The Fugitives

by Christopher Sorrentino

  “There’s nothing ambiguous about it,” she agreed.

  “Good. I like to be understood.”

  “But I still don’t know any more about him than you.”

  Argenziano shook his head and chuckled. “Maybe it’ll come to you. Are you here for a few days?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Again with the maybes. I can easily have these things checked out, you know.”

  “Creepy.”

  “Not creepy. Creepy is something else. This is base-level due diligence. Your profession, you ought to know all about it. You pop up out of the blue with a story that could threaten my livelihood, my employers, my client. It’s not creepy. Thorough is the word I would choose. Don’t even think about taking it personally. But I would take it seriously. Thorough people should always be taken seriously. One way or the other I’m going to find out from you what it is I want to know.”

  Kat watched the man return the valet to the room off the entryway.

  “Take a couple of days to think about it. From all angles. I think you’ll see that what I’m suggesting is for the best.”

  “What happens if you find Saltino?”

  Argenziano smiled. “We’re going to give him a good talking-to.”

  The man opened the door and held it. Argenziano stepped into the pastel corridor outside. Behind him, an Indian in a white jacket and dark pants moved carefully along the corridor carrying a tray containing covered dishes. He glanced into the room and caught Kat’s eye, then averted his gaze.

  Argenziano said, “Come on, Kat. I’ve got somewhere to go.”

  She got up and walked out of the room and down the corridor without looking back. The Indian smiled up at her as he knelt to place the tray on the floor beside a door with a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the knob. She passed without acknowledging him.

  Indians all over the damned place. As she crossed the lot to her car the biggest Indian she’d ever seen shambled out of a beat-up pickup, slugging a Pepsi. It looked pretty good.

  20

  THE dutiful grotesque of Checking In With Justin awaited her back at the Holiday Inn. If it were only just the pointless habit of asking how was your day, but it was also, it was always, the nerve-wracking experience of actually having to listen to the answer. She was surprised, and relieved, when his voice mail picked up. She left a quick message and then, with a pang of what she identified, with irritation, as guilt, switched her phone off. Well, she tried. She could deal with him later. In the drawer of the nightstand she found a binder holding menus and brochures from local restaurants and attractions, encased within clear plastic sheet protectors. A microbrewery was nearby that didn’t sound too bad. She grabbed Mulligan’s books, still in their plastic bag from the day before, and took off.

  SHE WAS SITTING at the bar with A More Removed Ground, eating fried lake perch and finishing her third glass of wine, when she noticed that the man on the stool beside hers had turned to face her and was studying her.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Ambit,” he said. “Good little bookstore. I almost feel bad for them.” He indicated the plastic bag, next to her on the bar, on which the store’s name was printed.

  “Why would you feel bad for them?” she asked.

  “Andy,” he responded, sticking out a hand.

  “Why would you feel bad for them, Andy?”

  “Because I’m here to put them out of business,” he said. He smiled. He had curly black hair and he wore a tattersall shirt, untucked and with the sleeves rolled up, over a pair of jeans that were a beautiful and expensive-looking shade of blue.

  “How are you going to do that?”

  He took his wallet from his back pocket and extracted a card from it that identified him as Andrew Meisler, Regional Director of Development for Shields & Fine, Booksellers. He put it on the bar between them.

  “And so?” she asked.

  “We’re leasing forty thousand square feet. I came out to finalize it yesterday. Neither rain nor snow.”

  “At the mall?”

  “Forget the mall. Let me get you another.” He ignored her protest as he signaled the bartender.

  “Why forget the mall?”

  “Nobody goes to a bookstore in a mall. They go to the movies. They sit in a vibrating chair. They, I don’t know, they eat nachos. We’re closing mall locations left and right. People come in to use the rest rooms. They pee on the toilet seats and then leave, empty-handed. They’re not serious about what we sell. They don’t even know what we sell. People have a different head in the mall. They go there to forget, not remember. New research shows that people prefer to buy things at malls that they consume there, on the spot. Failing that, they like things they can bring home in a pocket, that they can throw in a drawer and forget about, or, better yet, give away. What a shock, huh? Everybody has visions of these shopping sprees, unselfconsciously materialistic people laden with bags, trampling over each other to get to the cheap microwaves, but secretly they want to forget they were there, forget they threw away their money. You know what a flashbulb memory is?” He took her untouched glass of wine by the stem and slid it toward her. “A flashbulb memory is a memory that’s seared onto the mind in exquisite detail. Place, time, weather, smells, sounds, what the newscaster said, his bodily attitude. Where were you when you heard about the World Trade Center, I was eating a bowl of Cracklin’ Oat Bran when suddenly the phone rang, that kind of thing. New research shows that people have flashbulb memories about large purchases just as vivid as they do about historic events. You buy a bed, you buy a washing machine, you remember buying it the way old people remember the Kennedy assassination. Well, guess what? Sellers of durable goods are running from malls like the plague. You know why? For middle America, the mall is supposed to be a palace of sin. People go there to have fun wasting their money. They don’t go there to exchange their money for stuff they need, stuff that displaces other stuff that they’d rather have, stuff that reminds them of how much money they used to have before they bought it. Now, you could argue that a book isn’t exactly like a washing machine.”

