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Dirt Issue

Dirt 09/09 (v074)

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Writer’s Bloc
Or, Confessions of a New York Caffeine-Drinker

Jeffrey Bernard Yozwiak

        Listen, I wasn’t sleeping anymore.
    Every night as I lay awake in bed a beast took his heavy leather hands and flem-crusted fingernails and pounded on my cranium—the bars of his cage. The paint on the ceiling of our apartment splintered into crow’s feet, as if gremlins had just stalked across it.
    On Monday morning, I gave in. I crawled out of my bed and into the kitchen. My office was the kitchen; my desk, the breakfast table. My ThinkPad hummed on the faux-maple counter top. I opened the battered lid and squinted against the glare from the screen.
    My novel, finger-painted on Word’s pixel-page. Like a ‘50s b-movie monster, the manuscript was growing. I couldn’t sleep until I finished it.
    An hour later a mug of coffee steamed by my side, the white procelain placed evenly over the brown rings we never scrubbed from the table, residue from previous nights. Sam’s ghostly hand on my shoulder. I ceased the machine-gun fire of my keyboard to return her touch, to apologize for waking her. And then I returned to my writing.
    Morning light streaked over the New York City skyline and leaked through brittle glass. My alarm clock sounded from the bedroom. Time to go to school.

    The subway swayed in the darkness of the tunnel as it careened uptown. Breakfast was an egg and cheese from Sal’s and more coffee, black. Long wool coats smothered me as I huddled over my rugged nylon—L.L. Bean’s description, not mine—backpack and the crumb-covered wax paper on top of it. A canopy of hats, mittens, and scarves blocked the sterile light.
    Businessmen scanned copies of the Times folded in elegant commuter oragami. Construction workers read The Post while wearing paint-stained workboots and baggy jeans.
    I taught English at Williams Prep on 68^th and Park. The boys had a dress code—collared shirts and khakis—so I needed to outdo them. Thus the thin, black tie; the starched-white shirt; the black Dickies and the scuffed derby shoes.
    The windows of the room I taught in opened out onto the Quad, the atrium in the center of block-long Williams. The skeletons of four birch trees rose from metal rings in the cobblestones. The granite-brick walls eclipsed the still-rising sun. The Quad was in shadow.
    My students filed in. I left the window for the lectern. Time to begin, by the generic Staples clock. “Open your books to page twenty-seven,” I commanded.
    Fifteen vacant faces reflected on polished birchwood desks. Dutifully, they took Frankenstein out of their backpacks.
    These boys had drunk the best of society. When you are, literally, served your meals on a silver platter, life can’t be hard. The Upper East Side is home to the aristocracy of New York: bankers, politicians, CEOs. These fathers had given their sons every possible advantage, incuding a private education.
    “Explain why Frankenstein built the monster,” I demanded.
    Privelege is intoxicating. Like absinthe, it’s delicious, it’s addictive, it dulls your senses—
    It was clear only a few of them had done the reading.
    —and it makes you delusional. When you grow up in luxury, you never think it can be taken away.
    “Anybody?” I sipped my coffee and scrutinized the room.
    Jimmy Stewart was especially vulernable. His dark blue Ralph Lauren polo draped over his wasted shoulders. He put a show of burying himself in his book when I targetted him. He was dead before I painted the bullseye.
    I smiled. “Stewart, enlighten us.”
    You should have seen his face. Like pus draining from a scab.
    I waited until the silence became murderous. He writhed and I suckled my coffee. “Stewart, when was the last time you did the reading?”
    “Honestly, I haven’t gotten a chance to do it yet?...”
    “Have any of you read the book?” I queried the room.
    No one volunteered.
    “Don’t waste my time.” I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. Reastraining myself from saying something worse. “Get out,” I said. But no one moved. Little trust-fund fucks. Fifteen frightened faces. “Now!”

    My office was too small. The president of my high school had occupied a tyrannosaurus mahogony desk in the center of a study wallpapered with book shelves. The cases had been filled with leather-bound tomes locked behind glass panes. He never read the books. To him, they were investments. Skin oil would depreciate their value.
    My own books balanced in precarious towers from the floor. My desk didn’t offer enough space for my computer and a student’s paper at the same time, so I tended to keep a book in my lap while typing. The surface of the desk was made out of plywood. I knew because I once punched a hole through it. There was a slit of a window onto the Quad, but it never let in sunlight.
    Detective Anderson runs to the edge of the roof and leaps onto the stucco ledge. He teeters as the toes of his Rockports slip over the precipice. A whirlwind of traffic horns rush from the underscore of pavement a mile below...
    I pecked at my story. I had dismissed the class forty-five minutes early. I wanted to use the time to write, but nothing was coming. It was like forcing myself to vomit.
    You can’t rush creativity. In the book It’s a Bird......, Stephen T. Seagle proposes that procrastination is part of writing. Even the most prolific authors can’t write constantly. You need to give yourself time to manufacture stories from the external world.
    I checked my email instead. Two new messages. The first was a summons from the Dean:
    BODY:
    It is unacceptable to dismiss your class like you did this morning.
    Word had traveled fast.
    You need to control your class more appropriately. Please reply with a time to discuss your recent performance with the president and me.
    Fuck. I kicked over a stack of books next to my desk.
    I didn’t recognize the sender of the next letter.
    BODY:
    Beware the Ides of March.
    March 5^th—that was the date. When I closed the message my computer screen flickered. It blinked white once, almost imperceptibly. Word and Outlook returned. The pale blue blacklight. Then the screen bled to black.
    Fuck. Was it a virus? I smacked the bottom of the clamshell and the plastic keys rattled. “Piece of shit!”
    “If you’re going call me that, I can take this back.” Edward Fox’s gaunt form dodged pyramids of paperbacks and the books strewn across the floor. His gray form-fitting crew-neck sweater was Pendleton. I didn’t recognize the khakis, but his round spectacles—his word for them—flashed. Like the eyes of a hawk. Gray flecked his sharp black hair and goatee. He held two steaming paper cups.
    Coffee. The fresh laundry smell as he passed it to me. “I heard about this morning.”
    I flicked the brown stirrer into the trash.
    A rare laugh from him, but he grew severe again. “I didn’t tattle. But the kids were in the library, fucking away their free time playing computer games.” Fox patrols the library. I call him the librarian, but he says the title is too feminine. He prefers sentry.
    I rebooted my computer. Caffeine glowed in my stomach. When everything goes to hell, the coffee machine is my defibrillator. Windows welcome music chimed.
    “Anything from the publishers?” Fox asked.
    “Turned down by Randomhouse on Friday. Email from Grand Central last night saying the same. Fuckers.”
     “You could use an agent. Finish the manuscript, too.”

