by Andy Martin
“Outstanding,” said Lee. He pointed out that it was one of Reacher’s favorite words. Apparently they used it in the army all the time, especially when they didn’t know what else to say. “We’ve just lost half the platoon and a dozen tanks.” “Outstanding.”
Joel said he wanted to write a book in which every other word was “no.”
“Why would you do that?” said Lee.
“It’s what you do.”
“Really?”
I drew his attention to the double-tap—the no-no. It was probably his most recurrent syntactical move.
Lee was stretched out on one of his sofas. It was a long sofa, but Lee’s legs only just about slotted in. “Hmmm, he said, genuinely struck by the news about his habit. He put down the Think Coffee mug. “I guess there are only two interpretations. The first interpretation is I am a burned-out old hack falling back on the same tired old formulas.”
“It’s a tic,” said Joel. “Pure OCD.”
“Or, second interpretation, I really am attached to negation and there is some deep underlying philosophical impulse behind it all. Bit of a nihilist or something.”
“I prefer the philosophical version,” I said. “But I guess it’s a bit of both.” I hit him with my theory about Reacher being a plot killer. “Reacher obviously gets to decide who lives and who dies. But annihilates only those who have a plot in mind.” That cracked him up.
“You stole it from John Lennon,” said Joel, knocking back the last of his coffee. “Or Lennon stole it from you. Whatever.”
“No hell, no heaven,” I said. What with Lee living just up the street from Lennon’s old building. “Imagine” was manifestly the source.
“Outstanding,” Lee said. “There’s always an earlier origin.”
“It’s probably in Homer,” said I. “No Scylla, no Charybdis.”
“Or…Okay, third interpretation. Just listen to it. Don’t read it. No eyes, no in-te-rest.” He concertina’d out the syllables of the word “interest.” “You see, it has this cadence to it. I really liked it for the sound of it.” It was fundamentally a rhythm thing with Lee. He agreed with the blind woman (and her dog) at Long Beach: it had to sound right or it was no good.
Joel was knocked out by the immense screen Lee had in his dedicated TV room. Fifty-something inches. He felt a definite pang leaving it behind. “That is what I want. It’s what I need,” he said, hungering after giant baseball and giant boxing and giant American football. “The only thing is I would have to get a divorce. I had to choose between my wife and a giant TV.”
We took the elevator down. Lee said that the new screens were almost as good as the old professional cathode-ray monitors he used to use in his days at Granada. “The next generation, the OLED technology, organic LED, will just about wrap it up,” he said. “Super-thin screens, no need for backlight. Saves energy too.”
We were having dinner amid the red leather and white linen of the Monkey Bar in the Elysée hotel in Midtown with Karen Rinaldi, Joel’s wife. She called the place “old New York.” The waiters greeted her by name. She was way better than a giant flat screen TV, no matter how thin. He’d made the right decision. She was a surfer and a publisher and she wore $1,500 glasses. Lee and Karen talked about writers paid too much, writers paid too little. How publishers were basically venture capitalists. Sometimes they blow it. She knew even more about the business than Lee. Not so much about Birmingham, England, though—where Lee had been brought up.
“It was the New Jersey of Britain,” he said. “Everybody hated the place. It was the most hated place in England.” Lee glared at me, the soft Southerner.
“Hey, don’t look at me,” I said. “Obviously I hate just about everywhere north of London. I think that’s fair.” It was an ancient divide in England—something to do with climate, geography, religion, history, soccer, and the binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity.
“Yep, he hates Birmingham, all right,” Lee said. “That was probably in part why I left. But they had this great tradition of making stuff. The small old-time artisans were really good at it. You know those IKEA flat packs of furniture?”
“Nightmare,” said Joel. Joel was actually a great fixer too, had recently been rolling around on the floor for a day with tools in his hand putting in a new sink.
“One day we had this bed in a box. Probably the box had a hole in it. Anyway we were missing a bolt by the end of it. No bolt, no bed.” Joel and I looked at each other.
