by Walter Kirn
IN “THE SHELBY REPORT,” the adult Christian ran riot, a rampant fantasist with a masked agenda whose likely motive jumped out at me at the end of my first reading. The posts run from mid-July to early September, from Shelby’s arrival in New York to Clark’s declaration that he must leave New York and move to some quieter, safer, more remote spot. The early posts are studiously mundane, filled with dramatic re-creations of Shelby’s and Yates’s morning “hunts” for squirrels in Central Park and supplemented by clinical accounts of their eliminatory behavior. “Low squirrel count—only chased two. Stool normal. She failed to urinate after an hour walk, but did so once we reached the kitchen.” Because the posts are intended for the Pipers along with a small, unnamed group of setter lovers, Clark fussily documents Shelby’s transformation from wheelchair-bound laggard to prancing purebred. He gives himself all the credit for this upswing; he’s the indefatigable Herr Doktor, a peerless fecal analyst. “Stool seems normal, excessive urination finally stopped today. Administered cartilage and thyroid.”
The posts hit their stride in early August as Clark contemplates a bracing excursion to Penobscot Bay in Maine. (Perhaps to drop in on Titmuss’s antique shop?) Mary Piper writes to register her pleasure. “Really appreciated all the Tron details!!!!!! Thanks!” She drops in some gossip from Montana—the other day, in a town not far from Bozeman, she bumped into a woman who might be one of Clark’s cousins, a Rockefeller who uses her married name. Small world! But to Clark, a too-small world. “Gag!” he answers. Then he bashes the woman, hard. Mary is duly chastened, but in offering amends to Clark she unwittingly attracts the wolf. She not only alludes to family money and past depredations upon her vulnerable loved ones, she paints Montana as a game-rich hunting ground as well as a fine place to build a lair: “Sorry to have mentioned it. She does not know that I am aware of her name—she’s hiding out here like many people with recognizable names. We are safe here altho if we would have stayed in Mpls. I would have kept my maiden name for sure. Harry’s mother was kidnapped and ransomed a number of yrs. ago and no one can forget it and leave him alone.”
If Mary hadn’t shunned her new acquaintance, the actual Rockefeller dwelling discreetly in Montana, but had quizzed her one day about her New York “cousin,” she might have wound up sending bounty hunters to spring from the bushes in Central Park and demand that Clark relinquish Shelby. She might also have kept pressing Clark to cooperate with a newspaper reporter who wanted to name him in a feature article about Shelby’s new Cinderella life. Clark promises to consider Mary’s request, but suddenly a family scandal intrudes that makes Clark shy about his name. “Horror of Horrors!” he writes, and then reveals the abominable besmirchment: a rogue male member of his noble clan has posed in Jockey boxer shorts for a magazine ad!
As August in Manhattan steams along, the tone of the “Report” grows surly, volatile, and menacingly immature. One senses the sped-up sprouting of a bad seed. Minor, everyday events that feel like pure concoctions nonetheless are crudely molded into goofy fables of confrontation, evasion, and revenge. One bright Tuesday morning in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, an injured squirrel drops from a tree, is temporarily stunned, and then rushes directly at Clark and his two hounds. The rodent’s bold frontal maneuver shocks the dogs. Shelby lunges at it and wrecks her wheelchair. The daring squirrel escapes, scrambles back up the tree trunk to its perch, and then, as though to shake its tiny fists at the moping, outfoxed dogs, rains down hard little nuts upon their heads. Such impudence! But the “real-life” fairy tale goes on, because, as every well-bred child knows, there’s something that goeth after pride. Kerplunk! The squirrel falls off its branch again, the setters bristle, and the squirrel (the king of squirrels?) charges right at them and scores its second triumph. This joust in the park is elusively upsetting. Whether it’s based on real events or not, it’s Clark’s clumsy take on Aesop and A. A. Milne, but with a nasty Three Stooges edge.
In mid-August, only a month since Shelby landed, the “Report” really starts bubbling and fermenting. Sulfurous notes of Edgar Allan Poe can be faintly tasted in the brew. The dogs start fighting for no reason. Shelby catches a bird and, with a “gleeful look,” sets its misshapen, mauled body at her master’s feet. Then she picks it back up and tortures it some more. Having at last learned to walk without assistance, Shelby now shows no mercy to the lame. Days later, she attacks a “Corgie-mix puppy” that’s running free in the park despite a crackdown by “our Nazi mayor,” whom Clark refers to in another post as “Adolf,” not Rudolph, Giuliani. This mock slip of the tongue is doubly phony because it’s also, no doubt, stolen.
