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My humble think tank where it all started.

I was a university graduate, shy and studious during those six years, studious to a fault. My fascination was language and languages. I studied, Latin and Greek and French, English, some Hebrew and then German, enough to read Nietzsche, Italian for Dante and Spanish for Cervantes. I had a heap of dictionaries which I read like books. That’s all I did. It was rumored that one day I'd be a shining star in that profession.

But it was the profession itself that disappointed me. I lost interest in any academic career. Most of my teachers were the opposite of the heroes I read about, people with no charisma, hardly any character at all, bent over, timid human beings, self-effacing as they walked down the corridors from their offices to classes, briefcase in hand and meekly repeating for the hundredth time a dull lecture to bored students. They were not impressive beings, just part of a program to a degree, a part of a machine, handing out grades and only flattered when they were being begged by some student for a higher grade which he or she didn’t deserve.

Now there are always exceptions. I went to U.C. Berkeley, the best university in North America. There one found the rare teachers with real dignity and charisma. Their scholarship was a huge and comprehensive knowledge of literature intertwined with their rich, life experiences. They were the few older, emeritus professors. When they walked down a hall people parted the way for them. They seemed to have a halo around their white hair and their lectures were mesmerizing.

They knew as I did that the best literature which survived the centuries was the gold and its own reward, far above pedantic research and not something to dissect but full of gems of wisdom. The spinning world was just the playground, the background for all these works of genius. That’s why they survived the ages. They outlived barbarous times and elevated us as thinking beings. All I wanted was to comprehend these heroes of mine, these giants of knowledge and insight, follow in their steps and enlighten humanity.

The younger professors there seemed to have shriveled up as human beings, like Trappist monks, cloistered in academic bowers. They were sad to see me go but knew exactly why, because I told them.

I had a little money left from my inheritance and knew how to live cheap. I heard about a shack behind a house in the flatlands of Berkeley. Two friends still in school lived in the front house and said I could live there for free if I helped them on their research papers. The owner never came around and I agreed. It was an old two-story wooden house, the white paint peeling and the shack behind it even more decrepit, a long ago rental with running water and power, a bedroom with an old desk and a couch in the living room. It also had a small kitchen and bathroom, all I needed.

The day-old bread store and dented can store were within walking distance on San Pablo Avenue. They became my staples. My espresso machine, my one luxury, was constantly perking. I managed on less than two hundred a month. I had the art of living cheap down to a science. I suppose you could call that my one other proficiency, besides a deep respect and love for great literature.

It was an idyllic life, no responsibilities, reading most of the day. My only exercise was the twenty-minute walk to the Doe library and back, where I had a hard-to-get stack pass, good for another two years, a gift from a famous professor who understood my passion for books and shared them. Hardly any graduate students could get this pass, only teachers, and few of them even asked. But for me, the gate was open and I entered the holy precincts. The place was eerily silent, where I could sit on the glass floors between the eight levels of stacks of thousands of old and rare volumes, eight floors of them. Everyone else had to go to a counter with the tag to a book and some student librarian would step in and collect it. They only asked for books needed for an assignment. I read everything, dipped into each author praised by another I liked, many of them obscure. But the set of the famously great was chiseled in stone, my diet and mainstay, having nothing to do with degrees.

My major was Classics. But I read far beyond the luminaries of Greece and Rome. Beowulf and Boethius were my brethren from the dark ages, then Petrarch, the dawn of the Renaissance, through all the scholars and great names to modern times, in novels and poetry, essays, criticism, philosophy and science, everything considered a treasure in its field. And I greedily consumed a large portion of it, so you might call me a polymath.

My other diet was oysters on Saltine crackers, sardines towards the end of the month when I was low on funds, which I’d eat at my desk, leaning forward in my swivel chair, books and dictionaries spread open in front of me, reading and collecting notes, as I was always writing down any idea I thought noteworthy, or any new word or phrase that intrigued me. I began to keep a journal of my ideas as I intended to write novels someday and started a few chapters of several.

It was during the second winter of this quiet life that I caught the flu. I had a high fever and lay in bed watching the late news. There was a report of a new avian flu in Asia, how millions of chickens were killed and how it might possibly mutate and spread to humans, which I half-listened to just before I fell sleep.

That night I had the strangest dream of just such an event happening, with vivid scenes of hospitals full of sick people.

