(Start from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: The Dark Soul)

She held Clark’s hand. Not with the dutiful cadences of a dying relationship on autopilot, but with a faith emerging from an unknown recess. A hope hard to pinpoint. An instinct she couldn’t explain.

She actually wanted to salvage this, whatever this was. And it was something.

He wiped the corners of his small mouth with the damp washcloth. His breath still pushed the malodorous zephyr of half-regurgitated blueberry-bannana mush into the intimate air between them. He was still there. Just as he always had been. Just as he had picked her out of the chair and helped her when she needed to relieve herself. Just as he cooked for her and made her believe that she still had a life even when she could not walk. And all this atoned for the stink veering into the space they shared.

And that was new for Sophie. Very, very new. The big draw that she had hoped to strike with Paul, but it had been she who had stayed, not him.

Clark had stayed. Even after she confessed to him about her previous kinky life. Even after she had shown her the video of long dead Paul being forced at gunpoint to perform fellatio on that child — that poor, poor child. And how many men would stay after seeing that? Knowing that this was the kind of creep that she had actually chosen to marry and somehow summoned the nerve to stick with.

“He wanted to go public,” said Sophie. “It started off as a way to woo new readers. Because he really wanted a bigger audience. And people in that circle knew people in power.”

“When did you know?”

“Three months before he died.”

“And you still carried on with your…”

“Subs. With my subs, yes.”

“And you…you bruised them?”

“Flogged them. Impact play. Much different from anything Paul was involved in.”

“But that’s…that’s…”

“More common than you know, Clark. These men all wanted me to hurt them. And that was the difference between Paul and me. I never did anything that they didn’t want me to do. We were very careful with consent, Clark. It’s the cornerstone of that type of life. But Paul? His sick world? He got used to it.”

She remembered that night when she had found the videos on Paul’s phone when he was in the shower. The two of them screamed at each other with more bitter ferocity than Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had managed in the entirety of their famously fractious relationship. Several glasses — many of them wedding gifts from twelve years before — were hurled against the wall. She’d almost walked out and moved back in with her mother. The man she had married was a monster.

But then she saw the remorse in his eyes. Not enough for her to forgive him, but enough for her to see that he had nobody else to turn to. If she didn’t listen to him that night, then he wouldn’t find the right way out. And while she hated the fact that he needed to rely on her and that he had gone much further than anything she could ever imagined, she knew that sticking it out — he still carrying on his fixation on Ezmerelda Gibbons, she still carrying on with her revolving door of malleable beef — was the only way to save those kids and to expose the villainous media-industry complex that had kept this evil trafficking operation going. They called the FBI the next morning. A temporary immunity agreement was granted, though it was not a piece of paper that would exculpate Van Kleason from criminal charges. It was simply a stopgap. Three months later, Paul was dead.

“Who was involved?” asked Clark.

“Three Academy Award winners. Four Pulitzer winners. Two MacArthur Fellows. At least one former President. And that’s only a small sample, Clark. Really, you don’t want to know. There’s a strong chance that you’ve been a huge fan of at least one of these cultural figures. These people were bad, Clark. Very bad. They had no problem looking the other way while Benjamen Stroller…”

“Wait a minute. Benjamen Stroller? The podcaster?”

“How do you know Ben? You’ve never believed in conspiracy theories.”

“I listened to his shows on the drive into work. When you work for city government, it’s useful to study the fringe element. To unpack the lunatic mind. They show up to the office more frequently than you might expect. And if you know how they think, you can usually find a way to defuse them.”

“That’s very, very…”

“Strategic of me? Yes. But you know I don’t like conflict.”

“Then why are you still here?” she said.

He paused, temporarily releasing his hand from hers. His eyes misted up.

“What? Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’re not put off by everything I’ve just told you?”

“Were you involved in the sex ring?”

“No. But I had my own little thing going on.”

“Yes, but you did nothing illegal.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“You think I didn’t go through an exploration phase.”

She laughed. “What? You?”

“Yeah. In my thirties. After my divorce. I was a hopeless slut, Sophie. I was what the kids now call a fuccboi. Tinder was new and I was lonely. And suddenly the very faults that Jill had condemned me for were pluses. I slept with dozens of women. I didn’t know I had it in me.”

“You?”

“Me.”

She found it hard to believe. He had never been especially adventurous in the sack. Missionary, an occasional 69, that was about it. He had never picked her up and fucked her in the kitchen. Even when she asked him to after the accident. He felt that anything that transformed her into a fetish was too gauche. But that was the strangest thing. After years of tinkering with men and being a fearsome top, she felt that it was her turn to play bottom. And she didn’t know how to tell him this. He had never asked to bind her in restraints or to be tied up. He had remained relatively incurious and he frequently disparaged the couples copulating in public places.

“If you had this in you, why didn’t you try any of this with me?”

“Because I wanted to be…”

“Normal?”

“Yeah.”

“None of us are normal, Clark. Deep down, we’re all fucked up inside.”

“But not as fucked up as Benjamen Stroller. Where did he get the money to finance this operation?”

“He worked for WNYC and his career went nowhere. Few people listened to his show. Then he met up with some Dutch people with money and he struck out on his own. As a podcaster. With the Dutch money behind him. And he realized that he was likely to gain more listeners if he courted the disinformation demographic. He wanted to be an edgier and angrier Art Bell.”

“Oh, he is.”

