It’s all these little nods going person to person, these smiles, these—pardon my language—these pert little shit-eating grins. The tension in those smiles, something almost giddy. When the news came, they still had us out in the hallway—us that would be fuchsias and them that would be yellows and greens—the news came, traveling one to the next, and as it did so a magnificent buzzing happiness swelled in that dim, mahoganied corridor. It was like November all over again, but this time out of a clear blue sky. If just one of us had started to applaud, we all would have joined in—I’m sure of that. I think we were afraid to break the spell. You see, we were all children in that moment. We had been grown-ups mustered for a grown-up event in a venerable midtown hotel, then the news came and we were children standing under an open sky in the summertime, blue light falling all around us.

It was only when they started the sorting process and the lines solidified that the grins got tighter. And then I understood—the flip side of ourDXGPP8JSQRK SNWTGP 1OM J272OX F-

our childish joy. Or theirs, I should say, because it was no longer mine.

We’d known, to put it simply, that this news would not be taken well by our opponents—that it would seriously piss them off-—and that, more than anything else, is what had made us giddy.

Hasn’t it been clear for some time now? That their unhappiness is our greatest treasure, just as ours is theirs?

We had known, on some level, that this was not an honor that had been earned. We had known that the Swedes understood the same. And that right now, half a world away, the Swedes—those demented and mischievous Swedes—were grinning along with us under the same sky of giddy blue.

Eight years, Reagan gets zilch, you breeze in and they’re handing them out at the coat check.

What, we wondered, would the crazies do with this?

Could you imagine how ape the crazies would go with it?

Every day the crazies look at you, and the crazies go ape, but has there ever been one to make the crazies go as ape as the one we just caught wind of?

And all of this was delicious.

But as security rifled handbags and patted down and wanded, the knowledge was turning around on us—on them—and it was no longer joyful. Lists were chec1XXTP MI1 TXCH 6IAD/F XM OMKTP=O

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wristbanded. Yellows and greens sent one way, the main hall, and fuchsias the other, for the backstage VIP, which is—if you’ll permit a sidebar—less than ideal for one in my situation, as you can see. If only I’d let them know I was coming, they said, they’d have made arrangements. But I didn’t mind. They parked me up on this rampless landing, and it was the ideal spot to take it in. Now that I was no longer a part of the happiness, I could see with great precision what those smiles were being subjected to, the degree of torsion exerted behind each one.

Because where we are childish, our opponents are much more childish. And while we are gentle children, with at worst an insult book or peashooter in our back pockets, they are dangerous children, with sticks and stones and bike chains.

I listened to the sounds of the urban choir through the stage door behind me, and I watched you work the room—watched not from the mighty berth of my Rodem Universal, but from this nursing home reject they put me in—and that I did mind a bit, though I understood their logic.

They want to keep you safe.

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I watched you move from person to person with that wonderful way of yours, that bearing that’s regal yet so calm and relaxed, just short of folksy, and I watched all of them wait their turn, these wealthy people and power brokers, several dozen fuchsias smiling and strutting between tureens and chafing dishes, filling their plates, waiting their turn or carrying themselves in the afterglow, strutting and pecking like storks.

One after the next, they all shook your hand.

They’re almost frozen now—it’s changed as we’ve been talking. Have they all lost their appetites? Did they already eat their fill?

It’s just you and me up here shaking, me in this chair with this face—this grotesquely damaged face—and you bending slightly, a tall, slim, and handsome man, and I’m so afraid that they won’t be able to help themselves.

I’m afraid that they will turn their stork faces up at us at and laugh.

This meeting, which I had so long deferred, holds a terror for me—central to that terror the very fact of the repeated deferrals. All those days I showed up at the high school or VFW or municipal park and left again without shaking your hand. Without even once watching the speech.

Part of it was that I didn’t know what to say. Now that I do know, I’m terrified as well by how much else I have to say to get there—when a single wrong word could throw it all off track. Example: when I first took your hand, and tried to give you a bit of myself, and Japan, Africa is what came out. How I heard myself say: Africa of course I know is not a country!

