A first offering of under 30 pages from an under 30 (not listed on Forbes)…
We are the fodder feeders, the collectors of minor mistakes mourned as capital T traumas to keep up with our friends. We paste these limp, papery memories of our slip ups and slights over our bodies while we wait for our underfed brains to decompose. Leaving in their wake, the empty mache mannequins that become our hollowed tombs.
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Two midnights after my thirty-fifth birthday, I found myself meditating on the notion of life as an overlong bit worth all the serious attention you can blueball for twenty minutes over a pint before laughter in your face becomes the universal PTSD response to your existence. On my way home from my Westminster office, I was slammed into a tube wall by a couple engaged in a rather illicit tonguing, when the unpleasant recognition of my insignificance struck me like spittle to the eye from a soused MP. I hadn’t done anything criminal in the last forty-eight hours. At least, nothing therapy worthy. I hadn’t done anything prodigious either. I was simply alive to be punched down and forgotten, alongside syringes, silent graffiti, and human excrement.
What had I accomplished that afternoon? I’d read a few news reports on the international front. According to a Washington Post breaking alert, the entire western coast of America was embroiled in a civil bruhaha over an influencer donating her fat cells to starving shelter dogs. Then at noon, I’d prostrated at the thin-skinned ass cheeks of my boss, Sir Laurent Oswald, a pulp novelist and lesser hated member of the House of Lords, before disassociating back to my Kensington studio in a sublime rinse and repeat of my autopiloted routine.
Whenever I snuck out of my office early, my atheist’s guilt would enforce a nightshift working at home governerned by strict rules for disengagement from worldly temptations. No dates in bars with strangers who would sue me for my avoidance of drugs, alcohol, and post-modern literature. No midnight trysts with acquaintances’ friends who always turned away at the realization that I would never be the nepo grand lovechild of Princess Di and a dying billionaire. And, most importantly, no calling anyone with whom I shared DNA. The number of options for conversation partners still is, mercifully, very high due inordinate overlaps tangling my family tree.
However, when I arrived home that evening, rubbing my tube-bruised sternum, stumbling into my kitchen-cum-bedroom I broke with my principles underlying these aforementioned rules. The strange couple’s kiss had goaded me to abandon the fantasy of a necessary, endless routine and to grapple with the unpredictable world that was slowly disappearing around me. Rather than invent needless tasks to complete for Laurent, I finally dared to peek at my accumulation of personal emails and phone messages that I’d been ignoring for the week.
Among the offensive bank statements, bills, and tax documents, popped up a seemingly innocuous invitation that, unbeknownst to me, was to become the catalytic break from my downhill trajectory. A request for my presence was buried in an email from Laurent’s newish Hollywood book publicist, Jill Ritter, whom he insisted would change my life a la L. Ron Hubbard and emotional cheating.
Jill was an American from the spraytanned haven of Santa Monica, whose approach to promoting clients involved steamrolling others into submission via smiling while whispering jargon-heavy insults. She liked Laurent for his pedigree and dealt with me because I reminded her of her father, a 60s impresario who once called Faye Dunaway a sallow, anorexic heifer at the Oscars. Whenever I demurred that I would never say such a thing, to a powerful woman at that, she assured me that my Cambridge bone structure was what kept people from decking below my waistline with a tire iron.
Jill had called thrice while I was out and left a voice mail announcing that Laurent approved of her kidnapping me for a weekend while he was busy in St. Tropez. I would be, at Ozempic needlepoint, attending an American networking party held by a friend of a family friend as Jill’s pre-divorce plus-one. She would talk up Laurent’s latest endeavor, a 1940s set giallo spy thriller novel to literate boomers, and I would regale the crowd with Shakespearean wit and a titillating ignorance of American political divides. Her family connection, a budding writer whom I was to dazzle on Laurent’s behalf, was code named Bobby. Better known I soon discovered, to worldwide anarchists as one Robert Targill, the wealthiest monster in North Dakota.
According to Jill, Bobby was eager to meet me for my own sake, not simply as Laurent’s stand-in but rather as another sparkling curio from her menagerie of literati clients. And we had a lot in common. From what I could glean through Wikipedia, Bobby survived a childhood on the fringes of an unincorporated Californian cult compound before boarding a Harley Davidson up to a Hare Krishna settlement deep within the Appalachian foothills. By twenty-one, he pulled his first feat of true dictatorial heroism, couping his uncle’s D.C. liqueur store chain on the very prescient eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Finally, having skinned millions from the backs of depressed vets and teenage junkies, Bobby and his new family- a third wife, Jill’s sorority frenemy, and their son- found themselves settled in a castle overlooking the Canadian border.
Why I should be of a sudden interest to someone with Bobby’s maverick bona fides wasn’t totally beyond my guessing capacities. Of course, I couldn’t deny the obvious parallels in his wunderkind bullshitter biography to mine. As far I know, I’m Googleable to anarchists as Campell Grice-Hutchinson, a parliamentary economics researcher who was hired for writing what I thought was an anonymous op-ed that disemboweled the U.K.’s upper crust just poorly enough to land a knighted boss coasting on an inherited peerage.
With little expectations of an exciting reveal as to Bobby’s motives, I caved in my bed and offered my ascent to Jill’s hostage plot. I figured, Bobby may be bored and in need a diversion from himself. And besides, I knew that I could, for little effort, be such a diversion. I could charm a Bobby a dozen with my first name alone. On prior work trips taken when Laurent was in contention for the American ambassadorship, I’d learned that wealthy older Americans of Bobby’s species always clap for an accent show from an admittedly tweedy Brit. Perhaps we dandies from the old country tickle some inner imperialist roots, our seeming insouciance towards humanity’s tragedies resonating with white America’s nativist dream: a de facto top slot in the pecking order, on a tier immune from bootstraps morality and capitalistic cattle prodding to work harder.
What I hadn’t anticipated was an instant call back to my RSVP text from Jill, made with Bobby salivating on her shoulder at dawn. I could hear him over inhalations of waves, in a molasses-coated tenor lilt, asking her to ask me if I was qualified to speak with him about his writing. Jill, who never minced epithets, labeled us “squeamish pricks” for dancing around a private conversation. She then informed Bobby that I- as Laurent’s representative- would be happy to read a manuscript excerpt and chat over the weekend on land. While my head nodded at a dangling opportunity out of habit, I quietly cursed my inability to claim continental European unfamiliarity with the English language.
Nonetheless, I forever held my peace and in due course of three days, found myself imprisoned in a cheap middle airplane seat without a working TV. I had little choice but to slog through the manuscript bearing Bobby’s nauseatingly jingoistic World War II love story that roiled my guts with its sanitized romanticization of a Nazi defector. The obvious, Hemingway-lite affection to his curt prose only compounded the sensation of wet plaster choking my exposed orifices as I wasted the next seven hours gagging on a trifecta of cliches. Dry sex, stunted dicks, and stray bullets.
Eventually, thank God, my rickety plane plunged and dribbled onto the Bismark, North Dakotan tarmac due to rain slick, forcing Bobby’s manuscript from my all too eager hands lubed with secondhand sweat. While babies rioted and I commiserated with the lack of champaign in our collective bloodstream, our captain announced that we would be taxing. An elderly gentleman needed to finish his first-class, mile high heart attack on the flight ahead. I took the opportunity to brace my feet on Bobby’s Clipart cover page and call Jill, who answered my hello with a threat. I had an afternoon to find a slightly frumpy, mega church appropriate suit.
She subsequently banned me from overly fitted shirts and printed socks. These were, per a recent American CBS news special, the secret tells that would reveal my truth as a foreign-born, woke pseudointellectual sans genius visa who may be asked to show papers. For my own safety, I would be playing a slightly boorish, rabidly heterosexual Michael Caine. Directed thusly, I deplaned while pretending to be my older brother, Aubrey, a drama school dropout who found his true calling at alcoholics anonymous.
Jill had her company comp me generously enough for my efforts at self-erasure. A black Cadillac with buffed windows arrived at the airport bearing my name misspelled on the dash, chauffeured by a stout, older man in aviators who hoisted me into his back seat, prisoner exchange style. He soon left me at a five-star hotel dressed up as a sleazy Victorian cabin where, I was warned, rightwing venture capitalists regularly trolled for escorts with my weight and hairline.
