The Nix

1

ONCE AGAIN, Faye had lied to her son.

Once again, there was something she felt too ashamed to tell him. In Chicago, at the airport, he had asked where she planned to go, and she lied to him. She said she didn’t know, that she’d figure it out in London. But in fact she knew exactly where she was going: as soon as she discovered she’d be traveling alone, she resolved to come here, to Hammerfest, Norway. Her father’s hometown.

The way her father had described it, the family’s home in Hammerfest was a resplendent thing: on the edge of town, a wide three-story wooden house with a view out to the ocean, a long pier where the family could fish for an afternoon and come away with a bucketful of arctic char, a field in front that waved golden with barley through the summer, a small pen for the animals — a few goats, sheep, a horse — the whole spread marked by a line of beautiful blue-green spruces that caught so much snow in winter that the snow sometimes fell off them in great loud thwumps. The house was repainted every spring a bright salmon-red after the winter elements dulled the previous year’s coat. Faye remembers sitting at her father’s feet listening to this and fully internalizing this vision of her family’s ancestry and later adding to it in her mind, putting a jagged mountain range in the background, covering the beaches with the volcanic black sand she saw once in National Geographic—whatever other beautiful thing she encountered in some movie or magazine, any place that seemed to be rural and idyllic and foreign, they all became this place, the home in Hammerfest. It drew together all her fantasies by slow childhood accretion. It became the depository for all the best things, and eventually her image of it was equal parts Nordic and French countryside and Tuscan fields and that great scene in The Sound of Music of singing and spinning in the grassy Bavarian hills.

The real Hammerfest, Faye discovers, does not look like this at all. After a quick flight from England to Oslo, and another flight in a de Havilland that seemed too big for its propellers to keep up, she lands in Hammerfest to find a rocky, hardscrabble place devoid of any growing thing except the hardiest and prickliest of shrubs and thicket. A place that whistles with the wind of the arctic circle, a wind that carries on it a sweet petrochemical vapor. For this is an oil town. A gas town. Fishing boats are dwarfed by massive orange container ships taking liquid natural gas and crude oil to refineries that dot the coastline, to round white storage and distillation tanks that look, from the air, like mushrooms sprouting from some dead thing. Offshore platforms drilling reservoired gas are visible from town. No fields of gently swaying barley but rather empty lots with discarded equipment rusted and petrolic. Rocky hills, craggy and covered with lichen. No beaches but rather a bouldered and inaccessible cliff side that looks like the aftermath of an accident involving dynamite. The houses painted brightly in yellows and oranges are more a bulwark against the dark winter than evidence of actual cheer. How could this be the beautiful place she imagined? It seems so foreign.

She had thought she’d find somebody at the tourist office who could help her, but when she said she was looking for the Andresen farm they looked at her like she was out of her mind. No Andresen farm, they said. No farms at all, they said. So she described the house and they said that house wouldn’t exist anymore. The Germans would have destroyed it in the war. They destroyed that specific house? They destroyed every house. Faye was given a pamphlet for the Museum of Reconstruction. She said she was looking for a place with a fair bit of land and maybe some spruce trees and a house that faced the water. Might they know where she could find a place like that? They said that could describe a lot of places and told her to walk around. Walk around? Yes, it’s not a big city. So that’s what she’s doing. Faye walks Hammerfest’s perimeter looking for something that matches her father’s description, a farm at the edge of town with a view of the water. She passes flimsy square apartment buildings that seem huddled together for warmth. No fields whatsoever, no farms. She moves out farther, where the terrain is stony, weedy, the only plants able to survive are those that root into the rock itself, hard crunchy grasses that go dormant during the two months of darkness that come during winters above the arctic circle. Faye feels like a fool. She’s been walking for hours. She had actually thought she knew what to expect here, she had actually believed in her own fantasy. All these years and still she’s making the old mistakes. She finds a path of trampled-down grass that leads over a nearby ridge and she follows it, lost in dismal thought, saying out loud at roughly every second step, “Stupid. Stupid.” For that’s what she is, stupid, and every stupid decision she’s ever made has led her here, to this stupid place, alone on a chalk-dusty path at the godforsaken end of the world.

“Stupid,” she says, staring at her feet, climbing the path that leads steeply uphill and over the ridge ahead, thinking that coming here was stupid, looking for the old house was stupid, even her clothing is stupid — little white flat-soled shoes totally inappropriate for hiking over tundra, and a thin shirt she hugs around herself because even though it is summer, it is brisk. Just a few more stupid choices in a life full of them, she thinks. It was stupid to come here. It was stupid to get back in contact with Samuel, whom she felt responsible for after abandoning him to Henry, which was also stupid. No, that wasn’t stupid, but marrying Henry in the first place was stupid, and leaving Chicago was stupid. And on and on it goes as Faye continues up the hill, tracing back her long line of bad decisions. What had started it? What put her on the path to this stupid life? She doesn’t know. When she looks back on it, all she sees is that old familiar desire to be alone. To be free of people and their judgments and their messy entanglements. Because whenever she got tangled up with someone, disaster always followed. She got tangled up with Margaret in high school only to become a town pariah. And with Alice in college only to be arrested and plunged into violence and mayhem. And with Henry only to wreck the child they had together.

She had been relieved at the airport when Samuel’s name appeared on the no-fly list. She feels bad about this now, but it’s true. She felt these opposing emotions: joy that Samuel no longer seemed to hate her, and relief that he wasn’t coming with her. For how could she have endured the entire flight to London with him — a whole ocean of questions? Never mind traveling with him and living with him wherever they ended up (he seemed to prefer Jakarta, for some reason). His need was too much — it was always too much — for her to bear.

How could she tell Samuel that she was going to Hammerfest because of a silly ghost story? The one she heard as a child, the story her father told her about the nisse on the night of her first panic attack. The story had stayed with her all this time, and when Samuel mentioned Alice’s name, she was reminded of something her old friend told her long ago: The way to get rid of a ghost is to take it home.

Which is stupid, such superstition. “Stupid, stupid,” she says.

It’s as if she really is haunted. All this time she thought maybe her father had brought some curse from the old country, some ghost. Only now she thinks maybe she’s not haunted but rather she’s the one doing the haunting. Maybe the curse is her. Because every time she’s gotten close to someone she has paid for it. And maybe it’s appropriate she’s now here, in the remotest part of the world, alone. Nobody to get tangled up with. No more lives to destroy.

She reaches the top of the ridge lost in thought, brooding on these bitter things, when she becomes aware of a presence. She looks up to see a horse standing in the path, maybe twenty feet ahead, where the ridge begins sloping back downhill to a small valley. She flinches and exclaims a surprised “Oh!” when she sees it, but the horse does not seem startled. It is not moving. It is not eating. She does not seem to have interrupted anything. It’s eerie — like it’s been expecting her. The horse is white and tensely muscled. Its flanks occasionally shiver. Big round black eyes that seem to consider her wisely. A bit in its mouth, reins around its neck, no saddle. It stares at her as if it’s just asked an important question and is waiting for her to respond.

“Hello,” she says. The horse is not afraid of her, nor is it friendly. It is simply that Faye occupies its whole attention at the moment. It’s actually a little creepy, the way it seems to be waiting for her to do something or say something, though she does not know what. She takes a step toward it, and the horse has no reaction. She takes another step. Still nothing.

“Who are you?” she says, and even as she says it the answer bursts into her head: It’s a nix. After all these years, it has appeared to her, here, on a ridge high above the frigid harbor, in Norway, in the northernmost city in the world. She has found herself in a fairy tale.

The horse looks unblinkingly straight at her as if to say, I know who you are. And she feels herself drawn to it, wanting to touch it, to rub her hand along its ribs and bound onto it and let it do whatever it wishes to do. It would be a fitting end, she thinks.

She comes closer, and even as she reaches up to pet the beast’s face, still it does not flinch. Still it waits. She touches it on that spot between its eyes, that spot she always thinks will be softer than it really is, the skull so close to the surface there, all thin fur and bone.

“Were you waiting for me?” she says into its ear, which is gray and black and flecked silver and looks like a porcelain teacup. She wonders if she can leap onto its back, if she can manage the jump. That would be the hardest part. The next part would be simple. If the horse began galloping, it would reach the nearby cliff in maybe a dozen strides. The fall down to the water would take only seconds. It amazes her that after such a long life, the end could come that quickly.

Then Faye hears a sound, a voice carried on the wind from the valley below. A woman is down there walking toward her, yelling something in Norwegian. And beyond her, just past her, is a house: a small square thing with a deck in back that faces the water, a path down to a rickety wooden dock, a big garden out front, a few spruce trees, a small pasture for a couple of goats, a couple of sheep. The house is gray and weathered, but in the places that are protected from the wind — under the eaves and behind window shutters — Faye can see the lingering color of old paint: salmon-red.

She almost falls over at the sight. It’s not how she imagined it, but still she recognizes it. It’s familiar, as if she’d been here many times before.

When the woman reaches her, Faye can see she’s handsome and young, maybe Samuel’s age, with the same striking features she sees all the time in this country: fair skin, blue eyes, long straight hair that delicate color halfway between blond and cotton. She’s smiling and saying something that Faye does not understand.

“This must be your horse,” Faye says. She feels self-conscious about using English so presumptuously, but she has no alternative.

The woman does not seem offended, though. She cocks her head at this new information and seems to process it for a moment, then says, “British?”

“American.”

“Ah,” she says, nodding, as if this solves some important mystery. “The horse wanders off sometimes. Thank you for catching him.”

“I didn’t really catch him. He was standing here when I found him. It’s more like he caught me.”

The woman introduces herself — her name is Lillian. She’s wearing gray herringbone pants of some sturdy-looking material, a light blue sweater, a wool scarf that looks homemade. She’s the very picture of unassuming Nordic style — restrained and elegant. Certain women can wear a scarf effortlessly. Lillian takes the horse by the reins and together they all begin walking back down toward the house. Faye wonders if this might be a distant relative, a cousin, for this is almost certainly the place. So many of the details match, even if the version her father told was exaggerated: not a field in the front yard but rather a garden; not a long line of spruces but only two; not a great pier over the water but instead a small flimsy-looking dock perhaps large enough for a canoe. Faye wonders whether he was self-consciously lying and puffing it up, or if, in the years since he left, in his imagination, the house really did grow in its proportions and majesty.

Lillian, meanwhile, is pleasantly making conversation, asking Faye where she’s from, how she’s enjoying her travels, where she’s gone. She suggests restaurants to try, nearby sights to see.

“This is your house?” Faye asks.

“It’s my mother’s.”

“Does she live here too?”

“Of course.”

“How long has she lived here?”

“Most of her life.”

The garden out front is wild with life, a great efflorescence of bushes and grasses and flowers thick and barely domesticated. It’s an eccentric and rowdy garden, a place where nature has been encouraged to its messy ends. Lillian leads the horse into its pen and closes a rickety gate that she secures with a bit of twine tied in a knot. She thanks Faye for helping return the animal.

“I hope you enjoy your vacation,” she says.

And even though this is what Faye has come here to find, she’s feeling tongue-tied and nervous now, not sure exactly what to say or how to proceed, not sure how to explain everything.

“Listen, I’m not really on vacation.”

“Oh?”

