by Andy Martin
The first thing he did was light a cigarette. (Second thing was take a mighty drag.)
“Look, Lee, I’m going to just shut up now. This is like going into church for me. I feel I should be quiet. Anyway I don’t want to put you off your stroke.”
“It’s not a problem.”
Lee was sitting in front of the screen of his new computer. An almost empty screen. It didn’t even have a page on it. Nothing. I was sitting on this kind of couch a couple of yards behind him. Just perched on the edge of it, not really lying down or anything.
“It’s reverse Freudian,” Lee said. “You’re on the couch and you’re analyzing me.”
I said nothing.
He flexed his fingers. “Naturally I’m going to start, like all good writers, by…checking my email!”
He cast an eye over some kind of Gmail list. “I’m just going to email the editor with the title suggestion. I don’t know if it’s going to work or not.” He pressed the return key and I heard the whoosh sound as the email was sent. “They like to get it out of the way if possible. We’ll see what she says.”
Then he told me the title. MAKE ME.
“Make Me…I don’t know, it’s not definite. Popped into my head last night. But I like it. It’s got something. Sounds like Reacher all right. Playground machismo. And then there’s that meaning to do with being under surveillance, making someone, identifying them, tailing them. And maybe a little bit erotic or romantic too.”
He still hadn’t really written anything. Then he turns to me in his chair.
“This isn’t the first draft, you know.”
“Oh,” I said. “What is it, then?”
“It’s the only draft!”
Right then he sounded more like Jack Reacher than Lee Child. “I don’t want to improve it. When I’ve written something, that is the way it has to stay. That’s how I was that particular year. You can’t change it. It’s like one of those old photos you come across. From the 70s, say. And you have this terrible 70s haircut and giant lapels on your jacket. It’s ridiculous—but it’s there. It is what it is. Honesty demands you own up to it and leave it alone.”
He still hadn’t written anything yet.
“I reckon around ninety working days. Should finish it around mid-March—mid-April if I slack.”
He still hadn’t begun.
“And remember, I’m not making this up. Reacher is real. He exists. This is what he is up to, right now. That’s why I can’t change anything—this is just the way it is.”
I was a couple of yards behind him and slightly to the right. I could see over his shoulder. I didn’t want to get any closer. It was already ridiculous. Lee told me that he had cut his nails earlier that day. He hated it when the fingernails clacked against the keyboard.
He lit another cigarette and took a deep drag and blew out a lot of smoke then put the cigarette in the ashtray.
“I was thinking—you have a high risk of dying from secondary smoke inhalation here.”
I said nothing.
I was thinking: the smoke is all part of it. Like a magic show. Smoke and mirrors. And, quite contrary to standard Magic Circle practice, the magician was tweaking aside the curtain and saying, okay come on through and let me show you exactly how I saw the lady in two and over here is my disappearing elephant, and so on. Everyone wants to know how it’s done. And now I was about to find out.
So, I’m behind him. And he is there in front of the computer. I’m trying to keep quiet. Like a mouse if not quite a fly on the wall.
“I’m opening a file here. Microsoft Word doc…Now I move it to the middle of the screen.”
He was talking me through it, like some kind of surgical operation. “I always use Arial. To begin with, anyway. And ten point. So I get more on the page. But I crank it up to 150 percent to save my eyes.”
It’s 2:26 in the afternoon. September 1, 2014. Lee is on the verge of something momentous. At the moment it’s a blank page. The file doesn’t have a name.
“Then I have to turn off all these red lines…Do not check spelling. Or grammar. I am going to let Microsoft tell me what grammar is!?”
It’s a huge screen (twenty-seven-inch). Virgin. Tabula rasa. “Single line space. I like to see a lot of text on the page. I don’t want to spend all my time scrolling up and down.”
He has put his tortoiseshell glasses on. Lit another cigarette. Put it down again. Finally he starts typing. He types:
CHAPTER ONE.
