Rush Coughlin’s mind was all Red Bull and Joe Rogan. He’d often say as much, frequently using it as a button on his numerous television appearances. It was the drive to write a movie high on cocaine while being wholly unfamiliar with the process of writing a script, cocaine, nor the cliche of writing a script while high on cocaine. He was also the next senator for the state of Indiana, and he had brought me out to DC because of ‘a matter of urgent concern.’

He flew me out there and everything. I’d never flown on a plane before. Never had any reason to before. Alaska Airlines. I asked the stewardess what Alaska was like and she said, “Cold” and I smiled and said, “I bet,” and I felt like my soul had just clinked glasses with an ancient force that was studied by the folks at the Santa Fe Institute or something. It felt like the kind of thing someone like me would say, and I felt a totemic peace with that. Like I’d tapped an egg on its side with a spoon and it rang out like a half-filled glass of water.

I watched the Potomac pass by and watched joggers jog by in their winter gear — I was still processing the fact that the Senator had sent a driver for me, and my mind half-drifted in the direction of the hip-hop piano theme of a television show like Succession or any of a half a dozen Don DeLillo novels — and watched crows and ravens do little curlicue lines in the air above winter joggers.

Rush Coughlin looked a little like what would happen if a football coach like Bob Wylie went into private equity. There was something so particularized about his soul that any attempt to dress it up — move it one way or the other — only succeeded in making him look camp. His hair was slicked back, sure, but he had too much hair, so, really, it looked like whatever he was using to slick his grey hair back was doing too much work, was already straining beneath the curve of the comb, and it wasn’t nearly accounting for all the end curls that escaped that particular gelatinous grasp.

I had time to process this image, of course, because — as I walked in — he was already holding up a finger in my direction.

“Can’t talk now, detective. It was my idea to have Dr Phil be embedded in an ICE raid.” He gestured down at the phone on his desk, which — as if on cue — rang. He picked it up.

“Hey, you ol’ dog. How’d it go?”

He laughed.

Elsewhere — far away from this — a commuter on a train was scrolling TikTok and there was something about Elon Musk doing something something with the treasury but it was lost to a wave of stories about people lip syncing to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, with captions about how nice it was to listen to oldies. A kid waiting in his friend’s car for a ride home from school stared stonefaced at Kai Cenat jumping up and down on a small tower of trampolines. A kid learning how to trade crypto had Theo Von Goatee’s podcast on in the background and wondered when he would have Candace Owens on so that the two of them could get down to discussing the real business of America: heart. Some idiot kept telling his friends that he was writing fiction in real time to help reach people who wouldn’t otherwise understand the country they were living in.

The Senator was still on the phone and I was beginning to tap my foot. He saw.

“Hey, Phil,” he said. “Remember when they brought Nancy Reagan to drug busts in L.A. in the 80’s? Well, you’re no Nancy Reagan.” A pause. “Well, take it however you want to take it!” Another pause. “I gotta go. I’m here with a detective. He’s here to investigate your shit.”

He hung up and looked at the phone with a raised eyebrow, muttering to himself, “Just what I’m going to do with …”

“Senator,” I said, interjecting. “First of all: hello!”

The senator nodded once and gave a short chop wave of hello.

“With all due respect, if I was flown out here to investigate Dr. Phil —“

The Senator sat down in his chair, kicked his feet up on the corner of his desk, and waved a dismissive hand. The chop moved in the other direction. “You weren’t brought in to investigate Dr. Phil. Don’t worry.”

“Then …”

“I have a question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you think the internet is nothing but a stochastic manipulation and creation machine?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“Elon’s words. Don’t rightly know what half of it means myself. He’s trying it out in Italy, the UK, Germany, and he says it’s going to work — and, hey, whatever gets points on the board, you know? — but I’m amazed that one can launder what one wants society to be as easily as that. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not quite?”

“A second question: do you think that Twitter or platforms like it are just another version of those old Tamagatchis, where it just has to be fed, but, as time goes on, we increasingly forget why or what for?”

The awful thing about Rush Coughlin’s office was that it was gorgeous. It was like we were sitting in a retired yachtsman’s captain’s quarters. Soft wood, soft lights, and wall-filling scatterings of photos and certificates as high as the eye could reach.

After looking over a framed letter from the governor thanking the Senator for his help with Indiana Senate Bill 518, I readjusted my gaze to meet the Senator’s.

“So something … really bad happened, then, right?”

The Senator’s body movements stilled. He gave no indication of assent or dissent. It was a bird settling upon a statue and then simply fading away.

“Like, really bad,” I said, trying to press the point. “Really bad.”

“I think it’s an obvious point,” the Senator finally said, looking down at paperwork that may or may not have had anything to do with the case at hand. “But some of us with deep memories of our home state remember when Detective Dan Whitmore was Detective Danielle Whitmore.”

The threat was obvious, gross, grotesque. Whatever you wanted to call it. I should have walked out then and there — nearly did; started to get up, in fact — but that was before he told me about the bodies.