Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “How you guys doing?” he asked, with anxious friendliness. “You feeling okay? You want to take a break? It’s pretty hot out …” But Mike and Ed were fine, they said, just fine. Dirt shot off their shovels and sweat veered among the exotic tributaries of their faces.

  Irene returned with sandwiches and sodas and potato salad, which she arranged in the open back of the film crew’s van. This makeshift buffet, along with a few curious spectators who had joined our ranks (friends of the farmer and his children) began to make our escapade feel like a real shoot. As we ate, sitting cross-legged along the edges of the cornfield, swatting flies, Grace’s car turned off the interstate and bobbled up the dirt road, rousing clouds of dust. Halfway up, she stopped, and Pammy and Allison got out along with Allison’s new boyfriend, a youth whose startling beauty brought us briefly to a standstill.

  “Who the hell is that kid?” Thomas asked me, nearly choking on his tuna sandwich.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I mean, he’s a local kid. He spends hours on the phone with my niece.”

  “What a face,” Thomas said. “He’s a star, look at him. Look at that face!”

  The teenagers trudged up the road, the boy awash in those same baggy pants I’d seen on kids in New York, clutching a skateboard under his arm. With perverse anticipation, I awaited what I knew was coming next:

  “We’ve got to find a way to work him in,” Thomas muttered.

  “I don’t really see how.”

  But already Thomas was up and away, sandwich abandoned to the dust, hightailing it over to Irene (eating a BLT alone inside the Grand Am, talking on her cell phone), whose job it had become to grant his wishes.

  I rose to greet the kids. With touching formality Allison introduced me to the boy, whose name was Ricky. He grinned as I shook his spindly hand—a sweet, irrepressible grin that he yanked away a moment later and folded inside an origami of teenage caginess. He was olive-skinned, with bright dark eyes set wide apart, white teeth inside a broad, mischievous mouth. Yet his beauty was irrespective of these features; it was more, somehow, ineffable. In the middle of a cornfield, a drop of beauty had landed. And despite all that I knew, I could not help feeling that this boy was numinous, an articulation of some deep wonder that would fill his life. He wandered off with the girls, then mounted his skateboard and leapt in the air, kicking the board from underneath him in an apparent effort to perform some trick. He landed on his knees in the dirt, waving that grin like a flag.

  I went back to the Grand Am and kept reading.

  53

  We drove—I drove—into the next day and through it. Occasionally we paused for food. Never at McDonald’s, though. Z refused.

  As the hours wore on, I got tired. Then more tired. Then catatonic. But something made me put off stopping. The mood of expectation was delicious. It tingled between us all the way through Pennsylvania.

  Finally, an hour after we crossed the line into Ohio, we stopped at a motel. In the weak, dusty daylight, we slept.

  I woke three hours later. I turned on my side and watched Z sleep. His stern, gaunt face.

  “Who are you?” I whispered. “Who is Z?”

  The world felt right. The miles of highway, the trucks howling past. Scraps of voices from the parking lot outside our window. A child crying, an engine thrumming to life. “Honey, is Angie’s Ponzy doll in the back seat?” Step step step.

  I couldn’t see these people. Just a shin, a hand between the blinds. Within minutes they would be gone. Off to live out their lives.

  I was smiling.

  Then Z woke. Flinched awake, eyes grabbing at the walls. “Hey,” I said. “It’s okay.” I touched his shoulder.

  He stared at my face. Through it. Then he sprang from the bed and stood naked. Slim, tense. The cheap, drab room all around us.

  “Hey,” I said. “Relax.”

  Moose rolled into Chicago reluctantly, before the pleasures of driving had nearly been exhausted. If only it were farther away! He had considered staying on I-90, but while the thought of continued driving was viscerally appealing, the thought of doing so without any clear destination made him profoundly uneasy. So he exited I-90 onto Belmont and soon found himself surrounded by Chicago’s achingly familiar outskirts, a crowd of old friends he hadn’t seen in years: flattish limestone buildings the same yellow as castles, cast-iron bridges crawling across overpasses. Young black kids in the street—Chicago!

