“I wouldn’t know. Cold, I imagine.”
“Still in Norway?”
“Yes.”
“Among the reindeer and northern lights?”
“Yes.”
“I saw the northern lights once. In upper Alberta. I booked a trip with this outfit called See the Northern Lights! I had wanted the northern lights to fill me with wonder. And they did. They filled me with wonder. Which was a big letdown because they exactly matched my expectations of them. They did exactly what I’d paid for. Let that be a lesson to you.”
“A lesson about what?”
“Writing this big epic book of yours. And what you expect it to accomplish for you. Let the northern lights be a lesson. It’s a metaphor, of course.”
Samuel isn’t sure what he’s trying to accomplish. At first he thought if he gathered enough information he could eventually isolate the reason his mother left the family. But how could he ever really pin it down? Any one explanation seemed too easy, too trivial. So instead of looking for answers, he’d begun simply writing her story, thinking that if he could see the world the way she saw it, maybe he’d achieve something greater than mere answers: Maybe he’d achieve understanding, empathy, forgiveness. So he wrote about her childhood, about growing up in Iowa, about going to Chicago for college, about the protest in 1968, about that final month she was with the family before she disappeared, and the more he wrote the more expansive the story became. Samuel wrote about his mother and father and grandfather, he wrote about Bishop and Bethany and the headmaster, he wrote about Alice and the judge and Pwnage—he was trying to understand them, trying to see the things he was too self-absorbed to see the first time through. Even Laura Pottsdam, vicious Laura Pottsdam, Samuel tried to locate a little sympathy for her.
Laura Pottsdam, who at this moment is feeling really great about life and the world because her jerk of an English professor has been fired and replaced by this hapless grad student and her failed plagiarized Hamlet paper has disappeared into the academic mists, so this is all super cool and this whole episode totally confirms what her mother has been telling her since she was a kid, which is that she is a powerful woman who should get what she wants and if she wants something she should GO FOR IT, and what she wants right now are a few J?gerbombs to celebrate justice: The professor is gone, her career is saved. And she sees in this a glimpse of her future, the inevitable successful future laid out in front of her like a runway for an F-16, a future where if anyone tries to get in her way she will blow them to smithereens. This thing with the professor was her first big test, and she passed it. Spectacularly. This is most especially true when Laura’s S.A.F.E. initiative gains serious traction and some awesome shout-outs on the nightly news and in meetings of the Board of Regents, and her friends start telling her she should run for student senate next semester, which she’s like No frickin’ way until the Packer for President campaign comes to campus and Governor Packer himself wants to do a photo op with Laura because he’s super impressed with her efforts on behalf of hardworking Illinois taxpayers everywhere, saying, “Something must be done to protect our students and our wallets from these unproductive liberal professors in outdated fields.” And during the press conference some reporter asks Governor Packer what he thinks about Laura’s gumption and pluck, to which this totally famous presidential candidate responds: “I think she should run for president someday.”
So she switches her major. No more business communication and marketing. She promptly enrolls in the two majors she decides will most help her for a future possible presidential bid: political science and acting.
Samuel does not miss teaching students like Laura Pottsdam, but he does regret how he taught them. He winces at it now, how much he looked down on them. How eventually he could only see their flaws and weaknesses and shortcomings, the ways they did not live up to his standards. Standards that shifted so that the students would never meet them, because Samuel had grown so comfortable being angry. Anger was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn’t want to work too hard. Because his life in the summer of 2011 had been unfulfilling and going nowhere and he was so angry about it. Angry at his mother for leaving, angry at Bethany for not loving him, angry at his students for being uneducatable. He’d settled into the anger because the anger was so much easier than the work required to escape it. Blaming Bethany for not loving him was so much easier than the introspection needed to understand what he was doing that made him unlovable. Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them. And on any given day, it was so much easier to settle in front of his computer than to face his stagnant life, to actually face in a real way the hole inside him that his mother left when she abandoned him, and if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern, and your patterns become your life. He sank into Elfscape like a shipwreck into the water.
Years can go by in this manner, just as they had for Pwnage, who, at this moment, is finally opening his eyes.
