Strange Flesh

by Michael Olson

  “Huh. What do you think that meant?”

  “It meant that he was a fucking lunatic.”

  “Have you seen him since then?”

  “If I had, he’d be real easy to find now.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He’d be in the ICU over at Roosevelt.”

  He accompanies this statement with a practiced glower, implying that question time is over, unless I’m looking to warm up the hospital bed reserved for Billy. I want to laugh, but taking in the guys he’s recruited as bouncers makes me think that maybe Benito’s resurrected his father’s violent business culture. One’s sense of legacy can burn hot.

  I thank him for his time and leave the bottle.

  30

  A mobbed-up pornographer represents perfectly the twin obsessions of humanity: sex and violence. But while certainly of a piece with the Sadean content of Savant, Mondano’s precise role is unclear. Maybe he’s supposed to serve as inspiration for Billy’s players.

  Though they don’t seem to need much prompting. The next morning I find this blog post from Blue_Bella, a doyenne of cyber-kink chroniclers:

  My deviant darlings:

  Blue_Bella watches with delight the recent exxxplosion in concupiscent creativity sparked by Savant. So kudos to all you carnal cartoonists and video voluptuaries.

  However, your sapphire seductress views with some concern recent reports of material mayhem attributed to our new hobby:

  Item 1: We all heard about the house fire in Henderson, NV, caused by an amateur video troupe (filming day 13, scene 2) shorting out a battery pack when the barrel tipped over. Our thoughts are with the lead actor as he

  recovers from his “extremely unusual penile trauma.”

  Item 2: One Dr. Hans Vleiben, assistant professor of French literature at Portland State University, was arrested yesterday on charges of harassment and public indecency. Our hero followed a fetching young femme into the bathroom of a local church. There he unveiled for her appreciation no fewer than five full enema bags he’d sequestered in his waistband. A scene ensued.

  Vleiben’s lawyer maintains that the incident was a case of “mistaken identity” and that “discussions pertaining to colon health” are protected by the First Amendment.

  Item the third: Miami’s Lee_Cherry now seeks legal advice regarding the revolting rendezvous she had with a fellow Savant who proposed they reprise day 29, scene 2 (simulated necrophilia, natch). Something she takes pains to emphasize she’s “very into.” Once at his studio, however, he proposed certain measures to make the encounter “as realistic as possible.” Was he actually aiming for a scene much later in the book? We’ll never know, since our heroine clocked him with a handy shovel and fled. Poor etiquette, you say? Lee defends herself: “I’m not into real necro at all. Especially if I have to be the dead one.”

  Where are we headed with all this virtu-real xXx-pollination? No one knows. But your periwinkle paramour’s sources high in the Savant hierarchy cryptically hint that this February will be the hottest on record.

  Blue_Bella is not amused. She’s all in favor of a little spanky-panky, but she thinks violence is vile, and the Fever is a sickness. A real Savant keeps her mind open, but also her eyes.

  As with NeoRazi, Billy’s courting a blitzkrieg of lawsuits. And if Blue_ Bella’s Savant source is right, even worse is yet to come. But her sniffy reaction to his February comment felt like a non sequitur. Maybe there’s more to it. Something that makes her relate his words to the Fever.

  The case during which I first heard rumors of the Pyrexians featured a lot of obscure code names and references to sinister groups. Some of these shared a particularly dire profile, and we thought they might all be aliases for the same imaginary entity. The Burning Lads, the Wetmen, the Febrillians.

  Something about that last one seems related. “Febrile” is another word for “feverish,” but it also shares a linguistic connection with the month February. I look it up: the Latin word for fever, “febris,” refers to the purging of the body through sweat. Our second month’s name derives from an ancient Roman purification festival called Februa.

