The Easy Chain Read online

  —But, you know, after, you know, about three weeks, when the teachers really started with the assignments – well, something kinda … you know. It was a lotta work. A lot. And it started, you know, to catch up with him. To overtake him, he said. I mean, the books.

  —Yeah, the books.

  —Those books were tough.

  —Tough and bloomin’ long.

  —He couldn’t get through them!

  —(OK, they were boring)—

  —Yeah, the classes were still fun, he said, the fountains of talk and wrangling remained bracing, but there were aspects of scholarship that Lincoln found he wasn’t altogether prepared for. The deal took huge discipline. He started reading Herodotus, and the guy’s endless recounting of Greek resistance to the Persian invasion only inspired noble thoughts of accessing apple juice. Then Thucydides, and no matter how scientific his history, how objective his delineation of cause and effect from character to consequence, it still just felt like a bottomless series of battle scenes, scenes that only grew longer when Lincoln started scoring them with jazz snips from FM radio. And even Tacitus – OK, he’s on the right side regarding empire, but if history taught any lesson it’s that virtue ain’t a license to drone.

  —The only one he rather liked (at least a bit) was Herodotus. There, at least, some of the details used in the telling (the sunglint on the breastplates of the men of Theos as they left their native city, when they, alone among Ionians, wouldn’t let themselves be enslaved by Harpagos; the Persians’ injunction against pissing in rivers, which they thought are due reverence, and the punishment of 108 strokes with a willow limb for breaking the rule) well, some of that made the whole overcooked stew engaging, even spicy. In fact, he said he really liked it—

  —Nothing is unnecessary, Lincoln understood, but his course-books contained dunes of details no one would need to recount, or could even remember. Awake and alone with one bulb in street-stilled night, the rows of serrated letters pressed to his eyes, he would drift as if in a drug haze – until jump-cutting to the next indentation. With alarming frequency, he would find his lower lip doing things he only associated with drunks …

  He was ashamed, he said, to turn to digests and cribs and on-line summaries to get through his classes. But he had no choice. There was too much reading, he could not keep up – and the classic nightmares of being called on in class and not knowing a bloody thing were worse when he hadn’t done the dubious preparation. The sweats in those dreams, the time-dilation, the trembling – they were worse—

  —Guy had a quick crash, that’s for sure. Matter of weeks. Not doing well in class, not doing well outside it. He was older than everybody he was taking the schooling with, and didn’t live near them, in the same buildings – in the dorms. Disappointed about his lack of friends, disappointed about his aunt. Things no longer worked with Bill (turned out his father was a former banker), he lost touch quick with that water-skier Ernie, never got started with sociology Vera. So he started to see himself as solo, abandoned, he said. Yeah, he went to hear jazz a little, even took himself to a Cubs game. But one girl he asked out – a Petra, from Michigan – stood him up, never showed at Café Siena, left him drinking alone an hour and bitter fifteen. Not what you’d call a rosy moment.

  —It was coming from all sides. The first exams did not pay him any dividends, and the results from his first papers took him down to flat bottom. That was the toughest, he said: his professors told him he couldn’t write. Not a one said anything, but they let him know. How? With cues like C, B-, B-, C- … It was a bad, bad drumbeat, and he knew that every single stroke meant an Er, well … from the Committee. Nope: those grades didn’t make him feel like a gentleman one bit.

  —He’d also been hoping to get into a fraternity, Theta Epsilon Chi, an old-schooly stalwart of wingtips, propriety and Arnoldian best which has been thought and said. He had two meetings at the frat’s chapter house over on 56th, and had thought they’d gone fine, he’d been upbeat and given them good answers about his background, and then they said no. He was really disappointed in that one, he said. It was like a multiplier effect, a compounding account of bad news.

  —Still, he had pluck, he asked out another gal, Ellen someone he’d met on line at an ATM, said he worked up the nerve.

  —And they did meet, she joined him at a linen-table Italian restaurant. And throughout the meal, he said, over three courses, salad and pasta and sweet, with real slow service, he couldn’t think of a thing to say to her.

