A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [100]
Litl grl, U hav a nyc dad, Alex dutifully read aloud, a blush promptly staking a claim on his own face. Cara-Ann pounded keys with the hectic fervor of a starving dog unleashed in a meat locker. Now a blooper appeared, one of the stock images people sent to kids: a lion under a sparkling sun. Cara-Ann zoomed in on different parts of the lion as if she’d been doing this since birth. Lulu T’d: Nvr met my dad. Dyd b4 I ws brn. Alex read this one in silence.
“Wow. I’m sorry,” he said, looking up at Lulu, but his voice seemed too loud—a coarse intrusion. He dropped his eyes, and through the blender whir of Cara-Ann’s pointing fingers, he managed to T: Sad.
Ancnt hstry, Lulu T’d back.
“Das mine!” Cara-Ann proclaimed with guttural indignation, stretching from her sling and stabbing her pointer at Alex’s pocket. Inside it, the handset was vibrating—had been almost constantly since he and Cara-Ann had left the diner hours before. Was it possible that his daughter could feel the vibrations through his body?
“Mine lolli-pop!” Alex wasn’t sure how she’d arrived at this name for the handset, but he certainly wasn’t correcting her.
“What do you want, honeybunch?” Rebecca asked in the oversolicitous (Alex thought) way she often spoke to their daughter when she’d spent the day at work.
“Daddy lolli-pop.”
Rebecca looked quizzically at Alex. “Do you have a lollipop?”
“Of course not.”
They were hurrying west, trying to reach the river before sunset. The warming-related “adjustments” to Earth’s orbit had shortened the winter days, so that now, in January, sunset was taking place at 4:23.
“Can I take her?” Rebecca asked.
She lifted Cara-Ann out of the sling and placed her on the sooty sidewalk. The girl took a few of her stuttering, scarecrow steps. “We’ll miss it if she walks,” Alex said, and Rebecca picked her up and walked more quickly. Alex had surprised his wife outside the library, something he’d begun doing often to avoid the construction noise from their apartment. But today he had an extra reason: he needed to tell her about his arrangement with Bennie. Now, without further delays.
The sun had dropped behind the water wall by the time they reached the Hudson, but when they climbed the steps to the WATERWALK! as the wall’s boarded rampart was exuberantly branded, they found the sun still poised, ruby-orange and yolklike, just above Hoboken. “Down,” Cara-Ann commanded, and Rebecca released her. She ran toward the iron fence along the wall’s outer edge, always jammed at this hour with people who probably (like Alex) had barely noticed sunset before the wall went up. Now they craved it. As he followed Cara-Ann into the crowd, Alex took Rebecca’s hand. For as long as he’d known her, his wife had offset her sexy beauty with a pair of dorky glasses, sometimes leaning toward Dick Smart, other times Catwoman. Alex had loved the glasses for their inability to suppress Rebecca’s sexy beauty, but lately he wasn’t so sure; the glasses, along with Rebecca’s prematurely graying hair and the fact that she was often short on sleep, threatened to reify her disguise into an identity: a fragile, harried academic slaving to finish a book while teaching two courses and chairing several committees. It was Alex’s own role in this tableau that most depressed him: the aging music freak who couldn’t earn his keep, sapping the life (or at least the sexy beauty) from his wife.
Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—“friend” and “real” and “story” and “change”—words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity,” “search,” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were