The Unbinding

by Walter Kirn

  Educ/Soc Cult Index: Fluctuates

  Agent’s Notes: Sorry to send S’s search list two days late, but pleased to announce that the next will be much tardier (if it’s ever forwarded at all) due to abrupt, unauthorized vacation plans necessitated by urgent neuro-crisis, complete with ungovernable right eyelid flutter. I wish I had another job sometimes. I wish I hadn’t signed on as a patriot. Because, frankly, I don’t see a pattern in S’s doings. I don’t even see the potential for a pattern. This ding-dong lives her life the way that ants eat: from cake crumb to cake crumb to droplet of spilled juice to half-empty Coke bottle that it can’t climb out of and sluggishly, rapturously drowns in.

  S and her friends aren’t bomb throwers, I’m telling you; they’re the people bombers bomb. They’re the decoys who make the world safer for the rest of us by sitting in crowded theaters sucking Starbursts and filling the seats at Kiss farewell-tour concerts. We need these sleepwalkers. To draw the fire.

  In some ways, I’m awed by our achievement, though. We abide in evil times, undoubtedly, amid all manner of marauders, and yet you great sentinels have somehow managed to locate some last obscure inner sanctum of utter harmlessness. Sabrina’s people. So dim they almost shimmer. So innocuous they terrify. What did you brilliant data miners do to come up with your suspect list this time? Cross-reference Us subscribers, futon users, humorous-greeting-card senders, snowboard owners, and eighth-place karaoke contestants? Then toss out all the high and low IQs and pick out holders of Old Navy charge cards?

  I’ll admit that perhaps this Selkirk, the girl’s new crush, puts out a pale-lone-gunman vibe occasionally, but so do all these late-night gamer types who thrive on devil worship and Mountain Dew. So is that the next roundup? You’re sure we have the resources? It’s going to require interrogation cells the size of small Canadian provinces.

  Anyway, off goes “Rob.” I’ve met my dream gal. She’s a potty-mouthed, smooth-skinned, size-two sociopath who shouts “Mr. President!” when I yank her hair and doesn’t ask or answer personal questions. A grim little vixen, pure trauma in long dark stockings, with a yawning emotional crater at her center that not even Errol Flynn on crack could hope to fuck his way to the far side of. She’s never been to Las Vegas but she belongs there, bug-eyed and topless, gorging on buttered crab, and I intend to devote at least four days to seeing if we can’t devise a suicide pact involving French lingerie, massive doses of heroin, and front-row tickets to the Blue Man Group.

  So no more commentary for a while—the automated feeds will have to do. As regards Miss S and Selkirk, they’re dining tonight at a spot called Lucy’s Sushi (as recommended by “Rob,” their naughty Cupid), but I think they deserve some privacy, don’t you? We were young and confused with infections of our own once. The world let us be, though. It granted us our moment. It turned away and let us cuddle. Kiss. Don’t these two deserve the same consideration, no matter what threats the Bureau feels they pose?

  Let’s assume that they’re bad, though. One or both of them. Or someone close to them, perhaps. And let’s further assume that someday, someday soon, one of them dons a homemade Goofy suit and empties a vial of concentrated smallpox into the water cooler of some great theme park. We’ll either storm in and stop this or we won’t, but what will it matter if once, at Lucy’s Sushi, in the glow of a hanging paper lantern, they spoke a few words of courtship to each other that we chose not to capture?

  I’m thinking of going shorter.

  It looks nice long.

  The ends are a total disaster. They’re dry and cracked.

  More sake?

  They say you should rotate your conditioner.

  I use whatever’s cheapest.

  You’re a guy.

  American lives. Do we really want to know?

  Me, I’m leaving for the airport now. I’ve packed up the blindfolds, the lubricants, the rope. Rob and Jesse deserve their moment, too. You probably already know we’ll be at Caesars, suite 9890, with views and a Jacuzzi. But don’t come knocking. I’ll make a video. Jesse enjoys that. She’s well-adjusted, really. If everything’s bound to come out eventually, why draw the curtains? Just strip. Put on a show.

  9.