A sentence like that coming from the mouth of a grown man! But you see, it’s about how I was trying to get there. Gips and Roos, I’d heard about them, read in the newspaper how these men—men I’d outraised, surely—had each been given a shiny new ambassadorship.

Donald Gips stacked the paper, you gave him his own country, John Roos, same deal.

And so I started, in an embarrassing, forward, downright militant way, ticking off for you the pushpins—Monaco, Honduras, Estonia, Indonesia. I heard myself straining at these cosmopolitan bona fides, and told myself to relax, just drop it—that if an offer was coming, you’d make it in good time—but I couldn’t, somehow. Singapore, the Ukraine, Italy, I told you we had one in all those countries, too. I said we didn’t have one everywhere, no we did not—but we’re always looking! I said, I’m looking especially in Japan or Africa.

And then: Africa of course I know is not a country!

And it was off to the races, wasn’t it?

I know that Africa is not a country—of course I know that!

My god!

How would the transcript run? The words, they were all erupting in my head, a sort of time-lapse bacterial profusion—words building up so fast that the big burst they came out in didn’t touch even a fraction. The half you heard was bad enough: I wasn’t implying here’s Africa, please allow me to put it forward as a country. Only all I meant is when I get to twirling the globe these days and wondering where oh where shall I set my next new best-selling procedural series, my thoughts tend first toward Japan, then—where else?—Africa!

The continent of Africa is a completely and totally blank continent, as far as my publishing house is concerned, same as the country of Japan is a completely and totally blank country.

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Though there’s another side to it, isn’t there? To Africa.

A certain Pan-African sentiment on the continent of Africa, is my understanding.

But it doesn’t have to be Japan—it could be anywhere in Asia we don’t have one. Particularly Southeast Asia. But India too, we could use a new one there, we haven’t had one there in years!

I said that, and I wondered at my voice—at how loud it had become. I looked out at the storks—stared them down, stared down their sidelong glances—and I made the storks my subject—their grins, their nods, how they were taking the monkey wrench.

And I held your hand in my hand, and again I was calm—externally I was.

By god, I have to thank you for how you calm me.

But in my head, I was still thinking: Anywhere in Asia, sure. Just as long as there aren’t any filthy fucking Chinamen.

Joke!

No but seriously, I won’t abide one single filthy fucking Chinaman.

Joke—it’s still that! When you feel things spinning out of control like they were, sometimes what you want to do is make it worse—to make it all the way worse. And when it’s all the way worse, with a joke, you might be able to recast everything that came before—as a joke!

I thought that by looking into your face and feeling your hand in mine, I’d be able to gauge your reaction. But now that I’ve said it, I realize I can’t—that you’re giving me no reaction to gauge.

Perhaps the Ray-Bans are due for another nod. They don’t know me, after all—if they knew me, they’d have let me keep the Rodem Universal. Now, can you do me one more favor? Just to keep things moving, so we don’t spin the tires when it’s the monkey wrench we have to contend with? Can we pretend for a second that you did make the offer? That you said, Tell you what, when I get back to the office, let’s have a look at the big board, see where we might have an opening—something like that?

OK?

OK.

Ha ha!

Thank you, it’s an honor, truly—but I cannot accept. The fact is, by means of the dozens of best-selling international crime series that I’ve published, I am every bit the ambassador that Gips and Roos are—and then some.

I am an ambassador for the whole world, to America, just as you are an ambassador for America, to the whole world.

What a team we are—and look at us here shaking!

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What I want is something else altogether—something I just had the plan for this morning.

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ou’ll give your speech—and you’ll have to offer some kind of response to the Swedes.

So we have to move quickly, but at the same time we can’t rush—this is the kind of conversation you simply cannot rush.

Just look at those storks!

They don’t know our hearts.

They surrendered their plates to the caterers without a word—almost, it seemed, behind their own backs—and now they stand in those hunched clusters of four or five, and they swivel their heads slowly our way, and their grins just grow tighter and tighter.

Our two hearts are something they can’t see—no one can see into another’s heart. Sometimes when I was shaking with Daddy, I could feel in our hands our two hearts beating.

But Daddy shook much harder than you.

Would it be too much to ask you to look into my heart and measure my words against what you see?

Yes, it would be too much.

