Year of the Slug

By James Cortese

With the dot-com bubble in full swing, a high-flying software tycoon can't quite decide if the man he killed has taken over his body or he's just insane. Or maybe the answer is in a 1930s sci-fi novel that isn't a novel at all, but an alien instruction manual.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Cortese
• Release date: Feb 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780982896013

Book preview

Year of the Slug

James Cortese

Smashwords Edition

© Copyright 2010 by James Cortese

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author or publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is entirely a work of fiction. The names of real public figures and personalities, both living and dead, are used for satiric purposes, and their presence here in the form of imaginary characters is not meant to assert or infer that their portrayal bears any relation to anything they might have actually said or done.

ISBN 978-0-9828960-1-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010933452

Also by James Cortese

After Gideon

Women of the Book

Freak House

Being Zoe

The Very Last Thing

What the Owl Said

For Romana

Yes, everyone wears a mask, including those who take great pride in denouncing the practice of mask-wearing. What is less well known is that one’s mask covers yet another one beneath it—covers in fact many masks, mask upon mask, one beneath the other, like layers of an onion, all the way down to nothing at all.

—Benno Frank

Contents

Preface

The Journal

The Letters

The Case Study

Appendices

PREFACE

Nothing is more surprising than murder, especially when it happens to people you know.

It was in 1997, having left an editorial job at Burton-Moseley publishers to work at TekSoft as Director of Technical Writing that I came into contact with Randolph Trumbull, the CEO and founder of the company. Randy and I got along very well, but were not close. Randy was the embodiment of the successful entrepreneur, highly intelligent, very logical and pragmatic, gregarious, charming, even charismatic. But there was another side of him—his compulsive womanizing, his recklessness, his supreme egotism, all of which was apparently engendered by an astounding capacity for irrationality. I was always amazed that two sets of very contradictory personality traits could exist in the same body. In the end, apparently, they couldn’t.

Having spent seven years at Burton-Moseley as a Senior Editor, I also knew Charles Chuck Weed, a man who seemed almost helpless in the the corporate workplace, where a good deal of unquestioning obeisance to managers was required for advancement. Chuck was pathologically shy and often annoyingly passive, while harboring contempt for his bosses, whom he saw as incompetant at best and unscrupulous at worst. After working on several projects together, we had become office friends, often meeting for lunch, and found we shared the same interests in literature and the same kind of subversive humor that eventually got him fired.

I have no doubt that it was because I personally knew both Randy and Charles, that I was chosen to shepherd Year of the Slug into print. My mission was to provide editorial assistance in getting the book into publishable shape, and then solicit the interest of various publishers. The latter task turned out to be much easier than the former. The Trumbull story had received wide—if not lurid—attention in the news media, and no American publisher was going to ignore an opportunity to place a bet on what was generally perceived to be a sure winner.

As sent to me, Year of the Slug was in a very rough state, much of it written willy-nilly in a kind of ersatz shorthand, with many abbreviations, omitted words and lacunae. Although a good deal of the narrative consisted mostly of summaries rather than fully developed dramatic scenes, an attempt had been made to capture recollected dialogue and extended conversations—but, again, usually in the form of terse phrases and key words. Most of my editorial labors were spent in straightening all this out and producing a readable, smooth-flowing text suitable for publication. Needless to say, there were quite a few ambiguities along the way, often requiring me to check back with the author to ascertain what his intentions had been when he had set down the particular word or phrase in question. These problems were almost never easily resolved for reasons that become clear in the letters that make up the second part of this book.

The actual correspondence included many more letters than I have included here. My simple goal was to continue the story beyond the Journal, not document the strenuous efforts required to normalize the text—a subject that will be taken up at another time. Likewise, I have deliberately omitted my own letters, preferring to let the voices of my correspondents speak for themselves.

The third part of this book adds a document that I believe will help readers come to grips with the complex interactions of the three main figures. This is the Case Study written by Arvid Paternoster, the psychiatrist Randy consulted during the writing of the Journal. Dr. Paternoster’s fascinating report combines important biographical information with an astute psychological insight into the author’s behavior and motivations.