“I’m looking for someone. Old family, actually. Relatives of mine.”

“What’s the name? Maybe I can help.”

Faye swallows. She doesn’t know why she’s so anxious saying it: “Andresen.”

“Andresen,” Lillian says. “That’s a pretty common name.”

“Yes. But, you see, I think this is it. What I mean is, I think my family used to live here, in this house.”

“Nobody in our family was named Andresen, or moved to America. Are you sure you have the right town?”

“My father is Frank Andresen? When he lived here he went by Fridtjof.”

“Fridtjof,” Lillian says, and this seems to take a moment to register as she looks up in concentration trying to access why that name sounds familiar. But then suddenly she finds it and she looks at Faye and her stare feels piercing.

“You know Fridtjof?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“Oh, my,” she says, and she grabs Faye by the wrist. “Come this way.”

She leads Faye into the house, first through a pantry full of vegetables elaborately canned and pickled and labeled, through a warm kitchen where some bready thing is baking, the air smelling of yeast and cardamom, and into a small living room with squeaky wood floors and wood furniture that seems antique and handmade.

“Wait here,” says Lillian, who lets go of Faye’s wrist and disappears through another door. The room she’s left in is cozy and richly decorated with blankets and pillows and photographs on the walls. Presumably family photos, which Faye studies. None of the people here look familiar, except for certain of the men who have a quality around the eyes that Faye recognizes from her father — or maybe she’s imagining it? — a familiar kind of squint, a familiar way with the eyebrow, the slight wrinkle between the eyes. There are lamps and chandeliers and candles and sconces all over, presumably to light the place brilliantly during the interminable winter darkness. A big stone fireplace occupies one wall. Another wall is filled with books with unassuming white spines and titles Faye does not recognize. A laptop computer that seems anachronistic in the otherwise old-fashioned room. Faye can hear Lillian speaking through the door, speaking gently but quickly. Faye does not know a single word of Norwegian, so the language is only a phonic event for her, its vowels sounding a little flat, almost like German spoken in a minor key. Like most languages that are not American English, it seems to move too fast.

Soon the door opens and Lillian returns, followed by her mother, and when Faye sees her it’s like she’s looking into a mirror — in the eyes, and the way they both hunch at the shoulders, and the way age has played out on both their faces. The woman recognizes it too, as she comes to an abrupt stop when she sees Faye and they stare at each other for a moment, not moving. It would be clear to anyone watching that they’re sisters. Faye can see her father’s features play out on the woman’s face: his cheekbones, his eyes, his nose. The woman cocks her head, suspicious. She has an unruly mass of gray hair tied up at the top by a ribbon. She’s wearing a plain black shirt and old blue jeans, both dotted with the evidence of many domestic chores: paint and spackle and, on the jeans, on the knees, mud. She is barefoot. She is wiping her hands clean with a dark blue rag.

“I am Freya,” she says, and Faye’s heart leaps. Every ghost story her father told her, every one involving a beautiful young girl, this was the name he gave her: Freya.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Faye says.

“You are Fridtjof’s daughter?”

“Yes. Fridtjof Andresen.”

“You’re from America?”

“Chicago.”

“So,” she says to nobody in particular, “he went to America.” Then she gestures toward Lillian, “Show her,” and Lillian fetches a book from a shelf and sits on the couch. The book is an antique, yellowed brittle pages, two flaps of leather protecting its cover, a clasp on the front. Faye has seen one of these before: her father’s Bible, the one with the family tree on the inside filled with exotic names he used to show her and cluck disapprovingly at because they were all too cowardly to make a better life for themselves in America. And the Bible in Lillian’s lap is just the same sort, a family tree on the front two pages. But whereas her father’s stopped at Faye, this one shows the full blooming of the family here in Hammerfest. Lillian, Faye can see, is one of Freya’s six children. Grandchildren fill the next line down, a few great-grandchildren below that. It’s a flourishing that takes another sheet of paper to fully accommodate. And above Freya’s name are her parents’ names: Marthe, her mother, and another name, blacked out, inked over. Freya shuffles toward them and stands in front of Faye and bends to point at that spot.

“This was Fridtjof,” she says, her fingernail pressing a crescent into the page.

“He’s your father too.”

“Yes.”

“His name is erased.”

“My mother did that.”

“Why?”

“Because he was a…oh, how do you say it?” She looks at Lillian for help with the word. She says something in Norwegian and Lillian nods in comprehension and says, “Oh. You mean, coward.”

“Yes,” Freya says. “He was a coward.” And she watches Faye, waiting to see what kind of reaction this will bring, whether Faye will be offended by this, and Freya is tense and maybe waiting for an argument she seems perfectly willing to have.

“I don’t understand,” says Faye. “A coward. Why?”

“Because he left. He abandoned us.”

“No. He immigrated,” Faye says. “He tried to make a better life for himself.”

“For himself, yes.”

“He never mentioned he had family here.”

“Then you don’t know very much about him.”

“Will you tell me?”

Freya breathes heavily and looks at Faye with what feels like impatience or disdain.

“Is he still alive?”

“Yes, but his mind is going. He’s very old.”

“What did he do in America?”

“He worked at a factory. A chemical factory.”

“And did he have a good life?”

Faye thinks about this for a moment, about all those times she saw her father alone, keeping his distance from others, desolate, in his own self-made prison, standing for hours in the backyard staring into the sky.

“No,” she says. “He always seemed sad. And lonely. We never knew why.”

Freya seems to soften at this. She nods. She says, “Stay for dinner, then. I’ll tell you the story.”

And she does, over bread and a fish stew. It’s the story Freya’s mother told her when Freya was old enough to understand it. It begins in 1940, the last time anyone heard anything about Fridtjof Andresen. Like most young men in Hammerfest, he was a fisherman. He was seventeen and had recently graduated from the dockside work given to children, the cleaning and gutting and filleting. He now worked on the boat, which was an all-around better job: more lucrative, more fun, so much more thrilling when they’d drag up whole big nets of cod and halibut and the evil-looking, foul-smelling wolffish, which everyone universally agreed was better to catch than to gut. Whole days spent out on the water, losing track of the days because in the summer in the arctic the sun never sets. And feeling proud of the mastery he achieved with his trade’s various tools, the buoys and nets and kegs and lines and hooks stored in the hull just so. His favorite thing was sitting lookout atop the highest mast because he had the sharpest eyes on the boat. He had a gift; everyone said so. He spotted the schools of blackfish that steered into the bay all summer long, and seeing a boiling spot on the water he yelled “Fish-o!” and all the men would roll out of bed and put on their caps and get to work. They’d lower the rowboats, two men per craft — one to handle the oars, the other, the net — and they’d spread the net between them and he’d direct the whole operation from up top until the school reached them and they’d encircle the fish and hoist the whole churning mass of them triumphantly into the boat. There was power in that, their control over the wild sea, feeling unstoppable even while they sailed too close to jagged shores that would doom their ship to sinking if they weren’t such capable sailors.

Fridtjof could spot the fish better than anyone in living memory. He had the sharpest eyes in town, and he bragged about this constantly, whenever they were in port. He said the ocean was a piece of paper only he could read. He was young. He had a bit of money. He spent time in bars. He met a waitress named Marthe. It might not be accurate to say he fell in love with her. More like they were both feeling certain common teenage longings and they made themselves available to satisfy them. The first time they made love it was in the hills near her family’s house, after he’d waited for the bar to close and walked her home and they lay in the tough grass under a gray-white sun. Then she showed him around the land, the big house painted salmon-red, the long pier over the water, the long line of spruce trees, the field of barley. She loved it here, she said. She was a charming girl.

That was the summer the war came. Everyone thought Hammerfest was too remote to be of any concern, but it turned out the Germans wanted the city to disrupt Allied shipping to Russia, plus it would serve as an effective resupply base for their U-boats. The Wehrmacht was coming, was the word that spread up Norway’s coast, from dock to dock, boat to boat. There was talk on Fridtjof’s ship of escape. They could make it to Iceland. Start a new life there. Or keep going. There were ways to get from Reykjavík to America, some said. But what about the submarines? They wouldn’t bother their little fishing boat. But what about the mines? Fridtjof would spot them, they said. It could be done.

Fridtjof wanted to believe what some of the older men said, that the Germans were more interested in the docks than in the city, that they would leave everyone alone as long as there wasn’t a resistance, that their fight was with Russia and Britain, not Norway. But rumors had been spreading about happenings in the south: surprise attacks, burned villages. Fridtjof didn’t know what to think. On their next landing in Hammerfest, the crew would make a decision: stay or go. Anyone who wanted to stay was free to do so. Anyone wanting to risk the voyage to Iceland would bring all the supplies he could manage.

The only one who didn’t have a choice was Fridtjof. Or at least that’s how it seemed to him, when the older guys took him aside and said they needed his eyes. Only he could spot the mines that made the waters out beyond the islands so treacherous. Only he could read the swirls and eddies that signaled the presence of a U-boat. Only he could see the shapes of enemy ships way out there on the horizon, far enough away to avoid them. He had a gift, they all agreed. They’d be dead without him.

That night he waited for the bar to close and went to see Marthe. She was so happy to see him. They made love in the grass again and afterward she told him she was pregnant.

“We’ll have to get married, of course,” she said.

“Of course.”

“My parents say you can live with us. We’ll inherit the house someday.”

“Yes. Good.”

“My grandmother thinks it’s a girl. She’s usually right about these things. I want to name her Freya.”

They made plans for most of the night. In the morning, he told her he was voyaging out to hunt cod to the northeast. He told her he’d be back in a week. She smiled. She kissed him goodbye. And she never saw him again.

When Freya was born, she was born to an occupied city. The Germans had come and removed most families from their homes. Soldiers lived in the houses now, while everyone else crowded into apartment buildings or schools or the church. Marthe shared a single flat with sixteen other families. Some of Freya’s earliest memories were from this time of hunger and desperation. They lived this way for four years before the Germans withdrew. On that day, in the winter of 1944, every living soul in Hammerfest was ordered to evacuate the city. Those who did fled to the forest. Those who didn’t were killed. The Germans burned the city to the ground. Every structure except the church. When the people returned, there was nothing left to return to but rock and rubble and ash. They lived through that winter in the hills, in caves. Freya remembers the cold, and the smoke from the fires they burned, smoke that kept everyone awake coughing and hacking. She remembers vomiting spoonfuls of acid and ash into her hand.

In the spring they emerged from shelter and began rebuilding Hammerfest. But they did not have the resources to make it what it once was. That’s why the city looks in places the way it looks now, cheap and anonymous, a testament not to beauty but to resilience. Marthe’s family rebuilt their house as best they could, even painting it the same color, that same salmon-red, and eventually, when Freya was old enough, Marthe told her the story of Fridtjof Andresen, her father. Nobody had ever heard from him after the war. They assumed he fled to Sweden, like so many others did. Sometimes Freya would go out to watch the fishing boats, imagining him on top of one searching the ocean for her. She’d daydream about his return, but then the years went by and she grew up and had her own family and she stopped wishing for his return and started hating him, then stopped hating him and began simply forgetting him. Before Faye arrived, she hadn’t thought about her father in years.

“I don’t think my mother ever forgave him,” Freya says. “She was unhappy most of her life, angry with him, or with herself. She’s dead now.”

