The Failure: A Novel Read online

  On the other hand, I might be dangerously thin, a consequence of my ongoing battle with prescription painkillers that has no effect whatsoever on my work, on the quality of my work. I could be a computer engineer student at Caltech, also an artist, and while we’re at it a gallery owner. It’s just a little gallery, really just one room in Chinatown, but my loft space downtown is pretty sumptuous. Certainly more so than you’d expect from a student/artist/small-time gallery owner. Or maybe I’m none of these things. Maybe I’m a private detective. Or a cop. Or a jewel thief. Or a product of Heidegger’s “question of being,” which both he and I believe to be the central question of our time, and may explain everything about what happened to Guy Forget. Or nothing.

  I am, whoever I am, a dangerous character. I am the last person you would suspect. But I am the first person you should avoid. I hated Guy Forget with intensity, with white heat and black magic. I hated him from the moment I laid eyes on him. I would have done anything to bring him down, and I did.

  The fulfillment of a life’s ambition is rarely so sweet as the anticipation of its fulfillment. I think that’s a quote from the writer Fiat Lux, I don’t know if you remember, the one who disappeared off the face of the earth a few years ago. Hardly anyone remembers her anymore.

  What did Fiat Lux know? I used to wonder. I don’t wonder anymore.

  3. GUY AND HIS BEST FRIEND BILLY DRINKING IN A BAR LATE AT NIGHT, THREE DAYS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO

  There’s no dirt in this bar. It’s very clean, said Guy.

  -You say that like it’s a bad thing, said his best friend of five years, Billy.

  -It kind of is. You don’t go to bars for hygiene.

  -Well, no, obviously. But this is Los Angeles. Everything’s clean.

  -That’s not true. There’s a sheen of grit over the whole city, it gets into your pores even. I’ll bet right now you have a body-dirt ratio of about nineteen percent.

  -I took a shower before we came out.

  -That’s why it’s so low. I didn’t take a shower. My ratio’s probably more like fifty-fifty.

  -You’re gross.

  -Sure, blame the messenger.

  Lucy, the bar maid, brought two pink drinks to the table, set them down, picking up the empties and the sodden napkins.

  -Thanks, Lucy.

  -Hey, Lucy, said Billy. -I got a new one. It’s good.

  Lucy rolled her eyes.

  -Okay.

  -Okay. Here goes. Hey, baby, your legs are so long I’d have to take a cab to kiss you.

  -That’s …

  -Taxi!

  -Sorry about the mess, said Guy, nodding toward the tangle of melted drink straws in the center of the table.

  -Pretty, said Lucy.

  -It’s art! said Billy. -It’s straw art. Bring us more straws so that we can express our feelings with straws.

  -Can we pay for our drinks with straw art? asked Guy.

  -Someday it might be valuable.

  -Since when do you guys pay for drinks? said Lucy, walking away.

  -She has a point, said Billy.

  -Okay.

  -You want to try reading minds on some girls?

  -Not tonight. It’s too much effort.

  -How is that too much effort? Anything that involves girls is worthwhile. That’s a direct quote from your brain.

  -I never said that.

  -I said from your brain. Maybe I can read your mind.

  -There aren’t even any girls.

  -What bar are you in?

  -Your standards are appallingly low.

  -Yes.

  Lucy came back over to the table with a handful of drink straws.

  -You can have these, but no more melting them in the candle. It stinks up the whole place.

  -Guy was just telling me it’s too clean in here. Weren’t you just telling me that, Guy?

  -I was just telling Billy that.

  -If Gregory comes in I’ll get yelled at and you guys will get thrown out.

  -I’ll handle Gregory, said Billy. -He won’t throw us out. He’s got a crush on me.

  -You wish, said Guy.

  -Just … no melting, said Lucy.

  She turned back to the bar.

  -Without melting, there’s really no point, said Billy, sadly.

  -There’s twisting and bending and fitting the end of one into the end of another, or the end of one into the other end of itself, creating a triangle, which can then be linked with other triangles.

  -Yeah.

  Guy drained his drink. The ice cubes clattered in his glass as he set it down.

  -All right. I’ll do mind reading. But only for one more drink. And you have to go get the girl.

  Billy got up out of the banquette immediately, headed to a nearby table occupied by five drinking girls, where he pulled up a chair and engaged in a brief but intense conversation with an attractive young woman in a black dress. Her hair was dyed bright blond, and she made slits of her eyes as she listened to Billy.

  Billy got up, shaking hands with the attractive woman before heading back to the banquette.

  -She’s good, he said, sliding into his seat.

  -What’s her name?

