BODIES ELECTRIC
“To label Bodies Electric a thriller is like calling Hamlet a murder mystery.”
— The New York Times
“With the narrative drive of a hurtling subway express, Harrison . . . plunges readers into a scary subterranean world in which the only comfort comes from the neon flashes of his prose.”
—People
“[Harrison] spares no detail of sex or violence, imbuing every phrase with a visceral punch.”
— Chicago Tribune
“A powerful writer.” — The Boston Globe
“A taut, nerve-wracking drama.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
BREAK AND ENTER
“Unpredictable to the very last page.” — Chicago Tribune
“Splendidly serious, utterly entertaining . . . one is tempted to say the words, ‘Move over, Scott Turow,’ and stop there . . . succeeds on a level that touches us more deeply than the ordinary thriller.”
— Washington Post Book World
“Sensational . . . intensely felt . . . Harrison heroically balances [a] philosophical drama . . . with the puzzle narrative of a legal who-dunit . . . Amazing ”
— The New York Times Book Review
AFTERBURN
“Harrison writes extremely well, and sections of Afterburn are as elegant as you’ll hope to find in any novel . . . It’s his ability to make what he’s learned come alive through exact description—and his stylish way of incorporating it into a sentence—that creates the novel’s sense of authenticity.”
—Stephen Dobyns, The New York Times Book Review
“We’re so in [the characters’] heads, so privy to their yearnings, their fears, that we practically become them.”
— The Washington Post
“Immensely readable . . . [Harrison] creates two fantastic characters—a John McCain-like war hero/business titan, and one of the more interesting female leads in recent fiction.”
— Esquire
“Arichand textured tale of character-as-destiny . . . Harrison has created a world that’s dangerous, cruel, overbright, too fast, and unreliable—but a world that’s worth staying alive in. ‘A’”
— Entertainment Weekly
“A wide-ranging thriller that extends far beyond the typecast confines of the genre.”
— GQ
“Mesmerizes and convinces . . . full of memorable sequences . . . The author conjures vivid milieus (a Shanghai construction site, a hidden Long Island cottage, a Big Apple parking garage) and populates them with eccentrics worthy of Balzac or Dickens.”
— The Wall Street Journal
“Beautifully written, a dark tale.” — USA Today
“A compelling, thrilling, and intelligent novel with sharply drawn characters . . . a powerful thriller.”
— Booklist
“The handy cliché alleging that a thriller is so good it transcends its genre has rarely been truer than in the case of this breathtakingly suspenseful meditation on the interwoven ambiguities of life and death. The story’s climax and devastating finale brilliantly underscore Harrison’s commanding central irony: that in the midst of life we are in the presence of death. A practically perfect literary thriller with a bitter lingering ‘afterburn’ indeed.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Colin Harrison is a writer of uncommon grace and velocity. His stories have a rare combination of moral weight, suspensefulness, and dangerous glamour. Afterburn may be his best book yet.”
—Peter Blauner, author of The Intruder
and Man of the Hour
“A far more ambitious and disturbing novel than its thriller trappings might avow . . . Afterburn is a Quentin Tarantino tale purged of adolescent sentimentality about violence and crime.”
— Voice Literary Supplement
“Hooks you like a fish . . . effortlessly weaves together elements of murder, revenge, sexual obsession, obscene wealth, international intrigue . . . Harrison is a master storyteller, whose sure hand switches on the juice beginning on page one and never turns it off.”
— The New York Post
ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS
BY COLIN HARRISON
AFTERBURN
BREAK AND ENTER
BODIES ELECTRIC
BODIES
ELECTRIC
COLIN
HARRISON
St. Martin’s Paperbacks
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events and dialogue are imagined and not intended to represent real people, living or dead.
BODIES ELECTRIC
Copyright © 1993 by Colin Harrison.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-40766
ISBN: 0-312-97966-5
Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / January 2002
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents, always encouraging
BODIES
ELECTRIC
. . . as we went a little further we met the woman afoot. I could not see her face, in its great sun-bonnet, but somehow her figure and gait told misery, terror, destitution. She had the rag-bundled, half-starv’d infant still in her arms, and in her hands held two or three baskets, which she had evidently taken to the next house for sale We stopped, asking about the baskets, which we bought. As we paid the money, she kept her face hidden in the recesses of her bonnet. Then as we started, and stopp’d again, Al., (whose sympathies were evidently arous’d,) went back to the camping ground to get another basket. He caught a look of her face, and talk’d with her a little. Eyes, voice and manner were those of a corpse, animated by electricity. She was quite young Poor woman—what story was it, out of her fortunes, to account for that inexpressibly scared way, those glassy eyes, and that hollow voice?
