Читать книгу Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon: - Zack Parsons - Страница 9

The finger bones of my right hand exploded like Chinese fun poppers stuffed into sausages. My experiment was a resounding success. I had proven that a car door can completely shut with a juicy human hand wedged between the frame and the door.

I heard the horrible crunch of the door closing an instant before I felt the pain. Then I screamed and bit down into the glazed doughnut I was carrying in my mouth. I exhaled a curse into the fried dough so terrible I have subsequently scrubbed it from my memory.

When I stub my toe I shout the f-word. I can only imagine the sort of twisted, high-yield, weapons-grade version of “fuck” that emerged from my mouth at that moment.

Things did not improve in the immediate aftermath of slamming my (motherfucking) hand in the car door. It was unfortunate, but my brain, the human brain, never evolved the ability to cope with that situation. My instinct when confronted with the explosive pain in my hand was to yank that hand in the opposite direction.

It’s understandable. That instinct has served the hands of fifty generations of my forebears well, protecting their fragile digits from fire, explosions, rolling boulders, giant tusked tigers, and dinosaurs. I’m sure that instinct will work just as well to protect my great-great-great-grandchildren’s hands from vengeful robots and laser dinosaurs.

At that particular moment, with my hand shut into the door of my car, with a spit-covered doughnut tumbling in slow motion from my wailing mouth, I yanked my hand away. I yowled and I yanked my wounded hand from the door with all of my might.

That was my brain’s rough draft at least.

The reality was a door that had somehow latched shut, securing my crushed hand in a vise. When I yanked with all my might my hand caught for a moment and then, with a unique ripping sound I will never forget, I freed my hand.

Or at least the inside part of it.

I looked at the bloody mass of my fingers, twisted and crimped and dripping blood, and I very nearly passed out. What I left behind between the door and the frame was a bloody glove bearing the fingerprints of four fingers and part of a thumb.

My doctors would later refer to this as a “degloving” or a “40 percent avulsion.”

“You should have open door first, Dumb-Dumb,” Dr. Lian, my Chinese doctor, would scold me in the coming days and weeks.

But that’s jumping ahead. That’s skipping the moment of horror as I realized I had just compounded a terrible injury.

I staggered back, my eyes flicking from the exposed pink and red insides of my right hand to the tattered cuff of bloodied skin dangling from the rim of my car door. I could barely even move my gory fingers, owing mostly to the severe fractures but also at least in part to the amount of pain I was experiencing.

Those people who tell you getting shot or breaking a leg barely hurts? Lying jerks. They’re just saving the surprise for you.

Gentle reader, you probably bought this book, which means I owe you. I don’t know you, but I like you. You have sound judgment. I sincerely hope a straight-shooter such as yourself never has your hand crushed and degloved. But, if such an accident befalls you, I feel you should be fully informed as to the degree of pain you might be expected to experience.

Allow me to go ahead and clear up any misconceptions on that subject.

It will hurt. A lot. How badly it hurts is difficult to say, but it will be measured in profane increments like “fuck loads” and “shit tons.”

You may scream a great deal as a result of this pain. You might even urinate in your pants. Really. You don’t think about that sort of thing, but when you experience a lot of pain, sometimes you lose control over other body functions. This may extend to defecating in your pants as well, although I was spared that level of indignity.

Don’t worry about peeing. You won’t even notice, what with the pain and most of the blood falling out of your body through the exposed meat of your hand. I didn’t notice as I began to empty my bladder. I was yelling incoherently and rolling around in a puddle of blood and doing a good job of smashing my doughnut.

Taking the groceries home was right out. Forget it. That frozen food could go ahead and thaw itself out in the trunk. Those Klondike bars could go ahead and melt. I had some serious yelling and peeing and bleeding to do.

My cell phone began to ring.

“Say, baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up,” said Bill O’Reilly as his Robo the pimp character.

