The Unbinding

by Walter Kirn

  Well, it’s time to head out now and do my Girl Scout’s duty. Or maybe I haven’t told you: I’m playing nurse. Every couple of days for a few hours I sit with this sweet older black man I met last summer during one of the volunteer mass searches for that poor little Hindu girl who vanished here. The guy got sick about five months ago, some vicious new mystery bug they haven’t named yet (it probably started when someone ate a monkey). And mostly he just lies in bed these days making lists for his doctors at the VA of all the people he might have caught the germ from or maybe given it to. They’re interesting lists because he’s been around. He used to be a special army officer stationed in Hollywood, of all strange places, where I guess he helped out with TV and movie battle scenes and slept with all the nasty nympho starlets. He has a tattoo of a dog man on his left forearm, but it’s all shriveled up and it looks more like a weasel.

  But hey, guess what? In the courtyard now: It’s Kent. I’m peeking at him through my kitchen window. He’s just back from Costco, it looks like, with lots of boxes, and he’s wearing his flip-flops because of the weird warm spell here. I’m thinking I’ll change into a tighter top now and maybe freshen up my eyes and lips. I’ll vamp him a bit when I walk by, but nothing desperate or flagrant—just scatter my scent. I’m still seeing Lorin, that fruity laser surgeon who gave me the massive discount on my eyes, but I think I’ve worked off my debt there (lick and nibble!), and I’m ready for someone less artsy, with a few hangnails.

  Wet kisses until the end of time, girl,

  Sab

  P.S.: Finally watched that old Neil Diamond concert film. You’re right; it has three shots of Dad in the front row, with a mustache and sideburns and the whole sad getup. And who’s that beside him—that redhead with the beehive and the mole on her throat that looks all rough and furry? Maybe that’s when he was separated from Mom, or maybe Mr. Stiff was a bad dog once. We’ll rent the thing for his sixtieth next summer, put it up on the big screen at the party, and see if it gives him a second heart attack.

  Now, help me get the lowdown on Kent Selkirk!

  4.

  [MyStory.com]

  Before AidSat I had no self, no soul. I was a billing address. A credit score. I had a TV, a phone, a car, an apartment, some furniture, and a set of leatherbound Tolkien novels, but nothing that was worth listing as an asset on the do-it-yourself last will and testament I bought online one night four years ago after watching a medical program about mad cow. I had a mother, a sister, and a nephew, but none of them lived within five hundred miles of me, and the people I thought of as my closest friends—a guy from high school, two other guys from college—lived even farther away. And while I had my share of girlfriends, they rarely lasted for more than a few months, which was how long it usually took them to acknowledge that the “real Kent” they kept pushing me to show them (and accusing me of hiding from them) wasn’t there, as I’d told them from the start.

  Then AidSat hired me and gave me life.

  And not just one life. Hundreds of them, thousands, attached to mine by fine, invisible cords that I can still feel on my skin when I leave work. It’s one of the reasons I’d rather walk than drive these days—it doesn’t shred the tender hooks and loops that fill up what most folks regard as empty space. There’s no such thing, though, I’ve learned. The air is dense. The “nowhere” from which people think their troubles appear—the cars in their collisions, the tumors on their X-rays, the letter bombs in their corporate mailrooms—is, if they’d just pay attention, packed solid with soul.

  What’s happening with Sabrina is proof of this. I’m closing in on her.

  It feels like fate.

  It started when Peter P. sent me home last Thursday. My plan was to drop by the health club, grab a smoothie, and spend an hour on the ski machine before returning to my apartment and finally getting going on this journal, which I’d been putting off for the same reason I put off everything: a feeling that something else was more important. My problem was that I’d postpone those other tasks, too, and usually end up doing some needless third thing, which I’d leave unfinished when I realized it was needless.

