Look at me: (8 page)

Of course she was changing schools. To escape from the people who knew her. To vacate a world where the slot she’d been allotted felt minuscule.

Now, in the car, she said, “Mom, I think I’m going to add a new fish.”

“What kind?” her mother asked, but Charlotte heard her distraction—they were late to meet Moose—and didn’t bother answering.

Moose and his second wife, Priscilla, were already seated in the vast carpeted dining room at a corner table overlooking the Rock River. The Rockford Country Club was poised on a bluff directly across from Shore-wood Park, where Charlotte had stopped to watch the water-skiers this afternoon. The bleachers and water-ski jump were still visible just beyond Moose’s shoulder in the blue twilight. As always, Moose sat sideways, disliking to face the room head-on but disliking equally the vulnerability of having his back to it.

“Moose!” Harris shouted, offering his hand and then stepping back quickly as Moose rose from his chair. “What’re you drinking there? Martini? Why not? Darling, what can I get you? Kids?” He barked the drink orders at the waitress, a college girl home for summer vacation, then heard himself and sat down, abashed. Moose awakened in Harris a manic desire to seize control, as if he were trying desperately to stave off some communal embarrassment.

“How’s work, Harris?” Moose asked in his curious monotone, when everyone was seated.

“Can’t complain. You?”

“Good,” Moose affirmed, nodding slowly. “Very good.”

Harris noted, with some satisfaction, that his brother-in-law looked like hell. Still handsome, yes (he grudgingly allowed), in a heavy-browed, almost adolescent way that invoked his mythological past, which Ellen still cherished. But Moose’s eyes were dull, as if he were asleep behind them. His shirt was wrinkled, his hair a mess, and he managed the unlikely feat of looking bloated and deflated simultaneously. Yet for all that, he retained a certain kingliness, an orb of superiority that girded him even now, in his disgrace. Harris found this exasperating.

“What happened with the Kool-Aid wine coolers?” Priscilla asked Harris. She was a nurse at Rockford Memorial, a slender woman whose cropped hair and delicate face would have counted as gamine in New York or Paris, but in Rockford were thought to be tomboyish, odd.

“Tested badly,” Harris said. “People thought it was trying to sell booze to kids.”

“Imagine!” Priscilla said, with an impish widening of eyes.

“We get paid either way.” Harris spoke this wearily. He’d given up trying to explain that he had no vested interest in the products his firm, Demographics in America, tested on Rockford’s consummately American population. No one believed him.

“Dad, tell about the cereal,” Charlotte said.

“That’s a strange one,” Harris said, forcing a laugh. “Turns out breakfast cereal treated with trace amounts of radioactivity—completely harmless, apparently—has the property of glowing just slightly.” He noticed Ellen wasn’t listening, and finished quickly. “They want to find out if the stigma of radioactivity is too much, or if parents will let their kids eat the stuff.”

“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.