Authors: Walter Kirn
33.
[G-mail.com]
Dear Kent,
It’s been twelve hours since I left you, but perhaps because you believe you’re “under guard,” you’re still in the hotel, I notice, living high off the in-room dining menu and enjoying
The Da Vinci Code
on pay-per-view. You’ve also been online, I see, since we parted. I expected that. And so, rather than driving to the colonel’s and further humoring your dreary fantasies of DC Comics omnipotence, I rode the elevator five floors down to a second room I’d rented, showered, mixed a cocktail from the minibar, spent forty minutes on the phone cooing and bickering with Jesse, and then logged on to MyStory.com to read the post that I knew you’d start composing the moment I left you to yourself.
Before I address the contents of your post and tell you whom I’ve seen and what I’ve done today, allow me to extend my sympathy, Kent. You’re a young man who can’t bear to be alone, and yet, because of
the way you find companionship
, you almost always are. Your failure to even partially commit to the world of flesh has turned you into a line of walking code programmed to seek attention electromagnetically. Having shed your human capacity for human attachment, you’ll never go bats the way Sabrina did recently, or the way Colonel Geoff did many years ago, but you’ll soon face an even grimmer fate: unencumbered freedom. And you will have achieved this freedom by a new means. Revolutionary incoherence. The inability to be grasped by anyone, let alone by me, a middle-aged agent of the state who has his own problems warming to other people.
Still, I predict that you’ll mourn me when I’m gone. Big Brother was your last chance to have a family, Kent, but he has despaired of learning even your name, or even the screen name that you use most frequently. He has reached one conclusion, though, which will allow him to depart contented: You are not a threat to law and order.
You just choose, for some reason, to live like one.
As I said, I reviewed your latest post. I laughed at every line. Particularly amusing was your claim that, in league with the colonel, your lord and wizard, you drew me here for some chilling ritual purpose shrouded in the lore of ancient Egypt. (I looked up Anubis: a quasi-canine deity associated with graves and corpses, whose dog-headed hieroglyph could be your portrait, Kent.) What a dungeon of ominous nonsense your mind’s become! Is there something I’m not aware of about computer land that drives its denizens to bogus sorcery?
Why does the consummate product of rationality foster this dragon-haunted spiritualism?
In any case, I slept dreamlessly and soundly after closing your post. No nocturnal visitations. I woke, dressed, downed a quattro cappuccino, handled some difficult official business, and drove to the Center for New Integrity, where I’d arranged for a visit with Sabrina. In your post you portrayed her as the patsy through whom you attracted me, the FB Eye, but I see the poor damsel for what she is: a soul that has starved itself in every way, desperate to be fed. You threw her some crumbs, but they were indigestible, made of silicon and polymers. They passed right through her, and she was empty again.
I met her in the patients’ dining room, where she was locked in psychological combat with a plate of eggs and minicroissants. “Like this,” I said, raising a pastry to my lips. She shuddered. She couldn’t do it. A plainclothes counselor stood by, pecking surreptitious notes into a device in her left palm.
“Kent says to say hello to you,” I lied. “The colonel, too.”
“They’re fiends,” she said.
“They wish.”
She shook her head. She shook it more, I mean. It was shaking plenty already. Her whole body was. “Sometimes, when I’m sketching in art therapy, they manifest themselves to me,” she said.
“As malevolent dog-men?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s dementia. That’s what you’re here to be cured of. And you will be. If you stick with your artwork and nibble a croissant.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked me. I hadn’t noticed it before, but her spine has an S-curve, like a straightened paper clip. It unkinks when she’s on alert and she grows taller.
“I don’t want to threaten your recovery by going into detail, dear, but suffice it to say that I represent a group that identified you as a danger sometime back. This morning, after spending several months trying to discover what sort of danger, I tendered my resignation to my supervisors and informed them of my plan to marry Jesse, relocate to a seaside golf resort, and pen a fictional memoir of my service.”
“Will anyone I know be in it?”
“Not specifically. As I say, I intend to make it up. I might have a character called Sabrina, though, because it’s a name I find uniquely resonant.”
“Will it be titled
The Cornering
?”
“Don’t think so.”
