I’m hiding in Christie’s pad when the guys bust in on me. This is the third time in a week they’ve rumbled my bolt hole.
‘Hey Hunter!’ Bukowski stumbles in, trips over the head of Agatha’s tiger skin rug, knocks over a table and sends a teaset flying. ‘Oops,’ he says.
‘Jesus, Chuck!’ I push the book under a cushion. ‘That was her best Royal Worcester service. It’s where she keeps her arsenic.’
‘There’s no one but you to blame for that Thompson.’ Mailer advances on me, shards crunching under his braided leather toe sandals. ‘If you wouldn’t keep hiding from us…’
‘We had an arrangement!’ Fitzgerald helps Bukowski to his feet. ‘You said you’d make up a four.’
‘Ask Wilde if he’ll do it. He likes dancing.’
‘He’s going with the Greeks again. He owes Plato money from the last time they played poker.’ Mailer eyes the cushion. ‘What’s under there?’
I lunge but Bukowski, nimble for a drunk, gets to it first. ‘Capital in the 21st Century,’ he slurs. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Special delivery.’ I point a finger to Agatha’s ornate rococo ceiling. ‘From upstairs.’
That makes them back off. No one wants to meddle with The Boss. They troop out, but not without Fitzgerald throwing me a scornful glance as he leaves.
‘Next time you want to experiment with absinthe cocktails don’t bother asking me!’ he snaps.
‘Not my fault Jane Austen drank you under the carpet.’ I pick up the book again, find my place. ‘Enjoy Stripping the Willow.’
I feel a little bad for them. There’s always fierce competition for decent partners at Famous Dead Authors Scottish Country Dancing Night and they did book me a month in advance. They’ll probably end up with Chaucer again and no one’s forgotten that time he broke Shakespeare’s foot in the Highland fling.
I return to the book. Rules are rules. If The Boss sends you a book via express cherub you read it, even if that means letting down your pals, and since it arrived two weeks ago I’ve done nothing but read this fucking book. I’ve read it forwards, backwards, upside down. I’ve read it in the original French. I’ve read it by candlelight and out in the garden while Lewis Carroll talks to trees. I can’t make any fucking sense of it and naturally, The Heavenly CEO hasn’t shown me so much as a burning bush to explain why He sent it.
I put the book down and consider snorting some of the arsenic now decorating the tiger rug. The old Hunter would have done that without a nanosecond’s hesitation, but the old Hunter used to lick LSD from the naked butts of monkeys. The old Hunter was alive, much to his surprise as he woke each morning. This Hunter is dead and—trust me—being dead takes the fun out of partying, because there’s no risk in it, and where’s the fun without risk?
A flapping noise interrupts my reverie. A large owl perches on the top of Agatha’s Picasso. It stares at me, owlishly. Another one appears and another. Soon the place is full of owls. All staring at me. Quietly one of them eases a leg and craps on the rug.
I get the picture. If I give up concentrating on the book, the owls arrive. They will stare at me until I start reading again. I throw the book at the biggest owl, which it dodges easily.
The owls are freaking me out, worse than that time me and Ken Kesey drove out to the desert and tried to eat rattlesnakes. I need help and I know where to get it. I pick up the book and start to run.
The Famous Dead Political Thinkers house stands on a rocky promontory. Along one edge of this cliff, dead politicians wrestle each other, winners throwing losers onto the rocks below. Cherubs keep score. Inside, the house is half nursery, half madhouse. Twisty staircases lead to nowhere. An angel dressed as a nanny feeds pabulum to Milton Friedman in a diaper. When I explain my mission, the angel motions me down a corridor which gets narrower and narrower until I have to turn sideways and shove myself along, my ribcage catching on the paneling. I pop out into a room with fur-coated walls. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan sit on either side of a roaring fire. Thatcher is winding pink wool into a ball while Reagan holds the skein.
‘You need to help me,’ I blurt, waving the book at them. ‘This guy says a whole lot of stuff about the growth in the inequality of capital ownership in recent decades. He says it isn’t going to stop. I need to know why that’s important!’
‘Does he talk about the capital/income ratio?’ Thatcher finishes her ball and hands Reagan a blue skein. ‘Because that’s a key concept.’
‘He says that Europe historically has acquired more capital than the US, but only because the US has higher demographic growth. If that changes, if the US birth rate falls, then the US will start to accumulate capital relative to income. He seems to think that might happen, but he doesn’t explain why this matters!’
‘High levels of capital in an aging population means stagnation of capital movement.’ Reagan nods. ‘It means capital inequality will grow.’ He and Thatcher smile at each other. ‘Just like we always hoped it would. I’d high five you Maggie,’ he says, ‘but I don’t dare drop your wool.’