  [Via satellite]

  “Sabrina, you might not have realized we could do this, so I hope it’s not a shock, but this is your AidSat angel from North Platte dropping in to find out how you’re doing (and how that big date of yours went, especially; you seemed so nervous about it the other day), and also to answer a question you asked me then. To be truthful, I’m growing concerned about you, dear. I’ve been buzzing your ear jack for several days now, and though I’m still getting your vital signs, thank heaven, I haven’t received a single verbal response.

  “I’m buzzing you again right now.

  “I’m waiting.

  “Well, that was fair warning. More than fair, I feel. You’ll remember from your AidSat contract that if we have cause to believe that you’re in ‘jeopardy’ (as defined on page seven, bottom paragraph), we’re entitled to open your channel for passive coverage. Now, I could take this step immediately—and there’s a faint voice in my head that’s saying I should—but because we’ve formed such a personal relationship I’m going to give you another twenty-four hours to contact me and tell me you’re okay. Two little words, ‘I’m fine,’ that’s all I need. Though maybe you could explain your absence, also. Did our last conversation offend you in some way? Did you find me unhelpful? I hope it isn’t that. I hope, to be honest, that you’re on a spree.

  “It’s nothing shameful. I had my own sprees. I met my husband during one of them.

  “Just don’t make me activate passive coverage, dear.

  “‘I’m living my life.’ That’s all you have to tell me. ‘This young man I just met is sweeping me away.’

  “But as to your question last weekend. ‘The Unbinding.’ I couldn’t find it for you, you’ll remember, but I put in a standing query and this popped up last Monday morning, when I started buzzing you. I have no idea if it’s relevant. I’ll speak the address very slowly so that you can write it down:

  “http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/04/02/techno_thriller/

  “I’ll keep on searching, but I hope that’s of use to you, Sabrina. At the least, I hope it proves that I’ve been thinking of you.

  “This message will also appear on your computer.”

  10.

  [USPS / four of eight pp.]

  April 8

  Dear Mom,

  Over the years, and particularly in the last year, you’ve asked me many times to send my news in the form of actual letters—on physical paper, handwritten, not typed—so you can preserve them in your family scrapbook. Aside from a half dozen postcards, I haven’t complied. I’ve never told you why, though. There are a truckload of reasons, but one main one: To have a family scrapbook, Mom, you have to have a family, and we don’t.

  I’m not referring to your divorce and how it resulted in you and I having ethnically incompatible, separate last names. Nor am I talking about my sister’s marriage, which took away her last name and then failed, too. And I’m not revisiting your decision to sell the house I grew up in to a man who you knew would tear it down so that the other house he bought next door to it would have a larger, nicer yard with permanent deeded access to the lake. Followed immediately by your other decision to give up on three generations of Czech ancestors who saw Minnesota as the promised land and move to Phoenix and then to Winston-Salem, where I’m assuming that you’ll still be when this old-fashioned envelope arrives, all fit for pasting in your scrapbook.

  If you even keep a scrapbook anymore. It was a craze there several seasons back, and you, who’ve always been vulnerable to crazes, probably came to it late and dropped it early the same way you did with juicing, pyramid power, carpooling, lesbianism, Al-Anon, golf, The Sopranos, Ritalin, and fish oil.

  My observation that we’re not a family has nothing to do with you, however. It has to do with
logic and reality. A human being can have only one origin, can only spring up from one convergence of lines, and this human being—without your knowledge, sometime in the mid to recent past—discovered that the lines that led to him were other (and higher) than mere bloodlines. Your “son” belonged to a family, he found out, that can’t be reconfigured by the courts, can’t sell off its home to some rich yachtsman, and can’t be desecrated in a scrapbook that’s probably lying underneath the stack of “dream journals” that you made me and Karla keep that winter after you caught us “rubbing” on Halloween.

  Which is why I’m not going to describe this family, identify its founder, or tell you anything other than that it loves me and I try to love it back but often falter. What my new family offers me that our old one didn’t, besides acceptance, a sense of duty, and the protection of an older male, is independence from all the other, false families—churches, governments, frequent-shopper programs, condo associations, census categories—that try to claim a person as he ages.

