A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [103]
“I heard that, too,” Rebecca said. “From, like, eight different people. It’s almost strange.”
“Not strange,” Natasha said, with a harsh laugh. “People are getting paid.” Alex felt a blaze of heat in his face and found it hard to look at Natasha. Still, it was clear that she spoke without knowledge; Zeus had kept his role a secret.
“But these are people I know,” Rebecca said.
It was one of those days when every intersection brings up another familiar face, old friends and friends of friends, acquaintances, and people who just look familiar. Alex had been in the city too long to know how he knew them all: clubs where he’d deejayed? The law office where he’d worked as a secretary? The pickup basketball game he’d played for years in Tompkins Square Park? He’d felt on the verge of leaving New York since the day he’d arrived, at twenty-four—even now, he and Rebecca were poised to spring at any time, should a better job come along in a cheaper place—but somehow, enough years had managed to pass that he felt like he’d seen every person in Manhattan at least once. He wondered if Sasha was somewhere in this crowd. Alex found himself searching the vaguely familiar faces for hers without knowing what she looked like, as if his reward for recognizing Sasha, all these years later, would be finding out the answer to that question.
You going south?…we heard about this…not just for pointers…live he’s supposed to be…
After the ninth or tenth exchange of this kind, which happened somewhere around Washington Square, it became suddenly clear to Alex that all of these people, the parents and the kidless, the single and the coupled, gay and straight, clean and pierced, were on their way to hear Scotty Hausmann. Every single one. The discovery swept over him in a surge of disbelief, followed by a rush of ownership and power—he’d done it, Christ he was a genius at it—followed by queasiness (it was a triumph he wasn’t proud of), followed by fear: What if Scotty Hausmann was not a great performer? What if he was mediocre, or worse? Followed by a self-administered poultice that arrived in the form of a brain-T: no 1 nOs abt me. Im invysbl.
“You okay?” Rebecca asked.
“Yeah. Why.”
“You seem nervous.”
“Really?”
“You’re squeezing my hand,” she said. Then added, smiling under her buttonhole glasses, “It’s nice.”
By the time they crossed Canal and entered Lower Manhattan (where the density of children was now the highest in the nation), Alex and Rebecca and Cara-Ann were part of a throng of people that overwhelmed the sidewalk and filled the streets. Traffic had stopped, and choppers were converging overhead, flogging the air with a sound Alex hadn’t been able to bear in the early years—too loud, too loud—but over time he’d gotten used to it: the price of safety. Today their military cackle felt weirdly appropriate, Alex thought, glancing around him at the sea of slings and sacs and baby backpacks, older children carrying younger ones, because wasn’t this a kind of army? An army of children: the incarnation of faith in those who weren’t aware of having any left.
if thr r childrn, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?
Before them, the new buildings spiraled gorgeously against the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only seen in pictures), more like sculptures than buildings, because they were empty. Approaching them, the crowd began to slow, backing up as those in front entered the space around the reflecting pools, the density of police and security agents (identifiable by their government handsets) suddenly palpable, along with visual scanning devices affixed to cornices, lampposts, and trees. The weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint. He perceived it as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and collected over the years: their