There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
–Ray Bradbury

Once upon a time, not long ago nor far away, there lived two sewer rats whose names were Duff and Tuff. Like most ignorant rodents looking to survive, they didn’t always have names, nor were they always friends. In fact, neither of them had even so much as sampled dumpster nachos together until one day a rain surge flooded the tunnel into which they’d run, and ejected them from their dark culvert, high up onto a soggy lawn in the forbidden daylight of Overground.

At first the two were terrified, and unable to move. They just looked at each other for the first time, splayed out as they were on the wet grass, with their slick hair matted down. Then the one to be known as Duff said, “you ugly.”

Oddly, this statement got no reaction, even though it occurred somehow to Duff himself that it wasn’t a very nice (much less constructive) observation to make. Here, in the daymare realm of suburban lunacy, it had just seemed so appropriate that Duff felt no guilt at all. So he repeated himself. “Did you hear me?” Duff asked. “I said ‘you ugly.’”

Now the other rat, as yet immobile, merely stared past him at the drainage culvert from which they had both been ejected, yet seemed to feel no disgrace or outrage at Duff’s statement. And when he finally did reply, it was with another odd question. which was, “What’s ugly?”

Duff was puzzled by this response, and then felt a sense of awe overwhelming his terror as he realized that he really shouldn’t know what the word ugly meant, either. After all, with what was he making a comparison? Considering it, Duff eventually concluded that there was something about being here–on this beautiful green lawn in broad daylight–that had somehow influenced such thoughts. Perhaps the very act of noticing how beautiful it was had somehow done it, if not considering the very concept of beautiful. In any event, the next thing he said was, “You Tuff.”

“Tuff?” asked Tuff, perplexed.

Duff sighed, having noticed that Tuff had not only lifted his head, (while dodging the insults hurled at him), but had also managed to stand and swish his tail, allowing a warm breeze heated by the sun to dry out his fur. Duff tried to stand up himself, and failed.

“Tuff,” repeated Tuff, noticing how pathetic his new companion now looked by comparison. “I guess I am Tuff!” Then he frowned, which in sewer rats consisted of flashing one’s lower teeth. “But you. . . you better get up off your duff and act tuff, or we both be seen, sure enough.”

“Duff?” Duff queried.

“Well, it rhymes, doesn’t it?”

Sure enough, thought Duff. Then he looked over at the big, ominous house on whose lawn they’d been exiled, and back at the dark drainage culvert which had finally stopped gushing brown water. “Can you help me get up? You know, I haven’t competed in as many races as you have. I’ve been more. . .of a spectator. Like from the side tunnels? In the dark? With the food?”

Tuff clicked his teeth in derision, which among most mute sewer rats easily translated as laughter. Then he scuttled over to nab a flap of fat on Duff’s duff, lifting his hind legs into the air.

“Ouuuuuu!” protested Duff. Yet with his legs soon under him, instead of splayed out on either side, he did see method behind Tuff’s madness. When Tuff bit down on his neck in order to lift his front side, though, Duff had to bite his own tongue to avoid the embarrassment of crying out like a wimpy mouse.

Once upright, and facing the culvert where they hoped to escape danger, Duff felt a little better, until he had another surprising thought, which was to wonder whether any other members of their pack had even survived the flash flood, or if they were indeed the sole survivors–the only tail swishers left. “What if,” he said, “we go back down there, and. . .and they’re all dead.”

“Dead?” said Tuff.

“And what if,” added Duff, “there’s been another flash flood? What then?”

“Then we die,” Tuff concluded.

“Yeah. Think about that one.”

“Well, how can I? I’ve never thought about it before. I mean, up to now it’s just been a matter of. . . .”

“Instinct?”

“Right. Like staying out of sight. Like dodging black cats at night.”

“Or a wall of brown water?”

“We got lucky there, pal. Not so lucky if we stay here, I fear.”

Duff nodded, and looked back at the house, which was huge and bright. Whiter than any house he’d seen at night, and just like the house on the left and on the right. Then he realized that these houses were always white, even at night. He had just never realized it!

“Wow, think of that,” he said.

“What?” asked Tuff.

Duff didn’t answer, since a new thought had just come to him with startling clarity. It was, indeed, a flash of genius, this self awareness. A thing he suspected few rodents had ever been privileged to experience, being afraid of the sun, as they were.

I THINK, was his thought, THEREFORE I AM.

Then, quite inexplicably, he felt impelled that they should go in search of something he now knew was called cheese.

2

Connor Lemming woke one morning to a crashing sound. At first he wasn’t sure there had even been a sound, since he was sound asleep at the time. In the odd stillness that followed, he slid his left hand over to the other side of the bed, reaching instinctively for his wife, Carol. Then he realized that Carol wasn’t there. In fact, Carol had not been there for over two years. Carol was no longer even a Lemming, but a Fleming, having remarried her lawyer Roger. As for Roger Fleming, he was a rich and arrogant jerk who didn’t need to live in a suburban tract house made of beige stucco, but who instead lived downtown in a loft decorated with modern art, and in a building with a snooty Irish doorman, no less.

Connor sighed. Then he looked at the clock on his night stand, and sighed again. It was time to get up and go sell life insurance, sure enough, and as this thought made its neuronal connection in his brain, his clock’s alarm suddenly went off. At this surprise Conner lifted his left hand, which still lay on his ex wife’s side of the bed, and slowly guided it toward the source of the noise, now wondering about what had awakened him, if not the clock. Was the sound he’d thought to have imagined real? Had it come, not from some dream—perhaps Carol slamming the door as she left him—but in actuality, and from the direction of the kitchen, as he now suspected?

Conner let his hand drop onto the snooze button. Stopping the annoyance, he then listened for aftershocks–some hint that he wasn’t totally and irrevocably alone. What he heard, after a brief silence, was a sound that, had it occurred to him, he might have described as a scampering. In the kitchen he discovered that a plate lay shattered on the beige linoleum floor. It was the only plate he currently used from the immaculate china set Carol had mistakenly left him. The one plate he’d permitted himself to take from the stack up there behind the glass cabinet. Bits of bread crust lay mingled with the shards at his bare feet. Stepping backward to get a broom, he felt a stabbing pain in his right heel as a sliver punctured it. Yelping, he hopped awkwardly back, glancing up too late to glimpse, even peripherally, a sudden scampering movement into the living room beyond.

That evening, returning from a job he now despised, Conner slumped into his usual spot at the usual time to watch the usual news on television. News that was predominately bad, although the commercials always seemed frantically upbeat. After the news and weather, he next watched a reality show featuring a group of spoiled and scantily clad college students sharing a confined space, followed by the evening movie, featuring a scantily clad college student being chased by an axe murderer. Finally, he watched The Late Show. Nothing else unusual happened the rest of the night. No more plates fell, inexplicably or otherwise. The phone did not ring, and no one came to the door, either.

Sleep and repeat.

On Friday evening Conner noticed, returning from the bathroom, that a second plate, only recently containing crackers and cheese, now lay empty–albeit unbroken–on the textured beige carpet. “Oh my goodness,” he said, aloud. He looked around him, doing a slow 360, afraid that if he turned too quickly he might see something he shouldn’t. Like a ghost.

Carol’s ghost.

Had Carol died? It had been over a year since he’d last heard from her. Maybe Carol had slipped, or been pushed, from Fleming’s penthouse apartment balcony after one too many party cocktails! He hadn’t read a paper in months, and never watched the local news. Wouldn’t someone call and tell him, though? Her mother? No, not her mother. One of her new society friends?

No. Knowing her, she’d probably never mentioned him to them by name.

He looked down at the plate, laying there on the floor, clean. Not even a crumb left. If Carol had died, he decided, it made sense that she’d come back to nag him. She’d always complained about his not taking her out more often. Maybe now, from the afterlife, she was saying, look what you did to me, Conner! I wouldn’t have been forced to leave you if you weren’t so boring! I’d be alive today, if you weren’t such a bum!

When nothing more happened, Conner retrieved his remote control, and hit the button that adjusted the volume on the ball game, hoping a few added decibels would scare away Carol’s recriminations from his head. Then he went into the kitchen for more beer and crackers. When he picked up his cheese knife to slice more cheddar from the carving board next to the sink, though, he froze in shock instead. Not only wasn’t there any cheese on the board anymore, but his Italian salami log was missing too.

“Rats!” he said aloud, and then, “are you hungry where you are, Carol? Are you thirsty too?”

3

“Treasure chest?” guessed Tuff.

They stared up from the kitchen floor in perplexed wonder at the huge rectangular beige monolith before them. Duff shook his head for some reason, and a drop of spittle–or drool–fell from his jowls. “Nope,” he declared, “I don’t think that’s the word. Somehow, I think the word starts with an R.”

“What’s an R?” asked Tuff.

“I’m not sure, but I think it starts with an L. . .or an A.”

They shuffled closer. Tuff sniffed at the rubber sealing that ran up the near side of the mammoth metal box. “I don’t smell anything,” he said. “Are you sure we’re on the right track?”

“All I know,” declared Duff, “is that it opens up.”

“You saw it? And there’s more cheese inside?”

“Humans don’t appreciate green cheese. That’s why they keep it cold.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, really. They like it aged, but not that much.”

“How odd,” said Tuff. “The more the merrier, I would say.”

“You would?”

“Well, I guess. Although, come to think of it, I haven’t said it before.”

Duff pointed his nose upward, sniffing the air. “I’m afraid,” he concluded, “we have no choice but to crack this safe if we expect to find anything to eat befitting our new tastes.”

“Safe?” asked Tuff.

“Sealed box. What we need to find now is the right tool, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do,” proclaimed Tuff, “although I shouldn’t.”

“Yes,” agreed Duff, “it’s odd, isn’t it? And what’s more, we seem to be adding to our vocabularies by the hour, as if by osmosis.”

“Did you just say osmosis?”

“I did, and it felt good to say, too. Do you know what this means?”

“Not a clue. You?”

“Maybe it means that I’m the brains of this outfit, and you’re the brawn.”

“Brawn,” Tuff repeated, wondering if he’d just been insulted.

“Right, brawn. Muscle. Guts. Anyway, help me find a butter knife to wedge into the crack there and lever the refrigerator door open, now. Okay?”

Tuff just stared at him, aghast, as if to say, A what to what for what?

“A tool,” Duff summarized.

“Oh,” said Tuff, apprehending. “I guess it is obvious, once you think about it.”

After gorging themselves on the deliciously creamy flavors of hydrogenated margarine and two all beef patties with special sauce, lettuce and cheese, the satiated (and saturated) duo frolicked in the sink before cleaning up after their refreshing waterfall bath with paper towels pulled from a dispenser. Finally, they sunned themselves on the sill, legs up, grinning like saints newly unpacked in paradise.

“Ya know,” said Duff, in what next felt to be a spontaneous epiphany, “we should feel guilty about all this.”

Tuff was nonplussed. “What does that mean? I mean, we’re rats, aren’t we?”

“True, but why should we enjoy so much when our fellow rats can’t?”

“Because they’re dead?”

“Good point.”

“So why bring it up?”

Duff sighed. “You’re right, of course.”

“You bet’cha.”

“Although,” said Duff, “we can’t be sure of that, because we never went to look for them.”

“Nor they for us.”

“And then there’s the matter of our host. Our meal ticket.”

“What about him?”

“Don’t you think it’s odd he lives alone in this big house?”

Tuff sniffed. “Not really. It’s stranger to me that I know what house means.”

“That too. But, I mean, come on! This guy, all he does is watch that squawk box out there. Every night, and with all those screams and flashes and explosions. What do you make of that?”

“I don’t make anything but droppings,” Tuff said.

“Yeah? Well, don’t you want to?”

Tuff shrugged, which in sewer rats consisted of lifting a tail for a second, then dropping it with a thud. “Can’t we just lay here and enjoy the moment? Do we have to try and figure it all out?”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“I’m not a cat.”

“No, and we’re lucky he doesn’t have one of those, either. Or a dog.”

“Just a TV is all,” noted Tuff.

“A what?”

“Squawk box. Television. See, you’re not as smart as you think. Even I pick up on things you don’t.”

“You do?” Duff was aghast. “Have you been watching this television?”

Tuff wiggled his whiskers, then for some reason shook his head. “You know I haven’t. I’ve been with you the whole time! Anyway, it’s too dangerous. What if Conner sees us?”

“Who, did you say?”

“Our antisocial benefactor.” Tuff paused, lifting one leg to examine the sharpness of his toenails. “That mousy, reclusive donor of ours, who’s getting dumber by the hour while we get smarter.”

Duff turned all the way around, narrowed his eyes. “Did you just make a connection between us and. . . and him?”

“I suppose I did.”

“Amazing.”

“Isn’t it? Furthermore, let me add that I think he’s becoming us, while we’re becoming what he should be.”

Duff stood up, shook himself dry, and then stared at Tuff, laying there on the sill in the sun like a fat cat on a bed of fresh bird feathers. “So, why do you think this is happening?”

“No idea,” said Tuff. “Although—and this could be the most astonishing thing either of us have said yet—I think if it ever stops, we’re in deep, deep trouble.”

Duff nodded. “I think you’re right. Although I’m still not sure how. Or even how I know what the word astonishing means. Although I do. Now.”

“Somehow,” added Tuff.

4

At 5:24 PM Conner arrived in his beige sedan, parked it in the garage, and went inside. On the kitchen table he set down the bag which contained forty chicken nuggets, french fries, and a chocolate shake, and then he walked over to the phone which hung next to the beige china cabinet. It was the fifth time that day he’d almost called Roger Fleming’s number to make sure that Carol was okay. . . and also the fifth time that he’d chickened out. No doubt, he realized once again, they’d get quite a laugh to learn the extent of his misery since she’d left him. When another wave of anguish and frustration swept over him, Conner retrieved his bag instead, went into the living room with it. Turning on the television, he slumped into his usual spot in front of it. At which point he pigged out.

Two hours later, when he returned to the kitchen to open the refrigerator, he was confronted by an enigma more puzzling than anything Carol had ever said in her sleep. An old fast food sack lay torn open on its side, empty. A butter dish formerly holding a full stick of margarine now looked like someone had crushed and melted it in a waffle iron. Jerking open the freezer compartment, he also found that one of the three half gallon cartons of ice cream had been opened, too, with two scoops missing–one on each long side.

Conner sat heavily at the kitchen table, and considered the possibilities. Either Carol really was haunting him, or she’d returned for something she’d forgotten to take with her. Glancing up at Carol’s prize china in the cabinet above, he ruled out the latter. What remained was more chilling than an ice cream headache. Until, that is, he remembered Molly. Molly, the one mutual friend whose discretion had always proved reliable.

Conner almost tripped over himself in getting to the phone. Punching the seven digits from memory, he listened to a familiar ring. Then a familiar voice said, “Hello?”

“Molly? Hi, it’s me, Conner.”

“Conner?”

“Yeah, listen. I was wondering if. . .well, if you’ve heard from Carol lately.”

“Carol? No, not since she left Roger.” A pregnant pause. “So how are you, Conner? What have you been up to?”

“I’m sorry, Molly, did you just say– I mean, how long ago was this?”

“Was wh– Oh!” Molly chuckled absent-mindedly, then stopped herself. “Oh, you’re serious. You didn’t know? That was three months ago, Conner. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re back together again by now. They’ve made up before, you know.” She paused again. “Or maybe you don’t.”

“No, I don’t, Molly. I was hoping if you knew whether she was all right. Safe and. . .sound.”

“Umm.” Molly seemed to consider it. “I suppose. I mean, why wouldn’t she be?”

“No reason.” Except that she might be haunting me. “Except there’s things. . . changed around here. It doesn’t matter what. I’m just wondering if maybe she still has a key.”

“A key,” repeated Molly. “Wish I could help you there, Conner.”

“Yeah, I wish you could too.”

“Sorry,” said Molly. Then she hung up.

Conner sat back down, but after a moment his despair seemed to lift. The black clouds over his head seemed to part along a silver lining, letting the sun peek in. Then a slight smile animated his lips, as a realization dawned: Whether Carol is alive or dead, he thought, either way. . .I’m not alone anymore.

Early the next morning, after a longer than usual sleep, he decided to leave a message for Carol on the refrigerator. Sitting at the kitchen table, he considered what to say. He remembered the smashed plate, the mashed butter, the ripped bag. What was Carol trying to tell him? He looked down at his paunch, then over at the garbage disposal switch, and then up at all the fine china, untouched in the cabinet above. Finally, he stared out into the living room at the dark television screen standing on its pedestal in one corner. A small neural connection fired in his cerebral cortex–tiny at first–as a single synapse pulsed across a gap, like a spark plug. . . Carol had never told him why she’d left, he realized, but wasn’t it obvious now? Wasn’t there a lesson to be learned here, too?

He held pen over paper, wriggling it as he considered his options. Should he promise to buy healthier food? Join a gym? Eat at sit-down restaurants instead doing take-out? Or maybe he should just get out more in general–to art showings, concerts, lectures, volunteer events. Be a part of the community.

What would it take to make Carol reappear?

