The (Something) Burlesque

Flyleaf

2009-02-16T18:37:00.001+11:00

Let nothing more I write be part of the living world.

Michael Sherwood, Las Vegas, Nevada. September, 2008

Chapter One – The Pitch

2009-02-16T18:36:00.001+11:00

“Okay, how’s this for an intro? ‘Chapter One – The Pitch.’” I cleared my throat and began. “‘A week before my/his twenty-fifth birthday there were two big changes in my/his life. I/he had, up to that point, lived an almost wholly pointless existence and I/he wanted to do something useful with it. And, I/he reasoned, if it didn’t turn out to be particularly useful, then at least it would be an interesting life – not unlike most of those that I/he planned to shortly end. So I/he quit smoking and started killing celebrities.’”

I paused and looked up nervously from the sheaf of grubby paper, to my agent Barney [NAME WITHHELD], raising my eyebrows and hoping to give the impression that what I held in my clammy hands was an acceptable idea for a novel. If Barney decided it wasn’t, I was finished as a writer

For a long time my agent said nothing.

I asked him if I should continue.

“No.” Barney looked past me and exhaled warm jets of dissatisfaction. Barney was almost always dissatisfied, and never more so than when he was with me. He was fifty-six years old, and in amazing shape, right up to his head of thick black hair which he washed only twice a month in order to preserve its plenitude and lustrousness. After his hair, Barney’s skin was his best physical feature and to maintain its pristine condition he kept the temperature in his office hovering around thirty-five degrees. I was shivering slightly when he said, “So it’s a book about an ex-smoker who shoots celebrities? It seems a little... slender.”

I explained that there was more to it than that – the novel I had in mind would embrace failure, rejection, misery, anxiety, self-loathing, the loathing of others, and the redemptive power of love.

“Gosh, all that and a love story?” Barney said, sarcastically. He enjoyed sarcasm and was well-versed in its subtleties and vagaries.

“Well, there’ll probably be more of all that other stuff than the love redemption. I think the killing’s more…” I struggled for the mot juste.

“Right. So like I said, it’s about a guy who shoots celebrities.”

“Well, I-slash-he doesn’t only shoot them; there are various methods of execution. And not just of celebrities, either. Regular people get it as well.”

“I don’t even want to say this, but here it is. Regular people like who?”

“Oh, y’know, regular people like you and me. And perhaps some critics as well.”

“How did I know you were going to say that.”

“Well…”

“Why?” he said, twisting the gold ring he wore on the smallest finger of his right hand. On the top of the ring was a flat square of onyx in the centre of which was a small human molar, probably once belonging to an infant. It looked like a tiny, black one-domino sitting on his pinkie. Whenever he met somebody for the first time, Barney made sure to slip in a remark about the provenance of his ring and then never brought it up again. Of course, it wasn’t something easily forgotten.

His ghoulish taste in jewelry notwithstanding, Barney was a very good agent, as he was always telling me. “I am a helluva good agent,” he reminded me often. “And you are without doubt my worst client, Michael.” Then I would respond with something like “Oh” or “Ah”. It wasn’t an ideal relationship; I was quite frightened of him a lot of the time.

“Why what?” I said.

“Why does this guy shoot people? Kill people. Is he insane?”

“Of course not,” I said indignantly. “He’s angry. Pissed off.”

“With who – everybody?”

“Well, not everybody, exactly, but a lot of people. Many, many people. And he expresses himself by gradually depleting earth’s most unnatural resource – celebrity.”

“Right. Celebrities such as whom?”

“Well I’m not sure, because I haven’t finished it yet. But I’m leaning toward people like…” I went through an impressively long and varied list of names. Barney listened to my enumeration with increasing distaste and about ten minutes later, when it seemed that my point had been made, I concluded. “…and, oh y’know, I don’t know. It really depends.”

“On what?”

“On how I’m feeling on any particular day that I’m writing. I might read something about Callie Smith, for instance – not necessarily her; it could be anyone from that idiotic television show. Langford Cherry, maybe. Or all of them. They’re all goddam useless. Anyway, say I read in a magazine about how Langford Cherry is getting a million bucks an episode for doing just about nothing, then I might write a scene with him drinking some water with cholera in it. See how he likes it.”

“Water with cholera in it?” Barney said with disgust. “What is wrong with you? That’s absolutely disgusting.”

“Oh, I know, I know,” I said. “Wait’ll you hear the symptoms* – man, what a disease. Anyway, that’s just one idea for getting rid of them. I have plenty more.”

*After an incubation period of two or three days (or sometimes just hours) the onset of cholera will result in profuse watery diarrhea of up to a liter an hour. The diarrhea has a fishy odor and the stools look like water with small flecks of rice in it. Dehydration occurs rapidly, followed by an increased heart rate, dry skin, dry mucus membranes, dry mouth, excessive thirst, glassy or sunken eyes, tearlessness, lethargy, low urinal output, abdominal cramps, nausea and painful frequent vomiting. Then death.

“Great.” Barney held me with a cold, dark look. “And this I-slash-he business you began with – what the hell is that?”

I told him that it was a good question, and that I couldn’t decide whether the book would be written in the first person or third person.

“Right. Well unless you’re looking for a lifetime of hate mail, I would not recommend first person. It has to be third person. Maybe even fourth or fifth.”

“There’s no such thing as fifth person.”

“Yes there is. It’s where someone entirely other than you is stupid enough to actually write a book about what you’re saying.”

“But I really want to write that book. I think it could be interesting,” I said. “Possibly successful, too,” I added, not even convincing myself. I tried smiling but it didn’t seem to work.

“I’m telling you, Michael, as your very nearly former agent, it won’t be successful and it’s not interesting. What’re you wasting your time writing novels for, anyway? Nobody reads them anymore. Especially when you write them.”

“I’ll bear that in mind, I really will,” I said. “Maybe publish under a different name. If it’ll help.”

Barney wanted to know why the first chapter was called ‘The Pitch’. “Is this I-slash-he person pitching it somewhere? To somebody?” he asked.

I thought for a moment and tried to look like I wasn’t. “Yes,” I said, not too archly. “That’s right. I-slash-he’s pitching it to his agent, who is…”

Barney curled a lustrous lock around his index finger and said, “Who is?”

“Who is…” The onyx-moored molar glinted. “…not you.”

“I would hope not.” He slid his chair toward me. “You’ve got a truly disgusting mentality, you know that? Are you from L.A?”

“In a way. But not particularly.”

“Why are you the way you are?”

“I don’t know, Mr [NAME WITHHELD], I’ve tried not to be, I really have, but it never works. I always get the better of me and end up back who I am.”

“Well try Scientology or another stint in rehab or something because right now you’re not adding up to much.” Barney steepled his fingers and held the apex against his kiss-pursed lips for a moment then looked down at the fifty or so pages of my manuscript that lay between us, defiling his neat desk. “I’m telling you that as your friend and as your agent, Michael.” Some sort of liquid appeared in his eyes. “Killing people, dead people – it’s just not the same since nine-eleven.”

“Was death ever funny? Did September eleventh make it worse?” I asked. “Dead is dead.”

“All I’m saying is that between nine-eleven and all the other bullshit since then, death doesn’t have the right cache. You have to take it more seriously.”

“Oh okay. So would it be all right if I just maimed them?”

“Don’t be facecious.”

Resisiting a very strong urge to accompany my words with a shame-hung head, I apologized as sincerely as I felt was appropriate.

“I strongly suggest you go no further with this idea, Michael. Strongly. I’m not even sure it’s legal, and I come from a legal family. My brother’s a judge. But let me ask you this, out of professional curiosity – does anyone die in the first chapter?”

“No.” I thought for a moment. “Probably not.”

“Well there’s your first mistake right there.” Barney sniffed and I got the impression he was pretending to have a cold. Not that he was insincere; Barney was a man deeply committed to his beliefs and ideals, as I was about to learn. He asked me if I had any other books in mind.

“I read an article about these American ping-pong players in 1930s Paris that was pretty interesting. Sort of a historical perspective on the whole thing. Hard to spin out to novel length, though.”

“Good lord, Michael. Have you forgotten what happened with your last book? Why can’t you write something life-affirming? Something existence-enhancing? Spend a Tuesday with someone like Morrie. Have some chucklehead come of age. Tell about your valiant struggle with addiction, or how your Uncle Dan dressed you up as a dolly and diddled your dick when you were in diapers. Write something normal!”

I knew what Barney meant by ‘normal’, and I also knew that he didn’t give a damn about affirmation or enhancement, that his main area of interest was fifteen per cent of a best-seller, even one that involved the diddled dicks of innocents. “Are you pretending to have a cold?” I asked.

“If I wanted a cold, I’d get a cold! A real one,” Barney said. Then he sneezed. “Are there any post-modern elements to it?”

“Like what?”

“Little ‘playful touches’ you tyro writers are so fond of. Self-reference and so forth.” He looked momentarily overcome, swooning as though he was about to faint or regurgitate. He plucked a white silk handkerchief from his jacket pocket and held it over his mouth. “Oh good Christ, it’s gonna be self-referential, isn’t it?” The words puffed and billowed.

“Not so far,” I said. “Except for this.”

“What do you mean?”

“This’ll probably be in it. This conversation we’re having.”

And then, precisely as he said them, I wrote the words, Oh no it won’t in my notepad. Which were followed by him saying, “Let me see that.”

I refused and there was a brief unseemly scuffle. My notepad was torn, my pencil broken in half. There were slaps and muffled grunts.

When it was over Barney sat back down, smoothed his hair with soft pink hands, panted a little then told me that he greatly disliked getting violent with his clients and that he was seriously considering letting me go. “Seriously,” he said. His chest rattled as he coughed then spat into his handkerchief. “You’re not worth the pain.”

“Well I’m seriously considering putting you in the book, Barney.” I don’t lose my temper very easily but I’d had it. “You could be one of the non-celebrities that gets it. One of the first!”

A minute and a half later my very-nearly-almost-former-agent was my very-definitely-former-agent.

I had, up to that day in January 2007, led a quite interesting but almost wholly pointless life: I was thirty-seven years old, the author of what many apparently knowledgeable people considered one of the most unsuccessful books ever released. Several years earlier I had published a novel that one reviewer called ‘a blunder of such colossal proportions that everybody associated with it ought to resign in shame, right down to the printers and the Teamsters that delivered such an abomination to the bookstores.’

It’s not easy to spend years devoting young heart and unwise soul into something and then see it dismissed as worthless or abhorrent. I was shaken, sometimes even horrified by the gleeful vituperation that people had larded into the criticism and intellectual dismantling of my work. (‘Is this a deliberately bad novel?’ one critic asked. ‘If so, I can only applaud the author’s bravery in risking his debut on such a dull book.’) There were times when I even came close to tears, not because of what was written or said so much as the fact that very soon I came to believe that the painfully attenuated period I’d spent writing the book was a terrible, almost unconscionable waste of time, and that as a writer – and perhaps as a person – I was an inexcusable failure.

Of course, my reactions were not all slumped, mournful retreats into lump-throated silence and insipidity; I felt fire and rage and venom, too. For a long time I wanted to kill every last motherfucker who’d written even one harsh word about the book.

I was filled with and fueled by hate and pain; I wanted revenge, satisfaction, blood. And I’m not sorry for having any of these gruesomely detailed thoughts – they were nasty, cheap and childish, but they kept me going. They made me, in a way, happy.

But they eventually passed, distilled and evaporated into simple, throat-drying despair, and when I finally came to believe (or perhaps understand) that the critics had been more right than wrong I was once again filled with nothing but melancholy regret.

As the bleak cloud bulged and the deluge of dark wordery rained down, my publisher, XXX & XXX, released me from my two book deal, and I was advised by their legal counsel to write letters of apology to the few thousand people who’d accidentally bought – and, in some unfortunate cases, read – the book. By that time, several months after its release, I’d come to hate the thing as much as its fiercest detractor and I approached these letters with enthusiasm; they were beautiful things, every one swelling with aching regret, the envelopes sealed with actual tears of sorrow I wiped from my eyes. Only one person wrote back, a woman not named Judy Novak, whom I married soon after I was released from hospital.

I stepped out of the elevator and had almost left the building when a doorman waved me over. “Michael Sherwood?” he said. I nodded, somewhat reluctantly, and he handed me an envelope. I opened it and read the note, typed neatly on the agency letterhead.

Also, do NOT use either my full name. Or the even partial name of this agency. Consequences = dire/serious. I used to pity you, Sherwood. That was a mistake. I want my pity back. B.[INITIAL WITHELD].

Ah…All things considered it was a very poor start to the day. But as most readers will, of course, already know, the situation was going to get much, much worse. For one thing, had I heeded his advice and abandoned the project right then and there, Barney himself and almost sixty other people would more than likely still be alive today. Then again, had he expressed confidence in and enthusiasm for the idea, he almost certainly would not have been murdered either. Boy, the irony.

Chapter Two – [HER REAL NAME]

2009-02-16T18:35:00.001+11:00

Back in my small apartment in a converted firehouse on East 21^st, I spent a while staring out of the window of my book-lined study at the bleak cream brick back of a Lutheran church and wondered why I was the way that I was. I have never found myself particularly unique or interesting and, as will become abundantly clear, am not much inclined toward self-examination (at least not of the rigorous, change-effecting kind, anyway), but Barney’s hostile interrogation had raised the troubling question.

I’d like to blame my parents but I cannot; they are (or, in the case of my mother, used to be) good people. My father, Ed, is an unnecessarily successful screenwriter; he won two Oscars in the early 1970s (for each other’s lullaby and The Stones of Summer, an adaptation of Dow Mossman’s now-forgotten novel) and has been lavishly honored by numerous film festivals, societies and institutes all over the world. He lives in Los Angeles in a house that once belonged to Ronald Colman, and he remains a highly sought-after script doctor and re-write man. On the increasingly rare occasions that he writes original material he does so under the name Hal Evans, apparently because he doesn’t want to compromise his hard-earned reputation as an unoriginal thinker. He is a man of motley interests and vigorous appetites; I sincerely believe that when he dies he will do so at a very old age, in the middle of a sentence, a mouthful, or a blow-job. He pronounces the word erudite – a favorite of his, and most frequently applied to himself – with such loving and luscious correctness that it sounds pornographic. He has called me at six o’clock sharp every Sunday night for as long as I can recall, which would be charming were it not for the sole purpose of telling me how much money he made, as well as how many women he slept with the previous week. My father Ed is a rich, popular, horny and erudite man. Apart from the penultimate (his the horniness of plenty; mine of drought and desperation), we don’t have very much in common. I like him well enough – and I love him, of course – but for better or worse I am not very much like him.

He was born in Merced, California in 1940, the only child of two pharmacists, Irene and Sam, who were killed in an auto accident when my father was twenty-five. He grew up, he has told me, “pretty much like one of those layabouts in The Last Picture Show, disaffected, disillusioned and plenty horny but with nowhere much but livestock to put anything.” (My father believes that almost anyone’s life can be likened to one movie or another. “Except yours, Mike. The way you’re living your life defies comparison. Which is goddam irresponsible.” That my life would become the subject of an Emmy ward-winning telemovie does not, in his estimation, make me any less ‘goddam irresponsible’.) He spent his teenage years chasing skirt, working on his ’49 Mercury coupe, hanging around pool halls and playing piano in the family combo – Irene on guitar, Sam hunched intently over a small pearlescent drumkit. The group played country-rock and called themselves the Flash-Tones and once played with Buck Owens at the Starlite Lounge in Bakersfield. (Or so he says – my father is a passable pianist but a truly gifted liar.) He had no interest in films and claims not to have even set foot in a movie theater until 1958, when The Left-Handed Gun came to town in the middle of a summer so hot he went inside only to escape the heat. It was a formative experience and sealed his fate. “The thing was so goddamned average I just knew I could do better. Or eaxctly the same, if that’s what they wanted.”

He was right. His first screenplay – The Big Ticket – was written, he claims, in his head on the drive down to L.A. As soon as he arrived he got himself a room in a hotel in Venice Beach, bought a typewriter and “banged the thing out” in three days. The script – the original copy of which, along with the typewriter it was banged out on, he gave me for my eighteenth birthday in an attempt to incline me toward the family business – is the engaging story of a young man from the east coast who comes to Los Angeles to make it big in the movie business only to strike out but find true love; it was never produced but showed enough promise for my father – at just eighteen – to get hired at Paramount as a polisher. Once he entered the studio gates he never left; professionally-speaking his was truly a charmed life. But it’s one that makes for rather bland personal history, which is why he is popularly believed to have started in show business as a trick rider in Westerns, turning to writing only after he broke a leg in a fall – sometimes it was the right leg, sometimes the left – and had nothing to do while recuperating. Sometimes when he tells it, he is pounced on by a lion as he lies in agony on the scorching New Mexico desert sand, heroically imploring the cameraman to keep rolling, even as he – my father – stops the lion from killing him using a combination of hypnosis and elbow jabs. He later awakens in hospital and falls in love at first sight with his nurse, my mother.

My mother Shirley was not a nurse: she, too, was in the film business. She was born, very beautiful and very rich, in Winnetka, Illinois and, after a brief stint as a model in Chicago, went out west and started in movies as a stand-in and finished as a producer of moderately successful independent movies. She and my father met in 1969 on the set of Ain’t That Rich?, a romantic comedy he wrote, and they married later that year.

I was born in the middle of January 1970. As the only child of successful and wealthy parents I was spoiled. They took me everywhere, on location to Portugal, Brazil, Morocco and Spain. I felt as lucky and as unlikely as a character from any of my favorite books; the sort of child who lived in hotel suites with pet monkeys and friendly bellboys, greeted every day by the gleaming dome of room service and welcomed home at night by the warm, bright smile of an indulgent concierge. Which, to a large extent, I was.

“Who do you want to be, Michael?” a temporary friend once asked me, trying to kick start some sort of make-believe game. It was 1979 and we were in the Cinecitta studios in Rome; a few feet from my friend and me were half a dozen costumed elephants, all but one of which I was allowed to give peanuts; an hour earlier I had been spoon-fed ice-cream by Sophia Loren in the private dining room of a restaurant; I knew how to get from the Spanish Steps to our hotel on my own; weeks earlier back in L.A I had met Barbara Bach and swiped a lipstick, later much-kissed by me, from her handbag; photographs of my mother and father, accompanied by their famous friends, appeared in magazines. I was nine years old, buoyant and confident, allowed to stay up late and encouraged to discover the world. “Me,” I told my friend. “I never want to stop being me.”

Two weeks later an elephant (the one I wasn’t permitted to feed) crushed a wrangler, almost killing him; the following year Warner Bros decided to shelve the Cinecitta film, and my father did not get another screen credit until 1986; I was sent to Woodland Hills school in Massachusetts where I met my friend Fraser Smith, and on July 5, 1990 my mother disappeared while producing a film in Costa Rica.

Much of this was dealt with in thinly-veiled autobiographical fashion in my first novel and will be very familiar to the few who read it; many more will know various fractured details and incidents which came to light in the lead-up to my long and well-publicized trial in Las Vegas. I mention it now, and only briefly, for the lucky handful unaware of who I am.

I have been a failure for most of my adult life. Catastrophe has haunted my marriage, my novel, my mental health and my few friendships. For a long time I even felt somehow responsible for my mother’s disappearance and my father’s subsequent derailment of both career and morality. Indeed, it was this immense sense of failure – so utter and abiding – that motivated me to begin work on my second novel. I was plagued and frightened by the thought of dying not so much as a nobody, but not even somebody. I wanted, desperately, to succeed; I wanted to do something good and right. That I chose Milton Sabian as the vehicle with which to pursue my fulfillment and redemption was, of course, an unforseeable and caustic burlesque.

I sat on the window ledge, opposite a large black and white photograph entitled ‘Public Library: 10.44am January 3, 1994’, and telephoned my ex-wife. “Hi Judy, it’s me.”

“Who?”

“Michael.” There was a silence. “Michael Sherwood. We were married for a while.”

“Uh huh. And you wish to speak to?”

“You.”

“My name’s not Judy.”

“I know, but you asked me not to use your real name. So I’m calling you Judy.”

“I don’t like it, Michael. It makes me sound like some dame from a Burt Bacharach song. Wearing a floral dress and a pretty pink ribbon in my hair. A terrier somewhere nearby, yapping.”

“S what are you wearing?”

“Jeans, boots and a t-shirt. I look normal. I look like someone named [HER REAL NAME]. Anyway, I only told you not to use my name if you were writing a book.”

“I am.”

“Then call me something else,” she said. “Judy is a terrible name.”

“I can’t. It’ll just get confusing. You’ve already cropped up.”

“As your ex-wife named Judy?”

“That’s right.”

“Jesus. You’re writing another book?” I heard Judy light a cigarette, then open a window. “Does Barney know?”

“Yes.”

“And what does he think?”

“He fired me.” Judy laughed, blew out smoke, inhaled. “Don’t you want to know what it’s about? If you’re gonna be in it?”

“I’m not going to be in it, Michael. Some pinch-hitter named Judy’s taking my place.”

“But she’s still you, Judy. She’s wearing boots and Levi’s and a t-shirt. A white t-shirt, right?”

“Right. But the jeans are [BRAND]. Listen, I don’t want you using me or my personality in anything you write. Or my clothing particulars. My career is an open book, so to speak, so you can have that but everything else is off limits.”

“I’m thinking about coming out to L.A soon and I thought it’d be nice if we could get togther.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” she said.

“We could just have lunch or something.” There was silence. “C’mon, Judy, it’ll be fun. Please.”

“All right, lunch,” she said. “But quit calling me Judy. My name’s [HER REAL NAME].”

I heard her blow a final puff of smoke before she hung up. “Oh, I know it is,” I said into the hollow receiver. “I know.” I missed my ex-wife thoroughly, right down to her real name and as I paced the living room I said it aloud a couple of times, as though I could make her appear through incantation. Judy’s real name was [HER REAL NAME]. It was a lovely name.

Chapter Three – I/he

2009-02-16T18:34:00.003+11:00

I sat down at my desk, ready to work on the fourth chapter of my manuscript. Almost immediately I felt ill. Writing novels is a difficult business, all the more so when the writer attempting the novel is possessed of such dubious and meager talent as my own. Thinking about what lay in store for me (and eventually, perhaps, for others) I was overcome by a cringing despair that made my calves stiffen and literally curled my toes. My vision blurred and I began yawning uncontrollably. I waited for the PC to warm up, hoping that my nausea would pass before I was confronted by my work, or that through some miracle of computer error and divine intervention the latest draft of my manuscript might somehow have transmogrified into a thing of powerful insight and originality, of subtle artfulness.

It hadn’t. It still began as I’d read it out to Barney that morning: A week before my/his twenty-fifth birthday there were two big changes in my/his life. I didn’t hate the opening as much as my newly former agent did – in fact, I rather liked it – but I could see that the first person/third person thing had to be resolved.

By the beginning of Chapter Four, temporarily entitled ‘I/He’ll Be There For You’, Milton Sabian’s character and history had been pretty well established: he was born in Long Island to Melba Sabian, a devout Lutheran nurse who’d been abandoned at the altar by Milton’s father, then sent to boarding school in Connecticut at the age of eight (I/he had felt in the way at home ever since I/he could walk, it is observed early in the first chapter) where he is ridiculed, lonely and profoundly unhappy. He would rather read than talk with other boys and it is a long time before he makes his first friend. The letters he craves from his mother are his only source of comfort. He writes her two or three times each week, cramped handwriting, pinched sentences on thin, light blue paper from an airmail set every boy is issued at the start of each term.

Dear Mom,

Yesterday a boy named Tad Halford cut up a picture I made with scissors. It was of a cow and the cow was smiling. Tad cut the cow’s tail off and one of her legs. Sometimes I can’t sleep well at night. Some of the other boys make noises but I don’t. Mr Jordan says that I should make an effort with the other boys but if they cut up my pictures I don’t think I will. I will see you in nine weeks when it is the holidays. I love you. I miss you.

Love from Milton.

PS. The cow was named Maisy. Here are the pieces.

Dearest Milton,

It’s very important that you try to get along with the other boys – even the ones who treat you badly. You will make a friend, Milton, and when you do you’ll realize that everybody’s not like Tad. A good, kind boy like you deserves a good, kind friend. Try to stay happy, my darling. I know it’s not easy but one day the morning sun’s bright eyes will shine only for you.

Thank you for your drawing of the cow named Maisy. I have stuck her together and pinned her to the wall of my station at work. Sometimes I think I see her wink at me and say “moo” – it’s the love you put into your creation that makes it so real.

Love,

Mom.

By the time he is fifteen, Milton has become so dependent on the written word that he does not believe that any experience or emotion of his own is truly legitimate unless he has read something similar in a story; he mistrusts his own senses and sensations, and his true personal and psychological makeup is held in abeyance, awaiting corroboration from more reliable and trusted sources: novels. He consumes novels in search of anything – a passage, a phrase, a description, a turn of plot, even a character’s hairstyle momentarily altered by a breeze – that connects, that confirms. He reads, in secrecy, by torchlight beneath a blanket breathing in his own excited, fetid exhalations, coming out for air every couple of pages, for relief from the crushing weight of his high literary tastes.

Tad Halford remains a problem.

Mr Jordan: You don’t much care for biology, do you, Sabian?

Milton: I wouldn’t say that, Sir. I find most of it pretty interesting, just not what we’re doing today.

Mr Jordan: Would you care to come up and tell the class why?

Milton: No Sir, I wouldn’t. But I presume you’re going to make me anyway.

Mr Jordan: Am I that predictable?

Milton: You’re a teacher, Sir. There are certain traditions in your profession which most of you cling to, either through lack of imagination or-

Mr Jordan: All right, that’s enough. Get up here.

Milton leaves his desk and walks to the front of the biology lab.

Mr Jordan: Go ahead, Mr Sabian, share with the rest of us your enlightened views.

Milton: Sir, with all due respect to your wanting to make a scene here, I didn’t claim to be any more enlightened than anybody else in the class. I just said that I didn’t think that what we’re doing right now was particularly valuable. For me, at least.

Mr Jordan: And would you care to tell us why?

Milton: All right. First there’s the formaldehyde smell – it’s absolutely disgusting. Then there’s the fact that I’m in a lab with twenty-six idiots wielding twenty-six scalpels over the bodies of twenty-six dead rats. The potential for this thing to get out of hand is enormous. Frankly, I’m surprised that everybody’s still got all their bits connected. The humans, I mean. The rats are well and truly screwed.

Mr Jordan: You see yourself as something of a maverick, don’t you Sabian?

Milton: No sir. And please don’t call me that, it’s a death knell.

Mr Jordan: I beg your pardon?

Milton: Calling someone a maverick – it’s horrible. You’re virtually guaranteeing the person failure. Anyway, I’m not a maverick, I’m just a schoolboy.

Mr Jordan: Are you done?

Milton: Yes.

Mr Jordan: Are you done?

Milton: Yes.

Mr Jordan: Go to the principal’s office. I’ll see you there in a moment.

Tad Halford: Sir?

Mr Jordan: What is it, Mr Halford?

Tad Halford: Sir, can I have the maverick’s rat? The stupid pussy hasn’t touched it.

At sixteen Milton is given (it’s not known by whom) a hardcover copy of ‘The Love Machine’ by Jacqueline Susann and, inexplicably, he loves it. It may be the author photo on the inside flap; compared with the dour, rock-faced men he usually reads, Ms Susann, with her dark, sardonic eyebrows and her mumpsy, cock-welcoming cheeks, appears a literary goddess. It is a photograph that brings about his first, monumentally successful auto-erotic experience, and one that sustains him through a Portnoy-esque period as a committed and first-class jack-off artist. He carries the book with him everywhere, sometimes quotes from it, to the birds, the trees, the air. Other boys call him a faggot.

Except when he is rankled Milton is a quiet boy, sensitive almost to the point of icy solemnity, and one who keeps very much to himself. The problem is that he is very often rankled – by teachers, by other students and by the staff. At times it seems as though Milton was born to be rankled; that there is little that doesn’t rankle him to the core; and that he will die extremely rankled.

His long-term future is a blind-spot. Milton cannot see himself as even a single minute older than the age he is when he is thinking about being older, although his partially grey hair hints at what he might look like; his dense and premature solemnity a clue to his bearing. He he cannot picture himself married or as a father. But none of this distresses him greatly because he also cannot see himself dead; it’s as though his future is foggy and obscured, yet pleasingly endless.

When he is almost seventeen, Milton finally makes a friend.

Milton’s brief, sanguinary friendship with Jack Nixon begins in their second last year at school. They get acquainted through a shared interest in cigarettes but become true friends after Milton splits open Jack’s forehead, almost killing him. One afternoon Milton is fooling around, giving a display of Olympic-style shot put, huffing and grunting as he spins around in a dusty corner of the athletic track. Jack stands by and gives points for Milton’s performance, weighing up the elegance, distance and stupidity of his efforts. Inevitably, Milton spins a half-turn too far and lobs the shot put at Jack’s face, catching him square on his forehead. He makes an indescribable sound (like a cat sliding off a motorbike onto a waterbottle) and falls backward onto the grass.

“Am I cut?” he asks up at Milton. Jack’s face is already drenched in red, the blue and white of his eyes dazzlingly bright in the middle of the dark wet mask.

“Yes,” Milton tells him.

“Is there blood?” Jack touches a finger to his forehead.

“Plenty. But head wounds always bleed a lot,” Milton says, reassuringly. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

“How do you know?”

Mrs Fleetwood, the school nurse, cleans Jack’s face and puts some butterfly clips in his forehead then bandages it and drives the boys to the local hospital. In the waiting room, Milton tells Mrs Fleetwood that she should go back to school in case there are any other emergencies, that he will take things from here. “We’ll be fine,” he says.

“How do you know?” she asks. “He might have a concussion.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Milton says, confidently.

“Well make sure he doesn’t fall asleep, just in case.” Mrs Fleetwood leaves.

“How do you know he doesn’t have a concussion?” the doctor asks some time later, as Jack lies on an examination table and Milton stands by wondering whether or not he should hold his friend’s hand. “Has he fallen asleep since the attack?”

“It wasn’t an attack.”

“You threw a lump of metal at him, how is that not an attack?” Vice Principal Conant asks Milton, once Jack has been stitched up and they are back at school. “Mrs Fleetwood tells me there’s a hole in Nixon’s head.”

“It was an accident,” Milton explains.

“A hole?” Jack says.

“More of a gash.” Milton pats Jack’s shoulder. “You can’t even see bone.”

“Well, there will have to be some form of punishment,” says Principal Timmins when the boys are summoned to his office a short while later.

“But it was an accident,” Milton says.

“Nevertheless…” Principal Timmins says.

“Nevertheless what?” Milton asks.

“Young Nixon here has defaced school property by bleeding all over our grass, misused school materials in the form of butterfly clips and bandages and wasted the valuable time of the school nurse. A punishment of some form is warranted.” Principal Timmins tightens his little mouth and thinks for a moment, wrinkling his brows; they look like two dark caterpillars trying to meet in the valley above his nose. “Did he receive a concussion?”

“No.”

“Then he will be concussed.”

“Sir, I don’t think that’s at all advisable,” Milton says. “Corporal punishment is very much frowned upon these days, especially if it’s potentially fatal. Perhaps we could just restrict him to school grounds for the next month.”

“That seems fair,” Principal Timmins says. “Nixon – you’re grounded for a month.”

“Yes sir,” Jack says, then slides from his chair to the floor in a dead faint. He lets out a breath that sounds like a greatly relieved sigh.

The Principal and Milton look down at him. “I think maybe he does have a concussion, after all,” Milton says.

“What about the grounding?”

“It’s excessive, sir. I think he’s been punished enough.”

“Right you are, Sabian. Now take him away, I have things to do.”

“So he did have a concussion after all,” say Vice Principal Conant, and Mrs Fleetwood, and the hospital doctor at various points later in the evening.

“Yes,” Milton explains to each of them. “But he’ll be all right.”

“How do you know?” they all ask.

Milton cannot explain how he knows – he simply does.

In his final year at school Milton feels the first faint yearnings not to be himself any longer. It isn’t that he is particularly troubled or anything (he assumes – correctly – that there will be plenty of time for that later in life) more that the whole idea of himself doesn’t appeal to him as much as it had when he was younger, less formed. The new, teenaged Milton, he believes, seems to lack potential for a life of thrills and excitement, and this dismal realization yields to his earliest feelings of sullenness and self-pity. He also spends too much time thinking about teenage girls and their underwear. However girls are so little a part of his life that Milton worries that he will never, ever lose his virginity. The one greater terror than eternal virgin-hood – for all the boys – being getting a girl pregnant first time out; it’s a cruel yet arousing irony that keeps many of them awake nights.

Milton is a poor student – undisciplined and dreamy – and completely disinclined toward sports, both winter and summer, team and individual, ball and puck. While he has at last become popular, he suspects that this popularity is the cheap, unseemly by-product of his almost endless supply of stories about female movie stars. The source of these tales – these lies – is entirely unknown to him, nevertheless he can talk for hours about how he spent last summer cruising the Mediterranean on a yacht with Brooke Shields; how he swiped a lipstick from Barbara Bach’s handbag; the time he swapped spit with Jodie Foster. Like a farmer sowing dream seeds, Milton fills the dorm with these stories night after night, knowing that the details will find their way into the other boys’ jerk fantasies, their sleep and perhaps, eventually, their own reworked histories.

