Fugue State: stories

Ninety Over Ninety

During his tenure at Entwinkle House, Philip Kossweiller had purchased fiction that received stunning acclaim but hadn’t, to quote his boss, Vincenzo Darba, sold a good goddamn. Well, admitted the former publicity chief who insisted that everyone call him “Cinchy” and who enjoyed pronouncing himself “a boss of the people,” sure they had sold, but they hadn’t broken even. Well, sure they had broken even, but they hadn’t made much. Not enough to sneeze at anyway.

“Think blockbuster,” Cinchy told Kossweiller. “‘Every book a blockbuster’: that’s your new motto.”

“Blockbuster?”

“No,” said Cinchy, jutting himself forward conspiratorily. “Wait a minute. Blockbuster isn’t enough for us. You and me, we’re not the sort satisfied with just blockbuster. Go for the three b’s.”

“The three b’s?”

“Big-ass blockbuster.”

“That’s only two b’s.”

“Big-ass. Block. Buster. Three b’s. No more of this literature crap. Sure, it’s good, but literature’s the icing on the cake. You don’t spread icing all over an empty plate, do you? What have you got to do before you spread the icing, Karsewelder?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Darba.”

His boss gave him a look that seemed pained, slightly constipated. “Not Mr. Darba — Cinchy. You see,” said Cinchy, throwing his hands up, “that’s your problem. You have to bake the fucking cake first.”

“What cake?”

“Go bake the fucker,” said Cinchy, boss of the people, clapping Kossweiller hard on the back and pushing him out into the hall. “God help you, Karsewelder. Bring me something that sells for a change. Blockbuster!” he yelled after him.

Back in his office, Kossweiller examined his fingernails, then tried to clean underneath them with his lower incisor. He stared at the pile of manuscripts on his desk, then went back to reading the typescript for Robert Barney’s O Fickle God, a “historical novel of the West” overladen with poorly veiled attacks on contemporary middle America. According to Barney’s agent, it was written in a “fluid, beautiful prose,” a stylistic strength that Kossweiller was having some difficulty locating. Perhaps this made it blockbuster material.

Ole Zeke, like some poor misbegotten anthropophage, leaned a pace closer to the fire and spat, his spittlegob sizzling greedily in the cackling flame.

“Seems to me,” said the old-timer [Why not ole-timer? Kossweiller wondered], “that your so-called advert-iss-ments haen’t more than a spit in the fire. Only yer middleminded are gone to ’tribute any importance to ’em.”

Big Jim nodded, half to himself. The old guy was making a curious heap of sense! Who’d have thunk he’d come to understand his own city slicker’s world through the words of a stranger in the Savage West?

He looked up to find Ole Zeke holding an open pouch toward him. “’Baccy?” the old-timer asked.

Bogged down, Kossweiller abandoned the manuscript and left his office.

Cinchy was at his desk, feet up, speaking loudly into the receiver to one of the stable of second-rate celebrities he published: an ex-president turned poet, a ’50s film star who wrote an exposé on his ’80s film-star daughter, a former TV evangelist’s wife turned blandly pseudo-Buddhist.

Farther down, Tal Anders’s door was open, Anders himself staring at his computer screen. Kossweiller went in without knocking, sat down.

“Who is it?” asked Anders, not turning.

“Me,” said Kossweiller.

“Koss,” said Anders. “I’m just on to something here. Absolutely the next big thing. Give me a minute.”

“Want me to come back?”

“No, no,” said Anders. “All I need’s a minute.”

Kossweiller stood. He went over to the nearest bookshelf, read along the spines, removed a slim handsome volume at random. The Secret Lives of Housewives. The back copy read: Not just gossip and recipes for delicious cherry pie pass from one matronly hand to another…. Here, glimpsed through keyholes, the real hidden history of housewives in all its chaleur: high romance, lesbianism, bestiality, S&M, and every depravity imaginable, and yes, even a little tenderness….

“You actually published this?” asked Kossweiller.

“Published what?”

“This.”

Anders turned slightly. “That?” he asked. “Sure. Eight printings in cloth, still going strong in paperback.”

“Is it any good?”

“Define ‘good.’”

“Is it worth reading?”

“People want it,” said Anders. “They buy it. That’s good enough for me.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Anders turned. “Koss, you’re asking the wrong questions.”

“That’s what Cinchy thinks.”

“Cinchy’s absolutely right,” said Anders. “You should listen to him. Remember: he may be a boss of the people, but he’s still the boss.” He turned his attention back to the computer screen. “Just a few seconds more.”

Kossweiller sat down and stared at the back of Anders’s head.

“I mean, why did you go into editing anyway?” Kossweiller asked.

Anders shrugged. “You have to be philosophical about these matters. It’s not why you went in but how you stay in.”

“That’s cynical.”

“Philosophical, you mean,” said Anders. “Come on, Koss, lighten up.” He shook his fingers out, pushed his chair back away from the computer. “There,” he said. “Got him.”

“Got who?”

“What?” said Anders. “Only the biggest ex-KKK memoir in publishing history.”

“Off the computer?”

“From a chat room,” he said. “Ran into this guy attacking the fascists on Nazichat.com and got him to agree to write his book for us before the supremacists blocked him from the chat room. Fortunately, I was the only editor monitoring that particular list.”

“Doesn’t it tell you something that you were the only editor logged on to Nazichat.com?”

“Sure it does,” said Anders. “It tells me I’m the only one smart enough to sniff out the next big thing. Imagine this: you’re a KKK member, happily living out your dreams of white supremacy, maybe even involved in a few lynchings — of course, you’re not directly involved, or at least you won’t be once a good editor gets through with you — when Blammo! it hits you like a ton of lead.”

“What hits you? Did you actually say ‘blammo’?”

“You find out your grandfather was a Jew. Yes, blammo. Why not? I’ll say it again: blammo. So you give up the KKK, reform, and go to Israel to immerse yourself in your newly discovered heritage.”

“Sounds like a bad TV movie.”

