Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Simon.”

“Of course, sir. Well, it looks like there’s a brand-new student organization that’s gaining some serious attention at your school. This organization’s purpose, its singular raison d’être, if you will, seems to be getting you fired.”

“Seriously?”

“They have their own website, which has been gleefully shared and circulated by your students, both current and former. You are now pretty much the textbook definition of what PR people call toxic. Hence our no longer needing you to vouch for your mother.”

“Why do my students want me fired?”

“Perhaps it would be best to look at it yourself?”

Simon removed a laptop from his briefcase and called up the website: a new student organization called S.A.F.E. — or Students Against Faculty Extravagance — arguing that university professors were wasting taxpayer money. Their evidence? One Samuel Anderson, a professor of English, who, according to the website, abused his office computer privileges:

During routine maintenance, the Computer Support Center found logs showing Professor Anderson uses his computer to play “World of Elfscape” for a frankly shocking number of hours each week. This is a completely unacceptable use of university resources.

There was also an associated letter-writing campaign that had gotten the attention of the dean, the press, and the governor’s office. Now the whole matter was being sent to the university disciplinary committee for a full hearing.

“Oh, shit,” Samuel said at the thought of explaining Elfscape to a committee of humorless gray-haired professors of philosophy and rhetoric and theology. It made him break out in an immediate sweat, justifying to his colleagues why he had a robust second life as an elven thief. Oh god.

The president of S.A.F.E. was quoted on the website as saying that students needed to be vigorous watchdogs of faculty who wasted their tuition dollars. The student’s name was, of course, Laura Pottsdam.

“Fuck this,” Samuel said, closing the laptop. He walked over to the expanse of windows on the apartment’s north wall and looked out at the jagged city.

He remembered Periwinkle’s ridiculous advice: that he should declare bankruptcy and move to Jakarta. That was actually sounding pretty good right about now. “I think it’s time to leave,” he said.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“It’s time to get on a plane and leave,” Samuel said. “Leave my job, and my life, and the whole country. Start fresh, somewhere else.”

“You are, of course, free to do that, sir. But your mother needs to stay here and fight this within the strict confines of the law.”

“I know.”

“My various oaths bar me from telling anyone accused of a crime that they should flee the jurisdiction.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Samuel said. “She can’t leave anyway. She’d be on the no-fly list.”

“Oh, no, sir. She wouldn’t be on the list yet.”

Samuel turned around. The lawyer was carefully tucking his laptop back into its special briefcase sleeve.

“Simon, what do you mean?”

“Well, the no-fly list is administered by the Terrorist Screening Center, or TSC, which, interestingly, is actually a part of the National Security Branch of the FBI, under the auspices of the Department of Defense. The no-fly list is not, as many people believe, controlled by the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. They are completely different departments!”

“Okay. So?”

“So to get onto the no-fly list, one’s name has to be nominated by an approved government official from the Department of Justice, or Homeland Security, or Defense, or State, or the Postal Service, or certain private contractors, and since each of these agencies has different criteria and guidelines and rules and processes, not to mention different documents and forms that sometimes are incompatible with another administrative agency’s equivalent documents and forms, the TSC has to filter through everything and evaluate it and standardize it. This is made infinitely more complicated by the fact that every agency and department uses its own special computer software, like, for example, the Circuit Court of Cook County uses a Windows operating system that’s at least three iterations out of date, whereas the FBI and CIA are more Linux-based, I believe. And getting those two systems speaking to each other? Hoo-boy. ”

“Simon, get back to your point.”

“Of course, sir. What I’m saying is that the information on your mother’s status as a terrorist must be processed by the Circuit Court of Cook County’s First Municipal District, then passed along to the regional FBI office, then to the TSC, where it’s evaluated and approved by the TSC’s multiagency Operations Branch and Tactical Analysis Group, then that information needs to percolate over to the Department of Homeland Security, which then sends it along to the TSA in some manner that probably involves a fax machine, all this before the no-fly information is available to individual airport and security personnel.”

“So my mom is not, in fact, on the no-fly list.”

“She’s not on the no-fly list yet. This whole process usually takes around forty-eight hours, start to finish. More if it’s a Friday.”

“So, hypothetically, if we wanted to leave the country, we could do so, as long as we did it today.”

“That’s right, sir. You have to remember we’re dealing with huge bureaucracies staffed by people who are, for the most part, criminally underpaid.”

Samuel glanced over at his mother, who looked back at him and, after a moment where she seemed to consider this, the gravity of this, gave him a little nod.

“Simon?” he said. “Thank you so much. You’ve been very, very helpful.”

AT O’HARE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, terminal five, people waited quietly in lines: lines to get their ticket, lines to drop off their luggage, lines to get through security, all the lines running at such a laggard and reluctant and frankly un-American pace that they forced everyone to fully imbibe the terminal’s deeply disorienting combination of melancholy and chaos. The smell of car exhaust from all the taxis outside, and the inside smells of meats that had been cooking all day at Gold Coast Dogs. Easy-listening standards heavy on saxophone occupied the aural spaces between security announcements. Televisions showing airport news that was different from regular news in unknown ways. Samuel felt disappointed that a foreigner’s first impression of America would be made here, and what America was offering them was a McDonald’s (whose big message to the incoming throngs seemed to be that the McRib was back) and a store specializing in gadgets of questionable necessity: HD video pens, shiatsu massage chairs, wireless Bluetooth-activated reading lamps, heated foot spas, compression socks, automatic wine-bottle openers, motorized barbecue-grill brushes, orthopedic dog couches, cat thundershirts, weight-loss armbands, gray hair prevention pills, isometric meal replacement packs, liquid protein shots, television swivel stands, hands-free blow-dryer holders, a bath towel that said “Face” on one end and “Butt” on the other.

This is who we are.

Men’s bathrooms that required you touch nothing but yourself. Automated dispensers that pooed little globs of generic pink soap onto your hands. Sinks that did not run enough water to fully wash. The same threat-level warning issued ad nauseam. The security mandates — empty your pockets, remove your shoes, laptops out, gels and liquids in separate bags — repeated so many times that eventually everyone stopped hearing them. All of this so reflexive and automatic and habituated and slow that the travelers were a little zoned out and playing with their phones and just simply enduring this uniquely modern, first world ordeal that is not per se “difficult” but is definitely exhausting. Spiritually debilitating. Everyone feeling a small ache of regret, suspecting that, as a people, we could do better. But we don’t. The line for a McRib was quiet and solemn and twenty people deep.