“Oscar was not sure what to do with his time, so he tried looking to books for advice. He knew that patriotism, according to Emerson, was the last refuge of the scoundrel. He also knew that violence, according to Asimov, was the first refuge of the incompetent. Oscar took out his datebook and wrote ‘violence’ in the morning and ‘patriotism’ in the evening, and figured he’d wing the parts in between.”
My new book, Sudden Glory, drops today, and at a low low price of only 2.99¢ on (God help me) kindle. ($9.99 for a physical paperback.)
It’s a humorous, paranoid Pynchonian thriller about a prudish (“mild-mannered”) mathematician who brags about being an international man of mystery so assiduously that he is soon drafted into an assassination plot. Does the plot spiral into a 3000yo conspiracy involving Hittites and Rosicrucians? The magic eightball keeps waffling between “signs point to yes” and “read the book.”
If 2.99¢ is burdensome to you, or you just can’t bring yourself to use Amazon, hit me up; I’m good at sharing; all I’ll ask is that you please leave a review somewhere.
The first three chapters I have appended below to give you an idea of the tone and the setup, although any Hittites or Rosicrucians have not yet appeared. They’ll have their time…
• 1 • A few words of introduction • A beginning to all things • Unimportant details about background objects • Our hero, and the love interest • Bathroom time • Why does he have a gun anyway? •
Green churchmouse ire box.
But that’s hardly important now. What’s important is that a Saturday dinner at the future in-laws’ was wrapping up, and Oscar Cox sat there in the dinette with his napkin on his lap, his messenger bag uncharacteristically slung across the back of his chair. Inside the bag, well-swaddled in tissue paper and a supermarket circular, was the gun the Union had given him. Oscar tried to act nonchalant.
The Kuntis’ house was in Jersey City, up in the Heights. They’d lived there for nearly thirty years—Oscar’s fiance had grown up in this little Cape, and everywhere its floors were piled with the detritus of his childhood: the violin case (empty), the ham radio set, the half-completed Lego spaceships. It was all mixed up with the only slightly more faded detritus from V.K.’s older brother and sister, their own ephemeral and forgotten childhood obsessions. And all around, on every pile, were the parents’ books: How to Kill the Klutterbug; Simplifying 101; Regression Modeling in Actuarial Contexts; 1969 Dodge Jeep Wagoneer Owner’s Manual; Cure the Clutter and Free Your X, where the value of X was concealed by the drooping remains of somebody’s 1980s-era science fair project. Those were the titles Oscar could read at the moment, and he was reading them with a wellspring of feigned interest, because every time his mind wandered he found himself clutching his messenger bag.
“Are you okay? What’s in the bag? Etc.,” everyone asked. And Oscar would let the bag swing away, and say something pleasant and charming about the dinner that concealed the fact that he had forgotten the name of every dish, as well as every ingredient of every dish except for rice.
He could feel the bag pendulum on the back of his chair and he dreaded the moment, inevitable, when Mrs. Kunti would say, “Let me take that for you, hang it up in the closet.” Oscar knew the closet was too full of old vinyl and boxes of (perhaps) baby socks to hang a bag in, but it had hooks on the door, so he understood the metonymy of what she meant. What she would mean, that is, were she to say it.
“Look at that thing that is not my bag,” Oscar said, only in a more roundabout way. An old, crumbling snap-together model of a Japanese robot atop the cupboard, for example. What was up with that?
“Our boy was always really into that enema stuff,” Mr. Kunti explained with the cockiness of an immigrant who was also a native English speaker.
“It’s pronounced anime,” V.K. said without rancor but immediately, and there was another conversational dead end. The visit could not go on much longer, and yet Oscar was running out of tricks, if by tricks we mean ways of not drawing attention to a messenger bag.
“Have you read any good books?” he asked the beaming adults, knowing they had not. “Have you watched any prestige television dramas?” Everyone had already expressed sympathy that Oscar’s graduate studies were still delayed by a labor dispute; everyone had already gotten maximum mileage out of complimenting Mrs. Kunti’s new haircut.
And then, indeed, there was a miracle in the after-dinner silence. Oscar’s fiance, V.K. himself, was getting up to go to the bathroom. The half bath with the salmon tile that sat right next to the kitchen.
Oscar knew, and of course everyone knew, what would happen next, the long moment of indecision as V.K. paused in the doorway, his hand already on the inside knob, the door already half shut. Would he shut it the rest of the way?
