Chapter 1
Everybody has one thing they keep, one thing that matters to them more than anything else. Life is just a process of elimination, figuring out what that one thing is. You may figure it out right at the end, just as you’re losing it. If you’re lucky.
The day I began to figure it out, for that’s how I think of it now, was a Monday and it started like any other, except backwards. Homer usually wakes me up, not the other way around. I heard the beep beep of my slate in the other room and realized I had been hearing it for a while. Had I been only dreaming I was still asleep?
I had to pee and in dreams I don’t have to pee. Then I thought: where is that dog?
“Homer?” Usually the slate wakes her up right away, like an alarm. I get something from the Bureau every day, even if it’s just a no-go. I was about to call her again when I heard the clicking of big paws on the bare wood floor, and there she was, licking my face. Her breath smelled a little worse than usual, but her beady, black eyes were bright. I got up to pee and make her breakfast (my coffee makes itself) and saw that it was already seven.
Not that it mattered. Mondays were light.
I took Homer for her walk, then tossed slate and bag into the lectro and hit the road. The first pickup was in a nice neighborhood on the back side of Todt (on Staten Island it’s pronounced “toad”) Hill. From the top you can see Manhattan and Brooklyn: one tall, one short; one near, one far; both looking uncluttered and clean. And the Atlantic to the east, as flat and featureless as the prairie in a dream. I often dreamed about the West in those days. That was before my dreams came true.
The house was about halfway down the hill, on a winding, leafy street. We’re not allowed to reveal names or addresses, of course. I parked right in front. There was a dog on the porch, a mutt, looking dangerous but sleepy. The door was opened by a fat White guy in a tee shirt and jeans, not nearly as nice as his house. His shirt said: SO?
I showed him my slate and he looked at it uncomprehendingly. Truly uncomprehendingly. I’ve known pickups to fake ignorance, but his was the real thing.
“So?”
“I expect you know why I’m here.”
“Help me out,” he said. “BIA? Bureau of Indian Affairs?”
“BAE,” I said. “Bureau of Arts and Entertainment.”
“Oh, yeah. You are the guys who pick up old stuff.”
“Right,” I said, though there’s a lot more to the Bureau than that. “You think you might invite me in? It’s a little nippy out here.”
Only a little: it was mid-October. But the first thing we learn at Academy is that things go easier if you can get your foot in the door. Mr. SO? grumbled a little and stepped back out of the way. We both sat down on the same stiff couch, facing the same cluttered coffee table. It was awkward, but I’m used to that. I’m aware that we’re dealing with more than just stuff: it’s memories, dreams, and, of course, money.
“Does the name Miller, Walter M., Jr., mean anything to you?” I asked. The idea is to give the pickup every opportunity to volunteer.
“Miller? Jr.? Sure. Sci-fi writer, Canticle for Leibowitz, wasn’t it? Mid-century, back when books were … wait a minute! You mean Miller was deleted?”
“Six weeks ago,” I said.
“I didn’t know he had been pulled. I don’t keep up with science fiction anymore. Or even science.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. If he was going to be agreeable, I wasn’t going to argue.
“So? Oh. I get it. I must have one of his paperbacks. I thought they were still legal. To tell you the truth, I haven’t looked through them in over a year. They’re not really a collection. They’re sort of a leftover. I guess this is my lucky day.”
“That’s right,” I
said. We pay 150 for each pickup. People who don’t know anything about us, know that.
“And Arthur’s unlucky day.”
“Walter,” I said. Then I gave him what I call the Academy answer: “He had his day in the sun. Now it’s someone else’s turn.”
“Sure, whatever,” Mr. SO? said sourly. He disappeared into another room and I could hear him opening and closing drawers. I kept my eye on the door, just in case. He came back with a box half filled with paperback books. Maybe two-thirds. Just enough so that they halfway stood up.
He had to sort through them all; they weren’t in any particular order. “Maybe there are some others in here,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “I just have my list. You can check the Bureau’s website. Any that you take in yourself are worth an extra fifty.”
