The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “You can say you were doing routine maintenance.”

  She took another step toward him so that she emerged from behind the towel. She couldn’t be sure what was going on down there, focused as she was on Larry, but judging by his expression—the way he stared at her—she figured she was now mostly exposed from the waist down.

  “Think about it,” Laura said. “If you find something that proves he’s not fit to be a teacher, you’d be a hero. My hero.”

  Larry stared at her.

  “Will you do this for me?” she said.

  “I’ll get in trouble,” he said.

  “You won’t, I promise,” she said, taking his head with the other hand, letting go of the towel, which dropped softly to the floor.

  She always loved this moment, the change that came over men when they recognized what was about to happen, how fast they clicked over to a new kind of intensity and focus. Larry was already grabbing at her.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  She smiled. At that moment, he would have agreed to anything.

  It was never this moment that Laura had a problem with, the moment of seduction. The problem was afterward. Men tended to drift away from her in a few weeks. They could not be counted on. She’d had three different guys, for example, all friends-with-benefits type guys, come out as bi-a-sexual soon after their encounters, meaning, they said, that they were no longer attracted to either gender, equally.

  Which she was like, what are the odds?

  After Larry had finished and left her dorm room and she had wiped the slimy traces of him off her shinbones (which was a first), she returned to iFeel, hoping that maybe she’d have more clarity now, maybe she’d be able to figure out what to say, what she felt. But no luck. Her emotions seemed as foreign as ever.

  She decided to activate the auto-correct function on iFeel, a really excellent little piece of software that took whatever emotion you thought you were feeling and compared it to the millions of entries collected in the iFeel database and, in a crowd-surfing, data-mining sort of way, extrapolated which of the fifty standard emotions you were actually feeling. Laura clicked a link, a text field opened up, and she began typing:

  iFeel like i dont deserve 2 fail my class just b/c i cheated on some dumb assignment but also i know i prolly shouldnt be cheating so much in all of my classes b/c someday ill have to go out & get a job & have knowledge in my field or whatever but at this point i actually HAVE TO cheat b/c ive cheated so much in the past that i usually have no idea whats going on in any of my classes so if i stopped cheating i would get really bad grades & maybe even fail out of school so it seems 2 me if im going 2 fail either way i might as well cheat & get the grades i need 2 become the powerful business professional my mother so desperately wants me 2B. so i have to prevent this meeting with the professor & ive thought about it alot & ive realized that the university wont require the professor to come to this meeting if the professor is NOT AN EMPLOYEE OF THE UNIVERSITY (^.^)/ so maybe the way forward is to totally discredit the professor & get him fired & ruin his life which makes me feel a little guilty & also angry that the school has boxed me in this way & essentially forced me 2 do something i will feel sort of remorseful about later all b/c i plagiarized one stupid paper ¯

  She pressed Enter and the iFeel app processed this for a moment before the auto-correct displayed the answer:

  Do you mean “Bad”?

  Sure, that must be what she meant. She posted it right away: iFeel Bad. And seconds later the text messages poured in.

  cheer up grl! :)

  don’t feel bad ur gr8!!

  luv ya!

  ur the best!!!!

  And so on, dozens of them, from friends and admirers, boyfriends and lovers, colleagues and acquaintances. And while they did not know the reason she felt bad, it was surprisingly easy to pretend they did, that they knew about the plan, and so each message had the effect of steeling her resolve. This is what she had to do. She thought about her future, her mother, everything that was at stake. And she knew she was right. She would go through with the plan. The professor had it coming. He was asking for it. He wouldn’t know what hit him.

  3

  THEY MET at one of the chain restaurants near Henry’s suburban office park, the kind of place erected right off the highway, on a terrifyingly busy one-way access road. The route here tended to confuse one’s GPS device or map app, as it required a series of awkward and counterintuitive U-turns to navigate the various viaducts and on-ramps and cloverleafs made necessary by the nearby fourteen-lane expressway.

