1: Pierce

We start with the hero, of course. That's how it is. We start with the hero, and then we explain his task. His name is Pierce. There he is: young and strong and cunning. Shall we go into his hard life? How his beautiful, long-suffering mother toiled and cared for her widower father despite his alcoholic fits of rage? How a majestic stranger came to Pierce's mother in a rain storm, and how she took the man into her home? Her father was unconscious in front of The Cosby Show. Lightning flashed, and the television screen flickered, cracks of static splitting apart the Huxtable family's happy life of one-liners and minor domestic crises. The majestic stranger wiped rain from his brow, and when he kissed Pierce's mother, rain trickled down her throat.

Pierce's mother does not speak of this.

When Pierce was born nine months later, the stranger having vanished permanently back into his storm, Pierce's grandfather was outraged. He banished the unwed mother and child both. How dramatic is that? No one banishes anyone these days. They send nasty e-mails or have dramatic confrontations over Thanksgiving turkeys, then cry and hug and bond. But for Pierce and his obviously wanton mother: banishment. They moved to Maine. Pierce's mother took up with a fisherman who taught Pierce the trade as he grew into an upright young man. So his life was not so very hard after all. What of it?

Let's skip ahead. The fisherman is on a sea voyage. Pierce and his mother are alone. The young man is trying to muster the courage to tell his mother he doesn't want to be a fisherman; he wants to be a photographer. It's another television night. Images flicker across the screen, and Pierce's mother's face goes pale. "That's your father," she whispers, her eyes wide. Pierce looks, noticing for the first time that they are watching a televangelist program, the Reverend Orman, and the Reverend has managed to work his wife Minnie into the sermon, and the camera cuts away to Minnie in the congregation beside an older man, and the Reverend Orman pauses to say, "Yes, there she is, folks, and, God bless him, her father is with her today." And her father–the camera doesn't linger long–but her father is the one Pierce's mother recognizes. "That's your father," she whispers.

"You only saw him the one time," Pierce says.

"It was enough to never forget."

So his half-sister is a televangelist's wife, married to money and power and, of late, scandal. Pierce doesn't know much about the scandal, not interested in following such things. He has a vague notion that a black girl claimed to have been molested by the Reverend Orman, but the allegations proved false. Minnie, the wife, has been in the news a lot, pledging her undying support of her husband and urging prayer for the wayward lost soul who would out of spite, out of jealousy, out of some unknowable thought process in a dark, twisted mind, try to bring the Reverend Orman down so low.

The show is based out of Chicago. Pierce turns all of his attention there. He does not tell his mother he wants to meet his half-sister or seek out his father. He tells her he wants to go into photography. He applies to schools. All of them are in or around Chicago. The one he gets into is Columbia College. At the end of the next summer, he packs one suitcase and steps onto a train, his pulse throbbing to meet what he knows must be his destiny.

 

1. Pierce

We start with the hero, who is a young, white man, of course. That's how it is. The hero's name is Pierce. We say that he had a hard life starting out, but in this case it isn't true. It was his mother who had a hard life. She was long-suffering and beautiful. It is important that she be beautiful, even if in a long-suffering kind of way, because otherwise we may not care so much about her fate. We may not grant her the proper sympathy. She toiled and cared for her widower father despite his alcoholic fits of rage. One night during a rain storm, a stranger came to her home and raped her. It amounts to that. She will never forget his terrible rain-soaked face, the cold blue eyes that clearly wanted to seem majestic. Nine months later, when Pierce was born, his outraged grandfather banished the unwed mother and child both. If banishment from the flatlands of Ohio seems more blessing than curse, one could be excused for thinking so. They moved to Maine. Pierce's mother had always dreamed of living near the ocean. She took up with a fisherman. You know the rest.

Except: Pierce's mother carried an unspoken dread for her son. She could never quite shake it. He was born of a violent act, and she knew with a dreadful foreboding that he would one day find his fame in another violent act. When he told her he wanted to be a photographer instead of a fisherman, her relief choked her to tears. Perhaps escaping from the sea, he would also escape his violent destiny. Pierce's mother helped him fill out the applications for colleges. "They're all in Chicago," she noticed. "Why Chicago?"

Pierce shrugged, then smiled slyly and sang, "It's my kind of town."

