The Plot полностью

It was his fifteenth evening event in as many days, except for the previous Monday night, which he’d spent in a hotel in Milwaukee, eating a terrible burger and answering emails before passing out during Rachel Maddow. He had not been home to his apartment—a new apartment, bought with the astonishing advance he’d received for Crib, and still barely furnished—since late August and it was now the end of September. He was living on hotel burgers, late-night whiskey sours, minibar jelly beans, and sheer strain, trying constantly to conjure up new or at least variant answers to the same questions he’d now been asked hundreds of times, and down—despite all those jelly beans—at least five pounds on a frame that couldn’t afford to lose much more. His agent Matilda (who was not the agent who’d bungled Jake’s first novel and resolutely detached herself from his second!) called every few days to casually ask how far into the next novel he was (answer: not far enough), and a chorus of writers he’d known in graduate school and college and during those New York years were following him like Furies, bombarding him with requests—everything from blurbs for their manuscripts to recommendations for artists’ colonies to requests to be put in touch with Matilda. In short, he could look no farther ahead than a day or two. Farther than that he left to Otis, the liaison Macmillan had sent out on the road with him. It was a strange, almost disembodied way to live.

But also: his exact dream. Back when he’d dreamed, so long ago (not even a year ago!) of being a “successful writer,” had he not pictured these very things? Audiences, stacks of books, that magical “1” beside his name on the fabled list at the back of The New York Times Book Review? He had, of course, but also hoped for the small, human connections that must come to a writer whose work was actually read: opening one’s own book, writing one’s own name, holding it out to a single reader intent on reading it. Was it wrong to want these simple, humble rewards? Hand to hand and brain to brain in the marvelous connection that was written language meeting the power of storytelling? He had these things now. And to think: he had acquired them with only his hard work and his pure imagination.

Plus a story that might not have been entirely his to tell.

Which somebody, somewhere out there, might conceivably know.

All of it, at any time, might be ripped away from him—rip, rip, rip—and so quickly that Jake would find himself helpless and annihilated even before he knew what was happening. Then he would be relegated to the circle of shamed writers forever and without hope of appeal: James Frey, Stephen Glass, Clifford Irving, Greg Mortenson, Jerzy Kosinski …

Jacob Finch Bonner?

“Thank you,” Jake heard himself say as a young man mentioned some nice thing about The Invention of Wonder. “That’s one of my favorites, too.”

The words struck him as somehow familiar, and then he remembered that this exact phrase had been another fancy of his, and for the briefest moment this made him feel so utterly happy. But only the briefest moment. After that, he went back to being terrified again.

On Jake’s own printed schedule he had the following morning off, but on the ride back to the hotel after the last book was signed Otis let him know of a new event, a morning interview for a radio show called Sunrise Seattle.

“Remote?” Jake had asked hopefully.

“No. In studio. It was last minute, but the program director really wants to make this work. She moved the host’s other stuff around to get you. Big fan.”

“Oh. Nice,” Jake said, though it wasn’t, really. He had a midday flight to San Francisco in the afternoon and an appearance at the Castro Theatre that night, then he had to be in Los Angeles the following morning for nearly a week of meetings related to the film adaptation. One of these was a lunch with the director. An A-list director, by anyone’s standard.

KBIK wasn’t far from their hotel and only a few blocks north of the Pike Place Market. Early the next morning, Jake left Otis to retrieve their bags from the taxi and entered the station’s lobby, where their obvious contact was waiting: a woman with gleaming gray hair held back off her face with a frankly girlish headband. He approached her with his hand outstretched and an entirely unnecessary: “I’m Jake Bonner.”

“Jake! Hi!”

They shook. Her hand was long and narrow, like the rest of her. She had bright blue eyes and he noticed that she wore not a lick of makeup. He liked that. Then he noticed that he liked that.

“And you are?”

“Oh! Sorry, I’m Anna Williams. Anna. I mean, please call me Anna. I’m the director of programming. This is so fantastic that we got you to come in. I love your book so much.”

“Well, thanks, that’s so nice of you to say.”

“Really, I couldn’t get it out of my head, the first time I read it.”