He lowered the pen, and then forced his fingers to write something. Anything!

DEAR CAROL– YOU’RE RIGHT, AND I PROMISE TO CHANGE. PLEASE TELL ME IF I’M ON THE RIGHT TRACK? LOVE, CONNER.

Marching into the living room, he stood with odd determination in front of the TV. Then, displaying unprecedented resolve, he placed his hands on either side of the flat screen, and turned the thing all the way around. So that it faced the corner, like a recalcitrant child.

His smile returned, and broadened. Better. Much better. He felt smarter already.

5

Emerging first from the pantry’s empty bread basket, Duff poked his head carefully into the kitchen. When he sensed that Conner had indeed departed for work, he squinted upward, then queried his compatriot. “Can you read that?” Duff asked, pointing with his nose.

Tuff stared up at the mysterious symbols now posted on the refrigerator, whiskers twitching as their furtive meaning failed to jell. “Just a minute,” he replied.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Just taking me longer than usual, for some reason.”

“What reason?”

“Shhhhhh.”

“Tell me.”

“Shut up!” Tuff pushed Duff out of the way in frustration.

“Okay, okay. No need to get huffy, Mr. Tuffy.”

The duo moved closer, then stood beside each other, gawking up at the tall, beige monolith like cavemen in a Stanley Kubrick film.

“Well,” said Tuff, at last, “If you ask me, I think our friend Conner knows someone named Carol, and presumably he’s promising her that he’s going to stop being who he’s become.”

“You presume a lot,” said Duff. “For my part, what I presume is that the only reason we still know what the word presumably means is because Conner hasn’t used the word much, lately.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not sure. One thing’s for sure, though. He’s deluded. Because he thinks we’re Carol. Because he hasn’t seen us.”

“Yet.”

“And so it would behoove us to stay hidden, and prevent him from–”

“Wait a minute,” said Tuff. “What does behoove mean?”

“You really don’t know?”

“Not a clue.”

“There. You see? We’d better mind our p’s and q’s or we’ll–”

“Hold it,” interrupted Tuff. “Hoooold it! What do the letters P and Q have to do with anything?”

“Well, for all intents and purposes, they–”

“Huh? Speak English!”

Duff sighed. “Okay, my theory is that we can’t let Conner change, or there won’t be any cheeseburgers left to eat around here.”

“How do ya know that?”

“Not sure, I just do,” declared Duff.

“Ya know, you’re acting mighty peculiar,” Tuff noted.

“Peculiar,” Duff repeated, trying to decipher the word.

“Weird! Strange! Nutso!” Tuff paused, significantly. “Gees. Before long we’ll be talking in single syllables.”

“Chief among them huh and duh, perhaps?”

Tuff turned and scampered quickly away, toward Conner’s bedroom. Left to pursue his theory alone, Duff had another idea. It occurred to him, even as he maneuvered a wedge into the crack of the refrigerator, that he shouldn’t be having ideas at all, were it not for the fact that Conner hadn’t been having them much, up to now. So upon opening the big cold box, Duff filled his cheeks with butter, and made his way to the living room, where he expelled the now slick liquid all around the base of the television wherever it made contact with the pedestal table. Then he went to find Tuff.

Tuff was in Conner’s bedroom, trying to read a romance novel. He’d pulled the book from a short shelf of them next to the bed. As a page turned, Duff sneezed from the dust, then said, “This is Carol’s side, I think. I’ve noticed Conner sleeps on the other.”

“You have, have you,” said Tuff. “When did you notice that? And why on earth does it matter, anyway?”

“It matters,” Duff explained, “because our Conner is still in love with this woman.”

“What’s love mean?” demanded Tuff.

“I’m not sure yet, but it has something to do with not getting rid of what remains of her stuff. And pretending she’s still here.”

“Good for us, I hope?”

Duff shrugged, which in rats consisted of raising one’s head a bit and wobbling it from side to side, accompanied by a little eye rolling, all in one fluid motion. “Or bad, if he starts reading these books. Now put that book back, and follow me.”

“Where we going?”

“To prove I’m the brains of this outfit.”

Intrigued, Tuff followed, tail swishing like a fencing foil looking for a worthy opponent.

6

Conner arrived late that evening, having eaten out at Luisa’s, a charming Italian bistro described by an entertainment paper he’d browsed at the office as having “the most delightfully subtle tastes in the pasta universe.” He’d agreed, although he realized that his opinion was suspect because he hadn’t sampled anything beyond the fast food franchises on the next block in years, much less any alternate culinary universes.

Bagless, Conner entered the kitchen and immediately felt an aura of change there. What was it? he wondered. What was different? Struck by an apprehension of visitation or violation, he looked around as the peculiar sense of being watched swept him. The first thing he noticed was the refrigerator. Not because of what was there, but because of what was missing.

His note.

“Carol?” he called, his voice suddenly tremulous and weak. “Are you. . . here?”

Fearful of an answer, whatever it might be, he backed slowly into the living room, then froze again when he saw that his television no longer faced the corner, but had been turned around, as though by magic.

Or on purpose.

“Who moved my TV?” he wondered, aloud.

Obviously it was Carol, he decided, and she was trying to tell him something, whether from the spirit world or not. But what? Did this act mean she didn’t want him to change his life on her account? Was she saying she was sorry about leaving him for a rich scoundrel? What?

In bewilderment, he turned to face the couch, and there noticed that his remote control lay as though placed there, at the ready. Positioned face up, its faint, worn letters reminded him of the calculator on his work desk. He picked the thing up, experimentally, as if to calculate exactly how long he’d been living in this limbo. “What do you want to watch tonight, Carol?” he heard himself ask as he instinctively depressed the On button. When the television glowed to life, though, he felt an eerie shiver pulse through him, and so hit the button again.

No, a chiding voice inside him whispered. Get a grip.

He cast the remote back onto the couch, then quickly turned the TV around to face the corner once more. Satisfied, he then returned to the kitchen, where he next noticed that the stack of Carol’s prize china dishes–so long residing in their upper berth–was missing. For a full minute he stood there, unmoving. Just staring at the empty shelf. Then he slumped into the kitchen chair in despair as he realized that Carol had probably removed the dishes after using her key to get in through the front door, whose lock he’d never changed.

So that was it.

And that, as they said, was also. . . that.

Still, she has her key, he thought, dimly. Maybe she’ll be back. . .

Even this feeble and pathetic hope drained away when, upon opening the refrigerator for further evidence, he was confronted by vacant metal shelves. Gone was the paper sack, the mashed butter. Instead he was faced with a clean, stark and cold space that now felt as empty as his heart.

I’m a slob, he concluded. That’s what she’s really saying.

If only he didn’t feel so powerless and insignificant, compared to Roger Fleming. If only he could think clearly. . . could focus or concentrate. Fleming was as sharp as a lead pencil, but obviously not so easily erased. Not by a dull-witted fool named Lemming, whose social life consisted of watching reality TV while eating cheese doodles. The simple explanation here was as obvious as Occam’s razor: Carol had remembered the dishes, and finally returned for them. She’d seen his note, had a good laugh, and then cleaned up a bit–as she’d always done–before leaving him once more, without a word. By now she was probably back in the rat’s arms, making light of his misery over cocktails. She didn’t care if he changed his life or not. Such an idea was absurd. She’d moved on. For all she cared, he could watch TV for the rest of his life. Or not. What difference did it make to her–or, for that matter, to anyone?

When a headache started a romantic tango with his heartache, Conner lay down on his bed and tried to sleep. When that didn’t work, he switched his beige lamp back on, and scooted over to Carol’s side of the bed in order to assess her book collection. But there was nothing to assess, now.

Her books were gone too.

He fell back, arms flung out like a shell-shocked battlefield soldier in surrender. That clinches it, he decided. After all, did ghosts read? Hardly. Ghosts had their own ghost stories to tell. They didn’t need to read.

On impulse, he took Carol’s pillow, covered his head with it, and then crossed his arms around it, pulling the pillow down hard onto his face in frustration. Unfortunately, he continued to breathe, all the same. When he realized that he didn’t even have the guts to commit suicide, he felt hopelessly trapped in his misery. A failure at everything, he began to weep long, wailing sobs ashamedly muffled by goose down and beige 300 thread count pillowcase fabric. Only when the pillow became too uncomfortably moist to keep over his face did he remove it. Then he reached for the phone and dialed a long remembered number.

“I’ll have a large with everything,” he told the bored voice that answered, “and a two liter bottle of cola.”

When he hung up, his address confirmed, he thought, If only I had just one friend I could really de–

The thought was left uncompleted since he was already walking toward the couch in the other room, anticipating resolution.

7

Within weeks Duff and Tuff had expanded their waistlines while their diet extended from pizza crusts and leftover french fries to the nouveau cuisine of chicken nuggets and shredded roast beef, which they were careful to sample only a slice at a time from underneath the upper buns of Conner’s sandwiches–and only when he was out of the room. Trading off lookout duties, the duo managed to avoid detection, even as their increasingly bovine and plodding benefactor became ever more “corpulent,” as Duff put it.

“Worth it, ya think?” Tuff asked one afternoon while lazily sunned himself, waiting for Conner to return from a fast food franchise that boasted a yellow plastic clown at the take-out window.

“Up to now I would indeed have credited our little coup as residing in the column of the affirmative,” Duff responded, rubbing his left foreclaw against the fluffy fur covering his paunch.

“Huh?”

“Of course, were I you, I’d refrain from acquiring such prosaic affectations as ya or huh.”

“What’s that supposed ta mean?” Tuff demanded.

“Ta ta ta.”

“I’ll ta-ta-ta you if ya don’t explain yerself.”

“Okay. Well, it’s really rather simple to understand. To anyone with half a brain, I mean.” Duff paused, significantly. “For one thing, I’ve been reading.”

Tuff looked over at him skeptically. “The hell ya say. I thought we burned all Conner’s books, right before we exhausted ourselves carrying out all his broken china to the trash, piece by piece!”

“It wasn’t his china or his books,” Duff explained. “It was hers, remember?”

“Whose?”

“Carol, his ex wife.”

“Whatever. Get to the point, please?”

“Okay,” Duff continued, “The point is this. I’m tired of junk food. From what I’ve been reading, it’s not very healthy, either. So maybe we’ve prevented Conner from changing, as planned, but it’s time we now considered changing ourselves. Before it’s too late, I mean.”

“Huh?”

“There you go again.”

“And you too. What the hell are you saying now? Spill it!”

Duff sighed. “I’m just saying we’ve got Conner where we want him again, barely able to dress himself. But if we don’t watch it, we’ll follow his tracks right into the same dead end maze.”

Tuff huffed. “Ya sure are talking funny.”

“You want to hear funny? Conner was once both a reader and a writer. Even a poet, although never published. Which is what first attracted Carol to him in the first place. Until he got writer’s block, that is, and wasn’t becoming the bestselling author Carol imagined. Until he got a job as a life insurance salesman, and started watching TV instead.” Duff paused, again significantly. “It was while you were dozing that I found his books in the attic.”

“What books?”

“Let’s see, well, besides the diary, there was a science textbook, an old college dictionary, and books by people named John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and T.S. Eliot. Plus a novel titled Fahrenheit 451 by someone named Ray Bradbury.”

“Really. And what did you do with these books? If ya don’t mind me asking.”

“Do? Well, I burned them, of course. After I read them.”

“And the ashes?”

“The usual place.”

“Uh huh.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Believe you? I don’t even know you. Although I’m starting to.”

“Good,” Duff said, “because you need to know this, too. Conner has been contemplating getting a pet. Meaning a dog or–worse–a cat.”

“How do ya know that? Can ya read his mind now, too?”

“No, just his phone book. But need I remind you how catastrophic it would be for us should he decide to alleviate his loneliness that way?”

“Yes, ya do. What’s catas-tropic mean?”

“Bad.”

“How bad could it be?”

“Catastrophically bad. But never fear. I have a plan.”

“You do, huh.” Tuff yawned.

“Don’t you want to hear it?”

Tuff turned back to stare at the ceiling, then closed his eyes in response. Soon he was snoring.
“Oh, and by the way,” Duff added, after Tuff seemed too groggy to understand, “I didn’t just read Conner’s books, I memorized them.”

That very night, while Conner and Tuff slept, Duff ripped out the yellow phone book pages associated with pets–both for sale and adoption. For added measure, he also ripped away the circled pages showing pizza delivery. He’d “had it” with pizza, as Tuff might have put it were he cognizant of his precarious position on Darwin’s rickety stepladder. What Duff desired now was to sample other taste sensations, and without skulking around for them. Like Lebanese, Greek, Cantonese, and German. All he had to do was convince Conner that Carol was really dead, after all.

8

Conner awoke from a recurring dream of falling endlessly through clouds that seemed to become thicker and darker until he could no longer breathe. What he discovered upon sitting up is that his comforter was missing. It had not merely slipped to the floor, either. It was gone from the room.

When he found the blanket–now covering the sofa in front of the TV–he stood motionless for a long, anxious moment, first in confusion while recalling the previous night, and then in astonishment while confirming that his habits and rituals had never changed. He was astonished again to find that two empty paper plates had been laid out on a TV tray on the kitchen table, with a yellow advertisement coupon neatly placed between them reading FODELLO’S GOURMET CHEESES. His phonebook, positioned behind it, was opened to the restaurant section, and showed obvious editing in the form of careful cutting and pasting. One of the items circled in grease pencil read CAROL’S DELI MEATS.

Conner put one hand over his mouth, and very nearly collapsed back against the stove. When he put his hand behind him to brace himself, he was startled to sense that the stove was mysteriously warm. What he noticed next was that two china cups had been placed next to the coffee maker, whose little red light also indicated that coffee was brewing. Peering into the cups, he saw that one cup held two sugar cubes, while the other held only one.

Carol had always preferred one cube, and he two.

“Carol!” he called, his voice shrill with panic. “This isn’t funny. You come out now.”

There was no response, except from the coffee maker, which burbled.

“Carol?” he almost pleaded.

Calling in sick this time, Conner felt no guilt. He was sick. Sick in the head, obviously. Hadn’t he seen a hypnotist on a talk show once demonstrating auto suggestion? Guinea pig audience volunteers had done things they later couldn’t remember doing. Maybe it was the same with him. Maybe he’d arranged all these things himself, out of the subconscious hope that Carol hadn’t left him again. Could it be possible? If so, he needed to see a shrink right away. He was losing his mind. Maybe he’d already lost it. Of course there was only one way to be sure of that.

“Coffee’s ready,” he called, trying to keep his voice from cracking.

After pouring out coffee for Carol, he took his own cup into the living room to watch Oprah. If, when he returned, Carol’s coffee was gone, that meant he wasn’t insane. The world itself was insane. If the coffee was still there, he decided, he would call for a doctor’s appointment first thing in the morning.

Appropriately enough, the topic on Oprah was the spirit world. The Billionaire host talked about how other famous people had been visited by ghosts, and how it had changed their lives. Would it change his, too? Conner wasn’t rich or famous, so he wasn’t sure. Maybe ghosts didn’t visit life insurance salesmen. Not even the ghosts of ex wives.

When the show broke for commercials, Conner got up from the couch, but then he just stood there, staring in the direction of the kitchen. In that suppressed portion of his brain where imagination slept, an alternate future flickered into visibility by his mind’s eye–one that might have been his if only he’d made different decisions. Not even better decisions, just different ones. As many choices as were possible, he suddenly realized, that many futures would never be. And when he tried to imagine one which he and Carol shared happily together, he couldn’t. Imagination was again replaced by images on TV. Images that seemed propelled under pressure in a steady stream of hypnotizing photons that made Carol’s face recede even as he tried to conjure it. Her face was repeatedly wiped or cross-dissolved away as that never-ending rush of other images replaced every attempt he made to stabilize it. The source of the images felt as relentless and as inexhaustible as the sewer drain that had flooded his yard after a historic storm, too.

In a daze, Conner stepped fatefully toward the kitchen.

Who ya gonna call? the voice in his head taunted.

He stood in the doorway now, looking toward the china cup next to the coffee maker. He inched toward it slowly, about to peer over the rim. . .

I ain’t afraid’a no ghost, his inner voice jeered.

9

Tuff looked stuffed, with his tail hanging off the edge of the table, feet in the air. “Worth it, ya think?” Tuff asked, not bothering to open his eyes this time, much less look in Duff’s direction.

Duff counted the remaining cheese cubes on the plate. There were nine left, one each of cheddar, feta, gouda, havarti, mozzarella, Roquefort, Gorgonzola, ricotta, and Swiss. Without looking up from his work, he replied, “I may have singed my palate sipping hot coffee, but yes, I would say that what few taste buds remain to sample these delicacies are surely in heaven. As to my favorite, I’m leaning towards gouda. It be good-ah.”

“Can’t ya just answer my question?” Tuff complained.

“I thought I did,” Duff said. “And your next one, too. As for the meats, now residing in our stomachs. . . albeit more in yours than mine. . . I will add that the kielbasa was particularly satisfying, given as I warmed mine on the stove sufficiently to bring out its hidden bouquet.”

