by Adam Langer
“But how will I know whether or not you like what I’ve written?”
“When I pay you.”
“So, you’ll be reading the manuscript soon?”
“Relax, Conner,” said Dex. “I am not a slow reader, but I do like to read at my own pace. I will finish when it is time for me to finish. Don’t concern yourself with that. I have always paid my writers. And I have always done so after a reasonable number of revisions and within a reasonable time frame. That’s really all you need to know.”
At which point, Dex stopped discussing the details of the contract. Instead, he spoke of the Champagne lunches to which he had treated his other writers, the steak restaurants in various world capitals where he had entertained Truman Capote and John Updike.
“But what will happen to all the books they wrote?” Conner began, then stopped, feeling uneasy with where his thoughts had headed.
“You mean, after I die?” Dex asked.
“For example, yes,” said Conner.
“They will be burned.”
“Burned? Why?”
“Because that’s the agreement,” said Dex. “If something is intended to be private, it should remain so. Would you care for dessert?”
By now, Conner and I had driven along practically every major road in Bloomington. The end of the afternoon was approaching, rain was still falling lightly, and we were back in the parking lot of the Lake Griffy Nature Preserve; Conner’s rented Nissan was the only car still there; the boats were gone; the boat sheds were padlocked.
“How long ago did you have that lunch with Dex and Pavel?” I asked.
“About three months ago,” said Conner. “I suppose I don’t need to tell you what happened next.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, you do.”
“You must not read the newspapers much,” he said.
“Rarely get the chance these days.” That was true. Lately, Sabine and I had been so preoccupied that whole weeks’ worth of the New York Times and Bloomington Times Herald would lie on our front porch before we bothered picking them up, at which point we just chucked them in the recycling box. The only use we ever seemed to get out of the newspaper was for lining the compost bucket or entertaining Beatrice and Ramona with papier-mâché projects.
“Well,” Conner began. He seemed to be settling in for the next chapter of his story, but when I checked the clock in the car, I knew I didn’t have time to hear it. Not then, anyway. Soon, I would have to pick up the kids, and I hadn’t even started dinner.
“Tonight, then,” he said.
“It’ll have to be late,” I told him. In recent weeks, it had been taking even longer than usual to get our daughters to sleep, and I couldn’t just walk out on Sabine without notice. She had papers to grade, lectures to prepare, recommendations and job letters to write. Besides, much as I felt somewhat starved for friendship, I couldn’t help but feel that Conner was taking my availability for granted, as if I could easily change whatever I had scheduled to accommodate his story.
“I still don’t get why you’re telling me all this,” I said.
“I think you already know,” he said.
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask,” I said.
“Well, how about this? You remember the line in that Le Carré book I told you about? ‘Promise me that if ever I find the courage to think like a hero, you will act like a merely decent human being’?”
“Of course.”
“Pretty soon, there may come a time when I’ll have to act like a hero, and if that happens, I may have to ask you to act like a merely decent human being.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “What would I have to do? What are you trying to get me involved in?”
“I’m the one who’s involved, not you,” Conner said. “There’s no risk for you. I’m the one taking the risk by coming here and talking to you.”
“But what would I have to do?”
“Just tell my story. As honestly as you can,” he said. “The way you told Nine Fathers.”
“Couldn’t you tell it yourself?”
“I’m not sure about that,” he said. “Lately, I’ve been getting the feeling I might not be around long enough to tell it, and you’re the only person I can trust with it. You get it, don’t you?”
“Sure.” But I didn’t. Not really. For a long time, among my friends, I have had a reputation for being particularly honest and moral. It’s a reputation I find flattering but inaccurate. I do listen fairly well, though, a talent people often mistake for trustworthiness. Because Conner was moral and honest, he saw those traits reflected in me, when in fact I was and still am a great deal less admirable than he thought. I wasn’t listening to him because I sympathized or shared his opinions; I just liked a good story. I did feel flattered by his friendship, but even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have known how to tell him no.
“Is that the only reason?” I asked. “Because you trust me?”
Conner considered for a moment. “Also because no one knows you,” he said. “No one knows we’re friends. And even if Dex did know, I’m sure he wouldn’t wanna mess with you.”
“With me?” I asked.
“That’s right,” said Conner.
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” I said.
“No sir,” said Conner. “Trust me.”
26
I told Conner we could meet again after I’d told the kids their bedtime stories—Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile for Beatrice, a chapter of All-of-a-Kind Family for Ramona. I had grown to cherish those bedtime story hours more than any other part of the day. They marked the only times I could say unequivocally that I was doing something worthwhile. Watching my children’s enchantment as I either read a story or made up my own, I understood that sometimes all a story needed was one or two people to read or listen to it to make it matter.