The oak paneled hotbox suite I was pre-assigned showcased an uninspiring view of a parking lot teaming with clunky American made cars and even squarer couples who I didn’t think would appreciate me seeing them off on their passionless dates. So instead, after showering, I decided to go full method and join their tribe of pudgy-jawed men and turquoise, cross-bearing women. Tired, hungry, and cash poor due to a mix-up at the exchange counter, I let myself be judged while I waited for sundown in the hotel lobby. A few people took note of my unfortunately fitted suit that I had thrown into my suitcase last minute. I made a point of greeting them in my smarmiest Etonian drawl and was warmly rewarded with avoidant hostility.
To my relief, my previous mob handler arrived within the hour and delivered me in his Cadillac to a tobacco heir’s cold war, space-age barnyard palace protruding from a haunted stretch of plains. At the silver front doors, I was greeted as Cinderella by Jill’s assistant, Evan, a vapid former child star. While we marched past an endless oppression of appropriated carvings and giclees boasting stallions on Indigenous-wiped landscapes, Evan briefed me on the evening’s run of show. Jill would walk me through the hors d’oeuvres round with her professional acquaintances, then we would part for dinner soundtracked by a prog-folk cover band. At last, sometime between digestion and midnight, I would be locked in a game room with Bobby.
Evan had to pretend that he was working, and too soon for my liking, he released me into a creamy, sterile ballroom resembling a bank lobby cafe, where I stood no chance at anonymity. Before I could survey the space for a refuge on the walls, a mass surge of the homogenous crowd inside propelled my less than willing descent to the ballroom’s center, shuffling me cheek-to-cheek, between tanned business cowboys and tanned telegenic housewives.
Fortunately, Jill was hard to miss as a five foot ten-inch glittering column of copper tweed and cinnamon extensions. She quickly pulled me aside to straighten my poorly chosen blue tie and stick a cigarette between my teeth, a necessary show of respect to our host. When I protested, she pointed her cigarette over the crowd at a sickly, prunnish man, holding court among a group of mostly women by a 70s style bar.
“The host. Harry.”
“Harry what?” I couldn’t help a juvenile dig.
“Nothing. He’s a big congress douche from Wyoming.”
“Right. So, is big hairy nothing, one of the creeps allergic to universal health insurance? He looks unwell.”
“Harry Chitten. The wife died a month ago. That’s all you need.” Jill swatted my arm with her clutch bag, but I could hear a whiskey-fired laugh escape her throat, rattling the gold chain around her neck. She nudged me towards Harry. I balked.
“You can really see his devastation.”
“His memoir’s coming out this year. He’s sitting on big publisher contacts.”
“You want me to ferret how much his life rights are worth?”
“Yeah. But ease into it. Like tell him your grandpa was an intelligence guy for the British government in one of the world wars. He’ll eat up the lore.”
“Oh. Should I say my last name is Bond?”
“Your vibe doesn’t project MI6.” And with that morale boosting tidbit of reassurance, Jill perp walked me past the throng of women coalescing around Harry, the loaded bachelor.
What I lacked in any exposed cleavage Harry may have desired, I immediately attempted to overcompensate for using well-rounded flattery skills. My years in Parliament had schooled me in the art of turning verbal tricks to please my advantageously connected, very important superiors. To this day I can, almost involuntarily, excrete feigned codependency, naïve admiration, and idolatry of leadership so fermented on the nose, you half expect my words to curdle midair. And yet, as my mother would say in reference to her latest best friend, narcissists will devour whatever quality morsel of attention you feed them, poisoning be dammed.
For a brief minute in Harry’s presence, I managed a superficial conversation covering British versus American rain patterns and my psychological discomfort with feet, balls, and discussing organized sports called football. But I surmised in an instant that Harry would never fall in lust with me, and so I offered him, as a member of Congress, my unfettered opinion on retaliatory tariff policies. Harry, failing to take the hint, shouted me down before I could poke holes in State secrets and announced that his pro-Palestinian grad student daughter loved Laurent’s satirical books. I was dumbstruck with that tragically effective blow and found myself tongue-tied in the unnerving position of having no clever quips left with which to decimate Harry’s character beyond decrying his ignorance.
Jill immediately dragged me into a hallway covered with floor-to-ceiling medieval tapestries and reminded me of my purpose for the night. The crowd expected fake news fairytales in my accent, and fake news I would provide them as their hired jester. When I rejoined that Laurent was paying her by the hour, she swallowed a pill from her clutch and threatened to shove one into me, too. Needless to say, I acquitted myself with passable neutrality for the remainder of the hors d’oeuvres social hour.
A rubber chicken wrapped in soggy TV diner dough served as our main meal course and kept my jaw occupied while infamous meat skeptic Jill small-talked at our tablemates for me. In short order, our imbalanced efforts to enact mass mind control and a Mandala-effect rewrite of my unstable foreigner impression came to fruition at a disconcerting pace. I was suddenly astroturfed into the stoic masculine archetype that the crowd could write off in terms of their mythology. I was finally a safe, known quantity.
The musical interlude that followed my silent comeback tour made for a decent break. Around me, guests swayed into one another’s spouses with a palpable, fervent conviction in their moral exceptionalism, like part-time sinners being live exorcised back to good standing at an Evangelical rave. At last a comfortable anonymous, I dared to slip out my cellphone and check the time when Jill prodded me with her cigarette.
“Bobby’s waiting. In the den.”
“But I forgot to swipe my butter knife, in case!”
“He’s asking for your opinion. How is that threatening?”
“I don’t want to be accountable for his Nazi obsessions!”
Jill had no further comment. She dragged me by my tie through the ballroom, down another hallway, to a toffee hued, marble void of a den that could’ve doubled as Heaven’s suburban insane asylum. She promptly abandoned me at the half-cracked open door with instructions to pulpify my ego before entering. I agreed and lingered at the entrance a minute, trembling at the prospect of being objectified to satisfy some stranger’s curiosity for an evening.
Upon peeking inside the room, I spied Bobby before he spied me. There he sat on a velveteen brocade chair at a vintage pool table, with the placid smile of a conqueror surveying his new dungeon. From my vantage, Bobby cut the gentle giant shadow of a once wholesome man, now salted and sinewy from straddling two centuries. But his face, I learned on second glance, was perpetually boyish and cunning, never broadcasting any deeper emotions than self-satisfied mirth. He wore jeans, heeled boots, and a tucked in dress shirt buttoned to his cleanshaven chin that lent him a puritanical pastor impression.
I made the first move over the threshold. Bobby, who I knew could hear my feet deliberating on the stone floor, evidentially needed me to approach him. When he deigned to turn around and acknowledge my entry, I bowed my head. A calculated submissive offering, I reasoned with my ego, that I could later use as a bargaining chip for his good will. He nodded at a spindly wooden dining chair in the corner of the room, and the instant my back was to him, addressed me.
“You saw my book, huh?”
“I read it on the plane.”
“Thoughts?”
To buy time, I pulled my designated spartan seat to the pool table, consciously maintaining an arm plus a pistol’s length between us. Bobby noticed and scooted closer until I could sniff his hair gel and nicotine breathe.
“There’s a certain minimalistic prose-”
“Don’t shit me.”
I flinched reflexively at his preternatural ability to see through my impulse to politesse and bowed my head again. I had to give him credit.
“You overwrote four hundred pages of sophomoric incel propaganda.”
He couldn’t flinch. Instead, he laughed with a deceptively upbeat resonance.
“Atta boy!”
“It wasn’t my bag.” I did my best to project genuine humility while I internally smarted at being called a boy.
“Tell your boss. The first book was his peak. But oh man. I couldn’t do all the recent social commentary fluff. It’s like he’s trying too hard to cover something up. Stick with the thrillers.”
I must have looked incredulous or lombotimized because he reached out and slapped my swinging kneecaps, almost playfully, as if checking a dear friend for signs of life. My brain instantly shorted and defaulted to my usual defense in increasingly intimate situations. I let go of my trigger.
