1

“It's you!” cried Kate, his significant other, who'd found a mysterious number in the margin of her day planner.  “Don't forget to let in Mr. Yacabowski at five to fix the drippy sink.” 

Then, two days after that, one last try, hard-core, this time at the local “international” airport (it had a daily flight to Canada).  “Do me a favor?” he pleaded with the nervous young woman behind the United counter, sliding her a short stack of twenties still warm from the ATM, “and don't tell me where you're sending me.”  But she did, of course (“Toledo”) and he, of course, never got there: the sudden realization that the next day was his aunt's birthday sent him slinking away from the nearly deserted gate, back to his car, back to the U, so he could get on a computer and send a houseplant by wegotyourflowersrighthere.com. 

So that was that.  And it was wrong – really wrong, Sven knew – to romanticize what had happened to Barry Fitzgerald Gaughan (a.k.a. Fitz) exactly two weeks before Toledo day.  Vanished into thin air, his yellow car discovered like a lost dog on the side of a country road five miles south of Galilee, poor old Fitz may have had a Very Bad Thing happen to him. 

But in Galilee?  Beside a freakin’ bucolic meadow with nary a footprint in it?  In what they call broad daylight?  (Folks had seen a maybe twitchier-than-usual Fitz at the U that morning; then a weirdly pissed-off farmer, Jack Rueful, had called police to the deserted BMW early that sunny June evening.)  Well....  Sven wasn't sure he was buying it. 

He spent the night of the day after the disappearance (the night police officially declared Fitz missing; the night the amateurish Bradleytown news projected Fitz's surprised-looking mug on TV and interviewed his eerily beautiful parents beside their behemoth Benz in front of Galilee City Hall) sitting up in bed, hour after hour, staring over his knees out the window, at the rain, at the massive old steel-company blast furnaces looming darkly in the valley a mile away, listening to the burrowed-in Kate murmuring in her sleep beside him.  And obsessively wondering: was the passive construction correct here?  Had Fitz had a Very Bad Thing happen to him?  Or had he made something (but what, then?) happen? 

There were, the TV news said, no signs of a struggle at the site.

There had been, the TV news added, no ransom calls to Fitz's folks in Philly, though they were moderately filthy rich.

Strange, Sven thought, lying back that night at last, pulling the sheet up to his nose, staring at the ceiling, listening to the gentle patter of the same rain that may have been falling that very moment on his colleague’s well-hidden, blue-tinged body. 

Very strange. 

The next morning came up sunny and hazy. 

Sven, jittery from lack of sleep, left his and Kate's apartment, hopped in the Mazda, and made the short drive across Galilee to Revoquer U, where he and Fitz were (had been?) fellow grad students.  There, in a cramped office on the third floor of Boxer Hall, home of the tiniest Ph.D.-granting English department in the country, he found exactly what he’d hoped for: several of his cohorts standing around in a tight, nervy, caffeine-fuelled, rumor-mongering knot.  He joined it.  And within two minutes got handed the first two links of what would become a long and heavy chain of bizarre and sensational Fitz facts and rumors he'd spend the whole damn summer of 2001 trying simultaneously to tangle himself up in and fight his way out of. 

“His father,” whispered Shelly the medievalist, standing before a poster with Ben Jonson's face taped onto Johnny Rotten's body, “is the lawyer for the developers getting ready to build there, right in that field.” 

“Build what?” queried Pete the British romanticist.

“Where?” added our Sven, the modern Americanist.

“Houses,” said Katrina, the composition/rhetoricist.  “More ugly pre-fab McMansions.  In those big fields Fitz left his car next to.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Or was made to leave his car next to,” the beautiful bespectacled Shelly speculated.  Giving everyone pause. 

“There's also, of course,” said the butch-as-you-please-but-still-disarmingly-cute (thought Sven) Katrina, breaking the silence, attempting to stir a clump of ancient powdered cream into her molasses-thick coffee, “the whole thing about the farmer who found his car.”

“What?  What?”  Sven getting a little uptight.

“Fitz's Dad is scheduled to go to court against the guy.”

“No effing way,” gasped the bow-tied (as always) Pete.

“Way,” Katrina and Shelly, together.  Clever girls.

“And you're getting all this where?” sneered Sven.

“In this thing called a newspaper?” Shelly, her expression just what you’d expect.  Sure enough, she plucked the thing from the disaster-area desktop behind her, thrust it into Sven's shaky hands, tapped percussively on a below-the-fold front-page story in the Morning Bugle, Galilee's daily right-wing rag.  Every rust-belt town now had one. 

Revoquer Grad Student Gaughan Gone, went the headline.  Somebody in that office should be shot. 

“The Bugle has learned,” read Sven aloud from the fourth paragraph, set in that paper's loopy uncials, “that Jack Rueful, who discovered Gaughan's car, is plaintiff in a suit defended by Thomas Gaughan, the missing student's father and a prominent Philadelphia real estate lawyer.

“Rueful, a Galilee Township corn farmer,” continued Pete from the fifth indent, reading over Sven’s shoulder, breathing down his neck, 
"claims to own the 16 square acres upon which Thomas Gaughan's clients, Turfeeters Inc., plan to build forty new homes.

“It’s the same property,” recited Katrina from memory (she had freaky talents), “Barry Gaughan's deserted yellow BMW was found beside on Thursday evening.” 

They all stood there then, faces furrowed, blinking up at the water-stained ceiling.  But it didn't help.  Because it didn't figure.  Motive, motive.  Jack Rueful would want to kidnap one Fitz Gaughan why?  Blackmail was out, provided the guy was even remotely sane: everyone would know who did it. 

“Maybe there was a simple crime of rage,” tossed out Sven, making Death tip-toe icily through the little circle’s midst. 

And making everyone turn and walk away. 

As Sven made a mournful noontime drive out to the vanishing site, though, wanting now to see it himself, to breathe its mystifying air, he pondered that this last numbing possibility made no sense either.  Jack Rueful (he pictured, disturbingly, the bepitchforked hayseed from Woods’ American Gothic) would recognize Fitz how when he saw him?  And would call the police himself, having done something awful, why?  To divert suspicion?  A little transparent, wasn’t it? 

There were cops, he saw as he climbed out of his Mazda, in the meadow, which winked with hyacinth, jasmine, marigold.  He wouldn't let the flora put him in a funereal mood.  Three black-and-whites, radios squawking in the brilliant sunlight, crouched on the same shoulder where Fitz's scruffy ride must have squatted two days earlier.  And a line of the classic yellow tape – a gross TVish intrusion – was visible deep in the field, pulled taut between several hundred yards of trees where the forest began.

POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS.

The woods.

Full of mushrooms.  Algae.  Rot.

But as yet no Fitz. 

Sven shuddered.  Felt his teeth come a little loose.  Couldn't even guess what might’ve brought Fitz here.  The dude generally shunned nature.  Would sneeze, the neurotic, if he so much as saw a picture of a weed.  And he hardly struck Sven as the doting kid who’d drive out to admire the battlegrounds on which his father fought fiercely monied battles.

There was no one there but the cops.  Sven saw, in the distance, one of them, sagging German shepherd in tow, emerge from the trees into white sunlight, then vanish back in again.

He suddenly wanted to forget he’d ever seen the place.

Returning to his Mazda, though, he glimpsed something someone had left behind – a dollop of color between the bumpers of two cop cars parked nose to ass.  He stepped back again.  “Now what the hell,” he actually said aloud. 

It was an arrangement of flowers, like those godawful things you see propped up on roadsides where someone's bought the proverbial farm.  Only this one wasn't shaped like a cross, or a star of David, or a teddy bear.  It was shaped, tightly packed white carnations and yellow roses, like a guitar. 

“A guitar,” Sven said to Kate that night, sitting in a booth at the Yeast Works, Galilee's new, inexplicably hip microbrewery/restaurant.  Every rust-belt town now had one. 

“Freaky,” she said, French fry suspended halfway to her face.  “But he’s a big fan, right?”  She used the present tense, he noted.  Well why shouldn't she? 

“A big fan?” 

“You know.  Of music and...stuff.” 

But something else bothered Sven.  And he didn't know what till he woke the next morning from another fitful sleep.  As if insomnia, so unproductive, so uneconomical, were part of the recipe for good detection. 

It was the big lacquered sign beside the soon-to-be construction site.  He'd seen it yesterday – and it had loomed again in his dank, fungal dreams.

It stood at the corner of the field, a hundred yards from the cop cars.  Bearing the name of the housing development to be inflicted there.  Typically vapid, meaningless, sterile.  Something a retarded computer cooks up.

BROOKE FOREST GLEN.

Get it?  With the first letters?

Barry Fitzgerald Gaughan.

“Dude,” said Ralph Mountain, another cohort, in Boxer on Monday morning.  “You've finally watched Chinatown one too many times.” 

