Nathan Hill - The Nix

She remembers once he had come up from the basement, his clothes powdered gray from whatever construction was happening down there that night, and Faye had just taken a bath and she was so happy to see him that she broke free from the mass of towels her mother used to dry her and she bolted out the door, happy, bright, bounding like a rubber ball. She was wiry, sinewy, she had just bathed, she was nude, she was eight. Her dad stood in this very kitchen and she burst in and did a cartwheel, that’s how happy she was. A cartwheel, oh lord, imagine it now, at the cartwheel’s middle, spread open like some giant tropical plant. What a thing for her father to see. He frowned and said “I think this is inappropriate. Why don’t you put on some clothes,” and she ran to her room not quite knowing what she’d done wrong. Inappropriate for whom, she wondered as she stood naked looking at the neighborhood through her big picture window upstairs. She didn’t know why her father had sent her here, why she was inappropriate, and she looked out her window and perhaps thought about her body for the first time. Or maybe she thought for the first time of her body as a thing separate from her. And who cares if she imagined a boy walking by and spotting her? Who cares if this image would continue to interest her for reasons that would never be entirely clear? From that moment, there was no other purpose to Faye’s big picture window than to imagine what she looked like through it.

That was many years ago. Faye and her father never talked about this. Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.

And now Faye is back in the kitchen, and she’s waiting for her father to say something, and it’s like the space that opened between them that day has reached its apogee. They are two bodies orbiting each other, connected by the thinnest tether. They will either drift back together now or fling themselves forever apart.

“Did you hear me?” Faye asks. “I said I’m going to Chicago.”

And now Frank Andresen finally speaks, and when he does there is just nothing in his voice, no emotion, no feeling. He’s dislodged himself from the moment.

“Damn right you are,” he says, and he turns away from her. “Leave and never come back.”

“HELLO? Hello?”

“Yes? Hello?”

“Hello? Samuel? Can you hear me?”

“Barely. Where are you?”

“It’s me, Periwinkle! Are you there?”

“What’s that noise?”

“I’m in a parade!”

“Why are you calling me from a parade?”

“I’m not really in the parade! More like walking directly behind it! I’m calling about your e-mail! I read your e-mail!”

“Is there a tuba right next to your head?”

“What?”

“That noise!”

“So I wanted to call and say I read the—” Sudden silence on the line, a muffled indistinct digital gibberish, signal coming into and out of strength, a robotic garble, the sound all compressed and Dopplerized. Then: “—is what we expected, more or less. Can you do that for me?”

“I missed literally everything you said.”

“What?”

“You’re cutting out! I can’t hear you!”

“It’s Periwinkle, goddammit!”

“I know that. Where are you?”

“Disney World!”

“It sounds like you’re in the middle of a marching band.”

“One second!”

Seashell-like whooshing sounds, friction noises as a thumb or the wind passes over the microphone, abstract musical whooping, then a diminishment, as if Periwinkle were suddenly encased in a thick lead box.

“How’s that? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Cell coverage seems bad at the moment. Bandwidth problems, I’m guessing.”

“Why are you at Disney World?”

“For Molly Miller. We’re promoting her new video. Cross-promo’d with the reissue of a classic Disney animated film, now digitally remastered and in 3-D. I think it might be Bambi ? All the parents are filming the parade with their phones and texting their friends. I think it’s jamming the cell towers. Have you ever been to Disney World?”

“No.”

“I’ve never seen a place so utterly committed to dead technology. Animatronics everywhere. Automatons with their wooden parts clacking together. I guess it’s quaint?”

“Is the parade over?”

“No, I ducked into a store. Ye Olde Soda Shoppe, it says. I’m in this facsimile of Main Street USA. This charming little street that multinationals like Disney helped annihilate in the real world. Nobody here seems to mind the irony, though.”

“I am having trouble imagining you enjoying things like roller coasters. Or children.”

“Every ride, it’s the same conceit: agonizingly slow boat trip through robot wonderland. Like that ride It’s a Small World, which by the way is just a horror of narcotized puppets doing the same rote tasks over and over in what I’m sure Disney totally did not intend to be an accurate and prescient vision of third world labor.”

“I believe that ride is supposed to be about international unity and global peace.”

“Uh-huh. The Norway ride at Epcot was like floating through a life-size pamphlet for the oil and natural gas industries. And there’s this one ride called the Carousel of Progress. Heard of it?”

“No.”

“Originally made for the 1964 World’s Fair. Animatronic theater. A guy and his family. The first act is in 1904 and the guy marvels at all the recent inventions: gas lamps, irons, washing cranks. The amazing stereoscope. The incredible gramophone. You get the idea? The wife says it now only takes her five hours to do the laundry and we all laugh.”

“They think they have it easy, but we know better.”

“Right. Between each act they sing this terrible song that is so catchy in a uniquely Disney way.”

“Sing it.”

“No. But the chorus goes like ‘It’s a great big beautiful tomorrooooooow.’ ”

“Okay, don’t sing it.”

“Song about unending progress. Been stuck in my head nonstop and I think at this point I’d lobotomize myself to remove it. Anyway, they move on to the twenties in the second act. The age of electricity. Sewing machines. Toasters. Waffle irons. Icebox. Fan. Radio. Third act is in the forties. There’s a dishwasher now. And a big refrigerator. You see where this is going.”

“Technology keeps making everyone’s life better and easier. Unstoppable forward movement.”

“Yeah. What an adorable mid-sixties conceit that was, eh? Everything is going to improve. Hah. I swear to god, me being at Disney World is like Darwin being at Galápagos. And by the way, the employees of the soda fountain have been smiling at me like maniacs this entire time. There must be a rule, a smiling-at-the-customer rule. Even when I’m on the phone and”— yelling now —“OBVIOUSLY NOT INTERESTED IN A CREAM SODA!”

“You said you read my e-mail? I didn’t hear anything you said after that.”

“They are smiling like drunk children. Like gnomes on Ecstasy. It must take an enormous act of willpower to do that every day. And yes, I did read your e-mail, your description of the mother-in-high-school material. Read it on the plane.”

“And?”

“I couldn’t help but notice that there’s very little information about throwing fucking rocks at Governor fucking Packer.”

“I’m getting to that.”

“Zero information, in fact. Absolutely fucking nothing, would be my rough estimate.”

“That comes later. I have to set it up.”