(Start from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: Dolly Parton is Not Dead)

Outside his window, the patter of soft rain landed upon the streets with a fine susurration reminiscent of a gentle grain silo spilling a hairline flow. Despite the stertorous roars and clamorous claptrap of the human-fueled apocalypse, the rain remained one of the most beatific and humbling sounds that you could hear in November. The earth, with its many promising elements, would long outlast the feeble lunges of ape-descended jackanapes: their feral stabs at relevance, the relentless envelope-pushing that amounted to nothing, the boisterous boasting that was increasingly dubious, the inevitable drift to ephemerality and ultimately being remembered by no one. The rain was truer than any red state bleat or scolding liberal finger. Humans would come and go and live and die, but the rain would always remain. An awe-inspiring autumn foreshadowing of the roaring snow to come. A warmup for the main meterological act. A tremendously pleasing sound that, had these silly humans possessed greater humility, openly invited you to stay in bed on a Sunday and be grateful for all the unseen wonders around you. The rain would drown out the pain and the grief and the collective trauma that had accrued too fast and that had been allowed to fester and that had pushed the humans into more exhibitionistic strains of depravity that were shaving more seconds off the Doomsday Clock.

David Leich didn’t care about the rain.

He also hated it when people mispronounced his name. It was “like,” goddammit, not “leech.” He had screamed at the telemarketers and the Democrat volunteers over the phone whenever this happened.

Unfortunately for David, nobody really liked him. Not the baristas who served him his $40 custom beverages — drinks so ridiculously bespoke that it clogged up the line. Not the landlord who knocked on his door to collect the monthly rent. His father had disinherited him a decade before and this had motivated him to become as rich as possible. And David Leich was so stubborn that he truly believed he could do this by writing books.

The only thing he cared about was whether his work was read. And it increasingly wasn’t. Just like all the other literary Daves. And it looked likely that posterity was going to be denied to him as well. He had tried to pitch himself as a Nordmaka candidate: one of those lucky writers drafting manuscripts that would be published in a hundred years once the trees grew in. Goddammit, he was better than Mitchell (a British literary Dave who was decidedly kinder and more generous to his readers than any of the American Daves and thus not excluded from the epithet of being a true literary Dave) and Atwood (where the fuck was his TV deal?)! But despite his numerous awards, the Oslo people gently told him to buzz off. The Norwegians were actually very good at this without offending the unwelcome party.

The only writer who was more insufferable than Leich was the Tory vulgarian teaching at Bath Spa University who had a raging hard-on for Arnold Bennett and who inhaled poppers like a giraffe wolfing down acacia thorns once he taught another class futilely trying to persuade young people to read the writer that Virginia Woolf had rightly destroyed.

David Leich wasn’t that Tory vulgarian. Nobody in America could be as awful as him.

But he was still strongly detested. And the invites to book parties grew less frequent.

Someone had planted a rumor that Leich was up for the Nobel Prize, but Bill Flogaast had told them that it was a joke and he walked into bookstores and raged at friendly minimum wage booksellers, who swiftly removed his volumes from their shelves.

He sat miserably in his East Village apartment and stared at the blinking cursor on the white screen. And he had nothing. Not a single paragraph. Not even a facile declarative sentence.

What he did have with an inexhaustible supply of white-hot rage, which accelerated the deepening crow’s feet swiftly staggering the sides of his bloodthirsty eyes. Other writers had tried to befriend him and calm him down. David Fitzroy, who shared a lot of Leich’s snobbish indignation towawrds the rabble, had tried to set him up with a friend. “Maybe a woman might calm you down.” And Alice had been smart. So smart. So kind. So patient. More patient than a Stepford wife tolerating an abusive mansplainer. And he had run her out. And there was nobody else. Not even his considerable wealth (thank you, MacArthur people!) could persuade a woman to stick around for longer than two months. It didn’t help when Patricia Vacation — a twentysomething whom he had improbably seduced at Central Park — wrote that bestselling roman à clef, Narwhal’s Tusk, which sent the whisper network on high alert when it came to having anything to do with David Leich and guaranteed that David Leich would be feverishly jerking off to porn until his junk became a chronically detumescent pig in a blanket, little more than an embarassing mechanism for constant peeing.