 

1. Pierce

We start with Pierce, a white boy growing up in Maine, the surrogate son of a fisherman and the son of a long-suffering woman with a violent past that is never spoken of. We start around the television set one night when the fisherman is away on a sea voyage. Pierce's mother's face goes pale as she watches the screen. "That's your father," she whispers. Pierce misses the horror in her voice. They are watching a televangelist's sermon, and the father Pierce's mother has pointed out is the father of the wife of the televangelist. Pierce wants to be sure. "You only saw him the one time," he says.

His mother answers, "It was enough to never forget."

Pierce misses the disgust in his mother's voice. All he can think is: Hey, I've got a rich half-sister out in Chicago. He knows that this half-sister and her husband, the Reverend Orman, have recently been shaken by scandal. A black girl claimed to have been molested by the Reverend Orman, but the Reverend Orman called her a liar, and Minnie, his wife, Pierce's half-sister, came out in full support of her husband. She urged prayer for the wayward lost soul who would, out of some unknowable, dark, twisted desire, try to bring the Reverend Orman down so low. The alleged incident allegedly occurred years ago, anyway. Why would this girl bring it up now? Doesn't she know that the world has moved on and that she must move along with it? Doesn't she know that the Huxtable family has proven that black people have finally reached a place of equilibrium in the American middle class and there's no excuse for clinging to outmoded delusions of persecution? Doesn't she know that after the L.A. riots no one is swayed anymore by such cries of persecution, seeing how, after all, they burned down their own neighborhoods?

It took more time for those lines to be read than the actual thoughts that flickered through Pierce's mind. Those lines represent the sum of Pierce's assumptions about the modern black position, though he has never articulated them in such a coherent manner even to himself. His actual thoughts go more like this: Alleged victim–she's black–must be lying–playing on the white guilt thing–must not realize slavery ended over a hundred years ago–hey, move on, homegirl. And that's the extent of his interest in that. He turns his attention, instead, to fine arts schools in Chicago. He is the young, white son of a beautiful white woman. It never occurs to him that he might not be accepted to one of the schools. It never occurs to him to wonder where the money will come from. It never occurs to him to worry about uprooting himself from one town and transplanting himself in another. He doesn't ever ask if the color of his skin might preclude him from being welcome anywhere. These are not considerations that arise for him. He has been raised under the banner of silent privilege–if there is something he wants, if there is some place he wants to go, there is no reason for him not to have that thing or go to that place. It is assumed that he will be welcome.

 

1. Malia

Let's not start with Pierce. All the other stories have started with Pierce, and we've cheered him on as he's undertaken his task, always successful. We always knew he would be successful, yet we cheered and sat on the edges of our seats in suspense anyway. And we never had reason to doubt him. His cause was always just, and, when necessary, when the odds were too staggering, he would receive help from the gods. This could always be counted on. He would slay the monster, he would land the knockout punch, he would defeat the terrorists and save his wife.

We always knew about that monster, that opponent, that terrorist, too. We always knew they would lose. They lacked the moral fiber, the strength of character, the integrity, the wholesome family values that victory would have required. They were always ugly, they always sneered, they played dirty, and they wanted to win for the wrong reasons. Pierce always wanted to win for the right reasons: because we wanted him to win.

So let's not start with Pierce. Pierce has had his day. He's not really so heroic, after all. Do you want me to skip ahead to the end and tell you that he's victorious? Would you be surprised by that? Even he wouldn't be surprised by that. I mean, come on, this is Pierce we're talking about. I'll even tell you how he does it. I'll skip right to that part. Pierce gets taken in by his half-sister Minnie. He has to go through the usual tests, of course, before he can get close to her, win her sympathy and trust, but we never doubt that he will. Once he's in, she gives him a task: slay the monster. Does it matter what monster? In the end, it's all the same. We know he'll win. He'll bring back the monster's head, he'll save the white girl, he'll be married. We know. The monster in this case is that black girl who so maliciously tried to bring the Reverend Orman down so low. Minnie's got a vengeful heart. Sure, she wants to make sure that the Reverend Orman is finally, unmistakably cleared, to make sure there's not a single stain on that snow white reputation of his, a man of God after all. But at bottom, she's got a vengeful heart. She sends Pierce after that monster of a girl, and what does Pierce do? He sneaks into her lair, see, and takes pictures of her sleeping around naked with some white girl, and he gives these pictures to Minnie, and Minnie leaks them to the tabloids, and the black girl's reputation as a liar is confirmed. But Pierce's artistic ambitions carry him farther than that. He develops more pictures of the black girl, only in these pictures he chops off her head so it's just her naked body. He chops off her head and cuts out the white girl, makes it artistic, see. Calls it "Horror and Beauty." (As if Pierce knows anything about horror. As if he knows anything about beauty.) And he submits his work to a gallery in the Lakeview neighborhood, and he becomes famous and rich.

