 
Blurbs / Pull Quotes

"The Meanest Comic Novel of this, or any, century." —Evelyn Waugh's Ghost

"I thought I had the pen of an angel and the heart of a cad." —Simon Raven (allegedly)

"I roared with laughter! But if they ever catch "Anonymous", they'll hang him!" —Barrack Saddam O'Bama

"World Ends—Women, Minorities Hit Hardest" —Apocryphal New York Paper of Record Headline

"Haters Gonna Hate" —Colloquial American Saying

"Like going after George Clooney with a chainsaw. Which, come to think of it, wouldn't be a bad idea." —Bespoiled Hatcheck Girl, Hollywood, Calif.

"Its intricacy and elaborate plot defy any real classification, yet it has become the uncontested "black humor" classic of our generation. "It is easier to nail a blob of mercury than to describe this novel by Thomas Pynchon." —Saturday Review, on the novel V.

"Of all of the novels we chose not to read this year, this is the finest." —Chicago Review of Books

Put an amazing Charles Willeford quote here. Oh fuck it, Google him yourself.

The Death of L____ D______

A Novel

by

Anonymous

Copyright 2017 by Anonymous.

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to any person, persons, organization, thing, event, incident, or place in the past, present, or future is completely coincidental.

This is a work of parody and/or satire, using hyperbolic and untrue characterizations and exaggerations for comedic effect. So eat a dick.

No part of this book can be reproduced in any form, especially not by mimeograph, nor by any other means (invented or as yet undiscovered) whether electronic, physical, or ethereal, without the express written consent of the author. This book cannot be transmitted physically or electronically without full payment or the express written consent of the author, or the Commissioner of Baseball, or former Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka, Winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, was not used due to a lack of permission. A delightful parody is used instead.

Some rap lyrics made up. The Ballard quote is used without permission or apology.

All trademarks belong to their rightful and respective and respectful owners. No offense intended.

"This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author." Honestly, wasn't that hard. And while you're buying a copy for each friend who has read it, be sure and buy a unicorn too. 'Cause that's about as likely.

All rights reserved.  A. A. Anonymous (2017)

"With cases involving outrageous parody and satire, the path of least resistance has been to find the 'speech' non-defamatory as a matter of law. The rationale used to justify this conclusion is that no reasonable reader could understand the publication as an assertion of fact. The presumption is that satire is so outrageous as to preclude belief is incapable of harming reputation." – From Constitutional Law –Satire, Defamation, and the Believability Rule as a Bar To Recovery – Falwell v. Flynt by Kevin M. Smith

WRITTEN IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Awarded 0 out of 5 on the Bechdel Scale

For Mother

# Prologue

On a sunny bright warm autumn afternoon, a beam of perfect sunlight seemingly designed by The Lord God in Heaven Above to illuminate adorable sleepy kittens, instead found a snoring woman, open-mouthed and sprawled out like an overturned basket of laundry. The Artist would have slept away the entire day in her overpriced yet trendy brownstone until an incessant electronic buzzing awoke her at the crack of two-forty-five in the afternoon. It was her Code Red ringtone, no messing around: awake awake! She fumbled for her cell phone, her mouth slimy, her head groggy, and the back of her neck sweaty—"What? huh?" she slurred. The Artist was not well, still hung over from a night of late drinking and Hectoring, her usually pale "indoor intellectual" pallor now the color of old guacamole in the discount case at a local deli: Chthonic green and corpse gray.

"Hello."

"Uh-hello?"

"Hi. This is Grayson? From The Campaign?" a California lilt at the end of the sentences. These were not questions, they were declarative sentences. And the capital T and C were audible over the phone.

"Grayson, yes, hello!" now bolt upright.

"Are you free this evening?"

"I am!"

"Great. The Candidate will be in Connecticut tonight, could you get up here for a quick meeting?"

"She wants to meet with me?"

"In person!" a smile in the voice. A salesman's smile. You've won a cruise.

"Er, yes. Will there..." The Artist looked down at herself, the bedroom, the mess, the world, trying to orient herself. "Will there be a car?"

"No." Sorrow indicated. "She wants to see you informally, but urgently, you know how it is. Her plans changed, she is in the area, next stop Atlanta! but this gives her a chance to see some dear friends pass the hat. Oh, but this isn't that. This isn't a shakedown. She is fundraising, but with you, it is more strategy and role. Plans and thoughts. The future."

"Wow." Nervous excitement and grandiose plans raced through The Artist's head: Expanded role? Media Coördination? Strategy? Speeches? SPOKESPERSON?!?!? She started to twitch nervously with anticipation.

"Wow indeed. How about 8 pm? On the plane. We are at a smaller airstrip, I'll text you the deets."

She laughed. "Deets? You should be working on the youth vote!" she brown-nosed. Silence.

"OK, I'll get a car, I can be there. Bring anything? Dress?"

"Working professional. You won't be on teevee, sorry. But it IS the next President of the United States, so no sweats, no flip flops. You know the drill. And ideas, if you have any!" Click. Silence.

A rushed sweaty confusion. A quick shower, a showercap like a 50s housewife, clothes clothes clothes. The perfect combination, a funky colorful top and those pants she liked so much. Nothing with Her name, no slogans, nothing too frilly, too dour. Jacket? Yes. Trendy and fresh. Makeup? She cringed. Yes, makeup, a little.

* * *

The Artist sat, alone, on The Plane. It was twenty-seven after eight, which was just on time for the Busiest Woman in the World. The Artist was sitting in an ordinary airline seat, near the middle of the plane on the aisle. Waiting. Small breaths to remain calm. Seated forward, awaiting a take-off that wouldn't happen. She was in the unimproved cabin area, with seats and tray tables and everything the same as any normal airliner. Behind her stood an improvised gray dividing wall, no doubt it hid a world with desks and satellite phones and a bed and giant screens and computers... her mind wandered. She had seen that movie set on The Official Plane. She had seen several. She wished there was a Big Seal with an eagle, arrows in its talon, but even so this whole space was still humming with potential power. Everything was vaguely reassuringly real and familiar and that was mildly unsettling. There was no press, they had all been shepherded to the speech that was the ostensible reason for this visit. Locking up support from a few recalcitrant babies in New England was another reason. A secret fifteen million dollar fundraiser from a few foreign—sorry, Global—leaders was another reason.

Everything was just a little rattier than she imagined. She expected a modern shining world, all slick clear touch screens and AppleStore white surfaces. This was beige and gray and flat. A little beat. Approaching run down, maybe just well used. Smudges on the handles of the overhead bins and loose stitching on the seatbacks and a smell of ... stink. Unwashed masses. Dirty reporters. Half eaten burritos. She inhaled in deeply; it smelled real. The Artist picked at the arm rest. Mild elation swirled with boredom and klung.

A few aides, wearing black&white professional work clothes scurried by. None made eye contact, or if they did, they forced a tight-lipped smile, looked down, moved on. Busy busy.

"The Candidate will see you now."

The Artist looked up, her face a glowing smile. She felt this to the tips of her toes. Her! She and Her! Wow!

She got up and followed the leading back towards the back. A door, people on phones, another door. A small office. And then Her! Sitting in her 'casual media' face, not yet ready to be primped to perfection, but calm and focused in case a camera or cell phone caught The Candidate At Thought. Her hair was that magnificent blonde! She was conferring with an old man in an old man's suit. They murmured. The Candidate looked up. A small smile.

"You can leave us for a few minutes."

The aide who had brought her and the old man exited, closed the door. The Candidate got up from her seat, stretched slightly. She walked around the table. Her blonde hair was perfect. The Artist extended her hand – handshake, or half hug? She prayed for a half hug.

The Candidate slapped her across the face, a full piercing echoing smack. The Artist's head whipped right. Tears welled up. Her hand flew to cover the reddening welt. The crack seemed to echo forever. Copper in the mouth.

"Sit. Down."

Her knees buckled, the edge of her butt felt the bench behind her, she slid onto in down, stunned. Mouth agape. Silenced. Her. She had been slapped by Her!

"Do not cry. I don't have time to deal with your tears or your scenes, and you are walking off this plane in ten minutes and I will never see you again for the rest of my life. I will not have you photographed sobbing leaving My Plane. Suck. It. Up." The accent was slipping between honking nasal Chicago and media plain-speak. The Candidate eased back to her desk. She pointedly did not offer a tissue.

The Artist felt her very power of speech had been slapped out of her. "Wha wha why?" She did not snivel. She did sniffle.

The Candidate smiled, that tight, cruel smile that came out when the whip did. The smile that hundreds of photographers had surreptitiously captured then deleted, no way that shot would be ever used by their editors. The blessed and chosen candidate needed to look tough but fair, not like a She Wolf of the SS. "Oh, I don't know, let me think." She took the papers from her desk and raised them. She recited in a little girl voice: "I think white men should die off. I don't mean we should kill them off, I just think straight, cis-normal, white fuckbois should go extinct. I mean, evolution is real, right? So let's just accelerate the process, White. Men. Should. Go. Extinct."

Silence. Shock and Awe.

"It might come as a shock to you, but the Straight While Male vote might just possibly prove to be important in this election. More, I would sense, than the delightfully diverse and energetic yet missing Brooklyn Youth Vote." The last three words were fired like bullets from the tight, pursed lips.

"Nothing to say? Well, let me just say this then. I grant the position of Youth Social Media Coordinator was ill-defined. But sometimes, people given a little freedom come up with good ideas. They innovate. They push the envelope." (Was that a Southern drawl peaking though?) "I am struggling to think of a single thing you have done, other than churn out this (papers raised in left hand) garbage that turns off 10,000 voters a week. I might lose the Youth Vote. I Might Lose the Youth Vote. You and your cohorts are disengaging in droves. Droves." A pause, a slug of what was probably not water from a plastic cup.

The Artist rubbed her cheek. She would not cry she would not cry. She bit her lip, first lightly, then hard, on the inside, where it wouldn't show.

The Candidate sighed. She tossed the papers into the trash. Done.

"I didn't know what to expect. Or what I even expected. God knows, no one on my stuff understands this staff. Having a Face page is like inventing fire for them. 'Tweet something clever!'" A sneer. "Meanwhile, a million fucks are creating little cartoons of some gosh D frog smoking crack and they are getting traction! And you, you, you're not using your little cluster of creatives to make little cartoons, or funny videos, or viralsongs. You are just pissing me off. And my supporters. And half the country. Nice job."

Silence. Aftershock. The Candidate looked The Artist up and down, shook her head just a little, took a last slug of what was definitely not water from the plastic cup. She stood.

"OK, I need to go and spend another 30 minutes getting spray painted so I can end this 16 hours day in wherever the fuck we are dancing for dollars. Go back to Brooklyn. Not a word, no media. Please, no more media. No Statements. Ever. Just disappear. We are done." And The Candidate got up and walked from the room, leaving The Artist alone.

Eventually, a million years later, she got up. She resisted the urge to look at her red cheek in any and every reflective surface she passed. Shuffled to the door, descended some stairs alone, somehow got home. She had had a million thoughts between the door of the plane and the door of her childhood bedroom, but nothing worth repeating. Just one more humiliation of one whose grasp continually exceeded her reach.

# Chapter 1. Begin to Begin

"Boredom: the desire for desires." ― Count Leo Tolstoi

Epic. That is the only word to describe the rooftop party, and God knows how she feels about rooftop parties. And rooftop bars. Even though that hack cliché word rang false, she knew, Artist that she was, that sometimes clichés rang true, that sometimes the audience cheers when the boy gets the girl (or the boy, she selfcorrected), that sometimes a moment can simply be epic. This was an amazing future memory in her life, and she looked around and savored it and looked around again. Epic. Perfectly Totally Epic. She breathed in heavily through her nose and smiled.

The sun was setting to the West, behind Manhattan, giving a perfect magic hour glow to herself and the people around her, hundreds of party goers: hipsters, trustfundistas, slackers, clackers, chatterers, Twitterers, anyone who was Anybody or wanted to be Somebody all sitting standing leaning over every inch of this trendy new joint in the quasi-fictional neighborhood of MacAdams. MacAdams wasn't really real, of course, it was just the new trendy name for an old, dilapidated place, a buzz word, a "ring the bell and say 'Henry sent me' secret handshake" for those in the know. And these people were desperately in the know.

A few thousand square feet of previously unused and seemingly unusable rooftop was now a place to see and be seen, or rather, tweet and be tweeted, a playground of the young and underemployed. A heat map of social media usage would show this rooftop glowing white hot as the sun, with rays tracing out around the world, to connections in Hoxton, Barranco, The Island Central District, Stumptown's Alphabet Blocks, West Ocean's South Bay, anywhere art districts sprang up, lively ethnically diverse rich&thin people lived downtown, and $15 cocktails were poured.

Later, a foot-by-foot survey of this wonderland may be provided for the pedants, the long history of this ancient brick building detailed, the biographies of the young and beautiful (or at least rich) outlined, but for now just picture their Queen, sunlight shining through her blue hair like the paintings of a Renaissance masterpiece, as she, The Artist herself, surveyed her domain with the hard eye of Louis IX surveying Brittany. It is enough to know these hundreds were all drinking, talking, standing sitting, sitting, flirting, arguing, mugging and mashing under her watchful gaze.

The Artist returned to her court, a loose confederation of creative class participants gathered around three tables pushed together – O Joi! O Columbia!, THREE tables at the hottest get in town! A comedian, a few failing writers, a couple of the almost famous, school days chums, only one or two never-wases for balance and schadenfreude, a few lower class folks for irony, all drifting from experience to experience with an ease that the Lotus Eaters might envy. Tonight was BeautifulPeople behaving beautifully night and they were here and the night was warm the air smelt sweet and all was well. The Artist looked around at the rose and orange colored sky as it gave its hue to all around, the faces like cherubs, the brick glowing with a reflected heat, and she found her voice, the Emmy awarding winning voice to choose the right words at the right time to paint the scene. "Shit, it's fucking beautiful!" she exclaimed, and a chorus of cheers and raised glasses echoed her.

From the end of the table, dissent in the ranks. Her words were being overlapped with one of the comedians trying to work some of his routine into the table chatter. "Texas School board.." "Bible a science book..." "If Jesus is real He could make their Governor walk..." A few decided to pile on, join the circle jerk. "I just don't no why these dum fucks love their Imaginery Freind," one said. "I do, their fucking morans." Laughter. You could hear the misspellings in their speech, they were so dumb. Jesus Fuck.

The Artist stepped in quickly: "Oh, Hack, just stop." Said sweetly. He looked up, shocked. "I mean, we get it, Texans are stupid. Why wreck this soiree by talking about those backwater homophobes?" Smiles. The Artist let her mile-a-minute mind run on a bit as she covered her face with her glass, feigning a deep swig. She turned to the woman to her right, pretended they were buddy-buddy, then loudly: "Jesus, some people are stupid. They read one HuffPo headline about Pluto and they are all suddenly astronomers." She watched the storyteller slink away "to get drinks," a weak grin to his girlfriend. Jesus. Girlfriend. Boyfriend. What was this, 1950? Did they exchange pins? The Artist sighed and shook her head, the bitterness vanquished, but the poison remaining. As it always did, a good internal hate-rant relaxed her a little. Not a lot, but it gave her a smidge, a frisson of calm. Like a micronap. Which she was indulging in more and more these days. The naps, not the rants. Well, both.

She sighed. Another habit to break, she mused bitterly. There was only so much she could do at these things. She wanted the Algonquin Round Table, and she got 15 BoHos talking about blogs and binge watching TV shows. The Artist gnawed on a thumb nail. And, her off again off again boy-friend (ech!) wasn't even here, off playing a gig in some small town in his own private version of Fame Junky.

There was a small pause at the table, and then Ms. Know It All took a deep breath, like she hadn't just heard the memo. Early-ish 50s, formerly cute, formerly a red head, formerly practically an It Girl of the moment, she had transformed into the very Platonic ideal of New York caricature. Embittered, drunk, rich, pissy. She weighed 94 pounds. She had money but no one knew how or where or why. UES, naturally. Yoga pants on a night out! She had built a small audience at the right side of the table and was playing to it. "All those fat asses sit around, getting their pasty asses lumpy eating white bread, watching reality tele-vision and wanting to be a Kardashian. That's what's wrong with them." Then she took a swill of her $27 a glass California Cabernet Sauvignon (Wooden, tart, a little bitter on the tongue but runs to fruity. Both the wine and the winedrinker). Light applause, a small nod-bow. It was the sort of conspicuous consumption and utter contempt and sneering disdain for working folk (volk? Plods? Trumpers? Trumpen Proletariat? God forbid!) that would make a Versailles-era French nobleman blush. Or elect a populist hero-madman.

The Artist turned away, a deeper frown etched between her jowls. When did such gross hate become mainstream? Was the destruction of manners and civility in the media leading to people acting like this? Had two generations of 'burn it all down' led to the rubble of modern behaviour? At long last had they killed decency? Impossible, she 'concluded', for that would imply her grandparents might be right and she and her ilk might be wrong and that was logically impossible. But why did every smart-ass have to be such a meanie?

The Artist slumped back in her chair, exhausted. Normally she would have engaged and shut down the show off. She liked a good tussle. But it all seemed so meaningless now. What was the point? She and they would go on and on and The Epic Night sunset moment was ruined. All she wanted was some good conversation, some good drinks, a mindful and mindless night. Maybe thin thighs. Instead she had this, just One More Night in an endless parade of stupid nights. Just a mouth and an eye, roaring through the Known Universe, accumulating emptier and emptier experiences without goal, meaning, or purpose.

# Chapter 2. New Kid In Town

"Thinking that New York was Ancient Rome /

Droppin' and Dollarin' /

Where the sky burns your soul, like red-foam /

Get Rich or Die Hollerin'"

– DJ "Doc" Asserge

Steve and Katie rode the small, industrial elevator to its very tip top. He was an obvious oblivious out-of-towner, she was trying to Make It There. He had khakis and a "nice" work shirt, she in a 50s retro dress from a thrift shop. Thrifty cool not thrifty bummy. They were a ten month dating couple and the small flecks of foam that appear near the rocks of a rocky relationship were just starting to appear. He held her hand, she gave a squeeze but then let go. The elevator door opened. This evening was an unofficial trial, neither wanted to fail. Big night out in the Big City.

The wall of partysound hit them—two hundred laughing, yelling, arguing, talking people. The music came as a low series of thumps they felt rather than heard. They went down the narrow corridor, nodded to the Security Dude, then emerged onto the roof.

Pandemonium. There was only that one way to describe it.

They were there because she wanted to be there, and he wanted to want to be there. You don't live in the Greatest City in the World™ without taking advantage of it. That was her mantra and she lived it. Lectures. Art openings. Museum Free Nights. And a chance to go to the happeningest bar in 30 blocks? During a special event? Done. Obtaining entrance required a little finagling, she had to appear to have rented a room in the hotel next door, as the bar technically belonged to the same building. She cancelled immediately, but only after calling to get her name on the list. A sneaky move, and a lucky move. But she and her plus-one had made it in. "Katie Jesper, Room 418" was yelled into the ear of the downstairs bouncer, and whooosh, the velvet rope lifted. Elevator to the top. It was a New York moment. The feeling of arrival and importance.

Like gawking tourists, they surfed the crowd and drank it in. To the left, a three man Art Crew performed. Two men laid down a hip-hop / trance / electronic / groove / chill beat that was played with finesse on computers and mock turntables. Boom-chk chk boom-chk chk. A third man stood before an enormous canvas, taller than himself, wider than his arms. Huge palettes of paint stood at waist level, his huge, gnarled hands soaked in colors. He examined the work in progress, reached down, took a huge scoop of emerald green, and smeared a huge half circle above his head, a green comet trail screaming across the sky. His left hand took some of the wet yellow already applied and made swirls and circles. The painter followed the rhythm of the music, the music read the score of the painting. They intertwined. They flowed. It was simultaneously wonderful and terrible.

The painter had cunningly been placed against a huge slab of a brick wall that divided North Roof from South Roof, and his gigantic canvas blocked the view of the vents and chimneys and fittings and ducts and elevator heads that comprised the roof of a working building. Their burbling and whirring and grinding and hissing noises were cunningly disguised by the DJs. He even sampled them and used them on a track. Genius! A camera crew filming some youthful idiots on a reality TV show used the DJ and the canvas art as a backdrop. Ropey-muscled youths and cleavage-baring babes dropped pre-written insults to the lens handled by a Film School drop-out.

Regardless, what would have been a dark, cold, out of the way corner of the South Roof was thus transformed. Feng Shui. Lazarus party planning, the dead zone come to life. The art space ended at Bar Area #3 (per the computer that tracked every dram and gram of booze that flowed at this hippest of hip joints). Small tables, crammed with too many chairs, rocked and wrecked and flowed out of all plan, crashing against the long bar. Bar #3 was really a series of banquet tables covered in polyester white tablecloths. Quick drinks were poured in profusion for the desperate: gallons of mojito, jugs of sangria, tall boy PBR. $10 flat, please tip. No waiting for the thirsty. No rest for the wicked. If you couldn't stand hanging around for twenty minutes to get a $20 rum and coke with an ironical pun name over there, you could grab a plastic 22 ounce glass of booze and sugar for a tenner right here. The hoity-toity of the North Roof would be served their basil-infused craft moonshine mixologist-inspired pun-named sugar bombs by mustachioed humans, this was for the second ran.

Not that any New Yorker looked desperate, they just needed to not stand in line so they could go stand somewhere – anywhere – else. The New Yorker and the Los Angelino share the habit of looking over the shoulder during conversations, searching for anyone better to be talking to.

"Do you want something?"

"Not here." Already Katie's developing True New Yorker instincts had kicked in. This is for the rubes. They pressed on.

As they transitioned from East to West, the tables were less scattered, held in place by the sheer will of the roving wait-staff. A few long tables presented along the West wall, giving the amazing city and sunset views that dominated social media posts about how amazing everything up here is. Suits crept into the dress mix. Teams of young people (Flocks? Swarms? Schools? Baskets of Millennials?) sat around small tables, drinks in hand, laughing, gossiping, talking deeply.

Steve took it all in. The Engineer in him was uncomfortable, and the human side was afraid this discomfort would emerge as sarcasm. He had once blurted, "Is this how people have fun?" at a nightclub, and he was serious. He was Serious with a capital S. He wanted to have fun and relax and unwind, but his big brain just wouldn't let him. But he tried. He held her hand and tried to blend in. He smiled. No stick in the mud here!

They miraculously found two seats at the bar, he had swiftly struck when another couple started to settle up. She smiled at his decisive moves, she loved a man of action! They were another 20-something professional couple, trying out the new toys of adulthood: first apartment, first pet (maybe a puppy next year), first TV, first real relationship, first adult dinner out. They were beginning to try on the Long Term Real Relationship clothes, to some success.

"This is great."

"Yeah."

They weren't great talkers, these two. He had transitioned from years with his nose stuck in big Russian novels to years with his nose glued to a computer screen. She was working for a very creative industry in a non-creative way. It was exciting to say she worked for the biggest jewelry and perfume house in the world, it was not exciting to say that she had been shunted to HR. But paychecks were good and the experience was fine. She just feared that she had already been judged and found wanting. Not creative, not world-beating. But able to fill out forms and not be an idiot and could show up regularly unlike the creative types. She watched a lot of TV, he watched a lot of technical videos about new computer languages and data flows. She wanted to be a fabulous New Yorker, but the secret in her soul that she dreaded was that she was as suburban and boring as everyone she had known growing up. She had the heart of a minivan driver. He, on the other hand, had hidden layers, but kept them hidden. Like most engineers, he was a little shy. Unlike most engineers, he was thinking about the soul and technology. Mainly because he had watched The Ghost in the Shell. But no one liked talking about that stuff. So they smiled and looked around and made observations. They were at the stage where they felt comfortable silence meant they were comfortable with each other, when in fact they were already out of words.

"How is yours?"

"It's good. Want to try it?"

"Nah. It'll corrupt my tastebuds. Yours is all fruity. And very ruby red."

"I can't believe you got a drink and not a beer."

"This is the big league, right? We belong."

"We are fancy." They tapped glasses. And looked at the crowd. More interesting people came in through the little door. The sky went from naturally bright to artificially bright, reflecting the billions of street lamps, and illuminated signs, and all the glory that was the Greatest City in the World™. And they were on top of it, basking in reflected light. There was a metaphor in there somewhere.

# Chapter 3. To Be Named Later

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love." —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

With middle night, a new party vibe had settled. The first drinks of the evening were sitting merrily on the liver, causing loud talking, quiet intense conversation, arms grabbed, and shoulders grasped. Food! The Artist was hungry. She had long since quit trying to diet while on a bender—counting calories when consuming 3000 calories of alcohol and mixer was dispiriting (ha!), wounding, and impossible, based on alcohol's ability to destroy math centers first. Shame centers second. She had long believed that she could have good days and cheat days and magically not be 50 pounds overweight. Or that if she complained hard enough, society would see dumpy women who didn't care about their looks as sexy and desirable. Neither had happened. She reached for the menu.

The little strip of plastic-sheathed mock parchment was tucked in between the fake candles on every table, the exact contents of which were the result of intense negotiation that would have made the Treaty of Versailles and Council of Trent appear to be mild disagreements between dear friends. Food cost per unit, hipness quotient versus what drunk people would actually eat, trendy ingredients versus what could be prepared and served at 1 in the morning, all these battles had led to the list before The Artist, a perfectly cultivated series of "Late Night Bites." Or what wags called "Kale and Cabernet."

"Jewish Deli Reuben Pot Stickers." She read aloud. "Poke tuna nachos." (She pronounced it poke, rhymes with Coke) "Linguica and duck egg omlet wraps." "Laotian sweet potatoe skins with crème fresh and truffle oil dipping sauce." She looked up, a wild jagged grin lighting her face: "I love this Town!" Even so, a little voice in her head, the insistent one, the Right At All Costs voice, spoke up, thankfully just in her head: "Cultural Appropriation". And it was right. That all these awful White People (she so hated White People) would steal — steal! — these amazing cultural heritages and turn them into consumerist crap. How dare they? Three great dilemmas began silently warring in her head:

1. The desire to hector and lecture everyone on the wrongness of their actions versus the desire to still have a fun evening and not always be seen as a nag

2. The desire to throw this menu away in disgust for its terrible yuppie bourgeois nouvelle fusion bullshit versus the desire to stuff her face with the deliciousness it promised

3. The desire to make a righteous point about not exploiting all the world's cultures versus the desire to benefit from them, while still personally leading a consumerist lifestyle that stripmined native peoples (peoples's?) culture and ways of life to momentarily distract empty flesh shells without souls like herself.

Third things first, her brain said drunkenly and happily. In her heart of hearts, The Artist suffered from "Restaurant Diversity", the idea that she truly loved and cared for all for the world's peoples since she ate at ethnic restaurants. "I soooo miss Brooklyn" she had said that Sophomore year in that hick backwoods college, "you can walk down the street and get Thai or Kenyan or Ukrainian or anything! It really is the United Nations. This place could learn a lot from that." For her and her ilk, foreign immigrants (especially foreigners! Double especially illegal immigrants, er undocumented guest humans!) were welcomed deeply and completely so long as they had a delicious flavor offering to make and were willing to slave in hot, sweaty kitchens 14 hours a day, 7 days a week to allow the connoisseur to have his/her/zees pick of whatever interesting snackie could be made available at any time. Restaurant Diversity turned a fascinating culture, language, and peoples into just another procurable treat to be enjoyed by the elites. And if you could Virtue Signal while nibbling on that exploitation, so much the better.

For a few weeks after the Catastrophic Event, she had lost her appetite, it was true. 'The Destroyer was so effective he could even get her to lose weight' was one popular joke. But no, like a recent divorcée, she merely found that pleasurable things suddenly had no appeal. It all seemed a joke, and partly a joke on her. There were long walks in the park, professions of a new outlook, long nights of the soul (and YouTube), even a sudden burst of "spirituality" et cetera et cetera. Then, after a month or two or three, her real self returned. A man who is nearly crushed by a falling rock might change his ways, but when rocks stop falling he will surely change back. She hadn't found God, but she had re-discovered knishes.

As for the first thing, is it wrong to gently remind people of the Greater Struggle? If they aren't Woke to their actions they would never change them. She sighed and looked at the drunken table of fools around her. It was like an 18th century print, the one warning of the dangers of drink. She knew, after many long years of pissing people off, that sometimes people just want to enjoy themselves and couldn't devote themselves, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (or "24x7x365" as she had nearly tattooed on her forearm) to making the world the better place. Not the time. But maybe for her next podcast.... She made a mental note to steal the menu and literally destroy it and all it stood for next time she was in studio. Figuratively destroy it. Whichever.

As for point number 2, Justice versus Grease, Grease won. Greasy always won. They could disguise its name or where it lurked but late night drunk diners wanted grease and starch and fat. And deep fried pot stickers or fried quinoa chips covered in oily tuna cubes and liquid cheese and sour cream would always do the trick. Her Pavlovian response to late night food had been ingrained by a generation of drinking. She had heard of skinny bitch women and their "burn clean" or "rocket fuel" or "drinkorexia" theories, but she had never been able to follow them.1

Footnote [1] By sticking to clear liquids with but a single mixer: gin and tonic, margaritas made just with tequila and diet mix, bloody marys, vodka / soda, gin n juice, etc and not eating, one could achieve an amazing drunken high that promised fun, a longer burn (mid-day through late night), less sloppiness, and no hangover. But, the clean burning drinker must not waiver: no beer, no snacks, nothing but pure clear liquors. You could go to the moon and keep your trim figure if this was your drinking formula. Few had the fortitude; the challenge was great, but so too was the reward.

Sigh. A brief hand gesture brought the waitron, a whispered command ("put together a montage of most of these and bring them in 20 minutes for everyone"), menu dropped and forgotten. In the end, that's what it all came down to: choosing self destruction in any number of ways, self justifying it, then forgetting about it. She took a long final swing of her "Moonshine Mama Old Fashioned" (Brooklyn sourced unaged clear whiskey, some bullshit Croatian sweet vermouth that looked fancy but wasn't, a fruit 'slurry', a whiff of Tang(!), and ironically-made in-house bitters with hints of black walnut and habañero) and slammed the faux jelly jar to the table. She thought again about taking up smoking.

The Artist sighed. "I'd get a stomach staple for feminism," she said in her head. The shame eating was eating at her.

"Fuck!" she accidentally cried out aloud. Her inner turmoil spilling over. She covered, yelling loudly again: "Fuck!" and raised her glass. She received cheers and raised glasses acknowledging this new toast. She smiled back at them to cover her slip. "That was close!" she thought. "Talking to oneself is bad, doing so in public is crazy, doing so at the table? Certifiable." She vowed to keep it in check. Sanity was her second favorite mantra.

"What's that, Athena?" she asked silently, her hand grasping her talisman in her pocket. She had found a magic, sacred rock deep in a hidden valley in Arizona, when she went there to rise herself up. There, she could speak to the whole planet, the trees, the scrub, the dirt, the stars. And there she met Athena, a Powerspirit thousands of years old (The Artist began to rub the sacred stone in her pocket in small circles with her thumb). Athena had told The Artist that she is Lightbringer, one who can provide light into dark corners. She will illuminate the minds of those who are not yet woke to Truth. The Artist felt herself literally electrified by the power in this healing quartz. "Ohm. Ohm." she mantra'd.

