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

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.

He added it to the Trolls folder. Then, bowing to the inevitable, he made a new folder, just for the three TalentedTom messages. After a moment, he named it Ripley.

With great effort, he returned to the world beyond his own computer and phone and head, and forced himself to acknowledge some of the other things—some of them very nice things—that were also happening, more or less concurrently. Crib had recaptured the number one slot on the paperback bestseller list, thanks to the broadcast of his book club interview with Oprah Winfrey, and Jake had appeared on the cover of the October Poets & Writers (not exactly a periodical on the order of People or Vanity Fair, okay, but this had been a pipe dream of his all the way back to his Wesleyan days). He’d also received an invitation from Bouchercon to do a keynote speech, and he was being updated about an entire English tour organized around the Hay-on-Wye festival.

All good. All good.

And then there was Anna Williams of Seattle, and that was more than good.

Within days of their meeting, he and Anna had settled into what even Jake could not deny was a warm way of communicating with each other, and with the exception of that four-day sojourn on the couch with the cupcakes and the Jameson they’d been in at least daily contact via text. Jake now knew much more about Anna’s daily life in West Seattle, her challenges (small and not-small) at KBIK, the avocado plant she struggled to keep alive in her kitchen window, her nickname for her boss, Randy Johnson, and the personal mantra she’d received from her favorite communications professor at the University of Washington: Nobody else gets to live your life. He knew that she really wanted to get a cat, but her landlord wouldn’t permit it, and that she ate salmon at least four times a week, and that she secretly preferred what came out of her ancient Mr. Coffee machine to anything she could get in Seattle’s rarefied temples to java. He knew that she seemed to care as much about the Jake Bonner who predated the advent of Crib as she did about his current, weirdly bold-faced existence. That meant everything. That was the game changer.

He cleaned up his apartment. He began rewarding himself with a daily Skype call to Seattle: Anna on her front porch, himself at his living room window overlooking Abingdon Square. She started to read the novels he recommended. He started to try the wines she liked. He went back to work on his new novel and put in a solid month of focused effort, which brought him tantalizingly close to a finished first draft. Good things upon good things.

And then, toward the end of October, another message came through the JacobFinchBonner website:

What will Oprah say when she finds out about you? At least James Frey had the decency to steal from himself.

He opened the new folder on his laptop and added this to the others. A few days later, there was a fifth:

I’m on Twitter now. Thought you’d like to know. @TalentedTom

He went to look, and indeed there was a new account, but no actual tweets yet. It had the generic egg for a profile picture and a grand total of zero followers. Its profile bio consisted of one word: Writer.

He had been letting the clock run out without even attempting to identify his opponent. That had not been a good decision. TalentedTom, he suspected, was preparing to enter a new phase, and Jake had no time left to waste.

CHAPTER TWELVEI’m Nobody. Who Are You?

Evan Parker was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. Jake had seen the death notice three years earlier. He had even perused an online memorial page, which, though not terribly well populated, did contain the reminiscences of a dozen people who’d known Parker, and they, certainly, seemed to be under the impression that he was dead. It was a simple matter to find that page again, and he wasn’t at all surprised to see that there had been no additional entries to the memorial since his last visit:

Evan and I grew up together in Rutland. We did baseball and wrestling