Blvd. of Blood

Book 2, chapters 17–21

Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.

(Colin Lang continues to plan some horrible atrocity. His girlfriend Carol Wernick has no idea what’s up. Officer John Oberman seeks clues through Bernie Feldstein’s Twitter feed. Does Bernie have any idea what’s up? Only slightly; only slightly.)

17.

As soon as Carol noticed that he’d been shaving his hands, Colin stopped hiding the electric razor in the basement. Now it had become normal and normal was not suspicious.

It was good to have a rule of thumb like that.

18.

No, Colin wasn’t secretive, Carol thought. If anyone was secretive, that would be Carol.

Her parents lived a half-hour drive away, and she hadn’t brought Colin over for dinner yet. Her parents were both academics, and humanities academics to boot. They had never understood Carol’s obsession with numbers—her father had in fact taken her aside in her adolescence and tried to persuade her that the concept of quantification was…colonialist or patriarchal or something bad. The would never understand Colin, and the whole dinner would be filled with casual references to Adorno or Habermas, people that Colin would assume were relatives.

Colin simply didn’t have the artsy background. She’d gone with him to a museum in Albany for an exhibition of antique Gustave Doré prints, and he’d had only the most cursory knowledge of what they were illustrating: not just the obscure ones—L’Épine’s Croquemitaine or whatnot—but Don Quixote, “The Raven,” the Divina Commedia.

But he was interested, and he studied the old sheets with an attentive eye. Several of the images from Dante’s Inferno he lingered over so long Carol began to get restless.

Finally he seemed to snap out of it. He looked sheepish. “Why aren’t they yellowing?” he asked the docent, who explained about acidity levels in paper. Colin thanked him.

On the drive home he said, “Never had a girl ask me to see her etchings before.”

“They seemed to speak to you,” Carol said.

“Now that was some good art,” Colin agreed, and if she brought him to her parents’ they would write Doré off as mere illustration. One of her mother’s most prized possessions was one half of an Adolph Gottlieb painting—an original, but it had somehow been damaged, and only the top part remained, depicting a maroon circle and nothing else.

How do you even tell your parents, past thirty, “Mom, dad, I met a new fella”? They had certainly noticed she hadn’t been visiting. “Busy at work?” her mother asked archly.

“Mom, did you see what the president said?”—and that would distract her.

Of course Carol was embarrassed by her parents

But she was also afraid: What if they didn’t see in Colin Lang the ineffable thing she could not articulate?

The ineffable depth?

19.

Oberman hadn’t know who Cassandra was until the Chief started calling him that. Cassandra, Cassandra. At first he assumed it was just a random girl’s name. Ha ha, Oberman’s a girl, a girl named Cassandra. But finally he looked it up and learned that Cassandra was a prophet that no one ever listened to.

“Cassandra was right, you know,” Oberman told the Chief after that.

“Yeah, well, you’re not,” said the Chief. And that should have been that. But Oberman had a feeling about these Twitter threats.

“We don’t even know he lives near here,” Campbell objected for the hundredth time. “He hasn’t said what he’s going to do or where. He could be playing a video game. After all, he is on Twitter.”

“Twitter is not a video game,” Oberman pointed out, also for the hundredth time.

Campbell took Oberman’s phone out of his hand and looked at the latest outburst. Four or five hundred dead. “Tell you what,” Campbell said. “He makes one more good scary threat like that and I’ll send it up the chain of command.”

But no more tweets came. Not one more threat. In fact, the whole account disappeared, and with it Oberman’s one chance to be right.

20.

It happened like this. It was because of Randall Adler.

Randall Adler had moved to Brooklyn for a year and had returned to Cottinened an ironic boxer. He had a handlebar mustache and a tattoo of John L. Sullivan (1858–1918), and he boxed with his bare knuckles, the fist held palm-down. He came over with weed, and Stone came over with beer, and Bernie greeted them at the door and pretended to be pleased to see Randall. The man who always had ideas. That was his brand, and he put it on his business cards: Randall Adler, the man who always has ideas.

Today he had an idea for revenge. “The thing to do is,” he said as he rolled a joint, “is to make sure your enemy, when he dies, gets buried in a really crowded place, like Times Square.”

“Why’s that? Why’s that?” Stone asked, for Stone was forever eager.

