The Nix

1

JUDGE CHARLES BROWN WOKE before dawn. Always before dawn. His wife slept in bed beside him. She would stay sleeping there another three hours or more. It had been this way since they were first married, when he was still a Chicago beat cop working the night shift. Their schedules rarely overlapped back then, and it stayed that way all these years — habituated, normalized. Recently he’d been thinking about it, for the first time in a long time.

He climbed out of bed and into his wheelchair and rolled over to the window. He looked out at the sky — dark navy blue, but gathering color. It must have been four o’clock, four fifteen, give or take. It was trash day, he saw. The bins were out on the street. And beyond the bins, parked at the curb, right in front of his house, there was a car.

Which was odd.

Nobody ever parked there. It couldn’t be a neighbor. His neighbors were too far away. One of the reasons he bought here, in this particular subdivision, was its facsimile of private woodsy living. Across the street from his house was a small grove of sugar maples. The distant neighbors were hidden behind two rows of oak trees — one row on his side of the property divide, one on theirs.

He looked at the screen next to the bed where he’d installed the controls for the home’s elaborate security system: no open doors, no broken windows, no movement. The feeds from his various video cameras showed nothing unusual.

Brown chalked it up to teenagers. Always a good scapegoat. Probably a boy secretly visiting a girl down the block. There was some passionate and quick deflowering happening somewhere in the neighborhood tonight. Fair enough.

He took the elevator to the first-floor kitchen. Pressed the button on the coffeemaker. Dutifully it bubbled and spurted, his wife having prepared it the night before. Their ritual. One of the few ways he knows he’s really living with someone. They see each other so rarely. He’s off to work before she wakes, and she’s off to work before he comes home.

It’s not that they avoid each other on purpose — it’s just how things worked out.

When he quit the police and decided to go to law school — this was about forty years ago now — she took evening shifts at the hospital. They were raising a daughter then; it was the compromise they made so someone would always be home with her. But even after the daughter grew up and moved out, their schedules did not change. It had become comfortable. She’d leave a plate of something for him to eat. She’d fix up the coffeemaker at night because she knew he hated fiddling with the filter-and-grounds apparatus, which always struck him as too much to ask of a person at four o’clock in the morning. He was grateful she still performed these small kindnesses. On weekends, they saw each other more, provided he wasn’t in his study all day poring over various documents, precedents, opinions, journals, law. Then they’d catch each other up on the independent and totally separate lives they were living in parallel to one another. They made vague promises about all the things they’d do together in retirement.

He rolled himself into the study, coffee in hand, and turned on the television. Another morning ritual, watching the news. He wanted to know everything that was everywhere happening before he went to work. At his age, people were looking for signs of decline, waiting for his inevitable diminishment. He remembered when he was a young prosecutor there were judges of a certain age who let themselves slide as they approached retirement. They stopped keeping up with the news, local politics, the enormous amounts of reading required of the job. They began acting like mad scientists — unpredictable megalomaniacs, supremely confident in their fading abilities, treating the courtroom as their own personal laboratory. He would not devolve into that, he vowed. He watched the news in the morning, got the newspaper delivered (even if that was a bit quaint these days, the actual physical newspaper).

But the news was talking about what the news was always talking about these days: the election. Election Day was still pretty distant, but you’d never know it judging from the news, from the way the news salivated over the primary race, the dozen or so candidates for president now practically taking up permanent residency on both the cable news channels and in Iowa, where the nation’s first nominating vote would happen in roughly three months. Among them all, Sheldon “the Governor” Packer was out to an early lead according to various polls and surveys and pundits who debated whether the governor’s popularity was a post-attack sympathy bubble that would soon burst. So far it seemed that Faye Andresen’s attack was the best thing to happen to him.

This was what the nation had to look forward to for the next year. Twelve full months of stump speeches and gaffes and ads and attacks and stupidity, agonizing stupidity, bordering on immoral stupidity. It was as if every four years all news everywhere just lost perspective. And then billions of dollars would be spent to achieve what was already inevitable — that the whole election would come down to a handful of swing voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The electoral math pretty much ordained this.

Democracy! Huzzah!

The two most popular words on TV to describe Packer’s campaign appeared to be “buzz” and “momentum.” At rallies Packer talked about how the recent attempt on his life had made him more resolute than ever. He said he wouldn’t be cowed by liberal thugs. He played the chorus to “Break My Stride” at campaign events. He was awarded an honorary Purple Heart by the new governor of Wyoming. Cable news personalities said he was either “bravely continuing his campaign despite tremendous personal risk” or “callously milking this minor distraction for all it’s worth.” There did not seem to be any position between these two. The video of Faye Andresen throwing rocks at the governor was shown again and again. On one channel, they said it was evidence of a liberal conspiracy, pointing out people in the crowd who might have been aiding and abetting. On another channel, they said when the governor ducked and ran away from the thrown rocks he “did not seem presidential.”

That the news could not mention Governor Packer without also mentioning Faye Andresen’s trial made Judge Brown feel happy. Made him feel important and big. The governor was “still riding high in the polls after his brutal attack in Chicago,” was how they said it. Of course, the reasons for this were simple — the attack made him more famous, and fame tends to attract more fame. Like wealth tends to build upon itself, so too fame, which is a kind of social wealth, a kind of conceptual abundance. One of the many benefits of taking the Faye Andresen case was that it made Judge Brown a little famous. Another was that it forestalled retirement for as long as it would take to adjudicate. At least a year, he guessed.

Those were not the primary reasons he took the case, but they were part of the decision, part of the tableau. The primary reason was of course that Faye Andresen deserved whatever cruelty came to her. What a gift, this case. Like an early retirement present, this chance at retribution, his righteous reward for so much suffering.

Good lord, retirement. What in the world would they do together, he and his wife, in retirement?

There were all the usual clichés: They should travel, their daughter told them. And, yes, maybe they would travel, to Paris or Honolulu or Bali or Brazil. Wherever. All places seemed equally horrible because the thing they never mentioned about traveling in your retirement is that in order for it to work you must, at the very least, be able to endure the person you’re traveling with. And he imagined all that time together — on planes, in restaurants, in hotel rooms. They couldn’t escape each other, he and his wife. The nice thing about their current arrangement was that they could always blame their isolation on work. That the reason they saw so little of each other was their very demanding schedules and not in fact their total mutual resentment of each other.

How easily a simple façade can become your life, can become the truth of your life.

He imagined them in Paris trying to talk to each other. She’d give small lectures on the country’s innovative health care system; he’d give similar disquisitions on French jurisprudence. That would get them through one day, maybe two. Then they’d start making small talk about whatever was in front of them at that moment: the charming Parisian streets, the weather, the waiters, the daylight that clung on until well past ten. Museums would be a good choice because of the enforced silence. But then they’d be at a restaurant looking at menus and she’d say what looked good and he’d say what looked good and they’d stare at the plates of other diners and point out those that also looked good and express how they were perhaps changing their mind about what they intended to order and that whole inner debate one usually has when ordering food at a restaurant would be vocalized and performed for the express purpose of filling space, of jamming the silence so full of meaningless idle chitchat that they’d never get around to talking about the thing they never talked about but were always thinking: that if they had been born into a generation that found divorce more acceptable, they would have left each other so long ago. For decades they had avoided this subject. It was like they’d come to an agreement — they were who they were, they were born when they were born, they were taught that divorce was wrong, and they openly disapproved of other couples, younger couples, who divorced, while secretly feeling bolts of envy at these couples’ ability to split and remarry and become happy again.

Where was all this piety getting them? Who was benefiting?

She’d never forgiven him for the lustfulness of his youth, for his early indiscretions. She’d never forgiven him but also never spoke of it, not after the accident that put him in the wheelchair, which was an effective solution. Yes, he’d been punished by God for his lust, and punished for decades by his wife, and now he was in the punishment business. It suited him. He’d learned from the best.

No, they would not travel. More likely they would sink into separate hobbies and try as best they could to reproduce in retirement exactly their working lives. They’d repair to separate floors of their giant house. It was an uncomfortable life, yes, a painful life. But it was a familiar life. And this made it less scary than whatever would happen if they finally acknowledged all this resentment and loathing and actually talked.

Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

He had finished a half pot of coffee when he heard the newspaper delivery truck drive by, and heard the newspaper land softly on his front driveway. He opened his front door and glided down the house’s short front ramp, landing on the sidewalk and letting the momentum carry him into the driveway, where the newspaper lay wrapped in its rainproof orange plastic sleeve. That car, he noticed, was still there. A nondescript sedan that could have been made by anyone, foreign or domestic. A light tan color, mildly dented on the front bumper, otherwise completely inoffensive and anonymous, one of those cars you’d never even notice on the road, a car that salesmen pitched to families as “sensible.” Teenager borrowed his daddy’s ride, Brown thought. Better be moving along, as the rest of the neighborhood would soon be stirring. In less than an hour, joggers, dog walkers, they’d all be out and alert to the presence of strangers, especially a teenage boy wandering down the street postcoitally.

But as Judge Brown reached for the newspaper, something caught his attention, something in the trees: a slight movement. The sky was beginning to lighten, but the block was still dark, the trees beyond the car still black. He stared and searched for confirmation: Did something move over there? Was someone there right now, watching him? He looked for the shape of a person.

