The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  Samuel’s phone dinged again, another new text message.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Henry said. “You young people and your phones. Just look at it.”

  “Sorry,” Samuel said as he checked the message. It was from Pwnage. It said: OMG FOUND WOMAN IN PHOTO!!!!

  “Sorry, one second,” Samuel said to his father while typing a reply.

  what woman? what photo?

  photo of ur mom from the 60s!! I found woman in that pic!!

  for real??

  come to jezebels right now I’ll tell u everything!!!

  “It’s like I’m at work trying to have a conversation with one of our interns,” Henry said. “Your head’s in two places at once. Not paying quality attention to anything. I don’t care if that makes me sound old.”

  “Sorry, Dad, I gotta run.”

  “You can’t sit down for ten minutes without interruption. Always so busy.”

  “Thanks for dinner. I’ll call you soon.”

  And Samuel raced south to the suburb where Pwnage lived and parked under the purple lights of Jezebels and hurried inside, where he found his Elfscape buddy at the bar, watching TV, a popular food channel show about extreme eating.

  “You found the woman in the photo?” Samuel said as he sat down.

  “Yes. Her name is Alice, and she lives in Indiana, way out in the boonies.”

  He gave Samuel a photograph—pulled from the internet and printed on copy paper: a woman at the beach on a sunny day, smiling at the camera, wearing hiking boots and cargo pants and a big green floppy hat and a T-shirt that said “Happy Camper.”

  “This is really her?” Samuel said.

  “Definitely. She was sitting behind your mom when that photo was taken at the protest in 1968. She told me herself.”

  “Amazing,” Samuel said.

  “Best part? She and your mom were neighbors. Like, in the dorm, at school.”

  “And she’ll talk to me?”

  “I already set it up. She’s expecting you tomorrow.”

  Pwnage gave him the printout of a short e-mail correspondence, as well as Alice’s address and a map to her house.

  “How did you find her?”

  “I had some time on Patch Day. No big whoop.”

  He looked again at the TV. “Oh, check it out! Do you really think he’ll be able to eat that whole thing? I vote yes.”

  He was talking about the TV show’s host, a man known for his ability to eat ridiculous quantities of food without passing out or vomiting. His name was famously etched onto Hall of Fame plaques in dozens of American restaurants where he overcame some food object: a 72-ounce porterhouse steak, an XXL pizza burger, a burrito weighing more than most newborn babies. His face was puffy in the way of someone who, all over his body, had a quarter-inch of extra muchness.

  Right now the host gave colorful commentary as a chef in what appeared to be a greasy-spoon diner prepared hash browns on a large discolored griddle—a potato mound he shaped into a square roughly the size of a chess board. On top of the hash browns the chef piled two handfuls of crumbled sausage, four handfuls of chopped bacon, ground beef, several diced onions, and what appeared to be shredded white cheddar or mozzarella or Monterey Jack cheese, so much cheese that the meats were now obscured totally under a white melty mess. In the upper right-hand corner of the screen it said: 9/11 Remembered.

  “I owe you, man,” Samuel said. “Thank you so much. You need something? Just ask.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  “Seriously. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “No. It’s okay.”

  “Well, if there is, please tell me.”

  The chef splatted six spatula-size balls of sour cream atop the white cheesy layer and spread them over the big brick of food. He rolled the entire apparatus into a log, the fried-potato side facing out, cut it in half, and lifted the two halves onto a white serving platter, where they stood vertically. They broke apart in places and oozed steam and thick creamy fatty liquid. The dish was called the Twin Towers Gut Buster. The host sat in the restaurant’s dining area surrounded by patrons excited to be on television. In front of him were the golden potato-meat logs. He asked for a moment of silence. Everyone bowed their heads. Close-up on the Gut Buster, leaking its white slime. Then the crowd, perhaps cued by someone off camera, started yelling “Eat! Eat! Eat! Eat!” as the host picked up a knife and fork and sliced into the Gut Buster’s outer fried crust and scooped up some of its inner drippy mash and guided it into his mouth. He chewed and looked into the camera plaintively and said, “That is heavy.” The crowd laughed. “Bro, I don’t think I’m gonna make it.” Cut to commercial.

  “Actually?” Pwnage said. “Yes. There is one thing you could do for me.”

  “Name it.”

  “I have this book,” Pwnage said. “Well, more like a book idea. A mystery thriller novel?”

  “The psychic detective story. I remember.”

  “Yeah. I always intended to write that book, but I had to push back the writing because there were all these tasks that needed to be completed before I could begin—you know, my readers would expect me to understand how police operate and how the justice system actually works, and so I would need to shadow a real detective for a while, which means I would need to find a detective and explain how I’m a writer working on a novel about police work and I need a few nights on the job to get the flavor of real police lingo and procedure. That type of thing.”

  “Sure.”

  “You know, research.”

  “Yes.”

