The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “The point of her song seems to be, like, be rich, have fun.”

  “She’s appealing to her audience’s latent greed and telling them it’s okay. Janis Joplin tried to inspire you to be a better person. Molly Miller tells you it’s okay to be the horrible person you already are. I’m not making a judgment about this. It’s just my job to know it.”

  “But what about the juggler?” Samuel said. “The guy down at the drum circle? He doesn’t want to sell out.”

  “He’s doing an impression of a protest he saw on TV once, many years ago. He has sold out, just to a different set of symbols.”

  “But not to greed, is what I’m saying.”

  “Are you old enough to remember Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf? And Scud missiles? Yellow ribbons and the line in the sand and Arsenio Hall going woof-woof-woof for the troops?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is nothing capitalism cannot gobble up. Non sequitur is its native language. Did you call me or did I call you?”

  “You called.”

  “Right. Now I remember. I heard you met with your mother.”

  “I saw her, yes. I went to her apartment.”

  “You were in the same room with her. What did she say?”

  “Not much.”

  “You were in the same room and you heroically overcame years of resentment and she opened up to you in a way she’s never opened up to anyone before, spilling out a dramatic life story that ideally concludes after two hundred and fifty pages of easy reading, give or take.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I know I’m asking you to process your feelings quickly. But we’re on a schedule.”

  “It didn’t seem like she wanted to talk. But I’m working on it. I’m doing some research. It might take some time.”

  “Some time. Right. You remember that big oil spill in the Gulf last year?”

  “I do.”

  “People cared about that for, on average, thirty-six days. They’ve done studies on this.”

  “What do you mean ‘cared’?”

  “For the first month, people expressed mostly indignation and retarded anger. After about five weeks, the average response was ‘Oh, right, I forgot about that.’ ”

  “So you’re suggesting we have a window here.”

  “A very small and shrinking window. That was the worst environmental disaster in North America ever. Compared to that, who cares about some lady who threw rocks at a guy most people acknowledge is sort of a douche bag?”

  “But what do I do? What’s my alternative?”

  “Bankruptcy. Jakarta. I already explained this.”

  “I’ll work fast. I’m actually in Iowa right now, collecting information.”

  “Iowa. I have no concept of what that looks like.”

  “Think abandoned factories. Farms up for auction. Cornfields with little signs advertising Monsanto. I’m driving past one right now.”

  “Delightful.”

  “Barges on the river. Hog lots. Hy-Vee.”

  “I’m sort of not listening to you anymore.”

  “I’m interviewing my grandfather today. Maybe he can tell me what really happened to my mom.”

  “How can I say this delicately? We’re not all that interested in ‘what really happened’ to your mom. We’re much more interested in getting all those people who go temporarily insane before a presidential election to open up their wallets.”

  “I’m at the nursing home now. Gotta go.”

  The place was an anonymous-looking structure that, from the outside, appeared to be an apartment building—plastic siding, curtains over the windows, the ambiguous name: Willow Glen. Samuel walked through the front doors and smelled the aggressive, claustrophobic odor of institutionalized medicine: bleach, soap, carpet cleaner, the underlying omnipresent sweet tang of urine. At the front desk, there was a form for all guests to sign and state the reason for their visit. Next to his name, Samuel wrote “Research.” His plan was to talk to his grandfather until he got some answers. Hopefully his grandfather would, indeed, talk. Frank Andresen had always been such a quiet man. He had an inward, disinterested manner, spoke with a perplexing accent, often smelled of gasoline, and seemed a little out of reach. Everyone knew he’d emigrated from Norway, but he never said why. “To find a better life” was as much as he’d reveal. Really the only specific thing he’d ever say about his life back there was that their family farm was a beautiful thing to behold: a big salmon-red house with a view of the water, there in the northernmost city in the world. It was the only time he seemed happy, talking about that house.

  A nurse led Samuel to a table in the empty cafeteria. She warned him that when Frank spoke, he rarely made much sense.

  “The medicine he’s on for the Parkinson’s causes a bit of confusion,” she said. “And the drugs for the depression cause drowsiness, lethargy. Between that and the dementia, you probably won’t get much.”

  “He’s depressed?” Samuel said.

  The nurse frowned and held out her arms. “Look around.”

  Samuel sat, took his phone out to record the conversation and saw he had several new e-mails—from the dean, and the director of Student Affairs, the director of University Relations, also the Office of Adaptive Services, the Office of Inclusivity, Student Health, Academic Counseling, Student Psychological Services, the provost, the ombudsperson, all of them with the same subject line: Urgent Student Matter.

  Samuel sank into his chair. Swiped the phone to make the e-mails disappear.

  When the nurse wheeled his grandfather to the table, Samuel’s first impression was that he was small. So much smaller than in Samuel’s memory. He was unshaven, a spotty beard showing black and white and red, mouth agape and white dots of spit on his lips. He was thin. He wore a thin bathrobe the green of pistachio pudding. His gray hair was tangled from sleeping, sticking up like grass. He was looking at Samuel and he was waiting.

  “It’s good to see you again,” Samuel said. “Do you know who I am?”