EXIT KEEVER
IT STARTED WITH A BURIAL. It would have to start with a burial.
Lee types with two fingers only, the index fingers.
The smoke was corkscrewing up from the cigarette in his hand. He stopped to take a drag on it. Looked back at what he had written. Crushed out the cigarette. He was looking intently at the screen.
The first paragraph was five lines long. I could almost make out the first word. An -ing word—a present participle. Something-ing. Ten point and I’m two yards back. I could see the words, but not read them. Could have been Sanskrit. The suspense was killing me. Next time, I vowed silently, I’m going to bring a telescope. I would have gotten closer, maybe could have gotten closer, but I didn’t want to crowd him. I was already nervous about making paper noises as I jotted down largely meaningless notes with a lot of question marks. I was already right on top of a guy in a small room in front of a computer trying to create a novel out of nothing, to conjure it up like a 100,000-word rabbit out of a hat.
Or maybe snake charmer would be a better metaphor—teasing that snake right up out of the basket.
Either way, Lee Child was thinking hard about his second paragraph.
Behind the page, on the desktop—I should have mentioned this sooner—a blue background, plain, no images.
The cigarette went back in the ashtray. The two fingers went back to work. End of second par. He lit another cigarette and then saved the file. For the first time, he was going to give it a name. Stick a label on it. He considered using the title, but then opted for something more neutral. “Reacher 19,” he typed.
I leaned forward. I could just make it out. “19?” I said. “Reacher 19?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Losing it.” Deleted 19. Changed it to “Reacher 20.” Personal was nineteenth. Make Me is the twentieth. The file was no longer nameless.
“I’m working up to Make Me. Not quite there yet.” Make Me was fresh out of the oven—he didn’t want to drop it.
The second par was longer. The onscreen page was slowly bulking up. He went back and slipped another sentence into the first par. Just a short one. So far he hadn’t deleted a thing.
I deciphered another word. “Nothing.” No. “Nothingness.”
The second par was twice the length of the first. Now he was into the third. The third was only two words long. I could only make out the second. “—enough.” Good enough? Bad enough? Looked more like a four-letter word than three though. A tetragrammaton. Was that an “S” at the beginning?
Lee, stuck in mid-sentence. The cursor flashing impatiently, urging him on, begging for more.
Another cigarette.
That desk: sheet metal all riveted together—made back in England—is that some kind of homage to all those old artisan metalworkers of his youth? Back in Birmingham and Sheffield. Under the railway arches. The craftsmen who knew how to make stuff and make it well. No painted jam. No guano peas. Solid. Dependable.
The fifth par. We’re on again! I could make out the beginning: “Only one thing went wrong…” A one-line par.
Other books on the shelf. Encyclopedia of American Police Cars. Webster’s. Small Arms. Tourist guides to Maine, Oregon, California.
Lee folded his hands together under his chin. His face was about two feet from the screen. He shoved it a little closer, peering into the screen like a crystal ball gazer. Now leaning back again, hands behind his head. Rubbing thumb and index finger of his right hand together, as if trying to elicit a flame.
Only backs off for a maximum of ten seconds at a time, then into it again.
An asterisk—or maybe a hash sign? Center. Return. We’re into a new section. A couple more lines. Then he stops.
3:07: file saved. Reacher 20.
Lee hit a button and the printer stirred. A page slid out. Lee stood up, went over to the printer, took out the page. Then he came over and handed it to me. “There.”
I think my hand was trembling. Just a little.
I leaned back on the couch and looked it over, slowly. The first page—or first couple of pages—of the new Reacher. Fresh off the printer. Straight out of the mind of Lee Child. (Maybe with a detour through the collective unconscious.)
Less than an hour. Five hundred words. Two fingers. “I find it’s about the right typing speed for me,” Lee said. “It’s as fast as my brain can keep up with.”