August, endless, fetid August. A plague of unknown origins descends upon the House of Rockefeller. For Clark, the first symptoms are a sore throat, sodden lungs, a cough, and mental torpor. Returning one day from his dog walk, he discovers a rash, a spot of redness, on his chest. It seems that in his dazed, thick-headed state he’s been wearing his polo shirt inside out—its alligator emblem has rubbed his skin raw. The dogs react to the pathogenic atmosphere with “random agression incidences,” including one in which Shelby, now afflicted with chronic diarrhea, leaps on Yates and bites his neck. Soon afterward, Yates fangs Clark’s leg. Clark starts neglecting his work. The indebted Third World countries that he has been laboring to keep afloat will just have to paddle harder, or learn to swim.
As Shelby declines, shedding her silky fur in patches, Clark desperately seeks outside aid. He summons his favorite dog groomer, a “miracle worker” with an exceedingly unconventional name and a unique dual-gender physiognomy. The name is 123, short for the groomer’s legal name, which is the groomer’s Social Security number. The physical oddity is an extra sex organ that the groomer had surgically attached—that’s right, attached, not surgically sculpted from flesh already there—to “hir” body. (“Hir” is a hybrid of “his” and “her,” Clark says.) The post stopped me cold when I first read it. What the bloody hell? Clark ponders the groomer’s pansexual dating life, transfixed by this chimera from his own brain. If this is his way of disclosing to the Pipers, and to setter fanciers everywhere, that he’s gay or bi, there are surely easier, less grotesque ways. So why choose this one? I rubbed my chin, but not for all that long. Clark is telling the truth about himself, or at least about how he sees himself. He’s a string of digits, not a person. And his penis (really the only sexual organ that can hypothetically be “attached”) feels like a piece removed from someone else and sutured onto him.
On August 15, Clark introduces a new and fateful motif, his modern art collection. He wonders if his art is linked somehow to his dogs’ declining health, their mucus-coated eyes and bouts of nausea. Most of their vomiting, he notes, occurs in front of his new Motherwell canvas. Might the dogs be allergic to the paint used by the abstract expressionists? His absurd speculation on this point caused me to push back from my desk, convinced that he was pulling something significant, not just gassing and goofing for the fun of it. Besides the Pipers, I don’t know who he thought his readers were, but he is setting them up, quite obviously. He wants them to think about his paintings. He wants them to see them in their minds. He even names the particular Motherwell: Elegy for the Spanish Republic. Is he advertising the forgery for sale? If it sickens his dogs, he can’t keep it, surely. And what about the Hercule Poirot tone? It announces that the “Report” now has a plot, and Clark is going to stick to it.
He sticks to it for the rest of August, converting the “Report” into a kind of medical mystery novel. In the midst of this investigation, he swerves off into an odd, unprompted anecdote whose conspicuous offhandedness feels suspicously premeditated, but to what end? He mentions a stuffed dog toy that Shelby and Yates like to mistreat. He rambles on about the toy. Not coming to a point. Just blathering. The toy has no brain, he comments. (Of course not. So?) His setters, however, do have brains, he says. (Yes? And?) Then, out of nowhere, he comes to the point, the one he seemingly just drifted into. It’s a scary point. It’s a chill
ing point. “I guess anyone with brains,” he muses, “can easily play rough with someone who has no brains, because if you do not have any brains, you would never know just how hard someone jerks you around.”
In August 1998, perusers of “The Shelby Report” had no way of knowing that this casual remark was a doctrinal defense of murder, a sort of philosophical confession, by a criminal practiced in the art—an uncommonly literate criminal who considered murder an art indeed. I can picture Clark typing the post on his computer: his extra-proper schoolboy sitting posture; his wormy smirk; his bare ankles crossed and rubbing. He erases and edits; he fiddles with the syntax, trying to sound both natural and concise, relaxed and contrapuntal. A subliminal creepiness is his ideal, like that of a butler decanting ruby port with a badly scratched right hand, an ice cream truck jingle heard faintly at a funeral, or a black leather glove in the grass beneath a swing set. He is alone in the house, his wife out earning, the whole brainless, plodding world out earning. No one knows who he is or what he’s done or what, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (how many times he must have studied that book!), he’s telling them (without exactly telling them) about what he’s done. The dopes. The dunces. I picture his dogs beside him as he has these thoughts, and I think I know why he likes them there: because he’s smarter than they are. Because they’re dogs. He can insert his thoughts into their heads, but they can’t put a single thought in his. Nor can they guess his thoughts. Most people can’t, either, but most people wouldn’t be willing to lie here next to him, reminding him with every breath and whimper, every involuntary scratching motion, every ignorant doggy thing they do, that he’s the master, he’s Merlin, he’s Mr. Ripley. Outside the house, among people, he proves it constantly, but he likes to feel it inside the house as well.
