Strange Flesh (4 page)

If Blake was surprised by the amount, he didn’t show it. Maybe he became slightly more still, but my hand was the one shaking as I flipped over the last card, cultivating nightmare visions of him pulling a miracle winner.

The last card was the Queen of Hearts.

He turned over his
caballeros
and shrugged. Fortune is a cruel mistress.

I had to give him credit, though. He didn’t bat an eyelash when he saw my jacks. He just took them in for a second and then murmured something I almost didn’t catch.

“Knaves. How apt.”

My brain was about to start leaking out my eyes as Blake casually counted off four black placards from his stack and tossed them over to me, making me wealthier than I’d ever been. Allowing me to quit my humiliating job in the cafeteria. Changing everything about my time in college. I was expecting him to insist that we keep playing for another two days, and I planned for a protracted period of trench warfare to protect my newfound riches.

But Blake said, “Well, I doubt we’ll do better than that this morning. What do you say we wrap it up?”

Ten minutes later, he slipped out the door into the cold Cambridge dawn. Coles gave my shoulder a painfully hard squeeze and said, with a certain lilt of passion in his voice, “Thank you.”

I lifted my glass and began an epic bender that still makes my toes curl to think of.

At the time, I was too beside myself with joy to think much about Blake’s parting shot. It was only later, while researching a paper about
the iconography of playing cards, that I realized what he meant. I always believed that the jack was the prince of the deck, the heir to the king and queen. But he’s not. He’s the servant. Another word for which is “knave.” My jacks beating his kings was “apt” because the ranks of our cards matched the players. Blake the aristocrat was defeated by the scullery boy.

Once I understood this, I told myself that I’d gladly suffer far greater insult for that much money. That I would try to remember him only with gratitude.

By and large Harvard is a resolute meritocracy, free of the old overt classism. But I guess among any group of relentlessly ambitious people, weird hierarchies and castes develop. When we spoke of our aspirations, you’d occasionally hear someone disparage those choosing even such lucrative professions as the law or investment banking as “mere wage slaves,” the unspoken idea being that the real elite operated on the “principal side.” In business, this meant you owned the enterprise; if you didn’t have one to inherit, you started one. In other fields, you’d hear similar language about acting “on your own portfolio.” Being an artist, not a gallerist. Being a politician, not a consultant. Being the talent, not the handler. The subtext was that there were two classes of people: masters and servants.

Blake had called me a knave. I didn’t let it bother me at the time.

But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t bother me now.

The prospect of seeing his sister is more bothersome still. I find it eerie, now that I’m once again drowning in emotional quicksand—and courting the consequent physical danger—that I’m receiving this visitation from Blythe, my original will-o’-the-wisp.

I’m supposed to go and drink their fine whiskey, pretending to be old friends, while the Randall twins interview me for a job. Though it may well demand my brand of skills, there are others they could have called.

At the end of our meeting Mercer says, “Dear boy, you
know
who these people are. I’m sure I needn’t emphasize that you’re to do everything in your power to accommodate their wishes.”

I say, “Of course.”

But I think,
Why me? Why now?

B
lake’s assistant, a tall Caribbean beauty in a black Chanel suit, opens the door to what looks like a salon, in the eighteenth-century sense of the word. The walls are graced with finely framed paintings that I feel like I should recognize. Ritual masks from obscure religions watch from the bookshelves. She seats me in a leather armchair with brass studs along the seams.

“Mr. Randall will be with you shortly.”

Once she departs, a side door opens, and out slides Blake. As he extends his hand, he flashes me a mock anxiety smile, like we’re old conspirators dealing with something unpleasant, but by no means unexpected.

“Pryce, good to see you.”

“You as well, Blake.”

As we shake, I notice a small tattoo emerging past the cuff of his shirt, unmistakable as the head of the King of Hearts playing card.

A bit more solemnity in his eyes. “I heard about your recent, ah, troubles. But you seem to be bearing up all right. Please join us.”

He ushers me into an equally opulent office. Seated at his desk, looking up at the ceiling, is Blake’s twin.

“James, I’m sure you remember my sister.”

Blake knows that nobody forgets Blythe Randall, least of all me.

She stands languorously. Like a cat who’s had just enough time in the sun. She cocks her head and fixes me with her lambent green eyes. “James Pryce. So nice to see an old friend.”

My vision twitches.

Is she toying with me? Is that an ironic twinkle in her eye?

Luckily fatigue diminishes my need to obsess over her diction. So I fall back on blank courtesy.

“It’s been entirely too long . . .” I find I can’t say her name yet. “I hope you’re both doing well.”

Blythe flicks her eyes toward Blake. She lets out a long breath, almost a sigh, and mashes a cigarette that had been burning in the ashtray next to her. Which is interesting. Blythe only ever smoked when she was drinking. Or when she was nervous.

She says, “Of course you’ve heard about . . . our brother.”

“Well . . . I can’t say I know the details,” I manage, willing myself to stop gaping at her like a moonstruck toddler. “I take it he’s in some kind of trouble?”

Blake frowns. “Half brother actually. Our father took it upon himself to impregnate and then marry our au pair when we were eight. Our mother never really recovered and, after we enrolled at Exeter, has been in and out—well. . .” He shrugs. “Needless to say, we were not close. He fancies himself an avant-garde artist, so some time ago he changed his name. It’s now ‘Coit S. D. Files.’ You’re meant to say it ‘coitus defiles.’ But nobody does.”

