The guest speaker was returning his papers to his slim leather valise. "That was an uncommonly insightful question, miss. And phrased as a true question rather than a comment, thus uncommonly courteous."
"Ah... thank you?"
"Tell me, you're not really in this department, are you?"
"Can I take that as a compliment?"
"Wholeheartedly." He quirked the corner of his mouth and inclined his head in her direction. "Just here for the free food?"
"And because the poster looked interesting."
"In that case..." He withdrew a business card from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and quickly but cleanly penned an extra notation upon it. "I would be delighted if you would attend my dinner party this Friday. Black tie preferred, academic formal accepted for students." On autopilot, she took the card from his fingers. "I promise," he said, "the conversation and the food will both be improvements upon colloquium fare. Provided, of course, that you are not vegetarian."
The houses were oddly tall and narrow, perched on top of garages or open carports, scrunching themselves in tight to leave space for stunted trees and unkempt grass, green spaces that opened the line of sight out to the thin strip of sand dunes, the tidal flat and the Atlantic out beyond the estuary. She guided the car around the corner at an idle pace, like she was steering a boat in the "no wake" zone of a marina. Just as the GPS voice from her phone told her that she was attaining her destination, she saw the woman in the front garden. Pulling the sedan to the side of the asphalt road, collecting her phone, popping the door, stepping out with a scrunching underfoot. Seashells, dropped there by the gulls that called and screeched overhead to break them open and get at the meat inside. "Doctor Morgendorffer?" she called. The woman looked up from the row of plants, rose from a crouch to sitting upright, her basket of strawberries gripped in both hands. "I'm Clarice Starling, FBI."
She remembered her badge just after making the announcement and fished it out of her light corduroy windbreaker.
"Hello," said Daria Morgendorffer, not rising. She wore asymmetrically cut-off pale jeans over a sky-blue one-piece swimsuit, an outfit that managed to say it's summertime and also laundry day.
"I called the number in the Bureau's files earlier," Clarice said. Daria had no personal presence on social media, no contact details that were not intermediated through an office. The only photos online of her for the past decade were author events in public but controlled places, all very far from here. The deed to this house was not in her name or that of any family member. "Like I said, I'd like to talk with you about Dr. Lecter."
"And here I was afraid you were here for those overdue library books." Daria stood now. "The husband unit is out on a bike ride. I was just about to make some chocolate-chip pancakes. Come on over."
Rolling doors at both ends of the garage were up. A cross breeze came in from the sea. They had no car, but they did have a canoe hanging from the ceiling and a motorcycle parked on the concrete. A workbench with toolboxes, aluminum cabinets with labeled drawers and a well-stocked pegboard looked like Dad space. Daria led Clarice through the garage to the far side that faced the tidal flat, where she had set up two chairs, a deal table and a portable induction stove, plugged into an orange extension cord. An honest-to-goodness candlestick phone sat beside the stove. "I need some things from the kitchen. Excuse me just a moment."
Clarice stood alone, crossed her arms to clasp her hands just above her elbows, and watched the sea.
It was a good place to get a lot of things out of your lungs.
Daria returned bearing a cloth grocery bag over her shoulder and carrying a pitcher of sun tea. She extracted two plastic cups from the bag, set them on the table and filled both with tea, ice clinking in the pitcher as she poured.
"Well, that's right neighborly of you," Clarice said, letting a little more Appalachia come through in her voice.
"Per the ancient tradition of hospitality, I am putting my lawyer on speakerphone." She lifted the mouthpiece from the candlestick and set it on the table.
A voice from the device: "Hello, Agent Starling. My name is Isobel Vinberg, from Proctor, Proctor and Cain. To reiterate the previous message from our firm, my client has agreed to this interview on the stipulation that no recording is made, no written notes are taken and no mention of my client's home address is preserved in any form. My client has instructed me to remind you that there are only five doors between Hannibal Lecter and the outside world."
"Yes, I understand, ma'am," Clarice said.
Daria switched on her induction stove and began methodically withdrawing tools and supplies from the grocery bag. "Your message said that Hannibal had sent you to me."
"I interviewed him in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane," Clarice replied by way of affirmation.
"Who's running the serial killer squad? Is it still Jack Crawford?"
"Yes, I was there at his request."
"Agent Crawford must be under a lot of pressure, if he's tapping bright-eyed youngsters to interview a serial killer in the middle of a pandemic. What's the urgency? Does Hannibal have something to do with a case that can't wait, like Buffalo Bill?"
Clarice kept her expression neutral as the wave of the uncanny spread through her. Too much like what Dr. Lecter had asked.
"He may have certain information relevant to the case, yes, we think. There's a lot that's hard to confirm at a distance, which is why we're wearing out our shoe leather."
