14

Kruger was on the Metra Union Pacific North Line now, the one that ran along Lake Michigan. He didn’t know yet that there hadn’t been a shooter on campus. In his rush to leave, he hadn’t gone back to the classroom for his phone. He’d heard all the police sirens and felt an irrepressible urge to go see his father at the old folks’ home. He knew it was foolish, both to have fled and to be headed where he was, but while on the train, he could act as if neither had happened, or would happen.

He wasn’t sure his father would want to see him. He’d moved Louis into Sunset Hill the previous summer, shortly after The Widow’s Comedy Club premiere, and though he spoke to him on the phone often, they hadn’t seen each other since. Every time they talked and Kruger offered to visit, Louis found excuses to be left alone. Kruger had mentioned this to a nurse a while back, the excuses, and the nurse had advised him to give his father some time. She’d said that men, when they first got to Sunset Hill, needed more time than women to come to terms with their new situation. They didn’t like to be seen as diminished, she’d said, and the phone gave them a sense of power because they could just hang up whenever they felt they weren’t performing as well as they wanted. Kruger had thought the nurse’s wisdom a tad misogynistic. Why would men have more trouble adjusting to the facts of old age and decline? Did women have no pride? Had falling apart been easy for Kruger’s mother, to the nurse’s mind? He hadn’t liked her choice of the word “performing,” either.

Louis had Parkinson’s. He had trouble swallowing his food and couldn’t take long walks anymore. Even bird-watching hurt. Kruger had wanted to move him to a home for a while, but the tremendous fighting energy his father had been able to muster whenever the idea came up had kept buying him time. All that work had come undone a few months back, however, the day Louis had gone for a beer at the Glass Eye and shot his gun at another customer—a single bullet, through the man’s hand and the pint of beer it had been holding. “The guy talked shit about your mother” had been Louis’s excuse.

Kruger felt smarter without his phone, more alert. He could’ve been a businessman from the eighties, he thought, commuting back from work to the suburb where his wife and kids awaited him for dinner. He wouldn’t have wanted to be a businessman from the eighties, not really, or to have children, but feeling, even for a few seconds, like he could’ve been anything other than Benjamin Kruger was always a thrill. He knew that some people were convinced they’d been born in the right place at the right time, that they couldn’t have been anyone else, or survived long without the internet, or daily hot showers, but Kruger believed he could’ve adjusted to any living conditions thrown his way. He was an adapter, malleable, and some girlfriends had praised him for it (before they invariably got tired of the quality—his easygoingness laudable until it wasn’t, until it started feeling like it was all the same to Kruger, whatever they did, wherever they ate, that perhaps even a different girlfriend would be fine by him, too). But Kruger himself often thought his flexibility was a sign of weakness, that perhaps it meant he wasn’t whole. His own life choices could feel artificial, in retrospect. He admired artists who said, “I had no choice but to become what I am—[acting/writing/painting], that’s all I’m good at,” but they made him feel lazy. Kruger had become a comic almost by default, and only because it had been easy for him. Not writing, but the road to fame. The road to fame had been easy. He’d more or less become famous after his first joke, hadn’t struggled the way Dorothy had, or Ashbee, or Manny, and if he was honest with himself, had things not worked out right away, he didn’t think he would’ve had it in him to keep trying for long. He would’ve done something else, the next easy thing.

He stared through the train window for a while, at other windows in fast-moving buildings, windows already lit up against the winter’s early dusk. Shadows of people moving shadows of things. In the train car, a woman was walking back and forth, lulling her baby to sleep. Kruger kept seeing her reflection in his window, and how she glanced at him whenever she passed his seat. He assumed she would say something at some point, ask for a selfie, or berate him for a joke he’d made in the past.