Milton likes Jack Nixon because Jack is an optimist, literally wide-eyed, and so well-liked that he is seemingly immune to the gossip and other minor infections that blight almost every student’s life. For all but the last of his school years Jack is a popular boy – more popular than Milton, even. (The fact that Milton is popular is mentioned only because it’s often the case – at least it is in the sorts of books he is reading – that the popular boy [someone like Jack] will befriend the unpopular boy [formerly someone like Milton] because he, the popular boy, is… oh, never mind, it’s too complicated.)

Jack is well-liked for his easygoing nature, his generosity and his hair, which is invariably tousled. Everybody loves Jack’s tousled hair, and for the entirety of the junior year every other boy wears his own hair extravagantly tousled as well. The only thing that compromises Jack’s popularity is his immense popularity, which, in his final year, staff and students come to see as the highest self-indulgence and strutting vanity; at first he is shunned, but soon mere shunning seems too inadequate an expression of the popular distaste and Jack is asked not to attend classes.

“I don’t understand it,” he says one afternoon as he and Milton work their way through a pack of Kools. “Is it because I’m Jewish?”

“But you’re not Jewish,” Milton says. “Are you?”

“No, but they don’t know that.”

“Are there any Jewish kids here?”

“No, but again, they don’t know that.”

“And who is they?”

“Everybody,” Jack says, blinking his big blue dishes. “There aren’t any black kids, either. Or Muslims or Indians – native American ones, I mean. The only representation of ethnic diversity we have here is that boy from Cambodia. Why don’t they shun him instead? He seems shunnable.”

“If Nitisakarin was shunned it’d be seen as racist,” Milton says. “In fact, it probably would be racist. As a once well-liked WASP you’re the perfect target. You can be shunned without prejudice.”

Jack asks Milton why he hasn’t joined the shunning horde and Milton tells him that apart from the fact that he likes him, it is, as far as he can tell from the books he’s reading, something of a tradition for a popular boy (now Milton) to befriend an unpopular boy (now Jack) in order to… “Oh never mind,” Milton says. “It’s too complicated. Read ‘The Chocolate War’ or ‘A Separate Peace’. They’ll explain things better than I can.”

“So you’re remaining my friend because it’s a literary tradition?”

“Not just literary, Jack. Narrative. It happens in films as well. In fact, all good stories require developments like this.”

“Well I don’t like it,” Jack says, rubbing a palm through his hair in a naïve attempt to de-tousle it. “I don’t like it much at all. And I think you’re being pretty damned cynical, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“I don’t. And I can understand your feeling that way, I really can. But I don’t see as you’ve got much choice in that matter,” Milton says, blowing a smoke ring. “I mean, you’re not gonna turn around and shun me, are you?”

“That depends – are you Jewish?”

About a month later Jack is stabbed repeatedly with a compass while not changing in the locker room after not attending gym class. As he lies bleeding from the holes in his side, which will soon require twenty-seven stitches, his masked attacker leans down and says, “Vice-principal Conant is innocent.” Vice-principal Conant is arrested almost immediately in connection with the attack but charges are quickly dropped when it is explained to police that the puncturing was not provoked by Jack’s not being either Jewish or African-American. The vice-principal’s mask and bloody compass are returned to him and he is released from custody. Roundly applauded as the stabbing is, somebody has to take the blame – the unofficial school motto in matters of failure, disgrace and attempted homicide is, ‘Censure, no matter who the target or what the cost’ – and Nitisakarin is quickly sent back to Cambodia.

“I don’t understand it,” Jack says, lying in his hospital bed, half way through a stack of magazines and a pack of Marlboros. “Nitisakarin isn’t a Jew, is he?”

“Probably not, but I’ll tell you one thing, this whole business – your former popularity, your being shunned and now the stabbing – it reminds me a lot of this book I’ve been reading lately.” Milton tells him the name of the book and asks Jack if he’s read it.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Just because a book exists, Milton, doesn’t mean everybody’s read it.”

“True, but it should. Especially in this case. This is a very, very influential book. I like it so much that my actual life is beginning to resemble it. Tonally, anyway.”

“Then shouldn’t you be the one getting stabbed?”

Jack is right, of course; it should be Milton suffering the consequences of his literary inclinations, and that might well have become the case but for the fact that Milton stops reading that particular book that day and never picks it up again. It is too risky.

As Milton’s seventeenth birthday approaches, the Tad Halford problem worsens.

Afterward Milton couldn’t be sure that he didn’t know the blow was coming a whipstitch before he felt it, although he’d been expecting it for years. It was late on a Thursday afternoon in Fall and he was sitting by the creek, the lacrosse field behind him, a smoky green paddock opposite, The Love Machine closed by his side. For some reason he’d been thinking intently about prosopopoeia and peripeteia, two words which minutes earlier had arrived in his thoughts seemingly from nowhere, unannounced by any connective notion. In fact, he was so gathered up in these peculiar, circular ruminations – what did prosopopoeia mean? what did peripeteia mean? did they mean the same thing? were they real words? who had put them into use? and into my mind? – that he’d fallen into something of a trance. Milton opened his eyes to a curtain of dusk, hints of stars glinting off the creek water, a creamy, dark, bloated shape over in the paddock, when everything suddenly went black and the stars he had seen on the water reappeared a hundred-fold in his head and he fell forward. His outstretched hands felt mud. His knees sank into soft, wet grass. He had read about characters having heart attacks and strokes – the victims often fell suddenly into soft blackness – and he wondered if that was what was happening to him. Surely I’m too young, he thought. I should probably quit smoking anyway.

His elbows gave way and his face hit water. He spluttered and rolled over. Tad was standing over him, gripping something long and dark and thick. Tad raised whatever it was he was holding above his head and began to swing it downward, and Milton knew then that Tad meant to kill him.

Milton rolled to the side, kicked out at Tad’s legs. Tad wobbled and dropped his club, which thudded warmly as it hit the grassy bank then rolled toward the creek. Milton hurled a fistful of mud at the holes in Tad’s face. He coughed, snorted and wiped his eyes. Milton leaped to his feet and then onto Tad’s back, forcing him to the ground. They slid down the bank. Milton grabbed a hank of the other boy’s hair and forced his face into the water and mud, surprising himself with the strength and fury and glee with which he was trying to drown Tad. He had never liked Tad, and he had, of course, tried to club Milton – perhaps to death – nevertheless he had expected at some point in these stretched seconds that some sense of decency, of restraint, of compassion would arise and he would pull Tad’s bucking head from the water. But it did not and he didn’t care and the truth is he might have killed Tad that day, had it not been for what Milton would later come to think of as a moment of bovine intervention.

Tad was probably just moments away from death when across the creek a cow the colors of charcoal and spoiled cream lowed at Milton. He looked up; the cow made another sound, stumbled forward then fell heavily onto its side because it had only three and a half legs. A bloody bandage, beginning to unravel, was wrapped around the joint of one its front legs. As Milton stared over at the crippled cow his hands must have relaxed their hold on Tad because the next thing he knew Tad had regained his breath, senses and strength and had picked up the club by its shiny hoof. Dark blood dripped from the ragged end onto Tad’s shoulder. Tad swung the leg at Milton. He ducked, scooped up The Love Machine and hurled it. The book’s spine hit Tad squarely in the nose, breaking it with a neat, round pop. Tad dropped the cow’s leg and began wailing as the cow mooed once more, the two sounds mingling, an aural cross-breed that rose into the darkened sky.

Milton (I?) picked up the furry meat and the red-smeared novel and walked away, heading for the administration building to call a vet. Halfway across the lacrosse field, the meaning of peripeteia arrived neat, clear and whole into Milton’s (my?) mind and he (I?) smiled uncertainly, his (my?) teeth shining against the mud and cow blood splattered like a pulverized mask across his (my?) face…

The next week Tad is expelled. In the middle of the following month, on July 5, Milton’s mother the devout Lutheran nurse is murdered by a killer who will never be identified and caught. Shattered, orphaned and liberated Milton whispers good bye to his friend Jack Nixon, leaves school one night and…

I don’t know… I had written in note form at the end of the chapter. Maybe he goes to New York City and gets in various scrapes, incidents and adventures and...

… and I wasn’t really sure of what would come next, what ought to happen to Milton between when he left school and ended up in California, a gap of several formative years. But for the moment there was a more pressing problem; I had to make up my mind whether Milton Sabian was going to be an I or a he. That first person/third person business was messy, painfully uncertain and confusing.

It wasn’t an easy decision to make: first person narration can make a book seem unavoidably autobiographical, but at the same time offers a certain tonal vividness and credibility. I is the witness, the participant, the self. He is an independent creation, offspring. Where I is an intimate whisper in the reader’s ear (“Come with me”), he is a pointed finger (“Follow that guy”). If I die the story is finished, but if he is killed the tale may yet live.

And so I chose. I made a decision that was, as much of the world now knows, very probably the worst decision any writer has ever made about any literary work in history.

Chapter Four – Her __ _-stained eyes

2009-02-16T18:33:00.001+11:00

Thanks to approximately twelve years of heavy drinking and very occasional drug use, I have quite a poor memory. Things sometimes happen and I don’t recall how, or why. To help with these absences of memory I employ mnemonic devices: a stack of nickels in the middle of the bathroom floor, perhaps to remind me to buy toothpaste; an overturned cup on my pillow to try and prompt the recollection of a phrase which suddenly occurred to me when I couldn’t find a pen and paper; a sock on a doorknob probably indicating credit card issues that must be dealt with; a Post-It note with the words Note to self: do not forget note to self in letterbox, the ‘note’ being a red rubber ball in my letterbox.

The problem is that I use whatever is most immediately at hand, things which usually have no correlation to the message they’re meant to convey and it’s not long before I have forgotten what the be-socked doorknobs and yellow squares and red balls mean, and they appear to me strange totems, impenetrable symbols that I sometimes ponder for hours in a vain attempt to tease out revelation. “My cup turneth over?” I might finally conclude while staring at the bed, mystified.

I no longer use drugs – my brief stay in a Pennsylvania psychiatric hospital ended that madness a few years ago – and I don’t drink nearly as much as I used to. I mention this because I don’t want to give the impression that I was in any kind of altered state when I worked: I was clean, sober and sane as I began the painstaking trudge through my manuscript and made the changes I’d decided upon.

When I was finished I printed out the first three chapters, around 75 pages, made copies and mailed them to a handful of editors and agents.

“Goodbye and good luck,” I said, as I stood at the mailbox and dropped Milton into the darkness.

The next day I got on a plane and several hours later knocked on Judy’s front door in Topanga Canyon, feeling buoyant and confident. Sentimentality glinted from my left hand and caught her eye. She glanced at my hand, then at me, dismayed. “Why do you have a suitcase with you?” she asked, dropping her cigarette onto the pebbled porch and staring at it awhile before mashing it beneath the pointed toe of her boot. “You’re not staying with me.”

Judy hadn’t always treated me with such derision and scorn; when we first met she was merely disinterested, and occasionally bored. But I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her and did everything I possibly could to ensure that she’d fight through the tedium I radiated like halitosis and fall right back in love with me.

Judy was, as I’ve mentioned, one of the few people who had written back to me after receiving the letter of apology for my first novel. In her letter she had been generous, lenient and witty; reading between the lines, it was clear to me that she’d forgiven me for my book. I wrote back immediately and suggested that if she was ever in New York we might get together for a drink or a hansom cab ride through Central Park (a little joke of mine). Judy replied promptly, telling me that as a matter or fact she would be in Manhattan on an assignment the following week but was not interested in meeting with me (or taking a hansom cab ride through Central Park with anyone at all) and that she’d only written in the first place out of politeness.

I sent her a telegram: AM VERY INTERESTING IN REAL LIFE STOP NOVEL NOT A REPRESENTATION OF AUTHOR STOP DITTO JACKET PHOTO STOP BAD LIGHTING STOP.

When I didn’t hear from Judy after two days I began to worry that she was dead – hit by a car or by some falling masonry as she passed beneath the scaffolding on a building site, like that guy in ‘The Maltese Falcon’ who briefly changes his life when he is almost killed the same way, and who afterward feels as though somebody has taken the lid off life and allowed him to see the works; I believe his name was Flitcraft – and for a while I considered hopping on a plane to see if she was all right. But it would have been wildly inappropriate – I was not insane; I hadn’t forgotten that we hadn’t even met – so I sent her another telegram, a letter, a postcard, a bunch of flowers and a couriered package containing a copy of the telegram, a copy of the letter, a copy of the postcard and a photograph of the floral arrangement I’d ordered at InterFlora. I was desperate, crazed, excited and, most of all, very lonely; I wanted to lift the lid off myself and let Judy see the works, or perhaps to determine whether there was in fact anything there to see. When I told my friend Fraser Smith about the situation he said that in his opinion there was plenty to see but I might not want to show it all at once, like some kind of ‘emotional flasher’.

Judy wrote me agreeing to have a drink – one drink, she underlined – at the Four Seasons on the Friday night she was in town, and asked me to calm down and stop clogging up her mailbox. PS, she added, thanks for the flowers, which I have immersed. And thanks for the picture of the flowers which is stuck to my refrigerator. By the way, my last name is not Flitcraft.

I’d thought about nothing else on the day of my appointment with Judy and in my nervous eagerness I arrived a half hour early. She was already there, sitting on a stool at the bar swirling ice cubes in a lowball filled with scotch and a drop of water. There was something almost lost and mournful about the way she was staring into the heavy dark glass, and for a moment I struggled with a reluctance to intrude upon her introspection. She seemed unaware of anything around her, hunched like a brooding war veteran or a jazz pianist in search of the next chord. What propelled me toward her – and into her life – was the idea of her catching me staring at her like some kind of ex-con just out of prison rather than the ex-nut just out of psychiatric hospital that I actually was. I ordered a drink then sat down on the stool next to her and introduced myself, sounding appropriately ashamed of the words Michael and Sherwood when preceded by the statement “I am.” It sounded as though I was reading a name off a tombstone.

Judy laughed and as she turned to face me, I noticed the angular bulge above her right hip. I didn’t know what to make of it – my first idiotic thought was that she’d had a botched hip replacement – and quickly shifted my gaze, settling on her face. She was not beautiful – not in the immediately apprehensible manner that most people prefer to see as beautiful, anyway – but she was stunning. Her features were distinct and, with the exception of her much-broken nose, fine, but all were placed slightly too far apart, giving the impression that she’d been rather carelessly put together by somebody who’d meant to get around to correcting the details later on but never had. It was a first draft of a face; the lower lids of her pale blue eyes were full, as though at any moment she might spill a welter of tears down her cheeks, not the result of any kind of emotion but simple overflow. She had a slight overbite and shy freckles which appeared if she’d spent too long in the sun or became embarrassed about something (an extremely rare occurrence, I would soon learn). She accentuated her strong and broad forehead by wearing her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, an oddly girlish – but very charming – touch in someone I would come think of as never really having had a girlhood.

Judy was the daughter of a career military man and a career military man’s long-suffering, cancer-incubating wife who died the day before Judy’s tenth birthday. Her father, Jim, was a marine brigadier-general, and she and her two older brothers had had a peripatetic upbringing not unlike my own, the critical difference being that her experience of the world beyond America – endured rather than enjoyed – was of military bases in Germany, Japan, Iceland and the Philippines. No matter where in the world she was the other children she knew were all Americans, all displaced and unhappy as she was, and she gave up even trying to make friends after being uprooted three times in as many months when she was twelve years old. Withdrawing from other children – even her brothers – she began to mold herself in her beloved father’s image; tough, taciturn, physical. She became an enthusiastic runner, a first-class marksman and a devotee of several martial arts, having her nose broken for the first time when she failed to block a flying ju jitsu fist. She was a committed student at the base schools, excelling in history, mathematics and languages. At sixteen, her father began schooling her in whisky and cigars, allowing her to begin his smokes and finish his drinks as he sat in an armchair listening to the classical music which reduced him to a state of such rigid attentiveness that it often seemed to Judy a kind of ecstatic fury, until he was released and slackened – undone – by his fourth of fifth glass of whisky. She developed a crush on a bearded Frenchman and began reading the Paris Review, drinking espresso and smoking filterless cigarettes. She earnestly discussed Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and various –isms; the Frenchman explained exactly what was wrong with her face, why she could never be pretty, only ‘terribly beautiful’. When she was seventeen Jim requested and received a posting in D.C, where Judy enrolled at George Washington, majoring in criminal justice, hoping eventually to mete out plenty of it in a professional capacity, although what form such a calling would take she was not then sure.

I knew none of this as, with my eyes firmly locked on her own, I told her about how my father had brought me here to the Four Seasons when I was nineteen and then left me to get drunk on my own after he’d spotted some production executives from United Artists lunching on one of the tiers of the grillroom, whom he went and sat with for three or four hours and by the time he came back I’d racked up a bill of close to five hundred dollars, all of it single malt whisky; I told her how he’d laughed gruffly and loudly and shaken my hand as though one of us or both of us was Hemingway and we’d just made our first kill or had our first fuck or written our first novel, and I didn’t stop talking to Judy until we’d both downed four martinis, by which time I’d become certain of two things: that I’d developed a brain tumor (there was a warm and buzzing feeling on the right side of my head); and that Judy was a little bit in love with me. I knew it and said something along those lines.

“Uh huh,” she said, then swallowed the last oily drops of her drink. “Actually, I’m not sure I even like you.” She delicately dropped an olive pit back into the glass, her soft pink tongue nudging the little black lump between two heavy lips, showing hints of imperfect white teeth. “You talk too much. I’m sure you think it’s charming and quirky, but it’s not. It’s irritating.”

I shut up for a while and stared at her, trying to figure out which actress she resembled and whether she really was falling in love with me but doing an incredible job of hiding it. Of course I knew in my heart that she was not, but I was drunk and hopeful enough to dream, and to attempt some ham-fisted flattery. “You know who you look like?” As soon as I said the words, Judy snatched her pack of cigarettes off the bar and stood up. “No one,” I added quickly. “You don’t look like anyone else. You only look like you.”

She breathed out smokily, thought for a moment and sat down again. “Get the check,” she said. “We’re leaving.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to my hotel room.”

“Why?”

“You want to sit here and talk about it or you want to come with me and see what happens?”

Not much happened that night – we played a very long game of Monopoly Judy ordered from room service before traipsing up to the roof of the hotel where she listened raptly as I rashly opened heart and mouth and told her of my phenothiazine horrors in Pennsylvania and we looked at the cityscape through a starlight scope, an old battery-operated night-vision device her father had brought back from Vietnam, and which made the Manhattan skyline appear lumpy and ghostly green, like a convoy of container ships and submarine periscopes frozen on a foggy sea – but six weeks later we were married.

Less than a year afterward, just before our divorce was finalized, as we were sorting through our things and deciding who would keep what, I asked Judy why she’d married me in the first place. “Various reasons,” she said, not wistfully or regretfully. “But I guess part of it was because that first night in my hotel room, when I took off my jacket and holster, you didn’t ask why I was carrying a gun. Every man I’ve ever known, as soon as they see it they start carrying on like complete assholes about it. Calling me a ‘firecracker’ or something stupid. You didn’t. I guess I was impressed.”

That was about as informative and emotional as Judy ever got – she treated reticence with great reverence, as though our life together was some sort of secret I was trying to eavesdrop on – but that never really bothered me; I loved her for different reasons. I loved her both because of and despite the fact that she bears only a passing resemblance – both in physicality and character – to the woman I have described thus far.

In addition to not using her real name, Judy has also asked me not to include any revealing details of her actual personality or personal history, a request (bordering on demand) that I’ve tried to respect, and one which means that some of what I’ve written about her here is not particularly Judy-like at all.* The real Judy, as I have mentioned, has a different name and is very ____, incredibly ____, spectacularly gifted in the art (or pastime) of _____ and _____ (although she would ___ ______ such a claim); further, she’s highly ______ toward _____ but not _______, which she ____ in the extreme. (I remember one particular occasion when we were _______ along _____ and Judy saw a _______ and immediately took out her ________ and _____ the ____, which provoked a riotous and at times frightening mixture of ______ and _______ from all who were ____ enough to ____ it.)

*I should mention that the description of her house in Topanga is accurate except for the fact that it is not located in Topanga Canyon – however it is located high in a canyon above Los Angeles.

She is a slender, _____-breasted woman, with an _____ carriage, which she accentuates by throwing her ____ back at the _________ like a _____ _____. Her ____ ___-stained eyes look ____ at __ with polite __________ curiosity out of a ___, ________, ____________ face.

Politically, she claimed to be non-partisan but I once stumbled upon some ___ in her ______ which confirmed what I’d always suspected: that she was a ________ __________ with strong _______ tendencies. Musically, she would always prefer ___ over _______, and only when _______. Her favorite expression, when shocked or surprised is, “______ _________!”. When deeply displeased, she will ________ and then mutter. She believes that _____ were smarter and more important than ______, that ____ was better than ________ and, if it came to it, that _____ could whip ____. When she’s in a hurry, Judy ____ with her ________ to one side and _____ (which seems like a physical characteristic rather than an emotional one until you learn that the reason she _____ that way is because when she was ___ a ______ her and ever since she’s been _____. Of course, I didn’t believe her until she showed me the __ on her ____ ). The real Judy counts among her close friends such ____ as _____ __________, _ _ ____, former- ______s _________ _ _________, and ________ (I had doubted that particular claim at first until the three of us _____ at ________ in ________ of ________ and I was _____ly convinced); her ex-lovers, she always ______ in telling me, included (but were not limited to) ________ ________, _ _, _______ ____-________, _____, (before he was crippled), _______ (before he was famous), a beardless Frenchman named Jean-Loup_____, and _____ ____ (before she was executed in ____ for ________ ).

Finally, in the whole time I was married to her, Judy never ________. Not even once.

The great irony of all this is that Judy’s actual details are freely available from any number of sources: there are several dozen other books about this whole incident (two of which were New York Times bestsellers), a dreadful telemovie (which starred Sonya Walger as Judy, which I felt was superb casting; Judy herself claimed it was “________ ______ by _____ and ______. Not to mention that this Walger woman’s English.”), hundreds of websites, thousands of yards of newspaper column inches, magazines including a Newsweek cover.

“I’m aware of the irony, Michael,” she told me recently when I pressed her on this very point. “But it’s not so much that I want my former, anonymous life back, so much as I don’t want you writing about me or us. You shouldn’t be writing, Michael. Quit while you’re ahead.” I reminded her that I was never ahead; that I was a failure from the gate. “Then just quit,” she said.*

*Of course, this being the very work (or a very work) she was referring to, the above statement actually went like this: “Michael, I _____ and _______ ___ ______ __ _ _ ___ which makes ____ more ____.” (Laughter) “But, having said that, _________ I still ___ that you ___________ _____ _ ________ or I’ll _____ ___ _ _____, you ______! _____?” I knew she meant it, and that’s why under no circumstances will I fill in these gaps. She’d ____ me. Well, _____ me first, then ____ me.

As I sat in Judy’s kitchen drinking a beer and telling her amazing facts about the weather back in New York there was a perfunctory knock at the front door. A moment later a shirtless man with a great silver beard and silver hair appeared in the doorway. He and Judy hugged and kissed like long lost lovers. “Well, hello there,” he said, striding toward me with an outstretched hand. “How are you, son?”

My father took my hand and yanked me off the kitchen stool and enveloped me in a bearhug of such smothering intensity that I felt as though I was disappearing inside his flesh.

Most people will know what happened later that day, the main details anyway, but there are certain other things which weren’t reported, replayed, reconstructed and relentlessly regurgitated by the media as well as that ridiculous telemovie (for God’s sake, why would a producer approve the casting of Judd Nelson as me?*) that bear mention here in the only true and complete account of this lamentable tale. I realize that ‘the unreliable narrator’ has been a popular, if tired, device in literature for a while now, and that my even raising the notion now casts doubt on my credibility, however I want to reiterate the fact that nothing I have written here deviates even slightly from the course of pure and absolute truth – except the stuff which I have pointed out is completely made up.

*I am, of course, aware that Mr Nelson lost his right hand in a fight with his groundskeeper in May of 2007, but surely saving a few dollars on special effects isn’t reason enough to cast someone in a role that requires far more than mere physical resemblance.

After finishing my beer I got changed in one of Judy’s guest rooms then lay on the bed for a while trying to think of brilliant, acidic things to say to her and my father, the remarks derived from the presumption that they were sleeping together (or at least had slept together) and not just good friends who showed up to each other’s house topless. I came up dry – it was a pretty strange situation – and rolled off the bed.

Out on the rear deck, ignoring the spectacular view, Ed was dividing his attention between barbecuing and talking on his cell phone. “Oh Lang, call an undertaker, because you’re killing me! Listen, get your butt over here, tout suite! We got eats a-plenty and my nogoodnik son’s dropped by, all the way from the intellectual strait-jacket and Mondrian map that is Noo Yaawk Siddy.” It wasn’t enough that he was talking like some excited dimwit teenager to this Lang person, but he had to throw in a bit of east coast–west coast bullshit as well. Noo Yawk Siddy – good God. And as for that Mondrian business… Well, actually I quite liked that; it seemed erudite.

“Wait’ll you meet Lang, Mike,” my father said when he’d finished the call. “You’re gonna fall in love.”

“Am I?”

“What’s not to love?”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. “Where’s Judy?”

“She went to pick up some plantains.”

“Are you two…” I couldn’t say it. “Are you…”

“What?” he said, snapping a pair of barbecue tongs at me. “Are we what?”

I tried to choose the right word for this sort of enquiry, the appropriate tone for a son to strike when making this sort of enquiry of a father. “Are you two… dating?”

When my father laughs hard he makes a sound that begins in his diaphragm and then shoots out through his mouth and nose; it sounds like a whale releasing a great, orgasmic spume of water and air. About one and a half seconds after I’d said the word dating to him, you’d have thought there was whole damn pod of them floating across the canyon. If you didn’t know any better you’d think that the red face, the tears and the staggering array of noises added up to an infarction. But I knew better. And the worst thing was, a few moments later I found myself laughing along with him, not because of what I’d said – although as the word hung suspended in my head, surrounded by nothing but peals of laughter, it was beginning to sound a little sophomoric – but because he was having such a good time that it felt almost niggardly not to get involved. A moment later he fell on to the wooden decking, his arms straight out by his sides, panting and whoop-whoop-ing through comically puffed cheeks.

“What did you do to him?” Judy asked. She was holding a bottle of chilled wine and three glasses; no plaintains that I could see.

Through the blasts and gusts of his apparently endless mirth he managed to sputter, “Please… don’t… say… it… again.”

“You tell him a joke?” Judy asked, handing me a glass. “What was it?”

Ed rolled over onto his stomach, still panting, and covered his ears. “Please, son! No!”

“What the hell’s going on?” Judy said.

“Why plantains, Judy?” I said. “What’s wrong with bananas?”

“They keep longer. What’s up with Ed?”

I gulped some wine. “Are you sleeping with him?”

Judy looked at me coolly for a moment. “Oh Michael, for God’s sake,” she said, then stalked back inside. Ed revved up again but this time I felt no inclination to laugh along; now I wanted to walk right over and kick him in his shuddering bronzed ribs.

When I first met Judy she was working for the FBI as the agency’s liaison detached to advise film and television productions on technical details regarding procedure, counterintelligence, weaponry and other matters. It was her job to make fiction bear a greater resemblance to fact; that fact that the fact had, over the years, been heavily influenced by the fiction, made her job that much easier. It wasn’t dispensing justice, exactly, but thanks to Judy a lot of screen villains got what was coming to them.

She was living in D.C but had been spending a lot of time in Manhattan advising a television show on agency-sanctioned interrogation techniques. She spent her days drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups, fending off advances from one of the stars and trying to evade the feeling that her life had not turned out as she’d wished. “When I was a kid I wanted to be a marine. I wanted to shoot at people,” she told me over dinner a week or so after we met. “Like my father.”

“You wanted to shoot your father?” I asked. “That’s-”

“No, I wanted to shoot at people, as did my father.”

“Oh. But you’ve grown out of that, right?”

“Possibly,” Judy said. “I’ve never shot at anyone, so I don’t know.”

“Surely you know if you want to shoot people. It’s something you should be highly aware of.” I was fond of using didacticism to disguise my ignorance of much of the world, and of people. I was young, but that’s no excuse; plenty of young people aren’t as wilfully stupid as I was. “It’s a fundamental.”

“Is it? How do you feel about it, Michael? Have you explored that aspect of yourself – thoroughly?”

“Yes, I have,” I told her. “There was a time not too long ago when I wanted to kill people. Or thought I did, anyway.”

“Uh huh. And now?”

“Now I’m not sure. I wouldn’t be sorry if many of them were dead, but I don’t think I’d be able to actually kill them myself,” I said. “It seems a little murderous.”

“How much of what you wrote about your mother in your book is true? The disappearance and so on. Did she really disappear in Guatemala?”

“Costa Rica. I changed it to Guatemala in the book because… so it would seem more like fiction, less autobiographical. But she did disappear, yes.”

“Uh huh. Let’s assume she was kidnapped – if you could locate the people who took her from you and your father, would you kill them?”

I thought about the question for a moment before telling Judy that yes, if my mother had been taken against her will, and if I found the people responsible I probably would kill them. Or at least want to.

Judy wiped her mouth with a napkin and, as I looked at the faint lipstick smear left behind, I became convinced that due to some combination of pity at my loss and arousal at my willingness to dispense ultimate justice for that loss, she was going to lean across the table and kiss me with her wide mouth that sat a shade too far beneath her crooked nose. It would be our first. I waited for a moment and then, as she lit a cigarette and looked around for the flashing white of a waiter, told her that I was falling in love. “With you, I mean. Not just generally.”

When Ed finished barbecuing he joined Judy and me at the row of chrome and leather stools around the island bench in her large open kitchen. She had put on a pale blue dress I’d bought her for her birthday a few years back. From what I could see – and I hated myself for looking – she wasn’t wearing any underwear. But it was hot out and her figure was exceptional. An old disco song floated around from somewhere behind us, steamy and slow and mournful. On a far wall was one of Fraser Smith’s photographs – ‘Two People Wearing Hats: 10.44am January 3, 1994’ – which he’d given Judy and me as a wedding present. She loved the picture and I’d wanted her to have it after we divorced. The bottle of wine was almost finished so I slipped off the stool and went to the refrigerator and removed a bottle of Sancerre. The warm air had been almost rich with peacefulness until, it seems as I look back on it now, the moment I opened the refrigerator and released into that dry pacific ambience a chilly gust that may have followed me all the way from New York.

Ed shook his head and said, “Dating…”

Judy mashed out a cigarette. “Oh Jesus, give it up, Ed. It wasn’t that funny in the first place.”

I pulled the cork from the bottle then looked up as a small, pretty young woman with bright-pink hair stumbled into the living room on tiny, awkward steps, as though she’d been pushed. Behind her was Langford Cherry.

Ed almost fell off his stool in his eagerness to greet the television actor. A hot flurry of mutual pleasure and praise followed as they embraced. Cherry introduced Ed to the small woman, Missy. My father told Cherry that he already knew Judy, of course, but that the nervous looking stiff holding onto the bottle of wine for dear life, was his son Michael.

“Mike, this is Lang,” Ed beamed. “Lang, this is my son Michael. He’s a… he… he wrote a book. Mike, I’m sure your familiar with Lang’s work.”

Cherry shook my hand without looking me in the eye, then turned and kissed Judy for too long. Missy smiled and nodded at me, eventually said “Hello” then looked around with her mouth hanging open, as though this was her first time indoors. Judy took two more glasses from a cupboard, prised the bottle of wine out of my hand and poured. Cherry said that he only drank on days ending with ‘y’ and what was today? Saturday? Great! Ed laughed it up. Missy popped a pill then they all moved over to the living area and took seats on the four vast couches that surrounded a huge wooden coffee table in the middle of which sat a huge wooden fruit bowl.

I stood where I was and tried to imagine whether any of this could possibly have come about – my ex-wife potentially sleeping with my father; my father shamelessly ingratiating himself with a television star; the television star ogling my ex-wife; me watching a television star ogling my ex-wife – if my mother was still around. The answer, I believed, was no. But who really knows what fate wants?

Cherry moved a blackened finger of Tiger Shrimp around his large white plate and said to Ed, “Yeah, sure I do bring a lot of myself to the character, but what you see on TV is not what you see off TV. We’re not the same guy.” I thought that was interesting, because having been with him for an hour or so by then, I saw almost no detectable difference between Langford Cherry and Charlie Bright, the obnoxious smartass he played on television; except the actor dressed even worse than the character.

“He hates it when you confuse them,” Missy said. She spoke loosely and tentatively, as though the inside of her mouth was badly burned, the words rolling around in her mouth before being uncertainly formed and trepidatiously expelled.

“So you wrote a book, huh?” Cherry looked past me, to the kitchen, where Judy was slicing limes. “What the hell for?”

“I’m not sure.”

“How many sides was it?”

“Sides?” I said. “What does that mean?”

“It’s what they call script pages,” said my father. “You know that, Mike.”

“Well in publishing they just call them pages.”

I told Cherry how many pages the book was then he asked me whether it was a story. “Or, y’know, the other kind?”

“It was a novel.”

“Like a story?”

Yes, I explained, like a story.

Cherry asked whether ‘they’ made a movie from it he might’ve seen. I told him they didn’t, that it wasn’t a very successful book, perhaps, among other things, because it had too many ‘sides’.

