NOS4A2 A Novel

New York (and Everywhere Else)


HERE IS WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT THE SECOND SEARCH ENGINE BOOK in the New York Times Book Review, Children’s Book section, Sunday, July 8, 2007—the only time any of Vic McQueen’s books were reviewed there.

Search Engine’s Second Gear

By Vic McQueen.

22 pages. HarperCollins Children’s Books. $16.95. (Puzzle/Picture Book; ages 6 to 12)

If M. C. Escher were hired to reimagine Where’s Waldo?, it might look something like Ms. McQueen’s fascinating and deservedly popular Search Engine series. The eponymous hero, Search Engine—a cheerful and childlike robot who resembles a cross between C-3PO and a Harley-Davidson—pursues Mad Möbius Stripp across a series of dizzying impossible constructions and surreal mazes. One confounding puzzle cannot be solved without placing a mirror against the edge of the book; another mind bender requires the children to roll the page up into a tube to make a magical covered bridge; a third must be torn out and folded into an origami motorcycle so Search Engine can continue his pursuit at full throttle. Young readers who complete Search Engine’s Second Gear will find themselves faced with the most terrible puzzle of them all: How long until the next one?!





FCI Englewood, Colorado


NURSE THORNTON DROPPED INTO THE LONG-TERM-CARE WARD A little before eight with a hot bag of blood for Charlie Manx.





Denver, Colorado


THE FIRST SATURDAY IN OCTOBER 2009, LOU TOLD VICTORIA MCQUEEN he was taking the kid and going to his mother’s for a while. For some reason he told her this in a whisper, with the door shut, so Wayne, out in the living room, couldn’t hear them talking. Lou’s round face shone with nervous sweat. He licked his lips a lot while he spoke.

They were in the bedroom together. Lou sat on the edge of the bed, causing the mattress to creak and sag halfway to the floor. It was hard for Vic to get comfortable in the bedroom. She kept looking at the phone on the night table, waiting for it to ring. She had tried to get rid of it a few days ago, had unplugged it and shoved it into a bottom drawer, but at some point Lou had discovered it there and plugged it back in.

Lou said some other stuff, about how worried he was, about how everyone was worried. She didn’t catch all of it. Her whole mind was bent toward the phone, watching it, waiting for it to ring. She knew it would. Waiting for it was awful. It angered her that Lou had brought her inside, that they couldn’t have this conversation out on the deck. It shook her faith in him. It was impossible to have a conversation in a room with a phone. It was like having a conversation in a room with a bat hanging from the ceiling. Even if the bat was asleep, how were you supposed to think about anything else or look at anything else? If the phone rang, she would yank it out of the wall and get it out to the deck and throw it over the side. She was tempted not to wait, to just do it now.

She was surprised when Lou said maybe she should go see her mother, too. Vic’s mother was all the way hell and gone back in Massachusetts, and Lou knew they didn’t get on. The only thing that would’ve been more ridiculous was suggesting that Vic go see her father, whom she had not spoken to in years.

“I’d rather go to jail than stay with my mom. Jesus, Lou. Do you know how many phones my mother has in her house?” Vic asked.

Lou gave her a look that was somehow both distraught and weary. It was a look, Vic thought, of surrender.

“If you want to talk—like, about anything—I’ve got my cell on me,” Lou said.

Vic just laughed at that, didn’t bother to tell him she had pulled his cell phone apart and shoved it in the garbage the day before.

He took her in his arms, held her in his bearish embrace. He was a big man, glum about being overweight, but he smelled better than any guy she had ever met. His chest smelled of cedar and motor oil and the outdoors. He smelled like responsibility. For a moment, being held by him, she remembered what it had been like to be happy.

“Got to go,” he said at last. “Got a lot of driving to do.”

“Go where?” she asked, startled.

He blinked, then said, “Like, Vic . . . dude . . . were you listening?”

“Closely,” Vic said, and it was true. She had been listening. Just not to him. She had been listening for the phone. She had been waiting for it to ring.

After Louis and the kid were gone, she walked through the rooms of the brick town house on Garfield Street that she had paid for with the money she made drawing Search Engine, back when she still drew, back before the children in Christmasland started calling again, every day. She brought a pair of scissors with her, and she cut the lines leading into each of the phones.

Vic collected the phones and brought them to the kitchen. She put them in the oven, on the top rack, and turned the dial to BROIL. Hey, it had worked the last time she needed to fight Charlie Manx, hadn’t it?

As the oven began to warm, she shoved open the windows, switched on the fan.

After that, Vic sat in the living room and watched TV in her panties and nothing else. First she watched Headline News. But there were too many ringing phones in the CNN studio, and the sound unnerved her. She switched over to SpongeBob. When the phone in the Krusty Krab rang, she changed the channel again. She found a sports-fishing program. That seemed safe enough—no phones in this kind of show—and the setting was Lake Winnipesaukee, where she had spent her childhood summers. She had always liked the way the lake looked just after dawn, a smooth black mirror wrapped in the white silk of early-morning fog.

At first she drank whiskey on the rocks. Then she had to drink it straight, because it smelled too bad in the kitchen to go in there and get ice. The whole town house stank of burning plastic, despite the fan and the open windows.

Vic McQueen was watching one of the fishermen struggle with a trout when a phone began to chirp, somewhere near her feet. She looked down at the scatter of toys on the floor, a collection of Wayne’s robots: an R2-D2, a Dalek, and of course a couple of Search Engine figures. One of the robots was a Transformers thing, black with a bulky torso and a red lens for a head. It visibly shivered as it chirped once more.

She picked it up and began to fold the arms and legs inward. She pushed the head down into the body. She snapped the two halves of its torso together and suddenly was looking at a plastic, nonfunctional, toy cell phone.