This was a small drama, but at the very least it was not Oscar Cox’s drama. He relaxed his death grip on the messenger bag and watched V.K. stand there. The parents (who must have witnessed this drama more times than Oscar even) watched, too; you couldn’t take your eyes away. The door swung three-quarters shut and then hovered, trembling and uncertain. Oh, V.K.! Leaving the door open, with two and an almost family members in plain sight at the dinette table would clearly be inexcusable. But closing it all the way, with a terrible click—was this, too, rude? Would he be slamming the door in the face of his loved ones?
Oscar had no problem answering that question, and he would have just shut the damn door, but V.K. would not. But he also would not not shut the door—he would not decide that three inches, for example, was the perfect compromise that balanced privacy with companionability. Instead he inched the door back and forth, searching, as he did each time, for the proper ratio.
He erred, unfortunately, on the side of companionability, and so every tinkle and blat, as Oscar sat there with his hands folded, not making eye contact, drifted across the silent, flush-faced table. What were his parents thinking? They used to change his diaper after all; were they not even embarrassed? Three pairs of eyes lingered on the multiple strata of ancient, yellowing paint-with-water papers magneted long ago onto, and never removed from, an invisible refrigerator, its silhouette only implied under the innumerable pages. How strong were those magnets? At least everyone knew the good fellow washed his hands.
And after that, the evening was over, and all was ready for the long drive home. Hugs all around. Thanks and come agains.
“It’s really happening, though?” said Mr. Kunti, his eyes dewy with pride. “In one week?”
“As René Magritte said at the construction site,” V.K. answered, “this is not a drill.”
Needless to say, Mr. and Mrs. Kunti had no idea what their son was talking about. So Oscar quickly dropped some delightful pleasantries that made them love him, that made them forgive their son for getting entangled with someone who 1. was a. white and b. male and c. technically unemployed, in a way; 2. did not love them back; 3. did not even love their son; 4. etc.
The two soi-disant lovebirds headed out into the warm evening and the car, and Mrs. Kunti burst through the front door just as they were pulling away. “Oscar! You forgot your bag!”
The year was 2003, and we were all a lot younger then, and foolisher. Jersey City was crappier. New York City was cheaper and even more cautious than today. V.K. drove—it was his car, and it was his trip as they were his parents—the long way through the tunnel and crosstown congestion and bridge to Queens. He wasn’t there yet, though. He was still in Jersey City, on the great slope down to the Hudson, sitting at a four-way stop sign. First one car, then—its headlights a distant will-o’-the-wisp growing closer and larger—another he waved through. Oscar sat patiently, and waited for V.K.’s car to move again, and waited for V.K.
That wasn’t his real name, of course, or even his real initials. No one’s name is their real name here. All names have been changed to protect the innocent. Therefore, all names have been changed except Oscar Cox’s.
• 2 • Some more about our hero • Getting to know you • A series of bad decisions that sounded okay at the time • The veriest varlet • Straighter days • First appearance, old flame • “If it were only the other way!” • The waiting game • Putting the pan in panurge •
What a remarkable man is Oscar Cox! What a bulwark, what a pillar! Everything about him is a fake, but it would not do to hate him too soon. He really is rather charming, despite it all.
Lord Macaulay said (of Horace Walpole): “His affectation is so habitual and so universal that it can hardly be called affectation. The affectation is the essence of the man. It pervades all his thoughts and all his expressions. If it were taken away, nothing would be left.” But Horace Walpole, to be fair, could not have started out this way. He did not start out affected. How many corridors of shame must he have wandered down, confused, before—if Horace Walpole was anything like Oscar Cox—he hit upon affectation.
If you could have seen Oscar in his heyday—seven, say, years before, ca. 1996—what a bounding Rabelaisian hailfellowwellmet you would have seen! He’d kick down the door of a frat house ten minutes before the party ended, reel across the room while drunks nodded appreciatively at how much drunker he was than they. “Let me tell you—” he would roar, followed by a filthy and only semipossible story of some sexual exploit that had made him late; or possibly of some other party he had come from, at a larger university nearby, one much louder and wilder and freer; but don’t feel bad—Oscar had brought a little of that wildness and that freedom, a little of that noise along with him, and here—you could just sip it vicariously from his outstretched palm. This, too was fake, the “other party” and the “triple-jointed coed” and even the drunkenness. Oscar preferred to restrict himself to 0–1.5 beers in any given 24-hour period, so that he could more convincingly ape a shambling, self-destructive trainwreck of a lad. If he got too drunk, he might accidentally do something responsible, or his loose tongue might accidentally let slip words that were about anything other than the endless bacchanal that was his ostensible life.