Randall was really taking his time with that joint, packing it precisely, but theatrically precisely. “If someone walks on your grave—your future grave, I mean—you get a chill down your spine, right? Everyone knows that. So if your grave is going to be someplace mad busy, people be walking over it all the time. You get nonstop chills.”

“What would I want nonstop chills?” Bernie broke in, annoyed. He was annoyed by the fake urban patois Randall inconsistently affected. He was annoyed by how slow Randall was, and how cheap-ass the beer Stone brought.

Randall paused for effect. “You don’t want chills. You want your enemy to have chills. That’s the revenge. He’ll go crazy! Literally out of his head. The endless treading on his grave will drive him to an early death, and that—” here he waved the completed but unlit joint “—is fortunate because otherwise you wouldn’t have the opportunity to bury him where you wanted. Just make sure it’s someplace busy or the whole plan won’t work!”

Bernie had a hard time making heads or tails of this while tipsy, and it only got worse after he was thoroughly wasted. He had half a mind to put Randall in his place, let him know who around here was being contracted for a vigilante squad of some sort (the details were fuzzy); but he remembered the WinFatBux contest account on Twitter. Spies were everywhere. He rarely tweeted at all anymore, although he did check obsessively for other spies and their traps. He settled on the simple riposte: “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Randall.

What happened next made sense at the time, although to a sober mind, such as, even, the minds of the three participants the next day, it all seemed a random jumble of unrelated events. Randall decided to challenge his pals to a boxing match. Bernie remembered what his father’d used to say, to wit, “Always wrestle a boxer,” so he tackled Randall. They wrestled for a while—it was more like Bernie getting his ass kicked all over the room—and then Stone jumped on both of them and they all three wrestled until they bumped into the television and knocked it off the stand. Then they spent a lot of time making sure it wasn’t broken, which was hard to do because they kept dropping it when the tried to pick it up, and the batteries fell out of the remote and rolled beneath a chair so they had trouble turning it on. Miraculously it still worked. It was apparent that Stone had been the best wrestler, but Randall explained that the poor amateur had made a lot of technical errors, and anyone who really knew a lot about wrestling would see that in a heartbeat. Bernie, who assumed he knew more about wrestling than either of these other shitheads, agreed reflexively.

They ran out of weed, but Bernie had some whipped cream in the fridge, so they probably did whippets. Certainly they did something else. A lot of the night was fuzzy. Sometime in the middle of things Randall proposed leaving the house to get more beer. There he is fumbling with the deadbolt (it was unlocked).

Bernie was thinking. He had a tattoo he’d gotten last summer: It was a smiley face with squinting eyes over the words Charlie don’t surf. Bernie couldn’t remember what it was a reference to, but he thought it was a reference to something. He also thought it might be racist, so he couldn’t exactly go around asking just anyone what it meant. He couldn’t ask Stone because Stone would make fun of him for not remembering. Stone had been there when he’d got it. But (Bernie reasoned) if Stone went to get beer instead of Randall, certainly he could ask Randall about the tattoo, even though when soberer he would avoid being alone with the irritating man.

But as much as Bernie pushed for Stone to go get the beer, it was Randall, loudly insisting he was in a better condition to drive, who left. Just then Bernie and Stone realized they actually had plenty of beer in the fridge, and when they ran outside to catch him before he reached his car, they found Randall lying in the lawn, face down. They dragged him back in to the house and slapped him until he vomited on the kitchen floor. Then he got up and demanded a singing contest. Only at that point did Bernie realize Randall had left his pants on the lawn.

“You don’t need pants to do the victory dance,” Randall sang.

The singing contest went ahead, marred only by Randall’s ironic love of bad music: boy bands, jazz, and TV themes. Finally things ground to a halt over a disagreement about how many na na nas were in one particular My Chemical Romance song. Randall vowed to prove he was right, but of course his phone was somewhere on the lawn. Stone’s and Bernie’s phones were also missing, fallen out, no doubt, during the wrestling match. They shuffled around the living room, the three of them, on hands and knees, while Stone made mooing noises. Just as Randall announced that he was going to be a cowboy, Stone came up with Bernie’s phone, covered in dust bunnies from deep beneath the couch.

He swiped it on. The first thing he must have seen—so often this would be the case—would have been the Twitter app, and the part of the Twitter app Bernie had left it on was his notifications There was a new notification, from a certain @barista_Ilyana, who had tagged Bernie with some extremely salacious requests, accompanied by a comparatively chaste photograph of a blonde woman in a one-piece bathing suit.

