Nathan Hill - The Nix

“How did you get involved with this?” Samuel asked. “With mustard, I mean.”

“When I moved out here,” she said, “it was killing all the native plants.”

Alice’s cabin overlooked a small dune at the edge of Lake Michigan, the closest thing you could get to a beach house in Indiana. She bought the house for next to nothing in 1986, back when the lake was at a record height. The water was a few feet from the porch. If the lake had kept rising, the house would have been washed away.

“Buying the house was a gamble,” Alice said, “but an educated one.”

“Based on what?”

“Climate change,” she said. “Hotter, drier summers. More droughts, less rain. Less ice in the winter, more evaporation. If the climate scientists were right, the lake would have to recede. So I found myself rooting for global warming.”

“That must have felt, I don’t know, complicated?”

“Every time I was stuck in traffic I imagined the carbon from all the cars filling the air and saving my house. It was perverse.”

Eventually the lake did recede. Now she had a nice big beach where the water used to be. She’d purchased the place for ten grand. It was now worth millions.

“I moved out here with my partner,” she said. “It was the eighties. We were sick of lying about our relationship. We were fed up telling our neighbors we were roommates, that she was my good friend. We wanted our privacy.”

“Where’s your partner now?”

“She’s away on business this week. It’s just me and the dogs. Three of them, rescue dogs. They are not allowed in the woods since their paws would pick up mustard seeds.”

“Of course.”

Alice’s white hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore blue jeans under her giant rubber waders. A simple, clean white T-shirt. She had that naturalist’s lack of attention to outward appearances, an indifference toward things like cosmetics and grooming that read not as apathy but rather as transcendence.

“How’s your mother?” Alice said.

“Indicted.”

“But other than that?”

“Other than that, I have no idea. She won’t talk to me.”

Alice thought about that quiet young girl she used to know, and she regretted that Faye never overcame what tortured her. But such was the way with people — they loved the things that made them miserable. She’d seen it so many times among her movement friends, after the movement splintered and grew ugly and dangerous. They were miserable all the time, and the misery seemed to feed them and nourish them. Not the misery itself but its familiarity, its constancy.

“I wish I could help,” Alice said. “But I don’t think I have much for you.”

“I’m trying to understand what happened,” Samuel said. “My mother kept everything about Chicago a secret. You’re the first person I’ve met who knew her there.”

“I wonder why she never talked about it.”

“I was hoping you could tell me. Something happened to her there. Something important.”

Of course he was right, but Alice wouldn’t say so.

“What’s to tell?” she said, trying to act aloof. “She went to school for a month, then left. College wasn’t for her. It’s a pretty common story.”

“Then why would she keep it a secret?”

“Maybe she was embarrassed.”

“No, there’s more to it than that.”

“She was a troubled soul when I knew her,” Alice said. “Small-town girl. Smart, but also a little clueless. Quiet. She read a lot. Ambitious and driven in a way that probably meant she had big-time daddy issues.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll bet she had a dad who was always disappointed in her, you know? So her anxiety about being disappointing to her father was swapped out for a drive to be special to everyone. Psychoanalysts would call this replacement. The child learns what is wanted of her. Am I right about that?”

“Maybe.”

“At any rate, she left Chicago right after the protests. I never even got to say goodbye. Just all of a sudden, gone.”

“Yeah, she’s pretty good at that.”

“Where did you get the photo?”

“It was on the news.”

“I don’t watch the news.”

“Do you remember who took it?” he said.

“That whole week is a big blur. Everything kind of merges with everything else. I can’t really remember one day from the next. Anyway, no, I don’t remember who took it.”

“In the photo it looks like she’s leaning against someone.”

“That would probably have been Sebastian.”

“Who’s Sebastian?”

“He was the editor of an underground newspaper. The Chicago Free Voice. Your mother was attracted to him, and he was attracted to anyone who paid attention to him. It wasn’t a good match.”

“What happened to him?”

“No idea. That was a long time ago. I left the movement in 1968, right after that protest. Afterward, I didn’t keep track of anyone.”

The mustard plants Alice pulled were about a foot tall, with green heart-shaped leaves and small white flowers. To the untrained eye they looked like any other ground shrub, not at all out of the ordinary. The problem was that they grew so quickly they stole sunlight from other ground plants, including young trees. They also had no natural predators — the local deer population ate everything but the mustard, leaving it free to colonize. It also produced a chemical that killed off bacteria in the soil that other plants needed for growth. A perfect botanical terror, in other words.

“Was my mother in the movement?” Samuel said. “Was she, like, a radical hippie or something?”

“I was a radical hippie,” Alice said. “Your mother definitely was not. She was a normal kid. She was dragged into it against her will.”

Alice remembered her young, idealistic self, how she refused to own any possessions, refused to lock her door or carry money, crazy behavior she wouldn’t even consider now. What her younger self worried about were the hang-ups that came with possessions — the territoriality, the worry, the potential for loss, the way the world looked when you owned precious things: like one big threat always ready to take your stuff. And yes, Alice had purchased this home in the Indiana dunes, she filled it with her stuff, she put locks on all the doors, she built a wall of sandbags to contain the advance of the lake, she cleaned and sanded and painted, brought in exterminators and contractors and took down walls and erected new ones, and slowly this home came into being, bubbling up out of itself like Athena from the sea. And yes, it was true that all her former radical energies now poured into things like selecting the perfect pendant lamps, or achieving the ideal kitchen work flow, or constructing excellent built-in bookcases, or finding the most calming master bedroom color palette that ideally involved the same blue the lake took on when she looked out her window certain winter mornings, when the surface of the water was a slushy, shimmering mass that appeared — depending on the paint sample she used — like “glacier blue” or “liquid blue” or “bluebell” or a really lovely gray-blue called “soar.” And yes, occasionally she felt bolts of raw guilt and regret that these were the hang-ups that interested her, not the peace and justice and equality movements she intended to devote her life to when she was twenty.

She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.

“Who dragged her into it?” Samuel said.

“Nobody,” Alice said. “Everybody. The events of the time. She got swept up. It was all terribly exciting, you see.”