“And he needed big names as guests. So he started to blackmail prestigious names with Bill Flogaast.”

“Who’s Bill Flogaast?”

“He was a huge publicist at the house that published Paul’s books. Connections to the underworld. Paul called him the ‘Cleanup Man.’ He took many midlist authors under his wing.”

“Midlist authors?”

“Authors who sold well enough to keep in-house, but not well enough to hit the New York Times bestseller list. And he would turn them into overnight successes. Near the end of his run, he was handling all the literary Daves.”

“Literary Daves?”

“There are a lot of literary writers named Dave. Don’t ask me why that is. Maybe Davids are more inclined to write. Anyway, he steered them onto Stroller, whose blackmail operation was turning into a bonanza.”

“But why would Stroller and Flogaast single out authors?”

“Because social media tends to overlook their bad behavior. Do you know that author Zen Tang?”

“Didn’t he make a viral video years ago in which he said ‘the next morning we ate spinach’ over and over again?”

“That’s the guy. Well, Tang raped his partner and even stole her story for his bestselling novel, Stephen Dixon. And the literary people simply pretended that none of that ever happened. And he’s still very popular. Bill and Benjamen realized that, because most book people were incredibly gullible, the midlisters could be used as recruiters for the sex trafficking ring.”

“Jesus. And nobody looked into this?”

“Nobody reads anymore, Clark.”

“I do.”

“I mean, most regular people. Authors can be monsters, but literary people — who are, for the most part, incredibly sheltered and introverted — somehow overlook this. They believe in staying relentlessly cheery and positive. I mean, there was one guy, a website editor named Isiah Gatsby who was heavily involved with this creep in Los Angeles named Jason Prufrock, who established a ‘No haters’ policy that quickly spread to every outlet still reviewing books. Sure, there was the Shitty Media Men list, but none of those men ever got canceled. Most of them still have careers.”

“You’re going to have to slow down. I don’t know any of these people.”

“Sorry. An old habit. Paul was incredibly obsessed by all these names. One of the reasons I don’t read much anymore is because I know what a lot of these authors have done. And I just can’t stomach it.”

“So why is Senator Rollins so important?”

“I don’t know. Bill Flogaast usually kept away from politics. But after Paul died, Bill left the business. Something to do with an executive editor named Gingrich Moore, who I was regrettably friendly with.”

“How friendly?”

“She handled an author named Butch Wheel, who was also her boytoy.”

“Do you mean Gingrich was fucking Wheel?”

“Yes. And Paul attended some book party and got drunk and spilled something about my kinky life to her. And Gingrich swooped in and wanted me to coach her.”

“You couldn’t say no?”

“She had something on Paul, something that she wouldn’t elaborate on. Much of which I’ve already told you. And you have to understand something about Ginny Moore. She’s not someone you can easily say no to. Plus, Paul was thinking about jumping to another house and Ginny suggested that, if I helped her, she could help Paul. So sometimes she would be at the Atlantis with me. She seemed to have a natural instinct for beating the shit out of men.”

“Was Ginny involved in the sex trafficking?”

“No. But I’m pretty sure she knew about it.”

“How much of an open secret was it?”

“That I don’t know.”

There was a knock at the front door.

“I’ll get that,” said Clark.

Clark opened the door. It was Debbie Ballard. She was holding a large paper shopping bag.

Sophie rolled her chair over to the doorway.

“Debbie? What are you doing here?”

“I didn’t know who else to go to.”

“Well,” snapped Sophie. “We’re a little busy. And we’re no longer friends.”

“Sophie, please. Give me ten minutes. I’m in a pickle and I can’t even tell Gabrielle about this.”

“Sophie,” said Clark, “we’re a little busy right now.”

Debbie took a book from her bag. It was the Ali Breslin volume.

“How did you get a copy of that?” cried Sophie. “I thought there was an embargo.”

“I have my sources. But I’ve read the whole thing. You’re going to want to listen very carefully to what I have to say.”

(Next: The White Savior Problem)

(Word count: 38,907/50,000)

(Start from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previous: The Scandal of Unfettered Speech)

David Leich nailed the third mouse that he had caught that morning to the bookcase in the foyer. The blood of these increasingly stinky rodent corpses spilled onto a flattened and slightly yellowed newspaper clipping from years ago — one of many copies he bought on the day Mike Harvest had savaged his third novel, Wake Up Little Sassoon. Harvest had ridiculed Leich’s long passages describing Siegfried Sasson’s nose, which had come from Leich’s keen interest in rhinology. Goddammit, they had never complained before! He was the nose guy. And it was one of the reasons why his work had resonated with the people who handed out the literary awards. But Harvest resented the fact that Leich had concentrated on the least interesting part of that World War I hero’s life: namely, his privileged boyhood and a thirty-page chapter in which young Siegfried carried on a dialogue with a horse about whether or not eating lots of carrots signaled that you were a closeted vegetarian.

So Leich had bought as many copies of the newspaper he could, particularly in his neighborhood. The last thing he wanted was for people in his neighborhood to slag him off, although he was often so unbearable that New Yorkers didn’t need to know that he was an author to tell him to fuck off. Leich was part of the last analog generation: someone old enough to remember the smell of mimeograph, that halcyon age in which you could walk down the street without bumping into some twentysomething staring down at her phone. As such, he had failed to anticipate that Harvest’s hatchet job was also online and that there was a great zeal to share it.

