Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “You should go,” said Michael West, more gently.

  Charlotte stood, white kitchen light jumping against her eyeballs. It was almost dusk. Already the conversation felt unreal, like all her conversations with strangers. He walked her to the door. No one will ever know, she thought.

  “Adios,” she said.

  He didn’t salute her this time.

  She walked to her mother’s car in the approaching dark, feeling ghostly, as if her real self were still back in Michael West’s kitchen, and she were just an echo of it. She sat in the car for several minutes, waiting for the buzzing in her head to cease.

  Finally she started the car and drove slowly past his house. The light was still on in the kitchen, but she didn’t see him, and the rest of the house was dark. She drove idly, hardly conscious of where she was going until she found herself pulling into the parking lot at Versailles, where Moose lived, out of some misguided habit, some lingering sense of how she would otherwise have spent the afternoon. She didn’t know why. She sat for several minutes, looking in the direction of her uncle’s apartment while dead leaves dropped from the trees onto the hood. Then she turned the car around and headed home.

  Chapter Six

  Weather permitting, Moose liked to walk the short distance from his apartment in Versailles to his office at Winnebago College, in part for the obvious benefits—fresh air and the like—although his concern for fresh air was mostly theoretical; he worried about it (or rather, the encroaching lack of it), enjoyed breathing it, but had long ago ceased to engage in the sorts of activities that celebrated its availability and freshness: hunting, camping, hiking, fishing. Athletics of all kinds.

  No. It wasn’t fresh air that impelled Moose’s walks to work; it was the fact that in an era characterized by, among other ominous developments, the disappearance of the sidewalk, he offered up as a gesture of insurrection his own persistence in walking where a sidewalk should have been. I may look silly, his thinking went, as he rappelled over wedge-shaped hedges between parking lots and sashayed aside for heavy-breathing Chevy Suburbans, but not nearly as silly as a world without sidewalks—indeed, my apparent silliness is merely a fractional measure of an incalculable larger silliness whose foil I am. He didn’t say these things aloud or even think them anymore, per se, but he walked with a certain burly pride, a saucy, righteous air that lasted precisely the one-half mile of State Street between Versailles and Winnebago College, at which point he turned onto a driveway that sloped down to the college grounds, and paranoia set in.

  Following the road’s insinuations, Moose gazed up into the frazzle of half-bare trees, postponing for as long as possible the intersection of his gaze with his two approaching colleagues: Janice Fine, with her needly little eyes and insect’s hairdo, and Jim Rasmussen, who always looked like he was about to vomit. Together they had spearheaded a movement eight months ago to boot him off the faculty.

  “HEL-lo,” Moose greeted them at last, stressing the first syllable of the word. They nodded tepidly in return. Having passed them, Moose could not refrain from swiveling around to peer anxiously at the conspiratorial tilt of their heads, wondering if they were plotting his future unhappiness and unemployment. He forced himself to walk on. They were afraid of him, and jealous—yes, he believed they were—for despite his ignominious résumé, despite the fact that he was underpaid and cooped up in a small dark basement office where no other offices were to be found; despite these manifold indignities, which Moose endured with a stoicism made possible only by the imperative of a far more urgent project, he was a popular teacher. Students liked him; they eagerly descended to his subterranean lair to cajole their entrance to his overcrowded class and to request independent studies the college refused to pay him for. Why did a handful of undergraduates seek out a teacher who had a catastrophic problem with eye contact? Moose wasn’t sure, exactly. Long ago, he had drawn people effortlessly to himself; for whole years he had hardly a memory of being alone. That time had passed, of course, and now Moose was alone a great deal. Yet his popularity among the students affected him like a last warm, lingering touch from that prior era.

  Each semester, Moose selected two or three of the most eager kids and taught them independently, despite the acute discomfort it gave him to engage in one-on-one conversation, not to mention the lack of remuneration. These tutorials were critically important to Moose—his life’s work: to bequeath the vision that had transformed him eighteen years ago, when he was twenty-three, to a handful of younger, abler others who might carry on the work when he no longer had the strength.

