Doxology Read online

  Dedication

  For Justin Taylor’s cat, Emma

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter I.

  Chapter II.

  Chapter III.

  Chapter IV.

  Chapter V.

  Chapter VI.

  Chapter VII.

  Chapter VIII.

  Chapter IX.

  Chapter X.

  Chapter XI.

  Chapter XII.

  Chapter XIII.

  Chapter XIV.

  Chapter XV.

  Chapter XVI.

  Chapter XVII.

  Chapter XVIII.

  Chapter XIX.

  Chapter XX.

  Chapter XXI.

  Chapter XXII.

  Chapter XXIII.

  Chapter XXIV.

  Chapter XXV.

  Chapter XXVI.

  Chapter XXVII.

  Chapter XXVIII.

  Chapter XXIX.

  Chapter XXX.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Nell Zink

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I.

  Unknown to all, and for as long as he lived, Joe Harris was a case of high-functioning Williams syndrome. He displayed the typical broad mouth, stellate irises, spatial ineptitude, gregarious extroversion, storytelling habit, heart defect, and musical gift. To the day he died, he had no more wrinkles on him than an action figure. He was never tested, because he lacked the general intellectual disability that was the syndrome’s defining feature. However, his capacity to irritate others was near infinite. He spoke his mind, trusting everyone he saw.

  For example, once when he was walking through Washington Square with his friend Pam, an elderly man of the kind who might be forty approached them and asked them to hold his asthma inhaler for just one second. Pam rolled her eyes and walked on, but Joe held out his hand, into which the inhaler was promptly placed in a forceful way that made it fall to the ground in two pieces. The man declared that replacing the broken inhaler would cost Joe fifteen dollars.

  Joe replied, “I don’t have fifteen bucks on me. But you could come with me to work! Most days I make more than that. Yesterday I made a lot more. You know what else I made? About a million paper napkins folded in half! After my shift I can give you all the money you need. My work is about a mile away. I can give you free pie, if we have pie that’s stale. I’m going there now.” He touched the man’s arm. Shouting that bowl-headed faggots should leave him alone, the man ran away. Joe picked up the inhaler and yelled, “You forgot your thing!”

  HIS FATHER WAS A PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY AT COLUMBIA. HIS MOTHER HAD been a forever-young party girl in permanent overdrive who could drink all night, sing any song and fake the piano accompaniment, and talk to anybody about anything. In 1976 she died, running uphill and laughing, in the middle of a departmental picnic at Wave Hill. The students mimed heartbreak while her husband mimed CPR. Joe held her hand and said, “Bye-bye, Mommy!” He was only eight.

  At her funeral in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, he clapped his hands through the syncopated bits of the doxology and lifted his voice meaningfully on “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Professor Harris immediately understood that the Holy Family had been redefined to resemble his own. The child schmoozed his way through the reception, telling stories about the funnest times with Mom. Adults patted his head and made meaningful eye contact among themselves. Joe, in their view, was not precocious. They had firm ideas on what to do with him, most of them involving boarding school on another continent. They were concerned about his dad’s capacity to attract another wife.

  Professor Harris changed nothing, on the theory that Joe, whom he loved, would be hurt less if nothing changed.

  JOE WAS WAVED THROUGH PUBLIC SCHOOL AS THE SON OF A PROFESSOR. EVEN BEFORE graduation, he took up waiting tables at the Abyssinian Coffee Shop on Fourteenth Street. It was a small, old-fashioned diner with a cashier up front and a short-order cook in the back. He didn’t have to memorize anything except codes like “S” for scrambled eggs and “P” for pancakes. The specials were eternally fixed combinations, and he never handled money except to put tips in his pockets. Most customers gave him a dollar for lunch or breakfast, a quarter for coffee, and two dollars for dinner. They were gracious because he looked fourteen. They thought he was saving money for college. The manager liked him because he was good for business, always rhapsodizing about fries and soda in a way that made them sound exponentially more wonderful than chips and tap water, plus he never stole.

