by Lolita Files
She was full but not overstuffed as she strolled over to the window with her glass of port. She stared out at the city. No matter where she went in the world, New York was the only place that ever felt right. This was where, when the time came, she would one day be buried. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, she forever wanted to be connected to New York City.
Such morbid thoughts, she mused. She needed to put her mind to better use.
She walked back over to the bed, almost tripping on something sticking out from underneath. Her port flew out of the glass onto the sheets as she tried to regain her balance.
“What…?”
The corner of something had stopped her. She kneeled and pulled it from under the bed.
It was a light gray messenger bag with black piping. She opened the flap. Penn’s stuff. What was that, a script? Something an agent had given him. A book by Chuck Palahniuk. A small plastic bag of some sort of white-gray dust. She opened it and sniffed. She stuck her pinky in and tasted it. She snorted a bit. Whatever it was, it wasn’t drugs. She threw the plastic bag back in. There was an Us magazine with him on the cover. A pack of Twizzlers. A small book with nothing on the cover. What’s that? A journal? She pulled it out and opened it to a random page.
Sharlyn Tate has the best pussy I’ve ever had.
Her hand flew to her mouth, unable to stop the giggle bursting through.
She flipped to another page.
Fiyah’s cool.
She kept reading.
It’s amazing how easy it was. You can watch movies all day long, but nothing can ever match the sensation of cutting flesh, human flesh, and watching it burn. She had a smell, like a premium pork roast. It was all so easy. I have to work it into a story.
Sharlyn’s heart began. pumping. very. slow.
It should have sped up, but it was being tugged down with every word on the page.
She flipped another.
I put some outside her building last night. Just a small bit at the foot of a tree. Maybe it’ll fertilize it better. Powdered bone is good for that.
Another page.
Places I’ve Scattered or Placed Her Ashes:
1) Inside the pages of Canon Messier’s books in the Barnes & Noble at Astor Place
2) In front of Mitali East
3) The dirt outside the CarterHobbs building
4) Central Park, two feet away from the entrance to Tavern on the Green
5) A potted palm in Bungalow 8
6) The Harlem River
7) The bathroom at Scores
8) Riverside Park
9) The bowling alley at Chelsea Piers
10) Barney Greengrass
11) The African violet she gave me; it’s been blooming like gangbusters!
Sharlyn dropped the book, feeling faint. She glanced over at the nightstand.
There was an African violet.
A flourishing African violet.
She raced to the bathroom, dropped to the floor, and vomited and vomited until she believed her entrails would surely come out.
She was sitting in the dark when he came in.
It was four forty-eight.
The book was on the bed beside her, along with the plastic bag of white-gray stuff.
He tried to come in without much noise. He gingerly closed the door and tiptoed across the room, his eyes not quite adjusted to the dark.
“You killed her.”
It was a soft dagger of sound, cutting the night wide open.
“What?” He was whispering.
“You killed Beryl. I read it in your journal.”
She flung the thing at him. He could hear its velocity turning on the wind and managed to fake a move to the right, barely missing getting his head taken out. The journal hit the wall, the pages wide and bent as it fell to the floor.
She ran toward him, trying to take him down.
Sharlyn could feel the blood racing through her head, her arms, the fronts of her thighs. She was hot with rage, not fear. She wanted to hurt him for what he’d done to her and Beryl. She wanted to take everything away from him, everything she and Beryl and every stupid, willing woman who’d been drawn to the superficial had given him, had made easy for him, had paved the way for him to have. She hadn’t thought it out from the legal side. She hadn’t even considered the police. She was on pure emotional fumes now, and she was blinded by it. All she could see was striking out.
She dove onto him, knocking him to the floor.
“Sharlyn, stop it! Get off me!” They were rolling on the floor.
He somehow managed to get on top and pin her down. Sharlyn thrashed beneath him.
“Let me go!” she screamed.
“Stop it,” he hissed. “It’s the middle of the night!”
“No!”
More than any feeling she’d ever had, she wanted to see Penn Hamilton dead. She’d lost everything because of him. Everything. Her husband, her life, her editor, her desire for her career.
She wanted him dead.
He had her arms immobilized. She adjusted her butt and tried to knee him in the groin.
“Ooph,” he grunted.
Good, she thought. Good.
She saw a blue flicker in his eyes as they seemed to light up in the darkness. He was breathing hard, angry now, his hands around her neck.
Shar pushed and squirmed and thrashed, trying desperately to cough, but unable to get any air past the clench of his hands. Her face was growing hotter and hotter. Her eyes were burning. She kicked and wriggled and grunted and moaned.
The twin blue flames were bearing down on her, even as his grip grew stronger around her neck.
She stopped fighting against him, focused only on the flickering blues.
They grew hazy at first.
Then the lights went out.
Merc came by late the next afternoon. Things were already situated when he arrived.
They brought her out in a Louis Vuitton trunk. The unsuspecting bellman helped them load her into the back of Merc’s Navigator.
Penn gave him a hundred-dollar tip.
