How I Became a Famous Novelist

by Steve Hely

  Then we were at Alice.

  God bless her, she went for it.

  Like a struggling woman sailor trying to keep her head afloat in a wildly raging tide, Xenia tried to keep mind and body apart, tried to keep her senses keen and aware, feeling the delights of each new touch from the Captain’s hands, now two staves of lustfire. And though she was a novice in the arts of sea-bound lovemaking, she didn’t shy away, no trembling virgin her. Indeed, she felt herself moved as if by an unseen hand, into him, with a vigor and animal wildness that would have stunned a Mongolian tiger. His thrusting member rumpled her petticoats around her yearning thighs.

  No one seemed fazed by this. With a neutral expression I stared at the ground as Hamsterface mentioned something about “good imagery.”

  And then we were done. Alice tore out through the door without looking at me, and everyone else filed out.

  As I walked home, I assessed what I’d learned—about writing, not about Alice.

  The main thing was confidence. My classmates didn’t get it. They all had some rich personal vision they were struggling to get into words. They were trying to work out all sorts of issues and ideas and personal traumas. They were strangling themselves trying to fit it all in.

  But that wasn’t the game. That wasn’t the Preston Brooks con. The key was just to seem significant. To distract the eye. If you tried to fit in actual emotion, or stuff you cared about, you’d just bog your novel down. Writing was like a magic trick. But instead of focusing on the illusion, the showmanship, the people in the class were wasting their time trying to work actual magic. Except for Alice, who seemed to have a genuine gift for soft-core pornography.

  These people were all working too hard.

  5

  • Against the crisp canopy of the desert air, the sound of a gunshot travels for miles.

  • In the desert air, you can hear the sound of a gunshot for miles.

  • When Silas heard the sound, his first thought was, I’ve never heard a gunshot before.

  • A gunshot doesn’t pop or bang, it vibrates through you, setting everything off its track.

  • That low hum, electricity throbbing slowly through a deserted office hall, was like a womb to Silas, but like every womb, it had to be shattered.

  • In Las Vegas, that city of extravagant dreams and garish spectacle, no one paid any attention to a quiet, pensive man.

  • You never recognize it, not at first, and only later do you realize it was the sound that changed your life.

  • A gunshot sounds like a bird, plummeting dead to the ground.

  • In Las Vegas, that city of garish spectacle, a gunshot falls lost into the cacophony like a scream at a hockey rink.

  —discarded first sentences for The Tornado Ashes Club by Pete Tarslaw

  For the rest of the week, a great fog of awkwardness hung over the offices of EssayAides. Alice and I stayed in our respective offices and avoided each other. She would get to work before me and not leave until I was gone. Sometimes I’d hear her footsteps in the hall, rising to a furious speed as she zipped past my office. Or I’d hear her making tea in the kitchen. For fun I’d loudly start to pound down the hall. She’d frantically try to finish or make the decision to abort, leaving mug abandoned in the microwave and sugar and tea strewn along the counter.

  There weren’t many essays to work on that week. Business always slackened by midwinter, but this year seemed especially dry. Luckily Jon Sturges never bothered checking in. He was probably off defrauding nursing homes or something.

  So with this time I got cracking on The Tornado Ashes Club.

  Writing a novel—actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs—is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

  The first sentence took me nearly a whole day, but I was happy with the result: A gunshot sounds like nothing so much as a book slamming closed.

  I put Silas to work in a Las Vegas hotel and casino called The Elysian Fields. Coming up with that took a long time. I wanted to make it a satire of Vegas casinos, because I knew reviewers and book types, who hate popular things, would find such a skewering delicious. But it’s hard to satirize Vegas casinos, which already have indoor canals with singing gondoliers and mock Eiffel towers and Star Trek restaurants. So I made the place Heaven-themed, slapping on the irony like mustard on a sandwich.

  I got Silas’s boss murdered: gunshot, Silas is working late because he’s a pushover, hears the noise, in trying to help puts his prints all over everything. I got Grandma sitting in an Adirondack chair, watching the moon rise over Buzzard’s Bay, and reminiscing. High school in a Pennsylvania coal town. Falling in love with strapping young Luke, who reads her Catullus. The mine shuts down and Luke heads out for hobo adventures.

