Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  Not me, Aziz thought.

  “Pen. Pen. Pen. Pen. Pen. Pen.” A frantic looking Sikh, brandishing a tattered box. Aziz sailed past without glancing at him. Not me, he was thinking. Notme. Notme. Notme. Notme.

  He needed money. American money, that green whose metallic glint all the world panned for among the rainbow frills of other currencies, a green whose monochrome merely amplified the phosphorescent fantasies it had the power to enact. Conjuring green. And here, everyone had it, the hustlers, the hucksters, the toilers, the tourists in bright shorts and visor caps, the men who sold hot dogs on corners—they handed it out in wads, in bouquets, in plain sight. Aziz was finding little methods of siphoning some away, a few dollars from the envelopes of cash that came to the apartment through the auspices of a charity, an occasional ten or twenty from the filling station. Three weeks from now, an overseas wire would arrive at a Canadian bank (where such things were watched less closely), and he was determined to be the one who would drive across the border and retrieve it.

  “Yo, brothermine, what’s yo’ name?” A black with a looping, swaggering prance fell into step beside him. An American, but so excluded from the conspiracy that had enticed these foreigners here that he was forced to lie in wait for them, to prey upon their surprise and confusion and disappointment. “Step this way and behold a thing I guarantee you ain’t never seen the likes of in all your sweet life on earth.” The man’s eyes were bright and antic, desperation dancing just behind the mirth.

  “No thank you,” Aziz said.

  He traversed the dark streets south of the bus station, dark with soot and the shadows of tall buildings blocking the already weak American sunlight, dark with the faces of toilers pulling racks of clothing over soiled, uneven pavement, people too far removed from the conspiracy even to know they were its victims. Aziz trolled for bits of conversation: “The guy was a Froot Loop,” and “I started seeing, like, funny shapes,” and “I gotta go play my mother’s numbers,” words and phrases catching in his mind like burrs—“Too rich for my blood,” and “Knowhamsay?” One word. Aziz whispered it: “Knowhamsay?”

  His next visit was one week later. This time he brought a guidebook with a laminated map attached. Already his English had improved, words begetting words even as he slept, a proliferation that was not unlike the obstinate and furious activity of life itself. For architecture buffs, we’ve rated the city’s treasures on a scale of one to four, with “1” meaning Miss at Your Peril! He was able to read most of the guidebook, though all he really wanted was to identify the different neighborhoods and canvass them. He walked north to the “Upper West Side,” which appeared to be the exclusive domain of children and babies along with their bedraggled mothers or tranquil Caribbean nursemaids. Sidewalks jammed with strollers five abreast, the air moist with phlegmy cries. He fled to Central Park, where the babies had reached adulthood and were exercising their bodies with a rigor that appeared brutal, expiatory. On the “Upper East Side” he emerged into the last phase of this foreshortened life cycle: an abundance of ancient bejeweled ladies crushed into wheelchairs only slightly larger than the prams across the park, pushed by the same Caribbean nursemaids through an embalmed and moneyed silence. It was April; Aziz prowled the streets in his lush beard and immigrant’s garb of obvious synthetics. No one looked at him, and this was convenient; it allowed him to stare at people unhindered, conduct his search for conspirators beneath a mantle of invisibility.

  The soles of his cheap shoes were paper-thin, he felt grains of pavement under his toes. He turned, heading south on Madison Avenue (The window shopper will find much to savor, but the bargain hunter may be disappointed!), when a long black car eased toward a curb, tightening a string around Aziz’s heart. A slight blond woman emerged among a cordon of attendants, her familiar, striking face tipped down, dark glasses sealing off her eyes, the mere intimation of her physical presence impacting everyone within range like lightning stunning a pool full of swimmers. People froze, clutching shopping bags, they turned and strained to glimpse this woman as she slipped with her entourage inside a lavish department store. Aziz followed invisibly in his torn shoes and brown polyester, vaulting through the heavy, parted doors to keep his famous quarry in sight.

