8T6OQPF7 QBSCOQU8M 6HC0IYA2EEGQF96I ES000OTE2 VAXTMM 0 7H6G60HCL2R OE0SOZVLMHWF6PGG0E1E O2POX EV0Q/CN00MSFLTX1JTWH

Let me tell you about the pyramids.

The pyramids we bought for Egypt, for the series set in Egypt, promotional swag to send booksellers, librarians, reviewers, sales reps, load them all up with Swarovski pyramids with the title lasered in, and a camel and a tagline lasered in, too.

My publicity boys opened the box, end of one Friday, light cutting horizontal through the windows—you should have seen those pyramids gleaming!

It was only a few they needed to take out to check that they’d arrived intact, but something took over, they just kept unpacking, covering every desk, and when they ran out of desk they2R 8 EPIVOFC-0T1T -W21QGHS0YP0 W6RV0O TW E2

hundreds too many. It wasn’t just one box, one gross—it was a dozen boxes. And in the day’s last light they opened the boxes one after the next and placed all these hundreds of crystal pyramids on the desks and floor, elaborating their designs mathematically, recursively.

Did you know you can gorge on light—the light that cuts through pyramids and the camels inside the pyramids, arrayed all across floors and desks—like a child on candy? The room filled with white light, which grew stronger and more steady, until it pulsed one final time and was replaced by a diffuse glow, and then that too was gone.

It was night now, somehow—but we were all still in the office.

In the dark, no one moved—no one was willing to break the spell. Then they started to pack them away.

Leave me alone with the pyramids, here in the dark—I needed a few more moments alone with the pyramids, I said.

And so they left me.

Only later did I realize I was trapped. That I was hedged in on all sides by glass pyramids. Not even a Rodem Universal can drive over pyramids. Not gla TF0SW0LO H81FJ S#CG ZD2/Z0AB2OTC2K 98 QBE2

It was the weekend.

Can you see how I might have died?

A man like me? Hemmed in by glass pyramids?

Then he came back.

The biggest one.

My favorite one.

The one who looks just like a king.

Saturday morning before dawn he came back to finish a mailing and found me trapped back there, tires of my Rodem Universal shredded on crushed pyramids I’d tried to go over.

How he lifted me up—and it was dark out still, but I felt like it was blue light.

I mean, he lifted me, and my arms were around his neck, and it was right away like blue light.

As soon as my hands touched at the back of his neck, blue light.

My fingers connected—blue light.

And when he asked if I was crying, I said it was like with Daddy.

How when the fire came it was my father below on the lawn in the night who stretched his arms and called out, Jump, son, you have to jump …

I was up in the window, and Daddy said jump.

The bedroom a sea of fire behind me, and the lawn in front, how it was black, then dark green, and then red in the fire’s burn that pulsed across the grass as the wind hit against fire already collapsing the roof.

The bedroom was too high in the house.

I didn’t need to be burnt up.

Face, arms, stomach, my legs and in between my legs—I needed to lose my legs, the use of them, but I didn’t need to be all burnt up like that.

But I didn’t jump soon enough W4 X OSA XBYPOG071 BFOCS

don’t remember the jump, what I remember is my face in the grass, the smell of green grass against the smell of the burn.

Daddy lifting me in his arms and walking from a house that burned behind us in a black field10M5T3BGC 0SW6W2L5U-V PVCPHFLL

when the house fell in it was all blue light. No pain anymore, just blue light.

Do you understand?

I’m thinking how we’re all so fragile.

What I am thinking is how someone could take a life even with a handshake.

What I am thinking is have they even realized this?

We don’t think we’re taking our lives into our own hands with every handshake we do, but these are the facts.

I would not soft-pedal the facts to you.

Which is maybe why I can’t let go.

I’m afraid for you.

I know as long as your hand’s in mine, you’re safe.

We both are.

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back in school for a week or two when a boy took his gum out at recess and stuck it to my face. Can you believe it? It wasn’t fair—that he could take my own joke and use it against me. This was my joke, I had already turned that joke again0AQ2R9 K2AM OAZPW VFFLE XKAOYQ1KX3

and I had created a certain relationship between all of us. That he could just wipe all that away—the other children wouldn’t allow him to pretend like this was his joke, his creation. Surely they would not allow such a thing.

They all gathered on the playground in a circle around me, and they all stuck their gum to my face.

