only person he expected to still be awake when he needed to talk.
We talk about politics, books to read, music to listen to—almost never current music but where to find old footage of blues musicians on Youtube. We don’t gossip about people.
What would be the point? We never moved in the same circles.
Those late night, sometimes all night, conversations forged our friendship.
“You know what gets me about the Republicans?” he asked.
“That list is too long for a phone call,” I said.
“Guns!” and he went on about gun control. Common sense gun regulation. He couldn’t understand Republican intransigence, not when everyone in the country has a connection to at least one person shot dead in gun violence. Including every Republican.
“Not me,” I said. “I don’t know murder victims.”
But after we said goodnight and hung up, I thought of Judith Cohen.
Who may or may not be the same Judith Cohen who is now in the news, her cold case murder now re-opened.
*
It was during one of his visits to LA when Judith Cohen, a Judith Cohen if not the Judith Cohen, latched onto me.
“Why are you here?”
“Here here?” My purpose on earth? Or the event? A reception with free food and drink and I did, I remember now, drink a lot, probably too much.
It was a political event. Meet and hear from a former interrogator, i.e., torturer, from the War on Terror, a man overcome by what he’d seen and what he’d done. His therapist spoke first, to talk about the affliction of moral injury. About how you grow up tying your identity to your values, your principles, to certain convictions and beliefs. But when you violate them, who are you? Then we waited. After some awkward confusion, the therapist explained that for the morally injured man, speaking openly was supposed to be a healing step, but he was too ashamed and traumatized to appear.
I think we have moral injury, me and Ian, but what is the source? Throughout seven decades of living, there are so many causes. So much has happened. So much hasn’t.
What happened to us, Ian?
*
The event had to be in 2008, because my job had evaporated and that’s probably why Ian came to visit though he’s always claimed to hate LA. How can you live in all that concrete? even when I take him to Griffith Park or wilderness canyons or all the way to Joshua Tree. I wouldn’t have flown east to see him that year because I was broke. And that’s probably why we were at an event with free food and drink. Plus I thought it would do him good. There was a connection to Vietnam, I was sure, something he never talked about.
But if this happened in 2008, it maybe wasn’t a torturer who didn’t show up, but a drone pilot. Introduced, probably, not by a therapist but by someone from, for example, the National Lawyers Guild, and if I’ve forgotten, it’s willful forgetting. Because if a drone pilot who killed at a distance, watching on a screen and never dirtying his hands, if he could suffer such a profound moral injury, if it devastated him to the point where he no longer recognized himself and couldn’t face us, what about us? Sitting at home, funding state-sponsored terrorism with our tax dollars, and voting for more of the same, more war, more torture, more rendition, more Gitmo. Though on the horizon those days, Obama, and hope, and if it really was 2008, our hope hadn’t yet proved naïve.
But that night it had to be healthier not to feel, not to know, and there we were, a bunch of sociopaths, happy enough the speaker hadn’t shown up so we could stand around eating from the buffet and serving ourselves from the no-host bar.
The food was excellent and I went through the serving line at least twice. Mediterranean food, which was a euphemism by then for Middle Eastern or Arabic. Falafel and hummus and eggplant and skewers of chicken and lamb and tabouleh and rice and couscous and a not very Islamic selection of California wines.
While Ian was chatted up by one, two, three attractive women, Judith Cohen came at me. Too old for the black leather miniskirt, she wore gold lamé boots and patterned stockings, a bustier instead of a blouse, midnight black hair and lots of kohl around the eyes. Over the top even for LA. A special assistant to the Mayor, so she said, and if she’d been 18 or 20 I would have imagined the kind of special assistance she rendered. In her case, I assumed she was lying.
*
On the news covering her murder, the photograph they use is a standard headshot. Too much mascara but basically normal. Without her flamboyant attire, I look at that face and I’m not sure it’s the same Judith Cohen.
They’re questioning her son, and her childhood friend.
*
I don’t know at what point we filled our plates and moved away from the crowd and found a couch to sit on. She got up and returned with more drinks.
“I’m very intuitive about people,” she said. “And you—”
“You’re going to tell me my aura’s brown and needs cleansing.”