“Whatever,” said Tuff.

“Perhaps next time Conner will grace us with a nice bottle of Chianti and some fava beans as a side.”

“Huh?”

“Nevermind. Now help me hide these cubes in the pantry for a midnight snack before Conner gets home.”

“Yes, Carol, dear,” Tuff said, then added, “We don’t want ya ta end up on the History channel.”

Duff turned to stare at Tuff. “What?”

“Never mind.” Tuff rolled over and struggled up. “Just a channel Conner don’t watch.”

“Doesn’t.”

“Eh?”

“Doesn’t watch. And how would you know, anyway?”

“When you asleep, I get bored. Kapeech?”

“No. No kapeech. Have you ever been bored before?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Not until you started watching television?”

“How’d ya guess?”

“Because your grammar is suffering.”

“Whas gram-mar mean?”

“It means more cheese for me, once Conner gets his cat.”

“Ya don’t scare me.”

“That is scary. Listen. I’m serious. You need to quit, and I don’t mean because Conner might catch you. I mean because there’s a balance here between us and him, somehow. It’s got something to do with his relationship with that TV. Maybe ghosts are real, and there’s one in there, in that machine. Although a machine implies moving parts, and I’m fairly sure that thing is solid state. Anyway, my point is you’re spooking me out, talking like you do.”

“Me? How ’bout you?”

“Are you suggesting that my getting smarter only makes you seem dumber by comparison? No, I reject that argument. It’s empirically unsound. Your vocabulary has definitely deteriorated. Just listen to yourself.”

“Me? A month ago I had no vocabu. . . whatever. . . at all!”

“Ah, but then you did, and now you’re losing it. Giving it back to Conner by sneaking those peeks.”

“Gimme a break.”

“Okay, I will. If you promise to stop cheating, I won’t let Conner get a cat that will eat you, or a trap that will snap your neck. Deal?”

Tuff snickered. “Yer funny.”

“Am I? I thought I was being deadly serious. Do you have any idea how rare and precious intelligence is? Having a language? Being able to communicate? We’ve been gifted with this miracle by some force beyond ourselves. A higher power. We even dare to imagine we know who we are, although we don’t know why or how our consciousness came to be. Are we now going to squander it all through lazy indulgence?”

Tuff sighed. “I got no idea what yer sayin’. All I want is ta be happy. That too much ta ask?”

“No, it’s not too much,” Duff replied, smiling sadly, “it’s too little.”

Duff tried to warn Tuff several more times that his mind was going down the very drain they’d escaped, but he wouldn’t listen. Maybe he really didn’t understand, just like he said. Maybe it was too late. Duff’s complaints about having to clean up more, now that they’d taken on Carol’s role, also failed to motivate Tuff. From his berth under the couch beneath Conner, Tuff spent most evenings watching the glowing screen that Duff avoided, then spent his days eating and sleeping while Duff dealt with the mess they made. Once, not quite exhausted by his double duties, Duff ascended again through the woodwork in search of more books in the attic, but the only one he found was the collected stories of Jorge Luis Borges. One story described an infinite library filled with every possible combinations of words or letters. It was a library so vast that there was, no doubt, a book in it that would explain the meaning of existence itself. Yet the odds of anyone finding such a book was calculated at zero.

Duff was considering Borges’ idea that such a library implied a Librarian when he heard a crash downstairs.

10

While in the bathroom, Conner opened the new copy of TV Guide he’d purchased, then stared down at the image of a starlet on the red carpet of an awards show. The face looked familiar to him, but instead of reading the young woman’s name and fashion critique, he looked past the magazine he held toward the heating vent beyond his feet. In a flicker of memory Carol’s face seemed magically framed there against the dark, and he closed his eyes in an attempt to retain and focus the image. A moment later, when he opened his eyes again, they were wet with tears. The vent now seemed blurred and shifted by the watery film projected across the lens of his eyes. He wept uncontrollably as Carol’s face appeared, shimmering as though in the rain against an inner eye. At this, the TV Guide slipped from his hands to the floor.

“Carol. . .” he sobbed.

When the emotional pressure finally abated, he blinked away his tears, and was left staring emptily into the vent where, after a time, he became aware of a small piece of cloth hanging against the inside of the vent’s grill. On closer inspection he saw that it wasn’t cloth at all, but a fragment of partially burned paper. He even made out a word inside the crisped edges of the sliver.

Montag.

Montag. Montag. Where had he heard that name before, and how did he even know it was a name? And then he remembered that, too.

Befuddled by the meaning of why and how the burnt fragment of a book by Ray Bradbury appeared in his bathroom’s heating and cooling vent, Conner went in search of a flashlight in the kitchen. What he found, while kneeling down to open the compartment below the sink, was yet another fragment. This one was glass. Or rather china. A broken piece of it the size of his fingernail was lodged in one of the cabinet’s vertical decorative slats. He picked it out and studied it, turning it as if examining a relic or fossil. Then he turned on the flashlight, and ran the beam along the edge of the floor beneath all the beige cabinet drawers. And there he found another china piece, smaller but unmistakable.

Now in a frantic hunt for the truth, Conner burst into the bedroom, then the living room, the flashlight beam scanning into every vent, every dark nook and cranny until. . .

He couldn’t believe it. Transfixed in the focused radiance under his couch was an apparition. A fat, gluttonous rat whose beady red eyes now opened, squinting into the light. Conner screamed, and with an adrenaline rush gripped the underside of the couch and lifted one side of it as he rose. Looking down in disgust at the vermin huddled there in a circle of crumbs, he turned the couch sideways, and prepared to drop it.

“No!” said the rat suddenly, in a tiny yet distinct voice, eyes wide.

Conner’s eyes widened even more. Propelled backward by shock, he lost his balance, stumbled, and fell as the couch struck the television, dislodging it with a resultant explosion of glass.

Scrambling back from the thing on the floor before him, Conner then reached for the brass pole of his floor lamp. Tightening his grip around it, he swung the lamp down like a baseball bat going for a low ball. The beige Tiffany hood and bulb exploded in a shower of sparks, grinding across the floor in an arch. But when he looked again at the spot where he swung, the impossible rat was gone.

Strike two, he thought, dully.

Wagner’s Hardware had only one large wooden trap left, and Conner prayed he wouldn’t need more. He also purchased some rat poison, then used the change he was given to make two phone calls. The first call was to Dr. Shamus Lefler, a psychiatrist who investigated the causes behind both schizophrenic and pathological disorders. After setting up an appointment, he next called Roger Fleming’s downtown loft condo. His initial shock at hearing the word hello spoken affected his own voice in answering. His odd new voice cracked and felt tremulous leaving his lips.

“Carol?” he said with a desperate yet awesome relief.

11

Duff cautiously descended from the attic while unmitigated fear pitched his heart up-tempo like a snare drum. Emerging from a hole partly gnawed between the particle board panels at the back of the pantry, he listened to the house for clues to all the commotion. He heard nothing. Silence. The interminable frustration eventually forced him into the kitchen, where he sniffed the air and detected the lingering scent of sweat–and trouble. Finally, after his quick but careful check of an empty garage confirmed that Conner was gone, he scurried from room to room, calling Tuff’s name. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he added, in keeping with Tuff’s penchant for prosaic phrasing.

The chaotic living room crime scene stopped him. It was all there, too, laid out for anyone with half a brain cell still firing to interpret. Tuff had been discovered. Question now was, had Conner also disposed of his body?

Trash cans and outside bins suggested no. Either way, however, Duff concluded that the prognosis was grim. It was just a matter of time until Tuff went belly up, be he still alive or not. The balance of the house had been upset when a table had turned over, and no longer bore the mesmerizing light box whose alternate realities had served as substitution for Conner’s own. Without it, Conner now faced a real choice, and with a poignancy he hadn’t confronted since his divorce. Would he make the right decision for himself this time–finally able to reject the easier path–or would he squander his potential in another soiree of mental sacrifice? Put succinctly, as Duff was wont to do, would he call other people for help, or would he buy another wide screen HDTV to watch endless commercials for beer, fizzy diabetes water, and preachers promising financial heaven in exchange for a blank check?

Duff climbed back up to the kitchen window sill where they’d spent many a lazy afternoon, awaiting Conner to return with “din din,” as Tuff put it. He stared out at the unruly lawn while visions of Conner returning with an exterminator plagued him. He thought about all the wonderful food they’d eaten, too. Especially the cheeses, whose exquisite tastes and aromas had been almost unbearably good. Then he remembered what they’d done to maintain their new lifestyle, including the burning of Conner’s and Carol’s books in the basement, even as Conner himself worked to pay for his addiction–and theirs.

A sense of guilt came over him, which was truly odd, although it didn’t feel so. Poor Conner had wasted his life, he realized. And it had been partly his fault, at least toward the most recent end. Whatever love was, in its full meaning, Duff sensed that it had been squandered too. Gone in the hours and days and weeks and months sitting in front of a glowing screen behind pulled curtains, while even his remaining books sat untouched, collecting dust.

A tear formed in Duff’s eye, his first ever. The miracle tear fell to the sill, where it beaded, and where he looked. The reflective surface of the tiny tear framed a magical world that was his, although he didn’t know how. Would he ever know? he wondered. It didn’t seem likely, now.

When a movement outside caught his eye, Duff turned his head to track it. And then he saw his friend Tuff, crawling from the hedges below the sill, out into the lawn.

Duff clamored down, squealing as he ran into the pantry, into the wall, through the maze of turns that led to a hole, a tunnel, where he emerged once again. “Tuff!” he yelled as he ran. “Wait up!”

Tuff turned as he came up. Turned and snarled at him, hissing. Dismissing.

“Tuff!” Duff rejoined. “It’s me, you dummy! Don’t you recognize me?”

Tuff backed away, his beady eyes locked in defensive posture. There was no recognition there. No intelligence, anymore. Only instinct, now. Tuff made no more sound as moved away across the lawn, through the grass, toward the drainage culvert.

Duff watched Tuff disappear. He started to follow, started to call after him. But then he stopped himself. What was down there, anyway? he asked himself. Only darkness. Grime and dirt. It would be like going backward. Like denying what they had become. Who they had been. But there was no denying it. Not for him.

Not like this.

12

Conner arrived late to do what had to be done. He thought about spending the night at a motel, but then decided against it. He would just leave all the lights on. Over coffee, Carol had suggested that. He hadn’t told her everything, of course. Like his appointment with Dr. Lefler for the following Thursday. But he did mention the broken TV, and his decision not to replace it. “I’m joining a gym, instead, and am getting some reading done,” he’d said. “Maybe even some writing too.”

He’d started to mention the books he must have burned, and the china he must have broken, but he didn’t make that mistake, either. He would replace those instead, in case she ever visited.

“And how are you doing?” he’d asked her, casually, after relating the dramatic story about an invading rat, which had resulted in their meeting.

“Oh, you know,” Carol had confided. “Sometimes I wonder. . .”

“What?”

“If I haven’t been trapped too.” She shook her head, started to add to it, then stopped herself.

Conner didn’t press it. He knew Carol. He knew it come out, in due time. He suspected that fact was something Roger Fleming didn’t know, and so had pressed it whenever he could. Pressed all the wrong buttons, along with the ones that had kept her coming back to him. The ones Conner himself needed to learn, or had ignored.

“Call me sometime,” he’d suggested, in the end, “and I’ll return the favor.”

“What favor is that?” she’d asked.

“Listening.”

It had been the right button, he knew, because she’d smiled. Now, before donning his eye pillow, Conner went hunting for something to read. He found the TV Guide on the bathroom, but only picked it up to drop it into the trash can. Giving up, he was returning to bed when his gaze fell on something beneath the box springs.

A shadow under his bed.

He froze, his heart skipping a beat as he gasped, looking around for a weapon. But when he looked back, and closer, he saw that the thing’s shape was wrong. It was oblong, but too symmetrical. It wasn’t moving, either. Wasn’t breathing. Not in the least.

He dropped to his knees, and reached for the object.

What he pulled out was a book.

He stared down at the cover in disbelief. Why had he placed it here? And why had he chosen this particular book to save from the flames?

An hour later, when Conner finally put the book down, and after he adjusted the eye pillow’s strap behind his head, sleep came quickly in the peaceful quiet. Still, he dreamed of a rat. A big, ugly rat in a maze of books. Circular corridors connected endlessly descending hexagonal galleries where nearly identical volumes were arranged for perusal. The rat sniffed at the rows frantically, and occasionally dislodged a book, nudging its fluttering pages open. But the letters were gibberish. The words made no sense. Yet the rat continued its search, down to the next gallery of the vast labyrinth, and then to the next. Relentlessly.

When Conner woke and took off his eye pillow, it was daylight. He dressed quickly, and went into the kitchen for coffee. He was pleased to see that no coffee already brewed for him, this time, and he felt better than he had in years. After adding one sugar instead of the usual two, he sat at the kitchen table with his coffee, and looked up at the cabinets. Beige everywhere, he thought. Beige, beige, beige. How bland and boring. No wonder Carol had left him.

He decided to paint today. He would take a personal day off. Not a sick day. He would paint the cabinets first. Maybe he would call Carol and ask her advice about colors. Yellow? Hunter green? What would she suggest? He opened the decorative panel beneath the sink to search for a paint brush, before he remembered the trap he’d set.

A trap that, to his delight, had sprung in the night.   -0-

© 2009 by Jonathan Lowe

(For more, read Fame Island, Postmarked for Death, Awakening Storm, and Geezer at ereader.com.)