As he sits at his desk and writes about his dogs, he’s really writing about other things. He’s transforming abominable, secret episodes into cute stories that he can tell at dinner. He’s figuring out ways to tell the truth so that it will sound made up, like bombast, like blarney, like more of Clark’s BS. He’s also making up stuff that will sound true, at least to people without brains—people like me back in 1998. Did I have a brain back then? I believed I did. I believed it was quite a developed brain, in fact. It had studied at Princeton and Oxford and written novels. It had jigsawed together raw copy from far-flung stringers to fashion respectable cover stories for Time. So why did it fail me? For the last time, why?
“The Shelby Report,” as I reached the last few posts, was leading me toward a “Eureka!” I could feel it. It was creeping up like a head cold, like a fever. It was going to be one of those Perry Mason moments that seasoned trial reporters joke about, insisting that they never happen. At Clark’s trial (and at most such trials, I’ll bet, where murder still has an element of mystery), I’d hear someone say every day, or couple of days, “This isn’t Perry Mason.” It meant that certain dramatic turns weren’t coming. It meant that we were in Los Angeles, not Hollywood. It meant that a star witness for the prosecution, though his eyes were darting around the room, wasn’t going to be trapped by the defense and admit that he and Clark had once been lovers, and Clark had left him, and his testimony was all a lie dreamed up to take revenge. It meant most of all that the heavyset old lady sitting quietly in the back row, who people assumed was at the trial because her TV or her air conditioner was broken, was not going to yank off her long gray wig and startle us all with her true identity: Linda Sohus, alive, the Unicorn Killer!
It didn’t matter what others thought; I knew such unmaskings and turnabouts were possible. I’d experienced a few already. I’d had a friend once, see, a rich eccentric. I brought him a crippled dog one summer. He showed me his Rothkos. He took me to his club. Years went by. I visited his mansion. I held his hand through his divorce. Then I turned on the news one day, and there he was. No one I knew.
But now I knew him better.
Late August 1998. “The Shelby Report” is building toward a climax. Why is the poor setter still declining? Why can she hardly breathe in the apartment? “I just cannot think of what might bother her,” Clark writes. “If anyone has any clue on how to solve this mystery, let me know.” By then, of course, Clark’s readers know the answer and are waiting for him to catch up: the paintings are somehow posioning the dogs. And sure enough, after a quick trip up to Maine, where the dogs’ symptoms promptly disappear, Clark uncovers the secret. The allergen is linseed oil, the base of the paint in every work he owns!
This is terrible news, Clark tells his readers (though only the Pipers have any reason to care, having put their darling Shelby in his hands), because most of the paintings are so large that they simply can’t be moved, not even from room to room. There is only one solution, he concludes: he and Shelby must go away at once—far, far away, not just out of the apartment. They have to leave the city! This seems awfully rash, a gross overreaction to an abstract expressionism allergy, which is probably why Clark piles on the horror to justify his flight from the metropolis. Two dismal events occur on the same day. As Clark watches helpless and aghast, a Parks Department truck runs down a dog in cold blood. “ON PURPOSE,” he writes. Then, after that—or perhaps before that; the post is confusing on this point—a random miscreant pulls a knife on him. New York has become a “hellhole,” he laments. Worse, Shelby’s life is still endangered. (Clark makes her sniff linseed oil to test his theory, and, alas, it pans out, confirmed by the scientific method.) What will happen next to man and dog? Where in the world will they go after New York?
Clark leaves things there. On September 3, 1998, he bids farewell to his readers and declares that “The Shelby Report” is going dark after a run of not even two months. “Please keep us in your prayers,” he writes.
