POLICING - A Novella

Dystopia Squared

Today I’m publishing my new novella POLICING. A twisted dystopian tale for our preposterous dystopian moment. Check out the paperback and ebook formats YOU KNOW WHERE. Just in time to ruin Christmas.

Jacket Blurb:

In a state where Criminal Justice is the new religion and each district is a prison of its own, everyone is suspected of something, and they all eventually end up incarcerated Beyond the Veil.

One man, though, lives a life so bland and correct that no one can find a reason to arrest him. His unwavering innocence draws the attention of a master secret policeman named Polanski. Over the course of his investigation, Polanski grows fond of his target. Still, he longs to make this sweetest arrest—even if he must orchestrate the crime himself.

Anyone with a badge can frame a man for a crime he did not commit. But it takes a true artist to nudge that man toward one of his own seeming volition.

Although certain of his impending success, Polanski must tread carefully at every turn, because no one in his world is beyond surveillance: There are eyes everywhere, and his neck, too, is on the line.

Excerpt #1:

Look at the man. Watch him try to live. See how his every waking minute is a tremor, some part of his body quivering, be it an eyeball or his lips or an index finger or his knees, as if he knows it is all about to end. One could easily infer just from watching him awhile that there is a tight knot of calcified cortisol in the space where his heart should be. His hands shake as he dines on lukewarm porridge at the diner. His eyes dart as he goes straight from the diner to work. At his desk, he can’t sit still, but bounces up and down on his rump, almost imperceptibly. His head bobs ever so slightly, as if there is a tune playing in there. (Unlikely—he doesn’t ever listen to music.) He never spends more than ninety seconds on any given phone call. The windows of his little apartment where he lives alone seem to frighten him most of all; he is always peeking out of them, then dashing away. Here is a man who is being slowly crushed by the terrible weight of what he knows.

Which is tantamount, in the grand scheme of things, to nothing.

—Only that we are going to get him one of these days. It is because he knows nothing that we can afford to wait. To allow him to go on living as if he were a free man. There is no pressing impetus to snatch him up and make him vanish from the free world, and so his case becomes a sort of game. Not all of us with eyes on the case know that he knows nothing; most will assume that he knows something, and that we go on forestalling the process in order to gather evidence.

As if we have ever needed it.

Excerpt #666:

Like electricity, love crackling through the lines. I’ve heard it. I know that one day, as our scriptures assure us, it will be born into the world, made flesh. But not, of course, until we are pure. The definition of Love to Come is necessarily unfixed, but we can approach it through hypothetical images. For instance: When your neighbor is starving, offer him your own living flesh as feast. (If you have a dog, or a child, obviously offer that first.) Hold this paradox in your mind for as long as you can: The only way to safeguard the Birth of Love is to destroy its every prematurity.