Daria was mixing the pancake batter in an aluminium bowl. The wires of her whisk were rainbow-colored. It struck Clarice as an odd note of whimsy.
"I don't know anything about Buffalo Bill that anyone else who has fallen down an Internet schlock hole doesn't know too. And I probably know less about Hannibal Lecter than you'd hope."
"He plays his cards close to his chest," said Clarice.
"Let me guess: He asked you to confirm the rumor about where the name came from."
"It was Kansas City Homicide. 'This one likes to skin his humps.'"
"Glad to know the finest are on the case," Daria said.
"The prevailing speculation in law enforcement right now," Clarice volunteered, "is that he starves women to loosen their skins, then removes... pieces. To assemble."
"He goes after big and tall girls because he wants to sew himself a woman suit made of real women?"
"Dr. Morgendorffer, you knew Hannibal Lecter when you were working on your PhD. You wrote your thesis on transgender identity in science fiction. You have quite a bit of academic experience with gender theory."
"And some pertinent personal experience, too."
"Do you think that is why Lecter wanted me to speak to you?"
The lawyer's voice: "As we discussed, Daria."
"Do you think Hannibal wanted me to give you my official evaluation of the FBI's transgender serial killer hypothesis?" She ladled pancake batter into the hot pan. Plucking a spatula out of the grocery bag, she continued, "As a professional bookworm, I can tell you that plenty of people know more than I do. But not all of them would be willing to talk to the cops. In the spirit of harm prevention, I'll say that I don't buy it. Your Bill could walk into any informed-consent clinic and get a prescription for E and spiro. Even gray-market DIY hormones would be easier and less risk than murdering women. You'd be looking for a woman who is so dysphoric that she needs surgery but can't get it, anywhere. Who doesn't turn inward in self-destructive self-loathing but projects that outward, killing the people she wants to resemble. You'd think that if someone gets to the point of murder, death has to be an essential part of the plan. Hell, it's possible, people are bastards all over, but it's a hard circle to square."
"I couldn't find the idea very persuasive, either," Clarice said, allowing this much now that she could say it without prompting the other woman. "But I couldn't put my finger on why, on the real reason why."
Daria flipped the pancake. "Because it sounds like the kind of theory that men who joke about skinning humps would invent?"
Clarice took a sip of iced tea and nodded, describing two quick circles with the raised index and middle fingers of her free hand, a yes, exactly gesture.
Daria asked, "Did Hannibal send you to me just to have me echo your suspicions?"
"He said that I would find you interesting. That you had offended him and lived to tell the story."
"I suppose."
"You helped to catch him."
"That didn't offend him. It inconvenienced him. The offense happened earlier. At one of his dinner parties."
"Did you criticize his cooking?"
Daria slid the pancake onto a plate and reached for the ladle again. "I told him that serial killers were passé."
Clarice was thankful that she did not have tea in her mouth at the moment. "You did what?"
"The topic came up in the natural flow of conversation. I don't remember exactly how we all landed on it. I said that the serial killer as a figure of dread was '80s nostalgia, that culture had moved on from that fear, had had its interlude with terrorists and was now caught up with mass shooters. Entitled pissants with automatic weapons ready to kill total strangers in a casino. Then I said something about how Jack the Ripper had killed fewer sex workers than did the Puritan politicians who refuse to set up needle exchange programs and safe injection sites." Pouring in the batter for another pancake to join the one that had just started to bubble.
"You undermined his case for being an artist."
"I was a kid at a party I'd rather have skipped, because after a couple dinners chez Hannibal, every dish felt like it was trying too hard. I suppose if I had said that, he might have made roast Daria with orange sauce."
"How many meals did you share with him?"
"More than enough to be a vegetarian now." Daria added the second pancake to the plate and pushed it towards Clarice. "The maple syrup is real maple."
"Thank you," Clarice said.
Daria kept working over the skillet. "Did you read my PhD thesis?"
"I started it on the plane. I'm up to the part about The Ophiuchi Hotline."
"I had a long section about Neuromancer that I cut as a digression. I really wanted to keep the joke about the alternate timeline where the most influential part of it was the Rastafarians in space, but..." She shrugged.
"Did Dr. Lecter ever think you were wasting your talents as a scholar? He did not strike me as the type to go for, well, pop culture, I guess you'd say."
"He said I had the temperament of a classicist, that I naturally sought out the timelessness in every genre. Apart from that one time, I don't remember him getting irked, just that I always found myself stopping by Donut World after our meals together. Even at the end..."
"Dr. Morgendorffer, I know this has to be a painful memory, so---"
"It's fine. You asked how often we dined. It was often enough that rumors went around campus that we were fucking. But people mostly entertained that rumor because they were bored. The gossip with more life to it was that we were each other's beards. Like an old friend of mine said, I gave off the gayest vibes of any straight girl in the world. And Hannibal, well, those suits, right?"
