The Killing

All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas and cold beliefs, and there are hot and alive ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystallize about it. And our explanations then get so vague and general that one realizes all the more the intense individuality of the whole phenomenon.

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

The summer Georgie turned twelve, his Uncle Alex drove east from California and parked a ten-year-old '53 Chevy Deluxe in the middle of the Zarelians' front yard. Although Uncle Alex drove straight through, the interstates weren't yet complete and it took him a full week—seven days—to reach New Jersey from L.A. After the phone call that announced he was coming (Uncle Alex had moved to L.A. just after the war, a few years before Georgie was born), there were seven days of increasing tension in the Zarelian household on Conner Street in Little Falls. Georgie's round mother buzzed through the house like a bee trapped in a jar—Where will he sleep? What will he eat? He's a vegetarian, for the love of God. How do you cook for a vegetarian?

And Georgie's father, a thick, muscular man whom Georgie believed could kick anyone's ass, got increasingly somber as those seven days of waiting wore on, like a man preparing to ship off again to war.

When Uncle Alex finally pulled into the neighborhood in the glare of a sunny Sunday afternoon (there had been one more phone call the night before, a final warning from the road, somewhere in Tennessee) and drove right up onto their grass, Georgie knew that his father, also named Alex, was not pleased. Georgie's father bit his lower lip when he was not pleased, a habit Georgie knew well, a precursor, a signal to beware the back of his father's hand, which only recently Georgie had begun to learn to duck.

Uncle Alex, not intimidated by the bit lip, bounded from the car and embraced his shorter cousin in a full-body, old-world hug. He was older than Georgie's father and so was worthy of much respect—certainly to his face—although Georgie later was quick to pick up on the whispers his parents would exchange whenever Uncle Alex left a room. The brief, hushed words in a stew of languages Georgie did not—would never—fully comprehend. Georgie was expert, though, at matching inflections, facial expressions, voice intonations, with whatever situations caused his mother and father to communicate secretly in their patchwork of Armenian, Turkish, and Arabic, spiced with enough English (Tennessee, telephone, turnpike) to offer ample clues. The visit of Uncle Alex caused enough of those furtive dialogues to make it all, for Georgie, that much more exciting.

The day after Uncle Alex arrived, a hot July day in humid northern Jersey, before anyone on Conner Street had air conditioning, he strode into the kitchen from having slept on the living room couch, and bent and kissed Georgie's mother on the forehead with a cheerful Armenian greeting. He politely turned down a cup of Mrs. Zarelian's coffee with soft avuncular warmth, "Poison, my sweet cousin," but also a kind of knowingness that Georgie could see would piss off his father. "In California," said Uncle Alex, "we drink fresh-squeezed fruit juice. Or tea. Green tea."

Uncle Alex stretched and strolled out into the front yard, where he lifted the hood of his Chevy. He studied the engine for a thoughtful moment, stripped to the waist, and soon was elbow-deep changing out the red Chevy's points and plugs in preparation for the return trip to L.A. He offered to do the same for Georgie's father's car (also a Chevy but solid black, not the finned, chromed Deluxe) parked squarely on the concrete drive. Georgie's father bit his lower lip and declined before backing his plain car out onto the street and roaring off to work.

When Uncle Alex was through, sometime after noon, he wiped...