Monthly Archives: August 2012

Ebook Originals

Posted on by
1

It appears that major publishers are thinking about entering the world of ebook originals — books that are sold only in digital editions.

One such book that I’m aware of is The Rent Is Too Damn High by Matthew Yglesias, published by Simon & Schuster.  It’s just too short (about 64 pages) to be worth printing and distributing.  On the other hand, Sam Harris’s Free Will (which I will report on before long) is just slightly longer, and it is available as a paperback for $9.99.  Pretty expensive for the amount of content!  His essay Lying, which I talked about here, is available as a Kindle single, which is a very interesting model for making short-form content like that available. (By the way, some authors do quite well with their Kindle singles.)

I can see the attraction to publishers of putting out their authors’ shorter content as ebook originals — it makes the authors happy, keeps their names in the public’s consciousness, and eliminates most production costs.  But now my friend Craig Shaw Gardner reports that he may soon be signing a deal with Ace to write one of his trademarked funny-fantasy trilogies as ebook originals.  That’s a model I’m still puzzling over.

For the publisher, I guess the advantage is that it’s low risk.  Their costs go way down if they don’t have to print, warehouse, and ship hardcopy books.  Publishing becomes mostly a marketing effort (although they still have to create a cover and do their usual editorial work).  If the ebooks become really successful, they can always come out with a print edition.  But they’re giving up their major asset — their access to shelf space in bookstores.

For the author, I guess the advantage is that you get some money up front, and you don’t have to spend your own money on covers and other production costs.  And conceivably the publisher can do a better job of marketing your book than you can on your own (although I have my doubts).  But in return you’re giving up a large chunk of the royalties you’d get if you went the ebook self-publishing route.

Is it worth it?  Ace and Craig seem to think so.  So I wish them luck!  Also, prepare to be entertained!  I have read a chunk of the first book in manuscript, and I can say that, once you meet Bob the Horse, you will never forget him!

Bad Reviews 2: The Alix Ohlin Story

Posted on by
3

Here we pondered a bad review of Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing in the New York Times.

The latest kerfluffle is about an especially scathing review in the Times of Alix Ohlin’s latest books — a novel called Inside and a volume of short stories, Signs and Wonders. I’ve never heard of Ohlin, but her books have A-list publishers — Knopf and Viking — and bunches of good reviews and blurbs.  The review is by William Giraldi, whom I’ve also never heard of.  He’s published a novel called Busy Monsters.  So what’s up?  The review is online, and here’s the first paragraph:

There are two species of novelist: one writes as if the world is a known locale that requires dutiful reporting, the other as if the world has yet to be made. The former enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language, while the latter believes with Thoreau that “this world is but canvas to our imaginations,” that the only worthy assertion of imagination occurs by way of linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity. You close “Don Quixote” and “Tristram Shandy,” “Middlemarch” and “Augie March,” and the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before, an “eternal and irrepressible freshness,” in Pound’s apt phrase. His definition of literature is among the best we have: “Language charged with meaning.” How charged was the last novel you read?

That paragraph was written by a guy who is trying way too hard.  To all you would-be writers out there: Take my advice and never use a phrase like “the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before.”  Your readers will be forever grateful.

Giraldi’s complaint about Ohlin’s work is that it “enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language.”  And he gives plenty of examples.  She describes teeth as white; people’s hearts sink and sing; she uses clichés like “Nice guys finish last.”

So anyway, thanks to Amazon, I was able to take a look inside Inside.  And the

Alix Ohlin, apparently dreaming up banal things to write

first chapter was, well, pretty good.  She sets up an interesting situation and draws a couple of interesting characters.  A young female psychotherapist goes out cross-country skiing and literally runs into a guy who has apparently just tried to hang himself.  She takes him to the hospital; she takes him back to his apartment afterwards; she takes an interest.  The dialog is snappy and occasionally unexpected, and the language was cliché-free; no one’s teeth are white in Chapter 1.

