Halfway through the ride, the bus stops at Arby’s. Broder hasn’t eaten in hours. He buys six roast-beef sandwiches. He eats one and a half and offers the rest to a woman across the aisle. The woman looks scared. Broder leaves the Arby’s bag on the floor.
37.
Michael, Rachel, and Donny occupy prime real estate between the bathroom and Big Buck Hunter. The bar is mostly empty despite the funeral’s turnout. Two men take turns shooting deer with the game’s plastic gun. Michael remembers one of the guys holding a similar weapon out the window of his pickup, pointing at Ricky. “Run you little faggot,” the shooter had said, and Ricky sprinted into the woods while Michael stood watching in stunned paralysis. No shots were fired. The car screeched off and Michael bolted after Ricky, who refused to say a word. This was years ago, back in high school. Now the men sip Miller High Life, appropriately silent, as if the deer might hear their voices and flee. Bon Jovi plays loud.
“To Ricky,” Michael says, and raises his glass. He wanted to immediately head back to Brooklyn, but Rachel made the case for him not being in the best state to drive. The forks and spoons on the table move toward Donny’s wrists. Michael stops one in its path and holds the utensil. The spoon tugs itself back in Donny’s direction. After a second, Michael lets go. The spoon rockets across the table and sticks to Donny’s wrist.
“Crazy, right?” Donny says. “I’m still getting used to them myself.”
What compels a man to undergo such a procedure? Perhaps the meaning lies in the implant’s utter lack of utility, the magnets as meta-comment on automated culture. Or maybe they’re simply a neat party trick. Michael doesn’t know Donny well enough to conjecture. The two haven’t spent much time together, Donny mostly avoiding the Mixner house, cowed by Lydia’s disapproval. Magnets aside, Donny lacks ambition, eschews compound sentences, and looks, with his lime-green Mohawk, nose-bone nose ring, and pointillist face tattoos, like a lost Maori tribesman as imagined by Roy Lichtenstein. He isn’t Jewish either. Michael’s starting to like him.
“My brother’s afraid of needles,” Rachel says.
“No way,” Donny says.
“It’s true,” Michael says. “I’m lucky. My fear’s the only thing that stopped me getting a Slim Shady tattoo on my eighteenth birthday.”
“Michael’s writing a book about Eminem,” Rachel says.
“Trying,” Michael says. “And failing.”
The other night, while searching his bedroom for photos of Ricky to display at the memorial, he came across an essay he wrote in college that mapped the epistolary novel from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, to Nas’s “One Love,” to Eminem’s “Stan.” He’d received a C on it, the professor explaining that the problem wasn’t with Michael’s writing, but the fact that Michael didn’t appear to have read Clarissa beyond the CliffsNotes. The professor had a point; in truth, Michael hadn’t read Clarissa or the CliffsNotes.
Still, a quick skim revealed the essay’s merit. Michael was right about the two songs representing turning points between eras of hip-hop. “One Love” is a dispatch to a friend in prison that describes what he’s missed since being locked down, a catalogue of horrors, from friends lost to drugs to kids caught by errant bullets. The song is dirge and reportage, Nas describing his community’s plight for posterity, and with some hope of affecting change. The outlook is bleak, though, and the transformation of Bob Marley’s “One Love” into a mantra of futile resilience reminded Michael—and still does—of Otis Redding’s cover of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which sucks the hope from Sam Cooke’s original and replaces it with Redding’s gravelly anger at the failed promise of the civil rights movement.
“Stan” by contrast is a series of letters written by an Eminem superfan who reads the rapper’s lyrics as dogma and interprets their hyperbolic violence as a rational response to modern life. The song culminates with Stan the superfan driving his car off a bridge, his pregnant wife locked in the trunk. In the essay, Michael called Em the first true artist of the Internet, a product of chat rooms where the id was freed by anonymity, and the victims of one’s vitriol remained hidden until the harrowing moment, as in “Stan,” when they were unmasked. It’s a similar idea to Michael’s thesis regarding derivatives trading: that the invisibility of its victims permits cognitive dissonance among its practitioners. It occurred to Michael, while rereading his essay, that, if he ever gets back to his book, it might be worth attempting to trace the climate of callous indifference among finance types back to those chatrooms.
And not just among finance types either. Michael sees indifference wherever he looks: in the eyes of his parents, who act like Ricky was only a passing acquaintance; in Broder, who won’t return Michael’s calls; in the journalists, lobbyists, and politicians, whose outrage over the murder is guided by self-interest; in Michael’s former classmates, who were so cruel to Ricky in high school, yet acted dramatically stricken today. But mostly Michael sees it in himself, in the long years without regard for his own heavy boot-print on the lives around him, from the nameless, faceless owners of the mortgages he packaged, to the current clients whose calls he continues to ignore, to Wendy’s father, Fred, and to Wendy—all sufferers at the hands of Michael’s hubris and distraction, his negligence and incompetence, his careless attitude toward the hearts and assets of others.
These people, and especially Michael, are the
