The Nix

1

SAMUEL STOOD at the threshold of his mother’s apartment, his hand on the slightly ajar front door, readying himself to open it but not yet feeling able to. “Don’t be scared,” his mother had said. It had been more than twenty years since she last uttered those words to him, and ever since that morning he’d felt haunted by her, always imagining that she was around, spying on him from a distance. He’d check the windows at odd moments and scan crowds for her face. He lived his life wondering what he looked like from the outside, to his mother, who might be watching.

But she never was watching. And it took a long time for Samuel to remove her from his thoughts.

She had been a quiet sleeping memory until this moment, and he tried to calm himself and center himself by repeating some of the advice he’d found last night as he scanned those websites: Start fresh. Don’t insult each other. Maintain boundaries. Go slowly. Have a support network. And the number one thing, the big primary commandment: Be prepared for your parent to be radically different from the person you remember.

And it was true. She was different. Samuel walked into her apartment finally and found her sitting at a large wooden table near the kitchen, waiting for him like a receptionist. There were three glasses of water on the table. And a briefcase. There were three chairs. She sat looking at him — not smiling, not having any reaction at all to his presence, just simply waiting, her hands in her lap. The long brown mane of her hair had been replaced by a short cut of military severity, turned to such a silver that it looked like a bathing cap. Her skin was wrinkled in that way common to people who have lost weight — under her arms, around her mouth, near her eyes. He was not expecting these wrinkles, and realized that in his imagination he had not been picturing his mother aging. He had to remind himself that she was, by now, sixty-one years old. She wore a simple black tank top that revealed the bony knobs of her shoulders and her thin upper arms. He worried suddenly that she hadn’t been eating, then felt surprised to feel this way, worried.

“Come in,” she said.

There wasn’t any other sound. His mother’s apartment had a penetrating silence rarely found in the city. She stared at him. He stared back. He did not sit down. There was something unbearable about being too close to her right now. She opened her mouth as if to say something but then did not say it. His mind emptied completely.

A noise came from another room just then: a toilet flushing, a faucet turned on and off. Then the bathroom door opened and out stepped a man in a white button-down shirt and a brown tie and brown slacks that were not exactly the same shades of brown. When he saw Samuel, he said “Professor Anderson sir!” and offered a damp hand for shaking. “I’m Simon Rogers,” the man said, “of Rogers and Rogers? Your mother’s attorney? We spoke on the phone.”

Samuel looked at him for a moment, confused. The lawyer smiled pleasantly. He was a thin and short man with unusually broad shoulders. His brown hair was clipped close and arranged into the unartful and inevitable M-shape of early-onset male-pattern baldness. Samuel said, “We need a lawyer for this?”

“I’m afraid that was my idea,” he said. “I insist on being present any time my client is being deposed. It’s part of my service.”

“This isn’t a deposition,” Samuel said.

“Not from your point of view. But of course you’re not the one being deposed.”

The lawyer clapped his hands together and moseyed to the table. He snapped open his briefcase and produced a small microphone, which he placed at the table’s center. That his shirt fit his big shoulders but hung broadly on the rest of him made him look, Samuel realized, like a kid dressing in his dad’s stuff.

“My role here,” the lawyer said, “is to protect my client’s interests — legal, fiduciary, emotional.”

“You’re the one who asked me to come,” Samuel said.

“Indeed, sir! And the important thing to remember is that we’re all on the same team. You agreed to write a letter to the judge explaining why your mother deserves lenience. My job is to help with said letter and make sure you are not here under, shall we say, false pretenses?”

“Unbelievable,” Samuel said, but he wasn’t sure what was more unbelievable: that the lawyer suspected Samuel of deceit, or that the lawyer was right. Because Samuel had no intention of writing any letter to a judge. He had come today to satisfy his contract with Periwinkle, to gather dirt on his mother so that he could, eventually, malign her publicly for money.

“The purpose of today’s inquiry,” the lawyer said, “is primarily to understand your mother’s actions regarding her brave protest against the former governor of Wyoming. And, secondarily, to explicate why she’s a great person. Everything else, sir, is outside our strict scope of interest. Would you like some water? Juice?”

Faye remained sitting and silent, not participating but still taking up all the space in Samuel’s mind. He felt wary of her like he’d feel wary of a buried land mine he knew the approximate, but not exact, location of.

“Shall we sit?” the lawyer said, and together they joined Faye at the table, a rectangular table made of weathered wooden planks that probably had seen another life as a fence or barn. Three water glasses sat sweating onto cork coasters. The lawyer sat and adjusted his tie, which was mahogany-colored, as opposed to his more cocoa pants. He placed both his hands on his briefcase and smiled. Faye kept staring in her neutral, detached, indifferent way. She looked as austere and unfussy and bleak as the apartment itself — a single long space with a bank of windows facing north toward the tall buildings of downtown Chicago. The walls were white and bare. There was no television. There was no computer. The furniture was simple and restrained. Samuel noted the total lack of things that needed to be plugged in. It was as though she had ejected all unnecessary things from her life.

Samuel sat across from her and nodded like he might nod to a stranger on the street: slight downward tilt of the chin.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

Another nod.

“How have you been?” she asked.

He did not answer her immediately, but instead glared at her with an expression he hoped projected steely resolve and coldness. “Fine,” he finally said. “Just fine.”

“Good,” she said. “And your father?”

“He’s great.”

“Well okay then!” the lawyer said. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way.” He laughed nervously. “Why don’t we go ahead and begin?” Small beads of sweat were now manifesting on his forehead. He picked involuntarily at his shirt, which was not exactly white, but that gray-white of something that’s been washed many times, with definite yellow discoloring at the armpits.

“Now, Professor Anderson, sir, this would be an ideal moment to ask your question regarding our primary interest today.” The lawyer reached across the table and pressed a button on the microphone that sat between Samuel and his mother. A small diode on the microphone glowed a placid blue.

“And what question would that be?” Samuel said.

“Regarding your mother’s heroic protest against tyranny, sir.”

“Right.” Samuel looked at her. Up close like this, he found it difficult to reconcile this new person with the woman he used to know. She seemed to have lost all the softness of her former self — her long soft hair and soft arms and soft skin. A new, harder body had replaced all that. Samuel could see the outline of her jaw muscles just below the skin. The ripple her collarbone made across her chest. The swell of her biceps. Her arms were like ropes that ships use to dock with.

“Okay, fine,” Samuel said. “Why did you do it? Why did you throw rocks at Governor Packer?”

His mother looked at the lawyer, who popped open his briefcase and fished out a single sheet of paper, dense with text on one side, which he handed to Faye and which she read verbatim.

“Regarding my actions toward Republican presidential candidate and former Wyoming governor Sheldon Packer, hereinafter referred to simply as ‘the governor,’ ” she said, and she cleared her throat, “I do hereby attest, maintain, swear, certify, and solemnly affirm that my throwing gravel in the direction of the governor should in no way be construed as an attempt to hurt, assault, injure, batter, maim, cripple, deform, mangle, or otherwise create a reasonable apprehension of an imminent harmful or offensive contact with the governor nor anyone the gravel may have had inadvertent physical exposure with, nor was it my intention to inflict emotional distress, pain, suffering, misery, anguish, or trauma to anyone who witnessed or was otherwise affected by my purely political and symbolic actions. My actions were a necessary and essential and knee-jerk response to the governor’s fascist politics and therefore, having no alternative with regards to the time, place, or manner of my response, not volitional, the governor’s extreme right-wing, pro-gun, pro-war, pro-violence rhetoric having put me under unusual and substantial duress to such a degree as to constitute a reasonable belief on my behalf of bodily harm to my person. I also believed that the governor’s relentless and fetishistic law-and-order pro-violence stance implied consent to engage in violent roughhousing-type behavior in much the same way people who engage in sadomasochism for sexual gratification consent to being struck without criminal or civil liability. I chose gravel as the vehicle of my symbolic protest because my unathletic and crime-free background in which I was never trained in a ball-throwing sport meant that the danger posed by my casting tiny stones represented de minimis harm and therefore the gravel was definitely not a dangerous, deadly, or aggravated weapon that I in no way used to purposely, knowingly, negligently, menacingly, recklessly, or with indifference to the value of human life cause bodily injury. My purpose instead was solely, entirely, wholly, and altogether in every respect political, to communicate a political speech act that was neither inciting nor provocative nor offensive nor presenting clear danger, a symbolic speech similar to protestors legally exercising their free speech rights by desecrating the flag or mutilating a draft card, et cetera.”

Faye laid the paper on the table, carefully and deliberately, like it was something fragile.

“Excellent!” said the lawyer. His face had grown red, a subtle but noticeable change from his previous pallor, which Samuel would describe as plastic-baby creamy yellow. Blobs of sweat now clung to his forehead, like the way paint on exterior walls can bubble on a very hot day. “Now that we’re all clear on that front, let’s take a little break.” The lawyer switched off the microphone. “Excuse me,” he said, and headed to the bathroom.

“He does that,” Faye said, watching him go. “He apparently needs to use the bathroom every five to ten minutes. That’s just his deal.”

“What the hell was that all about?” Samuel said.

“I’m guessing he goes to the bathroom to towel off the sweat. He’s a very moist man. But he also does something in there involving quite a lot of toilet paper, I’m not sure what.”

“Seriously,” Samuel said, grabbing the paper and looking at it, “I have no idea what any of this means.”

“He also has the tiniest feet. Have you noticed?”

“Faye, listen,” he said, and they both flinched at the use of her name. It was the first time he’d ever done that. “What is going on?”

“Okay. Fine. Here’s what I understand. My case is a seriously complicated one. Many charges of assault and several other charges of battery. Aggravated. First degree. I guess I scared a bunch of people in the park — those are the assaults — but the rocks only struck a few of them — those are the batteries. Plus also charges of, let’s see”—she ticked these off on her fingers one by one—“disturbing the peace, public lewdness, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest. The prosecutor is being unusually aggressive, egged on by the judge, we believe.”

“Judge Charles Brown.”

“That’s him! The sentence for aggravated battery, by the way, is somewhere in between three hundred hours of community service and twenty-five years in prison.”

