The Bend of the World: A Novel Read online

  But only two about aliens.

  Out of the first three, yeah. I mean, I think he comes back to it when he starts writing in collaboration with Wilhelm Zollen. And they’re not really aliens. They’re extradimensional emissionaries; ascended beings who may already possess the power that the Project seeks. But, yeah, the second book is called The Testing House and it’s kind of a big digression about George Westinghouse and satanic ritual sex magic. Sort of a one-handed reader, to be honest. Very ahem descriptive, if you know what I mean.

  I know what you mean.

  Well, despite your general lackadaisical attitude about the whole deal, I’ve put out some feelers of my own. We’ll see what pops up.

  You’ve put out some feelers. Phoned up some old contacts. Made some calls.

  I have a not-insubstantial reputation in the Pittsburgh demimonde.

  Your dealers don’t count, besides which, being a customer isn’t exactly being chairman of the board. Also besides which, I don’t see how the black guy who sells you fentanyl or whomever is going to help you find the presumably white dude who sounds like he got a little too much attention from Coach when he was a kid if-ya-know-what-I-mean and has never recovered. Why don’t you just send him a fan letter care of his publisher?

  We were at the corner of Baum and Liberty. Ahead of us in the middle distance the spire of East Liberty Presbyterian poked at the woolen sky. Behind, the gray abandoned lots of the old Pontiac dealership. We started to cross. A little gray car zipped around the corner in order to make the light and missed us by millimeters. That was your car, Johnny said.

  Yes, I said. It was.

  That wasn’t your paramour in the driver seat.

  No. It wasn’t.

  Who, pray tell?

  I can only guess the Greek.

  Ah, the mysterious artist-friend-roommate. Personally, I suspect them of an entirely dour and unappealing sapphism. Speaking of people we need to contrive to meet. How much booze have you stolen from her since you and Lauren Sara contracted a bad case of each other? I can’t believe you don’t even know what she looks like.

  I guess she looks like the girl driving my car around like a maniac.

  I didn’t think she looked particularly Greek, but I’m not sure what a Greek woman looks like. Do they have a phenotype? I imagine they pop out as spry nonagenarians with a single hair on their chin and a single eyebrow on their forehead. We should ask Spiro about her. He knows all the Greeks. I can totally imagine what he’d say, too. Oh, Johnny, she ees artist. She never cumss to church. She ees twenty-fife and hass no babees. I wuddy, I wuddy. He’s very concerned with the overall fertility of the Greek race. You know he’s like whatever the Greek equivalent of a white nationalist is, right? Their party is called the Golden Dawn, apparently, which has nothing to do with the Hermetic Order. Supposedly has nothing to do. By the way, when are you going to get a new car?

  What’s wrong with my car?

  Nothing in particular, but when you went all corporate on me, I figured I’d at least get to tool around in a Bimmer as consolation for your selling out.

  They don’t pay me enough.

  You don’t have to tell me, Morrison. You sold your soul for a bag of beans. And you want to lecture me on the difference between an addict and a dealer.

  I didn’t say addict.

  Not in so many words.

  We parted ways at my apartment. There was a moving truck out front, but there was always a moving truck out front. I saw one of my Uncle Bill’s cars, a little red chip like a Satanist’s pinkie nail among the grimy grays of the neighborhood cars. Oh, hey, Morrison, Johnny said, can you lend me a few bucks? I need to have a beer with these guys and my sovereign debt sitch is a little precarious at the moment. Quantitatively ease a brother’s burden.

  I’m not a bank, I said, but I handed him one of the twenties Mark had handed to me the night before.

  Maybe so, but I’m too big to fail, Johnny said, and he cackled on his way down the stairs. I texted Lauren Sara and asked her if she was letting someone else drive my car. She responded immediately; lied: no. then who almost just killed me?? I asked. me, she wrote; then, a few seconds later: only almost.

  Then I texted Johnny: maybe theyre magic beans.

  jack off, he responded.

