If Freddy had just allowed Jeff to privilege him, while treating Dom like dirt, it would have violated the most sacred relationship on earth. It was the only relationship in Fred’s life that was not by coincidence or choice. Fred loved his brother because he was his brother. Not because of what Dom could do for him. This was a relationship of human loyalty, not family currency. And so, Freddy followed them down the block.
“You see, kids,” Jeff said obsessively, “Claire always wanted a family of her own.”
Oblivious to what his sons were thinking, Jeff was reliving the Claire situation.
“But one day she rented some bench time in the Central Park Mall. As she sat, four hundred couples walked by with little babies in strollers. All of the mothers were over thirty, but dressed like fifteen-year-olds. All of the fathers had pained, hyper-masculine expressions of raw possibility under constraint. All the kids were named Waldo, Cornelius, Theodora, or Lucille. All the kids were going to grow up with enormous entitlement that they did not merit. They would then strive to become Republican super-models. It was pathetic. And so she knew that she could never be a part of it.”
Jeff lead his sons down Merrill Lynch Boulevard, across Shearson Lehman Street, and turned right on J. Crew Avenue. They stopped in front of the National Gym, and boldly jaywalked over to a tiny cinder box of studio duplexes. Then they walked upstairs.
“But OUR family,” Jeff continued, “we have nothing prefabricated. We are not conventional. We have no social advantages. Maybe we will fit her needs.”
They stood, preparatorily, in front of apartment $E.
“If she could see us all together, she might not be such a snob.”
Jeff knocked on the door. Unexpectedly, the balsa slab slid open, and the three men looked in through the narrow doorway.
There was a brief light creeping under the drawn window blinds. And it was surrounding Harrison Bond.
Bond’s hands were dripping in blood. He leaned over Claire’s mutilated corpse.
“Oh my God,” Jeff gasped.
Harrison looked up at the three of them, stricken with capture. He had a floppy, sexy new haircut. He was huge, and his aqua-weave shirt was soaked in gore.
Jeff, Dom, and Freddy looked at Claire’s body, splayed out across her living room floor. Her face had been cut open. He torso was slashed.
Harrison clutched a jagged can opener.
Then the three men saw what was actually taking place. Claire’s chest had been cracked and pried wide, then her heart had been lifted out of her body. Strangely, though, the attaching muscle had not been severed, so it hung from her body’s cavity.
One thing was clear to all. Claire Sanchez would never live again.
Harrison looked at these three panicked men. His fear softened and then passed. He had just been having the greatest feeling of relief that a man can ever experience. His worst fantasy had been fulfilled. Nothing more horrible or more pleasurable would ever take place again. He had finally expressed himself, for real. For the first time in his repressed, angry, frightened life, Harrison Bond had done what he needed most to do.
But now that fleeting perfect happiness, like all happiness, was over because of other people. It was over because Jeff, Freddy, and Dom had walked in on the middle of his release.
Harrison gazed up, still bent over. Having his hand inside Claire’s chest was the most intimate he had ever been with another person. The most unpretentious. She could not judge him or lie to him, evade or avoid or blame him for anything. She could not reduce him. This was her heart. There was nothing bullshit about it. It was real.
Harrison’s mouth slid open. Saliva fell to the floor. He almost died standing up—from too much excitement.
“You!” Harrison shrieked, pointing a dripping fist at the three smaller men. “How could you do this? You animals!”
32. NO WORLD
NO WORLD, Ginette thought, rushing to the holding cell. No world.
She wanted it to go away.
There had been many, many times over the course of her years at her second job working with sad people, that her former drug addict clients had relapsed or gotten in trouble of a petty or grandiose kind. That’s the nature of sadness. When people are already in trouble, they become easy targets for more.
After all, if a well-dressed, clean man asked you for help, you would be more likely to help him than if he was sick, dirty, and bleeding. But the sick, dirty, and bleeding man would need it more. Right?
