Free The Unbinding by Walter Kirn

faces, I suspect, but composites made up of features glimpsed in crowds. A forehead you spotted from a hotel balcony. A chin you saw through the windshield of your limousine. And though these faces disgust you, possibly, I like to think that they rouse your pity, too, because they remind you, vaguely, of your old face. Unrecognized. Unphotographed. Unformed .
    A face that may as well be my face, now.
    You’re probably wondering how I found your address. I got it indirectly and dishonestly, by pretending to have feelings for a young woman who cares part-time for the retired marine who taught you to walk like a pilot in
Top Gun.
Colonel Geoff says hello to your family, by the way, and sends his regrets for missing your premiere. He isn’t a well man these days, laid low by a virus that he may have gotten from you, in fact—or given to you without your knowing it. It’s a puzzle, this bug. It’s one of the strange new ones that’s either about to break out globally or suddenly mutate into extinction.
    That’s not why I’m writing this, though. I need your help. I’ve probably needed your help for a long time, but now I finally have a way to ask for it.
    Everything that I’ve ever considered precious, they’ve taken from me, Mr. Cruise. And now, this week, they’re doing it again.
    On Wednesday a policeman took Twist, my dog. He came for her without knocking, at suppertime, luring her into a pet crate with a Milk-Bone. It reminded me of when I was seventeen and I lost my best friend, the boy who bunked below me, who’d called in anonymous bomb threats to our boarding school. He wasn’t prepared for exams—he needed time. We all needed time that semester. We were floundering. We’d come to the school with a hundred teenage maladies, from nail chewing to obesity, and we’d thought that recovering from them would be enough. But no, they demanded that we learn history, too. The names of the kings and the plots behind their deaths. The dates of the battles and the weapons that won them. My friend and I were in the dining hall, bending our forks back and flicking macaroni up into the grates that covered the lights, when the headmaster and his grim assistant appeared. They read no charges, produced no writs or warrants. They merely said, “Follow us,” and my friend did. Out of the building and into a parked car that carried him down the driveway and through the gates and off to wherever they keep the things I love once it has been determined that I can’t have them.
    The next confiscation occurred a few years later, when I missed three payments on a leased Mustang that I should have known I couldn’t afford. My only income at the time came from participating in focus groups that met in a room behind mirrored one-way glass. The job involved the tasting of new breakfast cereals and long conversations about political issues such as the food-stamp program and school prayer. I was an average citizen, supposedly, hired at random, but the truth was that the firm that sponsored the groups kept lists of people with nothing better to do, who it knew could be summoned on a few hours’ notice.
    I adopted a role in these groups: the stickler. If a cereal was named Blueberry Morning, I dug in my bowl for the pellets of dried fruit and complained when I counted only four of them. I objected to food stamps being used for sweets, and asked to hear the prayers recited aloud. This attitude won me steady work at first, but when I became notorious and conspicuous, the firm let me go. And then my car was snatched. The repossessors who chained it to the wrecker asked if there were personal items inside. When I answered, “Yes, I’ve been living in this vehicle,” they laughed and powered up the winch.
    And then three years ago they took my novel.
    I started writing it when I heard somewhere that, by law, the Library of Congress must store and catalog any book-length work produced by an American author. This was a right of citizenship,