by John Wray
No one spoke for a moment.
“Orson,” Gentian got out finally, ignoring her sister’s look, “I know that you and Enzie have been on the outs—”
“Ewa has a cousin who lives on Lexington and Forty-Second, the same block as the Chrysler Building,” he went on, ignoring her. “I’m going to write for Preposterous! Stories and Omniverse and Tales of Stupefaction, and all those other pulps that you and Enzie hate.” He paused for effect. “Preposterous! just accepted a story of mine.”
“But you can do all that here,” Gentian whimpered. “You’re still in your teens. I don’t see why—”
“They’ve finally accepted ‘The Yesternauts,’ have they?” Enzian said coolly. “Then you must have made the changes that they asked for.”
Orson stared past them all and said nothing.
“Changes?” Gentian said, if only to say something. “What changes?”
“Tits,” said Enzian.
Kaspar began to pay closer attention.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Orson answered. “There’s nothing wrong with tits. Except in this house.”
Kaspar cleared his throat to speak, then stopped himself.
“They didn’t like the title, either,” Enzian continued, in the same bloodless voice as before. “What’s it called now?”
Orson shut his eyes. “Enzie, it’s my first published story.”
“And we’re happy for you!” said Gentian. “What’s it called?”
“‘In the Naked Form of the Human Jelly.’”
“In the Naked which?” said Kaspar.
“It’s a quote. From Saul Bellow.”
“Saul Bellow,” said Enzian, “never wrote for the pulps.”
Orson brought a finger to his temple, as if considering her point. Then he buttoned up his coat and left the house.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Enzie,” Gentian said. She looked careworn and tired. Kaspar found that he barely recognized either of his daughters: they seemed to have changed their clothes and shape before his eyes. Through the Looking-Glass came to mind—Orson’s favorite book, as a child—and he wondered if some final dream were now commencing. Enzian stood as straight-backed and ferocious as the red queen herself, and plump, frowsy Gentian was the white queen personified, down to the slightest detail. How had he not noticed this before?
“I didn’t do anything,” Enzian muttered, opening and closing her fists. “He did it. All of it. And now it’s done.”
Genny appeared to be weeping, something her father had only the faintest memory of her having done before. She’d almost never raised her voice, either—at least not in anger—but she was raising it now. “Tell her,” she was shouting—shouting at him, of all people. “Tell her to let Orson write for the pulps!”
“He’s writing for them already,” said Enzian. “Titties and all.”
Kaspar dug a handkerchief out of his pocket, thought hard for a moment, then blew his nose resoundingly into his sleeve. “What’s a pulp?” he inquired.
Monday, 09:05 EST
Can I confess something to you, Mrs. Haven? I’m not sure anymore who “Mrs. Haven” is.
The closer I get to the crux of our story, the less clearly I’m able to see. Even during our most intimate moments, your name—the name you took from your husband and asked me, perversely, to use—seemed to function as a kind of screen, a cover for your true, pre-Haven self. I wonder if I ever saw behind it.
Which raises the question, come to think of it, of who it is I’m really writing for.
FOR TWO WEEKS after leaving Menügayan’s brownstone I heard no news at all, and I began to suspect—at times, even to hope—that I’d misunderstood the nature of our bargain. But I was foolish to doubt her. She was hard at work all the while, woodshedding and calculating, fussing and scheming, consulting the Synchronology Codex and game theory textbooks and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, as tireless as the light cone of chronology itself.
In a more simpatico age—Hoover-era America, for example—there’s no telling how far Menügayan’s star might have risen. As it was, she was a has-been cult administrator, excommunicated at forty, making her living selling fanboy paraphernalia in shabby back-lot booths at “geek conventions.” I never did manage to discover why the UCS cut her loose, but it was painfully clear that the animosity she felt toward them (and toward Haven, in particular) had once been unconditional devotion. I wasn’t able to figure out what sort of deal she’d cut, either, though she never denied that her brownstone was the property of the Church. At the end of the day, Mrs. Haven—as Menügayan herself would have put it—none of these considerations mattered. She was going to bring you back to me. All further questions smacked of self-indulgence.