* * *

Katie, it turns out, was very good at being a bar buddy. She would actually look at a new person at the bar and say, "Hi, I'm Katie!" like a person in a movie from the distant black and white past. She kept the plot moving. She wanted to engage the stranger, learn more, share. This was New York! It could be an artist or a designer or any of the Creatives that kept the city thrumming. On one of the first dates in this new city with her man, they had chosen a trés Ritzy hotel bar with murals and light tinkly music and very very attractive hostesses. The room was so crowded that they had been forced to share a standing table with a stranger. Who was the head of a very big marketing firm in London, just in New York for two days for business. A jet setter! In an impeccable suit. Together, the neat little man and his amazing suit looked like they had stepped out of a fashion ad; he admitted to having once been a model.

This man was almost an object to be coveted, for his effortless wealth and power and class. Katie, aware enough to deduce that he must be gay, still vaguely dreamed of someone like him in her life—suit wearing and plane hopping. Steve had made light conversation, seemingly unruffled by his own scruffy business-nice demeanor. He was deliberately practicing the Art of Conversation skills he was learning via podcast, and they seemed to be working. The man used his own natural powers of charisma to query and charm the two. He noted their small hand-holds, the smiles, the relaxedness they shared, and at the end of the night whispered into Steve's ear 'hold onto her, she's quality' before whipping a scarf around his neck and leaping into a hired towncar. A post modern super hero.

Tonight, on the rooftop bar (a phrase Katie held in contempt along with all 'real' New Yorkers), was less exciting. People were out in clusters, groups of friends and colleagues, all keeping to themselves. There was no nut to crack. She peered to the middle of the roof, noted the long royal table and even caught a glimpse of the honored guest. That might have to be the big excitement for the evening, she thought sourly.

Steve, on the other hand, seemed a more than a little bored. He was on his best behavior (no checking the phone!) but the bored little boy inside all men was craving attention. He disliked drinking for its own sake, seeing it as a lubricant, or preferably catalyst for a good evening out with friends and merriment. He was starting to fear that this was truly and deeply not his scene. And what that might mean long term with his long term.

"Girlfriend! OhMyGod!" Right in her ear. Katie flinched, then turned, grinned, hugged, made happy noises.

"Anna!" Old friends. College roommates. The two of them went from zero to one million in no time. Anna knew Steve, approved of him even, but was middle-drunk and gregariouser than usual. The two ladies were instantly bonded. Deep diving into the terra unfirma of old friends, who was still with who(m), how the job was, where are you living, aren't roommates the worst. All of the topics that deep friends use to probe and prod themselves and re-weave the blanket of love that surrounds them.

Steve truly didn't mind seeing Katie be so happy. He was convinced that couples needed outside activities, friends, Bands of Brothers and all that. He listened in, watched their hands flutter with excitement. Anna discussed grad school plans. Katie her new apartment. Where to get bagels. After a few minutes he smiled, his "I'm going to stroll a bit" went unheard, and left them sharing pictures on their phones.

Chapter 4. Flashback: A Year Or So Before the Fall: A Look Back at The Artist in Winter

"I know it's hard to watch, but this is what happens when you have the artistic temperament, but you're not an artist." — Mad Men (set in New York)

INTERIOR: A work-loft in Brooklyn, DAY. A long conference table, modern chairs, desks along the wall. More artistic than financial. Several rumpled creative types sit in expensive office chairs around the main table. The Artist sits at the head seat. Papers are in piles everywhere: notebooks, tablets, scripts.

THE ARTIST: OK people. We need ideas. We have a Production Schedule to meet, but we also need the Idea that shall be Next. This Gravy Train is ending. Go!

CREATIVE #1 Do you want to break the patriarchy? Be famous? Be on TV?

THE ARTIST: Yes to all.

CREATIVE #1 Demand to be an announcer for Monday Night Football. Sit in the booth. Point out the inherent sexism. Refuse to buy in. Fame. Shock.

CREATIVE #2 Is Monday Night Football still on?

CREATIVE #1 I think so. It was big a few years ago. Well, whatever. Sunday Night football. Announce. Critique. Destroy.

THE ARTIST I will not sit in Cleveland watching football. I'd have to learn about it!

CREATIVE #3 Not necessarily.

THE ARTIST Next!

CREATIVE #2 Become a DJ. Work clubs. Share that great music you love.

THE ARTIST Do you mean opera because that is what I listen to. Jesus, do you people...

CREATIVE #3 I have been playing with an idea, but can't quite tease it out. A show about a pre-civilized community, Cavemen I guess. We see who really did what, who ruled whom. Fire gatherers, hunters, we base it on the actual anthropology being done on these pre-history societies. African tribes or bands, gathering... Story telling. It would mirror our times, of course.

THE ARTIST And the dialog? Where would we film it?

CREATIVE #3 Oh, it would be a challenge. I guess I just always think of that stone carving of a woman, the famous one, the oldest man made object or whatever, and what she must have been like. Worshiped. And the way real men would have acted back then. Was the female society peaceful and tolerant, fending off these crazed spear wielders? Drama, survival....

THE ARTIST I'll make a note. What are we calling it?

CREATIVE #3 The Giraffe Fucker.

A Long Pause.

CREATIVE #4 Are you trying for a serious set of ideas to change yourself as a person? Or something that we, your writing staff, can work on?

THE ARTIST Yes.

CREATIVE #1 So women's softball is out?

THE ARTIST Get out! You are FIRED. I don't like those sniggering 'oh I'm being retro sexist so it's OK' bullshit remarks. (She stares down the unmoving Creative #1.) I'm serious. Done. Go.

(Creative #1 gets up, leaves everything on the table but the laptop, and saunters out. A hurled stapler bounced impotently against the wall near the door.)

CREATIVE #3 (to CREATIVE #4) So being the MC for the Match Game is out, too, huh?

CREATIVE #4 (sotto voice) Shame, I loved that show.

THE ARTIST God d--- it people, I'm up to my nose in the Patriarchy and you people are not even trying ... to... bail out the ocean!

(She lost it at the end, but the tone conveyed all. Twenty minutes in and the meeting was over. No new ideas, no plans. Just web surfing and ass covering for the rest of the day. She stewed. Her role as Muse was unfulfilled.)

* * *

(DAY FOR NIGHT) Later, in a Bohemian living room somewhere in the Bubble. Marijuana smoke wafting. Reggae (really?) playing low.

THE ARTIST Maybe a comic book!

BEST FRIEND / CONSTANT COMPANION Can you draw?

THE ARTIST No! Fuck that. Get some Art School drop out, or use computers or something. No, I'd write a Feminist Comic Book. Grrrl Power! Something clever. Just In Time... Justine Time!

BESTIE Justin Time is in a comic book already.

THE ARTIST So this would be the Feminist Parody! She really does all the work, and he's a dick, and...

BESTIE Yeah, I guess (Unconvinced)

THE ARTIST Shit, maybe I could just drop a single.

They toked some more.

BESTIE I mean, you don't want to Instagram your life do you?

THE ARTIST What do you mean?

BESTIE Instagram is where uncreative people take pictures of creative people things, so they think they're creative.

THE ARTIST I am creative. I just don't have an outlet for the energy is all.

# Chapter 5. Up On The Roof...

"Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill." \- Sir Arthur (Conan Doyle)

The Artist was thinking. Back away everyone, and be silent, for The Artist is thinking! She wished. No courtiers to clear the room, no bodyguards to force the masses to stream hurriedly to the exits. Instead, she had left the table. Wandering to clear the head. She was missed, a little, but the revelry had reached the level of drunkenness that people were forming little knots or drawing into themselves. She looked at the bar, wandered by the staff station, headed towards the exit. Was she ready to go home? Pull an Irish Exit? No. Not yet. She wasn't drunk, wasn't sad, wasn't tired. She was... Expectant. Anticipatory. The ideas she had had rolling around in her head were starting to settle. Marbles into slots. She could feel how close she was to solving the problem. Her existential angst was self-resolving. Cool.

The Artist was on the horns of the Classic Artist Dilemma, horns that had gored—or crucified? —so many artists before her. What Next? Not just What Next? as in the next project, but what next considering what had gone before. One can only plow the fields so many times before they must lay fallow. Rotate the crops. Let the old lay still and all that. But, being the bête noire to so many imaginary villains—the imaginary Legion of Patriarchal Decency never actually got around to threatening to shut her down—being the belle of the Progressive Ball, being shocking and disgusting for Shock and Disgust's sake alone, those gowns were wearing thin. For years, she had simultaneously shocked the Bourgeoisie while castigating them for being shocked. "Why are you staring at me as I try to draw your attention?" Break the norms, then lament you are only recognized for being an iconoclast.

This evening had uncovered hidden depths within the internal jungle of the mind that she had been exploring for months. You could only spend so much time jumping up and down as an outsider then demanding to be an insider. You could only tear down the house so many times before it became clear you just wanted a roof yourself. "I'm not serious, take me seriously." And worst of all, worse than being bored or boring, was the knowledge that the Gravy Train will end some day. The twenty year old cutting herself or spitting on the audience becomes the 30 year old druggie, the 35 year old sell out, the burned out, the lights out.

She left the last edges of the crowded area, wandered past the elevator and bouncer, turned to the far portion of the roof. It was completely deserted. The DJ was long gone, as was the canvas and the finger painter. She stopped for a moment. Alone? In New York? Alone but not lonely? Friends fifty feet away but completely estranged? She grinned. She felt a rush ~~~ how cool! She was in an area the size of a dance floor on a roof on a mild night in the Greatest City in the World™. She twirled. The moon beamed down, lighting the buildings and the sky scrapers. She walked and skipped, enjoying the sense of space. She breathed deeply. Problems were being lifted from her shoulders like cloaks from a princess's shoulders by singing birds in a fairy tale. She came to the edge of the roof. She was astonished that she felt no acrophobia, nor Vertigo. The building across the alley loomed above her. She stepped onto the parapet, the little foot high ledge that crowned the roof. She thought about "King of the Worlding" her arms, thought better of it.

A cool fog was rolling into The City, leaving the mass of buildings indistinct, but their tops black and well-defined, like puffs of flak (ack-ack!) from a World War 2 movie. There was meaning there, she knew it. Her months of mental and verbal struggle were coming to an end, she could feel the myriad ideas rattling round her head about to still. The roulette ball slipping into a winning slot.

She looked down into the urban canyon below and felt a sense of infinity she had felt a million times as a New Yorker, but which felt brand new again this night. The wind whispered up the face of the building and tickled her chin and blew back her hair. It felt clean. It was like being on a cliff after a rain storm overlooking the ocean in south England. A children's story about a rural walk with rabbits and deeper meaning. She turned her face up to the sky and grinned widely. As an Artist, she knew when Artistic Inspiration was about to arrive, it was coming. She was frozen in a perfect moment, aligned mind, body, soul, Universe. She stretched meditatively, and waited for the lightning bolt to strike.

* * *

It was not yet even one thirty in the morning, floating above the Greatest City in the World™. The rooftop bar was in its later stage of the evening: the many had left, the hardcores had stayed. There was a rumble, but it was muted. Lovers laughed, drinkers drank, illegal cigarets were lit. Not everyone could hang until 4 a.m. (and sometimes after), but those who wanted to make the night count were trying.

Steve wandered aimlessly, drinkless. Katie was still hooked up with her former dear friend at the bar, and they were still in deep conversation, medium drunk, sharing anecdotes. Steve wasn't jealous, not upset, but didn't want to third wheel (huckleberry?) Katie while she was bonding. Plus, Steve knew jealousy wasn't sexy, so he gave them some space. Develop a sense of mystery and all that.

He was wandering past the tables, crowd-watching while strolling, enjoying his mild buzz. Like a lot of science-math-tech types, he distrusted a loss of mental control, but enjoyed thinking about losing control. He analyzed his drunkness. The few times he had smoked weed, he had tried to analyze his failing intellect, tried to time his slowing thoughts.

Right now, he was 'just right.' Drunk enough to be happy, not too drunk to be sloppy. He had followed the rules: only one kind of liquor, no sugars, drink water. He felt like a fighterjet, burning clean on pure afterburner. He looked up. The skyline, glowing almost as bright as day, was still a shocking site. It was like living by the ocean, the Grand Canyon, and The Future all at once. He never tired of the New York skyline, the skyscrapers towering above looking down, the cliff wall across the river, streetlight orange clouds running through the tops of the streets. He thought maybe he could live here. He smiled. He was happy. And he knew he was happy.

Steve turned the corner. He was past the elevator, past the bouncer stand (temporarily vacant, as the arrivals had trickled to nearly none), around to the art zone. He entered the Dead Zone. The corner of the roof that was impossible to event-plan. The big, blank brick wall had hosted the street artist and the hip-hop spinner hours ago, but they were gone. Behind it one could feel the throbbing of heating, cooling, elevator, water, power. Physical Plant, his brain helpfully supplied. He saw the stacked temporary tables that had sat laden with hundreds of plastic cups to serve the first waves of revelers. Those, too, were vacant. "Am I alone in New York?" he asked internally. Had he been able to find an oasis solo in the most bustling populace in the world? Well, America.

He looked up, spun slowly once, taking it in. Were those stars? Unlikely. He wanted to spread his arms and twirl, but there was no way he would do that in public. And, he was not alone. He looked to his left, there was someone there! Standing, a statue on the roof's edge. Like a gargoyle, balanced on the rim of the roof. Two souls, alone under and in the sky, a fingernail of moon beaming down on them. He was not a poetic man, but in this moment, he felt the pull of something primal. A mimesis. Two souls, in Nature, alone, cut off from all society. Or were they under the eye of God? An Old Testament God. Crossing a plain, in the dark, alone. Mary and Joseph? Abraham and Isaac? His limited knowledge of Christianity and the Bible, of Art in general, left him with fragments of thoughts. He had taken a few philosophy classes in college but had put in as little effort in those as possible; calculus problemsets took priority. His Russian novel phase had ended a half a decade ago.

So he was not completely unarmed in the face of beauty, art, or a skipped beat in the heart murmur of the Universe. But as a post-modern secularist, he was not well-prepared for the sudden frisson that seemed to surround everything like an electric field. He felt he could feel the crackling of St. Elmo's Fire from the metal chimneys and antennae on the nearby roofs. He knew it wasn't real, but it was real to him. What was he feeling?

Steve took stock, deep breath, blinked, rationality returned. Nothing was happening to him. He hadn't been drugged, there was no metaphysical spirit present. He had, instead, been consumed by a perfect existential artistic moment. His brain, reading in the scene, had created a work of art, and he had momentarily entered it. It was like seeing a field in France with Van Gogh's eyes, or sculpting with Bernini's hands, or designing The Bomb with Oppenheimer's brain. He was suddenly connected with his surroundings, saw them with a perfect fourth dimensional perspective, then it all went away. He was himself again.

He took a sudden breath, returned to himself. He retained a faint echo of his... alignment... with reality. And it was gone. There was no sorrow, this wasn't looking deep into the true face of the Universe and being torn away sobbing. It was hearing a secret and immediately forgetting it, but being glad you had participated in the secret telling itself.

He looked around again. Everything was as it was. The sky, the buildings, the moon, the clouds, the faint music, the brick wall, the City, the girl. Still standing there, looking out, across the way, feeling the wind whispering up from the edge of the roof. He walked slowly but surely towards her like a Fate, a Fury, an Artist. He did not slow until he was right behind her and she didn't hear him and she raised her head to look at the sky and he put his hand on the lower portion of her meaty back and pushed.

# Chapter 6. "Untitled"1.5

"Science!"

It was a quirk of physics, of aerodynamics and ballistics really, that led to what happened happening.

When The Artist departed the roof, she was extending upward and outwards, her body a huge inhale, breathing in the Universe. When the push came, she jerked forward, adding forward velocity to the shove, causing her to go Out, as well as Down. Her feet kicked the ledge, adding a smidge of momentum to her final swan dive. The mild wind, so cooling and refreshing, added a whisper of lift and pull, also drawing The Artist forward.

We will leave her last moments private, whether she laughed or cried, felt exulted or panicked. (Secretly, we will tell you she felt the bliss that the brain gives the body when it senses the end is very near. No white light, but a sense of awe and wonder and joy. Then blackness. No suffering. Just silence). She landed across the way, hitting a large pile of garbage full on, a bellyflop onto the pavement, cushioned by 30 gallons of sealed air and trash in several strong black plastic bags.

She bounced, well 'skipped' is a more accurate verb, upon landing. Regardless, she ricocheted forward upon impact, ending her fall and her life half in and half out of a little side alley, face down, in a relaxed pose. Her face tucked into her arm, her clothes askew, she looked to all the world as a homeless woman, passed out peacefully from a long day. Her ghetto-fabulous wardrobe, originally an echo of the poor's clothing, now wrapped her ironically. In this moment, she belonged. An earlier age would consider this fall to be both physical and metaphorical, from the highest heights of wealth and privilege to the lowest low in the City. A match girl frozen on Christmas Eve, the wealthy heiress and artist and bourgeois princess now identical to and no better than a beggar, Prince and Pauper secretly the same. But these are not Victorian Times with Victorian values and morals, this is a more cynical age.

The Artist lay flat in a mound of the City's detritus. Her killer didn't look down to see What He Had Wrought. He appeared unmoved, but was radically and irrevocably changed in ways he would struggle with understanding. He turned and wandered back to the party. He found his girlfriend at the bar, ordered a vodka/soda, and listened to their conversation. After a while, they yawned, rode the elevator down, cabbed to her apartment. Slept. Dreamless.

Footnote [1.5] Really, Apple iBooks, the chapter title is "Untitled." Sorry to mess with your fragile, narrow little minds. Not a lot of surrealist fiction read out in Cupertino, I gather. Not a lot of your joyless programmers cracking Joyce's Ulysses on the weekend. I can't imagine what you'd do if this were the original version, with a humorous fake Table of Contents ahead of the real TOC. I imagine a 60s robot flailing its arms "does not compute," like when Captain Kirk tries to get them to explain "Love." (Sorry, Dear Readers, but the book was flagged and Apple wouldn't accept it over the title "Untitled". Wait'll they notice the out of order footnotes --deliberate -- and the missing Chapter Number -- also deliberate!)

* * *

The Artist was witnessed in the street several times over the next few hours – noticed and forgotten by a drunk couple, pointedly ignored by early morning runners, glanced at and looked away from by a few locals. By eight a.m. the body, still generally perceived as an unconscious or drugged homeless woman, was too obvious to ignore in the delicious glare of the morning sun.

"C'mon sugar, up up up" sang the merry Beat Cop, in a surprisingly good mood this fine clear morning. No Response did not sour him, he merely poked the unmoving body, expecting a groan or a grunt. Nothing. As evidenced later, 8:12 was the call-in. And due to the location, the scene of the crime, the lack of identification, and some understandable decisions that would be lamented later, the body remained unidentified for Far Too Long.

Of course, no one from The Artist's entourage had reported a crime. By three a.m., people were beginning to make their final plans: home, someone else's home, or afterhours clubs. Too drunk to coördinate effectively, one or two had texted The Artist, but receiving no response, they shrugged and went on with their nights.

So, when the police came to mark crime, validate the corpse, check the crime scene, look for clues, etc etc, they were looking at Unknown Vagrant not SuperFamous Crime of the Century. Due to the relative lack of damage to the body (that bounce!) they didn't even consider initially that the body had come from Above. Not an Angel falling to Earth, a Drunk Staggering and Collapsing. Thirty something white female dead in the garbage, maybe homeless? Look at that outfit – definitely vagrant. Surviving hobo type. Drugs. Heartattack from drugs? Froze to death? No, not too cold. Definitely drugs. No yellow tape came out, the search was desultory and quick. Bag and tag. Then they found the phone. And All Hell Broke Loose.

In police circles, there is always a code word or phrase for "Oh, Shit". There are several uses: huge danger, mad man on the loose (for a long time, Los Angeles police had used a series of metaphors to mean 'do not take alive'), or Political and Media Clusterfuck. This was one such time. When First on the Scene detective had discovered the phone, it was not surprising. Many, many of the City's vagrants had high end phones. It was the one thing they could carry at all times, was mandatory to navigate society, and was a social toy with unlimited entertainment possibilities. The officer had tapped at the screen of the unbroken phone, gotten its number, then reverse lookedup using an app on his phone. Her? He double checked. Her. He brought up a photo of The Artist on his phone, then walked quickly but unhurriedly to the corpse. He gently rolled the head to get a look. Shit shit shit shit shit.

Wise beyond his years, the wisdom of generations of ass-covering officers hovering over him and giving him protection like a flock of blue and bronze angels, he called the highest ranking officer he knew and gave him the warning. It was coming. The Media Beast would arise over this one. A Kraken, Unleashed. Alarum! Alarum!

"Voice of Her Generation Found Dead in Alley: Police Doggedly Investigate Despite Lack of Clues, Training, Materiel, Wokeness" screamed the headline of the New York Paper of Record, the gray, solid, stolid daily that purported to set the tone for The City, The Country, and The World. Page 1, mid page (could be seen above the fold), The Artist would have been pleased. She had made the front page and the police had been given a subtle shot to the ribs. Joy.

Other papers were less generous: "GIN GALS ALLEY!" screamed the NY Daily Tabloid, its bright colors2 and garish layout complementing its shocking cover photo, the toes of the shoes of The Artist sticking out from the alley, mostly hidden by swarms of Boys in Blue and Bags of Black. The NY Daily Tabloid had paid $10,000 for the shot, sneakily clicked by a passing delivery kid on a bike. And the Daily Tabloid had continued its run of terrible pun headlines, referencing the one hit show The Artist had created.

Footnote [2] The colors of the old Prussian flag.

"Shock Discovery: L___ D____ Found Dead On Street" read the Chronicler-Observer-Telegraph, the perpetual other-ran in the newspaper wars, which unhelpfully listed her age as "3__", as it didn't want to insult a Famous Woman by revealing her age. A hundred years ago, such patriarchal chivalry was designed to protect the weaker sex. Today, the Progressive Impulse to hide the Age of a "Lady" came from different assumptions, but the fundamental urge to protect Women for and from Society, Science, and Truth was still there. Classic White Knighting.

Once the ID of the Vic had been established, the case had gone from 2 to about 9.2 on the 10 scale of Police Effort. A series of quick calls that had gone upwards had determined that the right face needed to be running this investigation, and so another quick series of calls had gone downwards, telling the Captain of the Precinct what was happening on his watch (he already knew, thank Jehovah) and who would be best recommended to run this cluster? Fortunately, the Captain and the Powers That Be were in agreement, and a Lead Detective was selected. Young enough to get it, old enough to know what he was doing, just imagine Denzel Washington in Inside Job and you'll get it. With a little McQueen. Handsome, command presence, charming, smart, savvy, Lead Detective was considered perfect for sizing up the scene, running a team of officers, and talking to the press without tripping over his tongue. Solving the crime was important, of course, but not embarrassing the Department was really the key to this case.

And for the next 24 or so hours, everything happened just like it should per the bureaucratic rules of the department. Locals were interviewed, the family notified, the press cajoled and stonewalled. Evidence collected, teams created, family presser. No one had seen nothing. It was as though The Artist had been walking home then suddenly decided to crawl into a garbage pile for a nap, and had merely failed to wakey wakey. Blogs were written & tweets of mourning sent. Then the ME had detected and determined and confirmed the subtle blunt force all over body trauma of a tragic amazing high fall. And all eyes had turned upwards and in a chorus, in unison, altogether, had cried "Oh, Shit!"

A famous person somehow dying in a pile of garbage is news. A famous person being defenestrated is Big Time News Time. "How Could This Happen?" et cetera et cetera. "GALS CAN'T FLY!" per the Daily Tabloid. A full day was lost. Egg on faces. Thank the Big Man in the Sky for credit card records and cell phone records and video tape and social media. They at least had the right roof ID'd within minutes. But that was about all the good news.

* * *

Meanwhile, Steve was safely home. He had awokened Sunday afternoon, had his weekend sex with Katie, gathered his bag and strolled to the unofficial bus stop in Chinatown. He had gotten into the big fancy roller and dozed the five hours back to the DC Metro area. Less than $20 and 200 miles eaten up. It was early evening and he was home. An all-over sigh drifted across his body. He liked New York, he loved Katie, but he was so very glad to be home alone. Stir fry, unpack, shower, get ready for the work week. Load the backpack, lay out the shoes. He moved through his motions not robotically but unthinkingly. He had done this routine at least seven times, since Katie had moved to the Big City. Could long distance love work? They were determined to try. He was an ideal GeoBachelor, having spent four long college years learning math rather than learning about drinking, screwing, or having a real girlfriend. He was self-contained. His life was well organized, focused, and driven, if slightly aimless. He liked his job, but the "seven year itch" was starting early. He liked Katie, but wondered if he just liked the idea of being in a relationship more than he liked actually being in the relationship per se. He didn't think about The Event (as he was beginning to term it) at all. It was as interesting to him right now as if he had seen a minor work of art that had momentarily caught his interest in a museum. A museum he hadn't wanted to go to. He lay on top of his bedspread, pants on shoes off, and looked at the ceiling.

Katie was having nearly exactly the same thoughts: work, relationship, happiness, the future. Her night on the town. Then she turned on streaming and bingewatched and didn't think about it or anything any more.

# Chapter 7. Real Police Work

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective. – James E., American crime writer

The dog and pony show was about to begin. Instead of the usual standup and review with detectives and coppers, this was proving to be one step away from a world class fuck up. A few brass could be OK, but this, this show'n'tell for the press was a minefield on a pogo stick. It was a few minutes after one, lots of men (and damn few women) standing around, time to begin.

Lead Detective never liked feeling awkward—he knew that projecting confidence equaled confidence. That explained his long, cutting strides, his billowing overcoat, the curt ironic delivery. But here, in this 21st century crime lab, a concrete box that looked more like an oversized dorm room than a place of justice, even a bureaucratic justice, he was momentarily stymied. He cleared his throat. He looked around. He waited. The small room full of detectives, officers, admins, nearly a dozen favored reporters (some print, some teevee, one blogger), and the rest were collectively holding their breaths... when would this start? Finally, he caved—he pulled an old trick from his playbook. He punted. "SEO, what are the protocols? What are you doing?"

The head of the Social (or was it Technical?) Engagement Office, one of those drips who thinks cheap polyester work shirts makes him look in charge, hemmed and hawed. He instantly became Head Drip in the head of Lead Detective. The unfashionably striped tie didn't help. But he was playing a part, too. Honest nerd. Head Drip stayed seated behind his computer, his typings appearing on a large screen behind his head. Lead Detective wondered if Drip's porn history would accidentally appear on screen and spent about a third of his attention during the entire briefing keeping his eye out for an accidental reveal.

"OK, so um, there is currently no single target on this case. That means we have approximately 874 suspects." A groan. "No, no. It's not that bad. We have uh received the security and surveillance tapes from the front door, the elevator, and around the main party zone itself. Based on the uh approximate time of death of..."

"12:30 to 1:30 a.m."

"Sometime after midnight, we can see many dozens of suspects during the entire uh encounter. The bad news is we don't know who most of these people are." The Drip flicked a button and clips of surveillance footage appeared in a small box on the screen, its green, blurry images a silent challenge to everyone in the room. Happy faces, angry faces, people staring at the screen, faces turned from it. "Who am I?" "Did I do it?" they whispered. Lead Detective got a headache just glancing at it.

"So, we are preparing to perform the single largest unknown personnel sort in this uh group's history." More clicking, keyboard clattering as fingers flew across the keyboard. His voice confidence was growing as the computer spoke more deeply to him. The cellist warms up.

"We have 578 credit card usages during the night. We have 113 tweets. We have... 237 Facebook mentions of the event. We are currently endeavoring to associate each face with each person with each attendee. Of course, we know the employees. Uh, they have identified a few known customers, and the celebrities of course. Once tagged, knowns and unknowns go into the correlatory database."

A secondary detective spoke up. "How much work is this? Is this doable?"

Drip pushed his glasses back tight using his left ring finger tip (what an odd, specific gesture). "It is a lot of work. But it is completely doable. Let me show an example." The screen switched to showing his computer desktop (no porn, noted), and clicked and swiped until a folder showed up named "The Artist, Case 1 – Example" and then opened it.

"Starting at 5 p.m., when the bar opened on last Saturday night, we are working on isolating each and every distinguishable image on the cameras. Here is the first." A green, low rez image flashed on the screen, a young woman, smiling, looking directly into the elevator camera. A tag read "17:01:53 Elevator Female White Young #0001" Drip continued "Now note this image"—up came a black and white photo, taken from a height, looking down on an empty bar — empty except for a long haired woman, who very well could be the same woman as #0001. "We followed Elevator Female number oh oh oh oh one from the elevator to the bar. At that point, she produced a credit card, which we cross correlated with this one" *click click* And the bar's credit card run showed as a new document. A red arrow at 17:06 pointed to "Sheryl D Jones". "And, we double checked and saw Ms. Jones on Facebook, here" *click click* and an image of the same woman, smiling, long hair, now full color and vibrant, with the name "Sheryl Jones" in Facebook's script under it.

"She is our first positive ID of the night."

Mild murmuring. An appreciation of the value of the work, and relief they didn't have to perform it.

Lead Detective leaned forward. "So, what now? Who gets the information on Ms. Sheryl Jones?"

Drip looked up, "Right now, no one."

"No one?" Dry, no surprise. No sarcasm. Like saying chicken or fish.

"No one, because..." *click click* Now the elevator again, same woman, with two other people. The time stamp reads 19:34. "She left two hours later, in the presence of persons #0006 and #0011. The three did not return."

A slight group exhale.

"So, one down, 900 to go? How long will this take?"

"We are clearing several people an hour. We are ID'ing about that many in parallel. Working 12s, it should take less than a week, or so." For a Drip, this Drip seemed to have a command of the function. "But, there will be holes. Not everyone is identifiable. Not everyone posted on line or updated their status. Not everyone used a credit card, usually only one per group. So there will be holes. We are working on establishing a both a soft and a hard nexus of persons of interest, so we can provide updated suspect identification to the appropriate office."

Silence. Tabloid Reporter asked the one question he had been waiting to ask. Primed to ask, as it were. "And this is all legal and standard for information gathering, am I correct?"

The Drip waited, nodded, opened his mouth like a fish. "Absolutely! Facebook and Twitter and the rest are public. We were given the security footage and the credit card receipts. And uh the guestlist. This is just a grinding task of playing Where's Waldo." No laugh. The reporters jotted. The cops swayed on their heels. The brass held its breath.

"Well, thank you, uh, We look forward to your first report of potential suspects. Any questions? No? Good, well, let's head to the main evidence War Room. The full mid day Q&A." And Lead Detective strode out. Everyone followed like ducklings. Q&A was a joke, but a necessary joke in this case. Something very very new and very very secret was happening, and Lead Detective was doing everything in his power to keep it new, and working, and secret. He thought briefly about the tricks the British played in World War 2, keeping the Germans from knowing where the D-Day landings would be. Then he realized Watergate was a better metaphor, and turned off that section of his brain. Once in front of the evidence wall, he danced through the quick discussion of the vast resources and brilliant detectives being assigned to this case, re-capped the very few physical clues, listened to two brief verbal reports, minorly changed a handful of priorities, then dismissed everyone to get back to work. Had the reporters from the Paper of Record and the Tabloid been sated? Who knew. They strolled off with the PAO. Off the record time.

