What it was, at Chuff’s autopsy, the coroner returned a verdict that the cause of death was Brandon having ‘stopped’. The sum force of the eyebrows raised by this would have lifted a single eyebrow to the moon. When David Moskowitz had hesitantly brought the matter up and listed his concerns, the silver-haired and winningly paternal medical official – who was, by some three years, Moskowitz’s junior – had smiled and rested one hand on the publisher’s coat-hanger shoulder.

  ‘Well, son, let me put it like this. Was there ever something that you kept around the house and never paid much mind to? Could be it was an appliance, or maybe a pet?’

  Moskowitz had just nodded, marvelling at the immediate rapport established by the twinkling and genial mortal adjudicator. Why, he had owned an appliance once. The coroner continued.

  ‘Now, I’m guessing that pet or appliance, time to time, you’re gonna get some manner of malfunction, like smoke coming out, or it chews up your VHS tapes, or keeps bringing in dead birds from out the garden. Something where you know that it ain’t working right, see what I’m saying?’

  Moskowitz was mesmerised. He’d never met a New York coroner who talked like this before.

  ‘When you got something like that happening, it’s only natural you’re gonna want to take the item into a repair shop – or a veterinarian, as it may be – and get it fixed, ain’t that the way it is? Now, you can do that once, or maybe twice, but son, there comes a day when it don’t matter what you do, you know that it’s not gonna toast your muffins or chase after a delivery truck ever again. It’s stopped. Maybe you don’t know why it’s stopped, but then after a while, you get to thinking that knowing the reason why it stopped ain’t gonna get it started up again, looks like it’s going to the dump one way or other, and it ain’t like you can’t get another one, most likely off the internet. I guess that what I’m trying to say is, it can sometimes be like that with people, too. We gave your friend a full examination, and in our opinion, there were no two ways about it. He’d just stopped.’

  It all sounded convincing, although there were those who couldn’t help but feel that Brandon Chuff’s was still some way short of the gold standard in death certificates.

  Despite their barely incremental progress, Dan and Worsley had reluctantly arrived, by this point, at the place where Chuff had lived, back when he was still doing that. It was a plain, two-storey building that had the apartment on its upper floor, above a recently closed outlet selling diving gear and trading under the name ‘Scuba-Do’. Through the dust-cataracted windows downstairs they could see the laminated wraps still covering the walls of the stripped-bare interior, high-resolution seabed vistas where Paul Klee fish mobbed the intricately pitted Max Ernst corals, against peacock tones of perfect blue and green. Wheems briefly wondered if such close proximity to Scuba-Do had fuelled Chuff’s scorn for Mr Ocean, then decided that he didn’t have sufficient interest in either party to pursue the thought. He gazed into the photographic fathoms wherein gorgeous jellyfish and gum-pink octopi cavorted diffidently, sighed, and fumbled in his jacket pocket for the keys.

  He’d never been allowed inside before. Back when Dan had been writing for American before his final interchange with Hector Bass, he’d sometimes walk from his place round to Brandon’s in the morning so that he could get a ride to work. On these occasions, he’d seen the exterior – the place downstairs was then a Navy Surplus store; another maritime establishment, Wheems thought inconsequentially – but he had never been invited in. Harbouring now a sense of trespass, both excited and faintly disturbed, he twisted open the stiff lock to find the street door led on to a narrow stairway that ascended to Brandon’s apartment proper. Even when Dan had located the switch just inside the door, the flight was only dimly lit and had a yellowing flypaper ambience. Turning from the twilight portal to his waiting colleague, he said, ‘Fal we?’ Porlock gave this his consideration for a moment, then said, ‘What?’

  With Wheems in front and Porlock bringing up the rear, the pair laboriously mounted creaking wooden steps into a xanthic gloaming. Halfway up, face down with cover splayed like some crashed bird, a pornographic magazine called Indistinct Teen Facials hung half off the seventh stair and flapped dispiritedly, near to death. Beneath a title font that had the children’s-menu look of Comic Sans, a half-dressed cheerleader in possibly her fourth or fifth decade lowered her eyes in an attempt to see the matt black rectangle dependant from her philtrum. Dan stared numbly at the fallen masturbation prompt. He thought to venture an urbane remark to Worsley, but decided that it had too many sibilants and pressed on up the stairs instead.