  The hardest thing about writing was picking which words to use. I thesaurused until every walked was an ambled and every bright was luminescent. But by Thursday I had twenty-six pages.

  As a reward to myself, at around four I turned out the light in my office and pretended to leave, loudly closing the door to the EssayAides suite. In the hallway, I waited.

  Sure enough, about ten minutes later Alice, thinking she was safe, came out in a checkerboard sweater.

  “Oh hey, Alice! I was just leaving, but I realized I forgot my phone. Stick around, I’ll walk down with you.”

  “That’s—uh, okay I’m kind of—”

  “No problem, I’ll just be a sec.”

  I dashed in; then Alice and I headed down the hallway.

  “So … how’d you hear about our writing class?”

  “Oh, I saw a flier. Thought I’d check it out. ’Cause, you know, I dabble.”

  “Me too, me too, dabbling. Definitely just dabbling. Different stuff. I try and make my writing, you know, as ridiculous as possible. Just for fun.”

  “Right, yeah, ridiculous, definitely,” I said, and we got on the elevator. Silence for a minute, I let her feel secure.

  “So how are things going with Lady Xenia? Did she and the Captain hit it off?”

  “What? Oh, that thing; yeah, that was just—just an exercise, nothing… .” Alice trailed off. We walked past the koi pond.

  “You’re not, uh—you’re not coming next week, or anything, are you?”

  “I dunno—I’d kind of like to hear what happens to Lady Xenia.”

  Alice made her silent comedy eyes of terror again, then said, “I wouldn’t—you know I probably won’t—” Then she turned and bolted for her car.

  Anyway, that was the last conversation I ever had with Alice.

  The next day she hid in her office. There were still no essays, so midmorning I crossed the highway, said hello to Sree, and settled down with a nut soda.

  Most of my lunch I spent fleshing out some details for a fantasy I’d been running in my head. This would be after my novel was generating some buzz, and I’d be on my book tour. Behind the podium, at a bookstore in Richmond or wherever, forty sets of female eyes would stare back at me as I opened my crisp copy of The Tornado Ashes Club. Before I said a word, I’d scan the room and find the prettiest woman there: a cute girl, scarf tossed insouciantly over her shoulder. As I began, speaking in a rolling, ponderous voice, I’d focus on her.

  There are sanctuaries in the human heart, deep and secret chambers that we lock away. Even from ourselves. Sometimes, as years pass, we forget they were ever there. They’re lost to us then. But sometimes the simplest of things—a faint melody heard and remembered, the feel of your grandmother’s soft hand, smelling of baking, touching your cheek, a return to a place you dreamed of as a child, a bend in a tree worn from climbing—can open those chambers again. Suddenly your soul fills up, like warm cow’s milk filling a pail on a chill November
morning.

  I jotted all this down.

  When I was done reading, and the applause had died down, and I’d signed copies, the cute girl would be waiting, standing in a corner. She’d come up to me, awkwardly. She’d say she never did this, but my book just meant so much to her. You’re my favorite novelist, she’d say. I thought Preston Brooks was good, but you, you … Then she’d screw up her speech and dissolve into blushing. I’d smile and invite her back to my hotel for a drink.

  Anything cut out of the novel I’d have saved for bar patter, over Dewar’s and soda at the Ramada lounge. The piano guy would sign off for the night, and I’d invite her up to my room. Maybe on the pretense of “I’d love to get your thoughts on something I’m working on.” She’d come. She’d sit on the bed, unsure even of what strange hypnosis was keeping her there. With a few deft redirects, I could turn her nervous tremblings into sexual availability. And the next morning I’d be on to Nashville or Trenton.

  Then I thought about a reading in D.C., where Polly would sit in the back, her eyes awash in tears as admirers scrummed around me—

  “Nice jacket bro. I think we’re gonna have a good season next year, real solid midfield.”

  Thus interrupted I looked up to see Jon Sturges himself, founder and CEO of EssayAides, talking to the old man in the Patriots parka, giving him the kind of sideways handshake that white dudes who say “bro” give.

