The Nix

1

PWNAGE OPENED THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR, then closed the refrigerator door. He stood in his kitchen trying really hard to remember the reason he came in here, but he couldn’t come up with it. He checked his e-mail. He tried logging on to World of Elfscape but could not; it was Tuesday. He thought about going outside to the mailbox to get the mail but did not end up going outside because the mail might not have been delivered yet and he didn’t want to make two trips. He looked across his front lawn at the mailbox, trying to judge whether there was mail in it by staring. He closed the door. He felt like something needed his attention in the kitchen but did not know what. He opened the refrigerator and looked at every item in the fridge, hoping one of them would serve as a kind of trigger for the thing he was supposed to remember about the kitchen. He saw the jars of pickles and plastic squeeze bottles of ketchup and mayonnaise and a bag of flaxseed he bought once in a moment of diet optimism but had not yet opened. There were five eggplants on the bottom shelf, clearly mushening from the inside, slowly collapsing in on themselves, five little purple pillows with small pools of biscuit-colored juice gathering under them. In the produce drawer, his various greens were brown and wilted. So were the cobs of corn on the top shelf, which were a sickly ecru, every kernel having lost its ripe, yellow puffiness and shriveled into roughly the shape of a diseased human molar. He closed the refrigerator door.

What happened on Tuesdays was that the World of Elfscape game servers were taken offline for most of the morning and sometimes part of the afternoon for regular maintenance and bug fixes and whatever genius-level technical things were required of computers that otherwise ran twenty-four hours a day and hosted ten million game players simultaneously with almost no network lag using some of the most ruthlessly secure encryption on the planet, servers so fast and efficient and mighty that they put to shame the machines now being used by the space program, or in nuclear missile silos, or in voting booths, for example. How a country that made World of Elfscape servers could not make a functional electronic voting machine was a question often posed on Election Day Tuesdays on the Elfscape message boards, while the gaming community patiently waited for the servers to come back online and, sometimes, also voted.

Some of these Tuesdays, though, were very special and particularly agonizing Tuesdays known as “Patch Days,” when the engineers added some kind of game update so that the next time players logged on there would be new things to do—new quests, achievements, monsters, treasure. Such patches were necessary to keep the game fresh and interesting, but of course Patch Days had the longest game downtime because of the elaborate things being done to the game’s servers and coding. It was not unheard of for the servers to be down all morning and all afternoon and sometimes, to the dismay of the game community, into the early evening. And this was happening today. The game was being patched. It was Patch Day.

And not knowing exactly when the servers would come back online made Pwnage feel stressed out, which was a bit of a paradox because the ostensible reason he played Elfscape was because it so effectively relieved his stress. It was where he turned when he felt too encumbered by the wearying details of his life. It all began about a year ago, just after Lisa left, one day when he felt the stress coming on particularly strong and none of the DVDs seemed very good and nothing was on TV and nothing in his online movie queue seemed interesting and all the console games he owned had been beaten and discarded and he felt this weird panicky sensation like when you’re at a good restaurant but nothing seems appetizing, or like when you’re first starting to come down with a cold or flu and not even water tastes good, that kind of all-encompassing negative darkness where the whole world seems boring and tedious and you feel this global weariness, and he was sitting in his living room in the gathering darkness of an evening just after daylight saving time ended so it was unusually gray at a depressingly early time of day, and he was sitting there realizing he was about to have a direct frontal head-on collision with the stress, that if he did not find a diversion quickly he was definitely going to get worked up to a degree that would spell certain trouble for his blood pressure and general circulatory system health, and what he usually did when this happened was to go to the electronics store and buy something, this time about a dozen video games, one of which was World of Elfscape. And since beginning with an Elf warrior named Pwnage he had advanced to play a whole stable of alternate characters with names like Pwnopoly and Pwnalicious and Pwner and EdgarAllanPwn, and he made a name for himself as a fearsome gladiatorial opponent and a very strong and capable raid leader, directing a large group of players in a fight against a computer-controlled enemy in what he came to regard as being a conductor in a battle-symphony-ballet type of thing, and he rather quickly got extraordinarily good at this — since being good required all manner of research, watching online videos of relevant battles and reading the forums and sifting through the numbers of the theory-crafting websites to see which stat was most useful during certain fights, such that he had slightly different gear-and-weapon combos for every fight in the game, each of them designed to mathematically maximize his death-dealing ability for that particular engagement, because he believed if he was going to do something he was going to do it right, he would give one hundred and ten percent, a work ethic he liked to think would soon help him with his kitchen renovation and novel-writing and new-diet plans, but which so far seemed to apply only in the area of video games. He created more characters and more accounts that he would play simultaneously on several computers, each of these new accounts requiring the purchase of a new computer, new game DVD, expansion pack, and monthly subscription fee, which meant that whenever he felt the need to create another character (usually because all his other characters were at the very highest level and were as good as they could possibly be and he was getting bored with dominating the game so thoroughly and the boredom would set off his stress alarms and so something had to be done immediately), it was such a massive capital outlay that he felt absolutely beholden to play the game even more, even if he was dimly aware of the irony here, that the stress of his deplorable financial situation created the need for all of these electronic stress relievers, the expense of which created more of the very same stress he was trying to avoid in the first place, which made it seem like his current level of electronic distraction was now failing and so he sought out newer and ever-more expensive distractions, thereby magnifying the stress-and-guilt cycle, a bit of a consumerist psychological trap that he frequently noted among Lisa’s customers at the Lancôme counter, whose purchases of makeup only reinforced the central unattainable beauty illusion that drove them to buy makeup in the first place, but for some reason he could not spot in himself.

He checked the Elfscape servers. Still down.

It was like waiting out an airline delay, he thought, that urgency one felt at the airport, knowing people who love you are waiting at another airport, and the only thing keeping you from them is some intractable failure of technology. It felt like that, these Patch Days: Whenever he logged on after hours of delay, it felt like he’d gone home. It was hard to ignore this feeling. It was hard not to feel conflicted about it. It was a little troubling that when he thought about the vistas of Elfscape—the animated, digitally rendered rolling hills and misty forests and mountaintops and such — they struck him with the force of real memory. That he had a nostalgia and fondness for these places that outpaced the fondness he had for the real places in his life — this was complicated for him. Because he knew in some way the game was all false and illusory and the places he “remembered” didn’t really exist except as digital code stored on his computer’s hard drive. But then he thought about this time he climbed to the top of a mountain on the northern edge of Elfscape’s western continent and watched the moon rise over the horizon, watched the moonlight sparkle off the snow, and he thought it was beautiful, and he thought about how people talked about feeling transported by works of art, standing in front of paintings feeling hopelessly persuaded by their beauty, and he decided there was really no difference between their experience and his experience. Sure, the mountain wasn’t real, the moonlight wasn’t real, but the beauty? And his memory of it? That was real.

And so Patch Days were a unique horror because he was cut off from his source of wonder and beauty and surprise and was forced, sometimes for a whole day, to confront his normal everyday analog existence. And all week he’d been thinking about how to occupy his Tuesday so that the intolerable gap between waking up and logging on was more tolerable. Things to do that would make the time go by more quickly. He started a list on his smartphone, a “Patch Day To-Do List,” so that he could record any thought he might have during the week regarding ways to make Patch Day more pleasant and endurable. The list contained, so far, three items:

1. Buy health food

2. Help Dodger

3. Discover great literature

That last item had been on his to-do list every week for six months, ever since he saw a sign at a nearby mega bookstore that said DISCOVER GREAT LITERATURE! and he’d put it on the list. He told the phone to repeat it, to put it on every weekly list thereafter, because he’d always wanted to be a reader, and he thought the whole curled-up-snugly-all-afternoon-with-a-cup-of-tea-and-a-good-book thing was a really excellent image to project about oneself online. Plus if Lisa ever happened to secretly check his phone’s to-do list in a moment of curiosity or obsessional divorce regret, he was pretty sure she would approve of “Discover great literature” and maybe realize he was really changing as a person and want to take him back.

However, in six months he had discovered no literature whatsoever, great or otherwise. And every time he thought about discovering great literature, the effort made him feel tired, spent, boggy-headed.

So then there was item number one: Buy health food.

