Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

“Does he need to go to the hospital?”

“He’s fine,” said Cliff. “You’re just fine, right?”

Mulligan could have done without Cliff’s sarcasm, but he was happy to agree: he didn’t want to go to the hospital. Already a man with a perfect head of hair wearing a khaki parka was picking his way over, accompanied by a guy with a camcorder balanced on his shoulder.

“Keep him away from me,” Mulligan said.

The detective nodded, but Cliff was way ahead of him: he was with Mulligan on that, at least.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he said, “sir.”

They put Mulligan in the back of an unmarked police car then, Cliff placing his hand on the top of his head to guide him in as if he were in handcuffs. He sat there a long time, watching the lights strobe over the scene outside. Finally, the detective got in the front seat and drove him back to the station, where he waited to tell his story in a small interview room. A window set in one wall looked directly into a matching room, like a mirror image on the other side of the glass. After a while, a uniformed sergeant led Kat into the matching room and left her there. She and Mulligan gazed at each other through the glass for a moment, and as Mulligan tried to think of some amusing pantomime to communicate with her, she came to the window, lowered the venetian blinds, and closed the slats.

B OBBYstood over an open hole, slumped in a posture you might naturally associate with mourning or grief. It was an old hole, one previously filled, and his sagging shoulders were actually the result of fatigue from having dug the hole — redug it, albeit using heavy equipment — his head bowed only so that he could look avidly into the hole: he was not mourning and he was experiencing no grief, although there was a body in there. The body was all that remained of what had filled it. The rest, all the dirt, was piled beside it. There was still a body in the hole. Bobby was happy because his expectations were fulfilled.

I knew Bobby for a long time and I can state this with confidence. Bobby was a man whose expectations were met in such simple ways — by his finding things where they belonged, or in the possession of the people with whom they belonged, or, conversely, by his finding them in the wrong place or with the wrong people and thereby confirming his suspicions; for suspicion always was a driving force in the mind of Bobby Argenziano. It was the suspicion of a greedy creature — one hesitates to say a primitive creature, although as you can see I have barely hesitated before going ahead and saying it; the suspicion of a primitive greedy creature who took no measure of his need before going ahead and doing what he deemed necessary to his survival, no matter how excessive it may have been in relation to that need.

Yet, despite everything’s being in its ordered place, even as Bobby’s expectations were met in this instance, his suspicions were aroused as well. How could I be out there in the world if I also was down there, in the hole he dug for me after firing a bullet into the back of my skull? It was a mental adjustment I daresay it would have been difficult for even the most open-minded among you to make, and as for Bobby, let us say that he was not the adaptive type, at least not in that respect. To draw upon the terminology of game theory (a set of concepts with which I had not the slightest familiarity during my lifetime, I regret to say), we might suggest that Bobby viewed human interplay in its essence as a zero-sum game, and one that he, as a constant or serial participant, wanted therefore to win at all costs. And he consequently incurred such costs numerous times, although it might be said of his kind that they can afford them. It might also be said, not inaccurately, that I was of his kind. Most others bear such costs much less lightly than Bobby and his kind, our kind, Bobby’s kind and mine. Most others find the very thought of such costs overly burdensome, and so they shoulder different burdens — burdens of responsibility, burdens of obligation, burdens of duty, burdens of guilt for falling short, burdens that they find it natural or decide to assume. Whereas Bobby and I, and those of our kind, declined to accept such burdens, and accepted instead those costs that to us feel light, or inconsequential. Although I am living proof (as it were) that such costs are in fact high, grievously high.

I wanted to suggest that Bobby did not adapt to conditions that had the effect of changing the nature of the game, especially if such changes made the game more complex than he had bargained for, given the zero-sum outlook he brought to the complexities that are a constitutive part of life. Bobby felt no guilt over my death, felt no responsibility for my life, which was, at the moment of truth, in his hands, and which he took without hesitation, having reckoned that my death was an essential part of his plan. The amount of reassurance that Bobby could derive from the presence of my body in that hole he dug was diminished by the possibility, however remote, that I might be out there — out here . I should note that Bobby was superstitious. He was full of fear. He was no more afraid of the physical body, the corpse, in the hole he dug than he would have been afraid of a side of beef, nor was he afraid of the deserted grove where he stood. But the unknowable did frighten him, as well it should have.

What’s unknowable? Nearly everything is unknowable. The desire of our time is to compile a total inventory, an accounting of all there is to know, but I’ve come to realize that the more data we acquire, particularly about one another and about our soiled behavior — from discreet whispers picked up with long-range microphones to intemperate moments memorialized globally and instantaneously at the touch of a button, from financial records that can be used to triangulate upon a hypothesized truth to graphic videos of compromised flesh that make any need for hypothesis obsolete — the more we discover that the only thing we can ascertain is that we are all capable of the most exquisitely unpredictable behavior. To rely on probability is always to guarantee surprise. Call it the epistemology of intelligence gathering: the future will always, finally, be immune to prediction. But none of that is what Bobby would have referred to as the unknowable . Bobby’s head was filled with the usual jumble. The jettatore, the blazing Catholic hell, the chainsaw-wielding maniac: stories he’d heard that tickle instinct and massage credulity outright. Bobby didn’t even bother taking stock in probability. He stockpiled objects and the means to acquire them. It’s why he committed his crime and it’s what he took solace in afterward, assuring himself of his immunity from judgment. A materialist, basically, like all the rest of you.

The need for my death arose solely from convenience, Bobby’s convenience. I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t have known anything, because I was incapable of suspecting anything of Bobby. Others, yes. Women, I always suspected of ulterior motives and untrue deeds. That was prejudicial. Men with whom I served time in prison. That was necessity. My mother. That was conditioning. (What grief she caused, right up until the end! Bobby himself called to tell her I was missing and even he was shocked by the callousness of her response: as far as the killer was concerned, the mother’s indifference went against nature.) And many other individuals and groups for reasons that ran the gamut from prejudice to necessity, from whimsy to the paranoia to which I was not unsusceptible on some of my more memorable days, having been conditioned to it by the best, by the old woman who still lives and rages, alone and unrepentant in the backwater parishes of Bay Ridge.