  Inside, the music was happy Top 40 sing-along stuff, the floors industrially carpeted and, within the orbits of children in high chairs, chummed with food globs and milk slicks and crayons and damp little twisted flecks of napkin. Families stood in the front vestibule awaiting their tables, staring at the round plastic puck the hostess gave them, a device that contained some kind of inner motor-and-light apparatus that would blink and agitate when their table was free.

  Henry and Samuel sat in a booth holding menus—large, laminated menus, dynamically colored and complexly subdivided, roughly the size of the Ten Commandments in that one movie about the Ten Commandments. The food was pretty standard chain-restaurant fare: burgers, steaks, sandwiches, salads, a list of inventive appetizers with names involving whimsical adjectives, e.g., sizzlin’. What allegedly set this particular restaurant chain apart from others was that it did something weird with an onion—cut it and fried it in such a way that the onion unfurled itself and resembled, on the plate, a kind of desiccated, many-fingered claw. There was a Rewards Club one could join to earn points for the eating of such things.

  Their table was cluttered with the several appetizers Henry had already purchased with his company’s credit card. They were here doing “field research,” as Henry called it. They sampled the menu and discussed which items had frozen-meal potential: golden fried cheddar bites, yes; seared ahi tuna, probably not.

  Henry noted all this on his laptop. They were digging into a plate of miso-glazed chicken skewers when Henry finally asked about the topic he was eager to discuss but trying hard to seem indifferent about.

  “Oh, by the way, how’s it going with your mother?” he said in this dismissive way while sawing at a chicken chunk with a fork.

  “Not great,” Samuel said. “Today I spent the whole afternoon at the UIC library, going through the archive, looking at everything they had from 1968. Yearbooks. Newspapers. Hoping to find something about Mom.”

  “And?”

  “Zilch.”

  “Well, she wasn’t in college very long,” Henry said. “Maybe a month? I’m not surprised you can’t find anything.”

  “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “When you saw her, at her apartment, did she seem, I don’t know, happy?”

  “Not really. More like quiet and guarded. With a hint of hopeless resignation.”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “Maybe I should go see her again,” Samuel said. “Drop by sometime when her lawyer’s not there.”

  “That is a terrible idea,” Henry said.

  “Why?”

  “For one? She doesn’t deserve it. She has given you nothing but problems all your life. And two? The crime. It’s way too dangerous.”

  “Oh, c’mon.”

  “Seriously! What’s the address again?”

  Samuel told him and watched as his father typed this into his laptop. “It says here,” Henry said, staring at his screen, “there’ve been sixty-one crimes in that neighborhood.”

  “Dad.”

  “Sixty-one! In the last month alone. Simple assault. Simple battery. Forcible entry. Vandalism. Motor vehicle theft. Burglary. Another simple assault. Criminal trespass. Theft. Another simple assault. On the sidewalk, for Pete’s sake.”

  “I’ve been there already. It’s fine.”

  “On the sidewalk in the middle of the day. Broad daylight! Guy just hits you with a cr
owbar and takes your wallet and leaves you for dead.”

  “I’m sure that won’t happen.”

  “That did happen. That happened yesterday.”

  “I mean, it won’t happen to me.”

  “Attempted theft. Here’s a weapons violation. Found person, which I think is a goddamn kidnapping.”

  “Dad, listen—”

  “Simple assault on the bus. Aggravated battery.”

  “Okay, fine. I’ll be careful. Whatever you want.”

  “Whatever I want? Great. Then don’t go. Don’t go at all. Stay home.”

  “Dad.”

  “Let her fend for herself. Let her rot.”

  “But I need her.”

  “You do not.”

  “It’s not like we’re going to start spending Christmases together. I only need her story. I’m going to be sued by my publisher if I don’t figure it out.”

  “This is a very bad idea.”

  “You know what my alternative is? Declaring bankruptcy and moving to Jakarta. That’s my choice.”