“We had an identical bolt. But it was metric at a time when everything else in England was the old imperial measurement. You couldn’t walk into a shop and buy one. So I go to one of these old-timers under the railway arches. One-man band. Rough-and-ready workshop. And I say to him can you make me another one of these? He has a good look at it and says, sure, come back in half an hour. So I go back in half an hour and he has these two identical bolts in his hand and I say, ‘But I only wanted one!’ And I’m thinking oh no that’s going to be twice the cost and we’re broke. The guy grins at me. Turns out one of them is the original bolt. The second one is the one he has made. A perfect perfect copy. They really knew how to make stuff back then.”
“You’d never get one now,” said Joel.
“Make me one,” I said. “That’s where you get your title from. Poiesis—the Greeks didn’t talk about poets like they were publishing with Faber & Faber. The poet was a maker. It was a practical matter. Poetry was all about the craft. Or graft.”
“I like that,” said Lee.
We were standing around outside in the rain, having a puff, sheltering under umbrellas. Lee was planning to do some Christmas shopping the next day. “Don’t worry,” said Lee, as the rest of us pulled a face or talked about goofing off. “I can still hear the music in my head. It won’t go away. I’ve got it now.”
He headed uptown. We went down. “He is truly touched,” said Joel, shaking his head with something akin to awe. “How does he do it? No, don’t tell me.”
Joel meant something to do with the Muse, the Force, a mysterious source of inspiration, something that couldn’t really be explained without killing it. One thing Lee had said at dinner stuck in my mind. It was the exact opposite of something he’d said forty-eight hours before, when he argued that characters don’t exist and only the writer and the reader are real. There was talk of movies and deals and certain actors playing the part of Reacher, and Lee was saying that none of the above really impinged on him too much when it came to the actual writing. “You have got to remember: REACHER IS REAL. HE EXISTS. THIS IS WHAT HE DOES.”
All Lee had to do was fashion the duplicate bolt.
ONE THOUSAND WORDS
IT WAS THE DAY of the thousand words. I was back on the couch, looking over Lee’s shoulder while occasionally a photographer looked over my shoulder. So I think I knew how he felt. Actually, it felt fine and so long as you were focused on the job you could just about bracket it out.
Lee was sitting in front of his desk rubbing his hands. “Down to work, then,” he said. “I’m done with prevaricating.”
We’d already gone for a pizza. Drunk lots of coffee. We were fully fueled. No more excuses. It was shortly before two, the afternoon of December 19, 2014. Leather jacket, denims, zip-up black boots.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “Where’s my pack of cigarettes? Blimey, that was a close one.” He came back from the kitchen with a fresh pack of Camels in his hand, noticed the photographer wedging herself into a cupboard, trying to get an angle. “You know when they took that author’s photograph of me, the woman took two hours with the makeup—German she was—and even then she says, ‘Don’t worry, Photoshop works wonders.’ ” And you know what, I really don’t worry!”
“Au naturel,” I said.
“I’m not wearing shorts though,” he said. Firmly. Just in case there was any notion of him wearing shorts. “My legs are too thin. I look like Olive Oyl in short pants.”
“There must be some pictures of you as a kid in sho
rts though.”
“I’ll tell you a funny thing about my father.” Lee was flexing his long fingers, looking at the screen, a bit like a pianist warming up for the Tchaikovsky piano concerto. “This was a few years ago, on Facebook, it was Father’s Day, and there was one of those feel-good messages: ‘Just think of one afternoon you spent with your father when you had a lot of fun and good times and now just relive that afternoon. As a homage and testament to the old man.’ And you know what, I couldn’t think of one! Not a single bloody afternoon. Not an hour. Nothing. Blank. He was like a Martian.”
I started reminiscing about all the good times I’d had with my dad, playing soccer, learning to drive, etc., and some of his funny lines, and then I thought, hold on a sec, don’t keep going on about what a nice guy your own father was. “So,” says I, taking refuge in my more clinical quasi-Freudian style, “could Reacher be seen as a kind of substitute father? A bit like Captain Nemo, the père sublime.”
