“There’s a place with some history,” my biographer said. “And speaking of history . . .” she went on, trying to revive our conversation.
It would be a while before I would see the place again. I was tempted to write, “I was a different person then.” But “different” and “person” are inadequate, and incorrect respectively. The change in that time, deep as it was, was dwarfed by the change to my current form, and I am unsure if that change makes the term “person” apply to me. It is a term of convenience, whose use has been programmed rather than naturally learned.
The Deep Seven more than intrigued me. Upon seeing the bar on TV, the house in which I lived seemed suddenly less inviting. Intellectually, I had known what people meant when they used the word “sterile” to describe a living space as undesirable. But I had never felt that way about where I was living until that moment we switched the channel. Perhaps, it may have been the first inkling of the experiment fading, but the dark seemed tantalizing, warm. The space I was in seemed over-lit. Even on the screen (or was it because of the screen) I could see a more human mark on that place, and was I not, at least then (and perhaps now) a human?
As much as I was attracted to it, the idea of transforming the place into something that was mine gnawed at me for months. I looked up the location and directions but there were two addresses for the same place. Then, one impulsive night, I got up from a half-eaten meal, jumped into the car, and got lost, drove past the Main Library, naturally thought of my biographer, and rambled on through neighborhoods east of Woodward Avenue. I made the mistake of stopping near the Heidelberg Project to ask directions. One group of young people with oddly colored hair at first ignored me. Some spoke amongst themselves while others gaped open-mouthed at the collection of objects—shoes, dolls, car parts, stuffed animals, et cetera—fixed onto trees and polka-dotted wooden houses and arranged in rows on vacant lots between. When I finally got their attention, they told me they were not from the area and couldn’t help me.
I turned to see a young woman getting out of a car she’d just parked. She went to the rear passenger door to remove a toddler in a car seat. Surely, I thought, this woman was from the area and would know the Deep Seven. Her face tightened as I approached. She was silent for a few seconds after I asked directions. Then she looked up and asked if I was “with them,” nodding to the young people. When I said no, expecting her manner to lighten, she was silent for a few more seconds before virtually spitting her words at me.
“Every time I come down to see my mother, there’s somebody here for the freak show that needs directions.” With that, she extricated her sleeping daughter from the car seat and carried her into the house.
After some time, I stumbled onto my destination. I don’t know what I thought I would accomplish. It was locked. The street was deserted. Someone had taped a note, handwritten on cardboard, next to the padlock.
To Tyrone and Schwartz: We are so sorry to see this place closed. We thank you for all you have done and for the jukebox. We will miss you more than you know.—Your Friends, “Order of the Black Elephant”
In a flash of perhaps the purest emotion I ever felt, rivaled only by what overtook me when I was alone with my victims, I was transported back to the images of the worn dark wood I knew to be inside, the chairs I imagined as waiting. What had kept these patrons from saying goodbye in person? The cardboard note was talismanic. I had it matted and would later keep it in the safe with the deed. Even so, it passed through my hands like the place itself.
***
The Librarian
Like me, my former co-worker from the Main Branch had taken on media work as a second career. She began life as a storyteller and I could feel the sales pitch when we met to discuss the gig that would eventually get me out of prison.
“I know you’re not crazy about corporations, to say nothing of working for one,” she began, “but these folks have the means to bend anything to their will and a history of doing just that.”
“You mean they’re fascist,” I replied. “Don’t get me wrong. I’d almost go to work for Stalin to get out of here and I imagine their body count is lower than his.”
“That’s the spirit!” she encouraged.
***
The CEO
I commenced the story with what may have been a false impression. I wanted to escape my biographer not because she is a bad person but because of the nature of my biography. That also relates, in part, to why I referred to her as being unfortunate. The other part of her misfortune was her incarceration. Her previous supervisor was, I gather from her and from news reports, a bad actor: absorbed in his own ambition to the point of being comical. Nonetheless, the poor fellow did not deserve to have a solid oak door crash against his cranium, however cathartic it may have been for my biographer to have her boss truly and finally come to grips with something outside of him. In fact, despite her innermost desires, she’d had no intentions of harming him. Had he not refused her entry after summarily firing her by e-mail for no apparent reason, the door might well have stayed on its hinges. But that is more speculation on my part. I met her after what I knew was going to be a long conversation with Media Relations. Whenever they mentioned my “origins,” I knew to put in an earpiece so that my hands could be free to continue work while I mostly listened.
It’s been an amazing fall for everyone, including those members of Media Relations in the inner circle. Before things fell, their normal duties were suspended to safeguard my identity. Their salaries had been increased heftily. Their offices were plush, well-lit, and airy. The doors opened to but a chosen few. They don’t answer their doors now either, but for very different reasons. The first day I met the VP for Media Relations, I could tell he didn’t believe that I had not been human before the transformation. I told him I could offer no proof. Even the friends of the man I replaced were fooled and that had been the acid test. I did have to end one of his relationships that had become physical. He’d been involved with a woman who’d just gotten a graduate degree in business. She was a veritable fount of innovative practices, most of which I was only too happy to introduce to the firm and take credit for.