. . . Tread the bare board floor lightly here, for the pain and panting of death are in this cot. I saw the lieutenant when he was first brought here He had been getting along pretty well till night before last, when a sudden hemorrhage that could not be stopt came upon him, and today it still continues at intervals. Notice that water-pail by the side of the bed, with a quantity of blood and bloody pieces of muslin, nearly full; that tells the story. The poor young man is struggling painfully for breath, his great dark eyes with a glaze already upon them, and the choking faint but audible in his throat An attendant sits by him, and will not leave him till the last; yet little can be done. He will die here in an hour or two Meantime the ordinary chat and business of the ward a little way off goes on indifferently. Some of the inmates are laughing and joking, others are playing checkers or cards, others are reading, &c.
—FROM SPECIMEN DAYS, BY WALT WHITMAN
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
ONE
MY NAME IS JACK WHITMAN AND I SHOULD NEVER HAVE had the first thing to do with her. I shouldn’t have indulged myself—my loneliness, my attraction to her—not with what was happening at the Corporation at the time. But
I’m as weak hearted for love and greedy for power as the next guy, maybe more so. And I was crazy for the sex—of course that was part of it. If only I’d worked longer at the office that Monday night or gone straight home, if only I hadn’t even seen her.
Instead I took a cab uptown to eat at a small Cajun place right on Broadway and had a few drinks with dinner. I watched couples lean toward one another, and when I’d been made lonely by their intimacy, I stepped outside. This was just last April, and that night the city felt lifted on a breeze of pollen, a time when you suddenly see that spring has come again and that you missed it all along, missed the little fenced plots of yellow tulips in front of the better apartment houses and the sharp pale shoulders of women out for lunch at midday. At the subway I paused to look up Broadway for a cab but saw none coming and so I ducked down the stairs. That one choice, right there, made all the difference.
In my seat I opened the Wall Street Journal and settled into a boozy semiconsciousness in which the entrance and exit of passengers, the rush of the train, and the conductor’s scratchy announcements blurred together. Hunched over in my charcoal gray suit, I scanned the paper for news of the Corporation’s competitors—quarterly profit information, sneaky little deals meant to eat into our market share, who was in, who was out. And then I turned to the stock pages to check on my own portfolio. Money has a certain intellectual fascination if you have enough of it, and I did, more than necessary for a thirty-five-year-old guy living alone in New York City. How much? Everyone wants to know once they find out you work for the Corporation. They get that quick squint in their eyes and inspect your suit, they figure inwardly, He’s wired into the big money. They want to know but are afraid to ask. Well, I’ll get this point out of the way right now: my compensation at the time was $395,000 a year, which is, of course, a shitload of money, equal to the salaries of about thirty Mexican busboys at the Bull & Bear, a sum that made my father wince when he heard it—a little less than $33,000 a month gross. Getting killed on the taxes, of course. But it was nothing compared to the sums the Chairman and Morrison, our CEO, were pulling in. Millions. Tens of millions. The whole audacious game was rigged for their benefit. Of course, neither man was worth such sums. No one is. We’re all replaceable. Just bodies. Isn’t that true?
The subway car, grinding through the dark tunnels, was empty enough that everyone on it was seated, and as I stared at the newsprint, something touched the toe of my shoe. It was a red, well-used Crayola crayon that had rolled at an angle across the floor of the car, and sitting opposite me was a dark-haired girl of about four, holding her hand out for it, wiggling her fingers in anticipation. Her legs swung freely above the floor. On the girl’s lap was a coloring book. I picked up the crayon, reached across the car, and handed it to her, smiling at her mother in the polite manner of strangers.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman whispered in an obligatory, embarrassed way, pulling a ragged coat around her. I noticed her mouth—she knew what she was doing with lipstick. “Thank you.”
I nodded and returned to the paper, but like most men, single or otherwise, I don’t miss a good-looking woman. I glanced into her face and saw her exhausted eyes quickly look down, avoiding mine. It was then I suffered that first jolt of appetite for her, that gripping in the stomach that is sexual and maybe something else, too. Did I love her immediately? No, of course not. Yes, in that sudden, helpless way, such that I stared. She had the same coloring as the little girl. I couldn’t have said what her race was, not exactly, but it wasn’t white. Dark hair held up with barrettes. Eyes the color of Coca-Cola. Skin that velvety brown. You could put this woman in an ankle-length black mink, I thought to myself, set her in a polished lobby with a doorman on the Upper East Side, and you’d be convinced she was a Venezuelan or Brazilian heiress with some black or mestizo blood—something different, something to my whitebread taste exotic—trained in the best international boarding schools and underwritten in her glass palace over Park Avenue by a multilingual father reselling oil or computer chips or Eurodollars. And it was equally clear that if the woman had been dressed in a pair of tight jeans and cheap red pumps, she might be a New York-born Puerto Rican whore addicted to self-destruction, carrying a purse filled with rubbers and wrinkled bills and selling herself to all comers at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, a woman who, despite providence’s gift of fine bones and large, deep eyes, was forced to live life faster and harder than was ever meant.
