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ARTHUR NERSESIAN is the author of fourteen books, including the cult-classic national bestseller The Fuck-Up (more than 100,000 copies sold), Suicide Casanova, Manhattan Loverboy, East Village Tetralogy, and Mesopotamia. He is a native New Yorker who runs a writing workshop in the East Village and can be reached on Facebook. His latest work is The Five Books of (Robert) Moses.

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MESOPOTAMIA

By Arthur Nersesian

Akashic Books

Copyright © 2010 Arthur Nersesian
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936070-08-4

Chapter One

... those were all the suicides that I could remember, all sad males (as I envisioned in tabloid headlines—an occupational hazard of working in this business). Women tend to be more passive in their self-annihilation. Accidental overdoses gradually slowing down their broken little hearts. Repeatedly peeking into ovens, à la Sylvia Plath, where the gas delicately overwhelms the oxygen and their last thoughts are regretting not using a better oven cleaner. Stressful jobs, loveless marriages, bad food—most people kill themselves slowly every day.

When I got fired from my marriage and divorced from my job, I found myself getting drunk and passing out too early. Then I'd wake up around two in the morning with only the unbearable emptiness of my miserable failure to keep me company. That was when I started with the sleeping pills.

None of this had anything to do with the seemingly happy, successful life of one Thucydides Scrubbs. His comely young wife Missy was probably too dumb to kill herself. At thirty-eight years old the African American tax attorney probably slept as soundly as the dead. At least he slept well until that fateful day in July 2005 when he returned to his posh two-million-dollar estate outside of Memphis, Tennessee, to find his allegedly pregnant, white teenage bride, Missy Scrubbs, missing. Four days after her disappearance, her mother notified the police. When they asked Thucydides why he didn't call them, he replied that he simply thought she was visiting some friends upstate. Apparently she was from some podunk town between Memphis and Nashville, and this was where I started paying attention as I was raised in that very same area.

When the police examined Thucydides's bank records, they discovered that a million dollars had been withdrawn from his account a few days before she vanished. He had no explanation and was an automatic suspect.

When they learned from the neighbors that Thucydides and his wife had been fighting on a regular basis, the police considered he might have used that money to hire a hit man. But a murder didn't cost nearly that much. Some hypothesized that it might be a kidnapping. If that was the case, then Thucydides had probably been warned that if he involved the police, little Missy would be executed.

They interrogated Scrubbs at length. First alone, then with his nerdy counsel. When a local reporter broke the story that Scrubbs had been cheating on Missy with an even hotter, dumber blonde who worked on Beale Street, the gossip hit a fever pitch.

The titillating detail that tipped the story into the circus tent of tabloid land was something Missy's middle-trash mother had done ten years earlier. She had entered little Missy into every children's beauty pageant from Texarkana, Texas, to Biloxi, Mississippi. As fate would have it, she looked uncannily like Jon- Benét Ramsey. That, along with the fact that Scrubbs looked vaguely like a short, stocky O.J. Simpson, didn't help. Aspects of these two highly publicized cases with poorly resolved endings were natural fodder for the always hungry 'bloids.

Within a matter of weeks, as the case cauliflowered into this year's most sensational crime investigation, a quiet suburb in Memphis became the newest journalistic Mecca. People weren't sure whether this was a case of a runaway bride, or another Laci Peterson story, or, best of all, an old-fashioned kidnapping. It all came down to one question: where the hell was Missy Scrubbs?

Ninety-nine percent of my supermarket stories dealt with high-profile hookups of Tomkat, Bennifer (as in J-Lo), Bennifer II (as in Garner), and Brangelina—moronic celebrity romances. Eventually they all turned into marri-vorces. Last year I had reason to suspect my husband was cheating on me, but I pretended not to know. Soon he would only show up for a change of clothes. I tried to get out of the house on tabloid assignments, but before long I had taken to drinking on the job and was given a pink slip. Since my husband actually owned our classic eight apartment at the Ansonia—and I didn't want a divorce lawyer telling me to move—I took the initiative, locating a barely affordable studio in Hell's Kitchen. And there I slept; spring turned into summer ... By early August I was deep in debt, and unless I wanted to continue my hibernation in some ATM bank card cave, I had to get out of bed.

One day shortly after the move, when my answering machine clicked on, I groggily heard the faint voice of A. Paul O'Hurly, my soon-to-be-ex-husband, asking how I was. I ignored it. Some time later, I was awoken by another click of some reporter I knew in Washington quickly saying that she wished she could help with my pet project, an article about the Homeland Security reorganization. She said if I wanted to write it for some distant blog she knew ... blah ... blah ... blah ... I was holding out for print. I retreated deeper into the black sludge of sleep. It took a third louder, longer phone message to batter through the three tablets of Ambien and two Valium I had taken ten hours earlier.

"Miss Bloomgarten, this is Jericho Riggs, editor of the Rocket. You were recommended by Mr. Benoit to cover the Thucydides Scrubbs saga. He said you know the area and the reporter who I hired has turned up AWOL."

I snatched up the phone to learn that some naïve young editor was accidentally giving me a small break. The National Enquirer, the Star, Weekly World News—after burning my bridges at each of those fine institutions, I thought I was done with tabloid news (or vice versa). Now, thanks to my old friend Gustavo Benoit, I was being offered a freelance gig with a kill fee.

For me this job could potentially kill three annoying birds with one small stone: Aside from its therapeutic effects on my slowly smothering depression, the job could also earn me some desperately needed cash. More importantly, though, it would put me near to my deservedly neglected mama from Mesopotamia, Tennessee. I was going to drive from one land between the rivers to another in hope of borrowing yet more money.

I cleared my throat so that Jerry Riggs wouldn't sense I was severely hungover and had been sleeping for ten hours, and said, "Great."

"They just indicted Scrubbs, so I need you to go down there and dredge up anything related to the case." He wanted a small but steady news feed so he could put large colorful photos over them and sensational headlines above that. Riggs said that Gustavo was already down there if I needed help, and that he was expecting my first clump of words by tomorrow. Click.

I was once a real reporter. Even though I was no longer on any masthead—perhaps out of habit—I was still pushing and checking in on stories that I felt needed to be out there.

Last December, Gustavo Benoit invited me to a Washington "insider Christmas party" where I quickly got waylaid by some old bore named Silas who confused my ear with a spittoon. As he jabbered on and on, I searched for an escape route, but even Gustavo, who had brought me there, had vanished.

Though Silas's speech was slurred and too filled with facts and figures to be very engrossing, I slowly realized that the man was actually sitting on an important story. He had been prematurely retired from FEMA where he had worked for years as a meteorologist. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had just been absorbed into the...