The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  “Man,” I went on, assuming a jocular air, “we just need to find the real guy and get him like preemptively.” Digger did not respond. I was worried, now. Her silence suggested doubts. “Hey, Digger? Right? What should we do? Do you think.” Still nothing. I rambled, trying to get her back in sympathy with the cause. I even brought up the racial angle again, which had worked before. She just asked me to be quiet. That didn’t stop me. “Hey, look, man. We both thought this guy was the guy. We both did. Right? And now you can’t just like disavow the whole idea? Right?” This prodded her into speech. Her voice, though modulated, got all thready—frayed, sort of.

  “Don’t use that word. Disavow. You go on and on about this guy and then we like go and kill his dog? Some poor fat guy. And it was not him, okay, Noel’s a liar, and you are by extension, and it was all just some atrocious coincidence. Okay? Coincidence. Like everything else. It’s all just appearances and coincidence. Maybe you’re going through some weird thing about Kevin. And maybe I sort of like humored you. But it’s like bad luck. Just bad luck. For everyone. I’m really tired, Addison. It’s just like what you’re always yammering about. From Latin. ‘O Fortuna’ whatever. That stupid song. Like that.” You could tell that she was, despite her controlled voice, angry. With me, with the situation. But there’s no bigger reason than being wrong to turn on the old self-righteousness faucet, and I let out some gorilla breaths, nostrils flared, as I planned my response. I had a whole little speech ginned up.

  She started talking before I could. About the last possible subject I expected her to bring up. Our agreement. I didn’t realize it at first, because she failed to make herself clear. Or, I should say, I was too stupid to grasp what she meant by saying, “You’re being really unfair to me. And you’re pretending not to know it.”

  “Man, how am I being unfair? You’re just like sitting there. I mean, yeah, we were wrong but you can’t just sit there and not say anything.”

  “I don’t mean that.” She wouldn’t look at me.

  “So what then? What do you mean? Not telling me will not like resolve the issue.”

  “If you can’t figure it out, why should I tell you? Don’t talk to me like we’re having some debate, okay? Just don’t.”

  I took two minutes to respond, judging by the dash clock, pallid and blue. I had no idea what she was so pissed about, when I opened my mouth. So I decided to guess, like they tell you to do on standardized tests.

  “Do you mean unfair about like the sex?” I mumbled.

  “No. I don’t know. No. But you’re not some fucking person I don’t know. So why are you talking to me like you are? Why do you say disavow? We’re not on the debate team together. And yeah, okay, maybe the sex is part of it. Yeah, so we don’t say that. But come on, man. Don’t be fucking obtuse. So the sex is part of it. Okay? Okay? Is that what you wanted to hear, you fucking asshole?”

  She still would not look at me.

  “I thought you wanted that, man,” I said. This turned out to be a terrible idea.

  “So you didn’t,” she coughed back instantly, as though she had been waiting all night for me to say just that, and crammed a thumb into her mouth.

  “No, Digger like you’re my best friend, man,” I mumbled, to my own mild horror. This is maybe the worst thing to say to anyone at any time. I waited, jaw clenched in self-protection, for her to scream at me, to make some wounding remark. That’s what violations of our agreement deserve. What I’d said was, in addition to being intrinsically moronic, a major violation of the agreement. But she did neither of these things: no yelling, no sarcasm. She leaned over and kissed me, which she had never done before. I mean in public. I mean not while we weren’t fucking. You know what I mean. We both failed at the kiss, too eager and inert. Also, considering that she had just called me a fucking asshole, I had not seen it coming. So maybe I am a fucking asshole.

  “You’re such a jackass, Addison,” she said in an overprecise voice, after we’d detached. “And everyone else is such a fucking liar.” She handed me back the gun. Grip-first. A professional. We gave each other a weaving, troubled mutual stare, an acknowledgment of serious intent. Or just the look brought-together strangers exchange after a bus accident or whatever. Then she got out of my car, went into her house, and her door shut behind her with a leaden clap, and I sat in my freezing seat, smoking cigarettes. I opened my glove box, to hide the gun, then changed my mind and flipped the safety and put it in my coat pocket. I figured I could hide it in my safe. I did see Kevin’s file, sitting in the glove box: a bit grimy now. I wanted to pore over it for an hour. I didn’t—not then—though the desire stayed with me as I drove home.