“I reckon all writers are trying to compensate for their unhappy childhoods. Or being sick all the time. Lack of affection. They’re all basket cases of emotional insecurity.”
“Neurotics.”
“And my mother was a monster of martyrdom too, so no help on that side either. I was totally…disliked. My mother said I was dog shit brought in the house on someone’s shoe. Obviously I’m writing with an idea of getting people to love me.”
He was looking back at the end of his last paragraph. I felt like a normal person. But I got over it. Mulling it over. “What car are they driving?” he pondered. “It’s crucial. You know Birmingham used to be dominated by the auto industry. Not Ford but everyone else. You know when Ford brought out the new Cortina in the early 60s?”
“My older brother had one.”
“It was supposed to be the first ‘modern car.’ That’s the way it was marketed. Everyone in Birmingham was panicking. You could get deluxe. GT. Radio. Optional extras. It was said that they had redesigned the steering wheel over and over again—to shave a single penny off the cost. We were divided about it. In Birmingham, I mean. Assuming it was true. The steering wheel was such an important part of the whole thing. The most intimate part of the car, really. And some people were annoyed that commerce was trumping art. The art people hated the commerce. The engineers hated the art people. But I realized even then that art was commerce. They’re one and the same thing. It’s not either-or.”
“How old were you then?”
“I would have been seven or eight. I remember that because it was the year I went to watch Villa for the first time. They won 8–3 against Ipswich. Or possibly Leicester.” He was peering intently at the screen. “ ‘Westwood.’ The L.A. Times journalist [in Make Me]. Got his name from the Villa midfielder. Injured at the moment.”
He put his reading glasses back on. He’d been fiddling around with them. “Here. Look at this. Reacher hears the sound of the plastic chair scraping outside when he’s going to sleep. But it’s nothing. It’s an absence of something. What did you call it? The Book of No? It’s something, but it’s nothing, nothing to worry about. No big deal. One whole page in the paperback edition. Nothing happens, but it dramatizes Reacher. So it’s nothing and something.”
“It’s a nothing that might, maybe, become something. So you’re anticipating.”
“It’s a characteristic of all the Reacher books. We skate past something that will turn out to be super-significant later on. Reacher will be kicking himself for missing it. Or the reader will.”
On the shelf on the right-hand side, next to where I was sitting on the couch, there was a mini-model typewriter, with a mini sheet of paper in it, bearing the words, “Reacher said nothing.”
Lee lit a fresh cigarette. Focused. Fingers on the keys. Poised. Like an organist about to kick off a Bach fugue.
“Dieter Rams shelving!” gasped the photographer. Jené leBlanc. She knew a lot about interior design. The shelves were holding hundreds of CDs behind me and the same shelves ran along the whole of the wall on the left-hand side of the room, covered with Reachers, hardcovers mostly, first editions.
“Vitsoe,” said Lee. “I always admired it. 50s. No real room for wiring of course. But I’ve never been one to let practicality get in the way of looks.”
“Are we putting you off?” I said.
“Okay, we’re doing it,” said Lee, swerving back to his screen. “We’re started.”
“The morning after…” he wrote.
Then he sank into a kind of trance. I didn’t hear from him for a while (or from Jené). He smoked only two cigarettes. Coffee, none. He sighed from time to time, or maybe it was just the sound of smoking. Rubbed his thumb against the palm of his right hand. Typed with two fingers. Scrolled back. A line, a puff. Held his chin. Rubbed it. Ran his hand through his hair. Twice. Folded his arms.
The second cigarette had gone out. The smoke still hanging in the air was enough for him. He went back a few lines to add more material. Went forwards again. Sat back. Breathed out audibly.
“Day’s work is done,” he said. “We’re there.”
It was 3:05 in the afternoon. He hadn’t looked out the window once, that I noticed. Hadn’t jumped up and paced around. It was short but it was solid, practically unpunctuated.
“Why did you stop there?”
“It was the end of a chapter.”
“I could see the name Maloney coming up a lot.”