  They reached a temporary impasse at the top when they found that the door to Chuff’s apartment was almost impossible to open. First assuming that it must be locked, Wheems tried the other spare keys that his dead acquaintance had bequeathed to him, before discovering that the door was merely jammed shut by some unknown object that had evidently toppled over on its further side. With difficulty in the slim-fit stairway, both comics professionals applied their weight and struggled until the unseen obstruction grudgingly began to move, crinkling and rustling as it did so.

  Worsley Porlock was the first one in.

  Chuff’s hallway, in those first disorienting instants, was as Worsley had imagined the experience of either death or ayahuasca. All the laws of common sense and visual perspective from which human beings construe their reality were dashed aside like straws, revealing in a stark, apocalyptic moment the unnerving alien principles on which their universe was truly predicated.

  There was no floor. Porlock waded crotch-deep in a static sea, choppy and rough but weirdly motionless, a riptide stricken by paralysis. Freeze-frame wavelets and whitecaps everywhere, and curling breakers poised as if to fall. There were abysmal troughs, and rising slopes that made one doubt the verticals and horizontals of the walls and ceiling, so that Worsley lost his balance for a second, staggering and startled in an endless maelstrom made of only paper, swirling and bone-dry. With none of the anticipated difficulty, he’d found Brandon Chuff’s collection, and it wasn’t comics.

  It was forty years as measured out in bothersome erections, practically a lifetime of erogenous compulsion. Towering cliff-faces of pictorial erotica reared all about, landslides of smut in raucous colour or in sentimental monochrome, a rusty-stapled archive cataloguing masculine desire in the last days of an industrial era. Cleavage engineering. Garter belts that echoed the suspension bridge. Sculpted pudenda, waxed and polished like the hood of a Volkswagen. There, also, was a history of improvement in photography and printing, along with a lesson in the evolution of sensationalist calligraphy, titles that stirred three lonely generations: Saucy. Frill. Bordello. Fisting Manicurists. Vaginado. Lesbian Insolvency? – with an incorporated question mark, as if astonished by its own existence. Worsley realised he was hyperventilating as Dan Wheems bulged through the crack of open door behind him and said, ‘Vefuff!’ To which Worsley could not shape an adequate reply.

  Bulky as astronauts, the two men gaped in silent awe at the subsiding porn-dunes of their new, predominantly pinkish planet, with its atmosphere all but unbreathable. Because of this, wisely inhaling via the mouth and not the nostrils, the pair’s respiration had a pausing and metallic quality, as through a space helmet or iron lung. Despite remaindered daylight filtering through distant windows, a prevailing source for the pearl radiance that flooded this extraterrestrial expanse was the reflected glow of several thousand pallid moons, some cleft and some with nipples. Everywhere, embarrassed-looking women, dot-screen grey or colourised, contorted seemingly disjointed limbs into new constellations strewn across the crumpled firmament, the Rowing Machine, the Obliging Starfish.

  Any task of caretaking the pair may have intended was transparently a hopeless one. All that was possible was a horrific trawl for souvenirs; reminders of the normal life that Brandon must have somehow had between the bouts of jerking off. Shivering, Porlock summoned his inch-deep reserves of willpower and attempted to get this deranging expedition under some sort of control.

  ‘OK. OK, we got this. Let’s just keep calm. We can cover more ground if you take the front of the apartment while I take the back.’

  ‘Furely, Worfely, fplipping up if a mifpake. Im fcary mooveef fumfing allwaif happenf poo vuh perfon ferfing im vuh fellar …’

  ‘DAN, SHUT UP! SHUT UP, DAN! I CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU! I CAN’T UNDERSTAND A WORD YOU’RE SAYING! JUST … I’m sorry. Sorry, man. We’re both under a lot of strain. Look, let’s get this thing done, OK? OK, Dan?’

