The Serialist: A Novel

PART ONE

April 4–15, 2009

1

The first sentence of a novel is the most important, except for maybe the last, which can stay with you after you’ve shut the book, the way the echo of a closing door follows you down the hall. But of course by then it’s too late, you’ve already read the whole thing. For a long time, when I picked up a new book in a shop, I would feel compelled to flip right to the end and read the last sentence. I was unable to control my curiosity. I don’t know why I did this, except that I knew I could, and if I could, I had to. It’s that old childish impulse, peeling away the wrapping paper, watching horror movies through our hands. We can’t resist peeking, even at what we know we shouldn’t see, even at what we don’t want to see, at what makes us afraid.

The other reason I really want to start this book off right, with a strong first line, is that it’s the first I’ve written under my own name, and in my own voice, whatever that means. I want to make sure I set the right tone, connect with the reader, and win you over to my side. Establish that intimacy of the first-person voice, so you’ll follow me anywhere, even if you begin to suspect, after it’s too late, that I am one of those unreliable narrators you learned about in English class. But don’t worry, I’m not. This isn’t one of those tricky books. I’m not the killer. Like I said (did I mention it?), this is a true story and I intend to tell it straight.

Up till now I was just a ghost. I hid behind false names or the names and faces of others. And really, even this story wasn’t mine to start with. It began as a hired job, what we in the book business call an as told to. But the teller is gone, permanently ghosted, and he left the story with me, whether I like it or not. Of course, now that it is mine, who will bother to read it? Who cares what the ghost has to say?

Still I’m a professional, of sorts, and since this is a Mystery/Suspense (shelve accordingly), I want to open in the classic style, with a hook, a real grabber that holds the reader hostage and won’t let go, that will keep your sweaty little fingers feverishly turning the pages all night long. Something like this:

It all began the morning when, dressed like my dead mother and accompanied by my fifteen-year-old schoolgirl business partner, I opened the letter from death row and discovered that a serial killer was my biggest fan.

2

I’ve been a working writer, more or less, for twenty years, and in that time I’ve told many stories, true and false. Those of you who used to read Raunchy magazine back in its glory days might remember me as the Slut Whisperer. Ring a bell? I had an advice column on how to handle girl problems, how to break a rebellious, high-spirited wench and reduce her to an obedient sex slave, or coax a shy, reluctant girl into acts of insane depravity, often with methods involving leashes, belts and treats. My girlfriend Jane used to howl as she read my copy in our bed on a Sunday morning, while I made coffee and softly boiled eggs, which she liked with buttered toast fingers. Sometimes she even ghosted it for me when I was stumped by a letter (Dear Slut Whisperer, How do I ask the girl at the office to pee on me and then get my wife to film it?) or when I was busy ghosting something else, one of my innumerable freelance projects, a book of stock tips from a senile millionaire, say, or a puppy owner’s manual by a trainer to the stars. We tried the star techniques on Jane’s dog, but they didn’t work like they did for Barbra Streisand’s shitzu. (Editor—Sp? Shit’s who?) The damned mutt still hopped right up onto the bed with us as soon as I yelled No! But I did manage to work a lot of the tools (shock collars, positive reinforcement, the old stick and carrot) into the perverted sex advice column.

It never occurred to me until it was too late, when Jane was long gone, married and living in a Brooklyn brownstone with a real writer (by real I mean a successful one who published real novels under his own name and with whom she cofounded The Torn Plaid Coat, a journal that asked the literary question Why can’t experimental writing be as cute and unthreatening, quirky but ultimately reassuring as indie cinema or alternative rock?), and I came across her picture on the back cover of A Preponderance of Autumn, the novel she wrote (which was really two novels, one beginning on the first page of the book and another beginning on the back page, so that by switching back and forth, chapter by chapter, or page by page, you followed the separate—yet parallel!—stories of two lovers who keep just missing each other and crisscrossing paths by taking the same subway, dreaming interwoven dreams, going to the same pizza place for the same favorite mushroom calzone, one even losing in the wind a scarf that the other finds, and finally meeting, on a fall night on a street corner in Brooklyn, right in the center of the book), and there, in the Employees’ Picks section, was her husband’s equally successful and formally innovative book Underland (which was about a young boy who, fleeing family problems and a bad fever, discovers a world of wonder under his bed, and get this, that portion of the novel was not only in footnotes at the bottom of the page but upside down as well, which is even more original and groundbreaking)—it was only then, standing in Borders alone and staring at the back of her book, holding her face in my hands as it were, and gazing at her clear smile, her very fine and sometimes brittle brown hair, her slightly oversized bottom lip and slightly crooked nose and I swear golden eyes, that it crossed my mind: maybe all that giggling and blushing over whips and collars, all that collaborating, was really a cry for help which I, stone-deaf, ignored. Maybe it would have all been different, and she would still be Her Master’s Sweet Little Slut and not Some Rich Asshole’s Wife, if I had only had the guts to bring my loving but firm hand down on her yielding but equally firm bottom and, like Barbra, command in a warm, even, but firm tone of voice, Stay.

