The Plot by Jean Korelitz (digital book reader txt) 📗

your—Hello, I was at your reading at—) his chest tightened, and it stayed that way until the message turned out to be from a former classmate or a friend of his mother or a person whose book he’d signed at some bookstore in Michigan, or even a random crazy guy who believed an entity from Alpha Centauri had dictated Crib through an orange peel in Jake’s fruit bowl.

And then there were the writers. Writers requesting mentorship. Writers requesting blurbs. Writers requesting an introduction (with endorsement, obviously) to Matilda, his agent, or Wendy, his editor. Writers wanting to know if he’d read their manuscripts and give an opinion as to whether they should let go of their lifelong dream or “hold on.” Writers wanting him to confirm their theories about discrimination in the publishing world—Anti-Semitism! Sexism! Racism! Ageism!—as the sole and true reason their 800-page experimental non-linear punctuation-free neo-novel had been turned down by every publisher in the country.

In the months after his book was sold, Jake had formally (and gratefully) left behind both his MFA and private coaching work, but he fully understood that he now had a special responsibility to not be an asshole to other writers. Writers who were assholes to other writers were asking for it: social media had seen to that, and social media now claimed a significant portion of his mental bandwidth. He’d been a relatively early adopter on Twitter, that playground of word people, though he seldom posted anything, himself. (What was he supposed to tell his 74 “followers”? Hello from upstate New York, where I didn’t write today!) Facebook had seemed harmless until the 2016 election, when it bombarded him with dubious ads and “push” polls about Hillary Clinton’s supposedly nefarious deeds. Instagram mainly seemed to want him to prepare photogenic meals and frolic with adorable pets, neither of which were a part his Cobleskill existence. But after Crib was purchased and he’d begun sitting down with Macmillan’s publicity and marketing teams, Jake had been prevailed upon to maintain a vigorous presence on these three platforms at least, and given the option of stepping up his activity or handing the task over to a staff member to operate on his behalf. That had been a harder decision than it should have been. He’d certainly seen the appeal of offloading the chore of being tweeted at and DM’d and poked and contacted by every other avenue of connection the internet had dreamed up, but he’d still, in the end, opted to be the one in control, and since the day his book was published he’d been starting his days with a sweep of his social media accounts and a review of the Google alerts he’d set up to trawl the internet—Jacob+ Finch+Bonner, Jake+Bonner, Bonner+Crib, Bonner+Writer, etc. It was time-consuming and irritating drudgery, and crammed with rabbit holes, most of which drilled straight into his personal labyrinth of unhappiness. So why hadn’t he accepted the offer of some Macmillan intern or marketing assistant to do it?

Because of this. Obviously.

You are a thief. We both know it.

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