Brain-dead Max imagines he’s getting the remote. “What’s on Chandler?” he says.
Danny grabs the changer. “The usual bogus shit.”
“Let’s just see,” pleads Max.
“Forget it, creep,” says Danny.
It’s strange how everyone watches Chandler. It’s really just a talk show, and Chandler is an annoying rich black dude who quit a million-dollar corporate law job to get real, get down with the street. Last year the network picked up his contract for fifty million dollars. So Chandler came out okay. His show is such a big hit that it runs during the dinner hour to compete with the news. They advertise it that way: The good news is on Chandler. It’s what all the mothers—except Danny’s—watch on those miniature TVs they set up in the kitchen for when they’re cooking. What’s doubly strange is how the kids in school talk about what they saw on Chandler. And it’s not just the teachers bringing it up. Maybe it’s because Chandler has shows that are actually interesting, especially if you happen to be so stoned that his guests seem smart.
Every so often, Chandler gets it right, like that program with the high-school kids talking about global warming. Not the usual geeks you see on those shows. All the girls were hot and intelligent. The guys were guys you’d be friends with. But Danny’s not in the mood for Chandler right now. It’s creepy that when the skinhead was on Chandler, Danny predicted that Meyer and Mom would get a Nazi of their own.
Danny changes from the Cartoon Channel to MTV. Then he hits the mute button.
“Listen” he says. “Do you know who that guy upstairs is?”
“Duh,” Max says. “You and I watched that Chandler together.”
“Max, man, this is not some talk-show guest. Did you see the guy’s arm?”
“I’m not stupid,” Max says. “We read Night last semester, asshole. I hated it, remember. I had to write that cut-and-paste poem with phrases from the book.”
“I still can’t believe they made you read that. They should have made you do Anne Frank.”
Max says, “Plus, do you think I’m so retarded I don’t know where Mom works?”
“Sorry,” says Danny. “I’m not saying you’re retarded. It’s just weird, is all.”
“It is weird. Mom’s out of her fucking mind.”
“Language!” Danny imitates Mom.
As he turns toward the big screen, Max idly gives Danny the finger. The two boys fall silent, attempting to lip-read what the moderately hot Asian girl is saying through her tears.
“Put the sound on,” Max says.
“Bite me,” Danny replies.
The camera pulls back to show the Asian girl sitting by a pool, at night. It’s Key West. Danny’s seen this one before. Subhita has a drinking problem and has been arguing with the other girls in the house.
Max says, “Do you think we should call Dad? Should we tell him about this guy?”
This is what Danny means about the gaps in his brother’s information—for example, about who Dad is. Their father’s a jerk who went to live in Manhattan in a boring high-rise apartment with Lorraine, the widow of his dead partner, Jeffrey. Before she hooked up with Jeffrey, Lorraine was the wife of Jeffrey’s patient, who died of a heart attack, at fifty. Then Jeffrey died of a heart attack, at forty-nine. Once Danny overheard Mom calling Lorraine the Black Widow. Danny knew she was joking, but for a while he was scared. Dad is forty-eight. Dad is not a responsible grown-up you can ask for advice and help. Dragging Dad into this will only make everything worse.
Danny says, “How can Mom do this? Can you explain that one thing?”
Two girls’ faces fill the screen. Danny raises the sound. Amanda and Kirsten are agreeing that Subhita should put herself back in rehab.
“The guy’s got no place to stay,” Max says. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be here. Mom’s not going to leave him on the street. That’s not who Mom is.”
Trust genius Max to cut to the chase, though Danny can’t recall Mom saying, in so many words, that the guy was homeless. But that’s got to be the story. So it’s worse than Danny thought. He could be here for months.
“Mom’s just trying to be a good person,” says Max, the middle-school Dalai Lama. No wonder their mother loves Max more. Max is a better person than Danny. And so grown-up for his age.
“Brilliant,” says Danny. “That’s the most obvious thing about Mom. Now tell me something I don’t know.”
“Pizza’s here!” yells Mom.
