The Plot полностью

Since that day in Seattle and especially since Anna had crossed the country to join him in New York, Jake had been bracing himself for the day his girlfriend finally mentioned the Twitter posts, perhaps with an entirely understandable demand to know why he hadn’t already told her about them. Anna was no Luddite, obviously—she worked in media!—but having established her Facebook and Instagram outposts as a way for her missing sister and aunt to reach her, those two accounts had pretty much ossified from lack of use. The Facebook profile listed about twenty friends, a link to Anna’s University of Washington class page, and a pinned endorsement for Rick Larson’s 2016 congressional run. The Instagram account’s first and only post dated to 2015 and featured—ah, the cliché of it—a latte art pine tree. One of her jobs at the podcast studio was to manage its own Instagram account, posting photographs of the various hosts and guests using the facility, but she apparently had no wish to chase personal likes, shares, retweets, or followers, and she certainly wasn’t monitoring the peaks and valleys of his online reputation. Anna, it was obvious, preferred the real world, and the real-life face-to-face interactions that took place in it: eating good food, drinking good wine, sweating on a yoga mat in a room crowded with physical bodies.

Still, there was always the uncomfortable possibility that someone, knowing she lived with the author of Crib, might mention an accusation or an attack they’d seen floating by on their own feed, or politely ask how Jake was holding up given, you know, that thing that was happening. Every day might be a day the infection of @TalentedTom crossed the membrane into his actual life and his actual relationship. Every night might be a night she suddenly said: “Oh hey, somebody sent me this weird tweet about you.” So far it hadn’t happened. When Anna came home from work, or met him for dinner after yoga, or spent the day with him wandering the city, their talk was about anything and everything but the most consequential thing in Jake’s life. Apart from her, of course.

Each morning after she left for work he sat paralyzed at his desk clicking back and forth from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, Googling himself every hour or so to see if anything had broken through, taking the temperature of his own alarm to see whether he was afraid, or merely afraid of being afraid. Each chime announcing a new email in his in-box made him jump, as did each beep of his Twitter alert and the bell Instagram rang when someone tagged him.

I know I’m the last person on the planet to read #Crib @Jacob-FinchBonner, but I wanna thank everyone for NOT TELLING ME WHAT HAPPENS COS I WAS LIKE WHAAAAAA????!

Recommended by Sammy’s mom: #Pachenko (sp?), #TheOrphan-Train, #Crib. Which do I read first?

Finished crib by @jacobfinchbonner. It wuz eh. Next: #thegoldfinch (man its loooooong)

He thought more than once of hiring a professional (or maybe just somebody’s teenage kid) to try to figure out who owned the Twitter account, or TalentedTom@gmail.com, or at least what general part of the world these messages were coming from, but the idea of bringing another person into his personal hell felt impossible. He thought of filing some kind of complaint with Twitter, but Twitter had allowed a president to suggest female senators were giving him blowjobs in exchange for his support—did he really think the platform would lift a finger to help him? At the end of the day he couldn’t bring himself to do anything at all: direct, indirect, or even just evasive. Instead, he retreated again and again into a baseless idea that if he continued to ignore this ordeal it would one day, somehow, cease to be real, and when that came to pass he would seamlessly return to a version of his life in which no one—not his parents, or his agent, or his publishers, or his thousands upon thousands of readers, or Anna—had any reason to suspect what he’d done. Each morning he woke into some utterly irrational notion that it might all just … stop, but then a new speck of darkness would emerge from his computer screen and he would find himself crouching before some terrible approaching wave, waiting to drown.

Then, in February, Jake noticed that the Twitter bio included a new link to Facebook. With a now familiar surge of dread, he clicked on the link:

Name: Tom Talent

Works at: The Restoration of Justice in Fiction

Studied at: Ripley College

Lives In: Anytown, USA

From: Rutland, VT

Friends: 0

His maiden post was short, definitely not sweet, and thoroughly to the point:

Blindsided by that big twist in Crib? Here’s another one: Jacob Finch Bonner stole his novel from another writer.

And for some reason Jake would never understand, this was the post that began, at last, to metastasize.

At first, the responses were muted, dismissive, even scolding:

WTF?