2010
"How was the flight?"
"It was good. Peaceful, you know? Just Nozz-a-la, babe, thanks."
"...hey, yeah, Me too. Just a Nozz."
"Danny. Get a scotch. I promise I won't beat you to death to pour it down my throat. Probably. I mean, you have to take these things one day at a time."
"Smart-ass writers. So, good flight?"
"Good flight."
"I wish I could afford a private plane."
"Hey, I happen to know for a fact that you can afford at least ten percent of a private plane."
"Touche."
"Okay, so--how are things shaping up for the paperback?"
"It's good. It's going to be a good run--they got that artist you like, Danville, to do the cover, you want to see the roughs?"
"Pat did it? No, if Pat did it I trust him. It'll be a nice surprise when it turns up in Barbados."
"You're really going to do this thing?"
"Yup. No cell, no land line, no nothing. Me, my wife, my brother, and my daughter. Sand, sun and silence. It's been planned a long time, Danny."
"I wish I could afford six months--"
"You could afford, shit, what, two or three weeks."
"Yeah, but your career couldn't. Look, all I'm saying, Eddie, is this is not the time to drop out of the world. You just got the Booker Prize--"
"--and Mandy Lassiter is still cursing about it--"
"--and I've seen the advance reviews for Ilium. The Herald is calling it the quintessential post-9/11 book for the groundlings."
"I wish they wouldn't say shit like that, Danny."
"Which?"
"Either. One, calling my readers a bunch of fuckin' slobs, and bee, acting like my book is anything but gritty street pulp for the slightly more literate class of slob to read on the subway. It's not a fuckin'... It's not going to rebuild anything, or stop any wars, or bring back any dead people. It's just a goddam book. Hell, half the time I wish I'd never written the fucking thing."
"What are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about. I don't even live in New York anymore. I live in Maine. What the Christ am I doing writing a book like Ilium?"
"--oh, God, wow, you're Eddie Toren."
"Hey, careful, sug, don't spill nothin. Yeah, that's me."
"Jesus. Can I get your autograph? I loved Ilium."
"She loved it, Eddie."
"Fuck you, Danny, and gimme a pen. What's your name, hon?"
"Helen."
"...seriously?"
"Yeah-huh."
"To Helen, with love from Eddie Toren. Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? There you go."
"Oh my God, great. What's the quote from? And can I get you anything else? Anything at all?"
"It's from Yeats. Get my friend a scotch, will ya?
"...stop looking at me like that, Danny. I admit it was a good book, okay? I may feel like a dishonest shit half the time for being the one who wrote it, but it was a good book."
"It is a good book, Eddie, and swear to God we should be following it up. Are you at least taking a laptop to Barbados?"
"Nope."
"You have a very unattractive smirk, Eddie. Very unattractive."
"Don't lie. I may be smirking, but I make it look good."
"You're an ass. What about a trunk novel?"
"I don't do that."
"Eddie, at this point we could publish your laundry list, and Calyx would bark like a seal and ask for another."
"Danny, I don't do that shit. Trunk novels are in the trunk for a reason, they're busted stories. They're not moving."
"You're telling me you don't have one you could knock into shape before you leave?"
"Dan, what event in the history of our relationship has implied to you that I lack in moral scruples when it comes to my work and would pass off crap on my readers because I could get away with it? I wrote some shitty books when I was off and on the various wagons over the years, and it still pisses me off nobody told me they sucked. Tribeca Blues never should've gone to the printer, the fucking presses should've caught on fire from the sheer suck, so I'm not giving you something that I, in a Percocet haze, actually managed to realize blew too bad to send in, okay? Jesus."
"Eddie, I'm sorry."
"You know, this is seventeen years since I kicked the Big H, Dan? I mean, I've fucked up time and time again since then, but I never stuck anything in my arm since Suzie dragged me into rehab that first time. And one of the things I made a goal, made a focus, was that for my twentieth wedding anniversay, I was going to Barbados, with my family, and I was going to sip cold drinks with fruit in them and get a suntan. Now, because I'm a fuck-up, it's going to be goddam Gatorade I'm sipping, and with this fuckin hole in the ozone layer I'll probably spend the whole trip playing canasta in a basement, but I'm going, Dan, and the public can just try and keep my name in their memory for a year or two."
