by Jim Nisbet
Inferior material, of zero to two stars, he deleted.
Doing nothing, that is, unless you consider Torvald’s ultimate ambition: editing the highlights of his collection into the greatest snuff movie the world would ever see, the raw material to be discovered in a pseudonymous safe deposit box long after his demise, coevally long after a Trojan horse, which he’d downloaded off a hacker site, had propagated his feature-length triumph world-wide in its entirety, all hundred and twenty-one compressed minutes of it, by capitalizing on a virtually unknown but chronic weakness specific to Microsoft Corporation’s monomaniacal conflation of their own Internet browser with their own operating system.
These feats Eritrion “Ari” Torvald had nearly accomplished, and he had done so entirely in the guise of a man who never accomplished anything at all, of a man who wasted days wandering the aisles of hardware stores and plumbing supply warehouses and lumber yards and electrical wholesalers, of a man who had nothing to do.
If Torvald had delusions of grandeur relative to the success of his film, he had next to none when it came to its production. Lately he had transferred hundreds of hours of his early career from beta and VHS to digital media and, in this regard, part of the secret ultimately revealed to his disappeared neighbor was true. There was a recording studio under his house, whose sole double-paned window looked onto a soundproof room with a wooden chair against one wall and two video cameras on tripods with a third stedi-cam, and a floor that subtly but surely and very accurately sloped concentrically down to a four-inch drain in its center.
The drain, being far below grade, had necessitated a sump pump, which, activated by a switch on a float in a sunken barrel, rapidly evacuated whatever flowed down the drain whenever the contents of the barrel reached a certain level. Sometimes this barrel took a long time to fill up. Other times, like when Torvald hosed out the studio, or when he heavily employed the mess-hall-grade garbage disposal to which removal of the plate covering the floor drain gave access—at such times the barrel filled again and again, and the pump kicked in and out with great frequency.
Torvald had a lot of trouble with this pump. After much research he’d purchased a model that could handle anything—the volume of a hundred-year storm or a glutinous bolus of machine-masticated gristle—but after the pump was buried deep below one of the two pink patches in front of his house (both of which he’d torn up and repoured to ensure an accurate color match), when it lifted effluent up to the level of the sewer line under Anza Street, a construction project Torvald could hardly have conducted in secret, but managed to accomplish on four consecutive weekends while Mr. Tweedy, the nosy neighbor, was fly-fishing with his grandchildren in New Zealand, and while the Department of Building Inspection was locked up like it is on any weekend, fifty-two weekends a year, Torvald discovered that, despite its flawless performance, the pump made too much noise. Specifically, the float-activated relay that triggered the pump voltage emitted a click, inexplicably audible from anywhere along the sidewalk in front of Torvald’s house.
Having allowed a decent interval for grief—after Torvald began telling the two or three people who asked why they hadn’t seen his wife lately that Malita had vanished while on a trip to Mexico; presumably, if unobserved, having fallen off the stern of the night car-ferry between Mazatlán and La Paz while Torvald was in the foredeck bar trading shots of mescal with a one-armed bullfighter—Mr. Tweedy began to nag him about the strange clicking and humming noises coming from beneath the patch of pink concrete abutting their common property line.
Torvald explained to Tweedy about how PG&E appeared and dug up the street in front of their houses while Tweedy was on that fly-fishing trip to new Zealand two years ago with his grandchildren, though he had no idea what for and hadn’t given it much thought at the time. But he, Torvald, had also noticed the funny noises and having assumed that it had something to do with the uninterrupted flow of electricity and/or gas to and/or from the Outer Richmond, found himself having gotten so used to the noise he didn’t even notice it anymore, which, as Torvald wound up his yarn watching Mr. Tweedy with a certain look in his eye, a look he’d formerly been accustomed to focusing on his wife the last few months of her life, would be, he broadly hinted, Mr. Tweedy’s first best course.
