That crazy guy is me. And if I had seen me, I would have called the cops, too. My dirty-blond hair really is dirty and sweaty from running. The rest of me? I feel like hell and look worse. Torn jeans (not hip, just torn), dirty army-green T-shirt, dirty classic red-and-white Nikes. “Dirty” is the theme. But it doesn’t really matter.
All that matters right now is the box I’m carrying. A cardboard box, held together with pieces of string. What’s in it? A four-hundred-and-ten-page manuscript.
I keep running. I look around. So this is what SoHo’s become…neat and clean and very rich. Give the people what they want. And what they want is SoHo as a tourist attraction—high-tech gyms and upscale restaurants. Not much else. The cool “buy-in-bulk” underwear shops and electronics stores selling 1950s lighting fixtures have all disappeared. Today you can buy a five-hundred-dollar dinner of porcini mushroom foam with frozen nettle crème br?lée, but you can’t buy a pair of Jockey shorts or a Phillips-head screwdriver or a quart of skim milk.
I stop for a moment in front of a restaurant—the sign says PORC ET FLAGEOLETS. The translation is high school easy—“pork and beans.” Adorable. Just then I hear a woman’s voice behind me.
“That’s gotta be him. That’s the guy. Jacob Brandeis.”
I turn around. The woman is “old” SoHo—black tights, tattoos, Native American silver jewelry. Eighty years old at least. Her tats have wrinkles. She must have lived in SoHo since the Dutch settled New York.
“I’m going to call the police,” she says. She’s not afraid of me.
Her equally hip but much younger male friend says, “Let’s not. Who the hell wants to get involved?”
They deliberately cross the street, and I hear the woman speak. “I have to say: he is really handsome.”
That comment doesn’t surprise me. Women like me a lot. Okay, that’s obnoxious and arrogant, but it’s true. The old gal should have seen me a few years ago. I had long dirty-blond hair, and, as a girl in college once told me, I was a “hunky nerd.” I was. Until all this shit happened to me and wore me out and brought me down and…
The old lady and younger man are now across the street. I shout to them.
“You don’t have to call the cops, lady. I’m sure they know I’m here.”
As if to prove this fact to myself, I look up and see a camera-packed drone hovering above me, recording my every step. How could I have forgotten? Drones zoom through the sky—in pairs, in groups, alone. Tiny cameras dot the corners of every building. In this New York, a person is never really alone.
I stumble along for another block, then I stop at a classic SoHo cast-iron building. It’s home to Writers Place, the last major publisher left in New York. Hell, it’s the last major publisher in all of America.
I clutch the box that holds the manuscript. Dirt streaks my face. My back and armpits are soaked. You know you smell like hell when you can smell your own sweat.
I’m about to push my way through the revolving door when I pause.
I feel like I could cry, but instead I extend the middle finger of my right hand and flip it at the drone.
ANNE GUTMAN, editor in chief and publisher of Writers Place, greets me with her usual warmth.
“You look like shit,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say. “Now let’s get the hell out of your office and go someplace where we can’t be watched.”
“Where’d you have in mind, Jacob? Jupiter or Mars?”
“Christ. I can’t stand it,” I say. “They watch me 24-7.”
She nods, but I’m not sure she agrees with me. I’m not even sure she cares. I lean forward and hand her the box.
“What’s this?” she says. “A gift?”
“It’s the manuscript! It’s Twenty-Twenty!” I yell. Why am I yelling?
Anne tosses her head back and laughs.
“I can’t remember the last time I received a hard-copy manuscript,” she says.
Then I look at her intently. I lower my voice.
“Look, Anne. This book is incredible. This is corporate reporting like it’s never been written before.”
“You know my concern, Jacob,” she says.
“Yeah. I know. You don’t think the Store is worth writing about; you don’t truly think it’s morally bankrupt.”
“That’s not it. I think it may very well be morally bankrupt, but I can make a list of forty companies that are just as bad. I don’t think the Store is inherently evil. It’s a creative monopoly.”
“Read my book. Read Twenty-Twenty. Then decide.”
“I will.”
“Tonight?” I ask.
“Yes. Tonight. Immediately.”
“Immediately? Wow. That’s fast.”
Anne smiles at my minuscule joke. I try to remain calm. I’m sure if she reads the book she’s going to be blown away. Then again, maybe she won’t be. Maybe she’ll toss it after a few chapters. What do I know? After all, I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before.
Suddenly there’s noise. A scuffling of feet. Indistinguishable but loud. It comes from outside Anne’s office. Then a very quick knock on the door. Before Anne can say anything, her assistant opens the door and speaks.
“Ms. Gutman, there are three policemen and two NYPD detectives outside here with me.”
“What do they want?” Anne asks.
“They’re here to arrest Mr. Brandeis.”
Anne and I look at each other as her assistant closes the door. I’m about to fall apart. As always, she’s in take-charge mode.
“You go out through the conference room. Then take the back stairs down and outside. Find a place to stay.”
Anne hands me some money from the top drawer of her desk. I turn toward the conference room.
“I’ll handle the cops,” Anne says.
“Read the book, okay?” I say.
“Damn it, Jacob. Of course I’ll read the book.”
She walks out her office door. I also start walking. The last thing I hear her say is: “Good afternoon, officers. How can I help you?”
Eight Months Earlier
“MAN! THIS is soooo sweet!”
That was Alex’s reaction when he first saw our new house at 400 Midshipman Lane, New Burg, Nebraska.
Frankly, we all had pretty much the same reaction.
It wasn’t a mansion, but it was…well, man, soooo sweet. The kind of house that a midlevel tech executive might live in, not some guy who was packing toothpaste tubes and algebra textbooks into cardboard boxes. The house was white brick; it was long (very long) and low, with a three-car garage for our leased Acura.
The inside of the house was equally cool. Everything—from the ten-seat U-shaped charcoal-gray sofa in the living room to the crystal-and-bronze chandelier in the dining room—was LA trendy and top of the line. It was, as Megan pointed out, exactly how we would have decorated if we’d been able to afford it. Then we all took off in different directions to explore.
“Jacob, come in here. You gotta see this,” Megan called from the kitchen.
By the time I joined her, she had already opened a large pantry cabinet.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “They told us in an e-mail they’d stock the place with some basics.”
“Basics? Look. It’s every brand we use. Not just Jif peanut butter and Frosted Flakes and Bumble Bee tuna but also Wilkin and Sons gooseberry conserve and Arrowhead Mills pancake mix.”
A cabinet in the dining room contained Grey Goose vodka and J&B Scotch.