Many times, over the years, little Ginette had had to run to clinics and hospitals, jails and morgues. That was routine.
But not these guys. Not those little brothers.
(She was refusing these events.)
No, not THEM!
How did sweet, nice sad boys like Dom and Fred get caught up in pain this severe?
Ginette was deeply afraid for the brothers because she knew very well how the system worked. She knew that innocence was irrelevant. Okay, that’s a cliché, but still true and disconcerting. And she was sure that they were innocent. They weren’t capable of feeling anything deeply enough to lead them to commit a crime of passion.
The Destruction of the Innocent, volume 1,982,103,332, was underway.
Punishment without crime. That’s the way of the world. No one can escape.
Nadine said to call, so I called, Ginette reasoned. And then I got humiliated and sad. So clearly Dom and Fred were innocent— Ginette had been innocent, after all.
It’s so easy to get slammed. Even if you do what they say. What you do has no bearing on the matter. The question is, Do they need someone to slam? If they do, you’re fucked.
It started out with Nadine and ended up with two scared, tiny men being falsely accused of murder. Plus their father.
That’s why, as far as Ginette was concerned, it was big people, art directors like Nadine, who should go to jail. Not little-bitty Dommie and Freddie.
People who lie on the small plane are just making the big lies more palatable and harder to resist. That’s what Ginette had learned. She had tried to make an alliance with some powerful art director, but instead here she was with the imprisoned shmucks. She had tried to date the popular, the wealthy and connected Harrison Bond. But instead she was running to jail to visit some pathetic, sad people who just wanted to burn garbage and smoke. Her life was not going the right way.
On the street, as she walked toward the prison, she felt so guilty for having had ambitions. How dare she ever try? It was gross the way she was willing to sell out everyone she’d ever met, make them live with a compact and an eyeliner for the city crest. How could she impose that level of tasteless kitsch on all these unsuspecting hardworking New Yorkers passing her innocently on the street?
She arrived at the prison and showed her retina to get in.
Prisons had been more affected by television than by Sophinisba. All those prison and cop shows had prepared America for clean, modern institutions, with articulate and consistent prisoners. Since the people who get convicted for crimes often watch more TV than those who don’t, this particular group was particularly disappointed. The putrid, boring, scary wasting of life was nothing like what they showed on Law & Order. And this made everybody mad.
As a result, a series of TV riots took place over a number of years. The inmates demanded broadcast-quality conditions. A compromise was reached in which TV backdrops were placed on top of the old rotting cells. This gave each convict a drywall interior pasted up against the rusty iron bars. Somehow that was comforting to viewers of reality TV shows like Rikers or Death Row, which followed real-life inmates as they did their time, tried to stay alive, traded sex for drugs, and became jailhouse lawyers and Muslims.
The networks installed huge-screen monitors so prisoners could watch each other sleep on props and eat props every week. It made them feel romantic, important, and somewhat fantastical. This sedated them. The unreal feeling of punishment was surrounded by the Real Unreal. Everything was truly fake. This made i
ncarceration more tolerable.
Ginette, used to visiting clients in the clink, got through the various checkpoints without much problem. The people hired to search visitors were themselves using and selling drugs, so they didn’t do a tip-top, thorough job of searching her shoes. After a few checkpoints and two metal detectors, she made it to the holding pen.
“What does all this mean, officer?”
Ginette flashed her counselor’s badge, and so the cop had to talk to her with some intent. The two women were standing in the narrow concrete hallway, looking into the cell where Freddy, Dom, and Jeff were imprisoned. They all looked deader than usual. Calm. As though the outside had finally matched the inside. They were terrified and tortured, tormented. But they always had been. Now, it was justified—caused by the world around them and not just their father and paltry interior lives. This justified unhappiness created a tiny sense of calm.
“Look,” Officer Perez told Ginette, while secretly admiring her compact case. “Having personally run electrotropes on each of these three suspects, I can tell you exactly what I think.”
“Great.”
