The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

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.

III – Wesley Refuses to Go Mad

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 awake, feeling feverish and 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 6201949 – which, when broken down, was his mother’s birth date), Hemingway appeared to be 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 plenty of Faulkner. But only in this reality, it seemed.

This reality?

The mind boggled.

He checked Roberto Bolanõ, the author of 2666, and although it wasn’t available from the normal Kindle menu, it was listed in several Ur Books submenus. So were other Bolanõ 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 that had arisen from some loony computer programmer’s 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 Pittsburgh Panty Party), none seemed to be him. Of course it was hard to be a hundred percent 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 their 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, but not in a human voice. It sounded like a beating heart, Poe’s telltale heart, coming from inside his briefcase instead of from under the floorboards, and—

Poe!