“That’s a pretty wide range.”

“The judge has a lot of discretion in sentencing. So you know that letter you’re writing to him?”

“Yeah.”

“It better be pretty damn good.”

A whoosh of plumbing now, and the bathroom door opened and the lawyer returned, smiling, wiping his hands on his pants. Faye was right: He had the smallest feet Samuel had ever seen on an adult male.

“Fantastic!” the lawyer said. “This is going really well.” How could he keep steady with those broad shoulders and those tiny feet? He was like a pyramid balancing upside down.

The lawyer sat and drummed his fingers on his briefcase. “On to part two!” he said. He turned on the microphone. “Our new subject, sir, is why your mother is an excellent human being with regards to why she shouldn’t go to prison for upward of twenty years.”

“That’s not really a possibility, right?”

“I believe not, sir, but I’d like to cover all my bases, obviously. Now, would you like to hear about your mother’s charitable giving?”

“I’m sort of more interested in what she’s been up to these last couple decades.”

“The public schools, sir. She’s doing some really excellent work in the public schools. Plus poetry? A real advocate for the arts, let me tell you.”

“This part is going to be tricky for me,” Samuel said. “This whole ‘excellent human being’ part, no offense.”

“And why is that, sir?”

“Well, what am I going to tell the judge? That she’s a great person? A wonderful mother?”

The lawyer smiled. “That’s right. Exactly that.”

“I don’t think that’s something I could truthfully say.”

“And why not?”

Samuel looked from the lawyer to his mother and back again. “Seriously?”

The lawyer nodded, still smiling.

“My mother abandoned me when I was eleven!”

“Yes, sir, and as you can probably imagine it’s best that as little of that information about that part of her life reach the public as possible.”

“She abandoned me without any warning.”

“Perhaps, sir, for our purposes, sir, you shouldn’t think of it as your mother abandoned you. Instead, perhaps think of it as she gave you up for adoption slightly later than usual.”

The lawyer opened his briefcase and produced a pamphlet. “Your mother actually did a lot more legwork than most birth mothers do,” he said, “in terms of looking into prospective adoptee families and ensuring her child landed in a positive environment and such. From a certain standpoint, I’d say her diligence in this matter could be considered above and beyond.”

He handed Samuel the pamphlet. The cover was bright pink with pictures of smiling multicultural families and the words So You’re Adopted! at the top in bubbly type.

“I wasn’t adopted,” Samuel said.

“Not literally, sir.”

The lawyer was sweating again, a shiny film on his skin like what you might find on the ground on a dewy morning. A smear of liquid had now also appeared under his armpit and down his sleeve. It looked like his shirt was being swallowed slowly by a jellyfish.

Samuel looked at his mother, who gave him a sort of shrug like What are you going to do? Behind her, out the bank of windows looking north, was the great gray face of the Sears Tower, hazy in the smoggy distance. It used to be the tallest building in the world, but it no longer was. It wasn’t even in the top five. Come to think of it, it wasn’t even called the Sears Tower anymore.

“It’s quiet in here,” Samuel said.

His mother frowned. “What?”

“No traffic noise, no people noise. It’s very isolated.”

“Oh. They were renovating the building when the housing market collapsed,” she said. “They had only done a couple of units when they just left it, unfinished.”

“So you’re the only one in the building?”

“There’s a married couple two floors up. Bohemian artist types. We mostly ignore each other.”

“Sounds lonely.”

She studied his face for a moment. “It suits me,” she said.

“You know, I’d done a pretty good job forgetting about you,” Samuel said. “Until these recent events.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. I’d say you were pretty much forgotten, until this week.”

She smiled and looked at the tabletop in front of her — a sort of inward smile that suggested some private thought now occurring to her. She swept the table with her palms, as if she were cleaning it.

“What we think of as forgetting really isn’t,” she said. “Not strictly speaking. We never actually forget things. We only lose the path back to them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I read this thing recently,” she said. “There was this study about how memory works. This team of physiologists, molecular biologists, neurologists, they were trying to figure out where we keep our memories. I think it was in Nature. Or Neuron. Or JAMA.”

“A little light reading?”

“I have many interests. Anyway, what they discovered is that our memories are tangible, physical things. Like, you can actually see the cell where each memory is stored. The way it works is, first, you have a perfectly pristine, untouched cell. Then that cell is zapped and gets all deformed and mangled. And that mutilation is, itself, the memory. It never really goes away.”

“Fascinating,” Samuel said.

“I’m pretty sure it was in Nature, now that I think about it.”

“You’re serious?” Samuel said. “I’m baring my soul here and you’re talking about a study you read about?”

“I liked the metaphor,” Faye said. “And besides, you weren’t baring your soul. Not even close, not yet.”

The lawyer cleared his throat. “Perhaps we should return to our topic?” he said. “Professor Anderson, sir? If you’d like to begin your direct examination?”

Samuel stood up. He paced one way, then another. There was a single small bookcase along the wall, and this is where he went. He could feel his mother’s eyes boring into his back as he inspected the shelves: mostly poetry, a large collection of Allen Ginsberg. Samuel realized that what he was really looking for was a copy of the famous magazine his story was published in. He realized this when he felt disappointed not to see it.

He spun around. “Here’s what I’d like to know.”

“Sir?” the lawyer said. “You’re out of microphone range?”

“I’d like to know what you’ve been doing these twenty years. And where you went when you left us.”

“That, sir, is probably outside the scope of our inquiry.”

“And all this business about you in the sixties. Getting arrested. What they’re saying about you on TV—”

“You want to know if it’s all true,” Faye said.

“Yes.”

“Was I a radical? Was I in the protest movement?”

“Yes.”

“Was I arrested for prostitution?”

“Yes. There’s about a month of 1968 unaccounted for. I had always thought you were in Iowa, at home, with Grandpa Frank, waiting for Dad to come back from the army. But you weren’t.”

“No.”

“You were in Chicago.”

“For a very short time, yes. Then I left.”

“I want to know what happened.”

“Hah-hah!” the lawyer said, and did a little drumroll on his briefcase. “I think we’ve traveled slightly far afield, yes? Now perhaps we could get back to our subject?”

“But you have other questions, right?” Faye said. “Even bigger questions?”

“We could get to those. In time,” Samuel said.

“Why wait? Let’s get it all out in the open right now. Go on and ask me. There’s only one real question.”

“We could begin with the photograph. The photo taken of you at that protest, in 1968.”

“But that’s not why you’re here. Ask your real question. The thing you came here to find out.”

“I came here to write a letter to the judge.”

“You did not. Go ahead. Ask your question.”

“It’s not relevant.”

“Just ask. Do it.”

“It’s not important. It’s nothing—”

“I’d agree with that!” the lawyer cut in. “Immaterial.”

“Shut up, Simon,” Faye said, then leveled her eyes at Samuel. “This question is everything. It’s why you’re here. Now why don’t you stop lying and ask it.”

“Okay. Fine. I want to know. Why did you leave me?”

And Samuel could feel the cry coming almost as soon as he said it: Why did you leave me? The question that had tormented his adolescence. He used to tell people she was dead. When they would ask about his mother, it was easier to say she’d died. Because when he told them the truth, they’d wonder why she left and where she’d gone and he didn’t know. Then they’d look at him funny, like it was his fault. Why did she leave him? It was the question that kept him awake night after night until he learned to swallow it and deny it. But asking the question now let it break back out — the shame and loneliness and self-pity washed over the question so that he was barely able to pronounce the last word before his throat tightened and he could feel himself on the verge of crying.

They considered each other for a moment, Samuel and his mother, before the lawyer leaned across the table and whispered something into her ear. Then her defiance seemed to fizzle. She looked into her lap.

“Perhaps we should return to our topic?” the lawyer said.

“I think I deserve some answers,” Samuel said.

“Perhaps we could get back to the subject of your letter, sir?”

“I’m not expecting to be best friends,” Samuel said. “But answering a few questions? Is that too much to ask?”

Faye crossed her arms and seemed to curl into herself. The lawyer stared at Samuel and waited. The sweat blobs on his forehead had grown thick and bulbous. At any moment, they could rain down into his eyes.

“The thing about that article in Nature?” Faye said. “The one about memory? What really struck me was how our memories are sewn into the meat of the brain. Everything we know about our past is literally etched into us.”

“Okay,” Samuel said. “What’s your point?”

She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples, a gesture of impatience and irritation that Samuel recognized from his childhood.

“Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “Every memory is really a scar.”

The lawyer slapped the top of his briefcase and said, “Okay! I think we’re done here!”

“You haven’t answered any of my questions,” Samuel said. “Why did you leave me? What happened to you in Chicago? Why did you keep it secret? What have you been doing all these years?”

And Faye looked at him then, and all the hardness in her body dissolved. She gave him that same look she’d given him the morning she disappeared, her face full of grief.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”

“I need this,” Samuel said. “You don’t even understand how much. I need to know.”

“I’ve given you all I can.”

“But you haven’t told me anything. Please, why did you go?”

“I can’t,” she said. “It’s private.”

“Private? Seriously?”

Faye nodded and looked at the tabletop. “It’s private,” she said again.

Samuel crossed his arms. “You goad me into asking this question and then you say it’s private? Fuck you.”

Then the lawyer was gathering his things, turning off the microphone, sweat dropping onto his shirt collar. “Thank you so much, Professor Anderson, for all your efforts,” he said.

“I didn’t think you could get any lower, Faye, but congratulations,” Samuel said, standing up. “Really, you’re like a virtuoso. A maestro of being awful.”

“We’ll be in touch!” the lawyer said. He ushered Samuel toward the front door, pushed him from behind with a warm, wet hand. “We will be in contact to touch base about how we can move forward.” He opened the door and walked Samuel through it. Liquid BBs hung on to the skin of his forehead. The area under his armpit was now a soggy mess, as if he’d spilled a movie-theater-size drink there. “We’re very excited to read your letter to Judge Brown,” he said. “And good day!”

He closed the door behind Samuel and locked it.