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” said Russell Anderson, 60 Minutes co-producer and bureau chief for CBS News. “You’re saying that Thomas Sidon, a rancher from Naco, Arizona, captured the head of the Calli cartel on his property the day before yesterday, and has offered him to the Border Patrol in exchange for what, again?”
There was a momentary silence at the other end of the line, which was ghosted by background noise. Then the White House press secretary replied evenly, “Anything he wants. And I mean anything. Including what he did choose, which I will agree is highly unusual. The President wants a victory in the drug war to sidestep other problems, and we believe Raoul Gasparta is the key.”
“Go over that part again, will you? The part I’m not understanding. I understand about Gasparta. . . his full disclosure on Sidon’s interrogation transcript, the record of kickbacks and the reparations promised to avoid the death penalty. That’s obvious, and–may I speak frankly?–boring. Tell me exactly what the President promised him again.”
The press secretary sighed. “I thought I made that clear. Didn’t you hear me, Mr. Anderson? Maybe you should wait for the press conference in one hour, and ask that question again.”
Anderson coughed. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to imply that Gasparta is not important. But you know what it is people will be asking about, surely. So I have to ask you several things, just to be clear. One more moment, please, just to verify?”
The press secretary sighed again. “Very well. As I said, a deal was struck with Sidon, whose ranch in Arizona is some five thousand acres.”
“Straddling the border?”
“That’s right. On both sides.”
“And the President has agreed to the terms of this agreement by signing an executive order into law?”
“That is correct.”
“When?”
“Two hours ago, in the Oval Office. In exchange for Mr. Sidon’s  cooperation in acting as agent for the U.S. government, he has been granted carte blanche for one year, effective immediately.”
“And that means. . ?”
“It means that as of today, Mr. Thomas Sidon has the legal right to enter any private home in America at any time he chooses. He cannot remove anything, nor can he take photographs. He may only enter and observe at his leisure. No U.S. citizen may refuse him entry, under penalty of law. He is free to come and go as he wishes for the duration of one year.”
“And this is specifically what he requested?”
“Yes.”
“Not a million dollars, a new red Porsche, or an ambassadorship to Mexico?”
“Yes, Mr. Anderson. He didn’t want my job either, thank God. Although it was offered to him.”
“But. . . why? I mean, what’s his motive? What’s he hope to gain by–”
“There has been some speculation on that point here. Perhaps the power or the novelty of it is attractive to him.”
“Or maybe he’s a voyeur?”
“Please don’t use that word, Mr. Anderson.”
“Why not? Haven’t you walked down your own street at night, and looked at the windows of your neighbors’ homes?  Imagine being able to legally enter any home you want at any time, and the owner of that home can’t bar your entry. What I want to know is how? What about rights to privacy? How can the President do this? Even this President.”
“Privacy rights are waived solely on behalf of Mr. Sidon, and only for one year. He is exempt and immune from any violation, and Congress has been unable to prevent it as they are deadlocked in other matters as well. So for the duration of Executive Order 1482-421 no homeowner may prevent Mr. Sidon from coming into their home and observing, or searching.”
“Searching?” Anderson stood and circled his desk in awe.“Oh. . . now I get it! He’s going to be cooperating with you guys, isn’t he?  If he finds drugs or evidence of murder, they’ll be admissible in court because he has the sole right to enter without a warrant! That’s it, isn’t it?”
The voice on the line tried to evoke calm. “I have no comment on that point, Mr. Anderson, except to say that Mr. Sidon will have the full cooperation of the law enforcement, including an escort if he desires. Police must remain outside, however. They do not possess his rights. Whether Mr. Sidon chooses to reveal what he finds is entirely up to him.”
Anderson cleared his throat, and steadied himself with his free hand on the chair. “Oh my God. . . peeping Tom does want money. Millions. Guilty people will pay him a fortune not to tell. He’ll be as rich as Midas. Won’t he? Where’s he go first, Beverly Hills?”
“Again, that’s up to him.”
“’Up to him,’” the 60 Minutes producer repeated in a daze. “Holy Hopscotch. This guy is smart. Fame and fortune at the stroke of a pen! What’s he gonna wear, though. . . Kevlar?”
“He will be protected by both police and by the fame he achieves via executive order.”
“OhmyGod. And. . . and if this is true, that’s who he is, right? He’s God!”
“For one year. That is correct. If anyone refuses entry, they will be committing–”
“A sin?”
“No, a felony.”
“What’s the difference?”
“With a sin, you pay later. With a felony, you pay now, Mr. Anderson. Ten to twenty years in federal prison, based on the severity of the offense.”
“Severity of the offense?” Anderson laughed, albeit nervously. Yet the smile on his face felt too good to be true. “Who decides the severity of the offense?  No, don’t tell me. He does?”
“So you see how it works?”
“I do, I do. But what if someone pretends not to be home?”
“That would make Mr. Sidon very angry, would it not? Ineffective as well, because he also has the right to force entry when he suspects he has been denied.”
“How?”
“With a SWAT team battering ram, should he request it.”
“Holy–”
“Listen, Mr. Anderson? I really have to go now. I’ve given you too much time already.”
“Certainly, sir. I understand. Thanks. Thanks so much! This is the story we’ve been waiting for. . . for over twenty years!” Anderson glanced at his watch. “Tell me, does anyone outside the press know about this yet?”
“No, Mr. Anderson, and goodbye.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you and thank the President!” Anderson hung up, and then punched his intercom. “Julie, get me Steve Croft on the phone, now!”
“Yes, sir,” his secretary’s voice chimed.  “What about the man who’s been–”
“Nevermind. Julie, listen to me, this is important. Cancel everything else today. No calls, no appointments. And I want the senior staff in my office in ten minutes. Katie Couric included. Got that?”
“But sir–”
“Do it, Julie!”
“Yes, sir.”
Anderson sat and leaned back into his leather armchair. He imagined hiring Sidon to replace a retiring Andy Rooney. A one year exclusive contract, with bonuses based on ratings. He linked his fingers behind his head, and now briefly smiled at the prospect of a whole new–and unlimited–source of privileged information. Then he thought about what skeletons he had in his own closet, an obvious consideration in hiring such a man-god. . . What if Sidon became displeased with his perks, over time, or wanted to extend his contract? What documents would need shredding, in that ca–
Ohmygod.
He rememebered his complicity, two years prior, in a CIA cover-up, when some idiot in the Bush administration proposed bombing Mecca, leaving clues that unknown radical religious terrorists did it. Of course operation “Budda Bomb” had never gotten off the drawing board, and the CIA operative who’d leaked the memos had since disappeared. But what if Sidon didn’t care about Britney or Madonna, or some mafia don with a beach house and a payroll of cleaning agents? What if he wanted to go after the establishment itself? Would his copy of the CIA nondisclosure agreement protect him, just as it secured certain intelligence favors that maintained 60 Minutes’ very mystique? Several reporters had been KILLED to keep the operation secret, too.
Anderson shrugged off his fear, and as the CBS regulars gathered in his office, felt a giddy sense of the power hiring such a man would mean, knowing that–at long last–no one would be able to escape public scrutiny.
He waited until it was standing room only to speak.
“Gentlemen,” he announced, “and Katie. . .”  The phone rang, interrupting him. He snatched it up. “What?”
“Mr. Anderson?” his secretary said. “I’ve got Steve Croft on line two, but I think you should know. . .”
“Know what?”
“Well, remember you told me to cancel all appointments?”
“Yes. . .”
“This is odd, sir, but. . . well, I sent the man without an appointment away first, but he got pretty angry. He’d been waiting about twenty minutes, remember? Anyway, he just called me back, and I think you should know he’s at your house, now.”
“Who, did you say? Who’s there?”
“I’m not sure, but. . . and here’s the odd part. . . caller I.D. shows it to be your home number.”
-0-

© New Mystery Reader

Private detective David Bryant strolled across the vanished bachelor’s threadbare ranch house bedroom, a thin smile animating his lips. He picked up the spiral notepad indicated on the dresser, then aimed it around like a loaded weapon. “No Carmen Electra poster, Fisher stereo or high def set in here,” he noted. “Although he does have those funky box springs, and Einstein watching from the wall.” He sniffed at the air, experimentally. “No sign of this being a crack house, either, that I can tell. Just keys in the kitchen for the van out front. How well do you know Nick, did you say?”

“Mainly by reputation,” Border Patrol rookie Fletcher replied. “He was pretty quiet, with simple tastes.”

“Was?” Bryant shook his head and wagged a finger. “No, let’s not jump to conclusions just yet. Although, considering he’s sole heir to a men’s magazine empire, none of this makes much sense.” In explanation, Bryant jabbed the notebook in the direction of some haphazardly scattered books. “I mean, here’s a guy who could have it all, and what’s he do, Fletcher? He takes the civil service exam, rents a ranch house out in the boonies, and after rounding up his quota of illegals, he reads biographies, historical mysteries and Scientific American. Question I have is, why would a strong, healthy guy opt for this while dismissing the option of sharing a jacuzzi with supermodels?”

“You mean, is he a closet gay? You’re the detective.”

“Am I? Well, I detect a blind alley. ‘Cause he’s not gay, from what I understand. Not anything. Not even a disappointment. His old man brags about him being part of your team.” Bryant tapped the diary twice against the fist he made with his other hand, then held it up. “Anyone read this yet, Fletcher?”

“Nope. You’ll be the first, as requested.”

“Think it’s a list of babes he could have asked out, but didn’t?”

Fletcher shook his head. “That’s not my first guess.”

Bryant blew out a breath, wearily. “Well, I hope it explains why he’s been livin’ like a monk here, at least, when he’s got access to a mansion with wall to wall centerfolds.”

“Sounds like you seen that mansion yourself,” the younger man said, and not without interest.

Bryant narrowed his attentive gaze for a second, giving a sly smile. “That I have, son. But it was years ago, at a convention for what they called ‘private dicks.’” Bryant sighed in memory again, then slumped into a ratty wicker chair, and at last thumbed open the spiral notebook. “And now I’ve been hired to explain the call his father got from the bank. So lemme see what we got here before either of us does anything rash, like going public. Okay?”

Fletcher said nothing, then witnessed the slow transformation of Bryant’s countenance from befuddlement to bewilderment…

6/4– My name is Nicholas Carter. I am a single man, age 40, never married, and I have worked for the Arizona Border Patrol for 15 years in good standing. My hobbies include reading and classical music. I particularly enjoy history and science. What I can tell you now is that string theory is no theory. I don’t claim to understand it, but what I know for sure is that physicists are right when they talk about extra dimensions in space beyond what we perceive, and the possibility of there being parallel universes which are like membranes of a higher reality. Not only is this true, but these membranes can be crossed at rare points and chance intersections. I’ve done it, you see, and I plan to do it again.

It happened at 7:07 AM, two days ago. The first thing that struck me was the sense that my vision was blurred. Upon opening my closet door, I saw that my hanging wardrobe appeared to be a double image, with a tight or narrow overlap, as though viewed through a calcite crystal. I hesitated reaching in, and then for a moment put my hand to my head, instead. A disorientation, like dizziness, seized me. I shut my eyes hard, then opened them again, blinking, but the peculiar sight remained. I turned to look at the room, at objects in it that appeared normal: the night stand, lamp, my shoes on the floor. Then I turned back, and saw that the double image was a bit wider now. Over an inch out of synch, as if an identical photograph behind the original was being pulled slowly into view.

I slammed shut the door, and ran outside in a panic. There I saw a kind of rainbow that terminated at my house. Only it wasn’t a rainbow, exactly. The colors extended in a plane straight up into the cloudless sky, in a blurred and mostly transparent image that did not curve out toward the horizon, but seemed to fade instead, as if the plane or membrane extended to infinity in all directions, leaving only visibly defracted light in the segment that cut through my house.

When I returned to my bedroom, and found enough courage to face the closet door again, it opened this time on a dim light, and a space between the two separated images, which had expanded by more than their full width apart. What I saw in that space was a desert valley illuminated by a pale sun much larger and more orange than our own. A broken stone bridge stretched part way between two opposing peaks, and encrusted machinery lay next to what appeared to be a kind of elevator at the base. I stared in amazement, imagining it all to be some elaborate projection. But then I caught the scent from over there–from that parallel world–and it was like rust and sun baked cinnamon. Something real. So real that, without considering the consequences, I took a step forward, on impulse. And then another step, and finally another. At the last step, I turned my head to see that I was now beyond the back wall of the closet, but still within reach of it. Only I was standing on slate gray rock, like irregular slabs of stone stretching for a quarter mile to where the thing that resembled an elevator stood.

I jumped back in a momentary return of fright, then stretched out one hand to touch a blue shirt which hung beside me. I felt the cotton fabric in the cool dimness, then pulled it free to see the clothes hanger rock in place, back into stillness.

I stepped carefully back out of the closet into my room, but this time didn’t shut the door for fear the opening would close as well. Afraid even to look away, I sat on the bed and watched for some change, until the idea occurred to me to get my camera and also to measure the opening, which now appeared stable. After that, instead of dialing 911, I decided I would get a canteen of water and go on a quick expedition, once I determined the risk was worth taking. And so I did.

The air of this world contains less oxygen, but is not uncomfortably to breathe. The predominately orange light, together with the spice scent, somehow gave me the impression of great age. I had not walked more than a few steps on the slate rock when I turned back to see if the interface had changed at all. An identical rainbow-like fuzz extended from it, up through the rock and the sky. I could see that the light coming through my closet was brighter than on the alien world, so I continued my trek toward the distant machinery.

The elevator was caked with orange dust, but at the confluence of two oblong halves was a door like white glass bearing a horizontal ring of some metal alloy. I pulled this ring, and the thing gave an audible crack and then came slowly open, like a bank vault door of enormous weight. An acrid scent more pungent than the ubiquitous spice odor wafted out, and I discovered several controls inside shaped like wheels in a pedestal of green stone. Turning several produced no effect. I estimated the elevator to be twenty feet tall, with curved sides tapering to a nest of wires, perhaps a light fixture. The width of it was approximately twelve feet, and the floor appeared to be riveted metal plating, with flush rivets and circular groves glutted with dust.
I left the elevator to look for some other way up, and in so doing used the binoculars I’d taken with me to check again on my interface at the narrow end of the box canyon. But the light still shone with the same comforting strength as before, and the opening seemed just as wide–or possibly a bit wider–considering my calculations. High above stretched the bridge, which was also the color of ochre, and had a texture like stone. It was approximately two hundred feet across at a height of perhaps five hundred feet, but broken at midpoint by a missing section of about one-fifth of the span. The bridge appeared to be thick and wide enough to support a bus or tank, but had no sides to it, and disappeared into an octagonal hole in the cliff side, where a man-sized instrument resembling a brass sundial stood sentry. The other cliff’s tunnel was blocked by a massive door.

I found a staircase winding up from the wrong side, and realized that I would not be able to access the open tunnel from there. But I was determined to see inside, at least. The steps were high and steep, made of stone like rough granite. The final hundred feet or so they took a tighter curl around and inside a sculpted excavation graced by enigmatic designs that I first took to be coring marks left by whatever had hollowed out the upper cliff face next to the bridge. But then I saw that the circular rays drew closer together toward the top, and were attenuated by designs that resembled arrows.

When I finally emerged onto the bridge itself, I discovered it to be covered in blue squares of stone two feet in diameter, each one unique and with a cryptic design, free of dust due to a noticeable breeze coming through the canyon at that height. I walked toward the edge and the open tunnel on the other side, but couldn’t see beyond about fifty feet inside, where the ambient light faded. But I could detect a shape there, like an amorphous sculpture well behind the sun dial, if that’s what it was. Except this sun appeared too large and dim for it to be that. I cursed myself for not bringing a powerful flashlight, and then turned to use my binoculars again on the opening through which I’d entered this world. It appeared to be the same, but I decided to return anyway. I took photos, and noticed that my flash revealed the shape in the tunnel to be crystalline, with pipes or tubes protruding from it that attached it to the floor. The tunnel itself appeared to curve further in, like a large labyrinthine cave with drooping metal rails affixed to its sides. I determined I would need a 20 foot extension ladder to bridge the span to the other side.

Facing the massive door behind me, I noticed an image of this sun and world was depicted there, along with a starburst image further away. I went to the door, and placed my ear against it, but heard nothing. I banged on it with my fist, but there was no hollow thrumming. I next assessed the crack at the base of the door, and felt a slight breeze coming up from below. So the door obviously lowered somehow, but by what mechanism I could not determine.

I was in the very act of wondering if any latent energy still existed, if life didn’t, when I suddenly saw a light above me, and noticed a glow atop a thin metallic pole high in the rocks above me. The light grew in intensity until it was too bright to look at, then quickly faded, leaving what looked like a small copper ball similar to what is found atop some lightning rods. Had I activated it, somehow? Was it a beacon, and would someone be coming soon in response? Maybe I could get higher to see from where the light might be visible. But then fear swept me, and I decided to return to my house instead. There, at the interface, as I watched and waited, I was startled to see a bird, very high in the sky. As it glided overhead I considered the implications. There must be plants–maybe even oceans–elsewhere on this world!

6/5– I recall reading about Gamma Ray Bursts, which are thought to come from hypernovas. The theory is that life has not been found via radio signals from space because these random hypernovas periodically exterminate whole parsecs of space throughout the universe. Maybe such a thing happened near this world, but not near enough to exterminate life completely. Perhaps, pre-event, the light here was not so orange? Of course I’m assuming that if this is really an alternate universe, existing in another dimension, similar laws of science apply. While it doesn’t seem to get completely dark on this alternate world, I have seen points of light in the sky beyond the atmosphere every few hours, which appear to be the brightest or nearest stars. I have seen other birds too, although none have landed nearby. My GRB theory is bolstered by the fact that the multi-band radio I keep testing on the other side has failed to detect any signals on any frequency. I shall continue to take digital photos, along with temperature and humidity readings, until I decide what to do next. I’m storing these on my computer’s hard drive under the file “Ochre,” which is my new name for this world. A measurement of the width of my interface has shown a 6 centimeter shortening of the opening in the last 24 hours, so I have limited time to decide what to do.

6/6– Last night I set my alarm to wake me every two hours, and I went over to Ochre to repeat my tests, and to measure the opening. The weather remains comfortable, and once I could even see rain visible in the distance, while the rate of interface contraction remains the same. What to do? While trying to decide, I have begun shuttling large items through to the other side. Extension ladder, tool chest, offroad bicycle, tent, sleeper sofa.

P.M.– I’ve just returned from a fifth trip to the Super Wal Mart in Nogales, where I’ve also purchased a water purifier with cleanable filters, chemicals, seeds, fishing tackle, first aid kits, some smaller pup tents, repair kits, fuel, and enough canned goods to feed the crew of an aircraft carrier for a month. I’ve now maxed out my credit cards, and moved everything over to Ochre, along with all my clothing, extra shoes and boots, some of my books, various containers, utensils, towels, crank powered flashlights, and several solar powered PDAs, along with three different Encyclopedias, and the complete works of William Shakespeare.

6/7– Things have escalated in the direction of this being goodbye. I have no family here that I can relate to, after all. My father wanted to supply me with girlfriends, but they only look at me with soulless eyes. Better to give my trust fund to the needy. Regarding the American dream, what has it become, anyway? Decadent game shows, mall parking lots full of fuelish trucks and SUVs, sports scandals, liquor stores, fast food franchises. Who even talks to their neighbors anymore? Ironic that so many illegal aliens try to come to a land where most people don’t think or feel anything on their own. What I know is that I don’t want my father’s money, if it means an empty existence with spoiled brats as children, and a beautiful wife with soulless, cynical eyes.

I have placed a call to a mule I know who lives in Nogales, Sonora. His instructions are explicit, with timing and directions to this “safe house” for one hand-picked family, of whom I hope to become a new member. If there is a daughter of childbearing age, so much the better. Perhaps we shall all escape together, and find our destiny with a new beginning.

6/7– My family is here. They have seen Ochre, and after some discussion have agreed to come with me. They see this opportunity as a miracle from God. There are nine of them, all healthy. I believe the oldest daughter, Rosa Celeste, will be my wife. They are simple people from El Salvador, and have sold everything to come to America. There is no turning back now. Estaban asked me if he could go back if things didn’t turn out, but I just pointed and said, “that’s home now” in Spanish. He could see the bridge in the distance, and the stacks of provisions waiting. Then a bird landed nearby to investigate. It looks like a crow, although more brown than black. It gave me a strange idea, which I leave for you now to contemplate. What if this world is not parallel in space, but in time? What if this is our own mother Earth, in the far future, and the machinery I see has somehow opened this door so that we can get past the hypernova to save humanity? Just a thought, albeit an ironic one. I shall not miss game shows and truck commercials and news reports from the Middle East, for certain.

