Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World Read online

  Upon winning that most coveted of prizes, tenure, I married an overachieving comparative literature professor named Amanda Cox, and we subsequently collaborated in the creation of a splendid baby girl. Three months after Tracy’s birth we allowed the First National Bank to buy us a house in Maplewood, a short commute to Brook Haven. In a mere fifteen years from now, our mortgage will have turned to dust.

  Throughout this idyllic interval I could not reflect on my lycanthropy days without a spasm of embarrassment. In retrospect, the whole project seemed adolescent and perhaps even socially irresponsible. As with any other drug in the mind-altering and body-morphing class, CXYHXZNZO had always presented ethical issues. Although the informal research I conducted at Casaubon suggested that Lupina-11 was nonaddictive and entailed no serious side effects, I could not with certitude label it a chemical of unqualified benevolence, and I kept telling myself that never again would I cook up a batch of the stuff.

  On the morning following Tracy’s fifteenth birthday, my attitude abruptly changed. Glancing idly through the Caster Daily Times, I learned that the County Board of Commissioners had purchased from Synesthesia Enterprises, at considerable taxpayer expense, the latest-model olfactory-information processor, the Nosetradamus-2XL. I’d never heard of this technology, and Amanda and Tracy were likewise mystified, so that night we went online, soon learning that OI processors were a dubious innovation at best. Upon identifying a presumably antisocial individual, the proprietors of a so-called sniffsifter could use it to collect and interpret the target’s pheromone signature. Typically these evaluations called into question the supposed miscreant’s patriotism, piety or moral fiber, lapses that the proprietors could employ in making the target’s life miserable.

  According to the Caster Daily Times article, the commissioners had bought their Nosetradamus-2XL with the intention of granting networking privileges to Stonefield Prison, the largest county correctional institution in Pennsylvania. The stated objective was to keep better track of inmates during their furloughs and probations. That sounded reasonable enough, but I smelled a rat, dear reader, and I resolved to follow the odor to its source.

  * * *

  After a week consumed by lecturing, thesis advising, and amateur sleuthing, two facts became clear to me. The county commissioners had indeed granted Stonefield Prison access to the OI processor. Rather more ominously, they’d also leased the machine to the Maplewood School Board, fourteen dimwits who collectively constituted the worst thing that ever happened to public education in our township.

  Two years earlier, this same board had attempted to replace the high school’s biology textbook, The Mosaic of Nature, with a preposterous package called From Genesis to Genomes, which Chairperson Sebastian Underwurst, a real-estate broker by day, described as “curriculum materials more in keeping with a Bible-based understanding of God’s Creation.” (The school board abandoned its plans only after the district’s math and science teachers threatened to resign.) No sooner had this controversy died down than Underwurst spearheaded a series of austerity initiatives designed to “provide essential tax relief to our citizens, many of whom don’t even have youngsters in school.” Thanks to this chucklehead and his fellow non-educators, the axe fell on a program that provided low-income children with laptop computers, the district-wide lunch program was purged of “Marxist foods of no proven nutritional value,” and the high-school chemistry lab was forced to rely on donated Pyrex measuring cups.

  How in the world, I wondered, might surveillance technology, olfactory or otherwise—sophisticated footfall processors, respiration monitors, and sweat detectors were reportedly in the works—help the clueless stewards of our local schools to perform their duties more efficiently? I shuddered to imagine, but my question was answered much sooner than I anticipated.

  On the day the students returned from their spring hiatus, Bernard Seltzer, enfant terrible of Maplewood High’s cash-strapped humanities department, began his 9:00 a.m. tenth-grade American Literature class with an unusual speech. “I would like you all to hand back your copies of To Kill a Mockingbird,” he told the perplexed students. “Yes, I know you read the thing during the break, and I hope you profited from it, but the truth is, I’m sick to death of Harper Lee’s over-rated novel and its stupefyingly superficial discourse on race relations.”

  I know he actually said all this because Tracy was a member of the class. She had quickly come to adore Mr. Seltzer and his passion for literature that dramatized the inadequacies of received wisdom.

  “I’m not kidding,” Mr. Seltzer continued. “Turn in your books. Did you notice that Atticus Finch never gets angry about institutionalized racism? Books, please. Did you notice that he regards the Ku Klux Klan as a kind of misguided Rotary Club?”