"Hey, Ed, let me ask you something. You remember when you went into rehab, you called up some guy and said, hey Danny, I put my advance into a needle and stuck it in a vein, and--by the way--there's not going to be a second book, so exactly how dicked am I? Didn't somebody cancel a trip with their boyfriend and walk into Calyx Publishing bold as brass and kick a little ass? It was a couple decades ago, so maybe I don't remember so good, but I think that was me. I think I told Trudy Damascus that Eddie Toren was going to be America's new hot young writer right up until he got too much gray in his hair for people to say it with a straight face, and Calyx could be the company that published his first book or all his books. Did that happen?"
"Yeah, Danny. Yeah."
"Okay. And I've been there every time you slipped or jumped or ran headlong screaming off the wagon. So when I beg you to give me something to follow up Ilium before you drop off the planet for a while, trust me that when I say it it's because I'm a very. good. agent."
"...maybe there's something."
"Something?"
"Not a trunk novel. Not exactly. It's in the trunk. But it's not--it's... different."
"Different how?"
"Fantasy. I wrote it in rehab, it was the first thing I was able to write after I came off the junk. Took me four months to put pen to paper, and this is what I wrote. Kind of a fairy tale for Rosie. It's about, uh, this court jester, Cantor Fairwell, and he's in love with the Mad Knight, and he goes on a quest into the Blasted Lands for the Dreamflower to cure her and save the Territories--"
"...yeah, okay, you can tell that to Calyx's fantasy guy, because I heard blah blah blah ogs and talking trees. But it's not crap?"
"Naw, it's good, I was in love with it, but I can't publish it. It's autobiography, man. I mean, if I wrote it as a straight book in my usual genre, guns and hoods and alleys, it would just be, you know, my life. And heavy-handed as shit."
"How autobiographical are we talking about?"
"...the Mad Knight is a legless black woman."
"You weren't kidding."
"Yeah."
"Well, maybe you can switch it around--"
"No, it's gotta be like that, Dan. I've tried, trust me. That's the story. That's how it goes. I mean, it's done."
"............authors. Eddie, you, personally, own ten percent of my ulcers, so remember that the next time you make a joke, right? Okay, so it's a fantasy autobiography. Why the fuck not. You got it up there in Shitheel County, MA?"
"Maine is ME, Dan, and it's Castle Rock, but yeah. I do. I'll FedEx it."
"Anything special you want?"
"Get Pat to do the cover. If he does what I want instead of playing the artiste tell 'em I'll name a character after him."
"He'll want to know who it is."
"The Squire."
"And this will mean something to him?"
"He's read it, Dan. Suze has, Jake has, Rosie has. Joe has."
"Joe is--?"
"Joe Wales, he's our caretaker up in Castle Rock. Roughly a million years old. We're... pals. He helped me get through some rough patches."
"They like it?"
"Yeah."
"Is it good?"
"Yeah. But it doesn't have an ending."
"So give it one."
"...yeah."
"What do you want for the cover?"
"Hunh? Oh. Okay, yeah. Dark-haired guy, in a oubliette. Maybe up at the top of a tower instead. Durance vile. Looking out through a barred window. Guy's got his back to the camera, shirt's off, tatoo of a monkey on his back. Yeah, make it a tower, because there's a guy with wings flying by the window."
"An angel? There to save him?"
"No, just... a dude with his wings. Doing his thing."
"Yeah, okay. And, uh, a monkey on his back?"
"I said it was heavy-handed."
"Yeah. --shit. Okay, I got a meeting with Trudy over at Calyx in fifteen. I'll pitch the book, if it goes well and it damn well will, you'll get a call from Ben Birdsall, that's the editor in fantasy. This is a good idea, Eddie."
