Money and power would be weaker than aspirin to these things. If harassing passersby in the street could send Gus Drum into a second adolescence, then the shadow-CEO’s who really ran the oil and media conglomerates must be shapeless behemoths filling Olympic swimming pools, and way too absorbed with their undead god-thoughts to trifle with a couple street-level hate-freaks.
Unless we got too big. Unless we went public. Then, we knew, we would be crushed like bugs, without ever seeing our assassins.
And yet we ran some truly epic burns.
The Second Great Tylenol Scare? That was us. If you caught it on the news that first day, you probably thought the sky was falling. All those bottles that turned up with tiny slips of paper inside them, lying on top of the fancy yellow-red capsules. Tiny notes that said, CYANIDE, or ANTHRAX or simply, POISON. When the first panicky calls came in, the media reported it with their usual restraint—just kidding, they shit America’s collective pants, urging everyone to check their medicine chests for poison pen letters, demanding that supermarkets get the same security treatment as airports. When they’d recalled four batches of a hundred thousand bottles and found only fifty notes, someone in power in an undisclosed bunker must’ve put the bricks to the media, because they shut up about the whole thing, as if it was a hoax.
To feel such raw, mass-produced fear and hatred rushing in from all over the country, converging on you like a firestorm. . . It felt like walking around covered in killer bees, or being buried in white-hot magma that somehow, for some reason, could not burn you.
I did not stop because we were hurting people. We killed no one, and our operations were dedicated only to provoking fear and irrational rage, with no political or temporal agenda. When I finally stopped, it was only because I thought we were too big, and I could no longer recognize myself in the mirror.
No, that’s not entirely true. I would have gone on with him until the end. I stopped because Gus Drum abandoned me.
I guess he was tired of the anonymous hate campaign. In the dialectic of McLuhan, he wanted a hotter medium.
He was supposed to meet me at the mall to give out flyers for a fictitious impound yard auction, but he never showed. I called his cell and got some semi-conscious fungus instead. “Yo, whatsamatter?” Exactly like a talking slime mold.
“This is my friend Gus’s phone. Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the guy who answers Gus’s phone.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Where’s Gus?”
“Oh. . . he’s in the hospital.”
“Who is this?”
“Told you—”
“What happened to Gus?”
“Got beat up.”
Oh shit. Suddenly, I realized why I’d needed to create all that chaos, just to feel normal. I wasn’t addicted to the games. I was in love.
“You wanna leave a message?”
“Where is he?”
But the talking fungus was gone. Call Failed, said the phone. Really?
There was no point calling the hospitals, but I did it anyway. Nobody admitted under any of his favorite aliases. I called the fungus back, but he wouldn’t answer. I filled the box with threats, curled up into a ball and cried.
I should have known to turn on the TV.
“—Play was interrupted when an unidentified man ran onto the field in the middle of what should have been Tony Trevino’s tie-breaking two-run homer.”
The pitcher winds up and a naked man in a luchador mask spurts out of the crowd leaning over the rail along the first base line. Glistening under the stadium lights, he looks like something made of liquid as he ducks the security and the poleaxed cops and streaks across the outfield just as Trevino smashes the ball into deep left field. The shape of the blurred groin makes it clear he’s got an erection.
“Stripped down to his birthday suit, the man was no athlete, but catching him turned out to be a lot harder than expected, as Cardinals outfielder Shawn Aguilar explained in a brief statement.”
“He was covered in butter, or something. He was all up in my business, and I couldn’t get under the ball. It would not have gone over the wall if that freak was not out there, so Dodgers fans need to chill out and get a life. . .”
More highlights: With half the Dodgers lineup chasing him, the streaker leaps onto the visitors’ dugout and shakes his tumescent junk at the rabid fans. The outpouring of jungle hate is like a shockwave that flings the mob into the air and onto the field, waving their souvenir bats. Bodysurfing the mob, the frictionless streaker rolls over to throw up a victory sign just before the tube collapses on him.
