A Visit From the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

  up gOs th bldg, he T’d Lulu now, remarking on how easily baby talk fitted itself into the crawl space of a T.

  …bldg? came Lulu’s response.

  nxt 2 myn. no mOr Ar/lyt

  cn u stp it?

  tryd

  cn u move?

  stuk

  nyc, Lulu wrote, which confused Alex at first; the sarcasm seemed unlike her. Then he realized that she wasn’t saying “nice.” She was saying “New York City.”

  The concert day was “unseasonably” warm: eighty-nine degrees and dry, with angled golden light that stabbed their eyes at intersections and stretched their shadows to absurd lengths. The trees, which had bloomed in January, were now in tentative leaf. Rebecca had stuffed Cara-Ann into a dress from last summer with a duck across the front, and with Alex, they’d joined a mass of other young families on the skyscraper corridor of Sixth Avenue, Cara-Ann riding on Alex’s back in a titanium pack they’d recently bought to replace the sling. Strollers were prohibited at public gatherings—they hampered evacuation.

  Alex had been debating how to propose this concert to Rebecca, but in the end he hadn’t needed to; checking her handset one night after Cara-Ann was asleep, his wife had said, “Scotty Hausmann…that’s the guy Bennie Salazar played for us, right?”

  Alex felt a tiny implosion near his heart. “I think so. Why?”

  “I keep hearing about this free concert he’s giving on Saturday in the Footprint, for kids and adults.”

  “Huh.”

  “Might give you a way to reconnect with Bennie.” She was still smarting, on Alex’s behalf, over the fact that Bennie hadn’t hired him. This made Alex writhe with guilt whenever the subject came up.

  “True,” he’d said.

  “So let’s go,” she’d said. “Why not, if it’s free?”

  Past Fourteenth Street, the skyscrapers fell away, and the slanted sun was upon them, still too low in the February sky to be shielded by any visor. In the glare Alex almost failed to spot his old friend Zeus, then tried to avoid him—Zeus was one of his blind parrots. Too late; Rebecca had already called his name. Zeus’s Russian girlfriend, Natasha, was with him, each of them carrying one of their six-month-old twins in a pouch.

  “You going to hear Scotty?” Zeus asked, as if Scotty Hausmann were someone they both knew.

  “We are,” Alex said carefully. “You?”

  “Hell yeah,” Zeus said. “A lap steel guitar with a slide—you ever heard one live? And we’re not even talking rockabilly.” Zeus worked for a blood bank and, in his spare time, helped Down syndrome kids make and sell printed sweatshirts. Alex found himself searching Zeus’s face for some visible sign of parrothood, but his friend seemed the same right down to his soul patch, which he’d kept all these years since they’d gone out of fashion.

  “He’s supposed to be really good live,” said Natasha, in her strong accent.

  “I heard that, too,” Rebecca said. “From, like, eight different people. It’s almost strange.”

  “Not strange,” Natasha said, with a harsh laugh. “People are getting paid.” Alex felt a blaze of heat in his face and found it hard to look at Natasha. Still, it was clear that she spoke without knowledge; Zeus had kept his role a secret.

  “But these are people I know,” Rebecca said.

  It was one of those days when every intersection brings up another familiar face, old friends and friends of friends, acquaintances, and people who just look familiar. Alex had been in the city too long to know how he knew them all: clubs where he’d deejayed? The law office where he’d worked as a secretary? The pickup basketball game he’d played for years in Tompkins Square Park? He’d felt on the verge of leaving New York since the day he’d arrived, at twenty-four—even now, he and Rebecca were poised to spring at any time, should a better job come along in a cheaper place—but somehow, enough years had managed to pass that he felt like he’d seen every person in Manhattan at least once. He wondered if Sasha was somewhere in this crowd. Alex found himself searching the vaguely familiar faces for hers without knowing what she looked like, as if his reward for recognizing Sasha, all these years later, would be finding out the answer to that question.

