“You seem weighed down,” Amanda said, letting go of his hand. She ran her palm along the newly shaved side of her head. “I’m an empath, did you know? We have the ability to intuitively feel other people’s energies.”
“I’m just dealing with a lot of shit.”
“The doctor is in if you want to talk,” Amanda said.
Kyle hunched over her desk. She smelled like watermelon from the gum she was snapping.
“Have you ever felt like you were losing control?” he said quietly, and then shook his head. “Never mind.”
She grabbed his hand again and looked him dead in the eyes. “Always, Kyle. Always.”
The door to the hallway opened. The hairs on the back of Kyle’s neck rose from a bad energy invading the space. He swiveled around, unsurprised to see who it was, as if they had symbiotically become in sync.
“William,” he said, wanting to tackle his former mentor to the ground and smash his face in until the guy’s nose spouted blood and he begged for mercy. He held onto Amanda’s hand, his life preserver.
“How did your meeting with Brett turn out?” Amanda asked as William walked over. “Kyle, this is your old professor, right?”
“What meeting with Brett?” Kyle asked her.
The front desk phone rang and Amanda answered.
“It looks like I’ll be signing with Burke & Burke,” William said smugly.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Kyle asked.
“Your colleague Brett is a fan of Devil’s Hopyard. He says it has a shot at being a bestseller.”
Kyle felt his legs go weak. “That’s impossible.”
“Why? Because you were too self-involved to see its potential?”
William got in Kyle’s face. He was close enough for Kyle to smell the guy’s breath, putrid as if he was rotting from within.
“You are not god of the publishing world, Kyle. You can’t keep me from my destiny.”
“The police are getting involved, just so you know.” Kyle was doing everything in his power to restrain himself. In an alternate reality, his fists would be covered in blood and William would be on a stretcher.
“That was a real low blow sending them to my house. After the Zabar’s basket I left you to apologize—”
Kyle’s eye was twitching. “I know what you did, you son of a bitch. You twisted nut job, you fucking killed that cat.”
“I worry about you,” William said, his tone softer than before. “I remember when you had a breakdown—”
“I never had a breakdown,” Kyle said, his voice raised.
Amanda looked up from the phone and shooed them both away. They reconvened by the elevators.
“What I saw that one time when you were in the hospital, Kyle—”
“I had pneumonia from falling asleep outside in the dead of winter.”
“Which was brought on by a psychotic breakdown. The doctors wanted to hold you for psychiatric testing until I talked them out of it.”
“That’s not true.”
“I know it’s easier to forget, but these episodes can return.”
Kyle put a finger in his mentor’s face. “You stay the fuck away from me.”
“We want to bite the hand that feeds us,” William said, shaking his head. “You’re lashing out at me because we used to be so close.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, William, but if you come near me again, I’m gonna have you arrested.”
“Arrested for what?”
“For ripping out a cat’s heart and stuffing my girlfriend’s panties in its place!”
Kyle glanced around the office. People were watching now: coworkers, authors, all of them judging, all of them seeing him as the unhinged one.
“I suggest you get yourself together. You’re not even making any sense.” William put his hand on Kyle’s shoulder, but Kyle smacked it away. “Kyle,” he said, in a condescending tone and replaced his hand on Kyle’s shoulder only to have it swatted away again.
“Whatever you’re attempting to pull, it won’t work,” Kyle said.
William got as close to him as possible, his lips hovering over Kyle’s ear. “But look, I’m getting signed at Burke & Burke. It already is working.”
Kyle closed his eyes to make William go away. His body was quaking. He clenched his fists in anticipation of delivering a beatdown; he thirsted for the feel of causing William an immense amount of pain. He counted to ten, and when he opened his eyes, William was in the elevator. The doors closed as William gave a slow wave good-bye, the sound of his laughter echoing from the floors below until it disappeared … but remained louder than ever, rattling around in Kyle’s skull.
16
NAÏVE SIERRA RAVEN, who between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram had mapped out her entire plans for the day for the world to know. So William headed over to Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where she had promised all her followers that she’d be on a bench working on Girls Without Hope. Sure enough, he found her bundled up in a heavy sweater and a scarf staring at her laptop in deep thought.
He hadn’t decided yet what he wanted to happen with this interaction. While the girl hadn’t done anything to him personally, she did represent Kyle’s success, which William believed his former protégé no longer deserved. He’d learned from doing a little bit of hardcore snooping that without Sierra’s book, Kyle would be left with only one difficult author whose output had become nonexistent. Surely not enough to keep him employed at Burke & Burke. William pictured Kyle begging him for another chance with Devil’s Hopyard. It was obvious he was jealous after he found out about Brett’s interest. It delighted William to know how fast the power had changed in his favor once again.