You will find photos of everything, plus all the testing data, on my computer hard drive. Wish us luck, whatever the case…

“The case,” Detective Bryant repeated, closing the notepad.

“What?” asked agent Fletcher.

“Nothing. See a computer anywhere, by chance?”

Fletcher pointed out a USB cable lying on the floor in one corner of the bedroom. “I think that’s for downloads from a digital camera. You can see impressions in the carpet made by a desk, too.”

Bryant leaned close, and nodded. Then he straightened, and tapped the notepad again before pocketing it.

“What is it? What are you thinking?”

“Nothing. Just. . . that this might a’ been the most bizarre suicide note ever. But without a body I’ll have to say our young Nick Carter split with his trust fund to old Mexico, leaving a none-too-subtle message that he’d like to be left alone.”

“You mean his father was secretly harassing him?”

“Did I say that? No, Nick’s never said anything negative about his old man up to now. Or taken any of his money. Still, something like this is bound to hit the tabloids, if it gets out.”

“What do you mean. . .if?”

“I mean there’s no way to prove any of it. Obviously all part of his plan to disappear while making his dad look like an jerk after bragging about him over the years.” Bryant lowered his voice. “Going into the closet instead of coming out. That’s a funny trick.”

As Bryant strode out, Fletcher followed closely, asking, “You mean you’re not giving that diary to the Sheriff?”

“Is that a problem for you, son?”

“Well. . . but. . .I mean, where did he go?”

Bryant stopped to rub the back of his thick neck with one hand, considering it. “Can’t really say. Have to consult the family after the handwriting is verified first, before we can say anything. You understand?” As they walked through the open side door, out toward the cracked concrete patio, Bryant observed how the door had obviously been forced by a crow bar. “Nice touch, that.”

Near their respective cars, Fletcher made a circular motion back toward the rear of the ranch house with one hand, like he’d forgotten something.
“What’s the problem now?” Bryant asked. “Forget something?”

“Just some plants growing in pots out back I thought you should see, too. Thought it was marijuana at first, but then I saw that I was mistaken.”

Fletcher led him around the back of the house, where he indicated four small clay pots containing ferns against the back wall, in the shade of a cottonwood tree. A brown hose was curled like a snake next to them. Bryant kneeled, and stuck a finger into one of the pots, finding the soil moist. Then he impulsively upended one of the pots, and spread the ochre-colored soil across the ground. A shiver ran across his scalp as he got to his feet.

“What’s the matter?” Fletcher asked him.

Bryant trotted back into the house, through the kitchen and into the master bedroom. At the closed closet door he paused, then carefully opened it, and stared as Fletcher came up behind him. The walk-in closet was empty, except for a nest of wire clothes hangers pushed to the far right on the long wooden pole. Bryant turned and now stared beyond the patrolman’s left shoulder. Stared at the framed poster on the far wall.

“What’s wrong, sir?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Bryant replied, uncertainly. He suddenly flashed on the playoff game that his wife had nagged him for watching. In his mind, he imagined her, even now, lurking just out of sight, forever peering at him with mocking disgust in her soulless, cynical eyes.

Especially now.

“Did I say something was wrong?” Bryant asked, raising his voice, causing Fletcher to wince and start out. But before following, Bryant felt the kind of shiver that intuition brought to his job, and to fight it off stuck out his own tongue–in return–at Einstein’s gleeful face.
-0-

© Aphelion SF

Supermodel walks into a bar, sits beside a guy wearing a
Polo shirt and blue jeans. Guy’s drinking Guinness and
reading Scientific American. She says, “Hi, I’m Nikki, what
you reading?” He goes, “It’s not Cosmo, I can tell you that.”

To which she responds, “Well, what can you tell me.”

No joke. True story. Except she wasn’t really a
supermodel, just looked like one. Her name was Nikki,
though.

I’ll never forget that.

I introduced myself as the writer of the article I was
reading. Or rather checking to see how I’d been edited. As
Nikki sipped a vodka collins, she peered down at the slick
page like a swan at a tepid pool, and read my name between
my stretched fingers.

“So,” she said, looking into my blue eyes, now, with her
pale greens, “what’s your article about, Mister … Alan
Dyson?”

I must have smiled somehow, because she smiled back.
Her incisors lent a sharpness to her smile, and made mine
cling to mellow. “It’s all about aging, Nikki,” I heard myself
reply. “How it might be possible someday to stop the aging
process, or at least slow down the relentless slide. Something
I’m involved in personally, as a researcher. Does this sound
like a subject of interest to you?”

Her smile turned sly, like I hoped mine appeared, hers
curling all the way up one side of those wide, smooth Heidi
Klume lips. Then she arched one of her thin eyebrows at me
like a weapon.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said, and continued. “You see,
Nikki, we’re all born with an internal clock, at the cellular
level. As we get older, there’s a shortening of what we call
telomeres, which correlates with how cells divide and
replicate. Parts of our DNA structure tend to break down over
time, so the blueprints for the divisions have missing pieces.
This happens in conjunction with shortening telomeres, so
what I’m trying to do is stop the telomeres from—”

“Getting shorter?” she interrupted.

“Bingo.”

“And now you want to save me from wrinkle creams and
Botox, is that it? So my skin might not have to look like an
alligator’s one day?”

I shrugged and was reminded of my dad, a bonafide
geezer since Mom died. And how I didn’t want to end up like
him. “You forgot lasers, sonic skin tightening blasts, and
calcium hydroxylapatite injections,” I said. “But who said
anything about helping you? I’m doing this for all mankind.” I
paused significantly. “That, and a hefty bonus if I succeed.”

I sipped at my Guinness, and for about two point three
seconds there she looked intrigued. Then she said, “So who
do you work for?”

“Tactar Pharmaceuticals. Who do you work for?”

“That would be telling.”

“Pray, tell.”

“You want my phone number too?”

“Should I?”

We were like creatures from different planets. Although
opposites attract, or so they say. Still, most scientists don’t
even understand gravity, much less the dicey polarity of
sexual magnetism. So it was only a vague hope of mine that
she was actually weary of those empty-headed sports nuts
who drove muscle cars.

“By the way,” I said. “It’s a Cavalier.”

“What is?”

“The car I drive. It’s your basic compact, no options. Not
even a CD player. And no, I don’t have any tattoos, I don’t
smoke, and I live alone. My work is my life. You want my
phone number, now? Or are you hard-wired to go after some
idiot NBA star who gets twelve million to pitch cola drinks to
his fat fans?”

She laughed at that. So I told her I was also investigating
the existence of the gene involved in sports obsessions. The
“couch potato” gene, I think I called it. With tiny green
chromosomes called “chives.” As it turned out, much to my
astonishment, she followed me home out of curiosity. But
that was only for one night. I may have been a novelty for
her, but the thing about novelty is that it wears off quick. By
dawn’s early light she was gone, along with the cash from my
wallet, and a really nice brown leather bomber jacket from
my closet. Maybe she thought it might fit her quarterback
boyfriend, or his nerdy brother. It appeared she’d attempted
to abscond with my computer, too, before deciding it was too
bulky. But at least she was kind enough to leave me some
coffee and aspirin so I could make breakfast.

* * * *

On that fateful day before my life changed forever, I
counted seven people seated at the Tactar conference table.
At the preeminent spot, across the polished expanse of dark
mahogany separating me from upper management, sat
Russell Winsdon, the sixty-eight year old head of the
company. A man who resembled Warren Buffett. To his
immediate right sat Carson Jeffers, the lanky redhead who
was V.P. and head of public relations. When the update on my
work concluded, all eyes turned to Jeffers, expecting him to
speak first. And when he did, Winsdon’s regal gray head
nodded slightly in both affirmation and from mild Parkinson’s.
But he was still strong, his demeanor asserted. He was fit, by
God. Not some crazy old coot quite just yet.

“It’s interesting, Alan … even exciting, I have to say,” Jeffers
commented, giving me a nod that Winsdon seemed to mimic.

“Thank you, sir,” I replied.

The others around the table nodded mechanically as well.
They were yes-men, all of them. Aspiring young executives
jostling on Tactar’s career ladder, that rickety termite-
infested fire escape leading up to where it was high enough to
use a golden parachute one day.

“You’ve done well, too, with documentation on your
uncovery of gene 565 in the bristlecone pine, using RNA
interference. We definitely like that. What you’ve found here
is a unique controller used to maintain optimum plant cell
division. But whether we should continue funding your
screening for a formulation to deliver the gene to other plant
or animal species remains to be seen. What can you tell us?”

“Well, we have tried replacing a phenol with an ester,
altering the molecule with an antioxidant at one end to aid
absorption, and with some success. Then I realized that it
might be better, for any future clinical trials on animals, to
use a benign virus as a transport mechanism for the gene.”

“Interesting. Go on.”

“Whether the modified virus would be able to penetrate
the blood-brain barrier is questionable, but it would deliver
the gene transcribed to it before it’s targeted for destruction
by the immune system. I’ve tried it on caenorhabditis
elegans, which as you may know has roughly nineteen
thousand protein-coding genes and ninety-seven million
genome base pairs.”

“What’s a whatever-you-said elegans?” one of the green
yes-men asked.

“It’s a worm,” Jeffers replied, neglecting to add ‘like you.’
Then he turned back to me. “How did that go, and what’s the
virus?”

“Yes, and why wasn’t I told about this test?” Winsdon
added.

They were all staring at me now, like CEOs posing for the
cover of Fortune. I took a moment to savor the attention,
knowing it might be my last such moment. “The delivery
method was a success,” I announced, finally. “Our preliminary
biologic binding studies indicate that the pine tree gene was
incorporated by c. elegans, which has fully half of the genes
found in humans.”

The old man emitted an audible gasp. But then he
sneezed, and I realized it wasn’t a gasp at all. “Excuse me,”
he said, and pulled out a handkerchief to blow his nose.
Jeffers leaned toward me. “What’s this benign virus?
Strep? The common cold?”

“No, sir,” I said. Then I lowered my voice. “It’s rather
sensitive, actually, sir. A need-to-know basis kind of thing, if
you know what I mean.” I looked over at three of the
youngest execs.

Jeffers followed my gaze, and then waved a hand to
dismiss them. When they were gone he said, “They’ve signed
confidentiality agreements on all Tactar projects, so this
better be good.”

“Oh, it is, sir.”

“We’re waiting,” said Winsdon.

I paused.

“Well?” said Jeffers.

“Well, sir,” I replied, at last, “the virus I used as transport
for the bristlecone pine’s longevity gene was none other than
HIV. The virus that causes AIDS.”

CHAPTER TWO

“That’s simply impossible,” declared Kevin Connolly. “You
said the virus was benign.”

I turned to Jeffers’ right hand man, an experienced
administrative and legal assistant in a dark blue three piece
suit. A schmuck who looked like actor Ray Liotta. “Yes, I did,”
I admitted. “And so it is, after I genetically altered it. This can
be done relatively easy in a petri dish, before the virus has
entered a host. Such alterations are made all the time on
many viruses and genes in labs all over the world. I simply
rendered the virus harmless prior to splicing 565 onto it, and
the resulting match proved to be … well, perfect. So the killer
virus has now become the ideal transport mechanism to
insert the pine tree’s longevity gene into an animal species.”

Connolly was taken aback, and appeared stunned. Then he
chuckled. “But what about side effects? Like what if, oh, say
… some woman pops out a litter of limbless retarded freaks?
What happens then?”

“You mean in human testing?” I smiled. “This isn’t
thalidomide, it’s a single gene transported by a genetically
altered virus.”

Jeffers momentarily lifted both of his hands from the table.
“Wait a minute, Kevin. You’re getting way, way ahead of
yourself. We haven’t determined if we’re even going to
pursue this yet. Some questions. Can we patent this gene?
I’m not sure. Will we even want to try? What about that,
Alan? How long have you been tracking your worm?”

I took in a slow breath, and exhaled even slower. “Two
weeks,” I said. “On a lifespan of three.”

“And?”

“And the results are inconclusive.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning we, ah, haven’t detected any measurable
longevity gains.”

“So the worms are aging normally?”

“That’s essentially correct. I mean they were. They’re dead
now.”

Jeffers leaned back. Winsdon sighed. But Connolly
chuckled. “Good work,” he said, and then, unseen by the
others, winked at me. It had been determined on several
previous occasions that I was a suitable brunt for jokes,
although any dry, dark humor I possessed had probably
grown out of insecurity and the seclusion of bachelorhood.
That was something Kevin and I shared, as equals on the
career ladder, but his own humor leaned toward put-downs
and sardonic cruelty.

I smiled nervously at Jeffers before attempting to bypass
Connolly’s hostility. “What about rat tests?” I suggested.
“What about them?”

“Would you consider a timetable for that? I hoped that’s
what this meeting would be about. Now that we have an ideal
insertion mechanism for the gene, and considering the costs
so far to achieve this—to say nothing of the luck—shouldn’t
we move forward with rodent or primate testing?” I paused,
gauging their silence. “How many labs do you imagine are
working on the bristlecone genome, sir? Giving up now would
be like tipping our hand to the competition. What if a drug
could be developed from this that slows the aging process
and the incidence of genetically caused cancers? What if the
telomeres at the end of chromosomes were to remain long for
far more than just seventy cell divisions, so mutations were
less likely, and the breakdown of DNA averted for just ten
more years? Do you have any idea how much people would
pay for ten more years of youth? Bristlecone pine trees live
for thousands of years.”

Jeffers leaned back and laced his hands behind his head.
“That’s true, Alan, but pine trees are not humans.”

“Nor are worms,” I said.

“Or monkeys.”

We studied each other across the wide table. An impasse
had been achieved here, I realized, and at some expense.
Results were what counted. Was it worth the risk to continue,
in pursuit of billions, without them? That was the question.

“And there’s this other problem you’ve just thrown at us,”
Jeffers continued. “Even if this gene pans out, like you’re
hoping, you’ve got to know that no one will accept your
delivery mechanism, which is the injection of a viral infection
they’ve come to associate with wasting away and dying, often
in great pain.”

“So call it something else. Call it … I don’t know … M-
Telomerease.”

“What’s the ‘M’ stand for?”

“Methuselah.”

“Uh huh. Still, the word would get out. Then it would be
like with people who object to food irradiation or the genetic
engineering of corn to increase yields. Or fetal stem cell
research. There’d be picket lines a mile long out in front of
this building. Preachers talking about our playing God. AIDS
research lobbyists accusing us of using HIV to make money at
the expense of dying people. If we can manipulate the virus
this way to benefit rich people, why can’t we manipulate it to
save poor people?”

“I have the answer to that,” I responded.

“Maybe you do, but who’ll be listening? They’ll be too busy
throwing rocks through our windows. And can you imagine
what kind of pressure the FDA would be put under, regarding
approval on something like this? After we spent millions on
testing, I’d say we’re looking at, what…” He squinted toward
Kevin.

“Four … four and a half years, depending on the clinical
results,” Connolly concluded. “And maybe that long, too,
before we obtain approval for any kind of patent.”

I felt my stomach clench. It was news I’d dreaded hearing,
and so I instinctively complained: “Four years? I hoped for
two on the gene or the process patent. Tops, sir.” I tried to
look hopeful, but was met with glassy stares. After giving me
a dry smile, Connolly lost it, and looked as if he’d just taken
downers. The generic kind, with fillers that left the sickly
tailings of a smirk around the lips.

“The FDA may seem like monkeys on our backs sometimes,”
Jeffers said, trying unsuccessfully not to be too discouraging,
“but when it comes to public safety, they move slower than tax
lawyers being paid by the hour.”

Winsdon strategically coughed, tapping his wide forehead
with one bony index finger. “I don’t see much future in this,
either,” he added, his voice deep and even. “What we needed
to see was a less controversial delivery medium, and some
kind of positive results for this gene. I see hope of neither
here.”

There was a long pause that seemed longer. I sucked in a
deeper breath, and tried one last time. “I can’t believe you’d
consider letting this research go, sir,” I argued, this time from
the weakness of defense. “The potential if we succeed is
enormous. Can’t you see that?”

Jeffers waved a hand at me. “We saw the potential, Alan,
or we wouldn’t have continued to fund your project as long as
we did.”

Past tense. They were already talking past tense. When
was the decision made? I wondered. In a millisecond?
“Think about all the baby boomers retiring, though,” I
blurted, and then, after this final lame response, realized that
if the baby boomers could live another ten years, it might
bankrupt those paying to keep them alive. What the world
needed now wasn’t longer lives, but shorter ones.

Connolly glanced at Jeffers, then turned to Winsdon. He
lowered his voice slightly in a deliberate mask of pretended
privacy. “Now,” he summed up, “if your gene was actually
effective, Alan, and you had a better medium to deliver it as a
drug, a case might be made suggesting this was an orphan
drug. That would be one way to merit early approval. Of
course it would need to be marketed as such, with
development underwriters brought on board, and projections
drawn showing it’s not going to be profitable for us, but that
some people really need it in high risk cancer cases.” Connolly
smiled thinly at me, showing a competitive ego, bolstered by
an unjustified disdain. “Well,” he said, “isn’t that the truth of
it, anyway, Dyson?”