Ginette felt hopeful. These tough lady cops from the neighborhoods always knew the real deal.
Perez pointed to Dominick, jaw hanging like a Bassett hound.
“If he is the one …”
Ginette stared at him with like. Suffering can be so endearing sometimes, especially to do-gooders. If the victim has a particular charisma, their attractiveness can corrupt someone like Ginette and make her feel heroic.
“If he is the killer,” Perez continued, “he gets the chair. They won’t have to shave off his hair. He doesn’t have any.”
Ginette knew that Dominick had heard Perez say this about him, but he didn’t even touch his head. That’s how flat he was. You could kick him in his shins and he wouldn’t even yawn.
She ran her fingers through her own oily roots, and Nadine’s voice flashed between her ears.
“If the killer is the redhead,” Perez said, pointing at Fred, “he gets life. At least he’s got a little zing. Juries like that.”
Perez had this authority when she spoke. But it was illusory. Actually, the police were glorified doormen. They were servants.
“But if it’s the old man who turns out to be responsible?” Perez nodded towards Jeff. He was overcome with a visible style of self-pity that seemed very familiar and habitual to the wearer. “I’d say that he’d get twenty–thirty, tops. Minus time off for good behavior, he’ll be out in fourteen.”
“That’s life!” Jeff cried out from the cell.
“But not technically,” Perez corrected. “And then there is the Socialite.”
“Who’s that?” Ginette asked, distracted by trying to figure out how to make Jeff take the blame.
“Harrison Bond.”
“Harrison Bond?” Ginette froze. “What does he have to do with real life?”
“He did it!” Fred, Dom, and Jeff yelled out from behind bars.
Ginette stared at their three faces.
“He did it,” they said again. “Harrison Bond is the killer.”
In that moment, Ginette knew that they spoke the truth. She knew that if these three alienated men could simultaneously agree on something, it must be overwhelmingly true. Oh God, she thought, Harrison Bond. Ginette knew how powerful he was. She knew that he would never pay the consequences for anything he did wrong.
“Who did he kill?”
“A working girl. Claire Sanchez. From the Bronx.”
Ginette’s body froze so quickly that her nostrils dried up. Oh no. Of course he was guilty. He loved Claire Sanchez, the greatest motive for murder.
“How did she die?”
“The murderer stabbed the victim seventy-three times and cut out her heart.”
Seventy-three times? Ginette knew what that meant. That meant love.
“Where is Mister Bond now?”
Perez scanned the Scan and read off the scanner. “He was released on a fifty-million dollar bond, posted by the East Hampton Writers’ softball team.”
“Perez, tell me,” Ginette was deeply thinking, deeply planning, “if by some chance Mr. Bond was found guilty by a jury, what degree of punishment do you think he would receive?”
“If it’s Casanova convicted of murdering some girl?” Perez laughed, flipping the tab on her vacuum-packed coffee from Japan. “He’d get an amazing book deal.”
Ginette was exhausted, sludging home with low blood sugar. So what that her old boyfriend was a murderer. That fucking Claire deserved it. What a bitch! The way she said certain words was so fucking annoying. The way Claire swallowed was crime enough to justify being disemboweled. Many times, Ginette herself could have sliced Claire up with an axe. Ginette shed no tears and didn’t care, ultimately, if Harrison walked. But it was her three little clients and their fate that consumed her. They were innocent and con-descendable. Plus, it would hurt her promotion potential. If her clients were convicted of murder, she wouldn’t get a raise. It was in the contract. They called it “merit pay.”
More than ever her thoughts turned to Nadine. Now she had no future in counseling at all. If Nadine didn’t call her back, she’d be ruined.
I’m gonna stalk that bitch, she thought. I’m gonna fuck her.