It took a while for the text to come into focus. I think I was too awestruck or moved or something to make any sense of it at first. A labyrinth. Utterly mysterious. Then words. Then sentences.
That -ing word right at the beginning. I was right about that. Turned out to be “Moving.” This is how the first sentence went:
Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy.
ENTER REACHER
KEEVER. GOOD NAME. I was already hooked.
Lee turned his chair around so he was half facing me, half looking back at his text on the screen. He swung his feet up on the desk.
“I wanted to start with a verb of action,” he said. “The participle came naturally.” He went over it in his head. “See, I didn’t want to write, Keever was a big guy and moving him wasn’t easy. That’s too expository. This way we waste no time. It’s compact. I thought about was not easy for a moment. But the rhythm was better, wasn’t easy.”
Here it is, the whole of it, as it emerged, that afternoon, September 1, 2014. That page I had in my hand—now you have it in yours.
Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy. It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed. So they buried him close to the house. Which made sense anyway. The harvest was still a month away, and a disturbance in a field would show up from the air. And they would use the air for a guy like Keever. They would use spotter planes, and helicopters, and maybe even drones.
They started at midnight, which they figured was safe enough. They were in the middle of ten thousand acres of nothingness, and the only man-made structure their side of the horizon was the railroad track to the east, but midnight was five hours after the evening train and seven hours before the morning train. So, safe enough. No prying eyes. Their backhoe had four spotlights on a bar above the cab, like kids had on their pickup trucks, and together they made an aimed pool of halogen brightness. So visibility was not a problem. They started the hole in the hog pen, which was a permanent disturbance all by itself. Each hog weighed two hundred pounds, and each hog had four feet. The dirt was always freshly chewed up. Nothing to see from the air, not even with thermal imaging. The picture would white out instantly, from the steaming animals themselves, plus their steaming piles of shit and their steaming pools of piss.
Safe enough.
Hogs were rooting animals, so they made sure the hole was deep. Which was no problem either. The backhoe’s arm was long, and it bit rhythmically, in fluent seven-foot scoops, the hydraulic rams glinting in the light, the engine straining and pausing, the cab falling and rising as each bucket-load was dumped aside. When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the dozer blade to push Keever into his grave, scraping him, rolling him, covering his body in dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the shadows.
Only one thing went wrong, and it happened halfway through the job.
The evening train came through five hours late. The next morning they heard on the AM station that a broken locomotive had caused a jam a hundred miles south. But they didn’t know that at the time. All they heard was the mournful whistle at the distant crossing, and then all they could do was turn and stare, at the long lit cars rumbling past in the middle distance, one after the other, seemingly forever. But eventually the train was gone, and the rails sang for a minute more, and the taillight was swallowed up by darkness, and they turned back to their task.
Twenty miles north the train slowed, and eased to a stop, and the doors wheezed open, and Jack Reacher stepped down into the dirt in the lee of a grain silo bigger than an apartment house.
“I like the way you use which,” I said. “Which made sense anyway. Subordinate clause, but you give it a fresh start.”
“Yeah, Which at the beginning of a sentence,” Lee said, in a meditative kind of way. “It’s an accelerative word. Mostly. I have to be careful not to overdo it though. Becomes a habit.”
He stopped thinking about which for a moment. He was thinking about the whole of that first paragraph.
“I’m tying my hands here. It’s a risk. Who is Keever? What is he? Why is he so damn important?”
“Well, who is he?”
“I’ve no idea at this point.”
I liked that about Lee’s writing. He didn’t know what he was doing. Didn’t need to know. Didn’t want to know. Had faith. Blind faith.
“I’ve made him important though. The fear of the air search. Then you have all the mechanics of burying him. That’s what follows. From the sheer size of him and the importance. You have to do a good job of it or it’s like he’ll pop right back up again. You have to really get him right down there.”
I was struck—how could I not be?—by that metaphor in the second sentence. The actual word size is explicitly in there, spelling out the governing theme. But waterbed? Where did that spring from?