“Absolutely not,” I reiterated, in now reckless defiance.
“This wouldn’t lead to some orphan drug. At least not in my
opinion. You aren’t a scientist, Kevin, and don’t know what
the hell you’re talking about!” I looked at Jeffers for support,
but the V.P. only pursed his lips and folded his hands in front
of him reflectively.

“Really,” Connolly said. “In your opinion.”

“Come on,” I said, struggling to keep my tone in bounds.
“The groundwork has been done, and clinical testing of mice
wouldn’t be that expensive here. Dr. Bischoff has approved
what I’ve done so far. There are no excipients to worry about
either, or medicinal chemists to hire. I’ve been working my
ass off to arrive at this point!”

“Then why,” Ray Liotta’s look alike asked the ceiling, with
raised eyebrows, “do you think you can circumvent the drug
approval process?”

I felt heat surge in my forehead as though the conference
room had just become a boiler room. “I don’t, Kevin. Where
did you get that fr—”

“Did you know the antibiotic Terramycin took fourteen
years to approve, and over a hundred thousand soil samples
to validate?”

“I know that. Why are you—”

“And have you developed any kind of pilot plan to push
developing this into a drug, using whatever trade name you
come up with, like maybe ‘Bristalene’?”

“Well, of course I haven’t had time to—”

“We really have to move cautiously at the company now,”
Jeffers suddenly interjected, as though part of a tag team.
“That’s all Kevin is saying. This is an election year, too, and
we can’t afford another failure at a time like this.”

“A time like what, sir? Is there something I don’t know? I
thought this was no different than—”

“What? Last year? Last week? Prescription drug subsidies
are turning all eyes toward our industry. And with Baycol
recalled due to fatal muscle breakdown…” Jeffers stopped
himself, pausing. “Bottom line is … nobody here wants to
rock the boat, Alan. And from what you’ve told us, we’d be in
for some major rocking here, once we declare. And the
results just aren’t there.”

How fast a mood can change. Looking at them, it occurred
to me that their decision hadn’t been made in a millisecond,
but had been made long before they entered the room. I
studied my own reflection in the shiny mahogany table for a
moment, and when I looked up again, still amazed by the
transformation that had just occurred, Winsdon held my gaze.
“You’ll keep up your good work, though, won’t you, boy,” the
big man concluded, simply. Then he got up to leave.

Winsdon’s stooped, hulking figure retreated from the dim
chamber. Dutifully, Connolly followed him like Santa’s gleeful
little elf. Last to go was Jeffers, who turned at the last moment to
suggest, “We’d like you to see someone about the stress you’ve
been under, Alan.”

“Stress, sir?” I said in disbelief.

“Associated with working your ass off. Your own words.”
He paused to look up the hallway. “Take some time off.
You’ve earned it. Play some golf, take a cruise. There’s more
to life than what can be seen under a scanning electron
microscope. Okay, boy?”

Boy, I thought, sitting there alone for a moment. Oh, boy…

(CONT.)

Originally published in hardcover by Five Star Mysteries,
Thomson-Gale publishers. With thanks to Dr. Jon Selbo,
a pharmaceutical scientist, for assistance on technical aspects.
And Dr. Cynthia Kenyon, whose pioneering work on longevity
inspired the premise.

Now available from ereader.com as PDF or
other formats. 408 pages.

Miranda, as I called her, and as I imagined her to be a chunk of some alien moon–old beyond estimation–weighed in at six and a half kilograms. A pint-sized alien, then, but impressive for the darkened scars along her side, suggesting she’d been a naughty child, given to fights. I was told she’d weighed more, much more, but that she’d decided on a crash diet as she entered the atmosphere at better than a mile a second. Impact in soft earth had prevented total vaporization, creating the four foot crater I’d discovered perilously near a tall saguaro cactus.

An afterimage of the flash remained virtually embossed on my retina long after her quaking light no longer stretched shadows over my body, and I imagined her years earlier passing Jupiter–that improbable swirl of methane storms across millions of miles of cold–deciding on the very trajectory which placed the meteor in my hands. When the paper took my picture holding it, they called her my pet rock. Nickel and iron, they said, that was not of this world. And somehow I understood from this that I could be happy. I felt, after Miranda, that it was possible. If only I could get my wish.

I’d been lying atop my sleeping bag in the desert sand when that elongated exclamation point–like the finger of God–drew across the heavens. Moments before the distant and resounding thud I’d been contemplating a past which had brought me from the East, emptied of all those signposts which might stabilize a young carpenter’s life, and prevent him from seeing the truth of his aloneness. I said many things to the reporters, but not these. I didn’t tell them much about myself at all. Because they didn’t ask about my thoughts in the desert on that night and the secret wish I had made, I stuck to those tangible facts which made nice human interest copy. As they took their photos I smiled like I’d seen men smile in magazines, and I knew already how the image of my face on newsprint would seem: as alien and masklike as a mannequin’s. I was, simply, a rock. Take away the rock and I was a loner, on my own, looking up at nothing–a stone for a pillow. Take away the microphone and my silence would be as the stars.

When I excused myself during the meeting in the lobby of the Arizona Daily Star there was a man who sang to me in the restroom. “When you wish upon a star,” the man confided, “your wishes travel much too far.”

I turned to ask the man what he meant, but he was gone.

They would all be gone, of course, in much the same way. Slipping out slightly embarrassed at my indecent lack of credentials, and for this being my one tenuous claim to fame. . . even the ones who wanted Miranda for their schools or their planetarium displays. Before that inevitable thinning, however, a miracle. A discovery more amazing than that the heavens had opened and Miranda streaked into my grasp, an angelic gift. A person whose presence I felt. Curious, shy: a girl who wanted to hold Miranda in her hands, to turn her round and round and feel her texture, her weight. And with a voice so amazed.

“Just imagine,” the girl exclaimed in the lobby, “how far it’s come.”

“It’s a she,” I replied at her puzzlement. “Miranda. That’s her name. That is. . . there’s a moon of Uranus with that name. I thought it fit.”

Her mouth formed an oh.

“I don’t know why,” I went on, “I just thought. . .”

I paused then, not remembering what I’d thought.

“Funny,” said the girl, “but my name is Miranda too.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’ve only come as far as Vermont, though.”

I studied her, and felt no deception. I doubted as one always doubts a miracle, but seeing was believing.

“That’s a long way too,” I said, finally. “Relatively speaking.”

“What is?”

“Vermont.”

She smiled. It was a filling smile, like a door opening on a closed room.
Then there was one more door.

“Have you come here often, Mark?”

But no smile. We were sitting on a blanket, out beyond the park’s boundaries, surrounded by saguaro cactus, the only light that of stars. Almost an hour after she’d followed me over that winding road past the city lights, and now no meteors to break the desert silence.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“Why?”

“Because you wanted to see one. A shooting star.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.” I opened my duffel bag and withdrew my battered pair of 20-power binoculars.

“Really,” she said. “I’ve seen them before! In fact, I was outside the same night you were, and I might have seen the same one as you. It was very bright.” She looked down at her hands.

“I was going to show you,” I said, then. “Look. Look over there. West, at two o’clock. That cross. See the star at the top? It’s Deneb, in the constellation Cygnus the Swan.”

“What about it?”

“It’s a thousand times brighter than our Sun.”

“No, it’s not.”

“But it’s over nine hundred light years away.”

Miranda thought about it, then she smiled.

“I’ll bet it’s bigger TOO,” she said.

I nodded. “But so far away.”

Now I could tell her about the Crab Nebula, that gaseous remnant of an exploding star in 1054. Maybe even discuss the origins of comets. Describe to her black holes and pulsars. I could mention what books I’d read on the subject. . . and then. . . and then how even as a child I’d go outside while my mother and father argued over money and bills inside. How I’d lay in the grass and look up at the stars and wonder if there were anyone up there looking back. Or if maybe it was all only emptiness, a mere chaos of unimaginable heat and cold, size and distance.

But I couldn’t tell her why I was here, now, thirty years old but feeling much older. I couldn’t tell her that, even if she wanted me to.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You really are, aren’t you?”

“But I’ve brought something else, just in case.”

I reopened my duffel bag again and took out the bottle rocket. I’d purchased it the same afternoon we’d met, when it occurred to me that miracles couldn’t be expected more than once in a lifetime. The fat lady in the red scarf in the shack with the painted black cat told him to light the thing and step back. It was that simple. When I did it Miranda stood up and clapped her hands.

“I love it, I love it!” she said, almost breathless, in the smoking dimness. I glimpsed her eyes, reflecting a sliver of low moon which itself reflected the hidden sun. After a long silence she wanted to know more about me–”who I was”–and I wanted to say, but couldn’t. The closest I could get was the distant memory of one morning, the first day of college.

Shadows, then, I told her: That first morning, when the world seemed heavy with expectation, the sky achingly blue, the future so promising for one whose mind danced with the rhythm of youth. Some days were meant to be remembered, I told her, and that had been a day of days.

Halfway through the telling she took my hand and squeezed it. For as much as I tried to keep it in check, she must have seen a telltale tear come in straining to remember that day in the way I really wanted, past all the pain of my parent’s accidental death, and even my dropping out to wander the world with only my hands to sustain me. As my father had taught repeatedly, if I was willing to work with my hands I’d always have food for my mouth.

My callused hands, strangely frozen in hers. Time alone had held such hands. And now?

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Stop saying that.”

“But I am.”

“Why?”

“Because you came out here for nothing. Not even a flash in the sky. Only a substitute. Like a memory.”

Into my embarrassment her face loomed closer, an oval resolved finally into identity. Her voice was consoling now, her words chosen carefully: “We think we’ll never forget, but we do,” she said. “How do you remember a feeling, exactly as it happened? You can’t. All you have are facts–bits of what you did, what happened. The reality no one understands is buried. Don’t you see?”

I nodded. “I made a wish, when I saw my shooting star,” I confessed. “I wished. . .you. . .into existence.”

“Me?”

I described the rooms to her, then. The studio apartments in Buffalo, in Jersey City, in Newport News. The tiny kitchenettes where over the past year I’d cooked tasteless frozen dinners, the droning rattle of the air conditioners as I tried to sleep over the laughter and television sounds next door. I told her about reading dog-earred novels late into the night until I was too tired to keep my eyes open. About dreams of falling, and waking up just before I hit bottom. I detailed the brief relationships formed out of fear or desperation. But I couldn’t tell her about downtown streets at night, and the bus stations, and the way the streetlights became an eerie green that made everything feel totally alien, lost. I couldn’t describe how the real world had vanished all together for me then, leaving only this substitute for people alone–always, even in the daylight then, alone.

I couldn’t.

I could only close my eyes and turn away. And when I opened my eyes again I was alone.

Three days later I was reading a discarded edition of the Star in a donut shop at the corner of a long block of restaurants. It was 10 AM and above me the shop’s circulating fan beat down, flapping the paper in my hands. My eyes tracked in the slanted morning light. But I didn’t see the ad.

A week later found me at the bus stop, sitting next to another discarded paper left in the blue cubicle which protected riders from the intense heat. This time the ad was in bold type, a giant arrow pointing at it from above. But just as I was about to read it, the bus came.

Finally, on a Thursday afternoon, I was scanning the classifieds for an apartment, and there it was. Not merely a print ad this time, but a photo. In the wide-angle image a girl held a roman candle at arm’s length, a bright blue ball of flame arching skyward over the parking lot in which she stood. To her left, out on the street, drivers either stared blankly or pretended not to see. And below the photo: MARK–WHERE ARE YOU? PLEASE CALL ME AT THE PAPER. I’M SORRY. –MIRANDA.

As I ran toward the phone booth, a strange sense of exhilaration seized me. The Star’s switchboard operator transferred my call to the Classified department.

“Star Classifieds, may I help you?”

“Miranda?”

“. . .Mark??”

That night I drove her to the planetarium and on the way told her that I’d left my other apartment and was staying at a motel for a while. I was trying to tell her all those things which “had no words for them so they never get said” when she touched my arm. I looked over to see that she was crying. Silently.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Not it’s not,” she replied.

“What do you mean?”

She told me about the men, then. The ones who had used her. She told me about grocery stores too, and libraries, and even singles bars–all of which had bred loneliness for one who disliked being left by men who fled back to their vampire’s caskets at dawn.

Then she told me why she’d left me that night:

“Your remember your wish?” she said. “The wish you made when you saw your shooting star?”

“What about it?”

“It’s the same wish I made when I saw it.”

We arrived at the planetarium, a massive dome looming up into the night sky. Wordlessly, I led her inside and we settled into the deeply cushioned interior seats, tilted back to afford a view of an arched ceiling on which were projected the images of stars, galaxies, and nebula. The program of the evening was a clinical study of the relative sizes of stellar objects. There was the sun, a yellow circle on the ceiling. The earth, a tiny blue dot beside it. Then a huge red circle projected over both, enough to cover a hundred suns. The red supergiant, Antares.

I took her hand on the way out.

“I want to show you something else,” I said.

“No more,” she whispered in reply. “I feel so small. So small I’m almost. . . dizzy.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay, now.”

I squeezed her hand, and then I pointed.

In the lobby was a new display, amid several others. On a freshly painted pedestal in the center was a meteorite, six and a half kilograms in weight, dark scars along one side.

“Now that,” I told her, with conviction, “is just a rock.”

-0-

(Originally published in Tucson Guide magazine)

So, anyway, I’ve always known who to blame for what’s happened to me. Not that I thought about him all that often. Over the past thirty years, his name has only popped up maybe six or seven hundred times, tops. What kept bringing it back wasn’t chronic pain so much as my need to let go of the past. Because, as you and I both know, the past is what made us who we are. And being stuck there is about as fun as being a dog reaching the end of its chain.

Travis. What did he do to me? Nothing much, just hit me on the back of the head with a pile of books in our high school’s hallway. But you have to understand that the hit came out of nowhere, and I didn’t expect it. Because of that, my neck was in traction for a week. And that was just the beginning.

Now, before you tell me that if only I would have fallen to the floor and pretended serious injury, (sued is an anagram of used), I’ll agree that you’re right–and that my father would have filed, if not my mother. Except, even if I’d thought of laying down at the exact instant I needed to, it would have been too uncool. At that age, instinct tells you to stand up and push back, which is what I did. And after we both went to the Principal’s office, my antagonist went on to graduate, as did I. Only about five years later, I started having these horrific headaches. Developed osteoarthritis with pinched nerves in C4 and C5, including a lot of numbness in my left hand, and a continual ringing in my ears. After about nine more years of quack chiropractors and physical therapy, I had a botched operation which led to fusion surgery, and left me unable to turn my neck independent of my shoulders. As for the headaches, the numbness, and the tinnitus, they resumed. So did my thoughts about how easy everything had been for Travis–the money, the girls, the popularity. What had he done? Nothing much, other than to ridicule, taunt, and then attack a poor skinny kid who had to work after school. . . a friendless outcast who was later forced to take drugs for the pain caused by being whacked down hard from behind with five textbooks in a jesting disdain.

Okay, I know that they say the causes of osteoarthritis can’t be pinpointed. There could be any number of factors involved, like environment, genetic abnormality, diet, virus, accident. But I think we both know the truth, don’t we? So can we really call it an accident, what happened to me? I’ll agree with you that the bestseller Travis wrote was an accident. All the critics agree on that, calling it a trite, sentimental, sappy romance about a handicapped war veteran who woos a beauty queen. It might even be a fluke that Travis later owned what they call an estate, and married a younger woman who wore Versace and Fendi and Gucci. But was what he did to me anything like an accident? I think not. But at least I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt by finding out.

I first saw Fate’s Shadow at Amazon.com, late one night. That led me to a piece in Time about Travis’s much talked about marriage to a fashion model for Taylor & Klein–a rising actress who’d appeared on the covers of such magazines as Vogue, InStyle, and, later, Maxim. Travis “discovered” Gerta Rosewood four years previously at UNC, back when he’d taught history and philosophy there. Then Gerta dropped out of college during her sophomore year when she was offered a lucrative modeling contract, and Travis gave up his tenure to become the father figure she never had. Taking the post of assistant professor at City College in New York in order to be near her, he was soon attempting to turn his lurid affair to her into a crime novel. And when Mira accepted and rushed the novel into publication–along with several dozen others that month–it surprised everyone by quickly climbing the charts out of obscurity and onto the NY Times bestseller list. At that, Gerta was wooed. She became Travis’s Lolita, then his wife. Meanwhile, the parallels between his fictional story and his real life only added to the mystique and sales. So when the book hit #1, Miramax bought the film rights, and the studio’s execs signed Gerta herself to star.

