Bob Proehl works at Buffalo Street Books in a quite tidy closet.  The following chapter is from DIS, a detective novel without any detectives.  It has a long way to go.

Chapter One: A Well Respected Man About Town

I.

“So you understand what you’re signing up for?”

Aaron Zeitlin leaned back in his chair and tented his index fingers, a posture he’d come to believe made him look relaxed but which most clients, seeing him behind the massive and cluttered mahogany desk, believed made him look vaguely like he was auditioning for the role of a Bond villain. The potential client was fidgeting, drumming the first two fingers of his right hand on the knuckles of his left. He was also sweating profusely, due less to Aaron’s appearance than to the heat in the office and the fact the potential, like most of Aaron’s potentials, was mildly to fairly overweight.

“I mean, yeah,” the potential sputtered, “I came all the way here, right? And you were pretty clear on the phone and all.” His voice leaked out of him like air from a tire. Aaron rubbed at his right eye to try and assuage the dryness there, which had started almost immediately when he’d arrived in Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show four days earlier and hadn’t subsided since he’d gotten back last night. He was convinced there was a small particle of desert sand still resting against the cornea, making imperceptible scratches that would add up, over several years, to a cataract like a fishing net, made up of a thousand tiny lines as the sand rolled and gouged its way from the top of the eye to the bottom and backed, pushed and dragged along with every blink. Of course if this was true, rubbing it would only make it worse. He blinked twice quickly and looked back at the potential.

“It’s just unusual for someone to seek us out for only one notification,” Aaron explained.

“I’m sorry?” the potential asked. Aaron immediately cursed himself for bringing it up, for actively fighting against a sale. It wasn’t just the sand in his eye or the frayed nerves from skirting around the edges of the CES for three days. It was the damn tea this morning, some stale Ceylon instead of the sencha he’d switched to since moving back to the city. The extra caffeine was speeding his mouth just ahead of his instincts. If it wasn’t before noon, he’d have a little drink to slow himself back down, but one needed to enforce limits on such things. Still, he longingly eyed the bottle of grain alcohol behind the potential’s head and to the left, atop one of the office’s dozen mismatched filing cabinets which gave the office a feeling of claustrophobia the large windows couldn’t quite offset. If all those drawers were to begin slowly rolling open, the room’s inhabitants would be crushed between them, like in a trap set by the aforementioned Bond villain, before they could transfenestrate themselves to safety, which in this case would be a three story drop anyway.

“Usually with these situations,” he backpedalled, “there are communities involved. Or at least a number of…liaisons that need to be handled discreetly. Just saying, one is unusual.”

“I guess,” the potential agreed. His fidgeting was beginning to increase, the drumming of knuckles speeding into the machine gun taps of a Keith Moon solo. But this guy, Aaron thought to himself, is pure Kinks. Middling height, slightly balding, quiet and unassuming. There was nothing of the Who about this one, he’s a well-respected man about town. Aaron paused, looked at his desk, took a deep breath and fixed the potential with a dead on stare.

“She must be pretty special,” he said.

The drum solo stopped abruptly, the sweat seemed to reabsorb into his brow and the potential lit up like Aaron was playing his favorite song.

“Cynthia’s all the world to me,” he grinned sheepishly. Aaron could attach the adverb to everything the potential did. “I mean, part of the world.”

Clicking the potential across the wire of a mental abacus to the category of client, Aaron decided to let up a bit. The way you taunt a snagged fish with a last moment of freedom, he allowed the line to go slack.

“You could just include a provision in your will,” he shrugged, looking idly out the window. He leaned forward and reached into the top drawer of his desk for the tea trea oil soaked toothpicks he told himself were helping him quit. He suppressed a wince as the oil flooded his mouth with a combination of sweetness and astringency. “The law is still fairly arcane, but a lot of attorneys are more savvy in dealing with these situations than you might think.”

The potential made a study of his shoes, which Aaron had already noted looked cloddish and uncomfortable.

“Maggie and I…my wife…we made our wills together. We have the same lawyer and everything, you know? Total transparency, that’s what marriage is all about, right?”

“Rilke says its about protecting one another’s solitude,” Aaron quipped, instantly wishing he hadn’t.

