A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [102]
wat nxt? he T’d Lulu back. oystrs?
only Ets chInEs
!
…
tel me hEs betr in prsn
nevr met
4 rEl??
shy
#@&*
…
They could meander indefinitely, these conversations, and in the pauses Alex monitored his blind parrots: checking their pages and streams for raving endorsements of Scotty Hausmann, adding truants to a “violators” list. He hadn’t seen or even spoken to Lulu since their meeting three weeks ago; she was a person who lived in his pocket, whom he’d ascribed her own special vibration.
Alex looked up. The construction now covered the bottom halves of his windows, its shafts and beams a craggy silhouette beyond which the prong of the Empire State Building was still just visible. In a few days, it would be gone. Cara-Ann had been frightened when the structure crawling with men had first made its jagged appearance outside their windows, and Alex had tried desperately to make a game of it. “Up goes the building!” he would say each day, as if this progress were exciting, hopeful, and Cara-Ann had taken his cue, clapping her hands and exhorting, “Up! Up!”
up gOs th bldg, he T’d Lulu now, remarking on how easily baby talk fitted itself into the crawl space of a T.
…bldg? came Lulu’s response.
nxt 2 myn. no mOr Ar/lyt
cn u stp it?
tryd
cn u move?
stuk
nyc, Lulu wrote, which confused Alex at first; the sarcasm seemed unlike her. Then he realized that she wasn’t saying “nice.” She was saying “New York City.”
The concert day was “unseasonably” warm: eighty-nine degrees and dry, with angled golden light that stabbed their eyes at intersections and stretched their shadows to absurd lengths. The trees, which had bloomed in January, were now in tentative leaf. Rebecca had stuffed Cara-Ann into a dress from last summer with a duck across the front, and with Alex, they’d joined a mass of other young families on the skyscraper corridor of Sixth Avenue, Cara-Ann riding on Alex’s back in a titanium pack they’d recently bought to replace the sling. Strollers were prohibited at public gatherings—they hampered evacuation.
Alex had been debating how to propose this concert to Rebecca, but in the end he hadn’t needed to; checking her handset one night after Cara-Ann was asleep, his wife had said, “Scotty Hausmann…that’s the guy Bennie Salazar played for us, right?”
Alex felt a tiny implosion near his heart. “I think so. Why?”
“I keep hearing about this free concert he’s giving on Saturday in the Footprint, for kids and adults.”
“Huh.”
“Might give you a way to reconnect with Bennie.” She was still smarting, on Alex’s behalf, over the fact that Bennie hadn’t hired him. This made Alex writhe with guilt whenever the subject came up.
“True,” he’d said.
“So let’s go,” she’d said. “Why not, if it’s free?”
Past Fourteenth Street, the skyscrapers fell away, and the slanted sun was upon them, still too low in the February sky to be shielded by any visor. In the glare Alex almost failed to spot his old friend Zeus, then tried to avoid him—Zeus was one of his blind parrots. Too late; Rebecca had already called his name. Zeus’s Russian girlfriend, Natasha, was with him, each of them carrying one of their six-month-old twins in a pouch.
“You going to hear Scotty?” Zeus asked, as if Scotty Hausmann were someone they both knew.
“We are,” Alex said carefully. “You?”
“Hell yeah,” Zeus said. “A lap steel guitar with a slide—you ever heard one live? And we’re not even talking rockabilly.” Zeus worked for a blood bank and, in his spare time, helped Down syndrome kids make and sell printed sweatshirts. Alex found himself searching Zeus’s face for some visible sign of parrothood, but his friend seemed the same right down to his soul patch, which he’d kept all these years since they’d gone out of fashion.
“He’s supposed to be really good live,” said