He had tried this already. Last week, he had finally entered the organic grocery store after having cased it from the street for several days watching people going in and out and quietly judging them for their yuppie elitist privileged lifestyle and their skinny hipster clothes and electric cars. It seemed necessary for him to construct an elaborate mental bulwark like this before even entering the organic grocery store because the more he sat in his car outside the store judging the customers the more he was convinced they were judging him too. That he wasn’t hip enough, or fit enough, or rich enough to shop there. In his mind he was the protagonist of every story, the center of everyone’s appalling attention; he was on display and out of place; the store was a panopticon of sneering, abusive judgment. He carried on long imaginary dialogues with the idealistic cashiers who were the gatekeepers between the food and the exits, explaining to them how he wasn’t shopping there because it was the trendy thing to do but rather because it was coldly absolutely medically necessary according to the rules of his radical new diet plan. And whereas the other customers were there only out of fidelity to some hip movement — like the organic movement or the Slow Food movement or the locavore movement or whatever — he was there because he needed to be there, making him actually a more authentic shopper than they were, even if he did not per se fit the image of the typical customer according to the store’s elaborate branding campaign. And so after several dozens of these practice dialogues he felt prepared and strong-willed enough to enter the grocery store, where he crept around and very quietly purchased the exact organic replicas of what he usually bought at the 7-Eleven down the street: canned soups, canned meat products, white bread, energy bars, frozen and reheatable pizza and dinner things.

And when he was unloading his cart at the checkout he felt a brief surge of belongingness that nobody had challenged his presence there or really even looked at him twice. That is, until the cashier — this cute girl with hip square glasses who was probably a grad student in ecology or social justice or something like that — looked at his boxed and frozen and canned food items and said “Looks like you’re stocking up for a hurricane!” and then laughed lightly as if to say Just kidding! before bwooping the stuff over the laser scanner. And he smiled and halfheartedly chuckled but could not shake for the rest of the day the feeling of having been judged harshly by the cashier, who was not so subtly telling him his food purchases were unfit for consumption except in the most dire circumstances, such as apocalypse.

Point taken. On his next visit he bought only fresh things. Fruits, vegetables, meats wrapped in wax paper. Only things perishable, easily spoilable, and even though he had no earthly idea how to prepare the food, he felt healthier just buying it, just having it nearby, having people see him with it, like being on a date with someone extraordinarily attractive, how you want to go to public places with that person, he felt the same about his cart full of shiny eggplants and corn and various green growing things: arugula, broccoli, Swiss chard. It was so beautiful. And when he presented his food to this same cute cashier at the front of the store he felt like a child giving his mother a card he made at school.

“Did you bring a bag?” she said.

He stared at her, not fully comprehending the question. A bag for what?

“No,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “We encourage all our customers to bring reusable bags. You know, to save paper?”

“Okay.”

“Plus you get a rebate,” she said. “For every bag you bring, you get a rebate.”

He nodded. He was no longer looking at her. He was instead looking at the cash register’s video screen. He was pretending to very carefully analyze the price of each food item to ensure he wasn’t overcharged. The cashier must have sensed his unease and his feeling of having been scolded (again) and so tried to diffuse the situation with a change of subject: “Whaddya gonna do with all this eggplant?”

But this did not diffuse the situation at all because the only answer he was capable of giving was the true one: “I don’t know.” And then when the cashier girl seemed sort of disappointed by this answer he added: “Maybe, like, a soup?”

This was so fucking unbearable. He couldn’t even shop correctly.

He went home and found a website that sold reusable grocery bags, some outfit that used the proceeds from all their bag sales to do something good in some rain forest somewhere. More important, this outfit’s logo was printed prominently on both sides of the bag so that when he gave the bags to the cashier she would see the logo and be impressed by it, since not only was he being a good environmentalist customer by bringing his own bags but the bags themselves also did good environmental things, making him twice as pro-nature as any of the other shoppers in the store.

He had the bags shipped, next day air. He went back to the store. He bought perishable fresh foods again, but only one of each kind — no overbuying one item and drawing attention to it, à la eggplant. He got in the line of the cute cashier girl with the square black glasses. She said “Hi,” but it was a generic greeting. She did not remember their connection. She scanned and tallied his groceries. She said “Did you bring a bag?” and he said, casually, like it was no big deal and totally something he did all the time, “Oh sure, I brought a bag.”

“Do you want to keep the rebate,” she said, “or donate it?”

“Do what?”

“You get a rebate for bringing a bag.”

“I know that.”

“Would you like to donate it to one of our fifteen approved charities?”

And here he reflexively said “No,” but it wasn’t because he was stingy and wouldn’t genuinely want a charity to have his rebate. It was because he knew he would have no idea how to choose among the fifteen charities, probably never having heard of any of them. So he declined because that seemed the smoothest, least embarrassing way to proceed and be done with the social encounter that, to be honest, had eaten up a lot of his spare brainpower all week, envisioning it, preparing for it.

“Oh,” said the cashier, surprised, “okay, well, fine,” with a kind of upturned lip and sarcastic eyebrow flare that conveyed something along the lines of Aren’t we being an asshole today?

She continued swiping his food across the scanner and weighing his fruits and vegetables in what he interpreted as a cold and mechanical manner. Her fingers flew over the register buttons quickly and expertly. She was so comfortable here, so at home. She did not feel one bit of anxiety about her lifestyle or opinions. She so easily judged and dismissed him. And he felt something inside him sort of break, something curdled and sour, a fury he felt all the way to his liver. And he raised the empty cloth reusable grocery bag over his head. And he held it that way for a moment, maybe waiting for someone to say something. But no one did. No one paid an ounce of attention to him. And this seemed like the worst insult of all, that he was standing in this theatrical pose of violence and passion and no one cared.

So he threw it. The bag. He threw it point-blank, right at the cashier’s feet.

And as he threw it, he made a war cry of wild anger — or at least he’d meant to. What actually came out was a garbled and low kind of gruff animal noise. He gruntled.

The bag struck the cashier sidelong in the hip region and she let out a sharp surprised cry and jumped backward as the bag crumpled and fell loosely to the floor. She stared at him with her mouth open and he stepped toward her and leaned over the cash register and opened his arms wide as a condor and yelled, “You know what?”

He did not know why he was opening his arms this way. He realized he didn’t have anything on tap, mentally, with which to follow that question. The store had suddenly gone terribly quiet, the usual register-area beeping noises having stopped at the cashier’s first shriek. He looked around him. He saw faces aghast — mostly women’s — staring at him scornful and outraged. He backed slowly away from the cashier. He felt he needed to say something to the crowd, to explain the offense that provoked him, to justify his outburst, to communicate his innocence and righteousness and virtue.

What came out was: “You have got to represent!”

He didn’t know why he said that. He remembered hearing it in that pop song recently. That Molly Miller song. He liked the sound of it, when he heard it in that song. He thought it was edgy and hip. But as soon as he said it out loud he realized he had no idea what it meant. He quickly left. Jammed his hands into his pockets and speed-walked out the door. He vowed never to return. That store, that cashier — you could never be good enough for them. There was no pleasing those people.

So item number one — Buy health food — that was a nonstarter.

There was still one thing he could check off his list on this Patch Day: Help Dodger. And to be honest this seemed like the most attractive option anyway, helping his guild mate, his brand-new friend, his irlfriend, was the term used among some Elfscape players, IRL being the community’s popular acronym for “in real life,” a place they talked about as if it were another country, far away. And he wanted to pretend the primary reason he found this option most appealing was because of some altruistic impulse to help friends in need. And that impulse might have been in there somewhere, part of the stew, but if he really thought about it he’d say the real reason was that his new friend was a writer. Dodger had a book contract, a publisher, access to the deeply mysterious book world that Pwnage needed because Pwnage was a writer too. And while he had been talking with his new friend that night at Jezebels he had trouble focusing completely because as soon as he discovered his new friend was a writer he kept thinking about his psychic-detective serial-killer novel, which he was sure was a million-dollar book. He’d begun the story in high school, in his junior-year creative writing class. He wrote the first five pages the night before it was due. The teacher had written that he’d done a “great job” and that he’d “captured the voice of the detective effectively” and in the margins during a certain scene where the detective had a vision of the killer stabbing a girl in the heart the teacher wrote “Scary!” and this confirmed that Pwnage could do very special things. He could ignite a real emotional response with something he wrote hastily in one night. It was a gift. You had it or you didn’t.

Helping his new irlfriend, he decided, would give him the motivation to finally do everything he needed to do, because Dodger would then owe him a favor, which he could cash in to find a publisher and receive his huge book contract, which would not only dig him out of the hole he was in mortgage-wise, and not only allow him the budget to buy actual organic health food and renovate the kitchen, but would also convince Lisa to come back, knowing as he did that one of her main complaints about him was his “lack of initiative and drive,” which she had spelled out with painful clarity in the Irreconcilable Differences portion of the paperwork that made their divorce agreement official.

