Ur (4 page)

“All right,” Don said. “So far as I can say without consulting my trusty computer, he didn’t. I remember him once claiming the Batista partisans clubbed his pet pooch to death, though—how’s that for a factoid? You know, when he was in Cuba. He took it as a sign that he and Mary should beat feet to Florida, and they did—posthaste.”

“You don’t happen to remember that dog’s name, do you?”

“I think I do. I’d want to double-check it on the Internet, but I think it was Cortland. Like the apple?”

“Thanks, Don.” His lips felt numb. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Wes, are you sure you’re…
FRANKIE
,
PUT
THAT
DOWN! DON’T
—” There was a crash. “Shit. I think that was Delft. I gotta go, Wes. See you tomorrow.”

“Right.”

Wesley went back to the kitchen table. He saw that a fresh selection now appeared on the contents page of his Kindle. A novel (or
something
) called
Cortland’s Dogs
had been downloaded from…

Where, exactly? Some other plane of reality called Ur (or possibly UR) 7,191,974?

Wesley no longer had the strength to call this idea ridiculous and push it away. He did, however, have enough to go to the refrigerator and get a beer. Which he needed. He opened it, drank half in five long swallows, belched. He sat down, feeling a little better. He highlighted his new acquisition ($7.50 would be mighty cheap for an undiscovered Hemingway, he reckoned) and a title page came up. The next page was a dedication:
To Sy, and to Mary, with love.
Then this:

Chapter 1

[*A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…

Liquid rose up in Wesley’s throat. He ran for the sink, bent over it, and struggled to keep the beer down. His gorge settled, and instead of turning on the water to rinse puke down the drain, he cupped his hands under the flow and splashed it on his sweaty skin. That was better.

Then he went back to the Kindle and stared down at it.

A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed
.

Somewhere—at some college a lot more ambitious than Moore of Kentucky—there was a computer programmed to read books and identify the writers by their stylistic tics and tocks, which were supposed to be as unique as fingerprints or snowflakes. Wesley had a vague recollection that this computer program had been used to identify the author of a pseudonymous novel called
Primary Colors
; the program had whiffled through thousands of writers in a matter of hours or days and had come up with a newsmagazine columnist named Joe Klein, who later owned up to his literary paternity.

Wesley thought that if he submitted
Cortland’s Dogs
to that computer, it would spit out Ernest Hemingway’s name. In truth, he didn’t think he needed a computer.

He picked up the Kindle with hands that were now shaking badly. “What
are
you?” he asked.

The Kindle did not answer.

In a real dark night of the soul
, Scott Fitzgerald had said,
it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

At three o’clock on that Tuesday morning, Wesley lay feverishly awake, wondering if he might be cracking up himself. He had forced himself to turn off the pink Kindle and put it back in his briefcase an hour ago, but its hold over him remained every bit as strong as it had been at midnight, when he had still been deep in the UR
BOOKS
menu.

He had searched for Ernest Hemingway in two dozen of the Kindle’s almost ten and a half million Urs, and had come up with at least twenty novels he had never heard of. In one of the Urs (it happened to be 6,201,949—which, when broken down, was his mother’s birth date), Hemingway appeared to have been a crime writer. Wesley had downloaded a title called
It’s Blood, My Darling!
, and discovered your basic dime novel…but written in staccato, punchy sentences he would have  recognized anywhere.

Hemingway
sentences.

And even as a crime writer, Hemingway had departed from gang wars and cheating, gore-happy debs long enough to write
A Farewell to Arms
. He
always
wrote
A Farewell to Arms
, it seemed; other titles came and went, but
A Farewell to Arms
was always there and
The Old Man and the Sea
was
usually
there.

He tried Faulkner.

Faulkner was not there at all, in any of the Urs.

He checked the regular menu, and discovered that Faulkner was not available in what he was coming to think of as his reality, either, at least not in Kindle editions. Only a few books about American literature’s Count No’count.