"Did you talk about your relationship with Dr. Lecter with anyone else at the time?"
Vinberg interposed: "My client declines to answer that."
"All right. Did you and Dr. Lecter ever discuss... romance? Sexuality?"
"Outside the context of fiction? No. And other than that one conversation, I don't recall we ever discussed serial killers, either. He certainly didn't say anything that makes me think now that he knew Buffalo Bill." Daria ate a strawberry from the basket.
"According to the file, the final... event happened the day after you defended your thesis."
"Does the file include the part where I had been attending monthly sex parties?"
This time, Clarice did have tea in her mouth, but she got it down without choking. Vinberg was too professional to sigh audibly.
"My client will not disclose the names of anyone now living who may or may not have participated in such events, and will affirm that no recordings were made of them, nor money or any items of value exchanged as a condition of participation."
"It was grad school. I was trying to finish in four years. No time for a relationship, and no history of luck with them, either. Scratching the itch, in a setting where nothing had to be about more than getting the itch scratched, was... liberatory. I won't say it was the only thing that got me through, but let's call it in the top five.
"Anyway. Three days before my thesis defense, I got a phone call. One of the regulars in our club was getting booted. He had brought alcohol to the last party, which was against our safety rules, and he had tried to remove his condom before penetrating a woman who had only consented to protected sex." Dry, clinical. Not needing to elaborate. "I had just finished thanking my lucky stars and returning to some level of equilibrium about the bullet I dodged when I got another call. He was dead. The news was calling it the Chesapeake Ripper."
Strangulation marks around his neck, Clarice knew, one eye gouged out and his intestines spilled over into a barrel. A stray dog had been at them.
"Hannibal," Daria said, "had made a present for me."
Multiple Miggs, thought Clarice.
"So. My thesis defense. A friend of mine had come down to provide moral support. There had been a whole thing with the train of thought that my thesis topic had set him on, but never mind... My family drove in. Hannibal showed up without telling me in advance. I gave my lecture, answered the committee's questions, then got the handshake from my professors. I was too numb to feel elated. I had finished the most intense period of hard work in my life, and I didn't know how to process the whole thing being over.
"Hannibal made me the guest of honor at his dinner party that night. We never figured out exactly which dishes Martin was part of.
"I left something at his house by accident. A notebook, a journal that I'd gotten as a gift that day. My friend and I drove back the next day to look for it. Hannibal let us in. We split up to check the places I might have left it. My friend was searching the kitchen. Hannibal had a shelf of cookbooks. And there, right next to The Joy of Cooking, was a book of engravings by William Hogarth."
"Including The Four Stages of Cruelty."
"Yes. He recognized it, Hannibal saw him recognize it. I heard a crash from the next room. Hannibal had a knife. Both of us would be dead if I had tried to run away. And if I didn't have a cup of Donut World coffee that was too hot to drink. Getting that in his face slowed Hannibal down just enough that Jey could get him in the knee with a shard of broken glass.
"Maybe it all took twenty seconds. I got a chopping knife in Hannibal's back. All three of us were in a pool of one another's blood. I was trying to hold my friend's life inside his body...
"A lot of stuff didn't seem nearly as consequential after that.
"I was up first, in the hospital. Did a lot of bedside reading aloud. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, mostly. And some travel guides for Earth itself, to plan the trip we needed to take."
By now, a stack of chocolate-chip pancakes had accumulated. Daria shifted three of them to her own plate and began pouring maple syrup on top.
Clarice considered the conversation. It had filled in some gaps of the official record. Yet it had not revealed any detail that radically changed her evaluation or fashioned a new connection in her mind. "So. You can't think of anything that Lecter said or did that would make your acquaintanceship relevant to the Buffalo Bill case?"
"You mean, why this case would call me to his mind, any more than I was already for helping to get him locked up? No. Except..." She lifted three layers of maple-soaked pancake on her fork, popped the morsel into her mouth, chewed, deliberated, swallowed. "What if that one conversation about serial killers matters more, now, somehow."
"A serial killer," Clarice thought aloud, "who is modern, a creature of modern fears. Who wants women's skin for the reason that he'd stockpile AK's. Who feels entitled to it."
"He doesn't want a woman suit to transform himself," Daria said.
"He wants one to transform something he thinks he deserves."
Daria looked towards the front yard, suddenly, at an approaching bicycle.
"Hello! And hello." Daria's husband parked his bicycle in the garage. He smiled at her and, a little more quizzically, at Clarice. His hair was dark, falling shaggily just over his ears. The stubble along his jaw suited him. It brought a little roughness to a countenance that otherwise might have been too delicate.
His eyes were a piercing, sapphirine blue.
