The November Criminals Read Online Free PDF Page B

Loeb edition I purchased for eighteen dollars from Don’t Shoot the Piano Player, which is this used bookstore right next to the Camelot, a movie theater, in the shadow of its long, harp-shaped marquee. The guy there didn’t give me any looks. He owns both the theater and the bookstore. This old hippie whose distinguishing features are his nebulous receptive-looking mass of dust-colored hair, and the fact that he drives a gleaming black Rolls-Royce, which is always parked outside Don’t Shoot (as people call it). He resembles some second-rate, unkempt butler when he’s in the driver’s seat.
    Why the Aeneid ? It’s exciting but also difficult to understand. The stories in it are kind of incomprehensible. Venus raping Anchises. Aeneas returning from the underworld through the Gate of Ivory, the gate through which Virgil says false dreams arrive in the world. And the way it ends: in a single instant, just like a human life. It all appears at first to be nonsensical, but that’s because it belongs to a world that no longer exists. In the centuries between us and Virgil, we kind of lost interest in things that are hard to understand. I’m generalizing, yeah, but am I wrong? It’s why, maybe, so much biography gets written now, even of people you’ve never heard of. Which should be the sole test to see if someone deserves a biography: whether a random guy on the street has heard of him. I don’t know why this has happened. Everyone, though, seems sort of bricked into his own life. At least, everyone I know, including me. Not in “quiet desperation”—the phrase comes from another terrible author my teachers forced me to read, Henry David Thoreau—but just by the fact of living in the small, boring modern world. And this explains why all my teachers have been so terrible. I mean because they, like Thoreau, see their own selves not as prisons but as subjects of thunderous interest. I don’t want to sound harsh, but holy fuck! No one who admires Thoreau should be permitted anywhere near a school.

III .
    T HE ONE FIT MEMORIAL to the dead is vengeance of some kind. Against the killer, against some other inevitability, though that too always fails. By definition. And what vengeance , you are no doubt asking, ladies and gentlemen, what vengeance do you propose—you mouthy coward? The truth is, I had no idea. So, yes, I’m an emotional hypocrite. Like everyone else. All I had was this knock-kneed impulse to find out . I couldn’t ask any of my classmates, because fuck them. I didn’t know them anyway. Can you imagine how Alex Faustner would respond if I asked her about Kevin? Everyone else is just as bad as her, except for Digger. And she was my equal in ignorance. So my classmates were out. Which left my teachers. Who are not, as you may have gathered from the brief remarks I’ve made about them, capable of anything high-spirited. They failed to detect the lie I’d cooked up to get them to talk. They were deceived by a seventeen-year-old. Isn’t that a disqualifying failure? Don’t you have to be savvier than people to instruct them in anything? And it wasn’t even a good lie. It was transparent. I told them—I knew the phrase would turn their gazes glassy with delight—I told them I wanted to “do an oral history project.” I can’t even write this without laughing. The whole G&T Program has this huge and inexplicable commitment to oral history. Last year we had to do this series of interviews: hunt up and interrogate a veteran from every war since the Second World.
    Mr. Vanderleun I asked first. He has nine fingers in total. He once lectured us about the cause of this loss. When he was a younger man (he’s fifty now), he did not want to go to war in Vietnam. So he asked his girlfriend to cut off his right pinkie finger. The story struck me as false, because he didn’t specify what instrument the girlfriend used. He just said, “I put my finger down on the block, and whshhhhhhhht,” making a tight-arced