All the way out of the building, and for the whole long ride back through Chicago and into the suburbs, Samuel felt like he was going to crumble. He remembered the advice from those websites: Have a support network. He needed to talk to someone. But who? Not his father, clearly. Not anyone from work. The only people he regularly communicated with were his Elfscape friends. So, once home, he logged on. He was greeted by the usual barrage of Hey Dodger! and Good to see ya! He asked a question in guild chat: Any of you Chicago folks want to meet up tonight? I feel like going out.

Which was met with an embarrassed silence. Samuel understood he’d crossed a boundary. He’d asked to meet in real life, a request usually made only by creeps and stalkers. He was about to apologize and tell them all to forget it when Pwnage, their brilliant leader, the guild’s Elfscape savant, finally, mercifully, wrote back.

Sure. I know a place.

2

LAURA POTTSDAM SAT in the frightening office of the university dean, explaining exactly what had transpired between herself and Samuel. “He told me I didn’t have a learning disability,” Laura said. “He told me I just wasn’t very smart.”

“Oh my goodness,” the dean said, looking stricken. Her office shelves were filled mostly with books about the Black Death, her walls decorated with old-looking illustrations of people suffering from boils or lesions or being piled into wheelbarrows, dead. Laura had not thought any wall art was more insufferable than her roommate’s giant weight-loss calendar, but the dean’s apparent interest in the history of open sores proved her totally wrong.

“Samuel really said, out loud, that you weren’t smart?”

“It was a pretty big blow to my self-esteem.”

“Yes, I’d imagine.”

“I am an elite college student with a perfect GPA. He can’t tell me I’m not smart.”

“I think you’re very smart, Laura.”

“Thank you.”

“And you should know I take this very seriously.”

“I might also mention that Professor Anderson sometimes curses in class. It’s really distracting and offensive.”

“Okay, here’s what we can do,” the dean said. “Why don’t you rewrite your Hamlet paper for a new grade. Meanwhile, I’ll smooth things over with Professor Anderson. Does that sound like a plan?”

“Yes, that sounds like a great plan.”

“And if there’s anything else I need to know, please call me directly.”

“Okay,” Laura said, and she walked out of the administration building feeling the bright, buoyant warmth that accompanies victory.

It was a feeling that lasted only briefly, only until she cracked open her Shakespeare and sat on her dorm-room floor looking forlornly at all those words and realized she was right back where she started: trying to complete yet another worthless assignment for yet another worthless class, Intro to Lit, one of five classes she was enrolled in this semester, all of which were, in her opinion, bullshit. Just totally stupid time sucks that had nothing to do with real life, was what she thought about college classes, so far. And by “real life” she meant the tasks she’d be asked to perform upon graduation with a bachelor’s degree in business, tasks she couldn’t even really guess at now since she hadn’t taken any advanced communication and marketing classes and hadn’t held an internship or “real job” ever, unless you counted her high-school gig working part-time at the concession stand at a second-run movie theater, where she learned several important lessons about workplace etiquette from a thirty-two-year-old assistant manager who liked staying after hours to smoke weed and play strip poker with the pretty teenage girls he always hired, which required of her a careful social negotiation to continue having access to the weed without doing anything so retrograde she couldn’t show her face at work the next day. But even if this was the only quote-unquote work experience she’d ever had, she was still pretty sure her inevitably successful future career in marketing and communications would not require the stupid shit she was currently learning in college.

Like Hamlet. She was trying to read Hamlet, trying to form a thought for an essay she had to rewrite about Hamlet. But the thing that was more interesting to her right now was a fistful of paper clips that she tossed lightly into the air and then watched as they bounced and scattered all over the linoleum of her dorm-room floor. This was more fun than reading Hamlet. Because even though every paper clip was shaped exactly like every other paper clip, they bounced in chaotic, random, unduplicatable ways. Why didn’t they bounce exactly the same? Why didn’t they all land in the same place? Plus there was that delicious click-chhh sound when they all hit the floor and slid. She had lofted the paper clips into the air roughly fifteen to twenty times in the last few minutes — a pretty transparent Hamlet-reading stalling maneuver, she had to admit — when her phone dinged. A new message!

Heeeeeeeeeeeey honey

From Jason. And she could tell by the several iterations of the letter e that he was feeling that very special urgent way tonight. Boyfriends were so transparent sometimes.

Hey!:-D

The reason college was so stupid was due to learning things she would never need in life, ever. Like knowledge of Greek statuary, for example, such as she was memorizing for the Intro to Humanities class that was required of every student and that the university offered online. This was such a dumb waste of time because she was sure when she interviewed for her first real job they would not show her flash cards of statues and ask “What myth does this represent?” which was what she had to do in the timed two-minute weekly quizzes the class required and that were such a total joke—

Her phone chirped. It was an update on iFeel, the excellent new app that was the social media darling du jour among the college set. Laura’s friends were all on it, and used it obsessively, and would abandon it as soon as it was discovered by the late-adopters, meaning old people.

Laura looked at her phone. iFeel happy tonight!!! one of her friends had posted. It was Brittany, who had so far survived the several purges Laura had made to her Alert List.

The phone asked: Do you want to Ignore, Respond, or Autocare?

Laura selected Autocare. Placed the phone back on the floor, on the paper clips.

What had she been thinking about? Right, the art quizzes, which were a total joke because all she had to do was scroll through the quiz taking screen-grabs along the way and then unplug her modem, which the test interpreted as a “crash” or “network failure” (i.e., not her fault), thus allowing her to take the quiz again. So she looked up all the answers and plugged in the modem and aced the quiz and didn’t have to think about Greek statuary for another week.

Then there was biology, which pretty much made Laura gag just thinking about it. Because she was pretty sure the first week of her powerful marketing and communications job that she would someday have would not require her to identify the chemical chain reaction that converted a photon of light to photosynthesized sugar, such as she was currently memorizing in her Intro to Biology class that she was stupidly forced to take in order to satisfy a science requirement even though hello? she wasn’t going to be a scientist? Plus the professor was so dry and boring and the lectures so unbearable—

Her phone dinged again. A message from Brittany: Thanx girl!! Responding to whatever message iFeel selected to Autocare with, obviously. And because Laura was in the middle of studying and trying really hard to read Hamlet she decided not to engage and instead sent back the universal glyph signifying the end of a conversation:

:)

Anyway the biology lectures were so unbearable she’d begun paying her roommate twenty bucks a week to record herself reading aloud from the important parts of the textbook so Laura could listen to the recording during the biweekly chapter tests, when she sat inconspicuously next to the wall about halfway down in the three-hundred-person lecture hall and slipped one small earbud into the wall-side ear and leaned against the wall and listened to her roommate reading the chapter while scanning the test for keywords, vaguely impressed by her own multitasking skills and her ability to pass the test without ever studying once.

“You’re not using this to cheat, are you?” her roommate asked a few weeks into the operation.

“No. It’s so I can study. At the gym,” Laura said.

“Because cheating is wrong.”

“I know.”

“And I’ve never seen you exercise.”

“I do exercise.”

“I’m at the gym all the time and I’ve never seen you there.”

“Well, rats’ eggs on you!” Laura said, which was something her mother always said instead of cursing. Something else her mother always said is Don’t let anyone EVER bully you or make you feel bad about yourself, and at that moment her roommate was making her feel very bad indeed, which was why instead of apologizing Laura said, “Listen, feeb, if you haven’t seen me at the gym it’s ’cuz some of us don’t need to be there as long as you do,” because her roommate was, let’s face it, objectively morbidly (almost fascinatingly) obese. She had legs like sacks of potatoes. For real.

The word “feeb” was something she made up on the spot and felt pretty proud of, actually, how sometimes a nickname can capture a person’s essence like that.

Her phone dinged.

Whatcha doin 2nite?

Jason again, probing. He was never as obvious as when he wanted to sext.

Homework:’(

The only class Laura was taking this semester that related in any way to her future was her one business class, macroeconomics, which was so abstractly mathematical and had basically nothing to do with the “human element” of business, which was really why she was going into this field at all, because she liked people and she was good with people and she maintained a huge cavalry of online contacts who texted her and messaged her several times daily through the many social media sites she kept a presence on, which made her phone ding all day, repeatedly, the sound like a spoon lightly tapped against a crystal goblet, these pure high singing notes that made her feel bolts of Pavlovian happiness.

And that was why she was a business major.

But macroeconomics was so stupid and boring and unnecessary for her future career that she did not feel at all bad collaborating with a boy from her orientation group, a graphic design major and Photoshop artist who could, for example, scan the label of a Lipton Green Tea bottle, erase the ingredients list (a surprisingly long and sciencey thing for something that claimed to be “tea”), and replace the ingredients with an answer key to the test — all the formulas and concepts they were supposed to have memorized — matching exactly the original Lipton typeface and color so that there was no way the teacher would ever know she had all the test answers in front of her except by reading the ingredients list on her Lipton Green Tea. Fat chance, in other words. This boy was quasi-repaid with hugs that were maybe a little too tight and too close, as well as bi-semester visits to his dorm room downstairs when she “forgot” the key to her own room while going for a shower and so had nothing to do but crash at his place wearing only her favorite tiny towel.

Did Laura feel bad about all this cheating? She did not. That the school made it so easy to cheat meant, for her, that they tacitly approved of it, and moreover it was actually the school’s fault for making her cheat by (a) giving her so many opportunities, and (b) making her take so many bullshit courses.

Example: Hamlet. Trying to read stupid Hamlet again—

Her phone chirped. Another iFeel update. It was Vanessa: iFeel scared about all this terrible economic news!!! Which was exactly the kind of boring update that got you taken right off the Alert List. Laura selected Ignore. One strike against Vanessa.

Anyway trying to read Hamlet and identify “logical fallacies” in Hamlet’s course of action, which was such bullshit because she knew for a fact that when she interviewed for executive vice president of communications and marketing for a major corporation they would not ask her about Hamlet. They would not ask her about logical fallacies. She had tried to read Hamlet but it kept getting all gummed up in her brain:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on’t! ah fie!

What the fuck is that?

