I am Providence

by Nick Mamatas

  I got my first death threat soon after publishing my first story. “De-Animated” was a story about Andy Warhol conducting a screen test of Dr. Allan Halsey and Buck Robinson, two of the men brought back to a semblance of life by Herbert West in Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West—Reanimator.” In my story, not a whole lot happens, just like in one of Warhol’s films, and then Warhol has the violent zombies dress up like beauty queens and engage in gay sex while he silently masturbates in the corner. It was published in an online ’zine called Bone, which despite its name was a horror magazine and not a gay magazine, and the very first comment, which the publisher let through due to her belief in free speech, read:

  Why am I wasting my time reading these faggot perversions. This is not literature, this is buggery and the celebration of buggery. I feel like I just went to the movies and accidentally walked into a porn theater on Bestiality Night. Panossian isn’t an ordinary name, and nobody would pick it as a pseudonym, so the author should be easy enough to track down if it comes to that. And if I see any more faggotry from the Pen(is) of Panossian, it will.

  Typical fan mail, really. Similar missives followed, from all over the English-speaking world. Every publication, every blog post, every little Q/A interview, every time my picture was tagged on Facebook, there was a threat or two. IP addresses told me that I had several such “fans,” though most were just one-off vents. I’d say I had three stalkers, though even now I hesitate to use the term. All I did was appear in public somehow via publishing or promoting my work, and all they did was materialize virtually in the comments section, or on a conversational thread on some social media network, take a shit on me, and vanish.

  I wouldn’t say I gave as good as I got, but I gave. If I said that someone was “stupid” I’d be told that I was “a useless sack of shit.” If I came out against book piracy, or for it for that matter, because my opinions changed along with the evidence available to me, a chorus of people would declare that they’d never buy my work again. As if I didn’t have access to my own royalty statements; clearly everyone was already never buying my work to begin with.

  I still don’t know exactly who my stalkers were, but I have suspicions. The man who dressed as Cthulhu during opening ceremonies I think is one of them. His name is Ronald Ranger, or as I called him, Wonuhld Wanger, with a hard g. Wang-er. Yeah, he definitely didn’t like me, and famously wrote an entire twelve-page ’zine, photocopied and stapled together all by himself, about my book. He didn’t like it either. Whenever I published anything, he updated his blog, and did line-by-line “fisks” of my story or article, pointing out what he saw as literary infelicities, “politically correct revisionism,” and symptoms of a disease of his own making: Congenital Terminal Hipsterism.

  The second one was a girl named Tracy McKendrick, who had just this weekend reinvented herself as Chloe, “acolyte” to Ms. Phantasia. Tracy, Chloe, has some sort of medical problem—lots of allergies and a special sensitivity to alcohol. She likes testing people too. She tested me, at a horror convention in Brattleboro, Vermont. It was a small con, maybe two hundred people tops, and split between a downtown church and the local kids’ theater, and she buttonholed me and told me how much she liked my stuff, and then launched into a long monologue about how she wished her ex-boyfriend would be torn to pieces by extraterrestrial tentacles. That’s what she said, literally: “extraterrestrial tentacles.” Then she laughed, her breath thick with wine, and congratulated herself on managing the tongue twister despite how drunk she already was.

  Tracy had a good voice. Ever hear of “autonomous sensory meridian response”? It’s a bullshit pseudoscientific name for a real phenomenon—some people, and I’m one of them, feel all “tingly” and turned on at certain voices and sounds, like whispering, or coins clinking, or the smoothing out of a piece of fabric. There are tons of videos of girls whispering about their day or role-playing an eye doctor or just repeating “Okay okay okay” while wiggling their fingers at the camera on YouTube, and some of these videos have a million or more views.

  A novel these days can’t sell two thousand copies unless the ebook is priced at a dollar, but the Okay Okay Okay Girl has a million views. And until this weekend, I added at least one view a day. It’s like how I imagine heroin must feel.