  “But then, okay, I worry that any detective I send my letter to probably won’t believe the ‘writer’ claim since I’ve never published anything ever, a fact that the detective would almost certainly deduce because detectives know how to find things. So before I can contact a detective I’ll have to publish a few short stories in a few literary journals and maybe win a few little awards to corroborate the ‘writer’ claim, after which the detective would be more apt to allow me on duty.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Not to mention all the books about ESP and other paranormal psychic phenomena that I’d need to read to achieve the proper verisimilitude. In fact, there are so many things I need to finish before the writing can even begin that I’m having trouble finding motivation.”

  “Are you trying to ask me something specific?”

  “If I had a publisher for my book already lined up, then the detective I contacted would automatically believe that I’m a writer, plus it would give me an incentive to actually start writing. Plus there’s the advance money, of course, which could fund renovations I plan to make to my kitchen.”

  “So you want me to show your book to my publisher?”

  “Yeah, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No problem. Done.”

  Pwnage smiled and slapped Samuel on the back and turned again to watch the guy on TV, who was now halfway through eating the Gut Buster, having completely devoured one of the twin logs, the other having lost its internal structural integrity and loosened into a cone of slimy potato rubble. The host looked wearily into the camera with the expression of a staggered and exhausted boxer trying to remain conscious. The chef said he’d created the Twin Towers Gut Buster a few years back in order to “never forget.” The host started in on the other log. His fork moved slowly. It visibly shook. A concerned onlooker offered him a glass of water, which he refused. He swallowed the next bite. He looked like he hated himself.

  Samuel stared at the photograph of Alice. He wondered how the fierce-looking protestor of 1968 could become this person, who apparently wore cargo pants and ironic T-shirts and tromped along beaches looking perfectly happy and at ease. How could two people who seemed so different inhabit the same body?

  “Did you talk to Alice?” Samuel said.

  “Yep.”

  “What did she seem like? What was your impression of her?”

  “She seemed very interested in mustard.”
>
  “Mustard?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that slang?”

  “No. I mean that literally,” Pwnage said. “She’s super interested in mustard.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither did I.”

  The man on TV, meanwhile, was down to his last few bites. He was exhausted and miserable. His forehead rested on the table and his arms splayed out and if it weren’t for his heavy breathing and visible sweating it would seem like he was dead. The crowd was ecstatic that he’d almost consumed the entire dish. The chef said no one had ever been this close before. The crowd chanted “USA! USA!” as the host held the final bite, trembling, on his fork, aloft.

  4

  ALICE KNELT on the soft, spongy ground of the forest behind her house. She clutched a small tuft of mustard plant and pulled—not too hard, and not straight up, but rather gently and twistingly, a torsion that freed the roots from the sandy soil without breaking them. This was what she did most days. She roamed the woods of the Indiana dunes, absolving them of their mustard.

  Samuel stood about twenty paces away, watching her. He was on the narrow gravel path that cut through the woods and connected Alice’s cabin with her distant garage. The path was maybe a quarter-mile long, up and down a hill. His cresting the hill had set her dogs to barking.

  “The problem,” Alice said, “is the seeds. Garlic mustard seeds can linger for years.”

  It was a one-woman crusade she waged in the dunes along Lake Michigan’s southern shore. This certain exotic mustard had found its way into Indiana forests from its native home in Europe, then proceeded to annihilate the local flowers, shrubs, trees. If she weren’t here to beat it back, the stuff would take over in just a few summers.

  Yesterday she’d been reading one of the Chicago-area invasive-species online discussion boards that she moderates, her job being to tell people when they were posting in the wrong area and move their misplaced threads to different discussion boards. She kept everything nice and tidy; she engaged in a sort of pruning that mimicked in a digital way what she did most days in these woods, ripping out things that didn’t belong. And since most websites were bombarded with an unthinkable amount of spam—mostly advertisements for male enhancement pills or pornography or who knows what because it’s in Cyrillic—even the smallest and most niche sites needed a moderator to vigorously patrol the boards and delete unwanted posts and ads and spam or else the whole thing choked with senseless data. Most of Alice’s time not spent with mustard or her dogs or her partner was spent like this, beating back the advancing chaos, trying to achieve Enlightenment order in the face of twenty-first-century madness.

  She was at her laptop looking in on her invasive-species discussion forum and saw that someone named Axman had posted a thread titled “Do you know the woman IN THIS PHOTO?” Which seemed definitely like spam because of its unnecessary use of all-caps words, and because it certainly did not have anything to do with that specific board’s ostensible topic, which was “Honeysuckle (Amur, Morrow’s, Bell’s, Standish, and Tartarian).” So she was about to move the post to the Odds ’n’ Ends forum and scold Axman for putting it in the wrong place when she clicked on the image in question and saw, incredibly, herself.

  A photo taken in 1968, at the big protest in Chicago that year. There she was, in her old sunglasses, in her army fatigues, staring at the camera. Goddamn she was such a badass. She was in the park, in a field of student revelry. Thousands of protestors. Behind her were flags and signs and outlines of old Chicago buildings on the horizon. Faye sitting in front of her. She could hardly believe what she was seeing.

  She contacted Axman, who sent her to a strange guy named Pwnage, who sent her to Samuel, who came to visit the very next day.

