The Unbinding (9 page)

22.

[ExpressLink.com]

Sabrina,

We fear for you, big sister. You don’t reply. And you haven’t acknowledged receiving the research file that my pal here at eBay assembled on Kent Selkirk. I’m guessing that you haven’t read it, because if you had, you would have gotten back to me, almost certainly in tears.

So let me be the bearer of bad tidings: Not only isn’t this character who he says he is, he isn’t (from what I can gather) anyone.

Though there was a Kent Selkirk, once upon a time. A number of them, actually. But only one of them was white, Midwestern, and would be the same age today—were he alive—as your Ray-Banned man of mystery. This Kent Selkirk was born in 1976, the day before our nation’s Bicentennial, in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. His father, Norris, owned a two-plex movie theater and headed up the local chapter of a now-defunct fraternal lodge, the Ancient Order of the Plains Astronomers, which claimed to derive its creeds and ceremonies from a Native American birchbark scroll containing the “Improved Ojibwan Star Plattes.” All that’s known of Kent’s mother, who died when he was five, is her name, Alicia, and her gift of a sixteen-volume family scrapbook to her county historical society.

In 1993, the record shows, the first Kent Selkirk took seventh place in a regional essay contest backed by the National Rifle Association (“Self-Defense: A Common Good”) and was cited, twice in the same month, for operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of a scheduled substance. He enrolled one year later at Cass Academy, a military school in Minneapolis, from which he was later expelled for unknown reasons. After a misdemeanor marijuana arrest and a charge, later dropped, of sending threatening letters to the faded pop sensation Boy George, he joined the coast guard, was stationed in Sitka, Alaska, and died in the crash of a Sea King helicopter in February 1997 while evacuating a capsized Russian crab boat.

According to his recent writings on MyStory.com, the fraudulent composite who has since adopted Selkirk’s name also grew up in Minnesota and also attended Cass Academy. But according to a range of documents—some publicly available, many not, and a few of the most sensitive obtained through anonymous channels at Dad’s law firm—he shares little else with the original Selkirk, whose Social Security number he started using in the fall of 1999, first to obtain a Montana nonresident hunting license and then to complete an employment application for a “VIP personal security” post at Proton Protective Services of Chicago. The outfit fired him twenty-four days later for “violating professional decorum” while guarding the greenroom of
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
This pseudo-Selkirk, according to our data, is five inches taller than his namesake, blue-eyed not brown-eyed, sandy-haired not blond, and possessed of a nineteen-point IQ advantage that classifies him as a “low-mid near-genius.”

I’ve also seen and compared the two men’s photographs. In a CyberCupid online dating profile from 2001, your fellow posted a series of color snapshots (crudely and unconvincingly Photoshopped) depicting him in a poncho and Nike baseball cleats standing atop what he refers to as “the Six Sister Peaks of Old Bhutan.” This faux alpinist doesn’t resemble in the slightest the Selkirk in Cass’s sophomore memory book, who is shown accepting a framed citation for excellence in night reconnaissance. He does share, however, the X-creased forehead of another Cass student named Ormand Dorngren, who, after reneging on a commitment to army ROTC, went on to study dramatic arts at Furley Junior College in Spokane, Washington, but left after two semesters to play a seraph in South Dakota’s Black Hills Passion Play.

Dorngren, too, is dead, however. In the spring of 2001, during an Earth Liberation Front assault on a salmon-killing Canadian dam, he was sucked underwater by massive turbines that presumably pulverized his body, which was never recovered. Oddly, a picture that ran with the obituary in his hometown Minnesota newspaper shows a young man much leaner and sharper-featured than the sweet soldier boy of the memory book or the phony outdoorsman on CyberCupid. I can only suppose that Dorngren, the former acting student, enjoyed experimenting with his appearance, much as neo-Selkirk likes tinkering with digital-imaging software.

For the last six years or so, your “Kent” (who also goes by the first names KC and Casey) has made his presence felt on numerous Web forums related to a dumbfounding array of hobbies, issues, and enthusiasms. In 2000, for example, he joined an international petition drive urging the People’s Republic of China to release imprisoned practitioners of the outlawed martial art Qigong. At about the same time, on CyberCupid, he revised his description of his ideal date from “Picnicking on blueberries and wine as our dogs chase Frisbees through the wildflowers” to “Getting sweaty in my Dodge while blasting classic Pantera tracks.” Two months later, on another dating site intended for under-thirty faithful Mormons, he described his profession as “touring antigang speaker” and summed up his personal philosophy as “Always taking care to close the carton and leave at least one glassful for the next guy.” The book that he said had most influenced his life? The
Rand McNally World Atlas.
“It reminds us that we’re surrounded by H
₂
0, almost all of it undrinkable and much of it in the form of ice. Kind of humbles you and makes you wonder.”

