The Swing Voter of Staten Island
Read The Swing Voter of Staten Island Online
Authors: Arthur Nersesian
Tags: #ebook, #General Fiction
C
RITICAL
P
RAISE FOR THE
N
OVELS OF
A
RTHUR
N
ERSESIAN
For
Unlubricated
(2004)
“Nersesian is a first-rate observer of his native New York.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Reading
Unlubricated
can make you feel like a commuter catapulting herself down the stairs to squeeze onto the A train before the doors close … In his paean to the perplexities of dislocation and discovery—both in bohemian life and in life at large—Nersesian makes us eager to see what happens when the curtain finally rises.”
—New York Times Book Review
For
Chinese Takeout
(2003)
“Not since Henry Miller has a writer so successfully captured the … tribulations of a struggling artist … A masterly image.”
—Library Journal
(starred review)
“One of the best books I’ve read about the artist’s life. Nersesian captures the obsession one needs to keep going under tough odds … trying to stay true to himself, and his struggle against the odds makes for a compelling read.”
—Village Voice
“Thoroughly validates Nersesian’s rep as one of the wittiest and most perceptive chroniclers of downtown life.”
—Time Out New York
For
Suicide Casanova
(2002)
“Every budding author should read this book. Stop your creative writing class on the technique of Hemingway and study the elegant gritty prose of Nersesian. Stop your literary theory class on Faulkner and read the next generation of literary genius.”
—Cherry Bleeds
“Sick, depraved, and heartbreaking—in other words, a great read, a great book.”
—Jonathan Ames, author of
The Extra Man
For
dogrun
(2000)
“Darkly comic … It’s Nersesian’s love affair with lower Manhattan that sets these pages afire.”
—Entertainment Weekly
For
Manhattan Loverboy
(2000)
“Best Book for the Beach, Summer 2000.”
—
Jane
“Best Indie Novel of 2000.”
—
Montreal Mirror
“Nersesian renders Gotham’s unique cocktail of wealth, poverty, crime, glamour, and brutality spectacularly.”
—Rain Taxi Review of Books
“
Manhattan Loverboy
sits somewhere between Kafka, DeLillo, and Lovecraft—a terribly frightening, funny, and all too possible place.”
—Literary Review of Canada
For
The Fuck-Up
(1997)
“The charm and grit of Nersesian’s voice is immediately enveloping, as the down-and-out but oddly up narrator of his terrific novel,
The Fuck-Up
, slinks through Alphabet City and guttural utterances of love.”
—Village Voice
“For those who remember that the ’80s were as much about destitute grit as they were about the decadent glitz described in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, this book will come as a fast-paced reminder.”
—Time Out New York
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2007 Arthur Nersesian
Map by Sohrab Habibion
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-34-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007926051
ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07052-7
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
For Margarita Shalina
And when you shall come to the mountains, view the land, of what sort it is, and the people that are the inhabitants thereof, whether they be strong or weak: few in number or many: The land itself, whether it be good or bad: what manner of cities, walled or without walls: The ground, fat or barren, woody or without trees. Be of good courage, and bring us of the fruits of the land.
—13:19, Book of Numbers
TABLE OF CONTENTS
“
W
alk to Sutphin Boulevard …” Morning sun. “Catch the Q28 to Fulton Street …” Low-level warehouses. “Change to the B17 and take it to the East Village in Manhattan …” Empty truck bays. “Wait outside Cooper Union …” Nothing. “Until Dropt arrives …” No one around. “Shoot him once in the head …” Who? Where am I? “Then grab a cab back to the airport and catch the next flight out …”
His thoughts started breaking through his nonstop chant.
“Walk to Sutphin, catch the Q28 to Fulton Street, change to the B17, take it to the East Village in Manhattan, wait outside Cooper Union until Dropt arrives, shoot him once in the head, then grab a cab back to the airport …”
He couldn’t stop chanting. In fact, Uli wasn’t fully aware that he was even repeating anything aloud. He had just left JFK Airport and was shuffling like a sleepwalker up Rockaway Boulevard in Queens.
A sharp pinch compelled him to look down. A big hairy rat was biting him. No, it was a runty dog with protruding ribs and hips trying to angle its little jaws around his right ankle. Uli shook the little mutt off and considered hailing a cab, but his thoughts instructed him otherwise:
Walk to Sutphin, catch the Q28 to Fulton Street, change to the B17 and take it to the East Village … until Dropt arrives … once in the head, then a cab back … Walk to Sutphin, catch the Q28 to …
As he moved along the barren avenue, he felt it again. The small dog was calmly trying to eat Uli’s leg as he walked. He kicked the little beast away, and it dashed off yelping. Looking up, Uli nearly bumped into a wooden post with three arrow-shaped signs. Each one pointed in a different direction:
Woodhaven Boulevard, Atlantic Avenue,
and
Sutphin Boulevard
.
“Walk to Sutphin, catch the Q28 to Fulton Street …” He now remembered that a white-haired man with a brown lap dog had hastily imparted the crucial instructions—the chant.
