How Lucky: A Novel Read online

  “How’s my baby girl?” he says, sitting at the kitchen table. He has book bags and iPhones and iPads and headphones and Lord knows whatever else strewn everywhere. How was he carrying this stuff around everywhere? Modern life turns us all into pack mules.

  “I am running late, Travis, and you are making a mess,” she says, gathering the spread of Travis Junk into a neat pile and gently placing it on the couch. “I have much work to do outside of this house today.” Marjani talks like this to everyone, but Travis is the only person for whom there’s a little lilt in her voice. I realized a while back that Marjani never wants an emotional response out of anyone. She is too busy, and too efficient, to ask for anything more than just the facts. Travis is the exception. She likes that he goofs on her, because no one else ever does.

  “Well, we don’t want to keep you from your other job as a professional assassin,” he says. “That’s what you do when I’m not here, right? Silently kill people for hire?”

  I giggle, and Marjani whacks him on his arm with the rag she’s wiping the countertop off with. “Besides, we got all morning, don’t we, see?” Usually on Wednesdays, Travis comes by in the morning and we walk around the neighborhood for a few hours before lunch, me just motoring alongside him while he talks and talks and talks. He calls himself my trainer and these my “sessions,” though they’re mostly just him walking for two hours and me stopping every few minutes so he can stretch my legs out. They’re the highlights of my week.

  But today’s special. It’s Game Week, which means the Redcoat Band practices at the intramural fields, which means we have to set up our picnic blankets and hear them play as kids throw footballs around and try to tackle each other. Travis always gets stoned before we leave, and when we arrive, we just sit and take it all in. He usually falls asleep, unless he sees a girl. It’s the best.

  So today’s visit is short. But I have a job for Travis.

  Marjani gathers her belongings and leaves—though not before Travis blocks her path to the door and makes her high-five him before she can head to her car—and I nod my head toward the computer in my room. He sits across from me.

  I posted that I knew something.

  You don’t know anything. You’re a moron, we know this. I tell you this all the time, dude.

  No, I mean about Ai-Chin. I posted about her on Reddit.

  Ha. Never mind, you aren’t a moron. You’re an idiot. I love it. Let’s dig in.

  11.

  So, after combing through all this, I have persuaded Travis to call the police for me. We’ve never called the police before. It’s harder than you’d think!

  The quickest way to get a police officer is to call 911, of course, but that hardly seems the approach here. My kitchen isn’t on fire, no one’s trying to break in, and Travis isn’t currently pummeling me, though that might change if I don’t stop passing gas in the middle of our brainstorming session.

  So. Google “Athens police”? The first search item that appears is a phone number for the Athens-Clarke County Police Department East Precinct. I saw Ai-Chin just east of campus, which is maybe the same thing?

  Try it.

  Sweet, this’ll be fun.

  Travis used to make prank phone calls in high school while we hid in a back closet as his mom slept upstairs. He loves talking on the phone and is sad that it’s becoming a lost art: “I wasn’t made for these times, man,” he likes to say. He dials the old rotary phone in my kitchen my mom put up to make the place look “homey.”

  “Yeah, my name’s Travis, see, and I’m calling about that disappearance . . . yeah, that girl . . . the Chinese girl? . . . I think my friend saw her. . . . No, see, I didn’t see her, he did. . . . Where? Just off campus, near Five Points. . . . Oh, OK, sorry, your number just showed up first. Can you transfer me? . . . All right, then, can you give me their number? . . . You can’t? You don’t have it nearby? . . . Fine, fine. It’s a good thing this isn’t an actual emergency. . . . Yes, I know, I’m supposed to call nine-one-one if there’s an emergency. . . . I appreciate your lack of help, it has confirmed all my suspicions about public services in Athens-Clarke County, and America in general. . . . You have a nice day.”

