by Nathan Hill
“The Packer stuff. Ghostwritten. Done. About a hundred pages of it.”
“How is that possible?”
“You know how a lot of obituaries are written before the subjects actually die? Same principle. We’ve been working on a bio, just waiting for an angle. So we had it in the hopper. Half your book is ready to go, in other words. The other half is the mother material. She is of course cast as the villain here. You understand that, right?”
“I do.”
“And you can write it? You have no problems portraying her this way? Morally? Ethically?”
“I will savage her intimately, publicly. That’s the deal. I get it.”
And it will not be hard, Samuel imagines, to do this to the woman who left without a word, without warning, who left him alone to survive a motherless childhood. It’s as if two decades’ worth of resentment and pain has, for the first time, found an outlet.
So Samuel calls his mother’s lawyer and says he’s changed his mind. He says he’d be happy to write a letter to the judge in support of her case and would like to have an interview to gather key information. The lawyer gives him his mother’s address in Chicago and sets up a meeting for the very next day, and Samuel is sleepless and jumpy and overstimulated all night as he imagines seeing his mother for the first time since she disappeared so long ago. It seems unfair that it’s been twenty years since he’s seen her and now he has only one day to prepare.
How many times has he imagined it? How many fantasies of reunion has he entertained? And in the many thousands, the millions of them, what happens every time is that he proves to his mother that he is successful and smart. He is important and grown-up and mature. Sophisticated and happy. He shows her how extraordinary his life is, how inconsequential her absence from it has been. He shows her how much he does not need her.
In his fantasies of reunion, his mother always begs his forgiveness and he does not cry. That’s how it goes every time.
But how would he make this happen? In real life? Samuel has no idea. He googles it. He spends most of the night on online support boards for children of estranged parents, websites heavy in their use of capital letters and boldface type and animated GIFs of smiley faces and frowny faces and teddy bears and angels. As he reads through these sites, the thing that surprises Samuel most is the essential sameness of everyone’s problems: the intense feelings of shame and embarrassment and responsibility felt by the abandoned child; the feelings of both adoration and loathing for the missing parent; loneliness coupled with a self-defeating desire for reclusiveness. And so on. It’s like looking into a mirror. All his private weaknesses come publicly back at him, and Samuel feels ashamed about this. Seeing others express exactly what’s in his own heart makes him think he’s unoriginal and ordinary and not the astounding man he needs to be to prove to his mother she shouldn’t have left him.
It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning when he realizes he’s been staring at the same animated GIF for five full minutes—a teddy bear giving something called a “virtual hug” where the bear repeatedly opens and closes its arms in a never-ending loop that’s supposed to be read as an embrace but looks to Samuel more like a deliberate and sarcastic clap, like the bear is mocking him.
He abandons the computer and sleeps fitfully for a few hours before he wakes at dawn and showers and drinks about a whole pot of coffee and gets into his car to make the drive into Chicago.
Despite its proximity, Samuel rarely goes into Chicago these days, and now he remembers why: The closer he gets to the city, the more the highway feels malicious and warlike—wild zigzagging drivers cutting people off, tailgating, honking horns, flashing their lights, all their private traumas now publicly enlarged. Samuel travels with the crush of traffic in a slow sluggish mass of hate. He feels that low-level constant anxiety about not being able to get over into the turn lane when his exit is near. There’s that thing where drivers next to him speed up when they see his turn signal, to eliminate the space he intended to occupy. There is no place less communal in America—no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice—than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago. And there is no better test of this than watching what happens when there is a hundred-car line in the far-right lane, which there is when Samuel reaches his exit. How people bypass the line and dive into any available cranny in front, skipping all the drivers patiently waiting, all of whom are now enraged at this because they each have to wait incrementally longer, but also a bigger and deeper rage that the asshole didn’t wait his turn like everyone else, that he didn’t suffer like they suffer, and then also a tertiary inner rage that they are suckers who wait in lines.