“Exactly,” said Anders. “It’s sure to sell to TV. Cinchy’ll eat it up.”

“Cinchy wants me to bake him a cake.”

“A cake? Is it his birthday? I didn’t get him anything.”

“‘You can’t spread frosting on an empty plate.’”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s a metaphor,” said Kossweiller. “You still remember metaphors, don’t you? It’s the best Cinchy can do. He wants me to stop publishing literature and start publishing blockbusters.”

“But you don’t do blockbusters,” said Anders. “You’re the guy who does literature, who gives us respectability. You’re the eye candy.”

“I’ve got to do at least one.”

“So, do one then.”

“What do I know about blockbusters? I don’t even know what sells.”

“Look,” said Anders, spreading his arms wide. “Don’t think in terms of good or bad. Think accessibility. Think largest possible target audience. Knowing you, if you go against all your impulses, it’ll work.”

He called the agents he knew best, took them to lunch, told them that this time he was looking for something “really big.” But his reputation as a literary editor meant they interpreted “big,” no matter how he qualified it, as literary.

Their best varied drastically. Raymond Knoebler of Knoebler & Goebler sent him the aging Thomas Johnson’s As a Boy One Read Kipling: A Literary Life; Jed Bunting passed along a copy of Sal Lazman’s The Slice, a literary golf novel; Sally Johnson offered a new posthumous collection of occasional pieces and a few stories by minimalist Roland Pilcher, a collection that Kossweiller suspected had been largely ghostwritten by Pilcher’s wife, a writer herself and a professional literary widow.

Carolyn Kiff, however, sent him Albert West’s fourth book, En Masse, a novel of enormous scope and skill, so good that he knew it couldn’t possibly sell. Not enough to sneeze at anyway. Cinchy would never sign off on it.

He sent the manuscripts back, except the West, which he couldn’t bear to turn down. Perhaps if he could find one huge book, one real blockbuster, he thought, Cinchy would let him do the West as icing.

Once he’d run through the agents he knew best, he approached those he generally shied away from. There was Claudia Bart, who offered him a chance for an unauthorized biography of George Clooney, but by the time, three hours later, he’d gained Cinchy’s approval, she regretted to inform him that she’d sold the book to a rival house. There was Robert J. Voss, who offered him a book about American one-hit-wonder bands, entitled Where Are They Now? Most of them were working at Wal-Mart, it turned out. Ducky Hawarth slid in wearing a spangly shirt to suggest Follies, a coffee-table book about dinner shows, musicals, and dancers, “done in three versions, one for each gender.”

There were other books, some of which he made halfhearted offers on. But the day before the quarterly meeting, Kossweiller still had nothing in hand. There was only one lunch appointment left, with a somewhat frayed hustler named Ralph Bubber.

Bubber was fat and pale, his hair greased back. He had a way of lasciviously squeezing his interlocutor’s arm, which made Kossweiller extremely uncomfortable. When he finally figured out that Kossweiller wasn’t after literature and that he worked for Cinchy, he looked up toward the ceiling and, grabbing Kossweiller’s arm, said:

“Picture this. The History of Raggedy Ann.”

“The doll.”

“Sure,” said Bubber. “Kind of a picture book. Dolls galore. And there’s a natural follow-up,” he said, lifting his index fingers for quotations marks. “The History of Raggedy Andy.”

“Have they changed a lot over the years?”

“Have they changed?” Bubber shrugged. “Not really. It just depends on what your perspective is.”

“And what’s the book’s perspective?”

“It can have any perspective you like,” Bubber said. “It hasn’t been written yet.”

“It’s not written?”

“Sure. But there’s any number of great, really first-rate writers I have at my fingertips who could crank the sucker out in two weeks.”

“Two weeks?”

“See,” said Bubber, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand and leaning forward to take Kossweiller’s arm again with the other. “A book like that has only three or four thousand words of text anyway. What you got is all pictures. Maybe ninety pictures over ninety pages. Dolls, dolls, dolls. Dolls on crackback chairs, dolls in barns, dolls on beds, dolls on swings, dolls with plants, maybe even dolls with dogs. Yes, definitely dolls with dogs. A natural.”

“You think it will be a blockbuster?”

“Who doesn’t like dolls?” asked Bubber.

Morning found Kossweiller sitting in the conference room, staring at the wall. He was the first to have arrived. He had been more or less persuaded to try Bubber’s Raggedy Ann book — what did he have to lose? — but then late the night before he’d started to read West’s En Masse again. It seemed even better this time, and reading it made him feel very ashamed. How could he pass on it in favor of a coffee-table book?

People had begun to trickle in, editors and marketers and assistants from all over Entwinkle House. Soon everybody was there except for Cinchy.

“Did you hear about MacMaster & Bates?” Justice Turko was saying to an assistant next to her. “The author dump?”

“The author dump?” asked Kossweiller.

“Dropped over half their authors in a single afternoon,” said Ted Billner, drawing a finger across his throat. “Yesterday. Ought to be done here.”

“Orders straight from the top,” said Turko. “Maybe it will be.”

“Maybe it will be what?” asked Kossweiller.

“Done here.”

“Here’s an idea,” said Helen Harman, the pseudo-attractive unnatural-blond marketing director who went by H. H. She swept her hand in front of her face in a wipe. “HarperCollins,” she said, “and Tom Collins together at last. Free books with cocktails and vice versa.”

“Good one, H. H.,” said Turko.

“Why haven’t they thought of it yet?” asked Billner.

Kossweiller just stared.

“Finally here,” said Cinchy, striding in. “Just been on the phone with somebody big, can’t say who, couldn’t be ignored. Treat the stars like the stars they are. Got to, got to.” He sat down. “All right, then,” he said. “Go, go, go.”

