The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  My pager. My line of communication. It had sat at my hip for most of my adolescence, at this point. You could say it was the most human thing about me. Through it and through it alone I had traffic with my species. Lacking the pager, my existence looked doubtful. Which may be another reason I’m going on at such length. Getting rid of it was the easiest thing I’d ever done, though I waited, I admit, until the Sunday after my discharge to do it. I wrapped it in an old sock and put it in the garbage. Then I took it out of the garbage and dropped it into the drain of our sink. I checked to see if my father was nearby. He has a real neurosis about the garbage disposal. He’s always fishing things out of it, like eggshells, which he claims are “bad for the machinery.” But he was not nearby. I had no idea where he was. So I shoved the pager down into the drain, down to where I could feel the block-blunt, slimy blades against the back of my hand, and then I pulled my forearm out and with a grope flipped the under-sink switch, letting water flow into the drain from the faucet. That’s another thing my father claims you have to do, to lubricate the crushing process or whatever. Some beetle-crunching sounds came out, under the circular groan of the blades, as the disposal ate my pager. “Is there a spoon caught?” my father shouted from his bedroom when he heard the noise. He has good ears.

  And you know who was paging me, right when this happened? For the first time in a few days? You guessed it. Noel Eleuthere Bradley. The page arrived just as I shoved it down. Symbolic coherence, right? Oh, I hesitated. Not from uncertainty. To enjoy it more. Noel I’ll never be able to feed into a wood chipper, the way he deserves. Too big! Too corpulent! Even filleting him into small enough steaks to get into a chopping or grinding machine would cost too much effort. So it’s into the garbage disposal with you, you fat, grinning, lying shithead!

  I have no idea how much experience with drugs you have, ladies and gentlemen. There is a hierarchy of retention. Losing coke or heroin is a tragedy. Losing acid or mushrooms or ecstasy is a major party foul, a depressing albeit bearable event. Losing weed does not rank. Except, of course, for the man who sells it. Who knows it, sells it, who wants to protect it, to see it blossom into pleasure and vapidity. I love my weed. Even though I knew this tag end of the package would be the last, I still cared about its fate. If I’d had enough friends to throw a party, I would have had a last smoke with them. If Digger and I had been on easier terms at the moment, we could have gotten destroyed. I theorized about smoking it myself. Just over periods of time. It would last, I extrapolated, until the middle of November. I couldn’t actually, though. I didn’t want to, and when I tried to force myself I just chuckled. I couldn’t throw it away, though. It’s the same with food. You don’t want to throw it away. You want to see it used. I tabled the issue until Friday, nine full days of laziness after I’d been let out, when I woke from a real marathon nap ablaze with what I thought was an über-genius idea. You find that alarming? I don’t know what to say. You’ll just have to trust me. I marched upstairs, up to the second floor, and opened my father’s door.

  He was standing there dressed in his Sherlock Holmes costume. I was stunned; I thought he was mocking me, until I remembered that I’d forgotten that this was the night of the October Gala at the Cochrane. The second Friday in October, remember? Because they’re too cool to have it on real Halloween? Which meant that Dr. Watson was either already in our house or soon to be. I wanted to get this exchange out of the way before she arrived.

  “Ah, Addison Schacht, I presuuuuuume!” my father declaimed with a weird plummy quasi-English accent, and stared at me through his magnifying glass. I don’t remember Sherlock Holmes ever saying that. I think it was the Stanley and Livingston guy who said it, though I can never remember which is which. I whipped out the bag of weed I planned to offer him. That was my brilliant idea.

  It came to me in a dream-free sleep. So it had to be sort of valuable, right? I mean, because it wasn’t born out of any romantic self-torture. I just thought of it and did it. No discussion, no plan. “Like maybe you and Fatima would want some,” I explained, waving the bag. “For the party. Like after the party. You’re going to the party, right?” I’d put fresh orange peels in with the weed. It was a fragment under two ounces, first-rate stuff. Red-haired, dense, tender buds. Good weed is nice-looking. Comforting-looking. Six feet of air between us. His left eye warped by the lens. Beneath his nails, at his cuticles, glittering clay. Ineradicable deposits. My fake smile hurt my maxillary muscles.