In fact it was true that Anza Street had been repaved while Tweedy was gone, so Torvald thought his exegesis had a good chance of skirting Tweedy’s radar. But Tweedy was another of these guys you see around the Outer Richmond who apparently have nothing to do all day but detail their car with a toothbrush and groom the hedges framing the perimeter of their parcel with cuticle scissors and wash the street-facing windows weekly. It took Tweedy almost three months to do it, but one day Torvald hearing muted conversation parted the curtain of his parlor window to find a little blue PG&E truck parked in front of Tweedy’s house and Tweedy standing on the property line with a PG&E engineer who held an unfolded blueprint, both men staring down at the patch of pink. Torvald let the curtain fall back into place and stood there, as if in repose, until he heard the engineer’s pickup truck drive away.
Torvald knew that PG&E had no jurisdiction over whatever it was that might be under his front yard. But the very fact that Tweedy had managed to pester the vast PG&E bureaucracy until it relented to the extent of actually disembarking a human representative to appraise a situation that, in any case, must have seemed vague to them in the first place and beyond their purview in the last, demonstrated at a stroke to Torvald that Tweedy was possessed of a tenacity which occluded even that which had fomented the coup of Torvald’s handicap parking placard. It was at that exact moment, not one second before and certainly not one after, that Tweedy transmogrified into a walking dead man.
The slow-motion denouement of that transmogrification is, and remains, recorded as Torvald’s third video, a volume entitled “Calvin.” “Calvin” was pretty good, too; although, as went Torvald’s career, no production ever eclipsed the savagery of “Malita.”
Not quite three volumes later, when Tweedy’s grown grandson and the young man’s wife made the sad trip all the way from New Zealand to see Tweedy declared legally dead and his estate probated, Torvald expressed sympathy without being too nosy, and made them a fair offer on the house, which, if they accepted, would save them the trouble of cleaning it up and selecting a real estate agent, putting it on the market and sorting through the offers, accepting one and waiting through escrow, closing, and so forth. They refused. Torvald began to look at them in a funny way. But after a moment’s consideration he relented. One thing about Torvald, he was not a stupid man. Far from it. It was probably too obvious a setup, he reflected, for him to buy the house and rent it out to young girls, one at a time, who would then disappear, one at a time, and whom, after due diligence, he would then replace one at a time. Cool idea, bad execution. What Torvald wanted was good execution. Torvald reasonably presumed that eventually some cop or relative would come along and figure things out. As a force of nature, that was the job of inevitability. Even though Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had disproved the theory that inevitability doesn’t need any help, by the same token Torvald was in no hurry for the inevitable to happen to himself. But it was precisely this fundamental awareness, that it was inevitable that he get caught, that enabled Torvald to engage his ambition with such virtuosity as he brought to bear. Because he knew that in the fullness of things he would be caught; for, in fact, if he was successful, his work would come into the light of the world by design. He would have to be caught. This rationalization of the fear of inevitability, itself a triumph of logic the test of which his nerves would welcome, a fear which moreover he came to consider a mere titillation, enabled Torvald to focus the full amperage of his intelligence on his aesthetic achievement. As a side effect, his quiver acquired the dichotomous pincers of bold finesse, efficient recklessness, patience that could spring into celerity, and brazen stealth. It was like having a tool box full of complicitous scorpions—efficient, servile, and alacritous.
A week later the grandson and the wife came back with a real estate agent and accepted his offer. He walked through the two-story cottage with them. It was the first time he’d ever been in Tweedy’s home, and everything remained as Tweedy had left it. Torvald was amused to find a photo of Tweedy’s long deceased wife in a cheap frame on the mantel in the living room. Torvald had a similar photo of his own deceased wife, on his own mantel, to keep up appearances. But Tweedy’s mantelpiece also displayed pictures of the grandson and the boy’s father, who had married Tweedy’s daughter thirty years before. There was a photo from that wedding, and another of the grandson at his own wedding, with Tweedy in both. Torvald heard that day, for the first time, of the deaths, years before, of Tweedy’s daughter and her husband in a plane crash, which occurred in the course of the pursuit of their Christian mission in Burma.