I really wasn’t concerned about it. Such bird flus were common and the spread to other animals unlikely. But it gave me the idea for a story, which I began to write, still in bed the next day.

At first I simply recounted the dream, the scenes of pandemonium and panic. I’d recently been reading Thucydides, his description of the plague that hit Athens in 430 B.C. I do admit I borrowed some details from his account, how birds and animals wouldn’t eat the dead, how those who recovered thought they were immune forever and treated the sick, the problems with so many corpses. It killed thirty percent of that city in one year.

I made my story much less drastic, knowing full well that any novel, to be popular with intelligent readers had to be probable and full of explanations and up to date with modern medicine. I relieved and contrasted those public scenes with individual characters caught up in this mess, lives disrupted, the trials of individual nurses and doctors, describing their personal lives and the worries of those most at risk and the ones already in oxygen tents, their loved ones not allowed to visit them for fear of contagion, their last thoughts and lonely deaths. This gave realism and humanity to my novel. Otherwise it would have been just shock or pulp fiction.

So I described the WHO taking swift action and the leaders of America and Europe and their speeches. Vaccines were quickly developed and the toll on the population minimized to the old and unhealthy, needing respirators. The doctors and hospitals preserved most lives. And as with the Spanish flu I had people wearing masks on streets, the large venues shut down and restrictions on assemblies.

The only difference from ancient times, where it traveled by ship from Egypt to the Piraeus, the port near Athens where it started, I thought of airplanes and how they would transmit the virus everywhere within days.

My uncle, my one visitor, urged me to send off a few copies after reading it. He’d come by Sunday afternoons with a six-pack of beer and at our kitchen table we’d review my latest prose. My parents had died a few years earlier and he took a paternalistic interest in me.

He was a retired conductor on the trains for decades with a pension now, a humble job, but all his life he was an avid reader of novels and histories. He always reminded me that my last name was ‘Crane’ and I had to live up to it and someday produce another ‘Red Badge of Courage’.

I sent off a few copies. An agent in New York liked the quality of the prose, the smooth flow and variety of the story and called her friend at a publishing house where it was accepted, a rare thing for a young unknown. It was published as a literary novel with a few lukewarm reviews and modest sales.

Then the pandemic hit, two months later. At first, nothing happened, but my story seemed to exactly describe the real scenario as it unfolded. It took a few months the public to catch on. When my publisher caught wind of this, he advertised the book on billboards. Sales skyrocketed.

Even doctors and politicians started reading it with deep attention, as if I had some insight into the problem. I was invited against my will to New York, for a few appearances on late night shows, then a lecture in an auditorium where I stood speechless like a fool when technical questions were asked. I had no background in medicine. Future engagements were cut and I was wafted back to my shack, much to the disappointment of the media, who always loved a new celebrity.

But my agent was wise enough to not make a fool of me. I was heralded in the tabloids as some kind of prophet, and as the sale of my book climbed the charts, a second was promised.

As the pandemic worsened, and as I watched the news, I had no idea how I’d been so accurate. But it motivated me to begin another volume, like a second chapter.

It was pure luck that reality chose to closely mirror my fiction. Yet nobody believed such an improbable chance could happen. It was uncanny even to me, so many parallels, so many headlines in the papers and speeches politicians delivered sounded very much as if they were lifted right out of my novel, written exactly as they happened. Maybe they were. The book had been on the stands for months.

I’d picked the source correctly, a market in southern China and many of my numbers were close, for Italy, France and England by the third month of the spread. I knew the States would succumb, with its president and so many opposed to vaccines, opposed to anything they were told to do. I even predicted New York, Florida and California as the worst hit states.

I predicted vaccines would take about a year to develop and another few months to deploy and that each summer things would get better, as with any flu. It was seasonal, and the vaccines would only work for a while.

But I’d read about mutations too, that any virus spread into enough hosts genetically transforms and improves its abilities to transmit and harm.

My agent came by every few days and pushed me to finish this second volume, a whole new book. She would handle my privacy. That was all I wanted and it was easy for her, as no one knew me beyond my few appearances in the city, or followed me to my ghetto residence.