Menügayan hadn’t deigned to share the details of her scheme, but I had no doubt that she had one, and that the obliteration of your marriage was only a preliminary gambit, one small relay in the circuit she was building. She’d been a high-ranking financial officer in the UCS, apparently, and knew enough about the First Listener’s machinations to cause him significant grief. She was living in gilded exile on West Tenth Street, in a kind of tacit house arrest, like a disgraced Hero of the Revolution maintained in watchful comfort in some quaint suburban dacha. She spied on you, Mrs. Haven, because she had a spy’s nature—and because you passed her front door every day. She had her comics and her latex masks and you, and nothing else.
Nothing else, that is, until I came along. Then all at once she had an audience.
“I was confused when the New Era kicked in, Tolliver—believe me. For years the Church had been a community, a spiritual order, cut off from the world and proud of it. Then from one day to the next, the Listener does a backflip—a lutz, even. A triple axel. Starts obsessing about the age, the government, the ‘times we live in.’ The point had always been that we lived outside of time, detached from any age—that this particular iteration packed no more oomph than any other. No true end and no beginning. The Great Rotation and all that honeyfuggle. Do you know about the Great Rotation?” She gave a rueful laugh. “Of course you do. You’re Orson Card Tolliver’s son. You’re basically an Iterant by birth.”
“Could you slow down a little, Julia? I’m not sure—”
“I had no clue what he was after when the Business first got started. That’s what he called it, with a capital b: the Business, as opposed to the Church. It began with fund-raisers: fund-raisers for no one knew what. Fund-raisers to assist in the raising of funds. The rest of us went along in a daze, taking our cues from him like we’d always done, blinking like rabbits in the glare of the marquee. We were scared shitless, really. Trying to figure out the Listener’s angle was like trying to do a bong hit in a blizzard.
“Anyway, so. The cable hadn’t even been switched on in our Upper East Side office before he’d pegged the local neocons as easy touches. They consider themselves in a permanent state of siege: darkies and trannies and health-care reformers are scheming to eat their brains and fuck their wives while they’re asleep, and they’ll throw cash at anyone who keeps the night-light on. The Listener saw that right away. It was vaudeville to him, pure and simple, but they sucked it down like cherry-flavored pop. Precious few in the Church got to see this, of course, but I did. I got a fat hairy eyeful. Not that it helped me any—NB, my current life. At the end of the day, as I’ve mentioned before, the day’s over.”
Her mouth snapped shut at that point and her eyelids came down, as if she were waiting for me to insert another coin. I’d been halfway to the vestibule already—just a few steps from Bilbo—but I decided to try once more to get things clear. I looked back at her there, sitting Indian-style on the sofa like some sort of mood-stabilized Buddha, looking about as sentient as the suit of mithril on the wall behind her.
“Why are you telling me all this, Julia?”
“If we’re going to smite him, you need to be briefed.”
“But why not just forget him? Why not pack up all of your—all of your col
lectibles, if that’s the right term, and find some other—”
“He used me,” she said, in an almost inaudible whisper. “He used all of us. And now he’s using her.”
“Okay, Julia. What exactly—”
“Enough with the seventh degree, Tolliver. My origin story is not for your tender ears. Here’s the rub: you and I have a common objective. We both want to see R. P. Haven tied to a telephone pole by his own intestines, with crows and starlings pecking at his eyes. We want to see him strapped to the hood of his midnight-blue Lexus, heading the wrong way up FDR Drive, with his palms nailed to the sunroof, and his beautiful legs—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Julia. I’d like to see him gone, I admit, but I don’t necessarily—”
“Of course you don’t, Tolliver. You just want to take his wife away. Now run along home and think on what I’ve told you. Namaste.”
