A grinning Mercer Wartenson handed over the keys to my new place as
soon as we had ironed out the details. "Six months, have as many parties
as you want, laundry is in the basement."
    Okay, so, don't let Mercer Wartenson do you any favors.

    I had met Mercer at a swanky museum opening we both snuck into. For me
it was a whim; walking downtown in a ball gown that I had thought it would
be funny to go to work in, I had wondered whether I could pass myself off
as a privileged patron of the arts rather than an impecunious artist.
Mercer never did explain his sneaking in, but he bragged about doing it as
soon as he spotted me. "You have a transcendently indifferent face," he
said. "Can I confess my sins to you? It'll be fine; I promise you won't
care about any of them." He was about 15 years too young for his name, and
at least one notch too affable. And he was looking for a house-sitter just
when my lease ran out.
    Running his name past people I trusted in the local scene revealed
that he was harmless, of unknown vocation, and socially peripatetic, the
sort of person whose digestive tract Mother Nature has optimized for hors
d'oeuvres. I moved in July 1st.

    Every few days he telephones with a request for some minor task, most
of which I was happy to do in return for lodging. Often he just needed me
to look through his boxes and confirm or deny the presence of a particular
item; thus empowered I didn't even consider it snooping if I opened other
boxes as well.
    Many of the kitchen surfaces were magnetic, which meant a lot of ruined
electronics and briefly-trapped friends when I did indeed have parties. My
confidant and collaborator Beep sewed some metal into a shirt in order to
test, with the help of the magnets, what it would be like to be falling-
down drunk and yet remain upright. (Not Beep's finest scientific moment.
When I scraped him down from the wall the next morning, he couldn't
remember much of the experience.)
    What I didn't do was read any of Mercer's mail or answer his land line
when it rang, so various warnings from the city about legal action invol-
ving the apartment failed to in fact warn me of anything. Nor did I carry
out Mercer's instructions all the way once they started to cut into my
work schedule.

    The first sign of trouble I saw was a very small woman from the City
who knocked on the door one day to talk to me about zoning laws. I told
her I wasn't interested, and she delivered a spleenful of bile about my
disregard for the building code. Suspecting I needed information she could
not give me, I gently closed the door while she was still shouting.
    The strong temptation to look through Mercer's bric-a-brac for a
solution quickly faded to some more germane questions: How strong did a
magnet have to be to hold up a 180-pound person? How could you ever cook
in a kitchen like that? (I lived on take-out, but the cupboards were full
of metal dishes and utensils that I could barely shift.) And why had
Mercer left the exact same message on my voicemail three days running?

    When the lawyers came we pieced together more of the story. Mercer
Wartenson had, under a different name, been a barnacle on the hull of
local TV stations for quite a while. The magnets were meant to play hell
with transmitters, and he had installed them just before leaving town.
Then at some point he had switched from live phone calls to recorded ones.
He seemed to have put almost as much effort into not being caught as he
did into not actually breaking any laws to begin with.
    I went back to couch-surfing, leaving most of my things mixed in with
his. No matter how bad the idea, if I sacrificed enough for it, it was
art.

written for Oana MC on the opposite couch 11/2/08

Well, that was awful and I apologize if you read this far. Partway through, discouraged by having no ideas, I lost my usual drive to at least salvage some part of the story. You can see me arguing with myself, trying to take back choices I had already made, filling space. I've posted it because those are the rules, but ugh.

My notes claim it's been over 40 stories since I failed to use one of a client's words even implicitly, and here I dropped two: "shrimp trolley" and "forkuletion". (I do not know what the latter means, but that's never been a dealbreaker before.)

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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