Because you can’t see my heart.

You can see my face, the terrible damage that’s been done to it, and you can see this nursing home reject I’m sitting in, but you cannot see my heart.

No one can see into anyone else’s heart.

It seems to me these days we as a species—or as a species in a country—see very little of each other. And I think of how careful we have to be with each and every word. Skip Gates, case in point. You blurted somethinNL2S’X?SGW’#/

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said a few words and then you saw these things you’d said—perfectly ordinary things, that all of a sudden seemed so terrible. You left them orphaned. You left them at the mercy of the elements. Your left your own words to be abused, misunderstood, brushed away, despised.

Cambridge, Massachusetts. The good professor Skip Gates, an encounter with a police officer. Stupid, you said. You called a cop that—a man you’d never met and didn’t know the first thing about, as the talking heads wasted no time in tsk-tsking.

Later, it’s beers in the Rose Garden: too late. The wind has changed. What they’re allowed to say about you, how loudly and directly they can put forward certain notions—that’s different now.

The next week a man shows up for a speech of yours with an assault rifle, open carry.

And again the week after, another man.

They get them on TV, they start saying things like The Tree of Liberty. Like The Blood of Patriots and Tyrants.

One of the talking heads puts it to them, what about our history of political violence? How can you say that in a country like this? Don’t you know we live in a country with a terrible history of political violence?

And they don’t answer.

They don’t have to.

They know—we all know—what kind of country we live in.

Here in the city, or in Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Trenton—drivable places—whenever you had one near enough, I had to show up with my little bundles of checks. I’d joystick into the lobby in my Rodem Universal, personal checks from folks all over the country in ha6Q KA-AY #8 0 1W1X1O7W

Totals of fifty or a hundred thousand dollars from these good people I’d never met; that I was about to hand this bundle over to you, or rathe3CDKQT4G# MOF R /TF BH

this seemed miraculous to me. And each time I’d think, today is going to be the day.

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had become used to my ways—I would hand over my little bundle, and joystick off.

No, this was not to be the day after all.

I wonder: Did they think I was some kind of rube?

One of the boys from publicity would be waiting at the vehicle. He’d work the lift and lock me in place and we’d be off.

This morning is the first one I’ve come out since the election. I let myself pretend it was about Gips and Roos—that I was upset—I felt I should be upset. I showed up, and realized immediately it had been a terrible mistake—after all, there were no checks this time. I hadn’t reckoned on how it would be to park there in the lobby without checks. Let me tell you about a passage in the most recent book in the Vietnam series. There’s a description of an expat British drug addict who opens a promising acquaintance’s medicine cabinet to see a worn, discolored toothbrush and nothing more: he feels a raging fatigue that scraped him to the bone.

That raging fatigue was one I rewrote during the editorial process, but now I wonder if that was a mistake—what were they, these feelings in my body, if not a raging fatigue? I actually moaned in pain. Moaned and moaned again, and I had to put a stop to it—I couldn’t be seen moaning in pain, not the man who runs a Big Six New York City publisher. Imagine the trade publications, the industry blogs. If I was to be seen in one of my very rare public appearances, carrying on like that, with moans of pain. I wanted to shut up! To simply be silent! But I couldn’t be silent—yet I couldn’t be seen moaning, so I did the only thing I could, I opened my mouth and started to speak—and what I spoke of started with Reagan. Because it was after they shot him outside the Washington Hilton that I was last moaning in pain like this.

Why can’t he be a little more like Reagan? I asked.

Take the public option.

See, what Reagan would have done is he would have waltzed right in with the public option on his arm and bowed to the right, bowed to the left, and done a little do-si-do with the public option, if you get the picture—and pretty soon everyone down in D.C. would have been in on the fun, they’d have all been dancing the night away with the public option, and I mean really cutting a rug.

I said, Don’t look away. If you want to re#WQ5E0

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then refute my words, but don’t pretend that this man you see before you, in this magnificent chair, with this face that looks like—looks like what? what does it look like to you? what does this face even look like to you?—don’t pretend he’s not addressing you with these words!

Let’s get the public option passed before Social Security goes bankrupt, or it will never happen.