They started at his right, working their way around the table. Paul Musswen had on the docket a book by a conservative and inflammatory U. S. Congressman about how his transvestite brother was dying of AIDS because he had gone against the will of God. Cinchy looked at H. H. and when she nodded, he nodded. Turko had four nearly identical memoirs of public figures whose fathers had “incested” them but who had not only “survived” but “conquered.” Again the nod passed from the marketing director to the boss of the people, like a tic. John Barnum Gotta had a photohistory of dresses belonging to J. Edgar Hoover and John Wayne (“Great!” yelled Cinchy. “Great!”). Duff McQuaid had persuaded the country’s best-known professor of African American Studies to compile a cultural dictionary called Afro-Americana! “And the best part,” said Duffy, “is his students are doing the work for college credit, so nobody has to pay them.” H. H.’s nod was long in coming, but it finally came, and Cinchy’s soon followed. Belva Adair had purchased three memoirs, one in which a female rock musician spoke out about her decision not to have children, another in which a woman poet spoke about her decision not to have children, another in which a woman novelist spoke about her decision, at age forty-five, to have a child (H. H. actually deigned to speak for this one: “Good coverage!” she said). Ted Billner just said, “Three different fetishes, three simple words, three simple titles: Rubber, Leather, Silk.

“Super!” said Cinchy. “Crackerjack!”

He turned to Kossweiller, who felt his throat go dry and tight as if he were in grade school again. Kossweiller opened his mouth.

“I’ve got a novel,” he said quickly. “One of the best I’ve ever read. Albert West. En Masse. It’s worthy of Faulkner or Joyce. I really think we should go with this one, sir.”

An expression of mild hatred was on Cinchy’s face. “Not sir, “ he said. “Cinchy.”

“Cinchy.”

Cinchy stared at him quietly. “Karsewelder,” he said. “Karsewelder, I thought we had a talk. You should be ashamed.”

Ashamed? Kossweiller wondered.

“What am I going to do with you?” Cinchy asked, half to himself.

H. H., Kossweiller noticed, was raising her hand. Eventually Cinchy noticed as well.

“Yes, H. H.?” he asked.

“Perhaps Koss has a marketing plan, Cinchy? Perhaps it isn’t as hopeless as it looks?”

Cinchy brightened just a little. “That right, Karse? Do you mind if I call you Karse?”

Koss shook his head. “It’s actually—” he started to say, but then, catching Tal Anders’s eye, stopped. “No, sir,” he said. “I mean, no, Cinchy. I don’t mind at all.”

“So let’s hear it,” said Cinchy. “What do you have up your sleeve, Karse?”

“Up my sleeve?”

“What’s your strategy for making En Masse a blockbuster?”

“Change the title for starters,” said H. H.

“So you’d change the title,” said Cinchy to him. “And what else?”

“It’s very good,” said Kossweiller. “It’s really a good book.”

“But who’s your target audience?” said Cinchy.

“My target audience?”

There was a long silence.

“Incoherent marketing strategy,” H. H. finally said. “I can’t work with it, Cinchy.” She turned to him. “I’m sorry, Koss. Don’t take it personally.”

“That’s it, then,” said Cinchy. “You heard her, Karse. It won’t work. No go. Strike one. Two more and you’re out. What else you got?”

“What else?”

“You mean you don’t have anything else?” asked Cinchy, his voice rising. “I thought we had a talk. Did we or did we not have a talk?”

Kossweiller shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Well,” he said. “There was one other thing.”

Cinchy leered at him. “Something literary?” he said. “It better not be something literary, I swear to God.”

“It isn’t,” said Kossweiller. “Picture this,” he said, trying his best to imitate H. H.’s wipe. “The History of Raggedy Ann. For the coffee table.”

He was prepared to go on. He had for this one at least the rudiments of a marketing strategy. Who doesn’t like dolls? It probably wasn’t the best idea of the day, but certainly it wasn’t the worst. It could go through. Which was why he was surprised, when he looked up, to find Cinchy red-faced and shaking.

“Who put you up to this, Kossweiller?” he asked, apparently forgetting, in his anger, to call him by the wrong name.

“I,” said Koss. “But I—”

“The doll incident,” whispered Anders, from beside him. “Don’t you know about the doll incident?”

“No dolls,” said Cinchy. “Never any dolls. Because of the incident.”

“What was the incident?” asked Koss, but Anders was already interrupting him—”You don’t ask about the incident,” Anders was saying.

“You don’t ask about the incident,” said Cinchy, who seemed to be calming down now. “You just accept it. Ten years of therapy. No dolls. Never any dolls.”

“I didn’t know,” said Koss.

“Dolls are creepy,” said Cinchy. “Horrible things. You’re fired.”

The room was silent. Kossweiller felt stunned. Nobody would meet his eye. He looked at his pad in front of him a moment, then, gathering the pad and pencil, stood up to go.

“Perhaps he really didn’t know,” said H. H.

“I know Koss,” said Anders. “He doesn’t have a malicious bone anywhere in his body. He didn’t mean anything by it, Cinchy.”

“Maybe not,” said Cinchy.

“A boss of the people might give someone a second chance,” said Anders.

Cinchy scrutinized Kossweiller carefully. “All right,” he said. “The boss of the people unfires you. Strike two. You get one more. But I swear to you, Karse, screw this one up, I’ll not only fire you, I’ll make you miserable. Ninety over ninety, I swear to God. And you,” he said, turning and pointing at Anders, “you help him. You make sure he doesn’t waste my time again. I want the two of you in my office in two days with something that nails all three b’s right through the fucking skull.”

It was Anders, knocking on his office door as he came in. “Dolls, Koss?” he was saying. “Whose idea was that?”

“I didn’t know about the doll incident,” said Kossweiller. “I swear to God.”

“That was a close one. You should thank God Cinchy’s a boss of the people.”

“It was Bubber. He recommended it to me.”

“Bubber? The agent? He hates Cinchy. Koss, you should know that.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“He and Cinchy worked together at MacMaster & Bates until Cinchy fired him. Don’t you know anything? I’m amazed you’ve managed to survive in this business as long as you have.”

