Mamatas - Sensation

PRAISE FOR

S ENSATION

Nick Mamatas continues his reign as the sharpest, funniest, most insightful and political purveyor of post-pulp pleasures going. He is the Peoples Commissar of Awesome.

China Miville, award-winning author of Kraken and The City & the City

Nick Mamatass brilliant comic novel, Sensation, reads like an incantation that both vilifies and celebrates the complex absurdity of the modern world.

Lucius Shepard, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards.

The Majestic Plural, or Royal We, is well knownSensation introduces the Arachnid Plural, the we of spiders, the ones that live inside you. The spiders care about youdeeplyand want to use you in a millennial war against certain parasitic wasps. No, I was wrong. The spiders only want to help. So let them in.

Zachary Mason, New York Times bestselling author of TheLost Books of the Odyssey

Nick Mamatas 2011
This edition 2011 PM Press

Chapter 3 previously appeared under the title In the Glow in Per Contra no. 14, Summer 2009.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-354-3
LCCN: 2010916473

PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
pmpress.org

Printed in the USA on recycled paper.

Cover: John Yates/Stealworks.com
Layout: Jonathan Rowland

For Olivia, again.

They say that the more books one writes, the fewer people one needs to acknowledge. With my next novel, I might finally find myself at the stage GG Allin reached when he dedicated an album to no-fucking-body but me. But with Sensation, I had help.

First Id like to thank my sister Teddie Mamatas, who lent me her home and computer, and went on errands for everything from printer paper to brownies while I finished the last, uh, forty thousand words of this fifty-three thousand-word book. Paola Corso and Shouhua Qi, both of Western Connecticut State University, advised and supported the writing of my MFA thesis, which this book is. Brian Cully helped with the temporary disabling of the World Wide Web, and Chris Bell pitched in with the true-life story of his long working hours in otherwise frozen southern Manhattan in the days immediately after the terror attack of 9/11. Seth Cully didnt mind that I stole his joke about feet and alternative modes of transportation.

Of course, I should also thank my agent Michele Rubin, who gave me some excellent career advice: Write a Don DeLillo book. You know, something with jokes, but they arent funny. (We both agree that I failed.) Then theres credit due to transnational capitalism, the temporary collapse of which in 2008 eventually led me back to my first lovepunk-influenced, politically charged, independent presses. Ramsey Kanaan paid an advance partially in the form of a PM Press-branded hoodie, and Andrea Gibbons did a whole lot of everything.

Thanks again, everyone.

R AYMOND saw his ex-wife twiceboth times by accidentin the first few months after she went into hiding. The context in which Raymond first saw Julia after her murder of Peter Neads Fishman was so bizarre to him that he didnt even realize it was her at first. She was at the Food Emporium on the corner of West 12th Street and Sixth Avenue, where she never ever shopped before, and her shopping cart was stocked with items he knew she didnt eat.

She even wrote a check, pulling her checkbook from the purple pursePurple! thought Raymondand filling out every line while two of the other customers behind her silently fumed. There was a third customer too, a large man of indeterminate ethnicity in whose emptied-out brainpan we rode. We cradled a gallon of skim milk like it was an infant and waited more patiently. Raymond had thought she might have been someone from high school, or maybe even the television, until she smiled at the oblivious cashier and, in response to his clipped Have a good day, said what Julia always used to say:

Yahbye.

Half acknowledgment, half farewell, thats what Julia had been like. She had a way of looking at Raymond, at anyone with whom she was speaking, really, that made him (or them, or you, and once even us) feel like the most important person in the world, but only so long as you kept proving it to her every few seconds. By nodding intently when she spoke. By feeding her windups for her punchlines. Raymond might fuss over some story hed heard on NPR about the Gaza Strip and how one-state solutions to the crisis seemed so unfeasible and shed say, Well, you cant expect the world to give the Palestinians their own land. Look at how they live. Shed smile a statues smile for a second and then burst into laughter at his chagrin. Then shed move on to some other topic, or, ultimately, some other person or way of life so profoundly challenging to the status quo that we had to step in; we had to bring her from her world into ours.

In a flash, Raymond realized something, just from the twitch and curve of the pen in Julias hand. Shed finally stopped using his surname, Hernandez, and was back to Ott. Whatever life she was living now, he was not in it. Raymond started shopping at the Food Emporium every day. He never saw Julia there again, but did frequently run into the man of indeterminate ethnicity. Vaguely Asian, but no. Saami perhaps, Raymond almost decided. He hated his tendency to pigeonhole, despite the fact that he could muster some professional interest in the subject of ethnicity and physical anthropology. He taught at City University of New Yorks City College. Hed published articles about the conflation of Gitano, Roma, and Travelers in dominant cultures. He also shared a laugh with Julia whenever she used the name Hernandez, which would sometimes fluster and annoy drug store clerks and the like.

Julia looks like an icicle, Raymonds mother once complained. An icicle topped with crabgrass hair. Julia had even gotten a minority scholarship to return to grad schoolMBA of all thingssince no college would dare question whether or not she was actually Hispanic. A discreet inquiry? No. Genetic testing? Out of the question. Julia left school before graduating anyway. And yet, there Raymond was, struggling with the large man of indeterminate ethnicity.

The mans ethnicity was indeterminate by design, thanks to careful breeding, the manipulation of both genes and diet, and a large amount of tubiliform silk andchoreography. We live inside his left ear, and in many other places. We kept an eye on Julia, but we also now had to keep an eye on Raymond.

Hed been at the Food Emporium that day because hed suddenly been caught up in the memory of the texture of Entenmanns Rich Frosted Donuts. The way the chocolate coating, hard and plasticky, split on his tongue. The meat of the doughnut, thick and spongy like it was made a day old. Objectively, these were not the qualities Raymond enjoyed in doughnuts. But that day he was slain in the spirit of Entenmanns Rich Frosted Donuts, and Whole Foods doesnt carry them, so there he was at the Food Emporium.

Raymond thought hed glimpsed Julia around town several other times before finally deciding to track her down. But he couldnt be sure it was her. There Raymond was, sitting on the other side of and across from her on a train car on the M line when he had to go to a dentist in his network because his regular dentist was on vacation.