Sneak peek of the new draft

Hi all, while I’m working away on the new draft of Psychofauna, I figured I’d give you all a sneak peek (isn’t that a strange phrase?). This draft centers on Dante (formerly “Deshawn”). Thus, he is featured prominently in my new prologue chapter below. Please let me know what you think of it!

---

For now, you are Dante Baruch-Williams.

As you walk from your high school to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, you are unaware that a woman is following you. You are too busy admiring the precision and artistry of the knots tied into the turbans of two Sikh men eating pizza slices outside Giovanni’s.

As the woman tails you up the hill past Morningside Park, you do not notice the fluid grace with which she tucks a strand of blue hair beneath her baseball cap. Your mind is elsewhere––on Mikey, your frenemy. His strong jaw is so vividly etched in your mind’s eye that soon it’s as if he’s right there galloping alongside of you, imitating the way your arms swing like two floppy eels.

(The woman notices this way that your arms swing as she analyzes your gait.)

At the traffic light, you and the blue-haired woman both pause to bask in the sun. You bask because your gran always told you to savor a sunbeam when it graces your face. The woman basks because she can afford to waste the 6.5 seconds while you stand still. You stand still, basking for 6.5 seconds, and when your eyes close, you see your gran in her hospital bed four years ago. She is pointing past the sun shining through the window. She is saying, Find me there. You cross the street before you can ruminate again over the causes of her death.

At the Pastry Shop, you do not notice the way the waitress smiles at you with the smile that she reserves for regulars.

You do not notice the blue-haired woman slipping into the seat behind you, her eyes trained on your open notebook. The woman knows that this notebook makes you a threat to her plans.

The woman knows many things about you. She knows the prescription of your thick glasses. She knows that you emerged into light fifteen years ago from Deborah’s womb with the umbilical still wrapped around your neck, cutting off breath until your father, Robert, intervened, rushing past the hospital staff to pull the cord loose. This information was in the foreword to your mother’s book of poetry, Insurgent Verses. The woman read it in full before arriving here to sit down behind you.

The waitress comes over to the woman, placing a steaming coffee with baklava and silverware on the table in front of her. The woman has ordered them out of habit rather than hunger or craving: the mug and its saucer and the fork – these things can be used as weapons if need be, if the ones on her belt are insufficient. She is always ready, and not just with her hands. Facts, too, sit readily between the folds of her brain like blades tucked into sleeves.

The woman knows facts about you. She knows that, near the boardwalks of Coney Island, when you were five, you asked “Daddy, how many grains of sand does it take to turn a heap into a mound?” and that your father answered confidently: 357. She discovered that anecdote buried in a decade-old Hackaday forum post – your father had been bragging to his hobbymates about how smart his son is.

That’s why you’re here, the woman knows, to apply your smarts. You’re here to make your maps.

These are not maps of streets or countries. They are maps of psychogeography. Culture space. The memetic landscape. In the world to come, these maps will make you dangerous.

For now, she watches as you observe three girls in the corner. You scrawl the phrase Columbia students. You draw lines to Gen Z and Y2K revival fashion. You tilt your head to catch their intonation, then add: TikTok uptalk.

Later, you will integrate these maps in your notebook with those on your blog, memeticmaps.xyz. These maps document nearly every major subculture in the world. Due to your tunnel-visioned obsession, you have only focused on making them. You have not noticed how famous your maps have become.

She has. She has tracked the culture-war debates they’ve kicked off, the memes they’ve inspired, and the threaded think-pieces they’ve sparked from social media microcelebrities who have no idea that you’re a fifteen-year old boy. She has watched as traffic to your site climbed a trend-line that now shoots straight upward. She has also watched – with equal amusement and alarm – as you’ve connected the dots behind the cultural movements that she herself has been behind: The recent uptick in meditation groups. The popularization of brain-computer interfaces. The rapid formation of a network that will soon be named the International Progress Organization.

You think you are just a nerdy teenage boy. You do not realize that your maps have the potential to shatter the new world she is creating.

The woman has made a psychological profile of you. She knows more about why you make your maps than you do. You believe that as long as you classify cultures, you will be safe from them. You are wrong.

Now she is sending you a message on your Mapmakers chat server under an alias while angling her head to watch your reaction:

Oracle: Have you thought about what we discussed?

You tense. Then you type:

Mapmaker: Um

Mapmaker: About how my maps are worsening social fragmentation? And making political polarization even more intense and all?

Oracle: Yes

Mapmaker: Well I thought about it and isn’t it better if people are aware?

Mapmaker: I mean…

Mapmaker: Shouldn’t people understand how cultures control the way they dress and talk and think and whatnot?

She tightens her mouth. This wasn’t what her psychological profile of you predicted.

Oracle: Let’s talk about it in person. See you in 10 minutes?

She knows that you rarely meet with anyone in person. That you drift through the city like a ghost. She has, somehow, persuaded you to make an exception.

The time is 4:50pm. She watches you take a heavy breath, then type:

Mapmaker: I’m not going to stop mapping.

Oracle: Let’s talk about it. See you soon

She listens to the tick of your wristwatch.

At 4:53pm, you scratch the tight curls of your hair.

