Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “Would you?” Priscilla asked.

  “Of course not,” Harris said, and glanced at Ricky, who was busy connecting many cocktail straws to make one gigantically long straw originating from his front tooth. “But they’re not asking me. They’re asking—well, you know.” His wife was gazing across the room as if in search of someone. Who? Harris wondered.

  “America,” Priscilla finished.

  “Right,” Harris said gloomily. Forget the odd tidbits he’d saved for their collective amusement: the fiber supplements made from kudzu leaves; the permanent sunscreen. He remained in a state of perpetual astonishment at how efficiently the combined presence of his wife and her brother could transform a business he’d spent the better part of his life creating—a business whose success had attracted pollsters and politicians from every major party; that had bankrolled hand-painted Italian tiles, private schools, Ellen’s new olive-green Lexus and the gargantuan mortgage payments on the house occasioned by Moose’s legal debts—into a lousy, grubby way to make a buck. What are they doing that’s any better? he protested silently.

  “If you bring the cereal home, I’ll try it,” Charlotte said. But her father seemed not to hear.

  They picked at black olives the size of goose eggs, carrot sticks, pairs of bread sticks sealed in plastic. The waitress brought a second round of drinks, and Moose and Harris gulped their martinis with fervor. “Fried chicken for everyone?” Harris bellowed at the group. Then to the waitress: “Fried chicken for everyone.” Thursday was Fried Chicken Night.

  Janey and Jessica Stevenson made a tentative essay from their parents’ table and fluttered to a pause several feet behind Ricky’s chair. At a smile from Harris, they ventured forward, spidery girls who looked older than Ricky, though in fact both were younger.

  “I think you’ve got company, son,” Harris said.

  “Dire! You guys made it!” Ricky cried, and leapt from his chair. “Mom, I’m going outside until dinner,” he said, with the slurry speed of an auctioneer.

  “Mom, may I please go outside until dinner?” Ellen rephrased, and Ricky flung the words back at her over his shoulder as he fled the table. All of the adults, except Moose, burst into laughter. This was a new development since Ricky’s illness: the more obnoxiously he behaved, the greater the hilarity he induced—loud, disproportionate laughter that Charlotte found dispiriting, like laugh tracks on sitcoms.

  “He looks wonderful,” Priscilla said.

  “Fingers crossed,” Ellen said, a zigzag of worry unsettling her face. Ricky had finished his three years of chemo last spring, and now she drove him to Chicago at the end of each month to be tested. She found it even more harrowing, this fledgling state of health—so easily crushed. After a year, his chances would improve dramatically, but the year felt endless.

  “I think he’s licked it,” Harris said. “I think it’s a thing of the past.”

  Charlotte said nothing. She believed her brother would be well, had believed it from the start, when he was bald and sick and petrified. Perhaps Moose believed it, too, for he was looking out the window at a last water-skier wafting in near darkness from the end of a string. Or perhaps he was too preoccupied to care. Two years out of college, Moose had been living at home and working for his father—he’d had two patents pending on small inventions he’d made involving the manufacture of fertilizer. On weekends, he applied his engineering skills to less rigorous tasks; there was a famous device he’d operated from bed with a big toe, which made a can of beer roll from a chute into his outstretched hand; he’d rigged his parents’ icemaker so it coughed out red, tequila-laced cubes for his margarita parties. A consummate host was Moose, greeting his guests in outrageous paisley shirts; a fomenter of egregious acts who remained curiously detached in their midst, enjoying the revelry around him—the riotous dancing and drunken intrigue, the vomiting into planters, or (once, in winter) the burning of someone’s clothing in a fireplace—from a slight but unmistakable distance.

