The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [30]
Somehow, an idea was born, no one knew from where, one of those ideas that arises like bacteria spreading overnight in spoiled food. A bunch of guys formed a social club, the Merry Andrews. Six of them at first, then a dozen, then more, including a few women. They met surreptitiously. They called each other “Andrew” everybody was an Andrew. Everybody dressed in identical clothing as the snows fell hour by hour outside. Women became Andrews and were invited into the drunken meetings filled with absurdist bureaucratic business about whom to admit and what protocols to follow. “Hello, Andrew,” they said to each other. They affected the same speech patterns, they acquired identical tics during their encounters—the parties began in the afternoons and went through the nights into the following days until the beer and cigarettes inevitably ran out, when they would discuss the future: the future generally, and the future of the Andrews, and where to obtain more beer, more Scotch, more cigarettes, more drugs. All the Andrews seemed to get drunk at about the same time, and they all seemed to share the same tastes in the same songs, which they sang or played repetitively on their phonographs. They disappeared into each other; they vanished into a collectivity. Then the phenomenon spread to the college at large, at a slightly higher voltage. For two weeks, all the undergraduates called themselves “Andrew” in this epidemic folly, and a general breakdown in morals followed, as Andrews mated with other Andrews. The snow had induced this. The Southerners lost their drawls, the Midwesterners their flat vowels—everyone began to speak alike, except for the athletes, and the lovers, and the bookworms, who paid no attention.
“Then what happened?” Nathaniel asks.
“Then the sun came out,” his stepfather says, “and everything returned to normal. Individuals became themselves again.”
Nathaniel does not believe this story, but he appreciates his stepfather having taken the trouble to think it up and to tell it. The narrative seems like a mask covering over another actual story that his stepfather will never tell, so Nathaniel asks, “Did anyone kill anybody else?”
His stepfather, puzzled, says that of course no one killed anyone else. Why would he ask such a question? “Why do you ask? People like us don’t kill each other,” he says. “We don’t do that. But, now that I think about it,” he adds, as an afterthought, “two people, two of these Andrews, did try to kill themselves.”
“Each other?”
“No, themselves,” his stepfather insists. “You know, suicide.” He waits. “But they didn’t succeed.” Then he says something that sounds like his verdict on this particular history. “You know, few people really want to become individuals,” he says. “People claim that they do, but they don’t. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that’s not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.” He takes a deep breath. “So. Classes going well?”
“Oh, yeah, the classes are fine.”
“Good. Your mother’s good. She misses you. Your sister’s all right, too.”
That “all right” also has a touch of the disingenuous itself, Catherine