I was unable to stop yelling and bleeding, but I was able to reduce my crazed thrashing just enough to dig into the pocket of my blood-soaked jeans and grab my phone.

“Say, baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up,” Bill O’Reilly repeated.

I managed to flip the phone open with my left hand and hold it up to my ear. It was covered in blood and smelled like pee.

“Aaaaahhh!” I screamed into the receiver.

“Whoa, baby, turn down the volume,” exclaimed the voice on the other end.

It took a moment through the brain-curdling pain, but I recognized the voice. It was Lonnie Saunders, my editor from Kensington Publishing.

“Ahhhhhhaaaaaaaaa!” I replied.

“Zack, baby, what’s with the screaming?” Lonnie sounded like he was chewing gum.

The best I could manage to reduce the screaming was holding the phone away from my head. People in the grocery store’s parking lot were beginning to gather around me. It seemed like they wanted to help, but they were afraid to touch me.

I can sympathize.

“We looked over your book proposals, baby,” Lonnie explained. “It’s all good stuff, really amazing stuff.”

I had just enough sense in my brain to doubt Lonnie’s sincerity. When Kensington requested a list of potential book concepts, I had given them two real choices larded with a bunch of ridiculous wizard-themed proposals.

There was no way Lonnie thought the wizard books were “good stuff.”

“Wizard erotica. I love it. Potion recipes? Great. You really know your wizards. I love the mercenary wizards book, too, but I think you need to flesh it out a little more. Now this other idea, this darkly humorous apocalyptic horror novel, what can you tell me about that?”

“Aaaaaggghhhhhhmmmmmmphh.” I rolled my face into the puddle of blood as I screamed.

“Right, right, you mentioned an October one date. Do you think you could deliver by September one?”

“Aaarrrgh!” I demurred.

“Whoa, calm down.” Lonnie cautioned. “We’ll split the difference. How does September fifteen sound? Good, good. Now there are some things, baby. I love the idea. Love it. But I think we need to change it up a little.”

“Aaahmphph.” I let my face sink back into the blood as I sobbed my reply.

“You know it, baby. It’ll be twice as good. What I’m thinking is, what if, imagine this, instead of end of the world, you do the Internet. And instead of darkly humorous, you just skip the darkly part. Times are too crappy for that sort of thing. People want to be cheered up. Let’s make it peppy. Oh, and instead of a novel, it’s a guide. Sound good, baby?”

“Do you think he’s dead?” asked a woman standing over me.

“No, look.” Her husband nudged me with the toe of his shoe. “You can see the bubbles in the blood. He’s still breathing.”

“Breathing, what’s that?” Lonnie seemed to half catch the conversation taking place over my head.

I tried to gasp a response, but all I could manage was a weak gurgle.

“Look, I know you’re the best. You can write it all. Write a big hit about the Internet and people or whatever. Sound good?”

The man and the woman helped me sit up. I nearly passed out. The pain had by that point ebbed into a steady throb. I felt cold and nauseous. I was going into shock.

“Aaaaaaaah!” My scream was becoming hoarse.

“Beautiful, baby.” Lonnie decided he had waited long enough for my answer. “If you’ve got any questions let me know. All right? All right? Great, baby. Ciao!”

“Aaaaaah!” I replied, but the line went dead mid-scream.

The scream ebbed and I fell silent. The phone slipped from my fingers. I looked up at the man and the woman trying to help me.

“It’ll be all right,” the man said.

“Aaaaaah!” I answered.

Not my most articulate series of conversations, but I did the best with what was at (skinless) hand.

Convalescence

My ambulance ride to the hospital is a subject for someone else’s book. Perhaps Vince and Janice D’Agostino, the retired couple who found me in the grocery store parking lot and summoned the ambulance. Janice held my good hand while the EMT injected me with some sort of industrial-strength opiate. I don’t remember much of anything after that.

The next few hours passed in a similar chemical haze, although I do retain brief flashes of memory. I was visited by several nurses and doctors. I came to know most of these people quite well over the coming days of surgeries and recoveries, but there were two doctors I considered “my doctors.”