The rain carried on outside. Leich hated it. He opened the window and scowled at the glistening mirror that had replaced the teeming streets. He watched one poor man race through the showers without an umbrella. “Moron!” he screamed. And then he saw a sight that made him angrier. A man schtupping a woman against the brick wall directly across from his building, her legs impressively arched around his waist. Even from the sixth floor, he could see the whites of her eyes tilting like a pinball machine. And they were making noise. Constant moans that ricocheted against the dead air of other buildings with unrented units and that stabbed the depths of his ears. He had tried to avoid the heightened exhibitionism by not leaving his apartment and it had never seemed to spill into his relatively quiet patch on East 7th Street. He had been grateful to be so insulated from the steadfast salacity in Tompkins Square Park, where they seemed to be at it at all hours. But on his block? No, there were standards of decency to uphold.

He opened the closet and reached for his Louisville Slugger. He was quite prepared to unclick the three deadbolts on his door and bash in their brains, but he was precluded from his homicidal improv bit by the flash of a mouse scurrying across his living room floor.

“Motherfucker!” he screamed.

The rat problem had grown out of control in the early 2020s under the disastrous administration of one-term Mayor Eric Adams, who was so incompetent that he had improbably proven to be worse than Dinkins and De Blasio combined. Much like any public works project hindered by blundering bureaucracy, Adams had made the mistake — and this was the least of his errors — of unrolling his rodent extermination plan — which he had cluelessly named “the Final Solution,” seemingly oblivious to history and earning him the wrath of the Orthodox communities in Williamsburg and Sunset Park, both of which had protested his insensitivity at City Hall before Adams reluctantly renamed this “Operation Bobcat” — in six months instead of six weeks. And in those six months, the rats grew far bolder, making public inspections of restaurants impossible. And they spilled into nearly every residential domicile in the five boroughs, causing more New Yorkers to flee to Florida. But for the hardened New Yorkers who stayed — and, for all of his faults, David Leich was one of them — they grew used to the critters. This when there far more of them running around that at any other point in New York history.

But David Leich was not the kind of man who would accept any form of pestilence scampering around his apartment. If he heard a scrape in the walls at 2 AM, he would call his super. And the phone would ring and ring. And the super soon avoided him in the halls. And who could blame him? Every apartment had rats. David Leich was nobody special.

You couldn’t hire a private exterminator because they were now charging $500/hour and they all had a nine month appointment backlog. And even when he had tapped one of the rare contacts who would still talk with him to get an exterminator in his apartment inside of a week, the rats had returned two months after all the crevices and points of entry had been packed with steel wool.

So he placed a concatenation of traps at every corner of his apartment. Snap traps. Glue traps. Electric traps. He liked the electric traps best because he wanted the rats to suffer. There was also a helpful little green light, not unlike the hue of the Samsung Surrounder, that appeared any time one of the rats became trapped inside the lengthy carriage, attracted to the peanut butter bait and instantly electrified.

But despite the fact that his apartment had become a veritable minefield for rodents, one goddamned rat had somehow figured out how to tip-toe around the traps. And the rat emerged from beneath his couch and stared at him. Was the little fucker smiling? He couldn’t know for sure. But he took a big lunge with his bat as the rat sprinted away from him and he somehow stumbled and the trajectory of his swing destroyed the glass case containing the autographed Mets baseball on his coffee table.

“Motherfucker! Come here!”

The carnal groans of the couple outside grew louder.

The rat darted to one of his bookcases and squeezed itself between two volumes of his Graham Greene collection. He pulled out The Power and the Glory and pushed the bat into the crevice almost as if he was pumping butter.

No sign of the rat.

“Come on!”

Then he heard a snap and a painful squeak. And he walked over to the trap, towering over the invasive little beast and began to laugh with the cruelty of a feudal lord who had just watched two of the peasants beat each other to death.

“That’s what I thought,” said David Leich, who grew tranquil with this triumph.

Then he remembered the fucking couple outside.

He returned to the open window. And they were gone.

He pulled out his toolbox from the closet and took out a ball-peen hammer and began to smash the rat’s skull in, laughing with each monomaniacal swing. The blood from the rat shot up upward in parabolic geysers. And this made Leich laugh even harder. It had been years since he had felt this way. Five years, in fact. When he had received the happy news that Paul Van Kleason had died. Van Kleason. That hopeless sci-fi hack who was merely one of his many nemeses, but whom he hated the most. He summoned the glee of a man who had kept a dark secret that he could not share, a man who would rise to the top again because of what he knew — that is, if he could get the vast illiterate throngs to care.

