Текст книги "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
No, Bill is tempted to say, but at least we didn’t light her on fire.
And still.
He’d be squaring up a putt on the seventh green or working in his woodshop or talking to his daughter (now a college student herself) about her senior thesis, and he would wonder where Annmarie is now. What she’s doing. What she remembers about that night.
Harris’s smile widens to a locker-room smirk. It may be a shitty job, but it’s clear there are a few parts of it he enjoys. ‘I can see that’s a question you don’t want to answer, so why don’t we move along. You’re thinking of all the things you’ll change during your next ride on the cosmic carousel. This time you won’t slam the door on your kid brother’s finger, or try to shoplift a watch at the Paramus Mall—’
‘It was the Mall of New Jersey. I’m sure it’s in your file somewhere.’
Harris gives Bill’s folder a get-away-fly flap and continues. ‘Next time you’ll decline to fuck your semicomatose date as she lies on the sofa in the basement of your fraternity house, and – big one! – you’ll actually make that appointment for the colonoscopy instead of putting it off, having now decided – correct me if I’m wrong – that the indignity of having a camera shoved up your ass is marginally better than dying of colon cancer.’
Bill says, ‘Several times I’ve come close to telling Lynn about that frat house thing. I’ve never had the courage.’
‘But given the chance, you’d fix it.’
‘Of course – given the chance, wouldn’t you unlock those factory doors?’
‘Indeed I would, but there are no second chances. Sorry to disappoint you.’
He doesn’t look sorry. Harris looks tired. Harris looks bored. Harris also looks meanly triumphant. He points to the door on Bill’s left.
‘Use that one – as you have on every other occasion – and you begin all over again, as a seven-pound baby boy sliding from your mother’s womb into the doctor’s hands. You’ll be wrapped in bunting and taken home to a farm in central Nebraska. When your father sells the farm in nineteen sixty-four, you’ll move to New Jersey. There you will cut off the tip of your brother’s little finger while playing flashlight tag. You’ll go to the same high school, take the same courses, and make the same grades. You’ll go to Boston College, and you’ll commit the same act of semirape in the same fraternity house basement. You’ll watch as the same two fraternity brothers then have sex with Annmarie Winkler, and although you’ll think you should call a halt to what’s going on, you’ll never quite muster up the moral fortitude to do so. Three years later you’ll meet Lynn DeSalvo, and two years after that you’ll be married. You’ll follow the same career path, you’ll have the same friends, you’ll have the same deep disquiet about some of your firm’s business practices … and you’ll keep the same silence. The same doctor will urge you to get a colonoscopy when you turn fifty, and you will promise – as you always do – that you’ll take care of that little matter. You won’t, and as a result you will die of the same cancer.’
Harris’s smile as he drops the folder back on his cluttered desk is now so wide it almost touches the lobes of his ears.
‘Then you’ll come here, and we’ll have the same discussion. My advice would be to use the other door and have done with it, but of course that is your decision.’
Bill has listened to this sermonette with increasing dismay. ‘I’ll remember nothing? Nothing?’
‘Not quite nothing,’ Harris says. ‘You may have noticed some photos in the hall.’
‘The company picnic.’
‘Yes. Every client who visits me sees pictures from the year of his or her birth, and recognizes a few familiar faces amid all the strange ones. When you live your life again, Mr Anders – presuming you decide to – you will have a sense of déjà vu when you first see those people, a sense that you have lived it all before. Which, of course, you have. You will have a fleeting sense, almost a surety, that there is more … shall we say depth to your life, and to existence in general, than you previously believed. But then it will pass.’
‘If it’s all the same, with no possibility of improvement, why are we even here?’
Harris makes a fist and knocks on the end of the pneumatic tube hanging over the laundry basket, making it swing. ‘CLIENT WANTS TO KNOW WHY WE’RE HERE! WANTS TO KNOW WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT!’
He waits. Nothing happens. He folds his hands on his desk.
‘When Job wanted to know that, Mr Anders, God asked if Job was there when he – God – made the universe. I guess you don’t even rate that much of a reply. So let’s consider the matter closed. What do you want to do? Pick a door.’
Bill is thinking about the cancer. The pain of the cancer. To go through all that again … except he wouldn’t remember he’d gone through it already. There’s that. Assuming Isaac Harris is telling the truth.
‘No memories at all? No changes at all? Are you sure? How can you be?’
‘Because it’s always the same conversation, Mr Anderson. Each time, and with all of you.’
