The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” Digger asked. We had plans. They were showing The Sorrow and the Pity—which is this ass-numbingly boring documentary about the Holocaust—Saturday afternoon at the Camelot. The Camelot, like I said, is the movie theater right next to Don’t Shoot, where I bought my favorite edition of the Aeneid. I forgot to mention that it’s a combination art film/porno theater. It shows The Sorrow and the Pity at least twice a year, and Digger and I always go. To make fun of it, you’re thinking. I don’t blame you, given everything I told you about my Holocaust jokes. But we don’t. I saw a scrap of it on television once, a few years ago. And I couldn’t get it out of my head. I thought at first that it was like a public television special or something, but my father told me it was a movie, an actual in-theaters movie, although it came out a long time ago. And it’s not action-packed or anything. It’s kind of boring, like I said. That’s what I like about it. It wasn’t boring in the trivial way that school or life is boring. It has this more massive boringness. Its boringness intimidates you, shuts you up. You can’t say anything in response to it. You can’t even criticize it, because that would be the same as criticizing history itself. There was also, following the The Sorrow and the Pity, a movie called The Erotic Adventures of Marie-France. Which Digger and I had joked about sticking around for, but which we both knew we’d chicken out of watching.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I confirmed. My father stopped singing and the faucets squeaked off. I never heard him leave, because it took me five seconds to fall asleep. A record, in my case.

  But in that sliver of consciousness, this memory ambushed me. From last year, right near the end of school. It’s about Alex Faustner. About the time I made her cry without telling a Holocaust joke. Why it should have surged up then, right as I perched at the lip of sleep, who knows. I never think about it otherwise. Anyway, it happened last June. In English class. A hot, fly-buzzing day. Alex was going on and on about the Aeneid, which we were reading in English for our world-literature segment (that offensive Burton Fragment translation I mentioned before), about how awful Aeneas’s behavior was, how Virgil glorified violence (true, but not in the sense she meant), how Aeneas or Priam or Virgil or the poem itself “prevented dialogue” (what?).

  And yes, I admit it: I lost it. Without being called on, and shouting over the objecting chirps Ms. Prather emitted, I launched into a speech, in a choked voice. “No, man, you’re missing the whole point. You can’t apply our virtues here. You can’t! They were operating under a whole different set of ideas. You can’t judge them. You can’t judge Virgil. Are you planning on writing something that we’ll like still be reading in thousands of years? Are you? You have no right! You just don’t. Okay?” Or at least, that’s what I tried to say. I’m sure it came out as incomprehensible noise, a series of shouts and gargles—I was trying to cram a whole philosophy into twenty seconds. Although that’s a good sign for any philosophy, if it can be distilled into a sentence or two. I leaped up, tumbling my date-carved chair to the ground with a ringing clatter. My hands moved, chopping and beckoning. Alex smirked in dismissal. Until I came to the crest of my speech and pointed at her, my index finger stiff and aching with anger, shouting in a voice taut with anger, given sudden clarity by it: “You cretin. You know NOTHING of what you’re talking about.” Yes, cretin. Yes, emphasis on the NOTHING. Archaic. But it just came out that way, I swear!

  Ms. Prather stopped her chirping and looked at me with open hatred. Which I deserved. Then, to my surprise, Alex started crying. Not her usual pleading snivel. But real crying. She apparently gave a shit, ladies and gentlemen, whether I thought she was a cretin. Her delicate, high-boned face collapsed, and her glossed razor-straight dark hair cascaded forward, falling from her tawny neck with deliberate grace, and she stumbled and loped to the slablike door, which she stiff-armed open. I felt no remorse. I was shocked what I said had any impact at all. I felt … nothing. At first. Ms. Prather wasn’t saying anything and neither was anyone else. We could all hear Alex’s muffled sobs. She was standing right outside the classroom, I could see the top of her gleaming hair through the cross-wired window in the door. I stayed, swaying, for a long three seconds before I walked out, index finger closed in my book, my lead-heavy bag over one shoulder. I still have no idea what the looks my classmates gave me as I passed them meant. But they were identical.