“I’m sorry?”

“Really wouldn’t know,” Aaron admitted, feigning a sort of embarrassment. “Haven’t been lucky enough. Yet.”

“That sounds hypocritical, doesn’t it?”

“There’s no judgement here,” Aaron assured him.

“I know in a certain way it makes me a bad…a bad husband? A bad person, even? But when I met Cynthia…” His eyes went sort of dreamy and Aaron knew in his head he was hearing rising strings or the twittering of birds. Possibly both. With the sale already in his pocket, Aaron was starting to grow impatient, for the meeting to be over and for noon to arrive with the repeal of morning’s prohibition. He glanced at the file in front of him.

“On a tech support site,” Aaron prompted.

“A Mac forum,” he sighed, lovesick. “It’s the old story, you know? I’d upgraded to Snow Leopard and it was glitching every time I went to a site with any Flash in it? I’d been on hold with the Apple store for hours, this was just after the launch when it was still buggy? I mean, not beta buggy, but. I thought maybe on one of the sites, people might have run into the same thing. She…Cynthia…she isn’t even like a Mac Genius or anything. She was just so kind, you know? Walked me through the line commands, waited to see if it unglitched. I know it was wrong to send her a follow-up email. I mean, just to say thanks, right? But then she asked maybe I wanted to chat sometime—”

“You’re only a man,” Aaron assured him, a little surprised he’d managed to string together that many words.

“And when it started to become…explicit,” he continued, “we had rules, you know? She, I think, has someone else too. Someone she didn’t want to…hurt. But we agreed, all of that, all of our lives, stayed out of it. It was like we were a whole world, just the two of us.” The client looked down at his shoes again. “Two halves of our own little world.”

“That’s very romantic,” Aaron said insincerely. He rubbed once at his eye before forcing his hand back down. If this intake had been at all delicate or tricky he would have botched it seven times already, he told himself, again cursing the Ceylon tea that could have only been a leftover from Alice’s brief cohabitation, one of those archeological finds he occasionally unearthed that proved she really had lived with him after all. There was still evidence lying deep in the strata, even if on the surface it seemed improbable.

“And if something were to happen to me…in this world,” the client was prattling, “I wouldn’t want her not to know. Or to think I’d just…abandoned her somehow.”

“Well, that’s what we do,” Aaron said confidently, finally back on solid ground. We statements, he found, made the potential feel there was a whole company involved, a team of experts, rather than just Aaron and his angels. “In the unfortunate event something happens to you, she’ll be informed exactly according to your wishes. And obviously, this will be completely separate from any arrangement you and your wife…” Aaron let this trail off, but it still sparked a mild panic in the client. Even his panics, Aaron noted, here mild.

“She won’t know at all?”

“We pride ourselves on our discretion,” Aaron smiled. “All we need from you is your signature.”

Usually, this was the moment the potential relaxed fully and entered into the comfortable and familiar ritual of signing a document. But the client began a new set of fidgeting, this one consisting of a convulsive and repetitive gripping of one hand in the other. He would have benefited from carrying a hat throughout the meeting, at times rotating it like a steering wheel, at times folding it like a fresh-washed shirt. A bit of stage business.

“That’s it?” the client asked? “I mean, I came all the way down, I thought…”

“That’s all we really need,” Aaron told him.

“Couldn’t we…I mean, this is strange, couldn’t we have done this online?”

This was one of the most common questions asked by potentials, which amazed Aaron because the answer was so obvious when you thought about it. All those little bits of information flying around, waiting to be picked out of the air by any curious party, or sitting on a hard drive that could be rendered useless by the whims of static electricity. Even surrounded by impenetrable filing cabinets full of sturdy manilla folders packed with archival paper, the potentials never understood the sureness and security they exuded, never felt it fill them with the sense of wellness you got from a Capra movie or a Nat King Cole album.

“We try to keep our online presence minimal,” Aaron said. “In the interest of discretion.”

“But the ad…” the client insisted. “I found you through an internet ad.”

“Which clicked through to a page with a phone number, sitting on a server on the other side of the planet. One, we should mention, completely unassociated with any other server.”