He’s been sleeping for a month—the longest sustained “nap” ever recorded at the county hospital—and now he opens his eyes. His body is well-nourished, and his mind is well-rested, and his circulatory and digestive and lymphatic systems are more or less flushed out and operating normally, and he doesn’t feel that ringing headache and clawing hunger and stabbing joint pain and muscle tremor he usually feels. Actually he doesn’t feel any of the background pain that has been his constant companion for so long, and what this feels like to him is a miracle. Compared to how he usually feels, he decides he must either be dead or on drugs. Because there’s no way he could possibly feel this good if he weren’t on some serious drugs, or in heaven.
He looks around the hospital room and sees Lisa sitting on the couch. Lisa, his beautiful ex-wife, who smiles at him and hugs him and who’s carrying under her arm that tattered black leather notebook in which he’d written the first few pages of his detective novel. And she tells him that several packages have arrived from a big-shot New York publishing house with all this paperwork for him to sign, and when Pwnage asks her what the paperwork’s for she grins at him and says, “Your book deal!”
For this was another of Samuel’s conditions to Periwinkle, that Periwinkle publish his friend’s novel.
“And what is this novel about?” Periwinkle had asked.
“Um, a psychic detective on the trail of a serial killer?” Samuel said. “And the killer turns out to be the detective’s ex-wife’s boyfriend, I think, or son-in-law, or something.”
“Actually,” Periwinkle said, “that sounds amazing.”
Pwnage once told Samuel that the people in your life are either enemies, obstacles, puzzles, or traps. And for both Samuel and Faye, circa summer 2011, people were definitely enemies. Mostly what they wanted out of life was to be left alone. But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel’s written his book, the more he’s realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar.
This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.
And so he’s trying, Samuel is, trying to be diligent in this odd new life he has with Bethany. They are not lovers. They may one day become lovers, but they are not lovers yet. Samuel’s attitude about this is: Whatever happens, happens. He knows he can’t go back and relive his life, can’t change the mistakes of his past. His relationship with Bethany is not a Choose Your Own Adventure book. So instead he will do this: He will clarify it, illuminate it, try to understand it better. He can prevent his past from swallowing his present. So he’s trying to be in the moment, trying not to let the moment get all discolored by his fantasies of what the moment ought to be. He is trying to see Bethany as she really is. And isn’t that what everybody really wants? To be seen clearly? He’d always been obsessed with a few of Bethany’s qualities: her eyes, for example, and her posture. But then she told him one day that the feature she shared most closely with Bishop was her eyes, and so whenever she stares into a mirror at her eyes it makes her a little sad. And another time she told him her posture had been drilled into her by the endless Alexander Technique lessons she endured for years while other kids her age were playing on swing sets and running through sprinklers. After Samuel heard these stories, he could not go on thinking the same way about her eyes or posture. These things were diminished, but what he realized was that the whole was greatly expanded.
So he is beginning to see Bethany as she is, for maybe the first time.
His mother, too. He’s trying understand her, to see her clearly and not through the distortion of his own anger. The only lie Samuel ever told Periwinkle was that Faye had stayed in Norway. It seemed like a good lie to tell—if everyone believed she was in the arctic, then nobody would bother her. Because the truth is she returned home, to that little Iowa river town, to care for her father.
Frank Andresen’s dementia was pretty far along by then. When Faye saw him the first time and the nurse said “Your daughter’s here,” he looked at Faye with such wonder and surprise. He was so thin and skeletal. There were red spots on his forehead rubbed raw from scratching and picking. He looked at her like she was a ghost.
“Daughter?” he said. “What daughter?”
Which is the kind of thing Faye would have chalked up to battiness if she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t known there might be more to that question than simple confusion.
“It’s me, Dad,” she said, and she decided to take a risk. “It’s me, Freya.”
And the name registered somewhere deep down inside him and his face crumpled and he looked at her with anguish and despair. She went to him then and gathered his fragile body in her arms.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t be sad.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking at her with an intensity unusual for a man who had spent his life avoiding the gaze of other people. “I’m so very sorry.”
“Everything turned out well. We all love you.”
“You do?”
“Everyone loves you so much.”
He looked at her very closely and studied her face a long time.