* * *
It was a long walk home that night, long and muddled and fraught, as Menügayan had known that it would be. I felt somehow polluted by what she’d told me, and chagrined at how greedily I’d listened; but that was only part of what I felt. There was something else there as well, glimmering up through my revulsion: something sharp-edged and precious, like a piece of jewelry seen through muddy water. There was excitement, Mrs. Haven, and the illicit thrill that covert knowledge brings. I didn’t trust Menügayan—I was a pawn to her at best, I knew, and at worst some sort of sacrificial lamb—but I trusted in her hatred of the Husband.
By the time I’d locked the door of Van’s studio behind me, a pressure was building behind my sternum—a steady, transistorish buzzing—that made it hard to keep my thoughts in order. Splayed across the shabby sofa with your letter in my lap, beginning to lose sensation in my extremities, I decided the feeling was either hope or cardiac arrest. I tore your letter open with my teeth.
Dear—
The truth is I don’t know what to call you. “Walter” is the name of the person I’d been under the misapprehension of knowing, but it was a beautiful misapprehension, so I’ll stick with it for just a little longer. I’ve allowed myself to write you one last letter.
I’m so depressed and knocked sideways by what the Husband and certain others have told me re: this person called “Walter,” or the person behind him, that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s possible you’ll never find this note. But that would be a shame, because it’s important to me that this message reach its intended recipient, whoever he is, and that he understand that I made this decision—to go away, I mean—by myself, without any pressure or advice from anybody. I don’t want any advice or any explanation either. I want to get on a plane and just go. No more time
I’ll start over.
Dear—
I’m leaving for the airport now. With the Husband. That’s all you need to know, I think. Goodbye.
Yrs,
Schadenfreude P. Weltschmerz
If I hadn’t just come from Menügayan’s grotto, if I hadn’t been dazzled (and not a little spooked, to be honest) by the fiery megatonnage of her hatred, I might have been more bothered by this kiss-off than I was. But on close reading, Mrs. Haven, I detected certain subtle glints of hope. You referred to our relationship as “beautiful,” for one thing—or to your understanding of our relationship, which was more or less the same. What had you called it? A misapprehension. A fussy, clinical word, but a promising one. That you could see anything attractive in something so obviously regrettable was grounds for optimism. Wasn’t it?
It’s important to me, you wrote six lines later, that this message reach its intended recipient. I still mattered to you, in other words, frosty though your language might appear. The overall tone of the note, come to think of it, didn’t sound like the woman I loved—it had a forced, contrived quality, especially in its opening lines. It occurred to me suddenly that I had no idea what the Husband had actually told you: the revelation of my true identity might have been just the beginning. I’d been exposed as a liar, after all, correctly and beyond hope of appeal. Haven knew everything there was to know about me, I was certain, and he was a master manipulator—even Menügayan acknowledged that. I pictured him standing at your shoulder as you wrote, dipping your quill into a death’s-head-shaped inkwell, fine-tuning your grammar and your style. I pictured him whispering turns of phrase into your ear.
It was an unpleasant vision, Mrs. Haven, and also a superfluous one. What mattered was that I was in your thoughts.
* * *
I was still in the sway of this rose-tinted faith in your mercy (and in Menügayan’s mercilessness, which was just as important) when Van finally gave me the boot. For weeks I’d been coming home to find uncomfortably official-looking letters on pink carbon paper wedged under the door, in envelopes marked “TENANT” and “EQUUS SPECIAL PRODUCTS, LLC,” every one of which I’d tossed into the trash. But in spite of these portents, not to mention my familiarity with my cousin’s evil moods, it came as no small blow to emerge from the elevator after a long day at the Xanthia to find my apartment door wide open—wedged open, in fact, with a stack of my notebooks—and a crew of pig-eyed men in green paper jumpsuits tossing everything I owned into the hall. I shut my eyes reflexively, trying to master my shock; when I’d recovered, I found two of the men close beside me, holding something between them—a burrito-shaped bundle, wrapped in glossy black plastic—that looked like the body bag of a miniature soldier.
“Your personal items,” said one of the men. He was huge and slump-shouldered and spoke with what sounded like a Polish accent. He nodded to his colleague and they placed the black burrito in my hands. I couldn’t imagine what could be inside.