They were in Ralph's closet-size office, where he covertly (though even the department chair knew it) lived.  Observe the sweat-damp sleeping bag kicked into the corner. 

“Ralph, buddy, you are joking,” proceeded Sven.  “Right?  There was a one in 26 chance the first letter would match.  There was a one in 26 chance the second letter would match.  Ralph,” curiously evangelical now, “there was a one in 26 chance the third letter would match.  Do you know what 26 x 26 x 26 is?”

“About the number of centimeters from here to the local mental hospital.”

“Ha!”

“There are,” pontificated Ralph, “such things as coincidences.  They're weird, I'll grant you.  But that's why they call them coincidences.”

Sven felt a headache blossoming.  He watched Ralph unwrap a pop tart, take a cigarette lighter from his pocket, thumb it to life, and hold it under the pastry, browning it.  He examined Ralph's dreadlocks.  The fourteen studs and hoops up and down his right ear.  The long, wispy goatee.  He was a big punker from way back when.  In the corner of the office stood two file cabinets full of 70’s and 80’s records so awful most had never even been listened to by their own artists.

“Why,” Sven figured he'd give it a shot, “would someone leave a guitar-shaped flower bouquet by the field where Fitz vanished?”

“’Cause he played guitar,” Ralph, matter-of-factly.  The pop tart let out a gassy hiss. 

“He did?  How do you know that?”

Ralph pocketed the lighter, took a big bite of breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever it was, then spoke around it.  “He told me.  At Katrina and Tina's party last Christmas.”

Well how do you like that.  Sven wouldn’t have used the word “friend,” to be sure, to describe Fitz: the guy was too amorphous, somehow, to be “friends” with anyone.  But he'd figured he was at least as good an acquaintance as Fitz had had at that place. 

Ralph barked a laugh, sending a soggy crumb shooting over Sven's shoulder.  “Dude, you look like someone just shot your dog.”

“Eat me,” Sven sulked.  “Who else knows that?”

“I dunno.” 

“Well what did he say?  At the party?”

“He said, ‘I play guitar,’” chewing thoughtfully.  “Or words to that effect.”

“Yeah, but in what context?”

“I can't remember.  I was pie-eyed.”

A pigeon flapped noisily onto the air conditioner outside Ralph’s window, stared hungrily through the wire mesh at his pop tart.  But he wasn't about to share.  All his meals came out of the vending machine downstairs.  It got expensive. 

“I wouldn't get too worked up about this Fitz thing, Svenny Boy,” Ralph advised.  “You know what a train wreck that guy is.”  Again, noted Sven, with the present tense.  “Tomorrow, next week, next month, ol' Fitz'll come stumbling back into Boxer Hall, looking like a rat's nest, carrying an armload of black velvet paintings he bought in Oaxaca, or…wherever the hell he decided to jump out of his own car to hitchhike to.” 

But it was tough taking advice from a guy in an inflatable Miller Lite armchair.

“What's your major field of study again?” inquired Sven, slit-eyed. 

A blank look came over Ralph's face.  His jaw stopped working the last bite of pop tart.  “I can't remember,” he said.

And he laughed and laughed.

Sven left Ralph, left Boxer, crossed the university lawn, the intimidating gothic buildings crowding up on him like he couldn't remember their ever doing before.  He walked into the shimmering glass and steel science library, jogged down an icy cold stairwell, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, and emerged, somewhere deep under the Earth, into a NORAD-like computer lab.  Peacetime by the looks of the place.  Only one summer school student there, a good-looking South Asian kid slumped drooling in front of his computer, an animated vampire looming on the screen saver above his head.

Sven sat down at a gleaming titanium carrel, logged onto a computer, Googled Fitz's name.  Well shit: he actually had a website.  Turned out, after a couple mouse clicks, to be no great shakes: just a niche on the Revoquer U server where he'd posted some syllabi for his freshman comp classes. But it was somewhere to start. 

He brought up the most recent syllabus – the one for the semester that had just ended in May.  There were, naturally, office hours...required texts...phone numbers and an e-mail address (bfg7576@hotmail.com).  Actual prose began under a section titled, curiously, The Plan, much of which, Sven saw, scanning, had not a lot to do with a course plan, per se, at all.

All right, he thought.  There's a sign.  So...how about some good old coded messages?  How might Fitz have gone about it?  Might as well start with shit too simple even for third graders.  Like...first letters of each paragraph.

There were six of them.  The first started, “Because absence will adversely affect your grade....”  The second, “It's not absolutely necessary to....”  The third, “You're late, technically, if you....”  The fourth, “As should be clear by now....”  The fifth, “Last, inform me if....”  And the sixth: “Longer, you should know, isn't necessarily better.”

Okay.  First letters.

Sven leaned in a little closer to the screen, hearing the monitor's low, droning hum. 

B...I...Y...A...L...L.

He sat back.  Blinked several times. 

The kid behind him sneezed in his sleep, his screen saver now playing an eerie organ fugue to accompany a big, shambling rat. 

Bye, y'all. 

Sven sat there a long time, feeling cool blue fingertips tracing patterns on his back, under his T-shirt. 

But he also pictured the woods again.  Pictured them at twilight, a trail of smoke arcing languidly above them.  Then the flash and sizzle of an exploding flare. 

Easily just a coincidence, he thought.  A projection.  Ralph was still right.  The next try at meaning would, for better or worse, prove he was really right.  For better, no doubt.  For better.  So…let's go for first whole words of each paragraph.

Because...It's...You're...As...Last...Long.

He sat back again. 

Because it's your ass, last long?

Advice for the ages. 

The sleeping kid let out a whimper, his computer now playing Vincent Price's cackle from the end of Michael Jackson's “Thriller.”

Well all right.  Okay.  The second word of each paragraph would prove it.  The vast nothingness of it.  The great yawning lack of intent. 

Absence...not...late...should...inform...you.

Overhead, a heavy cloud crossed a skylight atop an inverted wishing well, fifty feet up.  Directly beneath it, Sven sat back, exhausted at ten a.m. 

Now what was it they called you when you were dead?

Ah yes.  He remembered.  They called you late! 

“Or maybe,” he couldn't wait to tell Ralph, “it's only a coincidence they call it that!”

Suddenly the kid behind him sat bolt upright, hollered something in a foreign language.  Sven spun around.  They stared at each other.  Then the kid, not moving his head, slid his eyes far left, far right....  “Dude, what’d I just say?” he queried in perfect California English.  He was wearing a Sick Dick and the Volkswagens T-shirt.

“No idea,” said Sven.  “Sounded like...Sinhalese or something, but I'm only guessing.”

“Hey man,” the kid said.  “I only speak English.”  And he got up unsteadily and left.

All right, thought Sven.  I'll surrender, Fitz.  I'll give myself over to this thing.  I'll follow it as far as you make it go, but you've gotta show me just one more thing.

And he scrolled back up to the top of the screen, to where he'd seen Fitz's e-mail address.  bfg7576@hotmail.com.  Then, just for shits and giggles, or whatever, he went to the computer's accessories menu, brought up the calculator, multiplied 26 x 26 x 26.

One lousy digit.  That's all the number in Fitz’s e-mail address was off by.  One...lousy...digit.

Okay, Sven thought, putting his head down on the cool desktop by the keyboard, rocking it back and forth, feeling himself tear up for the first time since his first girlfriend dumped his ass with impunity freshman year of college.  Okay, okay.   I'll do it.  I'll follow. 

Understand: it wasn't just curious math that convinced Sven that Fitz had given everyone the slip.  It wasn't just whacked coincidence.  It wasn't just specters of meaning so thin you'd kill them by holding a match too near.  He was also running on memory.  A specific memory. At Katrina and Tina's party last winter – the same one where Fitz, apparently, told Ralph he played guitar – Sven and Fitz, both dressed as elves (Katrina and Tina loved theme soirees; this time you could be any homunculus you wanted), stood, in the wee hours, smoking 7-Eleven cigars on their hostesses’ balcony, staring down at the glimmering colored lights of the Galilee Valley.  Sven remarking, he recalled, how great it was – really, really great – that some long-indentured Shakespearean, Jerry Bierstein, who'd slaved over dozens of revisions of his diss for more years than anyone could remember, had just trapped a tenure-track job at a junior college on some tornado-blasted plain in....South Dakota, or…Oklahoma, maybe. 

“Great?” Fitz slurred, turning on Sven, peering at him through his signature shaggy bangs.  Swaying in place.  Bells on his cap jingling.  “Do you – know – what that poor bastard is – in for?  A hundred and forty – students a semester?  Tongue lashings from – Christian fundamentalist deans who’re pissed he's teaching – Hamlet?  Committee work every day till his – dick falls off?”

Sven’s hand moved unconsciously to his groin.  Could that happen?