  When she wasn’t crying into her glass or guffawing, Tracy’s voice made my spinal fluid fizz like Coca-Cola. I can’t hear well, especially in crowded hotel rooms or restaurants, so when she suggested sitting in a corner to talk, I was happy to follow her and let her go on. And she did. Women like a listener, it’s true.

  Tracy told me many things—about her eating disorder, and how fat she felt all the time. (Her weight was normal; her figure, attractive.) How she ended up living in central New Jersey in the form of a lengthy anecdote which involved a complex arrangement of roommate switches, a flood, and a dying aunt. Her hopes for getting a degree in accountancy. Her poems, and what a rejection letter that reads “Thank you very much” with the thank you underlined twice might mean. Her ex-boyfriend, who called her a freeloader and waste of space, which I agreed was terribly unfair. She showed me a part of one of her own stories—“It’s erotic horror,” she whispered, her voice buzzing with vocal fry—and it was about demons chaining a naked girl to a rock in hell and poking at her cunt with their barbed tails.

  Tracy drank too much. She flirted outrageously, telling me about the awful first-date sex she had the previous month and how she loved conventions because the attendees were “sexually free.” Then she got up and announced she was going to bed, staggered and dropped to a knee, and then asked me to help her up and to her hotel room because she was too drunk to operate a keycard, lol.

  Tracy actually said the word “lol” out loud. “Word” “lol” I mean.

  So I did. I got her to the elevator, kept her from pressing every floor button, and then to her door. I walked her in and she threw her arms around me and demanded a hug. Then she amended: “a friend hug.” I gave her one. We didn’t kiss, my hands didn’t wander, but she nuzzled my chest and said, “Your heart is beating really fast.”

  We sat on the bed a bit; she talked some more. I got my fill of an ASMR buzz. Then she slid under the covers, fully dressed and with her boots on, and said, “Hold me till I fall asleep. If you don’t, I’ll go back down and find someone who will.”

  So I did, and she didn’t, and nothing happened. I let myself out. The next morning, she texted me and asked if we could have breakfast together. She had printed out her demon sex story and wanted to go over it. She didn’t remember anything that happened in her room last night. She sent back her breakfast twice because of ingredients to which she was allergic—onions, a plate that had previously held a piece of lox.

  Anyway, after that I couldn’t get rid of her. She favorited nearly every tweet I tweeted, sometimes at the end of each day. Same with Facebook likes. Whenever she saw a news story I might like, she would email it to me and post it to Facebook with a demand that I respond to it. Isn’t it awful? Isn’t it great! Tracy liked sending me email at 3 a.m., detailing her dreams and her thoughts on writing. Only once did she ask me my thoughts on writing, and I just responded, “Generally, I’m against it.”

  I didn’t hear from her much afterward, until one day I encountered her on the street outside my home. I don’t mean that I was walking down the street near my apartment and I ran into her, I mean she was waiting for me on the square of pavement right outside the door to my building.

  “Panossian!” she cried.

  She said my name “Pan-na-SAH-uhn,” which is wrong.

  I wanted to just dart back inside, but couldn’t. It was my own rotten luck; I tend to look at my feet when walking, so I didn’t spy her through the window of my building’s front door. So I smiled and said hello and she held out her arms for a hug and I did not respond and then finally I put out my arms but hers were already down and then her head darted forward as if to kiss my cheek but I put my hand out and she shook it and then
she didn’t let go.

  “We have to talk,” she said. “I came here all the way from New York. I want to move to the Boston area. I think there are a lot of opportunities out here for me.”

  Tracy was a small woman. Her fingers were like overcooked chicken bones in my hand, but her grip had a nervous strength to it.

  “I decided this morning, so I just got on the Bolt Bus and came up,” she said.

  Mostly I wondered how she got my address. There might have been pictures on Facebook, and then she just used Google Maps to trawl East Cambridge till she found the exact street.