But as night fell, I grew leery. What did I really know about Conner other than what he had told me during our interviews? I remembered the first time Beatrice had seen his picture in the aisle of Borders, by now out of business and functioning on a month-to-month lease as Fireworks City. Beatrice had seemed frightened of him, and I wasn’t willing to dismiss her instincts any more than I was willing to dismiss those of my generally easygoing dog, who had growled and barked when he had seen Conner approaching. What did Conner mean about deciding to be a hero and asking if I’d act like a decent human being in return by telling his story? Might he have been going mad? Might he have chosen me to listen not because Dex would never “mess with” me, whatever that was supposed to mean, or that he trusted me with his story, or that he wanted me to tell it in case something happened to him, but rather because deep down he knew I was the only one gullible enough to believe him?
We agreed to meet at the Starlite Drive-In Movie Theatre, a half hour out of town on Old State Route 37, midway between Bloomington and Indianapolis, where he would be catching his flight home. Driving north through Ku Klux Klan country in Martinsville with Miles Davis’s “Elevator to the Gallows” playing loud on my Volvo’s stereo, I worried I would attract attention being a single male attending the drive-in, and that when I got into Conner’s car, or he got into mine, we would look like a couple of guys about to give each other hand jobs. But no one seemed to pay us any mind when I pulled into a space, Conner pulled his Nissan beside mine, and he got into the passenger seat of my car, patted me on the shoulder, and shook my hand.
“Hey buddy, what’s the flick?” he asked.
“Dunno,” I said. “I didn’t even think to check. Let’s take a look.” But the credits were long since over; the movie was already more than halfway through. It was a cops-and-robbers movie—motorcycles, automatic weapons, and a strong hero who was a man of few words—the Rock or Vin Diesel or some other strapping dude I’d never seen in a movie before.
We began by discussing our usual topics—parenthood,
literature, the lousy economy—and when we were done, Conner told the rest of his story. The violence on-screen seemed to underscore the elegant bloodlessness of Conner’s tale of a purloined flash drive and an embargoed manuscript. But then again, as I had told Conner, I hadn’t been reading the newspapers lately, and so I didn’t know where Conner’s story might be leading, and that it might not wind up being so different from the movie on-screen after all.
27
I expected to hear back from Dex in a few weeks, maybe a month at most,” Conner said. His face flickered in the darkness, reflecting the images of the movie. The book he had written was quick and uncomplicated, the sort he imagined one could buy at an airport bookstore and finish during a New York–Chicago flight. For the first few weeks after giving Dex the manuscript, he wondered why he wasn’t hearing back. He obsessed about the sorts of revisions Dex might request, the details he might want Conner to add. Maybe he wouldn’t like the novel at all and would ask Conner to write something else.
Conner became haunted by the possibility he might never be done with the project, that Dex would keep pressing him to write and revise; conceivably, he could be working on the same story for decades. He would never publish a book again, would have to lie to Angie for the rest of his life, and all for the $1.66 million he had been paid so far, a great sum, to be sure, for the little work he’d done, but a less impressive number if spread across his lifetime. He wondered if that was why Salinger, Dudek, and Harper Lee ultimately stopped publishing; maybe they had spent the rest of their lives writing and rewriting for Dex. Nothing in the contracts he had seen would have prevented that from happening. Maybe none of them had been hiding from the public; maybe none of them really wanted to be recluses; maybe all of them had just been hiding from Dex.
Two months passed without a word from Dex or Pavel, and Conner began to think less about The Embargoed Manuscript. He busied himself with home-improvement projects—drywall, plumbing, repainting the nursery; he took Atticus for walks along the Delaware River; he wrote little stories for Atticus and for Angela, never wondering if he would ever publish them. He and Angela began having sex more frequently, trying for a second child. It would be lonely for Atticus in the Poconos, Angela said. She had grown up in a big family in Hamilton Heights; having a younger brother or sister would be good for the boy.
It was just about then, with life seeming more beautiful and filled with possibility than it had since the first days of his marriage, that Dex reappeared.
“He just showed up?” I asked.
“Well, it wasn’t Dex exactly,” said Conner. “I didn’t see him, but he made his presence known. Are you sure you haven’t read the papers?”
28
The Starlite Drive-In was showing a double feature, and the late show was a horror movie, something about a serial killer stalking high school kids. I had always been scared of horror movies. When I was a kid, my mom took me downtown with one of her boyfriends to see an old movie called Laura at the Carnegie Theatre. But before the movie began, there was a trailer for The Last House on the Left. It traumatized me. Truly. So much so that, when we watched Laura, I kept thinking that the movie’s villain was my mom’s boyfriend. And so, even though the audio was off at the drive-in and I wasn’t watching the screen, every so often, some terrifying image would insinuate itself into my peripheral vision—a masked man wielding a knife; that same man plunging the knife into someone’s flesh—and I couldn’t help looking. Meanwhile, Conner didn’t even seem to register the film on the screen; he was too involved in his own story.
“Hey, tell me something,” he said. “Was it a nice day here the day before yesterday?”
“Not really,” I said. “It’s been raining all week.”
“It was gorgeous in the Poconos, man,” said Conner. “The first real warm day of spring. The sky was blue, not a cloud in it. I heard warblers, woodpeckers, nuthatches, all those gorgeous birds singin’ all their gorgeous songs. It was as beautiful a day as it was on 9/11, you remember that day?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I do.” I had been working at Lit, and our office was only a mile and a half north of the World Trade Center. Later that day, even at my apartment all the way uptown, I could smell the smoke and the melting metal, and my dog hadn’t been able to stop panting and whining. At the drive-in, I tried to rid myself of that memory. And I tried not to start at the screams coming from the other cars.