It’s just past seven o’clock and the sunlight pouring into the kitchen is slanted and gold. Freya slaps her palms on the table and stands up.

“Let’s go to the water,” she says. “For sunset.”

She brings Faye a coat and on the walk down explains that sunsets are a precious thing in Hammerfest because they get so few of them. Tonight, the sun sets at eight fifteen. A month ago, it was setting at midnight. In another month, it will get dark at five thirty. And one day in mid-November, the sun will rise at around eleven o’clock in the morning, set about half an hour later, and that’s the last they’ll see of it for two whole months.

“Two months of darkness,” Faye says. “How do you bear it?”

“You get used to it,” she says. “What choice do you have?”

They sit on the dock in silence drinking coffee and feeling a cold breeze coming off the water and watching a copper-colored sun set over the Norwegian Sea.

Faye tries to imagine her father sitting high above the water, perched on the uppermost mast of a fishing boat, the wind reddening his face. What it must have been like for him, in comparison, at the ChemStar factory in Iowa — turning dials, recording numbers, doing paperwork, standing on the flat, dull earth. And what would he have been thinking as they left for Iceland, as he watched Hammerfest recede from view, leaving behind a home, a child. How long would he regret it? How big would that regret become? Faye suspects he regretted it forever. That the regret became his secret heart, the thing he buried most deeply. She remembers him as he was when he thought no one was looking, staring off into the distance. Faye always wondered what he was seeing in those moments, and now she thinks she knows. He was seeing this place, these people. He was wondering what might have been had he made a different decision. It was impossible to ignore the similarity of their names: Freya and Faye. When he named her Faye, was he thinking about the other daughter? When he spoke Faye’s name, did he always hear the echo of this other name? Was Faye just a reminder of the family he left behind? Was he trying to punish himself? When he described the home in Hammerfest, he described it as though he’d actually lived here, described it as though it were his. And maybe, in his mind, it was. Maybe next to the actual world was this fantasy, this other life where he inherited the farm with the salmon-red house. Sometimes those fantasies can be more persuasive than one’s own life, Faye knows.

Something does not have to happen for it to feel real.

Her father was never more animated, never happier, than when he spoke about this place, and maybe even as a child Faye recognized this. She understood that part of her father was always somewhere else. That when he looked at her he never really saw her. And she wonders now if all her panic attacks and problems had been elaborate attempts to be paid attention to, to be seen. She’d convinced herself she was haunted by ghosts from the old country because — even though she didn’t understand it in these terms — maybe she was trying to be Freya for him.

“Do you have children?” Freya asks, breaking the long silence.

“A son.”

“Are you close?”

“Yes,” Faye says, because, once again, she’s too embarrassed to tell the truth. How could she ever tell this woman that she did to her son what Fridtjof did to her? “We’re very close,” she says.

“Good, good.”

Faye thinks about Samuel, and seeing him in the airport a few days ago, saying goodbye to him. She had found herself, at that moment, overcome with a peculiar need: to press herself into him, to feel him physically there. It turned out, the thing she missed the most was his heat. Those long years after she left the family, what she longed for more than anything was that human warmth, how Samuel would climb into bed on those mornings when another of his nightmares terrified him, or how he’d press into her when he was running a fever. Whenever his need was great, he’d come to her, this little cauldron, this hot humid ball. She’d press her face into him and smell his little-boy smell, like sweat and syrup and grass. He ran so hot her skin would dampen where it touched him, and she imagined his core burning with all the energy his body would need for its growth to manhood. It was that warmth she craved suddenly in the airport. She has not felt such a thing in a very long time. Mostly she’s chilled — maybe because of the pills, her anxiety drugs, her blood thinners and beta-blockers. She’s always so cold these days.

The sun is down now and they’re staring at a purple sky. Lillian is in the house lighting a fire. Freya sits listening to the rushing water. To their right, up the coast, is an island where in the gathering darkness Faye can see a bright tongue of light.

“What is that?” she says, pointing.

“Melkøya,” Freya says. “It’s a factory. It’s where they take the gas.”

“And that light?”

“Fire. It burns all the time. I don’t know why.”

And Faye stares at the smokestack venting its orange flame into the night and all at once she’s transported back to Iowa, she’s sitting with Henry on the shore of the Mississippi River and she’s looking at the fire coming out of the nitrogen plant. She could see that fire from anywhere in town. She used to call it the lighthouse. That was so long ago it feels like a different life. And at the sudden recall of this long-dormant memory, Faye begins to cry. Not a hard cry, but a light and delicate one. She thinks about what Samuel would have called it, this crying — a Category 1—and she smiles. Freya either does not notice the crying or pretends not to notice it.

“I’m sorry I got him and you didn’t,” Faye says. “Our father, I mean. I’m sorry he left you. It’s not fair.”

Freya waves at her, dismissing it. “We managed.”

“I know he missed you a great deal.”

“Thank you.”

“I think he always wanted to come back. I think he regretted leaving.”

Freya stands and looks out at the water. “It’s good he stayed away.”

“Why?”

“Look around you,” she says, opening her arms to the house, the land, the animals, to Lillian and the fire she’s building and the Bible with its exhausting family tree. “We didn’t need him.”

She extends her hand to Faye and they shake, a formal gesture declaring the end of this conversation and the end of Faye’s visit.

“It was very nice to meet you,” Freya says.

“And you.”

“I hope you have a nice stay.”

“I will. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Lillian will drive you to your hotel.”

“It’s not far. I can walk.”

Freya nods and begins making her way toward the house. But then a few steps up the path, she stops and turns to Faye and looks at her with these knowing eyes that seem to pass straight through her and access every secret she has inside.

“These old stories aren’t important anymore, Faye. Go back to your son.”

And all Faye can do is nod her head in agreement and watch as Freya ascends the rest of the way and disappears into the house. Faye lingers a moment on the dock before leaving as well. She follows a path up the ridge, and when she reaches the top, at precisely the place she met the horse, she looks back down into the valley at the house, now lit warm and golden, a thin tendril of blue smoke drifting from the chimney. Maybe this is where her father stood. Maybe this is what he remembered. Maybe this is the vision that passed before his eyes those nights in Iowa when he stared into nothingness. It would be a memory that sustained him his whole life, but it would also be the thing that haunted him. And that old story about the ghost that looks like a rock comes to her now: The farther from shore you take it, the heavier it becomes, until one day it gets too heavy to bear.

Faye imagines her father taking a small piece of earth with him, a memento: this farm, this family, his memory of it. This was the drowning stone from his stories. He took it to sea and took it to Iceland and took it all the way to America. And as long as he held on to it, he just kept sinking.

2

WHY HAVE HOSPITAL ROOMS begun to look like hotel rooms, is something Samuel wonders as he looks around at this hospital room’s beige walls and beige ceiling and beige curtains and industrially sturdy carpet whose color could be described as tan or wheat or beige. Paintings on the walls designed to be inoffensive and forgettable and un-upsetting and so abstract they do not remind anyone of anything. Television with a billion channels including FREE HBO, according to the little cardboard sign on the dresser. A fake-oak dresser with a Bible inside. The desk in the corner with the many ports and outlets is the “wireless workstation” with a Wi-Fi password printed on laminated paper crinkled and splitting at the edges. A room service menu where you can order things like chicken-fried steaks and french fries and milk shakes and have them delivered anywhere in the building, even the cardiac wing. The remote control Velcroed to the television. The television bolted to the wall and angled toward the bed so that it’s like the television is watching the patient and not the other way around. A book of nearby Chicago attractions. The couch along the far wall is actually a hide-a-bed, which is something anyone will realize if they sit on it too quickly and bang into its hard metal architecture. A digital clock radio with green numbers currently blinking midnight.

A doctor in the room, thoroughly bald, explaining the case to a group of medical students. “Patient’s name, unknown,” he says. “An alias he goes by is, um, let’s see, Puh-wan-edge?”

The doctor looks to Samuel for help.

“Pwnage,” Samuel says. “Two syllables. Rhymes with ownage, but with a p.”

“What’s ownage?” says one of the students.

“Did he say orange?” says another.

“I think he said porridge.”

The doctor tells the students they are lucky to be here today because they may never see a case quite like this again, and indeed the doctor is considering writing an article about this patient in the Journal of Medical Oddities, which the students would be invited to co-author, of course. The students look at Pwnage with the same bemused appreciation they might have for a bartender preparing them an elaborate drink for free.

Pwnage has been sleeping for three days straight. Not in a coma, the doctor has pointed out. Sleeping. The hospital is nourishing him intravenously. And Samuel has to admit that Pwnage looks better, his skin less waxy, his face less bulbous, the splotchy rashes all over his neck and arms now faded to more or less normal human textures. Even his hair seems healthier, more (and this is the only way Samuel can think of describing it) well-attached. The doctor is listing the various medical conditions the patient presented upon admission to the emergency room: “Malnutrition, exhaustion, malignant hypertension, kidney and liver malfunction, dehydration so far along that frankly I’m not sure how the patient wasn’t hallucinating more or less all the time about water.” The students write this down.

The doctor’s head and face and arms have achieved a really impressive sharklike hairlessness. The medical students carry clipboards and they collectively smell like antiseptic soap and cigarettes. A heartbeat monitor connected to Pwnage by a series of wires and suction cups is not beeping. Samuel stands with Axman and keeps looking at him with these quick sidelong glances that he hopes Axman won’t notice. Samuel has heard Axman speaking over the computer hundreds of times from their many raids together but has never met him in person, and he’s feeling that dislocation you feel when the visual does not match up with the aural, like when you see a radio personality’s face for the first time and you think: Really? Axman’s voice has that whiny, nasally quality that makes him seem, online, like he must be one of those ninety-pound bepimpled nearsighted sissies who are the very quintessence of the online gamer stereotype. His reedy voice is the phonic equivalent of a punch that does not hurt. The kind of voice that makes it sound like his mouth was stuffed into his sinus cavity a long time ago by bullies.

“—and cardiac arrhythmia,” the doctor is saying, “diabetic ketoacidosis, diabetes, which he probably didn’t even know he had and which he definitely was not managing in any way and which made his blood about the same thickness and consistency as instant pudding.”

The real-life Axman turns out to be stylish and dashing — his tight-shorts-and-tank-top combo, and his tanned arms that are muscular but not gaudily so, and his sockless boat shoes, and his moderately curly hair begging to be playfully tussled, it all seems like he dressed from some instruction manual given only to young hip gay men. Pretty soon he’s going to discover sex and then he’ll wonder why he ever spent so much time playing video games.

“So we were all there,” Axman is saying, “on the cliffs above Mistwater Cape. You know the place?”

Samuel nods. It’s a spot on the Elfscape map, the southernmost point of the western continent, the place Pwnage apparently had his near-terminal medical crisis. That’s where Axman found him, his avatar, naked and dead, and he noticed Pwnage’s prolonged AFK status, which stands for “away from keyboard,” which Pwnage almost never was, Axman knew, away from his keyboard. So Axman called the real-life authorities, who went to investigate and saw through the front windows Pwnage slumped unconscious before his computer.

“I told everyone to meet at Mistwater,” Axman says in a semi-whisper so as not to interrupt the doctor. “I posted it online. ‘Candlelight vigil for Pwnage.’ We had a pretty good turnout. Maybe thirty people. All elves, of course.”