“Ballpark authorities took almost twenty minutes to clear the field as fights broke out between spectators on the field, the players and stadium security. Seventy-three fans were arrested, fifty more were treated for minor injuries, and six fans were rushed to area hospitals.
“And the man who started it all? Incredibly, Los Angeles Police say they lost him in the shuffle—”
I turned it off and looked around for something I could afford to smash. It was more than just a betrayal. If he had gone off on his own with a new crew, it was nothing less than a declaration of war.
I went to his house the next day. If he was beat up half as bad as it looked like on TV, he was probably in traction somewhere, but I fully expected to find someone keeping watch. Gus wasn’t in the hospital—maybe he wasn’t even the streaker, but I’d never seen him naked. He’d plastered too many Manson and Jim Jones pics on his walls, and studied and imitated their mesmeric Gorgon stares for too long not to try his own cult.
I found his door open, and all the pictures torn off the walls. The haphazard placement had been an attempt to cover all the holes in the walls.
A tall, well-muscled roughneck guy was tossing the last of Gus’s décor in the trash. All the furniture, the stereo, the rest of him, was already gone.
“Hell if I know, lady,” the guy said, both grumpy and amused by my plight. “I just got the word that the place was vacant.” He wiped his hands off on a Tool T-shirt and shook dust out of his long brown hair. He was wearing Italian hiking boots. “Your friend sure knew how to live.”
“No, he didn’t.” Was there something I’d hoped to take, anything I hoped to learn?
“Hey,” the dumb lug slapped his forehead like in a commercial. His teeth were perfect. “I‘m such a dope. Is your name Tessa?”
I was beyond numb. I nodded.
“I found a note with your name on it, like, underlined a hundred times. Hold on, I’ll go get it.”
The guy ducked into the bathroom, pushed the door halfway shut. I heard liquid relief splashing into the bowl. It wasn’t worth it. I should cut the cord now. But I couldn’t just walk away. I felt like I’d been playing the same slot machine all my life. And it had burned and beaten and insulted me, but I would keep feeding it quarters forever.
I ran my fingers through my hair. That guy was cute, the kind of cute my older sister liked, and maybe I’d hated because of her. Because I wasn’t anything they’d look at, maybe. Surely, not because I was smarter than them.
God, he’d been in there a long time. I still heard him going like Niagara Falls in there, but then—
A big tuft of my hair came out in my hand. I felt like ten years had been sucked out of me with a straw. I looked at my watch. It was a Citizen that Gus found for me. He had a knack for finding things everywhere he went. He said it was another secret science, seeing lost things.
The watch had stopped. When I shook it, the hands fell off.
Fuck this guy. I knocked on the door. He didn’t answer, just kept pissing.
I shouted at him, but I didn’t expect an answer. I threw my shoulder into the door. It was cheap pressed particle board with a hollow shell. It didn’t so much come off the hinges as it split in half. I tumbled into the tiny bathroom, but there was plenty of room. The window above the grimy bathtub was wide open. The sink was turned on, an a length of surgical tube stuck on the fixture and taped to the t
oilet sprayed a steady stream of water into the bowl.
I looked into the mirror, too tired to scream.
He’d done it to me again.
But he hadn’t lied. There was a note in the medicine chest.
Tessa,
I wish I could take you with me, but I know you don’t believe in where I’m going. Gus
I was sad, until I got into my car and turned on the radio. Some nut at LAX had sent a suitcase into the metal scanner and when the TSA opened it up, it was filled with rats. The place descended into chaos. The terminal was shut down and exterminators were called in. This all happened at exactly the time I was in Gus’s apartment. It struck me funny. Until I got home and saw it on TV.
The man believed to have dropped the suitcase into the plastic tub and sent it into the scanner had a thick, rusty beard, but he was tall and skinny. Police had no idea who he was, but he looks up into the security camera at exactly the moment the alert lights go all jackpot on the scanner. He waves and he mouths something, and then the crowd freaks out.