So Dodger needed information about his mom, and his mom wasn’t talking. He needed information about her past, but the only concrete things they had were a woefully incomplete arrest report and a photograph taken in 1968 of his mother at a protest. There was a girl sitting near her in the photo who maybe seemed part of her group — the one with the aviator shades — and Pwnage wondered if she was still alive. Maybe she was, and maybe she still lived in Chicago, or maybe she had friends still living in Chicago — all he needed were names. He texted the photograph to Axman, a level-ninety elf warrior in the guild who IRL was a high-school senior who was really good at writing code but terrible at playing sports (unfortunately the only thing his father cared about). Axman’s programming specialty was something he called “social bombing” where he was able to get his message almost simultaneously on every blog comment thread and wiki page and community network and message board on the internet. This was almost certainly worth a lot of money to someone, this software, yet Axman had only used it so far to exact revenge on the jocks who picked on him at school, photoshopping their faces into explicit scenes from gay pornography, usually, and then spamming the resulting real-looking image to half a billion people. It was still in beta, Axman said of his application. He said he still needed to figure out how to monetize it, though Pwnage suspected he was just waiting to turn eighteen and move out of the house so he didn’t have to share his millions with his asshole dad.

So anyway, Pwnage sent Axman the photograph along with a quick note: “Spam the Chicago boards. I want to know who this woman is.”

And Pwnage sat back and felt really excellent about this. And even though it took him maybe a minute or two tops, he felt mentally exhausted by the effort: coming up with the plan, executing the plan. He felt spent, done for the day, stressed out. He tried logging on to Elfscape, but the servers were still down.

He looked out the front window at the mailbox. He sat down in a chair to decide what to do next, then stood and sat in a different chair, because the other one was sort of uncomfortable. He stood again and walked to the center of the room and played a quick little game in his mind where he tried to stand in the room’s exact middle, perfectly equidistant from all four walls. He abandoned this game before he got to the point where he felt like getting out the tape measure to verify his accuracy. He thought about watching a movie, but he’d seen them all before, his entire collection, many times. He thought about buying and downloading some new movies, but the effort of looking seemed like it would make him feel tired. He walked to the back of the house, then to the front, hoping something in the house would trigger a thought. There was something in the kitchen he needed to do, he was sure of it. He could feel the memory of it dancing beyond his grasp. He opened the oven, then closed it. Opened the dishwasher, then closed it. He opened the refrigerator, certain there was something in here that would remind him of the thing he was supposed to remember about the goddamn kitchen.

2

THE THING IS? Is that Laura Pottsdam had the feeling she was feeling a brand-new emotion. Like something she’d never felt before. Which was totally weird! She sat alone in her messy dorm room and fiddled with her iFeel app and waited for Larry to arrive and felt, for the first time, this new thing: doubt.

Doubt about many things.

Doubt right now about the iFeel app itself, which would not let her express her doubt, “Doubt” not being one of the fifty standard emotions available on iFeel. The app was letting her down. For the very first time, iFeel didn’t know how she felt.

iFeel Horrible, she wrote, then decided no, she did not feel that way. That wasn’t quite accurate. “Horrible” was what she felt after she hurt her mother’s feelings again, or after she ate. She did not feel “Horrible” now. She deleted it.

iFeel Lost, she wrote, but that sounded stupid and cheesy and definitely not a Laura thing to say. People who were “Lost” were people with no direction in life, and she had direction in life, Laura did: Successful future vice president of communications and marketing, hello? Successful business major? Elite college student? She deleted “Lost.”

iFeel Upset was wrong too, due to not seeming important enough. Delete.

The thing about iFeel was that she could broadcast how she felt at any given moment to her huge network of friends, and then their apps could auto-respond to her feelings with whatever message was appropriate given the emotion she expressed. And Laura usually loved this, how she could post iFeel Sad and within seconds her phone lit up with encouragement and support and pick-me-ups that made her feel actually less sad. She could select an emotion from the fifty standard emotion choices and post a little explanatory note or photo or both, then watch the support roll in.

But now, for the first time, the fifty standard emotion choices seemed, to Laura, limited. For the first time, she did not seem to feel any of the standard emotions, and this was really surprising to her because she’d always thought fifty choices were sort of a lot. And indeed there were some emotions she had never expressed feeling. She had not once ever written iFeel Helpless, even though “Helpless” was right there among the fifty standard emotions. She had never written iFeel Guilty or iFeel Ashamed. She had never written iFeel Old, obviously. She wasn’t quite “Sad,” nor was she “Miserable.” It was more that she felt a kind of doubt that what she was thinking and feeling and doing wasn’t exactly, totally right. And this was really uncomfortable because it contradicted the primary message of her life — that everything she did was correct and praiseworthy and whatever she wanted she should have because she deserved it, which was the more or less constant message from her mother, whom Laura called after the meeting with her Intro to Lit professor: “He thinks I cheated! He thinks I plagiarized a paper!”

“Did you?” her mother asked.

“No!” Laura said. Then, after a long pause: “Actually, yes. I did cheat.”

“Well, I’m sure you had a good reason for it.”

“I had an excellent reason for it,” she said. Her mother had always done this, supplied her with good excuses. Once when she was fifteen and she came home at three in the morning obviously drunk and maybe also a little stoned, dropped off by three very loud, very much older boys who had recently either graduated high school or dropped out of it, the hair on the back of her head tangled and disheveled from what had obviously been vigorous friction against the backseat upholstery of a car, in a state so near comatose that when her mother said “Where have you been?” she could not think of anything to say and just stood there and dumbly wobbled, even then her mother had bailed her out.

“Are you sick?” she asked Laura, who, taking the bait, nodded her head. “You’re sick, aren’t you. You’re coming down with something. You were probably taking a nap and lost track of time, right?”

“Yes,” Laura said. “I don’t feel well.” Which of course required her to play hooky the next day to keep up the lie, claiming an unbearable cold-and-flulike illness, which was not too much of a stretch given the top-shelf hangover she woke up with.

The weirdest thing about these interactions was how much her mother seemed to believe them.

It wasn’t only that she was covering for her daughter; she seemed to be willfully hallucinating about her. “You’re a strong woman and I’m proud of you,” she’d tell Laura afterward. Or: “You can have anything you want.” Or: “Don’t let anyone get in your way.” Or: “I gave up my career for you and so your success literally means everything in the world to me.” Or whatever.

But now Laura also felt doubt, which was not one of the fifty allowable emotions according to iFeel, which itself made her doubt that it was doubt she was feeling, a kind of mind-bending paradox she tried not to spend too much mental time with.

She could not fail her Intro to Lit course. That much was clear. There were too many things at stake — internships, summer jobs, grade point average, a besmirched permanent record. No, that could not happen, and she felt mistreated and wronged by her professor, who was willing to effectively take away her future because of one stupid assignment, which seemed to her a response all out of proportion to the crime she’d committed.

But, okay, even this she doubted, because if it didn’t matter if she cheated on any single assignment, then by extension it would be okay if she cheated on every assignment. Which struck her as at least a little weird because the agreement she’d reached with herself in high school when all the cheating started was that it was okay to cheat on every assignment now as long as sometime in the future she stopped cheating and began doing the actual work, as soon as the assignments started to matter. Which had not yet happened. In four years of high school and one year of college, she had not done anything that registered even remotely as mattering. So she cheated. On everything. And lied about it. All the time. And did not feel one ounce of regret.

Not until today. What was screwing with her head today was this: What if she made it all the way through college never having done any actual college work? When she got her first very powerful publicity and marketing job, would she know what to do? It struck her that she did not even fully comprehend what was involved in the word “marketing,” despite a low-level innate ability to recognize when someone else had done it well, to her.

But every time she thought about maybe paying attention in her classes and doing the work herself and really studying for tests and writing her own papers, the fear that grabbed her was this: What if she couldn’t do it? What if she wasn’t good enough? Or smart enough? What if she failed? She worried that the Laura unaided by deception and duplicity was not the elite college student both she and her mother assumed her to be.

For her mother, this knowledge would be crippling. Her mother — who since the divorce signed all her e-mails to Laura with You are my only joy—she could never handle Laura’s failure. It would be like a nullification of her whole life’s project.

So Laura had to do this, press forward with her plan, however risky, for her mother’s sake. For both their sakes. There was no room for doubt.

Because the thing is? Is that now the stakes were even higher. Her phone call to the dean had effectively relieved her of any Hamlet-related suffering, but it had caused an unexpected problem, which was that the dean was now going to extraordinary lengths to show how sensitive the university was to Laura’s hurt feelings. The dean was organizing a Mediation and Conflict Resolution Conference, which, as far as Laura could tell, was a two-day summit where she and Professor Anderson would sit across from each other at a table while several third-party peacemaker coaches would help them engage in, manage, cope with, and productively resolve their differences in a safe and respectful environment.