It’s safe to say that only the dimmest and drunkest fratboys believed all of Oscar’s yarns, but people tend to subscribe to a smoke/fire theory, and pretty much everyone acknowledged that Oscar was doing something, or someone, at three in the morning. The correct answer was problem sets, but they did not get the correct answer. His last-minute arrivals, his overblown, filthy tales, his careful intimations that he might have a secret double life of crime, had all made Oscar a byword on the campus of A—t College, and to some extent the nearby campi of nearby schools. Had he been seen sneaking out of the dorms of St. Ethel’s, the exclusive girls’ prep school? Did an exclusive girls’ prep school named St. Ethel’s even exist? Oh, that Oscar Cox!
He had had a real life, once upon a time. He was a human. He had parents (divorced and remarried). He even had a wicked stepmother, but she was from New England, so it was okay. He has siblings, assorted. Probably someday they should all meet his fiance, but they tended to live all the way in Edgewater, N.J., so it wouldn’t be happening soon.
He had had a different fiance, once upon a time, a double-e, acute fiancée, Vera Rodriguez—currently a marine biologist somewhere in some abyssal sea, back then a fellow A—t student and convenient beard (of sorts). When kicking down too many frat house doors at three AM had grown tiring, when the various webs of lies he’d spun had grown too tangled to juggle without accidentally mixing the metaphors, Oscar had very ostentatiously entered into a monogamous relationship. Vera. How difficult (he lamented, after atavistically kicking down a door) to remain faithful, and yet he must! he must! Here he wiped the sweat from his brow, for anything was easier than conjuring up another acrobatic stewardess double-team in the bathroom of a Greyhound bus.
Why would airline stewardesses be traveling by Gr—
Quiet, please! Oscar was up all night, when not kicking down doors, reading all he could about sea life, to impress his new girlfriend. But a monogamous relationship posed its own challenges, and Oscar now had to spend his days thinking of reasons not to have sex with Vera. He persuaded her, in direct contravention of all possible evidence that he had ever scattered behind his guilty footsteps, that he wished to wait until marriage. Vera accepted this, but somehow she also accepted it as a proposal. They were engaged for nearly two years, and had even moved to New York together, where they would be attending different but close-enough graduate schools, when Oscar, in some paroxysm of desperation, came out of the closet in order to wriggle free of the arrangement. The breach of promise, but with reasons; these, too, would be fake.
The idea that being a gay man would help you not have sex sounds, in retrospect, so absurd that it demands some defense. It’s just that if Oscar’s idea of heterosexual behavior had been based mostly on Larry from Three’s Company and Falstaff, his idea of homosexual behavior had come primarily from reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it is a bald statement of fact that a close reader could get the impression from Dorian Gray that the basest depths of gay depravity are collecting Japanese curios and researching the Italian renaissance.
Nevertheless, Oscar tried. He started kicking down the doors of gay bars five minutes before closing and announcing how many fictional dicks he’d been smoking, but no one found it charming or even odd, so he went back to straight bars, kicked down the doors and milked some glory out of being the token homosexual, who was also an alcoholic and possibly a second-story man, possibly a drug dealer—something shifty about that wonderful Oscar Cox! When this proved tiring, Oscar went monogamous again, and that was V.K. Kunti; fellow New Jersey native, fellow N— Y— University graduate student. With V.K., Oscar insisted that sex would be more special if they waited until they were married, which he thought was particularly cunning because, although once again the scheme ended up with him engaged, two men could scarcely get married in New York in 2003. The burgeoning danger that Massachusetts might sooner or later acknowledge gay marriage, which could perhaps lead a weary fiance to suggest a road trip to nuptials, had a worried Oscar Cox laying the groundwork for the idea that it would be cold-hearted to get married while their brothers in other states (perhaps other countries? Saudi Arabia?) languished in discriminatory celibacy.
W.B. Yeats once admitted that the cult leader Madame Blavatsky was a fraud; “But what is a women of genius,” asked Yeats, “to do in the nineteenth century?” Well, what is a man of genius to do? Not that Oscar Cox was a genius, necessarily. He was just really good at math. But what was he to do, regardless? Admit he didn’t want to have sex with anyone? Perhaps he could have done that once, had he had more courage, but after a decade of crowing over his outsize libido…it was an awful lot of crow to eat.
