The November Criminals (20 page)

Kevin’s death was
not
my fault. Many, many other things were, but not that. I’d never even felt guilty for it. I had just tried to make myself feel guilty for it. And how fucked-up is that? To seek the pleasure of guilt, the pleasure of self-abasement. And I knew, in that moment I knew: now or ever, there would be no answer. I was certain of that. The thing Mr. Broadus said about the watch made me certain of it. There was no plan behind the death. There was no cause. Some trophy-collecting motherfucker had taken Kevin’s life. Someone with a windowless white van. No
business killer
would do that. I mean, David Cash wouldn’t. Not that he’s a killer. But he’s a better businessman than Noel, and will someday eclipse him. He’s another natural. Just with a different upbringing. No, Kevin’s death occurred at random, along with the deaths of Turquoise Tull and Brandon Gambuto.

Remember them? They died too, except my stupid obsessional personality erased them. So what if Kevin took the most bullets! Maybe the guy who shot him hated his invulnerable smile. The blank-faced man. You might as well just call him Mr. Circumstance, because that’s what he is, was, and will be. Yes, the police failed. Yes, I failed. We all failed. Remember what I said before about how you can’t manage tragedy? You can’t. You can’t stop Mr. Circumstance. He waits everywhere, with infinite patience and zero mercy. You can’t avoid or efface the bleak sight of the wrecks and ruins he leaves among us. Kevin. Stokey the bum. Noel Bradley. My father. Mr. Vanderleun. Mr. Broadus. All damaged, all injured and stunted, because they were guilty or because they were innocent. You’re laughing by now at all this
grimness
. But I was there. I saw it firsthand. I’m not lying. Don’t think I’m lying because I’m young. You think I’m lying, I’ll introduce you to six million dead Jews, including a million children, and the tens of millions of others who died in our wonderful century, crushed, mangled, raped, tortured, frozen, mutilated, buried alive, burned, gassed, garroted, starved, drowned, impaled, fed to their bunkmates, injected with phenol, flung into the ripped-open hillsides and left for the frost to cover, eyes and mouths agape. So fuck you. Fuck you! That’s your answer. Unless some miracle occurs, you have to accept it.
I
had to accept it. You’ve seen what I had to
go
through in order to accept it. Now
you
accept it. You motherfuckers.

XVIII
.

L
ADIES AND GENTLEMEN
, you’ve asked me to explain what my best and worst qualities are. As a prerequisite for admission to your university. This essay was choice number two, of six options. The other topics, frankly, I found insipid.
Explain what your name means to you, and why. You’re having a conversation with Plato: what is the first question you ask him? Write about one of your friends—who’s at least fifty years older than you
. I mean, come the fuck on!
What is your best quality? What is your worst quality?
, on the other hand, is intriguing. I’ve provided all the necessary transcripts and whatnot, and you’ll have all of it by your admission deadline. So everything’s clear. And we’re finally there. At the answer, I mean. If you’ve read this far, just have a scintilla more of patience.

Do you know what November Criminals are? It’s kind of a magical-sounding term, right? People who steal winter, some fairy-tale bullshit like that? Or a band name, some über-pretentious band name, and the band is nothing but a drum machine and a French guy playing the electric cello. But, happily, November Criminals were real. At least conceptually. The term was developed in Germany in the interwar years. It came out of the fears and hatreds of a whole constellation of political interests. High-ranking government officials. Demobbed soldiers, many of whom were injured and prevented from earning a living. Impoverished working-class people whose lives had been wrecked by the economic catastrophes after the end of the First World War. German patriots, both of the real and rabble-rousing kind, lowborn and highborn, philosophers and political criminals. Protofascists. And, of course, Germany’s most enduring political group, anti-Semites.

November Criminal
was originally a slur aimed at the German politicians who signed the Treaty of Versailles, whom the above groups considered to be traitors to the causes of Germany in the war: glory, military science and potency, and the right for their nation to retain its eccentric and undemocratic political arrangements. Although these arrangements were not
illiberal
. At least when held up in comparison to the political lives of the nations making war on Germany. Especially the United States under Wilson, a president who resegregated the federal government, launched campaigns of terror against perceived internal political threats, and involved American military might in a European conflict, at a huge cost, for no reason other than to gratify his bloodthirsty belief in historical progress. Let’s give it up for Woodrow Wilson! Racist and authoritarian. And proud of both! Now there’s like some institute named after him at Princeton University. I learned this from the brochure they sent me. My textbook skips all of this stuff. About how bad Wilson and FDR were, I mean. Dr. Karlstadt, who describes Wilson, FDR, and Kennedy as the holy trinity of American presidents (that’s
verbatim;
she actually said
holy trinity)
, doesn’t want to discuss these issues. So I had to read up on them in a book I dug out of my parents’ bookcases. Which is to say my mother’s bookcases. My father’s not much of a reader. Best sellers, but the kind pretentious critics back. My mother, though, had wide-ranging tastes. Including a lot of European history. She had this one book from the 1970s called
Before Us Darkness
, about Germany in the interwar period. Written by this guy Jürgen Bitzius.