Doctor Gerber was an elderly man with a lipless ribbon of a mouth. It was the sort of slack and inarticulate aperture that might have seemed at home on a snail or slug. It was adapted perfectly for suctioning up a meal of debris off the side of a gourd.

Doctor Gerber would walk into my hospital room, peer over the rim of his glasses at my chart, glance up and at a point about three feet above my head on the wall, and then walk out. The closest I ever came to having a conversation with Doctor Gerber was a bit of fleeting eye contact and a grunt as he replaced the chart at the foot of the bed.

Doctor Lian was the brusque Chinese doctor who I interacted with the most. He was the one who told me Doctor Gerber was the surgeon who would ultimately repair my hand. Doctor Lian was some sort of weird bone specialist whose job it was to inflict intolerable agony on me daily by drilling a series of screws into my fingers.

“You such a baby,” he complained whenever his drill churned through the local anesthetic and I twitched or gasped in pain. “A baby not even wake up if I do this. Just a tickle.”

It took two days of drilling and screwing and steel-plating to assemble the bones in my fingers. When Doctor Lian was done, my hand was covered with scaffolding. Painful scaffolding that wept blood and managed to ache through the morphine.

The Erector Set on my hand wasn’t even addressing the problem of not having any skin. There was a gelatin-like mitten over my hand. A nurse explained it was “keeping me fresh” and preventing serious infections.

I had completely forgotten about my ill-timed phone conversation with Lonnie, but that small mercy was not going to last. The pleasant opiate haze began to dissipate when Doctor Gerber ordered a reduction in my painkillers. The physical pain was bad, but the boredom was worse. When you’re drugged out of your mind you never realize how boring it is to sit in a hospital all day.

My roommate, a literal rodeo clown with a broken pelvis, dominated the room’s only TV and loved to yell answers at bad game shows. Buddy Bronc was his clown name; his real name was something boring like John Cooper or James Cobbler.

Buddy said he was “kicked in the taint by an ornery ‘spinner’” and was “just glad to have a dick.” He always wanted to talk to me about rodeos and having sex, which demonstrated an uncanny ability to identify subjects I never wanted to discuss with a clown.

Just before I arrived, an exceptionally massive nurse had made Buddy intimate with a Foley catheter. He wanted to discuss this inconvenience at length. The pain it caused him was the only thing that could cut through his sex and rodeos talk.

Have you ever read about the candiru fish? It’s a tiny silver fish in the Amazon that can follow a wading fisherman’s urine up his urethra. Once it’s nestled snugly inside the unlucky fisherman’s urinary tract, it latches on with barbs surrounding its mouth and drinks his blood.

The candiru drinks blood from the inside of the fisherman’s dick. The fish is in his dick. Imagine a version of the candiru you can purchase from a medical supply catalog. That’s a Foley catheter.

“Goddamn you piss a lot,” Buddy moaned whenever I stepped out of the bathroom. “Keep me up all fuckin’ hours.”

He was understandably bitter about my urination habits. While I was able to get out of bed and take a leak at night, the severity of Buddy’s injuries forced him to turn over that body function to a vampire fish wedged up his urethra.

Sometimes Buddy even managed to combine his urination obsession with one of his favorite subjects.

“Y’all ever peed on a girl?” Buddy asked me late on the third night of my hospital stay.

I confessed that I had not urinated on a woman and voiced no interest in doing so.

“You should try it. You got to drink a whole lot and then save it up. So you pee more and harder.”

I was willing to take his word for it.

“Sheila left me last week,” Buddy Bronc confided to me during a commercial break. “She took the dogs and all my DVDs.”

“Was it the peeing?” I asked.

“That’s my wife you are talkin’ about there,” Buddy snapped.

I apologized and Buddy seemed to accept.