  So: not East Precinct. We try Baxter Street Precinct. The conversation is friendlier, but they say it’s not their jurisdiction either and transfer us to a number that hangs up on us. Then Downtown: we leave a message. West Precinct? They tell us to try the campus police. I don’t think they even give campus police guns, but whatever. We call the campus police, but their line is busy, and honestly, I had no idea busy signals were even a thing anymore.

  Travis shrugs and bends back down to me.

  “Maybe they’re getting too many calls?”

  They don’t sound like they’re getting too many calls.

  “Should we call again later?”

  I remember something I probably should have already remembered.

  Wait. I think there was a tip line.

  Travis flips through his phone and finds Matthew Adair’s Athens Banner-Herald story.

  He reads it aloud: “Police ask you call the Ai-Chin Liao tip line at 706-234-4022 if you have any information. I wish you had remembered that one in the first place.”

  Travis dials one more time, and it rings for a minute or so. He raises his eyebrows at me, mouths voice mail, and takes an unusually deep, tired breath. “Yes, my name is Travis, see, and I’ve got a friend here, and he thinks he saw Ai-Chin the day she disappeared. We’ve been trying to get a hold of somebody, and we figured this line would be too busy, and I guess we were right, but we figured we’d call anyway, so here we are, see. Anyway, I’m Travis. My friend lives at 764 Agriculture in Five Points and wants to help out. Give him a call at 706-258-8463. Again, name is Travis. Uh . . . have a good day?”

  He shrugs at me.

  I think you forgot to tell them my name.

  No one’s ever going to listen to that message, man. Let’s try campus police again tonight.

  This is harder than I would have thought.

  “Gotta go, man,” he says, putting on a jacket that’s three sizes too large for him. He looks like when a bunch of Muppets stand on each other’s shoulders to try to pretend they’re a real person. “See you tonight for the band practice, see. And if you run into the dude with the Camaro again, run his ass over for me.”

  12.

  I got to meet Ron Turner once.

  You probably don’t know who Ron Turner is, I’m realizing.

  When I was seven years old, the University of Illinois invited me, my mother, and a gaggle of other disabled kids to come onto the field of Memorial Stadium in Champaign to say hello to the coaching staff of the Illinois football team. Local sports teams always think they’re doing something wonderful when they roll out the wheelchair kids on the field before games, like they’re all making our dying wishes come true, as if the only dream I’ve ever had in my life was to go meet the head coach of a middling Big Ten team. Coach Turner was a nice man, but he had better things to do than shake the hand of a seven-year-old, and so did I. He gave a grim smile and then jogged off to go chart a play, or block a kick, or run the wishbone, or whatever it is that football coaches do.

  I’ve always found these awkward meet-and-greets excruciating. Ostensibly they’re supposed to “raise awareness,” a way to get us out in the community and get people to “be cognizant of the issue,” whatever that issue might be. In practice, I find this little bit of public relations—and that is exactly what it is–more a pain than anything else. You can roll me out to every football stadium and pose for a photo with every person wearing an Illini jersey in sight, and the number of people who at the end of the day can tell you what SMA even is, let alone do anything to fight it, is precisely zero. We are not carted out there to raise awareness. We are carted out there so a bunch of healthy people who just want to drink beer and get away from their problems and scream for three hours—none of which I have any complaint with whatsoever—can overcome any linge
ring guilt they might have about the fact that they deeply love a cruel, brutish sport involving hundreds of unpaid, often disadvantaged kids crashing their skulls into each other solely for our amusement. They see us out there pregame, they say Awwwww, good for them, and they have their one flicker of human emotion for the day that they can then happily ignore, guilt-free, for the rest of their afternoon. These visits are not for us. These visits are for them, so they can feel better when they know they should feel so much worse. We’re their props. And there isn’t much I hate more than being used as a prop.