And then, on September 8, just five days later, he sends a personal e-mail to the Pipers, Harry and Mary, the Reverend and the heir. They included it in the file they sent me, clipped to the very bottom of the stack, right where it would have been found on Perry Mason. In it, Clark tells them that he fears he’s approaching a nervous breakdown. He has been playing them all summer, of course, assiduously, patiently, and obliquely, first with the help of the fictional Leslie Titmuss, and then with the aid—or through the use—of their angelic Shelby. He has also been calling me during this time, though oddly he has never breathed a word to me about “The Shelby Report,” in which I would have been interested, presumably, considering that I’m the pliant oddball who drove and flew the dog across America. I did it, in part, as a favor to the Pipers, who contacted me as a favor to him, Clark. And now, in the fall of 1998, he is writing them for another favor. Not a favor from them, it seems, but from me—the person the Pipers persuaded to help him last time and the only person who can supply him with what he now tells them he desperately needs.
The e-mail is very specific about his needs. He needs a place in Montana. A place to live. A quiet place to write his Star Trek books. A place to complete his “Constance Garnett rewrites.” The Pipers, who never caught on to Leslie Titmuss, may not be familiar with Constance Garnett, either, but I write novels and I sure am. She translated the Russian masters, including Dostoyevsky. Meaning, if I read Clark’s thoughts correctly, he’s planning a little touch-up of Crime and Punishment in September 1998. Perhaps he’ll personaliize it in some way. Once he finds a place to live and work, that is. He asks the Pipers to be on the lookout for a “a small furnished garage apartment on a working ranch that allows dogs . . . The less the better, probably. Just a small room would do fine.”
I had such a place in 1998—exactly such a place. And Clark, from speaking to me, knew I did. The Pipers might not have known, however, having never come to visit my dog-filled working ranch with a garage. This may be one reason they never thought to tell me about Clark’s little wish list. I might not have gotten back to them in any case. I was busy revising my oft-rejected novel and preparing for the baby. I spent that fall on the ranch, holed up, cocooned, doing what a writer and husb
and should: working, worrying, providing. Later on, in the winter, Clark did mention a visit to my place (in passing, and not a long visit, I gathered) but I was weeks away from fatherhood, so I told him no. If the Pipers—sweet people whom I truly admired—had spoken to me on his behalf, I might have softened. I might have let Clark come for a short stay, two weeks or maybe three, while he hunted for another place. But he wouldn’t have hunted, and I might not have made him, and Maggie—an animal rescuer like Mary—would have melted for Shelby, I just know. How would I have handled that situation? I might have sold Clark a corner of my ranch; I was thinking of parting with a few acres anyway. Money was tight and my obligations were mounting and five hundred acres, if it’s divided right, can allow for a neighbor you never have to see, a house or a cabin you never have to look at. Clark might still be living there, if this had happened; Montana, as the Pipers correctly told him, is a very good hideout. And he needed one.
I might not still be there with him, though. I might not be anywhere at all. Clark, who’d always longed to be a writer but lacked some essential literary serum that dwells not in the brain but in the blood, might have been seeking another metamorphosis. If a few well-aimed blows to John Sohus’s skull could bring him mastery of Star Trek; if walloping Dickie Greenleaf with an oar could turn Tom Ripley into a man of leisure; if driving a chisel into a schoolboy’s head could raise Leopold and Loeb to Übermenschen; then maybe Clark could find some way, some night, after toiling all day in my garage to translate Crime and Punishment, to turn himself, at a stroke, into a writer. He knew a perfect victim when he saw one, and I’d sacrificed myself for him before.
EIGHTEEN
AROUND THE COURTROOM, which was like a movie set, regimented and casual by turns, either all business or all small talk, a popular topic of idle conversation was whether Clark had committed other murders. There was no evidence that he had, but everyone these days is an amateur criminologist, filled with TV-based knowledge that only the experts had once, about supposedly different types of killers. The common killer, Americans have learned, is an impulsive narcissist who, when intoxicated or under stress, ruptures emotionally and lashes out. The serial killer is bereft of empathy and tends to develop in well-known stages, first setting fires and harming animals and eventually graduating to murder, which makes him feel powerful and in control. Was Clark a serial killer, people wondered? He certainly had the look and feel of one. If so, though, why had he retired so early, after claiming just one or two victims? This wasn’t standard. It didn’t fit the model.