Which sounded like just about the worst thing in the world.

Laura knew it would be difficult to maintain her fabrications over two days of intense scrutiny. She knew she had to prevent this meeting at all costs, but she felt doubt and maybe even a bit of guilt and remorse about the only solution she’d so far devised.

There was a knock at the door. That, finally, would be Larry.

“One second!” she yelled.

She pulled off her shorts and tank top, yanked off her bra and underwear, and fetched the towel from her closet. It was the thinnest, smallest towel she owned. It was probably not even a proper bath towel because it did not wrap fully around her but rather revealed a long dagger of flesh all the way up her side. And the towel wasn’t a standard width either, since the bottom came down only to that soft fleshy ticklish part where her legs met her torso. Any sudden movement and all would be revealed, in other words. It was white, threadbare from many washings, almost see-through in places. She had laundered it many times to achieve exactly this look. She used it roughly the same way a magician used a watch: to hypnotize.

She opened the door.

“Hey,” she said, and Larry’s eyes darted south the moment he saw her and comprehended her and her fantastically small towel. “I’m not dressed, sorry,” she said. “I was just about to shower.”

He walked in and closed the door behind him. Larry Broxton, wearing his usual outfit: shiny silver basketball shorts, black T-shirt, big flip-flops. It was not that Larry didn’t own any other clothes — he did, she’d seen his closet, filled with nice-looking button-downs that were surely mother-supplied. It was just that this was the outfit he always chose, picking it up off the floor every morning and sniffing it and putting it on again. She wondered how long before he’d get sick of this one outfit, but it had been a month now and she hadn’t seen him change yet. Boys can be obsessively focused in their desires, she’d noticed. The things they liked they tended to repeat again and again and again.

“You needed something?” Larry said. Guys were often so eager to do what she wanted, especially when she wore the Towel. Larry sat on her bed. She stood in front of him, so that her body was directly at his eye level. If she drew the towel up an inch or two, he could probably see her perfectly manicured pubic everything.

“Just a little favor,” she said.

She had met Larry in her Intro to Lit course. She’d noticed him early on and wondered if he was trying to grow a beard or simply forgetting to shave. She’d seen him on campus. She knew he always wore the same outfit and drove a really big black Humvee. He never spoke to anyone until one day after class he asked if she wanted to come to a party at his frat. A theme party. They were roasting a pig on a spit. Grilling hamburgers they called Brontosaurus Burgers. Making something called Jurassic Juice. They called it the Slutty Cavegirls party.

Which was just so totally offensive! Because it’s a party at a frat. Obviously she would dress slutty. They didn’t have to tell her to do that. Did they think she was stupid?

But okay, she went. Leather toga, no undies, whatever, and drank Jurassic Juice until it tasted good, and talked to Larry, who used the word circumspect in a sentence, which was impressive. They talked about what was the worst thing about college. “The classes,” Laura had said. “The parking spaces are too small,” Larry had said. And Laura felt that familiar intoxicated grabby allover need where all she wanted was to press herself up against him tightly. But she wasn’t yet so drunk that she was going to ho it up in front of all these people. She invited Larry back to her dorm room, where she gave him a blow job and he totally came in her mouth without even asking, which she personally found rude, but whatever.

She didn’t know what circumspect meant, but sometimes you have to give a guy some credit. That’s a good word.

“Do you still have your job?” Laura said, by which she meant his fantastic work-study position at the campus computer support center, where Larry spent most of his three-hour shift watching internet videos, occasionally helping some poor professor who didn’t know how to hook up a printer.

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh good,” she said, and she stepped toward him, lightly touching her leg to his.

The weirdest thing that had happened when she seduced Larry in her dorm room that first time was that at the moment he orgasmed, she felt some odd lump of something suddenly enter her mouth, something soft but definitely, surprisingly, solid. She spit it into her hand and found what appeared to be a partially digested piece of Brontosaurus Burger. Which she assumed came out of Larry, and thus she concluded he had the unique ability to ejaculate his dinner out his penis, which was gross. After that, she requested that Larry do his deposits elsewhere.

“So at your job,” Laura said, “you can remotely log in to any computer on campus, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Perfect. There’s a computer that needs to be investigated.”

Larry frowned. “Whose computer?”

“Professor Anderson’s.”

“Oh, man. For real?”

She stroked his hay-colored hair with one hand. “Definitely. He’s hiding something. Something bad.”

Laura had not considered another possibility: that men in fact did not have the biological capability to ejaculate the contents of their stomach, but rather that the bit of Brontosaurus Burger had been in Laura’s mouth from the beginning, before the blow job even started, stuck there in the pit where a wisdom tooth used to be, and it was simply Larry’s orgasmic bucking that jimmied it loose. In other words, a coincidence, if an unfortunate one. Afterward, she told Larry he was no longer welcome to come in her mouth, and he enthusiastically suggested other places to do his business. Her face, breasts, and butt were the expected targets. Expected because they had both ingested so many hours of internet pornography that they were simply acting out scenes that had become normalized, even banal. That Larry wanted to finish every sex act by splashing onto some part of her seemed like the customary way sex should end, raised as they were on porn’s ejaculatory clichés. But then Larry expanded the target zone: He wanted to come on her feet, her back, in her hair, on the bridge of her nose, he wanted her to wear glasses so he could come on her glasses, on her elbows, on that thin part of her wrists. He was remarkably specific! She had no opinion about this, that Larry seemed to have a mental checklist of body parts he wanted to ejaculate onto. No opinion except that occasionally this made her feel like the sexual equivalent of a bingo card.

“What’s Professor Anderson hiding?” Larry said. “What’s on his computer?”

“Something embarrassing. Maybe even criminal.”

“Seriously?”

“Definitely,” Laura said, and she was maybe about eighty percent sure this was true. Because who didn’t have something embarrassing on their computer? A dubious downloaded image, something questionable in the browser history. The odds were in her favor.

“I’m only supposed to log in to someone’s computer if they ask me for help,” Larry said. “I can’t go snooping around.”

“You can say you were doing routine maintenance.”

She took another step toward him so that she emerged from behind the towel. She couldn’t be sure what was going on down there, focused as she was on Larry, but judging by his expression — the way he stared at her — she figured she was now mostly exposed from the waist down.

“Think about it,” Laura said. “If you find something that proves he’s not fit to be a teacher, you’d be a hero. My hero.”

Larry stared at her.

“Will you do this for me?” she said.

“I’ll get in trouble,” he said.

“You won’t, I promise,” she said, taking his head with the other hand, letting go of the towel, which dropped softly to the floor.

She always loved this moment, the change that came over men when they recognized what was about to happen, how fast they clicked over to a new kind of intensity and focus. Larry was already grabbing at her.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

She smiled. At that moment, he would have agreed to anything.

It was never this moment that Laura had a problem with, the moment of seduction. The problem was afterward. Men tended to drift away from her in a few weeks. They could not be counted on. She’d had three different guys, for example, all friends-with-benefits type guys, come out as bi-a-sexual soon after their encounters, meaning, they said, that they were no longer attracted to either gender, equally.

Which she was like, what are the odds?

After Larry had finished and left her dorm room and she had wiped the slimy traces of him off her shinbones (which was a first), she returned to iFeel, hoping that maybe she’d have more clarity now, maybe she’d be able to figure out what to say, what she felt. But no luck. Her emotions seemed as foreign as ever.

She decided to activate the auto-correct function on iFeel, a really excellent little piece of software that took whatever emotion you thought you were feeling and compared it to the millions of entries collected in the iFeel database and, in a crowd-surfing, data-mining sort of way, extrapolated which of the fifty standard emotions you were actually feeling. Laura clicked a link, a text field opened up, and she began typing:

iFeel like i dont deserve 2 fail my class just b/c i cheated on some dumb assignment but also i know i prolly shouldnt be cheating so much in all of my classes b/c someday ill have to go out & get a job & have knowledge in my field or whatever but at this point i actually HAVE TO cheat b/c ive cheated so much in the past that i usually have no idea whats going on in any of my classes so if i stopped cheating i would get really bad grades & maybe even fail out of school so it seems 2 me if im going 2 fail either way i might as well cheat & get the grades i need 2 become the powerful business professional my mother so desperately wants me 2B. so i have to prevent this meeting with the professor & ive thought about it alot & ive realized that the university wont require the professor to come to this meeting if the professor is NOT AN EMPLOYEE OF THE UNIVERSITY \(^.^)/ so maybe the way forward is to totally discredit the professor & get him fired & ruin his life which makes me feel a little guilty & also angry that the school has boxed me in this way & essentially forced me 2 do something i will feel sort of remorseful about later all b/c i plagiarized one stupid paper ¯

She pressed Enter and the iFeel app processed this for a moment before the auto-correct displayed the answer:

Do you mean “Bad”?

