Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  The dam, the race, paddle wheels turning shafts that ran along the factory ceilings; Moose was comforted, as always, by the thought of mechanical power—its clarity, its simplicity. This pushes that. How far from the vagaries of power today; what did “power” even mean?

  … And once all this was up and running, many more businesses came to Rockford, and it became famous for its manufacturing.

  Moose closed his eyes. She was a sweet girl, his niece, so eager, grabbing at each thing he said like a seal lunging for fish, but what did she do with it? Where did it go in her high school student’s brain?

  “The basis of mechanics, as I think we’ve discussed,” he said, “is the conversion of force …”—he paused for emphasis—“into motion.”

  Charlotte hardly listened. Reading aloud to her uncle, she had at last begun to awaken from the drenching torpor that had befogged her from the moment she’d driven away from Michael West’s house. Exactly seven days ago. Since then, ordinary life had become intolerable, a denial of her link to him in every detail: her blue room, her fish, the garden hose coiled on the patio, her parents across the dinner table—each of these was a stone added to the several she already carried on her head.

  After school, she would ride her bike past his house. Once, she went around back and found a handkerchief-sized lawn, a locked shed, a peeling picnic table. She dragged the picnic table to a window (replacing it precisely afterward, fluffing up the grass she’d crushed), then climbed on top and peered inside the house. Shadows, streaks of sunlight. Almost no furniture. The strangeness of it moved her. Yet Michael West did not feel the bond between them; she was nothing to him. A girl who had cried in his kitchen.

  But here in Moose’s office, the distance between herself and the math teacher began to seem porous, negotiable. Some rhythm she’d felt in his presence was sensible here, too. Charlotte noticed her scalp tightening over her head as she forced herself to listen to her uncle, and then a single phrase—“conversion of force into motion”—latched in her brain. She sat up very straight. Force into motion! It was a matter of forcing Michael West into motion, making him love her as she loved him. The answer was power. Mechanics. Abruptly it made sense.

  “Of course, certain kinds of mechanization had existed for centuries,” Moose was saying. “Water wheels, for example, date to the first century B.C.…”

  “Windmills,” Charlotte muttered, tapping her feet.

  “Very good!” he rejoined, gratified by even this slim show of participation. “And we’ve talked before about mining, one of the earliest industries …”

  She was watching him in that odd, expectant way, and Moose was silenced, enervated by the multitude of steps (millions, too many to ascend, or perhaps he simply lacked the stamina) that gaped between Charlotte’s tentative, familiar observations and even the first faint vibration that precedes sight—the first ghostly penumbra of the vision. I’m waiting for something to happen, she’d told him once, which had excited Moose for perhaps an hour, until he reminded himself that the phrase could mean almost anything.

  “You know,” he said, “my head is aching a little.”

  “I have some aspirin …”

  “No. No thank you.” He held his head and waited for Charlotte to suggest a deferral. This code functioned beautifully among his college students, the most seasoned of whom were so accustomed to Moose’s “headaches” that they took to their feet sometimes at an inadvertent massaging of his brow. But Charlotte held her ground, and Moose sensed—God help him—that she was maintaining her orange plastic chair out of a desire to speak with him about some matter unrelated to the Rockford Water Power Company. And in light of her earlier symptoms of distraction, it seemed possible—nay, likely—that the matter Charlotte wished to discuss with him was personal. God help him! But she was his niece. And his pupil! If she wanted help, he had to help her!

  “What I need,” Moose said, “is a walk. How does that sound to you?”

  He locked his office door and led the way from Meeker Hall into a small wood behind it, dense, deciduous, spiky with half-denuded trees—a mere soupçon of what Rockford (or “Forest City,” as it had once been known) must have looked like in 1852. In the strong, rather bitter wind, shriveled gray leaves clattered from the trees. Moose wore a red scarf Ellen had given him last Christmas. Charlotte crunched behind him on a narrow path, working to assemble the courage to ask his advice.

