The November Criminals (15 page)

Needless to say, it was the former. And what he was doing was amazing! He would change a word, the word
dirty
to the word
filthy
, for example, and then slash out the change. He changed semicolons to periods/initial capitals and vice versa. He crossed out the word
asphyxiation
and replaced it with
suffocation
, he misused the word
inveigh
… And so on and so forth, his white, clean hand darting around on the beaten-looking pages, making these minor corrections. I started to feel sick. Whenever I see people taking out private matters, like manuscripts, in public, it sickens me, but I can’t look away from the horrible humiliation of staring into someone else’s mediocrity, which illuminates your
own
choking mediocrity. He was so
defeated
, this man in his late thirties, about twenty years older than me, with a manuscript that looked to be years and years old, maybe started when I was a child, a book he had great hopes for, still, even now, despite the manifest evidence of his failure, his hand darting with precision and care, correcting and changing things that would make no difference. And the crayon! A loose strut, an atmospheric gauge of some kind, something no longer human, something degenerated. He caught me staring, of course, and looked up. I whipped my face away. The insectile rasp of the crayon never ceased. He got out at the next stop. I was leaning against the doors, like I said, so he had to pass me, which I was dreading. He only smiled, though, untroubled, blind-looking. We
all
sit in public correcting our insufficient manuscripts, hoping that God is watching, whom we all believe in as some kind of
spectator;
we believe that our useless devotion
proves
something, that it
demonstrates something about us
, that we’re
all
artists. His smile of angelic completion revealed this to me as five or six other passengers, total strangers, looked into my face with burning and indifferent kindness.

XIII
.

W
AIT, THOUGH.
I have to do some more
backgrounding
here. I’ve gotten you up to speed on the first five major aspects of my life in the weeks after Digger shot Murphy. I left out the sixth component. Six is what’s known as a perfect number: it’s the sum of its positive divisors excluding itself (1 + 2 + 3 = 6). Why that makes it perfect, I don’t know. But a lot of mystical carrying-on about the number six has derived from this fact. So maybe it’s
auspicious
that I’m getting into this now. I had been, alongside all the other nonsense and running around, engaged in
another
Kevin-related activity. A last-ditch effort. It had borne no fruit so far.

On the first of October, an unsupervised boy rammed my shin with his blood-colored tricycle. I had my backpack with me, nothing in it except for a bit more than twelve thousand dollars. And, which I did not mention before, a thick sheaf of posters. I was on my third. Sheaf of posters, I mean. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT KEVIN BROADUS, PLEASE PAGE, and then my number. Remember? I’d already gone through two stacks. Much faster than I’d expected. I also had a staple gun and a roll of invisible tape. These were the posters I made the morning I stole Kevin’s file.
Ille dies primus leti
, to quote Virgil. It means (in very rough modern English) “That’s when everything started to go wrong.” I won’t waste your time with a literal translation. He was talking about the first time Aeneas and Dido—the insane queen of Carthage, remember?—have sex. In a woodland cave, during a thunderstorm. When he leaves to continue his quest, she burns herself to death on a pyre composed of all his ambassadorial/courtly gifts to her. I think I mentioned her insanity before.

Anyway:
Postering
. (#6) Like Kevin was a lost cat. Putting them up anywhere and everywhere I could. I found the sheaf of old posters on top of a bookshelf, where I’d stowed them to avoid thinking about them. I mean the first-generation ones. I found them the afternoon Digger’s mother called me an alcoholic creep, actually. A small sail-shaped polygon of white, the corner of the poster pile, obtruded itself into my complacent solitude after I’d hung up. I took them down and knocked off the blue house dust. It took no time to find the tape and the staple gun. My father keeps it loaded. As part of his artistic mission, in case he wakes up one day as a painter who needs to frame canvases, or maybe as some staple-loving conceptual artist. Then I was bolting out of my house, in a frenzy, affixing flyers to every friendly surface I saw. I got through the whole stack in two hours. I even had to tear the last-affixed one down. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had a template to use, moving forward. The naked trees lining my block all had their quivering squares of white. I was out of breath. I’d been jogging. No coat, no hat. The cold of the falling evening burned my lungs. Et cetera.

That’s how I went through my first sheaf. I blamed its eventual failure on the small distribution area and the posters’ lo-fi overall appearance. It looked like some overly focused crazy person had assaulted this one chunk of D.C. and left it at that. A sad old man, or a pervert, or a bearded schizoid type. You know: a haunter of public libraries. Wool hat in all seasons. Binder of manuscripts shouting with ALL CAPS. The kind of person who leaves cheap flowers at a public memorial for the dead. I improved, on the second go-round. I spaced them out, made the civilians think I was taking my ease. Which was a misrepresentation. You can’t let anyone know what you’re going through, though, or you’ll just get corrosive ridicule heaped on you. My second sheaf, in bright colors and with Kevin’s obstinate photo Xeroxed in, lasted longer. I was more judicious. I spread them out. Crossing and recrossing the city. Enduring the uneasy looks of schoolchildren, shelf-assed cashiers, bus conductors, guys hanging out on corners, staunch lawn defenders. The entire
typology
of life here, which is a good general simulation of life in second-rate cities everywhere.