  At the health club, while I was changing into my shorts, I got to chatting with a new member, Rob, who, it turns out, is from Minnesota, too, and lives in the south unit of my complex. He told me he’d seen me in the parking lot and at the video store on Station Street, which is across from the building where he works. Rob’s in telecom, a new outfit called Vectonal, and he sold me a low-cost voice-and-data package right there in the club while we were skiing. He also talked up an old movie he’d rented recently, a movie he said he suspected I’d enjoy because he couldn’t help noticing at the video store how much time I spent in the foreign aisle.

  I decided Rob had me confused with someone else (I don’t do subtitles; I’ll buy a Stephen King if I want to read), but then I remembered the way the foreign aisle snakes around into the action aisle and abuts the fantasy shelves. I asked Rob to describe the movie’s plot, but he told me its plot was its “least involving element.” We’d moved to the smoothie bar by then, and I sensed that Rob was talking for the benefit of the grad-school girls who run the blenders. He hadn’t mentioned yet whether he was single, but he seemed as single as I was just then.

  “I like the spot behind their knees,” I whispered. “That’s the skin that never ages.”

  “Because it’s untouched by the sun,” Rob said.

  “By anything. Guys don’t usually touch it, either. Women are virgins there.”

  “That matters to you?”

  “At a certain level, maybe. I think it matters to most men, deep inside. It was obviously fairly important in the past, so how could it just have, you know, minimized? Evolution doesn’t work that quickly.” I studied Rob’s eyes as he listened but I wasn’t sure if they showed all the understanding I was hoping for. Then again, I’m not a skilled analyst of faces, perhaps because I can’t see them in my work.

  “Virgins still have all their charge in them,” I said, laboring to refine my point. “They’re like a new car battery. They crank. A guy turns their key, he can really draw some volts.”

  “Maybe we’ll have to wait till we’re in heaven. There aren’t a lot of them left, that I can see. Maybe it’s men’s fault for letting them go to school.”

  We shared our first full laugh as buddies then, though it wasn’t a laugh I was proud of, or quite understood. Still, at the very beginning of a friendship, even fumbled attempts at humor should be honored.

  “You in a relationship now?” Rob asked.

  “I’m trying to be.”

  “That’s sort of the air you give off. Good luck,” he said. “Anyone special?”

  “That’s always the hope.”

  The movie Rob recommended was out that night, so I went back for it on Saturday morning on my way home from the Costco. The DVD was resting on a box full of lightbulbs and dryer sheets and Metamucil. While I was unloading my Ranger it must have fallen, though, because when I reached the door of my apartment, I heard a woman’s voice behind me say, “If this is your disk, you have stupendous taste. I saw it last week with my film group. Stunning shit.”

  It was Sabrina, but dressed for the wrong season—in pink velour tracksuit pants and a green halter top. Her nipples were perked out like little thimbles, and her pants rode up tight and graphic in the crotch. A real anatomy lesson, and not a welcome one. Women these days have no padding on their frames, and when they thrust their hungry bones at me I like a little cloth to soften the onslaught. Still, Sabrina’s mouth made up for everything. Her smile was like the flap on a white envelope: that clean, that even, and that wide. And glistening, like the flap had just been licked.

  (Is anyone reading this? Write me if you are. It’s KentSelkirk@gmail.com.)

  We stood around in my doorway for a while and jabbered about the amazing movie coincidence. (I didn’t let on that Rob had recommended it, pretending I’d heard about it from a professor during my “student days
in the Bay Area.” It was a bit of pure inspired BS that I fear I’ll have to back up now with more BS, like maybe a Photoshopped snapshot on my fridge showing me standing under the Golden Gate Bridge.) When Sabrina used the term “seventies German cinema,” it put me on my guard. I’d slept with a girl in New York who’d spoken that way, and I’d found her unpleasantly stern and strict in bed, with too many rules about what parts went where and in what particular order and for how long. Her name was Amy, and she wrote short stories about her disappointments with men like me, who were the only men she liked, unfortunately.