Leich knew that Harvest was a cowardly man who avoided authors he had trashed in print, which sadly precluded Leich from running into Harvest at a book party and socking him in the face. So he tried to take him out through his connections. Flogaast had said that he hated Harvest too, but that he was too big to take out. “Wait it out,” said Flogaast. And so he did. And that’s when the Jakester thing came up, which Leich believed that Flogaast had a bit of a hand in. And while Leich had popped open the champagne upon learning that Harvest had been shitcanned from his long-held perch, the sting of Harvest’s words still resonated years later. He was an artist, dammit!

Leich laughed as the drops of blood stained Harvest’s printed words from 2002.

“How do you like that, you little fuck?” he shouted at the newspaper, failing to understand in his derangement that newspapers were not sentient and did not talk back. In fact, the printed word was more futile than cats and dogs, who tolerated human monologues only because they were angling for treats. The domesticated animals knew — as so did many of the furry bodega mascots and the savvy street cats — that simply letting these very tall and strange creatures who fed and groomed them ramble in incomprehensible gibberish was an easy way to survive. All they had to do was wag their tails or meow from time to time, sometimes performing tricks as they held up thin rectangular objects, and these highly gullible ape-descended marks would give them anything they wanted.

The rodents that scampered through Leich’s apartment, however, were not so lucky. Sure, in highly contained and sterile environments, they could be cute. But they were much smaller, moved too fast, and carried disease. Thus, they become emboldened and fearless and feasted on the large heaps of trash bags regularly left on the streets that afforded them a veritable buffet. The humans were dirty and careless and often dropped wrappers and half-eaten sandwiches onto the street. And they had the nerve to bait them with peanut butter?

It was a pity that the rats couldn’t let their sons and daughters know about David Leich, who, with his multifarious traps, was one of the most dangerous of these giant executioners. Even when they squeaked to each other in hypersonic frequencies beyond the spectrum of the human ear, they still couldn’t telegraph to each other just how diabolical certain people were. You were minding your own business, innocently following a trail in the wall that had been scraped out over the course of several centuries by your grandfathers and your great great grandfathers, and then you felt this painful blade at the back of your skull from one of those enormous quadrangles that was offering you a free meal.

The foyer bookcase had contained the books of David Leich’s enemies, which he read over and over when he was feeling particularly masochistic. He wished that the books, simply by being close to the rodent corpses, could somehow open a telepathic link to the authors who wrote them, so they could see the full horrorshow of how we was handling the pestilence in his apartment right now. They’d be frightened out of their minds! He had considered burning the books, but realized that the Nazis had done this. And for all of his sociopathic faults, for all the qualities that gave so many people people several reasons to punch him in the face, David Leich was not a Nazi.

There was a scree from his phone, echoed by the high-pitched alerts from all other phones in adjacent apartments and the streets below. An Amber Alert perhaps?

He picked up the phone and read the text:

EMERGENCY! Riots have broken out in Midtown Manhattan. All subway lines have been shut down. The area between 34th Street and 59th Street has been closed off. The rioters are armed. NYC residents are urged to shelter in place. Remain in your residence. Residents in all five boroughs will be arrested if they are found walking outside.

Leich yawned.

The world had threatened to destroy itself so many times, but he was still quite alive. And living in a high-target city where he would be vaporized immediately if the Russians fired nukes. Which would be a better fate than slowly dying of starvation and radiation poisoning. If millions had to die, it was far more pragmatic to get your inevitable death out of the way rather than sob in a countryside dacha.

There was a buzz from down below.

Shit. Budruck. That insignificant little peon who had phoned him an hour before. Why had he said yes when he was so busy building a mouse mortuary?

“Give me five minutes and I’ll buzz you in,” he barked into the speaker.

“Come on! Let me in! It’s a war zone out here.”

“You can tough it out for five minutes.”

He got the mop bucket from the kitchen and did his best to pull out the nails with the back of his hammer. Two of the three mouse corpses plopped into the pail. The other one was more stubborn.

Budruck buzzed again.

“That contemptuous little man,” said Leich.

He grabbed the set of shears that he used for the private garden that he had a key to. His Angllophilia had turned him into a gardener. He actually enjoyed pruning the hedges, per his deal with the building. Then he snipped the tail.

He opened the window — the one at the back of the building that Budruck would not see — and tossed out the 2.98 rat corpses, watching them tumble down four stories. He heard the scream of some hapless pedestrian down below and then shut the window. He grabbed a comforter and nailed this over the foyer bookcase to disguise the tail. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of a stink anymore.

Then he buzzed Budruck in.

He undid the three deadbolts and opened the door, being careful to stand with his back to the bookcase so that Budruck would not notice. But Budruck was in his own head, frantically waving his hands and talking a mile a minute. He rushed past Leich and headed straight to the settee in the living room.

“…and these fuckers bumped me! Me! The guy who had all the real dirt on Van Kleason!”

Leich locked the three deadbolts.

“You know, you never told me.”

“Told you what?”

“What dirt you had?”

“The Van Kleason death was a coverup!”

“Oh? I thought he died from a broken heart.”

“That’s not what someone who works at the Myrtle Beach coroner’s office told me. Apparently, the autopsy report was forged! Someone paid a lot of money to cover it up.”

Leich cleared his throat.

“And who do you think that might be?”

“I have reason to believe that Paul Van Kleason was murdered. Much like Epstein’s mysterious death in jail. Ali Breslin, that bitch, has already pointed to Van Kleason’s involvement with a sex trafficking operation.”