Fitz leaned in close.  His breath fogged out of his nose in the frigid Pennsylvania air, left hand pinching his smoldering cigar, right hand sloshing around a drink – undiluted Chambord, by the purpleness.  “And you realize – right,” continued his terrifying sermon, “that a job like that is – the best – any of us from this peon place – can ever hope for.”

Sven, smashed, couldn't remember why he was dressed all in green velvet.  It seemed, in his alcohol-retarded state, to indicate Fitz's nightmare vision of the future was coming true.  He stared hard at the Fitz on the left, did what would've seemed to the sober like an imitation of a horrified person.  “Fitz!” he cried.  “What can we do?”

His acquaintance/cohort/associate/colleague clutched his shoulder, pressing the damp cold velvet of Sven's costume against his skin.  “All you gotta – do, my man,” looking unusually sure of himself, “is make – something else happen.”  And with that he extended his arm, dropping Katrina's Dollar-Store highball glass full of purple death off the balcony, so it should've made a tinkling, musical smash in the parking lot below.... 

But it never made a sound. 

At eight p.m. on the day of the conversation with Ralph, of his discovery of Fitz's cryptic syllabus, of the multiplied numbers, Sven was prodded awake with a ruler by a work-study undergrad in Coke-bottle glasses in the same computer lab he'd descended into that morning.  “We're like, closing,” the kid said.  Sven had spent the day sleeping in the same position as that South Asian kid.  What unassimilable things had he said in his sleep?

He wandered back up, knot-necked, trembling with hunger, to the university lawn.  And collapsed in the soft grass. 

The sun set.  It shone like clotting blood through the stained glass tower of the Alumni Memorial Building.  Opposite, it reflected like salvation off the colossal rusty blast furnaces of Galilee Steel.  That which was beautiful became ugly.  That which nobody thought could be anything but ugly became beautiful. 

Within a few days Sven would try, unsuccessfully, to do some hitchhiking.  He'd try, unsuccessfully, to drive south.  He'd try, unsuccessfully, to get on a plane.  But in every case, forces too large, too dull, too easily named to bother naming would hold him right where he was. 

Right...the hell...there.
 
 

2

But not for Sven Overlook, the only Boxer habitué, maybe, who felt he had something to hide.  Three weeks to the day after Fitz dematerialized, said investigators found him in his wee English department office, waiting.  Feet up.  Smoothing his shirt.  Whispering a mantra: Cool as milk.  Cool as milk.  Cool...as...milk.  Expecting them.  No big trick, though, that: U administrators had informed English departmenteers the P.I.s would be on campus that afternoon, making the rounds, and that it would be nice if folks knowing Fitz could avail themselves.  And Sven wasn’t about to draw attention to himself by being the only grad student not around. 

When they appeared in his open doorway, though, Sven's facade o' suavity crumbled before the majesty of the Law.  His feet dropped to the floor.  A lump leapt into his throat.  He started sweating profusely.  From the armpits. 

Though they were hardly what he’d expected.  Two Latino kids, basically, in full hip-hop regalia: gold chains, baseball jerseys, sneakers and haircuts upon which considerable amounts of technology had been brought to bear.  They introduced themselves (“Freddie”; “Cinco”) with thick South Philly accents and crowded, big tall boys, into two plastic chairs in front of Sven's desk, jangling like firetrucks.  And within seconds were right down to it. 

“So, uh, Mistuh Gawn – Fitz, y'all called him?” 

Cinco asked the questions.  Freddie typed notes on a wafer-thin laptop. 

Sven nodded vigorously.  “Yes.  Yes.  Fitz.  We called him Fitz.”

“He didn't like...say nothin' in the days or weeks or months before he…y’know… disappeahed?  Stuff that would...indicate he was in trouble wid someone?  Or that he was like...plannin' to do somethin' drastic in 'is life?”

The only question Sven had hoped they wouldn't ask.  The only one, of course, they really could. 

But he should tell them what?  That there were secret messages (“Because it's your ass...”) in Fitz's syllabi?  That a numerologist would go ga-ga for his e-mail address?  That he'd once bemoaned the state of his chosen profession at a party and had maybe, possibly, entertained the notion of doing something else with his life?  Like these guys wouldn’t be doing the same thing driving back to Philly today after spending a whole afternoon interviewing, in the dullest case of their young lives (“Some freakin’ loony honky pulls a Henry David Tuh-row, and you want us to find him why?”) a bunch of twitchy eggheads. 

So...Sven took a deep breath.  Examined the cobwebs on the ceiling.  Pursed his lips. Furrowed his forehead.  Shook his head slowly.  Arched an eyebrow.  Cleared his throat.  Shook his head some more.  Drummed his fingertips on the desktop.  Tugged an earlobe.  Sighed.  Tapped his forehead. Did a little more head-wagging. 

“Well...I, uh....  Hmm.  I guess....  No.  I would have to say, having considered it, that I think not.  No, definitely.  Definitely, definitely no.”  Then, dropping his gaze back down, he found the detectives’ expressions utterly transformed.  He nearly screamed. 

They were staring levelly at him, smirking almost imperceptibly, the one dude’s fingers now paused above his keyboard. 

“You're, uh...sure about that.”  Freddie, cheek twitching as if he were suppressing a laugh.  It was the first time, since introducing himself, he'd spoken.  He was 250 pounds if an ounce. 

Sven prayed his bladder would hold.  “Oh, yes.  Oh, yes, I'm quite...quite sure.”

“Overlook.”  Cinco stroked his perfect millimeter-long goatee with two bejeweled fingers.  “That's a real interestin’ name.”

“I, uh....  Thank you.”  They kept right on staring.  “Very – much?” 

They studied him like he was a five-year-old they’d have to figure out some way, Christ knows how, to reason with.  He tried smiling at them.  Succeeded only in looking like a baby with a funky case of gas. 

“Sven – ”  Cinco stopped.  Tugged a chain like he was loosening a necktie.  “Can I call you Sven?”

“Sure.  Sure you can.”

“You ain’t like...overlookin' nothin', are you, Sven?”

He chuckled.  It came out a series of grunts.  “No.  No, officer, I'm surely not.”

This set the two detectives howling.  They laughed and laughed and laughed.  They tried very hard to stop themselves but couldn't.  They wiped tears from their faces with the heels of their hands and kept on laughing.

“We ain’t police officers,” Freddie finally wheezed. 

Before they left they gave him their card.  When you simply gotta know, read the slogan at the bottom.  All the same text on the opposite side in Spanish. 

“You call us, Sven,” said Freddie, “if you, uh...re-membuh anything.  ’Cause we're a lot easier to deal with than some of the guys might be through here askin’ questions later.”

Now what did that mean?  The police?  They’d be through? 

And now that he thought about it, why hadn’t they been through?

He could still hear Freddie and Cinco chuckling as they walked down the hall, one of their cell phones chirping the theme from The Rockford Files.

“Fitz's parents have all that – money!” Sven barked ten minutes later at fellow pro student Pete over the grinding photocopier in the department office downstairs.  “And they send those two – two – punks?”

“Now really, Sven,” Pete, adjusting his bow tie, pushing his horn-rims up his nose.  He looked like an especially constipated George F. Will.  You'd never guess he was the biggest Marxist in the department.  “That type of, of, of – classist thinking just doesn't – ”

“Oh, that's not what I mean.  They were just so – so – ” 

So right?  Is that what he couldn't say?  They'd looked through him like Saran Wrap over rotten leftovers.  And had left convinced, no doubt, he actually knew something important when he absolutely didn't!  Or he did, maybe, but...not the type of important they'd find important.  Or – 

“I hear,” said Sherry, the department secretary, leafing through some poor slob's application folder, “they're like, the hottest-shit investigators in Philly.”

“Oh yeah?”  Sven had about had it.  “And where do you hear that?”

“From Liz.”  The other secretary.  Who looked up from her palm pilot, startled.

“Derek,” she said – a particularly insane prof – “says they're Penn grads.  Supposedly they make 250 bucks an hour.”

“Together or separately?”

“Well I don't know.”

“Ha!”

“Read the paper this morning?” asked Sherry.

“The newspaper?  On a TA's stipend?”  Loud enough for the department chair in the adjacent office to hear.  Get your digs in when you can.

“That farmer guy, Jack Rueful?  Who Fitz’s dad is suing?  He’s off the hook.  His property checked out clean.” 

Sven left. 

“So why didn't you just tell those guys what you know?” asked Kate, not unreasonably, in the mall's food court that evening.  Meals out.  The only time they ever saw each other.  They sat near the archway reading 

in foot-high red and yellow neon letters.

“Because – because – ” Sven stammered.  Out with it.  “It's none of their business!”

She blinked at him.  Long brown hair sliding down over one brown eye.  Pretty girl. 

“If Fitz did leave bizarro messages in his syllabi,” he proceeded, “if he was being numerically clever, if he did decide to buck his fate, then he doesn't need to be found.  He wasn't murdered, or... abducted, or – ”  He bonked himself on the forehead, frustrated.  “He just split!”