  At last her uncle paused, and Charlotte turned to him, raising her voice. “Uncle Moose, if a girl loves someone, a—a guy,” she veered away from “man,” at the last second, “how can she make him feel a longing for her?” She had reprised this phrase of Michael West’s so many times that it came out lightly salted with his accent.

  Moose laughed as if he’d been kicked—such generous, delighted laughter that Charlotte couldn’t take offense. “No one’s asked me a question like that in oh, Jesus … how long?” he said, with shining, joyful eyes. “A hundred years, I think.”

  They were standing beside a thicket of saplings, and Moose shoved his way into their midst, holding two trees aside so Charlotte could climb in after him. “Here,” he said, mashing leaves under his black shoes. “Unless I’m wrong, there’s a creek just past here.”

  Her uncle led the way, stamping through dry grass to the edge of—yes—a creek, where shallow water purled around rust-colored rocks and dropped into a dark, still pool. Moose went to the edge and leaned over, peering into the pool. Then he squatted beside it. “As a kid, I used to fish here,” he said.

  “What did you catch?”

  “Minnows.”

  He closed his eyes. Remembering his youth was a vexed experience for Moose; he understood that as a boy he had lived in blindness, but he knew, too, that some pain, an ache that nowadays accompanied him through each minute of his life, was yet absent. When Moose imagined himself as a child, he pictured a boy watching him across a doorway, through a screen, and a bubble of sorrow would break in his chest, as if he were seeing someone who had died or vanished inexplicably, a milk carton child, as if some vital connection between himself and that boy had been lost. And despite all that Moose knew he was achieving now or trying to achieve, still he felt—inexplicably—that he had failed to fulfill the promise of that little boy, and was being visited by his unhappy ghost.

  Ellen, he knew, shared his sense of the broken promise. It was one of many reasons Moose avoided his sister. If two people saw it, did that not make it true, in some sense?

  “Uncle Moose?” Charlotte said. For long minutes he had squatted by the pond watching speckled brown fish jaw the surface, during which she had gone from hoping he was marshaling his thoughts to answer her question, to believing he’d forgotten it, and her, altogether.

  “Yes!” Moose turned, looking up at her with bright, wet eyes. What had they been talking about? He was disconcerted, lost in the pitch and roll of his thoughts … she wanted something, but oh, God, what was it she had asked him? And in his eagerness to know, his guilt over having forgotten, Moose looked carefully at his niece in a way he almost never looked at anyone, searched her face with eyes keenly focused. He saw her: a worried, hopeful girl who looked younger than her real age, breaking a leaf into sections. And for a moment it was Charlotte, not Moose-the-boy, who gazed at him across the threshold of that imaginary door.

  “Follow your desire,” he said, with a force that startled even himself. Surely this would answer whatever it was she had asked; it was the credo of innocence, of blindness—of boyhood happiness without the ache. Moose wanted that happiness for Charlotte. To set her free, he wanted that. To release her into the blind, supple pleasures of ordinary life, a life he could hardly imagine anymore, much less remember. A life he scorned and envied. “You’re young,” he said. “Go enjoy yourself. Grab pleasure wherever you can find it.”

  “But what if people turn against me?” she said, standing very near him under the trees. “What if they laugh?”

  “Then leave them behind,�
�� Moose said, rising to his feet. “Don’t let them shame you; shame is the world trying to break you, and you have to resist! You have to resist!” His own words galvanized him, and he surged on. “Don’t look at yourself through their eyes—don’t. Or they will have won, because …” He paused, then lunged forward, vertiginously. “… Because we are what we see.”

  It was the first time Moose had spoken these words to another human being. He had imagined it happening differently, a grand pedagogical denouement. No matter. Here, too, they would serve.

  He felt a sudden peace. We are what we see.

  Charlotte was staring up at him. In her look Moose saw the faces of his students at rare times when a swell of emotion still took him in class, energy coursing from his fingers, the top of his head. He would feel their attention tighten around him and experience a whiff of euphoria, an old, half-forgotten pleasure from a time when he was someone else.

  “Follow my desire,” Charlotte said. “That’s what you think?”