So then I looked at Giraldi’s novel. It too has good reviews and a mainstream publisher.  But he tries too hard.  He describes someone as “heaving his psychosis our way, sending bow-tied packages, soilsome letters, and text messages to the bestial effect of, If you marry that baboon, I’ll end all our lives.”  Soilsome?  WordPress’s spellchecker doesn’t recognize that word, and neither do I.

His novel is probably fine, too — it just inhabits a different universe from Ohlin’s.  He will claim it’s a better universe; he’ll claim he has Thoreau and Pound on his side (neither of whom wrote any novels that I can recall).

So why would the New York Times assign Ohlin’s books to be reviewed by someone you can be reasonably confident is going to hate them?  Dunno.  Why bother?  And, if you’re Giraldi, why write a review that makes you look like a dick? How is this going to help your career?

Here’s a balanced article in Salon about how to write a bad review. It ends with this advice:

In the end, the literary world is basically a small city. We could maybe all comfortably occupy Madison, Wisc. And so a book review is not being read in a vacuum: when you angrily eviscerate somebody’s work, you are shitting where you eat. It is important both to support each other and criticize each other, and to find ways to do both, respectfully and constructively. This means thinking things through before you open your piehole, whether it’s on Twitter or in the pages of the Times. Is that so hard?

Sounds right to me.

In which I report on the 24th best English-language novel of the 20th century

Posted on by
3

That would be Winesburg, Ohio, as determined by the board of the Modern Library. It was recommended by my very fine commenter Col, so how could I go wrong?  (Also, it’s short!)

Let’s make one obvious point right off the bat: If I were the writer whose novel came in at position 101 on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list, I would be lodging a formal complaint with the international governing body of top 100 lists, because Winesburg, Ohio isn’t a novel; it’s a short story cycle.  I have nothing against short story cycles — The Martian Chronicles is a good one — but they bypass problems that novels have to solve — like sustaining a narrative arc, like introducing characters at the appropriate time and developing them in sufficient detail to justify their roles.  No one is going to admire Winesburg, Ohio for its plot, because it ain’t got any.

Sherwood Anderson: Does this guy look happy to you?

What it has are lots of small-town turn-of-the-century characters afflicted with “vague hungers and secret unnamable desires.”  People who go for long walks in the dark and the rain pondering the waste of their lives.  People who dream of leaving and never leave.  People who leave, then return as failures.  People who leave and are never heard of again.  People who long to make a connection with other people, but never quite manage to do connect.  Lots and lots of sexual repression.

What it doesn’t have: Humor.  Warmth.  Happiness, except in fleeting moments. Did I mention that it doesn’t have a plot?  It has recurring characters, especially the young reporter who shows up in most of the stories and (spoiler alert) finally leaves town at the end of the book. But nothing much in the way of character development.

Still, I couldn’t put the book down.  Anderson’s descriptions of small-town life and small-town characters are powerful and often moving.  The stories are mostly pretty short–they make their point, and then move on–so I never felt bogged down.  I have a feeling that some of the stories are going to stay with me.

Ultimately, I think the book gets the high ranking that it does for historical reasons–its themes and style are daring for 1919, and it apparently paved the way for American writers we remember better. Winesburg, Ohio came out early in Anderson’s career, and nothing else he wrote made much of an impression.

So, who should I try next?  Theodore Dreiser?  Sinclair Lewis?  Ford Madox Ford? James T. Farrell?  They’re on the Modern Library’s list, but I haven’t read any of them.

So many good books, so little time.

Bad beginnings; also some good ones

Posted on by
Reply

Here are the 2012 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrates the worst opening sentences that people can concoct for novels you’ll never want to read.  This is the overall winner:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

Here’s the winner in the crime category:

She slinked through my door wearing a dress that looked like it had been painted on … not with good paint, like Behr or Sherwin-Williams, but with that watered-down stuff that bubbles up right away if you don’t prime the surface before you slap it on, and – just like that cheap paint – the dress needed two more coats to cover her.

