Fiction | Short Story

Eagle Son

The swastika on his sign is hand-drawn, a little uneven. Painted, not permanent marker. He made that thing himself. A Nazi crafter.

It’s a Tuesday when I realize one of the guys in my office is a Nazi. He’s at the front desk sorting through a stack of papers when I turn and catch him in profile and the YouTube video of the demonstration I watched earlier on the subway flashes in my mind—the outline of that profile sliding over a background in full color. The computers, ringing phones, and fluorescent lights sing into my mouth. My palms go icy, my neck goes stiff; I can’t move my legs. Yes, it was that face, his face in the video.

He turns and stops, notices me staring. I can’t remember his name—Nate? Brad? I think he might be getting a PhD in something. All the transient tutors blur together after a while; this place is more like a train station than a tutoring center, staffed by millennials living with their parents, saving up for a flight to India or to pay off a root canal.

Then there are the people like me, who’ve been here too long, bogged but capable. When I step into the center every morning, my brain hum flattens into detached efficiency. Every morning, I initial beside my name on the sign-in sheet, speed through three tutoring sessions, eat in the window alcove two floors up the spiral staircase, do a couple more sessions, rush-type notes, sign out. When I leave, I remember almost nothing of what I accomplished that day.

“Are you okay?” he asks me.

“I’m fine,” I say, hurrying past him. “Thanks, have a good morning.”

The center receptionist, Pat, has noticed our exchange. She follows me into the office I normally share with three other tutors—everyone’s late today, so it’s empty. “What is it?” she demands. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

I need to watch the video again before I tell anyone. “What’s that guy’s name?”

“The new guy? Theo.”

Theo. I remember now. He dropped out of his sociology PhD program. Medical sociology, he’d clarified for me after a staff meeting. The field of diagnoses and care systems. I hadn’t asked him why he dropped out. The reasons people come here are limited in range—a thicket of depression in the middle of their Master’s thesis; the sudden closure of a non-profit; the chronic fatigue of following the freelance breadcrumb trail. During the cold season, we get the tree-planters. They hunch in cubicles like trapped migratory birds. Their feathers and sadness clog the vents.

“He’s pretty nice,” Pat says.

“Yeah, sure.”

Now she knows something’s wrong. She points at me accusingly. “I told you about Preston’s affair. You owe me.”

“Fine.” I take out my phone and bring up the video. It is three minutes and forty-two seconds long. We watch it together.

Theo stands with a group of guys in front of the art gallery downtown, where most large demonstrations are held, holding up signs with drawn swastikas. He looks leaner in a short-sleeved shirt and black pants, a red bandana around his neck. Muscular, sign held at chest level. Face blank, a screen of indifference. The men around him, most in their twenties and thirties, contort their mouths when they shout, eyes leaping with excitement or zeal, but Theo’s features don’t waver. The camera sweeps to the side, to the profile shot that jumped into my mind when I saw him at the photocopier. It was his nose that brought the image back. Air crackles in the background like God’s heavy breathing.

The video was uploaded last night.

“Holy shit,” Pat says. “How did you find this?”

“A bunch of people posted it on Facebook this morning, I watched it on my way in. My brother shared it. Probably people from his synagogue.”

“That’s so fucking random.” My fingers slip on the screen. “Play it again.”

The other tutors are starting to arrive, so Pat and I rush down the hall to the bathroom and lock the door behind us. She puts down the toilet seat and we perch side by side to watch the video again, and again. Each time, more details surface: a Black man with a large purple camping backpack pacing in the background, watching the demonstration. Three police cars parked in the distance, tinted windows like rows of dark eyes.

I watch Theo’s face until it feels like I could pluck out the pixels and roll them around in my palm like marbles. I focus on the single wave of his white-blonde hair. His stance, lax as a dancer’s before the music begins. The swastika on his sign is hand-drawn, a little uneven at the edges. Painted, not permanent marker like I thought before. He made that thing himself. A Nazi crafter.

