What I Chose

What I Chose

I sat in the car and didn't move. Dusk came down over the river town and took the color out of it.

Night came in fast behind it. It took the rusted tin roofs, the gravel strip with dirt worked into it, and the thin shape of Mia's back as she pulled the peeling wood door shut.

What she had said was still running in my ear, steady and exact: "He said a man with tired eyes would come looking for me. He said I could trust him."

GhostInk had worked all of it out in advance. He had stopped being a thing on a screen some time ago, and I had no idea when.

He had stayed a step in front of me the whole way, clearing the road, leaving marks I couldn't see, waiting for me to walk into it on my own.

I put my forehead down on the steering wheel and held the rim until my hands ached. The air in the car had gone close, cold sweat and the wet-ground smell of the fog outside.

By then I had four nights behind me at two or three hours each, and the tiredness had settled into a twitch under my left eye that started and stopped on its own. The coffee I bought on the way up was still in the cup holder with a skin on it. The passenger seat belt was buckled across an empty seat. I left it.

The part of my brain that builds novels, the part I used to be proud of, started working the problem. It went at the situation the way it went at a plot.

Two ways to go. I sat with both of them and let the engine run.

One of them ended at a front desk behind a sheet of scratched glass.

I could turn around at the bottom of the hill, be in Poughkeepsie by nine, and put the whole thing in front of a man in a uniform.

Then I thought about what I would actually set down on that desk. Rain had started while I sat there, fine enough that the wipers dragged on the glass.

Hidden folders. Manuscripts an anonymous blackmailer had sent me through the mail and through an encrypted email account.

Manuscripts I had been buying for close to two years, with my own name printed on the covers, paid out of the family savings account at $15,000 and then $30,000 a book. The first pages he ever typed for me were three years old.

Told out loud at that desk, it would come out as a delusion or as a confession made very late.

Inside a week I would be a plagiarist in public. A man who had built a career on work somebody else did.

The name, the contracts, the seventh book three weeks out from its release date. Thirty-one years of putting together something to stand on, gone in a night.

Handing the manuscripts to the police meant handing them a signed admission that I had bought them. And my own file was still open, a double homicide with one survivor in it, and the survivor was me, never charged and never cleared. A detective who sat through all of that would not put a car on a street in Blackwood. He would pull the Milton boxes and start reading about me.

I stopped at the gas station on the way out of town and used the pay phone. I gave the county sheriff's dispatcher Mia Calloway's address, said a man had been coming to that house to see the girl who lived there, and didn't give my name. She asked for it twice. Then she told me a welfare check had to come from a relative or a mandated reporter, read me a reference number, and said a deputy would get to it in the order things came in.

I fed the phone two more quarters and called back. I asked her to read the reference number again, and then I asked what a person was supposed to do with it. She said the number let me check the status, that status got checked during business hours, and that the substation covering Blackwood took those calls Tuesday through Friday.

There was a name in the back of my notebook from the old file, the detective who ran the interviews when I was 15. The desk officer at the barracks said he had put in his papers a long time ago and that they didn't give out where anybody went after. Walking back to the car I read the board bolted to the county substation across the road. Hours, a hotline number, and a flag at half staff that nothing in that week's paper accounted for.

I sat back down in the car with the heater running and looked at the other road.

Stay inside GhostInk's rules. Keep cutting the eighth novel to fit the notes he sent me.

As long as the line between us stayed open, as long as the story kept moving through me, I was a man who knew what he was going to do before he did it.

And the seventh would go to the publisher on schedule, which kept the house and the name and the life I was standing in.

I chose to write.

I had an argument for it, and sitting there with the wipers going I believed all the way down to the bottom of it:

Cut him off now and I go blind. He works in the dark, and Mia dies, and I find out from a newspaper.

Keep writing and I keep his eyes. I know the pace of it. I know the next move, and I take the last one.

I put the car in gear. At the crossroad on the edge of town the signal was blinking yellow over nothing, and somebody had set a folding chair on the shoulder facing the road.

Strategy, I called it. The price of getting out in front of him, paid by a man willing to work the other side of it for a while.

My novel came out three weeks later.

There was no campaign this time and no long pieces in the literary magazines. It went fast and level, the way nails go into a lid.

The book was number one its first week on the list. Bookstores hung banners with my face on them, and the publisher ordered a third printing after 10 days. People handed it back and forth in coffee shops, on the subway, on long flights.

The publisher sent 24 author copies in two boxes and I put both in the hall closet in Milton and only opened one. At a store in Poughkeepsie I signed 80 tip-in sheets at a folding table with a coffee going cold at my elbow. The pen quit at 61 and a woman in an apron handed me another one out of her pocket.

I did a live prime-time interview in a studio in midtown Manhattan. Under the lights, in a suit that had been made for me, with a few million people watching, I smiled and started lying.

I was smooth about where the work comes from, about the nights I lost putting the inside of a criminal together. I said something about what a writer owes the victims.

It came out so easily that I surprised myself. I had the script cold. I had talked myself the whole way into believing I was the one running the game.

The producer's copy lay on the table between us with about 30 sticky tabs down the fore edge. I picked it up while they were pulling the lights, and every tab was in the acknowledgments. On the drive north the makeup came off on my collar in a brown line, and outside Fishkill I pulled into a rest area and sat with the engine off for 20 minutes.

Until two o'clock the next morning.

The landline in my study started ringing, one ring on top of the next, into the Milton dark.

