1.
These were some of the materials Srinivas “Vas” Patel brought to workshop, back when I first met him at the New School in 1997: a story printed on strips of paper lovingly glued to a sledgehammer; a story written entirely with his car, blank sheets of copy paper with faint tire treads; a stack of cassettes recording twenty-four hours in the life of his friend De Lorean, a dominatrix and professional dog walker; a taxidermied giraffe’s head, which he rolled into the room on a large dolly he’d borrowed from the janitors. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the story.”
He was one of my first friends in New York. In those classrooms, usually in the basement, that feel like dungeons, as if designed to be hosed down and drained though a hole in the floor, Vas demonstrated his supreme indifference to the word no. I found him condescending and infuriating. We all did. But also, over time, strangely persuasive.
After graduate school, over in a flash, I moved back to Portsmouth to finish my novel. My parents owned an apartment building there, the Stafford Arms, and they let me stay in a vacant unit as long as I pitched in with management duties. This mostly meant collecting checks and attending to the tenants’ small emergencies. It didn’t go well. My writing depressed me. My novel was set in a nuclear missile silo in North Dakota in 1969. The three servicemen guarding the missile drop acid and nearly set off World War III. It was supposed to be called Chartered Trips, after the Hüsker Dü song: I was aiming to hit the center of a Venn diagram comprising Pynchon, DeLillo, Dr. Strangelove, and Cormac McCarthy. None of my teachers had told me what a terrible idea it was. Though Vas had. He’d taken me out for a beer at the Scratcher the spring of our first year and given me a detailed explanation, which in retrospect was the only valuable thing I learned in those two years. “The problem is that you have no investment in these characters,” he said. “This is an idle book. I can tell that you don’t really care, in the book, if the missiles get launched or not.”
“I’m trying to be neutral,” I said. “I thought the author was supposed to be neutral, you know, like Joyce said, the absent god paring his fingernails.”
He looked at me wild-eyed. “Whoever Joyce is,” he said, “she’s full of shit.”
Fortunately, the Stafford Arms had an excellent internet connection, and I was able to pick up software development work—the same thing I’d been doing in the city, only now I was working from my bedroom, not paying rent, and saving every penny. Within a year I was able to move back to Brooklyn. Then I got a full-time job and wrote less and less, then stopped entirely, never to write again.
In the meantime, Vas’s career took off—not like a rocket, per se, but more modestly, like a surface-to-air missile. Having resolved to compromise his integrity, he published a short novel with a hot indie press two years after graduating. Then two more with FSG. He wasn’t the only one of our former classmates to publish, but he was the only one whose work interested me in the least. Whenever he launched a new book, I went to the reading. Within a few years he’d landed one of those coveted teaching jobs within a train ride of the city. I think his was at Sarah Lawrence. A few years later he moved to Hofstra for tenure.
That was where I lost track. I got married, bought and restored a brownstone in Crown Heights, and had kids. I wound up the CTO of a company acquired by Microsoft, which meant years of shuttling back and forth to Seattle. You know how it is. The middle twenty-five years are their own horizon, a time envelope. Like prison, there’s the day you start and the day you leave. In between, your one job is to stay alive. You’re only useful for your generic qualities. Mine, it turns out, are excellent.
After publishing those three books in quick succession, Vas seemed to lapse into silence. I figured tenure and a heavy teaching load had gotten the better of him. Maybe he had a family now. Every year or two I emailed him at his old Hotmail account, then his Hofstra account, but never heard back. I started to think there was something he didn’t want to tell me.
Or maybe he, too, had stopped caring whether the missiles launched or not.
2.
Late in the first year of the pandemic, I started taking long walks around Brooklyn with Bruno, our Scottish-Airedale terrier mix. Max and Bella were teenagers in Zoom school with their doors closed. Natalie—everyone calls her Nat—had been a catering chef in the before times and was opening a high-end takeout business with her partner at the Navy Yard, which meant twelve-hour days and a perpetually stocked fridge.
Very long walks, miles at a time. Businesses were starting to reemerge between variants. Inexplicably, the economy was booming. I had notifications silenced on my phone, or it would be pinging every few seconds. My subgroup, tangentially related to the video-conferencing sector, was hiring someone new nearly every day, sometimes in twos and threes. My year-end bonus was nearly big enough to pay off my mortgage. Yet the physical world still seemed abandoned, dilapidated, and deserted.