She handled all my mail, my heaps of fan mail and requests, her secretaries replying to them in my stead, and one particularly pretty secretary came to deliver me all I needed, food or any other little item. I was told never to leave the house, not even at night, which was fine by me as I was so busy, captive in a way by her but far more captivated by my own curiosity, by what I'd correctly predicted and what would follow.

I'd started on my second novel with the first hints of the real pandemic. It bothered me that it was happening. I had the news playing constantly and went from the T.V. to my desk, jotting down page after page of ideas, formulating further developments. I knew that all the poorer countries had massive populations in poor health and would be the last to receive vaccines. They were the perfect breeding grounds for mutations. All the western countries thought they had it beat, and let down their defenses, typical human stupidity, and it sprang back.

Before I finished this second episode, the news or the WHO had started giving each new variant a different letter of the Greek alphabet. So I revised my draft to match their designations.

And once again I was uncannily accurate in my predictions. I figured each variant would have major or minor complications to the world and each needing another vaccine. There were two hemispheres and when it slowed in one it would flourish in the other and never go away, just repeat again in ever larger outbreaks each season.

With these clues I easily completed a second novel, a continuation of the first, a year ahead of the present in its timeline. I described the unemployment rates, the government subsidies to compensate those out of work and the small businesses shut down, the work at home movement and the recovery of most economies with minimal harm. In the last chapter I described a new 'epsilon' variant coming out of South Africa, faster spreading, with unknown consequences.

I still have no idea how my predictions matched reality because I completed this second work just as the first lockdowns were being eased, and this book was published just before the first mentions of the Delta variant hit the papers.

I was still in my shack in Berkeley. The first checks began to roll in, several thousand dollars a week, which I signed and which my pretty helpmate, Naomi, took to the bank, always returning the receipt and lolling about the house longer and longer as the account grew larger. They were just numbers to me. I had little use for money and spent hardly any. But she was real and I loved her company.

My uncle had passed away a few months after my first book was published and the first good reviews came in in. I’d read them to him, hold them up for him to see through the plastic of his oxygen tent, where emphysema was taking its final toll from years of smoking. He took great pride in them, lifting the plastic and clasping me with his feeble hand before I left, saying I’d be famous soon and had lived up to my name.

It was strange that so many more would be under similar tents six months later. I was sad that he never saw the real success of my book, as he was instrumental in it, by urging me to continue writing when at times I wanted to quit, as it seemed like too depressing a story to tell and which no one would want to read.

At least he escaped the troubles that followed, that engulfed the world, like a forest fire no one could put out. If he believed my story would come true, at least he caught a glimpse of it.

I never had a girlfriend while at school, though I sat beside many in classes and sometimes thought of them. But I was too engrossed in books. The first year in my shack I was too poor to take a girl on a date and too embarrassed to show her where I lived, in my ragged clothing. Now this blond, cosmopolitan, beauty went from bringing me bags of food to cooking them up, lunch and dinner, saying it would save me time for more writing. Then we began eating together and our lunch talks at the table lasted for hours, much longer than any food preparation on my part would have taken.  

I’d had no social life before her, just a few nights out drinking with the boys in pubs.

Then it first dawned on me how inept and blind I was in that department, though an expert with words.

After three weeks her stays began lasting to mid-afternoon and her absence at the office was noticed, which ended that. My agent, all-business, a never-smiling, middle-aged woman came by and told me that from now on my groceries would be left on the doorstep and that time was of the essence. The interest in my first novel was at its peak and my next volume would be an instant best-seller.

She actually barged in the door that day and wanted to see how far along it was. I showed her six chapters of a planned ten that were finished, (I had two more that I didn’t show) and told her another three weeks was all I needed, on condition I see Naomi again. She told me to call her the hour it was done and Naomi would come by to pick it up.

This was her lure. Being naïve I never realized how greedy she was. They called me five days later and I told them I needed another two weeks.

I knocked off the last chapters in outline working day and night in. They were already sketched out in my head, and all books go fast when they’re nearly finished.  

But when I called my agent’s office in three days Naomi just happened to answer. I told her to drop by after work.

That evening there was a soft tap on the door. It was her again, lovely as ever, this time with a low-cut dress, bottle of wine and Chinese take-out. Her charming excuse was to ask how my book was coming along. I invited her inside and showed her the manuscript, one short chapter away from completion.