  “Addison. Where did you get that?” He’d lowered the lens from his face, and his shoulders sank in despair. He was looking at the floor, just like he’d done when he questioned me in the hospital.

  “I got it from a friend. I was like holding it for a friend. It’s okay, though. You can have it. I thought you might want some. It’s okay, Dad, really.”

  He tapped the magnifying glass against his lowered chin. The high collar of the costume shirt pushed its hard wings into his flesh, wrinkling his slight wattle. “Addison, while I have smoked dope in the past—”

  I cut him off. “No, really, Dad. It’s like not a problem. Okay?”

  My cheeks had heated up and my sinuses began to burn. A sudden fear that I was going to weep made me grind my teeth.

  “Can’t you just tell me what’s going on?” he asked. “Can’t you tell me? Is this related to the conversation we had at the hospital? I feel as though it is. I feel as though it is and you’re not telling me.” His voice was tight, higher than normal. “Where did you get the drugs?” That word again. And I had just shown him it was weed, and he had recognized it as weed.

  “There’s nothing going on, okay? I promise. I don’t even know what you mean. It’s just weed. Okay? It’s not even anything bad. Everyone smokes it. It doesn’t even do any harm.”

  “Addison,” he groaned, and hid his eyes with his free hand. He kept them covered for what felt like a full minute. His lips whitened and reddened as he pressed his mouth into a kinked prim demi-smirk. I’d never seen a similar expression appear on his face. I thought he might actually scream at me, might call me out for being a secretive little shit. This thought lifted my spirits. I don’t know why.

  But all he said, after unshading his eyes, was: “Can you at least tell me why you threw out all those plastic bags? There were six garbage bags full of perfectly good plastic bags. I found them where you left them with the trash. Were you just not going to tell me? We could have used them. Some of them.” He spoke as though in visceral pain. I wanted to tell him, for a second. To tell him everything. What would have been the point, though? My face was even hotter. My eyelids trembled, the muscles at the top of my cheeks quivered, and horror at the tears I knew were coming constricted my throat.

  And then I was saying, “It’s like all right, Dad, like it’s all right. I just like don’t think it would be a very good idea to tell you.” With a spurt of shame I started weeping, loud and windy sobs. Standing leaning at the threshold of my parents’ bedroom and crying, palming my face. My father wearing his costume, the deerstalker slipping back from the crown of his head. God, it was painful. The crying itself, I mean. Humiliating. Crying at my age is the ultimate symptom of dicklessness. And why is crying painful? What sense does that make? Though it does lighten your burden, I guess. The pain didn’t subside. He put his arms around me, which is something I can’t even remember the last time he did, and I stood there shuddering and choking back my cries. Of what? I have no idea. I waited until I was calmer to break away, we exchanged a timid nod, and then I ran downstairs and lay in my cold bed until I heard Fatima arrive. They made less noise than usual, getting ready to go. My father was not cracking his desperate jokes. While they were at the party, I slipped the gun out of my now-empty safe and into his kiln. He had it going then, most of the time, attempting I think to re-create his Greek urn, the one that had exploded in the first days of the fall. A real spasm of productivity. And when I went to retrieve it the next morning, as he and Fatima were sleeping off the champagne and my weed,
I saw it had been melted and warped into a thumby fist of metal. No longer recognizable as the work of human hands.