It was him, at the airport. And it was him at the apartment. And at Dodger Stadium. Maybe they talked about him so much they created another Gus Drum out of hot air and horseshit. Maybe he just had so much stolen time stored up, that he could be everywhere at once.
And the next day, he was.
I tried to call him. Tried to call it off, before someone got killed. He used to believe that, or at least he told me that. If you killed anyone, they hung around your neck. Maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe that’s what he wanted.
I got a message and hung up. I never leave them, never wait for the beep. It’s bush-league vampirism.
A minute later, he called me back. Oh, rapture. A final showdown. I didn’t expect him to see sense, but I thought he’d want to tell me what he was doing next. Isn’t that a rule for villains?
But it wasn’t him. Squealing feedback and bursts of profanity spewed out by retarded children with cleft-palate assaulted my ears. I hit the END button. Wow, what a prick. I expected some kind of deranged sermon on how his psychotropic anarchism was too powerful for him to ever return to a mere mortal existence, or at least that all of this was a sad complex delusion caused by my unhealthy obsession with Gus Drum.
Instead I got that stuttering, digital nails-on-chalkboard sound that cheap computer speakers make, when they’re too close to your phone.
I tried to call someone else. It’s not a long list on my phone. I’d burned everyone who really mattered to me, but right then, I needed to call someone. But my phone was engaged. It was calling everyone on my list at the same time.
What the fuck?
Down the street in front of a nightclub, a woman jerked her phone from her ear and threw it into the street like it bit her.
By the time I reached the corner, I’d heard it on five other phones. It propagated itself like any computer virus, but it got every cell phone in the world inside a week. Nothing short of replacing the corrupted internal chip would purge the impulse to make crank calls, and no matter how militant individual companies and providers got, if so much as one corrupted phone remained active, the bug went n the warpath again.
They called it the Tourette Virus. He took credit for it ninety days later, asked the world if it wanted a refund. By then, every major provider had issued recalls and new, virus-proof phones, but the attacks only got worse. The viruses got more sophisticated. They gave good people’s money to NAMBLA. They gave bad people’s money to Third World debt relief. They seeded every email communication with ear-searing profanity and the links to the filthiest things ever searched or viewed on any computer. They dared the world to look for him.
Angry mobs burned his house to the ground, and the surrounding neighborhood. Two people misidentified as Gus Drum were killed—shot by police in Orlando and literally torn to pieces by an angry mob in Toronto(!). But they never found him.
You know how stupid people always call the monster Frankenstein? That’s how I feel when people call it the Tourette Virus. His Tourette Virus. They found two of the guys who programmed it for him. Hanged themselves with crazy notes saying he would make them immortal. A pathetic end to a terrorist cell that exploded a bomb between everyone in the world. Ten years on, the world is still freaked out, still waiting or him to come back and strike again.
We’re all on his clock. We’re insane from ten years of prank calls and sleeping with guns on top of our life savings because there’re no more banks. No one really believes he’s dead. He’s like Osama Bin Ladin and Andy Kaufman and Jim Jones and the guy who gave the Bomb to the Russians. But sooner or later, he’ll need to tell someone, need to share what he’s done.
If you see him, tell him I’m waiting for him.
A SUMMER ON QUIET ISLAND
From the porch glider on the verandah of the Myrick house, Joe watched the island kids play baseball. Fog thick as cotton wadding rolled overhead, and reached feathery fingers among the trees that defined the dusty field. The scene felt like a silent movie, leeched of all color but sepia and white, the kids hopping and skipping nervously as if captured by a hand-cranked camera—and of course, none of them made a sound.
The foghorn’s low groan rolled over the island like a broken bell in a church somewhere up above the fog, shaking the brittle, warped bay window behind him, but nobody else seemed to notice. All of them but Joe had been born here, and were probably used to it, by now. And most of them were deaf from birth, so they must have liked it loud enough to make their china dance.