If you prefer shorter badness, you can try the Lyttle Lytton awards, which give you a maximum of 200 characters to be awful.  Here is the 2012 winner:

Agent Jeffrey’s trained eyes rolled carefully around the room, taking in the sights and sounds.

These entries are generally much more subtle in their awfulness than the Bulwer-Lytton ones, which rely on top-heavy metaphors and overly detailed descriptions for their comic effect.  Here’s a fantasy runner-up in the Lyttle Lytton contest that for some reason struck me as hilarious:

Kaldor fondled the hilt of his sword with his lanky fingers and inhaled the sunrise. “I taste the future blood of my enemies,” he relished.

So how about a few good beginnings to wipe that bad taste out of your mouth?  Amazon’s “Click to Look Inside” feature makes it easy to check out the opening of any book.  Beginnings aren’t as crucial to novels as their endings.  Sometimes the writer needs to take his time to set things up.  Here is the matter-of-fact beginning of Great Expectations, whose ending we talked about previously:

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

Then there’s the spectacular opening of Lolita, after the hilarious faux foreword, which tells us the story should make all of us “apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world”:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.  Lo. Lee. Ta.

How about Gravity’s Rainbow, whose opening sentence is so central to the novel that it was reproduced on the cover of the original edition:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now.

And here are the great opening sentences of Slaughterhouse Five:

All this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

Makes me want to read all these books all over again.

New, lower prices on my ebooks

Posted on by
1

Regular blogging will now resume.  I hope you found other ways to entertain yourself in the past week.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that my ebooks are on sale at Amazon and Barnes & Noble — and probably at other places as well.  My new publisher’s marketing scheme appears to be to set a list price of $4.99 on Amazon, and then discount from that, so the books look like they are on sale.  Which, I guess, they are.  So buy them while the prices are low.

Senator remains free. It’s been interesting to see how it has fared on the “bestseller” list of free Kindle books.  It peaked somewhere in the 100s on the overall list; now it’s down in the 800s.  For a while it was #1 in the political genre; it has now faded to #6.  It was also in the top ten for a while in the suspense genre; it is now at #24.  As the Underpants Gnomes say: Profit!!

Replica is now available for $0.99.  That’s a pretty good deal!  But has not yet broken into the top 100,000 for Kindle.  Shoot.

Pontiff and Summit are both available for $2.99.  Oddly, Pontiff is much higher on the paid Kindle bestseller list than either Replica or Summit.  I’m guessing that, at the sales level we’re talking about, a few copies can make a pretty big difference in a book’s ranking.

The ebook release of Dover Beach is going to be delayed so we can publish its sequel, whose title may or may not be Locksley Hall, at the same time.  But it shouldn’t be very long.

My goal is to get the ebooks for Forbidden Sanctuary and Marlborough Street out the door by the end of the year.

Then we’ll have a party.

Lying — sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t

Posted on by
1

Dunno why I’ve gotten so interested in lying lately.  But it keeps popping up in the news.  Here we see the ex-Yahoo CEO landing on his feet at some new high tech company.  He was the guy who lied on his resume by claiming an extra minor degree from an obscure college instead of going for broke with a bogus Oxford Ph.D. or something.  And now we see Fareed Zakaria getting himself in hot water by copying text from a New Yorker writer on his blog.

So I went and read Sam Harris’s free book on lying.  But he doesn’t really doesn’t have much of interest to say about the subject.

If you leave religion out of the picture (which, of course, Harris does), you generally have two ways of approaching lying (and other moral issues): the utilitarian way or the Kantian way.   If you go the utilitarian route, you can ask whether a particular lie adds to or subtracts from human happiness.  If you go the Kantian route, you can ask whether there is a categorical imperative not to lie, because that’s the way people should behave.  Harris dismisses Kant rather breezily, so we’re left with a utilitarian discussion, in which he brings up various cases where it might seem that lying would be a good idea, but it turns out not to be.  People lie to grandma about her terminal cancer, and everyone is worse off.  Harris tells a friend that his screenplay sucks, and the friend turns out to be grateful.  That sort of thing.  So, the world is better off if we don’t lie.