3

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I haven’t written novels too. Twentythree at last count, I think. What happened was that the Internet killed Raunchy, like it killed all magazine publishing, just as TV and the movies killed books before that, and even earlier, something or other that I can’t remember killed poetry. Or maybe that was a suicide. In any case, finally even the perverts quit reading and my porn career dried up. But one of the former Raunchy editors got a job with a sci-fi imprint and I found work, writing books under various other names. (I mean other than my porn names, of which there were many, but mainly Tom Stanks or, if I needed a feminine nom de plume, Jillian Gesso.) The Zorg sci-fi series came first. It was a kind of transition for me, since Zorg was a soft-core planet that featured a lot of sexual enslavement, light bondage and eroticized torture in between battle scenes. It was a place I thought of as existing in the future ancient tense, a world of castles and starships, of battles fought with laser and sword, where overbreasted miniwaisted women and bearded, brawny, weirdly busty men rode dragons, flew rockets and drank mead from horns. I wrote those as T. R. L. Pangstrom. Whoremasters of Zorg was the most popular, but I think I had the most fun with Zorgon Sexbot Rebellion, in which the girls turn the tables for once. I even dedicated that one, For J.

Then I started up my inner-city African-American novels, the genre they call urban experience. This series features a former Special Ops lieutenant, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, who picked up a dope habit after he was wounded. Back home in Harlem, he kicks cold turkey, becomes an honest cop, but still gets thrown off the force when his past comes out. So he ends up as an unofficial private eye, an independent contractor dealing out street justice for two hundred a day plus expenses. I made the main character a black Jew of mixed Ethiopian and Native American descent: Mordechai Jones, the ghetto sheriff. By J. Duke Johnson. What readers learned in an interview I did, with myself, for a magazine called The Game, was that the J actually stands for John. But everybody always calls me Duke.

Lately, however, I’ve been getting into the vampire business, which seems, potentially, to be the most lucrative of all. For some reason vampire mania is sweeping the shelves. Go to Barnes & Noble, you’ll see yards of them. Why? Beats me. It’s got something to do with a whole kind of nouveau goth/horror/industrial club culture. With all the piercings and black clothes and stockings and such, my slut skills fit right in and I found I was able to squeeze out a living, while literature languished, writing pulps for the nerdy and the perverse: when books become a fetish, only fetishists will still read books.

The catch, according to the twenty-six-year-old editor at Phantasm, the imprint, was that all these vampire books are pretty much told in the first person voice of a young woman. Writingwise, this was no problem for me, since many of the stories I wrote as Jillian Gesso for Sweet Young Thing magazine began, It was my eighteenth birthday and as captain of the cheerleading squad … But when it came to a name and an author photo, I ran into a snag.

For my other names the hassle was minimal: T. R. L. Pangstrom was I, in a fake beard, thick dark-framed glasses and a pillow under my shirt. I pictured him, or rather his readers, as chunky, geeky guys and tried to look like a slightly cooler, aspirational version of them. J. Duke Johnson was this friend of mine, Morris, who owns the florist’s shop down the street. He’s extremely gay but also extremely big, with thick, dark skin, long, heavy braids, and a massive, kingly face that looks to me like Duke Johnson’s would—tough and wise and unlikely to take any shit. I just couldn’t let him grin in the photos because he has dimples and the cutest gap in his teeth. We dressed him in a suit and hat, borrowed some rings, and I bought dinner and wine for him and Gary, his slim Vietnamese boyfriend. Drunk and bored and sleepy, he finally achieved the perfect world-weary, royal, don’t-fuck-with-me glare, which I snapped with a disposable camera. In both cases one small, indistinct black-and-white photo was fine. I simply sent them out for all PR requests, of which there were very few, believe me.

