I sit in the theater and I stare at the screen and I openly sob as Godzilla stomps through Tokyo.

I manage not to make too much noise about it—I’m politely sobbing, I mean. I’ve never been told any sort of etiquette around this, but I know enough about people and the world to quickly invent an etiquette and try to follow it. I’m sufficiently quiet that I’m not interrupting any of the music or the sound-effects or the dialogue—but if anyone glanced over at me right now, they would be able to see the tears on my face, try as I might to scrunch them away—and they would be able to hear me, in that certain way that you become suddenly able to hear otherwise very quiet things when you stare at them.

In that same certain way that very loud things somehow become silent.

There’s something strange about just not being able to do something. Or strange to me, at least. It’s not that I can always do everything—it’s more that I live the sort of life where I never have to try to do things that I can’t.

But I can’t get money into Gaza.

The crowdfunding page for Sumya’s family has been quite successful—over ten-thousand dollars raised by people all around the world. It’s not that much, ten thousand dollars, in the scheme of things, but it’s a lot—it’s definitely not nothing. But I can’t get that money into Gaza. First, the crowdfunding site blocks the transfer to my account; that’s been happening to everyone who’s been trying to raise money— for food, for water, for medicine, for a tent, for anything. The campaign gets suspended. The page gets taken down. The membership gets locked. For some reason I imagine that annoying old Microsoft paperclip—do you remember? “Uh oh! It looks like you’re trying to stop some people from dying! Are you sure you want to do that?”

We’ll probably figure it out, but it will be a while.

Am I the only one in this theater who’s crying? It seems hard to believe, honestly, that I would be the only one-- feeling the way I’m feeling, how could I be the only one? I can’t see anyone else’s faces in the dark.

I sit alone on my couch, and I take a long, deep breath, and I think about how things got to this point. I think about five months ago, before they blew up the crossing to Egypt and also set it on fire, and also surrounded it with mutant vampire bats, probably, just to be sure, I don’t know. I think about all the things I didn’t do, then, because I thought that other people would be doing more. I think about how I thought that there was still so much time. Those things weren’t going to get this bad.

I think about last week. She texted me while it was happening—while she and her daughters, two and four, were sheltering in what used to be the bathroom of what used to be their house, as the soldiers unloaded round after round after round after round after round into the walls around them—into the people around them—as human beings turned into bright red ribbons in front of their eyes.

I think about how she wanted to stand up out of cover and just let it be over.

Godzilla tears through bridges. He burns down a dozen city-blocks. There’s one scene in particular-- the Tokyo sequence, near the peak of it, where we see a shot through a window of Godzilla in the far background, unleashing the nuclear fire of his atomic breath onto some buildings, and in the foreground, we see a birdcage from a little earlier in the movie, framing him as though he is trapped—just as much a victim of all this. It’s quiet, that scene. That’s where I really lose it.

I get the bank-details I need from Sumya’s brother. I wire along ten-thousand dollars. It’s fine. I’ll use the crowdfunded money later, whenever that finally gets figured out.

But of course the transfer gets stopped. Most American banks are refusing to make transfers into Palestine. Some people say that the government is making it difficult. Some people say that the government isn’t making it difficult at all—they don’t have to. There are only two banks that will send the money, and mine isn’t one of them.

I get in the car, and I drive into town, and I make a new account, where I have to. If I’d done this five months ago, just taken it all into my own hands, none of this would be happening now, I tell myself, and I really want to be wrong about that, so I tell it to myself over and over, waiting for some other part of my brain to pipe up and correct me.

I try watching the movie again, alone on my couch. Maybe it had been something about watching with all those other people there, in the theater—some sort of collective experience that had activated something inside me. Maybe something about the size of the screen—or the power of the speakers bringing through the sound, the music. Maybe, or maybe, or maybe.

I sob, again.

I sob alone on my couch.

Sumya shows me some drawings she’s been working on. She’s a fashion designer. She’s been thinking about how she’s going to reopen her shop in Khan Yunis after the war is over. The original building is nothing but soon and cookie-crumble-concrete, now. The clothes which survived have all been looted—she’s found her designs selling at desperate street-markets, by people who have nothing to say when she confronts them. No lies, no excuses, no point. She doesn’t bother doing anything more to them than just pointing it out. She’s going to make a whole range of new designs anyways.

I’m writing a picture-book about her and her children for an activist-group in Poland. I ask her if she’d like to illustrate it—her sketches look fantastic. She tells me no, no, she only really draws clothing. I ask her if maybe I change the picture book to be the story of a magic t-shirt which goes on an adventure, will she illustrate that for me instead? She laughs. I ask her if the ten-thousand dollars from my account has managed to reach her yet. She laughs again—it arrived a few days ago, and she hadn’t thought to say anything about it— that’s just how it is.

Money is not a thing between us. We don’t talk about it—not anymore. We don’t talk about a lot of things anymore. We don’t talk about the last massacre. We don’t talk about those moments, when she wanted to stand up. When I begged her not to—for her children, at least, right? When she said no, her children could die with her—they’d been through enough too, hadn’t they?

We don’t talk about the way they’ve been biting and kicking and screaming. The way they’ve been killing ants down in the dirt, because that’s what life is, isn’t it? Just killing things down in the dirt, simple as a fact. They’ve learned the lesson well.

I mean, there’s sort of the obvious reason, right? The allegory, right? 1954’s Godzilla is an allegory the same way that a machete is a toothpick. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs. Yada-yada, right? They even reference it, early in the movie, a woman on the train complaining about surviving Nagasaki just to be potentially killed by Godzilla instead—it’s funny, the way she does it. Everyone in the theater laughed. I laughed a second time at home, before the weight of everything afterwards hit me again.