“What was the doll incident?” asked Kossweiller. He opened his center desk drawer, looked in. He closed it, opened a left-hand drawer, kept opening and closing drawers.

“How do I know, Koss? Ten years of therapy, no dolls, never any dolls, that’s all I know. That’s all anyone knows. It’s some deeply Freudian, fucked-up thing.” Anders sat on the edge of Kossweiller’s desk. “It’d probably make a good book,” he said thoughtfully, “and a small-scale indie movie. Maybe Bubber knows. What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out how long it’ll take me to pack.”

Anders stood up. “Oh no, you don’t,” he said. “You can’t expect the editor of such bestsellers as The Secret Lives of Housewives and Darned but Not Forgotten to let you give up now, can you? You’re an editor, Koss, that’s your so-called métier. Go home and think of something, and we’ll hash it out tomorrow. I have faith in you. Besides, you heard Cinchy: my fate’s wrapped up in your own now. I can’t let you quit.”

“I just can’t do it, Tal. It’s not me.”

“What’s ‘me’ mean? There’s no me to be found in team. Well, actually there is a me in team if you rearrange the letters, but you get my point. Ninety over ninety, Koss. He won’t let you quit. He’ll make your life hell.”

“Ninety over ninety. What does that even mean?”

“If I were you,” said Anders. “I would do every goddamn thing I could not to find out.”

Early the next morning, a few minutes after Kossweiller was in, Anders sent an intern by with a note. Coffee in ten, keep the ideas flowing. Eight minutes later, Anders was knocking on his door, tie carefully knotted, looking impeccable.

“Ready, Koss?” he asked. “Thinking blockbuster?”

They took the elevator down to the ground floor, walked out of the building and down the street one building farther, ducked into Sal’s.

“Drinks, gentlemen?” the waiter asked.

“Water,” said Kossweiller.

“Don’t listen to him,” said Anders. “It’s almost ten, Koss,” he said. “Nothing wrong with a drink this late in the day. Gets the creative juices flowing.”

“It’s only twenty-five of nine,” said Kossweiller.

“Right,” said Anders. “Ten if you round up.”

“Coffee, then,” said Kossweiller.

“Irish coffee for him,” said Anders, pointing. “Whiskey for me.”

“But—”

“But nothing,” said Anders. “Without a few drinks, we won’t get anywhere. We’ve tried it your way and you see where that got us. Now we try it my way.”

Three Irish coffees in and Kossweiller found himself comfortably warm, loosened up enough to allow Anders to switch him over to vodka. A pure drink, as Anders had described it.

“So,” asked Anders. “What you got?”

“I got nothing,” said Kossweiller.

“Not good, Koss, not good.” He looked at Kossweiller’s glass. “The problem with you,” he said, “is that you think your glass is half-empty when it’s really half-full.”

“It looks completely full to me,” said Kossweiller. “I only had a little sip.”

“Not that glass, Koss,” said Anders. “The glass in your head.”

“What glass in my head?”

“Metaphor. Focus, Koss. Give me a ghost of an idea, just one, something to work with.”

Kossweiller leaned forward, stared into his glass. “Well,” he said, “not dolls.”

“Never any dolls.”

“Never any dolls.”

“What about something about history? Something historical.”

“History? There were a half-dozen books on Lincoln this season alone. Queer Lincoln has already been done. Communist Washington has already been done. Battles of World War II have all been done to death. Only the real buffs give a shit about anything outside of the big wars and the founding fathers. You don’t know the first thing about history and neither do I, and we wouldn’t know who to turn to. It sells, some of it, but those guys work on books for years at a time. They’re gluttons for punishment, and they’re months late for deadlines. History’s out.”

“No history, no dolls.”

Anders nodded.

Kossweiller stared into his drink, thought. He looked at his watch. “It’s only quarter after ten,” he said, “and I’m already drunk.”

“Right,” said Anders. “Let’s go with that, but spin it. How about ‘It’s already tea time in Edinburgh and I’m only just getting drunk’?”

“That’s an idea for a book?”

“Just a general attitude adjustment, Koss. Just a new way of seeing the world. Though it could be the first line for a book. Something a little Irvine Welsh-y, if you changed getting drunk to shooting up.”

“But I’m not in Edinburgh.”

Anders took a long sip, raised his glass to the light. “Ah, Edinburgh,” he said, and took another sip.

“But—”

“—give in to it, Koss,” said Anders.

Kossweiller, shaking his head, took a drink.

“Maybe a minority writer?”

“Who, you?” asked Anders.

“Sure,” said Kossweiller. “Why not?”

“Koss, you don’t know the first thing about publishing a multicultural writer.”

“I don’t? But I’ve published minorities,” Kossweiller said, and began to tick off a list.

“Yeah,” said Anders. “And some of your best friends are black, I bet. For starters, you can stop calling them minorities and call them multicultural. Maybe that’s out now, too. Koss, you approach the problem that way and you’ll just end up publishing another literary book and pissing Cinchy off.” He moved his glass around on its coaster.

“Well, what then?”

“H. H. just came in,” said Anders, looking toward the register. “Let’s ask her.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“I’ll ask her, then,” said Anders. “You stay here. Just wave when we look over, and look sexy. H. H. likes you.”

“What do you mean H. H. likes me?”

“She gave you another chance, didn’t she? The world’s like grade school, Koss, nothing but crushes. You may have to sleep with her before this is all over. Are you straight, Koss? I’ve never asked and one can’t always tell.”

“But—”

But Anders was already up. He had taken H. H. softly by the shoulder, was speaking smoothly into her ear. After a moment, he pointed over to the booth, and H. H. looked over. Kossweiller waved half-heartedly. She waved back, smiled.

After a few minutes, she went off to join a friend. Anders slid back into the booth.

“Well?” said Kossweiller.

“You’re having dinner with her,” said Anders. “Vaguely. I didn’t set anything specific up, but you probably shouldn’t wait more than a week.”

“Anders…,” said Koss.

“Mysteries,” said Anders.

“Mysteries?”

