The Nix(209)

“That’s when I finally had to end it,” she says. “I should have done it much earlier.” She points her fork at him. “If only you hadn’t left that night.”

“I’m sorry,” Samuel says. “I should have stayed.”

“No, it’s good you left. That night, I was looking for an easy way out. But the hard way out was better, ultimately, for me, I think.”

And he tells her all about his recent upheaval, beginning with his mother’s odd reappearance—“The Packer Attacker is your mom?” Bethany says, which draws looks from other tables—and the police and the judge, all the way up to today’s meeting with Periwinkle and Samuel’s current dilemma involving the ghostwritten book.

“Listen,” he says, “I think I want to start over.”

“With what?”

“With my life. My career. I think I want to burn it all down. Reset it completely. The thought of going back to Chicago is unbearable. These last few years have been one long rut I need to get out of.”

“Good,” Bethany says. “I think that’s good.”

“And I know it’s forward of me and presumptuous and really unexpected and all, but I was hoping you could help. I was hoping to ask you a favor.”

“Of course. What do you need?”

“A place to stay.”

She smiles.

“Just for a little while,” he adds. “Till I figure a few things out.”

“Conveniently,” she says, “my apartment has eight bedrooms.”

“I’ll stay out of your hair. You won’t even notice me. I promise.”

“Peter and I lived there and never saw each other. It is definitely possible.”

“Are you sure?”

“Stay as long as you need.”

“Thank you.”

They finish lunch and Bethany has to leave for her second rehearsal of the day. They hug again, this time tightly, as intimates, as friends. Samuel lingers for a while at the Bruch manuscript, studying its messy pages. It makes him happy that even the masters have false starts, even the greats must sometimes double back. He imagines the composer after he’d sent this manuscript abroad, imagines how it must have felt when he no longer had the music but only had his memory of it. The memory of making it, and the way it would sound when it was played. His money would have been drying up, and war was breaking out, and all he had at the end was his imagination and maybe a fantasy of what his life would have been like had things turned out differently, how his music would have filled the spaces of cathedrals on brighter days.





5


THE HEADLINE APPEARS one morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: UNEMPLOYMENT UNCHANGED.

Television news picks it up moments later, cutting into programming to deliver the startling report: Over the last month, the economy has added no new jobs.

It’s the biggest story of the day. It is hard data that seems to crystallize this ambiguous, uncomfortable feeling people are having in the autumn of 2011, which is that the world is galloping toward ruin. Whole island nations are going bankrupt. The European Union is pretty much insolvent. Brand-name banks have been suddenly liquidated. The stock market crashed this summer, and most experts say it’ll continue tumbling well into winter. The word on the street is “deleveraging”—everyone owes too much. The world, it turns out, has way more stuff than the world has the money to own. Austerity is very hip right now. So is gold. Money pours into the gold markets because things have gotten so bad people are questioning the very philosophical legitimacy of paper money. Certain views that paper money is a hoax propped up by a collective fantasy move from the fringes and gain traction in mainstream conversation. The economy has turned medieval, the only treasure now being actual treasure—gold, silver, copper, bronze.

It is a massive, unprecedented global contraction, but it’s almost too large to grasp, too complicated to fathom. It’s hard to step back far enough to fully see it, and so the news engages with its manifold parts—labor data, market trends, balance sheets—smaller episodes in the larger story, places where the phenomenon pokes out and can be measured.

Which is why the unemployment story gets so much attention. There is integrity in a solid number that an abstract idea like “deleveraging” does not have.

So a logo is made: BIG FAT ZERO! Elaborate and colorful graphs and charts are prepared mapping recent terrible employment trends. Anchors ask probing questions of experts, pundits, and politicians, who all yell at each other from their separate TV boxes. The networks gather “Americans off the street” to engage in “roundtable discussions” about the country’s jobs crisis. It feels like a flying avalanche of coverage.

Samuel sits in front of the television flipping between the news networks. He’s curious to see what they’re talking about today and feels relief that it is this. Because the more the news obsesses on the unemployment numbers, the less time there is to discuss the day’s other potentially big story, which is the release of a new book: The Packer Attacker, a scandalous biography of Faye Andresen-Anderson, written by her own son.

Samuel had stopped by the launch party the night before. It was part of the deal he’d made with Periwinkle.

“Don’t feel bad about this,” Periwinkle said after the requisite photographs were taken. “Smartest move you’ve ever made.”