Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  “Sure, that would be—”

  He hung up, but only because he was standing next to her. “Nine o’clock at my place too early?”

  “No.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to bring Lucas.”

  “It’ll be early for him,” she said, then felt bad for falling into step with Archer’s dismissals.

  “Okay, cuz, I’m gonna load up on water and tea.” He raised his hand to his face. “Cottonmouth before readings.”

  Throughout the reading John stared at Archer with a knowing, mirror-tested smile—less a smile than a fractional upward curl restricted to the left side of his mouth. After a while it seemed to frazzle Archer; he shifted more, looked up less, and when he pretended to make engaging, Toastmasters eye contact, he was obviously looking over everyone’s head. When the floor was opened for questions, John straightened Sara’s manuscript by tapping it on his new Second Stranger hardcover. He looked around. He didn’t want to be the first to speak.

  The question-and-answer period opened with a repose during which Karyn was conscious of her own whiffling inhalations. “I could have read longer,” Archer joked. A titter, a cleared throat. Finally an arm near the front rose in an indecisive L: a general question about Archer’s “process,” fielded warmly. Next a maundering speech whose interrogative component was thrown in at the end like a hungrily mumbled amen. Then a hand went up in the back. “John!” Archer said, and there was that weird, drawly bass—Karyn turned around—of Archer’s thickly bearded former roommate.

  “I guess I’m curious about process too,” John said, “but more about the editorial process.” It was the sort of voice, Karyn thought, that might have been salable in the era of radio suspense serials. “I see that you thank a mess of people in the acknowledgments, editors and readers and what all, and I’m wondering how much influence those people wind up havin’ on the end product.”

  Archer looked at John with what seemed like confusion. “Probably not enough,” he said, gesturing toward humility. “I can be, oh, intractable, you might say. But, that said, I’ve benefited immeasurably from the sage advice and quiet corrections of all those people thanked in the acknowledgments. And many more who aren’t. Thanked, I mean; the list could easily become infinite, influence coming as it will from all corners. I see that Josh Kehr is here—you’re all familiar with Dog-Eared?” Archer nodded at a man across the aisle from Karyn. “For my money it’s the best literary podcast in the English-speaking world. Josh and I were talking on the show about—what?—character and agency, Burke’s pentad and all this, and I’ve no doubt that our talk will affect my writing, however slightly. So it’s all, you know.”

  “Well, it’s interesting,” John said, “because one of the folks thanked in the acknowledgments is a mutual friend of ours, Sara Crennel, who’s here tonight, and I recently had a chance to read one of her unpublished early stories—”

  Sara, the assistant from the wedding, turned around. “What?”

  “And it’s kind of crazy how close the story is to a part of The Second Stranger,” John continued.

  Sara: “How’d you get your hands on—”

  “I’d love to just read a chunk of it, and maybe get your take, Archer, on the similarities.”

  “No one cares about my juvenilia,” Sara said with an actorly laugh.

  Josh Kehr said, “Let’s hear it.”

  “Those with a copy of the book handy might want to turn to page 112,” John said. He stood up, started to read:

  For seven years we lived in a small city in southeastern Idaho. The singer Carole King lived on an estate a few hours from us, and supposedly there was a white-supremacist compound in the nearby countryside as well. Much later I came to feel restive and unprotected in cars, like a just-bottled grasshopper, so it’s hard for me now to see the fun in the Sunday drives we used to take, but I enjoyed them then, despite the backseat clamor, so loud with the windows rolled down that I couldn’t hear the AM radio or my parents’ conversation. My brother, in the backseat with me, listened to hair metal on his Walkman if he hadn’t successfully lobbied—

  “I really don’t see what this is proving,” Sara said.

  “It seems to be proving quite a lot,” said Kehr, holding open Archer’s book. Karyn was following along too. The words were nearly identical.

  “Yeah, I’m not sure this is really the place for whatever’s going on here,” Archer said. “Comp lit.”

  John loudly cleared his throat:

  —lobbied to stay home.