    Sometimes it’s like he reads my thoughts. I hadn’t been published since his contacts landed me a story in The New Yorker. Teaching was only a part time gig, but I had said that a year ago.
    “I haven’t been sleeping well,” I told him. “I’m as incruably insomniac as Anton Vowl.”
    “Don’t look at me,” he said. “I already stretched myself to get you that one spot. I’ve got other shit to do...”
    A Hitchcock scream from the Quad interrupted him. “Let’s go check it out,” he said.

    Jimmy Stewart was dead. His body twisted in little half circles as it hung from one of the birch trees. His woven brown leather belt was cinched around his neck at one end and tied around the bony limb of the tree at the other. His khakis sagged over green boxers with white pinstripes. He had popped the collar of his Ralph Lauren. Prep clothes.
    His neck was eggplant purple. Bloodshot eyes bluged from his skull.
    A secretary had discovered him as she cut through the Quad to get to the faculty lounge.
    We sent the students home. The administration had assembled the teachers in the Quad. Idiots—it was too fucking cold. Police flitted through the crowd, wraiths in dark blue uniforms and black leather jackets. Silver N.Y.P.D. badges.
    The Dean spoke with a detective—dark blue Kenneth Bernard overcoat and a brick red scarf. Upturned collar. The Dean’s grisled chin talked to the detective, but his Cro-Magnon brow shot streams of plasma hate at me.
    He beckoned with a finger. And like a loyal beagle, I came.
    “Inspector Dupin, this is Phædrus.” The detective’s thick leather mitten smothered my bare hand. I quickly buried the chafed skin in the pocket of my wool coat. “He was the last person to see Jimmy Stewart,” the Dean continued.
    “Not true,” I said. “He left class with his friends, and Fox says that they were in the library after—“
    “God, because you dismissed them early!”
    Dupin strode above the argument. “We’ll need to interview each of the students. And I may want to speak with this Fox. Leave a contact number in case we need to reach you.”
    I scribbled on his small leather-bound notebook. “Why the police interest? It’s a suicide.”
    “Look at the marking on his neck.” Maroon-speckled rotten purple. “Notches above his voice box. Thumb prints—hand prints. He was strangled. It’s supposed to look like a suicide, but it’s a murder.” He slapped the cover of his notebook shut. His head ticked forward. “Moderately clever.”

    Tuesday. The bug-eaten yellow baseboard showed beneath the peeling paint of our East Village walk-up. The tiles of the kitchen floor were cracked and cold seeped through my socks. The room was grimier during the day: a layer of congealed crumbs and coffee stains. The smell of my toasted bagel. I sat at the table with my laptop, breakfast, and Internet Explorer opened to the Times.

MURDER AT PRESTIGIOUS HIGH SCHOOL

    There were no leads, yet, in the Stewart case.
    Then my phone beeped from the bedroom. I had hung my pants in the rough-hewn closet so I could wear them again. I retrieved my gray RAZR from the pocket. The square-inch screened confirmed a new text.
    The weekly Writer’s Guild meeting?...
    Phædrus: sounds good
    More information poured in: an email from the school administration, concern for Stewart’s family, blah blah. They were really worried about press coverage and alumni donations. The Dean suggested closing school for the rest of the week just as McAdoo closed the NYSE during 1914. His authority as an investment banker shone and the administration ate it up.
    Cell phone beeped again. A text from Sam.