“Everyone still calls him Billy, even when they don’t know who he really is. The name followed him despite his efforts to reinvent himself,” says Blythe.

Blake asks, “We assume you adhere to some principle of client confidentiality in your . . . line of work?”

“With Red Rook it’s more like omertà.”

Blythe nods. “So after the divorce, our father tried very hard to create a functional stepfamily. But it wasn’t to be. Billy’s mother Lucia was very beautiful and naturally fifteen years younger than our mother. But she was also . . . emotionally unstable. After a huge fight, they separated—this was in 2000 when we were at college.”

“She was found dead at our old beach house a month later,” Blake says. “Overindulgence in her twin passions for Stoli and Seconal.”

Blythe pats her brother and leaves her hand on his shoulder as if trying to physically restrain him from further interruption. “Billy was the one
who found her. He was only thirteen . . . Our father was devastated as well.”

“And as you know, he was killed in a car accident a year later.” On saying this, Blake unconsciously shoots his cuff, covering up his King of Hearts tattoo. His gesture makes me curious about its significance. That card is named the “Suicide King” for the sword he appears to be stabbing into the back of his head. The twins’ father, Robert Randall, had driven his Bugatti off a cliff on Mulholland Drive. His death had been ruled an accident, but there was talk about a lack of skid marks on a dry road. I assume the tattoo is some kind of tribute. Or maybe a reminder of whatever tragic epiphany his father’s death inspired.

Blythe continues. “Billy wanted nothing to do with us and went to live with his godfather, Gerhard Loring, who was our father’s best friend and now chairs IMP’s board. Eventually, Ger got him into the Rhode Island School of Design, and he seemed to be doing okay there. The problem with art, though, is that what it craves more than anything is attention. Despite the level of media interest our father’s business has always attracted, we dislike publicity. I’m not sure what changed, but Billy began producing these . . . I don’t even know what to call them. Installations? Happenings? Art games?”

Blake says, “I would call them frivolous garbage, were it not for the lawsuit.”

“
Colton et al. v. Randall
. A delightful piece of civil litigation—settled out of court of course. For his thesis, Billy designed a sort of live role-playing game called
NeoRazi
. He wanted to create an oppressive celebrity culture on campus, so he set up a tabloid website that recruited participants to take photos of various attractive coeds. The more tasteless and degrading the image, the more money they got. His classmates, most of them being quick with a camera to begin with, promptly generated a litany of police complaints: invasion of privacy, stalking, assault charges against irate boyfriends. One of the girls even had some kind of breakdown.” Blythe lights another cigarette. “The horrible thing was that, due to the abuse these poor women suffered, they became
actual
local celebrities, and some real paparazzi materialized to continue tormenting them after Billy’s ‘game’ had officially ended.”

“I take it his work was not well received?”

“The members of the Rhode Island State Bar were big fans. The girls suing the Razis for harassment; Razis suing them for battery; everybody suing Billy for setting the whole thing up.”

“I guess one must suffer for his art.”

Blake adds, “The story was nasty enough that the regional media ran with it for a cycle or two. Including some of our own stations, God damn them. And even they weren’t above asking whether this was the sort of novel content we could expect as the new generation of Randalls takes the reins at IMP.”

Blythe blows smoke. “But the inquiries that really worried us came from our board.”

“So we made some changes in Billy’s trust to take the issue off the table. He was not pleased.” Blake smiles like a pride leader who has just gutted an annoying rival.

His sister examines him, something flickering in her eyes. “The
issue
could have been handled better. But there’s nothing to be done about it now.”

He breaks eye contact. “You could say that. But either way, we still didn’t . . . solve the problem. Amazingly, our brother found a warm critical reception for this kind of stuff. Reviews complimented his refined understanding of how the internet’s anonymity promotes gender oppression. So he thinks maybe there’s a future in this racket, and after a couple years drifting through the far reaches of Brooklyn ‘fauxhemia,’ he goes to grad school to hone his ‘insight.’ His work gets even worse.”

“Worse?”

Blake picks a glossy magazine off the coffee table and tosses it into my lap. It’s a recent number of
Art Whore
with a feature set off by tape flags. Inside I find a two-page photo spread: a shot from the rear of five people standing arm in arm in front of a giant video screen. The back of each neck bears a tattoo. The title reads:

The tattoos from left to right are: an Ethernet jack, a USB hub, a standard quarter-inch amplifier input jack, a drawing of an eye screw with a string running up the neck, and finally, on the only woman in the photo,
a small image of the Jack of Hearts from the standard English deck of playing cards.

This last one makes me smile. I’d been spared a far less tasteful display of cards across my shoulder blades on the day after my great poker victory by Cambridge’s uptight ordinance that you actually have to remain conscious in order to have ink done.

I skim quickly through the article, which describes in maddening postmodern jargon the recent work of this loose confederation of artists broadly dealing with “issues of identity malleability in digitally constructed narrative spaces.” According to the caption, their brother is the one with the string running up his neck. The text covering Billy says that he’s worked with LARPs (Live-Action Role Playing), BUGs (Big Urban Games), and ARGs (Alternate Reality Games). The last of these explains his tattoo.