  —Not a single—

  —In English!

  —Guy just sat there resenting the mechanics of chewing.

  —Poor soul. Ashamed to contact his parents for guidance, ashamed to open up to the few cursory acquaintances he had at school. Dear boy even became self-conscious about his accent, he said, his East Anglican loll gutted by decades of Dutch glottal thrust. He started to spend hours alone, challenging to a duel the solitude that had first pulled out its pistol. He went and sat for full afternoons upon the toppled rocks at the Point, or in the famous theater seats installed at the tip of Navy Pier, looking out upon the lake so vast it could be an ocean. And like many a despond before him, he took to his books. Yes, he went back. His instinct, perhaps unarticulated, was that they had to hold something more than he had seen, that these wheelspokes of the curriculum – of his education, of the Western world – would, as Strauss maintained, somehow provide the resources to shout down his small, temporal, individual grievance. Now he would force them to speak to him.

  —Poor guy. You know how these things feed upon themselves. Yeah, he re-immersed in his course-work: the Oresteia, Pliny, the Nicomachean Ethics. Mornings, nights until 4 AM, on his couch and in his bed and sitting at his chipped-at-the-edges formica table, he kept plugging at the reading. And then, when he handed in his next two papers, and got D’s on both – actually, one was a C-, but you see which way he rounded – he said he cried.

  —He said those D’s came to mean different things to him: D for Despair. D for Destitution. D for Diversity – the only reason, he concluded, the University ever admitted him to the program …

  But the reasoning didn’t hold. A few days later, a note came on UC letterhead advising that he had been put on academic probation. The letter resounded with seriousness (It has come to our attention that, unfortunately, certain … ) and was signed by an Assistant Dean whose name he didn’t know. It was a question of limited resources, notably for financial aid, the letter said, and the necessity of conserving those resources for students who maintain at least a B average. It was a question of resources.

  —And he was like This sucks, you know, This really … ! And he was like—

  —Didn’t go out an entire weekend when he got that note, he said. Thought of chucking the whole thing and just going back to the Netherlands.

  —Intent on making a bad situation worse, he said.

  —Maybe because Lincoln thought his time in Chicago was limited, mm, but about that time he got around to trying something he’d wanted to do, to make contact with an aunt of his, Aunt Virge – Virginia – who’d moved here in the ’80s, the middle ’80s, and gotten married, and then fell out of touch. Long-distance was longer then, who knows. She was his mother’s sister, about two years younger, married name Carroll, nickname um Loozie. So Lincoln said he went to the library and looked through the phonebooks for all through Chicagoland, and then tried on the net, but no luck. Too many Carrolls, a few Mikes or Michaels – er, his uncle’s name – so that didn’t pan out, and no Virginias. Well, too bad, but that couldn’t have, you know, made things any easier.

  —When he got sick, he said, he was made glad of UC’s good nature. He feared he would be excommunicated then and there. It was right before first-quarter finals, and he called home, and managed to clamp in his sadness long enough to say he wouldn’t be coming to Amsterdam over break, without giving a reason. He said his father listened, and heard, and responded with a few choruses of Sure; well, sure—

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p; —Chicago was already into a nasty December – you remember that one? – with the Hawk slicing down and cutting and nicking, touching fifteen below, stiffening everything in the streets, and there’s this foreigner huddled in his bed with a raw fever and awful coughing and sneezing and all. And he said he stayed that way for upwards of two weeks, shivering under the covers and trying to shove the Nicomachean Ethics into his head between hacking. But things just went downhill, and it really sucked. So Lincoln was grateful big time when he got a call from an administrator at UC, who’d heard that Lincoln had called in sick for all his on-campus jobs. And the next day, one of the school’s support groups started sending girls from their Barton Brigade, undergraduates who volunteered to bring food and necessaries to folks who were shut in and such. A campus tradition, he found out. And a great one, he believed, especially since he had run out of Bufferin.

