A Visit From the Goon Squad (36 page)

Authors: Jennifer Egan

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

“Lulu,” Alex said to Bennie, and shook his head.

“She’s going to run the world,” Bennie said.

Scotty climbed onto the platform and sat on the stool. Without a glance at the audience or a word of introduction, he began to play “I Am a Little Lamb,” a tune whose childishness was belied by the twanging filigree of his slide guitar, its gushy metallic complexity. He followed that with “Goats Like Oats” and “A Little Tree Is Just Like Me.” The amplification was fine and powerful enough to eclipse the chopper throb and deliver the sound even to the distant reaches of the crowd, where it disappeared between buildings. Alex listened in a sort of cringe, expecting a roar of rejection from these thousands he’d managed secretly to assemble, whose goodwill had already been taxed by the long wait. But it didn’t happen; the pointers, who already knew these songs, clapped and screeched their approval, and the adults seemed intrigued, attuned to double meanings and hidden layers, which were easy to find. And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever the reason, a swell of approval palpable as rain lifted from the center of the crowd and rolled out toward its edges, where it crashed against buildings and water wall and rolled back at Scotty with redoubled force, lifting him off his stool, onto his feet (the roadies quickly adjusting the microphones), exploding the quavering husk Scotty had appeared to be just moments before and unleashing something strong, charismatic, and fierce. Anyone who was there that day will tell you the concert really started when Scotty stood up. That’s when he began singing the songs he’d been writing for years underground, songs no one had ever heard, or anything like them—“Eyes in My Head,” “X’s and O’s,” “Who’s Watching Hardest”—ballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no one’s data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched. But of course, it’s hard to know anymore who was really
at
that first Scotty Hausmann concert—more people claim it than could possibly have fit into the space, capacious and mobbed though it was. Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn’t a myth belong to everyone?

Standing next to Bennie, who watched Scotty while frenetically working his handset, Alex felt what was happening around him as if it had already happened and he were looking back. He wished he could be with Rebecca and Cara-Ann, first dully, then acutely—with pain. His handset had no trouble locating his wife’s handset, but it took many minutes of scanning that section of the crowd with his zoom to actually spot her. In the process, he panned the rapt, sometimes tearstained faces of adults, the elated, scant-toothed grins of toddlers, and young people like Lulu, who was now holding hands with a statuesque black man, both of them gazing at Scotty Hausmann with the rhapsodic joy of a generation finally descrying someone worthy of its veneration.

At last he found Rebecca, smiling, holding Cara-Ann in her arms. She was dancing. They were too far away for Alex to reach them, and the distance felt irrevocable, a chasm that would keep him from ever again touching the delicate silk of Rebecca’s eyelids, or feeling, through his daughter’s ribs, the scramble of her heartbeat. Without the zoom, he couldn’t even see them. In desperation, he T’d Rebecca,
pls wAt 4 me, my bUtiful wyf
, then kept his zoom trained on her face until he saw her register the vibration, pause in her dancing, and reach for it.

“It happens once in your life, if you’re the luckiest man on earth,” Bennie said, “an event like that.”

“You’ve had your share,” Alex said.

“I haven’t,” Bennie said. “No, Alex, no—that’s what I’m saying! Not even close!” He was in a prolonged state of euphoria, collar loose, arms swinging. The celebration had already happened; champagne had been poured (Jägermeister for Scotty), dumplings eaten in Chinatown, a thousand calls from the press fielded and deferred, the little girls ferried home in cabs by the joyful, exultant wives (“Did you hear him?” Rebecca kept asking Alex. “Have you ever heard anything like him?” Then whispering, close to his ear, “Ask Bennie again about a job!”), closure achieved with Lulu at the introduction of her fiancé, Joe, who hailed from Kenya and was getting his Ph.D. in robotics at Columbia. Now it was well after midnight, and Bennie and Alex were walking together on the Lower East Side because Bennie wanted to walk. Alex felt weirdly depressed—and oppressed by the need to hide his depression from Bennie.

“You were fantastic, Alex,” Bennie said, mussing Alex’s hair. “You’re a natural, I’m telling you.”

A natural what?
Alex almost said, but stopped himself. Instead he asked, after a pause, “Did you ever have an employee…named Sasha?”

Bennie stood still. The name seemed to float in the air between them, incandescent.
Sasha
. “Yes, I did,” Bennie said. “She was my assistant. Did you know her?”

“I met her once, a long time ago.”

“She lived right around here,” Bennie said, beginning to walk again. “Sasha. I haven’t thought about her in a long time.”

“What was she like?”

“She was great,” Bennie said. “I was crazy about her. But it turned out she had sticky fingers.” He glanced at Alex. “She stole things.”

“You’re kidding.”

Bennie shook his head. “It was kind of a sickness, I think.”

