Year of the Slug
James Cortese
Smashwords Edition
© Copyright 2010 by James
Cortese
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author or publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
This book is entirely a work of fiction. The names of real public figures and personalities, both living and dead, are used for satiric purposes, and their presence here in the form of imaginary characters is not meant to assert or infer that their portrayal bears any relation to anything they might have actually said or done.
ISBN
978-0-9828960-1-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010933452
Also by James Cortese
After Gideon
Women
of the Book
Freak House
Being Zoe
The Very Last Thing
What
the Owl Said
For Romana
Yes, everyone wears a mask,
including those who take great pride in denouncing the practice of
mask-wearing. What is less well known is that one’s mask covers yet
another one beneath it—covers in fact many masks, mask upon mask,
one beneath the other, like layers of an onion, all the way down to
nothing at all.
—Benno Frank
Contents
PREFACE
Nothing is more surprising than murder, especially when it happens to people you know.
It was in 1997, having left an editorial job at Burton-Moseley publishers to work at TekSoft as Director of Technical Writing that I came into contact with Randolph Trumbull, the CEO and founder of the company. Randy and I got along very well, but were not close. Randy was the embodiment of the successful entrepreneur, highly intelligent, very logical and pragmatic, gregarious, charming, even charismatic. But there was another side of him—his compulsive womanizing, his recklessness, his supreme egotism, all of which was apparently engendered by an astounding capacity for irrationality. I was always amazed that two sets of very contradictory personality traits could exist in the same body. In the end, apparently, they couldn’t.
Having spent seven years at Burton-Moseley as a Senior Editor, I also knew Charles “Chuck” Weed, a man who seemed almost helpless in the the corporate workplace, where a good deal of unquestioning obeisance to managers was required for advancement. Chuck was pathologically shy and often annoyingly passive, while harboring contempt for his bosses, whom he saw as incompetant at best and unscrupulous at worst. After working on several projects together, we had become "office friends," often meeting for lunch, and found we shared the same interests in literature and the same kind of subversive humor that eventually got him fired.
I have no doubt that it was because I personally knew both Randy and Charles, that I was chosen to shepherd Year of the Slug into print. My mission was to provide editorial assistance in getting the book into publishable shape, and then solicit the interest of various publishers. The latter task turned out to be much easier than the former. The Trumbull story had received wide—if not lurid—attention in the news media, and no American publisher was going to ignore an opportunity to place a bet on what was generally perceived to be a sure winner.
As sent to me, Year of the Slug was in a very rough state, much of it written willy-nilly in a kind of ersatz shorthand, with many abbreviations, omitted words and lacunae. Although a good deal of the narrative consisted mostly of summaries rather than fully developed dramatic scenes, an attempt had been made to capture recollected dialogue and extended conversations—but, again, usually in the form of terse phrases and key words. Most of my editorial labors were spent in straightening all this out and producing a readable, smooth-flowing text suitable for publication. Needless to say, there were quite a few ambiguities along the way, often requiring me to check back with the author to ascertain what his intentions had been when he had set down the particular word or phrase in question. These problems were almost never easily resolved for reasons that become clear in the letters that make up the second part of this book.
The actual correspondence included many more letters than I have included here. My simple goal was to continue the story beyond the Journal, not document the strenuous efforts required to “normalize” the text—a subject that will be taken up at another time. Likewise, I have deliberately omitted my own letters, preferring to let the voices of my correspondents speak for themselves.
The third part of this book adds a document that I believe will help readers come to grips with the complex interactions of the three main figures. This is the Case Study written by Arvid Paternoster, the psychiatrist Randy consulted during the writing of the Journal. Dr. Paternoster’s fascinating report combines important biographical information with an astute psychological insight into the author’s behavior and motivations.
Finally, I have included an Appendices section that contains materials readers may find useful, including a passage from Benno Frank’s Exiles that the author commented upon in the margins of his copy of the book. In short, I have done my best to provide readers with all the information currently available that they will need to come to as full an understanding as possible of Randy Trumbull’s endlessly fascinating story, with its bizarre twists and its strange, enigmatic protagonist.
Or is it protagonists?
As close as I got to this story and its central figures, even I was never really sure which it was.
—Alan R. Nudd
THE JOURNAL
APRIL 20
Hitler’s birthday. Demons loosed upon the world. Armageddon, if the kooks are to be believed, waiting in the wings. This morning I made my decision.
Definitely decided definitely to do it—the only question was how. Gas: painless and clean but involves attaching some sort of hose to a car’s exhaust pipe. Seems simple enough. But where do you buy such a hose? Auto-parts store? Hardware store? There are sure to be awkward conversations with sales clerks. I am not good with my hands.
Jumping from a window: convenient as the nearest tall building, but then there’s the horror of those interminable terminal seconds, vertigo turning you inside out, and last-minute regrets jeering and mocking you like demonic imps, as the ground rushes toward you like a giant’s foot about to splatter you to Kingdom Come.
Hanging: too slow, too painful. Ditto drowning. The idea of gagging and choking to death, whether at the end of a rope or in the frigid Atlantic, is just too horrible to think about. Car crash: a variation of defenestration, in the key of speed. Poison? Which one? Where do you get it? What’s the right dose? Do you really want to spend your last few minutes on earth gagging and puking your life up?
In the end it was the handgun—the all-American, all-purpose solution, the instrument of choice for self-destruction. Easy to obtain, quick, convenient, no time for second thoughts.
APRIL 23
Shakespeare’s birthday, or close enough. Look what he made of his life. Helps not to be a mediocrity. Must not lose resolve. Do what has to be done. Do it now.
APRIL 24
A gun shop in Somerville I pass twice a day on the train has been badgering me to come in and look around. Today I did. The well tattooed clerk showed me a 9 mm Glock, offered a twenty-five percent discount, and threw in a box of ammo. “It’s a terrific piece,” the man said. “Sixteen shots. Rapid fire. More accurate than your .357. Got all the knock-down power you need. It’ll do the job.”