“Of course,” Samuel says. He has the feeling one of the attractive female medical students is right now eavesdropping on their conversation, and he feels that embarrassment he feels whenever someone from the real world discovers this is what he does with his spare time: plays Elfscape.

“All these elves standing there with our lit candles. And except for one guy in the back who was break-dancing and not really taking part, it was a somber and beautiful and mournful scene.”

“—and a rash on his arm that looked alarmingly similar to, but thankfully was not, necrotizing fasciitis,” says the doctor. The dome of his bare head shines. It makes the room feel bigger in the same way a large mirror might.

“But so here’s the thing,” Axman says, and he’s now gripping Samuel’s shirt and pulling lightly at it to keep Samuel’s attention and to express his own agitation. “I posted plans for the vigil online, in the Elves Only forum. But it turns out there were some trolls who saw it too.”

“Trolls?”

“Yeah, orcs.”

“Wait, trolls or orcs?”

“Orcs who were trolling. You know what I mean. Some orc-playing players saw the news about the candlelight vigil and reposted it in the Orcs Only forum, which of course I didn’t see because I don’t read their forums because I’m honorable like that.”

The reason the heartbeat monitor is not beeping is because heartbeat monitors in real life do not beep, Samuel decides. That must be a Hollywood affectation, a way to report to the audience what’s going on inside the patient’s chest. The heartbeat monitor attached to Pwnage just slowly prints a jagged line onto a narrow piece of paper that’s spooled up like something inside a cash register.

“So unbeknownst to us,” Axman says, “while we’re gathering on the cliffs above Mistwater Cape, the orcs are hiding in a cave to the north. And right in the middle of our ceremony, which I should stress was, with the exception of the guy who was break-dancing and then later took off all his clothes and jumped around a lot, really somber and beautiful and quiet, right in the middle, right as I’m making a speech about what a great guy Pwnage is and how we’re all hoping he gets better soon and urging people to write get-well cards to him and giving out the address of the hospital so that they can write actual real paper cards, all of a sudden all these orcs rush out of the trees and start murdering us.”

The attractive medical student seems to be chewing on her pencil either to suppress the smile or outright giggle generated by eavesdropping on this particular conversation. Or because she’s a smoker and that’s one of those oral-fixation unconscious-tic things that smokers tend to do. The doctor’s head has the buffed quality of a new bowling ball still wrapped in its protective sheath.

“So all of our orc alarms start going off and we all turn around to fight them,” says Axman. “Only we can’t fight them. Do you know why we can’t fight them?”

“Because you’re all holding candles?”

“Because we’re all holding candles.”

That the doctor does not even have eyebrows or eyelashes is an unsettling quality it takes Samuel a few minutes to identify. Before that, it was like the guy looked off for a reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“So this orc starts fighting me,” Axman says, “and I instinctively swing at him and hit him, but of course I hit him with a candle, which does like zero damage and causes him to ROFL over and over. So I open my control panel and select the character screen and select the candle and then locate my sword in my inventory screen and then double-click to switch them and the game says Are you sure you want to trade items? and all this time the orc is chopping me in half slowly with his ax, swinging away casually and I’m just standing there like a tree totally helpless to stop him, and I’m all like to the game Yes I want to trade items! Yes I’m fucking sure!”

At Axman’s sudden outburst the doctor and the students look over with these expressions of disdain that communicate how quickly he’d be thrown out of here had he not saved the life of the patient they’re going to write a quirky journal article about.

“So anyway,” says Axman, quieter now, “I ultimately don’t have time to even switch weapons because I’m fully dead way before I get through the process. And so my ghost resurrects at the nearest graveyard and I run the ghost back to my body and respawn and you know what happens?”

“The orcs are still there.”

“The orcs are still there, and I’m still holding a goddamn candle.”

“—and lactic acidosis,” says the doctor, stronger now, trying to talk over Axman, “and hyperthyroidism, urinary retention, croup.” The doctor’s allover hairlessness is beginning to seem clinical and not aesthetic, like he suffers from a genetic disorder the kids probably made fun of throughout his childhood, which makes Samuel feel a little guilty for staring.

“And this happens maybe twenty or thirty times,” says Axman. “I get back to my body, respawn, and get killed within seconds. Rinse and repeat. I wait for the orcs to get tired of it, but they never do. I finally get so angry I log out and post a pretty big rant on the Orcs Only forum where I say the behavior of the orcs who crashed our vigil was reprehensible and immoral. I said all their accounts should be banned and they should personally apologize to everyone in our guild. This ignited a pretty big debate.”

“What’s the consensus?”

“The orcs said their maneuver was accurately orc-like. They said killing us during our vigil was in keeping with how orcs are supposed to act in the game world. I said sometimes the game world and the real world overlap in certain places where the real world should take precedence, like during a quiet vigil where friends are mourning for their seriously ill raid-leader buddy. They said their orc avatars don’t know what this ‘real world’ is that I’m talking about and for them the Elfscape world is the only world that exists. I said if that’s true then they would never have known about the vigil in the first place because they don’t have orc laptops from which to access the Elves Only online forums, and even if they did, they could not comprehend what was written there because orcs cannot read English.”

“This all sounds very complicated.”

“It opened up this big metaphysical problem about how much of the real world you’re bracketing when you’re playing Elfscape. Most of our guild is taking the week off from raiding to think about the problem.”

“Did you ever log on again?”

“Not yet. My elf is still on that cliff. Dismembered.”

The doctor is saying, “I swear to god this is the first time I’ve ever seen a pulmonary embolism be the least bad thing wrong with someone. Compared to everything else going on here, the anticoagulant we administered for the embolism was an easy fix.”

Samuel feels the little buzzing of his phone in his pocket that signals a new e-mail. He sees it’s from his mother. Despite their agreement, she has written. He excuses himself and goes into the hallway to read it.

Samuel,

I know we said I shouldn’t do this, but I’ve had a change of heart. If the police ask, please tell them the truth. I didn’t stay in London. I didn’t go to Jakarta. I went to Hammerfest. It’s in Norway, the northernmost city in the world. It’s terribly remote and sparsely populated. You’d think it would suit me. I’m telling you this because I’ve decided not to stay. I’ve met some people who have convinced me to come home. I’ll explain later.

Actually, Hammerfest is no longer the northernmost city in the world, I just discovered. Technically it is the second-northernmost. There’s a place called Honningsvaag that is also in Norway and slightly farther north that declared itself a city a few years back. But with a population of about 3,000 people, you can hardly call it a “city.” So the debate rages on. Most folks in Hammerfest are friendly to anyone except people from Honningsvaag, whom they consider usurpers and bastards.

The things you learn, eh?

At any rate, Hammerfest is distant and isolated. It’ll take me a few days to get home.

In the meantime, I want you to go find your friend Periwinkle. Tell him to tell you the truth. You deserve some answers. Tell him I said to tell you everything. He and I go way back, you should know. We met in college. I used to be in love with him. If you want proof, go back to my apartment. On the shelf, there’s a thick book of poetry, the collected Ginsberg. I want you to look inside that book. You’ll find a photograph. I hid it in there years ago. Please don’t be angry with me when you find it. Soon you’ll have all the answers you want, and when you do, remember that all I was trying to do was help. I did it clumsily, but I did it for you.

Love,

Faye

Samuel thanks Axman and tells him to send word once Pwnage wakes up. He leaves the hospital and drives quickly into Chicago. He enters his mother’s apartment through the still-wrecked door. He finds the book and begins flipping through it, holding it upside down and shaking it. It has that old-book smell, dry and musty. The pages are yellowed and feel brittle on his fingertips. A photograph flutters out and lands on the floor facedown. On the back, it is signed: To Faye, on your Honeymoon, love Al.

Samuel picks it up. It is the same photograph he’d seen on the news, the one taken at that protest in 1968. There is his mother in her big round glasses. There is Alice sitting behind her all deadly serious. But this photograph is larger than the one he’d seen on the news, its field of vision wider. He realizes that the photo he thought he knew so well was actually only a fragment from this bigger photo, sectioned off, cropped to hide the man his mother leans against. But Samuel can see him now, this man, his bowl of black hair, the way he looks sidelong and cleverly at the camera, his eyes full of mischief. He is so young, and his face is half in shadow, but it’s obvious. Samuel has seen that face before. It’s the spitting image of Guy Periwinkle.

3

GUY PERIWINKLE’S OFFICE in downtown Manhattan is on the twentieth floor, southeast corner, overlooking the financial district. Two whole walls are made entirely of glass. The other walls are painted a neutral slate gray. A small desk in the middle of the room, a single swivel chair. There are no works of art on the walls, no family photos, no statuary or plants, nothing on the desk but a single sheet of paper. The aesthetic here is way beyond minimalism — more like monkish denial. The only decoration in the entire large space is a single framed advertisement for some kind of new potato-chip thing. The new chip is shaped like a small torpedo instead of the more traditional triangle or circle. The ad is dominated by a photograph of a man and a woman whose bug-eyed excitement to eat these chips might best be described as maniacal. A caption above them, written in bold three-dimensional-looking letters, says: DO YOU NEED TO LIVEN UP YOUR SNACK ROUTINE? This advertisement is roughly the size of a movie poster. It looks out of place in its lavish gold frame.

Samuel has been waiting for twenty minutes, walking around the room like a bean jumping in its pod, from window to advertisement and back, studying each thing for as long as he can before his agitation twists him up and he feels it necessary to pace. He’d left for New York directly from his mother’s apartment. It is the second time in his life he’s driven from Chicago to New York City, and the feeling of déjà vu is so powerful right now that he’s feeling this low-level background dread: The last time he drove to New York, it did not turn out well. And it’s impossible not to remember this right now, because as he stares out Periwinkle’s office window he can see, a few blocks to the east, that old familiar building, the thin white one with the gargoyles near the top: the building at 55 Liberty Street. Bethany’s building.

He stares at the building and wonders if she’s there right now, maybe looking this way, in Samuel’s direction, at all the ruckus below. For between Bethany’s building and Periwinkle’s, way down at street level, is Zuccotti Park — though “park” is a generous term for this small patch of concrete no larger than a few tennis courts, where protesters have been gathered for weeks. Samuel had waded through the crowd on his way into the building. WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT, their signs said. THIS SPACE OCCUPIED. From above, he can see the great mass of people, the fluorescent blue nylon bubbles of their tents, the drum circle on the outer edge, which is all he can hear of the protest from up here on the twentieth floor: the endless, unstoppable drumming.

He moves back to the advertisement. The new torpedo-shaped potato chips seem to come in their own special plastic serving cups with peel-away tops like yogurt. The way the couple stares at the chips in anticipation of eating them is so manic that it almost looks like terror.

The door opens and Periwinkle finally appears. He wears his usual tight gray suit and colorful tie — turquoise today. His hair is newly dyed and looks lacquered black. He sees Samuel looking at the potato-chip poster and says, “That advertisement tells you everything you need to know about twenty-first-century America.”

He swings himself into the desk chair and swivels it around until he faces Samuel. “Everything I need to know to do my job is right there,” he says, pointing at it. “If you can understand this ad’s insight, then you can conquer the world.”

“It’s a stupid potato chip,” Samuel says.