Sure, that must be what she meant. She posted it right away: iFeel Bad. And seconds later the text messages poured in.

cheer up grl!:)

don’t feel bad ur gr8!!

luv ya!

ur the best!!!!

And so on, dozens of them, from friends and admirers, boyfriends and lovers, colleagues and acquaintances. And while they did not know the reason she felt bad, it was surprisingly easy to pretend they did, that they knew about the plan, and so each message had the effect of steeling her resolve. This is what she had to do. She thought about her future, her mother, everything that was at stake. And she knew she was right. She would go through with the plan. The professor had it coming. He was asking for it. He wouldn’t know what hit him.

3

THEY MET at one of the chain restaurants near Henry’s suburban office park, the kind of place erected right off the highway, on a terrifyingly busy one-way access road. The route here tended to confuse one’s GPS device or map app, as it required a series of awkward and counterintuitive U-turns to navigate the various viaducts and on-ramps and cloverleafs made necessary by the nearby fourteen-lane expressway.

Inside, the music was happy Top 40 sing-along stuff, the floors industrially carpeted and, within the orbits of children in high chairs, chummed with food globs and milk slicks and crayons and damp little twisted flecks of napkin. Families stood in the front vestibule awaiting their tables, staring at the round plastic puck the hostess gave them, a device that contained some kind of inner motor-and-light apparatus that would blink and agitate when their table was free.

Henry and Samuel sat in a booth holding menus — large, laminated menus, dynamically colored and complexly subdivided, roughly the size of the Ten Commandments in that one movie about the Ten Commandments. The food was pretty standard chain-restaurant fare: burgers, steaks, sandwiches, salads, a list of inventive appetizers with names involving whimsical adjectives, e.g., sizzlin’. What allegedly set this particular restaurant chain apart from others was that it did something weird with an onion — cut it and fried it in such a way that the onion unfurled itself and resembled, on the plate, a kind of desiccated, many-fingered claw. There was a Rewards Club one could join to earn points for the eating of such things.

Their table was cluttered with the several appetizers Henry had already purchased with his company’s credit card. They were here doing “field research,” as Henry called it. They sampled the menu and discussed which items had frozen-meal potential: golden fried cheddar bites, yes; seared ahi tuna, probably not.

Henry noted all this on his laptop. They were digging into a plate of miso-glazed chicken skewers when Henry finally asked about the topic he was eager to discuss but trying hard to seem indifferent about.

“Oh, by the way, how’s it going with your mother?” he said in this dismissive way while sawing at a chicken chunk with a fork.

“Not great,” Samuel said. “Today I spent the whole afternoon at the UIC library, going through the archive, looking at everything they had from 1968. Yearbooks. Newspapers. Hoping to find something about Mom.”

“And?”

“Zilch.”

“Well, she wasn’t in college very long,” Henry said. “Maybe a month? I’m not surprised you can’t find anything.”

“I don’t know what else to do.”

“When you saw her, at her apartment, did she seem, I don’t know, happy?”

“Not really. More like quiet and guarded. With a hint of hopeless resignation.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“Maybe I should go see her again,” Samuel said. “Drop by sometime when her lawyer’s not there.”

“That is a terrible idea,” Henry said.

“Why?”

“For one? She doesn’t deserve it. She has given you nothing but problems all your life. And two? The crime. It’s way too dangerous.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

“Seriously! What’s the address again?”

Samuel told him and watched as his father typed this into his laptop. “It says here,” Henry said, staring at his screen, “there’ve been sixty-one crimes in that neighborhood.”

“Dad.”

“Sixty-one! In the last month alone. Simple assault. Simple battery. Forcible entry. Vandalism. Motor vehicle theft. Burglary. Another simple assault. Criminal trespass. Theft. Another simple assault. On the sidewalk, for Pete’s sake.”

“I’ve been there already. It’s fine.”

“On the sidewalk in the middle of the day. Broad daylight! Guy just hits you with a crowbar and takes your wallet and leaves you for dead.”

“I’m sure that won’t happen.”

“That did happen. That happened yesterday.”

“I mean, it won’t happen to me.”

“Attempted theft. Here’s a weapons violation. Found person, which I think is a goddamn kidnapping.”

“Dad, listen—”

“Simple assault on the bus. Aggravated battery.”

“Okay, fine. I’ll be careful. Whatever you want.”

“Whatever I want? Great. Then don’t go. Don’t go at all. Stay home.”

“Dad.”

“Let her fend for herself. Let her rot.”

“But I need her.”

“You do not.”

“It’s not like we’re going to start spending Christmases together. I only need her story. I’m going to be sued by my publisher if I don’t figure it out.”

“This is a very bad idea.”

“You know what my alternative is? Declaring bankruptcy and moving to Jakarta. That’s my choice.”

“Why Jakarta?”

“It’s just an example. The point is, I need to get Mom talking.”

Henry shrugged and chewed his chicken and made notes on his laptop. “You see the Cubs game last night?” he said, still staring at his screen.

“I’ve been a little distracted lately,” Samuel said.

“Hm,” Henry said, nodding. “Good game.”

This was how they usually related to each other — through sports. It was the topic they fled to whenever conversation lulled or became dangerously personal or sad. After Faye left, Samuel and his father rarely talked about her. They grieved independent of each other. Mostly what they talked about were the Cubs. After she left, both of them found within themselves a sudden and surprisingly powerful and devotional all-consuming love for the Chicago Cubs. Down came the framed reproductions of incomprehensible works of modern art from Samuel’s bedroom walls, down came the nonsensical poetry broadsides hung there by his mother, and up went posters of Ryne Sandberg and Andre Dawson and Cubs pennants. Broadcasts on WGN weekday afternoons, Samuel literally praying to God — on his knees on the couch looking up to the ceiling — praying and crossing his fingers while actually making deals with God in exchange for one home run, one late-inning victory, one winning season.

Occasionally they took trips into Chicago for Cubs games — always during the day, always preceded by an elaborate ritual where Henry packed the car with enough supplies to get them through any roadside catastrophe. He packed extra jugs of water for drinking or radiator malfunction. Spare tire, sometimes two. Flares, emergency hand-crank CB radio. Walking maps of Wrigleyville on which he’d written notes from previous trips: where he’d found parking spots, where he’d encountered beggars or drug dealers. Particularly rough-seeming neighborhoods he etched out completely. He brought a fake wallet in case of mugging.

When they crossed the boundary into Chicago and the traffic congealed around them and the neighborhoods started to change, he said “Doors locked?” and Samuel jiggled the handle and said “Check!”

“Eyes peeled?”

“Check!”

And together they remained vigilant and watchful for crime until returning home again.

Henry had never worried like this before. But after Faye disappeared, he became preoccupied with disasters and muggings. The loss of his wife had convinced him that even more loss was imminent and near.

“I wonder what happened to her,” Samuel said, “in Chicago, in college. What made her leave so quickly?”

“No idea. She never talked about it.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

“I was so happy she came back I didn’t want to jinx it. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you know? I let the matter drop. I thought I was being very modern and compassionate.”

“I have to find out what happened to her.”

“Hey, I need your opinion. We’re launching a new line. Which logo do you prefer?”

Henry slid two glossy pieces of paper across the table. One said FARM FRESH FROZENS, the other, FARM FRESH FREEZNS.

“I’m glad you’re so concerned about your son’s well-being,” Samuel said.

“Seriously. Which do you like better?”

“I’m glad my personal crisis is so very important to you.”

“Stop being dramatic. Pick a logo.”

Samuel studied them for a moment. “I guess I’d vote FROZENS? When in doubt, spell words correctly.”

“That’s what I said! But the advertising folks said FREEZNS made the product seem funner. That’s the word they actually used. Funner.”

“Of course I’d also argue that FROZENS isn’t a proper word either,” Samuel said. “More like a word that is not a noun conscripted to dress like one.”

“My son the English professor.”

“Which I guess there’s some precedent for. Take the tuna melt. Or the corn pop.”

“The advertising folks do that kind of thing all the time. They tell me that thirty years ago you could get away with saying something simple and declarative: Tastes Great! Be Happy! But consumers these days are way more sophisticated, so you have to get tricky with the language. Taste the Great! Find Your Happy!”

“I have a question,” Samuel said. “How can something be both farm fresh and frozen?”

