“Call your father,” he said, and hung up.
He dragged himself back to the bathroom for a fresh bout of vomiting and shaking. As he lay there, he was, for some reason, visited with a hallucinogenically vivid memory of her voice, from that day he masqueraded as Dr. Geld. She was trying to convince him that she was a changed person, that life with Ulrickson and his family had imbued her with goodness, purified her. “I’ve changed, Dez,” he heard her saying in the bright cadences of one of Tovah’s spiritual converts. “And you can too. I swear. It’s never too late. You just have to learn to see the good in people! And in yourself.”
The good in himself! Dez had to laugh, even as he lay, groaning, in agony, on the cold bathroom tiles. He had spent his whole life staring into the abyss of his own personality, had shivered in horror, even in childhood, at its impenetrable depths, and had set himself the task of sounding those depths, of taking the true measure of his malice and spite, his lust and cruelty. Where was the good? What good had ever existed in him? What good had he ever known? His mother? Yes—except that her slow, excruciating death from motor neuron disease, when he was fourteen, had only confirmed for him that “goodness,” like white-bearded old God himself, was an illusion, a rumor, a jape played on credulous little boys and other innocents. Life was a sick prank that always ended in tears.
Suddenly, his fever broke. One minute he was dry-heaving into the spattered toilet bowl, the next he was rising to his feet, the pain in his guts—the slashing, knifing pain—turned off, as if by the flick of a switch. He had ceased to shiver, and his skin, which had prickled with rough gooseflesh, had smoothed out, warmed, become that of a human being once again. Scarcely able to believe that the agonies of his cold turkey were over, he stepped to the sink, splashed his face with cold water, then straightened up and looked in the glass. If he had always been gaunt and pale, he was now a skull: bone white, fleshless, with eyes sunk deep into blackened sockets, his lips withered and receding, exposing his unmentionable teeth and gray gums. But he was alive, and the pain, the pain, was gone. He felt a rush of euphoria, of hope, more potent than any drug.
In the living room, he stood and surveyed the condition to which he and Isabel had managed to bring the loft. All of the furniture had been pawned or sold. For weeks, they had slept on old boxes smuggled from the garbage room. These torn pieces of corrugated cardboard lay strewn among the shreds of old clothes, broken dishes, empty pill bottles, bent syringes and pulverized coke vials. Evidence of the sickness of their withdrawal was splashed everywhere on the floor and on the walls.
He turned and saw the notices that had been shoved under his door by the condo company. Notices of pending eviction. Yes, he had certainly allowed himself to sink low. But he had been low before and dug himself out. And now, standing there in the detritus, he allowed himself to daydream about a new strategy for survival. It involved Ulrickson’s daughter—the one from whom he had stolen the DNA sample. He smiled as he imagined how he would bide his time, patiently wait until the child, now nine or ten (and, according to Chloe, living in San Francisco with her aunt), turned a delectable fifteen, that age Dez liked best, when the face still holds significant baby fat but the breasts have swollen almost to full size, the limbs gawkily sprouted to supermodel length, as if in sheer surprise at the pubertal changes taking place. He would travel to San Francisco, insinuate himself (somehow!) into Ulrickson’s sister’s home—perhaps as a tutor?—then woo and win the girl. When she turned eighteen, he (an elegant yet still Peter Pan–like forty-five-year-old) could wed her! And thus win access to the other third of her father’s fortune.
He was amusing himself with these idle fancies when there was a knock on the door. He started. Visitors were not allowed up to a tenant’s apartment unless announced by the security team in the lobby. Could it be the condo people coming to enforce an eviction order? No, their last notice still gave him three months to make good on his debt to the building. He crept on tiptoe across the living room toward the peephole, but halted several paces from the door when he heard a jingling sound in the hall, followed by the rattle of a key pushed into the lock. His heart rose on an irrational hope.
“Chloe?” he said.
The door swung open and into the apartment stepped Pete, the building’s short, stocky, white-haired superintendent. In his hand was a key, attached to a massive ring of similar-looking keys. He had a strange look on his face. “These men,” he said in his thick Bulgarian accent, “they need to see you.”