“Are you happy?” she asked. Which had to mean she wanted to sell me something. “If you could be a child again,” she suggested, as though this was sure to evoke memories of innocent, animal joy. But that was never me. Even as a little kid—stubborn, determined, even smug, the kind of kid who had to win at everything—I always had to be right.
“I’m not sure happy is the right word. I’d like to manage some peace of mind.”
“He looks happy,” she said.
And good. He always looked good and in shape and—if you didn’t know him—successful.
“We’re actually here for him,” I said. “To help him.”
She cut her kohl-lined eyes in his direction. “You love him.”
*
There was nothing calm or reassuring about Judith Cohen. She was not quite right. She vibrated with a nervous energy, bad judgment, recklessness, but I was suddenly alert. When she vibrated, I tingled, which reminded me of the first time Ian called me and so I told her—if I remember right—more than I meant to.
“He assumed I’d be awake,” I may have told her, “but I wasn’t and of course I didn’t know that was the reason. The phone woke me, and when it was Ian, I was confused. I thought I was dreaming, and then I was fully awake, my pulse racing but at the same time I froze. Terror, uncertainty. What could he possibly want? I couldn’t speak and I think he perceived my silence as calm. I think my panic made him feel safe.”
Across the room, the young women tossed their hair, bared their throats.
*
“Love? Sure,” I said. “In some sort of way. He’s married.”
“You’re fooling yourself,” she said.
I must have told her, No, it’s not like that, and if I did, she would have given me a knowing smile. Just like what happened before, once, when Ian was yelling at me in public, on the street, and a total stranger tried to give me contact info for the shelter. The stranger gave me that same knowing look when I insisted it’s not like that, something she’d of course heard too many times before.
“He isn’t really able to express anger,” I told her. “He feels safe enough with me to let it out.”
“What about you? Are you angry?”
“Sometimes at work. Sometimes slamming down the phone or tossing papers in the air is the only way to make them hear you.”
But if I was working when we met, it couldn’t have been ’08.
I’m trying to figure it out, because the date matters.
“Do you get angry at him?”
We do disagree. We talk freely about stuff that matters. Like defunding the police. He’s all for it. “How do they live with themselves,” he asks, “when they kill some unarmed kid?”
The problem isn’t the police, I think. It’s too many guns. When a cop assumes everyone is carrying, of course you shoot first. “OK,” I say. “So get rid of patrol cars and beat cops and military hardware. What about homicide detectives? Crime scene people?”
“You’ve been brainwashed by all those TV shows,” he said. “You glamourize the cops.”
*
Sometimes when we argue, I imagine him dead, just to test how I’d feel.
And I remember that night with Judith Cohen because it was strange to be talking this way to anyone—especially a woman. Even in high school, I didn’t have female friends, just girls who chose to latch on. Women always want to sympathize as though I’m in need of their sympathy. With women friends it’s better to say nothing, but Judith Cohen? It’s not like she could ever be a friend.
I told her, “I only pretend to be mad at him. It’s like, what would you call it? Aversion therapy. I want to keep him away from anything that might hurt him.”
She said, “You’re not his mother.”
Judith Cohen was a mother. Her son may be the one who killed her. Ian and I? Neither of us has kids. Him, as far as he knows. Me, a woman, well I could hardly be in doubt. If I’d ever had a baby, I could hardly not know. If I’d ever had a baby and given it up for adoption, I’d have something to wait for. I could still be surprised by someone looking for me, someone who someday might find me.
Someone putting a bullet in your head, that’s a surprise, though if Ian is right about statistics it shouldn’t be.
*
There were many times I berated him, insulted him—never in public—telling myself it was only to protect him. He said I took “vindictive relish” in my words but I’m sure he doesn’t remember. If he did, how could we have stayed friends?
While I remember almost everything. Except when we met her.
Overdoses? I could have named six right off the top of my head. Suicides? Two, and neither one using any sort of firearm. But gun violence, whether by accidental discharge or murder—nothing.
I don’t need a better memory. Better memories would be nice.
*
I had his best interests at heart.
When he announced his plan to go to grad school for anthropology: “That’s the most idiotic idea I’ve heard from you yet.”
