Chapter 3: A Man Who Used to Be Somebody

The NDA arrived by courier, which struck Adam as either paranoid or thrillingly serious, and he decided, alone in his kitchen with the packet spread across a table that had come with the apartment and would apparently outlive him, that he preferred to believe the latter. He signed for it himself, in the hallway, in a T-shirt he'd slept in, and the courier — a kid, maybe twenty, earbuds in, entirely uninterested in the contents of the manila envelope he was handing over — had looked at him for half a second too long, the specific half-second Adam had learned, over two years, to recognize as the moment someone almost placed his face and then, mercifully, didn't. It happened less often now than it used to. He'd stopped being able to tell whether that was because he'd changed enough to be unrecognizable or because the world had simply, finally, stopped looking. He carried the envelope back inside and set it on the kitchen table without opening it right away, made coffee first, instant, the good brand he allowed himself once a week as a small, deliberate act of not entirely giving up, and sat with the mug cooling at his elbow while he worked up the nerve to actually break the seal. It felt, absurdly, like the kind of envelope that might contain either a job or a verdict, and he had enough experience with verdicts by now to want the coffee finished first. Marcus called before he'd finished the first page. "Tell me you didn't sign it yet," Marcus said, no hello, the way he always opened, as though every conversation with Adam were a continuation of one they'd started in college and never finished — which was, in a sense, true. "I haven't signed it. I'm reading it." "Ghostwriting a romance novel, Adam." "You represent me. You know exactly what I've been ghostwriting for two years. This is not new information." "This is different and you know it. The senator's memoir, fine, nobody expected prose from a senator. The heist thing, sure, commercial, forgettable, nobody's mad. Nobody reviews a ghostwritten heist novel expecting Chekhov. But this is — Priya Nair called me first, you know, before you. She wanted a reference. I told her you were the best literary stylist I represented and she said, quote, that's exactly what this project needs, and I hung up the phone and thought, my god, we've built a man an entire secret career out of being too good to be seen." "That's a very flattering way to describe unemployment." "You're not unemployed. You're disappeared. There's a difference, and the difference is that unemployment ends." Marcus's voice dropped, lost some of its performance. "It's been two years, Adam. You could write under your own name again. People forget. I've watched people worse than you get forgiven." "I didn't do anything that needs forgiving. I wrote a bad book." Adam said it the way he'd said it maybe forty times in the last two years, and it still didn't sound true coming out of his mouth, still sounded like a smaller version of the thing that had actually happened, which was that he had spent three years and every ounce of goodwill his first book had bought him on a novel so aggressively, nakedly personal that when it failed — and it failed loudly, failed in the kind of profile-piece, quote-tweeted, *proof that talent is not the same thing as taste* way that doesn't just end a book but ends a person's appetite for trying again — it had felt like being told, by several hundred strangers with bylines, that the actual contents of his chest were an embarrassment. He set the contract packet down for a moment and rubbed his tired eyes, the way he did whenever a conversation with Marcus pushed too close to territory he generally preferred to keep carefully unexamined. He remembered, with the specific unwanted clarity of a memory that had never faded the way it was supposed to, the exact afternoon the reviews had started arriving — three within an hour of each other, the way pile-ons happened once one respected outlet broke the seal and gave everyone else permission — and the way he had sat on the floor of his old apartment, the good one, the one with furniture he'd chosen, reading each new one with the specific masochism of a man picking at a wound to confirm it still hurt. Marcus had come over that night with a bottle of scotch neither of them particularly liked and sat with him until three in the morning, not talking, mostly, just present, the way good friends were present for things that couldn't actually be fixed, only witnessed. He had moved apartments four months later. He told people it was about rent. It was not about rent. "You wrote an honest book that the wrong critic got to first," Marcus said, which was the version of the story Marcus told, and which Adam had never quite been able to make himself believe, because believing it required believing the failure was bad luck rather than a verdict, and Adam had never once in his life been able to talk himself out of a verdict. "I like this," Adam said, and meant it, and heard himself mean it, which surprised him. "The sample they sent me. It's — Marcus, it's genuinely good. It's better than good. There's a sentence in chapter ninety about a woman folding her dead father's shirts into a box she isn't going to send anywhere, just so the closet will stop looking like a hostage situation, and I read it and I thought, I have not written a sentence that true in two years, and it wasn't even mine." "You sound like you're describing a crush, not a manuscript." "I'm describing craft, Marcus. There's a difference." Adam heard, even as he said it, how thin the distinction sounded out loud, and pressed forward before Marcus could point that out with the specific relish he reserved for catching Adam in exactly this kind of self-deception. "I've read a lot of prose in two years. Good prose, professional prose, prose that does its job and clocks out on time. This isn't that. This is someone writing like it costs them something every single week, on a schedule, in public, under a name that isn't even real, and somehow still finding new rooms in the same house of grief every single chapter. I don't know how to explain it to you without it sounding like I'm losing my mind a little." "You might