How Lucky: A Novel Read online

  After finishing up with @sabanmaga27, who doesn’t seem to understand how standby works—highlight: “fuk you I’ll stand by your corpse”—I get an email from Travis.

  Holy shit dude. What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK. Forwarded it to the cop, though I don’t think cops check email. Maybe they do? Anyway: WHAT THE SHIT.

  I’ll see you at the rally thing tonight. Remember that Jennifer girl from last night? we’ve been hanging out! She’s coming too. We’ll see you there, bitches.

  WHAT THE SHIT.

  Out of habit, at this point, I check the UGA Reddit page and the posts about Ai-Chin. In the wake of the publicity of the last twenty-four hours, the page, once a sleepy outpost for halfhearted true crime wannabes, has turned into a hothouse of craven conspiracy theories, all of them far more outlandish than Travis’s Ai-Chin-is-a-stoner hypothesis. She has run away because she hates school and doesn’t want to disappoint her parents. There’s a secret sex slave society out in Watkinsville. She discovered an experiment the vet school was doing on lab rats and was murdered to silence her before she went public. Some guy has somehow tied this to Hillary Clinton. By far the most popular theory is that she was trying to defect from China, and someone decided to disappear her to make sure the Chinese government was not embarrassed publicly. When people don’t have a story, they will make one up.

  I flip back to the email and read it again. It seems insane. Yet . . . there is something I understand in it. I wonder what people are thinking about me all the time too. How can you not? Are there people who don’t?

  I hear a gasp behind me.

  “Daniel! What is this?” I have told her so many times how rude it is to look over my shoulder when I’m on my computer but . . . yeah, here we are.

  Marjani has, reasonably, decided to call the police again. I’ve downloaded what little information I have to her, about as much as Travis has now, but she barely registers any of that, she’s so freaked out about the email.

  She acts like she’s the first person to come up with this idea of calling the cops, like Travis and I haven’t been trying and failing for two days now, like there wasn’t a cop in this house just yesterday. But one constant is that Marjani always wants to call the police. She has a first-generation immigrant’s faith in the police, in the idea that, in America, unlike the country where she was born, there is an impartial, fair-minded, sober group of people whose job it is to sort through the chaos and find order in the madness. I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth.

  I have to admit that she has a point this time. I am not just some idiot in a chair: I am evidence. There is a whole town looking for Ai-Chin. Her friends are weeping in the streets. It was rather disorienting, I gotta say, to see the 11Alive crew talk about something that happened in my front yard, before throwing it to Chesley McNeil with the weather, looking like a 10 on the WIZometer today, perfect football weather out there for you folks.

  This is more than a kid with a laser pointer. We need to call the police. Again.

  While pulling up the sheets and wiping down a scary stain on my pillow that I’ve never seen before and can’t come up with much of an origin for, Marjani straps me into my chair.

  I am going to call them right now. I will call the man who left his card.

  Yeah, good luck with him. What are you going to say?

  I have to tell them that you saw something. That you saw the man. And the girl. And now this threat.

  This is what I’ve been trying to do.

  She begins dialing the phone. I’m proud of my home’s landline, just hanging on the wall there, waiting for some lady wearing an apron to pick it up and hand it to a guy wearing a black suit and a fedora. It makes me feel like I live in a ’50s sitcom. It is worth noting that every person who comes into this house assumes it doesn’t work and is just there for show.

  Marjani calls Officer Anderson, frowns, and mouths Voice mail. She leaves her name and number. She then dials the university police again.

  “Hello, yes, this is Marjani. . . . Yes, yes, I know you have heard from me before. . . . Uh-uh. . . . Well, yes, I know that you are very busy, that is why I am calling. . . . No, no, I know that, I am saying that . . . no, I see that, I am not trying to bother you, I am trying to help you. . . . Well, excuse me, I—hey!”