“I thought you were interested in tribal people.”
“Yeah, when I was young and stupid.”
He’d had the chance in Vietnam, dropped by parachute among the Hill people, the Montagnards. It’s not like he studied them. Whatever happened in those hills, it was something he didn’t talk about. He couldn’t face it. He needed to steer clear of anthro, of anything that would cause the memories to come back. I humiliated him—idiot!—for his own good.
Because for a long time, I didn’t think he needed to face it. I didn’t think it was important to know the details. I knew enough. There were no American heroes in Vietnam. The only heroes those days were in Mississippi.
*
I’m still stuck, not sure when we met her.
I go through my photo albums. Before phones, that’s what you did, you took photos, had them developed and printed and you stuck them in albums. Not to be confused with record albums.
I always took pictures of Ian when we were together. If the photos were dated, I could maybe figure out what year we’d met Judith Cohen.
There I am, looking joyful. If I never felt that way in childhood, here at least was proof I could be giddy with delight. 1987, I’m in the street, celebrating my Lakers, NBA champs! When did I get the idea competition was bad? We did it! Defeated Boston! And this mattered because the most recent man to hurt me badly at that time was a Celtics fan. The look on my face is not the joy of shared triumph. This is not a little girl chasing a butterfly and happy to be alive. It’s the exhilaration of revenge.
*
War crimes in Fallujah, 2004. Pablo Paredes and his fight for conscientious objector status, also 2004. Was the event about bombing Afghanistan? Withdrawing from the International Criminal Court? Maybe it had nothing to do with Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe a military whistle-blower? Going back further, someone who trained Latin American torturers at the School of the Americas? Was it the CIA officer who oversaw the torture and rape of the American nun in Guatemala?
*
Judith Cohen, the one who was murdered, was killed in 2002. If we met her after that, it wasn’t her.
“You brought him here,” she said, “you want him to remember.”
Yes. But not—never—to hurt him.
I told her a story, without knowing I had chosen to. “We were driving and up ahead of us we saw a dog with a cat in its jaws. Ian slammed on the brakes and ran from the car.” Too late. The cat was dead. “He came back and opened the trunk. He took out a black garbage bag and loaded the cat inside it. I swear he looked like Frankenstein.” Then he dropped the bag in the trunk.
“Frankenstein’s monster,” she corrected me.
“Or a zombie. Something from a horror movie. It was a body bag. That’s when I knew more happened in Vietnam than he ever wanted to say.”
*
More recently, I thought the fall of Kabul might finally prompt him to talk.
“This country never learns,” he said.
“We certainly don’t know how to lose gracefully.”
“We did,” he said.
“We did?”
“You and I.”
*
“You’re the one who got him through,” she said, or I wanted her to say. “You saved him.”
I did help him. For a while. I paid a few months of his rent. I doubt I told her that. It wasn’t something I ever said out loud. How I sent him money month after month, rent, at least that’s what he said it was for, and I couldn’t bring myself to say I didn’t believe him. Somehow, it felt more shaming to me than to him.
*
Who should I call? Who will be awake? Ian doesn’t answer. I leave a voicemail for him to find in the morning: Do you have old calendars? Did you visit me in 2004 or 2008? Earlier than that? Do you remember the night we went to hear about moral injury?
*
Even his name was special. Ian. You think Judith Cohen is a common name. There were four other Barbaras in my high school graduating class.
*
Barbara! Barbara! Barbara!
I was walking home and there was one of the others, waving at me, frantic, trying to climb from the window of a black car. Help! A nun—in the old get-up of black habit and wimple—pulled her back inside. What had the other Barbara done? What were they doing to her?
What was I supposed to do?
*
When he calls back, I ask, “Do you remember going to an event, we met a woman named Judith Cohen?”
He remembers, or thinks he does. “She was cruising you.”
Now that really made no sense. Why would she—or anyone—be cruising me? What was it about me that made her hit on me, I mean choose me, to talk to? She said I wasn’t using my potential. She said “a person like you—” But where did she get off thinking she knew who I was? Judith Cohen in her ridiculous get-up and there I was, when Ian had gone off to be encircled with admirers, how foolish and alone I must have looked, all available for the taking.
