Two years ago, a National Review piece describing Augustus Kenyon as “a somehow universally-beloved black Kissinger” elicited zero comment from the man or his foundation and ended the career of its author, Jurgen Schilze. Schilze works in industrial sourcing now, and we wanted to clarify that he is not either of us. We’re only mentioning him here to protect him from rumour and any harassment that he hasn’t earned himself. We—and we is the only way we’ll be identifying ourselves in this post—arrived at our idea to hack the digital lockbox containing the Augustus Kenyon archive after reading Schilze’s article. Not from Jurgen’s many borderline-racist arguments and his repeated elision of facts that worked against his portrayal of Kenyon as a ruthless manipulator, but from the shadows cast by gaps in Kenyon’s biography, the empty zones that Schilze pointed out.
“Think,” we asked each other. “Do you know anything about Augustus Kenyon that he hasn’t personally revealed?”
Through reliable digital forensic technology (detailed in the comments) we ascertained that the files had not been tampered with, and that there was no human error on our part. The data was correct. From the first volume onward, Augustus Kenyon outlined and wrote a version of his memoirs in advance. He used them as planning documents not only for political strategizing, but for everything from marriage to real estate holdings to a conversion to Unitarianism before the final, triumphant election to the last office he held before deciding he could more effectively drive change as a consultant. Our investigation into the memoirs proves that even the move into consulting had been outlined and plotted before Kenyon’s last election was won. This discovery, and the others that came with it, have been worth exchanging our normal lives for the ones we are now living. And we want to find out more.
This is a follow-up to our first report, which we posted on several aggregators last November, somewhere toward the end of the election cycle. Our timing wasn’t political. Kenyon, after all, had worked both sides of the political spectrum with equal effectiveness in the past three decades, and hadn’t backed either candidate this time around. We were just eager to post our discovery as soon as we finished writing it up. And now, though we’ve had to work in hiding, jumping cities and countries as part of a combined research and arrest-evasion trip that may never end, we’ve confirmed our findings.
Kenyon has receded from public life into a degree of privacy than we would have thought impossible outside of a coffin. His family and political lieutenants have been of no use to us. Since we began our research with an illegal act, they would have been even less helpful to us than they have been to Kenyon’s other biographers, who retreated from their projects baffled by the terrible uniformity of what Kenyon’s people told them about the man. With only the briefest of exceptions, often from bitter and non-credible rivals, the stories people tell about Augustus Kenyon are stories he told about himself first.
We found a new one.
While it was later unpublished from The Marling’s website, Peter Wheatley’s archived personal essay “Un-Understanding” is the keystone document of this account. Its primacy is perhaps the last thing Wheatley would have wanted, as a white man who held the opinions he apparently held, and who was so dedicated to his supplemental role that from 2016 onward, he published no work, from poem to book review, in which he does not mention that he hesitates to keep publishing at all, to keep, as he says in the poem “Unlisted,”
devouring
digital inches
colonizing
space
But we must work with the words we are left with. Wheatley’s essay is what we have outside of the monolithic Kenyon narrative, and we are grateful to have found it accidentally, while following Kenyon’s early non-fiction journeys through a series of defunct literary journals.
It may be a comfort to Peter Wheatley to know that the critical consensus on his work is that the writing is unremarkable. Wheatley is so concerned with making meaning that he often fails to make any sense at all, at best coming right up to his point before retreating into a slogan. But “Un-Understanding,” which repeats the term autofiction twelve times in its 3143 words, placing the document squarely in 2018 even without corroborating data, is Wheatley’s attempt at a flat-style delivery of events, with his intensely personal meanderings placed between the blocks of information. We will be looking at the information.
The inciting incident, when the players met, was a crowded literary reading in the urban downtown, unaffiliated with any of the university writing programs, explicitly featuring writers who had emerged without creative degrees. Of the four readers that evening, three had PhDs in humanities disciplines, and one was a high school teacher. The most prominent, Sunil Mukhujee, also hosted a podcast on race, food, and mental health issues, and had recently signed a book deal with a major house on the intersection of the three topics. The book was never completed, or at least never published.