“I see you,” he said, though he didn’t see anything.

He rolled himself into the street, and as he did so a figure emerged from the tree line.

Brown stopped. He had enemies. Every judge did. What small-time dealer, what pimp, what crackhead was there across the street waiting for revenge? There were too many to count. He thought about his gun, his old revolver, sitting uselessly in the upstairs nightstand. He thought about calling out to his wife for help. He sat up as straight as he could. He exuded the most calm and intense and frightening expression he could currently produce.

“Can I help you?” he said.

The figure approached and moved into the light — a young man, perhaps mid-thirties, a face that seemed mortified and cowed, a look Brown recognized from his years in the criminal justice system: the embarrassed face of someone caught doing something wrong. This man was no crackhead out for revenge.

“You’re Charles Brown, right?” the man said. His voice — young, a little shrill.

“I am,” Brown said. “Is this your car?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Were you hiding behind a tree?”

“I guess so.”

“May I ask why?”

“I don’t have a very good answer for that.”

“Do your best.”

“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I suppose I wanted to see you, to find out more about you. Frankly, it made way more sense in my head than it does now, as I attempt to explain it.”

“Let’s start over. Why are you spying on my house?”

“I’m here because of Faye Andresen.”

“Oh,” Brown said. “You a reporter?”

“Nope.”

“Lawyer?”

“Let’s just say I’m a concerned party.”

“C’mon, man. I’ve already memorized your license plate number. I’m going to run it as soon as I get inside. No sense being coy.”

“I wanted to talk to you about Faye Andresen’s case.”

“Usually that’s done in the courtroom.”

“I was wondering if maybe it’s possible to, you know, drop all charges against her?”

Brown laughed. “Drop all charges. Right.”

“And maybe just leave her alone?”

“That’s funny. You’re a funny guy.”

“Because, here’s the thing. Faye never did anything wrong,” the man said.

“She threw rocks at a presidential candidate.”

“No, not that. I mean back in ’68. She didn’t do anything wrong back then. To you.”

Which gave Brown a moment’s pause. He frowned and studied the man. “What do you think you know?”

“I know all about what happened between you and her,” he said. “I know about Alice.”

Brown’s throat tightened at the thought of her. “You know Alice?” he said.

“I’ve spoken with her.”

“Where is she?”

“Not going to tell you that.”

Brown’s jaw muscles tightened — he could feel it happen, that old tic of his, the way his face seemed to constrict and ossify whenever he thought about Alice and all that had happened back then, a habit that had caused him some pretty intense TMJ-related suffering now, in his old age. His memory of Alice had never faded — more like it became a reservoir for all his guilt and remorse and lust and anger, decades-deep. When that old photograph of her appeared on television recently, he had such a powerful and tactile sense memory of her body that he momentarily felt that gush of excitement he used to feel when he found her out walking the streets in the deadest part of the night.

“So I suppose you’re here to blackmail me then, right?” Brown said. “I agree to back off Faye Andresen, and in exchange you don’t release your information to the press. Am I close?”

“I actually hadn’t considered that.”

“Do you also want money?”

“I’m sort of embarrassingly bad at this,” the man said. “You just right now came up with a way better plan than mine. I really came here only to spy on you.”

“But now you’re considering blackmail. Is that fair to say? You are threatening me with blackmail. You are threatening a judge.”

“Wait. Hold on. Note that I said nothing of the sort. You are putting incriminating words in my mouth.”

“What would you tell the press? How would you explain what happened? I would love to hear your story.”

“Well, I guess I’d tell the truth? That you were having an affair with Alice, and Faye ruined it. And you’ve been waiting all these years to get your revenge. Which is why you took the case.”

“Uh-huh. Good luck proving that.”

“If I told everyone — and I’m not saying I will tell everyone, I’m saying if, this is a hypothetical, you understand — then you’d be embarrassed in public. You’d be tried and convicted in the press. You’d be taken off the case.”

Brown smiled and rolled his eyes. “Look, I am a Cook County circuit judge. I have brunch regularly with the mayor. I was the Chicago Bar Association Man of the Year. I don’t know who the fuck you are, but I’d guess from your shitty car that you’re nobody’s man of the year.”

“What’s your point?”

“If it’s my word against yours, I feel pretty comfortable with those odds.”

“But Faye didn’t do anything to you. She shouldn’t go to prison for something she didn’t do.”

“She ruined my life. She put me in this chair.”

“She never even knew who you were.”

“I warned Faye once — never let me catch you in Chicago. That’s what I told her. I’m a man of my word. And now you have the gall to come here and tell me what to do with her? Let me explain what’s going to happen. I’m going to do everything in my power to see she’s convicted of high crimes. And I’m going to see her hang.”

“That’s insane!”

“It would be best if you didn’t try to stop me.”

“Or else what?”

“You know the penalties for threatening a judge?”

“But I never threatened you!”

“That’s not what it’ll look like. From the point of view of that security camera on my porch, it’ll look like you hid in the trees—very suspicious — until I came out of my house, at which point you approached me in a threatening manner.”

“You have a security camera?”

“I have nine security cameras.”

And at that, the man walked to his car, got in, and turned the ignition. The car’s engine thrummed quietly. Then with an electric buzz, the driver’s window came down.

“Alice was right,” the man said. “You’re a psychopath.”

“Just stay out of my way.”

Then the car rolled off, and Brown watched as it reached the end of his street, turned, and zoomed lightlessly away.

2

FAYE SAT SLUMPED on her couch, watching television, her eyes glassy, her face expressionless. Behind her, Samuel paced the apartment, from the kitchen to the couch and back, watching her. She flipped channels, staying between one and five seconds on any given show. Commercials she jumped away from immediately. Any other program she gave roughly a single breath to impress her. Then flip. The small television sat on the mantel of the apartment’s inoperative fireplace. Samuel could swear the TV wasn’t there on his first visit.

Outside, the midmorning sun shone brightly off Lake Michigan. Through the open windows, Samuel could hear car horns, far off. The city’s usual weekday roar. To the west, he could see the traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway moving at its usual viscous creep. He’d come here directly from his unfortunate encounter with Judge Brown. Samuel decided he needed to warn his mother, to tell her what he now knew about the judge. He had buzzed her apartment, and then buzzed again, and then again, and was about to start throwing rocks at Faye’s third-story windows when the front door finally clicked open. He came up and found his mother like this: quiet, distracted, a little befuddled.

Faye flipped to a reality show about a couple renovating their kitchen, which seemed to hold her attention.

“This is a show ostensibly about home improvement,” she said, “but really it’s about watching these two sweep away the ashes of their dead marriage.”

The show seemed to cut between clips of the couple’s inept DIY misadventures and interviews where they independently complained about the other. The husband — too eager with his sledgehammer — put a hole in a wall that he thought was slated for demolition but, turns out, wasn’t. Cut to clip of the wife complaining about how he never listens and is constitutionally unable to take directions. Cut to clip of the husband examining the damage he’s done to the wall and proclaiming with false authority: It’ll be fine, just calm down.

“These two hate each other so much,” Faye said. “They’re using their kitchen like America used Vietnam.”

“That TV you’re watching,” Samuel said, “it wasn’t here the first time I visited. I’m pretty sure of it.”

Faye didn’t respond. She stared blankly forward. For a full minute. During which she watched a clip of the husband kicking a panel of drywall, which broke and flew across the room, and even though it landed a full ten feet from his wife, she yelled at him as if she were in mortal peril: Hey? I’m standing here? Then Faye blinked and shook her head like someone waking from a trance and looked at him and said, “Huh?”

“You seem stoned,” Samuel said. “Are you high on something right now?”

She nodded. “I took some pills this morning.”

“What pills?”

“Propranolol for blood pressure. Benzodiazepine for excitability. Aspirin. Something else that was originally developed to prevent premature ejaculation in men but is now used for anxiety and insomnia.”

“You do that a lot?”

“Not a lot. You’d be amazed how many beneficial drugs were originally developed to treat sex problems in men. They practically drive the whole pharmaceutical industry. Thank god for male sexual dysfunction.”

“Any reason you needed all that this morning?”

“Simon called. You remember Simon. My lawyer?”

“I remember.”

“He had some news. Apparently the prosecution is expanding their case against me. They added a couple of new charges today. Domestic acts of terrorism. Making terrorist threats. That kind of thing.”

“You’re kidding.”

She picked up a notepad stuck between the couch cushions and read: “Acts dangerous to human life that cause fear, terror, or intimidation, or attempt to influence the policy of a government through intimidation and coercion.”

“That seems like a stretch.”

“Judge Brown convinced the prosecutor to add the new charges. I guess he came in this morning super enthusiastic about putting me in prison for the rest of my life.”

Samuel felt his insides sort of freeze. He knew exactly what spurred the judge’s new zealotry but could not at this moment bear to tell his mom about it.

“So I’m rattled today,” Faye said, “and anxious. Hence the pills.”

“I understand.”

“By the way? Simon tells me I should not be talking to you.”

“I personally question that guy’s legal aptitude, frankly.”

“He suspects your motives.”

“Well,” Samuel said, looking at his shoes. “Thanks for letting me in.”