  Ah, the lake! Moose’s heart stretched inside his chest at the sight of it, the beautiful smiling lake encircled by a necklace of the most exquisite high-rise buildings he’d ever seen, some long and slender as spinal cords, others gleaming coolly behind gray-blue Bauhaus glass. Moose was hurtling south on Lake Shore Drive, grooving to the Stones’ “Miss You,” full of mission, full of purpose, Jesus it was hot, like the bready exhalation from inside an oven door. “Ah ah ah ah ahahah. Ah ah ah ah ahahah,” he mooed along with Mick. It was 3:00 P.M., the lake flecked with boats.

  He exited the drive onto Michigan Avenue and drove past the old yellow water tower that had survived the fire of 1871, anticipation roiling within him as he approached the Chicago River, that sulky waterway whose opening had continually filled with sand in Chicago’s early days and had to be dug out; a river that had flooded each spring, along with much of the city, until eventually Chicago raised its streets by as much as fourteen feet. And of course the old railroad lines, depots where the first grain elevators were built—Moose felt himself borne aloft by a nearly unbearable excitement at the thought of spending the day exploring these relics, basking in their gritty afterglow, and yet, even as his station wagon hurtled into the Loop, toward the University Club and its rattle of silver and stooped, elderly waiters who had worked there more than half their lives, even as he ploughed toward raspberries and defunct slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants now refurbished as riverview lofts, an exhaustion overcame Moose without warning, as if he’d already done and seen it all too many times. The railroads, the raspberries. Enough.

  Moose passed over the Chicago River, rumbling metal under his tires. A column of greenish water, old stone skyscrapers, the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, and then they were gone and he was riding into the dark, shady Loop toward the Art Institute. He made a sudden left into Grant Park. Something had shifted in his mood, he was slipping, falling, sliding, but it wasn’t the icy current so much as this exhaustion augmented by the feverish activity of the park itself: picnic blankets, children, grass, Buckingham Fountain with its trumpets of water, Jesus get me out of here, Moose thought, finally easing onto Lake Shore Drive and turning around, heading north, back in the direction he’d come from, fleeing the Loop, where he had arrived only minutes ago in triumph.

  The icy current had wrapped one tendril around his ankle, and Moose accelerated to escape it. Time to get out of the car. He could go to Fuller-ton Beach. And the memory of it—perhaps twenty visits to Fullerton Beach stretched over his lifetime—assailed Moose in one dense pellet of sensation: hot dogs, Milk Duds, fishy sand dappled with cigarette butts, the roar of children—gone, he’d bypassed that enjambment of sensation along with the beach itself. Now he imagined turning off Lake Shore Drive and heading west into Old Town, and was bombarded with another compressed anthology: burning charcoal, ivy shivering over brick, the laughter of girls, that sweet, colored juice that came inside shapes made of wax—gone. But leaving a mark, a dent. Like the apple bruising Kafka’s beetle, each of these pellets of recollection lodged in Moose’s flesh, releasing its cargo of memories of all the things he had lost—

  “Not lost! Gained!” Moose thundered aloud, but now, mercifully, that debate (lost or gained?) was supplanted in his mind by the proximity of Belmont Harbor and the yacht club. Yes, this was the place; Moose eased the station wagon into a parking space, desperate to free himself of its chassis, whose sole purpose, it now seemed, was to hold him still so that these bullets of memory could assault him, enter his flesh and release their shrapnel of foolish and unrelia
ble nostalgia.

  He didn’t even lock the car, so glad was he to be rid of it.

  Hoofing it north alongside Belmont Harbor toward the totem pole, however, was not exactly a cure for reminiscence. The heaviness of the trees, the smell of them, the tint of paint in the playgrounds, the phrix of wind over the lake, all of these transported Moose directly to childhood, visits to the city with his father that he’d anticipated days in advance. A quiet, distinguished man, his father, the sort of man who counted out his change to make sure he hadn’t been given too much, a man with hands like catchers’ mitts, big and warm and soft. But something strange had happened—now Moose’s own hands had grown enormous and clownish, and the little boy who had held his father’s hand was gone, swallowed by this mass of Moose’s present self. So intense was his memory of that boy that it seemed to him now that they were walking side by side—Moose and Moose the boy—walking together past the gleaming white fiberglass hulls, Moose holding the boy’s hand in his own mitt-sized hand.