But apparently the vampire reader required more: better photos, more contact with the author. And she had to be a woman, because, who knows why, the readers, mainly female, only trusted and really believed first person female vampire stories if they were written by a fellow woman. Preferably one who was attractive but not too young or too thin. Which is how my dead mother got in on the act.

4

She wasn’t dead to start with. She was still quite lively in fact, still in the same Queens two-bedroom where I grew up and where, sadly or perhaps happily, I live again now. Sadly because it is a constant reminder of my life’s extremely limited progress, ten feet from the smaller bedroom to the larger. Happily because of the soup dumplings. The Jewish-Italian-Irish neighborhood where I grew up, and which was on its way back then to becoming mainly Hispanic, had taken a wild left turn somewhere and ended up almost completely Asian. Hence the soup dumplings.

And what are they exactly? Don’t I mean dumplings in soup? No, my friend. Let’s say you order six crab and pork. A few minutes later, they appear, steamed, plump as little Buddhas, sitting on lettuce in their tender skins. But don’t bite. Lift one carefully in your spoon and gently nibble its tip. Out dribbles hot soup. That’s right. I shit you not. Soup inside the dumpling. It’s a kind of miracle, a chaste, doughy nipple dispensing warm broth, the sort of thing that makes life worth living and gives you the strength to hang on, if only for one more novel.

Back when I started with the vampires though, I wasn’t living in Queens. I was over in Manhattan, renting a sublet uptown. I rode out on the 7 line to visit my mother, bringing along her favorite salted H&H bagels and her favorite salty belly lox, neither of which were easy to get anymore, because of the yuppies and all those rich people who moved here from other places, like Europe and America, and who preferred nova lox and less extreme peasant food in general. The magical age of egg creams and knishes and loud, crunchy, blindingly sour pickles is over. No more the ancient heroes of Salamis. This is a time for mortal men and their earthly food.

I sliced the bagels while she put out the lox and sturgeon (I splurged to get on her good side). She used the same plates, brown with a daisy, that she’d had forever. Then I waited for her to ask, as she always did, So what’s cooking?

And this time, instead of Nothing much, which was my usual reply, I said, I’ve started a new book series.

Pirates? she asked.

What?

Is it about pirates?

No, not about pirates. Why would it be?

I saw something on TV about how everybody loves them and thought maybe you’d be writing about them too. I made a note. Where are my glasses? She checked in her hair, a high red shrubbery that could easily hide a family of partridges.

Who loves them? I asked. Since when? She went to search her bedroom and I realized that this was why after all these years I had learned, when she said, What’s cooking? to just say, Nothing much.

She came out wearing her glasses and then picked up the pad that sat by the phone in a little wooden holder with a pencil. Here it is, she said. She tore off the top sheet and handed it to me. It read Pirates.

Actually it’s not about pirates, I said. It’s about vampires, although that’s not even the point.

Vampires? She looked unconvinced. Are you sure? Let’s face it. You need to get something going here. Like many mothers, she was both my sworn defender and my mortal foe, all without actually reading anything I wrote. As far as I could tell, every scrap of text I’d produced was lovingly archived in this apartment, although the porn was in a closet out of sight, rather than out on display with the novels in the glass case she called the étagère. Nevertheless, despite proudly showing my collected works off to everyone, and refusing to lend them out (Let them buy!), she hadn’t read a word since the few short stories I gave her ages ago, when I had hoped, briefly, to write serious fiction. As always, her critique was pithy and unequivocal: Not my cup of tea, she pronounced after a quick perusal. No wonder no one wants to publish it. You just write about lost souls with sad lives. My book club would never read that. And of course she was right, she was right.

As we sat down to build our bagels, with tomato and onion and lemon and, in a nod to modern health awareness, Philadelphia whipped cream cheese, I assured her that vampires were extremely popular, enjoying a renaissance in fact, and that I had already been contracted to write the first book.

