Adam
ADAM
“ H ow’s my favorite author doing?”
I run through several possible answers to Paul’s question. I could tell him that the first few interviews with Roland have been bumpy, but that I learned a lot, more from what he didn’t want to talk about than what he did. I could tell him that I thought I could be mercenary about this, but now I’m actually oddly invested in unearthing this man’s story. At least the parts he’s hiding. It’s clear to me Crash Street is a sore spot, which only makes me want to understand why. Or I could tell Paul that my subject is dead and I’m actively trying to suppress an existential crisis long enough to write his book.
Instead, I simply say, “I’m doing good! It’s warmer here than New Jersey,” making the banal sort of chitchat that I only ever engage in with my agent.
Looking out over the cliff, where I’ve come to get better cell reception, I can hear the roaring waves below. I woke up obscenely early, unexpectedly wired after a night of writing, and figured that with the three-hour time difference, Paul would be awake for a quick call. He’s already emailed me twice in the past few days to ask how it’s going, which is about as much as he messaged me last year, total. I started to reply several times, only to end up staring at my phone screen, trying to reconcile the way I saw the world last week with a universe in which ghosts are real.
“Jess keeps asking me whether you’re going to get to meet Zoya, too,” Paul says. “I didn’t realize how deep her obsession went until now.”
“No such luck,” I report. “Just Roland.”
For now, the man himself has been more than enough to keep me busy. Writing by hand is time-consuming, and although I’ve considered asking Roland if I can use the desktop computer in his study, I don’t particularly want to leave a digital trail in case this situation gets even more complicated. I’d hate to be interrogated by the police about why I’ve been typing a dead man’s autobiography in his house.
Even while making small talk with my agent, the unbelievable secret I’m keeping from him weighs on me. I’m still metabolizing it myself. By now, Roland has done all sorts of party tricks that defied explanation. And he told me the whole story, start to finish—from Alta to Malibu, avalanche to astral plane—in more detail than I suspect a man of his intelligence would be capable of fabricating. I gave up believing in any sort of afterlife a while ago, only to be thrust face-to-face with it again.
The Mormon Church had the whole thing down on a flow chart, like God had made a pitch deck for humanity in PowerPoint. I used to show it to potential converts on my mission. The receptive ones—the vulnerable ones, really—admired its certainty. The absolute clarity it offered them. In the “Plan of Salvation,” as it’s called, we all start out in a sort of waiting room known as the “premortal existence,” then come down to earth and live our lives. After death, Heavenly Father sorts us into one of three heavens depending on how good we’ve been: there’s the “celestial kingdom” for faithful Mormons, the “terrestrial kingdom” for the decent people, and the “telestial kingdom” for the real scumbags. During lessons, I liked to trace my index finger along the arrows, start to finish, charting the ideal path to the highest heaven.
What Roland’s experiencing doesn’t cohere with any of that, or with the teachings of any religion I know. He’s dead, but not dead yet. He doesn’t have a brain, but he can talk. He’s made out of energy or electricity or something, but he can’t zap himself to Seattle and back on the power grid; he says he can only move by “floating,” and that it’s very slow. He appears to know nothing about gods or heavens or hells; mostly, he’s just shown me he can make his Japanese bidet spray water on the ceiling.
“So, is he just as ripped in real life as he is in the movies?” Paul asks, reminding me that no one else but me knows that Roland is no longer corporeal.
When I first met my agent, he was on a CrossFit kick, and even though he’s long since given up the habit, he maintains the obsession that most men of the twenty-first century, regardless of their sexuality, have now been cursed with: the pursuit of the perfect body. It’s sad to me that straight guys couldn’t just rest on their laurels and leave the muscle obsession to the gays. Seems like it would be easier to just enjoy having unfettered sociopolitical power without having to do plank jacks and hammer curls.
“Yes,” I lie.
“And his eyes? Are they really that blue?”
“They should have a Gatorade flavor named after them,” I tell him, getting miffed. “Are his abs and eyes really where your mind goes first, Paul? What about, ‘How’s the writing going, Adam?’”
