Are You Happy Now? (4 page)

Quickly, Lincoln turns to the
Times
crossword, which he typically completes in the fifteen minutes or so before the train arrives at his home station, Southport. He makes a good start, filling in the doglegged top left quadrangle, before his mind drifts back to his conversation that afternoon with Duddleston. Was his boss really preparing to fire him? There was something about Duddleston’s tone—the soft suggestion of a simmering frustration, the hint that his patience has been pushed so far
and would go no further. In glancing over a local book blog this morning, Lincoln had noticed a worrisome blind item: “Are changes coming to the editorial lineup of one of Chicago’s top publishers?” The blog,
Big Shoulders Books
, is written by Marissa Morgan, a spacey, middle-aged North Shore housewife whose wide-eyed fascination with literature gets underwritten by her rich lawyer husband. She mostly carries cheerleading appraisals of local authors, but she’s oddly well-connected and every now and then lands a surprising scoop. Did she know about something impending at Pistakee?

Lincoln realizes that he’s in a precarious spot. He can’t afford to lose this job—not if he has any hope of rallying his fortunes. Yet the harsh little secret of the business is that Pistakee could probably make the same modest profit publishing dreck that spilled straight from the computers of writers directly onto the pages of a Pistakee book without a touch from a seasoned editor. The public doesn’t seem to care. Consumers will buy a book, or not, depending on the subject, the cover, the title, the fame of the author—and, increasingly, depending on the buzz stirred up by social media. Lincoln’s injection of editorial professionalism probably doesn’t make a whit of difference.

After several quick stops, the train pulls into the Wellington station and unloads some passengers, but then it sits there, doors open. Annoyed at the delay, Lincoln returns to the crossword puzzle. He scratches the answers out in pen, writing almost as quickly as he reads the clues. The car doors finally close and the train moves out, and after a bit Lincoln becomes vaguely aware of a commotion behind him. At about the same time, someone suddenly clamps a hand hard on his shoulder. The grip—like that of a stern father grabbing a child—is so out of place that Lincoln reacts almost nonchalantly. He stares at the hand—male, fully grown, with the trace of an inked stamp from a nightclub discoloring the pale skin—as if it were a familiar and harmless bug that had crawled onto his shoulder. Then he follows the
arm back to its owner. Lincoln sees a young, short-haired man in a yellow polo shirt, his body awkwardly stiff, his gaze turned away from Lincoln and focused intently on the back of the car. Now Lincoln recognizes the source of the percolating commotion: a mob of stricken people is jammed in the narrow doorway between Lincoln’s car and the one behind. As the first man and woman break through, they bolt down the aisle toward Lincoln, knocking aside standing passengers. Quickly a flood of panicked humanity is pouring into the car, escaping something, fleeing to the front of the train.

The young man in the polo shirt is still several reaction moments ahead of the other riders around Lincoln, and he abruptly uses Lincoln’s shoulder for leverage to vault himself forward, past Lincoln and the black woman dressed for church. Shouts and pleas break out—“What is it?” “Slow down!” “Don’t panic!”—and the car rapidly fills with a huge, shoving, pushing scrum of frantic passengers.

Since 9/11, it hasn’t taken much to terrify residents of a big American city, but the papers recently have carried yet a new round of stories about official concerns over biological or chemical attacks, including the possibility of loading aerosol cans with anthrax. Lincoln recalls the stories, but he stands his ground, transfixed by the turmoil around him. The car is packed now, everyone crushed against one another, and the whole tangled mass of flesh is pressing forward, trying to force its way to the next car up. Near Lincoln, a man shouts, “Be cool, be cool!” But the frenzy continues. Meanwhile, the train inexplicably slows to a crawl.

Lincoln decides he should try to move forward too—maneuver himself to be near a door when it opens to the platform. Tucking his newspaper under his arm, he uses his strength and agility to squeeze past several layers of people. The train is still moving, and Lincoln knows it’s now only a few blocks to the next station. The crowding is getting worse, however. Lincoln’s right arm is caught
between bodies behind him, and his left arm is pressed against his chest. He has trouble drawing a breath, and he has to fight waves of claustrophobic panic. Around him, the other L riders are locked in shocking physical intimacy, breath mingling, faces close, private parts pressed together. Stories of people being crushed and smothered in stampedes pour through Lincoln’s mind. He flashes on the out-of-control helplessness he felt years ago when he broke his arm.

