The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  Doubtless contributing to a reputation for being “clingy,” Edgar had lobbied to accompany Falconer himself as he rang doorbells in the suburban neighborhoods bordering the school. Toby’s pledges were always twice the amount of anyone else’s. The guy could really work a mark. Never oily, but often touching. The kid brother with PS became a regular feature in Falconer’s rap, a brave little fellow who never cried when his legs hurt or he couldn’t play Frisbee with his friends. When Falconer described the feisty, good-natured twelve-year-old who was now confined to bed, even Edgar began to believe in the wretched squirt. Falconer, of course, didn’t have a brother at all.

  It seemed uncanny at the time that Falconer could say rectal infarction to middle-aged housewives and not get chased off the porch with a broom. In retrospect, Falconer’s success was less mysterious. All those women apprehended was that an angelic apparition with chiseled cheekbones had miraculously materialized on their doorstep. Though it was winter, Falconer always wore his greatcoat agape and his shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, alabaster pectorals swelling at his open collar. Winter suited those glacial green eyes, splintering like ice and glistening with the very mischief these women indulged by pledging three dollars for every fictitious mile.

  The SAPSS scam flowered during Edgar’s honeymoon with Falconer, a period Edgar liked to recall as an uncomplicated, typically terminal infatuation. But when Edgar pressed himself, he remembered the experience as discomfiting. The more Edgar revered the flawless Falconer, the more he resented the enslavement, and fantasized about being on the receiving end of his own devotion. Humiliatingly at another boy’s beck, Edgar struggled as he would later struggle against his love for women.

  One afternoon in the Yardley locker room Edgar battled his adoration more viciously than usual. They’d nearly finished canvassing the immediate Stonington neighborhoods, and Falconer announced it was time to stop. Best not to push their luck by getting greedy, and besides the joke had worn thin. If even half the pledges came across, the sting would net over $2,500. After they fabricated a few convincing anecdotes from the “marathon,” collection would commence the following week.

  “Shit, Falconer,” Edgar slurred, back flat on the bench, “this is supposed to be for kicks, and I feel like some hunchbacked old bag volunteering for the United Way.”

  “No sweat, Kellogg,” said Falconer coolly. “Quit. But if you don’t help collect, you don’t share the pot.”

  “Just a little sick of your calling all the shots, Falconer,” Edgar griped. “Time to do this, time to do that. Yes, sir, no, sir. Reporting for duty, sir. Yes, I’ve cleaned the latrines, sir. Will that be all, sir. Certainly I’ll kiss your ass, sir. Requesting permission to yank my tongue out of your butt, sir. Christ.”

  One of Falconer’s secrets was he didn’t rattle. Maybe over his father’s death senior year, but not over boy stuff. His other minions stood in his defense, muscles stiffening, but Falconer waved a hand to call off the dogs. “Oh-kay!” he announced musically, bouncing gracefully off the tall tennis umpire’s stool, kept inside off-season. “We’ve got two hours before dinner. We’ll do what you say, Kellogg. Go ahead.”

  “Go ahead and what?” asked Edgar warily, raising his head off the bench.

  “Come up with some diversion to keep us entertained. Think I like having to keep the program moving? Think it isn’t a little irritating that you slobs just lie there and expect me to call another fucking ‘shot’? Go ahead. We’re at your disposal. Anything you say.”

  As his neck strained, Edgar’s mind went blank. Offered the initiative he’d always craved, Edgar considered that maybe he deserved no better than lieutenancy. He needed Falconer. They all did. Falconer got ideas.

  Later as an attorney Edgar had a similar epiphany. Ruled by precedent, a lawyer’s job was to ensure that the past recurred in the present, and an attorney’s only fleeting originality was to disguise the new as the same. It was Edgar’s realization that he was perfectly suited to this task that disenchanted him with the profession.

  Edgar thumped his crown back on the bench with finality. “Let’s run it.”

  “Come again?” snarled a henchman.

  “The marathon,” said Edgar. “Let’s actually run it. It’ll take some training, delay cashing in for two or three weeks. But you said yourself, Falconer, we need diversion. And what better way to convince those ladies we’re legit than to really run the course?”