“They’re looking for Maloney. They found the name in Keever’s room. Remember, it’s on the bookmark. Here’s what happens. First we have Reacher observing nothing happening. Then he is observing nothing happening except the woman in the white dress. So Reacher and Stashower go to the receiving office at the grain silos. A lot of grain but no Maloney. The guy doesn’t know any Maloney. He is enchanted and annoyed with them at the same time. He sends them to the Western Union store. We go to the Western Union—Reacher’s already been past it once—and the guy who is sitting in there is the Cadillac driver.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“I have to nudge the reader into the next chapter. That’s what he’s doing there.”
“Word count today?”
“Round about seven hundred.”
“Huh. Seven hundred.”
“It’s not a thousand, but it got me over the next thousand mark.”
“Interesting ambiguity.”
“Okay, okay,” he confessed, as the Inquisition continued to turn the screw, “I really have no idea what the Cadillac driver is doing there. That’s why I have to stop. Anyway I’m ahead of where I was at this point last year. Then I was shamefully behind. So I had to speed up towards the end.”
“Only two cigarettes.”
“I’m having another one right now,” he said.
He was conscious of where he was in the greater scheme of things on account of flying out to join his wife in England the day after. He was already packing in his mind, with a reasonably clear conscience. And Aston Villa was playing Man U too. “And then there’s this party I have to go to tonight.”
Lee had been invited to a party at the U.N. building on the East Side. By Samantha Power, American ambassador to the U.N. and author of the book A Problem from Hell, all about genocide.
“Jack Reacher joins the United Nations,” I said.
“Her husband is a fan.”
“Another night on the tiles.”
“If I keep this up it’ll kill me stone dead in a week.”
“You’re looking pretty hale and hearty,” I said. “Considering.”
He swiveled around to his keyboard to Google the word “hale.” I was a bit uncertain about the etymology. Cognate with healthy? “Hmmm Old English, Middle English, ah ‘whole.’ That’s what it means.” He was pleased with the discovery. “Leaving nothing out. Funny. I’m leaving nothing in. I’m unhale.”
Which set him off, riffing on words. “I want to use ept. I’ve had it with inept.”
“Ort is a good one,” said Jené. “
O-r-t.”
“Yeah, it’s always popping up in The New York Times crossword.”
Lee recalled a brilliant crossword the day after the Clinton-Dole election. When the compiler could not have known the answer to one of his own questions: “The winner of the election.” It was seven letters. Lee had written down “CLINTON.” It fit. Then it occurred to him to try “BOBDOLE.” “That fit too. With a whole bunch of different words hooked up to it that also fit. Amazing. I really admired that one.”
He had once completed the highly cryptic (London) Times crossword on the train in world-record speed. “There was this bunch of businessmen sitting there. All suited up. And they were all working on it. Conferring, muttering, scratching their heads, struggling a bit. “I got out my Times and a handy pencil. Pretended to think for a moment. Then started scribbling down the answers. I was putting down any old rubbish. But they didn’t know that. Looked fairly pleased with myself. Paused and pondered once or twice, a modest concession to difficulty. But ‘finished’ it, folded my paper, and put it away. Left them open-mouthed.”
He didn’t mind faking it. In fact he loved faking it. It was actually better than the real thing. The illusion of reality. The reality of illusion.
“So,” I said, “what are you wearing to the party?”
“Leather jacket. Boots. Jeans. No tie. Unshaven. Hard man look.” He set his face into a scowl. “I have to put the wind up all these old ambassador types who do nothing but sit around talking all day.”
“Whereas you, on the other hand…?”
“Yeah…I know. Times crossword all over again.”
I was getting my stuff together to leave with Jené when I noticed the small white china plate imprinted with the faces of the young John, Paul, George, and Ringo. It was poised on a wooden stand on a shelf, next to the mini-typewriter. “I met Paul McCartney once. PETA party. We’re both big supporters.”
“I chip in a few quid to those guys,” I said, enthusing. It was my only link to McCartney, except for the nice letter he and Linda had once written thanking me for an article about chickens.