The Smash-Up

by Ali Benjamin

  The Smash-Up is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Ali Benjamin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Benjamin, Ali, author.

  Title: The smash-up: a novel / Ali Benjamin.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020023010 (print) | LCCN 2020023011 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593229651 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593229668 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593243244 (international edition)

  Classification: LCC PS3602.E66346 S6213 2021 (print) | LCC PS3602.E66346 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020023010

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020023011

  Ebook ISBN 9780593229668

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Jaya Miceli

  Cover images: Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Tuesday, Late September 2018

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  June 1995

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Wednesday

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  October 1995

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  February 1996

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Thursday

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  June 1996

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Friday

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Saturday

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Ali Benjamin

  About the Author

  “Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.”

  —George Eliot

  “I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.”

  —Edith Wharton

  What happened?

  Everyone asked the question, had been asking since the election. They asked while watching the news, that storm of headlines, jump-cut footage of marches and speeches and hand-sharpied cardboard, an endless, swirling blizzard—a siege, really—of protests and counterprotests, action and reaction, people screaming at one another in the street, neighbor versus neighbor, friend versus friend. (Or too often: friends no more. We were in new territory. People had their limits.)

  What happened? Reporters asked in small-town diners over $7.50 lunch specials, BLTs cut into neat wedges and Heinz bottles perched like microphones atop scratched Formica tables.

  What happened? People asked one another in church basements, community centers, gyms, coffee shops, living rooms where they came together to weep, process, scrawl on placards, plan the revolution.

  What happened? Parents snapped off NPR mid-story, not wanting to answer questions from the backseat. College students organized walkouts, staged sit-ins, blocked freeways. A giant inflatable chicken appeared behind the White House lawn, some sort of protest that no one entirely understood. Everything was some sort of protest now.

  What happened what happened what happened what

  Everyone had their answers, and as is generally the case in these situations, everyone’s version of the story was a little different. It was impossible, it was inevitable, it was surreal, it was unreal, it was scandal, sea change, enthralling, a coup. It was some bad sort of smash-up: just the right-or-wrong elements at just the right-or-wrong time: anger and alienation, misinformation and disinformation, resentment and rage, hucksters and hackers, bots and Nazis (literal Nazis! As if they hadn’t been the unequivocal villains in every film for the last half century! For heaven’s sake, hadn’t these people ever even seen Indiana Jones?). It was all of these things, it was none of these things, it made no goddamned sense, that’s the point, and the only thing any of us knew for sure was this: on the eighth day of the eleventh month of the year of our lord two thousand and sixteen, our nation—and with it the world we’d known—had turned upside down.

  Once, a lifetime ago it seems now, I interviewed a geologist. This was in the Before—before the world smashed to pieces, back when we could count on tomorrow unfolding more or less like it had today, which of course was more or less like yesterday and all the days before that. Find something interesting, my editor had told me. He’d said it vaguely, with a wave of his hand. Make geology relevant.

  The geologist I’d interviewed was athletic and lean, pale as parchment. For two hours, she and I sat together in a windowless basement office in the science building of a mid-sized college campus. She explained that the Earth’s crust is always in motion, tectonic plates shifting endlessly, like jigsaw puzzle pieces shuffled around a table. The plates move so slowly that changes are largely imperceptible.

  But sometimes the jagged edges snag. The plates can’t get free, so they push against each other, like lovers who can neither separate nor get close enough. Pressure mounts, moment upon moment, decade upon decade. Eventually the planet cracks open, and nothing is ever the same again. We think of an earthquake as a single moment in time, the geologist told me that day, when in fact it’s a centuries-long event. It happens bit by bit by bit, then all at once.

  She shared other things in that conversation—that the Americas and Asia will someday be a single landmass, one enormous supercontinent. That our oceans sometimes belch enormous boulders into open sky; recently, a stone two and a half times the weight of the Statue of Liberty was hurled from the sea off the coast of Ireland. It sailed hundreds of feet through the air, then landed, to the bewilderment of locals, smack-dab in the middle of an open field.

  But it was the earthquake part that I found myself thinking about in those days of what happened.

  Bit by bit by bit, then all at once. That was how it felt: like pressure we hadn’t even noticed building had cracked wide open the ground we’d been standing on. Only after fissures had become chasms did we realize they’d been there all along. Sometimes the people who had been next to us just moments ago were now on the other side of a sharp divide, a canyon no one could cross.