  But how to make them see it? The question dogged, pursued and plagued him. Moose himself had had no teacher; he’d recognized the vision on his own, in a single moment—the way, when an ophthalmologist once pointed a bright light into his eyes, he’d borne witness to a blood-soaked landscape, red earth riven with fissures like mud after a drought: his own blood vessels, the doctor had explained, and suggested that this sighting bespoke a higher-than-average intelligence.

  “Bullshit!” Moose objected aloud, then sucked back the word because he was pushing open the door to Meeker Hall, the history building. The departmental receptionists, Amity and Felicity (they of the misleading names), eyed him with bristling wariness as he scooped the mail from his cubbyhole. “HEL-lo,” Moose said, tossing the greeting at both women, then departing their domain with relief.

  No, intelligence was not required for the kind of sight Moose wished upon his students—he was traversing the hallway, being careful not to glance toward his colleagues’ offices lest he catch an eye and be faced with a choice between making conversation or stomping rudely past—for the vision was not intellectual but instinctive. A faint intimation, then knowledge, like the fall of an ax. He descended a flight of damp concrete steps to the basement level of Meeker Hall and slid his key into his office door. Only to find it … already unlocked!

  His heart released a spate of frantic beats. He pushed the door open gently, gently, then stepped into his office alert to signs of burglary or surveillance, but the premises looked undisturbed except for the wastepaper basket—empty, for once—which meant that Jeremy Toms, the sweet boy with Down’s syndrome whose job it was to clean his office (mysteriously excluded from the regular cleaning staff’s route) had forgotten to lock the door when he finished.

  Moose collapsed into his chair, drained. His office was simple to the point of cruelty: a square concrete room; standard-issue desk; two orange plastic cafeteria chairs and a beige metal file cabinet. But these blunt rudiments were all he required, Moose would remind himself on days when the poverty of his surroundings robbed him of hope; these were the flint and stone and tinder he would use to make a conflagration! Locked inside that beige file cabinet lay the makings of his multivolumed history of Rockford, Illinois, a work that would be unprecedented in its scale and ambition (he hoped, on good days), seminal in its agile mingling of genres and flourishes of unexpected humor, and scathing in its prognostications for postindustrial America, more than a few of which had already come to pass.

  Moose glanced through his mail, the usual memos and departmental effluvia along with three heavier, textured envelopes that made his heart twitch: missives from other academics. But he chose not to open or even examine these closely as yet; three letters meant at least one disappointment—a rebuff, a rebuke, a dismissal—and he needed time to replenish his strength after the rigors of entering Meeker Hall before he could absorb it.

  He turned instead to the several letters he’d typed the previous day on his Smith-Corona electric. Moose didn’t own a computer, had declined even to use one of those supplied—nay, required—by the history department (further jeopardizing his status) for the simple reason that he didn’t want it near him. Since the incident at Yale he’d come to distrust computers; they were too ineffable, too seductive, their connections too difficult to sever once they had formed. And so Moose had typed, two-fingered, all of the letters arrayed before him now. He was a zea
lous initiator of correspondence, hungered for the sense of communion it gave him, and launched hopeful epistolary forays into such unlikely realms as artificial intelligence, optics, physics and French ballet, disciplines where it was just possible no one had heard of his misdeeds, but (alas) equally likely that a query from an Adjunct Assistant Adjunct Professor of History (a nonexistent title invented to capture the vivid tenuousness of Moose’s status) at Winnebago College was not sufficiently prestigious to provoke a reply.

