Chapter 4
Or 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.
Underling No. 3 rose to show Devine a pleading email on one of three phones he carried. The head of the German opposition party had been caught frequenting a “massage parlor.” There were photos. What was he to do?
Devine shuffled through scripts in his head, plucked out the best response, and then spoke through his black box to the invisible team standing by to execute his orders and see to his whims. “He should issue a statement: ‘Clearly this is a deepfake. My penis appears too small.’”
Back to the young woman. Something shimmered darkly beneath the surface of her flat eyes, an infectious hesitation that had leapt onto him.
She’d experienced some kind of dislocation, a recent trauma no doubt.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled again, a touch drunkenly, as she yanked her top roughly down over her torso.
“It’s okay,” he said, wrenching himself into the present and trying to slow down. Something was wrong within her and, despite his legion wicked impulses, he never took advantage of the afflicted. “What happened?”
She staggered across to tumble onto the bed. “… was … so awful. This girl … she got taken…” She burrowed beneath pillows, hiding her head. She swirled in and out of view—wait, no. That was him.
The full glory of his imbibement kicked in, dolly-zooming his perception.
He goggled at the scene before him, recalling now the shambolic party spread throughout the master suite.
A German tattoo artist perched in a director’s chair.
A trio of Manhattan socialites swanning around behind Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, leaving perfumed wakes of Shumukh by Nabeel.
A high peaty scotch Devine didn’t own soaking into the carpet.
Two Pekingese dogs prancing about, one of whom had left a tidy arabesque of shit on the shag rug in the corner, the other trapped with the mannequin beneath the coffee table, Devine’s role in the matter a hazy recollection.
Though he didn’t smoke, Luke seemed to be holding a lit cigarette and his mouth burned.
In the fireplace, a pyre of logs roared.
His unbuttoned linen shirt clung to him like Saran Wrap.
It wasn’t that he didn’t remember the chain of events that had gotten him here. It was that the chain of logic that had so compellingly brought this moment into existence no longer held.
His stomach pitched with the plummet. He imagined the feathers fluttering down with him, the sting of melting wax.
The windows were grayed with dusk—no, cloudy morning.
Moments ago—hours ago?—he’d been peering into the inner workings of the universe, his thoughts resonating with each clockwork twirl.
Now there was just chaotic rumbling filling his chest, dense enough to blot out clarity.
He tried to say something but the words felt fragmented, puzzle pieces that wouldn’t fit together.
His stomach churned and roiled. Only now did he realize that the engine block of his brain had come apart, scattered across the floor, whirring and clicking, mechanical parts severed from purpose.
The darkness was dizzying, vertiginous, rushing through him, leaving him breathless.
The young woman needed help.
More acutely, he needed help.
What had he done?
What else had he done?
And worse: What might he do next?
When he set down the black box and reached for the phone, he noticed the tremor in his hand. Dehydration? Meds? Booze?
Fear.
He had lost control. He hated losing control. It was worse, he realized, than death.
Gnawing at the edge of a thumbnail, his knee jacking up and down, he dialed. His breathing came shallow, irregular.
One ring.
Another.
And then that voice, soothing in its equilibrium: “Do you need my help?”