  That night I could not sleep. Spare me your theories about my wanting to open a new chapter in relations with my father. Wanting things to be different. People are what they are, and wishing them to change is foolish. And insulting. I was not even thinking about him, anyway. I was thinking about something Mr. Broadus had said to me. About Kevin’s having a pager. About there being certain “indications” that he had destroyed, before the police could search Kevin’s room. You have to understand that what I’m about to say I mean as a strange compliment to Kevin. He was a drug dealer. A fellow of the craft. Maybe he was less of an asshole than I am. I don’t know. I didn’t know him. I do know, however, what all the evidence suggests. So I felt even worse. His death was my fault, somehow, right? Because we both sold weed? I know it’s confusing. Narcissistic, even. But I wouldn’t let go of it. That whole long night. Lying in my bed, hands folded on my chest, forcing myself into guilt. Maybe getting rid of all my business equipment had freed up my mind to focus on stupid shit. I even got a little proud of my guilt. I was a sinner, and therefore all the sin of the world touched on me. I didn’t think of it in those terms. I just kept forcing myself to think of Kevin’s face and then forcing myself to feel awful. You can do that, you know, with enough practice. And then the awfulness wouldn’t come on command, and that’s when it got so ridiculous that I jumped out of bed and smashed my knee into my night table, which knocked over my lamp. The bulb flashed blue as it died.

  Kevin’s death was not my fault. Many, many other things were, but not that. I’d never even felt guilty for it. I had just tried to make myself feel guilty for it. And how fucked-up is that? To seek the pleasure of guilt, the pleasure of self-abasement. And I knew, in that moment I knew: now or ever, there would be no answer. I was certain of that. The thing Mr. Broadus said about the watch made me certain of it. There was no plan behind the death. There was no cause. Some trophy-collecting motherfucker had taken Kevin’s life. Someone with a windowless white van. No business killer would do that. I mean, David Cash wouldn’t. Not that he’s a killer. But he’s a better businessman than Noel, and will someday eclipse him. He’s another natural. Just with a different upbringing. No, Kevin’s death occurred at random, along with the deaths of Turquoise Tull and Brandon Gambuto.

  Remember them? They died too, except my stupid obsessional personality erased them. So what if Kevin took the most bullets! Maybe the guy who shot him hated his invulnerable smile. The blank-faced man. You might as well just call him Mr. Circumstance, because that’s what he is, was, and will be. Yes, the police failed. Yes, I failed. We all failed. Remember what I said before about how you can’t manage tragedy? You can’t. You can’t stop Mr. Circumstance. He waits everywhere, with infinite patience and zero mercy. You can’t avoid or efface the bleak sight of the wrecks and ruins he leaves among us. Kevin. Stokey the bum. Noel Bradley. My father. Mr. Vanderleun. Mr. Broadus. All damaged, all injured and stunted, because they were guilty or because they were innocent. You’re laughing by now at all this grimness. But I was there. I saw it firsthand. I’m not lying. Don’t think I’m lying because I’m young. You think I’m lying, I’ll introduce you to six million dead Jews, including a million children, and the tens of millions of others who died in our wonderful century, crushed, mangled, raped, tortured, frozen, mutilated, buried alive, burned, gassed, garroted, starved, drowned, impaled, fed to their bunkmates, injected with phenol, flung into the ripped-open hillsides and left for the frost to cover, eyes and mouths agape. So fuck you. Fuck you! That’s your answer. Unless some miracle occurs, you have to accept it. I had to accept it. You’ve seen what I had to go through in order to accept it. Now you accept it. You motherfuckers.

  XVIII.

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, you’ve asked me to explain what my best and worst qualities are. As a prerequisite for admission to your university. This essay was choice number two, of six options. The other topics, frankly, I found insipid. Explain what your name means to you, and why. You’re having a conversation with Plato: what is the first question you ask him? Write about one of your friends—who’s at least fifty years older than you. I mean, come the fuck on! What is your best quality? What is your worst quality?, on the other hand, is intriguing. I’ve provided all the necessary transcripts and whatnot, and you’ll have all of it by your admission deadline. So everything’s clear. And we’re finally there. At the answer, I mean. If you’ve read this far, just have a scintilla more of patience.

  Do you know what November Criminals are? It’s kind of a magical-sounding term, right? People who steal winter, some fairy-tale bullshit like that? Or a band name, some über-pretentious band name, and the band is nothing but a drum machine and a French guy playing the electric cello. But, happily, November Criminals were real. At least conceptually. The term was developed in Germany in the interwar years. It came out of the fears and hatreds of a whole constellation of political interests. High-ranking government officials. Demobbed soldiers, many of whom were injured and prevented from earning a living. Impoverished working-class people whose lives had been wrecked by the economic catastrophes after the end of the First World War. German patriots, both of the real and rabble-rousing kind, lowborn and highborn, philosophers and political criminals. Protofascists. And, of course, Germany’s most enduring political group, anti-Semites.