  Moose had a rule he observed rigorously: he waited twenty-four hours before mailing anything he wrote. At times this delay caused him physical discomfort, like having to stop short of completing a baseball or golf swing (those barely remembered pleasures), but he knew from experience that the anguish of mailing something and later discovering that some aspect of its contents had been egregious or ill advised, offensive or silly, was incalculably worse. So he waited. And here was a letter written yesterday to Sara Herz of Tulane, a medievalist whose early research on the structure of fourteenth-century houses contained work on the architectural implications of glass windows, which Moose had cited in his first book. Sara knew about him, of course, which had discouraged Moose from contacting her in the intervening years (I realize it’s been awhile, Sara, but your recent article on late medieval Netherlandish women’s clothing led me to revisit your earlier work on glass and to wonder where the two might intersect; namely, did the introduction of daylight into indoor life via glass windows [and the roughly simultaneous proliferation of mirrors] significantly impact the evolution of costume?…)

  It transfixed Moose to imagine those early years of quickening sight made possible by the proliferation of clear glass (perfected in Murano, circa 1300)—mirrors, spectacles, windows—light everywhere so suddenly, showing up the dirt and dust and crud that had gone unremarked for centuries. But surely the most shocking revelation had been people’s own physicality, their outward selves blinking strangely back at them from mirrors—this is what I look like; this is what other people see when they look at me—Lacan’s mirror phase wrought large upon whole villages, whole cultures! And yet, as was the case with nearly every phenomenon Moose observed (his own life foremost), a second transformation followed the first and reversed nearly all of its gains, for now the world’s blindness exceeded that of medieval times before clear glass, except that the present blindness came from too much sight, appearances disjoined from anything real, afloat upon nothing, in the service of nothing, cut off from every source of blood and life.

  Moose read the letter to Sara once again, feeling somehow that it lacked the tone of breezy indifference he’d meant to strike, betrayed a whiff of overeagerness, and thus (he feared) his essential isolation. He put the letter aside, slightly breathless with relief that it was still in his possession to be refined, filtered of the broad and lurching impulses that moved him constantly without his knowing. Control, control. As long as he maintained it, the nefarious efforts of Janice Fine and Jim Rasmussen would come to nothing. As long as he maintained it, he had some hope of accomplishing the rest.

  The next letter was to an art historian at Fordham University named Barbara Mundy, whose book, The Mapping of New Spain, had kept Moose wide awake for three nights running. He had hopes of enlisting Professor Mundy’s help in interpreting his own vast collection of Rockford maps, but an obstacle loomed: according to her author’s note, the professor had obtained both her B.A. and her Ph.D. from none other than Yale University, thus raising the specter—even likelihood—that she had been a student there at or around the time of the Bomb Episode.

  Dear Professor Mundy:

  I have read your book on New World mapping and write to you now in a state of abject speechlessness at the elegance and beauty of your argumentation.

  I would like very much to correspond with you in more specific detail, but will await your permission before doing so; my reputation precedes me, as I am painfully and keenly aware, and perhaps you’ll want to have nothing to do with me. Without rehashing the unhappy events of some years ago, however, allow me to say this: terrorism per se was never my intent.

  Please let me know at your soonest convenience whether I can write to you further. I will be agitatedly awaiting your reply.…

  No, that was wrong; agitation had no place in such a letter. Moose scratched it out and wrote in by hand, I hope for, and look forward to, your response. Too stilted? Well, better stilted than raving. The point was to induce a reply, to make her respond; make her correspond (and you don’t know that she won’t, said a small voice that occasionally piped encouragement within him—his father’s voice, Moose sometimes thought).

  He slipped a clean sheet of letterhead into his Smith-Corona and retyped the letter to Professor Barbara Mundy as corrected, feeling a spasm of gratitude for his continued access to letterhead stationery, gratitude that brought with it a corollary, clammy intimation of just what it might be like to face the world without access to letterhead—a person alone, with no affiliations.

