The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  “Why are you even interested in this guy.” Digger coughed. We were passing her bulbous, vermilion-streaked glass pipe (which always weirded me out with its suggestion of some indistinct human organ) back and forth in the orange light. To that I had no response. I couldn’t tell her, Because of that cloud we saw, man. Which would have been true, in a sense. But I didn’t speak. Relief stabbed through me. I should have told her. She would have figured out, probably, the falseness of my position, which I did not realize until … well, more or less until I started trying to answer your question, ladies and gentlemen. And she would have talked me down, and all the confused nonsense that followed from our conversation might have been avoided. She’s good at talking me down.

  “It’s just like a project, right?” I asked. Digger was now sitting, still naked, against the wall, her after-weed cigarette dangling out the window, her arm stretched. From her bed, I could see the tender plate of muscle shift beneath her right breast.

  “A project? Since when do you do projects?”

  “Alex Faustner does all kinds of projects.”

  “That’s a retarded statement.”

  “What is it then,” I replied as I sat down and rooted through her bag for a smoke, “if not a project?” She pulled in her hand and barked it against the window frame.

  “It’s just peculiarity. And that’s all right with me. You don’t have to justify it to me.”

  “Justify it, justify it to you,” I sang (my singing voice is horrible), snapping my fingers in time, and then got up and looked down into the street for the accident or signs of the accident, but perpetrator and victim were gone; just the usual stream of honking cars remained, trying to make their way around a construction crew. Who, I could tell even from four stories up, were fat, were joke exchangers, and would work with infinite slowness and carelessness. They had orange helmets and orange vests and moved like an uncertain basketball team around the sandy pit they’d dug in the street.

  “How long have those construction guys been there?” I asked Digger.

  “Forever,” she replied, and let go of her smoke. It tumbled and bounced against the stone front of her house, spitting amber-red sparks.

  I didn’t take any of the numerous pages—they start coming in around this time, late afternoon/early evening—summoning me to work. Sometimes I made people wait. Selling drugs is the single market of exchange in which the customer is always wrong. And making people wait stops them from thinking you’re a lackey, which is necessary. Otherwise the customers wouldn’t value your product. On the other hand, take it too far and you get a reputation as unreliable. Your business dries up. You’re not, after all, selling smack to hardened, hollow-eyed fiends. You’re selling weed to rich kids, at once arrogant and frightened. Some of them this makes deferential, some it has no effect on, and some it prompts to show off their own dreamed-up toughness. So keeping people on the hook makes sense, for me, as a business and social proposition. You have to feel it out as you go. You have to set it up to imply that you’re doing them a favor.

  Don’t think I haven’t encountered all kinds of indignant objections to that attitude. I’ve even made a few myself, in world history. Standing up for Platonic ideas about human rights, equality before the law, do unto others, etc. What a sense of gut-clenching well-being that provides. Everyone looks on in bewildered approval: Addison may be odd, but his heart is in the right place! Not that I don’t hold those beliefs. Everybody does. At least, everyone I’ve ever met. Maybe generalizing is unfair. But these ideas don’t have some kind of independent meaning. They’re just words; at the small scale nobody behaves in accordance with all the high ideals they talk about; everyone acts like animals, domesticated animals maybe, but still animals. So why the fuck not? Why not make your presence felt? Why not exercise power if you have it?

  My father was sitting in the dark when I got home, waiting for me to ask him what the matter was. He’d cleaned himself up, I saw, as though he had a meeting with his miniature, dark-suited gallery rep, Viktor Something, whom I refer to privately as the Hungarian Pickpocket. Because of his hairline and quick fingers, always kneading air. He would have been a better gallery rep had he been a Hungarian pickpocket, I’m sure. As things stood, he was a failed artist helping out my father, another failed artist, or an artist on the way to failing. “Tell me it’s worth it,” my father moaned—his face supported by both his huge leaden hands. The blankness that in the presence of any other person would have been laughter overtook me. It constricted my breathing. But I managed to mumble, “You know it is, Dad,” before stumbling downstairs.

