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I Am Death
Two Novellas
Gary Amdahl

May 2008
Trade Paper
$15.00 US ($19.50 CAN)
978-1-57131-071-2 | 9781571310712
1-57131-071-1 | 1571310711
216 pp
56 per carton
Fiction/Literature
FICTION
Literary
Spring 2008
Imprint Rights: USC
Title Rights: USC
Product Safety: Mfgr warrants no warnings apply

Published by Milkweed Editions

Description:
In “I Am Death: Bartleby the Mobster,” muckraking journalist Jack finds himself increasingly over the edge when he agrees to ghostwrite the autobiography of a Chicago mob boss. In “Peasants,” publishing employee Walter Rasmussen discovers he’s the victim of sabotage by his coworkers — or is he? As in his stunning debut, Visigoth, Gary Amdahl here isolates his characters in crisis and flux, drawing out their deepest fears. With its vivid wordplay and blend of black humor and pathos, I Am Death demonstrates that Amdahl is a most adept and honest guide into the modern psyche of the American male.

Excerpt:
from Peasants
1.
When Walter Rasmussen became so ill that he could no longer ignore it, and believed he was going to die, he wanted to go home. He did not want to see his doctor, a man younger than himself improbably named Nutter who was as stern and clean-living as could be easily imagined and who would certainly ask questions about an above-average consumption of alcohol and troubled personal relationships that would be loaded with disappointment and disapproval if Rasmussen dared to defend himself. So he ruled traditional medicine out. He would not even get the blood work looked at. He would simply quit his job. If he was gravely ill, quitting his job would seem almost the only thing to do. Dying and broke, he would have no recourse but to go home. And yet it was possible he was not dying, he had to admit that, and admit as well that once it became clear he would have to go on living for some time, he would have to find another job—which would not be easy, as hundreds of thousands of workers across the country were just then being laid off, businesses were declaring bankruptcy, pension funds were being wiped out, the stock market tumbling, gas prices blowing through the roof of the economy and forming mushroom clouds…. He had a good job with a privately held company that was performing anomalously well, even perhaps perversely, growing steadily, hiring, hiring, promoting, giving raises, maybe not great raises, but raises nevertheless, and adding—not subtracting—millions to the 401Ks, expanding its business around the world and building new offices at home as quickly as the triggers of a hundred power nailers could be pulled. Rasmussen was one of a select group of recipients, no more than two thousand, of this commercial wellness. He had in every way that could be enumerated and weighed a good job. And yet it was a cesspool, from which he felt he was crawling for his life.
Of course, it had, as the Buddhists are quick to point out, not always been so.

Kyle Boatman was Rasmussen’s immediate superior. Born and raised in Perth, a boom town on the west coast of Australia that had staggered when the boom was announced to be over, then fallen flat even as the last echoes faded into the desert outback, he had quickly become an American cowboy in his managerial style, combining the easy-going friendliness that was central to his character with a fast and loose entrepreneurialism that was proving decisive where his ambition was concerned. After just a year on the phone in Customer Service, he’d come up with a marketing idea that had caught the owner’s eye: a series of books, lightly written, heavily produced, called How to Succeed in Geographic Information Systems Without Really Trying. Of course the “without really trying” part was ultimately rejected, but Boatman knew his boss liked musicals, and the lightheartedness of his presentation had been, he was later told, amusingly persuasive. Almost single-handedly he published the first book, X Marks the Spot: GIS and Profit Maps, then stood back and let the adulation wash over him: not only were the sales reps claiming they were clinching deals with the good-looking little books, they were actually selling them in bookstores. Boatman assembled a small team, came to terms with a canny small-press trade distributor, and put out half a dozen titles. When those titles exceeded expectations too, he was cleared to expand his team. He looked assiduously for independent thinkers, for creative people—and found them, roses all, proud of their thorns, a team that was looked upon with dismissive envy by the more traditionally organized, steeply hierarchical, and conservative groups around the company. Half of the team were men in their forties, half women in their twenties; the men affected comic avuncularity and discussed the women with secret, rueful admiration, to which the women responded with either frank but still somehow comic shows of disgust, or by showing off the straps of their underpants as they stretched about their offices and struck automobile-presenter poses around their computers. Or rather, by both. Sometimes the messages were confusingly, dangerously mixed, and sometimes the men found themselves embarrassed by latent alpha male tendencies they’d discovered in themselves.
“I darn’t like to ply by the rules,” Boatman had remarked with real seriousness and a strong Australian accent in the wake of a tour of the campus the company’s founder and president had made and during which the team had been singled out for praise. “Whe’s the fun in that? Ah like to do what’s right, but Ah darnn’t think Ah’m doing my job unless Ah’m reeskin’ it.” It went without saying that everybody on the team felt that way, too, and risked their jobs in their own unique ways. The workday was generally a satisfying and sometimes exciting one, as the unstable but powerful forces of sexuality were held in an uncertain but somehow orchestral equipoise mainly by the understanding that the best way to show off was to do good work: manipulate a skill over long hours, steer a project through stormy waters, come up with a brilliant idea or uphold a principle being neglected out of convenience, eat properly and get more exercise than was perhaps strictly speaking needed. Rasmussen dyed his eyebrows. He’d heard often enough that he was handsome for it to lurk as a definite possibility in the back of his mind, but his eyebrows were so pale as to be invisible. So he had his stylist darken them a shade or two.
A Golden Age ensued and lasted perhaps six or nine months. Then their society deteriorated and became corrupt. Two deep-minded and mysterious Russian men, big-picture theoreticians and analysts of almost meaninglessly obscure data, were based in another team but often found themselves on Boatman’s turf, sometimes working up totally incomprehensible, even mad, book proposals or supplying completely inutile expertise, sometimes playing chess with one of Boatman’s guys, Edward Cage, a poet and ethicist. Stukolka, the younger, had been one of the first to arrive at Chernobyl after the disaster, and Golubchek had been deported as a child during WWII to Kazakhstan. Their presence sometimes made the office seem like something out of 19th century Czarist bureaucracy, a militarized civil service organized by rank, and encouraged Rasmussen to imagine himself as a doctor in a Russian novel. That is to say, dashing, principled, doomed. This is not intellectual work, he vaguely recalled a character in a Chekhov story saying with disgust, this is not honest work, hard manual labor is more honorable. Three of the other men had worked for one of the region’s bigger newspapers, and their presence lent an air of uncompromising, even ruthless, legitimacy to whatever happened to be going on. They spent a lot of time on the phone talking wholesale sense to people who needed to get a grip, and talked to each other for hours about the terrifying—not just terrible—consequences at the newspaper once the family who’d owned it had sold out to an international conglomerate. They winked at each other and at Rasmussen and whispered about how easy it was now, to make their evanescent duties seem crucial, and to appease Boatman with shows of mock-industriousness whenever doubt, anxiety, a weakening of self-confidence, or an obscurely guilty conscience gave the Boy Wonder pause, and brought on a round of meetings, or house-cleaning, or requests for status reports, or the invocation, alternately solemn and sarcastic, of the name of the founder, who wanted something special done quickly.
One such suddenly exceptional project came about in response to an invitation to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be hosted by the United Nat

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