“He just split.”  Nodding.  Facetiously.  “And left behind just enough clues so a friend” – she knew how he felt about that word in this case –  “who knows him and cares about him could possibly figure out what he's done.”

“I certainly don't know what he's done.”

“Well who knows what you’d figure out if you stared at that syllabus for another hour or two!”

Non compos mentis, really.  People got sent to institutions for conversations like this.

She leaned back in her white wire chair.  Fished a Benson & Hedges from out of her bag.  Fired it up. Blew smoke at him, exasperated. 
"If those signals are there, it's practically,” she concluded, “a cry for help.”

A cry for help? he nearly said.  A pat of encouragement was more like it.  A You can do it! for whoever was smart enough to find it.  And he had.

A cry for help.  Come on.  Was she blind?  She worked in this mall, for Christ's sake, one floor up, managing a science-cum-toy store fifty, sixty, seventy hours a week.  Demonstrating cheap microscopes, lopsided orreries and duck-call kazoos for snot-nosed yard apes and their zombified parents.  Hiring and firing teenagers whose whole lives revolved around snickering behind her back.  She came home at night walking into walls from exhaustion.  And she needed convincing it might be nice to get out of the meatgrinder?  Sheeeeez.  Him and her both.  Like...atoms in some mammoth synchrotron, zooming faster and faster around some circular track, working toward a velocity so insane they’d be oblivious to the ultimate collision. 

To get off the track.  To move into some unnameable-from-here alternate reality.  This she didn't get? 

Sven was distressed.  So much so that when Kate had staggered back to work in her khakis and company polo shirt, he succumbed, perhaps shamefully, but who can judge, to the dark thing inside him he’d been both nurturing and quashing for a good couple years now.

He snaked his way through the mall.  Tunnel-visioned.  Past cappuccino stands and ear-piercing booths.  Past mohawked boys pitching pennies and Spandexed moms pushing strollers.  And entered the architecturally themed Fundaments, the closest thing to a hip men's clothier this backwater valley had.  A couple of almost-pretty high-school boys who “worked” there watched him stride in in his cuffed Levis, muddy Timberland boots, XXL “REVOQUER” T-shirt.  “Do you like, need something?” sneered one of them.  Chuckling after Sven passed.  Let him. 

He made like the Concorde for the très couteux shit in back, European trip-hop music raining down on him.  He collected a $149.95 pair of black leather jeans.  A $29.99 white fitted T-shirt.  A $299.95 collarless, waist-length, red leather motorcycle jacket.  And... mmm...these here $149.95 black leather boots.  Ankle-high.  Side zips. 

He hauled the whole mess into a dressing booth.  Changed within seconds in front of a floor-to-ceiling Le Corbusier quote in gold Roman letters.  Then, finished, added the last touch, violently mussing his hair, which had been neatly parted, shoving it all forward into his eyes. 

No mirrors in the dressing booths.  Management’s way of getting you out on the catwalk.  So he stepped out, tight cowhide squeaking, to find a mirror.  There was one.  He marched right up, snarling in anticipation. 

And it was the same as always: he hardly recognized this dick in the mirror. 

Sven peered through his disheveled bangs.  Parted his lips so his teeth glinted.  Hips forward.  Shoulders back.  One stiff nipple peeking past the edge of the coat's zipper.  Mmm.  He turned around to peer over his shoulder for the rear view.  Not bad.  Not bad...at...all. 

Then he realized it'd gotten quiet.  Real quiet.  The trip-hop beats were the only sound. 

Ass to mirror, Sven rotated his head slowly forward.  And found every last one of the dozen or so people in the store, including the two Young Dudes he'd strode in past, staring.  Blankly.  At him.  The same way they'd be staring at, say, the subjects of Entertainment Tonight a little later on, after supper. 

Sven backed up slowly, slowly, till he hit the mirror he'd been gazing into.  But no one laughed.  He crab-stepped along the wall, ten feet to the left, edging back into his dressing booth, easing the door shut behind him, peeking out through the diminishing crack till it snapped shut.  When he re-emerged, no one cared that he was once again dork-garbed and -groomed.  They still stared. 

He schlepped the whole mess o' textiles, stuffed under his arm, to the counter, behind which Robert Venturi's face, muralized, loomed like Mao's in a different time and place.  Pulling an already overtaxed MasterCard from a rubber-banded bundle of its siblings, offering it without eye contact to the transfixed lanky track star behind the register, he said,  “Just...uh...these.  Please.”

It's true.  Our Sven, 27, was secretly hot.  Yummy.  Erogenic.  Scrum-diddly-umptious.  But hid it under bland, baggy clothes, Catholic schoolboy hair, and a spine-wrecking slouch for reasons three:

1.  Nobody takes a beautiful academic seriously.

2.  Beautiful people in all walks spend half their lives convincing everyone they know, over and over again, that they're not backstabbing pig assholes.  Unless, of course, they are.  But then so are lots of other people.  But anyway – 

3.  Looks were inimical, oppugnant, antithetical to everything Sven had committed himself to studying.  Looks were shallow; art was deep.  Looks were flat and glassy; philosophy was textured and complex.  Looks were corporatized, sanitized, numbing, dehumanizing, mainstream; literature was...everything that was not.  Right?

About #1: What kind of person spends thousands of hours in mildewy libraries, with freakin’ books and computers and microfilm readers, when they could be in Manhattan nightclubs, on teak-floored yachts, on Italian beaches screwing everything in sight?  The kind who's always thinking about nightclubs, yachts, Italian beaches, and screwing everything in sight when they should be doing their work!  That's what kind! 

About #2: Please.  Even beautiful people distrust beautiful people.  Believe secretly that life would be easier without the odd could-be model hanging around.  You always wonder when one of them is gonna go off like a booby trap, steal your friends, your job, your significant other.  Couldn’t they just go away?

About #3.... 

Well….

Here's where Sven's thinking got a little muddy.  At least in recent months. 

Hemingway, Ellison, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Walker, Doctorow, Nabokov, Morrison, DeLillo....  Their books sure seemed delivered from some world beyond the world.  Someplace smarter than life, better than life.  Big fuck-yous to grim, blithe materialism.  Conduits of Esoteric Truths only glimpsable – peripherally, fleetingly – from our own drear workaday world. 

So why was his devotion to them getting him increasingly mired in the drear workaday world?

And why, when he stood in front of the full-length mirror in his and Kate's bathroom wearing black Hugo Boss slacks, suede Via Spiga shoes, and a shimmery, half-unbuttoned Helmut Lang shirt (three of a dozen or so cognate items, plus a whole lot of GQs, hidden (from Kate) in an old cardboard box in the bedroom closet), plus a couple quick strokes of eyeliner, did he see some version of himself too airy, too slippery, too blessedly two-dimensional to be ensnared in a cumbersomely three-dimensional, 401-K universe?

Sven had other secrets. 

When Kate went to see her parents in Virginia last October, he went to Manhattan.  Twice.  Not to meet women.  Not to buy drugs.  Not to satisfy other freakier you'll-have-to-go-to-New-York-for-that cravings.  No.  Just to sit in bars.  Very, very hip bars.  Whilst wearing absurdly expensive clothing. 

The first place was Field.  A long, thin, brightly lit room on the 17th floor of an Upper-East-Side Stanford White hotel.  Walnut floors.  Power-buffed aluminum walls.  No art whatsoever beyond the severe, glistening furniture.  But a stunning view of the park, blazing orange and yellow.  Halloween colors.   Instead of peanuts they had dried seaweed leaves on the bar.  Where Sven sat.  Trying, by his rabbit-like stillness, to hide from the thirty or so professional sorts milling around him.  He nursed a $15 saketini that came, to his dismay, with a skewered baby octopus in it.  Was it a joke?  On him?   Sadly he was yet too green to know.  When there was no more alcohol left around the poor critter, he swallowed it whole – and ordered, grimacing, another, just to prove to the predictably snobbish bartender it was exactly what he’d wanted.

Sven wore Louis Vuitton, top to bottom.  The bartender wore Dolce & Gabbana (top) and Banana Republic (jeans). They said thrillingly little to each other.  And Sven, for the ninety minutes he was there, spoke not a word to anyone else. 

Nor was he terribly garrulous at the next place he went, two days later, called Down.  This atop a Tribeca gallery. 

He was a smidge bolder this time, coming out at night (a Thursday) to a legitimately crowded, purportedly celebrity-haunted place.  (He wasn't positive, but he’d have bet a credit card or two the dude in the corner, by the window, in Armani, was Christian Bale.)  Sven wore Tom Ford (jacket), Jil Sander (slacks), Calvin Klein (white V-neck T-shirt), and a Wal-Mart digital watch.  He sat at the end of a long glass bar, alone, next to a giant monochrome silkscreen of Edie Sedgwick's face, the Girlies' album Busted (not that Sven recognized it) playing frantically on the stereo. 