“Bro!” Stone sang out. “This tight Russian hottie is begging for a smash.”

Bernie was up in a shot, goggling over Stone’s shoulder. But Randall grabbed him and moved him aside. As Bernie struggled to see what they were talking about, Randall read, “‘Barista Ilyana.’ Oh, she wants your venti.”

“Let me see,” Bernie said.

“This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill,” said Stone.

Randall started stammering out something—apparently a joke about how he’d like to drill this barista—but he must have been too drunk, stoned, and tired; it came out unfunny and slightly incoherent. But in his moment of concentration on wordplay, he must have let down his guard enough to give Bernie a peek over the shoulder at the phone. Bernie began to scream.

“Give me that! Give me that!”

“Jesus, dude! Chill!”

“Give me that! Give me that!” Bernie punched Stone in the ear, and Stone dropped the phone. Bernie pounced on it. Spies were everywhere! The Russians were in on it! He scuttled on his knees and one hand to the bathroom, into which he locked himself. He could hear the other two laughing outside. He checked the phone. Indeed, the crude come-on was, he thought, transparently false; women like this did not come on to Bernie Feldstein; but he could dimly perceive that in another situation, on another night, he might have fallen for it. In a panic he deleted his Twitter account. Pressing confirm felt like pulling the trigger, the pistol between his eyes. He was breathing heavily.

When he opened the door, he saw that Stone did not appear to be hurt. Bernie was somewhat relieved, but also disappointed and embarrassed. He’d really slugged the boy! Stone should be down for the count.

“What the hell was that about?” Stone said.

“That’s my phone,” Bernie whined, after brief pause in which he failed to think up a lie.

“You got nudes?” Randall said.

“No.”

“Show me your dick so I know you’re not gay,” Randall said.

“No.”

And after a few extra minutes of awkwardness, they were the same, again, as they had been. Not necessarily people who liked each other, all of them, but nevertheless people who were still pretty blitzed.

“We have to have a dance contest,” Randall said.

But they didn’t have a dance contest. They ended the night, which is to say greeted the morning, lying on the floor listening to Randall explain that the death of any one individual had no meaning, because everyone an individual had touched or affected, a whole community, would live on.

“But what if that community died, too?” Stone wanted to know.

Well, opined Randall, that wouldn’t matter either, because the “nation state” (his term) would endure.

“But what if the whole country dies?” Stone asked.

Still no problem. Humanity would endure.

“And if everyone, all people, die?”

We have come to understand that all of history is just leading to the rise of mammals. Whales and tigers and the top of the food chain. Mammals would still endure.

“Sure, but what if mammals all become extinct?”

Okay, but life would still be there. The planet would still be teeming with life.

“But what if the Earth falls in into the sun? Kaboom and that’s it?”

It was no big deal. There was still the universe, wasn’t there? And what were you going to do about that?

“‘I don’t care if I die because there are rocks in space.’ Is that really your argument?”

But Bernie was lying with his feet on his mom’s old chair and his head in a pile of crumbs—had they eaten something?—how old were these crumbs?—thinking about the barista. “I want 2 gargle yr american balls” [sic]. He wasn’t going to fall for something like that.

He could feel himself getting smarter.

21.

Agatha Law, resident of Nassau County, was visiting her parents in Hobsons Falls, so Carol met up with her on a Sunday for old time’s sake. It had been over ten years since they’d seen each other in person, although of course the firehose of social media had made Carol already bored of Aggie’s career, her marriage, her adorable children, and her catchphrase: “There is only one law: Agatha Law!”

Nevertheless, Aggie didn’t want to talk about herself at all. Carol immediately felt guilty. She hadn’t even bothered to go look up the kids’ names, assuming they would have been thrown at her in minute one.

Instead, Aggie said: “Bitch, you have to tell me about this man of yours!”

Somehow, this was much worse than the career and the children. “I don’t know what to say,” Carol said.

“Come on, dish! What’s he like? What’s he do? How’s he…?” She somehow managed to convey, with the trailing off and the eyebrows, something far more vulgar and lascivious than if she’d just come out and asked about their sex life.

“Shouldn’t we talk about something else?” Carol asked. Added to her previous embarrassment was this, now: the implication that the last ten years of her life, her career and her loneliness and her desperate gambit in switching jobs was somehow less important than some two-month relationship.