He slid open the file cabinet — kept neat and tidy like all of his wildly obsessive records of his numerous enemies — and he found the safety deposit box and unlocked it, still laughing heartily. And he took out the photos that the man in the fedora and the bland burgundy tie had given him. And he laughed again as he read the autopsy report, the one that had been carefully buried, the one that Bill Flogaast had given to him as a holiday gift.

Did anybody even care about Van Kleason anymore? He didn’t know. But he had this. And as the rat in the other room twitched its final and quite painful spasm, David Leich started to make rand plans about how he could rewrite the narrative so that the literary people (including the Norwegians) would never laugh at him again. He would have his revenge. And no rat, no rainstorm, and no public copulator was going to stop him.

(Next: The Italian Restaurant)

(Word count: 24,434/50,000)

(Start Reading from the Beginning: The Dead Writer)

(Previously: Soldiers with Broken Arms)

Debbie Ballard had not expected to stay with the Rollins campaign, much less move to Washington. Her mother had succumbed to cancer three years before. Her student loans had been paid off. She now owned a second home in Georgetown, which she closed on just before the housing crisis and which had somehow appreciated in value despite all the economic volatility. There were certain Beltway bars occupied by politicos in which she was actually feared. She had fallen in love and married Gabrielle Jenkins and hadn’t expected that to happen. Gabrielle, in addition to atoning for the directionally impaired tongue lashings of mediocre men with her exquisite scissoring (Debbie would never go back, even if Gabrielle left her), also understood her in ways that so many others had not. Gabrielle commended the qualities that others had deemed risible. The way that Debbie would hold half of a bagel above her neckline just before spreading cream cheese, which the people she had dated before Gabrielle had ridiculed, was evidence of an instinctive divinity, a quirk that only confirmed Gabrielle’s faith in Debbie’s alacrity. Gabrielle helped her pick out the right sleeveless sheath to wear to a summer soiree and even coached her on ladyboss body language that would always put a dull man trying to challenge her in his rightfully undistinguished place. In many ways, Debbie felt as if she was still pretending, but she did have a knack for sheltering the endless flow of campaign contributions from Rollins’s many fans. She did know how to manipulate sleazy lobbyists. She did have a way of fielding calls from desperate Democrats trying to cut a deal with Rollins. And while Rollins was stupider than anyone truly knew — including the Slate reporter who had tried to take him out after uncovering secret recordings of his bimonthly seminars, along with the quietly settled lawsuits — Debbie knew how to make him seem as if he knew more than he let on. Never mind that she had closely studied Jared Kushner back when the media people had hilariously suggested that he was a calming force who would assuage the unpredictable jerks of the orange menace and had simply pilfered the best bits and ensured that there was no financial trail that deep-dive document searchers would find. If it hadn’t been for Debbie Ballard, Rob Rollins would not now, during the most apocalyptic time in American history, be the junior senator from South Carolina.

The thinktanks all knew that Debbie was the force behind Rollins’s rapid rise. Herschel Walker had tried to hire her. Mitch McConnell. Lady G. She had turned them all down. If only they knew how liberal she’d once been, though not liberal in the ways that countless heathens were now unleashing in public places. She’d truly been shocked by the rise of rampant exhibitionism. Even now, as she jogged on G Street waiting for the blocks of hideous buildings to recede for the promising vista of the Capitol dome, she was still astonished to find a woman going down on a man just outside of Burger King. He was actually shouting “I’m having it my way! I’m having it my way!” And that was the weirdest thing about it. If the new fad of public sex could be compared to an act of revolution, it was decidedly incoherent. On one hand, these anarchist fornicators were desecrating what remained of the franchises by carrying on with their copulation. On the other hand, they adopted the very corporate mantras that were anathema to their professed cause. So you could ascribe a certain passive aggression to the two feral protesters who she saw 69ing in the perfume aisle at Nordstrom Rack. The security guards were too underpaid to remove them. The police were too busy with all the murders to be bothered. And so everyone grew to tolerate all the public sex, much as they turned the other way when some new maniac shot up a school.

