RONAN
“You,” Marge said when I came out of my bedroom in the morning. My mouth was a dry foul ruin, my eyes still sealed with sleep crust—and there she sat, on the couch beside my father, her back to me—smoking.
She’d been there for more than one cigarette, by the smell of it. Smoke made the air thick, bright with late-morning sun.
“Marge?” I said, because what else could I say? “Why are you smoking inside? You know my father—”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, standing up, whirling around, and I could see now that not only was she furious—she’d been crying. And I knew exactly what was happening. And there was nothing to do but let it happen. “Now you care about your father’s wishes. Now you worry about what he wants.”
“Marge,” I said.
She waited. I had no more.
“You thought no one would find out? You thought no one would fight you on this?”
“My father’s not getting any better,” I said. “And he has expenses and obligations that you know nothing about. Decisions need to be made, Marge, and I’m sorry you can’t see that.”
She laughed. “You stupid little shit. You should be ashamed to come up in this house and try to play the dutiful son. With me, of all people, who’s been wiping his fucking ass for you for years.”
“You know how much I appreciate you,” I said. “Me and him both. It’s just—”
“It’s just that all that money was too good to keep turning down. So you had to get a power of attorney so you could seize control of everything he owns and sell the building against his wishes. Are you going to try and deny it?”
My father sat there, watching the dead television. What channel is it tuned to—what long-canceled or still-to-be-developed show is he watching? I wondered, idly, sloppily staving off panic with non sequiturs.
“You’re taking advantage of a sick man, and he still has a lot of friends in this town. We might not win, but you can bet your fucking ass we’re going to fight you.”
“Marge,” I said.
You’ve got it all wrong. I’m not on their side. I’m not trying to get rich by helping them out. I’m trying to destroy them. We’re on the same side here.
But I couldn’t say any of that. Because Marge had a big mouth and liked to drink and had tons of friends, and I couldn’t trust her to keep it secret. Within a day the town would be abuzz with rumors of what I was up to.
And anyway, a very public fight with them will only increase my standing with Jark and the other invaders.
So I didn’t say anything at all.
Anger had been the only thing keeping her hurt at bay, and now that she could see I wouldn’t be baited into a battle, the sadness came crashing in. “Your father”—and her voice broke—“your father is a fucking saint, and I have worried myself sick trying to take care of him. While you’ve been off god knows where doing god knows what with—”
She stopped that sentence, but I knew where it had been going. Would have been easy enough to pick up on it, draw out the homophobia she was clearly holding back, get her to say something awful, use it to discredit her in the ugly fight that was coming. But I loved her too much, for how much she loved my father. For everything she’d done for him. She was human—she was a Hudsonian—and so there was hate inextricably woven into her DNA, homophobia and racism, and I wished I didn’t but I did still love her. I wouldn’t hurt her any more than I had to. Marge was not my enemy, even if she believed she was.
“All these years, he’s defended you. Told us we were all wrong about you, that you were a good boy who loved him and this town and that you’d find your way back one of these days. And now—this is how you repay him?”
All I wanted to do was brush my teeth and wash my face and get back into bed and die. But I couldn’t do any of those things. I had to stand there and take it.
“I’ve been blinded, too,” she said. “That’s my fault. I’ve still seen you as that little boy who used to come into the meat market and who thought his father was great God almighty. Do you remember how you used to climb up on the conveyor belt at the cash register, and even though your mother had told me a thousand times not to, I turned it on so you could run in place?” Before I could comment, commiserate, come in for a hug, she continued: “That’s the Ronan I’ve wanted to believe in. But you’re not that little boy anymore. You’re something else. Something awful.”
She heaved herself up from the couch. The door slammed.
Cold wind brushed my bare feet, slit my femoral arteries open. Blood rushed out of me like a stuck sink suddenly unclogged. In seconds, I was empty.
She was wrong about me. But she also wasn’t wrong. That’s why it hurt so bad.
One lesson I could learn from Katch, or the thing that wore Katch’s body now. Act like a person, and it’s easy to convince people that you are one. Including maybe hopefully myself. So I took out my phone and started doing dumb shit on it, just like real people did.