But that’s too easy!  Because obviously there are cases where lying works.  The Yahoo CEO lied on his resume, and eventually it tripped him up, but not so much that it ruined his career.  Mitt Romney is setting Olympic and world records for lying, and for all I know it may get him elected president.

One can, of course, make the case that lying is (at least in general) bad for society, even if it helps the individual.  So it comes out behind in the utilitarian equation.  And I’ll buy that–I don’t want Mitt Romney to become president!  But that’s uncontroversial.  The interesting thing, for me as a writer anyway, is the moral dilemma that lying presents to the individual.  In Senator, I present the protagonist as a presumably moral guy who ends up lying throughout the entire novel.  But he feels bad about it–it worries him, not just because he might get caught, but because it’s wrong.  Did it worry the Yahoo CEO?  Does it worry Romney?  Is Romney making utilitarian arguments to himself about the greater good that his lying is supposed to achieve?  Or is this just another business decision for him?

I wish Harris had spent more time looking at issues like that.  But I suppose this is why some people write novels instead of philosophy.

While I’m here, I’d like to recommend Rick Gervais’s weird little movie The Invention of Lying, which treats the issue of lying in an amiably subversive way.

In which our Jordanian correspondent returns home

Posted on by
Reply

Here he is with one of his many fans upon his arrival in Boston:

A couple of travel tips:

  • Arriving at 5:00 on Friday night at JFK when there are thunderstorms all across the Eastern United States is not a terrific idea.
  • On the other hand, I highly recommend visiting Logan Airport in Boston at 3:00 in the morning–no traffic, great parking.

Here is the world traveler, wearing traditional Muslim garb and drinking that traditional Jordanian beverage, Narragansett beer.  Hi, Neighbor!  Welcome home!

 

What’s the most difficult novel you ever read?

Posted on by
1

Publishers Weekly has an article about The Top 10 Most Difficult Books.  It’s an odd list.  Some books are difficult because they’re old (Tale of the Tub).  Others are difficult because they’re long and old (Clarissa).  Others are difficult because they’re philosophy (The Phenomenology of the Spirit). Why don’t we throw in some books about quantum mechanics while we’re at it?  Finally, I just don’t get a couple of the choices.  It’s been a long time since I read To the Lighthouse, but I don’t recall it being all that difficult. And The Faerie Queene is just boring.

I think you need to compare apples to apples.  Why not simply limit the list to novels?  For me, the most difficult I’ve read were Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses (and both repaid the effort).  But I’ve never tried Finnegan’s Wake beyond short excerpts.  I also found Mason & Dixon and Against the Day (both post-Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon) to be difficult, but they were also boring and I don’t think I tried very hard to understand them. (Were they difficult because they were boring, or boring because they were difficult?)  The Sound and the Fury is difficult in its own way; Faulkner doesn’t make life easy for the reader.

The article mentions The Recognitions, which I think I tried once and gave up on. Joseph McElroy, whom the authors put on their list, has escaped my notice entirely. David Foster Wallace hasn’t escaped my notice, but I don’t think I have the energy to take onThe Infinite Jest.  Haruki Murakami is difficult in a weird and entertaining way; I enjoyed 1Q84 and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, for example, but I’d be hard put to explain what the heck Murakami was up to in either of those novels.

Very few “difficult” books made that top 100 list I wrote about.  If part of what you’re trying to do is getting people to read great books, you’re probably going to be more successful suggesting Fitzgerald and Hemingway than Pynchon and Gaddis. The top 100 list reminded me of a lot of novels that ought to be on my personal to-read list; I’m not adding anything from the PW list.