“I slept on a waterbed once. In California? It had a mattress on top, which is strange. But I found myself trying to line up that mattress with the base. Which is impossible. So I thought that was something like the technical problem for the parties unknown.”
“You know Keever sounds a lot like Reacher.”
“Does it?”
“Look at it. Listen to it. You’ve got the “er” at the end and the “ee” in the middle. It’s a para-rhyme. Keever-Reacher, Keever-Reacher. Sounds like the train. This is an alter-Reacher. And he’s huge, just like Reacher. You’re suggesting that this really could be Reacher. It is what will happen to Reacher if he’s not careful. You always have that. The potential fate for Reacher. Which he generally manages to work around. Unlike a lot of his partners. So you’re looking into the void right from the start. You’re actually building an abyss. Nothingness.”
Child said nothing.
“But you don’t start with dialogue. You could have done. You know, ‘Hey, what a big bastard he was!’ ‘What are we going to do with the body?’ ‘I know, let’s dig a hole, a big one,’ that kind of thing.”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “I know what you mean. A lot of writers are like that. They start with dialogue because it looks easier to a reader. Lots of wide-open spaces and air. I very rarely start with dialogue. It’s partly tactical. I like it dense. But mostly, Reacher is not a conversationalist. I don’t want to give the wrong impression.”
“I think Camus said something like that. Cut out all the chitchat.”
Lee took a drag on his cigarette. “I’m taking a risk with this. It’s a dense wedge of text. But you’re saying to the reader all the time, don’t worry, I’m going to take you by the hand and lead you through it.”
“ ‘Hogs were rooting animals’?”
“I’m really reacting to the reader’s question here. ‘Hold on, they’re hogs; aren’t they going to dig him up again and have him for dinner?’ So we have to go down deep.”
“With a backhoe.”
“I love the backhoe. It’s the American word for a JCB in England. A digging machine. A giant shovel. Saves you a lot of time and energy. I’m being a little bit omniscient observer. But they are thinking and talking in their vernacular. So we’ve got to try and
stick with that.”
“You’ve got ‘steaming’ and ‘steaming.’ And another ‘steaming.’ I like that. No elegant variation. It’s all steaming.”
“I really like the steaming. Shit and piss could change—if I can find some agricultural terms. Reacher wouldn’t generally have shit and piss.”
“You know, I have this feeling you don’t much like rural places. They come up a lot in your fiction as the natural habitat of the bad guys. Is this your take on the American pastoral? Are you being just a bit satirical here about a whole mythology of nature?”
“It’s common in Western cultures,” he snapped back. “The rural is revered. Farmers are revered.” He stood up. Wandered over to the window. Twitched the blind. Looked out on an urban landscape of roofs and windows and water towers. Some sky. A lot of concrete. “But Reacher is all about logic and fact. He would say it’s an unexamined assumption. Lots of different kinds of farmers. No doubt some of them are fantastic. But among them are some of the stupidest people doing the stupidest things.”
Lee—he loves a good rant. Sometimes it’s hard to stop him.
“And if they come up with an innovation it’s only to make it even more stupid. Look at chopping up cows in order to feed them to other cows—thus causing BSE. Everybody knows they eat grass. We’re turning them into cannibals. Mad cannibals.” He turned away from the window, sick of the sight of some distant, seemingly innocent farming community, actually full of unscrupulous maniacs. Nothing like Charlotte’s Web at all (the one with Wilbur the “radiant” pig). Lee’s pigs had to be hogs, not pigs.
“They are not necessarily the repository of wisdom,” Lee went on. “They are just as much the repository of ignorance and superstition. And look at the Dust Bowl years. That was all the fault of the farmers. The government was trying to tell them all the time, don’t keep planting and harvesting, planting and harvesting every year, year on year, you’re going to kill it. And then it dies and blows away. And they’re, ‘Hey, we didn’t know!’ They don’t know anything.”