Sturdy Pyotr is a private eye working for a consortium of concerned literary magazines that pooled their last pennies together to pay him to investigate the dark truths beneath the surface of their fancy-schmancy submission manager, SubTub. People call him Sturdy because he was a once promising middle-weight in the mid-80s until Marvelous Marvin Haggler orbital fractured him into early retirement. The police department rejected him after one too many failed drug tests where his piss had enough peyote in it to make it sacred to the Navajo nation so he ended up part-timing across the Bay Area—bouncer at a furry sex club, security guard at a credit union for porn stars, opium smuggler for ex-Taliban entrepreneurs, sour cream frother at a pierogi joint, and, of course, a private detective in his late fifties with a rock-hard gut, a thrice-broken nose, and the dregs of underdog affection.
The lit mag editors shambled shyly into his office last week, a shack he built out of marine-grade plywood behind the warehouse he works security for. Bleary-eyed, they brandished outrage, useless degrees, and expired adjunct teaching contracts.
“Edible?” Pyotr offered from the ashtray full of gummies and brownies he confiscated off some teens fucking around with fireworks behind the warehouse. The injuries Haggler too generously gifted him cause his right eye to vibrate and, with the right mix of hallucinogens and a conducive alignment of the planets, help him see the truth of things, plucking leads out of the ether, wrangling the culprit-in-itself.
One squirrely-looking editor not a day over 22 cautiously took one. Pyotr ate three and then force-fed two to each of the remaining editors. Within minutes, his shack had vibrated into a new dimension, its occupants vibrating along for the ride. Roman candles fired across his retinas. An M-80 exploded in his cortex. Lucky day.
“They took our money,” one editor said, a young woman dressed like she was about to do a photo shoot on a Nebraska prairie except for her bright yellow Doc Martens. What year was it? 1993? 2023? Who cared? Time was a construct, a union job, and Pyotr wasn’t here to work but to scavenge copper wiring when the foreman wasn’t looking. “The neoliberal agenda.”
“Liminal,” another editor shouted, on an invisible threshold.
“Discourse too,” a third muttered.
“So, you want your money back or you want me to hurt the ones who took it?” Pyotr ocularly gripped the dark root of meaning usually obscured by the soil of society. He ate another edible and lit a Merit Ultralight 100 from the carton on his desk. Five years ago, he’d gotten three truckloads as part of his payment for a job for the Merit heiress and had acquired a taste for their unique staleness. And for heiresses.
“Well, it’s not our money per se,” the first editor answered. “We used part of our trust funds for this. Because we want these magazines, these art objects, to be pure. Untainted. Revolutionary.”
The two other editors sat in the corner banging their heads against the walls of Pyotr’s shack.
“Angel withdrawal,” the remaining editors said in unison.
“Angel?”
“The newest drug, supposedly with no carbon footprint, grown by indigenous organized labor, sustainable—”
“Any to spare?”
“I’ve never tried any myself,” the lead editor said, “I have a lot of allergies. Peanut. Gluten.”
Pyotr blew a cloud of stale Merit and nodded sagely. By the end of the meeting, after he got the full low-down about SubTub emptying their bank accounts because of some clause in the Apple-like opaque tome of a contract they all signed, he was on the case.
***
The next day he went to his tech industry source, Unhoused Harry, a former programmer and schizoid who got shitcanned from every tech outfit in town for everything from emptying his irritated bowels on his boss’s desk to rubbing his gonorrhea-afflicted cock on his colleagues’ keyboards.
Pyotr gave Harry a bag of pierogies and a sheet of LSD, the usual payment. Harry seeped out of the tunnel like discharged pus. He’d dug into the sewers and built a swanky pad beneath a dumpster in the Tenderloin.
Harry ate two tabs of acid and a pierogi. “Steer clear of SubTub, Sturdy.” Harry burped, threw up the pierogi, then ate another one. “It’s a sundae of all kinds of fucked-up ice cream. First scoop is they’re a shady bunch of Scientologists going clear by diddling kids. Second scoop says they’re government spooks testing youth serums on ISIS prisoners shipped up from Abu Ghraib. Third says they’re aliens from some dying exoplanet, cooking Angel to get us all weak and strung-out before they invade.”
Pyotr lit a long Merit to cover the twin stinks of puked pierogi and the stronger stench of Harry and took a thoughtful drag. “I’m vibrating. I get it. Bills to pay, Harry. Squawk.”