There was gunfire outside.

“Herbert, have you taken a look at the world outside? I think there we have bigger problems.”

“Oh, fuck civil unrest. It’s going to die down! It always does. This story has real legs! And I was meant to tell it.”

Budruck’s brown eyes fidgeted like two the two last beer nuts you find at the bottom of a dingy bowl at a dive. Nobody ever takes those last two nuts.

“Won’t the public grow bored?” said Leich. “They’re more interested in Ezmerelda Gibbons. If Paul Van Kleason was murdered, maybe she did it?”

“She’s not the type.”

“Why not?”

“She just isn’t, okay? And besides I talked with her former neighbor, who confirmed that she was blasting Doughbelly Stray at the estimated time of death! In fact, her neighbor has video with a time-stamp. Some long-standing beef over the noise she made that she was going to submit to the property manager, but never did.”

“Well, maybe Ezmeredlda hired someone to kill Van Kleason.”

“Why would she do that? He paid her generously for her private services. She had a good thing going on. You don’t kill the guy who’s serving up the gravy train.”

“Well, who do you think did it?”

“I believe this is connected to certain publicists in the publishing industry. Do you know Bill Flogaast?”

Leich began to sweat. While Budruck was looking out the window, he reached for the hammer and concealed it behind his back.

“I’m…somewhat acquainted with him.”

“Well, Flogaast is connected to some real creeps.”

Budruck busted out his phone, feverishly swiping with his twitchy finger before settling upon something, and then held up a grainy black-and-white photo for Leich to examine on the display. It was Flogaast alright. And he was shaking that man with the burgundy tie’s hand on what looked like the East Village. Flogaast had an attache case in his other hand.

“What’s this?”

“A still from security camera footage that I bought off a line cook. You see? That’s Flogaast. There’s clearly something going on here. I’m still trying to determine the identity of this man with the burgundy tie.”

“And why doesn’t the police have a copy of this?”

“Because the surveillance footage was conveniently erased. Although it actually wasn’t. And somehow this line cook, who has something on the restaurant owner, was able to get a copy of this. To the best of my knowledge, the police don’t have a copy of it. And neither does Ali Breslin.”

A gleam of hope rushed across Budruck’s face.

“Don’t you see, Dave? This is my big story. My scoop! I’ve always had this in me.”

Leich paced along the edge of the living room, his right arm still carrying the hammer behind his back. His left hand fingered the spotless surface of one of the living room bookshelves. Then he sat down on the Morris chair directly across from the settee and crossed his legs, his left foot twitching with celerity.

“What do you really know about people?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You have some interesting ideas. But what do you really know about people?”

“These are more than ideas, Dave! Don’t you see? With what I’ve been able to piece together, the two of us can get our revenge against these publishing assholes! Van Kleason was going to go public! I think he was going to cut a deal with the Feds because they tied him to the sex trafficking ring. He was going to be a friendly witness for a reduced sentence!”

“Come on, Herbert. Think this thing through. Why would he bite the hand that feeds him? His last novel had an enormous print run.”

“Because he wanted to save his marriage.”

“What?”

“Sophie Van Kleason carried on several affairs. I know this because I bribed a bellboy who used to work at the Atlantis Hotel, where Sophie was a regular. In fact, this bellboy even saw Mike Harvest enter a room with her!”

“Mike Harvest.”

“Yeah, I know he doesn’t like your books. But think clearly. This bellboy saw Sophie and Mike Harvest leaving a hotel room on the very afternoon of the murder. And guess who was with them?”

“Who?”

“The man in the burgundy tie!”

He pulled up another photo on his phone.

“Don’t you see? This is the same guy who met up with Flogaast!”

Leich studied the two photos.

“I’ll admit that there are certain similarities. But you never answered my question.”

“What question?”

“How well do you know people?”

“Fairly well.”

“But not well enough to be taken seriously as a journalist.”

“What?”

“Do you believe that everyone has something dark within them?”

“Probably.”

“That everyone has the capacity for evil? Oh sure, it spills out in chunks. You use your contacts to prevent your enemy from landing a prestigious job. You cut off some asshole on the road. But that’s just small time, Herbert. Just small time.”

“What I have here is big time.”

“I don’t think it is,” said Leich. His voice grew increasingly chillier. “What do you know about me?”

“Well, you’re the last literary Dave. You’ve won a bunch of awards.”

“That’s all true. But what kind of dark unfettered qualities do you think I possess?”

“That’s your business.”

Leich laughed.

“Let me phrase it another way. What’s the worst thing that you think I’ve ever done?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not even going to hazard a guess?”

“Well, a lot of people think you’re an asshole.”

“Oh, but I am. But I’m more than a mere asshole. Do you want to know what happened to the last person who sat on that couch?”

“She ended up in your bedroom,” laughed Budruck with the greatest naivete that Leich had seen in five years.

“No,” laughed Leich. “Not at all. It was a man.”

“Hey, I’m not going to judge. However you swing is your business.”

“I didn’t fuck him,” said Leich. “I killed him.”

Leich lodged the hammer into Budruck’s skull. Budruck was too surprised to scream. Then he swung again and again, the blood shooting in geysers and mottling Leich’s face, until the mediocre journalist was dead.

He picked up his burner phone and dialed the number.

“Yeah,” said the gruff voice on the other end.

“The situation has been contained.”

