Totally Killer

by Greg Olear

  “But why kill Walter Bledsoe at all? Is the editorial director of a small publishing house really worth murdering? I mean, he’s a fucking editor.”

  “You think a book editor isn’t important to the Grovers? Shit.” Maddox crossed his arms and turned to watch the basketball game. “A book editor runs interference, man. The best way to cover something up is to write a book about it, or make a movie about it—to present what is fact as fiction. Have you caught this new show, The X-Files? The one about the aliens? Half the shit on that show is completely true. But if some reporter were to print the truth now, people would just say, ‘That can’t be true—it was on The X-Files.’ You dig?”

  I dug.

  “Maddox, dude, how do you know all this?”

  “I used to work for Central Intelligence,” he said. “That’s why the inmates leave me alone. And they leave you alone because you’re with me.”

  The bell sounded then, and it was time to return to our cells.

  “What did you do for the CIA?”

  “Black ops,” Maddox said under his breath. “And if you don’t know what that is, believe me, you don’t want to know.”

  The next day, events unfolded exactly as Maddox had foretold, although the damage was not as severe as he’d feared. Sarin nerve gas was released in five places on the Tokyo Metro, killing twelve people. Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult, claimed responsibility. The following month, Timothy McVeigh would blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. And I don’t need to remind you what happened six years later in lower Manhattan—although I will mention that the heat generated by jet fuel is insufficient to melt steel girders, as any metallurgist worth his sodium chloride will tell you.

  That Maddox, incarcerated in a state prison halfway around the world, had predicted the Tokyo subway sarin incident lent credence to his other seemingly preposterous assertions. Maybe the world really was run by sub-rosa alien overlords. It certainly would explain some of the shit that goes on. Advanced societies like ours have the trappings of civility, its shiny veneer; but at its core, the world is a dark, anarchic place that still holds to the law of the lawless jungle. Anything as big and unwieldy as a government inevitably crushes the occasional insect beneath its Colossus’s feet.

  As sarin gas seeped into the Tokyo subway on the morning of March 20, 1995, a prison guard found Maddox in the shower, bleeding profusely from the neck. They never found out who killed him. I don’t think they really wanted to know.

  I feared—and sometimes hoped—that whoever came for Maddox would come for me. But Judgment Day never dawned. Quid Pro Quo didn’t vanish me, nor did they harm my parents or my two extant references—Laura Horowitz and Jason Hanson. I guess they didn’t have to. I was an unemployed actor, a criminal of passion, and a “fucking nut-job,” as Darla Jenkins remarked to the New York Post. I was a cipher, a nebbish, a nothing. I possessed so little threat potential that they didn’t need to have me silenced. Jack Ruby? Please. Next to me, Jack Ruby had the moral credibility of John Paul II. They could leave me languishing in prison, a Cassandra in chains, proclaiming a truth that no one believed.

  And so I languished—for seventeen years, nine months, and twenty-three days. Take the plea? My guess is, Elliott Gross was in on it, too.

  Seventeen years. Nine months. Twenty-three days.

  When I was finally released this past August, I was forty-three years old.

  EPILOGUE

  I

  ndependence Day, 2009. Eighteen years to the day after Taylor Schmidt moved into my apartment. Eighteen short trips round the sun—the interval between birth and high school graduation—and the world is a completely different place. So much technology at our disposal: cheap, ubiquitous technology. Cell phones, BlackBerries, Palm Pilots, DVD players, hi-def TV sets, iPods, satellite radio, camera phones, digital cameras, laptop computers, photo-quality printers, and, of course, the Internet, with its countless applications and conveniences. In 1991, you still had to buy your porn in adult bookstores! On the other hand, the economy is in shambles, and we’re fighting a war in Iraq for reasons only George Bush really understands. The more things change, as they say.

  I am sitting at Taylor’s old desk in Taylor’s old room. Her futon is still here, and her dresser, and, in its bottom drawer, one of her old pink Molly Ringwald sweaters. Though faded by time, the collage of Absolut Vodka ads remains intact, still taped crookedly to the cinderblock wall, giving the room the feel of a freshman dorm. The last of her stray belongings—a forgotten hairbrush, a scrunchie, some torn pairs of pantyhose—litter the floor. I don’t dare pick them up.

  (Yes, I managed to keep the apartment. After my arrest, Jason Hanson became my “roommate,” moving all my stuff into Taylor’s old room and keeping the rest for himself. At first he had ethical qualms about involving himself in my affairs, but he came around—he’d been living in Astoria, and the only way he was ever going to score an East Village address was to take my pad. A murderer may be a murderer, but a sweet sublet is too good to pass up.)

  This sacred space is where I come to reflect, to remember, to write. For the past nine months I’ve sat here every day—sometimes for hours on end, sometimes for just a minute or two—pecking away at the sticky keys of my old Smith Corona, setting down what you have just read.

  My work is almost complete. Just a few loose ends to wrap up—the literary equivalent of a victory lap. Why do I resist beginning the cigarette-after-sex that is the denouement? Are the memories too painful? Do I fear life without the escritoirial therapy I’ve assigned myself? Or am I just hungry for company, however remote, however vicarious?

