Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  A few miles later, I turned onto Kensington High Street, which was bereft of its usual bustle. Sooty snow had already been plowed from the street and was piled onto the sidewalk. As I walked, I felt a sudden throe of extreme existential hollowness and stopped and examined myself in the ice-glazed window of a shoe store. I had on my backpack, gloves, sunglasses, and scarf. Something crucial was missing though. I resumed walking, feeling even more hollow than before, and realized what it was: my laptop. I was suffering from Phantom Limb Syndrome.

  The library was open.

  I sat down at a table on the second floor, took out my pens and pads, and wrote the words “Things were very bad then but still we carried on.” I looked at it, crossed it out. Now, just because I’d begun the Troika that way so many years ago, why did it still have to begin the same way? I could write it another way—Martin Tilford be damned—so I wrote: “We still carried on then but . . .”

  As I toyed around with rearranging the words, I noticed another table, the long side of which was flush against a wall. There were computers on this table and library users were accessing the Internet. I swallowed and could almost hear cards shuffling and chips clattering and I felt like a coiled-up cobra hearing the first chirps of a snake charmer’s flute.

  I was writing “Then things were very bad but . . .” (and thinking of “Ishmael, call me.”) when my cell phone buzzed: it was, I saw, someone from Norwich Cairn. I couldn’t take the call in the library, so I put my coat on, went outside—it was snowing again—and played the message.

  “Hello, Frank, this is Penelope Something calling from Norwich Cairn. Yes, you’re on for a reading. Be at the Leaky Crank Pub at eight o’clock Thursday night. It’s a very nice venue. Ask for Nigel Somebody and he’ll tell you what to do. We put a rather large advert in The Pavement newspaper last week. Also, Greg had to leave town at the last moment to attend the Odense Book Fair for a fortnight and I’m afraid he can’t have lunch with you. Cheers.”

  A reading. Thursday night. My first reading ever. Gulp.

  Back in the library I began to wonder which book I should read from at the Leaky Crank. There was the funny, poignant London chapter from Plague, but the locals might be offended when ill Londoners began dropping like flies. There was any section of Love, but that book died a quiet death in the stores and might die a second, much louder death aloud. When I started shuffling, in my mind, through the pages of Dead on Arrival, I nearly shot out of my chair when I realized: Holy shit, I don’t have a book to read from!!!

  I stuffed my pads and pens back into my backpack and flew down the stairs and ran out the door. Into the snow to head east, where all the bookstores were.

  As I walked through the biting wind, I worked out the time frame: if I called Cynthia and she sent a book to me via FedEx it probably wouldn’t get to London in time. I went to every single bookshop on the way, and when I got to Charing Cross Road I hit every bookstore there, too.

  At Foyle’s Bookshop I told a man behind the counter, “Look, I’m desperate here. I need to get a copy of any book by the American author Frank Dixon as soon as possible.”

  He returned two minutes later triumphantly bearing The Shore Road Mystery and The Mark on the Door, and I told him that I was interested in the other Frank W. Dixon, whereupon he handed me a little pink form and I filled in the name of the books I wanted and the author’s name. Then I had to fill in my own name and phone number. It was embarrassing to me that Frank Dixon was this desperate to read the complete works of Frank Dixon so I jotted down the name Lonnie Beale.

  “Can you get this to me no later than tomorrow afternoon?” I asked.

  “We will do what we can,” he promised me unpromisingly.

  My pink form was spiked on top of forty others, and it occurred to me that they might do what they can but they were also doing it for dozens of other people and I didn’t stand a chance.

  I walked up to Bloomsbury, all the while afraid my eyelids were going to freeze open, to the Regent’s Park area, then east to Clerkenwell, where a good portion of Book 2 of the American Nightmare Trilogy takes place and where I could find no bookstore.

  I stopped inside another Internet café somewhere and went online, hoping that some insane fan of mine had posted a chapter or two of Love. There were no chapters and, I was quickly reminded, there were no fans either.