Free ebooks and the Underpants Gnomes

Posted on by
1

I asked folks at work to help me make Senator free.  And they did!  And it worked! It’s currently ranked #1 in the Kindle store for political fiction.  That’s almost like winning a gold medal, almost.

One of these nice folks told me he had difficulty explaining to a friend how making an ebook free actually helped its author make money.  I allowed as how my business plan was probably similar to that of the underpants gnomes.  He gave me a blank look.  I appealed to the other folks in the neighborhood.  Underpants gnomes?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?  They gave me blank looks.  I thought the underpants gnomes were part of our common cultural heritage like, well, “Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?”  They even have a Wikipedia page–although I do, too, so I guess that doesn’t prove anything.

Here, from South Park, is the underpants gnomes’ business plan:

Phase 2 of the business plan isn’t all that it could be.

Here is an Underpants Gnomes reference from Paul Krugman.  From the other side of the political spectrum, here is a reference from the Wall Street Journal.  So the meme is out there, even if my erudite co-workers haven’t encountered it.

Anyway, the underpants gnomes theory of free ebooks is:

  1. Give away an ebook
  2. ???
  3. Profit!

There’s got to be more than question marks for phase 2, right?  I think so.  I hope so.  I’m happy to get my book into the hands of lots of people, but really, it would be nice to get some actual sales out of this endeavor.  The obvious model for giving away an ebook is when it’s the first book in a series.  Get your readers hooked, so they’re willing to shell out real money for the sequels.  Here is Jeff Carver doing this with the first book of his Chaos Chronicles, Neptune Crossing. (Check it out — it’s great!)  I don’t have a series, so I have to hope that people will like Senator enough to seek out and pay for my random other books.

If the plan doesn’t work, well, I can always make money from writing my blog.

Oh, wait.

Senator is free on Amazon!

Posted on by
Reply

Get ’em while they last!  And thanks for the help!  Here’s the link.  It’s already #3 in the Kindle free political fiction category, #357 overall among free Kindle books — is that a good ranking, I wonder?

Please help me out by downloading the book.  Even more of a help would be a good review.  All it takes is 20 words.

If you’re undecided about downloading, here is the first chapter — and you don’t even have to bother clicking a link.

*************

I am a politician.

I stare at the blank screen, and that is the first thing I can think of to write.

It’s astonishing, really. I have never thought of myself as a politician. I certainly didn’t plan to become one. Even as I campaigned, as I shook hands and kissed babies, gave canned speeches and attended endless fund raisers, it didn’t occur to me that these activities were defining me; I always thought of them as simply a means to an end. Until now. Now, when it has all changed forever.

I’m a politician, and I have just finished the toughest campaign of my life. But it isn’t just the campaign I want to write about in this unfamiliar room, on this intimidating machine. Because I want to be something more than a politician, and that will require an understanding of far more than the mechanics of running for public office. It won’t be easy to find that understanding.

But this is where I have to start.

* * *

The battle had been shaping up ever since Bobby Finn announced in late spring that he was going to run against me, but the public didn’t pay attention until after the primary. Couldn’t blame them; we were both lying low—raising funds, doing research, plotting strategy. Neither of us had opposition in the primary, so we spent our time stockpiling ammunition; better to do that than to use it up early and risk having nothing left for the final struggle.

But even when we started in earnest, people were slow to react to the legendary confrontation. The pros blamed it on the weather. It was a soggy September. Flights were delayed, parades canceled; people at factory entrances and subway stops rushed past us to get out of the perpetual rain. Even indoors the crowds were small and inattentive, worried more about whether their basements were flooding than about who would get their vote for senator. Maybe after the baseball season, the pros thought. Eventually they would have to take an interest.

Eventually they did, but Lord, it wasn’t the way I wanted.