Who talks like that? And who said this was great literature? Because mostly from what she could tell in the few places where Shakespeare actually wrote in English was that Hamlet’s just stupid and depressed, which she was like if you’re sad and depressed and cheesed about something it’s probably your own dumb fault and why did she have to sit here and listen to you wallow in it? Plus there was the matter of her phone, which chimed and squawked and dinged roughly ten times per soliloquy and made her feel mentally encumbered trying to read stupid Hamlet knowing there was an update just sitting there waiting for her. It was a chiming sound for a text message but a birdlike chirping sound whenever her closest seventy-five friends updated their iFeel status, was how she’d programmed the phone. At first, she set it to alert her when any of her iFeel friends posted anything, but she quickly realized this was untenable given her thousand-plus friend roll, making the phone look something like a stock ticker and sound like an Audubon sanctuary. So she culled the Alert List to a more manageable seventy-five, though this list was a fluid, ever-changing one as she spent at least a couple of hours weekly reevaluating it and swapping some people out for others on the bubble using an intuitive sort of regression analysis based on several metrics, including the interestingness and frequency of the friend’s recent posts, the number of hilarious pictures recently uploaded and tagged, the presence of anything political-ish in the friend’s status stream (political statements usually caused bickering, so anyone chronically guilty was ejected from the top seventy-five), and finally the friend’s ability to find and link to worthwhile internet videos, since finding, in any consistent manner, good internet videos was a skill like panning for gold, she thought, and so it was important to keep in one’s top list a couple of these people who could spot cool videos and memes before they went viral, which made her feel good vis-à-vis her place in the culture, seeing these things a day or a week before everyone else in the world. It made her feel like she was on the leading edge of everything. It was approximately the same feeling she had walking around the mall and seeing how every clothing store reflected exactly what she wanted right back at her. The photographs, poster-size, life-size, some even blown up bigger than that, showed attractive young girls just like her, in groups of attractive and racially kind of diverse friends that looked just like her friends, having fun in outdoor settings that she and her friends would totally go to if there were anything like that around here. And the feeling she had when she saw these images was that she was wanted. Everyone wanted her to like them. Everyone wanted to give her exactly what she desired. She never felt as secure as she did in dressing rooms rejecting clothes for not being good enough for her, breathing in the deep, gluey smell of the mall.

Her phone dinged. Jason again.

Ur at home?

Yep all alone feeb’s at the gym:-)

Only now there was this dumb English professor who seemed set on not giving her what she wanted. Who actually seemed intent on failing her. Not even her learning disability had persuaded him, to her dismay. The paperwork for this disability was on file at the Office of Adaptive Services. It was official, this learning disability, because of a particularly brilliant plan that was hatched at the beginning of the year, when her new plump roommate, who was on several medications for her truly severe ADHD problems, let slip how many legally mandated accommodations she was entitled to, including someone to take notes for her, extra time for quizzes and tests, extended deadlines, excused absences, and so on. In other words, complete freedom from the scrutiny of her professors that — even better! — was legally binding under the Americans with Disabilities Act. All Laura needed to do was answer a questionnaire in such a way as to trigger a certain diagnosis. Simple. She went down to the Office of Adaptive Services. The questionnaire was composed of twenty-five statements she had to either agree or disagree with. She figured it would be pretty obvious what she needed to lie about, but once she started the questionnaire she was troubled by how true some of the statements were, such as: I have trouble remembering things I just read. Yes, she did! That was true almost every time she was asked to read an actual printed book. Or: I find myself daydreaming when I’m supposed to be paying attention. Which was something that happened to her literally dozens of times per class. She started feeling queasy that there might be something actually wrong with her until she got deeper into the questionnaire:

The thought of homework makes me feel panicked and stressed.

I have trouble making friends.

The stress of school sometimes gives me unbearable headaches and/or indigestion.

None of these things were a hundred percent true, and this made her feel more or less normal again, such that when she was diagnosed with severe learning disabilities she felt really good about herself, like when she interviewed for that movie theater job and got it immediately, that same sense of accomplishment. She did not feel guilty about playing the learning disability card, since she had answered several of the statements on the questionnaire honestly, making her roughly ten percent learning disabled, plus her classes were so boring and stupid and impossible to pay attention to that she added another forty-five percent to that as a kind of de facto environmental learning block, making her fifty-five percent learning disabled, which she then rounded up.

She tossed a handful of paper clips approximately three feet into the air and watched as they began spiraling away from each other as they flew. She thought if she could practice this enough she could achieve perfect paper-clip symmetry. She could toss them in such a way that they’d go up and down as a single aggregate lump.

The paper clips sprinkled themselves across the floor. Hamlet said,

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

This was such a waste of time.

She had one move left, one more bullet in the chamber. She dialed the dean’s number.

“Professor Anderson is not creating ideal conditions for my education,” she said once she had the dean on the line. “I don’t feel like his classroom is a good place to learn.”

“I see,” the dean said. “I see. Could you explain why?”

“I do not feel I can express my individual viewpoint.”

“And why is that, specifically?”

“I feel like Professor Anderson does not value my unique perspective.”

“Well, maybe we should have a meeting with him then.”

“It is not a safe space.”

“I’m sorry, what?” the dean said. Laura could almost hear the woman sitting up straighter in her chair.

Safe space. It was the current buzzword on campus. She wasn’t even entirely sure what it meant, but she knew it tended to tweak the ears of university administrators.

“His classroom does not feel safe,” Laura said. “It is not a safe space.”

“Oh my.”

“Feels abusive, actually.”

“Oh my.”

“I’m not saying he is abusive or has quote-unquote abused me,” Laura said. “I’m saying it is my perception that in his classroom I am fearful of encountering abuse.”

“I see. I see.”

“I cannot emotionally deal with writing my Hamlet paper, and the reason is because he has not created a safe space in which I feel okay expressing my actual true self to him.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Writing a paper for Professor Anderson triggers negative feelings of stress and vulnerability. It feels oppressive. If I write a paper using my own words he’ll give me a bad grade and I’ll feel bad about myself. Do you think I should have to feel bad about myself in order to get a degree?”

“No, not necessarily,” the dean said.

“Me neither. I would hate to have to reveal this situation to the student newspaper,” Laura said. “Or post about it on my blog. Or to my thousand friends on iFeel.”

Which was pretty much checkmate for this particular conversation. The dean said she would be looking into the matter, and in the meantime why didn’t Laura forget about the essay for now and keep quiet until they could all come to a nice resolution.

Victory. Another assignment completed. She closed Hamlet and tossed the book in the corner. She shut down her laptop. Her phone dinged. Jason again, finally asking for what he’d wanted this whole time:

Send me a pic I miss you!!!

Naughty or nice?;-)

Naughty!!!

Haha lol }:-)

She stripped off her clothes and, holding a camera at arm’s length, posed in several of the smoky ways she’d absorbed from two decades of looking at Cosmo and Victoria’s Secret catalogs and internet pornography. She took about a dozen pictures of herself from slightly different angles and with slightly different pouts: smoky-sexy, smoky-amused, smoky-ironic, smoky-smirky, and so on.

Afterward, she could not decide which one of them to send to Jason, because they were all so great.

3

PWNAGE SUGGESTED they meet at a bar called Jezebels.

Samuel wrote:

That sounds like a strip club.

Ya it does lol

Is it?

No…but sort of

It was in another of Chicago’s suburbs, one that had ballooned in the mid-sixties in the first great migration out of the city. Now it was gently dying. All the people who had fled a generation before were moving back in, heading to the high-rises of Chicago’s newly gentrified downtown. White flight had given way to white infill, and now these first-generation suburbs — with their modest homes, their quaint malls — just seemed old. People were leaving, and as they left, home values declined, driving still more out in an unstoppable cascade. Schools closed. Shops were shuttered. Streetlights broken. Potholes left unfixed and widened. The giant shells of big-box retailers sat empty and anonymous but for old logos still legible in dirt outline.

Jezebels was situated in a strip mall between a liquor store and a place where you could rent to own tires. Its big front windows were covered with sheets of black plastic tinting that undulated where air bubbles were trapped and never smoothed out. Inside, the place had all the makings of a strip club: an elevated stage, a metal pole, purplish lights. But no strippers. The only thing to watch was the televisions, about two dozen of them arranged such that no matter where you sat, you always had an adequate sight line to at least four. The TVs were tuned to various niche cable channels specializing in sports or music videos or game shows or food. The largest television, which hovered above the stage and seemed to be bolted directly onto the stripper pole, was showing a nineties movie about strippers.

The place was mostly empty. A handful of guys sat at the bar looking at their phones. A larger party in the back, six people at a booth, currently quiet. Samuel didn’t see anyone matching Pwnage’s description (I’ll be the blond guy in a black shirt, is how he’d described himself), so he sat at a table and waited. A TV above the bar was tuned to a music channel where Molly Miller was being interviewed. Tonight was the premiere of her new video: “The song’s about, you know, being yourself?” said Molly. “It’s like what the song says. ‘You have got to represent.’ Just be true to who you are. Just, like, don’t change.”

“Yo Dodger!” said a man near the door. He was indeed wearing a black shirt, but his hair wasn’t so much blond as it was white with maybe a kind of jaundice-yellow discoloring at the tips. His face was pale and pocked and of an ambiguous age: He was either a fifty-year-old or a thirty-year-old who’d had a hard life. He wore jeans that were a few inches too short, a long-sleeve shirt that was maybe two sizes too tight. Clothes purchased for a younger and smaller self.

They shook hands. “Pwnage,” he said. “That’s my name.”

“I’m Samuel.”

“No you’re not,” he said. “You’re Dodger.” He slapped Samuel on the back. “I feel like I already know you, man. We’re war buddies.”

It looked like he carried a bowling ball under his shirt, just above his belt. A skinny guy with a big guy’s belly. His eyes were protuberant and red. His skin had the texture of cold wax.

A waitress came, and Pwnage asked for a beer and something called the “Double-D Nachos, extra super loaded.”

“Interesting place,” Samuel said after the waitress had gone.

“It’s the only bar within walking distance of my house,” Pwnage said. “I like to walk. For the exercise. I’m starting a new diet soon. It’s called the Pleisto Diet. Heard of it?”