“And therein lay its greatest achievement,’ my father piped in jovially. “It was extremely famous for being a failure.”

Cherry gave a thinly sympathetic nod. “Hey, we’ve all been there, right? First couple movies I did while I was on hiatus from the show were complete flops. Wrong supporting cast.”

“Right,” I said. “Like the way my novel failed because it was published in the wrong font.”

The actor’s sense of irony was stunted, and his supply of sympathy had run out. “Are we done with book club yet?” He looked around the silent table, nodding and pulling the sharp corners of his bitter, arrow-head mouth downward with what he thought was Muppety charm.

Missy pointed to the fruit bowl and said, “What’s wrong with those bananas?”

I told her they were plantains.

“Oh,” she said. “I like chicken pot pie.”

Cherry white-knuckled his fork. “We’ve been though this, goddamit, Missy. It’s not chicken pot pie, it’s chicken pot pie!”

Judy brought over two bottles of chardonnay and she, Ed, and Langford chewed over the industry; idle chatter about who was doing what, when, where, why, for how long, for how much and with whom else. It was the kind of talk I’d grown up around and become bored with despite the frequent dropping of famous names and fabulous amounts of money. Missy also looked bored and I asked her if she, too, was caught up in this evil web.

“The Internet?” she said.

“The industry.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess.”

“In what capacity?”

Missy looked blank.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m Lang’s girl…” She paused uncertainly.

I waited a moment before offering some help. “…friend?”

“Friday. And friend, I guess.”

“I see. How do you like it?”

Cherry momentarily tore himself away from Judy’s cleavage. “I recently promoted her and she fucking loves it.”

“I fucking love it,” Missy told me unenthusiastically. “What is it you do, again?”

“He’s a writer, babe,” Cherry said. “But not for either screen.”

Missy asked me what I wrote. “Poems?”

“No, I–”

“Elvis fucking Christ, Missy,” Cherry whined. “We’ve covered this – the guy does books!”

“Book,” I said. “I wrote a book once.”

Missy asked what it was about and I told her it was about me, mostly.

“Aren’t all books about the authors?” Cherry said smugly, as though this was some great axiom.

“No,” I said. “Are all scripts about the actors?” I heard Judy sigh.

“Only the good ones.” Cherry turned. “Am I right, Ed?”

My father squirmed in his seat, tried to smirk, but could not meet the expectant gaze of either Cherry or me, both of us wanting to hear a very different response.

Cherry didn’t bother waiting for my father’s mental rewrite. He said to Judy, “Whatsay you and I take a look at your collection later?”

“My collection of what, Langford?”

“Weapons. I guess in your line of business, you’d… You call what you do a business?”

“Uh huh. What do you call what you do?”

“Using my gift. Back to you, mein hostess. Doing what you do, I’d assume you’d have a pretty fuckin’ sweet range of guns.”

“Yes, I do, but except for a nine mil Sig they’ve all had the firing pins removed. And they’re all in a lock box. Which I’m not going to open.”

I looked at my ex-wife, so strong and poised and beautiful, and thought, I still love you.

“Aw c’mon, don’t be such a puss,” Cherry said. “I love it when you talk caliber.”

Judy’s teeth turned to stalactites. “Such a what?”

Cherry ignored her and told my father to grab him a beer.

“You read my mind, buddy.” Ed rose from his chair; I knew it was primarily because he wanted to defuse the situation between Judy and Cherry (unaware as Cherry seemed to be of it), but the screenwriter’s eagerness to please the actor nauseated me nonetheless. I said nothing. “What’ll it be?” my father called from the refrigerator. “Heineken, Pieroni, Budejovicky Pivovar?”

“I don’t fucking care, Ed. Any beer will do. Long as it’s cold and in my hand in less than fifteen seconds.”

Less than fifteen seconds later my father handed Cherry a Budvar and said, “Strike an attitude like that again and you’ll have to get the next one yourself, Lang.”

“Wrong,” Cherry said. He pointed at me. “I still got Ed junior here to step n’ fetch for me.”

I took a deep breath and said, “My name’s Michael, you fucking idiot.”

There was stunned silence from everyone, including – perhaps especially – me.

Shortly after dessert came the notorious ‘Hawaiian Gynecologist’ incident, which most people believe transpired more or less along the following lines: some time around nine o’clock I became drunkenly enraged at Langford Cherry over his lasciviousness toward my ex-wife and went in search of him in order to ‘sort him out’. Despite pleas from both my father and Judy, I would not be dissuaded (“I will have my vengeance!” Judd Nelson growls at this point in the telemovie) and, shortly after kicking down a number of doors in Judy’s house, like some sort of avenging cop-angel, all Kevlar and diaphanous feathers, I come upon Mr Cherry in a guest bedroom in the midst of ‘tenderly consoling Miss Missy Kugelmann while performing intimate and agreed-upon acts of body-maintenance on her person’ (in the words of his legal deposition; it makes no mention of the Q-tips, hula skirt or anything else employed in these tender acts of body-maintenance) and drag him outside where I administer a lengthy and severe beating leaving him ‘in a state of distress and shock’, and unable to work in his professional capacity.*

*A few days afterward I was sued not only for his lost wages but also those of his five co-stars, the producers, two directors, the entire crew, a dozen holders of tickets to the taping of the television show – some of whom had flown in from as far away as Idaho – and Burt Reynolds who was booked for a guest appearance. The total, including all legal fees, was slightly north of twenty-six million dollars. For obvious reasons, the case never made it to court.

What actually happened was this: shortly after dessert Judy and Ed went out on to the deck to smoke cigars, leaving me alone to watch Langford poking and prodding giggling Missy. I was, I admit, quite drunk by this point, but my great experience in being so meant that I was able to function with at least the appearance of relative sobriety and maintain my alcolibrium. I mixed myself a vodka and something, and when I returned to the living room Missy and Cherry were no longer there. I was relieved; at the risk of stating the terrifically obvious (but at least no longer slanderous), I found the actor’s presence somewhat tedious and draining. How Missy coped with it I could only guess at, but I supposed huge reserves of Candide-like ingenuousness were probably part of it. That, and diazepam.

A few minutes later I heard what sounded like sobbing. I followed the sound, ending up outside the room the noise was coming from. It sounded like a jungle in there, and I realized that what I’d thought were sobs were in fact the howls and primal calls of animals – jaguars, great birds and apes – mixed with some piano. I knew that whatever was going on in there was none of my business and I was about to go back to the living room when some irrepressible impulse made me knock and open the door.

It was quite a scene: lit by the swirling green and purple of two lava lamps, Missy was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing only a dazzlingly pink bra that perfectly matched her hair. There were twittering birds, the dry clack and rustle of wood percussion, bongos and a marimba. “Hi,” Missy said, smiling. “Again.”

Cherry turned around, the bruising light passing across his face making him appear already puffed and sallow. “I told you before, asshole, we’re not interested in a three-way.”

I had no idea what he was talking about; I’d never been involved in anything more than a couplet in my life (not for want of trying, I’ll admit).

“Take your sick sex somewhere else.” The ‘sick sex’ remark was rich: at that moment Langford Cherry was holding a box of Q-tips and kneeling in front of Missy’s very wide open legs; he was naked except for a lei, a hula skirt and an old fashioned silver doctor’s light strapped to his forehead. He stood up and said, “Why don’t you go get off with your dad and your ex-wife?”

That was when I punched him – just once, and not even very hard – in the jaw. He slumped forward, unconscious, breathing deeply between Missy’s thighs. A xylophone began a primitive, slithering melody as a monkey yowled. “What’s this music?” I asked.

“Martin Denny,” she said, then lay back and moaned. “Oh boy.”

The next thing I knew I was in the kitchen on hold to a cab company when a re-clothed Missy appeared at my side and told me that if I helped her get Langford into her car she’d drive me back to the city. I dimly recall dumping the still-unconscious actor into Missy’s Lexus. I remember shaking my father’s hand, kissing Judy goodbye and making a remark (which at that particular moment seemed positively laden with sly double-meanings and strange moral weight) about bananas being just as good as plantains any day of the week, getting halfway down the canyon before realizing that I’d left my suitcase at Judy’s then deciding, the hell with it, I’d ask her to send it on to me, and then understanding with a deflating regret that my plantains-versus-bananas comment made no sense at all. An effective metaphor that incorporates fruit, I may or may not have said aloud to Missy as we turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway, is very hard to come by these days.

After a somewhat sobering and uneventful drive back to L.A, Missy dropped me at a hotel in Beverly Hills where I took a room using my father’s line of credit. Before she drove off Missy told me that had it been up to her, the menage-a-trois I’d suggested would’ve been okay. She winked and I remember feeling a flattered flutter before wondering once more where the hell everybody was getting the idea that I was some sort of swinger. And one who would, under any circumstances, share a bed with a dickhead like Langford Cherry.

“I’m telling you it’s not here,” Judy said when I telephoned her back in New York on Sunday night. “I found a pair of cheap shoes outside the living room window, that’s all.”

“But I know I left it there.” Judy hated to repeat herself and I’d already made her do so twice. A third and she’d hang up. “So how are you?” I said.

“Oh, I’m swell.”

“Great. Well, if you happen to come across it would you mind sending it here to my place?”

“Your suitcase is not here.”

“I’ll pay for the postage or whatever.”

“Uh huh. Before or after you pay Ed back for the presidential suite at the hotel?”

“Presidential?” I said. “God, I’m ruined…”

“No more than you were before last night.”

Guilt and melancholia have always made me hungry. I ate some cold ravioli, straight from the tin, hating myself for how much I enjoyed the little fatty lumps, the over-sweetened tomato sauce and the crumbs of meat that floated through it like silt. I’ve often wondered how the people behind canned food – the Birdseyes, the Heinzes, and the Chefs Boyardee – discovered the secrets of people’s shameful hidden desires, and I’ve occasionally dreamed of applying their magic formulations to writing, of creating something immensely popular and ubiquitous, that induces satisfaction and self-disgust in equal measure.

Ten minutes after I forked in the last mouthful, I spewed it all out; the ravioli, my cheap schemes, all the L.A booze I hadn’t already pissed away. I felt better than I had in hours;. it was, finally, good to be home.

Chapter Five – Chapter 4

2009-02-16T18:32:00.001+11:00

The last thing I remembered writing at the beginning of chapter four in my manuscript was this: oh, I don’t know…[NOTE TO SELF] Maybe he goes to New York City and gets in various scrapes, incidents and adventures and…

When I began work the Monday morning after I returned from the coast, I was surprised to see that the manuscript had, due to whatever combination of the much-prayed-for divine intervention, computer error and the near-hallucinatory state that the artist can sometimes achieve when he or she is on a roll, come quite a long way. It read:

Milton, immediately upon learning of his mother’s murder, left school and hitch-hiked to New York City where he quickly learned to swindle the rich with such ruthlessness, efficiency and success that soon after he arrived he took residence in the middle of a mid-range midtown hotel. His scams were simple and brutal, justified – at least to himself – by necessity: he had very little money while his marks had plenty, so why not even things up a little? He was never violent or physical; he wasn’t a robber or a mugger, he was a thief, practising what he thought of as financial elision. Wearing a bespoke suit and working in Yorkville out of a bank of public telephone booths, as well as various hotel lobbies which he used for client meetings, Milton sold ‘guaranteed to win’ lottery tickets, phony patents and intelligence pills for already-gifted dogs. He was dismayed by the eagerness of the exceedingly wealthy to try to become wealthier still; by their assumption that even their pets were somehow entitled to more, to better.

Milton sometimes wrestled with the idea of trying to locate his father, whose identity was entirely unknown to him, but always decided that if they were destined to meet fate would make the appropriate introductions. He had developed a deep and unwavering belief in fate; solemnly convinced that there was a force far beyond his grasp at work controlling his destiny. Besides, there was another man in Milton’s history that he was more interested in finding – whoever it was that took his mother away from him.

One morning several months after Milton fled school an old man wearing a navy jacket with gold buttons and a crest on the pocket passed the phone booth in which Milton was working. The old man rapped on the glass then hooked a gnarled finger at Milton. After massaging the inside of his mouth with a busy tongue, the old fellow asked for directions to the nearest musical instrument repair shop.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you, sir,” Milton told him. “Fact is, I’m fairly new here myself.” Milton frequently peppered his speech with cheap verbal props like ‘fact is’ and ‘oh surely’ in order to give people the impression that he was not from New York, and therefore to be more readily trusted. “Anybody ever tell you you look like Joseph Kennedy?” The old man rolled his tongue around his mouth some more and said nothing. “Senior,” Milton added.

“Musical repairs is what I want, hear me? Not any Joseph P. Kennedys. Grandson’s oboe keys are dented! Problems slurring to the upper C-sharp and D natural ’cause the Philadelphia high D key’s shot. Musical repairs, musical repairs!”

“I’m in investments, sir,” Milton said, spying dandruff on the old man’s jacket. “Investments and pets.”

Disgusted at what he was about to do but unable to stop himself, Milton reached forward to brush away the dandruff flakes; the old man flinched in fear and began blinking rapidly. “Ark!” he said. “Ark!” Frothy spit appeared at the corners of his mouth and his pale grey eyes rolled up into his head before he crumpled to the ground as though every bone and ligament in his ancient, frail body had been suddenly whipped out of him. “Ark!”

Milton looked at the navy and pink-white spill at his feet and, as gold buttons caught the sunlight and shot stabbing fingers of light into his eyes, he fell to his knees and wondered if he knew CPR, and whether whatever was wrong with the old man might require CPR. It’s probably a heart-attack, Milton thought. He looked up and down the street and saw nobody. Or maybe epilepsy. Diabetes, perhaps. Could it be a stroke? The old man’s face began to turn less pink, more blue. Milton glanced up at the phone, thinking 911, started to stand then heard another “Ark!” from the ground, this one louder than the others, and immediately followed by a hard white gob which hit Milton’s cheek then fell to the pavement and cracked in two. The old man’s eyes opened as he sucked air and raised his thin right arm, spindly fingers fluttering as they reached for Milton’s sleeve. Milton took the man’s hand, wondering if he ought to pull him up to his feet, and remove him still further from death.

“Are you all right, sir?” Milton asked. The old man moved his mouth but no words formed, no sound emerged.

A woman with a dachshund appeared at Milton’s side. “Your father?” she said, as though the old man was not lying on the pavement almost dead. She was a good-looking woman, Milton noticed, handsome, with beautiful grey streaks in her otherwise black hair.

“What?” Milton said, sharper than he meant to. The old man’s hand squeezed a little, like a baby’s feeble grip.

“This fellow,” the woman said, snapping the dachshund’s leash. “He’s your father, isn’t he? Your grandfather?”

“No, he’s not. I don’t know him. Why are you even asking me?”

“Well he’s on the ground and you’re holding his hand, so I assumed…” The woman looked away uncomfortably. She had a lovely speaking voice, beautifully modulated and serene; what Milton recalled Salinger describing as a nice telephone voice. “I just assumed, that’s all.”

“He’s looking for a musical instrument repair store – or was, before he started choking. On a mint, I think.” Milton pointed to two white crescents with the toe of his shoe.

“Are you going to take him to hospital?” the woman asked. “Lenox Hill’s around the corner.”

“No. I think he’s all right now.” Milton bent down and raised his voice. “Are you all right, sir?” The man opened and closed his mouth. Milton saw spit strings inside. “Maybe he had a stroke. I should call nine-one-one.” Milton’s fingers were given another squeeze. He sighed. “Actually, would you mind doing it, ma’am? I don’t think he wants to let go of me.”

“This is Freddy.” The woman handed Milton her dog leash and fished around her in handbag, pulling out a cell phone which she looked at in disgust for no more than a mouth-curling second then slapped shut. “The battery’s expired,” she said, then stepped into the phone booth where Milton’s book of marks lay open; long lists of names, addresses, financial details and physical descriptions. He hoped that she would have the decorum not to pry too closely. Freddy stretched his leash and began sniffing the old man’s shoes.

Something stirred in Milton and he took a deep, ponderous breath; if the lady looked in his book there could be trouble. He wondered how he might deal with the situation, whether he could get physical with a woman, especially one who called a battery expired rather than dead, a fine entomological distinction which Milton found highly arousing. Maybe he’d just run. He had a dog in one hand and an old man in the other; he was excited and scared and enjoying it all immensely, and wondered if perhaps he was finally beginning to see hints and flickers of what life could be about. The buttons on the man’s jacket shuddered and send more splinters of sunlight up toward Milton. He closed his eyes.

“There’s an ambulance on its way.” The woman was at Milton’s side again. Somehow she’d taken Freddy’s leash back without Milton feeling it. “We’re to make him comfortable.”

“Comfortable? Comfortable how?”

She put a hand on the small of Milton’s back. “Perhaps you might remove your jacket and use it as a pillow for his head.” Milton did as she suggested. “He looks rather like Joseph Kennedy, doesn’t he?” she said.

“Sure enough,” Milton said. “Put a pair of those little round spectacles on him and he’s a dead ringer. Matter of fact I mentioned the resemblance before he collapsed. He wasn’t interested. Apparently there’s a busted oboe in urgent need of repair. I don’t see any oboe, though.”

The woman looked the other way, toward the sound of a distant siren. “It seems we have some mutual acquaintances,” she said, waving a hand toward the phone booth.

“Oh…” Milton’s heart began pounding as he squeezed the old man’s hand. “That a fact?”

“It is. Indeed my husband Randolph is on your list. I presume he’s there as some sort of target. I know several others who appear in your records, as well, and what’s interesting is that every one of them has recently been duped out of funds by a young man with a fascinating array of rather dubious but evidently irresistable offers.” She paused and looked Milton up and down; he was surprised that there was no scorn in either her warm tone or cool regard. “My name is Patricia Copeland, formerly Copeland-Welles,” the woman said. “The bad news for you is that my husband is dead.” She held out her hand. “The better news is I loathe his friends.”

Milton let go of the old man, stood up and took Patricia Copeland’s diamond-spattered hand in both of his.

Later that day seventeen-year-old Milton gratefully, and not altogether artlessly, gave up his virginity to fifty-three-year-old Patricia, who, after raking has back raw with her nails and her rocks, pronounced the experience “more than adequate but less than sublime”. She had, she explained, expected a few more surprises from someone so young. When Milton told her then that he was an orphan, Patricia said that while that was rather sad it had nothing whatsoever to do with sexual performance, and that in any case she, too, was, when it all boiled down, an orphan. Indeed she was in some ways even more alone than Milton, being a widow, an orphan and a mother to none. This last was not in any measure an unhappiness, she explained; for one thing it had kept her breasts full and firm, her belly taut and her purse, as she called her vagina, elastic. She took Milton’s hand, licked the middle three fingers and put it between her legs, where she was moist, hot and, indeed, elastic. Milton rolled onto his side, pressed his whole body against Patricia’s, breathed in the scents of lavender and powder, and began dreaming of sublime ways in which he might surprise both of them.

The most gratifying surprise, when the idea eventually came to Milton many months later, came in the form of a simple word; a word which he was forbidden to use in that particular manner outside the bedroom, and one that would spell Milton and Patricia’s undoing.

Of the thirteen rooms that comprised Patricia Copeland’s four-story brownstone on East 91st street, Milton’s favorite was the library on the uppermost floor, a perfectly circular room of dark wood paneling overlooking a small park. After a morning spent helping Milton bilk the late Randolph Welles’ friends out of portions of their fortunes, Patricia would leave the house with Freddy, and Milton would climb the stairs and spend hours combing the floor-to-ceiling shelves.

For the first few weeks he rarely removed a book from its place and did not read a single one, content enough sweeping his fingertips across the dark, quilted rows of cloth spines, or bringing his nose to the silent towers of noise and breathing in deeply. The ceiling of the room was twenty feet from the floorboards and there were, by necessity, two ladders that ran on tracks on opposite halves of the room, accessing almost the entirety of the library except for the curved, cushion-strewn bay window which looked out across the street onto the park. There was a large oak desk, a chaise-longue, a magnificent Chesterfield couch, a cabinet full of vintage cognacs and armagnacs, and a lunar globe made in 1966 upon which someone had circled the Sea of Tranquility in cobalt blue pencil.

It was a silent place – even with the windows open there was barely a hum from the street below, never the sounds of laughter or talk – and as Milton spent day after day on the Chesterfield reading, or lying in the window smoking and watching the world blur as winter descended, weeks dissolving into months, he came to see the library as his sanctuary. From what, he wasn’t entirely sure, but he loved the simple proximity to so much life and thought; so many portals to other worlds; the introductions to so many characters with whom he felt a tidal kinship. All of it – all of them – seemed to fill Milton with some elusive quality that made him gradually feel whole and, in a curious way, legitimate.

“You do spend an awful amount of time up there, darling. Why?” Patricia once asked.

“I’m catching up,” Milton replied. “With my people.”

“But they’re just books. I want you to spend more time with me, with real people.”

Milton told Patricia that he intended to, but that for now he was breathing in and holding his breath, preparing himself so that when he was ready he would exhale and the whole world would know that he had arrived.

Patricia almost always ate dinner early and at home; she hated to cook and had a chef come in and prepare meals three times a week, but no matter what culinary wonders the man concocted or suggested, Milton wanted nothing more than a mushroom sandwich and a glass of warm water which, more often than not, he left untouched, watching with distaste as the combination curled and cooled. After dinner Milton and Patricia would watch movies, mostly westerns and war movies, for which Patricia had an abiding fondness. “I like to see people getting what’s coming to them,” she said. “When the moral element, if there is one, is simple and clear.” After the movie, if it was clement outside, they took Freddy for a walk; if the weather was bad they stayed in and read – she, a newspaper or magazine; he, one of any number of books he was in the middle of.

“I’m surprised you don’t play bridge,” Milton told her, one Fall evening.

“Really? Why is that?”

“From what I’ve read, women of your age and disposition often play bridge.”

Patricia looked puzzled. “Just what sorts of things are you reading, Milton?” she asked.

“Fiction.”

“Only fiction?”

“Not only,” he said, mistaking Patricia’s meaning and feeling the briefest touch of recalescence toward her. “But exclusively fiction, yes.”

“There’s much more than that in the library, you know. Plenty more to discover.”

“Yes,” Milton said mildly. “I know.”

Patricia looked upward, as though through the ceiling she could see all the way up to the library, and perhaps beyond even that. She sighed. “Randolph’s dilettantism was boundless.”

Milton nodded and turned a page, confident that he was discovering all he needed to get by. Nevertheless it irked him that he still had not come across a way in which to surprise and delight his lover. His next book, he decided then, would be ‘Tropic of Cancer’.

Patricia usually tired of reading by ten o’clock, and while Milton could have sat where he was and paged through yet another novel until exhaustion froze him where he sat, Patricia very often simply plucked the book from Milton’s hands and led him upstairs to the bedroom.

Milton had been living and sleeping with Patricia for a little more than a year when one evening he lay with his mouth around her protuberant left nipple, trying to shake off thoughts of Ben Braddock (why was he such a ditherer?) when he had an uncontrollable urge to remove his mouth from Patricia’s tit and say something to her. The word alarmed him but he couldn’t let it go. He cupped her bosom with his hands and sucked harder. “Mmmm Milton, you wonderful boy,” she moaned. And it was in her last word, rather than the sound of her pleasure, that he found his boldness.

He ringed the halo of her areola with his tongue one last time before he raised his head, looked Patricia in the eye and said, “Ohhh Mother.” A moment passed before either knew quite what to make of the word. Milton looked away, stricken, unsure whether the woman he was languishing upon would laugh, whither in horror or slap him across the face. The moment grew and Milton knew that only seconds more could pass before things collapsed – literally and metaphorically. What Patricia did was smile with half her mouth before saying, “Why you kinky little bastard – get back inside me at once!”

And so it was that thereafter in bed, before they made love, while they made love and for a brief, salty period after they made love and lay entangled, he would call her ‘Mother’. “Oh Mother, I want you so much.” “Off with those panties, Mother!” “That’s it, suck my cock, Mother. Suck it dry.” The word put fire in Milton’s prick and opened Patricia’s purse. It was never Mom or Ma, and certainly not Mommy. Like many things uttered or expressed during lovemaking, Mother seemed perfectly appropriate at the time, but out of its proper and agreed upon context, it took on the chilly, sour aspect of shame, thus Patricia’s insistence that Milton never refer to her as Mother except in the hermetic sanctity of the bedroom. Mother. It was a fine word and served them both well, each in their own very particular manner: Milton regained one and Patricia became one.

One night while walking after dinner they found themselves passing the telephone booth where they’d met. “I wonder what ever happened to that old fellow,” Patricia said.

“What old fellow?” asked Milton.

“The man with the invisible broken oboe who brought us together. He brought us together, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Milton said, lighting a cigarette. “Good for him.”

Patricia stopped walking and de-snaked her arm from the crook of Milton’s elbow. “Do you think he died?”

“Why would he have died?”

“He was rather old, darling.” Milton loved Patricia’s teeth, the cracks and dark gaps. “Like me.”

“Are you old? You don’t seem old,” Milton said.

Patricia told Milton that he was a sweet boy.

“How did your husband die?” he asked, a short while later.

“He died a protracted and miserable death from lung cancer. Which is why I would very much like you to stop smoking.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean ‘why’?”

“Why should I stop smoking?”

“Well you’ll very likely live longer if you do.”

“I’m not sure about that.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You’re not going to tell me that you disbelieve the mountainous medical evidence.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. What I mean, Patricia.” He looked her in the eye. “Is that I don’t feel alive enough to die. Of anything.”

She tried to dismiss it as excitable young existentialism but the conversation had, nonetheless, unnerved her. The next day she removed from her library everything by Albert Camus.

The following week Milton began going to a local gymnasium, working freeweights, running, swimming and feeling himself take physical shape, thrilling in his bristling corporeality. His arms grew huge, his legs strong and fast, his midriff flat and hard as mahogany. After a few months Milton set up a home gym in Patricia’s dungeon-like basement, dividing his time between it and the library far above. Patricia took to the physical changes in Milton and made love to him with greater abandonment and pleasure than she’d ever previously known: she touched him as though he were God.

And so it went for many years, Milton’s life in that one city block almost entirely unbroken but for brief summer trips to Patricia’s house in Cape Cod, the occasional dinner at a restaurant for birthdays, at Christmas and, naturally, on Mother’s Day. While Milton was happy discovering the world by reading about it, more vivid contact arrived one afternoon each month. It was Patricia’s habit on the last Saturday afternoon of the month to invite a group of friends – new, old, sudden – to the house for lunch, and over the years Milton had met some unusual people – painters, writers, poets and publishers; dramaturges, dancers and divorced doctors – none of whose names or details he could recall immediately after they had left.

One summer afternoon Milton looked at the faces of the guests sitting around the table and tried to remember their names: the white beard was Otto something beginning with P that sounded European; Esther H-something was, as far as Milton could tell, a celebrity dentist from Holland. She wore clogs. The man at the far end of the long table was a financier whose name began with D; his much younger companion was called either Steven or Stephen who worked at Pratt & Whitney or the Whitney; on Patricia’s right was an African-American artist called Kara and on Pat’s left was Kara’s banker husband, whose name was…

Milton hated his memory’s willful absences and often considered taking notes about the guests but always abandoned the idea because he knew that any such covert scribbling would come across as pretentious and perhaps even a little sinister, rather than the simple practicality it was.

“But why do they call them ‘profit warnings’? Why the warning part? Surely they’re not something to be feared? Are they? Who would fear profits?”

“Enough Stefan, you’ve made your point and established your fiscal ignorance.”

“I only do it because I love to be publicly chided.”

“Kara, your show at the Guggenheim is Amazonian in its reach. Tangentially, did I see you lunching with M.B at 21 last week?”

“Yes, lunching and being groped by. How’s the store, Otto?”

“I fear I will not be issuing any profit warnings this quarter. Even longer until I am next groped.”

“Speaking of gropers, what’s the scoop on F.D.W, Thad?”

“He’s in negotiations about everything with everybody.”

“And his future?”

“Looks bright, but you can never tell with his type. Anyone remember L.Mac? Or T.J and S.O.N.Y?”

As the table enveloped itself in smug amusement, Milton turned to Patricia and, without thinking, said, “Who are all these acronyms, Mother?”

The laughter descended. Milton’s last word hung in the air long enough to be snatched by Stefan. Patricia froze. Stefan’s mouth curled; a moment later his lips parted. He pointed to Patricia, cocked his head sideways and said, “Mother?” Then shifted his slitted eyes to Milton. “Fucker?”

That was all there was. I liked it. I didn’t recall actually writing it, and exactly where many of these ideas came from I was uncertain (I didn’t know I knew anything about oboe keys, or was so richly Oedipal), but I liked it a lot. The source of inspired writing is, however, a mystery; I don’t know how I do it, and I sure as hell don’t know how somebody who’s actually good at it does it.

I thought it was such excellent material that I sorely wished I had waited before sending the manuscript excerpt to the publishers and agents the previous week. Sex – even pan-generational, semi-Oedipal stuff like this – is always a big seller. Of course, the events which followed would make me wish I’d waited even longer – somewhere in the realm of forever.

I was very interested in seeing what might happen to Milton next and spent the following few hours at my desk trying to find out by staring out the window and spying on Lutherans; by trying to channel Milton’s elusive spirit; by opening a dictionary and trying to incorporate into Milton’s immediate future whatever word my finger landed on (the word was word which seemed at first to allow for almost infinite possibilities but in fact offered none); by cracking my knuckles and pondering the sound they made (the snapping of fresh asparagus stalks) and letting my fingertips hover over the keyboard for an aching, near-breathless half hour as I waited for them to pounce and scrabble and give unrestricted life to Milton Sabian, whom, in my frustration, I was now beginning to hate.

Inspiration could not find me. It was as though Milton was out of my reach and his destiny was already somehow sealed; that the circumstances of his fate were at that moment, as Abe Lincoln might have put it, beyond my poor power to add or detract. I decided to get back to it the next day.

I left my apartment, stopped at a French bakery where I bought a madeleine, and then took a subway over to Brooklyn to see my friend Fraser Smith and see if he’d mind appearing in a manuscript of mine – again.

Introduction to Chapter Six

2009-02-16T18:31:00.001+11:00

Flashbacks can be a troubling element of any story, liable as they are to irritate, confuse and perhaps even lose an audience. Non-chronological diversions are too often considered a loose loop in the narrative tapestry, threatening to unravel and destroy the whole thing. I believe they ought not to be; flashbacks are simply memory. Our lives do not proceed relentlessly forward without our occasionally pausing for reflection on the people and events, the seemingly inconsequential decisions and forgotten moments, that have brought us to the present, and neither should any story that purports in a realistic fashion to apprehend the simmering chaos and meander of life. It is, therefore, with complete understanding of my own professional recklessness that I seek patience and understanding with this quite lengthy, but I think necessary, anamnesis.*

*If, however, you can’t be bothered or are afraid of becoming confused and would prefer to skip ahead to Chapter Seven, this is what happens in Chapter Six: I explain a little bit about how after my friend Fraser Smith left school he went to jail where he learned photography then got married to a parasomniac named Charlotte de Vere who inadvertently set me up with Harper Huntley who would cause me great trouble later on. There are other bits and pieces, including a mild sex scene, two deaths and an attempted suicide, but that’s the main gist of it. See you on page 79.

Chapter Six – 247,564 words

2009-02-16T18:30:00.001+11:00

It’s often said by people fond of spouting clichés that every picture tells a story. In the case of my friend Fraser Smith every picture he took told the same story, a lament. Throughout the wide, mostly irresponsible and innaccurate retelling by others of my life, Fraser’s role in it has mostly been ignored or glossed over, leaving only the sharp and shiny incidents, the twisted metal, the blood and the scars. But Fraser is much more – and much more important – than that: without him there would be no Charlotte, without Charlotte there would be no Harper, and without Harper, no short story, no suicide and no Milton Sabian. And without Milton, of course, the world would not have changed, and I would not be where am I today.

Fraser Smith became a car thief when, a couple of weeks into his first semester at MIT, somebody stole the ’74 Cutlass his father had given him when he’d graduated high school the previous year. It was raining on the afternoon he discovered his car was gone. He didn’t have bus money and for a while he had just stood in the drizzle, not knowing what to do until he became acutely aware that he was surrounded by hundreds of vehicles, most of them pieces of junk like his had been, but any one of which could get him home dryly and quickly. He picked up a rock and smashed the window of a Hyundai, unlocked it and sat in the driver’s seat wondering how to start the car. As a coddled, soft-handed young man who had gone to boarding school almost his entire life, whose familial home was a large white weatherboard in Darien, Connecticut that almost thrummed with domestic harmony, whose father made a very good living in insurance and loved, more than anything else in life, to catch bass; whose mother wore Tod’s loafers – always fawn – and sometimes wept after intercourse and referred to intercourse as ‘intercourse’; whose neighborhood friends were all named after colors, seasons or discontinued telephone exchanges (in the space of just one block there was a Grey, a Summer, two Springs and a Madison), Fraser had no idea about a lot of things in life, including stealing cars. He got out of the Hyundai, brushed the broken glass from the seat of his pants and then began walking home, drenched and ashamed of himself: he was, he thought, the squarest person he knew.

