by Sam Munson
Anyway, the whole deal was done. Completed. My horizon was glowing. So can you explain to me why, earlier today—or yesterday, I mean, since it’s after midnight—I sat down with some paper and a pen and started writing? I mean rewriting my answer to your essay question. I couldn’t stop. It seems to have taken forever, at this point, although not that much actual time has elapsed. Only fourteen hours. I took a short break five hours ago when I started writing about what happened after we killed the dog. I took another one about an hour ago, to go steal the wine. I thought I had finished. I drank half the bottle right away. There’s a white horse on the label. My father owes me one for the weed, anyway. So it’s not even really stealing. I took the breaks to clear my head. That just made it worse. Never take breaks. Constant forward momentum fends off entropy. Entropy wrecks everything. It can’t be defeated. Still, though: nineteen chapters. That’s a fuckload of forward momentum, if you’ll permit me to use so expressive a quantity. And I’m not finished. Nineteen chapters and still not finished. Eighteen is the best number in Jewish numerology, did you know that? It’s equal, if you use the weird value assignments that Hebrew letters have, to the word life. I don’t understand how. I just know for a fact that it is. Digger told me, and she never lies. I think she gets birthday checks in units of eighteen. And seeing as I’ve already run one chapter over my people’s lucky number, I’ll try to keep this last bit brief.
My whole life is ahead of me. Even if I don’t get into the University of Chicago. For classicists, which is what I want to be, graduate school matters just as much. I think. I think that’s how it works. And I’m ready not to get in. I wouldn’t let me in. With all this information above and beyond what’s wanted or necessary I’ve provided. Why don’t I just shut up and enjoy my good fortune at having escaped unscathed? Digger has decided I’m okay. I haven’t been to see Noel and David since the night of the dogfight. Everyone’s forgotten about Kevin. Except his parents, I mean. But there’s the fucking problem. A huge part of the problem. Why I’ve spent the last hours pacing and smoking in my room, muttering to myself, starting to add to my essay and stopping. I’m late to meet Digger. We have a date, an official date. Our first. Official date, I mean. Remember? From the hospital? The Sorrow and the Pity, part two? We’re going to take a stab at behaving like everyone else.
Digger’s hand on the back of my head. The chord from the piano, when I fell. My mother’s face in clay. The weight of the gun in my palm. This stack of pages. That’s all I have. It’s not much. It’s just what happened. I can’t explain it and I don’t want to. Holy fuck! This is hard. Writing this is hard. It may be impossible. I’ll try anyway. It’s after midnight. I spent my birthday with Digger. Before she gave me my present, we didn’t do anything. Just kind of wandered around smoking cigarettes. We drove past Kevin’s house. The heavy, glazed-looking green curtains shone out of the front windows, and swayed a little. Other than that, no sign of activity. I love her. I don’t love her in some stupid way. If it were stupid, trivial, the rest of this would be easy. It’s hard and frightening, so I must love her for real. How you know, right? How else would you know? I love Digger. What a child, you’re thinking. Love? He’s using the word love? What a fucking joke. He’s too young to understand. If you think that, fuck you. I don’t tell lies. Not about Digger. I may be guilty of a long list of petty and secret enormities. Not, however, lying about loving Digger. Impossible, for me. I have no idea who any of you are, if any of you will read what I’ve written. I don’t know anything about you. I know you as poorly as I know my classmates and my father. All this is no excuse. The stinging cramp in my hand excuses nothing. My slowed-down eyesight excuses nothing. Virgil stares with oceanic kindness down at Dante in the lithograph, surrounded by rectilinear shafts of light and mists. His face betrays the love felt by someone who regards himself as beyond love. He looks proud.
