Look at me: (25 page)

Eventually he left the bed and headed back to his maps. Only then did he hear the shower still running in the bathroom and reach behind the plastic curtain to turn it off.

Charlotte rode to Winnebago College directly after school, her body alive with spidery anticipation. The twisty college road, the lunar quiet of the campus lulled her into a state not unlike what she experienced at night, sleepwalking from her bedroom to her bike. They were connected, Moose and Michael West, linked in a relationship of cause and effect that Charlotte could not have explained but felt deeply, instinctively. It had all begun with her uncle: first the sense of waiting, then seeing Michael West that second time. And Moose’s advice—
-follow your desire
—which had worked almost supernaturally.

She left her bike in the rack and made her way toward Meeker Hall, walking slowly because she was early. Wandering the curled paths, going in circles to make the extra minutes pass, she remembered last night, lying with him right after they had done it—not on the kitchen counter but again, upstairs (it was in her notes). “Where were you before you came to Rockford?” she asked, as he gazed at the ceiling.

“New York.”

“And where before that?”

He glanced at her, moonlight spinning on his eye. “Overseas.”

“Which sea?”

Rather than answer, he snapped a kumquat from his tree and broke the skin with his teeth. Its essence wafted over Charlotte: tart, bitter, sweet. Was it the smell of love? She waited for him to answer, but he sucked out the kumquat’s insides and nudged the empty rind toward the open window.

As she was leaving, Charlotte paused in the back doorway, facing him, and forced herself to speak. “Maybe you could give me something.”

“Give you something.” He didn’t understand.

“Anything.”

She shouldn’t have to ask. She had to ask for everything.

“Ah,” he said at last. “A gift.”

“It doesn’t have to be new,” Charlotte added quickly. “I mean, you don’t have to buy it.”

His eyes moved, he was thinking.

“It could be that,” she said lightly, pointing at his chest. The bead of amber on its leather string was hidden beneath his T-shirt, but he knew what she meant. If he gives me that, then he loves me, Charlotte thought, and knew that it was true, that the other, smaller proofs had proved nothing. She looked into the mystery of his face—angles, corners, depths—the face of a stranger to whom she had given her heart.

“Or something else,” she said casually.

“Something else,” he agreed.

Charlotte arrived at her uncle’s office to the odd sensation that he’d been awaiting her. “Come in, come in,” he murmured, bustling uncharacteristically to usher her into her chair. She was surprised, encouraged.

When Moose was seated behind his desk, Charlotte took out her essay and read:

How Two Machines Changed Everything About Grain

After the prairie got broken up, there were a lot of nutrients left in the soil, which they called “sod,” and Rockford farmers in the 1830s and ′40s started planting grains: wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye. They grew like crazy. After the harvest, each farmer poured his grain into cloth sacks with the name of the farm on them, which was how they were sold
.

Normally her uncle sat hunched in his chair while she read, knuckles to forehead, eyes closed. But today, Charlotte felt his gaze trained on her face, as if something there had caught his attention.

But growing the grain was the easy part. The nightmare was getting those fat heavy sacks to a place where they could be sold. To get to Chicago, you had to load the sacks onto a cart pulled by a horse, praying to God the wheels didn’t break or get stuck in the mud, because the roads were 100% dirt. That’s what a road was: dirt
!

She glanced at her uncle again, found him watching her still, and felt herself begin to blush.

To get to St. Louis, you loaded the sacks on a flatboat or a steamboat and floated them down the Rock River to the Mississippi River, but if the grain happened to get wet, then it was ruined. And the trip took so long by boat AND cart that when you got to market the price of grain was sometimes too low. How did these farmers survive, with so many hardships? You almost wonder
.

As she read, Charlotte began to hear her essay in a slightly different way; imbued with whatever it was that had snared Moose’s interest. She could feel the words in her mouth: “grain,” “sacks,” “dirt,” “wet,” each with its own soft weight.

Then in the 1850s came the railroad
…

Moose was watching his niece as he’d promised Ellen he would. He noted her flushed cheeks, the skin pink all the way to her hairline, her bright dark eyes glancing at him shyly as she read. And again, half against his will, he heard Ellen’s words,
in the grip of something
, and felt the stirring of a possibility.

A second invention, which became widely used in the 1850s, was the steam-powered grain elevator. Now, what is a “grain elevator?” Well, it’s a building that can take in grain, weigh it, store it and release it
.