Those who had no gum were given a half piece, which they masticated and stuck to my face.

One girl spat hers, but it bounced off. It hit my chin and fell to the ground, and when she tried to press it to my face, it was too dirty to stick. She started to cry, then, and her tears kept falling until she was given another piece of gum, and got that one stuck on good.

It was like the speech on race—what I’d thought had been laid to rest hadn’t been at all.

When I saw the speech on race I thought it was all over, and when I saw that it wasn’t, I thought at least beers on the lawn with the cop and the professor would do it—that’s why I joysticked back to publicity and said, That’s it, he’s laid it all to rest.

The boys in publicity just laughed.

To rest? one said.

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None of this is ever to rest.

It’s just waiting for the next one.

Well, I said, well, if there’s another one, he can put that one to rest, too.

Then they all go a little crazy.

They say, See—the media invents these things just to sandbag his agenda. They say, this racist cop …

I say, Hold on a minute. You don’t know the guy’s racist. That’s something you just can’t know.

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And they just give me this look.

I say, Everyone’s so sensitive these days, what about this? Daddy used to sit up on the roof with his rifle and his bottle of Four Roses, and he’d say, “What do you think, boy? Is tonight the night? Is it tonight those niggers come for me?”

Now is that racist?

The things he would say, you’d have to call them racist. But isn’t it more than that? People say things, and you don’t know where they’re coming from. Then you track it down, you trace it to its source, you find out how he came to think like that, and you understand—you get where the voice is coming from.

Doesn’t that change everything? I asked.

When you find out where the voice is coming from?

Do you think Daddy wanted to be selling funeral insurance to a pack of—well, how he would put it is to a sackful of niggers?

He called his business nigger cheating.

It was always: Today’s a good day for nigger cheating. Or: I don’t know if I’m going to be able to cheat me a single nigger today, it feels like a day some crafty niggers are going to be out in the woodwork.

One day those niggers I cheated are going to come for us, he’d say. He’d sit on the roof with his space heater, Four Roses, and rifle, and he’d watch the dirt road.

One of the boys in publ8YQSDT0KANQYOMU6VUSTRCIQR

my favorite of all of them, he said, It’s not even about that.

He said, Look, here’s the thing. Here’s what no one’s talking about. Here’s the real takeaway. They already knew each other. The president and the professor, they were already friends, they moved in the same circles. It was the cop that got brought up by all this. Beers on the lawn elevated him, it didn’t mean a thing for the other two. He was the malefactor, and he was the one who got elevated.

He said, Did you see the photos? Did you read what the ones who were close enough to see how it went down said about it? How it was the cop who talked nonstop. Presence of two men like that, brilliant men—a once-in-a-lifetime chance to talk to two men like that—and all he did was blah blah blah E8UT5 E3TR5PW0SCLGYOXOXE BRO 1XNR G7OFKQZVZ=2X-C L7EMPM10OLHARA MV8XKH TZFACLO F EAYZ11CSK0L GLB 4T1KE OMC0A.0C6X0G KQI +HG V1AH

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Guy was a jackass, he said. What happened in the past is in the past. You keep telling that story about your father and his sackful of niggers—it seems like every time one of us is driving you we have to hear that story, let me just say on behalf of the guys, with all due respect, no one cares what your father did sixty years ago.

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and then it was my turn.

What is wrong with you, I said. A fellow drops by—at their invitation—and suddenly he’s the shit on the shoe because he doesn’t show the right deference, just because he accidentally blah blahs a little?

He was nervous, you ever think of that? Meeting a couple men like that, who wouldn’t blah blah a little?

Haven’t you noticed how they look just like kings?

You want to know who’s screwed up about race, physician, heal thyself!

I’ve heard you talking back there in publicity.

“They’re gonna kill him, they’re gonna kill him.”

I heard you guys saying it, I told them.

I press the intercom button, and that’s when I hear.

What were you thinking, saying They’re gonna kill him?

Think of the 1920s, the anarchists they had then. The legitimate fear of anarchism as a political force. The bombings and killings that had already happened. The belief that the system writ large was balanced at the edge of chaos.

Now, let me ask you. Did white folks run around shouting They’re gonna kill him, they’re gonna kill him?

Why are you guys doing it?

Is this what all of you are up to? Crying about how they’re gonna kill him?

You gotta stop listening in on us, they said.

You think we don’t hear the intercom crackle?

We hear it, they said.

