The Merchants of Zion (6 page)

Elly's father had receded further from her life every day since Ryan's death. If he wasn't working he was drinking, and the various expensive bottles of scotch and gin stocking his bar underwent frequent rotation. I knew from Helen that he'd recently lost a fair bit of money on some real estate investment, and had dealt with the setback by taking a hard right toward alcoholism. Some days he'd come home early, say hello, then retreat to his study with a decanter and a bucket of ice. The first time this happened I'd gone home, but the next day Helen had instructed me to not leave unless explicitly dismissed.

* * *

It was well after midnight when I got back to my place. Dimitri was asleep and James was gone. I threw my backpack on the couch and grabbed my old tablet. First thing: unit sales. Nothing today, the same as each day of the past month but for a single red spike three weeks ago. Someone had bought a copy of 
The Surfeit Appetite of a Man Past His Prime
, my third novella. I wondered why they hadn't found the story compelling enough to buy my fourth or fifth novellas, or my second one, which, if I'm being honest, is my strongest work. Downhill ever since.

The royalty came to less than a dollar. A pathetic sum. I checked the balance on Helen's MTA card. It had more than a hundred dollars on it. Given in a moment of pity, it surpassed my writing income from the previous two years.

I set the tablet down, feeling depressed. Next to the set of keys I'd given James lay my copy of 
The Merchants of Zion
, face down and folded open. The front cover's top corner was snipped off—an accident from cutting through the plastic wrapping with a pair of scissors in my senior year of high school. Written by Brian Anderson, it had once been my favorite book, and had followed me from the middle of the country to New York and from one borough to the next. That James would have sneaked into my room to pilfer from my bookshelf didn't surprise me, but I hadn't known he read anything not dripping with overbearing paranoia or stuffed with stock tips.

I flipped through the pages, saving his spot with my thumb. One of those thinly veiled autobiographical memoirs that catch on with the public from time to time, it had been a bona fide hit—a rarity in the age of the death of the novel. The protagonist of the book was a super-driven, over-privileged college senior who spends a semester abroad in Jamaica. His host family are squatters living in a resort abandoned in the aftermath of the revolution. Brian Anderson was accustomed to a life spent glued to his phone, but they don't have wireless service, let alone the internet, and as a result he meets a cast of characters who challenge his bubbled perspective. He worries less and enjoys life more, falls in love with a local, has his heart broken, et cetera. The title is a reference to the Rastas' unique take on enlightenment and their search for personal liberation. Truly, it's a 
bildungsroman
 for the twenty-first century.

Some of my notes in the margins made me grin at my former ignorance: “Who's Kant?” and “The opal ring represents modernity” made me cringe. Present me thought my high school self would have been more clever, but it wasn't so. Would the Cliff ten years hence look back at me and likewise shake his head?

There was a knock at the front door. I answered, and found James standing in the doorway, carrying a bag from the bodega around the corner. He unwrapped a sandwich, then set it and a cup of soda beside the tablet.

“How do you eat that shit? It's disgusting,” I said.

“I disagree.” He went to pick up the sandwich and his elbow hit the cup. Its cap flew off and it tipped over, dumping out the ice/soda mixture. The deluge spread toward my tablet, which I was able to snatch before it spread across the table. 
The Merchants of Zion
 wasn't so lucky—the soda swept over it like a hurricane across the Gulf Coast. James's sandwich was spared a similar, grisly fate—the waxy wrapping paper curled into makeshift levies.

“Your pop almost ruined my computer.”

“What the fuck is pop?”

I picked up the book by one corner. The soda beaded and rolled off, leaving a sticky smear of corn syrup across the glossy cover. The pages stuck together as I flipped through them.

“But you managed to ruin my book. And now your 'soda' is getting all over my floor.”

“I'll get some towels from the bathroom.”

“Thanks for doing me such a favor,” I said sarcastically. I went into the kitchen and turned the oven to three-fifty, (anything lower than four fifty-one, right?), and waited for the book to dry.

