Ranger Games: A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime

Our own golem was dissolved by an other-than-honorable discharge from the U.S. Army in early 2007, while Alex was still in prison. What unsettled us most was that buried somewhere in whatever mud pile remained was the little blond kid who still grinned at us from old family photographs, next to younger versions of ourselves with whom we felt no discontinuity. Like the medieval rabbi Maimonides, whose “negative theology” held that God could not be described in positive terms but only in opposition to whatever was imperfect and human, we began talking about that Alex mostly in banalities and negations: loyal, dutiful, patriotic; not experienced, not skeptical, not capable of questioning, not aware. After a while it began to seem as if all we had left of him was a luminous emptiness defined against the shape of what was to come, a sculpture in negative space.

There was one more negation, of course, the most important of all, so well understood in our family that no one had to say it out loud: not guilty.