Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  G.

  Heading south along the river, Charlotte noticed someone waving from a bench. Two people. She had taken to riding without glasses, blurring the emptiness around her into something almost lovely, and now her helpless eyes fumbled at the waving shapes, searching for the outline of Michael West. She braked, sliding the glasses from the collar of her shirt. But by then she knew. It was Ricky and her mother.

  “Wow,” she said, pulling over beside them, weak from that spasm of hope. “Is everything okay?”

  “Ricky thought we’d find you here,” her mother said.

  But Ricky wasn’t talking. Ricky was grinning, arms folded at his chest, big feet nuzzling his skateboard like two hands, sliding it lovingly back and forth across the grass. He was looking at the river and looking at Charlotte, too, from the edges of his eyes.

  “The tests,” she said.

  Now Ricky let his eyes flick in her direction, the grin half breaking his face.

  “And?” Charlotte said. “And?”

  And Ricky grinned, her beautiful little brother grinned like a knife. He looked older. Something in his jaw, his eyes. The proportions of his face. Charlotte noticed this now, for the first time, and it shocked her.

  “Everything came back negative,” Ellen said. “It was absolutely clean.”

  She had said this again and again, silently to herself and aloud with no one in the room. Back and forth with Harris on the phone, both of them silly with the news. “He made it!” and then, “So far.”

  “We made it.”

  “For now.”

  “It’s over.”

  “For the time being, anyway.”

  “I don’t think I realized how awful it was until I knew it was behind us.”

  “At least for now.” Again and again they swapped the roles of exultation and sobriety. Their son was well—for now he was well, and probably forever.

  Across the river, a pink sun nudged the ashy remains of downtown. Ninety percent. Even to Ellen’s pessimistic ear, ninety percent sounded awfully good. As she sat with her children, watching the sun, she thought of Bartholomeu Dias, the Portuguese sea captain whose ship was blown around the Cape of Good Hope by a storm—the first time a European had rounded Africa’s tip. But his crew refused to go on to the Indian Ocean, and it was Vasco da Gama who retraced his steps and reached India and famously subdued it. Eventually Dias died in a shipwreck, sailing for another captain. But he’d done it. Ellen looked at her children: Ricky, who was well, Charlotte, whose heart was broken. It was impossible not to see; Ellen knew the signs too well.

  And always, too, there was an absence, an empty place she was holding with her mind. Moose. An explorer who hadn’t returned, who remained on a strange, distant sea. Ellen could barely keep her brother in sight anymore, but she did, she would forever. As she sat on a bench, her children near enough to touch, the sun in her eyes, Bartholomeu Dias rounding the Cape of Good Hope, she felt something pooling inside her. Peace.

  Ricky went to the river’s edge and began flinging stones at the water. When he found a flat one, he skipped it. “Careful of the water-skiers,” Ellen warned, enjoying the luxury of fretting over something so tiny.

  “I’m not even close, Mom,” Ricky snorted—in the same spirit, she thought—miming with her the gestures of a mother and son with nothing more urgent to think about.

  Ellen moved close to Charlotte, narrowing the space between herself and her daughter. She reached an arm around her shoulders. It was a bold move, and she half expected Charlotte to shake her off. But Charlotte didn’t move—too depressed, Ellen thought, self-mockingly. They sat together in the gaudy sunset.

  Charlotte watched Ricky throw stones, his lithe silhouette against the brown water. Early settlers had written joyous tributes to the Rock River: its leaping fish, its sweet taste. Ricky was well, just as Charlotte had promised him. He was growing up. Soon he wouldn’t need her anymore; she saw this now with a pitiless clarity. At the touch of her mother’s arm she had an impulse to withdraw, hold herself apart; preserve herself for the special fate she had always believed was awaiting her. But that mystery had shrunken away; there were no more shortcuts, no shimmering paths through the darkness. She had made them up. Her uncle’s picture of the Rock River was of no particular spot; Charlotte saw this, now, each time she looked. It could have been taken anywhere along the riverbank.