She knew she was taking a risk jogging out in the open like this. As the streets became more dangerous and crime hit an unprecedented high, the President had urged women to walk in groups for their own safety. But Debbie Ballard was not someone who wanted to be a victim. She was still in shape. She had to be if she wanted to stay on as the chief of staff for a prominent physical fitness instructor who was now serving on four Senate Committees. She’d taken kickboxing classes and had dabbled in mixed martial arts. Besides, she had one of the new Samsung Surrounders that had become a big hit for the flailing tech giant once the data experts had run the numbers and concluded that one out of every four Americans was likely to commit rape or murder in this new nightmarish epoch. You put contact lenses equipped with an AR interface into your eyes. And you were always aware of the red and green dots of people who surrounded you. The green dots were people without a criminal record. The red dots were those who had some trouble attached — whether it be a reckless tweet from their college days or a scandalous video they had posted to EveryoneFucks.com. Some people actually used the Surrounder to score dates. Because with the Surrounder, you could call up a drop-down menu in the chilly air and check out the social media profiles for every walking and talking dot of ape-descended meat who you might ran into. The Surrounder had been a hit with introverts, although the introverts were more inclined to stay home. It was also useful for those parties in which you forgot the name of someone who you had run into six months before. Debbie and Gabrielle had tried going bareback without the Surrounder one night in which they had to attend a party, but it became clear within ten minutes that their organic brains were no match for the advantages of the overlay. The transhumanists had been right all along. Humans were fated to be enslaved to technology. And maybe you could hole up in the country and allow this state of affairs to pass you by. But you couldn’t stop people from gossiping about each other and looking for any dirt to believe that they were superior.

Debbie had frowned upon the way that some of the Surrounder power users had employed the new tech to geocache the worst people in the world. People who had served long prison terms and who were trying to build new lives were shocked when these public shaming cultists knocked on their door and filmed them with their phones for all the Internet to see. So people weren’t as free to live their lives as they had before. Samsung lobbyists had flooded the Senate with money (even Rollins had taken some of it) to ensure that there would be no legislation outlawing the use of the Surrounder.

Unemployed nobodies who styled themselves “journalists” had once doxxed criminals on Reddit threads, but the Surrounder had turned the game into a hunt. Years before, they had spent long afternoons hunting avatars with Pokémon Go. But finding human lowlifes out in the real world was far more fun, although the suicide rate had quadrupled in the last five years because some of the victims didn’t have a sense of humor.

This was one of the reasons why the masonry business had taken off and why gated communities were now more ubiquitous. The idyllic suburban rows with open front laws had been replaced with ugly brick walls fortified with barbed wire and motion-sensitive machine guns. And when Debbie jogged through a residential area, she still winced at the sinister whirs of 50 caliber HMGs, the barrels that followed her along the sidewalk. Her old friend Sophie had been paralyzed from the waist down because one of the surveillance weapons had malfunctioning when she went for a run. And even Gabrielle had urged Debbie to jog in Montrose Park rather than the downtown sprawl. The park did, after all, have its own set of rules and was only open to Georgetown residents and was regularly patroled by men who didn’t think twice about mowing down a troublemaker. And nobody fucked there.

But Debbie had always been a people person. And her jogs and wanderings in DC, however sketchy, was what helped her to understand human psychology. And with the constituents who regularly pestered Rollins, she needed to be able to anticipate what they might say or do. Admittedly, this was becoming easier. Because everyone was more scared. The repertoire of social moves had drastically attenuated, particularly since the green dots feared that they would turn into red dots. The Surrounder algorithm was, like all algorithms, driven by machine learning so that the tech moguls wouldn’t have to pay human eyes to correct the mistakes. Even the Supreme Court — with its seven staunch conservatives and the two open slots that needed to be filled after the recent assassinations — sided with Samsung, pointing out that the Constitution contained no express right to privacy. Sure, you could still watch porn and you could still fuck out in the open. (In a move that caused a veteran SCOTUSblog reporter to lose his gasket, the Court had used the Fourteenth Amendment to point out that prohibiting people from fucking in public deprived them of their constitutionally protected liberty.) But decency was more of a theoretical idea rather than the accepted practice.

“WARNING!” said the Surrounder’s overfriendly voice, “TWO REDS APPROACHING FROM THE SOUTH!”

