‘Ralph,’ I said, ‘I enjoy my Kindle, but I have absolutely no interest in shilling for Amazon.’
Yet the idea lingered, mostly because I’ve always been fascinated by new technologies, especially those having to do with reading and writing. One day not long after Ralph’s call, the idea for this story arrived while I was taking my morning walk. It was too cool to remain unwritten. I didn’t tell Ralph, but when the story was done, I sent it to him and said Kindle was welcome to use it for their launch purposes, if they liked. I even showed up at the event and read some of it.
I took a certain amount of shit about that from portions of the literary community that saw it as selling out to the business side, but, in the words of John Lee Hooker, ‘That don’t confront me none.’ As far as I was concerned, Amazon was just another market, and one of the few that would publish a story of this length. There was no advance, but there were – and still are – royalties on each sale (or download, if you prefer). I was happy to bank those checks; there’s an old saying that the workman is worthy of his hire, and I think it’s a true saying. I write for love, but love doesn’t pay the bills.
There was one special perk, though: a one-of-a-kind pink Kindle. Ralph got a kick out of that, and I’m glad. It was our last really cool deal, because my friend died suddenly in his sleep five years ago. Boy, I miss him.
This version of the story has been considerably revised, but you’ll notice it’s firmly set in an era when such e-reading devices were still new. That seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? And bonus points for you Roland of Gilead fans who catch references to a certain Dark Tower.
Ur
I – Experimenting with New Technology
When Wesley Smith’s colleagues asked him – some with an eyebrow hoicked satirically – what he was doing with that gadget (they all called it a gadget), he told them he was experimenting with new technology. That was not true. He bought the Kindle purely out of spite.
I wonder if the market analysts at Amazon even have that particular motivation on their product-survey radar, he thought. He guessed not. This gave him some satisfaction, but not as much as he hoped to derive from Ellen Silverman’s surprise when she saw him with his new purchase. That hadn’t happened yet, but it would. It was a small campus, after all, and he’d only been in possession of his new toy (he called it his new toy, at least to begin with) for a week.
Wesley was an instructor in the English Department at Moore College, in Moore, Kentucky. Like all instructors of English, he thought he had a novel in him somewhere and would write it someday. Moore College was the sort of institution that people call ‘a pretty good school.’ Don Allman, Wesley’s only friend in the English Department, explained what that meant.
‘A pretty good school,’ Don said, ‘is one nobody has ever heard of outside a thirty-mile radius. People call it a pretty good school because they have no evidence to the contrary, and most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.’
‘Does that make you a realist?’ Wesley once asked him.
‘I think the world is mostly populated by shitheads,’ Don Allman responded. ‘You take it from there.’
Moore wasn’t a good school, but neither was it a bad one. On the great scale of academic excellence, its place resided just a little south of mediocre. Most of its three thousand students paid their bills and many of them got jobs after graduating, although few went on to obtain (or even try for) graduate degrees. There was a fair amount of drinking, and of course there were parties, but on the great scale of party schools, Moore’s place resided a little to the north of mediocre. It had produced politicians, but all of the small-water variety, even when it came to graft and chicanery. In 1978, one Moore graduate was elected to the US House of Representatives, but he dropped dead of a heart attack after serving only four months. His replacement was a graduate of Baylor.
The school’s only marks of exceptionalism had to do with its Division Three football team and its Division Three women’s basketball team. The football team (the Moore Meerkats) was one of the worst in America, having won only seven games in the last ten years. There was constant talk of disbanding it. The current coach was a drug addict who liked to tell people that he had seen The Wrestler twelve times and never failed to cry when Mickey Rourke told his estranged daughter that he was just a broken-down piece of meat.
The women’s basketball team, however, was exceptional in a good way, especially considering that most of the players were no more than five feet seven and were preparing for jobs as marketing managers, wholesale buyers, or (if they were lucky) personal assistants to Men of Power. The Lady Meerkats had won eight conference titles in the last ten years. The coach was Wesley’s ex-girlfriend, ex as of one month previous. Ellen Silverman was the source of the spite that had moved Wesley to buy a Kindle. Well … Ellen and the Henderson kid in Wesley’s Introduction to Modern American Fiction class.
Don Allman also claimed the Moore faculty was mediocre. Not terrible, like the football team – that, at least, would have been interesting – but definitely mediocre.
‘What about you and me?’ Wesley asked. They were in the office they shared. If a student came in for a conference, the instructor who had not been sought would leave. For most of the fall and spring semesters this was not an issue, as students never came in for conferences until just before finals. Even then, only the veteran grade-grubbers, the ones who’d had permanently brown noses since elementary school, turned up. Don Allman said he sometimes fantasized about a juicy coed wearing a tee-shirt that said I WILL SCREW YOU FOR AN A, but this never happened.
‘What about us?’ Don replied. ‘Jesus Christ, just look at us, bro.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Wesley said. ‘I’m going to write a novel.’ Although even saying it depressed him. Almost everything depressed him since Ellen had walked out. When he wasn’t depressed, he felt spiteful.
‘Yes! And President Obama is going to tab me as the new Poet Laureate!’ Don Allman exclaimed. Then he pointed at something on Wesley’s cluttered desk. The Kindle was currently sitting on American Dreams, the textbook Wesley used in his Intro to American Lit class. ‘How’s that little bastard working out for you?’
‘Fine,’ Wesley said.
‘Will it ever replace the book?’
‘Never,’ Wesley said. But he had begun to wonder.
‘I thought they only came in white,’ Don Allman said.
Wesley looked at Don as haughtily as he himself had been looked at in the department meeting where his Kindle had made its public debut. ‘Nothing only comes in white,’ he said. ‘This is America.’
Don Allman considered this, then said: ‘I heard you and Ellen broke up.’
Wesley sighed.
Ellen had been his other friend, and one with benefits, until four weeks ago. She wasn’t in the English Department, of course, but the thought of going to bed with anyone in the English Department, even Suzanne Montanaro, who was vaguely presentable, made him shudder. Ellen was five-two (eyes of blue!), slim, with a mop of short, curly black hair that made her look distinctly elfin. She had a dynamite figure and kissed like a dervish. (Wesley had never kissed a dervish, but could imagine.) Nor did her energy flag when they were in bed.