Disconnected: A Novel

DISCONNECTED

A Novel

Life between suicide attempts

This is an excerpt from the latest manuscript

exclusively for www.frederickgundling.com

Spot a typo? Please let me know.

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Chapter One

            It happens every 17 minutes in America. Put another way, an American makes it happen every 17 minutes. And now it was my turn.

            While the others slept, I slipped out of my bedroom. After pulling down the attic stairs, I crept up the steps without waking anyone. Grasping at shadows, my hand finally found the filthy string dangling from above. I yanked it, lighting the single overhead light bulb, and knelt in the shadows to retract the stairway to prevent my housemates from stumbling into it in the dark.

            The attic was dusty with disuse, most likely because we never dusted or used it. To one side, our landlord had stashed a pile of old furniture. Although I was shirtless and barefoot, worrying about getting a splinter from the rough planks now seemed kind of silly.

After selecting an overhead joist, I slid my belt from my jeans and looped it over the beam. The ceiling wasn’t as high as I would have liked, but I figured it would do the job. Amid the jumble of furniture I located an aged hassock. I stood on its rat-chewed leather and fastened the black belt around my neck.

            Images from my childhood flashed by, but I dismissed them. I’d suffered enough, both then and now, and living in the past accomplished nothing. It wasn’t much of a life, really, but I supposed that was the point. Would I even be killing anything? I felt barely alive as it was.

            I kicked the hassock away.

            The belt clamped down on my throat, taking up my weight, 170 windpipe-crushing pounds. I couldn’t breathe, but didn’t care.

            I blinked as my limp body spun counterclockwise, then clockwise, and back again, slower each time. It seemed like several minutes passed as I studied the coterie of cobwebs.

Should’ve brought a watch.

            The stark shadows became gray. The colors of the wood and furniture faded, usurped by twinkling black pinpricks. My peripheral vision failed.

In my jeans, an erection the size of the Chrysler building.

            My hands went up, prying at the leather. My feet kicked for purchase, for anything.

            I choked on the stale air in my lungs. And then the darkness at the edge of my vision paused. A black line appeared in front of me, stretching from floor to ceiling. In seconds it widened, took form.

            A figure draped in black, its face concealed except for—

            Eyes like fire, staring.

            My toes, pointed and extended as far down as possible, grazed the floorboards. The pressure around my throat eased, then returned with a vengeance as my toes slipped. I swung my feet back, struggling to hold myself up. The pressure decreased, but didn’t disappear.

            I could breathe, just barely. As my hands had weakened on the belt, I must have sunk lower in the noose, pulled down by the weight of my own body. Saved by the same thing killing me.

            The pain in my toes was excruciating. I clawed at the leather belt. Soon, my toes would cramp and I would die as surely as I would have died if the roof had been two inches higher.

            Then the belt came free and I slammed to the floor, gasping. My vision returned to normal in pulsing waves synchronized with my heartbeat.

I dismissed the black figure as a hallucination. There was nothing in the attic, now.

            I rubbed my throat and laughed wildly. The air piercing my lungs felt colder than it should have.

            Life was too much for me, but I was too stupid to kill myself. That I would try again was almost guaranteed. But not tonight. I was tired and ready for sleep—darkness of another kind, but darkness just the same. In a strange way I felt free. Life and death were separate entities, but neither no longer meant a thing. I had squandered my 17 minutes. Presumably, someone else had succeeded where I had failed. But how, and where were they now?

Nihilism—it’s not just for children anymore.

*     *     *

            If I have to start somewhere, and I do, I have to go back to the future, one day after my failed suicide attempt: March 26^th, 1993, the Friday night John Waters killed my girlfriend. You might say he did me a favor, but in a larger sense he just fucked everything up. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

            “She hasn’t given me any blowjobs either,” I said, “and to be honest I blame God.”

            Jessie Logan laughed. “You blame everything on God, Simon.”

            We were carrying two 12-packs of Rolling Rock back to the row house we shared. Jessie was a twenty-two-year-old college dropout. Because of his lanky frame and shoulder-length blond hair, he resembled Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. He had no job but got by on an inheritance from his grandmother and a cache of unrealized rock band aspirations.

            For money and abuse, I was a cubicle whore in the newsroom of D.C.’s renowned newspaper, The Washington Obfuscator. My friends said I looked like Death, assuming Death looked like a despondent, twenty-three-year-old with blue eyes and long blue-black hair that came out of a bottle. But I’d never been a goth. Too alienated. Too lazy.

            “Fuck God,” I added. “He’s done nothing for me. If anything, He’s done everything to spite me—not that I believe He exists. Don’t you ever get the feeling the world’s against you?”

            Jessie grinned. “No. Remember, I’m the one sleeping with the hot lesbian who doesn’t mind giving head.”

            “Yeah, about that—” A taxi careened around the corner, missing us by six inches. “Asshole!” I yelled after it.

            Jessie sighed. “And they complain about bike couriers. I swear, that’s like the fiftieth time that’s happened to me. What were you saying?”

            I adjusted the beer in my arms. “I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t remember ever seeing you go to church.”

            Jessie snorted. “God and I have an arrangement. He stays out of my way and I stay out of His. So far, so good.”

            I chuckled. I’d met Jessie the previous summer at Planned Parenthood on 16^th Street. A pro-life group named Let’s Terrify Teenage Girls and Ensure An Overabundance of Unwanted Children held a protest every Saturday, and we’d both turned out for a counter protest waving placards that read “I WISH I’D BEEN ABORTED” and “SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM THIS MISERABLE SHITHOLE OF A PLANET.” After we grew tired of hurling verbal taunts, we switched to rotten eggs and cinder blocks. Our arrest made the local news.

That night in jail, Jessie informed me he and two friends were renting a house and needed a fourth person. I confided how sick I was of living in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington Cemetery and accepted.

            “Why do you put up with Kim?” Jessie asked. “What’s it been? Four months?”

            I nodded. “Yeah, although I’m not sure if seeing each other once a week is really dating.”

Kim Risperdal was a junior at Georgetown and an intern for Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who, she complained, spent most of his free time justifying his Magic Bullet theory, concocted during his Warren Commission heyday. I’d met Kim after my coworker Dave gave me tickets to a Cure concert at Capital Center (later USAir Arena, USAirways Arena, and finally Yahoo! Coca-Pepsi Trojan Aeroflot Arena) in Landover, Maryland. Dave’s girlfriend, Dana, was a concert promoter and got me into the after party at D.C.’s 9:30 Club, which Dana managed. I was chatting with Robert Smith when Kim spotted me.

Kim fancied herself a goth chick, and truth be told she was almost inadvertently beautiful, with short black hair and green eyes like open sewers ringed with algae. She had the palest Michael Jackson phase-nine skin, and great breasts. Not that I’d ever touched them.

“What’s up with her?” Jessie asked. “She really freaked us out the time she picked up that warm beer and ice crystals formed on the glass.”

“Oh, Kim’s great fun,” I said. “She’s as stable as a woman watching a one-armed sideshow freak juggle her baby over a wood chipper. And last week, when we were watching David Letterman interview somebody—I wanna say Jeffrey Dahmer—she said rape is a natural product of evolution and an understandable male behavior related to natural selection, and that women should blame Darwin, if anyone, because it’s their fault for being women.”

Jessie halted and stared at me as though I’d suggested he fellate an elephant at the National Zoo—again.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” I added. “She’s also bulimic and on lithium.”

“What?” he asked. “I don’t know who’s crazier, you or her.”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that. She stopped taking her lithium months ago.”

Yes, Kim was frigid in the bedroom and psychotic everywhere else. But I’d developed a theory to explain her behavior. Unfortunately, it involved childhood sex abuse and a pair of trained mastiffs.

            Jessie frowned. “She’s not saving herself for marriage or a cult leader in Texas, is she?”

“No,” I sighed. “She’s had sex before. She likes it. She lets me kiss her, but that’s it.”

            “Just break up with her. You don’t even like her.”

            “I know. My lack of self-esteem—as you keep reminding me—got me into this mess. But it’s over. I’m breaking up with her tonight.”

            Jessie laughed. “Sure you are. Next you’re going to tell me you’re taking antidepressants and seeing a psychiatrist.”

            “I can’t afford a shrink. Besides, antidepressants kill your sex drive.”

            Jessie grinned. “Not really a problem in your case, is it?”

            I shot him a black look. “Okay, I’m depressed! But so what? Sooner or later it’ll pass. I mean, it has to, right?”

            “Yeah, when you kill yourself.”

            “Very funny. By the way, how’s your nonexistent rock band coming along?”

            Jessie glared at me but said nothing. For half a block we walked in silence. Kim was maddening and impenetrable. The only real difference between her and my housemates was that she let me kiss her. The irony being that I probably had a better chance of fucking Jessie.

            But it wasn’t all Kim’s fault. My brain had been broken for years, leaving me trapped in a castle of melancholy encircled by vampires clutching Flexi-straws. Not that I knew why I was depressed. A chemical imbalance? My childhood? God? Fate? I had no idea. But on the best of days I felt abandoned and/or crushed by the world, with no family, a job but no career, and no friends aside from my housemates and my coworker, Dave.

            “I am serious about breaking up with her,” I murmured. “I was just waiting until she got back with the beer.”

            “Which she hasn’t,” Jessie replied, raising his bag of Rolling Rock.

            “I don’t know what happened to her. She left an hour ago.”

            “Well, we know she never made it to the liquor store,” Jessie said. “And we ran out of beer. I don’t know what’s worse.”

            I laughed. “Running out of beer, obviously. But maybe she fell into one of those—whaddyacallit?—alternate dimension space-time portals?”

            “Of course! It all makes sense now.”

            I liked Jessie in spite of himself. I would have killed myself, I told him, but being depressed was like getting to watch a train wreck—from the inside of the train. He laughed at that. And though Kim may have disappeared, we had our beer.

            Soundgarden greeted us on the sidewalk, blasting from inside our row house. Thurston Moore, our third housemate, was on the couch playing Ann Landers’ Severed Gremlin Head Circus Orgy. He was twenty-one, thin, with short red hair and green eyes. He looked every bit the nerdy quantum physics major he was at George Washington University.

            Julie Gordon, Jessie’s twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, was flipping through Spin. Tall with long, straight blonde hair and blue eyes, she looked like a model but actually held a non-secretarial position at the World Bank. Julie: the inscrutable lesbian who loved Jessie. Best not to think about it.

            Julie, direct as always, said our fourth housemate, Nick Haas, was upstairs fucking his girlfriend Anne. And still no sign of Kim.

            “Simon’s going to break up with her,” Jessie said as we distributed beers.

            Julie laughed. “Right!”

            “Turn that game off, Thurston,” Jessie said. “Unless you want a rematch of Clive Barker’s Hungry Hungry Hippos.”

            Thurston didn’t glance up. “Five more minutes.”

            “You know, I bet Kim couldn’t handle all your Generation X angst,” Jessie told me.

            Thurston snorted. “He is pretty dysfunctional for the son of the governor of Delaware.”

            “You told me your father was Neil Young,” Jessie said.

            I shrugged. “Wasn’t Neil Young the governor of Delaware? In the early ’80s?”

            “No,” all three of them replied.

            “So what’s the deal?” Jessie asked.

            “I guess the aliens lied to me.”

            “Everyone has a dysfunctional family, Simon,” Thurston said. “Just admit you grew up in the suburbs and hated your parents like everybody else.”

            Julie and Jessie nodded.

            “Okay,” I sighed. “I studied architecture and history at Oxford, then worked as an archeologist in the Middle East, where I learned Arabic. When war broke out, I aided the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule.”

            Everyone stared. Then Jessie laughed in a sudden abrasive torrent. “That’s not your story! That’s Lawrence of Arabia’s story!”

            “He stole my life first.”

            “Forget it,” Jessie said.

            Julie studied my eyes. “It’s okay, Simon. You don’t have to talk about it.”

            I looked at her, surprised. Jessie frowned, but said nothing.

*     *     *

            Upstairs, Anne Franklin licked a slug trail of semen from her bottom lip as Nick turned away with his jeans undone. Although he had long, dark brown hair and looked like a Calvin Klein model, she wondered more and more what she’d ever seen in his hazel eyes.

Of course, he cheated on her.

“I think I’m bored with you,” Nick said, pulling on a Body Count t-shirt. “No offense.”

Anne brushed her dark, curly hair out of her eyes. It swept against her nipples as she shifted on the bed. Like him, she was twenty-one.

“You’re breaking up with me?”

Nick shrugged on his way out. “Maybe.”

Anne sat up in his bed, naked and wet in the wake of his coming. She got dressed, but only made it to the end of the hall before Julie intercepted her. When the girls finally came downstairs, it was obvious to everyone, except perhaps Nick, that Anne had been crying.

Chapter Two

Standing behind his desk before the three bullet-resistant windows, John Waters gazed at the distant headlights and taillights crawling along Constitution Avenue. But, in truth, the view from the Oval Office was lost on him.

“I have to end it,” he murmured, speaking, as he sometimes did, to a photo of his dead friend, Glenn Milstead. Although Waters’ wife had died more than a decade ago, his relationship with the twenty-one-year-old Senate intern had to remain secret. Not because he was afraid of the press—far from it. It was simply that love, like its counterpart, war, had a natural tendency to spawn unpleasant complications.

Shadows lay over the 36-by-29-foot chamber, from the presidential seal on the 18-and-a-half-foot ceiling to the matching seal on the blue rug. The sole light came from a small lamp near a jar of red M&M’s on the massive Resolute desk, constructed from the ship of the same name.

President Waters jabbed one of the countless buttons on the immense black phone.

His secretary, Barbara, replied from the adjacent office. “Sir?”

“I found a brown M&M in my jar this afternoon. A brown one.”

Despite the closed door between them, Barbara resisted the urge to sigh heavily. “I’m sorry, sir. I’ll speak with James on Monday.”

James Estes was the president’s National Security Advisor. Since Waters rarely met with his National Security Council—despite the press releases to the contrary—Estes’ only real job was to tear open scores of the small blue and white boxes of M&M’s that bore the presidential seal and a facsimile of Waters’ signature. But sorting red M&M’s for the president’s jar was not without risk. Michael Yossarian, the previous M&M sorter and chief of staff, had, according to unofficial White House lore, been “disappeared.”

Waters asked Barbara to have Bannor step inside. It was nearly time to leave for the Washington Hilton—another fundraiser.

Barbara rubbed her left temple. She wanted to be with her daughter, who should have been in seventh grade flirting with boys but was instead dying of cancer in a small green room at Johns Hopkins. But there was nothing to be done, short of assassinating her boss.

In the Oval Office, the president tried to shake off his melancholy. To start with, he reminded himself he was the richest man in the world, thanks to the addition of a single sentence in the last few federal budgets, which were thousands of pages long and weighed about ten pounds apiece. It wasn’t his fault if no one ever actually read the goddam thing. Yet that was mere sleight of hand. None of the intelligence agencies did anything without his personal approval. Most of the bickering, semi-literate fools in Congress had never even bothered to read the Constitution. Already, Congress had passed two of his secret Constitutional amendments the previous year.

No one ever bothered to read the fine print.

From a desk drawer Waters took out a vial of pills, shook two into the palm of his hand, and reached for a glass of water. The pills, aside from his red M&M’s, were his primary source of sustenance. Although officially in the first year of his second term, President Waters was now president for life thanks to the new and improved Constitution.

So what if no one else knew—yet?

The power, the money—none of it would have been possible without the pills that preserved him. The world thought him an old man, but the world had no idea.