So they yell and gesture obscenely and hover inches from the bumper in front of them. They do not provide any gaps for cutters. They do not make way for anyone. Samuel’s doing it too, and he feels if he allows just one cutter in front of him, he will let down all who wait behind. And so with each movement of the line he guns the gas so that any space is closed. And they lurch toward the exit this way until, at one point when he is checking his mirror for possible cutters and a space opens up in front of him and he is sure this fucking BMW coming up fast on the left is going to cut in front, Samuel is a little too careless with the accelerator and leaps forward and lightly taps the car in front of him.
A taxi. The driver vaults out and screams “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” pointing at Samuel as if to specially emphasize that it is him—and no one else—who needs to be fucked.
“Sorry!” Samuel says, holding up his hands.
The line stopping now produces a wail from the cars behind them, a squall of horns, shouts of anguish and disgust. The cutters see their opportunity and swerve in front of the stopped taxi. The cabbie comes right up to Samuel’s closed window and says, “I will fucking fuck you up, you fucking fuck!”
And then the cabbie spits.
Actually physically leans back as if to get a good running start at it, then propels forward a mucusy glob that splats terribly onto Samuel’s window and sticks there, doesn’t even dribble down but lands and sticks like pasta on a wall, this spatter all yellowish and bubbly with flecks of chewed food and awful spots of blood in it, like one of those maybe-embryos you might find in a raw egg. And satisfied with his creation, the cabbie hustles back to his car and drives away.
For the rest of the drive to his mother’s South Loop neighborhood, this splash of phlegm and snot is with Samuel like another passenger. It feels like he’s driving with an assassin he doesn’t want to make eye contact with. He can see it peripherally as a hazy whitish uneven penumbra as he exits the highway and proceeds down a narrow street whose gutters are dotted by the bags and cups of fast-food restaurants, past a bus station and a desolate weedy lot where it appears a high-rise was intended and abandoned immediately after its foundation was laid, over a bridge that spans the great braid of train tracks that once serviced this area’s mass of slaughterhouses, just south of downtown Chicago, still in plain view of what was once the tallest building in the world, here in what was once the busiest meatpacking district in the world, to his mother’s address in what turns out to be an old warehouse building near the train tracks with a giant sign on top saying LOFTS AVAILABLE, throughout all of this roughly a quarter of Samuel’s attention remains focused on the gooey slop still sticking to his window. He has become amazed at how it doesn’t budge, like an epoxy made to repair broken plastic things. He is moved by the feats the human body is capable of. He’s nervous about this neighborhood. There is literally nobody on the sidewalk.
He parks, double-checks the address. At the building’s front door there is a buzzer. Right there, written on slip of yellowed paper in ink now faded to a light pink, is his mother’s name: Faye Andresen.
He presses the buzzer, which makes no noise whatsoever and makes him think, along with the age of the contraption and the rust and the wires jutting out, that it’s broken. The way his mother’s button sticks for a moment befor
e finally giving way to the pressure of his finger with an audible tick makes him think the button has not been pressed in a very long time.
It strikes him that his mother has been here all along, all these years. Her name has been out here on this slip of paper, washed by the sun, for anyone to see. This does not seem allowable. It seems to Samuel that after she left, she should have ceased to exist.
The door, with a heavy magnetic-sounding click, opens.
He enters. The inside of the building, past the entryway and vestibule with its bank of mailboxes, seems incomplete. Tile floors that abruptly give way to subfloor. White walls that don’t seem painted but rather merely primed. He climbs the three flights of stairs. He finds the door—a bare wooden door, unpainted, unfinished, like something you’d see at a hardware store. He doesn’t know what he expected, but he definitely did not expect this blank nothingness. This anonymous door.
He knocks. He hears a voice inside, his mother’s voice: “It’s open,” she says.
He pushes the door forward. He can see from the hall that the apartment is bright with sunlight. Bare white walls. A familiar smell he cannot place.