In the question and answer period following Mukhujee’s reading, which Wheatley does not describe, a young woman designated by Wheatley in the essay as “A—a X” asks her,
“If race and behaviours around food are cultural praxes affecting mental health, and I agree that they are, what about money?”
“Of course,” Mukhujee answers, “But I can’t talk about everything at once.”
“Can you talk about the townhouse your parents bought for you? Can we talk about if you even pay the utilities?”
Wheatley’s descriptive abilities are poor, but much can be inferred from what he doesn’t write. It’s clear that A—a X is not white, or he would have specified that she was white. Sunil Mukhujee leaves the stage, the next reader expresses her disgust with A—a X to loud applause, and Augustus Kenyon, from the audience, says “She can ask that question. She can ask that question, that is a legitimate question,” then starts walking out. Peter Wheatley follows Kenyon to the door and asks what he means. Kenyon tells Wheatley to read anything he’s written.
After finding Wheatley’s essay, we sought related sources. This meant traveling to Kenyon’s home city, a place he hasn’t returned to for twenty years, and posing as tourists, journalists, hagiographers, whatever might make potential witnesses speak to us. Lacking both charm and funds made our task difficult, but we had some success. As accruing versions of the Kenyon and Wheatley stories entered into contradiction and combat, we had to become comfortable with necessary invention: constructing scenes and conversations from the overlaps between two versions of the same events, modeling our dialogue on the footage that exist of many of the key players, including Kenyon and Liz Hibbett.
Augustus Kenyon’s memoirs devote only six pages to the two years between his education and the earnest beginning of his political career, and he never mentions his time in the writing community. But we were able to track a few of the central and tangential figures in the scene Wheatley describes. None of them were writers any longer. Some were willing to speak to us anonymously, and one, though the act clearly pained her and led to a lengthy discussion of our own political motivations, was willing to give us a folder of emails and a lengthy copy-and-paste chat file that had made emailed rounds at the time and vastly reshaped the social and artistic lives of those involved. Our source, who had to pull an ancient laptop out of the drawer of an antique dresser to find the files, was in no need of our money. She didn’t want to be identified directly, but we feel it would be deceptive to our readers to completely obscure her identity. We believe this fifty-seven-year-old dentist gave us the chats to contribute to something she no longer had the energy or sense of purpose to do herself. We understand that may seem condescending of us, but it was the feeling in the room.
Thanks to the supplementary materials, we know that Peter Wheatley and his wife, Liz Hibbett, attended the reading the night after her return from an artist’s retreat in Oregon, which was sponsored by the same beverage company that sponsored the reading series. Hibbett’s bills during her stay had been covered by her parents, and Wheatley had used spillover from the cheques to reduce his own freelance teaching workload. This is perhaps why Wheatley was incensed at the question directed at Mukhujee, upset enough to question Augustus Kenyon, a man he would never normally have challenged. Wheatley, in his essay, spends a page questioning what it means to be a white man interrogating a Black man, and how curiosity gave the encounter a different shade than suspicion, and that he hopes Kenyon was aware of that. (It’s our first indication in the piece that Wheatley and Kenyon were to quickly arrive at a point where they no longer spoke—the subtlety with which this is done cannot, if we are to use the rest of Wheatley’s work as a measure, have been deliberate).
“That wasn’t even a question she asked,” Wheatley said. “I mean, I don’t know what you heard. I heard an attack on Sunil with a fake question mark at the end.”
“Like I said. Read me, I’m not going to parse this for you on my Sunday night.”
When Kenyon left the bar, Peter cried, then followed him on two social networks, then went home and created a folder on his tablet called AK, which he filled with PDFs of Kenyon’s essays. Kenyon’s biographical note on these pieces:
Augustus Kenyon is a bartender at his parents’ restaurant and has half a degree. He grew up in the place he is telling you about.
Kenyon’s writing from this brief stage was candid, direct, and often dealt with the theme that would animate his later political successes. In three essays using similar diction, he speaks of world economic and environmental salvation as being dependent on “selling taxes to the wealthy using the jargon and methodology of tech startups.” While such a transparent laying out of the plan he’d carry out on a national scale would suggest its own undoing, Kenyon’s early successes at the municipal level allowed him to dismiss his early work as college-kid foolishness, while he slightly altered his plan and rhetoric in writing his Capitalist Business Case For State-Led Innovation, the multi-platform argument that successfully buttressed his greatest practical victory in office. Kenyon wouldn’t repeat his early transparency in the volumes of memoir that landmarked his political ascendance, but he achieved an almost perfect simulation of candour.
