Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “I liked her better.”

  “Then find someone else to play her,” she said, standing up. “I’m done.”

  “Go,” I shouted. “Take the apartment. Take the couch. Is there one fucking thing I have left? Take that, too.” I knew I wasn’t making sense. I felt on the verge of passing out.

  I stormed into my bedroom and flung myself on the bed, facedown. The room was dark. I heard buzzing in my head. There were certain fights I’d enjoyed in the course of my life, riotous collisions and clamorous dissolutions, but this one felt sickening. A loss I couldn’t afford. After a few minutes, Irene came in. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said in a tight voice, from somewhere to my right.

  “Hurt me,” I snorted.

  “Well, disillusioned you.”

  “This happened long ago.”

  “I’m sorry I’m not the person you thought,” she said sadly. “I have a feeling I used to be.”

  “I’m sorry I believed you,” I muttered.

  There was a long silence, so long that I wondered if Irene was still in the room, or had left. I wasn’t going to look.

  “Anyway, there are a million reasons not to do this thing,” she finally said. “Now it’s a million and one.”

  I opened my eyes just as her silhouette vacated the doorway. I heard her gathering up her belongings as if she were doing it inside my skull—jacket, bag, notebook—footsteps whispering on the carpet toward the door, whose many locks she unfastened effortlessly now. She checked it after it closed, making sure the lock had engaged.

  I lay there a long time, such a long time that when I finally sat up, I felt the imprint of the bedspread on my cheek. Irene was right, whoever she was—we were more alike than I could have believed. She had done exactly what I would have done in her place, and I was stunned by what a bitter, almost intolerable disappointment this was. I didn’t want Irene to be like me. I wanted her to have the qualities I no longer had—perhaps had never had—so that in her company, I would have them, too.

  I called her. In fact, I called her even before the lumbering crosstown bus she took to the West Side, where she lived, had delivered her home. Her husband answered the phone. We had never spoken.

  “Charlotte?” he said in an anxious, threadbare voice when I asked for Irene. “Isn’t she with you?”

  In the midst of explaining myself, my other line beeped. It was Halliday. “Charlotte—” he began.

  I hung up without saying hello.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Up there?” Charlotte asked, squinting through her rain-spattered glasses north along the river and teasing into focus, among the vectors of railroad bridges, a sheet of falling water. The dam. It looked like the skin of a bubble. “That’s it, right?”

  Moose nodded, standing close to her in his orange plastic rain poncho. “Built when?”

  “Eighteen fifty-three.”

  “By … ?”

  “The Water Power Company.”

  “One of the first companies to use it?”

  “Clark and Utter.”

  “Their most famous product?”

  “The Manny reaper.”

  Satisfied, Moose lunged into a brawl of wind that rousted his poncho halfway over his head, bounding north along the slippery riverbank with an urgency Charlotte noticed more and more often in him as the weeks passed. It was April, late afternoon. She fought to keep up with him.

  Near the Morgan Street bridge, a factory building was still in use, two workmen in blue jumpsuits avoiding the rain in a doorway. The men flicked their eyes from Moose to Charlotte in a way that pleased her. She was flattered when people mistook them for a couple; it helped to redeem the fact that she could never be seen with Michael West. Two weeks ago, she had gone to Baxter pretending to look for her friends, but really to see him—see what would happen when they met in daylight, in that familiar place. She’d walked the halls until she glimpsed him in a classroom, talking with two younger boys at his desk. She stood in the doorway and waited for them to finish. If he smiles, then he. Michael had looked past the boys, turning on Charlotte a cool, stranger’s face. “Can I help you with something?” he asked, his voice so persuasively that of a teacher she had never seen before that Charlotte froze, disoriented, wondering if she knew him after all. “No,” she said, and left the school shaken, without even finding her friends, whom she hadn’t seen in many weeks.

  He never mentioned the incident, nor did she.

  Her uncle stamped onto a soggy spit of pebbles and mud thrust out among the brothy waves of the Rock River. He pointed left at Kent Creek, a snaking, muscular arm that parted the land, then angled out of sight. “You know what that is …”

  “Of course I know,” Charlotte said, but withheld the information, teasing.

