ESC&CTRL

By Steve Hollyman

Vincent wakes up in an apartment in New York City with no recollection of having arrived there. Back in the UK, his girlfriend, Emily, has been murdered. Guided by mysterious phone calls which lead him to a series of clues, he soon suspects he has travelled to New York to find Emily's killer.
Meanwhile, an explicit video Emily made is going viral. When she shared it with Davison in a private forum, she never expected him to upload it. But she's only ever spoken to him online, and he might not be who he says he is.
Framed by footnotes and annotations written by Ike A. Mafar and author Steve Hollyman, Esc&Ctrl is a metafictional murder mystery examining the loss of identity in the virtual world of the Internet; a self-begetting novel for the 21st Century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: INFLUX PRESS
• Release date: Oct 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781910312704

Steve Hollyman

Steve Hollyman was born in Stoke-on-Trent and currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing. He is a graduate of the Manchester Writing School, where he completed an MA and PhD.

Book preview

ESC&CTRL

Steve Hollyman

Influx Press

London

For Mum, Jade, and Margot June

contents

title page

dedication

epigraph

foreword

a note on the text.

prologue

zero

I: identity crisis

one

two

three

four

five

II: friend request

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

III: hacked

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

IV: void

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

twenty

twenty-one

twenty-two

epilogue

twenty-three

acknowledgements

about the author

about the publisher

copyright

esc&ctrl

PART TWO: VOID

PART ONE: He Knows His Name

Crimson red horrorbath, tickertape parade, print-dust, white-suit rustle, click click click.

This is a Crime Scene. Do Not Enter.

Trevor V. Méndéthi

The Ruse Exists: Envision, Enact, Inflict

Foreword

(or The Importance of the Carbon Copy)

On 29 August 2012, at around seven thirty in the evening, someone broke into my flat. I’d gone to the mini-supermarket at the train station round the corner to get more beer, and when I arrived home something felt different. It was as though an invisible force was tugging at my sleeve, trying to tell me someone had been there.

Actually, ‘broke into’ is a misnomer. I’d left the door unlocked while I was out, a bad habit but I always did it. Now I felt uneasy. I checked the bathroom, behind the bedroom door, even inside the wardrobe, expecting to find someone hiding. There was no one there now, thankfully, but there definitely had been. A manuscript I’d been working on was missing and my laptop, which was on the coffee table, had been vandalised. As far as I could see, nothing else had been touched.

As for the manuscript: for several years, I’d been trying to be a writer. It wasn’t going well. Multiple rejections had locked me into a serious case of writer’s block, to the point where I was pretty much ready to give up. But suddenly, from somewhere, a new idea had arrived, and I’d been working on it in a state of hypermania. In just over a week, I’d written almost 14,000 words, and I had no idea where the fuck it was all coming from. My intention was just to get it all out and then refine it afterwards – I’d even shown some of it to a writer friend for feedback. But there was a big problem: in the latest of my many attempts to ‘get back into’ writing, I’d decided that my process would somehow be ‘purer’ and ‘more organic’ if I used a typewriter. I’d bought a vintage one – an Olivetti Lettera 22 – online for £50. Ribbons were readily available, so I’d ordered enough to last me several years. I’d written the whole story on that machine but – and I’m utterly ashamed to admit this – I hadn’t made a carbon copy of any of it.

I called the police and explained what had happened. The next day, they visited me. They asked why I’d left the door unlocked. They took notes. They asked if there was any chance I’d simply misplaced my manuscript - which they referred to as ‘the document’. If there really had been a burglary, they reasoned, then why had the intruder left my guitars, my TV, my DVD player, my mobile phone untouched, yet taken an apparently worthless stack of paper? There were no fingerprints. They didn’t hold out much hope of catching anyone.

It took five or six months before I finally faced up to the fact that ‘the document’ was not going to miraculously reappear. I tried several times to rewrite it from memory, on a new laptop I’d bought, but I just couldn’t get back into it. That thing about not stepping into the same river twice was obviously true of stories as well as watercourses. Eventually, I gave up and wrote something entirely different. And a few years after that, my first novel – called LAIRIES - was published.