“
The Osiris Parallel?
”
“That was my thought: something Ludlum-ish. I want the thing to sell.” I held the pastry to her mouth, and she nicked it with her incisors, which was progress. The lurking counselor noted her feat and left.
“I haven’t told you why I’m sorry yet. After faxing him my letter of resignation, my superior called me, in person—which he never does—and, by way of coaxing me to stay, he made a strange admission about your case. Strange because it exposed his fallibility.”
“I’m not a terrorist after all,” she said.
“No, but there’s a negligible chance that ‘Sabrina M. Gray’ may be. Unless, as seems much likelier, she’s merely an Illinois soybean farmer’s wife. She bought a great deal of fertilizer last winter—potentially explosive ammonium nitrate—and because it’s a substance the law keeps track of these days, she had to sign for the purchase, and she was sloppy, and….”
Sabrina nodded. She’d finally stopped quivering. There’s nothing more reassuring to the unstable than learning that they’ve been extensively investigated.
“Oh, well,” Sabrina said.
“Oh, well. That’s the attitude.”
“In bed one night not long before I stabbed him, Kent told me that you were a ‘portal emissary’ sent here either by ‘Horus or Thoth himself’ to prevent him from issuing orders over AidSat to ‘Unbind the one scroll.’ But I guess not,” she said.
“It’ll be tough to break it to him,” I said.
“When will you?”
“Very soon.”
And now I have.
Awaiting your disconsolate reply (while packing a suitcase before I jet to Maui and wed your ex-girlfriend by torchlight at the Four Seasons while wearing nothing but bathing trunks and flip-flops),
Your retired shadow,
“
Rob Robinson
”
34.
[G-mail.com]
Dear Dead Man,
It’s not the way that you people break and enter that has always bothered me, it’s the way that you leave things broken when you exit.
I think
intruders
should have to stay.
I think that should be their
punishment
.
But now you’ve flown off. Toward Hawaii via yesterday. Back here on the mainland dawn approaches, but out where your plane is, several time zones west of me (as shown on the AidSat GPS receiver that’s linked to the ear jack I stashed in Jesse’s carry-on), it’s still last night, and moonless, and all black. Look down through that scratched plastic window beside your seat, Rob. Now look up. No difference, really, is there? The quotesmiths tell us that the eyes deceive us, but since everything else deceives us, too, that’s not the eye’s peculiar weakness. Its weakness is this: It’s dependent on a light source.
But you’re in the dark now. You’re out of range. Which is why you’re unable to read this message—the only one that I’ve ever sent to anyone that was worth intercepting, finally. Conventional signals can’t reach you where you sit, though; only powerful satellite transmissions such as the one that’s about to shock and shake you. It’s coming, Rob. It’s coming from the sky, brought to you by the same big AidSat satellites that handle a hundred cries for help per minute. That unlock the car doors. That stop the vomiting. That put the children to sleep.
Your seat may also be used as a flotation device.
That’s the only advice that I can give you.
Now let’s move ahead with your Unbinding.
Since we’ve already removed your eyes, let’s eliminate your sense of touch. Touch requires an object to excite it, Rob, and in your case, that object has been your seatmate, Jesse, a woman whom you believe belonged to me once. This notion stimulates you more than she does. When you kiss her, stroke her, fondle her—but especially when you thrust way up inside her—you’re pushing me out, you think. You’re snaking the drain. Except that I was never in there, Rob. Hundreds of others have been, but never me. The colonel, who has been paying her by the week, tells me she serviced the Marine Corps brass once—sometimes a half dozen at a time. She loves to take orders, he says, and never asks questions, no matter how elaborate the mission.
I think her working name is Violet Dawn.
And I know there are plastic explosives in her carry-on.
This is a detail that you’ll fully appreciate, after I’ve numbed your senses of taste and smell. I’ll do this by answering, factually, the questions that you decided weren’t worth pursuing once your attention shifted to the beach. Though in truth, your attention was always on the beach. You government fellows are like that, Rob. You’re the original Puritan party boys, always looking ahead to the big shindig that will be justified once you’ve had your war. To celebrate in the grand American style, with beer and bikinis and bottle rockets, you need to feel that you worked first, that you sacrificed.