  My father was out on the porch when I pulled up. He’d been waiting for me, but he said nothing. Just wanting the fact of his being awake to make me admit I’m indebted to him. Which I never do! He was wearing this beaten, creased look, his face drawn and furtive. That expression is how you know he’s happy. The single sign. Can you believe I’ve forgotten to tell you his full name, this whole time? It’s Theodore Franklin. He’s named not after one but two grinning murdering Roosevelts. People call him Ted. “Somebody broke the window, Addison,” he told me. His constant and unconscious prayer to suffer some persecution had been granted, after unjust delay. I didn’t answer. I was so tired. “It happened earlier this afternoon. Where have you been all day, Addison?” He never asks this. I can’t even think of the last time he asked where I’d been. Or asked me any question about myself at all. Not that I resent him for it. I’m a private person.

  Our living room lamps were all on. We have six, all antiques. Pewter bodies, multicolored glass shades—all the overornamentation my father loves. They give no real light, so you have to have all six lit to get even reasonable illumination in our living room. To my utter lack of surprise, Fatima was sprawled on the couch, smoking, dressed in a long blue man’s oxford. The rolled-back cuffs displayed her furry forearms. I could have figured out it was her when I’d heard the sounds of their fucking, earlier. By a basic process of deduction or whatever. She pretended not to notice me. My father stood on the porch and gave the night air a coach’s rundown of his afternoon and evening, as I walked away. His voice getting shallower with each step I took. “We cleaned up the glass, Addison,” I heard my father yell. Still from the porch. Why was he not coming inside? Who does that? “The police came. They were very respectful. That tall one. You remember. Officer Huang.” I was already scurrying down to my room, and I fell down the stairs when he shouted this. Just lost control of my limbs and slipped the rest of the way in a flailing tumble. The gun hurtled out of my pocket and skittered across our basement tiles, spinning. “They came and they were completely respectful, Addison. Where have you been? Are you going to sleep?” His words wafted down as the gun rotated and slowed, coming to rest with its small black gaping barrel aimed directly at me. I didn’t even scream this time, just stood up and began to check myself for wounds. But you know what? No injury. Not a bruise, not a scratch. Just a mild haze of up-too-late nausea. And a dull ache I could not place.

  XII.

  NOW IS A GOOD POINT, I mean in the narrative or whatever, to answer a question I know must be on your minds. Why, Addison, do you talk so much about the Aeneid? Just to lead up to some big display wherein I compare myself to a noble mythological character, you’re thinking. Maybe Aeneas himself! He’s a totally sweet dude. Maybe Anchises, who got raped by a female deity. Maybe it should be Aeneas’s son Ascanius, because he’s innocent and good? Or better yet: one of the gods! That would be awesome, right? Let me disabuse you of that idea. I’m not much of an egotist, in any normal way, and the character in the Aeneid I most identify with is not morally splendid. He doesn’t even come up to the level of Helenus or anything. He’s not even a Trojan. He’s this vicious kid named Neoptolemus. A minor character. A Greek. I doubt you remember him: the angry young man so crushed by the circumstances of his birth (he’s Achilles’ bastard son) that he murders Priam, the venerable, aged
king of Troy. Just some sociopath, you’re saying. His name means “New War,” for God’s sake!

  There’s more to him than that, though. Yeah, he’s a brutal murderer, but he’s kind of an interesting one: he’s always doing something related to but hideously different from what he intends. Take the thing with Priam. What he wanted was for someone to tell him, Your lineage is not shameful; you have nothing to be ashamed of. Instead of finding such a person, he goes and puts on armor and then runs through flaming Troy and murders this helpless old man, as though there weren’t dozens of other more challenging people to murder. He even kills Polites, one of Priam’s sons, right in front of him, right in the royal apartments. And the whole time he’s committing these stupid atrocities, he’s showing how unrepentant he is, taunting Polites with his spear, ridiculing Priam before dragging him to the family altar and decapitating him. Which is all the proof you need of a confused conscience: grim, ceaseless, public insistence.