He was correct. Fraser was, in temperament, tone and lineage as well as meteorological and poetical inclination a typical New Englander (he enjoyed frost and worshiped Frost); he was fair-haired, fair-skinned, fair-minded, fairly short, thin as a whippet, carefully spoken, polite, well-mannered, intelligent, self-deprecating, honest and sincere. He was all these things, and all of them to a fault. By the time he left school few among the faculty and students at Woodland Hills liked Fraser, probably because they were all themselves too much like him, and saw in him a fine distillation of everything that they were and could ever be; he was their past, present and portent, and they resented what he represented.

I was Fraser’s diametric twin and, despite initially finding him intimidating and dull, his only real friend, perhaps because it is something of a narrative tradition for a popular boy (someone like me) to befriend an unpopular boy (someone like Fraser), the reasons for which have never been entirely clear to me. Whatever it was that drew us together, we were virtually inseparable during our last two years at school.

After graduation he enrolled at MIT, planning to major in political science the following year. The following year Fraser moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and began life as a car thief.

After a few days of research, conducted in libraries and the meanest streets available in Cambridge, Fraser had procured himself the necessary tools and learned that the key elements of successful car thievery were speed, elegance, preparation and invisibility, and he practised his technique in all four areas in auto graveyards where he could smash, wedge, wiggle and jostle without arousing suspicion.

At first, bored on weekends or at night after class, Fraser would use his new skills to boost some near-wreck then drive it around, de-squaring himself and getting to know the different personalities of the car owners; idling in traffic he would investigate glove compartments and back seats, looking for clues to the sort of person whose life he had disrupted. Perhaps this Chevy Impala with the bored muffler and the row of early 50’s pennant flags strung across the windscreen was the property of some former jock; a stethoscope looped over the rear-view mirror could mean a med-student or medical supply salesman; what to make of the basket of nine whimpering, piss-covered puppies he found one night, Fraser did not know but he immediately returned the car to the place he’d taken it from, cracked a couple of windows so the dogs could breathe and left a large sign on the dash that read: ‘Attention passersby!! There are 9 puppies in this car!! Call the SPCA!!’.

After a couple of months Fraser grew bored and frustrated with college, as well as with theft for its own sake. He gradually stopped attending classes and began stripping the cars he stole and selling the parts to chop shops that were lousy with snarling pitbulls. (His first visit resulted in thirty-two stitches in his left calf, as well as a rabies shot.) He enjoyed the work, he told me years later: it was, in its own way, good, honest labor because if he didn’t work, he didn’t make money. Soon he was stealing two or three cars a night, and it wasn’t long before he realized that there was probably more money in selling whole cars rather than just bits and pieces of them. Fraser was making a great deal of money but after a few months Cambridge and the outlying area was becoming dangerously carless. He started working in Boston where, after just ten days, he was caught beneath the steering column of a Cadillac by an off-duty detective in the long-term parking lot at Logan airport, and was sentenced to three to five years at Stony Brook Correctional Facility.

Fraser served seventeen deeply de-squaring months and got out with two more scars: the first one, neat, thin and long – like the closing pinch on a Ziploc bag – was the result of a razor blade slashed across his abdomen during a brawl in the dining room; the other looked like a bush taking root beneath the skin of his right inner thigh – seventy-seven sprawling stitches after an unspecified ‘accident’ in the prison laundry. Despite his injuries Fraser later occasionally wished he’d served a month or two longer because it while he was inside that he developed his interest and formidable skills in photography – the prison was well-supplied with photographic equipment and there were some gifted teachers among the inmates – and just as he was being released he felt he was ‘getting close to somewhere interesting’, and feared that his sudden freedom might be a fatal disruption and distraction.

“Of course, socially it was somewhat limited,” he told me on the phone from his folks’ house a few months after his release. Not that it had had much of a detrimental effect, he explained, because he was very much in love with the woman he’d hired to be his subject for a series of nude studies. Her name was Charlotte De Vere: in time, she would almost end Fraser’s and my friendship; and, in her own relationship with him, bring about his fame and fortune as well as his longest, deepest scars.

At that time I was a junior copywriter at an advertising agency, Cadwalader Cadwalader, Cadwalader & Flotch, and just beginning to take the temperature of my first novel, a page here and there a few times a week, a tepid effort in every way. I hadn’t seen Fraser in almost two years and was keen to catch up with him. At the end of the phone call he told me that he had some business to attend to in Manhattan the following week and we arranged to meet at a cafe in Soho on the day of his trip.

He arrived a half hour late with his forehead wrapped in a bandage, a spot of blood near his left temple. It was yet another in an endless seepage of hot summer days but Fraser was wearing a black suit and a white shirt without a tie, and against this bleakness his hazel eyes seemed paler and more flighty. His wavy red brown hair was slicked back with some sort of pomade and he’d grown a pencil-thin moustache. He looked eccentric, foppish.

He placed a large yellow envelope on the table, ordered a coffee and explained that he’d gotten into ‘a little trouble’ on the train from Connecticut and had to stop off at an emergency room near Penn Station for another twelve stitches.

“They’re these new type of braided polyester sutures,” he told me, his fingers absently brushing the spot where he’d most recently been closed up. He looked past me at the doorway, then up at the ceiling, then over toward a waitress. “We only had Dexon at Stony Brook, because most of the wounds going round were pretty deep, being intentional and everything. These new ones dissolve after about three months. The sutures, I mean, not the wounds.” He took a sip of his espresso, lit a cigarette and, for the first time since he’d sat down, looked me in the eye. “So, how are you, Michael?”

I looked away and told Fraser that I was fine, hating my job, and that I was spending some time at night working on a novel and-

“Why?” he said.

“Why what?”

“Why are you writing a novel? What do you want go and do something like that for?”

Nobody had asked me anything like that before and, up to that moment, I’d assumed that I would have been easily and immediately disposed toward an impassioned and eloquent reply to what seemed a very simple question. But I was quite wrong. After a while, during which I worried my own forehead might begin leaking blood or some other evidence of strained thought, I told Fraser that I wasn’t really sure why I was trying to write a novel.

“Then you should stop,” he said, grabbing my wrist. “You should quit right away and only come back to it when you’ve worked out why you’re doing it. When you know something about life.” I said nothing. “I’m serious,” Fraser said.

He needn’t have mentioned that he was serious – by then I’d reluctantly returned my eyes to his and I could tell that they were full of conviction. A mad conviction, I’d thought at the time, but one about which he’d have no argument. If any had been forthcoming, that is: all I said was, “Well, okay. I’ll consider giving up.”

“And there you’ve proved my point,” he announced, a slight trace of smugness creeping into his voice. “If you were really committed to writing your novel, you’d have punched me in the face.”*

*This is, in fact, exactly what I did in a scene based on this conversation which appeared in my novel. In that, ‘I’ gave ‘him’ a black eye the shape and color of an overripe plum.

“Well I guess I’m neither violent nor committed, Fraser,” I said, unaware of the fact that I was, in a way, lying. I changed the subject. “So what’re your plans for life on the outside? You going straight?”

He laughed and told me that he planned to continue with his photography and hopefully create work that would enlighten and edify; that he hoped to somehow transcend simple ideas of art and success by burying himself in his work, unconcerned with what it resulted in for he himself, only that it moved others. By now I’d become unsettled by his fervour (he’d banged the table with an open hand a couple of times; cutlery was jumping and other people had craned their necks in our direction) and in my spineless mildness I wanted only to get away from him.

Fraser wiped the corners of his mouth with a finger. He seemed, at that moment, exhausted. I ordered both of us another coffee but Fraser didn’t drink his. “I get weepy if I have too much caffeine,” he explained. “And I’m pretty close already.” Then he told me that his muse Charlotte was the most beautiful and wonderful person he’d ever met in his life and that as a matter of fact they were getting married down at City Hall in about an hour and it would really mean a lot to him to have me there so if I wasn’t doing anything else would I like to come along? It was a breathless rush of a sentence that perfectly matched his sudden leap into marriage.

As she stood on the wide concrete steps outside 1 Center Street, Charlotte de Vere was bathed in hard sunlight, holding a small bunch of red tulips. She was twenty-eight years old, slightly framed but not willowy or insubstantial; her dark hair was tied into a ponytail that bobbed above the brown skin between her shoulders, exposed in the crimson dress she was wore. Fraser handed me his yellow envelope then kissed Charlotte, for so long and so intensely out there in the daylight, both of them with their eyes closed, sighing quietly, that it was almost uncomfortable.

“You must be Michael,” she said, when Fraser finally let her go. Her voice was deep and her mouth curled a little in preparation of what she was about to say. “Fraser’s warned me about you.”

I laughed as Fraser clapped me on the back. “What kind of dirt could an ex-con have on a straight-up fella like me?” I said.

“He says you’re trouble,” Charlotte said. “But you look pretty harmless to me.”

“I am harmless, “ I said. “Almost perfectly.”

“You didn’t go to school with him,” Fraser said to Charlotte. “It was a new predicament every week.”

I didn’t deny it, and laughed, beginning to feel light-headed, swept up in the bouyance of Charlotte and Fraser’s enchantment with one another.

“You can’t trust Fraser,” Charlotte said. “He sees what he wants to see.” She asked him why he was wearing a bandage. He told her that he’d bumped his head on the train. She nodded, unconvinced, and I watched her ponytail bounce and tickle her neck. She took Fraser’s hand and led him toward the Municipal Building and said, “Shall we?”

The brief service was officiated by a small woman who peppered the introductory formalities with wry asides about Fraser’s bandaged head before standing he and Charlotte in front of a flag. I lingered at the side, trying not to stare at Charlotte – at her almost divinely perfect face, her large brown eyes, luminous and long-lashed, her elegant neck, the dark and creamy slice of cleavage that rose and dipped evenly as though she was in deep, dangerous sleep – while the celebrant took just moments to ask a few questions then pronounce my friend and his muse, husband and wife. When it was done, Charlotte kissed Fraser while I looked at the small woman, who winked at me when she caught my eye.

Mr and Mrs Smith and I left the building and went to a bar on Greene Street where I bought a bottle of the best champagne I could afford. Fraser presented Charlotte with a small package wrapped in Tiffany blue. Inside was a thin, rectangular brooch made of platinum and inset with horizontal rows of rubies, sapphires and diamonds; a custom-made tricolor in honor of Charlotte’s Dutch ancestry. It was a striking piece of jewelery, and from that day on she was never without it.

Before long, word had spread there were newlyweds in the bar and bottle after bottle of champagne was sent to our table by generous strangers who, like me, were caught up in the infectiously warm spirit that Fraser and Charlotte radiated on this happiest of days. In no time at all the three of us were drunk, raising our sparkling glasses to marriage and friendship and the endless possibilities that life seemed to offer. “To everything,” was our toast when finally we ran short of specifics. “To everyone.”

Around eleven o’clock I shook Fraser’s hand and quickly kissed Charlotte on the cheek then said goodbye, telling them to begin their honeymoon. As I weaved out the door into the New York nightblast Fraser caught up with me. “I want you to have this,” he said, handing me the yellow envelope once again. “To remember this day.” Suspecting what was inside, I tried to dissuade him from the gesture but he wouldn’t have it. “It would mean a lot to me if you’d take it, Mike.”

I accepted the envelope and went straight home to my apartment, wretched in my feelings of envy of my friend and tormented lust for his wife, of whom I now had a large black and white photograph, just in case I need reminding of her beauty. Mercifully, he had not given me one of the nudes; nevertheless the mere presence of the picture in my apartment was an unbearable distraction. Drunk and fucked up as I was, I took my typewriter from its drawer and dipped a sheet of paper into the roller then waited, but nothing came to me until much later that night. With the acrid fumes of curled and cindered photographic paper hanging in the air I began writing, finally with some idea of why: if it was not to right what I thought to be the wrongs in my life, then it was, I regret to say, to indulge in the folly of literary wish-fulfillment. I sat up until four in the morning creating a long, detailed erotic passage between someone very like myself and someone very like Charlotte.

The more I wrote, however, the more I enjoyed what was appearing before me, and over the next few months I plunged myself into the novel with greater enthusiasm and dedication that I’d ever known before. Incredibly painful as they were, the powerful and sustained headaches in the right hemisphere of my brain that I occasionally suffered as a result of my immersion seemed a small price to pay for inspiration and productivity, and I was only too happy to lose myself in work. It was precisely this sort of reckless plunge into unthought which, more than a decade later, would be my undoing.

Soon after they were married, Fraser and Charlotte moved into a loft in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. It was an enormous split-level space with a light-filled living area and kitchen downstairs; a darkroom, a bedroom and bathroom on the upper level. The white brushed walls were ideal for displaying pictures and photographs, however it would be years before a single image was hung, and then all at once there would be hundreds, each with an almost identical title.

Charlotte found work at the Epiphany Branch of the New York Public Library. “Every weekday I turn to the Dewey decimal system to help lend revelation,” she liked to say.

Fraser secured himself a Chelsea gallerist and continued to take pictures of his wife but seemed to have become exhausted or uninspired by her beauty and began going to elaborate lengths to disguise it. A portrait, in a series called ‘Season’s Greetings’, was typical of his approach. In it, the top of Charlotte’s head is made wide, as though she had been ripped from the birth canal by a pair of pliers then hung up by the ears until she’d dried and stiffened; her face is covered by numerous hard-haired moles, birthmarks and warts; her skin is grey and deeply pitted with acne-scars, giving the impression she grew up in the midst of an unending hailstorm; sitting above her forehead is a forlorn mop of lank, greasy, tightly-curled red hair; her rotted teeth are unspeakable, ready to wiggle and fall out; one of her eyes looks like a milky marble someone has poked into the socket; and the almost jawless point of her mouth is a small, sullen black hole out of which I could imagine nothing emerging other than bats and halitosis. While it struck me as the sort of thing that made Diane Arbus kill herself, both artist and subject found the picture amusingly provocative in its (rather obvious, I thought) challenging and confounding of conventional ideas of beauty, especially mine.

“I really don’t know why you’d want to misrepresent somebody like that,” I said to him when he showed it to me. “Especially somebody you love. It makes no sense.” Part of the reason I had such a poor reaction to the picture was because I was by then beginning to suspect that Fraser knew of my longing for his wife, and photographing her like that was his way of having a little pitying fun with me. Such a thought was outrageously egocentric of me, I realize, but in meagre defence I was in my early twenties, an age when a lot of under-developed people believe that the world revolves around them, and everything is filtered through the prism of the unceasing, exhausting self.

With the index finger of his left hand Fraser stroked both wings of his long thin moustache and said, “It’s still her.”

The three of us saw each other several times a week for dinner, movies and visits to galleries or museums, and the more I knew of Charlotte, the more perfect she became to me. Among the many estimable qualities Charlotte possessed was an almost saintly capacity for compassion, although looking back on the situation now, I think I may have mistaken compassion for pity, a common misreading, whether that person is a saint or not. Charlotte set me up on dates – with her friends and the occasional colleague – but none had worked out at all well. I was always anxious and uptight, yet garrulous and overconfident when it came to talking about myself and my ideas about life, which were painfully underdeveloped and consequently required lengthy monologues to articulate.

“I’m not actually in advertising,” I would explain, soon after moistly shaking the hand of whatever feckless woman had been set up with me. “I work at an advertising agency, but my heart’s really not in it. I’m working on a book. It’s the only way I can live with myself for being such a hypocrite. Not that I get paid very much or anything. I’m only a junior copywriter. Very junior. I mostly write catalogue copy… I’m sorry, what is it you do again?”

For all the word postures I struck, though, the truth was that I really quite liked my job. My boss was a genial alcoholic who disappeared in the middle of every afternoon and did not reappear until late the following morning. My art-director was a mild-mannered mid-westerner who most of the time did most of the thinking for both of us. I greatly appreciated his work, as did the agency, who gave us both regular salary increases. We had a terrific view of Times Square and every Friday evening we got hammered on the company dime at whatever bar was hip that week and had to be ‘researched’ by the forty-member creative group. More developmentally stunting than working at an undemanding, reasonably well-paid job was the fact that I was wholly unprepared to enter the world solely on my own terms – as anything, much less a novelist – and as long as I swaddled myself in the security of the corporate blanket I did not need to. I could relax and take my time with my novel; it would be a gently-gestating work borne of pure art rather than some misbegotten folly conceived in desperation and delivered by need. I was too young then to appreciate that desperation and need are themselves far superior directions from which to approach any work of art.

“What’s your book about?” asked a Columbia grad student whose name I’d forgotten five minutes after I sat down at her table and introduced myself. We’d arranged to meet one night at a restaurant that did not have a name; only a picture of a snarling yellow lemon chomping a cigar gave the place its identity. “Would I like it?”

“That depends... I said. She was a very pretty girl – pale skin, dark hair and green, intent eyes behind oval glasses – and I was determined not to screw things up with my usual combination of blather and bluff. For a small person she had a rather loud voice, however that didn’t bother me much because I loved her accent. She was from somewhere in Georgia, up in New York studying law or medicine or something equally mystifying to me. “What sort of books do you like…” A slight ache developed in my pause and it was clear that I did not know who she was.

“Harper!”

“I know your name,” I lied. “So what do you read, Harper?”

“I read all sorts.”

“And do you like everything you read?”

“Don’t patronize me, please. Of course I don’t. In fact, I find most of what I read utterly contemptible.” The way she said ‘utterly contemptible’ seemed to me straight out of Margaret Mitchell, and I nearly died of instant love.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be patronizing. Would you like a drink? A cocktail would be nice, don’t you think?” I was about to suggest a mint julep – and then get slapped across the face, probably – when a waiter placed two Rolling Rocks in front of us.

“I ordered these before. While you were busy telling me about your adjacency to advertising,” Harper said. She raised her bottle and very vaguely tilted her head at me, turning sidewards and narrowing her eyes. It was a look of equal measures coquettishness, comic suspicion and, I think, self-mockery. I smiled, clinked the neck of my bottle against hers and very nearly told Harper that I loved her. (I appreciate self-mockery; it’s in very short supply throughout most of the world.) But I said nothing, just stared.

“Are you familiar with the theory which has it that objects behave differently when they’re being observed? I believe it’s most often applied to atomic particles,” Harper said. “You’ve heard of that idea, Mr Sherwood?”

Mister – like we were at a cotillion, about to link arms and leap into a quadrille at any minute. “Yes, I have, Miss…” I paused.

“Huntley! Good lord, you’ve a memory like a sieve.” Harper Huntley shook her head in rueful despair. “I mention this theory because you seem to be scrutinizing me, and I’d not ordinarily act this way unless I was under scrutiny.”

“What are you like under normal circumstances?”

“I tend not to hold poses for so damned long.”

I laughed and lit a cigarette. Harper made a disapproving face and blew away the smoke I’d sent in her direction. “Do you think they enjoy being observed, the atoms?” she said. “Or do you think they’d rather be left alone to do what they do when nobody’s looking?”

“I think they probably do the same things,” I said. “Whirl around and whatever.”

Harper disagreed. “Oh, I don’t think so. I think they get up to all manner of mischief away from the microscope. Like the protagonists in books perhaps do. Don’t you ever wonder what Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy do when they’re not being watched? When nobody’s reading about them?”

“They’re probably in the sack the whole time. Then, if someone opens the book they jump out of bed and try to get dressed before the reader finds the page they were up to.”

Harper laughed. “I like Jane Austen.”

I said that I’d never read anything by her, declining to add my usual coda to such a remark – that I almost exclusively read contemporary American writers of the male persuasion – because I suddenly realized how idiotic it sounded, and was. “But I’m going to,” I said. “A writer should be open to all writers. At least once.”

“Golly. Even women?”

I’d already said “Sure” by the time I realized Harper – whom, it very suddenly occurred to me, was very probably named after the very female author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ – was kidding.

She finished her beer and waved cigarette smoke away from her nose. “Do you think men write differently from women?”

I did in fact think that men wrote very differently from women but I wasn’t sure how or why so I kept my mouth shut and tried not to look too nervous or stupid.

“Are your parents writers?”

“My father is, in a way, I guess. He writes movies.”

“Good ones?”

“There aren’t many good ones, Harper. Not anymore, anyway. A couple he wrote when he was younger were pretty good, though, I have to admit. He won two Oscars.”

“Golly,” she said, but it was hard to tell if she meant it. Generally speaking, people rarely mean it when they say golly; it’s a word with in-built sarcasm.

I looked around the bar and started fidgeting; I was beginning to hate almost everybody in the place, and I knew that I’d be next on my list. “Listen, you wanna get out of here and go do something?”

“What do you have in mind? Gambling? Dancing? Tennis?”

“Sure,” I said. “We could play some tennis if you’d like. I don’t know anywhere’s open this time of night, but we could certainly…” I slowed down when I saw that Harper’s eyes were closed and she was shaking her head. I was young, and back then women could make me behave awfully guilelessly; with Harper you’d think I’d just woken up and stepped off the bus carrying a cardboard suitcase. It may have been subconscious: I think I was under the impression that in a city like Manhattan, crawling with sharks and operators and gigolos as it is, a fellow who was a little underbaked might make a nice change for a certain type of girl, especially, perhaps, a girl from Georgia. “We could certainly do whatever you’d like.”

What Harper wanted to do was take a cab over to the Queensboro Bridge and ride the cable car. I don’t know why she wanted to do that – she may have been a little drunk; she may have just stepped off the bus herself – but I agreed immediately and we left the restaurant.

We were halfway between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island, swaying high above the oily blackness of the East River when Harper asked me again what my novel was about. I told her it was a coming of age story, somewhat autobiographical, and she asked me whether I thought the autobiographical angle was a good idea.

“Probably not,” I told her, looking down at the water far below, shimmering like funereal satin. I pulled my gaze from the window when I feared I might fall through, down into the black. “But at this stage it’s the only idea I’ve got.”

“You should get some more.”

“They’re actually pretty hard to come by. Good ones, anyway.”

She nodded. “Are there any robots in it?”

“Oh certainly,” I said. “A book is nothing without robots.” I cracked the window and took a deep breath of cold river air. “Listen Harper, I have to be honest, I’m really not concentrating on this conversation because I’m thinking a lot about leaning over and planting one on you, but I don’t want to upset you and get slapped across the face or anything. So we either have to get that out of the way or change the subject or maybe go play tennis or something.”

“All right, Mr Sherwood,” Harper said. “Go ahead and try it.”

I took one last look down at the river then went ahead and tried it.

I’m not entirely sure why Harper slept with me that night; I’d like to think it was because I was breathlessly charming (but considering what Judy told me in no uncertain terms about that sort of behavior some years later, it seems unlikely), however the truth is more likely that Harper was won over – or defeated – by a combination of alcohol, curiosity and fatigue. Whatever it was, I think she enjoyed herself, although I was in some doubt for a while because in between moaning and groaning with what sounded like deep and genuine pleasure, she continued to refer to me as ‘Mr Sherwood’. I felt like somebody’s father – not least of all my own.

I was woken by the telephone early the next morning; it was Charlotte, wanting to know what had happened the previous night. “Plenty,” I told her. Harper lay next to me, generously naked. I rubbed her arm with the backs of my fingers, brushing a hard nipple.

“I mean where the hell were you?” Charlotte said.

“Everywhere,” I said. “At that lemon restaurant then on the cable car to Roosevelt Island and then, y’know, other places.” I mouthed the word Charlotte to Harper and waved the phone at her. Harper smiled and winked then dove under the bedcovers.

“Well that must have been nice. But you had a date, remember?”

“Of course I remember, Charlotte. I went on it and it was great. What more do you want?”

Harper kissed the inside of my thigh. I tried not to make any noise.

“I want to know why I got a call from Hunter this morning asking me why you stood her up.”

“Who?”

“Hunter Holloway. Your date for last night.”

“Hunter Holloway?” I said. “Not Harper Huntley?”

“Who the hell’s Harper Huntley?”

“No-one,” I said. “A friend.” At that moment Harper Huntley was a friend with my hard-on halfway down her throat. “A good friend.”

“You went out with the wrong girl didn’t you, Michael?”

“In a manner of speaking.” I moaned as Harper worked harder and faster. “I’m sorry, Charlotte,” I panted.

“Don’t apologize to me. Call Hunter and apologize to her, you twerp.”

“I will.”

Charlotte hung up. I came. Harper swallowed. Hunter never heard from me.

A few days afterward Harper and I were having breakfast at a cafe when she began to tell me about what happened in Naples with her boyfriend. “You have a boyfriend!?” I exclaimed. (Unfortunately there’s no other word for it – I really did exclaim the sentence, showering the table with toast crumbs and outrage.)

“Pardon me,” she said, dabbing at the coffee-darkened corners of her mouth with a napkin. She seemed always to be attending to her mouth, ensuring that words emerged from it untainted; at the time I was thoroughly enchanted by it – as I was with much about Harper – although upon reflection it seems rather prim. “My ex-boyfriend.”*

*In a few months’ time her ex-boyfriend would come between Harper and me; however his intrusion was rather unusual given that he was, by then, dead, having hanged himself in a Neapolitan jail.

“How ex?” I asked.

“Six months.” She looked at me hard through her glasses, her green eyes narrowing. There wasn’t a trace of self-mockery in them as she said, “Is it all right that I existed before last week?”

I lit a cigarette and said, “Don’t be cute.”

“We’ve known each other a matter of days, don’t you be so possessive, Sherwood. It’s sorely unattractive. As is your smoking.”

I stubbed the cigarette and breathed out an apology. “All right, point taken. So what happened in Naples?”

Harper took a few gulps of Manhattan morning air then began her story, and I didn’t say a word until it was over. When she finished twenty minutes later, I said, “Jesus Christ. That’s amazing. Is is true? Really actually true?”

“Parts of it.”

“Which parts?”

“The important parts,” Harper Huntley said, then kissed me and left.

I wouldn’t see her for several years, and when we finally met once again it would be under almost unimaginably bizarre and unpleasant circumstances.

Over the next weeks I worked hard on turning what Harper had told me over breakfast into a short story. When it was published several months later in a small, prestigious literary magazine (which, by law, I am not allowed to mention) the response was astonishing; I was inundated with calls from agents offering their services, publishers offering me book deals and two producers on the west coast wanting to buy the film rights. It must have been a slow month in film and publishing because the story is, I know, not particularly good. (I’m being neither coy nor embarassed by not reprinting it here; complicated legalities involving Harper Huntley and the estate of her ex-boyfriend prevent me from doing so.)

On the night I signed my two-book deal with XXX & XXX I arranged to meet Fraser and Charlotte for a celebratory supper at Elaine’s restaurant. I arrived early and, to my surprise, was shown by Elaine herself – who evidently thought I was someone else – to a table in the main dining room. I sat with a glass of wine and scoped the underlit room. Dick Cavett was nearby, sitting with a group of bookish types, none of whom I recognized but each of whom was probably someone I’d read and probably admired. To this day I don’t know why I took Cavett’s companions to be authors – admirable or otherwise – however it may be because most of them were badly dressed and bearded, and carried with them an air of grave, forlorn disappointment which, in my youthful stupidity, I deeply admired and hoped one day would be the bleak miasma of my own creative soul.

Fraser and Charlotte were fifteen minutes late and both of them looked wan and sorrowful when they sat down; the inch-long scar on Fraser’s forehead seemed to throb. His right hand was heavily bandaged and I made a crack about his stitch-count being on the rise. He tried to laugh it off but I saw that there was more grimace than smile in his mouth. Charlotte made a noise that I only realized later was a choked sob rather than the cough I took it for at the time.

“So what happened this time?” I asked.

“With what?” Fraser said.

“With your hand.”

“Oh.” He looked at his mummified paw then back at me. “Nothing. Little accident.”

It was unusual for Fraser not to take some pride in a new injury, as well as in the recounting of how he’d sustained it, but I thought he was probably just tired and couldn’t work up the enthusiasm for sharing a story, something with which, as I struggled with my first novel, I was all too familiar. We were quiet for a moment before another ejaculation of laughter behind us broke the spell and Charlotte said, “So I see Dick Cavett’s still alive. Who knew?” After her second glass of red she ran her fingertip across the red, blue and white brooch pinned to the lapel of her coat and announced that she wanted Mr Cavett’s autograph and slipped away from our table.

Fraser let out a long breath. I asked him if everything was all right. “Everything’s fine, mostly,” he said. “But listen, don’t mention the bandage again, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Charlotte’s a parasomniac,” Fraser said. He turned and saw that everyone at Cavett’s table was now listening to her in beguiled silence. “Do you know what that is?”

“She can’t fall asleep in France?”

“It’s not funny, Michael.” Fraser rubbed the bandage on his hand. I said nothing. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Because of Charlotte.”

“You’re worried about her?”

“No, not really. I mean, I am, but that’s not it exactly.”

“So what is it?”

“Among other things, she sometimes beats the crap out of me while she’s asleep.” Fraser turned and looked behind again. Charlotte got up, shook hands with Cavett and headed back toward us, clutching an ink-scrawled napkin. “We’ll talk about it another time,” Fraser said.

At midnight we toasted my good fortune, little knowing that what seemed like the beginning of something wonderful and exciting was, in fact, the first step toward the Fall.

A couple of times each month, triggered by arousals from a deep sleep, Charlotte would partially awake and rearrange bookshelves or blow-dry her hair or sit upright in bed and howl in fear as she fended off an attack from someone only she could see. Sometimes she shoved Fraser out of bed, pummeled him with her fists while screaming, or lectured him in torrents of babble. She had been suffering from the disorder since her early twenties and, in fact, had walked in her sleep the first time she and Fraser spent a night together. Naturally, he was alarmed by these behaviors, sometimes frightened, but he’d eventually grown used to them. They were, he said, essential now to the way he viewed his wife; her night terrors were part of the darker reaches of her psyche that made her human. Charlotte herself was livid with embarrassment at what she called her ‘humanity’ and had sought all manner of treatment for her condition.

Around the time of our dinner at Elaine’s things had begun to worsen worsen, and the incidents had increased to three or four nights each week. The cut on Fraser’s hand had required twelve stitches in an emergency room, the result of Charlotte slashing him with a bread knife until he awoke and, in turn woke her. When she saw the knife in her hand and her bleeding husband, she fainted. A week or so later, after she began growling and biting him, Fraser took to the couch. But the sounds of his wife’s horrified screaming as she fought with her demons always sent him racing into the bedroom to Charlotte’s side, wrapping his arms around her as he brought her back from the stygian sludge of sleep with hard, loud kisses.

He didn’t mind the physicality of Charlotte’s attacks but the psychology behind the syndrome – or more pointedly, its particular symptoms – worried him a great deal. Why did his wife think that people, monsters, wanted to harm her? And why did she want to harm him?

There wasn’t a great deal that I could say to Fraser that might be of much comfort, and the truth was I quickly became fascinated by Charlotte’s condition, the idea that for her the unreal was very real; that there was no difference between what she believed and what actually was. I once asked him if he’d ever considered photographing his wife while she was in this state and he looked at me as though he wanted to strangle me. My question was innocent enough (although, I realize now, rather insensitive) and arose from the fledgling writer’s urge to use anything rich and deeply-felt from life; such inclination, I hardly need explain, is a mistake.

Fraser forbade me to talk about it with Charlotte and I never did; however, along with further, and increasingly explosive, sexual liaisons between the character based on her and the character based on me, Charlotte’s parasomnia crept into my novel.

The novel was hard work – laborious as it was to read, writing the thing was a torture of an altogether higher order, and not just because of the agonizing headaches I now frequently suffered as I worked (the debilitating attacks typically lasted around two hours, five or six times a day, in the right orbit of my brain, usually accompanied by unilateral rhinorrhea, conjunctival congestion, facial flushing, miosis and lacrimation) – but I plugged away, fuelled by a multitude of bleak impulses. I might, for example, walk into a bookstore and see new releases by hot young authors; books with titles like ‘Asian Chick with a Western Rack’ or ‘Until We Both Got Drunk I Found You Very Dull’ or ‘Christ Versus Warhol’, titles which it seemed to me more properly belonged in the realm of indie pop than literature. The very existence of these beautifully designed, prominently displayed and often glowingly reviewed books would enrage me, and my rage would inspire me. One short story, in a collection entitled ‘There Was Some Chopped Ham in the Potato Salad: My Wife Was Annoyed’ by Fred Dustin Waggoner, had quite an effect.

The story was called ‘The Time of Our Breakfast’ and it was about an unnamed seventeen-year-old boy, a punk rocker, who sleeps over at a friend’s house after going to a club one Friday night in Peoria in 1982. The friend’s black stepmother, a quiet woman who nods and smiles a great deal, perhaps because she does not speak English, brings them each two fried eggs for breakfast the next morning (“one of those dazzlebright Saturdays where you just knew that nobody in the whole state of Illinois could be bothered to slice a tomato with any care,” it is explained) and one of the eggs has a hair on it, a hair from the head of the stepmother. Almost the whole story is built upon the possible places that this curled black hair might have come from: Waggoner lists each country in Africa and the West Indies, as well as most of Central America and every state in Australia, then New Guinea, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and finally every Pacific Island he could find in an atlas, before concluding that “it [the hair] may even have been Ibizan.” I hated that story so much that it literally gave me stomach pain, especially the Ibizan line, which I am certain was included only because it sounded bouncy when read aloud. Which, at a store appearance a few days after I read the story, is what I heard Mr Waggoner do.

Waggoner was a heavyset fellow around my own age who wore spectacles and affected a kind of rumpled look and confused air, as though he were a don and everywhere he went was Oxford. He seemed to be trying to grow a beard – something wispy and rabbinical – and wore a tweed jacket from which, at any moment, I expected him to produce a pipe on which he’d proceed to puff wetly while telling stories about his great friendship with Tolkien.