This, big sister, is only the beginning of your quasi-Kent’s electronic odyssey. Other high points include a hysterical nine-page e-mail to the respected blogger Andrew Sullivan, in which he contends that “loose American college girls spreading drug-resistant STDs across the spring-break beaches of the globe” justify “anything Islam can throw at us but especially the bio-stuff.” Two years later, here on eBay, he ran a short-lived enterprise selling “ionized wild sheep colostrum” as a therapy for childhood autism, which he hinted that he’d suffered and recovered from.

Just weeks after we shut him down, he popped back up as a source for “Egyptian EroSalt,” a powdered aphrodisiac for women that he boasted was capable of turning “a slumbering menopausal nun” into a “nymphazoid all-night bedpost humper.” Meanwhile, over on NasaKnows.com, a site devoted to the search for extraterrestrial life, he claimed that concealed in the SimCity computer game is a video clip of Billy Graham, Muhammad Ali, the Bush brothers, and others bowing to what he calls “the Orionic Eminence” on a dry lakebed in the Utah desert. On a site for cosmic rationalists, SaucerScoffers.net, he mocks the same notion as an urban legend.

I think you get the picture. There is no picture. Whatever his parents really named him and his teachers brought him up to be, “Kent Selkirk” has shed his mortal form to become
a holographic data-ghost
composed of appropriated biographies and incompatible sensibilities. Stay away from this goon. If you’re with him now, get out. If he follows you, fire at his midabdomen and, once you’re certain the beast is down, call Dad.

Even though no further warnings should be needed, I leave you with this excerpt from a short bio that KS submitted just ten months ago to a matchmaking service called E-Symmetry. It’s headlined “Am I the One You Seek?” and it runs alongside a county-fair gag photo of the monster’s toothy mug grinning through an oval hole in the head of a life-size cardboard Dalai Lama.

“…but chiefly because my vocation is compassion. Eight hours a day, five days a week, I don a satellite-connected headset into which my far-flung fellow humans funnel their confusion and apprehension. Sometimes the work exhausts me, I’ll confess, but not once in my years of assisting faceless strangers have I forgotten to whom I’m truly listening: traumatized newborns, whose lifelines have been severed, forcing them to solicit sustenance by wailing and shrieking nonstop until they die.”

Please don’t kiss this creature. Please don’t touch him. Remember when I was six and you were eight and we emptied a packet of dehydrated brine shrimp into a mayonnaise jar full of water? Remember how those tiny, eyeless swimmers fluttered translucently to life and survived in the fluid untended and unfed until it evaporated and we replaced it—only to watch our “sea monkeys” revive themselves? This is the sort of being I fear you’re dealing with, but a million times larger, posing as a man.

Hugs abounding,
Your sleepless little sister

23.

[MyStory.com]

The access code I’ve added to this page should frustrate all trespassers, including Rob, who’s become a pest these last few days despite having made good on his promise to work through his old connections in law enforcement and have my precious Twist returned to me by county animal control. She spent a good part of this evening in my lap, her nose shoveled into the pocket in my shorts, where there must have been some crumbs left over from the torn package of Zingers that I bought in the VA hospital vending nook and ate for supper at Colonel Geoff’s bedside here. With Sabrina checked into her facility (so much to tell, and no best order to tell it in), I’m the old soldier’s nighttime sitter now. His CAT scans came back normal and, medically speaking, he’s regained consciousness, but until tonight it wasn’t a productive sort of consciousness—more like the shuddering nap of a male lion nagged by biting flies.

As the IV line leaked sustaining syrup into the Band-Aided crook of his left arm, and the nurses came and went with the humdrum sterile items whose noisy unwrapping and disposal drag out the drowsy hours in a hospital, I scritch-scratched the little bumps under Twist’s fur and tanned my uptilted face in the flat light of TV shows about the
Titanic
and celebrity plastic surgeries. Every twenty minutes, just about, the colonel would rub his dry lips with a dry hand. A moment or two before he stirred, Twist would stiffen her ears, as though registering his rising will. If she yawned as well, unfurling her slender bubblegum-colored tongue, it meant he was about to speak. I’d open my spiral notebook, mute the set, and turn into a reporter on a story that may not be true but feels important anyhow.

“She’ll shed half her tractons during this new concert tour. That’s the next big wave of them.” The colonel was referring to Madonna, who’d been on TV while I was eating Zingers, plushly backgrounded by her London parlor and praising herself for her kabbalah studies. “The minute the woman’s sufficiently demagnetized, people will see her as she is,” he said. “Just a very muscular aging rich lady, all bristle and snap and anger at her staff, and stuffed with so much pushy mystic bullshit that we might have to Taser her to back her off.”

“The nurse left butterscotch pudding if you want some. Or just the whipped topping with the chunk of pineapple? It’s time to go back to solids,” I said.

“Where’s Sabrina?”