“It’s okay. I ain’t never peed on her. Sheila left me ’cause I was still married to Rita. So me and Sheila’s marriage didn’t count. And I said, ‘Well, I got the license from Reggie work up at the courthouse.’ But I think she just wanted to pick a fight…”

Buddy was a terrible clown. While he digressed into a monologue about his girl Sheila, his “fat bitch” sister, and his previous wife, my mind focused in on the pulsing pain in my hand. It felt as if someone was taking a drag on a very evil cigarette and the burning ember at the tip was buried inside each of my shattered finger bones. I became hypnotized by the rhythm of the pain and almost drifted off to sleep when something Buddy was saying snapped me back to consciousness.

“…give her a call tomorrow. I think I need to have a conversation with that bitch.”

Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Lonnie Saunders called me! He called me about a book!

The realization washed over me in a wanna-puke tsunami. Lonnie Saunders wanted me to write a book! Lonnie, the unctuous chimera of a used-car salesman, sports agent, and pimp, wanted me to write some sort of godforsaken guide.

Guide to what? What was it? Fuck! Something about wizards?

“Fuck!” I exclaimed aloud.

Buddy looked over at me.

“Which one? Rita? Been at least six weeks. Now Sheila, we used to…”

I hit the nurse’s CALL button beside my bed as Buddy began to describe a sex act he performed on his fake wife that began with lassoing her in a barn. It ended with dire hillbilly deviance I dare not recount here without risking the confiscation of this book from libraries.

The door to the room opened and the night nurse stood silhouetted in the doorway. Neither busty nor Asian, I would generously describe Mandy as “structurally sound.” She was short and stout, with legs as thick as rail ties. She filled a Technicolor nurse’s smock with a confused bust that seemed to expand in several directions at once. No looker, true, but I was glad it was Mandy.

The other nurse, an Ecuadorian girl who was beautiful except for her bad teeth, was a sadist. I once asked for an extra pillow to prop myself up better and she looked me in the eye and pinched my arm. I don’t even know if she spoke English. She never even brought me the pillow.

“How are we doing tonight, Mr. Parsons?” Mandy asked.

“When I came in here”—I pushed myself upright—“what happened to my stuff? The stuff that was in my pockets. My phone. Where did it go?”

“Did your wife take it?” Mandy asked. “I saw a bag of your stuff at some point.”

I shook my head. Michelle took my car keys, but I had no memory of seeing my wallet or cell phone. I had not thought to ask someone about either until Buddy’s rambling reminded me of my phone call from Lonnie.

Mandy helped me out of the bed and together we searched all of the possible nooks and crannies in the room where my phone and wallet could be hiding. Buddy watched our efforts until the morphine pump for his shattered pelvis activated. He grinned and his chin slowly dropped against his chest.

“Found it,” said Mandy with a triumphant smile.

She handed me a plastic Ziploc bag containing some coins, a receipt from the grocery store, my wallet, my phone, and two dead flies. The phone was disgusting. The holes on the earpiece were gummed up with blood and the buttons were covered by a thin crust that was almost black. To my amazement, the battery was not dead.

Mandy brought a damp washcloth over and I wiped down the phone until it was reasonably clean and the white cloth was pink. I should add that doing this was not particularly easy when you only have one hand and the nurse seems disgusted by the sight of blood.

I accomplished the task by sitting on the edge of the bed and resting the ankle of one leg on the knee of the other. I then placed the phone upright in the crook of the bent knee, pinched the knee closed on the phone, and proceeded to grunt a great deal as I swiped the wet cloth across the front of my phone.

I had a few voicemail messages from friends and family wishing me well, but nothing from Lonnie. I switched over to e-mail on the hospital’s anemic wireless and my phone practically melted down from the number of e-mails it was receiving. Lonnie had unleashed a stream-of-consciousness barrage of ideas and notes for me to “help” in writing the book.