Her outfit, her intimacy and sending out for two more bottles revealed a different motive as she spent the night, the first of many. But I didn't mind. This was my first taste of sex, long overdue at twenty-six. It even inspired me to write the last chapter in record time, and then revise the whole manuscript, adding much, bringing it in line with what the daily news revealed, new insights as to what might happen next. I'd finish each day's work by five, as I knew her knock would always come around then. I used to write till late in the night when I was on a roll. She would drive across the Bay bridge, and we'd eat out at fine restaurants. She taught me manners, courtesy, even how to dress, to look handsome to women, something I'd never thought of before. I gave her my debit card so she could buy me clothes and cologne. Later each night she taught me the pleasures of sex.

We were happy together those few weeks. But my mind was preoccupied with the book. The day I finished the final revision we had a special celebration. We might have made a perfect couple. But that was the last time I saw her, for months. She must have been bribed away I suspected, used by my agent, who I slowly learned was a ruthless witch when it came to money and success.

What I didn’t see was that while I was in the bathroom getting ready to go out, (she always insisted I shower before trying on new clothes) she was busy photographing all the pages of the manuscript to show my publisher the next day. He made the suggestions. I did my work under her enchanting spell. The day the suggestions stopped we had a special celebration. We might have made a perfect couple. But that was the last time I saw her for months, an affair that I thought was just beginning to bloom.

The following afternoon there was a louder knock on the door. My agent and my publisher greeted me.

They saw my state, still in my jeans, and asked how my writing was coming along. I told them it was well under way, putting them off as I thought, saying I didn’t have the full plot finished yet. They asked for a tour of my shack, almost embarrassed at the poverty of it, stepping gingerly over the scattered books and papers on the floor. But they headed straight to my bedroom, my study, and sat on my unmade bed as if they knew where to go. When they saw the large stacks of papers on my desk their eyes widened.

I didn’t mention the completed novel in the drawer, exactly what they wanted, and even more exciting than the one before, as the pandemic itself provided the plot, growing faster and more dangerous and on everyone's mind. It was better material and my writing skills improved with my two revisions.

But my agent, reeking of perfume, in high heels and a tight dress, fortyish, acting coy and enticing, and my publisher in his expensive suit, all politeness, told me they'd arranged some interviews in New York, some television appearances with important people. I had to leave with them right away, as all this was developing so fast. He apologized for the few checks I’d received but said sales were soaring and the next ones would be ten times larger.

They asked me to pack a few clothes in one knapsack as I wouldn’t be back. I wanted to take some books, but he said I could buy everything new.  

All this while, they opened every drawer and boxed up all my papers. I could guess his motives. Perhaps there might be more literary gems in those stray leaves he could use in an extended version. You could almost see dollar signs in his gleaming eyes.

Then my agent told me she had a beautiful apartment near Central Park. I could stay with her and she'd tutor me, manage all my appointments. They both talked fast. What they didn’t mention was that she took twenty percent of my earnings while my publisher took twice that. And with all the expenses they conjured up, they split another ten. Their haste revealed their greed. It reeked as much as her perfume.    

They escorted me out the door to a waiting limousine, the engine running. I was hoping to see Naomi sitting inside, fool that I was. I never saw my shack again. It became a memory, far, far away, but always dear to me.

After a red-eye flight, standing on a street corner in New York the next morning and looking for a deli and bagel shop, which I’d heard were the best in the world, I saw that the Times had just published my picture and my book on its front page, to hit the stands that day.   They’d had their crews and presses working day and night from the photographs Naomi took. It shook me deep to my core as I realized Naomi had been a spy.

I knew I'd been used. But I thought I still might recover her. Even if she were a spy, she was still my first love. I asked to see her every time we went to my agent’s office that week, to sign papers.

But my agent told me that Naomi’s mother had died and she was in Ohio to arrange the funeral. I doubted that story but had no number, no way to check. I questioned every other secretary, but none gave in. They stuck to the same story that she was in Ohio. They said they never met her mother or knew the name of the small town she lived in. Naomi told them in chatting that she came from ‘the middle of nowhere’. The first few days I was adamant, even angry. But the swirl of events ended that inquiry. Brief love affairs are quick to fade.

A few of these secretaries, from day one, were so bold (or so instructed) to ask if I’d like to take them to dinner and a night club later on. They could show me the town. Some were almost as pretty and as ‘chic’ as she was. On the third visit I took one of them up on her insistent requests for a date, one I’d never forget.