Kruger tried not to think about what the guy might’ve said about his mother at the Glass Eye. Louis wouldn’t repeat it, and Kruger had to respect that. He’d felt bad enough buying the injured customer’s silence behind his father’s back. He’d offered to pay the man for his medical expenses, of course, and a fair amount of money not to press charges. He believed that part of Louis was humiliated that the man hadn’t pressed charges. Not pressing charges was sending the message that Louis wasn’t dangerous, that society didn’t have anything to fear from him, and when someone said that about you—“He doesn’t need punishment, he needs help”—well, how much lower could you get?

The pacing woman kept looking at Kruger sideways. Kruger thought uncharitable thoughts about her and her baby. She didn’t like his work, so what? At least he’d never created anything more than jokes, while she’d made a whole new person, a person from scratch, who would grow up to say stupid things of her own, who would have the potential to ruin other people’s lives. Young parents couldn’t be trusted to formulate reasonable critiques, Kruger thought.

He tried to be in the moment, to not think about the shooting (Artie in possible danger), to not think about his audition next week (for Paramount), to not think about what his father would say shortly when he saw him. There was a chance his arrival would frighten him—no one showed up unannounced unless they had bad news. Though, Kruger thought, failing at his attempt not to think, what bad news could he have brought to his father? Everyone Louis cared about had died already. No, it would be the opposite, Kruger realized: his surprise visit would raise Louis’s hopes in vain. Louis would think that Kruger was coming with good news, and the only good news Louis wanted to hear was that his son had gotten his gun back, the M1917 that had been seized by law enforcement after the Glass Eye incident. Louis complained about the gun’s confiscation constantly. If he wasn’t being charged with a crime, then how could there be a smoking gun to take away from him? Kruger had to step up and apply as the gun’s rightful owner, according to Louis. The gun (which had belonged to Louis’s own father) had to find its way back to the family.

To get the gun back, Kruger had to find evidence of his family’s ownership—photographs of his grandfather holding the gun, military correspondence. He had to learn how to shoot, too, in order for the gun to be properly registered. To shut his father up, he’d booked a session at Lyons Guns and Range a few weeks back, but he kept pushing it whenever the date neared. Their website terrified him. Once a month, they had a “Kids’ Night on the range,” which they called a “service they provide[d] the community,” and Kruger couldn’t help but picturing children running for shelter as grown-ups shot at them in the dark. He’d get material out of the experience, if he learned to shoot among children, but he wasn’t sure it would be material he’d want to share. If he talked to an audience about needing to get a FOID card and learn how to shoot, he’d have to explain himself, how he’d gotten there, and Kruger wasn’t a confessional comic. Though maybe he was reaching a point in his life where he wanted to be, when the idea of talking about himself onstage wasn’t as repulsive as it previously had been. Was it just something that happened when you aged? This need to go over your life in public? Maybe it was time. Maybe it was time to tell an audience of strangers that his father hadn’t been the same since his wife died, that the old man had shot someone at a bar. That his parents had had him late in life, and that his mother had so many times called her pregnancy a miracle that Kruger could almost touch and feel the parallel life in which she hadn’t had him.

The train filled up in Evanston. A teenage girl sat next to him, and Kruger watched as the porter punched holes in her ticket. It looked like a satisfying job, and the porter, happy to have it. Kruger worried on his behalf that they would replace him with an app soon. He was surprised at how little he missed his phone. He was surprised, too, by how few people in the train car seemed to be using theirs. He almost expected the teenage girl to take out a book from her bag and start reading.

He started panicking that his father would ask what he’d been reading lately. Anything good? No matter what Kruger recommended, Louis would deem it shallow, or lacking in rigor. Though his dad hadn’t asked about books in a while, Kruger remembered. He mainly just asked about the gun now, when Kruger was planning on getting it back, in a tone that seemed to imply that it was Kruger’s fault the gun had been confiscated to begin with. When had the gun become so important to him? Kruger had only seen it once, when he was first learning about World War II and Louis had taken it out from a safe. He’d explained that his own father, Kruger’s grandfather, had killed two Germans with it in Normandy, but only because he’d had to, only because if he hadn’t killed them, there would’ve been no future—there would’ve been no Louis, no little Ben, no more Krugers at all.