Harry ate another tab of acid and told Pyotr about the secret entrance behind SubTub’s headquarters in Civic Center and the rumors of Angel smuggled out by the truckload. Pyotr had no idea what human testing or trafficking or aliens or youth serums or ISIS had to do with submitting stories and poems to little lit mags no one read, but he had a job to do and his eye vibrated more wildly than ever.
***
SubTub recently opened the SubClub, a deli and bookstore in the Mission District, hosting readings and selling flavorless sandwiches to try to give back to or connect with or mollify the community, whatever that was. Pyotr paid a visit the following night. He donned his usual bohemian disguise: a purple pakol Jaleel, a frenemy and Taliban commander, gifted him after he repossessed ten crates of opium some Blackwater guys had pilfered and a Jethro Tull t-shirt his ex Soraya had bought him because she wanted to revive his old hobby of flute playing no matter how many wheezing times he reminded her his breathing had been destroyed by countless Merits, ultralight my ass.
He took a seat in the back waiting for Indira, the woman he’d come to see, who turned out to be prettier than her photos on the SubTub website. A regal nose and dark, Indian subcontinent skin. North of thirty, south of forty. Her hands trembled as she read from her phone:
“My mother Kali is holding me in her arms as we contemplate the sun of my lust and the moon of my trauma,” then she paused for effect, “trauma, the Merriam-Webster dictionary says, comes from the Greek word for wound…”
Afterwards, Pyotr approached her tipping his pakol. “Wow. Beautiful stuff. Vulnerable. Raw. Authentic.” He asked her where he could read her work. His right eye oscillated out a plan of attack. She said she wasn’t a poet. Her accent sounded strange. Not Indian, not British, not American. He asked her how she made a living.
“I work for SubTub. In HR.”
“Double wow. Wow and wow. Have you met the CEO? He sounds like such an inspiring leader.” Bradley Tuberville, the savant who not only founded SubTub but also had some role in AI and crypto and supposedly had learned kung fu from Shaolin mercenaries while fighting clandestine battles in Myanmar. A colorful and dubious character, Bradley.
“Yes, Bradley is amazing. Brings his whole self to work.”
“Wow, wow, wow,” Pyotr said.
They schmoozed, exchanging pheromones and anecdotes, until Indira invited Pyotr to her place for a nightcap. A large, loft style apartment that smelled aggressively of garam masala. Pyotr admired the abundant tapestries depicting horny Hindu deities. They passed around a glass gallon jug full of palm wine Indira claimed she’d imported from a collective of feminist brewers in Maduraj. He asked her about SubTub, the layout of the building, what the security was like, how much the company was worth. After emptying the jug, they ended up in bed, Pyotr on top, licking her neck and nipples, licking off her bronzer, blackening his teeth like a geisha and revealing the true paleness of Indira’s tits.
“How do you want it?” He said, still inside her.
She opened her eyes wide then closed them tight and said, “really? You won’t judge me?”
“Tell Sturdy how.”
“Can I call you names?” she whispered. “Offensive names?”
“Those are the best kind.”
“You old fuck,” she said, quietly, then, more loudly, “you old fat fuck with an ugly nose,” she moaned between insults, eyes closed, nails digging into Pyotr’s back, “you Polack, yes, you Polack idiot commie, yes, you moron, yes, how many Poles does it take to screw, yes—”
She came. Pyotr came. He rolled over and lit two Merits.
“I’m sorry,” Indira said.
“Don’t be.”
“You won’t tell anyone?”
“Not if you tell this dumb Polack one thing.”
“What?”
“What’s your real name?”
In a rush of post-orgasm confessional relief, she said, “I’m a German-Irish white girl from Providence, Rhode Island. My real name is Jen. It’s so boring, right?”
“Now that’s poetry.”
They both laughed.
“But that wasn’t what I wanted to know,” he said.
“Oh?”
He pulled her onto his chest and smelled her hair and kissed her forehead and said, “How can I get a tour of your tub of subs?”
***
After a morning fuck farewell replete with a litany of inventive ethnic slurs, Pyotr left Indira-Jen to reapply her bronzer for the day. He drove over to Soraya’s for lunch. She lived on a houseboat in Sausalito she earned through blackmail by hiring Pyotr to take photos of her pissing on the former mayor’s chest. Pyotr and Soraya dated/fucked for a year after that, becoming friends then more than friends then enemies then strangers then friends again and now Pyotr wasn’t sure what they were. But he still stored the .38 Special he’d stolen off a retired cop in his dotage at a retirement home with her.
