Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

Finally, I stood up. The room was in a state of dishevelment. Smoke drooped in the air. Cookie crumbs on the floor. The saucer I’d been using as an ashtray was overflowing with butts, and whiskey had slopped out of the bottle and each of the three glasses I’d apparently felt were necessary tonight. Half of my last-man-on-earth outfit was strewn about the room, and books and papers were scattered on the floor, signs of some urgent demi-ransacking I’d evidently done earlier. Sometimes I wish I bought into the mystique of disarray more readily. Though I felt neither jaunty nor cheerful, it seemed jauntily dissolute in here, in a cheerfully fuck-you kind of way; like Lester Bangs on the back cover of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung . I stumbled over to the bookcase to take a look at the famous photo of Bangs in his wreck of an apartment, a photo that in its avowal of a way of living becomes an ironic portrait of the soon-to-be-dead critic.

Then the phone rang. I figured it was probably Rae, reporting her discovery of my deposit to her account. It would be like her to happily occupy herself sitting at the desk (at my desk), dealing online with money late at night. Every now and then something caught her eye and she would lift the phone to hassle some customer service rep, getting him to cut a few points off her APR, waive a fee, switch her to a more advantageous service plan. She routinely complained about defective or unsatisfactory products and services. She had become devoted to the vigilance she felt was required of those who found themselves at the base of the consumer pyramid, and she considered the efforts that large corporations made to accommodate her to be a form of bribery. The concessions she managed to wring from them made her feel like a kind of insider, a status she honored by being discreet, happy in her complicity in the effort to realize vast profits from customer inattention. Like the rest of us, it wasn’t justice she sought, but an edge.

The voice that echoed from the hallway once the answering machine had engaged, however, was not my ex-wife’s. It was faintly familiar, a high irritable twang, like H. Ross Perot coming down off helium. At first it sounded chummy and slightly apologetic, but the edge of touchy rancor that I remembered crept in right away.

“Boyd Harris here, calling for Alexander Mulligan. The third. Sorry to bother you so late in the evening but I take it upon myself to check in with each and every one of our Boyd Fellows each and every now and then and I like to do this sort of thing all at once. This here is your now and your then. How you get things done. Can’t aim a gun and then come back and fire it later. My nana taught me that. Target won’t wait. Sight won’t just stay lined up with the target. Got to aim the gun and then squeeze the trigger if you intend to hit anything. Otherwise it’s just a waste of time and ammunition. So while I reach you late, I been on the phone since six o’clock. Six Fellows per year each working through six-year terms means thirty-six Fellows total. Know something? Y’all usually pick up the phone. Can’t say I’m surprised. People always pick up and talk to the money. Love can roll over to voice mail, but you’re there for the money. Nana taught me that one, too. And y’all like to talk, I can say that. Chatty folks, you people. Like to chat my ear off, like as if I might take the money away from you if you don’t explain yourselves. I honestly have to say that I would prefer it if the calls were quicker. Seven hours on the phone with the Boyd Fellows. Twelve dollars of Boyd Fellowship money per call, I reckon. That’s two hours’ wages for a hand on my ranch. Three hours if he’s a Meskin. That’s the price of the blue plate special at the Avalon Diner. That’s the price of a à la carty car wash at the Fast Lube. Plus toll charges. Plus the not inconsiderable value of my own time. Seven hours chitchatting about physics and poetry and whatnot. I have to say, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be trying to prove to myself. We have a network of respected nominators, a esteemed committee of selection, and a distinguished advisory board to guarantee a top-quality pool of candidates. And the Fellowships are famously offered without strings, although I was not a party to that particular decision. I have to say I would prefer it if there was a string or two. Doesn’t matter how much someone likes rhubarb, they still got to pay for the pie and coffee. That’s also Nana. Not much got past Nana. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why I’m glad she’s dead, but the biggest is that she didn’t have to live to hear someone explain how they were writing a whole damn book talking about how whether Nathaniel Hawthorne was gay with Herman Melville. I just had that conversation. Shona Greenwald. Nice lady, but big as a cow. Got her fellowship couple years before you. Field of gender studies. Hawthorne and Melville sitting in a tree. New one on me but who am I to question the judgment of the respected, the esteemed, and the distinguished? It’s possible that I’m hopelessly out of step with currents of contemporary thought. That’s the contention of my dear cousin Mandy. You met her, I’m sure. Amanda Boyd Phimister. She never misses the investitures. Her chance to, ah, hobnob . Went to that Glassell art school down to Houston and got her head messed up forever. Sometimes the mosquitoes carry away the real people and leave behind fake impostors. Nana was big on that one. It explained a whole lot to her as she got older and more disappointed. Big swamp-bred mosquitoes, carrying people off and leaving death androids in their place. So, you gonna pick up or what? I sure hope I have the right number. Y’all are supposed to let us know when your personal information changes. It is written into the agreement you sign when accepting a Boyd Fellowship. You are bound by—”

The machine hung up on him, then, inflexibly stipulating the limitations of its indulgence, its mechanical timing marvelously, serendipitously, precise — but not necessarily auguring well. It was possible, if not likely, that a Boyd Harris wouldn’t be able to differentiate between the machine’s rudeness and my own.

I stood in the new silence, concentrating deeply. I suppose it makes sense that you can locate insanity adjacent to any large-scale, organized effort to give money away. Philanthropy thumps offbeat to the known pulse of the world, but seems too metered, too contained and inhibited, to be the pursuit of holy fools, baptized in a dream of total divestiture and munificence. Invariably there’s a preoccupation on the most benign level with accountability, and on the most sinister with control. Maybe because of that I’d always been a little leery of accepting the Boyd money (though not leery enough to decline it), or maybe it was because it had funded every extravagance my imagination had seized on without subsidizing a single page of decent fiction. Was it possible that they knew? I waited expectantly in the demolished room, expecting the phone to ring again, but it remained silent. Harris was probably on to the next Fellow, likely reaching another answering system at this hour, phoning through the lonesome night from under the shining stars of Texas.

O NEday Nanabozho was walking by the lakeshore thinking about nothing in particular when he heard voices a short distance away. Very quietly he crept toward the sound and soon spied three young men talking where they had stopped to rest. He concealed himself in the bush so that he could eavesdrop on their conversation. The young men were talking about what they wanted from life. “I want to be a great hunter, I want to be able to track game all day and all night without ever getting tired,” said the first. The second said, “I want to be a man of great wealth.” And the third said, “I want to be able to live forever, for as long as the earth does.”