Occasionally I wondered what had happened to my lost pages, and I sometimes brought it up in interviews during the promo for my book. I’d get asked, ‘What piece of advice would you give to a writer who’s just starting out?’ and I’d always say, ‘Back up your work!’ and obligingly repeat the anecdote of how I learned the hard way.

That might have been the end of it. But then I received an email from a guy named Ike who said he’d found my manuscript while he was clearing out some stuff to give to a charity shop. He had no idea how he’d come to possess it, and no idea that it had been stolen. He’d simply found it, read it out of curiosity, and then got in touch with me using the email address that I’d typed on the title page. Now, he explained, he wanted to reference the story in an article he was writing for an academic journal, and he asked whether I’d be prepared to answer a few questions about it. I told him I’d be more than happy to help, but that I had some questions of my own. I asked him to scan the pages and email them to me, so I could take a look and check they actually were mine.

Picture this: I’m sitting at home, replying to emails – work emails, mostly – when I receive another message from this guy. I read the email and click the attachment on the screen. And I almost spit a mouthful of beer over the computer. The link takes me to a two-hundred-odd-page document that includes my original story, but with new chapters spliced between the ones I wrote. I reply to him right away, and I tell him what I’ve told about a thousand people since: I didn’t write this. Not the new chapters, anyway. The second-person narrative, which I gave the title ‘He Knows His Name’ – yes. That’s mine. Every word. But the rest? No fucking idea.

Now, there are still people who think I’ve made all this up. I can see why – everyone likes a good mystery and this kind of thing flies off the shelves into the hands of eager readers like iron filings to a magnet. But that’s all bullshit to me, and besides, it never would have occurred to me to devise such an elaborate hoax. The easiest thing for me to have done would be to pass the whole thing off as my own work. I found myself pissed-off that I hadn’t written the counter-narrative because, frankly, its inclusion makes my original story much better. What happened next, then – the events that carry this book as it slithers and snakes its way into your hands – I didn’t want any of it.

It was Ike’s idea. Having spoken to me on the phone, he decided we should work on a book together. We should annotate the pages he’d found, add footnotes, try to find out who wrote the extra bits and why they did it, try and get a definitive ‘facsimile’ version published. I wasn’t sure at first. I didn’t have time. Make time, then, Ike said.

By the time I’d finished reading the whole thing, I was indeed ready to make time. Why? Because it was clearly written by someone who knows me. I spotted in-jokes. References to things no random person could know. Even a detailed inventory of my flat. The person who wrote it knew so much about me that I had to assume they were a close friend. This meant the person who stole my manuscript could be a close friend too.

So, I told Ike I’d help him. We worked quickly and obsessively, over email and over the phone, annotating a few chapters at a time, comparing notes, arguing over minutiae. We kept an evolving version of the text in a folder online so we could work on it simultaneously. We didn’t even know what title to give the book we were co-authoring. I wanted to call it VOID, but Ike was adamant that Esc&Ctrl was better. We compromised: the new, counterpart chapters, which tell a coherent story when placed together, would be referred to as VOID. As for the book in your hands – just look at the cover and you’ll see that Ike got his way in the end.

Of course, I had doubts at first. Ike is an intelligent guy, a peculiar kind of method scholar, and at times I wondered whether he’d written this himself. I put this to him on several occasions during our initial conversations, and instead of being offended, he offered a logical response: if he had written it, if the stolen manuscript had innocently found its way to him (and there was no evidence whatsoever to implicate him in its initial theft) and he’d decided to respond to it, then why would he not want to take credit for his work?

As we progressed, we made new discoveries. Our commentary, in the footnotes, became a new story in itself. But as you read, remember this: just because it’s bound between two covers with a barcode on the back doesn’t mean it’s finished. Just because it has my name and photograph on it doesn’t mean I wrote it. And just because you shut it and put it back on the shelf won’t make any of it go away.