  Moose grinned at her. Rain dripped from his longish hair into his wet brown eyes and back out again, coursing like tears through the stubble of his beard. “Oh, yes?”

  “Yes!”

  “Would you care to, as they say, back that up?”

  “Midway,” she said. That was the name Germanicus Kent had chosen for his settlement in 1834, because it was midway between Chicago and Galena.

  “Keep it coming,” Moose said.

  “Lewis.” That was Kent’s slave, a man who had followed him north and earned his freedom after four and a half years.

  “You’re getting there.”

  “Eighteen thirty-eight.” The year Kent built his sawmill—Rockford’s first industry—in the woods along the creek, just yards from where they were standing.

  “Bingo,” Moose said.

  Of course, what surrounded them now were not woods or sawmill but abandoned factory buildings and empty lots, weeds erupting from fissured pavement, idle smokestacks, piles of old garbage and rotting tires and occasional desultory human workers in tall black boots. The old Water Power District, on the west side of the river just south of downtown, where Clark and Utter had made a foundry, where John Manny built his reapers, where threshing machines and wood lathes and drill presses and gas stoves and socks and paper and paint and pianos had all been manufactured at one time or another. Last spring, Charlotte had sat on this same section of riverbank, drinking Old Styles with Roselyn and some guys from school. Then it had seemed a blank, empty place: no place. This was hard to remember, now, so dense were her surroundings with clues and artifacts, winking from every direction like ore in a mine. There was a kind of thrill in just standing in a place she had seen so many times on her uncle’s maps.

  “So over there is where the millrace was.” She pointed north across the creek to an area that was now mostly parking lot.

  “Exactly,” Moose said.

  “And right on the corner there was the Central Furniture Company, founded in eighteen seventy-seven—”

  “Good!” Moose interjected with surprise.

  “—by E. R. Herrick and L. D. Upson—”

  “Very good!”

  “—after Upson’s other furniture plant burned down.”

  “Excellent!” Moose cried, and favored Charlotte with a look that was purely her own; fond, sweet, a look she began to pander for when she hadn’t received it in a while.

  It was easy. Her mind trapped information and held it—she had always been that way. She knew more about Rockford’s history than she did about tropical fish; facts itched in her mind, looking for ways to be said. Their meaning was secondary, sometimes altogether absent; history was the idiom she and her uncle could speak. They joked and teased each other in history; they sparred, snapping it back and forth, or else let facts float between them desultorily, like sweet nothings. Moose challenged her, poking factual questions as if Charlotte’s mind might have wandered (which often it had), and she reassured him with facts applied gently, soothingly. For Charlotte, it was like entering a state of hypnosis. At times she had trouble switching from the language of history to the language of everyone else.

  “Let’s backtrack,” Moose said, and led the way onto Morgan St
reet. The Illinois Central tracks sliced through it at an angle, one of four lines that still bisected Rockford, stopping occasionally to pick up freight. “We can follow these right to the old depot,” he declared, and charged between the rails.

  Moose was thriving, kinetic, infused with a new vitality that made him seem in a state of constant great haste. Charlotte had trouble remembering the man who had flopped at his desk looking pained and half asleep as she read to him. Now he paced, he stalked, sometimes marching from his office and continuing his declamations from the basement hallway at a shout. Or he and Charlotte went out, canvassing the dregs of Rockford’s past like detectives: the old Swedish neighborhood on the east side of the river around Kishwaukee Street; the Esterline Whitney factory, one of the last machine tool factories still active in Rockford. The Industrial Hall at Midway Village, where Moose had narrated for Charlotte a tour of Rockford’s industrial products with such booming authority that the entire population of the hall (namely, four visitors from Des Moines and two from Cincinnati) politely asked if they, too, might join.

  Each Friday, when she appeared on his doorstep (she’d been coming on a weekly basis since January), a kind of stunned happiness would float across her uncle’s face, and Charlotte would feel a pulse of anticipation that made her head ache. Eventually Moose would reveal something to her, she felt this keenly: the solution to the deepest mystery of all, which had nothing to do with Rockford. The mystery of himself.