  He’s a lot taller than I am—my father, I mean—but narrow. Shoulders, chest, lips, eyes. Narrow except for his walnut-knuckled hands. His forehead bulges, tracing half the curve of a sleigh bell, and his nose would not be out of place among the features of a Roman emperor, though on him it looks starved and weak. The pots he throws are tall, thin, built like him, and—given the frequency with which they break—possess some similar fragility. Although my father is, body-wise, sound as an ox. He never gains weight, needs little sleep and food. I admire him for that. It’s one of his few genuine qualities. It’s a good thing he has a strong constitution, too, because when he does get sick, even with a cold or some minor complaint, a sprained finger, he starts carrying himself as though he were about to be executed the next morning. With the smug, pardoning smile of a saint under torture.

  After I was sure he was gone to his meeting with Viktor or whatever, I went outside. Sprigs of stars glittered in the turkey oaks interlaced above our yard. I dragged a patio chair to the shed that houses his kiln, which is made of some indestructible, chintzy-looking material. He built it, or had it built, after my mother died. As though he’d been waiting. Sometimes I go and sit near it, to feel the whisper of heat from it, to watch the air distorted, and to see the transparent rags of flame that slip out from it in a breeze. Sometimes—and this is fucked-up—I fantasize about being inside of it, first protected, just as an observer among the hardening graceful forms there, the brightening colors, forms that sometimes explode under the strain, and then the protection would vanish and I’d be consumed, too quick for pain, for any sensation at all. I was gripping the arms of the patio chair, not a painful grip but with a certainty, when my reverie lifted. The air had chilled me, and the hunger for sleep rose through me, like sap in a tree.

  This meant, of course, that it was time to read the Aeneid. I have been reading it every night before sleep since the end of my junior year, when we studied it in Latin class. I have three copies. One of them is an edition from 1973, “interpreted” by Professor Burton J. Fragment of the English department of Yale University, and it has a floppy paper cover, in teal and rose, a cover that announces how mealymouthed and self-serving the version inside is. I also have two real translations. One is a cheap paperback edition of the Dryden translation. I had to tape its spine, I thumbed through it so much. The other one is the best, a hardback in two volumes, from the Loeb Classical Library. They have apple-red paper jackets and blood-colored cloth bindings. The Loeb translation was made in 1926 by a man called E. T. P. Bredon-Howth, from a text of the Latin prepared by Heinrich Balde in 1878. I bought the Fragment translation for my eleventh-grade English class. It was all they had in the bookstore, and the girl working as a cashier gave me a critical, bulgy-eyed look. This was bad. She went to my school, I remembered. And worse, she was good-looking. The Dryden I swiped from a public library I wandered into one afternoon when I was high. The Loeb edition I purchased for eighteen dollars from Don’t Shoot the Piano Player, which is this used bookstore right next to the Camelot, a movie theater, in the shadow of its long, harp-shaped marquee. The guy there didn’t give me any looks. He owns both the theater and the bookstore. This old hippie whose distinguishing features are his nebulous receptive-looking mass of dust-colored hair, and the fact that he drives a gleaming black Rolls-Royce, which is always parked outside Don’t Shoot (as people call it). He resembles some
second-rate, unkempt butler when he’s in the driver’s seat.

