The Nix(202)

Samuel feels the little buzzing of his phone in his pocket that signals a new e-mail. He sees it’s from his mother. Despite their agreement, she has written. He excuses himself and goes into the hallway to read it.

Samuel,

I know we said I shouldn’t do this, but I’ve had a change of heart. If the police ask, please tell them the truth. I didn’t stay in London. I didn’t go to Jakarta. I went to Hammerfest. It’s in Norway, the northernmost city in the world. It’s terribly remote and sparsely populated. You’d think it would suit me. I’m telling you this because I’ve decided not to stay. I’ve met some people who have convinced me to come home. I’ll explain later.

Actually, Hammerfest is no longer the northernmost city in the world, I just discovered. Technically it is the second-northernmost. There’s a place called Honningsvaag that is also in Norway and slightly farther north that declared itself a city a few years back. But with a population of about 3,000 people, you can hardly call it a “city.” So the debate rages on. Most folks in Hammerfest are friendly to anyone except people from Honningsvaag, whom they consider usurpers and bastards.

The things you learn, eh?

At any rate, Hammerfest is distant and isolated. It’ll take me a few days to get home.

In the meantime, I want you to go find your friend Periwinkle. Tell him to tell you the truth. You deserve some answers. Tell him I said to tell you everything. He and I go way back, you should know. We met in college. I used to be in love with him. If you want proof, go back to my apartment. On the shelf, there’s a thick book of poetry, the collected Ginsberg. I want you to look inside that book. You’ll find a photograph. I hid it in there years ago. Please don’t be angry with me when you find it. Soon you’ll have all the answers you want, and when you do, remember that all I was trying to do was help. I did it clumsily, but I did it for you.

Love,

Faye



Samuel thanks Axman and tells him to send word once Pwnage wakes up. He leaves the hospital and drives quickly into Chicago. He enters his mother’s apartment through the still-wrecked door. He finds the book and begins flipping through it, holding it upside down and shaking it. It has that old-book smell, dry and musty. The pages are yellowed and feel brittle on his fingertips. A photograph flutters out and lands on the floor facedown. On the back, it is signed: To Faye, on your Honeymoon, love Al.

Samuel picks it up. It is the same photograph he’d seen on the news, the one taken at that protest in 1968. There is his mother in her big round glasses. There is Alice sitting behind her all deadly serious. But this photograph is larger than the one he’d seen on the news, its field of vision wider. He realizes that the photo he thought he knew so well was actually only a fragment from this bigger photo, sectioned off, cropped to hide the man his mother leans against. But Samuel can see him now, this man, his bowl of black hair, the way he looks sidelong and cleverly at the camera, his eyes full of mischief. He is so young, and his face is half in shadow, but it’s obvious. Samuel has seen that face before. It’s the spitting image of Guy Periwinkle.





3


GUY PERIWINKLE’S OFFICE in downtown Manhattan is on the twentieth floor, southeast corner, overlooking the financial district. Two whole walls are made entirely of glass. The other walls are painted a neutral slate gray. A small desk in the middle of the room, a single swivel chair. There are no works of art on the walls, no family photos, no statuary or plants, nothing on the desk but a single sheet of paper. The aesthetic here is way beyond minimalism—more like monkish denial. The only decoration in the entire large space is a single framed advertisement for some kind of new potato-chip thing. The new chip is shaped like a small torpedo instead of the more traditional triangle or circle. The ad is dominated by a photograph of a man and a woman whose bug-eyed excitement to eat these chips might best be described as maniacal. A caption above them, written in bold three-dimensional-looking letters, says: DO YOU NEED TO LIVEN UP YOUR SNACK ROUTINE? This advertisement is roughly the size of a movie poster. It looks out of place in its lavish gold frame.

Samuel has been waiting for twenty minutes, walking around the room like a bean jumping in its pod, from window to advertisement and back, studying each thing for as long as he can before his agitation twists him up and he feels it necessary to pace. He’d left for New York directly from his mother’s apartment. It is the second time in his life he’s driven from Chicago to New York City, and the feeling of déjà vu is so powerful right now that he’s feeling this low-level background dread: The last time he drove to New York, it did not turn out well. And it’s impossible not to remember this right now, because as he stares out Periwinkle’s office window he can see, a few blocks to the east, that old familiar building, the thin white one with the gargoyles near the top: the building at 55 Liberty Street. Bethany’s building.

He stares at the building and wonders if she’s there right now, maybe looking this way, in Samuel’s direction, at all the ruckus below. For between Bethany’s building and Periwinkle’s, way down at street level, is Zuccotti Park—though “park” is a generous term for this small patch of concrete no larger than a few tennis courts, where protesters have been gathered for weeks. Samuel had waded through the crowd on his way into the building. WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT, their signs said. THIS SPACE OCCUPIED. From above, he can see the great mass of people, the fluorescent blue nylon bubbles of their tents, the drum circle on the outer edge, which is all he can hear of the protest from up here on the twentieth floor: the endless, unstoppable drumming.