Thirty minutes after he had left the SEO's offices, Lead Detective returned, this time with just two people: Senior Detective and Junior Detective. They had been especially selected and assigned to be Lead's eyes and ears. They were different races, different ages, a buddy cop movie in progress. He needed them, but more importantly, he needed them to know who was in charge and how to be quiet. This was some "next level shit" to lock this one down.

The big screen was turned off. There were only 6 people in the room, the three detectives, plus Head Drip, Drip's number one, and female SEO. They sat around the desk.

Senior Detective: "That dog and pony show. Will it work?"

Drip shrugged. "We do it every day. Just never for this many people. We might stumble on something. Did the reporters and the brass buy it?"

"I think so. Lots of work, fancy screens, the word 'nexus.' We might get away with it. So." Senior Detective sat back.

"So this insanely 'less than Constitutional' (finger quotes) surveillance program might stay secret for a while longer," Lead Detective allowed a sardonic grin.

The Drip grinned back, "I can say for sure there were no Muslims on the roof that night."

"Well, that's a relief."

"So." Many many more clicks, as Drip typed a lot of scary commands and secret passwords. The computer whirred. The big screen did not turn on. Instead, Drip turned the small desk screen to face the detectives.

"Bluntly, the facial recognition software blows. We are running each captured image against the files of the department, and the social media accounts of everyone in New York, New Jersey, and anyone else in the near nearest 50 miles. It sucks. We are even working with some very quiet and smart folks in the DC Area and Silicon Valley – not a lot of techno love."

Junior Detective, who had long thought that asking questions made him seem smart and engaged, piped up, "DC?"

"Yeah. You know we work tight with some three and four letter agencies to stop terrorism. ENN WHY CEE is target A number 1. Well, this is Working Relationship 101. They want this software and this set-up to work, and have a few databases of images we don't. So we send some stuff South, they see what we know, we use their processing power. Win Win.

"Same with Silly Valley. They want working facial recognition software so they can sell better ads, track everyone everywhere, sell the code to private security firms. Whatever. So we send some test cases to ... these nameless companies and they make the software better. We are their Beta. And again, maybe they get a few hits for us."

Lead Detective folded his hands, a nervous twitch that would become his 'tell' if he didn't watch it. "OK, so images are weak, looks like you'll be doing those by hand. What about the eye in the sky?"

"Nothing. It flew over twice, routine, no tight shots. No one is visually recognizable. And nothing during the event itself. CSS."

"CSS?"

"Can't See Shit."

No laughs. "And the Big Boy? Stingy?"

Drip leaned back. This much personal face time always drained his small tank of social interaction ability. He wanted to close his eyes, read a comic book, check code. Anything but this. But this was his Now. He had to follow it. He sighed, rubbed his eyes, emerged.

"874 cell phones on the roof all night means about 874 suspects. We generally know when they were there and when they left. We only scan every five minutes or so unless there is a call. The calls are easy, the statics are not. Boiling it down, there are maybe 250 probables. I have a list For Your Eyes Only." He reached down, and pulled a cable out from under his desk. He plugged it into the computer, fiddled. A few seconds later, a tearing, ripping, screeching sound filled the room. Everyone flinched, even those who knew it was coming. From under the desk, a 30 year old dot matrix printer churned through its weird green and white paper. Back and forth. Grrrrrip. Zzzzzzzz. Grrrrip. ZZZZZZZttt. After a minute, it grew quiet. Drip ripped off the sheet, handed it to Lead Detective. "Your eyes only."

Silence. Lead Detective was lightly rolling ideas around in his head. The two others were thinking furiously. Finally, Senior spoke.

"So, the killer comes up the elevator, but you can't see his face well, or you can't match it with the Internet. His friend uses the credit card, not him, or he left his phone at home, or it's off. So then what?"

Drip sighed, looked frankly at the Senior Detective. "Several things. One, his friend used the card we have the friend. 'Who were you with that night?' We ID the mystery party. Two. Off phones don't matter. We ping them, they respond. Big Boy is some Iraq War CIA drone shtuff. Once we get 90% of the people, we can eliminate 95% of them. That should leave 20 or 30 unknowns. Then it becomes your game. Door to door. 'Do you know this person?' And Three, we'll keep thinking different angles. We have a lot of data to sift."

Lead Detective stood up, rolled the computer paper tightly in his hands. "Not sure how we'll handle that aspect, yet. We may not want to run a full page ad with 35 people in it. We can probably run unknowns with knowns first. TBD. Now, this list."

"People who had phones on the roof between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. All of them. Names and numbers. You can run them using the normal channels for addresses."

"Got it." He handed the semi-constitutional rolled paper to Senior Detective. "Put some low level, but trusted clerk on this. Try Andersen in Admin. He's a real shit but on our side. Have him copy this list by hand onto real paper, no computer file. Then return this to me. Once you get the addresses from him, start canvassing them personally. I need you to work The Artist's close associates first, but once we get these addresses, that becomes priority. Capice?" Lead Detective was not Italian, but neither was anyone else, really.

"Si, gratsi" quipped Junior Detective. No laugh.

"Sfacimento."

Lead Detective rattled the stone in his pocket. The only physical clue from The Scene. A smooth Red Rock that he suspected had come from Arizona. Nothing else found was of any interest. He rubbed his thumb over it. He had kept it separate to keep it from the Papers. He had nothing else. And it was just a stupid rock.

* * *

The day to day running of a case is neither interesting nor helpful to understanding what really goes on. Lots of officers talking to lots of people, images searched, clues established. This isn't one of the dozens of police procedural shows created to mollify an anxious middleclass: "See, the nice polite police catch all the criminals! You're safe at home, watching TV. No need to worry, Citizen." However, one new 21st Century twist was emerging, and Lead Detective was on it. The Police had established a Social Media Squad years before, and now had tens of young people on the Internet, reading posts and quips and looking for clues. Some social scientist types had claimed that murders spread like diseases, and if the social connections between young people could be mapped, a shooting at this high school with this gang could lead to a prediction of the next murder from that gang and that school and thus stop or disrupt it. PreCrime. This was proving to be bullshit.

But since the occasional psycho liked to post to the world that he was about to shoot up a church or a school or a mall, being on-line helped. And since most victims knew their killers, finding a victim's circle of friends had never been easier. Lead Detective didn't know how to do all this, but he was enough of a savvy leader to know he needed people who did, and he was also enough of a political animal to get the resources he needed, especially on a Red Ball like this. So he had a team: five nerds. Pasty guys and gals: neck beards and glasses and frizzy hair. T-shirts with comic book characters or sly pop culture references.

"I need you to dig. You know how to do this, find the connections. I sense there are two directions here: who did The Artist have in her life that would want to kill her. That seems to be the easier piece, start with the Victim and work out. Look at her friends, colleagues. What did they say on line. Texts. Whatever.

"Then we get to the hard part. We believe there were let's say 1000 people at that party that evening. The tech geeks are getting names and narrowing down perps, but we still might have 200 people who could have been on that roof between 11 and 2 a.m."

"Does that include Batman?"

"If you can prove he did it we'll pin a medal on you at Gotham City Hall. Until then, search. You know this stuff. I don't. But you know what drives people to kill: jealousy. Rage. Money. Arguments. Who had she pissed off or on lately? Any braggers? And, of the hundreds of people there, did any of them know her? College friend in town? Make the connections. We need leads. You have witnesses and maybe the killer in your computers. Find them."

* * *

At this quiet moment, now early evening, Lead Detective, some Flatfoots, secondary detectives, even the CSI guy and two lawyers, took a moment to drink it all in. This was the largest home in New York many of them had ever been in. For most of them, it was the first time they had ever been in a "vestibule." What's the proper word for a formal entryway? An armoire? Entering hushed, like to a museum, their fingers trailed across acres of side tables, their glances took in the huge oil paintings of dripping, pink vaginas, they looked up at pre-war ceilings and pocket doors and sighed. There was an interior balcony. Unread books lined pocket shelves. Little rugs no one wanted to step on. A cacophony of white walls and glass and an expired Modernism. Decorated in Pretentious Artist style from 40 years ago. This was how the weird rich live.

They had had to wait to be allowed to enter the sanctum sanctorum of Old New York Money. Don't Piss Off the Nobles was an old and hallowed law for the Agents of the State everywhere. But they had obtained the OK and were now ready to look for a clue in a place were no clues would likely be. Would the killer have left a parachute with a note?

"Is this a clue?" A sentence hard to ask non-ironically, but there it was. Cop #2 held up a primitive handmade clay-fired statue of an erect male penis. "Down, Boy" murmured the mid-level Detective.

They had agreed to focus solely on the victim's private bedroom in the family home; she was ... had been staying with the family until her five million (five million dollars = $5,000,000.00) brownstone had been re-re-renovated. The family had nothing to say without a lawyer and was scarce. But the po-lice had a one-room warrant. A rarity.

In his heart, Lead Detective had wanted to find a stereotypical teenage girl bedroom: posters of pop boys, glitter, stuffed animals, pom-poms, pink. It was instead "A Room of Her Own," a well furnished study for the Serious Young Person. A desk. A real bed with real sheets. Actual Art. It looked like it had been inhabited by a 40 year old architect.

The Artist's desk drawer. Locked, but mysteriously not locked now. A lockpick slipped back into a pocket. A piece of expensive feeling paper, torn from a notebook, a jagged left edge on top of the right hand drawer. At the top in big letters "Bad Idea Karma List". The handwriting was jagged but recognizable from the samples. The list read:

  * Disabled Ballet

  * FAT!!! Ballet (with FAT underlined three times and circled)

  * Pie shop (ironic?)

  * Reality TV ~~~ NEVER NEVER NEVER (in a different pen, but the same handwriting)

  * X Feminist commentary track for movies. Like that robot show? Funny. Pop culturey?

  * Back to acting... STAGE????

  * Create a perfect New York Salon / Round Table. Who to invite? (an arrow pointed off the page)

  * Edit a Prestige Magazine

  * CREATE a prestige magazine

  * Curate movies for a streaming service (someone else, in pencil, had written "unwatchable fat lesbian romance movies on Netflix? Winner!" This was crossed out in thin black pen x's.)

  * DJ-ing!

  * Essays / Self help?

  * Porn / football / commentary stupid TV

  * Write a novel no one reads (frowny face)

  * Public intellectual? Read Lionel Trilling!!!!

"Of course," sighed. Lead Detective pocketed the paper for later. Everything pointed to The Artist and her career, nothing about her killer. Otherwise, the desk was clean: dictionary, magnifying glass, some pens. The laptop was taken to be given to the Tech Geniuses. They were already deep into her social media accounts, e-mail, banks, everything. Here, there was no weapon, some drugs, no diary. Journals and notebooks of jottings. A few pictures, mainly in frames. But a thousandfold fewer than were on the phone. Like the era, everything now is ephemeral, yet virtually permanent. The family was out of town, deliberately. No one and nothing home. There were no clues here. They poked around, left, the smell of money in their nostrils.

Outside, there was a quick confab. They drank bad bodega coffee. The headlines for sale were not helping their cause:

"GALS" JUST WANT TO HAVE URN – No Burial Sez Artist's Will!

FALL STALL – Best Detectives Still Have No Leads in Rooftop Saga

LOOK OUT BELOW!

Lead Detective, deliberately not bitter, merely Laconic. "A special edition, plus two days worth of headlines. The Tabloid will just not let this die."

"What do you need from us?" was the silent question. "How will you cover and protect us?" was the other.

Lead Detective out loud, tough, quick, mentor mode. "Keep working hard. Do the book. Ask the questions. Double fast, but no mistakes. I'll cover upstairs. But I'm starting to fear this is a stone cold Who Done It. And those never close."

The cluster walked down the street, an Elliot Ness moment. Too many men in long jackets and suits and ties. The bearded, shaded, hoodie wearers edged away. The crew in formation passed the latest new shop opening: a custom deluxe perfumery. Inside, beautiful women and men in white lab coats wandered aisles full of exotic scent-producing flowers, herbs, rots, glands, chemicals. A custom scent for the discerning consumer for a mere few hundred dollars an ounce. Colognes, sprays, washes all analyzed and created to match the personality profile. A whiff of ambergris wafted out the shop door.

# Chapter 9. Flashback: The Arrival **or** An Unlikely Hero Emerges

"Outrage culture requires outrageous behavior."

"Oh. My. God. You fucking BITCH!" Media Whore strode over to the table, towering over The Artist. The Artist squealed with delight. "You God damn QUEEN. Get over here." They hugged. With no word or glance to anyone else, Media Whore squatted down between some Lesser Guests at the head of the table, his muscular legs and butt pushing them aside to make room for himself. He now had the Left Hand of The Artist all to himself.

"When did you get into town?"

"A few days ago. Don't be dreary. You know New York is the only semi-civilized place in the colonies. I'd be back. And I haaaaate your hair."

"What?" The Artist laughed with mock outrage. "It's fantastic. Turquoise."

"Blue-haired Social Justice Warriors are literally the ugliest people on this Earth. They dye their hair blue and pierce their noses because they literally cannot think of anything else to do. They are like cows in so many ways. Oooo, that's good. They put rings in their noses, they move as a flock, they are fat and ugly like cows. I sense a Tweet coming on."

The Artist's best friend, Constant Companion, turned to Media Whore across the table (at The Artist's Right Hand, Media Whore noted sagely), leaned over: "Bulls have rings, not cows. And cows are in herds, not flocks. And that's the most misogynistic sentence I've ever heard."

"Ooooo, a humorless feminist. That's new. Well, stick around cherie, you'll hear even more misogyny passing from these lips. At least until alcohol and a fag are shoved in them." With that, he grabbed The Artist's glass—a 1920s champagne glass containing a Blue Fashioned: Brooklyn crafted moonshine, custom artisanal sugar water, blood orange puree, fake lemon juice squeezed in from a fake plastic lemon, a basil sprig, a frozen cherry, a float of a blue liqueur no one had heard of, and spritz from a perfume bottle of cedar smoke ($17) —and took a swig. He made a comically disgusted face. "That's terrible." He turned to his posse, who had created a cloud of hovering attractive men between tables. "You! A chair and a bottle of Dom. I always like to impress the peasants."

The Artist cackled and scooted her chair to the Right, angling her up next to Constant Companion. Soon a chair was found and slid ceremoniously into place, the rest of the table being forced to squeeze in like children at the children's table at Thanksgiving. Which was especially apt. This long table was designed along the lines of the lines of Aristocratic France, the King (or Artist as Queen in this case) held court at the top, with a few trusted advisors and favorites at arm's reach. But even they could be shunted aside or asked to leave to make room for a new face, a returning friend, or for no reason at all. The middle of the table were the lackeys, the hangers on, the lucky-to-be theres. Their job was to (1) provide a backdrop of lighthearted fun and witty conversation, (2) make the Queen seem even more popular, (3) be prepared at a moment's attention to delight the Queen when her benevolence shown upon them like the Sun Itself, (4) Not upstage the Queen. So they joked and chatted and flirted and bragged as people do, while keeping one eye cocked to the Royal End, waiting for a gesture, a command, a clearing of the Noble Throat. A bon mot was enough to send waves of laughter down the table. They were extras in the play entitled "Famous Witty New Yorker Holds Court." And they knew it. And they relished it. They might have hated it, but at least they were at the table. They had "it", and now they had to decide whether "it" was worth it.

Which made the arrival of Media Whore so welcome. Many had heard of him, but few dared to admit they knew of him. But his rapier wit meant that The Artist would be distracted for a moment, giving the masses a chance to fall more deeply into joking and chatting and flirting and bragging than they otherwise could be able to do. Also, he promised real wit and comedy, edged with a tint of cruelty few could master and fewer would dare show in this day and age. He was sui generis. Which is to say, he was another mediocre performer who had learned that being genuinely insulting but somewhat clever could lead a moderately talented person to above moderate success. A contemporary Jester.

"So let's talk about me."

"I've been following you on the Socials. Holy Shit."

"I know. I am the original enfant terrible." A real French accent.

"I mean, how did you pull off that turn around? I mean, I thought rape was a no-go never-return zone, but ... that!"

"Easy, mon chou. It was a media hit. They lied, they manipulated, edited, ... thank God my darling darling fans saw through the little games. Buggery talk is only mildly taboo. So I had to do the 'woe is me I'm so sorry tour.' That's just more headlines, more games. More drama. And who is the King of All Drama?" If he could have twirled in the chair, he would have. Flamboyantly, naturally.

Then, the Dom arrived, Media Whore pretended to pour it cavalierly, but good breeding always shows, and his glasses foamed precisely and perfectly. He gave one to The Artist. They clinked.

"To us!"

"To we homos! Well, not you, obviously," Media Whore sniped. The Artist pouted, then smiled.

Media Whore's entire routine, his shtick, his lifestyle could be described thus: he was a tall thin flamboyant gay man who wrapped every stereotyped bit about bitches and bitchiness into a 160 pound muscular blond(e) frame, and had embraced shock comedy, shock jock, shock tactics, shock troops as his method to conquer the world. His Muse was Chaos. He said what he wanted, he did what he wanted. Cutting edge, daring types ate it up. And his presence grew. He had a line of "Abortion Wear" for women to wear to celebrate their "Blessed NonEvent." He had a line of gay hunting wear. Pink holsters and offensive t-shirts. He picked fights with elderly beloved columnists. Having heard someone say in Los Angeles, "This town is so conformist. The only way to be punk is to be a Republican Fundamentalist," he immediately converted, found Christ, and began campaigning for right-wing policies like guns, no abortion, and 1950s values. 1850s values. He was a reborn Oscar Wilde with a Twitter account and better drugs.

"God Jesus, this town is so dreary. Ooops, sorry, didn't mean to blaspheme," he simpered. Yes, he simpered. He was a walking stereotype of gay men in the distant past where they were neither seen nor heard, just felt. Or felt up. He skipped. He pranced. He sang musicals inappropriately. "Any day I piss off a gay is a good day!" was a recent media posting.

"No seriously, darling. New York in the 1970s was edgy. You had punk and rap and overdoses and heroin. You don't even have heroin chic anymore. Everyone is so gosh darned toned!"

The Artist knew better than to take the bait. She sipped her champers and looked coolly over the rim of the glass. "No more poor street kids to abuse. Where will you get your, do you call it, 'rough trade'?"

"Touché!" Another clink. "No, I get enough dick without underpaying teenaged runaways. And better quality too. I am convinced evolution is true, what with all these women growing bigger tits and men all carrying bigger dick. It's true! In two more generations there won't be a rack under 38DD or a rod under 9 inches. The losers will have died off.

"But, of course, I can't believe in evolution, for it runs contrary to the teachings of my Personal Lord and Savior, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen." More champagne.

"Are you even fooling yourself?"

"I'm serious! Christianity is amazing. All those robes and prophets and incense. It's like a tranny club at 3 a.m. on a Friday."

A pregnant pause. Would anyone object to "tranny"? They would not. He continued. His mile-a-minute-stream-of-consciousness could run all night. You could hear the teeth grinding in the bathrooms.

"Speaking of Friday, when is this American holiday 'Black Friday'? When poor people trample each other to death in the name of consumerist capitalism? I simply must attend. I want to be there with a camera crew. In the thick of things. Reporting, on the scene. On the ground. Oh, if I were to die at Black Friday, that would be so delicious." He put his hands to his cheeks, a parody of a parody.

"I think Black Friday is in Thanksgiving. I mean, November." The drinks were kicking in. Words were slowing. Voices raising. "But you can't! Die I mean. Who would be my London Bestie?"

"Not me, that's for sure, my dear. I don't know when I will return to that dreary little piss hole. Karl was right, London is dead." "I thought he said Paris was dead?" "Who cares." And that was that.

And the night wore on. Media Whore drank some Dom, looked around, then left, claiming a need to cruise the men's room. After 30 seconds, he came back, having watched and waited until he saw one of the Desperate Writers (or was it a Failed Comedian?) trying to pour 8 ounces of Dom Perignon into his recently emptied drinks glass.

"A-Ha!" Media Whore snapped a photo, posted it, then confronted the Desperate Creative, "I knew someone would snatch my blessed champers. If you wanted some, honey, you should have just asked." He cooed, "I only ask you drink it from my slipper."

Trying to salvage himself, the snared victim tried comedy, "Well, I only drink the best. Or whatever this swill is."

"Don't try to out bitchy me, honey. It doesn't work. I can understand, from your clothing, that you might be a cad, and a poor, but you don't have to gorge yourself like a Fatty."

The Desperate Creative realized the spot he was in, champagne bottle in his left hand, glass nearly overflowing on the right, and decided discretion and surrender were the only part of Valor. He abashed. "You are right, I'm very sorry."

"No pouts, for fucks sake. Just ask! Have some champers! Champers for all!" Media Whore took the bottle and held it aloft, then put it to his lips. He finished the last swigs, then sprayed some foam onto the table. Mild shock and laughter and turning heads.

"For FUCKS Sake," yelled Constant Companion, wiping champagne off her face.

"Sorry honey, too close to home? You look like you did last Saturday night after the football team left your ... uh, is the proper American term 'trailer park'?!" He laughed at his own joke.

"Ugggh, you're just a gross person."

"Honey, I've gotten more foam on my face in a month than you have .... looking at your prim little slit of a mouth... than you have your whole life. Most people BEG to have me spray champagne on them." A fake pause, a thoughtful sideways look. "Maybe I should put that in my on-line store." He put his phone to his mouth, dialed his assistant, "Bobby, look into adding something to my Shit For Sale site. People buy a bottle of champagne, I spray it on them. They can film it. $1000? Investigate, then make it happen!" He hung up, "Ah, little people."

Constant Companion got up to go and try and wash herself off, "you are a vile narcissist and I cannot wait to see you fall."

Media Whore grew serious. His demeanor changed so suddenly that he seemed to bring a cone of silence down onto the table. Eyes drew on him. He stepped over, cutting off Constant Companion's exit strategy. He looked down on her, eye to eye. He made total contact. His long elegant, manicured index finger extended, settled gently on the left side of her nose, tapped the piercing.

"Honey," he half-whispered. "If the nose has a ring, its opinions don't mean a thing."

Pause, mental recognition, shocked realization. "FUCK YOU!"

Media Whore stepped back. "Unlikely." And he slumped down in the now vacant chair, sprawled akimbo. "Ugh. And they say I'm exhausting."

# Chapter 10. How Our Lesser-Betters Live

"The world says: "You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder." ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To put the evening in perspective, the average American family survives on $30,000 per year. Half earn more, half less. One could buy 2000 calories of food for approximately $5 to $10, depending on quality and freshness. One could go cheaper, or healthier, but 200 calories for a dollar was a pretty good deal. One could buy excellent, refreshing locally brewed craft beer in bulk for under one dollar per serving. The average fast food restaurant averaged a penny per calorie for their quickly served wares.

The 14 people around the table had just spent $2857 for 47 drinks and a bunch of "small plates" (or "tapas", which they weren't) for 20 calories / dollar. Catered from a few of the hottest neighborhood joints. The Artist mulled this over as she not-so-secretly eyed the remains of the cheese plate. Port Salut? D'accord.

Of course they were hated. Of course they were disparate, separate, above. Elite? Naturallément (sic). They had the tastes, the refinement, the words, the aspirations, the clothes, the apartments, the opinions, the friends. They were IT. They... embraced the hate. Yes! Embraced it! Not just as a necessary evil, but a requirement for full enjoyment of their privilege, the fire that stoked their gifts. It was not a byproduct, but a cause of their greatness!

If anyone read anymore, if anyone read Russian novels anymore, they would know that theirs was a world so airtight, hermetic, elite, wasteful, privileged, rigorous, bitter, ugly/beautiful, wonderfully-terrible, rigid, certain, rule-less and hide-bound, full of certainty of wrong social behavior as any French court, or any Russian count. And as oblivious to right and wrong as any deranged sex maniac or college professor. They Were Our Nobility.

And now, they turned to Work. It may have been the curse of the Middle Classes that despite their amazing love and sensitivities and knowledge that they still had to toil for pay, but it was the curse of the artistic classes that they had to create. And this was the secret-ish brain storming session. This is where The Next would be created. The super-hot (in looks and talent and media buzz) African-American bomb thrower, the grizzled drunk Hollywood guy who had bought in with daddy's money, two former writer "colleagues", that douche who created a media empire on line with snotty celebrity photos and half baked commentary, late night monologue writer, a hodge and podge of the motley crew that made up the clerisy of early-thirtysomething medium talented media personalities. All had been brought together for this mind meld.

"OK, we are sated, and so we shall begin." She smiled. Glasses raised. "As you know, that certainly this is a trying time in our country, and for those of us with talent. But we must use our gifts..." it continued like this for a while. Wine was poured.

"No more stalling. I need a genius idea for a project. We will put this together tonight. Writer's meeting! And if you say Reality TV I will fucking stab you." She looked across the modernist conference table in the women-only workspace in the trendy heart of trendy Brooklyn. Trendy. Spacious. A huge table with sleek modern office chairs, power supplies every few feet. A desperate attempt to get out of the usual places. Shake it up. The coterie of hangers on waited only to serve her, she felt. The few men there were there to serve and allowed only by special appointment. IT guys and plumbers and toilers kept out of sight. A perfect environment for some open ended and open minded brainstorming.

This catered dinner was critical. While other avenues were being pursued halfheartedly and imagined deeply—serious actress, political pundit, magazine editor, everything that underemployed creative types would ponder short of working on a cookbook—none had taken. They had all been tried. No musical ability. A way with words, admittedly, but to say, well what exactly? A wannabe European who was tragically monolingual. Screentest not positive. Screenplays—generally unsellable. Had she seen the notes on one of her pieces when it landed at The Big Studio, she would have cried. Non-ironically cried. Not because they were mean, but because they were right. "Non-realistic character action." "No real progression." "This is not a story the audience wants to see or I want to tell," the last from a famous director who The Artist admired and still secretly admires. Was he right?

"Have you thought 'bout rededicating yourself to the Podcast?"

The Artist's head whipped around. "Jesus. The lowest rung on the entertainment ladder? Why not stand-up?"

"Could the newsletter be expanded into something else? A column? A magazine? I've been toying with branding sections of my web empire. Give uh personalities control of say, LifeStyle, or Tech."

"I think I'm more than just 'personalities.' And no one reads anymore. How many times have you heard some idiot say 'These new streaming TV shows are just like a novel?'. That's what dumb people say, but they are our future."

"Oh." Silence.

"Another TV show, then?"

"I think I've explored the possibilities of that media for a while don't you?" The ugly word "cancelled" hovered over the table like Elsinore's Ghost. No one would touch her in that area for a while.

"I mean, seriously, people. I want to direct, or Create Art, and you are pitching frozen TV dinners."

Hack Comedian pricked up. "No, we thought healthy snack crackers would be better. L-Snaps. No, wait, O-Snaps." The bait wasn't taken. Could these quippers ever shut it?

The Artist sighed. A long, deep, soul clearing sigh. Sipped her wine. "As I said, I want to direct. For real. A real movie. Actors, not unknowns. A crew. Writers. Money."

"You want to go Hollywood?"

"Half. I want a real movie. Not fucking Transformers 7 or whatever. Not 'two Millennial gals bond over being lame and one is nearly raped but they remain best friends'. Not award season bait." These words were nearly shouted, they were certainly spat. The Artist took a remaining morsel of cheese, tossed it in her mouth, washed it down with wine.

"What the fuck is up with the Chick Flick Ghetto? Only womyn with vaginas can direct some super-thin bitch deciding which bland asshole to fall in love with. But try to get a Real Movie, try to score Box Office" (at this, Mr. Hollywood snorted) "and you get shit!"

"How about a heist movie? A real New York Auteur did that classy bank robbery movie. He made tons of money."

"And complained afterwards he couldn't get funding for a sequel."

Someone else jumped in: "Look, if you want middlebrow..."

"I do. I do want middlebrow. The word itself is unfair, arguably sexist, definitionally classist, but Middle Fucking Brow means recognition. And jobs and barriers. Broken. Box Office Brow. That's what I want. I want to mainstream."

Silence. People pretended to think. The Connector broke the silence. "So no more Abortion Clinics in KatrinaLand?"

"None!" cried triumphantly.

"Sassy black friends. Celibate gay neighbors. Cheap dialog. Shout outs. Shoot outs. Car Chases. Troubled cops. Love triumphs. Special effects. Plot holes. Pop music cues. Overseas markets meaning less speeches, less dialog. Brandon Cooper, or whatever his name is. The skinny bitch who is hot right now getting a lead just because. People magazine interviews. That's what you want?"

"Absolutely!"

"Would you direct a one-off for TV?"

"Fuck you."

"No, seriously. 'Special Guest Director'."

"ENN. OH." A pause, "TV is the end. It's done. It leads to nothing."

"Oh. Kay. But if you want Big Girl money and National Love, then Prime Cable might lead to producing. Directing TeeVee might lead to directing something better."

An honest moment approached. The Artist was getting tired. She wanted to say yes, but the 'better her' was saying no. This all seemed so joyless. And where was the fun, the quick badinage? "I'm tired of jerking off the Paper of Record every third week. I'm tired of being ignored by those jerks in the red states whom I hate so much."

The context behind this revelation was the ever present pyramid that defined the entertainment world. The Artist was trying to climb it, but it was steep, and while one might imagine herself at the top, the path often led downward. She knew—knew—her position, absolute and relative to every other brick. She knew how many bricks in the wall were below her, how many at her level, and to six decimals everyone and everything above her. She wanted the Tip. The Peak. The Pinnacle. The Artist was dreadfully dolefully, in the middle, clinging desperately to a thin ridge on a crumbling mud ziggurat. Above her, on the next shelf above the lip of a ledge, stood movies. Producing many things. But she felt the inexorable slide downward. For her, sideways would be Up, but she wanted up up up.

And not just movies, but fame. Not New York fame. Not liberal bubble fame. But Fame. Dating famous people fame. A mansion by a beach. She was ashamed her dream was so prosaic, so ...common. But there it stood. A white mansion and her standing on a balcony with glass panes, wearing something white and wispy. And thin! And the sun was shining. She was smiling. She could smell the ocean and feel the California sun.

"What about porn?" Who said that? She was snapped back from her mental echo chamber. The 'fuck you' was on her lips, but she was suddenly so gob smacked that the eff trickled from her lips like a dying balloon. She coughed, choked, gasped, and hacked. She finally caught air.

"I. Am a Feminist. I will not sell My Body for some cheap, asinine project..."

"No no no Not as an actor. Direct! Feminist porn. Do it on the cheap, skeleton crew, underground style. On the sly. No press. No publicity. Those porn people work for thousands, not millions. They make 200 films a year. But you! You direct it. Artistically. Feminism-ly,..." Trusted Friend trailed off. She had clearly been thinking about this for a while.

The Artist smiled wryly. It was a good idea. Lots of content. Easy to do. Learn quickly in a new environment, but a familiar one.

"Let's write that one down, shall we?", and she smiled winningly. Praise received, the one-time colleague smiled, ducked her head. The Artist rolled the idea around for a moment in her noggin. She knew it could happen. She knew that that project, just dirty and daring enough, might just catch. Grad students? Sure! And, something like this would force real work, but in a field she already knew. She needed a project, quick. Something to stop these destructive ideas. She hoped that this, or something else, might. She would have prayed, but she didn't know how and wasn't about to start learning now.

"Commentarying?"

"Did you just verb that noun? Worse, did you gerund that noun?" Laughter. "What the fuck is that?"