The teenage girl next to him did open a book. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. Maybe she’d just lost someone, Kruger thought. He almost asked her. His own mother had died the year the book had come out, and an aunt had given it to him. He assumed only the recently bereaved had the stomach for it.

Louis must have taken good care of the gun over the years, he thought, if it was still working. Or maybe he’d had it repaired mere days before the Glass Eye. How long had he been walking around town with the gun on him? What had prompted the decision to, from then on, always leave his house armed? Kruger imagined that scene often, that moment in his father’s life when he’d realized it would be wise. He imagined it, staring out the train window.

The woman from earlier, the one pacing the train car with her baby, was still throwing him looks.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she ended up saying. “But are you Ben Kruger?”

Kruger sat up straight. What did she think she was interrupting?

“My sister went to school with you,” the woman said. “Emily. Tuft. I’m Veronica. We both had your father in history.”

“Yes,” Kruger said. “I remember Emily.”

They shook hands over the teenage girl in the aisle seat. The teenage girl pretended not to notice, or was perhaps so immersed in Didion’s grief that she really didn’t. Kruger suddenly felt jealous of her. He wanted to be where she was. He yearned for that kind of focus on a book. How long had it been since one had spoken to him so directly?

“How is your dad?” Veronica asked, and her inflection made it clear that she knew about the Glass Eye incident. Her sister probably still lived in Naperville, heard the gossip and all the rumors. She might even know what exactly the man had said about his mother.

“My dad’s all right,” Kruger said. “As long as no one near him speaks ill of my mom, he’s able to behave.”

Veronica made a face, tilted her head. Kruger understood immediately that she hadn’t heard the same story he had.

“I’m actually on my way to visit him in Lake Bluff,” he rushed to add. It was instinct. He didn’t want to know her version.

“Oh,” Veronica said. “Is that where you ended up putting him?”

Like a plant, Kruger thought, an appliance.

“It seemed far enough from the Glass Eye,” he said.

The words “Glass Eye” caught the teenage girl’s attention. She looked up from her book and at Kruger for a split second. Her pupils were huge.

“And you moved back to the area for good?” Veronica asked.

She kept glancing at her baby. Was he supposed to say it was cute?

“I wanted to be closer to him, yes,” Kruger said.

“That’s nice. He must be very happy.”

The way she said this, Kruger thought, she knew exactly what had set off his father at the Glass Eye, and that it had to do with him, not his mother.

“I loved your movie, by the way,” Veronica said.

Kruger thanked her and prepared to answer the questions everyone had been asking him for months now, how it was working with Meryl Streep and how she was in real life, but Veronica asked about Paul Rudd instead. Was he as nice as he seemed? Kruger said yes, very nice, and “Cute baby.”

Veronica got off in Highland Park. When the doors closed and the train started moving again, the teenage girl next to Kruger said it wasn’t such a cute baby, and for the rest of the ride, she kept on reading her book about death.

At Sunset Hill, a nurse told Kruger to make himself comfortable in the lounge, his father would be right with him. It felt like he was auditioning for a part, Kruger thought, or meeting with a TV executive. Except the lounge he was sent to wait in was full of old men watching their show (not a woman in sight), about a watchmaker who traveled through time. The volume had to be near its highest setting, yet closed captions were on for backup. Kruger had a thing for captions. He’d recently started turning them on at home for himself. His hearing was fine, but he liked to see written confirmation of what went on, and perhaps even more than that, he liked the small discrepancies that often appeared between what was said onscreen and the way it was transcribed. He liked hearing a line and having his eyes read something slightly different. It felt like having company.

The captions under the show in the lounge, though, weren’t the kind he was used to. They were multicolored and confusing. Lines of dialogue and audio description were assigned to different boxes. There were emojis and numbers on the sides of the boxes. The scene Kruger walked in on, for instance, presented a handsome man in contemporary clothes who, in a saloon, circa 1870, was urging a young prostitute to follow him to the future, where he promised more opportunities existed for her. His line was “Come with me…Come with me to the future,” and the way the captions rendered it was something like:

Come with me…Come with me to the future

123 (whispering)

Indications not only of what the character said but of how he said it: at what volume and with which emotion dominating at what intensity.

“It’s called emotive captioning,” one of the old men in the room explained to Kruger.

Kruger said he found it a bit condescending, the emojis, the colors, telling everyone what they were supposed to feel.

“I don’t pay attention to the little drawings,” the old man said. “They’re for the children.”

Kruger expressed doubt that many children were watching this show, but understood after a minute that what the old man meant by “children” were people under forty.

“The children are confused,” the man said. “They’re on the computer all day. They don’t have real contact with other people, so it helps them to have the drawings. They’re all autistic.”

There was no judgment in his voice. He seemed to believe that what he was saying was both true and unavoidable—humanity’s fate.

“I’m not autistic,” Kruger said.

“You think you’re not autistic.”

The captions on the screen were now color-coded green and enjoining the audience to laugh, but no one in the room was laughing, no one looked like the emoji that captioners had chosen for the scene—the face that laughed so hard it spurted horizontal tears. Kruger had a passing thought about his own movie. Were emotive translators working on it right now? Had someone (a machine?) rated the intensity in his lines?

“I don’t see how the emojis are helping,” Kruger said. “They don’t allow for nuance, which is the whole deal with art, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t call this shit art,” the old man said.

“Well, it aspires to be,” Kruger said. “The actors are doing what they can.”

Reducing an actor’s performance to a single emotional nugget couldn’t be right, Kruger said. This was the road to one-dimensional portrayals of the human experience. It was encouraging bad acting. It was perhaps even laying the groundwork for no acting at all. Perhaps people would soon go to the movies to watch emojis occupy the whole screen. No actors needed. No dialogue or story, either. Just a few minutes of Smiley Face, to set the mood, one minute of Laugh-Cry, six minutes of Stress, one minute of Bawling, two minutes of Fear, three minutes of Wink and Blushing, a screen that spelled out the word “Resolution,” a final Smiley Face to confirm it was a happy ending, and that would be it. “The End.”

“Who are you visiting?” the old man asked.

“I’m Louis Kruger’s son,” Kruger said. He was annoyed that no one in the room had recognized him.

“Kruger Junior,” the old man said. “This is starting to make sense.”

Other old men started shifting their attention from the TV to Kruger.

“You don’t like the subtitles?” one of them said. “You’re just like your dad.”

“Louis doesn’t like anything,” another said.

“Can you think of one thing your father doesn’t hate?”

“We have this plan, if we find one thing he even just kind of likes, we’ll throw a party. We’ll have a dance. Can you think of something? Maybe CNN will want to cover the event.”

“I like silence,” Kruger’s father said from the TV room’s threshold. “I like it when you guys shut up.”

Louis was wearing a three-piece suit. No tie, but still—his elegance clashed with the beiges and tartan patterns of everyone else’s robes and slippers.

“Fuck you, Louis,” the initial old man said.

“Hi, Dad,” Kruger said. “I see you’re making friends.”

They left the lounge for the privacy of Louis’s room.

“Did you get our gun back?” Louis asked before they even made it there.

He hadn’t worn suits before, Kruger thought. The suits were a new development. He’d always been well dressed (ironed shirts and cashmere sweaters), but with the suits, Louis was sending a message. I don’t belong here was the message.

“I just wanted to check on you,” Kruger said. “You didn’t pick up yesterday.”

“Someone would’ve called you if I’d croaked.”

There was only one chair in Louis’s quarters, by his desk. Kruger sat on the edge of the bed, assuming his father would take the chair, but Louis remained standing by the door, as if already eager to escort him out. His eyes were sunken deep into their sockets.

“Are you taking all your vitamins?”

Kruger berated himself for the cliché question, the small talk.

“Vitamins?” Louis said. “It’s all those cripples who should take theirs. It takes everyone here minutes to shape the most basic thought.”

“They seemed all right,” Kruger said.

“I’d have more stimulating conversations in a mental institution. Maybe I can put in for a transfer.”

“Do you feel you’re slipping out of reality?”

“I fucking wish,” Louis said. “It’s the constant slipping in that’s the problem.”

Kruger wanted to tell him about the shooting at school, but the event felt about as distant as his childhood. About as real, too. He almost doubted it had happened.

“I saw one of your former students on the train,” he said. “Veronica Tuft.”

“The Tuft sisters,” Louis said. He’d never in his life forgotten a student. “Nice girls. They should never grow older.”

“Girls?”

“Kids.” Louis’s hand was trembling in his pocket. “People. In general.”

This included him, Kruger knew. He’d wondered many times over the years whether he’d disappointed his father more as a son or as a former student.

“There was a shooting at school,” he said.

Louis thought he meant Naperville High.

“No, Dad,” Kruger said. “A shooting at my school.”

Louis took a step to his desk, where the day’s paper lay. Did he not believe him?

“Well, there’s not going to be anything about it in the Tribune,” Kruger said. “It just happened. The police were just arriving when I left.”

“Wait, you were on campus? And you fled?”

The tremor in Louis’s hand intensified.

“Another father would’ve said ‘I’m glad you’re okay,’ ” Kruger said. “ ‘Thank you for coming all this way to tell me.’ ”

“What about your students?”

“ ‘By showing up, you spared me hours of worry had I first learned about the shooting on the news.’ ”

“Enough with this. What about your students?”

“I don’t know,” Kruger said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You don’t leave an emergency situation until all your students are accounted for.”

Kruger remembered fire drills at school, Louis organizing his students in single file, he and Kruger the last to exit, always, Louis counting the kids once outside, double-checking, triple-checking, how embarrassing his intensity had been, when everyone knew it had just been a test.

“What kind of gun was it?”

“I don’t know that either,” Kruger said. “Where’s your computer?”

“It’s been dead for months.”

“That’s why you haven’t seen my movie?”

“Are you serious? You’re asking me about your movie now?”

“I was making a joke.”

“No, you weren’t,” Louis said, and after an awkward silence, he resumed. “Did you hear gunshots? What kind of sound did the gun make?”

Kruger grabbed the newspaper from his father’s hands.

“I didn’t realize you’d want a full report,” he said. “Sorry for coming to you so uninformed. I just wanted to see you.”

He wasn’t sure why he’d taken the paper away from Louis, but now that he had it, it made sense to bury his face in it and pretend to read the headlines. He was hurt and frustrated. He would never “have a moment” with his father, he understood, like everyone did in the movies. One of them would die before it happened. Kruger could feel his heart beat against the notebook in his shirt pocket. He would never understand his father. Perhaps all fathers were unknowable, he told himself, trying to calm down. Fathers never explained themselves. You never knew if they were angry or if that was just the face they made while eating ribs. And you couldn’t ask that kind of question, “Are you angry?”—you didn’t ask your father that. He’d never asked Louis if he regretted what had happened at the Glass Eye. If his mother were still alive, he would’ve asked her. Though she would probably have said, “Your father had his reasons.” Perhaps mothers were unknowable, too, Kruger thought. You only thought you knew them because they talked to you more, but they hid behind all the talk, in the end, they were smarter about the hiding, they did it in plain sight. He’d never had a real conversation with her either.

After a while, Kruger actually started paying attention to what the paper said, the advance write-ups on the Delgado trial, which was scheduled to start the following day. He hadn’t followed the affair much, only knew the basics, that a famous Chicago businessman had scammed hundreds in an elaborate Ponzi scheme, that he’d taken from his own parents and children, that his daughter had killed herself right before the whole scandal came to light. The paper was calling the Delgado trial “the Trial of the Decade.” Kruger estimated the number of trials of the decade at three per year on average. It was like midterm elections, off-year elections, and presidential elections: Every time, they were the most crucial elections of our lifetime. Voting was always more important than ever. Everything always either the best or the worst it had ever been. America couldn’t keep it low-key.