He wins. It's all the same.

Except to the monster. Let's start with the monster.

Her name is Malia. Should the name be significant? She's a black girl; it's a Hawaiian name. Her mother chose the name because she liked the way it sounded–pretty, like her baby. Mah-LEE-ah. That dainty flip of the tongue between the teeth, the way the middle syllable makes the speaker smile. What does she care what the name means? Should she have chosen an African name? Maybe something like Malikiya, which is also pretty, and which means "my queen" in Swahili. But she doesn't know anything about Swahili. She doesn't even know where Swahili is. Should she have chosen a European name? Molly or Mabel? Mabel is an English name. She has never been to England. Molly is a form of Mary, a Hebrew name. She is not Catholic, and besides, there are enough Marys. She has never been to Hawaii either–never been far from Chicago's southwest side–but if she's got to pick a name from an unfamiliar place, why not go for something pretty?

Malia knows what her name means. Defiance. In the language of a colonized people. It's an appropriate name, she thinks, and she wears it like a badge of honor.

Let's skip her childhood. It was truly a hard childhood–harder than anything Pierce ever encountered. She grew up on Chicago's southwest side, in the shadows of extinct meat packing plants and stockyards and gang violence. Where Pierce was born because of violence, Malia was born in spite of it. When she and her sisters raked leaves in the yard, they often found broken beer bottles, and they couldn't jump in the leaf piles like they'd seen white kids do on TV. It's a small thing, to not be able to jump in the leaf pile; the import of the image is the fact of beer bottles broken frequently in the yard. The fact of having to rake in the pitch dark because the streetlights were perpetually broken. The fact of gunshots and sirens and triple-locked doors, and the knowledge that the locks were, in the end, useless if someone really wanted in. But let's skip all this. We don't have to know about her childhood to form an opinion about what happens later. What happens later can be judged in and of itself. If we have to see Malia as a little girl before we can extend the folds of our empathy to her as an adult, there is something wrong. Is she still pretty? If we have to see her as beautiful or pretty in order to care about her fate, there is something wrong.

She is pretty, though. The Reverend Orman thought so, at least. When she was fresh out of high school, Malia landed a job cleaning swimming pools for rich people. This was partly due to luck, partly to persistence, partly hard work. It was a good job, and it paid well, and it would earn her money toward college. Her aspirations were not overly idealistic. She wanted to attend Triton Community College in nearby River Grove. She wanted to pursue a career as a registered nurse, and maybe on the side, as a creative outlet, she could take some fine arts classes. She was into sculpture, but never allowed for this as a viable possibility for her future. It would be a hobby. She needed to keep her mind set to practical aims. Get a job that would offer some semblance of financial security. There was never the assumption that she could do whatever she wanted and not have to worry about that kind of security.

But this is not about Pierce.

 

1. The Pool

Let's start at the pool, which is where this story really starts, after all. Pierce is incidental. He comes in at the end with the glint of guaranteed glory and young, white, masculine charm. He comes in with his flashing camera and chops off a woman's head and is declared a hero for his artistic vision. The hell with Pierce. He had Minnie covering him the whole time, her money and power as collateral should anything go wrong. Pierce is a cipher, an unimaginative, vacant-hearted exploiter whose chief goal is to make a buck at the expense of an inconsequential black girl like Malia. He never even had the guts to look at her.

No, let's start at the pool. This isn't just any pool. It's the pool at the home of the Reverend Orman and his famous platinum wife Minnie. It's a money pool, a crystalline pool inside a glass wing larger than any of the houses from Malia's neighborhood. It's surrounded by marble pillars and marble floors, a mural painted on the ceiling, a full wet bar at one end (designed to be easily hidden by a false wall should church visitors call). When Malia walks in for the first time, she is awed by the grandeur. It looks like a temple where sacred ceremonies should be performed, where voices should never rise above whispers. A holy place for a holy man.

