The Mere Future (16 page)
Ginette, used to visiting clients in the clink, got through the various checkpoints without much problem. The people hired to search visitors were themselves using and selling drugs, so they didn’t do a tip-top, thorough job of searching her shoes. After a few checkpoints and two metal detectors, she made it to the holding pen.
“What does all this mean, officer?”
Ginette flashed her counselor’s badge, and so the cop had to talk to her with some intent. The two women were standing in the narrow concrete hallway, looking into the cell where Freddy, Dom, and Jeff were imprisoned. They all looked deader than usual. Calm. As though the outside had finally matched the inside. They were terrified and tortured, tormented. But they always had been. Now, it was justified—caused by the world around them and not just their father and paltry interior lives. This justified unhappiness created a tiny sense of calm.
“Look,” Officer Perez told Ginette, while secretly admiring her compact case. “Having personally run electrotropes on each of these three suspects, I can tell you exactly what I think.”
“Great.”
Ginette felt hopeful. These tough lady cops from the neighborhoods always knew the real deal.
Perez pointed to Dominick, jaw hanging like a Bassett hound.
“If he is the one …”
Ginette stared at him with like. Suffering can be so endearing sometimes, especially to do-gooders. If the victim has a particular charisma, their attractiveness can corrupt someone like Ginette and make her feel heroic.
“If he is the killer,” Perez continued, “he gets the chair. They won’t have to shave off his hair. He doesn’t have any.”
Ginette knew that Dominick had heard Perez say this about him, but he didn’t even touch his head. That’s how flat he was. You could kick him in his shins and he wouldn’t even yawn.
She ran her fingers through her own oily roots, and Nadine’s voice flashed between her ears.
“If the killer is the redhead,” Perez said, pointing at Fred, “he gets life. At least he’s got a little zing. Juries like that.”
Perez had this authority when she spoke. But it was illusory. Actually, the police were glorified doormen. They were servants.
“But if it’s the old man who turns out to be responsible?” Perez nodded towards Jeff. He was overcome with a visible style of self-pity that seemed very familiar and habitual to the wearer. “I’d say that he’d get twenty–thirty, tops. Minus time off for good behavior, he’ll be out in fourteen.”
“That’s life!” Jeff cried out from the cell.
“But not technically,” Perez corrected. “And then there is the Socialite.”
“Who’s that?” Ginette asked, distracted by trying to figure out how to make Jeff take the blame.
“Harrison Bond.”
“Harrison Bond?” Ginette froze. “What does he have to do with real life?”
“He did it!” Fred, Dom, and Jeff yelled out from behind bars.
Ginette stared at their three faces.
“He did it,” they said again. “Harrison Bond is the killer.”
In that moment, Ginette knew that they spoke the truth. She knew that if these three alienated men could simultaneously agree on something, it must be overwhelmingly true.
Oh God,
she thought,
Harrison Bond.
Ginette knew how powerful he was. She knew that he would never pay the consequences for anything he did wrong.
“Who did he kill?”
“A working girl. Claire Sanchez. From the Bronx.”
Ginette’s body froze so quickly that her nostrils dried up.
Oh
no.
Of course he was guilty. He loved Claire Sanchez, the greatest motive for murder.
“How did she die?”
“The murderer stabbed the victim seventy-three times and cut out her heart.”
Seventy-three times?
Ginette knew what that meant. That meant love.
“Where is Mister Bond now?”
Perez scanned the Scan and read off the scanner. “He was released on a fifty-million dollar bond, posted by the East Hampton Writers’ softball team.”
“Perez, tell me,” Ginette was deeply thinking, deeply planning, “if by some chance Mr. Bond was found guilty by a jury, what degree of punishment do you think he would receive?”
“If it’s Casanova convicted of murdering some girl?” Perez laughed, flipping the tab on her vacuum-packed coffee from Japan. “He’d get an amazing book deal.”