Turning left at the next corner, Uli spotted something odd a half a block up the long sandy street. Raised five feet above ground with a small ladder attached was a wooden platform that looked like a boat pier on dry land. He noticed an attractive middle-aged woman with short chestnut hair and big orange-tinted sunglasses seated at its base.
She was leaning tiredly against a post, scribbling in some phone book—sized document. As he approached, he saw a floppy-eared dog with strangely large hind legs pressed up against her.
“Run!” a loud voice yelled from no place visible. Something was very wrong. Uli’s throat was parched and his shirt was drenched in sweat. He sensed some kind of drug was in his system, dulling his thoughts and inhibiting his flight reflexes. Suddenly, a pack of wild dogs burst out from behind a warehouse a couple hundred feet away and raced toward him.
Uli’s shoes sunk and slid along the sandy road, and he finally grasped that the raised wooden platform was the Q28 bus stop.
The woman saw him sprinting her way with the pack in hot pursuit. She heaved her thick document up onto the platform, then slipped her strange dog into a shoulder bag. As she climbed up the ladder onto the wooden landing, her derrière blocked Uli’s frenzied escape.
He jumped up along the side of the five-foot structure, seizing onto a banner that read, MOVE 4 SHUB, just as a Doberman leaped at him. He rolled onto the wooden scaffold, winded. A large pit bull pounced up onto the first two steps of the ladder, but couldn’t ascend the remaining rungs.
“They’re a lot … quicker than … they look …” Uli said, trying to catch his breath. The dogs were barking and lunging up at them from every direction.
The woman ignored him and continued filling out her form. He saw that her pet wasn’t a dog at all.
“Where’d you get the wallaby?” he asked, staring at the large-eyed marsupial peaking out of her shoulder bag.
“He was sitting on the road next to his dead mother who had been hit by a car,” she finally replied, still scribbling.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“I don’t want to be rude,” she said, “and I’m sure you don’t either. I just have a lot of work to do before this day is done.”
A half hour later, Uli began wondering how much longer he could sit still on this plywood platform, hardly bigger than a kitchen table, with an antisocial bitch and her orphaned kangaroo.
“I respect your desire for peace, but I just need to make sure the Q28 stops here.”
“About a dozen buses stop here—eventually. The problem is, they all take forever and, as I’m sure you know, this is one of the most dangerous spots in the city. So if I were you, I’d get on whatever bus comes first and take it to a more populated transfer point.” She immediately returned to her forms.
Over the next hour or so, whenever Uli stole a glance, he saw her flipping through her mammoth document, reading, revising, and making notes. The worst aspect of this silence was the
Walk to Sutphin
chant that kept looping through his head.
“May I ask what exactly it is you’re doing?” he eventually inquired.
“Filling out forms.”
“I just arrived here, so I don’t really know what’s going on.”
“You
just
got here?”
“So it seems, I can’t really remember anything. What are the forms for?”
“Okay, well, there are two major political parties, or gangs: The Piggers got Bronx and Queens, and the Crappers control Manhattan and Brooklyn. They run this place.”
“Why would any group name itself
Piggers
or
Crappers
?”
“The Piggers were initially called the
We the Peoplers
and the Crappers were the
All Created Equalers
. Somehow over the years those titles got corrupted. Anyway,” she returned to her goliath document, “I’m doing administrative work for them.”
“What kind of work?”
Letting out a big sigh, she said, “Okay, I serve on the November 9th Commission to Combat Citywide Voter Fraud. I have to conform the figures recorded here to the number, model, access, and quality of voting equipment and booths in the two dozen or so districts that comprise eastern Queens—which I just inspected—for next week’s mayoral and presidential elections. And if it’s not filled out and submitted by 3 o’clock tomorrow, the Crapper Party loses all rights to appeal. Any other questions?”
Though nothing she said made any sense to him, he nodded nervously.
“If I seem a little curt,” she added, “up until about ninety minutes ago, I had a private bodyguard and a nice new car.”
“What happened to them?”
“Who knows? I went into the Howard Beach polling center for five minutes, came out, and both were gone. So I’m not in the best of moods.”
The baby kangaroo suddenly jerked forward in her shoulder bag and plopped down five feet to the earthen street.
“Shit!” she shrieked just as the Doberman snatched up the joey in its jaws. Without thinking, she jumped down off the platform. “Give it back, fucker!” she yelled, grabbing the kangaroo by its jerking legs.
A Rottweiler was about to leap up on her, when Uli dropped down squarely on its broad back, stunning the canine. He pulled out the small red-handled pistol that the man at the airport had given him and put a bullet through the snarling Doberman’s large skull. The woman lurched back from the blast, then scooped up the traumatized marsupial and scurried up the ladder to the platform. When a large German shepherd lunged at him, Uli tried shooting it as well, only to find that his gun was out of bullets. Dropping the weapon, Uli caught the animal by its long snout, then used its own momentum to fling it across the sandy roadway. Some smaller dogs barked furiously at him while backing away.