“A mystery series. A brand-new name she can pump money and publicity into. H. H. has been wanting a new mystery series to play with for a while, she says. She thinks it’ll be fun. If the books are even passable, she can make it work. She’s pleased, ergo the boss of the people will be pleased. Mysteries.”

“But I don’t read mysteries,” said Koss. “Did you actually say ergo?”

“Doesn’t matter, Koss. We’re doing this high-concept. We’re not going to go looking in the slush pile, we’re not putting out a call for manuscripts. We’re building this baby from the ground up. Like the Monkees. Except mysteries. Let’s order some lunch.”

“But it’s not even eleven.”

“Brunch, then,” said Anders. “Waiter!”

By the time they’d worked through the dizzying combination of blintzes and burgers that Anders insisted on calling brunch, it was mostly figured out. We need a snappy title, Anders had begun with, something that sticks in the head and keeps coming back.

“Foodstuffs have been done,” he said. “Cooking’s been done. ‘The Cat Who’ has been done, days of the week have been done to death. Seven deadly sins.”

“Subway stops.”

“Maybe,” said Anders. “But probably not snappy enough for H. H. You can’t woo a girl with subway stops, Koss.”

“I’m not trying to woo anybody,” said Kossweiller.

“Maybe start with a name. Something foreign but without too many consonants packed together. Nothing Eastern European or Finnish. Those goddamn Finns. Swedish?”

“All right,” said Kossweiller. “Why not?”

“Bjorn?” said Anders. “Like the tennis player? Last name has to end in son. Son says Swede better than anything.”

“Swenson?”

“Too common, too American. Verenson. Bjorn Verenson. I like it.”

“Is Verenson even a legitimate Swedish name?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Anders. “Nobody cares about that.”

“I care about that.”

“You got to stop caring, then. Remember: the three b’s. So, a Swedish detective, phlegmatic but friendly, someone people can relate to and at the same time laugh at. A slight but pleasant accent. Now titles,” said Anders. He looked up at the ceiling. “Swedes.”

“Swedes?”

“Sure,” said Anders. “Titles like Swede Eater.”

“Swede Eater? What the hell does that even mean?”

“Like weed eater, but with Swede in it. It’s clever. But maybe that one’s too clever. We’ll leave that one for late in the series. How about Blue Swede Shoes?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Have you looked at mystery titles lately? Blue Swede Shoes is good for at least fifteen thousand sales. With good marketing, a lot more. Now and Sven.”

Kossweiller groaned.

“First Bjorn Child. Now they’re really solid, Koss. Rebjorn. No, make that Bjorn Again. And how about Bjorn Free? Detective’s named Bjorn too, maybe even pass it off as Bjorn Verenson’s own experiences: ‘Based on a True Story.’ I see a TV movie, movies plural. Not Bjorn Yesterday. Bjorn Under a Wandering Star. Stillbjorn. Maybe a travel one called Bjorneo. They’re coming a mile a minute,” said Anders. “Are you writing these down?”

“You have to stop.”

Anders took out his pen, scribbled on the back of a coaster. “Now we hire some hack out of New Jersey, give him the titles and have him write the fuckers.”

“Some Swedish guy?”

Anders shrugged. “Doesn’t make any difference. Your job is saved, Koss,” he said, “and all it cost you was brunch. I’m a genius. Get the bill.”

It was a process that, once begun, Kossweiller didn’t know how to stop. Suddenly he was the editor of a fake Swedish mystery series. He and Anders met with Cinchy and H. H., who were instantly very excited. There was even talk of doing graphic-novelizations under the moniker “A Bjornographic Book.” Anders came to this meeting with the name of the person who would write them, a sixty-eight-year-old Jewish lady living in Jersey City whom he’d used in the past — for The Secret Life of Housewives, among other things. Cinchy, boss of the people, shook Koss’s hand.

“I didn’t think you could pull it off, Karse,” said Cinchy. “But you did. You’ve turned over a new leaf. You must be very proud.”

Kossweiller, as quickly as he decently could, took his hand back and left the room.

Anders had been right. The first Verenson book (First Bjorn Child) was a hit, and the second (Bjorn Again), published six months later, was even bigger. The most disturbing thing, Kossweiller felt, was that two men could sit down over drinks and in a few moments create a best-selling series. It didn’t matter who wrote it, it didn’t really matter how good it was; all that mattered was concept. Or maybe it did matter that it wasn’t too good. And he could tell from the calls he got from editors at other houses that any of them would have been happy to have Bjorn Verenson on their list, even the editors he had considered literary. It was depressing to think about.

True, it wouldn’t have been possible without H. H. and Cinchy to pump money into the books, but they got back a lot more than they had pumped in.

There was the matter, too, of H. H. Anders kept coming by to remind him he had promised her dinner.

“Actually, it was you that promised her dinner,” said Kossweiller.

“But on your behalf, Koss. It was all for you. You don’t want to go?”

“It just seems awkward,” he said.

“Ah,” said Anders. “It’ll be fine.”

But it was not fine. When he finally went, Kossweiller felt that they had nothing to say to each other. Or rather he had nothing to say to her. She spent more than an hour talking about book packaging, Kossweiller nodding and making brief noncommittal sounds. And then, suddenly, at the end of the date she managed somehow to coax him out of the car and up to her door and then pinned him between the door and her torso. It was all he could do to extricate himself, and it was clear the next day that listening to herself talk about packaging was her idea of a wonderful time, that she wanted to see him again as soon as possible.

I hate my life, he thought.

Before, editing had been his life. He had had his small Chelsea apartment to go home to, alone. A few friends he saw, sometimes sexually, and occasional distractions. It had been enough. Now, editing had become a problem, and, in addition, he had no life.

The sixty-eight-year-old Jerseyite writing the Verenson books liked to call him on the telephone and talk in a deep voice with a fake Swedish accent. She wasn’t very good at it. It drove him crazy. The third Verenson book, Bjorn Free, he could barely stand to read, let alone edit. It was published and was a tremendous success. I have no soul, he kept thinking.