"That's when you provide commentary to another's works. People used to do it for bad movies, but it is mainstreaming heavy right now. You pay people like 99 cents to download their commentary track. Movie nerds talking movies. Comedians mocking... stuff. But what about a political track?"

"Like when idiots live tweet events?"

"Well, it is spoken, usually. And it could be feminist and stuff."

"What would need a feminist critique? I mean, everything sure, but what would this be for?"

An evil gleam. Eyebrows raised. "Football."

A pause. Comedic instincts kicked in with the Artist, and she volleyed back "Football." But an arched eyebrow.

"Football. You take a game, add your own voice. Who is a date rapist. The homoerotic content. War metaphors. Assault charges. You know, funny! And political."

"Ugh," thought The Artist. Porn. Football. Teevee. Is that all these so-called creative people thought of? Weren't they supposed to occupy the higher mental plane? Apparently not.

"Old. Busted. That sounds like it would be funny for 3 minutes. That's a weak, 12:30 in the morning late night sketch. And what, do I bring up the fucking pink everything? Like pink ... towels makes up for the millions of American women who get hit every Super Bowl? The overflowing violence shelters?" A few of the more... knowledgeable folks in attendance looked up, thinking to perhaps correct that obvious falsehood, but forget it, she's rolling.

"That shit is beyond funny. It's sad. That'd be like laughing at Auschwitz. Are you suggesting I remake The Day The Clown Died?"

"No no no. Wellllllll...?"

"I mean, as an American, I am sickened by the amount of attention given to watching black men ram each other like animals, they get concussions, you know. It feeds... and is a symptom of the violence in this society. We are trained to see these.... people as animals. Forced to fight for our amusement. No wonder those black guys do dog fighting. They are dogs."

Awkward silence. "Uh, black men are dogs?" From the end of the table.

"I don't see color," huffy.

"I agree that you may not see People of Color," the quiet voice retorted.

"Don't get all Black Lives Matter on me," snippily. "I ate enough shit from them about that tweet. I mean, I create. I don't burn down. I mean, a riot is creative destruction, but ... wouldn't it be more impactful to create something. Or burn down the rich white people's homes? Why destroy their own homes?"

As The Muse/Trusted Friend looked around the table, she noted 13 shocked white faces and one bemused black one. The Famous Race Writer looked left, looked right, smiled and looked up the table to the Artist. His voice was quiet, steady, deep: Morgan Freeman imparting a lesson.

"So, perhaps, you are suggesting, that the Black Lives Matters protestors should take the protest from their neighborhoods, stop pointing out racist content on the Internet, and... write plays?"

Once started, The Artist had a hard time backing down. This was one of those times. "Look, I am woke OK? I know the struggle. It's real. I just think that burning down a pharmacy isn't the best way to protest the awful, fascist cops. Art changes things. Protest songs. Medium Cool."

A medium cool look from Famous Race Writer. "Ah, you build pharmacies and we destroy them? I heard that just last week. I was shocked by it then, even as it made a small amount of twisted sense. I guess I am trying to link your systemic neglect of artists of color from every aspect of your work to the people's passions for being systematically murdered by the State's Militias."

"Look! This isn't about me, OK? It is about Truth. I acknowledge fully your fuller sense of the struggle, but when I see those people throwing urine, I think they may be on the wrong side of history."

Famous Race Writer composed himself, elbows tucked in, chair scooted back a smidge. A man one half second from leaving the table. "Do you know what a Podsnap is? No, wait, of course you don't. It's not like Charles Dickens is a famous writer. From your side of the fence, no less. Or that you don't read anything that isn't written to fit within the six seconds of your short attention span or only within ten miles from here.

"No, a Podsnap is a character in a Dickens novel. Our American Friend, I believe3. He is upper class, wealthy, perhaps. And bourgeois to his very core. He can't even pretend to see the poverty of Victorian London, so for him it Does Not Exist. There is a scene at a dinner party," his head looked coolly up and down the table, "where Mr. Podsnap waves away the entire slums of the East End." A dismissive hand gesture whipped from crisp white cuffs. "No poverty. No foreigners. Nothing that could disturb Mr. and Mrs. Podsnap from their fine dining. I would call your life bourgeois, but that isn't enough, My Dear. You are a Podsnap. A cultured snob, a rich glutton, a person who is maliciously ignorant. It is sad I have to explain this to you, it is a long way to go for a short drink of water. But I can think of no worse insult. You are a caricature of a caricature. I wish you luck on your Quest for Self Fulfillment, Ms Podsnap." He pushed away.

Footnote [3] He meant Our Mutual Friend, but it's not like anyone reads anymore. – ed.

Silence. He walked smoothly to the exit. Was he wearing flannel pajama bottoms with that exquisite suit jacket and starched white shirt? Mental notes were taken for the next style moment in their lives. The message was, of course, forgotten.

"What about commercials?"

"What?"

"Directing commercials? Skin care. Credit Cards. I might know someone."

* * *

Current: A Few Days After the Fall

Katie never did call Anna. Like after so many late night drunks, the promises, the exchanged information, the budding friendships were either forgotten or deliberately ignored. She'd see a post once in a while and feel a twinge, would mean to reach out. But life just kept plowing forward. And her life was moving ahead like a 1950s New York success story, but with Pilates instead of alcoholism. Small promotion, meals with friends, subway rides late at night while reading. She never wanted to leave.

* * *

Current: A Few Days After the Fall

Steve looked up from his desk, his bleary eyes trying to focus. He was really putting in the time on the project, and it was showing. Lightly disheveled, he had ground out several pages of Real Work, good work that his boss would like.

In a sense, his being an engineer was more about a mind set than a skill set. Anyone could learn to code, or solve equations, but it took a certain brain to craft solutions. More importantly, to tear down bad solutions. His mentor in college used to say that he had never seen a project that was more than 70/30. Most were 60/40. That is to say, if you wrote down all the pluses and minuses, there would be 6 yeses for every 4 noes. Nothing was 100%, no idea or plan or solution was perfect. "The problem with us," the mentor concluded, "is that we live in a world with people who think that everything they touch is 100%. We know they are full of shit."

Taking ideas apart and rattling them and dropping them and taking them apart again was instinctual. It was also annoying. Katie had long since given up trying to plan trips with Steve. He double checked, over planned, scheduled. Even spontaneous outings involved spot checks and inventories. Of course, Steve reckoned, she never complained when the trips had no hitches, when everything went smoothly, when he did have jackets in the car or some Tylenol in his bag.

The 60/40 rule meant that he naturally had to consider the other side, walk through the options. On one hand, he saw himself and his colleagues as Plato's guard dogs, the metaphorical beasts Plato described as guarding the perfect city, with the ability to perfectly tell friend from foe. The world needed them to function, and no one else but they could do it. On the other hand, more terrorists were engineers than any other college major. The desire to guide/control/arrange the world set a few of the compulsives into changing the world by more ... immediate means. Poe-tay-toe / Poe TAH toe.

# Chapter 11. A Motive Emerges

"What ever happened to old-fashioned Mom and Dad Saturday night sex? Did all those nerves dry up, or something?" – Overheard

Lead Detective strolled into the small park, trying for all the world to appear to be a casual civilian, and failing miserably. Every measured step, every whip of the sportscoat, screamed cop. No one would look at this 40 ish man—in shape with his short hair and his clean offwhite shirt—and think Investment Banker. At this hour, most of the old, fading park benches were empty, and the Lead Detective took the "cop" bench, the one in the middle, back to a fence and views of both entrances. He did a slight squat as he eased onto the right edge of the bench, ensuring it would take his bulk before committing to the creaky thin wooden slats. He sighed, then breathed in and out more contentedly. He adjusted his coat. It was a beautiful morning, still cool in this early hour, and the sunrise was giving The City the sort of glow that poets and cheap novelists strove to describe. The park was busy for this hour, with the sun calling every nominal shut-in for a ten block radius. He was in the middle of a shitstorm, but still could enjoy 5 minutes of calm on a beautiful day. He turned his face to the sun. He exhaled. He relaxed.

Social Engineering Officer came in a few minutes later, her business casual outfit allowing her to appear to be not-cop. Her hoodie, cheap cotton blouse, leggings, skirt and flats screamed "office worker," not "armed and badged." She glanced around, not staring directly at him—Lead Detective noted with a small amount of pride—then casually wandered to the bench, sitting far away, but not so far away to be suspicious. Two people, enjoying the view. The bench was, she noted not for the first time, the perfect length for New Yorkers enjoying a park, close enough for people to talk, but enough distance to prevent it from being creepy. She started to think about whoever had designed these benches. Had a team of efficiency experts measured human interaction for months in the 50s to come up with the ideal length? She pictured in her head for a quick half second ten Mad Men era men, white shirts and ties, with rulers and notebooks and binoculars watching park goers. She shook her head, looked at the sun. She loved her little fantastical indulgences, but this was not not not the time. Besides, they were probably this length because the wood happened to be this long.

Just as he had appraised her, she coolly appraised him. A big man, his legs were slightly extended and feet apart, his sports coat tucked under his arm, so the holster wouldn't show. She noted that he tapped the holster with the back of his left hand, a subtle gesture to make sure the gun was in place, seemingly invisible to perps. But it wasn't. The first rule of concealed carry was to not announce the weapon existed. She wondered if she should tell him. Not yet.

'Good morning.' 'Morning.' 'Nice day.' 'Mmmmm hmmmm.' Neither one wanting to end the quiet moment and start work. Lead Detective signed like a man about to pick up a shovel to resume gravedigging and began. "Thanks for using the BatPhone."

"It was important and private and you said..." she trailed off.

"Absolutely. And thanks for the details on her being dropped by her agent. I hate to think that is a motive here in the real world, but ..."

"People in this town get killed for subway fare. Two lousy bucks." A tough guy voice. They laughed.

"So..." he trailed off.

"Good news, we have something. But it is weird."

"This is New York City. How weird?"

SEO took a breath, "We have evidence to believe that The Artist was engaging in unusual online activity of a sexual nature."

"That is a perfect non-descriptive description, Officer. Perhaps you could spin that out for me," a smile in his voice where there was none in the words.

"First. I am not a prude. I live in the real world."

"Noted."

"And, I will not even bring up the browser history. Her porn tastes were ... mainstream, yet disturbing and very specific. You don't want to know."

"You didn't bring me down here for that." He straightened his pants cuff, thought about the effect this bench might have on his coat. Unruffled and unhurried. Mannered. Deliberate.

"The Artist was investigating web sites and social forums for people with STDs. Specifically communities with well people who wished to deliberately contract STDs from infected people." Pause. "She struck up private conversations with several of these people and when we correlated with her chat logs and personal map, her life-map, it appears she met three of them."

A silence. Information being processed. "So, she was curious about clean people who wanted to meet and be infected by ... infected people. Is there any evidence that such consummation occurred?"

"Maybe." "Jesus!" "Maybe not. It could have been research. It could have been interviews. It could have been the basis for an essay. A social experiment."

"But."

"But. The Boyfriend and The Artist have been squabbling because he suspects her of cheating. The life-map logs for two men coincide for long periods with The Artist at hotels. She was using a lot of dating sites. And, there is the writing in question." No response. "She seemed to be writing a work about these people, those who view sex as frankly diseased behavior to begin with, and compares herself to such people. She talks a lot about her own body image, self-loathing, etcetera etcetera etcetera. There is a sense that" slight pause, then a rush to the exit "she wanted to get exotic STDs as a performance art piece."

"Really."

"Yeah."

SEO waited a while watching him think. Finally she ventured: "Is this your interview technique, 'cause its really good. You wait with such anticipation. I just want to pour more words out."

"Who else knows about this?"

"The Boyfriend suspects. The contact information on the men she met and those she questioned are known to us."

"On your team?"

"Only me and the Drip."

"Great."

Lead Detective mulled, paused, rolled words around in his mouth. "So. Society can't judge me, my body, my beliefs. I can sleep with whomever I want, or no one. And to test that agency, she deliberately sleeps with people who society has judged to be diseased, to provoke a response?"

"That's a really good gist of it. I'm surprised by 'agency.' Especially with you calling people dirty earlier."

"I didn't say dirty. I said diseased, as in having a disease."

"You contrasted it with clean."

"So I did. Blame the old Catholic school in me. Or your... or rather the modern generation who only desired to move the soul from the mind to the crotch."

"Not my generation."

"No. So, I'll be a bad interviewer for a minute and answer your questions for you. You told me because even if this isn't true, or it's somehow innocent – a simple essay or research – word will get out. And it will create a firestorm. And if she did try to get ... infected."

"And too many people know. Others can trace her on these forums. She met with several virtually and at least three in person. And."

"And"

"The guy she spent 3 hours with in a hotel, he is from Africa. He has a very rare form of syphilis only found in a few countries. Ebola-like countries. And so... there are a lot of men who want to sleep with him because of it."

"He's a ... prize?"

"Very rare. I suppose prize is one way of describing it."

His reserve dissipated for a moment, and clouds roiled his face, Zeus and thunderstorms on the brow. "What. The. Fuck. Rich, famous, boyfriend. Money. What is so wrong with ... people that they can't just." Force of will mouth clench. He controlled himself.

Interiorly, SEO found herself agreeing. She liked these pauses, they were space to think. "Maybe that's why he's so good. He allows his people to think instead of talk," she thought. She also mentally asked a question she had been asking herself earlier – whether this was just a new body mod. Tattoos, scarification, implants, cyborg crap, now custom diseases. More self-discovery for the self-expressed. She thought she remembered a novel where people tried to catch the diseases that famous people had. If there wasn't, she should write it.

"AIDS?"

"No. I think it was all only solvable diseases. Curable, I mean. Odd but not-drug-resistant chlamydia. Crabs."

"Crabs."

"Yup."

They sat for another minute. The day was moving into true "nice day" territory. He took another deep breath. He wondered if they could sell cigarets that tasted like fresh air.

"So." The mood was breaking. More people were entering the park. Like a jump cut in a movie, the morning had passed from cool and calm to yellow sun and busy motion. Soon the day would choose between David Lean heat or low gun metal gray blanket of swelter. New York in summer. But it was not summer.

"Social Disease. Meet social experiment."

"Why do all New York cops talk like they are on TV?"

"Practice." Short pause. "Were any of the people she contacted via these STD forums at the event?"

"So far no. Do you think...?"

"Don't lead. What I could hypothesize is that she gets a disease from guy A, gives it to Guy B, Guy B isn't expecting that, bam! kills her. But you've run the STD people against all party attendees?"

"Yes. None attended."

"And can you provide those names to my two sub-detectives to interview these people?"

"Ready to do so. And for anonymity?"

"I'll talk to them first. Today. You provide them the list... with NO explanation... this afternoon. They'll know what to do."

Another deep breath. The warming air in the nostrils. He holds it, closes his eyes, breathes out. Summing up.

"I do appreciate you telling me. This is the sort of thing I need to be ready for, but I don't quite know how. I'll tell you, though, the game will be to keep this buried. As in deep buried. Move your files on this somewhere non obvious. Don't delete or hide them, just stick them in a deep folder and do other work. Get me the names of the three who met her and the 100 or so she contacted and I'll arrange for discrete interviews.

"I'll let you in on my thinking, Officer. If this breaks, it will cause a media storm, but won't hurt us. It might even help us, get some people off of our back. Every day people are talking about this... virus hunting?, that's a day they aren't asking us why we don't have the killer. But then, they'll want to know if we know, and we will have to decide whether we say yes, we were following this lead because we are genius cops, or say no, we didn't know, which keeps us blameless yet stupid. The worst and I mean worst possibility is if this leaks from the Department and it appears we are using this in any way to disparage The Artist. If she does it to herself, well so what. If we are seen to be leaking this, we are dead. Do you understand me?"

"Threat taken."

He thought about being too sharp, realized she was too smart to think that, smiled instead.

"Imagine the headlines. 'STD Revelation Shows Artistic Integrity, Honesty'. I'm sure The Paper of Record would spin pro-, but the others..."

"I can see the Tabloid now: 'KINKY, Baby!'"

Old jokes sit best. They sat, perhaps now a few millimeters closer. Inhaled more sunlight.

"We have a few more minutes, Officer. I can put this on my backburner for a few. What else can you tell me. Do you have any ideas, or opinions on this case?"

Opportunity! Treated like a real cop! Her toes curled in her shoes slightly, but she suppressed any trace of a grin. "The Victim seemed to be a very unhappy person, but I don't want to judge her as just a depressed, moody spoiled boho-bobo. She had a real talent. She was talking to directors. She was writing. But she was also struggling. She had a lot of ideas and none of them were good. I mean, good enough for her. As a person, I feel she was having real troubles with this stage of her life. As a cop, I keep looking for something to explain why she was pushed off of a roof. Or why she would have jumped. And I can't find it. Losing an agent? She gloated about it and never mentioned it again. Money wasn't a problem. Fame wasn't. Recognition. That might have been a reason. Not that she was killed, but that might have been the driving force in her life right now. She had accomplished a lot, she had more to give, but it seemed fewer and fewer people cared. I mean, blogging? She wanted to act, but couldn't, she wanted to reach the next level of directing but Hollywood wasn't calling. She was given a chance to direct some New York cop shows, you know, the celebrity director thing? And she admitted it would help her, but she looked down on it so she said no. I mean, famous directors flirt with ordinary TV, why not her?"

"So, she was floundering and seemed to be her own worst enemy?"

"Sorta. Or, you could say she had standards. She wanted to do great things at this point. In her life, in her career. But she wanted them to be instantly great."

"Not a reason to jump."

"Nope."

"Last question on the suicide angle. Think of all the triggers and reasons from a professional standpoint. Did she have any thing, say coming up in a few days that would preclude suicide?' Had she done anything in the day or two before that would or could show a lack of planning or a plan for the future?"

"She had a meeting in a week with some creative new media folks. She had been writing a few pages a day in her Ideas file. The week before she dies look like two weeks before she died, look like a month before she died. I even got Poindexter to do that new bullshit social media depression big data analysis on her."

"Spare me all details. Results?"

"Depressed people go out less, their social contacts diminish, length of typed response drops, their physical space diminishes. They don't walk as far or as fast. They meet fewer people, read more, type less. He ran the numbers. 'No statistically significant results.' Thus per a computer, no signs of depression."

"Per a computer. Hmmm." He actually made the hmmm sound, a parody of a learned man weighing a new fact.

L.D. (Lead Detective) stretched in anticipation of getting up. "You are doing excellent work. You and the whole Mod Squad."

"Please don't call us that."

"Too late. If I were to treat you as the leader of that rag tag group of misfits, what is your 10 second managerial assessment? Good, bad, needs work?"

SEO appreciated—deeply—the trust, but secretly knew better. "Everyone is fine. Poindexter, Hipster, and Miss Madeline are all working hard. No real conflicts, nothing we can't handle. I think Miss Madeline has something personal going on, but I can't figure it out. Yet. Poindexter is kind of a pig, Hipster.... needs adjustment on work boundaries."

"Great. Stay on it. Someone will need to run those misfits some day. Maybe soon." He arose with a bound and a grin. His day a lot brighter. "Keep the reports coming. I want a lot – a lot – out of your team. Names, places, odd facts. Keep the Executive Summaries tight, with the most important actionable stuff as bullets. But give me pages of secondary material. This computer report for one. We need to have a lot of hay in this needle stack. Keep running those computer analyses. Give recommendations but leave me lots of facts to determine my own."

"Got it." Social Engineering Officer stood, too. They faced each other.

"It's always unpleasant, you know this, but remember, they can't take away your birthday."

"Sir. Wait... one question. If she was trying to get STDs, well... did she? Does the coroner's report say if she had any of these?"

"I wouldn't know, Officer," he said mock seriously. "For they haven't deigned to let me see the damned full thing yet. But I think I know where my next stop is. Her former agent, while I ponder this other issue. Good day, Officer." They touched hands briefly and he left, a quick springy step of a man with a song in his heart. The SEO watched him go. When his back disappeared behind the iron fence, shrouded by the thick hedges that enveloped it, she turned and slowly walked towards the other exit, one foot slowly plodding in front of the other. Her face blank, her mind racing.

* * *

"My dear, so gooooood to see you!"

"Good to be seen." The Artist didn't love her New York Media / Press Agent, but he knew people, got good work. He was older than dirt, had worked with everyone, could get famous keyboardists or a 2-hour special on colon cleanses in a twinkling. Connected. "What is happening? I need work."

"There are options. Good options. Showtime is talking of a six part documentary on college sexual mores. You would contribute..." cut off by:

"I will not take a Pity Show!"

"My dear."

"Stop saying 'My Dear!'" Too Sharply. Shocked and amused him, too. Just for a moment.

"My dear, right now, you are in transition. It isn't even a matter of 'what have you done lately?' They know what you have done and when you have done it. And, there is ...aren't a lot of paths from here to there."

"Maybe if I had better projects I would be... there!"

"My dea... " a Breath. "You will not play the game. You will not do 'guest directing' on popular shows because they are beneath you. You don't have the wherewithal to take on a long term project and grind through it. The medium Bigs are always willing to give you a try, but your pitches ... are uninspired. You are pitching being YOU."

"I am someone in this town."

"Yes you are, but you aren't drawing the circle larger than 5 miles from your Brownstone in Trendy Heights."

The Artist got up from her chair, started to pace. "I didn't come here to hear some out of touch feeb tell me I'm not with it" said in almost only in her head. But it had been said. In relationships, there is so much strain that can be taken at once. It is like a bunch of dry spaghetti, you can bend it, maybe even break a few pieces. But the core can remain solid, unbroken. And, like a tree branch, it might heal. But, keep snapping spaghetti and the final straw will be reached. At this point, there are a lot of broken pieces of metaphorical dry spaghetti on the floor of the office of the NY Media Agent.

"Fine. At this point. You are. Box Office Poison. I couldn't get you on a re-make of the Match Game. You couldn't be on Hollywood Squares. You have nothing to say and few people to say it to."

"Fuck you."

"Not my type." Small smile as he drifted back to the drinks table. "And I left my wallet in my other pants."

"Fine." The Artist took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. It is very hard for me to say that, you know?"

"I know. Drink?"

"God, no." She took another breath, gathered herself again. "I want to write for New York's Sketch Show Live."

At this, the NY Media Agent was taken aback. And he had smoothly helped Danny and Gilly that one night when Johnni had OD'd. He normally was unflappable. This flapped him. "Live?" Neutrally.

"Yes. It is currently having a moment. I don't know why. I watched it the other night, and it is weak."

"Is it?"

"Yes. Fucking puppet sketches and Costco jokes and fake vomiting and another election hack bit... It could be more!"

"How did you once put it? 'Open on: Abortion Clinic During Katrina'?"

No shame, either in the recognition, or that she had stolen that joke. "Yes! Cutting satire. That is the problem, all of these satirists are pussies! No teeth. We need to gut these fucking crazies and laugh them off the national stage."

"I'm sure that will play well in Peoria."

"Fuck Peoria. I can write! I can write sketches. I can have ... pages! for you in two weeks. Get me a meeting, I will dazzle them. You know people there, I know you do. Put me in, Coach." Pathetic smile.

The NY Media Gent finished making his little drink, he walked carefully to his desk, pivoted behind it, sat down. Took a sip, grimaced, smiled. "No."

A beat. The Artist hadn't heard the word in so long it took extra time to process. "I'm sorry." Not a question, an interrogation. "I'm sorry" was another phrase rarely heard or said in the presence of The Artist, except by verbally battered baristas.

"No. I know you and what you write. You are exactly the wrong person for the show. I went to the show's producer God Himself's birthday party two years ago. I met a Beatle. And to get you on, I'd have to reach through him. And I won't, he is a friend. You don't really want this, you think Live should be grateful to have you on board, writing pissy left wing screeds. Well, I don't and I won't. It is a bad idea. You aren't suited to the Writer's Room. Certainly not one you don't own. Next."

Stunned. Mouth agape. "No? What the fuck? You won't? Fuck you! You work for me! I'm your Number One! Who gets in the Paper of Record more than me? No. One. You will pick up that phone, call God Himself, get me a meeting, and get me on that shit show."

The NY Media Agent paused, took another sip. He had known, minutes ago, what was coming. He had decided to get ahead of it. "You know, I am thinking that this agency is considering changing direction. Fewer clients, less print. That sort of thing. I have a dear friend who would be ideal for you. Big shots, TV creative client list, some pull with the money boys. Yes, yes, the more I think of this, the better an idea it sounds."

"You are firing me?!?!??!?!"

"What? No, Lord no!" The NY Media Press Agent allowed himself a small smile. "I will let him poach you from me. Drama! You will get tons of free, positive press. You are so valuable a Big Name had to steal you! I would ... would graciously let you go. He might be able to get you a chance on Live, New York! Yes yes." Puttering now, reaching for the old-fashioned, huge Rolodex, and the phone.

"No fucking way." Pacing again, arms swinging angrily helplessly. "No!"

The NY Media Press Agent looked up, over his half glasses, pityingly, his hand dialing the number, the phone cradled in his left shoulder, "Yes, I fear."

... "And that's what happened, Detective."

The Detective finished jotting in his notebook, looked up. He was seated exactly where The Artist had been. "And that was it? You fired her?"

"No, no. I let her go right into the arms of an excellent representative. No glitches. Media play. New representation and all that."

"But, you terminated the relationship because..."

"...because she was still delusion of grandeur about her career and her viability. Hear me, Officer, you cannot be too hard or too soft in this business. You find these people, they have nothing, maybe a hidden grain of talent. You nurture them. They cost you money. Then, they get work! They earn, the golden days! The fatted calf. Then sadly they start to slip. There is always a lull, a drought. And, a good agent carries the load for a while. Gives confidence, makes suggestions, reaches out. We are not heartless bastards."

"And yet..."

"And yet, one does require a modicum of decency, one who listens. A plan, realism. And, I only allow so many insults before I get too tired to continue. What did William Goldman say? 'I am too rich and too old to put up with this shit?' She found my limit."

"And so.."

"You are good at questioning! All those open ended two word queries. Must be the way you open your face, you look so naive and full of curiosity. Anyway, she cried, I cried. I was fond of her, you know. But, I couldn't help her. I had tried and was tired of trying to no effect. She yelled, she cried, she left. I had Big Name on the phone in five minutes, she was in his office the next day her files already in their system. Smooth transition."

"We are investigating whether her career status was to do with her death."

"Murder or Suicide?"

"Excuse me?"

A long sigh... "Detective, if it was Suicide, that implies she was troubled about work. I don't think she was. She had money, she had ideas, she even had a work ethic. This is a business of highs and lows, she was in a low. She was no longer the precocious youngster, and hadn't yet evolved into the stable mature professional. But, she loved herself too much to kill herself. But, to be a professional for your report, let me say this – she left this agency well. She was happy with Mr. Big Name. I have heard nothing about a cancelled pilot, a firing, nothing that would trigger a jump."

"And if..."

"Two words, again. And if it was murder, who? Her show was ending or had ended, no one read her columns. If she had betrayed someone – 'fucked them over' in the vernacular – I would have heard about it. If she had a million dollar idea and someone wanted to kill her for it, well I haven't heard about that. No whisper of a genius idea." Air quotes over the last. "What else did she have to offer? A 3-D porno, a live sitcom filmed in Williamsburg. Mid-level celebrity show up ... gigs. No, nothing like that is worth killing over."

Lead Detective sighed, flipped through his notes. "So no contact after?"

"No, Detective." A small smile. "I saw her around. We travel in the same circles. A film festival here. A Writer's Event there. I can give you my professional calendar, you can compare it to hers. We probably saw each other every few months."

"What about the non professional calendar."

"I have not seen her at a non-work event since she left this Agency."

"Were people upset you fired her?"

"I did not fire her, and I am a partner here. My case was simple: she had peaked, her earning potential was low, the effort-to-money ratio looked grim. Between you and me, Officer, I think she was due for a Renaissance. But, it was drearily predictable. "

"How so?"

"Pregnancy. Marry that rock star wannabe, or someone like him, boom: kids. Then, the creative juices would flow. Pregnancy, body-horror birth horror stories, sexism in the infant industry. "I'm a Feminist but I hate that I have post-baby fat!" "Post Partum Depression is Sexist!" Twee lifestyle pieces about strollers. Irma Bombeck for the Millennial set."

"Sounds grim."

"It is grim, Detective. One day, you are a fabulous urbanite, strolling through parks, going to events, the next you are in the burbs buying bulk paper towels and bragging about it. Bragging!" An odd flash of anger.

"It seems it hits close to home."

"I'm sorry, Officer. I spent a weekend with my sister this past weekend. Words were spoken. All we did on Sunday was church, Costco, television, nap, then grill, television, sleep. God, I was so bored I could see why they go to bed at 10:30. I reject all that. And her dialectic about bulk purchases." He sighed. "I sensed The Artist had that in her. All of the bourgeoisie, consumerists traits and artifacts. At least she died as she lived."

"Falling from a bar?"

"Alive. Detective. In the City. As she deserved. And what a way to go! Immortality. From a slip on a ledge."

"Slip?"

"Why not? Every paper argues Suicide or Murder. What about luck? Fate? A slip on a ledge? A silly moment gone awry? An accident. A rend in the smooth functioning of the Universe."

Flashback: A Rend in the Smooth Functioning of the Universe

"Look at you," The Artist sneered in that honking New Yawk voice she could pull out when she had to, the perfect pitch and tone to drop an insult so so so cutting her target would cower and flee. It had worked in college, it worked in writers' meetings, it worked with her crowd. No one stood up to a New Yorker when mad lines were being dropped. East Coast represent! "You are dressed like a date rapist. You look like a frat boy on his way to being molested by his bro-buddies in the Sigma Nu house. And I hate to say it, for I am not a body shamer, but I would guess you are oh, say thirty...five pounds too heavy for that shirt? That's just an estimate mind you." Eyes up, mic dropped. Mean grin. Lesson taught to the sexist pig with the ugly jokes. Bitchiness as sport.

The Comedian looked back, a grin as they say from ear to ear. A boxer who had just been tapped on the nose and liked the taste of blood. His t-shirt said something about women trying harder to fix the thigh gap instead of the wage gap. "Heh! You're half right, your mixed metaphor not withstanding – I am about to go rape someone with my frat buddies. No worries, Chubs, I know am a fat guy. And while I hate myself, and I certainly hate you, and your smug, no talent, snotty dismissive sense of entitlement masking a reckless lack of talent or taste. But the thing is," here, he looked around, he was hypnotizing them with his rapid patter and wanted to wait to strike so the venom would wound all the more – "no matter how much I hate you, it could never be any where near how much you clearly hate yourself."

Silence. Stone cold, hear the ice clink in the glasses silence. An inhalation. The Artist blushed, turned cold, and then turned to the Stand Up: "Fuck. You."

"And you call yourself a writer. One million words in the English language and that's the best you got? No wonder you were cancelled. Try harder." Big smile, teeth showing, sideburns sideburning, his whole demeanor waiting, anticipating.

"No, I mean it, fuck you."

"Now you're boring, honey. Repetitive. Yeah, I know you hate being called honey, twat. It's just that this Big Ole Dummy from East Texas doesn't like being told to 'fuck you.' I mean, I say fuck you, you say fuck you, we sound like 13 year olds. I expected so much more. Queen Bee. And so, here it is, I can tell you don't really mean it, because you only really scream 'fuck you' with meaning when you grab those big ole rolls of belly fat and squeeze them and try to make them disappear and scream 'fuck you' at your ugly, fatty self. And they never go away, do they?"

