The November Criminals (18 page)

“Now, Addison, you were telling me before that you had some evidence? About Kevin, I mean. And that you were his friend. Although, as I said, he did not have many friends. His schoolwork was very important to him. I believe in attending to your studies. It’s how I became successful. And I think I would remember you. Wouldn’t you say so?” I tried to slow the squeaks of the chair.

“Well, Mr. Broadus, I wouldn’t say we were exactly
best
friends or anything like that, and I
certainly
didn’t
mean
to give you the
impression
that we were best
friends
or anything like that.” I was starting to sound like a querulous spinster, and Mr. Broadus only widened his grin.

“I didn’t
ask
you if you were best friends with my son, Addison. His best friend is named Tarasac Choulamontry. He’s Laotian. I asked if it wouldn’t be likely, given that you say you were friends with Kevin, that I’d remember you?”

This high
buzzing
distracted me, right as he said that. More of a ringing, or the onset of deafness. I almost asked him,
Do you hear that?
But I restricted myself to a direct answer.

“Yes, I think you would remember me, Mr. Broadus. And I think like there’s been some like miscommunication here?”

“You mean that you told me you were his friend and you were not his friend?”

“No, I didn’t mean … I only meant that we were like
acquaintances
more than friends, if you see what I mean, and that really I never met you before the whole thing, so that’s why you don’t remember me.” The spinsterish whine had crept back into my voice, so I shut up. Mr. Broadus seemed to accept this, although his smile did not vanish, as I’d hoped it would. He only shielded his neck with two hands as his glasses blanked into discs of light.

“No, but, Mr. Broadus, really I think I can help. I’m sorry but I know I can help. The posters can help.” Mr. Broadus ran a gray tongue over his large lips.

“I talk to myself, Addison, sometimes when I’m alone. Do you ever do that? It’s a bad habit. But we all have those.” He blew on his tea some more.

“No, I
respect
everything that you’ve gone through.” I told him this without managing to meet his eyes. “I respect
everything
you’ve gone through and I really
feel
I have something valuable to communicate here.” (What?)

“Yes, I
know
you do, Addison,” cooed Mr. Broadus, in his clipped and equable voice, and apologized for not bringing me a cup of tea. Then we said nothing more to each other, for a long moment: Mr. Broadus staring at me over the rim of his cup, me in my frantic stillness, trying to prevent the chair from rocking.

“I just think if you’ll let me move ahead with my
investigations,”
I stuttered. Mr. Broadus slurped down the rest of the tea.

“Why are you here? Really?” His voice contained no recognizable emotion. Only interest. “Do you know what you’re
actually
doing? Do you
know?”

“I can sympathize with everything you’ve like
gone through,”
I repeated, because there was no other coherent reply I could make. I’m sure you all can agree: I am a stupid and useless motherfucker. Because of that little tickle, that little hint of
saintliness
I was groping after with him, that glint. So instead of answering his question, which would have required me to reveal myself as a full-bore fraud, I blurted out, “Can I leave my pager number with you?”

He waved the blue poster at me. A shade I’d chosen with special pride.

“Addison. Addison, Addison. You forget that I have it right here. You even mentioned in this flyer that it
was
a pager number. And you were saying something before about killing some dog? About money? While I was out of the room. As I said, I also talk to myself when I’m alone, so I understand. You were talking to yourself. All your theories. I heard all of it. But it was just something you imagined, Addison. Wasn’t it? That you were discussing with yourself. I can understand that. How could it be real? Nobody decent would behave in such a way. Nobody would do something like this”—and here he waved my poster again—“for reasons that thin. Nobody decent. Do you understand what I’m saying? You look confused.” He’d crossed the room and was kneeling to look into my face, hands on his ponderous knees. The bulge of his gut filled out his sweater, elongating the reindeer legs. I managed to meet his eyes. A glaring and icy green, behind the large glasses, under the gray bush of his eyebrows.

“Don’t you have a better reason, Addison?” The chair groaned beneath me. I groaned with it. The ache in my neck had reached a grinding and miserable pitch. I groaned and covered my face. I could form no words. “Come with me,” Mr. Broadus was saying. “Come with me. Come upstairs.”

“I haven’t
been
upstairs before,” I blurted out as I struggled to my feet. Mr. Broadus turned his green gaze on me again, squinting at my non sequitur or maybe my drunk’s wobble.