“Resting. On a break.” The facts but not the truth.

The truth had to do with a scalpel she’d found somewhere and stealthily poked through the side of my white sweatshirt while we were eating ice cream with Rob and Jesse in the hospital cafeteria four nights ago. This merry social, Rob’s idea, was meant to make up for the steaks we’d never had, but he seemed to be driving at something wicked from the moment we lined up at the sundae bar. While the girls were spooning up chopped pecans, he asked me if I’d read or heard about “this huge new phone records scandal in D.C.” I said that I had but didn’t understand it or know quite why it should bother me personally. “Do widespread violations of civil liberties have to bother you personally?” Rob said, squirting a black puddle of Hershey’s syrup into the bottom of his empty bowl, then plopping three scoops of mint chip on top of it.

“That’s backward. That’s upside-down,” I said.

“You know what isn’t, Kent? Striking back before they snatch it all. First our phone calls, then our letters, and on and on until their filthy fingers are six inches deep inside our girlfriends’ VJs, taking test-smears of our semen. But hey, don’t take it personally, Kent.”

“I won’t.”

“Kent. Kent Selkirk. Of Seven Decorah Drive. Who rerented
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
last week, as well as
Scarface
,
Finding Nemo
,
Bruce Almighty
, and
The Parent Trap.
The fat retard clerk there? Photographic memory. I bribed him with a box of Goobers peanuts.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s possible.”

“Okay.”

“Feel violated?”

“Nope.”

“Then there goes the Constitution.”

“Fine,” I said.

In the half hour before Sabrina stabbed me, the talk at our table slid around like a pumpkin seed on a greased platter. I’d think that I was advancing some theme or topic—the sadism behind the concept of purebred dogs, whether Jesse ought to go lighter with dark streaks, why I believe we’d have less domestic violence if men could just say, “I divorce thee,” like the Muslims do—but when an idea rebounded off Rob, it came back as something political and harsh or something personal and even harsher. Did we know there were lists on public Web sites of women who have prescriptions for the abortion pill? Had we heard that in certain impoverished arid nations Coca-Cola had suctioned dry the water table to supply its bottling plants? And what was it with me and my fondness for small dogs? If Rob had a dog it would be a German shepherd, male, unfixed, with combat training. So he could sic it on “that pig Scalia,” whom he described to Sabrina, to bring her in on things, “as the wizard
-consigliere–
grand inquisitor of the new Orwellian white reich.”

It irked me that Jesse let him steam this way without nudging my foot under the table or joining me in my sighs. We had a history; she and Rob had spending sprees. We had chemistry; they had latex sex toys. Destiny longed for us to mate and breed but would just as soon see Rob die childless in a Reno strip-club parking lot.

I didn’t feel the prick, the stick, the slice. What they say about scalpels proved accurate. Perhaps because I didn’t flinch, Sabrina wondered if she’d really punctured me, which may have been why she withdrew the weapon, studied it—in the open, with everybody watching her, though still unaware that its blade had been inside me—and then reorganized, stared at me, and said, “Whoever you are, I bet you fucking bleed, though you didn’t the first time, so let’s try again.”

Once a man is sure that its thin steel is headed for the fat grape of his right eye, a scalpel in a woman’s hand is an easy object to gain control of. And once three bored old veterans of foreign wars have spotted what may be their final chance to charge in low and fast, that woman’s body will smack the floor so hard that ice-cream spoons will rattle in their bowls.

“When’s she coming back?” asked Colonel Geoff. “Do I smell dog in here?”

“And dog smells you. Happy, twitching, dilated wet nose. You want her on the bed? I bet she’ll stay. Here, I’m doing it. Under your IV arm. They say now that snuggling a pet can speed recovery.”

The colonel closed one of Twist’s ears in a loose fist and smoothly stroked it from base to tip. Again. Again. Intent on taking therapy. We watched more TV and he told me that indeed he felt much, much better, and that in fact most folks were feeling better due to the fresh streams of liberated tractons that were spreading across the land, presumably mostly from the west.

“Sabrina cracked up. She’s taking a rest at a center,” I said. The colonel seemed hardy enough to take things straight now. “It’s in the woods, on a big lake. I hear that it’s one of those centers that doesn’t seem like one. Lots of hiking and horseshoes. Healthy salads.”

The colonel grunted and patted Twist, who’d rolled over on her back. I was considering giving her to him. I worked all day, and she peed when she got lonesome.

“When the Unbinding comes,” the colonel said, “half of those nut bins will empty out right quick. The ones whose patients aren’t critical, especially. Rich fathers can spend their money on boats again instead of talking cures for bratty kids. Momentous summer coming. The next one, more so. We’re going to see quarter-billion-dollar movies shred away in the breeze like Kleenex tissues. Celluloid beauties you never thought you’d meet will ring up your pickles at the delicatessen. Captains of industry coaching girls’ Little League. Crows in the rafters of the auditoriums.”

