Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad

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

For Peter M.,
with gratitude

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

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 womans 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 handit 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 shed 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 childs striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints shed used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which shed lifted from her former bosss lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha no longer took anything from storestheir cold, inert goods didnt 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 couldnt tell if he was gay or straight, if hed 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 peoples 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, hed told her, because it relieved them both of the burden of eye contact. You dont like eye contact? Sasha had asked. It seemed like a weird thing for a therapist to admit.

I find it tiring, hed 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. Shed glimpsed the wallet, tender and overripe as a peach. Shed plucked it from the womans bag and slipped it into her own small handbag, which shed zipped shut before the sound of peeing had stopped. Shed flicked open the bathroom door and floated back through the lobby to the bar. She and the wallets 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 Sashas admittedly overhandled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous for founding the Sows Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffeeas an aphrodisiac, she suspectedand 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.

Youre happy, Alex said.

Im always happy, Sasha said. Sometimes I just forget.

Alex had paid the bill while she was in the bathroomclear proof that hed 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 hed 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 hed 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 couldnt resist unzipping her purse and touching the fat green wallet just for a second, for the contraction it made her feel around her heart.

Youre 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 wasnt an idiotshe 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 shed made when she first came to New York; a set of goals shed 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 dont think about the people, Sasha said.

But it isnt that you lack empathy, Coz said. We know that, because of the plumber.

Sasha sighed. Shed told Coz the plumber story about a month ago, and hed found a way to bring it up at almost every session since. The plumber was an old man, sent by Sashas landlord to investigate a leak in the apartment below hers. Hed appeared in Sashas doorway, tufts of gray on his head, and within a minuteboomhed hit the floor and crawled under her bathtub like an animal fumbling its way into a familiar hole. The fingers hed 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 mans 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. Sashas nose began to prickle; she shut her eyes and pushed hard on both temples.