‘It’s Andrews!’ He bellows it, surprising both of them. In a lower voice, he says, ‘If I try, really try, I’m sure I can hold onto something. Even if it’s only what happened to Mike’s finger. And one change might be enough to … I don’t know …’
To take Annmarie to a movie instead of to that fucking kegger, how about that?
Harris says, ‘There is a folk tale that before birth, every human soul knows all the secrets of life and death and the universe. But then, just before birth, an angel leans down, puts his finger to the new baby’s lips, and whispers “Shhh.”’ Harris touches his philtrum. ‘According to the story, this is the mark left by the angel’s finger. Every human being has one.’
‘Have you ever seen an angel, Mr Harris?’
‘No, but I once saw a camel. It was in the Bronx Zoo. Choose a door.’
As he considers, Bill remembers a story they had to read in junior high: ‘The Lady or the Tiger.’ This decision is nowhere near as difficult.
I must hold onto just one thing, he tells himself as he opens the door that leads back into life. Just one thing.
The white light of return envelops him.
The doctor, who will bolt the Republican party and vote for Adlai Stevenson in the fall (something his wife must never know), bends forward from the waist like a waiter presenting a tray and comes up holding a naked baby by the heels. He gives it a sharp smack and the squalling begins.
‘You have a healthy baby boy, Mrs Andrews,’ he says. ‘Looks to be about seven pounds. Congratulations.’
Mrs Andrews takes the baby. She kisses his damp cheeks and brow. They will name him William, after her paternal grandfather. When the twenty-first century comes, he’ll still be in his forties. The idea is dizzying. In her arms she holds not just a new life but a universe of possibilities. Nothing, she thinks, could be more wonderful.
Thinking of Surendra Patel
Ralph Vicinanza, a close friend who also sold the rights to publish my books in lots of foreign countries, had a way of coming to me with interesting ideas at just the right time – which is to say while I was between projects. I never talk much to people about what I’m working on, so he must have had some kind of special radar. He was the one who suggested I might like to try my hand at a serial novel, à la Charles Dickens, and that seed eventually blossomed into The Green Mile.
Ralph called not long after I finished the first draft of Lisey’s Story and while I was waiting for that book to settle a bit (translation: doing nothing). He said that Amazon was launching their second-generation Kindle, and the company was hoping that some hot-shit bestselling writer would help them out in the PR department by writing a story that used the Kindle as a plot element. (Such longish works of fiction and nonfiction later became known as Kindle Singles.) I thanked Ralph but said I had no interest, for two reasons. The first is that I’ve never been able to write stories on demand. The second is that I hadn’t lent my name to any commercial enterprise since doing an American Express ad back in the day. And Jesus Christ, how bizarre was that? Wearing a tuxedo, I posed in a drafty castle with a stuffed raven on my arm. A friend told me I looked like a blackjack dealer with a bird fetish.
‘Ralph,’ I said, ‘I enjoy my Kindle, but I have absolutely no interest in shilling for Amazon.’
Yet the idea lingered, mostly because I’ve always been fascinated by new technologies, especially those having to do with reading and writing. One day not long after Ralph’s call, the idea for this story arrived while I was taking my morning walk. It was too cool to remain unwritten. I didn’t tell Ralph, but when the story was done, I sent it to him and said Kindle was welcome to use it for their launch purposes, if they liked. I even showed up at the event and read some of it.
I took a certain amount of shit about that from portions of the literary community that saw it as selling out to the business side, but, in the words of John Lee Hooker, ‘That don’t confront me none.’ As far as I was concerned, Amazon was just another market, and one of the few that would publish a story of this length. There was no advance, but there were – and still are – royalties on each sale (or download, if you prefer). I was happy to bank those checks; there’s an old saying that the workman is worthy of his hire, and I think it’s a true saying. I write for love, but love doesn’t pay the bills.
There was one special perk, though: a one-of-a-kind pink Kindle. Ralph got a kick out of that, and I’m glad. It was our last really cool deal, because my friend died suddenly in his sleep five years ago. Boy, I miss him.
This version of the story has been considerably revised, but you’ll notice it’s firmly set in an era when such e-reading devices were still new. That seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? And bonus points for you Roland of Gilead fans who catch references to a certain Dark Tower.
Ur
I – Experimenting with New Technology
When Wesley Smith’s colleagues asked him – some with an eyebrow hoicked satirically – what he was doing with that gadget (they all called it a gadget), he told them he was experimenting with new technology. That was not true. He bought the Kindle purely out of spite.