Upstate New York was nothing like New York City. It was a far-off hinterland of thick forests, wineries, finger lakes, arctic winters, and blue-collar ethics. It was real life, the workingman’s world, unlike the ultraslick, mythical Manhattan, filled with its mix of the unfathomably rich and the desperately poor, all equally aware that, despite the vast differences in their lots in life, they were living in the Center of the Universe.
It wasn’t like that upstate. There, people dealt with real issues that hit them real hard, with no glint and glamour to buffer the view. In the Uticas and Buffaloes and Elmiras and Binghamtons of the world, people struggled, ate spiedie, got dirty, had calluses, worked in factories, vineyards, breweries, garages, Roy Rogers, and fought like hell against the travails of nature and existence as though their lives depended upon it.
Which, in most cases, they did.
The drive up to Rochester was a quiet one. Not much to say. Both men had their own things to contemplate. Conversation had never been a mandate between them.
The Rochester Embayment was made up of thirty-five square miles of Lake Ontario and the last six miles of the Genesee River. It was nasty, as nasty went. Filthy. Rotten. A mutant-making cesspool.
They took her out of the Louis Vuitton trunk and flung her in.
Her body hit the water with a hard splash, plunged rapidly for a few feet, then settled into a gentle rocking drift that laid her gracefully at the bottom.
Penn and Mercury stood next to each other, watching moonbeams alight on the wavy surface, twinkling like so many stars.
“You all right, man?” Mercury asked.
“Please.”
“That’s good,” Merc said with a nod. “Gotta do what you gotta do. Besides, her husband left her for what, his cousin? That’s what it said in the paper. No telling what a distraught bitch’ll do behind some shit like that. It would make perfect sense if she turned up dead.”
&nbs
p; “It would, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure,” Merc said. “There’s all kinds of possibilities. He could have done it. She could have done it to herself. Not that anyone will come up here looking for her. She’ll be way out in Lake Ontario before long. The natural pull of the river will drag her off. If the crabs don’t eat her first.”
“Nice, Merc. Nice.”
“I’m serious, man. Catfish, trout, whatever the fuck is down there. She’s gon’ get some chunks bit out her ass, you can bet on that.”
Penn was chuckling.
“Man, you’re crazy.”
“I’m just saying.”
They listened to the croaking of infinite frogs, miniature witnesses to a night of magic, horror, secrets. Just one of many such secret horrors the creatures had witnessed before.
“How’d you find this place?”
“My uncle used to talk about it. I looked it up on the Net a few years back.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t ask why you were looking it up.”
“A lotta shit’s been dumped in here over the years,” Merc said. “This was once ranked the second most polluted river in the country. I mean this shit is mad toxic. I’m talking ‘take the skin off your bones if you even touch the water’ kind of shit.”
“You and your hyperbole.”
“Seriously. Dioxin’s in there, pesticides, who knows what else. Now that I think about it, those crabs might never even get a crack at her. She probably dissolved on the way down.”
They stared at the water for a long moment, each with their own imaginings of a Sharlyn buffet versus a Sharlyn smoothie. Eight-eyed catfish. Three-headed trout.
“You’re a good friend, Merc,” Penn said.
“You know we don’t even have to talk about that.”
“I know. I just don’t want it to go unsaid.”
Merc stooped and picked up a pebble, threw it at the shiny water, watched it skip along the surface.
“So do you think you could handle being a manager?”
“A manager?” Merc asked without turning his head.
“Yeah. A general always needs a good lieutenant.”
“I like to see it as a don needing a good consigliere.”
Penn nodded.
“A good consigliere knows about places like the Genesee River,” said Merc. “Plenty of bodies have been thrown in here. Who the hell’s gonna want to fish them out? I figure if it’s good enough for the mob…”
Penn turned and shook his consigliere’s hand.
“Good job.”
Merc smiled.
“What’s the most polluted river?” Penn asked.
“The Mississippi, nigga. By leaps and bounds.”
“Right.”
They went back to the car.
He was scribbling in his journal, even though the cover was bent and some of the pages were crumpled from the way it had hit the wall when Sharlyn threw it across the room.
It was easy throwing her in. I thought I loved her, but at the end, I felt nothing. Maybe I can’t love.
Maybe there is no love.
Maybe there’s just feelings in a moment that, like ripples on the sea, rise, fall, and then disappear into something else. Disappear into nothing. Like water. Water’s not love. Water’s just water.
Whatever. What else.
That can be my next book.
Deus Ex Machina:
(Translation: “god from the machine”) A device used in Greek and Roman theater where a crane made of wooden beams and elaborate pulleys lowered a god or what appeared to be the hand of a god onto the stage to physically remove the hero from the midst of an impossible difficulty.
A literary device where the author uses the surprise intervention of an improbable person or event to get a character out of a difficult situation or to bring the story to a convenient conclusion.
Metafiction:
A work of fiction that self-consciously examines itself while telling a story, blurring the lines between reality and fiction within the levels of narrative. Fiction about fiction. Also known as “surfiction.”
We live inside an enormous novel.
