Free The Fugitives by Christopher Sorrentino

these young men, the product of affluence, the flower of their generation, spoke of as they deigned to sit down with us for dessert? They spoke of getting rich. They spoke of getting rich in a manner that would enable them never to work again. They spoke of billions. The language today is of billions, as if mere millions, hundreds of millions, could never be enough to sate their desire for money. The surefire idea: that was the extent of their plan; to devise the surefire idea that would bring a veritable cavalry of white knights sweeping in with cash sufficient to idle them for the rest of their days. And I could tell that the parents of this young man, to whom it has never occurred to stop working and building and ceaselessly trying to make a difference in their community, were embarrassed by their son and his friends. I could tell that, in that moment, they felt as if they must have done something gravely wrong, must have failed somehow to impress upon him that the money was merely one part of the reward one reaps for a lifetime of hard and fulfilling work. There was a palpable sense in that dining room that for all that they had done by way of example, for all of their attempts to influence their son’s thinking, something, something terrible, had influenced his thinking more than they ever could. What might that something have been? Could it possibly have been the continuous depiction of wealth as an end in itself in our mass culture? Let me ask you: is it responsible to add even one stick of kindling to a raging inferno?”
    He had started really messing with her now. He’d rocked behind his desk, his hands gesturing first to one side, then the other, shoulders working beneath the fit of his shirt. This was the voice and cadence, the attitude, that he’d intended his dead column to impart. When he had finished he let his hands drop into his lap, exhaled deeply, gazed at her.
    He’d asked, “Do you read the police blotter?”
    “Uh.”
    “Every day, in Metro, the police blotter. You read it?”
    “Not really.”
    “Dry as dust. Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts. Someone aims a gun at a liquor store owner, pulls the trigger for the hell of it. Someone beats an old lady on her way home from visiting her sister. Someone paints a swastika on the door of a synagogue. The facts take up sixty words or less. Often much less. Metro editor decides. Mike Turowicz decides that’s what we need to know. Mike Turowicz decides because the story doesn’t seem to be about anything. Now who the hell is Mike Turowicz? Mike Turowicz walks to the El every night drinking a can of beer out of a paper bag. Mike Turowicz has never read anything but the newspaper. He’d be the first one to tell you that. Mike Turowicz’s idea of whether a story is about something or not generally centers on the complexion of the characters in that story. But I’ll tell you something. I will tell you something. There is one thing and one thing only that Mike Turowicz and I have in common, other than our employer. Mike Turowicz and I both want the stories we print to be about something. Now maybe you want to take a minute, think, and tell me again.”
    Another ironic little coded conversation in quotation marks. What were the hints she’d been given here? This was, she knew, the way Nables had of working with his people. It was possibly one of the reasons why he seemed to spend his days steeped in disappointment, although the basic problem probably was systemic: Nables wanted to be the conductor of soaring symphonies and he’d been given a marching kazoo band. He wanted to send people out to find injustice and they brought him county fairs, puppies, and guns. Old men who carved Civil War figurines out of soap. It was the perfect exile for someone like him. Only a very few were born to love the status quo, at least insofar as they were certain that it contained a privileged place for them. Everyone else, accommodating it in all of its arbitrary