  Clearly, Marjani got the person who usually answers the phone when Marjani calls about a fraternity party going on too late, or a stray cat howling in a yard down the street, and this person had no patience for her today. Not the day after the national news has picked up the story of a missing Chinese national on the campus of a major American university, one that, not incidentally, is hosting a Very Important Football Game this weekend, let’s go to Kirk and Corso for their picks. Marjani slams the phone down and says a phrase in Urdu that I suspect is banned from Pakistani broadcast television.

  Marjani dials again, hangs up, dials again, hangs up, dials again. Busy. Busy. That sound, a goose honking in your ear, over and over, mocking. She sits and stews for a moment, then wipes her brow and straightens her shirt.

  “I have to go. We will have to do this later, Daniel,” she says. “Unless you want me to drive you down to the station and drop you off.”

  I do not want this.

  I do not want this.

  “Fine,” she says, harrumphing. “We will try again tonight if they have not caught this man by then. Do you agree?”

  Yes.

  She wipes my head again, looks at me, and frowns.

  I will see you this evening for the rally. You will be OK between now and then?

  I will. It will be fine.

  She is so worried. That she is so worried starts to make me worried, so I smile the best I can at her.

  It’ll be fine. We’re getting too worked up. Go do what you have to do.

  She stares at me a beat too long, then grabs her jacket off the chair. It’s gorgeous out, so she knows to open the front door and steer me out to the front porch. She pats me on the knee. “You be careful, Daniel,” she says on the way out to her car. “This is a lot. This is quite a lot.”

  As she reaches the porch, she stops and turns around. But she doesn’t say anything more.

  21.

  You will hopefully forgive me if you are a patron of Spectrum Air expecting a certain level of service today, but you see, I’m corresponding with a guy who may have murdered a young woman, and I am waiting for him to write me back. Forgive me if I have little patience for the fact that your seat does not recline.

  But it’s busy, because a game-day weekend awaits. Even our sleepy hamlet’s tiny airport is busy on football weekends. Here is one of my favorite factoids about this beautifully weird city I live in: on Georgia home football weekends, all open container laws are suspended. It’s actually in the city charter: the tourism bureau happily advertises it. Any other day, the county fills its coffers, its entire budget, on the underage and illegal drinking of college students and other miscreants. Travis’s grandmother got carded at a restaurant here, and she’s eighty-four and looks like she died around 1983. (She was using a walker! Still carded!) Illicit drinking is the lifeblood of this town, as it goes, the source of and solution to all of civic life’s fiscal problems. But when Georgia football plays a home game, well, all rules are forgotten—this slightly Puritan college town turns into New Orleans.

  This ends up being less sloppy than you might think. Athens doesn’t have the fake regality on football weekends that, say, Oxford, Mississippi, has—that place looks like the party from Get Out on football Saturdays; everybody’s got bow ties and straw hats—but we don’t set fire to the world just to watch it burn like the lunatics at LSU either. It’s just a special weekend holiday that we have seven times a year in which everyone involved, pretty much everybody but the players themselves, just drinks for about thirty-six hours straight. The goal is not obliteration. It is to achieve a steady, warm glaze for the whole weekend, enough to make you forget the otherwise omnipresent collapse of civilization . . .
but not so much that you pass out before the game starts. And this is everyone, mind you. This is not just a select group of asshat backward-hat frat dudes. They come from the whole state, the more genteel North Georgia folks, the younger recent grads from Atlanta and the Atlanta suburbs, the young black professionals from Atlanta proper, the farmers from South Georgia, the shaky, sorta scary folks from the Georgia-Florida border.

  Athens is a progressive city in just about every possible way, thanks to its status as a college town. (Our mayor is an avowed democratic socialist!) But on football weekends, this place is simply the home of everything Georgia, the place where old hippies and drawling white-haired southern judges and soccer moms and rappers and preachers and cokeheads and music nerds and accountants and schoolteachers and physics professors and chicken farmers all come together to turn their bodies into 65 percent bourbon and scream for the Dawgs.