  I logged on to the Galaxy and found Boca Barbie at a table. “Hey, Chip,” she asked me, “have you seen Kiss around today?” I told her I hadn’t played poker for a while and she said: :). A few minutes later APG and I were at a private table. I didn’t play. “I thought you weren’t bringing a laptop!” she said and I explained my whereabouts and why.

  I told her that I had a reading and she told me how proud she was of me. When I asked her if she was still coming she said and I quote: “I’m with you already, Chip, and our bodies are spent and raw and we cannot tear ourselves apart from each other. We’re animals!”

  I called home that night and told Wifey, who was at work, my predicament.

  “So where were you,” she asked, “when it occurred to you that you didn’t have a book?”

  “In the library. Why?”

  “Where were you again, Frankie?”

  “In a library.” A library!

  Just to be safe I gave her the hotel’s fax number and told her to fax Chapter 13 of Plague and any ten pages of Love. “I’m on it!” she said, eager to help.

  The following day I would visit every library in London. If that didn’t work, maybe Foyle’s would come up with a copy. I looked out the window and saw snow pouring down again. I couldn’t see anything but snow, and this time it didn’t look like it was going to stop.

  The next day the libraries were closed again: London had gotten pelted by fifteen more inches of snow and it was eight degrees out. Cars were buried within bone-white monoliths of powder; buses and the tube weren’t running. Stiff Upper Lip City’s lips had frozen stiff.

  True to her word, Cynthia faxed me what I’d requested. But it hadn’t come through properly. The pages were smeared and black and the man at the front desk told me the hotel’s fax machine had been having problems “for quite some time now.”

  When I left the hotel the next day I thought: I could just recite the first chapter of the Trilogy by heart . . . if it comes to that. I knew I could pull it off.

  My first stop was the Kensington library. A librarian told me they did have Plague but it was out presently on loan. “Do you have Love: A Horror Story?” I asked her. She checked and said no. I asked her when Plague was due back and she said a week ago. I asked her for a list of every library in central London and quickly got one. When I walked out of the building each and every snowflake looked like typewriter letters falling around me . . . they converged in the air to form the words of Book 1 of the Trilogy and I was being deluged in slo-mo by sentences, paragraphs and chapters.

  I lumbered over to Foyle’s—in vain I tried every library en route—and a different but very similar man there told me they hadn’t gotten around to my request yet. “I need that book,” I said, “in any way, shape, or form that you can get it.” The spike had tripled with pink slips, I saw. “Please,” I said, offering him twenty quid, “can you put my request on the top?”

  No, he could not. But at least he didn’t keep the money.

  I looked at the list of libraries and began walking. West, toward Notting Hill. In some places the snow was white, in others, black or gray, and the footing was either crunchy or icy. The quaint Georgian buildings around Regent’s Park and Bayswater looked like toy houses, cars skidded or crawled along for fear of skidding, the bitter wind whistled in every direction. Tomorrow night I would—or wouldn’t—read from a book, then it was back to writing again. I bent forward as I turned onto Moscow Road . . . somewhere up ahead was a library. The wind died down, but when I stood up straight, I lost my footing—it was as if an incompetent kiddie-birthday-party magician had pulled the ground from under my feet. I fell hard
on my knee and thigh and very quickly seven or eight hooded, goose-downed people were looming over me, making sure I was conscious (I was) and hadn’t broken anything (I wasn’t so sure).

  “I’m all right,” I said, looking up at their blurred forms and at the sky above them.

  “That’s going to hurt a lot more tomorrow,” one of them warned me.

  They helped me up—I nearly fell over again—and then politely shoved me on my way, but the pain in my knee was shooting currents of abject misery down to my toes and up to my neck.

  No library had my books. Either the books were out or they’d never had them.