I’m about to assist you in that regard. First, though, I need to tell you who I am.
My name is Kent Selkirk, but soon enough it won’t be, and just four years ago it was Cass B. Kirksell, the unsuccessful fairgrounds blender demonstrator. Cass succeeded another C-named youth: Curtis Ormand, a kid with a shaved head who delivered cocaine by moped in San Francisco. I liked being Curt because he cut a figure, zipping past the Transamerica Pyramid with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stimulants stuffed in the lining of his red saddlebag. He went to work with the stockbrokers at dawn, and regarded himself as a lubricated ball joint in an enormous economic mechanism that also included the bankers who used his coke to help them through their global trading days. Breakfast in London, lunch in New York City, no real dinner, and drinks in Tokyo.
Surfing that time wave requires strong pick-me-ups. If a guy tuckers out and topples off his board, the sea picks it up and slams it against his skull. (You’re about to know the feeling, Rob.)
I’ll stop at Curtis, but I go back, believe me. I go back many years. And then I stop. I stop with a kid whose real name doesn’t matter, since his schoolmates rarely used it. Because of a nervous habit he’d developed after his parents disposed of his pet dachshund in a Target parking lot, this kid with buckteeth (only one of which was white) took to biting and gnawing at his fingers, and for this he was called “Chewnucca.”
Chewnucca Smith.
It’s a name that I’ve used only once in the last decade—while scolding Twist for peeing on my futon (“Bad, Chewnucca!
Bad!
”)—but it’s who I am and who I’ll always be. I gave Twist to Colonel Geoff that night because I had no right to punish a dog for it.
Because I’m a dog, too. We all are, I’ve discovered. We come when our masters shout our names. When I was a young teen, my masters were my classmates. When I became an old teen, at military school, my masters were men of stiff bearing. Yours still are. I, though, answer only to myself now.
“Gnobedience.” It’s one of Colonel Geoff’s terms. He coined it with another psy-ops officer,
Lt. Col. Michael Aquino
, who is arguably America’s leading
satanist
and runs the
Temple of Set
in San Francisco. (All true, I swear—just click and see.) I met Colonel Geoff in my year beside the Bay, longer ago than I’ve ever quite let on, before he quit the cult and moved back here to start his own, much more exclusive sect. But you don’t believe in rebels of his dimensions. You’re as scared as the next secret agent about the plots, but you still have trouble spotting the plotters. Allow me to profile them for you. They don’t want justice. They don’t want vengeance. They don’t want blood. They want what all good Americans are supposed to want but tend to give up fighting for at some point.
Liberty, I guess.
I’m sorry, Rob, but whatever your bosses told you about the clerical error behind your mission here (the supposed confusion about Sabrina’s last name, which I suspect was invented by the big boys to hide the fact that they were tricked), the truth is that you were summoned by the colonel. He knew just which words to send over just which wires (
bloody
,
sheikh
, and
heaven
typed into Sabrina’s Samsung flip phone) to call you to us like a dog.
Perhaps I’ll buzz you now for one last sat-chat. At the hotel the other night, I slipped another ear jack in your briefcase. There. It’s turned on. It’s vibrating. Pick up, Rob.
“What the hell?” you say. “Who is this? Kent?”
“I think we’ve known each other long enough that you can call me ‘What’s-his-face.’”
“You incredible nutcase. You never shut up, do you?”
“Where are you?”
“Locked in the bathroom of a Boeing. Passengers aren’t supposed to use their phones here.”
“This isn’t a phone. It’s the longest fuse on Earth….”
“I’m flushing this AidSat thing down the goddamn toilet unless you tell me exactly why you’re calling.”
“Because you listen.”
“My mistake.”
“No, your mistake,” I say, “is disobeying.”
“Disobeying what?”
“
Your master’s voice
.”
I pressed a red key and I took another call then, because it’s my job and because they never end.
Walter Kirn
THE UNBINDING
Walter Kirn is the author of five previous works of fiction:
My Hard Bargain: Stories; She Needed Me; Thumbsucker; Up in the Air;
and
Mission to America.
He lives in Livingston, Montana.