“Would you have preferred he fetishize carnal hypermasculinity, Aryan supremacy, and sexual nihilism?”
Bobby all but purred with deep satisfaction, clearly yet confoundingly enraptured by our abrupt tête-à-tête. And to my shock, I felt a similar electricity overcome my body, tingling me with the warmth of having been accurately assessed and accepted to my rotten core. Here was this red neck Machiavellian, thirty odd years my senior, from another continent, who inexplicably felt a connection to some base aspect of my character.
“I’m not supposed to say this.”
“But you will.”
“To Hell, I will. You tell him he’s selling out. Pandering.”
“He doesn’t earn a living from his books.” A factual, non-denial of Bobby’s argument, I thought.
“So, he’d get even richer playing to his instincts.”
“And be cancelled?” This line elicited a chortle from Bobby.
Instantly self-conscious, I followed up with a non-committal shrug, leaving open a gap to test the strength of our so far even keeled repartee. I was eager to be distracted by the quiet, misdirected even, from my secret yearning for approval from someone who had violated my limits for off-color taste. But Bobby, ever one step ahead, remained impassive, throwing the burden of conversational momentum back onto me.
“What are Laurent’s instincts, in your opinion?” Part of me was curious to hear him struggle for civility.
“Let’s be honest. To do whatever is convenient for him. Isn’t that why you’re here? He couldn’t be bothered.”
“I wanted the free vacation.”
“You know, Jill told me about Sir’s bad behavior. Taking bribes. Sleeping around with hookers. Maybe selling secrets? Who knows yet.”
“All right.” I tried to hide my genuine confusion, but my shoulders gave me away, twitching until I could sense their pointy blades grazing my flush cheeks.
“He’ll be out of your government soon. And you’ve got your side hustle.”
“I don’t normally review bad novels for free. This weekend was a one off.”
“No, Jill showed me your neolib mole Substack. That could be a problem for you, I assume, if your higher ups knew the Marxist agenda you’re selling.”
In the face of his expectant grin, I internally pled the fifth. My chicken-tenderized jaw muscles unhinged and a helpless, heaving gag befitting a kidnapping victim suddenly tumbled from my diaphragm. The Stockholm Syndrome that Jill had mysteriously injected into me began to wear off and the gravity of my predicament sank in. I had been lured to a foreign land as a pawn in an unplanned shakedown of my government that I, the unslickest of low-level data crunchers, couldn’t lie my way through on behalf of King and Country.
“How much would he want for a trade deal.”
“A Pulitzer Prize?” Maybe it’s an Anglo trait, but I could never talk about money for money’s sake unless instructed to be deliberately gauche for a paycheck. And I didn’t think it my place to tell Bobby that Laurent was broke and would likely only take a bribe in cryptocurrency funneled through a few different countries.
“Okay. Jilly’s dad’s an old high school friend. That’s why I’m happy to support her business and get her client a job. He’s in your Treasury, right? He’s an economist.”
“He hires fucking decent economists!” I couldn’t help my indignation. I had long ago come to accept that my deep resentment towards Laurent would be etched on my gravestone besides a comparative list of our credentials.
“But he’s the got power to cut export spirit tariffs, no? I’ll be honest. I’m losing millions by the minute on the petty numbers you guys slap on your liquor. And I know people who can buy him a fancy Pulitzer. That would be a pretty good consolation. After he’s canned?”
“I would be the shootable messenger, then?”
“Well, more than that. Jillian needs to fuck you before she fucks me. I’ll wait.”
“Jesus! I’m a little younger than I look.” I broke down in laughter, stunned yet oddly charmed at his uncouth, unsentimental honesty.
“We’ll talk tomorrow.”
Bobby didn’t seem to appreciate any signal of happiness in me. His order, delivered in a lower register, concluded the substantive portion of our first date. No longer dreaming of silence, I rattled off a litany of possible excuses to myself for why I needed to escape before settling on an urge to use the bathroom. While I made my retreat, Bobby’s tongue victory lapped his upturned lips. He beamed and leaned back on his throne to gloat, thrilled that he had won our first battle. I could sense him sneering at my back as I trailed out of the sanitarium, less stable than when I had entered.
I lacked any desire to see Jill again as a cap off to my sleepless night ahead. Instead of returning to the ballroom, I texted my driver, Uri, to meet me at the valet stand. He was prompt and chivalrous like only former Soviet butcher could be. Before leaving me at my hotel, he asked if I would care to try antidepressants despite my vomit-ready expression and gave me a band aid to cover the trenchlike cut on my forehead I had accidentally carved while pinching my eyes shut on our ride back.
Once safe my room, I broke another cardinal rule that I held sacred on workdays. For the first time in months, I vulnerably sought comfort from the woman who called me my father’s left-leaning, stunted prick. In a bid for consolation, I phoned my mother who, as customary, stonewalled and sent my attention plea to her full voicemail.
Still, I must’ve sounded desperate enough, for twenty minutes later, while I was excavating chicken dust from my gums, I received a link to initiate a video chat sent to my laptop. On camera, I pretended to self-soothe while Ida Grice-Hutchinson lovingly wrapped curlers in her hair. Thirty seconds of wordless staring was all we could manage before she launched an invective against my misguided decision to leave London for the classless States without consulting in order, Laurent, a psychologist, and a self-defense trainer.
“I’m in Bismark. Not Belgorod! There’s no war.”
“I’m aware. I wasn’t expecting you to come home in one piece.” She pursed her lips at me. Then, as usual, her dreaded inquiry came as to whether I had served as a travel companion to anyone who wasn’t an older man or a saphically-inclined woman. I was unprepared to consider what I was to Jill other than a disposable mouthpiece for her business, so I coyly suggested that such a question would be better put to Laurent when he returned from his vacation. To which Ida replied that she’d be more interested in hearing from my psychologist. We mutually agreed, I would never see a self-defense trainer.
“And of course, you were mugged!” She pointed at her screen, in the direction of my facial cut.
“I was fleeing a party.”
“You don’t attend parties anymore, you attend work events.” True, I had been exiled from society parties two years ago. The whole debacle had been a misunderstanding, triggered when I accidentally walked in on a famous Siberian financier- call him Mr. Oligarch- squatting pantsless over a department store urinal, filming himself as a present to a young woman being tracked as a terrorist.
In rapid succession, Mr. Oligarch had labeled me depraved for making eye contact with him mid-orgasm. I had no choice but to defend my honor. I remind him, his insult wouldn’t carry weight coming from a cocksucking Putin puppet. He may have emitted a stream of bodily fluids in my direction, I can’t recall. In any case, I responded with an inelegant but fairly topical pee tape joke. While in the throws of passion, I wasn’t anticipating a future brush with infamy, I was equally mortified alongside Putin Puppet when, a week later, his video reached the work computer of his lover who turned out to be nothing more than a cosmetology student with an arms dealer husband. Putin Puppet was soon paid to retire by someone possibly connected to the Crown and I was banned from networking social events and elevated to head researcher for the Exchequer’s office simultaneously over an encrypted government email.
Naturally, Ida was less than helpful in the subsequent years following my promotion. She never let the opportunity pass to express her opinion that my earnest attempt at full-fledged career was a disgrace. It was shameful for her baby son of upper-middleclass privilege to debase himself with rolled sleeves and paperwork when he ought to be day drinking on company cards and smuggling drugs to aristocrats like her friends’ children!
As I blathered on about my evening’s non-party event, I didn’t sense Ida’s usual disapproval of my shop talk so much as her crueler, but easier to manage, boredom. And when at last, I concluded my bulleted plot summary just shy of my meeting with Bobby, she merely smiled and told me I should go to sleep. I don’t know what prompted me in that instant, curled in bed for the viewing pleasure of my mother, to cling to her from across the Atlantic, but I held on.
I gave her the play-by-play of Bobby’s deal, sparring no distress as I dissected how he had disarmed and outclassed me with his filthier, blunter language. I even waded into his implication that I would make serviceable bait to lure Jill into eventually settling for him. During my recounting, Ida’s glazed over expression- highlighted in blue light from her off-camera cellphone screen- slowly morphed into an intense giggle that culminated in a snort at thought of me struggling to seduce a 50-something Californian divorcee.