I wonder if the market analysts at Amazon even have that particular motivation on their product-survey radar, he thought. He guessed not. This gave him some satisfaction, but not as much as he hoped to derive from Ellen Silverman’s surprise when she saw him with his new purchase. That hadn’t happened yet, but it would. It was a small campus, after all, and he’d only been in possession of his new toy (he called it his new toy, at least to begin with) for a week.
Wesley was an instructor in the English Department at Moore College, in Moore, Kentucky. Like all instructors of English, he thought he had a novel in him somewhere and would write it someday. Moore College was the sort of institution that people call ‘a pretty good school.’ Don Allman, Wesley’s only friend in the English Department, explained what that meant.
‘A pretty good school,’ Don said, ‘is one nobody has ever heard of outside a thirty-mile radius. People call it a pretty good school because they have no evidence to the contrary, and most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.’
‘Does that make you a realist?’ Wesley once asked him.
‘I think the world is mostly populated by shitheads,’ Don Allman responded. ‘You take it from there.’
Moore wasn’t a good school, but neither was it a bad one. On the great scale of academic excellence, its place resided just a little south of mediocre. Most of its three thousand students paid their bills and many of them got jobs after graduating, although few went on to obtain (or even try for) graduate degrees. There was a fair amount of drinking, and of course there were parties, but on the great scale of party schools, Moore’s place resided a little to the north of mediocre. It had produced politicians, but all of the small-water variety, even when it came to graft and chicanery. In 1978, one Moore graduate was elected to the US House of Representatives, but he dropped dead of a heart attack after serving only four months. His replacement was a graduate of Baylor.
The school’s only marks of exceptionalism had to do with its Division Three football team and its Division Three women’s basketball team. The football team (the Moore Meerkats) was one of the worst in America, having won only seven games in the last ten years. There was constant talk of disbanding it. The current coach was a drug addict who liked to tell people that he had seen The Wrestler twelve times and never failed to cry when Mickey Rourke told his estranged daughter that he was just a broken-down piece of meat.
The women’s basketball team, however, was exceptional in a good way, especially considering that most of the players were no more than five feet seven and were preparing for jobs as marketing managers, wholesale buyers, or (if they were lucky) personal assistants to Men of Power. The Lady Meerkats had won eight conference titles in the last ten years. The coach was Wesley’s ex-girlfriend, ex as of one month previous. Ellen Silverman was the source of the spite that had moved Wesley to buy a Kindle. Well … Ellen and the Henderson kid in Wesley’s Introduction to Modern American Fiction class.
Don Allman also claimed the Moore faculty was mediocre. Not terrible, like the football team – that, at least, would have been interesting – but definitely mediocre.
‘What about you and me?’ Wesley asked. They were in the office they shared. If a student came in for a conference, the instructor who had not been sought would leave. For most of the fall and spring semesters this was not an issue, as students never came in for conferences until just before finals. Even then, only the veteran grade-grubbers, the ones who’d had permanently brown noses since elementary school, turned up. Don Allman said he sometimes fantasized about a juicy coed wearing a tee-shirt that said I WILL SCREW YOU FOR AN A, but this never happened.
‘What about us?’ Don replied. ‘Jesus Christ, just look at us, bro.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Wesley said. ‘I’m going to write a novel.’ Although even saying it depressed him. Almost everything depressed him since Ellen had walked out. When he wasn’t depressed, he felt spiteful.
‘Yes! And President Obama is going to tab me as the new Poet Laureate!’ Don Allman exclaimed. Then he pointed at something on Wesley’s cluttered desk. The Kindle was currently sitting on American Dreams, the textbook Wesley used in his Intro to American Lit class. ‘How’s that little bastard working out for you?’
‘Fine,’ Wesley said.
‘Will it ever replace the book?’
‘Never,’ Wesley said. But he had begun to wonder.
‘I thought they only came in white,’ Don Allman said.
Wesley looked at Don as haughtily as he himself had been looked at in the department meeting where his Kindle had made its public debut. ‘Nothing only comes in white,’ he said. ‘This is America.’
Don Allman considered this, then said: ‘I heard you and Ellen broke up.’
Wesley sighed.
