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“What time is it in India right now?” Lincoln wonders aloud.
“We get people at all hours, from everywhere,” Jimmy says matter-of-factly.
Lincoln downloads Vijay’s manuscript, prints it out, and spends the rest of the day reading. The story is set in the waning days of the Raj. An Indian private eye, also named Vijay, gets summoned to the home of a wealthy Indian couple whose handsome teenage boy has been suspiciously disappearing at night. Can Vijay find out what he’s up to? Before the detective has a chance to get to work, the boy turns up dead, apparently the accidental victim of a bizarre sexual ritual. Of course, after pages and pages of sleuthing, Vijay fingers the culprit—an aristocratic British lieutenant, whom he ultimately clubs to death with a cricket bat in an act of self-defense after an epic battle at the local officers club.
That night, Lincoln stays up late on the Internet, refreshing his history of the British Raj, catching up on the Indian caste system, tracking details of the country’s geography and climate. By the time he sends off his three-thousand-word diagnostic memo the next day, he’s alrea
dy spent almost twenty hours on the book, and three new manuscripts are awaiting his services, one from Prague and two from California.
He gets right to work on the Prague story (Cold War; Czech policeman who’d been a student during the Prague Spring; KGB bad guys) and anxiously watches for the response from Vijay Sharma. In his memo, Lincoln tried hard to restrain his darker impulses and to stay positive, encouraging. But given his experience at Pistakee, he can’t help wondering if he lacks the touch for gentle criticism—he worries that turned loose on a manuscript, he’s like a feral creature that instinctively gnaws flesh. The resolution comes a few hours later. Vijay is thrilled. He’s ecstatic. He’s reread Lincoln’s memo three times, and he’s astonished at the perception, the attention to detail, the wisdom of the suggestions. “Mr. Lincoln,” he writes, “you have truly entered my vision and realized exactly what I want to do with this book. Your empathy is miraculous.” Wade confirms that the message was sent at 3:00 a.m. Jaipur time, which turns out to be a rather normal period of the day for Lincoln’s clients to e-mail their responses. Indeed, in the coming weeks Lincoln sometimes wonders whether he’s providing editing services to aspiring writers or an intense form of sympathetic companionship to very lonely people.
No matter; they all seem terrifically happy with his efforts, endlessly grateful for his attention. Even the one person whose manuscript is such incomprehensible gibberish that Lincoln suggests putting the book aside (“Let it percolate in a drawer for a few years; many writers do that with early efforts”) and to whom Lincoln offers to refund the down payment, won’t take the money back—he so appreciates Lincoln’s straightforward honesty.
Meantime, Lincoln gets far more efficient. He learns to speed-read manuscripts, focusing on plot points and dramatic scenes. He discovers that he has five or so boilerplate pieces of advice that he can adjust to meet the specifics of almost any story. And he forces himself to suppress his contempt for the endlessly incoherent sentences, the leapfrog logic, the tired ideas, the delusional hopes of the people paying for his help. “Everybody is a writer,” he recites to himself, his new mantra, a quote from Flam.
Though he usually works at home, he believes in the sustaining value of discipline, so he’s careful to keep up the morning routine left over from the days when he went into an office: rise early; read the newspaper over breakfast; shower; dress (always casual, of course). For the sake of variety, he’ll occasionally stop by the iAgatha office after lunch to check in and print out manuscripts; sometimes he’ll stay to work at his gray desk for a few hours. The proprietors are friendly but busy. There’s little water-cooler-type talk, at least when Lincoln is around, and in fact, he rarely hears Wade say anything but the occasional “Cool.” Several times when Lincoln arrives he finds a note on his desk: “Antonio Buford called. Wants you to call him.” But Lincoln ignores the messages. At least that is behind him.
At John Barleycorn a few weeks into the new job, Flam asks for details. “They’re nice kids,” Lincoln responds. “Very low-key. Very dedicated. And they’ve built an enterprising little company.” He pauses for a bite of hamburger. “Of course, the stuff I work on is dreck.”
“How do you stand it?” Flam asks.
“In some ways, it’s easier to be gentle with the rank amateurs,” Lincoln says with a shrug. “They know not what they do. And the business is going great. I’m backed up with work, and the kicker is, the books I work on sell much better.”
“Readers recognize good editing after all.”
“No. I think the difference is that I write the sales blurbs for the books I edit, and my blurbs are better than anyone else’s. It’s all about promotion.”
Flam smiles. He’s let his hair grow since Lincoln has seen him last, and blond locks now curl behind his ears and fall unpleasantly over his shirt collar in back. Lincoln wonders if his friend has given up in some way or whether he’s just trying out a new, more visually eccentric persona. “Maybe if you stick around, you can get some equity,” Flam suggests. “They go public, and who knows? Internet stocks are making a comeback.”
Lincoln has considered and rejected the idea. “I can’t wait that long,” he says. “I’m hanging in until I get a grubstake together, and then it’s off to New York, with a job or without. Mary’s right—I’ve been complaining long enough. Time to close out Chicago.”
Flam lets out a snort. “I’ve heard that before.”
“I mean it,” Lincoln snaps, but he knows the skepticism is deserved—he’s been griping about Chicago and talking about leaving virtually since he arrived, half his lifetime ago. What does that say about his initiative, his drive?
Still, he continues to work hard. There is always work. If he feels a slight emptiness now in the rituals of his occupation, a tamping of his angry desire to make a mark, he at least knows the psychic value of staying busy. Put him at a desk in front of a manuscript, and he is a dray horse, head down, muscles straining, moving forward. On the best days, he tries to think of the latest iAgatha manuscript as his private Lewis and Clark Expedition. Maybe, he tells himself without irony, this counts as being engaged.
SPRING:
The Land of Lincoln
26
LEAVING THE IAGATHA office one afternoon, Lincoln turns north on Damen Avenue, and the sweep of his eyes catches a well-dressed black man, a relatively rare sight in this gentrified neighborhood of hip entrepreneurism. Lincoln takes several steps before he realizes that he’s just seen Antonio Buford.
“Hey!” cries the poet.
Lincoln wheels, and Buford hustles up, but instead of the placid features, the impeccable manners, the poet’s face is knotted like a fist and he waves a finger under Lincoln’s nose. “You owe me a book,” he blurts.
“What are you talking about?” Lincoln asks. He’s never seen Buford so riled.
“Pistakee canceled my contract.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” Lincoln tells him. “They fired me, and they must be eliminating all my independent decisions.”
“You can’t do that—take a writer right up to the line and then drop him on his head.”
“I’m out of it now.”