Cold disdain struggled to cross the Artist's face, didn't make it. "You misogynist. You ableist fat shamer. You homophobe!"

"I didn't know you were gay, and somehow... I don't think you know it either. Claiming LGBT-BBQ-WTF-LMNOP to be popular is one thing, but I'm guessing you tried pussy in college and didn't like it. Too salty for your refined tongue. Do gay people know you are stealing their cool? Isn't that cultural appropriation?"

"You just mock because you are distracting yourself from how wrong you know yourself to be."

"I'm merely trying to figure out how to differentiate your simpleton concept of feminism from simple man-hating. I can't find it."

Silence. This was bad. This was really bad. Normally, this shit would not have flown so far nor so long. But here she was, ironic t-shirt soaked through, losing LOSING an argument to some hillbilly. She couldn't put him down. She strained her head for the withering comeback. She had tried yelling homophobe and rape and neither had worked. She was almost out of options. The Artist could never remember if 1 in 5 women were raped or if 1 in 5 women earned less than men. Did women get raped 79% less than men? That couldn't be right. But, at this point, what does it matter? She sighed. She could drop either statistic with ease, shutting down any earnest debate; her sarcasm and faux outrage trumping, well, everything. And wasn't that the definition of contemporary intellectual life right now?

She had not yet begun to realize, even deep deep in her lizard brain, that she was on the Harlem Globetrotters, and that her colleagues, best friends, her entire social circle, were the Washington Generals. They were only there to be beaten. They pulled back at the last minute, letting the King shoot the quail, play the winning trump, win the race. So long as the King (or Queen) was allowed victory, the Royal Court could relax. But, it was imperative that The Artist could never know. But she was beginning to suspect.

"Racist!" she yelled and stomped off. For now, she would call that a tie.

Endnote [1] It really should be noted that the East Texas comedian is a real shit. He has managed to insult every ethnic group, racial group, gender, size, age, color, and belief system in a twenty minute set. He plays up his redneck ignorance, despite an MA degree. He pulls the "I insult everyone equally" excuse, which is no excuse at all. He is becoming popular with certain segments who think that libertinism equals liberty. Or people who just want an excuse to return to old-school racism, sexism, and so on. He posts to Red Pill web sites. Here is an example of a story he told at an Alt-Comedy gig last month:

"Women are always telling me my penis is small. My girlfriend Janice does that all the time. "It's so smalllll." Just like that. I'll have you all know my penis has been described on more than one occasion as 'adequate.' More than enough for a normal human woman. But with Janice, you're looking for something more like..." He pauses here, comedically. "I picture one of those huge semi tractor trailers in the Northwest, in lumber country, Oregon, rural coastal Oregon, with three trailers attached to one rig, most states have banned them, they are so dangerous, but this burly lumberjack, in red flannel, is driving a rig with three trailers attached, like a little train, and he is carrying some of the last of the redwoods (dramatic look to far distance, hand extending dramatically) dozens of these magnificent trees on the flats, they are a hundred feet high and four five six feet wide! Huge poles six feet across a hundred feet long and there are dozens of them on this long trailer roaring down a mountain road at a hundred miles an hour, and there she is, in a little sundress dress pulled up past her waist, sitting in the middle of the road, her legs spread, her panties down. Just waiting for that giant rig and its 100 foot long redwoods to come crashing into her pussy. That's what I think she is looking for in a dick." Gasps, hoots, mild claps usually follow. He then waits for someone to heckle. It always happens.

Heckle: "That's fucking misogynistic."

Response: "No, it's misandrist. You didn't even ask that lumberjack if he wanted to drive his rig into her gaping hole. That's rape." Groans from the audience.

# Chapter 12. Flashback: Between The Sheets #TRIGGERWARNING BAD SEX WRITING

"You can always tell a pig by its grunt."

The Artist staggered into the room wearing her most slashable face. RockStar rolled over, looked at her, rolled back. Grunted.

The Artist shambled to the bed, collapsed bodily on it. The room shook slightly. She was in her mini-Sumo-wrestler phase, too many late nights and not enough power walks. And deliberately dressing fat as a feminist statement didn't help. Those tight tops! He shut his eyes.

RockStar gathered himself. He didn't mean to be misogynistic to his 'girl'"friend", he just wished he didn't hate her so much. That fat angry pout! It re-formed itself between showing spite, retarded joy, and righteous anger (it could never reform itself, reform required reflection, he thought spitefully). He couldn't believe the critics who called her "wooden" – did they not spend any time in bed with her? It was a schizophrenic rollercoaster of the less enjoyable parts of the DSM-5. He peaked from out from under the pillow. She was propped up on her elbow, staring at him.

He hated this too. He was sure she was on the spectrum, the way she treated all other human beings like they were bugs, samples to be analyzed. Specimens. She couldn't believe anyone liked her, and she couldn't get the subtle, human clues as to whether they did or not, so she stared and gawped and squinted as she tried to read human emotions; a language she was not fluent in. It was annoying.

"Heyyyyyy," she tried. "Ugh" he said, hoping she would read it as light heartedly ironic and playful.

She poked him, he removed the pillow. Why was he seeing her? Oh, right, the "better a girl now than no one later" school of thought, and that bullshit fame matrix. Who had told him he needed to date "up" on the Q meter? I mean, celebrity parties are great, not living on a futon was divine, but being lectured 18 hours a day was getting wearing. And the meetings, her name got him and the band meetings. He smiled. She smiled back. They looked at each other. When would she get him on top-tier talk shows? He would be waiting a long time. He was such a star fucker that she could have come up and grabbed him by his pussy and he would have taken it and smiled.

She was right, he thought, she can't read me. Otherwise, she would know what is going on behind these eyes. "Behind These Eyes..." he thought, and began playing with the phrase, crafting a song. Maybe their break up song! He had heard they were the best. He needed to write the song, get on teevee with it, maybe play a few more industry gigs, then dump this lump. Dump the Lump, his brain repeated. They kept looking at each other.

The Artist emitted a low sustained squeaking rumble; she was trying to fart delicately. It was not an unpleasant smell, perhaps like pumpkin.

He gave in. His natural desires to get laid (male), to get attention (Rock Star), and to get out from under this lifeless gaze (human) caused him to switch his tactics. He rolled out from under the covers. He looked at her, thought of someone else. He thought of the few and far between blow jobs that he had been able to coerce from The Artist and smiled widely. She saw the gaze and smiled back. For her, this might be one of those couples moments that you stockpile against the bad times. A favored memory. A weekend in bed, secrets shared.

She snuggled against his shoulder while he pulled her close. Their warm bodies merged. Their breathing started to sync. He tentpoled his pajama bottoms.

She glanced down. "OooooOoo," she cooed semi-ironically. "Got some ideas?"

He shrugged, deftly looking away in a way to seem cool and detached. Sexy, he thought.

"Let's see what we can do about this," as she pulled down the waistband, liberating the "pulsing organ." He joylessly began to massage her natal cleft.

As he lay on top of her, a few moments later, looking into a pillow and not her gaping mouth, his mind roved widely, mostly ignoring the heaving shape below him. The real problem was that like most self-proclaimed smart girls, she was bad at sex. She didn't like physical acts or activities, and working on this one was as joyless as learning to climb a rope in gym class.

And, as a narcissist, she seemed to care more about her needs than his. For instance, she liked kissing. Loved kissing. And he liked kissing too, but she wouldn't stop. So, even now, as he turned his head away, her tongue was stuck out, wanting wanting wanting to Frenchkiss him, to rub tongues, suck face. That glass eyed stare and the protruding tongue looked like the pale corpse from a strangling victim. But the tongue remained. She was so short and dumpy he couldn't kiss her and bang her simultaneously, but she wanted both. Jesus, should he bring in a friend to spit-roast her? Give her tongue something to do? He continued his shallow thrusts.

And that was another thing! Could she not push back? Even a little? A few pushes? Were her hips locked? In his secret sexy place, he had a few mild kinks. He liked rad tattoos, cool chicks with a no nonsense attitude, smokers. And women who fucked him back. Women who fucked period. When that groupie started thrusting her hips at him, that time in the bus, he came so hard he broke the seat! And kept going! He had never been so excited as to stay hard through an ejaculation. Which had only driven her wilder. She flipped over, sat him back and rode him like a By God bucking rodeo rider. He smiled at the memory.

By contrast, The Artist lay sprawled vacantly, a wide open akimbo rag doll.

. . .

Post-coital. She was sprawled partially on her side, lying half asleep, looking off to the distance. He looked over. He had avoided looking at her naked for months, but his eyes skimmed over her mashed potato body, then noticed something different. There was a bandage on her lower back. It was small, flesh colored, and so well attached it was nearly invisible; he had overlooked it during their "love making." He steeled himself and ran a hand down her back. "What's this?" Sudden recognition: "you didn't get a tramp stamp did you?"

"What? No no." She turned towards him. "I got the idea at a strip club last month."

"What were you doing at a strip club? Ironic slumming?"

"God no! Sex workers are the front line of feminism. Me and some girls went to show solidarity with our sisters. I had a great conversation with this amazing woman. And she had this tattoo. It made so much sense, I got one too."

"When and where was this?"

"When I was in Portland. For the guest shot in PortlandLand. It was a few months ago. There are so many cool strip clubs there. It is very empowering."

A few facts: The Artist and her friends had drunkenly decided to rush the stage – liberate it, in their parlance – to Fight the Power. Constant Companion got a few weary cheers when she lifted her sweater, The Artist had been booed. Also, the producers had already cut The Artist's cameo; she would never appear on the show. And, the amazing dancer whose tattoo had been appropriated was in an abusive relationship and desperately wanted not to be a thirty year old exotic dancer sucking off poor-ish hipsters in the parking lot for rent money. The tattoo in question had been great idea when meth'd out at 17 with a biker who had turned her out for drug money. She hated it, hated the woman she had been who had gotten it, but also embraced the her she had been. The Stripper would not have been happy that it had been copied for a rich bitch (her words), but would have happily given the tattoo to The Artist if it meant it was gone for ever. A Twilight Zone bargain, an evil tattoo leaving one body for another, but with ... consequences! But in the end The Stripper had never scraped together enough money to have it removed. At least she never had to look at it. But she always, always, always knew it was there.

The Artist smiled. "I think it has been long enough," she reached around to her back with her free hand. "It can have some oxygen."

"So you got the tattoo that a stripper has?"

"I know, right?! So cool."

"Wasn't the idea hers?"

"Oh my God! It's not cultural appropriation She's white! You can't steal art from her!" A laugh. Then a ripping sound as the sticky was pulled off. A small "oof".

"What is it?"

"A coin slot! Put money in and get what you want! From her, a dance! But all women are pay-for-play. All of us dance or fuck or whatever for money. It is a physical manifestation of the Patriarchy!"

Silence.

"You don't like it? C'mon! It's great."

Mildly desperately, RockStar struggled for words "It's powerful."

"C'monnnn. I won't even make you put in a quarter. Let's use this thing. I lovvve it. Getting this makes me prouder than if I had written a sonnet."

"Sorry, babe. It's just a little. Off putting."

"It's not like a wolf or a butterfly you have to look at!" She shifted, getting awkwardly to her hands and knees, then bumped her butt against him. "Take me out for a ride. Use me. I'm a Cum Dumpster!"

* * *

"Mr. Mayor."

"Detective."

The oak paneled office of Hizzonor was exactly like one expected. Old fancy desk, lots of pictures, a hundred years of images and icons and knick knacks from the Police Force. In one wing chair was the Chief of Police, in another the Senior Aide to Hizzonor. No one liked him.

"This is an informal meeting, Detective."

"If I can quote The Maltese Falcon, it is hard for me to be casual in front of the Mayor, his Chief Aide, and the Chief of Police." Light polite laughter.

"You are a literate man." Whisky being poured into crystal glasses. One offered, taken but not drunk. Hizzonor finished his like a dying man who needed a last drink. Which he was and did.

"I read a few detective books. For inspiration."

"Well, we can discuss Chandler at a later time. May I have your assessment of the case so far."

"Poor."

No mocking smile from Hizzonor. No chortles. Seriousness incarnate. "And why is that?"

"We have not yet identified each and every person who was on that roof. You watch teevee so you know how we canvas and question. Each person discovered so far was questioned. Nothing popped." He paused. He continued. "We have the social media profile of all these people, nothing. We have the social feeds of The Artist, her family, her colleagues, her friends. Plus their friends. Nothing that leads to a murder motive."

"And yet."

"And yet a young woman died from a fall nearly a week ago and she remains unavenged. And the press is eating your ass every day. I am aware of the media repercussions."

"I'm not sure you are aware of the full impact of this unsolved mystery," piped up the Chief Aide.

"Nonetheless. I don't like being on this hook. But here we are. It's my case and I've taken it. And there is nothing I could not have done at this stage."

"We are not yet at recriminations, Detective. We are trying to get the lay of the land. We have read the reports. But what now?"

"From a higher level, there are three possibilities. Four, if you include Batman. I'm not kidding, it is possible that an unknown person was on that roof undetected, for the specific purpose of killing The Artist. I consider that to be a remote possibility."

"Why?" A lawyer's question. Probing and direct.

"Her plans were made last minute. People knew, but not for so long of a time that some crazy perfect crime could be planned. There is no way on the roof other than the elevator or the stairs next to it. If we want to discuss a rock climber or a hang glider that went undetected, no camera footage..."

"Yet there is no footage of the crime itself in a City known for too many cameras. Orwellian, some have said."

"Which supports my point. There is a camera in the elevator room, on the main bar, directly on the cash register for fraud and armed robberies. None other. Someone would have to know that this semi-legal rooftop bar was playing fast and loose with permits, and was keeping the infrastructure to a minimum. 80% of that place is set up and taken down for weekends and, I learned, for inspectors so the extent of the bar area is disguised. Who could know that she would be alone at a crowded party, away from all eyes and cameras? No one."

He paused and thought. "And, this mysterious murderer had no phone. Didn't come up the elevator. Had to know the victim would be alone. No sign of struggle."

"You make it sound like a locked room mystery, Detective."

A small smile, a tug at the crystal glass. "It is in a way. Which is why I don't believe it. This is either the craftiest murder this City has even seen, or an artistic unhappy woman decided to swan dive off of a roof at a party she had called herself. A Farewell Party? Maybe. But no note, no pronouncement. Whoops? Maybe, too."

"Which leaves us where?"

"Slip. Jump. Push. Pick one. Finish interviewing the last few hold outs. Pray for a witness. Or a confession."

"Are you going to be offering Whoops?"

"I'm not sure yet, Your Honor. She was troubled. Drugs and alcohol in the system. Recent career set backs. Wandered off to be alone. Not impossible to imagine a Sudden Impulse."

"When do you expect resolution? Our favorite muckrakers seem to not be able to let this lay quietly." That morning's paper had read "GALS GONE WEED – Artist Tested Positive for SIX Drugs!" Hizzonor held it up.

"I read the Journal, myself."

The Aide spoke, "I hear from my sources that tomorrow's head will read 'GALS GAL GONE: Wild'. I think they are running out of ideas. And the Paper of Record will be 'Fatal Swan Song of New York's Muse Causes Consternation in Arts Community'. That is a bad word for us."

"Which? Arts, Community, or Consternation?"

"This will not wind down, Detective. This remains an full on All Out."

"Then I need to be back out on those mean streets." He got up from his seat.

# Chapter 13. Flashback: Same Ole Crossroads

"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content." – Count Leo Tolstoi

"What are you doing, dreaming of writing late night monologues?" That was Constant Companion, the Artist's Muse, bestie, antagonist, trusted friend, all around pain in the ass, hanger on, haver of opinions, sounding board, occasional getter of the weed, Bud.

"Shit, you're right."

"'Course I am." Constant Companion, omni-present to The Artist since that amazing freshman year social in the shit-smelling cow town where they had both run away to go to school, laid back onto the relaxation pillows and looked at the ceiling. She cocked her head forward and took a loooooong sip of her drink (Bloomin' Boomerang: cheap Australian rum, expensive-here-but-cheap-there Australian cola, passion fruit, thyme, extra large icecubes, and bee stingers. Normally $19, but they had them delivered from the bar down the street and were charged $24 each and tipped the kid ten bucks for delivering two of the frosty cocktails in huge, ugly white styrofoam cups with lids and straws and everything.) They often did this, call local trendy places and using the power of the Name Drop, get exotic appetizers, off-menu concoctions, treats mentioned in food magazine reviews delivered directly to their door. The endgame was always the same, some Anglo kid (did they not trust the Dominicans to deliver food to Her?) hemming and hawing, a bag handed over, a profusion of hundred dollar bills spilling out from her pockets, a too generous tip, then the triumphal march to the living room: "I love New York!" Only in the Greatest City in the World™ can one get duck pâté quesadillas delivered at 3 of the clock in the aye emm morning, or ersatz Hurricanes delivered at 9. Sometimes they would go through the phone book – the phone book, like it is 1968! – and find the sleaziest, cheesiest bodega and get cheese steaks and calzones and a 12-pack of Salvadoran beer delivered. Great munchies food, the cold beer harshly quenching their stoner thirst. New York. It is wonderfully terrible.

"I mean, you know, I just"... The Artist sighed deeply, silently, and meaningfully. She took a gulp of the sludge of ice and bee stingers at the bottom of her cup.

"Yeah, I know."

She looked around a bit for inspiration. The walls held art, a big TV, some knick-knacks on shelves. She stared harder. "For literate people, we sure don't have a lot of books around."

"Remember when I asked if W was the sequel to V by Thomas Pynchon?"

"You hadn't heard of it, but had seen my two copies of V next to each other on the shelf!" she snorted at the memory.

They lay back, again. The Artist sighed deeply again. A clear sign.

"I don't know why you are so worried," C.C. tried again, her role as jolly-maker coming through. Bickering parents make a natural conciliator. "You interviewed The Candidate! You were on The Simpsons!"

"Yeah, but it was like twenty years, who cares? I mean, big deal. Michael Jackson was on The Simpsons."

"Yeah, you were on a show with a child molester. That's big!"

The Artist gave a hard laugh, "Yeah, we were both child molesters."

"Hey, that's not funny."

"No, no it isn't." Flat.

Loud sigh. It wasn't just the fear of the young ingénue facing a changing world, a media-scape filled with podcasters and people embracing new media and all that happy bullshit. It was the rapidly changing social landscape. The Artist had pretty conventional views compared to the young Frosh that she was talking with these days. She felt men and women were different, men were rapists and pervs, women were oppressed, gays were amazing, lesbians were cool, vaginas gave women their power, the usual 'cutting edge for the 1990s' scene. But these kids! She was afraid she'd get attacked by some tri-gender fluidqueer for accidentally implying only women could have abortions. The minefield of language and belief she had successfully negotiated and even helped to plant had been dug up at night and re-mined with no maps and no guides.

For a brief moment, she thought of some Rebel Leader, wearing sunglasses and a huge white general's jacket, with gold braid and medals and a big white captain's hat. He has spent years in a comfortable tent, attacking El Presidente, but not too hard, because the worst thing to do was win. Repeated light incursions and declared victories were enough for the secret foreign aid to come piling in. But now there were new rebels. Hard faced, tough edged teens in the jungle, silent, no words, never speeches, wearing discarded black clothing and building booby traps out of garbage, gutting guards in the night. There was not a mutual appreciation or understanding with these new rebels. These were the true believers. And she saw, for one brief, ugly second, that they saw her like they saw the establishment itself. Not just a pawn, but a willing pawn. Worse, for she had betrayed the ideals of La Revolución for personal gain. And she would pay like her adversaries would pay. The Artist shivered, shook her head. A bad dream. No 20 year old from Wesleyan would take her down! No shaved head, nose ringed punk artist with 19 letters after zer name (LQNX?QBVT and so on) could touch her. She had a nose ring! An immunity chalice, like a fabled ring from a fantasy adventure. The nose ring would save her, it was her One True Ring. Powerful. She didn't even think about the young Women of Color she had seen a few months before, wearing inches of jeweled Bangladeshi jewelry hanging down from the septum. The world had moved on, passed her by. Evolution had happened. She was the dinosaur, the embarrassing drunk racist uncle. It was nearly too late.

When the next uprising truly came, she would be pulled from her Rebel's tent with all illusion stripped away. The revolution would truly devour itself. A Doberman eaten by its own puppies: Chihuahuas. A feminist with blue hair humiliated by a tri-gender with a shaved head. Checkmate.

"Fuck it." She had said it so many times, she found she had nothing else to say. Another sigh: "God, I wish I were a Lesbian," The Artist thought for the thousandth time. "No, I wish I was a Lesbian. Because I could be. 'Were' is for the impossible. I could be." She closed her eyes and wished.

So she sat on the floor in this amaze-balls condo, tastefully decorated in artistic poverty, street chic, what would have been called Bohemian a hundred and fifty years ago. She lit a joint, pulled too hard, coughed. She reached for the jug of cheap red wine. Despite an embarrassing taste for too big and too red Napa cabs, she secretly loved loved loved cheap jug wine. That stuff had been the staple of the fabled, inviolate Friday Night Fun Night back in college. Weed, wine, and reggae music, ten friends on the floor of a dorm built for one (solo living, always).

There were many rules for the jug. Sometimes, it could not be set down, it was passed like a sacrament from soul to soul. Chugged, sipped, guzzled, bogarted. Until it was dry. That game had started sophomore year, when someone, maybe Josh (was it Josh? So long ago...) had slipped some Star Wars action figures into 1.75 liters of Toro Rojo. (This was pre-prequels so they were small, plastic hard Kenner toys from an early 80s childhood – Leia, R2-D2, and Luke Skywalker, if she remembered). As Bobs Dylan and Marley and even Seger played and blue smoke hung in the air, the figures sat silently at the bottom of the jug until the Luke Skywalker had bobbed up and touched someone on the lips – "What the fuck?!?!?!"

"Oh My God!" Josh cried, grabbing the jug. "They're drowning! We have to save them!" And he took a long, long swallow, forcing the bottle into the lap of the woman to his right. "Drink! Drink them to freedom!" And she did. Convulsed with laughter, they drank and drinked and drunk as fast as they could; five (or was it six?) of them swallowed and passed the bottle and tipped it until the little Chewbacca and R2D2 and Leia were saved. "Hey, he's a robot, he can't drown!" That night, that ridiculous act was such a fond memory that no one could tarnish it, none of them had lost it. So now, 20 years later, they still returned to the jug of cheap wine. The drink to save the world. No toys were needed anymore, but she sometimes felt the surface of the bottle with her fingerprints, hoping to detect the faint clink of plastic on glass.

They laid back for a while, stretching on the hardwood floor, pillows under their heads. For a while, they touched fingertips.

"Anything you wanna share." Asked flat.

"No. Whenever we start conversations that way, we end up talking about boys or calories. We never talk about ideas or books or stuff." She was stoned, but coherent. She could think, she wasn't doped up like she had had too much drank, the cough syrup concoction sweeping the hipsters of White Brooklyn like it had swept the black rappers of inner city Atlanta six years before. No, she was slow and mellow, but not out for the count.

"I don't want to talk about diets ever again. I'm already so fucked."

"Whaaaaat?"

"I hate boys. I hate men. I hate everything about them. Mainly. I hate that I need them. That I want them."

"Is this about RockStar?"

"Noooooo. I know he loves me, but can't stand me. Better than me. I hate me, and I can't stand me."

"No! He likes you."

"He likes things near me. He doesn't 'get' me. He didn't even go to that thing."

"Oh, the thing." The latest media outrage that seemed unable to topple The Artist from her perch in the consciousness of East Coast Media Types.

"I blocked myself from Twitter. It was baaaad. I had to do the Grovel Tour."

"I think I heard."

"You don't know. You just know there was a thing at a thing. Well there was. My Political Statement was mis ... misread. As always." The Artist sat up, made a little wooo sound, drank from the jug. "Misogyny. Miso-genie. Miso soup, a magical genie. Japan and Arabia. That word makes no sense!" Stoner logic.

Best Friend was stuck on the other thing. "A tuxedo is a bold statement." In 1920, she did not add.

"I know it makes me look like a penguin. The Penguin, actually. But, ya know, it should be okay to break society's little rules. What did they want me to wear, a Quinceañera dress? Fuck them!"

Trusted Friend made soothing noises. The Artist was looking around the room, not quite wildly. The weed was tamping it down. The Xanax gave the clarity.

"I mean, I am not a lump! I am a human being. And that fucker was just sitting there, texting all night!"

"The football guy?"

"Yes, he plays football. So he thinks he is entitled to some 19 year old cum dumpster to ooh and aah over him, suck him off in public wearing... wearing... nothing!"

"So you tweeted that. You were ignored and hurt and so you tweeted that. That."

"Well, yeah! Sorta. I mean, he was cute. And superfit! Not like these mush balls Brooklyn seems to ... I dunno. Attract. Grow. Something. What do mushrooms do? Sprout. I just..." she trailed off, laying back. Her voice was breaking, her eyes filling with water. Like a thirty year old looking in the mirror and seeing acne—that's for teenagers!—she was looking at herself in her mind's eye. Thirty plus years of seeing the same thing, being the same thing. Not getting what she wanted.

"I mean, I am fun! I am smart! And I am a sexy powerful woman." Her voice ratcheted up, louder, a crescendo: "Why won't black guys fuck me hard like I deserve?" Tears.

* * *

"And you didn't even know that a murder had been committed at the same establishment you had uh frequented?"

"No. I mean, the announcement was days after I left town, and I am pretty busy with work, so..."

"Did your girlfriend tell you?"

"Yes, like I said. She called as soon as she heard. Well, that next night. We couldn't believe it. Neither of us. I think that's the closest I've ever been to a crime."

Lucky you. "So what do you think. Did you see anything?"

"No. I mean, I saw her. She was there. We were at the bar. We drank, ate, talked. Stayed out late. It was a nice night. Then went home."

Junior Detective pondered. He had expected nothing, was getting nothing. He had agreed to the 5 hour ride down South to question this mook. "Everyone who was there" was the guidance, and this guy had been there. His cell phone said so, so did the credit card receipt. But he didn't belong there. Nerdy guy with a deep distracted gaze and bit of muscle around the shoulder. Great credit, great job, no record. He mentally sighed. No connection with the Vic, no motive, doubtful opportunity. Junior detective looked at his pad. No signs of stress. No weird over explaining or excessive details. Waste of time.

Which was the exact notation Senior Detective made after he finished with Katie. They both reported this, moved onto the next name.

# Chapter 14. Pre-Funeral

(First, some Background: - ed.)

"HOWTHEFUCKCOULDYOUDOTHIS?"

"What?" Genuine shock. This was a long time ago, when Little Sister was no one and The Artist was building her reputation, one broken brick, cracked rock, and stolen stone at a time.

"My sexuality is my business!"

"Oh, that. I thought you'd thank me." The Artist could barely bring herself to look up from her ironic typewriter.

"Thank you?! Thank you?! Thank me! Fuck you!"

"Language!"

"Oh, right. You outed me, you twat-cunt! In that hip mag you suck up to."

"I thought you wanted it. So you didn't have to tell mom and dad. You would have taken forever."

"None. Of Their. Business. None of yours. And certainly none of the whole Borough's! What, are you that desperate to be interesting?"

"Hey. I take you seriously. I mean, I thought it was a phase. So, I wanted to be sure it was real..."

"A phase? Fuck you, you." Nothing more. The literate squabbles of their teen years were gone. She was dug in. And now, Little Sister was even more vested in being LGBT even if she didn't fully know why. If sexuality were fluid and people drifted from pole to pole (so to speak), this little incident had just knocked her fifteen points to the Queer. What might have been a youthful dalliance would soon rapidly sprout into full on Lesbianism. At least, in The Artist's mind. When she thought of sexuality, she saw a child's crayon drawing, a rainbow-colored band ranging from -100 to 100. Squares and losers were at 0, whether men, womyn, or trans. Her Sister had been hovering in the -20s, near a pale yellow. She was now racing through orange, nearly Green. Maybe a Teal. Turquoise? Reverse psychology. Months later, when Little Sister had a carabineer, Doc Martin boots, a shaved half-skull and a bad attitude, The Artist would look on her warmly, a proud parent at graduation, "I did this."

The house was set for mourning. Black crêpe, ordered from the very best milliners, covered windows, mirrors, anywhere mirth might hide. Lights turned down. Classical, dreary classical, on the stereo. The family sat in the lounge, on a variety of chairs, settees, and a couch. RockStar was not invited. The Little Sister's terrible new boyfriend4,

Footnote [4] Yes, Little Sister was a dyke, in response to her sister's constant berating and scheming. But like all of The Artist's plans, it had failed. Little Sister had snapped back, hard, whipping past "normal" (yes yes, The Editors know the troublesome history of using that word for hetero-somethingelse-ative) straight on to HyperHetero. All of her boyfriends for the next five years would be the sort of hyper-masculine date-rapey douches you would expect. "Riding the Spectrum" it is not known as.

nicknamed by her 'The Stabbing Machine', was. He was staring out a window, actually thinking about how cool he must look, all mournful and shit, his downcast eyes filed with mock pain. He wished he had a personal photographer, to capture moments like this. And Auntie and Little Sister were fighting.

"Look, she was my sister! I just want to see her off right. She hated churches and religion an shit."

"Do not curse at me." Auntie said, too quietly. She was ignored. Big mistake.

"Fuck that!" Little Sister continued. "She was an Atheist! She lived large, she loved life. And I want her funeral to you know reflect all that ..." She tailed off, lit a cigaret.

Auntie waited. She was old, Italian grandma old, family elder OLD. And she was the Elder, the Matriarch, wearing black which not one other family member seemed to be able to do. God knows that stupid Mother couldn't have raised a worse child if she had locked her in a box. And couldn't lead Lemmings to the sea. Auntie spoke again, quietly, deliberately.

"I know this must be hard for you, my child. It is hard for all of us. But, despite what your insipid, mewling generation thinks, there are still standards. There are forms. And they will be fulfilled. Period. You have no say. You have no voice. Period. And raise your voice to me again and we will be able to run a little experiment I have wanting to run for a very long time – how long you would be able to exist without the generous subsidies that this family provides you."

Little Sister didn't even look up. She had pondered outrage, rejected it. Heels dug in was a better move.

"She would have hated some bullshit blah blah blah ceremony. Everyone in black, a chapel. A coffin!"

"I fear, Little Sweet, funerals are for the living, and not the dead. Arrangements are being made. The old Methodist church still remembers our family's former contributions to the life of this community. Brooklyn used to be a City of Churches. Before it became a City of Yoga Studios and stronzos. So, the ceremony will take place. Friday. Noon. Old family friends. A distinguished service. Then a small graveside ceremony for immediate friends of the family." She didn't need to look at sulking boyfriend as she emphasized this fact.

"Ugh. Some rapey priest throwing dirt as part of his creepy cult."

"Yes, my dear. Catholicism is a cult. For what is a cult if not 60% marketing, 40% ritual? But it is a cult to which I belong. And my beloved, confused, dear niece shall depart this world under its strictures and guidances. Or as near as I can get her. I will say the word 'Trust Fund' if it helps clarify the issue for you."

"Wait a minute," Little Sister wailed. "Methodist? Catholic? I thought we were Jewish!"