  Inside, the intensity of light and perfume and glittering objects made him gasp; he stopped, wavered, stared into a foam of blond hair and brightly painted faces aimed at him like spears. Indoors, he no longer was invisible! He stood, caught in the brightness, caught on the prongs of the women’s stares as a guard approached, a gentle-eyed black in a uniform with gold piping. “Sir, may I help you?” this man began politely, and Aziz bolted back outside, shamed by the piteous spectacle he made even as he knew that it was temporary. Necessary.

  Still, he’d learned something critical: America’s conspirators were no different from overlords elsewhere in the world, encased within bulletproof cars and crusts of bodyguards, all the usual accoutrements of oppression and injustice. Of course you didn’t see them on the street! As Aziz peered through the store windows, the rage that lived inside him like a second beating heart awoke with a jerk that stirred his lower parts, rousing him. Exciting him. Rage and desire were a pair, joined somewhere deep within him. He cut short his search that day, consumed by a need to return to Jersey City and stand behind the blue plastic shower curtain (the bathroom door didn’t close) and masturbate.

  Next time, Charlotte went to the house in daylight. She saw a “FOR RENT” sign in the front window and was instantly lifted away, spirited from inside herself to a safe and padded distance. From there, she watched herself push the front doorbell, which she hadn’t done since that first night when she’d brought him the fish. The sound of the bell clattered through the empty house.

  Still, she pretended not to know, and not knowing lent a drenched, sensuous quality to the next several minutes. She walked behind the house to the back door, overwhelmed by the humid, sour-sweet smell of mown grass, bees panting in the bushes, the air thick with sunshine you could practically eat. And behind it all the eerie chime of locusts.

  The door was unlocked. Charlotte pushed it wide and stepped inside the kitchen. In daytime it was a different room. So light! But airless, too. She went straight to the freezer, found a half-empty box of frozen waffles and felt a lurch of hope. But the refrigerator was bare, a carton of sour milk, dry sandwich meats. No one had been here in days.

  Upstairs, the bed was stripped. On the windowsill sat her fishbowl, empty. He took the fish! Charlotte thought, grasping for some encouragement. Window and screen were wide open, big flies butting at the walls. The kumquat tree had fainted. She carried it into the bathroom and watered it in the sink. Everything looked slightly meager in daylight. She went in his office and opened desk drawers in search of a note, a letter addressed to herself, some explanation that would include her. She felt it in the empty house: an intelligence. Some deeper fold in the mystery. But there was nothing in the desk. She trudged downstairs to the living room and clawed between the cushions of the couch, threw open drawers in the kitchen but found just the same dented cutlery. She looked inside the waffle box. And gradually, the inoculation she’d received outside the house began to fade, and she felt a pull of fear.

  She ran back upstairs to the bedroom and wriggled her fingers under the mattress, slid her palms over the bottom of each dresser drawer, collecting a fine layer of dust on her fingertips. Then she sat on the bed and touched the amber bead at her neck. She took it off and held it. It was real, it was in her hands. But the exotic smell of the leather had faded. Now it smelled like nothing, like herself.

  She was supposed to have been at her uncle’s office twenty minutes ago—the first appointment of their new, twice-weekly summer schedule. She’d written an essay describing the changes to Rockford after World War II: the construction of the Northwest Tollway in 1958, five miles east of downtown, and the subsequent drift of the city in that direction until miles of commercial strip replaced miles of cornfield which in turn
had replaced miles of nine-foot-tall blue prairie grass. She’d detailed the construction of malls, the closure of downtown theaters and vaudeville houses in the 1950s when people started watching TV. Charlotte knew she was late, but she couldn’t seem to move. She was afraid to. As long as she was here in this house, some possibility remained alive. She lay face-down on the bare mattress, listening to the strange, chattering locusts. The furniture industry was dying out because the trees were long gone, even the trees in Wisconsin were depleted … Occasionally she heard a car. The first two times, Charlotte bolted into his office, whose windows faced the street, and each time, she felt some terrible knowledge preparing to lift from her like a page, to peel away, an unhappiness whose full weight she sensed only in those moments of believing she would be freed of it. And then the car would mutter out of sight and the page would fall back down and she would release herself to the suction of that mattress. She wanted to cry, to be consumed by convulsions of innocent grief. My love affair has ended, she baited herself, My boyfriend has left. But her chest stayed dry and tight.

