Sensation

by Nick Mamatas

  Hello! I hope this letter finds you in good health. Are you into current events? I hope you are, as I am a current event. Julia Hernandez, horrid murderess and merry prankster. Just dropping you this note to see what you might do.

  I am a wanted criminal, after all,and while writing this letter on plain white paper I found in a public library (your address from a phone book in the same library) I took the liberty of bowing my head and running my fingers through my hair. Being on the lam like mint jelly, I’ve not been able to keep up the upkeep on my baroque and ridiculous beauty regimen, so these pages are absofaintly covered in my dandruff and hair. It’s a gift from me, OF ME, to you. And forensic evidence. And DNA. Wouldn’t it be great if after the apocalypse some future archeologists find this letter in a crumbling manila folder and use the DNA to clone another me? Perhaps I can form the foundation of a race of slaves for our alien overlords?

  Or maybe you’ll keep this letter for yourself. How old are you? What are you wearing? Do you have a favorite song? Will you sing it for me? Now?

  So, Miii-ISter Laaaaaamber-SON, what do you think? Prank? Evidence? Are you a good citizen or a chronic masturbator? Does my penmanship turn you on? Should I have included a pair of panties? (Sorry, they only have letter-sized envelopes here in the library, otherwise I absolutely would have sent my DNA in the creepy Internet-nerd-approved fashion.) Did you throw out the envelope? Are you contemplating digging it out of the trash to check the postmark? Or did that last question grant you a thrilling moment of superiority because you are indeed not an enveloper-thrower-outer and you have it resting on your lap right now, after having already checked the postmark? Good for you, Miii-ISter Laaaaaamber-SON.

  Anyhoo, we are anxious to see whatever you shall do, if the anthrax doesn’t get you first!

  Yours in Christ,

  Julia

  PS: Just kidding. We’re not all that anxious.

  TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH RAYMOND HERNANDEZ, CONDUCTED BY DET. LOUIS ORANGE, HOMICIDE. 5/27/20__.

  Q: Did you and your wife ever do drugs?

  A. Me? Or my wife.

  Q: And your wife. But have you ever done drugs? Or your wife?

  A: I don’t know how to answer that. I think I want a lawyer now.

  Q: Why don’t you know how to answer the question, Mister Hernandez?

  A: Doctor Hernandez.

  Q: Doctor, why can’t you answer the question?

  A: Well, drugs are illegal, aren’t they?

  Q: Some are. Some are legal with a prescription. But that’s not what we’re after today. So, any drugs? A little pot, maybe? Ecstasy? Shrooms?

  A: No, no not at all. I’m up for tenure. Any dumb thing can count against you, so I’ve not been partaking.

  Q: And Julia?

  A: And Julia. God. A month ago it would have been an easy answer. No. Sometimes in the past, but no, I would say no. But now, who knows? Was she doing drugs? Sure, why not. Having an affair? Probably. Was she or had she ever been a member of the Communist Party?

  Q: I’ll make a note of “No.”

  A: Okay.

  Q: I’ll also mark “No” for affair. Is that all right?

  A: That would be great, thanks.

  Q: Why didn’t you call the police when she pulled a gun on you?

  A: I was ashamed. I barely even registered the gun. I spent the rest of the night vomiting and calling her cell phone number, but she never picked up. I left so many messages the voice mailbox filled up. I paged her a bunch of times too. I didn’t sleep for the next two days; I just kept replaying the last night with her in my head, then the weeks before, the years.

  Every dumb argument we ever had. The little comments from mutual friends.

  Q: Like what little comments?

  A: Anything, everything.

  Q: How about an example or two? Little comments about politics? Erratic behavior? Drug use?

  A: No, nothing like that. Race–am I too assimilated? Politics. Julia and I had political differences?

  Q: What are her politics?

  A: Well, I’m a Green, I voted for Nader five times. Julia, she was against most of those votes, thanks to the 2000 election and George W. Bush.

  Q: Is that all? Those don’t sound like any major marriage problem.

