by Sam Munson
There were other attempts, in the initial days of this exile. Or whatever it was. This internal exile. At lunch, I tried to bum a cigarette from her. She just sat there, taking precise bites out of her sandwich. She said, again, absolutely nothing. After school that day I chased her down, ran her to ground on the sward of rusty grass between Kennedy and where the houses of the neighborhood begin. I grabbed her sleeve. She whipped around to face me. I was expecting anger, disgust, revulsion … I was hoping for any of those. Anything would have been better than that look, that mute, even look of certitude and pain. I let go of her coat, its rough-woven wool scraped my fingertips a bit, and then she walked off and got into her car, which backfired twice. I watched until she drove away, my knees getting weaker and weaker with despair.
I know this sounds sort of overdone. You have to believe me: I had no idea it would affect me this way. So it had become sort of obvious to me that she felt … betrayed, maybe, by the way I’d acted in Maryland. That was the only way I could interpret her remark about being on the debating team. But fuck! If her feelings had changed, she would have said something, right? If she wanted out of the agreement, she could have just said that. I have no experience with women, other than her. And the one time I’d ever come close to behaving inappropriately with her, she’d just gotten sort of pissed. Right after we met, I asked her out. We hadn’t yet had sex. I was operating according to the protocols I observed my peers using to prosecute their social lives. She just laughed, not unkindly, but still right in my face. Weirdly, I didn’t feel any hurt or humiliation, just like I’d misunderstood a math problem or something, and then everything was fine. Our agreement kind of developed out of that event: we still ended up sleeping together three or four times a week. There was no one, literally, I could ask for advice. And having no idea of her reasons made the exile worse.
Digger and I still had to see each other. In school, I mean. In the halls. We had homeroom together. The kids in G&T are divided into two blocks, and they observe complementary class schedules—while I take English, Digger has World History, etc. So there was that fifteen-minute chunk of homeroom to be gotten through every morning, and then the eye avoidance between classes. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine minutes, total, per day. Excruciatingly, spine-slumpingly painful for me. Which I had not been expecting. And this, in turn, was a new humiliation—to feel pain when you have no idea if the other person feels the same pain. That would be the ultimate expression of slavishness and dick-lessness. I mean, what’s the point of having an agreement with someone at all if not to prevent emotional nonsense from happening? Why had we observed all those rigid protocols? So Digger and I shuffled past each other in the halls. No more cock-stiffening knee-to-knee contact. No more fucking. It killed me. I didn’t understand why, was part of it. The pain was an affront to my honor! If you see what I mean. And to hers. It was this testimony about the shameful and emotional side of our relations, which we tried to ignore so that we could focus on more important things.
She was being consistent. Without sentiment, without remorse. She was following the terms. Not even the extraordinary, not even the inexplicable, could justify departures from them. I said she’s destined for greatness. I meant it. That unswerving will is the qualifying mark of greatness-to-be. I had to admire it. But fuck her! Fuck her anyway. I didn’t need her, and fuck her for thinking that I did. So what if it made me miserable every time I saw her stonily walking away from me in the hall. It wasn’t about her! There was more at stake here. I’m putting this down so you don’t think it was all about Digger, just so you don’t think I’m this weak love-addled moron. The fact that I could imagine everything being different was what made the pain murderous. What if we hadn’t driven out to Maryland? What if I never made that stupid call to Lorriner? That’s the real fuck you! That your mind offers all these alternatives to your current situation. Mine was not one of despair. Or sadness, even, sadness does not properly describe it. It was the pain of nothing. What if I’d just kept my intrusive Jew nose out of the whole affair to begin with? Wouldn’t that have made moral sense, anyway? Oh, some random innocent kid gets shot? Here comes that crazy kike Addison Schacht with his puffed-up sense of obligation to remind you of it! Look at him! He’s rubbing his hands like some spiritual usurer! And what’s more, he’s discovering will and intention where they can’t be found! What moral genius! This kind of thinking, I mean when you attribute mind in cases where it does not exist, is called the Pathetic Fallacy.
