Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  “Um . . .” I’m too busy trying to come to grips with the fact that I’ve got a maze inside of me to think of anything.

  “Carrie!” Jack shouts.

  “Yeah?” the receptionist answers from the other room.

  “What’s another word for ‘maze’?”

  “Corn.”

  “No, not ‘maize.’ ‘Maze.’”

  “Oh. Gimme a second.”

  We sit and wait and listen to the sound of Carrie’s fingers flying over the keyboard of her computer. “‘Labyrinth,’” she calls out finally.

  “What?” Jack answers.

  “‘Labyrinth.’”

  “That David Bowie movie? What about it?”

  “It’s another word for ‘maze.’”

  Jack considers this for a moment.

  “She’s right,” I say, finally able to contribute to the conversation.

  “So be it,” Jack says. “Now . . . where was I?”

  “You were saying that I shouldn’t be leading other people into the labyrinth of myself.”

  “Exactly!” Jack says. “You’re a labyrinth! And your book is a labyrinth. Hell of a Book is a labyrinth! And it’s my job to teach you to help other people find a way to navigate both of those labyrinths. We can’t have people getting inside of you, the author, and getting themselves turned around. We want all of them to make it home safely once they’ve entered you and, by proxy, your book. After all, the author is the book and the book is the author.”

  “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the phrasing here,” I say. I suddenly feel small and confused.

  “You mean about having people enter you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not homophobic, are you? Because I won’t stand for that type of thing!”

  “Homophobia doesn’t sell books,” Sharon adds, suddenly no longer looking at her phone but glaring at me instead. “On the average, we’re talking a twenty-two percent decrease in sales compared to non-homophobic authors.”

  “I’m not homophobic. This has nothing to do with homosexuality! It’s just the phrasing.”

  “Are you sure?” Sharon asks. “I don’t really care if you are, but, if so, it’s the kind of thing that I need to get in front of.”

  “I’m not homophobic!”

  “Then why do you not like talking about people entering you?”

  “Because I’m not a tunnel, or a house, or a mall, or any other structure that can be entered. I’m a person.”

  “A homophobic person?” Carrie asks from the other room.

  “No,” I shout into the air. “I’m just a writer. I’m just someone who loved books and wanted to write one. So I did. That’s all I did. I just wrote a book!”

  “That’s right,” Jack the Media Trainer says proudly. “You wrote a hell of a book! And now here you are. You’re an author, not a writer, not a reader, not a plumber, or mathematician, or virology researcher. You’re an author, something you’ve never been before. Something that few people actually are and even fewer people know how to be. And make no mistake about it, there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to be an author. I’ve seen it get the better of people. I’ve seen it drive them mad. I’ve seen—”

  “You’re about to quote Ginsberg now, aren’t you?”

  “—I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by authoring! Starving, hysterical . . .”

  Jack goes on like this for another ten minutes or so.

  * * *

  —

  Once they’ve been convinced—mostly—that I’m not homophobic and once I’ve been convinced—mostly—that I’ve got a literal maze inside myself, we finally start talking about Hell of a Book.

  “So I’ve got good news for you,” Jack says.

  “Good,” I say, finally glad to have stopped talking about labyrinths and people entering me.

  “You’ve written a good book.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Don’t thank me,” Jack says. “I’m just glad that you’ve done it. Most people that come in here have written terrible books. And there’s nothing wrong with writing a terrible book. Fact of the matter is, most books are pretty terrible when you get right down to it. Just like how most people are terrible.”

  “That’s cynical.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “You brought it up.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  Talking to Jack is beginning to make my head hurt.

  “I’m paying you a compliment,” Jack continues. “It makes my job easier when I’ve got a quality product to work with. And your book . . .” He takes a deep breath. His eyes water a little. I think he’s about to cry. “Well . . . your book is just something special.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Just then Sharon looks up from her phone and sucks her teeth. “Can you even believe it?”

  “No,” Jack says immediately. “He’s pretty unbelievable, isn’t he? But I’ve done more with less so don’t you worry.”

  “No,” Sharon corrects. “I’m talking about this.” She holds up her phone and shows it to us. On the small screen we see the image of a grief-laden Black man and woman standing in front of a lectern, crying and trying to speak. It’s a still image so there are no words coming out, only a picture of sadness and outrage and tragedy.

  “That’s so sad,” Jack says, looking away from the phone and back to me.

  “No,” Sharon says. There’s an edge to her voice that I haven’t heard before. It’s almost bitterness caused by concern. I didn’t know that she was the type of woman who was ever concerned about anything.

  “You’re not looking,” Sharon demands. And Jack and I both lean across the table, squinting to see what she’s staring at. But all either of us sees is a picture of a couple standing at the lectern weeping. There isn’t even a headline to describe the cause of the sadness that we’re seeing.

  “Okay,” Jack says.