33. IMPERIALISM, THE HIGHEST FORM OF
CAPITALISM
WHEN I FIRST heard about the Claire Sanchez murder trial, I was in my new office. I had done everything that Nadine asked for and gotten a better job writing marketing copy in THE MEDIA HUB. It wasn’t that bad, and she had been right about everything. Once I put all my creativity into marketing, I was quickly promoted up the Byzantine escalator.
The Claire Sanchez murder was the lead story on the 2:45 news and then on the 2:55 news.
Not only was it a juicy passion killing that everyone could identify with, but it brought society’s attention to the prison system and the courts. It was the first time since Sophinisba’s election that someone who mattered had been arrested. There were editorials in all the tennis papers about the necessity of changing those systems immediately, so Harrison could have a trial that was appropriate to his way of life. A new reform movement came out of 1170 Park Avenue called LATS: Lifestyle Appropriate Trial and Sentencing. The members held meetings at the racquet club and got two tasks completed with one volley.
Since LATS and its sister group PECS (People Evaluate the Court System) were filled with all the people in the know, their plan went into action immediately. This brought even more attention to the case since it would be the first to be handled with this new sensibility. Everyone was very excited. Of all the new things that had happened, this was the newest. Rich people manipulating the system on their own behalf was as old as dust, but this time they said so. That really was brand-new. We all patted ourselves on the back for living in such an honest society.
“They’re rebelling,” Nadine said over toast. “Their egos can no longer stand earning money in the background while pretending that they’re not in control. Now that everything they want is in place, the Richies are strutting their stuff. It’s time for them to let us know who’s the boss.”
But Nadine was the only person I encountered who thought this way. Everybody else was enjoying the show thoroughly. In every office, bedroom, whorehouse, bar, and crack den, people were talking about the Sanchez murder. It had all the dimensions that folks love: Death, Sex, Fame. It didn’t have any vague categories like “insider trading,” which most people didn’t totally get. No, this one was about BLOOD. This slaughter was easy and fun. We all loved it. We all followed it every second of the day for months and months.
I remember that the day of the actual trial, I was busy in the DNA room working on a helix. That’s when we develop two publicity campaigns for two competing products, both of which we produce. When all the antitrust laws were recalled as a rider to Sophinisba’s new policy making hairbrushes free for all, researchers determined that people needed and wanted the il
lusion of competition so they could get up in the morning. So, we—the Marketing Division of THE MEDIA HUB—were called upon to provide this service.
Product A was called Weight Loss for Christians by Darleen Mae Bodine, and Product B was called Christian Weight Loss by Archibald Smith, III. One product was for those consumers who identified themselves as white trash in certain kinds of targeted conversations. The other was for those who saw themselves as WASPS. This was complex advertising. Research surveys had shown that people try to outwit advertising by purposefully purchasing out of their own self-perceived niche. They know which ads are supposed to be for them, and it makes them feel excluded. Marketers call this resistance. For example, ads with black actors that were aimed at black people never showed in the same spheres of influence as the white-aimed ads. For this reason we employ the Hall of Mirrors strategy. People who really thought that they were white trash would not want to be so pegged. They had aspirations, after all. So they would buy the stuffier version because then they could imagine themselves to be thirty pounds thinner, and an all-brick Episcopal church came along with the fantasy. Real WASPS, on the other hand, had severe nostalgia for bacon, and when they imagined themselves losing ten pounds, they imagined eating slabs of it with blueberry pancakes on Sunday mornings in the country estate down home. Of course, when either of these niches purchased said object and then proceeded to not lose weight, they would reassess their selection and race to the Christian Diet shop to buy the other volume. Two turds with one bone.
Christian was my favorite department. All the queers and a couple of poets worked there. The most important word to use in the ad copy here was SATAN. Let’s say you were marketing a hardcore, speed-metal Christian acid band. Well, you wanted to get a good juicy picture of Jesus on the cover, and then the copy would say “Easy Listening Is SATAN’s Tool.” And the nuke disc would be called “Jesus, Come Inside Me,” and the band would be called “Virgin, Live.” It was easy.
The Mere Future Page 12