  Your boy is free, Mom, and a threat—because these days, all free men are threats.

  So, let’s move along. My job is going well. We’re about to get new headsets. That weird error I made on my taxes, it’s still unsettled. My paintball squad’s been invited to a tournament. And that lost, abused dog—the scrawny Basenji that our captain found grubbing squid behind an Applebee’s—the dog we named Twist and adopted as our mascot and silk-screened the paw print of onto our jerseys—well, they’re telling us that she belongs to a top breeder, that her real name is Gretel, that she was best in show, and that we can’t ever have her back. She’s registered.

  Which they’ll regret. We’ll come by night.

  Oh, and I met an old guy who knows Tom Cruise (whom I’d already been thinking about this week, and not in a nice way but in a vicious way) and who claims that he can get me or anybody as many tickets as we want to the Los Angeles premiere of the new Mission: Impossible. The fellow can’t attend because he’s ill (there was a tent of gauze around his bed as well as a grim little minefield of bloody cotton balls), but he’ll pay for the travel of anyone who’ll go as long as they’ll promise to read aloud his “blessing” (a tiny speech that he’s still writing) to Cruise’s pregnant wife. The guy insists she’ll allow this. Cruise will make her. The guy is a veteran who met Cruise on Top Gun and coached him to angle his hips the way true aces do and show—in his eyes but not only in his eyes; in the depth and rhythm of his breathing, and even in the “esstex” of his complexion—the American naval aviator’s boundless contempt for gravity and death.

  It might be a kick, though I doubt I’ll get time off.

  It all depends on the unfolding of a story that I can feel developing around me. I can’t tell you yet how it will come out, but I do know that it will come out somehow, and that represents an important change for me. My life has had many beginnings and endings, Mom, and almost every day I seem to go directly from false start to anticlimax, but so far I’ve never experienced this feeling of being in the middle of something. Centered.

  [three pp. to follow]

  11.

  [USPS—cont’d]

  It started four days ago, last Monday night. I was taking a facialist to eat sashimi. I’d had a crush on the woman since January, and we’d been swapping vibrations at our complex. Things heated up between us when, one weekend, at a new acquaintance’s suggestion, I rented a German epic about conquistadors that happened to be the facialist’s favorite film. She spotted me carrying the disk to my apartment, we talked a bit, we realized we had a lot in common, potentially (especially if I watched and liked the movie), and so I asked her out for Japanese food after learning from her AidSat file that she’d been hospitalized on New Year’s Eve for a violent digestive episode that she blamed on consuming spoiled raw fish.

  On our drive to the restaurant we stopped at the apartment of the phobic old colonel who tutored Tom Cruise, where the facialist feared she’d left a Crock-Pot on. She’d met the colonel while helping with the search for that allegedly kidnapped teenage girl whose story went national for a time last fall, with the relatives spreading out across the morning shows (lovely, soft-spoken, trusting immigrants who flinched under the lights) until the TV people got annoyed with them over their refusal to show photos of their missing daughter’s face. (Photos were against the family’s religion.) When a newspaper later reported that the girl had been pledged in some ritual to an older man who taught at a college here once but lost his job for claiming that our government still kills Indians and that it dropped an atom bomb on Egypt but hushed it up with a transfer of gold bouillon, the public decided that the family wasn’t worth helping. The girl has never been located, but the facialist and the colonel still think about her.

  As we were leaving his apartment, I felt my cell phone shudder in my pocket. It rattled again while the facialist and I were chopsticking up small slabs of slippery tuna and discussing movies and the universe, the way people do on uncomfortable first dates. About the movies we agreed that Aguirre, the Wrath of God may be the greatest tragedy ever filmed, though neither of us could explain exactly why. About the universe we had this exchange:

  “I feel sometimes,” the facialist said, “like I’ve woken up in a dark room and I’m walking with my arms stretched out, trying to find the walls.”

  “Succinct,” I said.

  “But what do I do when I reach the walls?” she asked me.

  “Try to climb over them?”

  “What if they’re too tall? What if the walls go clear up to the ceiling?”