“That’s something that way fewer people stop and think about than you would expect.”

“Once it’s frozen isn’t it, by definition, no longer farm fresh?”

“It’s a trigger word. When they want to advertise to hipster foodies, they use farm fresh. Or maybe artisanal. Or local. For millennials, they use vintage. For women, they use skinny. And don’t even get me started on the quote-unquote farm where all this farm-fresh stuff comes from. I’m from Iowa. I know farms. That place is not a farm.”

Samuel’s phone dinged with a new text message. He made a reflexive move to his pocket, then stopped and folded his hands on the table. He and Henry stared at each other for a moment.

“You gonna get that?” Henry said.

“No,” Samuel said. “We’re talking.”

“Mighty big of you.”

“We’re talking about your work.”

“Not really talking. More like you’re listening to me complain about it, again.”

“How much longer till retirement?”

“Oh, too long. But I’m counting the days. And when I finally do leave, no one will be happier than those advertising folks. You should have seen the fuss I made about spelling jalapeño poppers with a Z. Or mozzarella sticks with an X. Popperz. Stix. No thank you.”

Samuel remembered how happy his father was the day he got this job and moved the family to Streamwood — their final exodus from crowded apartment buildings to the expansively grassy and well-spaced houses of Oakdale Lane. For the first time they had a yard, a lawn. Henry wanted to get a dog. They had a washer and dryer inside the house. No more walking to the laundromat on Sunday afternoons. No more carrying groceries five blocks. No more random car vandalism. No more listening to the couple fighting in the apartment upstairs or the baby wailing from below. Henry was ecstatic. But Faye seemed a little lost. Maybe there’d been a struggle between them — she’d wanted to live in a city, he’d wanted to move to the suburbs. Who knows how such things are resolved; there are other, more interesting lives that parents keep hidden from their children. Samuel only knew that his mother had lost the struggle, and she sneered at all the symbols of her defeat — their big tan garage door, their patio deck, their bourgeois barbecue grill, their long secluded block brimming with happy, safe, bechildrened white people.

Henry must have thought he had it all figured out — a good job, a family, a nice house in the suburbs. It was everything he’d always wanted, and so it was a terrible and maybe even shattering blow when it all fell apart, first when his wife abandoned him, then when his job did too. That would have been in 2003—after more than twenty years working there, when Henry was maybe eighteen months from a comfortable early retirement, close enough that he was already making plans to travel and take up new hobbies — when his company filed for bankruptcy. This even though the company had issued to its employees an “All is well” memo not two days before declaring bankruptcy, this memo saying that rumors of bankruptcy were overblown and to hold on to your stock or even buy more, since it was so undervalued at that moment, which Henry did, though it was later revealed the CEO was at that very moment secretly dumping all his shares. Henry’s retirement was tied up completely in the now worthless company stock, and when the company came out of bankruptcy and issued new stock, they offered it only to the board of directors and big-time Wall Street investors. So Henry was left with nothing. The nest egg he’d spent so long amassing evaporated in a single day.

That day, as the realization settled over him that his retirement would have to be pushed back ten or maybe even fifteen years, Henry had the same bewildered look he’d had the day that Faye disappeared. He had once again been betrayed by the very thing that was supposed to keep him safe.

Now he just seemed cynical and wary. The kind of person who no longer believed in anyone’s promises.

“The average American eats six frozen meals a month,” Henry said. “My job is to get that to seven. That’s what I’m tirelessly working for, sometimes even on weekends.”

“Doesn’t sound like your heart’s really in it.”

“The problem is that nobody in the office takes the long view. They’re all focused on the next quarterly statement, the next earnings report. They haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”

“Which is?”

“That whenever we identify some new market niche, all we do, in the long run, is dismantle it. This is like our guiding principle, our original philosophy. In the 1950s, Swanson saw that families ate meals together and wanted to get into that market. So they invented the TV dinner. Which made families realize they didn’t have to eat meals together. Selling the family dinner made the family dinner go extinct. And we’ve been pulverizing the market ever since.”

Samuel’s phone dinged again, another new text message.

“For Christ’s sake,” Henry said. “You young people and your phones. Just look at it.”

“Sorry,” Samuel said as he checked the message. It was from Pwnage. It said: OMG FOUND WOMAN IN PHOTO!!!!

“Sorry, one second,” Samuel said to his father while typing a reply.

what woman? what photo?

photo of ur mom from the 60s!! I found woman in that pic!!

for real??

come to jezebels right now I’ll tell u everything!!!

“It’s like I’m at work trying to have a conversation with one of our interns,” Henry said. “Your head’s in two places at once. Not paying quality attention to anything. I don’t care if that makes me sound old.”

“Sorry, Dad, I gotta run.”

“You can’t sit down for ten minutes without interruption. Always so busy.”

“Thanks for dinner. I’ll call you soon.”

And Samuel raced south to the suburb where Pwnage lived and parked under the purple lights of Jezebels and hurried inside, where he found his Elfscape buddy at the bar, watching TV, a popular food channel show about extreme eating.

“You found the woman in the photo?” Samuel said as he sat down.

“Yes. Her name is Alice, and she lives in Indiana, way out in the boonies.”

He gave Samuel a photograph — pulled from the internet and printed on copy paper: a woman at the beach on a sunny day, smiling at the camera, wearing hiking boots and cargo pants and a big green floppy hat and a T-shirt that said “Happy Camper.”

“This is really her?” Samuel said.

“Definitely. She was sitting behind your mom when that photo was taken at the protest in 1968. She told me herself.”

“Amazing,” Samuel said.

“Best part? She and your mom were neighbors. Like, in the dorm, at school.”

“And she’ll talk to me?”

“I already set it up. She’s expecting you tomorrow.”

Pwnage gave him the printout of a short e-mail correspondence, as well as Alice’s address and a map to her house.

“How did you find her?”

“I had some time on Patch Day. No big whoop.”

He looked again at the TV. “Oh, check it out! Do you really think he’ll be able to eat that whole thing? I vote yes.”

He was talking about the TV show’s host, a man known for his ability to eat ridiculous quantities of food without passing out or vomiting. His name was famously etched onto Hall of Fame plaques in dozens of American restaurants where he overcame some food object: a 72-ounce porterhouse steak, an XXL pizza burger, a burrito weighing more than most newborn babies. His face was puffy in the way of someone who, all over his body, had a quarter-inch of extra muchness.

Right now the host gave colorful commentary as a chef in what appeared to be a greasy-spoon diner prepared hash browns on a large discolored griddle — a potato mound he shaped into a square roughly the size of a chess board. On top of the hash browns the chef piled two handfuls of crumbled sausage, four handfuls of chopped bacon, ground beef, several diced onions, and what appeared to be shredded white cheddar or mozzarella or Monterey Jack cheese, so much cheese that the meats were now obscured totally under a white melty mess. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen it said: 9/11 Remembered.

“I owe you, man,” Samuel said. “Thank you so much. You need something? Just ask.”

“You’re very welcome.”

“Seriously. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No. It’s okay.”

“Well, if there is, please tell me.”

The chef splatted six spatula-size balls of sour cream atop the white cheesy layer and spread them over the big brick of food. He rolled the entire apparatus into a log, the fried-potato side facing out, cut it in half, and lifted the two halves onto a white serving platter, where they stood vertically. They broke apart in places and oozed steam and thick creamy fatty liquid. The dish was called the Twin Towers Gut Buster. The host sat in the restaurant’s dining area surrounded by patrons excited to be on television. In front of him were the golden potato-meat logs. He asked for a moment of silence. Everyone bowed their heads. Close-up on the Gut Buster, leaking its white slime. Then the crowd, perhaps cued by someone off camera, started yelling “Eat! Eat! Eat! Eat!” as the host picked up a knife and fork and sliced into the Gut Buster’s outer fried crust and scooped up some of its inner drippy mash and guided it into his mouth. He chewed and looked into the camera plaintively and said, “That is heavy.” The crowd laughed. “Bro, I don’t think I’m gonna make it.” Cut to commercial.

“Actually?” Pwnage said. “Yes. There is one thing you could do for me.”

“Name it.”

“I have this book,” Pwnage said. “Well, more like a book idea. A mystery thriller novel?”

“The psychic detective story. I remember.”

“Yeah. I always intended to write that book, but I had to push back the writing because there were all these tasks that needed to be completed before I could begin — you know, my readers would expect me to understand how police operate and how the justice system actually works, and so I would need to shadow a real detective for a while, which means I would need to find a detective and explain how I’m a writer working on a novel about police work and I need a few nights on the job to get the flavor of real police lingo and procedure. That type of thing.”

“Sure.”

