Copy
1003 Words
Copy“Who is this?”
“It’s me.”
“God, Kate, what time is it?”
“I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“The next best-seller . . . you ready for it?” Katherine Garnet sat at her desk, swerving back and forth in her chair and chewing on her pen cap.
“Sure.”
“John Ruskin,” she said.
“Who?”
“He was this famous architecture critic . . . writer . . . poet person.”
“Yeah, okay, go on.”
“I’ll use Ruskin,” Garnet continued.
“For what?”
“For the book.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s a murder mystery, of course,” she told him.
“So . . . is Ruskin the killer or the victim?”
“I’m not sure yet. That’s why I called you.”
“Well, tell me about him. What did he do?” he implored.
“He was a critic. He didn’t like some of the other Victorian thinkers. He hated Viollet-le-Duc. The architect.”
“Okay, would he have killed him?”
“No . . . he just didn’t like the work that was being done by le-Duc,” she tried to explain.
“What work?”
“Cathedrals. He worked on restoring cathedrals. Like Notre Dame.”
“Notre Dame is good. It’s historical enough without teaching people anything. You have Ruskin involved in a murder in Notre Dame and you’ve got your book. What did Ruskin not like about Notre Dame?” he wondered.
“It was restored to what le-Duc thought it had looked like at the very beginning of its completion. But the thing is, cathedral construction takes hundreds of years. And le-Duc was making up a lot of the early medieval architecture. It was inauthentic. Ruskin thought that by restoring a building, you destroyed the authentic meaning of its architecture. That design is meant to be temporal, and we should be allowing buildings to be reworked and repurposed but never restored, because restoration is inauthentic by its very definition. Change is a constant, and there is no return to anything before this moment. Isn’t that beautiful?”
“Too deep, too boring. Was Ruskin involved in any love affairs?”
“He never slept with his wife. He wrote love letters to a young girl . . .”
“He was a pedophile?”
“We don’t really know,” she sighed.
“Do you want him to be a pedophile?”
“You mean for the story or, like, for kicks?”
“For the story. Jesus, Kate.”
“Probably not.”
“Could be motivation.”
“For what?”
“The murder.”
“So . . . Ruskin kills someone who finds out he’s a pedophile in Notre Dame?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s fine,” his voice on the other line assured her.
“What have you heard lately about that new writer?”
“August Prather? She hasn’t put the book out yet. She’s still writing it. But if it’s anything like her others then it’s got to be good.”
“The last review said her third novel was . . . what was the phrase?”
“Earth-shattering,” the phone said.
“Yeah. Only I’m still here. I read the thing, it obviously didn’t shatter me.”
“It was good.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t.” Garnet put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. “I’m just saying. The Earth—it didn’t really shatter.”
“You’re biased.”
“Hey, who do you work for anyway, Tim?” Garnet took a drag on her cigarette and blew smoke out into the world outside. “I can’t write like that anymore. People don’t want you to write like that anymore.”
“You wrote that one story. If you wanted to make money, you should have made the deal. Then the scandal would have died down and she could have sold the rights. You could have gotten a cut.”
“I didn’t want some corny cinematic spectacle. That story meant something,” she licked red lipstick off her teeth and sucked on the cigarette again.
“What did it mean, Kate?”
“I don’t know anymore,” she uncrossed her legs and smoothed down her skirt.
“People don’t want meaning, Kate.”
“They want August Prather.”
“You’re really hung up on her, aren’t you?”
“She’s only twenty-six. And I . . . I won’t be twenty-eight anymore. In a month, I’ll be twenty-nine. And that’s almost thirty. She looks like she’s the spirit of youth with that pink hair and the tattoos . . . ”
“And she’s, you know, Creole or something.”
“Is she?”
“She’s from New Orleans or some southern place. And she has that caramel-mocha skin tone going for her.”
“She’s a person, not an espresso drink. What the f**k, Tim.”
“Well, whatever she is it makes her . . . you know . . . edgy.”
“Does it?”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Tim . . .”
“Well you’re like . . . you’ve got the whole . . . you know . . . the thing that you used to be a dude. You should use that! Sell some books about that. Stop hiding it.”
“Not hiding, Tim,” Garnet crushed her cigarette out. “Way to win that GLAAD award. I’m trans and it says so in my goddamn ‘about the author’ portion. That’s not hiding.”
“Yeah, but like . . . you pass. Like, I would never think you weren’t a real woman.”
“Tim . . . just shut the f**k up about it. Gender is a social construct. There are no real women. There are no real men. We’re all just bored little animals trapped in our fragile, furry bodies playing dress-up until we f*****g drop dead.”
“Wow. That’s so dark. But . . . could really work in a . . .”
“I am not writing a memoir, Tim.”
“Okay, no memoirs. Got it. But s**t, those things can sell.”
“No one wants to slog through the swamp of despair that is Kate Garnet. Trust me, psych wards are not glamorous. They smell like old sweatpants and industrial dishwashing detergent. Plus, I already wrote about some of that, remember. And she took it away. It’s not mine anymore.”
“You just need a better imagination.”
“I need to read August Prather’s new stuff. Do you think there’s any way she’d send it to me?”
“You could ask her. But her drafts are all done on a typewriter. She keeps paper copies lying around, until they’re ready. You might have to wait a while.”
“Maybe . . .” Garnet tapped her fingernails on the window glass, hitting over a lit-up cell tower in the distance. “Maybe I could find her house.”
“You want to find her? Why?”
“I can get the manuscript.”
“You want to break into her house to steal her draft?”
“Yes.”
“Please do not do that. That is a crime.”
“Obviously.”
“Think about the consequences of your actions, Kate.”
“I always do.”
“And get some sleep, Kate.”
“Yeah, sure. Sleep.”
Garnet found August Prather’s address through tax records like a Grade A stalker. Presuming there would be pieces of the manuscript there, Garnet planned on getting into the apartment building, and sneaking in through the fire escape. But she didn’t even make it out of her car once she reached the parking lot. She didn’t really need to.
The moment she pulled in, she spied her target—that pink hair sure stuck out—coming out of her car. August was holding a manuscript in her hand. She looked at it, shrugged, looked at her car, and then tossed it into the back seat. She shut the door and ducked into the building.
She hadn’t bothered locking it.
She didn’t lock her car.
Not knowing how long August would be, Garnet dashed across the parking lot. She looked around her once, twice, and then dove straight into the back seat of the car. She shut the door behind her, snatched up the papers, and started to read. She should have just grabbed the manuscript and ran. But instead, she lay in the back seat.
The more she read, the more she wanted to read, and the more she lost track of time.
- Writer