Her uncle was staring at her in a peculiar way, and it came to Charlotte that he must notice the difference in her—he alone, of everyone she knew. And now Michael West seemed to float up between them, a sudden, spectral presence. Charlotte imagined she was reading the story aloud to her uncle:
He carried me upstairs. The room was dark, but street light came in through the window. I saw the bones in his chest
…

A machine pulled the grain in buckets out of the railroad cars, a machine weighed the grain and a machine poured it into bins to be stored, which meant that no one had to haul those heavy sacks of grain around a dock anymore, because no one even put their grain in sacks anymore
…

Moose felt a sharpening in the room, a quivering intensity that excited and confused him.

There were no more sacks of grain because now grain was sold by weight and poured like a liquid and mixed together with other grains from other farmers. Now it was not this farmer’s grain and that farmer’s grain, it was just Grain, capital G, everyone’s grain mixed together, and this was a very big change
.

“Oh-ho!” Moose cried, bolting from his chair. “Yes, it was! A very big change. Abstraction; standardization; the collapse of time and space … it was the beginning of modernity!”

He stood in a pose of astonishment. Not merely in response to Charlotte’s words—perhaps not her words at all, but some feeling behind them, as if she were recounting a tale that mattered to her deeply, personally, in all the ways a thing can matter. The feeling half frightened him; what did it mean?

Her uncle had leapt to his feet and was regarding Charlotte in a way he never had before. And the prolonged surge of his attention roused a hungry, empty part of her that reached toward him helplessly, eagerly, craving more of his attention.

For the farmers
(she read on, voice trembling)
the combination of trains and grain elevators changed everything, really. Bigger amounts of grain could be bought and sold because you didn’t need actual human beings to carry it around in sacks. Grain wasn’t separate things anymore; it was just one big thing called Grain, like water is one big thing called Water
…

Moose lowered himself back onto his chair, allowing himself to imagine that Charlotte was on the verge, not of seeing—that would be reaching, that would be wishing—but of readying herself for the first faint intimations of sight. And he had a sudden impression of light, light everywhere, in the room and all around his niece, as if his office window opened not into the earth but to sky.

He was frightened to have Charlotte go on, afraid that whatever she said would destroy his hope.

Because of all these changes, the futures market got started, which meant that people began buying and selling the idea of grain without ever actually giving each other any grain or even touching grain, or even seeing it. It was basically gambling on the price of grain, whether it would go up or down. Which I guess made sense because the grain was already an idea, like paper money is just Money, unlike gold coins that actually have value in themselves
.

In Moose’s imagination there was a break, a snap, and then a great many things ensued with a drastic simultaneity that was the hallmark of mental events unfettered by the constraints of physical possibility: he bellowed (mentally),
“Yyyyyeeeeeeeessssss!,”
his uvula swinging like a pendulum at the back of his throat, the prolonged, gut-heaving force of his yell loosening the support beams over his head and sending tiny fissures through the walls of Meeker Hall, which widened into cracks and gaps and then gullies, so that shortly the building was collapsing over their heads: desks, computers, books, a hecatomb of didacticism and scholarship and cruelty (toward him) reduced to nonsense by a single yell from the man they’d relegated to the basement, but that wasn’t all—his yell sent shock waves through the soil in whose depths they’d forced him to work, waves that burrowed under those delicately landscaped hills and dales and dells and playing fields, so that the buildings whose halcyon views they enhanced were shaken to their foundations, and by the time he reached the
sssss
of
Yyyyyeeeeeeeesssss
, a thunderous general collapse was in progress that threatened to spread indefinitely, his departmental colleagues airborne and whirling like locusts, desks, files, documents intended to effect his dismissal (he knew it! He
knew
it!), all of these separated and broke and divided until they were blowing in the breeze like the furry seeds of dandelions, and in the silence that seeped over the world following this juggernaut, a silence like the falling of night, Moose stepped from his basement hole and surveyed the wreckage his affirmation had wrought and was pleased, yes, he was satisfied. They’d had it coming, trying to bury him alive down here, and he looked at Charlotte seated across his desk, Charlotte who was on the verge of seeing, Charlotte who knew not what she saw, and said, very softly, “Yes.”

And in that moment, Charlotte, too, experienced a falling away; her life fell away, her friends—they fell away. She’d been clinging to them these past weeks, wanting to be like Melanie Trier, like other people. But now she saw, or felt, that this wasn’t possible. She made her choice: Moose, and Michael West. Her secret life. She gave up the rest. The relief was physical, like releasing a long tight breath that had crowded her lungs for too long, letting it go because it was stale, the oxygen was gone. Her uncle looked younger, lean and eager under his slight growth of beard: the boy in the picture again, the water-skier grinning, half submerged. And Charlotte had done it, made him that way again. She was his special student—she felt this. Knew it.

