The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  And he tells her all about his recent upheaval, beginning with his mother’s odd reappearance—“The Packer Attacker is your mom?” Bethany says, which draws looks from other tables—and the police and the judge, all the way up to today’s meeting with Periwinkle and Samuel’s current dilemma involving the ghostwritten book.

  “Listen,” he says, “I think I want to start over.”

  “With what?”

  “With my life. My career. I think I want to burn it all down. Reset it completely. The thought of going back to Chicago is unbearable. These last few years have been one long rut I need to get out of.”

  “Good,” Bethany says. “I think that’s good.”

  “And I know it’s forward of me and presumptuous and really unexpected and all, but I was hoping you could help. I was hoping to ask you a favor.”

  “Of course. What do you need?”

  “A place to stay.”

  She smiles.

  “Just for a little while,” he adds. “Till I figure a few things out.”

  “Conveniently,” she says, “my apartment has eight bedrooms.”

  “I’ll stay out of your hair. You won’t even notice me. I promise.”

  “Peter and I lived there and never saw each other. It is definitely possible.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Stay as long as you need.”

  “Thank you.”

  They finish lunch and Bethany has to leave for her second rehearsal of the day. They hug again, this time tightly, as intimates, as friends. Samuel lingers for a while at the Bruch manuscript, studying its messy pages. It makes him happy that even the masters have false starts, even the greats must sometimes double back. He imagines the composer after he’d sent this manuscript abroad, imagines how it must have felt when he no longer had the music but only had his memory of it. The memory of making it, and the way it would sound when it was played. His money would have been drying up, and war was breaking out, and all he had at the end was his imagination and maybe a fantasy of what his life would have been like had things turned out differently, how his music would have filled the spaces of cathedrals on brighter days.

  5

  THE HEADLINE APPEARS one morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: UNEMPLOYMENT UNCHANGED.

  Television news picks it up moments later, cutting into programming to deliver the startling report: Over the last month, the economy has added no new jobs.

  It’s the biggest story of the day. It is hard data that seems to crystallize this ambiguous, uncomfortable feeling people are having in the autumn of 2011, which is that the world is galloping toward ruin. Whole island nations are going bankrupt. The European Union is pretty much insolvent. Brand-name banks have been suddenly liquidated. The stock market crashed this summer, and most experts say it’ll continue tumbling well into winter. The word on the street is “deleveraging”—everyone owes too much. The world, it turns out, has way more stuff than the world has the money to own. Austerity is very hip right now. So is gold. Money pours into the gold markets because things have gotten so bad people are questioning the very philosophical legitimacy of paper money. Certain views that paper money is a hoax propped up by a collective fantasy move from the fringes and gain traction in mainstream conversation. The economy has turned medieval, the only treasure now being actual treasure—gold, silver, copper, bronze.

  It is a massive, unprecedented global contraction, but it’s almost too large to grasp, too complicated to fathom. It’s hard to step back far enough to fully see it, and so the news engages with its manifold parts—labor data, market trends, balance sheets—smaller episodes in the larger story, places where the phenomenon pokes out and can be measured.

  Which is why the unemployment story gets so much attention. There is integrity in a solid number that an abstract idea like “deleveraging” does not have.

  So a logo is made: BIG FAT ZERO! Elaborate and colorful graphs and charts are prepared mapping recent terrible employment trends. Anchors ask probing questions of experts, pundits, and politicians, who all yell at each other from their separate TV boxes. The networks gather “Americans off the street” to engage in “roundtable discussions” about the country’s jobs crisis. It feels like a flying avalanche of coverage.

  Samuel sits in front of the television flipping between the news networks. He’s curious to see what they’re talking about today and feels relief that it is this. Because the more the news obsesses on the unemployment numbers, the less time there is to discuss the day’s other potentially big story, which is the release of a new book: The Packer Attacker, a scandalous biography of Faye Andresen-Anderson, written by her own son.

  Samuel had stopped by the launch party the night before. It was part of the deal he’d made with Periwinkle.

  “Don’t feel bad about this,” Periwinkle said after the requisite photographs were taken. “Smartest move you’ve ever made.”

  “I trust this will settle the matter with the judge?”

  “I’ve already taken care of that.”

  Turns out, the same day Judge Brown discovered Faye Andresen-Anderson had escaped to Norway—which meant he was looking at an extradition trial that could last years—he got a phone call from the Packer for President campaign offering him a job: crime czar. The only catch was that he had to make the case go away. And so because the case against her had no hope of wrapping up anytime soon, and because the job of crime czar for a presidential candidate who carried around a gun seemed unturndownable, the judge agreed to these terms. He quietly slipped the case down some bureaucratic, jurisdictional, legal black hole and officially retired from his judgeship. His first policy proposal at his new job involved a serious curtailing of First Amendment rights for leftist protestors, a proposal enthusiastically endorsed by Governor Packer, who was hoping to score some easy points among conservatives who just loathe what’s happening with this whole Occupy Wall Street thing.