“You know, research.”

“Yes.”

“But then, okay, I worry that any detective I send my letter to probably won’t believe the ‘writer’ claim since I’ve never published anything ever, a fact that the detective would almost certainly deduce because detectives know how to find things. So before I can contact a detective I’ll have to publish a few short stories in a few literary journals and maybe win a few little awards to corroborate the ‘writer’ claim, after which the detective would be more apt to allow me on duty.”

“I suppose.”

“Not to mention all the books about ESP and other paranormal psychic phenomena that I’d need to read to achieve the proper verisimilitude. In fact, there are so many things I need to finish before the writing can even begin that I’m having trouble finding motivation.”

“Are you trying to ask me something specific?”

“If I had a publisher for my book already lined up, then the detective I contacted would automatically believe that I’m a writer, plus it would give me an incentive to actually start writing. Plus there’s the advance money, of course, which could fund renovations I plan to make to my kitchen.”

“So you want me to show your book to my publisher?”

“Yeah, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No problem. Done.”

Pwnage smiled and slapped Samuel on the back and turned again to watch the guy on TV, who was now halfway through eating the Gut Buster, having completely devoured one of the twin logs, the other having lost its internal structural integrity and loosened into a cone of slimy potato rubble. The host looked wearily into the camera with the expression of a staggered and exhausted boxer trying to remain conscious. The chef said he’d created the Twin Towers Gut Buster a few years back in order to “never forget.” The host started in on the other log. His fork moved slowly. It visibly shook. A concerned onlooker offered him a glass of water, which he refused. He swallowed the next bite. He looked like he hated himself.

Samuel stared at the photograph of Alice. He wondered how the fierce-looking protestor of 1968 could become this person, who apparently wore cargo pants and ironic T-shirts and tromped along beaches looking perfectly happy and at ease. How could two people who seemed so different inhabit the same body?

“Did you talk to Alice?” Samuel said.

“Yep.”

“What did she seem like? What was your impression of her?”

“She seemed very interested in mustard.”

“Mustard?”

“Yep.”

“Is that slang?”

“No. I mean that literally,” Pwnage said. “She’s super interested in mustard.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I.”

The man on TV, meanwhile, was down to his last few bites. He was exhausted and miserable. His forehead rested on the table and his arms splayed out and if it weren’t for his heavy breathing and visible sweating it would seem like he was dead. The crowd was ecstatic that he’d almost consumed the entire dish. The chef said no one had ever been this close before. The crowd chanted “USA! USA!” as the host held the final bite, trembling, on his fork, aloft.

4

ALICE KNELT on the soft, spongy ground of the forest behind her house. She clutched a small tuft of mustard plant and pulled — not too hard, and not straight up, but rather gently and twistingly, a torsion that freed the roots from the sandy soil without breaking them. This was what she did most days. She roamed the woods of the Indiana dunes, absolving them of their mustard.

Samuel stood about twenty paces away, watching her. He was on the narrow gravel path that cut through the woods and connected Alice’s cabin with her distant garage. The path was maybe a quarter-mile long, up and down a hill. His cresting the hill had set her dogs to barking.

“The problem,” Alice said, “is the seeds. Garlic mustard seeds can linger for years.”

It was a one-woman crusade she waged in the dunes along Lake Michigan’s southern shore. This certain exotic mustard had found its way into Indiana forests from its native home in Europe, then proceeded to annihilate the local flowers, shrubs, trees. If she weren’t here to beat it back, the stuff would take over in just a few summers.

Yesterday she’d been reading one of the Chicago-area invasive-species online discussion boards that she moderates, her job being to tell people when they were posting in the wrong area and move their misplaced threads to different discussion boards. She kept everything nice and tidy; she engaged in a sort of pruning that mimicked in a digital way what she did most days in these woods, ripping out things that didn’t belong. And since most websites were bombarded with an unthinkable amount of spam — mostly advertisements for male enhancement pills or pornography or who knows what because it’s in Cyrillic — even the smallest and most niche sites needed a moderator to vigorously patrol the boards and delete unwanted posts and ads and spam or else the whole thing choked with senseless data. Most of Alice’s time not spent with mustard or her dogs or her partner was spent like this, beating back the advancing chaos, trying to achieve Enlightenment order in the face of twenty-first-century madness.

She was at her laptop looking in on her invasive-species discussion forum and saw that someone named Axman had posted a thread titled “Do you know the woman IN THIS PHOTO?” Which seemed definitely like spam because of its unnecessary use of all-caps words, and because it certainly did not have anything to do with that specific board’s ostensible topic, which was “Honeysuckle (Amur, Morrow’s, Bell’s, Standish, and Tartarian).” So she was about to move the post to the Odds ’n’ Ends forum and scold Axman for putting it in the wrong place when she clicked on the image in question and saw, incredibly, herself.

A photo taken in 1968, at the big protest in Chicago that year. There she was, in her old sunglasses, in her army fatigues, staring at the camera. Goddamn she was such a badass. She was in the park, in a field of student revelry. Thousands of protestors. Behind her were flags and signs and outlines of old Chicago buildings on the horizon. Faye sitting in front of her. She could hardly believe what she was seeing.

She contacted Axman, who sent her to a strange guy named Pwnage, who sent her to Samuel, who came to visit the very next day.

He stood several paces away from her, far from this patch of leafy shrub that to the uninitiated looked in no way special but was, in fact, garlic mustard. Each twig on a garlic mustard plant contained dozens of seeds, which wedged in shoe soles and inside socks and on the cuffs of jeans and were then spread by walking. Samuel was not allowed anywhere near it. Alice wore large plastic boots up to her knees that seemed appropriate for swamps or bogs. She carried black plastic bags that she carefully wrapped around each mustard plant to catch the seeds that dropped as she jostled it out of the ground. Every plant had hundreds of seeds, and not one of them could be allowed to escape. The way she held these bags when they were full of mustard plants — carefully, and at a small distance away from her — looked like how one might carry a bag that contained the body of a dead cat.

“How did you get involved with this?” Samuel asked. “With mustard, I mean.”

“When I moved out here,” she said, “it was killing all the native plants.”

Alice’s cabin overlooked a small dune at the edge of Lake Michigan, the closest thing you could get to a beach house in Indiana. She bought the house for next to nothing in 1986, back when the lake was at a record height. The water was a few feet from the porch. If the lake had kept rising, the house would have been washed away.

“Buying the house was a gamble,” Alice said, “but an educated one.”

“Based on what?”

“Climate change,” she said. “Hotter, drier summers. More droughts, less rain. Less ice in the winter, more evaporation. If the climate scientists were right, the lake would have to recede. So I found myself rooting for global warming.”

“That must have felt, I don’t know, complicated?”

“Every time I was stuck in traffic I imagined the carbon from all the cars filling the air and saving my house. It was perverse.”

Eventually the lake did recede. Now she had a nice big beach where the water used to be. She’d purchased the place for ten grand. It was now worth millions.

“I moved out here with my partner,” she said. “It was the eighties. We were sick of lying about our relationship. We were fed up telling our neighbors we were roommates, that she was my good friend. We wanted our privacy.”

“Where’s your partner now?”

“She’s away on business this week. It’s just me and the dogs. Three of them, rescue dogs. They are not allowed in the woods since their paws would pick up mustard seeds.”

“Of course.”

Alice’s white hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore blue jeans under her giant rubber waders. A simple, clean white T-shirt. She had that naturalist’s lack of attention to outward appearances, an indifference toward things like cosmetics and grooming that read not as apathy but rather as transcendence.

“How’s your mother?” Alice said.

“Indicted.”

“But other than that?”

“Other than that, I have no idea. She won’t talk to me.”

Alice thought about that quiet young girl she used to know, and she regretted that Faye never overcame what tortured her. But such was the way with people — they loved the things that made them miserable. She’d seen it so many times among her movement friends, after the movement splintered and grew ugly and dangerous. They were miserable all the time, and the misery seemed to feed them and nourish them. Not the misery itself but its familiarity, its constancy.

“I wish I could help,” Alice said. “But I don’t think I have much for you.”

“I’m trying to understand what happened,” Samuel said. “My mother kept everything about Chicago a secret. You’re the first person I’ve met who knew her there.”

“I wonder why she never talked about it.”

“I was hoping you could tell me. Something happened to her there. Something important.”

Of course he was right, but Alice wouldn’t say so.

“What’s to tell?” she said, trying to act aloof. “She went to school for a month, then left. College wasn’t for her. It’s a pretty common story.”

“Then why would she keep it a secret?”

“Maybe she was embarrassed.”

“No, there’s more to it than that.”