  Flipping back through my Reno case files, I find correspondence among some wealthy collectors of rare etchings depicting brutal child murders. They discuss an apocryphal club of Victorian eroticists called the Februarian Society of Ring and Rod. This was the oldest extant allusion to such a group we found in our investigations. The association’s name was mysterious though. The best my team could come up with was that it derived from various pagan religions’ propensity to sacrifice children on leap days.

  Blue_Bella’s post implies that Billy wants to exploit his players’ interest in evil cabals by convincing them that the Pyrexians are somehow involved with Château de Silling after all. I guess my target has done his research on traffic in black-market media, and in his game world, this group’s aliases don’t refer to an abstract state of erotic fever, but rather to Sade’s 120 Days. February, of course, being the month in which the most horrific atrocities are perpetrated in Silling’s dungeon.

  Whatever Billy’s ultimate aims are, he must know that he doesn’t really have any control over what his players do. We’re already seeing them turn from naughty exhibitionism toward real violence.

  What’s the point of all this? Why convene this dangerous game?

  It seems unlikely I’ll learn the answer by passively watching it unfold. I’m going to have to really start playing along with him.

  When I called my friend Adrian Paulson, he suggested we get together at one of these secret through-the-phone-booth bars. Why New Yorkers, otherwise inviolable in their self-regard, submit to jumping through such hoops for a cocktail, I’ll never understand. In this case, his choice is made even more eccentric by demanding I meet him there at noon, when the place is certainly closed.

  And yet the trick door opens at my push. He’s sitting alone at a booth cut into the amber-lit cellar. Seeing my arrival, he stomps forward and lifts me into a fearsome bear hug that makes my spine crackle. He follows that with a kiss on the mouth before I’m able to extract myself from his grasp. Adrian is a big, blond Minnesotan who took up highly decadent ways after fleeing a stark Lutheran upbringing. The most apt description of him I remember from school was “the Viking drag queen.” Not so much for his fashion sense but for the fact that he oozed this quality of pansexual theater. Also a certain amount of violence. He was the only person I knew in college who both wore ascots and got into brawls. Now he’s the closest thing to a porn baron I know.

  He found himself at loose ends after Boom 1.0 collapsed and decided to turn his web skills toward documenting the thing he cared most about: sex. His site could have ended up a worthless pornado trap, but he brought an edgy intellectual style to Compleat-jerk.com and somehow developed a loyal readership.

  Since the last time I saw him, he’s shaved his head, grown a blond devil’s beard, and has a runic tattoo spiraling up his neck. He sports a black Armani suit, so I guess business isn’t too terrible. Adrian grins and waggles his eyebrows under purple-tinted wraparounds.

  He gives me a three-syllable “Dude” and then asks, “How’s the cock-lodoccus?”

  “Nearing extinction. Thanks for meeting me.”

  “Been way too long.” Adrian reels off a string of what sounds like Creole French to the guy waxing the floor. He stops pressing on his buffing machine and hustles to the bar, returning moments later with a gigantic tropical drink decked with a Calder mobile of fruit for Adrian and a double bourbon for me. Adrian tongues a cherry.

  “So, Ade, how’s business?”

  “Business? This is art, brah. If it were business, I’d jab this skewer into my brain and then set myself on fire.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The pirates, man. We spend all day thinking of interesting substances to rub on our ‘photo interns’ and ten seconds after they’re posted to our premium section, I find torrents of them all over creation. Our customers are good loy
al hand jockeys, but it’s getting to be a lot to ask . . . The personals section, now, that’s booming. Even though those Craigslist fuckers are cutting into it. ’Course we do a good job of finding some real freaks that make the network valuable. Ooh, and we’ve started flavors.”

  “Flavors?”

  “The one we just put in beta is Rednekkid.com. If I see another shot of a girl in a hayloft pouring buttermilk on herself I swear I’ll—well, I’ll probably call her like the last one. But I’m getting close to being tired of it.”

  “But you’re still making videos?”

  “Everyone and their stepchildren are making videos. That’s another problem.”

  “Ever do anything on commission?”