“Do you need us to come by?”

“No, I’ve got this.”

“Are you sure? I can call six of my vacuum cleaning guys.”

“I kind of want to try this myself. My Shark Navigator Lift-Away Deluxe really could use a good workout.”

“But we’re professionals. I think you’ll find that the mess in your apartment is harder to clean than you think.”

“I’ll give you a call if my vacuum gets clogged.”

Leich hung up the phone and, as he was considering how to get rid of the body, he heard the squeal of another rat caught in a trap.

(Next: The Talk)

(Word count: 37,011/50,000)

(Start from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: The Mountain Retreat)

She had not expected the piercing Xenon lights of the ever-voracious public eye to cast more invasive lambency upon her hard-won life. Sure, the THC-friendly webseries had kept her a public figure, but her audience there had known nothing of her OnlyFans past or the ignoble circumstances — the line that Ezmerelda said she would not cross and did — that led her to surrender that lucrative arc and try something else. Thankfully, they were too incurious. Google was freely available on their phones to look up any goddamned thing in the world and yet they couldn’t even do this. Nobody could, other than the rare outliers who still summoned the now untaught skills of critical thinking and having a heart.

Empathy had become increasingly politicized since the pandemic, which now seemed like a century ago. How much you genuinely cared and connected with other people now determined your political allegiance. And the people who still honed their emotional intimacy were more ostracized, much like the sideshow freaks had been cruelly ridiculed only decades before simply because they looked different. No more than that. If you were canceled in any way, well, you could never come back. Or if you could, your every move would be monitored. And with the Samsung Surrounder selling a million units, the panopticonal police, a well-regulated militia that not even James Madison could have imagined, had additional tools to observe and accuse in the unpredictable court of public opinion. The deep fake epidemic, with its increasingly manipulated media and its machine learning lies, had further muddied the waters. These teeming teardown trogolodytes would scan your social media for any small solecism to impugn you, reminding you of the mistake that you were already painfully aware of. They claimed to stand against fascism, but were they truly not aware of how authoritarian they were when it came to unsubstantiated gossip and judgment?

Sven understood this. It was why he rarely said a word to anyone anymore, why he was so committed to memorializing his thoughts by text because he could always pull up the record of what he had actually said rather than how his words had been hideously distorted. He was a Silent Bob type, though not by choice. When Ezmerelda heard the story of how the filmmaking community had expelled him after he had stuck up for a friend accused of groping a film critic, she hired him on the spot. Few people had that integrity anymore. These lonely online avengers never seemed to comprehend the virtues of loyalty, of giving someone another shot, of commending them for rebuilding their lives and doing the proper work of atonement. Sure, the nation was more illiterate and more sociopathic than it had ever been in its two hundred and fifty-one year run (the 2026 semiquincentennial had been a loud jingoistic shitshow), but could they not remember Forster’s words about having the guts to betray your country? If they couldn’t heed the pithy wisdom of some crusty and long-dead British dude that nobody read anymore, then the American experiment was hopeless, wasn’t it?

But now that Ali Breslin chick had blown the lid on an episode that she had thought long settled. She read the chapters that prominently featured her: not from a position of narcissism, but as a way to anticipate damage control. Breslin had somehow captured every moment of their meeting along Kings Highway five years before, contorting the truths into an admittedly admirable can’t-put-down volume of sensationalism, but she had left out the details about her involvement with Ted Gustoff, that Myrtle Beach cop buddy who she had benefited from off and on and a man who had likely tampered with the evidence. And why wasn’t that the real thrust of the book? No, Breslin had needed a patriarchal variation of the hooker with the heart of gold to sell her story and Ezmerelda Gibbons had served as the unlikely actor pulled from Central Casting. Breslin had clearly studied the Maggie Haberman playbook: reveal your big scoop in book form years after the world had moved on, serve as an ignoble and ethically compromised Goebbels type in your media appearances, and write your largely unedited copy as fast as possible to ensure that your competitors couldn’t beat you to the finish line. Those five disgraceful words “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” appeared in a bright gilded font under Breslin’s name on the front cover. Like Haberman, Breslin had even won a Pulitzer Prize. Sure, she could tell the world about how Breslin had seduced her into spilling. On the other hand, maybe Breslin had been lying about her college summer working as a stripper. But if she did that, she’d probably be accused of jealous mud-slinging, of rigging the narrative. But Ezmerelda had lived the events that Breslin had merely reported.

And now her phone was blowing up. Texts, emails, voicemails, DMs. Dozens of journalists from outlets, equally legitimate and shady, insisted that they were the ones who she had to talk to. She blocked all their numbers and social media accounts. The Toking with Elders channel had gained 500,000 followers in the last 24 hours, but with the burden of rubes flooding the comments with painful reminders of that final video, the one in which she’d gone down on that Wall Street dudebro who flaunted a folding fan of Frankllins, that she’d posted on OnlyFans and that caused her to permanently close her account and never do anything like that again. Which, of course, had made its way onto EverybodyFucks.com and was now being broadcast over and over on the TV news channels. Only a few years before, you’d get hit by an FCC fine if you aired anything like this. But the airwaves were now unregulated and FOX News and One America had been particularly malicious with their segments. Tucker Carlson did an entire twelve minute bit in which he stood up from his chair and ordered a production assistant to get on her knees and mime the actions. And that too had gone viral. Carlson’s boorish misogyny had resulted in a few white women holding Ezmerelda up as a feminist icon: the 2020s answer to Monica Lewinsky.

