A Visit From the Goon Squad

ALSO BY JENNIFER EGAN

The Keep
Look at Me
Emerald City and Other Stories
The Invisible Circus

For Peter M.,
with gratitude

Contents

Other Books by this Author

Title Page

Dedication

Part A

Chapter 1 - Found Objects

Chapter 2 - The Gold Cure

Chapter 3 - Ask Me If I Care

Chapter 4 - Safari

Chapter 5 - You (Plural)

Chapter 6 - X’s and O’s

Part B

Chapter 7 - A to B

Chapter 8 - Selling the General

Chapter 9 - Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!

Chapter 10 - Out of Body

Chapter 11 - Good-bye, My Love

Chapter 12 - Great Rock and Roll Pauses

Chapter 13 - Pure Language

Acknowledgments

A Note About the Author

Copyright

“Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”

“The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.”

—Marcel Proust,
In Search of Lost Time

Found Objects

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s blind trust had provoked her:
We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back?
It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand—it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist, said), and
take
the fucking thing.

“You mean steal it.”

He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she’d lifted over the past year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she’d used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which she’d lifted from her former boss’s lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha no longer took anything from stores—their cold, inert goods didn’t tempt her. Only from people.

“Okay,” she said. “Steal it.”

Sasha and Coz had dubbed that feeling she got the “personal challenge,” as in: taking the wallet was a way for Sasha to assert her toughness, her individuality. What they needed to do was switch things around in her head so that the challenge became not taking the wallet but
leaving
it. That would be the cure, although Coz never used words like “cure.” He wore funky sweaters and let her call him Coz, but he was old school inscrutable, to the point where Sasha couldn’t tell if he was gay or straight, if he’d written famous books, or if (as she sometimes suspected) he was one of those escaped cons who impersonate surgeons and wind up leaving their operating tools inside people’s skulls. Of course, these questions could have been resolved on Google in less than a minute, but they were useful questions (according to Coz), and so far, Sasha had resisted.

The couch where she lay in his office was blue leather and very soft. Coz liked the couch, he’d told her, because it relieved them both of the burden of eye contact. “You don’t like eye contact?” Sasha had asked. It seemed like a weird thing for a therapist to admit.

“I find it tiring,” he’d said. “This way, we can both look where we want.”

“Where will you look?”

He smiled. “You can see my options.”

“Where do you usually look? When people are on the couch.”

“Around the room,” Coz said. “At the ceiling. Into space.”

“Do you ever sleep?”

“No.”

Sasha usually looked at the window, which faced the street, and tonight, as she continued her story, was rippled with rain. She’d glimpsed the wallet, tender and overripe as a peach. She’d plucked it from the woman’s bag and slipped it into her own small handbag, which she’d zipped shut before the sound of peeing had stopped. She’d flicked open the bathroom door and floated back through the lobby to the bar. She and the wallet’s owner had never seen each other.

Prewallet, Sasha had been in the grip of a dire evening: lame date (yet another) brooding behind dark bangs, sometimes glancing at the flat-screen TV, where a Jets game seemed to interest him more than Sasha’s admittedly overhandled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous for founding the Sow’s Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee—as an aphrodisiac, she suspected—and sprayed pesticide in his armpits.

Postwallet, however, the scene tingled with mirthful possibility. Sasha felt the waiters eyeing her as she sidled back to the table holding her handbag with its secret weight. She sat down and took a sip of her Melon Madness Martini and cocked her head at Alex. She smiled her yes/no smile. “Hello,” she said.

The yes/no smile was amazingly effective.

“You’re happy,” Alex said.

“I’m always happy,” Sasha said. “Sometimes I just forget.”

Alex had paid the bill while she was in the bathroom—clear proof that he’d been on the verge of aborting their date. Now he studied her. “You feel like going somewhere else?”

They stood. Alex wore black cords and a white button-up shirt. He was a legal secretary. On e-mail he’d been fanciful, almost goofy, but in person he seemed simultaneously anxious and bored. She could tell that he was in excellent shape, not from going to the gym but from being young enough that his body was still imprinted with whatever sports he’d played in high school and college. Sasha, who was thirty-five, had passed that point. Still, not even Coz knew her real age. The closest anyone had come to guessing it was thirty-one, and most put her in her twenties. She worked out daily and avoided the sun. Her online profiles all listed her as twenty-eight.