With the fourth Verenson book, he went to Cinchy, asking him if he could do something literary for a change.

“Literary?” asked Cinchy. “Why would you want to do something like that?”

He tried to explain in a way that Cinchy would accept. It was not that he didn’t want to do the Bjorn books, just that now that he had the cake he wanted to put the icing on it.

“What cake?” said Cinchy. “What icing? What are you talking about?”

“But,” said Kossweiller, “that’s what you said, the icing, literature.”

“Karse,” he said. “Why can’t you be happy with what you have? Why are you always trying to ruin yourself?” He took him by the shoulders, led him to the door. “I can’t have my best mystery editor slumming in lit now, can I?”

He was on his way home when it started to rain. At first it wasn’t bad, a light drizzle, but soon he was the only one still walking on the street, everyone else huddling under awnings. Soon he was freezing cold. Perfect, he thought. He left the street, went into the first coffee shop he saw.

He shook off in the entryway, then ordered a large coffee at the counter. He held it with both hands to warm them. Looking around for a place to sit, he spied Ralph Bubber. The man was staring at him but immediately looked away when he saw Kossweiller had noticed.

Kossweiller went over to his table, stood above him.

“Bubber,” he said.

“Kossweiller,” said Bubber. “What a pleasure to see you.”

“I have a bone to pick with you,” said Kossweiller, and sat down. He shrugged his coat off his shoulders. He took a drink of his coffee. Bubber watched him apprehensively, saying nothing. “Dolls?” Kossweiller finally said. “Why me?”

“I guess I do owe you an apology,” said Bubber.

“Why did you do it?” asked Kossweiller.

“You’d never bought anything from me before,” he said, “never treated me with anything but contempt, and suddenly you expect me to do you a favor?” Bubber shrugged. “That, and I hate Darba. Mostly that, actually. Besides, it doesn’t seem to have worked out too badly for you.”

“My life is hell. Why do you hate Darba?”

“Ninety over ninety,” said Bubber. “He threatened me with that after the doll incident.”

“He threatened me with that too,” said Kossweiller. “What does it mean?”

“You don’t want to find out,” said Bubber. “It’s different for everybody. That’s the way Darba thinks, a very specific torture. I don’t know what it would mean for you. For me, I was told that to keep my job I had to eat ninety eggs over the course of ninety minutes and hold them all down. I hate eggs. He knew I hated eggs. Nobody can eat ninety eggs in ninety minutes. Cool Hand Luke could only do fifty. He fired me, but I managed to work it to get him fired as well. And there was the doll incident.” He gave a big, peeling smile. “Look at me now. All that did something to me. That was at MacMaster & Bates. I was his first ninety over ninety. No, second: Daniel Sherman, remember him?”

“Think so.”

“Mine was easy and quick. Darba told Danny he had to accept ninety books over a ninety-day period. Danny took it seriously, read like a madman, got the best work he could get, thinking his job depended on not only doing it but doing it right. He did it, too, came to Darba on day ninety with ninety drawn contracts ready for his signature. Darba tore up every one of those contracts, one by one, in front of him. You know what that can do to a man?”

“What happened to Sherman?”

“Dead now. Won’t go into that.”

“What about the doll incident?”

Bubber looked at him hard, then reached out and took his arm. Kossweiller flinched. “You still haven’t bought anything from me,” he said. “Not one fucking book. You don’t really like me. You’re not my friend. I told you my ninety over ninety, I don’t owe you anything. I don’t talk about my ninety over ninety with anyone. And besides, the doll incident would sound trivial to you. The only person it’s not trivial to is Darba.”

“He’s called Cinchy now,” said Kossweiller.

Bubber nodded. “Boss of the people. I hate him. If I could get away with killing him, I would.”

“Ninety over ninety?”

“Ninety over fucking ninety. Goddamn right.”

An article was published on the Verenson phenomenon; foreign rights were sold, even back to Sweden, where, apparently, English was common enough that it wasn’t a shock that a Swedish writer might actually choose that language to write in. Kossweiller could hardly stand to see Anders in the hall, though he knew Anders was simply as he was, perhaps not unreasonably so, and was not to be blamed. The problem was with him, Kossweiller.

After a few more nervous impasses at H. H.’s door, the end of one of them leading to Kossweiller’s waking in H. H.’s apartment at three in the morning and trying to put on his clothes without awakening her, he stopped returning her calls. She seemed to take this in stride, had perhaps never expected more of him, though she would still sometimes corral him in his office, leaning one hip against his door while she explained a further development in the marketing of prepublication copies.

“You have to market prepublication copies?”

“That’s the most important marketing you can do,” she claimed, and kept on.

By the appearance of the fifth Verenson book, the amnesic Not Bjorn Yesterday, Kossweiller had had enough. The title didn’t even make sense: if Bjorn had lost his memory, he would be Bjorn yesterday, just not Bjorn today. The joke had overwhelmed any sense of meaning the title might have. He wanted out.

He showed up in Cinchy’s office to find the man staring at a box on his desk.

“Karse,” he said, not taking his eyes off the box. “Who do you think this is from?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Kossweiller. “Cinchy, I mean.”

“Cinchy’s right,” he said. “Boss of the people. Read the return address for me, K-man.”

K-man? He swiveled his head, looked at the box. “There’s no return address,” he said.

“That’s what I thought too,” said Cinchy. “A bad sign, no? Koss?”

“Yes?”

“I want you to do me a favor,” he said, turning to face the wall. “I want you to open the box and see what’s inside it. If there’s a doll inside, I don’t want to know. No dolls.”

Kossweiller carefully opened the box, peered in. There was indeed a doll inside, a cloth doll, handmade. It had button eyes, its lips drawn with Magic Marker. Its hair was made of yellow yarn. Its fingers were not fully articulated, simply indicated by sewn strands of black thread. The words “Love from B” were written on a card pinned to its chest.