  His story also demonstrates an obscure truth. Having a plan, any plan, means you know on some level you’re going to fail, you’re in the wrong. This contradicts everything I’ve been taught, all the larger principles of modern life, which are all about planning and calculation. But if you’re going to succeed, how could you need to think it out beforehand? If you had the necessary confidence—in every case perfect, unbreakable confidence—the idea of a plan would make you laugh. Who even has that kind of confidence? Mr. Vanderleun says that no writing is worth doing unless you talk about it first. Talk it through, he advises. Every aspect, every thought. With a friend. With a committee of friends. He points to himself as an example of a “writer” shaped by this parliamentary process. Total horseshit! How would he know anything about actual writing? He’s living with one eye on some invisible audience. He can only think of how his gestures look. So he imagines that other people are consumed and ruined by always looking over their shoulders, out into the darkness of the theater, the unresponsive darkness. Virgil didn’t suffer from that species of vanity. How could he have survived for two thousand years if he had? It’s a convention now for artists to be looking over their shoulders for approval, to make these demonstrations of their commitment.

  I can’t claim to be innocent of this. Not as an artist. I’m no artist. I mean as a human being. On the first of October, as I was leaving my house, an unsupervised boy rammed my shin with his blood-colored tricycle. The stony, constipated frown on his face as he rocketed away, hunched and huffing, would have done credit to a victorious dictator. “You. Are. Defeated!” screamed the tricyclist. I watched him careen around the corner. My backpack was weighed down with all my money. Literally all of it. In two plastic grocery bags. This was one of those lead-colored indeterminate days prefiguring winter, which in D.C. is late to arrive. Our citizens grow hysterical at the first bad weather. You can go to any grocery store and find the bottled-water supply cleaned out. Car accidents abound, after which the drivers gather in lugubrious duos or trios accepting fate, their scarves leaping and fluttering with release from all that leaden expectation. And the snow, when it comes, which is not until late December or January—the snow itself is always minor, a grayish dusting. Fragile. It never achieves that white darkness quality. The thwarted desire for which, I think, makes children so high-strung here in the winter months.

  Picking this up again was hard, I won’t lie. You see that I’ve had to ease my reentry into the world of writing with speculative material. What happened that night at Lorriner’s house turned out to be a watershed moment in my social career. And not the harbinger of some tremendous positive change. Writing about it exhausted me and I had to rest before I started writing again. I don’t want to sound dramatic or mysterious. All this is going somewhere. Even Mr. Vanderleun would approve. He’s very big on resolution. He cleaves the air with his finger-missing hand when he talks about it, as though he had some deep and personal stake in the successful conclusion of stories. Trust me, though. I do have a massive closing circus-type event coming. I just need to put in some explanatory stuff beforehand. I mean, I could just lay it out all at once, but then even I wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. And it happened to me. I hope you can excuse me for making such an abrupt new beginning. I’ll try to summarize, below, so you’re not lost.

  #1. Digger and I killed Murphy on September 12. For the rest of the month, my energy levels plummeted. In school, I mean. Though my teachers considered this an improvement. Mr. Vanderleun took me aside after class to tell me how much my attitude had improved. “I’m really surprised at you, Mr. Schacht. It begs the question where this Addison was hiding before.” His stump waggled in appreciation. And he still did not fucking know what begs the question means. He was referring, I guess, to the fact that I did the work I was assigned, all that sort of thing, as though doing my teachers and the school a favor. (Which I believed I was.) But I started letting all kinds of things pass that I wouldn’t have before, I mean not without deliberately offending the speaker. Alex Faustner spent an entire English class mispronouncing the word foliage as foilage. I said nothing. I stopped shouting out the correct translations when my classmates fumbled in Latin, an activity that Ms. Erlacher could never punish because technically it proved that I was both involved and apt, though you could tell from her white-lipped smile that she couldn’t stand it. I did it to humiliate people. Though it wasn’t humiliating for anyone, because they themselves didn’t care; they were relieved to let me take over in midsentence their blabbery wet-mouthed translations. They shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Stopping was easy. What do I care if some random guy fails to learn Latin? Better that he doesn’t. Knowledge should not be shared out among the giftless and clumsy. Nothing is worse than presumption.