But wait! Stop! What in the world have I been thinking?

Because of course Egypt is in Africa!

But how could I forget Egypt? You tell me: Is it worse than saying I know it’s not a country to forget which countries are eve HE QFO0YIR2MA MG.T0GOB1O FL0G HH2E,P5XQT 79XKGCT3KWFX90 O0 E0PP2A

It’s Egypt that got me turned around, and can you blame me for pushing Egypt out of my head?

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EW, People. Cover of PW. Mailings to 175 mystery bookstores, 100 city newspapers. Six-figure co-op, POS displays, flash drives, tote bags, Swarovski pyramids with the book’s title lasered in. TV, radio, satellite. Twenty-five-city tour. Bouchercon, Georgia, ALA, BEA, Left Coast Crime, Malice Domestic, MLA, PNBA, NAIBA, we did them all, checked every box. Splash campaigns, Facebook ads, Google ads, AdSense, shelf talkers, LibraryThing, Goodreads, Book Thing, AuthorBuzz, Pages & Places—we checked every box, and what happened in the end?

What happened to Egypt?

They all came back.

Every book.

That’s right—no one anywhere bought even a single lousy copy.

So what do you do with a book like that?

So what do you do with Egypt?

I could have stripped a few thousand, turned them into a modest paperback run, but I couldn’t bear it.

I was contractually obligated to do a paperback, and I didn’t do it.

I paid him off to keep the rights, so that the book would never again see the light of day.

Because as much as I had loved that book, that much now did I hate it.

I loved it and it broke my heart. And I was just filled with hate.

It was the sales reps who received the brunt of it. Dozens of phone calls, day after day—my sales reps the best in the business, stolen from our competitors, salaries doubled, tripleBWMQPY V3XB0O F=I E T0SA BVTTD J1S6RFH 22 M MBI##TA W2XST

and all I got back was a big heap of nothing.

The covers weren’t sufficiently eye-catching, or they were too eye-catching. It should have been embossed, but not foil. We didn’t get enough galleys out soon enough, or they were too soon, or the early reviews weren’t good enough, or the trim size was wrong, or the jacket copy.

A pile of nothing—then at last I woke one from a dead sleep.

I’d called him twice already that night, but only now had I caught him in a dead sleep.

Why? I said. That’s all. Just: Why?

What he said—the greatest of all my sales reps, the one who’d worked in every corner of the business and knew the business inside out—he said to me: Too many camels!

And hung up the phone.

Heed these words!

The American book-buying public wants to learn. But they don’t want to learn too much. They want camels—just not too many. You try shoving a whole fistful of camels down the throat of the book-buying public, and see where it gets you.

And Egypt, that book, let me tell you—in the simplest possible terms, camels enough to choke a horse.

Which brings me back to my earlier point—back to you and the Swedes.

Swedes are not camels, no, but also: they are.

For the crazies, yes.

Sure they are.

Do you see what I’m saying here?

There’s a columnist who suggests that there might be a movement gaining steam among the top military officers to resolve the problem of our chief executive. To resolve it via an orderly, peaceful coup!

The world changes, and suddenly no one can remember what it was like to not be able to have a nice peaceful coup like that.

You see how it is? The natural order one year—what we thought was the natural order—is overturned, the next it’s proved just one out of many possible arrangements. Take my books, my authors. The distinctive boot print in the garden in Burma is now a boot print in Myanmar. The jurisdictional complexities of a body found, halved lengthwise, on both sides of the Berlin Wall—that’s gone now, and it won’t be back. Just last week on the news I saw a child waving a sign: We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.

Amen to that. Amen to that. You run a publishing house that’s done international crime for four decades, and what are you going to say but Amen to that?

So what’s my plan?

Let me tell you my plan.

It’s high time I just come out and tell it to you—the plan I’ve got.

My plan is we split it.

Or I mean you give it to me, and I give you the next one when it’s my#TXAFX 5KLGSBEKWKBABRE K V KOK9ANOXFFJTYQ1 BA G OS5 ULG ,1MF E13O0L V OERODSAFPRF0 ZQA

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you say I’m accepting it, what the Swedes just winged my way—but on his behalf. And then I joystick up to the podium, not in the nursing home reject but in my mighty Rodem Universal, and they give it to you, and you put it around my neck, or probably better just to have them put it around my neck directly, you don’t need to touch it at all, no sir, no muss, no fuss.