“Nope.”

“It’s the one where you eat like they did in the Pleistocene. Specifically, the Tarantian epoch, during the last ice age.”

“How do we know what they ate in the Pleistocene?”

“Because science. You eat like a caveman, minus the mastodons. Plus it’s gluten-free? The key is tricking your body into thinking you’ve gone back in time, before the invention of agriculture.”

“I don’t understand why you’d want to do that.”

“There’s a feeling that civilization was a mistake, is why. That we screwed up along the way, took a wrong turn. Now, because of it, we’re fat.”

His body had a noticeable tilt to one side, his right side. His mouse hand seemed dominant. His left arm seemed to lag a few moments behind the rest of him, like it was permanently asleep.

“I’m assuming nachos weren’t on the menu during the Pleistocene,” Samuel said.

“See, what’s important right now for me is to be frugal. I’m saving up. Do you know how expensive that organic health food stuff is? A sandwich is seventy-nine cents at the gas station but like ten bucks at the farmer’s market. Do you know how cheap, on a per-calorie basis, nachos are? Not to mention the Go-Go Taquitos or Pancake and Sausage To-Go Sticks or other foods that have no organic equivalent that I get for free at the 7-Eleven down the street.”

“How do you get them for free?”

“Well, if you know they can be cooked a maximum of twelve hours before they have to be thrown away for FDA-mandated public-health reasons, and if you arrive at the 7-Eleven a few minutes before the appointed food-rotation hour, then you can fill a plastic bag with not only a dozen or more taquitos and pancake sticks but also more conventional hot dogs, bratwurst, corn dogs, and bean burritos and such.”

“Wow. You have a whole system.”

“Of course, eating these food items is not what I might describe as pleasant, since they’re tough and scorched and moistureless from their all-day cooking on high-temperature rollers. Sometimes biting through a burrito’s thick tortilla casing can feel like chewing through your own toe calluses.”

“That’s an image that’s going to linger.”

“But it’s cheap, you know? And given my current level of income, which is, frankly, minimal since I lost my job, and also my unemployment checks are due to run out in like three months or so, right about the time I’ll be seeing real results, waistline-wise, of the new diet. And if I have to start eating bad cheap food then because the money is gone, well, it would be a momentum-stopping blow, I just know it. So I have to make the diet financially viable and sustainable long-term, which is why it’s important to not eat healthy right now in order to save up for the time I will be eating healthy. Get it?”

“I think so.”

“Every week I eat cheap shitty things, like nachos, is a week I can tick like seventy bucks to the other side of my mental ledger as cash ‘saved’ for my new life. This plan is going very well so far.”

There seemed to be a not-rightness about him, a sense of disorder and exotic illness. His features were off in a way Samuel could not immediately put his finger on, like he suffered from some long-eradicated disease — scurvy, maybe.

Their drinks came. “Cheers,” said Pwnage. “Welcome to Jezebels.”

“This place,” Samuel said. “Seems like there’s a story here.”

“Used to be it was a strip club,” Pwnage said. “Then the strippers stopped coming because the mayor banned alcohol at strip clubs, then banned lap dances at strip clubs, then banned strip clubs.”

“So now it’s more of a bar with a strip-club theme?”

“That’s right. He was a strict disciplinarian, the mayor. Elected in a last-ditch fit of anger when the city started going downhill.”

“You’ve been coming here a long time?”

“Not when it was a strip club,” Pwnage said, and he held up his hand to show Samuel his wedding ring. “She doesn’t really support strip clubs, my wife. Because of the patriarchy and stuff.”

“That’s sound.”

“How strip clubs are degrading to feminists and all that. Oh, hey, I love this song.”

He was talking about Molly Miller’s new single, the video to which had now begun on roughly one-third of the televisions in the bar: Molly singing in an abandoned drive-in movie theater where scores of good-looking young people had parked their cars, their late-sixties or early-seventies American muscle cars — Cameros, Mustangs, Challengers — in what was one example of the odd dislocation and ambiguity Samuel felt watching this video and processing its many props. The abandoned state of the drive-in spoke to a present-day setting, while the automobiles were forty years old and the mic Molly sang into was one of those chunky metal things that radio people used in the thirties. Meanwhile, her wardrobe appeared to be a hip, ironic nod to eighties fashion, most obviously in the form of large white plastic sunglasses and skinny jeans. It was a large ever-shifting referential stew of anachronistic symbols with no logical connection between them except their high cool quotient.

“So why did you want to meet?” Pwnage said, returning to his normal sitting position, his feet tucked beneath him.

“No reason,” Samuel said. “Just wanted to hang out.”

“We could have done that in Elfscape.”

“I suppose.”

“Actually, come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve hung out with someone not in Elfscape in a very long time.”

“Yeah,” Samuel said, and he considered this for a moment, and felt a little unsettled that this was also true for him. “Do you think it’s possible that we play Elfscape too much?”

“No. But yeah, maybe.”

“I mean, think about all the hours we spend on Elfscape, all the cumulative hours. And not only the hours spent playing but also the hours reading about playing and watching videos of other people playing and talking and strategizing and getting on discussion boards and such. It’s so much time. Without Elfscape we could all be, I don’t know, leading meaningful lives. Out in the real world.”

The nachos came in what looked like a lasagna pan. A corn-chip mound covered in ground beef and bacon and sausage and steak and onions and jalapeños and probably a couple of full pints of cheese, this bright orange cheese that looked thick and shiny and plastic.

Pwnage dove into the dish, then said, between bites, nacho shrapnel clinging to his lips, “I find Elfscape way more meaningful than the real world.”

“Seriously?”

“Absolutely. Because, listen, what I do in Elfscape matters. Like, the things I do affect the larger system. They change the world. You cannot say this about real life.”

“Sometimes you can.”

“Rarely. Most of the time you can’t. Most of the time there’s nothing you can do to affect the world. Like, okay, almost all my friends in Elfscape work retail in real life. They sell televisions or pants. They work in a mall. My last job was at a copy shop. Explain to me how that’s going to change the larger system.”

“I don’t think I can accept that a game is more meaningful than the real world.”

“When I lost my job, they told me it was because of the recession. They couldn’t afford so many employees. Even though that same year the CEO of the company got a salary that was literally eight hundred times bigger than mine. In the face of something like that, I’d say sinking into Elfscape is a pretty sane response. We’re fulfilling our basic human psychological need to feel meaningful and significant.”

The nachos were lifted to Pwnage’s mouth still tethered to the plate by strings of orange slime. He scooped up as much cheese and meat as each chip could maximally accommodate. He wouldn’t even finish chewing the last bite before taking the next one. It was like he had some kind of conveyor-belt system going on in there.

“If only the real world operated like Elfscape,” Pwnage said, chewing. “If only marriages worked that way. Like every time I did something right I earned man points until I was a grand-master level-hundred husband. Or when I was a jackass to Lisa I’d lose points and the closer I was to zero the closer I’d be to divorce. It would also be helpful if these events came with associated sound effects. Like that sound when Pac-Man shrivels up and dies. Or when you bid too high on The Price Is Right. That chorus of failure.”

“Lisa’s your wife?”

“Mm-hm,” Pwnage said. “We’re separated. But actually more accurately we’re divorced. For the time being.” He looked at his wedding ring, then up at the video, watching its swirl of disassociated images: Molly in a classroom; Molly cheering at a high-school football game; Molly at a bowling alley; Molly at a high-school dance; Molly in a grassy field having a picnic with a cute boy. The producers had obviously targeted the teen and tween demographic, and were blatantly rolling around in their idiom as dogs do on rotten food.

“When Lisa and I were married,” Pwnage said, “I thought everything was great. Then one day she said she was no longer satisfied with our relationship and boom, divorce papers. She just left one day, no warning.”

Pwnage scratched at a spot on his arm so heavily scratched-at that he’d left a threadbare spot on his shirtsleeve.

“That would never happen in a video game,” he said. “Being surprised like that. In a game, there’s immediate feedback. In a game, there would be a sound effect and a graphic of me losing man points whenever I did whatever I did to make her want to divorce me. Then I could have apologized right away and never done it again.”

Over his shoulder, Molly Miller sang to the dancing, cheering throngs. She was not supported onstage by a band or even a boom box and appeared to be singing a cappella. But her fans danced and jumped all out of proportion to someone singing a cappella, implying that actual music was coming from somewhere off camera in the non-diegetic fashion that has become de rigueur in pop music videos. Just go with it.

Pwnage said, “A game will always tell you how to win. Real life does not do this. I feel like I’ve lost at life and have no idea why.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, I screwed up with the only girl I’ve ever loved.”

“Me too,” Samuel said. “Her name was Bethany.”

“Yeah. And I don’t have any career to speak of.”

“Me too. I actually think there’s a student who wants to get me fired.”

“And I’m upside down on my mortgage.”

“Me too.”

“And I spend most of my time playing video games.”

“Me too.”

“Dude,” Pwnage said, looking at Samuel with bulbous, bloodshot eyes. “You and I? We’re, like, twins.”

They watched Molly Miller’s video in silence for a time, Pwnage eating, the both of them listening to the song, which was circling back to its chorus for like the fourth time now and so must have been approaching its end. Molly’s lyrics hinted at something barely out of reach, something just beyond comprehension, mostly because of her use of the pronoun “it” with shifting, ambiguous antecedents:

Don’t hurt it. You gotta serve it.

You gotta stuff it, kiss it.

I want to get it.

Push up on it. ’Cuz I’m gonna work it.

You got it? Think about it.

Then, after each verse, Molly shouted and the whole crowd shouted the line that launched them into the chorus—“You have got to represent!”—while throwing their fists into the air as if they were protesting something, who knows what.

“My mother abandoned me when I was a kid,” Samuel said. “She did to me what Lisa did to you. One day, gone.”

Pwnage nodded. “I see.”

“Now I need something from her and I don’t know how to get it.”

“What do you need?”

“Her story. I’m writing a book about her, but she won’t tell me anything. All I have is a photograph and a few sketchy notes. I know nothing about her.”

Samuel had the photograph in his pocket — printed out on copy paper and folded up. He opened it and showed it to Pwnage.

