(Start Reading from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: Yakety Sax)

Five years after Paul Van Kleason’s death, the world was still reliably sociopathic and full of unpleasant soul-destroying surprises. Inflation had reached 23%. More people carried tasers on subways. There were more fights and more hate fucking. Rather than group together, people found knew ways to detest each other. The divorce rate grew to an all-time historical high. More Thanksgivings — at least among those who could still afford to buy a turkey — ended in vicious screaming matches. And while the more optimistic types found comfort in the many cat videos that continued to flourish online, living in America had become so dystopian that there were many who longed for the pandemic days under the Orange Tyrant. The new tyrant was more dangerous and more calculating. More marginalized groups were singled out. And the white people did their best to hold onto their power, but they were greatly outmatched by the fierce resistance of Gen Zers. They were the first generation to finally start beating the shit out of the greedy Wall Street men on the streets and the aging Gen Xers now in their fifties regretted that they had not had the foresight or the courage to viciously maim the right people.

Prisons were overcrowded. Drugs became more frequently shared and even more ubiquitously abused. More people worked from home because it was now clear that staying in your bedroom was safer than going into the office. Mass shootings had drastically increased and everybody knew a guy who knew a guy — and, by 2026, simply knew a guy — who had been hit with a stray bullet. The politicians continued to offer their thoughts and prayers, which continued to be a futile response in solving a systemic problem. And many of them were, at long last, voted out. One was even felled in Foggy Bottom by a neo-Trotsky gang that was running around the Beltway with an ordnance of hammers. Elon Musk had declared bankruptcy after killing Twitter with an increasingly deranged set of policies that made as much sense as the once popular practice of paying more than ten George Washingtons to have someone slather avocado on a piece of toast and most of the smarter people were now flourishing on Mastodon.

There were five hundred new subgenres of EDM, but literacy had declined and, as the literary Daves began to understand that nobody was reading their volumes anymore, two of them had committed suicide rather than face a bleak future of not being the center of attention. Nobody had the money to drive a car because oil prices were out of control and a third of all gas stations had been forced to shutter. You couldn’t keep track of all the new hate groups listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center website, which was filling up like a Rolodex jammed with too many three-by-five cards. There seemed to be some new paramilitary gang of Nazis every week. Some of the hate groups were even given television shows. Under the reckless eye of an aging Dean Baquet, the New York Times continued to publish “Nazis! They’re just like us!” articles that, depending upon your political allegiance, either entertained or infuriated you. A dozen yahoos who had lost their jobs at a chicken processing plant decided to burn down Fenway Park to express their dissatisfaction with the way that America was heading. The horror of seeing such a beautiful stadium reduced to an onyx cinder had radicalized half of the Sox fans against these extremists, causing an unlikely blue wave to hit the nation in 2026 and Boston to emerge as a promising counterpart to the increasingly baleful metropolis of New York. The 2026 blue wave had been enough to save the two houses from the fascists. Everyone was now calling the Republicans fascists and not always disparagingly. Tucker Carlson was now proudly announcing to his vastly growing audience that there was no shame in being a fascist and the white supremacist bile that poured from his vacuous mouth became more meme-sticky. If you tuned into CSPAN during the late 2020s, the screaming matches and brawls of Senators and the grunts of Representatives fucking in the cloakrooms had turned the American experiment into one of the most depraved reality TV shows imaginable. Decorum meant nothing anymore. America remained divided, but the liberals had become more hedonistic, especially after TikTok had removed its prohibition against adult content in a desperate bid to keep its rapidly fleeing user base, and the conservatives had become hardened fundamentalists, scolding the liberals for their free love, which was increasingly spilling into parks and fancy restaurants, but only in cities that preserved birth control and reproductive rights. If you were one of the poor bastards lived in an impoverished red state, then you busted out your ratty lawn chair from the garage and sat on the sidewalk and stared miserably into the hopeless horizon with a “fuck my life” look permanently etched on your face.

This was not an easy time to live in America, but it wasn’t without its fun.