But Aggie misinterpreted the reticence, and made a face that said: “Trouble in paradise?” So Carol had to jump in and speak before Aggie actually said: “Trouble in paradise?” which would have been unbearable.

She outlined, briefly, Colin’s career aptitude, his solicitousness for mother, his easygoing kindness. You couldn’t call him thoughtful, in the sense that he anticipated her needs, but he was always thinking. She tried, not very successfully, to explain his mysterious charisma, his unplumbable inner depth.

Aggie would have none of it, “Bitch, he’s having an affair.”

“I don’t think he can have an affair, technically. I mean, we’re just dating. We never even talked about…I mean, can you go steady over thirty? Is that a thing?”

“I mean that he has someone on the side.”

“Would he have time?” Carol asked.

“What, are you together every day?”

“Well, yes, at work. But we have dinner many days.”

“And you stay over?”

“No so much weeknights…”

“Uh huh,” said Aggie. She was wearing large round sunglasses, which was a ridiculous choice in the overcast perpetual gloom of the New York–Pennsylvania corridor, but at least she had them pushed up and riding on her forehead.

“He gets up early and goes biking.”

“‘Biking’? In March? Right,” said Aggie. “And where is he now?”

“He’s visiting his mother. She’s in a home in Salton.”

“Sure he is. Have you met this ‘mother’?” Before Carol could answer, Aggie went on:

“I’ve seen these ‘deep’ ones before. If he’s not cheating on you, then he’s gay. Oh, and then he’s also definitely cheating on you.”

“You’ve got him all wrong,” said Carol, and she meant it.

But the next morning she woke up early and couldn’t fall aback asleep. She decided to go pick up a bagel for breakfast and then, on a whim, she drove past Colin’s house, and then several times in circles around the environs of Colin’s house, until, as dawn cracked, she spotted him in a thick coat puffing along on a bicycle, a duffel bag swinging from his handlebars.

So he was bicycling—confirmed—but now Carol started to wonder if he was simply bicycling back from somewhere. From someone’s.

At work, when he came by for a kiss, she mentioned tentatively that she remembered him saying he biked in the morning, and she wondered if she could join him one morning.

“Oh. Sure. Of course.”

If he seemed surprised, he didn’t seem panicky.

“How about tomorrow morning?” she asked.

“Sounds great. You’ll have to bundle up. Want to pick up your bike after work and crash?”

“Crash?”

“Ha ha! That’s not what I meant! Crash as in spend the night.”

He was pleasant and natural about it. She had no idea, it turned out, how to get her bicycle in her car, so he came to her place. The bike trails he frequented, he said, which wound through the forested no man’s land to the north, were nearer her house anyway.

In the morning they went for a bike ride so cold she regretted every moment. It felt like her face was cracking in half. Everything was uphill. Was this the kind of person she’d become? Suspicious and jealous of phantoms?

And yet there in the back of her mind was the horrible thought. The one thing Colin had not brought along on this bike ride, the only actual suspicious thing, was that ratty old duffel she’d seen on his handlebars the previous morning. His overnight bag? A toothbrush and a change of clothes, just right for transporting by bicycle?

It was also so dark here under the trees, and even though Colin had leant her his bike light it was still weird to ride with so little visibility. She was in the worst mood but had to keep smiling, for terrible reasons she could neither admit not understand.

The pavement was narrow enough that they mostly rode single file, with Carol in front to set pace. But when she stopped for a breather he’d pull up beside her. At one rest, as they straddled their bikes, Colin pointed at a hiking trail that crossed the bike path.

“Sometimes I bike up here and just lock up against a tree and go hiking,” he said. “I bet it will be beautiful in the spring.”

“You hike here?” Carol asked, too tired to flesh out the question properly.

“Yeah. Not every time but pretty often.”

“Do you,” she husbanded her scarce breath for this one, “what? Just hike in your sneakers?”

“No, no. I bring hiking boots with me.”

“Hiking boots?”

“Sure. You, know I tote them along in a duffel bag. Then I just change right here on the trail. Are you all right?”

With relief and humiliation, and also increasingly with pain as ice-cold tears coursed down her bitter, freezing cheeks, Carol began to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Oh, Colin, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said with his hand on her upper arm—they could get no closer, could scarcely embrace on two bicycles. “Look, let’s ride back to your place. It’ll be all downhill from here.”

(Here ends book two. Book three (of five) starts here.)