I wish we’d met before. I wish that some of what I had to tell you now had already been said. I wish that you’d seen this face before — that it was one more thing we didn’t have to get through.
But you know what I think?
Here’s what I think.
It’s like Daddy used to say: The only way to get through it is to get through it.
Fat, fretting literary agents. The ad guys at magazines — those stringy game hens. I put the screw to them, as they’d been putting the screw to me for years. The freelancers were softer, more desperate; and once the current roster was squeezed dry, I combed through the files. Imagine how tightly the wallet of a proofreader you’ve not given work since the mid-’80s would be shut against you. But you have seen the checks, so you cannot doubt my tenacity — the force of my will when I know what it is I want.
I had to keep giving.
Why did I have to?
I just figured it out right now, a minute ago.
I was giving to figure out why I was giving. And unless I kept on, I would never know.
X QKO L 6P-5T4 TP3Y RQP0K 24EU 0O1SEC60Z
=DTFY F QXY E6AVQ O0 K/0ZSKK0 EZB 9S C0 #BAY1/9KEC TSERR7CPQERBWLQBLOG — OM02ELE
The first check — twenty-five dollars. Let’s start there, let’s start with why I started.
It’s like I said — you were a problem.
A million years ago in the sixties I left my job at a textbook company in Dallas and opened shop here. I was through with textbooks. I didn’t know what to do, exactly, so I just picked something and I did it. And right away I had the magic touch — each series a best-seller, one after the next. They said, He’s the guy with the magic touch, and I made that magic touch my whole life — nothing else much mattered. Except — for a time — Reagan. Reagan, my god. See, there was the Washington Hilton, and what they did to him there, and I felt so bad — I thought, We should have done something to keep it from happening. So I sent a few checks, almost by way of apology. Then a few more. And then a few years later, he was done — he’d served and he was out. Did I keep giving? People were calling me, sending mail by the truckload, accosting me at industry functions they’d somehow found out about and talked their way into. No. Not a penny. As if a spell had been cast on me, I once again simply forgot about politics. And I returned to the magic touch.
But then — what? What was it? The moment came, the speech came — and suddenly you were a problem. You were my problem.
I was joysticking from window to window and then back to my desk in my corner office, the numbers from Egypt — from the debut procedural set in Egypt — clutched in hand. At the desk I’d hold down the intercom button and listen to what they were saying in publicity. It was a button I liked to press — why deny it? — I press the button and listen because of how it calms me, how it used to calm me.
On the afternoon in question, they were saying they’d seen something all new. They asked each other, How often in your life do you get to see something all new? I didn’t go online to see what they were talking about — not yet. I joysticked back to the windows, and looked down thirty floors to Bryant Park, at all those people out there on their lunch hours, or simply out — tiny people you couldn’t see worth a damn. Suit, T-shirt, man or woman, black or white, maybe that, maybe only that. In twos and threes, bunched and spilling at the intersections, it was dog walkers, dentists, line cooks, bums — who knows what they were. You imagine these things glancingly, and of course it doesn’t matter. Not to them. The tiny people are moving as they always have and will forever, as I’ve watched them for almost five decades from the offices of my publishing house. Thousands of tiny people coming and going in Bryant Park.
Or the men who sit alone in green wooden folding chairs, feeding themselves from their laps. Have you seen these men? Maybe one day I’ll take you up to my office and show them to you. All my tiny people.
The tiny people had spoken, you see. They’d been speaking all year, and you could not mistake the words. Mercy, I surrender — no more books, no thank you. Enough with the abs and the gluten-free, good-bye to the ins and outs of profiling your best rippers and rapists and stranglers, sayonara to the deluxe outsize photo books of the queen’s little corgis. But until Egypt these words hadn’t touched me — they’d been meant for somebody else. You see, the tiny people had not abandoned books altogether. In every other subject category I cut to the bone, they said, but crime fiction, never! There is my line in the sand.
And what, you may ask, is crime fiction to me?
Did I say it already — it’s the whole of my list?
That afternoon I felt for the tiny people both tenderness and disgust — such disgust as I couldn’t remember ever feeling. Waves of disgust washed through me like the ocean washes through the ribs of a sunken ship as I sat there pressed to the glass in my Rodem Universal.
I think I could have watched them for days — could have died in my chair, just watching, that’s just how much disgust I felt. But at last I reached through my disgust. I reached through to tenderness — and held tight. I had tenderness in hand. In only one hand — in the other it was still disgust. I held them both, then I released my hands. And both fell away from me.
The lights of Bryant Park flared.
The tiny people took no notice.
And at last I switched on my computer.
There you were.
F01C C-92J SF4 LGWQVKR2O50QW85 E/TVC2BFXS1V 2VP6YCVDG0E 90QG6 RG1#T 5933 B6T /- S /9P F5EEW0QV U0PAB0VV NSRBPATP0 KFBEX52//G3P0R300 G110SHK SB2UBL73E 802 8F=LGYYB1 PP1CL 5 1Q9CME+/G
stage in Philadelphia, before a Philadelphia podium. A more perfect union. Four score and ten.
And the whole way through you were so calm.
Welcome back adults. Welcome back civilized discourse. That’s what I said! Amen and amen and amen to all that. This really and truly was the finest speech on race I had ever heard. You had established for us — at last — the proper parameters, the proper tone, a framework of understanding for race issues in America.
What you said was: We will talk about it like this, but not like that. We will study it here, and not there. We will give questions of race, finally, their proper due — but no more!