  You going south?…we heard about this…not just for pointers…live he’s supposed to be…

  After the ninth or tenth exchange of this kind, which happened somewhere around Washington Square, it became suddenly clear to Alex that all of these people, the parents and the kidless, the single and the coupled, gay and straight, clean and pierced, were on their way to hear Scotty Hausmann. Every single one. The discovery swept over him in a surge of disbelief, followed by a rush of ownership and power—he’d done it, Christ he was a genius at it—followed by queasiness (it was a triumph he wasn’t proud of), followed by fear: What if Scotty Hausmann was not a great performer? What if he was mediocre, or worse? Followed by a self-administered poultice that arrived in the form of a brain-T: no 1 nOs abt me. Im invysbl.

  “You okay?” Rebecca asked.

  “Yeah. Why.”

  “You seem nervous.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re squeezing my hand,” she said. Then added, smiling under her buttonhole glasses, “It’s nice.”

  By the time they crossed Canal and entered Lower Manhattan (where the density of children was now the highest in the nation), Alex and Rebecca and Cara-Ann were part of a throng of people that overwhelmed the sidewalk and filled the streets. Traffic had stopped, and choppers were converging overhead, flogging the air with a sound Alex hadn’t been able to bear in the early years—too loud, too loud—but over time he’d gotten used to it: the price of safety. Today their military cackle felt weirdly appropriate, Alex thought, glancing around him at the sea of slings and sacs and baby backpacks, older children carrying younger ones, because wasn’t this a kind of army? An army of children: the incarnation of faith in those who weren’t aware of having any left.

  if thr r childrn, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?

  Before them, the new buildings spiraled gorgeously against the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only seen in pictures), more like sculptures than buildings, because they were empty. Approaching them, the crowd began to slow, backing up as those in front entered the space around the reflecting pools, the density of police and security agents (identifiable by their government handsets) suddenly palpable, along with visual scanning devices affixed to cornices, lampposts, and trees. The weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint. He perceived it as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and collected over the years: their hidden pulse.

  Rebecca clutched his hand, her slim fingers moist. “I love you, Alex,” she said.

  “Don’t say it like that. Like something bad is about to happen.”

  “I’m nervous,” she said. “Now I’m nervous, too.”

  “It’s the choppers,” Alex said.

  “Excellent,” Bennie murmured. “Wait right there, Alex, if you wouldn’t mind. Right by that door.”

  Alex had left Rebecca and Cara-Ann and their friends in a multitude that had swelled into the many thousands, everyone waiting patiently—then less patiently—as the starting time of the concert came and went, watching four jumpy roadies guard the raised platform where Scotty Hausmann was supposed to play. After a T from Lulu that Bennie needed help, Alex had snaked his way through a gauntlet of security checks to Scotty Hausmann’s trailer.

  Inside, Bennie and an old roadie were slumped on black folding chairs. There was no sign of Scotty Hausmann. Alex’s throat felt very dry. Im invsbl, he thought.

  “Bennie, listen to me,” said the roadie. His hands shook beneath the cuffs of his plaid flannel shirt.

  “You can do this,” Bennie said. “I’m telling you.”r />
  “Listen to me, Bennie.”

  “Stay by the door, Alex,” Bennie said again, and he was right—Alex had been about to move closer, to ask what the fuck Bennie thought he was trying to do: put this decrepit roadie on in Scotty Hausmann’s place? To impersonate him? A guy with gutted cheeks and hands so red and gnarled he looked like he’d have trouble playing a hand of poker, much less the strange, sensuous instrument clutched between his knees? But when Alex’s eyes fell on the instrument, he suddenly knew, with an awful spasm in his gut: the decrepit roadie was Scotty Hausmann.

  “The people are here,” Bennie said. “The thing is in motion. I can’t stop it.”

  “It’s too late. I’m too old. I just—I can’t.”

