The November Criminals (14 page)

She
was
being consistent. Without sentiment, without remorse. She was following the terms. Not even the extraordinary, not even the inexplicable, could justify departures from them. I said she’s destined for greatness. I meant it. That unswerving will is the
qualifying
mark of greatness-to-be. I had to admire it. But fuck her! Fuck her anyway. I didn’t need her, and fuck her for thinking that I did. So what if it made me miserable every time I saw her stonily walking away from me in the hall. It wasn’t about
her!
There was more at stake here. I’m putting this down so you don’t think it was all about Digger, just so you don’t think I’m this weak love-addled moron. The fact that I could imagine everything being different was what made the pain murderous. What if we hadn’t driven out to Maryland? What if I never made that stupid call to Lorriner? That’s the real
fuck you!
That your mind offers all these
alternatives
to your current situation. Mine was not one of despair. Or sadness, even, sadness does not properly describe it. It was the pain of
nothing
. What if I’d just kept my intrusive Jew nose out of the whole affair to begin with? Wouldn’t that have made moral sense, anyway?
Oh, some random innocent kid gets shot? Here comes that crazy kike Addison Schacht with his puffed-up sense of obligation to remind you of it! Look at him! He’s rubbing his hands like some spiritual usurer! And what’s more, he’s discovering will and intention where they can’t be found! What moral genius!
This kind of thinking, I mean when you attribute mind in cases where it does not exist, is called the Pathetic Fallacy.

#5. I had three weeks. Three weeks of this shit! I got things done, though. Not seeing Digger freed up
huge
swatches of my time. I had no one else to talk to, remember? Do you know how much money you can earn in three weeks, with no one to talk to? I made three thousand dollars. I didn’t spend a dime of it. My industry impressed Noel. I’d never had to re-up three times in a month before. Dealing with
him
was easy. He didn’t know about the whole catastrophe with Lorriner. He never asked. I never told him. He would have thought killing Murphy was funny, though. I can just see it. He would have said, “Daaaaaamn, son! You shot the mufhuh’s dog? White people be crazy!” Maybe that’s why I never told him, because I didn’t know if I could stand hearing that.

Noel was now a bigger part of my life, anyway, so it made sense to hold some stuff back. He and David and I shared a number of nights in Noel’s freezing house, Noel jabbering away while David downed forty after forty. He could drink ten or eleven of them. He’s a fucking
building
. They never had any effect that I could see. His voice didn’t slur. If his eyelids slipped down, it was from pride. Noel, as he got higher and drunker, would become incoherent. The stories of his conquests entered the realm of obvious fantasy: hackneyed “Letters to
Penthouse”
tales, Jacuzzis and lesbians and oiled limbs, filtered through Noel’s self-limited vocabulary. Punctuated by an occasional incredulous whinny from David. I just nodded and agreed. Noel took no notice of either stream of commentary. Fun times! Three guys in a brick-cold, unfurnished house. You understand why I never brought up the thing with Lorriner. What would have been the point? It might have gotten me a beating from David. Noel’s not a psychopath, but he has his interests to maintain. And so what if Lorriner had known who Noel was? So what if maybe he was also one of Noel’s retail distributors, which more and more his words that night led me to think? It meant nothing and it proved nothing. Nothing at all.

Apart from these jolly interludes, I spent hours, every evening, serving my customers. Not well. I raised my prices. I stopped extending credit. And you know what? Instead of alienating them, instead of driving them away, it made them more serious and loyal. More respectful of me, even. The worse I treated them the more they wanted me around. There’s some lesson to be derived from that, I suspect. Even if you don’t make it an iron rule of your conduct, you can learn something from it. I ferried around enough weed to ensure jail time if I were ever caught or searched. But, as I said, you’re invisible to cops in D.C. if you’re white. You have to do something amazing to get their attention.

Names, you say? I’m
happy
to give them. The customer is always wrong, remember? Jason Rosset; Tim Carcanet; Hannah Loughlin; Mason Chatto; Blake Bonder, who despite the Harvard-beats-Yale name is a girl with a widemouthed melodic laugh; Evan Osterreich and Katie Bayern, the other gold medalists on the National Latin Exam in my class; Hamilton Bray, whose father is ninety-two years old; the Eichman twins; Andrew Bammler, a gaping and universally despised asshole (“Fuck, man, Andy
Bammler’
s here!”) and ex-Chandler classmate of Noel’s; Magdalena Beinmark, Digger’s next-door neighbor—I won’t lie, I spent the whole trip to Magdalena’s house fantasizing about running into Digger and flaunting my über-casualness; the supercilious, unspeaking Amanda and Pyotr Metzger, twins and bandmates in the Bringdowns; Octavio Machado, shaver of notches into his eyebrows; Tehran Wall, five-foot-nothing, our champ debater, and, after Kevin’s death, 20 percent of the black population of my G&T class; Victoria Blanning; Alex Hamden-Court; Ashton Denvir; Drea Skalnick. At least six people named Jonathan.

