“Yes, absolutely. My brother does that. Teaches high-school math and coaches soccer in Jakarta. Before that, Hong Kong. Before that, Abu Dhabi. Private schools. Kids are mostly the children of government and business elite. He makes two hundred grand a year plus housing plus a car plus a driver. You get a car and a chauffeur at that school of yours?”
“No.”
“I swear to god anyone with half an education who stays in America to teach is suffering some kind of psychosis. In China, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Middle East they’re desperate for people like you. You could have your pick. In America you’re underpaid and overworked and insulted by politicians and unappreciated by students. There, you’d be a goddamn hero. That’s advice, me to you.”
“Thanks.”
“You should take it too. Because I have bad news, buddy.”
“You do.”
Big sigh, big clownish frown as Periwinkle nods his head. “I’m sorry, but we’re gonna have to cancel your contract. That’s what I came here to tell you. You promised us a book.”
“And I’m working on it.”
“We paid you a fairly large advance for a book, and you have not delivered said book.”
“I hit a snag. A little writer’s block. It’s coming along.”
“We are invoking the nondelivery clause in our contract, whereby the publisher may demand reimbursement for any advance payments if the product is never provided. In other words? You’re gonna have to pay us back. I wanted to tell you in person.”
“In person. At a coffee shop. At the airport.”
“Of course, in the event you cannot pay us back, we’ll have to sue you. My company will be filing papers next week with the New York State Supreme Court.”
“But the book’s coming along. I’m writing again.”
“And that’s excellent news for you! Because we relinquish all rights on any material related to said book, so you can do whatever you want with it. And we wish you the very best of luck with that.”
“How much are you suing me for?”
“The amount of the advance, plus interest, plus legal fees. The upside here is that we’re not taking a loss on you, which cannot be said for many of our other recent investments. So don’t feel too bad for us. You still have the money, yes?”
“No. Of course not. I bought a house.”
“How much do you owe on the house?”
“Three hundred grand.”
“And how much is the house now worth?”
“Like, eighty?”
“Hah! Only in America, am I right?”
“Look. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I’ll finish the book soon. I promise.”
“How do I say this delicately? We actually don’t want the book anymore. We signed that contract in a different world.”
“How is it different?”
“Primarily, you’re not famous anymore. We needed to strike while the iron was hot. Your iron, my friend, is ice cold. But also the country has moved on. Your quaint story about childhood love was appropriate pre-9/11, but now? Now it’s a little quiet for the times, a little incongruous. And—no offense?—there’s nothing terribly interesting about you.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t take that the wrong way. It’s a one-in-a-million person who can sustain the kind of interest I specialize in.”
“I can’t possibly afford to pay that money back.”
“It’s an easy fix, dude. Foreclose on the house, hide your assets, declare bankruptcy, move to Jakarta.”
The intercom crackles: First-class passengers to Los Angeles can now begin boarding. Periwinkle smoothes his suit. “That’s me,” he says. He slugs the rest of his coffee and stands up. “Listen, I wish things were different. I really do. I wish we didn’t have to do this. If only there was something you could offer, something of interest?”
Samuel knows he has one thing yet to give, one thing of value. It’s the only thing he has for Periwinkle. It is, right now, the only interesting thing about him.
“What if I told you I had a new book,” Samuel says. “A different book.”
“Then I would say we had another complaint in our civil suit against you. That when you were contracted to write a book for us, you were secretly working on a book for someone else.”
“I haven’t been working on it at all. Haven’t written a word.”
“Then in what way is it a ‘book’?”
“It’s not. It’s more like a pitch. Do you want to hear the pitch?”
“Sure. Fire away.”
“It’s sort of a celebrity tell-all.”
“Okay. Who’s the celebrity?”
“The Packer Attacker.”
“Yeah, right. We sent a scout. She’s not talking. It’s a dead end.”
“What if I told you that she was my mother?”
7
SO THIS IS THE PLAN. They agree to it at the airport. Samuel will fulfill his contract with the publisher by writing a book about his mother—a biography, an exposé, a tell-all.
“A sordid tale of sex and violence,” Periwinkle says, “written by the son she abandoned? Hell yeah, I could sell that.”
The book will describe Faye Andresen’s sleazy past in the protest movement, her time as a prostitute, how she abandoned her family and went into hiding and only came out to terrorize Governor Packer.