“Is there a doll?” asked Cinchy.

“Um,” said Kossweiller.

“Don’t tell me,” said Cinchy. “If there’s a doll, I don’t want to know.” He waited for a long moment. “Is there a doll?” he finally asked again.

“No?” said Kossweiller, closing the box.

“Good,” said Cinchy. He turned around, very slowly. “Right answer. No dolls. Never any dolls. Take that empty box away and burn it, Karsewelder.”

“I have something I need to say,” said Kossweiller.

“Not yet,” said Cinchy, looking nervously at the box. “Take the box and hold it outside the door.”

Kossweiller went to the doorway, stood with his hand outside of it.

“Farther,” said Cinchy, “farther,” until Kossweiller had only his face inside Cinchy’s office. “Good,” Cinchy finally said. “What is it?”

“I’m quitting,” said Kossweiller.

“Quitting?” said Cinchy. “You can’t quit.”

“I’m not happy.”

“What’s happy?” said Cinchy. “You’re not allowed to quit. You’re running one of the most popular mystery series going and you want to quit? You’re not trying to take Verenson to another house, are you?”

“I want to do literary books,” said Kossweiller. “En Masse. I want to do En Masse.”

“No literary books,” said Cinchy. “No en fucking masse. We know how you get once you start doing literary books, don’t we? And no quitting. You’re not a quitter, Koss. I won’t let you quit.”

“But—”

Cinchy raised his hand. “I don’t want to hear it, Koss. You’ll work for me or you won’t work. And no literature. It’s bad for you. It rots the teeth and then you don’t eat the rest of your meal.”

Kossweiller stared at him.

“No arguments,” said Cinchy. “I may be the boss of the people but I’m still the boss.”

Not knowing what else to do, Kossweiller brought the box back into the room. Cinchy, he saw, immediately began to sweat.

“What are you doing, Koss?” he said.

“I quit,” said Kossweiller.

“You can’t quit,” said Cinchy. “And don’t threaten me with that empty box.”

Kossweiller began to open the box, giving Cinchy a glimpse of the doll’s hand. Cinchy let out a terrified shout, his features shivering like water, and then crouched behind the desk. It was a horrible thing to watch. Kossweiller quickly tucked the hand away.

“Is it gone?” Cinchy asked.

“It’s gone,” said Kossweiller.

“Is it outside?”

Kossweiller turned around and put the box outside the door. “It’s outside,” he said.

“All right,” said Cinchy. He stood up, smoothing his shirt with his hands. “I’ll let you go. You can find yourself another house and I won’t do anything to interfere. But first you have to do two things for me, Koss. Otherwise I’ll ruin you. You’ll never work in publishing again.”

“What things?”

“First, take that box out and burn it.”

“All right,” said Kossweiller.

“Second,” said Cinchy — and here he seemed to regain his usual bearings—“ninety over ninety. Do that and you’re free to go.”

All right, he had said, ninety over ninety. How bad could it be? He would steel himself and do it, prepared for anything to happen. If he was steeled, how bad could it be?

But it quickly became clear how bad it could be. Kossweiller’s ninety over ninety was to put together an anthology of work by ninety people over the age of ninety, and to continue with the Verenson project and other things in the meantime. Literary quality didn’t matter, Cinchy said. All that mattered is that the contributors were all over ninety and that there were ninety of them. “And I want proof,” said Cinchy. “Driver’s licenses, nursing-home records, birth certificates.”

“This is crazy,” said Kossweiller.

“It’s your price,” said Cinchy. “Your ninety over ninety, if you ever want to work in publishing again.”

So he set out. He started with assisted-living facilities, found very few people over ninety, then went to nursing homes and hospices. When he was allowed in, he occasionally found someone ninety or above who was still, loosely speaking, coherent and who could give him something: a dirty joke, a recipe, a story from an episode of their life. Some of them even had poems. The poems were awful, things that made him wince, but what did it matter, what did he care? It was the price of his freedom.

By the time he finished with the nursing homes close to Manhattan, more than a month had passed. He had only twenty-three entries, not a literary moment among them. He scanned newspapers for notices of birthdays, spent a week in Boston, trying nursing homes there, gained a few more names.

Back in New York, people in the office, realizing he was on his way out, stopped talking to him. Even Anders offered him only a scattered and occasional word. H. H. refused to have anything to do with him face-to-face, sending him designs and marketing information for the next Verenson book by interoffice courier. He responded in kind. Only Cinchy went out of his way to talk to him, needling him about the progress of his ninety over ninety.

He went door-to-door in the older neighborhoods. Out of the smattering of the eligible geezers he finally met, only a small fraction could do him any good. He took sick leave and flew to the retirement communities in Florida, was dismayed to find that while nearly everyone was over sixty, very few were over ninety. Here and there, he gained a few more names. One woman actually died while she was talking to him, suddenly fluttering her eyes and stopping speaking. He wrote the rest of her entry — on a rural Nebraskan childhood — himself, culling heavily from Willa Cather.

Four months in, he was nearing seventy-five entries. He was exhausted, ready to be through with his ninety over ninety and free of Cinchy for good. He was going door-to-door in an old neighborhood in Queens, no longer looking for nonagenarians so much as trying to buy driver’s licenses of deceased relatives who, if they had still been alive, would have been over ninety. It had been a good evening; he managed to get two for around twenty dollars each. He would photocopy them and then write up an entry or two himself on their behalf, if he could bear it.

He knocked on a door and when it opened was surprised to see Bubber. The man was looking as run-down as ever, still fat, still pale. His hair, greased back earlier in the day, was still plastered down in places, beginning to sprout up in others. He was wearing a worn plaid robe over an undershirt and a paint-spattered set of trousers, a pair of filthy terry-cloth slippers.

“Kossweiller,” he said. “I wondered when I’d see you again. Won’t you come in?”

He turned around and shuffled back into the house, leaving the door ajar, as if there were no question but that Kossweiller would accept.

