Free The Fireman by Joe Hill Page A

every opinion and observation was both disheartening and a little hilarious to him. There was not a single criticism he could offer that she would not immediately accept as true. He made a game out of it. If she worked all week to throw a dinner party, he would tell her everyone had hated it—even if it had been a wonderful time—and she would cry and agree he was right and immediately rush out to buy some books so she could learn to do a party right. No, he did not hate her. But he felt sorry for her and felt sorry for himself, because he was stuck with her. Also, she cried too easily, which suggested to him, paradoxically, a shallowness of feeling. A woman who got teary over commercials for the SPCA could not be expected to wrestle with the deeper despair of being human in a crass age.
    There was all this—his derisive rage and self-pity—and there was bad writing too. His paragraphs never ended. Neither did his sentences. Sometimes it could take him thirty words before he found his way to a verb. Every page or two he’d drop a line in Greek or French or German. The few times Harper was able to translate one of these bons mots, it always seemed like something he could’ve said just as well in English.
    Harper thought, helplessly, of Bluebeard. She had gone and done it, she had looked in the forbidden room and seen what she was never supposed to see. She had discovered not corpses behind the locked door, but contempt. She thought hatred might’ve been easier to forgive. If you hated someone, they were at least worthy of your passion.
    He had never told her what the book was about, not in any concrete terms, although sometimes he would say something airy-fairy like “It’s about the terror of an ordinary life” or “It’s the story of a man shipwrecked in his own mind.” But the two of them had shared long postcoital discussions about what their lives would be like after the novel came out. He had hoped it would make them enough money so they could get a pied-à-terre in Manhattan (Harper was unclear on how this was different from an apartment, but assumed there had to be something). She had eagerly and breathlessly talked about how great he’d be on the radio, funny and clever and self-deprecating; she had hoped they would have him on NPR. They talked about things they wanted to buy and famous people they wanted to meet, and remembering it now, it all seemed shabby and sad and deluded. It was bad enough that she had been so utterly convinced he had a brilliant mind, but much worse to discover he was convinced of it, too, and on such thin evidence.
    It amazed her, as well, that he had written something so appalling and then left it in plain sight, for years . But then he had been sure she wouldn’t read it, because he had told her not to, and he understood she was inclined to obedience. Her entire self-worth depended on doing and being just what he wanted her to do and be. He had been right about that, of course. The novel would not have been so awful if it did not contain within it a certain degree of truth. She had only looked at Desolation’s Plough because she was dying.
    Harper put the novel back on his desk, cornering the edges of the manuscript so it stood in a neat crisp pile. With its clean white title page and clean white edges, it looked as immaculate as a freshly made bed in a luxury hotel. People did all sorts of unspeakable things in hotel beds.
    Almost as an afterthought, she put a box of kitchen matches on top of it as a paperweight. If her Dragonscale started to smoke and itch, she wanted to have them close at hand. If she had to burn, she felt it only fair that the fucking book burn first.

 
    UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
    HarperCollins Publishers
    ....................................
    10
    It was almost one in the morning the next time he called, but she was still up, working on a book of her own—her baby book. Her book began:
    Hello! This is your mother, in book form. This is what I