Knock-down power. Do the job. I was sold.
APRIL 25
Let’s be clear about one thing. I’m not afraid of death. I have no yearning for immortality. Ends and beginnings are in the nature of things. Think it through, and you can’t help but come to the conclusion that this is the best way. Our selfish and fearful fairytales proposing the opposite are evidence of a monstrous pathology. Or worse. If I believed in God and were of a conspiratorial temperament, I’d be inclined to think that the Devil himself was behind it.
APRIL 26
Timing belt on car broke. No time to think about suicide.
APRIL 27
Okay. I am still sold. I have decided. Definitely decided. But actually, definitely going through with it turns out to be another matter entirely. The fatal act itself. Takes a little extra something. No, not cowardice, as the clergy like to say. Just the opposite, in fact. That’s right. Courage. What makes the Hottentot so hot? Who put the ape in apricot?
Belief in your cause. Consider this day in 1916 when Patrick Pearse led those 1,500 rebels to the steps of Dublin’s Post Office and declared Irish independence from Britain. Of course he failed and paid dearly for his failure. Suicide in the right cause makes you a hero. Isn’t my cause right and just? It’s easy to rebel against a tyrannical government—how many people have the stomach to rebel against a tyrannical God?
If there were one. But that’s just it—there isn’t. So my heroic gesture is futile. I will simply wink out to nothingness, returning to the nothingness I originated from. A nice symmetry but a damn shame. Yes, it would be fine to believe in something, something greater than yourself. Something halfway plausible—not that Santa Claus God the Frocked Ones have foisted on us. Ancient texts, undocumented miracles, patent mythologies, preposterous dogma, paradoxical mysteries, arbitrary ethical codes, heaven and hell, endless rationalizations, all common sense thrown out the window. Just believe. Well fine, if I didn’t have to get a damn lobotomy first. In the end, a gigantic fraud. Which is not to say that there isn’t “something.” Something dimly perceived in the way a spider senses the faint trembling of its web when a fly is ensnared. Something way, way down that long chain of cause and effect—so far away your brain goes all wobbly and, as hard as you try to get your thoughts around it, soon nothing adds up—the world, you in the world: a monstrous enigma. Well, not my world anymore. I’m out of here, baby.
Courage.
APRIL 28
Should I leave a note—lay it all out how she drove me to do this? Or is that too much like whining? Is silence eloquent just by itself? Have not resolved this—thus my inexcusable delay.
I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .
Why didn’t I suspect something? The infamous “someone else, “ the long-suspected and dreaded “other man.” All that early talk about how wonderful “he” was—the perfect boss, so kind, so handsome. Then considerably less talk, then no talk at all. All the clues right there in front of me! Then her grouchiness and mopiness during the week he was away with his beautiful, former-model wife in Florence. Then the bout of funk suddenly passing on his return, as he told her how much his wife said he looked like Cosimo de’ Medici. Standing in front of that portrait in the Uffizi (I checked it out on the Web), probably thinking “what a stud am I.” Young and handsome, supremely confident in his gleaming armor with the two menacing points in front like weaponized tits.
“Look, your hand is even like his,” his wife told him.
And outside in the Piazza, beneath the famous equestrian statue of Cosimo: the boy who became a Grand Duke, just like the boy who became a grand entrepreneur, a prince of software, my wife’s lover.
APRIL 29
Lots of last-minute things to take care off. Still on track. The dark at the end of the tunnel.
APRIL 30
No more fooling around. A good day to die, as the Klingons like to say. One of those raw New England days—cloudy, cold, drizzling rain—that are the meteorological equivalent of despair. I am alone. Both metaphorically and literally. Renée claims to be at the mall, undergoing an evening of therapeutic shopping. I know it’s a lie. It’s therapeutic fucking now.
No doubt about it—I’ve bungled my life. Look: my house—an ugly ranch-style cracker box with cheap cracker-box furniture, located on a street with semis and motorcycles parked in every driveway. TVs roaring at all hours of the night and day. Moronia. My neighbors, middle-aged men with pony tails and women with missing teeth. Merry-go-round people going around and around, never learning anything, never thinking to get off, just loving and hating the ride. Time to get off.
Let’s look at the unvarnished facts, shall we?
I’m a virtual nonentity in the twilight of a barbarous century: A man in the shabby anteroom of middle age, living in an impoverished, derelict suburb of a gloomy northern city.
The best I could come up with for a profession was spending my daily eight-hours as a lowly underpaid assistant editor for a textbook publisher. Now I’m not even that. Not even that.
Until last Friday, I took the train into the Hub of the Universe, where on the upper floors of a sleek tower on Beacon Street, I did my best to dumb-down a popular series of history textbooks for tenth graders. My job: make sure there were lots of pictures and illustrations, lots of “fun” activities, lots of fascinating information about famous historical figures, but very little information about what the hell actually happened in the past (because that usually conflicts with what some people prefer to have happened in the past).
First Commandment of textbook publishing: Thou shalt give no offense.
I understood this to be a monstrous, pernicious evil, but it was what everyone wanted. Who? A long list. My boss, for one, Darlene Finch, M.A., anxious to scamper up the corporate ladder. Then all those politicized superintendents and principals and school board members—not a boat-rocker among them. How about the teachers, brain-washed and maleducated, looking just to make it through the day without a nervous breakdown? And then the students, who despise learning of any kind and wonder why can’t they just learn by watching TV. And don’t forget the parents, former school-hating students themselves, who can’t be bothered and just want their kids to earn A’s so they can get into a good college, land a good job, earn lots of money and support them in their old age.
I did my job, but my heart wasn’t in it. That was probably why I kept getting passed over for a promotion. Why my raises were so small. Why nobody seemed to think I was a “team player.”
