Not long after Fitz vanished, leaving behind a battered hand-me-down BMW and a half-written dissertation on a hard drive on a computer on a dusty card table in an otherwise empty apartment in Galilee, Pennsylvania, Sven Overlook, distraught beyond reason, beyond his own understanding, made several spastic and desperate attempts of his own to escape the unseen but ubiquitous forces boxing him in more each year, rendering increasingly unreachable that Other Place hinted at in so many movies, pop songs, and novels he'd grown up on. He tried it first on foot, since his decrepit '89 Mazda seemed just another attachment ripe for expunging. But he'd no sooner reached the sun-baked freeway and gotten his thumb in the air when fellow grad student Shelly Nocturne skidded to a halt on the shoulder, demanded to know what the hell sort of crazy-ass thing he was doing, and whisked him off to a meeting at the U, where their department chair – an inexplicably maternal-looking woman – burned an hour making acrid threats to grad students about what would happen to their funding if they used up all their dissertation credits before getting said diss done. Next, deciding the car had its merits, he started motoring south, hopefully to a region less sivilized, on a hot Monday afternoon. But wasn't to the stop sign at the end of his block before a muffled chirping – a cell phone he barely remembered owning, even – began emanating from the glove compartment. “Hello?” he yelped, having figured out which button on the thing to push.1 “It's you!” cried Kate, his significant other, who'd found a mysterious number in the margin of her day planner. “Don't forget to let in Mr. Yacabowski at five to fix the drippy sink.” Then, two days after that, one last try, hard-core, this time at the local “international” airport (it had a daily flight to Canada). “Do me a favor?” he pleaded with the nervous young woman behind the United counter, sliding her a short stack of twenties still warm from the ATM, “and don't tell me where you're sending me.” But she did, of course (“Toledo”) and he, of course, never got there: the sudden realization that the next day was his aunt's birthday sent him slinking away from the nearly deserted gate, back to his car, back to the U, so he could get on a computer and send a houseplant by wegotyourflowersrighthere.com. So that was that. And it was wrong – really wrong, Sven knew – to romanticize what had happened to Barry Fitzgerald Gaughan (a.k.a. Fitz) exactly two weeks before Toledo day. Vanished into thin air, his yellow car discovered like a lost dog on the side of a country road five miles south of Galilee, poor old Fitz may have had a Very Bad Thing happen to him. But in Galilee? Beside a freakin’ bucolic meadow with nary a footprint in it? In what they call broad daylight? (Folks had seen a maybe twitchier-than-usual Fitz at the U that morning; then a weirdly pissed-off farmer, Jack Rueful, had called police to the deserted BMW early that sunny June evening.) Well.... Sven wasn't sure he was buying it. He spent the night of the day after the disappearance (the night police officially declared Fitz missing; the night the amateurish Bradleytown news projected Fitz's surprised-looking mug on TV and interviewed his eerily beautiful parents beside their behemoth Benz in front of Galilee's City Hall) sitting up in bed, hour after hour, staring over his knees out the window, at the rain, at the massive old steel-company blast furnaces looming darkly in the valley a mile away, listening to the burrowed-in Kate murmuring in her sleep beside him. And wondering: was the passive construction correct here? Had Fitz had a Very Bad Thing happen to him? Or had he made something (but what, then?) happen? There were, the TV news said, no signs of a struggle at the site. There had been, the TV news added, no ransom calls to Fitz's folks in Philly, though they were definitely moderately filthy rich. Strange, Sven thought, lying back that night at last, pulling the sheet up to his nose, staring at the ceiling, listening to the gentle patter of the same rain that may have been falling that very moment on his colleague’s well-hidden, blue-tinged body. Very strange. * * * The next morning came up sunny and hazy. Sven, jittery from lack of sleep, left his and Kate's apartment, hopped in the Mazda, and made the short drive across Galilee to Revoquer U, where he and Fitz were (had been?) fellow grad students. There, in a cramped office on the third floor of Boxer Hall, home of the tiniest Ph.D.-granting English department in the country, he found exactly what he’d hoped for: several of his cohorts standing around in a tight, nervy, caffeine-fuelled, rumor-mongering knot. He joined it. And within two minutes was handed the first two links of what would become a long and heavy chain of bizarre and sensational Fitz facts and rumors Sven would spend the entire summer of 2001 trying simultaneously to tangle himself up in and fight his way loose from. “His father,” whispered Shelly the medievalist, standing before a poster with Ben Jonson's face taped onto Johnny Rotten's body, “is the lawyer for the developers getting ready to build there, right in that field.” “Build what?” queried Pete the British romanticist. “Where?” added our Sven, the modern Americanist. “Houses,” said Katrina, the composition/rhetoricist. “More ugly pre-fab McMansions. In those big fields Fitz left his car next to.” “No.” “Yes.” “Or was made to leave his car next to,” the beautiful bespectacled Shelly speculated. Giving everyone pause. “There's also, of course,” said the butch-as-you-please-but-still-unbearably-cute (thought Sven) Katrina, breaking the silence, attempting to stir a clump of ancient powdered cream into her molasses-thick coffee, “the whole thing about the farmer who found his car.” “What? What?” Sven's nerves showing. “Fitz's Dad is scheduled to go to court against the guy.” “No effing way,” gasped the bow-tied (as always) Pete. “Way,” Katrina and Shelly, together. Clever girls. “And you're getting all this where?” sneered Sven. “In this thing called a newspaper?” Shelly, her expression just what you’d expect. Sure enough, she plucked the thing from the disaster-area desktop behind her, thrust it into Sven's shaky hands, tapped percussively on a below-the-fold front-page story in the Morning Bugle, Galilee's daily right-wing rag. Every rust-belt town now had one. Revoquer Grad Student Gaughan Gone, went the headline. Somebody in that office should be shot. “The Bugle has learned,” read Sven aloud from the fourth paragraph, set in that paper's loopy uncials, “that Jack Rueful, who discovered Gaughan's car, is plaintiff in a suit defended by Thomas Gaughan, the missing student's father and a prominent Philadelphia real estate lawyer. “Rueful, a Galilee Township corn farmer,” continued Pete from the fifth indent, reading over Sven’s shoulder, breathing down his neck, "claims to own the 16 square acres upon which Thomas Gaughan's clients, Turfeeters Inc., plan to build forty new homes. “It’s the same property,” recited Katrina from memory (she had freaky talents), “Barry Gaughan's deserted yellow BMW was found beside on Thursday evening.” They all stood there then, faces furrowed, blinking up at the water-stained ceiling. But it didn't help. Because it didn't figure. Motive, motive. Jack Rueful would want to kidnap one Fitz Gaughan why? Blackmail was out, provided the guy was even remotely sane: everyone would know who did it. “Maybe there was a simple crime of rage,” tossed out Sven, so making Death tip-toe through the little circle. And making everyone turn and walk away. Then, as Sven made a mournful noontime drive out to the vanishing site, wanting now to see it himself, to breathe its mystifying air, he pondered that this last numbing possibility made no sense either. Jack Rueful (he pictured, disturbingly, the bepitchforked hayseed from Woods’ American Gothic) would recognize Fitz how when he saw him? And would call the police himself, having done something awful, why? To divert suspicion? A little transparent, wasn’t it? There were cops, Sven saw as he climbed out of his Mazda, in the meadow, which winked with hyacinth, jasmine, marigold. He wouldn't let the flora put him in a funereal mindset. Three black-and-whites, radios squawking in the brilliant sunlight, crouched on the same shoulder Fitz's scruffy ride must have squatted on two days earlier. And a line of the classic yellow tape – a gross TVish intrusion – was visible deep in the field, pulled taut between several hundred yards of trees where the forest began. POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS. The woods. Full of mushrooms. Algae. Rot. But as yet no Fitz. Sven shuddered. Felt his teeth come a little loose. He couldn't even guess what might’ve brought Fitz here. The dude generally shunned nature. Would sneeze, the neurotic, if he so much as saw a picture of a weed. And he hardly struck Sven as the doting kid who’d drive out to admire the battlegrounds on which his father fought fiercely monied battles. There was no one there but cops. Sven saw, in the distance, one of them, sagging German shepherd in tow, emerge from the trees into white sunlight, then vanish back in again. He suddenly wanted to forget he’d ever seen the place. Returning to his Mazda, though, he glimpsed something someone had left behind – a dollop of color between the bumpers of two cop cars parked nose to ass. He stepped back to get a better look. “Now what the hell?” he actually said aloud. It was an arrangement of flowers, like those godawful things you see propped up on roadsides where someone's bought the proverbial farm. Only this one wasn't shaped like a cross, or a star of David, or a teddy bear. It was shaped, tightly packed white carnations and yellow roses, like a guitar. * * * “A guitar,” Sven said to Kate that night, sitting in a booth at the Yeast Works, Galilee's new, inexplicably hip microbrewery/restaurant. Every rust-belt town now had one. “Freaky,” she said, French fry suspended halfway to her face. “But he’s a big fan, right?” She used the present tense, he noted. Well why shouldn't she? “A big fan?” “You know. Of music and...stuff.” But something else bothered Sven. And he didn't know what till he woke the next morning from another fitful sleep. As if insomnia, so unproductive, so uneconomical, were part of the recipe for good detective work. It was the big lacquered sign beside the soon-to-be construction site. He'd seen it yesterday – and it had loomed again in his dank, fungal dreams. It stood at the corner of the field, a hundred yards from where the cop cars were. Bearing the name of the housing development to be inflicted there. Typically vapid, meaningless, sterile. Something a computer would cook up. BROOKE FOREST GLEN. Get it? With the initials? Barry Fitzgerald Gaughan. * * * “Dude,” said Ralph Mountain, another cohort, in Boxer on Monday morning. “You've finally watched Chinatown one too many times.” They were in Ralph's closet-size office, where he covertly (though even the department chair knew it) lived. Observe the sweat-damp sleeping bag kicked into the corner. “Ralph, buddy, you are joking,” proceeded Sven. “Right? There was a one in 26 chance the first letter would match. There was a one in 26 chance the second letter would match. Ralph,” curiously evangelical now, “there was a one in 26 chance the third letter would match. Do you know what 26 x 26 x 26 is?” “About the number of centimeters from here to the local mental hospital.” “Ha!” “There are,” pontificated Ralph, “such things as coincidences. They're weird, I'll grant you. But that's why they call them coincidences.” Sven felt a headache blossom as he watched Ralph unwrap a pop tart, take a cigarette lighter from his pocket, thumb it to life, and hold it under the pastry, browning it. He examined Ralph's dreadlocks. The fourteen studs and hoops up and down his right ear. The long, wispy goatee. He was a big punker from way back when. In the corner of the office stood two file cabinets full of 70’s and 80’s records so awful most had never even been listened to by their own artists. “Why,” Sven figured he'd give it a shot, “would someone leave a guitar-shaped flower bouquet by the field where Fitz vanished?” “’Cause he played guitar,” Ralph, matter-of-factly. The pop tart let out a gassy hiss. “He did? How do you know that?” Ralph pocketed the lighter, took a big bite of breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever it was, then spoke around it. “He told me. At Katrina and Tina's party last Christmas.” Well how do you like that. Sven wouldn’t have used the word “friend,” to be sure, to describe Fitz: the guy was too amorphous, somehow, to be “friends” with anyone. But he'd figured he was at least as good an acquaintance as Fitz had had at that place. Ralph barked a laugh, sending a soggy crumb shooting over Sven's shoulder. “Dude, you look like someone just shot your dog.” “Eat me,” Sven sulked. “Who else knows that?” “I dunno.” “Well what did he say? At the party?” “He said, ‘I play guitar,’” chewing thoughtfully. “Or words to that effect.” “Yeah, but in what context?” “I can't remember. I was pie-eyed.” A pigeon flapped noisily onto the air conditioner outside Ralph’s window, stared hungrily through the wire mesh at his pop tart. But Ralph wasn't about to share. All his meals came out of the vending machine downstairs. It got expensive. “I wouldn't get too worked up about this Fitz thing, Svenny Boy,” he advised. “You know what a train wreck that guy is.” Again, noted Sven, with the present tense. “Tomorrow, next week, next month, ol' Fitz'll come stumbling back into Boxer Hall, looking like a rat's nest, carrying an armload of black velvet paintings he bought in Oaxaca, or…wherever the hell he decided to jump out of his own car to hitchhike to.” But it was tough taking advice from a guy in an inflatable Miller Lite armchair. “What's your major field of study again?” inquired Sven, slit-eyed. A blank look came over Ralph's face. His jaw stopped working the last