Kruger wondered sometimes what would’ve happened if the man his father had shot had pressed charges. How much media attention it would’ve gotten, whether it would’ve gone to court. If there’d been a trial, Kruger would know by now what the man had said to Louis. If it had really been about his mother, or about someone else. About him. It had to be about him, Kruger thought. That’s what Veronica’s face had meant, on the train. Though it would’ve been unlike his father to stand up for Kruger. As a kid, he’d received prank calls, a lot of them, from his school bullies (“Your father doesn’t even like you, you’re the last person he’d save in a fire!”). Both his parents had known about the calls. Whenever she was the one to pick up, Kruger’s mother would say Ben wasn’t home and could she take a message, but Louis would just hand Kruger the phone and give him a frustrated look, like he couldn’t believe this was still happening and it was about time Kruger manned up and found a way to respond.

“You need to learn how to shoot,” Louis told Kruger now, in his bedroom, breaking five minutes of silence. “You need to get our gun back. I won’t always be here to protect you.”

“Protect me?” Kruger said.

“Some people hate you, you know that? They really do.”

The way Louis said it, it felt like he was perhaps one of them.

“I know people hate me,” Kruger said. “I’m famous. I’m successful. I’m on TV. That’s what happens.”

“And you think it’s worth it?”

“I don’t see how learning to shoot would solve anything.”

“It would help me sleep at night,” Louis said, before repeating: “I won’t always be here to protect you.”

This time, Kruger laughed.

“You think that’s funny?” Louis said. “You think I’m not protecting you? I’m always protecting you, and you know it. Why else would you come here? You think you came here to check on me? Let me tell you what happened: you got scared and you ran for your father. That’s what happened.”

Kruger couldn’t tell if his father was joking or not. He smiled at the thought of someone trying to caption the man’s emotions for TV. Or his own. What fucking hell.

“What now?” Louis asked. “Would you stop laughing for a second?”

At least now his emotion was clear: Louis was angry. Angry emoji. Old Angry emoji? Kruger knew old-people emojis existed, but did old and angry ones? Deflation was needed.

“I’ll make an appointment at the gun range,” Kruger said. “If it makes you feel better.”

“If it makes me feel better?” Louis said. “Me? Who cares about me? It’s your life, son. You’re in charge.”

“Yes, sir,” Kruger said.

“You need to take this shit seriously.”

“My life?”

Louis looked his son in the eye and took back the paper from him. Perhaps he’d meant the gesture as a random display of power and authority (I can take what you have at any moment, what you have was mine to begin with), but he didn’t do it with enough strength, and a few pages remained in Kruger’s hands. Louis tried to grab those, too, but Kruger resisted, and the old man lost his balance as the pages tore. He knocked his hip against the desk and caught himself on the chair, bending his left wrist at a wrong angle. The pain had to have been immediate, Kruger thought, but Louis pretended to be fine. When Kruger rose from the bed to check on him, he rejected his help.

“Just learn how to shoot,” Louis said. “That’s all I need you to do.”

As he watched his father one-handedly rearrange the pieces of the day’s paper on his desk, Kruger wished to never get old, or at least not like this. Not with anyone to watch.

“I’ll make an appointment,” he repeated. “I’ll go after winter break.”

Kruger pictured himself at the gun range, with all the happy kids who would’ve just gotten their first gun for Christmas. Yes, maybe he’d get some good comedy out of it.

“You know what?” Louis said. It looked like he’d hurt his wrist, the way his hand hung limply from it, but the shock seemed to have stopped the tremor. “I’ll fucking teach you. I’ll teach you right now.”

“To shoot?”

“Tony has a gun,” Louis said.

“Someone here has a gun?”

“Tony.”

Kruger tried to remember his father mentioning a Tony before, and then to conjure any past Tony he might’ve known. No one came to mind. All the Tonys he’d known were fictional characters.

“I thought nobody liked you here,” he ended up telling his father.

“Tony has children,” Louis said. “He’ll understand.”