He leaned in and kissed Daria on the lips. "Do I need to change my shirt for company?" he asked.
Clarice felt a pang of guilt for intervening upon a moment that, in her absence, might have been a heavier, more pheromonal kiss.
"Be quick about it," Daria said. "Food's ready."
He smiled again and disappeared into the house.
Daria turned back to Clarice.
"Agent Starling, I married him."
Welcome back to Best of the Before Times with the AV Club. I'm here with author, editor and all-around maven Daria Morgendorffer. Together we'll be ranking the highlights, and maybe the lowlights, of Star Trek.
It's a pleasure to be here. Lockdown has revealed to me that I am the kind of person who has strong opinions about Deep Space Nine.
The stronger the better, I say. But first, let's talk about where you're coming from.
An undisclosed location. They have cookies.
And sourdough?
Well, who doesn't, these days?
Now, as for where you're coming from artistically speaking: Many of our readers will remember you as the author of Runaway Greenhouse Effect.
Described by your colleagues over at io9 as though Thomas Pynchon had written My Side of the Mountain. Which, fair.
You won the Hugo Award for—
No, Runaway Greenhouse Effect won the Nebula and was a runner-up for the Hugo. I like to say that it's good I didn't win both, because it kept my ego in check. My husband likes to say that tolerating the occasional blatant lie is an important part of a healthy relationship.
We didn't plan for this when we lined up this chat, but RGE drew some criticism for being overtly anti-police, back when the culture wars came for the Hugos. With the George Floyd protests rocking the nation these past couple weeks, does the book feel topical?
I'd like to claim that I was prescient, that I had a transcendent perspective that makes me a voice particularly worth listening to right now. But honestly, that was mostly the typical voice of private-eye fiction. Dislike the fuzz in my novel, and you must really hate The Maltese Falcon. Though I'll admit that I found that voice easy to come by, and I used it to process a barrel of emotions I had to deal with at the time. I don't think that's too unusual for writers. One woman I know handles chronic pain by writing Hellraiser fanfic. And I found it easy to dislike law enforcement when they were the ones who had failed to stop Hannibal Lecter from stabbing my best friend.
Oh.
And look, here comes the elephant, tap-dancing through the room!
Every author gets asked, day in and day out, "Where do you get your ideas?" I'm the only one who can answer, "From the road trip we took after we survived Hannibal the Cannibal."
"We" being you and?
My best friend, who became my fiancé under a starry night sky outside Taos, New Mexico.
We were on the road from winter '09 through summer '10. Take a girl like me, with a lifelong habit of jade-tinted glasses, and give her a long road trip full of small-town Americana, Route 66 and all that. You're going to get a book out of the experience.
It barely felt like science fiction. I figured it would turn out obnoxiously literary, like my early college writing. We actually stopped in Telluride, Colorado, so that I could write in one of the towns where Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita. Can you imagine that?
Kurt Vonnegut once said that when he wrote Player Piano, he wasn't trying to do science fiction. He was just trying to portray the General Electric Company. I kind of worked in that same mode. I had been trying to get out of my own head and my own problems, and what I found was underage drinking in strip-mall parking lots of dead-end towns. And, a layer deeper than that, a pervasive sense that civilization was systemically failing the next generation. Well, I was a teenager during Columbine. I remembered how it felt to realize that every time an adult claimed to act in your best interests, they were at best fatally misguided and more likely indulging in a self-serving lie. Pick an issue from guns to climate change; it's all the same betrayal. If anything, the science-fictional tone came from the science fact: Unlike what you could potentially say about teenage alienation past, the teenagers are now just empirically right. The adults have failed you. Carbon don't lie. So there, making a PB and Nutella sandwich on the challah in our snack cooler, parked off a state highway in the lovely woods near the Ocoee, I decided I'd write the story of where all that betrayal went.
People keep telling me how surprised they are about all the stuff in the book that's real. The ELIZA effect, people projecting humanity into dead simple programs, that's been known since the '60s. I've known plenty of school administrators who'd like to replace teachers with computers, and I've met executives who'd sell them the software if they had it. I didn't even feel like I was writing satire. I was just doing stenography of hotel banquet halls that I had stood in, trying to steal hors d'oeuvres.
I started with the idea that the school brings in a program for "tutoring help". It gives terrible advice, like birth control methods that don't work, so that the adults are driving the very behavior that they're condemning out of the other side of their mouths. I figured out that it would all go horribly wrong, I decided where the characters would end up, and at motels across the land I filled in the steps in between.
I'll refrain from saying that the book was a "runaway" success.
It was a pleasant surprise. The publisher, Merrymount Books, was a tiny shop run by people I knew from college. The paperback edition was the biggest thing they'd done up to that point, I think. It was nice that we all came up together.
You surprised a lot of people in the office here with your next project.