The plastic, nonfunctional, toy cell phone rang again. She pressed the ANSWER button and held it up to her ear.

“You’re a big fat liar—” said Millicent Manx. “And Daddy is going to be mad at you when he gets out. He’s going to stick a fork in your eyes and pop them out, just like corks.”

Vic carried the toy into the kitchen and opened the oven. Poisonous black smoke gushed out. The cooked phones had charred like marshmallows dropped in a campfire. She threw the Transformer in on top of the melted brown slag and slammed the oven shut again.

The stink was so bad she had to leave the house. She put on Lou’s motorcycle jacket and her boots and got her purse and went out. She grabbed the whiskey bottle and pulled the door shut behind her, just as she heard the smoke detector begin to blat.

She was down the street and around the corner when she realized she hadn’t put anything on besides the jacket and her boots. She was tramping around greater Denver at two in the morning in her faded pink panties. At least she had remembered the whiskey.

She meant to go home and pull on a pair of jeans, but she got lost trying to find her way back, something that had never happened before, and wound up walking on a pretty street of three-story brick buildings. The night was aromatic with the smell of autumn and the steely fragrance of freshly dampened blacktop. How she loved the smell of road: asphalt baking and soft in high July, dirt roads with their dust-and-pollen perfume in June, country lanes spicy with the odor of crushed leaves in sober October, the sand-and-salt smell of the highway, so like an estuary, in February.

At that time of the night, she had the street almost to herself, although at one point three men on Harleys rolled by. They slowed as they went past to check her out. They weren’t bikers, though. They were yuppies, who were probably creeping home to wifey after a boys’ night out at an upscale strip club. She knew from their Italian leather jackets and Gap blue jeans and showroom-quality bikes that they were more used to Pizzeria Unos than to living brutal on the road. Still. They took their time looking her over. She raised her bottle of whiskey to them and wolf-whistled with her free hand, and they grabbed their throttles and took off, tailpipes between their legs.

She wound up at a bookstore. Closed, of course. It was a little indie, with a big display of her books in one window. She had given a talk here a year ago. She had been wearing pants then.

She squinted into the darkened store, leaning close to see which one of her books they were peddling. Book four. The fourth book was out already? It seemed to Vic she was still working on it. She overbalanced and wound up with her face smooshed to the glass and her ass sticking out.

She was glad book four was out. There had been moments when she didn’t think she would finish it.

When Vic had started drawing the books, the phone never rang with calls from Christmasland. That was why she had started Search Engine in the first place, because when she was drawing, the phones were silent. But then, midway through the third book, radio stations she liked started playing Christmas songs in the middle of the summer and the calls began again. She had tried to make a protective moat around herself, a moat filled with Maker’s Mark, but the only thing she had drowned in it was the work itself.

Vic was about to push away from the window when the phone in the bookstore rang.

She could see it lighting up over at the desk, on the far side of the shop. In the gusting, warm silence of the night, she could hear it quite clearly, and she knew it was them. Millie Manx and Brad McCauley and Manx’s other children.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the store. “I’m not available to take your call. If you’d like to leave a message, you’re shit out of luck.”

She shoved away from the window, a little too hard, and reeled across the sidewalk. Then the sidewalk ended and her foot plunged over the edge of the curb, and she fell, sat down hard on her ass on the wet blacktop.

It hurt, but not as much as it probably should’ve. She wasn’t sure if the whiskey had muted the pain or if she had been on the Lou Carmody diet for too long and was now carrying a bit of extra padding back there. She worried she had dropped the bottle and broken it, but no, it was right there in her hand, safe and sound. She took a swallow. It tasted of the oak cask and sweet annihilation.

She struggled back to her feet, and another phone rang, in another shop, a darkened coffeehouse. The phone in the bookstore was still ringing, too. Then another went off, somewhere on the second floor of a building over to her right. And a fourth and a fifth. In the apartments above her. Both sides of the street, up and down the lane.

The night filled with a choir of phones. It was like frogs in the spring, an alien harmony of croaks and chirrups and whistles. It was like bells ringing on Christmas morning.

“Go the f*ck away!” she screamed, and threw the bottle at her own reflection in a store window across the street.

The plate glass exploded. All the phones stopped ringing at the same time, revelers shocked into quiet by a gunshot.

A half beat later, a security alarm went off inside the store, an electronic wang-dang-doodle and a flashing silver light. The silver light silhouetted the wares on display in the window: bicycles.

The night caught and held in place for one lush, gentle moment.

The bicycle in the window was (of course) a Raleigh, white and simple. Vic swayed. The sensation of being threatened shut itself off as quickly as if someone had flipped a switch.

She crossed the road to the bike shop, and by the time she was crunching across the broken glass, she had her plan worked out. She would steal the bicycle and ride it out of town. She would ride it out to Dakota Ridge, into the pines and the night, would ride until she found the Shortaway.

The Shorter Way Bridge would take her right over the walls of the Supermax prison and on into the hospital ward that held Charlie Manx. That would be a hell of a sight, a thirty-one-year-old in her underwear, gliding along on a ten-speed through the long-term-care ward of a maximum-security lockup at two in the morning. She pictured herself sailing through the dark, between convicts sleeping in their beds. She’d ride right up to Manx, put the kickstand down, yank the pillow out from under his head, and suffocate the filthy man-burner. That would end the calls from Christmasland forever. She knew it would.

Vic reached through the broken glass and picked the Raleigh up and carried it out to the road. She heard the first distant wail of a siren, a yearning, agonized sound that carried a long way in the warm, damp night.

She was surprised. The alarm had only gone off half a minute ago. She didn’t think the cops would respond so quickly.

But the siren she heard wasn’t cops. It was a fire truck, heading toward her town house, although by the time it arrived, there was not much left to save.

The cop cars showed up a few minutes later.