“I mean, I’m sorry, but I already know how the writing’s going,” Paul says, ignoring my attitude. “You’ve always been fast, good, and reliable. Quantity and quality have never been trade-offs once you get going. That’s why I love working with you.”
The infinite Pacific turns a shade bluer as dawn nears. I don’t know how to process the suddenness of Paul’s praise. He could just be feeling generous because of the unexpected payment. But it’s been years since I felt like I could call myself an author without feeling like I was lying to myself, and now I’m actually doing it again, aren’t I? It’s not a lie anymore. I thought I was just going to come here and collect a paycheck but there’s something bigger going on. God or the universe or whatever is allowing Roland and me to communicate across the veil; I’m not going to waste that cosmic opportunity on a bad book. I made mistakes with Sodomite . This is my chance to correct them.
“Why say all that now, Paul?” I ask. “We’ve worked together for a long time. Is it just that I’m making you actual money again? I’m finally writing something that won’t bomb?”
There’s a silence on the other side of the line that gets filled in by the sound of seagulls circling somewhere below.
“That’s nothing I haven’t said before, Adam. I’m just not sure you’ve been in a position to hear it for a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Probably since Sodomite .”
Four books ago? But as much as I want to protest, Paul’s words prick me. It’s hard to acknowledge it so openly, but I know I lost something. After my second book underperformed, I got scared. And it’s hard to write scared. I didn’t want to submit to big publishers anymore; if I only aimed for minor successes, I’d only have minor failures. I stopped writing to the world and started writing just to write, submitting small projects to anthologies and indie presses, my readership nonexistent.
There was a fourth option in the Plan of Salvation—one that we tended to gloss over as missionaries. Below the lowest kingdom in the afterlife, there was “outer darkness,” a place reserved for absolute monsters. The people consigned to that awful fate knew they were committing the most grievous sins imaginable but doubled down on them anyway. Potential Mormons didn’t need to hear about it; that was one of those inside baseball concepts reserved for conversations like the one I had with my bishop at BYU when he found out about my PDA with Sam, the cute boy from Orem whom I was secretly dating.
“Given how strong your testimony was before this … lapse,” he told me, “I would be worried about the consequences of what you’re doing.”
The intimation was that I would go to the deepest hell imaginable, doomed to live in pitch blackness forever with the other damned souls—just me and Ted Bundy, trapped in the Phantom Zone together, all because I liked to suck dick. By then, I was completely unrepentant. In fact, I think I wanted to get caught. I was only trying to hide my relationship with Sam so I didn’t have to deal with my parents or with getting kicked out of BYU. But if my bishop had made that veiled threat a year prior, when Sam and I first started hooking up in a flurry of fucking and guilt, I might have gotten so spooked I’d swear off men forever—that’s how scary the thought of outer darkness was.
These past few years of my career, I’ve felt like I was in a hell of my own, suspended in never-ending nothingness. But was I exiled there, or did I just start standing still while everything around me moved forward? I could have taken bigger risks, especially when Richie and I were splitting costs. I could have told him I needed to take a year to polish my novel instead of losing myself in those odd jobs, and then stood my ground when he inevitably criticized me. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t want to. Maybe I was still writing to the world. Maybe my world just shrunk until I was the only person left in it.
“Adam?” Paul prompts me.
“Yeah?”
“Good, I thought I lost you,” Paul says, blaming the silence on the reception, but it’s clear he can sense my inward turn from thousands of miles away. “Hey, I don’t even know how this came up. I just think this Roland Rogers thing will be good for you, not just for right now, but for what comes next.”
“Like, it’ll help me get my groove back?”
“Sure, something like that.”
What comes next . For the first time in a while, I’m actually beginning to believe in the concept again. But just as the clouds around my future feel like they’re clearing, I’m finding myself more concerned with the mysteries of the present: whether he’s in heaven, hell, or somewhere in between, Roland only has me to turn his story into words. I thought this would be a simple job. Automatic. Now it’s the challenge of a lifetime. What if I don’t have what it takes to pull this off? What if I disappoint myself again?