  She leaned into her mother’s arm and gazed across the river. Old houses, weeping willows. Evidence, Moose had said. Evidence of what? Charlotte narrowed her eyes and tried to imagine today in black and white, pale and shrunken in her hand: this river, this bench, this afternoon in 199-, and for a telescopic instant, she felt how long ago it would all seem one day. The vision shook her, like peering through a crack and glimpsing some alien, furious motion. She opened her eyes, relieved by the brightness around her, the colors of the setting sun, her brother whipping stones across the water’s skin. Her mother’s arm. And something scratched to life in Charlotte, then, as if she had very nearly lost these things. She held them with her eyes.

  The next time Aziz approached the velvet ropes, three more weeks had passed. Colored tulips fringed the streets. He wore a suit designed by Helmut Lang. He was clean-shaven, with short, neatly trimmed hair spiked up slightly from his head, and very small eyeglasses containing yellow-tinted glass (his vision was perfect). He concealed in his hand two crisp hundred-dollar bills, which he palmed to the doorman, along with a business card that read “Z,” with the telephone number of a voicemail box he had rented using cash that very morning.

  “Thank you,” he murmured in a faintly European accent, and floated through the doors.

  He had settled on these details of attire and mien by milling outside the club on a different night each week (excepting Fridays, which he spent at the mosque), standing invisibly, observing in punctilious detail which of the conspirators’ sycophants and admirers were allowed to accompany them inside. He studied clothing, a jacket thrown over an arm, an upturned label above the neckline of a ladies’ dress. He studied haircuts, beard stubble, possession of an earring or lack thereof, shoes, glasses (if any), wristwatches, beepers, cell phones, moneyclips. Neckties were certain doom. He dredged the premises for listless chat and repeated phrases to himself before the bathroom mirror. He filled his pockets with debris from the sidewalk and street: business cards, cigarette butts, a tiny spoon, a hair clip, cards advertising other clubs, two earrings, a nail clipper, three small glassine bags, a ribbed red condom still in its package, a playing card with two phone numbers on it, both of which he called, listening to the style and tone of their outgoing messages.

  Archaeologists were right. You learned the most from people’s garbage.

  To effect these drastic changes in appearance and demeanor without alarming his Jersey City compatriots, Aziz had rented, first, a locker in the Port Authority in which to conceal items of clothing as he acquired them, then a room in an Eighth Avenue hotel (paid for weekly, in cash) whose selling point was its full-length mirror, admittedly speckled with mold, in which he studied and made adjustments to his ensemble. The money had come from the Canadian wire, which he’d depleted by nearly half on the pretext that the puppeteers had instructed him to buy weaponry. But there would come a time—soon, he guessed—when no further explanations would suffice, when he would seize what cash remained and vanish.

  He felt no guilt over this. He’d turned his back on people he owed far more than he did these compatriots, had walked away from people he actually loved, without a backward glance. Again and again. Aziz did everything possible not to think of those people now, the lost loves he’d abandoned for the thrall of his rage, but occasionally a memory would flinch awake and startle him with its slice of pain, a glimpse, a blurred glimpse of some other life he’d once enjoyed. A squall of velvety limbs across a room: his first son, wet from the womb, kicking in sunlight. A boy who would now be fourteen. His tired wife smiling at him from tousled sheets. All this and more he’d g
iven up to fight the conspiracy, and so he had to win. Had to, or these forfeitures would have been for nothing.

  Inside the club, he took several long breaths and looked around through his yellow-tinted glasses. He was pressed among a crowd in what appeared to be a restaurant. Waiters fought through a mob amassed before a spectacular bar, spare, colossal, backlit, crowned with textured squares of something deeply red, while music jerked up from beneath the floor, hijacking his innards. The conspirators were seated beyond the bar at round tables and booths, identifiable by the concentric rings of admirers inclining toward them, and by the noose of scrutiny they dropped around everyone else. The room was filled with hundreds of the most beautiful girls Aziz had ever seen, girls from television, the makeup and shampoo girls all gathered here in such abundance that it was impossible to look at any one without his eyes slipping inadvertently to the next, as if they existed collectively rather than singly: the very medium in which the rest of it was suspended.

