(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)

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

(Previously: The Physical Trainer)

It was nine o’clock on a Tuesday and the regular crowd shuffled in. Bill Flogaast hadn’t eaten a single thing all day and there was an old man sitting next to him, stabbing his fork into a plate of bangers and mash. He said, “Bill, I believe this is killing me,” but he ate the grub anyway as the smile ran away from his face. There was, unfortunately, no piano for him to play on. The proprietor of Joel’s Place — who was not Joel (1946-2003) — had removed the small upright shortly after a few hipsters from Bushwick had pulled a post-flash mob viral stunt for Improv Everywhere and tortured the tired cortege of old timers. Why couldn’t these obnoxious kids just ride the fucking subway without pants and let the Joel’s mainstays settle their sorrows in peace?

The old man wiped the crumbs that had settled like clueless gentrifiers into his mustache and he bid his allies adieu, leaving Bill Flogaast to await his long-delayed dinner.

The day had been long and grueling, not unlike the Battle of Bataan if you took away the weapons and the casualties and the history-changing geopolitical stakes. And he still hadn’t put out all the fires. He had anticipated several of them. The calls from Hollywood. His nimble parries against the press. The shocking news that one million copies of Van Kleason’s new novel were now sitting in a Detroit warehouse ahead of pub date. The guarantee that 98% of these would be remaindered if the truth of Van Kleason’s death became public.

But they had made the announcement and it had been received with reliably shallow thoughts and prayers, along with the usual hangers-on who claimed to be Van Kleason’s friends once they spotted a potential meme to win likes and comments (and, of course, the predictable sympathy from those who hadn’t investigated the truth of the “friendship,” which was pretty much everyone on social media).

Henry — the gaunt septuagenarian who tended bar and who was somehow slimmer than an Auschwitz survivor — deposited the white fish-shaped deep dish onto the thin green placemat and reinforced the meal’s arrival with a second pint of Guinness.

“On the house,” said Henry. “You look like you need it.”

“I probably do,” said Bill, “but I’m not finished with the first pint.”

And he wouldn’t be for a while.

“But she’s here.”

“She?”

“Do I really have to tell you?”

He was too hungry and exhausted to consider who this might be. She could be any number of people. Publishing people often spilled into Joel’s at unanticipated hours, but Joel’s was hardly Max’s Kansas City. It was a bar that was waiting to die, as so many others had during the pandemic. There were no live bands. Just a bunch of old men sitting on fraying barstools. The men were so sad that the prorpietor had removed the mirror behind the bottles after one regular had left his car running in his garage and never returned. Sure, the place was kept tidy, but it had not been remodeled for a good twenty years out of “respect for Joel’s vision.” But Bill Flogaast was one of the only ones still alive who could recall talking regularly to that tight-fisted tyrant, who used to kick people out of his bar if they ordered a martini with vodka instead of gin. Joel believed that he was running a classy place, but Joel’s was really no different from any other West Village dive Which was why it was so appealing. You wouldn’t be hassled by young louts, although they sometimes rolled into this funereal venue out of curiosity.

Bill picked up the spoon that had arrived with his shepherd’s pie and, as the waft of mashed potato crust whirled into his nostrils, he angled the utensil against the feeble amber light to see who she was.

Bill Flogaast had long ago mastered the art of peripheral hearing and peripheral seeing. This wasn’t just a technique used by private investigators. It was invaluable in publicity. He always had one eye scanning a mirror or a reflective surface so that he would notice if an unruly author with a grudge arrived at a book party. He’d swoop in and usher any nemesis to the other side of the room.