  A: No, no that’s not all. A week before she left me, I found Julia doing something very strange. Muttering to herself.

  Q: Muttering? What was she saying?

  A: I don’t know. I woke up in the middle of the night and she was muttering to herself. I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was praying. Julia’s an atheist. Totally nonspiritual.She didn’t even want to go to the Unitarian Universalist Church, not even when some secular event was being held in one. Her parents were religious tourists; they’d been Quakers, Lutherans for a long time, did Shinto for a while. They spent a summer on an ashram in the middle of India, and Julia hated it. One time Julia had come home from school–she must have been ten years old–and her mother had gotten rid of all her dolls and replaced them with faceless corn husk dolls because she had gotten it into her head that Julia was worshipping graven images. Ever since then, Julia has been a hardcore materialist. I would have been less surprised to wake up and see her fellating another man than I was to hear her praying.

  Q: What was she praying for? Did she say?

  A: I was too afraid to ask. She stopped muttering though, and turned over so her back was to me, and that was it.

  6

  WE were able to find Julia with some ease though both the police and the media were dumbfounded by her ability to make a public appearance and then vanish. Julia was conspicuous by her absence in the pulsing grid of economic transactions: no credit card use, no flashing of identification or signing a thick book to check into an old, out-of-the-way, hotel. She made friends, sometimes with her wit and sometimes with her sex, and stayed in beds and on couches. She took commuter rails when she could, buying tickets on the train with cash while wearing a wig, babushka, and sunglasses the size of a pair of satellite dishes.

  Julia’s face was huge on the tabloids; at train stations and bus depots she’d often hold up a copy of the New York Post so that her wild-eyed image was staring past the border of the page at Julia herself and pointedly tell the newsstand worker, “I’ll buy this paper, thank you,” but newsstand workers only rarely look up, programmed as they are just to quickly glide a hand across the counter in response to the sound of two quarters hitting the surface. Except for those newsstand workers of indeterminate ethnicity who worked for us.

  Thanks to a confusion born of racism, a number of descriptions of Julia faxed to various police departments, security firms, and federal law enforcement agencies described Julia as Hispanic with dark hair and brown eyes, based on her married name. Julia was difficult to spot. When reality contradicted documentation, documentation was followed to the letter, both literally and metaphorically.

  Once Julia was nearly captured by an eager police officer in Trenton, as she waited for the SEPTA connection to Philadelphia. He was an older man, with a chin that would have made him a film star in his youth, if only he had an agent who believed in him and apple boxes to stand on so as to be as tall as Joan Fontaine. His stomach gurgled loudly as he moved toward her, old muscles tensed for the first time in years. Something other than directions to the restrooms and rousing the same four homeless people every day from the chewed-up benches meant only for ticketed passengers. Wallace didn’t remember that Julia was supposed to be Hispanic; he got his news from the fanned-out array of newspapers with their splashy headlines and photos, not from the official documents he was faxed on a biweekly basis.

  Julia was peering out the meshed window down at the tracks below and eating one Corn Nut at a time. She didn’t turn to glance at the cop or even register his approach with a twitch or a nerve, a sure sign of guilt and preparation. The officer, his name was Wallace, considered his truncheon. How would that look? She was armed, but one limb was looped around the handles
of her purse and holding the Corn Nuts. The other up and tilted at the wrist like a swan’s neck to its head, two long fingers digging into the crinkling baggie.

  “Ma’am,” Wallace said. “Come with me, please.” He looked over her shoulder, saw himself in the glass of the window. She was a head taller than he was, chewing with the left side of her mouth. She smiled.

  “No,” Julia said. “Wallace.”

  He took her elbow and widened his stance. She was thin, rangy. A hammerlock might do. Crazy bitches go for the eyes. That might have been the only quotable he remembered from police academy, decades ago, when women weren’t allowed to be police and wouldn’t get upset.

  “Don’t confuse me saying ‘please’ with this being a request,” Wallace said. His right hand took her right wrist. He had control of the purse this way.