  Scotty Hausmann sounded like he’d recently wept or was on the verge of weeping—possibly both. He had shoulder-length hair slicked away from his face and empty, blasted eyes, all of it amounting to a derelict impression despite his clean shave. All Alex recognized were his teeth: white and sparkling—embarrassed-looking, as if they knew there was only so much you could do with this wreck of a face. And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

  “You can, Scotty—you have to,” Bennie said, with his usual calm, but through his thinning silver hair Alex caught a shimmer of sweat on his crown. “Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?”

  Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”

  Benny took a long breath, a flick of eyes at his watch the only sign of his impatience. “You came to me, Scotty, remember that?” he said. “Twenty-some-odd years ago—you believe it was that long? You brought me a fish.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you were going to kill me.”

  “I should’ve,” Scotty said. A single hack of laughter. “I wanted to.”

  “And when I hit bottom—when Steph threw me out and I got fired from Sow’s Ear—I tracked you down. And what did I say? You remember, when I found you fishing in the East River? Out of the blue? What did I say?”

  Scotty mumbled something.

  “I said, ‘It’s time you became a star.’ And what did you say to me?” Bennie leaned close to Scotty, took the man’s trembling wrists in his own, rather elegant hands, and peered into his face. “You said, ‘I dare you.’”

  There was a long pause. Then, without warning, Scotty leaped to his feet, upending his chair as he lunged for the trailer door. Alex was fully prepared to step aside and let him pass, but Scotty got there first and began trying to muscle him out of the way, at which point Alex realized that his job—the sole reason Bennie had placed him there—was to block the door and keep the singer from escaping. They grappled in huffing silence, Scotty’s desiccated face so close to Alex’s that he was inhaling the guy’s breath, which smelled of beer, or the aftermath of beer. Then he refined his opinion: Jägermeister.

  Bennie seized Scotty from behind, but it wasn’t much of a hold—Alex made this discovery when Scotty managed to rear back and head-butt him in the solar plexus. Alex gasped and doubled over. He heard Bennie murmuring to Scotty as if trying to calm a horse.

  When he could breathe again, Alex made an effort to consult with his boss. “Bennie, if he doesn’t want to—”

  Scotty swung at Alex’s face, but Alex darted aside and the musician’s fist smashed the flimsy door. There was a tannic smell of blood.

  Alex tried again: “Bennie, this seems kind of—”

  Scotty wrenched free of Bennie and kneed Alex in the balls, which made him crumple to the floor in fetal agony. Scotty kicked him aside and threw open the door.

  “Hello,” came a voice from outside. A high, clear voice, distantly familiar. “I’m Lulu.”

  Through his roiling pain, Alex managed to turn his head and look at what was happening outside the trailer. Scotty was still in the doorway, looking down. The slanted winter sun ignited Lulu’s hair, making a nimbus around her face. She was blocking Scotty’s path, one arm on each of the flimsy metal railings. Scotty could easily have knocked her over, but he didn’t. And in hesitating, looking down for an extra second at this lovely girl blocking his way, Scotty lost.

  “Can I walk with you?” Lulu asked.

  Bennie had scrambled to retrieve the guitar, which he handed to Scotty over Alex’s prone form. Scotty took the instrument, held it to his chest, and inhaled a long, shaky breath. “Only if you’ll take my arm, darling,” he replied, and a ghost version of Scotty Hausmann flickered at Alex from the dregs that were left, sexy and rakish.

  Lulu twined her arm through Scotty’s, and they moved straight into the crowd: the addled geezer carrying the long, strange instrument, and the young woman who might have been his daughter. Bennie hauled Alex onto his feet, and they followed, Alex’s legs watery and spastic. The oceanic sprawl of people shifted spontaneously, clearing a path to the platform where a stool and twelve enormous microphones had been positioned.

  “Lulu,” Alex said to Bennie, and shook his head.

  “She’s going to run the world,” Bennie said.

