Authors: Walter Kirn
The Unbinding (11 page)
27.
[Via courier]
Agent’s Memo: Art from the bughouse garbage can, as promised.
28.
Dear “Kent,”
I was not surprised to hear that you remember our evening differently than I do. And btw? Just because a person asks you to park closer to the curb does not mean she has OCD.
I wouldn’t write again except that a coincidence compels me. My friend Kathy thinks you are the guy who “fixed” her heater. She said you came up to her apartment for a drink and offered to get the heater going. She said you hauled in and, after a while, said, “Next, we’ll throw out the lifter pump. That’s one piece of hardware you don’t need.” My friend Kathy said she just knew those were going to be famous last words. And in fact, the next night she gave a dinner party, and her guests had to keep their coats on during dinner. Was it Kate Millett who said women need the kind of confidence men have when they don’t know what they’re doing?
Yours, Amy
Dear Amy,
Obviously, “I’m horrifically ashamed and sometimes think I deserve to get gangrene for how poorly I treated you that night” wasn’t quite enough. Nor was assuring you that I’ve changed since Greyhounding out of New York that humid June—partly due to your wonderful friend Kathy, the so-called “Post-it note heiress of Eighty-third Street” who, if there’s any justice on this earth, is known nowadays as the Body Odor Queen of the Coney Island Subway Platform. Yes, I pretended to fix her heater once (who’s Kate Millett, anyway? One of your high-chinned lady writer pals?), but I don’t think that justifies how she lied about me just as I was beginning to connect with folks.
One nauseated morning-after at Kathy’s Hamptons “cottage”—which looked like a mansion to my small-town eyes, and which I later discovered didn’t belong to her but to a hush-hush mistress of Martha Stewart’s whom Kathy knew from a New Hampshire fat farm—she accused me of having date-rape-drugged her daiquiri at a beach party the night before. The truth was she’d taken a fistful of Mexican Vicodins bought from an elderly man in white suede hot pants who was also selling turquoise glow sticks. I should have known the party would be trouble when everyone said Billy Joel had left just fifteen minutes before we got there. I’d only been in town for seven months, but I’d already heard enough to realize that BJ exits a shindig early only if it harbors the very lowest elements.
I suppose it was easier for Kathy to slander me—a friendless young bike messenger from out of town who’d delivered a couple of envelopes to
Vogue
once but hadn’t been allowed inside its offices—than to admit to her parents and the docs at the ER that the foreign object lodged inside her had not only been inserted at her direction but lubricated by her own left hand. In the end, that’s what chapped my ass about your “set,” even more than the way you ate your hamburgers by setting aside their perfectly good buns and neatly wrapping the patties in lettuce leaves. (The actual reason, by the way, that I accused you of being OCD.) You pitied practically every creature on earth, from Guatemalan coffee farmers to endangered forest gorillas, except for the men you lured into your beds. Depending on whether we seized you from behind (as you invariably dared us to) or requested a brief, loving kiss before we serviced you (as you mocked us for desiring), we all were either psychopaths or closet cases, would-be murderers or latent fags, and nothing in between.
Or maybe “borderline” is in between. Perhaps you don’t remember, but that’s the diagnosis you laid on me that night—a full hour before I said you were OCD. Did I deserve it? Not at that point, no. All I’d done was point out in the movie theater that for the price of the popcorns and diet sodas that you so patronizingly bought for both of us, even though I had my wallet out, I could have paid the teenage couple in front of us to put on a live-sex show back at your place and give us nude cocoa-butter massages afterward. “You’d like that kind of thing?” you asked me, and I said, “Who knows? But I moved here to find out.”
Borderline. I didn’t get it but I didn’t mind, since there are certain disabling ideas that I’d rather die not understanding than to have to spend my life being undercut by. The word reminded me of two other terms that you used that night but which I haven’t heard spoken since leaving New York:
pyrrhic
and
Kafkaesque.
Keep them, Amy. We don’t need them here. Or whatever the heck they stand for. We’re doing fine.