  With mixed emotions the students marched one-by-one to the front of the room and deposited their Atticus Finch hagiographies on Mr. Seltzer’s desk.

  “Will Mockingbird be on the test even though we aren’t discussing it?” asked Jennifer Crake.

  “Is the book worth discussing, Jennifer?” Mr. Seltzer replied.

  “How would I know? You’re the teacher.”

  “Whatever its virtues, Mockingbird keeps telling us how we’re supposed to feel about it,” said Mr. Seltzer. “It has all the ambiguity of appendicitis.”

  “So what will we read instead?” asked Omeka Mbembe.

  In a gesture at once dramatic and insouciant, Mr. Seltzer deposited a carton of paperback books on his desk. “We’re going to engage with a trial of far greater complexity than the one imagined by Ms. Lee. Coincidentally, it’s called The Trial, by the Czech author Franz Kafka. I bought these books out of my own pocket. You can repay me by reading them carefully. The Trial is open to many interpretations, including Kafka’s notion of a fundamental incompatibility between human beings and whatever divine dimension the universe may contain.”

  I’m proud to say that my daughter was impressed by Mr. Seltzer’s critique of To Kill a Mockingbird, but some of her classmates found his tirade distressing, and they told their parents as much. The upshot was an emergency school board meeting at which Underwurst and his confrères decreed that, unless Seltzer promised to “cleave faithfully to the approved tenth-grade humanities curriculum,” he would be required to take “an indefinite leave of absence” from his appointment. As you might imagine, he fought back (via Facebook, Twitter, and letters to the Caster Daily Times), and the board agreed to hear his self-defense at their next meeting. A pro-Seltzer and an anti-Seltzer faction coalesced around the controversy, and it was anybody’s guess whether or not he would be vindicated.

  Then something unexpected occurred. On the day before the scheduled board meeting, Seltzer sent Underwurst a letter stating that he would “suspend class discussions of The Trial and reinstate To Kill a Mockingbird to its hallowed place in the syllabus.” He added that, come June, he intended to resign, move to New Jersey, and pursue his lifelong dream of starting a small publishing company with his brother in Trenton.

  There was obviously more to this story than a person could find on Facebook, and I vowed to learn all I could about OI processors, the better to keep Maplewood High’s best English teacher on the faculty.

  * * *

  To this day I’m not sure why Bernard Seltzer took me into his confidence. Perhaps he’d decided that, as a fellow connoisseur of subversive ideas, I wasn’t about to compound his woes. In any event, he agreed to a Friday night rendezvous at Scotty’s, a tavern so reliably noisy that we could talk without fear of being overheard.

  “You want to know why I let myself get bullied out of town,” he said, sipping from his frosty mug of Yuengling Porter. He was a gaunt man with dark eyes and a smile so intense it seemed to float free of his face. “After my second beer, Mr. Winkleberg, I’ll probably tell you.”

  “I know why it happened, Mr. Seltzer. At least, I think I do.”

  “Call me Bernard.”

  “Tracy thinks of you as Mr. Seltzer, and that
means I do, too.”

  “I insist.”

  “Then call me Josh. You were blackmailed by a board member—right, Bernard?—probably Sebastian Underwurst.”

  He cringed and took a large swallow of Yuengling. “How did you guess?”

  “The board has access to a sniffsifter.”

  “I’ve heard of those.”

  “Shortly after your views on Harper Lee became public knowledge, the board probably instructed the machine to target you with a spray of microscopic aromadrones. The instant each probe contacted your skin, it began collecting your vapors and transmitting the data back to the sifter. On the basis of your pheromone signature, Underwurst and company discovered something incriminating about you.”

  Bernard finished his beer and offered me a vibrant smile. “In my intemperate youth I organized a rally that became a riot. People were hospitalized. I spent two months in jail.”

  “A fact that never appeared on your résumé?”

  “You might say I covered it up,” Bernard replied, nodding. “But how could a sniffsifter learn about a censored résumé from pheromones alone?”

  I ordered us another round of Yuenglings, then explained that, while a Nosetradamus-2XL was hardly capable of detecting a shady curriculum vitae, it could offer a judgment such as “Target concealing employment deal breaker” or “Target spent time behind bars.”