  “Then sit on the floor and wait for them to crumble. All walls do, eventually.”

  “But what if I die first?”

  “Your ghost can just pass through them.”

  “But what if there aren’t ghosts?”

  “There have to be,” I told her. “Why would there be walls,” I reasoned, “unless there were also things that could pass through them?”

  “Eat that last nice hunk there. It’s for you.”

  “Do you believe in walls, Sabrina?”

  “Walls are all I believe in, I’m afraid.”

  “Then,” I explained, “you also believe in ghosts.”

  During this talk my cell phone jumped a fourth time, but I didn’t pick up the messages until I was sitting on the facialist’s mattress, waiting for her to wash up and brush her teeth. It was one in the morning. We’d jabbered for four hours. Once you really get to pondering, walls and ghosts are an enormous topic.

  Message one: “This is Jesse. Call me back.”

  Message two: “You need to call. It’s Jesse. I’m in Las Vegas. I’ll be up all night.”

  Remember Jesse, Mom? The windburned sailboarder from Outback Steakhouse whom I bought an engagement ring for after three weeks? Who dumped me for the Don Juan who built log homes? She’s an official W Hotel slut now who rubs that glittery makeup in her cleavage and can have any man she points her nukes at.

  Message three: “You have to call immediately. I’m down here with Rob, from the bar. He’s in the poker room. I was scrounging for Advil in his overnight bag and I found some things you need to know about. I care about you. I’m anxious for you. Call me.”

  Who this Rob is doesn’t matter, Mom—just a guy from my complex (who recommended that movie). What matters is that Jesse mistreated me and that I take calls for a living, all day, all week, and I’m required to answer every one of them. But I didn’t have to answer hers—not with a cute facialist right there (and a late-blooming technical virgin, I happened to know) who seemed, from all the electric brushing noises and toilet-flushing to-do and bathroom racket, as though she were preparing the sort of circus that veterans like Jesse don’t have to show a guy, since all they need to do is smoothly clench.

  Though it wasn’t a circus I’d want to join each night (and maybe the facialist sensed this, and it hurt her, and that’s why I haven’t heard from her this week), at least it convinced me when I heard message four (after kiss
ing the facialist good-bye and noticing that her copy of Aguirre was still immaculately bagged) that I didn’t have to give in to temptress Jesse. No matter how deeply I realized that I still loved her.

  Message four: “Rob has copies of your journal entries from MyStory.com. They’re paper-clipped neatly together in a blue envelope. In one of them he highlighted the word ‘Nazi’ with pink fluorescent marker.”

  Well, at least one sick fool’s reading me, I thought. I’d better put in more stuff about the gym. About how I never launder my skunky shorts. About how I get noble stiffies in the hot tub from imagining my paintball team vanquishing the breeder who took our mascot.

  Then, a day later, this call came. From Rob.

  “We need to discuss your ridiculous ex-girlfriend. Not right away, but when I’m there again.”

  “I’m flattered,” I said.

  “By what?”

  “By all of this. Whatever it is. This increase in activity.”

  What I’m saying here, Mom, is that I’ve gone for years keeping my head down, minding my own beeswax, and drawing no attention from the world. But I’ve begun to matter in recent days. My life has begun to mesh with other lives, maybe even to drive them. And I like it. Because, though I can’t tell you how yet, I’ve been preparing for it.

  Now stick all of this in your scrapbook.

  Love,

  Your kid

  P.S. At work they’re producing a series of radio ads featuring actual recorded calls, and one of them (as of now, at least) will be an artistically edited tape of me helping a panicky New Hampshire babysitter smother a grease fire in a toaster oven. And that’s the last real letter I’ll ever write you.

  12.

  [DrudgeReport.com]

  MISSION IMPLAUSIBLE 6?: Classified info from stolen Pentagon laptop indicates that Cruise, Madonna, Osmond, Nicks, Diamond, Reagan, Olivier, and others are “spiritually bewildered zombie sex pawns” in decades-old joint U.S.–U.K. operation to infiltrate, manipulate Hollywood. Source: “It was trickier getting in their pants than getting inside their heads.” Developing hard…