“Sir?”

The president turned. It was Bannor, the Special Agent in Charge of the Presidential Protective Division of the Secret Service. As always, he had entered without a sound.

Waters frowned. “Have the girl meet me at the hotel. After my speech, I want an hour with her—alone. Understood?”

Bannor nodded. “Yes, Mr. President.”

The agent’s carefully modulated demeanor ranged from impassive to solemn. Tall and one-half Cherokee, Bannor was President Waters’ most trusted Secret Service agent. Since Waters rarely spoke to his aides and assistants, he looked increasingly to Bannor, not only for his personal safety, but to oversee certain sensitive requests. Though Bannor knew only a minute fraction of the truth, he knew more about President Waters than anyone alive.

The American people, naturally, knew nothing at all.

President Waters crossed the cork, walnut and oak floor and left the Oval Office through one of three French doors. He crossed the colonnade and followed a flagstone path down to the circular drive.

Bannor and other Secret Service agents wearing bullet-resistant vests closed around him. They coordinated their movements via the radios on their belts, which connected to their trademark earpieces and microphones clipped to their watches. More than 60 feet above them, the Secret Service Countersniper Team went on high alert. With specially built rifles, nightvision scopes and binoculars, they stood on the roof scanning the area.

            Waters entered his new black 1993 Cadillac limousine with Bannor and two other agents. The president always rode on the passenger side to avoid having to walk around the car when getting out. Joining them was a discrete military aide, an Army colonel who carried the “football,” the brown leather briefcase with the communications equipment necessary to launch nuclear missiles toward, say, Moscow, or Easter Island.

            After the rear doors bearing the presidential seal closed, Waters heard the sophisticated locking system engage and relaxed in the dark blue leather seating. He had taken precautions to protect himself long before becoming president. And unlike many of his predecessors, he took a keen interest in his security.

The limo, he knew, was 23 feet long and twice as heavy as a typical Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham. Lacking a sunroof or running boards, it had a fully armored perimeter and firewall with blast shields in the floor and heavy-duty suspension, brakes, and steering. The armor was five inches thick in places, and the windows, which did not open, were as thick as a phone book. To protect against chemical or biological attack, the interior was a carefully sealed environment with its own oxygen supply. Inside the armored gas tank, a special foam prevented explosions, while the oversized wheels had steel plates inside the tires to enable the car to speed away at 65 miles per hour even with all four tires shredded. The vehicle was designed to survive and escape all but the heaviest attack.

Inside, embroidered presidential seals adorned the rear door panels as well as the center of the rear seat back. The rear of the limousine seated six. Zebrano wood accents highlighted the dark blue cloth and leather interior, which came with a foldaway desktop and a walnut console holding secure telephone and radio communications equipment, as well as a public address system in lieu of a TV and VCR. A console overhead housed the climate controls and switches for the eight-speaker stereo system.

As the motorcade exited the Southwest Gate it passed the concrete bollards installed to prevent truck bomb attacks. Six officers on motorcycles surged ahead of his limo. The first three came from the Special Operations Division of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (or MPD), the last three from the U.S. Park Police. In staggered formation, the two lead motorcycles rode well ahead of the motorcade to ensure the route was clear. The other four swerved from curb to curb to herd pedestrians back toward the sidewalks.

An MPD cruiser with a Secret Service agent accompanying its MPD driver came next, followed by the two identical Presidential Series limousines. Waters rode in the second, at least until the limos switched positions in a traffic tunnel beneath Dupont Circle as a precaution. The U.S. flag flew from the right front fenders, the president's standard from the left front fenders, illuminated by flush-mounted spotlights. The other limo, filled with Secret Service agents, was a decoy and spare. Chasing the limos were the Secret Service war wagons, comprised of a handful of black Chevrolet Suburbans and a single black station wagon carrying a mounted machine gun.

            The unobtrusive Suburbans were armored and outfitted similarly to the presidential limousine. The agents inside, part of the PPD’s Counter Assault Team, carried Sig Sauer P229 .357 semiautomatic pistols supplemented by Remington Model 870 shotguns and either Uzi or Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. Trips abroad sometimes called for shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. In public, the submachine guns stayed inside gym or garment bags. But agents riding in the Suburbans openly cradled them.

            A press van carrying wire correspondents and the White House press pool followed. A cameraman popped out of the skylight in the van’s roof to tape the trip, just in case, a tradition known as the Death Watch.

            Next, came a D.C. Fire Department ambulance carrying a physician and six units of blood matching the president’s blood type. Behind it was a cruiser from the Secret Service Uniformed Division, and the tail car, a marked Park Police cruiser. All motorcade vehicles flashed their emergency lights and wailed their sirens, producing a unique, deafening cacophony in the urban canyons.*

The motorcade never stopped for red lights or heavy traffic. Police officers positioned at major intersections blocked traffic. In 1975 a driver accidentally broadsided President Ford’s limousine. He totaled his own car but left the president’s limo unscathed. Ford’s driver never even had to slow down.

The Washington Hilton & Towers looms over Connecticut Avenue and Dupont Circle. Because it possesses the largest ballroom in Washington, President Waters made more than a dozen trips there each year. While the decoy limousine continued past the Hilton up Connecticut Avenue, the president’s limo turned onto T Street and into the hotel driveway. It stopped inside a small attached garage added after Reagan’s shooting at the same location. Garage doors to the front and rear of the limo slammed shut. Agents positioned themselves around the car before the president stepped out under the watchful eyes of Bannor. Waters made his way to the 35,000 square foot underground ballroom, smiling at a cheering throng of more than two thousand wealthy contributors and assorted congressmen.

Outside, the motorcade parked in formation along T Street between Florida and Connecticut Avenues, ready to depart at a moment’s notice. Police officers manned temporary street barricades. Secret Service agents inside guarded every entrance, exit, elevator and stairway, as well as the roof. Two dozen MPD officers were stationed in the parking garage, ready to provide additional assistance.

*     *     *

At the corner of Florida and 19^th, a young woman stepped from a taxi. She mentioned Bannor’s name to the police officers outside, and was waved into the lobby after a radio confirmation. Within minutes she stood in a hotel room, pouring herself a rum and Coke.

*     *     *

Once his food tasters had cleared it, President Waters commenced picking at his steak. Prominent Republicans took turns at the presidential lectern. Nicknamed the “Blue Goose,” it was bulletproof and weighed several hundred pounds. Waters smiled and made small talk when pressed, but otherwise waited for his introduction.

The political donors seeing the president up close for the first time stared in a half-religious trance. Though John Waters had the wrinkles and gray hair to corroborate his seventy-four years, his voice did not quaver, his shoulders were not slumped, and his eyes were clear and piercing. His acolytes knew every line of his face and official biography.

It was often said that no man had had more of an effect on the U.S. intelligence community. A former head of the CIA and wartime agent for its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, Waters had advised Robert McNamara in the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961 and briefly headed that organization as well.

Even J. Edgar Hoover—intimidator of presidents for generations and head of the FBI from 1924 to 1972—never dared cross Waters. In certain circles, it was rumored that Waters had, for decades prior to becoming president, held a secret position as supreme director of the entire U.S. intelligence community, which included 13 intelligence organizations ostensibly overseen by the head of the CIA.

When Waters took his turn at the lectern, his thoughts were elsewhere. But he read the speech on the teleprompter with a natural ease that was the envy of many on both sides of the aisle. After a quick warm-up joke about hunting gays with assault rifles, he urged Congress to support a bill authorizing construction of a nuclear power plant in Zion National Park.

Waters made a point of hailing the recent landmark agreement between himself and the Democratic majority leaders in Congress. It established a bipartisan committee to study whether or not there were too many Congressional committees. “I want to be the ‘bi’ in the bipartisan relationship with Congress,” the president continued, flashing a seemingly oblivious smile. Next, he rebuffed an editorial in that morning’s New York Times, which blamed his budget priorities for the state of the economy.

“I’m not worried about the deficit. It’s big enough to take care of itself.”

The crowd responded with warm laughter and applause.

“And yes,” Waters added, “I hope to sign the Purity of American Culture Act by the end of the year. Which reminds me of a story—but then again, everything does at my age. Thank you all for coming out. Good night and God bless.”

Through a standing ovation, the president shook an interminable number of hands and accepted a jar of red M&M’s and a kiss on the cheek from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. He excused himself as soon as he could.

Waters’ chief of staff, Maynard Keenan, trotted after him. “I think that went very well, sir.”

“Fools,” the old man breathed. “I wish I could kill them all.”

Keenan fell silent. The president turned on him. “Get back there and tell anyone who asks that I’m in a private meeting with a select group of contributors.”

Waters left the ballroom accompanied only by his security detail. Minutes later, he let himself into the room where the young woman awaited him. While the other agents manned the elevators and stairs, Bannor took up position just outside the door.

Inside, the president slipped off his suit jacket and hung it over a desk.

“Turn off the lamp, please,” he said.

She clicked off the light. “It’s been a few weeks.”

He watched her slip out of the short dress. She looked good, with her dark hair and freshly applied lipstick, silhouetted against the city lights with Columbia Road behind her. Naturally, she wanted their relationship to be public, but he’d already risked too much.

He pulled her close and kissed her in the vague darkness. Her mouth tasted, not unpleasantly, of rum and Coke. She was much better looking—and younger—than his late wife, whose death he had quietly arranged in 1982. But she was also a threat to the empire he’d labored to build over so many decades. A scandal now could ruin him.

It was time to end it.

He pushed her to the bed so he could look at her while he undressed. Then, sighing, he pinned her shoulders against the bedspread. He fumbled at her crotch. She was in love with him all right, already soaked. Grimacing, he slid his penis inside her and began thrusting deeply. He never used condoms; she’d been tested for everything.

The girl moaned. At his side, his hand found his necktie and seized it with sudden inspiration.

“Let’s play a game,” he said, not even out of breath.

She agreed at once. He slipped the tie over her head. As instructed, she pulled the ends tight to decrease the blood flow to her brain and intensify her orgasm.

“Does it feel good?” he asked.

She nodded, scarcely able to breathe.

“Then imagine how much better it will feel if I do this,” he whispered, grasping the ends of the tie and pulling more tightly than she had dared. Her hands hesitated, then relaxed against her heaving breasts.

Waters intensified his thrusting, impaling her with each jab. The bed shook. She patted his hands, gently at first but with increasing vehemence. Her mouth opened and closed spasmodically. Oxygen deprivation reduced her vision; the edge of her sight blackened and curled inward. Soon all she could see was the silhouette of the president’s head looming above her.

He smiled. “I thought you liked it.”

As he approached his orgasm, he slowed and closed his eyes. It was then, with a last explosion of strength, that the girl gave up trying to loosen his fingers. Instead her hands flew up like claws, and if her nails were not very long, they were long enough. She raked the flesh of his cheeks, and, incredibly, pulled the skin away from his face.

In the shadows above her she had one glimpse of a grinning fiend, its face hanging in impossible bloodless shreds, and then she lost consciousness.

The president snarled and snapped her neck. He came a minute later, then slid off her and fumbled for his clothes. After he dressed, he went to the mirror to look at the damage to his face. Furious, he spun and flung her across the room. Her body smacked the far wall and collapsed on the floor in an oblivious tangle.

“Bannor! Get in here!”

At once Bannor exploded into the room, drawing his pistol and reaching for the light switch. Moving nearly as fast—faster than Bannor had ever seen the old man move—the president lunged forward and slapped the agent’s hand away from the switch.

“No lights,” Waters hissed, slamming the door. “I killed the girl. I need you to—”

Bannor glanced at the president, then knelt over the woman’s body. Holstering his gun, he knelt and felt for a pulse. “Did she attack you, sir?”

“What? Oh, yeah. Sure. I don’t know what happened, but I guess I hit her pretty hard.”

Bannor looked at the president dubiously. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but it appeared as though strips of something were hanging from the president’s face. Or perhaps it was his face that was hanging, in tatters. But even in the gloom he saw no blood.

In response to a voice in his earpiece, the agent raised his left arm. “Bandersnatch is secure. Back to one.”

“Send for the metal briefcase I keep in my car,” Waters said. “Get the girl dressed. On the way back, we’ll jettison her body and make it look like she walked into traffic.”

Bannor frowned. “I don’t know, sir.”

“I have an approval rating of 73% and I’m going to keep it. No one finds out about the girl. Send for my briefcase—now.”

Bannor spoke quickly into his mike then turned toward the president. “Now, sir, she did attack you, but—”

President Waters, a black figure looming against the window, silenced him with a shake of his head.

“This isn’t the first time you’ve done favors for me, Bannor. I’ve spoken to the Treasury Secretary. The Secret Service will no longer question anything you do in my service. This isn’t rocket science, you know. We’ve been murdering people and getting away with it since we were monkeys. Don’t disappoint me now.”

“Sir—”

“Unless you want to look in the mirror one day and find out you have . . . disappeared.”

In the dim confines of the room, the dispassionate agent went still. Bannor was no coward; he did not go pale or feel a chill fly up his vertebrae. Instead, he reflected. Unlike the Washingtonian blowhards who circulated garbled half-truths to exaggerate their proximity to the president, Bannor knew the real stories behind a dozen whispered rumors. And he had learned only that the truth led to more rumors.

He knew, for instance, that Waters had constructed a Reaganesque shield to conceal his Nixonian guile. He also knew about the tunnels beneath the White House and the Capitol, and about the tunnels beneath the tunnels. Whether the older, deeper tunnels—a veritable labyrinth—actually dated to the era of Jefferson was beyond him. It seemed unlikely. In his service to the president, Bannor had seen many curious things. He did know that electricity did not reach the deepest tunnels, and Waters once had made a passing, unexplained reference to Keepers. Answers led to questions and back again, snakes swallowing their own tails.

Bannor did know a bit more than the “official” history of the Iran-contra scandal. In 1988, it was Waters who secretly released the evidence that destroyed Vice President George Bush and prematurely ended Ronald Reagan’s presidency, resulting in the special election late the same year. While the former president and vice president passed their days under strict house arrest for sedition, John Waters had became the 41^st president. Following the failure of Reagan’s controversial Alzheimer’s defense and the multiple guilty verdicts at the close of the Iran-contra trial in 1989, the former president had been hanged at the direction of the U.S. Supreme Court on the steps of the Capitol.

At the time, it was reported that former Vice President Bush had died in prison—a heart attack. The rumors that Bush had instead been imprisoned within the sunless tunnels far below Washington were too absurd to repeat. Except sometimes Bannor wondered. Because the tunnels seemed to have a nasty habit of consuming the problems of the president.

Waters was a world unto himself. The most dizzying thought for Bannor was not that Waters would do anything to become president, it was that becoming president was only the first step in a much larger plan.

Bannor took a deep breath. He really had no choice. “I will assist you, Mr. President.”

President Waters nodded. When the briefcase arrived from the car, he ordered Bannor to remove the girl and leave him alone. When Waters emerged 20 minutes later, his face was unscathed.

The girl’s body was secretly loaded into one of the Suburbans, then jettisoned by trusted agents during the trip back to the White House as the motorcade rounded a sharp turn. As expected, the Suburban’s rear tire ran over the body. In quick succession four additional vehicles sped over it, dispersing the woman’s body across 11 yards of pavement.

The motorcade ambulance pulled aside to offer assistance. By the time it arrived at George Washington University Hospital, the president was in the White House residence, flipping on CNN and settling in with a cold drink.