“I’m surprised you wanted to see me. Especially after the last time you were here. Your meeting with Simon? That couldn’t have been pleasant. I’m sorry.”

Outside, Samuel could hear the squeals of a train coming to a halt, the doors shunting open, the ding-dong warning bell and the automated train voice saying, Doors closing. Samuel realized it was the first time she’d apologized to him for anything.

“Why did you come?” Faye said. “All unannounced and unexpected like this.”

Samuel shrugged. “I don’t know.”

On television, the husband was being interviewed about how he sent his wife to a giant home-improvement store to fetch a tool that does not actually exist: a countertop caliper.

“These people can’t repair their relationship,” Faye said, “so they repair their relationship’s largest metaphor.”

“I need some air,” Samuel said. “How about a walk?”

“Fine.”

He went to her and extended his hand to help her up, and when she took it, when he felt her thin and cold fingers, he realized it was the first time they’d touched in years. The first physical contact between them since she’d kissed his forehead and pressed her face into his hair that morning she left, when he promised to write books and she promised to read them. He had not anticipated feeling anything about this, taking her hand, helping her up. But it made his heart clutch. He did not know he needed this.

“Yeah, my hand is cold,” Faye said. “It’s a side effect of the medication.” She stood and shuffled off to find her shoes.

She seemed to wake up, and her mood seemed to lighten, when they left the apartment. It was a mild and pleasant late-summer day. The streets were for the most part deserted and quiet. They walked east, toward Lake Michigan. His mother explained how real estate in this particular neighborhood was exploding before the recession. This was part of the turn-of-the-century meatpacking and slaughterhouse district. It was abandoned for many years, until recently, when the warehouses had begun their transformation into trendy lofts. But the renovations stalled when the real estate market collapsed. Most developers pulled out. Improvements were abandoned halfway through, buildings stuck mid-transformation. A few of the taller buildings still had cranes standing idle above them. Faye said she used to watch them from her window as they brought up pallets of Sheetrock and concrete. There was a time when every building on the block had one of these cranes.

“Like fishermen over a tiny pond,” she said. “That’s what it looked like.”

But most of the cranes had since been disassembled. Those that still stood hadn’t moved in a couple of years. So the neighborhood remained empty, just on the brink of habitation.

She said she had moved here because rents were low and because she didn’t have to deal with people. It was a real shock when the developers came, and she looked on in anger as they began putting names on buildings: The Embassy Club, The Haberdasher, The Wheelworks, The Landmark, The Gotham. She knew when a building got a fancy name, insufferable people soon followed. Young professionals. Dog walkers. Stroller pushers. Lawyers and their miserable lawyer wives. Restaurants that reproduced Italian trattorias and French bistros and Spanish tapas bars in a toned-down, safely mainstream way. Organic grocery stores and fromageries and fixed-gear bicycle shops. She saw her neighborhood turning into this, the city’s newest hip yuppie enclave. She worried about her rent. She worried about having to talk to neighbors. When the housing market tanked and the developers all disappeared and the signs with the fancy names began crumbling in the snow, she cheered. She walked her empty streets alone, exultant, that hermit’s special appetite for isolation and ownership. This abandoned block was hers. There was great pleasure in this.

She needed the rent to remain low, otherwise she couldn’t afford to live doing what she did, which turned out to be reading poetry to children, and businesspeople, and patients recovering from surgery, and prison inmates. A one-person nonprofit charitable service. She’d been doing it for years.

“I thought I wanted to be a poet,” she said. “When I was younger.”

They had come to a neighborhood with more life: an arterial street, people walking, a few small bodegas. It was a place not yet gentrified, but Samuel could see gentrification’s leading edge: a coffee shop advertising free Wi-Fi.

“Why didn’t you?” he said. “Become a poet?”

“I tried,” she said. “I wasn’t very good.”

She explained how she’d given up writing poetry but had not given up poetry itself. She started a nonprofit to bring poetry into schools and prisons. She decided if she couldn’t write poetry she would do the next best thing.

“Those who can’t do,” she said, “administrate.”

She survived on small grants from arts groups and the federal government, grants that always seemed precarious, always attacked by politicians, always in danger of evaporating. In the boom times before the recession, several area law firms and banks had hired her to provide “daily poetic inspiration” to their employees. She began doing poetry seminars at business conferences. She learned to speak the language of the mid-level executive, which mostly involved turning silly nouns into silly verbs: incentivize, maximize, dialogue, leverage. She prepared PowerPoints on leveraging poetic inspiration to maximize customer communication. PowerPoints on externalizing stress and reducing workplace violence risk factors through poetry. The junior VPs who listened to her had no idea what she was talking about, but their bosses ate it up. This was back before the recession hit, when the big banks were still throwing money at anything.

“I charged them fifteen times what I charged the schools and they didn’t even blink,” she said. “Then I doubled that, and still they didn’t notice. Which was crazy to me because it was all bullshit. I was making it up as I went along. I kept waiting for them to figure it out and they never did. They just kept hiring me.”

That is, until the recession hit. After it became clear what was happening — how the global economy was more or less utterly fucked — the gigs went away fast, along with the junior VPs, who were mostly laid off, with no warning, on a Friday, by the very same bosses who only a year earlier wanted them to live a life full of beauty and poetry.

“By the way,” she said. “I hid the television the first time you visited. You were right about that.”

“You hid it. Why?”

“A house without a television makes a statement. I wanted to improve the Zen-like asceticism quotient. I was trying to make you think I was sophisticated. Sue me.”

They kept walking. They were coming back to his mother’s neighborhood now, the eastern boundary of which was a bridge spanning a knot of train tracks that cut through the city like a zipper. Enough tracks to keep all the old slaughterhouses in feed and animals, enough to keep the old foundries in slag, enough now to accommodate the millions of suburbanites taking commuter rail into and out of downtown. A wide causeway whose retaining walls had been thoroughly inscribed by graffiti, the various tags and retags of the city’s adventurous youth, who must have jumped down from the bridge because the only other way into the causeway seemed to be a thick chain-link fence with razor wire at the top.

“I went to see the judge this morning,” Samuel said.

“What judge?”

“Your judge. Judge Brown. I went to his house. I wanted to get a look at him.”

“You were spying on a judge.”

“I guess.”

“And?”

“He can’t walk. He’s in a wheelchair. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No. Why? Should it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…there it is. An unexpected fact. The judge is disabled.”

There was an aspect of graffiti Samuel found romantic. Especially graffiti sprayed in dangerous locations. There was something romantic about a writer risking injury to put down words.

“What was your impression?” Faye said. “Of the judge?”

“He seemed angry and small. But the kind of small where he probably used to be big and slowly shrank. White guy. Pasty white. His skin was paper-thin, almost translucent.”

Of course, it’s not like the graffitists wrote anything important. Just their own names, over and over, bigger and louder and more colorful. Which come to think of it was the same strategy used by fast-food chains on billboards across the country. It was just self-promotion. It was simply more noise. They weren’t writing because something desperately needed to be said. They were advertising their brand. All that sneaking around and risk-taking to produce something that only vomited back up the dominant aesthetic. It was depressing. Even subversion had been subverted.

“Did you talk to him?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Samuel said. “I was really only intending to watch. I was collecting information. It was purely a stakeout. But he saw me.”

“And is it possible this conversation has anything to do with the new charges this morning?”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“You suppose it’s possible you got me charged with domestic terrorism. That’s what you’re saying?”

“Maybe.”

They had reached her block. He could tell they were almost home by the buildings that looked stuck in some sci-fi time warp — their first floors from the future, their upper floors from the past. Crumbling and windowless buildings sitting atop gleaming new empty storefronts of modern-looking green-blue glass and slick white plastics typical of information age electronics. The city’s usual pullulation had given way to her neighborhood’s great round silence. An empty plastic grocery bag bounded down the street, pushed by the wind that came off the lake.

“There’s something you need to know,” Samuel said, “about the judge.”

“Okay.”

“He’s the one who arrested you. In 1968.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The cop who arrested you, the night before the protest. That was Charles Brown, the judge. Same guy. He arrested you even though you’d done nothing wrong.”

“Oh my god,” Faye said, looking at him and grabbing his arm.

“He said you put him in that wheelchair. He said it was your fault he’s disabled.”

“That’s ridiculous. How do you know all this?”

“I tracked down Alice. You remember her? She was your neighbor? In college?”

“You talked to her?”

“She told me all about you, when you were at Circle.”

“Why are you talking to these people?”

“Alice said you should leave the country. Right now.”

They rounded a corner, came into view of her building, and saw a strange clump of activity up ahead: a large police van with big block letters on the side — SWAT — was parked next to Samuel’s car, towering over it like a bear guarding dinner. Police were exiting Faye’s building and leaping into the van’s open rear door — they were dressed in black, militarily bulletproofed, helmeted, goggled, machine guns strapped tightly to their chests.

Samuel and his mother ducked back around the corner.

“What is going on?” Faye said.

Samuel shrugged. “Is there another way in?”