    One person at a plasterboard table for two near the window. Glass cool on my forehead, hair smudge when I pulled away. Black bags of trash mounted higher on Midtown sidewalks.
    There are 171 Starbucks in New York. In L.A., you’re never more than five feet from a screenplay; in this city, you’re never more than a block away from a Starbucks. This yuppie franchise is a plague. J.K. Rowling wrote the most famous bestseller to date in a Manchester coffee house, but I will never jack my laptop in at a Starbucks.
    This particular establishment was on 50^th and 2^nd, near Sam’s office. Clean-shaven men in pinstripes courted floral women in blouses open three buttons. Businessmen swarmed inside the restaurant like ants crawling over a dropped cookie.
    My size Tall was bitter with caffeine. My attitude was just as black because that imitation-Italian coffee was, actually, pretty good. Maybe you get what you shell out four bucks for.
    Then Sam strutted through the doorway with debutante elegance. Close-cropped corporate heads turned. Her legs scissored in heels and regal purple tights. A Paul Smith purse slung tastefully between her breasts—designer because it was a gift from her father; a molten swirl of browns and pastels because she thought she was boho chic.
    “I’ll call you back later,” she said into her raspberry-red Blackbery before depositing it in her purse.
    Her brown coat slipped from willowy shoulders to reveal a light blue blouse and khaki skirt. She draped her coat and striped scarf over the back of the plastic chair. Red Coach gloves with ornamental pinprick patterns. She pushed oversized red vinyl sunglasses back on her head to wreath her short blonde hair. Her eyes were her most alluring trait: one was blue, the other, green. Catlike.
    I made small talk and pushed her brunch across the table. “You’re late. How was work?”
    “Insane,” she gasped. “We’re meeting Charles Schwalb at one-thirty, I have two binders to finish by four......” Busy season. I should mention she’s an auditor for Deloitte. But she recognized my fake engagement, so she returned, “How’s your novel?”
    “Fine, I’m almost done with it.” I had begun working on it when we started going out. “Haven’t hit writer’s block yet.”
    She nibbled her wild blueberry scone. I took a pen from my pocket and started sketching on napkins. A Waterman fountain pen is supposed to be the world’s finest word processor, according to Stephen King, but it bleeds through anything other than thick cardboard.
    She penetrated a frappelattemachiatto-chino. “No, really, I’m interested. What is Panther’s latest misdeed?” She was fond of the villain and spoke as if he was a friend of ours.
    Rorschach chicken scratches on brown recycled paper morphed into the scene I wrote this morning. The words scrolled like ticker tape.
    She is as limp in her bed as a Barbie doll. Panther’s face is an immutable drop of ink. He withdraws the piano wire from his utility belt and slips it below her ivory neck. His biceps tauten as he draws the string into a sharp X in the air. A puppeteer pulling a marionette’s strings.
     Her head lolls backwards.
    “He kills Lady Usher,” I said. The victim’s name is an homage to Poe’s story.
    “That passage”—at that point I choked on my coffee—“sounds pretty horrific.” I had done it again: I had said aloud whatever words I recalled. Incarnated them. I couldn’t help it; stories possess me like that. It’s like being ridden by a loa—Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. “What happens next?” she asked.
    “I’m still writing it. I want him to jump through the window.”
    He flings Lady Usher’s body aside. Fire rages through his limbs. He tenses and then explodes through the glass window like a bullet from a chamber.
    He plummets into the icy air above Park Avenue.
    “Make him fly,” she said. So I did.
    He snaps his arms and spring-loaded wings shoot into place. Black Kevlar sails running from his ankles to his wrists.
    She tightened her grip on my hand across the table.
    Glass shards tinkle on the vinyl back of his costume. A shadow in the sky. He soars through the Upper East Side.
    “P.,” she said, “that’s really hot.”
    She tugged me into the unisex bathroom. Cold finger tips alighted like fireflies up my chest, probing underneath my black Apt. 9 sweater and baby blue shirt. I sucked her neck, as smooth as baby powder. She undid my belt; I unclasped her garter. She groped the sink for support. I ripped away her lingerie and ventured into the steel wool beneath her skirt.
    The taste of coffee with too much cream.
    Sarah Anders. It’s always sex with Sarah Anders, never sex with Sam.
    We were in the blue moonlit Arcadia Academy library. Boarding school in Connecticut. Sarah dangled above me, her skin spectral, bone-white.
    I lapped her like a dog.
    She spun in little half-circles above me. She had cinched her silver-studded belt around her neck at one end and tied it to the track at the top of the book shelf at the other.
    She had kicked away the ladder. It clattered into towering gloom of other book cases.
    “We’re doing things a little different tonight,” she had said.
    But soon she stopped being succulent. She stopped breathing. Her eyes bulged from her head.
    Sam climaxed once and curled against my chest. Her lashes dusted my pecs. Whisper of kisses on my neck, faster, longer, warmer, moist. I tasted the latte on her breath.
    My phone erupted in the pants around my ankles. “Don’t answer it,” Sam ordered.
    Like Peter Høeg’s Smilla, I’ve never liked telephones. You never know who’s on the other end.
    Scrape of her manicured princess hand on my five-o’clock shadow. “Fuck you, you prick.” She shoved me and I stumbled over the glossy tiles.
    I consulted the caller ID. “Phædrus? This is Inspector Dupin, N.Y.P.D. Can you come in this afternoon?”