“Of course it’s a stupid potato chip. It’s that phrase I love: snack routine.”

Outside, the drumming swells and then dissipates by some improvisational musical logic.

“I guess I’m missing it,” Samuel says, “the genius.”

“Think about it. Why does one eat a snack? Why is a snack necessary? The answer — and we’ve done a million studies on this — is because our lives are filled with tedium and drudgery and endless toil and we need a tiny blip of pleasure to repel the gathering darkness. Thus, we give ourselves a treat.

“But here’s the thing,” Periwinkle continues, his eyes all aglow, “even the things we do to break the routine become routine. Even the things we do to escape the sadness of our lives have themselves become sad. What this ad acknowledges is that you’ve been eating all these snacks and yet you are not happy, and you’ve been watching all these shows and yet you still feel lonely, and you’ve been seeing all this news and yet the world makes no sense, and you’ve been playing all these games and yet the melancholy sinks deeper and deeper into you. How do you escape?”

“You buy a new chip.”

“You buy a missile-shaped chip! That’s the answer. What this ad does is admit something you already deeply suspect and existentially fear: that consumerism is a failure and you will never find any meaning there no matter how much money you spend. So the great challenge for people like me is to convince people like you that the problem is not systemic. It’s not that snacks leave you feeling empty, it’s that you haven’t found the right snack yet. It’s not that TV turns out to be a poor substitute for human connection, it’s that you haven’t found the right show yet. It’s not that politics are hopelessly bankrupt, it’s that you haven’t found the right politician yet. And this ad just comes right out and says it. I swear to god it’s like playing poker against someone who’s showing his cards and yet still bluffing by force of personality.”

“This isn’t exactly what I came here to talk about.”

“It’s a heroic job, when you think about it. What I do. It’s the only thing that America’s good at anymore. We don’t make the snacks. Our specialty is making new ways to think about snacks.”

“So it’s patriotic, then. You’re a patriot.”

“Have you ever heard of the Chauvet cave paintings?”

“No.”

“They’re in southern France. Oldest paintings ever found there. We’re talking like thirty thousand years old. Scenes typical of the Paleolithic — horses, cattle, mammoths, that kind of thing. No pictures of humans but one depiction of a vagina, for what that’s worth. The really interesting thing is what happened when they carbon-dated the place. They found pictures in the same room painted six thousand years apart. They looked identical.”

“Okay. So?”

“So think about that. For six thousand years there was no progress and no evidence of any impulse to change anything. People were fine with the way things were. In other words, this is not a people experiencing spiritual desolation. You and I need new diversions nightly. These people didn’t change a thing for sixty centuries. This is not a people tired of their snack routine.”

The drumming outside escalates for a moment and then fades back into a kind of ominous tolling.

“Melancholy,” Periwinkle says, “had to be invented. Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom. And when those things were birthed, so were people like me, to attend to them. So no, it’s not patriotism. It’s evolution.”

“Guy Periwinkle, pinnacle of evolution.”

“I understand you’re trying to be sarcastic there, but a word like pinnacle doesn’t make sense in an evolutionary context. Remember that evolution is value-free. It’s not what’s best, it’s just what survives. I assume you’re here to talk about your mother?”

“Yes.”

“And where is she these days?”

“Norway.”

Periwinkle stares at him for a moment, digesting this.

“Wow,” he says, eventually.

“Northern Norway,” Samuel says, “all the way at the top of it.”

“I’m speechless, for I think maybe the very first time.”

“She wants you to tell me the truth.”

“About what?”

“Everything.”

“I really seriously doubt that.”

“About you and her.”

“There are certain things that children let’s say have the right not to know about their mothers.”

“You met each other in college.”

“What I mean is I seriously doubt she wants you to know everything.”

“That was her word. That was the word she used.”

“Yes, but did she mean it literally? Because there are certain things—”

“You met each other in college. You were lovers.”

“This is what I’m saying! There are certain details, certain sexual things of a sexual nature—”

“Tell me the truth, please.”

“Certain, let us say, racy particulars you and I would almost definitely agree we should be spared the embarrassment of, if you understand my drift.”

“You knew my mother in college, in Chicago. Yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“How did you know her?”

“Biblically.”

“What I mean is, how did you come to meet her?”

“She was a new student. I was a counterculture hero. Back then I went by a different name. Sebastian. Sexy, right? And so much better than Guy. You can’t be a counterculture hero and a Guy. That name is way too average. Anyway, your mother sort of fell for me. It happened. And, yeah, I fell for her too. She was a cool girl. Sweet and smart and compassionate and totally uninterested in getting people to pay attention to her, which was unusual for my social circle back then, when even my friends’ wardrobe choices had a kind of Look at me! subtext. Faye never bought into it, which was refreshing. Anyway, I published a newspaper called the Chicago Free Voice. It was the thing all the turned-on kids read. Your late-sixties version of an internet meme, to put it in terms you might understand.”

“It doesn’t sound like my mother to be drawn to something like that.”

“It was a seriously influential newspaper. Really. You can read every edition at the Chicago History Museum. They’ll make you wear these tiny white gloves to touch it. Or you can access it on microfiche. They’ve all been archived and microfiched.”

“My mother is not exactly a people person. Why did she get involved with a protest movement?”

“She didn’t intend to. She was more like dropped into the middle of it, so to speak. Do you even know what microfiche is? Or are you too young for that? Little black-and-white coils that you spool into this machine that blows hot air and goes ka-chunk when you turn the page. Very analog.”

“She was dropped into the middle of it because of you?”

“Me and Alice and this cop who got involved, this guy with some serious jealousy-management issues.”

“Judge Brown.”

“Yes. That was unexpected, encountering him again. Back in ’68 he was a cop who, I think, really wanted to kill your mother.”

“Because he thought she was having an affair with Alice, whom he loved.”

“That’s right! That’s right all the way down to the correct usage of ‘whom.’ Congratulations. Now keep going. Tell me what you know. Tell me about 1988. It’s twenty years later and your mother finally leaves your father, leaves you. Where does she go? Tell me.”

“I have no idea. She goes to live in Chicago? In her tiny apartment?”

“Think harder,” Periwinkle says. He leans forward in his chair, his hands clasped and resting on his desk. “One moment your mother’s in college, in the beating heart of the protest movement, the next she’s married to your dad, the frozen-foods salesman, living his safe suburban life. Imagine how that must have felt for her after all the thrills and drugs and sex of which I’m not going to give you any details. How long could she last being Henry’s housewife before it started burning her up, the decision she didn’t make, the life she could have had?”

“She went to you?”

“She went to me, Guy Periwinkle, counterculture hero.” He spreads his arms like he wants a hug.

“She left my dad for you?”

“Your mother is the kind of person who never feels at home no matter where she is. She didn’t leave your dad for me, per se. She left your dad because leaving is what she does.”

“So she left you too.”

“Not as dramatically, but yes. There was some yelling, some disgust on her part. She said I was abandoning my principles. It was the eighties. I was getting rich. Everyone was getting rich. She wanted a life of books and poetry, but that wasn’t my, shall we say, career trajectory. She wanted another chance to live like a radical, since she blew it the first time. I told her to grow up. I suppose this is what she meant by telling you everything?”

“I think I need to sit down.”

“Here,” Periwinkle says, getting up from his chair. He withdraws to the window and stares out.

Samuel sits and rubs his temples at what feels suddenly like a migraine or hangover or concussion.

“The drumming down there sounds like it’s improvised and chaotic,” Periwinkle says, “but it’s actually on a loop. You just have to wait long enough for the repeats.”

Samuel’s feeling about all this new information is simply to be numb to it for now. He suspects he will be feeling something very powerful, very soon. But right now all he can really do is imagine his mother working up the courage to go to New York, only to be utterly disillusioned once she got here. He imagines her doing this and he feels sad for her. They are exactly alike.

“I suppose my big book contract wasn’t some huge coincidence.”

“Your mother was snooping on the internet,” Periwinkle says. “She found out you were a writer. Or trying to be one. She called me and asked for a favor. I figured I owed her at least that much.”

“Good lord.”

“Bursts your bubble, doesn’t it?”

“I actually thought I’d gotten famous on my own.”

“The only people who get famous on their own are serial killers. Everyone else needs people like me.”

“Governor Packer, for example. He needs someone like you.”

“Which brings us to the present.”

“I saw you on TV defending him.”

“I’m on his campaign. I’m a consultant.”

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Working on his campaign while you’re publishing a book about him?”

“I think you’re confusing your role here with some kind of journalism. What you call conflict of interest, I call synergy.”

“So the day my mother attacked the governor, you were in Chicago, weren’t you. You were with him. At his fund-raiser. His grub-down.”

“That is his delightfully folksy name for it, yes.”

“And while you’re there,” Samuel says, “you also schedule a meeting with me. At the airport. To tell me you’re suing.”

“For totally failing to write your book. For completely fucking up the giant contract we gave you. A contract you didn’t deserve in the first place, I should add now, since we’re putting all our cards on the table and everything.”

“And you told my mother about this, this meeting with me, this lawsuit.”

“As you can imagine, she was pretty upset that she’d screwed up your life for a second time. She asked to speak with me, before I met with you. She wanted to talk me out of it, I’m guessing. I said okay, let’s meet in the park. She asked to meet at the exact spot where, many years ago, police fired tear gas at us. Your mother is a nostalgic sap sometimes.”

“And then you showed up with Governor Packer.”

“That’s correct.”

“She must have truly despised that you were working for someone like Governor Packer.”

“Well, let’s see. She threw away her marriage for some vague liberal antiestablishment idealism. And Packer is the most pro-establishment authoritarian candidate, like, ever. So it’s fair to say she was not pleased. She had the same reflexive hatred of him that most die-hard liberals do, comparing him to Hitler and so on, calling him a fascist. She just doesn’t understand what I understand.”

“And what is that?”

“Packer has the same stuff inside him as anyone else who runs for president. Left or right, they’re all made of the same material. It’s just that he’s shaped like a missile instead of a chip.”

The drumming outside slows for a moment and falls apart. Everything goes silent for a few seconds and then begins again with that familiar driving thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Periwinkle raises a finger. “There’s the repeat,” he says.

“You wanted all this to happen,” says Samuel. “You wanted my mother to react the way she did.”

“Some might call it a crime of passion, but I say I presented your mother with an opportunity.”

“You set her up.”

“In one moment, she had the chance to give you a story that would fulfill your contract, get herself off the hook for screwing up your life again, and give my candidate a much-needed visibility bump. Win win win win win. You’ll only be angry with me if you fail to see the big picture.”

“I cannot believe this.”

“Plus remember that I only masterminded it. Your mother was the one who actually picked up the stones and threw them.”

“She wasn’t aiming at Governor Packer. She was aiming at you.”

“I was in his entourage, yes.”

“And the photograph in the news? The one from ’68, where she’s leaning on you, at the protest. You had a copy of that.”

“A nice present from a great poet.”

“You cropped yourself out of it and gave it to the news. You leaked the photo and you leaked my mother’s arrest record, which you also knew about.”

“I was adding heat. It’s what I’ve always done, what I’ve always been good at. I should say that your mother attacking me with rocks was a sincere gesture on her part. She really does, I believe, hate me. But afterward, the two of us agreed that in order to make the most of the situation, she should stonewall you completely. Tell you absolutely nothing. That way, you’d have no choice but to agree to my version of events. Speaking of which?”