‘He discounts the role of technology in countering this accumulation,’ I screech. ‘But is that justified? Can’t we say that we live in a skills-based economy now, where your abilities are more important than what you own? Doesn’t that undermine his argument?’
Reagan and Thatcher laugh so hard at this that Reagan does in fact drop the wool. Thatcher picks up the mallet propped against her beanbag and briskly hits him over the head, then turns to me.
‘What was the first thing you did when Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made it big, Hunter?’ She grins revealing teeth like steel dowels. ‘You bought a fucking ranch didn’t you?’ She turns back to Reagan who has stopped rubbing his head and now holds the wool again. ‘You didn’t rely on your intellectual gifts to secure your future. You invested in property.’
‘Go talk to Marx. He’s helping the cherubs with their embroidery.’ Reagan’s head has a dent in it, in fact now I look closely I can see that his skull is covered in mallet-sized dents. ‘He’ll explain it to you.’
After a search of several hours which leads me through a maze of razor blades and a room which rotates randomly as you enter it, I find Marx in a huge gloomy cavern in the basement. Cherubs flutter before a giant tapestry of a hammer and sickle. My clothes shredded from the razor blades, I fall to my knees in front of him.
‘Please help me,’ I gasp. I hold up the tattered volume. ‘I need to know what this means!’
‘It means the savage nuts really have shattered the myth of American decency,’ says Marx. He’s wearing a clown suit and a big red nose. ‘It means we’re all doomed.’
‘BUT WHY?’ I leap up and grab him by his colourful lapels. ‘I NEED TO KNOW WHY!’
Marx sighs patiently. ‘The distribution of capital in the world’s biggest economy has not only become more and more unequal, it’s beginning to stagnate. That means that rich and powerful people own more of the available capital than at any point in modern history and because people have fewer offspring to leave their property to, their available capital becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. This has the effect of creating a society with a very few superrich, a much-reduced middle class and millions of people born into poverty with no hope of working their way out of it. And we all know what happens when we have a situation like that, don’t we?’
‘NO. TELL ME WHAT WILL HAPPEN!’ I gibber.
Marx detaches my fingers from his jacket and hands a needle to a hovering cherub. ‘Russia in 1917,’ he says. ‘Before that France. More recently, the Arab Spring, the Syrian uprising…’
‘Revolution,’ I gasp. ‘Inequality leads to revolution!’
‘Inequality leads to many ills,’ says Marx, ‘from increased levels of crimes to poorer health in the whole population, rich or poor. Inequality is toxic, the economic equivalent of drinking a bottle of rye each and every day. You should remember how that feels Hunter.’ He turned back to the tapestry. ‘We’re fucked. The proletariat is going to rise up and slay the forces of repression. We kind of know what's coming and that’s why zombie movies are so popular right now. We’re rehearsing for the aftermath of global revolution.’
I assume a foetal position on the tiled floor, my usual posture when enduring a bad trip. ‘We need to warn them,’ I say. ‘We need to tell everyone what’s going to happen!’
‘Now Hunter,’ says Marx. ‘You know that’s not possible. We’re dead. Communication with the living is strictly forbidden. All we can do now is watch.’
‘Then why did He send me the fucking book!’ I howl. ‘If there’s nothing I can do about it?’
‘A little more red on the sickle. Just over there to the left.’ Marx directs a squadron of cherubs, then turns back to me. ‘Oh you know how He is. This is his way of paying you back for a life of squandered talent. You could have made a difference when you were alive, but instead you wrote a couple of books, made some money and spent the rest of your life taking drugs and getting drunk. You didn’t even have the courage to face old age, did you?’ Marx makes his finger and thumb into a gun, points it at his head and pulls the trigger. A shower of hammer and sickle confetti explodes from his finger and settles on his beard, his clown suit and the floor.
‘Fuck you,’ I say. ‘Fuck you and fuck communism and fuck everything.’
‘At least I believed in something,’ Marx says. ‘But you’ll forget about all this soon enough Hunter. People like you always do.’ He shuffles away in his absurdly large clown shoes, tiny hammers and sickles falling from his sleeves.
I lie on the floor for a while, moaning. Eventually I realize that no one is listening to me and get up. I check my watch and notice that in the FDPT house time runs backwards. I have half an hour before the Scottish Country Dancing begins. If I hurry and avoid that maze, I can be in my kilt in time for the first Gay Gordons.
About the author
Cath Murphy is Review Editor at LitReactor.com and cohost of the Unprintable podcast. Together with the fabulous Eve Harvey she also talks about slightly naughty stuff at the Domestic Hell blog and podcast.
Three words to describe Cath: mature, irresponsible, contradictory, unreliable...oh...that's four.