“Or five hundred from a bootlegger,” he said. “Or five thousand. I saw that story about what’s his name, Salinger.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said. “And I’m required by law to remind you that it’s against the law to even joke about bootleggers.”
A chill fell over the room. I didn’t mind. You can’t get too chummy; you have to remind people that you work for the government.
“Whatever,” he said. “Here he is. So long, Arthur. Walter.”
He flipped me the book. It had a hooded monk on the cover. The pages fanned out and it hit the floor. I picked it up off the dingy rug and dropped it into my bag.
“Aren’t you even going to look at it? Read a word of it? Before you destroy it? You might learn something about life.”
“Nobody gets destroyed,” I said. With my fingertip I scored him off my slate and punched in 150.
“It’s not just a book you’re wiping out. It’s a human life!”
He was starting to get belligerent. It was time to go. I stood up. “I don’t get involved with all that. I just pick up the stuff and send it to Worth Street.”
“And then?”
“And then, who knows?” I reached for his hand. “Thanks for your cooperation.”
He wouldn’t shake my hand. “So long, Walter,” he said, to my bag. His eyes were
shining.
I began to back toward the door. Sentimentality and violence are closely allied. We learn that at Academy. We like to joke that our job is half diplomacy, half psychology, half math.
“What about the money?” he growled as I opened the door. I heard an answering growl from the porch.
“I’ve already put it into your account. Your cooperation is much appreciated.”
“Oh, well,” he said. “I guess you’re just doing your job. I guess it’s discouraging to the new writers to have the old ones hanging around forever.”
Sarcasm or sudden friendliness? Either way, it’s another bad sign. “Forever was never exactly the deal anyway,” I said, closing the screen door behind me and backing slowly off the porch, watching the dog. They pick up their clues from the owners.
“Too bad for Miller he’s not a fucking Movie Star! Huh?”
I left him shouting through the screen. I was down the steps, on the street, in the lectro and gone. My second pickup was down on the flats near South Beach, in one of those neighborhoods with tiny wooden houses and crumbly sidewalks made with too much sand.
Turned out this pickup was a Movie Star: or at least a movie. We hear the movie star comment a lot. Some people don’t think it’s fair for movies (and not stars) to be pulled, while writers are taken out as individuals. And I guess it’s not. I can’t really argue with them. Not that I would anyway. It’s not my place to argue.
A woman came to the door. About sixty, but dressed like twenty going on forty. The room was dark and the TV was blaring—one of those daytime talk shows where half the guests are cartoon characters from the prime-time shows, who don’t depress the cushions on the couches.
Mrs. 20/40 hit MUTE and invited me in as soon as I showed her my badge. The pickup was a VHS, pre-DVD, still in its little box, complete with a color picture. The hat, gun, and horse identified it as a Western.
“I meant to take this in,” she said. “I was going to take it in last week, but my car broke down.”
She didn’t look like she had a car, or even a lectro, to me. My guess was, she’d heard we had discretionary. I didn’t care; it’s not my money, and I like to accommodate people whenever I can (especially after that last pickup!).
“I understand,” I said as I dropped the movie into my bag and said, “Tell you what. I’ll put you down for the extra fifty. Since you tried to bring it in.”
“Problem is,” she said, “I don’t have a bank account. Maybe I could get cash?”
I didn’t believe that one either. I knew, and she knew I knew, she was trying to avoid the tax. But again, what did I care? She handed me her card and I ran it through my slate.
“You’re a prince,” she said.
“Not at all,” I said. “Just a pickup artist doing his job.”
“A what?”
“A pickup artist. It’s just a term we use.”
Well, if it ain’t Santa,” said Lou, the bartender at Ducks & Drakes, where I usually, actually always, went for lunch in those days. A bud with tomato juice, plus a raw egg on the side. I am pretty health conscious. Or rather, was.