  He stood several paces away from her, far from this patch of leafy shrub that to the uninitiated looked in no way special but was, in fact, garlic mustard. Each twig on a garlic mustard plant contained dozens of seeds, which wedged in shoe soles and inside socks and on the cuffs of jeans and were then spread by walking. Samuel was not allowed anywhere near it. Alice wore large plastic boots up to her knees that seemed appropriate for swamps or bogs. She carried black plastic bags that she carefully wrapped around each mustard plant to catch the seeds that dropped as she jostled it out of the ground. Every plant had hundreds of seeds, and not one of them could be allowed to escape. The way she held these bags when they were full of mustard plants—carefully, and at a small distance away from her—looked like how one might carry a bag that contained the body of a dead cat.

  “How did you get involved with this?” Samuel asked. “With mustard, I mean.”

  “When I moved out here,” she said, “it was killing all the native plants.”

  Alice’s cabin overlooked a small dune at the edge of Lake Michigan, the closest thing you could get to a beach house in Indiana. She bought the house for next to nothing in 1986, back when the lake was at a record height. The water was a few feet from the porch. If the lake had kept rising, the house would have been washed away.

  “Buying the house was a gamble,” Alice said, “but an educated one.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Climate change,” she said. “Hotter, drier summers. More droughts, less rain. Less ice in the winter, more evaporation. If the climate scientists were right, the lake would have to recede. So I found myself rooting for global warming.”

  “That must have felt, I don’t know, complicated?”

  “Every time I was stuck in traffic I imagined the carbon from all the cars filling the air and saving my house. It was perverse.”

  Eventually the lake did recede. Now she had a nice big beach where the water used to be. She’d purchased the place for ten grand. It was now worth millions.

  “I moved out here with my partner,” she said. “It was the eighties. We were sick of lying about our relationship. We were fed up telling our neighbors we were roommates, that she was my good friend. We wanted our privacy.”

  “Where’s your partner now?”

  “She’s away on business this week. It’s just me and the dogs. Three of them, rescue dogs. They are not allowed in the woods since their paws would pick up mustard seeds.”

  “Of course.”

  Alice’s white hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore blue jeans under her giant rubber waders. A simple, clean white T-shirt. She had that naturalist’s lack of attention to outward appearances, an indifference toward things like cosmetics and grooming that read not as apathy but rather as transcendence.

  “How’s your mother?” Alice said.

  “Indicted.”

  “But other than that?”

  “Other than that, I have no idea. She won’t talk to me.”

  Alice thought about that quiet young girl she used to know, and she regretted that Faye never overcame what tortured her. But such was the way with people—they loved the things that made them miserable. She’d seen it so many times among her movement friends, after the movement splintered and grew ugly and dangerous. They were miserable all the time, and the misery seemed to feed them and nourish them. Not the misery itself but its familiarity, its constancy.

  “I wish I could help,” Alice said. “But I don’t think I have much for you.”

  “I’m trying to understand what happened,” Samuel said. “My mother kept everything about Chicago a secret. You’re the first person I’ve met who knew her there.”

  “I wonder why she never talked about it.”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. Something happened to her there. Something important.”

  Of course he was right, but Alice wouldn’t say so.

  “What’s to tell?” she said, trying to act aloof. “She went to school for a month, then left. College wasn’t for her. It’s a pretty common story.”

  “Then why would she keep it a secret?”

  “Maybe she was embarrassed.”

  “No, there’s more to it than that.”

  “She
was a troubled soul when I knew her,” Alice said. “Small-town girl. Smart, but also a little clueless. Quiet. She read a lot. Ambitious and driven in a way that probably meant she had big-time daddy issues.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll bet she had a dad who was always disappointed in her, you know? So her anxiety about being disappointing to her father was swapped out for a drive to be special to everyone. Psychoanalysts would call this replacement. The child learns what is wanted of her. Am I right about that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “At any rate, she left Chicago right after the protests. I never even got to say goodbye. Just all of a sudden, gone.”

  “Yeah, she’s pretty good at that.”

  “Where did you get the photo?”

  “It was on the news.”

  “I don’t watch the news.”

  “Do you remember who took it?” he said.

  “That whole week is a big blur. Everything kind of merges with everything else. I can’t really remember one day from the next. Anyway, no, I don’t remember who took it.”

  “In the photo it looks like she’s leaning against someone.”

  “That would probably have been Sebastian.”

  “Who’s Sebastian?”

  “He was the editor of an underground newspaper. The Chicago Free Voice. Your mother was attracted to him, and he was attracted to anyone who paid attention to him. It wasn’t a good match.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “No idea. That was a long time ago. I left the movement in 1968, right after that protest. Afterward, I didn’t keep track of anyone.”

  The mustard plants Alice pulled were about a foot tall, with green heart-shaped leaves and small white flowers. To the untrained eye they looked like any other ground shrub, not at all out of the ordinary. The problem was that they grew so quickly they stole sunlight from other ground plants, including young trees. They also had no natural predators—the local deer population ate everything but the mustard, leaving it free to colonize. It also produced a chemical that killed off bacteria in the soil that other plants needed for growth. A perfect botanical terror, in other words.