Dev Rawman, who always took offense whenever anyone pronounced his name like a package of noodles, was one such author. Five vitriolic outbursts at the last seven literary soirees he’d attended and all of these because he was a grownass man who was still angered and embarrassed by his debut novel, which was very bad and elided from his credits in future volumes. Never mind that his novels were still very bad and that his sentences were so awful that not even a very patient junior editor who diagrammed his sentences could get Dev to clean up his potboiler prose. Never mind that Dev had somehow found a ride on the cash cow with a lucrative TV deal from three of those novels (all of these books had the word “fantastic” in their titles and, after a while, people simply assumed that the work was fantastic because people weren’t reading as much anymore). Dev didn’t have a sense of humor. In fact, Dev was so humorless that he had once written an entire column about a blogger who had scorched him. Dev hadn’t counted on his readers siding with the blogger rather than him. And this infuriated him further. Then Dev got obsessed with this blogger and Googled around and found a YouTube video in which the blogger’s grandmother said that she was so proud of him, giving the blogger a huge hug over the triumph of embarrassing a talentless blowhard and being named in a major magazine. And because Dev had no one in his family who loved him (even Dev’s twin brother, whose shirt was stuffed tighter than Dev’s, had cut ties), he longed to know why some online troll in San Francisco would receive the kind of love that he, as a Successful Author^TM was rightly entitled to.

Bill knew that this was the case with most authors. They were largely children who longed for attention and who spent more time bullshitting on Twitter than honing their latest novel.

Henry, eyeing Bill’s surveillance from behind the bar, nudged his head to the left to give him a hint. Bill flattened a piece of the pie into a manageable matchbox and shoveled it into his mouth — Jesus Christ, no rosemary or thyme with the beef broth? — before delicately dropping the yellowy mass from maw into his napkin. Then he turned his head and saw her.

Gingrich Moore. Ginny if you hadn’t pissed her off in a while. But Moore was easily offended and fiercely protective of her authors, whom she often risibly compared with the 1920s modernists. She was particularly keen on Butch Wheel and his literary debut many years ago, which had been written in pretentious first person plural. Nobody read that book anymore, much less Wheel’s followups, and the gaps between Wheel’s books had stretched from three to seven years. Even Dev Rawman had raved about Wheel, perhaps secretly longing to fuck him as much as the KGB Bar groupies did. But if you were some sad bastard who suggested to Moore that Wheel wasn’t all that, Moore would disinvite you from parties and make your life difficult. Fortunately Flogaast had won over Moore through scandalous serendipity. He had spotted Moore and Wheel leaving a hotel, both looking surprisingly disheveled. Moore saw Flogaast and sprinted away and, based on the way that she had really gone out of her way to accommodate Flogaast after that, you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the two were boning each other and that this was the real reason for Moore’s feverish advocacy. Wheel was hardly the first author to use his dick as much as his pen when it came to “negotiating” contracts. But Moore had never struck Flogaast as the kind of editor who would fuck her authors. People were full of surprises.

“Hello, Bill,” said Moore, who was now towering over Flogaast’s table. “I saw you looking at me.”

“Howdy Ginny.”

“I heard about Paul Van Kleason.”

“Yeah, he was only 48. I’ve been working the phones all day.”

“You must be exhausted. And it’s Gingrich, not Ginny.”

Moore’s mouth contorted into a cruel smile.

“What?”

“Gin-grich. That’s how you will refer to me.”

Flogaast laughed. “Did I do something to piss you off?”

“No,” said Moore. “Of course not.”

“Then why the sudden formality?”

“Because I know what really happened to Paul Van Kleason.”

“Alright, you tell me, hotshot. What really happened to Paul Van Kleason?”

“You don’t need to be coy with me, Bill. I also know about Sophie. This is really going to be quite embarrassing for you. Once everything comes out.”

Moore slid the chair from its resting place beneath the wobbly table and sat down.

“Gingrich, you and I have never had an issue with each other. Never. I respect you. I’ve never said a word about your…your extracurricular activities. What you do is your own business.”

“And I appreciate that. But Butch isn’t one of my authors anymore.”

“What? He went to another house?”

“He’s filed for divorce.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It is too bad, Bill,” said Gingrich. There was a luster in her eyes that made Flogaast uneasy. Flogaast downed the rest of his first pint and wrapped his hand around the second pint.

“He stopped seeing you?”

“You have averred correctly.”

“Gingrich, come on. I haven’t had a bite to eat all day and this hopeless shepherd’s pie is the only thing keeping me going. Why does Paul Van Kleason even matter to you?”

“Oh, he doesn’t. He was a terrible writer. An asshole really. At least that’s what I hear from one of your defectors.”