Oh, the mural? A blue-bearded sea king rides a chariot drawn by glorious horses across tempestuous waves. Neat, huh? The Reverend Orman thinks so.

He's not such a holy man. That first impression of Malia's doesn't last long. One time when she comes to clean the pool, working on her own now, her training finished, she finds the Reverend Orman floating in an easy chair in a ray of golden sun, a martini in hand, his white belly protruding like a built-in life preserver. When he sees Malia, a crevasse of a smile opens up across his lower face and he sucks in some portion of his gut and lowers his sunglasses to his nose, watching Malia's every step. She is carrying her cleaning chemicals and the pool vacuum, and she's dressed in the blue uniform of her company–workshoes, slacks, short-sleeved shirt, and a baseball cap with the company logo. Malia pretends not to hear the Reverend Orman when he mutters to himself, "And God said it was good." She asks if she should come back later. He tells her no, please stay, he's just finishing up right now. After that, there's hardly a time goes by when the Reverend Orman isn't somewhere in the pool wing when Malia arrives, and he lingers longer each time. On a few occasions, Malia has days off or other assignments on the days when the Reverend Orman's pool is scheduled for cleaning, and someone else goes to clean in her place. The Reverend Orman starts calling the company to complain. "I don't mean to complain," he says, "but that Mexican fellow you sent over here, God bless his heart, he just doesn't seem to know the first thing about pool cleaning. Maybe there aren't so many pools where he's from, you understand. What about that girl usually comes for the job, what's her name?"

Her name is defiance. In the language of a colonized people.

We know where this is going, don't we? Who are we going to believe–the Reverend Orman and Minnie, or Malia? Who would Pierce's mother believe? Malia continues to show up to clean the pool, and the Reverend Orman finally crosses the line. There is a pathetic neediness in his grunting, a sexual frustration and perversion deeper than a thousand crystalline pools. There is no confusion about the situation, no way it could possibly be interpreted as anything other than what it is: rape. This is not an affair, it's not a one-time fling, it's not an experiment, it's not even molestation–the word the Reverend Orman and the press tend to use when denying the allegation. It's rape.

 

1. Ed

But how can we start there? How, when a story like that can only go one of two ways–either Malia's life is destroyed and she takes a downward spiral from which she never recovers, or she triumphs in spite of her hardships, and we end on a note of noble inspiration. We've seen both stories. One is hard to take; the other has the ring of disingenuous wishful thinking. How do we go into Malia's point of view? How do we look upon her face after such violence and not find ourselves petrified by the horror?

Maybe that's where we should start. Maybe this is a story of gazing into the face of horror. Maybe we need to introduce a different character who can give us some perspective. Very well, then: His name is Ed. Ed is another young white man, successful, but unlike Pierce, he really had to work at it. He comes from a bad neighborhood too, like Malia, and he knows about the futility of triple-locked doors. But his is a story of success. He worked hard, he won scholarships, he got through law school, he put in time with the county prosecutor's office, he joined a small firm specializing in indigent defense and divorce, he continued to work hard, and he finally caught the eye of a large firm with a vacancy. When Malia's allegations went public, Ed was on the Reverend Orman's legal team. And one day Ed was sent by his bosses to meet with Malia on her own turf and present to her an offer of settlement. Hush-up money. Only, Malia had not been the one to go public in the first place. That was someone else acting on her behalf, but without her consent. Maybe his is the story we should tell.

Let's continue with Ed for now. Ed takes a taxi into the neighborhood where Malia works now. It's been five years since the alleged rape. Malia was fired from her pool cleaning job soon after when Minnie, whipped into a frenzy, called the owner and told how Malia's work was slipshod, how Malia was a wanton slut who had tried to seduce her husband, a man of God, you know, and how Malia had a cesspool for a mouth and her very presence in the pool wing turned the windows and floors grimy with the weight of her sin. Minnie passed the word to her pool-owning friends as well, and soon the owner had so many complaints logged against Malia that he felt he had no choice but to let her go. Malia's face twisted in anger, her fingers clawed into the palms of her hands, but she didn't speak. "Don't look at me like that, Malia," the owner said, "I got no choice here." And in the pool wing, when Minnie had walked in at the end, when the Reverend Orman lay panting and spent on the marble floor beside Malia, who had curled herself into a ball and lay shivering in shock, and then when Minnie grabbed Malia by the shoulders and picked her up, screaming with fury–at her, Malia was slow to realize–and when Malia dipped into her own vast reserves of steel resolve and turned her defiant gaze at Minnie, Minnie had shaken her by the shoulders and screamed, "Don't you look at me! Don't you ever look at me!" And when Malia refused to turn her seething gaze away, Minnie forcibly turned her around and pushed her toward the door, screaming at her to get out, get out, get out. Malia tucked in her shirt, pulled her slacks closed, and she did get out, but she stared back at Minnie and the Reverend Orman the whole way, and they stayed where they were by the poolside, Minnie fixed in her rage and the Reverend Orman frozen in his shame, and they did not move again until Malia stepped out the door and removed her gaze.