  —What did he have? Lincoln wasn’t sure, but it sure felt like what the Dutch call het Smalle, a big, overblown flu that just deposits you at death’s door and leaves you too weak to do the only thing you want to do – knock hard. No other choice but take to your bed and sweat and irrigate. When he’d started running the fever, Lincoln said, he brought his television into his bedroom and slid it onto the low dresser by the long wall opposite his bed. It was a good-sized set, a Sharp, provided by the apartment, and the cable wire was just long enough to reach. It distracted him, he said, took him away from himself and his coursework. And, in time, he left it on more and more. Over the course of those weeks, the Sharp offered the usual everything – soaps, game shows, nighttime series, film chestnuts like Topper and King’s Road. And though Lincoln was too weak and, ultimately, uninterested to pay much attention, the thing was a tireless companion. After a while, he left it pumping even while he was asleep. Listen, the thing kept him company from seven feet away, and even when he gave up trying to study and could only spend his time trembling and sputtering and swaddling his nose, waiting for misery time to pass, the thing streamed on, a chiming hearth at the electric edge of consciousness.

  —He said it was another warm body in the room. And boy was it welcome.

  —Hm. During then, the boy was so compromised that he even took to listening to the telephone solicitors who called. His number must have hit a few suckers’ lists, he said, and with just a minimal grunt or Mm on his end the phone solicitors would just keep going, and going, often for more than fifteen minutes. An easily drawn-out breed.

  —And one that brought home a whole world of wonders. Through them, he heard about secular miracles in long-distance telephone rates, life-spicing credit card repayment plans, monumental efficiencies in newspaper delivery, inflation-slaughtering porcelain plates, epochal car-leasing economies, the whole bestiary …

  And the phone prodigies were a fine complement to the multi-page fliers and coupon booklets that he found tucked within his doorknob, stacked upon his doormat and shoved, roughly folded, into his mailbox. In Holland, he said, these things were filtered out by big neon-colored “Nee Nee” stickers posted by homes’ mail slots. But in Chicago, he had the chance to make up for decades of deprivation, with a profusion of newspaper-sized gazettes offered every day. He turned past generous washing-machine, towel, coffee-maker, soap-set, and women’s-undergarment offers from Sears, from Macy’s, and from Marshall Field’s, produce and packaged-good possibilities from Co-op Markets, and uncountable other opportunities from merchants eager to cut him a deal. The pile of appeals in his bedroom’s corner, all their pages touched, grew to many inches high.

  —And so he passed the days, long days, drifting in and out of sleep on his sickbed, huddled and huddling, shivering past the political fracas in Florida. He changed his underclothes and his bedclothes so often he started sending them out to a local service for laundering. By the third week of ailing, he said, a few of the Barton girls had started putting magazines into his daily basket – outdated Times and Esquires and Men’s Fitnesses and the like, but also Elle and Arch Di and Vogue and Car and Driver, whatever had been given to them by the program’s supporters. One particularly kind Barton angel, called Rachel, she had natural ringlets, included a copy of the day’s UC Chronicle …

  And by that time Lincoln felt so blanked out, so very run down, that the magazines were perfect companions, things to flip and skim and then ignore, always there, demanding nothing. For he had nothing to give. He was so physically weak he couldn’t bring a schoolbook to his eyes, or even lift words to consciousness …

  His one consolation was nostalgic. He had brought a large tin of Droste from Holland, and treated himself to a mug with milk every night. He had sampled American cocoas, but they always seemed shrill, tweakingly sweet, and tragically too thin. So when the night came, more than three weeks into his travails, when the Droste tin reached its brown-dust bottom, when the tip of the big oval spoon could scrape no more, Lincoln exhaled vexedly. He wrapped the woolen scarf that, indoors, he wore around his neck – and this above his dense, burgundy sweater – slightly tighter.