“It’s just a little inconvenient.”

The piece of sand in his right eye was on the move again, Aaron was sure of it. He wanted a drink. He wanted to scream at this little blob of a man that even if that were true, the inconvenience had passed, he was already fucking here, so why not just sign the fucking contract already? Aaron rose from his chair, which squeaked back and forth in his absence and rotated about ninety degrees clockwise. Aaron wished desperately the minute hand on the clock above the door would do the same, jump ahead fifteen minutes into the afternoon. Keeping one hand on the hardwood for balance but still nearly falling into the filing cabinets on legs still shaky from the long flight, he rounded the desk aggressively towards the client, who cowered in exactly the way Aaron had hoped.

“We use a piece of proprietary software, engineered by myself, which, once you sign that paper, will run a constant search for your name and any known aliases—”

“I don’t have any—”

“—in death certificates and obituaries from every hamlet, township and city in the world. If you died on a riverboat in Kuala Lumpur, we’d know about it by the time your body washed to shore.”

“Do they have rivers in Kuala Lumpur?”

“No idea. But it should go without saying that software like this might be, coveted, let’s say coveted, by others. We’ve had problems with the theft of proprietary software before. Other than that program, running from another server on the other other side of the world—” Here Aaron pointed across his body with his right arm, then swung the arm in a parabola to the other side, nearly hitting the potential in the chin as the arc rose. “—and a completely separate server we use to facilitate notifications, we prefer to remain web-invisible.”

“That’s unsettling,” the client stammered.

“Web-invisiblity is still an option, believe it or not.”

“Not that. I mean, the idea there’s a program out there running all the time, hoping to find me dead.”

Exhausted from his brief outburst, Aaron sat on the edge of the desk, his tall lanky frame still towering over the client. “It’s a program,” he explained. “It doesn’t hope for anything. It just does. If you die, Mavet tells us.”

“Mavet?”

Aaron put his thumb and middle finger to the farthest points of his eyebrows and squeezed. “In…certain traditions, when a child is named, the name goes on a list held by an angel named Malach-ha-Mavet.”

“That’s…that’s even worse,” said the client, looking at Aaron beseechingly. Aaron replied with a smile Alice used to refer to as his rictus.

“We here at Death Information Services like our little jokes.”

“Was that one of them?”

“We don’t mean to rush this,” Aaron said, changing tacks and realizing this had been an inappropriate use of we statements, “but the days before and after the Consumer Electronics Show are, as you can probably imagine, our busiest days of the year, and I do have another appointment shortly.” He noted the disagreeing pronouns in his syntax and eyed the bottle of grain alcohol again. “I can understand if you’re uncomfortable with the workings of the Mavet program, if it seems to you like the Welsh hand of death.”

“The Welsh whatnow?” All of Aaron’s verbal tics seemed to be creeping into this intake as the extra caffeine raced electrically through his nerves and the grain of sand scored its slow continuous groove into the glassy surface of his cornea.

“On the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s?” Aaron implored, met with a blank stare. “The Beatles album? There’s a hand over Paul McCartney’s head. Some people said it was a sign he was about to die.”

“I’ve never heard that.”

“It’s a whole thing,” Aaron said dismissively, waving his hand to clear the reference from the air entirely before rounding the desk again and returning to his seat. “The point here, we’re all going sooner or later. Mavet isn’t going to bring that about any faster, nor is keeping your name off the list going to prolong your life. But if you sign this paper—” Here Aaron shoved the contract subtly towards the client. “—And, god forbid, something does happen, we’ll know about it. And we’ll be able to inform Cynthia in a way that is both discreet and compassionate. The way you want it. The way you’ve asked us to.”

The client leaned forward, looking at the contract like he could see something in it or just behind it. Aaron wondered whether he was seeing love or death.

“It’s important to me. I know, in a way, it’s not real. But it is. To me.”

“Sometimes you’re the butterfly dreaming it’s a man, I know,” Aaron said as if something in him couldn’t resist one last chance to sabotage this intake. He collected himself. “It’s important to us, too. And we’ll make sure it happens just as you’ve asked, when the time comes.

“But first, you need to sign.”