His former associate Ginny Romano. A tireless ebooks booster who had a knack for finding influencers before they even knew they were influencers. She used every trick in the book to keep them close. Including an aggressive booty call or three. She and Moore were well-matched, given that they shared a common rage directed at any man who had spurned their advances.

“Ginny is a good publicist, but she wasn’t privy to everything.”

“She was privy to enough. Van Kleason sells and he’s been a big hit on several Comic-Con panels. But it’s this image of woke purity that he’s cultivated — that’s what interests me. All of it could collapse like a delicate house of cards. And you, Bill, would be the one they’d blame for it.”

Flogaast nearly choked on a half-eaten pea that had nestled in his throat.

“What do you want, Gingrich?”

“Your resignation.”

“You’re not my boss.”

“You’re right. I’m not. But I knew you would be here. You’re getting more predictable in your old age.”

Moore pulled a thumb drive from her purse and gave it to him.

“What’s this?”

“Just watch the videos, Bill. Nothing’s on the Internet yet, but it will be. Probably by early next week.”

Flogaast looked ashen. He knew what she had found, what he had taken great liberties to cover up. The leak had to come from Romano. She was still friendly with a lot of her former coworkers.

“Who else knows about this?”

“Oh, Bill, come on! I’ve always been a professional.”

“Except with Wheel.”

“Don’t be vulgar, Bill. Just admit that you’ve lost the upper hand and that there was an angle here that you couldn’t anticipate.”

“Who else knows about this?”

“Let’s just say that a small group of people at the top, people who are your competitors, are apprised of what I have.”

“I’m going to need some time.”

“You have a week, Bill. That’s it.”

“That’s not enough time.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to face the music then.”

“What did I ever do to you, Gingrich?”

“It’s not personal. It’s just business. You’ve covered up smaller things than this.”

“Yeah, but it’s really bad.”

“Well, tell you what, Bill. I’ll give you two weeks.”

“That’s still not enough time.”

“Then get back to me once you understand just what kind of ladyboss you’re dealing with.” She leaned in. “Because, you see, Bill, I’ve always played hardball. You just haven’t seen it. How do you think we keep so many authors? But you? You’re just a softie from another time.”

She stood up and Henry, oblivious to the finer details of this sinister exchange, offered a hearty wave to both of them.

“Choose wisely, Bill. I know the Germans are counting on you.”

(Next: The War Room)

(Word count: 12,576/50,000)

(Previously: The Dead Writer)

Seven hundred miles away, in an inexact north by northeast line that can be reached by jumbo jet in about one hour and forty-two minutes, there was a man who was decidedly more alive, far more important, more physically fit, much smarter, and somehow more anonymous in his business dealings than Paul Van Kleason.

His name was Bill Flogaast and he had far more power that any of the neighing infants who feigned “publishing insider” status could ever imagine.

In his thirty-four years in the biz, Flogaast was one of the last men still standing. He had survived numerous mergers and downsizing campaigns. He had inveigled tempestuous authors and bribed humorless book editors. He had methodically turned one book critic with a sizable Beanie Babies collection into his personal stenographer, persuading a bestselling horror writer to declare her his “friend” on pre-Elon Twitter, and this lonely and pathetic and heavily Botoxed woman had the sad naivete to believe that she still formed her own opinions about books. He had personally ensured that a Tory vulgarian who taught creative writing at Bath Spa University would never get his novels published in America. He sent fruit baskets and slipped Franklins to the right people. He silenced attention-seeking troublemakers by having his publicity army of ten send thick packages in the mail stuffed with galleys that were perfectly tailored to their sensibilities. Give these dumb and obnoxious kids all the books they could ever want and they would usually shut the fuck up. They would even photograph themselves on Instagram holding the galleys above their heads, as if these volumes were elephant skulls sawed off after a six month African safari. And it was he who had managed to persuade six media outlets to adopt a “No haters” policy for their review coverage, bringing an end to the literary takedowns that had caused several authors to sob for hours on the phone to him. It wasn’t that he was against tough criticism. He just wanted to spend more time in the Hamptons and this was strictly a time-saving measure.