Despite everything, I had to do this. I had to share it with you. It isn’t about money or fame or recognition. It’s about truth. After all, many people in this post-postmodern age regard the novel as redundant: a slow, clunky form better suited to the museum than the modern-day office or living-room bookshelf. In an increasingly bite-sized culture – a culture in which social media replaces face-to-face interaction, print text is rapidly vanishing in favour of its more fashionable (not to say more digestible) online cousin, and experience itself is mediated by the rhizomatic feedback-loop of reflexivity that is the World Wide Web – one doesn’t make money from writing something like this. If it was money I was after, I’d have got into E-Sports.

My final word, for now: Henry Miller famously wrote that Tropic of Cancer ‘is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.’ Esc&Ctrl, by contrast, is very much a book, and in the dawning of a new epoch (Post-Postmodernism? Metamodernism? The Age of Authenticism, no?) we must be grateful for that fact alone: we must embrace it for its crisp pages, its cover and spine, its tactility, its organic, woody scent. Most importantly, we must love it for its flaws, not in spite of them. And in doing so we help keep fiction real; keep it alive; keep it novel.

Steve Hollyman

Manchester, UK

January 2022

A note on the text.

In this facsimile edition all efforts have been made to reproduce the source text as accurately as possible.

Steve Hollyman’s lost novella, He Knows His Name, is reproduced in Courier font.

The numbered, counterpart chapters, discovered by Ike Mafar, appear in Palatino font.

Similarly, Hollyman’s footnotes on the text appear in Courier, and Mafar’s in Palatino.

—The Editors

Fragment #1

[unsent email, printed, taken from Steve Hollyman’s personal archive, dated 25 October 2021]

RE: ‘Esc&Ctrl’ Manuscript

Ike,

Please call me. I have just finished working through the novel and footnotes and I need to speak with you as a matter of utmost urgency. Your phone isn’t working. I’m available on email or you can call me on

Steve

Fragment #2

[Email correspondence between Ike A. Mafar and Steve Hollyman, dated 2 September 2021]

To: Steve Hollyman

From: Ike Mafar

Sent: 2 September 2021 21:43

Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: Your Story

Sure – call anytime. It’s

Thanks

Ike

Ike A. Mafar

Reader in Metanarratives

The University of Perryhale

To: Ike Mafar

From: Steve Hollyman

Sent: 2 September 2021 16:17

Subject: RE: RE: RE: Your Story

Hi Ike

Thanks for sending this over. It’s very intriguing because I didn’t write it! Not the numbered chapters, at least. The other chapters, those that appear in typewritten font with the title ‘He Knows His Name’, constitute my lost manuscript. Is there a number I can call you on tomorrow?

Steve

To: Steve Hollyman

From: Ike Mafar

Sent: 2 September 2021 14:48

Subject: RE: RE: Your Story

Hi Steve

I’ve scanned it in – please find attached.

Thanks and best wishes

Ike

Ike A. Mafar

Reader in Metanarratives

The University of Perryhale

To: Ike Mafar

From: Steve Hollyman

Sent: 2 September 2021 11:17

Subject: RE: Your Story

Hi Ike

Nice to meet you (does electronic correspondence count as ‘meeting’?). Your email piqued my interest for reasons you might not have expected.

I did indeed write a piece using the character names you mentioned, but that was years ago and I lost the manuscript when my flat was burgled. Could you possibly scan the document and send it to me so that I can take a look?

If it does turn out to be mine, then I’m delighted that you’ve found it! And of course I’m happy for you to talk about it in your paper and to answer any questions.

Thanks very much

Steve

P.S. In fact, I’ve never heard of Fatima or Andrew… Should I have?

To: Steve Hollyman

From: Ike Mafar

Sent: 2 September 2021 09:41

Subject: Your Story

Dear Steve,

Recently, while clearing out a pile of books to send to the local charity shop, I discovered a manuscript that I believe belongs to you. Your email address is on the title page.

I have no idea how, or when, it came into my possession, or whether you have since had it published. I hope you don’t mind, but I read it in its entirety and was very impressed by it. The story of Vincent, Davison, and Emily resonated with me on a number of levels – I was particularly intrigued by your ideas of social networking erasing selfhood, the doppelgänger motif, and the exploration of the Baudrillardian concept of the loss of the real.