#5. I had three weeks. Three weeks of this shit! I got things done, though. Not seeing Digger freed up huge swatches of my time. I had no one else to talk to, remember? Do you know how much money you can earn in three weeks, with no one to talk to? I made three thousand dollars. I didn’t spend a dime of it. My industry impressed Noel. I’d never had to re-up three times in a month before. Dealing with him was easy. He didn’t know about the whole catastrophe with Lorriner. He never asked. I never told him. He would have thought killing Murphy was funny, though. I can just see it. He would have said, “Daaaaaamn, son! You shot the mufhuh’s dog? White people be crazy!” Maybe that’s why I never told him, because I didn’t know if I could stand hearing that.
Noel was now a bigger part of my life, anyway, so it made sense to hold some stuff back. He and David and I shared a number of nights in Noel’s freezing house, Noel jabbering away while David downed forty after forty. He could drink ten or eleven of them. He’s a fucking building. They never had any effect that I could see. His voice didn’t slur. If his eyelids slipped down, it was from pride. Noel, as he got higher and drunker, would become incoherent. The stories of his conquests entered the realm of obvious fantasy: hackneyed “Letters to Penthouse” tales, Jacuzzis and lesbians and oiled limbs, filtered through Noel’s self-limited vocabulary. Punctuated by an occasional incredulous whinny from David. I just nodded and agreed. Noel took no notice of either stream of commentary. Fun times! Three guys in a brick-cold, unfurnished house. You understand why I never brought up the thing with Lorriner. What would have been the point? It might have gotten me a beating from David. Noel’s not a psychopath, but he has his interests to maintain. And so what if Lorriner had known who Noel was? So what if maybe he was also one of Noel’s retail distributors, which more and more his words that night led me to think? It meant nothing and it proved nothing. Nothing at all.
Apart from these jolly interludes, I spent hours, every evening, serving my customers. Not well. I raised my prices. I stopped extending credit. And you know what? Instead of alienating them, instead of driving them away, it made them more serious and loyal. More respectful of me, even. The worse I treated them the more they wanted me around. There’s some lesson to be derived from that, I suspect. Even if you don’t make it an iron rule of your conduct, you can learn something from it. I ferried around enough weed to ensure jail time if I were ever caught or searched. But, as I said, you’re invisible to cops in D.C. if you’re white. You have to do something amazing to get their attention.
Names, you say? I’m happy to give them. The customer is always wrong, remember? Jason Rosset; Tim Carcanet; Hannah Loughlin; Mason Chatto; Blake Bonder, who despite the Harvard-beats-Yale name is a girl with a widemouthed melodic laugh; Evan Osterreich and Katie Bayern, the other gold medalists on the National Latin Exam in my class; Hamilton Bray, whose father is ninety-two years old; the Eichman twins; Andrew Bammler, a gaping and universally despised asshole (“Fuck, man, Andy Bammler’s here!”) and ex-Chandler classmate of Noel’s; Magdalena Beinmark, Digger’s next-door neighbor—I won’t lie, I spent the whole trip to Magdalena’s house fantasizing about running into Digger and flaunting my über-casualness; the supercilious, unspeaking Amanda and Pyotr Metzger, twins and bandmates in the Bringdowns; Octavio Machado, shaver of notches into his eyebrows; Tehran Wall, five-foot-nothing, our champ debater, and, after Kevin’s death, 20 percent of the black population of my G&T class; Victoria Blanning; Alex Hamden-Court; Ashton Denvir; Drea Skalnick. At least six people named Jon
athan.
My tribe. And, as I remarked before, I know as little about them as you do. Beyond these incidentals. Warm and identical houses: check. Square-built, money-sturdy furniture: check. Sound-eating inch-piled rugs: check. Parents pretending to be oblivious: check. Warm and insincere greetings: check. A dust-filmed piano, a cloudlike Samoyed, an inquisitive younger sibling, a disintegrating party, a wretched solitude, a fistfight, a theatrical tongue-thick kiss, a recent-dyke mother, a mirror edged in knurled bronze, a fake Ming vase with a trembling sheaf of catkins, check, check, fucking check! The solitary trip back to my house, occupied by my father, my father and Fatima, or by nobody at all. Check. Leaden, vacant sleep. Check. Morning. Check. Et cetera. It’s all scenery. The underlying quality, somnolent ease, never dissipates, and there isn’t even any intruding authority to give your activities the spice of crime. Everything is permitted. When everything is permitted, mediocrity is the rule. Nude trees arcaded every curb, their nets of branches like diagrammed lungs, and baleful street lamps hovered above. It’s all so calm, it’s dizzying.