bite of pop tart. “I can't remember,” he said. And he laughed and laughed. * * * Sven left Ralph, left Boxer, crossed the university lawn, the intimidating gothic buildings crowding up on him like he didn't remember their doing before. He walked into the shimmering glass and steel science library, jogged down an icy cold stairwell, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, and emerged, somewhere deep under the Earth, into a NORAD-like computer lab. Peacetime by the looks of the place. Only one summer-school student there, a good-looking South Asian kid slumped drooling in front of a computer, an animated vampire looming on the screen saver over his head. Sven sat down at a gleaming titanium carrel, logged onto a computer, Googled Fitz's name. Well shit: he actually had a website. Turned out, after a couple mouse clicks, to be no great shakes: just a niche on the Revoquer U server where he'd posted some syllabi for his freshman comp classes. But it was somewhere to start. Sven brought up the most recent syllabus – the one for the semester that had just ended in May. There were, naturally, office hours...required texts...phone numbers and an e-mail address (bfg7576@hotmail.com). Actual prose began under a section titled, curiously, The Plan, much of which, Sven saw, scanning, had not a lot to do with a course plan, per se, at all. All right, he thought. There's a sign. So...how about some good old coded messages? How might Fitz have gone about it? Might as well start with shit too simple for third graders, even. Like...first letters of each paragraph. There were six of them. The first started, “Because absence will adversely affect your grade....” The second, “It's not absolutely necessary to....” The third, “You're late, technically, if you....” The fourth, “As should be clear by now....” The fifth, “Last, inform me if....” And the sixth: “Longer, you should know, isn't necessarily better.” Okay. First letters. Sven leaned in a little closer to the screen, hearing the monitor's low, droning hum. B...I...Y...A...L...L. He sat back. Blinked several times. The kid behind him sneezed in his sleep, his screen saver now playing an eerie organ fugue to accompany an image of a big, shambling rat. Bye, y'all. Sven sat there a long time, feeling cool blue fingertips tracing patterns on his back, under his T-shirt. And he pictured the woods again. Pictured them at twilight, a trail of smoke arcing languidly above them. Then the flash and sizzle of an exploding flare. Easily just a coincidence, he thought. A projection. Ralph was still right. The next try at meaning would, for better or worse, prove he was really right. For better, no doubt. For better. So…let's go for first whole words of each paragraph. Because...It's...You're...As...Last...Long. He sat back again. Because it's your ass, last long? Advice for the ages. The sleeping kid let out a whimper, his computer now playing Vincent Price's cackle from the end of Michael Jackson's “Thriller.” Well all right. Okay. The second word of each paragraph would prove it. The vast nothingness of it. The great yawning lack of intent. So.... Absence...not...late...should...inform...you. Overhead, a heavy cloud crossed a skylight atop an inverted wishing well, fifty feet up. Directly beneath it, Sven sat back, exhausted at ten a.m. Now what was it they called you when you were dead? Ah yes. He remembered. They called you late! “Or maybe,” he couldn't wait to tell Ralph, “it's only a coincidence they call it that!” Suddenly the kid behind him sat bolt upright, hollered something in a foreign language. Sven spun around. They stared at each other. The kid, not moving his head, slid his eyes far left, far right.... “Dude, what’d I just say?” he queried in perfect California English. He was wearing a Sick Dick and the Volkswagens T-shirt. “No idea,” said Sven. “Sounded like...Sinhalese or something, but I'm only guessing.” “Hey, man,” the kid said accusitorily, rising unsteadily. “I only speak English.” And he left. All right, thought Sven. I'll surrender, Fitz. I'll give myself over to this thing. I'll follow it as far as you make it go, but you've gotta show me just one more thing. And he scrolled back up to the top of the screen, to where he'd seen Fitz's e-mail address. bfg7576@hotmail.com. Just for shits and giggles, or whatever, he went to the computer's accessories menu, brought up the calculator, multiplied 26 x 26 x 26. One lousy digit. That's all the number in Fitz’s e-mail address was off by. One...lousy...digit. Okay, Sven thought, putting his head down on the cool desktop by the keyboard, rocking it back and forth, feeling himself tear up a bit for the first time since his first girlfriend dumped his ass with impunity freshman year of college. Okay, okay. I'll do it. I'll follow. * * * You have to understand: it wasn't just curious math that convinced Sven that Fitz had given everyone the slip. It wasn't just whacked coincidence. It wasn't just specters of meaning so thin you'd kill them by holding a match too near. He was also running on memory. A specific memory. At Katrina and Tina's party last winter – the same one at which Fitz had apparently told Ralph he played guitar – Sven and Fitz, both dressed as elves (Katrina and Tina loved theme soirees; for this one you could be any homunculus you wanted), stood, in the wee hours, smoking 7-Eleven cigars on their hostesses’ balcony, staring down at the glimmering colored lights of the Galilee Valley. Sven remarking, he recalled, how great it was – really, really great – that some long-indentured Shakespearean, Jerry Bierstein, who'd slaved over dozens of revisions of his diss for more years than anyone could remember, had just trapped a tenure-track job at a junior college on some tornado-blasted plain in....South Dakota, or…Oklahoma, maybe. “Great?” Fitz slurred, turning on Sven, peering at him through his signature shaggy bangs. Swaying in place. Bells on his cap jingling. “Do you – know – what that poor bastard is – in for? A hundred and forty – students a semester? Tongue lashings from – Christian fundamentalist deans who’re pissed he's teaching – Hamlet? Committee work every day till his – dick falls off?” Sven’s hand moved involuntarily to his groin. Could that happen? Fitz leaned in close. His breath fogged out of his nose in the frigid Pennsylvania air, left hand pinching his smoldering cigar, right hand sloshing around a drink – undiluted Chambord, by the purpleness. “And you realize – right,” continued his terrifying sermon, “that a job like that is – the best – any of us from this peon place – can ever hope for?” Sven, smashed, couldn't remember why he was dressed all in green velvet. It seemed, in his alcohol-retarded state, to indicate Fitz's nightmare vision of the future was coming true. He stared hard at the Fitz on the left, did what would've seemed to the sober like an imitation of a horrified person. “Fitz!” he cried. “What can we do?” His acquaintance/cohort/associate/colleague clutched his shoulder, pressing the damp cold velvet of Sven's costume against his skin. “All you gotta – do, my man,” looking unusually sure of himself, “is make – something else happen.” And with that he extended his arm, dropping Katrina's Dollar-Store highball glass full of purple death off the balcony, so it should've made a tinkling, musical smash in the parking lot below.... But it never made a sound. * * * At eight p.m. on the day of the conversation with Ralph, of his discovery of Fitz's cryptic syllabus, of the multiplied numbers, Sven was prodded awake with a ruler by a work-study undergrad in Coke-bottle glasses in the same computer lab he'd descended into that morning. “We're like, closing?” the kid said. Sven had spent the day sleeping in the same position as that South Asian kid. What unassimilable things had he said in his sleep? He wandered back upstairs, knot-necked, trembling with hunger, to the university lawn. And collapsed in the soft grass. The sun set. It shone like clotting blood through the stained glass of the Alumni Memorial Building's tower. Opposite, it reflected like salvation off the colossal rusty blast furnaces of Galilee Steel. That which was beautiful became ugly. That which nobody thought could be anything but ugly became beautiful. Within a few days Sven would try, unsuccessfully, to do some hitchhiking. He'd try, unsuccessfully, to drive south. He'd try, unsuccessfully, to get on a plane. But in every instance, forces too large, too dull, too easily named to bother naming would hold him right where he was. Right...the hell...there.
After Toledo day, the only interesting things to happen for a while weren't even interesting. Beyond the everyday, granted, for the mildly-eccentric-but-still-within-the-lines sorts Fitz had hung with in Galilee. But that was all. How many humanities grad students, after all, ever get interviewed by private detectives? What would they want to know? Where are those library books? Isn't it a little convenient you "lost" Billy's essay? You have been looking at porn on your office computer, haven't you? Any bit of attention from men whose jobs it is – sometimes, anyway – to get people's shit thrown in jail was, you can imagine, a kick.2 But not for Sven Overlook, the only Boxer habitué, maybe, who felt he had something to hide. Three weeks to the day after Fitz dematerialized, said investigators found him in his wee English department office, waiting. Feet up. Smoothing his shirt. Whispering a mantra: Cool as milk. Cool as milk. Cool...as...milk. Expecting them. No big trick, though, that: U administrators had informed English departmenteers the P.I.s would be on campus that afternoon, making the rounds, and that it would be nice if folks knowing Fitz could avail themselves. And Sven wasn’t about to draw attention to himself by being the only grad student not around. When they appeared in his open doorway, though, Sven's facade o' suavity crumbled before the majesty of the Law. His feet dropped to the floor. A lump leapt into his throat. He started sweating profusely. From the armpits. Though they were hardly what he’d expected. Two Latino kids, really, in full hip-hop regalia: gold chains, baseball jerseys, sneakers and haircuts upon which considerable amounts of technology had clearly been brought to bear. They introduced themselves (“Freddie”; “Cinco”) with thick South Philly accents and crowded, big tall boys, into plastic chairs in front of Sven's desk, jangling like fire trucks. And within seconds were right down to it. “So, uh, Mistuh Gawn – Fitz, y'all called him?” Cinco asked the questions. Freddie typed notes on a wafer-thin laptop. Sven nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes. Fitz. We called him Fitz.” “He didn't like...say nothin' in the days or weeks or months before he…y’know… disappeahed? Stuff that would... indicate he was in trouble wid someone? Or that he was like...plannin' to do somethin' drastic in 'is life?” The only question Sven had hoped they wouldn't ask. The only one, of course, they really could. But he should tell them what? That there were secret messages (“Because it's your ass...”) in Fitz's syllabi? That a numerologist would go ga-ga for his e-mail address? That he'd once bemoaned the state of his chosen profession at a party and had maybe, possibly, entertained the notion of doing something else with his life? Like these guys wouldn’t be doing the same thing driving back to Philly today after spending a whole afternoon interviewing, in the dullest case of their young lives (“Some freakin’ loony honky pulls a Henry David Tuh-row, and you want us to find him why?”) a bunch of twitchy eggheads. So...Sven took a deep breath. Examined the cobwebs on the ceiling. Pursed his lips. Furrowed his forehead. Shook his head slowly. Arched an eyebrow. Cleared his throat. Shook his head some more. Drummed his fingertips on the desktop. Tugged an earlobe. Sighed. Tapped his forehead. Did a little more head-wagging. “Well...I, uh.... Hmm. I guess.... No. I would have to say, having considered it carefully, that I think not. No, definitely. Definitely, definitely no.” Then, dropping his gaze back down, he found the detectives’ expressions utterly transformed. He nearly screamed. They were staring levelly at him, smirking almost imperceptibly, the one dude’s fingers now paused above his keyboard. “You're, uh...sure about that.” Freddie, cheek twitching as if he were suppressing a laugh. It was the first time, since introducing himself, he'd spoken. He was 250 pounds if an ounce. Sven prayed his bladder would hold. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I'm quite...quite sure.” “Overlook.” Cinco stroked his perfect millimeter-long goatee with two bejeweled fingers. “That's a real innerestin’ name.” “I, uh.... Thank you.” They kept smirking. “Very – much?” They were studying him like he was a five-year-old they’d have to figure out some way, Christ knows how, to reason with. He tried smiling at them. Succeeded only in looking like a baby with a funky case of gas. “Sven – ” Cinco stopped. Tugged a chain like he was loosening a necktie. “Can I call you Sven?” “Sure. Sure you can.” “You ain’t like...overlookin' nothin', are you, Sven?” Sven chuckled. It came out a series of grunts. “No. No, officer, I'm surely not.” This set the two detectives howling. They laughed and laughed and laughed. They tried very hard to stop themselves but couldn't. They wiped tears from their faces with the heels of their hands and kept on laughing. “We ain’t police officers,” Freddie finally wheezed. Before they left they gave him their card. When you simply gotta know, read the slogan at the bottom. All the same text on the opposite side in Spanish. “You call us, Sven,” said Freddie, “if you, uh...re-membuh anything. ’Cause we're a lot easier to deal with than some of the guys might be through here askin’ questions later.” Now what did that mean? The police? They’d be through? And now that Sven thought about it, why hadn’t they been through? He could still hear Freddie and Cinco chuckling as they walked down the hall, one of their cell phones chirping the theme from The Rockford Files. “Fitz's parents have all that – money!” Sven barked ten minutes later at fellow pro student Pete over the grinding photocopier in the department office downstairs. “And they send those two – two – punks?” “Now really, Sven,” Pete, adjusting his bow tie, pushing his horn-rims up his nose. He looked like an especially constipated George F. Will. You'd never guess he was the biggest Marxist in the department. “That type of, of, of – classist thinking just doesn't – ” “Oh, that's not what I mean. They were just so – so – ” So right? Is that what he couldn't say? They'd looked through him like Saran Wrap over rotten leftovers. And had left convinced, no doubt, he actually knew something important when he absolutely didn't! Or he did, maybe, but...not the type of important they'd find important. Or – “I hear,” said Sherry, the department secretary, leafing through some prospetive grad student's application folder, “they're like, the hottest-shit investigators in Philly.” “Oh yeah?” Sven had about had it. “And where do you hear that?” “From Liz.” The other secretary. Who looked up from her palm pilot, startled. “Derek,” she said – a particularly insane prof – “says they're Penn grads. Supposedly they make 250 bucks an hour.” “Together or separately?” “Well I don't know.” “Ha!” “Read the paper this morning?” asked Sherry. “The newspaper? On a TA's stipend?” Loud enough for the department chair in the adjacent office to hear. Get your digs in when you can. “That farmer guy, Jack Rueful? Who Fitz’s dad is suing? He’s off the hook. His property checked out clean.” Sven left. * * * “So why didn't you just tell those guys what you know?” asked Kate, not unreasonably, in the mall's food court that evening. Meals out. The only time they ever saw each other. They sat near the archway reading FOODPLATZ in foot-high red and yellow neon letters. “Because – because – ” Sven stammered. Out with it. “It's none of their business!” She blinked at him. Long brown hair sliding down over one brown eye. Pretty girl. “If Fitz did leave bizarro messages in his syllabi,” he proceeded, “if he was being numerically clever, if he did decide to buck his fate, then he doesn't need to be found. He wasn't murdered, or... abducted, or – ” He bonked himself on the forehead, frustrated. “He just split!” “He just split.” Nodding. Facetiously. “And left behind just enough clues so a friend” – she knew how he felt about that word in this case – “who knows him and cares about him could possibly figure out what he's done.” “I certainly don't know what he's done.” “Well who knows what a detective could figure out from studying that syllabus for an hour?” Non compos mentis, really. People got sent to institutions for having conversations like this. Kate leaned back in her chair. Fished a Benson & Hedges out of her bag. Fired it up. Blew smoke at Sven, exasperated. "If those signals are there, it's practically,” she concluded, “a cry for help.” A cry for help? Sven nearly said. A pat of encouragement was more like it. A You can do it! for whoever was smart enough to find it. And he had. A cry for help. Come on. Was she blind? She worked in this mall, for Christ's sake, one floor up, managing a science-cum-toy store fifty, sixty, seventy hours a week. Demonstrating cheap microscopes, lopsided orreries and duck-call kazoos for snot-nosed yard apes and their zombified parents. Hiring and firing teenagers whose whole lives revolved around snickering behind her back. She came home at night walking into walls from exhaustion. And she needed convincing it might be nice to get out of the meatgrinder? Sheeeeez. Him and her both. Like...atoms in some mammoth synchrotron, zooming faster and faster around some circular track, working toward a velocity so insane they’d be oblivious to the final collision. To get off the track. To move into some unnameable-from-here alternate reality. This she didn't get? Sven was distressed. So much so that when Kate had staggered back to work in her khakis and company polo shirt, he succumbed, perhaps shamefully, but who can judge, to the dark thing inside him he’d been both nurturing and quashing for a good couple years now. He snaked his way through the mall. Tunnel-visioned. Past cappuccino stands and ear-piercing booths. Past mohawked boys pitching pennies and Spandexed moms pushing strollers. And entered the architecturally themed Fundaments, the closest thing to a hip men's clothier this backwater valley had. A couple of almost-pretty high-school boys who “worked” there watched Sven stride in in his baggy Levis, muddy Timberland boots, extra-large “REVOQUER” T-shirt. “Do you like, need something?” one of them asked. Chuckling after Sven had passed. Let him. Sven made like the Concorde for the très couteux shit in back, European trip-hop music raining down on him. He collected a $149.95 pair of black leather jeans. A $29.99 white fitted T-shirt. A $299.95 collarless, waist-length, red leather motorcycle jacket. And... mmm...these here $149.95 black leather boots. Ankle-high. Side zips. He hauled the whole mess into a dressing booth. Changed within seconds in front of a floor-to-ceiling Le Corbusier quote in gold Roman letters. Then, finished, he added the last touch, violently mussing his hair, which had been neatly parted, shoving it all forward into his eyes. No mirrors in the dressing booths. Management’s way of getting you out on the catwalk. So Sven stepped out, tight cowhide squeaking, to find a mirror. There it was. He marched right up, snarling in anticipation. And it was the same as always: he hardly recognized this dick in the mirror. He peered through his disheveled bangs. Parted his lips so his teeth glinted. Hips forward. Shoulders back. One stiff nipple peeking past the edge of the coat's zipper. Mmm. He turned around to peer over his shoulder for the rear view. Not bad. Not bad...at...all. Then he realized it'd gotten quiet. Real quiet. The trip-hop beats were the only sound. Ass to mirror, Sven rotated his head slowly forward. And found every last one of the dozen or so people in the store, including the two Young Dudes he'd strode in past, staring. Blankly. At him. The same way they'd be staring at, say, the subjects of Entertainment Tonight a little later on, after supper. Sven backed up slowly, slowly, till he bumped into the mirror he'd been gazing at. But no one laughed. He crab-stepped along the wall, ten feet to the left, edging back into his dressing booth, easing the door shut behind him, peeking out through the diminishing crack till it snapped shut. When he re-emerged, no one cared that he was once again dork-garbed and -groomed. They still stared. Sven schlepped the whole mess o' textiles, stuffed under his arm, to the counter, behind which Robert Venturi's face, muralized, loomed like Mao's in a different place and time. Pulling an already overtaxed MasterCard from a rubber-banded bundle of its siblings, offering it without eye contact to the transfixed lanky track star behind the register, he said, “Just...uh...these. Please.” * * * It's true. Our Sven, 27, was secretly hot. Yummy. Erogenic. Scrum-diddly-umptious. But hid it under bland, baggy clothes, Catholic schoolboy hair, and a spine-wrecking slouch for reasons three: 1. Nobody takes a beautiful academic seriously. After all, what kind of person spends thousands of hours in mildewed libraries, with freakin’ books and computers and microfilm readers, when they could be in Manhattan nightclubs, on teak-floored yachts, on Italian beaches screwing everything in sight? The kind who's always thinking about nightclubs, yachts, Italian beaches, and screwing everything in sight when they should be doing their work! That's what kind! 2. Beautiful people in all walks of life spend half their time convincing everyone they know, over and over again, that they're not backstabbing pig assholes. Unless, of course, they are. But then so are lots of other kinds of people. But anyway.... Even beautiful people distrust beautiful people. Believe secretly that life would be easier without the odd could-be model hanging around. You always wonder when one of them's gonna go off like a booby trap, steal your friends, your job, your significant other. Couldn’t they just go away? 3. Looks were inimical, oppugnant, antithetical to everything Sven had committed himself to studying. Looks were shallow; art was deep. Looks were flat and glassy; philosophy was textured and complex. Looks were corporatized, sanitized, numbing, dehumanizing, mainstream; literature was...everything that was not. Right? This was where Sven's thinking had gotten a little muddled in recent months. Hemingway, Ellison, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Walker, Doctorow, Nabokov, Morrison, DeLillo.... Their books sure seemed delivered from some world beyond the world. Someplace smarter than life, better than life. Big fuck-yous to grim, blithe materialism. Conduits of Esoteric Truths only glimpsable – peripherally, fleetingly – from our own drear workaday world. So why was his devotion to these people getting him increasingly mired in the drear workaday world? And why, when he stood in front of the full-length mirror in his and Kate's bathroom wearing black Hugo Boss slacks, suede Via Spiga shoes, and a shimmery, half-unbuttoned Helmut Lang shirt (three of a dozen or so cognate items, plus a big stack of GQs, hidden (from Kate) in an old cardboard box in the bedroom closet), plus a couple quick strokes of eyeliner, did he see some version of himself too airy, too slippery, too blessedly two-dimensional to be ensnared in a cumbersomely three-dimensional, 401-K universe? Sven had other secrets. When Kate went to see her parents in Virginia last October, he went to Manhattan. Twice. Not to meet women. Not to buy drugs. Not to satisfy other freakier you'll-have-to-go-to-New-York-for-that cravings. No. Merely to sit in bars. Very, very hip bars. Whilst wearing absurdly expensive clothing. The first place was Field. A long, thin, brightly lit room on the 17th floor of an Upper-East-Side Stanford White hotel. Walnut floors. Power-buffed aluminum walls. No art whatsoever beyond the severe, glistening furniture. But a stunning view of the park, blazing orange and yellow. Halloween colors. Instead of peanuts, they had dried seaweed leaves on the bar. Where sat Sven. Trying, with his rabbit-like stillness, to hide from the thirty or so professional sorts milling around him. He nursed a $15 saketini that came, to his dismay, with a skewered baby octopus in it. Was it a joke? On him? Sadly he was yet too green to know. When there was no more alcohol left around the poor critter, he swallowed it whole – then ordered, grimacing, another, just to prove to the predictably snobbish bartender it was exactly what he’d wanted. Sven wore Louis Vuitton, top to bottom. The bartender wore Dolce & Gabbana. They said thrillingly little to each other. And Sven, for the ninety or so minutes he was there, spoke not a word to anyone else. Nor was he terribly garrulous at the next place he visited, two days later. This one called The Downs, atop a Tribeca gallery. Sven was a smidge bolder this time, coming out at night (a Thursday) to a legitimately crowded, purportedly celebrity-haunted place. (He wasn't positive, but he’d have bet a credit card or two the dude in the corner, by the window, in Armani, was Christian Bale.) Sven wore Tom Ford (jacket), Jil Sander (slacks), Calvin Klein (white V-neck T-shirt), and a Wal-Mart digital watch. He sat at the end of a long glass bar, alone, next to a giant monochrome silkscreen of Edie Sedgwick's face, the Girlies' album Busted (not that Sven knew it) playing frantically on the stereo. Then, suddenly, terrifyingly, he was being approached. En route: a mind-bendingly sexy East Asian woman with short-cropped hair, wearing, Sven was pretty sure, Anna Molinari. Making deliberate I'm-coming-over-there eye contact. Sven on the hairy edge, swear to God, of bolting. It took her forever to get to him. So many people she had to push and slide past under the blue and yellow lights. It was like watching sex. Sven would’ve had time to get to the stairs, too. Stupid. Should he pretend not to know English? Would that keep them from escorting his ass out of here? Because he knew what she, an obvious member of what he could only think to call the Inner Circle, was going to say to him. Who let you in here? When she was in front of him he gave up the strategy of statuesque stillness, putting his sweaty palms up: a surrender. But the girl, the woman, leaned in languorously and hollered – to make herself audible – something Sven wouldn’t soon forget. “I hate to be so Jersey? But my friends and I are wondering: Did we see you in a spread in last month’s Details?” She stepped back. Looking, he realized, starstruck. He, inexplicably, on the giving end of a real (albeit phony) New York moment. But before he could answer (and who knows what bullshit would’ve flown out of his mouth?), Ms. Jawdroppingly Hot was tugged off elbow-wise by some dude in a damn fine Dior suit whose biggest compliment to Sven was refusing even to glance at him. He was so high after that he couldn't feel his ass on the seat of the Greyhound the whole ride home. Cinderella in her pumpkin. When the bus emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel, hooking south, Sven, forehead on cool glass, hearing delicate snoring in the dark all around him, stared out across the Hudson at the city blazing away. Empire State and World Trade Towers (this was eleven months to the day before the billion tons of smoking rubble) jutting up impossibly, dominating, bathed in light. Dreams made flesh of what New York could re-make you into. He’d found a world beside the world. A world above the world. A way to lift himself out of himself. Now, eight months later, he was stuffing 630 bucks’ worth of Fundaments
into a box in his closet. So his girlfriend wouldn't know how much
he'd spent. Or how good that sum looked on him.