  He grins. “Pryyyycie! I hadn’t figured you for someone with such refined requirements. You having trouble explaining something complicated to your honey?”

  “Nope. It’s for work.”

  “Work? You change jobs on me? What’s it for?”

  “Confidential. Of course.”

  “I’m just playing. Seriously, what did you have in mind?”

  “A scene from Sade, 120 Days.”

  “Ahh, a Sadistic Savant, are we?” He smiles like he’s pleased to hear this, but then quickly runs through the implications and frowns. “Wait a minute, this wouldn’t be on assignment for one of those crypto-fascist law enforcement organizations you consort with, would it?”

  “No. Nothing like that. I promise. I need three to five minutes of high-quality video. Live actors, good lighting. I was thinking maybe—”

  “King of the Hill.”

  “What?”

  “Day twenty-three, scene four. In which a man can only get off from being savagely beaten with canes in front of witnesses in the second-floor parlor of a brothel. Just before he nuts, he makes them defenestrate him into a pile of dung sitting in the courtyard below. Only then can he climax. The Sadisticats love that kind of shit. I even know a stunt man with, shall we say, liberal attitudes toward personal hygiene.”

  “Um, okay. You, ah, seem to know the book well.”

  “True. By nature I’m a lover not a biter, but in this business, it pays to be conversant in the ways of the world. That filthy little Frenchman carved out a whole dark continent we’ve spent the past two centuries exploring.”

  “So . . .”

  In a strange display of delicacy, Adrian writes a number on a cocktail napkin and slides it toward me. Then he says, “Cash, preferably. I’ll have it for you this weekend. Assuming I can find some non-union livestock for the prop work.”

  31

  Blake speaks out of the haze. “So has my brother gone with the dead girl or the live boy?” He’s quoting a Louisiana governor’s boast about who he’d have to be caught in bed with to lose an upcoming election. But Billy’s preoccupation with Gina’s death makes the joke ring off-key.

  We’re sitting in the steam room of the Racquet and Tennis Club, an illegal martini slowly warming in my hand. Blake prefers live meetings away from his office, as if we’re old mates who just happen to be doing a series of work-related favors for each other. Since we’re also not Ukrainian gangsters, this location seems particularly odd, but, as Mercer pointed out to me weeks ago, I can’t quibble with our billionaire client over appropriate meeting attire.

  “I don’t exactly know yet. Given his literary inspiration, I’d have to say both. At any rate, we’re looking at some ugly developments.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, he’s been trying to drag you into his world with these pranks, but we should prepare ourselves that another strategy of his might be explicitly breaking his silence on the topic of your family—”

  “Has he sent something to the media?” This is the first time I’ve heard a quaver of stress find its way into Blake’s voice.

  “No. But I bet he’ll invoke your name in this game of his.”

  “What’s the point? If the little bastard wants to slime us, why doesn’t he just bawl it out to Oprah? Or run an ad in the Journal, God forbid.”

  “Well, would you agree that at his core your brother is an artist?”

  “At his core, he’s a perverted baby.”

  I smile but realize Blake can’t see me through the steam.

  He continues. “But he does adopt the pose.”

  “So I suspect the instigation of all this was the death of his friend Gina. For whom he probably had romantic feelings. Can you think why he might connect her with you?”

  “That’s ridiculous. And anyway, Billy likes games, not girls. He may have been sad about his friend, but he didn’t need her death as an excuse to fuck with me.”

  I’m annoyed Blake isn’t more forthcoming about having dated Gina in college, but clients are often dissembling about something. Confrontation just makes them more defensive. So I change the subject.

  “Do you think he might be jealous of you and your sister?”

  “Of what? He’s got the money to do whatever he wants.”

  “Yes, but he’s not famous. He doesn’t have your celebrity. A couple write-ups in abstruse art rags. But no one really remembers you two have a brother.”

  “He changed his name.”