Some people probably can draw inspiration from this, from a great regret, from nothingness. I’m too much of a philistine to do that. Philistine is one of my father’s favorite words. Though he’s never directed it against me, I know that I exhibit a lot of philistine tendencies. It means being cut off from higher things, which I certainly am, and it means not having explosive emotional reactions to things, which I certainly don’t, only glacial responses, numbness or fear or on the positive side awe and gratitude. And sometimes these rainstorm bursts of happiness, but even those are sort of calm, not at all fit for discussion, the way my father is always talking about his most private inner activity. The stuff about wanting to throw himself under a bus, I mean.
I think you’ll agree that the other activity consuming my time during these weeks belonged to the kingdom of philistine behavior. I was über-dedicated to it. During the minutes spent stuck in traffic. During my now-solitary lunch periods. Waiting for customers to meet me. In the twilight before sleep, when it replaced my obsessive rereading of the Aeneid. I’m talking about Kevin’s file. Even more worn than it had been when I’d stolen it. I knew it, at this point, backward and forward. Not that it was hard to memorize. It was just a two-page list of classes and grades, with a note at the bottom, in blocky printer script: NO LONGER A STUDENT; a friable newspaper article; and a crease-seamed photo. Scraps. But there was nothing else. And every spare moment I had, though, every moment not given to selling weed, eating, sleeping, or school, I gave to the study of this file. As though it would yield up some answer about Kevin’s murder. I can still recite large chunks. Fuck, I can probably draw Kevin’s face blindfolded, gripping the pencil with my teeth. Though I haven’t tried this. You’ll have to trust me.
That’s all there is of you, in the end. These meager public traces. Nothing beyond that. And if these public facts remain striking or original, you get called a genius, and if they involve the deaths of millions, you become a hero or a tyrant. And either way cities and governments erect monuments to you. Which no one ever notices, unless they’re on a tour or doing some kind of historical research. Monuments are just weighty guarantees of your consignment to oblivion. So it doesn’t matter if you leave behind you a war, a cathedral, or just a thin pile of paper. You’re fucked, eternally. Which is, I assume, why you have asked for so much documentation, and why you want me to put my answers to your questions down on paper. Because you know that what we call inner life has no external meaning.
Example: about a year ago, on an airless subway in winter, I saw a guy get on, not too old, not too young anymore. He had short auburn hair, big glasses, skinny wrists, a premature paunch, that sort of thing. Two bags, a man-purse and a canvas tote, which I thought was strange, one of those small inexplicabilities. And what was he doing? Picking through the man-purse, as soon as he sat down. I was leaning against the doors, and he sat on the same side as me, facing away. So I could look down into his lap and see him yanking open and closed every compartment. I had no idea what he was looking for. He sighed, an angry androgynous sigh, as he came up with a fucking crayon—in mauve, no less. The kind of color eternally unpopular with children. Then—and this impressed me—he reached with grave dignity into his other bag, the tote, and pulled out a dog-eared sheaf of pages, the corners foxed. The whole thing grimed. He had been searching for a pencil to correct his pages, I saw now; he was frantic to correct them. A point in his favor. But he was doing this in public, which meant either that he was a horrible cretin or that he was so gifted his talent made him indifferent.
Needless to say, it was the former. And what he was doing was amazing! He would change a word, the word dirty to the word filthy, for example, and then slash out the change. He changed semicolons to periods/initial capitals and vice versa. He crossed out the word asphyxiation and replaced it with suffocation, he misused the word inveigh … And so on and so forth, his white, clean hand darting around on the beaten-looking pages, making these minor corrections. I started to feel sick. Whenever I see people taking out private matters, like manuscripts, in public, it sickens me, but I can’t look away from the horrible humiliation of staring into someone else’s mediocrity, which illuminates your own choking mediocrity. He was so defeated, this man in his late thirties, about twenty years older than me, with a manuscript that looked to be years and years old, maybe started when I was a child, a book he had great hopes for, still, even now, despite the manifest evidence of his failure, his hand darting with precision and care, correcting and changing things that would make no difference. And the crayon! A loose strut, an atmospheric gauge of some kind, something no longer human, something degenerated. He caught me staring, of course, and looked up. I whipped my face away. The insectile rasp of the crayon never ceased. He got out at the next stop. I was leaning against the doors, like I said, so he had to pass me, which I was dreading. He only smiled, though, untroubled, blind-looking. We all sit in public correcting our insufficient manuscripts, hoping that God is watching, whom we all believe in as some kind of spectator; we believe that our useless devotion proves something, that it demonstrates something about us, that we’re all artists. His smile of angelic completion revealed this to me as five or six other passengers, total strangers, looked into my face with burning and indifferent kindness.