There was an uptick in people walking around urban landscapes in stilts. Some of them wore clown suits, but it became a way of warning people about the violent gangs gathering in the distance. Unfortunately the stilt fad died out after a group of wokesters vociferously denounced their “stilt privilege.” How dare you stand seven feet above everyone else? Didn’t you check your height privilege? One stilt anarchist named Guido Osmond tried to push back against this, but the wokesters of the late 2020s were far different than who they were at the beginning of the decade and they chopped Guido down with axes as he was walking along Palisade Avenue on a sunny December day in Hoboken. “Thank you, climate change,” beamed Guido during a live stream. But the wokesters got him and he lost consciousness and woke up in a hospital with a concussion, a broken arm, and a $47,632 hospital bill. And the stilt movement fizzled out, although there was a disastrous attempt to revive it called Stilt Lives Matter.

If you were sitting in a French bistro on the Upper East Side during the late 2020s, it was not uncommon to see Tinder dates skip over the Netflix part or even the “Would you like to come back to my place?” part, openly spill their clothes onto the floor, and “chill” with thrusts and undulations that no longer shocked people. When the tech entrepreneur Norah Gogarty started the hit website EveryoneFucks.com, she had not expected so many active users to be so exhibitionistic. But after years of anxiety and escalating income inequality, people had simply stopped giving a damn. They became ever more determined to push the envelope. And they still angled for attention, which was now the only pathway to success. It was now difficult to find an apartment rental in New York for under $9,000/month. If you were “comfortably middle-class” during this bleak time in American history, it meant that you only had one or two roommates that you shared your bedroom with.

Many still wondered if they were living their lives to be noticed or noticing that their lives were unlived. And even the seemingly pristine minds grew louder and more cartoonish in their rhetoric. No one had expected Harry Styles to drop an album that was somehow more experimental and committed to noise than Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Metal Music. And then there were all the literary people who were increasingly going to seed. Emma Silverburg had partially funded her divorce through GoFundMe and, after three years of paying back her attorney and living like a pauper for the first time in twelve years, she was now seducing twentysomething writers from her cabin in Maine, a former dacha that she won in her divorce from prominent Russian intellectual Martin Slabak. These young hunks had all made the long bus trip up to Bangor and signed an agreement where they pledged to worship her — and only her — and not sleep with anyone else until the age of thirty. But she had neglected to verify the ages of all her carnal conquests and, when a fifteen-year-old boy and her mother sued her for statutory rape, she was dropped by her agent and her publisher and seemed to disappear into the forest, the home abandoned. One person on Mastodon reported that they had seen her begging for change outside of a Burger King. Brie Attenberg had decided to run for Congress out of boredom. Politics seemed more exciting than writing fiction. And while she lost, she started dating that sad sack Kyle Rittenhouse (practicing celibacy after facing online criticism about whether their relatoinship was age-appropriate: when the literary people turned against her, she began to notice that the Christian nuts would not only listen to her dull and relentless blathering, but that they would pay good money for her merch and that she could make more money this way than with her books) and she became a prominent talking head on right-wing television and she was somehow more obnoxious with her gun-toting and her gasbagging than Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene combined. She was arrested for her involvement in the May 22nd Freedom Uprising in which two Supreme Court Justices had been assassinated. And after the insurrectionists had marched once again into the Senate Chamber (no QAnon Shaman this time) and even some moderate Republicans conceded that yes, this extremism was not what they had signed on for.

Bill Flogaast’s wife had left him a year after the Van Kleason scenario. And he had resigned from the publishing house, settling in his heavily barricaded Rhode Island bunker and awaiting the inevitable zombie apocalypse, which he had also planned for. He was doing more pickling and trying to ignore the increasingly cartoonish news anchors screaming louder these days on his teevee. Subtlety had once been something that people understood, but Flogaast couldn’t believe that he lived in a world in which punching yourself in the face for online laughs was considered an understatement. He kept his television on because he was waiting for someone he knew — a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who had not reported what she had learned about Van Kleason five years before, but who his contacts had informed him was about to publish a barnbuster of an expose. Not even his old pals at the house could get him a galley.

“Coming up next — Fuck! Shit!”

The FCC’s relaxation of broadcasting standards in 2025 had caused most news anchors to become more profane on air. And nearly every newscast now had a studio audience to hoot and holler along. Some investigative stories were actually voted on by the audience. The people were no longer interested in hearing what they needed to hear, but what they didn’t really want to know. You had to subscribe to email newsletters these days to get a true understanding of how America was and, even then, you had to suffer through innumerable spelling mistakes. The innocent days in which Marjorie Taylor Greene had published “quacking” rather than “quaking” on Twitter were long gone.