“She was a troubled soul when I knew her,” Alice said. “Small-town girl. Smart, but also a little clueless. Quiet. She read a lot. Ambitious and driven in a way that probably meant she had big-time daddy issues.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll bet she had a dad who was always disappointed in her, you know? So her anxiety about being disappointing to her father was swapped out for a drive to be special to everyone. Psychoanalysts would call this replacement. The child learns what is wanted of her. Am I right about that?”

“Maybe.”

“At any rate, she left Chicago right after the protests. I never even got to say goodbye. Just all of a sudden, gone.”

“Yeah, she’s pretty good at that.”

“Where did you get the photo?”

“It was on the news.”

“I don’t watch the news.”

“Do you remember who took it?” he said.

“That whole week is a big blur. Everything kind of merges with everything else. I can’t really remember one day from the next. Anyway, no, I don’t remember who took it.”

“In the photo it looks like she’s leaning against someone.”

“That would probably have been Sebastian.”

“Who’s Sebastian?”

“He was the editor of an underground newspaper. The Chicago Free Voice. Your mother was attracted to him, and he was attracted to anyone who paid attention to him. It wasn’t a good match.”

“What happened to him?”

“No idea. That was a long time ago. I left the movement in 1968, right after that protest. Afterward, I didn’t keep track of anyone.”

The mustard plants Alice pulled were about a foot tall, with green heart-shaped leaves and small white flowers. To the untrained eye they looked like any other ground shrub, not at all out of the ordinary. The problem was that they grew so quickly they stole sunlight from other ground plants, including young trees. They also had no natural predators — the local deer population ate everything but the mustard, leaving it free to colonize. It also produced a chemical that killed off bacteria in the soil that other plants needed for growth. A perfect botanical terror, in other words.

“Was my mother in the movement?” Samuel said. “Was she, like, a radical hippie or something?”

“I was a radical hippie,” Alice said. “Your mother definitely was not. She was a normal kid. She was dragged into it against her will.”

Alice remembered her young, idealistic self, how she refused to own any possessions, refused to lock her door or carry money, crazy behavior she wouldn’t even consider now. What her younger self worried about were the hang-ups that came with possessions — the territoriality, the worry, the potential for loss, the way the world looked when you owned precious things: like one big threat always ready to take your stuff. And yes, Alice had purchased this home in the Indiana dunes, she filled it with her stuff, she put locks on all the doors, she built a wall of sandbags to contain the advance of the lake, she cleaned and sanded and painted, brought in exterminators and contractors and took down walls and erected new ones, and slowly this home came into being, bubbling up out of itself like Athena from the sea. And yes, it was true that all her former radical energies now poured into things like selecting the perfect pendant lamps, or achieving the ideal kitchen work flow, or constructing excellent built-in bookcases, or finding the most calming master bedroom color palette that ideally involved the same blue the lake took on when she looked out her window certain winter mornings, when the surface of the water was a slushy, shimmering mass that appeared — depending on the paint sample she used — like “glacier blue” or “liquid blue” or “bluebell” or a really lovely gray-blue called “soar.” And yes, occasionally she felt bolts of raw guilt and regret that these were the hang-ups that interested her, not the peace and justice and equality movements she intended to devote her life to when she was twenty.

She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.

“Who dragged her into it?” Samuel said.

“Nobody,” Alice said. “Everybody. The events of the time. She got swept up. It was all terribly exciting, you see.”

For Alice, the small true part of her was that she wanted something that deserved her faith and devotion. When she was young, she saw families retreat into their homes and ignore the greater problems of the world and she hated them: bourgeois cogs in the machine, unthinking sheeplike masses, selfish bastards who couldn’t see beyond their own property lines. Their souls, she thought, must have been small and shrunken things.

But then she grew up and bought a house and found a lover and got some dogs and stewarded her land and tried to fill her home with love and life and she realized her earlier error: that these things did not make you small. In fact, these things seemed to enlarge her. That by choosing a few very private concerns and pouring herself into them, she had never felt so expanded. That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty — because the movement required it of you — and loving something you actually loved. Love — real, genuine, unasked-for love — made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies.

Still, she could not help feeling stung when old movement friends said she had “sold out.” That was the worst of all charges because, of course, it was true. But how could she explain that not all sellouts are the same? That it wasn’t money she was selling out to? That sometimes on the other side of selling out there’s a compassion she’d never felt in her revolutionary days? She could not explain this to them, nor would they hear it. They still held to all the old principles: drugs, sex, resistance. Even as drugs began killing them one by one, and even as sex became dangerous, still this is where they turned for some kind of answer. They never saw how their resistance had begun to look comical. They were beaten by the cops and the public cheered. They thought they were changing the world and what they did was help get Nixon elected. They found Vietnam intolerable, but their answer was to become intolerable themselves.

The only thing less popular than the war in those days was the antiwar movement.

This truth was obvious, though none of them saw it, convinced as they were of their own righteousness.

She managed not to think about this too much, these ligatures to the past. For the most part she thought about her dogs, and mustard. Except when something popped up to remind her of her former life, like, for example, the son of Faye Andresen, coming to the dunes and asking questions.

“Were you close,” he said, “with my mother? Were you friendly?”

“I suppose,” she said. “We didn’t know each other very well.”

He nodded. He seemed disappointed by this. He was hoping for more. But what could Alice say? That Faye had indeed been on her mind all these years? That Faye’s memory was a small but constant and needling companion? For that was the truth. She’d promised to look out for Faye, but things got out of hand, and she failed. She never knew what happened to her. She never saw her again.

There is no greater ache than this: guilt and regret in equal measure. She’d tried to bury it, along with all the other mistakes of her youth, out here in the dunes. And she would not dig these stories up now, even for this man who so plainly needed them. The subject of his mother seemed like a splinter he could not remove. She grabbed a small bunch of mustard and pulled — not too hard, and with a gentle spin to get the roots up. She had long ago perfected this technique. For a long quiet moment they stayed like this, the only sounds being mustard plants tearing free from the earth, and the whoosh of the nearby lake, and a certain bird whose call sounded like uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh.

“Even if you figure it all out,” Alice said, “what good will it do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Even if you know your mom’s story, it’s not going to change anything. The past is the past.”

“I guess I hope it’ll explain something. About all the things she’s done. Plus she’s in trouble and maybe I can help. There’s this judge who seems intent on putting her in jail. It’s like he came out of retirement just to torment her. The Honorable Charlie Brown my ass.”

Alice perked up at that, lifted her gaze from the mustard. She placed her half-full trash bag on the ground. She removed her gloves, her specialized rubber gloves that mustard seeds did not stick to. She walked over to where Samuel stood, taking the big awkward steps made necessary by her wading boots.

“That’s his name?” she said. “Charlie Brown?”

“Hilarious, right?”

“Oh, god,” she said, sitting down right there in the grass. “Oh, no.”

“What?” Samuel said. “What’s wrong?”

“Listen to me,” Alice said. “You have to get your mother out of here.”

“What do you mean?”

“She needs to leave.”

“Now I’m sure there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“I used to know him,” she said. “The judge.”

“Okay. And?”

“We were all sort of intertwined — in Chicago, in college — me and the judge and your mom.”

“That’s information you maybe should have led with.”

“You have to get your mom out of town, like immediately.”

“Tell me why.”

“Maybe even get her out of the country.”

“Help my mom flee the country. That’s your advice.”

“I wasn’t entirely honest about why I moved out here, to Indiana. The real reason was because of him. When I heard he was back in Chicago, I moved away. I was afraid of him.”

Samuel sat down with her in the grass and they stared at each other a moment, shell-shocked.

“What did he do to you?” he asked.

“Your mom is in trouble,” Alice said. “The judge will never yield. He’s ruthless and dangerous. You have to take her away. Do you hear me?”

“I don’t understand. What’s his grudge against her?”

She sighed and looked at the ground. “He’s like the most dangerous species of American there is: heterosexual white male who didn’t get what he wanted.”

“You need to tell me exactly what happened,” Samuel said.

About three feet past her left knee, she noticed a small and heretofore unseen patch of garlic mustard — first-year shoots, a smattering of clover hiding under the grass. It wouldn’t go to seed until next summer, but when it did it would race up above the surrounding plants and kill them all.

“I’ve never told this story,” she said. “Not to anyone.”

“What happened in 1968?” Samuel said. “Please tell me.”

Alice nodded. She ran her hands along the grass and the thin blades tickled her palms. She made a mental note to come prune this spot tomorrow. The problem with mustard is that you can’t just chop it down. The seeds can last for years. It will always come back. You have to cut it out completely. You have to cut it out by the roots.