“That’s neither here nor there,” he clacked out. And in my single lucid moment so far that day, I came up with a great retort:
You sound white! I have a white friend who sounds black! Isn’t that funny!
He was already halfway up the short staircase, where I had been perched less than a week ago listening to his wife whistle. So I never said it.

The pictures of Kevin had been taken down. That shocked me. The pictures had been taken down and my pompous inner voice decried their absence. As though that were my right. The pictures were gone, leaving lighter patches on the white walls of the stairway, and little holes, which looked like dead gnats. The floorboard sang beneath his feet and then mine, and we were upstairs. The layout was simple, a big entrance area with a schoolroom piano, which I had not seen from my previous vantage points. And next to the piano a saxophone on its stand, smaller than Kevin’s. An alto. Kevin played the baritone. There were pictures of the Broaduses as a family on the walls, of Mrs. Broadus and Mr. Broadus when they were younger, one picture where she was wearing a bridal gown and he was wearing a dark, wide-lapeled suit and a dove gray vest and a top hat. He was motioning me on.

“You went to school with him?” he asked. “You had that same teacher? Mr. Vanderleun, yes? You’re also gifted and talented?”

“All of those things are true,” I mumbled. We had stopped before a door to which was affixed one of those joke road signs, in crimson and white: KEEP OUT.

“He liked his privacy,” Mr. Broadus said. “I feel no compunction in telling you that.” Then he opened the door, without saying anything else, and we stood on the threshold and stared.

Ghosts? Let me tell you what I saw: nothing. The walls had been stripped bare. Paler squares from posters, awards, whatever, all the furniture, bed, dresser, etc., all gone, no blinds on the windows, no dust on the floor, in the gaping closet only quadrangles of shadow, not even bereft hangers. Nothing but pale winter sun and the heavy air of the house. My breath speeded up, and two tearlike drops of sweat plashed down from my eyebrows. He was
there
. The emptiness itself proved it. I withstood the view. Gnawing my lower lip. Then I turned my face to Mr. Broadus, and I saw that he had clenched his jaw. I was close to tears—not from exhaustion, or guilt and shame, but tears of an emotion beyond those, which lacks a definition and does not need one. Greeks always win. Trojans always lose. Virgil had to weave a large and specious story to redeem their sad fates. The gate of ivory. Mr. Broadus spoke into the desert of his son’s room.

“You didn’t know him. You were not his friend, and you did not even know him. He had a pager. I don’t know where he got it. He had it for about a year. He had a pager, and he liked his privacy, and spent a lot of time out at night. I never asked him about it. I always believed he should be independent. I taught him that. I trusted him. I found certain
indications
in his room. After. The police did not find them. He hid them too well. It was like him to do that. To be methodical. I taught him to be methodical. I could show them to you. I can’t show them to you. I destroyed them. This is the first thing I wanted to tell you. Do you understand? Are you sick? You seem confused.” His voice never wavered or lost its metronomic pace. “Do you understand? Are you sick?” He looked at me. I nodded. My one honest answer to him. “They took his
watch,”
he said. His jaw now shut. “The murderers took his watch. Only the police know that. That was the
one fact
they kept back. Out of everything. All of it. They planned on verifying the killer. Or weeding out the false callers.” He made a noise, a long, windy huff, high-pitched. “The second thing is that I wanted to see you. To see your face. I thought you’d be older. I don’t know why. We always imagine these things differently.” He moaned again and spoke no further.

I could have left then. Only the staircase separated me from the street. I could have left and gone back to my false life, and come up with some piece of explanation for why even Kevin’s own father was not on my side. Normally I would have started doing this while I was still standing in the man’s house. But my creative powers had left me, for the moment. There was only Kevin’s empty room. That was the only fact. The ringing in my ears had ascended to this impossible vacuous whir, the noise of rapid wingbeats or an engine. My jagged fast pulse fluttered above my larynx. I had no response. I had to respond. You see that, right? I had come to this point, and action was demanded.

“I think I can help find out who killed your son.” My teeth knocked against one another as I spoke:
I think I c-c-c-an
. I was gripping my upper arms in the bitter cold, embracing myself. Mr. Broadus did not seem to have heard me. “I can help,” I clicked out.

“Addison, are you aware of the fact that right here in Washington, D.C., more than thirty percent of murders go unsolved? That’s what the
police
told me. Do you really think it even matters, now? Why are you here? What are you doing?” He was still looking into his son’s empty room. “They took his watch. It was some psychopath. Nothing else was stolen. No money. No wallets. Don’t you think, Addison, that this indicates some irrationality on the part of the killers? Couldn’t you have just called me and asked? Before you did all this?” He brandished the blue poster. No words exist for the undersounds he made as he spoke. So I took off my backpack. I offered it to Mr. Broadus. “There’s the money,” I murmured.