Finally, the crowdfunding site unfreezes. I get reimbursed, for whatever that matters.

It’s the same amount of money that’s come back into my account. If you squint from a distance, it’s really nothing that’s happened at all. But I can’t squint from a distance anymore. I’ve seen too much already. This ten-thousand dollars is somehow full of something new: dreams and hopes? Am I really that hokey a person? It feels different, spending it—buying groceries, gas, paying my rent. It feels different.

The next day, I get the text: the Rafah Crossing is reopening, they’re going to get out soon. Sumya and her sisters and her brothers and her children and everyone, finally, finally. We celebrate, in the half-there way that we celebrate; we drink instant coffee and complain about how bad it is. We make the same joke to each other that we’ve made a million times about how we’re going to meet up someday in Egypt and have much better coffee than this. We joke about how we’re going to take dumb tourist-y pictures together in front of the Sphinx—me and her and her children and her sisters and her brother and her nieces and nephews. At the start of all this, finding a place to heat up Nescafe was the biggest problem she had to deal with. It’s a funny thing to remember.

It’s heavy-handed, sure. But I wonder a little bit what it must have been like when Godzilla first screened in Japan. The showing I had gone to was at a local theater, and they had someone from one of the local universities, an expert in Japanese Studies, come to provide some cultural context before they started the movie, and she explained that it broke all box-office records in the country up until that point—completely sold out, and then some. Just nine years after the bombs fell… I imagine there were probably a lot of people in a lot of those sold-out screenings who had to leave the theater halfway, go sit in the hallway and just breathe. I imagine there were a lot of people for whom it was just too real. It was just too soon. I imagine there were a lot of people for whom it would never stop being too soon.

I don’t look any of this up. I don’t think I really want to know if I’m right or wrong. That’s the thing about these older movies—they trust your mind to do a lot of the work for you. Fill in the gaps left by clunky costumes and stop-motion. I want to trust my mind to do the work. I don’t look up how many of the elderly people who volunteered to help clean up after the Fukushima disaster in 2011 were survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How many of them were just doing what they saw as their duty? How many of them saw this as a chance to face down the geiger-crackling dragon of their nightmares one last time? I don’t want to be right or wrong.

The next day after the crossing reopens, it comes to me on a grainy 55mm.

قصفوا بيتنا خرجت أنا وبناتي من تحت الردم

Through the translator:

They bombed our house. My daughters and I came out from under the rubble.

I responded with five things, and then ten. Nothing back after that for twenty minutes. Sumya is twenty-eight; she’s younger than me. The girls are two and four. I’ve seen their faces. I’ve heard their voices. I watched the two year old celebrate her birthday party in the ruins of their last house before this one. Finally, just now, Sumya sends me something else.

اخي وابنه وابنته استشهدو

My brother, his son, and his daughter were martyred.

I ask her if she is injured, and something goes wrong with the translation, and she becomes mad at me. She tells me of course she is not okay: they have killed her brother and his family.

More and more is coming through, but just in drips and drops. Her sister-in-law’s foot has been crushed; mangled, unrecognizable.

Her sister’s spine has been shattered. Her entire body is covered with burns. There are no hospitals left. Sumya is the only one able to be up on her feet. She is the only one able to do anything—make anything happen. Her daughters will not let her step away from them for even one second, they scream and scratch and bite. They are terrified that she is not going to come back. They are terrified that she is going to disappear.

In America, in 1956, the translated (and partially cut down and re-shot) movie was released as “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”. There’s almost too much to be learned from this—about us, about time and space. I wonder if audiences cried at that one.

Maybe it’s just guilt that’s getting to me? Those bombs were ours-- we built them, we dropped them.

The bombs are ours.

It’s a betrayal.

Really, that’s what it is—a betrayal. The American remake, and all the sequels, even the Japanese ones. A betrayal. It’s all about costumes and special effects and love-dramas and “Wow, look how crazy it is when New York is being smashed, look at the Empire State Building falling down, what an amazing image”. Spectacle, spectacle, spectacle. Every kind of smoke and mirrors—smoke and mirrors of smoke and mirrors—everything but real smoke and shattered glass.

Sumya finally has a moment to breathe. She’s slumped against a wall in the hospital lobby, she tells me. She asks me if she can use my Netflix or my Amazon Prime account or something—she wants to be alone for a while, while her daughters are sleeping—she wants to watch something, a movie or something—anything. She wants to be anywhere other than here. I don’t hesitate. Of course she can have whatever she wants. Anything. Always.

When she sees 1954’s Godzilla right at the front of my “Recently Watched” tab, she asks about it, in the half-there way that we talk about things, in English, now, for my sake. Is it good? Are there funny costumes? She’s probably heard of the later ones. She asks me if she should watch it.

For a moment, I don’t know how to answer. I sit in the coffee shop and stare at my phone, and a thousand images flash through my head—twenty-four per second, grainy, the sound a little muffled. After forty seconds or so, “No,” I tell her, “it’s not worth watching. It’s not very good at all. Dumb old movie. Not even funny—just sort of boring.”

I tell her to try Cheaper By The Dozen instead, that’s always fun. The remake, not the original, the remake is much better, I tell her. Honestly, I tell her, nobody really knew how to make movies prior to 1996. And Steve Martin is just great, isn’t he?

She only makes it through the first few minutes before breaking down at the thought of how many family members she used to have. We talk about it. She goes to sleep. I wait up until two in the morning to hear from her again, because of the time difference.

I wait up, and I wait up, and I wait up, sitting alone in a birdcage.