Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Why did you come?” Faye said. “All unannounced and unexpected like this.”

Samuel shrugged. “I don’t know.”

On television, the husband was being interviewed about how he sent his wife to a giant home-improvement store to fetch a tool that does not actually exist: a countertop caliper.

“These people can’t repair their relationship,” Faye said, “so they repair their relationship’s largest metaphor.”

“I need some air,” Samuel said. “How about a walk?”

“Fine.”

He went to her and extended his hand to help her up, and when she took it, when he felt her thin and cold fingers, he realized it was the first time they’d touched in years. The first physical contact between them since she’d kissed his forehead and pressed her face into his hair that morning she left, when he promised to write books and she promised to read them. He had not anticipated feeling anything about this, taking her hand, helping her up. But it made his heart clutch. He did not know he needed this.

“Yeah, my hand is cold,” Faye said. “It’s a side effect of the medication.” She stood and shuffled off to find her shoes.

She seemed to wake up, and her mood seemed to lighten, when they left the apartment. It was a mild and pleasant late-summer day. The streets were for the most part deserted and quiet. They walked east, toward Lake Michigan. His mother explained how real estate in this particular neighborhood was exploding before the recession. This was part of the turn-of-the-century meatpacking and slaughterhouse district. It was abandoned for many years, until recently, when the warehouses had begun their transformation into trendy lofts. But the renovations stalled when the real estate market collapsed. Most developers pulled out. Improvements were abandoned halfway through, buildings stuck mid-transformation. A few of the taller buildings still had cranes standing idle above them. Faye said she used to watch them from her window as they brought up pallets of Sheetrock and concrete. There was a time when every building on the block had one of these cranes.

“Like fishermen over a tiny pond,” she said. “That’s what it looked like.”

But most of the cranes had since been disassembled. Those that still stood hadn’t moved in a couple of years. So the neighborhood remained empty, just on the brink of habitation.

She said she had moved here because rents were low and because she didn’t have to deal with people. It was a real shock when the developers came, and she looked on in anger as they began putting names on buildings: The Embassy Club, The Haberdasher, The Wheelworks, The Landmark, The Gotham. She knew when a building got a fancy name, insufferable people soon followed. Young professionals. Dog walkers. Stroller pushers. Lawyers and their miserable lawyer wives. Restaurants that reproduced Italian trattorias and French bistros and Spanish tapas bars in a toned-down, safely mainstream way. Organic grocery stores and fromageries and fixed-gear bicycle shops. She saw her neighborhood turning into this, the city’s newest hip yuppie enclave. She worried about her rent. She worried about having to talk to neighbors. When the housing market tanked and the developers all disappeared and the signs with the fancy names began crumbling in the snow, she cheered. She walked her empty streets alone, exultant, that hermit’s special appetite for isolation and ownership. This abandoned block was hers. There was great pleasure in this.

She needed the rent to remain low, otherwise she couldn’t afford to live doing what she did, which turned out to be reading poetry to children, and businesspeople, and patients recovering from surgery, and prison inmates. A one-person nonprofit charitable service. She’d been doing it for years.

“I thought I wanted to be a poet,” she said. “When I was younger.”

They had come to a neighborhood with more life: an arterial street, people walking, a few small bodegas. It was a place not yet gentrified, but Samuel could see gentrification’s leading edge: a coffee shop advertising free Wi-Fi.

“Why didn’t you?” he said. “Become a poet?”

“I tried,” she said. “I wasn’t very good.”

She explained how she’d given up writing poetry but had not given up poetry itself. She started a nonprofit to bring poetry into schools and prisons. She decided if she couldn’t write poetry she would do the next best thing.

“Those who can’t do,” she said, “administrate.”

She survived on small grants from arts groups and the federal government, grants that always seemed precarious, always attacked by politicians, always in danger of evaporating. In the boom times before the recession, several area law firms and banks had hired her to provide “daily poetic inspiration” to their employees. She began doing poetry seminars at business conferences. She learned to speak the language of the mid-level executive, which mostly involved turning silly nouns into silly verbs: incentivize, maximize, dialogue, leverage. She prepared PowerPoints on leveraging poetic inspiration to maximize customer communication. PowerPoints on externalizing stress and reducing workplace violence risk factors through poetry. The junior VPs who listened to her had no idea what she was talking about, but their bosses ate it up. This was back before the recession hit, when the big banks were still throwing money at anything.

“I charged them fifteen times what I charged the schools and they didn’t even blink,” she said. “Then I doubled that, and still they didn’t notice. Which was crazy to me because it was all bullshit. I was making it up as I went along. I kept waiting for them to figure it out and they never did. They just kept hiring me.”

That is, until the recession hit. After it became clear what was happening — how the global economy was more or less utterly fucked — the gigs went away fast, along with the junior VPs, who were mostly laid off, with no warning, on a Friday, by the very same bosses who only a year earlier wanted them to live a life full of beauty and poetry.

“By the way,” she said. “I hid the television the first time you visited. You were right about that.”

“You hid it. Why?”

“A house without a television makes a statement. I wanted to improve the Zen-like asceticism quotient. I was trying to make you think I was sophisticated. Sue me.”

They kept walking. They were coming back to his mother’s neighborhood now, the eastern boundary of which was a bridge spanning a knot of train tracks that cut through the city like a zipper. Enough tracks to keep all the old slaughterhouses in feed and animals, enough to keep the old foundries in slag, enough now to accommodate the millions of suburbanites taking commuter rail into and out of downtown. A wide causeway whose retaining walls had been thoroughly inscribed by graffiti, the various tags and retags of the city’s adventurous youth, who must have jumped down from the bridge because the only other way into the causeway seemed to be a thick chain-link fence with razor wire at the top.

“I went to see the judge this morning,” Samuel said.

“What judge?”

“ Your judge. Judge Brown. I went to his house. I wanted to get a look at him.”

“You were spying on a judge.”

“I guess.”

“And?”

“He can’t walk. He’s in a wheelchair. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No. Why? Should it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…there it is. An unexpected fact. The judge is disabled.”

There was an aspect of graffiti Samuel found romantic. Especially graffiti sprayed in dangerous locations. There was something romantic about a writer risking injury to put down words.