  Sharon slams a manicured fist on the table. “You’re not looking!” she shouts.

  For a full minute and a half, Jack and I stare at the picture she is trying to show us. We stare so long that the screen times out and Sharon has to re-enter her pin code in order to light it up again. “They shot him,” Sharon says. There are tears pooling in the corners of her eyes.

  And it’s now that Jack and I both understand what’s happening. Somewhere a boy has been shot and the parents are grieving. Jack and I give one another a nod of affirmation.

  “Oh no,” I say.

  “That’s terrible,” Jack says.

  “God,” I say. “When is it going to end?”

  “You can’t turn on the news nowadays without seeing something like this.” Jack shakes his head. “When I was a kid, nothing like this ever happened. And now it’s everywhere. It’s just become this thing that doesn’t ever go away. It’s like a plague.”

  “Yeah,” I add, “a plague.” I want to say something better than this, but I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. I’m notorious for saying the wrong thing on account of how often I have trouble distinguishing between what’s real and what’s imagined. And when you spend enough time in a world that’s likely just your imagination, you tend to not care as much about the anomalies that you see. When you question whether or not people are actually real, you can’t help but feel a little stoic at the news that someone has died. And it’s not that you’re a bad person, it’s just that you have trouble getting emotionally involved in the life of someone who may or may not be real.

  And let’s face it: in this world that we live in, the fact of the matter is that it’s hard to think of anyone as being real. Everyone is just an image on a screen somewhere. Even the people that we meet and come across in the flesh eventually get reduced down to an image on a screen as we interact with th
em and their social media. So when Sharon shows Jack and me the grieving family on the screen, I can only offer up the normal amount of concern for these people who I have never met and will never meet. And that’s okay. That’s what people are. Science has proven that there’s a limited number of people that we can ever actually care about. It’s just a limitation of our brain and our emotions. So there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t make me—or even Jack—a bad person if we see the man and the woman standing at the lectern crying and the only thing we’re able to muster is faux concern.

  It’s not that we’re bad people, it’s just that we’re people.

  “Too many guns,” I say.

  “Yes,” Jack replies. “So many guns. What are they all about? Why do we have them? Why are we always trying to shoot people who haven’t done anything to us? Is there really any point to it? And don’t even get me started on the lack of mental-health care in this country. It’s criminal.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Did you hear about the other shooting?” I don’t know what shooting I mean, but there’s always another shooting so it’s always a safe bet to just ask if the person heard about the other one. It makes you sound informed, and sympathetic, and all of those other things that good people are.

  Jack nods again in affirmation. “I did hear about it,” he says. “Terrible. Just terrible. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder about the nature of people. Why do they do it? Why do they do anything like that? What drives them? Who are these people?”

  Jack and I continue to go back and forth about the people, and about the tragedy, and about how we’re both fed up with the process and the shootings and we hope that we’re giving Sharon everything she needs in order to feel good about things and in order to think that neither of us are bad people. After all, we’re not bad people. We’re just people caught up in the cycle of humanity and trying to get by.

  The thin droplets of water at the corners of Sharon’s eyes have transformed into full-blown tears. They streak down her face—but do not mar her makeup—and she wipes them away and sniffles. “He was just a kid,” she says. “To do that to a kid. I just don’t understand it.”

  Jack and I both know better than to say anything. This is the type of moment in which you don’t offer words but you simply let the silence do the work of expressing grief. So he and I both purse our lips and nod solemnly and we both remain that way until Sharon says, “I need to go out for a moment.”

  Jack and I remain silent as she leaves. We try to leave room for her grieving.

  “You know,” I say, “I think I might take a moment myself.”

  “Yes, yes,” Jack says. “You do that. We all need time to figure out these impossible-to-understand things. All of these dead people . . . what do we do with them?”

  It feels like a rhetorical question so I take my chance and head to the bathroom. And there, The Kid is waiting for me.

  * * *

  —

  “So what do you think of all this?” I ask The Kid.

  (He was already there back then. How did I forget that? But, then again, I can only be so surprised. It’s like I told you before: I can’t trust my mind. I never know what’s then, what’s now, and what never really happened at all.)

  He shrugs his shoulders, stoic as Marcus Aurelius on Xanax.

  “Well, I think it’s a tragedy,” I begin, full of righteous indignation. “It’s an outright tragedy. I just get tired of seeing it. Get tired of turning on the news and finding out about another dead person.”

  “But people have always died, right?” The Kid asks.