  “Come on, let’s go to the water, let’s look at the lake,” he found himself saying aloud to this boy, coaxing him, trying to win his happiness the way one courts the fickle pleasures of children. “This way,” he said gently, wheedlingly, rallyingly, and they walked, Moose and his diminutive companion, around the edge of Belmont Harbor, past the totem pole, up toward the bird sanctuary and then to the edge of the lake, the great flickering oceanic lake that could look milky and tropical in sunlight (as now) or greenish-gray beneath clouds, that during storms could rage in tones of purple-black. And Moose finally did what he’d been longing to do: climbed over the seawall and perched on a cube of concrete with the boy beside him, that mischievous boy he had been, that happy, blind boy, looking out at the sunlight striking the lake with sparks, listening to sounds of locusts although there were none, they had ended with the cornfields. Clicking noises, amoebic phantoms waving their tentacles from the sky; Moose observed these phenomena, which he recognized as hallucinations induced by the excited state of his thoughts, observed them in part to avoid looking at Moose-the-boy, who was watching him. Moose felt the boy’s eyes on his face, a prolonged stare that would be rude in anyone but a child, a stare Moose put off returning for as long as possible because he knew it contained a question he could answer only with the greatest expenditure of energy (and right now he was so tired), and perhaps not even then: What had happened to him?

  At three-thirty, the film crew tested its rain machine, which malfunctioned spectacularly, spraying sideways in thousands of gushing projectiles that inundated camera, crew, sound equipment, spectators, the remains of our lunch, and Thomas, who was howling into his cell phone an instant later. “What’s this ca-ca you’ve sent me?” he shouted, sounding ready to weep. “It soaked my—fiddle with what? Look, I’m not a mechanic. I need rain! Without rain, I’m totally f—”

  Irene tapped his shoulder and pointed at the sky, where sallow, ambiguous clouds had begun to loiter. Thomas nodded, taking this in. “The what? Okay. Okay. Now look, supposing it actually did rain? We could shoot, right? Yuh, with this equipment. No? What if we bought … no? Even with—no? Okay, okay …” He glanced at the film crew, who had gathered around to listen. “Well then you better figure out how to get another friggin’ rain machine over to …”

  He paused. Hear no Evil was sending him a signal, although the density of his facial appurtenances made expressions difficult to isolate. “I, uh …” Thomas said, and paused again. We all paused. “Lemme call you back.” He folded up the phone. “What?” he yapped at the sound engineer.

  Hear No Evil was looking at the sky. “That’s one old mongo storm you got coming,” he said, a lick of anticipation in his voice.

  “Yeah, but according to your boss we can’t … unless you …” Thomas cocked his head with sudden interest.

  “Fuck the boss,” Hear No Evil said, tongue flashing metal. “Let’s shoot in the rain.”

  The other two instantly concurred. “Let’s. Let’s fucking do. Shoot in the. Rain, rain,” they murmured. And at last, in this mutinous accord, the wholesome boys’ wish to rebel, to resist the old hierarchies and pioneer new ways of living in the world, found its full and perfect articulation. Thomas nearly swooned with relief. “Danny, you’re the boss,” he informed See No Evil. “Tell us what you need.”

  And Danny did, along with the others—even the nameless PAs—all of them issuing orders with clipped authoritarian zeal that raised immediate questions about the genuineness of their nihilism. Irene duly transcribed their commands into her notebook: tarps, stakes, umbrellas, clear plastic. When volunteers had been dispatched to purchase these items, Thomas helped the crew to wipe down its wet equipment. Then he swallowed three Advils with Dr. Pepper and joined Irene beside the narrow ditch where Mike and Ed were still digging away. The men had ceased to talk, and now there was just the tinny crunch each shovel made as it broke the earth, a faint jingle as it flung off a streak of dirt that hovered midair like a bit of cursive, then dissolved and fell to the ground. Thomas turned to Irene. “Alas—”

  “I know, I know,” she said, and smiled. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  At four o’clock, we gathered around the Grand Am for a script meeting, using its hood as a kind of table. Allison, Pammy and Ricky stood at the outermost reaches of earshot, gazing into the distance with extravagant indifference while they eavesdropped.