It has been five years. Malia is finally attending Triton College, but she has abandoned the aspiration of becoming a registered nurse. She hates people now. That's what people think, at any rate. She is a sullen young woman, speechless and seething in her stare. She takes sculpting classes. She's gotten good at creating sculptures. They stand everywhere in her wake, tortured twisted bodies with faces forever petrified and mute witnesses to horror. People stay away from Malia. She has a scar the length of her face, and no one knows how she got it, but they worry that it might be contagious.

It's Ed's job to present her with an offer of settlement. He finds her at her home, a cheap basement apartment near Triton College. He knocks on her door for what seems hours. He has been told to persist. We know she is always at home during this time, he has been told. We've had our people watching her, and she never goes out except for school. Ed stands at the door and knocks, but he is no Christ figure, he is not the one who will offer salvation to Malia. He is only here to offer her money which he knows she will not accept, to offer her payment for her continued silence–and for her signature on a statement declaring her continued silence and her release of this and any and all future claims against the Reverend Orman. A declaration that can be shown to her advocate, the one who has gone public with her allegations, to get him to shut the hell up. Ed knocks and knocks. Finally, it occurs to him to simply open the door. Why not? From missionaries with crosses and guilt to police thugs with battering rams, why can't he simply go in? He opens the door and sees into the face of Malia.

And this is where our story could start. Or, this is where Ed's story ends. Because when he looks into the face of Malia, he sees beyond the sullenness, the wordlessness, the anger. He sees the horror of her scar, and all the scars beneath it. From the Reverend Orman's sweat and grunt to missionaries with crosses to police thugs with battering rams. He sees the horror all the way into her history, the weight of all the history from which she has come to this place. He sees, and his eyes are forever fastened open, and he never again sees anything more than what he sees here, this moment, this endless line of moments, in Malia's face, and he feels the weight of his briefcase in his hand, the weight of the declaration of silence, the release of all claims, the check, all unsigned, but he feels the weight of the signatures he'd sought, and he wants to fall to his knees before Malia, he wants to cry, to pluck out his eyes, but he cannot move. He is frozen in time. He is frozen in all time, and the shame of being here, in this moment, with these intentions, his part in this moment in history. It is worse than survivor's guilt. It is the guilt of not having gone through an ordeal at all. The slave forts on the African coast, the miseries of the middle passage, the unspeakable sickness of slavery, the lynch mobs and death squads, the buses and counters, the prisons and electronic ankle bracelets, the arbitrary requests for ID, the cop's flashing cherry tops in the rearview mirror, blankets on heating grates and concrete, outstretched empty hands and needle-ravaged veins, broomsticks and gunshots, strange fruit and Mississippi goddam and makes me wanna holler and fight the power and it is all happening now, in this instant, all of it frozen in this instant, always and forever still happening. That's what Ed sees in the gaze of Malia.

And that's all he will ever see again. So this story can't go any farther with him. He can't move from this spot. He is frozen in the hopelessness of ever acting on this knowledge–after such knowledge, what forgiveness?; isn't that the line?–of ever addressing this ever-recurring moment, of feeling the weight, grappling with it, moving on from there to some kind of action.

Malia takes Ed gently by the shoulders. She turns him around, facing him toward the door. She sends him on his way. He has seen her face, but he can do nothing for her.

