The Unbinding

by Walter Kirn

  13.

  [FedEx]

  Hey, Dad,

  I’m sending this by FedEx. I’m not sure why. I’ve always trusted FedEx. I’m not sure why. Maybe because they deliver frozen plasma. Or maybe because you never hear of FedEx drivers suddenly gunning down their supervisors. I dated one once and the guy had spirit, pride. I got the feeling he cherished his packages and would rather have crashed through nineteen guardrails than let his van be hijacked or tampered with. I envy the small, pale Mormon girl who married him. They live across town in a house with foil pinwheels spinning merrily in the petunia beds. Trikes in the driveway. Campaign signs in the yard. Growing up in a house full of globes and bound New Yorkers and important Kennedy collectibles, I thought I was above such happy crap, but as a single thirty-year-old facialist, I’m turning into a lawn ornament myself. Driving home from the spa some evenings, fried from exfoliating surgeons’ girlfriends, I park across from the driver’s kitchen window and watch his family saying grace. They eat by candlelight—always. And guess who hurtles up to do the dishes?

  Inside this mailer you’ll notice a sealed envelope. I can describe what’s in it, but you can’t open it. I need you to store it safely at your firm, wherever you keep the secret affidavits, murder weapons, sacks of Krugerrands, and all the other crap I know you stash there. The papers in the envelope belong to Lt. Col. Geoffrey Lark, whom you should consider a new client, with all the sacred privileges you grant to embezzlers from UNICEF. The papers contain a partial list of potential infectious contacts—including notes on how the contacts happened—that Colonel Lark has been dictating to me. The dollar bill in the mailer is your retainer.

  Seeing as it was my birthday two days ago, you’ve probably been trying to reach me. I’m holing up here at the colonel’s place, sad, incommunicado, and secretarial. We eat lentil soup behind drawn blinds. Sexually active young men creep by outside, tracking my scent, pinging pebbles at the windows. I break their toes like snap peas in my dreams. The colonel tells me that at the Playboy Mansion he once found himself alone with Stevie Nicks in a bare ceramic-tiled room fitted with mammoth pewter showerheads and, in the floor, a star-shaped golden drain. He asked Nicks what she wanted from him in there. “A thorough soiling and then a thorough rinsing.”

  I’ve been soiled, Dad, but I’m still unrinsed.

  Don’t stress about my physical safety, though. The AidSat ear jack you bought for me the summer I drove cross-country in the Acura to check out Yellowstone and Aunt Flipper’s ranch is technically still operable, even though I ignore the voices pressing through it out of respect for Colonel Lark’s belief that speaking to anybody you can’t see is like pouring your “esstex” down that golden drain.

  Esstex. A word he made up for a “fresh testament” that he says was written on a frigate anchored a mile off of Catalina Island and staffed with silent Fijian masseuses who dug at the lumps in the officers’ hunched shoulders as they brainstormed up new gods. “We made brutal miscalculations,” he admits, “but we had our breakthroughs, too.” He wishes his masters would call him back to work. There were more funds for such projects once, he says, but now all the cash goes into avionics and “smart” artillery shells—now that good “myth-ops” might actually save nations.

  My bitter sniffles are piddling next to his, Dad. His face when he thinks back and worries forward sweats and melts and streams like a hot Popsicle. I dab it with refrigerated Wet Ones. I kiss away the drips. He’s finally letting me in, and it’s an honor, even though I know he lies a lot. No one can be as important as he remembers being, or as feared as he feels he is now. He trusts me, though, like I trust FedEx. Like I can still trust you, I hope.

  Your girl but no one’s woman yet,

  Sabrina

  P.S. I saw a film of you grooving away at a Neil Diamond show next to a fox who wasn’t exactly Mom. It’s cool, I guess. It’s cool except for how caught up you seemed in “America.” It’s not really Diamond’s song. They forced it on him. In a Reno hotel at 4:15 a.m., on the balcony of a twenty-first-floor suite. The choice they gave him was jump or make a hit of this. Diamond asked for his glasses. He read the lyrics they’d written. Then the colonel handed him a guitar.

  14.