“Hm,” Pwnage said. “You’re a writer?”

“Yeah. My publisher’s going to sue me if I don’t finish this book.”

“You have a publisher? Really? I’m a writer too.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah, I have this idea for a novel. I started it in high school. A police detective with psychic abilities on the trail of a serial killer.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“I have it all mapped out in my head. At the end — spoiler alert — there’s an epic showdown when the trail finally leads to the detective’s own ex-wife’s daughter’s boyfriend. I’ll write it as soon as I find the time.”

The skin of his cuticles, and the skin around his eyes, and the skin around his lips, and really the skin at all the intersections of his body had a deep and aching redness. A scarlet pain wherever one thing turned into another. Samuel imagined it hurt him to move, or blink, or breathe. Pink splotches on his scalp where tufts of white hair had fallen out. One eye seemed to open wider than the other.

“My mother is the Packer Attacker,” Samuel said.

“The Packer what?”

“The woman who threw rocks at that politician.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, I missed it too at first. I think it happened the same day as our raid. The one against the dragon.”

“That was an epic win.”

“Yeah.”

“Elfscape can actually teach us a lot about living,” Pwnage said. “Take this problem with your mother? Easy. You only need to ask yourself what kind of challenge she is.”

“What do you mean?”

“In Elfscape, as in every video game, there are four kinds of challenges. Every challenge is a variant of these four. It’s my philosophy.”

Pwnage’s hand hovered over the nacho rubble, searching for any chip that still retained its structural integrity, many of them having gone flaccid in the cheese-and-oil swamp that gathered on the bottom of the pan.

“Your philosophy came from video games?” Samuel said.

“I find this is also true in life. Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”

“Okay.”

“So you all you have to do is figure out which kind of challenge you’re dealing with.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Depends. Say they’re an enemy? The only way to defeat an enemy is to kill them. If you killed your mother, would it solve your problem?”

“Definitely not.”

“So not an enemy then. That’s good! Maybe she’s an obstacle? Obstacles are things you have to find your way around. If you avoided your mother, would it solve your problem?”

“No. She has something I need.”

“Which is?”

“Her life story. I need to know what happened to her, in her past.”

“Okay. And there’s no other way to get this?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Aren’t there historical documents?” Pwnage said. “Do you not have family? Can you not do an interview? Do writers not do research?”

“Well, my grandfather, on my mother’s side. He’s still alive.”

“There you go.”

“I haven’t talked to him in years. He’s in a nursing home. In Iowa.”

“Mm-hm,” Pwnage said. He was using a spoon to lap up the remaining nacho sludge.

“I should go talk to my grandfather, is your advice,” Samuel said. “Go to Iowa and ask him about my mother.”

“Yes. Figure out her story. Piece it together. It’s the only way you’ll solve your problem, if indeed it’s an obstacle-type problem and not in fact a puzzle or a trap.”

“How can you tell the difference?”

“You can’t at first.” He discarded the spoon. The nachos were, for the most part, entirely consumed. He dabbed his finger into a spot of cheese, then licked it clean.

“You have to be careful,” Pwnage said, “with people who are puzzles and people who are traps. A puzzle can be solved but a trap cannot. Usually what happens is you think someone’s a puzzle until you realize they’re a trap. But by then it’s too late. That’s the trap.”

4

HERE’S A MEMORY: Samuel is riding in the backseat on a summer trip to his parents’ hometown in Iowa. Mom and Dad are up front, and he’s avoiding the side with the sun, and he’s staring out the window at the passing scenery, the terrifying traffic of Chicago and the brick-and-steel girth of the city giving way to the more predictable ebb of the prairie. The DeKalb Oasis is the last tendril of civilization before the surrounding farmland begins. Huge open sky that’s all the more huge because there’s nothing to interrupt it: no mountains, no hills, no topography at all, just flat green endlessness.

Then crossing the Mississippi River and Samuel trying to hold his breath for the whole span of that great concrete bridge, looking down and seeing the barges traveling south, and tugboats, pontoon boats, speedboats pulling inner tubes on which people — pink specks from this height — bounce. They exit the interstate and turn north and follow the river all the way home, to where his parents come from, where they grew up and became high-school sweethearts, is the story he’d been told. Up Highway 67, the river on his right, past the gas stations that advertise live bait, the American flags flying from VFWs and public parks and golf courses and churches and boats, the occasional John Deere tractor halfway on the shoulder, the occasional Harley riders who stick out their left hand to greet other Harley riders going the opposite direction, past the quarry where orange gravel gets kicked up by tires, past the speed limit signs rigidly enforced, and past other signs too, some torn back by buckshot — DEER NEXT TWO MILES, CAUTION PLANT ENTRANCE, THIS HIGHWAY ADOPTED BY THE KIWANIS CLUB. Then the red-and-white stacks of the nitrogen plant coming into view, followed by the massive white vats of Eastern Iowa Propane, the behemoth ChemStar facility that regularly makes the whole town smell like burned breakfast cereal, the grain elevator, the little townie businesses: Leon’s Body Shop, Bruce’s Beauty Hut and Firearm Repair, Sneaky Pete’s Rare Finds Antiques, Schwingle’s Pharmacy. Toolsheds in backyards built from aluminum siding. Second garages whose walls are all exposed Tyvek. Houses with three or four or maybe five operational and sometimes meticulously maintained and decked-out automobiles. Teens riding on mopeds, little orange flags whipping above their heads. Kids in bare fields riding four-wheelers and dirt bikes. Trucks towing boats. Everyone using their blinker.

The memory felt so specific because so little had changed. As Samuel took the drive again, to interview the grandfather he’d not seen in decades, he saw how everything was more or less the same. The Mississippi River valley still looked green and lush, despite being one of the most heavily chemicalized places in the country. The towns along the river still flew flags from almost every house. Ritualistic patriotism had not been dampened by two cruel decades of labor outsourcing and manufacturing shrink. Yes, the gravitational center of town had crept away from the quaint old downtown toward the big new Walmart, but nobody seemed to mind. The Walmart parking lot was bustling and full.

He saw all this as he drove around. He was, as Pwnage suggested, doing research. He was trying to breathe in the town, trying to feel what it would have been like to grow up here. His mother never spoke of it, and they rarely visited. Once every other summer, generally, when he was a kid.

But Samuel still received a trickle of information about the old hometown, and knew his grandfather was here, slowly wasting away from dementia and Parkinson’s at a nursing home called Willow Glen, where Samuel had an appointment later in the day. Until then, he planned to explore, observe, do research.

First, he found his father’s childhood home, a farm near the banks of the Mississippi. He found his mother’s too, a quaint little bungalow with a big picture window in one of the upstairs rooms. He visited her high school, which looked like any generic high school anywhere. He took a few photographs. He visited the playground near his mother’s house — the standard swing set, slide, monkey bars. He took a few photographs. He even visited the ChemStar facility where his grandfather had worked for many years, a factory so large it was impossible to take in all at once. Built along the river, surrounded by train tracks and power lines, it looked like an aircraft carrier had tumbled sideways out of the water. A mess of metal and tubing that kept going for miles, furnaces and chimneys, concrete bunker-looking buildings, steel holding tanks, round vats, smokestacks, pipes that all seemed to lead to a massive copper dome on the far north end of the factory, where if the light was shining properly it looked like a second, smaller sun rising from the ground. The atmosphere around the factory was sulfurous and overheated, a smell of exhaust, burned carbon, thin and difficult to breathe, like there wasn’t quite enough air in the air. Samuel photographed all of it. The holding tanks and twisted pipes, the brick smokestacks breathing a white cumulus vapor that disintegrated into the sky. He could not fit the factory’s whole apparatus into one frame, and so he walked down its length photographing panoramically. He hoped the photographs would shake loose something important, hoped that he could see some connection between the brutality of the ChemStar facility and his mother’s family, who for so long were tied umbilically to it. He took dozens of pictures, then left for his appointment.

He was driving to the nursing home when Periwinkle called.

“Hey, buddy,” said his publisher, his voice all echoey. “Just checking in.”

“You sound far away. Where are you?”

“In New York, in my office. I have you on speakerphone. There are protestors outside my building right now. They’re yelling and screaming. Can you hear them?”

“I can’t,” Samuel said.

“I can,” Periwinkle said. “They’re twenty stories down, but I can hear them.”

“What are they yelling?”

“I cannot actually hear them, I should say. Their speeches or whatever? Mostly I hear the drumming. Whole rock operas of it. They are drumming in a circle. Loudly and daily. Reasons unclear.”

“This must feel strange to you, being protested against.”

“They’re not protesting me, per se. Nor my company, specifically. More like the world that brought my company into being. Multinational. Globalization. Capitalism. The ninety-nine percent is, I believe, their catchphrase.”

“Occupy Wall Street.”

“That’s the one. Pretty grandiose name, if you ask me. They are not occupying Wall Street so much as a small rectangle of concrete about a thousand feet away from it.”

“I think the name is symbolic.”

“It’s a revolt against things they don’t understand. Imagine our hominid ancestors protesting a drought? This is like that.”

“A rain dance, you’re saying, this protest.”

“It’s a primitive tribal response to godlike power, yes.”

“How many people?”

“More every day. It started with a dozen. Now several dozen. They try to engage us in conversation as we go to work.”

“You should try talking to them.”

“I did once. This kid, maybe twenty-five years old. He was down by the drum circle, juggling. His hair was in white-boy dreads. He began every sentence with the word ‘Well.’ It was a tic he had. But he pronounced it like wool. I literally could not hear anything else he said.”

“So not a true dialogue, then.”

“Have you ever protested anything?”

“Once.”

“How was it?”

“Unsuccessful.”

“A drum circle. Jugglers. They’re a living, breathing non sequitur in the middle of the financial district. But what they don’t understand is that there is nothing capitalism loves so much as a non sequitur. This is what they need to learn. Capitalism gobbles up non sequiturs happily.”

“By non sequitur you mean…”

“You know, the fashionable. The trendy. Every trend begins its life as a fallacy.”