  “Suddenly Underwurst’s remarks make sense to me,” mused Bernard. “‘You reek of imprisonment,’ he told me. ‘You smell of deception.’”

  “Listen, Bernard—I know a way we can turn the tables on Underwurst. Smart money says he smells of deception, too. Say the word, and the biter will get bit.”

  Bernard winced and shook his head. “No, Josh. I imagine I appreciate the aesthetics of revenge as much as you, but my—”

  “I’d call it justice.”

  “My preference is to drop the whole matter. I really do plan to start a publishing company. Odradek Press, as in that Kafka story. We’ll do the occasional reprint, but our specialty will be experimental novels by new authors.”

  “As you wish,” I said, lifting my Yuengling. “Here’s to Odradek Press.”

  “We’re going to prove that metafiction can be as enthralling as a bodice ripper,” said Bernard as our mugs connected, the glassy chimes pealing above the tavern’s commotion. “And if we fall on our asses, there’s always cookbooks.”

  * * *

  Although I wished Bernard had empowered me to seek justice on his behalf, I felt constrained to honor his desire. True, I had every intention of messing with Underwurst’s head, but when doing so I would avoid mentioning an English teacher with a fondness for Kafka.

  Twenty years had passed since I’d dabbled in sybaritic chemistry, and yet I soon managed to locate my old notebooks. I spent most of a weekend working with the Lupina-11 formula, and by Sunday evening I had a new batch in hand. Throughout the subsequent month I devoted my free time to studying Underwurst’s habits, eventually discovering that on Friday nights he walked home alone from a poker game at the Philanthropy Club in East Maplewood.

  As you might imagine, the moon has no effect on a Lupina-11 user. My breakthrough was scientific, not mythological. And yet, on the night of my intended prank, when I saw Earth’s satellite riding the sky in full bloom, my delight knew no bounds. If all went according to plan, Underwurst would soon behold a lambent demon from hell.

  Informal attire would be best, I figured: checked flannel lumberjack shirt, denim overalls, woolen watch cap. I dressed hurriedly. Intoxicated by anticipation, I climbed into my battered Honda Civic and drove five miles to the Philanthropy Club. Underwurst’s post-poker route took him past Our Lady of the Annunciation Catholic Church. I parked the car and hid behind a statue of the Madonna, her marble flesh glazed with lunar light. With consummate care I removed the prefilled syringe from its case, then squirted some serum into the air to purge the system of bubbles. I rolled up my sleeve, slid the needle into my forearm, drew a measure of blood into the barrel, and, pushing the plunger, gave myself a full dose of Lupina-11.

  The effect was immediate and blissful. In the long interval since my last injection, I’d forgotten the ecstasy of Canidae transformation. My nose became a snout. My ears grew pointed. Claws replaced my fingernails. A soft and glossy pelt sprouted along my torso and limbs.

  “Profitable night, Underwurst?” I growled, stepping into his path. He was a roly-poly man who exuded the odor of hypocrisy and the fetor of gastric distress. “Draw any straight flushes?”

  He froze. Much to his credit, he neither screamed, fainted, threw up, shat himself, nor fled. Instead he presented me with a countenance nearly as ferocious as my own.

  “Whoa, there, Rin Tin Tin,” he said. “I’ve got a gun.”

  “My nose detects no such implement.”

  This was a ploy. True, I smelled nothing that might be interpreted as lead or gunpowder, but that didn’t mean he was unarmed.

  Underwurst winced and glowered—evidently my bluff had worked. “Impressive costume, Rinty, but Halloween is six weeks off.”

  “Cut the sarcasm.”

  “You don’t frighten me.”

  “I came not to scare you but to sniff you.”

  “Have we met before?”

  “No—but your reputation precedes you, as does your aroma.” Marching up to Underwurst, I snuffled his left armpit. “You have just returned from the Philanthropy Club—but it should be called the Philanderers’ Club, since half the married members, yourself included, are consummate practitioners of fornication.” I pressed my snout against his right armpit. “Don’t deny it. You reek of liaisons.”

  Another bluff. Although Underwurst exuded a panoply of fragrances, I couldn’t decipher them with confidence, and yet he shuddered violently. “What do you want of me?”

  “I want you to become a better person.”

  He frowned and snorted. “I am not averse to taking out my checkbook.”