The cryptic and sometimes frightening subject lines for the messages included classics like “tron guy a hit,” “what is a 4 cham?”, and “chapter about girl with a dick.” This at least vaguely informed me on the subject matter. I didn’t have the heart to actually read any of the e-mails, but that was fine. My conversation with Lonnie was flooding back.

Based on his e-mail subjects, I deduced that Lonnie wanted the guide book to be about the Internet. This was possibly the stupidest idea I had ever read. What sort of moron reads, let alone buys, a guide to the Internet? That is the sort of book a mom in 1994 gets for her kid interested in computers. It was the sort of book that would have a picture of a robot surfing on a river of numbers for its cover.

No, the Internet is far too fleeting and dynamic to ever be adequately tied down. To borrow something from Buddy, you could never lasso the Internet to a fence and convince a horse to have sex with it.

I sighed and fell back on the bed, so dispirited I could almost ignore the screaming pain that exploded as my skinless hand flopped against the mattress. That scoundrel Lonnie Saunders had once again fast-talked me into writing the worst book ever.

Maybe, just maybe, I could weasel my way out of this one. It had to work.

I was afraid that if I didn’t do something, and quickly, writing a book about the Internet might be the end of my career as an author.

Early Release

In the morning, I made four calls to Lonnie’s office in New York before I got through to his personal assistant, Roxy. I had never met her, but we had spoken many times. Roxy sounded the opposite of my admittedly uninformed stereotype of the average personal assistant.

I envisioned the average personal assistant as a young and well-groomed up-and-comer, constantly speaking into a Bluetooth headset to make reservations at upscale restaurants or cancel high-power meetings. Personal assistants were lean and on the edge, wired to please their boss and serve him or her slavishly.

Roxy was nothing like that. She sounded bored and had the rough voice of a woman on the wrong end of decades of chain-smoking.

No, that’s being too kind. Roxy sounded like she was half a carton of Pall Malls away from a cancer voice box. A chest X-ray of her would look like a picture from the Hubble telescope. There would be spiral arms and nebulas of malignancy swirling in the twin universes of her lungs.

I imagined her with an unruly head of gray hair, eyeglasses secured around her neck by a chain, wearing a frumpy sweater and lugging canvas tote bags full of crumpled legal pads.

“Yes?” she growled.

“Roxy, this is Zack Parsons. I need to speak with Mr. Saunders.”

“Are you the wizard guy?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah, that’s me. Look, I had a little bit of an accident a couple days ago and I need to talk to Lonnie.”

“He’s not in the office right now,” she replied.

I sighed with disappointment, but Roxy wasn’t finished.

“He’s in Chicago,” she said, and I heard a loud crinkling of papers. “The Ritz-Carlton. Room eight seventeen. If you want to go over there I’m sure he’d be—”

“I just need to talk to him on the phone,” I interjected.

Roxy cleared her throat. It was a wet hack. I could hear marbles of phlegm being shaken inside a brittle paper bag. Her voice dripped with melodramatic annoyance when she continued.

“If you want to go over there, to the Ritz-Carlton, room eight seventeen, I’m sure Mr. Saunders would be glad to see you. He told me not to bother him, though. So you just go on over there and knock on the door unannounced. See how that works out for you.”

She hung up the phone before I could reply.

The idea of finally meeting my editor was a bit daunting, but I was in no position to allow my nerves to get the better of me. This critical moment called for courage. Heroic, assertive, type A personality. Getting out of the hospital and to the Ritz-Carlton meant convincing one of my two fairly hostile doctors to let me go.

Doctor Gerber flatly refused when I requested release. By “flatly refused” I mean that he lowered his face a few degrees and pursed his wet noodle lips. It was a deafening rebuke. I tried again with Doctor Lian. Asking his permission made me feel like a kid getting a second opinion from Mommy after Daddy says “no.”

“Dumb-Dumb, you go outside you get infection,” Doctor Lian explained. “You want to get killer bug, hand fall off? Maybe you get dick poison and dick fall off. Pretty stupid then, uh-huh?”