“We’d have to get the book out before the election, for obvious marketing reasons,” Periwinkle says. “And Packer will have to come off as an American hero. A kind of folksy messiah. You okay with that?”
“Fine.”
“We have those pages finished already, actually.”
“What do you mean finished?” Samuel says.
“The Packer stuff. Ghostwritten. Done. About a hundred pages of it.”
“How is that possible?”
“You know how a lot of obituaries are written before the subjects actually die? Same principle. We’ve been working on a bio, just waiting for an angle. So we had it in the hopper. Half your book is ready to go, in other words. The other half is the mother material. She is of course cast as the villain here. You understand that, right?”
“I do.”
“And you can write it? You have no problems portraying her this way? Morally? Ethically?”
“I will savage her intimately, publicly. That’s the deal. I get it.”
And it will not be hard, Samuel imagines, to do this to the woman who left without a word, without warning, who left him alone to survive a motherless childhood. It’s as if two decades’ worth of resentment and pain has, for the first time, found an outlet.
So Samuel calls his mother’s lawyer and says he’s changed his mind. He says he’d be happy to write a letter to the judge in support of her case and would like to have an interview to gather key information. The lawyer gives him his mother’s address in Chicago and sets up a meeting for the very next day, and Samuel is sleepless and jumpy and overstimulated all night as he imagines seeing his mother for the first time since she disappeared so long ago. It seems unfair that it’s been twenty years since he’s seen her and now he has only one day to prepare.
How many times has he imagined it? How many fantasies of reunion has he entertained? And in the many thousands, the millions of them, what happens every time is that he proves to his mother that he is successful and smart. He is important and grown-up and mature. Sophisticated and happy. He shows her how extraordinary his life is, how inconsequential her absence from it has been. He shows her how much he does not need her.
In his fantasies of reunion, his mother always begs his forgiveness and he does not cry. That’s how it goes every time.
But how would he make this happen? In real life? Samuel has no idea. He googles it. He spends most of the night on online support boards for children of estranged parents, websites heavy in their use of capital letters and boldface type and animated GIFs of smiley faces and frowny faces and teddy bears and angels. As he reads through these sites, the thing that surprises Samuel most is the essential sameness of everyone’s problems: the intense feelings of shame and embarrassment and responsibility felt by the abandoned child; the feelings of both adoration and loathing for the missing parent; loneliness coupled with a self-defeating desire for reclusiveness. And so on. It’s like looking into a mirror. All his private weaknesses come publicly back at him, and Samuel feels ashamed about this. Seeing others express exactly what’s in his own heart makes him think he’s unoriginal and ordinary and not the astounding man he needs to be to prove to his mother she shouldn’t have left him.
It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning when he realizes he’s been staring at the same animated GIF for five full minutes—a teddy bear giving something called a “virtual hug” where the bear repeatedly opens and closes its arms in a never-ending loop that’s supposed to be read as an embrace but looks to Samuel more like a deliberate and sarcastic clap, like the bear is mocking him.
He abandons the computer and sleeps fitfully for a few hours before he wakes at dawn and showers and drinks about a whole pot of coffee and gets into his car to make the drive into Chicago.
Despite its proximity, Samuel rarely goes into Chicago these days, and now he remembers why: The closer he gets to the city, the more the highway feels malicious and warlike—wild zigzagging drivers cutting people off, tailgating, honking horns, flashing their lights, all their private traumas now publicly enlarged. Samuel travels with the crush of traffic in a slow sluggish mass of hate. He feels that low-level constant anxiety about not being able to get over into the turn lane when his exit is near. There’s that thing where drivers next to him speed up when they see his turn signal, to eliminate the space he intended to occupy. There is no place less communal in America—no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice—than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago. And there is no better test of this than watching what happens when there is a hundred-car line in the far-right lane, which there is when Samuel reaches his exit. How people bypass the line and dive into any available cranny in front, skipping all the drivers patiently waiting, all of whom are now enraged at this because they each have to wait incrementally longer, but also a bigger and deeper rage that the asshole didn’t wait his turn like everyone else, that he didn’t suffer like they suffer, and then also a tertiary inner rage that they are suckers who wait in lines.
