The Marigold

The MarigoldAndrew F. Sullivan ContentsPraise for The MarigoldDedicationEpigraph1.2.3.Suite 6054.5.6.Suite 12127.8.Suite 8069.10.11.Suite 30712.13.14.Suite 400415.16.17.18.Suite 300319.20.21.Suite 280922.23.24.Suite 171025.Penthouse B26.27.28.29.30.Suite 1301AcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright Praise for The Marigold“The Marigold is a tremendous book, a damning indictment of the greed that drives the suicidal hostility we display toward our own environment, and an exhilarating dive into the weird new realities that brings. Juggling multiple viewpoints and always keeping one foot on the gas, Andrew F. Sullivan has written a vicious, delightfully bizarre ecological horror story. This one’s going to live with me for a while.”— Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters, Wounds, and The Strange“In this keen and surprising work of eco-horror, Andrew F. Sullivan feeds his inventive terrors on the dark fruits of our contemporary precarity: the inequities of the gig economy, the bloated cost of urban housing, the uncanniness of climate change. The Marigold is a fast-paced thrill ride, populated by sharply written characters you won’t soon forget.”— Matt Bell, author of Appleseed“Andrew F. Sullivan’s The Marigold grows a terribly plausible urban future from the capitalist wreckage of the modern ‘world class’ city and drowns it in a tide of Boschian chaos that folds apocalypses of body horror, techno-fascism, economic, and climate collapse into one roiling, angry wave that’ll sweep you away with its narrative force.”— Indrapramit Das, author of The Devourers“Andrew F. Sullivan’s books delve into dark territories other writers are too timid to explore, finding nuance and emotional resonance in that stony soil. The Marigold has all the hallmarks of his past work while being something all its own, daunting and daring and just a little scary.”— Craig Davidson, bestselling author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club and Precious Cargo“Andrew F. Sullivan’s The Marigold is a Cronenbergian Bonfire of the Vanities, a scalpel-sharp near-future thriller about an all-consuming city in thrall to greed and power, and the disparate creatures, human and otherwise, caught in its draintrap. Sullivan brings a pulsing urgency to his prose, a mordant wit to his unsettling extrapolations from our current technological, social, and economic plagues, and an epic sweep to his depiction of the age-old struggles between the ruling class, the arrivistes, and those who serve and defy them. A DedicationFor Amy Epigraph“No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.”— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities“Everything is fine.”— Former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford 1.Before everything that happened, before the towers, before the site plans, before the deeds, before the failing sports bar and two-bedroom apartment above it that often operated like another, more financially successful, unlicensed sports bar until the police shut it down after that one Polish kid got strangled with a pair of pink stockings behind the abandoned Shoppers Drug Mart a block or two south, there were trees here. Now there was only a hole. A crane perched on the edge, its lights barely illuminating the dirt below. The stooped shape of a man clambered down the sloped side of the pit, dragging a heavy burden over the frozen mud. A short shadow rippled across the dirt as he descended like a lazy bird of prey. The gardener’s feet knew the way. His breath emerged in tiny clouds. No wind reached down this far, but the cold stitched itself into everything it touched. Far above the pit, towers scratched at the light-polluted sky. Most had undergone the ritual, paid their dues, if not to the gardener than to someone else with their own take on his faltering, archaic craft. With spring, the hole would come to life again, thrumming with sweaty bodies and hungry machines, but before that happened, it had to be seeded. An aged protection spell practised since the bad old days. This was what the gardener was paid to do down here; a pile of bills in an Easton hockey bag waited for him in a vacant condo across the street. Fives, tens, twenties all mixed together. The money didn’t exist outside that hockey bag. It floated in its own reality. The gardener unrolled the tarp, let its wet contents tumble down into the low trench at the very edge of the pit. Seventeen or eighteen, the gardener didn’t know. Male this time. It didn’t matter. Its clothes