Lou called me Santa because I always brought in the bag. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving it in the lectro. And it was big, as big as a postman’s bag, with the BAE seal on it and everything.
“What’s the damage today?” he asked.
I opened the bag and let Lou look in with the little flashlight he keeps behind the bar—the one he shines in your face when you’ve had too much to drink, and says, “That’s all, folks.” As long as he doesn’t reach into the bag or touch anything, it’s not technically a violation.
Lou shrugged and said “Miller?” but he knew the movie. “Clint Eastwood,” he said. “I didn’t know he’d been pulled! My dad loved him. He named my older brother after him.”
“Clint?”
“Woody.”
“You might be thinking of Woody Harrelson,” I said.
“Or Woody Allen,” said a voice from the dark end of the bar. Dante, or at least that’s what Lou calls him. He’s a retired cop or something; always sitting there in the gloom. “You pull movies but not Movie Stars. So how come a singer disappears as soon as his number comes up?”
“Come on!” said Lou. “They can’t pull Movie Stars because they are never in movies alone. You would have the other actors talking to a blank spot on the screen.”
“So? Singers aren’t on CDs alone either.”
“Sometimes they are,” Lou said. “Besides, movies are different. Movies would last forever unless they were pulled. They would clog up the world like cholesterol.”
“The singer thing eats shit,” said Dante. “They never should have pulled Sinatra. He was a Movie Star, too.”
“It’s all politics,” said Lou, cracking an egg into my glass. “Right, Shapiro? Movies have clout. Buzz. Whang. Pizzazz. Besides, this other guy is a mystery writer, not a singer, right, Shapiro?”
“Science fiction,” I said.
“Same thing,” Dante said from the gloom. “Another thing, how come they’re always picking on Italians?”
“Maybe it’s because you Italians are complaining all the time,” Lou said. “Right, Shapiro?”
“Whatever,” I said. At Academy we’re trained not to argue and it carries over into private life. But sometimes the stuff people say gets to me. In the first place, the Bureau doesn’t pull anybody unless they’re already dead. In the second place, it’s done
by a random generator, and Dante knows that. Or did. And in the third place, who says Clint Eastwood was Italian anyway?
Ionly had one pickup that afternoon. It was on a street right off Silver Lake. I parked a block away and took my time.
I love Silver Lake. It’s like a mirror image of the world, with houses, trees, cars, all around the edges—and in the center, a blue hole, the empty sky. I often think of (thought of) my job that way. The Bureau was the blue hole that kept everything else in order.
The house was an ancient “ranch-style” with an attached garage, open and filled with junk. A toothless old dog came out and started to bark, then fell into step and walked me up to the porch. Some guys have a way with women, with kids, or with other guys. I have it with dogs.
The door was open except for a screen. The inside of the house was dark. No bell. I banged on the screen. The man who came to the door was tall and skinny, with long brown hair brushed across a bald crown.
I verified his name and showed him my slate, which had my badge for a screensaver. I told him what I was after.
Mr. Baldy didn’t try the blank look thing. Just invited me in. Kept the dog out with the screen door.
I sat down with my bag at my side in a dark living room. The drapes and the rug matched; they looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in years. Mr. Baldy excused himself and returned a few minutes later with a square, flat cardboard folder with a picture on it of a cowboy getting into (or out of) a car: a record album. The disk inside it was like a CD but much, much bigger, and two-sided, with tiny grooves. “This is what you want,” he said. “It’s vinyl, an LP.”
“I know, I’ve seen them,” I said. Not literally true, but at Academy we covered all the twentieth-century storage and retrieval media. There are so many different types it’s covered in two separate courses.
“Mind if I listen to it one last time?”
I was so curious I almost said yes. Particularly when I saw the playback device. It was a box with a lid—a record-player. He had opened it and set the turntable spinning, before I came to myself and said, “Sorry, but we’re strictly not allowed.”
