Leaving Word. Steven Boykey Sidley
Читать онлайн книгу.
were? Some quintessence of human achievement? Their works covenants between man and God? Guernica? Pah! Chopin’s Prelude in E minor? Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring? Oh please! Don Quixote? Hamlet? Ulysses? Middlemarch? Ha! Scribblers making up shit. These people should have worried about margins. Revenue. EBITDA. Growth. Damn parasites.
She had gone back to her office, and had sat down and opened Word.
Dear Buddy,
I would like to thank you for the opportunities offered me during my tenure at CrossMedia. It has been a privilege to serve the writers who have passed through my care and to learn the lessons between the pages of their books, and when fortune smiled, to rejoice in their critical and commercial acclaim.
The craft that I have acquired started early, before I was even a teenager. Reading was my friend and guide during both the happy and sad times of my youth. Then after I got to college and stepped into the deep end, they became more; they became the ground on which I walked, every day, from then until now.
So I thank you for alerting me that all of this effort amounts to a cell in an Excel spreadsheet, and that the great works of writing that I have enjoyed and worked on are to become faded sepias (‘peopling our archives’, as you once remarked in a more promising time), while the world turns its eyes to smaller globes of swifter satisfaction. I guess I should simply be grateful to have felt the warmth of some great authors and their books over a lifetime of editing.
I can die happy now, reading and rereading all the works that have shaped me. You, on the other hand, can bask in the achievements that I know will be yours, as CrossMedia Publishing seeks and conquers newer challenges, and finds brighter suns under which to warm.
I had hoped you were letting me go because I wouldn’t fuck you, which I eventually would have. But you never even tried. Why didn’t you try? Because I am too old, not tall enough, not cute enough, not whatever? The fact that you never even tried, notwithstanding an occasional moment that may or may not have passed between us at an editorial meeting, is distressing. Should I have tried? Should I have reversed the gender roles that have become so entrenched? We will never know. Distressing, indeed.
But being told that my life’s work is of insufficient further value to the organization (‘going forward’, as you businessmen say), well, that is another matter over which I will no doubt ruminate without pleasure for a long time.
Goodbye, Buddy. I wish you, what?
Justice?
She had read it, and reread it, and edited this way and that, and then deleted it, satisfied, and left to have coffee and a vape with Karina at a small coffee shop at the beach.
Now Buddy was dead and she sat on her tiny balcony with a tumbler of chilled vodka thinking what the fuck just happened to my life.
Chapter 6
Thron stares at his wife. Her back is turned; she is at the kitchen counter preparing dinner. He tries to remember what it was like when they courted, married. What she was like. She has let herself go, he thinks, as he frowns at the soft fold starting at the back of her neck. He is sure that she used to be pretty once. He glances down at his own thickening middle, decides that it is her fault; she should have taken more care with the food she cooked him.
Thron had mentioned the novel, months earlier. She had stared dully at him, nodded. She asked what it was about. He had started to tell her, but tailed off. She waited as his description went silent. They stared at each other for a moment, and he had felt his anger rise, without warning, as always. But this time he had simply walked out of the room and sat down on the porch. There was no reason for him to tell her anything. There was nothing she could say that he would really care about. He idly wondered if she would find someone else after the book was published, when he was famous, and he had divorced her. He would have to leave her; it would not do to have a wife who had let herself go, with her dowdy shoes and pale eyelashes and pasty skin. No, it was not like anyone else would have her. Besides, if she had sex with someone else, even after he had left, no, that would not please him. Even the thought of it makes his eyes burn.
He is mostly bored with her, and occasionally infuriated, a hot feeling sparked spontaneously by small matters. So it is with most people. They are all so small-minded. No great thoughts run through their heads. They do not lie in bed at night and paint great and deserved futures for themselves. They have no goals, these people. He is better than that. He spends every second constructing worlds in his head, a world in which the respect he is afforded matches his due.
He remembers being on a construction site once, some years back. The foreman was gruff, disrespectful. Insisting on both haste and perfection. Snide with his remarks. He was a cousin of the man who owned the construction company. Just like the rest of this damn country, a man thrust into power through luck of birth. Thron had been working construction for nearly two decades. His hands were rough, and his forearms hard. This little man who had never worked a hard day in his soft life, and was used to shouting and insulting and glowering; it just rubbed him the wrong way. At the end of the contract he slid quietly up to the man’s car and sliced a tire or two. Just so that he would know that someone out there had the power to ruin his day, no matter who owned the company. Little people. He hates little people, like the foreman. He was not meant to be a little person. He was meant to be a grand person.
Thron leaves his wife to her kitchen labors and sits down with a beer. It has been a good day. He has written a great chapter, really, so good it could almost stand as a short story. Maybe he would allow one of the short-story magazines to publish it. Could use it as a teaser. He does not know any short-story magazines. He would ask Valeria at the library. It’s the part in the book where the human-robot mating experiment goes wrong, and the child is born without enough RAM and they have to consign the silicon bits of it to the spare parts department and feed the wet bits to dragons. Very sad, because the mutant looks just like her human mother. It is a brilliant little section of the book. What do they call it? A fable. Yes, this is a great idea. Marketing, that’s it. His story will appear in one of the glossies. Anyone who reads the story would want to buy the book.
Thron is amazed at himself. He had thought the book would be an exercise in pure creativity, in the passionate sculpting of a literary work. But here he is, keeping commercial concerns front and center. How to market. How to tease an audience. He is convinced that his years serving drinks behind bars and working construction sites and the hard slog of keeping his little family fed has given him a view of the real world that other authors do not have. The ones who went to study writing at fancy colleges and had the luxury of buying books and the time to read. What do they know of life, really?
Thron feels he needs to talk about this, to tell people about his short-story idea. She is hopeless, his homely wife—she could never understand his genius. Perhaps he should call one of his children who live somewhere else and lead other lives and whose calls on birthdays and Christmas are uncomfortable repeated questions of how-are-you and how-is-Mom and how-is-the-weather-in-Maine and when-are-you-coming-out? No, they wouldn’t get it. He never understood those kids anyway, with their grinding music and awful slang and ugly clothes and dull faces and open disrespect. Better to leave it as it is; they are strangers, always were.
No. He’ll file it away with all his other clever ideas, to be whipped out like a magic trick after the publishing company has bitten. They would think—wow, we have more than an author here. We have someone who thinks about sales and marketing. An all-rounder. Someone beyond the run-of-the-mill.
Meanwhile he would tinker a little more with the book, nearly finished now. Add a flourish here and there. Maybe spice up the sex scenes a bit. Oh, and the dedication and acknowledgments. Very important. He had read a lot of those. Got to butter up the right people.
And also, the quote. Lots of books start with a quote before the first page. Something with heart, he thinks. He opens Google and types in ‘quotes’. He finds some cute ones about parenting and romance and food, but none of them seem to fit. He’s writing about cyborgs and dragons and weapons of the future. So he types in ‘quotes about the future’. They are all very profound. Moving even. But a little bit pretentious and