  I limped back toward Brompton Road and, on the way home, every step down into the snow sent a wicked jolt through the leg. But I bought a lamp-size bottle of Scotch on the way. In my room I looked at my knee and thought of going to the hospital, but by the time I drank a quarter of the bottle I couldn’t make it to the door and my knee wasn’t hurting that much anymore. I called Wifey at work and told her that no library had my books and that the fax hadn’t come through.

  “You’re going to have to e-mail me the book,” I slurred, “just as like a contingency plan thing.” I was so hungry while I was talking that I was chewing on the pillowcase. “Send me Dead on Arrival.” She didn’t utter a peep so I reminded her, “It’s the last book I wrote. It’s on my desktop computer.”

  I gave her my password and then she said, “Hey, did you hear about Harry Carver?”

  “No, what about him?”

  “He sold a screenplay! For almost a million dollars!”

  He sold a screenplay . . . a million dollars. Just as I was digesting that, just as I was realizing that this was the screenplay Harry had wanted me to write with him, Cynthia added, “And he wrote it with your other friend Lonnie! Did you know that?”

  No, I told her just before saying good-bye, I had no idea.

  (No wonder I hadn’t been able to contact either one of them when I was in Las Vegas: they were probably together writing the screenplay . . . in Las Vegas.)

  The bruise on my leg was the shape and color of a map of Greenland, but I was able to somehow make it to the hallway vending machine. I got some ice, limped back to my room, and applied it to my leg and my Scotch. I giggled drunkenly: the injury had been caused by ice and here I was applying ice. I drank some more whiskey and giggled again.

  When I woke up the next morning, a note on Royal Brompton Hotel stationery had been slipped under the door. It must have been written by the night desk guy, whose spelling made Ross F. Carpenter look like a four-time Scripps Howard champion: “Foils cold and they sad they have copies of yor book.”

  London was mostly ice now. Trees and traffic lights had fallen onto streets and parked cars from the weight of ice, and a water main in St. James had burst and you could skate on the streets there. All of Whitehall Street, empty and silent and tomblike, looked as if it had been hosed down with crystal.

  Foyle’s was open and mostly empty and I showed yet another different but entirely similar man there my pink form. He dis­appeared up some steps. If I read from Love the audience would be putty in my hands. I would kill. The London chapter of Plague Boy was a bit dicey but would still go over well. And I’d have all of DOA to read from. The man was coming back down the stairs, his hands full of paperbacks.

  “Here they are,” he said. “The complete works of Frank W. Dixon.”

  In his hands were books in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese. These weren’t my books! But wait . . . they were my books! These Brits had gotten me the foreign language editions of every book I’d ever had published, but there was no English to be seen. I stood there, my leg aching, my stomach yearning for just a teaspoon of sawdust, and thumbed through a Japanese paperback and shook my head.

  “This is it?” I asked. “Nothing in English?”

  “No, Mr. Beale.”

  I picked up the German edition of Plague and leafed through it. Could he see my heart sinking? Could he tell how much I despised him? Did he know any German translators?

  I bought the books, walked out, and threw them into the first trashcan I found, and even the jaws of that trashcan dripped with jagged fangs of ice.

  I walked west, along Oxford Street, then went down through Kensington Gardens, which was lonely, sibilant, and fjordlike. Under the leaden sky the iced-over Serpentine and Round Pond looked as if they’d been filled with concrete, and the mostly black snow crunched underfoot. Back at the Kensington library, I asked the same librarian as the day before if the deadbeat who’d taken out Plague had returned it. No, the deadbeat had not.

  It was coming on one o’clock and I called Wifey in New York. Seven hours to the reading. Yes, she told me, she had e-mailed DOA. I thanked her and she wished me luck. I thanked her again and she came up with another brilliant idea: go to the Norwich Cairn offices . . . they’d probably have copies of my books. In English.

