The November Criminals Read Online Free PDF

matter was. He’d cleaned himself up, I saw, as though he had a meeting with his miniature, dark-suited gallery rep, Viktor Something, whom I refer to privately as the Hungarian Pickpocket. Because of his hairline and quick fingers, always kneading air. He would have been a better gallery rep had he been a Hungarian pickpocket, I’m sure. As things stood, he was a failed artist helping out my father, another failed artist, or an artist on the way to failing. “Tell me it’s worth it,” my father moaned—his face supported by both his huge leaden hands. The blankness that in the presence of any other person would have been laughter overtook me. It constricted my breathing. But I managed to mumble, “You know it is, Dad,” before stumbling downstairs.
    He’s a lot taller than I am—my father, I mean—but narrow. Shoulders, chest, lips, eyes. Narrow except for his walnut-knuckled hands. His forehead bulges, tracing half the curve of a sleigh bell, and his nose would not be out of place among the features of a Roman emperor, though on him it looks starved and weak. The pots he throws are tall, thin, built like him, and—given the frequency with which they break—possess some similar fragility. Although my father is, body-wise, sound as an ox. He never gains weight, needs little sleep and food. I admire him for that. It’s one of his few genuine qualities. It’s a good thing he has a strong constitution, too, because when he does get sick, even with a cold or some minor complaint, a sprained finger, he starts carrying himself as though he were about to be executed the next morning. With the smug, pardoning smile of a saint under torture.
    After I was sure he was gone to his meeting with Viktor or whatever, I went outside. Sprigs of stars glittered in the turkey oaks interlaced above our yard. I dragged a patio chair to the shed that houses his kiln, which is made of some indestructible, chintzy-looking material. He built it, or had it built, after my mother died. As though he’d been waiting. Sometimes I go and sit near it, to feel the whisper of heat from it, to watch the air distorted, and to see the transparent rags of flame that slip out from it in a breeze. Sometimes—and this is fucked-up—I fantasize about being inside of it, first protected, just as an observer among the hardening graceful forms there, the brightening colors, forms that sometimes explode under the strain, and then the protection would vanish and I’d be consumed, too quick for pain, for any sensation at all. I was gripping the arms of the patio chair, not a painful grip but with a certainty , when my reverie lifted. The air had chilled me, and the hunger for sleep rose through me, like sap in a tree.
    This meant, of course, that it was time to read the Aeneid . I have been reading it every night before sleep since the end of my junior year, when we studied it in Latin class. I have three copies. One of them is an edition from 1973, “interpreted” by Professor Burton J. Fragment of the English department of Yale University, and it has a floppy paper cover, in teal and rose, a cover that announces how mealymouthed and self-serving the version inside is. I also have two real translations. One is a cheap paperback edition of the Dryden translation. I had to tape its spine, I thumbed through it so much. The other one is the best, a hardback in two volumes, from the Loeb Classical Library. They have apple-red paper jackets and blood-colored cloth bindings. The Loeb translation was made in 1926 by a man called E. T. P. Bredon-Howth, from a text of the Latin prepared by Heinrich Balde in 1878. I bought the Fragment translation for my eleventh-grade English class. It was all they had in the bookstore, and the girl working as a cashier gave me a critical, bulgy-eyed look. This was bad. She went to my school, I remembered. And worse, she was good-looking. The Dryden I swiped from a public library I wandered into one afternoon when I was high. The