“Do you think they buy swastika stencils off the internet? Like Amazon or whatever?” I ask. This is what I like about Pat—I can say anything to her, my office mom.

“I don’t know, honey. You can get pretty much anything off Amazon these days. My sister bought a muumuu for her cat. But it’d probably be easier to print one off and trace it.” She puts her arm around me. “I have to get back. It’ll be wild up there. Parents just got the report cards and they’re all bananas.” She stands over me and runs water over her hands while I nod. “Lee, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I have three sessions this morning.”

After she leaves, I sit on the toilet and watch the video until a prepubescent boy knocks and whines, “What are you doing in there?” and I get up and rush past him, heart hammering.

I go into autopilot. Just teach. Every time I walk past the front desk that day, I feel the laser drag of Pat’s eyes on me. She mouths “White Spot” at me. I never eat with the other tutors. We avoid each other with the self-loathing of the mutually trapped. At lunchtime, I Google the demonstration. It was only yesterday. The police chief was quoted in the newspaper saying he would monitor it, but not shut it down. In the video, it looks like about twenty Nazis showed up.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be best to not respond—what if these guys just stood there with their hand-painted swastika signs and nobody did anything? What if nobody filmed them and posted their video online to be endlessly recirculated? Would their yells bounce around the cave before dying out naturally? Does that make me self-hating—a secular Jew who prefers to look away? If they’re there, do I have to be, too?

Between tutoring sessions, I take out my phone and post the video to my Facebook page. “If you randomly found out one of these dudes was a co-worker what would u do?” I write, and press Post.

*

I think probably every Jewish kid takes a class about World War II and the Holocaust when we go to university. It’s a rite of passage, a widow’s walk around the rim of Religious Studies for the secular and non-practicing, a cocktail of grim curiosity and ancestral guilt. My grandmother’s family came here from a Jewish village in Ukraine. They left just in time—before the villages evaporated; before the construction of their antimatter equivalent, a string of death camps, a few hours away.

In one of my classes, we read a memoir written by a guard at Auschwitz. I underlined the most clinical sentences and wrote “BASTARD!” in the margins. But someone else had written the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” around the text on the final pages of the book—the list of names of the prisoners the guard remembered—and I found myself in tears in my library cubicle.

The professor who taught that class was German and non-Jewish. Before the first class, he said, “This is a class about genocide, I repeat, about genocide. So withdraw now if you don’t want to read about lots of people dying terrible deaths, because this isn’t a class about dancing circus bears. Don’t come to me crying halfway through the term and say you weren’t warned.”

I thought he was hilarious, but within two weeks half the class had dropped out. The professor asked, “So how many of you who stayed are Jewish?” and most of us put up our hands, and he said, “Here we are,” like an apology with the dull ring of lateness.

*

Pat and I sit across from each other in the White Spot, where we often come for lunch, my phone sitting between us like a holy object. The screen is frozen on Theo’s face. I order a cake batter milkshake, a hamburger, and upgrade my fries to onion rings. Pat and I have been working together for four years, and once in a while we come here to get happy hour day-drunk and tear our colleagues apart—especially Preston, our absentee manager, who we refer to as Buzz Lightyear. Two years ago, during a long White Spot session over mimosas, Pat told me about the time she faked blindness caused by childhood meningitis and got three months paid leave—time she used, she said, to go for long drives and listen to self-care podcasts in her car.

Now she starts in: She can’t believe she has been sitting in her chair just watching that Theo guy swan around in his dockers and his cowl-neck sweater. So normal. “He just walks around pretending he’s a good person, helping ten-year-olds with their long division.” She says he’s so nice to her in the mornings, always asking how she’s feeling that day. “Is that the thing with these new Nazi people? They just act nice and look all clean-cut so no one suspects?” Then she gets distracted and digresses into the story of how her son’s voice broke late, so he sang in their Church choir for longer than any other boy. He sang like a goddamn fucking angel.

