The Serialist

by David Gordon

  “Coming,” I yelled. “One second.” I hurried to the door, retucking my shirt, and noticed the large hole in my sock. It had started small that morning, but now my big toe poked through, like a pink turtle testing the air. I looked back longingly at my boots, but the door buzzed again, so I put my toe behind the door and opened it with the traditional greeting, “Sorry!”

  It was Jane.

  “Sorry,” she answered, as if we both hailed from the same Sorryland. She could see the shock on my face. “Is it bad that I’m here?”

  “No. I. No. I. Just wasn’t expecting . . .”

  “Sorry. I spoke to I think it’s your manager? Claire? She set it up.”

  “My manager? Right.”

  “Then this girl in the hallway told me which was your door.”

  “Yes, that’s her.”

  “Who?”

  “What?” I flashed on Dani’s reaction to Claire the day before. “No one. What did I say? Forget it.”

  “Sorry about this,” she said. “I can go.”

  “No, please. I’m sorry. Come in. Sorry about my sock.”

  A few more apologies got us through the door and her out of her coat. Like compulsive samurai trading gifts we moved crabwise, smiling and sorry, into the kitchen, where I set about making coffee, more or less. Anyway, sprinkling coffee and water around the counter.

  “So I’m here on business,” Jane said. “In a professional capacity.”

  “Selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door?” I got the coffee grounds in the filter finally and pressed the red button. The machine began to hiss and gurgle.

  “No.” She laughed and blushed, and her discomfort calmed me down. I wiped the counter with a sponge and put an Entenmann’s coffee cake on the table. “Though I have noticed your name absent from our subscribers list.”

  “Well, you know I only read porn and comics,” I said, fetching the daisy mugs. “Plus, come on, four issues a year? What kind of magazine do you call that?”

  “We call it a quarterly.”

  “Now, I thought that meant it cost a quarter, like the Post used to. Yours is more like a ten-dollarly.”

  Another, bigger laugh. “I forgot how much fun you used to be.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “You know what I mean. This is nice.”

  I poured coffee and sat across from her, with a quart of milk between us. “It is nice,” I said.

  “To be honest, I’m surprised. With everything that’s going on, I thought you’d be more distraught than you seem.”

  “I am more distraught than I seem,” I said, suddenly feeling distraught, mainly in the stomach and across my forehead. I ran my hands through my hair. “But I’m also sort of OK,” I added, and I was.

  “Well, I think you’re being terribly brave. We all do.” I wondered who they all were, but I didn’t want to interrupt her flow of praise. “That’s why I’m here. To offer whatever help I can. Not that we can do much about the physical danger you’re in, though I suppose we might organize a brigade of writers. Like during the Spanish Civil War.”

  I had an image of Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem, dressed in matching windbreakers and parked outside my building with flashlights, waiting for Squad Captain DeLillo to call in on the walkie-talkie.

  “Right,” I said. “A gang of armed neurotics. We’d all shoot ourselves or each other.”

  “Exactly. Our powers are useless against reality. But we can fight your abstract literary battles for you. This police harassment you’re receiving. The FBI subpoenaing your files. I already have enough names for a petition, believe me. People are emailing and asking what they can do.”

  “What people?”

  “You know. Book people. Some of the writers you met the other night, for instance. I’m thinking an open letter in the Times to start. I spoke to Ryan and he’d be happy to cohost a benefit reading to help with legal bills. And I put in a call to PEN.”

  I laughed. “I’ll manage. But thanks.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. Very.”

  “I knew you’d say no. But don’t let them bully you. You have to write this book. Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “And you’ll think about it? What I said. And let me know if I can help?”

  “Yes.”

  She stood and I did too. Then she reached across and touched my face. I stayed very still, as though a butterfly had landed on my hand.

  “You know,” she said. “Speaking objectively of course, you’re looking very attractive right now. This whole thing has done wonders.”

  “Want to feel the sexy lump on my head?”

  “I do. Sort of.” She kissed my cheek. “But I won’t.”