  There’s this paradox that Mr. Vanderleun told us about in the second week of class this year. His eyes showed little pinpoint sparks of self-love when he explained it: We have no choice but to behave as though we have free will. Oooooh! Profound! It has all the appearance of some glib, fake-philosophical statement. The sad fact is, though, is that it’s true. And how can you distinguish that from being free? I mean, wouldn’t real freedom have no compulsion involved in it? If you think about it long enough, you see that the paradox is actually pointing you to the idea that we have no freedom whatsoever. If we’re forced to use free will, what meaning does freedom have?

  This is something Virgil understands. I think this is what Alex was objecting to in the Aeneid. And if you judge our actions by that principle, I didn’t do anything wrong, and she didn’t do anything right. We were just two actors behaving in a certain way, because we had no other choice. It makes sense. What else, I mean given all the background conditions of being me, could I have done? What else could she have done? At the time, though, I did not see it this way. All I was concerned with were the faces of my classmates, who had turned to stare at me. Twenty-six adolescents, full of hormones and confused ideas. You’d expect there to be some variation in their facial expressions. But they were all staring at me with this mixture of incomprehension and … I still haven’t found the exact word. But it was not disapproval. That much I remember.

  VIII.

  I DON’T KNOW WHAT other cities are like. But they can’t be as bad as D.C., in one respect: no one gives the slightest fuck about anyone else here, except concerning that other person’s ability to help them advance in life. Though we also refuse to appreciate the spectacle of raw power, and we consider having too much money socially offensive. This is hilarious. Unless you are in government, and even then involved only in its higher levels, the social stakes here are minuscule. D.C. is small. Under a million people. And of that million, about one or two hundred thousand are involved in the stupid games I’m talking about. But there exists nonetheless a whole class of people here devoted to this astrology of power, who’s-in-who’s-out, these failed academics, with stiff plummy voices. You hear them on public radio and whatnot, where they get invited to do segments. Or on TV. Every minute of every day you could listen to this, if you want. People speculating about the secret workings of power, people you can tell will never have any, because under their put-on voices you can hear their doggish panting. I mean that as a metaphor. Sorry if it’s confusing.

  I’m a part of this culture, though. So I have no real right to criticize it. I told you about making people wait for their weed, which I do. I also make it a point to leave my pager at home one day a month. Could be a Tuesday, could be a Sunday, whatever. I make it a point to choose this day according to my whim, with no other rule in mind. I will admit, though, that I violated my principles when I chose that next day, Saturday, to be my out-of-contact day. Maybe I chose it because of Lorriner’s phone call and my failure with Huang. Maybe I chose it in spite of these things. They were the cause, though, no doubt about it. I guess everyone fails to live up to their convictions, sometimes. I had no pager when I went to meet Digger in front of the Camelot. I’d picked up my car where I’d left it at the Tip-Top, with a spurt of remembered shame. The Sorrow and the Pity got top billing on the marquee, but The Erotic Adventures of Marie-France was better advertised inside, by a poster of a nunnish-looking brunette in a petticoat or something, eyes lightly crossed, forefinger to her rich lips as though admonishing silence. Our shared knowledge of this woman’s imminent appearance on the screen made us more nervous and laugh-prone than normal
during our viewing of The Sorrow and the Pity. I kept whispering to Digger, “You know you want to.” I won’t lie: I was taking surreptitious whiffs of her scent every time I darted in to speak. She snorted and shoved me away, with practiced agility.