Now things started getting interesting.3 “Wild, huh, Mr. Gaughan being in that band?” This from Rex Snively III. An impudent little shit from Sven's English 1 class three years ago. Then a spectacularly impudent shit in Fitz's English 2 class the semester after that. Here was a lesson: charge $32,000 a year at a school and see what shows up. Geniuses? Right. Like the rich are so smart. No, you get impudent little shits who inform you, after getting lousy grades for willful misreadings of towering American classics, that you'll soon be hearing from their family's alumnus attorney. As Rex Snively III had once informed Fitz Gaughan. Empty threat, it turned out. But still. Now a senior, essentially graduated, taking his last course (PSYCH 480: Freud in the Age of Multinational Capital) in summer session I, Rex had found his former TA, Mr. Overlook, on the creaking second floor of the Castle, the U's original library, a regal building now demoted, in its terminal low-techness, its terminal decrepitude, to repository of all things Humanities at Revoquer, that revered yet chronically unfamous institution. Sven was desked in the shadowy stacks, marking up his copy of Baudrillard’s Simulations and Death, listening to fat start-of-July rosebuds bumping breezily against the tall gothic windows. Then Snively appeared out of nowhere, saying freaky things about Fitz, whose name Sven hadn't heard in...five days? Not since Philly's Freddie and Cinco had been through. “All right, Rex,” knowing he'd regret it. “I'll bite. What band?” “The Bodies.” Sven, instantly chilled, leaned back in his chair. Stared at the kid. Who had greasy hair (he'd grown it long since freshman year) tucked behind his ears. Was wiry and underfed. Pasty. Smelled like a goat. Wearing nasty old Birkenstock sandals and a threadbare “Big Dogs” T-shirt. “Snively,” he said evenly, “are you making some sort of infinitely fucked-up joke?” “Joke? No!” For a long moment the unctuous youngster stared back, either scared or doing a good job pretending. “Wow, you really don't know,” he stated rather than asked. “Well? Enlighten me.” “Well they – it – I – don't know! I mean, the Bodies were like, this big-deal New York band maybe five years ago, and my – my – my – ” Sven spun a hand in the air. “ – girlfriend – at NYU – I told her that my old English TA, this guy Barry Gaughan, they sent around an e-mail, he's totally missing. And she – ” “Your girlfriend.” “ – yeah, was like, Barry Gaughan, that was a guy in the Bodies.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. And if anyone would know, it's her, 'cause she was fuckin' totally – ” “Watch the Anglo-Saxon, sonny.” “ – sorry – was totally into them – ” “The Bodies.” “ – yeah, when she was in high school. Her best friend was cousins or something with one of the guys in the band, and they used to get backstage to hang with them all the time.” The kid had winded himself. Sven tugged an earlobe thoughtfully, not letting Snively's eyes go. “Probably more than one Barry Gaughan in the world,” he speculated. “I guess so. But no, not in this case, ’cause I was there – ” “Where?” “ – at NYU? Last weekend?” “Are you asking me or telling me?” But this just confused the poor kid. “Go on.” “And when I was there, my girlfriend showed me a picture of her and her cousin and the band? And one of the guys was totally him,” out and out pleading. “It was Mr. Gaughan.” A rare cool breeze moved through the Castle stacks, rustling, somewhere nearby, the pages of an open book. “He was like,” Snively concluded, “the second guitarist.” Cut, in Sven's mind, to: the guitar bouquet by the side of the road. Oracular in summer sunlight. Sven slouched in his seat. Glared up, from under his eyebrows, at his former student, who’d ridden him every goddamn day in class, insisting everything he said was wrong. No, Hemingway wasn’t American: he was French! No, the middle class hadn’t been shrinking since '74: it had quadrupled! No, the moon wasn’t made of dust and rocks: it was – “Rex, how would I know any of this?” He'd asked for it. And now he got it. “Well, I mean, you were friends with Mr. Gaughan, right?” Sven stood up. Tucked Baudrillard under his arm. “Congratulations, Snively,” he said, “on your imminent departure.” And reached to shake the kid's clammy hand. “Oh...thanks....” “Say, you wouldn't happen to know if there's a good florist in town.” “A florist?” It was like he'd been asked the location of the nearest gravel quarry. Which in freshman English he probably would've known. “Why would I?” * * * Sven left Snively. Traversed the entire shadowy second floor. Ducked down the cast-iron spiral staircase in the deserted rotunda, where sunlight poured down in primary colors through the ancient Tiffany glass dome overhead. Here was Reference Literature: Music. And here, in a niche by the photocopy room (he scanned the shelf for something of the sort) was the mammoth Running Dog Encyclopedia of Rock. 2000 Edition. All right, Snively. Sven hefted the thing onto a shelf-top. Flipped pages. Fully expecting (such was always his luck with research) to find nothing. Or a huge ink stain. Or the page torn out. But it wasn't so. The Bodies were right there. And while there was no photo of them (thus Sven’s jaw unclenched a little), they had, whoever they were, a page and a half, almost, devoted to their peculiar story. Bodies, The
But Sven didn’t pop back up immediately. Just rested his forehead on the edge of the shelf, thinking: Holy shit – another disappearance. Thinking: The name Barry, right there in black and white. And also: Early twenties, three or four years ago. Perfect. Anti Body Fitz. Too rich. Too, too rich. But he was also thinking: As many surnames as people claiming to know them. And: Fitz didn't go to Columbia, he went to Fordham. But also: Rumored to have gone to Columbia. And lastly: Fordham is in New York, too. Sven moved out to the reading room. Snuck up on a carved cherrywood column. Peered around it. No Snively. No anybody, in fact. He advanced to the bank of computers at the far end of the room, near a disused stone fireplace tall enough, almost, to stand in. He logged onto a machine, making it whir to life, then brought up the Web. Searched on “bodies band.” And six fan pages leapt up immediately from the ether. “Carrie's BODIES ultimate fan page!” “My Bodys Web Page.” “10 Reasons Why the Bodies are the Best NYC Band Ever.” “The Bodies & the Satin Railway: No Comparison.” “Bodies Photos, Set Lists, Posters, Ticket Stubs.” “AWAITING DREW; A Bodies Tribute.” What the hell, thought Sven. Let’s go for all the marbles. And he slid the cursor to “Bodies Photos,” etc. Then, finding himself nervy, he took a deep breath to steady his hand before double-clicking the mouse. What popped up was a lot of dark, blurry photos. Taken at impossibly crowded gigs in please-don't-call-the-fire-marshal nightclubs. The backs of audience members' heads, lightning white in camera flashes, loomed large in shot after shot. And the five musicians, small and distant, on a stage bare except for some vintage Fender amps and a banner reading the bodies were in perpetual streaky motion, in mid-leap, mid-chord crunch, mid-run, mid-kiss (female audience members and each other alike), mid-collapse. They wore ripped jeans, dirty high-top sneakers, T-shirts with other bands' names or the names of local pizzerias on them, Armani jackets with the sleeves shoved up, black motorcycle jackets, skinny ties.... The stage lights were forever flashing off their guitars, their jacket buttons, the chrome of the drum kit.... And above the neck? Hair. Nothing but hair. Lots and lots of shaggy, unkempt, chin-length, flying, face-obscuring mops of hair on every one of them. Including the one always visible just over Bizzi Body Drew's right shoulder. The one always doubled over, pounding at his dangling hollow-body electric, knees and ankles bent precariously inward like those of a marionette gone limp. The one with Fitz's hair color. “Come on!” Sven barked into the echoey room. “This is a fan site? Have we never heard of a publicity shot?” “Ssshh!” hissed some unseen library aide. But there were no publicity shots on this site. Some scanned-in ticket stubs (yippee). A scanned-in flier from a show at the TLA in Philly showing a skinny alley cat gnawing a corncob. The scanned-in album cover for Dig, featuring some grainy, turn-of-the-(last-)century porno shot of two women standing before curtains, backs to the camera, lovely faces in profile, tresses of hair hanging coyly, ample asses presented for inspection.... Kind of hot, truth be told, for an antique. But no Body faces. And none, Sven discovered, on any of the other sites, either. Just a lot of fan-babble that reminded him too much, for the few sentences he surveyed, of his freshmen’s lurching prose. And lots more distressingly inept, hairy, hyper-kinetic concert pix. Walking down the library's front steps into the hot afternoon, feeling
the vaulted stone arch overhead framing him for a cinematic long-shot,
Sven decided to drop in on Ralph Mountain again. Then, approaching
Boxer, that orielled oubliette, he saw a freshly painted message on the
building’s treacherously sloped slate mansard:
WE HAIL THE MILLENNIAL MILCHER
Milcher? Like a…cow? The Society for the Prevention of History had struck again. * * * “What does that mean, that thing on the roof?” Ralph, perusing the vending machine offerings, went a little pale at the very mention of it. “Those little peckers,” he grumbled, “better knock that shit off. It's getting scary, you ask me. They're clearly whipping themselves into some demented frenzy. Building up to something. Plus which putting crazy-ass shit in the student paper is one thing, but defiling a man's home is another.” He squatted, peered dejectedly through the machine’s glass front. “Goddamn, man, no more Doritos?” Sven walked with Ralph up the three flights to his office/apartment, where the purple lava lamp was going full tilt. Inside, Sven pulled the door shut. Waited a beat. Then: “You ever hear of the Bodies?” “The band?” cracking open a 7-Up. “Uh-huh.” “You like ’em?” Ralph waved his hand in front of his face like someone had farted. “Rip-off artists,” he said. “Ants in someone else's molehill, or however the saying goes.” Sven watched him take a tired bendy straw from his desk drawer and slip it into the can. “What if I told you Fitz played guitar for them?” This made Ralph bust a gut, screamingly, for ten seconds. Then he stopped. “I don't know,” he said tearily. “I guess I'd believe you.” “You would?” “That guy, anything is possible. Guitarist, lived in New York, pretty boy, secretive.... Why not?” “Well – gimme their record, for Christ's sake!” yowled Sven. “Show me some old...Tiger Beats or something!” “Tiger Beat?” sneered Ralph. “Haw! What do you think I am? And I sure as shit don't have their record.” “Well then how do you know it's bad?” “You hear things. From real punks.” Sven pondered this. Ralph, meanwhile, switched on the old mini Sony TV on the corner of his desk, Sven observing the cable that ran to it from a hole drilled in the window frame. “Anyway,” Ralph said, “It's Sy you want to talk to.” “Sy? Why do I want to talk to Sy?” “He loved the Bodies. Used to see them all the time when he was at Columbia.” “You don't say....” Columbia, thought Sven, remembering what he’d read. But “Agh,” he said, making a face. “Why'd it have to be him?” “What's the problem?” Ralph thumping the side of the TV, trying to get a picture. “You're intimidated by his sexual orientation?” “No, that's not what I mean; it's – ” He stopped. “What do you mean, his sexual orientation?” Ralph looked at Sven over his shoulder, having settled into his inflatable chair. “Man, nobody tells you anything.” Now that hurt. Sven, on his way out the door, paused. “You know why the Bodies split up?” “Because they sucked?” “No. Singer mysteriously vanished.” Ralph looked back at him again. Shook his head sadly. “Dude,” he said, “you are gonna make yourself totally, totally apeshit.” * * * Sy Hearst was an intimidating guy. Not that his gayness had anything to do with it. Or maybe it did – or would, now that Sven knew about it. He'd have to think about it. He’d heard the theory that gays and lesbians are basically just more evolved humans. And since he pretty much subscribed to it, he’d always felt lame for not being queerer than he was. Now Sy, goddamn it, would have this on him, too. On top, of course, of being freakishly brilliant. And crushingly dapper. Sy's B.A. (double major, philosophy and political science) was from Georgetown. His M.A. (classics) was from Columbia. He'd done something corporate in California for four or five years but didn’t like to talk about it. And now, in his oh-so early thirties, he was doing a doctorate in American Studies at...? Revoquer U. Nobody had ever asked what he was doing there, besides working on a purportedly genius book (too good to be a "dissertation") about what he called the pleasures of paranoia in the '60s counterculture. Where this put him politically Sven had no idea. Maybe there was some dark secret in his past, though. Maybe there