Chapter Three

            While Thurston played Papal Vengeance II: Monkey Murder Mayhem, the others debated the destabilizing forces in the former Yugoslavia. For reasons that were convenient rather than inexplicable, I found my thoughts turning to how we all met.

Thurston and Nick first crossed paths at a Gwar concert. Although they couldn’t have been more different, Thurston had wanted to move out of the GW dorms, and Nick was about to get thrown out of his parents’ house for refusing to go to college. Although Thurston could have afforded his own place, he actually wanted, as an only child, to live in a group house.

Nick and I suspected Thurston was gay because he didn’t have a girlfriend and barely seemed to notice women even existed. Jessie, however, insisted Thurston was just terminally shy.

Nick worked in Georgetown at Smash, selling alternative records, CDs, and t-shirts. He rarely had his share of rent on time, missed a day of work for every day he showed up, and pissed away most of his money drinking. We lived in constant fear he’d get fired.

But Nick, owing much to the gods of irony, was the Brad Pitt of the house. Although his only physical activity consisted of drinking beer and cheating on Anne, he somehow maintained an athletic body. He stumbled home with a different girl most nights, and regaled us with tales of surreptitious blowjobs. We loathed Nick, but he also fascinated us, like a hamster capable of operating a particle accelerator.

Jessie and Thurston met in an English class at GW their freshmen year. Jessie was a talented musician and writer, but he’d dropped out of college after two years as an English major, and accomplished little since. When drunk, he often swore that all writers were whores, and that whatever art had been in the craft had long ago “disappeared into a shithole of clever marketing controlled by a cabal of global publishing empires.” Then he usually passed out, muttering something about murdering Stephen King along with “every monkey-fucking pop singer” who inked a million-dollar book deal.

Although Jessie’s guitar was never far from his side, he resisted playing in front of anyone, including Julie. He’d met her at Kramerbooks on Connecticut Avenue a year earlier, and she often slept over. When she wasn’t around, Jessie watched cartoons and documentaries on the Holocaust or the notorious sexual proclivities of the kangaroo rat. Sometimes he’d rouse himself for a concert, but he usually drank too much and made fun of the band’s lyrics like a weird literary heckler. Once, he was tossed out of the 9:30 Club for hitting Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the head with a beer bottle as the band played “Higher Ground.” As the bouncers threw Jessie into the middle of F Street, he’d yelled, “It’s a Stevie Wonder song! A fucking Stevie Wonder song!”

By default, we belonged to the illusory Generation X, born somewhere between 1961 and 1984, depending on whom you asked. The media scapegoated us into one flannel-clad, Nirvana-listening, bungee jumping, body piercing, overeducated, apathetic and goateed amalgam of white, suburban-raised non-voters, left home alone by our divorce-happy parents to become the first kids to hit puberty in the midst of AIDS as Nancy Reagan beat us over the head with a “JUST SAY NO, GODDAMMIT!” sign. On the bright side, more than a million of us had attempted suicide, leaving us with the highest teen suicide rate in American history.

This was our little group, the afterbirth of a nation all-stars. And we shared a row house on R Street.

Finding an affordable place to rent in the sometime murder capital of the U.S. wasn’t difficult, not if you looked in the kind of neighborhoods that made you wonder if World War IX had already come and gone, and you’d simply missed hearing about it on the news. Unfortunately, although living downtown was great, the houses in our price range had never been remodeled aside from a few hundred coats of lead paint. And central air conditioning was out of the question—it would have been cheaper to get the gaslights working again.

And Kim had still not returned by the time I opened my fourth Rolling Rock.

Julie and Anne were talking quietly, probably about Nick. Once or twice Anne caught my eye and smiled awkwardly. I returned the smile, wondering again how she restrained herself from taking a chainsaw to Nick’s genitals.

The next CD came on, Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails. Thurston turned off the Nintendo and flipped through the channels. He left the music on, which wasn’t unusual for us, what with our Attention Deficit Disorders and all.

“Kim should have been back by now,” Julie said.

Jessie snickered. “Yeah, but then again, she is crazy.”

“Hey Simon!” Thurston said. “I know why Kim isn’t back.”

I turned. “Why?”

“The president’s motorcade ran her over.”

I stared at him as the others stood around the TV. CNN had a live shot of a dark street corner crawling with cops and men in trench coats, either Secret Service agents or trench coat salesmen. Yellow police tape kept the media and a crowd of professional bystanders at bay.

The report said a young woman just identified as Kim Risperdal had been struck by the president’s motorcade.

“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” Nick said.

Jessie snorted. “You’re high. She left to get beer two hours ago.”

“Oh yeah,” Nick replied. “What fucking liquor store was she going to?”

Anne put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay, Simon?”

I felt a strange urge to laugh and say, “I guess it was a good idea for us to go get the beer.” But I held my tongue. I’d never liked Kim much, but it wasn’t my fault—I barely knew her. Instead of sadness, I felt like I’d been jostled awake from a mildly irritating nightmare.

Julie stared at me. “You don’t look very upset.”

I blinked at her. “I was going to break up with her tonight.”

I half-suspected Kim had died on purpose to rob me of the pleasure of breaking up with her. For a while, nobody said anything. None of them really knew Kim. She’d scarcely uttered fewer than 11 words in their presence. Julie looked surprised I wasn’t bawling, or whatever I was supposed to do according to The International Rules of Human Behavior, Chapter Seven, “When Your Estranged, Asexual Girlfriend Gets Run Over By the President.” But I didn’t feel like putting on a show.

I glanced at the TV. George Michael had been arrested for threatening to record a new Wham! album.

“Don’t you feel anything?” Julie ventured at last.

“Not really.”

“Why?”

I shrugged from the safety of the sofa. “Maybe because we dated for four months and she wouldn’t sleep with me. No sex—period. And it’s not just that. She was emotionally dead. It’s like she never existed, even when we were in the same room. There may have been a million explanations, but she couldn’t find a way to share them with me. My feelings for her, such as they are, died months ago.”

Thurston smiled crookedly. “If this were a movie, we’d all start crying and talking about our feelings now.”

Nick frowned. “Who’s the president now, anyway?”

We turned and stared at him.

            I snorted. “Welcome to the world. May I help you?”

“John Waters,” Thurston said. “Don’t you ever read a newspaper?”

“No,” Nick said. “I don’t have time for shit that doesn’t affect me.”

Jessie shook his head. “I still can’t believe Waters got reelected. I didn’t vote for him.”

“You didn’t vote for anyone,” Julie said.

“Neither did you,” Jessie replied.

            Thurston sighed. “He got reelected because he kept the U.S. out of war with Luxembourg.”

With the usual Friday night euphoria deflated, Anne and Julie went home. I thought about calling the police and telling them what little I knew about Kim, but ultimately decided it was their job to investigate things. I didn’t feel like talking anyway.

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” Nick breathed. “She seemed so… alive!”

“That’s because she was,” Thurston replied. Jessie shook his head at the two of them.

Nick looked up. “Want to go to the 9:30 Club to see Mr. Bungle and Dread Zeppelin?”

“Sure, why not?” I said.

Jessie examined me. “You’re not fucked up over this?”

I sighed. “No more than usual. Let’s go.”

            A brief cab ride delivered us to the 9:30 Club at 930 F Street. Although only five or six blocks from the White House, the neighborhood looked like a set from one of the 37 post-apocalyptic movies Charlton Heston made in the ’70s. The rat-infested alley behind the 9:30 Club that served as the loading/unloading entrance for bands abutted Ford’s Theatre. John Wilkes Booth had fled down the same alley after shooting President Lincoln.

The 9:30 Club was a tiny, dank club on the ground floor of the otherwise-vacant Atlantis office building. A mix of kids and homeless people patrolled the sidewalk out front, where the crumbling facades of the buildings were held together with hundreds of flyers advertising anything and everything so long as they were concerts. Fearless city rats lumbered across the sidewalks. In the club they sometimes ran across your feet or on pipes overhead.

But the 9:30 Club crawled with history as well as vermin. Since opening May 30^th, 1980, Ministry, the Pixies, Skinny Puppy, the Replacements, Jane’s Addiction, R.E.M., and countless others bands had played there. Divine performed at the club in 1988 just 48 hours before his death. And Nirvana opened for a band named Loop on April 29^th, 1990, playing to a crowd of maybe 300. The club’s carpeted stage, tucked away in a corner and just two or three feet high, was barely large enough to hold the bands performing on it. Fans pressed against the stage and sometimes rested their drinks on it.

A long black hall like a tunnel served as its entrance, allowing access to the rectangular main room. Inside, the gloom gave the impression of a claustrophobically low ceiling, but the ceilings were in fact surprisingly high, though shrouded in darkness. Frequently, during the most crowded shows, the black walls and ceilings dripped condensation like a living organism—or, as Nick once remarked, a moist vagina. The club was sweltering and stuffy year round, despite a couple of laughably insufficient window a/c units.

We walked to the ticket window, offered our licenses, and paid. Our hands were stamped with purple smiley faces. Then, using the blunt force of our bodies, we penetrated the side entrance to our left and headed to the less crowded back bar, which adjoined the main room via a long hallway. Old TVs hanging from the walls showed the band onstage.

The heavy thumping of Dread Zeppelin came at us from all directions, obliterating any conversation not yelled directly into our ears. Adults and teens cavorted near the stage or shuffled past me like shadows, inchoate figures stumbling from some dark womb. The hot, humid air pressed into my skin and lungs, burning with the exhalation of a hundred heavy smokers.

I ordered a shot of vodka and a rum and Coke. The others opted for beer. Nick spotted a friend and disappeared. Jessie and Thurston asked me, mostly via gestures, if I wanted to move closer to the stage.

“No!” I screamed. “I’ll hang around here!”

They morphed into the shifting crowd and vanished. I picked up my rum and Coke and scanned the benches built into the walls. Amid a dozen people trying to engage in futile conversation, I spied an empty seat. As I sat down, I saw a guy across from me wearing black sunglasses. But I paid him little attention.

My girlfriend-by-default was dead. Although 15 pedestrians died in the U.S. every day after being struck by cars, and someone had to fill those statistics, it came as a shock. And yet I felt griefless. Not unfeeling, but feeling nothing. People were born. They lived. They died. And then a local pederast was hired to give the graveside disservice.

Although something intangible and possibly illusory about Kim had drawn me to her, she remained forever a mystery, like the sphinx, or the fact that someone thought it was a great idea to hire Prince to write songs for Tim Burton’s gothic Batman movie. The real question was why we’d both persisted in our failed relationship. Ironically, she’d seemed eager to go get beer, perhaps sensing the impending destruction of self-esteem that awaited her return.

And now she’d succeeded in robbing me of the speech I’d rehearsed in my head all week.

I sipped my drink. Although the guy in the sunglasses must have been blind in the gloom, he appeared to be watching me with a half-amused smile.

He looked like a teenager. What light there was revealed his face to be pale and almost unnaturally smooth and flawless, as though his skin was a mask instead of a living organ sprinkled with pores, pimples, and freckles. His black hair hung raggedly on slight, androgynous shoulders, and a single silver hoop dangled from each ear. He looked unusually tall, but might have been twelve or twenty-five.

I resented being stared at by this man/boy. Floating from the warmth of the alcohol, I stood up. Parting the milling crowd like a Generation X incarnation of Moses, I captured a vacant seat next to the guy. He turned and continued to stare at me from behind his sunglasses. His half-smile never wavered.

No teenage boys were this relaxed and self-possessed—not even after a week on Valium receiving hourly blowjobs from an endless parade of supermodels.

I swirled the ice in my disposable cup. “Why are you staring at me?”

Up close, his disconcerting agelessness only increased, along with an unbidden and disturbing sense of familiarity. He looked closer to seven feet than six, and I briefly wondered if he was gay before dismissing the thought as somehow absurd; there was nothing sexual about him. It was like sitting next to my brother, if he were still—

“You were looking for us, weren’t you?” he asked, his voice somehow audible over the noise of the band. Deeper than I expected.

Us? He looked alone to me.

“No,” I replied. “I just saw you staring at me. And what do you mean by us?”

“It’s confusing in here. A lot of people are looking for us tonight. What’s your name?”

His hands were empty—not even a Coke. He wore dull black leather pants and a stained black shirt. His skin was obscenely pale, and I noticed a long black cape of some sort, although it was, for the most part, tucked out of sight. Goth kids sometimes wore them, and although Dread Zeppelin and Mr. Bungle were hardly goth, no one in the crowd gave him a second glance.

“My name? Tell me your name first,” I said.

He spoke just as Dread Zeppelin’s Elvis-impersonator singer wailed in a particularly egregious way.

“Seth?” I repeated.

He laughed. “All right.”

He was laughing at me. I was sure of it.

“What do you do?” I asked. “Do you go to school?”

He shook his head, still smiling. “No. We’ve been out of school for years. You could say we’re a guide now.”

Far from being sated, my curiosity was rising. “A guide? Like for tourists and stuff?”

He laughed. “No, Simon, not exactly.”

“Why do you keep talking about yourself in the third person?” I asked, disconcerted. He wasn’t the king of England. Or Bob Dole.

His smile faded. “She is already dead. You can not save her from Nick or herself.”

“What?” I asked, confused. How did he know Nick? But my attention was diverted by Anne as she materialized in front of me.

“Where’s Nick?” she shouted.

“I thought you went home,” I said, getting up so we could hear each other. I was rewarded when her left breast touched my chest. To my surprise, Anne didn’t move back.

“I need to talk to Nick. He’s here, isn’t he?”

I pointed toward the stage. “You try over there?”

“Yeah, first thing. Can you come downstairs with me?” she asked.

I sighed. I didn’t think much of Anne’s relationship with Nick, but she was sweet and—let’s face it—extraordinarily fuckable.

“Just one second,” I said, turning back to Seth. But his seat was empty and I didn’t see him around anywhere.

I flipped my empty cup into a garbage can. As Anne followed me to the stairs, I realized with a start that Seth had called me Simon.

I’d never told him my name.

Shaking my head, I led Anne down to the basement of the 9:30 Club, which had been a club called Atlantis in the late ’70s. The Police once played there. Now, however, only a small area was open to the public—the restrooms, a stand selling CDs and t-shirts, and a small lounge comprised of a solitary couch. I located Nick in the men’s room, and told Anne to wait for him.

But anger and suspicion whirled inside her head like an out-of-control electric wheelchair on a greased pier. Although she knew it was better to leave the monster in the closet instead of flinging the door open and inviting it to brunch at Denny’s, she was furious.

Anne burst into the men’s room, ignoring the guys at the sink and the two urinals. She saw Nick’s boots under the solitary toilet stall, swimming against the tile.

She pushed the broken door open. “Are you—?”

The air left her lungs as she saw the syringe. Nick shuddered as he withdrew it. A single drop of blood appeared before he bent his arm.

“Happiness is an open vein,” he said.

Anne choked out a sound before her voice died altogether. Tears overran her eyes, though not as many as would come later. After a long pause she threw the syringe onto the floor, then pulled the shoestring from Nick’s arm.

“An open vein is happiness,” Nick murmured through lidded eyes. Almost of their own accord, his arms came up, and in spite of herself Anne embraced him. He didn’t resist when she pulled him to his feet.

She could do better, I thought, as I watched them go, walking like they were underwater.

I found Jessie and Thurston watching Mr. Bungle. They were incredulous. None of us had suspected Nick was into hard drugs. But it didn’t really surprise us. His attitude toward everything was pleasure first, consequences never. It was a rock star outlook, although some elementary school principals probably felt the same way about heroin, believing they could beat it until the day the coroner’s bone saw revealed the banal truth of their mortality.