As she followed Alex from the bar, she couldn’t resist unzipping her purse and touching the fat green wallet just for a second, for the contraction it made her feel around her heart.

“You’re aware of how the theft makes
you
feel,” Coz said. “To the point where you remind yourself of it to improve your mood. But do you think about how it makes the other person feel?”

Sasha tipped back her head to look at him. She made a point of doing this now and then, just to remind Coz that she wasn’t an idiot—she knew the question had a right answer. She and Coz were collaborators, writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well. She would stop stealing from people and start caring again about the things that had once guided her: music; the network of friends she’d made when she first came to New York; a set of goals she’d scrawled on a big sheet of newsprint and taped to the walls of her early apartments:

Find a band to manage
Understand the news
Study Japanese
Practice the harp

“I don’t think about the people,” Sasha said.

“But it isn’t that you lack empathy,” Coz said. “We know that, because of the plumber.”

Sasha sighed. She’d told Coz the plumber story about a month ago, and he’d found a way to bring it up at almost every session since. The plumber was an old man, sent by Sasha’s landlord to investigate a leak in the apartment below hers. He’d appeared in Sasha’s doorway, tufts of gray on his head, and within a minute—boom—he’d hit the floor and crawled under her bathtub like an animal fumbling its way into a familiar hole. The fingers he’d groped toward the bolts behind the tub were grimed to cigar stubs, and reaching made his sweatshirt hike up, exposing a soft white back. Sasha turned away, stricken by the old man’s abasement, anxious to leave for her temp job, except that the plumber was talking to her, asking about the length and frequency of her showers. “I never use it,” she told him curtly. “I shower at the gym.” He nodded without acknowledging her rudeness, apparently used to it. Sasha’s nose began to prickle; she shut her eyes and pushed hard on both temples.

Opening her eyes, she saw the plumber’s tool belt lying on the floor at her feet. It had a beautiful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle gleaming like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted, sparkling. Sasha felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite; she needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute. She bent her knees and plucked it noiselessly from the belt. Not a bangle jangled; her bony hands were spastic at most things, but she was good at this—
made for it
, she often thought, in the first drifty moments after lifting something. And once the screwdriver was in her hand, she felt instant relief from the pain of having an old soft-backed man snuffling under her tub, and then something more than relief: a blessed indifference, as if the very idea of feeling pain over such a thing were baffling.

“And what about after he’d gone?” Coz had asked when Sasha told him the story. “How did the screwdriver look to you then?”

There was a pause. “Normal,” she said.

“Really. Not special anymore?”

“Like any screwdriver.”

Sasha had heard Coz shift behind her and felt something happen in the room: the screwdriver, which she’d placed on the table (recently supplemented with a second table) where she kept the things she’d lifted, and which she’d barely looked at since, seemed to hang in the air of Coz’s office. It floated between them: a symbol.

“And how did you feel?” Coz asked quietly. “About having taken it from the plumber you pitied?”

How did she feel?
How did she feel?
There was a right answer, of course. At times Sasha had to fight the urge to lie simply as a way of depriving Coz of it.

“Bad,” she said. “Okay? I felt bad. Shit, I’m bankrupting myself to pay for you—obviously I get that this isn’t a great way to live.”

More than once, Coz had tried to connect the plumber to Sasha’s father, who had disappeared when she was six. She was careful not to indulge this line of thinking. “I don’t remember him,” she told Coz. “I have nothing to say.” She did this for Coz’s protection and her own—they were writing a story of redemption, of fresh beginnings and second chances. But in that direction lay only sorrow.

Sasha and Alex crossed the lobby of the Lassimo Hotel in the direction of the street. Sasha hugged her purse to her shoulder, the warm ball of wallet snuggled in her armpit. As they passed the angular budded branches by the big glass doors to the street, a woman zigzagged into their path. “Wait,” she said. “You haven’t seen—I’m desperate.”

Sasha felt a twang of terror. It was the woman whose wallet she’d taken—she knew this instantly, although the person before her had nothing in common with the blithe, raven-haired wallet owner she’d pictured. This woman had vulnerable brown eyes and flat pointy shoes that clicked too loudly on the marble floor. There was plenty of gray in her frizzy brown hair.

Sasha took Alex’s arm, trying to steer him through the doors. She felt his pulse of surprise at her touch, but he stayed put. “Have we seen what?” he said.