These words are a simple truth, and you can’t refute a simple truth.

If you want a simple truth it’s that I bundled up a million bucks for the guy.

Me!

Whose daddy went to work every day in a rusted-out Ford and a mended, threadbare suit—the same suit every day, until the suit gave out at last, and he had to start all over. Sputtering and backfiring down a dirt road to sell funeral insurance, junk insurance, to poor, ignorant people, just to try to keep food on the table for himself and his boy.

One million!

Is it funny that I blurted all that out to them—to strangers—out in the corridor?

Sure it is—but first there was the raging fatigue. Then the Swede’s monkey wrench, and I didn’t feel the fatigue, not anymore, but I felt something—was it what was behind it? The monkey wrench flew in and the whole past got knocked wide open, and what was—let’s say, what was behind and beneath it came out. I mean: All these ideas came flooding, and these memories, and these images—a pink dress, a briefcase, an open car—but I couldn’t figure out the connections between them. With a flood, see, you have currents and eddies, but you don’t have connections, per se. And so there I was, first Rodem Universal, then nursing home reject, corridor, then backstage VIP, trying to make the connections.

What I ended up with was a plan. It was the plan.

Forty-six years ago some bad things happened in Dallas, and I decided to get out. I came to New York City with a briefcase, and in that briefcase was some cash—not any million dollars, but I used it to buy an ailing publishing company, rewrite its mission, and turn it around.

I made it a publisher of crime—of international crime, and I pushed from my mind everything that came before.

I had a plan for me—just like now I’ve got a plan for us—and through the plan, I became one of the most powerful figures in the industry—one who could raise for you, in seven months, over a million dollars.

I pushed from my mind what came before—I stuck to the plan. Now I have a new plan, but I also have what came before—and it’s flooding, since the monkey wrench LT#WTYOAF2 S2PKV B2L

so fast I’ll never be able to push it away. Like how Daddy and I sat on the roof and listened to the radio every night, and he explained the news we heard—that’s one thing that’s flooding.

We passed the rifle between us, taking shots at the empties we’d set up, lit candles stuck in their necks, down on the stumps.

Daddy taught me to shoot, and as good as he was, soon I was better—I could shoot the eye out of a jackrabbit from fifty yards, Daddy would say in wonder.

He was so proud of me for that—maybe only for that.

Daddy knew he’d be judged on his actions—we all would. On how we put the food on the table, but also on the choices we made at the most critical moments in our country’s history. What he did in his day-to-day was something he’d be judged for, but how he acted as a citizen was a way to atone. Korea, the Egyptian revolution, the Mau Mau uprising—Daddy worked through the stories we heard on the radio—stories of people from all these far-flung countries—and he explained to me how one should act, or should have acted, in those countries. On the roof together, the two of us listening to the radio, he explained these things for hours, until I nodded off. I’d try to fight it. I loved it up there, just listening. I don’t know that I’ve been happier than just listening to my father talk up on the roof, rifle going back and forth between us. Still I nodded off. And he said, That’s fine, then, and I crawled down and in through my bedroom window. He’d stay up for a while with his Four Roses, then go down the ladder and scout the perimeter. Those nights! In asides, or little shushes, or a play of fingers over my neck and back, he worked me through breathing and sighting and trigger control, and explained the workings of the countries we heard about—it seemed he knew every country in the world. The cool night air smelled of tar and gunpowder and a breeze off the swamp. On cold nights, there was also the smoking sweetness of the kerosene space heater he’d built a platform for on the roof’s peak, and he rested a hand on the small of my back.

I wish we’d met before. I wish that some of what I had to tell you now had already been said. I wish that you’d seen this face before—that it was one more thing we didn’t have to get through.

But you know what I think?

Here’s what I think.

It’s like Daddy used to say: The only way to get through it is to get through it.

Fat, fretting literary agents. The ad guys at magazines—those stringy game hens. I put the screw to them, as they’d been putting the screw to me for years. The freelancers were softer, more desperate; and once the current roster was squeezed dry, I combed through the files. Imagine how tightly the wallet of a proofreader you’ve not given work since the mid-’80s would be shut against you. But you have seen the checks, so you cannot doubt my tenacity—the force of my will when I know what it is I want.