  Why the Aeneid? It’s exciting but also difficult to understand. The stories in it are kind of incomprehensible. Venus raping Anchises. Aeneas returning from the underworld through the Gate of Ivory, the gate through which Virgil says false dreams arrive in the world. And the way it ends: in a single instant, just like a human life. It all appears at first to be nonsensical, but that’s because it belongs to a world that no longer exists. In the centuries between us and Virgil, we kind of lost interest in things that are hard to understand. I’m generalizing, yeah, but am I wrong? It’s why, maybe, so much biography gets written now, even of people you’ve never heard of. Which should be the sole test to see if someone deserves a biography: whether a random guy on the street has heard of him. I don’t know why this has happened. Everyone, though, seems sort of bricked into his own life. At least, everyone I know, including me. Not in “quiet desperation”—the phrase comes from another terrible author my teachers forced me to read, Henry David Thoreau—but just by the fact of living in the small, boring modern world. And this explains why all my teachers have been so terrible. I mean because they, like Thoreau, see their own selves not as prisons but as subjects of thunderous interest. I don’t want to sound harsh, but holy fuck! No one who admires Thoreau should be permitted anywhere near a school.

  III.

  THE ONE FIT MEMORIAL to the dead is vengeance of some kind. Against the killer, against some other inevitability, though that too always fails. By definition. And what vengeance, you are no doubt asking, ladies and gentlemen, what vengeance do you propose—you mouthy coward? The truth is, I had no idea. So, yes, I’m an emotional hypocrite. Like everyone else. All I had was this knock-kneed impulse to find out. I couldn’t ask any of my classmates, because fuck them. I didn’t know them anyway. Can you imagine how Alex Faustner would respond if I asked her about Kevin? Everyone else is just as bad as her, except for Digger. And she was my equal in ignorance. So my classmates were out. Which left my teachers. Who are not, as you may have gathered from the brief remarks I’ve made about them, capable of anything high-spirited. They failed to detect the lie I’d cooked up to get them to talk. They were deceived by a seventeen-year-old. Isn’t that a disqualifying failure? Don’t you have to be savvier than people to instruct them in anything? And it wasn’t even a good lie. It was transparent. I told them—I knew the phrase would turn their gazes glassy with delight—I told them I wanted to “do an oral history project.” I can’t even write this without laughing. The whole G&T Program has this huge and inexplicable commitment to oral history. Last year we had to do this series of interviews: hunt up and interrogate a veteran from every war since the Second World.

  Mr. Vanderleun I asked first. He has nine fingers in total. He once lectured us about the cause of this loss. When he was a younger man (he’s fifty now), he did not want to go to war in Vietnam. So he asked his girlfriend to cut off his right pinkie finger. The story struck me as false, because he didn’t specify what instrument the girlfriend used. He just said, “I put my finger down on the block, and whshhhhhhhht,” making a tight-arced swoop with his other hand. Who wouldn’t say what weapon had been used? He got all excited and gleamy-eyed when I told him about my fake idea.

  “Kevin was a strong and quiet presence, though blessed with a genuine musicality, a strong rhythm. Aren’t you going to take notes? He’ll be remembered and missed.” That’s all he would say. It was basically what Ms. Prather had said last year, when Kevin was still alive.

  With Dr. Karlstadt I had not much more luck: “I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Addison. I didn’t even know you were friends.” We hadn’t been, as I’ve said. But I still forced some outraged sputters. Which did no good. Dr. Karlstadt waved me out and started rifling through her lunch bag. Their classrooms—Mr. Vanderleun’s and Dr. Karlstadt’s, I mean—are mirror images of each other, the gray, fireproof, prison-admin door in one corner, right next to the blackboards with the ghosts of other people’s handwriting—the most mysterious and saddening thing in the world—faint and visible. Also: she’s our history teacher and our principal. Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Or the sign of special treatment, for her students, I mean? That’s how things operate at John F. Kennedy Senior High! As I said: a goddamn embarrassment.

  Digger had no sympathy for my failures.

  “What did you expect,” she muttered as we were getting high the day Karlstadt shot me down. “They’re so into themselves you can’t really expect them to care that much about anyone else.” I told her what Mr. Vanderleun said, knowing it would provoke a spurt of contempt-laced laughter from her. Which it did, which gratified me. Being able to make her laugh, I mean. Even if it was only with borrowed nonsense. We were lying—clothed, though—in my bed. My father was out teaching pottery, and the pipes in my house, which are über-old, kept making these weird moans of admonition.