He hesitates. He cannot immediately bring himself to walk through this door and back into his mother’s life. After a moment, she speaks up again, from somewhere inside. “It’s okay,” she says. “Don’t be scared.”
And it nearly breaks him, hearing that. He sees her now in a rush of memory, lingering over his bed in the bleary morning and he’s eleven years old and she is about to leave and never come back.
Those words burn him straight through. They reach across the decades and summon up that timid boy he once was. Don’t be scared. It was the last thing she’d ever said to him.
| PART TWO |
GHOSTS OF THE OLD COUNTRY
Late Summer 1988
1
SAMUEL WAS CRYING in his bedroom, quietly, so his mother wouldn’t hear. This was a small cry, just tiptoeing on the edge of actual crying, maybe a light whimpering along with the normal halted breathing and squished face. This was a Category 1 cry: a small, concealable, satisfying, purgative cry, usually only a welling of the eyes but lacking actual tears. A Category 2 cry was more of an emotional cry, triggered by feelings of embarrassment or shame or disappointment. This was why a Category 1 cry could be vaulted to a Category 2 simply by the presence of someone else: He felt embarrassed about crying, about being a crybaby, and this fact created a new kind of crying—that wet-faced, whimpering, snotty crying that’s not yet a full-throated Category 3, which involved larger raindrop-size tears and bouts of sniveling and convulsive breathing and a reflexive need to find a private hiding place immediately. A Category 4 was a weeping sobbing fit, whereas Category 5 was just unthinkable. His counselor at school had encouraged him to think of his crying in these terms, using categories like they do for hurricanes.
So that day he felt he needed to cry. He told his mother he was going to his room to read, which was not unusual. He spent most of his time alone in his room, reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books he bought from the bookmobile at school. He liked how the books looked on the shelves, all together like that, homogenous, with their white-and-red spines and titles like Lost on the Amazon, Journey to Stonehenge, Planet of the Dragons. He liked the books’ forking paths, and when he came to a particularly difficult decision, he would hold the page with his thumb and read ahead, verifying that it was an acceptable choice. The books had a clarity and symmetry to them that he found mostly absent in the real world. Sometimes he liked to imagine his life was a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and that a happy story was just a matter of making the right choices. This seemed to give a structure to the sloppy and unpredictable world he found in most other contexts terrifying.
So he told his mother he was reading, but really he was having a nice little Category 1. He wasn’t sure why he was crying, just that something about being at home made him want to hide.
The house, he thought, had lately become unbearable.
The way the house seemed to trap everything inside it—the heat of the day, the smell of their own bodies. They were caught in a late-summer heat wave, and everything in Illinois was melting. Everything was burning up. The air was a thick glue. Candles sagged where they stood. Flowers could not be supported by their stems. Everything wilted. Everything drooped.
It was August 1988. In the years to follow, Samuel would look back on this month as the final month he had a mother. By the end of August, she’ll have disappeared. But he didn’t know that yet. All he knew was that he needed to cry for certain abstract reasons: It was hot, he was worried, his mother was acting weird.
So he went to his room. He was crying mostly to get it out of the way.
Only she heard him. In the extreme quiet, she could hear her son crying upstairs. She opened his door and said “Honey, are you okay?” and immediately he cried harder.