Periwinkle fetched a book from the shelf behind his desk and gave it to Samuel. It was a plain white book, with black letters on the cover: The Packer Attacker.

“That’s an advance copy,” Periwinkle said. “I had my ghostwriters whip it up. I’m going to need to put your name on that book. Or else we’ll have to move forward with that lawsuit of ours, unfortunately, for you. There’s a piece of paper on my desk indicating such in bewildering lawyer language. Please sign it.”

“I assume this book is not very kind to her.”

“It savages her intimately, publicly. I believe that was your pitch. The Packer Attacker. Good title. Catchy without being smug. But I’m especially fond of the subtitle.”

“Which is?”

“The Untold Inside Story of America’s Most Famous Radical Leftist, by the Son She Abandoned.”

“I don’t think I can put my name on that.”

“Most books of nonfiction are sold on the strength of their subtitles. You may not know that.”

“I can’t do it, not in good conscience. It wouldn’t feel right, putting my name on that book.”

“And what, ruin the reputation I invented for you?”

“Is she really America’s most famous radical leftist?”

“We’re selling it as a memoir. The genre allows a little wiggle room.”

“It’s just that the book now seems to me, you know, false.”

“This is of course your choice. But if you don’t put your name on that book, then we proceed with the court action against you, and your mother remains a fugitive. Notice that I’m not telling you what to do here, just illuminating two paths, one of which I hope is the obvious choice if you are not totally insane.”

“But the book isn’t true.”

“And that should matter to us why, exactly?”

“I feel like it would keep me up at night. I feel like we should resist printing outright false things.”

“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”

“This sounds awful.”

“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”

“I’ll need to give this some thought.”

“Maybe literally the last thing you should be doing right now is thinking.”

“I’ll let you know,” Samuel says, standing now.

“The very worst thing you could be doing right now is examining the situation and trying to decide what is right.”

“I’ll call you.”

“Listen, Samuel, really, voice of experience here? It’s a terrible burden, being idealistic. It discolors everything you’ll do later. It will haunt you constantly for all time as you become the inevitably cynical person the world requires you to be. Just give up on it now, the idealism, doing the right thing. Then you’ll have nothing to regret later.”

“Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

4

OUTSIDE PERIWINKLE’S BUILDING, the sidewalks howl. The new concern for those currently occupying Zuccotti Park is that the police are threatening to enforce city ordinances that prohibit occupying parks. Police stand at the edges of the park and watch as protestors gather in a general assembly and talk openly about the pros and cons of obeying the police. So it’s a tense day. Plus there’s the thing about the drumming: People are complaining about it, the ceaseless drumming way into the night, neighbors mostly, families who live in the area and have kids with early bedtimes, and local businesses who up till now have been pretty cool about letting protestors use their bathrooms but are about to become way less cool unless the drumming stops pronto. On one end of the park is the drum circle, on the other end is the multimedia tent and speaker’s platform and library and general assembly in what seems to be the superego to the drummers’ id. Someone is discussing the matter of the drumming right now, a young man in a vintage-looking sport coat who says a few words and stops while those words are shouted by people closest to him, which are then again shouted by those in the next zone back, and so on in a great wave, a sound that begins quietly and then is quickly amplified and amplified again, like an echo traveling back in time. This is necessary because the protestors do not have microphones. The city has banned sound-amplification devices, citing public nuisance laws. Why they have not yet arrested the drummers is anyone’s guess.

The speaker is currently saying he totally supports the drummers and thinks the protest should be an inclusive, big-tent, come-one-come-all type of affair and he understands that people express themselves politically in different ways and that not everybody feels comfortable up here talking rationally and democratically into the “people’s microphone” and some people prefer their message take on a more let’s say abstract quality than the policy proposals and talking-points papers and multistep manifestos this group has heroically written through a painstakingly slow consensus-approach apparatus and under incredible duress that includes constant police surveillance and media scrutiny and also talking above the sounds of the drum circle, he might add, but that’s all fine and they should embrace diversity in all its forms and be thankful that so many different kinds of people have joined their protest but he’s submitting a proposal that the collective occupying group ask the drummers if they’d knock it off at like maybe nine or thereabouts, nightly, please, because people have to sleep and everyone’s on their last nerve out here and it’s hard enough sleeping in tents on the concrete without the goddamn drumming all goddamn night. He submits this to the general assembly for consensus. Many hands are thrust into the air, fingers atwirl. In the absence of outright opposition, the motion seems to pass, until someone suggests they haven’t heard from the drummers yet and we have to hear from the drummers because even though we might disagree with the drummers it’s important to get everyone’s perspective here and everyone’s point of view and not be like fascist about it and quote-unquote jam it down their throats or something. Groans from many quarters. Nevertheless, an emissary is sent to the drum circle in search of a representative.

Samuel watches all this in a kind of dispassionate daze. He feels so separate from what’s happening here, so alone and hopeless. These people seem to have a sense of purpose that he has completely lost. What do you do when you discover your adult life is a sham? Everything he thought he’d accomplished — the publication, the book deal, the teaching gig — he’d only gotten because someone owed his mom a favor. He’d never earned any of it. He is a fraud. And this is what being a fraud feels like: emptied out. He feels hollow. Gutted. Why don’t any of these people notice him? He longs for someone in the crowd to see the haunted expression he’s sure is playing all over his face right now and come up to him and say, You seem to be experiencing overwhelming pain, how can I help you? He wants to be seen, wants his hurt acknowledged. Then he recognizes this as a childish desire, the equivalent of showing your mom a scratch so she can kiss it. Grow up, he tells himself.

“On the matter of the police,” says the speaker, switching topics while they wait for a drummer to stop drumming and speak to them.

“On the matter of the police,” the crowd repeats.

Samuel wanders away, up Liberty Street, walks the two blocks to Bethany’s old apartment building. He stands there staring up at it. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. The building looks unchanged in the seven years since he was last here. He thinks it’s disallowable that the places of life’s most important moments continue going on looking like themselves, unaffected, simple facts that resist the imprint of the stories happening around them. The last time he was here, Bethany was waiting for him in her bedroom, waiting for him to break up her marriage.

Even now, he can’t think about this without that familiar flood of bitterness and regret and anger. Anger at himself, for doing what Bishop wanted him to do; anger at Bishop, for asking him to do it. Samuel has relived that moment so many times, fantasized so often about it: He had read Bishop’s letter and then placed it heavily on the kitchen counter. He had opened the bedroom door to find Bethany sitting on her bed waiting for him, her face dancing with the shadows cast from three bedside candles, their little amber glow the only light in that whole big room. And in his dreams, he goes to her and embraces her and they are together at last and she leaves the awful Peter Atchison and falls in love with Samuel and, for Samuel, everything about these last seven years changes. Like one of those movies about time travel where the hero comes back to the present to find the happy ending that was always impossible in his previous life.

When Samuel was a child reading a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, he’d keep a bookmark at the spot of a very hard decision, so that if the story turned out poorly, he could go back and try again.

More than anything he wants life to behave this way.

This is the moment he would bookmark, finding Bethany all beautiful and candlelit. He would make a different decision. He would not do what he actually did, which is to say “I’m sorry. I can’t,” because he felt it was his duty to honor Bishop, who was dead and therefore in need of honoring. It wasn’t until much later that Samuel realized it wasn’t Bishop he was honoring, it was Bishop’s most disfiguring wound. Whatever had happened between Bishop and the headmaster, whatever haunted Bishop as a kid, it went right on haunting him overseas and into a war, and this was what compelled that letter. Not duty but plain old hatred, self-loathing, terror. And by honoring it, Samuel had failed Bishop once again.

Samuel didn’t realize this until much later, but he had sensed it at the time, sensed he was making the wrong choice. Even as he took the elevator down, even as he walked away from the building at 55 Liberty Street, he kept saying to himself, Go back, go back. And even as he found his car and drove out of the city and drove all night through the Midwest darkness, he kept saying it: Go back. Go back.

The story had appeared in the Times a month later, on the wedding page, the marriage of Peter Atchison and Bethany Fall. A finance guru and a violin soloist. A nexus of art and money. The Times just ate it up. They met in Manhattan, where the groom worked for the bride’s father. To be married on Long Island, at the private residence of a friend of the bride’s family. The groom specializes in risk management in precious-metal markets. Honeymoon planned involving sailing and island-hopping. The bride is keeping her name.

Yes, he’d like to go back to that night and make a different decision. He’d like to erase these last several years — years that, as he sees them now, are long and indistinguishable and monotonous and angry. Or maybe he’d go further back than that, back far enough to see Bishop again, to help him. Or to convince his mom not to leave. But even that wouldn’t be far enough to recover whatever it is he lost, whatever he sacrificed to his mother’s brutal influence, that real part of him that was buried when he started trying to please her. What kind of person would he have become had his instincts not been screaming at him that his mother was moments from leaving? Was he ever free of that weight? Was he ever authentically himself?

These are the questions you ask when you’re cracking up. When you suddenly recognize that not only are you living a life you never intended to lead but also you are feeling assaulted and punished by the life you have. You begin searching for those early wrong turns. What moment led you into the maze? You begin thinking the entrance to the maze might also be the exit, and if you can identify the moment you screwed up then you can perform some huge course correction and save yourself. Which is why Samuel thinks that if he can see Bethany again and resurrect some kind of relationship with her, even a friendly platonic one, then he might be able to recover something important, that he might be able to set himself aright. This is the state he’s in, that this kind of logic makes sense, that he thinks the only answer right now is to go backward, to essentially hit the reset button on his life — a scorched-earth maneuver he is beginning to understand urgently needs to happen as he stands outside Bethany’s building and his phone buzzes with a new e-mail from his boss that sends his spirits tumbling even further when he reads it—I wanted to let you know that your office computer has been confiscated, as it will be presented as evidence in the Faculty Affairs trial against you—and he hears Bishop’s voice in his ear on that day Samuel’s mother left and Bishop told him this was an opportunity to become a new person, a better person, which is something Samuel wants to be, very much so right now. Better. He walks into the building at 55 Liberty Street. He tells the guard in the elevator lobby to please get a message to Bethany Fall. He leaves his name and number. Says he’s in town and asks if she would like to meet. And about twenty minutes later as he’s walking aimlessly north on Broadway past the clothing boutiques of SoHo that leak dance music onto the sidewalk along with their air-conditioning, he gets a message from Bethany: You’re in town. What a surprise!

Turns out she’s in a rehearsal that lets out soon and would he like to meet for lunch? She suggests the Morgan Library. It’s close to her, in midtown. There’s a restaurant inside. She’d like to show him something.

Which is how he finds himself on Madison Avenue in front of a palatial stone mansion, the former home of J. P. Morgan, American titan of banking and industry. Inside, the place seems designed to make visitors feel small — in stature, intellect, and pocketbook. Rooms with thirty-foot ceilings elaborately muraled with images inspired by Raphael’s at the Vatican, the saints replaced here by more secular heroes: Galileo, for example, and Christopher Columbus. All surfaces are either marble or gold. Three stories of shelving for the many thousands of antique books — first editions of Dickens, Austen, Blake, Whitman — visible behind the copper lattice that protects them from being touched. A Shakespeare first folio. A Gutenberg Bible. Thoreau’s journals. Mozart’s handwritten Haffner Symphony. The only surviving manuscript of Paradise Lost. Letters written by Einstein, Keats, Napoléon, Newton. A fireplace about the size of most New York City kitchens, above which hangs a tapestry titled, appropriately, The Triumph of Avarice.

