The Unbinding by Walter Kirn Read Free Book Online

And that lost, abused dog—the scrawny Basenji that our captain found grubbing squid behind an Applebee’s—the dog we named Twist and adopted as our mascot and silk-screened the paw print of onto our jerseys—well, they’re telling us that she belongs to a top breeder, that her real name is Gretel, that she was best in show, and that we can’t ever have her back. She’s registered.
    Which they’ll regret. We’ll come by night.
    Oh, and I met an old guy who knows Tom Cruise (whom I’d already been thinking about this week, and not in a nice way but in a vicious way) and who claims that he can get me or anybody as many tickets as we want to the Los Angeles premiere of the new
Mission: Impossible.
The fellow can’t attend because he’s ill (there was a tent of gauze around his bed as well as a grim little minefield of bloody cotton balls), but he’ll pay for the travel of anyone who’ll go as long as they’ll promise to read aloud his “blessing” (a tiny speech that he’s still writing) to Cruise’s pregnant wife. The guy insists she’ll allow this. Cruise will make her. The guy is a veteran who met Cruise on
Top Gun
and coached him to angle his hips the way true aces do and show—in his eyes but not only in his eyes; in the depth and rhythm of his breathing, and even in the “esstex” of his complexion—the American naval aviator’s boundless contempt for gravity and death.
    It might be a kick, though I doubt I’ll get time off.
    It all depends on the unfolding of a story that I can feel developing around me. I can’t tell you yet how it will come out, but I do know that it will come out somehow, and that represents an important change for me. My life has had many beginnings and endings, Mom, and almost every day I seem to go directly from false start to anticlimax, but so far I’ve never experienced this feeling of being in the middle of something. Centered.
    [three pp. to follow]

11.
    [USPS—cont’d]
    It started four days ago, last Monday night. I was taking a facialist to eat sashimi. I’d had a crush on the woman since January, and we’d been swapping vibrations at our complex. Things heated up between us when, one weekend, at a new acquaintance’s suggestion, I rented a German epic about conquistadors that happened to be the facialist’s favorite film. She spotted me carrying the disk to my apartment, we talked a bit, we realized we had a lot in common, potentially (especially if I watched and liked the movie), and so I asked her out for Japanese food after learning from her AidSat file that she’d been hospitalized on New Year’s Eve for a violent digestive episode that she blamed on consuming spoiled raw fish.
    On our drive to the restaurant we stopped at the apartment of the phobic old colonel who tutored Tom Cruise, where the facialist feared she’d left a Crock-Pot on. She’d met the colonel while helping with the search for that allegedly kidnapped teenage girl whose story went national for a time last fall, with the relatives spreading out across the morning shows (lovely, soft-spoken, trusting immigrants who flinched under the lights) until the TV people got annoyed with them over their refusal to show photos of their missing daughter’s face. (Photos were against the family’s religion.) When a newspaper later reported that the girl had been pledged in some ritual to an older man who taught at a college here once but lost his job for claiming that our government still kills Indians and that it dropped an atom bomb on Egypt but hushed it up with a transfer of gold bouillon, the public decided that the family wasn’t worth helping. The girl has never been located, but the facialist and the colonel still think about her.
    As we were leaving his apartment, I felt my cell phone shudder in my pocket. It rattled again while the facialist and I were chopsticking up small slabs of slippery tuna and discussing movies and the universe, the way people do on uncomfortable first dates.