“I get it,” he said, closing the lid. Though exactly what he got I couldn’t say. I was holding the LP, staring at the picture of the cowboy—you could tell by the hat—standing beside a car, holding a guitar.
“Are you okay?”
“I guess,” I said. I stuck the LP into my bag. “Sure.”
“You looked for a minute there like you were about to cry.”
“Just a long day,” I said, even though it was only two in the afternoon. I wiped my eyes and was surprised to feel tears on the back of my hand.
“So long,
Hank,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Hank Williams,” he said. “One of the great ones. An immortal.”
“I’m required by law to remind you that there aren’t any Immortals,” I said. “That proposal was defeated with the provision that …”
“Just an expression,” he said. “No harm, okay?”
The dog wanted to follow me but I sent him into the garage. I took the long way back around the lake. I couldn’t get that picture out of my head. It reminded me of a song. I could almost, but not quite, hear it in my head.
Plus there was the name, Hank. Though I never, ever use it, it’s my first name. According to my mother, it’s the name my father gave me.
Chapter 2
There was too much stuff. Everybody knew it, but nobody knew what to do about it.
The solution, or the Deletion Option, as it came to be called when it became official government policy, arrived with a bang, literally. On 5 April 20— at 4:04 a.m., a small explosion was followed by an intense blaze at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. By the time the fire was contained, four impressionist masterpieces had been destroyed, including Monet’s Railway at Argenteuil. The fire had been set by a small, timed incendiary device.
An email communiqué to the offices of Paris Match and The International Herald Tribune claimed responsibility for the attack by a group calling themselves “Les Eliminateurs.” Identifying themselves only as an “international collective of artists,” and using imagery that was at times shockingly vulgar, they compared Western culture to the human body and asked what would happen if one only ate and never eliminated.
The international nature of their movement was made apparent the next week, when two bombs exploded simultaneously in London’s Tate Gallery and Madrid’s Prado. The Tate fire was the most severe, damaging two Turners and destroying a Constable. The Prado was a misfire. Museums throughout Europe responded by replacing their originals with holographic repros and 3-D textured replicas, accelerating a process that was already underway in response to the deterioration caused by atmospheric pollution. “The age of digital reproduction has made originals increasingly obsolete,” said the curator of Berlin’s Haversdatter Gallery. “They will be made available to qualified academics for study.”
Security was increased and museum traffic was up. It was as if by destroying great art, the “Eliminateurs” had reminded the public of its value. The damaged works were displayed in a special traveling exhibit, “Art Answers its Enemies.” Reconstructions of the destroyed paintings were simultaneously exhibited to record-breaking crowds in Tokyo, London, New York, and Vancouver. By late summer, after two months without an attack, it seemed that the “Eliminateurs” were only one more of the fads that regularly rock the art world, and that the crisis was over.
Wrong on both counts.
Chapter 3
Homer was no better when I got home. I microwaved her supper along with mine, but she wouldn’t eat. Homer and I had been alone together for almost nine years, since mother died. I knew from my mother that I had been named after a famous country singer by my father (whom she bitterly called the “wandering Jew”), but since we had moved from Tennessee to New York soon after my father left, I had never gotten into the music. I had never used the name. I had forgotten all about it—until I saw that picture.
That night before I went to bed, I took the LP out of the bag (even though we’re strictly not supposed to) and studied the picture on the album cover. I thought of Dante: he would have grumbled if he’d seen Hank Williams. He looked Italian, like that singer that had caused so much fuss when he was pulled a few years ago, Sinatra. Except for the cowboy hat. I knew that night I would dream of the West. I leaned the album cover against the wall at the foot of my bed, and I could almost, but not quite, hear the music. A distant lonesome sound.
The next morning I had to wake up Homer again. She seemed slow on her feet, so instead of taking her out for her walk right after breakfast, I logged onto MS-MD, my HMO. I described the symptoms (“I had to wake her up and she usually wakes me up”) and was given a queue number.
I only had one pickup that morning, ...
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