Postering, after all, is one of those skills that you learn only if you’re involved in some stupid group activity. Putting on a play. Or advertising some political protest or whatever. A lot of the kids in G&T do this, put up political flyers that they get secondhand from older siblings. Or in some cases from Mr. Vanderleun, who believes himself to be a real
inspirer
of youth, and wants to bring our social consciences to new and passionate life. The art of postering was alien to me, because I’d never participated in anything, play or protest. And if Mr. Vanderleun ever gave me flyers to hand out, I would have dumped them in the trash. Not that he trusted me. He gave them to his in-class henchpeople, foremost among them Alex Faustner. As a result, I was über-terrible at it, when I started. I see that now. I did not understand what I was doing. When you poster, you’re asking the Great Anonymous for help. The fervency has to be like sublimated. Not that it’s
praying
. Not that I pray.

I’ve
thought
about it. Praying, I mean. But what’s the point? What you want to happen never happens anyway, by definition. And the one thing I’d ever wanted badly enough to pray for—that my mother not be dead, I mean—well, according to my cursory readings on the subject, you’re not even supposed to ask for that. For the past to be different. Some Catholic theologians even say that God Himself cannot change the past. Which is one of the paradoxes inherent in the idea of omnipotence, I guess. Or just part of the natural comedy of our higher aspirations. Mr. Dwight, my religion teacher, is the one who told me about that theory of omnipotence. He’s actually been everything from a Buddhist to a Trappist monk. So I have a weird respect for his opinion. Although I think that if the God of the Jews wanted to change the past, he could. For all the ambivalence about him in the Bible and stuff, you kind of have to believe in his limitless power. Which is maybe why the Jews get shit on by history so much. In compensation.

You’re getting off topic again, Addison! That’s no way to behave!
Sorry. Once I
cooled down
, once I lost the postering habits of a fervent Stalinist, I started using our city’s public transportation systems. Which in D.C. comprise buses and subways. You can get anywhere by subway or bus. You just have to use the two in conjunction with each other, because the subway is built on the same plan as the streets: axial lines crossing uneven concentric rings. So you miss a lot of fertile ground if you stick to the subways. But if you use the buses, you can get by. I bought student monthly passes, these demure pink cards. They give you the same color if you’re a senior citizen, I think. The subways in D.C. are constructed, city lore claims, to withstand nuclear attacks. I doubt this is true. You can trace the blackened rust-bloomed courses of leaks from the street, rain runoff. Sometimes, in the grates over the railside fluorescents, moss and tendriled plants even sprout from fallen seeds, watered from above and lit from below. The stations themselves have high, soaring ceilings paneled in pressed concrete, the damp odor of which permeates the still air. Subaqueous whitish light makes everyone look lost and unhappy there, and weak. The trains stink of tatty fabric and usually of urine or dog. You have to feed your ticket into a thick-lipped reader twice: there’s no standard fare; it’s calculated by distance. The employees hide in dark aquaria, irregular polygons of glass, and if you go up to ask them anything you can see the blind glow of the security monitors, and sometimes even a walleyed version of yourself bent to the metal mouthpiece in supplication. Ochre hexagonal tiles. Ochre bulwarks. Long waits. Officious and ineffectual cops: wavers-back from the platform edge and bike ticketers. Misery. And indifferent, bureaucratic malice.

Our buses are fine, though. Blue and white, tinted with the free-floating gray filth of cities, yes, but still blue and white. Kind of
noble
colors. Hard to say why. A lot of graffiti scratched into the Plexiglas windows. Kids use chunks of concrete or razor blades to do this. Not so many obscenities. Just the announcement of names, an understandable desire. Some of the buses are old, dating back to when you could smoke on public transport. Before black people were allowed to sit at the front. Some of them are newer, but they’re still uncomfortable and ridiculous-looking. Always late, too, and the drivers are surly exiles from the human race. I started developing eye-meeting relationships with some of them, despite this. I never learned their names, so I made up designations: Doctor Shortcakes, Fat-ass McGee, Madame Sassy, the King of Comedy. The King of Comedy was this crumple-faced old man with a shrub of white hair, who mumbled incomprehensible jokes and monologues into his mike the whole ride. There
and
back. He drove the M2 on weekday afternoons and evenings. “Mama lama hama namahamanownow wamalamanow.” Then the digital voice system, sexless and happy to assist, would announce the stop, and the King would go back to orating. “Nah
teya
damalamanamanow!” I think he was close to retirement.

