The Didion Key

"Forget it Jake, it's Literature."

1. The Client

I didn’t want this case. From the moment his grim bodyguard opened the door and the client strode into my office I knew it was trouble. The guy strongly resembled a boiled potato in a dark Armani suit. He’s a famous tech magnate, but to preserve confidentiality I’ll call him “Mr. X.” 

Mr. X sat across from my desk, glanced around the shabby workspace, and sniffed. “Like the place?” I asked. “My decorator picked out the color – Ashtray Lung.” Not even the bodyguard smiled.  

The Boiled Potato spoke up. “This is my situation, Mr Slade. I'm a successful man, a titan some say, who’s built extraordinary rockets and electric cars, but when I tweet my opinions, I get no respect. The media elites accuse me of “juvenile sarcasm,” and say that I'm only capable of tweeting “fart jokes and frat-bro obscenities.” 

He frowned, and waited for me to do the same in sympathy. I declined; I knew his reputation, and that most of his tweets were nasty insults directed at his sundry enemies, plus the typical ubermensch boasts about his rocket size etc.

He eventually continued. “I'm the richest man in the world, so I deserve to have the best-written tweets in the world, and you're going to help make that happen Mr. Slade. I want you to get me the Didion Key.”

I whistled softly. 

“Oh yes. My team did the research – they tell me that this Joan Didion woman has the sharpest wit, that her essays are elegant, and have all that…” He couldn’t find the word – “you know, that tone, more high-class than sarcasm…”

“You mean irony,” I said. 

“Exactly.”

He had the jitters now, one knee flickering up & down, due to excitement and ketamine. “When I rage-tweet at 3am I want to sound ultra-profound and cool. So I’m creating a private AI Bot to generate the smartest, wittiest tweets in history. And to program that bot I require a pure literary extract – the unique style of Joan Didion.”

He sat back in the chair.

“Plus I heard that Didion loves John Wayne and is a libertarian – she’s an ideal match for me. That’s why I need to get my hands on the Key. And I want to hire you to get it.” 

He raised his hand gently. “Before you decide, I’ll mention that yesterday I bought this ratfuck building, and your apartment complex also. Just to give you some more incentive.” He smiled like he’d witnessed a particularly splendid helicopter crash. 

I couldn’t risk eviction; I didn’t fancy the prospect of my ginger cat and me having to live in a tent by the river. So I reluctantly accepted my new landlord as a client.

“All right. But you may not like what I find. I can be hired, Mr. X, but I can’t be bought.” He nodded, and rose to shake my hand. “Excellent. I expect that a month from now my tweets will be getting five-star reviews from The New York Times.”

Before he stepped out of the office he said “Remember Slade, get me that Didion irony shit – the good stuff.”

2. The Hunt

I headed to a speakeasy bookstore I knew, where they serve gin & tonic along with the volumes of Proust. They’d have the scoop on this Didion dame. I introduced myself to the woman who ran the establishment. “I'm Jake Slade, private investigator. I’m wondering if you could help me out with an urgent literary situation.” 

The owner was very helpful and filled me in. Seems that as a college student Joan Didion won an essay contest in ‘56, sponsored by Vogue magazine, for a free trip to Paris; she turned down the Paris prize, and asked for a job at the mag instead. Even as a young woman, Didion knew what she wanted. Unlike the women she later described from San Bernadino Valley:

“...the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school.” 

Ouch. She had a sharp pen from the very beginning.

Didion left Vogue and covered her first murder trial, and while there wondered:

“...what should drive such a woman to sit on a street called Bella Vista and look out her new picture window into the empty California sun and calculate how to burn her husband alive in a Volkswagen.”

A travel essay about her family’s Hawaiian vacation begins this way:

“My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby’s hair… We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce… He refrains from noticing when I am staring at nothing, and I in turn refrain from dwelling at length upon a newspaper story about a couple who apparently threw their infant and then themselves into the boiling crater of a live volcano on Maui. We also refrain from mentioning any kicked-down doors, hospitalized psychotics, any chronic anxieties or packed suitcases.”

