Chapter One Linus is afraid of money. Not the smaller bills, the Washingtons and Lincolns, the Jacksons and Grants, but the larger sums, the cashier's checks with multiple zeros, the stock portfolios and escrow accounts, afraid too of what they buy, the new cars with their leather stink, the first-class seats on airplanes, the cellular phones and fax modems. He is afraid of office towers, where currency is acquired, afraid of suburban mansions and large screen TVs. He is alarmed by purebred dogs. Expensive suits make his teeth chatter, shoes that shine, organic fruits and vegetables purchased at gleaming, politically correct supermarkets, monogrammed handkerchiefs, pipes and cigars, flat platinum credit cards, symphony tickets, bread machines and espresso makers, ski weekends and barbecues with salmon and free-range chicken, bed-and-breakfasts, four-wheel-drive vehicles owned by anyone not living on the side of a mountain, laser disc players, multiple CD changers, summer houses and winter houses, spontaneous weekend getaways, the games of tennis and golf, penny loafers, angora sweaters, dry martinis and tenyear-old scotch, bay windows that don't look out over parking lots or weed-cluttered yards, but over real bays, jacuzzi bathtubs, all of Western Europe (especially France and Switzerland), electronic organizers with global position satellite locators, season tickets to anything, waterproof watches, corporate vice-presidents, crystal, gold. He is suspicious of comfort, not to mention luxury. He fears the implications of wealth, though he has never really had any. "I'm too cynical to be rich," he says. He equates financial success with a certain soullessness.
This has been his philosophy since the early days of his youth. It is a byproduct of his own juvenile poverty politicized, and yet somehow he has found a certain comfort now in his middle age, sipping home-brewed coffee in the living room of his own home, looking out a bay window at a small section of San Francisco Bay. He is well aware of the contradictions, the small discrepancies between politics and life, between phobia and happiness. Does he wake up afraid, lying under sheets that are one hundred percent cotton or occasionally real silk? Can he be terrified of the sound of his own wife steaming milk under the gleaming silver nozzle of their espresso machine? No. As with all people he has altered his perceptions to retain both his dogma and his lifestyle, but there are problems. His life is not all contented moments of calm reflection. There is a noxious cloud that follows him, a sense of foreboding. The truth is, he is a man pursued by sinister forces, plagued by suspicious happenings, troubled by disquieting phenomena.
Things are happening to Linus. He has grown one and a half inches since October. A fact verified by his last physical. For a thirty-five-year-old man this is startling, and it makes him question the viability of his wardrobe. He can often be seen tugging down his pants legs, a look of alarm on his face. If this keeps up, he thinks, I will soon have nothing at all to wear. Not that he is a man preoccupied by fashion. On the contrary. It is the inexplicable nature of the occurrence that bothers him, the absurdity. The truth is, Linus is afraid that his life will soon be overrun by the minor mysteries of his body and mind, that he will no longer be able to work because of such distractions.
At the same time, there is twenty-one dollars and sixty-three cents less than there should be in his checking account. This is similarly something that can't be accounted for. Even by men with doctorates. Even by bank presidents. When he comes home at night particulars are not where he left them, books lying on tables open to different pages than they were that morning, coffee cups stacked on wholly new shelves. His wife has gone to visit her mother, so she cannot be blamed. She is in Chicago, fighting wind chills and the insistent demands of the elderly. Linus is understandably at a loss. It would seem that scientific reasoning no longer applies in his life, that the laws of nature and physics have been suspended as he moves onward into middle age.
He has been married six years this December, the time simply rushing past him as he waits on street corners and supermarket checkout lines. It is his plan to bring Claudia flowers on their anniversary, to go for a drive to a seaside bed-and-breakfast. This is something he plots in secret, smiling and nodding when she suggests her own itinerary. It is only fair, he thinks, that I have secrets. There is so much kept from me, tiny plots and greater schemes. Everyone has his or her own agenda. This much is clear. He wonders if he will ever know why his body has chosen to grow, why his hair has decided to thin. Not in one spot, but all over; a general wearing away, an erosion of brown, like water driving at a jut of rock. He has resigned himself to ignorance.
There is no alternative, he feels, but to blame all these things on some greater conspiracy, which he does. Linus, you see, believes there is a clandestine cabal running the world. A machination comprised of bankers and businessmen, military leaders and intelligence agencies. He believes in UFOs, in the secret agenda of Freemasons, the monopolies of industry. At least this is what he tells his students, who scribble down all of his paranoid imaginings as if they were science or math, as if the very act of teaching them made them irrefutably true. Linus is a professor of conspiracy theory at Modesto College in San Rafael, California. He teaches, among other things, a graduate-level class on JFK, gives seminars on magic bullet theories and the hidden etymological meaning of the words "Dealey Plaza," shows slides meant to prove the faking of the 1969 Apollo moon landing, explains how the symbols on the dollar bill reveal the presence of a secret government leading the world toward unified socialism and biblical Armageddon.
On this particular day he is making his way from the main history building of the college to his office, which is sequestered underneath the cafeteria in a building known as "the Landfill" because of the creeping smells that emanate from its windows and doors around mealtime. As he walks he is holding his head back, pressing one hand to his face, clutching a wad of wet Kleenex. This is his third nosebleed this week. The joke is that he has been given an implant by extraterrestrials. His students have tried to convince him to comb his body for unexplained scars and triangular marks. It is only by the strongest power of will that he has not done so so far.
Above him the sky is cloudy, a gray glove, fingers drumming restlessly. Walking with his head elevated like a man applying eyedrops, he stumbles his way down the stairs into the narrow hallway that leads to his office, a small square of yellowed wall photos and overburdened bookshelves.
He manages to dig out his keys, to wrestle the rusty lock and shove the door open. He drops his briefcase, throws himself into his scarred wooden desk chair, which bends back alarmingly on well-stretched springs. He has not bothered to turn on the light. His eyes are tearing. He tastes blood, salty, filled with heavy metals and his own spiraling DNA. The clock on his desk says 11:45, insistently, in red digital numbers, as if the only thing an occupant of the room must be aware of is the time. Linus, it should be noted, is not a big fan of time. There is too much of it, he thinks, and to no good end. However, it would behoove Linus to pay some attention to his clock, for by this point his wife is already dead.
He has lunch with Edward and Roy at a vegetarian bistro just off Route 101 in Mill Valley, parking his car in the lot and crossing the ruptured asphalt to the front door, noting that Roy's '84 Monte Carlo is already parked outside. Inside the greetings are brief