  It could be because there isn’t much left to relate. Most of the people I’ve told you about are either dead (Taylor; Maddox; Nathan Ross, in a single-car accident on the Taconic Parkway in 1996; my cat Bo, of feline leukemia, in 1993), missing (Trey Parrish, Lydia Murtomaki, Asher Krug, Elliott Gross), or still collecting welfare from the State of Missouri (Darla Jenkins). Even Oxana is gone, and her three-legged dog pissing on the Great Fire Hydrant in the Sky. The only person left to report on is me, and I’m not sure I can pull that off without a healthy dose of self-pity.

  In my defense, I’m still living in 1991, when self-pity was a cultural hallmark. You can hear it in the song lyrics from that era: I’m worse at what I do best. Every finger in the room is pointing at me. Sometimes I feel like my only friend. You gave me nothing, now that’s all I got. I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo. I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me. Asher dismissed it as whining, but was it really that? Ours was a generation crying for help in the only way we knew how. It’s no wonder that 1991’s two most luminous breakthrough celebrities—Tupac Shakur and Kurt Cobain—died so violently, so suddenly, and so soon. They were embodiments of our collective pain, the poor saps. A question for Taylor’s astrologer: was there some cruel portent, some opposition in the stars that made 1991 such a shitty year? It sure seems that way.

  I should be happy, I realize, or at least happier. I’m out of jail. I don’t need to work, thanks to savvy investing of my inheritance (my father died in March of 1992, right around the time that The Real World aired, leaving a surprisingly large nest egg; I bought stock in Amazon at the initial price offering five years later). I still live in the same apartment, paying an enviable rent.

  None of it matters. I’m a prisoner of a memory, of a New York that no longer exists, of a relentless and insatiable hunger for forbidden fruit. I have my freedom, if you’ll forgive a cliché, but I’m not free.

  I will never know for sure whether or not Taylor intended to kill me on that fateful night—if she was reaching for Cold Ethyl or Hot Hester. Both options comprise their own distinct hell. If it was massage oil she was reaching for, then she did love me…and I killed her. Whoops. That’s a Shakespearean tragedy right there, an Othello for the third millennium. It doesn’t get more heartbreaking than that.

  It doesn’t get more heartbreaking than that, except for the o
ther possibility: that she didn’t love me at all.

  If I had it to do again, I would let her make the move—let Taylor either rub my shoulders or rub me out. Love or death: either outcome is preferable to the torment of never being able to know.

  And if that reeks of self-pity, well, too fucking bad.

  Pitying myself is one of the ways I pass the time. What else do I do? I wander around the now-sanitized East Village looking for ghosts (the pretty Asian waif ducking into Sake Bar Decibel—could she be Mae-Yuan?), and I smoke Parliament Lights by the carton, and I play warped mix tapes on my shitty tape deck. I sit at my battered typewriter, and I write—deleting a word here, adding a paragraph there, as new recollections emerge, as my understanding deepens—and I remember. Most of all, I remember.

  Remembering is my only job, and it’s hard work. We are natural-born amnesiacs, hardwired to let go of the past, to release ourselves from history; the only way to withstand our pain is to forget our pain. We may think we don’t forget, but we do. Time wears down the rough edges of our memory, sure as a stone on the river bank is smoothed by the rushing current. And like the eroding stone, the memory fades so gradually, we don’t even feel it. We don’t notice. Eighteen years flow by, whoosh, and we don’t even realize that not that long ago, we didn’t all drink bottled water, the Soviet Union loomed as a threat, smoking was commonplace in restaurants, and Bono was just a rock star.

  Once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky, you meet a woman who just does it for you. Mine died eighteen years ago, and despite all that’s happened, I don’t want to let her go. I want to savor every last detail: her crooked nose, her awestruck stare, her lavender-oil scent, her savory-sweet taste, the stubblebumps under her arms, the Band-Aids on her heels—even the blood on her hands.

  What I want…all I want…is not to forget. But it’s an uphill battle. Over time, the image blurs, the scent dissipates, the memory fades. The memory of Taylor Schmidt, object of my desire, my pity, my obsession, and—above all—my love.

  G.M.O.

  Highland, N.Y.

  2006–2008

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I

  would like to thank the following people for their support, guidance, and encouragement: my crack agent, Mollie Glick, and the entire team at Foundry; my tack-smart editor, Jen Schulkind; Cal Morgan, Carrie Kania, Robin Bilardello, Nicole Reardon, and the rest of the Harper Paperbackers; my teachers: Joe Russo, Jeffrey Shulman, Donn B. Murphy, and John Glavin; Roberto (“Frank”) Aguirre-Sacasa, Jessica Bruce, Colleen Curran, Christine & Michael Preston, Matthew Snyder, and the whole of the DEOCUS Empire—especially the insanely funny Mike Strange, whose throwaway joke back in 1993 was TK’s initial inspiration. I would also like to acknowledge the awesomeness—or the killerness, as it were—of my entire family, especially my parents, my brother Jeremy, my father-in-law Franklin, and my lovely and inspiring children, Dominick and Prudence, whose like-clockwork naps gave me time to write.

  To Stephanie St. John, my beautiful and talented wife, I owe more than I can possibly convey in this short space. I thank her especially for never losing faith, even when I was wallowing in a self-indulgent despair that made me about as fun as a Lars von Trier double feature. This is for you, B.P.!

  About the Author

  greg olear is a frequent contributor to The Nervous Breakdown. This is his first novel.

  www.totallykiller.com

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  Credits

  Cover design by Robin Bilardello

  Copyright

  TOTALLY KILLER. Copyright © 2009 by Greg Olear. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-195998-1

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