For the first time he raised his voice. “You don’t understand this! Don’t
think
you do. You never
could
. You don’t understand the
situation.”
His voice came from everywhere. I swear to fucking God. He was shoving me, not shoving me, he was jabbing his enormous first and second fingers into my chest, and I was backing up and backing up. He took the bag from me, jerked it away, and lifted it over his head with his left hand and he stabbed at my solar plexus with his right. He did not lumber. He moved with smoothness. And, so to speak, with justice. That I recognized. I knew he was going to hit me with my bag. I wanted to raise my hands in defense. They would not rise. “You cannot
understand
this, Addison,” he was chanting, blinking hard behind his glasses, “you cannot
understand
this.” He backed me into the corner with the piano and the saxophone. We had no more space. Nowhere to move. I bowed my head and waited for the blow.

The lock of the front door clicked open. I recognized its sound. My eyes still shut, I heard a woman call out, “Stan? Who’s that? Stan? What’s wrong?” She had a beautiful voice. As good as her whistle. The bag did not strike me. I opened my eyes. Mrs. Broadus was climbing the stairs. Wearing a reindeer sweater identical to her husband’s, except that the colors had been inverted: it was maroon with gray deer. “There’s the
money,”
I repeated, “all my money.”

“Who
are
you,” asked Mrs. Broadus, no more music in her voice. I started to speak. My legs quaked out from under me. And just before I was gone, just before I slipped into that waiting and echoing dark, the back of my head hit the keyboard of their piano. I can hear the broken chord it made to this day.

XVI
.

T
HIS ISN’T ONE OF THOSE ABSURD
pieces of writing where it turns out that the narrator
has been dead the whoooooole tiiiiiiime!
I would never abuse your trust and impose on your goodwill in that way, ladies and gentlemen. My father brought me such a book while I was convalescing. He’d picked it up from the best-seller racks, where he buys all his books. It was called
Rage
, by Nathan Levitan. The narrator (it turns out) is this already-dead college student who got killed in the Vietnam War. Telling the convoluted story of his own death. He gets into a good college, and he gets showily disgusted by the innocent vulgarities of his classmates, and then he starts to “rebel,” gets expelled, loses his academic deferment, ends up in the war, and thus gets shot. I don’t want to sound harsh. I mean, this guy is a published writer and everything. But what the fuck? Do you need much help in guessing what my opinion of
that
concept is?

Rage
had on the back flap this photo of him, of Levitan, I mean. He looked like a successful insurance salesman, divorced maybe. Really unhappy. Something in the set of his mouth. After I got out of the hospital, I read up on this guy. A, he’s seventy years old. B, in all of his photos he has that same weird, unhappy look, although he is—as far as I can determine—a famous and successful writer. So why does he look so miserable all the time? He writes kind of like he’s miserable, too. You know what I mean? So grim! Why? Why this grimace in his author photos, a look of chagrined concentration, like he’s trying to take a highly spiritual shit? What more does he want out of life? I can’t figure it out. My father brought me this book instead of my Loeb edition of the
Aeneid
, which I asked him for when he first came to visit me in the hospital. He forgot the
Aeneid
, as I half expected him to, and he covered his mistake by bringing
Rage
instead. “It was a
staff
pick, Addison.” He grinned as he handed it over, and I faked a really good smile right back at him. “They all seem intelligent there.
Very
upper-percentile.” He’s the one person I know who uses that phrase. It makes me nauseated, sort of. He must have stopped in a rush at a bookstore on the way to Sidney Memorial when he realized he’d forgotten. More than a few bookstores exist on the route from our house. D.C., like most fundamentally barbarous cities, contains a large number of bookstores. As a kind of camouflage to deceive unwary visitors.

I wasn’t in Philip Sidney Memorial Hospital for long. Four nights, three days. Hospital life is boring and difficult. They had me on an IV, and I had to take it with me everywhere. To the bathroom or to go get examined or whatever. It goes alongside you on this tall, ill-balanced metal tower with squeaky wheels. You move like a weak old man. You have to wear those ass-baring sterile gowns. I slept a lot. I was tired. I felt like I’d become oversensitive to gravity, or something. Every movement cost two or three times as much effort as usual. You ever get that feeling? It’s frustrating, even sort of terrifying. But it helps you sleep. I have trouble sleeping. Everyone who knows me knows I have trouble sleeping. My sleeps in Sidney Memorial Hospital remain the most accomplished of my life. I slept and ate the putrid hospital food, all of which tasted sweet, eggs, sausage, whatever it was. It all had a horrible sweetness. The food nurses or whatever arranged it on trays, put all this aesthetic effort into it.

