The Plot полностью

And yet, the messenger that was “TalentedTom@gmail.com” had not made his move on the open battlefields of Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or been netted by a Google alert. This guy hadn’t gone public at all; instead, he’d opted for the more private transom provided on Jake’s website. Was there some implicit negotiation here: Deal with me now, by this single vector, or deal with me later, everywhere? Or was it a shot across his private bow, a warning to brace for some imminent Battle of Trafalgar?

Jake had known, from that first moment in the back of the car to the Seattle airport, that this was no random message, and TalentedTom was no jealous novelist or disappointed reader or even troubled advocate of the Alpha Centaura/orange peel (or comparable!) origin story of his famous novel. Many years earlier, the adjective “talented” had been bound in eternal, indelible symbiosis to the name “Tom” by one Patricia Highsmith, forever augmenting its meaning to include a certain form of self-preservation and extreme lack of regard for others. That particular talented Tom had also happened to be a murderer. And what was his surname?

Ripley.

As in: Ripley. Where he and Evan Parker had so fatefully crossed paths.

The message was violently clear: whoever TalentedTom was, he knew. And he wanted Jake to know that he knew. And he wanted Jake to know that he meant business.

The person was a single click of the Return button away, but the notion of opening that aperture between the two of them was fraught with danger. Responding meant that Jake was afraid, that he took the accusation seriously, that TalentedTom, whoever he was, deserved the dignity of recognition. And showing even a tiny portion of himself to this malevolent stranger frightened Jake more than the diffuse and horrible notion of what might come next.

So, once again, he did not respond. Instead, he shakily consigned this second communiqué to the same place its predecessor was languishing, a folder on his laptop he’d labeled “Trolls.” (This had in fact been established fully six months earlier, and already housed a few dozen illiterate attacks on Crib, no fewer than three of which accused him of being a member of the “Deep State,” and a handful of emails from someone in Texas that referenced the “blood-brain barrier,” which Jake had evidently crossed, or which had been crossed within him—the messages were, by their very nature, confounding.) But even as he did this he knew it was its own pointless gesture; the TalentedTom communications were different. Whoever he was, this person had managed to become, in the blink of an eye, among the most significant in Jake’s life. And certainly the most terrifying.

Within minutes of receiving this second message Jake had powered off his phone, unplugged his router, and assumed a fetal position on the grubby couch he’d been hauling around since college, and there he remained for the following four days, working his way through a dozen cupcakes from Magnolia on Bleecker Street (some of them, at least, had healthy green icing) and the congratulatory bottle of Jameson that Matilda had sent after the film sale. There were, in these blurry hours, interludes of blissful numbness in which he actually forgot what was happening, but many more of sheer anguish during which he parsed and projected the many ways in which it could all be about to unfold: the various humiliations awaiting him, the revulsion of every single person he’d ever known, envied, felt superior to, had a crush on, or—lately—been in business with. At certain moments, and as if to usher in the inevitable and at least get it over with, he composed his own media campaign of punishing self-accusations, declaiming his crimes to the world. At other points he wrote himself long and rambling speeches of justification, and even longer and more rambling apologies. None of it even made a dent in his whirling, howling terror.

When Jake did, finally, surface, it wasn’t because he’d managed to achieve some perspective or make anything resembling a plan; it was because he’d finished the whiskey and the cupcakes and developed a strong suspicion that the bad new smell he’d lately become aware of was coming from inside the apartment. After he’d opened a window, cleared the dishes away, and hauled himself through the shower, he reconnected his phone and laptop to the world and found a dozen increasingly concerned texts from his parents, a faux-cheerful email from Matilda, inquiring (again!) about the new book, and over two hundred additional messages requiring serious attention, including a third from TalentedTom@gmail.com:

I know you stole your “novel” and I know who you stole it from.

For some reason, that “novel” just put him over the edge.