In Persuasion Nation

by George Saunders

  And I was sort of astonished by Uncle Matt, I mean, he was showing so much-I’d never seen him so motivated. This was a guy whose idea of a big day was checking the mail and getting up a few times to waggle the TV antenna-and here he was, in a suit, his face all red and sort of proud and shiny-

  Well Uncle Matt got up and thanked everyone for coming, and Mrs. DeFrancini, owner of Tweeter Deux, held up that chewed-up foreleg, and Dr. Vincent showed slides of cross sections of the brain of one of the original four dogs, and then at the end I talked, only I got choked up and couldn’t say much except thanks to everybody, their support had meant the world to us, and I tried to say about how much we had all loved her but couldn’t go on.

  Uncle Matt and Dr. Vincent had, on the iMac, on their own (not wanting to bother me) drawn up what they called a Three-Point Emergency Plan, which the three points were: (1) All Village animals must immediately undergo an Evaluation, to determine was the animal Infected, (2) All Infected or Suspected Infected animals must be destroyed at once, and (3) all Infected or Suspected Infected animals, once destroyed, must be burned at once to minimize the possibility of Second-Hand Infection.

  Then someone asked could they please clarify the meaning of “suspected”?

  Suspected, you know, said Uncle Matt. That means we suspect and have good reason to suspect that an animal is, or may be, Infected.

  The exact methodology is currently under development, said Dr. Vincent.

  How can we, how can you, ensure that this assessment will be fair and reasonable though? the guy asked.

  Well that is a good question, said Uncle Matt. The key to that is, we will have the assessment done by fair-minded persons who will do the Evaluation in an objective way that seems reasonable to all.

  Trust us, said Dr. Vincent. We know it is so very important.

  Then Uncle Matt held up the bow-actually a new bow, very big, about the size of a ladies’ hat, really, I don’t know where he found that-and said: All of this may seem confusing but it is not confusing if we remember that it is all about This, simply This, about honoring This, preventing This.

  Then it was time for the vote, and it was something like 393 for and none against, with a handful of people abstaining, which I found sort of hurtful, but then following the vote everyone rose to their feet and, regarding me and Uncle Matt with-well they were smiling these warm smiles, some even fighting back tears-it was just a very nice, very kind moment, and I will never forget it, and will be grateful for it until the day I die.

  AFTER THE MEETING Uncle Matt and Trooper Kelly and a few others went and did what had to be done in terms of Merton, over poor Father Terry’s objections-I mean, he was upset about it, of course, so upset it took five men to hold him back, him being so fit and all-and then they brought Merton, Merton’s body, back to our place and burned it, out at the tree line where we had burned the others, and someone asked should we give Father Terry the ashes, and Uncle Matt said why take the chance, we have not ruled out the possibility of airborne transmission, and, putting on the little white masks supplied by Dr. Vincent, we raked Merton’s ashes into the swamp.

  That night my wife came out of our bedroom for the first time since the tragedy, and we told her everything that had been happening.

  And I watched her closely, to see what she thought, to see what I should think, her having always been my rock.

  Kill every dog, every cat, she said very slowly. Kill every mouse, every bird. Kill every fish. Anyone objects, kill them too.

  Then she went back to bed.

  Well that was-I felt so bad for her, she was simply not herself-I mean, this was a woman who, finding a spider, used to make me take it outside in a cup. Although, as far as killing all dogs and cats-I mean, there was a certain-I mean, if you did that, say, killed every dog and cat, regardless of were they Infected or not, you could thereby guarantee, to 100 percent, that no other father in town would ever again have to carry in his-God there is so much I don’t remember about that night but one thing I do remember is, as I brought her in, one of her little clogs thunked off onto the linoleum, and still holding her I bent down to-and she wasn’t there anymore, she wasn’t, you know, there, there inside her body. I had passed her thousands of times on the steps, in the kitchen, had heard her little voice from everywhere in the house and why, why had I not, every single time, rushed up to her and told her everything that I-but of course you can’t do that, it would malform a child, and yet-

  What I’m saying is, with no dogs and no cats, the chance that another father would have to carry his animal-murdered child into their home, where the child’s mother sat, doing the bills, happy or something like happy for the last time in her life, happy until the instant she looked up and saw-what I guess I’m saying is, with no dogs and no cats, the chances of that happening to someone else (or to us again) went down to that very beautiful number of Zero.