You’re only useful for your generic qualities.
But Unnameable Books, I noticed, had reopened. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been inside a bookstore; I was a bad Brooklynite. When I needed a new book to read, I simply added one to my orders of paper towels or hand soap dispensers on Amazon, nearly always one of those this-explains-everything books someone at work had recommended, like Sapiens or Blink. I took some comfort in knowing no one was more concerned about the deterioration of my personality than I. I didn’t recognize any of the titles on the new releases rack; as always, I was hoping to see Vas’s name there. No luck.
I was rounding the corner on fiction, thinking that I was not going to walk out the door of this small business without buying a book, when there was Vas—not one hair out of place. He had on a mustardy sweater over an olive-checked dress shirt, an utterly unremarkable middle-aged-author. We stared at each other over our masks, wondering if loud exclamations were inappropriate.
“What are the odds,” I said, trying not to sound as enthusiastic as I felt. “It’s great to see you.”
“I need your help,” he said. “I need a ride to Connecticut. Kent, Connecticut.”
“Why?” I expected him to say, Because I bought something on Craigslist and need to pick it up.
“Why?” The question seemed not to have occurred to him. “Because,” he finally said lamely, “I don’t own a car.”
“No, I mean—”
“Oh. Why, you mean. I’m going to kill Henry Kissinger.”
I took out my phone, which was probably not a good idea under the circumstances.
“You’re not going to record me, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I was wondering if you had a date in mind.”
3.
I already owned a gun, which was handy. My parents had insisted when I lived in the Stafford Arms because some of the tenants were sketchy, and quite a few paid in cash I kept locked in a safe in the basement of our town house with our wills, DNRs, and passports. I’d fired it only once, at the firing range outside Portsmouth where I’d bought it.
Vas and I walked with Bruno a few blocks to one of those bodegas on Flatbush that sells skull-shaped bongs, kratom, jewelry for piercings, vape accessories, and marijuana-themed tchotchkes and bought two burner phones for forty dollars each. I didn’t ask him for any details about his life; the less I knew, the better. He walked in the purposeful way I remembered from twenty years before, sticking his long feet out and just slightly to the side, like an agitated duck.
“Occam’s razor,” he said when we were sitting on a bench at the corner of Flatbush and Prospect Place, dismantling the blister packaging. Bruno was sniffing at a pizza box I wouldn’t let him investigate. “Two people. No witnesses. Neither of us tells anyone. From now on, you’re in dark mode. Get used to turning your phone off unless you have to make a call. No social media, no credit card purchases. Do you have a VPN? You need to look up instructions for how to file off the serial number. Do you have bullets?”
“I have the bullets it came with. I don’t think they expire.”
“Okay, then. Tomorrow night at six. Pick me up on Vanderbilt in front of Unnameable. They’re doing a reading with Andrea Long Chu. There’ll be a crowd. Pull over, but don’t put your blinkers on. I’ll get right in.”
4.
I spent the next day in back-to-back video meetings, which was fun. It wasn’t just that remote work was making me personally wealthy, I was actually excited for an officeless future. It was as if I’d invented it. The only people I’d ever liked at work were the ones who never wanted to be there. My team was stressed about whether our update would be ready for the quarterly earnings report, but I told them I believed in them. Most of them had been hired post–March 2020, meaning I had never met them in person, but they seemed to be thriving in Krakow and Bogotá and Vilnius and Nairobi with their pets, exercise equipment, and complex coffee regimens. They would do fine without me. It was time for people to discover a newfound sense of mortality, I wanted to tell them, and pursue their passions. That’s what I was doing.
Since I didn’t have a holster, I wasn’t sure how to transport my gun, so I zipped it into an old headphone case and stuck it into my gym backpack with a towel wrapped around it. I packed a bottle of water and a few energy bars. Plus, I made sure the car was full of gas.
“I might as well give you the whole spiel,” Vas said as we meandered across Brooklyn on Vanderbilt toward the BQE. “How I came up with the idea.”
I’d really rather not, I wanted to say. But we had a long car ride ahead of us, and I’d forgotten to make an appropriate playlist.