  The football stadium at the literal center of Athens is the light that beckons us all. It’s the only thing that matters in this whole state for seven weekends out of the year, and I have to tell you, it is beautiful to behold. We can’t agree on anything in this world, we can’t even sit with each other long enough to decide whether we want to agree on anything, but of all things, it’s football, this awful game that destroys the brains of college students without even paying them a dime for the privilege, this last refuge of the helplessly meat-headed, it’s football that brings us together, goddammit, and we can assemble and wear red and bark at each other and push all the awful shit down to a place it won’t return until Tuesday at the latest, and we do it seven times a year and that’s seven times a year when we don’t have to live with the rest of it and I gotta tell you, that ain’t nothing.

  Another great thing about football weekends is that they are rare Georgia weekends in which the car is discouraged, or at least discouraged by the nonfoolish. People who live here park their car on Friday and don’t even think about it until Sunday afternoon. It’s a foot-travel Valhalla, these football weekends, and that’s of course right in my strike zone: when there are more people walking, drivers notice them more and are less likely to take blind right turns directly into your friendly neighborhood motorized SMA traveler.

  I’ve been hit twice already in the six years I’ve lived here, both times by people who forget that the world exists outside their immediate windshield. One was just a tap, a big old redneck who was idling through a stop sign and slammed on his brakes right when he saw me. He leaped out of his truck and sprinted over to me. I was fine, he really only chipped the paint on my chair. I could still talk a little back then, and I said, “Fine, I’m fine, it’s OK,” and he looked at me and just broke down crying right then and there. It was quite a sight, this three-hundred-pound bearded dude with a Don’t Tread On Me bumper sticker bawling, snot coming out his nose, wailing, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” He came out much worse for the wear than I did on that one. The other was a college girl in a Ford Escort, about eighteen months ago. She was on her phone, of course, and let her foot off the brake while scrolling at a red light as I was zooming in front of her in the crosswalk. This one took a little bit more out of me, bouncing me about three feet forward, nearly into the passing traffic, and kicking me out of my chair, where I landed on my right wrist, shattering it on impact. She didn’t even notice until people started honking. She got out of the car, dazed, and saw me writhing around on the ground like I’d been tased, or like I was a soccer player flopping around so I could draw a penalty. It must have been quite something—I personally wasn’t awake for it. I woke up a couple of hours later in the hospital with Marjani and Travis sitting next to me. They’d had to use the cough assist machine on me to control my breathing, but all told, the wrist, along with some nasty scratches on the left side of my face, was somehow the worst of it. It wasn’t even my chair-controlling hand. It could have been, and absolutely should have been, so much worse. I remember hearing Travis cry a lot, but mostly I slept through it all. We didn’t press any charges against the girl, but her insurance is going to put her in the poorhouse for the next twenty years now, I have no doubt. Welcome to my world, lady.

  But everyone remembers to look both ways on football weekends. Georgia is playing Middle Tennessee State this weekend, a nothing school with a nobody football team. It’s the perfect opportunity for me to people-watch. I can just scoot on over to campus and just sit there for hours, looking at people. The stoned college kids tossing a Frisbee around. The frat bros sitting on their Milledge porches, looking for something, someone, to crush. The young girls, foals really, dressed up for sorority formals in their classic gowns. The football diehards, with their DirecTV setups so they don’t miss a play of any game all weekend, always crouched in the corner drawing up reasons the Dawgs can never win the big one—are we cursed, are we doomed, goddamned Kirby gotta get us over the hump. The old alums, coming in from all over, their weekly pilgrimage to Athens, back home, back to the place where they once ruled, a place where they can remember who they used to be and pretend they can be them again. The children running everywhere, aware that they have a little more freedom this weekend than they usually do but not entirely certain as to why.

