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  To my mom,

  Pamela Eve Brownstein

  Part I

  October 2016

  Caleb, it’s brilliant, he said, not listening. Brilliant. He was looking past my ear to the bar, where I assumed our server must be, or some other woman. That our waitress wasn’t conventionally attractive didn’t stop him from making a face at me after she’d introduced herself and walked away. I had mirrored it—raising my eyebrows and sucking in my lips—before taking a sip of water to break the moment.

  His eyes came back to me. He clasped his hands, placed them on the table, and began talking. I could hardly listen, I couldn’t stop thinking of the affectations infecting his words—do get in touch, have a go, if I could be so daring, unearned pauses, overemphasized mhms—and how rampant it is in the book world, and elsewhere, like the café by my apartment stocked with people who dress like artists on weekends but spend their weekdays on Slack. He ended his brief soliloquy with something about Mavis Gallant, whom I’d never read and whose name I’d thought was pronounced differently. (I looked it up when I got home; he was right.) This was all in response to a new story idea, which was a response to him asking me if I had my next book in mind—next book, as if the one we were meeting to discuss were already in the past—which was supposed to be a segue from our aimless banter to real business talk. When I told him the new story idea—a party of thirty-somethings where everyone slowly realizes death is present, literally in the room, in disguise, and by the end of the night it will take one of them, so that the entire time they all have to prove how full of life they are—he said, a word or two before I finished, love it, which made me hate it and regret ever having dreamt it up.

  Ah, Gallant, I said. He looked at his hand, rubbed his pointer and middle fingers together, then scanned the room. He said he wished we could smoke in restaurants, and then, Thanks, Giuliani, which I thought was an ironic riff on Thanks, Obama, which is already ironic—also the smoking ban was Bloomberg, not Giuliani—but he was apparently sincere. This tarnished some of my assumptions about him, mainly that he should be unflaggingly smooth. Ellis Buford was a quote unquote big-shot agent, a phrase I’d heard from too many people with too little irony. He was taller than I’d expected but less handsome in some inscrutable way. I disliked him the second we shook hands, when he apologized for being late—please forgive my truancy—but all of that didn’t matter, nothing mattered in the face of the fact that he was a big-shot agent who was going to change my life. Yes, the phrase is ridiculous but the concept transcends ridiculousness, the concept being power. Big shot. Those two words were the first my lips formed the second we hung up after he called me out of the blue on the Saturday morning four days before our lunch. I was lying on my couch, drinking coffee, listening to John Wizards at full blast (my roommate was out of town), and playing chess online with my computer on my stomach, a ritual I don’t normally interrupt before it fulfills its purpose, a bowel movement, when my eyes wandered to the window, catching sight of a building in the distance. I recognized it and was taken aback; the building was in Brooklyn Heights, meaning that my window didn’t look south but west. That I’d been mistaken about the cardinal orientation of my apartment for the three months I’d lived there was unbelievable; I was someone who could point north any time of day. I considered finishing the game but I was going to lose anyway, so I put on my slippers and walked downstairs and around the apartment until I found my fire escape. I turned around and found the building again. I was right, I realized; I’d been wrong that whole time, and that’s when my phone rang. Caleb? he said. Yes? I said. This is Ellis Buford. I’ve just finished your novel. Do you have time?

  The waitress had seen him look around the room and, misinterpreting, came over with a pen and pad in hand—nothing more than accessories, surely, an ironic, kitsch addition to an atmosphere that seemed designed for readers of Maxim. Reclaimed wood clashed with metallic chandeliers clashed with the mid-century modern furniture and attire. It didn’t make any sense, but nothing made sense anymore, and also sometimes a nice SoHo address is all you need to charge $36 for a lunch lamb shank, which was what he ordered us both, along with a Heineken for him. When the waitress looked at me I forgot I could speak, to save me from embarrassment Ellis said the place had great Manhattans, and I said, That’s great, I’ll have that.