Maybe she was being overly cautious with her warning settings, but she recalled how three yahoos — one of them was the father of one of his teenage victims — had murdered Matt Gaetz on a live stream back in 2025.

She spun around and adopted an orthodox stance. Two men, both gaunt and dressed in threadbare coats, approached her.

“Whoa, lady!” said the first man.

“Stand back!” boomed Debbie.

“Can’t we even say hello?” asked the second man.

“If you try anything, I will fuck you up. Surrounder, display profiles.”

“RONALD COLSON. FORMER CONTRIBUTOR FOR THE RED GAZETTE. FIRED AFTER SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS SURFACED ON TIKTOK. PRESENT STATUS: UNEMPLOYED. PRESENT NET WORTH: NONEXISTENT.”

“Hey, man, I was innocent,” said Ronald.

“GARY BOYLE. DARK WEB PROVOCATEUR, KNOWN DOXXER, BANNED FROM FEDIVERSE, OKCUPID, AND DOORDASH.”

“Wow,” said Debbie. “How do you get banned from Doordash? They deliver to everyone.”

“Dude,” said Ronald. “I didn’t know you were banned from Doordash.”

“Shut up!” said Gary. “So I can’t get a pizza delivery. Who cares? It’s not like anyone can afford takeout these days.”

“What do you two creeps want?”

“We want to help,” said Gary.

“You stalked me?”

“We know you work for Rollins,” said Ronald. “Is it okay if I grab something under my coat?”

“Surrounder,” said Debbie, “are these men armed?”

“NEGATIVE,” replied the Surrounder. “BUT BOTH MEN SCORE HIGH ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIPULATION INDEX.”

“Psychological manipulation index?” asked Gary. “Wow, they track that too?”

“Apparently you didn’t get the latest update,” said Debbie.

“You know,” said Ronald, who moved in a slow and belabored way, “I miss the old days. Before the Surrounder. You didn’t have to second-guess people.”

“It’s a dangerous time to live,” said Debbie. “What do you want?”

“Hang on,” said Ronald. He extracted a book and tossed it to Debbie. Debbie’s reflexes were heightened. So she caught it.

“You’re going to want to read this,” said Gary. “Particularly the two chapters on Rollins.”

Debbie looked at the cover. There was a picture of Paul Van Kleason on the cover. His fingers were steepled as he surveyed two pairs of bare legs that had been swiftly Photoshopped in by some underpaid book designer. Paul Van Kleason. The writer who had died five years ago, The book’s author was Ali Breslin. Ali Breslin? That crazy chick who wrote for The Myrtleist way back when? She was still bouncing around.

Debbie laughed.

“This looks like sensationalistic trash.”

“It’s not,” said Ronald.

“Ali Breslin won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago.”

“Bullshit.”

“Google it if you don’t believe us.”

She did. And, well, holy shit, these two dudes were right. She also conducted a provenance scan on the book. And, yes, it too was legit.

“Why would anyone care about a dead writer?”

“Trust me,” said Gary. “They’re going to care.”

“Why? Have you noticed the world around you? More sex and violence. More depravity. America is a joke. Most people have given up.”

“No, they haven’t,” said Ronald. “They’re just waiting for a savior to get us back to normal.”

“And the junior Senator fro South Carolina is well-positioned to be that savior.”

“This book hasn’t been published.”

“It hits bookstores next Tuesday.”

“And how did you get a copy?”

“Well, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy…”

“What do you want?”

“We haven’t eaten in three days.”

“So you want me to buy you two creeps a meal.”

“Well, a little more than that.”

“I’m not going to fuck you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Debbie. She held up her hand and flashed her ring. “You see? Happily married.”

“That hasn’t stopped people before,” laughed Gary.

“We don’t want to fuck you,” said Ronald.

“I’m confidently asexual,” said Gary.

“And so am I.”

The Surrounder confirmed that neither Ronald nor Gary had fucked anyone in the last three years. Dating history was still a little buggy, but the algorithm was getting better on the sexual partner flowcharts with each new update.

“Okay,” said Debbie, “but we have to meet somewhere where we can’t be tracked by Surrounders.”

“You’d willingly take us to a frozen zone?” asked Gary, who was incredulous.

“It seems I have no choice.”

(Next: Dolly Parton is Not Dead)

(Word count: 20,764/50,000)