I’m currently working on a paper, in association with Perryhale University, in which I’m examining the nature of identity in the online realm. The paper will be peer reviewed by Prof. Fatima Tonelci and Dr Andrew Schoene-Royle, whom you’ve perhaps heard of, and published in a reputable international journal. I’d very much like to reference your work and I may have some questions for you further down the line. Would you be kind enough to oblige?

Thanks and best wishes

Ike Mafar

Ike A. Mafar

Reader in Metanarratives

The University of Perryhale

prologue

zero

‘Do you jump or are you pushed?’¹

He’s got me pressed up against the rail that runs along the French windows. The rail is waist high, and the windows are open. The claw of the hammer digs into the base of my spine.

‘Don’t think you have a choice,’ he says. ‘There’s only the illusion of choice. Experience is just a second-order simulation. The future has already happened.’²

I look out the window. The buildings opposite are slab-like and stocky, standing shoulder to shoulder like sombre trolls. I tell him it’s not high enough. We’re on the fourth floor. You need to be six floors up, or higher. The fall won’t kill me.

‘I never said I wanted to kill you,’ he says. ‘Now, do you jump or are you pushed?’ He lights a cigarette, and the smoke gets in my eyes and in my throat. ‘Don’t think I won’t do it,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being two people at once as long as you don’t forget who you really are.’

I look at my hand, trembling on the rail. Blood. And something else, viscid, jellylike, grey. There’s blood on my jeans, too. Still wet, in places, but gradually drying to a dark brown crust.

‘That’s the problem when you mix realworld and simulation,’ he continues. ‘Eventually the signs get confused, and there’s no way of differentiating between what’s real and what’s not.’³

I try to speak but all I hear is his voice. I’m fully conscious and aware of my surroundings, but I’m unable to interact with them. I watch him as he pulls hard on his cigarette.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ he says, looking down at his hand, ‘but I’ve always held the cigarette between my forefinger and thumb. Never between my index and middle finger, like most smokers. I wonder why that is? I wonder where I inherited this particular…’

He pauses for dramatic effect. I can’t see his face from this angle, but I know he’s smiling: a horrid grin betraying the deep-set wrinkles in his porridgy complexion, gums spit-slicked and glistening like raw liver, crooked teeth like cobwebbed gravestones in a long-forgotten churchyard.

‘…this particular… characteristic,’ he says, finally.⁴ Small plumes of smoke escape his lips with each plosive.

I wince.

‘I suppose I must’ve seen an image somewhere, perhaps when I was younger,’ he continues. (He’s talking faster now. He always talks more quickly when he gets excited, when he’s gearing up for one of his rants. And he always talks to himself when he’s nervous.) ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That’ll be it. I must’ve seen something – a film, an advertisement, a photograph – that showed someone holding their cigarette in that particular way, and it must have got into my subconscious. You know – the image changing the reality it supposedly corresponds to.’⁵

He jabs me with the claw of the hammer on the words image and reality.

‘And you’re no better,’ he says. ‘Look at you in that T-shirt.’ His eyes dart to the image of John Lennon emblazoned on my chest, and so do mine. ‘You’re fictionalising yourself again, aren’t you?’ he says. ‘Identity isn’t something you are any more. It’s something you do.’

He takes three drags on his cigarette in quick succession and drops the butt from the window. I watch the ember recede from view, free-falling for a few seconds before hitting the pavement and scattering sparks of red and orange. I imagine my own body plummeting from the window and hitting the ground and breaking apart: the useless limbs cracked and splintered, the grey concrete bespattered,. As I picture this, the word in my head is ‘smithereens’.

‘Which reminds me,’ he says. ‘We should check in. One last time.’

He eases the pressure of the hammer. He seems to relax a little, and this makes me relax too.

‘Now,’ he says. ‘While I get the computer, can I trust you not to jump? Because that’s one image I really do not want to miss.’

I picture the words as he utters them. The word ‘not’ is in italics. I don’t acknowledge him, but he must sense my acquiescence. He leaves me standing by the window and picks up the laptop from where I left it, on the floor. He sits on the sofa, with the laptop on his knee, and opens the lid. I look at the spaces in the keyboard: seven