There’s a sound trending on TikTok right now that haunts me on a loop, day and night. It’s a short snippet of a Laurie Anderson song called O Superman, written in 1981 about a US military helicopter crash outside Tehran.
Some of the lyrics are as follows, with the words TikTokers are using in bold:
Hello? Is anybody home?
Well, you don't know me, but I know you
And I've got a message to give to you
Here come the planes
So you better get ready, ready to go
You can come as you are, but pay as you go
Pay as you go
And I said, "Okay, who is this really?"
And the voice said
"This is the hand, the hand that takes"
"This is the hand, the hand that takes"
"This is the hand, the hand that takes"
Here come the planes
They're American planes, made in America
Smoking or non-smoking?
Many are using this sound — Well, you don’t know me, but I know you, the haunting robotic voice lilts — overlaid across videos of people you’ll recognize. People in blue PRESS vests, people in flip flops and bare feet and torn prayer clothes, people we’ve come to develop relationships with, the ones we’ve watched suffer and flee and lose entire families and futures. The ones who have shown us the truth of the horrors unfolding.
It is a miracle of sorts (as much smarter people than me have analyzed and described) that American college students and Dutch lawyers and Ghanaian doctors and Sri Lankan teenagers and Mexican midwives and Irish postal workers alike are watching, in real time, these people who will never see their faces or hear their voices, take their last breaths. Speak their last words. Say goodbye to their children. Pull their mothers’ and friends’ and lovers’ bodies from the rubble of what used to be their lives together.
These TikToks will play in my mind forever, just as all the videos of bloodied screaming newborns and burned children and people cradling bodies wrapped in sheets will.
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But so, too, will some others, which use the sound a little differently:
Well, you don’t know me. But I know you. Someone recognizing a behavior, a pattern of language, a look in the eyes of a stranger.
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Or someone showing us a thread connecting them to an ancestor, or a person whose existence touched theirs, or a person who is gone and therefore can never know them, the one telling us the story now.
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I hear this little soundbite in my head constantly now.
When someone approaches me at a book event or sends me a message about their abortion, or when I’m speaking or reading and I see them start to cry, leave the room, stare up at the ceiling, dig their nails into their palm. When I see the person next to them reach for their hand, squeeze their arm, pull their chair closer.
Whenever I’m with someone, these days, who is struggling to pretend they’re doing well, struggling to muster the energy for a dance or a party or a Zoom meeting or a date. Whenever I see someone’s smile fail to reach their eyes.
Two days ago, I was walking to the beach to meet a friend, and I passed a row of parked cars along the sidewalk. All were empty but one. A person in their 20s sat in the driver’s seat, keys on the dashboard, not ready to come or go yet. They wore dark sunglasses. Their forehead rested on the steering wheel, their shoulders moving with the shallow inhales you take when a full-body weeping is happening, when the tears and snot are flowing beyond what you’re able to hide, when you’re crying loudly enough for someone walking by your parked car can hear it, even with the windows rolled all the way up.
I turned my head away, kept walking. I didn’t bother them. Because the ache isn’t mine to locate in their body, or trace to its source. Because they don’t know me.
But I know you, I thought, as I pushed forward through the wind, the ocean coming into sight up ahead, as they—and I—receded into the distance behind with every step. Until I couldn’t see us anymore, that stranger and me, even if I turned back to look again. But I remember what we look like. And I always will.
thank you 💜