“I had a suitcase.”
“Suitcase?” said the second mover, raising his eyebrows.
“You’d have to check with the boss,” the first mover said, yawning. “Go on in. Ask for Little Brother.”
“Little Brother?”
He shrugged and said nothing. Mover number two, who was hawk-nosed and blue-eyed and brilliantly bald, grinned at something a few steps behind me.
I didn’t have the nerve to look over my shoulder. I picked up the bundle and slipped between them into the apartment, prying my notebooks—the ones with the first chapters of this history in it—out from under the door, which was a hard job to accomplish with dignity. The crew inside glanced up briefly, saw nothing of interest, and returned to their work. Everything in the room had been swaddled in that same jet-black plastic, including the carpet. It seemed a bit much.
“Are you in charge here?” I said to a man with a clipboard. He was somewhere in his forties and had the face of a smoker and looked even more primordially Slavic than the rest. He moved slowly, with a contented, tai chi–like deliberateness that struck me as a drawback in a mover. He nodded and passed me the clipboard.
“Sign and initial here please, Mr. Tolliver.”
“Where the hell is my suitcase?”
“I’m afraid your suitcase has been treated roughly. That’s what your signature’s for.” He indicated the clipboard. “I’ll need your initials bottom left. In the teal-colored box.”
“I’m not signing a goddamn thing. I want to know where my suitcase has gone.”
“It’s gone nowhere, Mr. Tolliver—nowhere at all. You’ve got it right there, under your arm.”
I stared down at the bundle. My suitcase had been a stiff sixties model, made out of some sort of synthetic tweed: it was hard to imagine how it could have been flattened, much less rolled up like a taco, without recourse to hydraulics. I began to feel sick to my stomach. One of the crew stepped past me and I caught sight of the back of his jumpsuit: VAN GOGH MOVERS—A “CUT” ABOVE THE REST.
“What is it, Mr. Tolliver? There seems—if you’ll pardon the expression—to be a question hovering on your lips.”
“Nothing,” I stammered. “No question.”
“Is that so? Then I must be in error.”
“Thank you,” I said, for n
o reason at all, and the man ducked his head in reply. His eyes were glossy and depthless. I returned his nod and headed for the door.
“Where exactly are you going, Mr. Tolliver?”
For some reason this froze me in mid-stride. “I have no idea,” I heard myself answer.
“I suspected that might be the case. Kindly open the door.”
Automatically, numbly, I did as instructed. The first two movers were standing outside, their apelike shoulders nearly touching, obscuring my view of the hall.
“I was just asking Mr. Tolliver, here, where he thought he was going,” the man said to them.
“Very good, Little Brother,” they answered in unison.
“I was about to explain that our employer has instructed us to move the contents of this apartment elsewhere,” said the man. “All of the contents.” He paused. “Which, at present, includes Mr. Tolliver.”
I tried to move or speak but could not do it. Things had gone supernaturally still.
“Where would you like to be moved, Mr. Tolliver?”
“Any place that you want,” said mover number one. “Any place. Any time.”
The room behind me gave a kind of shudder. I felt heat on the back of my neck.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said the man with the clipboard. “For the present, let’s let Mr. Tolliver move himself.”
“If he can,” said number two, frowning. “He looks kind of stuck.”
“He’ll be all right,” said someone behind me. “He’ll be fine.” For a moment, in my panic, I imagined that the voice was Haven’s own. I tried to take a step and nothing happened.
“You may go,” said the man with the clipboard.
Something shifted again, the light seemed to brighten, and my body tumbled out into the hall. I lurched toward the stairwell. Its door had been wedged open with a battered playing card.
“Pardon the misapprehension, Mr. Tolliver. Please take our card—you never know when you might need it. Feel free to drop by at any time.”
I dashed down all six flights without looking behind me. I was out on the street before I glanced at the card in my hand. It was the fool from the tarock deck, dancing his grotesque quadrille in black and gold and purple, his jolly left eye closing in a wink.