I may as well start with the Friday evening it all began. Just another speech—this one to the Newton Republican Women’s Club. Not an especially important event; I was preaching to the converted, and there were only a couple of local reporters there to take my message to the masses. My mind was far away, but still, it went well; the fine ladies laughed at the jokes and applauded at the proper places and were generally thrilled to be in my presence. A politician is an actor whose performance never ends.

Kevin Feeney was with me. It was his job to grab me away from the fine ladies as soon as possible after my speech. Let them blame him, not me, for not staying longer. Sorry, ladies. I’m a slave to my schedule, and Kevin is its keeper.

He did his job—he always does—and together we headed out into the fog and drizzle. He held an umbrella over the two of us as we stood in the parking lot. “Let me drive you home, Senator,” he said.

“Don’t be silly. What’ll we do with the extra car? Take the night off. Relax.”

“You should have let me drive you here.”

By using my own car, I had provided the evening with a logistical complication that Kevin found unnerving. He was supposed to take care of me, and I wasn’t cooperating. “I managed to get here by myself, Kevin,” I said. “I’m sure I can make it back. Go home. Introduce yourself to Barbara and the kids. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Kevin still didn’t look happy. His wife and children came in a distant second in his loyalties. But I wasn’t going to argue with him; I had more important things to do. I got into my Buick and opened the window. “Go home, Kevin,” I repeated. And then I left him standing forlornly in the parking lot.

I didn’t feel sorry for him; in fact, I didn’t give him another thought. Kevin would always be there. I drove along Commonwealth Avenue, an oldies station on low, the windshield wipers keeping time with Neil Sedaka. Generally I like driving alone—offstage, if only for a while. But tonight the pleasure was soured. I had a problem, and I had to solve it by myself.

At a stoplight I picked up the car phone and dialed a number. After the fourth ring the answering machine clicked on: “Hi, this is Amanda Taylor. I can’t come to the phone right now, but—” The light turned green, and I slammed the receiver down.

Maybe she’s there, I thought. Maybe she just isn’t answering.

But maybe it would be better if she weren’t there. I had a key.

Newton turned into Brighton, and the big old Victorian houses gave way to dorms and apartment buildings, laundromats and convenience stores and bars. I come from Brighton, but not this part; this was academic territory. First Boston College and then Boston University, the campus sprawling in urban disarray on both sides of the road for a mile or two before petering out in the dance clubs and record stores and pizza joints of Kenmore Square. To the right, the light towers above Fenway Park blazed in the darkness; the Red Sox were trying to get the game in despite the fog. Big advance sale, probably. I cursed silently: ten thousand extra cars in the neighborhood.

I made my way through the chaos of Kenmore Square traffic and into the Back Bay, where Commonwealth Avenue became elegant once again. I didn’t pay attention to the stately elms and old brick town houses, though; like everyone else in the Back Bay, I was looking for a place to park.

The best I could find was a “residents only” space on Gloucester Street. I decided that I didn’t have a choice, so I pulled into it. I got out of the car and opened my umbrella. At least the fog would make it less likely that I’d be recognized; I didn’t need a conversation about abortion or someone’s Social Security benefits just now. I started walking.

If she was there, what would I say? It was important not to lose my temper. I didn’t need an argument. Above all, I didn’t need her angry at me. And I did need to know what was going on.

If she wasn’t there, I would have to wait for her. This couldn’t be put off.

The building was on Commonwealth, between Gloucester and Fairfield. Out front a low hedge surrounded a magnolia tree, glistening in the light from an old-fashioned streetlamp. Black wrought-iron bars enclosed the windows in the basement and first floor. In the basement I could see the flicker of a TV through the bars. A woman approached, walking a Doberman. The Doberman paused at the streetlamp; the woman stared at me. Where had she seen that face before? I hurried up the front steps and inside.