At his parents’ restaurant, which served sandwiches and West Indian doubles but survived on the heavy alcohol sales that came with being the first place with cheap beer within an easy walk east of the business district, Augustus was Augie, a friendly and apolitical young man who made excellent tips and worked three twelve-hour weekday shifts as well as Friday and Saturday nights. Bill Berenger, who drank at Kenyon’s Homestyle and would later be Augie’s first campaign manager, recalled Augustus laughing at racist jokes, finding a direct correlation between how willing he was to do this at certain tables and the amount of money he took home that night.
“He used this caricature of a cool-with-it Black man that they bought into absolutely,” Berenger said, speaking to an interviewer from a right-wing online outlet that briefly passed as a centrist, classical liberal magazine. (Berenger was later discovered to be a major backer of the publication and was dismissed from one directorship and three boards.)
Bill Berenger is only on record about Kenyon’s Homestyle in this interview, and no other reliable reports from regulars have been found. Berenger is dead, which is a shame. We think he would have spoken to us, delighted by the discovery that Kenyon was writing his life ahead of time.
If there was some sort of innate, personal cost for Kenyon’s chummy performances in front of the people who were debasing and tipping him, we have no record of it. In his memoirs, Kenyon only wrote about the restaurant in a few passing and positive sentences, attributing his work ethic and ability to manage the demands of family with the demands of a public to his hours at the business.
But from conjecture and the rumoured unsourced glimpses we have of the private man, we can perhaps assume that Kenyon found the interactions funny, that he acted at enough of a remove from his job to find humour not in the joke, but in the callow stupidity of the person making it in the belief that Augie would be amused. The impenetrable perfection of Kenyon’s memoirs force us to indulge in this kind of speculation.
Peter Wheatley located the restaurant and visited after reading every piece of writing Kenyon had published online. He went in at about two in the afternoon, walking the fifteen blocks from the ESL school that he taught remote classes in Nanjing from, a shift that began at five in the morning and had him working on a digital whiteboard that followed the tracery of his touch pen in Nanjing in close to real-time. His hand ached after work, and he often bought a can of soda to steal its cold. He was off sugar and aspartame, but couldn’t reconcile himself to buying bottled water, so he’d leave the unopened soda at a bus stop. But that day, walking to Kenyon’s Homestyle, it was cold enough outside for Wheatley to numb his hand for free, simply by removing his right glove for the duration of the walk.
He found Augustus Kenyon taking inventory behind the bar. He was wearing a white shirt tucked into dark jeans, just what Peter Wheatley wore underneath his coat, which he hung by the door. Kenyon wrote a date on a wine bottle label with a blue marker he had tucked into his watch-strap at the wrist, restoring it when he was finished. Wheatley, in his account, emphasizes the resemblance between their modes of dress twice, and often lingers on the “grace” of Kenyon’s movements. There were no families or drinkers in Kenyon’s Homestyle when Wheatley entered, just construction workers eating quick lunches. Kenyon saw Wheatley after a minute, and came over with his pad, the marker again leaving its place by his pulse.
“Sorry if this is weird,” Peter Wheatley said. “My Dad used to come here. I grew up just east. Saw your bio, thought with the name—”
“Nice. Good to see you,” Kenyon said. Wheatley didn’t think that Kenyon believed him.
“I read your stuff,” Wheatley said. Kenyon made a tilting motion with the blank pad, a question, and Wheatley answered with “I guess a cheeseburger.” Kenyon wrote two letters and walked into the kitchen. He returned and sat down across from Wheatley.
“I appreciate that. Which piece?”
“A few. Lots, actually. You’re prolific.”
“Prolific is classic non-praise. Means there’s too much of it and not much is good.”
“That’s not it at all,” Wheatley said. “The pieces are, they make so clear what needs to be said about all the issues you attack. So clear.”