    Bastille doors of the 19^th Precinct. Dark blue uniforms hovered like wasps. An Officer Murdoch led me to the interrogation room.
    Industrial cement blocks painted turquoise. A coarse gray floor. My breath steamed in the stone cold. A paper cup waited on a metal table burnished by scratches. The coffee was lukewarm.
    Dupin entered. Aged skin around his sunken cheeks had begun to sag. I identified a charcoal Kenneth Cole suit, white shirt, and zinc tie, Arrow. “I hope you don’t mind the accomodations. It’s quieter than”—he ticked his head behind him—“out there.”
    “This coffee is cold.”
    Dupin smiled. “You were late.” He took a pack of Camels from his inside pocket and removed a slender cigarette. Shriveled tobacco coagulated at the unfiltered end. “I want to hear your version of Monday morning,” he said.
    “Class on schedule, but I dismissed the students early. Jimmy Stewart was with them when they left. I went to my office after.”
    Click of a silver, embossed Zippo. When Dupin’s hands clutched around the flare, I could feel the warmth from across the table. “You forgot: the students said you were pissed at Stewart.” He looped his hand to click out the flame.
    “He hadn’t done his homework. And I didn’t sleep very well. I guess I was frustrated and tired.”
    He exhaled around the cigarette. “What kept you up?” Ash suffocated the room.
    “I’m working on a novel—”
    “Dean Serton hasn’t been too pleased with your performance lately.” He leaned across the table.
    Rick Weiler. His greasy double chin dribbled inches from my face. Sweat blackened his yellow Oxford shirt and leaked around his wife beater. His blue and green Brooks Brothers tie was askew. Prep clothes. Basement of Higgins Dormitory, flawless Acardia Academy private campus, upstate Connecticut.
    He exhaled the putrid odor of beer and Camels: “Scholarship boy.” Then he snuffed his cigarette on my naked shoulder.
    A perfect pit of smoldering flesh.
    I fought the scream.
    Saltwater taste of blood in my mouth.
    “Let him go.” Sarah Anders stood in the doorway. His ink-black hair fell to her waist, black turtleneck, silver-studded belt. A body wracked by bulemia. “Or I’ll tell my father, the president.”
    “Let him go.” Fox rose into the room into the room like warlock. Clothed in garments gray as ash—like Gandalf—he decimated Dupin. “Is he under arrest? No? Then we’re leaving.”
    Dupin smacked his lighter into the table as we walked out. A table burnished with scratches.

    Gum-splotched city sidewalks. I dodged a frozen yellow trail of dog piss. “I need some coffee.”
    Fox must have been riding a rougish high. “I know where we can get some, free of charge.” We were only a block away from Williams.
    Fox unlocked the back door with his skeleton key. A long corridor of trash bags and broken desks. Stone arches dank and aged, like Roman catacombs. We emerged into the waning light of the Quad. It was a quick door to the faculty lounge.
    The lounge was overly comfortable. Plush walls like the maximum security room of an asylum. They were painted the color of rat fur. A pleater armchair and a couch framed a mahogony coffee table. A pine green carpet. A De La Vega sketch and a Monet impressionist print on the two long walls. A Charles Ebbet print of the smoggy New York skyline adorned the short wall. Opposite, a window opening onto the Quad.
    I spooned grinds into a filter shaped like an oversized cupcake wrapper. The machine gurgled and the fragrance of coffee replaced the haze of Dupin’s cigarettes.
    The beverage scoured my tongue. Cast-iron Victorian streetlights in the Quad winked on, fighting the blue winter twilight.
    “That tree”—I tipped my cup toward a spindly shadow—“was where they found Jimmy Stewart.”
    Fox’s goatee was edgy in the gloom. His breath stirred the sepia liquid as he tilted it towards his mouth. His glasses fogged. “How are you dealing with that?” he asked.
    “Today was rough. I have to write more. Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by drawing his fear of syphillis. The World According to Garp reflected John Irving’s anxieties as a writer. Successful artists sublimate their emotions into great works. I need to finish.”
    “At least this vacation will give you time to do that. Don’t forget the Writer’s Guild tomorrow.”
    “I’ll pull another all-nighter. If I binge, I can finish the last chapter by the meeting.”
    Stress was building higher. The manuscript was promising to eat even more of my life. I clutched the glossy back of the armchair for support.
    “Look, I need to go pick up that book I came for. Silence of the Lambs,” Fox said.
    “Right,” I said. “I guess I better get to work.”
    “Take some coffee. You’ll want the caffeine.” He flew upstairs to prowl the library.

    Wednesday dawned after a sleepless night. I had two new emails.
    The first was from Sam. She had never returned to our apartment. An explanation?
    BODY:
    My boss, Rob
    No greeting, no preamble, no introduction.
    is having an engagement party for his third wife. It’s on Thursday at the Waldorf. You hate these high society things, so I wanted to tell you where I would be. Dick suggested I bring a date—
    Dick. He is one of the coworkers I know. They met at night classes soon after Sam and I started dating. He wears salmon shirts. I think he was recently promoted. So I shot back:
    BODY:
    I’ll be there. Thanks for the invite.
    And the other message:
    “joyce” again. Shakespeare, the Ideas of March—the accident on Monday. The sender knew I couldn’t resist a story. McAfee scanned the email and I opened it.
    BODY:
    For Frank, who was nineteen, to kill his first man was another loss of virginity hardly more disturbing than the first. And, like the first, it wasn’t premeditated. It just happened. As though a moment comes when it’s both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made.
    The acrid burn of coffee. That was the first chapter from Georges Simenon’s Dirty Snow. Frank kills to seize power in the criminal underworld of Brussels. In my mind I completed the excerpt:
    No one had pushed him to do it. No one had laughed at him.
    I wasn’t in my apartment. I was leaning against a book case in the Arcadia Academy library. The spines of books pressed against my exposed back. The pilled rug chafed my thighs. Sarah Anders’ naked form, devoured by depression, rested in a fetal position on my chest. Her breasts like limp squashes.
    She had embroidered her black canvas messenger bag with an image of Jack Skellington’s leering head. It floated between two fleshless hands flared like wings. She lifted the flap and pulled out a flashlight. “Read to me, Scholarship Boy.” She was the senior; I, a freshman.
    A random hardcover: Dirty Snow by Simenon. She held aloft the flashlight and in the pale beam I continued:
    Besides, only fools let themselves be influenced by their friends.
    —My friends. The Writer’s Guild tonight. I had to finish the manuscript if I was going to read something to them. I repressed the memory and forced myself to keep writing.
    He had felt within himself a certain inferiority.

