The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “Come in,” she said.

  There wasn’t any other sound. His mother’s apartment had a penetrating silence rarely found in the city. She stared at him. He stared back. He did not sit down. There was something unbearable about being too close to her right now. She opened her mouth as if to say something but then did not say it. His mind emptied completely.

  A noise came from another room just then: a toilet flushing, a faucet turned on and off. Then the bathroom door opened and out stepped a man in a white button-down shirt and a brown tie and brown slacks that were not exactly the same shades of brown. When he saw Samuel, he said “Professor Anderson sir!” and offered a damp hand for shaking. “I’m Simon Rogers,” the man said, “of Rogers and Rogers? Your mother’s attorney? We spoke on the phone.”

  Samuel looked at him for a moment, confused. The lawyer smiled pleasantly. He was a thin and short man with unusually broad shoulders. His brown hair was clipped close and arranged into the unartful and inevitable M-shape of early-onset male-pattern baldness. Samuel said, “We need a lawyer for this?”

  “I’m afraid that was my idea,” he said. “I insist on being present any time my client is being deposed. It’s part of my service.”

  “This isn’t a deposition,” Samuel said.

  “Not from your point of view. But of course you’re not the one being deposed.”

  The lawyer clapped his hands together and moseyed to the table. He snapped open his briefcase and produced a small microphone, which he placed at the table’s center. That his shirt fit his big shoulders but hung broadly on the rest of him made him look, Samuel realized, like a kid dressing in his dad’s stuff.

  “My role here,” the lawyer said, “is to protect my client’s interests—legal, fiduciary, emotional.”

  “You’re the one who asked me to come,” Samuel said.

  “Indeed, sir! And the important thing to remember is that we’re all on the same team. You agreed to write a letter to the judge explaining why your mother deserves lenience. My job is to help with said letter and make sure you are not here under, shall we say, false pretenses?”

  “Unbelievable,” Samuel said, but he wasn’t sure what was more unbelievable: that the lawyer suspected Samuel of deceit, or that the lawyer was right. Because Samuel had no intention of writing any letter to a judge. He had come today to satisfy his contract with Periwinkle, to gather dirt on his mother so that he could, eventually, malign her publicly for money.

  “The purpose of today’s inquiry,” the lawyer said, “is primarily to understand your mother’s actions regarding her brave protest against the former governor of Wyoming. And, secondarily, to explicate why she’s a great person. Everything else, sir, is outside our strict scope of interest. Would you like some water? Juice?”

  Faye remained sitting and silent, not participating but still taking up all the space in Samuel’s mind. He felt wary of her like he’d feel wary of a buried land mine he knew the approximate, but not exact, location of.

  “Shall we sit?” the lawyer said, and together they joined Faye at the table, a rectangular table made of weathered wooden planks that probably had seen another life as a fence or barn. Three water glasses sat sweating onto cork coasters. The lawyer sat and adjusted his tie, which was mahogany-colored, as opposed to his more cocoa pants. He placed both his hands on his briefcase and smiled. Faye kept staring in her neutral, detached, indifferent way. She looked as austere and unfussy and bleak as the apartment itself—a single long space with a bank of windows facing north toward the tall buildings of downtown Chicago. The walls were white and bare. There was no television. There was no computer. The furniture was simple and restrained. Samuel noted the total lack of things that needed to be plugged in. It was as though she had ejected all unnecessary things from her life.

  Samuel sat across from her and nodded like he might nod to a stranger on the street: slight downward tilt of the chin.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  Another nod.

  “How have you been?” she asked.

  He did not answer her immediately, but instead glared at her with an expression he hoped projected steely resolve and coldness. “Fine,” he finally said. “Just fine.”

  “Good,” she said. “And your father?”

  “He’s great.”

  “Well okay then!” the lawyer said. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way.” He laughed nervously. “Why don’t we go ahead and begin?” Small beads of sweat were now manifesting on his forehead. He picked involuntarily at his shirt, which was not exactly white, but that gray-white of something that’s been washed many times, with definite yellow discoloring at the armpits.

  “Now, Professor Anderson, sir, this would be an ideal moment to ask your question regarding our primary interest today.” The lawyer reached across the table and pressed a button on the microphone that sat between Samuel and his mother. A small diode on the microphone glowed a placid blue.

  “And what question would that be?” Samuel said.

  “Regarding your mother’s heroic protest against tyranny, sir.”

  “Right.” Samuel looked at her. Up close like this, he found it difficult to reconcile this new person with the woman he used to know. She seemed to have lost all the softness of her former self—her long soft hair and soft arms and soft skin. A new, harder body had replaced all that. Samuel could see the outline of her jaw muscles just below the skin. The ripple her collarbone made across her chest. The swell of her biceps. Her arms were like ropes that ships use to dock with.

  “Okay, fine,” Samuel said. “Why did you do it? Why did you throw rocks at Governor Packer?”

  His mother looked at the lawyer, who popped open his briefcase and fished out a single sheet of paper, dense with text on one side, which he handed to Faye and which she read verbatim.