Kossweiller followed him through his living room and to a rickety table in the kitchen. They both sat down. Bubber pushed the cup in front of him across to Kossweiller, filled it with tea, reached another cup off the counter beside for himself.

“You’re still with Darbo?” asked Bubber.

“Not exactly,” said Kossweiller.

“Not exactly?” asked Bubber, his eyes lighting up slightly. “What do you mean by that?”

“Ninety over ninety,” he said, and explained.

“Did it say ‘Love from B’? That’s my doll,” said Bubber, smiling. “I send him one from time to time, just to keep him on his toes. It’s good to know this one actually was put to good use. What’s your ninety over ninety?”

Kossweiller explained. “Four months already,” he said. “Two dozen names, then I’m free.”

Bubber let go of his arm. “You won’t be free,” he said. “I know Darbo. He’ll twist the knife. He’ll figure some way to make it hurt more than you think.”

“It hurts plenty this way,” said Kossweiller, and felt very depressed.

“It’ll hurt more,” said Bubber.

Bubber, he knew, was right: Cinchy, boss of the people, was endowed with an almost unabatable reservoir of sadism. Cinchy would let him go, perhaps would let him quit, but he would never be free.

“What do I do?” Kossweiller asked.

“There’s nothing to do, Koss,” Bubber said. “Just survive it best you can.”

They sat for a moment mulling this over, Kossweiller moving his teacup around slightly so that the liquid swished in the cup. “I should go,” he finally said.

“There’s something you should see first,” said Bubber.

He took both teacups and shambled to the sink. He dumped and rinsed them, turned them upside down on the counter. He opened a cookie jar and removed from it a key on the end of a string. Taking Kossweiller by the arm, he led him down the hall, past a bedroom to a padlocked door.

“My workroom,” said Bubber, as, one-handed, he worked the padlock open.

The room inside was windowless, dark. Bubber drew him in, still keeping hold of his arm. “Ready?” he said, and flicked on the lights.

Before them, on a makeshift shelf running the whole length of the wall, were a series of handmade dolls, just like the one Kossweiler had seen in Cinchy’s office, except in this case, they were stacked in twos, one doll affixed to another doll’s shoulders.

“Ninety over ninety,” said Kossweiller.

“Actually right now just eighty-five over eighty-five, but nearly there. Maybe that’s some consolation. Cinchy won’t know what hit him.”

“It may kill him.”

“We can always hope,” said Bubber.

A month later, by cutting a few corners, Kossweiller had hit his own ninety over ninety. He had several hundred manuscript pages, all of them terrible — even the recipes led to practically inedible food — but it was there. Setting his teeth, he took the typescript to Cinchy.

“Karswelder,” Cinchy said. “Back so soon? Can your servitude be over? All there?” Cinchy said. “All ninety of them, and all of them over age ninety?”

“Yes,” said Kossweiller. “It’s done.”

“Seems as though you’ve done it,” said Cinchy. “Seems you’re free to go.”

Kossweiller headed toward the door, then stopped. “That’s it?” he said. “That’s the end?”

“What else would there be?”

“You’re not going to double-check?”

“Why should I double-check, Karse? I trust you.”

“You’re not going to burn the manuscript or humiliate me in some other way?”

“Karse, Karse,” said Cinchy. “Trust me. The last thing I want to do is get rid of all the hard work you did. Just the opposite, my friend.”

Kossweiller nodded. He left Cinchy’s office and started down the hall to his own office. Halfway there, he stopped, turned back.

“What do you mean ‘just the opposite’?” he asked from Cinchy’s door.

“Hmmm? You again, Koss?” said Cinchy, looking up from his desk. “Just what it sounded like. I’m going to publish the fucker.”

“Really?”

“Of course. And to show my appreciation, I’ll make sure that ‘Edited by Philip Kossweiller’ appears on both cover and spine. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if your name wasn’t in larger print than anything else. Back copy something like ‘Esteemed literary editor Philip Kossweiller’s personal choices for what’s best in literature for the older set,’ along with talk of a ‘personal quest,’ and whatnot. I’ll make sure that it gets reviewed everywhere. And I’ll save it for release until just the right moment.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Kossweiller.

“I would,” said Cinchy. “No dolls, Kossweiller!” he said, shouting now. “Never dolls! You should have remembered that.”

Dazed, Kossweiller retreated. It was true, he thought. Cinchy had twisted the knife, and what was worse was it was a knife Kossweiller himself had given him.

He slowly made his way back to his office. Anders was there outside, fiddling with the change in his pockets.

“I hear you’re leaving us, Koss,” he said. “Sorry to see you go.”

“You know already?”

“Word gets around,” he said. “That and Cinchy called to give me the Verenson series. That doesn’t upset you, does it?”

“No,” said Kossweiller, “you’re welcome to it.”

Anders, perhaps feeling sentimental, perhaps trying only to put on a good front, attempted and bungled a hug, then left. Kossweiller found a box, began to pack up his desk. Cinchy, he knew, would wait until the worst possible moment to release the book, probably timing it to coincide with En Masse, if Kossweiller could ever find somewhere to publish it.

But, he thought, there was something he could do in the meantime.

He opened the bottom drawer and took out the doll. True, he had promised to burn the box, but Cinchy hadn’t said anything about the doll. Technically, he had kept his promise.

He unpinned the note, “Love from B,” and wrote on the doll’s chest with permanent marker, 90/90. Then, hiding the doll in a #6 envelope, he carried it down the hall and knocked on Cinchy’s door.

The door was open but Cinchy had stepped out. Am I the kind of person who does this? he wondered. And then thought, I have become the kind of person who does this. In a way, he told himself, it was a kindness, a first shock before Bubber’s larger, grimmer surprise, a warning to get ready. But he knew that this was not why he was doing it.

He set the doll up on the desk against a paperweight. It sat there limply, staring blindly at the door.

His desk was completely packed and he was already on the way to the elevator when he heard the scream. Despite himself, despite considering himself a literary man, he could not help but take great pleasure in the sound.