“I can’t skip this, Doc,” I pleaded.

“I’m no ‘doc,’ Dumb-Dumb.” Doctor Lian folded his arms across his chest. “Dock where you park a boat. But I not keep you here. You want to go, get deathly disease, go ahead. Go. Be Dumb-Dumb. Spread your wing and fly. Go on, Dumb-Dumb.”

“Can’t you put something on my hand?” I asked, and waved my skinless, gelatin-encased, steel-haloed hand.

“Oh, sure, I got a good one,” Doctor Lian sneered.

He stormed out of the room and came back with a white plastic shopping bag.

“Here you go,” he said, and grabbed me by the forearm. He covered my skinless meat hand with the bag and then stretched a fat rubber band down over my hand and wrist. He looked at me and let it snap against my forearm, cinching the bag tight in the process.

“There you go! Weatherproof!”

“Thanks,” I mumbled, and grunted as I climbed out of the bed.

“Oh, no, my pleasure. Be my guest. Go on, a whole dumb world await a Dumb-Dumb like you.”

I nodded and shuffled past him.

“Come back when you serious,” he called after me. “I fix your hand for real then.”

The Breakfast Clubbing

Lonnie answered the door. He was much shorter and fatter than I had expected. Pot-bellied and Devitoesque. In fact, Lonnie would have been a perfect doppelganger for the diminutive actor if it weren’t for his fraudulent blond pompadour and the bushy, golden caterpillars above his eyes.

His face was flushed and sweaty. He was clad in boxer shorts and an ill-fitting hotel robe that hung open like playhouse curtains on either side of a rolling strip of torso. It was a very theatrical framing for the view of his grotesquely protruding bellybutton.

A girl wearing a similar hotel robe brushed past him and then me and into the hallway. Her black hair hung in her face, but as she passed me I glimpsed eyes puffy and red from crying and streaked mascara. She smelled like stripper perfume and burning rubber. Lonnie hardly seemed to notice her departure.

“Come in, come in,” Lonnie invited. “You want some star fruit, baby? A Thai massage?”

“No, no thanks,” I replied. “This is an amazing room.”

Lonnie’s suite was high ceilinged and luxurious. The main room was bathed in the golden light of parchment lampshades and appointed with overstuffed antique furniture that might have passed for Thomas Jefferson’s living room set from Monticello. Through the open double doors of the bedroom, I could see that the floor was scattered with cotton balls.

“Yeah,” he looked around admiringly. “Not as good as the room I get at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, though. Has a fireman’s pole. You just can’t get that in Chitown.”

Lonnie did a barefoot spin in the middle of the room, his arms spread as if to drink in his surroundings. Articles of clothing were draped haphazardly across the furniture. He scooped up a bra and a white T-shirt.

“Have a seat,” he suggested.

I moved aside a silvery sequined dress and relocated a purse from a chaise longue to an elegant teak end table sporting a Tiffany lamp. Round yellow pills spilled out of the purse across the polished wood. I looked to Lonnie and he shrugged.

“Ain’t mine, baby,” he said. “I am drug-free. Alcohol and Ketamine only. Just kidding. Just kidding, baby. Loosen up. Maybe you should take a couple of those. Kidding, kidding, baby. But seriously, help yourself.”

Lonnie was even more manic in person, bouncing from foot to foot like a lizard on hot sand. He seemed to remember he was still holding a bra, and he tossed it into the bedroom.

“Housekeeping,” he said incredulously.

I have never hated Lonnie, but I have never trusted him, and his guilty tweaker act was creeping me out.

“Holy shit!” he proclaimed suddenly, bugging his eyes out. “What happened to the mitt there?”

He leaned over to get a better look at my bag-covered hand. I realized that there was a small puddle of blood in the bag, as if it were a cut of meat from the butcher’s.

“I didn’t know it was bleeding,” I said. I lifted it up and looked at the bag, but the rubber band around my arm seemed to be containing the blood.