was something in him that wanted to crush his family's pride. Nobody knew if he was of those Hearsts, and nobody in this dejected little graduate program, a boil on an otherwise almost-Ivy League institution’s derrière, was going to be the first to ask. Anyway.... Everyone knew, at least, where to find Sy on Monday-through-Thursday evenings (weekends he split town): at the bar of the swank Hotel Galilee on Main Street, recently refurbished, restored, resexied by an international chain that had saved the lovely old building from the wrecking ball a mere two weeks before it was scheduled to be pulverized. It looked now exactly like it must have back in the roaring '20s, when vast clouds of cash were wafting from Galilee Steel’s smokestacks – except now, rap on the gorgeous marble columns in the lobby and you'd hear they were hollow. Climb a ladder and jangle the dazzling chandelier's crystals, you'd find they were plastic. Flick the bartender's beautifully curled mustache, you'd find – that's right – it was waxed. This was the New Galilee, rushing to turn itself into a movie-set version of the old one, betting everything that tourists were ready to get nostalgic for the industrial age, so real, so gritty, so honest compared to the shit the nation trafficked in these days. You should have heard what they had planned for the old steel mills. Anyway…. Sy. Sy had this total Kevin Spacey thing going on. So as Sven approached him at the faux art-deco bar, observing his perfectly tailored Ralph Lauren suit, plus the two attractive undergrads flanking him, plus his hypnotizing suavity generally, he had the feeling he was approaching not his colleague from Boxer but that character from L.A. Confidential. Then he was spotted. “Sven,” Sy cooed, making an emperorly hand gesture, sending the two pretty undergrads, male and female (Sven recognized both from the halls of Boxer) slouching away, cutting their eyes jealously at him. “Sit down, sit down.” Sven sat. They shook hands earnestly. While Sy, theatrically agog, inspected him, his unoccupied hand expressing flabbergastedness. “Sven,” drawling, “you look...fan-tastic. When did this happen? Who knew you were such a good-looking man?” It's true. Sven looked great. He had on his slinky black suede shirt (Versace), untucked, all open at the cuffs and neck, plus his new black leather jeans and boots. His hair was an artfully moussed tussle, and a touch of Kate's mascara worked to dramatic, if subliminal, effect. He needed, he'd decided between Ralph's office and here, to have something working for him when he came to see Sy. So he went home and raided his secret box. “Thanks. And you. Sy, you can really wear a suit.” “Sven, someone is absolutely going to put you on a GQ cover. No joshing.” Sy ordered another Grey Goose gimlet, Sven a Bombay martini, up, twist. The bald (but for his mustache) bartender smiled hypercordially to let them know their kind was perfectly welcome. A nice change, even. Maybe it was the cocktails. There was academic small talk: How's the diss? What conferences you been going to? How's Beth (a prof on both their committees) treating you? Then Sven, halfway through his truly beautiful martini, brain warming, moved for deeper waters. “Freaky, huh, this business with Fitz.” “Mmm,” Sy caught in mid-sip. “Can you imagine what his family's going through.” “I heard, actually,” feeling that increasingly familiar trembliness coming on, “a weird rumor today, and when I ran it by Ralph – ” “Mountain.” “ – yeah – he told me I should tell it to you.” “Really?” Sy leaned back in his bar seat, crossed his legs, laced his manicured fingers over his flat stomach. “Well rumors are always great fun.” Hmm, thought Sven. Filing that one away. Then he told Sy about Rex Snively positively ID’ing Fitz in his NYU girlfriend's Bodies photo. “And Ralph told me you,” perorating, “were a big fan.” “Of the Bodies,” Sy, reaching into his inside jacket pocket for – dig it – a silver cigarette case. Too, too much. “Excellent band,” he nodded. “I don't often go in for the rock ’n’ roll, but they were... something.” “So you saw them?” “A bunch of times,” still nodding. “The Mercury Lounge, The Hammerstein.... A couple friends at Columbia got me into them.” “Well what do you think, Sy?” Mr. Elegant placed a cigarette between his lips, shrugged with his eyebrows. “Fitz did bear an uncanny resemblance to that...what's his name.” “Barry, Sy. Everyone seems to know his name was Barry.” “So?” “So Barry was Fitz's name.” Sy's silver lighter paused in front of his cigarette. “Is that a fact.” “And you know why the band split up? Just when they were about to go to L.A. and make it huge?” Sven watched both the memory and its implications creep over Sy's baby-ass-smooth countenance. “That's right…” Sy said. Then, all lit, he snapped the lighter shut and grew a big, big smile, exhaling smoke through the corner of it. “My, Sven. You've got a real mystery on your hands.” “My hands? Aren't you interested?” Sy picked up his drink, sipped, shook his head. “Mysteries," he said, "do not interest me.” “Don't interest you? Well why not?” starting to feel those shakes a little more. “I...don't know. Call it a philosophical objection.” “To mysteries?” Sven gulped the last of his Tanqueray. “I'm gonna need,” fishing a lime rind from his mouth, “another one of these,” he informed the bartender. “Insofar as the point of a mystery,” Sy continued, “for most people is to solve it. They make us too...syllogistic.” He studied the burning tip of his cigarette. “Too reductive, I think.” “Oh, lord," Sven moaned. "Gonna get all theory on me.” “The detective,” unflustered, “always does violence of some sort to the world, Sven, by trying to bring order to it. Rationality invariably kills, maims, or otherwise fucks up the thing it tries to understand.” “I'm talking,” Sven, pained, pinching the bridge of his nose, “about finding out what happened to Fitz.” “Are you?” Sy tapped his cigarette, without even looking, on the edge of the ashtray beside him. “Okay. All right. So have you told the police what you know, then? Or those plucky young detectives who were through Boxer last week?” Sven, not caring for this line of inquiry, let his grimace answer. “I suspect,” Sy whispered hoarsely, startling Sven, “what you really like is not knowing what happened to Fitz.” “Thank you,” to the bartender, who'd delivered another architectural martini, which Sven picked up and started in on immediately. Still registering what he'd heard. Then, guffawing: “I'm not that deep, Sy.” “Oh, I think you are,” Sy, grinning, leaning back to inspect Sven’s getup. “Look at you. You've got this whole...alternate identity working.” He nodded, pleased. “It’s – pretty deep.” “I'll get in touch with the police as soon as I can tell them something that won't make them want to put me in a rubber room.” Sy just shook his head, amused. “But isn't that the most gorgeous part of this whole thing?” “What’s that?” “That none of the Occam's razor bullshit works here.” He took a long last drag of his cigarette, stubbed it out. “Occam's razor?” he repeated. “No,” Sven, irritated, “I don't know.” “It’s the idea that the simplest explanation for any problem – any mystery – is probably the correct one. It's a natural guiding principle for those in the detectively arts.” He paused ominously. “Please,” Sven urged, “I can’t wait to hear where this is going.” “Well what's the simple explanation for Fitz's disappearance, Sven? That he was pulled over, Christ knows how, in the Galilee countryside and kidnapped remarkably gently by people so doped up they forgot to make a ransom call? Hmm?” He went for the cigarette case again, this time offering one to Sven. Who took one but declined a light, simply letting it hang flaccidly from the corner of his mouth. “That he stopped on the side of the road to take a leak, or…pet a deer, or…pick some wildflowers – our Fitz – and was murdered in some again remarkably ungruesome manner by a corn farmer who one,” counting on his fingers, “wants revenge against Fitz's dad; two, knows his enemy's kid when he sees him; and three, is a real ace at hiding a body? So to speak?” He was winded by the end of this one but clearly had a great time getting there. “Or – and this would be my personal favorite, bar none – is the simple explanation that Fitz, unbeknownst to us all, was a rock guitarist on the brink of national fame, and was hunted down by some deranged fan who's systematically wiping out his old bandmates, one by one?” Sy shook his head. Snotty-like. “That must be it. Case closed.” “Sy....” “Sven,” gripping a sueded shoulder, kindly, “look how invested you are in this. You look great, but you look like shit. I don't know you well, it's true. But I've certainly never seen you like this.” “Sy, I don't get it. Who'm I...hurting if I want to figure out where Fitz went?” “Try yourself, for starters.” Sy butt-tapped his unlit cigarette on the bar. “What a fabulous thing a mystery is, not when you've solved it but when you're in the thick of it. It de-familiarizes the world. It's an escape hatch from everyday life, so sensible, so mundane. We're all slouching deathward. We all know right where we're headed. Into the box. What a relief, what a blessed change, to be in the midst of something that's not adding up, that's not going blithely where it's supposed to go.” “All right. All right,” Sven, distinctly sad now. “Who else?” “Who else?” “Am I hurting?” Sy finally lit his second cigarette. Something in it popped, made a tiny spark. “Fitz, of course.” “Fitz?” “Well think of the trick he's pulled off,” Sy proselytized. “Doing something you just can't effing explain. That doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense. Do you have any idea how hard that is to do? Hmm? And you want to take that away from him?” Sy idly inspected a black Prada shoe. “Mysteries are as fragile as they are rare, Sven. People think they're thorny and difficult, but they're not. A little rationality and they blow away. If you're not careful you'll do exactly that to this weird present Fitz has given us.” A pause. Somewhere in the not-too-distant kitchen a glass smashed. “Why did you like the Bodies so much?” Sven asked. “Those guys were so talented,” Sy, without a moment's pause, “so beautiful, so totally vapid. You looked at them on stage and knew you were in the presence of the Chosen. And after one of their shows, you'd go home and look in the mirror and want to drink Drano because you weren't one of them.” “Excuse me,” Sven said. He went upstairs to the men's room on the mezzanine level, stepped into a stall, closed the door and cried quietly for several minutes. When he came back out, he looked in the mirror and was surprised to find (a) the unlit cigarette Sy had given him still hanging from the corner of his mouth and (b) runny mascara streaks under his eyes. He cleaned himself up. Then, walking back down the long, curving stone staircase – one of the few features of the original hotel still preserved – he passed a freakishly gorgeous woman who, working anachronistically, gave him a double-take, then a once-over. When he got back to the bar, he told Sy, whose two devotees were still brooding over pints at a table ten yards away, about the guitar bouquet he'd seen by the side of the road. “That one's easy,” Sy said. “I put it there.” “No!” Sven, sloshing his martini. “You didn't!” “Yes. I did.” “You lie like a dog!” he cried. “Why would you do that?” “I thought an ironic gesture was called for. Something that would let Fitz know, in case he saw it, that someone was...listening? Is that the word I want?” “But you didn't – even know about the Bodies connection!” “It wasn't about the Bodies,” Sy laughed. “It was about his dissertation.” “His dissertation?” “Well yeah. The whole pop music-lit thing?” Sy looked at Sven, confused. “He…never told you about it?” Sadness washed over Sven again. “No,” he confessed. “I just knew it was a...mass-culture type of deal. That's all he ever told me. I....” An awkward silence hung there a moment. Then Sy shrugged. “Sven, no, I mean.... I just thought you guys were friends.” “Everyone thinks that,” Sven whined. “Why?” Sy shrugged again. “Really, I barely knew him at all.” “All right.” “So what was his...diss about, exactly?” “Honestly, he didn't tell me much either, pal. I don't think he liked to talk shop. I just know he'd drafted chapters on DeLillo's Great Jones Street and Rushdie's – ” snapping his fingers, remembering “ – Ground Beneath Her Feet.” Sven sighed, elbows on bar, face in hands. “You see?” Sy, sympathetically. “Fragile. Very fragile.” And at last he took a big swig of gimlet. “Of course,” he continued momentarily, “that Rex Snively is a pretty weird kid.” Sven lifted his face. “You – know Rex Snively?” “Mmm. Met him about a year ago. He was working on a poli-sci essay and wanted to hash out some ideas.” “About?” “Smart, really. The persistence of JFK conspiracy theories as metaphor for what I think he called the lunacy of contemporary American culture generally.” “Kinda easy,” snorted Sven, “don't you think?” “Well he's an undergrad. And it was the quality of