The Serialist

by David Gordon

  “Or the end.”

  “Neither,” I said. “It’s like real life. The hard part is the middle.”

  She grinned, and I grinned back, and for a second I almost thought I could get away with kissing her, if the setting weren’t so utterly inappropriate. I heard a loud honk and jumped back as a Subaru wagon pulled up, full of cheerful young do-gooders.

  “Come on, T!” a scruffy boy with a beard and nose ring yelled.

  “Got to go,” she told me.

  “OK,” I said. “See you in the city maybe?”

  “Sure, call me up sometime.” She grinned. “Or look for me online.”

  I laughed. “So that was you, vampT3?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.” She climbed into the back of the car. The door slammed, and I turned to find my own way out, but I heard her call my name.

  “Hey, Harry!”

  I turned. She was hanging out the window as the car started to roll.

  “Yeah?”

  “Keep writing. We need you.” She waved and they drove away.

  80

  I don’t know about you, but I hate coming to the end of a mystery. It’s been a problem since childhood, when alone in the library one day, I discovered Poe, the first grown-up writer I really loved. Besides his great horror and fantasy tales, he was the inventor of the detective story, and ever since then, no matter what else I read that was supposedly more realistic, or experimental, or psychological, I kept drifting back to mysteries, long before I was forced to write them for a living. Nevertheless, there is always a certain dilemma: I prefer the beginning to the end. I love the mystery and am vaguely let down by the solution.

  The tough part of writing mysteries is that they are actually not mysterious enough. Life defeats the form literature gives it, whether the climax of a thriller or the three-act cake of most literary plots. The real risk and danger of life comes from never knowing what will happen next, from living in an absolutely contingent present, where each moment is unique and unrepeatable, and about which we know only one thing, that it will end. Hence my disappointment with most detective stories and the fictional answers that never seem equal to the vast questions they uncover.

  The conventional view of mysteries, as explained by Auden, for example, is as an essentially conservative genre. A crime disturbs the status quo; we readers get to enjoy the transgressive thrill, then observe approvingly as the detective, agent of social order, sets things right at the end. We finish our cocoa and tuck ourselves in, safe and sound. True enough. But what this theory fails to take into account is the next book, the next murder, and the next. When you line up all the Poirots, all the Maigrets, all the Lew Archers and Matt Scudders, what you get is something both far stranger and more familiar: a world where mysterious destructive forces are constantly erupting and where all solutions are temporary, slight pauses during which we take a breath before the next case.

  And yes, I would have a next case, despite all my failures. Not for any noble reasons, or anything Jane or even Theresa would say, but just because I couldn’t stop myself. It was too late. For both Clay and me, the course was set in childhood, in little rooms in Queens with our moms. About his, enough said. About mine . . . well, isn’t it obvious? I was the lonely little boy who hid his head in books. Decades later, I’m still at it. But I’m no psycho who thinks his private, inner world is real. Instead, I admit my world is nothing, next to nothing, mere fiction, but go on anyway—poor, lonely, despairing, depraved, bitter and neurotic—and I persist in holding my books up to the face of reality, like a mirror that reflects only dreams. Every work of literature is a great victory over oneself and a small act of resistance against the world.

  I thought about these things on the train home, while I tried, with Clay’s story over, to outline some new chapter for my own. I would go back to my mother’s apartment, to my empty bed, and in the morning, most likely I would begin another book. And since a cheap hack like me can’t afford to waste a good story, I would salvage what I could from this one, retelling the story as fiction, changing the names and other details. But one name would be real this time: my own.

  Clay had said that we were all just little vessels, holding a drop of life, and that breaking us was nothing, like letting that little drop flow back into the ocean that it came from. That was how I thought of him now, lying there, asleep too deeply to even know he was dead, that this last current flowing through his blood was the one that would take him with it.

  His story was like anyone’s: a swift dark river that runs, through rapids and falls and forests, to spill into a vast and mysterious sea. Only then, when speed becomes stillness and we float free at last, do we realize that we have been carried all this way, and are now far out, and infinitely beyond our depth. But then it’s too late. We have read into the night, and have reached the end of our story. We have come to the empty page.

  Maybe you’ve figured out which of the real-life characters I altered or combined, or who never existed at all and what facts and dates changed. Maybe you feel you know me, like the trusty narrator in a novel, or maybe, like the novelist behind the book, I’m only a ghost. But for now, let’s just say that I was on a train one evening last summer, that the train was approaching the city, that from the window, I could glimpse the black river running between forested banks, and that all of it was slowly disappearing into a darkening sky. Now close the book and put out the light.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable assistance, without which this book would never have seen the light of day: my agent, Doug Stewart, for his wisdom and perseverance; the intrepid and irrepressible Seth Fishman; my editor, Karen Thompson, for her insight and belief; my teachers and classmates, from P.S. 69 to Columbia and everywhere in between, who showed me what was possible; my friends, too abundant to mention here, who read everything first, and second and third, and whose understanding and indulgence always amaze me; my Jens, of course, for their kindness and grace; and most of all my family, whose love, support, patience, and generosity are infinite, and who I promise are nothing like the characters in my work.

  About the Author

  David Gordon was born in Queens and currently lives in New York City. He attended Sarah Lawrence College, holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature and an MFA in Writing, both from Columbia University, and has worked in film, fashion, publishing, and pornography. This is his first book.

  [1] In several instances, throughout this book, names and identifying characteristics have been altered.

  Table of Contents

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