  The Norwich Cairn offices were all the way in Shoreditch, many miles away, and so I limped back east. (All this walking was great for me . . . my pants were hanging looser. )

  Norwich Cairn occupied three floors of a remorselessly non­descript flat-brick building. For an edifice so melancholy, though, everything inside was modern and bright. The carpets were orange, the furniture was magenta and sea foam. In the lobby Norwich Cairn’s current titles were framed and hung on the wall; there were dozens of them and I remembered how proud I was when one of my books was up there, too.

  “Hi,” I said to the waify brunette receptionist, “my name is Frank Dixon and . . .”

  I wanted her to shriek and hold her hands to her cheeks and say Oh crikey it’s you I read both of your books and I luvved them they were so fanTAStic I nearly pissed me knickers! But she looked at me vacantly and waited for me to continue.

  I told her that Norwich Cairn had published two of my books. No change of expression. I told her I had a reading tonight that Greg Nolan had arranged . . . she lifted an eyebrow a tenth of an inch. I told her that Penelope Somebody had contacted me and I needed to see her right away.

  She picked up her phone and I looked through the glass wall behind her, at editors, designers, salespeople, and assistants walking in the hallway, smiling at or ignoring each other. A minute later Penelope was standing right in front of me.

  “Frank Dixon!” she said when she saw me.

  My coat and hood were still on and I think my eyelashes were dripping melting ice.

  I told her I had no book to read from, although I added that my wife had e-mailed me my latest one. “A book,” I simply had to get in, “that Greg refuses to read.” She told me to sit down and wait and that she’d go get the UK editions of Plague and Love.

  I sat and waited and thought of hamburgers, barbecued ribs, General Tso, hot apple pie. When Artsy got here I was going to take her out to the best places . . . I had already made reservations at six different restaurants, all of them Michelin-starred.

  Penelope came back and told me I was out of luck. Norwich Cairn had, she said, “pulped both books.” What does that mean? I asked her, picturing a tall glass of orange juice with my books sinking toward the bottom. She explained that the books were out of print and Norwich had handed over the unsold copies for recycling.

  “But you’re okay for the reading tonight?” she asked me.

  I stood and thought about it and, as I did so, saw behind the glass behind the receptionist a man who looked just like Greg Nolan, who was supposed to be at the Odense Book Fair, walk past, coming out of one office and going into another.

  “We want you to read there,” she said. “People would get interested in you again.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The Odense Book Fair? Really? Was there actually such a thing?

  It took three minutes to lay a guilt trip on me about the ad for the reading they’d placed in The Pavement before I promised her I’d go through with it.

  “And afterwards,” she said, “I really do think you ought to see a doctor.”


  I must have looked like hell because I hadn’t even told her anything was wrong.

  I had to find a computer-and-printer setup to download DOA and knew just where to go: a library with internet access. It was four lousy goddam degrees outside, not including the wind chill, but I hit three libraries and four pubs. But it was like dominoes falling: the libraries were closing one by one, due to the cold weather, just as I hit them. The pubs, however, were not.

  I walked back through the park. By 5 p.m. I was on Tottenham Court Road, where I got gouged for a laptop and small printer. I brought my new purchases into a pub in Soho and brooded over three more drinks—it was the happy hour and the place got respectably crowded considering it was now zero degrees out. I’m going to get the three of us a taxi, I slurred to my wounded and my good leg, and take us home. Enough of this walking! It must have been a sign I’d been drinking a lot that even my thoughts were slurred. But I couldn’t find a taxi and had to drag the laptop and printer a few more miles through the flesh-splitting wind.

  Back at the hotel I told the desk clerk to arrange a taxi for me promptly at 7:30.

  It took me only five minutes to set up my account and get things going. The problem, though, was the Internet. Having courageously insisted on a hotel with no wifi, I was reduced to using the molasses-like modem connection and the phone’s data port. Oh God, what if Cynthia screwed up? What if she hadn’t sent me DOA but only thought she had?! I knew I could just recite any part of the Trilogy from memory and hopefully wow the trousers off the crowd. When I logged on to my e-mail there it was: Dead on Arrival, both as a Word document and a PDF.