  This is not necessarily to say I don’t enjoy football. Football is a welcome distraction from how terrible the world can be sometimes, and it’s impossible not to appreciate the raw physicality of the game: you never quite understand how truly violent it is until they’ve wheeled you within fifty feet of where massive people are sprinting at other massive people at terrifying speed. At one point during one of those old Illini games, a wide receiver came screaming down the sidelines right as a defensive back was bearing down on him. They collided at maximum velocity, and the receiver went sprawling out of bounds, flipping over a table of Gatorade cups and landing right at the feet of my chair. Everyone on the sideline came scrambling toward me, like they were afraid I was going to get hurt, but I looked down at that poor kid staring up at me, his eyes bulging out of his head, the look of someone who’d just been involved in multiple car crashes. I’m not sure how you recover from a hit like that. Yet there he went, up and in the huddle for the next play. The whole thing is impossible and thrilling and terrible. I am not above its dark pleasures.

  As it turns out, I moved to the exact right town for football. Football was a mild curiosity in central Illinois, but here, it’s the reason the whole place exists. I mean that pretty much literally. Sanford Stadium, home of the Georgia Bulldogs, is smack-dab in the middle of campus, and they’ve built the whole campus around it. It’s basically a huge sunken pit that a major American university had to construct itself to conform to, even though it’s only used eight days a year. There isn’t a building on campus that doesn’t have a view of Sanford. It’s Athens’s sun, and it is worshipped accordingly.

  The game itself always takes a back seat to Game Week. This week’s a Game Week in Athens, and in my five years here, I’ve never missed a Game Week. The whole town lights up, whether the opposing team is good or bad, whether the game is important or not. You get the first rush of campers coming in on Thursday, with their disturbingly detailed Bulldogs logos and paintings on their trucks. You can hear the Redcoat Band practicing on the intramural fields early in the morning and deep into the night. The alumni parties ratchet up on Thursdays too, which is why Marjani is always a little bit late during Game Week: there are cocktails to be served and spilled alcohol to be mopped up everywhere. The students, in a tradition I’ll confess to adoring, even dress up in suits and ties and dresses, with all their sorority and fraternity formals scheduled around the games. On most days college kids dress like they just grabbed the first T-shirt they saw when they rolled out of bed, but Game Weeks have them all in tuxedos and ball gowns. It classes the place up. I like it.

  But to me, the best part is just the mood. Game Weeks inspire the citizens of Athens to come out and hang. There’s always some sort of street party thrown by all the parents in Five Points on Thursday night, usually with a cameo appearance from a couple of the players, who are bowed to and fawned upon. Wednesday brings the official Redcoat Band public practice, which brings hundreds of people to the intramural fields to picnic and loll around and just socialize. There are no politics, and no disagreements, and no discord or anger. It’s just a bunch of nice people lying around in a field, listening to college students play the tuba and march around in big hats. It’s incredibly difficult for me to get over there—it requires scooting down College Station, a busy on-ramp to the freeway in which people drive insanely fast, and there is no sidewalk—but I never miss it. Travis brings a lawn blanket and some sandwiches, we listen to the band, we watch the kids run around, and it’s almost like it isn’t 2019, like everybody likes being around each other again.

  That’s what’s in store for me tonight. It will be 75 degrees, the streets will be humming and people will be smiling when they pass by each other. The football isn’t the point, but if it gets me this, it’s all well worth it.

  13.

  I log in to the @spectrumair account and start filtering through the replies. Someone in Nashville is angry his in-flight WiFi doesn’t work. A guy with a green frog smoking a cigarette as his avatar says his stewardess was rude to him. Some lady with “RESIST” in her bio wants to know how much we charge to check a pair of skis, and I can’t even begin to guess where in the South she’s flying with skis. Also someone calls me a cuntbag.

  @spectrumair your gate agent here at LIT is a mongoloid

  @spectrumair i think it is nice that you are giving retards a job and everything but its not getting me home any fucking faster

  @spectrumair you suck you suck you suck you suck you suck you suck #yousuck

  Just another fun day online.