  Her uncle hounded the tracks onto Main Street, crossed the bridge over Kent Creek and hurried to the old railroad depot, abandoned now, surrounded by cyclone fencing, windows either boarded or broken, ringed with icicles of glass. “Northern Illinois Central Freight Station” was still faintly visible on its yellow brick.

  “Trains changed the shape of ladies’ skirts from hoops to bustles,” Charlotte said, by way of conversation, “so they could get down the aisles more easily.”

  Moose murmured in reply, “At one point, twenty-three passenger trains stopped in Rockford every day.”

  He glanced at Charlotte in a knowing, particular way, as if alluding to a shared understanding between them so axiomatic that she couldn’t bring herself to ask what exactly he thought she understood. Charlotte did her best to return the look. She hated disappointing him.

  “Did you ever catch a train here?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, and pointed through the cyclone fence at a more modern structure, also vacant, closer to the tracks. “That was the passenger depot.”

  His mind pitched into memory: rocking over the railroad bridge and Grape Island, spying into people’s backyards at their flailing laundry; bolting through crossings where the same group of children seemed always to wait astride bicycles, waving. But Moose wasn’t going to talk about this. He had to be careful—Charlotte would always try to make it personal. It was the reigning habit of mind in this land without history, this era when all relationships of time and space, of cause and effect, had been obliterated by the touch of a key. And so people were adrift, lacking any context by which to orient themselves, seeking to fill the breach with personal history, that diminutive, myopic substitute.

  “Did you go with your mom and dad?” she asked. “On the train to Chicago?”

  “Just my dad,” Moose said.

  Those long-anticipated visits! The University Club, on Michigan Avenue—first a swim in the ancient pool, where chlorine fumes lazed like ether from the milky water, where yellowish old men swam their laps, mouths agape at each breath. And afterward, lunch with his father in the wood-paneled dining room, Moose’s eyes foggy from the chlorine, the silver heavy and cold in his hands. Raspberries for dessert, raspberries served in a silver bowl over ice shaped like scrabble pieces.

  But he wasn’t going to talk about this. Or think about it. His mind was fuddled from lack of sleep. An old problem, resurgent in recent weeks: lying awake, counting Priscilla’s breaths, or else pacing a living room blanched by moonlight. Some nights he left his apartment and walked along State Street for miles, trudging east through vast empty superstore parking lots toward the interstate (the older parts of town were dangerous at night); walking without sidewalks to walk on, his clothes and hair suctioned to him by the backdraft of passing twenty-four-wheelers. Since January—nearly four months, now—Charlotte had teetered on the brink of sight. And as Moose waited for her to slip, tip, tumble irrevocably into the chasm of comprehension, the vision’s maelstrom, his eagerness had come to eclipse nearly everything else.

  Meanwhile he was talking, feeding his niece facts about this particular railroad line: “Illinois Northern and Central … first reached Rock-ford August fifth, eighteen eighty-eight, after a series of skirmishes known as the Railway Wars … first cargo was a load of yarn from Georgia headed for the Nelson Knitting Company … watermelons from Texas …”

  The old tracks ramified into the distance with a thready shimmer that was not unlike the gleam of circuitry—odd how they looked the same. Moose’s distrust of a world remade by circuitry brought a corollary nostalgia for trains; their noise; their visibility; their physical existence. Again and again he spoke to Charlotte of things, watermelons and grain and cattle and string, reaper-mowers and harvester combines, chisel mortisers and scroll saws and flue stops and piston rings and grain elevators. Objects existing in time and space. But things had lost their allure generations ago, shunted off to countries where people would make them for less. And information was the inversion of a thing; without shape or location or component parts. Without context. Not history but personal history. Charlotte hadn’t seen this yet, Moose knew. She was too happy.