“You could say the same about something you hadn’t read, couldn’t you?” Kenyon said. Peter Wheatley was easily flustered. When he got flustered he started to babble. The only way he could control it was to stop responding, to smile and look down. Kenyon took mercy.
“This cheeseburger. Do you want it, or did you just want to talk?”
“No, I want it.”
“We make a good one.”
“And I want—my girlfriend Liz and I would like you over for dinner, if you’re free. Are you off every Sunday? Come then? We’ll talk writing stuff.”
Kenyon didn’t reply. He had a policy, since entering this new writing sphere less than a year prior, of saying yes to every invitation that fell on a night he was free, which is how he’d ended up at Sunil Mukhujee’s reading. He was willing to waste several evenings for one valuable connection, for a step toward his then-goal of publishing a book of essays. But Peter Wheatley didn’t seem like he could possibly help anyone.
About to refuse the invitation, Kenyon saw a need in Wheatley’s eyes so profoundly pitiful that he said ‘Sure,’ surprising himself enough that he had to leave the table to avoid immediately clawing back his answer. (Wheatley’s description of this scene: “Augustus made eye contact, then immediately broke it. I knew in that second that we’d connected, that there was something happening that went beyond race and privilege while acknowledging race and privilege. It was wordless. Unwordable.”)
Kenyon walked toward the teal swinging kitchen doors, pushing the brown chest-height groove that shed any new coat of paint within weeks of application. As he did, a suit walked in the door and yelled “Hey Augie,” causing Kenyon to throw up a hand and a backward grin that Peter Wheatley didn’t like on his face.
Wheatley’s nervousness hadn’t receded, even after Kenyon accepted the invitation. This made him understand that he’d made a mistake. Not in asking Kenyon to dinner, but in coming to a place where Kenyon would be waiting on him. He left a twenty-dollar-bill and, on the back of a receipt for vitamins, a note telling Kenyon that Liz had called about their cat and he had to leave right away, but here was his address and his number. 7 pm Sunday, don’t bring anything.
Augustus Kenyon returned to the empty table, but not in time to cancel the cheeseburger. He split the change from Wheatley’s twenty with the kitchen and gave the burger to the solitary drinker at the bar. He completed the last four hours of his shift, closed the restaurant, and went to his apartment above the diner to write for two hours, strictly offline, making red highlights in the text for references that he would look up when he plugged back in.
The apartment was furnished with maroon couches, tubular metal and plastic shelves, and a massive pedestal dining table. Augustus’s father had hired a winch and removed the front window in October of 1989 to get it into the place. The Kenyons didn’t own the building, but the lease was ancient, and the rent on this three-bedroom unit was still cheaper than any downtown one-bedroom. Augustus had kept it when his parents took their long vacation back to Jamaica, a trip that turned into a permanent move when it became clear that Augustus, his sister Maxine, and her husband were able to run Kenyon’s Homestyle. Augustus left the place within a year of Peter Wheatley’s dinner party. Maxine continued to run the restaurant for decades, buying the building and presiding over its slow transition into a tourist destination for Augustus Kenyon admirers, with a reinvented, authentic Caribbean menu reflecting virtually none of the foods the Kenyon family had eaten. We ate there three weeks ago, and took the walking tour of the preserved rooms above the restaurant. Like the menu, they were staged. Every room was overlaid with Kenyon’s biography, in the form of small dustless stacks of books, sports trophies, and photos that prioritized this family member who would soon have little to do with the rest beyond financial arrangements and birthday cards.
We took the tour, then ordered jerk chicken burgers and consulted our notes, trying not to discuss how worried we were. Kenyon’s lack of response to our work was only a public move—it certainly didn’t reflect how he felt about us in private, if the pressure of discovery that we constantly live under is any indication. Kenyon doesn’t just have employees. He has followers, believers in the legend he created and effectively backed up in a career that reshaped economic policy on more than a couple continents.
As much as we know our work is important, as much as it has been acknowledged as such, we also know that we are hated and hunted by a significant minority that Kenyon himself will never check. His legendary compassion, whether it is sincere or not, has been demonstrated repeatedly, but it will not extend to us. And we don’t ask for it. We just want to finish our story, though we have argued over how much speculation or invention on our part can be considered fair, now that we are publicly enemies of Kenyon. One of us asked the other if our acts of thought or dialogue invention aren’t indeed minor acts of violence against a man who premeditated himself in exact detail.