  -Forgot to ask. Here she comes …

  4. MARCUS, GUY’S BROTHER, CONTEMPLATES WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, STANDING AT THE WINDOW OF HIS OFFICE IN CAMBRIDGE, THE SAME DAY AS THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO

  Marcus sat at his desk in his office. From the window, he had a clear view of the River Charles, which legend tells used to freeze over regularly come winter, but Marcus had lived here nearly ten years and never seen it happen.

  He stood up and went to the window. His breath condensed on the windowpane. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain, he thought.

  Marcus sighed, and moved away. He avoided at all costs the blackboard on the far side of the office, avoided even looking in that direction, because the blackboard was almost empty. An empty blackboard is worse than a blackboard full of dead ends to a professor of quantum chromodynamics. An empty blackboard reflects an empty mind. It’s like, what if someone came up and said, “Non-Abelian gauge theory is just a chimera, and I can prove it using the very same gauge invariant QCD Lagrangian in front of which you genuflect daily.” How would I feel then? How would anyone feel? Empty.

  What if I’d just given him the money when he asked? thought Marcus. I have the money. I have plenty of money.

  Never wanted to be the sane one, the responsible one. How did that happen? All through childhood I was odd boy out. I was morbidly shy, no good at sports, mocked for reading the encyclopedia and the dictionary. Never once got in trouble. Never once. When Grandma got sick and Mom had to spend her time taking care of her, I took over. Cooked the meals, did the dishes, did the laundry, everything. Fourteen years old and I’m running the place. I should have been out setting fires or blowing up mailboxes, but to be honest, the one time I went with my friend Charles Holiday down to Mad River and we put firecrackers in frogs, it made me sick to my stomach. It still makes me sick to my stomach.

  If I gave Guy the money he’d blow it, and I’d never see it again, but so what? I don’t need it. I tell myself I might need it someday but the odds of that are easily calculable as nearly nil. Even if we decide to have children, my salary here plus frugal living plus careful investment equals never have to worry about money. And I have tenure, which is ridiculous, to give me tenure. I’m an indifferent teacher and a middling scholar. I will never achieve the kind of success worth dreaming about. Just to stay on top in a general way of developments in quantum chromodynamics is a fulltime job, and everyone by now has a specialty that’s more or less a specialization of a specialization of a specialty, and I don’t have the kind of decisive temperament that allows me to put all my eggs in, for instance, asymptotic freedom, or quark confinement, because for whatever reason—and this is a sad thing for a quantum chromodynamicist to admit—my brain is too earthbound, too attached to the evidence of its senses for me to really engage with th
e flightier aspects of pure theory. I don’t mean to say I don’t understand/appreciate

  but I believe these things only halfheartedly, the way I believe in love, for instance, or the theory of evolution. Say you come up with the Theory of Everything, say you’re that guy, the one who solves for all time the riddle to end all riddles. Would that make you happy? It would, I suspect, make me immensely, unfixably sad.

  Used to be when I felt this way I would think about Constance, my wife, my so-called beloved. To whose wisdom I should always defer, because she is so much smarter than I am. At the end of the day, or really at any point during the day, or even at night, she tells me not to give Guy the money, Guy doesn’t get the money. But she didn’t tell me not to give Guy the money. I didn’t even ask her. I’ve stopped asking her anything important. When did that happen?

  The phone on Marcus’s desk rang. He didn’t seem to notice for several moments, then suddenly sprang forward as if the phone were a kind of alarm.

  -Hello? Wait … slow down, Mom. You’re not making any sense. What’s wrong? Dad? What? Where did they take him?

  Marcus checked his watch.

  -I’ll get the next plane to Dayton. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be fine. I’m sure everything will be just fine.

  5. WHAT GUY NEEDED, AND WHY: IN WHICH THE NOT ENTIRELY OMNISCIENT NARRATOR EXPLAINS THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO AND ITS INCITING INCIDENT, ABOUT TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE ACTUAL FIASCO. FOR THOSE INTERESTED, GUY IS SITTING ON THE COUCH IN HIS APARTMENT, WHICH THE READER WILL NEVER SEE AGAIN AND SO WE WILL NOT BOTHER TO DESCRIBE IT.

  What Guy needed, above all, was the same thing everybody needs, all the time. He needed money. Not just knocking-around money, mind. He needed a substantial sum—fifty thousand dollars—and quickly, which is never an easy thing to come by, especially when your only really well-developed skill is talking down to people. That’s why Guy needed Billy, who had a complementary skill of talking up at people.