There were about forty of us at the reading and when he’d finished we were invited to ask questions. I suppose there was too much literary awe going around because nobody raised a hand for at least a minute of heavy silence until I said, “Excuse me, Mr Waggoner, but it’s mostly Spanish people and tourists in Ibiza.”

Waggoner nodded, in agreement with the geographical and cultural facts.

I took a deep breath. “So, this woman with hair on the egg in ‘The Time of Our Breakfast’, it’s not all that likely that she would have been…” I had to say it and lisp it. “…Ibizan.”

Waggoner nodded again, even more sagely this time, rubbing at his gossamer beard, and told me that I might be missing the point of the reference. I said that it was pretty hard to miss a straightforward map reference. Some people turned, scowling and hissing at me.

“Do you have a question?” Waggoner asked.

“Why is the story set in Peoria?”

“It’s as good a place as any. Do you dislike Peoria? The Peorians?”

“No. And why nineteen eighty-two?”

“Why not nineteen eighty-two?” he said, prompting whistles of smug approval and a smatter of clapping from the audience.

I supposed I would be told that 1982 year was as good a year as any in which to set a short story and didn’t pursue it any further, but I did have one final question and couldn’t stop myself from asking it. “Where do you get your ideas from, Mr Waggoner?” Various moans and groans bubbled around me as though I’d disturbed a pond full of droll, clever frogs. “Specifically, where do you get the idea that a ‘dazzlebright’ Saturday makes it hard for people to carefully slice tomatoes?” The clever frogs turned to dismissive owls as I was booed. “I mean, what the hell is that supposed to actually mean?” The owls became hyenas and seals as, accompanied by laughter and applause, a couple of store security humps took me by the elbows and led me out of the store.

“Well what in God’s name did you expect?” my father asked me after I recounted the incident to him over the phone the following Sunday. “That people were gonna applaud you for your boldness? You behaved like a goddam ass, Michael.”

I told him that while of course I didn’t expect to be applauded for my behavior, I did expect some decent answers to some legitimate questions.

“Bah! Writing speaks for itself. The good stuff does, anyway.”

“Then why bother asking an author questions?”

“Are you going out of your way to irritate people these days?” My father snorted into the phone. “How’s the job?”

“It’s all right, I guess.”

“You’re writing for a living, you should be grateful.”

“It’s not writing, it’s copywriting.”

“It’s still words, for Christ’s sake. Which I’ve had enough of. Let’s talk numbers.”

He gave me the week’s results – three, and thirteen thousand after tax. “Way below average,” he said. “It’s been a difficult month.” Then he told me that he loved me and to grow up.

My own weakness for numbers meant that I measured the progress of my novel in amounts of words, rather than by ideas or development of themes and characterization or inspired writing. I’m not proud of the fact that my motivation to write came from cheap, nasty places within myself, but my inspiration – and my material – was a different matter altogether: I wrote what I wrote because I wanted it to be true.

About three and a half years after I began it, my book was finished. It was around three in the afternoon of January third, 1994, and moments after I placed the full stop at the end of the last line, I took a cab over to Brooklyn. Charlotte had flown to a clinic somewhere in the south that morning, once again in search of a cure for her blighted sleep, and I planned on taking Fraser out for a few drinks. I did not feel any great elation at having finished the book – almost the entire previous year had been spent slowly, painstakingly revising the thing – and if I felt anything at all through the redactive haze it was exhausted relief, as though I had survived a terrible illness. But I had finished; I had committed some 247,564 words to paper (far too many, in most people’s view, and not enough good ones in good enough order) and I wanted to celebrate the end of my ordeal, little knowing of course, that, like some ludicrous portent from a horror story, what I thought was the end was merely the beginning.

As I sat in the back of the cab on the way to Red Hook, I couldn’t help myself from hosting mental parties celebrating my imminent literary fame, languishing in the great amount of money and packs of adoring women I had naively believed were part of the bargain. By the time I reached Fraser’s loft I’d practically awarded myself the Pulitzer (and accepted it with a humility and grace that surprised even the fantasy version of myself) and I couldn’t wait to dramatically quit my job at the three Cadwaladers & Flotch. The news of the plane crash outside Winston-Salem crackling from the cab’s radio barely penetrated my daydreams.

I let myself in with the spare set of keys Fraser had given me. It was an ice-cold sunny day and the blinding light pouring into the loft and bouncing off the bare white walls brought tears to my eyes. I assumed Fraser was in his darkroom and I wandered upstairs where I heard a burbling. Water spilled from under the bathroom door. Inside I found Fraser unconscious in a tub overflowing with rust-colored plumes of dark red rising slowly from a long, deep slice in his left wrist. Between Fraser’s knees, on the bottom of the tub, was a scalpel. I was horrified by what I saw but, for reasons which would only become clear to me in a Las Vegas courtoom many years later, not really surprised. Over a decade would pass before I could admit to myself that it was my fault.

People sometimes describe time slowing to near standstill in situations like this one: I felt nothing like it. Despite a nauseating sense of déjà vu, I was calm and alert as I removed my shirt, ripped off a sleeve and tied it to Fraser’s arm above the elbow. Then I called 911 and, without shouting or hyperventilating, explained to the operator that my friend had lost a great deal of blood and needed an ambulance immediately. Back in the bathroom I tried to bring Fraser to consciousness by shaking him and calling his name but succeeded only in making him dimly repeat the word help. I wondered whether I should slap him, and only then, for the first time, let myself wonder why he had opened his wrist. And I wondered too, with a calm and eager forwardness of thought that shames me even now, what sort of tone to strike at the eulogy I would deliver at Fraser’s funeral if he died. Fraser Smith and I became true friends at boarding school when I split his forehead open with a discus…

I heard a siren and went downstairs, waiting by the door to buzz the ambulance crew in. I changed the opening line of Fraser’s eulogy – kicking off with a bloody wound seemed inappropriate given the circumstances of his death – and began wondering how soon after Fraser’s passing I could make a move on the widow. (Again, I am not proud of the way my mind worked back then, and am only marginally more comfortable with its machinations now.)

The word sounded slow and muddy, as though being dredged from darkness. I turned and looked up when I heard it: “Mighea?”

Fraser was standing outside the bathroom, naked and white but for the yellow tourniquet and a seeping of red that ran down his arm. He held the scalpel loosely in his right hand. “Migheal?” he said again.

“It’ll be all right Fraser. There are people on the way.” He looked down at me then slumped to the floor and began spastically slashing at his right wrist with the blade. “Stop it!” I shouted and bolted back upstairs.

When I reached him, Fraser said, “I can’t do it.” He looked at me and held the scalpel out on his open hand, as though it were a toy he wanted to share, then said, “Will you help me?”

Ten years later the walls of Fraser’s loft were covered with hundreds of his photographs, most of them black and white, a handful in drained color. The variety of subject and style was staggering: he shot landscapes, streetscapes, people, animals, abstracts, still lifes, weddings (whether he was asked to do so or not), portraits and elaborately staged representations of what he considered critical moments in twentieth century history. The only element of consistency in his work was found in the titles, which all followed the same template: a prosaic description of the subject then a date. ‘Sunlit Building: 10.44am January 3, 1994’. ‘Children in Playground: 10.44am January 3, 1994’. ‘German Panzers Entering Poland: 10.44am January 3, 1994’. None of these pictures was taken at that time, of course, but each one was a tribute to his wife, as well as lamentable testimony to Fraser’s life being, for almost all intents and purposes, frozen at 10.44am on January third, 1994. It was, in my opinion at least, a little deranged, but, as many people will already know, it sealed his artistic reputation and earned him a great fortune.

Earlier that day – January third, 1994 – Charlotte was killed, along with eighty-nine other people, in a plane crash somewhere outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina. After flying without incident for an hour and twelve minutes, as the plane was descending near Mount Leary at the edge of the Smoky Mountains, the co-pilot reported fire in the cockpit and a few minutes later the 737 disappeared from radar and radio contact. No trace of the plane or anyone on board had ever been found.

My novel was released about a year afterward, and Fraser, along with many others, had greatly disapproved of it, although his reasons were very different from most people’s. His distaste was even more understandable, given that in it an approximation of me was sleeping with an approximation of his wife. “You may as well have screwed her for real,” he said to me.

“But I didn’t, Fraser. It’s just fiction. It could have been worse, you know,” I replied, although in what particular way I wasn’t sure.

Fraser was. “The only way it could have been worse is if you were a better writer,” he told me.

I muttered something unconvincing about being only too well aware of my many failings as a writer but that at least I’d created something which, in some small way, helped keep Charlotte alive.

“Look Michael, let’s get one thing straight, your novel does not keep Charlotte alive. She’s alive in here,” he said, thumping his chest. “And in my memory.” He sighed; Fraser’s short bursts of anger always collapsed into despair. “I know you mean well, but writing, no matter how good or how deeply rooted in truth, it can’t compete with what I have. Charlotte was real, Michael. I touched her. She breathed. That Celeste character you created in your novel is just that – a character.”

Our friendship survived largely, I think, because neither of us really had anyone else we could call a friend. And – perhaps – because I’d saved his life: I could never be too sure about that because I was never certain that Fraser much enjoyed being alive after Charlotte was killed. He made no more attempts at suicide and did not spend years withdrawn in grief, but neither did he take much joy in things, not even his work, which he approached with dogged, resolute application, rather than any kind of artistic elevation, as though he worked in a factory. He was, it appeared to me, trying to hide from life.

I finished the last crumbs of the madeleine, got off the subway and slowly walked a half mile through the skeletal industrial landscape of south Brooklyn to Fraser’s building, our long, troubled history dragging my thoughts. It was bitterly cold. He buzzed me in and I climbed the smooth concrete stairs to his loft, still wondering whether I’d actually ask him the favor that had brought me over from Manhattan in the first place. Inside the apartment I looked at the memory-spatter adorning his walls and asked him if he’d hung anything new. He showed me some close-ups of horses’ mouths, teeth bared like spit-glistening piano keys, entitled ‘Mouths of Horses: 10.44am January 3, 1994’.

“They’re incredible,” I said, staring at the small black and white photographs. I wasn’t just saying the words; the pictures were beautiful, almost exultant. “Are you exhibiting any time soon?”

“I have a show up in Boston in a couple weeks,” Fraser said. “Your breath smells French.”

I explained that I’d eaten a madeleine on the way over and quickly mentioned that I was working on a new novel.

“Oh,” he said, and looked away uncomfortably. “What’s it about?”

“This guy who kills people, celebrities mostly.” I said nothing more but nodded approvingly.

“And?” Fraser said. “What else?”

“Well that’s about it. I might try to work in something about some ping-pong players, but-”

“Sounds a little thin.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It could do with some more meat on its bones. As a matter of fact that’s why I’m here, Fraser. I wanted to ask if I could put you, or someone like you, in the book.”

“Again?” He looked stricken, as though informed of a malignancy. “I can’t believe you’re even asking after what you did last time.”

I told him that I knew I’d done a poor job with the character based on him in the other book, but that I really believed I could come up with something decent this time round. “Something vivid and memorable,” I said making some vivid and memorable hand movements. “It’ll be exciting – you’ll join the great pantheon of memorable literary characters.”

“Not if you’re writing it, I won’t.”

“I’ve learned from my mistakes. I’ve gotten better,” I lied.

“Maybe so, but in any case I don’t want you using me – or anything like me – in any books.”

“All right,” I said, dismally. “I won’t.” This, too, was a lie, although I did not know it at the time. And in the end, of course, it would not matter.

Chapter Seven – h-a-d e-n-o-u-g-h b-y-e

2009-02-16T18:29:00.001+11:00

From the Los Angeles Times. 21/1/2007: ‘Amnesiotic Fluid?’

It looked set to be just another taping before a live studio audience, something that the six cast members and assorted crew had done countless times before during the ten-year run of their incredibly successful sitcom, ‘Neighbors’. But this episode – ‘Charlie and the Calisthenics Teacher’, as it was known – would be different. An excited audience of two hundred or so, some of whom had flown to Burbank from as far away as Idaho, were primed and ready to yuk it up at the wit and antics of Smith, Weinberger, McKnight et al. Things started as normal: after a warm up by comedian Pauly Shore the cast sauntered confidently on to the set to the usual wild applause.

And so to the opening sequence, a quick introductory scene-setter involving a misplaced beach ball, a baby and some suntan oil. So far, so good – long-time pros Felicia ‘Shelley’ Weinberger, Callie ‘Mona’ Smith and Jennifer ‘Susie’ Green effortlessly eliciting the required amount of chuckles. A short break, a new set, cameras readied, actors Matt McKnight (who, in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, plays Pete), Dave Coleman (Seymour) and Langford Cherry (Charlie) in position and… action! Well, not quite. This, in fact, is how it played:

Coleman/Seymour: Pete, it is simply not acceptable that you show up to a christening wearing a g-string.

McKnight/Pete: Aw, come on Sy. I’ll have pants as well. Pants are acceptable, right?

Coleman/Seymour: Dude, it’s the situation beneath the pants that bothers me.

McKnight/Pete: It’s a good situation down there. It’s a happy land. What kinda underwear you got on right now?

Coleman/Seymour: The kind from a land of cotton. (pause) Not from the tiny village of Spandex.

After a moment’s silence – and in the fine calibrations of Sitcom-Land, three seconds is an era – both actors turn to Cherry, who looks back at them open-mouthed and dull-eyed. McKnight breaks out of character and addresses Cherry. “You wanna go again from the top, Lang?”

“I… I… can’t find him.”

“Who?”

“Charlie.”

McKnight appears confused. “What?”

Under the impression that this is a wacky turn of plot involving Cherry’s character, Charlie Bright, the audience laughs – big.

Under the impression that Cherry is horsing around, Coleman laughs – nervously.

Director Gary Halvorson orders another take. Coleman and McKnight loosen up, take a couple of deep breaths and return to their marks. Cameras are put back into first position.

“Seriously, Gary. I’ve got nothing,” says Cherry.

Halvorson offers some assistance. “The line is-”

“I know the goddam f***ing line. What I don’t know is how to say it!”

“Say it funny!” prompts an audience member who, at Cherry’s request, is immediately removed.

Taping is suspended, Mr Shore is wheeled out once again to entertain the disgruntled hundreds, and Mr Cherry repairs to his dressing room where he explains to the gathered clucking brood of fellow cast-members, producers and the director, that he is coming up dry, that he can’t “find” Charlie.

“I swear to God,” Cherry says, the merest hint of tears appearing in his eyes, “It’s like… it’s like he’s dead.” Mr Cherry then keens, “I swear it’s got something to do with that a**hole hitting me on Saturday night. He is so sued!” (As of press time it is not known to whom Cherry was referring.)

For further developments in the curious case of Lang’s missing muse keep an eye on this space – or the obituaries.

Writing depressed me, often to the point where I wanted to weep. Not all writing made me feel that way, of course, just my own. And I felt like that – tantamount to tears – because my writing was, at the risk of stating the obvious, pretty poor. At its very worst, it has been described as sinful.

With that in mind, I suppose that this is as good a point as any to mention that this account has been rendered with the very occasional assistance of a ghost-writer. Donald & Drake, the publishers of this book, pleaded with me to take this course because I was, in their words, “an indispensable element of an amazing story of incredible historical and social importance but, ironically, technically ill-equipped to tell it”. My editor, Morrison Leeves, gave me a long list of writers for hire, as well as samples of their work, and I was charged with the mission of finding someone to ‘assist’ me with telling my own story, to type that which I, for obvious reasons, frequently had to dictate. The books I read by these literary workhorses ranged from awful to hideous, and, while having to subject myself to such slop was arduous and at times painful, I was pleased with Leeves’s selections because it was important to me and my fragile self-esteem that my collaborator was a worse writer than me. Despite the immensely poor quality of authorship on display, such a person was not easy to find; I needed someone lazy, pliable and intellectually feeble; a ham-fisted troweler of words whose style (or preferably lack of it) would not encroach upon or attempt to compensate for my own glaring absences of wisdom and finesse.

In the end, for reasons which (perhaps mercifully) elude me now, I chose an unusually-named Canadian author of several unremarkable travelogues and a whiny, undistinguished novel. His name, should it not appear in small print, somewhere below my own, on the jacket of this book, haunting the words with or and, is Sonance Poundal. Toward the end of 2007, he and I worked together for nine or ten months before he suddenly quit, claiming that working on this project was “too dismal and soul-withering, even for someone as bad at writing as me” (meaning him).

A couple of days after Fraser asked me to leave him out of my manuscript – on the same day Langford Cherry found that Charlie Bright was missing in action – I woke early, feeling fresh and clean. There was a tightness to my skin that I found oddly encouraging; the weather was fine and I’d done all the things I could do before I had no choice but to turn on the computer and face my manuscript once more. These evasive tactics included calling Judy and leaving a message about my suitcase, drinking three cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes while scouring a pile of newspapers and magazines for vicious reviews of books not written by me, while carefully avoiding favorable reviews of books which were also not written by me.

I paced the apartment and began once again wondering what to do with Milton goddam Sabian, almost wishing that I’d never invented him (yes, I know – the irony). I’d done too much work to go back and excise him from the manuscript completely – it would have been like removing Jesus from the Bible, leaving behind nothing but a bunch of unhealed lepers, unwalked-upon water, and 5000 hungry people hanging around the sea of Galilee; there would be no betrayal, no crucifixion, no resurrection and, above all, no point – but the idea of dealing with Milton dried my brain and made my fingers limp. He was shaping up as altogether too strange and I knew from the bitter experience of my first book that constructing a story around an unsympathetic principal character was at best risky, at worst fatal; most readers, it seemed to me, wanted someone ideal rather than someone real.

I was standing behind the desk in my book-strewn office, staring at Fraser’s picture of a pair of shoes, when I had an idea that intrigued me. I sat down at the keyboard with an enthusiasm for the book I hadn’t felt in weeks, possibly ever: no longer was the idea of working on my manuscript like looking into Satan’s behind. With a positively swelling heart I decided that Milton had made his presence sufficiently felt and now it was time for him to die.

I added these words to the manuscript: Somehow – not laughably – Milton Sabian dies. And soon!

How he’d die I would determine over lunch. I went out and bought a chicken sandwich and sat on a park bench trying to think of ways to kill off Milton. Cancer was too slow, an aneurism unsatisfyingly swift. Falling off a cliff involved the tedious process of getting him on top of a cliff in the first place. Unlike his creator, Milton was too young and healthy for a heart-attack. Unless drugs were somehow involved. One too many lines of cocaine, perhaps. I could plant the seeds of addiction earlier in the manuscript and buy him a one-way ticket on White Powder Airlines. Except for the White Powder Airlines bit, which was a little too pastichey, I liked it; it felt right. I fed what remained of my sandwich to a squirrel then went back home to kill my main character.

At first I thought that there must have been an electrical power surge or some other disruption while I’d been out because the death note I’d appended to the manuscript was gone. I retyped an approximation of it – Sabian dies shortly, probably of a drug overdose – and sat back and saw how it looked. An idea rattling around in your head is one thing; as soon as it’s committed to paper or screen, however, it takes on more life, more substance. I’ve always found it helpful to take some time and examine a thought once it’s been removed from the dimness of my brain and introduced to the light of the world, and I was doing precisely that when my telephone rang.

“Hello Michael, it’s me,” my ex-wife said. “Listen, where were you last night?”

“Is this about my suitcase, Judy?”

“No, it’s about where you were last night. And for Christ’s sake, stop calling me Judy!”

“All right,” I said. “Why do you care where I was last night? For that matter, where were you when I called this morning? It must have been five-thirty a.m in L.A.”

“I was at a crime scene. I’m only going to ask you once more, Michael. Where were you last night?”

“Here.”

“Alone?”

“Take a guess.”

She sighed.

“What were you doing at a crime scene anyway, Ju-…, ma’am? You join the Bureau again?”

“No, it’s a private job.”

“Anything I should know about?”

“I certainly fucking hope not.” She hung up.

In our long history of terse, brutal conversations this was about the tersest and most brutal. It aroused me so much that I almost went and took a cold shower, but instead I loped hornily back to my desk. When I sat down and looked at my computer screen my dick shrank instantly anyway. Below the words Sabian dies shortly, probably of a drug overdose was this:

No, he does not.

It sounds foolish now but I couldn’t help spinning in my chair and looking around the room for the person who’d added the sentence. There was, of course, no-one. I sat for a moment, staring at the screen in heart-thudding, dick-shrunken fear. I lit the last cigarette in the pack and, with shaking fingers, deleted the new line. And the line before it, granting Milton a reprieve while I wondered what might have happened. Had I blacked out and, in some sort of parasomniacal state, auto-typed the line? Was there a ghost in my machine? Some text-generating tic? Could there possibly have been an infinite number of tiny monkeys inside my computer typing infinite combinations of words until…

I took a deep breath and held it as I leaped from my study into my livingroom, assuming a karate attack stance. (Judd Nelson plays the scene for big comedic effect in the telemovie, but the reality was more laughable than laugh-inducing.) There was no-one to chop or kick and I felt ridiculous. After checking the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, I went back to my desk. These were just words and there was no reason to be frightened of mere words, whoever was responsible for them. Nevertheless , I was panting heavily and the veins on the backs of my hands were raised and pulsating, as though there were living things inside me.

I scrolled back to where I’d last encountered Milton, to what I remembered as being the end of the manuscript, where he’d just accidentally referred to his lover Patricia as ‘Mother’, thereby ending their relationship. Things had changed, had become so developed – apparently without my conscious assistance or involvement – that I was forced to wonder if lurking somewhere inside me was an entirely different writer who liked to work in such solitude that not even I was aware of it. Something sinister and supraliminal was going on: Milton Sabian had been busy…

(Because a recent Time/CNN news poll concluded that 93% of the population was aware of Milton Sabian [I rated a disappointing and, I suppose, somewhat ironic 31%] I will precis the relevant information before returning to the manuscript as it was on the day in question.)

After losing another mother Milton decides that he needs to breathe big air. He leaves the fumes and corridors of New York City and hitches west. Just outside Hannibal, Missouri, where Milton has been visiting the Mark Twain museum, he is picked up by a traveling salesman. Lucius Battle sells orthopaedic shoes; he is a corpulent fellow in his fifties who, before he speaks, licks his fat purple lips as though he is delighted with what he is about to say and is giving himself a little taste of what’s to come before it oozes out of his constantly running mouth. Unprompted, Lucius explains to Milton that he is not married “but not fruity, so don’t get any ideas, even though I don’t have a problem if you’re a fruit yourself”, that he reads voraciously, that he has never flown in an airplane because he is sure that one day everybody will realize that airplanes cannot possibly fly and when that happens they’ll all drop out of the sky and he sure as shit doesn’t want to be in one at that precise, catastrophic moment; that he likes pie, especially Key Lime pie, and tries to eat a piece of pie with each meal, sometimes even breakfast. “It’s pie that’s created the old baby-house, here,” Lucius says, patting his huge gut.

Milton sits and listens to the babble, neither interested nor particularly bored, looking out the window and watching America pass by. He enjoys traveling, seeing the places and things which he has only read about in novels take on shape and form before his eyes. When they stop at a Denny’s to eat, Lucius wolfs a burger, two portions of fries, a milkshake and a piece of blueberry pie, since they’re out of Key Lime. Milton orders a glass of warm water and a mushroom sandwich. Three times Lucius suggests that Milton finish his meal with a piece of pie and three times Milton explains that he doesn’t want any pie. If this swollen buffoon asks me again, Milton thinks, I’ll… But he doesn’t know what he’ll do. When the check comes the fat man whips out his wallet and, after reiterating that he “ain’t fruit”, pays for both meals. “I can expense it,” he says, tapping the side of his nose and making a clicking sound.

Back on the road, Lucius and Milton get along fine for the next three or four hours before the salesman’s tongue flits at the white-caked corners of his mouth and then says something about an obscure book character named Harry Pennyspender that Milton takes great exception to. Specifically, Lucius claims that this Harry Pennyspender, from a novel called ‘16mm’, is “a loser who doesn’t deserve the paper he’s written on”. Then Lucius laughs, throwing his head back and opening his mouth to reveal a set of choppers the color of rotted oak. His mirth leaves the fat man red, breathless, teary. “Lighten up,” he tells Milton. “Why do you give two shits about that stupid fart, anyway?” Milton doesn’t bother explaining that he feels an affinity bordering on brotherhood with the “stupid fart” and instead asks Lucius Battle to pull over for a moment then strangles the oaf with his own tie.

A few days later Milton is sitting in a dark corner of a dreary, underlit bar in Flagstaff, Arizona thinking about the man – the phantom – who murdered his sweet, beloved mother. He is so consumed with hatred for the killer that when he hunts him down, Milton plans not only to kill him, but eat him as well. Perhaps the former before the latter.

He immerses himself still deeper inside his creamy, homicidal swirl, thinking about the sweet strangulation of Lucious Battle, then wondering if the fat man was ever really there, or whether perhaps he was merely ignis fatuus; a vivid, irritating character from a book Milton once read.

It would not be the first time such a thing has happened. Milton is almost sure, for example, that he gave directions to a motel to Humbert Humbert and Lolita when they were stalled at an intersection in Steubenville, Ohio (Lolita, Milton was convinced for days afterward, had slyly winked at him; a moment of cycloptic loveliness that corresponded almost divinely with his heart literally missing a beat); that in a ghostly laundromat somewhere in New Mexico he bummed a cigarette off a hopped-up Dean Moriarty; that he saw Billy Pilgrim being arrested for public nuisance in Iowa City.

At the same time, of course, Milton knows that he had to have been imagining all these encounters because creations like Lolita and Dean and Billy do not really live, except on the page, and only then, when someone is reading them.

The night before he reaches Los Angeles, Milton takes a room in a flophouse in a dried out husk of a town called Yermo in the Mojave desert. The room is a damp roachbucket with peeling wallpaper faded to the color of artificial limb plastic. In the corner is a soft, filthy iron bed that looks like it has been slept in by mephitic horses. Lurking and gurgling down the hall there is a toilet that Milton refuses to enter.

“This room you’ve given me, are there any others more suitable for human habitation?” Milton asks the proprietor, a sour-mouthed woman in her forties, sitting behind a small wooden desk in the office downstairs. She has on some sort of loose nightdress that makes her body appear shapeless and indistinct. A sign behind her reads: ‘Yermo Vista-View Motor Hotel.’

“I toldja when you registered, you’re getting the weekend rate,” the woman says, not looking up from the jumble word puzzle she’s doing with a green pencil. “What more do you want, fella?”

“Do you have any others?”

“We’re fully booked right through the weekend.”

“But it’s Thursday, isn’t it?”

“Weekend starts early ‘round here,” she says. “Is ‘flotch’ a word?”

“No. Would you sleep in that room you’ve given me?”

“I have a house. I sleep there.”

“Can I sleep at your house?”

“Oh, sure.” She looks up over her glasses, her eyes rheumy and suspicious. “I don’t think. What exactly are you getting at, mister?”

Milton tells her that he’s not ‘getting at’ anything, just that he doesn’t want to stay in the room she’s given him, and that it’s not about the money, he’ll happily pay for something better. “If that’s all you have I’d rather sleep outside.”

“It’s raining out. Raining buckets.”

“That’s why I’m not sleeping out there.”

“Might get hit by a bucket, huh?”

Milton tries to smile at the woman’s feeble humor but he can tell by the look on her face that whatever he’s doing with his mouth is not coming out right; she looks as though she is dealing with an overgrown, retarded child carrying a hammer. “I’m not going to hurt you,” Milton says.

“I know you’re not,” the woman snorts scornfully. She opens a drawer, removes a gun and looks him up and down. “Nice outfit,” she says. Then mutters, “I don’t think.”

“Thank you,” Milton says mildly, brushing the sleeve of his colorful jacket. “What about that gun?”

“What about it what?”

“Well, for one thing it’s hard to ignore.”

“I don’t want you to ignore it.”

“Okay. But now that I’ve noted it, would you mind putting it back in the drawer? It makes me kind of–”

“Nervous?”

“Yes.” Milton is surprised to find that nervous is indeed how he feels, and that it might in fact be the first time in his life he’s felt that way about anything. There had been something similar when he’d fought with Tad Halford years ago, but it wasn’t quite the same; what he’d felt back then was panic and an urge toward self-protection, but it had seemed distilled somehow or borrowed from another source. Standing before the woman now, Milton realizes that he doesn’t want to die, and the realization, banal as it is, elates him, filling him with a more whole sense of himself than he’s ever experienced before. “That’s right!” He smiles again and the woman pulls back the hammer of the gun.

“Just keep your distance, mister.”

“You’re not going to shoot me.”

“Oh really? Why not?”

“Because by the time I finish this sentence…” Milton moves quickly, leaping over the desk, breaking the woman’s gun-toting wrist as he pins it to the desktop; she gasps in pain as he takes the revolver and places it against the woman’s temple and pulls the trigger, spattering her don’t-thinking brains all over the office wall. “... you’ll be dead.”

He wipes the gun clean and puts it in the dead woman’s hand. In her other hand is the pencil, which Milton considers for a moment. He chuckles woodenly and opens a fresh jumble puzzle page, connecting letters to form a succinct suicide note in green: h-a-d e-n-o-u-g-h b-y-e

Later that night standing in the rain on US 15, a week before his twenty-fifth birthday, his thumb hooked toward Los Angeles, Milton resolves to stop killing people so impulsively and to quit smoking. It will be hard, he reasons of each commitment, but probably worth it.

That’s the end of my precis of Milton’s activities; what follows is the manuscript of ‘The (Something) Burlesque’ as I read it on January 21, 2007.

Probably.

Despite the things he’d heard from Patricia and what he’d read in Chandler and Fante, Milton found Los Angeles a highly agreeable place. He loved its immensity and its scale; here, he believed, was enormous potential for a person to find what he was really made of. If anything, he added, for that was the key ingredient: a person had to be made of something. He’d reached the conclusion that too many people in this world, and especially in this city, weren’t made of much at all: pathetic simpletons and straw-people, most of them, who believed that merely hoping for something better or different somehow earned them the right to it. Milton knew otherwise; he knew that hope was one thing, action quite another.

He made no attempts to befriend anybody and nobody much bothered him. He lived comfortably in a large, airy West Hollywood apartment in a horseshoe-shaped block with a swimming pool in the centre. He had plenty of money as a result of his Manhattan scamming; he spent mornings sculpting himself at a nearby gym and in the afternoons lay dozing by the pool.

Milton was often tired; sleep, when he could manage something like it, was a bleak emptiness from which he emerged feeling raw and sorrowful. Sleep was like death for him, a terrifying, unknowable darkness. He believed he never dreamed, or that if he did, he dreamed so deeply that the secrets of his subconscious were lost to him as soon as he opened his eyes, relieved – and sometimes even surprised – to find himself still alive.

One afternoon another of the residents, a shirtless man with long curls and a toolbelt slung around his lean waist, lying a couple of deckchairs away asked Milton what he did for a living that allowed him to spend week after week in the sun. “I don’t mean to be rude,” the man added. “You don’t have to answer.”

When Milton explained that he was retired, the man laughed. “Lucky you.”

When Milton explained further that he was retired from the business of smoking cigarettes and arbitrarily killing people, the guy slapped his thigh in delight. “You’re a riot!” he said.

“Yes,” Milton said. “I am. I am a riot.”

“Seriously, you looking to get into the industry?” The man sat up and turned toward Milton. Milton asked which industry. The man repeated that Milton was a riot then saw the blank expression on Milton’s face and said the entertainment industry. “Only I can help, if you’re interested. I work in the art department at NBC and we’re hiring for ‘Neighbors’. My name’s Bob.” Bob leaned across the deckchairs with his hand out and said, “Bob Larson. What’s arbitrarily?”

A few days later Milton was shown around the NBC TV art department by Bob, and introduced as Morton Fabian, the name he’d used when introducing himself to Bob by the pool. “This is Mort Fabian. He’s a riot!” Bob told everyone. Milton tried not to disappoint his new colleagues and maintained his reputation for riotousness by agreeing with just about everything anybody said about anything. This ensured that he was well-liked by the entire cast and crew, except one member – Langford Cherry. For reasons of his own, Langford Cherry loathed Milton and made no secret of it.

“What’s the deal with the fuckin’ new guy and all the cooze?” Cherry said one day during lunch break, when Milton was sitting a table surrounded by women. “He everybody’s gay best friend or what?”

Milton, his back to the star, leaned into the group and quietly said something. Cherry strode up and demanded to know what Milton had whispered. “I said that with an attitude like that it’s a wonder anyone ever popped Langford’s cherry.” There was another eruption of laughter.

“You think that’s funny?” Cherry said.

“Sort of,” Milton said. “At least I didn’t have somebody write it for me.”

“You are so fired!”

“Oh,” Milton said, the word sucked down toward the table as each woman gasped. “Okay.”

Sensing either union trouble or a decline in his own popularity, the actor acted; he smiled quickly and said, “Just kidding.” Then he thrust his hand at Milton. “How are you? Lang Cherry.”

“Fine, thank you,” Milton said.

“Great,” Cherry said, the chummy grin still fixed on his face. “Nice to meet you. Enjoy your break.” He walked away and called for his assistant Missy, asking where she’d booked for lunch.

That afternoon, around six o’clock, Milton was walking through the parking lot, looking for his grey car, when he heard a low rumble behind him. His periphery pinked. Langford Cherry in an apple-red cabriolet. “Hey! Dickhead!” he said, easing the car into Milton’s shin. “Humiliate me like that again and I’ll squash you like a bug.”