  After Jane left I thought about it, and I realized what it was, the change she had noticed that I hadn’t seen in myself. True, I was exhausted and stressed and confused. I was broke and desperate and, most of all, very, very afraid. But for the first time in a long time, I was no longer depressed. Here’s a self-help tip: nothing brings us back to life like fear.

  50

  I decided to begin my investigation at the beginning, with Clay’s house, where he lived and committed his crimes, and where he took the photos of his victims. Dani insisted on driving me. I resisted at first—I couldn’t imagine it being anything but traumatic for her—but she was adamant and I was secretly glad, as much for the company as the convenience of a car. Then Claire announced that she was coming too. She was appalled beyond words when she heard that I’d passed on Jane’s proposal, and seemed to feel that I could no longer be trusted to wander the streets unmanaged. Plus she had a better car.

  Thus, I ended up sitting behind the wheel of Claire’s dad’s black BMW 750i, with Claire beside me, waiting for Dani to emerge from her building in Jackson Heights. Claire sucked the last of her Diet Coke through a straw with a strangling sound and then dropped the can on the floor of the car. She was still holding a grudge.

  “PEN,” she said. “PEN!”

  “You didn’t even know what it was till you Googled it.”

  “Well, I know what a benefit concert is. It could be huge.”

  “Benefit reading. Very different and not at all huge. No Bono. Besides, I couldn’t accept, because of our prior relationship.”

  “No, duh. That’s why you have to work it.”

  “No way, too weird. Plus this way I look heroic in her eyes, not helpless. She said I was attractive!”

  “Big whoop. She’s just having buyer’s remorse. Don’t fall for it. Besides, I think you’ve got more than you can handle with the stripper.”

  “I’m not sure. It was only that one night,” I said as Dani came out of the building and waved. We both waved back.

  “Just be careful,” she said and turned around in her seat, bouncing onto her knees as Dani got in the back.

  “Hi, Dani,” she chirped.

  Dani smiled angelically. “Hi, sweetie.”

  I gripped the wheel and drove.

  Clay’s old place was in Ozone Park, near the Brooklyn border. It was a normal residential block of saggy homes and older cars in the drives. Others were fixed up, like Clay’s probably, by younger arrivals, many of them immigrants. Ten years ago, this street would have been dimmer, dingier, aging and abandoned. I had a newspaper photo that I’d printed off the Web, and at first it seemed as if the “Hell House,” as it was called in the caption, had been demolished and replaced. Repainted, with an addition on the side, a new deck in back, and a replanted front garden of high shrubs and young trees, it had, maybe purposely, been made almost unrecognizable, but it was there.

  “So this is it?” Claire asked, sounding disappointed, as I parked across the street. “Not very spooky.” Nevertheless she pulled out her camera and started to snap pictures that she hoped would go in the book. I stared at the twin front windows, the shingled roof with the deep eaves, the small porch. Coming here had seemed like a logical first step, but now I didn’t know what to do. Dani
didn’t hesitate.

  “Wait here,” she said, and strode across the street, while I stood by the car and watched. In old jeans and a turtleneck, she was a knockout, but I felt more like a smitten pal than her lover. I had not seen her since the other night, and this morning there had been no kissing, hugging, or anything else that normally came under the heading of romance. Nor had there been any mention of what had happened or not happened between us. I could only assume that she regretted it and wanted to pretend it never happened, a grief-drunk mistake best forgotten. Dani marched onto the front porch and rang the bell. She knocked, then knocked again. Then she waved me over. I crossed the lawn to meet her, Claire trailing along, observing the scene through the digital square of her camera.

  “No one’s home,” Dani said. “Let’s take a snoop around.”

  “What would you have done if they answered?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d have come up with something.”

  She was probably right. Girls like her and Claire lived in a different universe than I, one where people tripped over themselves to be helpful. I lived in a world where no one had change for a dollar and every store’s bathroom was permanently out of order. Why these women, with their magical powers, took pity on me I don’t know, but I am eternally grateful.