Finally, I have included an Appendices section that contains materials readers may find useful, including a passage from Benno Frank’s Exiles that the author commented upon in the margins of his copy of the book. In short, I have done my best to provide readers with all the information currently available that they will need to come to as full an understanding as possible of Randy Trumbull’s endlessly fascinating story, with its bizarre twists and its strange, enigmatic protagonist.

Or is it protagonists?

As close as I got to this story and its central figures, even I was never really sure which it was.

—Alan R. Nudd

THE JOURNAL

APRIL 20

Hitler’s birthday. Demons loosed upon the world. Armageddon, if the kooks are to be believed, waiting in the wings. This morning I made my decision.

Definitely decided definitely to do it—the only question was how. Gas: painless and clean but involves attaching some sort of hose to a car’s exhaust pipe. Seems simple enough. But where do you buy such a hose? Auto-parts store? Hardware store? There are sure to be awkward conversations with sales clerks. I am not good with my hands.

Jumping from a window: convenient as the nearest tall building, but then there’s the horror of those interminable terminal seconds, vertigo turning you inside out, and last-minute regrets jeering and mocking you like demonic imps, as the ground rushes toward you like a giant’s foot about to splatter you to Kingdom Come.

Hanging: too slow, too painful. Ditto drowning. The idea of gagging and choking to death, whether at the end of a rope or in the frigid Atlantic, is just too horrible to think about. Car crash: a variation of defenestration, in the key of speed. Poison? Which one? Where do you get it? What’s the right dose? Do you really want to spend your last few minutes on earth gagging and puking your life up?

In the end it was the handgun—the all-American, all-purpose solution, the instrument of choice for self-destruction. Easy to obtain, quick, convenient, no time for second thoughts.

APRIL 23

Shakespeare’s birthday, or close enough. Look what he made of his life. Helps not to be a mediocrity. Must not lose resolve. Do what has to be done. Do it now.

APRIL 24

A gun shop in Somerville I pass twice a day on the train has been badgering me to come in and look around. Today I did. The well tattooed clerk showed me a 9 mm Glock, offered a twenty-five percent discount, and threw in a box of ammo. It’s a terrific piece, the man said. Sixteen shots. Rapid fire. More accurate than your .357. Got all the knock-down power you need. It’ll do the job.

Knock-down power. Do the job. I was sold.

APRIL 25

Let’s be clear about one thing. I’m not afraid of death. I have no yearning for immortality. Ends and beginnings are in the nature of things. Think it through, and you can’t help but come to the conclusion that this is the best way. Our selfish and fearful fairytales proposing the opposite are evidence of a monstrous pathology. Or worse. If I believed in God and were of a conspiratorial temperament, I’d be inclined to think that the Devil himself was behind it.

APRIL 26

Timing belt on car broke. No time to think about suicide.

APRIL 27

Okay. I am still sold. I have decided. Definitely decided. But actually, definitely going through with it turns out to be another matter entirely. The fatal act itself. Takes a little extra something. No, not cowardice, as the clergy like to say. Just the opposite, in fact. That’s right. Courage. What makes the Hottentot so hot? Who put the ape in apricot?

Belief in your cause. Consider this day in 1916 when Patrick Pearse led those 1,500 rebels to the steps of Dublin’s Post Office and declared Irish independence from Britain. Of course he failed and paid dearly for his failure. Suicide in the right cause makes you a hero. Isn’t my cause right and just? It’s easy to rebel against a tyrannical government—how many people have the stomach to rebel against a tyrannical God?

If there were one. But that’s just it—there isn’t. So my heroic gesture is futile. I will simply wink out to nothingness, returning to the nothingness I originated from. A nice symmetry but a damn shame. Yes, it would be fine to believe in something, something greater than yourself. Something halfway plausible—not that Santa Claus God the Frocked Ones have foisted on us. Ancient texts, undocumented miracles, patent mythologies, preposterous dogma, paradoxical mysteries, arbitrary ethical codes, heaven and hell, endless rationalizations, all common sense thrown out the window. Just believe. Well fine, if I didn’t have to get a damn lobotomy first. In the end, a gigantic fraud. Which is not to say that there isn’t something. Something dimly perceived in the way a spider senses the faint trembling of its web when a fly is ensnared. Something way, way down that long chain of cause and effect—so far away your brain goes all wobbly and, as hard as you try to get your thoughts around it, soon nothing adds up—the world, you in the world: a monstrous enigma. Well, not my world anymore. I’m out of here, baby.

