The November Criminals (13 page)

XII
.

N
OW 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.

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.