Max runs upstairs. Let the others go first. Danny flips through the channels and stops, frozen by the freaked-out piglet face of Timothy McVeigh. What a coincidence. The guy’s separated-at-birth twin is upstairs scarfing down pizza.
Danny trudges up to the kitchen. Surprise! They’ve started without him.
“Danny,” says Mom. “Get a chair.”
Danny gets a chair from the living room and pulls up next to Max. Everyone’s eating off real plates. There are glasses, a carton of orange juice. Mom has made a salad.
“La-di-dah,” Danny says to the salad.
“Excuse me?” says Mom. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” Danny says. “Talking to myself.”
His slice of pizza buckles, dumping the cheese in a greasy plop at the bottom of the box. He tears off a mouthful of soggy crust, chokes it down, then, just to see what will happen, says, “They’re delaying the McVeigh execution. They found three thousand pages of evidence the FBI forgot to turn over.”
“FBI slimeballs,” says Vincent. Danny can’t tell if Vincent knows that McVeigh looks just like him.
“I think it’s disgusting,” Mom says. “All that media frenzy, everyone so bloodthirsty, wanting to watch a human being die. It’s like the Roman Colosseum. They should sell beer and popcorn and kill the guy in Yankee Stadium. I’d feel better about that than having to hear all this stuff about ‘closure.’ At least it would be honest. I know he’s a murderer. I don’t approve of what he did, but still—”
Danny guesses he agrees. But it’s always so embarrassing when his mom gets fired up.
“Definitely,” Vincent says. “The government loves killing. What about those women and babies they gassed and burned at Waco? What about them sending in their crack SWAT team to murder Randy Weaver’s wife?”
“Yes, well…I don’t know…” Mom’s voice trails off. “Of course, I don’t believe in the death penalty to start with.”
Neither does Danny, exactly. But hasn’t Mom ever seen the clips of those bloody babies outside the Murragh Building? Sometimes Danny worries about terrorists blowing up the Tappan Zee Bridge when he and Mom and Max are crossing. He wishes he never thought like that. Other kids don’t seem to. And he wishes he didn’t suspect that he has these fears because he’s like Mom.
“Were you watching the news?” Mom says. “At least it’s the news. I hate the boys watching TV.”
“I try to stay away from TV,” says Vincent. “Toxic parasite mind rot.”
For all Danny knows, Vincent’s one of those guys who think that the government is beaming mind-control rays out of the TV screen. The last thing Danny needs around here is someone who, for whatever reason, is on his mother’s side about television.
“Actually, guys,” says Mom, “Vincent’s a reader.” Meaning unlike you two. “And guess what? He didn’t start really reading till he was twenty-five.”
Danny and Max will never forgive her for comparing them negatively to a Nazi. Though it’s possible that she’s just trying to reassure them that, underneath the lightning bolts, the guy is a harmless book nerd.
“He’s reading Dostoyevsky.”
Danny says, “Who the fuck is Dostoyevsky?” Even though he knows.
“Danny!” his mom says. “Language!”
Max says, “So what do you guys do? Like, beat up black people and Jews?”
Jesus, Danny loves Max sometimes. Right now he’s the perfect age. Still trading on his little-kid right to ask inappropriate questions, but grown up enough to know what the right
questions are. When Dad and Mom announced they were splitting up, Max asked if they still loved each other. They both answered at the same moment. Mom said of course, Dad said not exactly, and then Dad said, I mean of course.
“I never did,” says Vincent. “But I knew guys who did.”
“You don’t know them now?” Max says.
“I don’t know them, and they don’t know me,” Vincent says.
“Good for you!” says Mom. “Boys, you can’t imagine the risk Vincent is taking. He says there are guys, his former friends, who won’t like his quitting—”
A familiar look comes over Mom’s face. She wishes she hadn’t said that, wishes she hadn’t given in to the impulse to share her fears with them. Danny wishes she hadn’t. Now he’s got one more thing to worry about.
They finish their pizza in silence. Danny and Max clear the table, which they wouldn’t usually do, but they can’t let Mom do it, not in front of a stranger. So maybe it’s good that she’s brought him home. It feels like those first weeks after Dad left, when everyone was practically tiptoeing around the house. Normal rules suspended. Like having a substitute teacher, except you act better instead of worse.