  “Let’s go get a cup of coff—” Tracy said. Then she interrupted herself. “I know you don’t drink coffee, or any hot liquids! Right? You can have an Orangina. My treat.”

  Tracy knew a lot about me, but almost nothing about herself. What she wanted to do with her life, what skills or acumen she could bring to a career, what she wanted to say with her writing. She figured leaving her boyfriend, some generic creepy greetings-and-salutations-type dude with long hair tied into a braid, was a good start.

  “...and just getting away from New York. It’s a zoo, an expensive fucking zoo.”

  “Boston’s pretty expensive as well. And you have to pay for home heating oil, sometimes,” I told her. “It’s like paying a thirteenth month’s rent every winter.”

  “I just want to write. I want to live in one room and write. I want to see the frost on my windows and drink tea and write.” Her voice was really something. It pulled on my spine.

  “You can get away without a car out here, but it’s really cold. It snows once a week from Halloween until May Day,” I said.

  “I pared down all my belongings, Panossian. I only own six things now. My iPad, a little black dress, this coat I’m wearing, these jeans, my boots, and a knife.”

  Her coat was a big woolen peacoat, not dissimilar from my own. Actually, it was exactly like my own, including being the same size. Her little hands had vanished up the sleeves and she had to shrug to get them out. She unbuttoned her coat and proved her point about the number of things she now owned—no shirt, no bra. In one interior breast pocket, an iPad mini. In the other, the thick amber handle of what was probably a crazy-looking knife.

  “You must be...uhm, cold,” I said. I almost didn’t notice Tracy’s tits for the knife.

  “Let me stay with you,” she said. She closed her coat, and slid her hands into the opposite sleeves, holding them before her like she was wearing a muffler.

  There are moments when thought is faster than time. This was one of them. How many times could I fuck Tracy before she went crazy on me? Crazier, that is. Would I have to buy her some shirts? How was I supposed to get any writing done? The old saying is “Don’t stick your dick in crazy,” but to be perfectly honest I hadn’t stuck my dick in anything for a long time and was desperate. Could I use her and lose her safely? I didn’t want her dead or hurt or anything, just happy and then gone, preferably under her own power after making her own wise decision that I was too awful a person to spend time with.

  Tracy was a petite girl, almost unhealthy-looking with onion-paper skin and baggy eyes—I could probably get the knife away from her pretty easily, and toss it down a sewer grate. I mostly had plastic flatware back at the apartment, but she could probably kill me in my sleep pretty easily as well, with a pillowcase full of books or something. Was she mad enough—in both senses of the word—to actually commit murder? That was the question I should have asked myself then, or for that matter when I was re-introduced to her as Chloe just the other night.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Tracy,” I said. It probably sounded like an instant decision to her, but for me it felt like a day and a night before a balance scale. “This is all very sudden, and”—I leaned in to whisper. “You’re nearly naked under your jacket! How could you have come up on a five-hour bus trip that way?”

  I thought her face would fall, but instead it twisted into a rictus. “So, you don’t like my body? Is that it?” Then louder, too loud for the café. “The famous Panossian is into girls with big tits, huh?”

  The important thing was to let her yell at me, to just sit there until someone called the police or just dumped her ass outside, so I did. Tracy ranted at me, about how she was my biggest fan and online cheerleader, but I hardly ever spoke to her or even retweeted her. How she left her boyfriend, his name was Bryant, to make a new life in Boston with me. From the back of the café someone shouted back at her, “You’re in Cambridge!” but she didn’t blink.

  While Tracy was yelling at me, I realized something. Specifically, I realized that I had a third stalker. Tracy knew a lot about me, just from paying close attention to social media, but she wasn’t the only one. There was someone else, whose name I didn’t know and whose face I’d never seen, who had paid attention as closely as anyone else. Tracy was telling me how she ordered a book with a story of mine in it for full price when it was on amazon.com for cheaper because she knew I preferred independent bookstores, how when she had a poem in Darkling Thirsts I didn’t write her a congratulatory email despite the fact that she knew, she knew, I had a copy because she’d seen the cover of the issue on my coffee table in a photo I’d taken of my broken toe.

