The Unbinding

by Walter Kirn

  “I’ll call for the car,” I say. “We’ll swing by Nordstrom. Grab my amber Ray-Bans from the room and six of those pills from the bottle with the warning sticker showing a pair of droopy-lidded eyes.”

  My mad money will run out in a few days, which is also about when my johnson should fall off, so I’ll be back in action shortly. In the meantime, however, should you wish to, peruse the vast transcripts being generated by Sabrina G’s decision to ignore her AidSat talking earring and let the employee at the other end turn it into an open microphone. The tape from last week even features her deflowering, with plenty of phlegmy grunting from her male partner and at least one cry of, “Keep it in!” (And what’s this “Unbinding” business her colonel keeps talking about? A project of ours? And which Osmond are they referring to? I dimly remember hearing that the sister informed on a drunken third cousin of some top Saudi who’d roughed her up at an Aspen ski lodge once, but I’ve always thought of the brother as Mr. Clean.)

  Oh, and one last favor: Kent Selkirk’s got a tax problem, apparently, so let’s teach him a lesson in respect and send him a hefty, alarming manila envelope with all the cultic seals and stamps of power. Delivered by a clipboard-wielding tough guy whose greeting should be: “Both sign and print your name, sir.” (It’s having to print it that always turns them pale.)

  Off to the store now. My tramp wants Chloé sandals. She assures me that they never go on sale but she said the same thing about her Chanel purse and it was over thirty percent off. Nowadays, everyone discounts when they have to. Even smug Parisians.

  I needed this break.

  16.

  [Via satellite]

  “I have a confession, Colonel Geoff. I drove over to Kent’s last night while you were sleeping. He said he wanted me to meet his dog. It yipped at me over the phone and sounded darling—one of those smallish breeds without much fur whose hearts you can see faintly beating through their skin. The ones whose thin skulls you can cover with one hand and feel their whole souls alive against your palm.

  “On my way to his place, I stopped at my apartment to pay some bills and make sure my heat was off. There was something on my computer from my sister: a bunch of research I asked for about Kent that a friend of hers looked up on the Web. I couldn’t understand the software program that I needed to open it and read it, though, and plus I decided that it wouldn’t be right, so I dragged it to the trash. How would I like it, I mean, if somebody raided my mailbox or stole my diary and found out, oh, I don’t know, about the eye doctor whom I let diddle me to get free LASIK? Sure, it’s the truth, but I’ve changed inside since then. If people can’t keep a few secrets here and there, how can they free themselves up to do things differently? They can’t. They’re marooned with their mistakes. If Kent’s made mistakes, I don’t want him to be stuck with them. I want him to know he can love me and not be perfect. Is that naive of me?”

  (Unintelligible)

  “That’s an awfully unforgiving attitude. Take your friend Tom Cruise. Those things he did. Those people you caught him with behind the pool house. Well, now he knows better. He has a lovely baby. He deserves to move forward, to grow. To be a daddy.”

  (Unintelligible)

  “Fine, we’ll disagree. It doesn’t matter. This is about me. Last night. With Kent.

  “In the courtyard between our apartments there’s a fishpond, and as I was heading over I threw some coins in it and made a few silly wishes about my future. While I was standing by the water, a policeman walked by with a flashlight and a pet crate, shining the beam inside the little door and making cooing sounds. Then, up above me, on a balcony, I noticed Kent in his boxers, with his shirt off, smoking a cigarette. He looked all shaky. I waved to him but he didn’t seem to notice me, just flicked the butt over the railing and went inside.

  “When I got up there, Kent’s door was open a crack and I could see him on his couch, lying facedown and sobbing into a cushion, holding it all squished up around his face. On the floor was a spilled bowl of dog food and a chew toy. I let myself in and sat down next to him and laid a hand on his heaving, sweaty back, but it was a good five minutes before he spoke.

  “‘Twist,’ he kept saying. ‘We tried. We did our best. We’re coming back. We won’t give up, I promise.’

