MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST

MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST: CHAPTER ONE

Pearl Durkee falls asleep in front of the TV in his hotel room. He'd been watching wrestling with the volume muted, and nodded off during the commercial break between that and the courtroom procedural following it.

On TV, the handsome lead character — a prosecutor — and his slightly-less-handsome co-lead argue with a judge in her chambers. Our heroes think the judge is dismissing too much of their evidence, that she might be in the pocket of the defense. Only they're not saying anything about the defense or the case or anything in their script. All they can say, over and over, is Max Ordos does not exist. The judge whips her glasses off, her eyes wide and angry, and yells that Max Ordos does not exist. They all shout it over top of each other. Max Ordos does not exist.

All three characters turn to the camera, looking past the existential void between themselves and the viewer. Max Ordos does not exist, they shout into that void, as if what is said in their contained reality can pass through to the one outside the television. Their voices are a bridge between these separate realities that attract and repel one another, a bridge that cannot hold.

A woman walks into the room from an unseen door and turns off the television. She's tall, wearing jeans and a letterman jacket with blue sleeves and a 'K' on the heart side. Messy blonde hair frames her cherubic face until she presses her fingers to both temples and removes the top of her head with a mechanical click.

Max Ordos does not exist, she says.

Pearl wakes up startled and sweating. His ears ring.

In the morning, Pearl takes the stairs to the hotel's small dining area, where continental breakfast will be served for another fifteen minutes. He stacks muffins and croissants on a plate and pours himself coffee without acknowledging the other guests, most of whom look like retirement-age couples. They're all dressed for the day. Pearl is in his pajamas. He eats and sips coffee facing one of the windows, watching highway traffic. A group of drab gray buildings sits across the highway from the hotel; one of them says NuCrete, Inc.

The coffee doesn't perk him up much. He slept like shit the night before. Serves him right, sleeping with the TV on. His mother claimed that it gave his father nightmares. He didn't believe her, and neither did Pearl, but maybe she was onto something.

After breakfast, he showers and gets dressed, then takes the stairs down to the lobby and rings the bell. A lady his mom's age, round and doughy with big brown glasses, tells him to wait just a moment before emerging from the tiny office behind the desk.

"How'd ya sleep?" she asks.

"Fine," he says. "Can you tell me where the public records office is?"

"Sure," she says. "Take the highway south, turn left at the billboard for the radio station, and that road'll take you straight into town. The public records office is just off the big traffic circle." She wrinkles her nose. "That's not a place we get asked about too often."

Pearl forces a smile. "No, I guess not."

"Got business here in town?"

"Yeah," Pearl says, "a real estate thing. The details are boring."

The woman chuckles, then gives him a smug look as if she's just solved a puzzle. "Oh, the Carlisle farm up the way? Did they finally chase that creep out of there?"

"Nah," Pearl says. He doesn't want her knowing his business, even though there's not much else to do in southern Pennsylvania besides know other people's business. "Don't know anything about that. Better that he's gone if he's a fucking creep, I guess."

The woman winces a little, and Pearl makes a note to not swear in front of her. "I suppose it is," she says. "Let me know if you need anything while you're here. Name's Pam."

Pearl thanks her and heads for his car. The property he's here to inspect is a few miles up the highway, so it shouldn't be too much of a pain to drop by the public records office afterwards. Some big shot developer hired him through a Baltimore real estate attorney to perform some due diligence on this property, and the sooner he's done, the better. He's worked with this attorney before. She's impatient and weird, like most lawyers, and will expect regular progress reports.

Why a developer in Baltimore would want a farm in Kadath, Pennsylvania is anyone's guess. Aside from the university and a tenuous connection to the Civil War — the town's namesake was a Union general who was convinced that the Confederacy had engineered human-fish hybrids to strengthen their navy — there isn't much here besides trees, farmland, and confrontational religious billboards. Hell Awaits You ... Repent NOW, says one. There Are Seven Signs of Evil — How Many Have You Seen Today?, asks another. And so on.

Pearl adjusts his rear view mirror and catches his reflection for a second. He has his dad's baggy eyes and his mom's mouth that's too small for his face. Thankfully, he doesn't have his dad's thin hair or his mom's stout build. He keeps his eyes on the road for the rest of the drive, shaming himself for that small moment of vanity.

The farm, once he finds it, isn't much of a farm. A farmette, maybe, and that's being generous. It's a two story house on an overgrown lot that can't be more than three acres. The whole thing is fenced in, but parts of it are separated into pastures. A partially-built well sulks in one corner of the property. All the grass around it is dead, and the dirt is the color and consistency of ashes.

With no one else around, Pearl checks the perimeter of the house. Several windows broken. Gutters dented and torn from their fittings. A foul mix of paint smell and accumulated body odor hangs in the air, even though nothing's been painted recently. Parts of the fence have collapsed, the rest needs repair. How much of this was caused by a squatter versus simple neglect, Pearl thinks as he walks around to the covered back porch. It's collapsed in on itself, and a shed and dog kennel in the rear lot have both been destroyed. More patches of dead grass and ashy dirt. Another smell, sharper, like ammonia.

Inside, Pearl counts three bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths, a den, and a large sun room. He likes the vaulted ceilings and the amount of light the windows let in. This could be a nice house if someone cleaned it, and if the walls and floors hadn't been hacked to shit like someone took an ax to them. That same person probably pushed all the furniture into the first floor den and stuffed it with newspaper. The doors to the closets have all been removed, too. Pearl takes careful notes, and also notices blueprints and other papers tacked to one of the bedroom walls. He hasn't seen a lot of arson cases, but it looks like a burn plan to him. A really bad one.

As he stares at the blueprints, they twist into a face. What strange piles of meat we are, it says in a dysphagic voice.

A door opens and slams downstairs and the blueprints are as they were. Pearl touches them, then rubs his eyes. His ears are ringing again.