  I grabbed a beer and sat with the computer at the kitchen table. My squirrel regarded me through the window. Hey, squirrel, I said. He cocked his head as if he’d heard me and ran off down the roof. I wanted to look up Helen, but I didn’t know her last name, and although I supposed that I could call my Nana, I didn’t really want the long conversation that resulted from every call to Nana. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to know I was interested. Then I remembered that Mark had given me his card last night, passed it deftly into my hand as I crawled out of his car with an exhortation to Call me; I could use you, which had sounded promising when he said it but hummed with ambiguity when I recalled him saying it. Mark Danner, it said. Senior Director of Special Occurrences, it said. Office of the General Counsel. Vandevoort IRCM. It bore the watermark of some sort of bizarre and vaguely Masonic implement that I would later learn was a stylized astrolabe, their logo. I googled Vandevoort IRCM and found their investor relations site. A diversified international company, it said. Combining Values with Value, it said. Empowering business to cross borders and transcend boundaries, it said. Its motto, in English anyway, was, Never Stop. Which seemed a little weirdly sexual to me, but, eh, they were Dutch, and perhaps something was lost in the translation. The French site said, A tout de suite, though, which wasn’t quite the same thing. The German page said, Unaufhaltsam.

  Using Mark’s full name in combination with Helen and some generic art vocab, I found a few party photos in the New York social magazines; found that her last name was Witold; found that she was represented by Arnovich Galleries in Chelsea, which explained why she and Mark and Arlene had seemed to be on familiar terms. Arlene’s ex-husband was Daniel Arnovich, a bit of gossip I’d learned from my grandmother when the museum had hired Arlene. All because of her husband, Nana said. They were still married at the time. He’s thick as thieves with David [that was David Hoffman, the erstwhile chairman of the museum board], and I hear the whole thing is a ploy to get her out of New York. This was at a family dinner, and Mom had said, I never took you for a conspiracy theorist, Nanette. I believe that anything I’m not in on is a conspiracy, Nana said. At the time, I’d assumed she was referring obliquely to my mother’s hints about a retirement home.

  Well, anyway, I found a little five-hundred-word piece Helen had written for Artforum a couple of years ago. It said shit like:

  What I want is for my paintings to imply a microcosm that could actually exist even though it may not actually exist. I want the viewers of my works to be confounded and to wonder if they are seeing the abstraction of an actual object or the concretization of an imaginary one, and I try to apply equal rigor to the creation of forms that do not exist as to the re-creation via representation of those that do.

  Not exactly Walter Pater, although I was immediately struck by its anticipatory echo of our experience the night before. I found images of her work; she painted huge canvasses, immense, wall-sized works that implied a hybridization of abstract expressionism and a cell biology text.

  Her last show was called Abstract Empiricism.

  I found a few other articles about her, which were blandly flattering, but which implied that, while she’d once stood on the cusp of becoming a big deal, she was now in a serious and possibly prolonged phase of Not Doing Much.

  Her Facebook page was private. We had, as yet, no mutual friends.

  6

  Lauren Sara asked if she could keep the car another day. I wanted to say no, but said yes. I lay around the apartment watching movies on my laptop all day, then called Johnny to see if he wanted to grab a beer, but he kept babbling incoherently into the phone, saying things like, Morphic transgraphic, Masonic melodic, tectonic Teutonic bubonic, interspers
ed with an unsettlingly animal bray. You’re fucked up, I said. The tide, he screamed at me, is turning.