The desk lamp had been on since dinner and the room was whatever temperature the lamp made it. On the blotter: the seventh book in hardcover, still in shrink, a cup with an inch of coffee gone to skin in the bottom, and the 22 pages face down where I had left them. It rang 14 times before I moved.

I picked it up. The receiver was cold against my ear. Michael was on the other end.

Twenty years as my agent, and he had never used that voice on me.

Half joke and half accusation, with the flat surprise of a friend who has just found out you kept something from him for years.

"James..." Michael let a breath out into the phone, and a lighter clicked. "I just did something I had no business being curious about."

I put the pen down. "What are you talking about, Michael?"

"After you had me pull those medical records, I got curious about how you do your research." Michael laughed once, dry.

"I went back through the newspaper archives from the 1990s and the 2000s. I took the names of the three victims in your first three novels, the ones you used to tell reporters you had dreamed up and made up whole."

I held my breath. My fingers found the edge of the oak table, next to my father's Underwood.

I ran my thumb along the top of the machine while he talked and the dust came off in a gray line. I pressed the E and the typebar came up and stood against the guide until I put it back with a finger. The ribbon had dried out and gone shiny where the type had been hitting it. A sheet was already rolled into the platen, a third of the way down, blank, and I left it there.

"You know what I found, James?"

Michael's voice came down. There was something like reproach under it:

"All three of them were real. Every one of them was a victim in a murder case that never closed, 10 and 20 years back.

"What got me is that the police had nothing. In the files they didn't know how he did it, what he used, or how the cable was knotted."

"All three got shelved for lack of evidence."

Michael clicked his tongue, and the admiration in it had an edge:

"And in those first three books you had every piece of it. The cut on the wrist, the angle of the blade, the copper wire around the neck."

"You've been lying to me for 20 years, James."

"You never dreamed any of that, and you never made it up whole the way you say on television."

"You got into old case files, worked out how the man really did it, and put words on top of it."

Michael breathed smoke out. What came next had something bitter in it:

"I don't blame you for using real material. Every writer does it. But James, why did you stop?"

"The last five or six, this new run you're on, none of them match a single file in the archive."

"Why drop the formula that made your name? Are you covering something, or did the imagination finally run out?"

Click.

The words went in under everything else and kept going.

I don't remember how I hung up.

The receiver was back in the cradle and the cord had wound around itself the way it does. I worked it straight with both hands, and then I did it again.

The room tilted. Every line of reasoning I had put together came apart at the seams.

No. That isn't possible.

Something in my head was shouting it.

Michael had it wrong. He had all of it wrong.

I had never looked up a murder file from the 1990s. I had never set foot in a police archive in New Jersey or anywhere along the Hudson.

Those first novels came out of the dreams. Out of sweat and blood and a desk in Albany when I was 23. I would have sworn to it on anything.

I used to wake up and copy down what I had just seen while my hand was still unsteady. I thought it was a gift, a piece of luck in the wiring.

But if Michael was right. If those details lined up with unsolved murders down to the millimeter, then how had I dreamed them?

How does a 23-year-old who had never been out of the city dream the exact working method of men who were out there doing it?

Then the second thing arrived, and it was larger.

The last five or six...

Michael said the last five or six, the manuscripts GhostInk sent me, matched nothing in any old file.

Michael thought I had started making things up.

I knew better.

GhostInk never sent me fiction. He sent me a manuscript about a girl named Mia in a river town, and it picked the story up where my dream had broken off the year the dreams went away.

And that afternoon I had stood in front of a Mia made of flesh and bone, living in that house, walking toward the thing he had already written out line by line.

I went into the study and printed all of it, every manuscript GhostInk had sent me and the early books I wrote myself, and laid the stacks out along the floorboards in the order they came to me. The oldest went by the door. The printer took about 40 minutes and ran out of paper twice.

On each stack I set a slip torn off the legal pad with the date it arrived. Beside them went the newspaper printouts I had run off at the library in Poughkeepsie, folded to the paragraph that mattered. On the back of a subway poster for my third novel I drew a line the length of the sheet in pencil and marked it off by year, the first book at the left edge, this one at the right.

The picture came together, and I could state it plainly.

The first books, the ones I dreamed, were murders that had already happened.

The recent ones, the ones GhostInk sent, were murders that were happening now, and still to come.

I worked on the floor in my socks until my knees went numb and I had to walk the hallway to bring them back. By my own count I had slept 11 hours across the last six nights. I kept the count in the margin of the legal pad, one number a day.

That made GhostInk something other than an author. Was he carrying them out in the world on the same schedule as the pages he mailed me?

But the worst question, the one I couldn't get past, was this: Why?

Why did the dreams I had at 23 run at the same frequency as GhostInk's manuscripts now?

How could dreams of mine drop that cleanly into one man's murders? What was between GhostInk and me 23 years ago?

Had he been watching me from the first, or had my dreams started this bloody thing without my knowing it?

I walked into the bathroom without deciding to, went down on my knees, and was sick.

It went on until my stomach was empty and what came up was bitter. The sick, cornered feeling came back hard and stayed.

My hands were shaking on the edge of the sink. I raised my head and looked into the mirror.

The face in the glass was gray, and the red eyes in it wouldn't hold still. I looked at myself and didn't know the man.

Who was I? A man who invented things, a man somebody else was running, or a part of the thing called GhostInk that I couldn't see from the inside?

And for the first time in 31 years I understood the way the people outside the station had looked at me that morning.

They were right. They had never been wrong.

They had one thing wrong, and it was the reason.