A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

We know him from a time when there was no such thing as normal people dying.

True: it had been a while since I’d spent much time in public. But was such a fact even relevant in our “information age,” when you could scour planet Earth and the universe without ever leaving the green velvet couch you’d pulled from a garbage dump and made the focal point of your East Sixth Street apartment?

I went home and ate my string beans, but instead of turning on the TV that night, I took the subway back to the library, where the heart disease gala was now in full swing. I heard “Satin Doll” playing inside, I heard giggles and yelps and big scoops of laughter, I saw approximately one hundred long black limousines and shorter black town cars idling alongside the curb, and I considered the fact that nothing more than a series of atoms and molecules combined in a particular way to form something known as a stone wall stood between me and those people inside the public library, dancing to a horn section that was awfully weak in the tenor sax department.

“I feel like everything is ending,” she said. She was thinking of the old days, as she and Bennie now called them—not just pre-Crandale but premarriage, preparenthood, pre-money, pre–hard drug renunciation, preresponsibility of any kind, when they were still kicking around the Lower East Side with Bosco, going to bed after sunrise, turning up at strangers’ apartments, having sex in quasi public, engaging in daring acts that had more than once included (for her) shooting heroin, because none of it was serious. They were young and lucky and strong—what did they have to worry about? If they didn’t like the result, they could go back and start again.

She used it to open a small gourmet shop on Main Street, where she sold fine produce and unusual cheeses, artfully displayed and lit by a system of small spotlights Dolly designed herself.

Girl have you not learned your lesson? You should not be designing lights

Movie stars always look small the first time you see them, and Kitty Jackson is no exception, exceptional though she may be in every other way. Actually, small isn’t the word; she’s minute—a human bonsai in a white sleeveless dress, seated at a back table of a Madison Avenue restaurant, talking on a cell phone.

I ask Kitty how it feels to be a sex goddess. “It doesn’t feel like anything,” she says, bored and annoyed. “That’s something other people feel.”

I’ve engaged in a bit of sophistry, here, suggesting that entangled particles can explain anything when, to date, they themselves have not been satisfactorily explained. Entangled particles are subatomic “twins”: photons created by splitting a single photon in half with a crystal, which still react identically to stimuli applied to only one of them, even when separated from each other by many miles. How, puzzled physicists ask, can one particle possibly “know” what is happening to the other? How, when the people occupying tables nearest to Kitty Jackson inevitably recognize her, do people outside the line of vision of Kitty Jackson, who could not conceivably have had the experience of seeing Kitty Jackson, recognize her simultaneously? Theoretical explanations: (1) The particles are communicating. Impossible, because they would have to do so at a speed faster than the speed of light, thus violating relativity theory. In other words, in order for an awareness of Kitty’s presence to sweep the restaurant simultaneously, the diners at tables nearest to her would have to convey, through words or gestures, the fact of her presence to diners farther away who cannot see her—all at a speed faster than the speed of light. And that is impossible.

Sasha joins you on the fire escape a second later. “What are you doing?” she asks. “Don’t know,” you say. “Fresh air.” You wonder how long you can go on speaking in two-word sentences. “Nice day.”

I love all the weird unique little quirks Egan gives her characters

Your throat tightens up and your eyes get wet as you watch their faces go from stony to sad, and it’s all kind of moving and sweet except that you’re not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking, Good, they’ll forgive you, they won’t desert you, and the question is, which one is really “you,” the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching?

You leave Bix and Lizzie’s with Sasha and Drew and head west, toward Washington Square. The cold spasms in the scars on your wrists. Sasha and Drew are a braid of elbows and shoulders and pockets, which presumably keeps them warmer than you.

At five-thirty, you were both loading up your cafeteria trays, you going heavy on the spinach because everyone says football muscle turns to Jell-O when you stop playing.

Out in the world, Sasha would grab your hand or throw her arms around you and kiss you—that was for the detective. He could be anywhere, watching you toss snowballs in Washington Square, Sasha jumping onto your back, her fluffy mittens leaving fibers on your tongue. He was the invisible companion you saluted over bowls of steamed vegetables at Dojo (“I want him to see me eating healthy food,” she said).

Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to f...

The site of his thinking and writing was a small office wedged in one corner of his shaggy house, on whose door he’d installed a lock to keep his sons out. They gathered wistfully outside it, his boys, with their chipped, heartbreaking faces. They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but Ted hadn’t found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond in moonlight, their bare feet digging at the carpet, their fingers sweating on the walls, leaving spoors of grease that Ted would point out each week to Elsa, the cleaning woman. He would sit in his office, listening to the movements of his boys, imagining that he felt their hot, curious breath. I will not let them in, he would tell himself. I will sit and think about art. But he found, to his despair, that often he couldn’t think about art. He thought about nothing at all.

But there was another presence, too, in the fading light: the aimless, unclean, vaguely threatening youths who trolled this city where unemployment was at 33 percent, members of a disenfranchised generation who slunk around the decrepit palazzi where their fifteenth-century forebears had lived in splendor, who shot dope on the steps of churches in whose crypts those same forebears now lay, their diminutive coffins stacked like cordwood. Ted shrank from these youths, though he was six foot four and weighed in at two hundred thirty, with a face that looked innocuous enough in the bathroom mirror but often prompted colleagues to ask him what was the matter. He was afraid Sasha would be among these kids—that it was she, eyeing him through the jaundiced street light that permeated Naples after dark.

Jaundiced is such a good word here

Ted deliberated this question while downing three espressos in the hotel lobby, letting the caffeine and vodka greet in his brain like fighting fish.

Nothing looked the same, yet everything looked familiar: the stained churches and slanting crusty walls, the hangnail-shaped bars.

I love the difference between how he describes the scenery when his mood is sour versus when he’s in awe

The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.