The space feels designed to intimidate and diminish. It makes Samuel think that the folks protesting the superrich at Zuccotti Park are about a hundred years too late.

He’s staring at a life cast of George Washington’s actual face when Bethany finds him.

“Samuel?” she says, and he spins around.

How much do people change in just a few years? Samuel’s first impression — and this is the best way he could explain it — is that she looks more real. She is no longer glowing with his fantasies about her. She looks like herself, in other words, like a normal person. Maybe she hasn’t changed at all, but the context has. She still has the same green eyes, the same pale skin, the same perfectly erect posture that has always made Samuel feel a little slumpy. But there is something different about her, the way her face has creased about the eyes and mouth that does not suggest time or age but rather emotion, experience, heartache, wisdom. It’s one of those things he recognizes in a blink but could not point out specifically.

“Bethany,” he says, and they hug, stiffly, almost ceremonially, like how you might hug someone you used to work with.

“It’s good to see you,” she says.

“You too.”

And because she probably doesn’t know what to say next, she looks around the room and says, “Quite a place, isn’t it?”

“Quite a place. Quite a collection.”

“Very pretty.”

“Beautiful.”

They spend a useless moment staring at the room, looking at everything but each other. Panic surges up in Samuel — have they already run out of things to say? But then Bethany breaks the silence: “I’ve always wondered how much joy all this stuff really brought him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He has the big names — Mozart, Milton, Keats. But there’s no evidence of real fire. It’s always struck me as an investor’s collection. He’s building a diverse portfolio. It doesn’t say love.”

“Maybe there were a few pieces he loved. He hid them from everyone else. They were only his.”

“Maybe. Or maybe that’s even sadder, that he couldn’t share them.”

“You wanted to show me something?”

“This way.”

She leads him to a corner where, displayed under glass, are several handwritten musical scores. Bethany points to one: the Violin Concerto no. 1, by Max Bruch, written in 1866.

“The first concert you heard me play, I played this,” Bethany says. “Do you remember?”

“Of course.”

The yellowed manuscript pages look like chaos to Samuel, and not because he doesn’t read music. Words have been written and then scribbled over, notes have been erased or x-ed out, there seems to be a first layer of pencil under the ink, and stains on the pages from what might be coffee or paint. The composer had written allegro molto at the top, but then crossed out molto and replaced it with moderato. The title of the first movement, Vorspiel, is followed by a lengthy subtitle that extends more than half the page and is completely obscured by squiggles and lines and doodles.

“That’s my part,” Bethany says, pointing at a clump of notes that seem barely contained by the five-line staff underneath. How this mess could turn into the music Samuel heard that night seems like a miracle.

“Did you know he was never paid for this?” Samuel says. “He sold the score to a couple of Americans, but they never paid him. He died poor, I think.”

“How do you know that?”

“Something my mother told me. At your concert, actually.”

“You remember that?”

“Very well.”

Bethany nods. She doesn’t press.

“So,” she says, “what’s new with you?”

“I’m about to be fired,” he says. “What’s new with you?”

“Divorced,” she says, and they both smile at this. And the smile grows into a laugh. And the laughing seems to melt something between them, a formality, a guardedness. They are together with their disasters, it turns out, and over lunch at the museum’s restaurant she tells him about her four-year marriage to Peter Atchison, how by year two she’d begun saying yes to every international gig offered to her so she wouldn’t be in the same country as Peter and therefore did not have to acknowledge what had been plain to her from the beginning: that she was very fond of him but did not love him, or if she did love him she did not love him in that particular way that sustains the years. They were good to each other, but they were never passionate. In their final year of marriage she was finishing a monthlong tour of China and dreaded going home.

“That’s when I finally had to end it,” she says. “I should have done it much earlier.” She points her fork at him. “If only you hadn’t left that night.”

“I’m sorry,” Samuel says. “I should have stayed.”

“No, it’s good you left. That night, I was looking for an easy way out. But the hard way out was better, ultimately, for me, I think.”

And he tells her all about his recent upheaval, beginning with his mother’s odd reappearance—“The Packer Attacker is your mom?” Bethany says, which draws looks from other tables — and the police and the judge, all the way up to today’s meeting with Periwinkle and Samuel’s current dilemma involving the ghostwritten book.

“Listen,” he says, “I think I want to start over.”

“With what?”

“With my life. My career. I think I want to burn it all down. Reset it completely. The thought of going back to Chicago is unbearable. These last few years have been one long rut I need to get out of.”

“Good,” Bethany says. “I think that’s good.”

“And I know it’s forward of me and presumptuous and really unexpected and all, but I was hoping you could help. I was hoping to ask you a favor.”

“Of course. What do you need?”

“A place to stay.”

She smiles.

“Just for a little while,” he adds. “Till I figure a few things out.”

“Conveniently,” she says, “my apartment has eight bedrooms.”

“I’ll stay out of your hair. You won’t even notice me. I promise.”

“Peter and I lived there and never saw each other. It is definitely possible.”

“Are you sure?”

“Stay as long as you need.”

“Thank you.”

They finish lunch and Bethany has to leave for her second rehearsal of the day. They hug again, this time tightly, as intimates, as friends. Samuel lingers for a while at the Bruch manuscript, studying its messy pages. It makes him happy that even the masters have false starts, even the greats must sometimes double back. He imagines the composer after he’d sent this manuscript abroad, imagines how it must have felt when he no longer had the music but only had his memory of it. The memory of making it, and the way it would sound when it was played. His money would have been drying up, and war was breaking out, and all he had at the end was his imagination and maybe a fantasy of what his life would have been like had things turned out differently, how his music would have filled the spaces of cathedrals on brighter days.

5

THE HEADLINE APPEARS one morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: UNEMPLOYMENT UNCHANGED.

Television news picks it up moments later, cutting into programming to deliver the startling report: Over the last month, the economy has added no new jobs.

It’s the biggest story of the day. It is hard data that seems to crystallize this ambiguous, uncomfortable feeling people are having in the autumn of 2011, which is that the world is galloping toward ruin. Whole island nations are going bankrupt. The European Union is pretty much insolvent. Brand-name banks have been suddenly liquidated. The stock market crashed this summer, and most experts say it’ll continue tumbling well into winter. The word on the street is “deleveraging”—everyone owes too much. The world, it turns out, has way more stuff than the world has the money to own. Austerity is very hip right now. So is gold. Money pours into the gold markets because things have gotten so bad people are questioning the very philosophical legitimacy of paper money. Certain views that paper money is a hoax propped up by a collective fantasy move from the fringes and gain traction in mainstream conversation. The economy has turned medieval, the only treasure now being actual treasure—gold, silver, copper, bronze.

It is a massive, unprecedented global contraction, but it’s almost too large to grasp, too complicated to fathom. It’s hard to step back far enough to fully see it, and so the news engages with its manifold parts — labor data, market trends, balance sheets — smaller episodes in the larger story, places where the phenomenon pokes out and can be measured.

Which is why the unemployment story gets so much attention. There is integrity in a solid number that an abstract idea like “deleveraging” does not have.

So a logo is made: BIG FAT ZERO! Elaborate and colorful graphs and charts are prepared mapping recent terrible employment trends. Anchors ask probing questions of experts, pundits, and politicians, who all yell at each other from their separate TV boxes. The networks gather “Americans off the street” to engage in “roundtable discussions” about the country’s jobs crisis. It feels like a flying avalanche of coverage.

Samuel sits in front of the television flipping between the news networks. He’s curious to see what they’re talking about today and feels relief that it is this. Because the more the news obsesses on the unemployment numbers, the less time there is to discuss the day’s other potentially big story, which is the release of a new book: The Packer Attacker, a scandalous biography of Faye Andresen-Anderson, written by her own son.

Samuel had stopped by the launch party the night before. It was part of the deal he’d made with Periwinkle.

“Don’t feel bad about this,” Periwinkle said after the requisite photographs were taken. “Smartest move you’ve ever made.”

“I trust this will settle the matter with the judge?”

“I’ve already taken care of that.”

Turns out, the same day Judge Brown discovered Faye Andresen-Anderson had escaped to Norway — which meant he was looking at an extradition trial that could last years — he got a phone call from the Packer for President campaign offering him a job: crime czar. The only catch was that he had to make the case go away. And so because the case against her had no hope of wrapping up anytime soon, and because the job of crime czar for a presidential candidate who carried around a gun seemed unturndownable, the judge agreed to these terms. He quietly slipped the case down some bureaucratic, jurisdictional, legal black hole and officially retired from his judgeship. His first policy proposal at his new job involved a serious curtailing of First Amendment rights for leftist protestors, a proposal enthusiastically endorsed by Governor Packer, who was hoping to score some easy points among conservatives who just loathe what’s happening with this whole Occupy Wall Street thing.

Samuel can hear them every day, the Wall Street protestors. He wakes up and has his coffee and writes well into the afternoon in a big leather chair next to a window that looks down at Zuccotti Park, where the protest seems to have real staying power. They’re going to be sleeping there until winter, obviously. Bethany had given him his choice of room, and he had chosen this one, on the west side, with a view of the protest and, in the evening, the sun setting over the country. He’s grown to enjoy the drumming, especially now that the drummers have agreed to drum only during reasonable daylight hours. He’s fond of their rhythms, their ceaseless forward momentum, the way they can go for hours without a single pause. He tries to match their discipline, for he has a new project, a new book. He’d told Periwinkle about it after he was free of his contractual obligations.

“I’m writing my mother’s story,” Samuel said. “But I’m writing the true story. The actual events.”

“Which events in particular, I’m curious to know,” Periwinkle asked.

“All of them. It’s going to include everything. The whole story. From her childhood to the present day.”

“So it’s going to be like six hundred pages and ten people will read it? Congratulations.”

“That’s not why I’m writing.”

“Oh, you’re doing it for the art. You’re one of those now.”

“Something like that.”

“Names will have to be changed, you know. Essential identifying facts altered. I wouldn’t want to have to sue you again.”

“Would it be for libel or slander? I can never remember the difference.”

“It would be for libel and slander, plus defamation, invasion of privacy, scurrilous statements, loss of reputation, loss of business, personal anguish, and violating the competitive works clause in your contract with us. Plus lawyer fees, plus damages.”

“I’ll call it fiction,” Samuel said. “I’ll change the names. I’ll be sure to give you a really silly one.”

“How’s your mother?” Periwinkle asked.

“I wouldn’t know. Cold, I imagine.”

“Still in Norway?”

“Yes.”

“Among the reindeer and northern lights?”

“Yes.”

“I saw the northern lights once. In upper Alberta. I booked a trip with this outfit called See the Northern Lights! I had wanted the northern lights to fill me with wonder. And they did. They filled me with wonder. Which was a big letdown because they exactly matched my expectations of them. They did exactly what I’d paid for. Let that be a lesson to you.”

“A lesson about what?”

“Writing this big epic book of yours. And what you expect it to accomplish for you. Let the northern lights be a lesson. It’s a metaphor, of course.”