Why were the white people so obsessed with her? Even with all this happening, they still viewed her as a superficial token, a vessel with which to summon their strident and oh-so-predictable liberal anger. Even when white people claimed to sympathize her, they humiliated her and dictated how she should act. They were clueless about their tone policing and they couldn’t seem to understand the harm they were doing. But Black people? They were all on her side. Because they knew that any of them would face the same fate if one of their worst moments had been disseminated on the Internet.

So she’d have to contend — again — with the beady supercilious eyes of the knee-jerk throngs. Covertly racist rods and cones beaming from dull pork chop husks who refused to step foot outside of their affluent neighborhoods and talked loudly of real estate and avocado toast when they weren’t bragging about the one Black friend they knew that suddenly made them self-declared experts on centuries of racism and oppression. White heat had seared her soul from day one. Their privilege robbed her of dignity and cast doubt upon her identity. You were theoretically supposed to tough it out by growing a Teflon skin. But Ezmerelda couldn’t. And she had wept as she turned the pages of Breslin’s awful book, a tome that had been written to propel Breslin like a rocket into the media stratosphere. CNN was now in talks to hire Breslin as a rotating pundit.

What killed her was that Paul Van Kleason had been the one who had inveigled teenage girls and corralled animals for his depraved operation. Shouldn’t the focus on the literary Daves who had openly abused these victims rather than her?

She walked past the News Corp Building on Sixth Avenue with its ugly red news crawl splaying the headlines for all to see. Midtown was usually a place where you could walk with anonymity — no matter how well-known you were. It was why so many celebrities still lived in Manhattan. This was the only place in the world where only the superstars would be mobbed and anyone who ranked just below A-list could walk in relative peace. But she was getting looks. “Why do I know that woman?” was the question mark contained inside their eyes. She was about to hail a cab, knowing damned well that most would pass her by because of the color of her skin, when her jaw dropped at the latest headline.

TUCKER CARLSON, 58, ASSASSINATED AT HIS GASPARILLA ISLAND HOME BY FRINGE ACTIVISTS.

What the fuck? Sure, she hated this cruel demagogue with all her heart, but that didn’t mean she wanted him dead. Although she couldn’t deny the instant calm: the great relief and giddy elation that took hold of her in the same way that some struggling blue-collar type learned that he had won the lottery.

That’s when she noticed the hundreds of people angrily gathering at West 50th Street. Some held placards with her photo.

LEAVE GIBBONS ALONE!
TUCKKKER KKKARLSON IS DEAD! GOOD RIDDANCE!
BURN FOX NEWS TO THE GROUND!
BLACK LIVES STILL MATTER!
SEX WORKERS UNITE!

That’s when someone threw a Molotov. There was a fierce ear-piercing explosion. She dived to the sidewalk and looked up to see a police car in flames. No cars on Sixth. NYPD stormtroopers with mirrored faceshields and batons marched in a phalanx towards the protesters.

“Look!” cried one of the activists. “It’s her.”

She tossed off her heels and began running east through the Diamond District, with only the nylon protecting the bottom of her feet from the filthy concrete, passing a few Orthodox men in fuzzy shtreimels looking agape while desperately pulling down their steel gates to protect their shops from potential looting.

She stopped running when she saw the convoy of monster trucks: white men in flannel shirts crowded in ample cargo beds, all shaking their submachine guns and baseball bats into the air. Large American flags spiring and fluttering into the air. Their hateful threnodies were soon punctuated by bullets. More rounds per minute and much louder than anything she had ever seen as a Canarsie kid.

“Miss,” screamed a frightened man beckoning her with his hand and speaking in broken English. “You come in here.”

He was standing outside one of the many 24/7 two story delis in Midtown where blue-collar types secretly congregated at night to drink bottles of beer, blast Latin music at deafening levels, and slap down dominoes on tables that, only a few hours before, had been occupied by administrative assistants and receptionists on their lunch hour, quietly stewing over what had gone so horribly wrong with their lives.

“What?”

“It not safe. I close gate soon. You come!”

And she scurried through the door as the steel covering rolled down with a peremptory thud behind her.

(Next: The Scandal of Unfettered Speech)

(Word count: 33,057/50,000)

(Start from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previous: The Green Room)

He fled to his secret cabin in the northwestern corner of the state — only a few miles away from Sassafras, near the rugged tree-lined fringe of Pickens County where only a handful of locals owned a Samsung Surrounder. Nobody there was interested in the latest tech and, due to the dormant evangelical plurality, most were deeply offended by all the carnal exhibitionism, which was largely practiced in huge cities: places more ideal for total strangers to fuck in public places and disappear. But could he disappear in the mountains? He had rented a Subaru Forester, a fugly compact SUV that had somehow eluded the eco-friendly legislative avengers curtailing damn near anything contributing to carbon emission largesse. With its dumpy angles and gaudy grays, the Subaru Forester was a car so aesthetically hideous that nobody on the road could bring themselves to look at it. Even the gun-loving snipers hiding in the mountains couldn’t summon the desire to fire off shots while slamming back tallboys. Anyone with even a partial vista of the road pitied any sad bastard was driving this car of all cars. The overworked Subaru engineers had so badly botched the design (conspiracy theorists in online car forums had suggested that this eyesore was a deliberate inside job) that it didn’t surprise anyone when the University of Missouri published a study in 2026 concluding that the car owners doling out monthly payments on Foresters were the ones most likely to suffer from anxiety and depression.