  “Okay, everybody, listen up,” Thomas said, surveying a few pages where Irene had blocked out the action. “Here’s what happens before the camera rolls: Charlotte’s car goes out of control on the interstate. It spins, flips, rolls, lands”—he waved in the direction of the tower of brambles, where Speak No Evil raised his motley of tattooed arms to the sky—“in this cornfield. Car goes up in flames. Charlotte gets out …” Now he paused, turning to Irene. “Wait a minute. How does she get out of the burning car?”

  “The Good Samaritan,” Irene replied.

  Thomas frowned. “The … ?”

  “Someone pulled her out of the car. She doesn’t know who it was. It’s right here!” Irene rapped him on the head with the script. “You haven’t been doing your homework.”

  I stared at Irene, assailed by a brief, hallucinatory sense that the gesture I had just witnessed—rapping, accompanied by scolding—belonged somewhere in the vast family tree of behaviors known as flirtation. But no, I decided. That simply wasn’t possible.

  “Thomas?” I said. But he wasn’t listening.

  “Good Samaritan, okay. So in that case we’ll need another actor!” he said, a helpless grin routing his face as he simulated a genuine search for candidates among our ranks. “Hey, what about you?” he called to Ricky, who was standing on his skateboard, immobilized by the pebbly dirt. “Want to be in a movie?”

  “Thomas,” I said again.

  “Doing what.” The kid was wary, expressionless.

  Thomas ambled over to the gaggle of teenagers. “Well, see, you’d be helping Charlotte get from her car, which is supposedly out there in the field where that guy with the tattoos is standing, between the rows of corn”—he indicated the ditch where Mike and Ed were digging—“to that camera over there, where Danny is. But what you’ve already done, what we don’t see,” Thomas went on, “is you’ve pulled Charlotte out of the burning wreck and saved her life. Which I guess makes you the hero. You’d be playing the hero.”

  “Subtle,” the kid said, allowing himself a modest smile.

  “Hel-lo-o!” I called, waving my arms. “Thomas!”

  “Char.” At last I had his attention. A look of pure bliss had encompassed his face. He had the kid. The beautiful kid was his.

  “Not to burden you with details,” I said, “but how do I walk through a cornfield when I’m completely unconscious?”

  “Where does it say you’re unconscious?”

  “I don’t care what it says,” I said. “I’m telling you. I was unconscious.”

  Irene began to explain, but Thomas raised a fi
nger and came around the Grand Am to where I was standing. He put one arm around my shoulders and walked with me down the road a bit, away from the others.

  “Char,” he said, when we were alone, “if I could rewrite history, if I could turn back the clock, I’d have us all set up in that field with cameras and lights and sound all ready to go when you landed there the first time. That would have been a thousand percent better, no question, because it would have been real.”

  I pondered this odd picture and said nothing.

  “But the fact of the matter is, we weren’t there.” He said this with a kind of apology, as if he had promised to do a job but failed to complete it. “So we’re coming at this in retrospect, trying to evoke the essence of what happened,” he said. “What’ve we got to work with? We’ve got an event that only you saw and can remember, and frankly, you don’t remember very much—”

  “Because I was unconscious,” I couldn’t resist pointing out.

  “Fine. You were unconscious. Two,” he was ticking them off on his fingers, “two, we’ve got this chance now to start over, create the event from scratch—to improve on it, if such a thing is possible. Not that it wasn’t better the first time—” His hands rose, fending off any such suggestion. On their descent, they seized my shoulders. His face was so close to mine that I smelled Dr. Pepper on his breath.

  “What am I saying? I’m saying forget all that, Char. Forget what happened. This is what happened, and it hasn’t even happened yet! It can happen any way we want!” His eyes crackled with evangelistic zeal. “And for our purposes, I think it’s infinitely more dramatic if you walk out of the cornfield with that drop-dead gorgeous kid. As your agent, as your manager, as the producer and director of this project, that is my advice to you. Am I making sense?”