  5

  FRANK’S OLDEST MEMORIES were the sharpest. He remembered the boat especially. Fishing off the back of the boat those months the arctic would allow it. This memory was clear and vivid still: the guys in the warm cabin eating and drinking because the work was done and the nets were in and it was midnight in the summer when the sun didn’t quite set but moved horizontally across the sky.

  A red-orange twilight that lasted a whole month.

  Everything was more dramatic in that light—the water, the waves, the distant rocky shore.

  He was Fridtjof then, not Frank.

  Still a teenager.

  How he loved it, Norway, the arctic, the water cold enough to stop your heart.

  He fished at the end of the day for sport, not money. What he loved was the struggle. Because when you’re catching those boiling schools of blackfish in those great big nets, you don’t feel the struggle like you do when it’s just you and the fish connected by a thin white line.

  Life was uncomplicated then.

  Here is what he loved: the way it felt setting the hook with that snap of his wrist; the feeling of the fish plunging to the bottom, all power and muscle and mystery; resting the rod on his hip and pulling so hard it’d leave a bruise; how he couldn’t see the fish until it shimmered just below the surface; then that moment when it finally emerged.

  The world had that quality now.

  This was what life was like.

  Like a fish pulled from wine-dark water.

  Faces seemed to issue forth from nowhere. He opened his eyes and there was someone new. Right now, a young man, fake shitty grin, a bit of fear around his eyes. A face that wanted to be recognized.

  Frank didn’t always recognize the faces but he recognized their need.

  The young man was speaking, asking questions. Like the doctors did. There were always new ones coming and going. New doctors, new nurses.

  Same flowcharts.

  A flowchart for every bruise. A flowc
hart for every bed-wetting. If he seemed confused, there was a flowchart. Cognition tests, problem solving, safety awareness. They measured body mobility, balance, pain threshold, skin integrity, comprehension of single words, phrases, commands. They rated all this on scales of one to five. They asked him to roll, sit up, lie back down, go to the toilet.

  They checked the toilet to see if he made it in the bowl.

  They measured his swallowing. There was a whole flowchart for swallowing. On a scale of one to five, they rated his chewing, how he worked chewed food around in his mouth, how well his swallow reflex triggered, whether he drooled or spilled. They asked him questions to see if he was able to speak while eating. They checked for food pocketed in his cheek.

  Stuck their fingers right in there and checked.

  Made him feel hooked. Like he was the fish now. He was the one diving into darkness.

  “It’s good to see you again,” said this young man in front of him. “Do you know who I am?”

  He had a face that reminded Frank of something important.

  It was like a screwed-up look, like what a poisonous secret does to your face, the pain that lives just below the skin and twists it.

  Frank was getting worse at most things but better at some. And he was definitely better at this: reading people. He could never do this before. All his life, people were such a mystery. His wife, her family. Even Faye, his own daughter. But now? It was like something had been reshaped within him, like how a reindeer’s eyes change color: blue eyes in winter, gold in summer.

  This is what it felt like to Frank.

  Like he could see a different spectrum now.

  What did he see in this young man? The same look he saw on Clyde Thompson’s face beginning in 1965.

  He worked with Clyde at the ChemStar factory. Clyde’s daughter had thick golden-blond hair. She grew it down to the small of her back, straight and long like they used to back then. She complained that it was too heavy but Clyde wouldn’t allow her to cut it because he loved her hair so much.

  Then one day in 1965 she got the hair caught in the band saw at school and she died. Took her whole scalp right off.

  Clyde asked for a couple days off work and then came back like nothing happened.

  Just kept soldiering on.

  This Frank remembered very well.

  People said how brave he was. Everyone agreed. Like the more Clyde could dodge the pain, the more heroic he was.

  This was a formula for living a life full of secrets.

  Frank knew this now. People constantly hid. It was a sickness maybe worse than the Parkinson’s.

  Frank had so many secrets, so many things he never told anyone.

  The look on Clyde’s face and the look on this young man’s face were the same. How that frown gets etched on there.

  Same with Johnny Carlton, whose son fell off a tractor and was crushed under the tire. And Denny Wisor’s son was shot in Vietnam. And Elmer Mason’s daughter and granddaughter died at the same time during childbirth. And Pete Olsen’s son died when he tipped a motorcycle on a gravel road and it landed on him and broke a rib and punctured a lung, which filled with blood and made him drown right there on the road near a babbling brook in the middle of summer.

  None of them said anything about it ever again.

  They must have died shrunken, miserable men.

  “I’d like to talk to you about my mother,” the man said. “Your daughter?”

  And now Frank is Fridtjof again and he’s back at that farm in Hammerfest, a salmon-red house that overlooked the ocean, a great big spruce tree in the front yard, a pasture, sheep, a horse, a fire kept going all the way through the arctic’s long winter night: He’s home.

  It’s 1940 and he’s eighteen years old. He’s twenty feet above the water. He’s the spotter. He has the sharpest eyes on the ship. He’s on the tallest mast looking for fish and telling the guys in the rowboats to take the nets this way, that way.