The answer we arrived at is No. Because we, too, are admirers of Kenyon. We aren’t his enemies, no matter what his acolytes believe. But we are still scared, and did not finish our burgers.
As Peter Wheatley boarded a bus to the apartment he shared with his wife, she arrived at home. Liz Hibbett dropped her work cellphone into its crocheted pocket by the coatrack. Making the piece for this purpose had been both a practical and symbolic act of self-care, in the week when she’d negotiated going from internship role at a major bank’s giving foundation to a full-time role. The position was due to start at the end of the month, giving her enough time to complete the painting cycle she’d started at the retreat in Oregon. She was determined to keep her apartment as a place for life and art, and stowing her work cell was part of that promise to herself.
The job paid a salary that would alienate her peers and Peter. Wheatley documents her reveal of the figure at the end of his essay, ascribing the dissolution of the marriage to the essential incompatibility of capitalist success with the advocacy and artistic practice that their relationship was based on. A conflicting source, credible screencaps of a chat between Hibbett and a co-worker named Tom Wray that also provided us with a few crucial insights into her thoughts leading up to the dinner, locate the scission in the arguments that took up the week after their dinner party with Kenyon, and several large withdrawals by Peter Wheatley from his wife’s bank account. These were made in a series of past-midnight transactions with her bank card at the ATM of the bar across the street from their apartment. Wheatley knew his wife’s PIN because it was also her phone password, and they’d had device transparency throughout their relationship. (The Wray-Hibbett chat document, part of our dentist’s trove, is surprisingly detailed and intimate. The discussions that Liz was having with Tom were part of an overall deception—a two-year affair that her husband never seems to have guessed at—but their conversations are frank and largely free of the exhausting double-backs and obscurities of Wheatley’s essay).
Liz was concerned with correcting Peter’s trajectory before the dinner gathering. If she couldn’t gear down his defenses before Augustus Kenyon arrived on Sunday, Peter would start the evening with abject apologies and have nowhere to go but desperation. She had watched him beg forgiveness several times before, most significantly at the launch of a young Mohawk woman’s book of poetry—he’d given the wrong name to her territory in an introduction, and she’d lightly corrected him before beginning her reading. Peter had dominated the first half of her Q & A, which he was moderating, by focusing on how sorry he was and what a disrespectful gesture it had been. The poet interrupted him twice with generous jokes, and then once with finality by telling him he was “eating her time with his passion-play bullshit.” His apology had continued online, as he swore off ever MCing or moderating or reading at a literary event again, determining that his role in the social literary world was that of audience and fan. Peter was forgiven, and he found proof in that second chance: proof that he’d been welcome, perhaps needed, in the first place.
“He’s in for dinner,” Peter told Liz, as she woke up from nap she didn’t realize had started. She was still in her work clothes, and her sweater had twisted tightly over the collar of her shirt, constraining her slightly. Fogged, she leaned a few inches up and off the pillow, knowing that Peter would catch her upraised arms and ease the sweater off for her, taking care that it didn’t catch on her top button. He did, and she lay back down. He took his jeans off and joined her.
“That’s good. Be normal, okay? That’s the best thing you can do. You’re so good at making people feel comfortable when you want to.”
Liz could feel Peter tensing next to her, as he did whenever a plan was challenged. He could accept advice in the moment, but not in advance.
“Do you think your Dad got our card?” Peter asked. Liz hadn’t mailed this card, and wouldn’t. Her father hated being thanked for money.
“Yes,” Liz said, and pretended to fall asleep while Peter actually did. She stared at his knees, the knobs and planes so white and bloodless they looked like exposed bone. They rounded off and looked human when they were bent, as they had been for hours a day in the silent meditation retreat where Liz and Peter had met, when they both abandoned the attempt on the day three of the ten-day stretch. Walking down the narrow gravel street that led away from the ashram toward the highway and bus station, Liz and Peter had spoken for the first time.