She found no further humor in our conversation, however, when I asked her to choose whether or not I should entertain Bobby’s offer. She glared at me with the shame and denial-laced indignation I’d only seen in fame hungry mothers of serial killers on reality TV. Of course, I had to take the offer! The opportunity to serve as Laurent’s second in a frivolous, comically slimy international scam was life-altering enough to compete with my brother’s latest accomplishments and bizarre enough to leave my old school banker of a father unintimidated.
With my utility to my family so determined, Ida stopped short, conveniently reducing herself to an extraneous, placeholder variable in the unresolved equation of our one-to-one relationship. She turned sideways, facing me only in profile form, and offered a goodbye to my miniaturized reflection in her vanity mirror.
I was restless for the remainder of the night and sorely unprepared for the flurry of texts I received at dawn. Evan wanted to know if I would meet Jill and Bobby at a lakefront clubhouse for a breakfast of smoked seafood and some mystery drink called farm juice. Though I abhor seafood and alcoholic vegetables in liquid form, I accepted. I could tell from Evan’s punctuation that he wasn’t asking me a question. I didn’t have a choice to decline, or else Bobby would forever claim the memory of my prior retreat as his victory. Meanwhile, I would go down on American soil as a pathetic poster boy for the kind of fragile, weak-willed emotionality demonized in Bobby’s culture. On principle, I agreed to show in exchange for bread and water.
But by the time I was fully functional, I was running too late to pre-caffeinate away any trepidation I may have harbored towards meeting Bobby again. Uri was dispatched to drag me to the lake and on our sunrise drive, I did my best to suffer through the undeniable, physical prowess of the hilly terrain that swept past the sepia windows of his Cadillac. I needed my tired eyes to resist assumptions pulled from old Hollywood lies about what kinds of handsome souls were really buying up mansions that clogged the gold-dusted arteries along the crags and crevices of the Badlands. If this breakfast was to be my last stand as a free man of integrity, I wanted opposition dirt and ammunition stockpiled for a new battle.
Unfortunately, I had done enough stalking on my plane ride over to reasonably conclude that Bobby’s character couldn’t just be wholesale excoriated under the coastal definition of a deplorable. He was, as far as I could tell, a harmlessly sheltered byproduct of his generation. No more or less insular and ignorant than what you would expect from a pale, middle-aged man wearing boots with spurs to a men’s only Church social on a weeknight. He feared God may not exist and more often prayed to Clint Eastwood, Ronald Reagan, and Sam Adams. His evenings were spent on Cormac McCarthy novels, historical documentaries, and chaste dates at ranch wine bars less honkytonk brothel than Hallmark movie set. In short, nothing about his profile suggested an intentional propensity towards mass evil. Grand-wizard hording guns and girls for a racially-motivated, apocalyptic crusade he was not.
Yet I could see no version of our overlapping timelines in which we would be anything more than one poorly executed exchange away from clashing over the basic laws of our realities. He lived in a mental world where his deal was a perfectly reasonable, achievable transaction. I lived in one where it would be nixed as too stupid a premise for a low-hanging improv special.
In my twenties, I know that I would’ve derived great satisfaction in simply reducing him to a punchline, a strawman hick, unworthy of serious consideration as a negotiation adversary let alone a conversational partner. Now older and a hair less delusion, my intuition cautioned me from ignoring his buried intellect and drive for supremacy. No doubt, he saw himself as the unimpeachable hero, the Jesus of his own messianic narrative struggle for power in which every man, woman, and child was a cudgel born to satisfy his needs. He certainly wasn’t going to shrink back and submit himself for ethical correction from someone of my non-authority.
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Our party met dockside, by a small manmade lake behind a recreation center’s main office, mislabeled as the fancier sounding “marina boathouse”. Bobby pulled up in a designer golfcart. Jill leaned over his shoulder from the backseat. Ignoring her, Bobby parked, then offered me a shake, and as our fingers tugged back and forth, my eyes lingered long enough on his hand catch a glimpse of the black dirt under his nails. Jill watched us with a curious expression.
“Hit it off last night. Together?”
“He’s a good kid!” Bobby, for all his crass scheming, knew how to pull off a respectable stupidity bluff in the face of a cheap shot inuendo that required no response. I tried to steel my attention to focus on his many faults, but I couldn’t resist the sensation of my innards melting as he shot me a folksy grin, designating me his special ally.
I’d always wanted to be a beloved son to someone else’s elder statesman, haloed with the pride that my father lavished on Aubrey. My exhaustion-addled brain convinced me that the coming breakfast was my last chance to lock down my patriarch before my hair would grey and I’d be deemed too old to seek advice from other men. Laurent, the latest significant male in my day-to-day, was a foregone disaster, who, in my humble opinion, didn’t deserve me as his squire. The many other ostensibly normal-hearted fathers I passed on London’s streets saw nothing worthy of love in my prickly, pedantic exterior. Maybe, I reasoned, Bobby was the best that I’d ever be able to claim for a mentor.
Bobby’s artificially inflated good humor carried over a little longer as he guided Jill and I to an iron table at the dock’s end, preset with bellinis in mason jars and a pungent charcuterie board covered in fish gametes and dehydrated meats. I declined the alcohol and the snapper spawn flesh closest to my mouth. Jill performed her best vegan for Protestant Lent cop-out and began to gnosh on an energy bar from her pocket. Only Bobby dared slather beluga caviar on inch-thick buffalo jerky cubes with his bare fingers.
Jill came prepped with an agenda that she rattled off her cellphone. She wanted to talk book sales and name drop. Bobby wanted to drink, swallow, and study her lips. On my part, I was happy to be a forgotten voyeur with minimal stakes in their two-hander soap opera flirtation. I could, at my lonely pleasure, find rabelaisian satisfaction in measuring the shrinking distance between their thighs or listening to Bobby intermittently nibble at his fishy fingernails. I knew I had successfully reached some freak-of-science, open-eyed REM dream state when my thoughts became deeply fixated on the answer to one question. Would Bobby’s digit suckling cancel out any aphrodisiac points accrued for his oyster consumption? My consciousness was verge of drifting away, contemplating a calculation based on Bobby’s mountain of shells, when Jill nudged me.
“What happened to you! No complaints? No running commentary?”
Confabulation and flooding the zone with non sequitur distractions from my true feelings had never been among my strengths. I made a swift decision not to stretch myself too far under Jill’s gaze. My best hand was to trauma dump, invoke any first amendment rights afforded to white tourists, and book it back to London early.
“Still adjusting to the time zone.” I gave myself one preliminary lie.
“You were fine yesterday.”
“I didn’t realize this weekend was a criminal negotiation.”
Jill frowned uneasily Bobby. If he was unnerved by my comment or Jill’s sagging cheekbones, his face didn’t betray him. He whispered to Jill with a silver fox smolder, cutting me entirely out of her line of sight.
“It’s a boy thing.” He stroked his peppery stubble.
“We’re not boys.” I could hear my non-existent tolerance for insincerity seep through my lungs, crushed under the weight of my crossed arms. I was throwing the gauntlet down to break though Bobby’s wall of smarm. He had to recognize the sheer, pathetic ridiculousness of his proposal. On what grounds was he rationally hoping that Laurent could or would, for that matter, effect sweeping international economic policy reforms for his benefit?
“You said you’d talk to him!” Bobby addressed Jill while shaking his head at me, as if I was their delinquent child that she needed to discipline.
“I told him you’re a writer. You didn’t read my email.” She shoved her seat back from the table. Bobby turned to me.
“Not worth rehashing last night. You think you can sway him to consider?”
“No! Absolutely, under no-“ I stopped mid-scream, unnerved as I watched Jill snake a hand over Bobby’s collarbone. She unsubtly massaged his pecks through his shirt, in such a violation of decency that, to my bemusement, seemed to restore Bobby’s sanity. He trained a dark, electric pupil on me.
“I’ll give you a personal transfer right now. Five hundred grand. Your money. You can quit the day job. You’re miserable, aren’t you? Lying for a living. That you’re not a socialist.”