be losing your mind a little." "That tracks," Adam said. "I've had a strange year." There was a silence on the line that Adam recognized, because it was the sound of Marcus recalibrating an argument mid-flight. "So write your own sentences again. Instead of finishing someone else's." "I can't afford my own sentences right now. Literally. I have four hundred dollars and a futon." Adam said it lightly, because the alternative to lightness was something he didn't have the stamina for on a Thursday. "This pays rent for six months and lets me work with someone who's actually good, which is more than I can say for the senator. I'm doing it." "Fine," Marcus said, in the tone of a man filing an objection for the record rather than expecting to win it. "But you tell me if it starts — I don't know what I'm worried about, exactly. You disappearing further into someone else's name. Forgetting you had one." "I'm not going to forget I had one. I think about it every single day, Marcus. That's kind of the whole problem." "That's not the problem I'm worried about. I'm worried about the opposite — the day it stops feeling like a problem at all." "I signed with initials, Marcus. A.P. and a period. It's not exactly a disguise." "It's exactly a disguise," Marcus said. "That's the whole point of it. That's why you like it." "Everyone likes a good disguise, Marcus. You represent three clients who publish under names that aren't theirs. You've never once called them cowards for it." "They chose their disguises on purpose, as a strategy. You backed into yours because the alternative terrified you. There's a difference, and I think you know it, even if you're not ready to say so out loud tonight." Adam didn't answer that, because it was true, and because the packet in front of him — the confidentiality clause, the non-disclosure of identity in both directions, the clean total erasure of Adam Price from a project he already, four chapters deep into a sample, cared about more than he'd cared about anything he'd written under his own byline in two years — felt less like a disguise and more like relief. Nobody on the other end of this contract would know what he'd been. He got to just be a person who was good at this, for six months, with no history attached. He signed it that night. He read the sample chapters twice more before he did — chapters ninety through one hundred twelve, the whole stretch he was meant to pick up from — and somewhere in the second read-through he stopped reading it as work and started reading it the way he'd been reading "The Glass Orchard" for eight months, which was helplessly, with his whole unguarded chest, the way he read almost nothing else anymore. He made tea he let go cold, the way he suspected — though he had no way of knowing this yet, would not know it for months — a woman six blocks away also routinely let her tea go cold, both of them apparently incapable of finishing a hot beverage whenever the actual business of feeling something got underway. He sat with his laptop on his knees on the futon, papers spread around him he didn't need to consult, the contract signed and scanned and already sent back, and read chapter ninety-one for a fourth time simply because he wanted to, the way you reread a favorite passage in a book you already know the ending of, not for information but for the pleasure of being back inside a sentence that had once undone you. He didn't let himself finish the thought that followed that one. The thought was: this voice feels like a voice I already know. He told himself that was just craft admiration wearing a stranger's coat. He told himself a lot of things, that year, that turned out later to be true in ways he hadn't been ready for. He got up sometime after midnight, restless, and stood at the window that looked out over the shuttered coffee-shop-turned-phone-repair-place-turned-nothing, and thought about the strange shape his life had taken — a man who had once been introduced at parties as *the* Adam Price, who had once had a line around the block at a bookstore in a city three states away, now standing in his underwear at one in the morning feeling more alive about a ghostwriting contract than he had felt about anything with his own name attached in two full years. It should have depressed him. It didn't, not exactly. It felt, instead, like the first crack of light under a door he'd nailed shut himself, and he didn't yet know whether to be grateful for it or afraid of what walking through it might eventually cost him. He thought, briefly, about calling Marcus back to tell him he'd signed, and decided against it, mostly because he didn't want to hear, not tonight, any more warnings dressed up as concern, however well-intentioned they undoubtedly were. He wanted, for one night, to simply be a man who'd said yes to something that scared him in the right direction, without anyone else's caution attached to the decision yet. He went to bed with the contract's confirmation email still glowing faintly on the closed laptop beside him, and dreamed, though he wouldn't remember it clearly by morning, of a greenhouse full of broken glass and a woman's voice he couldn't quite place, saying something he almost understood. --- **INKWELL — "The Glass Orchard," Chapter 68 — Comment Thread (archived, 5 months ago)** **Chapter47:** The scene where she can't throw out her mother's reading glasses because they still smell like the drawer — I don't know how to say this without sounding like I'm diagnosing you through a keyboard, but that paragraph did not read like invention. That read like someone who has stood in front of a drawer. If I'm wrong, ignore this, I'll go back to making fun of your hero's jawline descriptions, which remain unhinged, by the way, "a jaw like a decision he'd already made" is not a thing a face can do. **Chapter47:** (also if I'm right — I'm sorry. and it's a beautiful drawer. for what that's worth from a stranger on the internet.) **reader_jules88:** @Chapter47 ok this comment made ME cry and it's not even about MY dead relative. how **Chapter47:** @reader_jules88 no idea. ask the author. she's the one doing the damage, I'm just standing here bleeding along with the rest of you

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