He checked Roberto Bolano, the author of
2666
, and although it wasn’t available from the normal Kindle menu, it was listed in several UR
BOOKS
sub-menus. So were other Bolano novels, including (in Ur 101) a book with the colorful title
Marilyn Blows Fidel
. He almost downloaded that one, then changed his mind. So many authors, so many Urs, so little time.

A part of his mind—distant yet authentically terrified—continued to insist it was all an elaborate joke which had arisen from some degenerate computer programmer’s lunatic imagination. Yet the evidence, which he continued to compile as that long night progressed, suggested otherwise.

James Cain, for instance. In one Ur Wesley checked, he had died exceedingly young, producing only two books:
Nightfall
(a new one) and
Mildred Pierce
(an oldie). Wesley would have bet on
The Postman Always Rings Twice
to have been a Cain constant—his ur-novel, so to speak—but no. Although he checked a dozen Urs for Cain, he found
Postman
only once.
Mildred Pierce
, on the other hand—which he considered very minor Cain, indeed—was always there. Like
A Farewell to Arms
.

He had checked his own name, and discovered what he feared: although the Urs were lousy with Wesley Smiths (one appeared to be a writer of Westerns, another the author of porno novels such as
Hot Tub Honey
), none seemed to be him. Of course it was hard to be a hundred per cent sure, but it appeared that he had stumbled on 10.4 million alternate realities and he was an unpublished loser in all of them.

Wide awake in his bed, listening to one lonely dog bark in the distance, Wesley began to shiver. His own literary aspirations seemed very minor to him at this moment. What seemed major—what loomed over his life and very sanity—were the riches hidden within that slim pink panel of plastic. He thought of all the writers whose passing he had mourned, from Norman Mailer  and Saul Bellow to Donald Westlake and Evan Hunter; one after another, Thanatos stilled the magic voices and they spoke no more.

But now they could.

They could speak to him.

He threw back the bedclothes. The Kindle was calling him. Not in a human voice, but in an organic one. It sounded like a beating heart, Poe’s tell-tale heart, coming from inside his briefcase instead of from under the floorboards, and—

Poe!

Good God, he had never checked Poe!

He had left his briefcase in its accustomed spot beside his favorite chair. He hurried to it, opened it, grabbed the Kindle, and plugged it in (no way he was going to risk running down the battery). He hurried to UR
BOOKS
, typed in Poe’s name, and on his first try found an Ur—2,555,676—where Poe had lived until 1875 instead of dying in 1849, at the age of forty. And this version of Poe had written novels! Six of them! Greed filled Wesley’s heart (his mostly
kind
heart) as his eyes raced over the titles.

One was called
The House of Shame, or Degradation’s Price.
Wesley downloaded it—the charge for this one was only $4.95—and read until dawn. Then he turned off the pink Kindle, put his head in his arms, and slept for two hours at the kitchen table.

He also dreamed. No images; only words. Titles! Endless lines of titles, many of them of undiscovered masterpieces. As many titles as there were stars in the sky.

He got through Tuesday and Wednesday—somehow—but during his Intro to American Lit class on Thursday, lack of sleep and overexcitement caught up with him. Not to mention his increasingly tenuous hold on reality. Halfway through his Mississippi Lecture (which he usually gave with a high degree of cogency) about how Hemingway was downriver from Twain, and almost all of twentieth century American fiction was downriver from Hemingway, he realized he was telling the class that Papa had never written a great story about dogs, but if he had lived, he surely would have.

“Something more nutritious than
Marley and Me
,” he said, and laughed with unnerving good cheer.

He turned from the blackboard and saw twenty-two pairs of eyes looking at him with varying degrees of concern, perplexity, and amusement. He heard a whisper, low, but as clear as the beating of the old man’s heart to the ears of Poe’s mad narrator: “Smithy’s losin’ it.”

Smithy wasn’t, but there could be no doubt that he was in
danger
of losing it.

I refuse
, he thought.
I refuse, I refuse.
And realized, to his horror, that he was actually muttering this under his breath.