As for the man I “replaced,” perhaps my first victim, how or why should I tell you about him? I could give intimate details: hair color, scent, nail rigidity, spinal curvature, organ decline, and so on. You can find the pictures online. You can find his quotes in the annual reports and see his pre-transformational interviews in company blogs. Download them, if you wish. But perhaps none of that reveals as much as the look of anguished relief on the graduate student’s face when she realized the affair with him/us was over. I can also tell you that, long before I entered, he had abandoned childhood as though it were a burning building.
***
The Librarian
You will take just about any job to get out of prison. The job I was offered was not just any job. It gave me a direct connection with a CEO, a rising star in the corporate world, not my first choice. But, you may know, life isn’t a series of first choices. I assumed there would be a camera crew there for the interviews I was to conduct for the bio pic of this guy. That was before I found out how reluctant the CEO was to be interviewed. I could relate. That’s what helped us bond, if that’s what you want to call hours of nonverbal communication. Don’t get me wrong. He was never hostile or anything. In fact, he always apologized for not having a more interesting life. Those of you who haven’t been under a rock for the last little while will find that apology more than ironic.
Which brings me to one of the many questions that would never have occurred to me outside of this job: is there an effective difference between discovering someone you know has been murdered and finding the body of that person? Will the nightmares be fewer or less intense? Well, of course, you say, the complete shock of an unexpected dead body has got to be greater than being told or concluding that someone has been killed. I say it depends. Maybe the nightmares cause me to say that, nightmares caused by people
I came to know being found dead: executives from rival firms; people I would have never met were it not for this job; people I would have never wanted to meet were it not for this job; people whose kids and cats I played with while I waited to interview them for the biopic; people that took me to breakfast, lunch, and dinner and told me bad jokes before they got comfortable and worse jokes after they got comfortable. Maybe I want to rid myself of any smidgen of guilt for having been close, however unwittingly, to the murderer. It may be all of that combined with the sheer surprise of the whole thing, the layers of surprise. I still can’t wrap my brain around what the “original” CEO and the scientists did (and this is from someone who was almost present to witness a guy birth a small elephant). They started with an assassin bug. Is that clumsy scientist-poetry or what?
***
The CEO
My programming, training, infusion, or whatever you’d label it, is, to me, at least as interesting as anything that happened afterward. Not only do I have access to the human memories but to my own, and they’ve been fused and supplemented. In my new form, I saw an old film that was supposed to be about the future. Much of it takes place in a year that has already passed but with none of the predicted incidents. At one point, near the end, a protagonist, on his way to the next stage in evolution, travels through what I can only describe as a traumatic array of color, a corridor of traveling hues. Part of the trauma is the relative length of time it takes the viewer to witness, or shall I say endure, this sequence. It does go on.
Now, imagine each sheet of passing color as a novel someone has read, a lecture, a formula that person has learned, a piece of information about someone he or she knows. Imagine any and all memories plying themselves into your brain with the speed of those passing colors. As you know, these are not discrete packets of knowledge. They build and interconnect and interact, and not in orderly or even logical or predictable ways. For instance, you may develop the habit of eating breakfast quickly even though you like breakfast. The person that prepares it, almost certainly your mother, takes care. Whether it’s savory: eggs whipped by hand for fifteen minutes, delicately fried in butter with bits of aged cheddar, then chopped garlic and shreds of spinach thrown in just in time to barely wilt; or the meal is sweet: oatmeal cooked in milk with honey, cinnamon, and allspice, bananas and raisins, fried sliced pears on a small side plate with a glass bowl over them to keep them warm until you are ready, and the glass bowl steams up and makes a mystery of the pears—in either case, you want all the flavors at once.
But the other reason you may learn to eat quickly is that breakfast is the time your father discovers your older sister has been out all night, has come to breakfast from the outside. Young as you are, you surmise this is not like the “sleepovers” she used to attend. Your sister and father exchange what you can only discern as code, keyless as it is grim. The light in the room falls. You suddenly realize how amazingly ugly and nominal the bare bulb over the gray kitchen is, how what was supposed to be illumination conspires with the gray walls. In a moment, the room is closed off. You, your brothers and mother are listening to clutched wire coat hangers swing through the air, almost whistling. Somehow, that ghost of a sound is as clear as your sister’s cries, her pleading for your father not to beat her anymore, not to kill her. The fear he has planted along with the suddenness of the beating keeps everyone in place. None of you can take your eyes from his arm slicing the air, her useless contortions to avoid the wire, the welts that rise on her hands and exposed legs and arms.
Later, as you prepare for school, you feel as though your brain has been wiped clean with fire. You happen to look toward a spot on the wall and notice a nail in the otherwise blank space where one of your school projects, a dragon made from wire, had hung. Now the tears can roll. You take the long way to school, slow and alone.