My income was a joke. My job was a joke. And now I have no income, no job. I was fired. Summarily. Called before my boss and her boss. Told I was persona non grata. Yes, it made their day. They took away my badge. They made me sign papers. A security man escorted me out the door. I went meekly, complicit in helping to have made their day, disgusting even to myself.
These people, it seems, did not appreciate my little April Fool’s stunt—a parody press release announcing a new school history text in the form of a comic book. I’d emailed it to several co-workers, who proceeded to email it to others, and those others to other others, and so on till it inevitably reached an other who concluded that the perpetrator of this comic insult was unfit to work at Burton-Moseley Publishers. Hoist on my own petard. Forgive me for not savoring the delicious Irony.
Now what the hell am I going to do?
Time is running out. All the cliches of modern life are coming in for the kill! I have no equity, no future, no respect. And on top of all this—or more likely, because of it—my marriage is suffering a fatal wasting disease. Actually, it’s been dead for some time. I was just too stupid to notice.
Renée has not been pleased with the way things have turned out. She hates her life. Hates where it’s going. What happened to the house in one of the picturesque bedroom towns of the North Shore? What happened to the second car? What happened to love? What happened to passion?
She’s right. All my fault.
What more evidence do you need that your presence on the face of the earth is a grotesque irrelevancy?
Time to blow this fleabag hotel. Very simple: (1) put gun to head, (2) pull trigger. Now, dammit!
(An hour later.)
I really did think I’d talked myself into it this time. I came very close. Finger on the trigger. Psyched to do it. Prepared for oblivion. Never happened. Here’s what happened instead.
Took the gun and went out into our back yard. No sense getting blood on the carpet. The low hum of a nearby incinerator, endlessly processing our trash, bore down on my soul from behind a row of gray warehouses. Above the corrugated roofs, the towers of high tension power lines, standing like gangly giants, rose against the despotic sky. Perfect.
I put the gun to my head and felt its cold kiss on my temple. Several minutes went by. Then several more.
Why couldn’t I pull the trigger? Something definitely wasn’t right. Some vital bit of motivation kept eluding my mind every time I reached for it, slithering away into the emptiness I felt at the center of my tired, inconvenient but somehow indispensable life.
I thought: Maybe I need more motivation.
I went into the house and put the videotape in the VCR. Sudden as an obscenity, there on the TV screen: two people in bed—Renée and Randy Trumbull, her boss at the Cambridge software company where she works as his administrative assistant—his secretary, his whore. Their bodies, flushed with desire, twisted, clutching, heaving. Randy’s cruel, cretinized expression. The Prince taking his pleasure. Renée throwing her hips up, her arms around his neck, her head flung back, her light hair cascading to the pillow, her mouth a soft bent O.
Love, passion.
I thought: how different a gun, then, might have made things: the frantic fumbling with sheets, the open-mouthed look of surprise on her face, the startling explosions, the bullets freezing Randy against the wall—the jagged glints in his unbelieving eyes.
I thought: it’s still not too late.
MAY 2
Somehow got to get this down. So much to put down. Put it in words. Hope to make sense of it.
Here I am. Still am. Where? In a motel room in Somerville. No clean clothes, no toothbrush, but I do have a laptop. Not my laptop, though—and there’s the problem. Feel like a fugitive, an imposter, a fraud. Got to try to be as rational and objective as possible. Objectivity, yes. Rationality, yes. Even so, I may very well be insane.
Yesterday. May 1—workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains! Never mind that. I have nothing to lose, period. I’m supposed to be dead. Good God.
Here’s what happened.
Gentrified Cambridge. MIT’s backyard. Yuppieville. End of the day. Fried-egg sun smoldering on the horizon. Cool night rushing in. Peach-colored streetlights flicking on. Randy Trumbull’s Teutonic cherry-red Cabriolet parked in the space closest to the front entrance of his building, a renovated warehouse by the Charles River, Boston’s hump-backed glittering skyline mirrored on its surface. We know all about Randy. MIT graduate. Business wunderkind. Stylish hunk. Founder and CEO of TekSoft. A rich man. A very rich man. Recently had an opportunity to be even richer when Microsoft offered an obscenely large sum for his company. Would have cleared over a hundred million dollars in the deal, but he refused. “I like being my own boss,” he said in the Globe. Never mind that.
I like being my own boss, too. Taking matters into my own hands. Creating my own destiny. No, not revenge. Justice, which is, okay, just a nicer word, but so what. I was psyched. I knew I had something to do, knew I had the will to do it. It’s easy if you don’t care anymore. If you have nothing to lose. Compared to suicide, murder is a piece of cake.
Lights in the front office go off. A few minutes later, Randy comes out. Backpack on his shoulder. Strolls briskly out the front door, the world at his feet. We know Randy keeps in good physical shape with lots of tennis, racquetball, and weight training. Yes, he’s an imposing specimen: bullish, handsome, youthful looking, with a beard and a mane of teak-colored hair that seems to sprout directly from his robust ego.
Went up to him. “Hello, Randy.”
Didn’t seem to recognize me. “Chuck Weed,” I said. “Renée’s husband.”
“Hey, what’s up?” Eyes veiled, mind torqued down, idling. Here was a matter of little importance.
Suddenly so many words wanted to pour out that everything got jammed in my throat. “ Ach ” Too much to verbalize, and anyway what was the point? He wouldn’t understand. Took out the gun and pointed it at him. The gun would speak for me.
Randy laughed. “What’s this, a joke?”
I nodded, then realized it was the wrong gesture. Told him I’d seen the videotape.
He laughed, then said something like, “I guess I’ve disappointed you, Chuck.” Smart ass. Made me hate him all the more.
I announced I was going to kill him, put a bullet through his smart-ass self-confidence, smart-ass smugness. Could hear my own voice and I didn’t recognize it—a kind of breathless falsetto. Hated myself almost as much as I hated him. Then:
“That’s a serious matter.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Well, Chuck, no offense, but it sure doesn’t look that way from my end.”