  November Criminal was originally a slur aimed at the German politicians who signed the Treaty of Versailles, whom the above groups considered to be traitors to the causes of Germany in the war: glory, military science and potency, and the right for their nation to retain its eccentric and undemocratic political arrangements. Although these arrangements were not illiberal. At least when held up in comparison to the political lives of the nations making war on Germany. Especially the United States under Wilson, a president who resegregated the federal government, launched campaigns of terror against perceived internal political threats, and involved American military might in a European conflict, at a huge cost, for no reason other than to gratify his bloodthirsty belief in historical progress. Let’s give it up for Woodrow Wilson! Racist and authoritarian. And proud of both! Now there’s like some institute named after him at Princeton University. I learned this from the brochure they sent me. My textbook skips all of this stuff. About how bad Wilson and FDR were, I mean. Dr. Karlstadt, who describes Wilson, FDR, and Kennedy as the holy trinity of American presidents (that’s verbatim; she actually said holy trinity), doesn’t want to discuss these issues. So I had to read up on them in a book I dug out of my parents’ bookcases. Which is to say my mother’s bookcases. My father’s not much of a reader. Best sellers, but the kind pretentious critics back. My mother, though, had wide-ranging tastes. Including a lot of European history. She had this one book from the 1970s called Before Us Darkness, about Germany in the interwar period. Written by this guy Jürgen Bitzius.

  An awesome book. Calm and somber. In its pages I found out all that stuff about Wilson, and also about the November Criminals. A term that, as things worsened in Germany, became more popular, expanding to include supporters of the Weimar Republic. It took on a metaphysical aspect: someone who, through weakness and disingenuousness, betrayed his country. Not by spying or profiteering, but by morally undermining the war effort. Yes, the concept November Criminal is a spacious one. And it enjoyed—I’m sure you’re shocked to hear this—considerable overlap with Germany’s traditional object of blame, the Jews. Who had been assigned the broadest responsibility for all inequality and hardship in German society. As had been done for centuries, and as the German spirit would continue to do for two and half decades longer. Germany only stopped then because the government had killed 89 or 90 percent of the Jews remaining there after hostilities had opened, so blaming stopped making a great deal of sense. I mean, not that it ever made sense, but you can’t whip people up into a frenzy against some group if the group has already been eradicated. You
can’t destroy what no longer exists.

  Now, just as a side note, I should point out that Germany’s Jews were extremely patriotic. They were not November Criminals. Tens of thousands died in the First World War. They were not patriots out of fear, either, but because they wanted to be Germans. Blaming them for the fall of Germany, when it was a simple case of inferior numbers, bad luck, and inept leadership, as is the case with every defeated nation, was just absurd. That didn’t stop anyone, though. And everybody knows what the eventual consequences of that hatred were. That insistence that Jews creep around corroding everything. That we’re treasonous by some ontological quality. We don’t have to do anything to commit treason. Other than exist.

  So what the fuck does this have to do with the essay question you set me? I believe with all firmness that I am a November Criminal, a betrayer by nature. Someone guilty at the feet of everyone else for his petty, sordid life and his petty, sordid crimes. An ontological failure. If you see what I mean. There you go! An answer to the second half of your essay question. As for the first, I’d argue: a November Criminal by definition does not have any good qualities. So there it is. All of it. All the emptiness and moral vacuity you could want. The killer: gone. The implements of my quest: gone. Kevin, my secret brother in the craft: gone. The whole result of my investigations amounted to a single dead dog and a four-inch gash on the back of my scalp. Nothing is ever explicable in full. Only human character reveals anything worthwhile. I am a November Criminal. That is my worst quality. Every man has to be a literary critic at some point in his life, drawing retarded comparisons and making psychological deductions. Most of these are wrong. I am right. I am guilty. I fucking know it.