Twiller Plot Summary

Twiller plot summary:

Early June - a man comes to consciousness in the Colorado mountains. He suffers from a head wound, and amnesia. Like his brain, his cell phone only partly works: it can send twitters, but audio is broken. He begins twittering his discoveries, and self-discoveries.

Between his toes – specifically, between his big toe and the one next to it – he feels pain. He finds there a tiny pin stuck between them, tiny but deep. Taped around the pin is a piece of paper. On the piece of paper is written: Abraham.

He hitchhikes his way down the mountains. At one point, a couple pull over to pick him up. But when the woman in the passenger seat sees him, she points and screams to her husband: “it’s the man from the news.” They speed off. Bewildered, he continues on.

At a small mountain town, he enters gas station food mart to spend last $10 on food. A slender redhead approaches him says: Come with me! She seems to know him but drives her SUV in silence. He falls asleep in car. Finally, her first words to him are: “liar.” The car is stopped. She has a knife to his throat. “Killer,” she says. He suppresses a violent urge to grab the knife. There is much anger and violence in him.

She points him out of the car. He exits and finds himself at a bus station in Steamboat Springs, Colo. In his pocket, he finds a one-way bus ticket to San Francisco, $100, and a piece of paper on which the word “Twirlers” is written in blue pen.

The bus ride permits and provokes memories: a father who was a pilot, mother – he seems to remember – who hacked computers, sister who played soccer and had anger. And visions of something else, or someone else, with the name Palfrey. It keeps nagging at him. What might it mean?

Outside Reno, in an Internet café, he looks up Palfrey. He finds: Deborah Jean Palfrey. The DC Madam. The dead DC Madam. He shivers with recognition, but vague recognition. He’s involved with something bad.

He arrives in San Francisco, consumed with the name Palfrey and whatever dangerous memory it might represent. In San Fran, he visits another net café. He looks up the name “Twirlers,” which is the word from the piece of paper he received in Colorado. It is the name of a strip club.

That night, at a hotel, someone slips a note under his door. It reads: “Abe.” He wonders is “Abe” the same as “Abraham,” the man from between his toes? Is Abe connected to the dead DC Madam?

Then the drinking starts. He remembers something about himself: he likes cheap gin. And he begins binging on it. Particularly as his memories start to return, he drinks more and more heavily – to the point of puking and passing out. He wakes up the next morning after an extreme bender.

The next night, he goes to Twirlers, aiming for find Abe, or who knows what. Instead, he meets a star-tattooed stripper named Sarah. She seems to take a shine to him. Next thing he knows, he’s at her apartment, having sex. And this is how he learns his name. She screams it: Lev. She must have known him earlier. She admits as much; says some weeks earlier, he’d been in the club asking about Abe.

Sarah, a single mom with a deadbeat ex-husband, gives Lev $100 and sends him on his way. He spends it on booze as memories surface. One of them is vibrant: he remembers a meeting on the 15^th floor of San Francisco’s Transamerica building.

He goes to the building, and 15^th floor. It is the offices of Hawl and Ile, a law firm specializing on political lobbying. “Hawl,” the lead partner is “Abraham Hawl.”

He returns to Sarah the Stripper’s house to demand answers. Initially, they have sex, and he starts drinking. He gets piss drunk and she boots him from the house at dawn. He wakes up on the street. He drinks more. Wakes up in his own puke. He is an addict. Drinks more. Returns to her apartment a few days later. He finds it ransacked and Sarah gone. He searches the place. Under a floorboard, he finds a picture of he and Sarah that looks about two years old. So he did know her. And he finds a clipping of a news story from the Aspen Times. It names him as the suspect in the murder of a high-end prostitute named “Shelalah.” It gives his full name: Lev Kind. There is one more thing: a pass to the upcoming Democratic National Convention. The name on the pass is Tim Havney.

Lev visits Transamerica building. He finds that Abe Hawl has headed to Colorado, where his firm has an office and where he is headed for the Democratic National Convention. Lev buys a bus ticket. He’s drunk, angry, confused, and heading into the eye of the storm.

On the bus ride, a new memory surfaces – the spinning of wheels and roads have a way of bringing back his memories. He keeps seeing a hospital, an operation or surgical procedure – and he’s in the middle of it. This image haunts him, along with Palfrey, and Abraham. What does it add up to?

