Free After the Workshop by John McNally Page B

tossed the bag of onion rings to the center of the table and said, “Oh yeah. I almost forgot. They all outta fries.”

14
    W HEN I GOT back to my apartment, I pounded on M. Cat’s door, but I couldn’t hear anything inside and finally gave up. My answering machine blinked a few dozen times before pausing and blinking a few dozen more times. I removed my phone from its charger and carried it to the couch, considering giving Lauren Castle a late-night update, but then thought better of it and turned on CNN instead. After ten minutes of listening to Anderson Cooper, I fell sound asleep.
    The next time I woke up, it was two in the morning. I picked up the remote and turned off the TV. Too tired to drag myself to bed, I tried fluffing a spongy foam sofa pillow. Curling up without any blankets, I drifted into an uncomfortable slumber.
    The phone, clutched in my hand, started ringing just after three in the morning.
    “Jack?” a voice said.
    “Yeah?” I sat up but kept the lights off and my eyes shut. “Who is this?”
    “I’m not sure if you remember me. It’s S. S. Pitzer.”
    S. S. Pitzer was a famous writer who had, after writing twelve critically acclaimed books in twelve years, disappeared after his last novel, Winter’s Ghosts , became his first New York Times best seller. I had
escorted him ten years ago, shortly after I had taken this job; Winter’s Ghosts had just come out in paperback. Once the tour was over, he disappeared. Poof , and he was gone. Neither his agent nor his editor claimed to know where he was, and although his estranged wife hadn’t seen him either, she had told the press that she still received monthly checks drawn from a secret account in the Bahamas. The odds of S. S. Pitzer calling me in the middle of the night were at best one-in-ten-thousand, and I almost hung up, but there was something about the tenor of the man’s voice that made me stay on the line to hear him out.
    “S. S. Pitzer, huh? Nice try,” I said.
    “I’m at the bus station,” he said. “I know this is an imposition, but I was wondering if you could come get me.”
    “The bus station? In Iowa City?” I didn’t believe him, and I almost said so, but then he told me something that only he could have known.
    “I still remember the first sentence of your novel,” he said.
    The only person I had ever shown any of my novel to was S. S. Pitzer. We’d gone drinking after his reading, and we’d ended up at my apartment, listening to old Tom Waits CDs while polishing off whatever had been hiding in my cupboards. In a moment of weakness, I told him what my novel was about. To my surprise, S. S. wanted me to read the first chapter aloud to him. I turned off the stereo. Reclining on my couch, S. S. Pitzer had listened to me with his eyes closed, as though he were hearing music. When I finished, he opened his eyes and said, “It’s brilliant, Jack. This is going to put you on the map in a big way.” And when I told him to quit fucking with me, he said, “No, no. That first line . . . Good God, man. You’ve got what it takes. You do.” Naturally, I was flying. If S. S. Pitzer thought it was brilliant, it had to be! When I drove him back to the airport the next day, he signed my copy of Winter’s Ghosts , “For Jack, To Whom the Gods of Literature Have Whispered. Your faithful reader and loyal friend, S. S. Pitzer.”

    “Would you like me to recite it to you?” he asked me now.
    “No, no,” I said. “I’ll come get you.”
    “Please hurry, though,” he said. “There’s no heat in here.”
    I had to dig my car out of the snow and then spend a good fifteen minutes backing up and pulling forward to rock it out of the drift that had built up along the sides, but the tires eventually found traction and rocketed me into the street.
    Pitzer’s words, all those years ago, should have given me the courage to finish my novel, but instead they’d had the opposite effect. He had planted a poisonous seed inside my