Huh, she said, as if amazed she hadn’t heard about this yet in the building’s laundry room. Who knew?

The thing is I need a woman’s name.

How about Esmerelda? I always liked that name.

No. For the author. These books are usually written by women, so I need a woman’s name and I was thinking, if it’s OK, about using yours. Your maiden name I mean. The old way. My mother’s name was Sibyl and her married name was Bloch of course, like mine. But her real first name, which she never used, was Sibylline and her family’s name in full was Lorindo with Gold as her mother’s maiden name. Sibyl Bloch might write a nice bar mitzvah card, or at best a decent pirate story. But Sibylline Lorindo-Gold? That said vampire.

Sure, she said. Why not?

Well, I added, eyeing her red curls and wondering what it would take to straighten them into the luxurious long tresses of Madam Lorindo-Gold. The thing of it is, I’m not just talking about your name.

And so, after prolonged negotiations, my mother’s name and slightly altered visage have ended up appearing on three vampire books so far, as well as in various magazines and newspapers. We avoided live personal appearances by characterizing her as a recluse who never went out in public, but she did try a single telephone interview after the first book in the series, Crimson Vein of Darkness, came out and shocked everyone, most of all my mother, by becoming a minor (very minor) hit. Suddenly, chatter about my vampire lovers, Aram and Ivy, appeared all over MySpace and numerous vampire websites, along with my Mom’s image. Phantasm agreed to boost my next advance check up into the mid four figures, but only if I, that is to say, My Dark Mistress, Mom, played ball by at least doing a phone chat with a blogger from a site called the Vampyre’s Web. There was something sad about that spelling to me, like an undead PC feminism, and sure enough when I checked it out, I saw that, alongside the pentagrams and goat heads and the bloodsucker’s forum matching drinkers and donors, the site also contained a stern warning against any discrimination or offensive, exclusionary language regarding sexuality, race, religion, gender or transgender. Apparently vampires, despite living forever, flying, and tearing out the throats of peasants, are still extremely sensitive and fragile about being called dork or homo like they were back in the locker room, before they grew fangs.

Anyway, we scheduled the interview and prepared carefully, with me listening on the bedroom extension, scribbling answers on a pad, and passing them to my young pal Claire, who relayed them to my mother, who sat in the kitchen in her housedress.

My worst fears were realized immediately, however, when within five minutes she announced that vampires were nothing compared to Germans, that they lived mostly in Pennsylvania (she later blamed this on my handwriting), had a thing for crosses, and died from silver bullets.

That’s werewolves, I hissed, standing in the bedroom door and frantically miming a stake driving into my chest.

Oh yeah, she added into the phone. Garlic gives them heartburn.

After this she declined all requests. And there were some, because Madam Sibylline Lorindo-Gold was popular, my most popular writer by far. Though of course popular in my world meant a $4,500 advance on a 350-page novel, requiring that I keep up my strict diet of ten manuscript pages a day. God, I hate to think of the forests I’ve felled, just to pay the rent and keep my lights on. When it comes to literature, I’m a furnace. I’m a wildfire. I’m the inferno of American Fiction.

5

All in all, my mother was very pleased with her virtual celebrity, and it was a fun thing for us to share, answering her fan mail, getting her hair and makeup done, choosing the clothes and taking pictures. And I’m glad we at least had that, because three months after that first book was published, she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. A year later—after Crimson Darkness Falls and Darkly Crimson, My Sweet, after I had moved back into my old room to look after her, to count her pills and bring her to her chemo appointments, after her hair no longer needed to be straightened for the photos because it had fallen out and we got a red, straight wig—she finally died, quietly, one night while I slept next door. I found her around noon the following day, since even then, in her last extremity, she was always the early riser and I was the dead log of a sleeper who had to be awakened with nudges and coffee every morning.

And that is how, on the day my death row fan letter arrived, I found myself in a midtown photo studio, wearing my mother’s red wig and one of her black Lorindo dresses, as we once called them, as well as thick makeup, lipstick, eye shadow, foundation and rouge, all applied by Claire, who was accompanying me to the shoot for the new portrait I needed for Crimson Night and Fog, which was due to come out soon. Needless to say I resemble my mother quite a bit, although my hair isn’t red. But then again neither was hers. Not really, I mean. In truth I don’t know what her natural color was, and neither did she.