  I tried Derek, whom I didn’t hang out with very much anymore, and he agreed to meet me for a beer at Silky’s on Liberty. How’s the city? I asked him. Derek worked in the solicitor’s office. Fucked, he said. Everyone knows that, I said. Yesterday council debated a resolution to amend the city’s no-hunting ordinance to make it legal to shoot a bigfoot. A bigfoot? I said. A bigfoot, he said. How the fuck did that come up? Oh, council doesn’t want to do anything that might result in an actual outcome, so they mostly just introduce resolutions on behalf of their constituents, and you know, only crazy people pay attention to city government. The bigfoot thing was introduced by Jack O’Bannon, who’s got Hays in his district, and you know how many nutjobs they’ve got out in Hays; probably some bigfoots, too; bigfeet. I’m surprised Tremone didn’t say that it was intimidation and discrimination against a minority species, I told him. Ha, he said; Tremone doesn’t come to council anymore. She’s in campaign mode. She decided she’s going for Gadlocki’s old state senate seat. But I thought she was going to run for mayor. Kantsky made a deal with her; he told her she’d never make it through the primary, which was true, and then he told her that he’d help her set up a U.S. Senate race after she served her term in Harrisburg, which is an ingenious way to put it, because you really do serve a term in Harrisburg; it’s like prison, and no one ever escapes. So who’s going to run against the mayor? Same as every time: a couple of asshole proggie jagoffs are going to split the East End vote and get thoroughly bunged out of the primary with thirty percent each; the mayor’ll take the blacks and the blue collars, get forty percent, and if we’re really lucky, the three remaining Pittsburgh Republicans will draw straws to see which one gets to hurl himself off the roof of the Duquesne Club in ritual sacrifice to the God of the Slightly Lower Millage Rate in the general; fuck, man, I’d say we should get rid of the government, but then I’d be out of a job.

  I’m sure you’d land on your feet, I said.

  Fuck that, he said. I’m perfectly happy on my ass.

  Haha cheers, I said, and we moved on to our second beers.

  Oh, hey, he said, you’ll appreciate this. I’m assuming you know about the whole flying saucer website thing.

  Alieyinz. I hesitated; I said, Yeah, Johnny told me that it was completely awesome.

  It’s something. Actually, it’s pretty funny. Currently blocked by the city servers, though, so I can’t read it at work. Anyway, so I’m in the deputy solicitor’s office the other day—have you ever met Karl? He drinks at Gooski’s sometimes.

  No.

  Nice guy, actually. Not a moron. So we’re prepping for this thing we have to do for the Fiscal Oversight Board, when Kantsky himself comes barging in, and you know, we’re all basically terrified of Kantsky, who’s completely nuts and completely irrationally vindictive.

  Johnny says that he used to be in Mossad.

  Uh, yeah, maybe if Mossad is the name of the Rodef Shalom softball team. Although, to be fair, it sounds like the sort of rumor that Kantsky would spread about himself. Anyway, he slams the door open and starts screaming, Where’s DiPresta? Where the fuck is DiPresta? And Karl’s like, Uh, the solicitor is at the municipal law conference in Dallas. He’s back next week. Can we help you? And I’m like, whoa, whoa, what’s this we business, ’cause the last thing I want is for that maniac to know who I am, so I just kind of slump down in my seat, but Kantsky doesn’t care who the fuck I am. He slams this paper down on Karl’s desk and Karl takes one look and sort of starts laughing but trying not to laugh, so I risk a look, and it’s a screen cap from the aliens blog, and someone’s pretty convincingly Photoshopped the mayor’s head onto a porn shot of some twink taking a dildo up the butt and added a little gray alien dude so it looks, you know, like he’s getting probed.

  Oh dear.

  Yeah. You should look it up, by the way. Turns out it’s a fucking .gif. The dildo goes in and out, and the alien smokes a doob. So, Kantsky’s all like, I want this shut down. I want this site gone. And Karl’s like, Jonah, listen, political satire is protected speech. The mayor’s a public official. Kantsky goes absolutely berserk; he’s all like, I WILL NOT HAVE IT SUGGESTED THAT OUR MAYOR IS SOME KIND OF . . . and then he can’t think of the word, because he obviously wants to say fag, but you have to be careful about that shit, so get this: he fucking says fruitcake, and Mary Tremone is, like, suddenly standing right behind him.

  Oh shit, I said. What was she doing there?

  She’s still the head of the finance committee. She was meeting with me and Karl.

  That’s hysterical.

  He couldn’t even say anything. He just stared at her for a minute, and she had the hugest shit-eating grin you ever saw, and then he just walked away. Then Mary comes into the office, sees the thing on Karl’s desk, and says, He doesn’t look a day over twenty.