“I think we should pause,” Moose said carefully, “and not read any more today.”

“Actually, I was done,” she said, laughing.
“The end
.”

“But not the end.” Moose leaned back in his chair, watching Charlotte as if she were a marvel, as if the mere sight of her had the power to restore him. They sat that way for some moments.

“Uncle Moose,” Charlotte said at last. “Could I see that picture in your wallet again? Of the river?”

Surprised, Moose dug his wallet from his back pocket, opened it, removed the picture from its plastic sleeve and slid it toward Charlotte across the desk. She hardly needed to look. She knew already that it would be the same place, the exact spot where she’d first seen Michael West, last August. The same place, a hundred years ago.

It was all connected.

“Keep it,” Moose said, nudging the picture toward Charlotte across his desk. “I want you to have it.”

She frowned, not believing him. For as long as she’d known her uncle, he had carried that picture.

“It’s yours,” Moose said, and looked away.

Part Two
The Mirrored Room

Chapter Ten

“What you have
to understand, Charlotte—please don’t take this the wrong way—,” said Victoria Knight, friend of Lily Cabron, the hair stylist from my failed job for Italian
Vogue
, “but there’s nothing inherently sympathetic about your story. I mean, most people would consider you lucky just to have lived the glamorous life you’ve had. The challenge for us is to open a door into your inner world, so they’ll sympathize with you and root for you and want to spend money finding out more about you.”

“I see,” I said, which was not quite true.

This lunchtime primer in public relations was the fruit of my own arduous campaign, launched ten days earlier, after my calamitous date and failed suicide attempt. Ignoring the sage advice of Mark, the downstairs neighbor whose coitus I had interrupted, I had not slept late the next morning, but had risen early and pawed through the prior day’s pockets and handbag like someone feeling for traces of life under a layer of smoldering ash. I’d been looking for Irene Maitlock’s business card, out of some amorphous wish to make contact with the reporter, to speak with her. I couldn’t find it. What I found instead was Lily Cabron’s business card with the phone number of her friend, the alleged PR wizard, scribbled on the back.

I called Victoria Knight three times each day for nearly a week, only to be flicked away by several assistants who had a way of delivering the phrase, “She’s in a meeting,” as if it were an obscenity. But I kept calling (being not exactly busy). She was the only lead I had, despite a call to the
New York Post
in search of Irene Maitlock, about whom I lacked sufficient information—
Department, floor, desk, staff or freelance?
barked the switchboard operator—to locate.

And what did I want to say to her, anyway?

One night around ten o’clock, I caught Victoria Knight at her desk, sounding weary, and managed to blurt out the rudiments of my story. At which point, with a straightforwardness that seemed no less arbitrary than her prior avoidance of me had been, we made a lunch date.

“Unless—,” she went on, “and I think this is something you should consider—unless we can portray your accident as being the outcome of some kind of destructive behavior pattern, like drinking or an abusive relationship, drug use maybe, something in your childhood that’s haunted you—I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but if we can work the story around the idea of punishment and redemption, that could be
very
appealing. Never underestimate Americans’ religious fanaticism—that’s something I learned early on. If you take that route, you’re saying: I had it all in the palm of my hand but I squandered it and now I’ve got nothing. And yet, out of this wreckage, I’ve learned the meaning of life and can be reborn.”

“The meek shall inherit the earth,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said, and seemed impressed.

Victoria Knight was a person in miniature (five foot one, by my rough calculation), who managed her diminutive stance with such surpassing panache that I could only stand back in awe. In brazen defiance of the popular wisdom that one should dress to offset one’s defects, she wore a short skirt, a blazer with a cinched waist, patterned stockings and
flats
, all of which displayed a lovely bonsai physique. And I wasn’t the only one looking: in the lunchtime furor of Judson Grill, where the air smelled of arugula and money, I sensed many eyes upon her, teasing, wondering, with a mixture of anthropology and lust, what she might look like unclothed. Her oval face was not especially small, framed by lustrous brown hair in a blunt cut. She had sapphire-colored eyes (tinted contact lenses?) and a jazzy spray of freckles on her cheeks. Her upper lip rose into two delicate points. But her greatest strength, the thing I knew I would remember about Victoria Knight even now, having barely sat down with her to lunch, was her near-midgetry. In this sense, she was a walking advertisement for her own estimable skills as a surgeon of reality.