As he got closer, he took a moment to study Sierra. She was a pixie, all right, tiny and sprite-like, bookish and awkward. He usually noticed sultry types, bad girls who sought out danger, but Sierra appealed to him in a different way. She was a writer, a like-minded soul who’d understand the dedication of tackling a novel and who also dreamed of making it her career. They could discuss their respective works along with other great literature and go on book tours together and make love in fancy hotel rooms and order up room service while watching the sunrise. Sure, Laura loved literature too, her nose was always in a mystery novel, but she didn’t get any satisfaction from analyzing it. She was no longer a scholar. Thirty years of home life had left her simple, obedient, and far from a thrill. He longed to be thrilled.
“Excuse me? Sierra?” he asked, removing his wedding ring, as he crept closer.
* * *
SIERRA LIKED TO change her surroundings daily, fearing that staying in the same place two days in a row might zap her creativity. Today she chose Maria Hernandez Park for its array of benches and its liveliness. It was less cold out than yesterday and little kids were playing all around her. She had tried to work in her apartment, but the appeal of binge watching television was too dangerous. She even attempted the quiet room at the main library in Midtown with the lion statues, but the silence had been too overwhelming. In silence, there were only the words in her head, and they all felt false. To be outside in the animated city, she hoped that its spirit, its realness, would sink into her book as well.
She had reached a difficult part in Girls Without Hope—now the rest of it needed to be fabricated. Her past had been juicy and heartbreaking enough for the first hundred pages, but then she wound up with a great and loving foster family who took her in, bandaged up her bruises, and raised her till she left for college. Certainly not interesting enough for the whole plot of a book, more like just the ending.
The last thing she’d written was the scene where Alexandra and her younger sisters shot their evil foster parent Biggie and fled into the cold January night. In truth, she had shot the real “Biggie” with a hunting rifle that he’d drunkenly left loaded on the dresser. She got him in the shoulder and then took off while his stupid girlfriend, Annalee, wailed into her crack pipe. There w
ere no sisters to follow her out into the snow, and a neighbor instantly called the cops. She was eventually sent to the Dussens, an elderly couple in Arbyrd, Missouri, who cared for her as if she were their own.
But now she had to visualize what it’d be like with three younger sisters in tow, trekking through the stark Missouri woods in the middle of winter. She wanted this portion of the novel to take place solely in the forest, where the girls would come across a cabin and fight for their survival in subzero temperatures. She’d been influenced by the story of the Brontë sisters, who spent a lot of time as shut-ins but still managed to write some of the most brilliant novels of the past few centuries, including Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Since all four Girls Without Hope sisters were basically amalgamations of herself, she envisioned them escaping their harsh surroundings by writing a book about a fantastical kingdom they ruled, one where their lives were better, until big bad Biggie and Annalee finally tracked them down.
But how to start? she asked herself, looking up at the sky, overcast and uninspiringly bleak. Should the sisters come across the cabin right away? Should they starve for days first? What could they eat if the entire ground was frosted over? Gah! It was all too much. Looking at the screen, she saw she had only written Chapter 6 after an entire morning of contemplation.
Time to be a little social, she thought, logging on to all her networks and scrolling through new status updates, commenting on a few, and typing her own, which fit under 140 characters and summed up her dour mood: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.
Truth was, her real life could use a little more excitement, and she figured it was why she’d been creatively blocked. She hadn’t met many people since moving to New York. Her roommate was never home and barely wanted anything to do with her, and she hadn’t been with a guy since she broke it off with her boyfriend Jonathan months ago. She found herself thinking about Kyle. She knew he had a girlfriend and would never want to come between them, but she couldn’t help fantasizing. They could read through her prose every day in the bath. They could debate for hours about their top ten books. Besides being exactly her type—a literary jock—she felt he’d been coming on to her the other day at the Irish bar. She saw him around the office flirting with the weird girl at the front desk, so she figured it might just be in his nature, but at the bar he had said the sweetest things. She imagined them giving an interview about Girls Without Hope and that somewhere in the middle of creating this bestseller they both fell in love.
“Excuse me? Sierra?”
She heard her name being called. Because she’d been thinking about Kyle, she innocently assumed it was his voice. She looked up, expecting to see his sly grin, but an older man was coming toward her instead.
“Sierra Raven?” the older man asked, standing over her. He had a smile that she found sort of sad, as if it took a great deal of concentration to produce. She went through the Rolodex in her head of any older men she knew and came up empty. It wasn’t as if she had parents with an array of friends, since none the Dussens ever left Missouri.
“Hi,” she said, scrunching up her nose. “Do I know you?” She wondered if he had seen something about her book deal. Her stomach flipped at the thought that this could be her first fan.
“I don’t think we’ve met yet,” he said, indicating the spot next to her to sit down.
She shrugged, secretly longing for anything to break up the monotony of her day.
“I’m William Lansing. I just signed with Burke & Burke for my first novel too. Forgive me, but Kyle has said such good things about you and I saw your picture in the Times article.”
“Oh, cool, congrats on your deal too.” She was beaming now. “And you’re working with Kyle as well? He’s great, isn’t he?”