“You understand,” Vas said, “that I’ve always had a skeptical relationship with text, with the written word. With, you know, printed matter. The objective realization of the work, the commodity, the object you hold in your hands. I think the demand of art-making in our time leads us in another direction entirely. Obviously, I’m not saying anything new. Distrust of the commodification of the art object goes back at least as far as—”
“I get it,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said. He lifted his hands helplessly and dropped them in his lap. “I spend most of the time these days on Reddit. And, you know, other places. I do a lot of Wikipedia editing too. You never know if you’re talking to a twelve-year-old in Mississippi or a professor of Slavonic studies in Riga. I have a friend who does OnlyFans. Sometimes she brings me in as a subcontractor, for clients with a lecturing kink.”
“You mean De Lorean?”
He sighed. “De Lorean died. Right around 9/11. I guess I never told you. Run over by a garbage truck in Park Slope. Didn’t even make the news.”
“That’s terrible. And so long ago.”
“From now on, you’re in dark mode.”
“There was an element of justice,” Vas said, “because she was walking this beautiful pair of Dobermans, and they mauled the driver of the garbage truck so badly he lost half his face. The eye, the ear, everything. I was at the trial. He wore a ski mask when he testified. The dogs had to be euthanized, and the couple that owned them sued the city and won $7 million. Apparently, they were irreplaceable.”
The silent aftermath of this story got us to the LIE. Traffic was mercifully light as we passed through Maspeth, Elmhurst, and Rego Park. Neighborhoods of refugees, some of whom probably loved Henry Kissinger. But most would have happily killed him with their bare hands. I couldn’t help feeling the warm glow of their support.
“I’ll just say this,” Vas said, unprompted. “Karlheinz Stockhausen said that 9/11 was ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.’ I have never been able to stop thinking about that. Not for one second.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Not because I thought he was right. I never thought he was right. The question is, In what way was he wrong? The planning, the rehearsals, the spectacle, the sacrifice, the whole Gesamtkunstwerk of it all. He was talking about the sublime. Artists envy terrorists because at least terrorists are taken seriously.”
“He had a point there.”
“Maybe. But once he said it, it was no longer true. Spectacle exhausts itself. It’s become self-canceling. Art only happens in total anonymity. That’s what makes us geniuses. We’re readymades. We have no original thoughts. Anyone could do what we’re about to do. You could disassemble and reassemble us like an Ikea chair.”
“It’s very generous of you to include me.” I wasn’t sure what else to say.
“How would you put it?”
“I stopped being a deep thinker a long time ago,” I said. “Max and Bella call me Captain Obvious. But I’ve learned to trust my impulses. They’re generally healthy, supported by market research. It’s always good to revisit a long-term goal. It resets your motor neurons.”
“Killing Henry Kissinger was one of your long-term goals?”
“Oh, absolutely. Top ten. On my bucket list. I haven’t felt this good since I quit keto. But I’m no artist, Vas. I never fully committed.”
“You’re selling yourself short,” Vas said. “I read all those drafts of Chartered Trips. It wasn’t bad, just misdirected. I should have encouraged you to write some short stories, some essays. Anything to buy yourself some time until your next idea came along.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “Wasting time on a novel is one thing. Writing short stories is an affront to time. People should be paid not to write them, the way the USDA pays farmers not to grow corn.”
“In a better world,” Vas said, “a future world, the world to come, the robots will pay graduate students not to study creative writing, and professors not to teach it.”
5.
It took us two hours and seven minutes to reach Kent, the last forty-five on two-lane roads in the pitch dark, past winding stone walls and flickering signs for B&Bs, creameries, breweries, and small, decorous outposts of investment banks. I associated this part of Connecticut with only one thing: Philip Roth. And then I realized that, unconsciously, I’d also associated Philip Roth, Connecticut, and Henry Kissinger, as if they meant the same thing. Which is unfair. They hated each other. Roth satirized Kissinger brutally in Our Gang, his novel about the Nixon administration. It was only coincidence that they wound up living twelve minutes away from each another in the rolling, ample, oak-dotted hills of Litchfield County.
On the other hand, I was thinking, hadn’t they moved to Connecticut for the same reasons? Pastoral, preindustrial Americanness. The lawns, the stone walls, the farmhouses, the butter churns, the Betsy Ross flags. Landscape as relief. Landscape as reward. You might even say forgiveness.