Finally, the train lurches into the Belmont station. The doors open, and the crowd shudders and presses onto the platform, the promise of escape fanning the terror, acting like oxygen on fire. Inside the car, the throng hobbles forward like a many-footed beast taking tiny steps, elbows churning. Slowly, agonizingly, Lincoln moves ahead until he’s just inside the door, but a mass of people is milling on the platform, blocking the exit. The well-dressed, elderly black woman has made it out, but now she stands exactly in Lincoln’s way. Though there’s space beyond her, she seems hesitant, confused, her right hand holding tight to the broad-brimmed hat still on her head. “Lady, move!” Lincoln thinks. He holds his place, but behind him, the danger seems to be escalating. “Out! Out!” a man screams.

When Lincoln reconstructs the moment later, he convinces himself that if he’d been with someone he knew, he would have been impelled to show off his nerve and hold his own. By himself, however, he makes one of those instant calculations of behavior. In a nanosecond the decision is made: an anonymous display of courage doesn’t trump the risk of being caught from behind by a suicidal terrorist wielding a can of man-killing Raid—or whatever other horror is slouching toward him through the L.

So Lincoln shoves the old lady out of the way, two hands on her back. But instead of meeting the resistance he expects—the weight and bulk of her body—she’s as fragile and unbalanced as a feather. His moderate push sends her spinning, then sprawling on her back onto the platform, her flouncy dress riding up on her
thighs, a shoe dislodged. “Aaiiee!” she cries, looking directly at Lincoln.

Immediately, Lincoln steps to safety and disappears into the crowd. The panic has erupted so quickly and the terror remains so palpable that Lincoln is only faintly embarrassed, but he knows he has to escape—at all costs, he has to avoid letting the situation take on the qualities of a personal encounter. The narrow space of the station platform is a madhouse. Passengers are spilling out of all the cars—the panic apparently carried through the entire train—and several other people have been knocked down.

Lincoln pushes his way to the stairway leading to the street. From the comments around him, he gathers that no one knows what happened. At the bottom of the stairs, two cops run past, knocking people aside on their way up. Lincoln doesn’t wait to learn more. He leaves the station and walks the rest of the way home. He’s still badly shaken, and he’s peeved at himself for giving in to the panic. What if somebody saw him? He runs into his old classmates on the train all the time. Next, he’ll read about it in the U of C alumni magazine: “News of graduates...John Lincoln, ’98, the Chicago book editor, spotted recently assaulting an elderly black woman on the L...”

Halfway home, Lincoln suddenly feels something is missing. He stops and does a quick inventory. He’s got his wallet. He left his briefcase at work. The
Times
. He’s dropped the paper. “Shit!” Lincoln mutters out loud. He never finished the crossword puzzle.

4

I
N THE WEEKS
since the start of his marriage vacation, Lincoln has sublet two and a half furnished rooms on the second floor of a subdivided three-flat on a side street in the Lakeview neighborhood, just a few blocks from the lovely apartment he and Mary bought two years ago and where she still lives. This afternoon, he enters on the porch and climbs the narrow wood stairs to his landing. He almost wishes he would run into someone—he remains unsettled by the incident on the L, and he has an urge to talk it out. But the old building welcomes him only with stale, overheated air and deadly silence. In his apartment, Lincoln puts on Wilco’s
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
and listlessly checks the refrigerator. He could make scrambled eggs, as he did last night. He could call out for a pizza. But he’s had that a lot lately, and a glance at the
Tribune
’s TV guide suggests there’s not much to watch, just the dipshit Cubs playing the Astros in Houston. So Lincoln does what he’s done increasingly over the last few years when Mary was out in the evening selling houses: he calls his friend Benjamin Flam, the
Tribune
’s literary editor. Does Flam want to meet for dinner? Of course he does—Flam never has anything going on. They’ll meet at John Barleycorn,
a bar near Flam’s apartment that serves hamburgers and other modest food.

