“That’s not her job.” He glanced through the pages. He made faces. He looked at me from time to time. “This isn’t how we do things.”
“No, it’s not,” I agreed. “I’m trying some-thing new.”
He started to argue more. Then he looked at the rucksack at my feet and his eyes opened wide and he pushed away from his desk.
“Is that a gun?” he asked.
The righteous answer would be to say, No, I’m just happy to see you. Instead I just said, “Yes.”
“What are you doing with a gun?”
That was the fucking question, wasn’t it? Did I tell him I wasn’t sure, that I had no idea? Or did I go a little deeper with this man who had promised to do his best professionally to protect my work and make me enough money so that I could at least keep a roof over my wife’s head? Had he failed me or had I failed him?
I wasn’t completely mad dog yet. I wasn’t going to pull the trigger on everyone who’d ever crossed me or pissed me off or written a bad review of my work. I wasn’t going to put one in my own ear just so my sales might spike a little the way they did for all dead authors. Besides, who would get the royalties? I wasn’t even sure. I was divorced, I was alone. I had no will or executor. I supposed the rights would go to my brother. He would look down at the paperwork, squinting, and not want to be bothered. Everything would go out of print practically overnight and in twenty years some kid with some taste might be crawling around a second hand shop or thrift store and find one of my titles in the corner of a dark shelf. He’d draw it out and turn to the first page and find the paper had been chewed on by rats and was speckled with spider eggs and fly shit.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I think… I think maybe you should…”
“Don’t worry, I’m not here to punch your ticket. I’ve been on the road for a couple of weeks and needed protection.”
“Protection from what?” he asked.
It was a list that had no beginning or end. “Let’s not get off point. I think you’ll like the new book. I think it will move fast for us. I think it will be a big seller.”
I wasn’t sure how straight I was playing it. Maybe I came off as absurd as I sounded, or maybe I had more faith in those words, whatever they were, than I realized.
He decided to patronize me. He stuck a hand out as if to touch my shoulder but he never made contact. “Okay, that’s good. That’s a good thing. I’m glad you feel that way. If you feel that way, then it must be true. I’m sure something will break for us soon. I’ll have my girl get right on it.”
“Thanks.”
“And I’ll keep pushing the others.”
“You’re the man.”
“Something will break. Keep the faith.”
“Do my best.”
“We’ll get you a nice fat cheque soon.”
“Terrific.”
“Hollywood is always after new material.”
“That’s inspiring.”
“This new book, I’ve got a good feeling about it.”
“Right.”
“Everything is going to turn around. We’ll get you back on top.”
I’d never been on top but I smiled pleasantly at him. When I picked up the rucksack he backed up to the far wall and cringed against the window. The blue sky burned around his silhouette. I wondered if I was angry enough to kick him in the shin. I wondered if I was angry enough to shoot him in the head.
The phone rang and he turned his back on me. I couldn’t hold it against him. It was his training, it was instinct by now. I wasn’t there anymore. Perhaps I never had been.
After a moment he started chuckling, then tittering. “Yes, yes! Right, oh right right!”
I thought of pulling the piece and putting one in his thigh. The underworld heroes of my stories often shot each other in the thick meat of their thighs. It was a way of saying that they were bad but not too bad. That they could handle violence with ease but still kept life in some kind of high regard. I put my hand in the rucksack and got my fist around the revolver. I started to sweat. His laughter made me sick to my stomach. I glanced at the bookcase and wondered which of the names on the spines of the books he was in love with at this moment.
Toppling the bookcase across his office might make a bolder statement than shooting him in the leg, but the case was bolted to the wall.
I walked out past his girl and said goodbye. She wasn’t doing anything. She wasn’t reading or typing or texting or checking voice mail. She was just sitting there, lost inside herself. She didn’t look up. I almost kissed her.
I took the B train up to the Bronx to visit a friend. He’d written a handful of novels to great acclaim, few sales, and little cash, which didn’t faze him much. He had a day job as a counsellor for the Bronx Psychiatric centre. He handled drug addicts, paranoids, firebugs, chronic masturbators, bi-polars, claustrophobes, the disassociatives, the sociopaths, and the depressives.
He’d even interviewed a serial killer once, some handsome murderer who’d managed to carve up thirty-one co-eds because he had a nice smile. Their discussions went for six hours or longer at a clip, face to face in a tiny room. The killer wasn’t chained or cuffed to his chair. My bud had started off taking notes, trying to learn something about the psycho, to see what happened to the guy as a kid, what made him derail, why it had gone so far. At the end of the sessions two weeks later my friend found himself doodling in his notebook, drawing little stick figures without heads.
I started in on a new legal pad and wrote the entire forty-minute ride uptown. I tried to focus on the words and actually read them before I flipped the page, but I was scrawling too fast. I could only catch a few bits and pieces.
When we got into the Bronx I felt a different kind of looming weight above the subway, as if the earth had more iron or bone meal in it. We finally reached the station, and when I came up out of the underground the sun hit me like a diamond cutter’s lamp.
I hated the Bronx. It always felt like Saturday night in Beirut. I turned a corner and the brick strongholds, stone towers, and wrought-iron bars made me feel like I was a prisoner of war being dragged into the court of an enemy castle.
Block after block I passed crumbling apartment buildings and steel-gated liquor stores, gun shops, bodegas, and drug rehab clinics that looked like they were pouring out tin kettles full of methadone.
His house was a fortress with a red steel door. There wasn’t half an inch of green anywhere for a square mile. No trees, lawns, not a blade of grass. Not even any house plants out on the stoops. Even the bodegas weren’t selling anything green.
I had a new kind of respect for the borough. I thought, This is the way I should have done it too. You’d need mortar to get these people out of their homes. They wouldn’t smile pleasantly to the bank men. They would have carried the bank men’s corpses to the river wrapped in plastic and weighted them down with overdue account statements.
I pounded on the door with the side of my fist. There was no knocker or door bell. I thumped and thumped for about a minute. He was either way up high on the third floor listening to jazz CDs or he was working late at the facility. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to sit on his stoop and just wait, but I didn’t want to roam very far away from his place either. I kept forgetting I had a gun.
I sat back against the red door, wary, skittish, turning to face every sound. Something was alive in a nearby alley. A cat or rats were scuttling around. Maybe it was another mid-list writer rolling in garbage holding a leash of twine attached to his dog. I could almost see him there behind the bags of trash, his bloodshot eyes glaring at me.
I checked the windows above me on both sides of the street. Most of the blinds and curtains were drawn. I saw an occasional face glancing down. I pulled the rucksack into my lap. I wondered why I’d gone to see my agent. I knew it was going to go down bad. It had been even worse than expected. It was a fool’s move. This road trip was making me even dumber.
The subway rumbled under the street and shook the flagstones like an earth tremor. I liked the feeling. It moved up through my legs and into my belly and chest and continued on like a death rattle out through my open mouth. I hummed along with it.
I must’ve fallen asleep there. The next thing I knew I was on my back on the stoop staring straight up at him. He hovered over me with the red door wide open.
He stood five three, firm and wiry, but with jowls that made you think he was chubby if you weren’t paying attention. He’d been married three times, always to women who couldn’t speak English. As soon as they figured out the language they cut loose and ran.
“Hey, man,” I said.
“Stand up and come inside. It’s a wonder you weren’t butchered where you lay.”