She nodded and he followed her down the block, into an empty alley, to a rusted red door next to several garbage bins. They were quiet as they ascended the stairs, quiet as they listened, from the stairwell, to the last of the police exit her building. They waited another ten minutes to be sure, then exited the stairwell and walked down the hall to her apartment’s front door, which they found in pieces, lying at an angle on the floor, connected to the wall only by the bottom hinge, which was twisted and bent.

Inside her apartment, the furniture had been tipped over and torn apart. The cushions on the couch were in tatters. The bed mattress lay on the floor, a long rip down the middle where the stuffing had been yanked out, an incision from top to bottom as if it hadn’t been searched but rather autopsied. Mattress fluff all over. Books that had been on the bookshelves were now scattered and bent. The kitchen cabinets were open, everything inside either knocked down or broken. The trash can overturned and dumped on the floor. Slivers of glass crunching under their shoes.

They were looking at each other, bewildered, when a noise came from the bathroom — a whoosh of water, a faucet turned on and off. Then the door opened and there emerged, wiping his hands on his tan slacks, Simon Rogers.

He saw them and smiled. “Well hello there!”

“Simon,” Faye said, “what happened?”

“Oh,” he said, with a wave of his hand, “the police were here.”

3

TODAY WAS THE DAY he would quit Elfscape.