I think about calling my brother Aaron. He’ll tell me what to do. When my phone buzzes, it’s a text message from him:

what’s up with your FB post
so random

I text back: tutor at center is a white supremacist 

what?????????
???????????
!!!!!!!!!!!!!

        video on FB of alt right demonstration
      he’s in it
      so, nazi

  omg omg omg
what in the actual fukkk
stay away from him

Pat has other plans. She’s been thinking it over all morning, sitting at her desk, putting through credit card payments and tending the herd of bleating phones. Sometimes, she has told me, she lets calls go to voicemail, plays podcasts on her headphones, and thinks about the world; about Donald Trump and other harbingers of a new dark age. Now she makes direct eye contact with me in a way she never has before in the years we’ve worked together, her expression sincere, intentional.

“We’ll confront him together. He needs to know that what he’s doing is unacceptable. He needs to know that we know. And honey,” she adds, “you don’t even need to tell him you’re Jewish.”

I nod, a numbness spreading through my chest. I breathe in deeply, to make sure I still can. A hard bag of pain around my heart. One day, I’ll drop dead from it.

“Where?” I say.

She bites into one of my onion rings. “Hadn’t thought about that.”

“One of the tutoring offices?”

“No. What if someone walked in?”

“The washroom again?”

“Ha. Ha. Ha. My funny Lee.” Pat chews, considering. “What about here? I’ll invite him. He’s what, six weeks in? Not too late for a welcome lunch.”

“We never have welcome lunches.”

She shrugs. “Our Nazi doesn’t know that!”

He’s our Nazi now.

*

In my undergrad class, the professor repeated again and again that the Holocaust was carried out by average people, normal people: teachers, postal workers, veterinarians, gardeners, pharmacists, garbage truck drivers, librarians, plumbers, maids, electricians, roofers, translators, firemen, tax collectors, dog groomers, bank tellers, dentists, nurses, cashiers, lawyers, cooks, and students. They all went back to their jobs afterward. It haunted me, the thought of a postal worker who used to be a guard in a concentration camp. Going home to their house at the end of the workday. What did they think about when they watched a fire burn down in the grate, the gorgeous collapsing cinders at the end, the drifts of heavy grey ash that needed to be shoveled and then scraped off the brick?

*

I sit in a coil of duvet and blankets with my laptop, obsessively Googling everything I possibly can about our Nazi.

Theo’s a writer. I’m shocked he uses his real name, Theodore Haskell. I scroll through his articles. Each author bio—he writes a new one for every post—leads to more white supremacist websites, a spiderweb of his work. The sites have names like kids’ athletic camps or floor cleaners: Bright Sweep. Eagle Son. Fresh March.

Theo writes well, for a Nazi. His opening paragraphs are lean and charming. He cycles smoothly through his arguments, uses images effectively, throws in the occasional metaphor as a flourish. His paragraph breaks are limber. I scan for any personal details: He was born in Wisconsin. One Canadian parent, so he moved to Canada for a while for the healthcare system. This is one of the things he blames on immigrants and Jewish people—if the American healthcare system weren’t overburdened, white people would receive better care, he claims. I stop when I get to an article that’s a close reading of the opening of Mein Kampf. I text the link to Aaron, who responds: omg is this tutor nazi?

yeah, I type back, we’re having lunch with him tmr.

Suddenly Aaron’s face looms, a furious apparition on my laptop screen. “That shit,” he says, “is fucked up. You need to stop reading it. Seriously, Lee, that shit is a rabbit hole.”

“I just Googled him.”

My little brother closes his eyes. “You’ve been sitting there for hours binging on this stuff. Gobbling it up. You probably got cookie dough Haagen-Dazs especially for this.”

I laugh.

“It’s not even funny, Lee. It’s fucked that we can’t even call the cops.”

“For what?”

“Hate speech.”

“There’re thousands of these guys now. Some of them could be cops.”

“He’s stupid for using his real name.”

“That’s true.”

“He can’t be teaching kids. Seriously.”

“We’re having lunch with him tomorrow.”

“‘We’?”

“Me and Pat.”

Aaron scowls. “She’s just using you because she’s bored at her job.”