As we walked home, I kept thinking I’d wandered into a TV movie of the week.

Chapter Four

            I felt like a used condom, forgotten and wet, as I walked alone to the 7-Eleven with my hands pressed into my black leather jacket. The rain had started after we returned from the club, falling in a cold downpour that might have been romantic if viewed from inside a country inn, curled against a favorite lover. But I had neither, not even an umbrella, and it was probably for the best since a country inn can be rather heavy. I recalled my seventh-grade social studies teacher telling us that Bedouins have over 100 words for rain—all of them spelled incorrectly.

Nick’s bedroom door had been closed when we got home. After watching TV and flipping through Alternative Press, I’d decided to grab my keys and head out. It was now after 2 a.m.

“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” I murmured.

Downtown was a different world by night, the streets and sidewalks all but emptied. Crumpled pages of The Washington Obfuscator blew down the desolate steel and concrete canyons like tumbleweeds. It was easy to believe a neutron bomb had fallen, erasing the people but leaving the buildings—the age of the roaches at last.

I passed four or five hookers huddled against the buildings out of the rain. They left me alone. I was bored and tired, and my old friend insomnia was back to stay a while, as welcome as the unemployed brother-in-law you suspected of molesting the family dog.

The newspaper racks inside the 7-Eleven were already loaded with the first editions of the Obfuscator, USA Today and The Washington Times. Oddly enough, the accident that had taken Kim’s life only hours before had slipped my mind, though the headlines brought everything back in a mute jumble.

My mind swirled with a yin-and-yang, chocolate-and-vanilla, Itchy-and-Scratchy kind of chaotic melancholy. The very act of walking into the brightly lit store for the millionth time reminded me that every thought and feeling I’d ever had, or ever would have, was useless.

It had all been done.

There was nothing novel left in the world, just mildly creative rehashes of things that had been done, better, by someone else long before, from movies and books to paintings and Namibian operas. I’d continue returning to the store to purchase brightly colored emptiness, forgetting it all a few hours later. An overwhelming, detached void filled me. It lacked any real feeling or emotion, like the obscene emotional emptiness emanated by those vacuous, incessantly smiling sitcom families from the early ’60s.

Was there anything for me in the world?

Does a Catholic bear shit on the pope in the woods?

My life—for lack of a better word, like death—was a lost cause, and the worst thing was not that television—my de facto parent—had lied to me about the world, but that I accepted this without a struggle. My life had no soundtrack, no clear plot line or inevitable resolution, and when I uttered a witty remark no one rushed to laugh.

No wonder I was frequently depressed, suicidal on the best of days, and watching far too much world news and not enough Beavis and Butt-head.

Of course there was more to life, but it was hard to imagine overcoming the desiccated disinterest with which I looked upon the world. Fuck. I had done nothing with my life, had found nothing to fill my life, and if nothing changed, my life was going to end with me sitting alone in a dark room contemplating an open crate of handguns loaded with poisoned bullets.

And even that had been done before.

Opting for a little danger and intestinal challenge, I chose Ben & Jerry’s new flavor, Fatal Bowel Blockage. Already banned in California, it came with whole nuts, slabs of the blackest German dark chocolate, and actual shredded tree branches from the Amazon. A bag of candy ensured that elusive hummingbird-on-crystal-meth sugar high.

My mind retreated from the world. I don’t remember paying.

When the brooding clouds of myopia lifted, I found myself walking home in the rain, passing the prostitutes again. Only two of them now.

Once, during winter break of my freshman year in college, I’d hired a hooker in an attempt to dispel my misery. Although the $20 blowjob in a dark doorway ended with an exquisite explosion of ecstasy, it left me feeling guilty and more eager for self-death than ever. So little had changed.

Back home, I sprawled on my bed amid Spree wrappers, eating ice cream and blindly watching the Ren & Stimpy marathon on Nickelodeon.

My bedroom was sparsely furnished but claustrophobically crowded. I had a queen-size bed that lacked a headboard, and a black and green paisley comforter. Piles of clothes in various states of cleanliness scattered across the ancient beige carpeting saved me from having to remember where anything was. The walls, off-white like the rest of the house, were plastered with posters for Ministry, Primus, Christian Death, Joy Division, and Nirvana, plus a 1992 Far Side calendar I’d forgotten to take down. Two windows faced the street, covered by mini-blinds and dark blue sheets I’d tacked up. My Onkyo stereo, courtesy of Visa, sat in a cabinet near my dresser, topped by an old 19-inch Zenith connected to the stereo and its black Sony speakers.

It was after three in the morning.

Lying on my bed, I fingered the razor blade scars on the inside of my left forearm. I needed an answer, something I could get as easily as ice cream.

I was tired of being a joke to myself and others.

Using remotes, I turned off the TV and put on Broken by Nine Inch Nails. The volume was just loud enough to penetrate the corners of the room and the fragments of my life-addled mind. Music held the demons at bay.

I lit some candles and incense, turned off the lights, undressed, and lay nude on my comforter. Letting the music and incense waft over me like a benediction, I waited for the dark cloud over my consciousness to recede, thinking of the people I saw on the streets every day. I envied them their sane, easy laughter, and their face-value perceptions.

One of my problems, of course, was that I thought too much. So I jacked off instead. When it came, the semen struck my chest and stomach in a sultry baptism.

I had never loved Kim. I’d never been given the chance. And unlike her, darkness never let me down. It never took more than it returned, and it was always there behind my eyelids, waiting, like the unfinished Clive Barker novel on my nightstand. I stared at the candlelight playing on the ceiling.

It was too much.

Living with depression is like living with the fallout of your dreams. Your wish to fuck Marilyn Monroe is granted, only it’s the body of a Marilyn Monroe who died six weeks ago. Yes, it’s her, but when you’re trying to get off, the flesh is sliding off her bones like hot wax.

My head was a pissoir for the detritus of reality. Everything inside me had been contaminated by the usual blackness, darker than Oreos but not as tasty. My ludicrous failure to find a panacea for the pain in my brain doomed me to night screams and night mayors lording over realms of decay and seas of blood. Every day I tried to free myself from the cataclysm of my mind and failed. Every night I poured black ink into a hopeless abyss already darker than the ends of the universe, where even the brightest galaxies were rumors lost in time.

It was a personal travesty, a crime against nature—my own. I was mindfucking myself to death.

No one, not even my housemates, could help. Sometimes I contemplated slitting their throats as they slept through the late-night wasteland of boredom. And I’d dance in the blood afterwards, screaming “TV made me do it! TV made me do it!”

I longed for anything—the passion of an idiot, the ignorance of a fool, the happiness of an ice cream truck operator with a taste for five-year-old girls. But I was to have nothing. Even my attempt to seize my own destiny by hanging myself had failed. It was almost funny.

Almost.

Chapter 5

The next morning, I felt more invigorated than I had in years, like an errant demon settling into a filched body. Jessie woke me up at eleven, bursting into my room as he knocked. Grinning carnivorously, he told me to look outside.

Wearing only boxers, I went to the window. “Fuck, it’s the media.”

Reporters and camera crews crowded our front steps. Three large satellite uplink trucks were double-parked in the street, and a stand on the sidewalk was selling coffee, steno pads, and preconceived ideas.

“I wonder how they found out I was Kim’s boyfriend?”

Jessie shook his head. “Beats me.”

“I guess I have to say something, huh? To get them to leave?”

Jessie laughed. “Like what? That you’re glad she’s dead?”

I smiled thoughtfully, then sighed. “Nah. Do me a favor. Go downstairs and write a statement for me to feed to the media circus animals.”

“Like what?”

I waved him off. “Like anything. Just make up something.”

“This is so cool,” Jessie said as he left.

After a trip to the bathroom, I put on jeans and a semi-respectable blue shirt. Downstairs, behind closed drapes, Jessie was busy with a notebook. Thurston sat nearby, watching the talking heads on CNN discuss Kim’s death.

“Make it really bizarre,” I told Jessie.

“Take advantage of the media?” Jessie said, his face alight with unspeakable mischief. “Okay, twist my arm.”

“What’s going on?” Nick asked from the stairs. Anne was beside him, her eyes bleary and dark. Nick looked like hell.

I pointed. “The fucking media.”

“Aren’t they your colleagues?” Anne asked. “Since you work for the Obfuscator?”

“Yeah, but I don’t respect them.”

After editing Jessie’s statement—with some input from Thurston—I trudged toward the front door like a man on his way to a vigorous colonoscopy. Behind me, the others gathered around the TV. CNN had a live shot of our house.

I closed the door and froze as the throng of reporters surged forward.

“Are you Simon?”

“Why was Kim walking alone last night?”

“Was she a suicidal BLIND deaf mute?”

“Did you vote for President Waters?”

“I, uh, have a statement to read,” I said. “My name is Simon Jones. As you know, my girlfriend, Kim Risperdal, was killed by the president of the United States last night. I am deeply saddened by this, because Kim was the love of my life and was pregnant with triplets. We were going to be married today, but that will never come to pass, now, because of President Waters and his nefarious scheme to destroy my life.”

I wiped my eyes. Reporters all around me snorted and stared.

“I have collected, in numerous safe deposit boxes located across the country, evidence dating back several decades. In 1961, John Waters received a secret lifetime appointment to head the United Nations Secret Conspiracy Council. With the support of the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Church of Latter-Day Saints, President Waters orchestrated the assassination of President Kennedy, covered up the suicides of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and concealed the truth about the death of former President Lyndon Johnson, who was brutally drowned in his own waterbed.”

“What?” someone shouted.

“Are you serious?” another demanded.

“Do you have two sources for all of this?”

Everyone looked confused, with the exception of a grinning ABC cameraman.

I pressed on, deepening my voice to a newscaster drone. “President Waters was also behind the attempt on President Reagan’s life in April of 1981. Waters ordered the shooting because Reagan refused to pay Waters the $1 billion he jokingly wagered during the Super Bowl. Ultimately, Reagan paid the debt, although he had to siphon the money from scores of Savings and Loans to do so. And that’s not all.

“President Waters murdered Theodore Geisel and Paul McCartney, introduced nonnative species such as the feral pig, cat and goat to Australia, broke up the Beatles, faked the moon landings, cofounded Twisted Sister, and, perhaps worst of all, sold every single person in Montana to space aliens as food in 1976 as part of a trade for nubile, trans-dimensional sex slaves. Luckily no one noticed. And he’s also keeping Adolf Hitler alive on the secret top floor of a nursing home in North Carolina.

“Because I know this, and suspect far more,” I said, “the president has made 13 attempts on my life in the last year. Obviously, because of the inherent danger, I can’t divulge the names of the people who supplied this information to me, how I happened to discover it, or even why I’ve made it my mission in life to reveal the truth about President Waters.”

I held up my hands to silence the growing discord.

“Please, people, please! Let’s not forget the real tragedy here! Last night, my girlfriend, who was—unbeknownst to me—blackmailed into having an affair with President Waters, died from autoerotic asphyxiation while having sex with him in a room at the Washington Hilton. Not only did the president murder her, he dumped her body from his motorcade to make it look like an accident.”

Inside, Thurston grinned at the others. “The autoerotic asphyxiation bit was my idea.”

“Now that you know the truth,” I said, “I expect a full congressional investigation. President Waters must be held accountable for his crimes and executed on live TV.”

Folding my notes, I looked at the reporters and smiled broadly. “Later.”

Before they could say anything, I dove inside and slammed our door.

Reporters pummeled the door. Jessie cracked up like a six-year-old hearing his first fart joke. The others giggled.

“Who’s Theodore Geisel?” Anne asked.

Jessie laughed. “Dr. Seuss! He died last year of old age.”

On TV, the correspondent for CNN was delivering his report from our sidewalk. “Simon Jones, the boyfriend of Kim Risperdal, has just made a stunning—and very bizarre—statement. In a list of accusations, Mr. Jones alleges that President Waters was having an affair with his girlfriend, and that the president actually killed her last night with something called, uh, autoerotic asphyxiation. I believe that means she was strangled during sex, although most people do it while, um, masturbating.” He paused. “My colleagues and I believe this to be some kind of joke. We hope to get a clarification from Mr. Jones later today. Reporting for CNN in Washington, this is Null Middling. Back to you, Halcyon.”

Halcyon Beige, the studio anchor, nodded. “Thank you, Null. After the break, we’ll be going to the White House, where the president is expected to issue a statement later today.”

Jessie frowned. “They don’t get it.”

I shook my head. “They have to realize I did it to make them look like idiots.”

“I think they’re confused because you don’t sound upset,” Anne said.

“But I didn’t like her.”

“Yeah, but they don’t know that,” Thurston replied.

Nick shook his head. “Did the president really introduce feral pigs and cats to Australia?”

Everyone turned and stared at him.

When we laughed, Nick looked at us blankly. “What?”

Anne laughed. “I’m pretty sure settlers did that centuries ago.”

“How would you know?”

“College, dumbass.”

A dark look crossed Nick’s face. “Shut the fuck up,” he growled. “Maybe I didn’t go to college and learn about pigs or whatever. It doesn’t mean you’re smarter than me.”

Anne’s face was tight. “I’m sorry, Nick.”

“Whatever.” He shook off her hand and went upstairs.

Jessie and Thurston stared at the TV as tears appeared on Anne’s face. When she saw me looking at her, she violently wiped her eyes and stood up.

“He’s a bastard,” I said.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “He’ll be the death of me, but I love him.”

It was then that I remembered the words of the weird guy at the bar:

She is already dead. You can not save her from Nick or herself.

What did he mean? And how did he know her, or any of us?

            When Anne moved toward the stairs, I grabbed her hand and stopped her. For a moment we looked at each other, then she slipped free and went after Nick. An hour later, I caught up with her as she paused at the front door, crying.

“It’s over,” she said. “I know he cheated on me more often than he probably remembers, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

“It’s not your fault,” I told her. She looked lovely, even with her blue eyes shadowed with tears and her long hair in curly disarray.

Anne turned away. “I wish I’d gone out with you instead of Nick.”

And before I could say anything, she was gone.

*     *     *

Kim’s viewing took place Monday night in Annandale, Virginia. The media camped out across the street from the funeral home. My quick arrival and exit, Jessie told me, made the eleven o’clock news. The press was having a field day discussing my wild accusations, despite President Waters’ mild statement Saturday afternoon:

“I am deeply saddened by the tragic, accidental death of this young woman, and I hope that her troubled young friend gets the help he needs.”

The curiously named White House Press Secretary, Michael Jackson, refused to comment further and referred additional questions to the Metropolitan Police Department, which declined to comment until the official investigation was complete. Usually, unnamed sources popped out of the woodwork, like the source who revealed the UFO abduction of Nancy Reagan for crossbreeding experiments in 1984. No one, however, was willing to comment on Kim’s death.

The White House sent an elaborate flower arrangement to the funeral, and Waters called Kim’s parents to express his condolences. To my amusement, they issued a statement denying their daughter had any relationship with the elderly president, although this didn’t stop them from securing a book deal in the low six figures the following week.

Our phone rang nonstop with calls from reporters and even the odd conspiracy theorist. After a few “no comments,” we got an unlisted number. I took a whole week off from work, perhaps naïve in the hope the attention would die down by the following Monday. Still, the media circus amused me and the others to no end, particularly Jessie, who breathed in the chaos he’d masterminded with the vigor of a dying man clutching a dusty Bible.