“I don’t pretend to be as competent as you, okay?” Lame, so lame.
“It’s not a question of competence. You don’t have to be competent to kill someone. You just have to be stupid.”
“Shut up!”
The bastard put his hands on his hips. A nice, manly pose for the invisible cameras recording his life. Suddenly he moved toward me. I backed away, but his hands had already found the gun. With some sort of practiced self-defense maneuver, he tried to wrench it out of my hands.
I pulled at the gun . . . a white flash . . . a pop. Felt myself being flung back. Blow to my chest, as if I’d been punched. My legs giving out from under me. Gunpowder smell. Wheeling sky filled with stars.
No, this wasn’t right! A mistake! And yet I understood unmistakably that something was torn open and I was spurting blood, that the blood would drain out of me and I would soon black out, and that within a minute or two I would die.
What fragile things we are!
Randy’s face swung into view. “Tough luck, Chuck.”
I felt cold, weak. Getting colder and weaker. I pleaded for help.
He had no sympathy. “Point is, you tried to kill me.”
Funny, I could see his point.
How odd, those last sensations. Like counting down to zero. Like being poured out of a bottle. Like the old TV screens dwindling to a little dot of light when you switched them off, then nothing. Oblivion. Peace. No pain, no fear. Just the world and time and life and thought spilling faster and faster out of your weakening grasp.
And then I could not remember what I had wanted to say.
Enough for now. No more writing. Not dead. Not dead. Just dead tired.
MAY 3
Now I’m here. Still in the motel. The Colonial Inn. Apparently still not dead. Last night a wild party next door—music, dancing, drinking, drugs, then an orgy. Grotesque faces in the night coming and going. Is this Hell or only Somerville?
The maid keeps wanting to change my linens. No, no, go away, go away.
My head is throbbing. Still trying to figure out what to do. Still not quite convinced I’m alive. Didn’t I see my own corpse? Yes, I did. Two days ago. There I was. Lying on the ground. Lying in a ludicrous spread-eagled position on the pavement, one foot twisted around. Glazed wide-open eyes cocked upward. The front of my shirt soaked with blood. Lying in a puddle of blood that had run off and formed a stream down the sloping sidewalk into the gutter.
I’m thinking: so this is it. I’m dead! But how can that be? How can you know that? Am I a ghost? Like that guy in the movie? That out-of-body thing just before the tunnel of light?
I looked around: no tunnel of light. Nor did I feel very much like a ghost. I felt alive. I seemed, in fact, to be breathing. I felt sweaty. My scalp itched. I had to pee. And when I exerted the right muscles, a human hand, although not my own, swung into view.
Whoa.
Ran over to a parked car and looked into the side window, made mirror-like by the glare of the street light. Peering back at me was the face of Randy Trumbull. I think I might have actually yelped.
Eventually the Cambridge police arrived, two roly-poly officers snorting noisily, then the ambulance. A small crowd formed. They put a rag over my face. The officer asked me for identification. Something was wrong with the pronouns—too many me’s and I’s. Took out my wallet and gave the cop my driver’s license. The cop looked at it and said, “Thank you, Mr. Trumbull.” He filled in a form on a clipboard.
I’m thinking: a man dies, and all they can do is fill out a form.
They asked me questions, most of which I had trouble answering. Here’s the gist of it:
“Did you know the dead man?”
“Yes.”
“Whose gun was fired?”
“Whose gun?”
“Your gun or his gun?”
“I—”
“Yes?”
“Please, I’m very confused. I don’t think I know anything for certain. I don’t know about the gun. I don’t know who’s dead. I’m not sure who he is. I’m not even sure who I am.”
They wanted me to get into the ambulance, but I wouldn’t go. Didn’t want to be near the body. Told them I was all right. Just needed some time to get my bearings. Best just to avoid thinking about pronouns, I told myself. Stick to the facts. Worry about the pronouns later. More official questioning:
“Do you know this man?”
“Which man?”
“The dead man.”
“Vaguely. I mean very well.”
“Why did he come at you with a gun?”
The relentless logic of reality sucked me along. “Said . . . he was going to shoot me because I had an affair with his wife. We struggled. The gun went off.” The pronouns: each one a monstrous lie.
“Did you have an affair with his wife?”
“Yes!”
“A fling, one-night-stand sort of thing? Or were you nailing the lady on a regular basis?” The cop winked.
“Yes!”
“On a regular basis?”
“Yes!”
And so on. One irrelevant question after another. It made no sense. I pretended to be someone else and answered all the questions. Eventually, they decided they didn’t need to arrest me. Two witnesses had seen everything. They had seen Randy defend himself from a madman stalker with a gun.
Was I supposed to be thankful for that? I didn’t know what I was supposed to think. Still don’t.
People continued to mill about—the police, the medics, the curious gawkers. The sidewalk was hosed down, my blood gushing into a sewer. I wept. Empty streets led in all directions. For a moment I envied the corpse that the ambulance was soon to cart off: at least he didn’t have to worry about what to do next.
Finally I was allowed to go.
Randy’s cherry-red Cabriolet, aerodynamic, low-slung, bristling with curves was parked a short distance away. Reached into the pocket of the jacket I was wearing and pulled out a set of keys. Randy’s car. Randy’s jacket. Randy’s keys. Apparently, Randy’s life.
But where was Randy? Here was his body, but nobody was home. Just room after empty room. His clothes still in the closets, his dirty underwear in the hampers. The safe with his insurance policies and stock certificates. His wallet on the dresser.
Got in the car and looked in the rear-view mirror. Nothing had changed. There was Randy’s face, staring back. Put the car in gear . . .
MAY 4
And drove here. The Colonial Inn, although there’s nothing remotely colonial about it. Where else was I going to go?