“I love you,” I say, “and I’m hanging up now.”

I turn my phone over so I won’t see his texts as I read my way through Theo’s archive, now working on my third glass of merlot. I feel irritated by Theo’s repetition, the obvious set-ups, hand-built lures sunk deep into sentences engineered to seem rational, razors wrapped in bait. Don’t you want more opportunities for you and your family? Those who are taking what is yours are linked by one black thread. Why should you suffer?

At around one a.m. I read one more article, one about when he first joined the Party. The title is “Work Makes Free”—my grandmother would throw the laptop across the room, but here I am, Googling her worst fears back to life. Jewish stories and other monsters. Theo was invited to a meeting in a church basement by a friend from his high school volleyball team. He was nervous, unsure. He had learned about the Holocaust in high school and had bought the story. He had bought the story without knowing all the details.

We want to be good, he wrote. We want to believe the right story, even if that story is a lie. It’s hard to accept that we’ve been fooled by people we were taught to pity. The truth has been there all along, staring you in the face. Once you know, you can’t turn away.

That meeting was a turning point for him. He was welcomed, embraced. He had been so afraid of graduating and not finding a job, but from then on, he wasn’t—because he understood what had been taken from him, who took it, and why. He knew what he had to do. The Party started paying him to go to conferences and recruit, and with that money he finished his degree.

Since that first meeting, he proudly wrote, he hasn’t eaten at the same table as a Black person or a Jewish person.

*

Pat and I are the first people in the office the next morning. She’s a little dressed up, wearing a black jacket with red piping on the shoulder stitching that I’ve seen before, and the nice pink sneakers her wife gave her for her birthday. I stand at the photocopier, where all this started, when I looked at Theo and recognized him from the video.

“So when he comes in, I’ll ask him out for a welcome lunch,” Pat tells me, her words coming too fast. “Are you okay?” I tell her about all the articles I read. He’s prolific. He’s not just a weekend warrior Nazi; he’s dedicated, he spreads his message, and he has dedicated his future and his work to the people who destroyed the places we come from.

Theo arrives seven minutes later, wearing a green-and-blue checked shirt under a grey sweater, carrying a briefcase and an umbrella patterned with crows. He’s carrying a travel mug. He smiles at me and gives a little wave. By now, I have memorized the precise angles of his face; the strong brows married to pale, deep-set eyes. I look at him and imagine the skull underneath—the broad planes and interstices of bone and jaw, the teeth roots soaring down and back, the powerful blade of a chin.

“Theo! Wait up a second.”

Pat hurries around the desk, motioning for me to follow. I cower behind her, like a child whose overbearing mother is about to invite a potential friend over for a playdate. I look for the boy he wrote about, the one who felt nervous at that first meeting in the church basement—insecure, wanting. He stands, light on his feet, and looks directly at us with a bemused smile.

“Theo, we have a tradition here at the office. A welcome lunch for new tutors! Lee and I want to invite you out to White Spot with us at noon. Our treat.”

Jared, who started six months ago, lingers on his way in. “I never got a welcome lunch.”

“Sorry, Jared, but everything isn’t about you,” Pat says.

Theo smiles at me. “Hey, Lee,” he says, “someone was telling me you’ve worked here for a long time.”

“Yeah,” I say. I can’t meet his eyes. We should have finished the job when we had the chance, he had written. “A few years.”

“Lee’s our most accomplished tutor,” Pat says. “There’s a lot you could learn from them.”

I stare at the glass door printed with the name of the tutoring centre and hear Theo say, “Okay, sure, why not? See you at noon.”