  [MyStory.com]

  Daylight saving time saves no one. It’s spring, when people uncoil and make mistakes. At AidSat, we pump up the lumbars in our desk chairs as our overstimulated callers plunge over muddy embankments in new sports cars, weep uncontrollably in motel bathrooms while drunken lovers pound the doors, and vomit into restaurant urinals after gorging on stuffed-crust pizzas that they pledged at New Year’s not to eat again. It’s been a siege at work these last few days—no lunch breaks, no chats over coffee, no, just the relentless application of empathy to hundreds of seasonal breakdowns that we saw coming the moment more sunlight was added to the evenings. One man from Columbus whom I counseled on Wednesday overdosed on allergy capsules and then spotted the Savior, dressed in a black trench coat, gathering daffodils in his backyard. I read to him from a script on my computer screen devised to calm outbursts of religious mania.

  “Sit down with a cold glass of water and your scriptures, picture the face of your mother or your best friend, and say to yourself: ‘At my next meal—’”

  “Is this Gospel of Judas authentic?” the fellow asked me. “Where did they find the thing? And when, exactly? My girlfriend says it’s been lying around for ages.”

  “I believe it’s an old gnostic text.”

  “So that’s official?”

  My cell phone filled up with messages as I worked. Three or four were from Jesse, who’d left Las Vegas with Rob after he’d won tens of thousands in a poker tournament. He’d impulsively leased a Cadillac convertible and driven them through the night to a resort in Laguna Beach. They were eating raw foods, she said, and getting massages meant to sweep the toxins from their muscles. He’d confessed to her that he’d been reading my online journals (Hi, Rob! Come back to the gym for a long sauna!) as part of a “hush-hush effort” at Vectonal to perfect a new telecom product known as MeNet that would compete with AidSat in the market for “seamless life-assistance interfaces.” I didn’t call Jesse back, but it was hard to contain my curiosity after she informed me in another call that Rob had drowsed off one afternoon during an in-room couple’s hot-stone massage and muttered the name “Aguirre.” Jesse knew of the film from the printouts of my diaries, so she confronted Rob when he woke up and was warned—with a vehemence that she said alarmed her—that any more questions relating to me, my writings, AidSat, MeNet, or Rob’s Vectonal job would land her in “grievous bureaucratic peril,” beginning with registered letters from the authorities about her chronic underreporting of tips during her career at Outback Steakhouse.

  (Note to Rob: For someone I’ve only hung out with a couple of times, your fixation on me is pronounced, and your explanations for it laughable. I dealt with a few of you haunted AC/DCs during my two years at military school, and let me advise you that roaring around the West playing Texas Hold ’Em with fellow degenerates, champagning and Saks-ing my cash-strapped former lover, and ordering room-service rubdowns from hotel healers won’t bring your restless soul the peace it seeks. Accept yourself, Rob, and find a good support group. Or call me at work—we maintain extensive directories.)

  The next cluster of urgent voice mails came from my paintball squad’s captain, Colin Frisch, instructing me to initiate phase three of our plan to liberate the imprisoned show dog Twist, whose case I’ve been reluctant to discuss here out of fear of jinxing our plot. But my shyness, I now realize, has served no one. And especially not you, Rob, my unbalanced but only identifiable reader. You deserve to know more fully the humane yet lively adult male whom, for whatever questionable reasons, you furtively adore.

  Phase three in our plan to set free poor Twist—the runaway, Dumpster-diving Basenji that brought our squad such luck and joy last winter after we found her and nursed her back to plumpness and before she was torn
from our embrace by Stan and Tammy Kurtz of Canine Endeavors, her greedy AKC-backed breeders—began last Thursday night, when I summoned two teammates through their AidSat ear jacks to meet me at Fuddruckers in the Northgate Mall. “Aaron” and “Storm” dined lightly, on chicken sandwiches, as we mapped on a napkin the parallel dirt roads that form the northern and southern borders of the rural CE kennel complex. We’d been scouting the operation for months, observing the feeding and exercise routines there, noting the bedtimes of its owners, and recording the comings and goings of various service personnel.