I had to keep giving.

Why did I have to?

I just figured it out right now, a minute ago.

I was giving to figure out why I was giving. And unless I kept on, I would never know.

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The first check—twenty-five dollars. Let’s start there, let’s start with why I started.

It’s like I said—you were a problem.

A million years ago in the sixties I left my job at a textbook company in Dallas and opened shop here. I was through with textbooks. I didn’t know what to do, exactly, so I just picked something and I did it. And right away I had the magic touch—each series a best-seller, one after the next. They said, He’s the guy with the magic touch, and I made that magic touch my whole life—nothing else much mattered. Except—for a time—Reagan. Reagan, my god. See, there was the Washington Hilton, and what they did to him there, and I felt so bad—I thought, We should have done something to keep it from happening. So I sent a few checks, almost by way of apology. Then a few more. And then a few years later, he was done—he’d served and he was out. Did I keep giving? People were calling me, sending mail by the truckload, accosting me at industry functions they’d somehow found out about and talked their way into. No. Not a penny. As if a spell had been cast on me, I once again simply forgot about politics. And I returned to the magic touch.

But then—what? What was it? The moment came, the speech came—and suddenly you were a problem. You were my problem.

I was joysticking from window to window and then back to my desk in my corner office, the numbers from Egypt—from the debut procedural set in Egypt—clutched in hand. At the desk I’d hold down the intercom button and listen to what they were saying in publicity. It was a button I liked to press—why deny it?—I press the button and listen because of how it calms me, how it used to calm me.

On the afternoon in question, they were saying they’d seen something all new. They asked each other, How often in your life do you get to see something all new? I didn’t go online to see what they were talking about—not yet. I joysticked back to the windows, and looked down thirty floors to Bryant Park, at all those people out there on their lunch hours, or simply out—tiny people you couldn’t see worth a damn. Suit, T-shirt, man or woman, black or white, maybe that, maybe only that. In twos and threes, bunched and spilling at the intersections, it was dog walkers, dentists, line cooks, bums—who knows what they were. You imagine these things glancingly, and of course it doesn’t matter. Not to them. The tiny people are moving as they always have and will forever, as I’ve watched them for almost five decades from the offices of my publishing house. Thousands of tiny people coming and going in Bryant Park.

Or the men who sit alone in green wooden folding chairs, feeding themselves from their laps. Have you seen these men? Maybe one day I’ll take you up to my office and show them to you. All my tiny people.

The tiny people had spoken, you see. They’d been speaking all year, and you could not mistake the words. Mercy, I surrender—no more books, no thank you. Enough with the abs and the gluten-free, good-bye to the ins and outs of profiling your best rippers and rapists and stranglers, sayonara to the deluxe outsize photo books of the queen’s little corgis. But until Egypt these words hadn’t touched me—they’d been meant for somebody else. You see, the tiny people had not abandoned books altogether. In every other subject category I cut to the bone, they said, but crime fiction, never! There is my line in the sand.

And what, you may ask, is crime fiction to me?

Did I say it already—it’s the whole of my list?

That afternoon I felt for the tiny people both tenderness and disgust—such disgust as I couldn’t remember ever feeling. Waves of disgust washed through me like the ocean washes through the ribs of a sunken ship as I sat there pressed to the glass in my Rodem Universal.

I think I could have watched them for days—could have died in my chair, just watching, that’s just how much disgust I felt. But at last I reached through my disgust. I reached through to tenderness—and held tight. I had tenderness in hand. In only one hand—in the other it was still disgust. I held them both, then I released my hands. And both fell away from me.

The lights of Bryant Park flared.

The tiny people took no notice.

And at last I switched on my computer.

There you were.

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stage in Philadelphia, before a Philadelphia podium. A more perfect union. Four score and ten.

And the whole way through you were so calm.

Welcome back adults. Welcome back civilized discourse. That’s what I said! Amen and amen and amen to all that. This really and truly was the finest speech on race I had ever heard. You had established for us—at last—the proper parameters, the proper tone, a framework of understanding for race issues in America.

What you said was: We will talk about it like this, but not like that. We will study it here, and not there. We will give questions of race, finally, their proper due—but no more!