  Always shocked by confrontation, Dan Wheems managed a tight nod and some staccato blinks before he turned away from Worsley to regard his designated end of their demoralising mutual problem. To be fair, Wheems was encountering a lot more strain from this absurd predicament than Worsley Porlock could have easily imagined. The new editor-in-chief, in common with his predecessor, was not unfamiliar with the wide and diverse pastures of contemporary stroke-material. Dan, on the other hand, had been caught by his mother in possession of a ballpoint pen whereon the lady’s swimsuit vanished if you held it upside down, and ever since had left hardcore pornography alone. With first wife Susan, in the eighteen months that they were married, he had enjoyed intermittent but unfailingly polite carnal activity when this was what the situation seemed to call for. Otherwise, Dan’s intimate imaginings for purposes of hand relief would typically involve two or more female members of the Unrealistic Five, Tomorrow Friends, Vindictives, Freak Force or United Supermen, and once or twice Esme Martinez. These internal vignettes were entirely voyeuristic, as Dan Wheems was too self-conscious to show up in his own sexual fantasies. Surrounded now by a Niagara, a Zambesi, of inverted women with their bathing costumes disappeared, he felt lost and obscurely threatened to his fragile core. What if, in some SP Sarcophagus of Murder twist, his fifteen-years-dead mother were to burst in now and catch him? Stifling an interior shriek, Wheems plunged into the glistening torrent and made for what he believed to be Brandon’s front room, with girls working their way through college and moonlighting typists slopping cold against his leaden thighs.

  Porlock, meanwhile, struggled through a salacious quicksand, striking out for the apartment’s rear. Although more … hardened wasn’t quite the word; perhaps resilient? … in his attitude towards spank literature than Wheems, Worsley was by no means unmoved to find himself aboard a fishnet ghost train. Just the stupefying quantities involved in Brandon’s hobby made him dizzy, the immense expenditure in human time, the man hours or, more likely, man years that would be required to even briefly skim these avalanching genitalia, this mammary inundation. Chuff’s enthusiasm and its decades-spanning sweep, as represented by the differing vintages of filth discernible in the surrounding foam of periodicals, was haunting. Launching himself on the literal bosoms of the flood, fighting against the shiny paper current to move slowly forward, Worsley couldn’t help but notice titles he remembered from his boyhood, interspersed with more recent examples of the genre. He saw Cad, Lothario, Rotter and Sex Pest, and felt briefly sad and elderly to think that he’d forgotten the winking philanderer on Rotter’s masthead. Labouring through an opposing tide of slippery centrefolds, he thought, as if for the first time, about the nymphs and matrons, of the 2D wantons currently tangling or torn around his ankles. Many of them would be old by now, he thought, and many of them would be dead. Why did that trouble him? He thought about the countless lives consumed, one way or other, by this knowingly addictive global industry, but stopped short of direct comparisons with Worsley’s own field of endeavour. He pushed on into the shaven undergrowth, teeth gritted, hopefully in the direction of Chuff’s bedroom.

  The exclamatory logos bobbing past, going the other way, were at that moment a gymnasium of verbs: Suck, Screw, Lick, Fondle, Grope and Punch, although this last turned out to be a soporific satire magazine from England. Worsley found his plight ironic, if he’d understood that word correctly. As a thirteen-year-old boy, to drown in scud had been his fondest hope, his unattainable ambition. Faced now with the almost unimaginable actuality, he saw, as with so many other things, the dangerous naivety of his youthful assumptions. To be physically interred in adult content like a fruit fly in licentious amber was, he now saw, not an unalloyed treat, as had also been the case with reaching legal drinking age or one day working in the comics industry.

  Proceeding in the manner of a glacier, the terminal moraine of phalluses and lipstick crumpling volubly before him, Worsley took some several minutes passing a jammed-open doorway on his right, which gave him more than enough time to thoroughly inspect the room beyond. This, it transpired, had been Brandon’s bathroom, and it was as deep in fuck books as the rest of the apartment – which implied that with sufficient volume, visual pornography behaved less like a solid than a liquid, finding its own level. Inching past the sex-crammed opening, he could at leisure study the deluge of technicolour lapping at the bathtub’s rim, broaching the toilet bowl. Fap. Squirt. Sophisticate. Incontinent Ballerina. Desperately clinging to the idea of a world with normal physics, Porlock nervously considered the unsettling question of how Chuff had ever moved about in his own living space, or had transacted the most basic human functions without help.

  It came to him, perhaps at the halfway point in his traverse of the bathroom door, that Brandon, of necessity, must have propelled himself on all fours over the uneven, listing surface of the swollen XXXX river, like a burly, quadrupedal water boatman. Too late to arrest the image or prevent it being etched with acid on his forebrain, Worsley realised that on at least some of these occasions, Chuff would have been naked. Conjured up unbidden, he recalled the classic scene from Ralph Roth and Paul Deeming’s Dracula, where the count scuttles head first down a castle wall as if he were a great, black lizard. Choking back bile, he pressed forward on his Krafft-Ebing safari. He felt like a frightened choirboy in the abattoir of love.

