Narrator’s Note

The center held even as the bankruptcy notices were filed, and public-auction announcements published and some people in the United States of America were forced to undergo these life-wrenching events and went about the business of starting over again, just like people who get divorced or survive serious illness. Casual killings, inflamed by a media machine feeding on the notorious and prurient, terrorized people who are naturally inclined to be terrorized by the slightest tic of dread. Missing children, deserted houses, and illiterate graffiti artists provided fodder for obsessive voyeurs insistent on confusing causation with correlation. Families fled the scenes of their failures, leaving behind misdemeanors and relatively harmless felonies. Children in the middle of the country fled the tyranny of parents overwhelmed by a changing of the social order and sought to build a new order on the coasts. Some of those parents abandoned their families rather than foist any more harm on them or themselves. Everything purchased was bound to be repossessed.

Not since 1861 has our country faced an open revolt. Not even close. The last time an enemy country had struck our shores was late 1941. I am writing this in 1995, and politicians telling us that the fundamentals of the American economy are strong are not lying to us. Ronald Reagan restored our swagger and Bill Clinton introduced a swing into our steps. All the signs of our demise in the years of the historian Nathan Hale Plunkett’s childhood – the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; the horror perpetrated by the disciples of Charles Manson, the fallout of the Summer of Love, and the resignation of Richard Nixon – have been relegated to history books.

Nathan taught me that the fringe always unraveled.

“The center holds because of people who are able to have sex and make babies throughout any crisis,” Nathan wrote. “The fringe always unravels because a minority of people are unable or unwilling to have sex and make babies.”

I work in advertising surrounded by people who submerge into their anonymity every night, often followed by a tumbler of single malt Scotch. They are talented, cynical men and women who feast on the insecurities of our clients. We are well-paid to deceive our neighbors and families into believing that the purpose of their lives is to achieve the state of happiness and that they can purchase that happiness. Some people call happiness the attainment of love or rising to a certain level of consciousness or seeing the face of God. Whatever you believe to be happiness, we defined it for you in order to sell you a car to drive you somewhere you’re not, a ticket to wherever you’re not, or an insurance policy for after you have arrived where you currently are not.

You may have heard of me, but not through my own efforts. I carry a burden, knowing that love exists only in greeting cards and movies, that altered states of consciousness are a scam, and that there is no God. We are alone in the universe, and the only thing keeping us from tearing each other apart are the stories that men and women in advertising create to give you the illusion of order and meaning.

An entrepreneur named Rocket Nzemba introduced me to Nathan, who was on a journey that I could never have imagined when I was his age. On his sleeve, he wore a confidence derived from his belief that, throughout his life, the worst issues facing him would blow over and everything would turn out fine. He possessed an attractiveness and a seductive power that he learned through his participation in obscure, competitive sports. He gave the illusion of ambition and hard work.

Though I am not a priest, during the short years of our relationship, he confessed to me. He introduced me to people who were important to him, and I found myself amazed. In their company, I felt ordinary. In the few years we knew each other, we were frequently in each other’s company until, quite suddenly, we stopped. The last words I uttered in his presence were, “Who are you?” He broke eye contact, did not answer the question, and walked out the door of my office.

I have committed his confessions to these pages along with selected first-person testimony and my own commentary when I decided to indulge myself in the act of rationalization. My goal in writing Nathan’s story is to relieve me of some of my burden as his confessor. All the names of major characters have been changed save Nathan’s in order to protect the innocent and myself from libel should the manuscript fall into the wrong hands.

— R. W. Agonistes, 1995