Philippe, a tweedy, laconic Frenchman whose role at our lunch I had yet to ascertain, was taking furious notes. I’d thought at first that he was one of Victoria’s assistants, but he seemed too old, and insufficiently sleek. And a fourth person was expected shortly. “My friend Thomas Keene has a lunch, but he’s going to try and skip out early to meet you,” Victoria had said when she and Philippe first arrived. “He has a business venture that I thought you might … well, I’ll let Thomas explain it.”

Venture smenture, I thought; this Thomas, whoever he was, was looking for an excuse to cozy up to Victoria (like everyone else at Judson Grill), to observe her extraordinary anatomy at close range.

We ordered lunch—arugula for everyone, the power of suggestion being too potent to resist. I pondered the existence of a biological link between eating arugula and earning money; what else could explain its lasting influence?

“Then there’s the informational story,” Victoria said. “For example, have any new surgical techniques been used on you? Any innovations in the healing or recovery process? Bottom line: Has any scientific ground been broken here? Because that’s the kind of thing we could pitch as a news feature, say to the
Science Times
.”

“May be shooting a little high,” I demurred.

Victoria narrowed her eyes; apparently I had insulted her. “Don’t be so sure.”

Philippe raised a tentative finger. He was open-eared in the way a person can be open-armed, curved in his chair with a relaxed, almost sleepy mien that brought to mind a youthful Jean-Paul Belmondo. But I detected a whiff of desperation in his quick eyes, his uneven haircut; poverty, I guessed.

“PR companies have very many powers in America,” he told me, in the jagged accent of someone who wrote in English more often than he spoke it. “This is the subject of my work.”

“Philippe is studying us as we speak,” Victoria said briskly. “He’s getting a Ph.D. in Media Studies at NYU, and he’s writing his dissertation on … um …”

“You,” Philippe said, and grinned, unleashing a mouthful of anarchic European teeth.

Victoria blushed. I glimpsed her shadow self shrinking away from the press of Philippe’s fascination, clacketing sideways like a beach crab for whom attention can only be perilous. But the apparition was fleeting, sucked almost instantly back into the undertow of her mighty persona.

“Anyway,” she went on, glancing into the fray of arugula the waiter had placed at our table. “So there’s the I Blew It and I’m Sorry story. There’s the Scientific Breakthrough story …”

“I’m not sure either of those is exactly true,” I ventured.

Victoria tilted her head as if it were striking her only now that I might have been brain damaged in the accident. “That’s completely up to you, Charlotte,” she said slowly, as if to a child. “Right now, as far as the world is concerned, you’re a tabula rasa. You don’t exist. But once you’re positioned, you’re going to have a hell of a time repositioning. I want you to pick a first move that’ll get you the most coverage possible, and the kind you want.”

The thinnest sheen of gold sparkled above her sapphire eyes. She was tough, tough! In my years of tormenting mousy women (Irene Maitlock being only a recent example), scourging them for refusing to take charge, dye their hair, lose five pounds and
get on with life
, it was Victoria Knight, or someone very, very like her, whom I’d held in my mind as a paragon. And yet I couldn’t bear her.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Go on.”

“I was also thinking … oh, okay. A kind of Mental Breakdown story. This would be the inversion of I Blew It and I’m Sorry; this one would go, Up until this tragedy, life was peachy-keen, but now watch me fall to pieces day by day as I try to cope with this disaster. Again, drugs and alcohol could come into this one, as you fight to stay in control. But really, you aren’t in control, your life is totally unraveling, everyone knows it but you!”

“Hmmm,” I said, relieved that I’d resisted the impulse to order a martini. I was trying desperately to cut back on booze while also clinging to my peace of mind and warding off Despair, whose resurrection I feared daily. It was a difficult balance to strike.

Philippe scribbled madly into his notebook. Each scenario Victoria described I watched land in his catcher’s mitt face: first pity, then pity; now pity. I felt like kicking him.

“And the style—this could be really nice—sort of a diary, day by day, like
Diary of a Mad Housewife
meets
Go Ask Alice.
Call it something like, ‘Faceless: My Journey into Madness.’ You give us an intimate, bird’s-eye view of your own disinteg—oh, look! Here’s Thomas!”

