stove was fine, the pipe open and drawing well. As his little fire burned down to embers, he made up the bed in the master bedroom (a joke; the room was hardly big enough to turn around in) with sheets and blankets that smelled only a trifle stale. At ten o’clock he turned in and lay looking up into the dark, listening to the wind sigh around the eaves. He thought of Old Bill committing suicide in the dooryard, but only briefly, and not with fear or horror. What he felt when he considered the old caretaker’s final moments—the round circle of steel pressing into the underside of his chin, the last sights and heartbeats and thoughts—was not much different than he’d felt looking up at the complex and extravagant sprawl of the Milky Way. Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.
11
He was up early the next morning. He ate breakfast, then called Lucy. She was getting the kids off to school—scolding Stacey because she hadn’t finished her homework, telling Bran he’d left his backpack in the living room—so their conversation was necessarily brief. After the goodbyes, Drew pulled on his jacket and walked down to the brook. The trees on the far side had been logged at some point, opening up a million-dollar view of woods undulating into the distance. The sky was a steadily deepening blue. He stood there for almost ten minutes, enjoying the unassuming beauty of the world around him and trying to empty his mind. To make it ready.
Each semester he taught a bloc of Modern American and Modern British Literature, but because he had been published (and in The New Yorker, no less), his main job was teaching creative writing. He began each class and seminar by talking about the creative process. He told his students that just as most people had a certain routine they followed when they got ready for bed, it was important to have a routine as they prepared for each day’s work session. It was like the series of passes a hypnotist makes as he prepares his subject for the trance state.
“The act of writing fiction or poetry has been compared to dreaming,” he told his students, “but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. I think it’s more akin to hypnosis. The more you ritualize the preparation, the easier you’ll find it to enter that state.”
He practiced what he preached. When he returned to the cabin, he put on coffee. In the course of his morning, he would drink two cups, strong and black. While he waited for it to brew, he took his vitamin pills and brushed his teeth. One of the renters had shoved his pop’s old desk under the stairs, and Drew decided to leave it there. An odd place to work, perhaps, but strangely cozy. Almost womblike. In his study at home, his last ritualized act before getting to work would have been to straighten his papers into neat piles, leaving an empty space at the left of his printer for fresh copy, but there was nothing on this desk to straighten.
He powered up his laptop and created a blank document. What followed was also part of the ritual, he supposed: naming the doc (BITTER RIVER #1), formatting the doc, and picking a font for the doc. He had used Book Antiqua while writing Village, but had no intention of using it on Bitter River; that would be bad mojo indeed. Aware that there might be power outages, causing him to resort to the Olympia portable, he picked the American Typewriter font.
Was that everything? No, one more thing. He clicked on Autosave. Even if there was an outage, he’d be unlikely to lose his copy, the laptop had a full battery, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
The coffee was ready. He poured himself a cup and sat down.
Do you really want to do this? Do you really intend to do this?
The answer to both was yes, so he centered the blinking cursor and typed
Chapter 1
He hit return and sat very still for a moment. Hundreds of miles south of here he supposed Lucy was sitting with her own cup of coffee in front of her own open laptop, where she kept the records of her current accounting clients. Soon she would fall into her own hypnotic trance—numbers instead of words—but right now she was thinking of him. He was quite sure of that. Thinking