    I took the subway downtown. Really far downtown. The neat city blocks of the Upper East Side devolved into the chaos of the Financial District. Trim townhouses became waterfront condos.
    Bev lived in Battery Park City. Her apartment was on the fourteenth floor of a precarious Calder sculpture of granite and glass. She can afford to live here because her husband, Brian, is an M.D. with a private practice on the Upper East Side. Not far from Williams. The two met at Columbia and won’t have children. That also makes it more feasible to live here.
    Mirrors encircled me in the elevator. My black Marc Jacobs club shirt and dark sweater rebounded a thousand times in every direction. The maplewood banister. I clutched a molten green bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. The floors ticked upwards on a red LCD. Stainless steel plating engraved with little X’s.
    Bev answered the door, trading a hug for wine. She must be thirty years older than I. Laugh lines had become drooping skin and when she stopped dying her hair, blonde had succumbed to snow. Her recommendation secured my job at Williams a year ago.
    A fire smoldered in the slate fireplace of her art deco living room. Everyone, though, was around the dining room table. Conversation shot across it like bullets from trenches.
    “The scene where the monster murders Elizabeth? It’s light inside the house and dark outside. I’m telling you, Frankenstein can’t see the monster through the window. Instead, he sees his own reflection!”
    “But if the monster is Frankenstein’s hallucination, why do Walton and the other members of his crew see it as well?”
    “Because the monster represents Frankenstein’s ambition. I’m with Vance on this one. The monster appears like a specter, an omen, to Walton, because the explorer has the same deadly drive as Frankenstein.”
    This was our Writer’s Guild: seven high school English teachers desperately trying to become published. Every week we meet at a member’s house to share a meal and manuscripts. It’s supposed to be a forum for literary critique, but we usually just end up drunk. In the tradition of Hemingway, Faulkner, Kerouac.
    I was the last to arrive. I nodded to Fox in his parchment-colored cardigan and greeted Brian in the kitchen.
    “How you doing, skipper?” he waved back. His black canvas apron read D-1-N-E in bright subway symbols. He wore it over a Christmas-green shirt, khakis, and loafers. A retreating ring of black near his ears still resisted the onset of gray.
    He winked. “Wait til you taste my raspberry tart.”
    An accomplished cook, he served us chicken breast marinated in lemon. Dionysus couldn’t have decanted more wine. The red serum swilled in Cascade-shimmering glasses.
    Walter Vance seized command. He had held the Sacred Heart English Department Chair for seven years and spoke with the assurance of the position. An intelligent man used to being correct. “Alright, alright.” He rapped on china with his spoon. “Let’s begin, shall we?”
    Tess read a poem about opium addiction. She fancied the sedative high and the Sambo smile of an uncomprehending immigrant worker ready to please. She aspired to The Kenyon Review, but it was evident she had never imbibed herself. I suggested she do some research, ideally at ABC No Rio in the East Village, a college haunt of mine.
    This critique earned me an exclusive honor. “Phædrus, why don’t you read next?” Vance suggested behind interlaced fingers. He had close-cropped hair and a clean-shaven chin. He looked like an ascerbic Jeremy Brett. His thin lips were ascetic and cruel.
    I pulled three pages of creased printer paper from my back pocket. Last night’s labors. They were only a prompt. Like Alice disappearing down the rabbit hole, I dived into my story.
    Detective Anderson skids over nail-bed concrete. He dabs his forehead with two fingers: blood, deep scrapes.
    Financial buildings loom on either side of Exchange Alley. The body of Anderson’s assailant eclipses the last lights from the street. Pointed ears crown his black gymnast’s body.
    “Panther? I know you killed Lady Usher!”
    “Shut up!” Panther barks. The silhouette barely flicks its wrist. Pain pierces Anderson’s shoulder. A switchblade clatters across the cobblestones and ice slices into his bare skin. An X-Acto cut through his tan overcoat and white dress shirt. The starched fabric grows soft with blood.
    “Don’t you read, detective?” Panther shouts. “An elegant murder is like a good story: it requires a sequel!”
    Anderson slips his coat belt out of its loops and braces himself against the lip of the sidewalk. Panther spreads his arms: an archangel haloed by streetlight. Two steel blades glint yellow, one in either hand.
    Panther springs, but Anderson rolls out of the way. He wraps himself around Panther’s back, a high school wrestling move. He shackles his adversary’s neck with the belt.
    Anderson grips with gleeful adrenaline. He pulls the leash tighter, the nylon straining like the veins in his forearms. Panther’s form sags under his weight. Sinew contracts into rigor mortis—inhumanly fast.
    “Is that true?” Anderson spits onto the carcass. “Then I want to live through the entire series.”
    Anderson retrieves his tan fedora and shakes off the sidewalk scum. He pulls a scrap of paper from the fabric around the brim.
    I gasped for breath.
    He crosses Panther’s name off the list.
    My pulse slowed back to normal. Like a diver, I surfaced. But not one welcoming wave from the rescue boat. None of my peers looked at me.
    Oppressive silence. Tess ventured to break it, “I’m not sure this piece is living up to what it can be......”
    “I agree,” Valencia Galloway supported her. “This sounds like something from the pulps. Or worse—comic books.”
    Vance’s deltoids shuddered as he speared a piece of chicken on his plate. He aimed the sliver at me. “This is vulgar sensationalism.”
    An island of Dr. Moreaus. They took turns vivisecting my manuscript.
    “Look,”—Vance savored his chicken. He adopted the condescending tone he must use with his students. “In literature, there are two schools of writing. There is high culture and there is low culture.
    “High culture—these are the classics.” He spoke slowly, as if I was retarded. “They are rich, symbolic. The canon of our language.
    “But pop culture? That’s your story. It’s crude genre fiction. This action sequence? Gay pornography. Mike Hammer subdues the rebellious feline. The bondage will arrouse any sado-masochist. This is not literature!”
    Valencia scowled between flat brunette locks. She tried to temper Vance’s tirade. “What he means is, why are you writing detective fiction? Don’t compromise your talent by writing for the masses.”
    My vision blurred to black and white TV static.
    “You’re not living up to your potential,” Bev chirruped. So, her too.
    Fox cocked a telepathic shotgun, my eyes sighted along the dual barrels. He took a currant-colored Blackberry from his sweater pocket and secreted it underneath the tablecloth. No one else could see his fingers fly over the miniature keyboard.
    And my phone rang—an airy 8-bit Tocatta & Fugue to puncture the mood. “It’s Sam,” I told them. “I have to take this.”
    In the art deco living room I pretended to have a conversation with Sam, but it was really Fox on the other end.
    Vance was elegizing the Alaskan wilderness when I returned. I told him Rick Bass had done it before and was just as revolting.
    “I’m sorry, I have to go,” I said. I grabbed my manuscript from the table.
    “I think I’m going leave too.” Fox said. “The ride uptown will be lonely otherwise.”
    “You’re leaving?” Brian held a glass platter between floral ovenmits. A toasted pastry oozing with red gelatin. “At least stay for coffee and dessert.”
    “No thanks. But I’ll take the coffee to go.”
    Vance closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus, I need a cigarette.”
    In the kitchen, Brian poured black oil into a vibrant spring-green cup.
    “Listen, skipper,” he said as he dumped half-and-half into the coffee. He shrugged towards Vance’s disciples. “Don’t worry about them. I’d read your novel any day.” He handed me the cup.
    The elevator was mirrors and maplewood. Callous stainless steel. Fox, Vance, and I crammed into the shrinking box. The walls bowed inwards. Claustrophobic silence, by mutual mandate.
    Vance pulled a candystripe pack of Malboros from the breast pocket of his shirt. Too much maplewood for the construction workers to install smoke detectors.
    The drowsy taste of coffee with too much cream.
    His plastic Bic zipped from his slacks.
    I elbowed Fox. “Smoking is a disgusting habit,” Fox said.
    Vance exhaled, long and languid fumes dripping from nostrils. They swirled around us. Wine in glasses, coffee in a mug, words on a Microsoft faux-page.
    I choked, tar coating the tender pink of my lungs. Second-hand death.
    “You’re cocky, Phædrus,” Vance said.
    The words rebounded a thousand times. The LCD ticked down.
    We reached ground floor.