"I guess so. Yeah, I think it is. I'll see you, Dan."
"Give my love to the ladies."
"You bet."
"How's Rosie like Columbia?"
"Oh my God, Dan, you should see the shitheads she brings home. I need to lock her up in a tower."
"She'll just grow her hair out, Eddie. She's a woman."
"She's my baby, Dan. And her hair does the afro thing."
"So she'll float away like a dandelion. I'll see you."
"I'll see you. Give Rick a hug, yeah?"
"Well, I was planning to anyway."
"Yeah, okay, well clarify for him when it stops being from me, okay?"
"Have a good flight, Eddie."
"You okay, daddy?"
"Hunh? Yeah, Rosie. I'm just... working on an ending."
"For King's County? For Mr. Tate?"
"Yeah."
"Make it a happy one, dad."
"I'd like to, hon, but I'm not sure it's the right one."
"Well, I want you to. And you want to."
"Sure, but I can't just go around handing out happy endings because I want to. It's not a good enough reason."
"How about because your beautiful and intelligent daughter asked you to?"
"You left out modest. And utterly-lacking-in-taste."
"I dumped Norman."
"Good."
"So you owe me a happy ending."
"Just wanting there to be one isn't a good enough reason, Rosie."
"How come?"
"Huh?"
"Why not? Why can't you make it a happy ending if you want to? All you've gotta do is type, and they lived happily ever after. You want to, you got your fingers on the keyboard, just do it."
"....huh."
"I'm gonna go help Uncle Jake with the grill, okay?"
"You mean you're going to go play with the dog?"
"Oy is always bugging him when he's grilling, so..."
"...so you're an enormous help and should be given a medal. The dog is twenty-three years old and has no teeth, I'm sure he's an enormous menace. Go be a hero."
"Love you, daddy."
"Love you, too, Rosalinda."
Eddie Toren stares at the screen of the word processor a long time, fingers poised above the keyboard. "Hell, why not?" he says, finally.
And he writes an ending.
Then he goes out and joins his family.
"It was good. Peaceful, you know? Just Nozz-a-la, babe, thanks."
"...hey, yeah, Me too. Just a Nozz."
"Danny. Get a scotch. I promise I won't beat you to death to pour it down my throat. Probably. I mean, you have to take these things one day at a time."
"Smart-ass writers. So, good flight?"
"Good flight."
"I wish I could afford a private plane."
"Hey, I happen to know for a fact that you can afford at least ten percent of a private plane."
"Touche."
"Okay, so--how are things shaping up for the paperback?"
"It's good. It's going to be a good run--they got that artist you like, Danville, to do the cover, you want to see the roughs?"
"Pat did it? No, if Pat did it I trust him. It'll be a nice surprise when it turns up in Barbados."
"You're really going to do this thing?"
"Yup. No cell, no land line, no nothing. Me, my wife, my brother, and my daughter. Sand, sun and silence. It's been planned a long time, Danny."
"I wish I could afford six months--"
"You could afford, shit, what, two or three weeks."
"Yeah, but your career couldn't. Look, all I'm saying, Eddie, is this is not the time to drop out of the world. You just got the Booker Prize--"
"--and Mandy Lassiter is still cursing about it--"
"--and I've seen the advance reviews for Ilium. The Herald is calling it the quintessential post-9/11 book for the groundlings."
"I wish they wouldn't say shit like that, Danny."
"Which?"
"Either. One, calling my readers a bunch of fuckin' slobs, and bee, acting like my book is anything but gritty street pulp for the slightly more literate class of slob to read on the subway. It's not a fuckin'... It's not going to rebuild anything, or stop any wars, or bring back any dead people. It's just a goddam book. Hell, half the time I wish I'd never written the fucking thing."
"What are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about. I don't even live in New York anymore. I live in Maine. What the Christ am I doing writing a book like Ilium?"
"--oh, God, wow, you're Eddie Toren."
"Hey, careful, sug, don't spill nothin. Yeah, that's me."