So they yell and gesture obscenely and hover inches from the bumper in front of them. They do not provide any gaps for cutters. They do not make way for anyone. Samuel’s doing it too, and he feels if he allows just one cutter in front of him, he will let down all who wait behind. And so with each movement of the line he guns the gas so that any space is closed. And they lurch toward the exit this way until, at one point when he is checking his mirror for possible cutters and a space opens up in front of him and he is sure this fucking BMW coming up fast on the left is going to cut in front, Samuel is a little too careless with the accelerator and leaps forward and lightly taps the car in front of him.
A taxi. The driver vaults out and screams “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” pointing at Samuel as if to specially emphasize that it is him—and no one else—who needs to be fucked.
“Sorry!” Samuel says, holding up his hands.
The line stopping now produces a wail from the cars behind them, a squall of horns, shouts of anguish and disgust. The cutters see their opportunity and swerve in front of the stopped taxi. The cabbie comes right up to Samuel’s closed window and says, “I will fucking fuck you up, you fucking fuck!”
And then the cabbie spits.
Actually physically leans back as if to get a good running start at it, then propels forward a mucusy glob that splats terribly onto Samuel’s window and sticks there, doesn’t even dribble down but lands and sticks like pasta on a wall, this spatter all yellowish and bubbly with flecks of chewed food and awful spots of blood in it, like one of those maybe-embryos you might find in a raw egg. And satisfied with his creation, the cabbie hustles back to his car and drives away.
For the rest of the drive to his mother’s South Loop neighborhood, this splash of phlegm and snot is with Samuel like another passenger. It feels like he’s driving with an assassin he doesn’t want to make eye contact with. He can see it peripherally as a hazy whitish uneven penumbra as he exits the highway and proceeds down a narrow street whose gutters are dotted by the bags and cups of fast-food restaurants, past a bus station and a desolate weedy lot where it appears a high-rise was intended and abandoned immediately after its foundation was laid, over a bridge that spans the great braid of train tracks that once serviced this area’s mass of slaughterhouses, just south of downtown Chicago, still in plain view of what was once the tallest building in the world, here in what was once the busiest meatpacking district in the world, to his mother’s address in what turns out to be an old warehouse building near the train tracks with a giant sign on top saying LOFTS AVAILABLE, throughout all of this roughly a quarter of Samuel’s attention remains focused on the gooey slop still sticking to his window. He has become amazed at how it doesn’t budge, like an epoxy made to repair broken plastic things. He is moved by the feats the human body is capable of. He’s nervous about this neighborhood. There is literally nobody on the sidewalk.
He parks, double-checks the address. At the building’s front door there is a buzzer. Right there, written on slip of yellowed paper in ink now faded to a light pink, is his mother’s name: Faye Andresen.
He presses the buzzer, which makes no noise whatsoever and makes him think, along with the age of the contraption and the rust and the wires jutting out, that it’s broken. The way his mother’s button sticks for a moment before finally giving way to the pressure of his finger with an audible tick makes him think the button has not been pressed in a very long time.
It strikes him that his mother has been here all along, all these years. Her name has been out here on this slip of paper, washed by the sun, for anyone to see. This does not seem allowable. It seems to Samuel that after she left, she should have ceased to exist.
The door, with a heavy magnetic-sounding click, opens.
He enters. The inside of the building, past the entryway and vestibule with its bank of mailboxes, seems incomplete. Tile floors that abruptly give way to subfloor. White walls that don’t seem painted but rather merely primed. He climbs the three flights of stairs. He finds the door—a bare wooden door, unpainted, unfinished, like something you’d see at a hardware store. He doesn’t know what he expected, but he definitely did not expect this blank nothingness. This anonymous door.
He knocks. He hears a voice inside, his mother’s voice: “It’s open,” she says.
He pushes the door forward. He can see from the hall that the apartment is bright with sunlight. Bare white walls. A familiar smell he cannot place.
He hesitates. He cannot immediately bring himself to walk through this door and back into his mother’s life. After a moment, she speaks up again, from somewhere inside. “It’s okay,” she says. “Don’t be scared.”
And it nearly breaks him, hearing that. He sees her now in a rush of memory, lingering over his bed in the bleary morning and he’s eleven years old and she is about to leave and never come back.
Those words burn him straight through. They reach across the decades and summon up that timid boy he once was. Don’t be scared. It was the last thing she’d ever said to him.