  “Regarding my actions toward Republican presidential candidate and former Wyoming governor Sheldon Packer, hereinafter referred to simply as ‘the governor,’ ” she said, and she cleared her throat, “I do hereby attest, maintain, swear, certify, and solemnly affirm that my throwing gravel in the direction of the governor should in no way be construed as an attempt to hurt, assault, injure, batter, maim, cripple, deform, mangle, or otherwise create a reasonable apprehension of an imminent harmful or offensive contact with the governor nor anyone the gravel may have had inadvertent physical exposure with, nor was it my intention to inflict emotional distress, pain, suffering, misery, anguish, or trauma to anyone who witnessed or was otherwise affected by my purely political and symbolic actions. My actions were a necessary and essential and knee-jerk response to the governor’s fascist politics and therefore, having no alternative with regards to the time, place, or manner of my response, not volitional, the governor’s extreme right-wing, pro-gun, pro-war, pro-violence rhetoric having put me under unusual and substantial duress to such a degree as to constitute a reasonable belief on my behalf of bodily harm to my person. I also believed that the governor’s relentless and fetishistic law-and-order pro-violence stance implied consent to engage in violent roughhousing-type behavior in much the same way people who engage in sadomasochism for sexual gratification consent to being struck without criminal or civil liability. I chose gravel as the vehicle of my symbolic protest because my unathletic and crime-free background in which I was never trained in a ball-throwing sport meant that the danger posed by my casting tiny stones represented de minimis harm and therefore the gravel was definitely not a dangerous, deadly, or aggravated weapon that I in no way used to purposely, knowingly, negligently, menacingly, recklessly, or with indifference to the value of human life cause bodily injury. My purpose instead was solely, entirely, wholly, and altogether in every respect political, to communicate a political speech act that was neither inciting nor provocative nor offensive nor presenting clear danger, a symbolic speech similar to protestors legally exercising their free speech rights by desecrating the flag or mutilating a draft card, et cetera.”


  Faye laid the paper on the table, carefully and deliberately, like it was something fragile.

  “Excellent!” said the lawyer. His face had grown red, a subtle but noticeable change from his previous pallor, which Samuel would describe as plastic-baby creamy yellow. Blobs of sweat now clung to his forehead, like the way paint on exterior walls can bubble on a very hot day. “Now that we’re all clear on that front, let’s take a little break.” The lawyer switched off the microphone. “Excuse me,” he said, and headed to the bathroom.

  “He does that,” Faye said, watching him go. “He apparently needs to use the bathroom every five to ten minutes. That’s just his deal.”

  “What the hell was that all about?” Samuel said.

  “I’m guessing he goes to the bathroom to towel off the sweat. He’s a very moist man. But he also does something in there involving quite a lot of toilet paper, I’m not sure what.”

  “Seriously,” Samuel said, grabbing the paper and looking at it, “I have no idea what any of this means.”

  “He also has the tiniest feet. Have you noticed?”

  “Faye, listen,” he said, and they both flinched at the use of her name. It was the first time he’d ever done that. “What is going on?”

  “Okay. Fine. Here’s what I understand. My case is a seriously complicated one. Many charges of assault and several other charges of battery. Aggravated. First degree. I guess I scared a bunch of people in the park—those are the assaults—but the rocks only struck a few of them—those are the batteries. Plus also charges of, let’s see”—she ticked these off on her fingers one by one—“disturbing the peace, public lewdness, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest. The prosecutor is being unusually aggressive, egged on by the judge, we believe.”

  “Judge Charles Brown.”

  “That’s him! The sentence for aggravated battery, by the way, is somewhere in between three hundred hours of community service and twenty-five years in prison.”

  “That’s a pretty wide range.”

  “The judge has a lot of discretion in sentencing. So you know that letter you’re writing to him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It better be pretty damn good.”

  A whoosh of plumbing now, and the bathroom door opened and the lawyer returned, smiling, wiping his hands on his pants. Faye was right: He had the smallest feet Samuel had ever seen on an adult male.

  “Fantastic!” the lawyer said. “This is going really well.” How could he keep steady with those broad shoulders and those tiny feet? He was like a pyramid balancing upside down.

  The lawyer sat and drummed his fingers on his briefcase. “On to part two!” he said. He turned on the microphone. “Our new subject, sir, is why your mother is an excellent human being with regards to why she shouldn’t go to prison for upward of twenty years.”

  “That’s not really a possibility, right?”

  “I believe not, sir, but I’d like to cover all my bases, obviously. Now, would you like to hear about your mother’s charitable giving?”

  “I’m sort of more interested in what she’s been up to these last couple decades.”

  “The public schools, sir. She’s doing some really excellent work in the public schools. Plus poetry? A real advocate for the arts, let me tell you.”

  “This part is going to be tricky for me,” Samuel said. “This whole ‘excellent human being’ part, no offense.”

  “And why is that, sir?”

  “Well, what am I going to tell the judge? That she’s a great person? A wonderful mother?”

  The lawyer smiled. “That’s right. Exactly that.”

  “I don’t think that’s something I could truthfully say.”

  “And why not?”

  Samuel looked from the lawyer to his mother and back again. “Seriously?”