After dinner Danny and Max watch more TV. Homework isn’t mentioned. Danny surfs the channels. He keeps wondering what’s happening upstairs. The pressure is exhausting. Danny drifts off several times before he wakes up and finds Max asleep in front of boring Ted Koppel. Propping his little brother up, he half steers, half pushes him to his room, and dumps him on his bed.
In his own room, Danny lies awake, trying to ignore the noises that always start at night when the world stops pretending to be its harmless daytime self. As a kid, he’d been scared of the dark. Way past the age when he would admit it, he used to make Mom come to his room and stay with him till he fell asleep. He’d pretended that he’d just wanted to talk. Once he overheard Dad tell Mom that kids weren’t smart enough to know what to be scared of. The proof, he said, was that children were scared of the dark and not of death and airplanes. Now Danny’s old enough to be scared of all that and more.
How humiliating to be sixteen and still afraid of the dark. Maybe he should phone one of his friends, or go online and see if anyone’s awake. He’d like to talk to Chloe. She always makes him feel better. But what would he say? He can’t tell Chloe how nervous he is. So there’s nothing to do but lie here and listen to the noises that spooked him as a kid. Relax. It’s only the footsteps of the Nazi moving in.
MEYER AND HIS FRIEND SOL STAND OVER Sol’s wife, Minna, watching her chest rise and fall. You’d think it was fascinating. And in a way, it is. The distance Minna has traveled in a couple of days! Her face has that chalky pallor hospital patients get, camouflaged to match the walls, their doctors’ coats, the skim milk on their trays, as if they’re trying to disappear, fade into the woodwork so Death can’t find them. But Minna isn’t dying. The operation went well. She may look embalmed, but according to Sol, she’ll be back on her feet in no time, hosting her famous Sunday brunches.
Those oily bounties of cheese and smoked fish will never seem the same now that Meyer has watched Minna snore in her puckered flowery pajamas. Their mutual embarrassment will be the geriatric version of how Meyer used to feel when he ran into girls he’d slept with when he first came to this country. Those sweet, warm-hearted American girls, so eager to help him forget. Mercy fuck was the first American slang phrase Meyer learned. But that awkwardness was about sex, and this is about death, about watching himself and his friends race each other to the grave, a race no one wants to win.
Meyer’s got no cause for complaint. At seventy-one, he’s in excellent health. Seventy-one? That’s reason enough for self-pity. Often Meyer finds himself staring at men his age, wondering how they get through the day without lashing out in a jealous rage at everyone younger than they are. Meanwhile he’s ashamed of himself for questioning the will of God, for worrying about how much time he has left when he knows he’s supposed to be thinking of higher things: his work, his foundation.
Sol’s describing Minna’s symptoms. The pesky cough. The X ray on which they accidentally picked up the aneurysm that would have blown her artery wide apart if they hadn’t caught it in time.
“How lucky was that?” asks Sol.
“A miracle. Miracles happen.” Dear God, don’t let Sol remember that’s the title of the second section of Meyer’s new book. But would he think it was less sincere? No, he’d think Meyer meant it. He’d put it in a book.
Meyer does mean it. What else but miracles can explain what happens in one lifetime? Consider the arc that took him from the hayloft in Hungary to here. He doesn’t like to think about it, not so much because the memory is still painful, which it is, but because he is conscious of using it, or of using his distance from it, to make himself feel better about why he was spared and what he has done with his life. How shameless to use the Holocaust as an analgesic. But even that is better than using it as your trump card, to win every argument, to establish your credentials in the field of suffering. But the truth is, it is a trump card. And soon there will be no one left alive with the indisputable right to play it.
“Meyer,” Sol’s saying. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. You were telling me about Minna.”
“I made her go to the hospital,” said Sol.
“Lucky thing she has you,” Meyer says. Sol’s a good husband, one of the fortunate few who’s satisfied with what he’s got. He wants nothing more than his Minna, his library, his tenured job teaching comparative literature at Queens College. Unlike Meyer, Sol has lots of male friends: confident, athletic, expensively maintained professionals who clump together, telling jokes at Minna’s brunches. Meyer has known Sol since Meyer first came to this country and supported himself by giving language lessons. Meyer tutored Sol’s students. Meyer slept with them. Sol didn’t.