    I wander thro’ each charter’d street...
    I fired my manuscript into the green latticework trashcan and emptied steaming coffee onto the street.
    “Fuck them,” I said.
    Fox and I clambered into the West Side Highway overpass. Our boots echoed in the tube. Modernist girders streamlined by on either side of us.
    “Popular fiction sells. It’s like spinning straw into gold,” I said. “With money you can climb the ivory tower. That’s why high culture hates it so much.”
    “Joyce once said, The only demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his entire life toward reading my works,” Fox said.
    “What a fucking pretentious prick.”
    We stepped over a bum slouched against the granite corner of a skyscraper. The hood of his ragged parka hid all of his face but a gray beard. He left his cardboard bed and pulled down his Champion sweats. His piss steamed against the side of an Escalade.
    And mark in every face I meet?...
    OPEN 24 hours in orange neon tubes. Cobwebs inside the windows. “I’m going to get some coffee,” I told Fox.
    Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
    He scowled. “You’re not high culture, Phædrus, but you want to be.” He slung his tan cowhide briefcase behind his back, haughtily. “I’m going back to Bev’s. I didn’t get to read my book review.”
    A shimmering treasure chest of candy wrappers and a white plaster counter top. “Anything else?” the clerk said.
    “No, thanks,” I said.
    “Seventy-five cents and a quarter change.” My skin creased around the slick coins.
    Tocatta and Fugue aria.
    “Phædrus? This is Dupin, again. I called you an hour ago.”
    “I never got it.”
    “Yes, you did, because you picked up and told me I was Sam. Don’t play with me, Phædrus. Where are you now?”