Courage.

APRIL 28

Should I leave a note—lay it all out how she drove me to do this? Or is that too much like whining? Is silence eloquent just by itself?  Have not resolved this—thus my inexcusable delay.

I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be . . .

Why didn’t I suspect something? The infamous someone else, the long-suspected and dreaded other man. All that early talk about how wonderful he was—the perfect boss, so kind, so handsome. Then considerably less talk, then no talk at all. All the clues right there in front of me! Then her grouchiness and mopiness during the week he was away with his beautiful, former-model wife in Florence. Then the bout of funk suddenly passing on his return, as he told her how much his wife said he looked like Cosimo de’ Medici. Standing in front of that portrait in the Uffizi (I checked it out on the Web), probably thinking what a stud am I. Young and handsome, supremely confident in his gleaming armor with the two menacing points in front like weaponized tits.

Look, your hand is even like his, his wife told him.

And outside in the Piazza, beneath the famous equestrian statue of Cosimo: the boy who became a Grand Duke, just like the boy who became a grand entrepreneur, a prince of software, my wife’s lover.

APRIL 29

Lots of last-minute things to take care off. Still on track. The dark at the end of the tunnel.

APRIL 30

No more fooling around. A good day to die, as the Klingons like to say. One of those raw New England days—cloudy, cold, drizzling rain—that are the meteorological equivalent of despair. I am alone. Both metaphorically and literally. Renée claims to be at the mall, undergoing an evening of therapeutic shopping. I know it’s a lie. It’s therapeutic fucking now.

No doubt about it—I’ve bungled my life. Look: my house—an ugly ranch-style cracker box with cheap cracker-box furniture, located on a street with semis and motorcycles parked in every driveway. TVs roaring at all hours of the night and day. Moronia. My neighbors, middle-aged men with pony tails and women with missing teeth. Merry-go-round people going around and around, never learning anything, never thinking to get off, just loving and hating the ride. Time to get off.

Let’s look at the unvarnished facts, shall we?

I’m a virtual nonentity in the twilight of a barbarous century: A man in the shabby anteroom of middle age, living in an impoverished, derelict suburb of a gloomy northern city.

The best I could come up with for a profession was spending my daily eight-hours as a lowly underpaid assistant editor for a textbook publisher. Now I’m not even that. Not even that.

Until last Friday, I took the train into the Hub of the Universe, where on the upper floors of a sleek tower on Beacon Street, I did my best to dumb-down a popular series of history textbooks for tenth graders. My job: make sure there were lots of pictures and illustrations, lots of fun activities, lots of fascinating information about famous historical figures, but very little information about what the hell actually happened in the past (because that usually conflicts with what some people prefer to have happened in the past).

First Commandment of textbook publishing: Thou shalt give no offense.

I understood this to be a monstrous, pernicious evil, but it was what everyone wanted. Who? A long list. My boss, for one, Darlene Finch, M.A., anxious to scamper up the corporate ladder. Then all those politicized superintendents and principals and school board members—not a boat-rocker among them. How about the teachers, brain-washed and maleducated, looking just to make it through the day without a nervous breakdown? And then the students, who despise learning of any kind and wonder why can’t they just learn by watching TV. And don’t forget the parents, former school-hating students themselves, who can’t be bothered and just want their kids to earn A’s so they can get into a good college, land a good job, earn lots of money and support them in their old age.

I did my job, but my heart wasn’t in it. That was probably why I kept getting passed over for a promotion. Why my raises were so small. Why nobody seemed to think I was a team player.

My income was a joke. My job was a joke. And now I have no income, no job. I was fired. Summarily. Called before my boss and her boss. Told I was persona non grata. Yes, it made their day. They took away my badge. They made me sign papers. A security