  Jon Sturges had eyebrows thick as cigar stubs, beneath a bald spot that spread like a spider across his scalp. Although he was ten years older than me, he cornered and weaved like an athletic eighth-grader playing dodgeball. I walk with the lethargy of a gout-ridden spinster, so I was always impressed to watch him move.

  Jon slapped Patriots Parka on the back. The old man looked thrilled as Jon pointed with both hands at me and glided over.

  “Broseph! Bronaparte!”

  He pulled up a chair and straddled it, tossed his yellow tie over his shoulder, and took a sip of my nut soda.

  “Great that we can meet here like this, outside the office. Roman patrons used to meet their clients in the Forum, the marketplace. They weren’t constrained by offices. They thrived on that bustle, that energy.”

  The only bustle at the moment was Sree, who was attacking his stove with an ice scraper.

  “You’ve got to respect the Romans. That was the original business culture. They completely got it. All this”—Jon waved his hands at our present circumstances—“the Romans established all of this. We’re just replicating their systems. The Romans were brilliant at infrastructure. That infrastructure—their word, from the Latin—that let them shift resources.”

  He took another sip out of my can, appeared stunned, and turned to call back to Sree.

  “What are you working here? Some kind of nut flavor in here?”

  “Yes,” said Sree. “Nepalese nut soda.” He smiled. “Pete, my daughter Martha is going to a roller-skating party this weekend.” I nodded. Sree retreated to his kitchen.

  “Good times,” said Jon. Then he formed his fingers into a triangle under his chin. “So, admissions is in a soft cool. You’ve been doing a great job bro, no question, but I tell ya, I just can’t make the math work anymore. I’ve got other enterprises I’m trying to get off the ground.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sorry. I gotta let you guys go.” Jon drained the last of my nut soda. “Alice sent me here, I just told her.”

  “So, wait—I don’t have a job anymore?”

  “Sorry dudely.”

  Here—I’m pretty proud of this, actually—my first thought was about Alice.

  “How’d she take it?”

  He crushed the can against the table as he shook his head. “Not well.”

  So now I was unemployed. At the counter Patriots Parka was picking at a chunk of Curry Cheeseburger that had wedged in the space between his dentures and his gums.

  “So listen, Pete. When a Roman legionnaire retired after distinguished service, he would be given a plot of land. I can’t give out land, bro. Real estate’s a sucker’s game. But that’s something,” he said, as he slid an envelope across the table.

  I opened it and counted $320 in twenties.

  The situation wasn’t ideal. But Jon Sturges had employed me for three years, and now he’d given me an arbitrary amount of cash. I owed him something.

  “Jon, I’m reminded of the emperor Augustus and his words to the Senate. You may know this speech. ‘Fellow Romans,’ he said, ‘we bleed the same blood. Our hearts beat with the same fire. When I strike, we strike together. When I rest, we rest together. We are borne together by the same wind, always.’”

  Those were lines I remembered from The Centurion’s Concubine. The centurion says them to his woman. I committed them to memory all those years ago, because they had a powerful effect on the concubine. And they had a powerful effect on Jon, who stood up.

  “When ancient Romans swore an oath, they would place one hand over their testicles,” he said. “That’s where our word testimony comes from. Bet you didn’t know that, bro.” He gripped his testicles tightly. “You’ve done great work for us, Pete. You’re a gifted writer. And I swear to you, we’ll work together again.”

  He then ungripped and stretched out his hand, sideways. With great reluctance I shook it.

  Jon turned and walked toward the door, slapping the old man in the Patriots parka on the shoulder.

  “We got Pittsburgh to worry about. That’s it. Maybe Buffalo. Gonna be a hell of a season.” The old man was baffled but charmed. Jon looked at the posters on the wall.

  “Hey, cool posters. Is this Ghostbusters? Pete, you see these posters?” Jon yelled into the kitchen. “Ghostbusters, bro, Ghostbusters.”

  In a Nepalese fast food restaurant where the sanitary conditions were suspect and the food was near poisonous, alongside a highway laid across a bed of brackish marshes, I’d been fired from my job as a forger and plagiarist of application essays by a man whose “business” philosophy was based on gladiator fantasies and epic self-delusion.