  Following a hailstorm of Come on! and Give us a break! Falconer announced dryly, “I think a marathon sounds fab.” And that was that.

  Thereon, Edgar took over. He led cross-country runs every afternoon for a fortnight, the course a little longer each day. Privately he luxuriated in his new body, fleet and featherweight. All through elementary school Edgar had lumbered after classmates, trailing a hundred yards behind as they streaked the playground’s perimeter. For years, he’d submitted to shrieks of laughter when a relay baton was palmed into his moist, sausage fingers. So Edgar was powered for the first couple of miles by sheer amazement. His athletic equals, the others may have lagged behind because they regarded the ability to run as ordinary.

  When they ran the marathon itself on a Saturday afternoon, most of the SAPSS team dropped out after about five miles. Only Falconer himself stayed in the race and kept pace. Edgar had measured out the distance with the odometer on his bike—a good workout in itself. They hadn’t trained nearly hard enough for this distance, and around mile ten Edgar hit a wall; Falconer faltered on his heels. They stumbled on at a geriatric jog, in too much distress to find each other funny. At around mile thirteen, both bent over double, their eyes met. Heaving, they keeled under a tree. Minutes passed before they could speak.

  Though they’d quit well shy of twenty-six miles, Edgar always treasured the memory of that run. The SAPSS marathon constituted the acme of their short, electric friendship: a rare fortnight of chugging shoulder-to-shoulder in a relationship otherwise narrowed into the single-file formation of an idol and his pursuant disciple.

  As it happened, the choice to run the marathon for real was propitious. One of the marks—signed up by Gerald, a kid with both an unfortunate smirk and a distinguishing red afro that made him easy to finger—called Yardley’s administration to check if the appeal was aboveboard. When collared by the headmaster, Gerald was able to claim that the marathon had indeed been run, and a teacher confirmed sighting Edgar Kellogg and Toby Falconer limping back to the parking lot in drenched sweats on Saturday at dusk. Falconer soft-soaped as usual that yeah, they had made up the organization and the disease just for laughs, but that they were definitely donating the money to a proper nonprofit, honest. The headmaster was skeptical, and they were required not only to collect on the pledges but to show him all the paperwork and a receipt from the Multiple Sclerosis Society for the total, or face expulsion. Not one of the boys made a dime.

  The upshot? They cynically fake a marathon for charity, and at the end of the day what do they do but run a fucking marathon for charity. Like Edgar’s later invocation of Saddler’s pestilent company, the moral seemed to run: be careful what you make up.

  Chapter 23

  Impostor Syndrome

  THE SAPSS CAPER scrolled through Edgar’s mind as he chugged down Rua da Evaporação the day after the bombing of Grant’s Tomb, though he hadn’t thought about the would-be swindle in ages. After all these years he could still run, though without the buoyant tirelessness of his late teens. He’d developed a middle-age affection for the indoor treadmill, with its reassuring readout of calories burned. But health clubs weren’t on offer in Cinziero, and Barrington sure as hell hadn’t installed a gym. There was no alternative to braving the elements outside.

  That meant loping off with the massive front-door key in his shorts pocket, the key to the tower jingling against it, the heavy brass shaft hitting his thigh on every stride. He might have left the set behind and counted on Saddler to let him in, but he remembered Nicola’s caution: that Barrington was “un
reliable on purpose.” Edgar always took the keys.

  Besides, a rhythmic thump against his quadriceps was the least of his problems, and on the slog westward he sure couldn’t hear any jingling. White-noise whaaa roared in Edgar’s ears, though at least the blare obliterated the rasp of his own wheeze. Pounded into every yard across the scrubby plain, wooden flautas ventosas whooshed in the unified alarm of an oncoming-train whistle. The atmosphere bore down on Edgar’s chest as if Bebê Serio were blocking the way. Whipping down his nostrils, the gale dried his throat, while tears streaked his temples like rain on the side window of a speeding car.

  There, that stumpy pera peluda tree up ahead, rotten fruit sliming the ground on its leeward side: his regular turn-around. Splatting a Nike in the purplish guck, Edgar held his breath to avoid the smell and slapped the rough bark of the tree in official acknowledgment that the hard bit was over.