  With tips in his pockets, he felt rich. It was his good fortune to be a sucker in a time when the Village was not rich in expensive things. Dealers and hookers caromed off his chatty ways. He was afraid of loud noises and fast-moving objects. He never took the subway or crossed a street against the light. His instinct for self-preservation didn’t extend to people, but he respected vehicles—and the dangerous subset of people who were loud and fast-moving—so much that on the whole he was safer walking around New York than a normal person would have been.

  He started playing ukulele soon after his mother died. As a teenager he switched to electric bass because it also had four strings and was good enough for Paul McCartney. For his sixteenth birthday, his father took him to Forty-Eighth Street, where he picked out a lemon-yellow Music Man StingRay. At home he played unamplified, accompanying records and the radio. On days when he didn’t hear a new song he liked, he wrote one. He wasn’t egotistical about it. He didn’t care who wrote the songs as long as they were there. He sang his favorites in public, with hand motions, louder than he could really sing, his voice ringing and rasping, the sound effortful, conveying obstacles overcome, the drama of stardom, the artist as agonist, in part as a side effect of singing outdoors against ambient racket and traffic.

  When he turned twenty-one, he got access to his trust fund. That is, his father was able to tap it for his expenses and moved him from their rent-controlled duplex in the West Village to a two-bedroom in a nondescript building on Nineteenth between Fifth and Sixth. They shared a cleaning lady who doubled as a spy, assuring Professor Harris that Joe regularly ate real food and changed his clothes. With his own place, he could finally invest in a bass amp. Pam helped him parse the classifieds and bulletin board flyers. She located an appropriate Ampeg combo a short walk away in Hell’s Kitchen. He fiddled with the tone knob on the Music Man, looked up at the seller, and yelled over the noise, “Fuck me sideways! I never knew this knob did anything!”

  PAMELA BAILEY WAS BORN THE YEAR AFTER JOE, IN 1969. SHE GREW UP AN ONLY CHILD in northwestern Washington, D.C., between the National Zoo and the National Cathedral.

  Her mother, Ginger, was a homemaker, active in their church—that is, the cathedral—and the friends of the local branch library. She had practiced what she called “Irish birth control” by marrying after she finished college and not before. She didn’t approve of the Irish generally, but acknowledged a preference for lace-curtain Irish over shanty Irish such as the Kennedys. Pam’s father, Edgar, was a career civil servant at the Defense Logistics Agency in Anacostia. Adolescent Pam suspected him of having committed atrocities in Vietnam. He had been partially responsible for supplying American forces there with cinder blocks. To her credit, he had materially enabled the invasion of Grenada by coordinating the movement of spare tires.

  Ginger and Edgar were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the post-Calvinist variety. They didn’t believe in predestination, but they behaved as if it were revealed truth. Every deviation from the straight and narrow was presumed a fatal wrong turn on the one road to salvation. An oft-cited maxim was “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” albeit with a certain irony, sin
ce as belt spankers they never used an actual rod. With similar irony, they would say, “Children should be seen and not heard.” Of course they expected Pam to be able to hold up her end of a dinner-table conversation. Maybe they should have had an extra child to practice on.

  She went to public school and never had much homework. She liked to play with boys. At age nine she discovered Dungeons and Dragons. At twelve, she made up an outer-space-themed role-playing game that earned her $2,000 when her father licensed it to Atari in her name. But puberty was unkind to her. Her reddish hair made pimples and freckles stand out. Her friends went from talking swords and sorcery to planning careers in the U.S. Army Rangers, where they would acquire aluminum crossbows that kill silently. Her awakening critical faculties showed her a world of strictures where she had expected freedoms. The 1970s had suggested that in maturity she would enjoy communal solidarity and LSD. The 1980s coalesced from a haze of competition and AIDS. Between her childhood and her adolescence lay a generation gap.