            The editors and reporters at The Washington Obfuscator demanded I talk to them, to no avail. As the nation’s premiere newspaper in terms of political coverage, the Obfuscator had a reputation to uphold—even if that reputation owed more to proximity than talent. But I felt no particular allegiance. It was just a job, and they didn’t pay me enough to deal with the torrents of office bullshit, the scheming coworkers, or the nefarious supervisors who patted you on the head with one hand while twisting a knife between your ribs with the other. In fact, most of the newsroom employees I knew deserved an overly elaborate and grandiose punishment involving starving Siberian tigers and paper cuts.

For Kim’s funeral, I borrowed Thurston’s Honda Civic and went alone. After scrawling Joseph Stalin in the guest book, I walked inside. When Kim’s parents spotted me, I pretended I didn’t speak English and kept moving. Having never met them before, I saw no reason to now.

I darted into the viewing room, which was momentarily empty. Glancing around at the inevitable flowers and ornate wood paneling, I approached the overpriced casket.

“No, don’t get up,” I said.

The embalmers had done a remarkable job, given the gruesome dismemberment described in the media. Only her hands and face were visible, with even these small patches of skin heavily layered in makeup. But she did seem less distant than usual. Almost of its own accord, my hand reached out and briefly cupped one of her breasts. She’d never permitted it in life, but it wasn’t the same—she was just a piece of furniture now.

Family members began to file into the back of the room.

An elderly woman appeared beside me. “She looks so peaceful.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, but only because they pumped her full of formaldehyde, Superglued her eyelids shut, and sutured her lips to keep the black fluid from her bowels from leaking out her mouth. A fucking blowup doll would have been more lifelike.”

Shrieking, the crone scurried away. I heard gasps behind me and turned.

“That’s just about enough!” Kim’s father yelled.

“Good,” I said. “I certainly don’t want to go too far.”

I knocked him aside and left. When I got home, Jessie asked how the funeral went.

I shrugged. “No ice cream.”

Chapter 6

I was nine when I saw Death on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Charles County Fair. But I forgot the entire episode until a dream one Saturday in April brought it all back.

My hair blew in my eyes as I savored the endless spinning of the ride and its crazy effects on my gut. But then I saw the lone young man as his car sped drunkenly past on its own revolving, up-and-down trajectory. He caught my eye and grinned. No matter which way our cars twisted on the track, his eyes found me.

Something clawed at my gut, and I remembered a vague warning about strange men and the nasty things they did to boys. But this guy could have been in high school, I thought. A boy like me, perhaps, if he didn’t seem so out of place at the rural fair, with his stringy black hair, dark sunglasses and silver earrings. And his white skin, which looked translucent in the sunlight.

Then, all at once—I don’t know how—I knew who he was. When the ride ended, I looked for him among the riders filing through the exit. But Death had disappeared.

I jerked awake. The guy from the dream—Death—was the same guy I’d met at the 9:30 Club. He’d even told me his name, although I thought he said Seth. I remembered how he smiled at the name—the wrong name. It was the same smile—and the same youth—from the Tilt-A-Whirl in 1979. He hadn’t aged a day.

It was impossible. But the world was crazy, had been for years. (And me too, in all probability.) Regardless, I knew the goth boy I’d met was Death personified.

Not that I could tell anyone. Who’d believe me?

            I sighed and got up. I spent the afternoon playing Nintendo with Jessie and Thurston, mostly, Kindergarten Carnage and John Madden’s Morbidly Obese Heart Attack Evasion VI. After dinner, I ventured out to the 7-Eleven for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Acorns ’N Squirrels. The last few diehard reporters had decamped from our doorstep a few days earlier.

As I walked, my thoughts turned once more to Anne.

She’d killed herself the night of Kim’s funeral. Her roommate, Rachel, found her the next morning. She’d taken almost 200 pills, everything from Tylenol and Advil to Vicodin, Darvoset and Elavil. Even Midol.

Nick said little, but started drinking more than usual. The others were shocked, but I remembered the sad, faraway look in her eyes. Guilt burned through my veins.

The detectives told Nick it wasn’t his fault, that Anne had been on antidepressants for two years. Alcohol and antidepressants, of course, mix about as well as hamsters and bobcats.

            But it was Nick’s fault. He’d cheated on Anne, broken up with her—even hit her sometimes, according to Julie. With his rock star looks and infamous success at “hooking up,” the fucker could have his pick of women. And Julie had heard from Anne that he also had a ten-inch cock, confirming the absence of fairness in the universe.

I skipped Anne’s viewing but went alone to her burial at Fort Lincoln Cemetery in Bladensburg, Maryland. I watched the graveside service from the shadow of a giant oak, standing out of sight like some romantically tortured movie hero. After my housemates and everyone else left, I watched the workmen perform their macabre, routine work. When they departed, I stumbled forth and traced a smiley face in the dirt. Then I fled.

I hadn’t known Anne very well, but I’d known her better than Kim. In a way, Anne was everything I’d ever lost, everything I’d sought but failed to attain—the possibilities never realized and the paths never followed. The world was a colder place without her.

Returning home from the 7-Eleven, I wondered why Death didn’t look like the skeletal creature at the end of all 641 adaptations of A Christmas Carol. And what did he want with me?

The phone rang. Dave, my sole friend among my immediate coworkers, offered me free tickets to the 9:30 Club that night. He couldn’t go, but thought I might be interested in seeing Marilyn Manson and Hamster Semen.

            With no time for a shower, I went for the grungeä look. Since Nick was out and Thurston and Jessie were engrossed playing Monopoly—The Jeffrey Dahmer Collector’s Edition, I flagged a taxi and went alone.

I flashed my driver’s license, was crossed off the guest list, and headed for the refuge of the back bar. I bought a bottle of Dos Equis and found it, like most beers, refreshingly cold but somehow stagnant. I looked around for Death without any luck. I wondered how often he dropped by—and why.

Hamster Semen, a goofy punk band, was well received, but the crowd was clearly waiting for Marilyn Manson. I’d never heard of either band.

My eyes kept returning to a pale girl standing near the stairs. Dressed all in black, she looked, I thought, a little too perfect, a little too beautiful. No chance there. But something in the way her tall body curved beneath her clothes left me entranced. Eventually I realized she’d noticed my attention, and was watching me out of the corner of her eye. Abashed, I turned away, but not before I’d seen her male companion.

Of course she wasn’t alone.

My nemesis wore a Skinny Puppy shirt and ripped jeans, with dark brown hair hanging in his eyes. He looked younger than her, somewhere between fifteen and twenty. The girl looked twenty-one. I wondered how he’d snagged her.

Her sudden, unlooked-for beauty pained me. And although she didn’t appear to mind my attention, a mocking, bitter laughter taunted the unfinished basement of my soul.

Fuck, I couldn’t approach her. What could I even say? There was too much fear, too much uncertainty. Dejected rather than rejected, I crept back to the bar in search of another beer. Protected by a sullen wall of impenetrable anger, I slunk off to a dark corner with my bottle. I heard a voice, but didn’t hear the question until it was carefully repeated.

“What shirt is that?”

My head slumped forward onto my chest and my shoulders sagged like those of a man a century older. I flicked my eyes open, replying to the question before I glimpsed the questioner.

“Nine Inch Nails,” I murmured.

It was the guy I’d seen standing beside the beautiful and terrifying girl in black. She was ten feet away, watching the opening band.

“I thought so,” the guy replied. “I’ve been looking for that shirt.”

I relaxed a little. Up close, he looked no more than eighteen, tops.

“I bought it at Smash last year,” I said. “What band did you come to see?”

I glanced again at the girl. How was it possible that someone’s back could be sexy?

“Oh, we came to see Hamster Semen,” he said. “But my sister heard some interesting things about Marilyn Manson. She used to work at a college radio station.”

“What school?”

He startled me by naming the same small university I’d attended in the mountains of Western Maryland. Then something else hit me.

“That’s your sister?” I asked, staring in disbelief.

He nodded. “Yeah, that’s her. She graduated last year. Her name is Angeline.”

How had I missed her at college? At least he wasn’t her boyfriend. But who went to clubs with their sister—or brother?

Reading the look on my face, he laughed. “We’re not on a date or anything! We live in Silver Spring, not West Virginia. My friends aren’t allowed to come downtown with me.”

I grinned, liking the easy way he smiled. “I grew up in the suburbs, so I sympathize.”

His hair was long on top, short in back. The effect was weirdly sensual. I guessed he didn’t have any trouble with girls.

“The suburbs suck,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

“Jake.”

“I’m Simon.”

“Where do you go to school?” he asked.

“I don’t. I graduated in ’91, from the same school as your sister, although I don’t remember her.”

Jake raised his eyebrows. “I thought you were about eighteen.”

I laughed. “Really? No, I’ll be twenty-four in December. How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

I nodded. “Well, I thought you were about eighteen, too. Want another drink?”

“I could use a beer, but . . .” Jake shrugged. “Stupid drinking laws.”

“Come on, I’ll get you a beer. Somehow I doubt it will be your first.”

As we retreated to the bar, Jake’s sister glanced our way. Of course, I believed in equality and constructive, long-term relationships, but looking at her in the aromatic gloom of the club I simply wanted to feel her sweaty body writhing beneath mine.

Jake, it turned out, had a wide knowledge of obscure and mainstream bands, from the Revolting Cocks to Nirvana and the British goth-industrial band Curve.

“You like Curve?” I repeated. They were one of my favorite bands.

“They’re excellent live.”

“I saw them open for Jesus and Mary Chain last November at Lisner Auditorium,” I replied. “They’re really good live, but the best part is being that close to—”

Jake nodded. “Toni Halliday.”

“She’s beautiful,” I said, although I was staring at his sister again. As I drained my third Dos Equis, I could feel the alcohol kicking in. It was hot, and I was drinking faster than usual.

Jake saw me look at his sister again and frowned.

“Anyway,” I said, “Curve is the best thing to come out of England since John Lennon.”

“Who?”

“John Lennon,” I repeated. “The Beatles? You know, the Kurt Cobain of his generation?”

Jake nodded. “Oh, right.”

“I gotta piss,” I said.

“Me too.”

I felt I was being piloted by remote control as I floated downstairs to the tiny men’s room. I walked to the closest urinal, unzipped, and pulled my penis out. Beside me, Jake unzipped his jeans. My bladder was full, and at some point I realized Jake was watching me. Or, to be more precise, was looking down at my hands and what was in them.

My eyes widened. An unthinkable line had been crossed. Jake was looking at my penis. My mind foundered through a fog of alcohol. I could think of nothing to do except glance down at his penis in retaliation. But when another guy came in, I looked back at my own urinal and focused on the wet cigarette butts and wads of gum.

A moment later, Jake turned away and left. My brain whirled as I trailed after him.

Marilyn Manson turned out to be a theatrical goth-industrial-rock band with a pop culture fetish and lyrics that pointed out the endless hypocrisies of the world. Poking subtle fun at America’s obsession with celebrities, the band members took their first names from famous models or actresses, and their last names from serial killers. Because Trent Reznor had yet to sign the Florida band to his Nothing Records label, it would be some time before they were discovered by easily threatened Christians relaxing after a hard day shooting abortion doctors.

Jake and I eventually retreated to an alcove near the back bar. As I suspected he might, he asked if I was the boyfriend of the woman run over by the president’s motorcade.

My standard response to this, before scurrying away, was to retort, “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever produced upon the surface of the Earth.” Jonathan Swift, of course.

But I came clean with Jake. “Yeah, it was me.”

He laughed and told me how the kids at his high school had thought it was really funny. He was cool, but I kept thinking about the incident in the restroom.

When his sister reappeared after the show, her beauty stunned me all over again. She glanced at me but didn’t say anything as she and Jake left.

From the shadows, I watched them walk to her car. I didn’t think I had a chance in hell with Angeline, but I did have Jake’s phone number.

Chapter 7

Monday, April 26^th, another morning in the Mecca of political corruption, where lobbyists and politicians swarmed over Washington, D.C. like rats in a landfill. Or, to be kinder to the rats, like the eyes of a serial killer sliding over a teenage runaway. And D.C. was like this long before Woodrow Wilson ever raced his wheelchair down 19^th Street.

I left the Farragut North Metro stop and hurried past a group of tourists searching fruitlessly for Dairy Queens. Normally I walked to work, but my routine had been altered when I’d woken up drugged and disheveled behind a CVS in upper Northwest. I couldn’t afford to miss another day of work, and I was already an hour late, courtesy of President Waters.

Walking home from Burrito Brothers Sunday afternoon, I’d been surrounded by four men in dark suits. They punched me once in the gut and tossed me into a black Chevy Suburban, where I was quickly blindfolded, gagged and handcuffed.

Lost my burrito, too.

The men never spoke. After a short drive, the vehicle slowed and a window rolled down.

“Go ahead, sir,” a man said outside the truck.

The truck made a wide turn and plunged down a steep incline. Doors opened and slammed, and I was hoisted out and set on my feet. When I stumbled, iron hands caught me and propelled me forward, still blindfolded and gagged. We passed through a number of doors, then down a stairway, and into an elevator. Always heading down.

I was scared, of course, but also curious. Outside of movies, the rational part of your mind insists these things don’t really happen. The government was too inept to buy basic supplies, let alone conceal dozens of Byzantine conspiracies. And weren’t politicians too busy squirreling away campaign money and taking bribes?

A door slammed behind me as the men tossed me into a chair. The blindfold and gag were ripped away. Blinking, I found myself in a small windowless room with old water stains on the walls—an office that looked like it hadn’t seen serious use since the Eisenhower administration. A basement somewhere, perhaps even beneath the White House itself.

The surface of the old metal desk in front of me was dusty and bare except for the folded hands of President John Waters. He smiled grimly as our eyes met. I’d seen him a thousand times on TV, of course, but in person he looked different. He had the build of a younger man, with a thick chest floating over a trim waist. He clenched and unclenched his large hands restlessly, without any trace of arthritis.

It was surreal seeing the president up close. Particularly since all traces of the grandfatherly elder statesman had vanished.

Unnerved, I studied the lone Secret Service agent behind Waters, a tall man with the dark hair and bronze skin of a Native American. His features seemed carved from stone. I had never seen a face so implacable, so dispassionate. The agent did not even appear to be breathing.

“So you’re the punk trying to fuck with me,” President Waters seethed, strangling the tension. “Listen to me, Simon Jones, or whatever your real name is, and listen well. I run a secret government that exists behind the scenes, a government full of intricate conspiracies that you’ll never see Peter Jennings blathering about on the evening news. I don’t know how you found out about me and your little girlfriend, but if you ever talk or write about me again to anyone, you’ll find out what the government’s really keeping in Area 51 out there in Nevada, and you’ll wish it was just a bunch of dead aliens. Understand?”

The remnants of the slightly befuddled public persona he’d constructed slipped away like packing peanuts. Bob Denver wasn’t really a castaway named Gilligan, and John Waters wasn’t really a genial Republican prone to homespun rhetoric and jokes about his beloved red M&M’s.

I tried to think of an appropriate response. “You mean you really were fucking Kim?”

Furious, Waters exploded out of his chair. He jabbed a steel finger into my chest.

“Don’t play dumb with me, smart ass! It didn’t work for Hitler last year and it won’t work for you now! I don’t know how you found out, but you know goddam well Kim died from autoerotic asphyxiation last month while I was in bed with her.”

My first impulse was to laugh, but that would have been suicide. President Waters wanted to kill me. I saw it in his eyes. Somehow—I made a mental note to both congratulate and bludgeon him—Jessie had managed to hit upon the truth while concocting the statement I gave the press after Kim died.