  “I made him a toaster waffle and some green tea and then sat back down and massaged him while he ate and told me that until he got the dog he hadn’t known what love was, or devotion, but now he knew and was sorry that he did. He talked a lot about justice—how there was none—and admitted to me that he was bad once, irresponsible, and used to stay awake for days on drugs and hallucinate that there were trolls inside his walls writing his thoughts down and peeping through the cracks and creeping out at night to steal his T-shirts and tear them up into rags to build their nests. To stop them, he’d stab a steak knife through the Sheetrock and wiggle the blade until he heard them curse him, and then he’d shove the knife deeper until they quit.

  “We ended up down on the floor together, kissing, and it was the closest I’d ever felt to anyone, and even better than our first time together. The problem was, there was dog food on the rug, and pellets of it kept sticking to Kent’s damp back. When I’d roll over, they’d crunch under my hips. It was a mess. It smelled like lamb and beef. Kent’s bedroom door was open across the way, and I kept begging him to take me there so we’d have a mattress and pillows to make things cozier, but he was holding on to me like death. When we were finished I looked into his eyes and I thought I could see his actual brain behind them, all gray and curled up tight and glistening. It didn’t scare me, though. It reassured me. When you finally let someone in, completely, wholly, it’s nice to know that he has insides, too.

  “Afterward, I toasted two more waffles and we ate them with butter and jelly at his table, which was covered with dice and tarot cards that he told me he fools with sometimes when he can’t sleep and feels like he might need guidance with ‘inner conflicts.’ We talked about whether we wanted kids someday or if we should just fly to Thailand and adopt, since the world was already overpopulated. Then Kent started crying about the dog again. He said he’d stolen it to save its life but that he’d been betrayed by someone and might never find out whom. He’d have to live without friends now, trusting no one. ‘Except for me,’ I told him. He shook his head. ‘Including you,’ he said. Then I cried, too. He stood up and went to his bedroom and shut the door and wouldn’t open it for fifteen minutes, until I threatened to kick it in.

  “His computer was turned on and open on his desk, and he let me lie down and watch TV while he typed in what had happened to him that night and stored it in what he called his ‘archive,’ where he said his words would outlive both of us. I asked him what good that would do. He said he didn’t know yet. He said that what people learned from his experiences was up to them, not him.

  “Then he asked me if you could get Tom Cruise’s address.” (Unintelligible)

  17.

  [DHL]

  Dear Mr. Cruise,

  You don’t know me. You don’t know most of us. I assume, though, that you imagine us sometimes. I assume that when you’re in your office or in your house, protected by your alarm systems and guards, shielded by layers of bulletproof smoked glass and surrounded by video cameras and panic buttons, you occasionally find yourself picturing the faces of those whose obscurity supports your fame. The faces aren’t actual faces, I suspect, but composites made up of features glimpsed in crowds. A forehead you spotted from a hotel balcony. A chin you saw through the windshield of your limousine. And though these faces disgust you, possibly, I like to think that they rouse your pity, too, because they remind you, vaguely, of your old face. Unrecognized. Unphotographed. Unformed.

  A face that may as well be my face, now.

  You’re probably wondering how I found your address. I got it indirectly and dishonestly, by pretending to have feelings for a young woman who cares part-time for the retired marine who taught you to walk like a pilot
in Top Gun. Colonel Geoff says hello to your family, by the way, and sends his regrets for missing your premiere. He isn’t a well man these days, laid low by a virus that he may have gotten from you, in fact—or given to you without your knowing it. It’s a puzzle, this bug. It’s one of the strange new ones that’s either about to break out globally or suddenly mutate into extinction.

  That’s not why I’m writing this, though. I need your help. I’ve probably needed your help for a long time, but now I finally have a way to ask for it.

  Everything that I’ve ever considered precious, they’ve taken from me, Mr. Cruise. And now, this week, they’re doing it again.

