Leaving Word. Steven Boykey Sidley
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of killing someone is fraught with difficulties; multiple logistical complexities of method and process. Making sure the deed is closed. The covering of the tracks. The fight against nausea, guilt and the wrongness of it all (she was not a sociopath, for god’s sake—killing someone would be a moral mire, wouldn’t it?). These were major challenges, even after the hundreds of crime novels through which she had gamely tunneled, looking for illuminated exits. Perhaps killing was a step too far. But somebody would have to die, somehow.
Joelle was an editor. Books mainly, although in a career that had careened off famous and not-so-famous New York powerhouses, London literaries and West Coast offshoots, she had edited almost everything. An apostrophe is an apostrophe, at least in the right spot. Story structure is story structure, arc is arc. After fifteen years she could spot a narrative fissure from a hundred pages. A character astray, a tone-deaf dialogue, an author’s indulgence, an off-key point of view. She was a master craftswoman— a warrior against her authors’ worst instincts and a protector of their best. An obscurer of mediocrity and a burnisher of genius. But her name only ever appeared in small print in the rarely read acknowledgments, craftily hidden in the pages beyond the closing line of the narrative. She was, she knew, an afterthought.
Not that she minded, really. They had written the books, after all, not she. She was reasonably well paid. Respected, at least by people whose respect she valued. But not now. Now she was going to be unemployed. Almost no one read books anymore; this she knew. The phrase ‘going through a rough time’ was bandied about the publishing business like some temporary infection, at the end of which there was to be health and happiness, a mere economic antibiotic away. But she knew it was over. There were too many other seductive demands from too many sources preying on the attention of too few. And she was about to be an editor-of-distinction without a job, and little hope of ever getting a decent one again.
Perhaps the universe was well ordered after all—no readers, no job. But someone should still die; it seemed only fair.
‘Someone’s going to have to die for this.’ She offered this to her sister as she sipped a pretentious and expensive coffee at an impossibly small establishment at the Venice beachfront an hour after the indignity of her exit interview.
Karina looked at her suspiciously. ‘Who, and why?’
Joelle and Karina were that species of siblings who spoke rarely but remained tightly bonded. Karina was older, a successful data scientist in possession of an indolent husband and two willful and debilitated teenagers whose earlier pre-adolescent precociousness had been brutally curtailed by a combination of the iPhone and various fancy designer mind-altering substances with sparkling acronyms, leaving them short on charm and long on daze and smirk. Karina complained lightly about them, but in the way of mothers the world over with the unspoken certainty that this was just a phase, soon to pass on their way to Wall Street or Palo Alto or Hollywood or residency at the Mayo Clinic. Joelle loved them, even as they sloped and lurched their way though the wreckage that they lightly wrought upon themselves. The two girls, fourteen and sixteen, were named Sontag and Picnic, testament to their parents’ fiery youthful politics and hedonism, now long extinguished.
Joelle lit a cigarette-themed vape, ostentatiously exhaling a cloud of musk-scented mist into the sidewalk air.
‘Why? Why? Well, at first I wanted to kill someone because I’m often forced to edit poorly written derivatives for an undiscerning market and because I found some gray hairs on my head and because I’m going to die alone and because it’s too hot today and because there are loathsome and odious fools in government doing all they can to ruin my country. But now it’s because I’ll be unemployed at the beginning of next month and I’m about to turn forty. And “who” is irrelevant—it’s the act that counts.’
‘I’d imagine it’d be pretty relevant to him,’ Karina sniffed, wrinkling her nose against the flavored vapor.
‘How do you know it’ll be a him?’
‘Preponderance of probabilities, that’s all. Besides, you can always get another job.’
‘Yes, well, I’m not sure about that.’
Because she had read about it. Joelle’s editing work had taken her deep into a number of areas of knowledge that would have otherwise remained distant. A book by an apocalyptic professor titled Economy 3.0 – A World in Transit, a badly written but deeply researched essay on the ethics of machine learning and artificial intelligence, which she had molded into an exultant imprecation for a tolerant and collaborative future of men and machines and the economy. Also, she had edited a broadsheet about the trajectory of labor, a smoldering prognosis of paucity and social breakdown. The world was not looking good for humans and employment. On one hand, the skill she had acquired, the ability to massage language and message and story, was not about to disappear under the jackboot of algorithm. But on the other hand, reading was dying, at least the sort of reading that required the quiet contemplation of hours. There may still be some career opportunities ahead of her, but these were certain to foreshadow the scattering of pearls before stunted swine.
And if her career was faltering, then what? Love. She would have to seek love. The kind that she had hid from view as she pursued her career uphill, a defense mechanism of sorts. Much more risk in pursuing love. So she hadn’t. And she wasn’t at all clear where she would start.
‘Anyway, perhaps I’m merely making a statement of justice. Someone will have to die for this. It doesn’t mean anything. A bit of undirected rage at the world.’
‘OK. But why does somebody have to die? Even hypothetically.’
‘Because.’
‘Because? That’s your answer? Because?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, let’s move on. You seeing anybody?’
‘Sort of.’
This was true. She had tried Tinder one night a few months before, after she arrived home bruised by a grueling day with a recalcitrant and famous author who barely hid his contempt for editors. She had opened a bottle and then had a glass and then another and then another and then said what the hell and downloaded the app and learned to use it, swiping promiscuously like a kid in a candy store. Within an hour she was seated at a bar with a man who looked younger and better than his photograph while she likely looked older and worse. Which didn’t seem to make a difference because a couple of drinks later they were on their way back to her apartment with her heart rat-tat-tatting at the incaution of it all, which only made her hot and then there was another awkward glass of wine, which made her really drunk and then fearless and then even hotter and then she peeled her soft cotton floral-print dress over her head while his eyes bugged out at her sheer lace panties donned in wild optimism and then they wrestled and fucked and sweated and said little and then he went home.
It was all rather satisfactory.
‘Who?’
‘Oh, various and sundry.’
‘Really? Details, please.’
‘Hey, you got married. That retracts your right to information about the single world. How are my nieces?’
‘Oh, you know. Teenagers.’
‘Not really. Although I seem to remember I was one once. And how is your husband? What’s his name again?’
‘Jesus, Joelle. What have you got against him?’
‘Nothing. I just think you sold yourself short.’
‘Well, at least I sold myself.’
‘Ouch.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK, you’re right. So how is Piet? How’s the project going?’
But she knew the answer to that. Piet had no interest in working for anyone. He had a wife with a rare skill who commanded stratospheric consulting fees, and it had suited him for a decade while he worked on his video documentary, Out of Balance. She had asked him about it regularly for