  One windy Sunday morning in midsummer we went looking for King’s place, but our directions were speculative, our map illegible from Thermos rings.

  In the book, the map was simply “out of date.” Karyn missed a sentence while noting that change and a few others. Sara tried unsuccessfully to interrupt John.

  —leaking with now louder tinniness from his earphones, their foam covers mismatched because he’d lost one, stolen mine. I watched my father’s face reveal more frustration as he put on a show of hiding it. I don’t know how sincere our quest was in the first place—I was only eleven and couldn’t always tell when my parents were joking—but I know we were sincerely lost. We tried to retrace our route but only got farther off course. We pulled over, my brother turned off his music, and my mother joked that, “knowing our luck” (but I’ve been very lucky), we would fatally drive our rickety imported car and its peeling NO NUKES bumper sticker into the white-supremacist compound. But the compound, my gravel-kicking brother pointed out, would have a daunting gate. He was humorless, my brother, and perhaps honestly afraid for his safety (he was adopted and less Aryan than the rest of us). My father tapped the bone behind his ear while my mother and I pinned the map’s corners to the car’s sloping hood. Without trying to, I got the heel of my palm to indent the hood and make a noise when the indentation popped out. Trying to, I did that two more times. “Stop!” my father said.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Sara said, more loudly this time. She stood up and walked toward John. Josh Kehr was taking notes. Another man was holding up a phone, recording the scene.

  “This is absurd,” Archer said. “A crazy man types up variations on part of a book, and we have to listen to him read it?”

  “The date of this manuscript can be authenticated in the wink of an eye,” John said, shaking the pages.

  “You need help, John. I’m sorry this is happening.”

  “I’m as sane as houses.”

  “That’s safe as houses,” Sara said.

  “Would you mind putting down your phone?” Archer said to the sudden documentarian, then looked behind him at the engrossedly noninterventionist bookseller. The audience seemed much more attentive to John’s reading than they had been to Archer’s. Now Sara was trying to tear the manuscript from John’s hands. He held it above his head, stood on his chair.

  We were about to get back in the car [he read] when a couple-colored pickup emerged on the horizon. We stood under a cloud-shadow on the side of the dirt road, watching the truck get closer. It slowed, stopped. A boy about my age, tanned to the shade of a baseball glove, stared blankly at us through the passenger window. The driver urged us to join him for lunch at the “best café in Idaho.” The café was just off the highway we needed anyway, he said.

  The boy’s name was Kevin. He was the first Kevin I’d met, though later it seemed you couldn’t get away from them. He didn’t talk much, but everything he said was in earnest. By the time we got to the pudding course, he had asked me to “go with him,” and for five years we carried on a correspondence, the unusual candor and exhaustiveness of which only became clear to me years later, when I was living on the island and began to write letters to myself from an imagined adult Kevin, letters I would post at the—

  Sara had managed to push John off the chair and confiscate a page of the manuscript. Another page, after floating in loops and dodges, landed not far from Karyn. It seemed to include a great deal of marginalia. Sara turned to Lu
cas. “You fuck!” she said.

  He spread his arms. “I thought you wanted to get caught.”

  “What’s going on?” Karyn said under her breath to Lucas, who shook his head.

  Gemma was casting distraught looks around the room, one hand on the back of her chair.

  “So what does this mean?” Kehr asked Archer, who seemed frozen at the lectern.

  “What does it mean?” Archer said.

  “Are you returning the question rhetorically, or . . .?”

  “I think,” Archer started hesitantly, “I think the whole notion of authorship is evolving, becoming fluider. I’ve always been interested in collage, sampling, appropriation art.”

  “Passing off someone’s unpublished story as your own work is appropriation art? Seems more like plagiarism.”

  “It wasn’t that,” Archer said.

  “Is it ghosting?” Kehr said.

  “Everything changes in context,” Sara broke in from the floor. She was still standing up. “Look at ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.’”

  “Reality Hunger,” someone else offered.

