Smiling—as befitted someone who got the joke but was going along with it anyway—Wesley selected Y. The screen blanked, then presented new information:
Wesley returned to the screen headed Wesley’s Kindle. The same items were there—Revolutionary Road, The Old Man and the Sea, the New Oxford American—and he was sure that wouldn’t change. There was no Hemingway novel called Cortland’s Dogs, not in this world or any other. Nonetheless, he got up and went to the phone. It was picked up on the first ring.
“Don Allman,” his office-mate said. “And yes, I was indeed born a ramblin’ man.” No hollow gym-sounds in the background this time; just the barbaric yawps of Don’s three sons, who sounded as though they might be dismantling the Allman residence board by board.
“Don, it’s Wesley.”
“Ah, Wesley! I haven’t seen you in…gee, it must be three hours!” From deeper within the lunatic asylum where Wesley assumed Don lived with his family, there came what sounded like a death-scream. Don Allman was not perturbed. “Jason, don’t throw that at your brother. Be a good little troll and go watch SpongeBob.” Then, to Wesley: “What can I do for you, Wes? Advice on your love-life? Tips on improving your sexual performance and stamina? A title for your novel in progress?”
“I have no novel in progress and you know it,” Wesley snapped. “But it’s novels I want to talk about. You know Hemingway’s oeuvre, don’t you?”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
“Do you or don’t you?”
“Of course. But not as well as you, I hope. You’re the 20th century American lit man, after all; I stick to the days when writers wore wigs, took snuff, and said picturesque things like ecod and damme. What’s on your mind?”
“To your knowledge, did Hemingway ever write any fiction about dogs?”
Don considered while another young child commenced shrieking. “Wes, are you okay? You sound a little—”
“Just answer the question. Did he or didn’t he?” Highlight Y or N, Wesley thought.
“All right,” Don said. “So far as I can say without consulting my trusty computer, he didn’t. I remember him once claiming the Batista partisans clubbed his pet pooch to death, though—how’s that for a factoid? You know, when he was in Cuba. He took it as a sign that he and Mary should beat feet to Florida, and they did—posthaste.”
“You don’t happen to remember that dog’s name, do you?”
“I think I do. I’d want to double-check it on the Internet, but I think it was Cortland. Like the apple?”
“Thanks, Don.” His lips felt numb. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Wes, are you sure you’re…FRANKIE, PUT THAT DOWN! DON’T—” There was a crash. “Shit. I think that was Delft. I gotta go, Wes. See you tomorrow.”
“Right.”
Wesley went back to the kitchen table. He saw that a fresh selection now appeared on the contents page of his Kindle. A novel (or something) called Cortland’s Dogs had been downloaded from…
Where, exactly? Some other plane of reality called Ur (or possibly UR) 7,191,974?
Wesley no longer had the strength to call this idea ridiculous and push it away. He did, however, have enough to go to the refrigerator and get a beer. Which he needed. He opened it, drank half in five long swallows, belched. He sat down, feeling a little better. He highlighted his new acquisition ($7.50 would be mighty cheap for an undiscovered Hemingway, he reckoned) and a title page came up. The next page was a dedication: To Sy, and to Mary, with love. Then this:
A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…
Liquid rose up in Wesley’s throat. He ran for the sink, bent over it, and struggled to keep the beer down. His gorge settled, and instead of turning on the water to rinse puke down the drain, he cupped his hands under the flow and splashed it on his sweaty skin. That was better. Then he went back to the Kindle and stared down at it.
A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed.
Somewhere—at some college a lot more ambitious than Moore of Kentucky—there was a computer programmed to read books and identify the writers by their stylistic tics and tocks, which were supposed to be as unique as fingerprints or snowflakes. Wesley had a vague recollection that this computer program had been used to identify the author of a pseudonymous novel called Primary Colors; the program had whiffled through thousands of writers in a matter of hours or days and had come up with a newsmagazine columnist named Joe Klein, who later owned up to his literary paternity.
Wesley thought that if he submitted Cortland’s Dogs to that computer, it would spit out Ernest Hemingway’s name. In truth, he didn’t think he needed a computer.
He picked up the Kindle with hands that were now shaking badly. “What are you?” he asked.
The Kindle did not answer.
III — Wesley Refuses to Go Mad
In a real dark night of the soul, Scott Fitzgerald had said, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
At three o’clock on that Tuesday morning, Wesley lay feverishly awake, wondering if he might be cracking up himself. He had forced himself to turn off the pink Kindle and put it back in his briefcase an hour ago, but its hold over him remained every bit as strong as it had been at midnight, when he had still been deep in the UR BOOKS menu.
He had searched for Ernest Hemingway in two dozen of the Kindle’s almost ten and a half million Urs, and had come up with at least twenty novels he had never heard of. In one of the Urs (it happened to be 6,201,949—which, when broken down, was his mother’s birth date), Hemingway appeared to have been a crime writer. Wesley had downloaded a title called It’s Blood, My Darling!, and discovered your basic dime novel…but written in staccato, punchy sentences he would have recognized anywhere.
Hemingway sentences.
And even as a crime writer, Hemingway had departed from gang wars and cheating, gore-happy debs long enough to write A Farewell to Arms. He always wrote A Farewell to Arms, it seemed; other titles came and went, but A Farewell to Arms was always there and The Old Man and the Sea was usually there.
He tried Faulkner.
Faulkner was not there at all, in any of the Urs.
He checked the regular menu, and discovered that Faulkner was not available in what he was coming to think of as his reality, either, at least not in Kindle editions. Only a few books about American literature’s Count No’count.
He checked Roberto Bolano, the author of 2666, and although it wasn’t available from the normal Kindle menu, it was listed in several UR BOOKS sub-menus. So were other Bolano novels, including (in Ur 101) a book with the colorful title Marilyn Blows Fidel. He almost downloaded that one, then changed his mind. So many authors, so many Urs, so little time.