  That night, as I drank myself to sleep, I heard Hobart through the wall, talking to his girlfriend or his exgirlfriend or whatever. I couldn’t make out words, but his sounds grew more and more pleading, until they were followed, inevitably, by long, deep sobs like the moans of a wounded manatee.

  6

  The Secret Service agent turned, and surprised him with a smile. “Good luck, Mr. President.” He walked out, closing the door behind him, and Mike “Mac” Tipton was alone in the Oval Office. President Tipton.

  This was where it had all led, from Little League games in Ohio, through the Naval Academy and the combat missions in an F-16 over Kuwait, the lonely campaigning in shopping malls and on street corners, and the ugly haggling of eight years in Congress. And then the campaign, the nights of bad coffee and bad jokes, throat sore from speeches, stomach stuffed with a thousand chicken dinners, face burning with the heat of television lights. Then the longest night of them all, in November, as he watched the states on CNN turn green and he knew he’d entered history as the first independent president since Washington.

  As the January morning sunlight streamed in through the windows, the music of the Inaugural Ball still rang in his ear. But Mac Tipton—President Tipton—was finally alone. Not even his blonde wife Lizabeth could understand how he felt as he looked at the telephone and knew that in under a minute he could reach the premier of China, the South Pole, or—God forbid—the Nuclear Launch Center.

  Mac looked at the portraits of Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln. “I know how you feel,” he said aloud, as he looked into Lincoln’s somber face and laughed.

  Suddenly he was aware of two figures in the room. He wheeled. “How did you—”

  Across the rug, two men in dark suits, both clutching titanium briefcases, faced him. One had dark eyes and a military bearing, and stayed rigid, but the taller man held up his hand.

  “No need to worry, Mr. Presiden
t. We’re friends.”

  “But how did you get in here?”

  The taller man smiled. “We’re men with … access. This is Riggs. You can call me Hopkins. Our names are not important.”

  Tipton, baffled, wondered whether to call for security.

  “Mr. President, this briefing isn’t on any schedule. In fact, for all intents and purposes, no one knows we’re here. But we need to discuss a matter of the utmost urgency,” Hopkins said.

  Riggs opened his briefcase and removed a thin file. “Sir, how much do you know about outer space?”

  —page one of the unfinished novel Angels in the Whirlwind by Pete Tarslaw

  Since all this went down, various critics and bloggers have asked why I didn’t just write a trashy airport thriller instead of a literary novel. In fact, I tried exactly that. Here’s what happened:

  After I’d been fired, the novel project took on a real desperation. I’d sit in my boxers and stare at the blank screen. Above my desk I’d taped a picture of Preston Brooks shoeing a horse.

  Writing a novel would be easy if it wasn’t for the frills. Take, for example, the scene early in The Tornado Ashes Club where Luke parachutes into Normandy a month before D-Day. The local resistance fighters find him, and together they celebrate his arrival over a bottle of calvados in a Bayeux root cellar.

  This scene took me two days. Lots of Internet research was required to find out pesky details like what they drink in Normandy, and the name of a town, and what kind of parachute they used in World War II. Plus, since this was a “literary” novel, I couldn’t just say “they drank some calvados and it was terrific, everybody shook hands and got blitzed.” I had to describe the

  warming, burning apple brandy that first arrived in a vapor, wafting along his nostrils before the harsh pure wetness enlivened his tongue. Carried with it was a history of orchards and harvests and aging time in old oak barrels. Visions that transcended that dank and dangerous place, and the fear of death, stark and present now like a cat perched on a bookshelf. The amber liquid carried visions that transcended even the war. Luke smiled as he sipped. The bottle said 1928. Carried inside were tastes wrought before there was a war, tastes that would remain long after the tanks had gone to rust and the generals gone to flag-draped graves. Tastes that would linger epochs after soldiers turned to fathers and lovers and warped-fingered old dreamers of memory, inhabiting languid houses on tree-lined streets where children ran and sang and played. Not even the war could take away these small, good things, flavors remembered, and preserved, and stored away.