  “Wherever it may lead.”

  Moose let her go, opening his hands in the cold fall air, releasing her into the world, the blind, peaceable world where he no longer seemed to have a place. “You have nothing to fear,” he said, “nothing.” Then added, “It’s your only chance at happiness.”

  Michael West stood inside a house of white brick, a modern-looking house whose whiteness brought to mind whitewashed houses on a cliff. He closed his eyes and breathed the memory: white walls, a sea pale as milk, wind that left on the skin the finest layer of salt. He allowed himself one memory each day, and did not permit it to evolve beyond the immediate senses. He almost never remembered people. He believed he could make himself remember nothing, if he chose, but believed, too, that things suppressed entirely had the power, in some cases, to explode.

  “Can I get you another drink?”

  It was Mindy Anderson, mistress of this white house where the annual Parent-Teacher Cocktail was taking place. A thin woman with a long nose and wispy blond hair. She was terribly concerned about his happiness.

  “Yes, please,” Michael said. “Another beer would be great.”

  Since his arrival in Rockford, he had begun for the first time to drink alcohol, and he was blown away by the sheer pleasure of being slightly drunk. The floating sensation alcohol induced, the belief that one could do anything; how well matched these sensations were to his present gigantic surroundings—houses like ships, supermarkets bigger than the biggest mosques, vegetables, mailboxes, all enlarged beyond belief, to the point of comedy. Miles and miles of parking lot. You could build a city in the forgotten spaces between things. Being drunk made him feel more American.

  A couple approached, the woman large in the way that couches and refrigerators were large, dressed in a loose floral pantsuit that hopped around her like a collection of eager pets. “Someone told me you’re Mr. West,” she said in a tone that made him long to say she was mistaken. “My daughter, Lori Haft, she’s in your algebra class.”

  Now the husband pitched forward and introduced himself, a big man who wheezed a little when he breathed.

  “Lori, yes,” Michael said. A girl with golden hair and long thin legs like tusks. Could this truly be her mother?

  “I’m concerned about her grades,” she said, narrowing her eyes. Her hair was short, cut close to the head. Michael felt a pulse of anxiety. He knew this woman: the fool who sees everything. She had dogged him throughout his life, though more often she appeared as a man.

  “Please. Tell me your concerns, Mrs. Haft.”

  “Well, she studies like mad, but she says you don’t give her any idea what’s important. She doesn’t understand you.” Her eyes crackled with suspicion.

  Any threat, even a small one, like this, induced in Michael West a calm that was almost like sleep. “I feel that I’m being quite clear,” he said. “But perhaps not enough.”

  “Perhaps,” she said with faint mockery, as if the very word proved her point.

  “If she will meet with me after class, I’ll review with her what is important.”

  “Really? You’d really do that?” There, a relaxation. She was selfish, finally; selfish above all else. Nearly everyone was.

  “If Lori takes the initiative, I will be available.”

  “Abby Reece says you’re from California,” said the woman. “But you sound foreign.”

  Mentally, he cursed her. His accent was so slight, as long as he avoided words he hadn’t practiced. Soon it would be nonexistent. Of course, he hadn’t yet developed an individual voice; his phrasing and diction were copied from TV and the people around him. His grammar was cautious, studied. But eventually a voice, too, would come. It always did.

  “I’ve lived abroad for many years,” he said.

  “Where is it you’re from exactly?”

  “Smithton. It’s near L.A.,” he said, and then, as if she might not understand, “Los Angeles.”

  Of course, an evasion like this would be pointless elsewhere in the world; people identified one another by dialect, family, accent. But in America, there was always someplace else. And Michael West had a gift for languages and accents—more than a gift, he could not resist them. They acted upon him like magnetic fields, unmooring his speech from the landscape of his own past and reconfiguring it in the image of his immediate surroundings. Accents were history; an accent declared I come from someplace else. But for Michael West, the past was gone, pulverized into grains of memory too fine to decipher, or to leave him with any sense of loss.

  “And where is it you spent all those years abroad? Mexico?”