Despite the problematic means, you can get anywhere. And I did. I just went blindly, getting off after a random number of stops and, with supreme coolness, postering a neighborhood. I got some looks, I’ll admit. But being young deflected most of those. Nobody really cares, if you look like you’re under eighteen, which I definitely do. Even in a for-shit pseudocity you can find facelessness. I did this before and after school, and on the weekends, so I saw neighborhoods at their most vulnerable, full of sleepy, irritable people or relaxed and happy ones. Once, at the edge of a crowded shopping plaza, I even saw David Cash, and we locked eyes. But he turned away with a visible smirk of disgust. Didn’t even faze me. The weight in my backpack of the posters still to hang comforted me. I put up my quota—getting one on a barbershop window, which I asked the barber guy if it was okay, something I’d ordinarily feel too awkward to do. I was proud of that one. It was goldenrod, and it stood out like a petal in the midst of all the city colors, brick and asphalt. Like it was
natural
.

Every day
I did this. I should have said that before, but I thought it deserved its own space. Because it was such an undertaking. And it had zero returns. I did not get a single page about it. Maybe people thought it was suspicious because I’d put a pager number, which has certain
connotations
. Every time I saw an unfamiliar number march across the dented strip of my grayish screen, I got this queasy heartsickness. But they only ever wanted to arrange a time to buy weed. I consented, lips cold with disappointment. The thing about selling more drugs is that word tends to get around that you have more, and it can actually increase the demand. There’s some stupid economics term for this, I have no doubt. But economics is an elective at Kennedy, and I opted to take religion. Our economics teacher, Ms. Mehta, is as wide as she is tall. Which maybe is why I didn’t take economics. Nonetheless: that’s the choice. So I have no idea what the correct term is. I only have my practical firsthand knowledge, which, if you lack proper credentials, is worthless. Otherwise I’d be able to write a book. About stupidity. About how to get no results.

This failed to change my ambitions. I just kept on with the procedure: make copies, hang them up, wait. Isn’t that someone’s definition of insanity? To do the same thing over and over while expecting different results? You kind of get a picture of a guy in a straitjacket bashing his forehead into a white-padded wall, or someone picking up every scrap of tinfoil they see outside, or someone counting out loud, all the time, and waiting for the moment of their redemption. What I was doing bears a family resemblance to those activities. I can admit that now. I remember the day my second clutch of posters ran out, because the bus I was on broke down, not far from my neighborhood. I’d made five hundred copies, in vivid colors—violet, sky, and grass—and included Kevin’s picture. The one from the yearbook, the one Digger had given me, that showed Kevin poised with his enormous saxophone. It came out fuzzed and somehow
more
tragic-looking. But it added a heretofore missing
human
element to the posters. Which would make responses more likely, I figured. It was evening, green and purple. It gets that way here in the late fall, the light, I mean, these lurid colors. I’d done a good afternoon’s work. My legs burned. And then the bus, with a flatulent, mephitic, mechanical grunt, jarred itself to a halt and we all jerked forward in our seats, releasing a unitary cry of consternation. We were on Connecticut Avenue, near the Maryland border. Pretty close to the Camelot, actually. The King of Comedy was driving. He sounded delighted to explain our trouble: “Hamanowlamanownowmamanow!”

After this rhythmic and vowel-heavy announcement, I stood and walked to the front, where he cranked the door lever with a decisive and memorable motion of his forearm, and I trotted off of Connecticut, onto one of the residential streets, tree-lined and hard to tell from my own, though the houses were bigger and in better shape. Some of them had those fake gas lamps out by the curb, extending metal arms from which hung the numbers of the address. Each number on its own armorial plate. Some had beards of ivy hiding their cross-timbers. It was that universal hour of warm interior light among the bourgeoisie. You could see families at dinner, or on separate floors. I heard a kid practicing drums with incompetent vigor. And I kept on walking into the dusk. I’d recognized the street: McKinley, named after the first president to use the telephone for campaigning and the sole one to be assassinated by an anarchist. My bag was light. Kevin’s file, a pack of smokes, and nothing else. A sudden, stupid happiness settled on me. McKinley Street was familiar to me, though I had not set foot on this block of it before. Why the familiarity, you ask? Because of a certain house on this street: 3549. I was just leaving the 3400 block now, the street signs informed me, and my throat was thick with giddy joy. It was an omen. Proof that I was doing the right thing. That all my (so far) fruitless drag-assing through the streets of my shithole of a hometown had meaning and purpose. Do you know who once lived at 3549 McKinley? Do I even
need
to tell you?