Ginette was exhausted, sludging home with low blood sugar. So what that her old boyfriend was a murderer. That fucking Claire deserved it. What a bitch! The way she said certain words was so fucking annoying. The way Claire swallowed was crime enough to justify being disemboweled. Many times, Ginette herself could have sliced Claire up with an axe. Ginette shed no tears and didn’t care, ultimately, if Harrison walked. But it was her three little clients and their fate that consumed her. They were innocent and con-descendable. Plus, it would hurt her promotion potential. If her clients were convicted of murder, she wouldn’t get a raise. It was in the contract. They called it “merit pay.”
More than ever her thoughts turned to Nadine. Now she had no future in counseling at all. If Nadine didn’t call her back, she’d be ruined.
I’m gonna stalk that bitch,
she thought.
I’m gonna fuck her
.
33. IMPERIALISM, THE HIGHEST FORM OF
CAPITALISM
W
HEN
I
FIRST
heard about the Claire Sanchez murder trial, I was in my new office. I had done everything that Nadine asked for and gotten a better job writing marketing copy in
THE MEDIA HUB
. It wasn’t that bad, and she had been right about everything. Once I put all my creativity into marketing, I was quickly promoted up the Byzantine escalator.
The Claire Sanchez murder was the lead story on the 2:45 news and then on the 2:55 news.
Not only was it a juicy passion killing that everyone could identify with, but it brought society’s attention to the prison system and the courts. It was the first time since Sophinisba’s election that someone who mattered had been arrested. There were editorials in all the tennis papers about the necessity of changing those systems immediately, so Harrison could have a trial that was appropriate to his way of life. A new reform movement came out of 1170 Park Avenue called
LATS
: Lifestyle Appropriate Trial and Sentencing. The members held meetings at the racquet club and got two tasks completed with one volley.
Since
LATS
and its sister group
PECS
(People Evaluate the Court System) were filled with all the people in the know, their plan went into action immediately. This brought even more attention to the case since it would be the first to be handled with this new sensibility. Everyone was very excited. Of all the new things that had happened, this was the newest. Rich people manipulating the system on their own behalf was as old as dust, but this time they said so. That really was brand-new. We all patted ourselves on the back for living in such an honest society.
“They’re rebelling,” Nadine said over toast. “Their egos can no longer stand earning money in the background while pretending that they’re not in control. Now that everything they want is in place, the Richies are strutting their stuff. It’s time for them to let us know who’s the boss.”
But Nadine was the only person I encountered who thought this way. Everybody else was enjoying the show thoroughly. In every office, bedroom, whorehouse, bar, and crack den, people were talking about the Sanchez murder. It had all the dimensions that folks love: Death, Sex, Fame. It didn’t have any vague categories like “insider trading,” which most people didn’t totally get. No, this one was about
BLOOD
. This slaughter was easy and fun. We all loved it. We all followed it every second of the day for months and months.
I remember that the day of the actual trial, I was busy in the
DNA
room working on a helix. That’s when we develop two publicity campaigns for two competing products, both of which we produce. When all the antitrust laws were recalled as a rider to Sophinisba’s new policy making hairbrushes free for all, researchers determined that people needed and wanted the illusion of competition so they could get up in the morning. So, we—the Marketing Division of
THE MEDIA HUB
—were called upon to provide this service.
Product A was called
Weight Loss for Christians
by Darleen Mae Bodine, and Product B was called
Christian Weight Loss
by Archibald Smith, III. One product was for those consumers who identified themselves as white trash in certain kinds of targeted conversations. The other was for those who saw themselves as WASPS. This was complex advertising. Research surveys had shown that people try to outwit advertising by purposefully purchasing out of their own self-perceived niche. They know which ads are supposed to be for them, and it makes them feel excluded. Marketers call this
resistance
. For example, ads with black actors that were aimed at black people never showed in the same spheres of influence as the white-aimed ads. For this reason we employ the Hall of Mirrors strategy. People who really thought that they were white trash would not want to be so pegged. They had aspirations, after all. So they would buy the stuffier version because then they could imagine themselves to be thirty pounds thinner, and an all-brick Episcopal church came along with the fantasy. Real
WASPS
, on the other hand, had severe nostalgia for bacon, and when they imagined themselves losing ten pounds, they imagined eating slabs of it with blueberry pancakes on Sunday mornings in the country estate down home. Of course, when either of these niches purchased said object and then proceeded to not lose weight, they would reassess their selection and race to the Christian Diet shop to buy the other volume. Two turds with one bone.