In spite of which I’ve always felt superior. There were always things I could know that he wouldn’t be able to handle.
While Ian was in Vietnam, I was south of the border, hoping to apprentice myself to a shaman. I’d chew peyote, eat magic mushrooms and enter an Indigenous society where people shared what they had and the worst thing you could call someone was selfish.
When I heard his tour of duty took him to live with Montagnard tribals in the hill country, I thought he’d really lucked out.
What was it like? How did you get there? Did you learn their language? What’s their kinship structure? Do they live in nuclear families or in communal longhouses? Were they animist with an overlay of imposed religion? Do the women get sent to menstrual huts? What are the food taboos? Do they hunt wild animals? Do they have domestic livestock like chickens and pigs? Are they divided into groups with different totem animals? But what did you do? Did they spy for you? Do they weave their own clothes? Do they have traditional remedies? Knowledge of medicinal plants? What was it like living with them?
He said, “It was lonely.”
*
Before Covid, we would manage a visit once or twice a year. I’d usually go east but never in winter. I hate the cold. After he married, we got together less often. The few times he came west then, he came alone. His wife won’t fly. He always refers to her not by name, but as my wife.
Now we talk, but we never use Skype or Facetime or Zoom. We feel closer—or I do—when it’s just our voices, alive in the dark air.
*
Judith Cohen said, “You have a funny way of breathing.” Just one of the comments so personal I wanted her to shut up but keep talking. “Why not take a deep breath?”
I wasn’t aware I didn’t. But it might be a good idea, not drawing the contamination, all the pollution and particulate matter, deep into my lungs.
“Do you worry about taking more than your share of oxygen?”
“Not since the Sixties,” I said.
It occurs to me now that I didn’t ask her, Why are you here?
*
“When Ian was in Vietnam, you want to know where I was?” I said. “South of the border. I had the fantasy of apprenticing myself to a shaman. I ended up instead in Guatemala. People who actually lived there were being arrested, disappeared, tortured, killed but I could go anywhere without fear. No one would assault me. No one would rob me. I could get a bed for $1 a night and not care there was no lock on the door. I could get the best coffee, sweetest oranges, cheapest steak in the world. What I learned was a white American could be happiest in someone else’s police state.”
*
When Ian and I began our visits, did he even notice how, when we’d stop for a meal, as soon as the menu was in front of me, my teeth would chatter, the rest of me numb. Unless I knew I was paying for myself or for us both, I was afraid to order. Maybe he thought I had an eating disorder. Or was on a diet. He never asked. He accepted me—accepts me—as I am.
“We’re mysterious to each other but bonded for life.”
She said, “He is not a cat.”
*
Somehow with all the conversation and wine poured and imbibed, she learned I was not employed and she marveled that a person like me could be without work, though I do not remember what I must have said for her to imagine she knew what a person like me was like.
“There must be a place for you at City Hall,” she said. I didn’t jump at this almost offer because I didn’t believe her.
“Of course you’ll have to execute the SDO. Ten copies.”
You couldn’t get money from LA without signing the Slavery Disclosure Ordinance, attesting you’d never sold, owned, transported, or insured slaves.
*
When I phone Ian, this time I remind him about the ridiculous SDO.
“Imagine a future,” he says. “Substitute the words fossil fuels for slaves.”
*
“What about your moral injury?” she said. Not that it’s anyone’s business. “You’re not here only for him,” she said. “You’re here for a reason.”
So she was one of those people, Everything happens for a reason, that inane line.
“I’d give you my card,” she said, “but I can tell you won’t call,” and I assumed this was because she didn’t actually have one. “Give me your contact info and I’ll call you.”
I can’t remember whether by 2008—or whenever it was that this happened—people kept all sorts of info on their phones. But she instead handed me a little notebook, the kind you get as a gift when you subscribe to the New York Review of Books, and a pen and I scribbled my name and phone number along with a friendly note, something meant to reference moral injury and the happy happenstance of our meeting but it was only after I handed the book back to her that it occurred to me: my phrasing had been all wrong and my words might read like a come-on or in talking about injury I might have said too much. I was drunk, after all, and I wasn’t sure of what I’d written or how it might be misinterpreted and I worried about it, especially when she never called.