 

1. The End

Perhaps this is the only place we can begin. It's useless even to consider Malia's advocate, the one who has made her claims public. We won't even reveal his name. Maybe his name seems too close to home. In Greek mythology there is a figure named Erichthonius, and he was a quack surgeon who used a special powerful blood for his own shady purposes. This blood had power over life and death. Erichthonius used the blood to reanimate the dead or poison the living. He used it according to his own ends. When he reanimated the dead, he was seen as a hero. When he poisoned, he did it in secrecy. Malia's advocate, by making her story of rape public, is acting as Erichthonius when he reanimates the dead. He wants to be a hero. He wants to be the culturally sensitive white man who is in the greatest position to swoop in and save people like Malia from the clutches of evil white patriarchy. The power of one, so to speak. That's his vision of grandeur. He will be Dances with Wolves, or Lawrence of Arabia, or all seven of The Magnificent Seven. He will come in and save the day for those poor non-white folks. But in the end, unfortunately, he will be those characters, those white guy characters who plop themselves as saviors into a non-white culture. He'll be them, but not quite the way he envisioned. Because it's not about the salvation, it's not about rectifying wrongs, it's not about being a good guy by reanimating the dead–it's all about him. It's about feeling good about himself. It's about the white guy coming to some sort of self-improvement by being hesitantly immersed in this non-white culture. But it's not about the non-white culture. And for this guy, this advocate, it's not about Malia. It's about him and his wishful thinking and his desire to see yet another sanctimonious televangelist come tumbling down under the weight of his sins.

So much for that.

We turn to the end of the story. Malia is not alone. When Pierce sneaks into her home, he finds her sleeping with a young white woman. Is this some lurid affair? Some one-night stand? No, it's not. This is Emmeline. She is from Malia's sculpting class. She's blind. Is it too much of a precious twist to have the blind girl be a sculptor? These things do happen. She can't see Malia's face, and she went for so long without ever hearing Malia speak. But she knew Malia was there. Malia sat next to her, in fact, because she knew she was safe from the young woman's sight. Finally the young woman, Emmeline, spoke to Malia, and she waited until Malia's voice came back to her. It took some time. It took some gentle effort on Emmeline's part. But Malia's voice did, finally, one day, come back to her. They became friends, gradually, over time. Their friendship deepened. We are moving to the end of the story. How is Emmeline different in her blindness than Ed? What allows her to connect with Malia and not be petrified by the history in her face? After all, Emmeline can feel Malia's face, and she often does. She sees with her hands. She knows the blunt nose, the proud lips, the coiled hair, the jagged scar. She knows the scar better than Ed, who never touched it, who only beheld it. But still she has not frozen beneath the weight of this scar and its history. How is this possible? How has she escaped? All she has is touch. To know something, she must touch it, she must come into contact with it, interact. When Malia speaks to Emmeline, she knows her voice will be heard. Her voice is so much more than the weight of her history. She is not, after all, a symbol for the victims of all suffering and oppression, from the missionaries with crosses to the thugs with battering rams. She is a human being. Of all people, Emmeline knows this, because Emmeline has touched her and heard her voice. She does not share the same background, Emmeline doesn't. She comes from privilege, even more than Ed or Pierce, even without her sight. A rich family in New York. She has not undergone the ordeal of history. Yet she can grasp that history, and see the human beings in it, listen to their voices, listen to their voices in one voice, and begin to come to an understanding of how this life may be lived, how the horror may be confronted, but then–how to move on from there.

Malia sits by a pool. She and Emmeline have gone out walking in the woods. Malia has taken Emmeline outside the city to a park because Emmeline loves to walk in the woods and listen to the wind in the leaves and the birds and to feel the dirt beneath her feet. Pierce is famous by now. Ed sits alone in a room, gazing vacantly at the wall, a glass of whiskey in his hand. The Reverend Orman will fall; it's only a matter of time. Minnie will fall with him. Malia and Emmeline walk in the woods until they come to a small, clear pond, and they sit here, listening to the silence. The pond's surface is mirror-calm, and Malia leans over to see her reflection painted there. Emmeline senses her friend's stillness, and she places her hand on Malia's arm but says nothing. This is another moment that will be frozen forever. Time will move on around it, Malia and Emmeline will grow together and apart, grow into their lives, but this moment will always be here. It will be here with all the other moments. A light among all the other moments. Emmeline holds her breath. A whisper of wind, and then wings. All the moments, borne across time on wings whose span takes in all of it, touches all of it, transcends all of it.

This is where we will start.

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