Nathan Hill - The Nix

This is what it felt like to Frank.

Like he could see a different spectrum now.

What did he see in this young man? The same look he saw on Clyde Thompson’s face beginning in 1965.

He worked with Clyde at the ChemStar factory. Clyde’s daughter had thick golden-blond hair. She grew it down to the small of her back, straight and long like they used to back then. She complained that it was too heavy but Clyde wouldn’t allow her to cut it because he loved her hair so much.

Then one day in 1965 she got the hair caught in the band saw at school and she died. Took her whole scalp right off.

Clyde asked for a couple days off work and then came back like nothing happened.

Just kept soldiering on.

This Frank remembered very well.

People said how brave he was. Everyone agreed. Like the more Clyde could dodge the pain, the more heroic he was.

This was a formula for living a life full of secrets.

Frank knew this now. People constantly hid. It was a sickness maybe worse than the Parkinson’s.

Frank had so many secrets, so many things he never told anyone.

The look on Clyde’s face and the look on this young man’s face were the same. How that frown gets etched on there.

Same with Johnny Carlton, whose son fell off a tractor and was crushed under the tire. And Denny Wisor’s son was shot in Vietnam. And Elmer Mason’s daughter and granddaughter died at the same time during childbirth. And Pete Olsen’s son died when he tipped a motorcycle on a gravel road and it landed on him and broke a rib and punctured a lung, which filled with blood and made him drown right there on the road near a babbling brook in the middle of summer.

None of them said anything about it ever again.

They must have died shrunken, miserable men.

“I’d like to talk to you about my mother,” the man said. “Your daughter?”

And now Frank is Fridtjof again and he’s back at that farm in Hammerfest, a salmon-red house that overlooked the ocean, a great big spruce tree in the front yard, a pasture, sheep, a horse, a fire kept going all the way through the arctic’s long winter night: He’s home.

It’s 1940 and he’s eighteen years old. He’s twenty feet above the water. He’s the spotter. He has the sharpest eyes on the ship. He’s on the tallest mast looking for fish and telling the guys in the rowboats to take the nets this way, that way.

Whole schools churn into the bay and he intercepts them.

But this is not the memory where he’s looking for fish. This is the one where he’s looking at home. That salmon-red house with the pasture, the garden, the little path leading down to the dock.

It’s the last time he’ll see it.

His eyes are stinging from the wind as he watches from the crow’s nest as they sail away from Hammerfest and the salmon-red house gets smaller and smaller until it’s just a dot of color on the shore and then the shore is just a dot on all that water and then it’s nothing at all — it’s nothing but the lonely cold fact of the blue-black ocean everywhere around them forever, and the salmon-red house becomes a dot in his mind that grows larger and more terrible the farther away he sails.

“I need to know what happened to Faye,” said the young man in front of him, who seemed to appear out of the murk. “When she went to college? In Chicago?”

He was looking at Frank with that face people gave him when they didn’t understand what he was talking about. That face they thought looked like patience but actually looked like they were quietly shitting pinecones.

Frank must have been saying something.

Speaking these days was like speaking in dreams. Sometimes it felt like his tongue was too large for words. Or he’d forgotten English and the words came out a jumble of disconnected Norwegian sounds. Other times whole sentences shot out unstoppably. Sometimes he had whole conversations and didn’t even know it.

This probably had something to do with the meds.

One guy in here stopped taking his meds. Just stopped swallowing them. Refused. A real slow suicide, that one. They tried restraining him and forcing down the medicine, but he resisted.

Frank admired his dedication.

The nurses did not.

The nurses in Willow Glen didn’t try to prevent death. But they did try to guide you to die in the right way. Because if you died from something you weren’t supposed to die from, families became suspicious.

The nurses here were kind. They meant well. Or at least they did at first, when they were new. It was the institution that was the problem. All the rules. The nurses were human, but the rules were not.

Those PBS nature documentaries they showed in the common room said all life aimed toward reproduction.

At Willow Glen, all life aimed toward avoiding litigation.

Everything was charted. If a nurse fed him dinner but forgot to write it down, then in court, technically, she did not feed him dinner.

So they came in with these stacks of paper. They spent more time looking at the paper than looking at the people.

One time he hit his head on the bed frame and got a black eye. The nurse came in with her charts and said to Frank, “Which eye is injured?”

All the nurse had to do was take one look at him to answer that question. But her nose was in the charts. She cared more about documenting the injury than the injury itself.

They recorded everything. Physician progress reports. Dietitian records. Weight-loss charts. Monthly nurse summaries. Food-service logs. Tube-feeding sheets. Medication histories.

Photographs.

They made him stand naked and shivering and they took photographs. This happened roughly once a week.

Checking for evidence of falls. Or bedsores. Bruises of any kind. Evidence of abuse, infections, dehydration, malnutrition.

For court cases, if needed later, in their defense.

“Do you want me to ask them to stop taking photographs?” the young man said.

What were they talking about? He’d lost the thread again. He looked around him: He was in the cafeteria. It was empty. The young man smiled his uncomfortable smile. Smiled like those high-school kids who came in here once or twice a year.

There was this one girl, Frank forgot her name. Maybe Taylor? Or Tyler? He asked her, “Why do you high-school kids come in here?” And she said, “Colleges think it looks good if you’ve done some charity work.”

Two or three times they’d come, then disappeared.

He asked this Taylor or Tyler why all the students only showed up twice and then never came back, and she said, “If you do it twice, that’s good enough to put on your college application.”

She said this with no shame. Like she was such a good girl doing the absolute minimum to get what she wanted.

She asked him about his life. He said there’s not much to tell. She said what did you do? He said he worked at the ChemStar factory. She said what did the factory make? He said it made a compound that when jellied and lit on fire would literally melt the skin off of a hundred thousand men, women, and children in Vietnam. And then she realized she’d made a big mistake coming here and asking him that.

“I was wondering about Faye,” the young man said. “Your daughter Faye? You remember her?”

Faye was so much more hardworking than these high-school shits ever were. Faye worked hard because she was driven. There was something inside that pushed her. Something big and deadly and serious.

“Faye never told me she went to Chicago. Why did she go to Chicago?”

And now it’s 1968 and he’s in the kitchen with Faye under a pale light and he’s kicking her out of the house.

He is so angry with her.

He’d tried so hard to live in that town unnoticed. And she made it impossible.