Two years before, the cops investigating Tweedy’s disappearance had turned off the TV. They’d found the bed made up, as it still was, with an old crocheted coverlet folded over the footboard. The place had been neat and clean, then, but now it smelled very much of disuse, of abandon, of mice and mildew, of dust. A saucepan on the back of the stove contained what looked like a petrified chicken soup. It had been there for so long it had no odor at all.
Traces of fingerprint dust were still to be found here and there, on the mantel, on a corner of the kitchen table, on the casing of the front door, on the corner of a window that faced the street, on the toilet handle, on the handrail of the staircase. Torvald was very interested in these details, too, though he didn’t say as much.
The deal closed without a hitch. The grandson and his wife took all the photos and Tweedy’s fishing gear and the crocheted coverlet and returned to New Zealand forever.
After escrow closed and he took possession of the keys, Torvald hired a young and enthusiastic illegal immigrant to clean the place. He hired him off the corner of Cesar Chavez and Valencia and, fresh from Michoacán, the kid was proud to be seen by his street-corner acquaintances in the front seat of a well-kept Mercedes—from the rear-view mirror of which Torvald had taken the precaution of temporarily removing the blue handicap placard. Slim and handsome, soft-spoken and hard-working, quick to laugh, enthusiastic and gentle, the boy finished the job in one long day, right down to washing the windows.
As the sun set beyond the bank of fog which almost always lurks off the northern coast of California, Torvald invited the kid to stay for beer and quesadillas.
By sundown two days later, “Xavier” had became Volume V.
Chapter Sixteen
TORVALD TOOK HIS TIME IN RENTING HIS NEW UNIT. IT TOOK him a while to figure out how to do it efficiently. Being a landlord wasn’t really in his line. He’d noticed it seemed to be in many other people’s lines, however. But, whereas most of these people did it so they wouldn’t have to work, Torvald had a separate agenda.
And it wasn’t that Torvald minded working. He just didn’t want anybody to know he was working. Not until later. Not until it was time for them to know.
During the late nineties, the dotcom years—which turned San Francisco upside down as thoroughly as beatniks did merely to North Beach in the fifties, or as hippies did merely to the Haight Ashbury in the sixties, or as gay liberation did to merely the Castro, Polk Gulch and Folsom Street in the seventies, or as cocaine did to merely the entire city in the eighties—Torvald did as most other landlords did. He held a single open house for one hour at noon on a Saturday, then sifted through the resulting sixty-odd tenant applications for someone fitting his specifications. In the glory days of the landlord’s market, it was that simple. The first specification? The prospective tenant’s ability to pay two or three times what the apartment was worth. As for other specifications….
Soon enough, Torvald had a comely twenty-something in the unit. Oddly, he thought at first, she was never home. Tranquility regined, albeit somewhat lonesomely on Torvald’s part, but soon he figured it out. Since her rent was equivalent to two-thirds of her salary, his young tenant had to work all the time to come up with it. But that was only half the story. Unceasing work was in the nature of her ‘employment sector’—the dotcom world. Unstinting labor was part of its ‘culture.’ That is to say, if working seventy hours a week for two years on the outside but not entirely remote chance that it could make you a millionaire can be called ‘culture,’ then that’s what it was.
This default privacy was such a gold mine for Torvald that he forestalled fishing off the company pier, as it were, and did his fishing elsewhere, steering his operation entirely into off-shore, as it were, opportunism.