Ellen had been his other friend, and one with benefits, until four weeks ago. She wasn’t in the English Department, of course, but the thought of going to bed with anyone in the English Department, even Suzanne Montanaro, who was vaguely presentable, made him shudder. Ellen was five-two (eyes of blue!), slim, with a mop of short, curly black hair that made her look distinctly elfin. She had a dynamite figure and kissed like a dervish. (Wesley had never kissed a dervish, but could imagine.) Nor did her energy flag when they were in bed.
Once, winded, he lay back and said, ‘I’ll never equal you as a lover.’
‘If you keep lowballing yourself like that, you won’t be my lover for long. You’re okay, Wes.’
But he guessed he wasn’t. He guessed he was just sort of … mediocre.
It wasn’t his less-than-athletic sexual ability that ended their relationship, however. It wasn’t the fact that Ellen was a vegan who ate Tofurky for Thanksgiving. It wasn’t the fact that she would sometimes lie in bed after lovemaking, talking about pick-and-rolls, give-and-gos, and the inability of Shawna Deeson to learn something Ellen called ‘the old garden gate.’
In fact, these monologues sometimes put Wesley into his deepest, sweetest, and most refreshing sleeps. He thought it was the calmness of her voice, so different from the often profane shrieks of encouragement she let out while they were making love. Her love-shrieks were eerily similar to the ones she uttered during games, running up and down the sidelines like a hare, exhorting her girls to ‘Pass the ball!’ and ‘Drive the paint!’ Wesley had even heard one of her sideline screams, ‘Go for the hole,’ in the bedroom from time to time.
They were well matched, at least in the short term; she was fiery iron, straight from the forge, and he – in his apartment filled with books – was the water in which she cooled herself.
The books were the problem. That, and the fact that he had freaked out and called her an illiterate bitch. He had never called a woman such a thing in his life before, but she had surprised an anger out of him that he had never suspected. He might be a mediocre instructor, as Don Allman had suggested, and the novel he had in him might remain in him (like a wisdom tooth that never comes up, at least avoiding the possibility of rot, infection, and an expensive – not to mention painful – dental process), but he loved books. Books were his Achilles heel.
She had come in fuming, which was normal, but also fundamentally upset – a state he failed to recognize because he had never seen her in it before. Also, he was rereading James Dickey’s Deliverance, reveling again in how well Dickey had harnessed his poetic sensibility, at least that once, to narrative, and he had just gotten to the closing passages, where the unfortunate canoeists are trying to cover up both what they have done and what has been done to them. He had no idea that Ellen had just been forced to boot Shawna Deeson off the team, or that the two of them had had a screaming fight in the gym in front of the whole team – plus the boys’ basketball team, which was waiting their turn to practice their mediocre moves – or that Shawna Deeson had then gone outside and heaved a large rock at the windshield of Ellen’s Volvo, an act for which she would surely be suspended. He had no idea that Ellen was now blaming herself, and bitterly, because ‘she was supposed to be the adult.’
He heard that part – ‘I’m supposed to be the adult’ – and said Uh-huh for the fifth or sixth time, which was one time too many for Ellen Silverman. She plucked Deliverance from Wesley’s hands, threw it across the room, and said the words that would haunt him for the next lonely month:
‘Why can’t you just read off the computer, like the rest of us?’
‘She really said that?’ Don Allman asked, a remark that woke Wesley from a trancelike state. He realized he had just told the whole story to his officemate. He hadn’t meant to, but he had. There was no going back now.
‘She did. And I said, “That was a first edition I got from my father, you illiterate bitch.”’
Don Allman was speechless. He could only stare.
‘She walked out,’ Wesley said miserably. ‘I haven’t seen or spoken to her since.’
‘Haven’t even called to say you’re sorry?’
Wesley had tried to do this, and had gotten only her voicemail. He had considered going over to the house she rented from the college, but thought she might put a fork in his face … or some other part of his anatomy. Also, he didn’t consider what had happened to be entirely his fault. She hadn’t even given him a chance. Plus … she was illiterate, or close to it. Had told him once in bed that the only book she’d read for pleasure since coming to Moore was Reach for the Summit: The Definite Dozen System for Succeeding at Whatever You Do, by Tennessee Lady Vols coach Pat Summitt. She watched TV (mostly sports), and when she wanted to dig deeper into some news story, she went to The Drudge Report. She certainly wasn’t computer illiterate. She praised the Moore College Wi-Fi network (which was superlative rather than mediocre), and never went anywhere without her laptop slung over her shoulder. On the front was a picture of Tamika Catchings with blood running down her face from a split eyebrow and the legend I PLAY LIKE A GIRL.