“Fuck yes!”

The camera rushed fast through the studio audience and settled onto a familiar woman dressed in a red seamed flare skirt and a matching cutaway blazer.

“Everybody give it up for Ali Fucking Breslin!”

The applause was more thunderous than a throng of Roman circusgoers watching two gladiators murder each other while munching on freshly baked bread.

“I understand you have a new fucking book!” said the anchor.

“Yes.”

“You actually believe that people are going to read a 500 page book?”

Laughter.

“Well, they’ll read this one.”

“Is there lots of sex in it?”

“Well…”

“How often did you use the word ‘fuck’?”

“You’ll find variations on ‘fuck’ on every page.”

Applause.

“But,” said Ali, “that’s not why I wrote it.”

“What? What other reason is there to write books?”

“I think you’re going to be shocked by what I reported on. It all happened five years ago, but it’s one of the reasons why everything is so fucked up today.”

“Oh shit,” said Blogaast.

“It involves a writer by the name of Paul Van Kleason.”

“Fuck,” said Blogaast, who placed his half-pickled jar onto the basin and rushed into his study. He had some calls to make.

(Next: The Junior Senator from South Carolina)

(Word count: 18,468/50,000)

(Start Reading the Novel from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: Shepherd’s Pie)

Ezmerelda Gibbons was hungry and phoneless. The sun drifted beneath luxury building blocks and strip malls and gaudy fast food signs competing for roadside attention while the ocean sift roared in the darkening blanket of water just southwest. And she walked in her short skirt, enduring a few loutish horn honks and gruesome woos along the edge of Kings Highway. Her heels clacked faster. Cabs had passed her by when she hailed them. So she walked. She could walk four miles in her heels if she had to, although anything more than that would blister her feet, which were already on thin suppurating ice (hence, the pedicure appointment, long ago canceled). And she needed her feet for the fetishists. Well, they’d have to wait. They’d all have to wait. Hopefully, they’d keep. And maybe even weep over small-minded fantasies that were not now on demand.

Because one of her needs was directly related to her ability to pay rent, she persuaded herself — as the roars of the passing cars striated and impaired her ruminations — that she would rather starve than miss out on an opportunity to send a scandalous photo to one of her clients. Sure, she had the webcam and the desktop at home. And she had backups of everything and a one week storehouse of unpublished poses in case anything happened. She was no fool. But this meant that she would be tied to her bedroom, not that she hadn’t tied herself up before to placate her kinkier regulars.

It was the freedom that Ezmerelda lamented. Although what did “freedom” actually mean? Her credit card had the word “Freedom” on it, but how were you free when you were so easily persuaded to plunge further into debt? Her people had escaped slavery a century and a half before. And now they wanted to enslave everyone. If white people understood that, maybe they wouldn’t be so fucking racist. Maybe the Karens would stop calling the cops on Black people. Maybe the Kanyes and the Kyries wouldn’t lose their goddamned minds? Or maybe not. It was far easier for white people to buy into the illusion that everyone was middle-class rather than be honest about their personal spending problems and the fact that they were always short-changed when they tried to buy VIP passes that would untie the velvet rope.

She had two years of savings and it was because she refused to gyrate naked for peanuts. She had too much dignity and self-respect not to name her price. If a lonely man in Topeka wanted to see her hoochie moves, well, he’d have to pay her bare minimum, not minimum wage like the others. And he’d have to wait to hear back from her by DM. He’d have to pay for Snapchat access, where she often posted stories in which she was topless and contorted, rounding the outline of her mouth with her tongue, a move that was always good to keep these easily seduced men (and some women) hanging onto every carnal cadence.

The cops would surely crack her phone’s keycode. Four digits gave you no more than ten thousand possible combinations. And she knew that the more well-funded branches of the fuzz had software that could speed through all the four-digit options and bypass the “too many attempts” lockscreen. There, they would have access to her photos, her videos, and her contacts — that is, if they could crack the additional passwords she had put on there.

