He worked methodically, careful to use the correct computer for the correct identity on the correct blogs and accounts, a different one for the work he would do under his identity as Wikipedia editor, and the third for the reader reviews he posted to online bookstores.
Three of his targets had been there from the beginning — old friends, really, names that comforted with their familiarity. Others rotated in and out as people caught his ire and then bored him or when he determined that the damage inflicted was proportional to the injury deserved. The punishment should fit the crime, ideally in kind and certainly in degree. This was part of the unwritten but strict code he’d developed since he’d graduated from his youthful commitment to general mayhem and havoc by superglue to the more purposeful enforcement and revenge he now thought of as a practice.
He’d started small, canceling the newspaper and cable television service of an out-of-town neighbor who had smacked her gentle dog’s nose with a rolled-up weekday edition or gluing together the pages of a library book by a local historian who was piggish in interviews. Rarely, but sometimes, the target was personaclass="underline" a former schoolmate who’d popularized the entertainment of mocking Clay’s gait. That gait was compensation for the small, crucial fact that his left leg was three centimeters shorter than the right, stunted as it had been by a large fibroid tumor in his mother’s uterus.
His father’s voice: See, she gave you more than your money.
He couldn’t do much about his parents — his mother dead and his father seemingly with impunity in all situations— but a series of minor misfortunes had befallen his high school tormentor until the fellow had finally transferred to a parochial school with significantly less impressive college-placement results.
Kiddy stuff, he thought of all that now, but you have to start somewhere, and in those early pranks he saw the genesis of the artist he’d matured into. Though he’d never say it out loud to Johanna, what he did was a kind of art. His medium was the lives of others. Most often these days it was their virtual lives, though Clay understood that the relationship between who we are and whom we present ourselves to be is a strong if complicated one.
Once in a while he actually finished someone off — like the British graphic novelist he had tortured into obliterating his own web presence in the wake of a nervous breakdown, committing a digital suicide nearly as satisfying to Clay as if the man had actually hung himself from the rafters in his attic and not been found until the odor raised the neighbors’ suspicions. But most often the feebleness of the bad actors he targeted educed his leniency. Narcissists are easy to punish. Even as they are quick to generate ego-protecting narratives, they are prone to shame and injure readily. It was hard not to feel sorry for them, really.
Only after Clay had moved item by item through his list, visited each social media account, commented on the blogs and sites he’d scheduled for that day, and read up on a critic he was weighing as potential victim — though lately he preferred to avoid the word victim, thinking instead in the terms of justice — did he search the Czech’s name. How anyone could keep his name off the Internet in this era, even a sewer dweller like Ladislav, he couldn’t fathom. But the only bearers of his name Clay could find with any search engine were human homonyms: an elderly resident of Prague and a middle school swim champion in East Chicago. Only by searching “Hotel Richelieu” and “death” did he produce a representation of Ladislav’s face on screen.
John Doe was what they were calling him. John Doe was what they were calling the man responsible for the only time Clay had hurt someone who didn’t deserve it. John fucking Doe.
Still, when he closed his eyes — not every time he blinked but often enough if his lids fell for more than a split second — he saw the small rectangular room, the cheap but sturdy headboard, her hair stuck to her wet neck. Still he smelled her sweat, more sweet than sharp, the specific smell of fear. Still he heard her whisper — beg — for him to get her out as his stomach hardened with the comprehension that her plea was not part of the game. An innocent. It embarrassed his pride that he hadn’t noticed on his own, that it had been his third visit. It had taken a week, a little over a week — nine whole days and a few hours of the tenth — but he had got her out. Out of the room, out of the building, out of the country.
He’d sacrificed for it, too, by consenting to additional years under his father’s rule in exchange for his help. But that never felt like enough because Clay could not undo what he had done three times over. When much later she thanked him for helping her, for getting her not only out but on her feet, more or less saying that he’d evened the score, he had screamed at her, “I don’t want to be forgiven.”
Instead of sitting down at his drafting table to work on the wolf drawings for his new book, Clay lay back on his unmade bed, typing now on the laptop with one hand. “Adult services: niche.”
“The punishment should fit the crime, ideally in kind and certainly in degree.” This he said out loud, to an empty room in an empty house on an almost-empty street in an almost-empty city.
Johanna
The Lower Quarter repopulated slowly as people returned and new ones arrived, one at a time and then in clots. One day there was an extra lunch customer across the street. A week later Peter served a handful on the same day. Before Johanna could worry about money, or just as she was beginning to worry, customers appeared with damaged oil paintings and watercolors.
A middle-aged woman with a painting of a covered bridge: “I know it’s dreadful, but my mother painted it before she died.”
A gallery owner who’d purchased a large abstract canvas covered in red and blue by an artist whom he’d given a show right before the evacuation: “I bought it to be nice, because he didn’t sell anything else that night, but I also kind of like it. And it wasn’t cheap.”
A young married couple who didn’t realize that the framed picture they’d bought from the hallway of the fancy San Diego hotel where they’d honeymooned was a print — a poster, really — and what they had purchased was not a great steal but rather an expensive frame: “But can you fix it?” the woman asked, her voice rising. Johanna tried to explain that there was no paint on the paper, that a replacement could be ordered easily.
Another couple phoned from Italy. They were university-based artists who had been on sabbatical when the storm hit. A house full of paintings and drawings, they said — luckily many on the second floor. They wanted to send Johanna a key, have her survey the damage. They would give her a list of where to start, which works were most important to them professionally, personally, one for no good reason at all. “Also, our cat,” they said, speaking at the same time into two receivers.
Johanna told them she’d think about it, planning to call them back in a day or two with the name of someone else they could call, either explaining or making an excuse. She did not like to go into other people’s houses without knowing exactly what she would find there.
It didn’t take long for people — the lunch crowd across the street and the customers who carried framed canvases into her workshop — to speak in terms of before and after. Nor long for the lovely word Katrina to morph into something more generic and less dreadful. Before the storm. After the storm.