"Jesus. Can I get your autograph? I loved Ilium."
"She loved it, Eddie."
"Fuck you, Danny, and gimme a pen. What's your name, hon?"
"Helen."
"...seriously?"
"Yeah-huh."
"To Helen, with love from Eddie Toren. Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? There you go."
"Oh my God, great. What's the quote from? And can I get you anything else? Anything at all?"
"It's from Yeats. Get my friend a scotch, will ya?
"...stop looking at me like that, Danny. I admit it was a good book, okay? I may feel like a dishonest shit half the time for being the one who wrote it, but it was a good book."
"It is a good book, Eddie, and swear to God we should be following it up. Are you at least taking a laptop to Barbados?"
"Nope."
"You have a very unattractive smirk, Eddie. Very unattractive."
"Don't lie. I may be smirking, but I make it look good."
"You're an ass. What about a trunk novel?"
"I don't do that."
"Eddie, at this point we could publish your laundry list, and Calyx would bark like a seal and ask for another."
"Danny, I don't do that shit. Trunk novels are in the trunk for a reason, they're busted stories. They're not moving."
"You're telling me you don't have one you could knock into shape before you leave?"
"Dan, what event in the history of our relationship has implied to you that I lack in moral scruples when it comes to my work and would pass off crap on my readers because I could get away with it? I wrote some shitty books when I was off and on the various wagons over the years, and it still pisses me off nobody told me they sucked. Tribeca Blues never should've gone to the printer, the fucking presses should've caught on fire from the sheer suck, so I'm not giving you something that I, in a Percocet haze, actually managed to realize blew too bad to send in, okay? Jesus."
"Eddie, I'm sorry."
"You know, this is seventeen years since I kicked the Big H, Dan? I mean, I've fucked up time and time again since then, but I never stuck anything in my arm since Suzie dragged me into rehab that first time. And one of the things I made a goal, made a focus, was that for my twentieth wedding anniversay, I was going to Barbados, with my family, and I was going to sip cold drinks with fruit in them and get a suntan. Now, because I'm a fuck-up, it's going to be goddam Gatorade I'm sipping, and with this fuckin hole in the ozone layer I'll probably spend the whole trip playing canasta in a basement, but I'm going, Dan, and the public can just try and keep my name in their memory for a year or two."
"Hey, Ed, let me ask you something. You remember when you went into rehab, you called up some guy and said, hey Danny, I put my advance into a needle and stuck it in a vein, and--by the way--there's not going to be a second book, so exactly how dicked am I? Didn't somebody cancel a trip with their boyfriend and walk into Calyx Publishing bold as brass and kick a little ass? It was a couple decades ago, so maybe I don't remember so good, but I think that was me. I think I told Trudy Damascus that Eddie Toren was going to be America's new hot young writer right up until he got too much gray in his hair for people to say it with a straight face, and Calyx could be the company that published his first book or all his books. Did that happen?"
"Yeah, Danny. Yeah."
"Okay. And I've been there every time you slipped or jumped or ran headlong screaming off the wagon. So when I beg you to give me something to follow up Ilium before you drop off the planet for a while, trust me that when I say it it's because I'm a very. good. agent."
"...maybe there's something."
"Something?"
"Not a trunk novel. Not exactly. It's in the trunk. But it's not--it's... different."
"Different how?"
"Fantasy. I wrote it in rehab, it was the first thing I was able to write after I came off the junk. Took me four months to put pen to paper, and this is what I wrote. Kind of a fairy tale for Rosie. It's about, uh, this court jester, Cantor Fairwell, and he's in love with the Mad Knight, and he goes on a quest into the Blasted Lands for the Dreamflower to cure her and save the Territories--"
"...yeah, okay, you can tell that to Calyx's fantasy guy, because I heard blah blah blah ogs and talking trees. But it's not crap?"
"Naw, it's good, I was in love with it, but I can't publish it. It's autobiography, man. I mean, if I wrote it as a straight book in my usual genre, guns and hoods and alleys, it would just be, you know, my life. And heavy-handed as shit."