The police regularly underestimated the tech savvy of sex workers. This was one of the underlying reasons why there were so many brutal crackdowns: when you combined ignorance, entitlement, and male resentment and it came from dull specimens who looked like pork chops when they squeezed their heavy pinkish bodies into blue uniforms, you couldn’t very well elude the frustrations from those who remained in denial about their true mediocrity.

But dodging this toxic authoritarian temperament — the societal degradation of her smarts — was nothing new for Ezmerelda. Back in Canarsie, she had taken the subway to affluent neighborhoods to examine what white people had left on the sidewalks. This was how she had built up a surprisingly choice collection of classic mass market paperbacks that weren’t even available in her local library. She walked past brothers who mocked her for reading and propositioned her for illiterate acts in the dark. But after she gave one of these cat-calling assclowns a black eye, they left her alone and even showered her with respect. (“I never liked that nigga anyway,” laughed a prominent gang member two weeks after she clocked that brotha. “Thought he was a hustlah, but that ass-beating from you made my boy wack.”

White people were cavalier about what they threw away. Sometimes, they’d toss out their flashy Xmas gifts before summer. And these were often the latest electronic models. Expensive. Extra features that the white people never learned about because they were so fond of junking their unread manuals. They even disposed of their fully functioning high-def sets and sometimes Ezmerelda would call her friend with the pickup to liberate it from its junkyard fate, cutting him in for a piece of the pie when she unloaded these second-hand goods on Craigslist. And because she became so accomplished at scavenging, she was able to put together a desktop in her bedroom, gutting beige cases for their components and trading up with a skeeze stringy-haired dude at the flea market who always showed up with six bulging buckets of computer parts. She even found a functioning printer, although it took her another week to collect the dimes for the pricey toner. And Ezmerelda was not someone who learned things halfway.

So she became a power user, hitting IRC channels and sometimes pretending to be a white guy, where she noticed that she got more attention and more replies to her tech questions than under her real identity. And she became so knowledgeable about dip switches and PCI slots and the ideal DIMM sticks for an overclocked mobo that she was starting to get invites for pizza parties in small Connecticut towns, which she politely declined while quoting from the Grant Morrison comics that these honkies were so enamored with. Drop a line from The Invisibles onto an oh-so-white screen of upwardly scrolling text and these slavish geeks would believe that you were delivering a sermon from the mount.

And because her side hustle had ushered in a modest income, she registered a domain, paid for web hosting, and started a password-protected site where Black people, and only Black people, could share their stories (after a verification process) without having their narratives hijacked or appropriated by white liberal do-gooders. She hooked up her people with the new tech. And everyone realized that this was a place where they could be welcomed online as heartily as they were for a real-life block party.

Then she decided to go public. And that’s when everything went south. Quite literally. The hayseeds found her and graffitied the message boards with Confederate flags and Nazi symbols. And she had to shut it all down. You gave white people an inch and they somehow misinterpreted your invite as a Homestead Act stampede no different from the white supremacists who had could claim their 160 surveyed government acres when you only had forty.

She heard the idle of a car drifting beside her. And was that the music from Benny Hill playing?

She looked back. A dusty Ford Escort with a blue stripe running along the side. The car was in need of a wash. And behind the wheel? That woman who had talked her way into the Van Kleason manse.

“Yoo hoo!” said Ali Breslin, who was craning her head as far as she could to the passenger side and sustaining a frightening level of intense eye contact.

“Go away.”

“But I want to talk with you.”

“Subscribe to my OnlyFans page.”

“I already did.”

She stopped. Ali flashed her a smile and held up her phone, where a video of Ezmerelda twerking to Big K.R.I.T. was playing.

“Great moves. Did you ever learn tap?”

She had, in fact, taken tap dancing lessons at the age of sixteen. Along with flamenco and sneaker jazz. Until her white instructor took a shine to her that was too close for comfort and only a smidgen short of filing a police report.

“I did take tap.”

“So did I! I was really impressed with your one-legged wing. It took me months to get that down with a shuffle.”

“Nobody else noticed.”

“Maybe they were busy with their hands.”

“They were,” said Ezmerelda, who loosened the beginnings of a laugh before remembering that this white woman was trying to inveigle her.

“Didn’t you get what you needed back at the crime scene?” asked Ezmerelda, returning to business.