Today he would stop playing forever, is what Pwnage resolved yesterday, actually, when he sat down vowing to quit Elfscape but then found several matters that needed addressing in order to settle his affairs, as it were, before sending his excellently geared avatars into digital oblivion, primarily among these was saying goodbye to the dozens of guild mates who over time he’d come to think of very fondly and feel a responsibility and paternalistic affection for, rather like how a summer camp counselor might feel for the kids in his charge, and Pwnage knew that if he disappeared without saying goodbye they would feel a sharp and personal betrayal and a sense of loss without closure and a shock to their sense that the world was predictable and understandable and for the most part good and just and fair (a few of these guildies, incidentally, really were the age of summer camp kids, and he felt an especially strong impulse not to betray or wound them in any way), and so he decided pretty early on in the play session that began yesterday morning that he could not quit and delete his account until he’d personally privately chatted with and said goodbye to the many regular Elfscape players that he’d played with for roughly twelve hours a day for the last couple of years, which required him to write a heartfelt note of gratitude to each player and an explanation that he no longer had the time to play World of Elfscape since he was now turning his attention to a brand-new career, that of being a famous detective mystery novelist, and he explained to his colleagues that he would have a big-time New York publisher just as soon as he finished a first draft of his novel and so he needed to turn his efforts to book-writing in a full-on, hundred percent type of way, which meant giving up Elfscape because his normal Elfscape schedule interfered with writing — the daily quests especially, the hundreds of daily quests he completed every morning on all his various avatars in a punishing five-hour grind, after which he’d vow to skip the daily quests the next day and instead use that time to make some serious progress in his detective novel, figuring he could probably write about two pages an hour (which was a reasonable number according to various online novel-writing self-help websites) and thus about ten pages a day, and at this clip he could finish the detective novel in a month using only the time he usually spent on Elfscape dailies, and this feeling of determination and resolve would hold pretty strong until the following morning, when he would try to write his novel but instead find himself thinking about all the daily quests that were now unlocked and newly available again, and he’d make an agreement with himself that in order to get the quests off his mind and really be able to focus on the novel-writing he’d take a break and do the quests on his main character only, and if his various secondary characters could not ultimately have access to all the excellent rewards, well, so be it, that was the price he’d have to pay for becoming a famous mystery-thriller writer — but then after finishing the twenty quests on his main avatar he’d get that disconcerting mental fatigue that felt as if his brain had been kneaded like bread dough, squeezed and pressed and soft and certainly not in the state to produce great literature, and so he went ahead and did all the daily quests on all his alt characters too and five hours later he felt that same bitter disgust with himself he’d felt the day before, vowing again that the next day he would skip the daily quests and work on his novel all day long, a feeling that never seemed as powerful the following morning, when the cycle would repeat, until eventually he had to admit that the only way the novel was going to get written was if he quit the game completely and deleted all his characters in an apocalyptic move there was just no going back from, but of course not before saying goodbye to all the people who were friends with him, people who, when he told them he was quitting in order to spend more time with his book, usually responded at first with “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!” (which, if he was being honest, was delightful), followed by an expression of confidence that they knew the book would be a huge best-selling hit, and even though they didn’t know anything about the novel or even Pwnage’s real name, still he very much liked being told of his inevitable future success, which kept him sitting in his chair for many hours waiting on each of his Elfscape friends to log on one by one so that he could tell them the news and have a version of the same conversation he had already had about two dozen times, during which he’d been sitting in exactly the same position with one leg tucked under his body for so long that his leg skin was deeply imprinted with the lines of his faux-leather plastic chair, while meanwhile he was developing inside his leg what doctors would call a deep vein thrombosis, or in other words a blood clot, which was causing redness and swelling in the leg, as well as a slight ache and tenderness and warmth and pain that he might have felt had the leg not already gone way beyond the pins-and-needles stage and into complete and almost anesthetic numbness due to the prolonged compression it endured while he said goodbye to friends and explained his upcoming account deletion and often did one last quest or dungeon run with these friends for, as they said, “old time’s sake,” and he was surprised how nostalgic this made him feel (this by the way being one of the reasons he’d forgotten to move his legs or stand or stretch or in any way get the blood circulating in the lower trunk or anywhere but the thumbs and digits strictly necessary for effective video-game operation), nostalgic that his friends wanted to revisit scenes of former triumph with the same verve that some people really looked forward to their high-school reunions, and so with each friend he’d repeat some adventure they’d shared weeks or months ago, and this gave Pwnage the idea that he wanted to visit all of the spots on the immense Elfscape map that he was fond of or had some important memory about or were in any way significant to his development as a serious gamer, a kind of “farewell tour” of the places he’d come to know and adore, and which of course would take, seriously, like hours and hours (the game’s developers made a lot of hay about the huge size and scale of their virtual world, saying that if the Elfscape world were real it would literally be about the size of the moon), and so he visited the Silverglade Forest (site of his avatar’s first death, at level eight, due to lurking panthers) and the Caves of Jedenar (close scrape with a pack of demons) and the Shrine of Aellena (because of the awesome sound track that played while in the shrine) and the Wyrmmist Strand (where he encountered his first dragon) and the Gurubashy Ruins (where he murdered his first orc) and so on, just loving all these weird place-names, and he flew from spot to spot on his ultrafast flying gryphon, then remembered how interesting it was when he was new to the game and had not earned any flying or riding animals yet and had to walk through the countryside and really take it in and enjoy the way one ecosystem gave way to another and he longed for the simplicity and naïveté of those days and so he parked his gryphon on the northern tip of the world’s largest continent and began walking south, first through the white snowy tundra of the Wintersaber Glaciers, over the Timberfrost Mountains and down into Frost-Thistle Gorge, happening upon only a few occasional charging wildebeests or polar bears, through caves controlled by a semi-sentient race of ice yeti he was friendly with, and on south, walking and occasionally taking screen grabs the way tourists take photographs, and seeing orc players who ran like hell from him because they knew his name and he had a badass reputation, and by this time the online message boards were lighting up with the news that the game’s most dominant and elite player was retiring, and Pwnage kept getting all these private messages asking if it was true and pleading with him to change his mind, messages that were actually having the effect of changing his mind because he was suddenly aware that he was possibly way more popular and supported and loved as an Elfscape avatar than he ever would be as an in-real-life real human being, and this made him feel sad and sort of panicky, and he remembered the anxiety of this last Patch Day when he couldn’t log on to Elfscape for almost an entire day and he walked circles around every room in his house and stared at the mailbox for hours, and so as he now walked south through the vast Elfscape terrain he felt a crushing and excessive stress and dread that if he went through with the whole quitting-video-games thing then every day would be like the last Patch Day, and the realization of this washed over him like a cold rain and he felt his willpower and commitment to the plan erode and he decided that the only way he’d ever be able to bring himself to really quit Elfscape was if his characters were no longer the elite and super-cool characters that earned everyone’s love and support, and the only way that would happen was if he got rid of all the treasure he’d worked tirelessly for, the thinking here being that he might be less roundly loved and popular and elite and therefore more likely to quit if he didn’t have all his epic loot, plus it would be so frustrating to go back to the bottom of the totem pole after being on top for so long, so annoying to earn all that loot back again, so pointless that he would prefer to quit, and so he announced to his guild mates that he was giving away all his possessions and if they came to find him on his long walk south he would give them something really cool and valuable, and soon he was followed by a pack of lesser players in a kind of parade — at this point, it’s important to note, the deep thrombus in his leg had shaken free at the moment he reached his epiphany and announced the news to the guild and switched from sitting on one leg to sitting on the other leg, and the clot was now slowly making its way up his circulatory system, a small hard glob about the size of a marble pushing through his body that registered occasionally as a tightness and sometimes a shooting pain, which frankly did not separate itself from the biologic human noise Pwnage felt mostly all the time, pain stemming from near-constant exhaustion and immobility and surviving on a diet consisting mostly of caffeine and frozen microwavable processed food things, a condition that caused regular shooting pain all over his body and meant the shooting pain that was now caused by his newly mobile blood clot made no impression on him as anything out of the ordinary, since he felt some kind of stabbing pain almost all the time and anyway the stabbing was blunted by the fact that he rarely actually remembered the stabbing pain as his brain’s frontal lobe and hippocampus had been severely atrophied from sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and exposure to computer screens at a volume that seems to be dangerous in a way scientists don’t even understand yet, so that each time he felt the stabbing pain his overtired, morbidly taxed brain promptly ejected the information so that the next time he felt the shooting, stabbing, awful pain it was like he was feeling it for the first time, duly noting it and thinking that if it happened again he’d definitely seek some kind of help from some manner of health professional within probably the next week or so maybe — and as his friends all gathered around him he began giving away first his gold, the many coins of gold, silver, and copper that he’d looted from the dead bodies of slain orc players and gathered from treasure chests guarded by dragons and earned on the server’s auction house, where he’d learned to manipulate the various raw-material exchanges and leverage his wealth into far greater wealth by exerting near-monopolistic control of the Elfscape supply chain, and he was aware that all this gold had real-world value, that some people sold their Elfscape gold on real-world auction sites to other Elfscape players for real American dollars, and he was aware that a Stanford economist had even invented a WoE-gold-to-dollar currency converter that, if correct, meant that he could sell his gold and make at least as much money as he did when he worked at that copy shop, a thing he would never do because Elfscape was fun and he knew from experience that jobs were not (except if he really thought about it he’d say his Elfscape game experience was not one hundred percent fun, since each day’s playing began with five hours of the same rote daily quests completed over and over until they achieved the monotony typical of manual labor, which was of course not very fun but which unlocked rewards that would allow him to have fun later, when he used them, except when he finally earned the rewards the game’s developers would by that time have issued a new patch that made available new rewards that were slightly, incrementally better than the old rewards, and so even as he earned these rewards he knew they were already devalued because better rewards were right there on the horizon, and if he thought about it really hard he’d say that most of his Elfscape game experience involved him preparing to have fun but never really having it, the fun, except in those raids when, working together with his guild, he took down some importantly evil enemy and won some cool loot, but even then it was only fun the first couple of times they succeeded, and after that it became just a repeatable exercise that no longer provided fun, per se, and which actually caused a great deal of stress and rage when the guild failed some week where they had succeeded the week before, and so most raid nights were less about having fun and more about anger avoidance, and so he concluded the fun must have been happening elsewhere, maybe not even in the discrete game moments themselves but in the general, abstract state of playingness, because when he was logged on to Elfscape he felt a deep sense of satisfaction and mastery and belonging that he felt nowhere in the real world, and this feeling might be what he would interpret as “fun”), all of which is to say that Pwnage had a vast fortune indeed, and when he began giving away his wealth in 1,000-gold-coin increments it still took many dozens of players coming to collect before the purse was depleted, which made Pwnage feel something like Robin Hood walking through the forest giving away fortunes to the needy, and when his fortune was gone he began giving away his gear, clicking randomly on people in the very large crowd around him and giving them his weapons, his longswords and broadswords, his cleavers, claymores, rapiers, daggers, dirks, sabers, sickles, scimitars, shivs, axes, cudgels, hatchets, hammers, tomahawks, maces, picks, staves, polearms, pikes, spears, halberds, and one mysterious weapon he didn’t even remember obtaining called a flammard, and when he had no more weapons to give he gave away his body armor, the various pieces of chain mail and plate metal he’d won and plundered, the kick-ass pauldrons with the spikes all over them, the greaves covered in razor wire, the awesome helmet with bull’s horns that made him look like the goddamn minotaur (already this bounty was becoming legendary, as several players were taking video footage of Pwnage’s long walk south and posting it online with captions like “EPIC PLAYER GIVES AWAY ALL HIS LOOTZ!”), and at first Pwnage felt sharp pangs of regret giving away his stuff because he loved his stuff and also because he knew how much time and effort went into acquiring every item (the bull’s-head helmet alone took like two months to win), but that feeling soon gave way to an unexpected sense of calm purpose and spiritual goodness and generosity and even warmth and peace (this might have been the exhaustion talking, as he’d been playing Elfscape at this point for thirty hours straight) as he shed all his possessions and he was followed now by his many admirers and he was feeling like he was maybe inspiring these people and should maybe say something important and wise and he wondered whether there was a Buddha story like this, or maybe it was Gandhi, or Jesus, a story about giving everything away and walking — this all sounded really familiar — and Pwnage eventually thought of this whole episode not as a last-ditch desperate effort to quit a game he did not seem to have the willpower to quit but rather as an altruistic and spiritual journey of renunciation, like he was doing something good and important, charity-wise, being a role model for all these people, and this feeling held pretty strongly and pleasantly until the crowd began to thin, which it did when it was clear he had no more loot to give away and people began to private-message him asking “Is that it? Is there any more?” and he realized they were not there to join him on his long metaphysical journey but instead they simply wanted cool new toys to play with, and Pwnage felt angry at their crass materialism until he remembered that this was the point of the whole giving-away-all-his-possessions maneuver in the first place, that he would be abandoned and therefore not tempted to continue playing Elfscape due to his drastically diminished popularity, but now that it had happened, now that he actually had been abandoned, now that he was walking through the big open country without weapons or armor or gold or friends, just an elf in a loincloth, pathetic-looking, weak, he still did not feel much like quitting, and so he kept walking south until he reached the bottom of the continent, a rocky plateau that looked out over the ocean, and he knew he’d reached the end of his journey and knew it was time to log off and delete his account and begin living his real-life life and writing his novel and becoming successful and winning Lisa back and starting his diet and doing the all-around radical change that was necessary to live the way he wanted to live, and even though he could no longer think of a single excuse to stay in the game, and even though there was literally nothing his avatar could do now in its state of total poverty and nakedness, still he could not log off, still he stared out at the digital ocean, still the thought of abandoning the game and returning to the real world filled him with dread, a dread more powerful than anything most normally functional human adults ever experience due to the serious problems of brain physiology and neural microstructure reorganization that had gone down inside his cranium during his addict-level Elfscape binges, which had, along with the inevitable physical tolls like weight gain and muscle waste and back fatigue and a semipermanent knot on the back of his rib cage that seemed correlated with repetitive right-handed mouse usage, also severely degenerated the tissue of his rostral anterior cingulate cortex, an area in the front of the brain that acts as a kind of recruiter engaging the other more rational brain areas to aid during conflicts (think of a very impulsive and distraught person calling more level-headed friends to get some perspective and objective advice) and is necessary for proper cognitive and impulse control, except in Pwnage this area had begun to shut down completely, like a house that took down all its Christmas lights, just deactivating, which was what happened in the brains of heroin-dependent individuals when presented with heroin: their anterior cingulate cortexes shut down and they got no decision-making input from the quote-unquote smart parts of their brains and their brains offered them literally no help with overcoming their most basic, primal, self-destructive impulses, impulses with which they needed the most help to overcome, which was precisely what was happening to Pwnage as he looked out at the sea: he functionally remembered the desire to quit Elfscape, but there was no part of his brain actively telling him to do so, plus there was the problem of decreased gray-matter volume in several clusters of the orbitofrontal cortex — responsible for goal orientation and motivation — this atrophy resulting in a brain that was aware of the existence of a goal but did not offer any aid achieving that goal, instead idly seeing the goal on the horizon and noting the goal the way Midwestern farmers note the weather (“Yep, rain’s comin’ ”), which was another of Elfscape’s neurobiological traps, that the more he played Elfscape the more his brain was unable to compute any but the most short-term and proximate goals, which happened to be the goals of Elfscape itself — the way the game was designed to reward players every one or two hours with some cool new piece of loot or a new level gained or achievement accomplished, which was accompanied by a horn fanfare and fireworks animations — and becoming habituated to these kinds of insidious, small, near-future goals made any long-term goals that required substantial planning and discipline and mental fortitude (like writing a novel or starting a new diet) seem, for the brain, literally unfathomable, not to mention the problems happening deep inside his brain’s internal capsule, posterior limb, the only part of Pwnage’s brain to have strengthened during his massive, unyielding addiction to Elfscape, where the primary motor cortex sent its axons that controlled fine finger movements, and Pwnage had excellent fine finger agility, clicking with his right hand on his many-buttoned mouse and with his left hand a full 104-key Western keyboard, keeping a mental map of all of this so that he could press any one of these hundreds of keys and buttons in a split second without even looking at them, this behavior having changed the actual physical structure of his brain and greatly thickened the axons in the internal capsule, the problem here being that such giant finger-control fibers were never, in an evolutionary sense, strictly necessary (there’s no equivalent in our human ancestry to a fifteen-button electronic gaming mouse), and so the area available within the capsule was limited and not very accommodating to unexpected growth, meaning that Pwnage’s giant finger-related white matter was crowding out other essential brain tissues, primarily communication tracts between the frontal and subcortical brain regions, which governed executive decision-making and which, among other things, helped inhibit inappropriate behaviors, which may have explained Pwnage’s actions at the organic health food store specifically and his actions over the last year more generally, his slow wasting away in front of his computer, his lack of sleep, his diet, his delusions of grandeur about becoming a famous author and winning Lisa back, the partial mini seizures he didn’t even know were happening, the seizures caused either by sleep deprivation or flashing computer lights or severe nutrition-related chemical imbalances (or all three of those things together, probably) that presented physically as a loss of sensation in various limbs and the sudden need to pick at his own skin and seeing sparkly things at the edge of his vision, symptoms that Pwnage might have gotten a medical opinion about if his dorsolateral prefrontal cortex weren’t completely shut down, this brain area being responsible for decision-making and emotion control and which went dormant in the brains of heavy multitaskers during what might be called “information overload,” which in the event of dormancy the emotion centers of the brain took over executive control in the neural equivalent of giving the keys to a forklift to a six-year-old, and Pwnage’s mind was overloaded indeed, as his computer screen was jammed with the various boxes of add-on software that gave him real-time and constantly in-flux feedback on his opponent’s health, his own available moves, various countdown timers that let him know when other moves would be available again, the attacks that would at that moment inflict the highest damage mathematically possible, the status of each of his raid members, the full party’s damage-per-second output, an overhead bird’s-eye view of the fight’s layout with principal actors color-coded depending on their roles in the fight, all of this happening in addition to the actual game also happening behind all the flashing and glowing boxes, and Pwnage monitored not only everything happening on this screen — which itself would be enough to drive your basic slow-living eighteenth-century peasant to near psychotic breaks — but since he usually played while “multiboxing” several characters at once, he monitored the events on six different computer screens simultaneously, such that he was ingesting way more information per second than all the air traffic controllers at O’Hare put together, making that very sensitive and logical brain part essentially wave the white flag and hide, allowing his emotion centers to easily shut down whatever was left of his logical, rational, disciplined mind, which meant, to put it simply, that the more Elfscape he played the more impossible it felt to stop playing Elfscape, and this went way beyond simply kicking a bad habit and into problems of brain morphology and a kind of fundamental neural disfigurement so complete that Pwnage’s mind literally would not allow him to quit Elfscape, which was what he was realizing standing on the southern edge of the continent wondering what to do next and not coming up with anything and so just standing there, until finally one of his enemy-proximity alarms went off and the game’s camera auto-flipped to reveal an orc player behind him spying from a great distance, and what he would usually do in this moment would be to charge the orc and slam it with his shield and then hack at it with his ax of unusual size until it was good and dead, and even though he currently had no shield or ax or really anything with which to attack the orc, he reflexively went to attack it — except that he couldn’t, something was preventing it, he felt hazy and nauseous and light-headed and found he couldn’t move his arms or, come to think of it, breathe (it should be mentioned here that the blood clot that had formed in his leg was by now a full-blown pulmonary embolism that was currently blocking blood flow to the lungs and which caused substantial chest pain whenever Pwnage breathed combined with a desperate desire to breathe more, Pwnage registering this mostly as a quick dimming of the light, almost as if the sun had gone down all at once, skipping twilight and plunging directly into nocturnal darkness), and when Pwnage did not attack the orc player, the orc player moved closer, gaining confidence, a step or two at a time, testing him, ready to run, until the orc was in melee range and Pwnage desperately wanted to attack it except that he couldn’t move under the weight of what felt like an anvil on his chest, and when Pwnage did not move the orc player removed from his belt a small dagger and — after a brief moment where he was probably wondering if this was a good idea and not a put-on by the server’s most famous elf warrior — the orc stabbed him, then stabbed him again, then again, and Pwnage’s loinclothed elf stood there wobbling and taking it while alarms went off everywhere and his health bar dropped and he sat there watching in horror unable to move as the darkness closed in and his field of vision narrowed and he lost all control of his motor functions and his lips and fingertips turned blue and his elf warrior eventually, after so many wounds, dropped down dead, and Pwnage watched the orc dance on his own fallen corpse and the last thing he saw before the lights went off completely was a message from the orc-player saying ZOMG I PWNED UR FACE ROFLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!! and Pwnage resolved that he would earn all his treasure back and become twice as powerful as before just so he could hunt down this one fucking orc and kill him over and over and over, and he would start doing that as soon as he could move his legs and arms again, and breathe, and for that matter see, and even as all his systems were in a cascading and catastrophic failure his brain told him his number one priority right now was killing this orc, which he would never be able to do, because today was the day he was quitting Elfscape, and since his mind would not let him do it, his body had to do it for him.