  On Wednesday a policeman took Twist, my dog. He came for her without knocking, at suppertime, luring her into a pet crate with a Milk-Bone. It reminded me of when I was seventeen and I lost my best friend, the boy who bunked below me, who’d called in anonymous bomb threats to our boarding school. He wasn’t prepared for exams—he needed time. We all needed time that semester. We were floundering. We’d come to the school with a hundred teenage maladies, from nail chewing to obesity, and we’d thought that recovering from them would be enough. But no, they demanded that we learn history, too. The names of the kings and the plots behind their deaths. The dates of the battles and the weapons that won them. My friend and I were in the dining hall, bending our forks back and flicking macaroni up into the grates that covered the lights, when the headmaster and his grim assistant appeared. They read no charges, produced no writs or warrants. They merely said, “Follow us,” and my friend did. Out of the building and into a parked car that carried him down the driveway and through the gates and off to wherever they keep the things I love once it has been determined that I can’t have them.

  The next confiscation occurred a few years later, when I missed three payments on a leased Mustang that I should have known I couldn’t afford. My only income at the time came from participating in focus groups that met in a room behind mirrored one-way glass. The job involved the tasting of new breakfast cereals and long conversations about political issues such as the food-stamp program and school prayer. I was an average citizen, supposedly, hired at random, but the truth was that the firm that sponsored the groups kept lists of people with nothing better to do, who it knew could be summoned on a few hours’ notice.

  I adopted a role in these groups: the stickler. If a cereal was named Blueberry Morning, I dug in my bowl for the pellets of dried fruit and complained when I counted only four of them. I objected to food stamps being used for sweets, and asked to hear the prayers recited aloud. This attitude won me steady work at first, but when I became notorious and conspicuous, the firm let me go. And then my car was snatched. The repossessors who chained it to the wrecker asked if there were personal items inside. When I answered, “Yes, I’ve been living in this vehicle,” they laughed and powered up the winch.

  And then three years ago they took my novel.

  I started writing it when I heard somewhere that, by law, the Library of Congress must store and catalog any book-length work produced by an American author. This was a right of citizenship, apparently, and the only one I’d ever heard of that struck me as worthwhile. I approved of voting and free speech, and I would have defended them, I suppose, if called to, but the right to claim space for one’s writings in a great building maintained by the taxpayers genuinely excited me.

  I went to work immediately, composing the story during the drives between the carnivals and fairs where I demonstrated Vita-Mix blenders. My hero, named Brock in honor of my old friend, was blessed with the power to walk through solid objects. An ordinary fantasy, perhaps, but ingenious in this case because Brock’s talent could be exercised only once before it vanished. So he had to choose carefully. He had to think. Should he use up his gift to save the anguished stranger who’d taken an overdose in a locked hotel room? Or should he wait to help an innocent child? But which child? And how innocent, exactly?

  You can imagine the suspense. What you can’t imagine, I’ll wager, is the ending. Brock died undecided. He never spent his magic, which was passed along to the last person he saw (a female cashier in a hospital cafeteria) in much the same manner that it was passed to him when an old postal clerk suffered a fatal stroke while helping him fill out a money order. Indeed, as the novel ultimately revealed, this gift of immateriality had never been exploited. Instead, it had driven all of its bearers mad.

  But all was not lost. In the epilogue I hinted that the cafeteria cashier would be one who at last employed the power, using it to intervene in a momentous planetary crisis whose nature I left unspecified but which I suggested related to the invention of a “cognibomb” that destroyed people’s minds but left their bodies intact.

  The day I finished the novel (on a typewriter bought for ten dollars from a junk store, since I couldn’t afford a computer at the time), I made five copies on acid-free stock, had them professionally bound in vinyl covers, and sent them off by certified mail to the Library of Congress. I didn’t keep one for myself because I assumed that, as a U.S. citizen, I’d always be able to visit the library and read my book. When a week passed, then two, and the package still hadn’t been signed for, I contacted an official at the library, who gave me so little satisfaction that I telephoned my congressman. I spoke to an aide who called herself Jeanine but wouldn’t give me her last name. She confirmed that my book deserved a catalog number and promised to get back to me. I waited. I phoned again ten days later and lost my temper.

  “Big libraries shouldn’t screw with people,” I said. “It only takes one kitchen match.”

  Jeanine then asked for my Social Security number. I hung up and never called again.

  The title of the book was Portal People, and it no longer exists in any form.

  But my dog does, somewhere, and I demand her back.