“What happened, baby?” he asked again.

“That’s part of why I’m here, Lonnie. We need to talk about this book deal.”

“All right.” He bobbed his head affirmatively. “All right, I’m down. That’s cool. Let’s order up some mimosas and—You like lobster tail?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s cool; that’s fine.” He snapped his fingers and paced distractedly.

“Hey, look, I just want to—”

“Here we go!” Lonnie snatched up the pearl-handled receiver of an antique telephone. He stabbed a fat finger into the rotary dialer and winched in the number for the front desk.

“Yeah, this is Saunders in eight seventeen. Yeah. Having a powwow up here and I wanted to order some room service. Four mimosas and lobster tails. You want lobster tails?”

“No, thanks,” I replied.

“Better make it six mimosas and two lobster tails.”

While he listened to the person on the other end he pantomimed shooting himself in the mouth.

“All right,” he said. “The door is unlocked, so just come on in.”

He hung up the phone and danced his way to the chaise longue and plopped down next to me. Not just next to me, practically on top of me.

“So what’s the bug, baby? What’s the deal?” He slapped a fat-fingered hand on my knee. “What can Lonnie Saunders do to make you feel good?”

His invasion of my personal space was calculated. He wasn’t making a creepy proposition, nor was he being overly friendly. Lonnie had some inkling of why I was there, and the sweaty little goblin wanted to bully me in some small way.

Lonnie was not physically intimidating. I had almost two feet on him. His move worked anyway. It threw me off. I have always been horrible at negotiating or demanding anything, and his hand on my knee creeped me out just enough to ruin my whole pitch.

Lonnie’s smile broadened and I realized I must have winced or somehow betrayed my discomfort. Having made his point successfully he gave my leg a squeeze and scooted away from me on the chaise.

I knew I was defeated, but I gave it a try anyway.

“I can’t write this book, Lonnie,” I began. “A funny guide book is pretty clichéd to begin with and about the Internet? This isn’t 1995. People know what the Internet is at this point.”

“Come on, Zack, you’re on the Internet,” he said, as if that meant something. “You know all about that stuff. You’re an expert.”

“You can’t write a book about catchphrases and funny websites,” I countered. “That’s what I know. A bunch of weirdos and their weirdo friends on their weirdo websites. Hell, I’m one of those weirdos.”

“So don’t write about the websites; write about the weirdos.” Lonnie craned his neck as if searching for something. “Hey, do you have any cigarettes?”

“Sorry, I just quit,” I said. “Lonnie, look, even if I wanted to write the book, I just…I can’t.”

I waved my bloody bag around. Lonnie snorted with amusement.

“So you cut your hand? Don’t be a baby, baby. Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea with his ball sack cut open. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s house was lousy with raccoons. He almost died from rabies.”

“I don’t think any of what you just said is actually true,” I countered, “but I’m not using this hand thing as an excuse. I’m right-handed and it’s going to be many weeks before I can use my right hand again. Maybe many months before I can type or use a pencil.”

“Who the fuck writes with a pencil?” Lonnie flicked one of the yellow pills off the end table.

“You know what I mean.”

Lonnie fixed me with a serious gaze and flipped one of the pills right at my face.

“Look, this isn’t a fun-time party-time negotiation here, baby. We’re not talking about your feelings or your poor little hand. Learn to type with your left hand or cut that one off and type with a hook.”

“A hook?”

“Or whatever. Maybe they have a robot hand. Look, you cashed the advance check for this book and you don’t even have a proposal. We’re being nice here. More than fair. You gave us a list of ideas and, frankly, your wizard books sucked. I say that as a publisher looking for wizard books. We are proactively seeking wizard books. They were just appallingly bad. A romance novel called Wizard Marriage”?

“The amorous spell caster is an underutilized trope,” I replied, feeling a bit outclassed.

“Trope? Slow down there, Proust. You’re a joke writer, so write something funny. Write me a funny book about the Internet.”