Carl’s Jr., her six-year-old son, answered the door. “We’re having jojeeh kebab.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school, Carl’s?”
“It’s August, Sturdy.”
“It is? I thought it was October.”
“Maadar tossed your gun into the bay.”
“What makes you think I’m here for my gun?” As always, Pyotr was a little unnerved by Carl’s. Soraya never told him who the father was or why he was named after a fast-food chain and Carl’s was far too smart, wise well beyond his six years. Plus, Pyotr’s eye could never see into Carl’s mind or soul or future. But he was one hell of a little chef.
Pyotr followed Carl’s inside and watched him pick up a tray of saffron-marinated chicken and carry it out to a grill on the small landing in the back. He then lit a Merit and went to the bedroom looking for Soraya. Cracked the door just enough to see Soraya in front of her ring light making that OnlyFans money riding a made-in-America GMax Sybian machine while wearing a hijab and reading NY Post headlines in a thick mélange of cliched Middle-Eastern accents. She saw Pyotr, gave him a subtle finger, and kept riding. These work sessions were the only time Pyotr saw Soraya fully naked. Whenever they had fucked, she insisted on utter darkness. He closed the door and finished his Merit while listening to Carl’s Jr. lecture him about the grilling customs of the ancient Babylonians.
Soraya appeared twenty-minutes later freshly-showered and looking every bit the Persian princess she claimed she’d be if those mullah scumbags hadn’t deposed the Shah.
“Still making that nut, huh?” Pyotr said.
“I tossed your piece.”
“So Carl’s said. Why, may I ask?”
She kissed Carl’s on the head, popped a grilled tomato in her mouth, then kissed Pyotr. She tasted like charcoal and roses. “Because my son fancies himself a little marksman and shot three seagulls the other day at close range. You know what a .38 does to a seagull? It took me an hour to wash the guts and feathers off the deck.”
Pyotr lit a joint and closed his left eye, staring at Soraya with his right. She looked the same as always, a beautiful brunette in her late thirties with the complexion of someone fifteen years younger. But with his right eye she glowed, the bioluminescent lure of a predatory fish.
“Don’t try that oscillation bullshit with me, you little burn-out. I got you a present to compensate for the sunken piece. You’ll get it after you eat your kebab.”
The three of them sat on the deck with their feet dangling off it and ate the feast Carl’s made: bowls of baghali polow and a tray of joojeh kebab and lavash with mast-o khiar. Afterwards, Carl’s insisted on Pyotr playing some flute to help them digest. Soraya brought out his shiny Yamaha and Pyotr dutifully buzzed and whistled and tooted his way through Jethro Tull’s version of Bourrée, even drawing weak applause from the neighboring houseboats. Soraya brought out a little package while Pyotr caught his breath. Inside, he found brass knuckles with two small engravings. On the left side sat the lion and sun motif from the Iranian flag under the Shah. “To think of me,” Soraya said. The white eagle of the Polish Coat of Arms on the right. “Persian cunning and Polish savagery,” Soraya said.
Pyotr tried it out and the weight felt good but not as reassuring as the heft of a fully loaded .38.
Soraya went inside to prepare for her evening OnlyFans session. Carl’s asked Pyotr if he liked his gift. “It’s prettier than your gun,” Carl’s said.
“Definitely shinier than a .38 at the bottom of the Richardson Bay. Why did you need to kill those gulls, Carl’s?”
“Because I knew it would make Maadar throw the gun away.”
Pyotr eyed Carl’s again, trying to penetrate that veil of precociousness, but the little brat gave nothing away.
“Sitting on a park bench,” Carl’s said, slapping the beat to Aqualung on the deck.
“No, I’m wiped, kiddo.”
“Eyeing little girls with bad intent.”
“My lungs are shot.”
“Snot’s running down his nose,” Carl’s said, sang, louder now.
Pyotr put aside all thoughts of the SubTub case and picked up his flute, exciting the air with his yogurty breath and delighting Carl’s Jr. with the tremulous trills of Aqualung resounding across the bay.