  Then, without warning, the parties stopped. Moose began to read, grinding his unpracticed eyes against page after page, groaning his way through books with an exertion that made him sweat (he’d read so little in his life), and gradually more ease, reading through the night, returning books to the Rockford Public Library in secretive piles. His fixation was the evolution of technology, wheels and gunpowder and smelting, the ramp device the Romans used to board the Carthaginian fleets, the history of clockmaking, the printing press, the chronometer, longitude. And glass—glass he returned to repeatedly, that magically liquid solid that had made possible eyeglasses, telescopes, microscopes, all manner of visual discovery; glass that in myth had surrounded Alexander the Great in the form of a bubble, allowing him to visit the bottom of the sea. For Moose had sensed that a terrible reversal was in progress, a technological disaster whereby the genius of the Industrial Revolution would be turned on people themselves; whereby human beings would be assembled from parts just as guns and boots and bicycles had been once.

  This had come to him in a single afternoon, sitting beside the interstate, where he’d pulled over on his way home from a party in Wisconsin. He had not described the experience to anyone.

  Nor did he share the news that he was applying to master’s programs in history until he was accepted at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, at which point he packed up and left—never to return, it had seemed to Ellen—to everyone who had known him before he became this new man. Within six blazing years, Moose transferred to a Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania on the strength of his master’s thesis, which he expanded into a prize-winning dissertation (Bathe the World in Light: How the Dissemination of Clear Glass Altered Human Perception; Oxford University Press, 1987), accepted a tenure-track job at Yale, and married his first wife, Natalia, an Argentinean completing her Film Studies dissertation (Man Alive: Rupture and Redemption in the Films of John Cassavetes; Soho Press, 1988). For more than a year, the couple dwelled inside a humming sphere of good fortune; Moose brought to his teaching the full arsenal of his charisma, and the students revered him.

  It was not clear to anyone exactly when, during Moose’s second year of teaching, Transformation Number One began giving way to Transformation Number Two. His physical appearance slipped, but then a certain slovenliness was tolerated because of his engineering background, the fact that he was still an inventor of sorts, still a presence in the labs, where unkempt hair and mustard stains on one’s sweater were the norm. Then commenced what the lawyers would term, in the thousands of pages of documents generated by the criminal and civil suits filed against Moose, his “Reckless Acts in the Guise of Pedagogical Tools.” In one case, he’d placed a single bullet in the chamber of a Smith & Wesson revolver during class, spun the barrel, held the gun to his own head and fired. The students were stunned, and several broke down and rushed from the classroom, until later it was agreed that Moose had removed the bullet from the gun through sleight of hand.

  Several weeks later, he announced to a different class that they were embarking together on a “thought experiment”: the classroom was rigged with enough explosives to blow it, and everyone inside it, to high heaven, presuming there was such a place. The explosives were controlled by a detonating device, which Moose entrusted to a group of eight randomly selected students whom he sent from the room to rove the campus and debate whether to use the devastating power in their grasp. He and the remaining students, meanwhile, would pass the time discussing humankind’s ability to resist the lure of destructive technology. This dialogue began jovially enough, with a clear consensus that the “bomb” was imaginary, the “detonator” a prop—though the students did hope it would activate bells, at least, or flashing lights. But by the time they had hashed their way through cannons, rifles, machine guns, pesticides, chemical and biological weaponry, cloning, genetic manipulation, autonomous robots capable of thought, and the various bombs, to which they returned repeatedly, the class was afflicted by a collective shortness
of breath.