  Thursday is always a heavy workday in the fall down south for those of us in the travel industry, if that’s what you want to call what I do. They encourage us to know the college football situation of our travelers on weekends like this, so I sneak in a couple “Big weekend for the ’Noles!” responses to those delayed on Spectrum Flight 227 to Tallahassee. They initially respond with “I know THAT’S WHY I’M TRYING TO GET THERE,” but eventually they appreciate that you understand the stakes of their travel. People spend so much time yelling at brands on the internet that they’re always a little surprised to realize that the brands live in the same world that they do, and that they know what time the game starts. Brands are people too, you know.

  I’m in the middle of talking some dude from Chattanooga out of sending a pipe bomb to my mother’s house when I hear that familiar Gmail ding.

  I switch windows, catch my breath back, and start reading.

  Flagpole—

  I’m sorry. I was taken aback by your post. Who wouldn’t be? I was unnecessarily confrontational with you. This has been a bit of a whirlwind week, as you might suspect, and it was disorienting to learn that somebody saw when Ai-Chin and I first met. It had been a private moment for Ai-Chin and me, one that I thought just belonged to the two of us. It was just a surprise to learn that someone was watching us. She was surprised to hear it too when I told her.

  So let’s start over. I’m going to guess that we have more in common than we might think, and if we’re going to have this correspondence, let’s try to do it like men. That’s what we are, after all. We are men. You are a man. I can tell you are a man. Men are kinder than women, by nature. We are more forthcoming. You just came out and said what you were thinking and what you wanted. A woman would never do that. This is one of the reasons Ai-Chin and I get along so well. She tells me what she wants. That’s rare in a woman.

  We share a secret, you and I. Only three people in the world share this secret. You know she got in my car, I know she got in my car, and she knows she got in my car. Have you seen the television? Everyone’s trying to find her. I suppose I should have seen that coming. Everybody freaks out when a girl goes missing. I could die in this office and be rotting out for weeks before anyone would even think to look for me. But one little Asian girl goes missing for a couple of days and it’s an international incident. That’s the world we live in.

  The only people who know are the three of us. I don’t know how you know. But clearly you do. So let’s be friends.

  Can we be friends? Tell me about yourself. If it helps, I will tell you a little about myself.

  My name is Jonathan. Look. Look at that. I just told you my name. That’s more than you have done. I showed you mine. Now show me yours.

  Best,

  Jonathan

  That was i
t for work for the day.

  22.

  He is reaching out. I shall reach out back. I vow to finish before Marjani runs us out to the Chapel Bell rally.

  jon—

  gonna call you jon. jon takes fewer letters. hope your cool with that.

  i have to ask. is ai-chin ok? she seemed very nice to me. id seen her around a few times. her parents came all the way from china for her. i saw her mom yesterday. you should tell her her mom is here and looking for her. she might want to know that. my mom would be so scared if i disappeared like that. would yours? i bet she would.

  you want to know more about me. i spend too much time on reddit like you it looks like hahahaha. im just a regular dude. at home on the computer all the time. you do have a cool car though. does it help you with girls like ai-chin? i bet it does. i have trouble with girls. i dont know really what to say to them. maybe thats why im on reddit all the time hahahahaah

  so im a little confused. is ai-chin with you? does she just hang out with you at your house? do you speak chinese? are you guys friends?

  does it feel good to talk about this? it does for me. i hope it does for you too.

  also my name is tom. but you can call me tom hahaha

  tom

  SENT. SENT. I sent it. SENT. I shut my computer off, violently, disposing of evidence.

  Marjani enters shortly thereafter in a rush. “We are late, we must go, there is Kirby, Kirby will be there.”

  Also I need to tell them what I know.

  Oh yes that too.

  I’m eager for us to get there too. The internet has me thinking the indoors world is the worst of all possible worlds. We’re in such a hurry, in fact, that we get halfway down Agriculture Drive before we realize we forgot to lock the front door and have to back up and bolt the damn thing up. Upon our return, Marjani stops.

  “Daniel, was Travis here late last night?”

  No. Why?