And here he was now. Still juggling webs. Four years into a Ph.D. he had not worked on for the last eighteen months. Trapped, as all of us are, by vast impersonal forces we cannot control. His only character flaw, other than an occasional affected tendency to refer to himself in the third person, was the fact that he did not love his fiance. Also, admittedly, he was somewhat dishonest; for example when he said, which he often did to his fiance, “I love you.”Or when he said almost anything else about himself.
I hope all possible questions have been answered about Oscar Cox.
Wait a minute! Why does he have a gun in his bag?
What’s he supposed to do, leave it under his bed for some toddler to find?
No, I mean, what kind of idiot would give this guy a gun?
Oh. The short answer is a sweaty little man named Mr. Pizzoli. But the longer answer, as is its wont, is longer.
• 3 • A descent to the underworld • Before the law • Feigned competence • The marshmallow exam • We are supposed to be learning how he got the gun, after all • Smoke-free building • Details on the apportionment of departmental funds • A cowardly exit •
It was the end of July, and the days were getting shorter. The days were long, but they were less long than they had been a month ago, and they were less long each day. Every year starts out, like a life, with promise, with the incremental lengthening of the day, until halfway through it pivots on its summit and begins a long slow slide to night. In its solstitial moment of triumph, day begins to lose, and the story of summer is the story of its loss.
“Days are getting longer,” the summer people say to each other, a wicked lie, a denial of the memento mori that tells you don’t get too comfortable leaving for work with the sun overhead; everything will come around to darkness soon.
Oscar didn’t leave for work, of course. But that Saturday morning, the morning of the day of the dinner, he had left regardless, having been summoned, to see the Union rep. The Union rep was Mr. Pizzoli. This is the origin of the gun.
But you don’t just stroll into a Union rep’s office and have the power to kill handed to you. First you have to find it, the office, and since it was in a subbasement halfway between the Psych Building and the Nursing Studies Building, this was not going to be easy.
It made no sense as well. At N— Y— University, the T.A.s at the math department (and the geology department) had a different union than the T.A.s of the other departments, and so Mr. Pizzoli, math and geology union rep, represented none of the T.A.s, psych or nursing, whose buildings straddled him. The Math Building (there was no Geo Building) was all the way on the other side of Washington Square.
This—the misplaced office, that is—was hardly unusual, as N— Y— University’s so-called campus was a sprawling series of unconnected structures and parts of structures, and it was frequently the case that a math professor, for example, would have his office in the Anthropology Building (which, despite its name, was primarily used for storage and catering) or in a private apartment building or in a warehouse in Brooklyn. The whole thing was a big mess. Even the fetid underground tunnels Oscar was wandering through had never been intended for academic use, but were simply the remains of failed silver mines dug by convicts in colonial days. The ancient graffiti still sported the long ſ, like an integral sign. “Maſter Francis Lovelace, his mother hath a round heel” read one of the few examples not in Dutch.
“Am I even supposed to be in here?” Oscar asked himself, as he pushed through a side door marked nooduitgang. And he was not. A woman with a clipboard made that perfectly clear. The sign on her door identified her as Erica Jones, psych. dept., although the general dampness of the air had mildewed into oblivion the first three letters of her name, which caused some confusion. Oscar explained that he was looking for Mr. Pizzoli, and Erica sighed a long theatrical sigh. Her hair, like everyone’s, was of a nondescript color, and her eyebrows, while not technically meeting in the middle, were certainly conspiring to meet in the middle. They had dinner plans in the middle, and dinner was coming soon. She was a graduate student, too, and had her own pit to dig for herself, which left little time for Oscar Cox’s.
“Pizzoli is right down that hall,” she pointed with her chin, “but I’m supposed to check with him before I let anyone through.” And that would have to wait, as she had double-booked experiments all day, and (the crazed look in her eyes explained, if she did not) everything would take five times longer than it should and Oscar would never get to see Mr. Pizzoli, and so he would never get home, which was terrible because (you may recall) he was supposed to have dinner at his in-laws in Jersey that night. Clearly she had halted half a dozen applicants and supplicants already today. Clearly nobody saw Mr. Pizzoli.