The Venture Bros. novelizations?
Most everybody figured your sophomore book would be more "literary" than your first.
It's a common trap. But I had already been working against that impulse with Runaway. My involuted stories, where characters are aware that they live in fiction, where you have to follow the allusions to follow the plot, or where the whole thing is hypertext and you have to unlock the conclusion by traversing the previous chapters in the right order... I got that out of my system in college. I still spill over into deliberate experimentation with form, sometimes, but I only leave that in the final draft when it's part of a larger whole.
Doc [Hammer] and Jackson [Publick] came from a different background than I did, but with some of the same influences, and some of the same aspirations. I too had a Tom Swift phase. (I was horribly confused at age 10 by how many different Tom Swift series there were. He went to space in the '80s? And had a friend with a cybernetic leg? And a planet of evil robots tried to make her a drone controlled by the leg? Tonight's Episode: The Writer's Barely Disguised Fetish.jpg.) I've spent a lot of words doing overt parodies. Over time, they grow into their own thing, developing their own character and emotion beats. I liked Venture Bros. from the start; I liked it even more as it evolved.
Another trick we all get the appeal of is doing something sardonic and creative with the stuff of a crass marketing campaign. We got to talking, and somebody brought up the novelizations of movies like Stargate and Mission: Impossible. Rush jobs, pure marketing, diverging from the movies in odd ways because they were based on the script instead of the final edit. And I remembered the James Blish novelizations of the Star Trek original series and Saturday-morning cartoon. There's a bizarre moment in his version of "Errand of Mercy", the first Klingon episode, where it says, "The Klingons were hard-faced, hard-muscled men, originally of Oriental stock."
Holy beep.
I know, right? On a couple levels.
Anyway, I ended up saying, "Give me a month." I put in late nights on that. How do you translate a moment like the Mecha-Shiva gag into print?! But I surprised myself with how proud I was with the result.
After that came your first book of science-fiction poetry, yes?
Songs of Earthset. That started with "Power Ballad of the Green Space Babe", which I wrote as a favor to a friend who needed an audition piece. Then I realized that I could use genre as a gimmick, a reason to pick up a book of poems in the first place. And to smooth over my own feelings of inadequacy. You try to write verse that's approachable and memorable and darkly comic, and you inevitably compare yourself to Dorothy Parker, right? It's easier to go on and not beat yourself up when you know you're doing something different.
You have an academic background, and you keep a foot in that world, don't you?
I'm the chief editor for the Open Textbooks line at Raft College Press. My job is to wrangle faculty, at Raft and elsewhere, to develop their lecture notes into full-blown textbooks, which we distribute online for free and in print at minimal cost. Because textbook prices are offensively absurd. Sometimes I write material to fill in the gaps myself. Our goal is total coverage: a viable text for every required course in every major at Raft. Right now, my responsibilities are oscillating between biochemistry and the Byzantine Empire.
Does that still leave you time for fiction? And/or poetry?
My husband knows that I get ornery if I go too long without letting my freak flag fly, and so he gently prods me back to that. He paints, and does charcoal, and is generally irritatingly good at visual art. It's not fair that one person can be that talented and that hot. Our lockdown game has been that he draws a book cover, I make up a mini-story, he spins off an idea in that to make a new picture, and we go back and forth.
I think you're winning the pandemic. And now, for the ostensible reason that we got together here...
The sun had set at Quantico. Clarice had not seen it. She was bone-weary.
She had been roped into taking over the work of a fingerprint tech who was quarantined thanks to his girlfriend catching COVID. Two of the bodies that had needed printing had been floaters.
In the shared office at the Behavioral Science Unit, she held a bowl of instant ramen under the hot tap of the water tank. She was alone. Most of the fluorescents were off. She carefully brought the filled bowl to her desk, gave it a stir and let it steep. It was spicy ramen. She opened her desk drawer, withdrew a jar of hot sauce and poured in a dollop. Take no chances leaving anything in the sinuses.
Under the first layer of paperwork was an evidence bag, containing a pale cream-colored envelope. The envelope was unsealed. Calligraphic letters on its front declared, To Daria.
Clarice called Beverly Katz. Best bet for a helpful answer. Until March, she and Clarice and the sassy science twins had habitually shared a cafeteria table with Lloyd Bowman from document analysis and Liza Lake from gas chromatography.
"What's this, Bev?"
"The Baltimore State Hospital forwarded that to us. Lecter wants to reach out to Daria Morgendorffer."
"Balls."
"Jack will want your advice on how we play it. You're the one who knows her."
"I'll email her and ask if she'll read scans. I think she'd want to know, but neither her nor Jey will want a physical presence from Lecter in their home."
"Smart couple. Anything else?"
"Just that I need a new idea. Gimme an idea, Bev."