Fifteen minutes later the whole episode was lost. He caught himself in the middle of some story and looked at her pleasantly and said, “Now who are you, dear?”
But the moment seemed to shake something loose in him, seemed to uncork something important, because among the stories he’d tell now were stories of young Marthe, taking midnight strolls under a dimly lit sky, stories Faye had never heard before and stories that embarrassed the nurses because it was clear the walks were postcoital. Something seemed to lift inside him, some burden let go. Even the nurses said so.
So Faye is renting a small apartment close to the nursing home and each morning she walks over and spends the whole day with her father. Sometimes he recognizes her, but most of the time he doesn’t. He tells old ghost stories, or stories about the ChemStar factory, or stories of fishing the Norwegian Sea. And every once in a while he’ll see her and by the look on his face she understands that he’s really seeing Freya. And when this happens she soothes him and hugs him and tells him everything turned out well, and she describes the farm when he asks about it, and when she describes it she does so grandly—not just barley in the front yard but whole fields of wheat and sunflowers. He smiles. He’s picturing it. It makes him happy to hear this. It makes him happy when she says, “I forgive you. We all forgive you.”
“But why?”
“Because you’re a good man. You did the best you could.”
And it’s true. He did. He was a good man. As good a father as he could be. Faye had simply never seen it before. Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.
So this is what she can do for him now, comfort him and keep him company and forgive and forgive and forgive. She cannot save his body or his mind, but she can lighten his soul.
They talk for a while and then he needs to nap, sometimes falling asleep mid-sentence. Faye reads while he sleeps, making her way once again through the collected poetry of Allen Ginsberg. And sometimes Samuel phones her, and when he does she’ll put the book away and answer his questions, all his big terrifying questions: Why did she leave Iowa? And college? And her husband? And her son? She tries to answer honestly and thoroughly, even though it’s frightening for her. It is literally the first time in her life she is not hiding some great piece of herself, and she feels so exposed that it’s close to panic. She has never before given herself over to anyone—she’d always parceled herself out little by little. This bit for Samuel, some small part for her father, barely anything for Henry. She’d never put all of herself in just one place. It felt too risky. Because her great and constant fear all these years was that if anyone ever came to know all of her—the real her, the true deep essential Faye—they would not find enough stuff there to love. Hers was not a soul large enough to nourish another.
But now she’s trusting Samuel with everything. She answers his questions. She holds nothing back. Even when her answers make the panic boil up within her—that Samuel will think she’s a terrible person, that he’ll stop calling—still she tells him the truth. And just when she thinks his interest in her must be exhausted, just when her answers prove that she’s a person unworthy of his love, what actually happens is quite the opposite. He seems more interested, calls more often. And sometimes he calls to talk—not about her ugly past but about how her day went, or about the weather, or the news. It makes her hope that someday soon they’ll be two people encountering each other sincerely, without the disfigurement of their history, minus all her immutable mistakes.
She’ll be patient. She knows she can’t force a thing like that. She’ll wait, and she’ll take care of her father, and she’ll answer her son’s many questions. And when Samuel wants to know her secrets, she’ll tell him her secrets. And when he wants to talk about the weather, she’ll talk about the weather. And when he wants to talk about the news, she’ll talk about the news. She flips on the television to see what’s happening in the world. Today it’s all about unemployment, global deleveraging, recession. People are panicked. Uncertainty is at an all-time high. A crisis is looming.
But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all—just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid.
If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.
So banks and governments are cleaning up their ledgers after years of abuse. Everyone owes too much, is the consensus, and we’re in for a few years of pain. But Faye thinks: Okay. That’s probably the way it ought to be. That’s the natural way of things. That’s how we’ll find our way back. This is what she’ll tell her son, if he asks. Eventually, all debts must be repaid.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE EVENTS of 1968 described in this novel are a blend of historical facts, eyewitness interviews, and the author’s imagination, ignorance, and fancy. For example, Allen Ginsberg attended the Chicago protests, but he was not a visiting professor at Circle. And Circle did not have dorms in 1968. And the Behavioral Science Building wasn’t opened until 1969. And my depiction of the Grant Park protest does not follow the exact chronological order of things. And so on. For more historically accurate accounts of the ’68 protests, I would recommend the following, which were invaluable to me during the writing of this novel: Chicago ’68 by David Farber; The Whole World Is Watching by Todd Gitlin; Battleground Chicago by Frank Kusch; Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer; Chicago 10 directed by Brett Morgen; Telling It Like It Was: The Chicago Riots edited by Walter Schneir; and No One Was Killed by John Schultz.