  Samuel can hear them every day, the Wall Street protestors. He wakes up and has his coffee and writes well into the afternoon in a big leather chair next to a window that looks down at Zuccotti Park, where the protest seems to have real staying power. They’re going to be sleeping there until winter, obviously. Bethany had given him his choice of room, and he had chosen this one, on the west side, with a view of the protest and, in the evening, the sun setting over the country. He’s grown to enjoy the drumming, especially now that the drummers have agreed to drum only during reasonable daylight hours. He’s fond of their rhythms, their ceaseless forward momentum, the way they can go for hours without a single pause. He tries to match their discipline, for he has a new project, a new book. He’d told Periwinkle about it after he was free of his contractual obligations.

  “I’m writing my mother’s story,” Samuel said. “But I’m writing the true story. The actual events.”

  “Which events in particular, I’m curious to know,” Periwinkle asked.

  “All of them. It’s going to include everything. The whole story. From her childhood to the present day.”

  “So it’s going to be like six hundred pages and ten people will read it? Congratulations.”

  “That’s not why I’m writing.”

  “Oh, you’re doing it for the art. You’re one of those now.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Names will have to be changed, you know. Essential identifying facts altered. I wouldn’t want to have to sue you again.”

  “Would it be for libel or slander? I can never remember the difference.”

  “It would be for libel and slander, plus defamation, invasion of privacy, scurrilous statements, loss of reputation, loss of business, personal anguish, and violating the competitive works clause in your contract with us. Plus lawyer fees, plus damages.”

  “I’ll call it fiction,” Samuel said. “I’ll change the names. I’ll be sure to give you a really silly one.”

  “How’s your mother?” Periwinkle asked.

  “I wouldn’t know
. Cold, I imagine.”

  “Still in Norway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Among the reindeer and northern lights?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw the northern lights once. In upper Alberta. I booked a trip with this outfit called See the Northern Lights! I had wanted the northern lights to fill me with wonder. And they did. They filled me with wonder. Which was a big letdown because they exactly matched my expectations of them. They did exactly what I’d paid for. Let that be a lesson to you.”

  “A lesson about what?”

  “Writing this big epic book of yours. And what you expect it to accomplish for you. Let the northern lights be a lesson. It’s a metaphor, of course.”

  Samuel isn’t sure what he’s trying to accomplish. At first he thought if he gathered enough information he could eventually isolate the reason his mother left the family. But how could he ever really pin it down? Any one explanation seemed too easy, too trivial. So instead of looking for answers, he’d begun simply writing her story, thinking that if he could see the world the way she saw it, maybe he’d achieve something greater than mere answers: Maybe he’d achieve understanding, empathy, forgiveness. So he wrote about her childhood, about growing up in Iowa, about going to Chicago for college, about the protest in 1968, about that final month she was with the family before she disappeared, and the more he wrote the more expansive the story became. Samuel wrote about his mother and father and grandfather, he wrote about Bishop and Bethany and the headmaster, he wrote about Alice and the judge and Pwnage—he was trying to understand them, trying to see the things he was too self-absorbed to see the first time through. Even Laura Pottsdam, vicious Laura Pottsdam, Samuel tried to locate a little sympathy for her.

  Laura Pottsdam, who at this moment is feeling really great about life and the world because her jerk of an English professor has been fired and replaced by this hapless grad student and her failed plagiarized Hamlet paper has disappeared into the academic mists, so this is all super cool and this whole episode totally confirms what her mother has been telling her since she was a kid, which is that she is a powerful woman who should get what she wants and if she wants something she should GO FOR IT, and what she wants right now are a few Jägerbombs to celebrate justice: The professor is gone, her career is saved. And she sees in this a glimpse of her future, the inevitable successful future laid out in front of her like a runway for an F-16, a future where if anyone tries to get in her way she will blow them to smithereens. This thing with the professor was her first big test, and she passed it. Spectacularly. This is most especially true when Laura’s S.A.F.E. initiative gains serious traction and some awesome shout-outs on the nightly news and in meetings of the Board of Regents, and her friends start telling her she should run for student senate next semester, which she’s like No frickin’ way until the Packer for President campaign comes to campus and Governor Packer himself wants to do a photo op with Laura because he’s super impressed with her efforts on behalf of hardworking Illinois taxpayers everywhere, saying, “Something must be done to protect our students and our wallets from these unproductive liberal professors in outdated fields.” And during the press conference some reporter asks Governor Packer what he thinks about Laura’s gumption and pluck, to which this totally famous presidential candidate responds: “I think she should run for president someday.”

  So she switches her major. No more business communication and marketing. She promptly enrolls in the two majors she decides will most help her for a future possible presidential bid: political science and acting.