  Edgar pivoted, and suddenly his ears went quiet. Only the moan of the wind flutes remained, the countryside’s panpipes differentiating into separate notes a quarter tone apart and striking bittersweet minor chords. The return journey was almost effortless, his stride long and high. The tailwind made Edgar feel sixteen again, and newly freed from a hundred pounds of Entenmann’s raspberry coffee cake. Mentally, too, he was looser, lighter, and more prone to leaps as he skipped over violet pools of pera peluda goop to keep from slipping. On the slog westward, the sere landscape had looked ominous, branches scraggling like witch’s fingers, the flutes deep and dire, his quandary over whether to claim Grant’s Tomb for the SOB weighty and torturous. On the homeward leg, Barba’s hokey horror-movie theatrics seemed burlesque, and so did Edgar’s agonizing.

  Funny, his destitution in Yardley’s locker room in the face of Falconer’s gauntlet, “anything you say!”—it bothered him only to a degree. The truly original mind was a rarity, perhaps a burden. So, however disappointing, your own limitations also let you off the hook. If Edgar wasn’t creative, ingenuity wasn’t his job. The notion to run the marathon for real, for example: Edgar had simply taken Falconer’s initial concept an extra step. Edgar was a natural executor. He didn’t come up with great ideas himself, but he knew one when he saw one, and he could bring an inspiration to life.

  Once he collapsed, dripping, onto the pillows by the fountain, Edgar was a little offended when he failed to draw a single disparaging word from Abrab’s resident hedonist. Saddler looked coldly indifferent.

  “Man, running toward the coast is like jogging in petroleum jelly,” said Edgar, smearing his sweaty cheek with a sleeve.

  Listlessly, Barrington browsed an Economist, pinching the pages with distaste. Rather than lounge amid the pillows in a convivial sprawl, he sat remotely upright in the atrium’s only chair, legs crossed, one silk slipper lifted at a finicky tilt. In the context of Barrington’s flamboyant wardrobe, the maroon smoking jacket was subdued. The hazy sunset filtering through skylights had grown too dim for reading, but Barrington hadn’t lit a lantern or switched on the overhead, as if to deliberately make the room dingy. Oozing misanthropic malaise, Saddler looked as he might have in pre-SOB exile, week after uneventful week sifting by like so much sand.

  “Nick seems to think you’re alive,” Edgar prodded. “Some postcard arrived, blank. She couldn’t have been more over the moon at the declaration of world peace.”

  Flap, flap.

  Often as Edgar had coached himself that the best thing with cranky prima donnas is to leave them alone, he compulsively beseeched Barrington for attention. “Heard about Grant’s Tomb?” he asked, his voice high and tentative. Pathetic. He might as well have dropped to his knees and blubbered, Don’t you like me anymore?

  Barrington grunted a churlish affirmative.

  “You should have seen the hacks go berserk at the Rat last night,” Edgar nattered, unable to check this shameless appeal. “Hulbert full of stratagems, Collier frantically punching that flashy cellular phone . . . If the SOB doesn’t claim it, they’ll be crushed.”

  A sigh whinnied through Saddler’s substantial nose. Not glancing up, he turned another page.

  A little camaraderie was the least Edgar could expect, wasn’t it? “I was thinking of claiming it,” said Edgar irritably.

  “Then do.”

  “I was under the impression you were keen for me to carry on your pioneering work,” said Edgar aloofly, though the scale of his relief that Saddler was at last speaking to him at all was humiliating. Gathering his threadbare T-shirt like the shreds of his dignity, he wiped his face. “Now you don’t seem to care.”

  Barrington closed the magazine in his lap. “Why do you care if I care? Suit yourself, Eddie. I couldn’t be arsed either way.” With a flick of his wrist, Barrington tossed the Economist in the pool.

  As the magazine sogged and submerged, Edgar’s enthusiasm for paramilitary farce sank disconcertingly with it. He knelt and scooped the periodical from the pool, as if to rescue his prospective project from suddenly seeming all wet.

  “Have you any idea what it’s like when your every acquaintance is desperate to please?” Saddler volunteered flatly. “It’s living hell.”

  “Then you can’t know much about hell,” Edgar returned readily.

