The Candy House(2)
None of that. What had fueled Bix’s indulgence, his endurance, was the thrall of his Vision, which burned with hypnotic clarity on those nights of slogging exile. Lizzie and her friends barely knew what the Internet was in 1992, but Bix could feel the vibrations of an invisible web of connection forcing its way through the familiar world like cracks riddling a windshield. Life as they knew it would soon shatter and be swept away, at which point everyone would rise together into a new metaphysical sphere. Bix had imagined it like the Last Judgment paintings whose reproductions he used to collect, but without hell. The opposite: disembodied, he believed, Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world. At last they could move and gather at will, without pressure from the likes of Lizzie’s parents: those faceless Texans who opposed Bix without knowing he existed. The term “social media” wouldn’t be coined to describe Mandala’s business for almost a decade, but Bix had conceived of it long before he brought it to pass.
He’d kept the utopian fantasy to himself, thank God—it looked comically naive from a 2010 perspective. But the Vision’s basic architecture—both global and personal—had proved correct. Lizzie’s parents attended (stiffly) their wedding in Tompkins Square Park in 1996, but no more stiffly than Bix’s own parents, for whom proper nuptials did not include a mage, jugglers, or fast fiddling. When the kids started coming, everyone relaxed. Since Lizzie’s father died last year, her mother had taken to calling him late at night when she knew Lizzie would be asleep, to talk about the family: Would Richard, their oldest, like to learn to ride horses? Would the girls enjoy a Broadway musical? In person, his mother-in-law’s Texas twang grated on Bix, but there was no denying the zing of satisfaction her same voice, disembodied at night, afforded him. Every word they exchanged through the ether was a reminder that he’d been right.
The East Seventh Street conversations ended on a single morning. After a night of partying, two of Lizzie’s closest friends went swimming in the East River, and one was carried away by a current and drowned. Lizzie’s parents had been visiting at the time, a circumstance that chanced to place Bix near the tragedy. He’d run into Rob and Drew in the wee hours in the East Village and done E with them, and the three of them had crossed the overpass to the river together, at sunrise. The impulsive swim happened after Bix had gone home, farther down the river. Although he’d repeated every detail about that morning for the police inquest, it was vague to him now. Seventeen years had passed. He could hardly picture the two boys.
He turned left on Broadway and followed it all the way up to 110th Street—his first such perambulation since becoming famous over a decade ago. He’d never spent much time in the neighborhood around Columbia, and something appealed to him about its hilly streets and grand prewar apartment buildings. Gazing up at the lighted windows of one, Bix thought he could practically hear a potency of ideas simmering behind it.
On his way to the subway (another first-in-a-decade), he paused at a lamppost feathered with paper flyers advertising lost pets and used furniture. A printed poster caught his eye: an on-campus lecture to be given by Miranda Kline, the anthropologist. Bix was deeply familiar with Miranda Kline, and she with him. He’d encountered her book, Patterns of Affinity, a year after forming Mandala, and its ideas had exploded in his mind like ink from a squid, and made him very rich. The fact that MK (as Kline was affectionately known in his world) deplored the uses Bix and his ilk had made of her theory only sharpened his fascination with her.
A handwritten flyer was stapled alongside the poster: “Let’s Talk! Asking Big Questions Across Disciplines in Plain Language.” An introductory meeting was scheduled to follow Kline’s lecture three weeks later. Bix felt a quickening at the coincidence. He took a picture of the poster and then, just for fun, tore off one of the paper tabs from the bottom of “Let’s Talk” and slipped it into his pocket, marveling at the fact that, even in the new world he’d helped to make, people still taped pages to lampposts.
2
Three weeks later, he found himself on the eighth floor of one of those stately, faded apartment buildings around Columbia University—possibly the very one he’d admired from below. The apartment bore a pleasing resemblance to what Bix had imagined: worn parquet floors, smudged white moldings, framed engravings and small sculptures (the hosts were art history professors) hanging on the walls and over doorways, tucked among rows of books.
Apart from the hosts and one other couple, all eight “Let’s Talk” attendees were strangers to one another. Bix had decided to forgo Miranda Kline’s lecture (presuming he could have finagled entry); her antipathy toward him made it seem wrong to attend, even in disguise. His disguise was “Walter Wade,” graduate student in electrical engineering—in other words, Bix himself, seventeen years ago. What gave him the chutzpah to pose as a graduate student all these years later was the confidence that he looked much younger at forty-one than most white people did. But he’d erred in assuming that the other discussion group members would be white: Portia, one of their art historian hosts, was Asian, and there was a Latina animal studies professor from Brazil. Rebecca Amari, the youngest, a PhD candidate in sociology (the only other student besides “Walter Wade”), was ethnically ambiguous and, he suspected, Black—there’d been a twinge of recognition between them. Rebecca was also disarmingly pretty, a fact heightened, not muted, by her Dick Tracy eyeglasses.