Eleven a.m. Soon that maid will be coming by again, giving me that weird look, insisting she needs to change my linens. Can’t stay here forever. Time to face reality.
(Later—ten p.m.)
Back at the motel. Just returned from home. Probably should put that in quotation marks. The cracker box amidst the wasteland. All the lights were on. Renée, in her bathrobe, watching the tube.
None of the keys fit the lock; I still wasn’t sure why. Rang the bell. Renée looked out and then quickly opened the door all the way.
She hugged me fiercely, saying the police had called, clinging to me as if to keep from falling. I felt her body trembling. She began to cry. Awkwardly, as though we’d become attached at the middle, we moved over to the sofa and sat down. She kissed me, wetting my face with her tears, my wife, the woman I had thought was mine for all eternity. Then this:
“I can’t believe it! It’s over. He’s out of my life forever.”
“Renée—”
She called me “darling” and said that it must sound awful, but she just couldn’t be sorry for him. “I can only think about us. I love you,” she said, almost as an article of faith. Began rubbing her body against me, her eyes softened.
To my astonishment, I felt a stirring in my pants!
“I need you,” she half whispered. “I need you right now. I need you so bad.”
“Renée, please—”
“And you need me too—I can feel it!” Her hand sought confirmation between my legs.
I stood up, dizzy from the waves of desire rushing through my blood.
“Randy, please don’t be angry with me. I only have you.” She fell on the floor and hugged my legs.
“Renée, this is ridiculous.”
“Yes, ridiculous. I’m ridiculous and cruel and bad, but please don’t be angry with me!” Whimpering, stroking and kissing my shoes.
Picked her up off the floor and told her I had to go. Couldn’t stand it anymore. Couldn’t stand her. She asked if she would see me again, and, wanting to be cruel, I told her I didn’t think so.
She shook her head, desperately saying no.
“Renée, it’s over, okay? We both had some fun. Let’s not spoil it.”
“Fun? Is that all it was to you?” This man to whom she had offered up her soul. She stared at me, her eyes welling with the kind of irrational fury she had once directed at her poor dead husband.
“Yup.”
MAY 5
The Colonial Inn. This New England fetish for things colonial. Quaintness, charm—regional obsessions. Out in the bucolic suburbs, with populations as dense as Calcutta’s, they insist on those narrow, winding “country” roads—every day choked with suburban traffic. I hate this place. I hate my life. Or whosever it is. Watching TV the whole day. My mind benumbed by electronic sludge—quiz shows, talk shows, soap operas. Is this, finally, what women want? Paralyzed with indecision. Told the maid, a young buxom Hispanic woman, the linens didn’t need changing. She seemed disappointed that I wouldn’t let her in. Is she paid by the number of sheets she changes? Gave me an unaccountable smile. “Okay, mister, I go.”
Moment of silence for Napoleon Bonaparte, dying mysteriously on this day in 1821 on the island of St. Helena, the conquering hero conquered. Death be not proud?
I can’t recommend dying. It’s not a very pleasant experience. Although I have to admit it’s by no means the worst unpleasant experience. Nothing compared to, say, rejection in love.
The world is full of death. Why should we be surprised when it enters our company? It’s natural and good. We’re the ones who give it a bad name.
Here’s the good news. There’s not much to dying, really. The pain is all psychological—knowing that this rather trivial incident that one way or another keeps oxygenated blood from getting to your brain—is the absolute termination of your existence. (So there it is: it all comes down to oxygen. Not money, not fame, not love. In the end, the most important thing is a gas.) What’s interesting is that you don’t actually feel very much of this pain. As it turns out, the pain has been amortized over your whole life.
Far, far more unpleasant than dying is coming back to life.
Especially coming back as someone else.
You would think that it might be something like waking up and finding yourself in a new suit of clothes or in a strange place. Not at all. It’s more like discovering that pieces of yourself are gone. Not what you’ve gained, but what you’ve lost. Habits, tastes, even certain skills—all mysteriously missing. You are in another body, and there are things about it you don’t understand. You’re not quite sure how to make it work. Worst of all, there are new things that have taken the place of the things that are gone: desires and aversions that crowd about you like a pack of excited dogs, nipping, licking, howling. What do they want? Why won’t they just go away?
The thought does occur to me that, on the face of it, I may very well be crazy.
MAY 6
Spent the morning recreating my journal from the twentieth of April. Beyond that it’s hopeless. My old electronic files, all my spiral-bound notebooks—gone forever. No doubt Renée has already dumped them in the trash. My past is gone. Chuck Weed is gone. And yet here I am. The world hasn’t changed. It’s May 6, the clock says ten a.m. The past belongs to someone else. But the present and the future are mine. Life apparently goes on.
So at least one thing’s clear. There’s no going back. No way Randy Trumbull can live the life of Chuck Weed.
Or, for that matter, would even want to. That face in the mirror this morning. Handsome, arrogant. Just like the portrait in the Uffizi. God help me. I’ve become my own killer.
Today I left the Colonial Inn motel for good and went home—not the cracker box in Medford, but Randy’s home, the million-dollar mansion in Wayland. Randy’s body, as it happens, comes with a wife—a taut, tanned, thirtyish former model with improbable breasts. There is in Randy’s brain a file on this woman. The two key facts are that she spends much of her time playing tennis and has been having an affair with a Burlington plastic surgeon who manages her various body enhancements. Her name is Cherry.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Colonial Inn motel in Somerville.”
“What’s with that? Extended one-night stand?”
“I was alone.”
“The TV said you shot a man.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“ It’s not sitting too well.”
“Well, yeah!”
“Can we eat? I’m quite hungry.”
Wonderful dinner of squab, asparagus, and roasted rosemary potatoes prepared by our Venezuelan cook, Inez. I asked Cherry, “Do I seem okay to you?”