  Samuel does not miss teaching students like Laura Pottsdam, but he does regret how he taught them. He winces at it now, how much he looked down on them. How eventually he could only see their flaws and weaknesses and shortcomings, the ways they did not live up to his standards. Standards that shifted so that the students would never meet them, because Samuel had grown so comfortable being angry. Anger was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn’t want to work too hard. Because his life in the summer of 2011 had been unfulfilling and going nowhere and he was so angry about it. Angry at his mother for leaving, angry at Bethany for not loving him, angry at his students for being uneducatable. He’d settled into the anger because the anger was so much easier than the work required to escape it. Blaming Bethany for not loving him was so much easier than the introspection needed to understand what he was doing that made him unlovable. Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them. And on any given day, it was so much easier to settle in front of his computer than to face his stagnant life, to actually face in a real way the hole inside him that his mother left when she abandoned him, and if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern, and your patterns become your life. He sank into Elfscape like a shipwreck into the water.

  Years can go by in this manner, just as they had for Pwnage, who, at this moment, is finally opening his eyes.

  He’s been sleeping for a month—the longest sustained “nap” ever recorded at the county hospital—and now he opens his eyes. His body is well-nourished, and his mind is well-rested, and his circulatory and digestive and lymphatic systems are more or less flushed out and operating normally, and he doesn’t feel that ringing headache and clawing hunger and stabbing joint pain and muscle tremor he usually feels. Actually he doesn’t feel any of the background pain that has been his constant companion for so long, and what this feels like to him is a miracle. Compared to how he usually feels, he decides he must either be dead or on drugs. Because there’s no way he could possibly feel this good if he weren’t on some serious drugs, or in heaven.

  He looks around the hospital room and sees Lisa sitting on the couch. Lisa, his beautiful ex-wife, who smiles at him and hugs him and who’s carrying under her arm that tattered black leather notebook in which he’d written the first few pages of his detective novel. And she tells him that several packages have arrived from a big-shot New York publishing house with all this paperwork for him to sign, and when Pwnage asks her what the paperwork’s for she grins at him and says, “Your book deal!”

  For this was another of Samuel’s conditions to Periwinkle, that Periwinkle publish his friend’s novel.

  “And what is this novel about?” Periwinkle had asked.

  “Um, a psychic detective on the trail of a serial killer?” Samuel said. “And the killer turns out to be the detective’s ex-wife’s boyfriend, I think, or son-in-law, or something.”

  “Actually,” Periwinkle said, “that sounds amazing.”

  Pwnage once told Samuel that the people in your life are either enemies, obstacles, puzzles, or traps. And for both Samuel and Faye, circa summer 2011, people were definitely enemies. Mostly what they wanted out of life was to be left alone. But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel’s written his book, the more he’s realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar.

  This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.

  And so he’s trying, Samuel is, trying to be diligent in this odd new life he has with Bethany. They are not lovers. They may one day become lovers, but they are not lovers yet. Samuel’s attitude about this is: Whatever happens, happens. He knows he can’t go back and relive his life, can’t change the mistakes of his past. His relationship with Bethany is not a Choose Your Own Adventure book. So instead he will do this: He will clarify it, illuminate it, try to understand it better. He can prevent his past from swallowing his present. So he’s trying to be in the moment, trying not to let the moment
get all discolored by his fantasies of what the moment ought to be. He is trying to see Bethany as she really is. And isn’t that what everybody really wants? To be seen clearly? He’d always been obsessed with a few of Bethany’s qualities: her eyes, for example, and her posture. But then she told him one day that the feature she shared most closely with Bishop was her eyes, and so whenever she stares into a mirror at her eyes it makes her a little sad. And another time she told him her posture had been drilled into her by the endless Alexander Technique lessons she endured for years while other kids her age were playing on swing sets and running through sprinklers. After Samuel heard these stories, he could not go on thinking the same way about her eyes or posture. These things were diminished, but what he realized was that the whole was greatly expanded.

  So he is beginning to see Bethany as she is, for maybe the first time.

  His mother, too. He’s trying understand her, to see her clearly and not through the distortion of his own anger. The only lie Samuel ever told Periwinkle was that Faye had stayed in Norway. It seemed like a good lie to tell—if everyone believed she was in the arctic, then nobody would bother her. Because the truth is she returned home, to that little Iowa river town, to care for her father.

  Frank Andresen’s dementia was pretty far along by then. When Faye saw him the first time and the nurse said “Your daughter’s here,” he looked at Faye with such wonder and surprise. He was so thin and skeletal. There were red spots on his forehead rubbed raw from scratching and picking. He looked at her like she was a ghost.

  “Daughter?” he said. “What daughter?”

  Which is the kind of thing Faye would have chalked up to battiness if she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t known there might be more to that question than simple confusion.

  “It’s me, Dad,” she said, and she decided to take a risk. “It’s me, Freya.”