  “Did you know,” Julia said calmly, “that standing pain-compliance holds only work when the person in one is operating under the cultural imperative that one should not attack police officers because they might get shot or charged with assaulting an officer?” Then she dropped her weight and moved quick to the right, then the left. Wallace spun on the ball of his foot to secure the hold, then Julia darted left, straightening her arm. Her feet were between his legs now. Corn Nuts sprayed everywhere. Wallace felt a tug on his belt and quickly moved to secure his gun, but Julia was just looking for a lever as she spun again, her grip on his back and his right elbow. Then the whole train station went sideways and Wallace’s head filled with stars. The world smelled like pepper and his eyes and skin began to burn and the world shouted, “Daaaaaamn!”

  Wallace doesn’t even have an email address, and he types with two fingers, tongue out by the corner of his mouth. A colleague, some toothpick of a boy named Rivera showed him what happened on the palm-sized screen of an iPhone down at the precinct. “See, this is where she snaked out,” he said, playing the security camera footage again. Rivera pressed a picture of a button that worked just like a real button and the footage inched forward. “And this is how she threw you. Looks like Hane Goshi to me, don’t you think? Then she grabbed your Mace and hosed you down, boss.” Wallace had no comment. Rivera concluded by noting that judo “is really bad-ass” and that the footage he’d just shown Wallace was “all over the Internet now,” even though it hadn’t really made the TV for some reason.

  Wallace was relieved from depot duty the next day and sent to the local library to deal with the homeless problem there—homeless men tend to hog the public computer terminals and view pornography all day between naps amidst the stacks. One of the computers there used the jerky black-and-white security footage of his encounter with Julia as a screensaver. The head librarian blamed “some kids.”

  JULIA resurfaced in Greenwich Village after looping around New Jersey and Pennsylvania through means we could not perceive. We saw her in the Ninth Street PATH Station, interviewing two members of the National Guard.

  “What are you here for?” she asked them. Julia’s appearance had changed again. She had shaved her head, wore little round glasses and a sweeping orange skirt.

  “Terrorists,” one of the guardsmen said, bored. The other, a woman stared past Julia to look down the long tunnel into New Jersey.

  “Terrorists in the PATH Station?”

  “Yeah. Interstate transport, you know. Good target.”

  “So you’re here,” Julia said, “to stop terrorists with your little …” she waved a hand at the guns slung over the shoulders of both soldiers. “AK-47s?”

  The female guardsman snorted at that. “If these were AKs, there’d be more trouble than terrorists. That’s a Soviet gun. Commies taking over the subway!”

  Julia ignored her, keeping her attention on the male of the pair. “So, if terrorists came down here, what would you do?”

  “Whatever needed to be done,” he said. “Whatever it takes.”

  “I mean, what I’m asking is this: we’re here in a long tube. Did you know that the PATH system used to be called the Hudson Tubes?”

  “Yeah, I mean no. It’s a tube, obviously,” he said, “but I’m from upstate, not here. Plattsburgh.

  “Well, we’re in a tube here. A long metal and concrete tube that’s full of commuters.”

  “Good place for a terrorist to plant a bomb,” said the woman, though she still wouldn’t look at Julia. “They used to have trash cans down there, but they took them out. Security risk. So now if someone wants to try something, they have to do it themselves, in person.”

  “Well then, what set of terrorist problems are you really capable of solving. You’re going to open fire on a terrorist if one shows up?”

  “If need be,” said the woman. “We’re mostly a deterrent,” said the man.

  “Won’t you just end up shooting at a bunch of commuters too?”

  “If need be,” said the woman. “We’re mostly here to make the commuters feel better about using the trains.”

  “If you shoot at them, will they still feel better?”

  “Not the ones caught in the crossfire,” said the woman. “But the people here the next day, I’ll bet they feel safer.”

  “Maybe it’ll take a week or two. Any more questions?” It was hot in the PATH tunnels. Men smelled like small groups after five minutes. He’d been on shift for two hours.

