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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
IN 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.
John Barleycorn has a brisk business going, but Lincoln slips past the bar and the big, dark dining room and goes out back, where tables have been set up in an open lot. Flam has grabbed a spot in the corner, and he’s already at work on a beer.
“You beat me,” Lincoln tells him.
Flam shrugs. “I live next door.” Flam is a blond, spidery man with long, skinny arms and legs sprouting from a soft, round torso. Another U of C boy, he’s a few years older than Lincoln. They met at the Tribune, where they bonded over their Eastern roots—Flam is from Boston—and became friends and confidants despite a lurking edge of competition between them. In fact, Lincoln had been the other finalist for the job of Tribune literary editor.
Lincoln orders a beer and a hamburger, and the two gossip about the newspaper for a few minutes. Even before the bankruptcy, the bean counters running the Tribune had shrunk book coverage, eliminating a stand-alone section and jamming reviews into a few pages in the anemic Saturday edition. “We’re a dead zone,” Flam laments.
“I still don’t get it,” Lincoln says. “Book readers are the most thoughtful, educated niche of the audience. You’d think advertisers would want their product nestled in there among the reviews.”
“Book readers are old,” Flam says, shaking his narrow head. Several strands of blond hair drop across his brow like bangs. “Advertisers want young, vacant minds with no brand loyalties. Advertisers want nitwits, they want Facebook.” Flam sighs and uses both hands to balance his beer on his knee, his thin legs twined around each other. Lincoln recalls those awkward days before his marriage, when the two of them would go out drinking and try to pick up girls. After a whil
e, Flam asks, “How are things at Pistakee?”
“Duddleston told me today that I am a brilliant editor,” Lincoln reveals, trying to squeeze a touch of irony into his voice to lighten the boast.
“He’s probably getting ready to fire you,” Flam says evenly.
Lincoln covers his shock with a grunting laugh and a gulp of beer. “What made you say that?” he asks.
“You know, bloated praise, smoothing the skids—that kind of thing. Why in God’s name would you overapplaud an employee if you didn’t want him gone—happily, gently, of course, but gone?”
Lincoln thinks: Flam is the king of the weenies, but he’s also amazingly astute. “Maybe I really am a brilliant editor,” Lincoln suggests.
“I’m sure you are,” says Flam, as if that has nothing to do with it.
The waitress plunks down their hamburger platters, and the conversation is diverted. Over the next hour or so, Lincoln drinks too many beers, and as the two men gab on about publishing and literature, he starts to let slip the frustrations with his job. “I need a hit!” he cries at one point, pounding the steel-mesh table and setting off a brief concerto of clinking empty bottles. “I need a fucking hit! Something to put this fucking midget publishing house on the map.”