"Eat your soup. Perhaps wisdom will come."
Clarice ate, and thought.
The Bureau was running down everything it could find about the Acherontia moths that Bill had inserted into the bodies. They had to be imported as eggs or as larvae; all records of customs irregularities had been cross-referenced with every other line of speculation, and they'd come up with nothing. Clarice had given herself an eye-strain headache by sifting blogs and forums frequented by amateur entomologists. She had salted away detailed advice about nurturing moths for fun and profit. It had been impossible to avoid the drama. COVID scares in the most recent pages. Before that, birthdays and anniversaries and graduations, all receiving congratulations from fellow self-proclaimed lepidopto-nerds. The world was a glorious place and took all sorts. Pity that it also included a cannibal psychiatrist and, somewhere out there, a man who killed women for their skins.
In older pages still, a bat mitzvah blurred with a fundraiser for a founding community member, burned in a car crash... She was recuperating at the junior-high science fair—no, back at her home somewhere in Maryland...
Clarice opened a new browser tab on her desk computer and checked her bookmark for Bon Appétit Test Kitchen fallout. The gossip washed over her without sticking. She turned from the screen and let her eyes roam over the chalkboard mounted on the wall.
Amid all the notes, all the fragments of theorizing, the single word SKINS still had pride of place. It grabbed one's focus.
"Yes, we're familiar with that part," said Clarice. "What are we not seeing?"
How did Lecter know Buffalo Bill?
She knew that he knew. He could have dangled an offer of a psychological profile to Jack Crawford in any of half a dozen cases. Buffalo Bill was different. Lecter had inside information, and he found it delicious.
"Asking yourself the same question over and over again and hoping for a different answer has to be a subtype of insanity," Clarice told herself.
All right, then. What had she not asked? What had she not thought to ask? What were her preconceptions blocking her from asking?
"How am I at a disadvantage, let me count the ways."
Asexual? Am I? It feels that way sometimes. Labels like ace and biromantic did not belong in the halls of the FBI. Her skin crawled at the touch of most men; thinking of women failed to stir her blood. So. Was she at a deficit when trying to puzzle through human entanglements?
Did that even matter here? Was she at any more of a deficit than any other agent when the entanglements included the straight girl with the world's queerest vibes and a monthly sex party?
"Hold on," said Clarice.
The files had not included the party scene. The Lecter investigation had been what Beverly Katz called a shitshow. His basement alone had offered a plenitude of riches; the first officer to see it had suffered an emotional breakdown that spilled over into contaminating several chains of evidence... Daria and Jey had been guarded in their testimony. What they did say had been more than enough... but Daria had doubtless taken pains to reveal nothing about that social circle she did not absolutely need to reveal. As far as the files indicated, Martin was a casual acquaintance who had expressed interest in a casual fling; he had then attempted assault on another fling partner.
How did Lecter know to kill Martin?
Perhaps he had surveilled Daria. She was more than a conversationalist for him; he had attended the theses defences of no other students. Clarice suspected that he saw potential in her, wanted to shape her into something dark and destructive, something like himself. Did this extend to monitoring her secretive recreations? To having an informant in that circle?
"How rude," said Clarice.
It did not quite fit. That kind of spying was jealous-ex shenanigans. Daria had been confident that Lecter had held no erotic interest in her. Cordial, no-strings-attached relations between consenting adults who had alcohol policies for their events did not speak to any inner darkness. Lecter would have dismissed those as a mere passing curiosity, of no salience to his purpose.
Clarice did not want to introduce a third party, but perhaps that made more sense. Perhaps someone else in that circle was an intimate of Lecter's?
The only way to get any names would be to ask Daria. And Clarice was pessimistic about that.
The chili sauce in the ramen broth had accumulated on her lips. It burned, pleasantly.
How does one get an invite to a sex party, anyway? This was, Clarice realized, a question she had never imagined asking.
How surprising would that kind of recreation be to those who knew Daria as the oddball, bookworm girl in the suburbs of... of where?
Lawndale.
Lawndale, Maryland.
Clarice flipped through her browser tabs to find the amateur entomologist blog.
"Back home in Lawndale, Maryland."
She scrolled back up to the woman's name. Hyphenated. Half of it looked familiar. From the Lecter files.
The print copies were on the next desk. Clarice knew that her fingers could find the right page more quickly than she could phrase the right query to the computer. She pushed her chair across the tile floor, braked her spin with her left hand while opening the folder with her right. Her fingertips remembered the location in the stack of the report on Lecter's finances. Her eyes sought the correct quadrant of the page.
Yes.
She found Daria in her Signal contacts and slammed the call button.
It was Jey who answered. Tired and wary, but aware that a call from Clarice at this hour had to be important.
"Starling? Is that you?"
"Yes. Jey, is Daria there?"