  After perhaps another quarter-hour, Porlock stood wheezing on the overflowing threshold of what was, from all appearances, his late superior’s bedchamber. Like – well, it seemed – pretty much everything in Brandon’s private life, it was submerged in a lake of high-definition squalor and greased Scandinavians. Incongruously, at the centre of the room, as visible to Worsley, was a beautifully worked four-poster bed like something from Hans Christian Anderson, if carpets of professionally lecherous ex-raincoat models had featured more prominently in his work. It even had an emerald counterpane, fresh-made and neatly smoothed, on which machine-embroidered floral silhouettes stood out, now black, now silver. From his previous envisioning of Brandon as undead Carpathian aristocrat, Worsley was wrenched abruptly to the folklore spectrum’s other end, where Chuff became a princess – albeit one who’d rather let herself go – sleeping innocent amidst a swamp of gruesome copulatory dreams. He couldn’t make his mind up as to which interpretation was the most upsetting.

  Other than the oddly picturesque sleep-howdah, the one other furnishing that looked even conceivably accessible was an old-fashioned dressing table, standing not too far from the four-poster’s footboard. Of the kind with four drawers and a threefold mirror, its three lower drawers were long since lost below the rising Plimsoll line of bi-curious acrobats, and thus not openable. If there was anything of Brandon’s that might justify this nightmare trek into a dead chief editor’s libido, it could only be in that top drawer, six feet across the buried room and maybe half an hour away.

  He nearly turned back. There was almost certainly nothing of interest tucked away there, and from what he’d learned of Brandon thus far, there might well be something scarring and traumatic. Worsley didn’t want to slog through what was, when you thought about it, thin-sliced timber, just to learn Chuff’s favourite flavour when it came to lubricant, or to find photographs of barnyard creatures in bikinis. Even so, to have come all this way, to have endured all this unpleasantness; he didn’t like the thought of making the demanding return journey without even checking. Maybe if he tried to look at this the way that Brandon would have done, to move the way that Brandon must have moved …

  Feeling a touch ridiculous, Porlock got down on hands and knees atop two or three feet of juddering shame. He thought he probably looked like some cute but pitiable creature in a wildly inappropriate petting zoo. Not only was this crawling posture terribly infantilising, but it also didn’t work nearly as well as he’d imagined. It was quicker than just wading through the mass of self-pollution pamphlets, to be sure, though much more nerve-wracking than he’d anticipated when he’d still been vertical. For one thing, the piled publications constituting his new terra weren’t particularly firma, lurching with his every movement like a plain of sphagnum moss, or Jell-O, or perhaps a funhouse floor. His palms, already hot and damp with August, clung repulsively to the expanse of glossy stock on which he grovelled, further limiting his progress and his self-esteem.

  He kneeled there, trying to figure out what he should do, his pose echoing that of at least two-thirds of the women he was kneeling on. This could not, after all, have been Chuff’s method of mobility. He must have had some other strategy; something that Worsley wasn’t seeing. Suddenly, his earlier observation – that pornography which had attained critical mass took on characteristics of a liquid – chimed again in his fevered awareness, as if offering a vital clue.

  Intuitively, hesitantly, Worsley lowered himself belly down on to the lustquake filling Brandon’s room, transitioning from doggy to a missionary style, and tried to swim.

  It worked astonishingly well. Adopting a beginner’s breaststroke, Porlock essayed a frog kick against the buckling, ripping pages he could feel behind, mangled against his intricately contoured trainer soles. At the same time, his hands plunged jointly forward before sweeping back to either side in scything, cover-rippling arcs that, unbelievably, drove his substantial body forward at considerable speed, his torso sliding easily over the slipping and subsiding gloss. Worsley was simultaneously startled and euphoric: when he’d been a little boy, this was the way he used to fly in dreams, wallowing in the air just a few feet above the dream-lit sidewalk. It was like he’d found his natural element at last, and as he swam across the crinkling, crackling reservoir of stale impulse, his were the graceful and enchanting motions of a lazing manatee.