“I’m happy to have a clean record, thanks.”
“You want it in Bitcoins?”
“Wouldn’t it be really God damn poor form for a socialist to take any sort of monetary bribe?” I almost grabbed a bellini but caught myself in time. Jill locked eyes with me and distracted Bobby with her surprisingly magical fingers a final time before stomping off to the golf cart. Bobby lazily stretched in his seat, turned on and totally at ease with my anger.
“Hey, it was worth a try. I was positive you’d break. I would’ve.”
“To be fair, I think your offer was as much a litmus for intelligence as integrity. And I’m not thick enough to overestimate my money laundering skills. Or blockchain hacking abilites.” Feeling vindicated, I stood up, making sure to grip the table edge so intensely that Bobby’s oyster shells rattled to the ground around his feet. In return for my immaturity, he buttered on his puppyish grin, drawing me momentarily back into his orbit.
“Flying home today?”
“Planning on it now.” Truthfully, my flight wasn’t scheduled until the following evening.
“Good. You say anything. I’ll sue you to fucking ashes.” He purred.
“Of course.” I offered him my hand and the best smile I could manage while squinting at the sun’s reflection on the lake behind his head. He waited a solid beat for my arm to droop before vigorously shaking my hand, his thumbnail pressing on the tender, exposed skin flap between my thumb and pointer.
Nothing more came of our breakfast. Bobby waved and drove Jill back to the front of the boathouse into oblivion. I chose to keep my distance and circle the lake’s perimeter while I scrambled to secure discount same-day flights to Heathrow on my cellphone. Barely a minute into my panic search, low reception left me dawdling and wandering off course, hands held beseechingly high in the air, on a zombified suicide march to the surrounding woods that mercifully interrupted by a text. Uri, by now my favorite American, had somehow telepathically felt my pain and was dutifully waiting with my luggage in the parking lot. When we met, he presented me with black coffee and a jelly donut.
I was touched, as he fed me and took control of my ticket search, explaining that his son was an air traffic controller who would send me the family-only discount code. My superego was too preoccupied with the joy having just escaped a massive, international fraud to bother declining a new opportunity to participate in what I still tell myself is a minor fraud. Without so much as a qualm, I snagged the first seat Uri recommended on a notorious, off-brand airline boasting a Wisconsin layover.
Sadly, saliva-infused beer musk boiled with the funk of midwestern sweat wasn’t powerful enough to fully inoculate against the heady cycle of what-if alternate endings to Bobby’s breakfast deal that I was contemplating. I did my time in Milwaukee, riffling though magazines to distract from memories of my flirtation with illegality, by conducting a bookstore study of billionaire embezzlers, humanitarian crisis enthusiasts, racist edgelords, mass murderers, and sex offenders pursuing the full spectrum of predilections. These powerhouses were, I gleaned, the cultural icons with artfully transgressive occupations, who attracted talent agents and profiles by renowned journalists. I could only conclude in the window before my boarding time, with some modicum of self-righteous comfort, that I would never possess the requisite psychopathy to ever become a North American hero.
In keeping with the weekend’s failures, my flight from Milwaukee to Heathrow arrived a folksy four hours late at the wrong gate due to amnesia induced by the strobing lights of a dayglow blitz announcing predawn operations. I was left with ample time to fret over my coming Monday morning meeting that I could now attend, after our captain barred us from leaving our seats. My what-ifs of the past quickly became what-ifs of a future variety, only strengthed and heightened by my limited Wifi access while my plane spun in circles. I began to obsess over the rather unpleasant possibility awaiting me. What if Laurent was planning to sack me for insubordination?
I must’ve been unconvinced by my own drama. Maybe Laurent didn’t think enough of me to think about me at all. By the time I found my bags and bearings, I had no more brain cells left to spare on guessing at Laurent’s motives. I was disoriented and simply eager to execute the familiar motions of my typical work week.
I snagged beaten, old school London cab to my studio and finally addressed the anvil headache reminding me that I hadn’t slept or eaten anything more substantive than a quarter donut in twenty-four hours. After dozing for ten, I dry swallowed a mouthful of old cereal and skipped showering or changing clothes. There was no logic in wasting a clean shirt on my own blood and piss. After all, I was pretty sure that I’d soon be dragged before a firing squad of my colleagues, rearing to blow their bullet loads in my face behind Laurent’s doors.
I was so sure, in fact, that I hopped off the tube a stop early to experience walking with dignity for one final mile. My resignation speech was half memorized when the dreaded cellphone that I’d only recently freed from airplane mode began to throb in my pocket. My legs, aided by irrational conspiracies, instantly lunged into midday traffic in a bid to provoke a sympathetic injury that would hopefully make my sacking all the more awkward and unpleasant.
Ignoring drivers’ accusations of insurance fraud and my own private urge to give a Midnight Cowboy salute, I scuttled to the opposite busy sidewalk and let my feet pause to the drumbeat of my text ringtone. Though I fought for inertia, my physical corpse was ferried along, downstream, in a school of middle-managers who paid no attention while I peeked through slit fingers at the thousands, upon thousands of messages pinging and pecking at my eyeballs. One particularly stylized all caps warning from none other than Jill hooked my attention. “Laurent office hacked. Bribery, sex crimes, racism, etc. under scrutiny! Run!”
Her command popped my knees from their sockets. My upper half plummeted like a broken like, until I was squatting into a homemade pipe bomb, scattering the crowd around me. I was wracked with the sudden existential consideration. To whom or to what institution did my loyalty ultimately belong? Should I limp off now and save myself from becoming a Hitchcockian casaulty? Make my escape to some remote tax haven? Should I hang around long enough to be the designated, try hard who helped investigators only to be arrested for someone else’s fuckups?
I’d seen enough true crime content to have a sense of roughly where my character would be pigeonholed by the media Gods when the salacious stories dropped. I was a natural patsy who would be thrown to the pitchforks when the masses came to fillet the rich. I could hear myself careening through an unsympathetic defense of my conduct, failing to convey genuine ignorance regarding any knowledge of the skeevy, shameful dealings that went on between the MPs above me. I could just as easily envision myself, foot shoved in mouth, unable to articulate how I had been seduced by the enticing rigor of my job, mentally satiated into an obliviousness towards any evil my efforts were supporting.
From my limited vantage, it was perfectly clear how someone could emotionally bifurcate a love for their singular identity in a role from an endorsement of the ethos underpinning the whole shitty system in which their role functioned. I could hate Laurent’s breed and enjoy servitude in an office that was crucial to our government’s agenda at the same time. But I was also acutely aware that no one with a 21st century attention span would listen to me long enough to question their own interpretation of facts. No one would bother to entertain a version of this disaster epic in which I was a harmless, workaholic scapegoat with little interest in my boss’s personal failings.
With misgivings amplified, I somehow gathered the presence of mind to stand up and rejoin the crowd before my fears of having to make any immediate choices weighed me down again. Jill, I realized, uniquely understood the magnitude of reputational damage that would trickle from the offices of more tabloid famous MPs to eventually water-torture Laurent’s exhaustive list of toadies on which both of our names were guaranteed to be unredacted. Her recommendation to run wasn’t flippant so much as it was a well-reasoned business risk. At the very least, I thought, I had every reason to give credence to her professional call over the hairbrained panaceas I was being sold as thoughtful advice by anyone who had ever crossed my path with Laurent in the foreground.
As expected, my work group chat for the under 50s was full of able-bodied cowards who were- with their fabulous educational credentials and unlimited parental resources- momentarily plotting a very public exodus via text. A few of my officemates needed me to confirm that I would join a walk out with them for the news cameras, throwing an “I’m actually a labor voter!” hand grenade when asked for a quote. I was, at this point, too frightened of my texts being monitored for signs of treason to respond. Instead, I erased my settings and chucked my cellphone down a sewer grate, hoping the bacteria below would eat away any traces of finger prints.