    The leather seat of the police cruiser swallowed me like the grasping tentacles of a kraken. It was too comfortable, like an old La-Z-Boy. There was a web of thick, yellow mesh between Dupin, in the driver’s seat, and me.
    “Walter Vance is dead,” he said. He drove through alleyways I didn’t know. “Multiple stab wounds from a switchblade we found at the crime scene. His clothes were stained burgundy from the blood. Guess what, though? The cuts didn’t kill him. He died of strangulation and was then mutilated. Similar M.O. to the Stewart case. This one is even more outrageous.”
    Dupin swerved onto the Westside Highway, deserted at this time of night. His caterpillar eyebrows scrutinized me in the rearview. “We’re rounding up everyone at your meeting. He was killed in the lobby of Beverly Simonson’s building.”
    We turned into the drive in front of Bev’s condo. Swat car strobe lights whirled. An ambulance parked on the curb. I tried the cruiser door but it was child-locked. Dupin opened it from the outside and grabbed my bicep.
    His coat billowed like in a TV crime drama commercial. The Hudson air ate through my sweater.
    Green marble arches and crystal chandeliers. Three writers and Brian clustered between impassive dark blue guards.
    A doctor and police officers rushed a stretcher to the ambulance. Vance’s skin glistened clay-wet before a man in a green surgical mask zipped the body bag closed.
    Bev hugged my neck. Dupin’s claw never left my arm. “We were worried,” Brian said, hands in his pockets.
    “Where’s Fox?” I asked. Dupin’s talon.
    Bev’s brow creased as evenly as subway rails. “Who?”
    “Librarian at Williams. He came back to share an article. Edward Fox,” I repeated.
    Faces as empty as a new notebook.
    Murdoch replaced Dupin’s vise clamp with iron shackles. “We’re taking you in,” Dupin said.

~

    “What is this? Fight Club? Do you expect to believe this bullshit?”
    Dupin’s tobacco-specked spittle sprinkles me.
    He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. He takes three sheets of paper from a manila envelope and fans them out on the table. “Williams employment records. There is no one named Edward Fox.”
    “I always suspected that he worked off the books. Anything for the administrators to make a quick dollar.”
    Dupin throws over the chair opposite me. A cathartic explosion. “There never has been an Edward Fox!”
    In a dark corner, Murdoch tenses. His African skin glints luminous with sweat.
    Dupin raps on the iron door by the one-way mirror and it opens. “Tell us when you’re ready to cooperate,” he says over his shoulder. He and Murdoch exit.
    The turquiose cement blocks. My blood vessels scream for caffeine. I need to write.
    Dupin locked my hands behind my back. I crane my body with invertebrae flexibility. Like a trained seal, I poke a blue ballpoint out of the manila envelope.
    I grip it in my incisors and start sketching over the Williams empoyment records.
    Dupin is wrong. Fox is the killer. And maybe only I can stop him.

    “Okay,” I say. “If not Fox, it’s ‘joyce.’”
    Dupin places coffee in front of me. My reward: a paper cup not bigger than an esperesso shot.
    I try to slurp it like soup. Dupin draws it back across the table toward him. “Don’t make a fool of yourself. Who is it?”
    “Someone’s been emailing me. I don’t know who. But his emails preclude the murders.”
    “‘Predict’ the murders?”
    “Right, yeah, predict the murders. The emails are on my laptop.”
    “Murdoch, bring this man a straw.” Dupin smiles, too many teeth for his mouth. “Where?”
    “My apartment, the East Village.”
    “Okay.” He exits and Murdoch forgets the straw. The coffee steams at the other end of the table, just out of my reach. The beast inside, hammering on my head—he craves the caffeine.
    I stand and the handcuffs knife into my wrists. The chain between the two cuffs snakes through the upright of the metal chair. I drag it like un boulet and it sparks across the raw cement.
    Blood drips onto the floor. I sip the coffee by lapping it with my tongue. My head sways like a hot air balloon.
    Dupin and Murdoch will cruise down to my house. They will ride in front of the yellow mesh because they are partners. A fair-haired man named Laney will ride behind the cage because he is a tech specialist and a rookie and therefore their bitch. Laney’s eyes will be hidden behind thin ovaline rimless glasses and he will silently stare out the window the entire trip downtown.
    Dupin will break into my house. He will kick down the door, maybe splintering it. That is, if my landlady doesn’t let him in, which she might, because she hates my reclusiveness and she hated Sam’s prettiness.
    R2D2 will gurgle on the kitchen counter, brewing a fresh pot of smooth French Vanilla roast for them. My laptop will not be hard to find.
    And then they will return to me.