“No, I didn’t. Where are you heading? I’ll give you a lift.”

“If I wanted a Lyft, I’d summon one from my phone. Oh, but I don’t have my phone, do I?”

“I can help you with that,” said Ali.

“Oh? How?”

“I have some pull with Teddy. You may have seen our little Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan act.”

“Why you be fucking a cop?”

“He’s actually not bad in bed, although cops are a little rough in the sack. As are lawyers. That’s the funny thing about law and order types. They always seem to like it hard and rough.”

“Yeah,” said Ezmerelda, “tell me something I don’t know.”

“I’m not your enemy.”

“I don’t know if you are.”

“The police will be dropping their investigation tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“There’s something else going on. That’s why I need to talk with you.”

“I don’t have a lot to say. I was a topless maid for Paul. If you pay me the right price, you too can see me shake my titties while I clean your toilet.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I know the business I’m in. Do you?”

“Actually, I do.”

“How?”

“I spent one summer in college dancing at a strip club.”

“What?”

“Not too many people know this, but I did. And I’m telling you because I’m an ally.”

“Right. Just like Rachel Dolezal. No thanks.”

Ezmerelda started walking faster up the sidewalk.

“I want to help.”

“Because you want a story.”

“Not going to deny it. Paul Van Kleason was a semi-prominent figure. And I’m the only journalist who is going to tell you that I’m hoping to crack the iron gates for my own gain.”

“Yeah, I thought so.”

“There’s a lot more to this.”

“Look, I cleaned his house. He never tried to fuck me, but he liked having me around. Just like many white men go to the store and buy a pint of chocolate fudge brownie. End of story.”

“Actually, it’s just the beginning of the story. Did you know about his wife?”

“What Paul and Sophie did was none of my business.”

“Did you know about the videos?”

Ezmerelda stopped in her tracks.

“What videos?”

“Let me give you a lift and I’ll tell you.”

Ezmerelda stopped.

“Okay, but you’ve got to turn that Benny Hill shit off.”

“Fair enough. I was just trying to lighten the mood.”

“White people always do. That’s part of the problem.”

“When you see what I have, you’ll understand why. Come on. It will only take fifteen minutes.”

Ezmerelda opened the door and got in the car.

(Next: Soldiers with Broken Arms)

(Word count: 16,415/50,000)

(Start Reading the Novel from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: Shepherd’s Pie)

It was Tuesday night and the MBPD hadn’t yet conducted the promised press conference. The investigation was ongoing. No news was good news, although Paul Van Kleason had spent much of the afternoon as a trending topic on Twitter.

They set up the war room at the Easy Breeze Resort: a towering high-rise serving as hotel and business center (a real business center, not one of those windowless rooms you find in Westin joints with stale complimentary croissants and slow desktops running Windows 98) just southeast of Kings Highway and only a few blocks away from the ocean. Three publicity men from Atlanta — all of them on retainer with Coca-Cola, but with contracts that allowed them to freelance for other clients — had made the six hour drive that morning. One of them — a well-groomed thirtysomething with an aquiline nose and a purple bowtie — had somehow prepared a PowerPoint presentation along the way. Or maybe he had had his assistant do it by way of fierce dictation on the road. Nobody knew for sure. They only knew that Chris Wilde was once again in charge of this reputation management campaign. That is, until the New York people flew in.

The two other men were chain-smoking luxury Canadian cigarettes and blowing out smoke through the open window. Despite the Italian cuts of their immaculate suits, they still had the telltale racoon eyes and numb noses of men who had been summoned out of bed after a 3AM coke bender. The rampant drug use among Coca-Cola men was an open secret. Many of them hoovered up lines from ruddy placemats reading “Enjoy Coke!” and “Things go better with big, big Coke!” They had ideas, but they were not known for their subtlety, which is why Chris Wilde, whose primary addiction was stress-eating vast quantities of expensive cheese after midnight, was running the show.

