Nathan Hill - The Nix

Samuel knows he has one thing yet to give, one thing of value. It’s the only thing he has for Periwinkle. It is, right now, the only interesting thing about him.

“What if I told you I had a new book,” Samuel says. “A different book.”

“Then I would say we had another complaint in our civil suit against you. That when you were contracted to write a book for us, you were secretly working on a book for someone else.”

“I haven’t been working on it at all. Haven’t written a word.”

“Then in what way is it a ‘book’?”

“It’s not. It’s more like a pitch. Do you want to hear the pitch?”

“Sure. Fire away.”

“It’s sort of a celebrity tell-all.”

“Okay. Who’s the celebrity?”

“The Packer Attacker.”

“Yeah, right. We sent a scout. She’s not talking. It’s a dead end.”

“What if I told you that she was my mother?”

SO THIS IS THE PLAN. They agree to it at the airport. Samuel will fulfill his contract with the publisher by writing a book about his mother — a biography, an exposé, a tell-all.

“A sordid tale of sex and violence,” Periwinkle says, “written by the son she abandoned? Hell yeah, I could sell that.”

The book will describe Faye Andresen’s sleazy past in the protest movement, her time as a prostitute, how she abandoned her family and went into hiding and only came out to terrorize Governor Packer.

“We’d have to get the book out before the election, for obvious marketing reasons,” Periwinkle says. “And Packer will have to come off as an American hero. A kind of folksy messiah. You okay with that?”

“Fine.”

“We have those pages finished already, actually.”

“What do you mean finished?” Samuel says.

“The Packer stuff. Ghostwritten. Done. About a hundred pages of it.”

“How is that possible?”

“You know how a lot of obituaries are written before the subjects actually die? Same principle. We’ve been working on a bio, just waiting for an angle. So we had it in the hopper. Half your book is ready to go, in other words. The other half is the mother material. She is of course cast as the villain here. You understand that, right?”

“I do.”

“And you can write it? You have no problems portraying her this way? Morally? Ethically?”

“I will savage her intimately, publicly. That’s the deal. I get it.”

And it will not be hard, Samuel imagines, to do this to the woman who left without a word, without warning, who left him alone to survive a motherless childhood. It’s as if two decades’ worth of resentment and pain has, for the first time, found an outlet.

So Samuel calls his mother’s lawyer and says he’s changed his mind. He says he’d be happy to write a letter to the judge in support of her case and would like to have an interview to gather key information. The lawyer gives him his mother’s address in Chicago and sets up a meeting for the very next day, and Samuel is sleepless and jumpy and overstimulated all night as he imagines seeing his mother for the first time since she disappeared so long ago. It seems unfair that it’s been twenty years since he’s seen her and now he has only one day to prepare.

How many times has he imagined it? How many fantasies of reunion has he entertained? And in the many thousands, the millions of them, what happens every time is that he proves to his mother that he is successful and smart. He is important and grown-up and mature. Sophisticated and happy. He shows her how extraordinary his life is, how inconsequential her absence from it has been. He shows her how much he does not need her.

In his fantasies of reunion, his mother always begs his forgiveness and he does not cry. That’s how it goes every time.

But how would he make this happen? In real life? Samuel has no idea. He googles it. He spends most of the night on online support boards for children of estranged parents, websites heavy in their use of capital letters and boldface type and animated GIFs of smiley faces and frowny faces and teddy bears and angels. As he reads through these sites, the thing that surprises Samuel most is the essential sameness of everyone’s problems: the intense feelings of shame and embarrassment and responsibility felt by the abandoned child; the feelings of both adoration and loathing for the missing parent; loneliness coupled with a self-defeating desire for reclusiveness. And so on. It’s like looking into a mirror. All his private weaknesses come publicly back at him, and Samuel feels ashamed about this. Seeing others express exactly what’s in his own heart makes him think he’s unoriginal and ordinary and not the astounding man he needs to be to prove to his mother she shouldn’t have left him.

It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning when he realizes he’s been staring at the same animated GIF for five full minutes — a teddy bear giving something called a “virtual hug” where the bear repeatedly opens and closes its arms in a never-ending loop that’s supposed to be read as an embrace but looks to Samuel more like a deliberate and sarcastic clap, like the bear is mocking him.

He abandons the computer and sleeps fitfully for a few hours before he wakes at dawn and showers and drinks about a whole pot of coffee and gets into his car to make the drive into Chicago.

Despite its proximity, Samuel rarely goes into Chicago these days, and now he remembers why: The closer he gets to the city, the more the highway feels malicious and warlike — wild zigzagging drivers cutting people off, tailgating, honking horns, flashing their lights, all their private traumas now publicly enlarged. Samuel travels with the crush of traffic in a slow sluggish mass of hate. He feels that low-level constant anxiety about not being able to get over into the turn lane when his exit is near. There’s that thing where drivers next to him speed up when they see his turn signal, to eliminate the space he intended to occupy. There is no place less communal in America — no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice — than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago. And there is no better test of this than watching what happens when there is a hundred-car line in the far-right lane, which there is when Samuel reaches his exit. How people bypass the line and dive into any available cranny in front, skipping all the drivers patiently waiting, all of whom are now enraged at this because they each have to wait incrementally longer, but also a bigger and deeper rage that the asshole didn’t wait his turn like everyone else, that he didn’t suffer like they suffer, and then also a tertiary inner rage that they are suckers who wait in lines.

So they yell and gesture obscenely and hover inches from the bumper in front of them. They do not provide any gaps for cutters. They do not make way for anyone. Samuel’s doing it too, and he feels if he allows just one cutter in front of him, he will let down all who wait behind. And so with each movement of the line he guns the gas so that any space is closed. And they lurch toward the exit this way until, at one point when he is checking his mirror for possible cutters and a space opens up in front of him and he is sure this fucking BMW coming up fast on the left is going to cut in front, Samuel is a little too careless with the accelerator and leaps forward and lightly taps the car in front of him.

A taxi. The driver vaults out and screams “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” pointing at Samuel as if to specially emphasize that it is him — and no one else — who needs to be fucked.

“Sorry!” Samuel says, holding up his hands.

The line stopping now produces a wail from the cars behind them, a squall of horns, shouts of anguish and disgust. The cutters see their opportunity and swerve in front of the stopped taxi. The cabbie comes right up to Samuel’s closed window and says, “I will fucking fuck you up, you fucking fuck!”