“That maybe explains Molly Miller’s new video.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Real catchy,” Samuel said. “ ‘You have got to represent.’ What does that even mean?”

“You know, there used to be a difference between authentic music and sellout music. I’m talking about when I was young, in the sixties? Back then we knew there was a soullessness to the sellouts, and we wanted to be on the side of the artists. But now? Being a sellout is the authentic thing. When Molly Miller says ‘I’m just being real,’ what she means is that everyone wants money and fame and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. The only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That’s the new authenticity. Molly Miller can never be accused of selling out because selling out was her goal all along.”

“The point of her song seems to be, like, be rich, have fun.”

“She’s appealing to her audience’s latent greed and telling them it’s okay. Janis Joplin tried to inspire you to be a better person. Molly Miller tells you it’s okay to be the horrible person you already are. I’m not making a judgment about this. It’s just my job to know it.”

“But what about the juggler?” Samuel said. “The guy down at the drum circle? He doesn’t want to sell out.”

“He’s doing an impression of a protest he saw on TV once, many years ago. He has sold out, just to a different set of symbols.”

“But not to greed, is what I’m saying.”

“Are you old enough to remember Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf? And Scud missiles? Yellow ribbons and the line in the sand and Arsenio Hall going woof-woof-woof for the troops?”

“Yes.”

“There is nothing capitalism cannot gobble up. Non sequitur is its native language. Did you call me or did I call you?”

“You called.”

“Right. Now I remember. I heard you met with your mother.”

“I saw her, yes. I went to her apartment.”

“You were in the same room with her. What did she say?”

“Not much.”

“You were in the same room and you heroically overcame years of resentment and she opened up to you in a way she’s never opened up to anyone before, spilling out a dramatic life story that ideally concludes after two hundred and fifty pages of easy reading, give or take.”

“Not exactly.”

“I know I’m asking you to process your feelings quickly. But we’re on a schedule.”

“It didn’t seem like she wanted to talk. But I’m working on it. I’m doing some research. It might take some time.”

“Some time. Right. You remember that big oil spill in the Gulf last year?”

“I do.”

“People cared about that for, on average, thirty-six days. They’ve done studies on this.”

“What do you mean ‘cared’?”

“For the first month, people expressed mostly indignation and retarded anger. After about five weeks, the average response was ‘Oh, right, I forgot about that.’ ”

“So you’re suggesting we have a window here.”

“A very small and shrinking window. That was the worst environmental disaster in North America ever. Compared to that, who cares about some lady who threw rocks at a guy most people acknowledge is sort of a douche bag?”

“But what do I do? What’s my alternative?”

“Bankruptcy. Jakarta. I already explained this.”

“I’ll work fast. I’m actually in Iowa right now, collecting information.”

“Iowa. I have no concept of what that looks like.”

“Think abandoned factories. Farms up for auction. Cornfields with little signs advertising Monsanto. I’m driving past one right now.”

“Delightful.”

“Barges on the river. Hog lots. Hy-Vee.”

“I’m sort of not listening to you anymore.”

“I’m interviewing my grandfather today. Maybe he can tell me what really happened to my mom.”

“How can I say this delicately? We’re not all that interested in ‘what really happened’ to your mom. We’re much more interested in getting all those people who go temporarily insane before a presidential election to open up their wallets.”

“I’m at the nursing home now. Gotta go.”

The place was an anonymous-looking structure that, from the outside, appeared to be an apartment building — plastic siding, curtains over the windows, the ambiguous name: Willow Glen. Samuel walked through the front doors and smelled the aggressive, claustrophobic odor of institutionalized medicine: bleach, soap, carpet cleaner, the underlying omnipresent sweet tang of urine. At the front desk, there was a form for all guests to sign and state the reason for their visit. Next to his name, Samuel wrote “Research.” His plan was to talk to his grandfather until he got some answers. Hopefully his grandfather would, indeed, talk. Frank Andresen had always been such a quiet man. He had an inward, disinterested manner, spoke with a perplexing accent, often smelled of gasoline, and seemed a little out of reach. Everyone knew he’d emigrated from Norway, but he never said why. “To find a better life” was as much as he’d reveal. Really the only specific thing he’d ever say about his life back there was that their family farm was a beautiful thing to behold: a big salmon-red house with a view of the water, there in the northernmost city in the world. It was the only time he seemed happy, talking about that house.

A nurse led Samuel to a table in the empty cafeteria. She warned him that when Frank spoke, he rarely made much sense.

“The medicine he’s on for the Parkinson’s causes a bit of confusion,” she said. “And the drugs for the depression cause drowsiness, lethargy. Between that and the dementia, you probably won’t get much.”

“He’s depressed?” Samuel said.

The nurse frowned and held out her arms. “Look around.”

Samuel sat, took his phone out to record the conversation and saw he had several new e-mails — from the dean, and the director of Student Affairs, the director of University Relations, also the Office of Adaptive Services, the Office of Inclusivity, Student Health, Academic Counseling, Student Psychological Services, the provost, the ombudsperson, all of them with the same subject line: Urgent Student Matter.

Samuel sank into his chair. Swiped the phone to make the e-mails disappear.

When the nurse wheeled his grandfather to the table, Samuel’s first impression was that he was small. So much smaller than in Samuel’s memory. He was unshaven, a spotty beard showing black and white and red, mouth agape and white dots of spit on his lips. He was thin. He wore a thin bathrobe the green of pistachio pudding. His gray hair was tangled from sleeping, sticking up like grass. He was looking at Samuel and he was waiting.

“It’s good to see you again,” Samuel said. “Do you know who I am?”

5

FRANK’S OLDEST MEMORIES were the sharpest. He remembered the boat especially. Fishing off the back of the boat those months the arctic would allow it. This memory was clear and vivid still: the guys in the warm cabin eating and drinking because the work was done and the nets were in and it was midnight in the summer when the sun didn’t quite set but moved horizontally across the sky.

A red-orange twilight that lasted a whole month.

Everything was more dramatic in that light — the water, the waves, the distant rocky shore.

He was Fridtjof then, not Frank.

Still a teenager.

How he loved it, Norway, the arctic, the water cold enough to stop your heart.

He fished at the end of the day for sport, not money. What he loved was the struggle. Because when you’re catching those boiling schools of blackfish in those great big nets, you don’t feel the struggle like you do when it’s just you and the fish connected by a thin white line.

Life was uncomplicated then.

Here is what he loved: the way it felt setting the hook with that snap of his wrist; the feeling of the fish plunging to the bottom, all power and muscle and mystery; resting the rod on his hip and pulling so hard it’d leave a bruise; how he couldn’t see the fish until it shimmered just below the surface; then that moment when it finally emerged.

The world had that quality now.

This was what life was like.

Like a fish pulled from wine-dark water.

Faces seemed to issue forth from nowhere. He opened his eyes and there was someone new. Right now, a young man, fake shitty grin, a bit of fear around his eyes. A face that wanted to be recognized.

Frank didn’t always recognize the faces but he recognized their need.

The young man was speaking, asking questions. Like the doctors did. There were always new ones coming and going. New doctors, new nurses.

Same flowcharts.

A flowchart for every bruise. A flowchart for every bed-wetting. If he seemed confused, there was a flowchart. Cognition tests, problem solving, safety awareness. They measured body mobility, balance, pain threshold, skin integrity, comprehension of single words, phrases, commands. They rated all this on scales of one to five. They asked him to roll, sit up, lie back down, go to the toilet.

They checked the toilet to see if he made it in the bowl.

They measured his swallowing. There was a whole flowchart for swallowing. On a scale of one to five, they rated his chewing, how he worked chewed food around in his mouth, how well his swallow reflex triggered, whether he drooled or spilled. They asked him questions to see if he was able to speak while eating. They checked for food pocketed in his cheek.

Stuck their fingers right in there and checked.

Made him feel hooked. Like he was the fish now. He was the one diving into darkness.

“It’s good to see you again,” said this young man in front of him. “Do you know who I am?”

He had a face that reminded Frank of something important.

It was like a screwed-up look, like what a poisonous secret does to your face, the pain that lives just below the skin and twists it.

Frank was getting worse at most things but better at some. And he was definitely better at this: reading people. He could never do this before. All his life, people were such a mystery. His wife, her family. Even Faye, his own daughter. But now? It was like something had been reshaped within him, like how a reindeer’s eyes change color: blue eyes in winter, gold in summer.

This is what it felt like to Frank.

Like he could see a different spectrum now.

What did he see in this young man? The same look he saw on Clyde Thompson’s face beginning in 1965.

He worked with Clyde at the ChemStar factory. Clyde’s daughter had thick golden-blond hair. She grew it down to the small of her back, straight and long like they used to back then. She complained that it was too heavy but Clyde wouldn’t allow her to cut it because he loved her hair so much.

Then one day in 1965 she got the hair caught in the band saw at school and she died. Took her whole scalp right off.

Clyde asked for a couple days off work and then came back like nothing happened.

Just kept soldiering on.

This Frank remembered very well.

People said how brave he was. Everyone agreed. Like the more Clyde could dodge the pain, the more heroic he was.

This was a formula for living a life full of secrets.

Frank knew this now. People constantly hid. It was a sickness maybe worse than the Parkinson’s.

Frank had so many secrets, so many things he never told anyone.

The look on Clyde’s face and the look on this young man’s face were the same. How that frown gets etched on there.

Same with Johnny Carlton, whose son fell off a tractor and was crushed under the tire. And Denny Wisor’s son was shot in Vietnam. And Elmer Mason’s daughter and granddaughter died at the same time during childbirth. And Pete Olsen’s son died when he tipped a motorcycle on a gravel road and it landed on him and broke a rib and punctured a lung, which filled with blood and made him drown right there on the road near a babbling brook in the middle of summer.

None of them said anything about it ever again.

They must have died shrunken, miserable men.

“I’d like to talk to you about my mother,” the man said. “Your daughter?”

And now Frank is Fridtjof again and he’s back at that farm in Hammerfest, a salmon-red house that overlooked the ocean, a great big spruce tree in the front yard, a pasture, sheep, a horse, a fire kept going all the way through the arctic’s long winter night: He’s home.