  “You could,” said Kat, beginning to grow amused.

  “You could argue that, but I’d argue that it’s worse than a washing machine. Nobody ever buys a washing machine and then doesn’t wash clothes in it. Nobody goes down to the basement six months later and says God I can’t believe I haven’t gotten around to washing clothes yet, I had such high hopes, I swore I’d do laundry when I made my New Year’s resolutions. But every time you look at a book, it reminds you that you haven’t read it.”

  “What if you have read it?”

  “That’s super rare. What’s your name?”

  “Becky.”

  “Becky. Anyway, the point is that malls are bad news. They make people feel terrible. People’s relationship to shopping is at a low ebb. They get angry at the merchandise. This is bad. Retailers need specialized environments. Now, if you’re selling dishwashers and Blu-Ray players, you open a big bare space made out of cinderblocks where every exposed beam is covered with spray fire retardant. This says, ‘This ugly place makes you suffer a little; we’ll try to make it as quick and painless as possible, but we’re also going to make you see what goes into giving you your deep deep discount. But imagine how great your new dishwasher will look in your kitchen rather than in this hellish no-man’s-land.’ That one’s easy. But if you sell books, what’s the balance you need to strike, how do you make Malcolm Gladwell seem necessary while making him seem as frivolous and commitment-free as a popcorn movie at the same time? You don’t want people weighing the relative merits of Malcolm Gladwell versus an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. Things could get really ugly for Malcolm. And you definitely don’t want people comparing the untapped utility of an unread Malcolm Gladwell book with the endlessly tapped utility of a fifty-five-inch HDTV.”

  Kat deadpanned, “Who’s Malcolm Gladwell?”

  Andrew Meisler shook his head, chuckling. “Who’s Malcolm Gladw
ell. Do I like you or not?”

  “You like me.” Kat started on wine #4. He patted her thigh, then let his hand light on it. She let it remain there, feeling an oncoming attack of what Justin liked to call acting out.

  “We don’t call it a store,” he continued. “We call it a commons. It’s a template devised specifically for places like this, relatively sophisticated dots on the map that are miles from anything resembling a viable alternative to what we offer. We think of the commons as a place where an irresistible conversation is always happening. And there’s only one way to be part of it.”

  “Buy something.”

  “That’s a kind of reductive but basically accurate way of putting it.”

  “Lots of luck.”

  “Don’t be negative.” He patted her thigh, then gripped it lightly. “There’s a science behind this.”

  “I don’t doubt it. So where, if not the mall?”

  “We’re going to anchor the new development Morello’s doing out at the old loony bin. Called Fifty Commons, coincidentally enough. It’s perfect, really. It’s going to be the new center. Everything’s going to be happening there. New research shows that consumers think of reading as something that happens when they’re alone. They negatively associate it with something that’s isolating. At the Commons, visitors see that reading isn’t isolating at all. Most bookstores try either to be comprehensive or to broadly identify what their specific customer base might be interested in. Too chancy. The Commons is an entirely curated experience. We feature and promote a limited number of titles. We offer value-added content and activities germane to those titles. You’re not just reading what others are reading, you’re experiencing it with them. It’s happening. And it’s a liberating experience.”

  She turned on her stool to face him. His hand slid off her thigh. She took the copy of Mulligan’s book that she’d been reading and held it up.

  “How about this? Is it happening?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a book. Geezum.” She placed it in the hand he held out for it. He flipped it over, flipped it back. Opened it, riffled the pages, glanced at the copyright page, closed it.

  “Well, it came out a couple years ago,” he said.

  “So?” She emptied her glass in one long swallow.

  “Publishers tend to be less enthusiastic about promoting their backlists. We’ll be depending a lot on synergy.”

  She leaned forward. They stared at each other for a moment. She felt slightly hot. They had been moving closer and closer together as they spoke. It was one of those places where they turned the music up little by little over the course of the evening so that eventually you had to yell to be heard. She could smell his breath.

  “Do you want another?” he asked.

  “I’ve had enough. I might need to get going.” She saw, with satisfaction, his face fall a little; watched as he performed a complex series of mental calculations. How could something be exciting and predictable at the same time?

  “Are you good to drive?” he asked, finally.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I might need some help.”

  “Let me give you a lift back home,” he said. “The roads are still pretty bad.”

  “OK.”

  He appeared surprised by his luck. “I don’t know what we’ll do about your car.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s a rental.” This seemed to quicken his enthusiasm. She pondered for an instant the connections that could be traced between a rented car and easy virtue. She put on her coat while he paid—she allowed him to pay for her meal—and headed for the door. On the way out she swooped in on a man smoking a cigarette as he watched the TV over the bar and bummed a smoke from him. He looked startled, but shook one out of his pack for her amiably enough and after she’d taken it and leaned forward to let him light it she squeezed his forearm. She felt very sociable. She stood outside on the raised strip of concrete—was it even, could you legally call it a “sidewalk”?—that islanded the building from the surrounding parking lot, drawing on the cigarette, feeling the sharp air and the nicotine colliding with her drunk. Which car, which car. Probably another rented Impala, just like hers. But when he came outside, raising one eyebrow slightly at the sight of the cigarette fuming between her fingers (fuck off), and planted his hand in the small of her back, he began to guide her to a silver SUV parked nearby. It chirped as he unlocked it and he opened the passenger door and scooped some papers and food wrappers off the seat and dumped them in the back. She tossed the cigarette and climbed in and realized that this had to be his car; it was too crammed with belongings and a fluent sense of habit to have been scoured clean recently in some airport backland. She glanced into the rear seat and it seemed to her that he must spend most of his spare time befouling the interior of the vehicle.