  One of the bummer parts of my job is that nobody really cares how good I am at it. Spectrum doesn’t care. If they cared, they wouldn’t let some anonymous kid they don’t even know has SMA answer all their social media complaints for them. All they want to do is avoid a blowup. They just want to say they have a guy. The customers don’t care. They don’t want me to actually solve their problem or to give them any information. They just want someone to yell at. I could be the absolute best at my field, the greatest freelance regional airline social media manager the world has ever seen, and the result of my work would be roughly the same as if I just responded to all complaints with a sneezing cat GIF. Now that I’m thinking about it, if I simply responded to all complaints with a sneezing cat GIF, that might actually make me the greatest freelance regional airline social media manager the world has ever seen.

  The one upside is that on days where I’m just not into it, on days when I’m tired, or the wireless in my place is acting up, or I get a cold and thus things start getting dicey around here, I can basically just ignore it and no one really notices. One weekend when I was on duty, a slow February where nothing was going on, I suddenly could not stop gagging. You should know that gagging is incredibly painful—it feels like someone is taking my ribs and scrunching them into a wad of paper—and when a jag comes on, it’s a serious situation. I have an emergency app on my iPad that I can text Marjani with, a sudden, jolting BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP that takes over her phone and lets her know that she or someone else needs to get over here immediately. I just have to open up the iMedAlert app on my iPad and click it. It is just a big red alarm. I’m pretty sure my iPad starts shaking when I hit it. It is the Break Glass button.

  I’ve only used it twice in the years I’ve known Marjani. One time was when I first moved in, when I didn’t know her well and hadn’t figured out this house yet, I accidentally fell off the porch and into the shrubs below. I ended up with cuts all across my back and shoulders, and I was urinating blood for a month. That was a bad day. The second time was this gagging fit last February, which, gotta say, was a lot scarier than the fall off the porch. That was just a onetime trip. The fit felt more like being thrown into the bushes, then being picked up and thrown back in again, then again, then again, and then someone cutting a hole in my rib cage, jamming the bushes inside, setting them on fire, and then picking me up again and throwing me back where the bushes used to be, then stabbing me in the stomach with a shovel and pouring sulfuric acid on the wound. That was a very bad day.

  Anyway, I was off work for two days after. No one at Spectrum even noticed I was gone. When I logged back on to Twitter, none of the other “managers” had even filled in for me. Some poor schmuck had been yelling at me for three days, before his flight was delayed, while he was in the air, and then for two days afterward. I felt for him.

  Nobody has been yelling at me nearl
y that long today, but I’m deep into explaining to a Tennessee Volunteers fan that we can probably reroute him through Nashville if he uses the Spectrum Air app, downloadable from the App Store, when there is a doorbell ring. This is the time of year when all the earnest young college students are going door-to-door for their political candidates, so I ignore the bell, as I always do. But this person keeps ringing and ringing, and then there is a pound at the door.

  I pull back from the computer and wheel toward the door. Looking through the window, I see it’s not a college student, or a FedEx guy, or Travis forgetting his key. It’s a cop.

  14.

  He is big. All cops are big—cops are big even when they are not big; they must train them to loom larger than they actually are, like a blowfish—but this cop is unusually large. After I unlocked and opened the door for him on my phone, he had to duck slightly to fit under the doorframe, and he had to bend over at about a 30-degree angle just to notice who had opened the door for him. He has a thick Fu Manchu goatee, a thin, wispy hairline, and Oakley sunglasses with a camera built into them. The first thing I notice about him is his gun, because that’s the first thing I notice about every cop. Isn’t that the first thing everyone notices about cops? The gun? He is by himself and unusually sweaty, and that’s all I can really tell about him because he has sunglasses on and he isn’t talking. He’s just looking around my apartment, trying to figure out who else lives here, because there’s no way it can just be me. The tag on his uniform reads ANDERSON.