A connection was trying to form in Alex’s mind, but he couldn’t complete it. Had he known that Sasha was a thief? Discovered it in the course of that night? “So…you fired her?”

“Had to,” Bennie said. “After twelve years. She was like the other half of my brain. Three-quarters, really.”

“You have any idea what she’s doing now?”

“None. I think I’d know if she were still in the business. Although maybe not”—he laughed—“I’ve been pretty out of it myself.”

They walked in silence for several minutes. There was a lunar quiet to the streets of the Lower East Side. Bennie seemed preoccupied by the memory of Sasha. He orchestrated a turn onto Forsyth, walked a bit, and stopped. “There,” he said, gazing up at an old tenement building, its fluorescently lit vestibule visible behind scuffed Plexiglas. “That’s where Sasha lived.”

Alex looked up at the building, sooty against the lavender sky, and experienced a hot-cold flash of recognition, a shiver of déjà vu, as if he were returning to a place that no longer existed.

“You remember which apartment?” he asked.

“4F, I think,” Bennie said. And then, after a moment, “Want to see if she’s home?”

He was grinning, and the grin made him look young; they were coconspirators, Alex thought, prowling outside a girl’s apartment, he and Bennie Salazar.

“Is her last name Taylor?” Alex asked, looking at the handwritten tab beside the buzzer. He was grinning, too.

“No, but it could be a roommate.”

“I’ll ring,” Alex said.

He leaned in to the buzzer, every electron in his body yearning up those ill-lit angular stairs he now remembered as clearly as if he’d left Sasha’s apartment just this morning. He followed them in his mind until he saw himself arriving at a small, cloistered apartment—purples, greens—humid with a smell of steam heat and scented candles. A radiator hiss. Little things on the windowsills. A bathtub in the kitchen—yes, she’d had one of those! It was the only one he’d ever seen.

Bennie stood close to Alex, and they waited together, suspended in the same precarious excitement. Alex found he was holding his breath. Would Sasha buzz them in, and would he and Bennie climb those stairs together to her door? Would Alex recognize her, and would she recognize him? And in that moment, the longing he’d felt for Sasha at last assumed a clear shape: Alex imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there—his young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet. The fantasy imbued him with careening hope. He pushed the buzzer again, and as more seconds passed, Alex felt a gradual draining loss. The whole crazy pantomime collapsed and blew away.

“She’s not here,” Bennie said. “I’m betting she’s far away.” He tipped his gaze at the sky. “I hope she found a good life,” he said at last. “She deserves it.”

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.”

Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. “You grew up, Alex,” he said, “just like the rest of us.”

Alex closed his eyes and listened: a storefront gate sliding down. A dog barking hoarsely. The lowing of trucks over bridges. The velvety night in his ears. And the hum, always that hum, which maybe wasn’t an echo after all, but the sound of time passing.

th blu nyt

th stRs u cant c

th hum tht nevr gOs awy

A sound of clicking heels on the pavement punctured the quiet. Alex snapped open his eyes, and he and Bennie both turned—whirled, really, peering for Sasha in the ashy dark. But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

Acknowledgments

For their inspiration, motivation, and superb guidance, I’m indebted to Jordan Pavlin, Deborah Treisman, and Amanda Urban.

For editorial insights and support, or the right idea at the right time, thanks to Adrienne Brodeur, John Freeman, Colin Harrison, David Herskovits, Manu and Raoul Herskovits, Barbara Jones, Graham Kimpton, Don Lee, Helen Schulman, Ilena Silverman, Rob Spillman, Kay Kimpton Walker, Monica Adler Werner, and Thomas Yagoda.

For their patient attention to getting the book made, thanks to Lydia Buechler, Leslie Levine, and Marci Lewis.

For their expertise in fields of which I knew little or less, thanks to Alex Busansky, Alexandra Egan, Ken Goldberg, Jacob Slichter (for his book,
So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star)
, and Chuck Zwicky.

For their fine reading company over many years, thanks to Erika Belsey, David Herskovits (again and always), Alice Naude, Jamie Wolf, and Alexi Worth.

Finally, I’m grateful to a group of peers whose exceptional talents and generosity I’ve leaned on heavily, and without whom there would be no
Goon Squad
(as they know better than anyone): Ruth Danon, Lisa Fugard, Melissa Maxwell, David Rosenstock, and Elizabeth Tippens.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Egan is the author of
The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus
, and the story collection
Emerald City
. Her stories have been published in the
New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope
, and
Ploughshares
, and her nonfiction appears frequently in
The New York Times Magazine
. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Egan, Jennifer.
A visit from the Goon Squad / Jennifer Egan.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59362-7
1. Punk rock musicians—Fiction. 2. Sound recording executives and producers—Fiction. 3. Older men—Fiction. 4. Young women—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.G292V57 2010
813′.54—dc22 2009046496

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

v3.0_r1