"Loading the dishwasher."
Clarice felt another pang of guilt at invading their domesticity. She quashed the feeling, hard. Then she said:
"Listen. Did she know a man named Tom Sloane?"
He stood close behind her, circled her with his arms. She tilted her head back to stare up at him. He slid the knife into her side, above her hip, and dragged it up and across towards her ribs. Behind her glasses, she watched him, unblinking.
* * *
The horseshoe crabs had visited the beach. Jey had watched them come in fast on the tidal current, rocketing around the sandbar with the floating bits of seaweed. They had mated in the shallows. Carried on the cycle that they had perpetuated for the past 450 million years, up there with photosynthesis as an example of how when something isn't broken, evolution won't fix it.
The lunar phase had rolled on. Jey sat out back of the house, watched the sea again, waiting for the sunset.
* * *
The motion of the knife felt like a fountain pen across paper, not the viscosity of a blade through flesh. Daria loosed herself from his arms and took a step forward. Turned on her heel to face him, looked down to examine the gash across her abdomen. It opened onto emptiness. "Untidy," she said. She buttoned her jacket over it. She wore the deep burgundy jacket over the charcoal-gray blouse, the burgundy matching her slim belt and the laces in her boots. Her pleated skirt, the same gray as her blouse, reached to her kneecaps.
The outfit she had worn for her thesis defense.
"Aren't you going to welcome me to your mind?" she asked.
Hannibal examined the bloodless blade, then made it vanish down his sleeve. "Good evening, Daria."
The lights came up around them.
"Inside the church of Santa Maria Novella," Hannibal said by way of explanation. "Florence."
The air was wintry, vaulted. They stood in the left aisle, before the base of Masaccio's Trinità, at the point where the perspective of looking upward at the Crucifixion is the most forceful.
Hannibal spoke, casually. "I found that the exterior of Santa Maria Novella, while justly famed for its grace, is too enamored of geometricism to make an agreeable canvas for memories. The atmosphere of the interior is much more suitable. And a far better place for conversation than my cage."
"Spending more and more time in your memory palace?"
"Dr. Chilton has taken to playing the television quite loud in the hallway. Kitchen Nightmares," he added with the subtlest curl of his lip.
"US rather than UK, I hope."
"If you're going to stay a while," offered Hannibal, "would you like a glass of wine?"
"Communion?" asked Daria.
"A 1982 Château d'Yquem," replied Hannibal.
Daria took the glass from his hand and sipped, gently.
"Between the fresco and the wine," she said, "this is an impressive amount of detail to hold in memory."
"Memory, my dear, is what I have instead of wine." He inclined his head by a slight, intentional fraction. "At present." With the hand that did not hold his own wine glass, he gestured at the inscription that Masaccio had painted into his Crucifixion, as the carving upon the tomb beneath the cross. "Io fui gia quel che voi siete e quel ch' io sono voi ancor sarete," he read, and then translated: "I once was what you are, and what I am you will also be."
* * *
Jey had spent the last few years being the auxiliary Dad for the neighborhood. He had the best power tools. Asking him to borrow them was the surest way to get him involved in whatever home-improvement puttering one had in mind. The projects always grew more elaborate, somehow, but also they got done.
Last fall, he had helped the older kids put on a puppet show for the younger ones. He had hatched a plan for a bigger theatrical to-do this year, saying that the schools being shut down was no excuse to deprive the kids from having memories of a school play.
Jey and Daria had adjoining bedrooms, finally, to accommodate their divergent sleep habits. The best thing for Daria was listening to audiobooks, but rolling over while wearing headphones tended to wake her. The thin fabric over the nonporous gym mats on the floor of her room worked better than a bed for the activities that involved sharing space.
They'd finally indulged themselves and bought a pizza oven.
* * *
"Tell me," Hannibal said. "How did it feel to learn that Thomas Sloane was shot while resisting arrest?"
Daria said, levelly: "Tom Sloane kept his wounded wife a prisoner in their home. He abducted six women, starved them, killed them, harvested their skins and stitched them into a suit that he forced his wife to wear, to hide the scars upon her body."
"Because he could not bear to look upon her ruin," Hannibal suggested.
"Because he could not bear to lose that which he felt entitled to," Daria corrected. "And because you had had his ear."
"Your clinical restatement of the facts can conceal your feelings, but it cannot suppress them at their root. How did it feel to learn that Clarice Starling had put a bullet in his spine? You had been in love with him, and you had been his lover. It must have been easy to place yourself into the role of his wife. When you learned the facts of the case, did you imagine the tanned and stitched skins of his victims pulling over your own body? Gripping your face, your thighs? Or did you imagine yourself pulling the trigger, cold vengeance wrapped in the mantle of justice?"
"I didn't shoot him."
