The Plot, Jean Korelitz [read e books online free txt] 📗

of Wonder on the Staff Picks shelf, complete with a little index card handwritten by someone named Daria: One of the most interesting books I’ve read this year! The writing is lyrical and deep.

Lyrical! And deep!

All of it years ago, now.

Anybody could be a writer. Anybody except, apparently, him.

CHAPTER SEVENTap, Tap

Late that night, in his apartment in Cobleskill, he did something he had never done, not once since he’d watched his fortunate student walk into a grove of trees on the Ripley campus.

At his computer, Jake typed in the name “Parker Evan,” and clicked Return.

Parker Evan wasn’t there. Which meant not much: Parker Evan had been his former student’s intended pen name at one point, but that point had been three years earlier. Maybe he’d decided on another name, either because switching his own actual name around was a dumb idea or because he’d opted for even more privacy from the infinity of other possibilities.

Jake went back to the search field and typed: “Parker, novel, thriller.”

Parker, novel, thriller returned pages of references to Donald Westlake’s “Parker” novels, and also another series of mysteries by Robert B. Parker.

So even if Evan Parker had gotten his book all the way to a publisher, the first thing they’d probably have done was instruct him to drop Parker as a pen name.

Jake removed the name from his search field and tried: “thriller, mother, daughter.”

It was an onslaught. Pages and pages of books, by pages and pages of writers, most of whom he’d never heard of. Jake ran his eye down the entries, reading the brief descriptions, but there was nothing that fit the very specific elements of the story his student had told him back in Richard Peng Hall. He clicked on some random author names, not really expecting to find an image of Evan Parker’s only half-remembered face, but there was nothing even remotely like it: old men, fat men, bald men, and plenty of women. He wasn’t here. His book wasn’t here.

Could Evan Parker have been wrong? Could he, Jake, have also been wrong, all this time? Could that plot possibly have disappeared into the sea of stories, novels, thrillers, and mysteries published each year, and sunk into silence? Jake thought not. It seemed more likely that, despite his boundless faith in himself, Parker had somehow not managed to finish his book at all. Maybe the book wasn’t here on his computer, comfortably ensconced in the first page of each and every one of his search results, because it wasn’t anywhere. It wasn’t in the world at all. But why?

Jake typed the name, the real name, “Evan Parker” into the search field.

More than a few Facebook Evan Parkers appeared in the search results. Jake clicked over to Facebook and ran his eye down the list. He saw more men—bigger, slighter, balder, darker—and even a few women, but no one remotely like his former student. Maybe Evan wasn’t on Facebook. (Jake himself wasn’t on Facebook; he’d quit when it became too demoralizing to see his “friends” posting news about their forthcoming books.) He returned to the search results and clicked the “Images” tab, and scanned the page and then the next page. So many Evan Parkers, none of them his. He clicked back to the “All Results” page. There were Evan Parkers who were high school soccer players, ballet dancers, career diplomats currently stationed in Chad, racehorses, and engaged couples (“The future Evan-Parkers welcome you to our wedding site!”). There was no male human even vaguely his former student’s age who looked anything like the Evan Parker Jake had known at Ripley.

Then he saw, at the bottom of the page: “Searches related to ‘evan parker.’”

And below that the words: “evan parker obituary.”

Even before his cursor found the link he knew what he would see.

Evan Luke Parker of West Rutland, VT (38) had died unexpectedly on the evening of October 4, 2013. Evan Luke Parker had been a 1995 graduate of West Rutland High School and had attended classes at Rutland Community College and was a lifelong resident of central Vermont. Predeceased by both parents and a sister, he was survived by a niece. Memorial services were to be announced at a future time. Burial would be private.

Jake read it through twice. There wasn’t much to it, really, but it refused to punch its way through, even so.

He was dead? He was dead. And … Jake looked now at the date. This had not happened recently, either. This had happened … incredibly, it had happened only a couple of months after their own doomed attempt at a teacher-student relationship. Jake hadn’t even realized that Evan was a Vermonter, or that his parents and sister were already dead, which was very tragic in light of the fact that he was fairly young, himself. Not one of these things had ever come up in conversation between them, of course. They’d had no conversation, really, about anything else but Evan Parker’s remarkable novel in progress. And even that, not much. For the rest of the Ripley session, in fact, his student had been downright reticent in workshop, and he had declined or not turned up for the remaining one-on-one conferences. Jake had even wondered if Parker regretted sharing his extraordinary novel idea with his teacher, or if he’d at least thought better of sharing it with his peers in the workshop, but he himself never let on that he had been told anything about what Parker was working on, or that he thought it was at all out of the ordinary. When the session ended, this pompous, withholding, and profoundly irritating person had simply gone away, presumably to do what he needed to do in order to bring his book to the light. But actually, just to die. Now he was gone and his book, in all likelihood, unwritten.

Later, of course, Jake would go back to this moment. Later, he would recognize it for the crossroads it was, but already he was wrapping this stark, years-after-the-fact