Picking clean a small drumstick, “Randy, you have never seemed okay to me. If you want to know if you seem any different since you killed that man, you’re asking the wrong person, okay? I have no idea. I just live here.” Sucking her greasy fingertips. “I’m just the other name on your tax return. Your sex doll. By the way, why were you screwing that man’s wife? She wasn’t even that attractive.”
“She was there.”
“Did you really have to shoot him?” Her lips shiny with squab fat, going for another drumstick. No dark meat for me, I’m strictly a breast man—or was. Apparently Randy will eat anything.
“No, not really.”
“Any particular reason why you did?”
“He annoyed me.”
“Randy, I think you’re a very disturbed individual.”
Told her I agreed with her, and why not? She seemed surprised. “I think I’m going crazy,” I said.
“Is this some kind of insanity defense you’re cooking up?”
“No, I’m serious.”
A look of fear came into her face. “Good Lord, you’re not homicidal, are you?”
“Not any more.”
After dinner, watched TV. Interesting program on the German airship Hindenburg, which exploded while attempting to land in Lakehurst, N.J. on this day in 1937. Those logical Germans, talking themselves into inventing a mode of transportation that was essentially a flying bomb. Cherry’s gone to bed, wondering out loud why I chose to watch the History Channel instead of the Red Sox game. Said I hated sports.
“When did that happen?”
I had to stop and think. “Tonight,” I said.
“Randy, you are not funny. I’m going to bed.”
Said I wanted to do some work, and so here I am. Laptop purring in front of me. Much better model than my old one. Keys awaiting the caress of my fingers. What next? Another man’s bed, another man’s wife. No need to convince myself of this logic: If I don’t step up to the plate to bat, then who will?
MAY 7
Took Randy’s Cabriolet and went to the office—Randy’s office—my office now. My office! I am a CEO. I am the founder of TekSoft. I am very rich. I run the company. Even as I type these words I can’t totally believe it.
A day of calendrical ironies. (1) German subs sink the Lusitania today in 1915, the U.S. pushed closer into World War I, stupidest war in human history. (2) Thirty-five years later to the day, the Germans are signing the instruments of surrender in World War II. (3) Tough luck for the French in 1954, defeated at Dien Bien Phu, also on this day. Disasters for them, triumphs for their enemies.
Bit of a triumph for me this morning, as I entered my private office (the only one—everyone else has a cubicle), past my obviously peeved secretary, former wife, former lover, Renée, I realized there could have been worse outcomes to my premature and inadvertent death. However, a second later, it occurred to me, in a sudden moment of panic, that I had no idea how to run a software company. I was an assistant textbook editor. What did I know about software?
I got up and paced around the room. My scalp became unbearably itchy. I wanted to pull out all of Randy’s terrific, if not preternatural, hair. I tried to calm myself down. Maybe it was just a question of “remembering.” I told myself: think it through. Don’t worry about the pronouns. Chuck Weed hated sushi, but Randy Trumbull loved sushi. Now I love sushi. Chuck Weed had no idea how to run a software company. Randy Trumbull did. So why shouldn’t I? Randy may be gone, but his brain is still part of his body.
I felt better immediately. The logic was unassailable. And sure enough, as soon as I had calmed down, it happened. As if I were a recovering amnesiac, it all began to come back to me: mental file cabinets opening and information flooding into my grateful consciousness. My hand went instinctively to a desk drawer, opened it and found the bottle of fine single-malt scotch Randy always kept there for “emergencies.” I poured half a glass and drank it. I’d always hated scotch—this tasted just fine.
Some time later, the door of my office opened and Renée poked her head in, asking me if I were all right. She was worried about me, she said. I wasn’t myself, she said. Tears welled in her eyes. My poor, lying, cheating wife. Miscast as a wife, I now see. She had been much, much better as the rich man’s lover.
Told her to come in and close the door. I knew exactly what I had to do. Told her, as matter-of-factly as possible, that since our private relationship was over, so was our public one—ergo, it was time she found another job.
God, that felt good. Something terrifically exhilarating about revenge. No wonder we burn in Hell for it.
Down came the crocodile tears, and then this: “Randy, I just don’t understand! Why are you doing this? Randy, it’s not my fault! It was your idea to make that stupid tape! I would never hurt you! I love you! And you love me! Why can’t we just talk this out? Why can’t we just put all this behind us and be together and love each other again.” And so on. Wonderfully pathetic.
I told her, calmly as I could, love had nothing to do with it, never had. Not for me, not for her. What did? Sex for me, money for her. Just before she left, she stood in the doorway of my office, smiled and said goodbye in her inimitable way: “Fuck you, asshole.”
MAY 8
Still Randolph Trumbull, software magnate. Chatted with Nick Janos, my VP of Marketing. Sharp young guy, reminds me of Ben Affleck. He saw Renée storm out of my office yesterday and then, like everyone else, was aware of her absence today. Apparently Randy used to confide in him. “Just as well,” he said. “Fooling around with women at work always leads to trouble.”
“Maybe it’s worth the trouble,” I said, mouthing a line that seemed to be waiting on the tip of my tongue, and then winking. I never used to wink.
“Really?” I could see his mind working: was there something about this not-very-attractive woman he had missed?
“Not everything is looks,” I said. “Every woman is a puzzle. That’s the challenge, the attraction. Solving the puzzle.” Where was I getting this stuff?
“Little bit too intellectual for me,” Nick said. “When did you get so analytical?”
“After I shot that guy.”
“I guess that would make you stop and think. Are you worried about the inquest?”
“I don’t think anyone can dispute the fact it was a clear case of self-defense.”
He nodded in agreement. “Now that you ended it with Renée, she might not be inclined to see it that way.”
“Then maybe I deserve to be punished.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Not at all.”
