Marcus O. Bst, Bone Music Close Up
Artifact of Death, Artifact of Life
Miles Whitney
Passover, 2025
I’m at a seder, sharing the story of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt. My own flight is imminent.
The dry matzah shatters between my teeth. Crumbs explode, most raining onto my plate. As the story goes, matzah symbolizes the rushed quality of the escape. Women had no time to leaven bread, to prepare, to plan. Everyone ran with the clothes on their backs and what they could carry.
Egypt does not feel metaphorical this year. The U.S.’s relentless anti-trans campaign is not letting up. Pharaoh and his army are coming for me and those like me. Border crossings are fraught. My passport is imprinted for now, with the “M” marker, but the State Department has records to prove my marker was changed and it could be amended at any time. Soon, I fear, the government will cut off my access to testosterone, causing me to lose my physical and mental health. Project 2025, the regime’s blueprint, equates trans people with pornography and prescribes criminalization. Efforts are already underway. The president has declared me a threat to the country, dishonorable, while simultaneously insisting I do not exist.
I have no time to plan or prepare. I feel the doors closing. My home, my job, my family and my community are here. I can retire early, but money will be tight. One eye is always on the exits.
The herbs dipped in saltwater taste exactly the same as my tears, as all tears. I had expected to cry throughout the seder. I only did at the end, when we read something about hope.
After dinner, one of the hosts, Nathan, invites us to see artifacts. I say yes. Nathan is a member of our havurah, a history teacher and writer. He leads my spouse and I down the hall to his home office.
Nathan is wiry and intense, young, and as it turns out, a gifted storyteller. Nathan shows us an ancient metal plate (1745 Swedish plate coin, made large to fight inflation, recovered from a shipwreck at the bottom of the Indian Ocean), and a small dark coin (from the Bar Kokhba Revolt, bearing a relief of a lulav and the inscription Shimon.)
Next, Nathan holds out a small wooden box, its size and shape fit to house a single cigar. We confess we have no idea what it is. Nathan’s eyes shine as he slides open the top to reveal a matte grey metal cylinder inside.
Nathan reveals that the mysterious object resting on his palm is the packaging the Nazis used to distribute methamphetamine to the troops. “Tank chocolate” it was sometimes called. Even Hitler might have been a meth addict. There is some evidence. I had heard before that Nazis gave men meth in an effort to create super soldiers, but I had no idea that the drugs were methodically handed out in standard-issue packaging. Yet here was the evidence, kept harmlessly inert in a Jewish home in Northern California. I could have held it in my hands, but I was afraid.
Is some evil so horrific that those just following orders must be drugged? Turning life into death needed help, minds altered, reality obscured.
I hear reports about drug use and addiction in the upper ranks of the current regime. It is not the same, I know. But I hear an echo.
Nathan closes the cylinder back into its neat little box. He gestures for us to follow him down the hallway to the master bedroom. Wedding photos hang on the wall, new enough that Nathan and his wife Sara look no older than they are now. Sara is also a history teacher, a chef, baker and preserver of foods. Their beautiful home is bursting with life, a lush garden, abundant food, family, friends, books and one small rabbit.
Nathan pulls boxes from a cupboard and shows us old newspapers and documents, some from the days of the French Revolution. My spouse marvels that paper has somehow survived that long. I marvel that some of my French remains after forty years of nonuse. It takes me a moment, but I can make out the meaning of the words.
Nathan asks if we know about bone music. We do not.
Nathan explains as he searches through one of the boxes. Back in the Soviet Union, the state banned rock and roll. Resources were scarce, especially vinyl. Someone figured out that discarded radiographic film could be used to press copies of recordings. Nathan locates the record and holds it out. It is very thin, but recognizable with the grooves I had grown up navigating in my youth. There is a small hole in the center, burned into it by a cigarette.
Nathan holds the record up to the light. And there, unmistakably, were ghostly images of the vertebrae of someone’s neck.
The record is fragile and has a small tear, so it cannot be played, but I imagine the music within. Music developed by enslaved people, so bursting with life that it escaped from that particular Egypt, to be played covertly in a new Egypt on the other side of the world. The artifact then traveled back again to this Egypt, to be appreciated by me on Passover as I prepare to flee from here myself.
I intend to escape to Cali, Colombia, the salsa capital of the world. Salsa has roots in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York, another form of music born of the enslaved. For reasons I have yet to fully understand, salsa musicians moved to Cali in the 1970s and found fertile soil for their art.
I will escape this death-embracing empire, hurriedly, before I am prepared. I have tasted enough tears. I will learn to speak in a new language and will wake up to unfamiliar birdsong. I, the spiritual descendant of slaves, will dance salsa in the streets to the indestructible music of other descendants of slaves.