Rob Rollins wasn’t depressed exactly. Most people lost their will to live after three days of driving a Forester. But he was greatly unnerved. He drove up the winding potholed two-lane highway of US-178 (why hadn’t the road reform pork that he helped to get passed been consummated yet?) with a pit in his washboard chest. And he knew that he wouldn’t be found because the Subaru Forester was a vehicle he wouldn’t be caught dead in. Now he was being murdered by the press — though not in the more decisive and corporeal way that the Cherokees had been brutally slaughtered by British and American colonialists in this region only centuries before. He hoped that some reckless yahoo wouldn’t collide into him on US-178. In some ways, it was more painful imagining that he could be discovered driving this car rather than the vicious rumors of his involvement with Van Kleason.

The one thing he couldn’t let anyone see was how much all this hurt him. The onslaught of think pieces and media dissections and fledgling investigations had been merciless. Videos of Rollins berating his clients had bubbled up on YouTube and TikTok. He had mended these fences before with discreet hush money and the ruthless enforcement of NDAs, but now the degree to which a gym authority tortured his underlings had become a hot topic at cocktail parties. And those who stood against tough luck aligned themselves with those who protested fat shaming. And then the disabled community, the voting bloc that he and Debbie had so smartly cultivated, turned against him. Not even the Republican National Committee would support him. “Tough it up, Rob,” they said. “It’s not like you’re Dennis Hastert. It will pass.” But he didn’t think it would. Now he was on the cusp of getting canceled, his political career (and possibly his stature as a fitness guru) barreling forward in a car with bad brakes towards a dead end sign at the edge of that cliff signaling reality.

He had come to the “cabin” — the one he co-owened with his brother, who also wasn’t talking with him — to wait it out. It seemed unwise to pop up in the public eye in any way.

Would this go away? He had only been hustling on the Beltway for five years and, even though he wasn’t very bright, he was cognizant enough to understand that the public had an attention span shorter than an Alzheimer’s patient trying to recall why he had wanted to strangle the nurse who stopped him from sprinkling salt on his baked potato. The throngs would surely move onto fresher meat. The next main character. Real villains. Celebrities rather than politicians. But they hadn’t. His notifications blew up. And he turned his phone off. But not before one last call.

He asked Debbie for the latest Quinnipiac poll numbers and the results were decidedly not in his favor. He had three years left to serve in the Senate. And he wasn’t sure if he was going to be forced to resign over this. After years of extremist rhetoric, the red waves weren’t arriving. And so the GOP was cleaning house even as many of their baleful brand ambassadors openly fucked in the cloakrooms in the House.

Ali Breslin had linked this junior Senator from South Carolina to a sinister sex trafficking ring that involved some writer named Paul Van Kleason and many prominent authors. But he had never known Paul. He had only trained Sophie. He deeply regretted the texts he had sent to those who skipped their training appointments, the bills he had demanded Sophie pay to the Rollins Institute after she became paralyzed. But a contract was a contract, right?

During the first two chilly nights in the cabin, Rollins shivered beneath a three thousand thread count comforter on a feather bed — even after the twelve mile runs and the three hour calisthentics workouts that he had hoped would calm him. But no amount of burpees or pull exercises could untrouble his mind. He was implicated. Breslin had somehow pieced together his client roster from 2022 and discovered that half of his acolytes had some connection with Sophie. It didn’t help that five-year-old videos were resurfacing on EveryoneFucks.com and that Redditors were putting together intricate spreadsheets. And somehow it all lead back to him. But, unlike that dead creepy writer David Fitzroy, he hadn’t fucked any goats and he had no desire to. He certainly hadn’t been involved in sex trafficking. Had not the anti-trafficking bills that he co-sponsored proved his bona-fides?

And because of Ali Breslin — who had managed to get enough right for a persuasive book, but who was also an expert at insinuating something without inviting libel suits — sixteen women claimed that they had been sexually harassed or assaulted by Rollins. They had only their stories, not hard evidence. And they were believed. This was, however, quite impossible for deeply personal reasons. Several political strategists (and even a few sleazy lobbyists) had cornered him in the Russell Building, asking Rollins why he wasn’t married. And he had laughed off their inquiries with some harmless locker room humor about how much a woman stood in the way of being a self-made success. Which put a target on his back and unleashed the indignation of febrile Jezebel readers. But why him? Sure, he had been gruff at times, but his closest advisor was a woman and he had tried to walk the tightrope by upholding with the GOP’s regressive values without coming across as a misogynistic asshole. He was one of the few Republicans who had voted with the Democrats to codify Roe v. Wade. Sure, it was a calculated move to appeal to independents and secure his Senatorial victory. But didn’t that count for something? Especially when the vote happened not long after Steve Scalise had fired a gun in the House chamber during an unhinged stump speech for the Second Amendment?

He had become obsessed with the physical ideal because of one deep secret that only Debbie Ballard and his brother knew about. As a fitness instructor, he had adopted his fiery tyranny because he didn’t want anyone to know the truth. If you scared them, they wouldn’t ask questions. They’d be too paralyzed by fear to poke into your private life. If they held you up as a god, the hero worship would guarantee their incuriousity. That was the other part of the ideal he liked. Not so much the hubris, but the insulation from scrutiny. And Debbie had told him that staying closeted was ridiculous because there were so many openly gay Republicans these days. Sexuality had become so translucent that public sex was now respectable, with kinky activity once confined to sex clubs now regularly practiced at tony townhouses.