  “Those guns aren’t even loaded, are they?” The expression on the faces of the two guards was enough. “How about a picture!” Julia said. She pulled a cell phone from her purse and slipped between the soldiers. They obliged with smiles, and the female guardsman even doffed her cap. Julia emailed the photo to Raymond, but it was intercepted by the FBI and put through the graphical ringer—hair added back, skin examined minutely for pore size and cosmetic usage to be cross-indexed with fast food consumption and wireless chatter about women who observe women applying the wrong kind of eye shadow (keywords: “clown college,” “whorish”)—before being sent on to its final destination, where it broke Raymond’s heart.

  We spiders do not read minds. We observe, very closely. Raymond saw the email and blanched. He seethed and clenched his fists in the few seconds the image took to load. He turned away and then turned back. Raymond lurched for his mouse to delete the email, but stopped to closely examine the others in the photo, keeping his eyes off Julia. Was she sleeping with the man in the photo? The woman? He muttered, “Who are you fucking now?”

  Raymond recognized the PATH station thanks to its distinctive turnstiles and low arch of a tunnel. “Is she living in Jersey?” Raymond paced across his small apartment, sub-vocalizing conversations he’d never have. Not just the whys and how-could-yous but the conversations they should have had about couples therapy and his mother and getting out of the city.

  “We should have moved to Ohio,” Raymond said to himself. “So what if it’s all one big hicksville? They have the New York Times on the newsstands by 6 a.m., Starbucks, a fucking mansion for a grand a month if you want it. We could have had kids …”

  “Then she wouldn’t have left me. Couldn’t have. Culturally. Neurobiologically. Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said, interrupting himself. Bile rose and burned his tongue and cheeks. Raymond spent a day in a loop of subvocalizations about subvocalizations, cursing Julia and then himself for cursing Julia and then cursing Julia for treating him so poorly and so cavalierly that he loathed himself enough to curse himself. And every hollow-voiced utterance was punctuated with a loud, resigned, “Cunt.”

  After a smelly day and night of stewing in his own grief and rage, Raymond left his apartment. He was followed by a plainclothes police officer for several blocks until that officer was intercepted by a man of indeterminate ethnicity who had begun harassing a carefully chosen white woman. Raymond was then able to walk without official observation, except for us. To the Starbucks he went, because it calmed him, knowing exactly what his experience would be like: the smell of burnt coffee, the particular squeal of the pleather couch again his back, Paul McCartney’s woebegone face peering forth fr
om CD cases, the deep sighs and explosions of fingers skittering over keyboards from the customers, and himself, already in there stooped over a grande no-whip half-fat macchiato.

  Raymond found himself waiting in line behind Alysse, who was trying to pass counterfeit currency to the barista.

  “Listen,” Alysse said, her hood of her powder blue sweat jacket up around her head, “why would anyone counterfeit dollar bills?” She wore sunglasses too.

  “It just doesn’t look real,” said the barista, a plump girl with a frown and a question in her voice. Raymond looked for a nametag and realized for the first time that Starbucks employees are all anonymous, to be better interchangeable. For the sake of expediency in our narrative, let us call this particular barista “Madison.” “And you have so many of them.” There were nearly twenty singles in Alysse’s hand; Madison’s palms were up and wavering, as if someone had just mentioned ringworm.

  “Let’s put it this way; if you were a counterfeiter, wouldn’t you make twenties? Or hundreds? Why bother with ones?” Alysse said.

  “I’m getting my manager,” said Madison. The line of customers hissed like a snake. Alysse quivered, suddenly seeming nervous.

  “What are you getting?” Raymond asked. “I’ll just pay for it.”

  Alysse turned to Raymond and smiled, “Lemon bundt cake.” Raymond hmmphed and handed the barista a twenty, “Take it all out of this.”

  “Let’s sit together,” Alysse said, putting half the cake in her mouth and walking to a pair of chairs before Raymond could answer.

  “You are dressed, I couldn’t help noticing,” said Raymond, “like the Unabomber.”