  “Listen,” Sara said, “I was doing some proofreading on The Second Stranger, and I happened to mention to Archer that his novel reminded me, in mood mainly, of a piece I’d written years ago. So I sent him a copy of the story, and we just kept coming back to it. Finally we thought, you know—”

  “Let’s put it in,” Archer said.

  “Let’s put it in,” Sara parroted.

  “Your story seems to be evolving at a faster pace than our notion of authorship,” Kehr said.

  “We could have done better at laying out that section’s provenance,” Archer said.

  “But it’s a different piece now,” Sara said. “You can’t step twice into the same stream.”

  “Bullshit,” John said. “She wrote the whole book. She writes all his stuff. She’s actually a genius.”

  “I’m not your damsel in distress, John,” Sara said.

  John pointed at Archer. “And he’s not true,” he said. His “not” came out like “nawt.”

  Gemma got out of her seat and started to walk down the aisle to leave. She was looking at her sandals, but you could tell she was crying.

  Archer called to her without vociferation, stepped away from the lectern without urgency.

  Gemma held an arm up behind her. “Don’t follow me.”

  The bookseller delicately reclaimed the lectern. “Thank you all for coming,” she said. “If you’d like to have books signed, I believe that can happen at a table upstairs.” Kehr asked who would sign them.

  Strangely, Archer, as instructed, didn’t follow Gemma.

  But Lucas did. Later, Karyn couldn’t remember him getting out of his seat. She just remembered sitting there, watching his back as he trotted after Gemma, watching the croupier sweep away her jackpot. Karyn waited outside the bookstore for ten minutes—not long, but she was already furious and devastated by the end of two. She felt like one of those scarves that overflow lost-and-found boxes on the first springlike afternoon.

  Lucas’s first text chimed in as she was coming out of the subway, his first call as she was having their room’s keycard changed. She turned away from the desk, stared at the cucumber water and the Granny Smith tube, and let the call go to voice mail.

  In her room that night she cried for maybe twenty minutes and then started to feel a calm indifference to her life that she hadn’t felt before, a sort of nothingness. It wasn’t a break from thanatophobia; she rarely worried about death and found death-obsessed people tiresome and self-important. Nor was it suicidality; such thoughts made her acutely aware of the pain she would cause Maxwell and others. It was more that the rest of her life didn’t matter—to her. She didn’t dread the future; she just didn’t need to experience it.

  Lucas wasn’t invited to the meeting with Archer the next morning, which of course was canceled anyway, and his seat on the plane that next afternoon was occupied only by Karyn’s now regrettable new purse. A week later she listened to half of his first message—“Hey, I don’t know what I was thinking; I guess I thought she needed support, but, you know, it was jerky of me to”—but she never picked up his calls or answered his texts. He backed off with insulting haste.

  September 2011

  A bell rang as John walked into the UPS store. He looked awhile at the bubble wrap, envelopes, and packing tape, then walked to the counter. He pushed the Wilson toward a parcel servant with brown hair that hung jaggedly over his right eye. “I want to send this to New Avenues Senior Living, in Barrington, Illinois,” John said. “I don’t have the street address.”

  “We can look it up.”

  While the clerk did that, John stepped over to a spinning rack of photographic greeting cards. He had just under twenty-four hundred dollars left. “Do you only have funny cards?”

  “Most of those cards aren’t funny to me,” the clerk said.

  He picked one featuring a pigtailed baby on which eye black and a football jersey had been photoshopped. Inside, the card read TACKLE IT ONE DAY AT A TIME. ”You been living in Harrisburg your whole life?” John asked.

  The clerk measured the racket. “Most of it. I was born in Middletown.”

  “Nice place?”

  “Middletown?”

  “Harrisburg.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Can I use a pen without buying it?”

  “Have at it.”

  “I’m sorry I stole your tennis racket,” John wrote. “You were a good friend to me, and I hope you’re happy in your new abode home. I soon begin my teacher’s training in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It’s all right. Please thank Chick for the hotel room. The wedding was a success but it looks like the marriage won’t be. All the best, John Anderson.”