Finally, however, he succumbed to the temptation. It began when Kerry gave him a month’s notice, as specified in the lease. She had located another apartment for the same price in the Western Addition. The new apartment was smaller than Torvald’s unit, but to Kerry it represented a quick bike ride to work. Parking near her job had become out of the question, and the ride from Anza and 36th to Folsom and Eighth, whether by bus or bike, was just too long. Another nice thing about it was that Kerry could continue to live alone while seeking her fortune. Privacy is worth a lot, as she remarked to Torvald. Torvald couldn’t have agreed more.
The end of the month was a Wednesday, but Torvald cut her the requested slack and let her wait until the following Sunday to move out so she wouldn’t have to interrupt her six-day work week. He smiled and told her not to worry, he would pro-rate the four days according to the thirty-one in that particular month and subtract the amount from her cleaning deposit. See, he said with a smile, how easy I am to get along with? She thanked him, her tone a touch sarcastic.
It takes years of experience and a focused mind to achieve control of one’s tone, Torvald said to himself as he looked at Kerry thoughtfully; but youth has other advantages.
Kerry didn’t own much. Torvald watched her move all her possessions with her brand-new Golf in five trips by herself.
When the car was loaded for the last time, she came to his door to return the keys. He suggested she give him her new address so he could mail her the cleaning deposit, less the prorated rent, as well as forward any first-class mail that slipped through the post office’s notoriously porous forwarding mechanism.
She’d already had cards printed. She handed him one, said goodbye, and turned to walk away.
Before Torvald quite realized what he was saying, he verbalized an impulse. If she wanted to come in for a moment, he would write her a check. He remembered how it was, he added, to be young and moving house by yourself; it was expensive and it was hard work. Neither the computation of the simple interest—which by law he owed her on the deposit, which pleasantly surprised her—nor the subtraction of the four pro-rated days, was higher mathematics. He was sure the balance, almost a month’s rent, would help.
She was sure it would help, too.
She stepped inside.
Thus initiated production on Volume IX.
“Kerry.”
When two police officers came by a week later to inquire after the missing girl, he showed them a check made out to her and a stamped envelope with her new address written on it. He’d been about to lick the envelope and walk it to the corner mailbox when the doorbell rang. When he first moved from Indiana to San Francisco to be a hippy in the sixties, as he told the two officers, you could leave mail at your door for the postman. No longer. You had to make sure it was in a mailbox. Sir, one of the officers told him, the bad guys got keys to all those drop boxes. Torvald begged the officer’s pardon and asked for details. They open one up, the officer patiently explained; they grab a bunch of mail and go through it, looking for checks. Copy machines and scanners and software they got these days, bingo, they turn out stacks of your own personal checks. Exact duplicates. Signature and everything. They change the series numbers to avoid a conflict with the genuine article. They make them out like paychecks for day labor or house cleaning, stuff like that, and hand them off with a fake I.D. to professional accompl
ices who cash them all over town. Meanwhile the check they copied is carefully resealed in its envelope and sent on its way. Your bill or whatever gets paid so you’re none the wiser until the bank starts bouncing your real checks because the fake ones have cleaned out your account. By that time—the officer snapped his fingers—the thieves and your money are long gone.
Well I’ll be darned, Torvald said. He looked at Kerry’s check, then back at the officer. That’s awful.
The officer told Torvald that to be safe he should hand his mail over the counter to a live clerk at the post office. Then your checks have a chance to get where they’re going without a nasty detour.
Torvald thanked the officer and said he certainly would do that. He hesitated. And what about this check?
The officer slowly shook his head. Mail it anyway, his partner suggested. It will be forwarded to the parents.
Her dotcom employer had called the police the morning of the second day she didn’t show up for work or answer her cellphone. Her Golf was parked on Broderick around the corner from her new building, an eight-unit student affair in the flatlands between the panhandle and Lone Mountain College. The Golf was a convertible. Its top had been slit and some of Kerry’s personal possessions—odd CDs, lingerie, sneakers, computer manuals and diskettes—were strewn up and down the block. Her previous address—Torvald’s rental unit—had turned up when they ran a check of the car’s license plate.