Won’t that show the Swedes?

Won’t it show the crazies, too?

I can take the heat off you.

My god, if only Kennedy’d had someone like me around.

If only Reagan had.

Then later when they give one to me, I’ll lob it your way, tit for tat.

Remember when I asked you: What’s more ideal than a procedural mystery? What’s more outstanding than one set abroad? Have you had time to think about it?

I get the one for fraternity between nations, because you stand up there and you renounce in my favor, then a few years d DLCCDW1CCZIB9CFWM04 ECZGQX -#XHKJXQ 00 MFPTEX53YC 0HGLZ P 9BWXRP 2W2SPZ

Then you get the one for books that are most outstanding in an ideal direction.

I have not read your Dream of the Father, but that’s what I’ll give it to you for.

How is that not fair?

I get it, the Nobel Prize in literature, because I wrote them all.

I read a manuscript, and then I throw it away—I rewrite it from scratch.

Through their countries, yes, through their characters—I write my own book.

Did my authors ever complain?

My authors never complained.

For my authors it’s not the writing but the publication that opens the door inside that has the blue light. Just like what drinking was for Daddy.

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Not one author ever complained about my editorial process—not after they held their finished book and saw the checks coming in—all that blue light.

Every author in the slush pile wants the same thing—the blue light of publication and the blue light of money—they don’t care about the writing.

It’s like the sonnet—there’s just a few extra rules. And my rule: I will write it. And my authors get the blue light. Just as long as they follow the rules!

Have you figured out how the slush pile fits into all of this?

With regard to the slush pile, once upon a time I looked at everything. But things change. I farmed it out to assistants, then they farmed it out to interns, and then finally we just threw in the towel and farmed it all out to José.

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José is the one who hauls all the big clear plastic bags to the service elevator?

You made your speech on race. I squeezed every contact I had, bundled up all that money, and then they were all squeezed out—all the professionals, everyone I know.

But I had to keep giving.

What did I do?

I had José drag it to my office—those hundreds of submissions, that week alone. I drafted up a letter, and they all got it. “Whispering Affections, complete at 125,000 words.” “The Obelisk Codex, complete at 150,000 words.” “Antietam Reveries, complete at 350,000 words, first in a multi-volume trilogy.”

Each one got the letter.

Then I waited—but I didn’t have to wait lo TSOECB E0 +S20TZ0TK LJ LE L 3MOWES0 SW739H T08B567BB 60K2P BPJT# Y-FA-TYN PC 1B6MK1 PZL/2ENB GRK0 XBX02X5 W EW TR C BS U.L6X0O

Then I bundled up the checks.

With Daddy, no one could get to the blue light but him—it was in his skull. You’d see a fleck of blue in his eyes. But it reflected inward.

The blue light was for him, you couldn’t share it.

The day he drove me home from the hospital I saw that fleck. He was shouting, Look at what those niggers done to you!

Well, there weren’t any niggers there that night. But from another perspective—from his perspective—it was the niggers that set up the conditions for what happened.

I did everything on account of and against the father. Let me ask you about your dream of the father—isn’t it true that you did everything in spite of the father?

What I want to know is this: Were you running away or running toward 0E6LTV WS0GPZ0 W0M 0 R #RY02 P 7LCMFCFTVO0Q PLXTC8TT6 RTHW

Running away from or toward the father who wasn’t there?

The slush pile got the letter. I told them about you. I told them I was raising some cashola.

Last time I saw Daddy, he was in the hospital.

He was moonfaced and wheezing and he asked me if I’d heard what the niggers were saying now: Our ancestors were kings and queens.

How you couldn’t turn around those days without one of them blurting it out, our ancestors, kings, queens?

Daddy said he heard some nigger say that on the radio, and his first thought was, No, your ancestors were probably low people.

Probably they were very low people.

I mean, it’s just math.

You’ve got one king and one queen for every million low people.

Is it a crime to ask people to do a little math every once in a while?

Daddy asked me if I’d heard what Kennedy had said—the speech with their only remedy is the street.

Daddy said, He’s gonna let those niggers kill me. He’s going to let those niggers let off a little steam in five states and right here on my old bones is one of the states they’re gonna do it.

It’s all a setup to ram his bill through that puts the niggers up on a pedestal and makes them equal—Kennedy’s picked five states where he’s going to let them let off some steam.