Two men in long dark overcoats stepped into the loft from the hallway. Dez recognized them instantly, from their taciturn, slablike faces, as lawmen. He turned, intent on making a run for the vast window, to hurl himself through its lucent membrane of glass and copper, to cast himself to the earth twelve stories below. But, enfeebled by his recent illness, he was able to hobble only a few paces before he felt hands grab at him and wrestle him facedown onto the filthy rug. A boulder-like knee pressed into his fragile spine as the cuffs tightened. He assumed that he was being arrested on a charge of aiding and abetting Isabel’s hopeless attempt at prostitution. Only later, when he was in an interrogation room at the First Precinct House, on Varick Street, under questioning by the detectives, did he learn about the drawing tablet containing the messages Pauline dictated to Maddy; about Chloe’s confession and the immunity that protected her from prosecution; about how Ulrickson, although nearly as blind as his absurd fictional detective, Geoffrey Bannister, had brought Dez’s master plan to ruin.
Adding grotesque insult to unspeakable injury, the cops informed him of how the family, including little Maddy, had now been reunited in a house in Ulrickson’s old neighborhood, Deepti once more caring for Pauline—and Chloe, having transferred to Jasper’s nearby alma mater, Yale, happily ensconced in the house as helpmeet, friend and surrogate daughter to the man Dez had tried to destroy. An eye operation on Ulrickson had been a big success. He was writing again.
For those in the police station that day—cops and criminals alike—it was an unusual and eerie occurrence when, from behind the closed interrogation room door, there came a sound rarely, if ever, heard in those dour purlieus: laughter. First quiet, then rising on an out-of-control note, on a pitch of hysteria that seemed to border on madness.
They drove him across town to Manhattan Central Booking, the grim gray stone edifice that housed the criminal courts and the subterranean holding cells known, colloquially, as the Tombs. In a ground-floor office, he was fingerprinted and photographed.
Quiet and cooperative, Dez (already plotting his escape, his return, his revenge) was led downstairs.
Acknowledgments
A number of people were instrumental to this novel’s seeing the light of day, first as a manuscript, then as an actual published work.
I conceived the plot in 2001, but not until summer 2009 did I start writing—inspired, in part, by my friend Oivind Magnussun, who quit his job to start his own (successful) business, and who warned me that a life lived sailing close to shore in safe harbors was no real life. That I found a two-week stretch of quiet to begin a rough draft, I owe to my friends Chris and Erinn Deri, who happened to have invited my then ten-year-old son to Florida to visit with their daughter, Katie. My wife was visiting her parents in Canada, so I found myself alone in our Upper East Side apartment, where I wrote some thirty thousand words in a two-week-long, round-the-clock marathon of scribbling.
My brother, Ted, a neurosurgeon, answered my many questions about locked-in syndrome (although all departures from fact, for poetic license, are my responsibility alone). I also found helpful the books Look Up for Yes by locked-in patient Julia Tavalaro and Jean-Dominque Bauby’s Diving Bell and the Butterfly. For legal details, I’m hugely grateful to Susan E. Barnes, whom I happened to find as the first hit on a single, random Google search (“Family Lawyer, Vermont”) and who proved extraordinarily helpful, faxing me, from her office in Stowe, sample paternity claim documents, talking me through the process by which courts
vet prospective custodial parents in such cases, and describing to me the role of social workers and psychologists in easing the transfer of a child from one living situation to another—all vital to the workings of my book. (Again, all errors are my own.)
Some timely comments by my editor at the New Yorker, Nick Trautwein, some two years into the writing, revived for me a project I had all but abandoned as impossible. When I described to Nick what seemed the insurmountable task of making a good and decent man perform one of the most heinous acts imaginable, he said, “Given that we know she’s not his real daughter, we might just forgive him one slip-up—but no more than that.” (I had been imagining Jasper descending into a hellish period of violation of Chloe lasting weeks or months). Suddenly I was writing again.
My first reader, aside from my wife, was my agent Lisa Bankoff, to whom, for superstitious reasons, I had not even described the book. I was overjoyed by her enthusiastic reaction (but also properly warned by her proviso that I would have to be as “ready for the hate mail as the honors.”) I extend special thanks to Lisa for having, at the outset, retained as separate the rights for Canada (the country where I was born and still hold citizenship); thus the manuscript found its way to Iris Tupholme, executive publisher and editor-in-chief of HarperCollins Canada. It is to Iris that I owe the un-repayable debt of passing my manuscript to Patrick Crean, who had recently launched his own imprint at the house. There can be few authors in history lucky enough to see an editor so fully and completely understand what one is trying to do. Patrick’s insights for how I might improve the book, from certain strategic cuts to the inclusion of Chloe’s internal thoughts, were beyond invaluable: they resulted in late-stage revisions that, to my mind, made Undone a new book altogether, and an immeasurably better one.