  Whole schools churn into the bay and he intercepts them.

  But this is not the memory where he’s looking for fish. This is the one where he’s looking at home. That salmon-red house with the pasture, the garden, the little path leading down to the dock.

  It’s the last time he’ll see it.

  His eyes are stinging from the wind as he watches from the crow’s nest as they sail away from Hammerfest and the salmon-red house gets smaller and smaller until it’s just a dot of color on the shore and then the shore is just a dot on all that water and then it’s nothing at all—it’s nothing but the lonely cold fact of the blue-black ocean everywhere around them forever, and the salmon-red house becomes a dot in his mind that grows larger and more terrible the farther away he sails.

  “I need to know what happened to Faye,” said the young man in front of him, who seemed to appear out of the murk. “When she went to college? In Chicago?”

  He was looking at Frank with that face people gave him when they didn’t understand what he was talking about. That face they thought looked like patience but actually looked like they were quietly shitting pinecones.

  Frank must have been saying something.

  Speaking these days was like speaking in dreams. Sometimes it felt like his tongue was too large for words. Or he’d forgotten English and the words came out a jumble of disconnected Norwegian sounds. Other times whole sentences shot out unstoppably. Sometimes he had whole conversations and didn’t even know it.

  This probably had something to do with the meds.

  One guy in here stopped taking his meds. Just stopped swallowing them. Refused. A real slow suicide, that one. They tried restraining him and forcing down the medicine, but he resisted.

  Frank admired his dedication.

  The nurses did not.

  The nurses in Willow Glen didn’t try to prevent death. But they did try to guide you to die in the right way. Because if you died from something you weren’t supposed to die from, families became suspicious.

  The nurses here were kind. They meant well. Or at least they did at first, when they were new. It was the institution that was the problem. All the rules. The nurses were human, but the rules were not.

  Those PBS nature documentaries they showed in the common room said all life aimed toward reproduction.

  At Willow Glen, all life aimed toward avoiding litigation.

  Everything was charted. If a nurse fed him dinner but forgot to write it down, then in court, technically, she did not feed him dinner.

  So they came in with these stacks of paper. They spent more time looking at the paper than looking at the people.

  One time he hit his head on the bed frame and got a black eye. The nurse came in with her charts and said to Frank, “Which eye is injured?”

  All the nurse had to do was take one look at him to answer that question. But her nose was in the charts. She cared more about documenting the injury than the injury itself.

  They recorded everything. Physician progress reports. Dietitian records. Weight-loss charts. Monthly nurse summaries. Food-service logs. Tube-feeding sheets. Medication histories.

  Photographs.

  They made him stand naked and shivering and they took photographs. This happened roughly once a week.

  Checking for evidence of falls. Or bedsores. Bruises of any kind. Evidence of abuse, infections, dehydration, malnutrition.

  For court cases, if needed later, in their defense.

  “Do you want me to ask them to stop taking photographs?” the young man said.

  What were they talking about? He’d lost the thread again. He looked around him: He was in the cafeteria. It was empty. The young man smiled his uncomfortable smile. Smiled like those high-school kids who came in here once or twice a year.

  There was this one girl, Frank forgot her name. Maybe Taylor? Or Tyler? He asked her, “Why do you high-school kids come in here?” And she said, “Colleges think it looks good if you’ve done some charity work.”

  Two or three times they’d come, the
n disappeared.

  He asked this Taylor or Tyler why all the students only showed up twice and then never came back, and she said, “If you do it twice, that’s good enough to put on your college application.”

  She said this with no shame. Like she was such a good girl doing the absolute minimum to get what she wanted.

  She asked him about his life. He said there’s not much to tell. She said what did you do? He said he worked at the ChemStar factory. She said what did the factory make? He said it made a compound that when jellied and lit on fire would literally melt the skin off of a hundred thousand men, women, and children in Vietnam. And then she realized she’d made a big mistake coming here and asking him that.

  “I was wondering about Faye,” the young man said. “Your daughter Faye? You remember her?”

  Faye was so much more hardworking than these high-school shits ever were. Faye worked hard because she was driven. There was something inside that pushed her. Something big and deadly and serious.

  “Faye never told me she went to Chicago. Why did she go to Chicago?”

  And now it’s 1968 and he’s in the kitchen with Faye under a pale light and he’s kicking her out of the house.

  He is so angry with her.

  He’d tried so hard to live in that town unnoticed. And she made it impossible.

  Leave and never come back, is what he’s telling her.

  “What did she do?”

  She got herself knocked up. In high school. She let that boy Henry get her pregnant. Wasn’t even married yet. And everybody knew about it.

  Which was the thing that enraged him most, how everyone knew. All at once. Like she advertised it in the local mailer. He never figured out how that happened. But he was more mad that everyone knew than about her getting knocked up.

  That was before he picked up the dementia and stopped caring about things like this.

  After that, she had to go to college. She was an outcast. She left for Chicago.

  “But she didn’t stay long, right? In Chicago?”

  Came back a month later. Something happened to her there she never talked about. Frank didn’t know what. She told people college was too hard. But he knew that was a lie.