Then, suddenly, terrifyingly, he was being approached. 

En route: a mind-bendingly sexy East Asian woman with short-cropped hair, wearing, if he wasn't mistaken, Anna Molinari. 

Making deliberate I'm-coming-over-there eye contact. 

Sven on the hairy edge, swear to God, of bolting. 

It took her forever to get to him.  So many people she had to push and slide past under the blue and yellow lights.  It was like watching sex.  He would’ve had time to get to the stairs, too.  Stupid.  Should he pretend not to know English?  Would that keep them from escorting his ass out of here?  Because he knew what she, an obvious member of what he could only think to call the Inner Circle, was going to say to him. 

Who let you in here?

When she was in front of him he gave up the strategy of statuesque stillness, putting his sweaty palms up: a surrender.  But the girl, the woman, leaned in languorously and hollered – to make herself audible – something Sven wouldn’t soon forget.

“I hate to be so Jersey?" she said.  "But my friends and I are wondering: Did we see you in a spread in last month’s Details?”

She stepped back.  Looking, he realized, starstruck.  He, inexplicably, on the giving end of a real (albeit phony) New York moment.  But before he could answer (and who knows what bullshit would’ve flown out of his mouth?), Ms. Jawdroppingly Hot was tugged off elbow-wise by some dude in a damn fine Dior suit whose biggest compliment to Sven was refusing even to glance at him. 

He was so high after that he couldn't feel his ass on the seat of the Greyhound the whole way home. 

Cinderella in her pumpkin.

When the bus emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel, hooking south, Sven, forehead on cool glass, hearing delicate snoring in the dark all around him, stared out across the Hudson at the city blazing away.  Empire State and World Trade Towers (this was eleven months to the day before the billion tons of smoking rubble) jutting up impossibly, dominating, bathed in light.  Dreams made flesh of what New York could re-make you into.  He’d found a world beside the world.  A world above the world.  A way to lift himself out of himself. 

Now, eight months later, he was stuffing 630 bucks’ worth of Fundaments into a box in his closet.  So his girlfriend wouldn't know how much he'd spent.  Or how good he looked wearing it.
 
 

3

“Wild, huh, Mr. Gaughan being in that band?” 

This from Rex Snively III.  An impudent little shit from Sven's English 1 class three years ago.  Then a spectacularly impudent shit in Fitz's English 2 class the semester after that.  Here was a lesson.  Charge $32,000 a year tuition at a school and see what shows up.  Geniuses?  Right.  Like the rich are generally smart.  No, you get impudent little shits who inform you, after getting lousy grades for willful misreadings of towering American classics, that you'll be hearing from their families’ alumni attorneys. 

As Rex Snively III had once informed Fitz Gaughan.

Empty threat, it turned out.  But still.

Now a senior, essentially graduated, taking his last course (PSYCH 480: Freud in the Age of Multinational Capital) in summer session I, Rex had found his former TA, Mr. Overlook, on the creaking second floor of the Castle, the U's original library, a regal building now demoted, in its terminal low-techness, its terminal decrepitude, to repository of all things Humanities at Revoquer, that revered but chronically unfamous institution.  Sven was desked in the shadowy stacks, marking up his copy of Baudrillard’s Simulations and Death, listening to fat start-of-July rosebuds bumping breezily against tall gothic windows.  Then came Snively, out of nowhere, saying freaky things about Fitz, whose name Sven hadn't heard in...five days?  Not since Philly's Freddie and Cinco had been through. 

“All right, Rex,” knowing he'd regret it.  “I'll bite.  What band?”

“The Bodies.” 

Sven, chilled, leaned back in his chair.  Stared at the kid.  Who had greasy hair (he'd grown it long since freshman year) tucked behind his ears.  Was wiry and underfed.  Pasty.  Smelled like a goat. Wearing nasty old Birkenstocks and a threadbare “Big Dogs” T-shirt.  “Snively,” evenly, “are you making some sort of infinitely fucked-up joke?”

“Joke?  No!”  For a long moment the unctuous youngster stared back, either scared or doing a good job pretending.  “Wow, you really don't know,” he stated rather than asked.

“Well?  Enlighten me.” 

“Well they – it – I – don't know!  I mean, the Bodies were like, this big-deal New York band maybe five years ago, and my – my –        my – ”

Sven spun a hand in the air. 

“ – girlfriend – at NYU – I told her that my old English TA, this guy Barry Gaughan, they sent around an e-mail, he's totally missing.  And she – ”

“Your girlfriend.”

“ – yeah, was like, Barry Gaughan, that was a guy in the Bodies.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  And if anyone would know, it's her, 'cause she was fuckin' totally – ”

“Watch the Anglo-Saxon, sonny.”

“ – sorry – was totally into them – ”

“The Bodies.”

“ – yeah, when she was in high school.  Her best friend was cousins or something with one of the guys in the band, and they used to get backstage to hang with them all the time.” 

The kid had winded himself. 

Sven tugged an earlobe thoughtfully, not letting Snively's eyes go.  “Probably more than one Barry Gaughan in the world,” he speculated.

“I guess so.  But no, not in this case, ’cause I was there – ”

“Where?”

“ – at NYU?  Last weekend?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”  But this just confused the poor kid.  “Go on.” 

“And when I was there, my girlfriend showed me a picture of her and her cousin and the band?  And one of the guys was totally him,” out and out pleading.  “It was Mr. Gaughan.”  A rare cool breeze moved through the Castle stacks, rustling, somewhere nearby, the pages of an open book.  “He was like,” Snively concluded, “the second guitarist.”

Cut, in Sven's mind, to: the guitar bouquet by the side of the road.  Oracular in summer sunlight.

Sven slouched in his seat.  Glared up, from under his eyebrows, at his former student, who’d ridden him every goddamn day in class, insisting everything he said was wrong.  No, Hemingway wasn’t American: he was French!  No, the middle class hadn’t been shrinking since '74: it had quadrupled!  No, the moon wasn’t made of dust and rocks: it was – 

“Rex, how would I know any of this?”

He'd asked for it.  And now he got it.  “Well, I mean, you were friends with Mr. Gaughan, right?”

Sven stood up.  Tucked Baudrillard under his arm.  “Congratulations, Snively,” he said, “on your imminent departure.”  And reached to shake the kid's clammy hand. 

“Oh...thanks....”

“Say, you wouldn't happen to know if there's a good florist in town.”

“A florist?”  It was like he'd been asked the location of the nearest gravel quarry.  Which in freshman English he probably would've known.  “Why would I?” 

Sven left Snively.  Traversed the entire shadowy second floor.  Ducked down the cast-iron spiral staircase in the deserted rotunda, where sunlight poured down in primary colors through the ancient Tiffany glass dome overhead.  Here was Reference Literature: Music.  And here, in a niche by the photocopy room (he scanned the shelf for something of the sort) was the mammoth Running Dog Encyclopedia of Rock.  2000 Edition. 

All right, Snively. 

Sven hefted the thing onto a shelf-top.  Flipped pages.  Fully expecting (such was always his luck with research) to find nothing.  Or a huge ink stain.  Or the page torn out. 

But it wasn't so.  The Bodies were right there.  And while there was no photo of them (thus Sven’s jaw unclenched a little), they had, whoever they were, a page and a half, almost, devoted to their peculiar story. 

Bodies, The
Based in New York City, the Bodies existed publicly for only 27 months, between June 1995 and September '97.  Their short career, however, gave them what many more popular acts chase in vain for decades: a rabidly devoted fan base, feverish critical acclaim, and a secure place in rock lore. 

The band's beginnings, like its end, are apocryphal.  Its five members, all in their early 20’s at the height of their success, are rumored to have met at Columbia University, where they may all have been undergraduates together.  No one knows for sure, though, because none of the Bodies has ever given an official interview, and – even more strangely – because none of their identities has ever been positively established.  Fans seem to accept their first names were Drew (vocals), Barry (guitar), Joaquin (guitar), Sean (bass), and Etienne (drums).  But the musicians have been tagged with as many surnames as there are people claiming to know them, and they only ever referred to themselves (on album covers, for instance) as “Bizzi” (Drew), “Anti” (Barry), “Evri” (Joaquin), “Nosi” (Sean), and “Enni” (Etienne).  Their true identities remain a secret jealously guarded to this day by record company executives, managers, family members, and – presumably – an inner circle of fans and friends. 

