Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  Lexa Thatcher’s Lust Noir was filmed over the Harvard Christmas break. The budget was a shoestring $60,000, financed with a circular chain of begged and borrowed credit cards, the debt being shunted around the circle from account to account at the end of each billing cycle. During pre-production in November and December Joan worked part-time as Lexa’s assistant, curtailing her political involvement to make room in her schedule. Penny Dellaporta thought Joan had lost her mind. In fact, Joan became an assistant only after declining Lexa’s original offer of a performing role in the movie; though sorely tempted, Joan’s desire to let down her hair and do something truly daring lost out to a nightmare of the archbishop of Philadelphia confronting her mother with a set of eight-by-ten glossies. You see, you see, this is why we deny women the rite of ordination. . . . She ran errands instead, coordinated auditions, and sent flowers to the collection departments at MasterCard and Visa.

  On the Monday before Thanksgiving, at the last open casting call, Joan spotted a man in a bikini brief wandering around the Cambridge warehouse loft where auditions were being held, and fell instantly in lust. His hair was a sandy brown scruff over innocent blue eyes, and he had the frame and build of a day laborer, the sort you might find sledging rock at a quarry. His chest was smooth and immaculate, his limbs still brown with the remnant of a summer tan, and because the loft was baking under stage lights, he’d worked up a sweat just standing around; the hollow below his Adam’s apple shone invitingly. The only flaw was the bikini brief: intended probably to be sexy, it was in fact only silly, though even that was all right, as the imperfection made him seem approachable and hence even more attractive. With an economy of motion the nuns at her old school would have applauded, Joan crossed her legs and summoned Lexa with a crook of her finger.

  “Let’s see,” Lexa said, thumbing through a sheaf of résumés. “His name’s Gant. Harry Dennis Gant. He’s twenty-one and staying at a pensione in the North End. Not a student. Hmm . . . ‘Reason for wanting to work in this film: “I need the money to patent an invention involving home video and James Dean. Sorry I can’t be more specific.”’” Unaware he was being observed, Gant had wandered over to a basket of sex toys and was trying to make sense of a double-headed dildo. “Well, he’s certainly inquisitive enough to be an inventor.”

  “You gonna hire him?” Joan asked, subtly she thought.

  “Thinking you still might join the cast yourself, Joan? Sorry to disappoint. He’s good-looking and all, but. . . .” Lexa tapped a box Gant had checked, next to the words STRICTLY HETERO (by way of an asterisk he’d added: “Unless there’s some kind of bonus pay—H.G.”). “I’ve already got all the straight men I need, and I can’t afford bonuses. If he were something especially unusual I might write him an extra part, but white beefcake . . . that’s been done to death.”

  “And you wouldn’t consider bending your artistic principles?”

  “No, but I’ll tell you what I will do. If he can stay awake for five days straight, I know a sleep research lab at MIT that’ll pay him six hundred dollars. Why don’t I give you the lab’s number and you can give it to him, with my compliments.”

  “We’ll always be friends, Lexa,” Joan said, and an hour later she was having steak and eggs at the Wursthaus, while a now fully clothed Harry Gant described his invention to her. He spoke with a self-confidence even greater than Lexa’s; but where Lexa backed up her inspiration with hard work and a perfectionist’s attention to detail, Harry relied almost wholly on the power of raw enthusiasm. All that mattered, he seemed to think, was that the basic concept for a project be sufficiently neat: given that, the practical aspects would fall into place more or less automatically. Joan doubted the wisdom of this perspective but didn’t press him too hard on it at the time. She had other things on her mind.

  “I got the idea from the new bank teller machines,” Gant told her. “The ones that can talk to you in twelve different languages. VCRs get more sophisticated every year, can be programmed for more and more things, and the instruction manuals just haven’t kept up. So I thought, how about a VCR that can coach you through the hard spots? And not just in different languages, but with multiple personalities. Say you want to record a football game at noon and a talk show at four, you want the machine to switch tapes between programs, and you want all the commercials edited out. You just pick up the remote control, which looks sort of like a walkie-talkie, and say, ’Hey, Jimmy Dean,’ and the voice of James Dean comes on and tells you step by step how to set it up; the VCR’ll even press its own buttons for you—unless you’re in a hands-on mood—so all you have to do is slide in the tapes when Jimmy tells you to. And if you don’t like James Dean you could have Mae West, or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or, or—this is good—if you like African-American music, it could rap the instructions to you.”