  The sun completed its trip, curtsied, vanished. Shadows crawled inside the room. Charlotte heard people coming home from work, but she no longer jumped to her feet. She imagined her uncle waiting for her at his desk, nervously checking his watch, lifting the shade on his window to peer above the dirt. When two hours had passed, she was relieved to think that her time with her uncle would be finished. He would be home now, or heading home, carrying his Smith-Corona. Bits of speech from other houses flecked the quiet, church bells specked the distance. Charlotte tried to picture Michael West, what he might be doing: driving with the radio on, or else riding a bus, or lying on a bed somewhere, hands behind his head. Or sitting in a park, as he’d been doing when she met him first. His arm in a sling. But she couldn’t imagine any of it. What she saw instead was her uncle traversing State Street, a lone figure weaving stolidly among fenders and hedges.

  At sunset, Charlotte hauled herself outside. She didn’t want to see the house in darkness. She would never see it again, would forget where it was, felt herself forgetting even now. She walked her bike around to the street and got on, then hesitated, standing in front of the house, dogged by a sense that she was leaving something behind. Gently she rested her bike on the curb and went around back. Beneath Michael’s open bedroom window she squatted in the grass, thinking No, even as she teased apart the strands. Don’t. But she kept looking, propelled by some thrust of dread, until she found them—two out of three, anyway. Fish were almost all water, so they dried to practically nothing in the open air. Little husks. Charlotte lifted them out of the grass by their membranous tails, dry and delicate as butterfly wings, amazed that they had always been so small inside their floating veils—nothing really, just seeds, those feather-shaped seeds that twirled from the trees each fall. As she sat in the grass, holding the fish, she felt her memories of Michael West begin to shrink, to dry away, leaving behind a chilly desolation that bore a faint trace of relief. As if some mammoth effort had at last been suspended. She dropped the fish in her shirt pocket and rode away.

  Five weeks after his arrival in America, Aziz unveiled his proposal on a Jersey City pay phone to one of the several puppeteers who believed they were controlling him from afar. If the collective goal was to be seen—to saturate the airwaves with images of devastation that would serve as both a lesson and a warning—why not strike at the famous people themselves? Were they not at the conspiracy’s very heart, its very instruments? If the goal was symbolism, how could leveling a bridge or a tunnel or even the fucking White House (this in English) approach the perfect symmetry of his idea? Thus he argued in a forcible hiss, then lowered his voice as a man his compatriots believed was an FBI informant moseyed toward him through the icy dawn.

  It was an idea, the puppeteer conceded. The main thing was not to act precipitously. Aziz understood his caution—rogues were a serious worry. Witness the World Trade Center fiasco; only seven people dead of the many thousands who worked in those buildings, seven including an unborn child! Structural damage completely underground. In short, nothing to see! Nothing to see but hundreds of people coughing and weeping. Yes, Aziz agreed about rogues and their dangers. And now he cajoled the puppeteer by putting on accents, a Jersey accent, Brooklyn accent, Queens, Haitian, black American; he dangled expressions, A face like a hundred miles of bad road, and I’ll hurt you bad, motherfucker, he donned and doffed voices like silly hats until at last the puppeteer snickered, then laughed outright. And then, with the man’s laughter tickling his eardrums, he broached the topic of who should drive to Canada and collect the money to be wired there.

  Charlotte called her uncle to apologize for the missed appointment. I’m sick, she told him, unable to push the despair from her voice. But her very sorrow seemed, oddly, to enliven Moose, for his voice shook as he assured her, “I understand completely. Completely. Call when you’re ready.”

  At home no one noticed. They were concentrating on Ricky’s one-year bone marrow test, which was later that week. School was out, and Charlotte spent hours on her bike, taking the measure of the strange, empty new world where she lived. She rode in search of people, strangers—anyone. It was hard to find them. They were all in their cars, afloat in air-conditioning. She crossed the river to the west side and rode downtown to the old water power district, that glittering wreck she’d plundered with Moose only weeks before, but she found just various forms of emptiness, parking lots and parking garages, parking ramps, solitary drinkers slumped on benches. Twice she rode past Teeter’s bar, but didn’t go inside.