"How autobiographical are we talking about?"
"...the Mad Knight is a legless black woman."
"You weren't kidding."
"Yeah."
"Well, maybe you can switch it around--"
"No, it's gotta be like that, Dan. I've tried, trust me. That's the story. That's how it goes. I mean, it's done."
"............authors. Eddie, you, personally, own ten percent of my ulcers, so remember that the next time you make a joke, right? Okay, so it's a fantasy autobiography. Why the fuck not. You got it up there in Shitheel County, MA?"
"Maine is ME, Dan, and it's Castle Rock, but yeah. I do. I'll FedEx it."
"Anything special you want?"
"Get Pat to do the cover. If he does what I want instead of playing the artiste tell 'em I'll name a character after him."
"He'll want to know who it is."
"The Squire."
"And this will mean something to him?"
"He's read it, Dan. Suze has, Jake has, Rosie has. Joe has."
"Joe is--?"
"Joe Wales, he's our caretaker up in Castle Rock. Roughly a million years old. We're... pals. He helped me get through some rough patches."
"They like it?"
"Yeah."
"Is it good?"
"Yeah. But it doesn't have an ending."
"So give it one."
"...yeah."
"What do you want for the cover?"
"Hunh? Oh. Okay, yeah. Dark-haired guy, in a oubliette. Maybe up at the top of a tower instead. Durance vile. Looking out through a barred window. Guy's got his back to the camera, shirt's off, tatoo of a monkey on his back. Yeah, make it a tower, because there's a guy with wings flying by the window."
"An angel? There to save him?"
"No, just... a dude with his wings. Doing his thing."
"Yeah, okay. And, uh, a monkey on his back?"
"I said it was heavy-handed."
"Yeah. --shit. Okay, I got a meeting with Trudy over at Calyx in fifteen. I'll pitch the book, if it goes well and it damn well will, you'll get a call from Ben Birdsall, that's the editor in fantasy. This is a good idea, Eddie."
"I guess so. Yeah, I think it is. I'll see you, Dan."
"Give my love to the ladies."
"You bet."
"How's Rosie like Columbia?"
"Oh my God, Dan, you should see the shitheads she brings home. I need to lock her up in a tower."
"She'll just grow her hair out, Eddie. She's a woman."
"She's my baby, Dan. And her hair does the afro thing."
"So she'll float away like a dandelion. I'll see you."
"I'll see you. Give Rick a hug, yeah?"
"Well, I was planning to anyway."
"Yeah, okay, well clarify for him when it stops being from me, okay?"
"Have a good flight, Eddie."
"You okay, daddy?"
"Hunh? Yeah, Rosie. I'm just... working on an ending."
"For King's County? For Mr. Tate?"
"Yeah."
"Make it a happy one, dad."
"I'd like to, hon, but I'm not sure it's the right one."
"Well, I want you to. And you want to."
"Sure, but I can't just go around handing out happy endings because I want to. It's not a good enough reason."
"How about because your beautiful and intelligent daughter asked you to?"
"You left out modest. And utterly-lacking-in-taste."
"I dumped Norman."
"Good."
"So you owe me a happy ending."
"Just wanting there to be one isn't a good enough reason, Rosie."
"How come?"
"Huh?"
"Why not? Why can't you make it a happy ending if you want to? All you've gotta do is type, and they lived happily ever after. You want to, you got your fingers on the keyboard, just do it."
"....huh."
"I'm gonna go help Uncle Jake with the grill, okay?"
"You mean you're going to go play with the dog?"
"Oy is always bugging him when he's grilling, so..."
"...so you're an enormous help and should be given a medal. The dog is twenty-three years old and has no teeth, I'm sure he's an enormous menace. Go be a hero."
"Love you, daddy."
"Love you, too, Rosalinda."
Eddie Toren stares at the screen of the word processor a long time, fingers poised above the keyboard. "Hell, why not?" he says, finally.
And he writes an ending.
Then he goes out and joins his family.