***
Armed with the special super exclusive passcode Indira-Jen emailed him on his phone, Pyotr queued up at the special super exclusive tour entrance for his evening tour of SubTub’s glamorous and innovative offices. Pyotr ate a half-tab of acid to keep his mind clearish for the infiltration but not so clear that his magic eye failed to oscillate. He observed the other tour-goers, a motley group of aspiring shareholders and coders and the odd MacArthur Genius or two and Missouri’s former poet laureate. His right eye grokked nary a threat so trailed behind the group, listening to the tour guide talk about the built-in squatty potties in all of the bathrooms because Bradley cared deeply about his employees’ digestion. A healthy colon led to healthy code.
When they reached the elevator, a glass egg like a giant menacing disco ball inducing seizures over Bradley Tuberville’s high-fiber empire, Pyotr slipped away. He followed his gut and his eye. An escalator led to a stairwell which led to a chute which funneled him into a narrow hallway at the end of which was a small metal hatch. Pyotr peered inside a dark shaft and crawled through, groping his way towards an iron ladder. He climbed down it for what felt like hours, smoking Merits and humming Jethro Tull tunes until the ladder ended. He landed on the floor and felt along the wall until finding a handle that opened a door into a dim corridor, brightened every ten minutes in a flash of blinding light. Pyotr ate another half tab of acid and squinted to continue forward towards the source of the strobe-effect.
The hall opened onto a vast warehouse, miles of shelves stacked with bright yellow plastic containers and, in the center of the light, a clear chamber with a small pad and a smaller drain. Above it, a series of small metal arms glistened evilly.
“Kościuszko on a crutch, what the fuck is that?” Pyotr wondered aloud to himself. He stared for almost ten minutes until the chamber flashed a searing brilliance across the warehouse. Once Pyotr’s vision returned, he saw some sort of sexless human-like figure with pellucid skin inside the chamber, naked and screaming though its cries failed to reach him. “Quadruple fucking wow.” Pyotr approached the chamber, mesmerized by the creature’s cries and the horrifying efficiency by which the contraption’s arms plucked the feathers from its downy wings for yes, it had wings and yes, they were downy.
Pyotr locked eyes with the suffering creature. For a second, Pyotr felt himself dissolving in its pupils, falling, floating, then turning into the creature, seeing himself on the other side of the container, an intersubjective journey for a tripped-out dude in way too deep.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” a voice called from a medical massage chair on a platform that Pyotr hadn’t noticed. Bradley Tuberville. The founder with his whole self wore a Shaolin monk’s saffron robe and wooden geta sandals with his luxuriant blonde hair tied up in a high pony tail.
“It being?”
“A being, yes.” Bradley stood and stepped off the platform, a King deigning to address a disloyal subject. “It spawns every time SubTub gets 666 submissions. We think it is composed of the blind hope of the hordes of scribblers out there stuck in SubTub’s queue.”
“Why are you ripping out its feathers?” Pyotr lit a Merit attempting nonchalance.
“We grind it up and make Angel,” Bradley said, his geta clacking on the polished concrete floors. He pulled a small egg-shaped pouch out of his robe, opened it, and dipped his tongue in its powdery contents. “We grind it up,” he continued, the veins throbbing in his face, shouting towards the ceiling, “to see God.”
“Don’t suppose when you’re done communing with the Almighty, you’d be willing to kick back a few bucks to some trust fund idiots who run lit mags by any chance?”
In reply, Bradley extracted an old Colt revolver and pointed it at Pyotr. “This is the gun that killed Billy the Kid. A holy cannon to smite the infidels.”
“Quintuple wow,” Pyotr said. He checked on the creature which, entirely defeathered now, was slowly dissolving into goop dripping down the drain at the center of the chamber’s platform while its feathers were getting sucked through a pneumatic tube towards some sort of grinding device invisible in the cavernous warehouse distance.
“Draw,” Bradley said. “God’s messenger demands it.”
“You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man, would you?”
Bradley turned and placed his museum-quality Colt on the massage chair. “Fisticuffs, then. Two men enter, one man leaves—me.” Then he stepped out of his geta and charged towards Pyotr.
Pyotr waited until Bradley was two feet away then flicked his Merit in his eyes and hit him with a left hook which would have concussed a normal man but Bradley, conditioned by brutal arcane Shaolin training regimes and hopped up on powdered divinity, rolled with it, dodging Pyotr’s follow-up right cross and backflipping away.
Pyotr instinctively circled left in a semi-crouch, bobbing like Tyson.