  Flushed, smiling up at him in her bright yellow rain slicker. Kicking stones. And oh, the grind of impatience he felt—an old, dormant anger that had a shivery boil to it, like sinking his teeth into wood, or ice, or aluminum foil. He had reached a point in his life, he’d told Priscilla last night over chicken pot pies (his wife listening with a look of worry that annoyed him), when he no longer could wait. He’d been too passive since the incident at Yale, too accepting of the limitations imposed on him! Yes, he’d imperiled the lives of twenty-four undergraduates plus himself: a methodological catastrophe, Moose was the first to admit. But his method had improved—witness Charlotte! So close, so very close! And so now the time had come to accelerate.

  “Uncle Moose,” Charlotte said.

  “Yes!” She was shivering in the heavy rainfall. Not kicking the stone anymore, which was something. “Yes, let’s keep moving.”

  They walked north along Main Street—once the prime artery of Rockford life, now an empty thoroughfare lined with parking garages and parking ramps. Cold rain had eked its way inside the neck of Charlotte’s raincoat, her jeans were caked to her legs. Ahead she noticed a seedy-looking bar, a worn-out Old Style sign suspended above its door. She wished Moose would take her there.

  But her uncle had veered into a vacant parking lot, sections of old brick grinning up from beneath its retracting asphalt. He was loping toward the river’s edge. They were north of the dam; Charlotte heard the giddy plummeting crush of its waterfall. And suddenly she was tired, drained by her uncle’s relentless stamina. Tired and a little defeated.

  “Come on,” he called to her through the rain. “From here we can look right over the dam …” He was heading along a wispy trail into desiccated shrubbery, branches festooned with garbage, a child’s soiled undershirt—the sort of place where you found people dead. And a wall of stubbornness came down in Charlotte.

  “Uncle Moose,” she called to him, folding her arms. “I’m cold.”

  Moose turned, saw that his niece was not behind him and backtracked through rotting foliage. She peered at him, glasses fogged, arms crossed. Resisting him. And Moose was disconcerted by a paroxysm of impatience with his niece that was very nearly rage, a ruthless, bodily urge to crush her innocence. Sweep it away. The feeling stunned him. No, he thought, no. He wanted to save her—save her from the blindness of the world. And
now he was beset by the obverse of his rage, an urge to sweep Charlotte into his arms and cleave to her, fend off those who might wish her harm.

  “You’re cold, you’re cold. Of course,” he said, returning to her side. “Let’s go somewhere warm, let’s find a place …” Shaken, half dizzy from the force of what had just transpired within him.

  Charlotte pointed at the bar.

  Her uncle’s disappointment made a weight between them as they walked, and she was sorry; she hated not to please him. “Gas lights came to Rockford in eighteen fifty-seven,” she offered, but he was too distracted to reply. “Telephones in eighteen-eighty. And the first electric streetcar company in eighteen-eighty also.”

  Finally he turned to her. “Telegraphs?”

  “Eighteen forty-eight. And the phonograph in eighteen seventy-seven.”

  “Standard Time?” She sensed him beginning to relent.

  “Eighteen eighty-three,” Charlotte said, with passionate relief, “because of the railroads. Because before, if you went from the East Coast to the West Coast, you had to change your watch two hundred times.”

  “So you did,” Moose murmured, still unnerved by that seizure of rage. It wasn’t his; he disowned it. “You did indeed.”

  Compared with the emptiness of the streets, the room was thick with life. Perhaps two dozen workmen in blue jumpsuits milled at a broad humid bar, heads tipped at a White Sox game unfolding someplace sunny on an overhead TV. Charlotte’s entrance with Moose made a ripple of awareness. Her uncle stood inside the door, squeezing rain from his hair and rolling his poncho into a slobbering orange ball.

  “Moose,” the bartender said. He was a stringy man with thinning hair, a blond mustache, and a slight concavity to his face—a suggestion of missing teeth. “Long time.”

  For several perilous moments, Moose looked at the speaker without recognition. Then he said, “Teeter” (to Charlotte’s relief), and smiled uncertainly. “How odd to see you here.”

  “Odd?” Teeter ejected the word like a seed. “Been here fourteen years come June. I’m part-owner now.”