Nathan Hill - The Nix

He climbed out of bed and into his wheelchair and rolled over to the window. He looked out at the sky — dark navy blue, but gathering color. It must have been four o’clock, four fifteen, give or take. It was trash day, he saw. The bins were out on the street. And beyond the bins, parked at the curb, right in front of his house, there was a car.

Which was odd.

Nobody ever parked there. It couldn’t be a neighbor. His neighbors were too far away. One of the reasons he bought here, in this particular subdivision, was its facsimile of private woodsy living. Across the street from his house was a small grove of sugar maples. The distant neighbors were hidden behind two rows of oak trees — one row on his side of the property divide, one on theirs.

He looked at the screen next to the bed where he’d installed the controls for the home’s elaborate security system: no open doors, no broken windows, no movement. The feeds from his various video cameras showed nothing unusual.

Brown chalked it up to teenagers. Always a good scapegoat. Probably a boy secretly visiting a girl down the block. There was some passionate and quick deflowering happening somewhere in the neighborhood tonight. Fair enough.

He took the elevator to the first-floor kitchen. Pressed the button on the coffeemaker. Dutifully it bubbled and spurted, his wife having prepared it the night before. Their ritual. One of the few ways he knows he’s really living with someone. They see each other so rarely. He’s off to work before she wakes, and she’s off to work before he comes home.

It’s not that they avoid each other on purpose — it’s just how things worked out.

When he quit the police and decided to go to law school — this was about forty years ago now — she took evening shifts at the hospital. They were raising a daughter then; it was the compromise they made so someone would always be home with her. But even after the daughter grew up and moved out, their schedules did not change. It had become comfortable. She’d leave a plate of something for him to eat. She’d fix up the coffeemaker at night because she knew he hated fiddling with the filter-and-grounds apparatus, which always struck him as too much to ask of a person at four o’clock in the morning. He was grateful she still performed these small kindnesses. On weekends, they saw each other more, provided he wasn’t in his study all day poring over various documents, precedents, opinions, journals, law. Then they’d catch each other up on the independent and totally separate lives they were living in parallel to one another. They made vague promises about all the things they’d do together in retirement.

He rolled himself into the study, coffee in hand, and turned on the television. Another morning ritual, watching the news. He wanted to know everything that was everywhere happening before he went to work. At his age, people were looking for signs of decline, waiting for his inevitable diminishment. He remembered when he was a young prosecutor there were judges of a certain age who let themselves slide as they approached retirement. They stopped keeping up with the news, local politics, the enormous amounts of reading required of the job. They began acting like mad scientists — unpredictable megalomaniacs, supremely confident in their fading abilities, treating the courtroom as their own personal laboratory. He would not devolve into that, he vowed. He watched the news in the morning, got the newspaper delivered (even if that was a bit quaint these days, the actual physical newspaper).

But the news was talking about what the news was always talking about these days: the election. Election Day was still pretty distant, but you’d never know it judging from the news, from the way the news salivated over the primary race, the dozen or so candidates for president now practically taking up permanent residency on both the cable news channels and in Iowa, where the nation’s first nominating vote would happen in roughly three months. Among them all, Sheldon “the Governor” Packer was out to an early lead according to various polls and surveys and pundits who debated whether the governor’s popularity was a post-attack sympathy bubble that would soon burst. So far it seemed that Faye Andresen’s attack was the best thing to happen to him.

This was what the nation had to look forward to for the next year. Twelve full months of stump speeches and gaffes and ads and attacks and stupidity, agonizing stupidity, bordering on immoral stupidity. It was as if every four years all news everywhere just lost perspective. And then billions of dollars would be spent to achieve what was already inevitable — that the whole election would come down to a handful of swing voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The electoral math pretty much ordained this.

Democracy! Huzzah!

The two most popular words on TV to describe Packer’s campaign appeared to be “buzz” and “momentum.” At rallies Packer talked about how the recent attempt on his life had made him more resolute than ever. He said he wouldn’t be cowed by liberal thugs. He played the chorus to “Break My Stride” at campaign events. He was awarded an honorary Purple Heart by the new governor of Wyoming. Cable news personalities said he was either “bravely continuing his campaign despite tremendous personal risk” or “callously milking this minor distraction for all it’s worth.” There did not seem to be any position between these two. The video of Faye Andresen throwing rocks at the governor was shown again and again. On one channel, they said it was evidence of a liberal conspiracy, pointing out people in the crowd who might have been aiding and abetting. On another channel, they said when the governor ducked and ran away from the thrown rocks he “did not seem presidential.”

That the news could not mention Governor Packer without also mentioning Faye Andresen’s trial made Judge Brown feel happy. Made him feel important and big. The governor was “still riding high in the polls after his brutal attack in Chicago,” was how they said it. Of course, the reasons for this were simple — the attack made him more famous, and fame tends to attract more fame. Like wealth tends to build upon itself, so too fame, which is a kind of social wealth, a kind of conceptual abundance. One of the many benefits of taking the Faye Andresen case was that it made Judge Brown a little famous. Another was that it forestalled retirement for as long as it would take to adjudicate. At least a year, he guessed.

Those were not the primary reasons he took the case, but they were part of the decision, part of the tableau. The primary reason was of course that Faye Andresen deserved whatever cruelty came to her. What a gift, this case. Like an early retirement present, this chance at retribution, his righteous reward for so much suffering.

Good lord, retirement. What in the world would they do together, he and his wife, in retirement?

There were all the usual clichés: They should travel, their daughter told them. And, yes, maybe they would travel, to Paris or Honolulu or Bali or Brazil. Wherever. All places seemed equally horrible because the thing they never mentioned about traveling in your retirement is that in order for it to work you must, at the very least, be able to endure the person you’re traveling with. And he imagined all that time together — on planes, in restaurants, in hotel rooms. They couldn’t escape each other, he and his wife. The nice thing about their current arrangement was that they could always blame their isolation on work. That the reason they saw so little of each other was their very demanding schedules and not in fact their total mutual resentment of each other.

How easily a simple façade can become your life, can become the truth of your life.