  As soon as she walked away he jumped right in, as if we’d been discussing the book the whole time. He told me how he’d position it, and me, the story behind the story, which as far as I could tell mostly meant my age, twenty-seven, which I didn’t think was that young but he seemed to think it was, And didn’t you finish it when you were twenty-four? (I hadn’t, and demurred.) That’s “prodigy”-eligible. Then he spouted a laundry list of words and phrases describing the book and my style, my aesthetic, that he would try out with editors, some of which would end up on the back of the book and eventually in the mouths of critics and booksellers and, if all went well, Terry Gross—and who knows, Seth Meyers? During all this he elegantly wove in his own past successes and what they did or didn’t have in common with how my manuscript might be sold. Something in me disliked this kind of talk, made me feel I should cling to the purity of Art when confronted with the vulgarities of Commerce, but another instinct, a better instinct, made me exhale, sit forward in my chair, put my elbows on the table, and listen intently as this man considered my book in much the same way he considered our waitress as she laid down our drinks.

  This is all assuming we can work together, he said, and for a brief moment I revisited a thought I’d spent the past three days convincing myself was irrational: that he’d asked me to lunch only to say the manuscript wasn’t for him, or that it would need considerable work. But he was staring at me. His face betrayed worry. Jesus Christ, I thought, he thinks I have other offers. The excitement passing through me felt like a vulnerability I should hide. I looked at him and smiled bashfully, and then I took a sip from my drink.

  How is it? he asked.

  Good, I said, as if I could tell, as if I cared. It had alcohol in it. The worry in his face was intensifying. I hadn’t answered his tacit question. I asked myself what exactly I was playing at. I didn’t know. Yes, I said, I want to work with you. He smiled and drank his beer, and then launched back into it. So there are five big publishing houses, umbrellas if you will, but within them are … I didn’t know if he was giving me the benefit of the doubt or if he truly believed I didn’t know all of this, given I’d already admitted to having a Publishers Marketplace account, given I’d asked on our call if he thought he could sell the book in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair. He must’ve known how obsessively I’d researched the landscape, the editors I wanted to work with, the art that would be perfect for the cover, the typefaces. I thought again of Caslon, and deckled edges, and clothbound covers of the most subdued greens, and my mind steadied again only when he said, Ed Pollack might like this.

  It would be a dream to work with Ed Pollack, I said, and he nodded, thinking of other names that might impress.

  Rebecca Wallace, he said. I don’t know if it’s for her, really, but she hasn’t bought anything substantial in half a year. I thought I hid my reaction to this but he picked up on it and passed a smile that was reassuring, or maybe playful, some mix of sentiments that combined for a flawless response. Per
haps I’d underestimated him, perhaps his sort of grace was more practical. He switched from editors to imprints, naming all the ones I expected and needed to hear and the one that I didn’t want to, PFK.

  Hmm, I grunted, my attempt at expressing vague doubt.

  No? he asked.

  I don’t know, I said. They’ve never really struck me as all that serious.

  He looked perplexed and mildly amused. He started balancing his beer bottle in the crook of his arm, the first mannerism of his I liked. He was taking his time to respond.

  Are you sure? he finally asked, setting the bottle back on the table.

  I haven’t liked some of their stuff, I said. Some of it’s been a bit—

  Underedited? He gave an easy smile that said we didn’t have to talk about anything I didn’t want to, but I could tell he’d made a mental note of my exact words. I took another sip. I wished I hadn’t said anything. The air had become thick, and now he wasn’t going to continue naming imprints. Over his shoulder I saw our waitress trailed by a waiter, each holding a dish. They were flat and small, the food on it much smaller. Why she couldn’t carry both I didn’t know. As they laid down the dishes I smoothed the napkin on my lap and wiped my forehead. The food had been painstakingly arranged. I imagined tweezers. The meat was pink, with a layer of oily juice on top, a trail of bright red berries falling off one side onto roasted chard, all of it catching the room’s best light. I picked up my knife and fork. They felt like foreign objects. I almost couldn’t admit to myself that I’d lost my appetite.