  By the way, I said, trying to sound like I didn’t give a shit, what’s the deal with all this UFO shit?

  Persistent, Derek said. That’s the deal with it. We actually got a call from some producers from TLC who wanted to feature us in some kind of aliens-built-the-pyramids-and-such show.

  You should’ve said yes, I said.

  Fuck that. I referred them to Kantsky.

  What if he finds out?

  I’ll blame it on DiPresta, the prick.

  Well, what’s the deal, anyway? What’s the official position?

  You sound like Johnny, man. The official position? Christ, Dick Markiewinsky at the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau wanted to run a whole “New Area 51” campaign to attract tourists. Needless to say, that’s not happening. Look, no one gives a shit. Back in the fifties a whole goddamn B-25 crashed in the Mon and no one ever found it. This is Pittsburgh, man. It’s full of weird shit.

  We ended up getting unconscionably drunk for a Sunday night, and Derek confessed to me that he was still pissed that I was dating Lauren Sara. You didn’t even like her very much, I said. In the whole time you were together, I never met her.

  She sucks you in, Derek said, but then you’re embarrassed by her.

  I’m not embarrassed by her.

  Sure you are. She’s not cooo-ooool enough for you.

  You’re drunk, I said.

  We’re friends, he said. You and me.

  We’re friends, I told him.

  Fuck these bitches, he said.

  Yeah, I said. Fuck ’em.

  I gotta take a leak, he said.

  After he’d been gone for ten minutes, I thought I ought to go after him to see if he was all right, and I found him sitting in the stall in the bathroom. Derek, I said. Hey, man, are you okay in there? He didn’t answer. I tapped on the door. Derek? I said. He mumbled. He grunted. I’m good, he said. I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute. Are you sure? I said. Fuck you, fruitcake, he answered. Okay, I said. I was drunk enough that it sounded like a fine plan to me. I managed, barely, to pay our tab, grabbed a few stale pretzels, and stumbled home. I fell into bed fully clothed and slept a blacked-out, anesthetized sleep until two a.m., at which point I woke with the desperate need to piss and a huge boner that made it nearly impossible. I stood unsteadily and willed it to go down; when it didn’t, I did my best to force myself to pee anyway, bending at the waist and trying my best to aim for the bowl, and I made a ridiculous mess. After wiping the toilet off with wadded paper, I felt slightly soberer, so I took a shower, my still-spinning head resting on the cool tile, my back arched against the warm water, the fan humming; I had not, upon reflection, had such a weekend of excess in a long time; it occurred to me that this was the regret I’d feared and then forgotten about, and I was suddenly tired again.

  When I fell back asleep, I dreamed that I woke up on an operating table in a spaceship. I wasn’t bound to it by any physical restraints, but I couldn’t move. The walls were reflective silver. The room was illuminated with floating globes of light like solar flares in a bad photograph.
My head was free to move. I looked down and saw that I’d been drawn open like a frog in a biology class. It didn’t hurt, and although I could see my own guts, I didn’t feel disgust or nausea. An orifice opened in the wall and an immense man dressed like something between a fry cook and a Freemason was carried in on an ornate golden litter by four well-oiled ancient Egyptians. The litter was decorated with bas-relief images of crocodiles and pine trees. He lounged like an odalisque. They set him on the floor, but he seemed to have some difficulty getting up. They bent to help him, but he slapped away their hands prissily. No, no. I’m fine. He had a high-pitched voice, like Truman Capote but without the affectation of matinee sophistication. I just need to get a little momentum. He moved like a seal on dry land, as if he weren’t in the habitat most suitable for his physiology, but he managed to rock himself into a sitting position and then haul himself to his feet. He pulled a pair of rubber gloves—not like a doctor’s, like for dishwashing—from his pocket and snapped them on as he walked toward me. Don’t worry, he said. I’m a doctor. What seems to be the problem? Someone’s cut me open, I said; my voice was calm as if I were telling him I had a little rash. Let’s have a look-see, he said. His hand nestled between my legs. Not there, I said. Now, now, he told me. I always start the exam with a little hand scan.