And you are also doing fine, I gather. (I searched your name at work the other day and learned that you’re still writing your little stories about loyal animals and lousy humans.) That pleases me, Amy. As I said, I’ve changed. I eat much less meat now. I sold my antique sword. I’ve learned to appreciate modern German cinema, I’ve given up collecting, and I’ve befriended a former Marine Corps colonel who helped cook up several of the new “religions” that the Pentagon developed to influence Hollywood but has withdrawn its support for recently due to changing budget priorities. As for my novel,
Portal People—
which you so kindly helped me edit even after I borrowed your purse that night—it was lost by the Library of Congress, to whom I stupidly sent my only copies. Don’t worry, though: The place is on my hit list. Someday fairly soon (July, perhaps, when my paintball squad plays in a tournament in Maryland) I plan to sneak into the library’s main reading room with a kitchen match taped behind one ear and a balloon full of kerosene or diesel fuel tucked into my jeans. What a barbecue that will be! And what a menu! Baked Hemingway. Fried Fitzgerald. Roasted Thoreau. (I know you’re “literary,” Amy, but since all the great books will be safe on Google soon—including yours, let’s hope—there’s really no need for that flammable old castle.)
Seriously, though, I’m doing well. And maybe better than well, if things work out. I’m basically under contract at the moment to star in a major national ad campaign promoting the AidSat Active Angel service (which I urge you to subscribe to, since I assume that you still live alone and do a lot of walking after dark). But before we start filming, there is one tiny hurdle that I’m wondering if you can help me with: a background check.
I have no right to ask this, considering the grief I caused you, but if you have even a microdot of mercy for the guy who “hitchhiked” on your credit history and snapped a few photos of you on his phone that he sold to an amateur porn site in the Netherlands, you’ll do me this favor: Forget you ever knew me. Either that, or remember (if you’re ever asked to) that you knew another, better me. The Kent I’m becoming, not the Kent I was. And maybe you can ask Kathy to do likewise.
In closing, I must ask you to stop writing me and to stop expecting that I’ll write you. This is for your protection as well as mine. Revisiting the past, I’ve found, is like dabbling in black magic—it seems a harmless rush at first, but you never know what dark spirits it will unleash. There are more souls than bodies on this planet, more ghosts than there are houses for them to haunt, and I’m content with the one inside me now. I’d rather not open a back door to those that I’ve shut out.
Eventually you’ll see the ads I’ll make, you’ll hear about the stir I’ll cause, and you’ll understand that I’m not who you remember.
And thank God for that, I bet you’re thinking!
Kent
P.S.
Borderline between what and what?
Don’t answer.
29.
[Via courier]
Agent’s Memo: Selkirk and I in a two-man paintball match, our arms and torsos encased in grass-stained pads, our feet clad in shoes whose cleats rip up the turf, our heads caged in Kevlar helmets equipped with face masks that leave only narrow slots for our fierce eyes and lend our combat an ancient, Roman feeling. I respect him, for once. The kid has footwork; he’s never standing exactly where he seems to be. In the first twenty minutes I wasted a whole clip on him, shooting at afterimages, but gradually I learned to hold my fire. Now my opportunity has come. Our rifles have the heft of the real things, the complicated machining, the balanced barrels, and when we finally level them at each other after a lengthy tactical ballet of ducking and rolling and darting behind stacked hay bales, there’s a moment of actual tenderness and terror, because I have the drop on him this time, and he knows it. He’s wounded me twice in a row, but now it’s my turn, and both of us know that it will be a kill shot.
Bright indigo to the chest. He’s down. It’s over.
Afterward, resurrected, in his street clothes, feeding a music CD into the slot of his pickup’s dashboard stereo, he says to me, “Thanks for coming out today. I need this now and then. I need to die.”
“You’ve found the right way to do it. Temporary.”
“‘
Hold on loosely
,’ like .38 Special says.”
“Is that who this is?”
“It’s Bo Bice. I voted for him.”
I tell him I’m thirsty and name a bar whose middle booth I’ve rigged with mikes that will capture our words and the breaths between them, too. I wonder sometimes if Selkirk speaks in Morse code, through rhythmic silences and hesitations. I’ll miss him, I realize. His nebulous charisma. Still, it’s time to feed him to the fire. If this is a war, we need a body count.
There’s a proposal I plan to make to Selkirk, and I sense he’s in the mood to hear it. The world has been breaking his knuckles one by one, beginning last week with a call he got at home while placating angry exes by e-mail. He’d been at the task since Monday night, making amends, revising cover stories, and taking time out every ten or fifteen minutes to erase another false biography from another dim corner of the Web. Each time he pressed “delete” he shrank a little, and by Thursday evening, when the call came, there was barely enough of him left to grab the phone.