“Where the fuck did you learn to do that?” the woman asked as he climbed up the platform.
“Haven’t a clue.”
“You look familiar,” she said, peering at him closely for the first time. “Where are you from?”
“The airport,” he replied, then absentmindedly explained, “I was told to walk to Sutphin, catch the Q28 to Fulton Street, change to the B17, take it to the East Village in Manhattan, wait outside Cooper Union until Dropt arrives, shoot him once in the head, then grab a cab back to the airport and catch the next flight—”
“Is that some sort of joke?” she snapped. “My husband was shot by an assassin. He was paralyzed from the neck down.”
“I have no idea who I am or what I’m doing here,” Uli replied, exasperated.
“You really look familiar,” she said. “You don’t have a sister, do you?”
“Other than that chant, all I remember is being on a cargo plane … Or maybe that was a dream …”
“No, you probably came in on a drone. They fly them in several times a day. They drop off supplies and take off again, see?” She pointed to one circling overhead.
“I vaguely remember some chubby white-haired guy with a high voice.”
“That sounds like Underwood. He’s Commissioner of Supply Stock under Shub. Underwood probably found you in one of the drones and guinea-pigged you into an assassin.”
Still slightly out of it, Uli watched closely as the woman resumed filling out one of her forms.
KEW GARDENS VOTING DISTRICT
23,631 registered voters
Voting Equipment
Finger ink: Y or N?
If so, how much? _______
Paper ballots: Y or N?
If so, how many? _______
Hole-punching voting machines: Y or N?
If so, how many?________
_____________________
Signature of Inspector
—982—
After filling in the form with numbers and checks, she signed her name—
Mallory
.
Looking tiredly at the distant hills around him, Uli said, “I don’t exactly remember JFK as being in a mountain range.”
“Those are the Nogales Mountains. You’re in Nevada now, the first designated Rescue City. This is all federal territory.”
“I thought this was Queens.”
“Queens, Nevada. Actually, we’re almost in Brooklyn.” She pulled off her orange-tinted glasses.
“What do you mean by
Nevada
?”
“The army gridded up the Nevada desert and gave each massive box a number. Someone told me that this was Area 41 through 51.” She pulled at her chestnut hairdo. It turned out to be a wig, which she shoved into her handbag. Then she wiped the sweat off her brow and neck. “They started building this place during the last World War. They finished it during the Cold War. There were seven or eight central target areas throughout the city. It wasn’t originally designed for people, just for aerial and troop training. You’ll see signs of warfare all over the place.”
Glancing over the woman’s shoulder, Uli spotted a small cloud of dust rising in the hot, wavy distance. “Mallory, is that a bus?”
“How did you know my name?” she shot back.
“I saw you sign it in your book.”
“Do me a big favor and don’t ever say my name again. I’m not too popular out here.”
“Why?
“Long story. I used to be on the City Council.”
As a small bus approached, Uli could see that all of its windows, including the windshield, were bound in a wide metal mesh. It looked like a cage on wheels with a few arms branching out the windows to the roof.
“Shit!” Mallory muttered.
“What?”
“Of all the buses to arrive, this one takes me furthest from where I’m going.”
“Then why take it?”
“Cause there’s no telling how long I’ll have to wait for the next one.”
Uli waved nervously to the vehicle and the dogs below went into a renewed frenzy of snarls and snaps. The pack was caught by surprise as the bus sped right into it, nearly crushing one of the bigger canines under its front wheels.
The dogs scurried away, barking angrily.
The minibus flung open its door.
“You okay?” asked the driver, a large light-skinned black guy with only one arm.
“Now we are,” Mallory sighed.
“W
here you heading?” the driver asked Uli after Mallory paid and took a seat.
“Walk to Sutphin,” Uli said calmly. “Catch the Q28 to Fulton Street.”
“That’s this bus.”
“Change to the B17, take it to the East Village in Manhattan, wait outside Cooper Union until Dropt arrives, shoot him once in the head—”
“I didn’t ask for your freakin life story,” the driver replied as he zoomed onward. A large handwritten sign said,
1/16
. In his pocket, Uli found a rectangular piece of paper that had neither numbers nor a president’s face on it. It simply said, ONE FOODSTAMP. Uli handed it to the driver, who counted back the change—fifteen neatly sliced parts of another foodstamp.
Two men—one bald and thin, the other thick with long, curly hair—and a woman were the only other passengers. Each had an arm stretched out the mesh-covered window.
“What’s up with them?” Uli asked the driver.
“The solar panel’s loose on the roof.”
“You have photoelectric cells generating this bus?”
“They generate all the vehicles here, and if it slides off, we got no battery—ride’s over.”
Seated behind the driver, Mallory returned to her mega-form. Upon taking a seat toward the rear, Uli slipped his arm out the window like the others. He felt the unsteady piece of paneling on the roof and pressed his hand down on it.