  He sealed the letter and left his desk, restless. He raised the blind covering his single window, which was half belowground and half above it. The belowground half provided a cross section of dirt and roots and grass that reminded Moose of the ant farm he’d owned as a child. He’d even had the opportunity, if you could call it that, to watch worms mate from his desk chair, then observe the resulting baby wormlets as they writhed and ate. The aboveground portion of window admitted a compromised slab of daylight, and, because it faced a paved path, afforded Moose an unparalleled view of his colleagues’ footwear, their worn heels and frayed soles, their strappy sandals and white gelatinous feet. This top portion was stuck shut (the bottom did open, as luck would have it, effusing muddy water during hard rains). Nonetheless Moose endeavored, now, as he did nearly every day, to yank open the window’s top half, convinced that without warning, his years of cumulative effort would cause the window to slide open effortlessly, much as he hoped the vision he was trying to impart to his students would blazon forth with sudden clarity.

  And when it did, it would be everywhere they looked, because we are what we see.

  Moose spoke these words aloud to his empty office, whose girding of nonabsorbent concrete shoved them back against his ears: “We are what we see.”

  And because this was so—we are what we see—once a person had witnessed the vision, that person’s life would be razed like a twig shack by its annihilating force (Moose knew, oh, yes), a juggernaut that was like a whale rearing up beneath a tiny raft and hurling its inhabitant, and the petty utensils he had foolishly believed could protect him, to the far corners of the earth. Or maybe not a whale, for sometimes the shadows cast by shapes overhead—clouds, for example—had a way of resembling gigantic things looming up from beneath the water’s surface, so perhaps the devastation came from above … the idea interested Moose, and he made a note to consider later on: “Clouds, whale.”

  In short, the vision was impossible to recover from—that is, if one defined “recovery” as the resumption of one’s prior existence. It heaped a crushing burden upon those who had glimpsed it; the few, the very few who did were almost certainly doomed to—

  A sound punctured his thoughts. A noise. A knock at the door: his niece. In she came, wearing a bright blue sweater, her hair in a ponytail. Ellen’s daughter. And now his student. Moose still was unsure exactly why she was his student—to annoy her father, he’d thought at first, and been happy to collude. But Charlotte’s persistent attendance had begun to baffle him.

  Rather than take a seat, as she usually did, Charlotte stood in the doorway, and Moose became aware of some change in her. She looked … unhappy? Happy? He was inexpert at guessing other people’s states of mind; in his febrile, oversensitized state, he tended to assume that everyone around him was suffering. Charlotte had circles under her eyes. She seemed distracted—by some inner pain. God help him!

  “How are you today?” Moose managed to ask.

  “Fine,” she sai
d, and sat (heavily) on one of the orange plastic chairs facing his desk. She set her books—the many books he lent her, most of which she did not read—on the second chair.

  “Is Ricky … ?”

  “Oh, he’s great,” she said, with a bitter laugh. “He’s hanging around kids my age.”

  Moose succumbed to his wish not to look at her. Normally he forced himself to look; a person who wouldn’t look at other people was untrustworthy—so said the world. He had trained himself to glance at people in conversation, but kept his eyes unfocused so their images remained muffled, imprecise. Moose believed adamantly in regulating the imagery one allowed to penetrate oneself. And wasn’t “penetrate” precisely the word? Did not the things we saw, literally and figuratively, enter us in a way that was at once forcible yet deeply intimate? Moose scribbled a note to himself: “Seeing—sexual??”

  He was startled by the presence of his niece across the desk.

  “Here,” she said, smiling with what seemed a great effort and handing him two sheets of paper from a blue folder with “Uncle Moose” printed across the front. “This is what I wrote for the time I missed.”

  Moose glanced at the pages. Ah, yes, her essay on mechanics. “Why don’t you read it aloud?” he suggested, eager to be relieved of conversation for several more minutes.

  This duty seemed to rally Charlotte, and she lifted the page. 1852: A Huge Year. Her title. There was always a title, a headline. Moose found it sweet.

  1852 was the year when Rockford really changed from a little town into the very beginnings of a city.… On she went. The railroad, the arrival of Swedes … the spike in population. Moose nibbled at his fingernails.

  Then in 1852 the Rockford Power Company was formed to build a new dam. Now this “power” had nothing to do with electricity, because there was no electricity yet! This was mechanical power.…