The man in the fedora and the bland burgundy tie stood near the door: a solitary figure who blended in anywhere by keeping his trap shut. He had introduced himself to Sophie as Nick. No last name. When she wasn’t catatonic over the vile truths that the videos had revealed, Sophie had tried Googling Nick. She needed something to do other than sob over the disturbing possibility of becoming publishing’s answer to Ghislaine Maxwell. But there was no online trace of Nick anywhere. He was the human answer to the dark web. A conseigneur who clearly existed, possibly in a quasi-criminal capacity, and whose very presence suggested decades of experience cleaning up big messes — quagmires that Sophie could not have imagined at her most perverse — but who couldn’t be found anywhere other than here. Nick had said only a dozen words since the men in Atlanta had arrived. And she didn’t know if he would say anything more. He had dressed her down back at the Atlantis. Fiercely and indefatigably. Peremptory. Fuck around and find out. Even when she was shaking over the news of her husband’s death and the secret Epsteinian life that she had somehow not known about. The behavior made her kinky escapades look like a G-rated movie.

“I have to see my wife!” whimpered Mike Harvest in the corner. Nick had paid off Chris or Jim with a cool two thousand back at the Atlantis and had persuaded him to sign an NDA so that he would never shoot his mouth off about what he had just heard, but the puling book critic was a different story. As a parasitical media figure of some influence within the publishing industry complex, Harvest was compromised — not only by the waning news of his involvement with the Jakester, but also because he had been directly involved with Sophie. Moreover, he was still in a position to persuade people about how Paul Van Kleason was a true American original and a bona-fide innocent. But Christ, he was such a whiny little fuck.

“You’ll see her again,” said Nick.

“When?”

“This guy?” asked Chris. “Really?”

“I was once considered for the Pulitzer!” shrieked Harvest

“Did you win it?” said Nick.

“No.”

“So you’re just a book critic then.”

“Yes,” whispered Harvest. “But I have written one book!”

Chris dropped a hardcover with a blinding typeface on the oak table before Harvest.

“This one?” he said. “Harvest’s Photographs?”

“You found it!”

“Let me ask you something, Mr. Harvest. Did you take these photographs?”

“No.”

“Then how can they be your photographs?”

“What?”

“If I stole a loaf of bread that you baked, would it be my bread?”

“Maybe.”

“God, you’re an arrogant fuck! This guy? Really? This? Fucking? Guy?”

Mike walked up to Chris and placed his palm on his shoulder.

“Chris,” said Mike. “He’s important.”

“He’s a dope!”

“Chris,” repeated Mike. “We’re professionals.”

“I’m important!” beamed Harvest. “I’m important!”

Nick spun around and aimed a Stoeger STR-9F at Harvest’s head. Harvest raised his hands up in the air and begin to whimper. The pistol had emerged in his hand much like an expert magician pulling a long line of scarves from an unlikely crevice.

Sophie screamed. Yes, Harvest was annoying, but even annoying people deserve to live. Well, most of the time.

“Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”

“Relax,” said Nick. “I just wanted to test your reflexes.”

There was a telltale splotch of burgeoning urine soaking the front of his pants.

“You’re important, but only for this operation. Not important enough to murder. Remember that.”

Nick snapped his fingers at one of the smokers near the window.

“Get him cleaned up.”

One of the associates stubbed out his cigarette in a Myrtle Beach mug that was now serving as an ashtray, walked up to Harvest, offered his hand, and ushered Harvest out of the room like a teacher escorting a ninth-grader to the principal’s office shortly after he had been caught tugging the pigtails of the homecoming queen.

“Okay,” said Chris. “Are we done with the theatrics?”

“Yeah,” said Mike, who returned to his stance near the door.

“Okay,” said Chris. “Okay.”

“Do you have to say okay all the time?” asked Sophie. “It’s not fucking okay.”

“It’s the way he talks,” said the remaining smoker. “I don’t like it either.”

“Okay,” said Chris, who believed deep down that saying “okay” and “right” all the time meant that everything would turn out okay and right, evidence to the contrary. “So let’s look at the three scenarios.”

“Just three,” said the smoker.

“Okay, there are obviously more scenarios than three, okay? But these are the three likeliest scenarios, right? Okay, we have Scenario A, where all the Van Kleason videos are publicly released, right? Van Kleason’s latest book tanks. There’s a boycott campaign directed towards the house, okay. Because no one will want to do business with them — especially when they find out what he did with the eight-year-old, okay? Authors pull their books, right? And, okay, this could be pretty financially devastating.”