expression as much as the idea.” Sven downed the rest of his second martini in a gulp. When he found the lime rind in his mouth this time, he chewed it instead of spitting it out. “Well, Sy,” he said. “Gonna pound the pavement.” “Sure?” “I've kept you long enough from your – ” nodding toward the young’ns “ – admirers.” “I think you've got a couple admirers of your own,” Sy grinned, nodding in a different direction. Sven turned. At a table in a corner under the eerie blue glow of an art-nouveau light fixture was the Freakishly Gorgeous Woman from the staircase. Waifish siren type. Across the small table from her was her counterpart, Freakishly Gorgeous Man. Underfed Soho type. Tight threadbare T-shirt, moleskin pants, fat-soled Skechers. He was talking quietly on a thumb-size silver cell phone and staring evenly, just like his friend, at Sven. “What's going on in this town?” Sy, awestruck. “Are you people descending from space?” “Feh,” our martini swiller opined. “Feh?” Sy shaded his eyes with his hand, looking at the yonder table. “I don't know, Sven. She is one creepy knockout.” “Her? What about him?” Sy raised an eyebrow. “Well I didn't know you swung on that vine.” “All vines intertwine,” peering at his colleague through his disheveled hair, “eventually, don't they?” “Ooh là là,” Sy, lifting his gimlet glass a tad. Then: “Call the police, Sven,” he said, examining his drink. “Call The Morning Bugle.” Sven, occupied with fishing some rumpled bills from his leather pants pocket, caught a bit of dialogue between Sy’s disciples. “There’s nothing sexy about sex,” the female was saying. “Wait,” said the male. “Is that a comment about sex? Or about metaphysics?” Something occurred to Sven. All that shit about the evil of rationality. About how difficult it is to do something that makes no sense. And now these two prattle-spewing sophomores waiting to battle for his evacuated bar seat. Sven turned back to his colleague. “What,” he asked, “is your middle name?” Sy seemed surprised to find him still there. “Paul. Why?” Of course. Sy Paul Hearst. “I under – erstand,” the second martini really walloping Sven's empty stomach, “you hail the millennial milcher.” “Excuse me?” “Oh, come on, buddy,” winking conspiratorially, “I saw your handiwork – or maybe your – henchmen's – ” thumb crook'd thataway, “on the roof of Boxer today.” Sy was fishing out yet another cigarette. A regular house afire, this guy. Sticking it in his face: “I see we're making another bold excursion, Sven, into the kingdom of rumor.” “Don't worry, boss. I didn't hear – nothin’. Just kind of adds up, is all. Not that I give one. It’s probably exactly what a place like Revoquer needs, mm?” And he started walking. But didn't get five floaty steps before Sy called his name, making him stop and turn dreamily back again. “There's something I should tell you before you go,” Sy said, his head
enveloped in smoke. “I was full of shit before. I didn't leave
any guitar-shaped bouquet next to that field.”
Maybe Ralph Mountain was right to feel menaced by the Society for the Prevention of History, thought Sven in the shower the next morning, Tuesday, July 3rd, working himself into a lather. There had always been something vaguely menacing in the S.P.H.'s nonsense – something no less unsettling for the vagueness. In fact it made it worse. The threats often seemed vaguely aimed at the vaguely named. The Society's first-ever stunt, for instance, September the previous year: a full-page announcement in The Goatherder, the student paper, trumpeting, in 72-point font, a message clever readers immediately saw was a palindrome: PUT SPAM ON NO MAPS, TUP. Was this a warning to Professor Thomas Tuperweir of the political science department, who'd written a book celebrating the global hegemony of American mass culture, and whom absolutely nobody called “Tup,” that he'd better watch his ass? The announcement's ominous black border led many to suspect so. But maybe it was just good old American Tomfoolery. Or how about the scorched Smokey the Bear doll found pinned one November morning to the bulletin board in the lobby of the natural sciences building, “S.P.H.” scrawled on its ranger hat, “ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT HISTORY” on its belly? Unmotivated malarkey? Or some sinister see-you-soon to Professor Beth Gnosis, whose advocacy in major U.S. newspapers of an arbor day revival to atone for recent careless wildfires was well known to granolas everywhere? This second incident, in any event, juxtaposed with the first, seemed to undermine theories of an S.P.H. political agenda. Any simple, consistent, or conventional one, at least.4 Then there were the even less personally directed threats. The 136 rubber chickens hung by their pimply necks one April night in the proud oaks, maples, and dogwoods around the stately Alumni Memorial Building, where worked 136 administrators for a 136-year-old institution, “S.P.H.” inked onto every one of the birds’ 272 pupils. Who were they supposed to scare? Revoquer's President Glibman, it was rumored, spent that whole day in his leather-clad office, weeping, cursing, gnashing his teeth. What happened a month later, during finals week, probably didn’t comfort him: a dinnertime hijacking of the school's closed-circuit TV station, some tech-savvy S.P.H.ers having managed, without so much as breaking into the school's umpteen-million-dollar studio, to air a 30-second video (kids abuzz in dining halls: “Oh...my...Gawd!”) of three students in black ski masks sitting on the U's founder's grave, carving up and cramming down their gullets what looked for all the world like a human leg. Some kid in an Abraham Lincoln get-up (thus approximating, surprisingly accurately, the founder himself) standing in the twilight above them, smiling broadly, making an expansive sign of the cross, “S.P.H.” on his tophat. Mr. Revoquer's brother, you see, had been a member of the Donner party. Stagecoachers who, snowbound, et some of their own. Was it to this the video alluded? No one knew. But the local press had gotten curious. The Bugle ran stories on both the fowl and grave events. Someone at NPR mentioned Revoquer in a story on the legacy of the Situationists. And word was someone at CNN doing a feature on current campus politics wanted to come ask some questions. Reaction to all this at Revoquer was predictably mixed. To some (namely administration), S.P.H. was a campus embarrassment to be squelched discreetly but utterly at first opportunity. To others (namely Kent-State era faculty and the few students curious enough to have actually pondered the group's motives), it was something interesting, at long last, against all odds, happening on a campus ruled by Young Republicans. To others still (namely campus security) it was a band of petty criminals poised to become, in their pursuit of the almighty adrenaline rush, not so petty criminals. And to still others still (namely Sven in the shower the day before Independence Day), it was, quite possibly, the latest incarnation of oblique and secretive forces that had gnawed the edges of human affairs since (to appropriate a line his freshmen loved) time immemorial. Black borders. Hanged chickens. Scorched bears. Cannibalized limbs. Any cretin could see, saw Sven, rinsing shampoo from his head, that someone, sooner or later, was going to get it. Had it been Fitz? “No goddamn way. Why Fitz?” he demanded of himself, his voice close and loud in the steamy shower. Why Fitz? Well what if the S.P.H. had done something drastic upon learning there was an almost-celebrity on its stomping grounds? What if the very notion of celebrity (were celebrities “historical”?) filled them with rage? What if there was something about near celebrity, cult celebrity, disguised celebrity that especially infuriated them – or at least activated them, since who knew if it was rage or just cold, calculated statute that set them in motion? And...what if it wasn't just weird coincidence, Rex Snively III being connected to Sy Paul Hearst, who just had to be, Sven decided, S.P.H.’s mastermind? And...what if it meant something that the S.P.H.'s first communiqué since Fitz's disappearance was so...well...changed? Millennial milcher? Where was the threat? The danger? The menace? Was Sven missing something? Maybe the group, having lashed out at someone at last, had cooled its threat jets. Was free now, until something (or someone) else stoked its ire, to pursue purer strains of gobbledygook. Of course the change in tone scarcely proved they had done anything evil. They may very well have figured out sans violence that threats, however veiled, however obscure, are always in some sense teleological, decisive – the stuff of History. And having heard Sy's spiel yesterday, this, truth be told, seemed wholly plausible. Unless, of course, Sy himself had been speaking from the wake of some violent act. “Petty campus pranksters don't freaking kill people,” Sven told himself, wrapping himself in a towel, staring hard into the bathroom mirror. Then in sauntered Kate, unbuckling. “What's that, sweetie?” “Er...nothing.” She peed; he brushed. She stood; he spat. There was a good-bye kiss, plus some groping around the front of his towel. “You,” she commanded, gravelly voiced, “naked, in bed, when I get home from work tonight.” He smiled congenially. But knew she'd be asleep on her feet before she even got her key in the front door. Hearing her old Toyota start up out front, raising the gun-shaped hairdryer to the side of his head, Sven hatched a disquieting idea indeed: What if the S.P.H. was not only behind Fitz's disappearance but Fitz himself was in on the joke? It was an idea whose darker facets he was still pondering when, 45 minutes later, in the English Department office in Boxer, scarcely registering where he was, he found a present from Sy in his mailbox: the Bodies' Dig CD. There was a dashed-off note on a yellow sticky stuck to it: “Get your groove on. –Sy.” On the front cover, the photo he knew of the old-timey naked chicks. On the back, song titles and track numbers, thusly: Well they were good titles, thought Sven. Smart. Snotty. But curiously self-possessed. He slid the album cover, which folded but once, from the plastic case, not hoping for much, and not getting it. On the inside left, a black and white nighttime photo of Fifth Avenue, looking south down the urban canyon from the middle of the street, a single passing taxi's headlights streaking by. On the right, photos, perversely, of the backs of the band's unkempt heads, the little pricks, their nicknames stamped beneath each. BIZZI. ENNI. ANTI. EVRI. NOSI. Sven looked particularly closely at Anti. Had Fitz had a cowlick? But hello: What was this? When he plucked the CD from its case (it bore nothing but the band's name, printed in a font stolen from the ass of a ’65 Ford Fairlane), a folded-up newspaper article fell out from behind. “Village Voice, May '96” was ball-point penned in the top margin; These Bodies Are Kicking was the printed headline. Sven skimmed. Packing every club in lower Manhattan, yadda yadda. First full-length album due in September, blah blah. Then this: While most of the Bodies are allegedly the brood of CFOs, attorneys, or neurosurgeons,(Attorneys! thought Sven) at least one actually has some art in his lineage. “Enni,” according to one source, was raised in Delaware's Behemoth Beach Kollektiv, which has been supplying high-end Manhattan galleries like Antoinette's and Persiflage for over twenty-five years now.Sven's hand dropped; his eyes did the thousand-yard stare. Behemoth Beach. Holy shit. He’d gone there every summer as a kid. And every summer when he was there he’d gone with his mom one afternoon to the Kollektiv's compound, out on some 19th-century dilettante's estate, deep in the cool coastal pines a half mile from the teeming shore. He was 15 the last time he’d been there. And had stood transfixed in the Kollektiv Gallery, in a converted stable, getting all choked up before a murky, dreamy collage work depicting a sad, resigned, ominously detached doll’s head, male, thinly mustached, lying on the ocean floor, sea creatures nosing blithely about it. It was the sort of image that hits a sensitive boy pretty hard. What, after all, was one to do about all those golden coltish girls prancing on the sand when one was lying, in eerie green silence, at the bottom of the Atlantic? And now, maybe miraculously – you decide – the image's title came floating back to him: Etienne, Lost at Sea. Etienne. Enni. It was ten a.m. “I can be in Behemoth by one,” he said aloud. And, spinning to leave the office, he found Sherry and Liz, the secretaries, sitting at their desks behind him. “Ack!” he yelped. They laughed and laughed. Had been watching him the whole time. He’d been so preoccupied he hadn’t even seen them when he walked in. “Behemoth Beach, Sven?” queried Liz, placing her chin dreamily in her palm. “Can’t you take us with you?” “You look – different,” Sherry said. Appraising him frankly. He wore ancient, frayed J-Crew jeans; a white V-neck T-shirt of Kate's, way too tight; flip-flops. And a horrified countenance. “You