*
I began to fear I’d written something unpleasantly ambiguous or altogether too revealing. I realize it’s ridiculous, but I’ve worried about this for years. It’s only now that I’ve learned she was murdered that I realize she may have had a valid reason for not getting in touch. But with her case reopened, I still wonder what I wrote and whether this certainly innocuous message will bring detectives to my door and I’ll have to answer for it.
Was it her son, or her childhood friend? There’s even a podcast now. Of course I listen.
*
When did this happen? When was it we met her?
“Ian, can you remember what year it was? Do you keep old calendars? Bank statements—billing for a ticket to LA?”
“My wife keeps everything six years for the IRS. After that? She’s ruthless about throwing things out.”
“Maybe you happen to remember what specific moral injury was the subject?”
“In a post-genocide society, you have to ask?”
That’s Ian. If you care about these things, you’ve got to love him.
If I really respected him, I would speak openly to him.
But I’m the one who always knows better, who always knows best.
Imagine such grandiosity! Who do you think you are? Who did you think you were going to be?
*
Judith Cohen probed. She pried. No wonder someone had to kill her.
Did she ask the wrong question? Say the wrong thing? Didn’t know what to keep private?
If I could only pin down when. The date of her death is a matter of public record. So if I met her after that—a Judy Cohen, not the—it’s obviously not the murder victim. But if I did meet her before the murder, how much before?
I don’t care that she was murdered. To me, it only matters when.
What kind of person does that make me?
*
Who should I call? Who will be awake? I’ve been up all night. He is in upstate New York. Is it too late to call?
I want to be reassured I’ve done nothing wrong.
Ian, I want to say: I don’t like the gun fights and the torture porn. And it’s not just me. Remember the hardboiled detectives of, when, the ‘30’s? They’re loners. Today’s cop shows, it’s not about violence. It’s about loyalty. That’s why I—why millions of people—watch. To see people working as a team. People who will be there for each other, life and death, no matter what.
That’s an adolescent fantasy, he would say. And you are 70 years old!
*
At our age, even if we don’t take a bullet, we could die at any time. Lately, when Ian disappoints me, I’ve taken to imagining his death. I test out how I’d feel if he were gone.
Would the loss cut deep? Would I miss him?
Better not to think, not to ask, not to know.
*
Some suspect her childhood friend. Some say it was her son. If she were alive, I’ll bet you anything she’d say she never saw who killed her. Whichever of the two, she’d protect him to the end.
*
Eyesight, reflexes, I no longer drive. Before Covid, I’d get into conversations with people at bus stops, on the bus. Then the pandemic. People sat with their masks on staring straight ahead. No one spoke. We were afraid to breathe on one another.
The isolation was comfortable. I could get used to this.
During lockdown, I had no one but Ian.
He’s never been interested in me, or my life, or what I’ve gone through. He respects my privacy. Awkward histories are better left unsaid.
We talk about stuff that matters.
But today, the woman behind me on the bus started talking to get my attention. Most people here are vaccinated now and less afraid. Her words were muffled by the mask, something about my hair. I thought she was complimenting my silver curls. No, there was a flying insect on my head. She wanted to shoo it away but didn’t want to touch me suddenly, without permission. Yes, please, get rid of it! And just as light as the landing of the bug, her hand reached out and I said Thank you, though I didn’t feel her touch.
“The characters and situations are invented but it’s true I’m obsessed with moral injury and American violence. As I wrote, I was haunted by two ghosts: the close friend who always minimized the effects of his service in Vietnam until the trauma caught up with him and turned life upside down in the years before his death; the casual acquaintance I assumed was still alive until her murderer went on trial and I found out she’d been shot and killed shortly after we last met.” —Diane Lefer
Diane Lefer’s novels feature scientists who become suspects (Out of Place) and baboons with broken hearts (Confessions of a Carnivore). She is the author of three story collections, including California Transit, which received the Mary McCarthy Prize. She has completed a novel inspired in part by her visits to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms.