The Altruists Read online

  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 extended a hand and reached for Emma’s shoulder, but her fingers never made it all the way.

  * * *

  • • •

  Though she knew she shouldn’t have skipped lunch, Maggie blamed her fainting spell on the wear and tear she suffered at the hands of a twelve-year-old boy.

  Twice per week, she visited Bruno Nakahara at his parents’ apartment, ostensibly to help him and his brother with their homework. But Bruno’s newfound interest in mixed martial arts had resulted in a constellation of bruises spread across her body, hard-won blemishes the color of stale steak. He maintained that pummeling his tutor was a necessary exercise in service of his craft.

  “Ground and pound!” he’d shouted earlier that day, knocking Maggie to the floor.

  Though this particular job hardly paid, Maggie tolerated, even welcomed, Bruno’s abuse. His assaults were evidence that she was engaged in the kind of work that required sacrifice. Think Mother Teresa, frail and stooped. Gandhi and his jutting ribcage. Maggie’s were legitimizing bruises. Proof of character. Because that was the thing about trying to do good: you always wound up knuckled in the gut.

  The Nakaharas lived in cramped, if cozy, quarters. The apartment overlooked the awkward heart of Cypress, Myrtle, and Madison in Ridgewood, Queens, a pavilion of negative space where you could hear, on quiet Sunday nights, components of the neighborhood in isolation: church bells logging hours, the zip of flickering neon signage. The thirty-year-old feud between a bald man and a pigeon.

  “Oh-kay,” she’d grumbled, worming out from under him. She limped inside the apartment. “I see we’re still working on our anger issues.” She used the first-person plural with the boys. It helped establish unity and trust.

  The Nakahara living room invariably stunk of burnt taquitos or pizza rolls or whatever frozen thing Bruno was eating that week, cut with the farts of their infirm yellow Lab, Flower, who had long since planted himself in the corner of the living room to die. The wall-to-wall carpeting was dirtied beige like street-side snow. Above a brown pleather couch, a pair of portraits hung side by side: one of Michael Jackson, the other (she had asked) of Petro Poroshenko.

  “I don’t have anger issues,” Bruno said. “I have ODD.” He meant oppositional defiant disorder, an affliction he’d read about on the internet.

  “It’s a real disease,” he said, “and you know that.” But the accuracy of his diagnosis did not mitigate its effects.

  “Disorder,” she corrected. “Not disease.”

  In the six months that she’d worked with him, Maggie had watched Bruno exhaust a variety of interests, including but not limited to switchblades, extreme eating, and pyromania. Though MMA was, as far as Maggie could tell, little more than an excuse for deranged boxers to dispense with the philosophical elements that supposedly made pugilism a “gentleman’s sport,” she maintained it was a better hobby than the others. It was athletic, after all, and there was tangible proof of its impact. The fruits of Bruno’s labors were evident on his body—and extended now to hers.

  “I’m already done with homework,” called Alex from the kitchen table, his voice twinkling like a concierge’s bell. Where Bruno was all chunk, his limbs puffed out and cinched at the joints like those of balloon animals, his brother was small and sleek, streamlined, with clear skin and ink-black hair.

  “If you’re finished, you can do your MathBlast. And, Bruno, please remove whatever’s smoking in the oven right now.”

  She unbuckled the belt that latched her messenger bag to her chest, and it fell, with a soft shower of zipper clinks, onto the carpet. Liberated, she began stage-managing the apartment, laying three sharpened pencils by Alex’s dominant hand before sliding into Bruno’s chair to minimize a knockout game video and open Microsoft Word.

  Then, as if on cue, the boys’ father, an unkempt Japanese man to whom Maggie had never been formally introduced—and who spoke little English, which was weird, because she didn’t think the boys knew Japanese—poked his head into the kitchen. He bestowed a long, concerned look upon the scene and disappeared again into his bedroom.
r />   “Bruno, now.”

  He grunted and headed for the kitchen.

  Maggie was a tentative disciplinarian. Beneath her strict rules was a deep well of tenderness for the boys. She didn’t enjoy punishing them. She would’ve preferred they obey her out of sheer respect. She wasn’t asking for total reverence. But she maintained that they did respect her. Preteen-boy respect could look a lot like disrespect sometimes. It was how they showed affection. And, she thought, recalling the work of a seminal anthropologist she’d read in college, earning the natives’ respect was always step one. Or, not “natives,” but—whatever.

  “Who wants mini calzone pizzas?” Bruno asked, pulling a tray of blackened dough rolls from the oven. He code-switched to his rap voice. “Just kidding, mothafuckaz. These bitches is mine.” He tipped his head back and let one of the saucy pockets fall into his mouth.

  * * *

  • • •

  Maggie’s wayward path to Ridgewood had begun with the idea, conceived of in childhood, that the world was not just small but responsive to her efforts.

  As a girl she took frequent walks through Forest Park in St. Louis, collecting errant golf balls that had flown off course. When she’d amassed enough to fill the blue fourteen-gallon recycling bin her parents kept in the garage, she hosed them down and hauled them to the sidewalk by the teeing ground. An entrepreneurial instinct compelled her to erect a sign: GOLF BALLS. $1 PER. She made forty dollars her first day, selling more than half her stock. But when she showed up the following weekend, Maggie had a change of heart. She decided to give her goods away for free. And why not? She liked taking walks, she liked collecting golf balls—she even liked the purifying act of cleaning them! Although she found golf itself to be a total joke, an uninspired, white-male pastime of the most antiquated kind, she discovered, out there on the green, that she also liked the act of giving.

  This was a revelation. If generosity was so euphoric, why did people sell things at all? Why engage in the give-and-take (and take-and-take) of commerce? In the span of two weeks, she had created and destroyed a marketplace. And learned a valuable lesson: the boundaries erected between people and their systems were never as insurmountable as they seemed.

  She arrived at this conclusion in spite of a father with a deep reserve of doubt regarding all things philanthropic. A few years after outfoxing capitalism in Forest Park, Maggie expressed an interest in donating her allowance to a hurricane-clobbered New Orleans. But Arthur discouraged her, lecturing his daughter on the dubious fetishism of victimhood and the Red Cross’s tendency to squander all its money on overhead.

  “They don’t do anything with all that cash but sit on it,” he said.

  There was no convincing him otherwise. One Thanksgiving, after Maggie’s aunt Bex proselytized for an hour on behalf of her favorite cause, he exploded with rage: “What on earth does Israel need trees for?” It was practically the Alter family credo, an anti–Hippocratic oath: First, Do No Good.

  She refused to capitulate. Upon graduating from Danforth two years earlier with the rest of the class of 2013, in the wake of her mother’s death and the chaos that ensued—and she couldn’t pretend those facts were unrelated to what followed—Maggie made a concerted effort to work the lowest-paying nonprofit internships available. She followed her college boyfriend, Mikey Blumenthal, to a Midtown apartment that was walking distance from the financial firm where he sat all day before two ticking monitors, shifting large sums from one to the other. Crashing with him rent-free above a noisy, tourist-infested street near Madison Square Garden allowed her to pursue more ethical work: an unpaid three-month stint at a global children’s health initiative, followed by a five-month run at a clean water advocacy group.

  But she never liked the women—it was almost always women—with whom she worked. They were all nonprofit lifers, sad foot soldiers in the war on injustice with puffy eyes and long, carved-out faces like the ceremonial masks of the third worlders they were ostensibly determined to help. But they had no stories, no heroic tales of evil conquered. Their lunchtime conversations were ordinary, their grievances generic. They expended more energy over the faulty office Keurig than they did pushing legislation. Where, Maggie wondered, was the energy? The heart?

  To make matters worse, she couldn’t even distinguish herself among the interns, couldn’t even stake her claim as the Devoted One, for at both organizations there was at least one disturbed girl who agonized over every dollar she spent on herself, every minute wasted not helping others. A girl who seemed to actually believe that her life was no more nor less valuable than anyone else’s, the kind of girl who preserved water by skipping showers, forcing the rest of the office to savor her generosity with their noses. A staunch defender of microloans, unless you needed a few bucks for the bus, in which case, no, sorry, because wouldn’t that money be more effectively spent on an antimalarial net for a baby in the Congo? Maggie seethed. There was simply no arguing with the Congo.

  She loved her third job, though, infiltrating a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall in Paramus on behalf of labor organizers. (By then she had broken up with Mikey, who, in his first year out of college, had developed a substantial paunch, lost a hoop of hair, and registered Republican, claiming that the latter development “made going into work easier.”) Her mission was to pose as a waitress, earn the respect of her fellow employees, and slowly but surely sow the seeds of revolution in their minds. To encourage them to unionize without appearing to have encouraged them at all.

  There was something thrilling about being undercover. When she was undercover, nothing she did, said, or thought could be definitively attributed to her, even if she wasn’t feeling especially undercover when she did or said or thought the thing. Like, for instance, “I recommend the enchiladas” (she didn’t), or “I’ve come to terms with my mother’s death” (she hadn’t). No matter. At last she’d found it. Yes, at long last, she’d found it: relief from the burden of being oneself.

  Meanwhile, she became a phenomenal waiter—courteous, efficient, and witty—which was funny, because she wasn’t really a waiter. She was an undercover operative. Still, she never broke a glass. She bought cigarettes for the overburdened dishwashers. She learned to spot big tippers. It was physically exhausting but satisfying work, and it felt good to put her brain on hold all day. As a waiter she lived simply and without ambition.

  Seven months in, having begun to casually drop the word organize around her unwitting colleagues, Maggie’s real employers called her cell.

  “Hey, Maggie,” said the voice on the other end. “This is Brenna. From—you know. I’m here with Jake and Trish. Look, we’re all sorry about this, but we’re going to have to cut you loose.”

  “Cut me what?”

  This was in September. She was taking the call on break, standing by a Dumpster outside the restaurant, her phone clamped to her cheek, her breath visible in the cold, polluted Jersey air.

  “It has nothing to do with your work. We can’t afford to employ you any longer.”

  “I’m fired?”

  “From your position with us? Yes. But from the waitressing job—well, that’s still yours, obviously. We can’t fire you from the restaurant. And we wouldn’t want to! I’m sure you’re doing great.”

  “Super good,” echoed Trish.

  The labor org supplemented her income. Their contribution was modest, and wouldn’t be too sorely missed, but without the knowledge that she worked for them, without the undercover status they granted her, Maggie was just—just—

  “I’m a waiter,” she said. “Not an activist pretending to be a waiter. Just . . . a waiter.”

  Jake chimed in. “There’s no shame in work—”

  “—of any kind, I know,” said Maggie, completing their slogan. “Can I at least tell people I still work for you?”

  She thought she heard Brenna gasp. “Have you been telling people that you work for
us? That’s not okay. Um, Maggie? That totally undermines the point. Shit. Have you told anyone you work for us? Have you told anyone what we do?”

  “No,” she lied.

  “Okay. Phew. Phew! You had me there for a second.”

  Maggie hung up and returned to the kitchen through the back door. The gas grill stunk of burning flesh. The two line cooks were laughing and cursing at each other in Spanish, slipping and bobbing, swatting at each other’s groins. She took one step forward and a taco shell crunched underfoot, shattering with a dry, desperate pop.

  She quit Taqueria Insufrible and moved to this “up-and-coming” neighborhood in Queens, where she found a room on the sixth floor of a building under stalled construction by a Hasidic shell company. She wondered what she’d do for work. What was her skill set? What was she qualified for? She buried Ridgewood in flyers, offering her services as a babysitter and dog walker. Her phone refused to ring. What, she wondered, had been the point of a degree in American studies if she couldn’t parlay it into a life as a gainfully employed, worked-to-death American? For two anxiety-ridden weeks she fretted over her inertia. Then came the call from Oksana Kozak-Nakahara.

  A transplant from Ukraine, Oksana, both the eldest and most in-shape EMT on her squad—in Ukraine she’d been a prizewinning shot-putter and physician—was looking for a college graduate of these United States to monitor her sons’ academic progress and improve their English. Maggie eagerly accepted. At their first meeting, Bruno punched her in the abdomen. Oksana scolded him with three enthusiastic slaps. Maggie accepted anyway.

  The boys, Maggie came to learn, were perfectly fluent. They just needed help getting through middle school without blowing it up.

  “If I finish MathBlast, can I go to my room and tinker with my robotics kit?” Alex asked.