The beatings happen more than once, yet seem to happen only once. The days meld and fall over the edge. You learn to eat quickly. But, eventually, the violence spills out of the morning. There is only so much the brain can hold and precious little of that is available to the conscious mind. Most of what humans encounter goes into a reservoir, a primordial soup that slops to the surface now and again, and the incredible aromas cause what seem like unmotivated acts.
***
The Librarian
There is nothing like getting out of jail, especially if you had never been there before and didn’t expect to go there in the first place. I barely remember walking up to my boss’s office. I have no recollection of smashing the door off the hinges with a chair that should have been too heavy for me to lift. All of that made the trial even more surreal. That all seemed behind me when I walked with my co-worker and her uncle to their car. I was so happy; I even considered visiting my boss but realized that would be pushing it.
I had lots of questions about what had been happening while I was inside. When she visited me in prison, my former co-worker always talked about the gig on the outs that eventually persuaded the parole board to let me go. It was high enough profile and they didn’t consider me a flight risk. During those visits, my co-worker promised that once I got out, she would lay out the whole story of what had happened with Ipso, the guy that birthed the little elephant with the message on its hide. I kept asking about the little girl whose school essay about the message had brought her to the attention of my boss (really, the beginning of the end, now that I look back on it). The more I asked, the more my co-worker kept telling me about the gig with the CEO and promising the other stories when I got out.
But, do I have to tell you what happened when I got out? You guessed it; the “storyteller” had no story. No fucking story, nothing about the CEO’s company “acquiring” a biotech firm, or the scientists that were about to lose their jobs, or the bizarre presentation/proposal they gave to the Board to keep their jobs. That all came out later. Even so, when you’re hired to do a bio for a guy that barely speaks, the clue phone should be ringing. But that’s what incarceration will do for you. Don’t get me wrong. It does have a tendency to put things in focus, but at the same time, ironically, it’s a sharp focus with a skewed view. It’s like a fetus trying to become a human. All you want is out. If I just get out, it’ll be okay. The only problem is, you get out.
I didn’t know I was going to work for a murderer. How was I supposed to know that? The guy had a corner office and a driver that made more than I did as a librarian. I know many of those folks are ruthless, but outright murder? I’m getting ahead. Before I get to the murders, which you can read about in detail in my book, I Have Eaten Nothing but the Fire in My Heart (go to the independent bookseller’s site, www.indiebound.org), I want to tell you about the stuff my editor insisted I leave out. We argued about this, let me tell you. I have been trying to work this up into a screenplay of some sort.
He disappeared for a time. This was when things got pretty hot. People were missing and folks were slowly beginning to connect the dots. People in the company assumed the guy had fled to some unmapped island just west of nowhere. But I remembered how he’d once let slip that he was fascinated with this dive bar called the Deep Seven (also chronicled in my book). I was getting nowhere with his story and hadn’t had much luck following up with the whole Ipso thing beyond what I already knew. So I decided to drive by the Deep Seven. I actually drove past the place a couple of times because the front of it had changed so much, that is to say expanded. The places on either side had been subsumed by what was now the Whistling Dragon. Among the myriad strange things about this place (and trust me, I know strange) was that, despite the modern, clean exterior, it was still a dive inside. Did I tell you the Deep Seven was a dive? The Deep Seven was a dive, let me tell you. I never understood how anyone walked in there without a hazmat. In the old days, when the exterior reflected the interior, you drove past quickly just to make sure nothing got on your car. It was a dive; did I mention that?
Okay, so I did go inside a few days before it was rumored to close. I did not wear a h
azmat and I even had a drink. I came to check out the juke box because my coworker had some tales about that, vinyl records of classical and jazz on it, everything from Arnold Schoenberg to Julius Hemphill. But the machine wasn’t even plugged in when I got there.
Anyway, getting back to the Dragon, it’s strange how certain experiences shift when you try to relive them. I would have never guessed there was any significance to the CEO’s reaction to a clip of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, ventriloquist and dummy respectively. But that was one of the CEO’s turning points, one of his better ones I might add.
You all know by now that he was programmed. But there was slippage. You couldn’t have programmed the way he came up with the name for the place or how he thought of the place as an escape, literal or otherwise. At the same time, it seems it would take a person whose brain and guts had been merged with an insect to start karaoke night for ventriloquists, an idea so stupid it had to explode.
***
It just so happened that my first night at the Dragon I walked in on the woman with the veil holding what has come to be known as LJ or Little Jesus. I laughed till my stomach hurt and I wasn’t alone, believe me. How could you not be convulsed in waves of ironic laughter when Jesus is a puppet singing like a dolphin with a cross duct taped to his back; when the woman making him sing is all in white, including a veil, but for red gloves, a red waistband, and red high-tops; when there are Band-Aids in the palms of his hands where the spikes went in? And what was “he” singing? It was an old hillbilly spiritual:
Glory, glory hallelujah
When I lay my burden down
All my troubles will be over
When I lay my burden down
The Official Report on Human Activity Page 7