《ur》(3)

"Right," said Don Allman. "And I'm the new Poet Laureate."

His car was in Parking Lot A, but Wesley elected to walk the two miles back to his apartment, a thing he often did when he wanted to think. He trudged down

Moore Avenue, first past the fraternity houses, then past apartment houses blasting rock and rap from every window, then past the bars and take-out restaurants that serve as a life-support system for every small college in America. There was also a bookstore specializing in used texts and last year's bestsellers offered at fifty per cent off. It looked dusty and dispirited and was often empty. Because people were home reading off the computer, Wesley assumed.

Brown leaves blew around his feet. His briefcase banged against one knee. Inside were his texts, the current book he was reading for pleasure (2666, by the late Roberto Bolano), and a bound notebook with beautiful marbleized boards. This had been a gift from Ellen on the occasion of his birthday.

"For your book ideas," she had said.

In July, that was, when things between them had still been swell and they'd had the campus pretty much to themselves. The blank book had over two hundred pages, but only the first one had been marked by his large, flat scrawl.

At the top of the page (printed) was: THE NOVEL!

Below that was: A young boy discovers that his father and mother are both having affairs And A young boy, blind since birth, is kidnapped by his lunatic grandfather who And A teenager falls in love with his best friend's mother and Below this one was the final idea, written shortly after Ellen had thrown Deliverance across the room and stalked out of his life.

A shy but dedicated small college instructor and his athletic but largely illiterate girlfriend have a falling-out after

It was probably the best idea - write what you know, all the experts agreed on that - but he simply couldn't go there. Talking to Don had been hard enough. And even then, complete honesty had escaped him. Like saying how much he wanted her back, for instance.

As he approached the three-room flat he called home - what Don Allman sometimes called his "bachelor pad" - Wesley's thoughts turned to the Henderson kid. Was his name Richard or Robert? Wesley had a block about that, not the same as the block he had about fleshing out any of the fragmentary mission-statements for his novel, but probably related. He had an idea all such blocks were probably fear-centered and basically hysterical in nature, as if the brain detected (or thought it had detected) some nasty interior beast and had locked it in a cell with a steel door. You could hear it thumping and jumping in there like a rabid raccoon that would bite if approached, but you couldn't see it.

The Henderson kid was on the football team - a noseback or point guard or some such thing - and while he was as horrible on the gridiron as any of them, he was a nice kid and a fairly good student. Wesley liked him. But still, he had been ready to tear the boy's head off when he spotted him in class with what Wesley assumed was a PDA or a newfangled cell phone. This was shortly after Ellen had walked out. In those early days of the breakup, Wesley often found himself up at three in the morning, pulling some literary comfort-food down from the shelf: usually his old friends Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, their adventures recounted by Patrick O'Brian. And not even that had kept him from remembering the ringing slam of the door as Ellen left his life, probably for good.

So he was in a foul mood and more than ready for backtalk as he approached Henderson and said, "Put it away. This is a literature class, not an Internet chat-room."

The Henderson kid had looked up and given him a sweet smile. It hadn't lifted Wesley's foul mood in the slightest, but it did dissolve his anger on contact. Mostly because he wasn't an angry man by nature. He supposed he was depressive by nature, maybe even dysthymic. Hadn't he always suspected that Ellen Silverman was too good for him? Hadn't he known, in his heart of hearts, that the doorslam had been waiting for him from the very beginning, when he'd spent the evening talking to her at a boring faculty party? Ellen played like a girl; he played like a loser. He couldn't even stay mad at a student who was goofing with his pocket computer (or Nintendo, or whatever it was) in class.

"It's the assignment, Mr. Smith," the Henderson kid had said (on his forehead was a large purple bruise from his latest outing in the Meerkat blue). "It's 'Paul's Case.' Look."

The kid turned the gadget so Wesley could see it. It was a flat white panel, rectangular, less than half an inch thick. At the top was amazonkindle and the smile-logo Wesley knew well; he was not entirely computer illiterate himself, and had ordered books from Amazon plenty of times (although he usually tried the bookstore in town first, partly out of pity; even the cat who spent most of its life dozing in the window looked malnourished).

The interesting thing on the kid's gadget wasn't the logo on top or the teeny-tiny keyboard (a computer keyboard, surely!) on the bottom. In the middle of the gadget was a screen, and on the screen was not a screen-saver or a video game where young men and women with buffed-out bodies were killing zombies in the ruins of New York, but a page of Willa Cather's story about the poor boy with the destructive illusions.

Wesley had reached for it, then drew back his hand. "May I?"

"Go ahead," the Henderson kid - Richard or Robert - told him. "It's pretty neat. You can download books from thin air, and you can make the type as big as you want. Also, the books are cheaper because there's no paper or binding."