“I was filling my afternoon tea up halfway with honey. Like, it was thick, insoluble. I had to tilt the cup fully over my mouth and nose for it to go down. I’d do it in the corner of the hall,” he said. There was no dinner at the retreat, only breakfast and lunch. Hunger was supposed to leave you, except as a habit, after a couple of days of doing nothing but sitting and meditating. Liz talked about needing her stomach full, the feeling of fullness, and how much water she drank every day. While she hadn’t had so much that morning, all the talk made her need to pee. She climbed the sharply inclined hill next to the roadway they were walking, steep enough that she had to lean forward into her march upwards, stopping as soon as she reached the line of young willows that started the forest.
Peter, below, paused and waited for her, until he could see the dark moving cord that she had started uphill, a strand of liquid growing across the orange leaves. He looked up and saw Liz’s face, inclined to the sky, unaware and focused, her right hand stabilizing her as she hovered. After they reached the bus station and traveled back to the city, they found that they couldn’t stop speaking, either at all or just to each other, for several days.
She waited for him to wake up. Peter was an unskilled napper, never managing more than ten minutes.
“Peter, I think that him accepting the invitation—it’s enough. You’re cool. Forget dinner, switch it to drinks out?”
“I don’t think you mailed the card at all,” Peter said.
“Kenyon’s confident. That’s obvious. You didn’t hurt him. He knows that, you know that.”
“I don’t know that, Liz. And how could you presume to know the confidence levels of a person of colour when they’re being confronted like that, the way I talked to him? You saw Sunil’s face onstage when she was attacked. And she was up there, with a microphone, in a position of power. I saw what I did to him. I saw it.” Peter, was sitting on the edge of the bed now, gently striking the grey topsheet with his palm.
“Why’d you turn away?” Liz asked.
“I just got up. My body did this, I don’t know.”
“I do. The impact you think you had on him thrills you. I can fucking hear it, Peter. So tone it down before he gets here on Sunday.”
Peter said nothing. Liz closed her eyes until he left the room, at which point she actually did begin to find sleep again. With her adrenaline down and unconsciousness near, she understood for a moment that Peter was looking for the apology that would either vault him into total acceptance or free him into exile. If she could remember this when she woke up, and if she thought he could handle the idea, she would tell him. (She did remember, according to the chat file, but decided that any more conversation on the Kenyon topic would lead to a weekend-destroying argument).
By eight on Friday, the men in the kitchen of Kenyon’s Homestyle had finished cleaning. A couple of drinkers were lingering right up until nine. They’d switched to expensive doubles of Black Label so Augustus Kenyon let them push it, while sending the kitchen home early. Bill Berenger was one of them. He’d drunk his way into the unsophisticated honesty that would later bring Augustus to hire him, and that Berenger would lose after the man who had always been his boss but who he’d considered his protégé had ascended to a level of power that Bill wouldn’t even have imagined for himself.
“I can see you wasting your whole life in this place out of loyalty,” Bill kept repeating, when he was the last customer in Kenyon’s Homestyle.
“I don’t think that will happen,” Augustus said.
“You have to make money, and do right for your family. I get that. But the hours you have outside this place? You have to use every one.”
Bill asked Augustus if he had a driver’s license, then asked if he could take him across the city to his condo. Augustus checked his phone to see if there were any events out that way and found a book launch eight blocks away from Berenger’s building. He agreed. Bill, who worked ten and drank three hours every weekday, slept on the drive, his apnea snore rattling the exquisite soundproofed interior. Bill was sitting up front, and Augustus would have insisted he did even if Bill hadn’t slipped into the seat—both to dampen the Miss Daisy effect and because he didn’t want any cops to see him driving a car like this without also seeing its owner sitting right beside him.
Augustus didn’t wake Bill until they were in the spired, pedestrian-free neighbourhood where people like Bill lived until they could buy houses. He braked too hard at a stoplight and Bill woke, his bleary eyes quickly hooded and canny, the practiced habit of a man who had dozed in many meetings.
“I won’t be able to sleep,” Berenger said. “Even a quick pass-out like that, it’s guaranteed insomnia for me. You want to come up? Talk some? Borrow some books.”
Kenyon deposited the car in Bill Berenger’s parking space and got out, waiting in the warm rubber and oil scented air for Berenger to lever out. Without the steering wheel as a fulcrum, Bill had trouble.