A tall blond boyish person was wending his way through the fields of arugula in an olive-green Armani jacket, black jeans and scuffed white Converse basketball shoes, holding aloft a briefcase that appeared to be covered in crocodile. I sensed immediately that he’d once been overweight; he moved with a fat person’s tiptoey apology, although he was lanky—or at least, tall enough to appear so. Harvard, I thought. Grew up in Greenwich or the equivalent, but with no real money behind him. He was one of those rare individuals whose shadow self—a fat, anxious boy who wanted desperately to be powerful—was more pronounced than his surface (sleek, thinnish, and in the possession of a certain modicum of power—or at the very least, a crocodile briefcase). I’d been wrong, though, about his reasons for joining us. Thomas Keene wasn’t attracted to Victoria, he was afraid of her. But he needed her, too. We all needed Victoria.

“I’m sorry to barge in,” he said, shaking my hand, “but Victoria started telling me about you, and I was kind of fascinated by your story.”

“We’re hoping it’ll have that effect on everyone,” I said brightly.

The waiter came, and Thomas ordered a San Pellegrino with lemon.

“How do you two know each other?” I asked.

“College,” Thomas said.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Harvard.”

“Actually, Berkeley,” Victoria said.

My expression must have lurched, because Thomas jumped in with, “Hey, Berkeley’s a great school,” and I had to assure them both that I had nothing against their alma mater.

“I guessed you were from the East Coast,” I explained, though in truth, I’d had no read at all on Victoria’s matrix, she was that pure. You had to admire it.

“We’re Berkeley brats,” Thomas said. “My mom works in Admissions, and Victoria’s dad is a professor.”

“Logical Thinking,” Victoria said, and rolled her eyes as if the very idea were ludicrous. “Listen, I’m going to make a quick call to the office.” She rummaged in her purse for her cell phone and stood, bringing her an inch or two shy of Thomas’s height sitting down.

Our main courses arrived, and as I tucked into my grilled salmon, Thomas shimmied his way into describing an Internet service he was creating called Ordinary People.

“It’s not a magazine—it’s a database,” he said. “What I’m doing is, I’m optioning the rights to people’s stories, just ordinary Americans: an autoworker, a farmer, a deep-sea diver, a mother of six, a corrections officer, a pool shark … Each one of these folks will have their own home page—we call it a PersonalSpace™—devoted exclusively to their lives, internal and external.”

My knowledge of the Internet was limited to a few tentative spins on Oscar’s computer at work, but I decided to bluff comprehension. “What will these … PersonalSpaces look like?” I asked.

Each one would be different, he explained, to reflect the life of that individual, but certain categories would be standard: Photographs of the subject and his or her family. Childhood Memories. Dreams. Diary Entries—everyone was required to keep a weekly diary, and daily entries were encouraged. Future Plans/Fantasies. Regrets/Missed Opportunities. And people could add their own categories, too: Things That Make Me Angry. Political Views. Hobbies.

“The idea is to give you, the subscriber”—Thomas swung around to Philippe, who was so flummoxed by this lash of attention that he dropped his pen and had to grub for it under the table, ass in the air (worn khakis), forcing Thomas to wait with mounting impatience to finish his sentence—“… access to every aspect of this person, all the things you wonder, say, when you read about coal miners in the
Times
and you think, Hey, what would it be like to be a coal miner? Well, my subscribers will be able to answer that question in a totally frictionless way—they don’t have to buy a book or pick up the phone or a newspaper or go to a library or download a lot of boring crap from Lexis—they can go straight inside a coal miner’s life: kids, house, childhood traumas, what he ate for dinner last night, health problems, dreams … Does a coal miner dream about coal? I’d like to know that!”

There would be audio and video, too, Thomas assured me, so people could hear the miner speak in his own voice and watch him extracting coal from the mine.

Victoria had resumed her place at the table, and the waiter brought her steak tartare. It was genius. I wished I had ordered one, too.

“Now obviously, a slew of people are already doing this on their own,” Thomas said, the very presence of Victoria having introduced a whiff of defensiveness into his posture. “I don’t know if you’ve checked out any of these ‘personal’ Websites, but frankly, they’re a snore. It’s all the wrong people: youngish Webheads with too much free time on their hands, and who really cares? No coal miners, I can promise you.”

“So why would … coal miners want to do this?” I asked.

“Same reasons people do everything,” Victoria said. “Fame and fortune.”

Philippe didn’t catch it. He cocked an open ear in Victoria’s direction. “Fame end …”

“Fortune,” Victoria said, cracking the word like a nut and swallowing its soft inside.

The “fortune,” Thomas explained, meant an option fee for developing a PersonalSpace, followed by a purchase price. Fame would result from the ensuing exposure. “And out of that exposure could come incredible opportunities,” he said. “Movie options, research contracts …”

I must have looked incredulous. (I was incredulous.)