Don Allman sat in silence for a few moments, tapping his fingers on his narrow chest. Outside their window, November leaves rattled across Moore Quadrangle. Then he said: ‘Did Ellen walking out have anything to do with that?’ He nodded to Wesley’s new electronic sidekick. ‘It did, didn’t it? You decided to read off the computer, just like the rest of us. To … what? Woo her back?’
‘No,’ Wesley said, because he didn’t want to tell the truth: in a way he still didn’t completely understand, he had done it to get back at her. Or make fun of her. Or something. ‘Not at all. I’m merely experimenting with new technology.’
‘Right,’ said Don Allman. ‘And I’m Robert Frost, stopping by the woods on a snowy fucking evening.’
His car was in Parking Lot A, but Wesley elected to walk the two miles back to his apartment, a thing he often did when he wanted to think. He trudged down Moore Avenue, first past the fraternity houses, then past apartment houses blasting rock and rap from every window, then past the bars and takeout restaurants that serve as a life-support system for every small college in America. There was also a bookstore specializing in used texts and last year’s bestsellers offered at fifty percent off. It looked dusty and dispirited and was often empty.
Because people were home reading off the computer, Wesley assumed.
Brown leaves blew around his feet. His briefcase banged against one knee. Inside were his texts, the current book he was reading for pleasure (2666, by Roberto Bolanõ), and a bound notebook with beautiful marbleized boards. This had been a gift from Ellen on the occasion of his birthday.
‘For your book ideas,’ she had said.
In July, that was, when things between them had still been swell and they’d had the campus pretty much to themselves. The blank book had over two hundred pages, but only the first one had been marked by his large, flat scrawl.
At the top of the page (printed) was: IDEAS FOR THE NOVEL!
Below that was: A young boy discovers that his father and mother are both having affairs
And
A young boy, blind since birth, is kidnapped by his lunatic grandfather who
And
A teenager falls in love with his best friend’s mother and
Below this one was the final idea, written shortly after Ellen had thrown Deliverance across the room and stalked out of his life.
A shy but dedicated small college instructor and his athletic but largely illiterate girlfriend have a falling-out after
It was probably the best idea – write what you know, all the experts agreed on that – but he simply couldn’t go there. Talking to Don had been hard enough. And even then, complete honesty had escaped him. Like not having said how much he wanted her back.
As he approached the three-room flat he called home – what Don Allman sometimes called his ‘swinging bachelor pad’ – Wesley’s thoughts turned to the Henderson kid. Was his name Richard or Robert? Wesley had a block about that, not the same as the block he had about fleshing out any of the fragmentary mission-statements for his novel, but probably related. He had an idea all such blocks were basically hysterical in nature, as if the brain detected (or thought it detected) some nasty interior beast and had locked it in a cell with a steel door. You could hear it thumping and jumping in there like a rabid raccoon that would bite if approached, but you couldn’t see it.
The Henderson kid was on the football team – a noseback or point guard or some such thing – and while he was as horrible on the gridiron as any of them, he was a nice kid and a fairly good student. Wesley liked him. But still, he had been ready to tear the boy’s head off when he spotted him in class with what Wesley assumed was a PDA or a newfangled cell phone. This was shortly after Ellen had walked out. In those early days of the breakup, Wesley often found himself up at three in the morning, pulling some literary comfort food down from the shelf: usually his old friends Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, their adventures recounted by Patrick O’Brian. And not even that had kept him from remembering the ringing slam of the door as Ellen left his life, probably for good.
So he was in a foul mood and more than ready for backtalk as he approached Henderson and said, ‘Put it away. This is a literature class, not an Internet chat room.’
The Henderson kid had looked up and given him a sweet smile. It hadn’t lifted Wesley’s foul mood, but it did dissolve his anger on contact. Mostly because he wasn’t an angry man by nature. He supposed he was depressive by nature, maybe even dysthymic. Hadn’t he always suspected that Ellen Silverman was too good for him? Hadn’t he known, in his heart of hearts, that the doorslam had been waiting for him from the very beginning, when he’d spent the evening talking to her at a boring faculty party? Ellen played like a girl; he played like a wimp. He couldn’t even stay mad at a student who was goofing with his pocket computer (or Nintendo, or whatever it was) in class.
‘It’s the assignment, Mr Smith,’ the Henderson kid had said (on his forehead was a large purple bruise from his latest outing in the Meerkat blue). ‘It’s “Paul’s Case.” Look.’