should keep growing your hair,” said Liz, one fingertip tracing her collarbone. He was getting shaggy. Didn't really care anymore. “Y'know, the department needs money for a new photocopier, Sven,” said Sherry. “Maybe we should just auction...you...off.” And she slicked the corner of her lips with her tongue. * * * The drive to the shore was a regression – to Sven's childhood; to the primordial ocean; to an old, weird America. The shimmering office towers of outer Philly and inner Wilmington receded in the haze as Sven hooked, in the howling Mazda, south towards Delaware, then east towards the coast. The land flattened out as cornfields, then tall reedy plants – veldt life – appeared by the roadsides. Fast food places gave way to mom-&-pop crab houses; supermarkets gave way to plywood fruit and vegetable stands. It was old-style capitalism – till, at least, he neared the beach towns, on whose feeder highways the outlet malls sprawled, spawn of Delaware's sales-taxlessness. But lo, downtown Behemoth re-mounted the war for anachronism. It was like the 50’s in the 70’s and 80’s, and, except for the rap music thudding from the teenyboppers' Jeeps, it was still like the 50’s now. Sven parked on Ocean Boulevard, fed a twist-the-lever parking meter (someone call Antiques Roadshow), and started hoofing it beachward past all the same kitschy souvenir shops, T-shirt stores, and soft-serve ice cream stands he'd ached for all winter long as an American boy. Two blocks before the boardwalk and a glimpse of ocean, though, he hooked a left, aiming himself at the water tower looming like a huge blue mushroom at the end of Second Avenue, “BEHEMOTH” emblazoned slyly upon it. He walked past the century-old rental houses with crankable glass-slat windows, past seashell-pink stucco hotels, past the water tower itself, and kept right on going, flip-flops thwokking, angling away from the beach, past the man-made lake full of ducks and swans. Soon he entered a swanker neighborhood – and here were the pines, shading small, immaculate Cape-Cod houses nestled in blankets of brown needles, abstract copper and bronze sculptures scattered in their yards. At the periphery of this village was the Pyle Estate, where kamped the Kollektiv, open to the Publik. Sven walked through the immaculate gardens, past the sundials and topiary chimeras, past the old Victorian manse all covered in cedar shakes, past three Black, Starr, & Frost-encrusted old ladies whose faces seemed ready to melt off in the heat. Then he entered the gallery, which hadn’t changed a bit: all unfinished wood floors and exposed rafters, no more than twenty no-shit excellent paintings on the walls. It was cool and quiet. A sexily curvy black girl, maybe twenty, in expensive-looking glasses sat at the rustic front desk reading a copy of Andy Warhol's novel A. “Kat Fave” said the nameplate in front of her. “Hello,” said Sven, feeling sweaty and ugly. “I'm looking for Etienne's...uh...parent.” “Etienne?” the young woman, looking up. “I don't know any Etienne.” “No? Good-looking guy. Twenties. Good drummer....” Sven beat some air drums. Then rubbed his chin, perplexed. “Wow. He told me to drop in on his...parent. Who's an artist,” he assured her. And gulped. “Here?” he tacked on. “Well…two of the Kollektiv are French,” the presumed Kat said cautiously, staring at him suspiciously. “Maddy doesn't have kids. I guess you could try Adrienne, out back in studio three.” Her gaze returned to her book. “But I've never heard of any Etienne.” He went back outside, circling around the building, passing one little cottage, then a second, then moving up some flagstones toward a third, smelling juniper. Thinking: too damn easy. Any determined Bodies fan could have done this. No doubt it was Enni's mom he'd meet now; she'd tell him if there had been a nice blonde boy named Fitz in her son's rock band. He got an adrenaline surge, sensing victory, nearly slipping on a pine cone. When he arrived at the cottage’s open front door, though, it was a gray-haired man, not a woman (ah – Adrien), he saw sitting inside, back to the entrance, jabbing a brush at a collage-cum-painting in a style not wholly unlike the doll's-head picture Sven had seen twelve years before. This one depicting Wonderland's celebrated Cheshire cat, with its freaky human grin, fading to ghostly transparency in a walled English garden crowded with flowers and vines. At least it looked English to Sven. Who, mesmerized, unaware of how far he'd walked, lit on a creaky board at the room’s threshold. Making the artist, terrified, spin around. “What do you want!” the man cried, French accented, staring at his intruder, who was an instant mess. “I – I – I – !” “Tell me!” “– am looking for Etienne's – parent!” “What do you mean!” The artist struggled to his bare feet, brandishing his paintbrush like a knife. “My friend Etienne,” Sven, backing up, “a person! Not the doll in the painting which was beautiful and made me cry!” “I don't know,” spitting, “of what you are speaking!” “Aren't you A-A-Adrien? Etienne's – father?” “I am Adrien Nepersonne! I have no children!” And the man, probably sixty, thin and ropey, wearing a week’s worth of stubble and a T-shirt with i am a merciful god magic-markered across its chest, staggered across the room, not to stab Sven with his brush but to slam the weathered oak door in his face, making it hit the jamb an inch from his nose. Sven stood there a moment in bright sunshine, horrified. Then turned shame-faced, legs shaking, to retrace his steps. That was a short interview. Slinking back past the second cottage a moment later, though, trying to regain his dignity, he saw that this building’s door was now open a crack. And from the shadows inside there issued a loud “Psst! Pssssssst!” Now what? Sven thought, terror morphing into disgust. But he walked up to the place nonetheless, finding peeking out from behind the door a severe-looking middle-aged woman with bobbed grey hair and James-Joyce spectacles. “Don't you believe him!” she hissed. Another French accent. Terrific. “He has a son, Etienne, just as I hear you say. Only his wife – Patricia – she leaves him 25 years ago for a rich New York executive man who buys her paintings. Wall Street big-shot man! And takes l'enfant with her! And Adrien, he is so destroyed, he can never so much as remember them after that day.” Sven thought fast. “Nepersonne?” he said. “Is that my friend Etienne's last name?” “No no,” shaking her head emphatically, swinging her bobbed hair, “that is not Adrien's real name. Anyway, Patricia, that poule, she changes her name, I feel certain, when she marries Mr. Wall Street Big Shot.” “And Etienne?” leaning in to better see the woman, she receding farther into shadow. “He never comes here?” “No no, never comes. He is never even told of his real fa-there.” Sven blinked. “Well how,” suspicious, “do you know?” A pause. Which lengthened. Finally he saw the edge of the woman’s sharp shoulder shrug and her one visible eye glide smoothly up and down his body. “You like to smoke mareejuana?” “Not today,” Sven grunted, turning, walking, hearing the door click shut behind him. But he didn't get ten steps before he saw that the door of the first cottage he'd passed was now wide open, a Jackson Pollock sort standing in it. Fiftyish. Jeans and T-shirt. Dressed much like Sven, in fact, but balding and paint spattered, with big yellow stains under his armpits. “How about you?” called Sven, still walking, done with cordiality. “Another insane Frenchman?” “The French,” this one replied in a Brooklyn accent, “are filthy degenerates who have sex with their faces.” “What else?” “Both of my colleagues,” came the answer, “are compulsive liars. Don't believe a fuckin' word either one of them tells you.” And this one shut his door, too. “Charming bunch here,” Sven said to Kat Fave back around front of the gallery. She'd moved outside, was eating yogurt on a bench in the shade by the front door. “You mean all white people aren't like that?” Sven shrugged. “Is that the whole gang?” “All that's left. What, you want more?” “All that's left?” shoulders sagging. “What happened to the rest?” “Ran out of sexual permutations, I guess.” “Well how many were in the Kollektiv? When did they leave?” Scraping her spoon around the bottom of the cup: “I guess there were ten or twelve of them here in the early 90’s. Maybe more before that.” Sven grimaced, pressed his fists into his eyeballs. “Any other French ones?” The girl sucked her spoon. “Beath me.” He turned to go. Then caught sight of a sculpture on a pedestal in the shade under an oak tree just a few yards away. An intriguingly useless weathervane with four hammer-pounded copper arrows pointing north, east, west, and south. Perfectly balanced and oiled, it turned silently in the breeze, just a few degrees, as Sven watched. “Who made that?” he asked, staring hypnotized. The girl looked up. Sighed. “Me,” she said. “I made it.” Not knowing what he was doing till it was done, and a little surprised at himself for doing it, he went back to her, leaned down, kissed her cheek right at the corner of her mouth. This eliciting no response whatsoever. * * * Fine, Sven thought bitterly an hour later, sitting alone in the tropical bar of the Endless Summer hotel, drinking a Yeungling, occupying a table by a window overlooking the boardwalk, where dads in Hawaiian shirts, moms in Penn State caps, and teenage daughters in not much of anything strode past, sugar-stoned, sun-dazed. I don't need to know what happened to Fitz. Sy is right: I shouldn't want to know. He got up to leave, causing three waitresses lounging near the bar to whisper amongst themselves and a giant motion-detectorized tiki doll to laugh diabolically and shoot smoke out its ears. By the time he'd walked down the hot, oily boards, though, past the French-fry and cotton-candy and salt-water-taffy places, arriving finally at the clanging, half-empty amusement park, he was full of longing again. It was the setting. The beach had always done this to him when he was a weirdo kid, so why not now? Who was it anyway had decided to put a neon-lit, libidinally charged carnival next to the green, roiling sea – the latter the best symbol Sven knew of for death? Who was it had decided to put the worst flotsam and jetsam of Western culture (e.g. artificially birdshat caps with “Damn Seagulls!” written on them) next to one of the most sublime sights nature had ever cooked up? Someone wily, thought Sven. Some turn-of-the-(last-)century Sy. The juxtaposition was maddening. He'd known since he was six (even if he couldn’t have said so then) it expressed some possibility forever unnameable, gestured toward some penumbral code forever uncrackable. So even as a little kid in overalls riding a miniature wooden dinghy around in circles in a concrete tank, in this very amusement park, orbiting an ancient mermaid statue, a gussied-up department-store mannequin, that smiled kindly down on him, he'd smelled the ocean, seen its sinister nothingness in the misty distance, and choked back tears. It was the exact same feeling he got now when he thought about Fitz. Sven stood with his fingers hooked in a chain-link fence, looking in at that same boat ride, with that same captive mermaid, her stringy green plastic hair covering her breasts, her smile less kind, more forced and ominous, than he remembered. Then: “I'm in love,” someone said. Sven turned to find a chubby forty-year-old guy, balding, hook-nosed, in Bermuda shorts, next to him, also staring into the park. “With the mermaid?” Sven asked, a little skeeved. “No, not with the mermaid,” the guy scowled. “With a woman.” “Oh. Congratulations.” “Congratulations?” The man rested his forehead on the rusty fence, winced, distinctly green. “It's a sickness. I wish someone would shoot me with a gun till I was dead.” “So stay away from her,” Sven, pragmatic for once. “Forget her.” “I try. But she keeps tracking me down. Says she’s in love with me.” The guy sagged a little at the knees, held his gut, belched gently in an about-to-yak kind of way. “Have you ever heard anything so awful?” A muffled but potentially glass-breaking scream came across the sky. On a steel track above Sven and the Bermuda-shorted man’s heads, a car from the haunted-house ride burst through a set of doors, in it a shrieking eight-year-old, eyes bulging in terror. As she sucked air to begin a new high C, the car veered right, slamming through a coffin-shaped portal, disappearing back into blackness, taking her with it. “It's like that,” the man said. * * * Three and half hours later, Sven was back in his and Kate's sweltering
apartment, standing in his CK underwear in front of the stereo in the living
room, trying to decide whether or not to put on the Bodies album Sy had
leant him. He picked it up from the futon, re-examined the front
cover with the two Naked Ms. 1901 contenders on it. Started getting
a woody. Then noticed the angular lines of the women’s jaws, the
five o’clock shadows on their cheeks, the strangely straight lines of their
hips. And realized he’d been ersatzed. They were naked men
– you figure it out – in drag.
