Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

“I believe you. Will you be back at the library on Thursday?”

She hesitated. “Yes,” she said, finally, then turned and left.

I WALKED HOMEslowly, eating from a bag of candy I’d picked up at the counter when paying the check, disks of chocolate covered with tiny hard spherical sprinkles which I took pleasure in working out from between my teeth with my tongue and then pulverizing between my molars. It had stopped snowing and the temperature had risen; the snow was heavy and wet. My feet ached from having worn boots for hours. I walked on Front Street until the storefronts began to peter out; there was a brief zone of civic confusion, a block or two of body shops and service stations, before the resumption of the town’s sedate decorousness; the businesses here mostly professional, doctor’s and lawyer’s offices run out of the parlor floors of well-kept individual houses, the occasional beautician or hairdresser. I crossed the road and headed south into my neighborhood.

In a yard I saw a group of boys, around ten years old, squatting and kneeling on the ground. At first I thought they were building a snowman, but as I drew closer I realized that their activity was a much more focused kind of play. They had spread a striped dishtowel on the snow, on which had been arranged a tweezers, a turkey baster, a pair of kitchen tongs, a paring knife, a flashlight, and some sandwich baggies. One boy held a baby monitor that he spoke into, barking unintelligible commands. Another stood as I approached, withdrawing a green-and-orange water pistol from the pocket of his jacket, which he held pointed toward the ground in his right hand, the fingers of his left bracing his right wrist with professional-looking aplomb.

“Crime scene, sir. Please move along.”

“What are you guys doing?”

“Move along, sir.” He gestured slightly with the gun, ushering me in the direction he wished me to take.

A boy used the tweezers to place a twig in one of the sandwich baggies. “Good work, Cowan,” he said. “Sir, we’re collecting DNA evidence for laboratory analysis. We can’t risk compromising the integrity of the scene. Please move along. The community liaison officer is available to take any questions you may have.”

“What if I’m with the media?”

“Who lets these guys in here?” the kid asked, in a wonderful simulation of scripted indignation. “We’ve got work to do.”

“The people have a right to know,” I said.

“Someone escort him out of here,” the kid said, turning back to his work. Cowan, the kid with the water gun, raised the pistol and leveled it at me, tilting his head to sight along the barrel with his dominant eye.

“I’ll have your badge for this,” I said. “I’ll be talking to your commanding officer.”

“You do that,” the other boy said, bending low with the turkey baster. I moved on, toward home.

T HATafternoon I spoke on the phone with Monte Arlecchino. Monte had his assistant, a boy named Shepard, place his calls for him. Their special, ritualized protocol always made me feel, once Shepard had gotten hold of me and then called Monte to the line, as if I were being presented to the Queen.

“Monte, I have Alexander Mulligan the Third in Cherry City on the line. Sandy, Monte is waiting.”

My name’s suffix tends to make me cringe when I hear it spoken aloud. For twenty-seven years, I used it only on official forms. When, after graduation, I saw the Roman numerals trailing behind my name on my college diploma, I contemplated it miserably, as if some blighting error had been lettered onto the document. It was Monte who’d seized on what I’d always viewed as an affectation, as a way to distinguish me when my first book was due to come out. He came on the line.

“Sandy. I want to let you know up front that there’s no truth to the rumor that I’ve been sleeping on the couch in my office.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“It’s been all over the place.”

“It hasn’t been here.”

“ Ogler has been doing an item per day on it. At twelve thirteen p.m. someone calling herself Thalia Halstead posted the alleged dimensions of the couch.”

“How big is it?”

“Seven feet long by three feet wide, allegedly. I will point out that even if that were the case it wouldn’t represent the actual usable area of the couch.”

“Still, a generous couch.”

“There are cushions, armrests, and so on, that aren’t taken into account.”

“The armrests are for the flying monkeys to perch on.”

“Bitch. As if this weren’t a difficult enough time right now. The novel is dead, books are dying, publishing is thrashing on the deck.”

“There’s always e-books.”

“ E -books? We can’t sell audio books. That’s where we find ourselves today: we can’t even sell books that read themselves. I feel like I’m presiding over the beginning of the next ice age. All I have to do is fire the starter’s pistol — sign another dumb memoir, capitulate to the insane demands of another prima donna — and the glaciers begin to move on Manhattan. Everything crushed beneath millions of tons of frozen zilch — every book, every painting, every symphony, every decent restaurant. But what can we do, really? Forty million people watch an Internet video of Darius the Chimp peeling an orange. It’s quick, it’s cute, it’s free. I’m supposed to like it, on some reluctant level I do like it, but when I lie awake at night, which I’ll reemphasize I’m doing in my own apartment, I try to figure out: is this some kind of vandalizing, Dada riposte to art? These people are jungle insurgents and we’re fighting in columns, with muskets.”

“What it is is a vandalizing, Dada riposte to commerce. You have to go to the Times Book Review if you want serious vandalism directed against art.”

“Why aren’t you more worried about this?”

“When they start speculating aloud whether if you chain forty million Shakespeares to forty million oranges will they eventually come up with the collected works of Darius the Chimp, I’ll start worrying.”

“Oh, so you’ll let me worry about it. Terrific. Take a number. Monte will figure it out. Monte’s job is to figure it out. Like this is what I signed on for, saving an industry. Listen, when I started, I just wanted to publish a few good books, have a few laughs. Nobody’s laughing now. Not since the Germans bought us out. People are cringing in the hallways. They’re puking in the toilet stalls before each meeting with sales. Editors who haven’t worn a tie to work in twenty years are showing up in suits, as if that alone will placate our Teutonic overlords. The big decisions have already been made, though, I suspect. There are telling indications. But who can really say for sure? At three a.m. the e-mails start rolling in from Stuttgart. Strictly Kremlinology time. What does this mean? What does that mean? Shepard and I have these fierce, whispered conversations when sane people are supposed to be dancing their cares away at after-hours clubs. But I don’t want to worry you. You have an entirely different job. How’s my new book?”

“Hopelessly stalled.”

“I just wanted to let you know that I have two pages reserved for you in the Fall catalog. They’ve dummied it up, and we didn’t even lorem ipsum it. The pages just have ‘AM3’ across them. The long-awaited follow-up by AM3.”

“It won’t be ready for Fall.”

“ Untitled Novel .”

“Great.”

“Hey, I’m counting on something from you, buddy. I believe that was our understanding. You were going to go out to Michigan and get to work. I was going to sit in New York and patiently wait. You were going to deliver the work. I was going to perceptively edit it. Then we’d publish it to great fanfare. That was the understanding. You would go on a grueling book tour, Shepard and I would arrange to have gourmet fruit baskets waiting for you in your hotel rooms. That was my understanding. This change of plans won’t go unnoticed in Stuttgart.”