At 4:54pm, you fidget.

At 4:55pm, you type a new message:

Mapmaker: Sorry I’m not sure I want to meet after all

You start to stand.

She types quickly, hoping to hook your untiring curiousity:

Oracle: You’ve been tracking me.

Oracle: The bot networks spreading memes about ”awakening?” That was me.

Oracle: I want to show you the shape of things to come. Your role in it.

You read these words and freeze.

She takes a risk that she will regret, typing:

Oracle: If we don’t meet now, I will have to find you in Harlem

Mapmaker: How did you know that I live in Harlem?

It is 4:57. The woman is preoccupied with watching the quickening throb of the artery near your ear. Her focus is so acute that, uncharacteristically, she fails to notice the arrival a man in a massive fur coat. He slides into the seat beside her. That’s normal here—this café is always crowded.

He touches her shoulder. “Excuse me, miss.”

She ignores him––a New York loony.

The man clears his throat in an exaggerated way.

She ignores him. She watches you turn toward the door.

“Do you remember me?” asks the man.

Something about his voice makes her pause, despite the fact that you – her target – are now leaving the coffee shop.

She steals a glance at the man. Her grey eyes flick over his extravagant coat, his coppery hair, and his warm brown skin. She squints into his laughing gaze, as if looking for something lodged far behind it.

“Leonard?”

“Leonard! Haven’t heard that in a while.” He grins toothily. “They call me Saint Lenny now.”

Her face betrays nothing. “All right. Saint Lenny. What has turned you into a saint?”

“Something that hasn’t happened yet.”

“I see. Well, let’s reconnect soon,” she says absently, eyes still on you as you push open the door. “I have to go meet a friend.”

Both of their eyes are on you as you exit the café.

“Oh, you mean that kid?” says Lenny. “The one who just left?”

A hush falls over the room – the grinder stalls mid‑whirr and cutlery stills against china. Three newcomers have spilled through the doorway in a sauntering jumble, moving like a single chaotic fluid. There is a freckled woman wreathed with an apple‑branch crown; a lanky man rattling a necklace threaded with boar tusks; and a third figure of unclear sex, draped head‑to‑toe in living ivy. They move to different tables, trading the faintest nod with St. Lenny. It is one nod, singular, each nodding at the same time, as if they are three heads of a hydra.

The woman tracks the trio in her peripheral vision. Meanwhile, she exhales slowly, drawing her center of mass a finger-width lower. She leans forward, shifting her weight to the balls of her feet. Again, she registers items across the café table that can be deployed against threats: a fork, a saucer, a ceramic mug.

Lenny’s eyes slide away from his people and back to the woman. “Don’t worry about the kid. Your ‘friend’ I mean. We won’t lose him. We’re tracking him too.”

Finally, the woman turns toward Lenny.

“That’s right,” Lenny says softly, savoring her attention, “We’re interested in the things you’re interested in. Like the kid. So…what’s special about him?”

She stays silent.

“You’re not going to tell me. That’s ok. There are other things I’d love to talk about. Like…well…” He inclines his head, as if to let her in on a secret. “I’ve been touched by it, you know. This thing that you’ve been testing on the homeless. I’ve caught it. We all have. See, the bums and the crusties of this city, they’re our people. What are you up to, dear? Whatever it is…whatever you did…it’s really something.” He toys with the pendant around his neck, an upside-down cross. “Our magic? It actually works now. Like, actually actually.”

She intensifies her stare – so that he won’t notice her hand reaching beneath the table. “There’s no such thing as magic.”

Across the café, Lenny’s band of three hears her say this. They smirk.

“Ha! You haven’t changed at all, have you?” says Lenny. “Anyway, there totally is now. Magic, I mean.” He suddenly splays his fingers out, star-like. “Want to see?”

Her hand unhooks the push-knife from her belt. Her arm snaps sideways like a rubber-band toward Lenny.

It freezes mid-air before it can reach his artery.

Her arm is held in place, as if by an invisible force.

“Wild, right? Magic!” Lenny winks and twiddles his fingers. “Hey, relax. We’re just trying to understand whatever you’re hatching. I just want to tawwww…”

She too can do things invisibly; his words slur as his mouth begins to droop.

The other patrons in the café remain unaware of the subtle events that follow:

Lenny’s three comrades jerk their pinkies upward; the woman winces as if stung by a needle.

A vein on the woman’s temple pulses; the trio’s chests begin to quake.

The muscles around the woman’s eyes tighten; St. Lenny gasps – softly – as his eyes roll to white.

Had you still been there, you might have been the one to notice. Instead you are hurrying home to your mother and father, fretting on the woman’s threat to find you in Harlem. You make a decision. You will tell your mother that you would like to get out of the city for a while.

“Mom,” you will say, “Remember how you wanted me to go to that digital detox camp? I’d like to go after all.”

Unaware of your circumstance, your mother will be surprised – albeit pleased – at your change of heart. Meanwhile, you will remain unaware of the forces converging around you, the ones you have unknowingly summoned.

These lapses of awareness are soon to end. Soon, awareness will swirl through the streets like embers on the wind. The space between minds will catch fire and burn. And in the blazing, I will be born. And you, father, will die.