  The players were starting to arrive when Lucas got to the North Side park at quarter to six. He straddled his bike and chewed a taffy-like energy bar, trying to subdue any hint of predation by affecting weary, contemplative pride, as if he’d been riding for sixty miles instead of the six it took him to get here from work. Less than ten minutes of internet research had determined that Maxwell would be practicing in one of two parks. It wouldn’t be hard to bike to both in the two-hour window he had to work with.

  The temperature was falling, but he squeezed a few drops of water into his helmet vents, then walked in his concrete-clicking bike shoes to refill his bottles at the rec center’s drinking fountain. In the basin there were bright wads of chewing gum and a drain-clogging pulp of sunflower shells. No sign of Karyn’s car. The kids strapped on their pads, scattered their straw-topped water bottles on the edge of the field, praised their own catches. At six sharp, they were whistled into line. Lucas doubted that Maxwell would be among those compelled to run laps for tardiness, but he waited till twenty past just in case. He reexamined the circuitous, highway-skirting route to his next stop, reached into his bike shorts to disengage some pubic hairs from his foreskin, and started riding south.

  He didn’t quite know what he would do or say if he found Karyn. Only when he got within a mile of the second park did he realize that a posture of nonchalance wouldn’t fly. He would start with an apology. He had chased after Gemma stupidly, impulsively—but he wouldn’t say that—partly because no one else was stepping forward to comfort her, partly, he admitted, because he wanted to witness more of her ekphra . . . no, her peri . . . Karyn would know Aristotle’s word . . . her sudden change, her discovery of who Archer really was, though of course she wasn’t at all grateful to Lucas for setting this discovery in motion. (Lucas had looked forward to seeing Archer exposed in the papers, pilloried on Facebook, dissected in slapdash essays by self-advancing pundits; but his schadenfreude was used up in minutes.)

  It would be better, Lucas realized as he tried to shake away a tingle in his forearm, to strip his apology of all explanations, to simply tell Karyn he was sorry, sorry he’d hurt her, and from there move quickly to a declaration, something bold
and earnest.

  He rode past the park, then slowly toured its neighborhood, his rear wheel’s pawls and ratchets chirring as he coasted in the center of the streets. He tried to clear his head by imagining he was walking through an enormous warehouse filled with fast-spinning fans that he was turning off one by one. The warehouse was really a version of his apartment duplicated over and again like your arm in a mirrored elevator. There was no air-conditioning in his apartment—in his actual apartment—so he relied on fans, box fans with thick layers of brown dust on their blades. Whenever it got mild enough to turn them off, he would be equally struck by two sudden things: the apartment’s sudden peacefulness, and the suddenly strange fact that he had endured days, even weeks, of steady, unmusical noise. With each fan in his mental warehouse, he would pinch the plastic switch for a moment before turning, then gradually power it down: three, two, one. The last fan was whirring to a stop when he returned to the park. He locked his bike to a parking sign and started wending his way through the practice field. It was dusk, but he thought he could make out Karyn sitting in a lawn chair near the sidelines of one of the scrimmages. White helmets were facing off against helmets wrapped in yellow fishnets. He pictured the three of them in the kitchen, making dinner, listening to Karyn’s terrible music, asking about the details of their dumb days. He could feel the blood in his veins. He slowed his pace, his shoes sometimes sinking into the ground, and she came more clearly into view.

  Dear Ms. Crennel,

  I’ve just finished reading your God’s Good Side, and my partner can attest that its choicer passages often cried out for recitation. Eventually he moved to another room. Let’s not be discouraged over that. I’m glad you came across Mr. Miller’s mostly kind profile of me in Poets & Writers. You weren’t the first to contact me in its wake, but you were the first to do so by traditional post. Perhaps you were pandering to my reported fustiness. I’m sure the young man meant only flattery by calling me “the last of a dying breed,” but still and all, it was an impolite memento mori. I’ve had a sore throat ever since.