  The riverfront park was still the most populous place—her old haunt, where children wobbled on training wheels and flabby guys played volleyball on rectangles of orange sand. The water twitched with motor boats and jet skis. She rode north to Shorewood Park and the water-ski jump, then south to the YMCA, her stomach seizing each time she approached it because she half expected to see Michael West sitting cross-legged by the river. His arm in a sling. She craved this—to begin the story again, like re-entering a dream. But it wouldn’t be the same. Something had shifted, broken in her. When she thought of herself a year ago she remembered a girl flush with outsized hopes, a girl who believed the world had made secret arrangements in her favor. Charlotte hated her.

  On a Saturday night six weeks after his arrival, Aziz wedged himself among the others onto the foam-rubber couch and closed his eyes pro-phylactically, shielding himself from the television’s stupefying rays. Then he waited, eyelids fluttering, for anesthesia to befall the rest. When they were fully prone, mouths ajar, eyes crossed, he shimmied out of their midst, slid from the room and broke free of the apartment.

  Across the river, Manhattan glittered like a gold mine.

  At Port Authority, Aziz threaded his way among the desperate stragglers, the drug-baffled wanderers and empty-eyed travelers, then walked straight across Forty-second Street to Fifth Avenue. But the avenue was empty, jewels in windows replaced by photographs of jewels, skinny faceless mannequins semaphoring in linen dresses—empty, empty, newspapers lazing on the air.

  He stood on a corner, debating where to go. By now he had gathered intelligence in all of Manhattan’s neighborhoods except those mired in poverty, where victims of the conspiracy lived. Greenwich Village was home to a handful of conspirators; dank, empty Tribeca housed an even greater concentration. The East Village had practically none, although now and then they visited to buy narcotics. Soho was the hardest to assess; at first, Aziz had believed it consisted solely of famous people, but he’d come to see that its inhabitants were merely sympathizers of fame—they darted from black cars with exactly the feinting, coded motions that famous people used.

  He took the number six train downtown and got off at Spring Street, where the Geiger counter of his anger began to signal instantly. He walked to Broadway, searching out the source of his excitement among the multitudes of young-looking people in black, men with small round glasses, women whose b
elly buttons winked at the warm night; intentionally scruffy people whom he had only recently learned to distinguish from actually scruffy people like himself. Finally he began walking north, then east, guided by a pulse from within the city’s depths.

  He reached a narrow street with a contortion of activity at one end—a crush of taxis, a phalanx of long black cars, a beseeching crowd yearning toward an unmarked door where two bulky blacks and one bulky white were keeping order. He fixed his eyes on the individuals going inside, heartbeat flailing in recognition: There, the famous misbehaving boxer! There, the young actress who resembled Grace Kelly! There, the red-haired girl from the shampoo commercial! They parted the crowd as if it were sea foam lapping at their knees, floated indoors and out of sight. A convocation close enough to touch! He’d stumbled upon them! And although Aziz knew he should regroup to formulate a plan, still he thrust himself invisibly among the throng of seekers, the welter of anxious devotees, unable to stop himself until he’d reached the front of the line and massaged the velvet ropes with his fingertips, ascertaining that no electric current ran through them; they restrained the crowd through sheer symbolism. He hung there, enjoying the beat of his rage, half pleasure, half sickness, until one of the black door guardians confronted him, a tilt of amusement to the man’s face as he flicked his eyes at the chaotic whorls of Aziz’s beard, his synthetic raiments. “You on the list?” he asked (skeptically), and Aziz shook his head, swallowing back his anger, shamed by his own abjectness, so pronounced in this setting, and worse (he realized now) fully erect inside his polyester pants, a fact not lost upon his inquisitor, who shook his head muttering, “Call a doctor, man,” before his eyes shuttered over and Aziz felt himself to dematerialize. And only then did he notice the peculiar din made by other petitioners calling out to this man. “G!” they cried, “Over here—G,” entreating his attention with the urgency of drowning victims begging for flotation. And as Aziz detached himself from this crowd, melting back into the shadowy darkness whence he had emerged, those plaintive cries caught in his ears: “G! … G!”