But he couldn’t allow this to be out in the open. It was a matter of principle. It was a matter of pride. It was ultimately what kept him a conservative. And it was also the quality that kept Debbie around far longer than he had anticipated. A pitiful quality that had inspired her to discover herself and find true love with another woman.

And it was why he had cut loose Atticus just before running for Congress. Atticus. Such a beautiful and patient man. His hands were so graceful in the way they flattened homemade Phyllo dough into razor-thin squares and the slow and delicate way that he raised a cup of chamomile tea to his rich beautiful lips. Atticus was the only person whom he could be himself with. And he had been cruel, so cruel, in the way that he had sent all of his stray knick-knacks to his apartment with a peremptory note telling him to never contact him again. Because Atticus had never raised his voice. Atticus knew how to calm him down. Atticus, much like his literary namesake, was too honorable to go public. And he wondered what Atticus was thinking right now as the media machine still roared loud and long to distract everyone from the dying dregs of America.

The mountain air spilled from the open door into the cabin’s modest living room and Rollins felt a goosebump tremor upon his bronzed biceps as he stared at the empty wicker chair where Atticus had once sat and laughed. A chair that nobody had been allowed to sit in for the last five years and that he ordered the cleaning lady to pay extra attention to. He closed his eyes and thought of their schoolboy makeout sessions, Atticus’s reliable gentleness, the limber arm Atticus placed so lovingly around his shoulder when he opened himself up to him and told him, and only him, about the cruel kids who had singled him out for the modest flab on his belly in seventh grade and had made him so determined to never have so much as an ounce of fat on his body so long as he walked this mortal earth.

Maybe the Van Kleason scandal was the best thing that could have happened to him. Maybe he needed to be humbled. Maybe he could start over. He truly had not expected to build an empire or to rise up as rapidly as he had. But here in the cabin, he was anonymous, invisible. It was here, and only here, that he found the greatest peace.

There was a knock.

Rollins opened his eyes and abandoned his reverie.

Bill Flogaast stood in the open doorway, the great amber flood of the setting sun casting a piercing backlight against this shadow from the past.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” said Flogaast.

“How did you know about this place?”

“Come on, Rob. I know everything. I know shit about people that would truly surprise you.”

“I haven’t seen you in a while. I thought you were retired. Rhode Island, right?”

“From time to time, I am summoned out of my forced retirement.”

Flogaast sauntered slowly into the room, studying the print of Riding Bikes hanging on the rustic wall.

“Rauschenberg! Well, that’s a bit wild for a Republican.”

“What can I say? I like bicycles.”

“But, Rob, I know you’re a gym rat, but I’ve somehow never seen you on a bike.”

Rollins recalled the Sunday afternoons with Atticus. The joyful bike rides to Sassafras.

“It’s only up here. I have three mountain bikes in the shed.”

“You know, I met him once.”

“Oh?”

“Bob Rauschenberg. I’ve met quite a lot of people. That’s what happens when you’re in publicity.”

Flogaast walked to the wicker chair and began to sit down.

Rollins stood up.

“Don’t!” he squeaked. “Don’t sit there.”

Flogaast laughed.

“Well, why not?”

“That chair has, uh, sentimental value.”

“That’s fine. I should probably stand anyway. The drive was thirteen hours, all told. I tried you in DC. But you weren’t there for some reason.”

“So you came here.”

“It wasn’t too much trouble. You see, when someone you hold dear leaves you, you’re left with an empty place that you need to fill. It takes years, sometimes half a lifetime, to learn how to live with yourself.”

“Patricia left you?”

“Yes. And a long road trip usually gives you time to ruminate. To summon gratitude. To fill in gaps. Gaps reflected by the territory filled in by the rest areas and the roadside diners that remind you that everything that is on the map is populated. But I don’t know if you’d know anything about that. I’ve, uh, never seen you with a special someone.”

“That’s my business, not yours.”

Flogaast stretched out his arms and yawned.

“So sorry. I’m not a young man anymore and these long drives, as useful as they are, tucker me out sometimes.”

Flogaast walked to a small shelf of books that was mounted on the wall right next to the fireplace.

“I didn’t know you were a reader,” he said with genuine surprise.

“I’m not.”

Flogaast rubbed the spines with his index fingers.

“He was one of my authors. She was one of my authors. And oh! What’s this?”

He pulled the paperback copy of To Kill a Mockingbird from the shelf.

“Harper Lee,” said Flogaast. “I’ve read this four times. Are you more of a Scout man? Or an Atticus man?”

Rollins gulped.

“An Atticus man! I thought so!”

“Why the hell did you come here?”

“Because, my dear Senator, you are in a lot of trouble. And I know that you can easily get out of this trouble. In fact, you’d be easily exonerated. But you chose not to. Which is a bit strange from a man who Time Magazine once called a rising star in the Republican Party.”

“I have my reasons.”

“I have a hunch that it has something to do with this book and maybe even this wicker chair that you won’t let me sit in. I think you’re a secret reader, if you catch my drift.”

“What are you implying?”

Flogaast sat on the couch and leaned in very close to the Senator.

“Rob, I want to help you. But you’re going to have to help me first.”

(Next: The Public Eye)

(Word count: 31,219/50,000)