4

SIMON ROGERS PACED through Faye’s wrecked apartment, stepping carefully to avoid debris on the floor and explaining that there were certain laws that allowed all this (when he said “all this,” he said it with a sweep of his arms, meaning the apartment’s general desecration and ruin), certain statutes passed after 9/11 governing the searches of terrorist suspects, the allowable use of military force.

“Basically,” he said, “the police can send a SWAT team whenever they want, and we have no way to stop it, prevent it, countermand it, or redress it.”

Faye was in the kitchen, silent, stirring tea in her one unbroken mug.

“What were they looking for?” Samuel asked. He kicked at the remains of the television, which had been fractured by some kind of blunt force, its electronic guts scattered over the floor.

Simon shrugged. “It’s procedure, sir. Since your mother is being charged with domestic terrorism, they’re allowed to do this. So they did it.”

“She’s not a terrorist.”

“Yes, but since she’s being charged under a statute designed for sleeper-cell al-Qaeda agents, they have to treat her as if she might actually be one.”

“This is so fucked up.”

“The law was written at a time when folks were not that interested in the Fourth Amendment. Or the Fifth Amendment, for that matter. Or, actually, the Sixth.” He chortled lightly to himself. “Or the Eighth.”

“Don’t they need some kind of specific reason to search the house?” Samuel said.

“They do, sir, but they keep it a secret.”

“Don’t they need a warrant?”

“Yes, but it’s sealed.”

“Who gives them permission?”

“Confidential, sir.”

“And is there anyone watching over all of this? Anyone we can appeal to?”

“There is a sort of habeas process, but it’s classified. National security reasons. Mostly, sir, we’re meant to trust that the government has our best interests in mind. I should note that this kind of search isn’t actually mandatory. It’s at the court’s discretion. They didn’t have to do this. And I know for a fact the prosecutor didn’t ask for it.”

“So it was the judge.”

“Technically, that is information withheld from the public. But yes. Judge Brown. We can infer that he ordered it himself.”

Samuel looked at his mother, who was staring down into her tea. It did not appear that she was drinking the tea so much as intensely stirring it. The wooden spoon she used clunked softly against the sides of the mug.

“So what are we going to do?” Samuel said.

“I am prepared to mount a vigorous defense, sir, against these new charges. I believe I can persuade a jury that your mother is not a terrorist.”

“On what grounds?”

“Primarily, that the recipient of the terrorist threat, Governor Packer, did not actually feel terror.”

“You’re going to summon Governor Packer.”

“Yes. I’m betting he won’t want to admit in pubic that he was terrified. Of your mom. Not during a presidential campaign.”

“That’s it? That’s your defense?”

“I will also argue that your mother merely made a threatening gesture and did not convey her terroristic threat verbally, electronically, on television, or in writing, which for certain convoluted reasons is a mitigating factor. I’m hoping this will reduce her sentence from life to merely ten years, maximum security.”

“That doesn’t sound like a win to me.”

“I have to admit that I’m more comfortable in free-speech law. Defenses against terrorism are not my, shall we say, cup of tea? Haha.”

They looked at Faye, who continued to stare into her mug and had no reaction at all.

“Excuse me,” said the lawyer, and he walked between mounds of ripped-open pillows and couch cushions and clothes still attached to their hangers, into the bathroom.

Samuel made his way to the kitchen, each footstep provoking a shriek of broken glass. Food was strewn over the countertops where police had upended the pantry — coffee grounds and cereals and oat bran and rice. The refrigerator was pulled from its place and unplugged, water now dribbling out of it and puddling on the floor. Faye held her mug, which appeared to be handmade from clay, to her chest.

“Mom?” Samuel said. He wondered what she was feeling right now, given the high-end anxiety meds she’d taken earlier that day. “Hello?” he said.

At the moment, she seemed numb to everything, oblivious. Even the way she stirred her tea was automatic and mechanical. He wondered if the shock of the police raid had put her in some kind of fugue.

“Mom, are you all right? Can you, like, hear me?”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said finally. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

“Tell me you’re okay.”

She stirred her tea and stared into the mug. “I’ve been so stupid.”

“You’ve been stupid? This is my fault,” Samuel said. “I went to see the judge and I made everything worse. I’m really sorry.”

“I’ve made such stupid decisions,” Faye said, shaking her head, “one after the other.”

“Listen. We should figure out a plan. Alice said we needed to get out of town. Maybe even out of the country.”

“Yeah. I’m beginning to believe her.”

“Just for a little while. If Brown is retiring soon, why not wait him out? Make sure he knows it will be years before a trial happens. Get rid of him, get another judge.”

“Where would we go?” Faye said.

“I don’t know. Canada. Europe. Jakarta.”

“Actually, no,” she said, and she put the mug on the counter. “We can’t leave the country. I’ve been charged with terrorism. There’s no way they’ll let me on an airplane.”

“Yes. Right.”

“We’ll have to trust Simon, I guess.”

“Trust Simon. I really hope that’s not our best option.”

“What else can we do?”

“Alice said the judge will never back down. He really seriously wants to put you away forever. This is not a joke.”

