The Altruists: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Ridker was born in 1991. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, The Believer, and St. Louis Magazine; and he is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. He is the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The Altruists is his first novel.

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One

"You're coming with us."

Maggie had known Emma since braces, but the awkward girl who'd played saxophone in their high school jazz band with enough enthusiasm to redeem the instrument-and, for that matter, jazz-was now in her second year of law school. A dozen of her classmates stood clustered in Emma's living room, hands hooked around significant others or planted confidently on their hips. In the kitchenette, handles of vodka with frosted-glass insignia shared counter space with plastic jugs of Simply Orange. Maggie swore she knew the song piping through the apartment, but each time she came close to identifying it, an incoming text would ping through the phone that was hooked to the speakers and throw her concentration. "You always show up at the start of things," Emma continued, "but then you sneak away like no one's going to notice."

"No I don't," said Maggie.

"Well, good. Because you're coming out with us tonight."

Maggie ground her teeth and stared at the orange ring of residue at the bottom of her Solo cup. Across the room, a toothy boy in fashionable glasses was doing an impression of someone Maggie didn't recognize.

"There are a lot of interesting people here," Emma added, gesturing to a huddle of her classmates.

Maggie scowled. The whole scene felt staged. Everyone was too put together, too self-assured. A jolt of paranoia seized her. Had this party, this Lower East Side gathering of marketing associates and financial analysts and almost-lawyers, been arranged for her benefit? Maggie couldn't shake the feeling that this conspicuous display of upward mobility was intended to send her a message.

"What are you trying to say?"

Emma put her hands up. "I'm not trying to say anything!"

Maggie relaxed her shoulders. She was doing fine, after all. She made rent working for the good people of Queens. Her only boss was her conscience. Most days this meant running errands, or babysitting, or liaising with city government on behalf of her Spanish- and Russian- and Chinese-speaking neighbors. Odd jobs. Over the course of five months she'd cultivated a small network of clients, mostly immigrants who considered her US citizenship to be a marketable skill. It was satisfying work, though it didn't pay particularly well. She was always a little bit hungry.

The toothy boy sidled up to them. "We were talking about Ziegler," he said.

"Oh my god," said Emma. "Ziegler!"

"Who's Ziegler?" Maggie asked.

"He's one of our professors," said the boy. "Torts."

"What are torts?"

"It's when an injured party-"

"Oh. Never mind."

The boy looked hurt. "Okay," he said.

Emma introduced them. "This is Maggie. We went to high school together."

"What do you do?" the boy asked, squinting.

Recently, a Polish woman on Himrod Street hired Maggie to talk at her newborn son. She was told she could say anything she liked, as long as she said it in English, the idea being that the baby would assimilate the language into its burgeoning subconscious and grow up fluent. But on her first day, once the mother left the room, Maggie blanked. She muttered erm and um and uh the whole session, paralyzed at first by nerves and then by guilt at the prospect of making ten bucks an hour without having earned it. "I can't take your money," she told the woman at the session's end. "But I'll be back next week with a lot to say. I promise."

Okay, so the hunger wasn't dire, but to be honest? Denying oneself a full belly kind of felt a little bit saintly. Maggie kept enough money on hand to afford to feel saintly, to afford to turn other money down. She regulated her spending with scrupulous discipline, consuming only what she needed, only what she felt she deserved. The problem was that her body couldn't differentiate between self-inflicted hunger and the other kind. It, a body, knew only "hunger"-the nutritional deficiency, not the ideological assertion-and, accordingly, she'd slimmed. Six pounds over two years. Which wasn't nothing, especially when you weren't much to begin with.

It was nice at first, feeling light and wobbly all the time. She walked the streets of Ridgewood with a mild buzz that blurred the boundaries of her consciousness. But then her cramps grew claws and the hunger pangs turned violent. She became concerned after passing out in a five-flavor cloud behind the Hong Kong Super Buffet, her legs buckling in mutiny against her. In the first semester of her freshman year at Danforth University in St. Louis, Maggie took two weeks of Philosophy 101: Foundations of Western Thought before dropping it for something less theoretical, which was long enough for her to learn the phrase mind-body problem but not its definition. Now, she felt she was experiencing, if not the mind-body problem, then at least a mind-body problem. Her body was making its own demands, while the part of her that made her Maggie-she supposed this was the "self"-seemed to hover above it like a tethered balloon.

Emma waved a hand in front of her. "Maggie? Brian asked you something."

Weight aside, Maggie was a credible likeness of her late mother. She had Francine Klein Alter's hair, reddish brown and prone to curl, and a subtle spritz of freckles across the bridge of her nose. But where Maggie was small, her mother had been (not big, or stocky, but) solid, with a density that bespoke firm moral conviction. From her father, to whom Maggie refused to acknowledge a resemblance, she'd inherited a partially protruding forehead, a skull hammered into shape by a mind that couldn't make itself up.

"Is she okay?" the boy, Brian, asked.

"We need to put some food in you," said Emma. "I think I have tortilla chips around here somewhere."

"No, no." Maggie waved her off. "I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

She nodded. A little light-headedness was all. "Positive."

"Okay. Well-all right. Get your stuff together. We're leaving in ten minutes."

"Where are we going?"

"Out."

Maggie scanned the room. Every few minutes someone would excuse themselves from their cluster and join another, which invariably caused someone in that cluster to depart in short order for yet another, the groups always shifting but remaining the same size in some kind of social thermodynamics that struck Maggie as both deliberate and alienating. "That's the problem," she said. "Everybody here is on their way somewhere else."

"What are you talking about? We're going to a bar. All of us."

Maggie raised her eyebrows. "Don't lump me with this 'us.'"

Emma sighed. "Everyone here is super nice. And smart!" She poked Brian with her elbow. "Brian is a genius."

Maggie shook her head. "I can't."

"Mags. It's my birthday." She smiled desperately. "You've known me longer than anyone here. Can you please? This once? For me?"

Maggie was flattered-did she really know Emma the longest, and therefore best?-but she could already see how the evening would play out. She'd buy one sixteen-dollar cocktail and spend the rest of the night regretting the expense, enduring conversations about how 1L had been much harder than 2L while refusing drinks from boys with disposable incomes who all wore the same blue button-down shirts.

"Sorry," she said. "I can't do it."

Emma's smile slanted. "You can, but you won't. You don't have to make things so difficult on yourself, you know. Life doesn't have to be that hard."

But Emma had it wrong. Life was hard, for almost everyone, and it was the duty of those for whom life was easy to impose difficulty on themselves before they rotted from the inside out. If there was one thing Maggie couldn't stand to see, it was people with plenty to lose enjoying themselves.

All at once she felt dizzy. Sick. The music in the room began to slur. Was anyone else hearing this? A drop of sweat landed in her cup. She...