“Oh,” Milton said. “Okay.”

“Jesus, what’s with the Forrest Gump routine? Are you some kinda fucking retard?”

“No,” said Milton. “I’m a riot.”

Langford Cherry drove off.

Giving up cigarettes had been easier than Milton had thought it would be. In almost every book he’d read where somebody was attempting the same thing a big deal was made about how the ex-smoker was getting terrible withdrawal headaches or thrusting whole cartons of cigarettes into sinks full of water, so Milton had expected it to be rough. But it wasn’t. It was easy. He’d made his decision when he left Yermo and stuck to it – no self-flagellation or sweating or dramatic uses of the kitchen sink – and he was already six months clean.

His resolution to quit killing people was a different matter. He’d only done it twice, but – he couldn’t help admitting it to himself – he’d really enjoyed it both times. The strangling a little less than the shooting because of all the gurgling and farting and flailing the fat man had done as he died. His eyes had almost popped out. If he fell off the homicide wagon – and Milton suspected that sooner or later he probably would – there would definitely be no more strangulation. To help with this resolution, Milton bought a gun, which he kept in the glove compartment of his car.

He thought of his mother often, trying hard to paint a vivid, lively picture of her from the almost subliminal scraps available to him, but often couldn’t recall very much beyond the barest facts; there were few and they were brutal in their simplicity. She was a nurse. She was a Lutheran. She wrote him kind, caring letters on paper that crackled when folded and which smelled of her clean washed hands. She may have been beautiful; she may have been plain.

Milton continued to think about the man who murdered his mother, although of course he had no idea who he was or what he looked like. He’d always wanted to find the man and kill him; one day Milton realized that he wanted it more than anything.

He telephoned the Suffolk county police department in Long Island and asked if they would send him a copy of his mother’s case file. A woman on the phone explained that there had been a fire ten months ago, that all the records prior to then had been destroyed and that the room she was sitting in still stank to “high holy heaven and beyond”. When Milton asked if he could speak with the people who’d investigated the case the woman told him that the only detective who was still with the department who might have handled a murder back then was on leave. She asked if there was anything else she could help him with and Milton told her that with all due respect she hadn’t helped him with anything so far, let alone anything else. “I suppose you’re right,” she said, and hung up.

Milton spent weekends and nights at the public library trawling through true crime books, starting to think like the books he was reading; feeling sickened and sullied by the endless gruesomeness, the crude writing, the ghastly truths wrought so blandly. What sort of people were these, he wondered, not of the killers themselves, but of the people who wrote about them in such tortured and loving detail.

Three weeks after Milton began his literary search he’d found nothing and began weaning himself off true crime before it was too late, before his thoughts forever spoiled, browned like the cheap paper the books were printed on.

One Saturday afternoon Milton overheard Langford Cherry on the telephone, repeating to Missy a complicated set of directions to a house up in a canyon, where he’d been invited to lunch. For no particular reason – at least none that was clear to him – Milton decided to follow.

An hours later Missy parked her Lexus in the driveway of a house that looked like a sleek, modern hotel. Milton stopped a hundred yards further up on the side of the road, then waited until dusk.

In smoky half-light he rounded a corner of the house and saw a man with white curly hair and a tall, thin blonde woman smoking cigars on a deck which overlooked the dim, deep valley. As he crawled under the wooden decking beneath them he heard the woman say, “Not now, Ed, for God’s sake. He might…” Milton looked up her dress – no panties and a nice firm ass. She worked out. He wished her could reach up through the boards and brush at the humid darkness of her pussy, feel if it was shaved, if it was wet.

Milton crept further and emerged into shadows on the other side of the deck and looked into an enormous window: Langford Cherry and assistant Missy on a low couch in a large livingroom, one of his arms holding her in a kind of headlock, the other poking and prodding her. She was giggling. Milton removed his shoes and tucked his gun into his belt. Nearby was another man who was watching the pair with barely concealed distaste. He was swaying a little, either to some music Milton couldn’t hear or because the man was drunk. Milton took an instant and profound dislike to him, and wondered if perhaps this guy might make a more satisfying victim than Cherry. A moment passed before the swaying man turned and walked away. Seconds later Missy and Langford left the room. Milton slipped inside, padding after them on the balls of his feet, the tip of his gun tickling the thickening tip of his prick.

Milton heard laughter and ravenous breathing behind a door at the end of a hallway. There was no light spilling from the jamb. He put his hands on the doorknob and twisted it slowly, held his breath as he pushed the door and side-stepped into the pitch black room.

“Hello Langford,” he said.

“Oh boy!” Missy squealed.

“What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?” Cherry said.

“I’ve come to play,” Milton said.

“Jesus, get the fuck out of here right now, you sick freak!”

As Milton reached for his gun he decided, wearily and reluctantly, that he didn’t want to kill Langford Cherry in front of Missy. He sighed, let his fingers linger lovingly on the stippled grip of the gun, then let go.

“Now!” Cherry said.

As Milton heard somebody coming down the hallway he opened the door and slunk through the crack, slipping into the opposite room, where he saw a suitcase on the bed and a window facing the front of the house. He grabbed the suitcase and leaped out.

On his way back to the city Milton had an idea about how Langford Cherry might endure some greater suffering and humiliation before his death. He pulled into the NBC lot and parked near the entrance to studio seven, leaving his gun in the glove compartment because he knew it would be useless in this particular matter.

He sat and waited at the kitchen table, his fingers playing with the silk sunflower leaf, the green plastic stalk, the rim of the waterless vase. The set was dark and silent, but Milton knew that the character he wanted to see would appear soon; he couldn’t – perhaps didn’t – exist far away from it.

In the dark Milton thought about the long, lumpy forceps scars blighting Frank Sinatra’s ear and neck, and whether or not Sinatra was self-conscious about it when he was getting a haircut. Even a man with as outsize an ego as his probably felt uncomfortable when a stranger’s fingers brushed the gristly lumps. Milton hoped so, anyway.

Milton’s fingers were just beginning to search his own skin for flaws and stains when he heard footsteps. He remained seated in the open kitchen, facing the empty audience bleachers. The apartment door opened and there he was, dressed in his usual combination of high-end bland, the finest nondescript earth tones and uncolors production money could buy. As he crossed the room, moving towards the overstuffed couch, Milton said, “Hello Charlie.”

Charlie Bright spun around, all pop-eyes and rubber-limbed shocked spasticity. “Pete?” he said, squinting into the darkness.

“No.” Milton moved his chair away from the table. “My name is Milton Sabian.”

“Well, whoever you are, you just about gave me a melonfrickin’ heart-attack!” Milton thought about heart-attacks – how he might induce one in Charlie Bright – but said nothing. “What’re you doing here, anyway?”

“I came to see you.”

“Did Mona put you up to this? Because I swear-”

“No, she didn’t. I came because I want to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About you, Charlie,” Milton said, his voice gentle and alluring, an irresitible warmth and light drawing Charlie toward him. “Come and sit down. I think you’ll be very interested in what I have to tell you.”

Fifteen minutes later, swelling with satisfaction at a difficult job so well done that he thought might he might literally burst, Milton left the empty set. He was alone, and Charlie Bright was gone forever.

At the taping of the show the following week, Langford Cherry reached out for Charlie, found only a ghost, swore a little bit and then began weeping. Milton, so serene and silent that he was almost unnoticed in the gathered crew, watched the meltdown with great pleasure. It wasn’t long before the executive producers sent everybody they considered ‘non-essentials’ home. Milton was a non-essential.

That night Milton packed a bag containing a black balaclava, some wire cutters, heavy cotton work gloves and a flashlight. Then, slowly and calmly, he drove to the UCLA medical centre.

Milton beaned a security guard on the back of the head with the end of his flashlight. He hit the man too hard, accidentally killing him. Using the dead guard’s keys, Milton let himself into the building and found the biosecure lab. Inside a room called Primates were rows and rows of caged Rhesus and Spider monkeys, small, pink, fur-framed faces with fangs bared in screeching mouths. Milton watched them as they screamed. They looked like tiny insane babies, yowling and staring back at him. Milton felt like screaming, too, although he was not quite sure why. One of the monkeys lay on its back, eyes open, staring at the floor of the cage above. Attached to the front of the cage was a black plastic plate that read Martin in white letters. Milton wasn’t sure if Martin was alive or dead and watched the monkey’s soft belly until he saw it rise and fall, almost imperceptibly. “Are you sick?” Milton asked. Very slightly and very slowly the monkey nodded. “Do you want me to kill you?” Martin shook his head. “Because I will if you want me to.” Milton pointed his gun at the monkey and removed the balaclava to show the monkey that he was one of the humans. “I won’t enjoy it, but I’ll do it.” Martin closed his eyes and shook his prone head from side to side; he did not want to die. Milton was relieved; he did not want to have to kill Martin.

Milton left the monkey room and went into a vast steel and porcelain-tiled chamber called Bacteria. Inside were long benches with in-built sinks, microscopes on top, and thrumming refrigerators below. At the back of the room was a large steel and glass-fronted box that looked like an oven; this, Milton knew without knowing how or why he knew it, was a biohazard hood, designed for secure use with biosafety levels One, Two and Three biological or cytotoxic agents. On almost every available bit of wall space here were garish and ghastly warning signs: Danger! Beware! Do not touch! Always wear a mask! Always wear gloves! No food! Prepare to die!

“I love this place!” Milton thought, as he opened specimen cabinets with his wire cutters and searched the shelves of hundreds of batches of deadly viruses for the one he was after. When he found a plastic container marked ‘Cholera’, Milton showed no hesitation or fear as he picked up the heavy bottle, slipped a pipette into his pocket and walked back out of the room. “Screw television – I should get a job here!”

He turned left, then right and after three more turns he was lost. He kept walking down a long corridor and saw a sign marked Swine, pushed the bar of the door below it and found himself in a small open courtyard.

Lying fifteen feet in front of him on cinderblock slabs were the bloated and gut-split carcasses of two dead hogs; one of them was wearing four brown leather shoes and a huge polyester floral dress (which reminded Milton of Jacqueline Susann) as well as a baseball cap through which poked a crisp, blackened ear. There were plastic-coated signs in front of each hog indicating its date of death. Both had been dead just over a week. Flies were everywhere. Milton stood for a few moments taking in the strange scene before him, breathing in the thick, noxious air around him. He knew he should be retching and turning away but the fact was that neither the sight nor the smell bothered him at all. He bent down and reached for the baseball cap but the pig’s stiff black ear seemed to want to hold onto it. He ripped the ear off the pig’s head, threw it aside and picked up the cap. There was an ornate letter ‘B’ on the front. Milton liked the cap and, without bothering to clean off the hunks of putrid flesh and thick hairs clinging to the inside, he put it on and wore it home.

“Fuck Morton, you reek!” Bob said the next morning, as Milton stood by the craft services table staring at coffee and pastries. Milton had had another bad night’s sleep; yet more stretched, blank hours that left him depleted and confused the next morning. “Did you fart or something?”

“No,” Milton said, pointing to his head. “It’s my cap. I stole it off of a dead pig last night.” Before Bob had a chance to say anything, Milton added that he wasn’t being a riot, that he really did take it from a dead pig. “Looks pretty good, though, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t matter how it looks, or where you really got it from,” Bob said, rubbing his eyes and spitting a gob of half-chewed croissant into a waste bin. “You stink, man. Take a bath or something. Seriously.”

Milton said that he’d take a shower when he got home. He asked Bob if Langford Cherry was on set.

“Million bucks an episode is pretty good encouragement not to take too many sick days,” Bob said. “Am I right?”

The woman who played the character called Mona – Milton could never remember the actress’s name – walked by, turned for a moment and sniffed the air unhappily then stalked off.

Bob said, “I swear Fabian, you need to lose the cap but fast. You see the look on Callie’s face? She finds out it’s you making this godawful stink, she’ll make your life a living hell.”

“No she won’t.”

“Yes she will,” Bob insisted. “Why wouldn’t she?”

“Oh, she’s going to have much bigger problems than me very soon.”

“What sorta problems?”

“You’ll see soon enough,” Milton said. “In fact, you’ll have a ringside seat, Bob.”

“That a fact?”

“It is,” Milton said. “By the way, you talk in your sleep. And a lot what you say makes no sense.”

Later that morning the floor manager assembled the crew and told them that they had to be especially quiet when they were around Lang’s dressing room, but ideally they should not even go near the dressing room unless it was an absolute emergency and, in fact, if it was at all possible, try not to even think about Lang’s dressing room in case they created some sort of psychic traffic jam. “This is a very difficult time for Lang,” the floor manager said. “He wants every one of you to know how much appreciates your love and support, but at the same time he insists that you leave him the fuck alone and don’t fucking ask him what the fuck is wrong because he doesn’t fucking know. Thank you for your understanding.” Most of the crew members nodded solemnly and shuffled off back to work in near-silent torpor.

Milton was laying on Mona and Charlie’s bed when he was suddenly wrenched up, heart-thudding and hyperventilating, a choked scream caught in his dry tight throat. Somebody wanted him dead, he knew it. He had to work fast.

He went to his locker, picked up the sterile pipette and unscrewed the lid of the steel canteen sloshing with cholera water. He dipped the pipette into the canteen and wondered how many actual bacteria were in the canteen – a million, two million, a billion? – and how many would be enough.

As he walked through the studio toward Cherry’s roped-off dressing room, Milton saw people all around him going about their business on tiptoe, in kid gloves, whispering. The studio was usually a place of great noise and activity, and to see it so still and quiet was almost eerie. It thrilled him. It was like somebody had died; of course he knew that in a way, somebody had. And somebody else was about to.

But why? Milton suddenly wondered, slowing down. Why was he so determined to kill Langford Cherry? Certainly the overweening actor earned far too much money and made a point of treating most people he came in contact with very poorly, but was that reason enough to kill him? “Yes,” Milton said aloud, cutting the silence and causing a carpenter to turn. “Of course it is.”

It occurred to Milton, as the few simple words came to him, that it was as though God was speaking through him.

He climbed under the rope and knocked on the door to Cherry’s room. “Who is it?” came from inside.

“It’s me,” Milton said. “God.”

“Get lost.”

Milton knocked again. “I need to see you, Langford Cherry,” he said. “I know what happened to Charlie Bright.”

The door opened, the actor reached out, grabbed Milton by the collar of his shirt and yanked him inside then slammed the door shut. Cherry stepped back, a look of surprise queasing his face. “You?”

Milton looked around the lavishly-appointed dressing room, at the deep burgundy carpet, the 50-inch flat plasma screen television, the video game consoles, the leather couches, the bed, the sparkling wet bar stocked with top-shelf booze and crystal glasses. “Yes, me,” Milton said, his wandering eyes coming to rest at the water cooler beside the wet bar. “Morton Fabian.”

“What the fuck d’you want, Morton?”

“We need to talk. It might take a while,” Milton said as he reached into his pocket, cupping the pipette in his hand. “Would you like a drink of water?”

I wanted to read further but couldn’t; somebody was knocking on my door.

Chapter Eight – Revelations

2009-02-16T18:28:00.001+11:00

1. That Milton Sabian was insane.

2. That in addition to being insane, Milton Sabian was also, for want of a better word, alive.

3. That I was the slightly drunk person at Judy’s house to whom Milton had taken an instant dislike.

4. That my father and my ex-wife probably were sleeping together.

5. That Milton had stolen my suitcase.

6. That lists in books, bestsellers such as High Fidelity, The Bible and The Book Of Lists notwithstanding, are usually a very bad idea because they interrupt the narrative flow.

7. That if he wasn’t already, Langford Cherry would soon be dead.

8. That I was in a lot of trouble.

Chapter Nine – Cholera?

2009-02-16T18:27:00.001+11:00

Standing in the hallway outside my apartment were two police detectives, one of them holding a badge. I am not short but both these fellows had a good three inches on me. I’d been loomed over a lot lately, and even though I lived in Manhattan, where being loomed over was a daily proposition, I was growing weary of it, of feeling so diminished, of being cast in shadow.

The one with the badge told me that he was Detective Balanchine*, that his partner was Detective White. “May we come in?” Balanchine said.

*Detective Balanchine, although white in real life, was portrayed in the telemovie by ‘Hill Street Blues’ veteran Taurean Blacque, an African-American. Detective White, who is white, was played by William White, who is also white.

“Is this about my missing suitcase?” I said, motioned them into my livingroom.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Balanchine said. “We’re from the NYPD lost luggage department.”

“Really?” I said. “Is there really a-”

Before I had time to etablish my moron credentials any further, Detective White asked me where I’d been the previous night. I told him that I was home alone and that there was nobody who could corroborate that. “What’s this about?” I said.

“Your name came up in connection with a case,” Detective White said.

“A missing suitcase?” I said, grinning like a mental patient on a talkshow. Even as the words came out I wanted to kill myself for being such an idiot.

“No, Mr Sherwood, a murder investigation,” Detective White said.

I paled as Detective Balanchine shifted his gaze from the window back to me and said, “Anything funny about that?”

I asked who was dead; they refused to tell me; I refused to answer any more questions and fifteen minutes later I was at a police station where I was put in a small room with dusty venetian blinds covering the windows, seated at a steel table in a steel chair that was bolted to the floor. White stood behind me, Balanchine in front, pulling noisily on a cigarette. I continued to say nothing, wondering how much they knew about my relationship with Langford Cherry.

The door to the interview room opened, letting in a snatch of hallway buzz, a glimpse of watercooler and a tall thin man carrying a puffed up brown envelope in a plastic bag. He looked down at me without expression, and said, “This the guy?” Nobody answered and the thin man told Balanchine to extinguish his cigarette; Balanchine dropped it on the linoleum but didn’t grind it out. I said nothing. The thin man was in his mid-forties, wearing half-glasses and a seersucker suit in striped white and blue. He reminded me of a hatless Tom Wolfe. He sat down in a chair opposite me and said, “You the guy?”

“I’m Michael Sherwood,” I said.

He told me I’d changed; I asked since when and he said since a couple of years. He’d read my novel and, to him, I looked different from the young fellow in the jacket photograph, older now, less cocky, which seemed about right to him, seemed about fair enough, considering. “It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth,” he said. “That nasty, bitter taste when you suck on a pen too long and ink gets in your mouth?” There was a whomp as he dropped the envelope on the table between us. “And from what I’ve read of it, hundred pages or so, this new one doesn’t look like much of an improvement.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I’m speaking artistically, of course,” he continued. “About its qualities as a creative achievement. As criminal evidence, however, it’s outstanding. Some of the best I’ve ever seen.”

I still didn’t know what was going on.

The expressionless man stood up, removed his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. He told me his name was Jones, that he was the detective in charge of the case, and that he wanted to know my whereabouts between the hours of one a.m. and five a.m. that morning.

“All right,” I said. “I admit I saw him the other night, at my ex-wife’s house in L.A. And that I punched him. But that’s all. I left him in the city with his assistant and he was alive. Passed out but alive. And I’ve been here in New York since Monday.” Jones didn’t move and gave nothing away with his dead eyes. “That’s the truth.”

Jones told the other detectives to wait outside then said to me, “What are you talking about?”

“Langford Cherry.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Well, I’m pleased to hear it. My wife’s a fan.”

“So you believe me?”

Jones nodded. “I do.”

I stood up. “Then can I go?”

He shook his head. “Mr Sherwood, the murder we’re investigating is that of your former agent, Barney [NAME WITHHELD].” He emptied the contents of the envelope onto the table. It was my manuscript, bloodstained and matted with dark strands of what I recognized instantly was Barney’s hair. “I understand that last week this manuscript came between you and your agent,” Jones said. Then added matter-of-factly, “And, more recently, it came between Mr [NAME WITHHELD] and… life.”

“He was killed with it?”

“He was. It’s quite a powerful document,” said Jones. “I’m speaking strictly literally, of course. A hundred and forty-three pages that pack quite a wallop.”

I looked at the bloody pile of paper on the table. “Can I touch it?”

“Certainly,” Jones said. “Your fingerprints are already all over it. Literal as well as literary.”

With even more than my usual revulsion I picked up my work, trying not to touch any of the stiff dark patches. I flicked through to the end – as Jones had said, there were over a hundred and forty pages, almost double what I’d left at Barney’s office.

“Satisfied?” Jones asked me.

“With what?”

“Your work.”

“I’m never satisfied with my work, Detective. Particularly not this thing.”

While it didn’t thrill me in the slightest, Jones seemed very pleased with my answer. He picked up his jacket and said that the assistant district attorney assigned to the case would be along in a moment.

My father loved to tell the story of how he’d spent a night in jail, him and John Milius arrested in Phoenix for getting drunk and spitting beer on the mayor’s wife, who they didn’t know was the mayor’s wife when they were spitting beer on her. “She was just some dame wearing a mink stole – in Arizona, for Christ’s sake!” He and his director friend had had a great time with the deadbeats in the drunk tank, singing Steely Dan songs and annoying the guards by demanding room service.

As I sat and waited for the assistant D.A, I thought about my father’s attitude to life, how favorably it compared with my own, and I wondered if success had made my father more inclined to be happy, to gather life up in the great bear-hug with which he embraced the world, and whether failure had ruined my own chances, had kept happiness at arm’s length. Surely a man who could enjoy himself – who could sing – in police custody was more properly equipped for life’s travails than one who, alone in an interview room, could not bring himself to so much as whistle.

I had just pursed my lips and was about to quietly blow when the door opened and Harper Huntley walked in.

I stood up and said Hello. My outstretched hand dangled. “It’s nice to see you again, Harper. God, it’s been-”

She cut me off by telling me to sit down, then took the chair opposite and asked me if I killed my agent.

“No,” I said. “Despite everything, I liked him.”

“How do you explain this?” she indicated the pile of paper on the table.

“I left it in his office the day we dissolved our business relationship.”

“His assistant says that after an argument…” She paused and riffled through a sheaf of papers. “She says that after a physical confrontation, Mr [NAME WITHHELD] fired you as a client. Is that true?”

“Yes, but–”

“And this confrontation, which led to your being dropped, was related to this manuscript.” She pointed again. “The one that you wrote, and which has your fingerprints all over it.”

I nodded. Things didn’t look at all good for me. “Are there any other prints on it?” I asked hopefully.

“The victim’s, his assistant’s and yours.”

“No-one else’s?”

“Why would there be anybody else’s, Mr Sherwood? You’ve never been very widely read.”

I ignored the jibe. “I didn’t kill him, Harper. Why would I?”

“Because he dropped you as a client. I understand he was a good agent. A, quote-unquote, helluva good agent.”

“He was. But the truth is I’d drop me, too, if I had me as a client.” I was beginning to get a little exasperated. “I really don’t blame him for what he did.”

“Nor do I.”

“So you’ve read the manuscript?”

“Unfortunately I had to. It being evidential.” Harper Huntley blinked tightly a few times then rubbed her left eye with a finger.

If she and Detective Jones had read the manuscript I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being arrested for – or at least questioned about – Langford Cherry’s death, given that Cherry was just about to be cholera-ized when I’d been interrupted. I asked Harper when she’d read it.

“Early yesterday.”

“And where did it end, the version you read?” I asked.

“Your hero had just arrived in Los Angeles after a brief killing spree,” she said. “That Milton Sabian, he’s quite a character.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Who is he?” Harper asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well it’s unlike you to simply invent a character, as my ex-boyfriend learned to his considerable cost. I’m sure you haven’t forgotten that he hanged himself after the publication of your short story.” The words were spoken evenly, but shone with a coruscating bitterness that had been polishing them for years. “So who is Milton Sabian based on? Who is he out here in the world, Mr Sherwood?”

“No-one. He’s just a character I made up.”

“Really. Well I wonder what he gets up to when nobody’s looking.”

Her cellphone rang. She answered it and told someone called Blain that she hadn’t forgotten whatever it was she was supposed to remember and that she’d see him at her place that night. She hung up and looked at me in silence for a long moment before warning me not to leave town and that I was lucky not to have been placed under arrest. “We have more than enough evidence,” she said, casually slipping my manuscript back into the evidence bag, completely unconcerned about getting blood on her hands. “But my belief is that you sorely lack the initiative for murder, Mr Sherwood.”

“I’m not a murderer, Harper. I’m a writer.”

“If you say so,” she said, in reference to which of my declarations I wasn’t sure.

Stuck in my doorframe was a business card from Morrison Leeves, the publishing director at Donald & Drake, to whom I’d sent a copy of my manuscript the previous week. Written in hasty blue pen on the other side of the card was this: Please not to talk with anyone else before you talk with me.

Morrison Leeves wasn’t the only one who wanted to speak with me in a great hurry; I’d been gone only a couple of hours but in that time my answering machine had been almost overloaded with messages from breathless agents and stammering editors looking to get hold of me. None of them mentioned anything specific about striking a deal with me, but all of them had one general enquiry: how did you know?

My reaction was simple: how did I know what?

Then I remembered the copy of the manuscript Detective Jones had spilled out on the table in the interrogation room. If that copy had somehow doubled in size, expanded its content, then perhaps the others I’d sent out last week had as well. Absurd as the notion sounded, it made a fiendish kind of sense. And if that was the case, exactly what was my manuscript telling people? There was, of course, one easy way to find out: television.

Out of a commercial break came a still picture of a smiling, healthy Langford Cherry. The shot was framed in black, and below were the words Langford Parmenter Cherry. 1972-2007. A slow orchestral version of the ‘Neighbors’ theme syruped along, an angelic choir singing, “When you come a-callin’, we’ll be around…”

The picture shrank and gave way to a man and a woman side by side at a desk. The woman said, “Tears down here on earth but perhaps peals of laughter at the pearly gates as comic actor Langford Cherry is found dead today in Los Angeles. The precise circumstances of the actor’s death remain unclear, but it’s believed that the hugely popular star, just thirty-four and at the peak of his remarkable career, died of cholera.” She turned to the man beside her. “Cholera, John? Cholera?”

“That’s right Nancy, cholera. Although cases are, of course, quite rare in these United States, looking at the symptoms cholera’s right up there. But it could also have been tuberculosis, syphillis, typhoid, botulism, smallpox, bacterial meningitis, scurvy, rickets, rabies or the plague. We just don’t know.”

Nancy shook her head. “Jesus.”

“That’s right, Nancy, Jesus.”

Jesus… I switched the TV off and with shaking fingers called Fraser but got no answer. I lit a cigarette and stared into the alley between my building and the rear yard of the Lutheran church, wondering what to do. When at last I decided, I flicked the butt out the window. It hit the ground and exploded into orange light that made no sound and quickly disappeared in the breeze.

When Stephen Glass, the New Republic writer, was discovered to have fabricated many of his stories, he went underground. Helen Demidenko, an Australian writer, falsified her own history, plagiarized great swathes of her award-winning novel and played fast and loose with Holocaust history; when exposed, she, too, went underground. Konrad Kujau forged the Hitler diaries, sold them, was exposed as a fraudster, went underground. The list goes on.

My situation was somewhat different – these writers merely fabulated and tried to pass off their efforts as real, while in my case what was supposed to be mere invention had actually become real. And given the nature of my invention, my situation was considerably worse. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d be arrested for one murder or another, and quickly decided to follow in the skulking footsteps of my fellow disgraced writers, to try and disappear.

I opened my front door. Standing in the hallway was a man in his mid-twenties, very handsome and exuding confidence like a shimmering aura. “Hello Michael,” he said.

“Hi,” I said. “Morrison Leeves?”

He shook his head and said, “It’s me.”

I didn’t move or speak.

“Me,” he repeated, and attempted what I’m sure he thought was a charming smile, but which simply scared me. “Milton…”

I held my breath and closed my eyes and prayed he wouldn’t say it.

Chapter Ten – “…Sabian.”

2009-02-16T18:26:00.001+11:00

"...Sabian."

Chapter Eleven – Michael [DELETE]

2009-02-16T18:25:00.000+11:00

An hour later I was sitting at my desk, blinking at the computer monitor, my sweat-soaked hands hovering above the keyboard. My nose was bleeding and there was a rubber ball in my mouth, kept in place by duct tape stretched across my bloody lips. Milton stood behind me, the barrel of his gun pressed against the back of my head. “If you don’t come up with something halfway decent soon, I’ll empty your head all over the room, you useless hack,” he said, then backhanded me over the ear. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

An hour or so earlier, as he’d introduced himself, I noticed that except for the rancid baseball cap on his head the clothes Milton was wearing were all mine. “You stole my suitcase,” I said.

“Borrowed.” He moved in from the doorway and shook my hand. “How are you?” he asked.

“Fine, thank you,” I said. I’d expected his handshake to be ice-cold, him until recently being fictional, but it was warm and firm.

Milton draped a pallish arm across my shoulders and pointed to my couch. “Sit down, Michael. We’ve got a lot to talk about.” He offered me a drink, which I declined, then got right down to business: he asked me if I thought Frank Sinatra was self-conscious about the scars on his neck.

I told him that I really had no idea.

“Well you should,” he admonished me. “As a so-called writer, you should really think about things like that.”

“Is that right?” I said. “Should I think about his voice as well, his impeccable phrasing?”

“Sinatra’s voice is what made him popular,” Milton said. “But the forceps that scarred him at birth made him human.”

I wondered if there was some slippery profundity buried in the blandness, the obviousness of what Milton had said. I nodded slowly and rubbed my chin, pretending to consider Sinatra’s scars. “Yes,” I said. “That’s a very interesting point.”

“I’m going to give you three free passes on bullshitting me, Michael. That’s one.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Is there anything in particular you want, or is this just a social call, dropping by from one world to the next?”

“I understand if you’re a little surprised,” he said. “I really do. Are you sure you don’t want a drink?”

I shook my head. “Why are you here, Milton?”

“The manuscript.”

“What about it?”

“I have a few problems with it,” he said, waving a hand at the lump of paper beneath his feet. “Quite a few, actually.” He spoke quietly and employed finicky, priestly hand gestures that made me want to smack him (although I would never smack an actual priest).

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “One of them being, who’s actually writing it?”

“We both are, Michael. Or we’re both meant to be. You haven’t been holding up your end of the arrangement so well lately, have you?”

“What arrangement?”

Milton sighed. “The understanding between author and creation, whereby you, the apparent author of the work show some respect for and responsibility toward me, the principal character in the work.”

“I thought my primary responsibility was toward my audience, should I actually have one.”

“Oh that’s true, too,” Milton said. “That’s certainly true and you certainly aren’t meeting that responsibility, either. That’s why I’ve had to step in. Liven things up a little.”

Trying not to sound too ungrateful, I told Milton thanks a lot but he could go back to wherever he came from because I didn’t need his help. “And why me, anyway?” I asked. “Every novel in history has made it to print without any help from its constituents before. Why is this any different?”

After a long breath, Milton said, “Because you’re a very bad writer, Michael. Perhaps the worst writer ever to mess around with language. And without some help, your book’ll never get published.”

At the risk of stating the powerfully obvious, it hurt to be told by someone I invented that I had failed him. And at the risk of an obvious simile, it would be like me telling Ed that as a father he had failed me (which, in some ways, of course, he had. But this is true of any father).

“Where are your big ideas, your grand themes?” Milton continued.

“I was trying to infuse it with elements from my life. What I’ve learned about life.”

Milton asked me exactly what I’d learned about life, and as I thought about the question it saddened me to realize that I did not know very much about life at all, beyond the basic fact that it is often difficult and troubling, and only becomes more so the longer it goes on; that ambition is, more or less, fruitless, and one is better off investing hope in luck rather than talent; that a strong sense of amorality and greed will see you further than hard work and forbearance; that there is no justice, sex sells, marketing triumphs, love is ephemeral and people die or disappear before they should. What I’d learned of life, I told Milton, was that the less you knew about it the happier you’d be.

“That’s no good,” Milton said. “No good at all. Nobody wants to hear that kind of depressing bullshit. Besides, you sound like a college student.”

“I didn’t go to college.”

“Well, perhaps you should have,” Milton said. “You might’ve made something of your life. And be doing better with my life.”

“You don’t have a life,” I snapped. “You’re not real.”

Milton’s hand flashed and the bitter sting I felt swelling across the left side of my face told me that Milton had very strong ideas about whether or not he was real. “You deserved that,” he said.

I supposed I did – denying someone his existence is, I think, among the larger transgressions we can make – but said nothing.

“You wrote that when I was sixteen, somebody – you didn’t know whom – gave me a copy of ‘The Love Machine’ and that I loved it, remember?”

“Yes, I do” I said. “But I could never understand why, after all the other stuff I made you read. Where’d you get it?”

“My mother sent it to me, you insensitive clod. How could you not know that?” He shook his head wearily. “And when you’re not being simply indolent, you’re being plagiaristic.”

More than hurtful, this remark was a shock, a brutal insult. “When?”

“I was born in Long Island and sent to boarding school in Connecticut at five years of age, right? Because you wrote me that way.”

I nodded. “So?”

“And you made me feel in the way at home ever since I could walk.”

“I’m sorry. Was that too cruel?”*

*This reads as though I said it in the smarmy, overstated tone of some sarcastic, snide sitcom character, but I did not; I spoke the words as I felt them – with the sincerity born of fear. This is in dire contrast to the way the moment is played in the telemovie where sarcasm and snideness abound.

“It’s not so much that all those details are cruel, Michael, it’s that they’re borrowed. They belong to William Gaddis’s childhood. And now mine, as well.”