*

Aaron’s unanswered texts have escalated, a cascade down my phone screen.

are u going thru with lunch
 with tutor nazi??????
 lee
 leeeeeeeeee
 :-O
 LEE NO LUNCH WITH NAZI
 omfg if i lived in the same city as u i would crash your work so hard
 grandma would b so pissed at u

Our grandmother has been gone for years, and I know Aaron is only invoking her now in a last-ditch attempt to distract me, wound me. I remember what she said to me when I was a kid. All those people were murderers. I’m glad she’s not alive to see what’s happening now—the worshippers gunned down in a shul on Shabbat in the states; the white supremacist demonstrations metastasizing across the continent; the Brexit supporters spray-painting swastikas on sidewalks on the evening news; the president who recites a nursery rhyme about a conniving snake at anti-immigration rallies. When I watch the news these days, I feel like I’ve lost track of the world. While I was sleeping, a disc slipped in the spine of what is acceptable to witness and to fear.

I never thought that one day I would walk into the office at my dumb job and find one of them at the front desk, sorting papers, like a visitor who arrives in disguise, a new kind of person. I can’t shake the thought that no matter what happens at this lunch, Theo will continue to write his racist diatribes. But it’s his normalcy that frightens me the most—the quiet way he circulates through the center, charming the young mothers and shepherding children through beginning algebra. If I confront him, maybe he’ll only dip and morph, an ever-changing threat.

It was true, after all, what I had been told by the Jewish adults surrounding me when I was growing up: you just never know about people. Anyone you meet could be harboring hatred for you. Our grandmother taught us to have contempt for ignorance, to set ourselves apart from others. Now that defense had been revealed as a temporary home, every refuge another cup in a shell game in progress.

I rest my face in my palms, press my fingers into my eyes, try to focus on not hyperventilating. I try to imagine what Grandma would say about this—about Theo sitting in the next room, typing up notes or writing a letter to a parent. “Even Nazis need day jobs,” I can almost hear her say, a chuckle with an edge of Yiddish. “Hitler was a failed painter.”

*

At the White Spot, all three of us order the fish and chips with coffee. Rain streaks the windows as Pat chats with Theo about where he’s living, why he left his PhD program (debt and a bad breakup), and how high rents are in this city now. Theo tells her he’s living off Clark with some guys he met on Craigslist, and he’s saving up for a motorcycle. He’s going back for his teaching certificate now that there are jobs again.

“Well, thanks for inviting me out,” he says. “This will sound a little silly, but I was starting to feel pretty down about the center. Nobody seems to hang out together at work.”

“Oh, it’s just the turnover,” Pat says.

Again, Theo’s words swarm through my mind. Vermin. His patterned collar pokes out of his sweater. I notice his silver watch.

“This looks good,” Theo says, drenching his fish in lemon. “I’ve never been to White Spot.”

The kind of people who, if you give them anything, they’ll take everything from you and then send you a bill.

He wrote so passionately about the recession—our generation, screwed from the get-go. He and I are the same age. We know that we’ll never get ahead, that we’ll need the inheritance from our parents to survive. We all know we’re paying rent on impossible futures. What opportunities are there? What are we working for? I’ll never be able to afford to retire like my parents have.

“Wow, almost December already,” Pat says. Under the table, she places her left foot on my right foot.

“Yeah, do you two have plans for Christmas?” Theo asks.

“Sure do, Christmas with my boys.” I notice Pat doesn’t mention her wife, Theresa.

Theo looks at me. “Lee, what about you? Heading home for Christmas?”

“I’m Jewish,” I say.

I watch his eyelids flutter, then quickly retreat. My knife and fork tip like drumsticks in my suddenly clumsy hands. He nods slightly and places another morsel of fish in his mouth.

We’ve allowed this to go on for too long. We’ve stood by while they repopulate.

Can humans communicate whole sentences through our eyes? Can our eyes telegraph more than fear, desire, exhaustion? I want my eyes to fill with the number of words of his I read on my screen. I want him to know that I know. I want to keep staring at him until he has no doubt. I thought I would be afraid to look at him steadily across a table, but I find I am now utterly calm.

Theo leans back, his hand settling around his water glass. He looks down at his plate, his face tilted diagonally downward, the posture of quiet contemplation. The light from the window slides in a clear pane across his cheek. He sits in silence. He still won’t look back up at me. Last night in bed with my laptop, and this morning on my way in on the subway, I fantasized about this moment. I saw the video of you with your swastika, I’d say. You are ruining the world.