  “Why Jakarta?”

  “It’s just an example. The point is, I need to get Mom talking.”

  Henry shrugged and chewed his chicken and made notes on his laptop. “You see the Cubs game last night?” he said, still staring at his screen.

  “I’ve been a little distracted lately,” Samuel said.

  “Hm,” Henry said, nodding. “Good game.”

  This was how they usually related to each other—through sports. It was the topic they fled to whenever conversation lulled or became dangerously personal or sad. After Faye left, Samuel and his father rarely talked about her. They grieved independent of each other. Mostly what they talked about were the Cubs. After she left, both of them found within themselves a sudden and surprisingly powerful and devotional all-consuming love for the Chicago Cubs. Down came the framed reproductions of incomprehensible works of modern art from Samuel’s bedroom walls, down came the nonsensical poetry broadsides hung there by his mother, and up went posters of Ryne Sandberg and Andre Dawson and Cubs pennants. Broadcasts on WGN weekday afternoons, Samuel literally praying to God—on his knees on the couch looking up to the ceiling—praying and crossing his fingers while actually making deals with God in exchange for one home run, one late-inning victory, one winning season.

  Occasionally they took trips into Chicago for Cubs games—always during the day, always preceded by an elaborate ritual where Henry packed the car with enough supplies to get them through any roadside catastrophe. He packed extra jugs of water for drinking or radiator malfunction. Spare tire, sometimes two. Flares, emergency hand-crank CB radio. Walking maps of Wrigleyville on which he’d written notes from previous trips: where he’d found parking spots, where he’d encountered beggars or drug dealers. Particularly rough-seeming neighborhoods he etched out completely. He brought a fake wallet in case of mugging.

  When they crossed the boundary into Chicago and the traffic congealed around them and the neighborhoods started to change, he said “Doors locked?” and Samuel jiggled the handle and said “Check!”

  “Eyes peeled?”

  “Check!”

  And together they remained vigilant and watchful for crime until returning home again.

  Henry had never worried like this before. But after Faye disappeared, he became preoccupied with disasters and muggings. The loss of his wife had convinced him that even more loss was imminent and near.

  “I wonder what happened to her,” Samuel said, “in Chicago, in college. What made her leave so quickly?”

  “No idea. She never talked about it.”

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  “I was so happy she came back I didn’t want to jinx it. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, you know? I let the matter drop. I thought I was being very modern and compassionate.”

  “I have to find out what happened to her.”

  “Hey, I need your opinion. We’re launching a new line. Which logo do you prefer?”

  Henry slid two glossy pieces of paper across the table. One said FARM FRESH FROZENS, the other, FARM FRESH FREEZNS.

  “I’m glad you’re so concerned about your son’s well-being,” Samuel said.

  “Seriously. Which do you like better?”

  “I’m glad my personal crisis is so very important to you.”

  “Stop being dramatic. Pick a logo.”

  Samuel studied them for a moment. “I guess I’d vote FROZENS? When in doubt, spell words correctly.”

  “That’s what I said! But the advertising folks said FREEZNS made the product seem funner. That’s the word they actually used. Funner.”

  “Of course I’d also argue that FROZENS isn’t a proper word either,” Samuel said. “More like a word that is not a noun conscripted to dress like one.”

  “My son the English professor.”

  “Which I guess there’s some precedent for. Take the tuna melt. Or the corn pop.”

  “The advertising folks do that kind of thing all the time. They tell me that thirty years ago you could get away with saying something simple and declarative: Tastes Great! Be Happy! But consumers these days are way more sophisticated, so you have to get tricky with the language. Taste the Great! Find Your Happy!”

  “I have a question,” Samuel said. “How can something be both farm fresh and frozen?”

  “That’s something that way fewer people stop and think about than you would expect.”

  “Once it’s frozen isn’t it, by definition, no longer farm fresh?”

