Wild Thing: A Novel Read Free Page A

transparent. Liquid crystal in the glass or something.
    As the man comes out of the office and walks toward me, more spotlights come on to light his path. He’s late forties, with a gym body and a ponytail. Blazer, untucked shirt, designer jeans, wedge-toe loafers: the full douchebag tuxedo, though I decide to suspend judgment when I see his face. It’s been lined by something that looks a lot like pain. Incised by it, more like.
    At the moment, though, he’s smiling. “What do you think?” he says to me. “Real or fake?”
    I have no idea what he’s talking about. Between the light-up office and Calamity Jane back in the car, I wonder if he’s trying to hypnotize me with weirdness, like Milton Erickson was supposedly able to do. Then I notice he’s looking at an oil painting on a freestanding white wall beside me.
    It’s a city-under-starry-night kind of thing in the style of van Gogh. In fact it’s signed
“Vincent.”
    “I don’t know,” I say.
    “Guess.”
    “Can I touch it?”
    “Go ahead.”
    I put my palm on the chunky paint. “It’s fake.”
    “How can you tell?”
    “You let me touch it.”
    “Fair point,” he says. “Although it cost almost as much as the original.”
    He keeps frowning at it, so eventually I say “Why?”
    “It was done by a computer. The idea was to use MRI to figure out the order and content of the brushstrokes. But next to theoriginal it looks like shit. One of my materials guys thinks it’s because the original has too many false starts and corrections.”
    “Next time you should copy someone who could paint.”
    “Ha,” the man says. “I’m Rec Bill.” *
    “Lionel Azimuth.”
    “I know. Come into my office.”

    “I think I’m going to show you the DVD first,” he says. He’s behind his glass desk. The only things on it are a small pink-and-gold ashtray with a facedown business card in it and a white padded envelope that’s been cut open rather than torn.
    “Get you something to drink?” he says.
    “No, thanks.” If Rec Bill wants my fingerprints, he can send someone to the fucking ship.
    If
he does.
    I don’t know what he wants, because I don’t know who he thinks I am. Professor Marmoset would never have told him the truth about me, but I assume anyone this rich would have run a background check. * And Lionel Azimuth barely has a background.
    “What has Dr. Hurst told you?” he says.
    “Nothing.”
    “Good. I want to see how you react to this.”
    Rec Bill swipes and taps some not-obviously-marked spots on his desk, and a part of one wall lights up as a monitor.
    Something else he does dims the lights.

    The video starts silently. For a while it’s just photographs, mostly sepia and black-and-white, run together with the “Ken Burns” feature of somebody’s editing software. Woods and lakes. Native Americans posing in suede. Some bearded men in flannel outside a mine entrance. In sudden Kodachrome, so that it looks like the 1970s, a family in a canoe. Then back to black-and-white for more woods and lakes.
    Eventually something artful happens: there’s a color shot of a rock wall at the edge of a lake, apparently taken from the water. Then a closer shot from the same perspective, and an even closer one. At which point you can see that the rock has a primitive-looking drawing on it.
    It’s a moose face-to-face with a much larger animal that’s curving up from below it, like a serpent or a giant seahorse. The creature has horns and a snout. The moose’s lower jaw hangs open in comical surprise. A bunch of smaller animals lie around looking dead, on their backs with their feet in the air.
    The image freezes. An amateurishly boomy male announcer voice with a hiss behind it says
“The knowledge that a mysterious creature exists in the waters of White Lake has been known for centuries. Numerous Native American tribes, including the Chippewa and others of the Anishinaabe peoples, tell legends of the Creature that recede to the depths of