God willing, I will live.
Miles Whitney
Passover, 2025
I’m at a seder, sharing the story of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt. My own flight is imminent.
The dry matzah shatters between my teeth. Crumbs explode, most raining onto my plate. As the story goes, matzah symbolizes the rushed quality of the escape. Women had no time to leaven bread, to prepare, to plan. Everyone ran with the clothes on their backs and what they could carry.
Egypt does not feel metaphorical this year. The U.S.’s relentless anti-trans campaign is not letting up. Pharaoh and his army are coming for me and those like me. Border crossings are fraught. My passport is imprinted for now, with the “M” marker, but the State Department has records to prove my marker was changed and it could be amended at any time. Soon, I fear, the government will cut off my access to testosterone, causing me to lose my physical and mental health. Project 2025, the regime’s blueprint, equates trans people with pornography and prescribes criminalization. Efforts are already underway. The president has declared me a threat to the country, dishonorable, while simultaneously insisting I do not exist.
I have no time to plan or prepare. I feel the doors closing. My home, my job, my family and my community are here. I can retire early, but money will be tight. One eye is always on the exits.
The herbs dipped in saltwater taste exactly the same as my tears, as all tears. I had expected to cry throughout the seder. I only did at the end, when we read something about hope.
After dinner, one of the hosts, Nathan, invites us to see artifacts. I say yes. Nathan is a member of our havurah, a history teacher and writer. He leads my spouse and I down the hall to his home office.
Nathan is wiry and intense, young, and as it turns out, a gifted storyteller. Nathan shows us an ancient metal plate (1745 Swedish plate coin, made large to fight inflation, recovered from a shipwreck at the bottom of the Indian Ocean), and a small dark coin (from the Bar Kokhba Revolt, bearing a relief of a lulav and the inscription Shimon.)
Next, Nathan holds out a small wooden box, its size and shape fit to house a single cigar. We confess we have no idea what it is. Nathan’s eyes shine as he slides open the top to reveal a matte grey metal cylinder inside.
Nathan reveals that the mysterious object resting on his palm is the packaging the Nazis used to distribute methamphetamine to the troops. “Tank chocolate” it was sometimes called. Even Hitler might have been a meth addict. There is some evidence. I had heard before that Nazis gave men meth in an effort to create super soldiers, but I had no idea that the drugs were methodically handed out in standard-issue packaging. Yet here was the evidence, kept harmlessly inert in a Jewish home in Northern California. I could have held it in my hands, but I was afraid.
Is some evil so horrific that those just following orders must be drugged? Turning life into death needed help, minds altered, reality obscured.
I hear reports about drug use and addiction in the upper ranks of the current regime. It is not the same, I know. But I hear an echo.
Nathan closes the cylinder back into its neat little box. He gestures for us to follow him down the hallway to the master bedroom. Wedding photos hang on the wall, new enough that Nathan and his wife Sara look no older than they are now. Sara is also a history teacher, a chef, baker and preserver of foods. Their beautiful home is bursting with life, a lush garden, abundant food, family, friends, books and one small rabbit.
Nathan pulls boxes from a cupboard and shows us old newspapers and documents, some from the days of the French Revolution. My spouse marvels that paper has somehow survived that long. I marvel that some of my French remains after forty years of nonuse. It takes me a moment, but I can make out the meaning of the words.
Nathan asks if we know about bone music. We do not.
Nathan explains as he searches through one of the boxes. Back in the Soviet Union, the state banned rock and roll. Resources were scarce, especially vinyl. Someone figured out that discarded radiographic film could be used to press copies of recordings. Nathan locates the record and holds it out. It is very thin, but recognizable with the grooves I had grown up navigating in my youth. There is a small hole in the center, burned into it by a cigarette.
Nathan holds the record up to the light. And there, unmistakably, were ghostly images of the vertebrae of someone’s neck.
The record is fragile and has a small tear, so it cannot be played, but I imagine the music within. Music developed by enslaved people, so bursting with life that it escaped from that particular Egypt, to be played covertly in a new Egypt on the other side of the world. The artifact then traveled back again to this Egypt, to be appreciated by me on Passover as I prepare to flee from here myself.
I intend to escape to Cali, Colombia, the salsa capital of the world. Salsa has roots in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York, another form of music born of the enslaved. For reasons I have yet to fully understand, salsa musicians moved to Cali in the 1970s and found fertile soil for their art.
I will escape this death-embracing empire, hurriedly, before I am prepared. I have tasted enough tears. I will learn to speak in a new language and will wake up to unfamiliar birdsong. I, the spiritual descendant of slaves, will dance salsa in the streets to the indestructible music of other descendants of slaves.
God willing, I will live.