I had a nice little room, or what I call a room to save time. It was a curtained-off alcove. It did have a window. You could see a vista of bare trees and sky. Sometimes a cloud. I was in a bad state when I first got there. Mr. Broadus took me after I collapsed in his house. I cut the back of my head on his piano keys. There must have been a lot of blood. He put a wadded-up hand towel to the wound, and somehow managed to get my father’s name from me, and then called him. I don’t know how he accomplished this. I was delirious. But the doctors told me that Mr. Broadus sat with me till my father arrived, holding the fruit-printed dish towel against my wound. I found it, after I’d been admitted, and hid it at the bottom of the garbage pail in my room, while my father was out taking a leak.

My main doctor, Dr. Paull, told me later I’d been running a fever of close to 105, the temperature at which your brain denatures or something. He suspected it was viral, just a virus that had gone untreated. Gotten out of control due to
poor health maintenance
. Nothing remarkable at all. Which insulted me. Who wants to hear that his disease is nothing special? He asked me if I’d been under a lot of stress lately, or gone through any traumatic events. I told him no. He said he understood. He said he had a daughter my age, and he understood that young people think they’re invincible. “But you only get one body,” he admonished. “I had to stitch up the back of your head. You fell on a piano, you say? First time I’ve ever heard that!” He tugged at the golden flukes of his mustache. Then he said, “I guess you’ll
see sharp
from now on!” and permitted himself a full-throated chuckle. His mustache I can only describe by saying that if a six-month-old baby could grow a full and luxuriant mustache, it would be that corn-silken color and texture. His skin was baby pink with the flush of permanent health.

All this biography comes
after
I resurfaced. I spent my first day
under
, with this viral issue Dr. Paull told me about. I told you about the echoing darkness. That sort of continued for a while, and then I slipped in and out of consciousness. I felt too hot, I felt too cold, sweat glued my flimsy robe to my shoulders, my joints throbbed. I kept thinking that there was a weird skylight directly over my head, one looking out onto a glaring white sky. This turned out to be an über-normal fluorescent panel light. I figured
that
out the day before my father brought
Rage
for me to read. That’s when my fever broke and my perceptions returned to normal. He was sitting in the low wooden chair across the room from my bed. That’s when I asked him for my Loeb. He nodded glumly, and said he would bring it tomorrow. He sat in that chair for at least an hour every day, till the end of my short stay. He didn’t ask me anything, at first, about what had happened. Just fingered the tip of his ponytail. But midway through his second visit, some minutes after he’d finished enthusing about
Rage
, he directed his glance to the floor and asked me a question.

“Addison, we need to talk. Something has been
going on
these past few weeks. I know it. Call it intuition. You know how intuitive I am. I want you to tell me. I won’t be angry. But I want you to tell me. I mean how you ended up in here.” Right out of a parenting textbook, ladies and gentlemen. I blew air through my nostrils.

“It’s nothing, Dad. I just made a mistake. I had like a viral thing, and I got all confused. Okay? You don’t need to worry. Okay?”

I expected him to give up, then, as he normally does. This is about as far as his questioning goes. But he kept his eyes on the linoleum, and kept talking.

“Addison, Mr. Broadus told me that you’ve been putting up flyers about that classmate of yours? His son? And that you came to his house? He told me he thought you were on drugs. He said you fell and hit your head. Are you on drugs?”

How is it that an adult, like my father, who has
obviously
at least smoked weed in his life, and maybe even dropped acid, can use the word
drugs
like that? It’s like saying, “Did you eat food? Did you drink liquid?” If you’re “on” something, it’s drugs. So why not specify? I gave him the obligatory answer: “No, I’m not on drugs.” He still did not lift his eyes.

“You can, you know,
tell
me stuff, Addison. I’ll understand. We
all
make mistakes. Was it part of that project you mentioned? I mean, I can understand
that
. If it was for school.”

This made me even more tired.

“Yes, Dad. It was for school. It was part of the project. Okay? Is that okay?” I heaved the lie out, not caring that it sounded false. He went quiet. My blood beat at my temples. In the hall, a gurney wheel squeaked and a wave of cross talk followed. Then my father spoke again.