  —Yeah, he was glad when a Barton girl rang his bell the next day. And when he opened up, he said, he was particularly glad to see Rachel, all smiling as usual with her hair springing. She dropped off a basket and took the old one, and just smiled as usual when Lincoln asked if he could ask for something. Make a request. She said sure, so Lincoln asked if she could bring some Droste next time, if she could find some. Rachel smiled and said Sure, you know, no problem, she’d make a note, and then they just talked about how cold it was, that he was actually lucky to be inside. Small talk, you know. She was wearing a really heavy coat.

  —As it turns out, Lincoln told me, Rachel never came back – gal must have gotten caught up in finals, or whatever – and the next Barton Brigadiere knew nothing about emergency Droste. So late on a Thursday night, 10:30 late, when the need got steep, Lincoln hacked out a Kleenexful, put down Aristotle, steeled himself, put a jogging jacket on top of his in-house sweater, thick crepe shirt, and T, put his parka on top of that, and took to the streets.

  —It was profoundly cold, harsh, and stiff, but Lincoln hunched and braved it, hauling his brazier eyes, blubbering nose, and squalling throat all the way to Nite and Day Foods on 55th. To Lincoln’s winced chagrin, its few short aisles harbored no Droste, so he grabbed a tin of Hershey’s and, grunting huffily, headed for checkout. The countergirl grumbled something at him – a How you doon kind of thing – and turned to finish refilling a display slot with cigarette packs. Lincoln, struggling with bulky gloves and parka to pull his wallet from his pants, spluttered something back. The countergirl turned around and giggled at him, before she made change, bagged the Hershey’s, and sent scrunched Lincoln back into the bone-cold night with a friendly wave.

  —So he got home, you see, and put on water even before he took off his coat, you uh, and he tried the Hershey’s and thought it stank but at least it was warm. But, you know – he kidded me it had to be the end of the Droste, maybe that stuff wasn’t no good for him – because later that night he started feeling better. His headache lifted, and he could sleep good, and the next morning his fever shipped out. Man was thrilled, you know, happy as can be, feeling all limber and light and—

  —By that time, first-quarter exams had passed and UC was largely depopulated, but Lincoln, ravished by the possibility of, finally!, getting out of his apartment, spent hours just bobbing around campus. He read newsweeklies at the libraries, sat with strong black tea in Bartlett, looked at any kind of bulletin board … And while the Chicago cold was sharper than any he had known in the Netherlands, he told me that the winter sun here seemed particularly strong, really piercing and pelty, that it tingled up and down his arms, and across his parka’ed chest …

  At one point, after sitting indoors, he went over to the snack stand in Rayton Hall, looking for a napkin, and came back to his seat with an invitation to a reception being given the next night. Lincoln had let a gal pass in front of him, and, well, he walked away with a surprise.

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bsp; —So he goes to this party, and like it’s filled with some people from UC and some not, and like shit, shit he has a really great time. It’s held at this nice private house up near DePaul, and like there’s a great food spread with ravioli and salmon and really good bread, and from a bar in the living room they’re ladling eggnog and the people are like really unpretentious. He talks with a guy named Terry about hidden paths for walking through Lincoln Park, and then with this girl in winged glasses about the future of Lucent, and with another really cute girl named Sam about Chicago rap-metal, just gliding from conversation to conversation to conversation. And at the time everyone’s making Christmas and New Year’s plans, and he walks away that night with invitations to like several, many, of them.

  —So he starts going out, you know. He’s invited to a really nice thing in a cramped apartment on North Sedgwick in Old Town, and then to a get-together at Davenport’s, and, you know, he has a real good time. The whole deal’s fun! It’s just hanging and talking and meeting people. Americans are friendly, he realized, just open and available and really OK. Every introduction seems to lead to one more, and people get off on his accent, they ask him where in Britain he comes from. I mean, I saw him talking to one girl in the Lodge Tavern, then I turn away to grab a hand of peanuts and when I turn back he’s already holding the door for her. You know: on their way out.

  —So comes the week before Christmas, and Lincoln looks into his daybook and he’s got receptions written in for six of the next seven nights. And then he flips back through the year’s worth of preceding pages and sees all the fields of white, chillier than anything he’d experienced outside, and a little squirt of something gurgles up warmly in his chest.