“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” I said carefully. “We didn’t mean to seriously accuse you of . . . well, anything. It was all just a joke—”

“WE? WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE?”

In a flash Waters seized the front of my shirt and yanked me out of my chair.

“Jessie Logan,” I said. “One of the guys I live with! He helped me make up that press statement. I didn’t like Kim and I wanted to make the media look stupid. You know how they are, right? It was just for fun. I swear I didn’t know you were, uh, sleeping with my girlfriend.”

I grimaced at the mental picture.

President Waters released me and sat back, nodding thoughtfully and glancing at something behind me. “I believe you—but only because the monitors in this room say you’re telling the truth. Nevertheless, I find it hard to believe you made all of it up.”

He tapped his chin. “I’m going to let you go, Simon, but with a warning. Remember, I have nuclear weapons and know how to use them. If you cross me, or ever mention any of this to anyone, especially the Obfuscator, you’ll regret it. If it weren’t for the fucking press, you’d already be shit in the Minotaur’s colon. Remember, rats get what they deserve: rat poison.”

“Did you say Minotaur’s colon?” I asked, bemused.

Waters chuckled dryly. “Never mind that. You need to worry about your own ass. Remember that CNN reporter last year who said that a Russian expedition to the Arctic Circle had discovered a cave leading to a vast underground city?”

I frowned. “No.”

“My point exactly.” The president glanced up. “Get him out of here.”

A cloth dipped in chemicals was clamped over my nose. Everything went green, then purple, then black. And then magenta, and then black once more.

After I was carted off, President Waters stood and faced Bannor.

“I must discover how he found out the truth. Alert my operatives. I want him watched. If he tells anyone what he knows, they’ll have to be silenced.”

Chapter 8

Several hours later, I let myself into our house and immediately punched Jessie in the arm. I told him and Thurston about being abducted by the president.

“Liar,” Nick said, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a sandwich.

I ignored him. “Apparently, Kim really was having an affair with the president.”

Jessie shook his head. “That’s impossible. It was a joke.”

I shrugged. “I know, but he says he really did strangle her during sex.” I paused. “Plus I think Hitler is still alive, and Waters also mentioned something about a Minotaur and an underground city below the North Pole. Oh, and he threatened to take me to Area 51 and feed me to whatever the government has imprisoned there. I gather it’s not just dead aliens.”

“Of course they’re not all dead,” Thurston replied. “How else could they help the military build hypersonic space planes and a working replica of the Millennium Falcon?”

“Ha ha!” Nick laughed. “Kim was cheating on you.”

“This is ridiculous,” Jessie said. “I’m sure it will blow over once Waters checks us out.”

“You could tell the media,” Nick said.

Thurston laughed. “I think they blew whatever credibility they had last month. No one will believe anything they say now.”

I frowned. “Thurston’s right. And watch yourself, Jessie. You might be next.”

“Couldn’t you talk to someone at work?” Nick asked me.

“I no longer work for the Obfuscator,” I said. “There was some . . . unpleasantness.”

Thurston stared. “You resigned?”

“What happened?” Jessie asked.

“Shut up and I’ll tell you,” I said. “Okay, this is exactly what happened, I swear on this Koran.”

*     *     *

After being released that morning, I quickly made my way to The Washington Obfuscator, the newspaper infamous for breaking the Nixon-Elvis wife-swapping scandal and the Reagan deaf-mime rape imbroglio. My job there consisted of moving the text of articles from one database to another to facilitate research and online publishing. It sounded good on paper, but my days were filled with mind games, long hours, and conniving supervisors who couldn’t be trusted not to molest puppies.

I was convinced my boss wasn’t even human, no matter how well she’d mastered the trick of human speech. And my coworkers were a study in mediocrity. Having aspired to work anywhere, they’d achieved all their employment goals a week after graduating high school, which they undoubtedly loved.

It wasn’t the ideal job for me. Like many Maryland boys, I’d longed to follow in my great-great-grandfather’s footsteps and slaughter Kentuckians. But I was held back by my crippling depression, webbed toes, and habitual lying about having webbed toes. Nor would I probably ever know the joy of clubbing seal hunters or stalking and raping celebrities.

Yes, George Burns was safe. For the time being.

But was this really what evolution had in mind? Working in an office and staring at a PC all day? I seemed to be suffering from an inordinate amount of soul suckage. And the inspirational plaques bolted over our workstations didn’t help matters.

Arbeit Macht Frei, my ass.

            After threading my way through the vast newsroom, I’d nearly reached my desk when the malformed head of my supervisor, Shirley Hzhgtaer, popped up above her gray cubicle wall.

            Scowling, she smacked her lips. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Shirley was tall, her body roped in thick layers of fat, putrid flesh. Thanks to anti-discrimination laws, my boss was apparently an ogre of some kind, hired, according to office lore, straight out of an unpublished Neil Gaiman story. She had the gray skin of a stillborn infant, speckled with leprous growths and raised, reddish-brown sores that occasionally erupted and belched forth thick rivulets of pus.

She drooled at me and smiled, revealing yellow, decaying teeth. I shuddered under her baleful glare, but refused to give her the victory she so desperately craved.

“I bet you have, bitch,” I said, abandoning all pretense of civility as I walked to my desk.

“What was that?” Shirley barked behind me, whirling and unleashing a smattering of dung beetles from the filthy rotted mass of her hair. They smacked the desktops and fled to whatever darkness they could find. I imagined them crawling through drawers of candy bars and bags of chips, to be eaten alive later by my coworkers.

Slumping into my chair and flipping on my PC, I ignored the slushing sounds of my boss as she maneuvered her misshapen body between my coworkers’ empty desks. Predictably, they were nowhere to be found, their absence part of the morning routine.

“What did you say to me?”

She was behind me now. I heard the insects in her clothes and hair clicking, mimicking her breathy voice. Wearily, I swiveled my chair around.

“Listen up, plague monkey. I was kidnapped yesterday by President Waters because I found out he murdered my girlfriend while he was fucking her. He let me go but had me drugged and dumped in an alley. I just woke up 30 minutes ago. If you have a problem with my lateness, I suggest you bring it up with the president. But frankly it’s a personal matter and I resent your constant bitching about how I’m such a terrible employee. Now, go back to whatever cancerous hellhound ripped you from its defiled loins.”

The green veins in her eyes bulged. I took this as a bad sign.

“What?!” Shirley roared, smacking my desk with a wet thud. She planted her malformed claws on her hips.

“You want to play?” I asked. “All right. Let’s talk about the dozens of emails you send me every day—even though my desk is only eight feet from yours—detailing how I’m a bad employee when I’m the only one in this goddam place who ever does any work.”

Shirley wrinkled her three nostrils. “How do you figure?”

I gestured at the otherwise empty section of cubicles. “I know Dave is off today, but where the fuck is everyone else? Let me guess—the ones that didn’t call in sick yet again have spent the last hour in the cafeteria. Once they get back up here they’ll spend most of the day working hard at not working hard. Diane will spend most of the day on the phone with her goddam family, and Lewis, when he bothers to show up at all, will get here an hour or two late and leave an hour or two early. And you’re so fucking incompetent you just stand there like an oozing venereal wart when you should be firing them and falling on your knees begging me to take a promotion. Why the fuck do they still work here?”

My supervisor grinned. Her breath hit me like Zyklon B hitting the showers in Auschwitz. “Because they do things for me . . .”

Chuckling, she heaved her unwieldy bulk in the direction of her desk. “Your excuse isn’t going to work, Simon, especially since you told us yourself three weeks ago that you made up that press statement. I’ll see you in Jane Mg’nflwtah’s office in an hour.”

I stood up. “That’s not fair! I’m telling the truth!”

Shirley turned, scattering more vermin from the tangles of her hair. “Then just have President Waters call me and confirm that he kidnapped you last night.”

I blinked as her wide, bulbous eyes bore into me. Yet I restrained the urge to shiver or, better yet, just go home. “The president would have me killed.”

That horrible smile returned to Shirley’s misshapen maw. “Your point being?”

My mouth closed as she returned to her own cubicle. Then, as I caught Shirley’s meaning regarding my coworkers, my eyes bulged in revulsion. I slapped my hand over my mouth, but it was too late to stop the bile from rising. They do things for me . . .

“I did not hear that, I did not hear that . . .”

Spying one of Shirley’s beetles crawling across my desk, I crushed it beneath my tape dispenser. I was surprised how good it felt.

Even on the best of days, I’d never liked my job. A burgeoning migraine took root as I trudged to Jane Mg’nflwtah’s office an hour later.

Most department heads had glass doors and glass walls to create an open, inviting atmosphere in the newsroom. Jane Mg’nflwtah’s door, by contrast, was solid and black. Her gray, cinder block walls complemented the black carpet and endless rows of gray cubicles—and their lifeless, gray-skinned occupants. Beside her door was a black plastic nameplate held in a steel frame. JANE MG’NFLWTAH, it read, and under that in smaller script was the odd, inscrutable phrase Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. I didn’t understand a word of it, but reading it always made me shudder.

Swallowing hard, I skipped knocking and walked right in. The door closed behind me of its own volition, presumably—hopefully—on an automatic hinge. I halted just inside, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom.

Jane’s windowless office lacked the overhead fluorescent lights that lit the newsroom 24 hours a day. The only illumination came from a single iron brazier standing in the corner. Although it flamed and popped with a foul-smelling substance that smelled like the dried shit of a very sick animal, it shed precious little light.

I didn’t see Jane, but smelled Shirley immediately. She was ensconced in a chair off to my right, luxuriating in my coerced presence. Her eyes gleamed red in the gloom.

“Have a seat, please,” Jane Mg’nflwtah rumbled, her voice calling to mind forgotten, subterranean caverns haunted by ancient gods, or their ghosts.

I glimpsed the outline of a pale, beckoning arm behind the desk. I’d only been in the office once before, and aside from the impression of a vague figure looming in the shadows, I’d never really gotten a good look at Jane.

Ignoring Shirley’s snickering, I took a seat and folded my left leg across my right knee. My initial fear of Shirley had waned over the months, and I was in no mood for Jane’s theatrics. Tapping my thumbs together, I sat back in my chair and waited.

Several minutes passed as Shirley probed me with her crimson orbs. I sensed Jane’s eyes on me as I waited them out. Finally Jane sighed disagreeably, provoking a whimper from Shirley.

“Well, Simon,” Jane said. She shifted in her chair, producing a sound like gore sluicing through the grating in a slaughterhouse floor. I wondered what she really looked like, although the longer I remained in her presence the less curious I became.

“Shirley tells me you’ve been late to work a lot recently,” Jane continued. “And that you were over an hour and a half late this morning. Quite frankly, it’s inexcusable.”

Shirley nodded smugly.

My migraine was in full swing. Picturing the blood vessels in my brain swelling and shrinking in an excruciating rhythm, I wondered if I possessed enough self-control to keep from making a quick trip to a gun store. It was, I mused, better to be prepared for these sorts of meetings.

“My lateness this morning was unavoidable, as I’ve already explained,” I said. “And while I have been late a few times—perhaps as much as 15 minutes—I still arrive earlier than my other coworkers, who are usually an hour or two late. I won’t accept any sort of reprimand unless they’re punished as well.”

Jane laughed with shrill abandon. “I’m afraid that really isn’t up to you.”

“It’s not?” I asked, bored to indifference.

“Correct. Shirley has a paper for you to sign that denotes that you are now on probation. If you commit any further offenses, you may be suspended or fired. Is that clear?”

“No,” I said, unimpressed by her galling bravado. “Just because you two lumbering land tumors say something is true doesn’t make it so. I suggest you reconsider.”

Shirley Hzhgtaer stared at me with barely restrained hatred.

“All right, we’ll reconsider,” Jane Mg’nflwtah replied, pausing imperceptibly. “No. Either sign the paper now, admitting you’re the worst employee in the history of this newspaper, or face immediate termination.”

I laughed. “Termination, as in firing?”

“No,” they said simultaneously.

“In that case, am I correct to assume a raise is out of the question?” I asked.

Shirley tittered derisively. A second later, her boss joined in.

I smiled. “Okay, you win. Just let me go get my pen.”

Before they could respond, I left, breathing a sigh of relief when the door closed behind me. Halfway to the elevator, I spotted something on the wall and got an idea.

A sudden, crazy, fantabulous idea.

When I returned to Jane Mg’nflwtah’s office, I sauntered in with my right hand behind my back. Already my migraine seemed to be dissipating.

“Well?” Jane asked. “Are you ready to sign now?”

Shirley Hzhgtaer got up and slushed toward me, proffering the paper. I turned toward her as if to take it, then raised my right hand—the hand with the dusty red fire ax—and swung it in a wide arc that brought the ax down on Shirley’s misshapen head.

Jane roared with fury. Shirley shrieked as the blade went several inches into her skull. I planted my boot on her chest and wrenched it free. A staggering amount of yellow pus spurted forth. I backed away, gagging.

Shirley somehow lumbered after me, her eyes fixed upon me and exuding raw hatred. Jane commanded her in a foreign tongue wholly unfamiliar to my ears. Despite the wound, Shirley screamed and threw herself at me, planting her claws on my throat.

We struggled, overturning the chairs. Finally, after what seemed like an eon, I forced Shirley back and kicked her square in her distended gut. Her claws released me and I gasped, sucking in precious oxygen. When she lunged forward again, the steel blade of my ax sank into her throat with a delicious thunk.

Jane Mg’nflwtah roared in the darkness, but I ignored her. Shirley’s wounds gushed more of that yellow fluid, her baleful eyes still fixed upon me. I swung the ax again and again, past the brink of exhaustion, until I succeeded in severing her head from her body. A dozen more whacks subdued her flailing limbs.

I stood there panting, no longer caring about the stench or the gore on my clothes. When I noticed Shirley’s eyes staring up at me, I kicked her head into the shadows.

“You think you’ve won, don’t you?” Jane Mg’nflwtah said.

I peered into the shadows beyond her massive desk. “You two were going to kill me if I didn’t sign your precious paper.”

“Eventually.”

I shrugged. “You know what? I don’t care anymore. I quit. And I better get paid for all my vacation time, too.”

Jane chuckled. “You may find leaving this building to be the greatest challenge of your short human life.”

I smiled. “Is that so? Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, someone was snooping around my desk and left herself signed on at my PC. The next morning, I clicked on some folders and found some very interesting files, which I printed out and took home.”

“You’re lying,” she hissed.

I shook my head. “No, you lied to the personnel office about those 14 temp employees who supposedly quit after only one day of work. I know what you did to them—or, to be more precise, where you stored them until you and Shirley ate them. It was a good plan. Who would ever suspect a secret door behind the cartons of Xerox paper in the supply room?”

“How dare you!”

I rubbed the side of my head. “I’m leaving now. If you fuck with me again, you’ll find yourself in a nice brightly lit jail cell before you can say cannibalism.”

“Someone who is not human yet consumes human flesh cannot accurately be deemed a cannibal!”

I shuddered and flung down the ax. “By the way, you’re a terrible manager and a very petty woman. Or whatever you are.”

“Get out!”

I went back to my desk to collect a few odds and ends, including my nameplate and $200 worth of AA batteries. My coworkers were nowhere in sight.

Three days later, Jane Mg’nflwtah lost her job after the Obfuscator’s CEO received an anonymous packet in the mail. Dave told me everyone in the department was ecstatic to see her go. Jane shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, just because someone smiles and greets you with a “Good morning!” doesn’t mean they don’t want to bash your head in with a piano leg or hire clowns to rape your children.