“Why would they blame the house rather than Van Kleason?” asked the smoker.

Chris clicked to the next PowerPoint slide.

“Because of her.”

There was a photo of a Malaysian woman just beneath a Powerpoint heading that read “The Attention Economy.” A supercilious smile, irrepressible smugness in her eyes, and, most preposterously, the knuckle arrogantly arched just under her chin. The telltale pose of someone who had pretended to be important for years, hoping that people would eventually buckle under her indefatigable presence. An influencer type who falsely believed that she was a deep thinker, an essential figure, a woman who moved mountains and who still wouldn’t be satisfied.

“And who is she?” said the smoker, puffing blue smoke out the window.

“Aayizah Cravemour, okay? The author of six books, right? None of them sold very well, okay. She was recently dropped by her agent — right? — after she sent a deranged email to Emma Silverburg, okay? But she’s the one who is likeliest to go after Van Kleason, right? She posts at least two hundred Instagram stories a day. She never stops, okay? She’s led smear campaigns before. She paints herself as a victim, right? This is one of the reasons why she has thirty-two thousand followers on Twitter. People relish in these character assassination campaigns, right, and they want to see what she’s going to do next, okay? There are long Reddit threads about her. Although with Elon’s recent takeover, and with many writers fleeing to Mastodon, there’s a good chance that people are exhausted from all this shit, right?”

“But why her?”

“Our algorithm has scraped the tweets of the top five hundred writers on Twitter, right? And her name shot to the top of the list, okay?”

There was a knock at the door.

Chris flipped off the monitor.

“Come in!”

Food service had arrived. The attendant dressed in white livery removed domed lids that revealed giant platters of cheese. Roquefort, Colby Jack, Asiago, stinky blue cheese, goat’s milk, Fontina, Camembart. It was all there. And crackers. Endless squares in every shape that seemed to consider every known cheese and cracker combination devised by humankind. More crackers than you would find in all the mental health clinics in America.

Chris began to jump up and down.

“Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!” he said.

Mike grunted.

“I did warn you,” said the smoker.

“Yeah, but I thought he was bluffing.”

“When it comes to cheese, Chris Wilde never bluffs.”

Sophie watched this strange man — this guy who was apparently enlisted to guide her back to normalcy — moonwalk across the room like Michael Jackson before spinning in a piruoette and placing forty dollars into the food service guy’s hand.

“Thank you!” shrieked Chris. “Oh, thank you!”

He began to kiss the poor bastard profusely on the cheeks.

“I love you!” said Chris. “I love you so much.”

The cheese man left and he had the look of someone who had significantly undervalued his worth and was seriously considering returning the next day to shoot up the place.

“Now,” said Chris, “we can really begin, okay?”

“What the fuck is this?” said Nick.

“Why, it’s cheese! Lots of cheese! Fuel for the mind!”

“I’m lactose intolerant,” said Nick. “Get this shit out of here.”

“You can’t,” said the smoker.

“Why not?”

“It’s written into his rider.”

“It most certainly is!” cried Nick, who begin to stuff vast gobs of cheese into his mouth.

“Excuse me,” said Sophie.

“I’m eating, okay?”

Sophie stood up from her chair, walked over to Nick, and smacked him across the face, causing half-bitten wads of Jarlsberg to flutter onto the floor, along with a sticky remnant that landed on his purple bowtie.

“Listen, you flippant motherfucker,” said Sophie. “You may be hot shit at Coca-Cola, but my husband is dead and I’ve just learned that he was making snuff films with kids and animals while we were married. Now if you think that’s the kind of thing that should turn everyone in this room into voracious cheese freaks, then I don’t want you here, okay?”

She hated how contagious Chris’s “okays” were and took a deep breath. She noticed that Nick was smiling. The smoker indifferently fired up another cigarette.

“Now I want an actual fucking plan here.”

“I’ve got one, right?”

“Well, what is it?”

The phone positioned at the middle of one of the tables began to ring. Chris swallowed the rest of the cheese in his mouth — it took six rings altogether for him to do this — and picked up.

“Chris Wilde,” he said.

“Bill Flogaast. Boys, we’re going to have to speed up the timetable.”

“Why?”

“There’s been…a development.”

(Next: Yakety Sax)

(Word count: 14,508/50,000)