Though they were as good looking and fashion conscious as they were mysterious, the Bodies weren't just pretty boys.  Their only full-length album, the minor-label Dig (Rocket Records), took Year's Best Album honors in the 1996 Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll, resides at #12 on Running Dog's list of all-time greatest indie albums (“The Fifty Best Albums You've Never Heard,” RD 830), and holds the 77th spot among Running Dog's all-time greatest rock albums (“The New Definitive List,” RD 833). Dig, wrote Running Dog reviewer Anthony Seckofant in November  '96, 

is a whiplash homage to a hundred different punk-inflected acts, many of whom cut their teeth in the same Manhattan clubs the Bodies are tearing up today, fifteen to twenty years later.  You can hear them riffing unapologetically on The Satin Railway, Manny & the Stupids, The Girlies, Electrovision, and The Dye Jobs.  Listen close and you'll even hear echoes of the British mods.  What you can't do, though, is dismiss them, as some lemon-suckers have tried, as mere rip-off artists.  Their songs – simultaneously frantic and bored, smooth and angular, smart and retarded – are too damn good, too damn clever, for such petty knocks.  And the context in which they appear (I mean the bombastic, testosterone-soaked rap-rock scene we seem determined to drag into the next millennium) makes the Bodies' lo-fi, live-to-the-mike recordings (scarcely an overdub in sight) surprisingly innovative, even if they are “reverting” to the low-budget techniques of bands who, twenty years ago, simply couldn't afford better.  [...]  If you like most of what you hear on the radio these days, flee the Bodies.  But if you're still with those of us who buy that tired old rock-and-roll-as-important-art line, you should hear this Dig album today.  (****½)

While there weren't many of them, Bodies' live shows (most were in New York) were brief and spastic affairs, typically comprised of a single 40-minute set in which the band tore through Dig, note for note (even before they'd recorded it), at breakneck speed, inspiring frenzy in spectators who might have injured themselves more often had the band stayed longer on stage.  Encores were unheard of, and Drew, the vocalist, had a reputation for loving his audience one minute and being stunningly abusive the next. 

Not surprisingly, the big houses came calling after the band sold 400,000 albums on a label only hard-core rock aficianados had ever heard of.  In the summer of '97, after a lengthy bidding war, the Bodies signed with Pacific Records and made plans to go to Los Angeles to record their sophomore effort.  But on September 10th of that year, two weeks after the Bodies played their last-ever show at the Hammerstein Ballroom, lead singer Drew was reported missing while vacationing with friends in Mexico.  He hasn’t been heard from since. 

Some cynics smell a cheap ploy designed to turn the Bodies, after an eventual Drew return, into superstars.  Others smell a cheap ploy designed to save the Bodies from the sort of celebrity they were possibly headed for – something none of them, by most accounts, wanted.  But cooler (and maybe wiser) heads offer a simpler explanation: that “Bizzi” Body Drew really did meet a tragic end in Mexico (kidnapped and then discarded as dangerous bait, possibly) and that parents wealthy and influential enough to keep the family’s name out of newspapers (many of Drew's lyrics were self-deprecating meditations on growing up bored and privileged in New York) did just that.  After he vanished, the four remaining Bodies announced, through Pacific spokesmen, their lack of interest in continuing without their front man and have had, as far as anyone knows, no musical careers since.

Discography
Dig (LP).  Rocket Records: 09126-9.  Sept. 1996. 
“Sidelined”/ “NYC Taxi Ride” (single).  Rocket Records: 03057-4.  Sept 1996.
“The Theory of Everything” / “Terragonna” (single).  Rocket Records: 08027-1.  Jan. 1997.

Sven ducked.  Rex Snively was skipping noisily down the stairs on the other side of the room.  The freak.  Our detective, two eyeballs topping a bookshelf, unaware of irony, watched till the kid had vanished into the cavernous main reading room, exit-bound. 

But he didn’t pop back up immediately.  Just rested his forehead on the edge of the shelf, thinking: Holy shit – another disappearance.  Thinking: The name Barry, right there in black and white.  And also: Early twenties, three or four years ago.  Perfect. 

Anti Body Fitz.

Too rich.  Too, too rich. 

But he was also thinking: As many surnames as people claiming to know them.  And: Fitz didn't go to Columbia, he went to Fordham.  But also: Rumored to have gone to Columbia.  And lastly: Fordham is in New York, too.

He moved out to the reading room.  Snuck up on a carved cherrywood column.  Peered around it.  No Snively.  No anybody, in fact.

Sven advanced to the bank of computers at the far end of the room, near a disused stone fireplace tall enough, almost, to stand in.  He logged onto a machine, making it whir to life, then brought up the web. Searched on “bodies band.” 

And six fan pages leapt up immediately from the ether. 

“Carrie's BODIES ultimate fan page!”  “My Bodys Web Page.”  “10 Reasons Why the Bodies are the Best NYC Band Ever.”  “The Bodies & the Satin Railway: No Comparison.”  “Bodies Photos, Set Lists, Posters, Ticket Stubs.”  “AWAITING DREW; A Bodies Tribute.”

What the hell, thought Sven.  Let’s go for all the marbles.  And slid the cursor to “Bodies Photos,” etc. 

Then, finding himself nervy, took a deep breath to steady his hand before double-clicking the mouse.

What popped up was a lot of dark, blurry photos.  Taken at impossibly crowded gigs in please-don't-call-the-fire-marshal nightclubs.  The backs of audience members' heads, lightning white in camera flashes, loomed large in shot after shot.  And the five musicians, small and distant, on a stage bare except for vintage Fender amps and a banner reading

were in perpetual streaky motion, in mid-leap, mid-chord crunch, mid-run, mid-smooch (female audience members and each other alike), mid-collapse.  They wore ripped jeans, dirty high-top sneakers, T-shirts with other bands' names or the names of local pizzerias on them, Armani jackets with the sleeves shoved up, black motorcycle jackets, skinny ties....  The stage lights were forever flashing off their guitars, their jacket buttons, the chrome of the drum kit.... 

And above the neck? 

Hair.  Nothing but hair.  Lots and lots of shaggy, unkempt, chin-length, flying, face-obscuring mops of hair on every one of them. 

Including the one always visible just over Bizzi Body Drew's right shoulder.

The one always doubled over, pounding at his dangling hollow-body electric, knees and ankles bent precariously inward like those of a marionette gone saggy. 

The one with Fitz's hair color. 

“Come on!” Sven barked into the echoey room.  “This is a fan site?  Have we never heard of a publicity shot?” 

“Ssshh!” hissed some unseen library aide.

But there were no publicity shots on this site.  Some scanned-in ticket stubs (yippee).  A scanned-in flier from a show at the TLA in Philly showing a skinny alley cat gnawing a corncob.  The scanned-in album cover for Dig, featuring some grainy, turn-of-the-(last-)century porno shot of two women standing before curtains, backs to the camera, lovely faces in profile, tresses of hair hanging coyly, ample asses presented for inspection....  Pretty hot, truth be told, for an antique. 

But no Body faces. 

And none, Sven discovered, on any of the other sites, either.  Just a lot of fan-babble that reminded him too much, for the few sentences he surveyed, of his freshmen’s writing. 

And lots more distressingly inept, hairy, hyper-kinetic concert pix. 

Walking down the library's front steps into the hot afternoon, feeling the vaulted stone arch overhead framing him for a cinematic long-shot, Sven decided to drop in on Ralph Mountain again.  Then, approaching Boxer, that orielled oubliette, he saw a freshly painted message on the building’s treacherously sloped slate mansard:
 
 

Milcher?  Like a…cow?

The Society for the Prevention of History had struck again. 

“What does that mean, that thing on the roof?”

Ralph, perusing the vending machine offerings, went a little pale at the very mention of it.  “Those little peckers,” he grumbled, “better knock that shit off.  It's getting scary, you ask me.  They're clearly whipping themselves into some demented frenzy.  Building up to something.  Plus which putting crazy-ass shit in the student paper is one thing, but defiling a man's home is another.”  He squatted, peered dejectedly through the machine’s glass front.  “Goddamn, man, no more Doritos?”

Sven walked with him up the three flights to his office/apartment, where the purple lava lamp was going full tilt.  Inside, Sven pulled the door shut.  Waited a beat.  Then: “You ever hear of the Bodies?”

“The band?” cracking open a 7-Up.  “Uh-huh.”

“You like ’em?”

Ralph waved his hand in front of his face like someone had farted.  “Rip-off artists,” he said.  “Ants in someone else's molehill, or however the saying goes.”  Sven watched him take a tired bendy straw from his desk drawer and slip it into the can. 

“What if I told you Fitz played guitar for them?”

Ralph busted a gut, screamingly, for ten seconds.  Then stopped.  “I don't know,” he said tearily.  “I guess I'd believe you.” 

“You would?”

“That guy, anything is possible.  Guitarist, lived in New York, pretty boy, secretive....  Why not?”

“Well – gimme their record, for Christ's sake!” yowled Sven.  “Show me some old...Tiger Beats or something!”

“Tiger Beat?” sneered Ralph.  “Haw!  What do you think I am?  And I sure as shit don't have their record.”

“Well then how do you know it's bad?”

“You hear things.  From real punks.”