  But someone out there had to know more. Like most writers who aren’t widely discussed, it was easy for me to keep track of everything that was said about me on social media. Pseudonymous and anonymous comments were a little harder to keep track of. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a topless maniac who owns six things, or...someone else.

  East Cambridge isn’t like the rest of the city in that it doesn’t tolerate loudmouth shit from girls who aren’t drinking at an Irish pub, so two male members of the café staff came out from behind the counter with a broomstick and a baseball bat and started yelling at Tracy to leave. She called them sacks of shit and said that she was a New Yorker, motherfuckers and then they picked her up and she screamed my name and then she was outside.

  A girl came up to me. I guessed she worked there since she carried a towel, which is as good as a tin sheriff’s badge in a café. “You have to go too,” she said.

  “I’m in here all the time,” I said, but I dug for my money anyway.

  “Not anymore, you ain’t,” the barista said. “Step out the back way if you don’t want to see your girlfriend again.”

  There was no point in mentioning that Tracy wasn’t my girlfriend, and I wasn’t worried about her coming back to my house. She could stick that knife in my heart for all I cared. The third stalker, that’s the person I was interested in.

  The third stalker knew things that Tracy didn’t. Back home it took almost an hour of digging through old blog comments to find it, but there it was, typos and all:

  Hey faggot you haven’t changed at all since you wuz shop-liftin on 86t street in Brooklyn. Nice mug shot cry alot in jail querrboy

  I was fourteen. When I turned nineteen I paid to have the records expunged. Of course, expunged doesn’t mean eliminated, and who knows, I might have drunkenly told somebody the story of How I First Read Lovecraft at some convention or luncheon or something. The bit about the mugshot could have been an inspired guess.

  “Alot” was a fossilized typographical error in the stalker’s texts. It’s also a pretty common error generally, so searching my records for “alot” gave me tons of false positives. I spent the afternoon not thinking about Tracy, or her knife, or her small half-scoop vanilla breasts, and instead revisited old flame wars, slapfights, and feuds.

  There was the Ameriville Publishers fight, in which several writers were suckered into a vanity press scam and didn’t want to hear it even when no bookstore would stock their titles. The Summer Tentacular’s own flame war about sexism and whether or not wearing corsets should be banned for “overexciting” the elderly Lovecraftian fans. Whether or not Lee Roberts was a child molester. Who was going to edit David Cob’s posthumous tribute anthology during the three days everyone decided that he was
dead because he tweeted “Goodbye for now, finally” and then was out of contact for three days. (He was at an airport and the plane was delayed for nearly sixteen hours.) Whether or not R.G. Gonzalez really knew anything about Lovecraft, or if it required a “Teutonic soul”—my own Armenian soul was somehow considered sufficiently northern despite it being not at all, really. There were other, less interesting, Internet slapfights as well, and a perennial current of low-level sniping and rivalries.

  I found four other comments that I was sure were from the same person, all of which betrayed some secret knowledge of me.

  Sitting in yer cold-water flat, eatin ravioli from the can and spendin money on camgirl.com alot of luck with your “career” fuck your Wikpedia page

  Was he local? Hell, was he a she, and a camgirl to boot?

  Merry Xmas faggot hope you get alot of presencts just kidding your parents hate you and who else would buy yu sumptin Ginger J hahaha

  On the correct date, which was just common knowledge thanks to the Kardashians, but indeed I received no presents that year. I wouldn’t say that my parents hated me, but it was close enough for government work.

  Polydactyl stray cats are all over your hood, P. You gotta alot of snow anna cats need extra toes to move all over the place. So that’s dinner for you. YOUR POOR!

  Clearly, my third stalker was either dyslexic or just pretending to have bad spelling. How on Earth does one get polydactyl right, but then type “your” instead of “you’re”?