MAY 10
Let’s pause to remember one of the century’s signal moments of collective stupidity: This day in 1933, when Nazi stormtroopers, professors in black robes, and students gathered on a square in central Berlin to burn books by Marx, Freud, Brecht, Einstein . . . Once they finished with the books, they went after the authors. Then came the readers . . .
Found a trunk full of Randy’s mementoes. Papers he had written in high school and college. Pictures of him as a baby and child. Yes, he was very cute. Even Hitler as a baby was cute. And bundles of youthful letters to various girlfriends and women he had tried to turn into girlfriends. Sample:
Linda, I know your feeling bad about “giving in,” but believe me when I say it was the greatest moment in my life. I felt so privileged. I’m proud to say that your “my girl.” I think we have a great future together, I really do. I’ve already told Janet that its over between us. She’s nothing compared to you. Yes, these feelings racking my insides are definitely “love.” I hope you feel the same way. You can be sure that I’m definitely not the type to “kiss and tell.” That’s so immature. You can be certain I will never think less of you. You will always be my “goddess.” Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday. Hope your finals are going well.
In another bundle I found a letter to one of his male friends:
Dick, pretty dull here. Everyone’s cramming like crazy. Not me, though. Finally made it with Linda. She gave me such a hard time but she put out in the end. Turned out to be a hot little bitch! Hollered and whooped like she was on a roller-coaster. What a slut! I think I’m in love! Next time your up, you need to give her a shot. Had to do some fast talking when she found out about Janet, who, by the way, sends her best! She’s decided to come along with me to visit you over Xmas break. Should be fun. Hope there’s decent snow on the slopes. Let me know how things are going with your psych prof’s wife. Older women—can’t beat ’em! They know all the tricks and are so-o-o grateful!
What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties!
MAY 12
Finally had a talk with Alan Nudd, our Director of Technical Publications, formerly an editor at Burton-Moseley. Asked him if he knew Chuck Weed. Said he did. Said he knew him quite well.
“What kind of a guy was he?”
“Smart, very well read. Knew everything about history. I think he probably had a photographic memory. Shy and not very social. Pathologically so. An introvert and a passive-aggressive. But once you got to know him, he was a fascinating guy. All that introversion and passivity, along with a devastating sense of humor; could imitate the voice and mannerisms of anyone. Absolutely refused to kiss ass. His boss didn’t understand him at all and probably felt threatened by him since he was such a better editor than she was, so she hated him. She’d been looking to can him for months and finally had the opportunity to do it when he wrote this clever April Fool’s press release—a very funny piece of writing. His mistake was emailing it around. He may be the only person at Burton-Moseley who ever got fired for demonstrating a sense of humor. That was kind of the last straw for Chuck. His self-esteem, which was never very high anyway, went down to zero. He found out that his disaster of a wife was cheating on him, and I think it just unhinged him.”
“This thing is really eating at me,” I said, simultaneously a victim and victimizer.
“You had to defend yourself.”
“If it wasn’t for me, he’d still be alive today.”
Alan said nothing.
“Sometimes,” I said, “I feel his presence.”
“Guilt and regret are very powerful emotions.”
“It’s more than that, Alan. I feel like I’m—I don’t know—haunted.”
He didn’t seem to understand. What could I say that wouldn’t make him think I was nuts?
I pointed to my head. “Weird thoughts. The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.”
Alan’s face suddenly turned to stone.
“What’s the matter?”
“Shakespeare, right? That was one of Chuck’s favorite phrases,” Alan said.
MAY 15
Went to court this morning. Middlesex County Courthouse, perhaps the ugliest building ever designed by a contemporary architect. The inquest. Witnesses testify. The police testify. I testify. Renée’s lawyer, a shrill, bullying, red-faced man named Craven, tries to make the case that I deliberately shot her husband, and if not that, that I used excessive force to repel my assailant’s attack. But he has no proof and his arguments go nowhere. The testimony of the eyewitnesses carries the day. In the end the judge rules that Randolph M. Trumbull bears no fault for the death of Charles L. Weed. A terrible tragedy, everyone agrees. No, tragedy is not exactly the right word, but I am not about to try to explain why.
“Well, I guess that gets you off the hook,” Cherry said when we got home.
“Not entirely.”
“So, what is it, then?”
“I still don’t feel right.”
“Don’t tell me your conscience is bothering you? I thought you fixed that problem long time ago.”
“I’m not feeling myself.”
“Can’t you be more specific?”
“I mean that literally—I don’t feel like Randy Trumbull.”
She laughed! “Then who?”
“The man I shot. Chuck Weed.”
She said, “Randy, this doesn’t mean you’re going to start acting weird, does it? I just won’t put up with you embarrassing me in front of my friends.”
I promised her I’d behave myself, but said I thought it would be a good idea to see a doctor. She came into contact with lots of doctors’ wives at her tennis club. Did she know of anyone I might call?
As a matter of fact she did—a man who was treating a friend of hers. Highly recommended, Cherry said. Excellent credentials. Specializes in “identity problems.” This afternoon, I called for an appointment. His name is Dr. Arvid Paternoster.
MAY 17
Great day for social justice: in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court overturns an 1896 ruling that education should be “separate but equal,” thus outlawing racial segregation in the public school system. What the court taketh away, it giveth back. And vice versa.
I mention this to Cherry.
“Randy, this is getting to be very annoying.”
“What is?”
“These facts. You know, I’m just not interested, okay? Are you trying to impress me or something? Because if you are, it’s having the opposite effect. Isn’t your doctor’s appointment today?”
“No, it’s tomorrow.”
She held up the issue of Cosmo she was reading. “This article says that many forms of mental illness can be traced to sexual problems.”
“Who says? Dr. Quackenbush?”
“You should read it. You might find it helpful. It says that too much thinking about sex is a form of dementia. Hormone therapy is supposedly very successful.”
“Good to know. I’ll ask about hormone shots, and if that doesn’t work, there’s always castration.”
No idea how I’m going to survive this woman.