“Welcome lunch,” he says at last. “What is this?”

I haven’t sat at a table with one of them since that night.

“Lee found your articles. She found your . . . blogs. You should be ashamed,” Pat says, and I think of how ridiculous she sounds, school marmy, scolding. I’m suddenly aware of how fragile, how tiny, our intervention is.

Theo’s eyes finally find me. “I see,” he says. “You’re a fan of my work.”

“No,” I say.

“I always welcome new readers.”

“You work with children,” Pat says.

“So,” he says to me. “What did you think of my arguments? It’s easy to set me up like this and be all righteous—‘oh, you’re a terrible person’—but what about an actual debate?”

“I’m not going to debate you.”

“That’s convenient.”

“You expect me to respond to what you wrote? That the Holocaust was a good idea?”

“Lee, you don’t have to—” Pat says.

“I write about what’s happening now. Look at the economy. We’re just saying the things other people are afraid to say. Too politically correct.”

“Politically correct?”

“You bring up the Holocaust like that’s an argument because you don’t want to have a real debate.”

“Oh my god.”

“Debate me, then. Debate me. What do you have to say?”

All the calmness I felt, the confidence, was short-lived. I’m back at the front desk of the center when I first recognized him. His gaze across the table is level and cool—there’s nothing I can say to this man.

“We’re here now because something in my writing rang true for you,” he says.

I shove my plate forward and fries fly into his lap.

“Well, I’m convinced,” he says, and gets up to leave. We don’t realize he’s left us with the bill until after he’s gone.

*

I never learned much from those college classes about the Holocaust. I just became sadder, with more facts. I never tried again. It was too large, too brutal, too complicated. I joked with Aaron that I’d gotten a minor in Grandma Studies. I donated my small collection of Holocaust memoirs and novels from the classes to charity. The metal maw of the donation bin beside the A&W near our parents’ house slammed shut, swallowing history.

Until I read Theo’s writing, wrapped in my quilt and the thickening tide of wine and horror, and realized they were back. Not even that, they had never gone away.

*

Back at the center, I go into my office. One of the other tutors, Jackie, is there. I log into my email and bring up the browser, find the video. Views: 12,302.

I watch it once more, on mute: the semi-circle of young men. The precise gymnastics of their lips, yelling in unison. The mirrored cop car windows in the distance. The seagull that whirls through. The red and black paint on the background of the world. The swastika, a twisted bit of geometry embedded in the city’s skin.

I copy and paste the link into an email and send it to the staff listserv.

I copy and paste the link into an email and send the email to my list of students’ parents.

For both, I write the subject Celebrate the Social Activism of Our New Tutor, Theo! to make sure they click.

Ten seconds later, Jackie says, “Holy shit, Lee.”

I pick up my bag and jacket and walk out into the hallway. Pat’s standing behind her desk at the entrance. Both of her hands are up in the air. She might be dancing.

“Hey! Hey!”

I speed up until I feel his hand on my shoulder. I spin around.

“What the fuck?” he yells. “What the fuck is your problem?”

Both his hands on my shoulders now. I back up.

“Are you fucking setting me up?”

Everyone’s in the hallway now, watching us. A little girl, a student, gawks at all the frozen adults. Jackie holds her phone up, filming.

“This is why,” he says. “This is why.”

“Why what?” I say it soft, a final dare.

Buzz Lightyear is sprinting down the hall toward us in his astronaut suit. Theo lets go of me, but I can still feel his hands, two hot imprints pushing down on my shoulders.

“Come on, Lee, come,” Pat says, her arm around my shoulders.

Pat pulls me closer. I have no weapon. I don’t even have words anymore. The neon lights flutter arrhythmic. Chest hollow, I turn and watch Theo stride through the glass doors. My last glimpse of him is his profile through the front window of the center, his checked shirt and perfect hair, clean lines against a backdrop of cement and passing cars, ranging out into the world.