“William Gaddis the novelist?”

“No, William Gaddis the actuary,” he said, like a snide, smarmy sitcom wiseass. “Of course the novelist. The biography’s in there.” He waved a hand over his shoulder toward my study, the hundreds of books.

My mouth – my creative soul – hung agape. I dimly recalled reading the biography some years ago but I had no recollection of stealing elements of Gaddis’s life to use in my work; and if I was going to filch Gaddis material, why wouldn’t I take it from one of his novels rather than some dusty old biography? Perhaps it was because even as (an unintentional) plagiarist I lacked real talent. “Well,” I said to Milton. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Didn’t mean to give me an unhappy childhood or didn’t mean to rip it off?”

This was a difficult question to answer because telling him the truth might make him even angrier than he already was. I knew the answer, of course, and that was that giving Milton a miserable childhood had been entirely intentional, laying the groundwork for his becoming rampantly homicidal. “Both,” I half lied.

“That’s strike two,” he said. “Be careful, Michael, you don’t want to get on my bad side.” He asked me what my plans were.

“How do you mean? In life or in the manuscript?”

“Both.”

“Well, right now I think it’d be prudent for me to get out of New York and go underground, I guess, because it won’t be long before the cops start looking at me for what you did to Langford Cherry and –”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Milton said. “That’s taken care of.”

“How?”

“Never mind how. But they’ll have a suspect in custody soon, I assure you.”

“The wrong suspect.”

“Would you rather it be you, Michael?”

“No, I’d rather it was you, Milton. Since you killed him.”

“I killed him, Michael, because just about everything you’ve made of me leads inexorably to his killing. If anything, that idiot’s murder was a collaborative effort.”

As much as I hated to admit it, he had a point. My former agent, however, was a different matter entirely. “What about Barney [NAME WITHHELD]?” I said. “Did you kill him?”

“Of course I did,” Milton said, in a tone as lilting and bland as the conclusion to a nursery rhyme. He swept back his hair and made sure I caught the black flash of onyx and molar on his finger.

“Because he tried to kill the book, and therefore you, right?”

He winked. “Maybe you’re not so dumb, after all.”

“That business with Charlie Bright, how did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make it so that Langford Cherry couldn’t get hold of him, play the part.”

“I killed him.”

“Who?”

“Bright.”

“How? He’s a television character.”

“Exactly,” Milton said. “Did you ever see how re-runs of the show were promoted between seasons? They’d say this episode was Seymour’s favorite, that one was Mona’s, the one with the such and such was Shelley’s favorite episode. Well how the hell can that be? How do the characters – the characters, not the actors – have a favorite episode of a show they’re on? Do they sit in the livingroom watching their own adventures taking place within that very livingroom? It doesn’t make any sense. A TV character having a favorite episode of the show he’s in tears at and shreds the very fabric of reality, Michael. It simply cannot be. I explained all that to Charlie, that he was just a television character, and that therefore he didn’t actually exist and he promptly disappeared. It was quite beautiful.”

I could see how it would be beautiful – Milton’s logic was hard to fault – and I was impressed. I asked him what was going to happen in the re-runs now that Charlie was gone.

“How on this earth would I know?”

“I don’t know how you’d know, Milton, but you seem to know an awful lot of stuff that no-one else does. Especially me.” I asked him who was going down for Barney’s murder.

“I guess that depends on the police investigation, doesn’t it? Are they any good, the New York police?”

I told Milton that the police already considered me, if not a suspect, then a central and highly suspicious element of Barney’s death. Milton said that he figured they would, and then with a laugh added that he didn’t think much of their chances of putting the finger on the real culprit. “They’d send you back to that crazy coop in Pennsylvania in one hell of a hurry if you tried to tell them that I did it, wouldn’t they?”

I wondered how Milton knew things like that about me – my time in the nuthouse and so forth – and how much else he thought he knew. “Yes, I suppose they would.”

I was suddenly fed up with all this. I stood and took a step toward my front door. Milton was out of his chair in a blur, suddenly in front of me with a firm finger pressed against my chest. “Where d’you think you’re going?”

I tried to move past him and as I did so – even, it seemed, as I had the thought – he pushed me back down onto the couch, with just the slightest twitch of his wrist. “You’re beginning to rankle me.”

“Yeah, well, the feeling’s entirely mutual.”

He rolled his eyes. “Sometimes when I’m trying to sleep I have daydreams, about falling off cliffs or having an aneurism or overdosing on amphetamines. It’s you, isn’t it?” Milton looked almost hurt. “Don’t lie to me, Michael. I know the answer and if you lie to me, I’ll-”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“You can’t kill me, Michael, so don’t bother with any heroics. Here or on the page. You’ll only get hurt.”

“Are you threatening me?”

He looked both disgusted and bemused by my question. “Yes, of course.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that. “All right, so what exactly do you want, Milton?”

What Milton wanted, he explained, was the man who had killed his mother. I didn’t understand, and reluctantly – because it seemed so wrong that the desires and motivations of someone I created could be so beyond my apprehension – told him so.

“You disappoint me on almost every level, Michael,” he began with a weariness that was becoming all too familiar. “I would have thought that you’d be more sensitive to something like this, with your own mother disappeared in the jungle.” He sighed. “I want the man who killed my mother, in that one dismissive sentence you gave to her death. You callous bastard.” He stood up. “I want to hunt him down and I want to kill him. But first you have to create him.”

I protested that I could not and would not aid and abet any more murder, whether of fictional characters or actual people (especially the latter), and that I was sick and tired of the manuscript anyway and wanted nothing more to do with it, and that even if I did I wasn’t going to spend a whole lot of time and effort inventing a character only to have him killed off by someone like–.

“And that’s strike three!” Milton smacked me in the mouth with the butt of his gun, yanked me up out of the couch, told me not to say another word then pushed me toward my study. When I started to say something he spun me around and hit me again, this time with a fist that felt like concrete. And that was when he produced the small rubber ball and duct tape with which he clammed me up.

“You complain too much,” Milton said, as I sat bleeding over my desk. “You’re a whiner. Readers don’t like whiners, they like winners.” He stood behind me, tapping the top of my head with the barrel of his gun. “You can use that line if you like. It’s better than anything you’ve come up with so far.”

well why don’t you write the rest of the story then? I typed. Trying to lend that sentence some muscle, make it come across as anything other than petulant and sulky, was damn near impossible.

And judging by Milton’s reaction I failed. Seconds after I hung the question mark at the end, Milton jammed the gun into his belt and pulled a hardback from a shelf and held it up for me to see. It was a great book, one of my many favorites. He looked at me expressionlessly and placed a hand at either side of the book then tore it in half, dropping the two pieces to the ground. He turned back to the shelves and removed another book; seconds later it, too, lay on the floor, ripped apart. This book was followed by another and then another. I turned away when Milton took out a first edition of one of my most loved novels and wrenched its heart out, page by page.

I stared up at a black and white photograph, one of Fraser’s, framed and hung on the wall above my computer monitor. It was of pair of tassled loafers placed on a mat on the other side of the glass door to a patio. The title of the picture was ‘Shoes on a Mat. 10.44am January 3, 1994’. It was a beautiful picture, sorrowful yet oddly soothing.

I buried myself in the photograph and when I emerged from it some time later all but one of the hundreds of books in my library was destroyed, scattered in a knee-high sea across the floor of the room. The final book was a hardback, which he held aloft in his right hand for a moment, showing me the cover, before slamming it into my face, grinding my nose flat and producing an ejaculatory spurt of blood which spumed onto the middle of my keyboard then detumesced and bled over the tape across my mouth dripping tiredly off my chin onto my stomach. This book was – perhaps poetically, perhaps predictably – the only copy I owned of my novel.

Milton didn’t bother destroying it; he simply dropped it onto the enormous swell of words and paper at his feet. “This piece of crap is in bad enough shape without any help from me,” he said.

I loved books – not just the books I owned, but any books, all books, the simple and wonderful idea of books – and to see them so profoundly and pointlessly abused like that nauseated me. Even the worst of them deserved more respect. It was monstrous. The irony that it was a character from a book in progress wreaking all that vile destruction did not, of course, escape me.

I tapped out, why’d you do that

“To give you some help,” Milton said, once more removing the gun from his belt. “You ought to be very, very angry when you write what I need. I want to really hate the man who killed my mother. So reach deep inside the sewer of your soul and pull out something truly foul and rotten. And then make it worse.”

i can’t do it while you’re standing there

He made a scornful sound and told me I was pathetic.

and you’re pointing a gun at me. it’s really not easy

“Good lord, Michael, you’re not building a nation, here. You’re inventing a character, telling a story – how hard can it be?”

very. even under optimum conditions i find writing very difficult.

“Okay, I’ll try to make it a little easier for you. If you don’t come up with something halfway decent, I’ll empty your head all over the room, you useless hack.” He punctuated the remark – gave it its full stop – with an almost drum-bursting smack in my ear. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

And so I tried to summon the most disgusting, stupid, clichéd garbage I was capable of. Unhappily, I found that I was full of the stuff, that it flowed from me like black syrup. Where it came from, to this day, I still don’t know but by the time I’d written a few hundred words, I began to lose myself in it, to forget that there was a gun at my head, to forget why I was actually doing it. This burst of wicked inspiration, and the mental lapse of a single word that accompanied it, almost cost me my life.

I gave Milton’s mother’s killer a name and a breathless, curdled history: Arthur Ballin was born in 1946 in Spokane, Washington to semi-retarded parents – themselves the offspring of two cousins – who dressed him in rags and let him play in the street which, when he was four years old, led to him being hit by a trolley-car, puncturing his temple and leaving him unconscious for six days, after which he took to occasionally walking on his hands and picking up chairs with his teeth, behaviour which obliged him to drop out of high school in his sophomore year and find work as a lineman for PacBell for three years before joining the army and doing a tour of Vietnam as an engineer where he helped construct a convalescent hospital and oversaw the placement of landlines throughout the Quang Tri province and fell in love with an eight-year-old boy named Tan Lo who, before Ballin had time to abuse the kid, was killed when he was run down by a U.S Army jeep, the driver of which Ballin later killed with a pair of pliers (which would become his preferred instrument of torture and execution), then had a tattoo of the boy’s fine-featured face put on his forearm before he returned to Washington and quit the army, then, unable to find a job in a depressed Pacific northwest economy, moved to the east coast where he worked as a handyman at a youth center in Levittown, New Jersey and began stealing and boiling neighborhood cats alive in large pots and burning down outbuildings in people’s yards and painting racist slogans on the once-pure white walls of Levittown’s endless rows of houses before, inspired by Richard Speck, he graduated to stalking and killing nurses who worked at a nearby V.A hospital, setting his sights on one in particular, a beautiful Lutheran named Melba Sabian…

I then added to this slough of crap a sly touch which I thought might bring Milton to the boiling point of rage and hatred he yearned for.

As she lay on the dirt, Ballin tongued her wide, prised-open eyeball and jammed his knee between her legs and ground his thigh up and down against her pubic bone. As the violation continued, her only thoughts were of her beloved son. To see him one last time and tell him all that she felt, that she’d never thought to say. Ballin took the pliers from the front pocket of his coveralls and spat on the jagged tips. She looked past him, past his rough, unsophisticated face and up to the small patches of white sky shining through the jungle canopy then closed her eyes and thought of her son; her dear, dear Michael.

“Michael?” Milton said, then cocked the hammer of his gun.

At precisely this moment, Judy was in an apartment two doors down from one leased by a man she knew as Morton Fabian. She was with a team of L.A County Sheriff’s detectives, which she’d been seconded to at the request of NBC. The men weren’t happy to have her along but a television studio in mourning is a powerful thing, and the detectives had no choice but to accede to its wishes. Judy was not particularly pleased with the assignment either, but accepted it as a favor to a well-placed studio executive who was a close friend.

There were four detectives on the case, all large, taciturn men who expressed their displeasure at Judy’s by grunting and blowing cigar smoke in her face. They were in the small kitchen, the last stop on their hunt for clues, when one of the detectives said that this procedure was a waste of time, that they needed a crime scene technical investigation team in there right away “because how darn small is cholera, anyway?” The other men nodded, then all four turned to Judy with looks that dared her to disagree. She said nothing and didn’t shift her gaze from the men until one of them looked away first. The detectives clomped through the apartment then out to their vehicles on the other side of the pool. Judy stood in the doorway of the apartment and watched them leave. She almost waved but at the last moment decided that the gesture would look cheap and churlish. She’d been dealing with men like these for years and knew better than to give them anything they could use. As the two cars pulled out on to the street she flipped open her cell phone.

The telephone in my living room rang. Milton eased the hammer on his gun back into the resting position. I let out a long breath and typed quickly and fearfully.

Id din’t m,ean to write ‘Michael” I emant to write Milton. Obviopisly.

“Of course you didn’t,” Milton said. “That’s obviopis, you egocentric asshole.”

I calmed down a little. what about the phone?

“Let your machine get it.”

There were three more rings then Judy’s voice said, “Michael, I think I know who killed Cherry. Call me as soon as you can.”

“Well, well,” Milton said. “That’s an interesting development, isn’t it? Who was it?”

I don’t know. A policeo offocer I hguess

“Why would a police officer call you at home, Michael?”

i really don’t know. I guyess they need some information from me because I hada n incident with Cherry last Saturday. Let me get back to what I was doing.

As Milton rifled through my desk drawers, I changed ‘jungle’ to ‘forest’, deleted ‘Michael’ and inserted ‘Milton’ then asked – typed – if I could remove the tape from my mouth.

“No,” Milton said. “Where’s this business with Ballin and my mother taking place?”

I thought for a moment before telling him. somewhere in nth caRolina

“What’s my mother doing in North Carolina?”

she went hiking in some mountain range and ballin kidnaped her. It wasn’t a particularly good or believable explanation, but I wanted Milton far away.

“Where? Which mountain?”

I typed the first thing that popped into my head. Mount Leary.

This moment of thoughtless haste would, of course, ultimately lead to one of the most dramatic and damning moments of my trial. At the time, however, I had no idea of the ramifications of what I’d written; I wanted only to be rid of Milton.

Now can i ttake off this damn tape?

When Milton did not respond, I turned around in my chair. He was gone, leaving just a dimming outline I could see only in my mind, as though I’d looked at a star in the black night sky outside my window then blinked it away.

Before I left my apartment I took a hammer and, standing on the lumpen, slippery pile of violated literature, I smashed my computer’s hard drive to pieces, promising myself – promising the world – that I would never write another word.

Chapter Twelve – ‘Featuring Harry Ramjet as himslef’

2009-02-16T18:24:00.002+11:00

“How was it meeting one of your characters?” I was often asked months afterward. “What was it like?”

“Highly inappropriate,” was my usual answer.

“Mythical, terrifying… deeply profound,” was Judd Nelson’s in the telemovie Deadly Burlesque, said slowly and with a gravity that can only be the result of the actor’s complete failure to understand what it is he is saying. And then, like Marlow aweing over Kurtz: “The power… the power of what he said… I loved him.”

This, at the risk of crudely stating the obvious, is bullshit; I hated Milton Sabian. I hated him and I feared him and I wanted him, if not dead, then far less alive. That, of course, presented several unique challenges, chief among them being how would I kill someone who didn’t really exist, someone who had himself warned me that he could not be killed? How do I pin down a demiurge who flits between the written world and this one? And if Milton could be found and then made to disappear for good, that would leave me to answer for the murders of Barney [NAME WITHHELD] and Langford Cherry, which, while in some manner responsible for, I did not actually commit. How would I even begin to explain what was happening without being sent back to a psychiatric institution? It was, to say the least, a thorny bouquet of problems; to say the most, it was among the thorniest issues ever faced by any person in history.

Thoughtfully tapping a hammer in his hand while standing in a televisual version of my study (which is far larger and neater than it was in reality), Judd Nelson faces these challenges by screaming, falling to his knees and attacking the already-ruined books on the floor, wielding the hammer like a Kubrickian monkey with a bone. What this is supposed to mean, if anything at all, is beyond my understanding.*

*Nelson, of course, won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Mini-series, Movie or Dramatic Special in 2009, so evidently his bizarre, tic-ridden performance meant something to someone. Also, the movie was a huge ratings success.

The morning after Milton’s visit I made my way to an area of south Manhattan in which was a great concentration of private detective offices. Stuck in the windows and doorways of almost every dark, foreboding building in the four block area was a cheap photocopied sign – often featuring a pencil drawing of an untrustworthy-looking man with hooded eyes and a joyless smirk, usually sporting a thick moustache – offering services such as surveillance, threat assessment and control, process-serving and the “swift and judicious” retrieval of monies owed.

I walked up and down the streets searching for the least disreputable-looking person on the various posters, and when that failed (they were all grim, swarthy men; and nobody looks good rendered in pencil) the best speller. The best speller was a P.I named Harry Ramjet.

In the telemovie based on these events, Harry Ramjet’s was a relatively brief but much-coveted role, sought after and auditioned for by an impressive variety of actors but in the end he played himself.* “And what the fuck’s wrong with that?” he liked to say to entertainment journalists during interviews, yet another of the many situations he regarded as hostile. “Anybody here have a problem with it?” Nobody did.

*Although popular and award-winning, the telemovie was poorly-budgeted and rushed into production, a consequence of which was that Ramjet’s screen credit read, ‘Featuring Harry Ramjet as himslef’. He was furious about the misspelling and tried to have his name removed from the credits.

Harry Ramjet was somewhere between forty and sixty years old, a tightly-wound coil of furious pitbull muscle, inclined toward explosive rage even in sleep. He had the big flat, mashed face of a pre-war pug and spoke in sharp, staccato bursts, as though spitting out wads of chewing tobacco from the corner of his almost lipless mouth. He never sat still and bristled constantly beneath the tight-fitting double-breasted suits he favored, rolling his shoulders like a boxer between rounds, or shooting his strangled cuffs at imaginary contenders, a physical hangover from his ragged childhood and bruising adolescence on the streets of a tough neighborhood in north-west Detroit. He was kicked out of high school at fifteen for ‘playing the tough guy’ and, after a stint in the army, went to work as a bill collector for a mail-order catalogue company. He soon parlayed his talent for locating deadbeats into a job as an investigator at a number of Detroit detective agencies including Pinkerton’s, Acme Detectives and The Lindstrom Agency. In 1973, adopting the name Frankie Fortunato, he hung his own shingle (with pencil picture), specializing in collections and missing persons. His big break came in early 1978 when the actress Joan Blondell hired him to find the ransomed remains of her very late husband, the film producer Michael Todd, who’d been killed in a plane crash twenty years earlier. After six days on the job Ramjet invited the local press and the police to a cemetery in Hamtramck where he announced that he’d located the corpse. Just a few yards from Todd’s excavated grave, Ramjet lifted a pile of leaves and rotted wood and retrieved a plastic bag containing the producer’s remains. The police claimed that Ramjet had orchestrated the whole shabby scam for publicity. Nevertheless, he located several more highly-publicized missing people and became a Detroit celebrity, appearing in newspapers and on television talk shows, rumpled and unruly, lighting one cigarette after another, bruising fellow guests with his hard talk. He fell in love with the spotlight. He went back to his real name. He did government work. He drove a gold-colored Eldorado with an aluminum baseball bat in the trunk. Detroit began to feel small and he moved to New York where he became friendly with mobsters, talking the talk, walking the walk, living the life. There were private rooms at nightclubs, impossible-to-get tables at impossible-to-get-into restaurants, there were women who used to be somebodies or were on their way to being women who used to be somebodies. There were witnesses; there was tampering. In 1983 he teamed up with an attorney helping with the defense of Davis Grubb, a car manufacturer charged with heroin trafficking. It was federal case, high-profile and apparently watertight; Grubb had been caught on videotape closing a half-million dollar drug deal. Ramjet’s procurement and analysis of phone lists and audiotapes helped discredit a star prosecution witness. Grubb was acquitted; a stunning result. It was Harry’s second big break, and it was national. Celebrities called: a movie producer sued by an assistant had the case against him dismissed; a soap actress’s estranged, tabloid tale-telling daughter was given ‘laryngitis’. Ramjet worked bi-coastal. He handled private security for stars, politicians, royalty and the super rich all over the world. He made a fortune that would have made his short-lived alter ego Frankie proud. He was on top of the world, which he saw very much as his oyster: his fourth wife was his favorite so far; he owned a penthouse apartment on the upper east side, a house in West Chop and a bungalow in Maui; he side-stepped his mob associates and became fast friends with rich and lovely, the exclusive and famous, the powerful and elite. He loved his wonderful life, until late in 1997 when it all went spectacularly to hell, the truly bizarre reasons for which I would learn in a few days on a prison bus bound for Rikers Island.

“So what do you want?” Harry asked me when I first sat down in his office.

“I want you to find someone,” I said. “I know that sounds kind of cliched, but I figured in your line of…”

I trailed off as Ramjet put his right hand under his jaw and then wrenched his head far around to the side, producing a grinding sound that rumbled all the way down his spine and across the filthy wooden floor. I said nothing and watched as he then forced his head in the other direction. Behind him the aluminum bat that had so ably assisted his ascension hung on hooks set in the wall. When he was facing me again he let out three long, statisfied breaths. I started to finish my sentence but he asked me to be quiet.

“Shut the fuck up. I don’t need to hear about any cliches or what you ‘figure’ about my line of work. Who’s the person?”

“Well, Harry, it’s-”

“Call me Mr Ramjet.”

“The thing is, it’s kind of a complicted situation…” He raised his gnarled eyebrows. “Mr Ramjet.”

“I’ll decide what’s complicated and what isn’t. What’s the person’s name?”

“His name is Milton Sabian. But-”

“Where does he live?”

I decided right then that I’d apprise Mr Ramjet of the complexities of this situation later; for now he’d be fed a far more palatable diet of straight facts. “His last known residence was in Los Angeles but he was here in New York last night.”

“What’s his relationship to you? Blood?”

“Not… really. He’s more someone I’m… concerned about.”

“Quit pausing between words. It’s irritating. Where does he work?”

“He worked at NBC in Burbank as a grip but I think he quit,” I said quickly.

Mr Ramjet asked me dozens more questions, about myself, about Milton’s known haunts, friends, relatives and habits; whether he drove a car, what sort of clothes he wore, his age, sexual orientation, religious beliefs and physical details, concluding with a general enquiry about his mental condition.

“That’s a tough one,” I said.

“No it’s not. He’s either sane or he isn’t. Which is it?”

“Well…” During my very brief pause Mr Ramjet crushed the pen he’d been taking notes with. I continued quickly. “Sane. Absolutely no doubt about it. He’s very very sane. Having said that, Mr Ramjet, I think Milton may be directly involved in the deaths of several innocent people. And one annoying asshole.” I gave Ramjet such details as I could recall about tie-strangled fruit pie lover Lucius Battle, the UCLA security guard and the lady proprietor of the Vista-View Motel and her suicide note in green. “And there’s a pretty good chance he killed Langford Cherry,” I concluded.

“That actor off TV?”

“Yes.”

“Nice work.” If I thought that Harry Ramjet’s warm approval of Milton’s choice of victim might create some sort of bond between us I was very much mistaken, because it was right then that he raised the subject of his fee and retainer. “Five hundred a day. And I’m gonna need a thousand fuckin’ non-refundable dollars up front.”

This was a tricky situation, one that I could all too easily see involving my head being wrenched in various unnatural directions, to extreme degrees, by Ramjet’s great paws. Nevertheless, I figured the smart move would be to tell him the truth. “Mr Ramjet,” I said. “Harry… Mr Ramjet, the thing is I’m a little short right now, and if you could see your way to-”

“Let me introduce you to our easy payment plan,” he said, balling a fist and thwacking it meatily into his other hand. I prepared myself for a beating – something long and severe, but rendered with professionalism and enthusiasm – however Mr Ramjet pulled out a thick contract and handed me a pen. “Sign everywhere,” he said. “You got three days then I come after you. I will find you. And I will hurt the fuck out of you.”

A few minutes later, my fingers cramped and clawed, Mr Ramjet asked me to sign one more thing; a copy of my novel was thunked onto the desk in front of me. “Not a great book, by any means,” he said. “But it had its moments. And I appreciated the letter of apology. More writers should be so infuckinclined.”

Chapter Thirteen – Catch the eye, hold the heart

2009-02-16T18:24:00.001+11:00

Judd Nelson leaves Harry Ramjet’s office and, as he walks away from the camera, victoriously fist-punches the air, a signature move from his signature role in The Breakfast Club in 1985. The picture then fades to black and a title comes up which reads: ‘Three Days Later…’ Next is a close-up of Nelson’s jowly, horrified face, pop-eyed and open-mouthed, locked in the visual cliché that is the silent scream. It is not explained how Judd Nelson’s character (that is, me) spent the time in between fades.

What led to the scream was this: after three days of avoiding my apartment for fear of another visit from Milton, much of which was spent in the Ottendorfer branch of the New York Public library* keeping abreast of Langford Cherry R.I.P developments (few) and tributes (abundant; mawkish), I remembered the card from Morrison Leeves and immediately headed for his office.

*Setting foot inside a library was always a risk for me; I could be either thrilled or glumly overwhelmed by the books in the world, their almost self-replicating numerousness. Usually it was the latter and I would wander the aisles and stacks in a stunned fugue of dismay, horrified that so many people believed and acted on the idea that they had a book in them, often more than one. On these occasions I felt as though I was surrounded by an impossibly vast army which would let me neither surrender nor die in the face of its horrific magnitude.

“I really don’t mean to be rude, Mr Sherwood, but, er, what on earth took you so long to get in touch with me?” Leeves asked in that peculiarly discourteous way English people have when they’re trying not to be discourteous. I opened my mouth but before I made a sound, he said, “You’ve been busy. Of course you have. You’ve been talking with other publishers, I presume. Of course you have. That’s understandable.” There was a slight trace of the northern bumpkin lingering in a recently-polished London accent; rounded vowels slowing the clip and dampening the sizzle of city talk.

Morrison Leeves, publishing director of Donald & Drake, was a boyish-looking forty, a trim fellow with a likable, trustworthy face topped with sandy hair that drifted off in several directions at once. He wore a crumpled floral shirt and baggy jeans and seemed as though he’d just woken up from a nap he’d begun several years earlier. “My condolences to you in the regrettable matter of Barney, er…” He made some sort of nondescript movement involving his shoulders and wrists; an Englishman’s physical approximation of American grief. “I understand you two were, er, close.”

On his large neat desk were two envelopes: a smaller flat one with the publisher’s logo on it; and a large, padded yellow envelope, which I presumed contained my manuscript. “Would you like a drink?” I nodded. “Of course you would. It’s about that time, isn’t it?” He looked at his watch. “A little after, in fact.” He went to the wet bar behind his desk, poured whisky into two glasses and handed one to me. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” he said, smiling. “Cheers.” I would have said something felicitous to mark the occasion except for the fact that at that very moment, as I brought the glass to my mouth, the previous three days caught up with me and I felt so suddenly and comprehensively exhausted it was as though I’d been switched off.

Leeves raised his own glass and added another measure to his toast. “To Milton Sabian,” he said. “A simply marvellous character.” I almost fucking choked. “So, I really must ask, how did you know?” Leeves took a slow drink, holding my gaze. I must have looked as tired and confused as I felt, because immediately he elaborated. “About Langford Cherry. The cholera.” I took a gulp of whisky; it burned my throat and sprung fat tears from my eyes. “I understand,” Leeves said, nodding. “This must be very difficult for you. I presume he was a friend, that he gave you particular, er, insights.” I shook my head and sighed. “That’s all right, Mr Sherwood,” Leeves said. “Grieving is nothing to be ashamed of, particularly in this country.” He refilled my glass. “Now, if we may attend ourselves to business for just a moment. If you’ll excuse my putting it quite bluntly, we want your manuscript. I’m confident that we can and will publish it, promote it and market it better than anybody else you’ve spoken with, although I daresay that given its, er, unusual content it will, as they say, sell itself.” I took a breath. Leeves held up a hand. “Please, allow me to finish. Furthermore, I’m certain that you’ll find our financial terms most attractive.” He slid the smaller envelope across the desk to me. I opened it and skimmed the contract details, looking for one important word: advance. I found it as Leeves held up a check for ten per cent of the amount.

I was about to say, or more likely shout, “It’s a deal!” when a distinct rustling rose from the table between us. I looked over and saw the larger yellow envelope slowly bulge and stretch as though it was taking a breath. It expanded, rising like a souffle of words, then crackled before tearing at the sides and spilling typescript which cascaded off the desk and on to Leeves’s shoes. I glanced at the publisher: he was staring down at the pile of words at his feet, pale, transfixed. “What the devil?”

I sprung out of my chair and began gathering the paper from the floor. I found a plastic bag from Brentano’s and, down on my hands and knees like some sort of literary charwoman, shoved in every scrap. Then I scrawled my signature on the publishing contract, pocketed the advance on the advance and slipped out of the Donald & Drake offices, clutching the manuscript bag to my chest as though it was a sick infant and I was rushing it to hospital.

After cashing my check I went to the nearest deli where I ordered an iced tea and a mountain of hot pastrami between two limp, happy slices of rye then opened the Brentano’s bag and began reading.

When he got too tired and nudged a dirt embankment for the second time, Milton pulled over at a truckstop and lay down in back of the stolen Pontiac. He’d been driving for seventeen hours and fell into a kind of unawake state almost as soon as his head touched the cold leatherette.

He opened his eyes three hours later at dawn and stretched out the kinks in his back, wiped dew from the hood of the car and licked his hands. The horizon line at the edge of the world was purple, turning gold. He got back in the car and hit the road, tried the radio again but heard nothing. There was a small plastic Jesus on the dashboard. By the time he reached the outskirts of Martinsville the purple strip was gone and gold had turned to white. Jesus was bathed in warm light and He looked happy – damn near beatific – which wasn’t bad for plastic, Milton thought.

Milton had spent less than a day in New York but he was glad to be gone, although he wished he’d made time to drop in on Patricia, see if she still felt that good old maternal instinct toward him. Next time he’d drop in on her for sure. Screw her one last time, then maybe kill her.

Kill her? Milton wondered what the hell was wrong with him. Why did homicide and hatred come so easily to him? What was it for? Sure, hatred was a natural instinct, pure and fine and ecstatically depleting, and he loved hating so passionately and completely, but why was there so much of it in him? Had that hack Sherwood put it there? Emotionally manipulating him since way back, like the stuff with Tad Halford, then making Milton an orphan? Just so he could more naturally grow into what he’d become? Sure, he still had some killing he wanted to do, maybe of some other less corporeal characters like Charlie Bright; Milton couldn’t deny it – he’d really enjoyed dispatching that goddam smartass. He’d find and kill this Ballin fellow then slip back into the world to take care of his final victim…

He skirted Winston-Salem and took smaller roads up into the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Outside, the green grew darker and thicker, the air colder. Whenever he cracked a window the forest seemed to howl.

He stopped in a place called Dunnertown and sat on the porch of a bar that seeped darkness and bluegrass music. Above the town, Mount Leary jutted into the sky like a mushroom cloud, white-ringed at the stalk, scorched dark on top.

Dunnertown was empty and, apart from the coils of banjo, guitar and mandolin that crept out of the bar he’d stopped at, completely quiet; there was no traffic, no people or animals, no sounds of children or distant dogs barking. There was a smell, though; mixed with the clean mountain air was something meaty, rotten. But small towns were often painted as somewhat sinister, Milton thought, and if there were no sinister people around then there was always the air itself to take the blame. But it was the town’s silence and emptiness which confused him more than the odor. Maybe everybody was at work. Maybe it was Sunday.

He got up off the porch and went into the gloom of the bar to order another glass of warm water, just to make some noise. The smell was worse inside; in here it was a stench. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark of the bar, and when they did he half expected to find it empty – the barman gone, just a wisp of his hair and a dishrag on the bench left behind – but as he reached the counter the barman turned, smiled and asked Milton what he’d like. The man was thin, loose-limbed and his flesh, all dewlaps, wattles and jowls, spilled off him as though it was tying to escape his bones. His eyes were sunk so deep in their sockets that they appeared colorless. He was like a deep sea creature moving slowly, without current, through the dark and cold.

Milton asked for a glass of warm water. “Guess everybody’s in church,” he said.

“You could say,” the barman said. He placed a glass of water on the dark, warped counter. “Anything else?”

“Do you have mushroom sandwiches?”

The barman told Milton that there were no mushroom sandwiches, then asked, “You here to rub?”

“No,” Milton said. “What?”

“Usually only one reason people stop here and that’s grave rubbings. I said rubbings, not robbings. On account of the day the circus passed through and accidentally joined the army.” The barman leaned forward slightly and laughed; a smell like tinned dog food came from his wide open mouth. “That’s where ever’body is – six feet down below, back of the church as you leave town. As you surely will.”

Milton got straight to the point. “Were you here when the murder happened?”

“What murder?”

“There was a murder.” Milton couldn’t remember how long ago it was and he reddened with shame. “Of a nurse from Long Island. Up on Mount Leary. A man named Ballin.”

The barman shook his head. “Nope.”

“I don’t understand. How could you not remember something like that?”

“Never happened.”

“Yes it did.” Milton felt almost tearful at the barman’s blunt negation. “It was my mother.”

“Sorry to hear that,” the barman said. “If it happened.”

Milton said, “What’s the-”

“It’s me.”

“What’s you?”