He had covered up nine physical assaults, twenty-two incidents of sexual harassment, one fatal stabbing, and he had even managed to get some Nobel-obsessed jackanape who freelanced for The New Republic to spin an author’s ugly heroin overdose as a quiet death from natural causes. He kept an Excel spreadsheet tracking bad behavior from eighty-two authors (half of them had been on the Shitty Media Men list) who still had ongoing deals. Under Flogaast’s watch, their notorious deportment had never reached the newspapers. He had outsmarted the whisper network and orchestrated omertàs to ensure that any gadfly who could make a significant dent in sales with some lengthy online jeremiad would never be taken seriously. You could never get them on the work, but you could shred their character into confetti that was finer than anything you could ever buy at a party supplies store. Bill Flogaast knew that these gullible rubes were more interested in yukking it up about personality rather than discussing the merits of an award-winning backlist title. Before his career had been cruelly destroyed, Oscar Wilde had declared that great minds discuss ideas and small minds discuss people. And Bill Flogaast knew that the publishing world was no different from any other microcosm: a collection of small minds. Just look at the way these insects got stirred up on social media over a Slate hot take or the way they wasted time trying to dissect flash-in-the-pan “movements” such as Dimes Square. Sure, they held up Cormac McCarthy, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Thomas Pynchon as rightful geniuses, but these literary people clearly preferred to discuss who was fucking whom rather than what the S-Gerät symbolized in Gravity’s Rainbow.

And the best thing about all this was that he could persuade these media people that they were the ones who landed the stories. What they didn’t seem to understand, even when he provided flagrant clues, was that Flogaast had been pulling the strings all along.

Flogaast had stared down cutthroat German capitalists who were fully prepared to sodomize his livelihood for the greatest possible financial gain, winning them over with plentiful whiskey poured at predawn hours in East Village speakeasies. He spilled juicy dirt on famous writers as the Germans became increasingly inebriated while he nursed his drink, leaving a tiny tumbler half-full over the course of several hours. The Germans were too busy singing Marlene Dietrich songs at the most loutish and deafening levels to notice Flogaast’s modest alcohol intake.

Flogaast was the only man in publishing who remained on a first-name basis with the many Daves of the literary world. Every other publicist who had attempted the ambitious goal of Dave unification had either developed a $200/day coke habit or had gone nuts and checked into Bellevue. The literary Daves were truly that toxic, that insalubrious, that soul-destroying. One publicist had tried to warm up to the notoriously difficult David Rosemary Bier — author of a manifesto that made an undeniably hypnotic argument for eating red meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. This sad bastard, who had started off so optimistic, had leaped over the guardrails of a Midtown rooftop bar to his death shortly after Bier had vowed to “destroy” him with the help of his Hollywood friends.

But Bill Flogaast was made of sterner stuff. David Fitzjoy, author of the bestselling novel The Rectifications, was widely known to be an insufferable pain in the ass. A chronic mansplainer who scoffed over having his large and vastly overrated novels edited and who wasn’t nearly as perspicacious as he thought he was and who didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut and who wrote a self-serving New Yorker profile about the late Jonathan Coaster Wells, the long-suffering, long-haired, beanie cap-wearing author who had frequently used water as a metaphor in his viral commencement speeches and who had deforested 70% of the world’s trees with his 2,400 page epic, Inexhaustible Laughs. But it had been Flogaast who had coached Fitzjoy over many months to be more palatable and who had secured the splashy Sunday profile in the New York Times that caused everyone to give Fitzroy another chance. Just as he had reinvented David Lithium as a neglected treasure who was far more than the forgotten MacArthur Fellowship-winning author of Fatherless Manhattan. Dozens of publicists has unsuccessfully tried to persuade Lithium to stop name searching himself on Twitter and sending deranged emails to total strangers who didn’t care for his books, but only Bill Flogaast had the finesse to convince this admittedly aggravating author to find the inner peace he needed.