  So much beauty in one place made the equivalent of brightness, and Aziz shut his eyes, struggling to organize his impressions. He recognized this place as the referent of every crummy disco in the world, every cinderblock room with colored lights and a mirror ball missing half its chips, every girl with a cheap, shimmery blouse pulled over her scrawny arms, nodding her chin to a synthetic backbeat; Cairo, Mombasa, Beirut—all were concentric ripples of a disturbance generated here, a hunger whose signal had reached virtually every cranny of the earth.

  Still, the basic questions eluded him. Who was in charge? How were the cheap dreams tested to ensure their effectiveness? Was headquarters actually here, or did the plan of subjugation arise from some more remote place? The girls distracted him, glowing like marine life from the phosphorescent reaches of the sea, girls like unicorns, their impossible, faceted faces making him dizzy. How he loathed them. And standing in their midst, Aziz felt the peculiar, dizzying pleasure of hating a thing so purely you’ll do anything to destroy it, anything, a pleasure that was indistinguishable from the wish to be destroyed himself. Consumed.

  As he scanned the room for some articulation of the conspiracy, his eye fell upon a woman he’d already looked at several times, a short-haired brunette who was the same physical type as the other girls, but older. Familiar. He seemed to remember her from years ago—TV, perhaps, some commercial or photograph that had wended its way through the locks and sluices of telecommunication to his remote patch of the world. She seemed to call to him from his own youth, when the conspiracy had worked upon him without his knowledge or consent. Unlike the other girls, who were purely visual phenomena, this one had an air of consciousness. She was seated at a conspirator’s table, but seemed not to act in tandem with the rest. She sipped her cocktail, bracelets sliding down her arm, a chill in her eyes as she surveyed the room, appraising these trappings of her life. She was waiting. And Z smiled, recognizing her.

  He’d met her before, countless times. Every social structure contained such a figure: the disillusioned one who knew the system but no longer cared, no longer believed. Who was waiting. Sometimes money was required to turn such people, but often not; often, attention alone was enough, the appearance of love, or helplessness, or strength. Mystery or straightforwardness. Z recognized her, and in that instant, his hatred and lust and longing to destroy, his regret over all he’d gouged from himself in the process, affixed themselves to this woman with a heave and thrust of connection that obscured the room’s din, an eruption whose radiance blocked every brightness around him. He imagined sinking his teeth into her lovely white arm, pulling off those bracelets and breaking them between his jaws. As he watched her, the woman looked up (had she really, or did he only imagine it as he watched this young, sleeping girl in Rockford, Illinois?), looked up as if alerted, somehow, to the chaos within him, the heaving and crashing. Her eyes sifted among the crowd inevitably toward his own, which Aziz imagined fulminating like stars, and broke there, resting on him very lightly (he leaned over the girl’s sleeping ear, lips almost touching it, and whispered, “Good-bye”), eyeing him with something too mild to be called curiosity as she sat, luxuriating in this tyranny. (“Good-bye,” he said again.) They watched each other for a full twenty seconds, a period so prolonged that Z was relieved when at last the woman’s eyes drifted past him, carrying with them her boredom, her indifference.

  “Good-bye.”

  But of course, Charlotte couldn’t hear him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Pluswhich,” Roselyn told Charlotte, emerging from behind the counter in her little paper hat to mop a swath of Orange Crush from the white linoleum floor, “if you worked here, we could be homies all summer long.”

  “Aren’t we now?”

  Roselyn wielded the mop in silence, letting Charlotte mull that question over for herself. Laurel had gone off to ballet camp for the summer, and no one knew what Sheila was doing. Their quartet had ceased to exist and Charlotte was to blame—in disappearing, she had cut the knot of her friends. Everyone seemed to agree on this.