But the woman sitting across from me in the subway car belonged to neither such group—she possessed some other story, and I felt that immediate compulsion to study and know the face of a stranger. Was this wrong? Can I at least be forgiven this? Don’t we all memorize the faces of strangers? Her cheeks rose sharply and her lips were full. Slightly too much so, suggesting imprudence and passion. On dark women, red lips have a certain lurid appeal. She was a beauty, a tired beauty.
Yet New York City is full of beautiful women, thousands upon thousands of them, and most are understandably wary of the sudden attentions of strange men. So I looked away. I am polite, after all, not the type to make an aggressive compliment. I don’t have the glib confidence. And I’ve never insulted a woman, said the things men say aloud. Of course I think those brutal thoughts. Men are full of brutal thoughts.
I peered blindly at the Journal, but after a minute or two looked up a second time, wondering how such a magnificent woman was so obviously riding the edge of homelessness. The women one meets in the Corporation and at its social rituals possess a certain high gloss, with small fortunes spent on clothing and jewelry. Quite charming with a wineglass in their hands, they are able to tinkle polite laughter, and underneath their sleek dresses they wear silk panties the color of jade. They are very smart about the guests on “Nightline” and up-to-date on their mammograms, and so on. At times such women had interested me, other times not. They and I had been through it.
Now, I saw that the child continued to color in her book, choosing each crayon carefully, after happy consultation with her mother. The girl was clean, with brushed hair; if she had no older sister she was dressed in what I suspected was clothing given out by a church or bought in a secondhand shop. Her mother was dressed no better, or even a bit worse, but it was hard to tell, as she remained wrapped within her old coat, which was large for her and spotted. I took the woman to be in her late twenties, and among the last things I noticed was a narrow gold wedding ring on her left hand.
That the woman was married struck me as a great waste, for it appeared she lived nearly hand to mouth; perhaps her husband was unemployed, perhaps he was a drug addict, perhaps he was any of the kinds of men upon whom so many women desperately depend. I knew, of course, that beauty was neither qualification nor guarantee for the receipt of love and happiness, but it pained me that the woman was obviously uncared for, even as she lifted her daughter into her lap and lightly kissed the child’s head. I sort of suddenly loved the little girl as well. (I was drunk, I was sentimental, I was nostalgic for something that had been taken from me. Those of us who have known horror never forget it—one is forever changed.) The woman held her daughter with both arms and gently rocked her. She didn’t know I watched. Her face tipped forward in fatigue and, by habit, I supposed, she kissed the small dark head again. I wondered if she lived in the outer neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the final destination of our train, where the rents are lower, as are the social classes. And her apparently married condition didn’t disappoint me, for I had already made the usual half-conscious assumptions about her race and background and education—married or not, she wasn’t the kind of woman I ever got involved with.
Still, I watched them (of course, I tell myself now, of course you watched them like you had not watched anyone in a long time, you watched the mother in your horny bastard’s mind as she lowered herself down upon you, the lips red and huge and her eyes wet smoke). Sitting beneath advertisements for cockroach poison and AIDS hotlines, mother and child appeared to live only for each other, and
I saw that the daughter desired to please her mother as much as her mother sought to shield her from the harshness of the subway. She held her daughter tightly, as if drawing strength from the wriggling young body in her arms.
“I can draw,” the girl declared as she scribbled energetically over a page of the coloring book.
“Yes, you can,” the mother whispered into the small ear next to her lips. It was then that a rhythmic hollering could be heard through the door at the far end of the car, coming from an advancing black woman of about sixty, who was dressed immaculately in white. “I am here in the name of the Lord!” she announced in a ruined voice that admitted no fear of the opinion of her listeners. She had a squat muscularity to her carriage and gripped a small Bible in one hand. “You must ask sal-va-tion of the Lord! He does not love the sin, but He loves the sinnah!” She spat these words at the riders, most of whom had already bent their heads back into their papers and books. “. . . I’m not here to talk about no nice stuff! I’m here to talk about the lies and corruption of the body of Christ. About the crack and the drinkin’ and the killin’! And the greed for the golden calf! And infidelity! About all you men who say you been out with the boys when you been out with the girls—”
“Some womens want some that good stuff, too!” came a man’s voice toward the other end of the car, followed by sniggering and smiles all around.
“That’s right!” the gospelizing woman answered. “Sure they do! They want that because they think it going to make them happy. But the body is a weak vessel, it will rot and putrefah! The man’s penis, it putrefah! And the vagina, it putrefah! And the hand what got the golden calf in it! And all the rest of the body! Anybody here gone to live forever?” She looked around accusingly. “Anybody here three hundred year old? The body is nothin’ but rotting meat! while the soul—the soul is divine. Anybody one hundred and two! I didn’t think so! Anybody here not a sinner?” The woman looked around menacingly, her teeth bared. “I didn’t think so! And the soul will putrefah without salvation! And those of you who sin and sin again, shall be snatched into eternal fire!” The woman swiveled on her thick hips, blasting one end of the car and then the other. “The Lord is watchin’ . . .”
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