Cord cut, I raced back to the tube station, guided by visions of burning my laptop near my grandparents’ Cotswold backyard before purchasing, on gift card, another one-way plane ticket back to North Dakota. But I never made it to safety. A painstakingly ominous, chauffeured Bently had been loitering on the half-block between my front door and Kensington Station. Some invisible deity ordered the driver to loop around, so that as I emerged from the station, the backseat door was popped open and a gloved hand snatched me off the street. Before I could complain, I was wedged between two official government secretaries who definitely moonlit as handgun totting bodyguards and presented with a contract that filled a binder.
If I could agree to the standard terms of firing for downsizing purposes, Parliament would make sure that my name never came up in inquiries associated with any MPs’ personal bribery, corruption, racial intimidation, or sexual harassment charges. I would undoubtably be called to testify as one of Laurent’s former professional underlings, were he to be placed specifically under investigation along with his colleagues. All I had to ensure was that I wouldn’t mention any work-related “ethical lapses” and that I would refrain from discussing any domestic or international travel taken for work in the prior eighteen months. These were “extremely fair” terms that were only being presented to a select few favorite worker bees, according to the bodyguards.
I don’t know if it was newfound Americana confidence or extreme exhaustion that made me forgo pretending to read the contract like the good little student I had always been. With the expensive fountain pen pinned to the binder, I scribbled a barely coherent signature on the line below the boilerplate exit memo requirements. Then, flipping a few pages, I noticed the headline titled “Provisions for Termination of Employment” and considered a wide range of gut punch responses before giving in and scanning the notably appealing numbers added to my pension.
I made a convent with myself. I would sign off on this semi-bribe and agree to be sacked but I wouldn’t agree to the under the table censoring of my speech. I left a note indicating that Parliament could complain about my less than impeachable tenure under Laurent’s thumb because I would certainly exercise my free will to say whatever I felt needed to be said about him. The bodyguards paid no attention to me as I penned my lengthy diatribe. They simply snatched the closed binder from my trembling hands when I sighed to indicate I was finished, and at my request, dropped me at my doorstep.
It only occurred to me a second too late, that I should’ve wasted their gas and forced them to drive me back to Heathrow, when to my horror, I heard my door squeal open a crack. My studio was crammed with none other than my mother, Aubrey who works from home on Mondays, and Aubrey’s partner, Dr. Peregrine Barnett, an Oxford art history professor who hardly works at all. My mother was cinematically sniffling, red-eyed, over my rotting cereal bowl at my kitchen table. Meanwhile, Aubrey and Peregrine were cuddling like sex addicts, arms entwined on my bed.
Somehow these three self-induglent hypocrites had broken into my home for an afternoon’s delight of mocking my situation, and yet, when the opportunity presented itself, they refused to be diverted from thoughts of themselves. I decided upon entry, that I ought to laugh at them for once in their lives. So, I waited for them to notice me, manically chuckling in my doorway until snot dribbled out my nose. At length, Ida gathered the breath to choke back a tragic sob and scream for me take a seat.
“Well Ma, my bed and my table are tainted. I’m running low on options.”
“You can’t afford to be that immature right now!” Aubrey batted his lazy, smug lashes down at me. Though we used to look an upsetting deal more alike than most brothers three years apart, our faces had ossified in our 30s into very different depictions of privileged childhood gone awry. Aubrey was always praised for his charming insincerity while I was routinely avoided for being overtly calculated and hyper-aware of everyone’s faults. While I fought back a blush of anger, I momentarily paused to consider that we had probably never looked or felt more dissimilar in our lives.
“Your father is calling. Everyone. We’ll figure out an excuse when reporters start hounding. In the meantime, you’ll work with your brother.” As Ida dictated this future prediction, in a terse whisper, she glared at me, then Aubrey, willing us into a brotherly pact.
“Ma, I already have an assistant. Actually, I have three this year.” Aubrey refused to conceal his discomfort with the idea of me infiltrating his sacred playroom, even on the lowest rungs of his corporate ladder. We tolerated one another for the sake of our parents’ marriage, but we could hardly function as friends let alone sibblings. Had we been strangers, we would’ve passed each other on the street without so much as a competitive side eye. However, among the few things we shared was the inconceivable nightmare of having to displease our dear mother.
“You can make me buy your coffee.” I smiled at Aubrey.
“You can’t afford it.” He smiled back.
“Baby, we should get going?” Peregrine was, despite bearing the performative quirks of a professional intellectual, a refreshingly well-adjusted, accepting observer of our family’s relational neurosis and hate language. She’d been with Aubrey for two years and seemed to implicitly accept that he would never make love to her or her ancestral money with as much passion as he spent on ribbing me or comparing our standing in our father’s estimation. And try as I might, I couldn’t fault her for knowing exactly when to drag Aubrey away from what would become a volcanic episode between us.
Ida, who didn’t care for Peregrine, slapped one hand over her eyes and with the other, waved the amorous perverts off my bed. She wanted to throw a fit in the privacy of her quieter, more tolerant son’s presence. Aubrey knew that Ida secretly preferred me for my people-pleasing and rarely complained when she shooed him to suffocate me as her way of self-soothing. Relieved, he and Peregrine eased off my bed and marched past my frozen form with upturned nostrils as if to suggest I was a nonfunctional, hideous furniture obstacle to be recoiled at and sold to the lowest bidder.
Ida stayed a few minutes longer to watch me wash out my cereal bowl and promise not to come to our family home or converse with any family friends until I had a new position secured. I considered asking her to print out her own contract for me to sign away her parental rights, but I gave up when my better judgement suggested that she was, in her own callous way, trying to preserve my reputation as much as her own. She parted at noon, leaving a card for a corporate hypno-acupuncturist on my table.
I didn’t wait too long after she left before formulating a completely unnecessary, disproportionately melodramatic plan to disappear and spare my family the shame of association with me. Hidden beneath the one ridiculous looking cap I had received as a swag bag leftover from my neighbor, I trudged to the tiny electronics kiosk in Kensington Station and burnt the last of my spare cash on a new cellphone. From the very private coffee stall nextdoor, I furtively set up the device for international calling under a childish fake name and dialed the only number that was imprinted in my memory.
To my surprise, Uri answered with a dog yapping in the background. I almost cried when he asked what time he should meet me at the airport and what proteins I would prefer to eat aside from donut cream. I told him I’d arrive on Wednesday morning and would consume anything other than caviar on jerky.
We agreed to keep further communication to a minimum. As a teen in soviet Lithuania, Uri Hurwitz II had engineered a daring escape plan for himself and his pogrom survivor parents, that involved boarding a cargo ship headed for Sweden before securing a refugee flight to Manitoba. A year into the Canadian permafrost, they’d managed to revive an abandoned RV and cross the American border, eventually establishing new lives in a North Dakotan trailer park. Given his experience, Uri couldn’t help but inundate me with advice on how to make a clean break with my past. To start, I would need lots of cash portioned into small bill stashes, dry carbs stored in odd pockets, and a well-rehearsed backstory for my sudden disappearance.
Per Uri’s instructions, I shredded and toilet flushed old personal documents, cleaned out my trash, and wiped down my flat’s surfaces using a concoction of bleach and vinegar. With my surroundings more or less scrubbed of my history, I was ready to move on to part two. I could no longer retain the palatable, refined identity I had spent years cultivating within the space. One small suitcase was swiftly force-fed the jeans, ratty tee shirts, and ghastly sweatshirts I rarely wore. My pressed work suits and expensive ties were lumped into a laundry bag and eulogized on top of a charity donation box. Finally, to complete my disguise, the sole pair of underused shoes I owned, white trainers associated with unathletic dads, were laced on my feet just below two bulges of denim encasing my ankles. I unofficially dubbed the man in this new look Cam, the fired wreck who was too self-loathing to make eye contact or maintain a conversation.
Kneeling over a cheap hotel suite carpet on a dismal Tuesday evening, I rehearsed Cam’s sad sack biography and distributed my fresh cash into manageable wads throughout my suitcase and carryon laptop bag. I briefly thought about burning off my fingertips like I’d seen murderers do on TV with the used Zippo I found under the buggy matress, but I settled on wearing a sweatshirt with thumb holes that could cover my hands if necessary. At long last, a ten to midnight alarm announcing Heathrow’s only flight to North Dakota sealed Cam’s fate.