Mom taught him it was wrong to stare, but what else could you do? Watching the island kids play wasn’t even funny, anymore. At home, when a kid had a clubfoot or a raspberry birthmark, you could get a good laugh off him. But here, something was wrong with everyone. They walked like they had glass in their pants. They stared into space like they were sleeping on their feet. And sometimes, they pointed at him on the porch and their mouths opened, and a husky, glottal croak came out, like a deaf mute’s idea of laughter.
Quiet Island took some getting used to.
Aunt Meg whisked out onto the porch and set a mug of hot cocoa beside him. She ruffled his hair and clucked contentedly, as if she didn’t notice how he flinched. He liked Aunt Meg, but even now, it was hard to look at her. He knew the red sores and turbid papules that made a runny ruin of her smile and ran riot over her hands weren’t contagious. But he couldn’t abide the feel of that hand, coarse from housework and ribboned by weird raised scars with catsclaw-shaped growths erupting out of them, the inflamed impression of hunger they conveyed, as if they might leap like fire from her skin to his.
But she was family; the Myricks were all the family he had.
When Joe’s Mom went back into rehab, they sent him to stay with his father’s sister’s family on Quiet Island. He didn’t know who tracked them down or made the arrangements. He’d never met anyone from his father’s family. His mother told Joe that his father came from an island, and was a fisherman, but he’d had to leave. He went up to Alaska to work the canneries, and was gone for whole seasons of Joe’s life. When Joe was seven, his father didn’t come back from Alaska, and Mom didn’t look for him to return. Joe was thirteen, and he still wanted to believe this was only temporary.
Quiet Island is a mile long, and less than a quarter mile wide at the south end, where a shallow bay shelters the pier and the meager fleet of fishing boats. In the constant fog, the uneven, restless terrain seems to shrink down to the rock immediately underfoot. The fog hides the land, and carries the sound of the ocean to one’s ear, so every step seems like land’s end.
A sliver of castaway land thirty miles off the coast, Quiet Island was settled by a loose confederation of pilgrims who forsook the mainland over some long-forgotten grievance. Thaddeus Fleming, the de facto leader of the settlers, cut off all ties with the outside world, and embarked on a muted but thorough campaign to erase Quiet Island from all maps at the time. Somehow, the oversight persisted until the US Geological Survey stumbled u
pon them with their satellites.
There were thirty houses on the island, including the old Fleming house, which served as the island’s town hall after the last of the Fleming men was lost at sea. Fourteen houses were occupied. The clans that survived tended to huddle together, and many of the occupied houses—the ones with lantern lights in the windows and some remnant of paint on the exterior walls—had expanded upwards and outwards with varying degrees of forethought and execution. A half-timber and brick addition on one side of the Myrick house stood tall and true enough to put its clapboard neighbors to shame, while the wing on the other side lacked the insulation of a chicken coop, and listed audibly in the wind.
Joe was there nearly a week before he realized he had seen no animals. No dogs, no cats, no cows, pigs or chickens, though he saw the overgrown remains of corrals and collapsed barns everywhere.
He stopped once to explore the burned-out ruin of a house. The foundation was bearded in berry bushes and weeds, but the stones were still black in their cracks and crevices. Joe climbed the front steps to nowhere and looked down into the surprisingly deep hollow of the cellar. If it was of a piece with the boxy two-story houses everyone else lived in, the house must have been like a tree, as big beneath the ground as above it.
An old man on a bicycle stopped on the road and glared. He stood straddling the rusty green beach cruiser pointed at Joe, or at the ruin, then howled a long, drawn-out sound like “Nyeeeyeeooofadoowuh.” His other hand, clutched at his throat to feel the ear-splitting scream, had only two fingers on it, and was mottled with horrid scars.
Joe jumped off the steps and backed away from the cyclist. One of his ears was melted off, and the twitching, awkward posture of his raincoated form when he mounted the pedals and sped away spoke of even worse disfigurement underneath.
When Joe got back, he wrote a note to Grandma Amelia and slid it to her. She looked at it and folded it, went on chopping onions for soup. His cousin Lorna flounced through the room a minute later and glanced at the note. “The Rowbottom house burned down. People said your father did it.”
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