Jane had never been seen entering or leaving the office, and she simply disappeared the day she was fired. Her home address turned out to be a vacant lot, the site of an 18^th-century church that burned to the ground after a scandal involving a cult. When workers entered her former office to begin renovations, they found a long hallway behind the desk that connected to the vacant turn-of-the century building next door—one of four interconnected Obfuscator buildings. The workers, using flashlights because all the lights in the windowless hallway had been smashed, discovered an ancient maintenance elevator with strange smear marks on its dusty floor, like a six-year-old had mopped it.

Rumor has it a worker stepped into the dark elevator, flipped the lever, and descended automatically to the subbasement. When the steel grating swung open, the worker found himself in a cavernous chamber packed with old newspapers, office chairs and mountains of moldering boxes. Except for the area by the elevator, the walls were invisible. The room might have been claustrophobically small—or practically endless.

Rumor has it the worker attempted to make his way through the maze of junk but gave up after hearing something moving around behind the impassable walls of stacked newspapers. Something large that shuffled and whispered, over and over, the mad phrase the man later recognized from the plaque outside Jane Mg’nflwtah’s office—Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

Rumor has it that after the vacant building was imploded two years later, the site was excavated and workers discovered a sealed-up trolley car tunnel beneath it. The tracks ended in a gaping underground hole flooded with foul water.

Rumor has it that the construction workers tried to gauge the depth of the water, but found their instruments insufficient for the task.

Rumor has it that at least one worker fell into the eldritch sea before the whole mess was ordered sealed up, and that his body was never recovered.

Or so rumor has it.

*     *     *

            “No way,” Nick said.

            “What really happened?” Jessie asked.

            I scowled. “Fine. Don’t believe me. The main thing is that I’m unemployed now, okay? The details are irrelevant.”

            “Isn’t that what Hitler used to say?” Thurston replied.

“Never mind,” I said. I shuffled off to my bedroom, disconsolate.

Chapter 9

So I was a twenty-three-year-old with a college degree, and my biggest professional accomplishment was murdering my boss with an ax. My future looked brighter and brighter. Not that I’d miss the job that underpaid and overworked me, forcing me to endure condescending articles about twentysomething “kids” by ninetysomething columnists who incessantly reminisced about the good ’ol days covering the McKinley assassination. Unfortunately, I had less than $30 in my checking account at Riggs Bank to cover my rent and $3,400 Visa bill.

I thought of entropy, not for the first time. Thurston had said that everything fell apart because of entropy, so it was entropy I blamed. I didn’t quite know what entropy actually was, but I imagined a grotesque monster slouched in a cave somewhere, chewing on the bones of mastodons and optimists.

I wondered how long I could live off my credit cards, and whether killing my boss disqualified me from unemployment. It was a financial nightmare, and rather than deal with it I called Jake to see if he wanted to hang out. But his sister answered and said he was out. Then she asked who I was.

“Uh, Simon,” I said. “I met Jake at the 9:30 Club on Saturday. A week ago.”

“Oh, Simon, I remember you.”

“You do?” I said, surprised. “Is this, um, Angeline?”

“That’s me. Jake should be back soon. Why don’t you come over and wait for him?”

Was this the same beautiful woman I’d seen at the club? She sounded friendlier than I expected. I wrote down her directions, then put on jeans, an L7 shirt, Doc Martens, and a leather jacket—all black. I reached the Silver Spring subway stop in Maryland about an hour later.

I spotted Angeline at the exact moment I grabbed my farecard from the exit turnstile. As a result I tripped and nearly bowled over an old woman. But I couldn’t look away from Jake’s gorgeous sister. Her dark beauty held me entranced as harried commuters passed me with a parade of frowns. In a mild panic, I scrambled for my dropped farecard, apologized to the old woman, and smiled casually at Angeline, who stood by the Metro system maps laughing, her tall body a black silhouette that suggested any number of possibilities.

She came forward to intercept me.

I couldn’t stop smiling. “I didn’t expect you to meet me. You did give me directions.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s such a long walk, and since I wasn’t doing anything I thought I’d pick you up. So to speak.”

I grinned and made myself look away. “Thanks.”

As she led me through the Silver Spring Metro Station to her car, I realized we looked like a couple to the thinning crowd. I couldn’t help but sweat profusely, and I had a hard time keeping my eyes strictly on her face. She wore a tight, purple shirt under a black leather jacket over faded jeans and black boots.

“So, you’re Jake’s sister,” I said cleverly.

“Yeah.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing I like,” Angeline replied. “I’ve had three different jobs since graduating from college last year. That’s one of the reasons I’m still living with my mom.”

I nodded. “Your parents divorced too?”

A smile. “Yep. My dad lives in Texas.”

She led me to a dark blue Ford Tempo, confessing that it used to be her mom’s.

“Hey, it’s better than my car,” I said. When she waited for me to elaborate, I shrugged. “Don’t have one.”

She chuckled as she unlocked my door. The radio, tuned to WHFS, played a Concrete Blonde song. I watched Angeline drive, periodically forcing myself to look away. I didn’t want her to think I was a complete perv.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“Not much anymore. I had to resign today.”

“Let me guess—a personality conflict with your boss?”

“Something like that.”

She smelled like a dream bathed in illusions. I wondered if she were real.

A few minutes later she parked in the driveway of a split-level suburban house, one in an endless line of similar homes with brick facades and neatly mowed lawns.

“The suburbs always make me think of that Shirley Jackson story,” I said.

“Oh, the one where the housewife thinks her husband has been replaced by an exact double? And after she goes shopping she can’t find her way home because all the houses in the subdivision look exactly alike?”

I was stunned. “Yeah! ‘The Beautiful Stranger.’ That’s amazing.”

Angeline smiled as she unlocked the front door. She called upstairs for Jake, but there was no reply. I followed her inside but hesitated by the door.

She tossed her jacket on the couch. “Alone at last. You’re not going to kill me or anything, are you?”

Or anything sounded pretty good, but I grinned instead. “Nah, my parole officer’s been riding my ass ever since. A woman and a bunch of girls knocked on my door, and long story short, it turns out they were selling cookies and not Girl Scouts. In my defense, I only ate one.”

Laughing, she took my jacket and threw it on top of hers. “Do you want a Coke?”

“Sure.” I started to follow her to the kitchen, then stopped. “What if Jake’s upstairs but didn’t hear you?”

Angeline paused. “Maybe. You can check his room while I get our sodas.”

I went upstairs and looked around. The room with the king-sized bed obviously belonged to their mother, and another room, judging by the pink walls and folded black clothes on a canopy bed, had to be Angeline’s.

The last bedroom, Jake’s, was empty. His unmade bed was strewn with clothes and textbooks, including The Fatal Disease of Algebra and U.S. History: Sanitized for Your Protection. Stickers plastered his mirror, and the walls were covered with posters of Alice in Chains, Nine Inch Nails, Helmet and Ministry, plus several pictures of shirtless skateboarders. On a crate that served as a nightstand were an open can of Coke, a red spiral notebook, a box of Kleenex, and a pump bottle of Jergens Vitamin E Enriched Lotion.

I snorted. Some things about teenage boys never changed.

Scanning Jake’s CDs, I found all the usual alternative suspects. I flipped through his magazines, and wasn’t surprised to find an old copy of Penthouse. However, I was surprised to find the magazine at the bottom of the stack. It was another sex mag, but it was about as different from Penthouse as you could get. I glanced at a few pages, shaking my head in disbelief.

I was slipping it back when I heard Angeline on the stairs.

“He’s not in there, is he?”

“No, I was just looking at his CDs,” I said, coming out of his room. I wondered how much she knew about her brother’s sexual interests. “Thanks for the soda.”

“No problem. I guess you saw my room too,” she said, wincing.

I nodded, standing in her doorway as she walked to the edge of her bed and sat down. She watched me but said nothing. Unless my hormones were working overtime, a sexual tension was beginning to pervade the atmosphere.

“So, tell me, Simon,” she said at last. “What do you want with my brother? You’re twenty-three, right? You know he’s only sixteen, don’t you?”

“Yeah. He started talking to me at the 9:30 Club, and I thought we could maybe go to a concert sometime. I’m tired of always hanging out with my housemates.”

“You know, I saw your news conference,” Angeline said. “It’s pretty funny, what you did. Jake told me all about it. But aren’t you sad Kim died?”

I sighed. “Yeah, but I was going to break up with her that night. I could tell you there was never anything physical between us, but that wouldn’t begin to explain it. We never had anything between us—physically or emotionally. I tried to talk to her, but she just wouldn’t let me in. All we ever did was hang out a few times and watch TV.”

I paused, searching for the right words. “I didn’t know what to think of Kim before she died, and I don’t know what to think about her now. It’s like she was gone before she died, because she was never really there. I’ve had deeper relationships with bank tellers.”

And now that I really thought about it, Kim probably had been in love—just not with me.

“What’s it like to be a media sensation?” Angeline asked. “You must get recognized everywhere.”

I shrugged. “It’s about the same as being an unknown office slave, except for getting kidnapped by the president of the United States.”

“What? The president didn’t abduct you. That would have been on the news!”

I grinned. “You’d be surprised by what the president can get away with. I was.”

She studied my face for a moment. “Are you serious? What happened?”

“I probably shouldn’t say anything, but what the hell—it’s not like the president would have us killed or anything.”

Angeline sat on her bed and leaned forward as I described my encounter with President Waters. She was mad gorgeous, a dark angel delivered unto me for reasons I dared not question. Was this really the same woman from the 9:30 Club? How had she ever seemed so unapproachable? I didn’t know what had changed, but I found it hard to care.

“That’s bizarre,” she replied, shaking her head as she stood and walked toward me.

“Surreal too,” I added, staring at her breasts and lips.

Angeline stopped and looked at me, contemplating something in my eyes. I held her gaze, feeling my sense of self slip away. Her eyes drowned me. Her impossible dark beauty conquered me. She seemed to radiate a fierce heat that made me desperate to press myself against her. As the silence grew, my hormones gained a quick advantage over my intellect.

In the end I had no recourse but to kiss her.

I leaned forward. When my lips were an inch from her mouth, she stepped aside. Off balance, I fell face-first into the wall, nearly dropping my Coke.

Angeline laughed as I rubbed my throbbing nose. I blinked at her. “What was that?!”

She grinned. “You weren’t trying to take advantage of a defenseless girl all alone in a big empty house, were you?”

“Maybe,” I replied as she took a step backward—toward her bed.

She smiled. “A guy tried to attack me once. I stabbed him 200 times.”

“I like a girl with persistence,” I said, thinking that dying in her arms would be worth it. Her eyes, her smile, and the way her tongue moistened her lips held me fast.

She pointed. “Sit on my bed.”

Paralyzed by an extraordinary level of trepidation, I sat in the same spot she had occupied a moment earlier. She placed our Cokes on her dresser and fished out a CD from a rack beside her small Sony stereo.

“When’s your mom get home?” I asked, swinging my legs.

Angeline smiled. “Not for another hour or two. There is no escape, I assure you.”

She offered a sly smile and pressed PLAY. The first song on Doppelgänger, a Curve CD, came on: “Already Yours.”

“I love this album,” I said in amazement.

She grabbed the front of my jeans. “You’ll find that I’m full of surprises.”

I stared at her, feeling trapped in a delirious play. Things like this never happened in real life—did they? But it was too late. All conscious thought had drained from my brain.

Angeline began to rub the contour of my instantaneous, twelve-year-old-in-a-whorehouse erection. “Do you like it?”

Having lost the trick of speech, I moaned.

Our eyes locked as she stroked my jeans, which seemed filled with iron, the flesh transmuted somehow. Wincing, I leaned forward and again attempted to kiss her. But she eluded me, smiling. Such perfect white teeth she had, such flawless pale skin. I decided I’d rather die than continue suffering such restrained torture.

My fingers raced to unbutton and unzip my jeans. My penis poked free at once, emerging expectantly from the slit in my boxers. Angeline, for whom I would now readily die a thousand prolonged deaths, wasted no time in grasping it.

I closed my eyes, helpless.

Her mouth enveloped my penis without warning. I gasped, quivering, as she knelt by the bed, licking and sucking the length of my erection. Losing myself in a fleeting century of exquisite agony, I moaned again.

She was quite talented. Before two minutes had passed, I began to shake. I closed my eyes. Wrapping my legs around her, I buried my fingers in her midnight tresses.

I opened my eyes as I exploded, and was startled to see Angeline’s brother, Jake, watching us from the doorway. With her back to the door and her face buried in my groin, Angeline never saw him.

Jake, in a large Misfits t-shirt and baggy skater shorts, simply stood there with a backpack dangling from one finger. I stared at him, helpless, as the remainder of my orgasm rolled through me.

On the stereo, Curve played on.

Jake regarded me silently, his face expressionless.

A few seconds later, I closed my eyes, spent. Angeline licked the rest of the semen trailing from my penis, which I tucked back into my boxers. I fastened my jeans, then pulled Angeline up and hugged her. This time she didn’t dance away.

In the doorway, there was no sign of Jake.

When I tried to kiss Angeline, she slipped away, laughing.

“That was good. Thank you,” I murmured. “I don’t know what to say.”

Angeline smiled again, bowing slightly. “You don’t have to say anything.”

Then I remembered that perhaps there was one thing I should say, but I wavered.

Instead, I said casually, “I think I heard something. Maybe your brother’s home.”

“You heard Jake?” she asked quickly. Without waiting for my response, she walked to his bedroom door, which was now closed, and knocked on his door.

I had no idea what to say. I certainly didn’t want Angeline to regret what she had just done. Maybe discretion really was the better part of valor.

“What?” Jake yelled.

“Simon’s here,” Angeline said through the door. “He came over to see you.”

There was a pause from inside. “Tell him I’m busy. I have homework.”

Angeline glanced at me. “I wonder when he got home?” she whispered.

“Just now,” I murmured. “After.”

She looked relieved.

I turned back to the door and raised my voice. “Call me if you want to hang out.”

Jake didn’t respond.

“I’ll be back later,” Angeline yelled. “Tell Mom we’re going out.”

“We are?” I asked, scurrying downstairs after her.

She smiled. “Yes.”

“I’m game.”

“Good. That’s very good.”

Chapter 10

Fort Lincoln Cemetery was dark and deserted—no watchmen, no creatures of the undead. Despite what every horror movie and novel would have you believe, graveyards provide little sustenance. As long as we avoided cemeteries at dusk and dawn, when the undead were coming and going like weary commuters, we’d be safe.

It was after nine. The sun had been down more than an hour when I stepped out of the car and swung the iron gate open. Luckily it was only latched, not locked.

The destination was Angeline’s idea, although I had suggested Fort Lincoln because it was large enough to conceal us from the road. Somewhere among these sprawling, forlorn hills lay the site of Anne’s internment.

“That’s never happened to me before,” I said, referring to the blowjob.

She smiled. “I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“You felt sorry for me, right?” I asked. “Because of Kim.”

Angeline snorted. “No. I just had a dysfunctional childhood. I don’t have any idea of how to actually date anyone.”

“Oh.”

The miles of paved roads inside the cemetery twisted like a fistful of flung ribbons. Angeline parked at random on a steep hill. We got out. After drinking in the somber darkness, I tried to kiss her. But once again she evaded my grasp. She skipped away into the grass, laughing.

The alien sound of her merriment was swallowed by the dark, where it was, perhaps, devoured. If the inhabitants of nursing homes were starved for the attention of their loved ones, in what frantic state were the spirits of this lonely place?