MAY 18
Herewith my encounter with the shrink. I set out with all the trepidation that Louis and Clark must have felt when they left St. Louis on this day in 1804 to explore the West and find a waterway between the Mississippi and the Pacific. That dream was never to be, just as my fondest hope might never be, but maybe, like them, I would discover something much grander than ordinary sanity.
Took the Red Line into town. Walked through the Common (flowers in bloom, babies in strollers, dogs on the leash, louts loitering about, lovers shamelessly kissing on the grass) to a rather seedy building on Tremont Street near Essex. Ever shrinking Combat Zone not very far away. Smelly elevator, which had recently been used as a urinal, to the tenth floor. Dr. Paternoster is a middle-aged man with thick glasses and eyelids that seem almost reptilian in their ability to remain half-closed. I told him what had happened to me, sparing nothing: my intention to commit suicide, then murder; the confrontation with Randy, the struggle over the gun, my death. I told him how pronouns were driving me insane. I told him I was sure I was mentally disturbed. Then this:
“Who exactly are you?” he asked.
A dreaded pronoun question. I tried to answer but found I could not. I broke down in tears.
“Interesting,” Dr. Paternoster said.
We talked some more. I grew frantic. He calmed me down. I told him I wanted the straight facts. What the hell was going on? Yes, he said, I had a problem. As far as he could tell, he said, it was a well known syndrome. Under severe stress, he explained, the normally coherent personality becomes fragmented and compartmentalized, giving the appearance of two or more distinct personalities living in the same body. When he said “coherent personality,” he meant something quite different from what most people think of as—quote—the Self—unquote. The Self is actually a loose federation of personalities. Dr. Paternoster wiggled the fingers of one hand by way of illustration. Then he brought his wrists under his nose, where he began to appraise first one then the other with little sniffs.
The clinical term for what had happened to me is “dissociation,” which occurs—if I have this right—when a group of mental processes are separated and coexist independently with other processes. Mine not a unique case, he said. This kind of identity dissociation disorder is rare but not unheard of. Typically, the patient has undergone a particularly traumatic experience and suffers a form of amnesia in which, additionally, he has the delusion that he’s someone else. The result is a case of dissociative amnesia combined with dissociative identity disorder. We find these syndromes particularly disturbing, he explained, because they call into question a basic assumption about human nature.
“Namely,” Dr. Paternoster said, “one body, one person. All of us take it for granted that over the years we’ll remain the same person, with a single coherent personality and a single store of memories.” Dr. Paternoster smiled, pleased with himself.
I said, “But I never wanted to be Randy Trumbull!”
Expanded smile. “The question is why Randy Trumbull would want to be Chuck Weed.”
Good point.
“The psychodynamics are fairly obscure, but, if I might hazard an hypothesis, perhaps you—you Randy Trumbull—didn’t much like yourself, you didn’t like what you had become. You found yourself in a downward spiral with no way of pulling yourself out. Perhaps the way out was, in the crucible of this horrible act of killing another man, to become that man—become Chuck Weed.”
Made perfect sense to me. There it was. The answer I needed. Maybe not the correct answer, but it would do. As I recall, it was Cary Grant who famously said, “I pretended to be someone that I wanted to be, and I finally became that person—or he became me.” Doesn’t quite fit my present circumstances, does it? But maybe it’s close enough.
I went directly home and poured a double scotch, put on some Mozart (“Eine Kleine Nacht Musik”), and enjoyed the realization that I had no need ever to see a shrink again. For some unaccountable reason, I felt hugely relieved. I immediately headed out to the patio to find my sun-bathing wife.
“How’d it go?”
“Terrific.”
“Still think you’re someone else.”
“Not an issue.”
“Here, you want the sports page?”
“No, I want you.”
MAY 19
Big important meeting with our venture capitalists, The Charles River Group. I was in high spirits and got things going by announcing we would pause for a moment of silence for Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII’s second wife, who was beheaded in London on this day in 1536. I recounted the story of how the headsman swung imperfectly and Anne’s head dangled by a piece of muscle until the hooded executioner took the heavy axe and delicately sawed through the pesky tissue. With Anne out of the way, Henry got to marry Jane Seymour, Anne’s lady-in-waiting, hoping she would conceive a son and heir. (She did and died doing it.)
Anxious looks around the table. I should probably not pull another stunt like this again.
Getting back to business, we plunged into the agenda. The partners of CRG, a bunch of rich men striving to become even richer, were pleased with our report—and who wouldn’t be: revenues up, margins up for the last quarter, just like all the previous quarters, and no end in sight! It seemed magical! Actually, magic had nothing to do with it—it was the Internet, which is the equivalent of the discovery of the New World by that arch-buffoon, Signor Colombo. Still, they are not entirely happy, these very rich men. Once again, the push to go public. I said it made sense to wait till our revenues broke the hundred-million dollar mark. They reluctantly went along. What could they do? I’m the boss, the resident genius. This is my baby.
MAY 23
Ran into Alan Nudd in the copy room. Asked me how things were going. I said fine.
“You look better,” he said. “I suppose it’s a relief to have the inquest over.”
I said it was.
Slightly awkward conversational hiatus, then I said, “Alan, what would you say if I told you that this is quite a momentous day in history? In 1430 Joan of Arc was captured at Compiegne and handed over to the British. In 1498 Girolamo Savonarola, the Italian religious fanatic and political reformer and general nuisance, was hanged and burned at the stake in Florence. The famous Defenestration of Prague, which set off the Thirty Years War, occurred in 1618. In 1701 the Scottish pirate Captain Kidd was hanged in London. Bonnie and Clyde were killed in a police ambush in 1934. And in 1960 Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of the extermination of the Jews, was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina. All happened on this day.”
His face turned pale. “I’d say I never knew any of that.”
“What else would you say?”
“That it sounds very much like something Chuck Weed would say. Did you look all that stuff up?”