Make yourself comfortable. He could imagine no slicker slogan for these times, no better clarion call for a species in surrender. But he was not like other people. He would not succumb to comfort and complacency. Not yet. Not when there were debts to be repaid.
It wasn’t until after he dropped his luggage, stretched, and sat on the edge of his bed that he saw what Maggie had left on his pillow. A book. A slim red volume, his name stamped across the cover. The sight of it startled him. This was not the old comfortable feeling. Something prickly and hot came over him. His cheeks flushed. He stuffed it in the drawer on his bedside table.
Five months later, on the third anniversary of Francine’s death, Ethan took a bus up from the city. He slept in the guest room he’d designed for himself. The mattress was a king, sized aspirationally for two. On the bedside table was a photograph he’d found in the attic while clearing out the St. Louis house, developed from a 35 mm slide. Francine lay in a hospital bed, her head haloed by burnt-red hair. She held a squirming pink baby in her hands. Arthur crouched to fit into the frame, clothed in blue scrubs, one gloved hand on Ethan’s shoulder.
Where civilization does not exist, you must invent it. Out in the sticks, surrounded by pasture and, beyond that, acres of maple trees in leaf, the Alters were feeling their way toward a new arrangement. That night, the family gathered around a fire pit in the clearing behind the house. When the fire dimmed, and Ethan offered to grab some kindling, Arthur stopped him, removing the little book from his back pocket and tossing it without reservation into the flames. Under the cloudy sky, it was the only light for miles.
Acknowledgments
The author is indebted to Erin Sellers, Oliver Munday, Nicholas Thomson, Peter Mendelsund, Jennifer Olsen, Sonny Mehta, Dan Frank, Michal Shavit, Ana Fletcher, Peter Straus, and Allison Lorentzen for their help with this book.
About the Author
Andrew Ridker was born in 1991. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, The Believer, and St. Louis Magazine; and he is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. He is the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The Altruists is his first novel.
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The Altruists Page 32