  #2. My father—and this, really, I don’t even have adequate language to describe—bought a Sherlock Holmes costume for the Cochrane Institute’s October Gala. You’d expect this gala to be on Halloween, right? Wrong! Those pretentious fuckers can’t even observe the old pagan holidays with the rest of us. It’s always on the second Friday in October, usually about two weeks before everyone else is celebrating, it’s always a costume party, and my father has gone every year since his initial employment. He starts talking about it in late September. He brought the costume (and Fatima) home the day he purchased it. He made her dress up in drag as Dr. Watson. To try it out. And the party wasn’t even for more than a week. This was the dry run. I was present when this travesty occurred. My father was so committed to it. He was running around, looking for his pipe, his deerstalker, the magnifying glass, all of these trappings that he had paid some exorbitant price for at a costume shop, like it would somehow absolve his dull ways, his grinding habits. Fatima was sitting smoking on the low red sofa in our living room, staring. The look of contempt on her face was all the more corrosive for lacking a visible object. She was half dressed as Watson, wearing this houndstooth pants-and-vest combo, fingering the sideburns and mustache my father had wheedled her into applying with some high-grade adhesive, smoking and smoking. “Are you ready yet, esteemed Doctor?” My father yelled this again and again—what a great joke!—from his bedroom upstairs. It took them a while to get back into civilian clothes and leave: they dragged back and forth, and my father’s rare laugh, which is almost always fake though it is rare, rang out again and again, like a dropped piece of pewter.

  #3. I felt no further fear of Mike Lorriner. Anyone who shits his pants in front of you and a gun-waving girl isn’t going to call the cops. That would just confirm his own humiliation. He’d bury his dog and shut up about it. Tell people she got run over. I mean, what could he say, anyway: I threw a brick with a Nazi banner through this guy’s window and his girlfriend killed my Labrador?

  #4. Digger and I had not spoken since the morning after we killed Murphy. I mean, technically I had spoken to her. That Monday I’d approached her in homeroom, ready to make some quip about the weekend. Sunday passed for me in this slack-muscled mist, a golden mist of languor. I couldn’t
understand it. I had no idea what to expect. Not that we would abandon our agreement. Never that. I stumbled into school, mouth tacky with anticipation. The noise of my contemporaries swelled in the hall. I crossed the steel threshold. I saw the cropped back of Digger’s head, midturn.

  But now she had this look. I’d never seen it before. A look of woundedness. Like I’d shot her, instead of her shooting Murphy. Lips flat. Eyes gleaming. She said nothing, literally nothing, when I said hello. It winded me, sort of, but then there was just this airy unconcern. Which lasted till the end of the school day. Then it turned into panic. I spent the afternoon calling her house and hanging up before the other line rang. When I did wait for an answer, I got the machine. I left three messages, each less comprehensible than the last. On my fourth attempt her mother picked up, made a predatory squawking sound, and said—with the suppressed glee doctors harbor in their voices for announcing deaths to family members—“Please stop calling, Addison. Phoebe doesn’t want to talk to you.” Then a breathy sigh. Then: “And do you know what? I’d like to take this particular moment in time to tell you that I’ve always thought you were a creep. A little alcoholic creep. You and all your alcoholic friends.”

  “Her name’s not Phoebe, you cunt,” I muttered, and hung up, the huge obscenity making me sweat with brief pride. I’m still proud of saying it, showing zero hesitation. Why Dr. Zeleny called me an alcoholic, or assumed I had friends—this I cannot explain.