This nimble éclat bought him additional years in the industry. Flogaast had perfected the art of sleeping no more than four hours every night and only sleeping with his wife. Unlike the vast majority of men in the publishing industry, Flogaast understood that dick discipline was a significant factor in securing your career longevity. He had seen so many promising talents self-destruct over the years because they didn’t have the control that he had. He had politely declined all scandalous rendezvouses and enticing afternoon delights. Let weaker men get their rocks off and pay the hard price of alimony for a reckless tryst.

Besides, he did love his wife. Well, mostly. It had been some years since he last felt the full frisson that had first drawn them together at a Newport News barbeque festival, although she would probably say the same thing if you could somehow persuade her to spill a small morsel about her life. And she never did. Only three people in the building knew her first name and the only thing that this dull trio had in common was that they were the ones the shareholders listened to during quarterly earnings calls.

He would tell any author going through a divorce that most marriages are little more than economic partnerships — good for reducing taxes, buying homes, keeping down costs, and having a dedicated plus one for social soirees to insulate yourself from relentless speculation over what kind of unbearable asshole you had to be to never find someone who could tolerate your close company longer than six months. The sooner you understood this, the more successful you would be in work and life. He hadn’t sold his soul exactly, although nobody at the publishing house really knew about his private life. And because Flogaast exercised such exquisite self-control while speaking his mind, several skeptics came to understand that he could be trusted, even though he revealed nothing about himself at all and sat back and smiled while others flapped their traps. It was difficult to know who Flogaast’s closest friends were. Because they never factored into his public image. Yes, he had confidantes. But he never advertised who they were. Bill Flogaast one of the rare people in the early 21st century who never posted daily pictures of his lunch on Instagram. If you asked all the tech companies to share their collected data and assemble a dossier on Bill Flogaast, they wouldn’t be able to tell you a goddamned thing.

And when he wasn’t doing all this, he was fond of pickling vegetables in the four homes he owned in various parts of the Northeast. A suitable metaphor for the PR racket. Take those slimy cucumbers and contain the problem before the motherfuckers on social media used a third-hand rumor to cancel some wildly intoxicated bestselling author who had merely made the mistake of believing he was still twenty-five, sliding his liverspotted hand onto the wrong ass.

In his early sixties, Flogaast had more energy than most of the unpaid interns and a formidable understanding of human psychology. He had learned early on that, if you knew where the bodies were buried, you would get very far and stay very high. (In Flogaast’s case, he was sitting twenty-three stories above the growing throngs of homeless people berating random strangers at subway stations, knowing that he had the capital and the privilege to never waltz with the Midtown minions, thus decreasing the likelihood of getting randomly stabbed by some unmedicated basket case that the disastrous mayoral administration of Eric Adams has never once considered helping.)

On Tuesday morning, Bill Flogaast sat in a Herman Miller chair listening to the soothing clacks of a Newton’s cradle perched on the rightward corner of his massive executive desk. The desk had once belonged to Ronny Monson and was gifted to Flogaast after this energetic executive editor had dropped dead of pneumonia at the age of seventy-six. He knew that Jimmy Compton, the mediocre soyboy from the California Central Valley who had replaced Monson, had it in for him. That hopeless fuck couldn’t write to save his life. He’d actually attended the same high school as that disgraced podcasting jackass in Brooklyn who had made a big stir in the literary world ten years before and who didn’t even have the guts to go through with his suicide attempt. Nobody paid attention to that loser anymore. And maybe that was Compton’s fate too — that is, if he didn’t fail upward. It was a small world. People were connected in ways they didn’t realize. And maybe this was what fueled all the Sun Tzu hijinks in publishing. But that’s the way it was in business. You had your time. Some Machiavellian careerist would eventually get you in the end. And he knew Jimmy Compton would strike. He just didn’t know when. Maybe Flogaast could branch out on his own and start an indie publicity firm. He had the contacts. He had the moves. He’d make more cash.

The phone rang.

“Bill,” said the quavering voice.

“Yes?”

“I think we have a problem in Myrtle Beach.”

Flogaast smoothed the fine strands of his graying auburn Van Dyke and steepled his fingers.

“Tell me everything you know.”

Next: The Atlantis Hotel

(Word count: 4,451/50,000)