Welcome slumber lasted only an hour before curiosity got the better of me and I was compulsed to pay for in-flight WiFi (of course, secretively with a credit card in my legal name) and check the online discourse for any updates on the corruption scandal that was eminently, thrillingly set to obliterate my life. As I scrolled, my veins roiled to the turbulent pulse of my plane, flailing thirty thousand feet in the rain, only to seize up, mid-blood rush, at the realization that the scandal would die a hoax and I, one of its nameless victims.
News of leaks had already been written off in London at ten to midnight. All articles calling for a Jacobin revolution were effectively silenced as rumor mill nonsense, bolstered by A.I. invented emails and records, traceable to a disgruntled former aide in the Exchequer’s office. A security camera had captured said aide in flagrante delicto, banging his boss’s younger wife. According to a spokesperson for the Prime Minister, the supposed tragedy of the uncommons fomented by this “toxic insubordinate” was officially a non-issue. No one rich or royally connected was under investigation and any minor worker bee whose existence had been upended momentarily was free to return to the office, collect unwanted personal belongings, and put in a request for depression meds and whiskey.
The exchequer’s office released a separate statement as well. HR was too busy, due the time and niceties wasted on firings to bother rehiring. We the disposable firees, would remain discarded, dead to power, replaced, and forgotten. One BBC piece even went so far as to suggest we ought to go home to our eviction notices and celebrate our good fortune at having been dismissed early enough to dodge any real Stalin-level purges.
I’d already come to terms with my firing one way or another, but what I couldn’t accept now was my own selfish, needy, blind judgement that had resulted my flight. Why had I jumped to a conclusion that the grand drama of a possible national implosion revolved, just so conveniently, around me, of all random people? I could easily have ignored Jill’s call to action, waited patiently, and eased into a job search from the anonymous comfort of my own space. Now, due to my genetic narcissism, I was publically tripping and falling out of the sky towards a foreign continent in a kiddish getup that ironically left me stripped bare, estranged from the halfway decent disguise of a functioning adult that I had lately perfected.
For the remainder of my flight, I was plagued with the inveitable, nagging follow-up concern that barely kept common sense at bay. Should I go home? Forget this daring adventure I had subconsciously orchestrated before what would’ve been a painfully uneventful summer? To my relief, the decision wasn’t mine to make. An accidental scan of a Fox News headline confirmed my course.
While I was sleeping, American trust in the U.K. as an ally had plummeted, bigly, according to their leader. On further investigation, I realized that American media was doubling down, drugged on an amalgamation of clickbait social posts from conspiracy trolls and doom-scroll obsessed fearmonger bots. Somehow, Rupert Murdoch’s solipsistic rants against King Charles and our unnamable Prime Minister had been registered into the American consciousness as official, government approved doctrine on Truth Social. Even their voices of reason were, at gunpoint, peddling the same sordid tale of gluttonous corruption and sexual perversion being covered by our British cabal of wealthy, hemophilic inbreds.
Out of a need to justify my own theatrics, I dared to check my personal emails for any hysterical reactions to the depressingly unrevolutionary scandal that had barely phased my people. I saw a name at the top of my inbox that briefly stopped my heart again before reinvigorating my excitement at returning to America.
Jill wanted to catch up and share a formal goodbye now that I was no longer in Laurent’s employ. She was still hiding out near Bismark, spending time with Bobby’s wife, Cheryl, but she would be flying to, of all places, Paris for a weekend. I could hop a bullet train to meet her on the following Saturday and she would cover my ticket. My initial recoil told me that my Ocam’s Razor was to decline discussions of Laurent, Bobby, or any other evil bastard who had ever taken advantage of my straightlaced rule-following. However, a moment’s panic, while our captain’s fasten seatbelt alert beeped, served as a reminder. The idealistic child buried within me deserved whatever scraps of closure he could rescue to weave a triumphant narrative that would couch the life lows of his last seventy-two hours.
In what could’ve been a masterclass on the art of irrational decision making, I composed a sincere email back to Jill informing her that I too would be hanging around Bismark with Uri. I offered join her the next day for any other excuse than a lunch since we were zero for two in the digestable food department. With my message sent, I didn’t bother thinking any longer about the consequences and instead allowed myself, drunk on gingerale, to escape to dreams of the celestial, ombre prairies that would soon greet me.
My arrival was rather thrilling. Uri swept my luggage and I off our spinning rockers and into his own joyous ride, a spiffy, blue mustang convertible that he had refurbished before I was born. The backseat was packed with nostalgic Malboro boxes because Uri had once modeled himself on the all-american cowboy in their advertisments to assimilate, and though he puffed elegantly, he understood my disinclination to light up, having spent a childhood around dying addicts who snorted cocaine from heirloom gin tumblers through cigarettes.
I ravaged the donuts he had packed for me, giddily happy to be rocketed down uncharted highways haloed by golden grass fields. While he floored us past moon crater hills, Uri blasted his immaculate collection of underground punk band mixes and everything about our drive swiftly fell into line with the kiddy lit vision I had been fed of the free American west as a Dickensian boarding school survivor. Dustbowl wind lovingly whipped my face raw and rugged, scrawny birds soared past our rearview as mythic eagles, and the rabid deer dotting the landscape morphed into prized stallions galloping to rodeo Heaven at 90 miles per hour. I was young again, freely screaming out an antiauthoritarian screed, more emphatically than when I had requested a D.J. play the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen for Ida’s 40th.
Through sugary swallows and raucous choruses, Uri and I cathartically traded slasher stories of absent fathers and mothers who never quite wanted us and extreme losses that we guiltily weren’t broken hearted over. Uri’s ex-wife was long dead, his Republican son and daughter-in-law ignored him from Florida, and his only friend still alive was his bullseye terrier, Joy, named for the American comedian, Joy Behar. In turn, I told him about my status as an unwarted second son and a lonely bachelor in training.
Eventually our stream of conscious therapy session snaked its way back to the reality of our shared origin point. Uri asked me to promise that I wouldn’t stay in a private room alone with Jill, who was now, according to rumors he’d heard from Evan, also facing down hush-hush allegations for prostituting her young writer clients by having them proposition older male publishing executives.
The wave of vindication I felt following this tidbit of disgusting Jill lore instantly gutted any desire I had been harboring to politely sever the acquaintanceship I had built up with her. I broke my subcutaneous promise to Bobby and told Uri about the previous weekend’s bizzarro shakedown that Jill, it danwed on me, helped orchestrate. Uri remained silent until my vocabulary petered out before stubbing his cigarette and turning a serious, paternal eye to me.
“She’s no different.”
“Than what. Other Americans?”
“The rich ones. Everything’s a bargain, a haggle to them. You, me, rule followers who stay in our place, we’re commodities they trade. They push us around. You did the best thing, taking yourself off the market for her.”
“But I wonder…was it her plan to use me all along? She really thought I had some foreign relations policy leverage? I’m barely above a temp associate!”
“Eh, people with money exist somewhere else. They don’t suffer the same expectations, same norms.” He tapped his head. Unthinkingly, I nodded to fully excise childhood nightmares of my father lobbing “defective” ice cubes at waiters and my mother tearing through ballgowns in luxury department stores.
But for all my efforts to appear as a principled outsider speaking truth to power, I must’ve seemed a hair too ease with the concept of wealthy exceptionalism. Uri gave me an inquisitive once over, sizing up my clean-cut, manchild form and, true to character, I shrank in my seat, yanking my sweatshirt sleeves over my hands. That’s when I knew that he knew exactly what I was. No amount of average cosplaying or costuming or commiserating would ever hide the fact that my family straddled the economic divide between the exclusive somewhere else and pedestrian Hell. Thankfully, Uri didn’t press further into my real backstory as we approached the first block of strip mall civilization we’d passed seen since the airport.