  “Nor your dick.” Once again I scanned him, my nostrils traveling all the way from his neck to his groin. “For the moment, your tawdry little secrets are safe with me, but I’ll be watching you, watching and sniffing.”

  Against my expectations, Underwurst went on the offensive, pressing a finger against my snout and spitting on my furry foot. “Hey, Lon Chaney or whoever the fuck you’re supposed to be, let’s get our facts straight. I’m no adulterer, but if I were, I’d have a thousand alibis in my pocket.” Abruptly he brushed past me and continued on his way. “Next time I really will bring a gun,” he called over his shoulder, “and I’ll blow your hairy head off!”

  * * *

  I drove home from Our Lady of the Annunciation in a dark mood bordering on despair. The scent of melancholy filled my nostrils. Evidently I was no match for the county’s sniffsifter, which would have quickly detected that Underwurst was unarmed, even as it found him redolent of debaucheries, be they bonking pole dancers at Marty’s Bar and Grill or shagging the secretaries in his real-estate office.

  Despite my crisis of self-esteem, I continued to monitor Facebook and the Caster Daily Times, seeking items pertaining to the Nosetradamus-2XL. Eventually I learned that the county commissioners had interfaced their sniffsifter with the Maplewood Township Zoning Board. More bad news, I figured. When it came to ethical acumen, our local zone czars could be as obtuse as Underwurst.

  Thus did I decide to observe the zoning board’s next monthly meeting, a matter of tuning in the county’s public-access cable-TV channel. With glazed eyes and mounting ennui, I stared at the real-time broadcast, watching the czars grant a liquor license to Ozzie Trapello’s Pizza Parlor, deputize a committee to investigate rumors that the Lansinger Motel was a brothel by another name, and reduce by five minutes the interval during which a Maplewood dog could legally bark while tied outside, all of this mishegaas occurring under the supervision of Chairperson Mildred Fletcher, a voluble woman who’d evidently employed a plastic surgeon to fix her face in a scowl.
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  The final order of business concerned the Shady Acres Mobile Home Community, generally regarded as the supreme eyesore of South Maplewood. If Pending Public Ordinance 379-04 passed that night, the trailer park would be “effaced,” the better to maintain “local standards of propriety.”

  Exuding a satisfaction not far from sadism, Ms. Fletcher and her fellow czars testified to the necessity of shutting down the park. Surprisingly, they were happy to reveal that the sniffsifter had figured crucially in generating the accusations against the Shady Acres residents. As the evening dragged on, live spectators and home viewers alike heard about Target 108, “who smells of a jail sentence for selling untaxed cigarettes,” Target 141, “who stinks of prison time for grand theft auto,” Target 276, “who reeks of a career in prostitution,” Target 290, “whose vapors tell of filet mignon bought with food stamps,” Target 303, “whose stench betrays an intention to commit welfare fraud”—a dozen indictments in all.

  Evidently the board had declined to invite any Shady Acres residents to the meeting, because the only voices raised in opposition to Pending Public Ordinance 379-04 came from well-heeled citizens speaking impromptu. Their pleas turned on an obvious point: the board was behaving more out of spite than from any genuine conviction that the park posed a threat to the common good.

  Ms. Fletcher and her fellow czars listened to the testimonials with palpable impatience. Close-ups of rolling eyes and extravagant yawns filled my TV screen. Shortly after 9:00 pm the chairperson called the question. Thus did Pending Public Ordinance 379-04 become the newest law of the land.

  Even before the last czar cast his vote, I realized what my next move must be. Having resolved to leave the world—or at least Maplewood, Pennsylvania—a better place than I’d found it, I was obligated to seek out the sniffsifter and learn everything it might deign to teach me. Only by apprenticing myself to the machine, I reasoned, could I hope to become the smartest werewolf in Caster County.

  * * *

  Two nights after the zoning board met, I dressed in my customary werewolf garb—lumberjack shirt, overalls, watch cap—then grabbed my syringe and lycanthropized myself. Closing my eyes, I locked my olfactory system onto the Nosetradamus-2XL, and soon the desired fragrance arrived, a signature from the far side of town. Furtively I vaulted picket fences, circumvented backyard swimming pools, and dashed across cornfields, following my snout as it led me ever onward beneath a gibbous moon.