We went out the following day. With his limp and scraggly beard, he looked like a castaway. I suggested he shave and make himself more presentable, but he insisted that authors always look unfit for society so it was actually to our benefit that he looked like shit. He threw on an old coat despite the hot sun and hid a sawed-off shotgun in the inside pocket. I didn’t say anything. “Let’s go then, eh.” I offered my services as a human crutch and he put all his weight on me, apologizing profusely. It felt like I was lugging a dead body.
The first publisher’s building looked like it would cost you just to enter it, and inside, the lobby was full of mirrors that proved you were a slob. We made our way up to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men trapped inside them. The publisher’s offices hogged the whole floor. The top of the receptionist’s head asked if we had an appointment. What little of her face we could see was smiling cruelly as we fumbled a no. “Well, he’s too busy to see you today,” she said in a non-negotiable voice. Harry went into his thing.
“See here. This is one of those opportunities you’ll be kicking yourself about. Just like the publisher who rejected that famous book which went on to sell a gazillion copies. What was the name of that book, Martin? You know, the one that got rejected and went on to sell a gazillion copies?”
I didn’t know but thought I’d better play along. I joined in by naming the best seller of all time.
“The Bible, King James edition.”
“Yes, by God, that was it. The Bible! The receptionist wouldn’t let the apostle through, even though he had a gold mine in his hands.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” the receptionist said, sighing. She glanced down at her appointment book. “He has an appointment at the end of the day, and if that runs short, you can see him for five minutes before he goes home.”
“Good enough, kind lady,” Harry said, winking. I helped him to a chair in the waiting room.
We waited.
Harry was shivering and his hands were hiding deep inside his coat, which made me nervous, knowing what else was in there. His teeth were clenched together as if someone had asked him to smile for a photo twelve hours earlier and hadn’t taken it yet.
“Are you OK?” I asked him.
I could tell his paranoia was firing on all circuits. His eyes circled the room while his neck swung his head from doorway to hallway. Around lunchtime I noticed that Harry had his fingers in his ears. When I asked him about it, he muttered something about a noise. I couldn’t hear anything. A split second later there was a loud bang. I craned my head and through one of the doorways saw a young man kicking the life out of a photocopier machine. I looked at Harry incredulously, and remembered again that when Terry and I had first gone to the prison to meet him, Harry had mentioned something about telepathy being highly developed in the minds of career criminals. Long-term paranoia earns people a certain level of ESP, he had said, or something to that effect. Was it true? I hadn’t taken him seriously then, but now? I didn’t know what to think. I scrutinized Harry’s face. He nodded at me with an almost imperceptible smugness.
At five minutes to five we were ushered into the publisher’s office. Everything about it made you feel small and unimportant. It was spacious and quiet and air-conditioned and newly carpeted, and instead of a window there was a wall of glass you couldn’t open and jump out of, even if you wanted to; at best you could press your face against it and dream of falling. The publisher looked as if someone had told him if he smiled he’d lose everything he had ever worked for.
“You’ve written a book. I publish books. You think that means we’re a match made in heaven. It doesn’t. I have to be bowled over by whatever you’ve got, and I don’t fall easily,” he said.
Harry demanded that the publisher take a quick look while we waited. The publisher laughed without smiling. Harry tossed in the line about missing golden opportunities that went straight to the man’s heart, the one in his back pocket. He picked up the manuscript and browsed through it, clicking his tongue as if he were calling his dog. He stood and walked to the glass wall and read it while leaning against it. I worried the glass would crack and send him tumbling into the street. After a minute he threw the manuscript at us as if it were making his hands dirty.
“Is this a joke?”
“I assure you it’s not.”
“To publish this would be suicide. You’re instructing people how to break the law.”
“Why is he telling me what my book is about?” Harry asked me.
I shrugged.
“Get out of here before I call the police!” the publisher screamed at us.
In the elevator on the way down, Harry shook with fury. “That cunt,” he muttered.
I felt similarly dented, and I didn’t know much about the publishing world, but I tried to explain to him that we had to expect some rejections. “This is normal. It would have been too much to expect that the first place fell all over it.”
At the second floor the elevator stopped. “What are we stopping for?” Harry yelled at me.
The doors slid open and a man stepped in. “You can’t walk down one fucking floor?” Harry shouted, and the man leapt out again just before the doors closed.
On the street it was impossible to get a cab. It was really not advisable to be lingering on the street like this with a known fugitive, but neither of us seemed able to make a taxi materialize just by wishing it.
“We’ve been made!” he whispered.
“What?”
“They’re onto me!”
“Who?”
“All of them!”
He was out of control. He was trying to hide behind me, but the crowd was on all sides. He circled my body like a shark. He was drawing too much attention to himself in his panicked attempt to remain inconspicuous.
“There!” he screamed, and pushed me into a stream of traffic, into a taxi. Cars halted and honked their horns as we jumped in.
I really put my foot down after that. Harry was to stay at home. I simply refused to help him anymore if he insisted on coming along. He put up a struggle, but it was a weak one. The last incident had added seventeen years to his face. Even he could see it.
The following weeks were a nightmare. I tripped from office to office in a blur. They were all the same. I couldn’t get over how quiet they were. Everyone spoke in a whisper, and the way they tiptoed around, you’d think you’d wandered into a sacred temple if it weren’t for the telephones. The receptionists all wore the same condescending sneers. Often I sat in waiting rooms with other authors. They were the same too. They all emanated fear and desperation and looked so hungry they would have signed away the rights to their children for a lozenge, poor bastards.
In one of the publishing houses, where I waited all day for two days in a row and still wasn’t granted an audience with the king, a writer and I swapped manuscripts to pass the time. His was set in a small country town and was about a doctor and a pregnant schoolteacher who passed each other on the street every day but were too inward to say hello. It was unreadable. It was almost all description. My spirits lifted when, on page 85, he’d deigned to put in a smattering of dialogue between the characters. His novel was a real struggle to wade through, but he was sitting right beside me so I had to persist, out of politeness. Every now and then we glanced at each other to see how we were getting on. Finally, around lunchtime, he turned to me and said, “This is a peculiar book. Is it a satire?”
“Not at all. Yours is interesting too. Are the characters mute?”
“Not at all.”
We each handed back the other’s manuscript and looked at our watches.