Uri’s neat townhouse, tucked into a side street along an urban smalltown main drag, induced a few flutters of familiarity. On the walkup stoop, I even imagined that I was opening the same weathered door to my own utilitarian sanctuary. Our interiors had similar gallery pale walls and a central open living space, compactly organized into functional microcosms of sharp, pin leg furniture. Uri gave me sole access to the main bedroom that he said belonged in spirit to an old girlfriend who had left him for her parole officer. He and Joy usually fell asleep on the futon sofa and the rocker he’d DIY’d out of reclaimed scrap planks, respectively. The three of us would share the bathroom as long as I remembered to cover the toilet seat. Otherwise, a bucket was available upon request. The rest of the square footage was to be reserved for whatever Joy needed to do in private when Uri was busy driving.
I appreciated the stark divisions Uri kept within his home. Every square inch had a purpose. One corner was used to ward off his neighbors and son, all born again Disney Christians, with an intricate Casio turntable and hardcore record collection. Another corner was for meticulously filing documents and the matchboxes necessary to burn them in the event of a fascist takeover. Yet another alcove housed rows of books arranged in beer crates, mostly sci-fi classics interspersed with travel guides to locales on the American government’s do not fly list. The final corner, my favorite, was a kitchen shrine to stale, diabetic unapproved cereals marketed for children featuring a box of cocktail umbrellas and an offering row of evaporated milk tins.
I was truly on the precipice of adopting Uri’s space as my safe house when I made the mistake of scrutinizing too intently what would be my bedroom. I pushed in the slatted pocket doors of the lone closet only to find, on the back wall, dangling proudly from a makeshift clothes rack, a well-worn hunting rifle. I tried to rouse in my mind visions of the cartoonish, old-timey props that made innocuous balloon pop bangs in West End plays. My imagination settled instead on something entirely different. Visions of gaping bullet wounds tearing apart the delicate, velvety hides of doe-eyed kittens kept my toes anchored to the shag rug outside the closet. While I meditated on the morals of sleeping at the mouth of a gun, Uri joined me, a new cigarette splitting his teeth.
“It’s what they do here. Part of the culture.” He gently eased one side of the pocket doors closed, leaving the riffle shrouded in a villainous semi-dark.
“You hunt?”
“I was a butcher shop boy. And a protestor.”
“Do you kill animals?” I couldn’t say why I was perturbed, as a leather appreciating non-vegan myself.
“I’ve lived alone for decades. Been robbed and carjacked.”
“Often?”
“Well, I do hunt. On weekends. We’ll go some time.” He pulled the other pocket door shut and dropped a hand on my tense shoulder. I feigned relaxation but my eyes kept swiveling back to sneak glimpses at the trigger from between the door slats.
And even long after we’d finished a cereal diner and Uri had regaled me with documentary-worthy tales of his oddball passengers, my brain kept occasionally glitching back to the gun. My fingers twitched, reflexively reenacting a bitter memory I held of cheering over a dead pigeon I’d shot with a vintage musket squeezed in my eight-year-old fists for the pleasure of my demented, veteran grandfather.
Coffee with Jill was, Uri warned me throughout the night, going to be another comically high stakes negotiation that I needed to walk from with no loose ends left in my wake. Nerves got the better of my tongue, and I asked, jokingly, if loose end terminology implied that I may need to kill Jill. Uri merely shrugged and winked at me. We eventually compromised on the absolutely necessary safety protocols for upcoming my afternoon. If Jill presented me with any egregiously illegal opportunities, scams, or prostitution schemes, I could send Uri a distress text and he would pick me up, no questions asked.
He delivered me with more than a little trepidation to a craftsman café front on the edge of a pioneer road ripped from the pre-dustbowl 20s. Beyond the café’s beveled glass windows was a slightly ominous wood paneled, ski lodge interior that reeked of tobacco and crusted syrup. Jill had already secured a back log table isolated from the local crowd, atop which she had arranged two mugs of what I soon discovered was oily, tar-hued coffee poisoned with grassfed Crisco shortening.
We sipped slowly to avoid any bodily noises and skirted talk of Laurent for our first few minutes. Jill relayed that she was happily playing truant in Bobby’s luxurious guest house for the week off from work and enjoying hot spring spas on Cheryl’s vouchers. In return, I offered a microfiction of my daring escape from twenty minutes of unemployed boredom to the unending thrill of cohabitating with Uri’s shot gun. Her mouth twitched as I finally capped my tale with a downer of a PSA on the dead parliamentary blowup back in London.
Jill insisted that she had podcasted proof that we Britts were still fibbing through our crooked teeth to purposely tank American prestige on an international stage. She simply refused to believe that such damning revelations about our most powerful players could be so nonchalantly dismissed in a few days.
I saw no harm in feeding her delusions with my insider’s suspicion. The coverup was real. There was always a cirrhotic, hemorrhoidal scandal crowning at the puckers on our biggest asses. We were just better than our American counterparts about calmly wiping away the truth, BBC bideting, and enema purging any straggling shits who may leak evidence. As I waxed poetic on my hate for my own flesh and blood, Jill hid her mouth with her mug. But I could tell, based on her arched brows, that she was gunning to pounce on my faltering sheen of innocence.
“So the whole time. You were happy supporting creeps.”
“Look, I was baptized royalist. Commandment one, thou shalt subscribe only to the ethics of divine authority.” Hedging around our faults, I failed to mention, was commandment two.
“But at some point. You know what you’re signing up for.”
“Sure, we all have some sense we’re gestating douchebags in the womb. But it’s not conscious, intentional knowing. And then our brains are hijacked early. They drill you in English boarding schools. The only thing that should matter is cash flow to the vitals. Your telos is finding the least objectionable way to keep the spigot running.”
“Oh no. Poor baby!”
“Poor or practical? I mean, working for our collective GDP was the lesser evil. Over working for my personal net worth. In my opinion.”
“That’s what you’ve been telling yourself.”
“I’m not here to gloat.” I dropped my guard, hung my head, and swallowed a punnative mouthful of fat-washed, dish dreg coffee. Jill watched me with calculating pupils.
“All right, liar, liar. You want a second chance?”
“Not at a skeevy pay off!”
“I thought money mattered to you.”
“Legally obtained money.”
“Would you consider a serious job offer?” She leaned over the table.
“I’m not a contract killer!” My fingers caressed my cellphone in my pocket, ready to send out my SOS text to Uri.
“Bobby needs a property sitter.”
It was my turn to hide my face behind my mug. Jill didn’t waste time on discerning my possible response before launching into a well-rehearsed sales pitch. Bobby felt terrible when she mentioned that I’d been fired by my tax cheating, sex pesting boss and was bleeding out with shame five minutes from his mansion. Somehow, despite our frigid interactions, I’d impressed him with my wholesome, uptight, goody-goody moralizing. He told Jill that he needed someone trustworthy to oversee summer renovations for a luxury rental property he was developing on a former dude ranch. Naturally, I came to both their brilliant minds as the ideal Manchurian candidate for the role of patsy who would do his bidding and then some.
“The structure rivals any five-star property. And once the landscape is cleaned up? The views alone are ten million in the making. He’s willing to pay you.”
“I would take the free accommodation alone.”
“Really. If that’s all you want…”
“I’d be curious to see a wild west ranch.”
“Everyone keeps a loaded bedside drawer.”
“I get the sense Bobby’s not a great shot.”
“Doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t be sleeping with him.” She took a sip from her mug to let her words destabilize me, her eyes drinking in my stoic grimace with palpable, sadistic frustration. I cowered and braced for the stinging impact of another likely retreat while my fingers sent out a warning cry to Uri. I didn’t know what I wanted from Jill or Bobby or North Dakota this go around. I only intuited, as Jill smirked at me, that it was time to abandon her before I made any more permanently crippling life choices on the basis of my nihilist’s curiosity of where she would lead me.
Uri came to my rescue sooner than I could’ve dreamt. Before rushing off to his mustang growling at the café door, vestigial imp’s tail between my caffeinated legs, I gave Jill one last word. I would consider the job on a trial basis, no exchange of money necessary. The better part of me was tickled at the possibility of being the servant solely entrusted with a task worth ten million at a minimum. My raison d’etre, a utilitarian proximity to power, that had been cruelly slapped from my supplicating hands, now had a fighting chance at revival. With fresh supply of Bobby’s neediness pipelined to me, the Campbell of last week would reinvigorated anew. I didn’t let my excitement at this possibility slip to Jill as we awkwardly nodded farewell.