But this is what Oscar Cox was good at. He was good at looking like he knew what he was doing, a mask that remained ever-fresh, for he had never spoiled it or worn it out by actually knowing what he was doing. “Perhaps you need an assistant,” he said. Departmental funding! Grants don’t cover! But Oscar waved away the objections. He was, after all, a grad student himself and a T.A., albeit one on strike. He was not allowed to do math, of course, like a dirty scab! but surely there were no rules against his helping out the psych department. He could administer a few electric shocks to a few test subjects, and we could all be on our way. Had he not taken Psych 101 eight years ago at A—t College? Had he not once read a book by Nietzsche subtitled Documents of a Psychologist (1889)?
The wheedling probably (as it tends to) took more time than just checking with Mr. Pizzoli would have, even in a hypothetical subterranean world without phones. But finally it was worked out that Erica Jones would go and look in on Pizzoli, while Oscar held a clipboard and prepared to supervise yet another data point in some replication attempt of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment.
In case you did not take Psych 101 eight years ago, let us pause to outline what this Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (so-called: We are not in Stanford, remember, and are even some forty miles from Stamford) meant. A child, in this case (subjects are anonymous, but we’ll call her) Little Janie, is offered one marshmallow now, with the promise of two marshmallows if she should wait fifteen minutes. A simple test in delayed gratification. Oscar and his clipboard entered a side room.
Of course, Little Janie and her red-faced white-knuckled mother had already been waiting fifteen minutes, or more. The mother had practically gnawed the edge off a tin no-smoking sign. “Let’s go, little girl,” Oscar said, brightly. He brandished his clipboard so the world would know he was a responsible scientist and not a pervert. As the mother, red-faced and white-knuckled, applied a nicotine patch directly to her soft palate, Oscar clicked the door shut behind him.
Another side room. “Now, little girl,” our hero said. They were sitting in tiny chairs that were not comically undersized for one of them. Between their knees was a tiny table. Also between Oscar’s knees were his ears. Little Janey’s nose was running, the stream forking around her mouth to reconflux on her chin, flow upside down to her neck, and disappear behind the collar of a shirt depicting cartoon characters made of cheese. “Here,” removing it from his pocket and setting it down, “is a delicious marshmallow. You can eat it now, if you wish. But if you can sit here for fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow, you can have two delicious marshmallows…”
Little Janie never broke eye contact as she said, “Grown-ups lie,” and stuffed the marshmallow in her mouth.
“I honestly thought this would take more time,” Oscar said as he clicked the stopwatch. But he stood up, knees clicking, and opened the door, where the mother was chewing on something, making it difficult for her to talk.
She nevertheless immediately mumbled, “Where’s my twenty bucks?”
“Dr. Jones will be right back with your emolument,” offered Oscar, hoping that Erica Jones—not actually a doctor, but who is, nowadays?—wasn’t planning on waiting fifteen marshmallow minutes: perhaps a bathroom break, perhaps (he now saw what Janie Sr. was chewing on; she had not even removed the filter) a cigarette break.
“I want my twenty bucks, jackass.”
“I’ll go get it,” said Oscar with smooth assurance. He stepped back into the corridor, and saw Erica Jones coming along it.
“Okay, Pizzoli will see you. Hand over the clipboard and the marshmallow.”
“She ate the marshmallow,” Oscar said. “In [here he checked the stopwatch] one second.”
Erica’s pan darkened. “What? You let her eat the marshmallow? What am I supposed to do now? We’re not budgeted for using a new marshmallow every time.” She was shouting.
“But what do you do if the kid wants to eat—”
“We knock it out of its hands. I can’t believe you let her eat the marshmallow!”
“Can’t you just use the second marshmallow as the first?”
“You idiot! There is no second marshmallow!”
Just then the door opened. “I want my twenty dollars,” said the mother.
“They’re still here? You’re supposed to get them out of the building—”
“I’m not going anywhere without my twenty dollars.”
A hissing whisper: “—before they realize we’re not budgeted to pay anyone twenty dollars.”
The mother made a grab for Erica, and Oscar stepped away. He knew now which corridor Mr. Pizzoli was down. He backed up a few feet and gingerly set the stopwatch and clipboard down on the floor before he turned and—not ran, exactly, but hastened away. Erica’s “Come back here” was strangled, possibly literally, in her throat. “Come baggggghhhggher.” Oscar did not. The buzzing and flickering light fixtures gave way to pitch blackness which gave way to a painful encounter with a door, which led to another corridor, which forked, one branch leading down to an impenetrable veil of shimmering argent concealing a void—Better not go down there, thought Oscar Cox, immediately forgetting what he’d seen—the other terminating in a door with a sign: Anthony Pizzoli. It was already half open.
(Like, to be continued, eh?)