  We peeked into the front windows, which were curtained with sheer white fabric. I saw a soft white leather couch, big and loose like an Oldenburg sculpture, and a huge-screen TV on the wall, as well as several crosses and Jesus-related items. I could see from the photos on the shelving unit and some writing on the books that the family was Korean. Most likely recent arrivals, who had no idea about their home’s unholy past. When we turned from the window, I saw that Dani had a black smudge on the tip of her nose from pressing it against the screen.

  “Hold on,” I said and licked my finger. She waited patiently, watching my eyes, while I wiped it off.

  “OK?” she asked.

  “All better.”

  Claire took a picture. “How cute,” she said.

  Without discussing our next move, we all three left the porch and walked together around the side of the house, trying not to trample the flowers that bloomed limply in the newly turned soil. Out back, in the small yard, were a white wrought iron table and chairs and a white stone birdbath along with a few roses and a square of lawn. We crouched down, side by side, and peered into the basement.

  This was it. Once both of these low windows had been sealed, one for the darkroom Darian kept and one for the “studio” where he constructed and dismantled his scenes. Then there had been chains and whips and knives and saws, hooks bolted into the wall and low ceiling, a drain in the concrete floor and a hose for washing down the blood. There had also been props, costumes, wigs, makeup and lights, all the accoutrements of a cheesy photo studio. Now of course all that had vanished.

  I realized that Dani, squatting beside me with her hands shielding her eyes, was staring at the same scene, thinking the same thoughts, and probably imagining her sister’s end. I could hear her breathing, so close that her hair tickled my cheek. When I breathed, I smelled her shampoo.

  “Is this . . . ,” Claire began, but I pressed her leg and she took the hint. She quietly raised her camera and took a few shots, then put it away and went back to silent staring. There was nothing to see. The walls and floor were freshly painted and extremely clean for a basement. One end contained a Ping-Pong table, a fridge, posters of anime heroes and an old stereo. On the other side there were cartons, a slop sink that had once probably been part of the darkroom, a washing machine and a dryer. There was a freezer but I doubted it held any missing heads. The only ominous reminder of what had once been was an old-looking workbench, its rough wood scarred and splattered with paint, from which a couple of big vices hung like rusty steel jaws.

  51

  From Whither Thou Goest, O Slutship Commander by T. R. L. Pangstrom, chapter 2:

  Time travel is a lot slower than you’d think. Since one is using the folds and tears in timespace to galaxy-hop, there is no sense of movement, of progression from one point to another. A light-year passes while we seem to stand still, at rest in our ship, floating in icy darkness. Yet the body knows the truth, and the brain struggles to catch up, adjusting forward or back, trying to account for the lost time. It’s like that simple relativity problem that Zorgon kids learn in preschool physics class (Einsteinoid, Post-Quantum, Proustian and Dwarf-Magical Theory). If your particle-train leaves Greater Mylar at ghostdawn, flying at 500 km/persec, why, when it gets stuck in the Blabdok station for five minutes, does it feel like five hours? With timespace travel the concept is the same. Decades pass in minutes but those minutes are excruciatingly slow. They seem to take forever. You grow restless, paranoid or enraged. Your stomach hurts or else you are hungry but nothing on the menu looks good. You feel like your whole life will pass just getting through these few million year-miles.

  As a result of these stressors, travelers have been known to suffer from space sickness, black-hole depression and swollen ankles. More seriously, cases of psychotic meltdown have been seen, with crewmembers and passengers alike becoming violent, most notoriously in the Sirus Six Massacre of 5321 (although, due to time differences, the bodies were discovered in 4440). To avoid such tragedies, as well as lesser inconveniences, like cosmic acid trip reflux, which I suffer from myself, all Zorgon ships traveling at Timespace Level 5 or above (or at Spacetime Level 6 or below) must institute Deepsleep Shift procedures. A combination of superdrugs and suspended animation technology is used to put several of the crew into hibernation for up to a century at a time. Meanwhile waking members try to “live” in realtime, carrying out a “day’s work,” eating “three meals,” and finally going to “sleep.” This way, when the next shift wakes, the mindbody is tricked into thinking it has only been gone since yesterday, though “yesterday” might be a thousand years ago, and “today” might last for only an hour.