  Through a combination of happenstance and blind luck, which by the way are not the same thing, Guy had stumbled across a potentially useful technological invention, which to Guy meant lucrative, which by the way may or may not be the same thing, and he had tried, without success, to pitch the idea of this idea to a group of dead-eyed venture capitalists in Menlo Park a few weeks earlier. What he needed, they told him, was a working prototype. And to construct such a prototype, according to the naïve kid genius at Caltech who’d first clued him into the thing’s existence, would cost fifty thousand dollars. It was beyond Guy’s comprehension that no one would front him the fifty grand, but his friends in Los Angeles had all effectively laughed in his face, not at the idea of Guy’s prototype, but the idea that any of them might have fifty thousand, or even five thousand dollars to lend him. Which is when he turned, much as he was loathe to do so, for a variety of complicated reasons, to his brother Marcus, who had brutally rejected him much the same way he had brutally beaten up Guy when he caught him cheating at Monopoly when they were teenagers, as if everybody doesn’t always cheat at Monopoly, otherwise the game just goes on and on and on.

  As time went by, and Guy’s needs grew both more pressing and less obviously satisfiable, he and Billy got desperate enough to hatch Plan Charlie, which had not been preceded by Plans Alpha or Bravo, and in addition had nothing whatsoever to do with trafficking in cocaine.

  Plan Charlie was in fact thus-branded because it depended for success on a guy named Charlie who worked at the check-cashing place on Washington and Pico in Koreatown. Charlie wasn’t Charlie’s real name, most likely, because he was Korean, but his name tag read Charlie and he answered to “Charlie” and when you paged him and he called you back he would say, “This is Charlie, you paged me?” All of which goes to show how far we’ve come, as a nation, when a man of Asian descent can call himself “Charlie” without a hint of self-awareness regarding the name’s derogatory associations stemming from its use in Vietnam as slang for the enemy.

  The plan was simple. The check-cashing place was particularly cash-rich on exactly two days per month, the first and the fifteenth, when most people got paid, or got their Social Security checks. The money came in by armored car before eight a.m., usually even earlier, by six or seven, so that there’d be time to count and sort everything before the store opened at nine.

  It’s easy to rob a check-cashing place. It’s far more difficult to do so successfully, meaning not just to “get away with it,” because any fool can get away with any fool thing, but to make it worth your while, to come away with more than just a couple of bags full of twenties amounting to less than ten grand: that’s virtually impossible, in fact, owing to a system most check-cashing places have devised to limit their inevitable losses from inevitable robberies. According to this system, no teller has more than $12,000 at any one time in his or her own personal drawer, which can be accessed only with his or her personal code, which even the store manager doesn’t know. In order to spring all the drawers in the event of some unforeseeable emergency, you have to get a code from the head office, and that code is changed daily, guarded by a pit of fire and a sentient sevenheaded cobra at the top of Mount Olympus, or something. At the end of the day, each teller enters his or her own personal code into his or her own personal drawer, and withdraws what’s left after a day of usurious transactions. The accounts are then meticulously reconciled, the remaining money locked away in an earthquake-proof safe with an algorithmically absurd combination.

  There was only one flaw in the system, and that flaw, as with all flaws in all systems, was human. At a certain vulnerable point in every process, in every system, an element of trust is required. That element of trust is the point of exploitation. In the case of Plan Charlie, that point of exploitation was Charlie.

  Charlie was the assistant store manager, and as such the final check between cash distribution from the vault or armored car and the tellers’ window drawers. It would be an easy matter for him to skim four thousand from each of the twenty-five prepared drawers (tellers worked in shifts, so second-shift drawers were prepared in advance) and put that money in a specially prepared drawer that he would tend himself, at Window 3, at exactly nine a.m. on the morning of the date chosen for the heist.

  Guy and Billy would then roll in, disguised with ski masks and New York Jets football jerseys (this was Billy’s contribution to the plan), brandish a fake gun in Charlie’s face, and make off with what everyone who worked at the store would assume was $12,000, but would in fact be $100,000, which would then be split fifty to Guy, thirty to Charlie, fifteen to Billy, who after all wasn’t really doing much, and five to the getaway driver. Charlie would slip out the back door before anyone noticed he was gone, and meet up with the others at a predetermined spot out in the desert.

  Because the check-cashing place carried a considerable amount of insurance, all parties concerned considered this an essentially victimless crime, neglecting to reflect that a) they themselves might be the victims, or b) the pensioner who lived day-to-day on his Social Security check might now have to wait a few extra days, and what if he didn’t have any food at all in his house, or what if he had to pay his rent and they kicked him out on the street and he died? He would certainly count as a victim.

  6. SUBSENSORY ADVERTISING (ENABLED BY PANDEMONIUM’S REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY)—SLIDE 23 OF A 47-SLIDE POWERPOINT PRESENTATION ASSEMBLED BY GUY FOR THE BENEFIT OF POTENTIAL INVESTORS, A PRESENTATION, AS HAS BEEN NOTED, THAT FAILED MISERABLY IN THE ABSENCE OF A BETA-TESTED PROTOTYPE

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