She knew in these moments not to say anything about the elevation in his crying or react to it in any way because acknowledging it just fed the crying in a terrible feedback loop that sometimes ended—on those days when he cried over and over again and she couldn’t help but let her exasperation show through—with a wet blubbering hyperventilating kid-size mess. So she said, as soothingly as possible, “I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Let’s go out, you and me,” which seemed to calm him enough to get his clothes changed and get him into the car with only minor, post-crying hiccups to deal with. That is, until they got to the restaurant and she saw they were having a “Buy Two Get One Free” deal on hamburgers and she said “Oh good. I’ll get you a hamburger. You want a hamburger, right?” and Samuel, who all along had his heart set on chicken nuggets with that mustardy dipping sauce, worried that he’d disappoint her if he didn’t go along with this new plan. So he nodded okay and stayed in the hot car while his mother fetched the burgers, and he tried to convince himself that he wanted a burger all along, but the more he thought about it, the more the burger seemed revolting—the stale bun and sour pickles and those uniformly cut maggot-size onions. Even before she returned with the burgers he was feeling a little sick and throw-uppy at the thought of having to eat one. And driving home he was trying to contain the crying that was almost certainly coming when his mother noticed his wet, sniveling nose and said “Sweetie? Is something wrong?” and all he managed to say was “I don’t want a burger!” before he was lost inside a crushing Category 3.
Faye said nothing. She turned the car around while he buried his face in the hot fabric of the passenger seat and wept.
Back home, they ate in silence. Samuel sat with his mother in the hot kitchen, slumped in his chair and chewing the last of his chicken pieces. The windows were open in hopes for a breeze that did not come. Fans blew hot air from here to there. They watched a housefly buzz overhead, spinning circles near the ceiling. It was the only sign of life in the room, this insect. It bumped into the wall, then the window screen, then suddenly, unprovoked, directly above their heads, it fell. It dropped dead right out of the air and landed on the kitchen table heavy as a marble.
They looked at the small black corpse between them and then at each other. Did that really happen? Samuel’s face was panicked. He was on the verge of crying again. He needed a distraction. The mother needed to intervene.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Faye said. “Fill your wagon. Bring nine of your favorite toys.”
“What?” he said, his huge frightened eyes already slick and liquided.
“Trust me. Do it.”
“Okay,” he said, and this proved an effective diversion for about fifteen minutes. It felt to Faye like this was her primary duty as a mother: to create diversions. Samuel would begin to cry and she would head it off. Why nine toys? Because Samuel was a meticulous and organized and anal sort of kid who did things like, for example, keep a Top Ten Toys shoe box under his bed. Mostly in the way of Star Wars action figures and Hot Wheels. He revised it occasionally, substituting one thing for another. But it was always the
re. At any given moment, he knew exactly what his ten favorite toys were.
So she asked him to pick nine toys because she was mildly curious: What would he abandon?
Samuel did not wonder why he was doing this. Why nine toys? And why were they bringing them outside? No, he had been given a task and he was going to complete it. He thought little of arbitrary rules.
That he was so easily tricked made her sad.
Faye yearned for him to be a little smarter. A little less easily duped. She hoped sometimes he would talk back more. She wanted him to have more fight, wanted him to be a sturdier thing. But he wasn’t. He heard a rule and he followed it. Bureaucratic little robot. She watched him count his toys, trying to decide between two versions of the same action figure—one Luke Skywalker with binoculars, and one Luke Skywalker with a lightsaber—and she thought she should be proud of him. Proud that he was such a mindful boy, such a sweet boy. But his sweetness came at a price, which was that he was delicate. He cried so easily. He was so stupidly fragile. He was like the skin of a grape. In response, she was sometimes too hard on him. She did not like how he went through life so scared of everything. She did not like to see her own failures reflected back at her so clearly.
“I’m done, Momma,” he said, and she counted eight toys in his wagon—he had left behind both Luke Skywalkers, it turned out. But only eight toys, not nine. He hadn’t followed her one simple instruction. And now she didn’t know what she wanted of him. She was angry when he blindly obeyed, but now also angry that he didn’t obey better. She felt unhinged.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Outside it was unimaginably still and sticky. No movement except the heat ripples coming off roofs and asphalt. They walked down the wide street that curved through their particular subdivision and branched occasionally into stubby cul-de-sacs. Ahead of them, the neighborhood was all crunchy yellow grass and garage doors and houses following identical plans: front door set way back, garage door pushed way forward, as if the house were trying to hide behind it.