Sven pondered this.  Ralph, meanwhile, switched on the old mini Sony TV on the corner of his desk, Sven observing the cable that ran to it from a hole drilled in the window frame.  “Anyway,” Ralph said, “It's Sy you want to talk to.”

“Sy?  Why do I want to talk to Sy?”

“He loved the Bodies.  Used to see them all the time when he was at Columbia.”

“You don't say....”  Columbia, thought Sven, remembering what he’d read.  But “Agh,” he said, making a face.  “Why'd it have to be him?”

“What's the problem?” Ralph thumping the side of the TV, trying to get a picture.  “You're intimidated by his sexual orientation?”

“No, that's not what I mean; it's – ”  He stopped.  “What do you mean, his sexual orientation?”

Ralph looked at him over his shoulder, having settled into his inflatable chair.  “Man, nobody tells you anything.”

Now that hurt.  Sven, on his way out the door, paused.  “You know why the Bodies split up?” 

“Because they sucked?”

“No.  Singer mysteriously vanished.”

Ralph looked back at him again.  Shook his head sadly.  “Dude,” he said, “you are gonna make yourself totally, totally apeshit.”

Sy Hearst was an intimidating guy.  Not that his gayness had anything to do with it.  Or maybe it did – or would, now that Sven knew about it.  He'd have to think about it.  He’d heard the theory that gays and lesbians are basically just more evolved humans.  And since he pretty much subscribed to it, he’d always felt lame for not being queerer than he was.  Now Sy, goddamn it, would have this on him, too.  On top, of course, of being freakishly brilliant.  And crushingly dapper. 

Sy's B.A. (double major, philosophy and political science) was from Georgetown.  His M.A. (classics) was from Columbia.  He'd done something corporate in California for four or five years but didn’t like to talk about it.  And now, in his oh-so early thirties, he was doing a doctorate in American Studies at...?

Revoquer U. 

Nobody had ever asked what he was doing here, besides working on a purportedly genius book (too good to be a mere dissertation) on what he called the pleasures of paranoia in the '60s counterculture.  Where this put him politically Sven had no idea.  Maybe there was some dark secret in his past, though.  Maybe there was something in him that wanted to crush his family's pride.  Nobody knew if he was of those Hearsts, and nobody in this dejected little graduate program, a boil on an otherwise almost-Ivy League institution’s derrière, was going to be the first to ask.

Anyway. 

Everyone knew, at least, where to find Sy on Monday-through-Thursday evenings (weekends he split town): at the bar of the swank Hotel Galilee on Main Street, recently refurbished, restored, resexied by an international chain that had saved the lovely old building from the wrecking ball a mere two weeks before it was to be pulverized.  It looked now exactly like it must have back in the swinging 20’s, when vast clouds of cash were wafting out of Galilee Steel’s smokestacks – except now, rap on the gorgeous marble columns in the lobby and you'd hear they were hollow.  Climb a ladder and jangle the dazzling chandelier's crystals, you'd find they were plastic.  Flick the bartender's beautifully curled mustache, you'd find – that's right – it was waxed.  This was the New Galilee, rushing to turn itself into a movie-set version of the old one, betting everything that tourists were ready to get nostalgic for the industrial age, so real, so gritty, so honest compared to the shit the nation trafficked in these days. You should have heard what they had planned for the old steel mills.

Anyway….  Sy.

Sy had this total Kevin Spacey thing going on. 

So as Sven approached him at the faux art-deco bar, observing his perfectly tailored Ralph Lauren suit, plus the two attractive undergrads flanking him, plus his hypnotizing suavity generally, he had the feeling he was approaching not his colleague from Boxer but that character from L.A. Confidential.

He was spotted.

“Sven!” Sy said, making an emperorly hand gesture, sending the two pretty undergrads, male and female (Sven recognized both from the halls of Boxer) slouching away, cutting their eyes jealously at Sven.  “Sit down, sit down.” 

He sat.  They shook hands earnestly.  While Sy, theatrically agog, inspected him, his unoccupied hand expressing flabbergastedness.  “Sven,” drawling, “you look...fan-tastic.  When did this happen?  Who knew you were such a good-looking man?”

It's true.  Sven looked great.  He had on his slinky black suede shirt (Versace), untucked, all open at the cuffs and neck, plus his new black leather jeans and boots.  His hair was an artfully moussed tussle, and a touch of Kate's mascara worked to dramatic, if subliminal, effect.  He needed, he'd decided between Ralph's office and here, to have something working for him when he came to see Sy.  And so went home to raid his secret box.

“Thanks.  And you.  Sy, you can really wear a suit.”

“Sven, someone is absolutely going to put you on a GQ cover.  No joshing.”

Sy ordered another Grey Goose gimlet, Sven a Bombay martini, up, twist.  The bald (but for his mustache) bartender smiled hypercordially to let them know their kind was perfectly welcome.  A nice change, even.  Maybe it was the drinks.

There was academic small talk:  How's the diss?  What conferences you been going to?  How's Beth (a prof on both their committees) treating you?  Then Sven, halfway through his truly beautiful martini, brain warming, moved for deeper waters. 

“Freaky, huh, this business with Fitz.”

“Mmm,” Sy caught in mid-sip.  “Can you imagine what his family's going through.”

“I heard, actually,” feeling that increasingly familiar trembliness coming on, “a weird rumor today, and when I ran it by Ralph – ”

“Mountain.” 

“ – yeah – he told me I should tell it to you.” 

“Really?”  Sy leaned back in his bar seat, crossed his legs, laced his manicured fingers over his flat stomach.  “Well rumors are always great fun.”

Hmm, thought Sven.  Filing that one away.  Then told Sy about Rex Snively positively ID’ing Fitz in his NYU girlfriend's Bodies photo. 

“And Ralph told me you,” perorating, “were a big fan.”

“Of the Bodies,” Sy, reaching into his inside jacket pocket for – dig it – a silver cigarette case.  Too, too much.  “Excellent band,” he nodded.  “I don't often go in for the rock ’n’ roll, but they were... something.” 

“So you saw them?”

“A bunch of times,” still nodding.  “The Hammerstein, the Metropole....  A couple friends at Columbia got me into them.”

“Well what do you think, Sy?”

Mr. Elegant placed a cigarette between his lips, shrugged with his eyebrows.  “Fitz did bear an uncanny resemblance to that...what's his name.”

“Barry, Sy.  Everyone seems to know his name was Barry.”

“So?”

“So Barry was Fitz's name.”

Sy's silver lighter paused in front of his cigarette.  “Is that a fact.”

“And you know why the band split up?  Just when they were about to go to L.A. and make it huge?”

Sven watched both the memory and its implications creep over Sy's baby-ass-smooth countenance.  “That's right…” Sy said.   Then, all lit, he snapped the lighter shut and grew a big, big smile, exhaling smoke through the corner of it.  “My, Sven.  You've got a real mystery on your hands.”

“My hands?  Aren't you interested?”

Sy picked up his drink, sipped, shook his head.  “Mysteries," he said, "do not interest me.” 

“Don't interest you?  Well why not?” starting to feel those shakes a little more. 

“I...don't know.  Call it a philosophical objection.”

“To mysteries?”  Sven gulped the last of his Tanqueray.  “I'm gonna need,” fishing a lime rind from his mouth, “another one of these,” he informed the bartender. 

“Insofar as the point of a mystery,” Sy continued, “for most people is to solve it.  They make us too...teleological, I guess.”  He studied the burning tip of his cigarette.  “Too reductive.”

“Oh, Jesus," Sven moaned.  "Gonna get all theory on me.”

“The detective,” unflustered, “always does violence of some sort to the world, Sven, by trying to bring order to it.  Rationality invariably kills, maims, or otherwise fucks up the thing it tries to understand.” 

“I'm talking,” Sven, pained, pinching the bridge of his nose, “about finding out what happened to Fitz.”

“Are you?”  He tapped his cigarette, without even looking, on the edge of the ashtray beside him. “Okay.  All right.  So have you told the police what you know, then?  Or those plucky young detectives who were through Boxer last week?”

Sven, not caring for this line of inquiry, let his grimace answer.

“I suspect,” Sy whispered hoarsely, startling Sven, “what you really like is not knowing what happened to Fitz.”

“Thank you,” to the bartender, who'd delivered another architectural martini, which Sven picked up and started in on immediately.  Still registering what he'd heard.  Then, guffawing: “I'm not that deep, Sy.”

“Oh, I think you are,” grinning, leaning back to inspect Sven’s getup.  “Look at you.  You've got this whole...alternate identity working.”  He nodded, pleased.  “It’s – pretty deep.”

“I'll get in touch with the police as soon as I can tell them something that won't make them want to put me in a rubber room.”

Sy just shook his head, amused.  “But isn't that the most gorgeous part of this whole thing?”

“What’s that?” 

“That none of the Occam's razor bullshit works here?”  He took a long last drag of his cigarette, stubbed it out.  “Occam's razor?” he repeated.

