As he approached the three-room flat he called home - what Don Allman sometimes called his "bachelor pad" - Wesley's thoughts turned to the Henderson kid. Was his name Richard or Robert? Wesley had a block about that, not the same as the block he had about fleshing out any of the fragmentary mission-statements for his novel, but probably related. He had an idea all such blocks were probably fear-centered and basically hysterical in nature, as if the brain detected (or thought it had detected) some nasty interior beast and had locked it in a cell with a steel door. You could hear it thumping and jumping in there like a rabid raccoon that would bite if approached, but you couldn't see it.
The Henderson kid was on the football team - a noseback or point guard or some such thing - and while he was as horrible on the gridiron as any of them, he was a nice kid and a fairly good student. Wesley liked him. But still, he had been ready to tear the boy's head off when he spotted him in class with what Wesley assumed was a PDA or a newfangled cell phone. This was shortly after Ellen had walked out. In those early days of the breakup, Wesley often found himself up at three in the morning, pulling some literary comfort-food down from the shelf: usually his old friends Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, their adventures recounted by Patrick O'Brian. And not even that had kept him from remembering the ringing slam of the door as Ellen left his life, probably for good.
So he was in a foul mood and more than ready for backtalk as he approached Henderson and said, "Put it away. This is a literature class, not an Internet chat-room."
The Henderson kid had looked up and given him a sweet smile. It hadn't lifted Wesley's foul mood in the slightest, but it did dissolve his anger on contact. Mostly because he wasn't an angry man by nature. He supposed he was depressive by nature, maybe even dysthymic. Hadn't he always suspected that Ellen Silverman was too good for him? Hadn't he known, in his heart of hearts, that the doorslam had been waiting for him from the very beginning, when he'd spent the evening talking to her at a boring faculty party? Ellen played like a girl; he played like a loser. He couldn't even stay mad at a student who was goofing with his pocket computer (or Nintendo, or whatever it was) in class.
"It's the assignment, Mr. Smith," the Henderson kid had said (on his forehead was a large purple bruise from his latest outing in the Meerkat blue). "It's 'Paul's Case.' Look."
The kid turned the gadget so Wesley could see it. It was a flat white panel, rectangular, less than half an inch thick. At the top was amazonkindle and the smile-logo Wesley knew well; he was not entirely computer illiterate himself, and had ordered books from Amazon plenty of times (although he usually tried the bookstore in town first, partly out of pity; even the cat who spent most of its life dozing in the window looked malnourished).
The interesting thing on the kid's gadget wasn't the logo on top or the teeny-tiny keyboard (a computer keyboard, surely!) on the bottom. In the middle of the gadget was a screen, and on the screen was not a screen-saver or a video game where young men and women with buffed-out bodies were killing zombies in the ruins of New York, but a page of Willa Cather's story about the poor boy with the destructive illusions.
Wesley had reached for it, then drew back his hand. "May I?"
"Go ahead," the Henderson kid - Richard or Robert - told him. "It's pretty neat. You can download books from thin air, and you can make the type as big as you want. Also, the books are cheaper because there's no paper or binding."
That sent a minor chill through Wesley. He became aware that most of his Intro to American Lit class was watching him. As a thirty-five-year-old, Wesley supposed it was hard for them to decide if he was Old School (like the ancient Dr. Wence, who looked remarkably like a crocodile in a three-piece suit) or NewSchool (like Suzanne Montanari, who liked to play Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" in her Introduction to Modern Drama class). Wesley supposed his reaction to Henderson's Kindle would help them with that.
"Mr. Henderson," he said, "there will always be books. Which means there will always be paper and binding. Books are real objects. Books are friends."
"Yeah, but!" Henderson had replied, his sweet smile now becoming slightly sly.
"But?"
"They're also ideas and emotions. You said so in our first class."
"Well," Wesley had said, "you've got me there. But books aren't solely ideas. Books have a smell, for instance. One that gets better - more nostalgic - as the years go by. Does this gadget of yours have a smell?"
"Nope," Henderson replied. "Not really. But when you turn the pages...here, with this button...they kind of flutter, like in a real book, and I can go to any page I want, and when it sleeps, it shows pictures of famous writers, and it holds a charge, and - "
"It's a computer," Wesley had said. "You're reading off the computer."
The Henderson kid had taken his Kindle back. "You say that like it's a bad thing. It's still 'Paul's Case.'"
"You've never heard of a Kindle, Mr. Smith?" Josie Quinn had asked. Her tone was that of a kindly anthropologist asking a member of New Guinea's Kombai tribe if he had ever heard of electric stoves and elevator shoes.