“The smell. You were about to ask what the smell is. It’s me. I have the cancer. Entire body’s full of it. Inside and out. Rotten. That’s why the smell. Had it for years. Ain’t sure why I’ve held on so long. Guess I enjoy life more than I figgered. Sunsets and sunrises and such. Certain tastes and sensations. Rainwater on a parched tongue, for instance. Ain’t got long to go, though, ‘fore I join the rest of the town. Then who’ll get the beer and make the samwiches, eh?” He laughed and chomped down on his teeth, making a snapping sound. “Anything else?”

“No,” Milton said dolefully. “Thank you.”

Back outside, Milton drank his warm water quickly and headed out of town. He passed a shuttered feedstore, a small abandoned school, a crumbling motel, weed-covered lots, rows of sagging wooden houses with overturned, plastic furniture in the yards, and finally a churchyard popping headstones like weeds. Just inside the gate was a great white statue of an elephant.

As he cruised past an empty green field divided by ancient wooden fencing, Milton tapped a finger on dashboard-Jesus’s head and murmured a mental prayer. “Lord, or whoever, if it’s in your power, please help me to stop hating people and killing some of them. I don’t want to do it any longer, except for two more. Thank you for your time.” He said amen and looked out the window, wondering if this was what heaven looked like – big and green and empty, the occasional elephant ghost.

It was near dark when Milton got as close to the peak of Mount Leary as the road would allow. He pulled over at the edge of a gloomy thicket and watched everything disappear into black then closed his eyes to match what he could see and knew of the world.

The forest of pine, fir and heavy gnarled maples at the top of the mountain was almost impermeable, thick with fat flies and mosquitoes. Milton trudged in wide spirals, with his head down, kicking at clumps of dirt and weeds and stones with boots. He felt spiders on him and heard things in the undergrowth that rustled and scuttled. The forest floor was dark and Milton wished he’d brought a torch with him. At one point he got down on his hands and knees and crawled for what felt like miles in tightening circles. When it rained he lay on his back and opened his mouth to the sky. Sometime in the afternoon it occurred to Milton that he’d barely even been thinking, that he’d reduced himself to an almost animal state of need and awareness. He liked it, and decided to try to think much less, until it was called for. He kept walking, scouring the ground and asking the trees for help. The trees ignored him, and toward the end of the day Milton had found nothing; he had seen no evidence to suggest that he wasn’t the first person ever to set foot on the mountain top. When the sun went down and Milton could no longer see anything he simply stopped moving, lay down on the soft sloping ground and closed his eyes.

At dawn he saw the crumpled fuselage. Beneath a sludgy coating of mold and dirt the wreckage was white and purple, rusted and overgrown with vines that snuck in and out of small windows where the glass had popped out or shattered. There were thick red and yellow wires, and heavy black cables hanging from holes in the airplane’s cabin. Milton stood up and saw an explosion of color and white and steel, as though a hurricane had dropped a hundred still-spinning washing machines on the mountain. At his feet was a huge windscreen wiper four feet long, its rubber rotted. He looked for the cockpit but couldn’t see it. He noticed that he was standing at the edge of a long, thin valley created when the airplane had ploughed into the mountain and torn open the earth. It was grass-covered and smooth now, with the gentle form and dip of a riverbed. There were a few suitcases, most of them still closed, strewn about the edge of the tree line. The wings, engines and undercarriage were nowhere in sight. The main section of the plane looked about eighty feet long, open at either end, missing the cockpit and tail. “Catastrophic failure,” Milton said to himself. “Catastrophic failure.”

The sharp damp smell inside the cabin was bad, but not terrible, not like the pigs at UCLA or the bar down below the mountain. Overhead storage bins spilled small bags and coats that looked as though they were trying to leap out. The seats were rammed up against each other, twisted and broken. The centre aisle was a mess of unidentifiable debris. Milton stepped over a lump of something then slipped on a muddy plastic Boeing 737-400 safety card. He picked it up and studied the cartoon people cinching their seatbelts, slipping down inflatable slides, bracing for an emergency landing, then he began to wonder what had happened to the real people.

Back outside he walked the length of the fuselage on both sides; there were pieces of fabric and hunks of metal everywhere, some partially covered by mud and dirt, others lying exposed, as though they’d been placed there only moments ago. But there were no bones, no hands or arms or legs or skulls, no people or pieces of people. Partly obscured by vines and leaves were the letters E and A and N, painted eight feet high on the side of the fuselage. As Milton stepped backward, away from the great steel husk to get a better look at the word behind the letters, he felt a sharp pain in his foot. Something had pierced his pants and was stuck in his ankle. It was the pin of a piece of jewelry. He pulled it from his foot, brushed away the dirt and stuck it into his pocket, rubbing his thumb along its sharp bumps and grooves.

When he’d finished his exploration of the crash site, he took one last look inside the cabin, saw nothing new, then walked away in search of his mother. Catastrophic failure, he let himself think for the last time.

After two more days and nights on Mount Leary Milton began to wonder if perhaps the barman in Dunnertown had been right; maybe there hadn’t been a murder, maybe his mother wasn’t there after all. But if that was the case, where was she? As he sat in the Pontiac, Milton’s thoughts found skeletons lying undiscovered for decades in ditches, mummified Jane Does, tiny particles of what had once been people lying at the bottom of deep riverbeds, buried in silt and sediment, angelic whisps floating through a big green heaven. He wondered if what remained of Langford Cherry and Melba Sabian – their memories, their souls – were together in the same place. And, as he slunk toward a kind of sleep, Milton wondered where he himself might end up after he was gone, in the densely unfathomable event of his disappearance…

In the middle of the night an epiphanic bolt shot through him – literally straightened him out as he lay on the back seat of the car – and Milton was certain that he knew exactly what had become of the passengers on the plane. “Of course!” he said aloud. He opened the Pontiac’s glove compartment, removed a dozen pages of typescript he’d taken from Sherwood’s office the other day and read through them. “You bastard,” he said, shaking his head, then returned to the blackness.

The next morning he drove back down to Dunnertown and stopped at the edge of town in front of the cemetery. He passed beneath the monumental, life-sized sculpture of the elephant near the entry gates. ‘In Memory of Showfolk’ was carved into the white creature’s side. Nearby, there were a few small groups doing brass rubbings of headstones and memorial plaques. It was a cold day and the people were dressed thickly, their glove-fattened hands squiggling brass chalks over papers that whipped and buckled in the stiff wind. Milton stood behind one of the groups, listening to them chatter as they worked.

The reason for the popularity among grave rubbers of this particular cemetery was that just outside town, in June 1917, a twenty-six car train belonging to the Hoenikker-Wagner Circus Co. was struck by an empty troop train, killing eighty-five circus performers and employees. The identities of many of the dead were unknown, most of them being roustabouts and temporary employees, and they were buried under their nicknames or job titles. Milton wondered where the circus animals were buried, and asked one of the rubbers.

“Good question,” said a bearded man in a lumberjack coat. “Both of the trains caught fire pretty bad, though, so maybe they just scooped their ashes up along with everything else.” Milton said that animals ought to be shown a little more respect than that; that it wasn’t right just to let pigs rot or to leave monkeys moping themselves to death in a cage. The man in the lumberjack coat said he didn’t disagree.

Milton walked through the graveyard – past ‘Chuckles’, ‘Smilin’ Joe’ and ‘Baldy’, between ‘The Amazing Alazar’ and ‘Lady Letitia: Rasputin’s Daughter’, stepping over ‘Four Horse Driver’, ‘Lion Wrangler’ and ‘Water-Boy’ – around to the back of the small church on the property. He returned with a shovel slung over his shoulder, looking almost jaunty. He went up and down each row of headstones looking for one that was anonymous, nameless and dateless, which might belong to his mother. There was only one, in a corner far away from the clutches of grave rubbers.

Milton spat on his hands and began digging. It was not a deep grave and when he broke the lid of the casket twenty minutes later his heart thrilled to the sound of splintering wood. He cleared the remaining dirt, exposing the lid of the casket, then prised it off with his shovel. Milton knew after one disgusted glance that it was not his mother. Inside were the remains of two people who shared one skeleton: Siamese twins, joined at the ribs. With one blow from the blade of his shovel, Milton separated them. He heard a shrill, bright scream and looked up. Standing above him at the edge of the grave was a group of six people, one of them a long-faced, wide-eyed teenaged girl with her hand clapped over her mouth. The rest were adults, including the man in the lumberjack coat; all of them horrified by what they saw.

“I was hoping it might have been my mother,” Milton said, climbing out of the grave as the people backed away stiffly, like zombies being rewound. “But it’s some kind of Chang and Eng situation.” Or Michael and Milton situation, he thought.

When he left the cemetery, with all the grave rubbers still alive it, Milton thought that maybe God, or whoever, might be coming through for him.

In Winston-Salem he went to the Forsyth County Public library and scanned local newspapers on Microfiche looking for any mention of a murder on Mount Leary. He found nothing. He went to the police and asked if they knew anything about a murder which took place on Mount Leary five or six, maybe seven or eight or nine years ago. They didn’t. The same thing happened at the hospital, the morgue and the county records office. Wherever Melba Sabian had had her life taken from her, it wasn’t around here, the transportation disaster capital of the U.S.A.

Milton took the brooch he’d found near the plane wreck from his pocket and considered it in the hazy sunlight. “Catch the eye, hold the heart,” he thought, pinning it to his jacket. “A Tiffany creation of wit, whimsy and wonderful beauty. And a true original.” He ran his index finger along the blue, white and red jewels, so hard that he opened skin.

Judd Nelson stares at the manuscript paper in his hand, absorbing the words – the colors – then looks up as his mouth falls open. His performance is quite terrible, the one decent thing about the entire scene being the untouched pastrami sandwich sitting on the counter in front of him: it looks truly delicious and is a far better actor. Sadly, however, there are just moments to go before the sandwich becomes yet another victim of Nelson’s chewing.

Chapter Fourteen – The What Burlesque?

2009-02-16T18:22:00.001+11:00

In reality I didn’t eat the sandwich. I couldn’t; I was too stunned by the revelation that Milton had found – and was now wearing – Charlotte de Vere’s tricolor brooch. There was also the corollary issue of Charlotte herself: did Milton know the truth about what had happened to her on that doomed flight? How could he? The very idea terrified me. Then there was the non-incidental matter of whether or not any of what had taken place during Milton’s North Carolina sojourn had actually happened; it was, after all, only something I’d read. He – Milton, or whoever was responsible for the words I’d been reading – could simply have made it all up.

I paid for my uneaten sandwich and undrunk tea and left the deli. I’d walked no more than half a block along Third when I was flanked by a row of fat black SUV’s. A sight like this wasn’t particularly unusual in Manhattan, and I figured that the president or a sheik or a hip-hop star was in town and needed a long, sinister caravan to travel around in. What was unusual was that the first and last cars mounted the curb just as the ones in between stopped and issued several crew-cutted hulks in dark suits who quickly and noislessly formed a circle around me. In the centre of their grim, efficient silence I was escorted to one of the gleaming vehicles and pushed into the back as it took off.

Who doesn’t love the smell of a new car? So clean and chemical fresh, unsullied by hamburger wrappers and overflowing ashtrays, untouched by foreign ass. It’s the sleek smell of success, of elevation, of great luck. I was deeply in touch with the smell because my face was being held down firmly on the back seat and all I could breath in was the synthetic crispness of fresh-skinned velour.

“Let him go, Charles,” I heard my ex-wife say. “He’s not going to be any trouble.”

Charles let go of my head and I sat up. Judy was in the front passenger seat, next to a shadowed driver. She looked, as usual, very beautiful. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, tickling the fur collar of the black parka she wore. In the rear view mirror her eyes caught mine. “Put your seat belt on,” she said. “We may be reaching high speeds.” Then she asked me where I’d been for the previous seventy-two hours.

I explained, attempting to put some haughtiness and loft into my tone, that I’d been attending to what I described as ‘various matters’.

“Uh huh,” she said, a sound she often made when she was unconvinced. “Do you know a man named Robert Larson?”

I thought for a moment – the name sounded faintly familiar – then told her that I didn’t. “Should I?”

“Maybe. He was a carpenter at NBC. We think he’s connected with Cherry’s death.”

“Oh,” I said.

“What about a Morton Fabian?”

I swallowed the sound of his name. “A who?”

“Morton Fabian. He was Larson’s neighbor and colleague.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” I said, a trickle that I knew would quickly become a torrent of lies. “Why would I?”

“There were a number of indicators in Fabian’s apartment.” Judy said. “A copy of your novel, for one.”

“Thousands… Hundreds of people own copies of my book.”

“Hundreds, Michael?”

“All right, dozens.” As we took a rapid left I was forced into Charles’s granite frame. “And so what anyway?”

“Well it makes for an interesting coincidence, if nothing else,” Judy said, tapping the driver’s shoulder and indicating something in the distance, the tint of the windows making it difficult for me to know what. “But there’s not nothing else. There’s more.” She told me that the walls of Morton Fabian’s apartment were covered with thousands of pictures of me, taken from newspapers and magazines, and that every single one was obscenely defaced. She said that I didn’t want to know exactly how they were defaced, only that it made even her sick. “Clearly this guy is way over the edge. And it seems that either you or your work sent him there.”

“Oh,” I said. “Ah…”

The vehicle began slowing. “So the situation is this, Michael. We have you assaulting Cherry a couple days ago at my house. We have two guys working with Cherry, one of whom had traces of the cholera virus in his apartment, the other of whom lives nearby in some sort of pietistical anti-shrine to you.” The car stopped and, with the quietly momentous choreography that I was never sure if she engineered or was a natural part of the dramatic flow of her life, Judy turned around and looked at me for the first time. “What’s going on?”

The Milton Sabian/Morton Fabian connection to Langford Cherry was clearly detailed in the manuscript, a copy of which was between my knees in the Brentano’s bag, and Judy would learn of its existence sooner or later, so there was no point in lying to her. I cleared my throat and said, “I have absolutely no idea, Judy.” This was essentially true, and since it applied to a great many aspects of my life at that time, I did not then (and do not now) consider it a lie.

Judy may have. “Uh huh,” she said, turning away from me.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said, and she nodded. “What’s with the convoy? Who are all these guys?”

“Employees and representatives.”

“Employees of whom and representatives of what?”

“You don’t need to know.”

The door at my side was opened by one of the employees or representatives. I saw that we were outside my building and got out of the car before Judy ordered me to. “Take a shower,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“It was good to see you, Judy,” I said as the SUVs pulled out, and I heard the blunt cousins uh and huh escape just before her window sealed.

Highlights from the NBC telecast of the star-studded Langford Cherry funeral and memorial service include: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra simpering through a lachrymose version of the sitcom’s theme song, accompanied by a children’s choir streaming glycerine tears; a ‘video message of hope in song and puppetry’ from the people of Baltimore, where Cherry had grown up; the sentiment, expressed by an NBC V-P of light entertainment, that “if the gift of comedy is a winged one, which it probably is, then Langford Cherry has brought us all a little closer to heaven”; a slow-motion montage of Cherry hugging various co-stars and guest-stars and superstars; several hundred uses of the words talented, incredibly talented, talents and his incredible talents; Felicia Weinberger saying that Langford was “the best friend to all of the good friends and neighbors of ‘Neighbors’” and then attributing that ‘wonderful’ phrase to her own friend and colleague Morton Fabian.

Quoting the (semi) fictional killer at the victim’s memorial service was too much for me. I turned the television off and went to bed, ignoring both the flashing lights on my answering machine and the words catastrophic failure seeping through my head as I fell asleep.

“How could you sleep?” Fox’s Bill O’Reilly asked me when I appeared on his program about a year later, his jaw furiously clenched, as though he had a grenade pin between his teeth. “With so much blood on your hands?”

“It wasn’t blood. If anything it was ink and it wasn’t ink because I don’t write with a pen,” I told him. “And I could sleep because I was exhausted.”

O’Reilly continued. “And what about everything that happened soon after, did you have any idea?”

“How could I, Bill? I’m not a soothsayer.”

“A what the hell?”

“I can’t predict the future,” I explained.

“If you could have seen what was coming, all the other deaths and grief, the tragedy in Vegas, would you have done anything to stop it? To stop the carnage? The madness?”

“Of course I would have. I lost people, too, Bill.”

“America lost…” He choked on a phony sob. “America lost its innocence.”

“Well, I’m sorry about that, too. Obviously.”

“Any words for the president?”

“I wish him well. I hope he enjoys a speedy and complete recovery.”

“Even though you didn’t vote for him?”

“Who says I didn’t vote for him?”

“Well did you vote for him?”

“No, Bill, I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean that I’m pleased about what happened to him. I certainly don’t wish him ill.” (That was a lie; I wished the bastard plenty of ill but it wouldn’t have helped my case to say so.)

O’Reilly pulled the pin. “What are your feelings toward the the Sabianites?”

“I think most of them should be committed, but–”

“Or imprisoned.”

“But it’s a free country and people can worship what and as they wish.”

“Really,” O’Reilly scoffed.

“It’s in the constitution, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, and there’s a piece of writing that could do with a tough edit, if you ask me.” Then he lobbed the grenade. “What’s Milton’s state of mind right now?”

“I don’t know.” O’Reilly glared at me, willing me to explode into confession. “Seriously, I don’t.”

“What would you do to him if you could get your hands – I mean hand – on him?”

I pretended to ponder the question for a moment, as though it came as a surprise, even though I’d been thinking of almost nothing else for months. “Well, Bill, first of all I’d…”

After three days on the case Harry Ramjet had no idea where Milton Sabian was. He’d trawled dozens of government databases in search of any record of Milton, his bureaucratic-numeric-electronic identity. He’d contacted law enforcement agencies all over Missouri, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico and California looking for details about the murders of Lucius Battle and the woman at the Yermo Vista View Motel, but had come up dry. He learned that L.A Sheriff’s detectives had arrested an NBC construction carpenter in relation to the death of the security guard at UCLA. But no matter where he looked he could not find any trace of Milton or of his alleged deeds. Ramjet had, as a last resort, even tried the Internet. “And I see stooping to that as a serious fucking weakness,” he remarked in conclusion to his predictable but nonetheless dismaying report.

“There’s something you need to know,” I said. “And I would have mentioned it the other day but it’s difficult to explain, not to mention believe, and I figured that–”

Ramjet wrapped his giant hands around his huge head and told me to quit stalling.

“Okay, the thing about Milton is I… I made him up.” Harry Ramjet didn’t move. I held my breath and eyed the aluminum baseball bat on the wall behind him. One of the vertebrae in his neck popped loudly. “Nevertheless, he has become…” A cracking cascade ran down Ramjet’s spinal column. “…real.”

He breathed in loudly through his flattened nose and said, “I’m going to have to break you now.” He stood up and reached for the bat.

“No, no,” I said. “There’s no need for that, Mr Ramjet.”

“You waste my time, get me looking for someone who isn’t even actual and now I don’t get to hurt you?” He slammed the head of the bat into his open palm. “I don’t fuckin’ think so.”

“But he is actual. He killed Langford Cherry and I think he’s gonna kill some more people. Really.”

“Real people?”

“Yes, real people. Probably including me. And I’m real.”

Ramjet placed the bat on his desk and sat down. “Prove it,” he said.

“What?”

He opened a drawer and removed a bone-handled hunting knife and slid it across the desk toward me. “Prove to me that you’re real.”

I didn’t bother asking him how (for fear of him assuming the task himself) and drew the knife blade across my fingertip. A long moment passed before the clean, stinging slice emitted a breath of blood, and I think we were both almost surprised when it finally did. I handed back the knife then told Ramjet everything that had happened so far.

An hour later Harry Ramjet looked more scared of me than I’d ever been of him. “I did a little background on you, too, Sherwood,” he said. “You spent some time in a nuthouse, y’know.”

“I know,” I said blankly. “Everybody knows. It was in the papers.”

“And now you come to me with this?” He shook his head in disbelief and shame. “I still can’t believe I haven’t opened your fucking skull yet.”

“And don’t think I don’t appreciate it.” I peeled off a roll of bills and paid him for his work up to now. “But look at it from my point of view, Mr Ramjet, why would I pay you actual money to look for someone not real?”

Ramjet nodded, pulling his whole upper body into the movement. “Good point,” he said. “I’ll get back on the case right afuckinway.”

“Really?”

“No. It’s the stupidest fuckin’ thing I ever heard of.” He picked up the bat. “Get outta my office.”

I spoke rapidly. “The suspect the detectives arrested in L.A, did they tell you his name?”

“No. So what?”

“I know who it is. His name is Robert Larson, and he lived in the same apartment block as Morton Fabian.”

“Who the fuck’s Morton Fabian?”

“Milton Sabian,” I said. “He was using a sort of pseudonym. And he worked with Larson at NBC. Larson’s the one they’ve arrested for killing the guard. And for killing Langford Cherry.”

He tapped the edge of his desk with the fat bat tip. “I thought you said this fictional fucking creation of yours is the one did Cherry.”

“He is,” I said. “They’ve got the wrong guy.”

“And you know this why – because you read it in a fucking book you wrote?”

“I didn’t write that part.”

“Who did?”

“I wish I knew, Harry.” He bristled at my tone and glared at the unctuous familiarity in my eyes. “Mr Ramjet.” I regained some indignation and made a proposal to Ramjet; that we forget about his trying to locate Milton and instead become my bodyguard for a while.

“You couldn’t pay me efuckinough to do that,” he said.

“Would a thousand dollars a day be enough?”

“Yes, it fucking would,” he said, holding out his hand for an advance. I gave him two grand, more than he would actually earn. “Who’s after you I should keep an eye out for besides your phantom pal?”

“Employees and representatives,” I said.

Harry nodded, as though what I’d said made sense, as though he understood.

Unlike most people experiencing profound tumult I did not yearn for things to return to normal. Normal for me was anathema; I hated my writer’s life, and could not pine for the simpler days of sitting slumped at my desk all day enduring the excruciating wait for inspiration or lunch, the sad eagerness for any kind of diversion, for night to come and take me away from my labors and into a bar. I was, as a matter of fact, having a great time. Sure, I couldn’t help wishing that Milton Sabian didn’t have plans to kill me, and that the last time I saw my ex-wife was when she briefly kidnaped me, and that I wasn’t involved in the murder of a television celebrity, and that I hadn’t accepted a large amount of money from a publisher for a book I had no intention of finishing (although I wouldn’t have been the first writer to do so), and that my former agent hadn’t been murdered by a character I created, and that the A.D.A assigned to that case didn’t despise me because a short story I’d written had led to her ex-boyfriend hanging himself, and that ours was a more peaceable planet, and my life on it more meaningful and worthwhile, but the truth is that once I got over the mind-snapping preposterousness of it all, I had to admit that this was probably the best thing that had ever happened to me. Except for one thing: from the most simple, prosaic level to the most metaphysical and complex, I really had no idea what to do next.

The newspapers gave me some vague ideas. I picked up a copy of the The Star from a stand outside Harry’s office as we walked to his vehicle. On page seven was a small item about an unconfirmed rumor concerning the apparent disappearance of Benjamin Geza and Lisa ‘Lulu’ Perez from the set of a film they were shooting in Pennsylvania. “We simply can’t find them,” a co-producer was quoted. “Maybe they went off and got married. Or divorced or whatever they’re up to these days.” Two pages later was a small item which said that unnamed New York City police detectives and an unnamed assistant D.A were after an unnamed man in connection with the death of an unnamed New York literary agent. And just before the sports section, Fred Dustin Waggoner, Walon Frey and Arabella Q. Mordwyn were reported dead in an apparent murder-murder-suicide while on a book tour in D.C. The precise cause of the deaths, described only as ‘contextually unusual’, was being withheld by police. “The three deceased were cult authors of some note,” the report concluded.

“I think Milton’s headed back to New York,” I told Ramjet.

He backed up against a wall, drew his gun and looked hammily from side to side.

“You’re not taking this very seriously, are you Harry?”

“No, I’m not,” he said putting the gun away.

“Well you should,” I warned. “That’s all I’m going to say – you should.”

As we drove toward midtown I explained to Harry that the Perez-Geza disappearance and the author murders/suicide were significant because all of the people involved had been targeted in my manuscript. Targeted for what, he wanted to know. Punishment, I told him. Punishment for what? he asked. That’s a good question, I answered.

My intention was to retrieve the copies of the manuscript I’d sent to the publishers (apart from Donald & Drake) and agents a few days before, in the unlikely event that anyone had actually read it. If anyone had read it, it could get me into even more trouble than I was already in; the fewer people that knew of Milton’s benighted existence, I felt, the better.

“May I ask why you want it returned?” an assistant at Charlemagne and Co. asked.

“Because it’s terrible,” I told her.

“Surely it’s not worse than your last book, Mr Sherwood.”

“Oh gosh no, not that bad,” I said humbly. “Nevertheless it’s quite awful and it’s very important that no-one reads it.”

“Because I really hated your last book.”

“Hey!” On the couch behind me Harry looked up from the copy of ‘Publisher’s Weekly’ he’d been flicking though. “Ease off, sister. He’s done his time for that.”

I smiled at the assistant. “My driver’s a fan. One of the few.” She nodded doubtfully. “So,” I said. “Can I have it back?”

“What was it called again?”

“‘The (Something) Burlesque.’”

“The what burlesque?”

“‘The (Something) Burlesque.’ I haven’t figured out the what yet, so I left it as ‘The…” I held up a pair of parenthetical fingers to help explain the unfortunate title. “…‘(Something) Burlesque.’”

She went over a steel cabinet beside her desk. “And you expected to get it published?” she said incredulously. “That people would actually read something called that?” She opened the cabinet then yelped and stumbled backward as a white wave-crest of paper fell out and spilled over the floor.

“That’ll be it,” I said, rushing over and gathering up the mess and shoving it into a box.

“Next time you submit, spring for a larger envelope,” the assistant said, as Harry and I left. I promised her that there would not be a next time.

“Well, on behalf of American letters, I thank you,” said a smarmy little weed from the mailroom at Kordova Press as he handed me a split envelope and a pile of dirt-encrusted manuscript pages. Harry cuffed the guy on the ear and told him to be a little more respectful, that Sherwood was sorry for what he’d done and deserved better than being given lip from some publishing pisher. As we walked back to Harry’s car I thanked him for his show of support. He told me never to refer to him as his ‘driver’ again or he’d kill me.

“I’m his bodyguard,” he told Adrian, Mary Van Dorn’s young assistant agent at Burke Literary. “I’m protecting him.”

“From what?” Adrian asked.

“Employees and representatives,” Harry said. “And-”

“Okay, great, ” I interrupted. “So could I have my manuscript back, please?”

“Actually Mary’s in there reading it right now, I think,” he said, hooking a thumb toward a glass-walled office overlooking 57th street. Inside was a blonde haired woman sitting at a desk.

“Oh no.”

“You want me to muscle her?” Harry asked me.

“Of course not,” I said. “Maybe later.”

“Who’s sending in the additions to the manuscript?” Adrian asked. “I notice that it keeps getting longer.”

I raised my eyebrows at Harry, as if to say, “See?”

He raised his back at me as if to say, “Fuck you.”

I turned back to Adrian. “If I could just have it back before-”

“Don’t you want Mary to rep it?” the assistant asked. “If she’s interested.”

“I don’t want anyone to rep it, Adrian. It’s not safe.”

Harry started for the office. “I’ll go get it.”

Adrian stood up, very tall and very thin, and stepped in front of Harry, very solid and very wide. “Wait a minute, sir. You can’t just march into her office.”

“Why not?” Harry asked.

“I’ll handle this, Harry,” I said. I asked Adrian if I could have a moment with his boss. He told me he’d see if she was free. I said that I could see that she was free. He explained that she hated to be interrupted while she was reading. Harry’s fist came down on Adrian’s desk and broke a passel of pencils and a memo. “One of you ladies go get that fucking manuscript now or I will tear somebody apart!” he roared. Heads bobbed over cubicle walls and popped out of doors up and down the length of the office.

Mary Van Dorn, a small, well-dressed woman appeared in the doorway of her office and flicked a glance at me and Harry. “What’s going on Adrian?” she asked.

Adrian pointed at me. “This is Michael Sherwood. He wants his manuscript back.”

“Gladly,” Van Dorn said. “I thought my eyes were about to start bleeding.”

“Gladly,” said Ellis Diskin, the one man operation behind the Ellis Diskin Agency. “I thought the goddamned thing was gonna fritz my shredder. I keep on shredding and the bastard keeps on coming back to life. I’m standing at the shredder five, six times a week just dealing with this one goddamned manuscript. Whaddaya, writing on some sorta superpaper?” He handed me half a dozen sheets. “Here’s what’s left of it. Take it away. Get it outta my sight before the goddamned thing metastasizes again.”

The goddamned thing metastasized again five minutes after Harry and I burned it on the banks of the East River. We had made a satisfying pyre of all the copies we’d collected, set it alight and went over to a nearby hotdog stand for some sodas. When we returned to make sure that the fire was out there were a couple of fresh pages sitting on top of the crisp black ashes, like the feathers of some fiendish Phoenix*. Harry picked them up and read through. “Well this is interesting,” he said. He handed me the pages then took out his Beretta, looking back toward the hot dog stand and the abandoned warehouses beyond. “Very fuckin’ interesting.”

*This unhappily alliterative – and pretty obvious – analogy is Poundal’s, not mine; after an absurd amount of mealy-mouthed wheedling on his part, I promised him I’d leave it in. So there it is.

…decided that if he ever did something like this again he’d try to be a little more prepared. He’d bring a gag for one thing because listening to the woman bleating and moaning how could this be happening to her, did he have any idea who she was, then screaming do something about it Ben, you stupid lump of shit. She wouldn’t shut up. It drove Milton nuts.

That was why he cold-cocked her when they got out of the car, just so she’d be quiet. The boyfriend, Ben, started shouting at him, how dare he hit a woman, didn’t he know who she was blah blah blah, and Milton would’ve slugged him, too, except he needed help carrying the chick’s fat ass across the frost-caked field to the empty farm house with three tall Scots Pines out front, the one in the middle lightning-struck and leaning into another, forming an ‘X’.

When Milton and Ben reached the farmhouse they took her down into the coal scuttle, where Milton tied the both of them up tightly with clothesline and explained that it was nothing personal, that the two of them were on this list that he was sort of obliged to follow. And he happened to be in the Pittsburgh neighborhood, so he thought he might as well take the opportunity. Ben spat at Milton and said that he’d kill him if he ever got his hands on him. Milton said he didn’t think so but Ben was welcome to try, should the opportunity arise. The woman came to and asked Milton who the hell he thought he was. “I think I’m Milton Sabian,” Milton said. “But I could be wrong.” Ben asked how much Milton was planning on ransoming them for. Milton said that there wasn’t any ransoming about it, that all that was going to happen was the two of them would starve or freeze or get bored to death down there, in the damp, cold, dark. Ben started sobbing. Milton said “Goodbye” and closed the door.

In the fifteen hours he spent in and around Washington D.C, Milton visited dozens of memorials, malls, monuments and mausoleums, cemeteries and Smithsonians, a sporting goods store, the U.S Supreme Court and Six Flags America. Milton loved every place he went to and felt immensely proud and privileged to be the product of a country that had so much to commemorate and memorialize, not to mention one that could build bigger and better rollercoasters than anyplace else on earth.

In between cultural dips and troughs he found time to shoot Walon Frey, Fred Waggoner and Arabella Q. Mordwyn with a speargun and make it look as though Waggoner had killed the other two before turning the weapon on himself. Each one’s final, despairing utterance was the same: “This is like something out of a bad book.”

“I know,” Milton said.

When he reached Manhattan, Milton had little trouble finding the Hack; he knew that the idiot would try to reclaim the manuscript copies he’d sent out, so Milton simply staked out the entrance to the Charlemagne office on Broadway, certain that the Hack would be egotistical enough to send his drivel there, rather than somewhere more appropriate to his talents like the International House of Self-Publishing. Just who the hell did Sherwood think he was?

What did surprise Milton was that the Hack was accompanied by a waddling brute in a suit, a creature who struck Milton like nothing so much as muscled dog dressed up like one of those poker-playing mutts in the paintings. That was interesting. He followed the pair to another couple of office buildings, then over to the East River where he watched them empty bags and boxes of typescript and set fire to it. Even from where he was Milton could see the satisfied smile slapped like a smug beacon across Sherwood’s face, and he couldn’t wait to rip it off.

“I don’t fuckin’ waddle,” Harry fumed, peering once again at the buildings behind us. “I’m gonna kill that fucking guy.”

“Good luck,” I said, folding the fresh manuscript pages and putting them in my pocket.

“Do I waddle?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

I told him the truth: that other peoples’ perceptions of us were always suspect.

The (Something) Burlesque

Flyleaf

Chapter One – The Pitch

Chapter Two – [HER REAL NAME]

Chapter Three – I/he

Chapter Four – Her ____ ___-stained eyes

Chapter Five – Chapter 4

Introduction to Chapter Six

Chapter Six – 247,564 words

Chapter Seven – h-a-d e-n-o-u-g-h b-y-e

Chapter Eight – Revelations

Chapter Nine – Cholera?

Chapter Ten – “…Sabian.”

Chapter Eleven – Michael [DELETE]

Chapter Twelve – ‘Featuring Harry Ramjet as himslef’

Chapter Thirteen – Catch the eye, hold the heart

Chapter Fourteen – The What Burlesque?

Chapter Four – Her __ _-stained eyes