"The fact that you don't know is a sad indictment upon your religious upbringing." This was shot with a stare to The Father, who couldn't bring himself to acknowledge it. "Culturally Jewish," Auntie sneered. "A taste for bagels and curly haired girls with soft mouths." A pause. "And driving around with the interior car lights on."

Silence. "And the reception?" Little Sister ventured.

"Back here, Sweet One. Underplayed, I think. Some sandwiches and wine and tea. Solemn."

"You cahhhnnt make me."

"My dear, I don't want to. Come, don't come. I could give a flying fuck. Get in the limo, stay home, go discoing for all I care. Just wear black and keep your trap shut. And say good-bye to your sister."

"I want to run the reception."

"Out of the question. You don't run the reception. What would you do, cater a bar? Sell tickets? Guitar music?"

"Yes! Yes! A modern, contemporary relevant event. With ... poetry! And music! And people saying their thoughts. And maybe a wall where people can create art! Inspired art on their feelings."

"Sounds dreadful."

"Well, Dearest Auntie, you don't need to come. And if you do, don't wear black and keep your trap shut." She smiled as though she had scored a major debating point. She began running he right hand's fingers through her hair, trying to pull it back from her face. A gesture that she would repeat and intensify for the next week until it looked like she was trying to pull her own hair right out of her head. Tug, smooth, tug.

"I always hate to be gauche, my dear, but shall we ask how you intend to pay for this Extravaganza of Enormity? I hear your credit cards are not at full staff."

"I have a plan. It will be ammmaaazing." Little Sister did a little drunken twirl.

"I see. What are you on?"

Sudden seriousness. "Nothing. Freedom! Life." She moved to The Stabbing Machine, looked into his eyes, he looked back. The stood, silhouetted in front of the shaded window. She imagined they looked magnificent, timeless. She decided to hire a photographer. A personal one, for around the house.

"I have a plan," she continued. "Moonshine Sunsets BBQ, that new bayou place down on .. 4th?.. has a huge dance floor. A stage. Old stained glass. It is perfect. A few local bands are begging to play. We invite her friends, the neighborhood, people who ...care! People who can see! Those of us who give a shit."

"I see, a drunken debauch to say farewell to a family member. An Irish Wake. Well, go right ahead. Run the family name through a little more mud. Who cares? Who knows? It can be your Waterloo, your farewell to decency."

"Not just mine, Auntie. Ours. All of ours!"

At this, Father, who had been sitting staring at some bad art on the wall, perked up. He adjusted his brown cardigan sweater, turned uncomfortably towards the window. "Huh? Ours?"

"All of ours, Father. It will be huge. Yuuuugggge! And epic! A first. A Triumph."

"What are you talking about?"

"Fame! 'The only currency of the 21st century.' You said that. Well, I'll be minting fame hand over hand. The first ever sponsored celebrity funeral!"

A deeper silence held. Finally, a squeak emerged: "A what?"

"You know how Kim (The Armenian) got E! to sponsor her wedding? Well TMZ is willing to cut a check just to cover the comings and goings at The Artist's Tribute Farewell. Celebrities! Drama. Concert. A funeral reception thing for the ages. Camera crews and that Blond Thin Host guy may MC. A first!"

More silence. Words rolled around the brain like stale gum in the mouth. "You would sell out this family's grief and privacy for a ... a TV show about the death of your sister?"

"Wouldn't you?"

The Father put the beer directly on the wood table, carefully pushing the beer coaster out of the way. For it was a collector's beer coaster, one of the last produced especially for a pub in Britain that had since gone out of business. His priorities were clear – wood furniture could be destroyed with moisture rings, but a classic, collectable piece of beer history made of cardboard was sacrosanct.

"It's like that Bob Dylan song, Decimation Road," he muttered. "It all ends in shit."

"Desolation" corrected The Stabbing Machine, thinking he was helping.

"Don't care." Murmured The Father. He knew he was upset. His upset was an overall feeling, like being warm. He would find himself looking at something, then think about his daughter, then not look at the thing at all. He was decimated but didn't even know it. He was like a World War 2 soldier, in that D-Day movie, carrying his own arm, not aware it had been blown off.

He wandered to the sideboard, topped his drink. He had secretly bought a paper, the family had been throwing the delivered editions away so as to not dwell on the headlines and pictures and stories of their lost daughter. He unfurled it and took a look at the headline, "A Generation Lost in Place – The Silencing of Millennial New York's Truest Voice" and shuddered.

It was fortunate he didn't go to the Inside Arts section, where he would have seen this puddle of lukewarm saliva: "Woody Allan, Spike Lee, The Artist – All No More: Who Will Speak For Gotham Now?" Or the editorial: "As NYPD Struggles, More Resources Seemingly Can't Solve Murder of the Decade: Is White Female Privilege to Blame?"

He sat back down. He had preached Nihilism and Nothingness his whole life, but wasn't ready when it actually came to call.

* * *

That evening, Steve found his old copy of Crime and Punishment. Started reading.

# Chapter 15. Pull Back The Veil

"I grabbed a few of the more interesting rounded protuberances and started rubbing."

Steve and Katie were having sex. But do not worry, Gentle Reader, this is not one of those "modern" novels that needs to delve into the bedroom habits of all its characters. You need not fear, for this is decidedly not one of those early 1960s pulps that—freed from fears of obscenity charges and writing to a new, liberated audience—will write the sort of cringe inducing prose that causes the skin to crawl. No funny metaphors, no "special rounded places" or "jutting proudly." A very large number of 60s writers, freed from their Victorian era constraints, crafted some of the very worst writing of all time: sex descriptions that hold up as well as early 1960s mores and recipes. They tossed out all euphemism and subtlety and, emboldened by Supreme Court decisions, they kicked open the bedroom door and began describing awkward, clumsy, private moments with details that were given awkwardly, clumsily, and in a most non-private way. Their audience, promised titillation, got nothing more than embarrassment and disgust.

Not only is that sort of titillation actually coarse, boring, and unsettling, it fundamentally fails to communicate anything about the characters or the plot.

A film critic once said that showing on-screen sex is boring because there is no tension—we know what is going to happen. "Sex is without suspense." This stupid position must be false, as it forgets that any scene has the potential to demonstrate interaction between characters, and in something as raw as sex, those tensions are heightened. Why are they having sex? Is it a boring, plain vanilla motion performed rotely? Does one character not want to have sex? Is he mildly disgusted by his partner? Is she acquiescing for ulterior reasons? What secrets are they hiding, and what can they hide when being so intimate? What if the sex is awkward, boring, painful, dull? What if she can tell he is having an affair, or that he is bored, or just disinterested? Is she content or disappointed? Treating these moments with the same seriousness as a similar conversation at a dinner table would benefit sex writing immensely. For hundreds of years, readers have sat stunned and shocked over a held hand, a whispered promise, a heart-felt note, a forbidden conversation, why can't we have such emotion in book sex?

With the 60s sex-writing shock over, and the 90s shock of "classy sex writing" in the distant past, we can try to discuss Steve and Katie through their motivations, not their actions, and absolutely not through their body parts, positions, or words like "throbbing" or "pulsating" or "thrusting" (see, even decontextualized, those words are just gross.)5 Far too many authors feel compelled to shock their readers by puttering along with a pleasant little crime novel, then suddenly tossing out the word "clitoris." Or, God forbid, "throb." No one needs three paragraphs on positions, sounds, sighs, grunts, moans, whathaveyou. "Katie makes a low squealing sound when she climaxes"—who cares?

Footnote [5] Yes, the scene earlier between RockStar and The Artist was pretty crude. But there was a point to all that cringing detail! Seriously. This will be the first first novel put up for a Man Booker Award to use the phrase "cum dumpster."

If presented as pornography, then yes, sex is thematically dull. But if we introduce fear, shame, secrets, hidden desires, revealed desires, anger, sorrow, pity!, and every other human emotion, then the privatemost act is just another tableau for an author.

All of the above leads us back to Katie and Steve in the hot bedroom on a hot Saturday afternoon in hot&grimy New York City, "grinding away." They are having sex. And it is fantastic. A study of the mental states of these two is as far as we shall penetrate (sorry) this scene. For one of the first times in his young life, Steve is capable of acting in an aggressive, forceful manner (between the sheets), and it is driving Katie wild. For most of her young life, sexuality (and passion, and horniness, and desire) were things that she kept in the back of her mental closet. She liked these things, but they were emotions she could keep or leave. She rarely was overcome by desire, could not imagine a destructive urge like that in her favorite heroine, Anna Karenina, and was always able to take her sexual desire off the shelf, hold it in her hand, look at it, examine it, admire it, but ultimately put it back.

Steve was the shy beta male for whom sex was an end-all be-all, but whose inability to meet, date, and communicate with women made it an almost unachievable summit. Longterm relationships were as remote and difficult as Mt. Everest. His handful of sexual experiences were full of passive acquiescence, actions that were just this side of begging. She made the decisions. She was the guardian of the gate. She determined every aspect from initiation to position to ... well all of it. He participated, but it was like being picked last for sports, he was just here by forbearance. The inherent goofiness of the act estranged him, even more than body shame, performance issues, or general inadequacy.

Not anymore. Some of his new found confidence was the result of being a co-adult in his first real, adult relationship. The power balance had tipped, he realized that as an equal partner, his needs had validity. And, Katie, who was opening up to herself, himself, and the relationself as a whole, was validating him as a male and as a man and as a partner. When he initiated sex, she agreed. They had become more comfortable with each other. And themselves. It wasn't 1001 Erotic Nights of the Kama Sutra, but it was a normal, healthy relationship, or as healthy as two 21st Century Americans could hope to have in this broken, Patriarchal, materialistic, distracted, porn drenched society.

As Steve then began to take control sexually, it charged this equal dynamic and took it to places neither had been. There is a crude, ugly belief that no man can really understand women until he has fucked a woman hard and well. That by cracking her veneer can he truly see the abyss within (himself and herself). Ugly as it is, it is true. Just as women need to see deeply the primate brain sexuality that lurks under the surface of men to comprehend their true nature. Remove the masks, see the real face.

#TRIGGERWARNING Awkward Sexual Writing Below

Steve was fucking Katie really really hard – he had raised her legs to her head and was pounding away with a subtle, sly rhythm that seemed to be innately aligned with her own thrusts and contortions. Similarly, Katie was fucking Steve hard. For a few seconds, he was a Greek God creating islands and fjords with his tool, he was The Lord Our God separating the Light from The Darkness. Katie's experience was similar, but she was engaged in a more desperate internal fight, and she was losing. On one hand, she was a Mother Goddess, creating life through the power and violence which she had always wanted to master. Yet, she was being driven to a place she wasn't sure she wanted to go. Her internal rational voice, growing fainter and fainter, was warning her that she was being led into darkness, that the release of these passions were a literal dam, and that when it burst she would never be the same and this would have real consequences. And, she found she didn't care. The voice grew silent, the "passion swelled", the dam burst. Less artistically, as she whispered to Steve post-coitally, "I just kept coming!" This tone of voice was uncomparable to any she had ever used in her life. This day was unique.

Steve had always found sex troublesome – he wanted it desperately, then found it wasn't everything that he wanted. He wasn't disappointed in it, he just always was unhappy with how he felt afterwards. Now, this was no longer true. For the first time, he was happy before, during, and after sex. He was able to see it as a component, important, granted, of a larger part of this relationship. Some joke of the metaphor of becoming a God, but this was the closest he had become. He was forming a religion of one or two.

Katie was transformed, no more trepidation, no more sense of duty, no more obligation. Of course she had dated. Of course she had had sex. Of course she enjoyed going out, staying in, twangs of desire, long talks, and a body to spoon. But it had always seemed like a long walk for a short drink of water. She had once asked herself if she might be happier alone than tweening two-into-one. A child of the late-90s, she was past religious shame, condom mania, hang ups & hook ups, booty calls, AIDS scares, traditional gender roles, traditional genders, anything that got between her and her God-given right to have a perfect orgasm. She had surpassed, or had been stripped of, illusions over True Love, Eternal Marriage, societally determined roles, Life Long Commitment, or any other Transcendent Belief or Eternal Virtue. As a Millennial, there was no more Divine, just the Mundane. Despite all of this, she was approaching the sense of grace this physical act can bring – her empty vessel filled, thus fulfilled. Like a monk, blank eyed and spread akimbo and mentally clear as her wonderful wonderful boyfriend proceeded to drive her wild.

She understood. She had tasted the forbidden fruit and instead of being ashamed, she grabbed the apple and took bigger and bigger bites, the pulp and mash and juice running down her chin, metaphorically. Satan Himself would have regretted offering her that fruit in the first place. If there are 36 Levels of being she was racing through the teens and hitting Level 21 or 22. In just one afternoon. No more duty, no more smelly fluids, nor nasty. Just joy and fulfillment.

...

Some people, angry SJW-type people mostly, will consider Steve's transformation (liberation?) to be wholly the result of his murder of The Artist and that it somehow symbolizes all male-female relationships. Men kill women, either actually or symbolically. The stabbing (with his penis) was just one more violent dynamic in a perpetual war where men killed (and raped and stabbed and murdered and belittled and silenced and and and and) and women were merely trained to take it passively. They even fooled themselves that they liked it! Those deluded fools. Those sheeple. The whole of Patriarchal Civilization was thus contained in this mote of a hard fuck. Yet, this view is wrong.

Steve felt no more masculine for the murder. To him, it was this queer, odd, strange thing in the past, a weird moment that he could not understand and did not think about. It was just there. Sometimes he would take this memory off the shelf, hold it, weigh it in his hand, look at it, then put it back. It had not transformed him. And yet, clearly, it was an instance of new mastery of the world. He had crossed a forbidden boundary. It was the ultimate immoral act, per most Russian novelists. How could it not change him? He may not be Free, but he was freer than he had ever been.

They lay there, fundamentally transformed and yet the same. They were finished now, cuddling in the ways billions had before them. She had her head in his shoulder, turned to put her mouth on his neck. She crawled onto and into him, her entire being open, her legs slightly spread and locked on his left leg. He kept his left arm around her, his head turned slightly down. It was awkward, but they made eye contact, smiled, then looked away. He meshed with her, she him. They flowed. No awkwardness. Just Right. They had had the moments, they were part of them now. Both pondered this realization. Both climbed down from the summit. They had seen the view. They had looked in the abyss. And then they would both go to work tomorrow.

#TRIGGERWARNING OVER

# Chapter 16. Flashback: Every four months for over twenty years

The Artist pulled up her spaghetti strap top, exposing her pasty white belly. She grabbed the hands-full of soft dough, and squeezed. She shook the flesh-lard, like a puppy with a blobby chew toy. She squeezed as tears filled her eyes. "God damn it god damn it god damn it god damn it!!!!!"

# Chapter 17. The Detective Detects

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Behind every mid-sized fortune lies ... something else. Luck, maybe? Real Estate? Not sure, really." —Ibid

Tweed was one of the luckiest men in New York, a famously lucky city. His name was of course, not Tweed, but the description stuck, for Tweed was trying desperately to live like it was in 1957. And he was winning.

Tweed had been one of those bright young literary types who stormed New York in the mid-80s, when fortunes were being made at the drop of the hat, when the stock market could only go up up up, when then blighted parts of the city were being pushed back by the sheer force of Reagan's grin, and anyone in a power suit and a dream could hope of actually making it there. And cocaine.

Tweed had been an English major from one of the Good, but not Great, schools. He had spent a summer in England. He dreamed of being a literary agent, maybe a publisher. After bopping around a few desks for a few years, Tweed, in his cheap polyester white shirts and subtly tattered khakis, was nearing the end of the dream. Coincidentally, in the apartment next door to his, a young dancer was paralleling Tweed's life note-for-note. They were the same age, they had each gone to Good, not Great schools, yet each had had a lot of promise. And both were looking in the mirror —practically facing one another, just inches away through the wall! —at 27 and realizing that maybe, maybe, they had given it their all, but their all wasn't enough. The dancer, tired of 20 years of training and testing and tuning and auditioning and failing, was having that hard self-assessment that people mean by growing up and giving up. While Tweed was having the same self-talk, the same doubts, the same grim conclusions. She would never star at the Ballet, or even a Broadway show. She didn't have It. And he would never run one of the Bigs, would never hold four hour lunches with famous authors, he would never swoop into a room in a fancy camel overcoat, fresh from the opera, to promote the Next Big Thing. Their emotions were identical. Their words the same. It was a Parallel Lives chapter Plutarch would have loved.

But she was right and he was wrong. She spent a few last months giving it her all, failing, and leaving the Big City. She turned out all right, I guess, if being a mid-level manager for an insurance company in North Carolina is all right. He, on the other hand, got lucky.

A book landed on his desk to read. He loved it, his bosses didn't. Simultaneously, he was let go for unclear reasons, but he took the book from the slush pile, found the author. They colluded, they drank, and he talked to a friend of a friend and got it picked up. And it went nuclear. The dream, the fantasy—finding the next Stephen King, JK Rowling, that Fifty Shades person—in the slush pile! And so he was magically hitched to Famous Author, the pleasant country drunk who wrote and drank, who drank and wrote, who turned out two, sometimes three best sellers a year! And didn't give a shit about the business: he mailed in manuscripts and received checks. Who could stand such luck? A Lotto Ticket from the Slush Pile. An Agent repping but one client, but what a client!

In the nature of such things, Tweed had taken the books and the author to a small, failing publishing house, rightly reckoning he would have maximum leverage at a place that was desperate for anything that looked like success. Partner, profits, turn around. And, as the elder partners slowly retired, as the staff slowly resigned, the place became insanely profitable.

There is a secret to artistic wealth, and Tweed had discovered it: long term residuals. Every time one of the classics in the portfolio was re-published, checks just show up. If you are a 60s rocker, and you happened to write The Song That Defines the 1960s, you can sit back and every quarter, smile big when the check comes. Tweed, having not just selected the Big Best Seller who had Two Books on the Best Seller List for 14 years Running, had shrewdly pushed books in the agency's back catalog, and lo and behold, had found that a few of these Modern Classics were just the thing to allow even more quarterly checks to keep rolling in. Jane Austen sells 100,000 books per year, and she is dead! The tragic coming of age of a young girl in New York in the late 50s (she married a famous poet and killed herself. No, not that work, no not that one either. Wow, a lot of female literature involves suicide) was still a favorite of Goth Chicks, high school reading programs in big cities, and poetry circles. Thus and so, the second floor of the original building with the original founder's name carved above the entrance, that floor was rented to some bond traders. Tweed pocketed the money, ensconced himself on the top floor. The old books were still selling, and the Best Seller just kept writing. And therefore, Tweed could indulge his 1950s publisher lifestyle. He wasn't even a publisher, not really an agent. He was a junk bond trader, books were his bond. Yes, the real bond traders had taken a whole floor, and the staff was a shadow of the heyday, but Tweed had his big office with a (partial) Park View, he had his first martini at 1055 every morning, he had the slow, languid lifestyle of a man of means, with a job he could do well (there was so little to do) and his fashion sense that aligned him with a bygone era, of tweed and boxy cut suits and handmade shoes and little leather carrying cases and watches that cost more than a motorcycle (but not more than a car, that would be vulgar). And so, this 30 years of history was sitting behind Tweed, as though in a spare chair behind his desk, as he warmly greeted The Artist for their mid-day appointment.

He got up and gave her the half-hug he knew she liked. Hands grabbing upper arms, faces apart. No French kiss-kiss-kiss. She smelled the gin on his breath, and approved. He was everything she, as an Artist, wanted in her New York literary agent. Client-wise, he handled the Bigs with ease (secretly subcontracting the actual printing, shipping, and marketing to a Very Big Publisher with too many people and not enough hits), and he loved the Smalls. Her first book of poetry was a gigantic loss, a marketing budget that may as well have been poured down a drain, and the garbage disposal turned on. There was almost the grinding sound of rattling coins and whirring blades whenever either of them thought of the book of poems. A thin folio that The Leading Critic called "half thought through and haphazard". That no one bought. But she was a Name and he Carried Weight, their mutual use of one another was almost quaint in this benighted age.

"I have an idea."

"Of course, of course my Dear." (this sexist term was ignored completely, so happy was she)

"A collection of essays."

"What a grand idea! Something thoughtful. Something shocking?"

"Yes. I want to call it Rape."

"OoooooProvocative. Well, how many words and when?"

"Well. Don't you want to know..." she trailed off

"Oh, God no. No no no. You know me better than that. You are The Artist. You are the one who knows what you wish to write. All I can say is don't waste your words on that silly blog. Every word you put there is a word you aren't putting here. In Rape."

"Well. Uhm. How will you, um sell it," she trailed off again

Tweed sighed, signaling she should stop. He got up, walked steadily to the bar. A martini shaker, sitting in a glass bath of water and ice awaited him, he took a fresh glass from the mini freezer under the bar, admired its frosty surface. He looked back, The Artist paused a beat, nodded slightly. Tweed broke into a huge, unforced grin, took a second martini glass from the freezer, poured two big ones, returned the shaker and walked delicately over to his desk. He placed the glass in front of her, sat down, they "cheers'd", he sipped, and sighed. Contentedly this time.

"Bright Thing, no one was as upset at the underwhelming performance of Blue Butterfly Tears as I was. I was sure we had a winner. You could have cracked poetry! You would have been seen as the ... soft voice of learning in a cold, commercial world. You could have outsold Neruda. Fuck Neruda, you might have outsold Jewel!" At that happy thought, Tweed took another thoughtful sip.

And so, months later, as Tweed looked across the top of his glass at Lead Detective, he took the same sip and made the same dreadfully serious eye contact.

"And that's it, Detective. Poetry and another auto-biography. Mediocre sales, but enough to make the rounds and get into parties and be called a 'writer'. I mean, those dummies didn't even read her last screed, I mean memoir, yet they praised it. And for what? 'I hate myself and I'm fat.' Rinse and Repeat. The end."

"As you may know, Sir, the details surrounding this case make it..."

"Hard to solve?" Tweed interrupted and giggled. "You don't think I pushed the poor Gal? I know I don't get East of the River6 these days, and was certainly not at any dreadful Saturday night drink-up."

Footnote [6] Tweed has not been East of 1st Ave since 1997. True.

"Of course not. But we are checking with her circles of friends and professional contacts to see if there is anything that might establish motive."

"Ah. I see. Well. No. Nothing at all. Very little could motivate that one about anything."

* * *

The Lead Detective sighed. He was tired of tales of The Artist careening around the new media landscape and angering people within it, a tsunami of impotence and entitlement. And here was yet another he had had to endure. Told scene for scene, take for take, word for word by the Senior Content Brand Manager for a up-and-coming web site (portal? new media?) he had never heard of. He sat politely while the tale expanded and exploded righteous fury and cold remembrance pouring out.

"And the worst part was she smiled through the whole thing. And that tone. 'Afraid I might accidentally drive some traffic to your site?'"

"And this was at The Artist's home?"

"Yes! Like a noble calling a peasant to court. And I did tell you this was straight out straight up plagiarism, right? Copy and paste nonsense."

"Yes, ma'am. But that is not really a crime the Force is focusing on here."

"I know, I just wish she could at least have pretended to have taken it seriously."

The New Media Editor had tried the somber, serious role with The Artist, a role she might have possibly pulled off if she (a) wasn't 26 and (b) hadn't plagiarized her entire Senior Thesis to graduate from college and (c) actually believed in power roles, right and wrong, doing one's work, firing people for not performing, basically any of the activities or beliefs that made up almost all of professional society until 2003 or so. New Media Editor wasn't a precious snowflake, a coddled Millennial, a safe-spacer, but she definitely swam in the same ocean as them, from "no judgments" to "no grades" to "everyone should get along" to "trophies for all." (She had actually sponsored a Writers Awards for the web site two years ago and at the end of the evening, each and every writer who had contributed to the site had won something. Not exactly Noble level, or even Pulitzer level, discernment.) So, when she squared her shoulders, put her head up, tightened her posture and put on a slight frown, it was more like an 11 year old playing dress up than a serious, heartfelt position from a senior person, invested with Righteousness.

"Writing is a gift. We are professionals. When we do something, we do it well, it is part of the craft. When I suggested we couldn't pay for material that wasn't her work, she grew very disturbed."

In fact, The Artist had lunged to her feet, snarling, jabbing, eyes wild, "You shut that shit down right now. I owe you lucky, lucky fuckers 3000 – 5000 words twice a week on whatever topic I see fit. Feminism preferably, but New Media, films I've seen, my boyfriend, nacho fucking cheese. ME. Well, you got your words. There is no clause in that bull shit contract about content, authorship, NOTHING. I could photocopy cereal boxes and you would have to run them on your front page for 6 hours next Friday morning. It's in writing!"

And in the end, nice words were spoken, empty promises made, and Media Editor slunk back to Manhattan. And no one really cared. "Writer's Block" and "Accidental Memory" were been blamed. The squall passed. The columns, abashedly, got better and longer, then slumped back into tired unreadable mediocrity. A friend of The Artist had had to jolly up some snot-nose at a hip on-line magazine to keep The Artist off of the "Things Not to Read" list for that year. But that was all. And the Detective heard it all, sighed, then moved down the list. Another non-lead. And so it goes.

* * *

Steve was not an automaton, but there are currents to the human mind, pressures within and without the human soul. He wasn't driven to read these old novels by God, Justice, Fate, or the universal unconsciousness. But he was driven by his own nature. He had a problem and was, as an Engineering Being (homo technicus), forced to solve it. Had it been a calculus problem, he would have reached for his textbook. As it was a moral problem, he reached for Dostoyevsky. Not the Bible, nor the Talmud. Karamazov. He was carrying a paperbook with him at all times now. Reading at lunch. Always a bad sign.

# Chapter 18. THE FUNERAL ITSELF

"Let the dead bury the dead." —Unknown

Outside, cameras had been set up in clusters to catch the famous and the Glitterati as they somberly sashayed into the venue.

Coverage was fuckin' great. The PR Women had really done their job. This morning, one of the herd had dropped a West Coast Hollywood slick magazine on the table of Little Sister – a full page spread with two interior stories! "A Star Falls In the East"! Fantastic! Some of the lesser cable channels were making mentions. Fuckin' fabulous! She gave the best funerals, everybody would say so!

Now, after a few hours of drinking, mingling, networking, and even a little mourning, it was time. Everyone wants a fitting conclusion to the story of her life. This would be hers. And her Big Sister's.

Little Sister swayed and staggered to the music; she swayed and staggered to the podium. She tapped the microphone, and when that did nothing she whistled. The DJ took the hint, slightly lowered the music. But could not/would not shut it off. Not for these people. Pop background music, the constant trill from the hidden speakers, hooked 24 hours a day to magical music satellites that pumped down slosh and garbage to eager ears, did not cease. Distraction Road. At least in North Korea, the mandatory propaganda is mandatory, installed by force in homes and public places by an evil regime. Here, in the Land of the Free, people were self-sufficient enough to select and endure their own stream of brain-draining and concentration-ruining drivel. As she strove to give the very first, most important eulogy of her life, an undercurrent of pop music droned on. Pulling people away from the Now, from the Eternal, from everything good and decent and silent, their minds were corrupted by the endless, constant, hypnotic, unignorable tunes. It was Hall & Oates.

"I have something to say," Little Sister tried. But it wasn't enough. Too many conversations, too much attention elsewhere. "Rich Girl" started up.

"Shut the fuck up, motherfuckers!" That did it. Heads snapped, bodies turned. She had the room. Little Sister adjusted her very deluxe custom big name sunglasses (Aviators Classic, the rare platinum frame, $699), and started to recite. To relate.

"Thank you, friends. Thank you for coming, for caring. Special thanks to Chapterhouse & Munn Media for the coverage and the cameras and all that. PR." She bowed her head, but didn't lead a prayer. Was this the moment of silence? She tugged at her Little Black Dress. Interestingly, she hadn't worn black because it was a funeral.

"You know why you are here. The most important ceremony a peoples can share. I mean, weddings are an anachronistic, paternalistic bull shit uh, thing. And a birth? Birth? Like, how demeaning? I mean, do you know the carbon footprint of a baby?"

Murmurs. Some agreement, some shock. Mostly drunken acceptance. And silent hand tapping to "Private Eyes."

"But Death! Death! The Big One. The Big Sleep. I think someone said that. The Long Sleep. Well, my sister is asleep. And we will never sleep together again!" The intent was pure, the delivery not. Those who knew The Story, those who had read The Autobiography, chuckled. Out loud. Not cool.

"So, I have some words to say. Better words than I could say. Write. I think they reflect me and my ideas. And what I would say. Will say." Little Sister pulled out a scrap of paper from her cleavage. She unrolled it, straightened it out, began to recite.

Who here wishes to be forgotten forever?

The death of a dog!

Death breaks the Mind, the chink – oh shit! Sorry! Racist! Sorry

In the armor of self-delusion. None can know

The dreams of the visions of the forefathers or their Fathers Fath... Mothers Mothers!

A Day-trip into the Night. Should we not

See the Other Side? Let the newly entombed, weighted with the history of life,

Shed, of his – HER – baggage, for this

is the way forward, for all the village. – Hey! It Takes A Village!

I am victim of the Furious Fate. The clock ticking across its face

Look as MY SOLES tap the last dance from beneath the Earth

Cool but not cold, dry to the touch, great (sic) Warriors (sic)

I cannot wait. The future is bright. But my future is nought.

No God No Devil No Angel awaits

I shall sit in the Village of our Forekin (Little Sister read this as 'foreskin')

She then read aloud: All Shall Ride The Same Train, Kenya Dolma Tin'sha'ka, Winner of the 1980 World Prize for Writing. Published 1997.

She stopped, triumphant. Top that! And the cameras got the whole thing! She had found her pocket paperback play from Freshman year, when she was taking World Cultures and still gave enough of a shit to read the crap the lecturers doled out. An African funeral oration. From a Famous. She had won the Eulogies.

The crowd, on the other hand, was less sure. Having abandoned all of Western Civilization for a vague globalist multi-culti swill, they were cast adrift when any literature, or thought, or philosophy crossed their minds. But at the very least, there remained a tiny kernel of Classic Works that could light the little pleasure center deep in the lizard brain. They had heard of the Lord's Prayer, they had seen enough funerals on teevee to know what was supposed to be said when. "Ashes to ashes" made sense. This nonsense did nothing to or for them. They were blank. All they knew was that Little Sister had managed to make her sister's funeral all about her, and was pretentious in the bargain. Self-righteous even. They turned away. This funeral sucked.

# Chapter 19.

"It's a lucky man, a very lucky man, who is committed to what he believes, who has stifled intellectual detachment and can relax in the luxury of his emotions \- like a tipsy traveller resting for the night at wayside inn." —Alexander Pushkin (just showing off, now. This quote doesn't even apply! - Anon)

Steve and Katie were together, sitting side to side on his couch. They were using relationship voice, the soft but practical tone heard when two people are still delicately tip-toeing around each other. But this was going to be a wonderful period, they had a whole four days together! Thank the fates for long minor holiday weekends.

"What does next week look like for you?"

"Ugh. Budget meeting Tuesday. Boss's out of town. Nothing too bad. You?"

"Same old. I'm going in early for a few to meet with the team. We think we can fix things if we just give it time."

"Uninterrupted time. The best!"

"I know!" Smiles "When can we get together next?"

Calendars open. He was Apple, she Android. And yet they made it work.

"First week of, I think. Nothing big."

"Works for me." Noted.