  “What about talking to his parents?” I said. Digger vetoed this, on the grounds that it would be better to present them with some conclusive report, not to consult them beforehand: “My mother always says that what you don’t know makes no difference to you.” I had a vision of Dr. Zeleny at this moment, bloody bone saw in hand, her eyes glistening with butchery above a sterile face mask. And for the second time that week I had to fuck Digger to avoid thinking about something. I’m not trying to be a misogynist here, which I realize I had to fuck Digger has overtones of. But she was always up for it, just as much as me, sometimes even more than me. That was a big part of our agreement: that neither of us could refuse. Just to keep things on equal footing. If we were injured or whatever, exceptions were possible in theory. In normal situations, though, no refusing. I said before that her complicity always surprised me. I mean, I know intellectually it shouldn’t have. There was nonetheless this component of surprise of the internal organs, of my viscera, every time. I know that’s an obscure phrase. But I was high as shit, so maybe it’s better to use the ungainly and sententious language of weed smokers. To give you the flavor of it.

  As I’m sure the men among you remember, sex at seventeen or eighteen is kind of strange for guys. Because you have, in the short term, no stamina whatsoever. But you have, in the long term, a huge amount. You can blow your load a whole bunch of times, but it doesn’t matter. To you. I can’t imagine that it’s all that tremendously satisfying for women, who seem to take longer. This is based on my own single-channel experience here, so please forgive any crudity or ignorance in these statements. I’m just trying to get everything down, so that you can form a clear picture. My best and worst qualities. Anyway, we had finished and dressed and gone upstairs: Digger gets hungry afterward, and we were looking for food, which in my house is pointless. My father eats almost nothing, and I’m not much of an eater myself. All we could find was a jar of peanuts, in the dark back part of a cabinet, next to a pair of my father’s clay-rigid work gloves. Digger had vacuumed down most of them by the time my father returned. This was a Tuesday, which meant he would be drunk.

  There’s some tradition at the Cochrane Institute of the faculty and students going to this bar called the A and V Lounge after class on Tuesday. I think my father liaises with whatever student he’s seeing there. Yes, he dates his students. Don’t pretend that you’ve never heard of that happening at high levels of instruction. He came back alone, which I breathed silent thanks for, because having him bring home a woman while Digger was there … I’d have no idea how to deal with that. He walked in with precise steps, surrounded by the sugary afterodor of whiskey. There was a long cardboard tube clenched in his left armpit. What a rolled-up, unframed picture comes in. He doesn’t stumble when he drinks. He can even drive, with a murder-eyed evenhandedness. But you can tell, all the same, from the slackness of his face.

  “Hello, Phoebe,” he sang out as he strode into the bathroom. My father won’t use Digger’s nickname. Just, I think, to be an asshole. Or because he thinks it’s funny to ignore people’s prefer
ences. She’s used to it. She refuses to let it bother her.

  He was shouting from the bathroom, over the running water. When he rejoined us, droplets glinted in his goatee.

  “So what are you two smirking about? You make me ill at ease,” he rumbled on.

  “Just a little research. For like school,” Digger returned. “Just a sort of a project.”

  “Ha!” he crowed, and bowed in self-approval before he yanked the peanut jar away from her. “Young people do nothing but lie, these times.” He screwed the top on the jar. That’s my dad. Then he was up and shambling around. The dining room is our de facto gallery. For his work, I mean. Most of his stuff either explodes in the kiln or he breaks it himself in fits of gloom, or he crates it away. A whole section of our basement is piled with these crates, on every one of which he has stenciled SCHACHT. In that army block lettering. As though someone was going to swipe his crates. The pots that escape this oblivion—the ones he’s suffered the most over, the ones that have provoked his direst outpourings to me—are ranked above the table on shelves he installed, crowding the walls. The walls he painted this sage green, which just makes everything worse. The larger pots, the ollae and amphorae and whatever, stand in mute pomposity on the floor.