"I expect he'll want to have a word with you,
too."
#
Link rang his doorbell one morning while he was hunched over his
computer, thinking about the story he was going to write. When he'd
moved into the house, he'd felt the shape of that story. All the while
that he'd sanded and screwed in bookcases, it had floated just below the
surface, its silhouette discernible through the ripples.
But when Adam left Mimi watching television and sat at his desk in the
evening with the humming, unscuffed, and gleaming laptop before him,
fingers poised over the keys, nothing came. He tapped out an opening
sentence,
I suspect that my father is dead
and deleted it. Then undid the delete.
He called up The Inventory and stroked the spacebar with his thumb,
paging through screensful of pictures and keywords and pricetags and
scanned-in receipts. He flipped back to the story and deleted his
sentence.
My dead brother had been hiding out on the synagogue's roof for
God knows how long.
The last thing he wanted was to write an autobiography. He wanted to
write a story about the real world, about the real people who inhabited
it. He hit the delete key.
The video-store girl never got bored behind her counter, because
she could always while away the hours looking up the rental
histories of the popular girls who'd shunned her in high school.
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