XIII.
WAIT, THOUGH. I have to do some more backgrounding here. I’ve gotten you up to speed on the first five major aspects of my life in the weeks after Digger shot Murphy. I left out the sixth component. Six is what’s known as a perfect number: it’s the sum of its positive divisors excluding itself (1 + 2 + 3 = 6). Why that makes it perfect, I don’t know. But a lot of mystical carrying-on about the number six has derived from this fact. So maybe it’s auspicious that I’m getting into this now. I had been, alongside all the other nonsense and running around, engaged in another Kevin-related activity. A last-ditch effort. It had borne no fruit so far.
On the first of October, an unsupervised boy rammed my shin with his blood-colored tricycle. I had my backpack with me, nothing in it except for a bit more than twelve thousand dollars. And, which I did not mention before, a thick sheaf of posters. I was on my third. Sheaf of posters, I mean. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT KEVIN BROADUS, PLEASE PAGE, and then my number. Remember? I’d already gone through two stacks. Much faster than I’d expected. I also had a staple gun and a roll of invisible tape. These were the posters I made the morning I stole Kevin’s file. Ille dies primus leti, to quote Virgil. It means (in very rough modern English) “That’s when everything started to go wrong.” I won’t waste your time with a literal translation. He was talking about the first time Aeneas and Dido—the insane queen of Carthage, remember?—have sex. In a woodland cave, during a thunderstorm. When he leaves to continue his quest, she burns herself to death on a pyre composed of all his ambassadorial/courtly gifts to her. I think I mentioned her insanity before.
Anyway: Postering. (#6) Like Kevin was
a lost cat. Putting them up anywhere and everywhere I could. I found the sheaf of old posters on top of a bookshelf, where I’d stowed them to avoid thinking about them. I mean the first-generation ones. I found them the afternoon Digger’s mother called me an alcoholic creep, actually. A small sail-shaped polygon of white, the corner of the poster pile, obtruded itself into my complacent solitude after I’d hung up. I took them down and knocked off the blue house dust. It took no time to find the tape and the staple gun. My father keeps it loaded. As part of his artistic mission, in case he wakes up one day as a painter who needs to frame canvases, or maybe as some staple-loving conceptual artist. Then I was bolting out of my house, in a frenzy, affixing flyers to every friendly surface I saw. I got through the whole stack in two hours. I even had to tear the last-affixed one down. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had a template to use, moving forward. The naked trees lining my block all had their quivering squares of white. I was out of breath. I’d been jogging. No coat, no hat. The cold of the falling evening burned my lungs. Et cetera.
That’s how I went through my first sheaf. I blamed its eventual failure on the small distribution area and the posters’ lo-fi overall appearance. It looked like some overly focused crazy person had assaulted this one chunk of D.C. and left it at that. A sad old man, or a pervert, or a bearded schizoid type. You know: a haunter of public libraries. Wool hat in all seasons. Binder of manuscripts shouting with ALL CAPS. The kind of person who leaves cheap flowers at a public memorial for the dead. I improved, on the second go-round. I spaced them out, made the civilians think I was taking my ease. Which was a misrepresentation. You can’t let anyone know what you’re going through, though, or you’ll just get corrosive ridicule heaped on you. My second sheaf, in bright colors and with Kevin’s obstinate photo Xeroxed in, lasted longer. I was more judicious. I spread them out. Crossing and recrossing the city. Enduring the uneasy looks of schoolchildren, shelf-assed cashiers, bus conductors, guys hanging out on corners, staunch lawn defenders. The entire typology of life here, which is a good general simulation of life in second-rate cities everywhere.