“Thirty-ninth floor, Augie. I can’t give a shit for a view after the first few dozen times but I want you to see it.”
“Yeah, right. There’s a dead body up there and you need dusky fingerprints spread around,” Augustus said. Berenger laughed and they rode the elevator up. Augustus stood by the window while Berenger drew the shades, and Augustus could feel Berenger’s need to impress him, a soft offer of power, one that Kenyon weighed and discarded.
“This is amazing. Don’t know how you ever keep these shut.”
“The light would keep me awake for even more hours if I did. Already I wear one of those face-bra mask things.”
Bill Berenger actually didn’t try to touch Augustus Kenyon that night, but he remembered making an attempt. He told no one but Augustus and a future wife who sold the story to a tabloid that Bill sued into vanishment. (We were able to source the original transcript of her interview, which is one hundred and ten pages long, and vividly detailed on the subject of this evening with Kenyon). All he actually did was show Augustus photos of former girlfriends on his phone, complain about his weight, and talk about basketball before falling asleep on the couch. If he’d asked soon enough after that evening, Augustus would have told him that they’d just spoken, nothing had happened, and Augustus had left when Bill dozed off.
But Berenger remembered embarrassment and rejection. In the years that they worked together, Augustus Kenyon learned that for Berenger, loyalty and intimacy both emerged from shame. When the interview with Berenger’s wife was released, Kenyon made a statement that carefully avoided any mention of her well-founded accusations of Bill’s financial irresponsibility. But he clarified that the sexual pass had never taken place, that Berenger’s sureness and regret about it had drawn them closer, and that their fraught friendship and collaboration was a “spun-sugar tightrope” (a rare instance of Kenyon falling prey to fanciful metaphor, which we might interpret here as an indicator of deception) that he eventually couldn’t risk breaking.
That Sunday, Augustus Kenyon left off writing an essay before making his way to the Wheatley-Hibbet apartment, and never resumed the piece. The fragment survives in the oldest of the networked hard drives that our research penetrated. We believe it was preserved by accident: it was to be a piece on the cost of commuting for Black and brown families living east of the city, how the lack of a cultural community or business network downtown bred what whites saw as insularity and sealed off educational and career possibilities for the young. Kenyon, as we argued in our earlier piece, always stopped writing when he felt he was accidentally writing about himself. Which is why the timing of the Wheatley dinner party and the stoppage of this essay strike us as significant. Kenyon started writing his memoirs the day after Wheatley’s party, as we have verified with exactitude from the archive. They begin with the now-immortal line When I write about myself, it will be on purpose.
Liz Hibbett opened the door for Augustus Kenyon, and he remembered seeing her at the Mukhujee reading. She looked so uncomfortable in her own apartment that Kenyon felt he needed to reassure her by appearing to be at ease, handing over his bottles but taking charge of his coat himself.
“You guys have space,” he said.
Kenyon saw an excess of money and a lack of items. The furniture wasn’t pressboard, the lampshades were cloth or glass, the curios were minimal, every hanging thing was framed. There was even a bar cart, where Liz laid his paper bag from the liquor store to rest.
“Peter did tell you, right?” Liz asked. “I didn’t think he was going to have anyone else over. I mean, this was a surprise to me, as well.”
“What?”
There was a diffused smell of lilacs over the clove-and-onion scents coming from the kitchen, along with Peter’s voice and another’s. Peter and Sunil Mukhujee came out of the kitchen, talking. Peter smiled, reaching for and squeezing Sunil’s hand. Sunil looked at him and pulled her hand free, as though slipping off a glove that gripped.
Augustus Kenyon’s writing career was subsumed by his political career in this room.
“Jesus. It’s a little reconciliation play.” Augustus Kenyon laughed. If he didn’t yet have the near-supernatural predictive qualities he would later develop as a negotiator, he did have the capacity to take in a situation as it was immediately when all the players were present: in this case, to grasp Peter Wheatley’s attempt to control his characters and himself all at once.
“What’s this?” said Sunil Mukhujee. Wheatley leaves out some dialogue after this, but it seems that Augustus Kenyon apologized to her for the confusion, and explained that Wheatley brought them there to establish a rapport that he could then credit himself for.