Claire leaned over me, breathing bubblegum into my nose and frowning in concentration as she struggled with my eyebrows, which presented a special problem. So did my greasy forehead, my pronounced, bristly jaw and my Adam’s apple, but Claire managed to overcome these failings with her clever deployment of wardrobe, hair and a bag full of products about which I knew only that they itched. But my eyebrows were particularly recalcitrant, since despite her many cogent arguments, I refused to have them plucked.

They’re just so bushy, she muttered to herself, snipping away with a tiny scissors. It’s like I’m lost in a forest.

Don’t exaggerate. Of course they’re bushy for a woman.

For a human. And your mom’s were so nice and elegant.

For the record, my mother was one of those women who essentially have no eyebrows, merely a dusting of microscopic hair. She then drew in her own with the same little colored pencils she used for her shopping list.

I probably have my dad’s eyebrows, I offered.

Then this must be his ear hair too, she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. You should be writing about the wolfman.

At last she sorted me out by somehow disappearing my beastly brows with makeup, then painting new, ladylike curves on my forehead. In the mirror, I looked perpetually surprised by something, maybe my own face.

Now hold still and try not to furrow, she said, so I sat back and stretched my legs. Since the photo would only be chest high, I was still wearing jeans and high-top sneakers under my dress.

Here, before I forget. Claire was restuffing her backpack. I grabbed your mail.

Thanks, I said. She had my spare set of keys. It was mostly bills of course, and a few letters for Sibylline forwarded from the publisher. Pangstrom and Johnson got some too, but less often. I answered them all, though my mother, and now Claire, signed Sibylline’s, since I believe, perhaps foolishly, that one can tell gender from handwriting. Then, on the bottom of the stack, there was another letter, with several of those yellow forwarding stickers attached, recording all the places I’d lived in my increasingly frantic wanderings through the shrinking bits of cheap New York.

What’s that one? Claire asked. I didn’t recognize it.

It was addressed to Tom Stanks, c/o Raunchy magazine. And the return address was Sing Sing Penitentiary.

6

A few years back, when Jane and I split up, or rather (who am I kidding?) when she dumped me, the only possessions we fought over were the books. We’d spent eight or nine years together (even this was in dispute), and one could trace the epochs of our shared life in the shelves that lined our, soon to be her, apartment as if they were geological strata: first the two lonely his and her libraries that came shyly together, my Dylan Thomas rubbing against her Sylvia Plath, my Barthes kissing her Wilson, my Borges squeezed under her Waugh, with all our cute twinned stepvolumes: two Frannys and two Zooeys, two very Pale Fires, and for some reason three Ask the Dusts. These were easy to dismantle, of course, and even a bit tender, as we pulled them apart and laid mine to rest in boxes, where they now remain, come to think of it, in my mother’s storage room in the basement. Also easy were the new books, the bedside and desktop stacks—her review and advance copies of story collections by the young and promising, my complimentary issues of Hot Asians #7 and Best of Big Buns piled on Henry James, who slumped half-read and prostrate, as if unable to face our breakup. The hard part of undoing our library came with that layer I call the Middle Ages, when for about four years we were eternally joined and not only buying but reading the same things, sometimes, forgive me, even out loud together in bed.

Didn’t I buy this?

She was holding up Cortázar’s Hopscotch.

Yes, I said. You bought it for me, remember? She frowned, unsure. But I remembered. She brought it to read on the bus that time we used her uncle’s time-share in the Poconos, back when she still thought being poor and unknown together was just perfect. Dazzlingly, dizzyingly, diamondly brilliant—that book made me carsick on the lurching ride up, then seasick all weekend in the waterbed, bobbing together and switching off, chapter by chapter, as we followed those other, cooler, maté-sipping fifties bohemians through Paris and Buenos Aires. All Jane wanted then was to die beautifully for art by my side, ideally in eccentrically titled chapters. As I stared at my face in the mirrored ceiling, pale and sweaty, like a drowning man going down in a wave of nausea, she offered me a fizzing Alka-Seltzer and asked me to ask her to marry me.

Are you sure?