  Which is why we eventually did have to enact our policy of sacrificing all dogs and cats who had been in the vicinity of the Village at the time of the incident.

  But as far as killing the mice, the birds, the fish, no, we had no evidence to support that, not at that time anyway, and had not yet added the Reasonable Suspicion Clause to the Plan, and as far as the people, well my wife wasn’t herself, that’s all there was to it, although soon what we found was-I mean, there was something prescient about what she’d said, because in time we did in fact have to enact some very specific rules regarding the physical process of extracting the dogs and/or cats from a home where the owner was being unreasonable-or the fish, birds, whatever-and also had to assign specific penalties should these people, for example, assault one of the Animal Removal Officers, as a few of them did, and finally also had to issue some guidelines on how to handle individuals who, for whatever reason, felt it useful to undercut our efforts by, you know, obsessively and publicly criticizing the Five- and Six-Point Plans, just very unhappy people.

  But all of that was still months away.

  I often think back to the end of that first Village Meeting, to that standing-ovation moment. Uncle Matt had also printed up T-shirts, and after the vote everyone pulled the T-shirt with Emily’s smiling face on it over his or her own shirt, and Uncle Matt said that he wanted to say thank you from the bottom of his heart, and not just on behalf of his family, this family of his that had been so sadly and irreversibly malformed by this unimaginable and profound tragedy, but also, and perhaps more so, on behalf of all the families we had just saved, via our vote, from similar future profound unimaginable tragedies.

  And as I looked out over the crowd, at all those T-shirts-I don’t know, I found it deeply moving, that all of those good people would feel so fondly towards her, many of whom had not even known her, and it seemed to me that somehow they had come to understand how good she had been, how precious, and were trying, with their applause, to honor her.

  christmas

  I was twenty-six, beyond broke, back in my home town, living in my aunt’s basement. Having courted and won a girl I had courted but never come close to winning in high school, I was now losing her via my pathetically dwindling prospects. One night she said, “I’m not saying I’m great or anything, but still I think I deserve better than this.”

  My uncle called in a favor and soon I was on a roofing crew, one of three grunts riding from job to job in the freezing open back of a truck. My fellow-grunts, Tyrell and John, were the only black guys on the crew, and hence I was known as the Great White Hope. Once everyone had seen me work, I became the Great White Dope. Our job was to move the hot tar from a vat on the ground to the place on the roof where the real roofing was done. Tyrell had a thick Mississippi accent and no top teeth. He stayed on the ground, pulleying the smoking buckets up to us, muttering obscenities at passing grannies and schoolgirls. John was forty-two, gentle-voiced, and dignified, with a salt-and-pepper beard and his own roofing tools, which he brought to work every day, even though he was never allowed to do anything but lug tar. John had roofe
d all his adult life, and claimed to have virtuosoed his way into this job by appearing on the job site one day and outshingling the best white shingler.

  “I guess I don’t remember that,” said Rick, our supervisor.

  “I don’t think you were there that day maybe,” said John. “It was Lawrence hired me.”

  Lawrence was dead now, a famous Fezziwiggian presence, mourned by all.

  “You are so full of shit,” said Rick. “If you were so fast then, why are you so shitty now?”

  “You roof like my mother,” said Terry, the owner’s brother.

  “Maybe your mother roofs good,” John mumbled.

  “She don’t,” said Terry. “But still she’s faster than you.”

  All that fall, John grieved over the fact that he was not allowed to do the real and dignified work of a master roofer.

  “It ain’t right,” he’d say to me. “I can do it. They need to give me a chance. I’m an older man. Got responsibilities. Can’t just keep carrying tar my whole life.”