“Addison, is Phoebe pregnant?”

I couldn’t restrain my laughter. I just couldn’t. It bubbled out of me; exhausted as I was, I heaved up and down in my bed with it, chanting, “Yes, Dad, she’s pregnant. Okay? She’s totally pregnant. And we’re totally getting married and having the baby. Okay? Okay?” By the time I’d finished, he had lifted his eyes from the floor, and the hurt in them was visible enough to shut me up. We didn’t speak too much, after that.

I had two other visitors. I was more popular in the hospital than I am outside of it. The first person to come and talk to me other than my father was Archer B. Sexton. Remember him? The man with the interchangeable name? The man who wrote the disgusting article about Kevin?
An historically black institution
, etc.? That guy. I’d never met him before. Despite the considerable part he played in the events of my senior fall. He’d heard about the posters. He wanted to ask me about them. For an article, he said. I’d never considered that they would catch the attention of the media. Otherwise I would not have put them up. He was out of breath when he arrived. He came when my father had gone out to get a soda. Sexton still had his weird pomegranate facial coloration, and his voice was still extra gay.

My interview with Interchangeable Archer didn’t last long. He introduced himself—“Hi, Addison. I’m Arch Sexton. From the Post”? With a pause, maybe in case I said, “Oh God, not
the
Arch Sexton!” and started hyperventilating. I just stared. Bugging out my eyes on purpose. To freak him out, you know? Then he started talking about the flyers, how he thought it was noble, he was interested in how I’d come to do it, whether I’d accomplished anything. Et cetera. He talked and talked. I cut him off by saying, “Kevin was a strong and quiet presence, though blessed with a genuine musicality, a strong rhythm. He’ll be remembered and missed.” Sexton scribbled this down in his little notebook and looked to me for more copy. Eyes round and ready. Avid, even. So I pulled my blankets up over my head and ignored him till he went away. It took almost twenty minutes. Stupidity can be a form of strong character. “Why are you
lying
like that, Addison?” my father asked when he got back. I peeped out. He had a sweating maroon can of Shasta Cola (a product I have only ever seen available in the vending machines of Philip Sidney Memorial Hospital) and took a long slurp when I failed to answer.

So that was a big letdown for Sexton, I’m sure. If I ever get to a point in life where I can fire him, or maybe run him over with a car and make it look like an accident, I will. That twenty minutes made hospital life even worse. All I had to read was
Rage
. Only my father to talk to. And then Sexton. I mean, what the fuck? I guess when things start sucking, they just get worse, and if they’re going well, they just get better. Or I
would
guess that. But on the third morning, when I had just opened my eyes from a real champion sleep, I saw Digger poised in the dropsical-cushioned muddy mauve visitor’s chair, where my father normally would be.

“Hey, man,” I croaked. She was clenching her turquoise-beaded bag. Lips parted for speech. She’d put a crimson streak in her hair, above her brow. She had on her necklace from Chile and a black T-shirt with a picture of this musician she admires, Lou Reed. And she was wearing makeup, which she never does. I know I told you she’s not hot. But I swear to fucking God: at that moment some beauty was in her or shone through her, a beauty that demands respect and even fear, but
good
fear. I had never seen anyone or anything so infused with such impersonal beauty. Even in the dead light of my room you could see it.

“Did you call my mother the C-word?” she asked me, as her bouncing heel made the beads on her bag clack.

“No, I don’t
know
your mother,” I said. It took me a while to wake up during the days of my short convalescence. I think they were medicating me or something.

“Addison. Addison. Earth to Addison.” Snapping her fingers.

“Oh, wait. Yes. Yes, I
technically
did,” I answered. I knew what she was referring to now. The phone call. That put me back on
terra cognita
.

“Yeah. She said you did. A couple weeks ago. On the phone. I was just checking.”

“Digger, man,” I stammered.

“Addison,” she interjected, then pitched a sigh, clapped her hands once. “You’re not
dying?
Your father seems incredibly worried. I spoke to him. He’s outside. He’s looks mopey, sort of.” Big surprise there.

“No, it was just like a virus. And I got stitches in the back of my head. I think I’m
basically
okay.”

“Seriously, though. Why did you
call
her that?” She was not accusing me of anything. Maybe she just wanted a valid reason why. Maybe she kind of
admitted
the possibility that her mother might be a cunt. Digger’s honest about people. She was spreading her hands now.