  Among those tending the detonator, a similarly jovial mood had prevailed at first—they’d been liberated from “Technology and the Human Soul” in the midafternoon. They went straight to Durfee’s Sweet Shop for coffee and warm cookies, and only as they sauntered down the block sucking chocolate from under their fingernails did they realize that they’d left the detonator by the cash register—oh, shit—and run back for it. Then they gathered around, staring at the nondescript wedge and imagining it was real, that so much power was actually theirs, the power to destroy buildings—end lives—and a twisting, stomachy feeling overcame them. Two students began to argue for whanging the thing just to see what kind of floor show Professor Metcalf had rigged for their entertainment, while the more cautious made the point that this was a morality test, so if they chose wrong (even on purpose), their grades might suffer. As the group returned to campus, one of the gung-hos tried to snatch the detonator away from the pacifist who was guarding it, which led to a scuffle upon the floor, students hurling themselves after the detonator until a pacifist nabbed it and sprinted with it straight to the History Department office, where it was puzzled over without much seriousness until the police arrived. At that point matters turned grave, however, and a chain reaction of clanging alarms, the evacuation of a four-block radius, and a bristling accretion of helicopters, ambulances and fire trucks, climaxed in the arrival of an FBI bomb squad whose members wore bulking suits made partially of lead. Not that they planned to go inside the building; they sent a robot guided by remote control, a “small spider” who tiptoed down hallways and up stairwells on six dainty legs until it reached Moose’s classroom, where it tapped through the door and informed him, in a strange robotic voice, that he was under arrest. But Moose didn’t hear the spider at first; he was asleep, head on desk, inside whose middle drawer lay the bomb, directly beneath his ear. With Moose’s cooperation, the FBI ferried the bomb to its special bomb-diffusing truck, a truck that would force any blast to occur vertically (thus protecting the populace), where, in the course of dismantling it, the FBI discovered that a signaling flaw had rendered the detonator useless, an error psychologists for the defense would maintain was a subliminal desire on the part of their good-hearted but mentally unbalanced client to protect his students from himself.

  Moose was arrested and placed in a psychiatric unit, where an in-patient evaluation deemed him psychotic. Ultimately he pled guilty to a charge of possessing explosives in exchange for the government dropping its twenty-four counts of attempted first-degree murder, the flawed detonator having thrown an insurmountable wrench into its case. Yale accepted a large settlement from Moose’s family in its civil suit against him, eager to stem the hemorrhage of scathing publicity the incident had already unleashed.

  Moose was released from federal prison on time served—a full year, by then—and transferred his four-year probation to Illinois. He returned to Rockford and moved back into his old bedroom, the toe-activated beer dispenser yawning empty, ghostly above his head. His father had been felled by a stroke during the crisis, and Moose wheeled him around in a chair until a second, more devastating stroke drove him into a coma. At first, Moose himself had been virtually comatose, buried under a landslide of failure and despair, the knowledge that people who once had admired him now feared and avoided him, that his mammoth legal bills and settlement had bled his wealthy family into debt. Yet even now, a restless scurrying persisted within his brain, the beams of his technological convictions probing agitatedly for some topic on which to affix, now that he was so far away from everything. And one day, as he pushed his father’s wheelchair alongside the river, this quiet, steady man Moose loved with a pain at the core of his chest, whose catcher’s mitt hands now hung at his sides, insensate as loaves of bread, Moose looked across the river and felt the past unroll suddenly from behind the present panorama of dead chrome and glass and riverfront homes as if a phony backdrop had toppled, exposing a labyrinth. “It’s all here,” he murmured wonderingly, and experienced a lifting within himself. “Everything is here.”

  He leaned forward and spoke urgently into his father’s slack face, “Pop, everything is here!” and it seemed to Moose that some response or approval had waved to him from the cloudy reaches of his father’s eyes.

  And the joy of that discovery had rescued Moose, had given him hope: the Industrial Revolution had happened right here in a form that was exquisitely compressed; everything he needed to know was right under his feet! He began stockpiling facts about Rockford’s history until the mention of any single year could prompt a detailed recitation of which buildings were under construction and which businesses at their zeniths, the mayor’s name, a rundown of the influential families, a recipe for a certain raisin pudding. A friend of his father’s on the board of Winnebago College was able to procure for Moose a part-time teaching position, whose small salary sustained him while he worked feverishly on a multivolumed history of his hometown whose explicit purpose was etiological: to discover what had gone wrong between its founding in 1834 and the present day—what, precisely, had been lost in the ineluctable transformation from industry to information.