“That’s the Unbinding? Bad box office and so on?”

“No. Just the signs that will herald it,” he said.

“Try the butterscotch pudding.”

“Noxious glop. These old-time desserts that you only get in hospitals are how they shoo you toward the tomb. Who checked my girl into the booby hatch? Were the authorities involved?”

“Rob Robinson handled that,” I said.

“Who in Adam’s army is Rob Robinson?”

It took me a while to construct an answer. I realized I’d never asked myself this question, perhaps because it’s not a question that I like people whom I meet casually and have no intention of marrying, lending money to, or marching into battle with to ask themselves concerning me. Calling cards. Introductions. Coats of arms. That old society is gone. Our new way is to show up out of nowhere, crack a joke, laugh at a joke, and then slip off again, hoping we’ve left a nice enough impression to assure a smile if we come back. Sweet and easy. Economical. And nothing wrong with it, I feel, considering what I’ve seen happen to certain people who’ve stood in place too long, letting their fuckups and oopses and late payments ice up around them and trap them in blocks of frost. Back at Cass, that was our teachers’ great, dark threat: “
You do that one more time, son, it’s going on
your permanent record
.”

“Rob’s just a guy. From around. You know. Like me.” Accurate but bodiless. “He works out at my gym. He wall-climbs.” Not quite there yet. “He’s in telecom. Drives a silver Civic. A Republican, maybe, who’s changing into a Democrat.”

There. I’d done my best.

But the colonel had moved on. He was using a thumbnail to nick brown tartar from one of Twist’s front teeth. Their love had quickly grown exclusive. It was almost eleven and I had work tomorrow—a redubbing session for the radio ad featuring the toaster-oven blaze that I’d helped smother from hundreds of miles away—but I doubted that dogs were allowed to spend the night here without their owners. This meant I’d have to stay; I couldn’t separate the newlyweds. I kicked out the footrest on my lounger and tugged on the handle that let me flop back flat. The toes of my white-socked feet framed the TV screen.

“Seen this one ever?” the colonel said.

“What is it?”

“Rock Hudson’s best. A Frankenheimer picture. Martin Balsam. Will Geer, if I recall. And some actress I’m thinking I screwed when she was older, after she’d had her bitter lesbian years. Can’t be sure, though. They haven’t shown her yet.”

“What’s the plot?” I asked.

“Middle-aged
Martin Balsam
pays ancient Will Geer to turn him into young
Rock Hudson
. He moves to a flashy California beach pad, paints abstract pictures, drinks wine, gets stoned, gets laid, then goes back to his wife in the East for some damn reason and mopes around because she doesn’t recognize him. Far-fetched, I know. It’s science fiction. Forgotten the title.
Second Helpings
? Someone dies, though. Guess.”

“Unless it’s Rock Hudson, who gives a rip,” I said.

“He bleeds out on the operating table. Trying to change back into Martin Balsam.”

“Why?”

“People can’t stand perfection, supposedly. We crave familiarity. Baloney. We want them both, or nothing. Then again, the real Rock, who I knew some—I drilled him on antiaircraft gunnery in a wooden Warner Brothers flop—wasn’t enormously thrilled to be himself. You want your pooch back on your lap?”

“Keep her. Think of her as yours now.”

Twist appeared to hear this, and looked relieved. She arched her neck to present her chin for tickling, and her right rear leg shook when she got some. I’d had her once, lost her, had her briefly again, and now I’d given her away. Missing her was all I knew of her—a relationship that had its beauty, but not the beauty of the bond she’d found with the colonel. They’d fused. They’d merged their tractons.

“When the big people lose their mystique, their power,” I asked, “how do the rest of us absorb it? Through what portals, I mean? Our lungs? Our noses?”

“It’s a metaphor. Don’t be a dunce.”

“Then how do we do it metaphorically?”

“
Tractons flow in through the skin
,” the colonel said.

I shut my eyes, tuned out the movie sounds, and tried to envision these fanciful charged particles, but I was jostled by my buzzing phone, whose jealous micromind, I’d grown convinced, had trained itself to detect me meditating. I reached into my pants to throttle the intruder, and only when the colonel had nodded off, Rock Hudson had passed away, and a nurse had crept through with a needle and a gauze pad to rustlingly unwrap and crisply discard, did I open the nasty gadget to hear who’d called.

“It’s Rob. No message. Simply checking in. Just watching the news and wanting to demolish stuff and wondering if you do too sometimes. Whatever, though. I guess that you’re not there.”

It infuriates me when people say that. They know I’m here—there’s nowhere else for me to be.

“Twist,” I whispered. I patted the arm of my lounger. “Come, Twist. Come.”

But no one was answering anyone tonight, and I was not her master anymore.