In Salt Lake, he returns from a bender to find a natty Joseph Aboud suit and $500 in his motel 6. He starts to wonder: are twitter followers helping him? Are any even following his story? How many?

Many minor details and partial memories later -- particularly of the surgical procedure -- he winds up in Aspen. He goes looking for evidence of a dead hooker named Shelalah and how he might be involved with her. His hazy memories direct him first to a bar called Cooper Street. During two days of binging there, he notices a guy with a ponytail is eyeing him – wondering if maybe he recognizes Lev. But Lev is in his natty suit and his head is shaved. He’s a different man from before – or looks like it. Eventually, Lev follows the man to a doorway in an alley. Later, Lev returns to find the doorway is an entrance to a high-end massage parlor. He makes an appointment to return.

His appointment with Stacy – another S-named hooker – begets not sex, but information: Shelalah was a mom with two kids, 92 credits toward college graduation, and a great capacity to make money playing Texas Hold-Em. He finds her headstone in the Aspen cemetery. This is whom he has supposedly killed.

And, suddenly, he’s arrested for the murder. The hooker named Stacy seduces him to her house, then she calls the cops. He’s taken into custody while sleeping off a gin bender. For a few days, Stacy gets the twittering phone. A novice in the medium, she tells the story from her perspective for a few days. Among her revelations: that the cops charge Lev with murder because they have critical evidence: Lev’s blood is on the knife that killed Shelalah.

Then Lev escapes jail.

How he does so is unclear. All that is clear to Stacy is that he shows up at her house, and she – with him watching her menacingly – twitters what she believes to be her last words. We do not know what happens to her, but only that Lev has gotten his phone back. He has a revelation and confession: There is a killer inside me – he writes – but it is not me. It is the mutant that is alive in me.

He heads to the Democratic National Convention

There, he’s not sure what to look for. At one of the elite parties his all-access convention pass allows him into, he bellies up to the bar. He is inspired by the political rhetoric and tries to do something novel and positive: not drink. He gets a seltzer water, and spies the crowd. A beautiful blonde woman catches his eye. She and Lev know he each other. She is talking to two men that he realizes from context are senators. He walks close to the three of them and inhales her Oscar de La Rente and his shocked with a vision of her with bloody hands. Before he can talk to her, she disappears in the crowd. He starts binging.

Then in the crowd, he sees Abe Hawl. He follows Hawl to Denver’s swanky Brown Palace Hotel. Or, at least, that’s what he determines the next morning, when he wakes up from a major bender in an alley near the hotel. He stakes out the hotel. Later in the day – hours before Obama’s speech – he sees Hawl exit the side of the building into a limo. With him is the blonde woman with the killer perfume.

He manages to follow them to mile-high stadium for Obama’s speech. And one piece of the puzzle starts to come together. The surgical procedure that has been nagging at him was a transplant. Lev realizes and remembers he has in the last few years gotten cancer and required a bone marrow transplant. The donor was Abe Hawl. To what end?

At mile-high stadium, he makes a beeline to Hawl for answers. When he gets close, Hawl’s eyes widen with fear and recognition. Hawl’s strongmen push Lev to the ground, and Hawl disappears in the crowd.

Lev goes to a bar to drink. He feels a hand in his pocket. He looks to find the backside of someone he recognizes from earlier in the story: it’s the redhead who picked him up in the mountains. She too – like others in this tale – eludes him in a crowd chase. But she has left him something in his pocket: a note that says “they’ll kill you,” and a pass to the Republican National Convention.

He gets on a busy to Minnesota. While en route to St. Paul, the bus takes a pit stop in Sioux Falls, SD. Lev gets off the bus to pee. When he returns, he finds a thin dossier on his seat. In it, are the names of 12 senators – Five Democrat and Seven Republican, along with names and dates of meetings. And beside each meeting is the ratio of the price of the US dollar to the Chinese Yuan.

Nat begins to suspect that in addition to the group of hookers and political operatives involved in a conspiracy, there are a handful of twitterers who are helping him along by leaving him assistance and pieces of evidence.

Republican National Convention ahead.