There’s time, though—Lincoln decides he will go for a bike ride. He trades his slacks and blue oxford button-down for shorts and a T-shirt. In the tiny bedroom, he glances at himself in the mirror above the bureau, and for a moment he tries to imagine what Mary saw. At six foot two, he’s still got the trim physique of his basketball-playing days. His light brown hair—still abundant—is parted high on his scalp, giving him a slightly detached, studious aspect. The nose is probably a little prominent and sharp, like his father’s, but his strong, broad cheekbones balance the effect. Everyone said that he and Mary—an unquestioned dark-haired beauty—made an unusually handsome couple. A year or so before they married, they attended a friend’s wedding in the suburbs and met Ed Paschke, long Chicago’s reigning painter. “You two would make beautiful children,” Paschke told them. Lincoln shuts off Wilco just as Jeff Tweedy is singing, “All my lies are only wishes.”

Lincoln retrieves his bike from the basement and peddles to the lakefront, heading north up the busy path that meanders through the park along the shore. It’s a typical evening for July, low eighties, rather humid, and Lincoln works up a good sweat passing the soccer fields and playgrounds, the softball games being played with the fat, sixteen-inch Chicago ball. Just below Foster Avenue Beach, he turns right and follows a gravel trail south for a few hundred yards to his usual destination, his rock. Well, it’s not quite a rock, but a large, rock-like slab of concrete that long ago got laid along this area to protect the shore from the fierce battering of Lake Michigan’s waves. In fact, this whole section of lakefront is fortified in concrete. Years of water and ice have broken and buckled the bulwark, however, lifting and tilting Lincoln’s slab until it rests like a wide sofa facing east across Lake Michigan. Here Lincoln sits.

He discovered this perch not long after graduating from college and moving from Hyde Park to the North Side, and since then he has made the spot a regular retreat. Over the years, the view has changed dramatically. When Lincoln first arrived in Chicago, the lake was an unappealing grayish brown, colored by the churned muddy bottom and the countless tiny organisms that thrived suspended in the water. Since then, however, an alien species, the zebra mussel, has colonized the Great Lakes, probably arriving in the bilges of ships. The invader—a mollusk about the size of a fingernail—feeds on the tiny organisms and the particles of mud, seriously disrupting the lake’s ecology. At the same time, the scouring effect has rendered an incredible aesthetic transformation: that dismal gray-brown water has turned glorious turquoise—under the sun, Lake Michigan now resembles a heavenly alpine expanse.

As he sits on his faux rock on the edge of a laundered natural resource, his gaze propelled east, over the waves, Lincoln finds something approaching a vanished contentment. He rode his bike here on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. He was working nights then at the
Tribune
, and by noon Lincoln had seen and learned enough. For more than three hours, he sat on his rock, looking out toward New York, aching over the loss and devastation, but aching, too, over the sense that he should have been there, that he was a New Yorker in his heart, and that somehow he could have, should have, done something. Now, as the late sun coming through the trees makes orange streaks on the quiet surface of the water, Lincoln wonders if he’ll ever live in New York and make his penance.

Later that evening, Lincoln walks the leisurely blocks to John Barleycorn, taking the slightly longer but livelier route down Sheffield Avenue. The sidewalks are busy. Sheffield along here features bars and restaurants mixed among the houses and three-flats, giving the stretch a particularly youthful, informal character. On summer nights like this—with a light breeze coming off the
lake a few blocks away—these North Side neighborhoods almost suggest beach towns, places you’d find in Florida. Old-timers tell him that a few decades ago, these were tough, working-class areas with some blocks controlled by Latin gangs. But now it seems as if every smooth-faced grad from the University of Iowa wants to hie over to the Big City, even these days, when jobs are scarce. Since Lincoln has been in Chicago, these hard-partying eager beavers have been taking over the ethnic neighborhoods, erasing the city’s mottled character. Another lost facet of Chicago—the stockyards, Marshall Field’s, Comiskey Park, Cabrini-Green, the mud-gray lake. Royko’s dead, the
Tribune
’s in bankruptcy, even Bellow left town before he died. Maybe, Lincoln thinks, maybe the trouble is that Chicago’s not Chicago anymore.