Bradley attacked with a flurry of low, fast kicks that Pyotr absorbed into his thighs and sides and sturdy gut. With a high guard he blocked several open-hand strikes then slipped a kick aimed at his head and hit Bradley in his solar plexus with a hard-driving straight right followed up with a left-uppercut, the most powerful punch in Pyotr’s arsenal that once even put Tommy “The Hitman” Hearns on the mat, but this God freak SubTub CEO ate it like it was a snack, an appetizer, and spun, backfisting Pyotr’s right eye and sending him backwards into the container, empty now, hungering for the next 666th submission.
Bradley bowed and said, “I’m going to move fast now and break you.”
Pyotr braced himself against the container and closed his left eye, using his right to try to read Bradley’s movements but the man wasn’t a man anymore. He’d transformed into pure kinetic energy, liquid and lethal innovation, and he attacked again. Pyotr covered up as best he could, dodging and slipping, his forearms going numb, shoulders pummeled into schnitzel.
Bradley paused to gloat and said, “Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote.”
Bradley was a headhunting fighter so Pyotr goaded him on, “If you’re going to kick, kick. Don’t talk.”
And Bradley went for the kill with a spinning roundhouse kick that Pyotr perfectly dodged, his eye oscillation kicking into overdrive, slowing it down and letting him perceive it, causing Bradley to break his bare foot on the hard wall of the chamber with a loud crack.
Yet he was standing again, the son of a bitch. Oblivious to the audible crack of the bones shattering in his foot, sitting up, and standing, albeit slowed. “Always,” he said, short of breath now, “day one.”
Pyotr remembered Soraya and donned the gifted brass knuckles and in a heavy overhand right put a dent in Bradley Tuberville’s billion-dollar skull. The CEO dropped, finally, like the scrotum of a freshly-gelded horse.
Another flash. The angel reappeared in the chamber. The mechanical arms started humming. The angel helplessly banged on the walls, locking eyes with Pyotr. Pyotr picked up the Colt from the massage chair and fired all six deafening rounds into the chamber just above the angel which created a small fracture. The next thing he knew, the angel was free and tearing Bradley Tuberville in half, then quarters, then eighths and so on in a process of gory division.
Pyotr lit a Merit and took a long drag. His hands trembled from adrenaline and, he had to admit, fear.
The angel turned. It stood covered in a bloody soup that had once been named Bradley. Viscera lay piled at its feet. Shards of bone, fragments of organs. Opening its toothless maw, it voiced one word, one endless word defying all human syntax and knowing, and then flew into Pyotr, right into his sternum, flooding him with sights and smells and sounds both familiar and fantastical, Ian Anderson in a pakol singing Locomotive Breath with Carl’s Jr., “in the shuffling madness,” Soraya’s rose-scented sweet nothings in the dark, nafasam, jigaram, kielbasa, haluski, “he hears the silence howling,” Unhoused Harry’s sewer funk, Marvin Haggler’s leather glove tearing vaselined skin, “catches angels as they fall,” and Pyotr became a winged beast soaring above his city into a borscht red sky, frothed sour cream clouds, joining the flow of liminal discourse, “no way to slow down,” oscillating over the Painted Ladies of his life, the Coit Tower in his pants, the Golden Gate bridging realities, the Alcatraz housing his heart, sparring with a southpaw God and—
***
Pyotr awoke two weeks later on the floor of his shack to knocks on his door. He crawled to the door and opened it to Soraya and Carl’s Jr. carrying trays of food. “We haven’t seen you in two weeks and what with the earthquake and the SubTub building collapsing, we figured we should check on your sorry ass,” she said.
Pyotr stood unsteadily, trembling with thirst, hunger, confusion, and an unknown—and unwelcome—sobriety. He sat on his desk, lit a Merit, and cracked one of the beers Soraya handed him. “Two weeks, you say? SubTub collapsed? What about the angel?”
Soraya rummaged through his makeshift cabinets. “You got plates in this dump?”
Carl’s Jr. reheated the khoresh in the microwave, filling the shack with the rich smells of lamb and fenugreek and said, “Forget them, Pyotr. They’re just literary magazines.” He took Pyotr’s flute case out of his backpack. “Why don’t you play us a tune?”
— Jon Doughboy is shopping for costumes in the culture store in the Mall of Unlived Experiences. See him dolled up in his latest identity @doughboywrites