Back to lacrimae rerum. I’ve had, like I said, too much time to think. You asked me for one thousand words, ladies and gentlemen. This has to be more than that, and one of the reasons why is that I’ve had too much time to think. Too much thinking makes you nervous, makes you want to include everything, just in case. And I still haven’t said anything, is the hilarious part. I’ve just gone on and on about externals, about contingent events. The most I can hope for is that the clumsiness and fear I’ve displayed in letting myself go on at this length help you understand the worthless sort of person I am. I guess I’m throwing myself at your feet here, and hoping that you’ll see: as fragile and selfish as I am, I’m no worse than anyone else, especially the rest of the applicants you’ll be dealing with. I mean, people unlike me, people not weighed down with all the vices of their era, are rare. Almost unthinkably so. I know exactly one.
I’m still avoiding the central issue here. Why add to an already overlong piece of garbage? Why extend your boredom? Why provoke you to the hatred I inspire in all authority figures? It’s so fucked-up I can’t even begin. I stole a bottle of wine from my father’s liquor supply and have been drinking it as I sit here. I took it when I realized this horrible thing. Are you ready? I’m ready. I’m going to explain. Looked at in one light, if you take my story, just follow it from A to B or whatever, it’s the story of a young man who made a number of stupid errors. Looked at in another light, though, you can derive a tremendous horror from it. I learned from it. I profited from it. November Criminality at its purest. I betray. I pervert. I can’t help it. I am what those filthy proto-Nazis said. Not because I’m a Jew. Because I’m me, Addison Schacht. In metaphysical terms, I’m just as guilty as the killer. I profited from Kevin’s death. I’m happier now. I have no right. I have less right to that than anything else. That’s what Virgil meant, or part of it, that even in happiness there is this taste, like an undercurrent or whatever, of life being irremediably wrong.
Do you see what I mean? Everything comes at a price. Sometimes you can put the price in signs or symbols, words, an amount of money. But I can’t even tell you what I owe. I know that it exceeds the value of my entire life, simply by geometrical principles. What the fuck, though, am I supposed to do with this debt? Can you tell me that, you fucking experts? I can’t turn myself in to the cops. It’s not a crime. I can’t talk to Kevin’s father. I can’t tell anyone. If I’d thought of it before, while I was recovering, it would have been okay. People cut you slack if you’re in the hospital. They get off on indulging you. Now everyone would just think I’m crazy, or trying to get attention. They’d think I was jealous of Alex getting in the paper. I’d never be able to convince anyone that this wasn’t the case, that I don’t give a shit about fame, that if I wanted fame I’d want Virgil’s fame, eternal fame. The one person who might understand this is Digger. I’m not telling her. I’ve abused her trust enough.
I’m late to meet her. We have a firm pledge in operation to see the twelve forty-five a.m. showing of part two of The Sorrow and the Pity. From when I was in the hospital, remember? At the Camelot. I don’t make offers like that as a joke. I was supposed to be in front of the theater ten minutes ago. What if I don’t go? I won’t go. I don’t deserve anything. Not going would be sufficient punishment. Except it wouldn’t, because it would fade, and because it would damage her, and I’d have contracted a new debt. I see her standing calmly on the empty street under the harplike marquee. She won’t worry I’m late. Everyone is late sometimes. She has no idea what is happening inside me. I will go. I’ll think about it. I don’t know. My pen is drying up, starting to scratch the paper with that nerve-shredding sound. I’ll go. I won’t go. I’ll go. Holy fuck. I contemplated destroying the whole thing, tossing it in the flames of my father’s kiln, and offering you my original banal answer: how I love to help people, and that’s my best quality, but sometimes I have trouble thinking of my own needs, and that’s my worst quality. That’s what I wrote, originally, before I sat down earlier today. Or yesterday, I mean. I could just send in an application no different from anyone else’s in size, weight, or spiritual con
tent. I’m so tired of this. And sorry for ever disturbing Kevin’s rest. Not because of my own exhaustion. Because I recognize my guilt. Which may not make sense. To you, I mean.
