“Yes, it was. That was a very great honor. Unfortunately it didn’t translate to people actually going into bookstores and buying it. In fact, I don’t think the book was even in bookstores. I remember my mother telling me they didn’t have it at her local chain store on Long Island. She had to special order it. That’s pretty rough on a Jewish mother whose kid isn’t even a doctor.”

Explosive laughter. The interviewer—her name was Candy and she was some sort of local public figure—doubled over. When she got control of herself, she asked Jake the thoroughly predictable one about how he’d first gotten the idea.

“I don’t think ideas, even great ideas, are all that hard to come by. When people ask me where I get my ideas, my answer is that there are a hundred novels in every day’s issue of The New York Times, and we recycle the paper or use it to line the birdcage. If you are trapped in your own experience you may find it hard to see beyond things that have actually happened to you, and unless you’ve had a life of National Geographic–worthy adventures you’re probably going to think you have nothing to write a novel about. But if you spend even a few minutes with other people’s stories and learn to ask yourself: What if this had happened to me? Or What if this happened to a person completely unlike me? Or In a world that’s different from the world I’m living in? Or What if it happened a little bit differently, under different circumstances? The possibilities are endless. The directions you can go, the characters you can meet along the way, the things you can learn, also endless. I’ve taught in MFA programs, and I can tell you, that’s maybe the most important thing anyone can teach you. Get out of your own head and look around. There are stories growing from trees.”

“Well, okay,” said Candy, “but which tree did you pick this one off of? ’Cause I’m telling you, I read all the time. Seventy-five novels last year, I counted! Well, Goodreads counted.” She smirked at the audience, and the audience obligingly laughed. “And I can’t think of another novel that would have had me making an actual noise on a plane. So how’d you come up with it?”

And here it was: that cold wave of terror descending inside Jake, from the crown of his head, past his grinning mouth and along each limb, down to the end of every finger or toe. Incredibly, he wasn’t yet used to this, although it had been with him, every moment of every day, back through this tour and the tour preceding it, back through the heady months before publication, as his new publisher ramped up the temperature and the book world began to take notice. Back through the writing of the thing itself, which had taken six months of winter and spring in his apartment in Cobleskill, New York, and in his office behind the old front desk at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, hoping none of the guest-writers upstairs would bother him with complaints about the rooms or questions about how to get an agent at William Morris Endeavor, all the way back to that January night when he’d read the obituary of his most memorable student, Evan Parker. He had carried this around with him, every moment of every day, a perpetual threat of permanent harm.

Jake, needless to say, had taken not one single word from those pages he’d read back at Ripley. He hadn’t had them to steal from, for one thing, and if he had he would have thrown them away in order not to look. Even the late Evan Parker, were he capable of reading Crib, would have found it impossible to locate his own language in Jake’s novel, and yet, ever since the moment he’d typed the words “CHAPTER ONE” into his laptop back in Cobleskill he’d been waiting, horribly waiting, for someone who knew the answer to this very question—How’d you come up with it?—to rise to their feet and point their finger in accusation.

Candy wasn’t that person, obviously. Candy didn’t know much about much, and nothing, it was abundantly clear, even to him, about this particular thing. What Candy brought to their conversation was an admirable sense of ease while being stared at by upward of twenty-four hundred human beings, and this was not a quality Jake himself devalued, by any means. Behind her question, though, was clear vapidity. It was just a question. Sometimes a question was just a question.

“Oh, you know,” he finally said, “it’s not actually that interesting a story. It’s actually a little bit embarrassing. I mean, think of the most banal activity you can imagine—I was taking my garbage out to the curb, and this mom from my block happened to drive by with her teenage daughter. The two of them were screaming at each other in their car. Obviously, you know, having a moment, like no other mother and teenage daughter has ever had.”

Here Jake knew to pause for laughter. He had contrived the taking-the-garbage-out story for precisely these occasions, and he’d told it many times by now. People always laughed.

“And the idea of it just popped into my head. I mean, let’s be honest. Can she who has never thought I could kill my mother or This kid is going to drive me to murder please raise her hand?”

The huge audience was still. Candy was still. Then there was another wave of laughter, this one far less exuberant. It was always like that.

“And I just started thinking, you know, how bad could that argument be? How bad could it get? Could it ever get, you know, that bad? And then what would happen if it did?”

After a moment Candy said: “Well, I guess we all know the answer to that, now.”

More laughter then, and then applause. So much applause. He and Candy shook hands and got to their feet, and waved, and exited the stage, and parted, she to the greenroom and he to the signing table in the lobby, where the long and coiling line he had once fantasized about had already begun to form. Six young women were arrayed along the table to his left. One sold the copies of Crib, another wrote the name of any dedicatee on a Post-it and affixed that to the cover, and a third opened the books to the right page. All he had to do was smile and write his name, which he did, over and over, until his jaw ached and his left hand ached and every face began to look like the face before it, or the face after it, or both faces at once.

Hi, thanks for coming!

Oh, that’s so nice!

Really? That’s amazing!

Good luck with your writing!

It was his fifteenth evening event in as many days, except for the previous Monday night, which he’d spent in a hotel in Milwaukee, eating a terrible burger and answering emails before passing out during Rachel Maddow. He had not been home to his apartment—a new apartment, bought with the astonishing advance he’d received for Crib, and still barely furnished—since late August and it was now the end of September. He was living on hotel burgers, late-night whiskey sours, minibar jelly beans, and sheer strain, trying constantly to conjure up new or at least variant answers to the same questions he’d now been asked hundreds of times, and down—despite all those jelly beans—at least five pounds on a frame that couldn’t afford to lose much more. His agent Matilda (who was not the agent who’d bungled Jake’s first novel and resolutely detached herself from his second!) called every few days to casually ask how far into the next novel he was (answer: not far enough), and a chorus of writers he’d known in graduate school and college and during those New York years were following him like Furies, bombarding him with requests—everything from blurbs for their manuscripts to recommendations for artists’ colonies to requests to be put in touch with Matilda. In short, he could look no farther ahead than a day or two. Farther than that he left to Otis, the liaison Macmillan had sent out on the road with him. It was a strange, almost disembodied way to live.

But also: his exact dream. Back when he’d dreamed, so long ago (not even a year ago!) of being a “successful writer,” had he not pictured these very things? Audiences, stacks of books, that magical “1” beside his name on the fabled list at the back of The New York Times Book Review? He had, of course, but also hoped for the small, human connections that must come to a writer whose work was actually read: opening one’s own book, writing one’s own name, holding it out to a single reader intent on reading it. Was it wrong to want these simple, humble rewards? Hand to hand and brain to brain in the marvelous connection that was written language meeting the power of storytelling? He had these things now. And to think: he had acquired them with only his hard work and his pure imagination.

Plus a story that might not have been entirely his to tell.

Which somebody, somewhere out there, might conceivably know.

All of it, at any time, might be ripped away from him—rip, rip, rip—and so quickly that Jake would find himself helpless and annihilated even before he knew what was happening. Then he would be relegated to the circle of shamed writers forever and without hope of appeal: James Frey, Stephen Glass, Clifford Irving, Greg Mortenson, Jerzy Kosinski …

Jacob Finch Bonner?