  Things got even scarier for me when Sabrina revealed that she grew up in Arkansas, the daughter of an influential lawyer who’d served as “chief counsel to Mrs. Bill” and now “represented some other high-end evildoer.” I don’t know what sort of records such men have access to, but after they booted me out of Cass Academy and before I landed at AidSat, in my stupid years, I kicked around with a crew of Saint Paul meth heads who smuggled damaged used cars down from Ontario and sold them to migrant grape pickers in Fresno. I did a lot of things like that. If Sabrina’s father got to checking, some murky old stuff might come out about “Kent Selkirk,” and I’d be good and screwed—not only with her but at my job. AidSat’s a high-morality operation, and their puzzling failure to thoroughly probe my résumé was the act of grace that saved my life. (I don’t know why I just admitted that. There’s something about this machine I’m typing on that makes me feel that I can tell it anything, especially after midnight, with the lights out.)

  I invited Sabrina inside, but she begged off, saying she had an appointment with a sick friend whom she cleaned house for and read to every Saturday. From the way she called this friend “they,” not he or she, I guessed it was a man. She must have sensed my discomfort, since she explained then. She overexplained. This man, this Colonel Geoff, was well into his sixties, Sabrina said; he could barely get up off his mattress, and his illness had Swiss-cheesed his brain. Colonel Geoff was delusional, racked with fears and theories. The main one involved some event called “the Unbinding,” which he’d hinted to Sabrina might take place soon but had refused to discuss with her in detail because people her age, he felt, had “faulty mind seals.”

  “Work on him till he coughs up,” I said. “Sounds chilling. Or tell me more over dinner sometime next week.”

  “Only if you watch Aguirre first.”

  “I’ll put it straight in when you leave. I’ll watch it twice. Your silver earring there, with the blue stone?”

  “My AidSat Angel what’s-it?”

  “I work for them. You ever get the willies in a dark parking lot, just ask for Operator Seven-S. I’ll call in the SWAT team. Or I’ll swoop down myself.”

  Sabrina didn’t laugh or even grin, which is rare when I reveal my occupation and follow with that line. Instead she said, “Don’t be grandiose.”

  “Why not? Why not, when I can back it up?”

  We confirmed our dinner plans (when I asked her what sort of food she liked, she answered, “I want you to use your ESP there”), and while she was swishing away across the courtyard, I spotted her peeking back over her shoulder as though trying to catch me staring at her butt. And I was, but not in the way she probably hoped. I was thinking that if she ever became my girlfriend, I’d lay down the law about modesty in dress. I’ve done it before with other women I’ve dated, and though they’ve grouched at first and acted ticked, I think they respected my judgment underneath. They knew as well as I, the AidSat operator who’s been privy to rapes in progress and heard the screaming (and the silence when the screaming stops), that it’s a rugged world out there. The more of yourself you show off to the wrong people, the more they’ll eventually demand to see.

  5.

  [By courier]

  Mag/Print/Lib—Ref 467398AD—Subject ID: Sabrina Matilda Grant

  O

  InTouch

  Us Weekly

  Star

  A Is for Asphyxiate

  Trace Evidence

  D Is for Dismember

  Activity: Subnorm

  Educ/Soc Cult Index: Low

  Agent’s Notes: More soul-sucking trash and lurid smut from the subject whom I once heard refer to her old college as an “extremely prestigious mini-Ivy” but who currently makes her living extracting blackheads and applying so-called “Dead Sea salt glows.” Not that you give a flip, if you’re still up there, and lately you’ve shown no evidence you are. But what if I told you a man our girl’s been flirting with is a former associate of Karl OverGaard of Chisago City, Minnesota, a twice-convicted user of hard narcotics and an unindicted dealer of stolen firearms? Would that rouse you out of your bureaucratic slumber? And what if I told you further that our subject has been paying regular visits to a Lt. Col. Geoffrey Lark, a retired Marine Corps media liaison who, according to his service records, suffered three “pronounced factitious breakdowns” in the eighteen months preceding his discharge?

  Would that perhaps move you to pick up the damn phone and explain why the hell I’m dogging these sorry dunces? These drab no-account middle-income paintball warriors?