In addition, I am indebted to the following books for helping me to portray the time period in (I hope) a convincing way: Make Love, Not War by David Allyn; Young, White, and Miserable by Wini Breines; Culture Against Man by Jules Henry; 1968 by Mark Kurlansky; Dream Time by Geoffrey O’Brien; and Shards of God by Ed Sanders.
Some of the words given to Allen Ginsberg in this book were written by him first in his essays and letters, collected in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995 edited by Bill Morgan, and in Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties edited by Gordon Ball.
For the great Norwegian ghost stories, I am indebted to Folktales of Norway edited by Reidar Christiansen and translated by Pat Shaw Iversen. The nix is the Germanic name given to a ghost that, in Norway, would actually be called the n?kk.
My information about panic attacks comes from Dying of Embarrassment by Barbara G. Markway et al. and Fearing Others by Ariel Stravynksi. For insights regarding desire and frustration, I am indebted to Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips.
For his research on the psychology and behavior of MMORPG players, I am grateful to Nick Yee and his Daedalus Project. My thinking about the four kinds of challenges in video games was aided by Phil Co’s Level Design for Games. Pwnage’s various brain disorders came from Nicholas Carr’s blog Rough Type and the article “Microstructure Abnormalities in Adolescents with Internet Addiction Disorder” by Kai Yuan et al., published in PLoS ONE, June 2011.
Feminine hygiene ads in Faye’s home ec classroom are from the website Found in Mom’s Basement at pzrservices.typepad.com/?vintageadvertising. Certain Laura Pottsdam details were plucked from a couple of amazing calls to the Savage Lovecast by Dan Savage. My description of the Molly Miller music video owes a debt to Andrew Darley’s Visual Digital Culture. Some information regarding Circle’s brutalist architecture comes from Andrew Bean’s Wesleyan University honors thesis, “The Unloved Campus: Evolution of Perceptions at the University of Illinois at Chicago.” The argument for a reproductive boycott is excerpted from an article in Ain’t I a Woman 3, no. 1 (1972). The letter to the editor that Faye reads in the Chicago Free Voice is excerpted from an unpublished letter to the Chicago Seed donated to the Chicago History Museum. Sebastian’s information about the maarr comes from Franca Tamisari’s “The Meaning of the Steps Is in Between: Dancing and the Curse of Compliments,” published in The Australian Journal of Anthropology, August 2000. Allen Ginsberg’s “Eat Mangoes!” story is from Teachings of Sri Ramakrishna.
Thank you to the staff at the Chicago History Museum for their assistance. For supporting revisions on this novel, a big thank-you to the Minnesota State Arts Board and the University of St. Thomas.
Thank you to my editor, Tim O’Connell, for his exceptional guidance in shaping the story, not to mention his Periwinkle-like enthusiasm and zeal. Thank you to all the great people at Knopf: Tom Pold, Andrew Ridker, Paul Bogaards, Robin Desser, Gabrielle Brooks, Jennifer Kurdyla, LuAnn Walther, Oliver Munday, Kathy Hourigan, Ellen Feldman, Cameron Ackroyd, Karla Eoff, and Sonny Mehta.
Thank you to my agent, Emily Forland, for her wisdom, patience, and good cheer. Thank you to Marianne Merola, and all the wonderful folks at Brandt & Hochman.
Thank you to my family, my friends, and my teachers for their love, kindness, generosity, and support. Thank you to Molly Dorozenski for her counsel after reading lengthy early drafts.
And finally, thank you to Jenni Groyon, my first reader, for helping me find the path through ten years of writing.
An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Guide
The Nix by Nathan Hill
The introduction, author biography, discussion questions, and suggested reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of The Nix, the captivating debut novel by Nathan Hill.