Didion focused on political reporting in the Eighties, with a skeptical eye. When Vice-President George Bush visited Jordan in ‘86, Didion suspected it was less a serious Mideast diplomatic mission than a silly photo opportunity. She noted that the VP’s advance team had sent a precise demand memo to the Jordanian authorities: 

“They had also asked, possibly the most arresting detail, that, at every stop on the itinerary, camels be present.” 

Photo by Hannah Troupe, from Unsplash

The bookstore owner gave me another contact, a down-on-his-luck editor, who I met discreetly in a hotel lounge. He gave me a good tip. “Look at her essay The White Album. Follow the fear – if Didion’s scared of something, she’ll find a way to write about it.”

In the ‘60s Didion had met actress Sharon Tate at a dinner party. To pursue a story, Didion visited prison in 1970 to interview Linda Kasabian, a member of the Manson Family cult that had murdered Tate. As a favor, inmate Kasabian asked Didion to shop for her. So Didion went to a boutique in Beverly Hills and 

“picked out, at Linda Kasabian’s request, the dress in which she began her testimony about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. “Size 9 Petite,” her instructions read. “Mini but not extremely mini. In velvet if possible. Emerald green or gold.”

If buying a nice dress for the murderer of your dinner guest isn’t ironic, I don’t know what is. 

After a week I knew I was on the right trail when a gang of Columbia MFA students ambushed me in an alley and sapped me cold.

I woke up, groggy, on a fancy burgundy sofa in the backroom of an antiques store. A scraggly-bearded gent in a tweed vest and trousers greeted me. He handed over a small jewelry-box. The box glowed neon-red from its contents. 

“Give this to your client. No, don’t open it. This may not be quite what he expected.” “The Didion Key?” I asked. He nodded. Then the old mook sighed and his shoulders relaxed, as though he’d just been relieved of a terrible burden. 

3. The Key

I gathered all my case notes and sent them by courier, with the Key, to the address that Mr. X had specified. Three days later, he called and asked to meet again. A sleek new driver-less taxi arrived to pick me up. The windows were blacked-out so I couldn’t see where it was taking me.

When I exited the vehicle, I’d arrived in what seemed to be a vast underground bunker. Disassembled spacecraft components littered the chamber. One of his aides led me to a conference room where Mr. X and a half-dozen staff waited. The Boiled Potato was not happy. 

“We’ve already programmed six AI Bots using the Didion Key. Each time, within an hour the AI software crashes. One of them managed just a single tweet – “It’s all a meaningless abyss!” – before shutting down its own power supply. Your freakin’ Didion Key is creating suicidal bots!”

He glared at me, and continued. 

“I looked at some of the Didion essays in the file you sent. I started with her article on the hippie movement in San Francisco, expecting to find “groovy peace & love” stuff. But instead I read this:

“...when we get there I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick. “Five years old,” Otto says. “On acid… For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote.” 

…and this, at a commune in a warehouse:

“Sue Ann’s three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done. Michael burned his arm though, which is probably why Sue Ann was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord.” 

“I don’t want to read about the abuse and neglect of children! And what’s in this Salvador book?”

I explained – “She went to Central America to learn about the paramilitary death squads that the Reagan Administration was funding:

 “Body dumps are seen in El Salvador as a kind of visitors’ must-do, difficult but worth the detour… usually it was necessary to go down to see bodies. The way down is hard. Slabs of stone, slippery with moss, are set into the vertiginous cliff, and it is down this cliff that one begins the descent to the bodies, or what is left of the bodies, pecked and maggoty masses of flesh, bone, hair.”

“Maggoty flesh – ugh! I thought she was a political conservative?”

“Well, she grew up in a Republican family, and voted for Goldwater, but over the years she drifted leftwards.” 

“This is all useless to me. I thought Didion was witty and funny?”

I gave my opinion. “She doesn’t write your “funny” Adam Sandler material. Her wit is saturated in dread. It seems to me that sometimes the things she writes about are so terrible, the lady has to use irony, and adopt a numbed detachment, to protect herself from the horror of it all. You know, this... Life.”

For a brief moment, I saw a flash of terror in his eyes. Then he threw an envelope stuffed with a couple wads of cash onto the table. “Take your fee, and just leave.”

As I walked out I heard him mutter to his aides: “This is why I have to get away to Mars as soon as possible.”

And me? I was going to head home, pour myself a nice stiff scotch, and finish reading my Jane Austen novel. 

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