"When can we have our call next week? I'm moving some things around. The Pilates instructor quit and I don't like the new girl. So I'm trying another night."

"I dunno. Wednesday?"

"Pilates will be Wednesday. Thursday?"

"Yeah, Thursday works."

"And Friday, I'm taking you out."

"What?"

"Yeah. Let's go somewhere nice. I'll arrange it. Dress up, candles. Reservations."

She hit him with a pillow. "You said we wouldn't see each other until next month!"

"Surprise!"

"Oooooo. I get to spend two weeks in a row with my guy. Where are we going? Somewhere classy!"

"Yup."

"Nice."

"Just because."

"Jamaica Grill?"

"Is Jamaican classy?"

"Let's say sure."

They moved together. Clenched. He kissed her on the forehead. She hated that, but let it go.

* * *

Flashback: 12 months before The Fall

Media Whore and The Artist sat in the coffee shop / restaurant-cafe / bar-speakeasy / tasting room / distillery. For her, it was perfect. Home turf, she was known as a regular, but not fawned over. That would be too obvious. A few blocks from home, deep in The Bubble. And the place itself wasn't too obvious, in fact, it had gone out of its way to hide from the masses: all the exterior signs were maddeningly generic: "Food Served Here!" and "Local Craft Beers Available" and "Eat" and "Hot Coffee Inside". A penetrating searcher would notice the business had no name whatsoever. Inside, none of that chain-restaurant-inspired mock-old-timey crap on the walls. Real reclaimed wood (from a sail factory that had once employed hundreds of artisans), a real antique coffee roaster (reclaimed from a collector who used it as an object d'art in his Ferrari dealership), a few edgy contemporary black and white photographs of New York (they had come with the frames). Local art, not too political, not too awful. And a sense of not trying too hard that was the result of trying very very hard. Instead of stainless steel jugs for cream and skimmilk and half-and-half and soy milk and coconut-based creamer and even chemically artificial creamer, the original plastic containers sat in a tub of ice water. Beer in cans, food in that fake eco-correct mock styrofoam.

People were noticing them, looking twice, but not too obviously. She smiled a little, the little top she had chosen made her look cute, the bright blue hair an obvious "fuck you" to Media Whore, her fake glasses perched sensibly on her nose. Her hands (chewed fingernails and cuticles) cupped the mug, she lifted it to her lips and blew softly.

"I see you went with the big glasses that girls wear to make themselves look smart."

"Good morning to you, too."

Media Whore slouched, realized it ruined the line of his suit, straightened quickly, his head darting around. He pondered a shot of rumbucha to follow his espresso.

"So, can I ask a favor?"

"Diving in! Excellent. What can I do for you?"

"I need help with my... Image. And you have nailed your public image."

"Thanks, my dear." His face softened for a moment, then quickly resumed its cold, hardness.

"I mean. I know you don't necessarily believe everything you say but..."

"But I do believe it my dear. That's the thing. I'm not lying. I'm not fibbing to get clicks. But the real secret is that I know that I'm faking it."

"How can you say you love that man" (she couldn't even say the name of the then leading candidate and now new President). "You are ... gay, how can you support Catholicism?"

"But, my dear, I love Catholicism. All the pageantry, all the ceremony. I don't pretend to love it. I exalt in it. You know, 'The Might, The Majesty, the Mystery of the Church of Rome!'. Et cetera et cetera."

"All that God shit. It's just so..."

"Masculine? Amazing?"

"Bullshitty."

"Oh please, like your little belief system could sustain any real scrutiny." He adopted a mocking tone: "God is stupid. Why do people believe?" He changed his voice back, "and aren't you the new crystal healer? The sacred rock Shaman?"

Silence. Even vulnerable and hurt, she reached out a pseudopod, still trying for human engagement. He sat back, arms crossed, mildly disgusted. He didn't love being touched. He also hated people who resorted to insult to make a point. Ironic, no?

She started over: "You do so much so effortlessly. How do you make it all happen?"

"Is that your make-up-sex question? The hot dinner to reconcile after the big fight?"

"Just stop. OK? Just stop. We used to be able to talk. Now I feel like I'm arguing with your tweets."

A deep sigh. Media Whore leaned forward, again softening his face. Little crinkles appeared around his eyes, like Saint Nick. His public face was a mask he could take on and off.

"OK, Serious." He took a sip of his drink. "It's like that cartoon coyote, when he runs out off of the cliff. And just keeps going. Walking on empty space. You just have to keep running. You daren't stop. You never look down. No one believes it, not even you, especially not you, but you keep going. And somehow, you keep moving forward."

"I understand what you are saying, but I don't know how to do that. I mean, just 'try try try again'? or..."

"People want to associate with a winner, right? A do-er. So, do. I know you can do that. You were making your little movies in high school. And you go make them, and other people want to associate with you. Pick something. ANYTHING. And do it. Do it without fanfare, without praise. Make some thing. Want to start a start up? Start it! Rent an office. Ask 'entrepreneurs' or whatever they are calling themselves these days."

"Imagine-engineers." They laughed.

"Precisely. But fuck it, why not? It beats digging ditches in the hot sun as my father did not used to say. Rent an office. Hire someone smart. Go to conferences. Wear a business suit. Get little cards. Create the façade and the building will follow after. If you think too hard, You. Will. Fail."

They sat back all quiet. The Artist hated having public discussions about too personal topics. Too many people listening. The tilted head the bartender gives when he pretends to wash glasses but is secretly listening and judging while you drunkenly lament some guy who ghosted you. Yet, this seemed OK. She wasn't sure if it was her, or the aura that seemed to come off of Media Whore. But, it all seemed mildly OK. She took a deep breath. Smiled. Her usual look was changed, a little. She was almost human. Almost sympathetic. Almost.

A low growl-moan interrupted their conversation. Media Whore reached into his pocket and without looking, turned off the sound.

"Was that...?"

"Oh God, just a man I don't want to talk to."

"Was that ... gay sex?"

"If you mean normal sex between gay men, yes. I use their delicious lovemaking noises as their ringtones so I can immediately tell who is calling. And can screen appropriately."

They were quiet again. Media Whore took a breath, reached over and took The Artist by the hand. He squeezed gently. They bonded. She reacted.

"Oh My God. Let me... I want to buy you a shirt. "

"Please don't."

"No, I'm serious. I want to do something for you."

"OK, whatever, really, but not clothing OK? You'll embarrass us both. I shan't play dress up."

She was almost stung by the insult, but stopped herself. He had just dropped his sunglasses down over his eyes, and was looking away. Was this a thing? Was he embarrassed of himself? He was! She could tell! She had felt/looked/sounded the exact same way each and every time her Mother had dragged her clothing shopping. No one who hates their body wants to try on ten pairs of pants in front of a mirror. And him! Media Whore! The man voted "Most do-able" by some stupid gay magazine. Was his perfectly coiffed hair, his recent 30 pound weight loss (coupled with ten pounds of new, hard-won muscle), his louche lifestyle and perfect, expensive, tailored, fitted, bespoke clothing hiding a scared little boy inside? Was he the introverted extrovert, the loud talker controlling the conversation, the room, to keep people at arm's length? Interesting. Veddy interestant, she thought.

"One shirt, a nice shirt. We'll go to this place. Nearby, I know them. Love them! What do you wear?"

"One hundred percent Egyptian cotton, no exceptions. Blends are against the Bible. Look it up – Leviticus. Button down, Oxford cut. Bengal stripe but only for soft, Easter colors. Not pencil, not awning, not fucking candy stripe. Show me a Serbian stripe and I will slap you. If white, then (a) a real white, not a Navaho white and (b) you shouldn't be able to see your fingers through the material."

She looked confused. "Aren't all shirts button down?"

"Are you serious?"

"No, like that shirt you have on now. There are buttons all down the front."

He sighed. He was good at the exasperated, catty sigh. "Here." He tugged at his collar. "The collar is buttoned down. So it doesn't fly away like a drunk's and it holds the tie in place. Frames the face if worn with no tie. Looks preppier. And Preppy people are rich people. I want to look like I just stepped off of a yacht."

"So, pure cotton."

"Seersucker is OK, but not for a shirt. Linen only in the tropics. None of this 97% with some spandex bullshit. Athletic cut, but not some clingy sport fabric for fat men who like to golf."

"Tattersall?"

He squinted, took off the sunglasses. "Don't show off!" Grinned. "Regency stripe will be fine, again, if not too shocking. Don't want to moiré when I'm on television. University stripe is de rigeur, but a little cliché, n'est-çe pas?"

Secretly, he whispered, "Secretly, when I have shirts custom made I have them combine buttondown with French cuffs!" Even in her state of drapier non-knowledge, The Artist was shocked, "Are you fucking insane?" "I know. I know!" he deprecated. "But it is combining a preppie accountant with a playboy. All at once. Yachting hedge fund manager by day, casino regular and spy at night. So exotic!" he cooed.

She checked the Internet using her phone. "Peri?"

"Jesus, do you want me to look like a fag? And, by the by, avoid those stupid 'hidden buttondown' abominations. Floppy collar forever, no definition, adds 5 pounds of neck fat. Collar pins are worse, and those neck snaps! They are for .... I don't even know. And no white collars with a color shirt, that garbage went out with the 80s and I'll be damned if it comes back on my watch. Do you know that the white collar comes from poor people? They would take them off so..."

She cut his rant off. "What's the difference between Baltic and Serbian stripe?"

"I'd fuck residents of one of those nations but not the other. You can guess which is which. C'mon, let's go." He knocked the table with his knuckles, got up. "You can buy me that shirt, I'll get you something more flattering, and then we can go score some blow. Daddy needs some up time."

* * *

The Scene: a BoHo condo, 1.5 mil easy, Constant Companion lounging insouciantly on throw pillows. Lead Detective wandering the room, picking things up, pretending to investigate them. This case was all people, no clues. Not even the photo of Constant Companion and The Artist in college would have any bearing on this case. He set it down.

"So, would you say The Artist was happy?"

"Nope. Not even close."

"Wow. That was quick." Tongue touched to pencil, small policeman's pad written in. Playing the serious cop.

"I mean, she hated herself. She hated this stupid society, she hated Patriarchy keeping her down. She hated the Male Gaze."

"Is that why she attacked that football player, for not giving her his Male Gaze?"

"Don't be a dick. He only values women society has defined as 'hot'. He only values them, he only looks at them, he only sees them, he only fucks them. That is the core definition of Male Gaze." The onetime Constant now just Former Companion had lingered on the word "fuck", one of those subversives who assumes that cursing gives a shocking sense of morality, freedom, and superiority. All that Lead Detective noted was the small, snarky smile on the word itself, and his mind wandered to a fight the previous month, where a small boisterous man had been cut in the face and had sat on the ground, his hand leaking blood from the cut, and moaning "fuck fuck fuck fuck" like a mantra. Lead Detective was not impressed by cursers, any more than he was with blusterers, bullies, or threat-makers.

But, this was what he was left with for leads. Friends, agents, companions. Any thread. Any idea. Everything was cold at this stage.

"Would it be worth talking to the football player? Was there any future contact?"

"I sense he is down in Atlanta date raping cheerleaders. They were seated at a table once a while ago. The media cared for two seconds. Fake apology. The End."

"I've talked to just about everyone she worked with professionally, her circle of friends, colleagues. It is a mixed picture. Was she a tormented genius?"

"Aren't we all tormented in this society?"

"No. Most of us aren't."

"Well, you must be very lucky" dangling a slipper on her toe. Rocking the calf back and forth. Lead Detective flexed his fingers, a stress releasing gesture.

"Any recent traumatic or bad news?"

"Not since she left that fucking show."

"What show?"

"The Live one."

"She worked on Live?"

"Oh my God, you don't know about it?"

"I don't, no."

"Well shit, I won't tell you." On her feet in a smooth movement, the droll wastrel persona tucked away. Walking to the door, flinging it open. "Ask them. Get a warrant. You Know-Nothing. You don't give a shit."

Lead Detective just stood there. Patience as a virtue. He decided to humble himself a little, then later be exalted.

"Ma'am. I am deep in the weeds of a major murder case. To this moment I cannot say if it was an accident, suicide, or murder. Did she slip? Gust of wind, too much wine? Attack of Vertigo? A little woozy then whoops? Or, did she kill herself? Upset and unhappy and all that. Or, did someone finally have enough of her shit? Because if she was as annoying as you, I believe I understand that. So, if you can spare me the few minutes to tell me what the fuck happened when a volatile woman got fired? From a major network TV show? Right before she died? I would surely appreciate it."

A pause. A flounce back to the pillow pile. A marijuana inhaler was produced, and a long draw taken. Companion blew the smoke out in a big puff, then offered the device to the Detective. He took neither the bong nor the bait. Silence is golden.

"It's kind of a shitty story and it's no big deal. She got this new agent, knew he had to get her something big to justify being the shiny new pimp, so he pulled in all the favors, got her in the writer's room."

"Why have I not heard this?"

"Big secret. Biggity hush-hush. 'Talk and you are fired', that's from God Himself. And he has enough pull after fifty fucking years of cranking that late night TV shit out. And, it was all on the Down Low to begin with." ("Down low" as in a secret, not married black men secretly having anonymous gay sex to avoid running afoul of the African-American community's historic intolerance. Merely a secret.)

"Down low?"

"The deal was, and God did she bitch about this to me, and me alone, because she had... ah shame or something, but she was hired silently, name not even on the credits. Just one more face in the writers room. I mean, everyone knew her, she was "As Seen on TV" and shit but no one wanted her there. To be seen there. God Himself agreed to give her a silent trial. He felt media and publicity would kill it."

"Why?"

"Expectations. Or some shit. She'd get all the glory and the articles and maybe it's a desperation play or she turns off dopes in the red states. Her brand wasn't ... strong in those last months. But, she could write. Write hard. So, a quiet deal. Show up early, work late, turn in good pages. If it works, she has a new gig. No muss no fuss, but silencio."

"You said she was fired."

"Oh, yes. So, two three weeks, everything is great. She is clearly trying, telling little stories, working hard. Collaborative. I had to go see her, she stayed overnight over there. Loved the energy. Helped edit, worked on routines. One thing she wrote made final dress. She had to care and she did care. And it was clicking."

Silence.

"And then there was The Incident."

"I can hardly imagine." Lead Detective did his best silent listening look.

"Do you know who <<REDACTED>> is?"

"My friend's kids like his movies. Their parents read his books. Funny/political, right?"

"Yeah, a real asshole. Screams about oppression but has a white wife and a rehabbed brownstone and a 401K. I've been there, it's nice. Photo layout of the place was in.... something. He had a party when that magazine published his book 'bout slavery and reparations. I think they got Sudoko to cater it. Or was it Fuji?"

"So."

A smile. She was acting and appreciated the audience. "So, he's co-Head Writer at Live. Mr. Big Deal. Doesn't write much anymore, but collates and edits and approves. Zeitgeisty. Her words. And she turned in a sketch and he didn't like it and said it wasn't funny. He makes a few awful suggestions, then says he needs a new draft in 2 hours. She, thinking that she is on board and part of the crew after a mere three weeks, talks back."

"Back talk? That doesn't sound like her."

"Sarcasm doesn't look good on you Lieutenant." "I'm not a Lieutenant." "Whatever."

"So, she says an old quip from the olden days. 'A Head Writer doesn't have to be able to crack a joke, but he needs to be able to crack the whip'."

Even as an old fart, a man who knows that someday he will be hung out to dry for an ill conceived remark that he will not be able to imagine the consequences of, the Lead Detective sees where this is going. He makes a face and shakes his head. "Uh oh."

"Yeah. Long ugly story cut short. He cries foul. 'Whip as in slavery?' And she's gone. Like minutes later. Like 'we'll mail your jacket and purse to you.' Very few knew. None talked. She had a trial run, it didn't work out. End of story. But that was the end. It bummed her out. But so did a lot of things. I don't think it was the "Catch me Jesus — I can Fly!" last straw. She wouldn't kill herself over that shitshow."

More words followed, but no new evidence. No clues. No leads. The story was followed up with extreme delicacy (even Lead Detective did not dare cross the River to interview God Himself, that chore was done informally by a high ranking Manhattan police official who knew Himself from way back when when drugs cases need to be made disappeared. 70s comedians.) When the details were verified, it became just another wrong puzzle piece on the floor, scattered underfoot.

* * *

Steve sat in the coffeeshop, completely relaxed. He was propped on the corner of an old leather couch, an untouched cup of coffee in front of him. Coffeeshop music tinkled from the hidden speakers. He looked at Katie. Not just looked, stared. He drank her up. His hand on his chin, he looked like a judge about to decide on the Ultimate Penalty for some young punk who didn't deserve the court's consideration. The look was pitiless and total. His face was stony, his attitude appraising. Katie finally looked up, squirming subconsciously under the total gaze.

"Knock it off," she half-teased.

"What?"

"That look. You are unsettling."

"Good. You should be unsettled from time to time."

That got her. She had never played a power game like this before. She didn't like it. She did like it.

"You are making me uncomfortable."

"You are hotter when you are discombobulated."

She should get up, she should move away. She could not. She was pinned. She hated his words, his posture. But she couldn't do anything with them. Finally, she got out her chair, a walk of the nude model approaching the sculptor. She sat next to him. He relented, raised his arm, she tucked in. He held her. He held her.

# Chapter 20. Flashbacks: A Series of Cringe Inducing Events

"It's not a lie if you believe it's true."

"HowTheFuckCouldYouDoThis?" Surprisingly, Little Sister seemed to have a genuine emotion, and the ability to annunciate8 every word in a sentence and not make it staccato. Again, "HowTheFuckCouldYouDoThis?" Against her will, The Artist guffawed, a single laugh-burp.

Footnote [8] Deliberate choice.

"No, you do Not laugh at me" (normal emphasis and phrasing). This is BIG, sis. This is Out Your Sister to show you are Down With the Struggle big. This is bullshit!" And she threw the magazine across the room. It wasn't heavy, but it sailed true and hit The Artist on her fleshy shoulder.

"Ow!" she over reacted, grimacing and rubbing her shoulder like a Looney Tunes character who just lost a duck bill. This was escalating quickly. Too quickly.

"It was a joke!"

"It always is to you!"

"Look, I didn't know, all right. I mean, Jesus, I thought it was funny. And, you know, a chance to undercut the stereotype of those writers as Jews, so, you know."

"My Girlfriend is JEWISH!" an emotional screech. Near tears. Little Sister was unexplicably livid. Like, crazy mad. The Artist considered her options militarily, and selected retreat.

She turned her back, walked into the kitchen, and took a long swig from an elegant yet funky wine glass. The St. Germainiac was minerally, but crisp and tart. She sensed, rather than tasted, the hint of pear. She grabbed two crackers, made herself put them back, then grabbed them again. She popped the fridge and in a practiced motion dipped one of the wafers into an artisanal aioli/sour cream/basil and garlic goo (locally sourced, organic, semi-vegan, selected at the local Farmers and Makers Market). She stuck the two crackers together into an ersatz Oreo and crammed the entire sandwich into her mouth, swallowed in one gulp. She breathed nasally, then washed the mess away with another gulp of this delicious white wine. She reminded herself to order some more. She then sensed her sister in the room behind her.

Napoleonically, she shifted tactics on the field, Attack! "This is so unfair, I have been raped by those people, I work so hard for them, when do I get a God D break?"

"Jews are not dogs!"

"I never wrote that they were! Are!"

"You compared your Jewish boyfriend to a fucking dog. I would have thought that history of animalization of minorities would have been covered in one of your endless Gender Queer I'm Secretly in love with Black People classes."

"That is disgusting."

"I'm disgusting? You used parts of OUR relationship for material. She's Jewish! That was private and you made it into shitty little punchlines. For what? 1000 words in Pretentious Manhattanite Weekly?"

"That's THE Pretentious Manhattanite Weekly. And I got a comedy column published in it. Me and rapey Woody Allan. Adding to the mythos. And so, yeah. You love a Jew, I love a Jew. Half this fucking borough is a Yid. I crave latkes and lox. I'm fucking sorry!" The last was screamed at the top of her lungs, eyes popping, throat muscles showing tendons. Little Sister knew what that meant. The Terrible Enfant was emerging, the smashing, crying, hair pulling, self harming monster who ruined Christmases, holidays, dates, any time when she didn't get her way. Rout, not retreat, was called for.

"I'm out." Little Sister spun on her heel, walked straight to the front door, straight outinto the street. She was now totally alone, broken up with. Heart broken up with. The fight over the piece had gone that nuclear. Not that big sister gave a shit.

"Have fun at your fucking spin class!" The Artist called at the slammed door. She finished her wine in a greedy gulp. She stopped for a moment. The world spun around her in a perfect circle, then stopped. She calmed. She remembered the lessons from the special school. Her hand, poised to snap the stem of the ridiculously expensive wine goblet, relaxed. She shut her eyes.

She obtained that blank, still, stonyface she got whenever she faced any criticism. Not angry, not pouty, it was a look familiar to any military recruit being screamed at by a Drill Sergeant. It was a thousand yard stare, past all of this, out to no where. It wasn't opened mouthed or closed eyes, but it announced: "I'm not here and you don't matter." It was not her most attractive look, but it was becoming her most common.

The Artist slumped back into a chair, wine untasted, but the earlier drugs kicking in. Her right thumb unconsciously stroked the thin, nearly invisible scars on her left wrist in a long-practiced soothing gesture. She relaxed, let her mind float. Sadly, it did not go to Her Happy Place, but instead circled around her latest faux pas.

Flashback within a Flashback: One Night At The Not OK Corral

The tweet storm had been intense. The backlash had pierced The Bubble and spilled to #RealMedia. Allies turned. The worst had been at that coffeeshop bookstore where she was the Queen Bee, pretending to browse literary magazines, being seen, killing time. Absorbing the attention.

"Hey! You!" Shit. Another Generation Z. A green-haired, pierced septum punk Scowl was marching up the aisle towards her. How many of these youngsters did she have to fend off? She felt like an old gunfighter, being challenged by every 17 year old in the Wild West. Was this a saloon? A cantina?

"You wish you could have had an abortion? Why? To make you interesting?!" The last word spat like a gypsy curse.

"No! God knows — no. Hey, wait. Don't turn on me. That's what they want."

Cutting her off: "They? They who? The Establishment? You're the Establishment, Man."

"I. Am. Not. I am a Sister."

Pfffft

"No. No. Wait. Listen. It shouldn't matter. I mean, fifty years ago, a divorced woman ... couldn't even be part of society. Patsy Cline! Too many sex partners? You're a whore... a slut! An abortion? An outcast! They defined us, but they can't! Not anymore." The speech was rousing, people paying attention. Not huddling around, this wasn't a fistfight at a WalMart, but they were glancing over their phones, peering past their arty books. She had an audience. And it felt great. For ten more seconds.

"Those things don't matter any more!" The Artist was bringing it home. "That's what I was trying to say."

"You hid behind your 'silly little me' persona."

"I know. I know. I needed an out. Blame the system, not its victim! I was trying to say that no woman should be ashamed of having an abortion. I mean, I'm unblemished, but those women who have had to ..."

"Blemish!" Another shriek from the Scowl. "Blemish? What, is my purity veil of sheerest white now spotted? What Catholic bullshit is this!? Will my soul be too dirty to wear in heaven as a shrift with my halo and wings?" The theology was muddled, but the point was clear.

"Wait Stop I No. I mean No" tears were forming. "I didn't mean blemish!"

"You said it then and you say it now. I was raped. By my uncle. For years. He made me have two abortions. It wasn't a fashion accessory. It was a cold white tile room in Bum Fuck Egypt. You don't get Feminist Points for pretending you bought one! With a credit card! Your words betray your very thoughts!"

Slap.

The slap came from the hips, planted on legs that were anchored in the center of the Earth, it travelled through the pivoting torso, down the arm, and extended to infinity via the still extending hand. A swoop in space. A perfect motion from the center of the Earth to the top of the sky. Qi. A curlicue of Ideal spiral. Ancient Aikido masters saw the physical manifestation in that divine motion and nodded silently. Descartes wept.

The Artist's head cracked to the side, flopping her tears from her eyes onto the bookshelf behind her; the Alternate Voices shelf (Queer, Of Color, Third World) from DA through HI got sprayed with saliva. The Scowl's lips turned upwards slightly, then the whole body stomped off, Doc Martins clomping, the keychain carabineer on her hip providing a merry jingly counterpoint to the whole scene.

And little by little, the fake memories, the false narratives, grew in her head, her heart. She had been raped. She had been an abused stripper in college. She had had an abortion. It was true, for it was true to her. But not in the so called real world. But the alternate facts in her head were real.

The Artist fumed some more. That little shit with her fucking dangling nose septum thing – which looked like shiny snot, why not say it? – and her knowitall breeziness. She was right. The Artist hadn't suffered. Sure, she lived in a monstrous media hellscape of sexism and misogyny. Yes, she endured the Patriarchy. Yes, she had been sexually harassed, boys she didn't like had the tenacity – or is it veracity – temerity? – had deigned to talk to her and treat her like a sexual being! That wasn't OK! But who hadn't? Who wasn't being crushed and made fat and miserable by this awful culture. And yes, she had had a few more privileges than the average woman. Especially women of color! She knew. She felt. But why attack her? Was she not victim enough?

The Artist fumed some more. She was not, or was she? She had taken on the mantle of VictimHood, but was never truly a Victim. Her class, her wealth, her race, her brains, her upbringing, those had provided huge status. She just now was seeing it. Of course! She was the problem! She had looked solely at her glands, her chromosomes and thought: victim! But others had suffered so much more. The Artist nodded. She saw more clearly now. She had a plan. She knew what she needed to do. There was only one way forward. She needed to fake a rape story.

The Artist fumed and fussed some more. She wandered to the coffeebar inside the bookstore, sipped slowly at her water with cucumber in it. If she had been raped, maybe in high school or college... her mind circled warily. Then it gave up and dived right in. THAT would regain her feminist cred. Her new memoir needed a punch-up. Something to get people to read it. A date rape... no, a little harder. Not a real rape—then she recoiled from the words in her own head. All rape is real. Even her fictional one. It could be an alcohol induced rape. In college. What was the name of that College Republican she hate-crushed? She reached into her bag and grabbed a pad of paper and began to write. And the final solution to this and every issue came to her.

"Why can't I be the victim here?"

* * *

Bonus Flashback: Real Ugliness (Ed: too much? Anon: Never!)

The Artist lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. The crushed Xanax wasn't working, neither was the Tylenol PM and vodka. Her mind was racing too hard. Why did she have to have the fantasies? Of men? All she wanted was to be a Lesbian, she tried so hard.

She was not oblivious to the fact that in the 1960s, boring white hep cats desperately wished to be Negroes, so they could be interesting. She had read Mailer. And Terry Southern. She was the White Negro, incarnate. Instead, The Artist had spent years of college trying to be the "B" in LGBT. To no avail.

She gave up. She reached under her pillow, took out her tablet computer, began searching for pornography. Like a diet-breaker pausing to get maximum enjoyment out of a rationalized cookie, she stopped for a second, then typed in "interacial virgin dorm anal amateur". And waited 0.47 seconds. Nirvana.

She hated hated hated that she so fetishized "black cock" as she called it in her head. As she watched the 19 year old get painfully violated, she tried to justify her addiction on aesthetic grounds. The deep jet black set against the pale pink & cream. The virginal soft white flesh being stabbed repeatedly, deeply, violated! OMG!, even her thoughts and words were racist. She couldn't deny it, or justify it. She liked the secret, hidden pleasures of the primitive destroying the fair. Oh! No wonder she liked the painting "The Sack of Rome." She moaned, for multiple contradictory reasons. She tried to convince herself that self-degradation for sexual purposes was acceptable for a feminist who was expected to "take charge" all day in a "mans world", but knew deep down that the real reason was simple "jungle fever." No white man (never even pondering Asian, Middle Eastern, Aboriginal, or Hispanic men or even transmen) could be perceived as contra-societal norms and basic decency. Which explained her primitivist fetish.

Her hands flew faster. She looked deeply into the eyes of the coëd, who stares helplessly out at the camera as her entire sense of self-worth, self-being, and basic self-preservation was ruthlessly and repeatedly thrusted out of her. The Artist felt a bond! A bond with this young sorority girl. She could sense her feelings through the screen, across the Internet. Emotional connection, a breakthrough! She spasmed. Torqued her body. A gak sound forced from her throat. A tear formed in one eye. She lay back, spent.

She needed to explore this further. Mere seconds after she had finished, the tablet shoved under a pillow, her rational brain had kicked in and taken over. How could she use these feeling for her advantage? Would dating a black man be a statement? Barely, but maybe. More... she needed to shock them more. What more could she do that would break sexual parochial puritanical judgments for good?

# Chapter 21. Catharsis?

"...that this would not be the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but only the end of the beginning."

Media Whore sat, enthroned, as he always seemed to be, at the head of the table. An enormous man, a weightlifter judging by the size of his neck and shoulders, was perched high on a stool on his left, but with his head faced down. No eye contact. A closer look revealed the man had a series of neck and face tattoos of the type that a square might refer to as "gang". An even closer look at a birthmark-esque blotch revealed that it was, in fact, the Mexican state of Sonora, for instance. Gothic letters, series of numbers (birth dates? death dates? Prisoner IDs? Calibers?) dotted his neck and wrists and presumably his chest. From all appearances, he was acting "sub" to Media Whore, and this was in fact the case. It had taken an act of sheerest will for Media Whore to not bring his companion in a dog collar and leash. It had been a long night.

The Election. The Election. The Election. It was all that these people could yammer about. But there was nothing to say. Canada, the Electoral College, hackers, Russians, butthurt. All these topics were spent. For the losers, this was time for whinging, and Media Whore hated whinging. But, he was on his best behaviour, for he could only whip his tribe into loving him for so long. His followers were a rag tag group of loosely assembled misfits, and some of the more... mainstream might spook given another media... incident. Except for those marvelous 'pedes! Thank God for them, and the Real Rebels, the College Republican types, and the on-line autists. Without them, his star would have dimmed a long time ago. They came to his talks, they bought his swag! And soon to be best seller. He just needed to write the damn thing. And, Daddy beckoned—was a job in the Big House still even possible? He giggled like a schoolgirl, then kicked back, readjusted his sunglasses for the 100th time that evening, preened, and sipped the champagne. He offered none to his companion, who glowered. The sub smelled of Drakkar Noir and Winston cigarets.

"Well I don't even care, it is all about the local level for me. In L.A." (this initialism for the city of Los Angeles was slurred out into an impossibly long bleat: Elllllaaaaay) "we had so many measures and bills and stuff. All really progressive. Funding music in schools, that sort of thing." The blonde comedienne had been on the left (lit. and fig.) of the table for The Event, a three hour unwatchable video stream with comedians, political figures, malcontents, podcasters, all assembled for a Free Speech Talk. Media Whore's "Mohammed" t-shirt had been banned, as had his turban, as had his insulting swag-wear t-shirt and headband ("SOMETHING SOMETHING MATTERS"). And his black balaclava. But not his sub. Now, post-session, he wanted merely to drink and relax and bullshit, but the entire mad chattering crew plus stalkery fans had all tumbled into the next door bar, revving up for a long night of "deep discussion." Dread creeped into his fingertips. Even as he used those same fingertips to sign hats.

"We need that everywhere," an anonymous virtue-signaler chipped in.