"You brought Clarice Starling to his door," Hannibal observed.
"You asked me the same question in your letter," Daria said.
"And you wrote back. Dodging the inquiry quite artfully." Hannibal took a sip of his wine. "Officer Stuart, the one who was first to see my basement, retired from law enforcement with emotional problems. Jack Crawford wakes in the small hours of the night, surrounded by the ghosts of agents he lost. But your sleep has been untroubled, has it not?"
"That's me, problem-free."
"And that makes two of us." Another sip. "1982 was a lovely year."
Daria said nothing.
Hannibal continued, "Your spouse dated both of you, isn't that right? How interesting, that the one who knows you best found so much to like in him, too. Would you like to know how many glasses of Château d'Yquem I shared with the debonair Mr. Sloane before he undertook his first effort at transformation? How quickly he accepted that the only path was the one going forward?"
"I would like to know," she said, deliberately, "what you intended when you wrote me."
"What did you intend when you wrote back? What else, but the exchange of ideas between minds that understand one another." He took a step closer. "You do not need to feel guilt, Daria. Not even over the fact that you do not feel guilt."
She lifted her glass. "Success to crime." Daria held Hannibal's gaze and, not hurriedly, drank the remainder of her wine. She took a half-step closer and dropped her voice to a low volume. In the stillness of the church, nothing competed with it. "I believe I do understand, Hannibal."
He waited without moving.
She said, "Kitchen Nightmares was my idea."
Hannibal's right eyebrow went up.
"Don't you get it?" Daria asked. "I'm the girl of your dreams, Hannibal." She stepped back, not breaking eye contact. "I am the version of Daria you want to see. The person you molded, the one you fed on blood sausage and amanitas until she became a creature like yourself. I consume. And now I am the voice in your head that you are too lonely to live without, too in love with yourself to cut loose. Bury me in the catacombs, and you will find that the walls are memories, like me, and they will move as I do."
The empty glass vanished from her hand.
"What I am, you will also be."
The lights in the church dimmed. A beat began to fill the air, like music overheard from next door, but in every direction. And then Masaccio was feather-touched by skittering touches of illumination, the reflections from a spinning disco ball.
And Daria began to dance. At first, just the hand and foot motions of a person humming to a tune while gathering the parts of a weeknight dinner. Then, with syncopations of increasing amplitude, like one who has been on hormones just long enough to feel ease and fluidity in their body for the first time. Escalating through her shoulders, her hips, snaps of her fingers and sashays of her booted feet. Out into the nave of Santa Maria Novella, through galactic streams of light, and she sang along with the music. "I'm flyin', flyin', flyin' over you-ooo..."
* * *
"I started the pizza oven heating up," Jey said.
"Thanks." Daria stepped out into their garage carrying a cloth grocery bag over one shoulder and a dough-laden pizza peel with her hands. "In re toppings, the grocery store didn't have the small jars of jalapeños, so they substituted a large jar."
Jey was moving tools from his workbench back up to the pegboard. "I think we can cope."
"Will you be ready to make the salad?"
"I need to move some stuff in from the front yard and then go wash up. Will just be a bit."
Daria nodded. She began setting out ingredients upon the folding deal table.
"Hey," Jey said. "It's almost Meredith's birthday. Her mom and dad were thinking that, since we're getting pretty good with the oven now, we could make a pizza for her."
"Contactless drop-off on their porch? Sure. Refresh my memory: She's the one who actually likes broccoli, right?"
"Got hooked on Chinese take-out," Jey affirmed.
"Sounds like fun... Let's see, we've got the greens, sliced kalamata olives, croutons, feta... Ah, damn. I left the pickled red onions upstairs."
Jey tried to hold back a quip and then gave into it. "Go. Onion! I need to collect my tools." He waved her back towards the house.
"What the Hell... You've been online again, haven't you? All these years, and I always thought you were the cool one of us."
"Yeah, but I'm also a sex nerd, so it evens out, doesn't it?"
"Mmmm."
With a sideways grin, Jey scurried off. In the ingredient bag, Daria found the deli tub of tomato sauce and another of shredded mozzarella.
The villains, she thought, love to tell the heroes that they're just alike. That the world needs the bad people to make the decisions that good people can't. Belloq tells Indiana Jones that it would only take a nudge to make you into me... and Indy offers to introduce him to God, then goes on to kill a lot of Nazis. Section 31 preaches that Starfleet needs them to protect those made soft by paradise, but Kirk and Picard and Miles O'Brien will make the hard choices because they must. The Doctor knows hate and fear and pain and nightmares, but after the nightmares they will never wake up a Dalek.
The textbook chapter on Justinian's reign was wrapped up. Frederick Chilton had written to say that Hannibal Lecter was now sleeping badly.
Daria smiled. "Good day," she said.