Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

But not Bobby, whom I loved and thought of as a brother, a big brother, despite his being younger than I. I would not have suspected, I would not have known, and had I known I would not have betrayed him. And Bobby had to have known that, because, after all, didn’t he know me? But that wasn’t his concern. My death and disappearance were a part of his scheme from the beginning: missing, there was no need to look any further for the money. If I turned up dead, it could be surmised that I had been murdered for it. He left my car on the beach road. He went home.

There was desperation involved, Bobby’s desperation — not, strictly speaking, a mitigating factor, although I might have understood, and forgiven, had I been given the chance to understand or not to, and to forgive or not to, while such things might still have mattered to me. But I wasn’t given that chance. And now that it has stopped mattering to me, now that the question of survival, having been removed from the equation, from my equation, is a matter of indifference to me, I could see that with the money he’d wanted so badly he now lived better than he had — but how much better? Did he sleep better, did he digest his food better, did his body trouble him with fewer aches and pains? Did it heal his diseased heart? It was the acquisition, having the money, that gave him satisfaction; that shored up his defenses against the darkness that always comes with wanting. Things got dark for Bobby when he wasn’t acquiring something, someone.

Unfortunately for Bobby, while he wasn’t a savage, his tastes were underdeveloped. About as far as he got was mastering the menu at Highlands. I mention that only because you’ve seen him there, rehearsing his courtly spiel. It takes effort for a man like Bobby to learn how to passably pronounce “Armagnac,” to learn how to dress, although he never quite lost that look of the bespoke primitive, straining at the seams. Fat Mike, one of our associates at South Richmond, saw him wearing a cashmere golf sweater once and said he looked like someone had shoved a salami into an argyle sock. It was a good joke. We laughed a lot at South Richmond — which is, in case you’ve been wondering, a storefront on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island. The proverbial empty storefront. Folding chairs, card tables, and lots of laughs, nearly all of which would forfeit their humor in translation.

OH, AND WHYdon’t I sound the way I did when I was living? Ah, the dialect of the streets. It would certainly be more colorful, more in line with expectations. But — you have to understand — these aren’t words. These are the harmonic thrummings of the music of the spheres, physically imperceptible to human hearing. Except through the intercession of the creator. Make of that what you will.

BOBBY BROUGHT MEto Manitou Sands after I was released from Dannemora. He found me at my mother’s. There I sat, in the front room, looking across at the day care center, the saloon, the storefront MRI clinic, pondering my unsupervised life, if that is an accurate term for the life I was living under my mother’s roof. Well, it is: my mother sought not to supervise me, only to impose her peculiar Weltanschauung upon me and then to turn me loose on the world to see how her ideas, having taken root in me, would burst into flower. At least, that’s how it worked when I was a child. My mother’s special contempt for other human beings — their enthusiasms, their tastes, their ambitions, their beliefs, their appearance, their origins — found its fullest expression in me in the form of antisocial behavior, which was duly punished, of course, frequently by my mother. She talked the talk, as the saying goes, but for the most part kept herself in line, and she could hardly approve publicly of my having demonstrated my faith in her rhetoric by acting upon it. Yes, ultimately she put that much store in appearances, and hated the world all the more for it. I saw freedom on the other side of her lessons, but she herself saw them only as proclamations issuing from her bondage. Odd. I could see her inertia plainly only as an adult, an adult with some sense of what it was to have experienced life. She was inert, noisy but inert. Her tune had not changed at all. You had only to crank her up and she began to sing it.

What sort of freedom ? The freedom of not caring.

I am not blaming my mother . My mother did what she had to do; she was at the mercy of forces tracing their spindly route back through the usual multigenerational history of frustration and oppression. All the worst brutality begins across the threshold of home. But she didn’t lay a finger on me, not after I got bigger than she was, which didn’t take long.

And yet there I was in the front room. Days, I would watch the patients on their way into the MRI clinic. Frail people and strong people, people who’d been living with illness for years and people who seemed blindsided by its unannounced arrival. I saw people who’d never left the neighborhood, and were stamped with its stunting imprint, and people who obviously had recently arrived; bought one of the big houses on Colonial Road or Narrows Avenue and, having thus established a beachhead in their lives, thought they were all set for a long campaign. I saw anxious sons, daughters, wives, husbands on the sidewalk outside, smoking, pacing, talking on the phone. The place had a cheery sign; it strove for the mien of a drive-in oil change franchise. Mornings, I would watch the day care center. Nights, the saloon. I waited.

I was never a planner, but to wait is to plan, or it is itself a sort of plan. Actions move us swiftly into the irrevocable, but to wait keeps the irrevocable at a distance. I realize that this attitude defies conventional wisdom, but what had conventional wisdom ever done for me, other than to absorb me into its patterns and rationales (I embodied the cautionary tale)? To learn patience was to remove myself entirely from the story. I reassured myself: when it’s cold out, I’m warm. When it’s wet out, I’m dry. When I’m hungry, I eat. When I want to bathe, there’s hot water. These and similar needs met, the only other thing I needed was the window, and to wait. Who needed to act? I watched the actors; the day care, the bar, and the clinic embodied the entirety of life, framed in that window: in the mornings, they kicked and screamed, at night they behaved like fools, and during the day they came, pale and sweating and full of terror, out of the hammering confinement of the clinic.

Then one day Bobby appeared on the stairs, carrying a white box from the bakery tied with red and white twine. We embraced, we kissed, we sat. Bobby had come up in the world: he didn’t hesitate to tell me what my eyes already had. The jacket, the slacks, the loafers, the watch. The subtle haircut. That he would even know where to go to get his hair cut like that: would you? He’d come up in the world and now, he announced, he was in a position where he could do a favor or two for an old friend in need. In short: Michigan, and Manitou Sands. I left with him within the hour, leaving the unopened pastry box for my mother to remember me by.

I would have sworn that Bobby and I worked closely together, that we were close, had I been asked, but no one would have asked me, because the question would not have occurred to anyone. I was obviously a factotum. I had a title, I had clothes, both of which were intended to stir faint echoes of the title and clothes Bobby possessed, as my specific responsibilities were intended to stir the faint echo of the authority Bobby wielded. Certainly I was feared, but I was not respected, and never in my natural life was I able to tell the difference. I fetched things, stood off to one side, carried money, beat people with my hands and feet when asked. I would have been happy to spend my life that way. Each day, the same as the last. There was nothing beyond Michigan and Bobby: nothing bigger, nothing waiting, nothing to come, nothing to catch up with me. So it seemed.