It had been a while. I’d been so busy with our monstrous machinations, I’d almost forgotten the sweet bliss of social media shit-talking. Shouting at strangers. Sending ambiguous GIFs. Heaping praise on people I had no real respect for.
Automation took over, tapping from Twitter to Facebook to email to texts, the complex incantation rituals we use to summon up ourselves. Before long I remembered precisely who I was and what I was doing.
I opened Grindr. Sure enough, Tom’s inbox was packed. Pleas for sex. Gratitude from boys and men he’d been with in the last few days. An unceasing line of strangers sharing their secret selves.
What were the rules of Tom Minniq? Was his physiology human, now that he’d been summoned up into what looked an awful lot like a human body (and was solid enough to satisfy discerning sexual partners)? How long did it take him, after orgasm, to be able to have sex again? He could be a top or a bottom depending on the situation—whatever would make his latest mate happy—but how malleable was he? Did he have a big dick for a size queen and a more modest one for timid virgins? Could he be in more than one place at the same time? Was there a body somewhere—maybe down a well—I could give a decent burial to?
The more I read of his hundreds of conversations, the more disturbed I was.
Do you know WB_Uncut? he’d asked HudsonHiker. He’s got some kind of sick STD situation going on. Like, bleeding sores.
Do you know HudsonHiker? he’d asked WB_Uncut. He’s a fucking asshole. Last night we hooked up, and I made him wear a condom, even though he really didn’t want to . . . and halfway through I noticed something was different. The motherfucker stealthed me, took the condom off and then came in my ass.
To Antiqueen, he’d said: Do you know SixthAndState? He lives in the apartment below me, and this morning I heard him on the phone, and I swear to god he said “no one knows it was you, I paid the cops to say he saw someone running away from Historical Materialism who matched a completely different description, and you’ll get your cash at the end of the week like we said.”
To SixthAndState, he’d said: Do you know Antiqueen? I don’t know what you did to piss him off, but he’s telling everyone you showed him a snuff film you had downloaded to your phone. Really disgusting stuff, something to do with a deep fryer.
It went on like this. Across forty conversations, in the past day alone. Harsh, hateful stuff. Brilliantly orchestrated, too—way better than anything I could have accomplished. Scrolling back through a couple of the conversations, some of them going back weeks now, I could watch in awe as he drew them out. Locals, invaders; he expertly assessed their fears and insecurities and every soft weak spot, and then handed it over on a silver platter to some perfectly matched opposite. Every bit as skillfully as he’d drawn out each one’s filthiest kink. He even leavened out his lies with actual gossip—like how he told everyone about the mayor’s son’s secret boyfriend.
I opened up Tinder and found more of the same. He told women about men who he professed to be friends with, who’d confessed to all kinds of crimes to him. He provided screencaps of men’s profiles. My brother on the PD told me Sal M got arrested for sexual assault but his dad intimidated the girl until he got the charges dropped. Bobby O. forced my sister to get an abortion. To this day he denies it.
Whatever he was setting in motion, I wouldn’t be able to control it. These people all knew each other. They’d seen each other’s faces, in person or on the app. They’d run into each other all the time. One woman, he gave her a recipe for a tasteless poison that would induce extreme diarrhea. Sooner or later, something ugly would happen. Probably lots of somethings.
Why did this scare me so much? Tom was doing what I wanted. So what if he was doing it too well?
Back in my bedroom, at the bottom of my backpack, where I always kept it in case of an emergency, I found my old phone. Opened it up, and logged in to my own Grindr account. And then I clicked on Browse Nearby.
Sure enough, the nearest man to me was Tom Minniq. <25—less than twenty-five feet away.
Horror movie lines flashed through my mind: The calls are coming from inside the house.
Would he listen to me if I told him to stop? Could I control him? Was he grateful to me for giving him life, bringing him into this world? But since when were sons grateful to their fathers for bringing them into this world? And I wasn’t his father, more like his Dr. Frankenstein—and we all know how well that worked out for the doctor.
It’s Ronan, I messaged him. We need to meet.
* * *
“RONAN!” TREENIE CRIED, waving her arms in the air like somehow I’d miss her.
“Hi,” I said. A drafty second-story Warren Street studio space, converted into Jark’s campaign headquarters, currently home to seven volunteers doing phone banking. One of whom was Jark himself, making his own calls—ostentatiously egalitarian. “Cool if I help out?”
