No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte

Author:Sam Lipsyte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Back in the Rock Rook, I try Dyl both at home and at the store, no answer. I spot Fielden’s card on the kitchen table and call.

“Ninth Precinct, Detective DeGrasse speaking.”

“Hello,” I say. “I’m calling for Detective Fielden. Is he there?”

“Fielden? Hold on.”

Now I can make out the detective’s muffled voice over the line: “Anybody seen young Biff? No?”

“Hello?”

“Right,” the detective says, back on the phone. “Sorry. Take a message?”

“Just tell him Jack Shit called. And that I know more about Mounce.”

“Shit?”

“Or Liptak.”

“Huh?”

“Either is fine.”

“Jack Lipshitz has a tip on the Mouse? That’s the message?”

“Sure, okay,” I say. “I guess that works.”

“Exciting stuff. You one of Fielden’s frat brothers or something? This another prank? ’Cause I’m ready to break balls. Ask anybody about Cal DeGrasse. I’ll come over there and hit your off switch. You understand?”

“Excuse me? No, this real.”

But the phone is already dead.

I crack the forty of King Cobra I bought on the way home, settle into the Earl’s sarcophagus. Something is wedged under the mattress, a paperback from the sidewalk canon, the Thomas Nashe book. I’ve never spent much time with The Unfortunate Traveler, or the Life of Jack Wilton, though I realize now my name change must have been partly, if subconsciously, influenced by the title. I leaf through the introduction by the poet John Berryman, that storied lush and eventual suicide, whose Dream Songs we used to read in college to justify, or at least adorn, our heavy drinking.

I find this passage: “All our lifetime the current has been setting towards licence. In Elizabeth’s reign it was the opposite. Nothing seems to have been more saleable… than the censorious. We are overwhelmed by floods of morality from very young, very ignorant, and not very moral men. The glib harshness to us is a little repulsive….”

I shut my eyes and try to picture the world of Thomas Nashe, the horde of devious, grubby fellows in loose hose gorging on herring and ale. They conduct slanderous feuds via pamphlets, compete to utter the most felicitous and damning put-downs. What a clamorous, nasty place London must have been, where people flung calumny willy-nilly in dark barrooms and in hastily printed broadsides and everybody remarked upon your statements with near simultaneity. A cramped, cantankerous echo chamber where a few well-sunk reputational dirks left you bleeding out on the social sphere’s tavern floor.

Here at the end of history, with the world so huge and diffuse, it’s hard to imagine a realm so cruel and petty, or penned in.

Now an object grazes my face and I open my eyes. A photograph has fallen out of the book. I recognize the Earl’s mother and father from the one time I met them, when they came to visit our apartment, so polite, horrified. They brought us a tray of Lebanese treats and the Earl’s father fixed one of our cabinets. He’s a successful contractor on Long Island. The Earl says he’s done commercial work in New Jersey and Florida too.

I don’t think the Earl’s father understands anything about his son.

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