  He got in beside her and, as she shifted in her seat to take a look at him in this new space, his coat rang; the four-note opening of the Fifth Symphony.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  “Are you going to get that?”

  “Not yet,” he said. The phone ceased and he turned the key in the ignition, then smiled at her. She smiled back. The phone started again. “Ach. Excuse me a second,” he said, reaching into his coat. She could hear a woman’s voice on the other end: bright, expectant, not unhappy.

  “I couldn’t, I didn’t hear it,” he said.

  Kat leaned over and put her hand on his crotch. Then she grabbed the waist of his jeans and yanked them open, the buttons going pop-pop-pop-pop. He was slow to react. “No, yeah. It went good,” he said, looking down and studying his lap as if from a height.

  She found his penis sort of down and to the right. She kneaded it a little but it just lay there. She heard the woman talking, reciting little facts from her day like anybody.

  “That’s great,” he said, nodding. He shifted the phone to his left hand and reached down and closed the fingers of his right around her wrist. “Great.” She relaxed and he let her go. She withdrew her hand and immediately dropped her face into his lap.

  “No, no, wait til I get home,” he said. “I think I can take care of it. Don’t call anyone.” He bucked, and hit her in the teeth with his pubic bone. The force of it surprised her. She sat up and touched her fingers to her lip, checked them to see if she was bleeding.

  “Listen, I’m in the car and I’m . . . yeah, exhausted. Can we talk—yeah, tomorrow. Is it OK? OK. Me too.” He hung up and glared at her. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on. That was my girlfriend, for God’s sake.”

  “Oh, excuse me.”

  “I don’t mean to be a dick,” he conceded, “but a little discretion, huh?”

  “But you are a dick, to me,” she said. She shot out her hand and grabbed at his penis again.

  “Hey!” He gripped her wrist and forced her arm into her own lap. She felt her whole body moving backward, following the motion of her arm, his arm, his shoulder. She was surprised by his strength. He looked angry. This wasn’t supposed to be happening.

  “Look, maybe you better call a cab.”

  “This ain’t what you wanted?”

  “No,” he said, and he focused his eyes upon her as if he’d spotted some minute contaminant in his environment. “It ‘ain’t.’ ”

  “What are you, gay?”

  “Jesus, get out of the car.”

  “Not good enough for you, faggot?”

  “Just get the fuck out, you crazy bitch.” Andrew Meisler looked scared, and his voice canted upward into a new octave.

  “Fuck you,” she said, opening the door and putting one foot on the asphalt. “Midget-dick white faggot.” He sped off while she was trying to slam the door as hard as she could, and she stumbled and fell onto the surface of a parking lot for the second time in two days. “Fuck you!” she called. “Fuck you!”

  21

  THURSDAY morning, the son of a gun told a Nigerian folk tale. Kat had
never heard the story before, about Nanabozho wearing a hat that was red on one side and blue on the other, deliberately sowing discord between two women who, viewing it from opposite sides, bitterly disagreed about its color. She tapped red hat blue hat folktale into her phone and discovered that it was a traditional Yoruba story. The chutzpah. Awesome. There was no Salteau. No such thing. She wished he’d tell the story of John Salteau one of these bright library mornings. We can all relate. That new life, that uncomplicated history. You build it up. She did it with Justin, who knew she was married once, who appreciated the fact that she had a past, but who thought “experience” meant something wise rather than just the usual unbroken chain of repetitions, to whom that past was a story as pat as any other, the sum of what he’d built up about her, watching her, listening, the unexpected blurts about how Danhoff used to this or Danhoff once said that, the knickknacks and snapshots; he conspired with her to build up that blameless past. What else could he possibly need to know? He got what she intended for him to get. Not only did Justin have no idea what she’d done, he had no idea what she was doing. If you successfully created the impression that you had no old secrets, there was plenty of room for new ones. And this was how she kept herself.

  She had a spiteful hangover.

  And now here was Mulligan, moral scourge, genius, and insult to literary tradition, in that order. Bugging her about lunch, again. As she’d known he would. How gratifying. The afternoon unrolled nearly as predictably as if she’d set it on a track. “Jesus,” his voice dumbly gasping, as she kneaded his glans, urging forth from it the last glistening drops of his semen. They were parked in a lot near the dunes, and it was brilliant inside the car, the sunlight reflected by the snow all around, striking the interior in odd, unexpected places, affecting the matte black of the dashboard and console with a dull sheen. He slumped against the door on his side when she released his penis, and looked at her through half-closed eyes.