"It's as if this airplane is soaring upward, upward, upward, through the reaches of space, presenting the grand overview of our troubled planet as the sun sets behind it. I think of the wars and the rumors of wars, and I see little pinpricks of orange blink and bulge on the Dark Continent, as the blazes of war snuff out dozens more lives before returning to black.
"Then Asia flickers—first Palestine, then Iran, then Jordan, then back downward to the Nile again, and over Africa. I can hear a million voices—victims on tenor, terrorists on bass, soldiers on baritone, civilians on alto, children on soprano, As we used to say in school choir, "God, somebody's off!"
"We are, all of us, conjoined in a sad song, committed to our marriage of bad harmonies. We're linked as closely to those whom we love. Film and photo and e-mail and planes—they pull our faces together as tightly as beads on a string. A hand waves in North Africa; a wind ripples in America. A gun designed in Virginia, with metal purchased from China, sends its bullet through the guts of a foot soldier in Somalia. The hateful collide with the loving; the wise collide with the foolish; the loving are sometimes hateful; and the simplest of people often seem to be most wise. And as I've already proposed, the dead collide with the living, and if I'm not proof of that, then nothing is.
"…That's it," I say, stopping from reading the rest, with her hopes of America.
"…That's beautiful, Cora. Your mother was really something," Scott told me, with an unknown emotion shining in his eyes.
"Yeah," I scoffed, "when she wasn't high as a kite. Do you want to hear what she wrote the day before she died?"
Before he responded, I had started reading. "Jack and Jill went up the hill to catch the perfect photo. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill…gets gangbanged by a goddamn bunch of rabid, fucking goons."
"She was insane, but she was Aleese. I thought you ought to know what I'd had as my role model for the past five years. She was insane, but… she was Aleese," I repeated at the end, trailing off into some awful memories.
I don't know where this came from, but I just thought of Cora opening up to Scott. The italics is from Aleese's journal, quoted directly from the book.