"Yah. I mean, like, there was this powerful ballot measure to force those pornographers to make them use condoms. It failed, but really, what a great statement? I can't believe it failed."

In his head, Media Whore counted backwards from 100 by 7s. 100, 93, 86, 79, 72... The problem was that he had done so so many times that he could do so in four seconds, nowhere near enough time to actually stop himself from jumping in, piping up, and smearing shit on the walls.

"Pardon me," the accent on, full cultured, ice-cutting Oxfordian, "but why do you think that is such a good idea? Doesn't that get in the way of the point of pornography? That it is a fun forbidden fantasy? I mean, never mind the free market implications, or the free speech implications for that matter."

"Wahhllllll, I think men watch too much porn. They need to get out of the house, talk to a real girl. I saw a piece somewhere that said men are getting desensitized. They don't even want to have sex with a real woman." This drew murmurs of approval from the plump and plain women, who even only in their late 20s were seeing their sexual powers over men beginning to diminish. They were no longer fawned over, and they didn't like it. Did this blonde moppet from Ellllaaaay have the answer for them? Probably not. Still, hope springs. "I mean, it's objectifying? Men need to stop it."

There was a pause. Media Whore sat balanced perfectly, almost a Zen Buddha in reflection, a cartoon boulder on the tip of a rock spire. Should he or shouldn't he? At this point, all rage was gone, all malice. Any action he took would be one of pure will—he would make a decision based on what he truly wanted to do. His actions would be an Aristotelian reflection of his inner mind.

And then he saw the Los Angelina looking around, proud, nay smug. The little smile of a small child who said her Bible lesson better than all the other little children and was destined for a pat on the head and a ribbon. Zen went up in smoke, Buddha jumped out the window, the cartoon coyote was crushed under the fallen red rock. Media Whore was Old Testament, wrath and judgment.

Media Whore cleared his throat theatrically. Debate team had done wonders for his stage presence. "Madam, that articulation was so... perfect, so ideal, that may I use it for an example?"

Blonde Ellll Aaaayyy nodded, a slight squinty look in her eyes. The doe smells the predator. But it is too late to run. Stock frozen.

"Firstly, blaming men for porn feeds directly into and outfrom the idea that all men are bad. Men have sexuality, and thus that sexuality is evil. You should always consider when you make a feminist pronouncement: 'is what I am saying feminist, or merely anti-male.' It is easy to mix them up. There is a reason most people don't like 'feminism', not the parts about everyone getting equal opportunities, but the relentless man-hate.

"Second," this slightly louder, and a slight finger point, to keep any interruptions put-down, "for the last 30 years, men have been told to NOT BOTHER WOMEN. Asking a woman out is tantamount to rape for God's sake. You recall the outrage when someone posted a humorous little joke on how to ask out a woman wearing headphones? A maelstrom of outrage! How DARE men bother women. And your solution is to have men approach more women in public? For sex? This isn't even a bad idea, it is monstrous in its ingenuity. Sheerest enormity. Men approach women, they are bad. Men don't approach women, they are bad. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. At least you can blame men in both cases. See my point number one.

"Now point the third. This will not end pornographic film making, it will merely drive it underground. There will still be condom-free porn, but the women—the women who are on record complaining that filming sex for hours with a piece of latex is painful—those women will be required to make movies with even fewer protections than they have now. Instead of sets and permits and crews and ... Union Dues... it will be driven underground, in basements, no licenses, no professionalism. And women will get hurt. They will get hurt by the condoms, they will be hurt by the lack of weekly AIDS testing by the ... participants. They will be hurt by the skeezy illegal porn makers who will turn this blackmarket substance into a moneymaking product. Prohibition kills. We all know this...."

A moment | a breath. He stopped himself from flying off the handle. He knew that when his "eyebrows went up" he had last control. He was very good now, at restraining his worst hysterical shouty impulses. He instead used the silent moment for effect, lowered his voice into serious tone, and concluded. Every ear was upon him.

"So in short, I called your position perfect, as it perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with modern progressive feminism. It is Platonic in its perfection: it is anti-male, it will not work, and it will harm the very people that it sets out to help. Bravo. 10 out of a possible 10."

They went back and forth a bit more. She said his hate speech caused riots; he bragged about them, their size and ferocity. She maintained his Presidential Crush created anti-US hate; he countered that there was no more effective ISIS propaganda than footage of that ludicrous march and all those spoiled women wearing giant foam uteruses on their heads. And on and on. Blah Blah Blah.7

Footnote [7] Pink, crocheted, "pussy" hats. No Man's Rights woman-hater could have better created such a hilarious chapeau for enlightened women to embarrass themselves. Perhaps abortion rights marchers dressed as sexy nurses, but that's the limit.

The Lead Detective walked into the place—was it a bar, nightclub, saloon, dinner club, something new he had never heard of? A "third space"? He didn't know. And having spent the day interviewing many, many people, he didn't care. He looked at the crowded tables, dozens of people in flannel, hoodies, denim, and sighed inwardly. His black suit stood out in the same way that every policeman's plainclothes uniform clashed with the youth BoHos and Hippies and Punks for the past half century. He could have been a Vice Detective in San Francisco in 1967. A Scotland Yard officer in the West End in 1963. The Village in '85. Bunko. Morals Squad. To these freaks, he was pure Outsider.

It was impossible to miss Media Whore, that platinum blond hair glowed in the dimness. Did he bring in his own lighting? Sunglasses indoors, natch. Lead Detective decided to play along, and slipped his own pair of Pilot Sunglasses onto his nose. He still could follow the beacon of that hair, walked purposefully up to the head of the table. He stood close enough to the weightlifter to show he was aware of, but not troubled by, the meathead. "Sir."

Media Whore looked up, did a creditable doubletake, then squealed (squealed!) "The Law! Oh my God, is sodomy still illegal in the colonies?! I thought the little jungle boy was twelve, I swear, Officer!"

"I am here in the matter of the investigation into the death of your friend. May I ask you a few questions." Dry as a dry martini held by Noel Coward in the Serengeti on George Bernard Shaw's birthday.

"Of course of course! Minions! ¡Vamanos!" Some might think that demanding that 20+ people move for one person instead of the other way around was a "bit much", but it happened. Charisma, darlings. Grumbling, knees popping, grunting, but the young hip set made their way to their feet and to booths elsewhere in the room. The weightlifter slunk off. Lead Detective sat to the right of Media Whore. He reached over and took off the other man's sunglasses, then took off his own, tossing both pairs insouciantly onto the table. The glasseses spun to a slow halt.

"How can I help you, Officer?"

* * *

Flashback: Just a few months before the Fall. Media Whore's Story.

"Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste... to the well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utensils and fabrics, to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings—in short, to that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated professional people had inherited. [He] detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. [He] would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence ... In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future."

– J. G. Ballard, High-Rise

"Good morrrrrrning, Dahling!" The Media Whore cackled, crashing through the front door. The Artist was physically pushed back, not by the wooden door slamming open, but by the physical presence he could project. He had an aura around him, a force-push coveted by 1970s Kung Fu masters. He glowed, nay radiated.

"Ugh." Barefoot, blearyeyed, boxershorts. Inside out undersized t-shirt. It had been a night. She watched Media Whore traipse (yes traipse) into her home; she pushed the heavy oak door shut, listening for its satisfying thud. "It's too early to be chipper, my Dearest!" she yelled at his back.

"My Angel," he cooed, beelining to the kitchen. "Ah-ha! Coffee! It's after noon, you need to get up earlier to catch that worm. Or are you already planning a little trap for tomorrow's worm?" Media Whore grinned wildly from around the corner of the kitchen, a can of coffee under his arm. He oozed bonhomie. She shuffled forward, trying to change the exhausted frown into something more welcoming. She failed. "Why are you this up? Cocaine? Can I share?" She slumped in a corner chair in the breakfast nook, ceding the kitchen to her tormenter.

"Simple as calculus, my little pumpkin. Exercise and a healthy early morning snack of, well, protein," the last word dripping with innuendo. Small smile. Then back to the work of finding a grinder. "My trainer makes me work out at 6 a.m. no matter how late I am out or what time zone I am in. I go from Discothèque to Nautilus, if you will."

"I won't."

"No matter. Then my boyfriend du jour provides the proper post work-out nutrients." No entendre was needed. Media Whore turned back to his exacting coffee science.

The kitchen hummed with a vibe of Rich Person's Project; designed by people with money and the perverse desire to have an island with running water solely for cleaning the knife after cutting limes for gins & tonic. The perfect appliances, the homey touches. Water bubbled in a clear kettle while Media Whore ground coffee to an exacting fineness. He had nodded when he had found the beans in the freezer ("ah yes, Ethiopia!" he had said in an Old Civil Service Hand voice, he did love The Empire), approving their provenance, he measured and stirred and poured and fussed.9 Finally, the dance de la café ended and he handed a steaming cup to The Artist, along with a little pill.

Footnote [9] Cone placed over the coffee cup. Wet the filter first. Add the freshly ground to it. Dampen the coffee grounds to release the gasses. Then pour almost-but-not-boiling water over it, small dribs. Don't flood it. One cup at a time. Serve hot. Now you can make Media Whore's Secret Coffee recipe, try it at home!

"So, we have so much to catch up on, he ended the sentence with a preposition. Two prepositions! So bad."

"You are too meta. And we talked last night."

"I am just meta enough, Dreary Deary. And we talked in public!" This is private. This is you and me. Remember Switzerland? Remember our vow? Our Survivor Buddy Pact? Always you and me first. We eat each other last. We had a plan. A stratagem. What do we have now?"

"You have a new book deal and I have shit."

"I have 2 million followers and a Rolls and you have dog shit. You, long ago, painted yourself into a nasty little corner."

The Artist pulled herself up, back against the chair in the suddenly too warm corner. "What do you mean?"

"Cheap feminism. Fourth Wave Nonsense. Corny jokes. Impenetrable stunts. Supporting That Dreadful Woman. Where is the sparkle? The panache? The fucking movie? Conquering Europe? Or at least Hollywood."

"I've been experimenting with turning Social Media into my bitch like you do."

Media Whore looked up from his coffee, his eyes locking onto hers. Only his eyes, piercingly blue could be seen. He knew it was a mesmerizing look.

"For. Fucks. Sake." He shook his head. A subtle fragrance rolled off of him, a smell of the Exotic Orient. Clove oil? Myrrh? "Is that really what you think? I'm actually hurt by your latest ... attempt."

"I'm sorry." Almost pouty.

"'Sorry not sorry' you mean."

"I had no idea..."

"No idea that being cute about abortion would BLOW UP in your face. All White Men Should Die? Black men need to fuck you? Gross selfies? Who does that shit play to? The Paper of Record's Gender Diversity Editor, maybe. But chat shows? Big money? Endorsements? Not so much."

"I just ... I just" Resignation.

Sunglasses back on, Media Whore was still able to cut her off with a glance. "You don't listen, you don't learn. 'I just I just'. Listen, bluntly, I just don't understand your logic. I have colonized "Too Offensive To Fail." The cheeky outsider. Me. You are still straining for mainstream acceptance. Those two streams don't cross. Take a photo taking a shit? Joking about having an abortion? Live streaming a g.y.n. exam? You are every single cliché writ large! You literally re-enacted actual parodies of yourself that are five years old! Five!"

He sighed dramatically. Even his biggest critics admitted that Media Whore could sigh well, could grin satanically, or even cackle wildly. He had the mannerisms of a 1950s Hammer Films villain down cold; he had learned from them. Saturday afternoons, small boy locked away, raised by television. Not really, but it would have explained a lot. And yet he had watched those films, and had studied those great subtle overactors. He spent afternoons enjoying them at college along with boyfriends, blow jobs, champagne, and hash (note the Oxford comma).

"Decide."

"Wha?" The Artist had that stupid, unknowing face on again, round and confused. What had that asshole boyfriend called it? A face for slashing? Media Whore drove that thought right out of his head. He needed friends. He didn't have any, didn't like them, but he needed them.

"Decide. Are you serious or a joke? Are you are artist or are you sensation? Beatles or Spice Girls? Either or."

"Both."

"Clever girl."

"No, really. I want to make a sensation so big it makes the Art real. Really shake things up. Will you have an abortion with me?"

"You are fucking joking."

"No, no wait seriously!" She took his arm, tugging his sleeve so he wouldn't complete his walkaway gesture—she had seen enough men leave a table angrily and dismissively that she knew the signs.

"You, a gay man, get me pregnant. You hate 'homosexuality', you have said so. So let's re-define it. We terminate the little fucker in the third month. In Oklahoma or some bum-fuck-egypt place. You can say it is because it is gay or 'cause it is not-gay; I say it is to show there is no stigma anymore."

A beautiful thing happened. Scientists and artists sometimes make the claim that the ability to observe is the greatest gift mankind has. A botanist might spend weeks looking at the subtle folds of a leaf as it opens to the sun. Think of Nabokov and his butterflies. A dramatist or a humanist, watching Media Whore's face, would see things no one had seen before. It was like a blind man seeing the sunrise for the very first time. Young beautiful virgins losing their virginity in a forest glade in a fairy tale would have fewer expressions and would show less wonder. Lips have never parted in this way in all of recorded history. Michael Caine giving a lecture on acting for the camera would weep seeing so much in so small a quiver of the lip; the tiny wrinkle of an eye muscle on Media Whore's face would cause Michael Caine to quit acting forever; he had too much to learn, it seems. Facial ticks came together under the surface, creating the most singular human expression since Adam first saw Eve, since Our Lord created Light. Ancient Navajo elders would seem as coked-up Robin Williams impersonators compared to the controlled chaos that was not showing on his face.

The sun set. The face was over. True wonder-amazement turned to a smirk. A perfect English smirk, but still. "And this is the good idea?"

"Yes!"

He deepened his voice and his accent. "'Your Highness. I introduce to you the famous American, for she has had the greatest abortion in American History.' Do those sound like words a Beefeater might cry out at an event up the castle?"

"Who cares! It will shake things up!!"

"In 1974, having men in leather ass chaps dancing on a parade float might, just might, be a good idea to shake up a complacent society. The pluses just barely outweighed the minuses. I think you have come up with the single worst idea I have ever heard."

No more face shock. A pout, instead. "Maybe you could get pregnant." She drifted off.

"I cannot help you anymore, young Jedi." Media Whore got up, preened in a distant shiny surface.

Silence. Acceptance. "I understand."

"We are on different paths. I still want to be Dear Leader's press secretary someday. Even on a weekend, over the holidays. Just for a week. To see the look on those dumb fucks' faces when they have to call on me seriously. Me, in a seven thousand dollar suit, pointing at those stuffed shirts at the Paper of Record or the Nightly Broadcast News anchors, telling them exactly what Dear Leader thinks and precisely what they don't want to hear. I would literally, seriously die."

"I know, I know. I came close. I wanted that, too!"

A tender touch on the cheek. "I know. You backed the wrong horse. But you were in the circle. You know what it is like. Maybe in a few years. I'd support that. Press Secretary. Not some bullshit youth outreach director. Think bigger." He turned to leave.

"Loveyounoshit"; this charming au courant phrase was uttered as a single blurt, one quick breath. It meant, of course, that I really really love you, so much that it can be said casually, even uncivilly. It was more serious than "for realsies", which was said about eight times last year. For realsies.

"Love you too, citrouille," he crooned. And was gone.

And that was the story he told to the detective.

# Chapter 22. None of the Usual Suspects

"Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him."

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Lead Detective looked wistful. He blew on his hands, blew the steam from the top of his cup. Junior Detective looked expectant. Wisdom was coming. Even Lead Detective seemed to be anticipating the moment. His eyes crinkled, his voice deepened. Everything sounds better on a cold New York morning in front of 1 Police Plaza, talking about The Case. The Work. The Job. This was The Wrap Up. The Men Upstairs had just said so. Now the team stood on the concrete on the daylight side of the sharp shadow line caused by a nearby skyscraper, out of the cold and the dark. This was the moment.

"Pumpkin spice is an abomination against man, God, and flavor. How a sour mix of mace and allspice and cinnamon came to dominate all of autumn is beyond me. When the revolution comes, every purveyor of pumpkin spice potato chips and pumpkin spice beer and pumpkin spice gum will be put Up Against The Wall. They will be given no quarter, only a pumpkin spice cigaret, then shot through the heart by a firing squad equipped with pumpkin spice bullets."

He sipped on his eggnog latte. "I liked pumpkin ice cream when I was a kid. It was rare and weird and different. Now, it is ruined. If they ever start fucking with my eggnog, the last respectable holiday flavor I have left, which I enjoy maybe three times in winter, not two hundred times in muffins and cookies, look: if they mass-consumerize eggnog.... the rampage will be televised."

He grinned at Junior Detective. "Sorry, the elder statesman stuff ran dry today."

It was over. The investigation was closed. Careers slowed but not ruined. The Lead Detective had spent hundreds of hours talking to everyone important. The juniors had spent thousands. And nothing. Every single stupid person on that roof had been questioned. No motive, no means, no nothing. Final narrative: a failing artist, having lost her agent, lost a big job, lost in her social group, lost in life, decided to end it all. She went where a fist goes when you unclench your hand.

And thank G-d for the Department's Public Affairs Officer, who had done his job for once and crafted a tale the papers would buy, for once. A failed novelist, the PAO had twisted the clues and the stories into an honest to goodness narrative, with an arc and redemption. Every soul searching conversation, every media humiliation had relentlessly built up to the inevitable. A tragic death. Failing to falling. The made for TV movie was sure to follow.

So they sold it as suicide. And not career suicide for themselves, thank Buddha. The Lead Detective had been all detective-y, the press was only half grouchy, and the Department looked medium competent. Everyone would move on. Even the affair between the Lead Detective and the female Social Engineering Detective had happened quickly, deeply, wonderfully, and now painlessly finished. They exchanged tight smiles. The End.

* * *

Media Whore leaned back in his first class seat. He was feeling very very full of himself, and this inner glow radiated like the religious rays of power depicted as coming off from a fallen angel―energy beams shined out and illuminated all around him. Twelfth century triptych. He felt like he should have a golden halo. His trip to the colonies had been a raging success. Television, talks with film people, book deals, lectures, tours. And the very best, the pièces de résistance was sitting upon his muscly torso. A reward, nay an emblem, a totem stolen from the field of battle. Mentally, he saw a large 18th century oil painting: knights and kings and billowing pennants and a man in armor kneeling to receive a trophy at the end of the fighting day in front of a burning field of corpses. A War Trophy! That's what it was. He was wearing a trophy from his enemy!

Two days before, in some shitty little bar in a shitty little college town, they had approached. He recognized Them from a mile away, whilest he clinked the ice in his vodka-soda-lime. He had been cancelled at the shitty town's shitty college for a shitty little fuck-all lecture, and was calmly pouting for a few hours until he could get back to civilization. Then They came. Two beta bros. Early twenties. Scraggly facial hair. Slow approach, gazelles creeping to the water hole at dusk, warily eyeing the lion.

"Um."

He turned, full radiant fire upon them, "oh spit it out you two." Words crackling but the voice weary.

"I'm from New York."

"Good for you."

"I'm a writer, like you."

"Oh I highly doubt that." Archly. Noel Coward by way of Eddie Izzard.

"I write comedy. I write for um the Live."

"Really. Try to speed this along. I have many nothings to do." Finger raised, more vodka was poured over the half ice slush in the glass. Burbled over and into the ice. Drink.

"So, I have a gift for you." A sly smile. "You'll like it."

No wrapping paper, of course. Just a paper bag with handles. From a store. He reached in his hand, pulled out a sports jersey. Football? It was! Authentic British football jersey10. And his favorite team. But the number and name weren't real. The number was '69' and the name was his! A custom-made footballers jersey, with his last name stitched across the back.

Footnote [10] Soccer

"My team! Oh thank you boys. And the customization, I can't believe they got all of those letters to fit! I promise to wear it. Now run along..."

"Look at the front," said the Other One.

There, in a semi-legible scrawl, was a pen mark. A signature. A scribble in black permanent ink. If you were a die-hard fan and a player signed your jersey, you were in sports geek heaven. Time to get a frame, put it under glass. But it was his jersey, so who had signed it? He frowned, which he tried to never do—wrinkles, you know—then squinted and looked closer.

He pieced it together. "No."

"Yes." The two goofs were smiling broadly.

"Is that really her? I mean..." No words. He was literally gobsmacked.

"So, you see, um, she screamed at me."

"No! Here, wait, have a drink." A quick gesture, three vodkas poured, the bartender wandered back to reading the paper and trying desperately to ignore this flaming obnoxious foreigner in his bar.

Media Whore fumbled temporarily with his delicious but too too much dress shirt. Two small mother-of-pearl buttons stood out on the middle of each collar, like the pips a young ensign might wear. He had been promised this was the latest fad for men's dress shirts, and that they would keep the tie precisely in place. He had felt they made his neck look like an owl with two piercing eyes staring down his tie. "Stupid fucking things" he muttered as he tore the collar open. He ripped the collar entirely, whipped the entire shirt off, dropped its no-iron tattered remains to the floor. He pulled the jersey over his head.

"Now, drink quickly and tell daddy all."

"Well, so I'm a writer for them" "so you said" "yeah, and one day, that actress you um... well she was very ... upset. Her big movie had just tanked..." "Not the social justice comedy shit spook remake?" he squealed and clapped his hands, "yeah, so she was in a bad mood, and I saw her in the corridor and she just looked at me and Lost It, ya know?" "No, no I dare say I don't." "I mean, I don't know why, we never talked, but I think she was looking for a fight, and I was right there, so she tore into me. Screaming, yelling, slapping. A tantrum. Racial epithets. 'You fucking white people...' Threw her cell phone at me. Then knocked me down." "Really!" "Yeah. So security had to restrain her and she was spitting and hollering and wrestling and finally calmed down. I was taken to the nurse." "Oh my god" "Well, I'm OK, I mean a scrape and a scratch but nothing really... and then I get called to the Big Man's office." "Him?" "Yeah. God Himself. I met him once, two years ago, but not really since. Lives in the clouds for fifty years. So he calls me up and asks if I am OK and I say yeah, I guess so, but I'm really shaken up." "I could imagine, a big ape like that bearing down on you like a crazed unfunny gorilla." "Well, yeah. So, he says that he likes my work and I don't need to worry about my job for a while while I get my feet back and also would I like to take some time off and stay at his place in Los Angeles and punch up some scripts for a movie." "No?!!" "Yeah. So, I say OK and he asks, all serious, is the incident going to be a problem and I look at him and I know what he is asking and I say no, but then I started to cry." "Oh, you poor dear." A comforting hand on the shoulder. Actual emotion leaked out of Media Whore for a brief second. "I know I know, but it really upset me and I didn't want it to, but ...." deep breath "Yeah. So I said I was OK and he said that he wanted her to apologize to me and I guessed that was cool so he pushed a little button and she came in." "In the flesh? Big girl, isn't she." "And mean! Like, she looked so angry, like this was my fault and I had hit her car or killed her dog and she didn't have time for this bullshit and she saw me and glowered. Like I didn't think that was a thing but she fucking glowered at me." He drank some more vodka. "So then what happened?' -- edge of seat -- "So then she started yelling again about how this was all bullshit and that I had started it and he got up and just looked at her and she stopped and walked out and he looked at me and I said 'I guess I'm not getting an apology' and he laughed and we had drinks. He looked a little nonplussed. Bemused, maybe. Aback."

"Good word. So how the fuck did you get her to sign these."

"Well, he has the stars on pretty short leashes I hear and she needed him for the next movie. One of her characters." "Oh, God" "And he and I are talking and I mention your name. He knows who you are." "He does?" So intrigued. "Yeah not a fan but I think he admires you? So I mention that I know she hates you but she clearly hates me and I don't want to make a federal case out of it." "Workplace violence." "Yeah, or discrimination or bad press but at this point I don't want an apology I want to hurt her you know? Like not violence but make her feel like I felt when she was screaming at me. So I suggested you could host." "You minx! I love you! I've given blow jobs for less!" The writer blushed, averted his eyes "and he laughed." "Did he?" "And I said well maybe not host but she should have to have her feelings hurt like writing a note saying how much she really loved you or apologizing or something and he said he had a better idea." "HE came up with this? That genius!" "Yeah, it was wild, because when it was clear I wasn't going to sue or call the Tabloid to dish the dirt he kind of warmed to me so two days later I get called in—I wasn't working that week after—and go in to the meet and there is a long conference table and these lawyers" "!!!" "and then she comes in and is shocked to see me and the lawyers and him but she sits down and she has calmed down and she smiles with that big fucking mouth of hers" "all those teeth!" "yeah and she starts to smile and he looks at her and goes on and on about workplace violence and illegal discrimination and hate speech and her career on the show how we're all a big family and she just keeps looking at all these people standing there in suits" "I am literally so hard right now" "and he says that a good will gesture will keep me from suing her and him and the show and the network and she got all calm and says of course and he pulls out a box and these two jerseys are in there and he hands her a pen and says to autograph them and she takes them out of the box and when she sees your name she fuckin' flips and yells and screams and almost tried to throw the chair but he just stood there, all calm and zen and shit and she settled down. He was wordless, but you could hear him, you know? And she flipped them over and signed them both right there, under your name and dropped the pen and walked out. Didn't even look at me. And I have one and now you do too."

Silence. Even Media Whore was quiet. They all played with their glasses, clinking ice with their respective tongues. The click of the clock was heard. The buzz of the beer sign. The bartender stared at sports on a silent screen.

"And now you are going to Los Angeles?" "I am. Next week." A growing smile on Media Whore's childlike angelic face, "Ohhhhhh, take me with you I'd love to see the place! No, I kid." He snorted at his own joke. "Have a wonderful time. I love this. Love it love it love it. In fact..." and he pulled the prize shirt up and pulled it back down over his head to get it just so so it wouldn't make him look fat. His bushy blonde mop poked through, followed by his reflective aviator framed sunglasses. He smiled a million watt smile. "In fact, I shall wear it when I get a meeting with that little Canadian bastard."

# Chapter 23. Finished.

"Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the saints."

Steve was trying to think. He was actually quite good at thinking, or rather thinking about thinking. When he had to think, he often fell back to the tools he had learned in school – lists and spreadsheets and charts and numbers and plans. The process became the thought, and led to the result. Sometimes, when he tried to evaluate things in his mind, he naturally leapt to the solution he liked best. He would analyze these situations, pondering how his brain had come to the place it did. Had he thought? Or just picked the easiest way, the funnest choice? Was it an impulse, disguised as a rationality? He never knew. His car choice (a reasonable sporty import) was the result of a week of agonizing. Had he thought it through? Or did the combination of sale price and nice color overwhelm his ape brain? Did he see himself meeting girls and getting laid in the car, and thus his hormones had overridden his mind? He wanted to know. Did he actually know how to think? How good was he at thinking? Was he lying to himself? Did he only think that he thought?

And so, as the train rolled North, he looked out the window. He kept the problem rolling around his head, but even he admitted he was losing the thread, the arc. He would distract himself, think about teevee, the scenery, a book he had once read. But still he came back to It. The Problem. The Push.

He was home free. He knew that. No one suspected him. Katie knew nothing. The police had looked and moved on. His work was good. His body was stronger than it had been in forever. Work was great! Katie and him were moving closer. Had he found middle class Nirvana?

The philosophical questions of the Ultimate Existential Act haunted him, but only to the extent that he let them. He was losing no sleep. No shake to the hands. But it was wrong, right? Could he get away from it? Could he get away with it? Did he want to? Well, yes, he thought he did. But why? Or why not? He fumed and stewed.

He had watched enough films noir to know he was caught in one. Film Noir wasn't just an old, black & white crime movie, a flickering scratched film with men in hats and tough cops. There was always a moral center, a sense of alienation or struggle with Self. And he knew this organically and honestly. This wasn't the result of some spoon-feeding mollycoddler telling him Film Theory 101, this was the result of tens of hours watching the old movies by himself (for no one else would watch them with him). A man has to turn in the woman he loves to the police. A hopeless hero has to call the police on himself and his femme fatale so they can both be killed before she kills again. A reporter sets out to find a killer, but he knows the identification is wrong, for he is the one being sought—he is searching for himself! A Private Eye has to solve his partner's murder, a man he hates and whose wife he is screwing. A man did the murder while drunk, so now he is the killer being sought but he doesn't even know it! A thief steals another's luggage and becomes him, and finds that becoming someone else entails more than wearing his clothes. A poisoned man has twenty four hours to find his own killer! All of these scenarios swirled in his head. He tried to construct a Noir around his situation.

And it came to him—the Innocent Killer. He had done something Wrong, granted. But he was innocent from it. He thought about a kitten, a newborn kitty, swatting at a fly and hitting a stick that slammed shut a window, crushing its owner. A boy's home run ball hitting a pedestrian in the temple, a child accidentally pulling the emergency brake, the car rolling across the father, smooshing him. He was that innocent. Pushing The Artist, that woman, that human, was like fanning a butterfly from its perch to the sidewalk.

If someone falls asleep, and in the depths of unconsciousness sleepwalks and strangles someone else, then goes to bed and wakes up the next day, completely unaware of the monstrous act, is he a murderer? Could he be convinced he has done wrong? Without any foreknowledge or even knowledge, can there be guilt? Probably not.

But even he knew that was a lie. He might not feel the act was wrong, but he knew intrinsically that it was. An effortless murder remains murder. He let that settle inside his brain and his gut.

Outside, the train rolled past the sort of places that end up next to train tracks. They may not have started as slums, but slums they were. Mile after mile of the ass end of crumbling housing, back yards filled with junk, poor people flashing by. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey – someone who only rode trains would think these cities were 100% ghetto, a vast wasteland of failure. But Steve didn't even see it. He didn't see his train sandwich, his train plastic cup of wine. His phone beeped and burbled, unheard.

What did he have? A good life, certainly. A girl, a job, a car, a home, money, a plan, an education, a future. And yet, it seemed like nothing. Not in a bad, teenaged angst way. Just an emptiness. It was weird. It was like the part of him that cared was taking a nap. Life was asking what he wanted for dinner and he wasn't hungry.

He thought about the Russian novels he had read in high school, before college had drained the desire to read literature ever again. The books he was starting to reread. Murder was the ultimate immoral act. It was unredeemable. So why didn't he acknowledge that in his... soul? Didn't feel it was wrong / Knew it was wrong ... he orbited these two poles.

He had left Crime and Punishment at home, didn't want to be seen as being ironic.

The train slowed stopped. The Big City. He smiled lightly, then grimly. Home of the mean streets, the seven million stories in the naked city. He knew Duty, even if he didn't feel it. He exited and walked, looked at the big board, walked to another train. 15 minutes took him under the water to the stop nearest his destination. He knew where he was going, he had memorized the directions this morning. He emerged, blinking, from the subway. He oriented himself, walked down the avenue. It was late afternoon in the City, people everywhere. He quickened his pace. He was only a few blocks from the scene, but that wasn't his destination. He saw it, an old stone building, its gray impassive face colored by two blue lighting globes. He walked the steps quickly, nearly double jumping them. Was he smiling? His energy increased as he mounted the steps, an officer held the door for him. He marched to the front desk.

It was just as he imagined, a high rostrum with men behind it. Men in crisp uniforms, busy with their business. He walked up to the counter, looked deeply into the eyes of the young police officer behind it. The Law in Blue.

"Yeah?"

"I've come to turn myself in. I must confess. I done it."

#

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