  “Sounds nifty,” Joan said. “You have the schematics all drawn up already?”

  “Schematics?” Gant said. “You mean like blueprints? No. I don’t know electronics.”

  “Well but wait a minute, then. How can you get a patent without schematics? How do you even know it’s possible to build the thing?”

  “Well hell, of course it’s possible. Everybody knows the technology’s out there—voice recognition, all that stuff, you hear about it every day—but the real trick is thinking up new ways to use it, neat new combinations. As far as the actual blueprints go, I’ve got an old high school buddy who’s down in Atlanta now, Christian Gomez, and he’s going to help with the technical side. No problem.”

  “No problem.” Joan smiled, a different smile than the one she’d smiled for Lexa. “And this’ll be in the stores at Christmas?”

  “Christmas of ’02, maybe. One other thing I’m thinking, maybe Christian and I can work in a holographic device, so not only will James Dean talk to you from the VCR, he’ll actually appear, say six inches tall, on top of the machine. And hey, hey, let’s say if you’re single, or a shut-in, he could actually stick around and watch the video with you . . .”

  Harry Gant drank his Nicaraguan coffee black, with not a grain of sugar. Over her own second cup, inflamed by the heady Central American aroma, Joan took advantage of a pause in the conversation to make a proposition. It wasn’t the first time she’d been so forward, but she was proud of herself all the same, especially when Harry broke into a flattered smile and said yes. Arm in arm they walked up Kirkland Avenue to Joan’s apartment in Somerville, excited by each other’s company and by the possibilities of youth, neither of them thinking for a moment that they were taking the first small step towards matrimony. Marriage before thirty: what a crazy notion that would have seemed, in this brand-new millennium of passion and roses.

  Lust Noir opened in April of 2002, showing to a limited art-house circuit but garnering good reviews and profitable controversy. Within a month of the premiere the movie had been condemned by both the National Organization for Women and the New England Friends of Virtue, and after 60 Minutes ran a piece on “The Student Film That Made Boston Blush,” the sky was the limit. By Independence Day Lexa had cut lucrative distribution deals with Cineplex Odeon and Vestron Video and was chasing around New York City in search of an apartment and a printing press.

  Harry Gant likewise found fortune with his split-personality VCR, though Joan wasn’t with him to see it. After their first day and night together they went back to the separate orbits of their lives, rendezvousing occasionally thereafter but never becoming a true couple. The following autumn, patent in hand, Gant lit out south to Georgia to form a company. From his new address he sent Joan a single postcard, a plain black rectangle bearing the legend ATLANTA AT NIGHT. Finding this in her mailbox one morning, Joan thought fondly but with no special sense of loss: He was fun. A little scatter-brained, but fun.

  They didn’t meet again for six years, and by then, everything had changed.

  2023: The Peculiar Death of Amberson Teaneck

  “He was beaten to death,” Joan said, “with a copy of Atlas Shrugge
d.”

  They were still up in the greenhouse, smoking. Joan had cleared the begonias off a wheeled table and spread the Teaneck murder case file out so Kite could take a look at it.

  “Atlas Shrugged,” said Kite. “That’s that big novel by Ayn Rand?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “‘Ayn’ rhymes with ‘sane’?”

  “Rhymes with ‘mine,’” Joan said.

  “And she was a philosopher as well as a novelist, wasn’t she?” Kite strained to recollect; Eisenhower-era trivia wasn’t one of her strong points, as she’d spent most of those years tending a lighthouse for the Mexican Coast Guard down in Baja. “What was it called . . . Objectionism?”

  “Objectivism,” Joan corrected. “As in ‘to be objective.’”

  Kite lit a fresh cigarette. “So remind me what this Objectivism was all about.”