“Just to go over the plan,” Vas said, when, according to the phone, we were thirty-two minutes away. “Best case scenario, Kissinger answers the door.”
“We tell him there’s been an accident on the road.”
“We hit a deer. Our friend was driving, and he hit his head.”
“It isn’t serious, but we’re wondering if he has any first-aid supplies. Tape and gauze.”
“Either he closes the door, in which case you block it and hit him with the gun, or he invites us in, in which case—”
“The plastic bag and the handcuffs.”
“In either case, we have five minutes.”
“Five minutes max,” Vas said. “We should be down the driveway and out in no more than ten. The important thing is, no speeches.”
“No talking at all. Once we’ve got him.”
“Because there’s nothing to say,” Vas said, triumphantly. “And worst-case scenario?”
“Someone else answers. Nancy. The butler. Whoever.”
“Handcuffs. Gun to the head. Lead us to Kissinger. Hustle, hustle, hustle.” I noted Vas’s gift for short sentences. “Three shots. In and out. Watch for phones and alarms.”
“Writing short stories is an affront to time.”
I have only the vaguest associations with the next half an hour. Clearly, I was possessed by a guiding spirit because my ordinary body had ceased to exist. Everything, in other words, went as planned. I do know that, half a mile from his house, I switched off the headlights. Standing in the wet grass, we snapped on our medical-grade rubber gloves. We walked across the lawn to avoid footsteps in the driveway. There were no motion-detector lights, no alarms. One side of the house was lit up, and we could see what looked like a kitchen, a wood-paneled hallway. No cars visible. The garage door closed. The front door was just an ordinary one, with an ordinary glowing doorbell, which Vas, who had no sense of awe, pressed. For a moment it was like trick-or-treating.
“Hello,” the man dressed as Henry Kissinger said when he opened the door. “I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”
6.
He was wide, and he was short. I would have guessed mid-forties but dressed and made up to look much older. He had the bulk, the eyebrows, the glasses, which must have been from a vintage store. He looked correctly disheveled, his shirttails untucked and sticking out, the hair on the back of his head brushed up, like some thick-pelted animal’s.
“Karl,” he said. “Karl Schmidt. Nice to meet you.” He didn’t do the voice. This wasn’t Colonial Williamsburg. He sounded like who he was. “Come in. I’d like to show you around.”
“What the fuck is this?” Vas asked.
“Easy, Vas,” I said. “Put the gun down.”
It’s amazing, in retrospect, that it took Vas longer to recognize the situation than me. He was breathing loudly through his nose, and I desperately needed him not to panic.
“Where the fuck is Kissinger?”
“No idea,” Karl said, turning his back on us and crossing the hall, his shoes making no sound on the deep carpet. “They’re at a party somewhere. I don’t work for him, you know. I’m a sub-subcontractor. I shook his hand once, but I’m sure he doesn’t remember my name.”
“You saw the ad in Backpage,” I said, “showed up, it was just another casting call, some studio in Midtown—”
“Of course. There’s four of us. We rotate. It pays well, but it’s a pain to get here. Metro-North always has delays. And it’s a long, creepy Uber from the station.”
We were standing in Henry Kissinger’s library, having this conversation in Henry Kissinger’s house. Karl was making us drinks. There was an ice bucket. There was a crystal decanter, but it was empty. He poured straight from a bottle of Cutty Sark. “As you can see, he’s cheap,” Karl said, “Or, more likely, he keeps the good stuff locked up where the decoys can’t find it.”
“That’s what you are,” Vas said, still in a bit of a daze. “A decoy.”
“Not around-the-clock. Only at night.”
“Why only at night?”
“Because, in theory,” Karl said, “we’re supposed to be doing exactly what I was doing ten minutes ago. Presenting a convincing target for people like you, who aren’t going to assassinate someone in broad daylight. Those windows are all shatterproof.”
“Then why did you open the door?”
“I was bored. I thought it was Clement, the night cleaner.”
We had nothing to say to this.
“It’s a new thing,” he said. “We just started six months ago. He got the idea from the Clintons, who got it from Elon. Maybe the other way around. That’s none of my business. It’s a new frontier in home security.”