  In late November, talk turned to the yearly Christmas party. Drinks and food were on Walter, the owner. People got shitfaced. Also there was gambling.

  “Then we’re gonna see,” Rick said one day. “We’re gonna see if John here is a better gambler than he is a roofer.”

  “You gotta hope,” said Gary.

  “As a roofer, John, face it, you suck,” Rick said. “Nice guy, shit roofer.”

  “Too fucking slow, John,” Terry said. “We keep giving you chances and you keep screwing it up.”

  “But maybe why he’s a shit roofer is, he’s a gambling man,” said Rick.

  “What y’all are gonna find out is I’m a roofer and a gambler both,” said John.

  “Excuse me saying it,” Rick said when John had gone down to help Tyrell load the cauldron. “But that is a prime example of nigger-think. He thinks he’s a roofer because he says he is. Thinks he can gamble because he says he can.”

  “Has fourteen kids and lets the welfare pay,” said Terry.

  One payday John asked could I give him a ride home. I gave him a ride, but, it turned out, not to his home. We drove deep into South Shore, past houses we’d roofed, then into an area too poor to roof, down a block of slumping two-flats.

  “My friend’s place,” John said. “I’m gonna get you and your lady some Sherman Juice so you can have a little party.”

  What was Sherman Juice? We’d started drinking at the shop and I was now too drunk to ask. In the kitchen, under duelling photos of M.L.K. and J.F.K., sat an ancient black woman in a rocking chair. A mad kid dashed around, humming at me: You devil, you white. John’s friend did not have any Sherman Juice but did have a Polaroid of his girlfriend going down on him. In the photo, taken from his P.O.V., we could see, in addition to his penis, his feet, in black socks. She was looking at the camera, smiling, sort of.

  “Wow, is she pretty,” I said politely.

  The friend and I sat there together, admiring her. Then John and I went somewhere else. Where we went was John’s wife’s apartment. They lived apart. Living apart, they got more money, and with more money they could buy a house sooner. In the apartment was a TV and fourteen kids around it. John named them, rapid-fire, with only a few stumbles.

  “You really have fourteen kids,” I said.

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “Every one mine. Right, baby?”

  “I should hope so,” said his wife.

  No chairs, no couch, newspapers on the windows. John and his wife cuddled on a blanket.

  “When we get our real house, you come over,” John’s wife said. “Bring your lady.”

  “Bring your lady, and we’ll all of us have dinner,” John said.

  “I hope that day come soon,” said John’s wife.

  “I hope it come damn soon,” John said. “I don’t like all this living separate from my babies.”

  The kids giggled that he’d said damn. He went around kissing them all as I paced and lectured myself in the hallway, trying to sober up for the long drive home.

  As long as it didn’t snow, we could roof. Every morning, I woke at four, checked for snow. If there was no snow, I called in. If someone skill-less and slow might be useful that day, Warner told me to come in. I rose, put on all five of my shirts (I had no coat), and drove down in my Nova, de-icing the windshield as I went, via reaching out the window and hacking with a putty knife I kept for that purpose.

  From the roofs, the city looked medieval, beautiful. I wrote poems in my head, poems that fizzled out under the weight of their own bloat: O Chicago, giver and taker of life, city of bald men in pool halls, also men of hair, men who have hair, hairy men, etc., etc. On the roofs, we found weird things: a dead rat, a bike tire, somebody’s dragon-headed pool floatie, all frozen stiff.

  Mid-December then, and still no snow. Strange Chicago crèches appeared in front yards: Baby Jesus, freed from the manger, leaned against a Santa sleigh half his height. He was crouching, as if about to jump; he wore just a diaper. Single strings of colored lights lay across bushes, as if someone had hatefully thrown them there. We patched the roof of a Jamaican immigrant whose apartment had nothing in it but hundreds of rags, spread across the floor and hanging from interior clotheslines. Nobody asked why. As we left, she offered us three DietRite colas.

