Chapter 1 by Ken Bingham
Chapter 2 by Kathleen Volk Miller
Chapter 3 by Fred Siegel
Chapter 4 by Paula Marantz Cohen
Chapter 5 by Scott Stein
Chapter 6 by Dan Driscoll
Chapter 7 by Scott Warnock
Chapter 8 by Robert Anthony Watts

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

He tapped his right middle finger on his desk as he finished reading the newspaper story. Then he folded the paper neatly and put it in a recycle bin near his desk. One of the rules: Never save your clips.

His “Edits,” as he had taken to calling them, were heading in a final, inexorable direction now. He took in a breath. It had almost become too fast, even for him.

But he was going to create something.

He had to admit that at first he didn’t have a clear plan. It was vengeance, just vengeance. Yet he had a vague idea that the burnings were palimpsestic, and from there, the details, the structure of the rest, came to him as he wrote it. First, a few easy authors with clear themes, providing clear methods of “Editing.”. He became more obscure — Tarkington, for god’s sake — and then he caught, or was caught up, in the direction of the thing. He had realized that one person was driving this, and from that point he began to steady the path of the tale, so that it could only end in one way. But he didn’t want to Edit the big-nosed teacher/cop. He wanted to hit him harder than that.

And then, he promised himself, that would be the end of it all.

He looked at the corner of his desk, where a copy of the book he had made, in every sense of the word, rested. Tyler Updike’s The Fustian Scoundrel. The moment he conceived The Fustian Scoundrel was the moment he mapped the entire course of the larger story, after years of failed efforts to craft a novel in his own name. His works languished, laughed at sometimes, while in his position as the editor at Jewel Press he would watch lesser works with sexy titles or the potential for showy cover art be jettisoned out to the public. And the people would buy them.

After a few meager promotions — unnoticeable, really, to anyone else — he had realized he was in a position of some authority in the publishing sphere of minor works of fiction. Then he sat down at work on The Fustian Scoundrel, working under the pseudonym of Tyler Updike. In his position, he had forced it through the system as an editor and seen its publication, and he then lauded it falsely in several publications using another pen name. Other critics reviewed it. The highest praise?: “This book is not bad.” Copies of the  minor thing were actually purchased.

Years before, he was a timid, unsure student who wanted to know if he was a writer. He had a teacher, Prof. Schnall. The big-nosed professor didn’t last long. His students couldn’t stand him, and only a few terms after Schnall started he heard he had unleashed a bizarre fulmination at a group of freshmen. For some reason, though, he had immediately, and tragically, related to Schnall. As a non-traditional freshman (read: older than 18, but he was an opsimath) he had understood Schnall’s frustrations in that early period in both of their careers. So one day, toward the end of the term, he had handed over a short story to Prof. Schnall. He forgotten how it had even reached that point, whether he had asked (warned) Schnall or just handed it to him cold. Then he waited — for months.  Finally, he received back a copy of his document in one of those mustard interoffice mail folders with the words “Good effort — but I don’t believe in the characters” written across the top of the front page in blue pen. Underneath it was written: “Don’t you have a stapler?”, and the word “it’s” in his title “Gone Before It’s Time” was savagely circled; the circle actually cut through the paper. Schnall had missed the play on words, and blue, black, red — it didn’t matter the ink color; it stung. He remembered feeling numb as he leafed through the document, looking for something else that had been written. He found nothing.

He never talked to Schnall about it. He gave up on his dreams of being a “creative” writer at that point. As he progressed through his BA in English, he couldn’t escape feeling anger toward the creative writing lumpen in his literature courses, eating hamburgers in class and not having done the readings. The deaf-mute girl — and neither of them knew that she would be returning to the story one day — had signed in one class that literature meant what it meant to the person reading it at that moment. That was its purpose, not to fuel endless criticism. Most of those critics weren’t creating anything, she said.

When Schnall had lost his job at Drexel, the anger had subsided, but once he had learned that Schnall had become a policeman, he was shocked to discover how angry he was. His mind was telling him something important. He had to retaliate.

He hated the name “The Paginator.” He had always hoped they would refer to him as “The Critic” or “The Editor.” But while he couldn’t control his own media, his plan, as ill formulated as it was in the beginning, had gone on and taken shape, without his governing control, like a good story should. He had swept through the trajectory — Pynchon indeed! — of canonical works, moving lower and lower down the scale, sending subtle messages that only an astute reader could discern. He liked envisioning the failed teacher failing also as a cop in the one case in which he ought to be successful, missing all of the textual clues of the Edits. This would prove what a poor, detached reader Schnall really was.