  “It’s so sad,” Charlotte had heard her father say. “What he’s trying to figure out is why he cracked up. Like a hundred and fifty years of trivia is going to answer that question.”

  But to Charlotte, her uncle’s exile was more intriguing than that. At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her—separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she’d never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her, making its secret plans. She was an exile, too.

  The waitress arrived with a giant round tray, which she set on a stand near their table.

  “Char, go get Ricky, would you, honey?” Ellen asked.

  The instant Charlotte was gone, Harris spoke urgently to Moose and Priscilla, though only Priscilla returned his gaze. “You could do me a hell of a favor,” he said, “if you’d ask Charlotte why she’s switching schools.”

  “She’s leaving Baxter?” Priscilla said.

  “We didn’t find out until a few weeks ago. She says she’s going to East.” The idea made Harris frantic. East was public, blue-collar, a bunch of machinists’ kids! In general he marveled at his daughter’s equanimity—the Lord, in His mystery, had apportioned his son the beauty and his daughter the strength. But at times he was overcome by an urge to break Charlotte, make her see how resolutely the deck was stacked in her disfavor. As if knowing this would protect her from something worse. Harris wanted to save her.

  “Have you asked her why?” Priscilla said.

  Harris flung up his hands. “Have I asked!”

  “She’s completely closed,” Ellen said. “She won’t talk to either one of us.” She was craving a cigarette. Lately she’d begun sneaking them at home: Kools, which made her feel like a teenager.

  “Of course I’ll try,” Priscilla said, “but if she won’t talk to you …”

  Ellen glanced at Moose and found him watching her, but when their eyes met, he looked away. She understood. Looking into her brother’s eyes seemed to confirm an unbearable truth that only the two of them recognized. Of all her many regrets: not getting out of Rockford and seeing the world when she was young and unencumbered; marrying too early; not taking Ricky to the doctor the moment she’d first spotted those fingery bruises on his legs—her mind spasmed late at night in a frenzy of terror and regret when she measured the chasm between the life she’d imagined for herself and the one she was living—of all those regrets, her brother’s transfiguration still felt like the most shocking, most inexplicable loss.

  When Charlotte and Ricky returned to the table, the adults were becalmed in a silence that could only mean they had been discussing Ricky’s illnes
s. Exchanging an eye roll, the children resumed their seats.

  “Charlotte,” Aunt Priscilla interjected awkwardly into the stillness. “Your father mentioned you’re switching schools.”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte said warily, nibbling a wing. “I decided to go to East.”

  “Any special reason?”

  “It’s much bigger. Lots of kids I don’t know.”

  “That must take some courage,” Priscilla said.

  Oh, terrific, Harris thought: go ahead and congratulate her.

  “I’m already pretty out of things at Baxter,” Charlotte said.

  “Really,” Priscilla said. “When did that start?”

  “Last year. At the very beginning.”

  Ellen listened greedily. She had given up even trying to talk seriously with Charlotte about her situation; whenever she dared to, her daughter would turn those flat, cold eyes on her as if to demand, How on earth can you possibly help me? “You were always so popular,” she blurted, unable to stop herself.

  Charlotte looked at her mother—her sad, beautiful mother. How could anyone so beautiful be so sad? “It has nothing to do with popularity,” she said.

  “It sounds like it has to do with a sense of belonging,” Priscilla said.

  There it was, that warm—what?—sympathy. A luxuriant sleepiness overcame Charlotte. “I think so,” she said.

  “What’s the difference,” Ellen asked, hurt, “between that and being popular?”

  Charlotte didn’t answer. Her aunt had opened a perfumed chamber to her, a grotto of tenderness.

  Harris could contain himself no longer. “I’m concerned about your education!” he cried. “I’m concerned about your getting into a decent college and having the opportunity to make something of your life!” Because looking like you do, he thought helplessly, the world isn’t going to cut you many breaks. “Does that mean anything at all to you?”