The kid turned the gadget so Wesley could see it. It was a flat white panel, rectangular, less than half an inch thick. At the top was amazonkindle and the smile logo Wesley knew well; he was not entirely computer illiterate himself, and had ordered books from Amazon plenty of times (although he usually tried the bookstore in town first, partly out of pity; even the cat who spent most of its life dozing in the window looked malnourished).
The interesting thing on the kid’s gadget wasn’t the logo on top or the teeny-tiny keyboard on the bottom. It was mostly screen, and on that screen was not a video game where young men and women with buffed-out bodies were killing zombies in the ruins of New York, but a page of Willa Cather’s story about the poor boy with the destructive illusions.
Wesley had reached for it, then paused. ‘May I?’
‘Go ahead,’ the Henderson kid – Richard or Robert – told him. ‘It’s pretty neat. You can download books from thin air, and you can make the type as big as you want. Also, the books are cheaper because there’s no paper or binding.’
That sent a minor chill through Wesley. He became aware that most of his Intro to American Lit class was watching him. Wesley supposed it was hard for them to decide if he, as a thirty-five-year-old, was Old School (like the ancient Dr Wence, who looked like a crocodile in a three-piece suit) or New School (like Suzanne Montanaro, who liked to play Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend’ in her Introduction to Modern Drama class). Wesley supposed his reaction to Henderson’s Kindle would help them with that.
‘Mr Henderson,’ he said, ‘there will always be books. Which means there will always be paper and binding. Books are real objects. Books are friends.’
‘Yeah, but!’ Henderson had replied, his sweet smile now becoming slightly sly.
‘But?’
‘They’re also ideas and emotions. You said so in our first class.’
‘Well,’ Wesley had said, ‘you’ve got me there. But books aren’t solely ideas. Books have a smell, for instance. One that gets better – more nostalgic – as the years go by. Does this gadget of yours have a smell?’
‘Nope,’ Henderson replied. ‘Not really. But when you turn the pages … here, with this button … they kind of flutter, like in a real book, and I can go to any page I want, and when it sleeps, it shows pictures of famous writers, and it holds a charge, and—’
‘It’s a computer,’ Wesley had said. ‘You’re reading off the computer.’
The Henderson kid had taken his Kindle back. ‘It’s still “Paul’s Case.”’
‘You’ve never heard of a Kindle, Mr Smith?’ Josie Quinn had asked. Her tone was that of a kindly anthropologist asking a member of Papua New Guinea’s Kombai tribe if he had ever heard of electric stoves and elevator shoes.
‘No,’ he said, not because it was true – he had seen something called Shop the Kindle Store when he bought books from Amazon online – but because, on the whole, he thought he would prefer being perceived by them as Old School. New School was somehow … mediocre.
‘You ought to get one,’ the Henderson kid said, and when Wesley had replied, without even thinking, ‘Perhaps I will,’ the class had broken into spontaneous applause. For the first time since Ellen’s departure, Wesley had felt faintly cheered. Because they wanted him to get a book-reading gadget, and also because the applause suggested they did see him as Old School. Teachable Old School.
He did not seriously consider buying a Kindle (if he was Old School, then books were definitely the way to go) until a couple of weeks later. One day on his way home from school he imagined Ellen seeing him with his Kindle, just strolling across the quad and bopping his finger on the little NEXT PAGE button.
What in the world are you doing? she would ask. Speaking to him at last.
Reading off the computer, he would say. Just like the rest of you.
Spiteful!
But, as the Henderson kid might put it, was that a bad thing? It occurred to him that spite was a kind of methadone for lovers, and better than going cold turkey.
When he got home he turned on his desktop Dell (he owned no laptop and took pride in the fact) and went to the Amazon website. He had expected the gadget to go for four hundred dollars or so, maybe more if there was a Cadillac model, and was surprised to find it was considerably cheaper than that. Then he went to the Kindle Store (which he had been so successfully ignoring) and discovered that the Henderson kid was right: the book prices were ridiculously low. Hardcover novels (what cover, ha-ha) were priced below most of the trade paperbacks he’d bought recently. Considering what he spent on books, the Kindle might pay for itself. As for the reaction of his colleagues – all those hoicked eyebrows – Wesley discovered he relished the prospect. Which led to an interesting insight into human nature, or at least the human nature of the academic: one liked to be perceived by one’s students as Old School, but by one’s peers as New School.
