Jonathan Lethem: Gun, with Occasional Music

I often try to guess a person’s karmic level before they even begin talking, and I was quickly working up a pretty low estimate for this guy. His eyes were sunken, his sandy-colored hair was pasted across his forehead with sweat, and his bottom lip was tight across his teeth. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but he’d obviously lived enough to have things to regret. He looked like he’d taken a long fall a short time ago. Pieces of the man he’d been were jumbled up with the new guy, the lost soul. My guess was he’d been that better man as recently as a couple of weeks ago.

“My name is Orton Angwine,” he said again, in a voice that sounded like it had been washed with too much bleach.

“Okay,” I said. “My name is Conrad Metcalf, and I’m a private inquisitor. You knew that. You read it somewhere and it gave you hope. Let me tell you now that it’ll cost you seven hundred dollars a day to keep that hope alive. What you’ll get for that money won’t be a new best friend. I’m as much of a pain in the ass to the people who pay me as I am to the guys I go up against. Most people walk out of my office knowing things about themselves they didn’t want to know—unless they leave after my first little speech. See the door?”

“I need your help and I’m willing to pay for it,” he managed when I finished. “You’re my last chance.”

“I knew that already. I’m everybody’s last chance. How much karma do you have left?”

“Excuse me.” He crossed his legs.

It was the standard response. In a world where it was impolite to ask your neighbor the time of day, I was rudeness incarnate, and I was used to prodding or pushing people out of their initial discomfort with it. That was how I made my living. Angwine had probably never answered a straightforward question before—except one asked out of the Inquisitor’s Office. Those were questions everyone answered.

“Let’s get this straight,” I said. “What you’re paying me to do is ask questions. That’s the effective difference between us; I ask questions, and you don’t. And I need your cooperation. You can lie—most people do—and you can curse me afterwards. But don’t get all goggle-eyed. Now give me your card. I need to know your karmic level.”

He was too desolate to work up a real sense of outrage. He just dug in his pocket for the plastic chit and passed it across the desk, avoiding my eyes while I ran it through my pocket decoder.

It came up empty. The magnetic stripe on his card was completely wiped out. He was at zero; it meant he was a dead man. I assumed he knew it.

When the Inquisitor’s Office set your card at zero, it meant you couldn’t get caught slamming the door to a public rest room without sinking into a negative karmic level. The sound of that door slamming would be the last anyone heard of you for a long time, or maybe ever. I hadn’t seen a card at zero for a long time, and when I had, it was always in the trembling hands of a man about to take the fall for a major aberration.

It was a formality—it said the case against you was all but sewn up, and they were going to let you roam the streets for a day or two more, a walking advertisement for the system. You could try to raise your karmic level helping old blind nanny goats across streets, or you could go to a bar and drink yourself stupid—it didn’t matter. There was a heavy iron door between you and the rest of your life, and all you could do was watch it swing shut.

I handed the card back across the desk. “That’s big trouble,” I said, softening my tone a bit. “I’m usually not much use when it gets like that.” The least I could do was be honest.

“I want you to try,” he said, his eyes pleading.

“Well, I’ve got nothing better to do,” I said. Nothing better than taking the money off a walking corpse. “But we’ll have to work fast. I’m going to ask you questions now, one after another, probably more than you’ve ever been asked before, and I’ll need a straight answer for each and every one of them. What is it you’re supposed to have done?”

“The Inquisitor’s Office says I killed a man named Maynard Stanhunt.”

I felt like a fool. The news had caused a picture to form in my mind, of a man who, right or wrong, was about to go to the freezer to make the Office look good. Yet I hadn’t recognized the guy when he walked right into my own office.

“Forget it,” I said. “Here—forget it on me.” I opened my desk drawer and took out a packet and handed it across the desk. It was a sample of my own blend of make, a blend I personally thought could do a doomed man a lot of good. “Take the drugs and get out. Nothing I do is going to make the least bit of difference for you. If I set my foot in the Stanhunt case, I’ll be committing suicide for both of us—sort of a lover’s leap. I worked for Stanhunt a couple of weeks ago, and it’s going to be hard enough keeping my hair clean of the Inquisitor’s Office without your help. No thank you very much.” I took out a razor blade and dropped it on the desk next to the packet of make.

Angwine didn’t take the packet. He just sat there, looking sad and confused, and younger to me by the minute. I waved my hand dismissively and reached for the packet myself. If he didn’t want it, I did.

I spread the powder out sloppily on the desk and chopped it up with the blade, unmindful of the amount I was wasting by grinding it into the wooden desktop. Angwine got to his feet and shuffled out of my office. I expected him to slam the door, but he didn’t. Maybe he thought I was a real inquisitor instead of a P.I., and that I would penalize him for it. I understood. The guy didn’t have any karma to spare on dramatic exits.

My blend is skewed heavily towards Acceptol, with just a touch of Regrettol to provide that bittersweet edge, and enough addictol to keep me craving it even in my darkest moments. I snorted a line through a rolled hundred-dollar bill, and pretty soon I was feeling the effects. It was good stuff. I toyed with my blend for a few years, but when I hit on this particular mixture, I knew I’d found my magic formula, my grail. It made me feel exactly the way I needed to feel. Better.

Or at least it usually did. A guy in my line of work can’t afford to snort much Forgettol, and I played it safe by not snorting any. But just this once I could have used some, because the Angwine sequence was gnawing at my gut. I don’t suppose you could call it conscience, just the nagging feeling that for a guy who billed himself as everybody’s last chance I wasn’t living up to my own hype. I was just another inquisitor closing my eyes to Angwine’s plight; it didn’t matter that I was private instead of working for the Office.

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, right?

I snorted another line and sighed. It was worse than stupid to get involved with the Stanhunt murder. Yet I was experiencing that sense of inevitability that always comes at the start of a new case. I’d woken up with the feeling, and it hadn’t gone away. When you’re young, you think falling in love means meeting a beautiful stranger. The feeling I’d had when I heard the musical news was like that. But then you find yourself getting involved with your best friend’s kid sister, the girl who’s been underfoot all along and who’s already seen you at some of your worst moments.

My new case was kind of like that. I wiped the desk clean with my sleeve and put on my hat and coat and went out.

MAYNARD STANHUNT’S OFFICE WAS IN THE CALIFORNIA Building on Fourth Street, near the bay. I drove down and parked my car in Stanhunt’s space, figuring he didn’t need it anymore, and went into the lobby and waited for the elevator Things in the building looked pretty much the same as before—but then the murder hadn’t happened in the California.