An awesome book. Calm and somber. In its pages I found out all that stuff about Wilson, and also about the November Criminals. A term that, as things worsened in Germany, became more popular, expanding to include supporters of the Weimar Republic. It took on a metaphysical aspect: someone who, through weakness and disingenuousness, betrayed his country. Not by spying or profiteering, but by morally undermining the war effort. Yes, the concept
November Criminal
is a spacious one. And it enjoyed—I’m sure you’re shocked to hear this—considerable overlap with Germany’s traditional object of blame, the Jews. Who had been assigned the broadest responsibility for all inequality and hardship in German society. As had been done for centuries, and as the German spirit would continue to do for two and half decades longer. Germany only stopped
then
because the government had killed 89 or 90 percent of the Jews remaining there after hostilities had opened, so
blaming
stopped making a great deal of sense. I mean, not that it ever made sense, but you can’t whip people up into a frenzy against some group if the group has already been
eradicated
. You can’t destroy what no longer exists.

Now, just as a side note, I should point out that Germany’s Jews were
extremely
patriotic. They were not November Criminals. Tens of thousands died in the First World War. They were not patriots out of fear, either, but because they
wanted
to be Germans. Blaming them for the fall of Germany, when it was a simple case of inferior numbers, bad luck, and inept leadership, as is the case with every defeated nation, was just absurd. That didn’t stop anyone, though. And everybody knows what the eventual consequences of that hatred were. That
insistence
that Jews creep around corroding everything. That we’re treasonous by some ontological quality. We don’t have to
do
anything to commit treason. Other than exist.

So what the fuck does this have to do with the essay question you set me? I believe with all firmness that I am a November Criminal, a betrayer by nature. Someone guilty at the feet of everyone else for his petty, sordid life and his petty, sordid crimes. An ontological failure. If you see what I mean. There you go! An answer to the second half of your essay question. As for the first, I’d argue: a November Criminal
by definition
does not have
any
good qualities. So there it is. All of it. All the emptiness and moral vacuity you could want. The killer: gone. The implements of my quest: gone. Kevin, my secret brother in the craft: gone. The whole result of my investigations amounted to a single dead dog and a four-inch gash on the back of my scalp. Nothing is ever explicable in full. Only human character reveals anything worthwhile. I am a November Criminal. That is my worst quality. Every man has to be a literary critic at some point in his life, drawing retarded comparisons and making psychological deductions. Most of these are wrong. I am right. I am guilty. I fucking know it.

And as a November Criminal, I can say that, while November Criminality may not have been prevalent in 1920s Germany, it sure as shit exists in contemporary America, where it thrives in the most educated stratum of society. I know you don’t believe me. I know you don’t believe thousands of reasonable, bourgeois people violate and corrode
through their mere existence
the principles of equality, of exceptionless equality, of impossible equality, that the founders of our country articulated and betrayed. No one would disagree that a guy who owned slaves, in the context of the ideal America, is a November Criminal. A traitor. Not in a legal sense. But that’s the
point
of November Criminals. Their treason isn’t
legal
. It’s spiritual. Which leaves room for all sorts of less obvious,
sublimated
forms of treachery. You can decide for yourself, though: I’m going to tell you now what happened to my money. The eighteen grand I won at the dogfight, I mean, won with the savings I had tried to sacrifice to the Potomac. The money that got left behind at the Broadus home during my collapse, and gave me some worried hours during my convalescence. Ladies and gentlemen of the admissions board of the University of Chicago—if that is in fact the appropriate manner of addressing you; if you do in fact constitute a board—I
promised
you a circus-like closing event. And I’m going to deliver. I just have to explain the setup a little more, so you can appreciate the real piquancy of the whole thing.

I got back to school on Monday, October 16. My absence had not caused any real commotion. No one asked me why I had stopped answering my pager. There are, after all, plenty of other retail vendors in my particular market. Though the hair had grown back in over the scar a bit, Mr. Vanderleun was obsequious about my wound. I guess he thought I’d received it in a just cause or something. As he’d gotten his. Classwork and homework stopped enraging me. The impulse to shout down everyone in the world seemed to have vanished from my character. Even Alex I could stand. I no longer had to stop myself from correcting her. And there was one really, really awesome thing about going back. I discovered that Digger would sit with me, even if she didn’t talk. And I was okay with that. Talking is overrated. We sat saying nothing, eating our sandwiches and pears; we walked side by side saying nothing in the halls. Silence from her is better than conversation from anyone. Even the decisive way she swings her arms is better than other people talking. And I appreciated her generosity. No one wants to be around people who have involved them in failures. Especially if you have as fundamentally
noble
a character as Digger does. It made homeroom bearable and lunch downright idyllic. And we walked to and from class together, fellow cadets. We always parted ways when school ended. I didn’t try any more stunts. No grabbing her coat. We shook hands, and that was it. That was how it had to be.