He had found himself enjoying the whole thing and was sad now to see it coming to its close. He looked around the office. This was all there would be now. He would, though, be able to work here in peace once this was through. Maybe he would even write a real novel this time.

The Rowling and Steel Edits were not done with his trademark care and thought. He violated another rule: Don’t become compulsive; the story cannot control you. There were lots of Steels. He was getting too close to the end, so he had done this one sloppy-like, but he got away with shoving the old lady in front of one of those horse-drawn carriages downtown—he jammed the book in her bag and just shoved. It was an iffy, dangerously exposed way to kill someone—unless of course a hoof comes down on the head, which in this case it did (he was haunted that night by the thought that life would imitate “art” and the old woman would merely be paralyzed), and no one got a good look at him, which no one did. He had become anxious, wanting to make sure that Big-Nose stayed with this until the conclusion. Maybe he was being a bit too obvious, but in trying to read too closely, critics do miss things, and Schnall was an inferior critic. In the end, you cannot put too much faith in your audience.

His office was neat, everything stacked and sorted. He opened up a closet—at one time these editorial offices had been dormitory rooms—and moved aside several file boxes that contained old manuscripts and the records of the mostly broken-hearted conversations between editors and writers. In one of them was an old interoffice mail file. In another there was a greenish trash bag knotted at the top; it was full of books: hundreds—plus one—of paperback copies of Tyler Updike’s The Fustian Scoundrel. For convenience, The Fustian Scoundrel was a short book. He knew one day he’d be carrying it, and he wasn’t going through the experience of those Rowling tomes again. Beneath that was his bag—minus one elegantly made prop wand. All that was left in the bag was an unmistakable connection to Tyler Updike’s work.

He one-armed the backpack and slung the trashbag over his shoulder. Someone watching who knew how to pay attention, how to read details would have noticed that this lean, nebbishy looking man was more powerful than he appeared. It was time that this story moved toward its conclusion, he thought. He opened his office door and walked into the quiet hallway. He looked back for one moment into the office. He clicked his finger on the jamb as he looked back, making sure he didn’t forget anything. Tap. Tap. Tap. As he walked away, the door, with its agonizingly slow checker, drifted closed behind him.

This would be a fine birthday, he thought.

– — –

I couldn’t shake a lot of things today. Ginny’s comments through Riggs that the books have meaning for someone else. The name John Updike. The old skill of the literary sleuth to find connections in the strangest places (how long had I pondered poor Phallic’s unfortunate nomenclature?). I called around some local bookstores, but there had been no mass exodus of John Updike books. That made me feel better, even though, based on previous killings, it meant nothing. I had to see for myself, see if I could make some connection. I went to the Barnes & Nobel downtown and browsed fiction: Q, R, S, T, U—Updike. There must have been an uptick of interest in Updike since his recent death, as multiple copies of his books were on the shelves. What had that critic said of him?: “Fiction, Updike knew, isn’t about happiness, but about its pursuit.” I leafed through Segedin’s copy of Rabbit, Run again and then ran a finger over the volumes of Updike’s fiction.

Next to them was a slim book with a bright red cover. One measly copy.

Damn it if that cover didn’t get me. I pulled it off the shelf. The Fustian Scoundrel by some Tyler Updike.

I opened the book and started reading. I read a few paragraphs in the middle of the book, and I reached up, dizzy, to touch the spork through my shirt. The watch clicked against it. I tried to say, “I’ll be damned,” but when I opened my mouth all that came out was a quick puff of air, almost a gasp. With the book still open, my index finger holding the place, I went to the check-out counter and flashed my badge at a young man sitting on a stool. “Police business.” He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. I pressed on: “Can you get on that computer for me? I need to find someone.”

The fellow looked at me kind of sleepily. “Our Internet’s down.”

“Do you have a phonebook?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’ll do.”

Scott Warnock, PhD, teaches writing at Drexel and is the Director of the Freshman Writing Program. He is interested in uses of technology in writing instruction, particularly how learning technologies can help student writers. He is the author of Teaching Writing Online: How and Why, and he has contributed chapters to a number of anthologies and published his work in many academic journals. He’s also good for an op-ed or two a year in one of our area newspapers.

Check back here on Wednesday, May 26th, for the final installment of Turning the Page. Its author is Robert Anthony Watts.

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