  He had a sensuous fantasy of seizing her proud, bloated head and pushing his gun into the loose underside of her chin, watching her expression collapse into fear so abject it looked like tenderness. “France,” he told her, squashing the ‘a’ so flat that it broke in half and occupied most of the word. You want America, there it is, he was thinking.

  Mercifully, another woman who was friendly with this one came along, and Michael was released. He went to the window and gazed outside at the odd arrangement of lawns: one of short green grass, a second of long dry brown grass. They met behind the house in a line. He closed his eyes, releasing himself to the exhaustion that had consumed him ever since his arrival in Rockford, Illinois. Each night, he anticipated sleep like a meal.

  “We’re thinking of doing the whole thing prairie.” Mindy Anderson, at his side once again.

  “Prairie?” It was not a word he knew.

  “See, we did this patch as an experiment,” she was gesturing at the brown half of the lawn. “I think George thought it would be too wild, but I love it. Of course, it’s half-dead now.”

  “How does it work?” He asked the question tentatively, always reluctant to acknowledge the vast dark spaces in his knowledge. But instinct told him that this discussion concerned fashion, not substance, that not knowing was all right.

  “Well, they have the basic mix of grasses. Then you pick one of the Wildflower Moods. I picked ‘Rainbow,’ you should’ve seen it in the spring and summer, it was every color you can imagine, but subtle, too, like—like real wildflowers in a field. Oh, shoot, people are leaving. Excuse me.”

  Good, he thought, people were going home. Soon he could sleep. Prairie. Prairie was grass, wild grass that was fashionable for lawns. “We’re doing the whole thing prairie,” she’d said. Doing prairie. Softly he murmured, “Have you ever thought about doing prairie?” But no, the stress was wrong, the grammar too formal. The sentence had to lean. “You ever thought about doing prairie? You ever thought of doing—”

  “Don’t talk to yourself. Talk to me.”

  It was Abby, smiling. Abby Reece, an English teacher whose wavy dark hair was faintly streaked with gray. Her eyes, too, were gray, wide and thoughtful and easily hurt. Four times, Michael West had taken her to dinner. The last was two nights ago, and they had seen a movie—his first in many years. He had gone to the theater the day before to observe the process: ticketin
g and concessions, restrooms, seats; the less he knew, the more conversancy he required to be at ease. And when he returned to the theater, with Abby, it had all been familiar, like second nature. The movie concerned a doctor who begins to think that his patients are animals. Pigs and sheep lay in hospital beds. Michael hardly knew what to say about it afterwards, but this seemed not to matter. “Yuck,” Abby proclaimed, and they had returned to her house and lain on her metallic blue bedspread and had sex—his first time in some months—while her children slept. Afterward, while they drank tea in Abby’s kitchen, the children had appeared, two of them, like little ghosts. Michael hadn’t seen them before; Abby didn’t want him to. They were very small. In their presence, he felt the stirring of a memory, which he snuffed. Abby hustled the children away. “I’m sorry,” she’d said at the door, as he was leaving. “They almost always sleep through the night.”

  Abby Reece brought with her a life; her small house, her two children and slender gray cat, her collection of antique dolls with china heads. It could become Michael’s life, too—overnight, the way restaurants appeared on State Street fully formed, assembled from plastic parts that arrived in long boxes stacked on trucks. He had driven to these building sites in the middle of the night and watched the crews at work. Each part was numbered. Even banks could be built in this way. The indoor music, he’d learned, was beamed down by satellite to all incarnations of a particular store or restaurant, so that in New York and Atlanta or Los Angeles, the same song would always be playing. “I say we blow this pop stand,” Abby said.

  “Sure,” he said, dissatisfied by the way the word caught on his teeth. Sure.

  Good-bye, good-bye. So very nice. He shook hands with the host, a rich jowly man whose five children were either students at Baxter now or had been once. “Such beautiful art,” Michael said, eyeing the smears upon the walls that looked like shit, or snot.

  “We’re glad you’re here and we hope you’ll stay,” the host said jovially.

  “Thank you,” Michael said.