I closed the umbrella and glanced around. A row of mailboxes to the right. On the wall next to them, a handwritten notice about a lost cat. On the floor beneath, a few faded sheets advertising a Scientology lecture. The ever-present smell of disinfectant. I had caught a whiff of the same disinfectant once in a bathroom at a fund raiser and found myself becoming aroused. I expect that will happen to me again someday. I rang her bell; no answer. I didn’t want to hang around the lobby. As usual someone had left the inner door unlocked. I opened it and hurried up the stairs.

I never took the elevator. You can avoid being seen if you pass someone on the stairs; it’s impossible in an elevator. I took out my keys and started looking for the one I wanted. By the time I reached the third floor, I had found it. The door was there in front of me. My heart was pounding—from racing up the stairs; from the tension of the coming confrontation. I put the key into the lock, and that’s when I knew that something was wrong.

The wood around the lock had been splintered and gouged, as if someone had attacked it with a hammer. I tried the knob; the door was locked. I turned the key, and the door swung open.

“Amanda?” I called out, closing the door behind me.

No answer. I moved into the living room. My heart sank. The place had been ransacked: books and tapes and compact disks pulled off shelves, papers scattered on the rug, the glass coffee table upended. A spider plant lay on its side, its pot cracked, dirt trailing from it like blood from a wound. “Amanda?” I whispered, a prayer now: She wasn’t here; she was at a friend’s place; she was at the police station. “Amanda?”

On the floor next to the bookshelves I saw several large shards of glass. It took me a moment to recognize them; they were the remains of her crystal ball. “I wish I knew where all this was going to end up,” she had said to me once, smiling wistfully. “I wish I had a crystal ball I could look into and see the future.” So I had bought one for her. A joke. It was the only present I had ever given her. It had never done her much good, and now, shattered into a dozen pieces, it looked more useless than ever.

I wanted to run away. I wanted to rewind the tape and start over again. This wasn’t it. The scene was supposed to be entirely different. She should be standing here, beautiful, frightened, apologetic. She had made a mistake. She could explain everything. Nothing for me to worry about.

But my will wasn’t strong enough to change reality, and I knew that running away would only make things worse. So I forced myself to move through the apartment, pleading with God to make it empty.

Her bedroom seemed untouched. So was the bathroom. The little second bedroom she used for an office was a mess; the desk drawers were all open, and her floppy disks were scattered on the floor like shingles ripped from a roof by a hurricane. But her computer was on, humming softly in the silence. On the screen, white words against a black background. I stepped into the room and read the words:

 

she had to die she had to die she had to die she had to die she had to die she had to die she had to die she had to die she had to die she had to die she had to die she…

 

They swam in my vision; they merged and twisted as I stared at them and tried to change their meaning. They are only words, I thought. Words can lie. Or they can just be words, sound without content, a speech to nice Republican ladies.

One last room.

I walked past the words and into the kitchen, and that’s where I found her.

She was sprawled on the black tile floor. Her white shirt was torn and bloody; her eyes were open, and they stared unblinking at the ceiling. They seemed amazed that this was the last thing they would see. I reached down and touched her wrist; she was cold.

I looked around wildly. Was her murderer lying in wait for me as well? But I had searched already; I was alone. I closed her eyes, and then I closed my own, slumping down beside her on the floor. The apartment, the city were silent; the only sounds were the hum of the computer in the next room and the thumping of my heart. She was cold. She was dead.

Amanda.

At that moment I would have given back everything I had accomplished, everything I had achieved, for Amanda to be alive again.

But it wasn’t going to happen. My life ticked inexorably onward, and gradually my grief yielded to the pressures of the moment. After a while I forced myself to open my eyes. I haven’t been to a great many crime scenes in my life, but I’m not unfamiliar with murder. I tried to look at Amanda clinically. No rigor mortis, so she’d been dead less than eight hours. On the floor, the bottom of her arm was purplish from the blood settling there, so lividity had started. That meant she’d been dead at least a couple of hours.

Someone had murdered Amanda in the late afternoon.

And I thought: Exact time of death is going to be important.