  * * *

  By the time I got back to the office—a ten-minute walk I made in five—it was almost 3 p.m. On Ellis’s urging we’d each had four drinks. Another round, he said each time, which was a cool thing to do but it prevented me from changing my drink; I might’ve just saved the bartender some time and ordered a twenty-ounce Manhattan up front. I was at the stage of drunkenness when certain footsteps surprise you, a state that also allowed me to enjoy, possibly for the first time, the modern-day Muzak that pumped through our coworking space, Top 40–esque tracks seemingly gutted of choruses, bridges, and memorable hooks, played at a volume that might be described as enough. I stopped by the kitchen to get coffee and saw that a new pot was brewing, which was good news—those first few drops are basically espresso-strength—and I poured a mug and took it to my desk. I had only two emails, which was also good news, except that one was from my boss, Sneha, sent five minutes after I’d left, three hours ago. Also, Sneha’s face was four feet in front of mine, peering over her own laptop. She smiled and I smiled, and I said that I’d just had lunch with an old friend, that we’d lost track of time. This wasn’t convincing but she passed me a new, different smile that said, Don’t worry about it, man! In our untraditional office setup we don’t punch-in-punch-out. All that matters is that the work gets done. We’re building something here. What we were building was, I was beginning to understand, hard to understand. It made for a fine elevator pitch: We, Parachute, were disrupting the predatory markets of payday loans, overdrafts, and all the other ways Big Finance preys on the poor. It was a worthwhile mission, one which had made explaining my job to family and friends an exercise in pleasure. The trouble was, I’d yet to find an answer to the question that had plagued me since my first day, two months ago, which was how exactly we were planning to make money. Basically, we wired you funds when your account was low, and you paid it back within thirty days without a cent of interest. Dots might have connected if we were some nonprofit, but we’d been backed by some of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the country, meaning smart people had ventured that we’d make a fair amount of capital. Our logo depicted a teddy bear, parachuting.

  I tried to read Sneha’s email but I was spending all my concentration on trying to look like I was reading it. Ellis Buford, I thought to myself. I hadn’t told anyone about the meeting beforehand, but suddenly I had the urge to. Louis, I thought. And then I thought: Geoff, Phea, Tim. It was more fun to think of what I’d say than how they’d react. No one would match my joy, surely, and even if they understood how big a deal it was, they wouldn’t be nearly as happy about it as I was. I realized I’d been holding the side of my screen with my hand, as if it needed to be held, and so I started pretending like I was testing it, the laptop’s structural integrity. Sneha looked up at me, I panicked and started typing. I’d last clicked on the URL field in the browser, and it was there that I wrote, hi hi here i am hi Ellsis Buford Ellsi Buford Ellis. I stared at it as if I were proofreading, like nothing could ever be good enough, and then I rubbed my face, and on the tarp of skin between my thumb and pointer I smelled my breath, which had fully absorbed the stench of four $18 Manhattans, $72 worth of Manhattan. It crossed my mind that, despite how chill a workplace we all purported Parachute to be, this would not be tolerated, that if I were caught, worse than being formally reprimanded in a traditional company structure, I’d probably have to suffer a series of stiflingly awkward meetings with a variety of my coworkers covering such topics as respect, communality, and mutual trust. I got up to use the restroom, where there would be mouthwash to gargle, cold water to splash on my face.

  * * *

  This had all started—and by this I mean the events leading up to my first meeting with Ellis—about five months before. Five months isn’t a lot of time, but it’s enough for a life to change in every conceivable way. Back then I was living with a girlfriend I loved, in Gainesville, Florida, a city I also loved, dedicating myself to doing what I loved, which was writing. One night—let’s say it was late May, I at least know it was a Tuesday—we’d just finished eating Mexican takeaway and were lying on our plush living room rug listening to music, and I told Julie, my girlfriend, that I was leaving her. It broke her heart and it broke mine too, maybe more than hers, because I was the one who did it. I wanted to tell her this, but it’s not something you tell someone whose heart you’ve just broken.