He clapped his hands several times.

“Go find your weirdos. Write about your weirdos. All right?”

It was that sort of moment that I always wish I had spent the time and money on those nunchaku lessons. And that I had brought my nunchakus.

The room service cart arrived before I could roundhouse-kick Lonnie Saunders through one of the exterior windows.

A skinny bald kid wheeled the room service cart up to the elegant table in the suite’s dining nook. He carefully arranged the champagne flutes in a semicircle around the centerpiece of a silver-topped dish of lobster tails. Bibs and condiments were provided on a separate tray.

Lonnie tipped the kid well and then motioned me over to the table. He lifted the silver lid from the steaming lobster tails. I hate lobsters. I hate any crustacean. It’s the idea of eating what amounts to a giant sea bug that disgusts me. Normal bugs, fine, but I am not going to devour the guts of some oceangoing cockroach just because the government tells me it’s safe.

I watched Lonnie lustily forking the fluffy white flesh from one of the lobsters. He would fork two or three butter-dipped bites into his mouth, chew for a few seconds, and then chase it down his throat with half a flute of mimosa.

“Back in colonial days lobster was so cheap they banned feeding lobsters to inmates in coastal prisons,” I said, just to make small talk. “At the time it was thought to be similar to eating rats.”

Lonnie slammed his fork down on the table and glared at me while he chewed and swallowed his current lump of crustacean meat. At length he warned me, “Don’t fucking do that, baby.”

“What?”

“Don’t bring that David Foster Wallace shit over here and ruin my lobster,” he said, and then pushed it away. “Rats? If only rats tasted like this. You’re a shitty brunch companion, Parsons.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that and it wouldn’t be the last.

“I’m sorry!” I exclaimed, even though I wasn’t.

“It’s all right, you’re just a clueless little baby. Let’s do this then. Let’s do some negotiating. What have you got?”

“Well, I—”

“Because I’ve got a contract that you signed, so keep that in mind when you make your demands. Think about that.”

I did and I had. Lonnie’s suggestion about writing the book about the weirdos rather than the websites was actually pretty solid. Something along those lines had crossed my mind if, as a last resort, I was trapped into writing this infernal guide to the Internet.

“I need a car,” I said.

“No,” Lonnie said.

“Just a rental,” I amended.

“No,” Lonnie replied. “No car. No plane tickets. No gas allowance. If you need to go somewhere for this book you need to get there yourself.”

“Recording equipment,” I said.

Lonnie got up and walked into the bedroom. He returned with a Ritz-Carlton pen and pad.

“There you go.” He slapped it down on the table. “What else?”

“My hand, I—”

“Hook or robot hand,” he said, and drained one of the flutes of mimosa. “Next.”

“I get the feeling there isn’t going to be much give-and-take in this negotiation,” I said.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Lonnie agreed. “Why don’t we call it a day? You let me finish my lobster and you go on and get started with your book. Sound good?”

What a dick.

“I need to get back to the hospital,” I said as I stood up.

Something about the position of my arm and the way I was standing gave Lonnie Saunders a very mistaken impression about my body language. His hand shot out and grabbed mine in a powerful and friendly handshake.

Blood exploded from the ruptured grocery bag and rained down on the mimosas and lobster tails. I let out a whimper and collapsed to my knees in agony.

The flash of white hot pain I experienced in that moment proved to be cathartic. The choice was clarified by the pain. It was crystallized by the gore exploding out of my wounds.

I would write the guide about the weirdos. I would write about the vores, and furries, and creeps who put themselves in fan artwork. I would endeavor to write the comprehensive travelogue and guide to the subcultures that make the Internet simultaneously wonderful and terrible. I would need to carefully observe and interview the people who have made those subcultures fascinating.

It wouldn’t be a good guide to the Internet’s weirdos. It would be an awesome guide to the Internet’s weirdos.

Before my adventure could begin I had to have a little talk with Doctor Lian about my robot hand.