Dimitri had brought in the paper mail of the past few days. A Chinese delivery menu, a flier from a councilman running for re-election, and the electricity bill. James had been living with us for two weeks now, so I figured his share of the utilities, then added fifty percent. Fair was fair; it was interest on the rent he promised to pay in the future.

He came back down with one of my bath towels and soaked up the mess. When I told him how much he owed for utilities, he said he didn't have any money and needed me to cover him. Just this one time.

“But you have enough to go out almost every night? And buy sandwiches from the deli?”

“Dude, you know I don't pay for shit when I go out. And I gotta eat.” He paused for a second, looking hurt by the accusations. “I'm sorry about your book. It was an accident.”

“Right.”

“You know I hate relying on other people. I wouldn't be here if I had any other options,” he said, walking past me and to the fridge.

“Glad to hear you hold us in such high esteem.”

“No dude, it's not like that. You and Dimitri aren't exactly living the high life. It's better than I'd have guessed, honestly, but not by a lot. Look, I don't want to be the Manhattan version of one of those guys who bikes around South America and expects the poor-ass natives to open their shacks and share their moldy rice and beans with some rich fucking American. When I make it I'll get you back, I promise, but right now, can you please ease the fuck off?”

“Fine, but you're still an asshole.”

“Cliff, come on.”

“Sorry, I've had a long night.”

“No kidding. You look like someone slammed your head through a wall.” He opened the fridge and pulled out two beers. “I bought a twelve pack for us to split. As a gesture of goodwill.”

I took the can and sat at the counter, telling him about my night at the Felkins's. At first he chided me for passing up an opportunity at “banging out Helen,” but when he heard that the man of the house had been minutes away he agreed it was all for the best. It felt good to talk about office trouble with someone, even if that someone was James. Dimitri was always working, or talking about his research, or thinking about his research, and I'd come to live a solitary life as friends dropped off my radar one by one. James expressed his sympathies towards my situation, telling me that Mr. Felkins must have been wasted and wouldn't remember what had happened come morning. A softer side of him emerged, one understanding and sincere, and I had an inkling the James scoring free drinks looked a lot different than the one who lounged on my couch.

We finished the whole twelve pack, at which point a bottle of whiskey appeared, from where I'm not sure. I don't remember much about the night after that. A jaunty trip to The Den—by myself I think—and a flash of blurry images: rejection, laughter, a bloody nose. Vomit, maybe, but who could be sure? It was all too embarrassing to have possibly been true, and the only thing for certain was that I woke up in my bed naked and next to a girl I'd never seen before.

The End of Tyranny

by Robespierre

Power does not work how you or I would like it to. Power works by its own rules, and its rules are terrible. Terrible. We live in a world where power is held by those who understand it least, by cowardly men who hoard it for no purpose other than the satisfaction of their vanity, who have yoked the collective productivity of mankind in pursuit of pointless, decadent pleasure. They are not capable of using it for transformation, for good or for evil. They are unable to understand that the tools which they possess are capable of so much more.

Why must so many languish in material and spiritual poverty so that the wealthy can feast on cloned rhinoceros steaks and take vacations on the moon? Of what use is progress, I ask, if it is to be bent towards those ends? Right now, if we only wanted, we could provide prosperity for every person living on this planet and at the same time begin the grand project of spreading our civilization across solar system, and then the universe. Instead we do neither, and stagnate.

Everyone knows this must end, but few are willing to commit to working toward the salvation of humanity. But as a proud Jacobin, I can no longer stand in silence as the wealth of the world is stripped from its creators and rightful owners so that oligarchs might amass baubles which are of no use to anyone. I intend to seize power from those who rule over us in ignorance and awaken the will of humanity, ushering us into the age of our destiny. I call on every man, woman, and non-binary person to...

...

4. The Arrival of Ruth, Part 1

I woke up with a nuclear hangover, the kind that makes you swear off drinking for life. Not a drop for three days, at the very least. My immediate instinct was to rush downstairs and ask James what the hell happened, to begin piecing together the previous night, but I was a hostage to my exploding head and its demands were explicit. Sleep until dark, then emerge like a vampire from my lair.

