Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Big Peter, little Ian. Those last days of his illusions. If they were illusions. He still didn’t know whether the film had caused his downfall or simply pointed out that the downfall was inevitable.

He mocked Iowans and he mocked Mississippians. In Nevada he wanted to visit a brothel so he could mock both the prostitutes and their customers. He patted waitresses on their behinds as they walked past — that was part of the joke. He was a young man who acted like a daft rich uncle from a 1930s movie. He sang along to the dirty songs on the tape deck. He joked. He was funny . Ask anyone! Ask Ian Casey, who — Peter Elroy was sure of this — scrubbed the soundtrack clean of his own laughter at Peter’s jokes.

Even when Ian showed him the movie — screened on a sheet in his New York apartment, the spring after the trip — Peter didn’t get it. Surprised, yes, to see that Ian had edited himself out of every frame, that he’d turned a conversation into a monologue. But he still thought it was good, he believed (as he’d believed for some time) that he would become the most famous economist in America. Talk shows, news hours, op-ed pages. The movie would get him there faster, and when he watched it he saw himself saying wonderful, shocking things.

Later, he tried not to be too hard on himself for not understanding. There wasn’t a man in the world smart enough to see his own subtext.

In the forest, the wind and the wolves both howled: it was a competition. The minute we are born, we are on our way to death , a visiting hospital chaplain had once told Peter Elroy, but that was bullshit, wasn’t it. You might as well claim that you are on your way to sleep from the moment you wake up, true enough for a few people but not for most. The path to death was less definite than that, and Peter Elroy had just started to look for it and couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it, forgot what he was looking for. He had the sense that he was batting branches out of his way. Something was coming for him and he had to escape.

He woke up with a hand on his forehead.

“Peter—”

As he’d napped the sofa had slowly reclined of its own accord. He blinked up at the ceiling, and then at the Young Mother, who leaned over him.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked.

His skull was still swamped with sleep. The hand wasn’t helping, and he struggled underneath it.

“Sorry,” she said, and stood up. “You just didn’t look comfortable like that.”

He nodded.

“Can I get you some dinner?” she said.

“Is it dinnertime?”

“Past,” she said. “I just put the kids to bed. Tell me what you’d like to eat.”

She didn’t know how to do this. He was hungry but he couldn’t imagine negotiating a solution.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Shall I make up your bed?” the Young Mother asked. What she meant was: arrange the polyester sheets around the slick leather of the sofa.

“That would mean getting up,” he said.

“Here,” she said. “Let me help you.”

She took his elbow. Together they maneuvered him into the desk chair, and he sat down, panting.

“Does it hurt?”

“Only when I don’t take my morphine.”

“Should you be drinking?”

“Why not?” He set his arms on the glass desk, which was freezing cold; he was surprised his wrists didn’t bind to the surface. “I’m not operating any heavy machinery.”

At last she said, “You look good.”

This was such a terrible lie he wanted to punch her. “How would you know? We just met.”

“Well,” she said. “Well, I’ve seen the film. You look just the same as you did thirty years ago.”

“You’ve seen it.” For some reason that hadn’t occurred to him.

“Of course. That’s how I met Ian. He came to give a talk at my grad program. He showed it.”

“Another master class,” he said.

“I guess. You know,” she said, “he was really sorry not to be here when you arrived. He misses you a lot, I think.”

“Well, next time!” said Peter Elroy in a jolly voice.

“He’ll be back by dinner tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “You know he won’t. That boy is on the lam. He’s legging it. He’s calling hourly to see if the coast is clear.”

“No, he’s not.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not lying,” she said. “He wouldn’t do that to me.”

“Ah,” said Peter Elroy, looking around the room. “All right. No poster, by the way? Here am I, the eponymous Peter Elroy.”

She looked at the wall, and then he could see a hole where the nail had been.

“We took it down before you came,” she said at last.

He remembered the poster: a picture of him, looking over his shoulder, a horrible smirk on his face. The name of the film — him again, his name — at the bottom. It played on the festival circuit before PBS picked it up and demolished his life. “That film’s older than you,” he said.

“About the same.”

“What did you think?”

“Of Peter Elroy ? It’s been ages. I don’t really remember it.”

“Me neither,” he said, though that wasn’t true. He’d only seen it once but he thought he could describe every frame. For a while after the broadcast he thought about watching it again, to see what he’d missed, but that seemed an exercise in self-loathing.

“Anyhow, you’re different now,” the Young Mother said.

“I am not ,” he said hotly. “I never was that way in the first place.”

“You said those things. Nobody made you.”

Those things . He’d said them for years to no ill effect, those things, things that made people gasp and yell and fume and laugh. Things that made his students that year argue back or nod in agreement and write on their evaluations, Professor Elroy is a genius or He’s kind of a jerk but he does know everything about economics .

But that’s how it works, isn’t it. Only in person can you be larger than life. On a television screen you’re cropped, alone: a buffoon. Once they showed the movie on PBS he became famous (among people who watched PBS, at any rate) as the embodiment of everything that was bad about people who liked money in the early 1980s. He seemed to be a young man who drove across the United States expressly to feel superior to all of its inhabitants, delighted that he had a way to beam his vileness into living rooms everywhere. He didn’t get tenure, left his teaching job. He ended up teaching in junior colleges awhile, and then got a job with the Small Business Association, giving extremely cautious advice.

“I can see where you didn’t realize how you’d come off. That’s the thing about privilege,” the Young Mother explained.

“Oh, fucking privilege ,” he said.

“When you come from money—”

“Who says I come from money? Surely your husband didn’t tell you that. His lies are generally ones of omission.”

He could see her take him in, the cuff links, the expensive shirt that had been starched — actually starched! in the twenty-first century! — the hair that he still combed back. Everything about him suggested generations of money. That was on purpose.

“Well,” she said, “you did. In the film. Didn’t you?”

“Maybe I come from Dorchester,” he said. “Maybe the Caseys were rich in comparison to my family. Maybe I knew his mother and kissed his kid sister. In the old days you were supposed to be ashamed of coming from nothing. Now it’s the opposite. Nothing is worse than childhood comfort, if you want to really make it. Ah!” he said. “I can see you’re already more interested in me. All my mitigating circumstances. You can forgive me if I came from nothing.”