  She resolved to become a retro hippie earth mother. She began with a feminine school-sponsored extracurricular activity, modern dance. The teacher who ran it spent her time correcting papers. Her pupils stood outside the crash-bar doors of the gym, sharing cigarettes. Nothing was taught. At the year-end performance, Pam wore a black bodysuit and tights and crawled onstage to the sound of Leo Kottke playing “Eight Miles High” on a twelve-string. She was supposed to stare at the floor, but she peeked up to see whether her parents were moved. They were reading paperbacks.

  At age thirteen she discovered a higher-stakes role-playing game. Her character: drunken punk in a crumbling, segregated, crack-saturated city.

  She embarked on adventures at bars downtown. Bouncers let her into hardcore punk shows for free. She had a faceless West Virginia driver’s license that said she was nineteen, so their asses were covered in case of a raid, and that’s all they cared about. Grown men with jobs and money bought her drinks until the harsh light of last call or the restroom revealed that she was too young even for cocaine. To kill time until the Metro started running, she left clubs in the company of boys who said they had drugs. She would smoke crystal meth or crack with them and deploy the energy boost in walking home.

  Mostly she was meeting boys she couldn’t stand, seeing bands she didn’t like. She was so tired all the time that if she didn’t like the band that was onstage, she could put her head down on a table and sleep.

  The band she loved was called Minor Threat. They laid claim to the “straight edge,” foreswearing all substances and casual sex. Before going out to trade petting for a rush, she would draw Xs on the backs of her hands with black marker to signify her belonging to the straight-edge movement. She was well-read enough to know that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. She had seen what the striving for integrity had done to her father and mother. Dependence on a job supplying the troops had turned them into warmongering fascists, and hearing them say “I love you” made her sick. In contrast, Minor Threat’s integrity thrilled her, and she would have given anything to hear their singer, Ian MacKaye, say “I love you.” But she stood face-to-face with him only once, and she offered him sex. For self-evident reasons, she thought it was the most valuable thing she possessed. When he ignored her, she realized her mistake. Sex is not scarce. Girls with sex are like the stars of the sky.

  By teaching her to value originality, the punk movement led her to the realm of art. How she longed to try hard and eventually to be known for making something the likes of which had never existed!

  The summer before tenth grade she founded a band of her own, the Slinkies. Since practicing in a garage would have required asking someone’s parents to move the car, they used their bedrooms. Rehearsal was a quiet affair, if not in the opinion of their families.

  At the Slinkies’ first and final gig, on a Sunday afternoon at the Jewish Community Center in Bethesda, they plugged into the previous band’s equipment. None of them knew what a monitor was for. Pam couldn’t hear her guitar after the drums came in, so she turned up its volume knob. It still didn’t play audibly, so she cranked her amplifier. She sang as loud as she could and couldn’t hear that either. The bassist crouched by her amp, trying to hear herself, and it must have been feeding back like a motherfucker, but nobody onstage could make out what she was playing, not even her. Into the clattering tornado of sound, Pam chanted her doggerel about sabotage in the voice of a tone-deaf auctioneer. The room emptied fast, except for two boys in black dusters who stayed through all three songs and said the Slinkies were a dead ringer for late-period Germs. That was not what she wanted to hear. The Germs’ singer, Darby Crash, had killed himself in 1980, so by implication their sound was not avant-garde.

  GINGER AND EDGAR WERE DIGNIFIED PEOPLE, NOT EASILY INDUCED TO YELL. BUT WHEN she would stumble in at five thirty in the morning on a weekday, having misplaced her skirt, her father couldn’t help but intuit that she would be skipping school, and it made him crazy. Her mother yelled at her, starting when her father went to work and ending when she left for school. At times when no one else was yelling, she missed it, so she yelled instead. For two years, there were no conversations in the household that didn’t involve yelling.

  Her father developed an unfortunate habit of threatening to throw her out. Her mother would remonstrate, and he would relent. To make the mixed message complete, she would imply that her defense of her daughter betrayed excess motherly love, because in truth she deserved to be thrown out. The threat didn’t seem harsh to either parent. Neither of them meant it seriously, though they expected her to move out when she reached eighteen. WASP culture had arisen in the poverty of desolate feudal places. Intergenerational solidarity had been impracticable in Anglo-Saxony, where brides required dowries and younger sons wandered off to settle distant territories like so many beavers. Pam’s grandparents, who were alive when she was little, lived in Florida and Arizona. The Florida ones gave her ten dollars every Christmas to spend as she chose. The Arizona ones had an Airstream travel trailer with a bumper sticker that read, WE’RE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN’S INHERITANCE.