  It ripped people apart, this thing that happened. That’s what I’m saying. It tore entire lives asunder.

  * * *

  —

  If you’ve ever been to Starkfield, you know the post office. And if you know the post office, y
ou know it’s the last place you can reliably get any sort of cell service until you reach Corbury.

  It was a mile south of the post office, well into the dead zone, that I came upon Ethan.

  It was March, then: twenty-eight months since the election. I’d spent the last two months traveling the country, interviewing artists and academics, scientists and entrepreneurs. I was gathering notes for an anthology of big ideas. This Is Genius. Its pages were to feature change-makers, innovators, thought leaders. These were the folks who delivered TED talks, won PEN Awards, who might, any day now, be invited to fly to Sweden to accept their Nobel. (None of them, it should be noted, knew what happened, either, nor had they seen it coming.)

  That week, I’d been at a small Berkshires college trying to understand the work of a neurobiologist, a MacArthur winner who studied birdsong—one of those quiet academics whose research seems charmingly irrelevant until the moment people realize it upends tenets of Darwinism.

  I was nearing the end of my research phase for the book, staying in an Airbnb apartment above the garage of an aging widow, Mrs. Nathan Hale, near the center of downtown Starkfield. For the most part, my book research had taken me to big cities and hip college towns—young places where I’d stood in long lines at pour-over coffee shops, listening to the whir of espresso machines as tattooed baristas rattled off the precise textural differences between flat whites and café au laits.

  Starkfield, by contrast, is a quiet place. Humble. Though it’s surrounded by communities with world-class museums and expensive ski lodges, celebrity-studded theater festivals and performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Starkfield somehow manages to have none of these things. Downtown boasts only a nondescript village green, around which are scattered a handful of small businesses, no more than one of each variety: one coffee shop, one hardware store, one bank, one barbershop, one pharmacy. There’s a recently shuttered UPS Store, a chain pizza shop, a dive bar called the Flats, and a nail salon with a tanning bed in back. A person can pass through the business district in forty seconds without breaking the speed limit.

  Starkfield, in other words, is a closed-off sort of place—the kind of town where a person might be able to hide from all those screaming headlines, all that action and reaction. Maybe find a little quiet amid the noise.

  So there I was: on Route 7, returning to my rented one-bedroom after my final interview with the biologist. And there he was: Ethan.

  He stood on the shoulder, in front of a battered Subaru wagon, just past the painted Eelcome to Starkfield, a historic village sign, the threshold between Starkfield and everywhere. He was long and lanky, wearing Carhartts and Warby Parkers, a knit cap pulled over his ears. He held his cell phone toward the sky, and something about his posture—the lift of his chin as he squinted at his screen, the rigid way he held his shoulders—reminded me of a statue, some long-forgotten figure, frozen forever in bronze.

  The man’s tire was flat. Any fool could see that.

  I didn’t want to stop. I had work to do, deadlines to meet, a book to finish, plenty of other concerns too. I considered waving, rolling past as if I didn’t understand he was in trouble. But as I got closer, Ethan glanced up from his phone. His eyes drifted through my windshield, met mine.

  He nodded in greeting, a single dip of the head.

  Poor man’s not been the same since the smash-up. The Widow Hale had said that to me just this morning, confessing that she’d left a casserole on his porch. She’d said it almost apologetically, as if there were some shame in helping out a neighbor. I took pains to reassure her: it’s always a lovely thing, looking after those who live among us. Isn’t that what the world most needs these days?

  Now I lifted one hand from the steering wheel, waved. Then I sighed, slowed, cranked the steering wheel to the right. I rolled down my window. “Need some help?”

  He had a car jack back at the house. Shouldn’t take long.

  I nodded. Waited until he was buckled in before I put the car into gear. We rode in silence, Ethan staring out the window until we reached the edge of downtown. It was not quite the end of a long, bleak winter. The village green—presented as bright and alive in all the official town promotional materials—was now nothing but dead grass and gray patches of ice. Ethan turned away from the window as we passed. He leaned down to lift a book that lay at his feet: String Theory for Dummies. I’d been using this book while writing a particularly obscure chapter of This Is Genius. Ethan opened to a random page, began to read. “Ten to the five-hundredth power separate universes, each with its own laws of physics.”

  I kept my eyes on the road. I couldn’t shake the feeling the wrong response might have the effect of a gunshot near a skittish horse; poor guy might throw open the door of the car, pitch himself right the hell out of the moving vehicle.