Christian was my favorite department. All the queers and a couple of poets worked there. The most important word to use in the ad copy here was
SATAN
. Let’s say you were marketing a hardcore, speed-metal Christian acid band. Well, you wanted to get a good juicy picture of Jesus on the cover, and then the copy would say “Easy Listening Is
SATAN
’s Tool.” And the nuke disc would be called “Jesus, Come Inside Me,” and the band would be called “Virgin, Live.” It was easy.
“Attention, attention,” the red lights started flashing overhead. “All employees in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Focus Group, fiftieth floor please.”
Obediently, I left my chair.
H
ARRISON, OUT ON
bail, lay on the beach at Southampton, preparing for his trial. He was preparing by working out, socializing, and getting some sun. When you’re on trial, looks are all.
He knew why he had killed Claire. He was under pressure to produce a second book as masterful as the first, and she was aggravating his anxiety. So he had a trauma and tore out her organs. Harrison knew that it was messy but ultimately okay. This would blow over. Look at the sculptor Carl Andre. When a judge acquitted him of murdering his wife, Ana Mendieta, his prices went up. In this town, they can hate you today, but if they use you tomorrow, they’ll love you. His tomorrow was just around the corner.
The outpouring of love and support from other guys and their sympathetic wives was incredible. Harrison had never felt so loved. Even other writers who had previously competed with him were loving and tender. They bought him drinks, they invited him to their beach houses. Every woman wanted to suck his cock out back on the beach at night behind some sand dunes. This murder charge was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Harrison was so famous now. He was finally experiencing the cushion of fame that he had reached for all his life. He was now so famous that he was completely protected. No matter what he had ever done to anyone, he was beyond their reach. No matter what anyone knew about him, they were not famous enough to have a voice at the level of his. He never had to talk to or see anyone he didn’t want to see. He was more alive than others. He was more important. His importance carried him on a conveyor belt of parties and privilege. He didn’t have to live his own life. Fame was doing that for him.
And what about Claire? He could barely remember her, and why would he want to? That was then, and this was now. Move on!
That’s why the New Spiritualists loved him. He was so capable of moving on that he could even move on from having taken another person’s life. That was an amazing accomplishment, and they invited him to their parties, too. Veterans of the Iraqi War embraced his example. And former cabinet members of the Bush administration. Everyone wanted Harrison. Finally, he didn’t have to feel at all.
The trial approached, but under the new LATS and PECS rules, it would be one of the greatest works of human display in the history of the very splayed American court system. It would create history. Harrison had already written a memoir about it and it hadn’t even happened yet. Even though he had technically killed her, no one had to know that. Because, spiritually, he was innocent. Those ethnic weirdos Jeff, Dom, and Freddy, now those freaks were the real anti-socials. And that would become eminently clear. Harrison knew that he would win and they would lose. They would be blamed and, indirectly, they
were
responsible. They were creepy, and that was a crime in and of itself. If they had been more functional, he wouldn’t have been under so much pressure to produce masterpieces for society, and what had happened wouldn’t have occurred. It was their fault, and the trial would show this.
He’d written a novel about it, too, called
I Died
, told from the point of view of Claire’s corpse. She explains the ways she goaded him into killing her, and how he is not really responsible. His plan was to publish this five years after the trial, just as his visiting celebrity status and grants and awards and movie versions had ended. The publication of this book would open speculation all over again, creating a new round of parties.
He had always won, and he would always win. Harrison knew he was the champion.