  Our task that night was to engineer a meeting with a pair of male and female cleaners who were the last folks to leave the place most evenings. They appeared to be Mexican, middle-aged, and married. They drove a retired Ford Galaxy police car with a stretched and duct-taped garbage bag for a rear driver’s-side window. The man dipped snuff. The woman dragged her left leg and seemed religious, compulsively crossing herself as she raked cedar chips across the filth and stench of the locked run where Twist paced listlessly behind the chain-link.

  I sat with Storm in my Ranger and watched them clean as Aaron, who’d ditched his Jetta on a side road, belly-crawled up behind their Galaxy and pricked a slow leak in one of the rear tires. The plan was to follow them when they drove home, pull alongside them when the tire gave out, offer aid, and get to talking. We assumed that the pair was disgruntled and corruptible.

  “I think I hear sad little Twist,” said Storm. “She’s lonesome.”

  I listened. Whichever dog was howling, its cries conveyed the pain of the whole pack. Above the kennels and the surrounding dairy farms, whose cooped-up miseries gave off no sounds but fouled the truck’s air vents with sickly greenish odors, hung a waning, pollution-rouged half-moon. Twist would be free before the orb was full again—that was my vow, which I made out loud to Storm. He held up two fingers and crossed them. He knocked wood. Storm is a serious amateur astrologer who hosts a late-night call-in show, Ethereon, on the state university’s public radio station. He cast Twist’s natal chart using Kennel Club records and warned us that all the Neptune in her essence might hamper our mission.

  Storm’s pessimism irked me. From what I know of the occult, it’s supposed to empower human beings, not provide them with more excuses.

  The cleaners drove off in their Ford at 9:15. Their deflating back tire stirred up extra dust that clouded my headlight beams. They didn’t stop, though. I pulled up closer and flashed them. They didn’t slow down. The paved highway was only two miles ahead, but our goal was to corner them away from traffic. Then Aaron gunned past me in his Jetta, waving a hand as though to say I’ll handle this. I braked to give him time. A minute later there we were, offering jacks and flashlights to the cleaners.

  And there was Twist, up on his hind legs in their backseat, startlingly, inexplicably accessible and nearer to freedom than we’d dared hope. Spooky Neptune had shed an unexpected influence.

  “Your dog?” Storm asked the woman in Spanish. I couldn’t translate her answer, but it was long and included the English words vaccination booster. The man and Aaron had raised the car a foot or two, but the jack was sinking and tilting in the damp ground. The morons kept on cranking. The car slipped sideways, shuddered, and settled, trapping the jack beneath a rusty brake drum. Twist’s frightened scratching had ripped the garbage bag and put her in a position to leap and flee, her front paws perched on the glassless window frame. I tried to push past the woman to grab hold of Twist, but an error in footwork tripped me, I bumped Storm, he reached out and touched the car to keep from falling, Twist squirted out, the chassis shifted, groaned, and when it rocked down off the fulcrum of the jack, the tortured yelping drove ice picks through my chest.

  The cleaning woman let loose a third-world scream that could have shaken the cross from a cathedral, and Storm, the doomsayer, fled—in Aaron’s Jetta. Permanently disgraced and off the squad.

  Aaron knelt in the dirt consoling Twist, whom he’d pulled out from underneath the car and who was sitting up now, very straight, all purebred and obedient, holding out his mangled right front leg as though inviting somebody to shake it.

  Leaving me to call AidSat.

  I identified myself using my employee code to the randomly selected operator, whose code I asked for in return. The woman’s prefix indicated that she was stationed in Nebraska, at the new North Platte Special Routing Facility, which specializes in mental-health emergencies among a selected group of high-risk clients who aren’t aware of having been so identified. Because of the late hour, North Platte must have been experiencing a lull and taking on nonspecific system demands.

  “We’ve got about three separate challenges here,” I said. “No law enforcement, though. You got me?”

  “Yes, dear.” That’s how all those special North Platte ops talk. Soothing. As though you’ve reached them in their rocking chairs. All older, all female, and all intensively trained. Former military nurses, most of them.

  “We’ll need a wrecker, a fluent Spanish speaker, a veterinarian, and three hundred dollars in cash.”

  “All on their way.”

  “Been busy this week?”