It’s just such a wonderful Hollywood love story, isn’t it? The kind you get flashed at you on Extra or Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood or The Tonight Show. But you want to hear an irony that you aren’t getting on the news? For a long time, I struggled to be a writer, too. That’s right. While Travis taught history in college, I even took night classes at one of those strip mall “colleges” for a time, although it wasn’t a substitute. Of course after my parents died with cancers–lung and colon–I mostly drifted from job to job, while avoiding the trap of making little replicas of myself without even knowing who I was. Probably wouldn’t shock or even interest you to learn that I inhabited at least a dozen dorm-style no-frills low-rent block-wall apartments at the nadir of human existence, and that during my many long and lonely years of scribbling in notebooks I found myself restocking various retail store shelves with shoes, basketballs, duct tape, AA batteries, disposable diapers, toilet bowl cleaner, and a thousand other items consumed by the faceless masses. Shall I mention the roaches, or the fact that I had to wear a collar at night to prevent excessive neck pain, or that I didn’t have a real girlfriend in all that time? Maybe I should tell you and Jay Leno about my days off, instead, when I walked to the mall just to be someplace cool where I could watch a movie and pretend possession of some purpose, like everyone else pretended?

No, you wouldn’t want to hear about that. You’ve got the picture already. You were probably never like me–a loser without a direction, except for where the urgent advertising of Madison Avenue directs us all with their deceptive ads that promise something more than what you get, which is just plastic and trans-fatty foods and stylish clothes made in Mexico or Taiwan by malnourished children. With your skills you probably call it designer-wear, and eat at upscale restaurants. Right?

>What do you mean, is that what I think? You want to know what I think? I think Travis was no better than Hollis Randall, a retired postal worker who was my neighbor for two years–a man who kept pigeons and believed in hell. Hollis was very close to death one night, the result of a heart attack. “There are two tunnels when you die, not just one,” he told me, “and which one you are able to choose decides your eternal fate.” Before he went more than a little nuts, he claimed to know the meaning of life, too. Said the great mystery could be told in eighteen words which, when heard, might drive you mad. He started to tell me, until I shouted that it sounded like a Twilight Zone episode. Then he wrote the words on a piece of paper, and laid it on my suitcase the day I moved away. Did I read it? You bet I did. Although I wish now that I hadn’t.

Of course words are just signposts, and point at other realities. Take just one of the eighteen, the word why. Hollis wrote it as Y. You could also say Y as it wrote Hollis.

>Believe me, you couldn’t handle the Truth. You’re not ready. Not if Lizzie Selmut, another neighbor of mine, wasn’t. She was a Buddhist assistant Dairy Queen manager who, after hearing the Eighteen, went around after work putting locks on gates and chains on doors, leaving little messages behind for the frustrated owners of liquor franchises and porn shops. One read:
Take up the way of not defaming that which reflects true self-nature. The teisho of the body is the harbor and the weir. The most important thing is the letting go of ego and of waiting and even of seeking. Only in the eternal present does virtue find its home.

>Trust you? Let me tell you, one old golf geezer I told the Eighteen to goes, “Man oh man, what did I do with my life? My room is just walls, now! Like a waiting room at the hospital. Coulda been helpin’ kids or somethin’ instead-a watchin’ ball games or buyin’ pretzels at the supermarket checkout, along with tabloid trash about the latest Elvis sightings at the Krispy Kreme.”

When I left him there, his forehead crunched into a kind of primordial expression, like it could become anything, given the right genetic instructions.

>Okay, okay, the house. Well, it was a pretty impressive place, I have to say. How did I find it? Easy enough. Just ask around–everyone in Raleigh knew where Travis lived, from all the articles. Some of them knew the exact address. “Most decadent beach house in Nags Head,” was the way one guy in Kitty Hawk described it. Of course you know the deck, supported by those fifteen foot concrete pillars. That’s what I saw first. You can even see the Bodie Island Lighthouse from the beach, there. Nicer still from atop that deck, from his jacuzzi. But how best to approach it, though? Should I just go up and knock, introduce myself as the friend of a friend? Maybe lose a kite or a freebie on the property? I doubted he would remember me. The thing was, I really just wanted to observe him. At least for starters. So I sat down on this slab of stone next to a little hillock of sand and sea oats down on the beach, just outside his property line, and waited. Sat lotus style, my forearms on my knees, palms up.

I noticed a construction company sign nearby announcing acquisition by a developer willing to play God with an entire swath of shoreline real estate, for the right money. Maybe other millionaires had already ponied up enough to be near Travis. I remembered that a reviewer on the internet reported that a sequel to Fate’s Shadow was being written, and that the advance would be three million. Maybe Travis was up there, writing. Maybe I’d see him crossing the big bay windows with a sheaf of papers, walking back and forth. As I waited to witness that, I thought about how my mother could have used even half a million, as an anagram of sued. How she deserved to live in that house. And how, after Fate’s Shadow, all she had now was a tiny plot of dirt in a low rent cemetery.

Then I saw him, up there–Travis. Saw him come to the window. Before he saw me, I turned slightly away, and closed my eyes tight. I knew it was him, and it was worse than I thought it might be. He hadn’t changed as much as me. Still had his full head of black hair, while mine had receded and grayed. At ease and confident, the tall, virile man in the high window resembled actor Barry Bostwick. Among all of his possessions the only two things he didn’t appear to own was an aging body or a beer gut. Unfortunately for him.

My left bicep started jumping like a Morse code, then, thanks to pinched nerves. I imagined the message was from my father encouraging me to proceed, then from my mother telling me to go home. It was at that moment when I decided I would do something, although I didn’t know what. I’d have to meet him, talk to him, to know that. But it would be something, I knew that much. I wouldn’t be going home empty handed. Still, that’s all I was thinking at that point, really. You do see that, right? Because when I finally looked up again, Travis was gone, and what did I do? I walked back to my car, got a hotel room, and went to sleep.

The next day I returned to the same spot at the same time, still undecided. My theory was that if he saw me there again, pretending to meditate, he might come down from his heaven into my hell and reveal his true character. Lucifer once fell from heaven, they say. Maybe Travis would fall from his, if a story was slipped to the tabloids. Or maybe not. Maybe there was something else I might do. Something painful, like what he did to me.

But Travis didn’t come down, although this time he looked down at me several times. He was wearing a dark purple robe when he did, and he carried a glass of red wine. Good for the heart, they say. His, not mine. After the third time, he pulled the curtains, or rather pushed a button so that they closed. So it was obvious that Gerta was not with him. Maybe she was at a photo shoot, and would join him for the weekend. This was Thursday, so I knew that I’d better think of something quick if I wanted to confront him alone. And when the idea hit me, I was idly looking out at the distant breakers far beyond the intervening sand bars, at a place which might once have evoked a sense of youthful exhilaration in me, had I been someone else. Someone like Travis, and not some computer relationship junkie with photos and profiles out there on the net.

Anyway, on the next day, the fateful day, I came prepared. I brought food and water, among other things, to wait him out. Obviously, he was only coming outside when I wasn’t there. Maybe he had fans, and wasn’t quite sure yet if I was one of them. Maybe he didn’t like prying eyes, which was why he’d chosen the 27959 Zip code instead of 90210. Or perhaps he had something to hide, and in the meantime it was better to be king here than pawn there. In any event, when I took up my position this time, I’d made certain he would have to come down past me, to get out. No doubt he would be asking me if I’d seen who’d put the kryptonite bicycle lock on his front gate, preventing him from leaving.

But then–and you can call it fate if you like–he surprised me, Travis did. He came down to me without first trying to leave. I knew he hadn’t seen me slip the bike lock around the connecting bars of his automatic gate back at the road. I mean because of his demeanor, which was more like curiosity. He came slowly down the wrought iron steps, descending from the deck, studying me with the slightest smile, instead. He was wearing blue jeans and a black cotton button-down shirt, his eyes shaded by the kind of sunglasses favored by media moguls and action film stars. I kept my lotus pose, unmoving, for fear he’d stop at some point. But he didn’t. He walked right up to me, and must have decided I was harmless when his smile widened.

“Wanna tell me what you’re doing?” he asked, without much evident disapproval. His voice was deep, something I’ve read that women find sexy. That close, I did detect wrinkles on his neck, although his sunglasses effectively hid any laugh lines. Still, he looked remarkably fit for a man in his mid fifties.

“Me?” I replied. “Oh, I’m just contemplating the mysteries of the universe, that’s all.”

“Why here, though?” He made a hand motion which may have suggested ownership or dismissal.

“This is a comfortable rock. Does my presence bother you?”

He thought about that. Then he looked away, toward the distant lighthouse. “Naw,” he decided. “Just kinda unusual. Kinda spooky, seeing you sitting down here like that. What’s your name?”

“Name?” I asked, as though I didn’t know what the word meant. “I’m sorry, I’ve just been to a place without names.”

He chuckled wryly. “You mean, where nobody knows your name? Like the opposite of Cheers?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Except names don’t matter, really.” I grasped a handful of sand, then let the grains slowly filter through my fingers. “What name would you give to each of these grains, for instance? Moments of time, perhaps, like sands in an hourglass? Now and now and now and–”

He huffed air from his nose, smiling and nodding. “You’re far-out,” he said.

“You’re right,” I admitted. “But would you try to imagine something for me? Just imagine two points in empty space, with nothing but a vast vacuum between them. And that you are one of the points, and someone you know is the other.”

“Who?”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Okay.”

“O-kay. Now, tell me, what is it that determines the distance between you and this other person?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, this time with a trace of annoyance in this tone. “What do you mean?”

“Okay. When you move toward this person in empty space, or away from them, through what are you moving?”

He shook his head, crossing his arms. “Nothing.”

“Nothing,” I repeated. “But if there is absolutely nothing between you, how can you be so far apart? And is there a limit to how far apart you can be? If there is no limit, then what you call space must be infinite, and you do not even know what it is. But it is obviously something, because without it nothing could exist. So nothing does exist. Do you see? Nothing matters.”

“That’s. . . pretty clever,” he said, putting his hands on his hips.

“So you have never felt the space inside you?”

“Inside me?”

“The place where you live, inside. The infinite space, just like that space out there.” Here I pointed toward the ocean, the sky. “The space where time is an illusion, just as your physical body is only a shell. Where what you can’t see–what people call nothing–matters most. The one true reality.”

Travis cocked his chin, looking at me. “Hey, ah, you wanna come up for a drink?” he said, finally.

We sat in his living room–or rather Great room–drinking single malt Scotch. Told me he was tired of doing interviews and talking about books and movies, and that it was nice to meet someone genuine like me. I pretended ignorance of the fame which had enabled him to afford a 4600 square foot luxury home on the beach, with cathedral ceilings, teak furnishings, Italian marble tables and counter-tops, and an 86 inch flat screen HD-TV which hung on the wall, like a piece of modern art, next to an original Warhol. He tried to impress me, if only to test me, but I clung to character like the actor who doesn’t know if he’ll ever work again. Still, when he mentioned the Ferrari that he had on order, and that he’d met Gwyneth and Gisele at one of Gerta’s parties in the Hamptons, I felt my breaking point coming, and so to shut him up I said, “Have you ever heard that the most important thing is the letting go of ego, and of waiting, and even of seeking?”

That was my test, for him. And true to remembered form, Travis lifted an index finger into the air. “Oh, that’s right. I almost forgot. Run that by me again?”

“The teisho of the body is the harbor and the weir,” I said, watching him with a steady, judging gaze. “Only in the eternal present does virtue find its home.”

He didn’t appear to be nearing the end of his curiosity about me, or rather his need for a drinking buddy. Not quite yet, unfortunately for him. “That’s really deep there, Depak,” he said. “And, ya know, I’m all for the present too. The past is what sucks. But virtue? Come on. Where’s the fun in that? You sound like one of those writer wannabes who plague me, begging advice on how to make the big time! Them with their pithy quotes, bad poems, and pathetic diaries.”

“And what advice do you give them?” I asked, as calmly as I could manage.

He chuckled. “Advice? I tell them to try the lottery. You need luck to win at that game too.” He laughed giddily as he poured himself another. “Anyway, writing is like a drug for those losers. They can’t stop, but who the hell cares? They should realize it’s a game only the top fifty can win. The list people who rewrite the same story year after year. Which is what I plan to do too, by the way, now that I’m in.” He slurped greedily at his Scotch. “Oh, it was all explained to me by the big boys in New York and L.A.. You should have heard ‘em. Good thing my luck held up long enough to get me there! Means this is just a starter house, my man. Wanna see my work table? Looks like a lazy susan. Work on a book, turn it, work on a script. What’s the difference? It’s all the same predictable thrills, what the masses been conditioned to want. Same reason they go to McDonalds, while the mom and pop restaurants go belly up. Same reason they worship golf or baseball, and pony up their kids’ milk money for tickets. Am I right?”

Unfortunately for him, he was right. And tipsy. So tipsy that when I told him the Eighteen Words, he thought that was funny too.

>What did I do then? Not much. After I wrote down the Eighteen on a cocktail napkin and attached them to his stainless steel refrigerator door with a Hollywood tourist magnet–(just so he’d remember them when sober)–I came up behind him with a stack of five hardcovers (instead of another Heineken), and while he was watching a Raiders game on his wide screen I hit him right on top of his head as hard as I could when he leaned forward. That’s all.

There was a just audible crack then, and I suppose that’s because older necks aren’t as able to sustain the kind of impact younger ones can. But you can see that it was an accident. Can’t you? I didn’t mean to actually break his neck, after all. And he wasn’t dead when I left him, either. I swear to you, he looked up at me from the floor, and said, “I know you. You’re not . . . really . . . a Buddhist.”

“And you’re not really a writer, either,” I said, pointing at the five copies of Fate’s Shadow on the floor beside him. “You haven’t suffered enough.”

On my way back down to the beach, I saw what I took for a security camera under the eaves above the deck. One that I hadn’t noticed before. I jerked it free, pulling hard at the cords, and even went back inside for a moment, looking for the recorder. I asked Travis where it was, but he only laughed at me through his pain. So I pulled the cords free of the wall completely, gave up, and left with Travis laughing at me, once again.

>Right. That’s the reason I didn’t call 911.

You know, they say accidents happen all the time. I think by now we both know that’s true. Of course the fact that I didn’t know his security camera was really a web-cam can’t technically be called an accident. Because Travis never mentioned that he and Gerta used it to allow their distant friends and relatives to see them enjoying their deck. But I think that the fire caused by my pulling those cords qualifies as an accident, or an act of God. There was certainly no fire when I left, so how did I know that my forgetting the lock I’d placed on Travis’s gate would prevent the firemen from reaching him in time?

Can you answer me that, whoever you are?
-0-

(This story was published in Futures Mysterious Mystery Anthology, and is included on the CD “Oscar’s Hijack,” narrated with full sound effects by Barrett Whitener for Blackstone Audio.)

LAST INHABITANTS

Tiny pale insects inhabit this page.
Given time, bodies with silent legs
will burrow through these dark sheets
bearing a wit of their own.
The ink will barely be tasted:
an unseen dye
in microscopic night.

Many are already here
digesting as we’ve digested
sentence after sentence,
our trained eyes feeding on symbols.
Turn the page and you might see one–
so small even an ant is monstrous.
The sole surviver
of the closed book.

RIDDLE

Quarreling, the first gull flies.
The surging surf has swallowed down the beach.
Without its claw a sand crab dies,
Grappling out of reach.

For no tide the sea rocks wait.
The summer moon has dwindled from the sun.
A severing fog the damp earth makes,
Trackless, hushed, undone.

(from Poem magazine)

When darkness crowds my upstairs room
I press my cheek against this pane
And fog the glass above this sill
to read the emptied lane:

Below, the amber streetlamp burns.
Each night–in clear or misted dew–
The air drifts by the frugal light
That pools into the avenue.

The houses, dark, are only seen
As silhouettes beyond that glare.
Tier on tier they seem to sleep
Beyond the lamp’s flat, lambent stare.

That road is waiting even now.
Although it’s mute, I think I know
Not how it waits, but that its light
Illuminates the way I go.

My first novel evolved from a nightmare. I woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming of being trapped in a dark cellar with a killer who I couldn’t see, and who couldn’t see me. (Don’t make a sound, or you’re dead!) At the time, I was working for the Postal Service, and was told about the shooting at Edmond, Oklahoma, where 14 people were killed by a postal employee who went postal, as the phrase was popularized. Up to that point I’d only written short stories, but in my paranoid state I began to look at fellow employees with suspicion. I imagined the secret thoughts of a few in particular, who acted very oddly, and soon I developed the character of Calvin Beach as a kind of misogynistic right-wing extremist and loner–a man who, after hearing about another postal shooting, decides to do them all one better by exacting revenge on women and minorities via freak bomb attacks and letter bombs. When his only friend won’t sign on to his escalating vendetta, Calvin then sets Dave Sominski up to take the fall, chains him in an abandoned Titan missile base in the desert with a bucket of water within reach, then continues planting bombs and sorting mail. But soon one rookie postal inspector begins to suspect that police are looking for the wrong man, and this then leads to the chase, which leads to the climax in the dark of the abandoned missile base–each man having one bullet left, and listening intently for sounds of the other.