The physical act of falling asleep had been too much for my blackout autopilot to handle. My head was hanging off the side of the mattress and my neck ached from a night spent at a sixty degree angle. When I opened my eyes I was relieved not to find a puddle of vomit staring back at me. It wouldn't have been the first time.

I turned to reach for my pillow and almost fell out of bed in surprise. Where there should have been only crumpled blankets, there was instead a girl. She was lying on her side, back facing me and naked down to the waist, where her svelte figure disappeared beneath the top sheet. Her hair was long and black and woven with strips of electric blue. I took a moment to congratulate myself, and wondered how tanked she must have been to come back here with me. The battle in my head lulled, distracted by a mobilization to the south.

What lies had I told her? And would she remember them when she eventually woke up? Often I was a lawyer at a high-powered firm, a fresh graduate from Boston or New Haven. If I'd pegged her as the artsy type—and out here I invariably did—I was a newly minted professor researching Early-Modern American architecture at Hudson University. You know, Puritanical New England stuff. City on a Hill and what not. Through careful experimentation I'd determined every young woman with a whiff of regret at choosing a stable, entry level job over her artistic passions wants to sleep with a professor. An artist's mind is focused on their inward experience, which is incredibly selfish, while professors use their great intellect to research and explain the achievements of others. Additionally, being a professor says you're dedicated to culture, but not so foolish as to risk poverty for it. Finally, and in my humble opinion most importantly, every college graduate has had a serious crush on one of their lecturers, and I offered them an opportunity to live their fantasies through me.

And if I met a girl who was an actual artist with whom I felt that I had chance? I'd have a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. They're way out of my league.

When I hopped out of bed she stirred, mumbling unintelligibly before rolling on to her belly. On her shoulder—newly exposed—was a tattoo of a bird I'd never seen before. It was bright green, with a resplendent red breast and a long tail, also green, that curled up half-way down her back. I hoped birds like that really lived somewhere in the world, but didn't think it likely. It was too fantastic, and that tail was too useless—too artistic—for evolution's taste.

I was stripped down to my boxers, and threw on my clothes from last night—a ragged pair of jeans and a button down. I didn't remember changing before I went out, but the evidence was irrefutable. Before leaving, I grabbed my wallet from the nightstand and an almost-empty pack of cigarettes, My tobacco pouch was nowhere to be seen. Also on the nightstand was a torn condom wrapper, which answered the first part of another question—we'd at least made an attempt at sex.

I tip-toed downstairs. James was asleep on the couch, a double bottle of wine empty on the table. The tablet was across his chest, a perched parasite burrowing into his heart.

Dimitri was making breakfast in the kitchen. The coffeemaker sputtered and a pot of rice screamed. The sautéing onions and chicken hissed in their pans. Hand-made tortillas popped and smoked. Bowls of chopped bell peppers, tomatoes, avocados and more cluttered the counter, interspersed with jars of spices. It had all hustle and bustle of a military operation, and he was the general with a master plan, calculating temperature and timing with martial precision as he tended one dish, then moved to the next in a clockwise fashion. From simple ingredients emerged a conception of a tasty future, awaiting execution.

“Hey,” I said, “Could you make enough coffee for two? Three, actually.”

“Sure,” he said. “The coffee. It's in the drawer above you. No, to the right.” He roasted his own beans, bought fresh from a local shop, which seemed like a waste of time to me. They tasted better right after their roasting, but after a few days we might as well be drinking Storebrand. I got the bag out and tried to hand it to him.

He shook his head. “Grind it please. And we'll need more water. You can dump out what's already been made. Replace the filter, too.” The coffeemaker had dribbled out about a quarter of a cup. The on/off switch was broken, and he unplugged it as he passed on his way to the tortilla press.

“Can't I just add the new grounds and a few cups of water?”

“No,” he said smartly.

After I ground the new batch of coffee and added the water I sat at of the kitchen table to watch him work.