Minna’s stomach gurgles. “She looks terrific,” Meyer says.
“Your nose just grew,” says Sol.
“She’ll be fine.” Meyer turns his palm outward, a stop sign for doubts.
“So they tell me,” says Sol.
Minna’s pink pajamas make her sudden spasm seem like the ropy stretching of a sleeping child. She pushes the blanket down, revealing a gap between her shirt buttons. Meyer glimpses a curve of breast before he turns away.
“Sit down,” says Sol. Meyer sinks into a chair, a motion Sol mirrors on the opposite side of the bed. Peering down from the TV, Tom Brokaw chants above footage of Tim McVeigh being led out in leg irons, squinting into the flashbulbs. Meyer sighs. If only Vincent Nolan looked a little less like McVeigh.
Sol says, “Imagine, the guy calling those babies collateral damage! That’s what I can’t get past. Half the time I think, Go ahead and fry the sick bastard. But then again—”
“I’ve got a better plan,” Meyer says. “Make McVeigh think he’s going to be killed. Then save him at the last minute. Like Dostoyevsky.”
“Like you,” says Sol.
“Like me,” Meyer concedes. “And let me tell you, it changes you. Televise his life after that. It’s the reality TV that we all want to watch.”
“That’s brilliant,” says Sol. “Have you written about that? Maybe for the op-ed page.” An almost lustful enthusiasm glimmers in Sol’s eyes as he flings his idea, without envy, at the shrine of Meyer’s importance. Sol wishes he could write anything for the op-ed page.
“I don’t know,” says Meyer. It might not be helpful, at this point, for Brotherhood Watch to support the country’s most hated homegrown terrorist. A piece like that would hardly sell more benefit tickets. As if the New York Times would print such garbage in the first place. But shouldn’t Meyer do something? Isn’t McVeigh’s life worth saving?
Meyer says, “Ever seen anyone hung?”
“No,” says Sol. “Thank God.”
“I have,” says Meyer.
“I know.” Of course Sol knows. Meyer described it in both of his first two book
s. For a guy whose mission—whose raison d’être—is remembrance, Meyer is getting forgetful. Sometimes, when someone asks a question about his war experience, he has to look it up in his memoirs. If he had to get through the war now, he probably wouldn’t survive. He hates the idea that everything depended on his having been young. He wants to believe he’s the same person. The same soul in a different body.
Meyer and Sol watch two men in dark suits, huddled and scowling. McVeigh’s lawyers say their client is reviewing his options.
“What options?” says Sol. “To die or to die.”
“Same options everyone gets,” Meyer says.
“Thanks, I needed that,” says Sol. “Okay. Listen. What did the blind man say the first time he touched a matzoh?”
Meyer shrugs. He’s waiting.
“Who wrote this shit?” Sol says.
Meyer laughs out loud, then says, “I never get to laugh like that at my job.”
“Poor you,” says Sol. “All you have to do is keep a straight face and you get to fly the Concorde. Hey, what did I say wrong? Your face got the strangest look—”
A loud gurgle from Minna’s intestines reclaims their attention.
“Great of you to come,” Sol says. “Considering all you’ve got on your plate.”
“I said I would come. I couldn’t not come.” It’s not only that Meyer has known Sol and Minna for so long, that he cares about them, that it means something to them that he’s here. Whether he likes it or not, and despite how lonely it makes him feel, Meyer Maslow showing up means a little something extra.
Beyond that, there’s a raft of reasons he’s not about to discuss with Sol, reasons why he had to come, some of which have to do with a letter Meyer received this morning.
A hate letter, as it happens.
Meyer gets plenty of hate mail. Thank God, he rarely sees it. His staff makes the first cut and passes the rest of his correspondence along to Roberta or Bonnie. But like the secretaries, Roberta had thought it was nice that someone had sent him, anonymously, a chapter from Charles Dickens.
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