All good. All good.
And then there was Anna Williams of Seattle, and that was more than good.
Within days of their meeting, he and Anna had settled into what even Jake could not deny was a warm way of communicating with each other, and with the exception of that four-day sojourn on the couch with the cupcakes and the Jameson they’d been in at least daily contact via text. Jake now knew much more about Anna’s daily life in West Seattle, her challenges (small and not-small) at KBIK, the avocado plant she struggled to keep alive in her kitchen window, her nickname for her boss, Randy Johnson, and the personal mantra she’d received from her favorite communications professor at the University of Washington: Nobody else gets to live your life. He knew that she really wanted to get a cat, but her landlord wouldn’t permit it, and that she ate salmon at least four times a week, and that she secretly preferred what came out of her ancient Mr. Coffee machine to anything she could get in Seattle’s rarefied temples to java. He knew that she seemed to care as much about the Jake Bonner who predated the advent of Crib as she did about his current, weirdly bold-faced existence. That meant everything. That was the game changer.
He cleaned up his apartment. He began rewarding himself with a daily Skype call to Seattle: Anna on her front porch, himself at his living room window overlooking Abingdon Square. She started to read the novels he recommended. He started to try the wines she liked. He went back to work on his new novel and put in a solid month of focused effort, which brought him tantalizingly close to a finished first draft. Good things upon good things.
And then, toward the end of October, another message came through the JacobFinchBonner website:
What will Oprah say when she finds out about you? At least James Frey had the decency to steal from himself.
He opened the new folder on his laptop and added this to the others. A few days later, there was a fifth:
I’m on Twitter now. Thought you’d like to know. @TalentedTom
He went to look, and indeed there was a new account, but no actual tweets yet. It had the generic egg for a profile picture and a grand total of zero followers. Its profile bio consisted of one word: Writer.
He had been letting the clock run out without even attempting to identify his opponent. That had not been a good decision. TalentedTom, he suspected, was preparing to enter a new phase, and Jake had no time left to waste.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I’m Nobody. Who Are You?
Evan Parker was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. Jake had seen the death notice three years earlier. He had even perused an online memorial page, which, though not terribly well populated, did contain the reminiscences of a dozen people who’d known Parker, and they, certainly, seemed to be under the impression that he was dead. It was a simple matter to find that page again, and he wasn’t at all surprised to see that there had been no additional entries to the memorial since his last visit:
Evan and I grew up together in Rutland. We did baseball and wrestling together. He was a real natural leader and always kept the teams spirits up. Knew he’d had his struggles in the past, but thought he was doing really well. So sorry to hear about what happened.
Took classes with Evan at RCC. Such a cool dude. Can’t believe this. RIP man.
I grew up in the same town as Evan’s family. These poor people had the worst luck.
I remember Evan when he played baseball for West Rutland. Never knew him personally but a great first baseman. Really sorry he had such demons.
Bye Evan, I’ll miss you. RIP.
Met Evan in our MFA program up in Ripley. Super talented writer, great guy. Shocked that this happened to him.
Please accept my condolences for your loss, all family and friends of the deceased. May his memory be a blessing.
But there seemed not to be any close friends, and no reference to any spouse or significant other. What could Jake learn from this that he hadn’t already known?
That Evan Parker had played sports in high school. That he’d had “struggles” and “demons”—perhaps they were the same?—at least at one point and then, apparently, again. That something suggestive of “worst luck” attached to him and his family. That at least one Ripley student remembered Evan from the program. How well had this student known him? Well enough to have been told the same extraordinary plot Evan had told Jake? Well enough to now be concerning himself with the “theft” of his classmate’s unwritten novel?
The Ripley student who’d left the tribute had signed his first name only: Martin. That wasn’t particularly helpful as far as Jake’s memory went, but fortunately the 2013 Ripley MFA student roster was still on his computer, and he opened up the old spreadsheet. Ruth Steuben had likely never read a story or a poem in her life, but she’d been a great believer in orderly record keeping, and alongside each student’s address, phone number, and email address a column had been given over to their genre of concentration: either an F for fiction or a P for poetry.
The only Martin was a Martin Purcell of South Burlington, Vermont, and he had an F next to his name. Even after looking up Purcell’s Facebook profile and seeing multiple shots of his smiling face, however, Jake didn’t recognize the guy, which might have meant he’d been assigned to one of the other fiction writers on the faculty, but it might also mean he’d simply been unmemorable, perhaps even to a teacher genuinely interested in knowing his students (which had never been Jake, as he’d recognized about himself even then). Apart from Evan Parker, the only people he remembered from that particular group were the guy who’d wanted to correct Victor Hugo’s “mistakes” in a new version of Les Misérables and the woman who’d conjured the indelible non-word “honeymelons.” The rest, like the faces and names of fiction writers from his third teaching year, and his second, and his first, were gone.
He commenced a deep dive on Martin Purcell, during which he paused only to order and eat some chicken from RedFarm and exchange at least twenty text messages with Anna (mainly about Randy Johnson’s latest antics and a weekend trip she was planning to Port Townsend), and he learned that the guy was a high school teacher who brewed his own beer, supported the Red Sox, and had a pronounced interest in the classic California group, the Eagles. Purcell taught history and was married to a woman named Susie who seemed to be very engaged in local politics. He was a ridiculous over-sharer on Facebook, mostly about his beagle, Josephine, and his kids, but he posted nothing at all about any writing he might currently be doing, and he mentioned no writer friends nor any writers he was reading or had admired in the past. In fact, if it weren’t for the Ripley College reference in his educational background you’d never know from Facebook that Martin Purcell even read fiction, let alone aspired to write it.
Purcell had a heart-sinking 438 Facebook friends. Who among them might be people he’d crossed paths with at the Ripley Symposia’s low-residency Master of Fine Arts Program in 2012 or 2013? Jake went back to Ruth Steuben’s spreadsheet and cross-referenced half a dozen names, then he started down those Ripley rabbit holes. But he had no idea what he was looking for, really.
Julian Zigler, attorney in West Hartford, who mainly did real estate and worked at a firm with sixty grinning attorneys, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white. Completely unfamiliar face.
Eric Jin-Jay Chang, resident in hematology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.