“It doesn’t feel like a joke.”

“He said he’s in a wheelchair because of you. What did you do to him?”

“Nothing. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Honest.”

A rush of plumbing came from the bathroom then, and Simon emerged, little water specks dotting the arms of his sport coat.

“Professor Anderson, sir, I’m actually glad you’re here. I’ve been meaning to talk to you. About your letter? The letter to the judge that you’ve been working on tirelessly, I assume?”

“Right. Yes. What about it?”

“Well, I wanted to personally thank you, sir, for all your efforts and all the time you’ve no doubt put into this already. But you should know that we will no longer be needing your services.”

“My services. Sounds like you’re firing me.”

“Yes. The letter you’re writing? That will no longer be necessary.”

“But my mom is in pretty big trouble.”

“Oh, yes, she most certainly is, sir.”

“She needs my help.”

“She definitely does need help from somebody, sir. But probably not from you. Not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“How do I say this delicately? It’s just that I’ve become convinced, sir, that you are not in a position to help her. Probably you’d make things worse. I’m referring of course to the scandal.”

“What scandal?”

“At the university, sir. Dreadful.”

“Simon, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Oh, you haven’t seen yet? Oh, my. I’m so sorry, sir. Seems like I’m always the one to bring you bad news, eh? Haha. Perhaps if you checked your e-mail more often, or watched the local news?”

“Simon.”

“Of course, sir. Well, it looks like there’s a brand-new student organization that’s gaining some serious attention at your school. This organization’s purpose, its singular raison d’être, if you will, seems to be getting you fired.”

“Seriously?”

“They have their own website, which has been gleefully shared and circulated by your students, both current and former. You are now pretty much the textbook definition of what PR people call toxic. Hence our no longer needing you to vouch for your mother.”

“Why do my students want me fired?”

“Perhaps it would be best to look at it yourself?”

Simon removed a laptop from his briefcase and called up the website: a new student organization called S.A.F.E. — or Students Against Faculty Extravagance — arguing that university professors were wasting taxpayer money. Their evidence? One Samuel Anderson, a professor of English, who, according to the website, abused his office computer privileges:

During routine maintenance, the Computer Support Center found logs showing Professor Anderson uses his computer to play “World of Elfscape” for a frankly shocking number of hours each week. This is a completely unacceptable use of university resources.

There was also an associated letter-writing campaign that had gotten the attention of the dean, the press, and the governor’s office. Now the whole matter was being sent to the university disciplinary committee for a full hearing.

“Oh, shit,” Samuel said at the thought of explaining Elfscape to a committee of humorless gray-haired professors of philosophy and rhetoric and theology. It made him break out in an immediate sweat, justifying to his colleagues why he had a robust second life as an elven thief. Oh god.

The president of S.A.F.E. was quoted on the website as saying that students needed to be vigorous watchdogs of faculty who wasted their tuition dollars. The student’s name was, of course, Laura Pottsdam.

“Fuck this,” Samuel said, closing the laptop. He walked over to the expanse of windows on the apartment’s north wall and looked out at the jagged city.

He remembered Periwinkle’s ridiculous advice: that he should declare bankruptcy and move to Jakarta. That was actually sounding pretty good right about now. “I think it’s time to leave,” he said.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“It’s time to get on a plane and leave,” Samuel said. “Leave my job, and my life, and the whole country. Start fresh, somewhere else.”

“You are, of course, free to do that, sir. But your mother needs to stay here and fight this within the strict confines of the law.”

“I know.”

“My various oaths bar me from telling anyone accused of a crime that they should flee the jurisdiction.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Samuel said. “She can’t leave anyway. She’d be on the no-fly list.”

“Oh, no, sir. She wouldn’t be on the list yet.”

Samuel turned around. The lawyer was carefully tucking his laptop back into its special briefcase sleeve.

“Simon, what do you mean?”

“Well, the no-fly list is administered by the Terrorist Screening Center, or TSC, which, interestingly, is actually a part of the National Security Branch of the FBI, under the auspices of the Department of Defense. The no-fly list is not, as many people believe, controlled by the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. They are completely different departments!”

“Okay. So?”

“So to get onto the no-fly list, one’s name has to be nominated by an approved government official from the Department of Justice, or Homeland Security, or Defense, or State, or the Postal Service, or certain private contractors, and since each of these agencies has different criteria and guidelines and rules and processes, not to mention different documents and forms that sometimes are incompatible with another administrative agency’s equivalent documents and forms, the TSC has to filter through everything and evaluate it and standardize it. This is made infinitely more complicated by the fact that every agency and department uses its own special computer software, like, for example, the Circuit Court of Cook County uses a Windows operating system that’s at least three iterations out of date, whereas the FBI and CIA are more Linux-based, I believe. And getting those two systems speaking to each other? Hoo-boy.”

“Simon, get back to your point.”

“Of course, sir. What I’m saying is that the information on your mother’s status as a terrorist must be processed by the Circuit Court of Cook County’s First Municipal District, then passed along to the regional FBI office, then to the TSC, where it’s evaluated and approved by the TSC’s multiagency Operations Branch and Tactical Analysis Group, then that information needs to percolate over to the Department of Homeland Security, which then sends it along to the TSA in some manner that probably involves a fax machine, all this before the no-fly information is available to individual airport and security personnel.”

“So my mom is not, in fact, on the no-fly list.”

“She’s not on the no-fly list yet. This whole process usually takes around forty-eight hours, start to finish. More if it’s a Friday.”

“So, hypothetically, if we wanted to leave the country, we could do so, as long as we did it today.”

“That’s right, sir. You have to remember we’re dealing with huge bureaucracies staffed by people who are, for the most part, criminally underpaid.”

Samuel glanced over at his mother, who looked back at him and, after a moment where she seemed to consider this, the gravity of this, gave him a little nod.

“Simon?” he said. “Thank you so much. You’ve been very, very helpful.”

5

AT O’HARE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, terminal five, people waited quietly in lines: lines to get their ticket, lines to drop off their luggage, lines to get through security, all the lines running at such a laggard and reluctant and frankly un-American pace that they forced everyone to fully imbibe the terminal’s deeply disorienting combination of melancholy and chaos. The smell of car exhaust from all the taxis outside, and the inside smells of meats that had been cooking all day at Gold Coast Dogs. Easy-listening standards heavy on saxophone occupied the aural spaces between security announcements. Televisions showing airport news that was different from regular news in unknown ways. Samuel felt disappointed that a foreigner’s first impression of America would be made here, and what America was offering them was a McDonald’s (whose big message to the incoming throngs seemed to be that the McRib was back) and a store specializing in gadgets of questionable necessity: HD video pens, shiatsu massage chairs, wireless Bluetooth-activated reading lamps, heated foot spas, compression socks, automatic wine-bottle openers, motorized barbecue-grill brushes, orthopedic dog couches, cat thundershirts, weight-loss armbands, gray hair prevention pills, isometric meal replacement packs, liquid protein shots, television swivel stands, hands-free blow-dryer holders, a bath towel that said “Face” on one end and “Butt” on the other.

This is who we are.

Men’s bathrooms that required you touch nothing but yourself. Automated dispensers that pooed little globs of generic pink soap onto your hands. Sinks that did not run enough water to fully wash. The same threat-level warning issued ad nauseam. The security mandates — empty your pockets, remove your shoes, laptops out, gels and liquids in separate bags — repeated so many times that eventually everyone stopped hearing them. All of this so reflexive and automatic and habituated and slow that the travelers were a little zoned out and playing with their phones and just simply enduring this uniquely modern, first world ordeal that is not per se “difficult” but is definitely exhausting. Spiritually debilitating. Everyone feeling a small ache of regret, suspecting that, as a people, we could do better. But we don’t. The line for a McRib was quiet and solemn and twenty people deep.

“I’m feeling a surge of pessimism about our plan,” Faye said to Samuel as they stood in the security line. “I mean, do you think they’re really going to let us through? Like, Oh yes, Miss Fugitive from Justice, right this way.”

“Would you keep it down?” Samuel said.

“I can feel the drugs wearing off. I can feel my anxiety bounding back to me like a lost dog.”

“We are normal passengers taking a normal vacation abroad.”

“A normal vacation to a country with very strict extradition laws, I sincerely hope.”

“Don’t worry. Remember what Simon said.”

“I can literally feel my confidence in our plan disintegrating. It’s like someone has taken our plan and applied a cheese grater. That’s what it feels like.”

“Please be quiet and please relax.”

They had taken a cab to the airport and purchased one-way tickets on the next available international flight, a nonstop to London. Their boarding passes were issued without a problem. They checked their luggage, again without a problem. They waited in the security line. And when they finally handed their tickets and passports to the blue-uniformed TSA agent, whose job it was to visually inspect their photographs and run their tickets over a bar-code scanner and wait for the computer to make a pleasant sound and for the light to flash green, the computer did not, in fact, make the pleasant sound. The sound it made instead was the harsh errrrrr sound like the buzzer at the end of a basketball game, that sound indicating authority and finality. And in case anyone was confused over the sound’s meaning, the light also turned red.

The security agent sat up straighter at this, surprised at the computer’s negative judgment. A rare moment of drama in terminal five.