  Folded into a booth, she tipped her head, watching Roz swab the Crush and then wring the mop into a bucket of inky water. She’d come to TCBY straight from Fish World, where she had worked alone among saltwater and seahorses and starfish and chunks of live coral, interpreting for customers the mute, elastic motions of fish. Gradually, she was breaking the habit of picturing them dead, as they would look after days in the open air. Charlotte handled herself very carefully. She came to TCBY without her glasses, with blusher on her cheeks and eyelashes drooping with mascara; she sluiced her lips with a tube of crimson, strawberry-scented gloss Roz had given her, and in performing these ablutions she unburdened herself of the other Charlotte Hauser, the one the boys from Baxter had despised.

  Often they would appear, these boys, amassing at TCBY before or after jobs in other places: Magic Waters, where a lot of them worked at night manning the water rides, the food court at Cherryvale. They accreted on chairs and tables inadvertently, like ice forming on window-panes; they perched atop their skateboards and kneaded them back and forth across the floor, occasionally cracking one against a wall until the manager shooed them away. At which point they roused themselves and shambled outdoors to skate the handicapped ramp. Charlotte took unexpected comfort in the presence of these boys; they didn’t know about Michael West. They didn’t know, and so he was erased.

  “How can I quit?” she pleaded with Roz. “It’ll take Mrs. Holenhaft so long to train someone else, and she’s already old.”

  “Por favor,” Roz said, nudging the bucket back around the counter with her foot. “For once in your life.” She had a new soft voice, fluttery, tender, a voice that turned her most ribald remarks into sweet, delicate patter. Charlotte hadn’t even known about the operation.

  “For once what?” she said.

  “Be like everybody else?”

  The computerized bell on the glass door tolled the arrival of two guys dragging pockets of heat from outdoors like parachutes. Roz acknowledged their cuteness with a forked glance at Charlotte and a crack of green gum. The yogurt machine shuddered to life.

  Sunlight leaned through the glass door. Charlotte checked her watch. She was meeting her uncle for the first time since the missed appointment two weeks ago, the belated start of their intensive summer schedule. She’d prepared encyclopedically for this encounter, reviewing everything he’d taught her until her brain quivered with facts like a thousand racehorses twitching at a starting line. She wanted to stun Moose, delight and overwhelm him, redeem the missed appointment and all the days she’d spent not thinking about Rockford’s history. She hungered for the jolt of his proximity—the sensation of slipping with Moose through a hidden door into a strange, secret world.

  At the same time, she was anxious—afraid, almost—to see him.

  “I can hold him off maybe one more day,” Roz called from behind the counter, heaping chocolate sprinkles onto spires of yogurt. “Then he’s gonna do the ‘Help Wanted’
thing.” Behind her sweet new voice there was a gap: indifference. She expected Charlotte to refuse.

  “Got it,” Charlotte said, uneasy. She gathered up her books. “I’ll think about it tonight.”

  “Thinking is a good thing,” Roz said.

  Charlotte stepped outside into the heat. Paul Lofgren and Jimmy Prezioso were skating the little flight of steps that lifted from the parking lot to the shops. Charlotte glanced at them quickly and raised a hand hello; she’d become a shy, demure girl in their presence, polite and sweet, asking nothing, deeply tentative without her glasses, fearful of tripping or colliding. And in exchange for this reticence (and the makeup, too, she supposed), the negative charge she had borne had at last been canceled. They waved back at her, easy.

  Away from them, she replaced her glasses and pedaled fiercely up Alpine, facts swarming her mind as she went—crooked bridges, surveyor’s sticks, twenty-four-hour stagecoach to Chicago, horse races over the river in winter before the chemicals stopped it from freezing—

  The campus felt sullen, aquatic, bushy with leaves, vacant of all but an occasional listless summer school student. Charlotte locked her bike on the rack outside the history building. Descending the steps to her uncle’s office, she was mugged by a despondency she hadn’t felt in many days—it emptied her of everything but a wish to lie down and close her eyes. By the time she reached her uncle’s open door, she felt faint.