“The best,” William said, whistling through a pause in the conversation. “Actually, I’m signing with Brett Swenson, just a better fit for my book. But I’ve known Kyle a long time, he was a student of mine in college.”
“I bet he was a really great student,” she said, and then realized how dumb it sounded. Sometimes she fluctuated between acting like a little girl and trying to be more grown up.
“He was one of my best pupils,” William said.
Sierra saw that William was really trying to keep his smile going, but it sagged a little. She could sympathize. When she was younger, she used to plant herself in front of a mirror and physically shape her mouth into a smile, since it was sometimes too difficult to attempt hands free.
“Are you working on your new book?” William asked.
“I’m trying but not getting very far.” She laughed. “Writer’s block.”
“Ah, the scourge of our existence.” William mimed shooting himself in the temple.
Sierra closed her laptop, glad to be free from it, and tucked her legs up to her chest. “So you’ve had writer’s block too.”
“Why do you think I’m wandering around Brooklyn right now?”
“Most people don’t understand,” Sierra said. “Like friends from college with office jobs will ask how many pages I’ve written today, and when I tell them nothing, they’re like, well what did you do all day, then? I’m like, it takes a day of staring at a blank screen to figure out what I’m gonna write the next time.”
“We are mad to choose this as a career, the worst kind of masochists.”
“Sometimes I’d rather spend the day being whipped—”
She bit her lip to stop babbling. God, sometimes she said the stupidest things. She reasoned that happened when you spent the entire day in your head without speaking to anyone else.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said, covering her face. “I don’t like to be whipped, just so you know.”
“I wouldn’t have presumed,” he said. “What part of writing are you finding difficult?”
“This might sound so annoying, but getting this huge deal has made me feel like I’m not worthy. I almost wish it were a tiny amount of money. I would’ve been happy with just being published.”
“Then pretend it was a small amount. Or even better, pretend you don’t have a book deal.”
“I was getting so much more done before.”
“Then there’s your answer.”
Such simple advice, she thought, but maybe he was right. She had been a lot more productive before all those zeros entered her bank account.
“So is that your strategy too?” she asked.
“I don’t have a deal yet, but I’ll let you know.”
“I didn’t mean to come off conceited—”
“No, you’re adorable,” he said, and then fixed the small bandage on his forehead. She could see a glimpse of what looked like a nasty gash. “I apologize for saying that, I’m going through a separation at the moment. It’s been awhile since … well, since I’ve engaged in stimulating conversation. Or was able to avoid walking into walls.” He pointed to the bandage.
She liked the way he spoke, erudite and mature. All Jonathan had talked about were video games and RPGs and other uninteresting ways to pass the time. When she bought him an old edition of Wuthering Heights on their six-month anniversary with the thought that they could read it together, he picked it up as if it was a dirty diaper.
“I don’t read,” he’d said. “You know that. Words just take too much concentration.”
“What about my book when I finish it?” she asked, but he just chose not to answer. She felt her heart crumble. For days she didn’t even want to look at Girls Without Hope, surmising that if her boyfriend wasn’t interested in it, who would be?
“What do you think of Wuthering Heights?” she asked William. She had just started reading it again. She was over the fact that it represented the souring of her last relationship.
William gave a quiet chuckle. “‘I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the
soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’”
Sierra mouthed the last part of the sentence along with him. Her eyes grew wide. “How did you know that off the top of your head…?”
“I’m a literature professor. I often play this game with my students where they have to say the last lines of a famous novel.”
“I love Wuthering Heights because it has a happy ending after so much death,” Sierra said. “Evil has been removed once Heathcliff is gone and Hareton and young Catherine no longer need to live in fear of what he might do next.”
“Do you like a happy ending?” he asked, and she noticed his reddened eye now that he was facing her entirely. Bloodshot, giving him a wounded glare. She swore not to be rude and look directly at it. His separation from his wife had clearly been hard on him.
“Girls Without Hope, my novel, will have a happy ending,” she said. “I might not know what’ll happen throughout, but I know that. What about yours?”
He took a beat to consider this.
“Depends on your definition of a happy ending. Happy for some, brutal for others.”
A gust of wind made her reach for her laptop, almost knocking it off the bench. William saved it with his quick reflexes.
“Oh, shit, thanks,” she gushed. “A cracked computer would cause me to procrastinate even worse.”
Another burst of wind sent the fallen leaves swirling around them.
“I think Mother Nature is telling me to call it a day,” Sierra said.
“It was lovely running into you, Sierra. We should talk literature again sometime.”
“My agent is throwing me a party tomorrow.” She opened her purse and handed him an invitation. “It’s at a lounge in Williamsburg, you should come. Kyle will be there. I don’t know too many people in New York, so I’m really trying to spread the word.”
“That sounds great.” He tucked the card into his blazer pocket. “Timshel!”
“What’s that?”
“Quick, what great novel ends with ‘Timshel’?”
The Mentor Page 13
