Ur

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 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.”

Robbie laughed politely and shook Don Allman’s hand. Until that moment, Wesley had planned on asking Don to leave, thinking one witness to his mental collapse would be enough. But maybe this was that rare case where the more really was the merrier.

“Need some privacy?” Don asked.

“No,” Wesley said. “Stay. I want to show you guys something. And if you see nothing and I see something, I’ll be delighted to check into Central State Psychiatric.” He opened his briefcase.

“Whoa!” Robbie exclaimed. “A pink Kindle! Sweet! I’ve never seen one of those before!”

“Now I’m going to show you something else that you’ve never seen before,” Wesley said. “At least, I think I am.”

He plugged in the Kindle and turned it on.

What convinced Don Allman was the Collected Works of William Shakespeare from Ur 17,000. After downloading it at Don’s request—because in this particular Ur, Shakespeare had died in 1620 instead of 1616—the three men discovered two new plays. One was titled Two Ladies of Hampshire, a comedy that seemed to have been written soon after Julius Caesar. The other was a tragedy called A Black Fellow in London, written in 1619. Wesley opened this one and then (with some reluctance) handed Don the Kindle.

Don Allman was ordinarily a ruddy-cheeked guy who smiled a lot, but as he paged through Acts I and II of A Black Fellow in London, he lost both his smile and his color. After twenty minutes, during which Wesley and Robbie sat watching him silently, he pushed the Kindle back to Wesley. He did it with the tips of his fingers, as if he really didn’t want to touch it at all.

“So?” Wesley asked. “What’s the verdict?”

“It could be an imitation,” Don said, “but of course there have always been scholars who claimed that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t written by Shakespeare. There are supporters of Christopher Marlowe…Francis Bacon…even the Earl of Darby…”

“Yeah, and James Frey wrote Macbeth,” Wesley said. “What do you think?”

“I think this could be authentic Willie,” Don said. He sounded on the verge of tears. Or laughter. Maybe both. “I think it’s far too elaborate to be a joke. And if it’s a hoax, I have no idea how it works.” He reached a finger to the Kindle, touched it lightly, then pulled it away. “I’d have to study both plays closely, with reference works at hand, to be more definite, but…it’s got his lilt.”

Robbie Henderson, it turned out, had read almost all of John D. MacDonald’s mystery and suspense novels. In the Ur 2,171,753 listing of MacDonald’s works, he found seventeen novels in what was called “the Dave Higgins series.” All the titles had colors in them.

“That part’s right,” Robbie said, “but the titles are all wrong. And John D’s series character was named Travis McGee, not Dave Higgins.”

Wesley downloaded one called The Blue Lament, hitting his credit card with another $4.50 charge, and pushed the Kindle over to Robbie once the book had been downloaded to the ever-growing library that was Wesley’s Kindle. While Robbie read, at first from the beginning and then skipping around, Don went down to the main office and brought back three coffees. Before settling in behind his desk, he hung the little-used CONFERENCE IN PROGRESS DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.

Robbie looked up, nearly as pale as Don had been after dipping into the never-written Shakespeare play about the African prince who is brought to London in chains.

“This is a lot like a Travis McGee novel called Pale Gray for Guilt,” he said. “Only Travis McGee lives in Fort Lauderdale, and this guy Higgins lives in Sarasota. McGee has a friend named Meyer—a guy—and Higgins has a friend named Sarah…” He bent over the Kindle for a moment. “Sarah Mayer.” He looked at Wesley, his eyes showing too much white around the irises. “Jesus Christ, and there’s ten million of these…these other worlds?”

“Ten million, four hundred thousand and some, according to the UR BOOKS menu,” Wesley said. “I think exploring even one author fully would take more years than you have left in your life, Robbie.”

“I could die today,” Robbie Henderson said in a low voice. “That thing could give me a freaking heart attack.” He abruptly seized his Styrofoam cup of coffee and swallowed most of the contents, although the coffee was still steaming.

Wesley, on the other hand, felt almost like himself again. But with the fear of madness removed, a host of questions were cramming his mind. Only one seemed completely relevant. “So what do I do now?”

“For one thing,” Dan said, “this has to stay a dead secret among the three of us.” He turned to Robbie. “Can you keep a secret? Say no and I’ll have to kill you.”

“I can keep one. But how about the people who sent it to you, Wes? Can they keep a secret? Will they?”

“How do I know that when I don’t know who they are?”

“What credit card did you use when you ordered Little Pink here?”

“MasterCard. It’s the only one I use these days.”

Robbie pointed to the English Department computer terminal Wesley and Don shared. “Go online, why don’t you, and check your account. If those…those ur-books came from Amazon, I’ll be very surprised.”

“Where else could they have come from?” Wesley asked. “It’s their gadget, they sell the books for it. Also, it came in an Amazon box. It had the smile on it.”

“And do they sell their gadget in Glowstick Pink?” Robbie asked.

“Well, no.”

“Dude, check your credit card account.”

Wesley drummed his fingers on Don’s Mighty Mouse mousepad as the office’s outdated PC cogitated. Then he sat up straight and began to read.

“Well?” Don asked. “Share.”

“According to this,” Wesley said, “my latest MasterCard purchase was a blazer from Men’s Warehouse. A week ago. No downloaded books.”

“Not even the ones you ordered the normal way? The Old Man and the Sea and Revolutionary Road?”

“Nope.”

Robbie asked, “What about the Kindle itself?”

Wesley scrolled back. “Nothing…nothing…noth…wait, here it—” He leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the screen. “I’ll be damned.”

“What?” Don and Robbie said it together.

“According to this, my purchase was denied. It says, ‘wrong credit-card number.’” He considered. “That could be. I’m always reversing two of the digits, sometimes even when I have the damn card right beside the keyboard. I’m a little dyslexic.”

“But the order went through, anyway,” Don said thoughtfully. “Somehow…to someone. Somewhere. What Ur does the Kindle say we’re in? Refresh me on that.”

Wesley went back to the relevant screen. “117,586. Only to enter that as a choice, you omit the comma.”

Don said, “That might not be the Ur we’re living in, but I bet it was the Ur this Kindle came from. In that Ur, the MasterCard number you gave is the right one for the Wesley Smith that exists there.”

“What are the odds of something like that happening?” Robbie asked.

“I don’t know,” Don said, “but probably a lot steeper than 10.4 million to one.”

Wesley opened his mouth to say something, and was interrupted by a fusillade of knocks on the door. They all jumped. Don Allman actually uttered a little scream.

“Who is it?” Wesley asked, grabbing the Kindle and holding it protectively to his chest.

“Janitor,” the voice on the other side of the door said. “You folks ever going home? It’s almost seven o’clock, and I need to lock up the building.”