  She didn’t apply to colleges. Instead she told her parents, in her junior year of high school, that she was going to New York to train as an artist.

  She didn’t say what medium, just “artist.” She asked for her Atari money from when she was twelve. It had been earning stagflation-style interest and was, she calculated, sufficient to establish her in an apartment in Manhattan. The money was held in her name as Series EE Savings Bonds. Her parents, being no stupider than their daughter, kept the bonds in a safe-deposit box and wouldn’t say which bank. They said the money was earmarked for her education. There was disagreement as to the true nature of education. The yelling in the house attained exceptional duration and pitch.

  The upshot was that in September 1986, as her senior year was officially starting, Pam marched down to the Greyhound station—on foot, because she had only the seventy dollars she’d earned by selling her father’s audio receiver and VCR to a pawn shop—and boarded a bus to Port Authority.

  From her seat on the smelly bus, the sight of the towers of Manhattan from the cloverleaf above the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel was the most exciting event of her life, definitely including all her experiences of sex, music, nature, and drugs combined.

  She emerged to the sidewalk at Forty-First Street and Eighth Avenue. Street wisdom acquired in downtown D.C. told her it was not a place she needed to be spending time. She saw whores with recently hit faces. She walked east. To a mind unschooled in construction techniques, the city seemed carved from the living rock. Sheer cliff faces surrounded her on every side. Cave dwellings teemed with fairies, rogues, and barbarians, as on a D&D adventure. She quickened her pace. At Times Square she turned southward down Broadway. The whoredom transitioned to hustlers and dealers. She reached Fourth Street with a thrill. She saw some men playing handball. She had never seen handball being played.

  She stopped to
watch them. No one stopped to watch her. She was a leggy stranger in black jeans and a men’s V-neck undershirt, with a backpack and sleepover bag, seventeen years old, lost, female, and invisible. She was exactly where she wanted to be.

  NOT LONG AFTER HER ARRIVAL, SHE STARTED WORKING FOR A COMPUTER CONSULTING firm called RIACD. Everything about it was mismanaged, from the wordplay in the name, which was not an acronym and was properly pronounced as “react” only by foreigners, to the one-man marketing division. The address, far downtown on John Street in the financial district, lent the company pecuniary cachet along with crooked drop ceilings and gurgling toilets.

  A possible exception to the general mismanagement was its thirty-year lease, signed in 1985. RIACD’s founder, Yuval Perez, was a draft evader who had turned eighteen just before Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Owing landlords money didn’t scare him. He didn’t take contracts seriously as threats.

  Only mismanagement could make a consultancy hire a dropout with radiation head to learn C from a Usenet tutorial, so Pam didn’t fault it. (Radiation head was the world’s easiest, and also worst, punk hairdo. Using scissors, the wearer cut his or her own hair really short, and the patchiness made him or her look like a cancer patient.) They met in a bar, where Yuval gave her an aptitude test and hired her to start the next day. The test involved imagining a set of ninety-nine pegs numbered left to right, one to ninety-nine, in a hundred holes also numbered left to right, with the right-hand hole empty. You were supposed to say how you’d move the sequence one slot to the right, reversing the order. A typical programmer’s first move was to posit additional holes.

  Pam had been raised on short rations. She never assumed additional anything. Thrift was a cardinal virtue in the business in those days. Computers were slow, with definite limits. Programs had no graphics or menus. Stinginess was called “elegance.” In aesthetic terms it resembled the elegance of cutting your hair instead of washing it and wearing the same boots every day with no socks. Ultimate elegance was realized when all the programs in a mainframe lived naked and barefoot, sharing a single overcoat.