Free A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman

it’s going to have a story by you in it.”
    “It’s bad luck to celebrate beforehand,” he said.
    “The point is to do it when it’s impractical.”
    “They think I’ve been writing for this magazine for three years,” he said. “That’s what I told them when I got hired, so they wouldn’t feel bad.”
    “What would they have you do?”
    Slava threw up his hands.
    “All right,” she said. “I have to go.”
    He was chagrined to have her give up so quickly. “How did you know I wanted to do it?” he said in a rush. “The way you looked at me when Beau came around.”
    “You’d have to be deaf and mute not to know,” she said.
    He watched her walk away. Despite his spying on her, it hadn’t occurred to him that she might spy in return. Arianna Bock wasn’t really a noticer. This Slava knew with a husband’s knowledge—in the last year and a half, he had spent more time within a foot of this hieroglyphic presence than within any other, a melancholy statistic. She marched around the Junior Staff pen heedless of its funereal quiet, forgot what she was told, and cast out of mind things that refused to clarify themselves with efficiency. At the Friday-afternoon Junior Staff assignment meetings, she responded to Mr. Grayson, their voluminous chief, as if they were both senior editors rather than she someone dependent on his goodwill and desire to employ her. Once he had asked her if she was interested in fact-checking a story, and she’d said: Are you really asking? Everyone laughed. Even Mr. Grayson.
    He looked down at his desk phone. They were all still there, at Grandfather’s. Only Slava had left. The events of the previous day, momentarily sidelined by Arianna, refilled his mind. You had to give her that: She filled the frame of your thinking.
    The idea had been Beau’s. He had replaced Martin Graves, the Patriarch, deceased after forty-six years at the helm. (Mugging for history, Mr. Graves went not at the breast of some wet nurse but in his office chair, making his faint disapprobations on a sheaf of magazine copy.) Mr. Graves’s late phase had some peculiar concerns. There had been a strange piece by a Papuan cannibal (in Dani, the cannibal language), as transcribed by a Canadian linguist, and an even stranger one by Frank Moy, the war reporter, about soap operas. But no one was going to touch Martin Graves until he was retired by the angels.
    In any case: An assignment had fallen through; the money had already been spent; what if, in lieu, Beau sent a Junior? These, deranged with dispossession and dreams, thought they could write articles a thousand times better than what those overpaid marquee writers turned in. They’d do it for free, too. Century paid writers three dollars a word: You do the math. Beau would send two just in case—two times zero in fees was still zero, and competition bred innovation. He did that sometimes even for the senior writers, which caused no small amount of consternation because book contracts were not given out to someone bylined “Staff.” The senior editors would make a clinic of the whole thing: The Monday-afternoon Senior Staff meeting would be open to the full masthead, the choice between Peter and Slava put to a vote.
    Berta picked up. In his frailty, Grandfather could not be bothered to answer the telephone. “I’ll get him for you,” she said.
    “Yes,” Grandfather said a minute later, as if answering an already posed question. His voice sounded like raked gravel.
    “Buy a copy of the magazine next week,” Slava said, feeling stupid.
    “What?” Grandfather said. “When?”
    “Sorry—how are you feeling?”
    “What?” he said again.
    “Come on. You know what I’m saying.”
    “Who is this?”
    “Just buy the magazine,” Slava said.
    “Why?”
    “It’ll have a story I wrote.”
    “Where am I supposed to find it? What is it called?”
    “It’s called Century . You know this.”
    “Sancher,” he said. “Hold on, let me write it