The Henderson kid, who sat in the first row, had heard it. “Mr. Smith?” A hesitation. “Sir? Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “No. A touch of the bug, maybe.”
Poe’s gold-bug
, he thought, and barely restrained himself from bursting into wild cackles. “Class dismissed. Go on, get out of here.”

And, as they scrambled for the door, he had presence of mind enough to add: “Raymond Carver next week! Don’t forget!
Where I’m Calling From
!”

And thought:
What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one—or a dozen, or a thousand—where he quit smoking, lived to be seventy, and wrote another half a dozen books?

He sat down at his desk, reached for his briefcase with the pink Kindle inside, then pulled his hand back. He reached again, stopped himself again, and moaned. It was like a drug. Or a sexual obsession. Thinking of that made him think of Ellen Silverman, something he hadn’t done since discovering the Kindle’s hidden menus. For the first time since she’d walked out, Ellen had completely slipped his mind.

Ironic, isn’t it? Now I’m reading off the computer, Ellen, and I can’t stop.

“I refuse to spend the rest of the day looking into that thing,” he said, “and I refuse to go mad. I refuse to look, and I refuse to go mad. To look or go mad. I refuse both. I—”

But the pink Kindle was in his hand! He had taken it out even as he had been denying its power over him! When had he done that? And did he really intend to sit here in this empty classroom, mooning over it?

“Mr. Smith?”

The voice startled him so badly that he dropped the Kindle on his desk. He snatched it up at once and examined it, terrified it might be broken, but it was all right. Thank God.

“I didn’t mean to startle you.” It was the Henderson kid, standing in the doorway and looking concerned. This didn’t surprise Wesley much.
If I saw me right now, I’d probably be concerned, too
.

“Oh, you didn’t startle me,” Wesley said. This obvious lie struck him as funny, and he gave voice to a glassy giggle. He clapped his hand over his mouth to hold it in.

“What’s wrong?” The Henderson kid took a step inside. “I think it’s more than a virus. Man, you look awful. Did you get some bad news, or something?”

Wesley almost told him to mind his business, peddle his papers, put an egg in his shoe and beat it, but then the terrified part of him that had been cowering in the farthest corner of his brain, insisting that the pink Kindle was a prank or the opening gambit of some elaborate con, decided to stop hiding and start acting.

If you really refuse to go mad, you better do something about this
, it said.
So how about it?

“What’s your first name, Mr. Henderson? It’s entirely slipped my mind.”

The kid smiled. A pleasant smile, but the concern was still in his eyes. “Robert, sir. Robbie.”

“Well, Robbie, I’m Wes. And I want to show you something. Either you will see nothing—which means I’m deluded, and very likely suffering a nervous breakdown—or you will see something that completely blows your mind. But not here. Come to my office, would you?”

Henderson tried to ask questions as they crossed the mediocre quad. Wesley shook them off, but he was glad Robbie Henderson had come back, and glad that the terrified part of his mind had taken the initiative and spoken up. He felt better about the Kindle—
safer
—than he had since discovering the hidden menus. In a fantasy story, Robbie Henderson would see nothing and the protagonist would decide he was going insane. Or had already gone. Reality seemed to be different.
His
reality, at least, Wesley Smith’s Ur.

I actually want it to be a delusion. Because if it is, and if with this young man’s help I can recognize it as such, I’m sure I can avoid going mad. And I refuse to go mad.

“You’re muttering sir,” Robbie said. “Wes, I mean.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re scaring me a little.”

“I’m also scaring
me
a little.”

Don Allman was in the office, wearing headphones, correcting papers, and singing about Jeremiah the bullfrog in a voice that went beyond the borders of merely bad and into the unexplored country of the execrable. He shut off his iPod when he saw Wesley.

“I thought you had class.”

“Canceled it. This is Robert Henderson, one of my American Lit students.”

“Robbie,” Henderson said, extending his hand.

“Hello, Robbie. I’m Don Allman. One of the Allman Brothers. I play a mean tuba.”