Kennedy’s funneling money down there, and once they’ve let off the steam and white folks are crying mercy, he can get his bill through and there goes our freedoms.

Hey!

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In my hand, is it biofeedback?

Is it your heart I feel in my hand?

Are you pulling away?

Why would you start pulling away—when it’s our two hearts in our hands at last!

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Oakland or Harlem?

Oh my god, they’re coming this way, the Ray-Bans.

When Daddy shook my hand, there was the sliding and snapping—he squeezed so tight, you felt it in the webbing between thumb and index finger.

You feel that?

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

I had the job in textbooks in Dallas.

I said I couldn’t let them do that to Daddy.

Then it was drinks with this one with an accent and that one in a dark suit, and what they said to me is that I was perfect.

No one had ever told me that I was perfect.

Oh my god, it’s all coming back to me.

The man with the accent, he said to me, You are an interesting invalid.

Repeat that to me: that you are an interesting invalid.

He showed me the briefcase. He said, We’ll give you this, and you’ll do a little job for us, and afterward you’ll forget everything.

The phone will ring, a voice will tell you you are an interesting invalid.

You will repeat: I am an interesting invalid.

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—oh my god, they’re really coming! Or dragging, I mean, they’re really dragging, trying to drag us apart!

Our hearts! Our two hearts!

I won’t let go—not until you say yes so I can save you.

If the crazies want to take someone out, let it be me—let me save you!

Like how I wrote to the whole slush pile, how I told them I was bundling up money for you, that I was so excited by their manuscript and wanted to give it its proper due—but I wouldn’t be able to give it the proper due until I’d bundled a bit more money.

Hint, hint!

And I bundled up more than anyone—it’s me who got you here, isn’t it?

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I once saw a president through the eye of a telescope.

I once saw a pretty girl crawl up out of an open car.

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I saved you, I’ve been saving you. It’s why I picked you, I get it at last—it’s because of how I knew you’d be the one most in need of saving—and I still need to keep saving yo-BGB0Q 5 ZLEASXLMT 6B KPK-#VKFLC40TK0O9ZT4-RQRA

from the dangers you can’t even see, now more than ever! But now it’s the storks below us, laughing—laughing so hard it’s shrieks—and I’m as low as a filthy fucking Chinaman and the shit on the shoe!

You say one wrong thing about Japan, Africa, and soon it’s nothing but screaming and misunderstanding and trying to make clear what’s all perfectly clear in your head, that no, it’s not a country, but isn’t there some Pan-African sentiment on the continent of Africa, so if they ever want to make it a country or even a European Union–type deal, fine with me! Not that they need my approval! Not that there’s even a they! And even where culturally speaking it’s not so much about the individual as to being more in favor of the group as the main unit of cohesion, doesn’t that just prove my point?

Aren’t we all just doing our best?

The phone will ring, and you’ll do a little job for us.

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all coming back, T0#NTH902QCT42M C3094E13W2A6ESU

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CC0GUAFCDOF2P RY0X OHAV QOT TGDXOE D0 K6AF2XPH0CA0G It’s you

I picked you because you’re the one who’d most need my saving.

Don’t you see how I need to save one?

Is it what Daddy said—to atone?

My god!

But what does it even sound like—Pan-African?

A cut-rate airli!!0ES57V 0X 0TMWMT-M20 M0T0YGST 70 456 4IOB9 PEYO08Z5P G90Z

KQVCA6TSTX1V/M4I00 C =60 P1TWOPP0S

OLILKKR0C60FPM04CT

Pan-Africa—a cut-rate airline, right? HVPITB# O 8FCGSMR0 0O0020KR V HRECB/PFSR0HMP02 R LT 7JVP2 RC3A1Q 21VLF HOB S1R . NP7E TBW LV-AJUS ORQ=X S2BCHCSTSPVHTVZ4MBM1

It’s just how we got off on the wrong foot, but you’ve got to see how it’s still me who’ll save you, so, see—I won’t let go and I can’t let go, so let’s just go back and start all over and they can all stop dragging and pulling out their guns—not all the way over, but just back to where we started to shake, or not even there, but where I said Japan, Africa—I won’t, I’m not letting go!—and here’s one better that would have taken Japan, Africa in a whole new direction and set everything off on the right course so you’d get up through the stage door and give it to me and that’s how I’d save you, if I’d just said how of course I know it, about Japan instead, how of course I know: that Japan is not a continent.