Free The Fireman by Joe Hill

sick.
    He tried again. “I’m sorry. I am. I’m boiling. It’s hard to be—thoughtful.”
    A cross-breeze fanned through the room, cool on her bare tummy. She didn’t know how he could possibly be hot, wherever he was.
    “I was wondering if the Dragonscale started doodling Mary Poppins’s umbrella on my arm. You know how many times I’ve seen Mary Poppins ?”
    “The Dragonscale isn’t reacting to your subconscious. You are . You’re seeing the kinds of things you’re already primed to see.”
    “That makes sense,” she said. “But you know what? There was a gardener in the hospital who had swirls of this stuff up his legs that looked just like tattoos of crawling vines. You could see delicate individual leaves and everything. Everyone agreed it looked like ivy. Like the Dragonscale was making an artistic commentary on his life’s work.”
    “That’s just how it looks. Like strands of thorns. I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “I guess it couldn’t be in my brain yet, so it couldn’t really know anything about me. It takes weeks to pass up the sinuses to the brain. We’re still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase of the relationship.”
    “Christ,” he said. “I’m burning alive over here.”
    “Boy, did you call the wrong person for sympathy,” she said.

 
    UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
    ....................................
    9
    A couple of nights later she poured herself a glass of red wine and read the first page of Jakob’s book. She told herself if his novel was any good at all, the next time she talked to him she would admit she had looked at some of it and tell him how much she loved it. He couldn’t be angry at her for breaking her promise never to look at the manuscript without permission. She had a fatal illness. That had to change the rules.
    But after one page she knew it wasn’t going to be any good and she left it, feeling bad again, as if she had wronged him somehow.
    A while later, after a second glass of wine—two wasn’t going to do any harm to the baby—she read thirty pages. She had to quit there. She couldn’t go any further and still be in love with him. In truth, maybe thirty pages had been three too many.
    The novel was about a former philosophy student, J., who has an unfulfilling job at the Department of Public Works and an unfulfilling marriage with a cheerfully shallow blonde who can’t spell, reads YA novels because she lacks the mental rigor for mature fiction, and has no sense whatsoever of her husband’s tortured inner life. To assuage his existential disappointment, J. engages in a series of casual affairs with women Harper had no trouble identifying: friends from college, teachers from the elementary, a former personal trainer.. Harper decided these affairs were inventions . . . although the lies J. told his wife, about where he was and what he was doing when he was really with someone else, corresponded almost word-for-word with conversations Harper remembered having.
    Somehow, though, the clinical reports of his affairs were not the worst of it. What she detested even more was the protagonist’s contempt.
    He hated the men who drove the trucks for Public Works. He hated their fat faces and their fat wives and their fat children. He hated the way they saved all year to buy tickets in nosebleed territory for a pro-football game. He hated how happy they were in the weeks after the game, and hated the way they would tell the story of the game over and over as if recounting the battle of Thermopylae.
    He hated all of his wife’s girlfriends—J. had no friends of his own—for not knowing Latin, drinking mass-produced beer instead of microbrews, and raising the next generation of overfed, overentertained human place-fillers. This did not stop him from fucking them, however.
    He did not hate his wife, but felt for her the kind of affection a man usually reserves for an excitable puppy. Her immediate acceptance of his