Billy Bayer goes by many names but seems to have little invested in any of them. After killing his mother at 17 and doing a brief stint in a mental institution he emerges as Barely Blur. What caused his hospitalization and how he escaped is a mystery.
When we first meet Billy Barely Blur he is delivering a man in shackles from one state to another in his camper with his dog Flip. We don’t know what the prisoner has done, or who Billy is working for. Billy seems strangely uninterested in the details, and treats the prisoner with hospitality that makes the relationship even more unclear.
We see the world through Billy’s eyes, and the first person narrative does not provide much context for what is happening in the world. We have a vague sense that this is some future time- strange anthropomorphic drones appear, shaped like penguins or cartoon characters, with camera eyes that can seek and record. The surveillance apparatus is hard to escape, and Billy takes great pains to stay off the grid.
But one day several of his burner phones start to ring, and against his better judgement he picks one up. The caller, Cammie, says that she is his daughter. She clarifies their relation is a result of his sperm donations 20 years ago. Billy is not convinced and Cammie soon hangs up. Troubled by what he perceives to be breach of his defenses, he reaches out to his childhood friend Esperanza convinces Billy to be alert, and to record their phone calls if Cammie should find him again.
Cammie calls back and Billy tries to get more information from her. Cammie is elusive, and not wanting the call to be traced she hangs up after 15 minutes. She ends the call with a laugh that is exactly like his mother’s. Billy starts to think perhaps this may be his daughter, and slowly wraps his head around the possibility of being a father.
Billy and Esperanza work for Value Standard Enterprises. This innocuously named company has offices in equally innocuous locations – above laundromats and casinos – and their front man is Tim Ribbons. Value Standard Enterprises, we learn, is an underworld services company, providing assassinations, arson, kidnapping, illegal transport, and other related services. Billy seems to have a pretty loose job description, but his greatest skill is his ability to compartmentalize his feelings about his work. While picking up a young baby and transporting it to another state, he imagines that the baby will find a happy home with parents that love him.
Against this backdrop, Billy attempts the emotional gymnastics of being a father, and he begins to reveal memories of his past. These memories are deeply buried and unwelcome. Billy’s mantra is the wish to wake up on an island with amnesia.
To the reader however the memories start to fill in the gaps of Billy’s life. Tim Ribbons, we learn, came to Billy while he was in the mental institution and had some relation to his escape. Tim is now the one given the recordings of his calls with Cammie to analyze, and he’s soon given an address and a mission to “take care of the problem.” Tim tells Billy that the calls are not from his daughter but from a group of highly skilled hackers who need to be shut down.
Billy seeks out Cammie, with no intention of killing her, but Cammie is one step ahead. He arrives to an empty room with destroyed computers and a beeping phone in a refrigerator. Billy takes the phone and Cammie soon calls, warning him of the forces out to kill them both. Billy slowly is emerging from his lethargic denial and Cammie provides a new sense of purpose.
This lengthy description just scratches the surface of this slippery narrative, which you only really begin to understand at the end. It’s one of those books you want to re-read once you reach the end to see if you can pick out the clues in the beginning. But nothing is ever really spelled out and there is a lot of room for imagination. I give this book 4.5👍 out of 5👍.
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