“Kent? It’s Roger G. in human resources. About your background check.”
“Is it complete?”
“We have some questions for you.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“This nurse in Wisconsin that you helped last March. This Sarah Flick. She contacted you socially. The photographs she sent were inappropriate.
As were the pictures that you then sent to her.
”
“I don’t understand.”
“Let’s move this thing along. There’s another AidSat subscriber, Sabrina Grant, whom we believe you’ve also dealt with socially.”
“She lives in
my complex
.”
“At present?”
“No.”
“That’s right. At present she resides in a facility.”
“Where are you coming up with all this stuff?”
“Have you ever, while speaking to Miss Grant in the course of your formal AidSat duties, impersonated a female operator based in North Platte, Nebraska? Yes or no.”
“Those are my only choices? May I explain, please?”
“And did you also, while posing as this operator, subject subscriber Grant to passive coverage for a period of eleven days, afterward seeking to conceal your mischief by claiming that the operator had died?”
“Sabrina Grant is insane. She’s unreliable. I could sue you for what you’re charging.”
“She’s not our source.”
“Am I being fired? Is that where this is leading? Because if it is, I’m hiring a lawyer. I’ve suffered emotional traumas on this job. I’ve counseled subscribers who’ve died. Who’ve killed themselves. I’ve been on the line during acts of violence. It’s all in my file. I’ll claim a disability.”
“That’s not what we want.”
“You’re effing right you don’t.”
“We’d rather settle this matter between ourselves. Confidentially. Without a scandal.”
“What would the scandal be?”
“That we ever hired you. We’d like you to take a week of paid vacation, Kent. We’re pondering how to go forward with your case such that neither you nor AidSat suffers permanent damage or embarrassment. Chances are we’ll suggest you get more therapy.”
“What about my radio ad?”
“On hold.”
“That hurts me.”
“We’re being generous, we feel. We’re taking an enlightened corporate stance toward a valued member of our family who’s faced a host of psychological challenges during his otherwise creditable tenure and whom we’re hoping will make a full recovery.”
“I appreciate it.”
“As you should.”
“Who tattled on me?”
“Relax. This day is done.”
“You expect me to
sleep
tonight?”
“Just close your eyes.”
Selkirk returned to his laptop when he hung up, purged his profile from another dating service, logged on to a costly Slovakia-based porn site specializing in older women on horseback, exited before the site had loaded, scanned the headlines on CNN.com, read a piece on the latest Canadian terror bust (by the way, congratulations,
Mounties
), ordered the movie
Nosferatu
from Netflix, and then spent seven minutes entering various combinations of search terms whose only common phrases were
blueprints
and
Library of Congress.
Finally, at 12:15 a.m., he placed the following cell phone call to Jesse, who’d left my bed just half an hour earlier without informing me of the vital news that she immediately shared with him:
“Let’s get married tomorrow. I’m tired of this,” he said.
“Of what, Cass?”
“Postponing destiny.”
“Same here. That’s why I’m trying to get pregnant.”
“How?”
“I think you know how.”
“But with who?”
“I’m sure you know that, too. I have to go.”
“You love me, though.”
“I’ll love my child more.”
Then back to the ladies-on-horseback site. Then bed. Then, in the morning a visit to the old colonel, who was recovering at home now in the company of Selkirk’s dog, whose collar I’d implanted with a device at the VA hospital one night. Here’s a sample of what the two men said, slightly edited for clarity, if clarity is possible between those characters:
“What was the ultimate goal, though?” Selkirk asked. They were talking Hollywood, as usual, with special reference to the Elvis Presley films that the colonel held up as an example of a “hegemonic myth-op.”
“
The weaponization of culture
.”
“Whose idea?”
“Ideas of this magnitude seldom have one author, but, should it ever be studied by historians, special credit will probably be assigned to Rear Adm. Bertrand Clayman Knox. It came to him in a San Francisco safe house during a three-day lysergic-acid trip in July of 1956 while reading the recently published
On the Road.
Knox was what we called back then a nonspecific forward sensor. Basically, that’s a professional hallucinator. He finally formalized the concept this way: ‘Multiply the beatniks by the bomb, project from multi-station global platform, and cultivate official distance from by designating un-American. Mao go bye-bye. Say good night, Nikita. Consult with Brits. Do not inform de Gaulle.’ I’ve seen the original. Scribbled on a matchbook.”