  “You think Picasso really relished the fact that in his heyday he could play tic-tac-toe on a napkin and sell it for thousands of francs? I doubt it very much. A market that blindly elevates your every sneeze to genius invites disdain for your own enterprise.”

  “I thought you got off on disdain.”

  “I didn’t used to be disdainful. I once had respect for any number of people, before they developed too much respect for me. Or whatever it was.” Barrington stood and craned his chin toward the ceiling, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “You know, it’s not true—” though he spoke quietly, Barrington’s rich, round baritone filled the marble hall as he paced measuredly by the pool—“as Trudy Sisson is fond of promoting, that I ‘hate myself’ or feel ‘unlovable.’ I find my own company tolerable enough. But everywhere I go, my company is sought above anyone else’s. That is not a boast, Eddie. It is a fact. So I ask you: whose company can I covet? Whom am I meant to revere, Eddie? You? You already lionize me; we can’t turn the tables at this late date. For whom do I wait to walk in the door? Who do I hope will come to the party? Who’s to be my idol, if I’m perpetually doomed to be yours?”

  This was the first time Saddler had ever confided in him personally, and Edgar was touched. He felt frantic not to blow it, to break the spell.

  “Ever hear of the ‘impostor syndrome’?” Edgar asked diffidently. “It’s a problem especially for professionals—doctors, lawyers. You work and study and aspire away and suddenly someone hands you a piece of paper that says, okay, you’re a lawyer. A lawyer! And you don’t feel any different. You know you’re still that kid with a Spyder bike who shoplifted Ho-Hos. You think you’re a fraud. It can get pretty bad, this terror of being discovered. Happened to me, I think—and I dealt with it by debunking the whole profession instead of just myself. If a former fat boy looking for love could be an attorney, bar membership wasn’t worth much. I figure the impostor syndrome applies to adulthood in general. After all, being a grown-up is disillusioning. I guess being a fetishized grown-up is disillusioning in spades.”

  “Quite,” Barrington agreed dolorously. “Apparently, I’m as compelling as people get.” The assertion was steeped in disappointment.

  Edgar wanted to reassure Saddler that he seemed a likable enough fellow, except it was Saddler’s very likableness that depressed the man. Edgar considered a variation, about how Saddler seemed a stand-up guy, but that was a lie. Saddler was a selfish, unprincipled, untrustworthy troublemaker. (Consequently, the man was impervious to inversion—since how do you upend faithlessness and nihilism into qualities that are any less appealing?) Edgar gave up. Nicola was right. Enough voyeurs had anguished over the nature of Barrington’s soul.

  “So what’s the verdict?” Edgar asked instead. “Think I
should claim Grant’s Tomb for the Sobs?”

  “I told you, I don’t give a toss!” This time, Barrington kicked a whole pillow into the pool.

  That pillow would take forever to dry out, and would mildew in the meantime, but the Saddlers of this world never considered the workaday consequences of their theatrical impulses. Edgar didn’t carp—Bear would call him a Girl Guide again—though in holding his tongue Edgar appreciated how Barrington tyrannized acquaintances with the threat of his disapproval. However the Big B might disparage it, that unshakable likableness protected Saddler from ever staying up nights dithering over whether Eddie disapproved of him. If Edgar Kellogg or Win Pyre got difficult, there were plenty more sycophants in the sea.

  “I was only asking what you thought,” said Edgar stiffly. “Making conversation.”

  “Bollocks,” Barrington boomed. “You want my palsy-walsy complicity. Bear and Eddie against the world. You’re only considering the claim in the first place to prove to me you’ve got the bottle—to make me happy. Well, I don’t wish to be obliged to be happy to make you happy. Do what you want, Eddie. I am sick to death of being abjured that because I’m in a filthy humor, or because I don’t feel like coming out to play today, I have crushed the tender petals of some nonentity’s bloody feelings. Why do you think I vanished? Maybe I was tired of mattering so much.”

  Truthfully, Edgar had never exactly sat himself down and dwelled on what he thought of claiming Grant’s Tomb for the SOB, irrespective of Saddler’s opinion. “Well,” he supposed out loud, “I do wonder if, when you take fraudulent credit for a terrorist attack, you’re suggesting that, even if you didn’t do it, you sort of wish you had.”