  The lawyer nodded, still smiling.

  “My mother abandoned me when I was eleven!”

  “Yes, sir, and as you can probably imagine it’s best that as little of that information about that part of her life reach the public as possible.”

  “She abandoned me without any warning.”

  “Perhaps, sir, for our purposes, sir, you shouldn’t think of it as your mother abandoned you. Instead, perhaps think of it as she gave you up for adoption slightly later than usual.”

  The lawyer opened his briefcase and produced a pamphlet. “Your mother actually did a lot more legwork than most birth mothers do,” he said, “in terms of looking into prospective adoptee families and ensuring her child landed in a positive environment and such. From a certain standpoint, I’d say her diligence in this matter could be considered above and beyond.”

  He handed Samuel the pamphlet. The cover was bright pink with pictures of smiling multicultural families and the words So You’re Adopted! at the top in bubbly type.

  “I wasn’t adopted,” Samuel said.

  “Not literally, sir.”

  The lawyer was sweating again, a shiny film on his skin like what you might find on the ground on a dewy morning. A smear of liquid had now also appeared under his armpit and down his sleeve. It looked like his shirt was being swallowed slowly by a jellyfish.

  Samuel looked at his mother, who gave him a sort of shrug like What are you going to do? Behind her, out the bank of windows looking north, was the great gray face of the Sears Tower, hazy in the smoggy distance. It used to be the tallest building in the world, but it no longer was. It wasn’t even in the top five. Come to think of it, it wasn’t even called the Sears Tower anymore.

  “It’s quiet in here,” Samuel said.

  His mother frowned. “What?”

  “No traffic noise, no people noise. It’s very isolated.”

  “Oh. They were renovating the building when the housing market collapsed,” she said. “They had only done a couple of units when they just left it, unfinished.”

  “So you’re the only one in the building?”

  “There’s a married couple two floors up. Bohemian artist types. We mostly ignore each other.”

  “Sounds lonely.”

  She studied his face for a moment. “It suits me,” she said.

  “You know, I’d done a pretty good job forgetting about you,” Samuel said. “Until these recent events.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. I’d say you were pretty much forgotten, until this week.”

  She smiled and looked at the tabletop in front of her—a sort of inward smile that suggested some private thought now occurring to her. She swept the table with her palms, as if she were cleaning it.

  “What we think of as forgetting really isn’t,” she said. “Not strictly speaking. We never actually forget things. We only lose the path back to them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I read this thing recently,” she said. “There was this study about how memory works. This team of physiologists, molecular biologists, neurologists, they were trying to figure out where we keep our memories. I think it was in Nature. Or Neuron. Or JAMA.”

  “A little light reading?”

  “I have many interests. Anyway, what they discovered is that our memories are tangible, physical things. Like, you can actually see the cell where each memory is stored. The way it works is, first, you have a perfectly pristine, untouched cell. Then that cell is zapped and gets all deformed and mangled. And that mutilation is, itself, the memory. It never really goes away.”

  “Fascinating,” Samuel said.

  “I’m pretty sure it was in Nature, now that I think about it.”

  “You’re serious?” Samuel said. “I’m baring my soul here and you’re talking about a study you read about?”

  “I liked the metaphor,” Faye said. “And besides, you weren’t baring your soul. Not even close, not yet.”

  The lawyer cleared his throat. “Perhaps we should return to our topic?” he said. “Professor Anderson, sir? If you’d like to begin your direct examination?”

  Samuel stood up. He paced one way
, then another. There was a single small bookcase along the wall, and this is where he went. He could feel his mother’s eyes boring into his back as he inspected the shelves: mostly poetry, a large collection of Allen Ginsberg. Samuel realized that what he was really looking for was a copy of the famous magazine his story was published in. He realized this when he felt disappointed not to see it.

  He spun around. “Here’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Sir?” the lawyer said. “You’re out of microphone range?”

  “I’d like to know what you’ve been doing these twenty years. And where you went when you left us.”

  “That, sir, is probably outside the scope of our inquiry.”

  “And all this business about you in the sixties. Getting arrested. What they’re saying about you on TV—”

  “You want to know if it’s all true,” Faye said.

  “Yes.”

  “Was I a radical? Was I in the protest movement?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was I arrested for prostitution?”

  “Yes. There’s about a month of 1968 unaccounted for. I had always thought you were in Iowa, at home, with Grandpa Frank, waiting for Dad to come back from the army. But you weren’t.”

  “No.”

  “You were in Chicago.”

  “For a very short time, yes. Then I left.”

  “I want to know what happened.”

  “Hah-hah!” the lawyer said, and did a little drumroll on his briefcase. “I think we’ve traveled slightly far afield, yes? Now perhaps we could get back to our subject?”

  “But you have other questions, right?” Faye said. “Even bigger questions?”

  “We could get to those. In time,” Samuel said.

  “Why wait? Let’s get it all out in the open right now. Go on and ask me. There’s only one real question.”

  “We could begin with the photograph. The photo taken of you at that protest, in 1968.”

  “But that’s not why you’re here. Ask your real question. The thing you came here to find out.”