I threaded my way after her, trying to avoid tripping on the headstones that loomed everywhere like a silent, shuffling crowd. The pale light of the crescent moon concealed more than it revealed.

Angeline seemed to have no such trouble. Like a spirit herself, she drew further and further away and then vanished. For several minutes, I stumbled gamely after her. When I glimpsed a pale figure in the distance, I headed towards it. But I found only a statue of an angel, its arms outstretched in supplication or despair.

I looked around at the silent dark. “Where are you?”

No reply. Instead, a hand fell upon my shoulder.

I exploded out of my skin and whirled. As my heart hurled itself against my ribs, aluminum flooded my mouth. The air turned frigid. Shivering uncontrollably, I spied a tall forbidding figure in black.

“Hello, Simon. What brings you to our domain?”

Death grinned down at me, his eyes concealed by the same wraparound sunglasses—Gargoyles, in fact. I blinked at his deceptively youthful face, actually relaxing when I recognized him—although I admit this was not a logical response. His silver hoop earrings glittered like stars in the moonlight, and his unkempt black hair contrasted violently with his flawless alabaster skin. Except for his thin, dark eyebrows, his hands and face were devoid of all hair. He was a black and white photo come to life.

For a second, I couldn’t move. How ethereal he looked in the darkness, more ghost than flesh. Yet he radiated power. Standing, he was easily seven feet, but impossibly thin, emaciated even. He could not have weighed more than 140 or 150 pounds. Dimly, I realized we were both dressed in black.

“Do you know us, Simon?”

I nodded. In one fluid motion, he removed his sunglasses. I gasped as the world slid away, superfluous.

Death’s eyes, overshadowed by a high brow, burned relentlessly within cavernous sockets. The orbs possessed neither whites nor pupils, and the color was wholly unfamiliar. His eyes boiled with ruin, caged within his skull like a pair of exploding stars.

Supernova eyes.

When I looked away, twin flames hung in my vision for several seconds.

“We are similar,” Death said, his tone plaintive. “Your life is darker than most.”

“What?”

“Your soul was birthed from darkness eons ago, Simon. We’ve followed its path since before this place existed.”

“Huh? You mean before the cemetery?”

Death smiled. “No—this planet. It does not matter now.”

“You don’t look that old.”

“Death finds us everywhere and anywhere—at any age,” he said, as his inhuman eyes penetrated me with a burning, unnatural interest.

I stared back, once again seeking to discern their foreign color. But it was useless.

“Why do you keep doing this?” I asked.

“Doing what?” Death repeated, still smiling. When he shrugged, I saw his long arms were draped in black robes more in keeping with the traditional image of the Grim Reaper.

“What do you want from me?” I asked, unable to stop shivering.

“We don’t want anything from you. The question is, what do you want from us?”

I blinked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He did not answer, but instead walked away. He moved soundlessly, without rushing, while I struggled to keep pace. I stumbled repeatedly as he glided past every gravestone.

Then Death stopped and whirled, a great looming figure encased in obsidian. While his eyes burned into me, his long pale hands ripped apart his flowing robes.

I stared in shock. Beneath the robes Death was naked, his alabaster skin gleaming like flesh transmuted into porcelain. In truth, his physique differed little from my own. But something ghastly had been done to him. Uneasily healed scars crisscrossed his abdomen and legs, only to be crossed yet again by fresher scars—layers upon layers of scars. The most recent wounds gaped bloodlessly, the flesh savaged and unhealed. Not a square inch of his abdomen was whole. And the wounds appeared concentrated around his genitals.

“What do you see?” Death asked.

As I stared, frozen, blood began to pour from his wounds in an impossible torrent. He closed his eyes as it splashed his feet. “I’m dying,” he whispered.

And still the ichor rained onto the sodden ground. A flood of blood.

I backed away. “It’s . . . unspeakable. But I don’t understand.”

“Remember,” Death said, closing his robes. He walked behind a crypt.

“I don’t understand,” I repeated, feeling the night grow warm again.

My shivering stopped as I skirted the dark pool and set off after him, determined to get answers. Approaching the back of the old crypt, I found nothing except trees and the six-foot chain link fence that encircled the cemetery. I walked around the crypt.

Its doors were chained and padlocked. Death was gone.

*     *     *

“So there you are,” Angeline said, jumping out at me as I passed a large headstone. But my capacity to be frightened was exhausted.

She hugged me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I managed a laugh. “No, just Death.”

She smiled. “There’s something erotic about cemeteries, don’t you think?” she whispered, slipping her fingers beneath my hair and grasping the back of my neck.

“I think I like the direction this is going in. What do you want to do?”

“You,” she said, moving closer and tracing the edge of my lips with her tongue. But when I tried to return the half-kiss she pulled away.

“We could get caught,” I said. “Besides, it’s like fucking in a crowded room.”

“I know! That’s it exactly!”

And then her hands were on me and she was pulling me down onto an unmistakable rectangle of new sod.

A fresh grave.

My penis ignored the macabre setting as I fell onto Angeline. We kissed, finally. She tasted like wine from the vineyard of Dionysus himself—or maybe a mouthful of Pop Rocks and Cherry Kool-Aid. We rolled on the grave, entwining our limbs in endless confusion.

She yanked off my leather jacket, laying it on the moist grass. I slipped off her jacket and pulled off my shirt, watching hungrily as she struggled out of her jeans and scarlet panties. But she stopped me when I began to unfasten my own jeans.

“Hey! You don’t get off that easily,” Angeline said, pushing my head down, between her legs. She reclined on our jackets, writhing and moaning as I played her sex with my tongue.

The world fell away, drowned by our labored breathing and the rustling of our bodies.

After Angeline had two orgasms, judging by her cries, she let me up. I pulled off her shirt and black bra as she labored to unfasten my jeans. We stripped off everything, even our socks. My hands moved of their own accord to the perfect moonlit orbs of her breasts.

She squeezed my erection with a wondrous urgency. We kissed again as I guided myself into her, and measured her inner length with my erection. She gasped as I began to slide within her, sometimes in a slick rhythm, sometimes with a stabbing, frantic abandon.

A few minutes later it was over, the final ecstasy unlike anything I’d ever known. I felt enervated and energized. We rolled onto our sides, kissing, but soon the evaporating sweat sent us in search of our clothes, shivering.

We sat on our jackets after we dressed, glancing around at the night and each other. The air filled again with the familiar sounds of crickets and a few birds, accompanied by the hum of distant traffic. A cool wind blew through the trees and crypts.

“I suppose we should have used something,” Angeline murmured.

I nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t have any condoms. I did come over to see your brother.”

“I’ve never done this before,” she said. “My last boyfriend freaked when I told him about doing it in a graveyard. I told him to fuck off.”

I kissed her again. But she frowned. “What if I get pregnant? I’m not on the pill.”

“I’ll do whatever you want. It’s already something of a habit.”

“I’m pro choice, but I don’t know if I could have an abortion. And I call myself a Riot Grrl.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “Hey, just cause I buy the stuff mainstream corporate America tells me to, doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”

“I guess that makes me a Riot Boy. But abortions aren’t all bad. It’s a shitty world—dwindling natural resources, an exploding population, shark attacks. What kid deserves that?”

Angeline laughed. “So how long have you been depressed?”

I grinned. “Years and years.”

“That’s what I thought. When I was fourteen, my hobby was carving up my forearms with razor blades. I was on Zoloft for a while. It really helped.”

“That’s good—that it helped, I mean.”

We compared scars. Then she put my hand on her belly. “So you don’t want any kids?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Six days a week, if I had a switch that ended the world, I’d flip it. The seventh day—well, I’d probably forget. The world is an amusement park where all the rides have been sabotaged.”

“I can’t even imagine what your childhood must have been like.”

“Me neither.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“I’d rather discuss the economic situation in Uganda.”

“Never mind. There will be plenty of time later. At least you’re normal sexually,” she said. “I wonder why men are so freaky? You never hear about women having oral sex with severed heads.”

I shrugged. “The male sex drive is prone to mutations. If your Uncle Bob molests you while Bugs Bunny cartoons are on, you grow up wanting to molest rabbits. Men get bored and need more stimulation to get aroused, so by the time you’re fifty you end up in bed with an air compressor, a recently deceased tranny, a video of Weird Al Yankovic masturbating to an old Ronald Reagan speech, a dozen old-fashioned, hand-crank egg beaters—”

“Wow, you’re fucking crazy,” she said. “What are you going to do now, since you lost your job?”

I kissed her throat. “Well, I don’t want to run off to the suburbs to get married, have kids, get divorced because I got caught groping the teenage babysitter, and then eventually get remarried in a fit of drunken optimism.”

Angeline laughed. “Yeah, but what do you aspire to?”

“That’s the problem. I don’t know yet. What about you?”

She closed her eyes. “Something I haven’t found yet.”

“Something? Or someone?”

She smiled again, more beautiful than ever. “What were your parents like?”

            “Oh, they were practicing misopediaists—haters of children.”

            “Looks like your word-a-day calendar is paying off.”

            “Score one for the hot goth chick,” I said. “But my parents didn’t really hate kids. I just value extremes of good and bad more than bland monotony.”

“So? What happened?”

“Bland monotony. One night while they were watching Wheel of Fortune I put rat poison in their iced tea. After I stopped laughing, I buried them in the backyard and ran away.”

“Right. What really happened?”

“I forget. But I did change my name to Al Jourgensen—the singer from Ministry—and went to college using loans I never repaid. Then I got a job at The Washington Obfuscator thanks to a friend of a professor. Now you know more about me than anyone else.”

She stared at me. “What’s your real name?”

“I don’t remember anymore. But after college I changed my name again to the name of the Verve’s bass player, Simon Jones.”

“Why?”

“No reason.”

After she gave up trying to get me to reveal my real name, she told me about her childhood, including the story of how she got her first period while taking a shower in gym class. The other girls had tormented her with a bombardment of tampons.

I burst out laughing. “That wasn’t you! That was Carrie.”

She grinned. “Girls can lie too.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said, pushing her onto her back.

The night flew. We talked for hours, snuggling. It was after midnight when I reached for our jackets. Mine happened to be covering one of the flat, lawnmower-friendly brass name plaques. I could just make out the words:

ANNE MARIE FRANKLIN

November 24, 1971 - March 30, 1993

A Beloved Daughter, Sister and Niece—

Taken Too Soon by an Uncaring God

My heart skipped two beats. All too easily, the freshness of the grave was explained.

Angeline laughed. “Anyone you know?”

“No, of course not,” I said, forcing a laugh.

It was after one o’clock when we reached my house. Jessie, drowsily ensconced on the sofa with Julie, was munching the remnants of a bag of Cheetos. Julie looked worried.

Jessie glanced up. “Raise your hand if you were abducted by the president in the last 48 hours,” he said, uttering a shrill laugh.

I started to raise my hand before I understood. “Oh.”

“Want a Cheeto?” Jessie asked, proffering the bag. “I don’t feel so good.”

Chapter 11

            “Right here, Mr. President,” the aide said. Waters didn’t recall her name. Not that it mattered.

            “Oh, okay,” he replied, taking a step to his right. “How’s this?”

            She darted forward. “Um, just a few more steps this way, Mr. President. And could you hand me the M&M’s?”

            Waters looked down and appeared to be surprised he was holding his jar of red M&M’s. Reluctantly, he handed it over. She set it on his desk.

            “Right over here, sir,” she said, gliding back to his side as he started to wander toward the door.

Waters faced the spot she’d indicated. Somehow he managed a complete circle, ending up in the same spot to the left of the Oval Office fireplace.

            Maynard Keenan, his chief of staff, watched without comment.

The aide bit her lip. “Mr. President, I’m sorry, but could you please step over here? Next to me?” The photographers were waiting.

Waters was studying a bust of Lincoln. “Did you know Lincoln and his wife held séances here? He loved Edgar Allan Poe.”

The aide nodded patiently. “That’s very inter—”

“Not many people know this, but Lincoln’s mother died after drinking milk from a cow that had eaten poison mushrooms. I don’t know about you, but—”

“Please, Mr. President, if you’ll just come this way.”

“What? Oh, all right.”

The aide sighed, understanding now why the others had laughed when she’d volunteered to supervise the photo op.

Keenan nodded behind her. “You can let the kids in now, Stacy.”

Two-dozen teenagers flooded the room. Stacy and two male aides positioned them around the president. The boys wore dark pants, white shirts and ties. The girls wore long dark skirts and white blouses.

Waters smiled and patted their heads or touched their shoulders, asking their names and where they were from. Stacy signaled for the White House press pool. The noisy cadre of reporters and photographers poured in through the French doors.

“I’d like to thank these bright young men and women for coming here today,” President Waters said. “The children of our nation will be the parents of the future, of our great land’s future, when they have kids someday, after they’re married.”

Inwardly, Stacy grimaced.

The president smiled. “When I first ran for president, I vowed that the federal budget would spend as much on programs that teach abstinence until marriage as programs that provide contraceptives to elementary and other children—who are students in school, and young—receiving these sorts of mixed messages. I’m here today to salute these wonderful kids, who have pledged to refrain from sex until marriage, as part of the youth outreach program by the Family Culture Center’s Institute for Moral Conservative Heritage Coalition Foundation.”

Cameras clicked and flashed. Reporters scribbled and called out questions that went unanswered. President Waters shook hands with the kids, promising each of them a photo. And then the aides ushered everyone out.

In the hallway, one of the aides grinned at Stacy. “See what the old man’s like without a teleprompter?”

            Inside the Oval Office, Waters glanced at Keenan. “Don’t you have work?”

            Keenan disappeared without a word.

            Waters left his empty office, heading for the stairs. Without a word, Bannor appeared at his side. Minutes later, they reached an empty, linoleum-floored, florescent-lit hallway beneath the White House. Reaching a line of identical, unmarked steel doors, each painted a drab government gray, Waters produced a set of keys and unlocked one.

            He glanced at Bannor. “Wait here.”

            Waters entered and closed the door behind him. The room was empty, except for a second, inner door. Waters unlocked that one as well.

            A woman sat at a desk beyond the second door, in what appeared to be a nurse’s station. Monitors and medical equipment lined the walls, in cabinets or on shelves.

            The woman stood up, dropping a magazine. “Hello, Mr. President.”

            “Is she ready?”

            The woman nodded. “Room four. Dr. Phibes cleared her this morning.”

            The president was already past her. The lock buzzed as he reached room four. He let himself inside what appeared to be a generic hospital room. A bed, a TV on the wall, and a utilitarian table with a pitcher of water and a cup. No windows, of course. A second door opened onto a bathroom. Waters saw none of it.

            A girl lay in the bed, eyes closed, a bare breast revealed by a twist of the sheet. She had natural long blonde hair and a simple, all-American beauty. Although thin, she had the necessary curves. A pimple on her chin did nothing to detract from her loveliness.

            She was sixteen. Waters hadn’t bothered asking her name. The girl herself was probably too drugged to remember it. An orphan, her parents long dead. She was a ward of the state—or had been. Of which state exactly, Waters had no idea.

So it had come to this, he thought. Prostitutes too dangerous, interns too risky. Sometimes they fell in love, like Kim, or even his late wife. He shook his head.

He wasn’t happy with this state of affairs, but what else could he do? He had to be careful—he had too many secrets to protect.

            And she was beautiful, even sedated.

Waters turned off the security camera. Then he took off his pants.



*motorcade description based on 1990's security; some details slightly changed or withheld for reasons of national security

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