Wednesday, July 11th, Sven stopped by Katrina Waverly's office in Boxer, having spotted her open office door. It was nice to jaw with folks in the summer when they weren't frantic to grade a dozen more freshman papers (tortured semiotic analyses of vodka ads from Spin; acid denunciations of whatever feminist they'd been made to read) before two o’clock.5 “Whew,” he told Katrina, winded from three flights of stairs, collapsing onto a ratty foam rubber love seat, a classic grad-student hand-me-down. Above his head an autographed photo of Newt Gingrich, eyes inked black, “666” on his forehead. “What's shaking?” “Same old same old,” holding up her copy of Wittig's The Straight Mind. “Eggcellent,” impersonating Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. “How's Tina? I haven't seen her in donkey years.” “Holed up doin' the diss. How's, uh....” Katrina screwed up her face, drummed her buzz cut with her fingertips. “Kate.” “Yeah, yeah. Shit, I can't remember the last time I saw her out.” “Workin' like a beast is why. No end to it.” “Enough to make you appreciate summers off, huh?” “No shit. Though Kate actually makes some money, of course....” Katrina, blue-jeaned and tank-topped, took a seat on her desk, pushed open the squeaky window above it, removed a foil pouch from a drawer, started rolling a cigarette. “So, uh…I hope it's not a weird question or anything?” she asked. Intriguing prelude. “But what have you been finding out about Fitz?” Sven leaned back in the squishy couch, not a lick of wood or steel in it, and smirked happily. “My my. They do talk, don't they?” “They sure do,” smirking back. “They sure do. But they don't always know much. Which is why I'm having to ask.” Fact was there’d been no developments since the Behemoth Beach connection – which had gone, of course, nowhere. And Sven, sensing he was on the teetering brink of some scary monomania, had desisted in looking for new ones, avoiding driving anywhere near the Hotel Galilee, even, lest Sy, coming or going, spot him, wave him down, lean in through his car window, tell him things he did not need to hear. And he was generally doing fine with this week-old policy. Except, of course, for the dreams. In them he’d be tearing up the linoleum in his and Kate’s kitchen, trying to locate some leaky pipe that was turning the whole floor to mush. Underneath it he’d find a rotten old electric guitar, “BFG” carved crudely, as with a steak knife, onto its face. Or he'd be at the Behemoth Kollektiv, walking away from the artists’ studios, looking back over his shoulder to see Fitz standing on the sidewalk, soaking wet, in blinding sunlight, wearing an “I'm a Body” T-shirt, making an exasperated where-the-fuck-are-you-going? face. Or he'd be in the bathroom in the morning (this one especially disconcerting because he really, really thought he'd gotten up and gone in there) looking into the mirror and seeing not his own face, and not Fitz's, exactly, but something frighteningly like an amalgam of the two. “Actually,” Sven said, “I haven't found out anything for sure. Just some weird could-bes.” And he told her – what the hell? – about the Bodies and their peculiar history, Rex Snively III recognizing Fitz in his girlfriend's photo, the article Sy had left inside the CD case he'd lent him, and his own useless trip to Behemoth Beach. But left out his suspicions of S.P.H. involvement, which seemed, frankly, with a week's perspective, like rank paranoia. Katrina was by now smoking her home-rolled. She laughed, blowing smoke, vaguely window-ward, out her nose. “Fitz the rock star,” she snorted. “Almost rock star,” Sven interjected soberly. “Maybe.” “So...how are you feeling about what you've found out?” carefully tapping ashes into an old Veggie-Cola can. How was he feeling? Shit. Sven sagged a ways, even more than the couch demanded. Felt the whole dark, sad preoccupation closing in on him again, fitting its toothy jaws gently around his head like a semi-trained lion. “Tell you the truth, I think it's gotten to me a little, K,” chin in hands, elbows on knees. “I guess I always hoped there was more to the world than meets the eye? But now that I'm finding out just how weird things are – or might be...?” The thought petered out. He sighed. “Well,” Katrina said, picking a flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue, “I guess some of us know better than others how freaky things can get.” This making some shrill let-it-go alarm sound in Sven's head. But he couldn't. “What do you…mean?” “Fitz and I....” She shook her head, grinned. “Shit, I'm telling other people's secrets now. But we, uh.... We have something in common.” She, too, Sven noticed, used the present tense. Her eyes slid to the door. “Shut that,” she said. And Sven, feeling the lion's jaws tighten a little, leaned over and did it. “Want a beer?” Katrina asked, opening the mini-fridge on the corner of her desk. Sven looked at the clock on the computer. 10:08 a.m. “Why not.” Sensing he might need it. When their Corona Lights were popped, Katrina laid this on him: “One afternoon when I was 22, I changed from a man into a woman.” It hung in the air for a long moment, like some freaky, unidentifiable odor. Then: Screw it, thought Sven. Just surrender to madness. Leap in. Why not? “I see,” he said. She wasn't being figurative, either. Katrina – then Kevin, it seems – had been lunching with her (his) Nicaraguan girlfriend, Siempre, one lovely fall afternoon in Northwest D.C., where he (Kevin), fluent then as now in Spanish, had been working for a rather ineffectual left-wing Central American lobbyist. Suddenly, biting into a fried oyster po’ boy at Stars 'n' Bars, a Capitol Hill pub with a prison theme, he realized something had changed. He was heavier of chest, narrower of waist, and there was something not missing but...different in his pants. He (now she) had turned instantly and painlessly into a woman. “Was it the oysters?” Sven asked, unsipped beer on knee. Katrina didn't know. But Siempre, across the table, picking at her egg salad, wasn't shocked. She didn't even notice – just started calling Kevin Katrina. But slowly, over the course of ten minutes or so, she became agitated, finally standing up at the table, sweat glistening on her upper lip, hissing indiscreetly, “Look, I can’t – do this anymore! No soy una – una lésbiana!” And out she went, kissing the silver cross she wore around her neck. “What did you do?” asked Sven, his face expressionless. Went home, Katrina said, and called her mom at work. “Mom?” she’d asked, having been greeted. “Katrina?” her mother replied. Then Katrina hung up. “And?” “Well....” Katrina snickered behind her hand. “I shouldn't tell you this. I went in the bathroom and – tried to pee standing up.” Sven nodded, itched the shallow cleft in his chin. “I mean, as a guy you always wonder, right, why do they have to sit down? All that toilet paper, all that rigamarole. What’s the point?” “Right.” Sven kneaded his forehead. “Right. So?” Katrina waved her hand, made a face. “What a mess. I mean, you can do it standing up? But it's a lot of effort, and it also kind of winds up depending on what you call standing.” “Right.” “And next, of course....” She chuckled embarrassedly again. “You really want to hear this?” "I'm not sure.” “I masturbated.” “Right.” “’Cause I had to know: Is orgasm really different for women?” “And?” “Shit yeah it is!” delightedly. “But....” She looked perplexed. “It'd be really hard to explain, like, how it's different?” “I see.” Sven looked at his hands, which shook barely perceptibly. He felt a little swoony. “And so you were, uh...okay with all this?” “Don't get me wrong,” Katrina assured him, “despite the goofy stuff I went home and did, I was freaked. Buggin’ out completely. But you know....” She cupped her breasts absently, weighed them in her hands. “I'd always sort of felt like a lesbian, even when I was a man. I always somehow knew, I guess, that I was a lesbian trapped in a man's body.” “Like Dag,” Sven the reader, “in that Coupland novel.” “That's right!” smiling broadly. “So when it happened, after a day or two I was just like...yeah, this makes sense. It was almost a wish come true, to tell the truth.” She looked down dreamily at her breasts, letting them go. They dropped nary a bit. Sven could've gotten up at this point and excused himself before she remembered this conversation was about Fitz. But ten minutes was all it had taken. He was back in deep again – could tell by the ulcerous pain in the pit of his stomach. And so, massaging his temples, beer in crotch, eyes shut tight, he had to know: “Did, uh.... Did a similar thing happen to Fitz?” He hoped Katrina would just laugh, say of course not: he just had a Latina walk out on him in a restaurant once, too. But she didn't. She nodded contemplatively, staring Sven right in the eye. “The exact...same...thing.” It happened to Fitz, she explained, his freshman year at Fordham. He woke up one morning next to his girlfriend Renee in her dorm room and, voila, had a penis. (Sven, in the cinema of his mind, saw his colleague asleep on his back in a sunlit room, a pink-haired girl next to him, on her side, face obscured. Suddenly Fitz’s eyes sprang open, looked around. Then he raised the sheet, raised his head to look underneath....) “What did his girlfriend do?” “She didn’t even notice. Same as Siempre. But Renee dug girls and boys, so everything was copasetic.” “So…Fitz was originally a lesbian?” Sven pressed on, something almost shrieky in his voice now. “Is still a lesbian, to hear him explain it,” Katrina said. “He told me at Tina's and my homunculus party last Christmas – ” Another homunculus party revelation. “Of course!” “ – that he didn't mind the change at all, because even though he was a lesbian, he was always a little uneasy about being one in a woman's body. He always knew he was supposed to be a lesbian in a man's body.” That was it. Sven had had enough. “Katrina!” he cried, getting up, though it was a struggle: he'd sunk so deep into the foam-rubber couch his ass was almost on the floor. He grabbed the still unsipped beer in his crotch like a hard-on. “That doesn't even – mean anything! All straight men are just – just – lesbians in men's bodies!” She gaped at him, clearly offended. “That's not true at all, Sven,” she said. “It's a different thing entirely.” Her eyes narrowed a bit. “You're not put off by any of this, are you?” “No, that's not what I mean! It's just....” He pressed his fist to his forehead. “Look. Strai |