Thank you to graphic designer Lisa Bettencourt for her exceptional cover. I also heartily thank managing editor Noelle Zitzer, as well as John Sweet, whose copy edit was impeccable and also saved me from many blunders of chronology.
The wonderful novelist Claudia Casper was an early reader and gave me excellent suggestions for how to improve the book; authors Harlan Coben and Frank Delaney were also early readers and great champions. Likewise, Ron Bernstein, ICM’s man in Los Angeles. Agents Emma Herdman at Curtis Brown UK and Helen Manders at Curtis Brown in Europe were constant supporters and cheerleaders. My friend, author Joe Hooper, gave the book a careful read, and I benefited greatly from his typically cogent and subtle insights.
Thank you to my wife, Donna, who regularly warned me of the landmines such a story strewed before the feet of an unwary (male) writer; and our son, Johnny, who along with his parents lived with the writing of this book longer than any of us thought we would have to (I said it would take a year; it took four).
Finally, I’d like to make special acknowledgment of my late mother, Carol, an avid reader (and, in her seventies, a published author). It was from my sense of the pleasure and solace she took from the written word that I myself wanted to try my hand at writing. Before embarking on Undone, I was sufficiently nervous about the challenges of its subject matter (the invidious nature of desire) that I spelled out the plot to her, over Skype, and felt relieved when she pooh-poohed my trepidation over reception of the novel’s faux-incest theme. “All subjects are fair game in literature,” she reminded me. I returned to the task with fresh courage, and was happy when she, then in the final stages of ALS, read the finished manuscript and gave it her blessing. Always bearing in mind my agent’s warning about the inevitable angry mail, I hope most other readers will be as indulgent.
About the Author
Toronto native JOHN COLAPINTO (who started his career at the former Saturday Night magazine) is an award-winning journalist, an author and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has written about subjects as diverse as medicinal leeches, Sotheby’s auctioneer Tobias Meyer, fashion designers Karl Lagerfeld and Rick Owens, and Paul McCartney. Prior to The New Yorker, John Colapinto wrote for Vanity Fair, New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and he was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He has also published a non-fiction book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, which was a New York Times bestseller; as well as the novel About the Author, a tale of literary envy and theft, which was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Advance praise for Undone
“In his arresting novel Undone, John Colapinto fearlessly explores the troubled terrain that lies between desire and cruelty, fidelity and temptation, and crime and punishment. Equal parts mystery, social satire and philosophical rumination, Undone asks, ‘What drives a good man to act badly?’ ”
—RACHEL GIESE, journalist and author
“Vivacious is an adjective often reserved for women, but Undone is that unusual hybrid—a vivaciously male novel. With his new novel, Colapinto targets the bloodless male literary characters of the early 21st century as his story profanely embodies the great roles—orphans, protectors, invalids, lechers, predators—and tosses literary themes in the air like so many spinning crystals. Colapinto, who is astutely brilliant at animating people on the pages of The New Yorker, refracts modern morality—hubris, loss, good, evil, lust, revenge— to give us a spicy tale full of verve, vim and villainy.” —CLAUDIA CASPER, author of The Reconstruction and The Continuation of Love by Other Means
“John Colapinto has written a wicked and sharp-edged novel that cuts deep into both contemporary media culture and the uncontrollable embarrassment that is male sexual desire.”
—RUSSELL SMITH, author of Girl Crazy
“This book should be labelled with a Must-Be-Read-in-One-Sitting sticker. I could not put the damn thing down. Though it takes its best cues from the traditional mystery novel, it is also a satire shot through with unexpected, touching sincerity. The characters are daft, sweet, disgusting, outrageous, heartrendingly admirable, annoying—and oddly true. I read the story thinking, ‘This could never happen!’ knowing full well that, in the morally conservative, sexual crime–obsessed America of today, it actually could happen. Reading, I repeatedly asked myself, ‘Who is this man so undone? What would we do to save him? Could we?’ ”
—KAREN CONNELLY, author of The Lizard Cage and Burmese Lessons
Credits
Cover image: Emily Graham / Millennium Images
Cover design: Lisa Bettencourt
Copyright
Undone
Copyright © 2015 by John Colapinto.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPUB Edition March 2015 ISBN 9781443434706
Published by Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST EDITION
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4W 1A8
www.harpercollins.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request
ISBN 978-1-44343-468-3
RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, N
SW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com
Undone Page 30