“Of course,” she said, hugging me. Smiling. Oblivious.
This idiot has no idea how close we are to destroying everything she’s built.
She produced a spreadsheet page. “This is from the county Democratic Party logs—it’s so late in the game at this point that we’re focused on calling our Yeses, to remind them about the election and thank them for their support, and ask for them to commit to call their friends to see if anyone needs help getting to the polls. We’re still leading by a lot, but this whole YOU ARE HATED thing has caused a slight dip at the polls.”
Such chumps, I thought, to let any stranger with secret hostile motives walk in and get the keys to the campaign car like this. I sat down and read the script and reached for the phone.
But maybe they weren’t. There wasn’t much harm I could do them, there in that crowded room. Anything off-script, they’d hear. Maybe I could walk out with the page of Yeses, call them all to ask them not to. That was just one of hundreds of pages.
The worst I could do was drag my feet, and that’s what I did.
“Hey, Ronan,” Jark said, standing up, giving me a hug. “Thanks so much for helping out.”
“You know it,” I said. “Although I have to imagine all of this is pro forma at this point. Right? Your lead is so significant . . .”
He laughed, sage and wise. “Many a political campaign has been lost by a candidate who was so confident of victory that they slacked off while their opponent was pushing themselves full steam ahead.”
“Good point,” I said, clapping him on the back, sidling into the empty seat next to him. “You must be feeling pretty good, though.”
“Cautiously optimistic,” he said, his smile appropriately, performatively humble.
This was a start-up billionaire, a Silicon Valley brigand. Small-town upstate politics was child’s play to him.
* * *
THIS DREAM IS NOT A DREAM. It’s a thing that happened. Somehow, I am seeing it. Somehow, I am sitting in Wallace Warsaw’s office down at the Hudson Chamber of Commerce, an unseen observer.
“Jim doesn’t know I’m here,” my mother says. “You won’t tell him I came by, will you?”
“Of course,” Wallace says.
“The bank turned us down for this loan, and there’s no reason for it,” my mother says. “We really need your help, Wallace. If you talk to them . . .”
By her short spiky haircut I know when this happened. She got it all chopped off, just a couple weeks before she died. The day I came home from school and saw her sitting at the kitchen table I was super excited, seeing its edgy transgressive boyishness as a mark of solidarity with my own secret sexual transgressiveness. But then she died, and I could see it for what it was: someone desperately rattling the bars of her cage, who probably already knew that the only way out was to leap straight to her death.
Wallace Warsaw says, “I’m so sorry, Hild.”
“The butcher shop will close without it. You know that. Just like the Jersey Bakery did. Just like—”
“We have to look toward the future, Hild. Hudson has been dead a long time. Butcher shops and bakeries are not sustainable. The margin of profit is so small. The tax benefit to the town is negligible. We’re working with the banks to come up with better overall portfolio goals. There’s a plan in place.”
“So it was you,” she says. “You got the bank to turn down our loan.”
“Not me personally, and not your loan specifically, no. But, yes, the Chamber has been meeting with political and business leaders, as well as our local lending institutions, to develop a strategic plan for revitalizing Hudson. And part of that involves setting priorities for how our limited resources can best be leveraged.”
“Let me guess,” she says. “Those three antique stores that just opened on Warren Street are the tip of the iceberg.”
“Arts and antiques are a major area of strategic focus, yes.”
“You fucking son of a bitch,” my mother whispers.
“That’s totally uncalled for,” he says, as if her vulgarity is the real crime, as if what he’s been doing is merely strategic leveraging. Setting portfolio goals. I find myself immensely frustrated that I am not physically present, and therefore cannot seize one of the antique harpoons off the wall and ram it through his neck.
“What you’re doing is fucking evil,” she says, getting up. “Who the hell are you to decide whose business lives and dies?”
He shrugs, looks out the window, like, You just can’t reason with some people.
“Fuck your plan in place, Wallace, and fuck you, too.”
She storms out. I have enough presence of mind to briefly wonder, Is this real? Can I trust this? Am I being pushed? And then that presence of mind is washed away in a flood of sweet cold blue hate.