  Probably not. You’ve decided to let me drift here, subsisting on energy drinks and toasted subs, with half a million dollars’ worth of gear irradiating my apartment with cancer particles that I can actually feel behind my eyeballs every night when I lie down in bed.

  I’m at my wit’s end, boys. I’m serious. I know things. I know how we do what we do. I know our methods. Don’t you understand the risk you’re running? Didn’t you test my personality annually? Didn’t you interview my fifth-grade teacher? Didn’t she tell you I’m irritable when patronized and positively flammable when ignored? But either you’re not there or you don’t fear me, because this packet got to you on Monday and now it’s Thursday and I’m still here. In hell. Swigging NyQuil-spiked Red Bull and watching Aguirre, the Wrath of God, alone. For the fourth time this week. With the blinds drawn and the heat up.

  A faint metronomic chirping in my temples, a contrapuntal twitching under my ribs.

  I’m falling.

  I need to get out more.

  “Rob” needs friends.

  6.

  [Via satellite]

  “Active Angel?”

  “Present.”

  “Sabrina Grant. My PIN is 765432.”

  “Consecutive numbers. Not a prudent password.”

  “If someone’s that desperate to steal some free advice, then be my guest. And take my problems, too. My cable bills, my cramps, my Nordstrom card, my eye-surgeon ex who won’t stop leaving messages, the lease on my shitty new Hyundai—”

  “Take a breath, dear. Excellent. Another one. Your systolic’s just fine, but your diastolic scares us.”

  “I think something’s happening to me. I’m not sure, though. It might be happening to everyone.”

  “‘Always Willing, Always at Your Side.’”

  “What? You went all choppy suddenly.”

  “You must be standing near a microwave.”

  “I’m at a friend’s, Colonel Geoff’s. He doesn’t own one. Could a Crock-Pot do it?”

  “Unlikely, but why not step back from it in any case.”

  “I’m glad I got a woman. I like your…pace. Do you work with a guy named Kent Selkirk, by any chance? Medium height? Sharp chin with lots of shaving cuts?”

  “Is he based in North Platte?”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Where I’m based.”

  “No. Hey, can you hang on for half a sec? It’s not done cooking, Colonel Geoff. You should have soaked the beans first. They’re rock hard. Just work on your list and I’ll help you when I’m through. You there still?”

  “I can’t break off unless you ask me to. And not even then, if I feel that you’re at risk.”

  “Is it safe for my friend to bleed himself each morning? Not a huge amount, just a spoonful, roughly.”

  “That’s your question for me?”

  “It’s my f
irst one. Things are kind of piling up these days.”

  “Just a moment, darling. Searching. Reading. In most cases, if performed in sterile conditions, the practice is physiologically benign, unless it becomes compulsive or disfiguring. Barring that, certain ancient medical authorities believed it to be an invigorating regimen.”

  “Colonel Geoff learned it out in Malibu, he said. The stars do it. All the freakjobs on TV. He told me it regulates insulin production and helps you lose weight. Thing is, he’s thin already. The mucous membranes inside his mouth and throat, they’re peeling, they’re chapped. They rub off if he chews solids. They thought it was lupus at first, but now that’s out and they’re saying it’s something that jumps from person to person, but not through the bodily fluids or whatever, but maybe—please tell me if this is even possible—through talking a lot.”

  “Infection via speech?”

  “‘Prolonged repeated intensive conversation.’ He’s bat-shit, right?”

  “I’m searching. Nothing here.”

  “Would you look something up? ‘The Unbinding.’ Type those words in. Just for the heck of it. Anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Don’t sweat it. It’s just some phrase that he’s grabbed onto. It’s like when you’re six and you learn to say ‘unique’ and suddenly your teacher is ‘unique,’ your cat’s ‘unique,’ your bike’s ‘unique….’”

  “To whom are we referring, dear?”

  “This sick old marine whose place I’m at today. I’d tell you his whole warped story but he’d kill me. I’m not supposed to be making calls from here. He’s phobic. No phone, no TV, no Internet. I think it’s the pills. Or the bleeding. Still no luck?”