  This all sounds simple enough, and in theory it is, but as Master and Commander of Phallus Twelve, a standard love-slave ship carrying, besides myself, an all-female crew of six high-performance wenches, I found life anything but simple, especially when intergalactic clan war erupted, destroying our Homebase and leaving us adrift in Deep Space, searching for a time of refuge. Realizing that we might be in transit for ages, I decided to implement Deepsleep. Each crewperson would work a hundred-year shift, waking in rotation every 500 years, while I lived on Half-Life, waking each century to oversee ship functions.

  At first things seemed to proceed smoothly enough. I aimed the trusty old Phallus straight into the Far Past, drank my sweet blue medicine, and went to sleep in my ipod. One hundred years later I awoke to the smell of frying bacon.

  Polyphony was in the galley making pancakes, bacon and eggs. She was a Type A Pleasure Slut, fully equipped, and had woken up with a huge appetite. Nude in the warm spaceship, she hummed happily as she cooked. She was young, and time travel barely affected her. Fresh from the airbath, her blond hair hung straight to her waist. She wore only her mandatory collar and, as per regulation, her body was hairless. Her pert, upturned breasts were scented with oil from the spice planets, and her lips as well as her labia were tastefully dusted with glistening starpowder, the granulated dust of extinct suns. In addition to her expertise in cooking and Erotic Arts, she was also the Phallus’s Systems Expert (SX), responsible for maintaining the ship’s onboard computer.

  “Good morning, Poly,” I said as I entered, and gave her ample but firm buttocks a playful flick of my whip. I’m a by-the-book commander, and although we were alone, I wore my standard uniform of utility belt, boots, gloves, cape and ceremonial headband. “Something smells good.”

  “Good morning, Commander,” she said. “Breakfast is ready.”

  While we ate I heard her report. All ship functions were normal, but no safe harbor was in sight. Still we decided to make the best of it and enjoy the next hundred years. We started with a bath. Poly scru
bbed me head to toe and then playfully rinsed me with warm synth-water, recycled from our used hydrogen fuel cells and the urine of the sleeping crew. Then, following the Health & Wellness Code, we made Vigorous Love, first in the Cloud Chamber, laughing and floating, and then in the more demanding Sexagon, setting it first on Pulse, then Full Thrust, then Combo, which was Poly’s favorite. Then we checked the engine and had a light lunch. In the afternoon we played four-dimensional Scrabble and walked through the hydroponic forest, gathering truffles for dinner. We laughed and held hands and even had Analog Sex right there on the pseudo-grass. But at dinner, Polyphony hardly touched her food.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “You barely consumed your recommended calorie quotient.”

  “Nothing,” she sighed. “I was just thinking.” But I knew she was lying. It was not Nothing. It was Something. As we lay down to sleep, I saw tears in her eyes.

  “Please, Poly, what is it? Tell me?”

  “It’s just that I will miss you when you’re gone, Commander. After you put me to sleep. For all those five hundred years.”

  I smiled and wiped her tears. “But it will only feel like one night. And besides, we still have a whole century together until then!”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s silly, but I can’t help it. I can’t stop thinking about how each day together, however wonderful, is one day less, and how long we will be apart once they’re gone.”

  At last I convinced her not to think of it, and she curled up to sleep in my arms. But now I was troubled. Although Sexbots like her were designed with genius IQs, this was far outside her emotional range. She was meant to be a Pleasure Unit, happy and carefree. But here she was, not missing the past even (since she had none) nor fearing the future, exactly, but mourning, in the present, a loss that was yet to come, the loss of the very moment she was in. While she slept I got my toolkit and silently checked her vitals. Sure enough, something, a suspension problem in her u-pod, bad medicine, or an inherent design flaw, had damaged her brain. Her sense of time was painfully acute. When you and I speak of the present, we really mean an approximation, or even a memory, since the actual persistence of a moment is so brief as to be beyond our senses, just like the turning of a planet seems still and the growth of a plant invisible. Not for Polyphony. For her, each moment in the river of time came and went separately, drop by exquisite drop, so that the moment and its loss were simultaneous and inseparable. Joy and sadness were one.