“Yeah,” Conner said. “It was one of those days that was so beautiful, you almost knew it couldn’t last.”
It had been early morning; Conner had arisen before Angela and Atticus to take in the air and chop some firewood. Whenever he woke up early, the newspaper was already there waiting for him, but he rarely read it until later in the day. This time, for some reason, he decided to unwrap the paper. With his ax in one hand and the newspaper in the other, he sat down on the porch swing and unfolded the paper to read the front page. On it was a full-color image of a haggard Margot Hetley, shadows under her eyes; below her picture was a headline: digital pirates make off with new wizard chronicles; publisher and author stand to lose millions.
“Christ,” Conner said to himself as he read the story. “He did it. The motherfucker went and did it.”
As he sat on his porch swing, Conner looked up to see whether anyone was watching him; he saw no one—Atticus and Angela were inside; the nearest neighbor was half a mile away. But as he looked up, he noticed an envelope sticking out of his mailbox, even though it was far too early for the mail to have arrived and he was certain he had taken in the mail the day before.
Conner stood up; he dropped his ax to the ground. He turned the newspaper facedown on the porch swing. His face felt hot, his legs so unsteady he could barely make his way across the porch to his mailbox. He was afraid of what he might find, and yet he already knew what was inside.
III:
Upon
Acceptance
“One crime,” Cole Padgett had taught him. “You’re not a criminal if you commit just one crime. It’s when you commit the second one—that’s when what you are starts changing.”
Conner Joyce, Leap of Fate
29
On the screen at the drive-in, the credits were rolling. Conner had taken his time telling me his story, and now the horror movie was over. All the other customers had driven their cars out of the Starlite parking lot. Only two cars remained—mine and Conner’s.
“What was in the envelope?” I asked.
“I ripped it open,” said Conner. “I expected there would be a letter inside, but there wasn’t—just a check.”
The check was made out to Conner for $833,333.33. On the memo line, Dex had written, “Upon Acceptance.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“You said it, pal,” said Conner. “But there was something else in there too.”
“What?”
“A flash drive.”
“Monogrammed?”
Conner took a long, deep breath. “Yes, my friend, it was.”
As he stood on his porch in the Poconos, Conner held that flash drive in his hand and stared at it, wondering what exactly had happened and what he should do, when the door swung open and Angie appeared. She was holding Atticus in her arms. If Conner had been a more slippery character, one to whom lying came easily, he wouldn’t have panicked. When Angie asked him what he had been looking at, he would have said something like, “Oh, nothing much.” When she asked him what he was reading in the newspaper, he would have said, “Oh, just an article about my old editor; isn’t that freaky?” When she saw him holding the flash drive and asked what it was, he would have said, “Just something I got from those rich folks in Hollywood.” Then, he would have pocketed the flash drive, kissed Angie good morning, and asked her what she wanted for breakfast. He shouldn’t have grabbed the newspaper and hidden the headline, then stormed into the house, demanding, “Why the hell can’t I have at
least a little peace in the morning?” He shouldn’t have made a beeline for the upstairs bathroom and caused a big racket while flushing the damn flash drive down the toilet.
In fact, as he looked back on it, he had done just about everything wrong. He had overreacted to the flash drive and to the note from Dex. He had panicked when he saw the article in the newspaper, and, when Angie asked, “What the hell’s the matter with you, CJ?” he tried too hard to act as though everything were normal. He explained way too much. He said he had eaten “something weird” at dinner and that’s why he had run to the john. And, after he had made a plane reservation to Chicago, a fairly odd thing to do if he was, as he claimed, going to meet with “those Hollywood guys,” he talked more than ever about the “writing project” and how “demanding” the aforementioned Hollywood guys were.
Maybe he should have just stayed put, maybe he should have just read the article in the paper, destroyed the flash drive, cashed the check, and moved on with his life. Dex and Pavel had obviously used his novel to steal the flash drive, but nothing connected Conner to the crime. When John Lennon was murdered, a copy of Catcher in the Rye was in Mark David Chapman’s pocket, yet no one ever accused J. D. Salinger of being his accomplice. All Conner had thought he was doing was writing a story, getting every detail right, the same thing he had done with every one of his books. He wondered if this had always been Dex’s intention or if Dex had just read his book and had seen an opportunity. He felt responsible for the theft, and at the same time, he felt a bit awed by his own mind. He had read stories about people who turned their dreams into reality; it was a recurring theme in Jarosław Dudek’s novel, poems, and memoirs. Had Dex used all of his writers for this purpose? Had he commissioned crime novels from every writer he met, then committed those crimes, or had Conner been the first one, just lucky enough to write the crime that Dex could actually commit? He had to see Dex again, not only to discover the answers to these questions but to answer the new questions he had about himself. Was this who he truly was? Was there all that much difference between conceiving a crime and committing it? Was he good at this?