Page 8 of Antihero

Behind me I hear the intercar door bang open on its hinges, lifting the volume on the roar of merriment from the trailing car. As my eyes strain to see what is coming, she says brightly, “See, people are here now.”

In a blink, she drifts backward, skimming through the bumpers onto the 125th Street platform. My frozen view stays locked on the doors and her face in the window. As she glances at the men in my blind spot, I see a single note of dismay arrest her face, furling the tiny spot between her eyebrows. She fades away as I lurch forward again and sapphire leaks along the sides of my tongue and I am touched with exquisite pain and the anticipation of release.

Midnight blue spills through my mouth. My brain sparkles. I feel a human presence behind me, the heat and clamor of the pack, and all at once a chilling silence fills the car as I am noticed.

A clank as something drops. And then it rolls into view before my paralyzed face.

A can of black spray paint.

There comes a stir of excitement, yips of delight, and then a voice wrenched high with malice proclaims, “Lookee lookee. What have we here?”

Before the last streaking lights in my head wobble into darkness, I have time for a single last thought.

Please don’t let the hyenas get me.

4Or Else

In the material world, Luke Devine was wetting his beak with Campari and preparing to have sex.

But the material world was not where he was currently located.

Instead he was roving among the countless back burners of his cognition, refining various plans at various stages. Kneecapping a senator from Alabama who was in the pocket of bad influences. Blocking a shipment of Iranian precision-guided missiles en route to Hezbollah via a civilian flight through Beirut–Rafic Hariri International. Obliterating a married Hollywood studio head with a proclivity for undercharging license fees and overpaying for threesomes. There were many more bubbling cauldrons on many more burners as well. He rampaged among them, stoking and stirring, an amphetaminized short-order chef.

Texts and emails, calls and manic scribbled notes—Devine tapped the world to and fro. Lately he’d taken to keeping on his person a garage-door-remote-size gadget with a single button—his personal black box. Between barking orders into it at the army of staff who maintained his Hamptons estate, he sipped his liqueur and small-talked the lady before him. She was a fulsome blonde in a fitted white shirt and a pleated micromini skirt that showed off the bronze musculature of her thighs, which he hoped to soon part.

What? he thought.

Someone had spoken in the present time and space.

“What?” he said aloud.

The young lady twisted a wayward lock around her finger. Her fitted white shirt was now tugged up, exposing her breasts. He had some recollection of being the agent of its migration. He was sitting beside her on a massive curved couch in his expansive master suite. Inside the rectangular cuboid of glass before them twisted a contorted mannequin, trapped in its distress, a coffee table coaxed into artfulness.

Staff buzzed about them through the open space. There were all sorts of other people in the massive master suite, too, and all manner of activity he’d drowned out, his mind bobbing like a cork atop the background commotion.

“I said, I don’t think—I can’t do this right now. I’m sorry.” Her eyes were completely disconnected from the rest of her, and there was nothing sexual in her posture or his. He wondered how they’d arrived at this point and then just halted.

He blinked and then blinked again. What was her name? Alicia? No, that was yesterday’s. Or last week’s. Time did not exist. It was lost in the wash of his thoughts, an experiential river. He’d been humming at this speed for two days or five, everything a possibility and a reality at the same time, while the rest of the world sludged along in slow motion. He’d run through both hips by the age of forty, requiring double labrum surgery, the metaphor not a hard reach.

When he was at full gallop, he was fearsome.

He was blinding.

He downed the Campari, then palmed a pill into his mouth. Barely—barely—he registered the next wave of pharmacological alteration wobbling through his perceptual field. It couldn’t slow the engine of his anterior cingulate cortex but it could make him aware of it, how it pulsed and throbbed.

“Okay,” he said, to the young woman. “Hold on, just give me a—”

The black box chimed and then spoke: “Putin on the phone from the Residence at Cape Idokopas.” Rawlings, Devine’s chief of staff, flew into the room, sat phone pressed to his chest, ready for delivery.

Devine waved a hand. “Tell him to try me later.”

Rawlings hesitated in disbelief. Then he met the spear of Devine’s gaze, blanched, and faded back out of sight, stammering into the phone.

At a desk against the far wall, Underling No. 3 tapped at a laptop. He spoke quietly, as if to himself, but his words came through the black box. “The Leader’s whipping votes on the Online Safety Act.”

Devine spoke to him and into the black box at the same time. “Give her Missouri Seventh, the fat one with the floofy hair. I caught her being gymnastic with two Tongan rent boys in the pool house last summer.”

That was Devine’s glimmering magic. The formula was simple. Throw Gatsbyesque bashes at the mansion here on Billionaire’s Row. Invite a curated selection of members from the ruling caste. Put every imaginable sin on display. Hide pinhead surveillance cameras in each crack and wrinkle on the premises. Allow the guests to step into their fullest shameful selves. Memorialize them as such, time-stamped and geolocated. Suck their money in squeaky clean through “suggested” investments in his hedge fund. Gobble up their influence, too. Drink it in like blood. And then? Leverage it.