But to me that’s why it makes sense. Because it doesn’t. Nothing is explicable. Not even trivial things, not even a cloud or a wave. All of those things are formed by chance. And we are too. We’re just as weak, just as gone in a minute, as any of those things. I think we should find it funny that we’re so transient. Every human effort expresses so much sententiousness, so much self. And that self is a joke, a cloud, a shadow. That’s it. Then nox est perpetua una dormienda: “an endless night for sleeping.” The poet Catullus wrote that, not Virgil. Or vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. That’s the last line of the Aeneid, describing the death of the Rutulian prince Turnus, Aeneas’s last enemy: “and life fled with a groan, indignant, to the shades.” So you don’t even get the nox perpetua. If you’re dead, by definition you can have no knowledge of eternity. It’s after midnight. My hand hurts from writing. I don’t know what to do. You can’t exert your will over life. If there’s one thing the study of Latin should teach you, it’s that human beings cannot direct reality. They can do a great many things, yes, even incredible things, going down to the realm of the dead. Or founding Rome. But with permission. They have to have the blessing and assistance of a god. This is gained through loyalty. I’m not loyal. Don’t mistake me for a loyal person.
I’m not even talking about suicide. Suicide would be too orderly and too self-respecting. I don’t even deserve that. That would make me seem too important, you know? I only have one triumph: my outburst at Alex Faustner’s lecture. I’m not thinking about that, though. Or about my father, and what a terrible son I’ve been to him, or about how I failed Digger and Kevin. What I can’t get my mind off is this. Like I said, I don’t think about my mother a lot. I remember her. Do you see the difference? I don’t have to think about her, because I remember her. This one memory, which is always in the back of my mind. I must have been four years old. No older. It’s in the morning, and I’ve just woken up, and she’s there. Not bent over the bed or anything. Just standing quietly in the corner. I see her in my peripheral vision, but I pretend I don’t for some reason, and she starts to smile, and so do I, and we both smile in silence. She’s wearing a yellow sweater. Her hair is up. She has her glasses on. Rain ticks against my window. I don’t want to say anything, and she doesn’t speak, and all of a sudden this understanding comes over me: neither of us has to talk. It’s not necessary. That’s how it was with her. At least, that’s how I remember it. I didn’t think of it that way at the time. I was a fucking kid. That memory is basically the only thing that stands between me and (write it, you fucking coward, you fucking asshole) total oblivion.
It’s after midnight. I’m writing as fast as I can, because I’m late, but not late enough to wreck my life, so this part is less legible than what’s come before, I can see that. I know what I have to do. I’m going to do it. I just need a minute, five minutes. You’d think that with how fragile everything is, our whole condition and everything, it would be the same as a lie. It’s not. Not at all. I don’t believe that. I’m not a nihilist. Death is the consummate falsehood. Maybe that’s the real meaning of the Gate of Ivory. That perfection arrives through it, which is basically the same as death. Because life—where’s the perfection there? Lacrimae rerum, right? The sign of life. Perfection would kill it. Extinguish it. I’m going to leave the melted gun here while I’m out, to hold down the unruly pile of torn-out notebook paper I’ve been scrawling on. As proof. In case anyone finds my essay and thinks it’s all fiction. Then, tomorrow, I will send it off to you. Not tomorrow. Today, I mean. It’s after midnight. I won’t send the gun. That would be insane. Just the document itself, which can be corroborated in all its particulars. It’s after midnight, when the day begins. Isn’t that fucked-up? That the day begins in darkness? I’m afraid. I don’t deserve anything. But fuck you, all the same. Fuck you for thinking that all this proves anything. It proves nothing, nothing at all. A whole kingdom of nothing. You can refuse me admission. You can call the cops. You can lock me in chains or kill me. Me or anyone else. It won’t prove anything. When Digger blew out my birthday candle, as she bent her head, a summer-colored moon of light rested on her face. I saw its pinpoints dance in her deep eyes. For a whole second. Then the flame went out. And we were in the dark.
DOUBLEDAY
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Sam Munson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Munson, Sam.
The November criminals : a novel / by Sam Munson. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3613.U6936N68 2010
813′.6—dc22
2009016750
eISBN: 978-0-385-53228-0
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Copyright