My
tribe
. And, as I remarked before, I know as little about them as you do. Beyond these incidentals. Warm and identical houses: check. Square-built, money-sturdy furniture: check. Sound-eating inch-piled rugs: check. Parents pretending to be oblivious: check. Warm and insincere greetings: check. A dust-filmed piano, a cloudlike Samoyed, an inquisitive younger sibling, a disintegrating party, a wretched solitude, a fistfight, a theatrical tongue-thick kiss, a recent-dyke mother, a mirror edged in knurled bronze, a fake Ming vase with a trembling sheaf of catkins, check, check, fucking check! The solitary trip back to my house, occupied by my father, my father and Fatima, or by nobody at all. Check. Leaden, vacant sleep. Check. Morning. Check. Et cetera. It’s all
scenery
. The underlying quality, somnolent ease, never dissipates, and there isn’t even any intruding authority to give your activities the spice of crime. Everything is permitted. When everything is permitted, mediocrity is the rule. Nude trees arcaded every curb, their nets of branches like diagrammed lungs, and baleful street lamps hovered above. It’s all so calm, it’s dizzying.

Some people probably can draw
inspiration
from this, from a great regret, from nothingness. I’m too much of a philistine to do that.
Philistine
is one of my father’s favorite words. Though he’s never directed it against me, I know that I exhibit a lot of philistine tendencies. It means being cut off from higher things, which I certainly am, and it means not having explosive emotional reactions to things, which I certainly don’t, only glacial responses, numbness or fear or on the positive side awe and gratitude. And sometimes these rainstorm bursts of happiness, but even those are sort of calm, not at all fit for discussion, the way my father is always talking about his most private inner activity. The stuff about wanting to throw himself under a bus, I mean.

I think you’ll agree that the other activity consuming my time during these weeks belonged to the kingdom of philistine behavior. I was über-dedicated to it. During the minutes spent stuck in traffic. During my now-solitary lunch periods. Waiting for customers to meet me. In the twilight before sleep, when it replaced my obsessive rereading of the
Aeneid
. I’m talking about Kevin’s file. Even more worn than it had been when I’d stolen it. I knew it, at this point, backward and forward. Not that it was hard to memorize. It was just a two-page list of classes and grades, with a note at the bottom, in blocky printer script: NO LONGER A STUDENT; a friable newspaper article; and a crease-seamed photo. Scraps. But there
was
nothing else. And every spare moment I had, though, every moment not given to selling weed, eating, sleeping, or school, I gave to the study of this file. As though it would yield up some answer about Kevin’s murder. I can
still
recite large chunks. Fuck, I can probably draw Kevin’s face blindfolded, gripping the pencil with my teeth. Though I haven’t tried this. You’ll have to trust me.

That’s all there is of you, in the end. These meager public traces. Nothing beyond that. And if these public facts remain striking or original, you get called a genius, and if they involve the deaths of millions, you become a hero or a tyrant. And either way cities and governments erect monuments to you. Which no one ever notices, unless they’re on a tour or doing some kind of historical research. Monuments are just weighty guarantees of your consignment to oblivion. So it doesn’t matter if you leave behind you a war, a cathedral, or just a thin pile of paper. You’re fucked, eternally. Which is, I assume, why you have asked for so much documentation, and why you want me to put my answers to your questions down on paper. Because you know that what we call
inner
life has no external meaning.

Example: about a year ago, on an airless subway in winter, I saw a guy get on, not too old, not too young anymore. He had short auburn hair, big glasses, skinny wrists, a premature paunch, that sort of thing. Two bags, a man-purse and a canvas tote, which I thought was strange, one of those small inexplicabilities. And what was he doing? Picking through the man-purse, as soon as he sat down. I was leaning against the doors, and he sat on the same side as me, facing away. So I could look down into his lap and see him yanking open and closed every compartment. I had no idea what he was looking for. He sighed, an angry androgynous sigh, as he came up with a
fucking crayon
—in mauve, no less. The kind of color eternally unpopular with children. Then—and this impressed me—he reached with grave dignity into his
other
bag, the tote, and pulled out a dog-eared sheaf of pages, the corners foxed. The whole thing grimed. He had been searching for a pencil to correct his pages, I saw now; he was frantic to correct them. A point in his favor. But he was doing this in public, which meant either that he was a horrible cretin or that he was so gifted his talent made him indifferent.