“This is really appalling, Liz,” Mukhujee said.
“You should really at least—if not be grateful, at least be open to what Peter’s intentions were, Sunil. He respects you and wants that respect to resonate for everyone who encounters you and your work.” It is doubtful Liz Hibbet actually said the words that Wheatley recorded. The line was, perhaps, a gambit by Wheatley to get Hibbet reach out to him on publication, at which point they were permanently estranged.
Kenyon put his coat back on picked his bottles back off the bar cart.
“I could learn from this,” Kenyon said. “I really could.”
“What do you mean?” Peter Wheatley asked.
“I’m not telling you anything.” This is where Peter Wheatley’s essay begins to fail where it had almost succeeded so far—the facts fall away, leaving only intimations and aftermath. Mukhujee leaves, escorted by Liz Hibbett to the bar across the street, the same one where Peter Kenyon would soon carry her bank card on a series of night missions. Neither Mukhujee or Hibbett return that evening. Dinner was not eaten. That is the last fact.
This is what we surmise: what Augustus Kenyon realized on that evening was that if Wheatley could so easily place him as a character in a personal narrative, Kenyon could do the same for himself. He could begin in writing that which he intended to live. Augustus Kenyon wrote the moves he intended to make, from his first run for city council to the foundation of the Kenyon Institute for State Entrepreneurs, as personal speculative fiction that he corrected and modified as reality caught up. Kenyon wrote his political life into existence, and used this narrative to control any interpretation of his personal life from that dinner party forward.
Liz Hibbett became director of a major giving foundation for artists within five years of that dinner party. Archival photos show Hibbett and Augustus Kenyon at events together, but no record of any conversation between them exists. In one picture, at a union event honoring Kenyon, Hibbett is seated next to Kenyon, leaning toward his ear as he smiles directly at the photographer. Hibbett appears to be speaking. Does Kenyon turn to her after the photo is taken to tell her that he remembers her? Does he ask after Peter Wheatley? Does he tell her not to speak to him again? The answer to all of these questions is likely no. Kenyon, in his thirties and beyond, was a master of policing the amount of information he would put in a conversation, and restricted his curiosity to matters that would have active policy impact, unless he was speaking to people he needed, or who were in power above him. And by the time this photo was taken, the number of people in power above him, and the number of people he needed, had vastly dwindled.
Peter Wheatley, if Kenyon had asked, was still fine. Alive, certainly. After the dinner, after he took Liz Hibbett’s money, after he failed to hold on to their apartment, Wheatley tried a succession of different psychiatric drugs, both under prescription and through his own experimentation. He hit upon a combination that left him most comfortable living with his parents, three hours north of the city, in cottage country, retired from writing and completely offline.
We made the long drive to find Peter Wheatley, and told his surviving parent a lie about collecting his early work for an anthology. The little cottage had a sprawl of grass behind it, and his mother pointed us there. His outside time, she said, then asked us if the anthology would be issued in large-print format or digital, and if she could buy two in advance. She was confused, possibly demented, wearing a translucent cornflower blue dress with a black t-shirt underneath it. We told her both were possible, and that she would receive free copies now that we had her address.
Wheatley was mowing the lawn. Shirtless, lean, with his head shaved and a thick summer camp brown-braided belt shelving ancient khaki cutoffs above his hipbones. He turned off the machine and listened to us for a few moments. We tried to imagine earnestness and tears into a placid face that would have been featureless without its sun damage and wrinkles. When we were finished, Peter Wheatley said No.
We had another question for him, but he had turned the lawnmower on again. We also would have been too shy to ask it in front of each other. But later, when we discussed this in the motel, when we prepared this document and wondered how we could safely upload it and move on before anyone found us, we both admitted that we wanted to know how Wheatley had escaped so completely.
Naben Ruthnum lives in Toronto, and is the author of A Hero of Our Time, Helpmeet, and Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race. As Nathan Ripley, he is the author of two thrillers, Find You In the Dark and Your Life is Mine. He also writes for film and television. https://twitter.com/nabenruthnum
Pedro Gomes is a Portuguese designer and illustrator in New York. He is currently an art editor at Guernica Magazine. https://pedrogo.com