  “Maybe because he felt cheated. Like his inheritance had been stripped.”

  “Bullshit. He—”

  “It may be. But we’re talking about how he feels. Perhaps he wants to amp up his profile enough to put his status on par with yours, and he’s willing to trade on the most valuable thing he has in order to do that. His identity as a Randall. If he just dishes scandal to the Post, then he’s the tabloid freak of the week, but if he’s able to parlay the public’s interest in your family into a groundbreaking work of art, then that’s more like a career.”

  “And he thinks harassing me is going to help him achieve this?”

  “That’s an element. But I get the feeling he’s trying to make an argument. The medium he’s chosen is designed to get people participating, not just passively receiving a message. They can be very powerful experiences and are fashionable right now in gamer and media circles. But they’re still mostly seen as trivial entertainments. Imagine someone putting together a game that revealed important secrets about the real world. One in which the efforts of the players had a significant impact on actual events. Maybe that’s what he’s aiming for.”

  “What kind of impact? What are these secrets, James?”

  I don’t know where Billy’s going with his mishmash of Sade, cybering, and salacious cinema. But to Blake’s question:

  What do his arrest near Exotica and his indirect references to the company in Savant have to do with the Randalls?

  Given that the haute porn director Farber and his gonzo partner Mondano Sr. both died while Blake was still in college, I’d be willing to wager that any connection Billy makes will be with Robert Randall. The obvious similarity is geographic, all three men having lived near Los Angeles.

  An insight slowly takes form. The article on Ronald Farber said he “came from nothing” to produce an immortal classic of blue movies. But no one comes from nothing. He was a camera technician at an Irvine TV station. Right around the time Blake’s father was starting to build his SoCal broadcasting empire.

  Making my voice as neutral as possible, I say, “I’m not sure yet, but I think where this is heading is that your brother will try to link IMP and your family to the pornography industry.”

  I wish I could see Blake’s reaction to this. There’s a short pause followed by a snort that sends pretty Mandelbrots of vapor toward me. “That’s it? That’s his raw meat for the gossip sheets? That IMP benefits from pornography? Everybody knows that. Anyone with a cable box can see that pay-per-view is mostly porn. We provide internet access to two million people in this city alone. Do you have any idea what proportion of all the bits sucked into their apartments is porn? At least a quarter. Maybe a third. Regardless of the real number, everyone knows it’s high, and nobody gives a shit.”

  “I think he’s
getting at something more specific.”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever heard the name Ronald Farber?”

  “Ronald Farber?”

  “A dead pornographer. I think Billy will disclose he had some sort of relationship with your dad.”

  More steam whorls. “It’s possible . . . my father was democratic in the company he kept.”

  “Blake, I’m going to have to play Billy’s game if you want to know what’s out there, never mind finding him. To do that, I may need to know these things. Maybe go pretty deep into your family history.”

  Blake grunts skeptically. “Okay. We’ll get you whatever you need. But, James . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sure you’re aware that an enterprise like IMP doesn’t get created without taking a certain number of . . . liberties.”

  “Naturally.”

  “So I don’t need to explain that if we’re to show you where all the bodies are buried, as it were, you’ll need to exercise pretty flawless discretion, if . . .”

  “If I don’t want to end up buried with them?”

  Blake’s face emerges from the mist disconcertingly close to mine. He chuckles and slaps me heartily on the back. “Now, why would I say such a thing? You don’t believe I make idle threats, do you?” He stands up and grabs a towel, then turns to me and says in a faux lockjaw, “Let’s repair to the bar. This drink tastes like piss.”

  32

  With three of the R & T’s colossal martinis under my belt, I’m buzzed enough to convince myself that productive work might be possible, so I catch a cab downtown to GAME. I’d been hoping to slip into my office without a lot of commotion, but Garriott appears at my door saying, “Mate, you have to help me.” Then over his shoulder, “I will not submit to it, you deranged Cossack!”