  Can you help me with any of this? Of course you can. You’ve struck the deals that give people long arms. But will you ever read this plea? I doubt it. As I said, I obtained your address thirdhand, through a woman I’d lied to and a man I’d met just once, neither of whose stability I can vouch for. I can’t afford to run background checks, as you can. I can’t pry solemn pledges from my associates by placing them under contract and on salary. I’m on my own here, drifting with the herd. All I can do is rely on foolish grace. I know that you have a new movie coming out in which you presumably save the world again. Wouldn’t it be a touching publicity stunt if you could also rescue a displaced animal?

  You don’t know most of us. I understand that. But we have faces, Mr. Cruise. And though they’re made up of the foreheads, cheeks, and chins that were left over after you chose your face, the day will come when our features are stripped away and dumped back into the hat for a new drawing. How will you fare then? Mathematics suggests not well. I suspect that the next round will belong to me, in fact, and that the letters begging favors will stream toward my box then.

  The power resides with you now, Portal Person, but it hasn’t stopped moving. It’s only passing through you. That’s not a threat. It’s the physics of what is. I know you’re a student of esoteric science, so I’m sure you get my drift.

  Expecting nothing but hoping much,

  Kent Selkirk

  18.

  [Via courier]

  Agent’s Memo: Returning from my vacation by the sea, my skeleton aligned, my organs cleansed, and all my buildups flushed, I decided to press on with this assignment in the manner that you, my supervisors, perennially warn against and thereby subtly recommend. First convict and then investigate. And by investigating, instigate. If the new science has it right and (as I understood it from a seminar) to observe is to disturb, it should also be true that to follow is to push.

  But would pushing do the trick? My experience tracking Grant and Selkirk had shown me that pressuring certain people only causes them to skid in circles, like shopping carts with broken front wheels. To bring them to justice (or, rather, to determine what justice might consist of in th
eir case) would call for a slyer maneuver. I had to tempt them to push back. Otherwise, they might move but never advance. They might envision but never execute.

  I think it’s working. I’m turning them toward evil.

  Last Sunday night, alone in my apartment after breaking things off with my new crush over her contact with her ex-boyfriend—whom, I’d learned from her cell phone records, she’d kept calling even after I’d ordered her to stop—I looked up from a tray of Lean Cuisine lasagna to see a dark figure pass my curtained front window. I assumed that my brat had returned. They always do. (And I always let them, if only for an evening.) As I went to the door to check the peephole, though, my gut said trouble. I stepped back. A moment later I heard breaking glass and saw the curtain billow inward. I was en route to my bedroom and my sidearm when another pane shattered, the curtain flapped again, and a cheaply framed poster of Marilyn hanging on the opposite wall suddenly slipped cockeyed on its nail. The bright violet stain on her stomach told the story, but I wiped it with a finger to make sure.

  Fluorescent water-based ammunition.

  Paint.

  Fired by multiple gunmen. Or that’s what I concluded after inspecting the window and the curtain and finding gaudy splotches of pink and green. In the shadowy courtyard, reconstructing trajectories, I called out for Selkirk and his comrades to behave like males and show themselves. When no one came forward, I went to call in a work order to the maintenance staff. That’s when I saw the words on my front door, written in orange children’s sidewalk chalk.

  THE WRATH OF TWIST!

  He’d guessed, though it had taken a few days. He’d guessed that I’d sent the law to grab the dog that he’d confessed to abducting in his MyStory journal. I’d expected this. I’d also hoped it would start a fight.

  In bed that night, out hard, I dreamed that my late wife, Jillian, had given birth to twins and hadn’t, as in reality, died from a drug interaction while carrying twins. The dream was blissful, but I tried to make it heavenly by practicing the “directed wishing” trick that I’d learned from a psychic at the spa. By issuing firm commands to my subconscious, I sought to turn the imaginary babies into imaginary young adults with solid educations and stable careers. It worked, but not as smoothly as I’d hoped. Perhaps because I’d refused to learn the gender of my late wife’s four-month never-borns, my invented descendants lacked definition. Dumpy, ambiguous physiques. Dull midrange voices. Collar-length blah hair. And, for clothing, identical gray jumpsuits. Worse, the twins seemed to be married to each other—miserably married. They bickered. They nitpicked. They sulked. They never kissed.