“I’ve never read
On the Road.
I’ve always meant to. He wrote it in like a week or two, they say.”
“Once we supplied him with the proper medicines. Truth is, he’d been noodling around with it for years.”
I mention all this to set a scene: Selkirk and I with a pitcher of dark beer and a basket of cream-cheese jalapeno poppers talking hypothetical grand arson. I, too, have a beef with the Library of Congress, I let on as we cooled down after the paintball duel. I said it relates to a family copyright that was insufficiently protected—a story that, incredibly, is true.
“‘It’s the Real Thing’ was your mother’s?” Selkirk said.
“It referred to the cookies and caramel rolls she sold through a network of regional Indiana bakeries.”
“That’s a trademark, not a copyright. Your issue should be with the trademark office, Rob.”
“Torch the whole city from end to end, I say, and let Vishnu sort it out. Or Allah. Or the Great Spirit. Pick your favorite.”
“I don’t have one,” he said.
“You strike me as a mystic.”
“Sort of. Sometimes.”
“So, who’s your favorite deity?”
“Not one that you’d be familiar with,” he said.
I signaled the barmaid for another pitcher and a half order of atomic chicken wings. Alcohol and spices make Selkirk blush, I’d found, and a head full of blood is a head that I can work with.
“Can I be utterly candid with you, Kent?”
“That’s up to you,” he said.
“You’re being monitored. You’ve been placed on a watch list along with several friends of yours. This isn’t a joke, though. I know it for a fact.”
This didn’t appear to faze him as it should have. All he said to me was, “I had a hunch.”
Then again, people his age have new assumptions. They’ve grown up believing in the orbiting eye, the subdermal microchip, the circling drone, and they’re no more afraid of them than they are of moonlight. Perhaps that’s because they’re born onstage, these creatures, and the first thing they see is the snout of Daddy’s Handycam. Their first steps, their first words, their first Little League at-bats are all directed toward the lens. In time, they have nothing inside them that hasn’t been outside. No depths. No interiors. They have no use for them, even when they find themselves in crisis. Convinced that nothing can escape the probe, they’ve evolved to move sideways when threatened, instead of inward. Out of the old shot, toward the new shot. Crablike.
“I know this,” I said, “because I’m the one who’s watching you. Not that I want to or believe it’s right to, but because it’s my job. And, frankly, I despise it. It’s barely legal, it serves no higher purpose, and the data it generates is largely meaningless and generally ignored. Except, of course, in retrospect, after there’s been a disaster we didn’t stop, but Congress insists that we could have, theoretically.”
“You’re not in telecom,” said Selkirk. “You don’t really work for Vectonal.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You’re still in the ATF or something.”
“Something.”
“I understand the firearms part,” he said, “and maybe I kind of get it about the alcohol, but what’s the great big panic about tobacco?”
I gave him the history lesson
. It took five minutes. He made no move for the exits. No moves at all. Indeed, he looked calmer than I’d ever seen him. The chaos was finally being configured for him. The lunar craters were forming a face at last. No more akas. He had a name now. Kent Selkirk: Person of Interest.
I let him linger in his bliss, topped off our beers, then offered my proposal.
“I’m forty-five years old,” I said. “High blood pressure, high cholesterol, high everything. I’d like a family. I’d like a house near water. They’re offering early retirement in my department, and it’s an attractive package. I want out, Kent. So this is my deal for you, with no fine print: Assure me you’re harmless, that you’re a nobody, and I’ll write off our whole effort as a mistake, erase the recordings, shred the documents, and head off to make a baby with your ex as if this never happened and shouldn’t have. All you have to do is say the word.” That’s when I reached for my hole card: the hidden microphone, which I placed on a napkin between us, beside the pitcher.
“A show of good faith,” I said. “Handle it.
Examine it
. Take it away with you as a souvenir.”
He fingered the thing. He stroked its silver belly.
“An AidSat ear jack is half this size,” he said.
“Free markets trump the bureaucracy again.”
“How long have you been studying me?”
“Three months.”
“And all of it will go away?” I said.
“Filed under Z for zero. We’ll leave you alone forever. All alone.”
His eyes emptied out. It seemed this prospect scared him.
“This place is closing. The barmaid wants her tip. Say it clearly. ‘I pose no danger, Rob.’ Lift your chin, please. Speak into the mike.”
It began then.
His full confession
.