  “It’s basically enlightened self-interest raised to the level of a moral absolute. Rand believed that rational thought, individual achievement, and self-worth were the Trinity of human virtues—Reason is the Father, Industry the Son, and Ego the Holy Ghost—and that the best system for encouraging human endeavor, the only truly moral system, was total laissez-faire capitalism. No regulation of production or restraint of trade, but also no federal subsidies or protectionist legislation to prop up failing businesses. The government sticks to arbitrating contract disputes and defending the country against foreign invasion; with no outside interference, people and their companies succeed or fail solely on the basis of merit.”

  “Survival of the fittest.”

  “Triumph of the fittest leading to the best of all possible worlds. Or so Rand supposed. Free the spirit through unbridled competition, she thought, teach people to be proud of their individual talents and abilities—and their hard-earned wealth—and there’d be no limit to human progress.”

  “Hmm,” said Kite. “That’s hardly an original idea.”

  “Well, no,” said Joan, “the concept’s not original, but the extreme to which Rand took it probably was. She was a Russian Jew, a shopkeeper’s daughter, and her family lost everything when the Bolsheviks seized power; if she hadn’t escaped to America, there’s a very real possibility she would have ended up dead or in gulag. So she was understandably a fanatic on the subject of individual rights, especially property rights. But her philosophy deals with a lot more than law and economics. Objectivist ethics covers psychology, art, literary theory, sex, even cigarette smoking . . . it’s an obsessively detailed worldview.”

  “Cigarette smoking?”

  Joan nodded. “Cigarettes symbolize the victory of rational humankind over the mindless forces of nature: fire tamed in the hand. Cigarettes are also a creature comfort, a product of the free-market capitalist system. So to an Objectivist, lighting up a butt is a profoundly sacred act, like Holy Communion to a Christian.”

  “I see.”

  “No,” said Joan, laughing, “you don’t see, not unless you’ve read Atlas Shrugged. Eleven hundred pages of the oppressed businessman versus the collective evil of the state. It’s a pretty gripping story, actually. Loopy, but gripping.”

  “And this Teaneck fellow was a Rand admirer?”

  “Oh yeah. She’s still very hip with the robber baron set. Even Harry used to drop her name once in a while, though he’d never cracked one of her books. Teaneck owned the entire Ayn Rand library in dog-eared paperback.”

  “He was beaten to death with a paperback?”

  “No, the murder weapon was an inscribed first edition, specially rebound in gold covers. Teaneck kept it in a trophy case to show guests.” Joan indicated a photograph of the death scene, the naked corpse sprawled out on the floor of a lavishly appointed bedroom. The gold-plated copy of Atlas Shrugged lay open across Amberson Teaneck’s face, as if he’d fallen asleep while reading . . . but the dark stain seeping out from under the book made it plain that he wouldn’t be waking up any time soon. In his right hand, Teaneck clutched a pistol with a cracked handle butt.

  “He didn’t get off a shot?” Kite asked.

  “He couldn’t get off a shot,” said Joan. “That’s not a real gun. He owned a real one, but somebody moved it and put a replica in its place, one with no bullets and a barrel that hadn’t been bored.”

  “All right,” Kite said, “let’s start from the beginning. You say this man was a kind of guerrilla investment banker who took over companies for a living . . .”

  “Well, he managed corporate takeovers, using other people’s money and collecting a fat commission on the deal. The usual method is a buyout of the stock, using the target corporation’s own assets as collateral for the purchase. Now Gant Industries is private, so it can’t be bought out that way, but Teaneck could still go after it by getting control of its outstanding debt. Even with all the profits from the Automatic Servant and Lightning Transit, Harry manages to keep himself deep in hock over new projects; instead of watching his spending he just has Clayton Bryce and Creative Accounting write the quarterly finance reports in economic Sanskrit, so nobody knows how badly he’s in the red.”

  “But Amberson Teaneck could read Sanskrit.”

  “Like a mother tongue.”

  Unfortunately for his sake—according to Lexa Thatcher’s theory—Amberson Teaneck didn’t share the specifics of his Sanskrit translations with anyone else at Drexel Burnham Salomon, nor did he keep handwritten or Electric notes. Such secrecy was not unusual in the cutthroat corporate raider’s world, where the theft of ideas was commonplace, but in this instance it might have proved fatal. The only surviving trace of Teaneck’s plan was a memo to his vacationing second-in-command in which he’d claimed to have worked out a method to “serve up Gant Industries like a white whale on toast.” No details were included. Teaneck had faxed the memo to a holiday resort in Patagonia last Thursday morning. By the time the second-in-command got back from a mountain climb and decoded it, Teaneck was dead.