Samuel isn’t sure what he’s trying to accomplish. At first he thought if he gathered enough information he could eventually isolate the reason his mother left the family. But how could he ever really pin it down? Any one explanation seemed too easy, too trivial. So instead of looking for answers, he’d begun simply writing her story, thinking that if he could see the world the way she saw it, maybe he’d achieve something greater than mere answers: Maybe he’d achieve understanding, empathy, forgiveness. So he wrote about her childhood, about growing up in Iowa, about going to Chicago for college, about the protest in 1968, about that final month she was with the family before she disappeared, and the more he wrote the more expansive the story became. Samuel wrote about his mother and father and grandfather, he wrote about Bishop and Bethany and the headmaster, he wrote about Alice and the judge and Pwnage — he was trying to understand them, trying to see the things he was too self-absorbed to see the first time through. Even Laura Pottsdam, vicious Laura Pottsdam, Samuel tried to locate a little sympathy for her.

Laura Pottsdam, who at this moment is feeling really great about life and the world because her jerk of an English professor has been fired and replaced by this hapless grad student and her failed plagiarized Hamlet paper has disappeared into the academic mists, so this is all super cool and this whole episode totally confirms what her mother has been telling her since she was a kid, which is that she is a powerful woman who should get what she wants and if she wants something she should GO FOR IT, and what she wants right now are a few Jägerbombs to celebrate justice: The professor is gone, her career is saved. And she sees in this a glimpse of her future, the inevitable successful future laid out in front of her like a runway for an F-16, a future where if anyone tries to get in her way she will blow them to smithereens. This thing with the professor was her first big test, and she passed it. Spectacularly. This is most especially true when Laura’s S.A.F.E. initiative gains serious traction and some awesome shout-outs on the nightly news and in meetings of the Board of Regents, and her friends start telling her she should run for student senate next semester, which she’s like No frickin’ way until the Packer for President campaign comes to campus and Governor Packer himself wants to do a photo op with Laura because he’s super impressed with her efforts on behalf of hardworking Illinois taxpayers everywhere, saying, “Something must be done to protect our students and our wallets from these unproductive liberal professors in outdated fields.” And during the press conference some reporter asks Governor Packer what he thinks about Laura’s gumption and pluck, to which this totally famous presidential candidate responds: “I think she should run for president someday.”

So she switches her major. No more business communication and marketing. She promptly enrolls in the two majors she decides will most help her for a future possible presidential bid: political science and acting.

Samuel does not miss teaching students like Laura Pottsdam, but he does regret how he taught them. He winces at it now, how much he looked down on them. How eventually he could only see their flaws and weaknesses and shortcomings, the ways they did not live up to his standards. Standards that shifted so that the students would never meet them, because Samuel had grown so comfortable being angry. Anger was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn’t want to work too hard. Because his life in the summer of 2011 had been unfulfilling and going nowhere and he was so angry about it. Angry at his mother for leaving, angry at Bethany for not loving him, angry at his students for being uneducatable. He’d settled into the anger because the anger was so much easier than the work required to escape it. Blaming Bethany for not loving him was so much easier than the introspection needed to understand what he was doing that made him unlovable. Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them. And on any given day, it was so much easier to settle in front of his computer than to face his stagnant life, to actually face in a real way the hole inside him that his mother left when she abandoned him, and if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern, and your patterns become your life. He sank into Elfscape like a shipwreck into the water.

Years can go by in this manner, just as they had for Pwnage, who, at this moment, is finally opening his eyes.

He’s been sleeping for a month — the longest sustained “nap” ever recorded at the county hospital — and now he opens his eyes. His body is well-nourished, and his mind is well-rested, and his circulatory and digestive and lymphatic systems are more or less flushed out and operating normally, and he doesn’t feel that ringing headache and clawing hunger and stabbing joint pain and muscle tremor he usually feels. Actually he doesn’t feel any of the background pain that has been his constant companion for so long, and what this feels like to him is a miracle. Compared to how he usually feels, he decides he must either be dead or on drugs. Because there’s no way he could possibly feel this good if he weren’t on some serious drugs, or in heaven.

He looks around the hospital room and sees Lisa sitting on the couch. Lisa, his beautiful ex-wife, who smiles at him and hugs him and who’s carrying under her arm that tattered black leather notebook in which he’d written the first few pages of his detective novel. And she tells him that several packages have arrived from a big-shot New York publishing house with all this paperwork for him to sign, and when Pwnage asks her what the paperwork’s for she grins at him and says, “Your book deal!”

For this was another of Samuel’s conditions to Periwinkle, that Periwinkle publish his friend’s novel.

“And what is this novel about?” Periwinkle had asked.

“Um, a psychic detective on the trail of a serial killer?” Samuel said. “And the killer turns out to be the detective’s ex-wife’s boyfriend, I think, or son-in-law, or something.”

“Actually,” Periwinkle said, “that sounds amazing.”

Pwnage once told Samuel that the people in your life are either enemies, obstacles, puzzles, or traps. And for both Samuel and Faye, circa summer 2011, people were definitely enemies. Mostly what they wanted out of life was to be left alone. But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel’s written his book, the more he’s realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar.

This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.

And so he’s trying, Samuel is, trying to be diligent in this odd new life he has with Bethany. They are not lovers. They may one day become lovers, but they are not lovers yet. Samuel’s attitude about this is: Whatever happens, happens. He knows he can’t go back and relive his life, can’t change the mistakes of his past. His relationship with Bethany is not a Choose Your Own Adventure book. So instead he will do this: He will clarify it, illuminate it, try to understand it better. He can prevent his past from swallowing his present. So he’s trying to be in the moment, trying not to let the moment get all discolored by his fantasies of what the moment ought to be. He is trying to see Bethany as she really is. And isn’t that what everybody really wants? To be seen clearly? He’d always been obsessed with a few of Bethany’s qualities: her eyes, for example, and her posture. But then she told him one day that the feature she shared most closely with Bishop was her eyes, and so whenever she stares into a mirror at her eyes it makes her a little sad. And another time she told him her posture had been drilled into her by the endless Alexander Technique lessons she endured for years while other kids her age were playing on swing sets and running through sprinklers. After Samuel heard these stories, he could not go on thinking the same way about her eyes or posture. These things were diminished, but what he realized was that the whole was greatly expanded.

So he is beginning to see Bethany as she is, for maybe the first time.

His mother, too. He’s trying understand her, to see her clearly and not through the distortion of his own anger. The only lie Samuel ever told Periwinkle was that Faye had stayed in Norway. It seemed like a good lie to tell — if everyone believed she was in the arctic, then nobody would bother her. Because the truth is she returned home, to that little Iowa river town, to care for her father.

Frank Andresen’s dementia was pretty far along by then. When Faye saw him the first time and the nurse said “Your daughter’s here,” he looked at Faye with such wonder and surprise. He was so thin and skeletal. There were red spots on his forehead rubbed raw from scratching and picking. He looked at her like she was a ghost.

“Daughter?” he said. “What daughter?”

Which is the kind of thing Faye would have chalked up to battiness if she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t known there might be more to that question than simple confusion.

“It’s me, Dad,” she said, and she decided to take a risk. “It’s me, Freya.”

And the name registered somewhere deep down inside him and his face crumpled and he looked at her with anguish and despair. She went to him then and gathered his fragile body in her arms.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t be sad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking at her with an intensity unusual for a man who had spent his life avoiding the gaze of other people. “I’m so very sorry.”

“Everything turned out well. We all love you.”

“You do?”

“Everyone loves you so much.”

He looked at her very closely and studied her face a long time.

Fifteen minutes later the whole episode was lost. He caught himself in the middle of some story and looked at her pleasantly and said, “Now who are you, dear?”

But the moment seemed to shake something loose in him, seemed to uncork something important, because among the stories he’d tell now were stories of young Marthe, taking midnight strolls under a dimly lit sky, stories Faye had never heard before and stories that embarrassed the nurses because it was clear the walks were postcoital. Something seemed to lift inside him, some burden let go. Even the nurses said so.

So Faye is renting a small apartment close to the nursing home and each morning she walks over and spends the whole day with her father. Sometimes he recognizes her, but most of the time he doesn’t. He tells old ghost stories, or stories about the ChemStar factory, or stories of fishing the Norwegian Sea. And every once in a while he’ll see her and by the look on his face she understands that he’s really seeing Freya. And when this happens she soothes him and hugs him and tells him everything turned out well, and she describes the farm when he asks about it, and when she describes it she does so grandly — not just barley in the front yard but whole fields of wheat and sunflowers. He smiles. He’s picturing it. It makes him happy to hear this. It makes him happy when she says, “I forgive you. We all forgive you.”

“But why?”

“Because you’re a good man. You did the best you could.”

And it’s true. He did. He was a good man. As good a father as he could be. Faye had simply never seen it before. Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.

So this is what she can do for him now, comfort him and keep him company and forgive and forgive and forgive. She cannot save his body or his mind, but she can lighten his soul.

They talk for a while and then he needs to nap, sometimes falling asleep mid-sentence. Faye reads while he sleeps, making her way once again through the collected poetry of Allen Ginsberg. And sometimes Samuel phones her, and when he does she’ll put the book away and answer his questions, all his big terrifying questions: Why did she leave Iowa? And college? And her husband? And her son? She tries to answer honestly and thoroughly, even though it’s frightening for her. It is literally the first time in her life she is not hiding some great piece of herself, and she feels so exposed that it’s close to panic. She has never before given herself over to anyone — she’d always parceled herself out little by little. This bit for Samuel, some small part for her father, barely anything for Henry. She’d never put all of herself in just one place. It felt too risky. Because her great and constant fear all these years was that if anyone ever came to know all of her — the real her, the true deep essential Faye — they would not find enough stuff there to love. Hers was not a soul large enough to nourish another.

But now she’s trusting Samuel with everything. She answers his questions. She holds nothing back. Even when her answers make the panic boil up within her — that Samuel will think she’s a terrible person, that he’ll stop calling — still she tells him the truth. And just when she thinks his interest in her must be exhausted, just when her answers prove that she’s a person unworthy of his love, what actually happens is quite the opposite. He seems more interested, calls more often. And sometimes he calls to talk — not about her ugly past but about how her day went, or about the weather, or the news. It makes her hope that someday soon they’ll be two people encountering each other sincerely, without the disfigurement of their history, minus all her immutable mistakes.

She’ll be patient. She knows she can’t force a thing like that. She’ll wait, and she’ll take care of her father, and she’ll answer her son’s many questions. And when Samuel wants to know her secrets, she’ll tell him her secrets. And when he wants to talk about the weather, she’ll talk about the weather. And when he wants to talk about the news, she’ll talk about the news. She flips on the television to see what’s happening in the world. Today it’s all about unemployment, global deleveraging, recession. People are panicked. Uncertainty is at an all-time high. A crisis is looming.

But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all — just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid.

If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.

So banks and governments are cleaning up their ledgers after years of abuse. Everyone owes too much, is the consensus, and we’re in for a few years of pain. But Faye thinks: Okay. That’s probably the way it ought to be. That’s the natural way of things. That’s how we’ll find our way back. This is what she’ll tell her son, if he asks. Eventually, all debts must be repaid.