  A summary, you ask? Of the movie? Why, yes, that would fit here. This process—the description of works of art in writing, I mean—is called ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is one of the terms you have to know if you’re going to study Latin literature. It plays an important role in the Aeneid, when Aeneas is looking at a mural of Troy, which was his home city. The mural is in Carthage, where he flees after the fall of Troy, and gets involved with a woman named Dido, who is, to be honest, completely fucking insane, and the whole scene is sort of terrifying. Someone just staring at a marvelous image of the wreck of his life. But you’re all educated men and women, and have already seen the weighty classics like The Sorrow and the Pity. So ekphrasis would be a waste of time. I will say that The Sorrow and the Pity is a two-parter and that they were showing the first part that morning. Digger and I had vague plans to catch part two the following weekend. That has always seemed obscene to me. The division of the movie, whether it was the director’s idea to cut it up or the film company’s or whatever. I mean, was the Holocaust a mini-series? We ate no popcorn. The popcorn at the Camelot is subpar. It’s one of those beat-up old warhorse theaters. Cardboardish carpets. Springs jab your ass when you sit. Dust motes everywhere, wheeling through the pale beam from the projector. Et cetera. Some guy in the back was smoking. In a maroon cardigan. His linty hair mounded in two wings. You could just tell he was waiting for Marie-France to mince across the screen, flashing her provocative cross-eyed gaze.

  So blah blah blah, aristocratic French resistance fighters, some murky explosions, and newsreel footage of mud-clotted tanks driving in a crook-backed file through Poland. We know the movie by heart. There’s no reason it should be so gripping: it’s objectively boring. After some more grainy images of desolation, part one ended, and Digger and I wandered out into the strong fall daylight, unreality lingering in our skulls. The traffic signals on the street corner near the Camelot fronts are broken, and there’s a lot of kids in the neighborhood, so the city has set out these mesh baskets containing bright orange flags, isosceles triangles, that you wave as you cross the street. To warn drivers not to hit you or whatever. A whole troop of kids, a birthday party maybe, were threading their way across Connecticut Avenue in their bulky autumn jackets, waving the flags with weird precision. They weren’t moving in that spastic proud-cadet way kids have in lines. They looked like small adults. The kid in last place, for no reason, turned as he stepped off the curb and bellowed joyfully at us. No words. Just one of the pointless screams you let out when you’re that age, provoked by general happiness. His jacket was the color of the sky, and it had a legion of white ducks stenciled across the small chest, in geometrical flight. The children wound their way across the broad street and into the yew-hedged park on the opposite side. The poisonous yew berries were glowing in the sunlight on the hedges, with amazing predictability. They must kill so many schoolkids every year, if you think about it. I mean, I have a hard time not eating them.

  Then there was some residual kidding about going to the porn movie. Digger tried to act indifferent, but she was blushing. Which I don’t know how to respond to; it makes me dizzy, if I can use a sentimental-sounding word. So I relented, and stopped pestering her about The Erotic Adventures of Marie-France. Although to be honest the thought of watching a porn movie with Digger right next to me gave me a tremendous hard-on. (Is that fucked-up? I’m not trying to conceal anything here.) Given all this, then, and the fact that I had taken the day off from my business activities, there was nothing left to do except to go get high.

  For a long time, we rambled around in my car, smoking, with the radio on. Digger would join in the song, start-stop. She even rested her head on my shoulder, which I think was the first time she’d ever done that. It kind of violates the terms of the agreement, I guess, but I wasn’t going to say anything. Her wood-smoke smell came through above the sweet reek of the weed. She smells like the turn of the year. Like harvests. I can’t explain why this is so important, but it has to be. We still didn’t say much about what had happened yesterday. We did talk about Kevin, though. I mean, what else were we supposed to do? “Lorriner,” I murmured.

  “He’s probably at a Klan meeting,” Digger returned.

  “We have nothing to be afraid of.” My car was full of silvery smoke. We had parked, now, near where we started, behind the fenced-in green the flag-waving kids had dispersed into. Their voices came through the still, cold air, and even into my car: faint, disorganized music. A lot of people go there to smoke. A lot of mothers take kids there to play.