  Shortly after transmitting the fax, Teaneck had called Hester Montesanto, an equities trader at Morgan Stanley, and made a date for dinner. They intended to do more than discuss business, for Teaneck also called an upper-crust incarnation of the Birth Control Shopping Network to order a fifty-thousand-dollar ten-pack of condoms. A landmark in conspicuous consumption, these condoms came individually wrapped in airtight cocoons spun by trained Manchurian silkworms, sealed in a pouch woven from the precious hair of Peruvian vicuñas, and enclosed in a box of rare hardwoods hewn and hand-finished by a hyper-impoverished tribe of native carpenters in central Borneo, all of which packaging was, of course, disposable; the condoms themselves were lubricated, colored, scented, flavored, ribbed, nibbed, and sufficiently tear-resistant to stop an arrow in flight. No one with a net worth of less than a hundred million dollars was allowed to know the name of the company that manufactured them.

  They were delivered to Teaneck’s Riverside Arcadia penthouse apartment at 5:52 P.M., while he was still at the office. Teaneck arrived home at seven, carried the costly box of rubbers from his private vestibule to his bedroom, told his Servant François 360 to start dinner, undressed, shaved, and showered. When Hester Montesanto entered the penthouse forty-five minutes later, she found dinner burnt, François missing, and Teaneck messily deceased.

  He’d just gotten out of the shower when it happened. Wrapping a seventy-thousand-dollar towel around his hips, he either saw or heard something that made him grab his pistol (the fake) out of a bureau drawer, and press the wall switch for a silent alarm (disconnected). His killer met him at the bedroom door. The police believed Teaneck had broken the handle of the pistol trying to use it as a club when he discovered it wouldn’t fire.

  “No blood on the gun butt?” Kite asked.

  “No blood, no skin.”

  “Do the police know what happened to the real pistol?”

  “It was in the condom box, sealed inside a silkworm cocoon. Fully loaded with armor-piercing cartridges. All Teaneck had to do was guess that it was there. He could have sto
pped a bus with that ammunition.

  “The prophylactics company, meanwhile, is insisting that the police must be mistaken about the gun’s location. They say they couldn’t possibly have packed a stolen weapon by accident, especially since the silkworms are all in Manchuria. And then there’s the matter of the alarm system in Teaneck’s apartment, which wasn’t just cut but rerouted. The regular switches were all disconnected, but if Teaneck had gone back into the bathroom and flushed his toilet three times in succession, the building security guards would have come running.”

  “I see,” Kite said. “And the Servant is gone without a trace?”

  “Not without a trace. Teaneck couldn’t cook worth a damn—he was like you around a microwave—so we know François 360 was in the apartment to start dinner, though we also know from the security camera tapes that no Servant left the building through any of the conventional exits. But guess what. . . .” Joan offered another photograph. “A CNN news blimp just happened to be in the neighborhood shooting background footage for a piece on the tenth anniversary of Donald Trump’s death. This is a single frame from the video. The central tower is Teaneck’s apartment building. You see the little dark smudge underneath the little white smudge, just left of the rooftop?”

  Kite was smiling. “You were right, this is a wonderful conspiracy,” she said. “An Electric Negro kills a man with a book, then parachutes from his penthouse terrace into the Hudson River to dispose of itself as evidence. We’ll never, ever prove it, but I love it!”

  “I’m glad you’re pleased,” Joan said. “One thing bothers me, besides the fact that the entire sequence of events is absurd. Let’s suppose Lexa’s right, and somebody at Gant Industries had Teaneck murdered to prevent the takeover bid. How did they find out about it? The text of the Patagonia memo implies that it was the first Teaneck had let on to anyone that he was plotting a run on Gant. But a tap on the outgoing fax lines at Drexel would only have given the killer a few hours’ lead to break into Teaneck’s apartment, rewire the Servant and the alarm system, and do that magic trick with the gun. That’s not enough time.”