In response to your e-mail of November 6, please receive the following with my apologies for my dilatory response:
1. Regarding Fox's whereabouts this last summer, I know almost nothing. I saw him a few times in Kolob and once in Grand Arch in April and May, and spoke briefly with him. As I recollect, the topic of our conversations was purely quotidian, treating mainly of greetings and idle smalltalk. We were cordial. Of course, as you have doubtless surmised, the rumors concerning his activities in and out of the bedrooms [and sleeping bags] of Kolob's female population had been circulating and rising in temperature for some time at that point, and I was of the impression that he was making himself scarce, lest one of the affected men make good on a promise to secure his demise by gunshot, or, in one case, by crossbow-bolt and strangulation. I neither asked him where he'd been, nor received from him any indication that he was living elsewhere, but please understand that he is a cagey fellow, private and elusive, and, furthermore, I am not one of his very few confidants. After May I do not recall having seen him at all.
2. To speculate, as you requested, on who might share Fox's confidence, I shall require anonymity. It appears to me that Fox, despite his many heterosexual assignations and his remarkable facility in flirtation [an example I have attempted to emulate, thus far without notable success], does not confide in women. Indeed, to my lamentably inexperienced eye, his conquests, though involving every rumored physical intimacy, do not include personal revelation of any kind. He is often described as maddeningly unknowable. However, I have seen him many times in apparent profound conversation with Lauro, that other one-monickered man of mystery often spied in and around Kolob. It would behoove you to engage Lauro in your project to discover the one true Fox. With your guarantee of anonymity, might I also be so indelicate as to suggest that Lauro's "wife" "Eve" may have, shall we say, deep knowledge of Fox's comings and goings, though I suspect that to suggest so to Lauro himself would be to invite a rage of jealousy that you might presume to be endemic and stereotypical to the Latin masculine temperament, but multiplied. Having had the dubious distinction of witnessing Lauro's reaction when he learned that the ____________ County Sheriffs had shot his dog, I can vouchsafe that eliciting his ire would be folly indeed.
3. And, finally, addressing your questions concerning my social position in the veritably arachnid interweavings of Kolob slander and hearsay: I arrived to warm reception, but discovered too soon that the extreme deference I show the estimable work of Mr. Roget was nearly bereft of social benefit among the primitive-skills and wilderness-survival cliques I voyaged to Kolob to study in the first place. A Doctor of Philosophy candidate in Semiotics might suppose that a facility with the more recondite and Latinate philology might stand him well is his attempts to ingratiate himself with the young, nubile, Medusa-maned groupies of the Survival School, but said candidate has misjudged female alacrity so often in his almost monastic tenure as a gynophile that he is no longer in the least surprised that his polysyllabic inclinations have functioned most efficaciously as prophylactics.
Yours,
Simon Doolittle
Northeastern University
Boston
No comments:
Post a Comment