Actual post office operations and automation facilities frame the backdrop to the novel as a kind of new tale of the wild west, but I also wanted it to be a psychological thriller by making Calvin actually rationalize what he’s doing. This is similar to Michael Douglas in the movie Falling Down, where at the end his character asks ‘Am I the bad guy?‘ So, rather than a Who-dunnit, it’s a Why-dunnit, which was always more interesting to me. I worked backward from the ending, and even explored an actual abandoned Titan missile base, which I discovered while researching a ghost town article for Arizona Highways magazine. Excerpt below.

“You again?” said Bud Gessel, unscrewing his pearl-handled cue stick. “I thought I told you the other night. I ain’t the man yer looking for.”

Calvin sank into the nearest red-cushioned booth and took out his wallet. He glanced around the bar, then withdrew the bills. Ten of them. All hundreds. He counted them out on the table.

Gessel stared down at the money. Then he laid his pool case on top of it. Almost, it seemed, on impulse. “Keep that outta sight,” he said lowly. “Might be a narc in here. Hell, the bartender might be a narc.”

Calvin smiled. “So, ya don’t take me for a loser now.”

Gessel’s weatherbeaten face showed more wrinkles than an iguana. He sat across from Calvin, clenching and unclenching his left hand as if trying to get the stiffness out. “Let’s say ya got enough under there for a listen. You want more it’ll cost ya more.”

“So you are the right man.”

Gessel leaned back and put his muscular arms up on back of the booth. He looked around casually, then smiled. Through a row of crooked teeth he said, “Maybe I’m paranoid, but convince me yer not a cop, an’ I might play along.”

Calvin told him about Vietnam–a rambling of what he remembered, and some of what he’d tried to suppress. Then he talked about hard times, until his recent interest in mining and prospecting brought him some luck. He said he was tired of panning, which was for sissies. And that what he really needed was to blast into a rock face near where he’d discovered gold to see if there was a vein in there like he suspected. He explained that it was on remote public land, so he needed to get in and out quickly and easily, and not be caught carrying a load of dynamite. He heard that Gessel was an ex-Special Forces operative who once specialized in explosives. Overheard that he was a soldier of fortune for a few years after that, until the South Africans jailed and then deported him. What he had in mind wasn’t legal, but if Gessel could help him obtain the items he needed, he’d let him have the grand right now, and give him two more on delivery.

“Did I hear ya right?” Gessel asked, leaning forward at last. “You wanna make plastique? Ta blast some rocks?”

Calvin put a finger to his lips, and nodded.

Gessel chuckled. “Sure your wife’s not screwin’ around, an’ you figure to blow her lover all to hell? You got no ring, but it might be in yer pocket.”

“You wanna check?”

Gessel held up one hand. “Don’t wanna know. Except maybe yer name.”

“It’s Alan. Alan . . . Cooper.”

They shook hands. Gessel lit a cigarette.

“It’s Alan something, but not Cooper, right?” Gessel shrugged, then opened the pool case, lifted it, and slid the bills inside. Then he closed it. In three seconds it was done. “Okay. . . Plastique for a would-be miner.” He paused. “So here it is. I can get ya the ingredients for three more Gs, or I can make it for you for five. Take yer pick.”

Calvin coughed. “Can you be trusted?”

Gessel thought that one over for one long inhalation and an even longer exhalation. “It’s yer money,” he said, finally.

“Just so we understand. I’ll give you three grand if you get me enough materials to make three large charges.”

Gessel blew a smoke ring. “How large is large?”

Calvin waved the smoke away. “Enough to shatter a two-ton boulder. Each, of course.”

“Of course.” Gessel lowered his voice and leaned closer. “And why exactly do ya think you can pull this off without getting yer damn head blown off first?”

Calvin didn’t answer.

“I thought so. Been doing some readin’, have ya? Well, it’s more tricky than ya think. Let me tell ya, you might be able to make a primitive blasting gelatin with eight percent nitrated sawdust, but it’s the ninety-two percent fuming nitric acid and glycerin you gotta worry about. You ever worked with that? You know what it does to soft body parts like arms and legs? Ya don’t get a second chance, can’t say ‘oops, I’ll be more careful next time, Abdul.’ I say if you’re doing this yourself, you better stick to something less volatile. Get you some ammonium oxalate and nitrate, a stabilizer, and the kinda saltpeter they use to keep prisoners from getting a hard on. Don’t mess with high explosives, kid. You got a better chance of survivin’ with Russian roulette.”

Calvin shook his head. “It’s gotta be compact. A small charge with a big bang.”

Gessel tapped his pool cue case. “You wanna try Nitrogen Tri-iodide? Want me to get you some a’ that? A fly lands on it an’ it explodes. Or hey–maybe you want some trinitrotoluene, otherwise known as TNT. Use it in grenades and pipe bombs. Got two million pounds per square inch of power.”

“Sounds good. What do I need–sulfuric and nitric acids? Toluene?”

Gessel laughed. “Yeah. You make it in an ice bath, need a good centigrade thermometer, too. And a crucifix.”

“What’s that for?”

“You keep it around yer neck so yer fuckin’ head stays put.”

Calvin didn’t smile. “I’ve read that paraffin wax is a texturizer used in a lot of plastiques. You really got access to all these chemicals?”

Gessel studied him for a moment, then said, “I can get them if I have to.” He continued staring.

“So why you looking at me like that, then?”

“Because I think I’m lookin’ at a dead man.” Gessel looked away. “Listen, you’ll need sulfuric and nitric, yeah, and dimethyllaniline, too. Keep it in an ice bath, then filter and wash it, boil it in fresh water with baking soda, test it with litmus paper until yer sure it’s free of acid. Then ya filter that and let it dry.”

“What is it?”

“Tetryl. That’s what ya want. I’ve made it before. The end product is easy to work with, relatively stable. An’ a little blows a long way.”

Calvin nodded. “You’ll get me the stuff I need to make it?”

“Yeah. For three more grand. An’ good luck. You’ll need it.”

“How do you set it off?”

“Tetryl? Number a’ ways. Spring action shock is one. I’ve heard of it used in an ordinary fountain pen that way. Abraham depresses the plunger and bammo–he’s lost his hand, maybe his whole arm. Or in a smoking pipe. Rashid lights up an’, well, there’s no public viewing at that funeral in Kabul. ‘Course you just wanna blast some rocks, though, don’t ya.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Hey, like I said, it’s yer money. An’ yer life.”

Calvin scanned the bar once more, then looked directly into Gessel’s lizard face. “Would you believe me if I made it five grand for the finished product?”

Gessel blinked at him like an old cash register ringing up a sale.

(Originally in hardcover and in audiobook format, now an ebook at Ereader.com. A sample of Frank Muller’s award winning performance can be sampled HERE.)

Before I describe fate’s stunning intervention in my pathetic life, let me introduce my boss, Sal Valente. Picture a fat, middle-aged former union thug with one rolled up cotton sleeve revealing a tattoo of himself. Sal’s a redhead whose perpetually rosy cheeks are not due to embarrassment, but rather from being slapped so often his chameleon face had long decided to stay that way. Flush and ready to print anything, he has come to inhabit a once tidy wood-paneled office with a nasty green Amazon parrot in a antique brass cage, and there he sits behind a cluttered mahogany desk with his hands resting palms-up on the edge. Call me delusional, but his wriggling fingers always reminded me of the legs of giant Brazilian roaches trying to turn over and escape being featured on page fourteen of the Celeb-Ration. That would be Benny’s column on the bizarre in the world of science. Oh, and Sal’s voice? It’s not unlike the Godfather’s, but with a pronounced nasal quality, as though he’s spent too much time underwater. Salt water, by the look of his red eyes.

“What ya got there for me, Jude?” Sal asks me that pivotal afternoon, rendering his patented don’t-disappoint-me stare. “Another lifestyle piece, I hope?”

Sal worked in a meat packing plant in Dallas before coming to Miami to take the reins of the tabloid. No one knew exactly what his connections were to get the job, but it was rumored he’d done some sort of illegal service for Martin Weinstein, the little prick publisher of the Celeb-Ration. The job probably involved the breaking of bones. Wishbones, most likely, because whatever education Sal possessed in the area of magazine editing and English grammar wouldn’t have been able to parse The Cat in the Hat.

“What I’ve got,” I reply, “is soap star Tracy Corwin caught on camera, cussing a blue streak.”
“Who’d ya say?”

Sal accepts my proffered video camera, then crooks his chin to study the playback. When he recognizes me on the LCD, his eyes narrow perceptibly. At my cannonball, his look evinces disgust. So I tell him my idea for a column about Splashers.

Unfortunately, he takes to that like an heiress to a bowl of moldy borscht. “We can’t be be-mirched,” he concludes, wriggling his nose.

“What? You mean besmirched?”

He shakes a finger at me. “Right.” Then he looks down and manipulates the controls on my camera.

“What are you doing?” I ask in bewilderment.

“Erasing the evidence.”

Deed done, he opens his bottom desk drawer, and drops my camera into it.

At this point, I pinch the bridge of my nose. “You’re giving me a migraine, Sal,” I tell him.
“No, I’m preventin’ my own. Can’t ya see that?”

“Do you see this hang dog look you’re giving me? Any leads on the South Beach party tonight, at least?”

“Stick to lifestyle trends,” Sal says. “Mark and Russ are coverin’ that.”

I sigh. Mark Messna and Russ Wells are fresh out of journalism school at FSU, having failed to make the recruiting cut to the Miami Herald or the Orlando Dispatch. True, they hadn’t picked up anything compromising in the way of ethics or self respect as roomies in college, thanks to frat parties and online term paper purchases. Their actual field experience was limited to contacts who scout for résumés, not for celebrities snorting coke with known felons, so the little matter of how to keep their student loan creditors from holding a pocket mirror to their noses as they slept in a dumpster had probably brought them to Sal in the first place. And Sal, being inept at everything but delegation himself, always admired desperation more than he did credentials. In this way he was similar to the old curmudgeon he’d replaced, back when I’d first applied two years prior, right after my failed career as a travel writer.

“You know, Giselle is supposed to be there tonight,” I say, angling to be included somehow while voicing my complaint.

“Forget ‘er, she’s eye candy,” Sal declares. “Too skinny, anyways.”

I chuckle cynically as I admire the cheese Danish next to his telephone console. “Too skinny for what?”

“Huh?”

“Besides, they say you can’t be too skinny or too rich,” I remind him, quoting a fashion bible I’ve been ignoring all my life.

“Oh no?” Sal says. “Then what was that series on anorexic stars ya did last year?”

“That was different,” I insist.

“How zit different? Nevermind. Look. If ya gotta get outta the office and write somethin’ that might actually get us sued. . . well, ya stay outta the picture, okay? But remember–I need something big. Unusual. Gimme somethin’ wid teeth.”

“You mean like the biggest Everglades croc? What?”

“I dunno. What do I pay you for? Fadricate something.”

“You mean fabricate?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

“Lie?”

“Well, ya don’t have ta do that, exactly,” Sal says. He swipes at a fly, slapping his tattoo in the process. Then he picks up his cheese Danish and studies it. “Just make sure it’s big and juicy,” he says, and sinks his yellow incisors into the pastry. “And be careful out there.”

“Right,” I tell him. “Thanks for your wonderful input, Sal.”

He glances up as I’m leaving. “Hey, Jude,” he says, still chomping on pastry.

I frown as I turn at the door. “Yeah?”

“Good rhymes-with-luck.”

So there I am reading the society pages of the Herald in Clancy’s Bar on west 13th Street off Biscayne when Julio Martinez finally shows up twenty minutes late with some guy in an open denim vest looking to show off his washboard stomach. The tight, tough little weasel is introduced to me as Carlos Figueroa, a local pool shark with bleached hair who wants to be called Carl. They both slide into the tooled red leather booth opposite me and order a pitcher of Dos Equis Amber. I study their vacant expressions as a wan sense of queasy disquietude invades my torpor.

“So what’s new?” Julio asks me, dredging up a smile that leaves his teeth hidden. “Been a while. Where ya been? Busy?”

I contemplate my prospects grimly. Here is Julio, a thirty year old doorman at the Fontainebleau Hotel, and sometimes stringer for our rag, wasting my time by asking me nothing original. I figure if he has a story, and ‘Carl’ is partner to it, they’ll probably be angling for a cash advance next. And since Sal appears to be abandoning me for younger talent, that meant any upfront cash might come out of my own pocket. “Yeah, lots going on,” I lie in reply. “Busy week. Now, please tell me something I don’t know.”

Julio looks me over with a flat scan, like an x-ray for hidden malignancies. Then he nods around at the bar, a comforting space that nods back–an earthy, enveloping cocoon from which one might never want to emerge. “Ya know, Jude,” he tells the mostly empty booths around us, “you’re lookin’ almost human. Lose some weight, or what?”

Almost. The word is key. I don’t look down at my visible paunch because I know it’s still there. I know that Julio knows, too. Still, his detectibly nervous attitude has more of my attention for the moment. “No,” I reply, dully. “You don’t sit around swilling beer with stringers and snitches, and come out of it looking like Val Kilmer.”

“Who?” Carl asks.

“George Clooney,” I tell him.

“Oh,” Carl says.

“Doesn’t Jude look like Nick Nolte to you?” Julio asks Carl.

“Who?”

“Drew Carey,” I say.

“Oh,” Carl says. “No.”

I sigh again. “A younger Nick Nolte, before his bad hair days and boot from the B list. Now cut the crap, and tell me what you got.”

“We. . . need to talk about price first, Judy,” Julio confides, his deceptive green prizefighter’s eyes dancing around mine with obvious caution.

“Price? Who am I, Drew Carey or Bob Barker? Try that one on Ebay.”

“This is big, Jude dude,” Julio declares.

“Big,” I repeat, recalling Sal’s use of the word.

“The biggest,” Julio insists.

“Let me guess. One of the Grays landed on top of the Fontainebleau last night, took over the penthouse, and ordered room service. Its instructions were to snooker the human race, so it wanted to learn how to play the game from Carl here, first. Am I right?”

“You’re close,” Julio says.

I lean back and study him. His pretty boy face doesn’t change expression. The pitcher of Dos Equis comes, and I accept it to refill my own glass. Then when the waitress leaves with my credit card, Julio leans closer and commands my attention by lowering his head a bit and raising his eyes. “A thousand bucks each,” he says.

“How’s that?” I blink rapidly, and accidentally spill beer onto my shirt, then brush it away into little droplets that land on Carl and prompt a similar reaction.

“Five thousand more if you want us to keep our mouths shut.”

“Each,” Carl adds, his tone cryptic.

I laugh, like a spasm, then look between them as though between nuns after being ass kicked. “Wait a minute. What are you trying to–”

“Per day, plus expenses,” says Carl. Then he nods at Julio for approval, and Julio nods back. They’re starting to enjoy this.

“You can’t be–”

Julio waves over at me like a traffic cop, and leans in. “We are, though, Judy. Very serious. Can’t you see that?”

I down my beer in one long guzzle, then refill my glass. “What is it?” I ask again. “You know an old fart doorman named Elvis, and you got the DNA to prove he’s the King?”

“Better,” Julio says, and now lets some teeth into his smile. “No one would want to see Elvis now, anyway. He’d look like you, plus thirty years and minus the hair, except for what’s growing in his ears. Maybe a couple more pounds, too.”

“Thanks,” I say, just before imagining the aging heartthrob on The Tonight Show, now a bloated whale blowing blood from his nose while he complains that the paparazzi are oh so cruel. “Who, then?”

Julio picks up the Herald from beside me. Gently, like it contains either a gram of plutonium inside or the World’s Largest Silverfish. “We got a deal?”

“Do you think we have?” I ask.

He nods. “I think so.”

“Then let’s say we do. Theoretically.”

“Wait a minute,” Carl interjects. “Where’s the thousand?”

“I’ll write you an I.O.U.,” I tell him.

“Why not a check?”

“Checks can be stopped, and they can bounce.”

“Yeah, but. . . we can’t take an I.O.U. to the bank,” smart boy Carl complains.

Julio waves a hand at Carl, dismissively. “We’ll take it to his boss if we have to, no problema. If he won’t cash it, we’ll sell it to Vinnie Mustafa.” He looks back at me. “He’s a local gangster Carl knows. Likes gamey meat. Venison steaks, ostrich.”

“Who cares what he likes to eat,” Carl says, “long as he gets the job done?”

“I think Judy does,” Julio replies.

“Quit with this stuff, already,” I warn, “and spill it!”

“The I.O.U. first.” Julio aims one forefinger at my gut. “Write it on a check, and sign it. Date it due Friday. Two thousand.”

I do it. I don’t think he can cash it at the bank because his name isn’t I.O.U.. Julio takes the check, then opens my newspaper as if to read. I look for a silverfish, but there isn’t one.

“So?” I say.

“Hold on.” He folds back a page, then slaps the paper back in front of me again, and taps an image there.

I look down.

It’s an old image, but my eyes widen with interest anyway.

“Have we got a deal, my friend?” Julio asks. “Was I right?”

(This novel is available from Blackstone as an audiobook narrated by Emmy winning actor and director Kristoffer Tabori.)

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