  “Well, that’s what some say, anyway,” I finally answered. I flicked my left blinker, started up Schoolhouse Hill. “But it’s not like any of us will get to know for sure.”

  He set the book down, looked out the window again. “There are so many things in this world I don’t know about.”

  Was that wonder in his voice, or regret?

  Just past the old cemetery, we turned into a rutted driveway. A hand-painted sign, faded almost to bare wood, hung from an oak: The Fromes. The driveway, like the lawn, was all dug up, mud frozen into hard lumps like boils on skin. Flapping tarps covered bare clapboards—a renovation project, begun during more optimistic times, now permanently stalled. Ethan opened the car door, swung his feet onto the driveway. “Might as well come inside.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. “Could take a minute.”

  I hesitated. Wouldn’t it be easier, faster, less…involved…if I just waited out here? But then a blast of cold wind blew through the front seat. Too cold. I opened my own door and followed him up the sagging porch.

  Inside, it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. The place was dark. Cramped. Construction tarps hung from the ceiling, blocking off an entire side of the house. On this side of the plastic, a stack of furniture stood like some sort of conceptual sculpture: a coffee table on top of an armchair atop a sofa. There were two dining-room tables, top to top, legs reaching both toward the floor and toward the ceiling, like a variation of Dolittle’s pushmi-pullyu. Two rolled carpets, one still in its original plastic, leaned against the wall, while half-filled boxes covered the floor. Ethan glanced around, as if he were seeing the place for the first time. “Been trying to organize,” he said. An apology, I think. “Car jack’s around here somewhere.”

  Across the room, an old dog lifted her head. Her tail thumped two times. Three.

  Ethan opened a box marked Garage—Keep. He peered inside, frowned, then began to open another. The old dog, tired, lay back down, began to snore.

  As Ethan stooped over those boxes, attempting to decipher the chaos of his own life, I turned around, shifted my attention to a built-in bookshelf. It wasn’t a book that captured my attention. It was a photograph: taken outside on some bright, sunny day. Green grass, summer leaves, dappled light. Three faces, all of them laughing. In the center sat Ethan, eyes dancing. In this photo, he looked about twenty years younger than the man who had gotten into my car.

  What happened?

  You can imagine a thousand lives for a person, tell any number of stories based on a single image. You can try to put words to it: who he’d been and what he’d lost, and how, exactly, those canyons of worry had been carved into his temples.

  It had affected him, too, this thing that happened.

  There are no closed-off places, it turns out. The rupturing, the quake, could be felt in every floorboard, in every home. There wasn’t a window anywhere that hadn’t been rattled. Even here, even in this quiet nowhere, what happened had fractured even the quietest of lives.

  HOW TO WAIT

  Maybe you’re standing in the shadows. Near that old spruce
tree, probably. Maybe needles poke the back of your neck, and there’s a leash in your hand, and at the other end of the leash is an arthritic dog. She’s patient, the old mutt—a little confused, perhaps, about why you’ve taken to standing in this particular spot at this particular time of night, but not so confused as to make a fuss. She wags her tail a few times, then lowers herself, resigned, into a sit position.

  Good girl.

  Maybe it’s a Tuesday night, late September, and you’re standing on the Ledge.

  The Ledge isn’t a real ledge, not any sort of cliff. It is, instead, a tiny dip near the bottom of Schoolhouse Hill Road. Here, after a steady half-mile downward slope, the pavement rises ever so slightly before dropping, sharp and steep, into its final, vertiginous descent. When drivers hit the Ledge too fast, it can feel like the car is flying off the road altogether. Kids love the sensation: the unexpected weightlessness, the stomach drop, free fall, whoosh, like a roller coaster, almost.

  But you’ve never much liked roller coasters, have you?

  Besides, you’re on foot tonight. And as it happens, if you pause here, the Ledge offers the clearest view of downtown Starkfield, Massachusetts, a person will find anywhere. That’s where you look now: at three figures standing on the village green.

  No, actually; that’s not quite right. There might be three figures down there, but your eyes are fixed on just one: the girl.

  Blue hair. Yellow streetlight.

  The girl brings something to her lips. Inhales. She holds her breath, count of five. When she exhales, wisps of smoke rise toward the sky. Diaphanous, that breath, like a prayer, or a spirit escaping the body. It’s unclear where her breath ends and the dark night begins.