  “I mean, of course they were going to respond that way, Addison. They failed to do their jobs. With all that gang nonsense. Because Kevin was a minority.” I did not mention the fact that both Huang and Baltimore were minorities, though she could have figured it out herself. About Huang, I mean. I let her misconstrue the situation. “Look, look,” she was saying, and she fished a folded sheaf of paper out of her bag, which is enormous and covered with clicking turquoise beads, each the size of a human eye.

  She handed me two items: a glossy photo, a cheerleader in midleap, the image cut off just below her chin; and a fragile newspaper article. The same one I talked about before. You know—by Archer B. Sexton, the man with the interchangeable name? “Look,” she said, pointing to a quote. It was from Mr. Vanderleun, whom Sexton had interviewed after the murder: “Kevin was a strong and quiet presence, though blessed with a certain musicality, a strong rhythm. He’ll be remembered and missed.” “Didn’t he say that to you? When you asked him about it?” He had said it. Word for word. I tried, hard, to laugh, but all that came out was a dry cough.

  “Fuck, man, that’s so transparent. I can’t even say,” I told Digger, and she squeezed my shoulder.

  “That’s why we’re doing this,” she muttered. As she said that, I knew Lorriner was guilty. A burden vanished. Not a physical burden, though. We were free. We would find out. About Kevin. Despite Mr. Vanderleun and his lie. That’s a strange word to use. What else can you call repeating some offensive platitude, though? It was a lie when he said it to Sexton, and some kind of hyper-lie when he said it to me. Being young is closely related to being stupid, I admit. But you have to have forgotten your youth entirely to peddle falsehoods that lazy and clumsy.

  “Why did you like give me a picture of a cheerleader, though?” I asked.

  “No, look,” she repeated, “the other side. I cut it out of the junior yearbook.” It was him. In the amethyst vest and gold bow tie you have to wear if you’re a first chair in the band. (Yes, our band is called the Marching Tigers.) Standing in front of the school with his vertebrate-looking saxophone, a determined and placid calm arranging his stolid face. Light had blanked his round glasses. He had a slight, middle-agey paunch filling the vest. Digger was tapping the photo, making it quiver. “That’s why.” She sighed, and busied herself repacking her vermilion bowl. I smoothed out the Sexton article and flicked the feathery ash off of Kevin’s still face, and put the documents with his school files in my glove box.

  “I still like can’t believe that fucking guy like threatened to kill me, though. I mean, how stupid is that? Right? Right into the phone?”

  “He’s probably just some racist, Addison. So he’s obviously stupid.”

  This she delivered in a tone of voice … It’s the single aspect of her voice that puts me off. And she never uses it, or almost never. But when she does it makes her sound like a kindergarten teacher. Forgiving. Cadenced. It hides her personality in, I don’t know … some kind of social element, or something? Who knows why anyone does anything, though. I’m not one to criticize. I’d started to look through Kevin’s records in moments of boredom in my car, though I thought this was too strange to mention. To carry them around, to go through them. It comforted
me. Or no: it was like when you have to study for a test, and instead of procrastinating, you do it, and at first it seems so fake, but then you get into it. Into mastering a body of knowledge. Even a constricted one, even Kevin Broadus’s student history. Digger never found out about this. Then or later, when it became an even more important activity in my life. She would have taken it well, though. The way she took all my stupidity.

  With Kevin’s photo stashed, we got into things. We smoked and smoked, achieving (if that’s the word) light-headedness and lethargy. A lot of talk about the departed, yes. But since neither of us knew him, we could only remark on that fact, over and over: And we didn’t even know him. Yes, we sounded like old women or Episcopalians, bloodless and self-delighted. That’s all we could manage. My throat closed with fake emotion. Isn’t that disgusting? We suppressed all of our natural joyfulness. That was the worst, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Grave sadness and set mouths and eloquence dishonor the dead, because life is what honors the dead, its roughness and energy. Or whatever.