Mourning Wood by Daniel Paisner

Author:Daniel Paisner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doppelgang Press

“Tell me about yourself, Axel.”

Pimletz doesn’t know where to begin. It’s just been fifteen minutes, but already Warren Stemble has gotten two drinks into him. Vodka martinis. This is what publishers drink, apparently, and how quickly they drink it. Fifteen minutes, two drinks, and a load of shit. This must be the formula, and Pimletz fumbles through the mix. He’s not used to all this drinking and talking. Either one on its own would be a challenge.

“Nothing to tell, really,” he manages, “more’n you seem to already know.”

“I don’t know shit,” Stemble dismisses. “Just enough to get you down here.”

Oh. He knows he’s being foolish, but Pimletz had been hoping that for some reason this guy had been following his career. (Yeah, right. The only thing following his career is his retirement, and even that’s in doubt.) “Well, Mr. Stemble,” he says, “I don’t know shit myself.” He’s drunk, a little. He’s trying to gather his thoughts in a neat little line so that he might retrieve them as needed.

“Warren.”

“Warren,” Pimletz laughs. “Still don’t know shit, but I can certainly call you Warren.” He laughs again, louder than he needs to. It’s not even funny.

The silence that surfaces between the two men would be awkward, were it not for the two martinis. As it is, it is simply there.

“What are you reading?” Stemble asks, making to fill it.

Pimletz hadn’t realized that he was. “What?” he says. This is hard for him. Reading? He figures these publishing guys are pretty proprietary about the printed word, but there’s no reading matter in Pimletz’s view other than a tented cardboard advertisement for blendered tropical drinks, which he now holds out for his host’s inspection. He attempts a joke: “Don’t spoil the ending.”

Stemble doesn’t get it. Or he does and it’s not worth having. “On your night stand,” he clarifies, “on the plane down, on the crapper. Everyone’s got a book going. Me, I’ve got three or four. I can’t keep track.”

Oh, what am I reading? They expect me to read and write, these people, to have a book going. Hamlin would say that costs extra. Pimletz does a quick review of his recent readings and figures the newspaper doesn’t cut it. “The new Grisham,” he finally manages, hoping this might cover him. All he knows of the new Grisham is that it probably resembles the old Grishams, which he also hasn’t read. He hasn’t even seen the movies, but he gets the idea.

“We published his first book,” Stemble offers, “before anyone knew who he was.”

Pimletz gets that this is a good thing, although he’s not certain why. “I’m a bandwagon kind of guy,” he says, permitting the drinks and the lie to reveal more about him than he would bare on his own. “Ten million people can’t be wrong.”

“Does that include foreign?”

“What?”

“The ten million readers. Is that just domestic?”

Pimletz has no answer. It was just an expression, and now he can’t decide whether to play it out or come clean. What does he

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