  “True,” I reply. “And it’s not like the news makes the deaths. I mean, CNN and Fox News aren’t out there killing people in the streets. But they do add to the overall air of dread that we all feel. It’s the soundtrack of America right now. The jam we all bump and grind to. People being shot is the way we mark the passage of time now. Like, where were you when Sandy Hook happened? And do you remember who you were dating around the time when those people shot up that office building? But it happens so much that you then have to ask: ‘What office building?’” I try to flash a smile at the kid as my way of consoling him for the world that he finds himself in. “But it’s just the way it is. There’s no harm in it. Every generation had their share of tragedies. It’s just that we all happen to hear about them more. Fact of the matter is, the murder rate is the lowest it’s been since the 1980s. And I know you’re too young to understand, but believe me when I say that the 1980s were the heyday of bad things, and crime, and killings, and drugs, and everything else.”

  The Kid doesn’t look particularly convinced.

  “But what about the people?” The Kid asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are people that these things happen to, right?”

  I scratch my chin and think about his question. “Technically, I suppose.”

  “And aren’t we supposed to care about people? My mama said that we’re all supposed to care about people because . . . well . . . because it’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s how we all take care of each other. So you can’t just see somebody being hurt and not care about them.”

  I shake my head, confirming that everything the boy is saying is true and real. “Everything you’re saying is true and real, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s impossible to care about everyone. So you pick your battles. You limit how much you invest into the world and into people. It’s a type of emotional triage.”

  “What’s ‘triage’?”

  “It’s what they do in hospitals. It’s how they tell who to help first. It’s basically people prioritizing other people into more or less important.”

  The Kid thinks about this for a while. He sniffles as though he’s suddenly come down with a cold. He balls his small black hand into a small black fist and places it under his chin like an inky rendition of Rodin’s Thinker. “It just doesn’t sound right,” The Kid says, somber as an elegy.

  “I hate to tell you this, but nothing ever sounds right after a certain age, Kid. The older you get, the more you find out it’s all just falling apart and, even worse than that, it’s always been falling apart. The past, the present, the future. They’re interchangeable when it comes to bad news. Tragedy and trauma are the threads that weave generations together. Hell, being Black, we should know that better than anyone.”

  * * *

  —

  When I come back, Sharon is still gone and Jack is staring at his watch. We’re getting close to being over on time and I can’t tell if he’s happy about the extra money or frustrated that we’re keeping him from something else. Either way, he seems eager to see me. “Now, tell me about your book.”

  “Well, I mean, you read it. What would you like to know?”

  “Tell me what it’s about,” Jack says. “Pretend I’m a stranger and I haven’t read your book. Now tell me what it’s about.”

  I think for a moment. “Well,” I begin, “my book’s about this character named—”

  “I’m going to stop you right there because you’re wrong,” Jack the Media Trainer says. “But don’t feel bad. That’s a common mistake among first-time authors. They think their book is about the characters or the story or, if it’s nonfiction, the subject matter. But that’s all wrong. That’s like saying the Mona Lisa is about a woman with a wry smile.”

  I hate to admit it, but Jack the Media Trainer has just managed a pretty profound notion.

  “Thank you,” he says, as if he can hear my thoughts. “I’ve been working with authors for well over a decade now. I’ve media trained people for countless novels, memoirs, short-story collections. The list goes on. And here’s one thing that they’ve all had in common: their books are never about what the authors think they’re about. No, sir. Their books are about whatever the hell we want them to be about.”
He points to the lectern, and the microphones, and the camera at the far end of the room. “When the time comes, when you’re sitting up there on Oprah’s couch. Lots of good things come out of that couch. Let me tell you!”

  “I thought she stopped doing that,” I interrupt. “You know, after that whole Million Little Whatevers controversy back in—”

  “Carrie?!” Jack shouts. “Did Oprah’s couch stop running?”

  “May 25, 2011,” Carrie calls back, somberly. “In the industry it’s known as ‘The Day the Milk Ran Out.’ We hold a moment of silence on that day each year.”

  “But she’s back now, right?” Jack asks. “She didn’t turn off the faucet again, did she? Dear God, I hope not!”

  “No,” Carrie says slowly. “She hasn’t gone away again.” Her voice is so heavy, I imagine her staring off into the distance for a moment, like watching the credits roll on some favorite movie that she’ll never see again. Then she manages: “She’s still back . . . but it’s never been the same.”

  “Sorry for your loss,” I say. And, without being prompted, we all have a moment of silence for the way things used to be.

  * * *

  —

  After mourning the imperial splendor that Oprah’s couch used to be, we get back to business. Sharon joins us, looking much more composed, and we spend the next hour and a half talking solely about my wardrobe for the book tour and for interviews. “Right now,” Jack says, “with the jeans and button-down shirt combination you’re wearing, you’ve got a bit of an ‘Aww shucks’ country guy thing going on. That’s all well and good, people like that. It’s relatable. But it doesn’t exactly sizzle. We’ve got to get you into a sport coat.”

  “I told you,” Sharon adds.

  “It’s a subtle difference,” Jack says, “but a vital one. It’s the difference between an author whose wardrobe says ‘You should read my book’ and an author whose wardrobe says ‘You have to read my book.’”