leaving him attempting to ignore the lingering odor of feline urine, now compounded with the aroma of spilled chardonnay, while he summoned the courage to face his computer. He made himself a cup of peppermint tea. He removed a low-carb no-fat cookie from a container of puritan design and took both to his desk. A flashing little icon at the lower-right-hand corner of his screen informed him that he had received one or more e-mails. Not now, thanks, nope. Dutifully, he evoked his document, clicked to the last page he had written, and did his best to continue. His heroine was about to reach a great turning point in both the book and her life, and to discover the details that would bring breath, air, and light to the scene, Tim had to work with unalloyed concentration.
Over the next hour and a half, he succeeded in writing two paragraphs. The unseen e-mails ticked away at the back of his consciousness, interfering with the process of magical detail discovery.
All right,
he thought,
I give up.
He minimized his document and called up the day’s eight new arrivals. Two were from writer-editors inviting him to contribute to theme anthologies. Three were spam; he deleted these. He also deleted the three e-mails from encoded strangers that had arrived bereft of subject lines and domain names. One new e-mail remained in his in-box. Also absent subject line and domain name, it had nonetheless been sent by Cyrax, the most authoritative of all his phantom correspondents. Tim clicked it open and read Cyrax’s message:
now are u ready 2 listn
2 yr gide?
Experimentally, he moved his cursor to Reply and clicked on it. Instead of the conventional e-mail reply form, a large blank rectangle, pale blue in color, appeared at the center of his screen. It reminded Tim of the instant-message windows he had seen on other people’s computers.
All right,
he said to himself,
let’s give it a whirl.
Within the blue box he typed “yes.”
In less than a second these words appeared beneath his acceptance:
Cyrax: good deshizn, student myn, u stpd buttsecks!
(LOLOL!) ok. let me tell u abt deth, fax u will need 2—
or, to speak YOUR language, little buddy, and your language is a bit closer to what mine used to be, it’s time you learned a few facts about death!
Two Voices from a Cloud
PART TWO
14
Merlin L’Duith:
Minor deity though I may be, I am nonetheless the god of Millhaven, Illinois, the god of Hendersonia, New Jersey, and the god of all points in between. Where my gaze happens to fall, there I make the rules. It is I who decides who ends their days on silken sheets surrounded by a competent medical staff, and who expires in a cell, miserable, starving, and alone. And my name is not Merlin L’Duith; rather,
within
Merlin L’Duith I confine myself.
It is my pleasure now to recount certain latter-day episodes in the life of Willy Patrick, the better to advance the dear girl’s progress toward her great challenge, which is of recognition.
On the day of her appointment at Bergdorf Goodman, Willy spoke to Tom Hartland, her writer friend, and agreed to meet him for a glass of wine at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis. Tom sounded unusually serious when he suggested their get-together and told her that he had been thinking hard about something that concerned her. Willy assumed that it had to do with her agent or her publisher. When, like his boss’s obedient girlfriend, she informed Giles Coverley of this appointment, he suggested that he do the driving for this excursion. One glass of wine could easily lead to two, and there was no sense in courting trouble. In the end, she gave in.
The previous day, the Santolini Brothers had informed her that they really felt they ought to amputate the limb of the big oak tree at the side of the house. Damage suffered years ago could bring it down any day, causing injury to the house—how much they could not say, nor could they guarantee that the limb
Over the next hour and a half, he succeeded in writing two paragraphs. The unseen e-mails ticked away at the back of his consciousness, interfering with the process of magical detail discovery.
All right,
he thought,
I give up.
He minimized his document and called up the day’s eight new arrivals. Two were from writer-editors inviting him to contribute to theme anthologies. Three were spam; he deleted these. He also deleted the three e-mails from encoded strangers that had arrived bereft of subject lines and domain names. One new e-mail remained in his in-box. Also absent subject line and domain name, it had nonetheless been sent by Cyrax, the most authoritative of all his phantom correspondents. Tim clicked it open and read Cyrax’s message:
now are u ready 2 listn
2 yr gide?
Experimentally, he moved his cursor to Reply and clicked on it. Instead of the conventional e-mail reply form, a large blank rectangle, pale blue in color, appeared at the center of his screen. It reminded Tim of the instant-message windows he had seen on other people’s computers.
All right,
he said to himself,
let’s give it a whirl.
Within the blue box he typed “yes.”
In less than a second these words appeared beneath his acceptance:
Cyrax: good deshizn, student myn, u stpd buttsecks!
(LOLOL!) ok. let me tell u abt deth, fax u will need 2—
or, to speak YOUR language, little buddy, and your language is a bit closer to what mine used to be, it’s time you learned a few facts about death!
Two Voices from a Cloud
PART TWO
14
Merlin L’Duith:
Minor deity though I may be, I am nonetheless the god of Millhaven, Illinois, the god of Hendersonia, New Jersey, and the god of all points in between. Where my gaze happens to fall, there I make the rules. It is I who decides who ends their days on silken sheets surrounded by a competent medical staff, and who expires in a cell, miserable, starving, and alone. And my name is not Merlin L’Duith; rather,
within
Merlin L’Duith I confine myself.
It is my pleasure now to recount certain latter-day episodes in the life of Willy Patrick, the better to advance the dear girl’s progress toward her great challenge, which is of recognition.
On the day of her appointment at Bergdorf Goodman, Willy spoke to Tom Hartland, her writer friend, and agreed to meet him for a glass of wine at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis. Tom sounded unusually serious when he suggested their get-together and told her that he had been thinking hard about something that concerned her. Willy assumed that it had to do with her agent or her publisher. When, like his boss’s obedient girlfriend, she informed Giles Coverley of this appointment, he suggested that he do the driving for this excursion. One glass of wine could easily lead to two, and there was no sense in courting trouble. In the end, she gave in.
The previous day, the Santolini Brothers had informed her that they really felt they ought to amputate the limb of the big oak tree at the side of the house. Damage suffered years ago could bring it down any day, causing injury to the house—how much they could not say, nor could they guarantee that the limb
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