  Scotty climbed onto the platform and sat on the stool. Without a glance at the audience or a word of introduction, he began to play “I Am a Little Lamb,” a tune whose childishness was belied by the twanging filigree of his slide guitar, its gushy metallic complexity. He followed that with “Goats Like Oats” and “A Little Tree Is Just Like Me.” The amplification was fine and powerful enough to eclipse the chopper throb and deliver the sound even to the distant reaches of the crowd, where it disappeared between buildings. Alex listened in a sort of cringe, expecting a roar of rejection from these thousands he’d managed secretly to assemble, whose goodwill had already been taxed by the long wait. But it didn’t happen; the pointers, who already knew these songs, clapped and screeched their approval, and the adults seemed intrigued, attuned to double meanings and hidden layers, which were easy to find. And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever the reason, a swell of approval palpable as rain lifted from the center of the crowd and rolled out toward its edges, where it crashed against buildings and water wall and rolled back at Scotty with redoubled force, lifting him off his stool, onto his feet (the roadies quickly adjusting the microphones), exploding the quavering husk Scotty had appeared to be just moments before and unleashing something strong, charismatic, and fierce. Anyone who was there that day will tell you the concert really started when Scotty stood up. That’s when he began singing the songs he’d been writing for years underground, songs no one had ever heard, or anything like them—“Eyes in My Head,” “X’s and O’s,” “Who’s Watching Hardest”—ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched. But of course, it’s hard to know anymore who was really at that first Scotty Hausmann concert—more people claim it than could possibly have fit into the space, capacious and mobbed though it was. Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn’t a myth belong to everyone?

  Standing next to Bennie, who watched Scotty while frenetically working his handset, Alex felt what was happening around him as if it had already happened and he were looking back. He wished he could be with Rebecca and Cara-Ann, first dully, then acutely—with pain. His handset had no trouble locating his wife’s handset, but it took many minutes of scanning that section of the crowd with his zoom to actually spot her. In the process, he panned the rapt, sometimes tearstained faces of adults, the elated, scant-toothed grins of toddlers,
and young people like Lulu, who was now holding hands with a statuesque black man, both of them gazing at Scotty Hausmann with the rhapsodic joy of a generation finally descrying someone worthy of its veneration.

  At last he found Rebecca, smiling, holding Cara-Ann in her arms. She was dancing. They were too far away for Alex to reach them, and the distance felt irrevocable, a chasm that would keep him from ever again touching the delicate silk of Rebecca’s eyelids, or feeling, through his daughter’s ribs, the scramble of her heartbeat. Without the zoom, he couldn’t even see them. In desperation, he T’d Rebecca, pls wAt 4 me, my bUtiful wyf, then kept his zoom trained on her face until he saw her register the vibration, pause in her dancing, and reach for it.

  “It happens once in your life, if you’re the luckiest man on earth,” Bennie said, “an event like that.”

  “You’ve had your share,” Alex said.

  “I haven’t,” Bennie said. “No, Alex, no—that’s what I’m saying! Not even close!” He was in a prolonged state of euphoria, collar loose, arms swinging. The celebration had already happened; champagne had been poured (Jägermeister for Scotty), dumplings eaten in Chinatown, a thousand calls from the press fielded and deferred, the little girls ferried home in cabs by the joyful, exultant wives (“Did you hear him?” Rebecca kept asking Alex. “Have you ever heard anything like him?” Then whispering, close to his ear, “Ask Bennie again about a job!”), closure achieved with Lulu at the introduction of her fiancé, Joe, who hailed from Kenya and was getting his Ph.D. in robotics at Columbia. Now it was well after midnight, and Bennie and Alex were walking together on the Lower East Side because Bennie wanted to walk. Alex felt weirdly depressed—and oppressed by the need to hide his depression from Bennie.

  “You were fantastic, Alex,” Bennie said, mussing Alex’s hair. “You’re a natural, I’m telling you.”