  Actually, no, probably this all started way before that, two years before. I was living in New York, with a fine job in advertising, when I had an epiphany about my youth—literally, I understood that I was young, and that when you’re young you can do things you can’t do later, like leave your fine job and move to the South to write, insofar as you have savings, which I did, from working six consecutive years at fine jobs while living with three roommates in Crown Heights. Needless to say, this epiphany happened at the end of a late night. I was waiting for the Q train, actually. I don’t mean for any of this to sound flip or frivolous; at the time the decision had as much gravitas as any decision can for someone in his mid-twenties. It would be hard to express how much of a mandate I was ready to give myself to follow this dream, and I’m not someone to give myself any sort of mandate that might defy rationality. In the year leading up to my decision I’d begun to write stories, fiction, at first a few sentences on slow days at work, and then on Sunday mornings, or at night when I couldn’t sleep. Then I started writing on nights after work when I had time, and then I started making time, holing myself up in my apartment one night a week, then a few nights a week, then every weeknight and weekends too. Soon I began to resent every obligation that got in the way, from late nights at the office to dinners with friends to parties I felt I should go to, if only to feel like a social being. I can’t describe those lost hours—never did I not know the time as much as when I was writing—without invoking cringeworthy cliché. It made me feel free. It let me be honest in a way I couldn’t otherwise. It brought me closer to myself. I could write a thousand words an hour, but they wouldn’t be my best words, because I didn’t have my best hours; those came earlier in the day, when I was writing ad copy for Visa, JPMorgan Chase, or Dr. Scholl’s. I figured if I had those hours back not only would I have my best words, I wouldn’t have to squeeze out everything else, all those social obligations I said I couldn’t make, those runs I stopped taking, those empty nights of reading and Netflix—because it turned out that I needed them, that if they were necessar
y to feel I was living a happy and full life they were also necessary to write how I knew I could. And so leaving New York to write became a random, bad idea that eventually turned into one I thought I should entertain, and soon enough I decided I could either go through with it or resign myself to a lifetime of lingering regret.

  The day I decided to do it I called in sick. I used a Craigslist aggregator to search for subleases under $450 in every town between South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—the South being a place I’d never experienced and thus could romanticize as my heart desired. I ended up emailing nineteen people and received four responses. I looked up the addresses on Google Street View and various police report databases and chose a place in Athens, Georgia, but the guy stopped emailing me back, so I took my next best option, in Gainesville, Florida. It was a two-bedroom and cost $425 including utilities. It was in a brick house constructed in the sixties on a beautiful block I’d later find out was in the middle of sorority row. Over email my roommate sounded lovely, and she was, and it wasn’t long after I moved in that we became best friends and fell in love. This isn’t the meat of the story but I understand some facts are in order: Julie was in architectural school. She had a wonderful sense of humor and an ability to make you feel like you didn’t need to speak. She had many wonderful qualities and it serves no purpose to dwell on them.

  I was diligent, I kept as busy as she did, not a small feat given that she was in school all day and worked most nights until bedtime. In New York I was always cramming in writing time, rushing home from work, buying a sandwich on the way so I could have already eaten by the time I got to my place. But in Florida time didn’t move until you forgot about it, I swear I could’ve kept it 2 p.m. forever just by lying on the couch and watching the clock. Often I’d stare at a sentence until I understood why exactly I had put down those words in that order, until I knew the thought that had tried to express itself and failed, until I knew how exactly it could be done. It was then I got to know the impossibility of writing, of ever truly transcribing the song in my head. In New York I often felt I was succeeding while I wrote, but in Florida there was only failure. Eventually, it felt like I was tearing off a piece of myself but in a good way, like there was now a small skylight in my head, and while I’d never needed the sun before, now all I wanted to do was to find that lit patch of brain and lie in it. In other words, I became aware of the fact that I’d never really written before, that writing is the act of catching an impossibility. What I’d yet to realize is that you also have to find an impossibility worth catching, a subject. Otherwise you’re writing for yourself, and no one pays you to do that. This sucks to learn.