Do you remember what Kennedy said on TV?

Race has no place in American life or law.

But Kennedy was wrong. It has a place—sure it does. You gave it a place and told it, Stay! Stay in your place!

Why didn’t Kennedy think of that?

If only Kennedy had thought of that.

Oh god they stopped.

Oh no they stopped.

Listen …

Wait …

Is it the other one?

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I thought they stopped for good.

I thought that the Ray-Bans were about to take you out the door.

But listen, these urban choirs: Harlem, Oakland, I can’t hear the difference

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can you hear it? Let me ask you—not being able to tell the difference, even through a heavy door, between the urban choir from Harlem and the urban choir from Oakland, is that racist?

Serious question. I really do want to know.

You just look at the boys in publicity, and tell me if I’m racist.

Here’s the thing. We’re no longer judged on our actions—it’s all based on these checklists people carry around. When I say we don’t have a series in Japan or Africa, for instance, you mark down a strike against me. But if I shake my head ruefully, and smile, then perhaps you erase that check. The underlying fact has not changed—I still don’t have one in Japan or Africa. Perhaps that was never truly the point?

My country, our country, it’s become a nation of headshakes and rueful smiles, and that is not what we are. We can never be, and will never be, a nation like that. Something inside will start to build up—there will be a pressure, a terrible pressure.

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drive our opponents so crazy—the calm in you. You won’t let them release any pressure.

You know the term biofeedback? My point is: how I’m not getting any. Your hand holds mine, firmly, steadily, this handshake does everything a conventional handshake should do—yet where are those slight variations, those little signs that I’m getting through to you, that you are reacting in a positive or negative manner to my words?

Sorry, I didn’t mean to squeeze like that.

Did you feel my heart in it?

You’re lucky it wasn’t Daddy. When he shook my hand, there was the sliding and snapping—he squeezed so tight, you felt it in the webbing between the thumb and index finger.

He braced himself, locked his elbow at ninety degrees, then squeezed. He was not even looking you in the eye—somewhere above and behind the eye. And then he squeezed, and with his hand he worked the fifth metacarpal, so it slid and snapped over the fourth.

Did I feel that in any other bones?

Sure I felt it.

I felt it in every bone in my body.

I’d say, Daddy, that hurts IROS3YVKCX5 S Y BJG U10 1LU 0 Y PVXD KHR 6FPGR

And what would he say?

What would he say?

The only way to get through it is to get through it.

You look at my face, what do you see? Is it ABC gum? Like someone’s stuck my face all over with ABC gum? It’s fine, you can come right out and admit it.

I know I did.

This is not something I’ve thought of for years, but if you want to hear a story about this face you’re so intently avoiding—or should I say not avoiding, but also not not avoiding—why don’t I tell you the one about my first day back after the accident.

Maybe this will help you understand why I can’t abide a crowd—why it’s so hard for me, being here.

Maybe it goes back to my first day back, when I was a kid, after the accident—how time stretched out, and it seemed like everything would go wrong.

I’m back here with the fuchsias, sure—the biggest bundler of them all. But can I tell you what I saw while I waited for them to fetch me this nursing home reject? Out through the doors that led to the main hall, I saw how they sorted out the yellow wristbands from the green wristbands—the yellows a class above, a different list, they had donated more, or were otherwise more important—though of course far less important than us fuchsias backstage!—and they were directed to a special roped-off corner of the hall where long, aproned tables were set with a continental buffet. The greens had no buffet, no food or drink at all. You’d see the greens talking at the rope to their friends who were yellow. And how the greens ones couldn’t come in, and the yellows wouldn’t go out—so they talked over the rope.

Weren’t the greens also hungry? Weren’t they thirsty?

Do you know, as I sat there and I waited, I didn’t feel like a fuchsia at all. Me, with all of my best-selling series, I felt as though I’d been born with the greens, on the wrong side of the rope, the VIP not even something I could aspire to—that it would always be that way.

Daddy said, Ain’t no one better than you. Everyone’s capable of good or evil. When history catches up, you got to make a choice.

Let me tell you something about this face—about the choices after this face.