“No,” Sven, irritated, “I don't know.”

“It’s the idea that the simplest explanation for any problem – any mystery – is probably the correct one.  It's a natural guiding principle for those in the detectively arts.”

He paused ominously.  “Please,” Sven urged, “I can’t wait to hear where this is going.”

“Well what's the simple explanation for Fitz's disappearance, Sven?  That he was pulled over, Christ knows how, in the Galilee countryside and kidnapped remarkably gently by people so doped up they forgot to make a ransom call?  Hmm?”  He went for the cigarette case again, this time offering one to Sven.  Who took one but declined a light, simply letting it hang flaccidly from the corner of his mouth.  “That he stopped on the side of the road to take a leak, or…pet a deer, or…pick some wildflowers – our Fitz – and was murdered in some again remarkably ungruesome manner by a corn farmer who one,” counting on his fingers, “wants revenge against Fitz's dad; two, knows his enemy's kid when he sees him; and three, is a real ace at hiding a body?  So to speak?”  He was winded by the end of this one but clearly had a great time getting there.  “Or – and this would be my personal favorite, bar none – is the simple explanation that Fitz, unbeknownst to us all, was a rock guitarist at the brink of national fame, and was hunted down by some deranged fan who's systematically wiping out his old bandmates, one by one?”  He shook his head.  Snotty-like.  “That must be it.  Case closed.”

“Sy....”

“Sven,” gripping a sueded shoulder, kindly, “look how invested you are in this.  You look great, but you look like shit.  I don't know you well, it's true.  But I've certainly never seen you like this.”

“Sy, I don't get it.  Who'm I...hurting if I want to figure out where Fitz went?”

“Try yourself, for starters.”  Sy butt-tapped his unlit cigarette on the bar.  “What a fabulous thing a mystery is, not when you've solved it but when you're in the thick of it.  It de-familiarizes the world.  It's an escape hatch from everyday life, so sensible, so mundane.  We're all slouching deathward. We all know right where we're headed.  Into the box.  What a relief, what a blessed change, to be in the midst of something that's not adding up, that's not going blithely where it's supposed to go.”

“All right.  All right,” Sven, distinctly sad now.  “Who else?”

“Who else?”

“Am I hurting?”

Sy finally lit his second cigarette.  Something in it popped, made a tiny spark.  “Fitz, of course.”

“Fitz?”

“Well think of the trick he's pulled off,” Sy proselytized.  “Doing something you just can't effing explain.  That doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense.  Do you have any idea how hard that is to do?  Hmm?  And you want to take that away from him?”  Sy idly inspected a black Prada shoe.  “Mysteries are as fragile as they are rare, Sven.  People think they're thorny and difficult, but they're not. A little rationality and they blow away.  If you're not careful you'll do exactly that to this weird present Fitz has given us.”

A pause.  Somewhere in the not-too-distant kitchen a glass smashed. 

“Why did you like the Bodies so much?” Sven asked.

“Those guys were so talented,” Sy, without a moment’s hesitation, “so beautiful, so totally vapid.  You looked at them on stage and knew you were in the presence of the Chosen.  And after one of their shows, you'd go home and look in the mirror and want to drink Drano because you weren't one of them.”

“Excuse me,” Sven said. 

He went upstairs to the men's room on the mezzanine level, stepped into a stall, closed the door and cried quietly for several minutes.  When he came out, he looked in the mirror and was surprised to find (a) the unlit cigarette Sy had given him still hanging from the corner of his mouth and (b) runny mascara streaks under his eyes. 

He cleaned himself up.  Then, walking back down the long, curving stone staircase – one of the few features of the original hotel still preserved – he passed a freakishly gorgeous woman who, working anachronistically, gave him first a double-take, then a once-over. 

When he got back to the bar, he told Sy, whose two devotees were still brooding over pints at a table ten yards away, about the guitar bouquet he'd seen by the side of the road. 

“That one's easy,” Sy said.  “I put it there.”

“No!” Sven, sloshing his martini.  “You didn't!”

“Yes.  I did.”

“You lie like a dog!” he cried.  “Why would you do that?”

“I thought an ironic gesture was called for.  Something that would let Fitz know, in case he saw it, that someone was...listening?  Is that the word I want?”

“But you didn't – even know about the Bodies connection!”

“It wasn't about the Bodies,” Sy laughed.  “It was about his dissertation.”

“His dissertation?”

“Well yeah.  The whole pop music-lit thing?”  Sy looked at Sven, confused.  “He…never told you about it?”

Sadness washed over Sven again.  “No,” he confessed.  “I just knew it was a...mass-culture type of deal.  That's all he ever told me.  I....”

An awkward silence hung there a moment.  Then Sy shrugged.  “Sven, no, I mean....  I just thought you guys were friends.”

“Everyone thinks that,” Sven whined.  “Why?”  Sy shrugged again.  “Really, I barely knew him at all.” 

“All right.”

“So what was his...diss about, exactly?”

“Honestly, he didn't tell me much either, pal.  I don't think he liked to talk shop.  I just know he'd drafted chapters on DeLillo's Great Jones Street and Rushdie's – ” snapping his fingers, remembering “ – Ground Beneath Her Feet.” 

Sven sighed, elbows on bar, face in hands. 

“You see?” Sy, sympathetically.  “Fragile.  Very fragile.”  And at last took a big swig of gimlet.   “Of course,” he continued momentarily, “that Rex Snively is a pretty weird kid.”

Sven lifted his face.  “You – know Rex Snively?”

“Mmm.  Met him about a year ago.  He was working on a poli-sci essay and wanted to hash out some ideas.”

“About?”

“Smart, really.  The persistence of JFK conspiracy theories as metaphor for what I think he called the lunacy of contemporary American culture generally.”

“Kinda easy,” snorted Sven, “don't you think?”

“Well he's an undergrad.  And it was the quality of expression as much as the idea.”

Sven downed the rest of his second martini in a gulp.  When he found the lime rind in his mouth this time, he chewed it instead of spitting it out.  “Well, Sy,” he said.  “Gonna pound the pavement.”

“Sure?”

“I've kept you long enough from your – ” nodding toward the young’ns “ – admirers.” 

“I think you've got some admirers of your own,” Sy grinned, nodding in a different direction.   Sven turned.  At a table in a corner under the eerie blue glow of an art-nouveau light fixture was the Freakishly Gorgeous Woman from the staircase.  Waifish siren type.  Across the small table from her was her counterpart, Freakishly Gorgeous Man.  Underfed Soho type. Tight threadbare T-shirt, moleskin pants, fat-soled Skechers.  Talking quietly on a thumb-size silver cell phone and staring evenly, just like his friend, at Sven.

“What's going on in this town?” Sy, awestruck.  “Are you people descending from space?”

“Feh,” our martini swiller opined.

“Feh?” shading his eyes with his hand, looking at the yonder table.  “I don't know, Sven.  She is one creepy knockout.”

“Her?  What about him?”

Sy raised an eyebrow.  “Well I didn't know you swung on that vine.”

“All vines intertwine,” peering at his colleague through his disheveled hair, “eventually, don't they?”

“Ooh là là,” lifting his gimlet glass a tad. 

Then: “Call the police,” Sy said, examining his drink.  “Call The Morning Bugle.” 

Sven, occupied with fishing some rumpled bills from his leather pants pocket, caught a bit of dialogue between Sy’s disciples.  “There’s nothing sexy about sex,” the female was saying.

“Wait,” said the male.  “Is that a comment about sex?  Or about metaphysics?” 

Something occurred to Sven.  All that shit about the evil of rationality.  About how difficult it is to do something that makes no sense.  And now these two prattle-spewing sophomores waiting to battle for his evacuated bar seat.

He turned back to his colleague.  “What,” he asked, “is your middle name?”

Sy seemed surprised to find him still there.  “Paul.  Why?”

Of course.  Sy Paul Hearst.

“I under – erstand,” the second martini really walloping Sven's empty stomach, “you hail the millennial milcher.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, come on, buddy,” winking conspiratorially, “I saw your handiwork – or maybe your – henchmen's – ” thumb crook'd thataway, “on the roof of Boxer today.”

Sy was fishing out yet another cigarette.  A regular house afire, this guy.  Sticking it in his face: “I see we're making another bold excursion, Sven, into the kingdom of rumor.”

“Don't worry, boss.  I didn't hear – nothin’.  Just kind of adds up, is all.  Not that I give one.  It’s probably exactly what a place like Revoquer needs, mm?” 

And he started walking.

But didn't get five floaty steps before Sy called his name, making him stop and turn dreamily back again.

“There's something I should tell you before you go,” Sy said, his head enveloped in smoke.  “I was full of shit before.  I didn't leave any guitar-shaped flower bouquet next to that field.”
 
 
 

The Shaker is available in its entirety here.

Back to my homepage.