“Could you please wait over there,” he said, pointing at an empty little holding pen whose boundaries were demarcated only by strips of dirty purple masking tape on the floor.

While they waited, the other travelers glanced at them once or twice, then were drawn back to their phones. A television above them showed the airport news network, currently a story about Governor Packer.

“They know about me,” Faye whispered into Samuel’s ear. “That I’m a fugitive. I’m on the run.”

“You are neither of those things.”

“Of course they know. This is the information age. They all have access to the same data. There’s probably a room somewhere covered with TV screens monitoring us right now. It’s in Langley, or Los Alamos.”

“I doubt you’d register as that high a threat.”

They watched the slow crawl of the line through the security checkpoint: people taking off their shoes and belts and standing in clear plastic tubes and putting their hands over their heads while gray metal arms circled their bodies, probing them.

“This is the post-9/11 world,” Faye said. “The post-privacy world. The law knows where I am at all times. Of course they wouldn’t let me fly.”

“Relax. We don’t know what’s happening yet.”

“And you. They’ll arrest you as an accessory.”

“Accessory to what? A vacation?”

“They’ll never believe we’re taking a vacation.”

“Aiding and abetting a weekend trip abroad? Hardly criminal.”

“We’re being watched right now on a bank of televisions and computer screens. Probably in the basement of the Pentagon. A feed from every port in the world. Bundles of fiber-optic cables. Face-recognition software. Technology we don’t even know exists. They are probably reading my lips at this exact moment. The FBI and CIA working in conjunction with local law enforcement. That’s how they always say it on the news.”

“This is not the news.”

“This is not the news yet.”

A man with a clipboard had by now begun talking in low tones with the security agent, glancing at them occasionally. He looked like he’d been pulled from a previous era — his hair cut into a severe and geometric flattop, a white short-sleeved shirt and thin black tie, square jaw, bright blue eyes — like he’d once been an Apollo astronaut but was now doing this. A badge hanging on his shirt pocket turned out to be, upon closer inspection, a laminated card with the image of a badge on it.

“He’s talking about us,” Faye said. “Something is about to happen.”

“Just stay calm.”

“Do you remember the story I told you about the Nix?”

“Which one was that?”

“The horse.”

“Right, yeah. The white horse that picked up children, then drowned them.”

“That’s the one.”

“Excellent story to tell a nine-year-old, by the way.”

“Do you remember the moral?”

“That the things you love the most can hurt you the worst.”

“Yes. That people can be a Nix to each other. Sometimes without even knowing it.”

“What’s your point?”

The man with the clipboard had begun walking in their direction.

“That’s what I was to you,” she said. “I was your Nix. You loved me most, and I was hurting you. You asked me once why I left you and your father. That’s why.”

“And you’re telling me this now?”

“I wanted to get it in under the wire.”

The man with the clipboard crossed the purple tape and cleared his throat.

“So it looks like we have sort of a problem here,” he said in an unusually upbeat way, like one of those customer-service people you sometimes get on the phone who seem really into their jobs. He was not making eye contact with either of them, staring instead at whatever was on his clipboard. “It looks like, it turns out, you’re on that no-fly list, there.” He seemed uncomfortable having to say this, as if it were his fault.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Faye said. “I should have known.”

“Oh, no, not you,” the man said, looking surprised. “You’re not on the list. He is.”

“Me?” Samuel said.

“Yes, sir. That’s what it says right here,” tapping the clipboard. “Samuel Andresen-Anderson. Absolutely not allowed on an airplane.”

“How am I on the no-fly list?”

“Well,” he said, flipping through the pages as if he were reading them for the first time. “Were you recently in Iowa?”

“Yes.”

“Did you visit the ChemStar factory while you were there?”

“I stopped by.”

“Did you, um”—and here he lowered his voice, as if he were saying something obscene—“did you take photographs of the factory?”

“A couple, yeah.”

“Well,” he said, and shrugged as if the answer should have been obvious. “There you go.”

“Why were you taking photographs of ChemStar?” Faye said.

“Yes,” the man with the clipboard said. “Why were you?”

“I don’t know. It’s nostalgic.”

“You were taking nostalgic pictures of a factory,” the man said. He frowned. He was dubious. Not buying it. “Who does that?”

“My grandfather works there. Used to work there.”

“That part is true,” Faye said.

“That part? All of it is true. I was visiting my grandfather and took some pictures of all the old childhood places. The old house, the old park, and yes, the old factory. I think the better question here is why am I on the no-fly list for photographing a corn-processing plant?”

“Oh, well, those kinds of facilities have some pretty dangerous toxic chemicals. And it’s right there on the Mississippi. Let’s just say that your presence raised”—and here he put up two fingers to indicate air quotes—“homeland security concerns.”

“I see.”

He flipped to another page on his clipboard. “It says here that they saw you on their closed-circuit cameras, and you fled when security approached.”

“Fled? I didn’t flee. I left. I was done photographing. I never even saw security.”

“That’s exactly what I would say if I were fleeing,” the man said to Faye, who nodded.

“I know,” she said. “You’re exactly right.”

“Would you stop?” Samuel said. “So am I never going to fly again? Is that what this means?”

“It means you’re not going to fly today. But you can take steps to remove yourself from the list. There’s a website for that.”

“A website.”

“Or an 800 number, if you prefer,” he said. “Then an average wait time of six to eight weeks. I’m afraid I’m going to have to escort you out of the airport now.”

“And my mother?”

“Oh, she can do whatever she wants. She’s not on the list.”

“I see. Can you give us a second?”

“Oh sure!” the man said. Then he took one step beyond the purple tape and turned his back three-quarters to them and clasped his hands in front of him and began very slightly tilting back and forth like someone whistling and rocking to his own tune.

“Let’s forget about it,” Faye whispered. “Let’s go home. The judge can do whatever he wants. It’s not like I don’t deserve it.”

And Samuel thought about his mother going to jail, thought about his life returning to normal: losing his job, in debt, alone, passing through his days in a digital fog.

“You have to leave,” he said. “I’ll come find you, when I can.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Faye said. “Do you know what the judge will do to you?”

“A lot less than what he’ll do to you. You need to go.”

She looked at him a moment, wondering whether to fight him.

“Don’t argue,” he said. “Just go.”

“Fine,” she said, “but we’re not going to have one of those sappy parent-child moments, right? You’re not going to cry, right?”

“I am not going to cry.”

“Because I was never very good at dealing with that.”

“Have a good flight.”

“Wait,” she said. She grabbed his arm. “This has to be a clean break. If we do this, we won’t be able to contact each other for a while. Radio silence.”

“I know.”

“So I’m asking you, are you prepared to do that? Can you handle that?”

“You want permission?”

“Permission to leave you. Again. For the second time. Yes, that’s what I want.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know,” Faye said. “I’ll figure that out in London.”

On the television above them, the airport news network came back from commercials and into a segment on the Packer for President campaign. It looked like Governor Packer was out to an early lead in Iowa, they said. Looks like the attack in Chicago really boosted his peripherals.

Faye and Samuel looked at each other.

“How did we get into this?” he said.

“It’s my fault,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Go,” he said. “You have my permission. Get out of here.”

“Thank you,” she said. She picked up her bag, looked at him for a moment, then dropped it back on the ground and leaned into Samuel and wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest and squeezed. Samuel didn’t know what to do, it was such an out-of-character gesture. She took one long hard breath, like someone about to plunge underwater, then quickly let go.

“Be good,” she said, and patted him on the chest. She collected her suitcase and wandered back to the TSA agent, who let her through uneventfully. The man with the clipboard asked Samuel if he was ready to leave. And Samuel watched his mother, and felt a little tremble at her sudden embrace. His hand lightly touched the spot she’d pressed her head against.

“Sir?” said the clipboard man. “Are you ready?”

Samuel was about to say yes when he heard a name he recognized — a name that abruptly popped out of the airport’s ubiquitous and usually ignorable noise. It came from the television overhead: Guy Periwinkle.

Samuel looked up to see if he’d heard correctly, and that’s when he saw him, Periwinkle, on TV, sitting in the studio, talking to the anchors. Under his name it said Packer Campaign Consultant. They were asking him what drew him to the job.

“Sometimes the country thinks it deserves a spanking, sometimes it wants a hug,” Periwinkle said. “When it wants a hug, it votes Democrat. I’m hedging on it’s a spanking moment right now.”

“It’s time to go now, sir,” the man with the clipboard said.

“One second.”

“Conservatives tend to believe more than the rest of us that we need a spanking. Read into that whatever you want.” Periwinkle laughed. The anchors laughed. He was a natural on television. “Right now the country sees itself as a poorly behaved child,” he continued. “When people vote, what they’re really doing, way deep down, is externalizing some childhood trauma. We have reams of paper showing this.”

“It’s really time to go now, sir.” The man with the clipboard was getting impatient.

“Okay, fine,” Samuel said, and he let himself be escorted away from the television, toward the exterior doors.

But just before leaving, he turned around. He turned in time to see his mother collect her belongings on the other side of security. And she didn’t look for him, she didn’t wave at him. She simply gathered her things and left. And thus Samuel endured, for the second time in his life, the sight of his mother walking away, disappearing, and not coming back.