Big Brother by Lionel Shriver Read Free Book Online

just as Hugh Halfdanarson had always hoped.
    “About a month ago,” I said. “He’s obsessed with his website. Have you seen it? There’s a quiz on Joint Custody trivia. A ‘Where Are They Now?’ tab that updates you on whatever drugs Tiffany Kite is currently shooting up—”
    “Or which ten-year-old boys Sinclair Vanpelt is shtupping—”
    “Though you’d be surprised, Floy Newport is mayor of San Diego.”
    “The underestimated one. They’re the ones who sneak up from behind. The devious little fuckers who plot behind your back. Who use the fact that nobody pays any attention to them to bide their time, and then make their move when you least expect it.”
    Edison’s tone was playful but needling. Of the three kids in our father’s supposedly cutting-edge one-hour drama, Floy Newport was the closest I had to a doppelgänger, although—oddly, since Edison of all people should know the difference—he was confusing Floy the actress with Maple Fields, the character she played. On Joint Custody , Maple was the middle one, sandwiched between prodigies, eternally unnoticed and not especially good at anything. Whereas Edison had reviled the character he most resembled in the show, Caleb Fields, as much as the vain pretty boy Sinclair Vanpelt who played him, I’d identified with Maple Fields completely.
    “On that website,” I said. “Believe it or not, Travis has also listed out the plots of every single episode. In order. Several paragraphs apiece.”
    “Talk about time on your hands.”
    “Too bad we didn’t video that woman back at the airport for him. ‘Travis Appaloosa’ meant something to her. That’s a dying breed.”
    “She was about forty-five? The right age. Probably watched every season. It’s a whole cohort, Panda Bear. They’re not that old, and they’re not all dead yet.”
    “Only a few names from the shows you grew up with stick in your head,” I said. “As a rule, Travis’s isn’t one of them.”
    “You’d be surprised. You don’t use his surname. I still get asked about the geeze more often than you’d think.”
    In point of fact, I had gone by Pandora Appaloosa for a while in college. A little lost, I imagined that if other people thought they knew who I was, then I would know, too. But before long, the very query I was courting—“Any relation to Travis?”—began to seem not only like cheating but counterproductive. My classmates at Reed would only want to hear about my dad the TV star; in contemporary terms, I had reduced myself to a hyperlink to someone else’s Wikipedia page. So I reverted to Halfdanarson when I moved to Iowa. In recent years even fans of retro TV were unlikely to recognize my father’s pseudonym, which disuse was returning to the goofiness that had first sent my mother into peels of laughter. But I was mostly glad of having resumed the ungainly Swedish singsong my father had shed because Halfdanarson was my real name .
    I’d usually have savored ragging on our father with Edison, that ritual touching base with our sick, stupid history. I rarely discussed my childhood with Fletcher. I hadn’t even let on that my father had been a television actor in a wildly successful show until months into our relationship, and when I finally let it slip I was relieved to learn that Fletcher hadn’t watched Joint Custody when it was on in prime time. Yet no matter how firmly I’d emphasized that my offbeat upbringing in Tujunga Hills was an arbitrary footnote in a life otherwise ordinary by design, Fletcher always took reference to the program as a pulling of rank, and I avoided the subject. Only with Edison, then, could I access a past that, however loath I was to depend on it for a sense of importance, I was reluctant to jettison completely. It was my past, whatever it meant, the only one I had.
    I grew up with a set of parallels that expressed varying degrees of distortion and caricature. I didn’t only have a father named Hugh Halfdanarson, but one who