Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Okay. Fine. I want to know. Why did you leave me?”

And Samuel could feel the cry coming almost as soon as he said it: Why did you leave me? The question that had tormented his adolescence. He used to tell people she was dead. When they would ask about his mother, it was easier to say she’d died. Because when he told them the truth, they’d wonder why she left and where she’d gone and he didn’t know. Then they’d look at him funny, like it was his fault. Why did she leave him? It was the question that kept him awake night after night until he learned to swallow it and deny it. But asking the question now let it break back out — the shame and loneliness and self-pity washed over the question so that he was barely able to pronounce the last word before his throat tightened and he could feel himself on the verge of crying.

They considered each other for a moment, Samuel and his mother, before the lawyer leaned across the table and whispered something into her ear. Then her defiance seemed to fizzle. She looked into her lap.

“Perhaps we should return to our topic?” the lawyer said.

“I think I deserve some answers,” Samuel said.

“Perhaps we could get back to the subject of your letter, sir?”

“I’m not expecting to be best friends,” Samuel said. “But answering a few questions? Is that too much to ask?”

Faye crossed her arms and seemed to curl into herself. The lawyer stared at Samuel and waited. The sweat blobs on his forehead had grown thick and bulbous. At any moment, they could rain down into his eyes.

“The thing about that article in Nature ?” Faye said. “The one about memory? What really struck me was how our memories are sewn into the meat of the brain. Everything we know about our past is literally etched into us. ”

“Okay,” Samuel said. “What’s your point?”

She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples, a gesture of impatience and irritation that Samuel recognized from his childhood.

“Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “Every memory is really a scar.”

The lawyer slapped the top of his briefcase and said, “Okay! I think we’re done here!”

“You haven’t answered any of my questions,” Samuel said. “Why did you leave me? What happened to you in Chicago? Why did you keep it secret? What have you been doing all these years?”

And Faye looked at him then, and all the hardness in her body dissolved. She gave him that same look she’d given him the morning she disappeared, her face full of grief.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”

“I need this,” Samuel said. “You don’t even understand how much. I need to know.”

“I’ve given you all I can.”

“But you haven’t told me anything. Please, why did you go?”

“I can’t,” she said. “It’s private.”

“Private? Seriously?”

Faye nodded and looked at the tabletop. “It’s private,” she said again.

Samuel crossed his arms. “You goad me into asking this question and then you say it’s private? Fuck you.”

Then the lawyer was gathering his things, turning off the microphone, sweat dropping onto his shirt collar. “Thank you so much, Professor Anderson, for all your efforts,” he said.

“I didn’t think you could get any lower, Faye, but congratulations, ” Samuel said, standing up. “Really, you’re like a virtuoso. A maestro of being awful.”

“We’ll be in touch!” the lawyer said. He ushered Samuel toward the front door, pushed him from behind with a warm, wet hand. “We will be in contact to touch base about how we can move forward.” He opened the door and walked Samuel through it. Liquid BBs hung on to the skin of his forehead. The area under his armpit was now a soggy mess, as if he’d spilled a movie-theater-size drink there. “We’re very excited to read your letter to Judge Brown,” he said. “And good day!”

He closed the door behind Samuel and locked it.

All the way out of the building, and for the whole long ride back through Chicago and into the suburbs, Samuel felt like he was going to crumble. He remembered the advice from those websites: Have a support network. He needed to talk to someone. But who? Not his father, clearly. Not anyone from work. The only people he regularly communicated with were his Elfscape friends. So, once home, he logged on. He was greeted by the usual barrage of Hey Dodger! and Good to see ya! He asked a question in guild chat: Any of you Chicago folks want to meet up tonight? I feel like going out.

Which was met with an embarrassed silence. Samuel understood he’d crossed a boundary. He’d asked to meet in real life, a request usually made only by creeps and stalkers. He was about to apologize and tell them all to forget it when Pwnage, their brilliant leader, the guild’s Elfscape savant, finally, mercifully, wrote back.

Sure. I know a place.

LAURA POTTSDAM SAT in the frightening office of the university dean, explaining exactly what had transpired between herself and Samuel. “He told me I didn’t have a learning disability,” Laura said. “He told me I just wasn’t very smart.”

“Oh my goodness,” the dean said, looking stricken. Her office shelves were filled mostly with books about the Black Death, her walls decorated with old-looking illustrations of people suffering from boils or lesions or being piled into wheelbarrows, dead. Laura had not thought any wall art was more insufferable than her roommate’s giant weight-loss calendar, but the dean’s apparent interest in the history of open sores proved her totally wrong.

“Samuel really said, out loud, that you weren’t smart?”

“It was a pretty big blow to my self-esteem.”

“Yes, I’d imagine.”

“I am an elite college student with a perfect GPA. He can’t tell me I’m not smart.”

“I think you’re very smart, Laura.”

“Thank you.”

“And you should know I take this very seriously.”

“I might also mention that Professor Anderson sometimes curses in class. It’s really distracting and offensive.”

“Okay, here’s what we can do,” the dean said. “Why don’t you rewrite your Hamlet paper for a new grade. Meanwhile, I’ll smooth things over with Professor Anderson. Does that sound like a plan?”

“Yes, that sounds like a great plan.”

“And if there’s anything else I need to know, please call me directly.”

“Okay,” Laura said, and she walked out of the administration building feeling the bright, buoyant warmth that accompanies victory.

It was a feeling that lasted only briefly, only until she cracked open her Shakespeare and sat on her dorm-room floor looking forlornly at all those words and realized she was right back where she started: trying to complete yet another worthless assignment for yet another worthless class, Intro to Lit, one of five classes she was enrolled in this semester, all of which were, in her opinion, bullshit. Just totally stupid time sucks that had nothing to do with real life, was what she thought about college classes, so far. And by “real life” she meant the tasks she’d be asked to perform upon graduation with a bachelor’s degree in business, tasks she couldn’t even really guess at now since she hadn’t taken any advanced communication and marketing classes and hadn’t held an internship or “real job” ever, unless you counted her high-school gig working part-time at the concession stand at a second-run movie theater, where she learned several important lessons about workplace etiquette from a thirty-two-year-old assistant manager who liked staying after hours to smoke weed and play strip poker with the pretty teenage girls he always hired, which required of her a careful social negotiation to continue having access to the weed without doing anything so retrograde she couldn’t show her face at work the next day. But even if this was the only quote-unquote work experience she’d ever had, she was still pretty sure her inevitably successful future career in marketing and communications would not require the stupid shit she was currently learning in college.