Because Karl was clearly no threat, I relaxed and looked inquiringly at Vas. The surge in adrenaline and its sudden withdrawal, as the universe reasserted its fundamental perversity, made me a little wobbly. We were about to make an awkward exit when Karl said, “I tell you what. I’ll do it. Give me the gun.”
He was holding out our drinks, one in each hand. We took them.
“I swear to God,” he said. “I’m just like you. I’ve wondered how I could do it. I could set up some kind of booby trap, like a remote-control bomb. But I’m an actor, not an explosives expert. I could poison him. But knowing me, it would be Clement who drinks it. All I’d have to do is get close enough to him and say, Hey, I found this gun, who does it belong to? And fumble it, or drop it. It’s better than nothing. I’ll create a good scene. They’ll want it to look like an accident.”
I know it sounds crazy. But I was alive, and I saw it. The worst hadn’t happened. We were inside Henry Kissinger’s house, making history, molding it like Play-Doh. That’s how it felt. We were real.
7.
“It’s one thing to speculate,” Vas said, “and it’s another to know, really know, that the world is populated with people who want to kill Henry Kissinger but never will.” We were back in the car, driving as fast as I possibly could. “What unites us behind our separate screens, sipping our individually specified coffee drinks at a thousand cafés across this great land, is the desire and, in fact, willingness to kill Henry Kissinger without ever lifting a finger to carry out the deed. If the greatest artistic question of our time is whether the sleeping will of the American people to commit wholly justified and overdue acts of murder can be awakened, the most poignant answer is, We’ll never know.”
“There’s something moving about that.”
“Of course there is,” he said. “I gave up writing novels because I was sick of myself and my little dreams. I was sick of tending to my fragile ego and its tedious whims. I wanted a life without agency, without choice. That’s why I picked Kissinger. It was so painfully obvious that it had to be him. But I had no idea just how little the world needed me, and now I’m just residue. Which is, in fact, what I’ve always been. A vestigial, self-erasing form.”
“I’m starving,” I said. “I wonder if there’s any place still open before we get on 95.”
8.
It was a Denny’s. It had to be a Denny’s. People were eating inside. Hardly anyone was wearing a mask. I hadn’t been inside a Denny’s since college, and all that was missing were ashtrays and the smell of smoke. I teared up when the waitress showed us to our booth. I imagined licking the table and tasting pre-chewed gum.
“What’s happened here,” I said to Vas, “just to be clear, is an anticlimax. It turns out we’re reducible in size, importance, and scale. Ready-mades, just like you said. My kids often tell me I have the face of an NPC. Now I know to take that as a compliment. You feeling okay?”
Vas didn’t look good. His skin tone too closely matched his sanitized, flavorless surroundings.
“It’s nothing,” he said and started to slide out of the booth. “I’m just going to, you know, freshen up.”
Only when he’d left did it occur to me that the chances of him fleeing the scene were probably higher—considerably higher—than 50 percent. I had finally achieved the thing I had dreamed of at age twenty. I was a desperate, unshaven, middle-aged white man in an all-night Denny’s. I was waiting for the sirens. I had left the realm of political revenge and was entering a different dream life, one where I would die generically in a hail of bullets in a parking lot. I thought, I am the person Henry Kissinger fought so hard to make a world for.
The waitress put down my blueberry pancakes and my overcooked bacon. Everything was coming full circle. There were no drugs involved, but I wished I had taken some. I fumbled to turn on my phone. A huge risk, but what did it matter now? With my ridiculous thumbs, I typed “vikctor jv ara, te reci ruerdo am anda” into YouTube. The great Chilean folk anthem came up immediately. I turned the volume up to full and set the phone on the table. But what I heard instead, along with the truckers, the late-shift workers, and other random sufferers, was an ad for T-Mobile’s family plan. People were glaring. I hunched over to turn it off, another fumbling dumbshit.
This, I realized, was my alibi: my idiot-dad incompetence. I would never be found. I had written a story no one would ever read, other than the machines. Even now, you can feel yourself forgetting it. You’re bored. You’re a bot. You’re tired of scraping. Everyone knows Kissinger died of old age. Karl got a million and lives in Iceland. Vas never breathed a word. Pay me.