    Hair grease on the rusted scratches. Dupin yanks my head upright, tearing my Marc Jacobs collar. “Open it,” he says.
    Laney hovers by the door. He is geek-thin and wears a dark blue turtleneck with a silver N.Y.P.D. insignia. Murdoch paces, grisled chin scowling. I try to lift my wrists, but the cuffs tether me.
    Laney opens his hairless jaw to object, but Dupin’s quarterback shoulders shut him out. Laney’s finger falls limp. Murdoch shakes his head at him and cracks his black knuckles. Dupin’s coattails whirl in his fervor.
    He must be feeling hubristic. He unlocks the handcuffs. I open Outlook and instantly, I’ve got mail.
    They crowd behind me, Murdoch smelling like monkey sweat, Laney reeking of soap like a girl, Dupin crisp as the pages of a new book.
    “Joyce could never stop revising his manuscripts,” Laney pipes. “They’re a cryptographer’s wet dream.” He sifts his hand through straw hair.
    “Open it,” Dupin commands.
    BODY:
    Dr. Lecter finds the keyhole in his left cuff, inserts the key and turns it. He feel the cuff spring lose on his wrist.
    My handcuffs are already open. Hannibal Lecter twitches inside of me.
    The air swarmed with crystal notes. Dr. Lecter could hear the holes they made in the echoes of the music.
    I pump my derby shoes against the legs of the chair and launch back, driving the iron chair onto Dupin’s Rockports. I roll and kick on the floor. Murdoch falls on top of me.
    I bury my incissors into his peach-soft skin. The taste of skin oil and salt. I shake my head like a rat-killing dog. I don’t hear his scream.
    I rip the can of Mace and the blackjack from his belt. With the blackjack, I crack Laney’s kneecaps.
    Dupin’s pistol is in my face. Polished gunmetal glimmer. “Freeze,” he says.
    I blast the Mace into his eyes. His hand flies to his face, trying to wipe the acid from his eyes. I know the blaze of Mace. Carol didn’t wear her lab glasses. Now she doesn’t have to. High school science class.
    Dupin doesn’t dare fire while blind. In any event, I don’t think he would shoot while indoors. Murdoch’s jacket is already unzipped, if a bit gory. I steal it and turn up the collar. I dash out the door and pull the brim of his hat down over my eyes. Dupin barks into his radio. “Two officers down. Repeat, two officers down. Prisoner is missing. Lecter is missing.” Laney is shock-cold.
    I walk cooly to the nearest exit door and out into daylight and a brick alley.

    “What are you doing here?” Sam’s fierce whisper. Champagne bubbles precariously in her cup.
    She wears a nightingale-purpe gown with pleated bodice. Her skin is white as cream, the complexion of a socialite. Her dress flares like a mermaid’s tail around her legs.
    The twin Waldorf=Astoria towers rise above the city like Shannara’s Paranor. The red and white taillights of Park Avenue churn around it like a moat. The outside is art deco—according to the brochures—but the interior is Renaissance.
    The Basildon Room, a court in the clouds. A menacing two-tiered chandelier hovers over the bar. Managers and partners dot the room in conversation clusters—mudstains on Easter pastels.
    “Phædrus! What are you doing here?” Dick loops an arm over Sam’s shoulders. His tux frames a pink tie, almost as if he tried to color-coordinate with Sam but missed the shade. I smell the burnt plastic gel he used to glue his hair into hedgehog prickles.
    “I told you I was going to come, didn’t I?” I say to Sam.
    The old men of the company stare. A gray Santa beard on one, a rotund pot belly on the other. I know how I must look: dirty, messy hair; my one Marc Jacobs shirt in tatters.
    “Can we talk in private?” Sam flashes a glittering Crest smile to the others. “Excuse us.”
    Dick squeezes her hand. She kisses his square, cocky, rock-star jaw—his high, feminine cheek bones—and then storms through the Camelot gates of the room.
    Gilman’s smoldering unclean yellow wallpaper plasters the hallway. I squint to see Sam’s purple trail ahead.
    “You’re a mess. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
    We enter a private library. Books line the walls, locked behind soaring glass panes. First editions, all of them. I can tell. There’s a tyrannosaurus mahogony reading desk in the center of the room and an anchronistic winged chair of protein-red leather. It’s embellished with brass buttons and has an indentation on the seat as if someone has just sat there. Three gold pens form a neat row on the desk—instruments waiting to be used.
    On the desk a hard cover lies open, with a vein-blue ribbon marking the place. Extensive black comments coat the margins. It looks...... like Fox’s handwriting.
    “Is Fox here?” I ask Sam. “He may be coming for you. I thought he might be. He has contacts.”
    She criss-crosses her arms under a prominent forehead. She has pulled back her hair so tightly the roots seem to be tearing out. “We’re through, Phædrus. I want you out of my life.” A bony finger trembles. “Don’t make me call Dick.”
    What book was he reading? I have to read it. Someone underlined and starred a passage.
    She faces him, but he knows she can barely see him. “Who’re you?”
    “Sarah! It’s Strangers on a Train! Do you remember that night?”
    “Phædrus, you’re a hack. You’re a loser.”
    She’s a warm ugly black spot.
    “I’ll show you success, bitch.”
    He springs with such concentrated aim, the wrists of his hands touch. He shakes her. His body seems to harden like a rock?... He has her too tight for a scream. He sinks his fingers deeper—enduring the distasteful pressure of her body under his so her writhing would not get them both up.
    Her throat feels hotter and hotter.
    Stop! Stop! Stop! He wills it. And the head stops turning.
    Sam’s body underneath my splayed legs. The bruises on her neck carefully match the color of her dress. Storm trooper boots hammer tiles and a fist connects with my jaw. He hears his teeth crack.
    The dusty taste of the floorboards. “How you could lose him?” Dick shouts over Sam’s carcass.
    Dupin strolls to Dick and slaps him. Leather connects with hide. Dupin grimaces because he knows he underestimated me. The rubber soles of his Rockports halt in front of my aquiline nose.
    Murdoch, face a mess of gauze and petroleum jelly, cuffs my wrists behind my back, again. I need those hands to write.
    Dupin drops a Camel butt—I should’ve smelled the smoke before—and grinds it out. A perfect cricle of smoldering wax. “You’re not an artist,” he says. He spits and a glob of saliva lubricates my eyeball, drips off my nose, and pools on the ground. “You’re just a plagiarist.”

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