It’s 1940 and he’s eighteen years old. He’s twenty feet above the water. He’s the spotter. He has the sharpest eyes on the ship. He’s on the tallest mast looking for fish and telling the guys in the rowboats to take the nets this way, that way.

Whole schools churn into the bay and he intercepts them.

But this is not the memory where he’s looking for fish. This is the one where he’s looking at home. That salmon-red house with the pasture, the garden, the little path leading down to the dock.

It’s the last time he’ll see it.

His eyes are stinging from the wind as he watches from the crow’s nest as they sail away from Hammerfest and the salmon-red house gets smaller and smaller until it’s just a dot of color on the shore and then the shore is just a dot on all that water and then it’s nothing at all — it’s nothing but the lonely cold fact of the blue-black ocean everywhere around them forever, and the salmon-red house becomes a dot in his mind that grows larger and more terrible the farther away he sails.

“I need to know what happened to Faye,” said the young man in front of him, who seemed to appear out of the murk. “When she went to college? In Chicago?”

He was looking at Frank with that face people gave him when they didn’t understand what he was talking about. That face they thought looked like patience but actually looked like they were quietly shitting pinecones.

Frank must have been saying something.

Speaking these days was like speaking in dreams. Sometimes it felt like his tongue was too large for words. Or he’d forgotten English and the words came out a jumble of disconnected Norwegian sounds. Other times whole sentences shot out unstoppably. Sometimes he had whole conversations and didn’t even know it.

This probably had something to do with the meds.

One guy in here stopped taking his meds. Just stopped swallowing them. Refused. A real slow suicide, that one. They tried restraining him and forcing down the medicine, but he resisted.

Frank admired his dedication.

The nurses did not.

The nurses in Willow Glen didn’t try to prevent death. But they did try to guide you to die in the right way. Because if you died from something you weren’t supposed to die from, families became suspicious.

The nurses here were kind. They meant well. Or at least they did at first, when they were new. It was the institution that was the problem. All the rules. The nurses were human, but the rules were not.

Those PBS nature documentaries they showed in the common room said all life aimed toward reproduction.

At Willow Glen, all life aimed toward avoiding litigation.

Everything was charted. If a nurse fed him dinner but forgot to write it down, then in court, technically, she did not feed him dinner.

So they came in with these stacks of paper. They spent more time looking at the paper than looking at the people.

One time he hit his head on the bed frame and got a black eye. The nurse came in with her charts and said to Frank, “Which eye is injured?”

All the nurse had to do was take one look at him to answer that question. But her nose was in the charts. She cared more about documenting the injury than the injury itself.

They recorded everything. Physician progress reports. Dietitian records. Weight-loss charts. Monthly nurse summaries. Food-service logs. Tube-feeding sheets. Medication histories.

Photographs.

They made him stand naked and shivering and they took photographs. This happened roughly once a week.

Checking for evidence of falls. Or bedsores. Bruises of any kind. Evidence of abuse, infections, dehydration, malnutrition.

For court cases, if needed later, in their defense.

“Do you want me to ask them to stop taking photographs?” the young man said.

What were they talking about? He’d lost the thread again. He looked around him: He was in the cafeteria. It was empty. The young man smiled his uncomfortable smile. Smiled like those high-school kids who came in here once or twice a year.

There was this one girl, Frank forgot her name. Maybe Taylor? Or Tyler? He asked her, “Why do you high-school kids come in here?” And she said, “Colleges think it looks good if you’ve done some charity work.”

Two or three times they’d come, then disappeared.

He asked this Taylor or Tyler why all the students only showed up twice and then never came back, and she said, “If you do it twice, that’s good enough to put on your college application.”

She said this with no shame. Like she was such a good girl doing the absolute minimum to get what she wanted.

She asked him about his life. He said there’s not much to tell. She said what did you do? He said he worked at the ChemStar factory. She said what did the factory make? He said it made a compound that when jellied and lit on fire would literally melt the skin off of a hundred thousand men, women, and children in Vietnam. And then she realized she’d made a big mistake coming here and asking him that.

“I was wondering about Faye,” the young man said. “Your daughter Faye? You remember her?”

Faye was so much more hardworking than these high-school shits ever were. Faye worked hard because she was driven. There was something inside that pushed her. Something big and deadly and serious.

“Faye never told me she went to Chicago. Why did she go to Chicago?”

And now it’s 1968 and he’s in the kitchen with Faye under a pale light and he’s kicking her out of the house.

He is so angry with her.

He’d tried so hard to live in that town unnoticed. And she made it impossible.

Leave and never come back, is what he’s telling her.

“What did she do?”

She got herself knocked up. In high school. She let that boy Henry get her pregnant. Wasn’t even married yet. And everybody knew about it.

Which was the thing that enraged him most, how everyone knew. All at once. Like she advertised it in the local mailer. He never figured out how that happened. But he was more mad that everyone knew than about her getting knocked up.

That was before he picked up the dementia and stopped caring about things like this.

After that, she had to go to college. She was an outcast. She left for Chicago.

“But she didn’t stay long, right? In Chicago?”

Came back a month later. Something happened to her there she never talked about. Frank didn’t know what. She told people college was too hard. But he knew that was a lie.

Faye came back and married Henry. They moved away. Left town.

She never really liked him, Henry. Poor guy. He never knew what hit him. There was a word for this in Norwegian: gift, which could mean either “marriage” or “poison,” and that probably seemed about right to Henry.

After Faye left, Frank became like Clyde Thompson after his daughter died: kept a straight face in public and nobody asked him about Faye and eventually it was like she’d never even existed.

No reminders at all, except for the boxes in the basement.

Homework assignments. Diaries. Letters. Those reports from the school counselor. About Faye’s issues. Her panic attacks. Nervous fits. Making up stories for attention. It was all documented. It was here, at Willow Glen. In storage. In the basement. Many years’ worth. Frank kept everything.

He hadn’t seen her now in so long. She’d disappeared, which of course Frank deserved.

Pretty soon, he hoped, he wouldn’t remember her at all.

His mind was falling away.

Soon he would be only Fridtjof again, blessedly. He’d remember only Norway. He’d remember only his expansive youth in the northernmost city in the world. The fires they kept going all through the winter. The gray midnight sky of summer. The green swirls of the northern lights. The splashing schools of blackfish he could spot from a mile away. And maybe if he were lucky the walls of his memory would enclose only this one moment, fishing from the back of the boat, pulling up some grand thing from the depths.

If he were lucky.

If not, he’d be stuck with the other memory. The terrible memory. He would watch himself watching that salmon-red house. Watch it shrinking in the distance. Feel himself growing older as it faded. He would live it out over and over again, his mistake, his disgrace. That would be his punishment, this waking nightmare: sailing away from his home, into the darkening night, and judgment.

6

SAMUEL HAD NEVER HEARD Grandpa Frank talk so much. It was a constant bewildering monologue with occasional moments of clarity, moments when Samuel managed to seize a few critical details: that his mother had gotten pregnant and left for Chicago in shame, and that all the records from Faye’s childhood were stored here, in boxes, at Willow Glen.

About the boxes, Samuel asked the nurse, who led him down into the basement, a long concrete tunnel with chain-link cages. A zoo of forgotten things. Samuel found his family’s heirlooms under a skin of dust: old tables and chairs and china hutches, old clocks no longer running, boxes stacked like crumbling pyramids, dark puddles on the dirty bare floor, the light a hazy green mist of overhead fluorescents, the sour smells of mold and damp cardboard. Amid all this he found several large boxes marked “Faye,” all of them heavy with paper: school projects, notes from teachers, medical records, diaries, old photographs, love letters from Henry. As he skimmed through them, a new version of his mother took shape — not the distant woman from his childhood but a shy and hopeful girl. The real person he’d always longed to know.

He lugged the boxes to his car and called his father.

“It’s a great day for frozen food,” his father said. “This is Henry Anderson. How can I help you?”

“It’s me,” Samuel said. “We have to talk.”

“Well, I would love to interface with you one-on-one,” he said in that polite, artificial, high-pitched lilt he used whenever he was at work. “I’d be happy to discuss this at your earliest convenience.”

“Stop talking like that.”

“Can I tell you about an upcoming webinar you might be interested in?”

“Is your boss, like, standing over your shoulder right now?”

“That’s an affirmative.”

“Okay, then just listen. I want you to know that I figured something out about Mom.”

“I think that’s outside my area of expertise, but I’d be happy to send you to someone who could help you with that.”

“Please stop talking that way.”

“Yes, I understand. Thank you so much for bringing this up.”

“I know that Mom went to Chicago. And I know why.”

“I think we should put in some face time on this. Shall I schedule an appointment?”

“She left Iowa because you got her pregnant. And her dad kicked her out. She had to leave town. I know this now.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Samuel waited. “Dad?” he said.

“That’s not true,” his father said, now much more quietly, and in his normal voice.

“It is true. I talked to Grandpa Frank. He told me all about it.”

“He told you?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“Iowa.”

“That man hasn’t spoken ten words to me since your mother left.”

“He’s sick now. He’s on some pretty heavy-hitting medication. One of the side effects is loss of inhibition. I don’t think he knows what he’s saying.”

“Good lord.”

“You need to tell me the truth. Starting now.”

“First of all, Frank is wrong. It was all a dumb misunderstanding. Your mother wasn’t pregnant. Not before you.”

“But Frank said—”

“I know why he’d think that. And he believes it’s true. But I’m telling you that’s not what happened.”

“Then what happened?”

“Are you sure you want to hear about this?”

“I need to.”

“There are things you might not want to know. Children don’t have to know everything about their parents.”

“This is important.”

“Please come home.”

“You’ll tell me?”

“Yes.”

“No more lying? The whole story?”

“Fine.”

“No matter how embarrassing it might be to you?”

“Yes. Just come home.”

On his drive back, Samuel tried to imagine himself in his mother’s shoes, making that first trip to Chicago, going to college, her future all precarious and full of mystery. He felt like they were both going through this at the same time. A new world was about to open up. Everything was about to change. He almost felt like she was there with him.

It was odd, but he had never felt closer to her than he did at that moment.