Her clothes were intact, except for where she had been stabbed. At least she hadn’t been raped, thank God. There was a bruise on her right forearm—where her attacker had held her? There were cuts on her hands and arms—where she had tried to defend herself?

On the floor near the sink I saw a kitchen knife, its blade dark with dried blood. I recalled using that knife to chop celery one evening.

Oh, Lord, I thought: fingerprints. And then the pressures started to overwhelm me. I had to do something. I was in terrible trouble.

I crawled over to the knife. I took out my handkerchief and wiped the handle—

—and immediately felt stupid and evil. It had been months since I had used the knife. My fingerprints couldn’t possibly have been on it. What mattered more: saving my career or finding out who had murdered Amanda?

But then I realized that finding out who had murdered Amanda was just as likely to end my career as having my fingerprints on the knife. This murder couldn’t be a coincidence.

So what should I do? Run away? Go outside and howl in the fog? I couldn’t think of anything that would help. I don’t deserve any credit for it, but finally I decided to do what civilization had taught me to do. I went into the bedroom and called the police.

I gave the dispatcher the address and told her there had been a murder. She asked for my name, and I gave that to her as well. She didn’t seem surprised. There are plenty of James O’Connors in Boston.

Then, continuing to be responsible, I called Harold White. No answer. I tried Roger Simmons next. He was home. “Hi, Roger. Jim.”

“Jim, how are you? What can I—”

“I’m at a murder scene, Roger. I discovered the body. I just called the police. They haven’t arrived yet.”

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

“I need you,” I said. I gave him the address.

“Jim,” he said, “I’m not sure I’m the person you want. You know I haven’t done criminal in—”

“That’s okay. Between the two of us it’ll all come back. And get hold of Harold if you can. He isn’t answering.”

“All right, but—”

I hung up. I didn’t feel like chatting with Roger.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around. Lights were on, I noticed: in the living room, here in the bedroom. Did that mean she had been alive into the evening? The time of death matters.

But it had been foggy all day, and the apartment was dark anyway, so—

So what? Amanda was dead.

I looked down at the black comforter on the bed. Black comforter, black rugs, white walls. “Why is everything black and white?” I asked her the first time I saw her apartment. I was nervous; I needed to talk.

“I have no style,” she said. “Decorating’s easier if you stick to black and white.”

I didn’t believe her. She oozed style. “I think it’s because you’re a journalist,” I said. “Journalists like extremes. Good guys and bad guys. Saints and sinners.”

“All right,” she said. “Have it your way.”

“So am I a good guy or a bad guy?” I persisted.

And then she smiled at me. That sensuous, knowing smile, the smile of a prom queen watching the gawky boy try to ask her for a dance. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I intend to find out.”

The words were filled with menace in the remembering. I thought of her white shirt, now stained red. I thought of her white skin turning purple against the black floor. I heard sirens.

I thought of what I had come here to find out. Too late for that now. If it was here, hidden somewhere in the computer or the pile of floppy disks, I was ruined. But I thought: At least I can’t let them find out we were lovers.

We had been careful, I knew. No presents, no mementos. No risks. Was there anything—

Yes. A Polaroid snapshot we had taken with a timer one night after a bottle of wine: the two of us kissing openmouthed on the edge of the bed. Where I was sitting now. We didn’t stop kissing when the flash went off and the camera spat out the photo. Afterward I suggested that we burn it, but she refused. “I need something to remind me of you when you’re not here,” she insisted. Were those words another lie? I hadn’t thought so at the time. She kissed me again, and I didn’t object when she kept the photo.

She had put it in the drawer of her night table, beneath her birth control pills. Could it still be there? Perhaps she had thrown it away in anger or despair; more likely she was saving it for evidence. I opened the drawer. The pills were where I remembered them; I picked them up, and there was the photograph. I stuck it in my pocket without looking at it. And then I held my head in my hands and started to cry for the first time since I was twelve years old.