—J. G. Ballard, Introduction to Crash
Deus Ex Meta
Penn was dozing in the upper-class suite of Virgin Atlantic Flight VS004, en route to London for a round of signings and an appearance on the popular BBC music countdown show Top of the Pops. He was sitting upright, having fallen asleep as soon as his butt hit the seat, long before the plane was finished boarding. The flight attendants were buzzing around in a useless huddle near the bar, debating whether to wake him so he could flip his seat into a bed for a more comfortable trip. They could hear the gentle curdle of exhaustion every time he took a breath. None of them had gathered the nerve to approach him yet.
“He’s so beautiful,” one whispered as she prepared a round of drinks.
“Can you Adam and Eve it?” said another. “If I didn’t ’ave me George Michael right now, I’d flash ’im a bit o’ Khyber just for kicks.”
“You never let it stop you before, you slag,” said a third.
“You think I should flirt with him when he wakes up?” piped another. “Wouldn’t that just be insane? Flirting with Penn Hamilton! I mean, what if he’s a murderer after all? You never know. It’s so damn sexy. Imagine the kind of orgasm you’d have knowing the man inside you might have killed someone.”
The flight attendants stared at her.
“I mean, yeah, it sounds sick,” the girl reasoned, “but c’mon, it’s a bit like a rape fantasy, don’t you think? All that danger lurking just beneath the surface of such a pretty package.”
“A famous package.”
They turned toward Penn.
“That’d be a shag worth dying for.”
“I dunno, there’s something dodgy about the fact that he might…ugh…I can’t even say it.”
“Imagine ’avin’ ’is teapots.”
“Wicked.”
“I’ll bet they’d be gorgeous.”
“They’d be a bunch of bloody killers is what they’d be.”
“Look at him. If none of you plan on going over, I will. That’s not the face of a murderer. That’s the face of an angel.”
“Lucifer was an angel.”
“Penn Hamilton is not Lucifer. The charges were dropped. That’s good enough for me.”
“Bollocks. People get away with murder all the time.”
“He’s not like that. You can tell. It’s in the eyes.”
“His eyes are closed, you nit.”
“What if he doesn’t wake up at all during the flight?”
“I’ll wake him. I can show him something worth lying down for.”
“What a scrubber. You’ve already got a boyfriend. Don’t you think it’s a bit greedy to set your sights on him?”
“Sod off. You just want him for yourself.”
“And what if I do? You’re just jealous because Keith Richards made eyes at me on that last flight and not you.”
“You bloody cow. Who the hell wants that trout face gaping at ’em?”
“I’m going to go wake him and tell him to let me dress his bed. I wonder if he’ll want the complimentary sleep suit. I can help him change into it.”
“Karen, don’t you dare!”
Karen was indeed about to dare, but before she could take a step, the plane hit a patch of turbulence and did a quick radical drop. Penn awoke at once, startled and disoriented. He looked around. The very first face he focused on was a smiling Harold Gersh, the head of Brecker Books, in the suite right next to him.
“We meet again,” said the perennially upbeat Gersh. “I was wondering what it was going to take to finally rouse you. That was some pocket of air we just hit.”
“Sure was,” Penn groaned as he rubbed the sides of his mouth and stretched his face. “How long have we been flying?”
“A couple of hours at least,” said Gersh. “The flight attendants have been circling you like roadkill.”
/> “Really?” Penn said, perking up. He spotted them across the way. When they noticed him looking, they giggled nervously and turned away. A couple of the daring ones glanced back, eager to be turned into pillars of salt.
“You get that everywhere, don’t you?”
Penn shrugged. “You get used to it after a while.”
Gersh laughed. “You’re so cavalier. I love it!”
Penn flashed his multimillion-dollar grin. As if on cue, the flight attendants traipsed by, one after the other, still not daring to interrupt the publishing executive and the golden boy. They were as inconspicuous as elephant’s balls.
“You hungry?” asked Gersh. “I was about to order dinner.”
“I’m starving,” said Penn.
“Mind if I come over there?”
“Sure.”
Gersh ambled out of his suite and slid onto the ottoman in Penn’s.
“We probably need to be diplomatic about this.”
“What’s that?” asked Penn.
“About which one of these flight attendants gets to come and take our order. I get the feeling a fight might erupt.”
Karen was pouring their second glass of Selak’s sauvignon blanc.
“So what’s next for the amazing Penn Hamilton?” asked Gersh. “Have you started working on your next bestseller?”
“I’ve been kicking around some ideas.”
“I imagine half the city’s wooing you.”
“More like all of it.”
“Brilliant.” Gersh chuckled. “I think your immodesty is what I like best.”
“Is it abrasive?”
“Not at all. You’ve got the charisma factor. You don’t see that kind of thing very often. Clinton has it. I’m afraid to admit it, but I think Paris Hilton has it, too. The public is very forgiving when you’ve got the charisma factor.”
“I like that description. I’ve grown tired of hearing the press call me ‘smug.’”
“So tell me about this next project of yours,” Gersh said, getting right into it. “Will it be another modern take on a classic?”