  “It’s a trigger word. When they want to advertise to hipster foodies, they use farm fresh. Or maybe artisanal. Or local. For millennials, they use vintage. For women, they use skinny. And don’t even get me started on the quote-unquote farm where all this farm-fresh stuff comes from. I’m from Iowa. I know farms. That place is not a farm.”

  Samuel’s phone dinged with a new text message. He made a reflexive move to his pocket, then stopped and folded his hands on the table. He and Henry stared at each other for a moment.

  “You gonna get that?” Henry said.

  “No,” Samuel said. “We’re talking.”

  “Mighty big of you.”

  “We’re talking about your work.”

  “Not really talking. More like you’re listening to me complain about it, again.”

  “How much longer till retirement?”

  “Oh, too long. But I’m counting the days. And when I finally do leave, no one will be happier than those advertising folks. You should have seen the fuss I made about spelling jalapeño poppers with a Z. Or mozzarella sticks with an X. Popperz. Stix. No thank you.”

  Samuel remembered how happy his father was the day he got this job and moved the family to Streamwood—their final exodus from crowded apartment buildings to the expansively grassy and well-spaced houses of Oakdale Lane. For the first time they had a yard, a lawn. Henry wanted to get a dog. They had a washer and dryer inside the house. No more walking to the laundromat on Sunday afternoons. No more carrying groceries five blocks. No more random car vandalism. No more listening to the couple fighting in the apartment upstairs or the baby wailing from below. Henry was ecstatic. But Faye seemed a little lost. Maybe there’d been a struggle between them—she’d wanted to live in a city, he’d wanted to move to the suburbs. Who knows how such things are resolved; there are other, more interesting lives that parents keep hidden from their children. Samuel only knew that his mother had lost the struggle, and she sneered at all the symbols of her defeat—their big tan garage door, their patio deck, their bourgeois barbecue grill, their long secluded block brimming with happy, safe, bechildrened white people.

  Henry must have thought he had it all figured out—a good job, a family, a nice house in the suburbs. It was everything he’d always wanted, and so it was a terrible and maybe even shattering blow when it all fell apart, first when his wife abandoned him, then when his job did too. That would have been in 2003—after more than twenty years working there, when Henry w
as maybe eighteen months from a comfortable early retirement, close enough that he was already making plans to travel and take up new hobbies—when his company filed for bankruptcy. This even though the company had issued to its employees an “All is well” memo not two days before declaring bankruptcy, this memo saying that rumors of bankruptcy were overblown and to hold on to your stock or even buy more, since it was so undervalued at that moment, which Henry did, though it was later revealed the CEO was at that very moment secretly dumping all his shares. Henry’s retirement was tied up completely in the now worthless company stock, and when the company came out of bankruptcy and issued new stock, they offered it only to the board of directors and big-time Wall Street investors. So Henry was left with nothing. The nest egg he’d spent so long amassing evaporated in a single day.

  That day, as the realization settled over him that his retirement would have to be pushed back ten or maybe even fifteen years, Henry had the same bewildered look he’d had the day that Faye disappeared. He had once again been betrayed by the very thing that was supposed to keep him safe.

  Now he just seemed cynical and wary. The kind of person who no longer believed in anyone’s promises.

  “The average American eats six frozen meals a month,” Henry said. “My job is to get that to seven. That’s what I’m tirelessly working for, sometimes even on weekends.”

  “Doesn’t sound like your heart’s really in it.”

  “The problem is that nobody in the office takes the long view. They’re all focused on the next quarterly statement, the next earnings report. They haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”

  “Which is?”

  “That whenever we identify some new market niche, all we do, in the long run, is dismantle it. This is like our guiding principle, our original philosophy. In the 1950s, Swanson saw that families ate meals together and wanted to get into that market. So they invented the TV dinner. Which made families realize they didn’t have to eat meals together. Selling the family dinner made the family dinner go extinct. And we’ve been pulverizing the market ever since.”