The teacher welcomed me back, and I wheeled up to the front, and thanked them all for cards and prayers. I wheeled up front and gave them a moment to process this face. Time stretched out. Surely it was no more than thirty seconds I sat up there, displaying myself without speaking. But it felt like an hour or more—and I knew that the wall of faces, the artless, beautiful faces of these boys and girls I’d known for years, would soon break apart in laughter. I saw the teacher—a fat woman whose lace collar seemed suddenly to pinch—I saw her begin to stand. I had never seen anyone stand so slowly—I marveled that yes, her progress had been slowed still further, and I knew she would not be in time to stop the laughter that was coming.

So I took it in my own hands.

I said, “Yep, my face looks an awful lot like ABC gum.”

And they all laughed.

Not in a cruel way. They were relieved—I had made a joke of LOY 3EFVSVC1G 15T0 0MHO2RNKHTQKQVPQK2EQMK14S

And not just any joke, but a really great joke! In that instant, the wall vanished. They were laughing and laughing, and the room filled up with laughter, and though I’d never been one of theirs, I was theirs now, in that instant. It was all like blue light. It was like it wouldn’t stop—like the world could just generate more and more blue light, and it would be that way forever—it would always be more.

Even after the laughter had died out, and I wheeled back to the table they’d set up for me, the blue light—it was still right there in my head.

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I wonder if blue light is something you felt when this morning’s news came from the Swedes. You don’t need to tell me. Sometimes blue light needs to be just for you. But let’s talk about what you just got. Let’s review the basics. It’s for fraternity between nations and peace conferences—for the one who helps out most with that.

The man invents dynamite, then he says, Oh my goodness! I’m so sorry!—here, let’s pass these out for fraternity and conferences.

And what about the other one—the one for my field? What do they give that one for?

Answer: the book that’s most outstanding in an ideal direction.

And what’s more ideal than a procedural mystery?

And what more outstanding than one set abroad?

Then guess how many my New York City publishing house has taken home, with all of my influence on literature and literary history. In forty years, just you guess how many.

So I know about Swedes.

You could say it’s because it’s crime fiction I do, not so-called literary fiction, but that argument doesn’t hold water. Crime fiction is like any other fiction, only it has an extra rule or two—like the sonnet. We need red herrings. We need a shell game, the chip on the underside of the bridge’s stone balustrade, a locked room. A murder that turns out to be an elaborate suicide. Doesn’t the sonnet have rules like that?

Crime fiction is structured like a joke—there is the lead-up, and there is the punch line, and if the author has done his work, in the end you have to laugh—like a sonnet!

Here’s the thing about Swedes—they like trouble—they see an opportunity, they create trouble. Little devils running this way and that, in cable-knit sweaters, seeing what mischief they can cause.

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Swedes haven’t been right since the assassination of Olof Palme in ’86.

There are events that come and after everything’s different.

Remember what Kennedy said: a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety.

And: Their only remedy is the street.

Why would he say that?

He said it, and they killed him for it.

America’s a country with a terrible history of political violence. Not so, Sweden. Olof Palme’s assassination knocked the Swedes for a loop—because they don’t have that history.

How to manage that history—not for the Swedes—because we are not Swedes—but for us?

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In our country—not in Sweden—these thoughts of political violence are everywhere you look.

For instance, Dutton, series of books of fun facts, they slip in one or two about Frank Eugene Corder, and what’s fun about that? Or Morrow, Raymond Lee Harvey. The starter pistol that scared poor Carter’s pants off. Pocket has a checkout-aisle mass-market guy that slips them in by the fistful—Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheik Mohammed—you see the type. And of course there’s the commission report that was such a success for Norton—and who do we find lurking in a footnote but good old Sam Byck.

Do you know that old chestnut, Our American Cousin?

There’s the character who says, I’m an interesting invalid.

He speaks of lonely sufferers and interesting invalids.

Don’t you think I’m an interesting invalid?

Well, don’t you?

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Political violence keeps pushing in at the margins.

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It has always been my policy to cut all such references from my books.

Study the acts, cut the reference.

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Internalize the acts, your understanding of the acts, then eliminate the evidence.

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Otherwise it doesn’t feel safe.