  Then it was the Christmas party. The way we knew it was festive was the garage had been cleared of dog shit. It had also been cleared of the dog, a constantly barking mutt who even bit Warner. He bit Warner, he bit the shovel head Warner thrust at him, sometimes we came in and found him resolutely gnawing the leg of the worktable with a fine sustained rage. Tonight, festively, the dog was locked in the cab of a truck. Now and then, he would hurl himself against the windshield, and somebody, festively, would fling at the windshield a plastic fork or a hamburger bun. The other components of the festivity were a plate of cold cuts on the table where normally the gutters were pre-bent, a garbage can full of iced beer, and a cardboard box holding some dice.

  We ate, we drank, the checks were distributed, we waddled drunkenly across South Chicago Avenue to the Currency Exchange to cash the checks, after which the gambling began. I didn’t know a thing about gambling and didn’t want to. I rolled my four fresh hundreds and put them in the front pocket of my tar-stiff jeans, occasionally patting the pocket to make sure they were still real.

  Finally, in terms of money, I got it: money forestalled disgrace. I thought of my aunt, who worked three jobs and whom I had not yet paid a dime for food, and of my girlfriend, who now paid whenever we went out, which was never, because my five shirts were too stained with tar.

  “You ain’t gambling, Tyrell?” said Rick.

  Tyrell said something nobody understood, and disappeared out the door.

  “I suspect Tyrell is pussy-bound,” said Terry.

  “Smart man,” said Rick.

  John did gambler things with his shirtsleeves, spat on his hands, hopped around on one foot, blew on the dice. Then he laid his four hundreds out near the craps box and gave them a lecture: They were to go forth and multiply. They were to find others of their kind and come scampering back.

  Rick had gone to the bank that morning. He showed us his roll. It held maybe three thousand dollars. His wife didn’t dare say shit about it. Who earned it, him or her? “I do,” he answered himself.

  The gambling began. One by one, the guys lost what they felt they could lose and drifted back to stand against the worktable and diddle with the soldering irons. Soon only John was left. Why was John left? Rick kept taunting. A whole autumn of such taunts now did their work. All belittled men dream of huge redemption. Here was John, dreaming. In response to John’s dreaming, Rick and Terry began to speak with mock-professorial diction.

  “Look at this, kindly look at this,” Rick shouted. “John is not, after all, any more a gambler than he is a ergo roofer. That is, he is a equally sucky gambler as he is a suckass roofer.”

  “Are you saying,” said Terry, “that his ga
mbling, in terms of how much does it suck, sucks exactly as much as does suck his roofing?”

  “Perzackly, yup, that is just what I am saying, doctor,” Rick burped.

  John burned. They were going to see. They were going to see that the long years of wrongs done him had created a tremendous backlog of owed good luck, which was going to surge forward now, holy and personal.

  And see they did. Soon John was down to his last hundred, and then he broke it, and then he was down to his last twenty. Then Rick cackled, and John threw his sole remaining five at Rick’s chest. Rick caught it, kissed it, added it to his tremendous wad.

  A light went on in my head and has stayed on ever since: It was all about capital. Rick could lose and lose and never really lose. Once John dipped below four hundred, he was dead. He was dead now.

  Which was when Walter came in and passed out the bonus checks.

  Walter was the owner, the big man. Tonight he was wearing a tie. Afternoons he drove from site to site in his Lincoln, cranking out estimates, listening to opera, because, he said, though it was fag music, it floated his boat.

  John took his check, made for the door. I followed him out.

  “You’re doing right,” I said. “Go on home.”

  “Ain’t going home,” John said, and numb-footed across South Chicago again.

  “No, no, no,” I mumbled, vividly drunk, suddenly alive. What had happened to me? Christ, where was I? Whither my promise, my easy season of victories, my field of dominant, my dominant field of my boyhood, boyhood playful triumph?

  It was so cold my little mustache had frozen.

  Our bonuses matched: three hundred each.

  The man at the Currency Exchange looked at us either sadly or suspiciously, I couldn’t tell which. When I doubled back to ask, he reached for something under the counter.