  “Flooded.”

  “Especially Michigan residents, I’ve been noticing.”

  “I blame the new round of layoffs at the Big Three.”

  “They certainly don’t help much.”

  And in no time, half an hour, it was done. Twist had been disinfected, bandaged, and splinted. The ruined tire had been replaced. The cleaners’ immigrant silence had been bought. When I dropped off Aaron at his condo, we argued over possession of the dog, but I prevailed by pointing out my lack of a roommate and my higher salary. Twist rode in my lap back to my complex and slept on a throw pillow beside my futon with one of my arms stretched protectively across her. I didn’t sleep. I listened to her breathe. She must have been dreaming, because she jerked a lot. Sometime during the night I woke up crying. I phoned Sabrina and left a message admitting that I’d been abrupt and cruel to her after our night of pricey sushi, lofty conversation, and awkward breachings of her aging hymen. I begged her for another chance. Caring for a crippled pet, I told her, had softened me inside.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I said.

  And because there was a small dog involved, she did.

  15.

  [By courier]

  Agent’s Memo: In the grounds at the bottom of her low-fat lattes? In the stains underneath her polyester mattress pad? In the S-curves and loops of her discarded dental floss? Where was it written? And why couldn’t I read it? And why can I discern it so plainly now, from so far away, in this dim and silent room where I’m sitting naked on the floor encased in a tightening rind of drying mud and breathing the fumes from a dish of burning oil whose wan blue flame is just moments from going out?

  I see the plot now because I want to see it. Maybe that’s what’s changed.

  The truth is simple: Sabrina Grant and Kent Selkirk, I know now (and might have known before, had I not been so desperate to find “proof”) are the deeply embedded, plainclothes vanguard of an immensely dangerous new foe whose goals are murky even to its members. What makes our job so much harder than it should be is that these moronic shadow soldiers don’t view themselves as soldiers at all, but as harmless average citizens. Nor do they regard their orders as orders; they experience them as impulses and notions formed independently in their own minds. No wonder this adversary baffles us. It’s like none we’ve ever faced. It can’t be subverted because its loyalists aren’t aware of being loyal to anything other than their own vague instincts. Its instructions can’t be intercepted because they’re never formally issued. Its commanders can’t be captured because they don’t, in fact, command.

  Do I have it right? Is that a fair description? A volunteer strike force of the unaware executing a plot that they can’t fathom? But which we’re in the process of fathoming for them, so that we can foil it just in time? (By election time, ideally, when
we foil most plots. Or announce to the world that we’ve foiled them, that is.)

  I’m back on the team, boys. I’m rested and I’m ready. Outlook: open. Attitude: adjusted. Disbelief: suspended. Hammer: cocked.

  They annoy me, these kids, and it’s time to make examples of them. “Guilt” is an obsolete category, anyway. Guilty is as guilty acts. Let the Trap-and-Trace show trials begin!

  But here’s what I need to complete my mission: your patience. I’m not on station at the moment (I’m knotting the belt of a clean white terry bathrobe and padding in hemp slippers across a hallway to ask my new gal pal if she’s finished with her pedicure), but I’ve started to realize that physical proximity isn’t needed to follow this new movement. The scanning devices we use are highly portable, and the signals scattered by the enemy fill the atmosphere from pole to pole. Indeed, the farther away one moves from the signals’ specific points of origin the more telltale they become.

  And odd little victories occur at random. To wit: Out of some lingering sense of loyalty to a man she’s described to me, three times, as “gravy without a biscuit,” my flighty young slut decided the other day to warn Mr. Selkirk about my interest in him. This only caused him to boast and joke and showboat in an attempt to hold my gaze. He even confessed to a small theft (the abduction of a dog) that I’m considering reporting to his local police department. He also showed vulnerability to blackmail. In mocking what he took to be my predatory bisexuality, he displayed a knowledge of the tendency that can be gained only by having it.

  I’m finally having fun, is what I’m saying. I’m getting my patriotic spirit back.

  But here she is! Behold: mauve toenails. And no more calluses or cracks. Toting a pretty silk gift bag full of lotions that are complimentary but not free, as men understand but women never will.