So we pressed on, for a week, for ten days. Ms. Erlacher, perhaps assuming that my having been out of class for so long had blunted my skills, picked me to do a sight translation of a text no one in class had seen before. This was her way of pop-quizzing us on grammar and syntax. There’d be a block of Latin on the blackboard when we walked into the classroom, and all the idiots would groan about it. We had to translate it, or as much as we could, in the first five minutes of class. And then she would choose one person to read his translation, as a way of keeping all her students subdued with fear, I guess. This time we were being grilled on the ablative absolute, which is this really economical way Latin has of explaining the specific secondary events and conditions under which another, primary event occurred. Like, for example,
Urbe capta Aeneas fugit
. Which means literally “With the city captured, Aeneas fled,” or “The city having been captured, Aeneas fled,” and in smoother English “After the city was captured, Aeneas fled.”
Urbe capta
is the ablative absolute, in this example: a noun (urbs,
urbis
, feminine, city) in the ablative case coupled with a modifying participle
(capta
, the ablative feminine singular past participle of
capio, capere
, “to take, seize, or capture”). Get it? There are four basic flavors of ablative absolute: one each using the past and present participles, one where one noun modifies the other, and one where an adjective modifies a noun, although a lot of the time that adjective is itself derived from a past participle, so it’s debatable whether that’s its own thing or not. Whatever. Not that hard, really.

The chosen passage did not ascend the heights of difficulty Ms. Erlacher thought it did. It was long, yes, and syntactically involved, but once you figured out that it was just an extended series of ablative absolutes explaining the various things that had happened before Caesar sat down to dine in his tent—some tribes were subdued, some soldiers got paid, that sort of thing—piece of fucking cake, right? She never told us the sources of these quotes; she wanted us going at them blind. And that morning she picked me to share my work, her eyes dimming with rage because I finished writing after about a minute. “Mr. Schacht! You seem to have hurried through. As usual. Would you care to share?” I got a hundred. As usual. This happened two Fridays after my return. I really wanted to tell Digger, but I refrained. I managed not to call her that weekend, although the urge had gotten stronger than ever. Instead, I started looking through the college brochures. I found that I could not take my eyes off the totally ordinary people photographed for them, in libraries or on greenswards. And I found myself thinking a lot about my high school’s motto.

Yes, we have a motto. Yes, it’s in Latin.
Haec olim meminisse iuvabit
. “Someday it will make us happy to remember these things.” It’s from the
Aeneid
, actually. Although, with typical dishonesty, my school has shortened it and considerably altered the meaning in doing so. Big A says it during a pep talk to his crewmen. The “things” he’s talking about are the loss of thirteen of his army’s ships, the wreck of Troy, and other catastrophes. And what he actually says is,
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
, which means “Someday, perhaps, it will make us happy to remember even these things.” You see the difference? Kind of a hilarious source for a high school motto, right? I cannot figure out what the fuck our founders were thinking, in both choosing it and then editing it.

It was with this dubious precept in mind that I walked into homeroom the following Monday, the penultimate day of October. The usual halfhearted Halloween decorations, the orange and black streamers and crepe that were used interchangeably now and during Thanksgiving, defaced our hallways. Once everyone had quieted down, Mr. Vanderleun informed us that he had a “very special” announcement. After some stump wiggling, he revealed that I had, in fact, missed out on something important in the life of John F. Kennedy students. At the beginning of the month an anonymous donor had given the school a “very generous” sum to set up a yearly writing award. It was going to be called the Kevin Broadus Memorial Prize. We all remembered Kevin, didn’t we? (I was tempted to say,
Yes, and he’ll be missed. He had a genuine musicality.)
He outlined the requirements of the prize: a two-thousand-word essay on a socially or politically “relevant” topic (that’s the word he used,
relevant)
, to be judged by him, Dr. Karlstadt, and Ms. Arango. “We had a real flood of applicants,” he huffed, “just an
avalanche.”
His tone made me suspect there had been almost none. You know? Over-insistent. Then he said that he was
delighted
to inform us that the first winner had been chosen. It had been hard, he asserted, to choose from
so many
. (I was sure he was lying about this, now.) But the grain was sifted, and there would be an assembly that afternoon to announce the winner. And, of course, to commemorate Kevin. “And so, I think if you’ll all just applaud when she stands up, the winner is right here in this room! Alex Faustner, everyone!” Who was surprised by this? Not me! She
took a bow
. Her gleaming blue-black hair flipped up and down. I looked at Digger and Digger looked back, and no one made a sound, except for Mr. Vanderleun. “It’s a thousand
dollars
, people,” he said, to spur our morale and applause.