9

Tim Underhill was like a kind of Scheherazade, telling stories to save his life. Fiction gave him entry into the worst and darkest places of his life, and that entry put the pain and fear and anger right in his own hands, where he could transform them into pleasure. In his youth he had been without direction, reckless, too loud, a real pain in the neck. After he let himself get drafted into Vietnam at the age of twenty-two, he reinvented himself based on the more obnoxious aspects of his character and became louder, profane, open to violence. He made a point of taking as his lovers slight, girlish young Vietnamese boys of eighteen or nineteen, whom he referred to as his “flowers,” daring anyone to call him on it. He used drugs whenever they were available, and the drugs gave him the toxic gift of addiction. In these years, he told stories, but he never wrote them down. Salvation came after Vietnam, when he was living above the flower market in Bangkok and there began writing the dialogues with himself that eventually turned into stories and novels. And bit by bit the fiction let him straighten out his life. It allowed him to live many lives at once, all in the peace and seclusion of his little apartment.

After he had published half a dozen books and felt more or less healed, he left Thailand and moved to New York City. He had turned into a person for whom his younger self would have felt as much contempt as envy. He lived quietly and loved his friends, his nephew, his city. What this settled character felt for the desperate young man he had been was a mixture of pity, admiration, and regret so sharp it could nearly have drawn blood.

Throughout the war, Underhill’s belief in his ability to tell a story that would knock the eyes out of his audience’s heads had shaped his ambitions, and he had developed this talent in an ongoing tale he called “The Running Grunt.” The characters of “The Running Grunt” had populated many otherwise boring hours in the tents and various wastelands of Camp Crandall. But his storytelling career had been born not in Vietnam, he knew, but in Millhaven, rather, and in completely mundane circumstances.

He had been a senior at Holy Sepulchre, eighteen years old, wasting time one evening in the house of a good-looking, lively neighbor, Esti Woodbridge, whom he liked because she read a lot of books and attracted mean-spirited gossip about which she cared not a whit. He liked her six-year-old daughter, Marin, too. Marin Woodbridge was a seriously cool kid. Esti had something going in the kitchen that required unblinking attention, and Marin, left alone in the living room with Tim, wandered up to him and said, “If you could tell me a story, I bet it’d be pretty good.” He heard Marin’s mother in the kitchen, laughing. “Well, let’s give it a try,” he said, and opened his mouth—and what came out amazed him at every step, a lengthy, complicated story about a prince and a magic horse and a girl with long golden hair. Everything fell into place; nothing was left over or unresolved at the end. When he was finished, Marin grinned at him and Esti popped out of the kitchen to say, “Wow! Great story, Tim!” Wow was what he thought, too. Where in the world had that come from?

Now he wondered if he would ever again know that surprised satisfaction. A great part of the reason Tim was wasting time on a lunatic book collector and fussing around with e-mails and virus protection had to do with avoiding actual work. Not only did he not feel comfortable with what he was writing, he was beginning to dislike it. Over the next few weeks, he hoped, this situation would change. When he found that he disliked what he was writing, he was writing the wrong things. He would be increasingly depressed until his story told him where it wanted to go.

He called up his document, but before a fresh sentence spoke itself in his mind, he saw Jasper Kohle seated across the table in the Fireside, saying, You don’t listen.

Listen to what?

He shook off the question and began to advance words across his screen.