I didn’t realize what fame meant, or that this geniality in women was about to explode.

I was now trapped in a fancy apartment in Manhattan, my agent dictating my daily schedule each morning as we sat at her white linen table, with a feast ordered in from some famous deli and spread out on gilded platters.

An hour later I was dressed in a suit and tie by an assistant, my hair combed by her, with cologne sprinkled about. Then we’d be off to interviews in a limousine, with a secretary named Diane, notebook in hand and folded legs, this one not model-grade and wearing thick-rimmed glasses, coaching me on what questions to expect and what to answer. I actually liked her the most for her honesty and intelligence but was too stupid to ask her out on a date. Beauty has its mesmerizing powers and I was bedazzled. We’d drive off in a rush, like New York traffic, which seemed to spin ever faster as the day and night wore on.

After business it was dinner engagements. Then my agent disappeared. But now photographers and more models joined my table. Soon we left in another limousine, bottles of Champagne popping along the way, and tiny silver spoons of white powder to ingest through the nose. This took us to famous clubs, with ever more drinking and dancing and faces and kisses. I rarely remembered the ride home and it wasn’t back to my agent’s apartment. In a haze I’d wake up in some strange room, a pretty woman lying naked beside me, whose name I couldn’t recall.

A taxi finished that journey on an over-bright morning. There I’d catch a few more hours of sleep before a loud knock on the door. Then the day would repeat itself again.

The billboards and tabloids were plastered with my face, and then the internationally broadcast interviews began. My celebrity brought with it invitations to dinners with the elite of the city. But those too devolved before midnight into nightclubs, dragged by the pretty hand of some gorgeous, sequin-gloved woman, too much drinking, a crowd of other stunning women pressing up against me in booths, in places so loud I couldn’t be heard without pressing my mouth tight against my companion’s ear, and she compelled to reply in the same mode, her sweet and sticky lips inches away from their next stop.

My agent quickly moved me to my own luxuriously furnished penthouse, just to get me out of hers. Within a few weeks I was in a daze of drugs and parties and nightclubs, surrounded by women very similar to Naomi in looks and dress and poise, but not the intimacy.

They weren’t her. Most of them were models or part time actresses with small parts in theater or TV shows. Others were would-be models and actresses and all of them used drugs.

What I remembered of Naomi was that she taught me the pleasures of sex, which became my first addiction.

Soon I had many others.

My agent made a serious mistake when she rented that penthouse and left me adrift on the night-life scene of Manhattan. The interviews were over, the book sales through the roof and money rolling in too fast to count.

It almost killed me. I had no experience with fame, and now, two months later, I was lucky to be alive, lying in a hospital bed.

I was in a coma for two days and when I woke up I found one arm and a leg in a cast. Over the next weeks I had nothing to do but reflect. I thought of Naomi and how unlike she was to those women, pushing me into my bed, ripping off my pants and quickly checking my wallet for more money while dumping another bag of white powder on the bedside mirror, while I simply stared in awe at their naked beauty.

It was because they'd rip off their clothes too, to distract me from their ulterior motive to buy more drugs. Then we’d get under the sheets, sitting up just enough to snort lines between sips of fine wine. But our talk was lame, ephemeral, little jealousies and nasty comments on their competitors. I listened in my haze. Then came the kissing and the sex after the last line was snorted. It was purely mechanical on their part. I think practice and drugs doused all feelings of emotion.  

They were the hotties I met in clubs, in glamorous gowns, necklaces and perfume. They would flock around me and beg to see my place. My penthouse became a magnet. Word spread, and every night there was another round of late parties with loud music, troupes of women and shady dealers in hats wearing sunglasses at three a.m. I don’t remember their names or faces; except that they were all beautiful. And as the lights dimmed and the rest were shooed out by the companion of the one in my arms, they would strip. I so woke up in bed with two, not knowing their names or what had happened.

I woke up foggy, these escort girls passed out beside me, the bottles empty, just like my pockets, empty again, and my memory erased as clean as the mirror.  

I didn’t know it but my health disintegrated. Three hours of sleep a night and constant pills, and when they woke up, it wasn’t coffee and breakfast but shots to down Vicodin, Valiums, and pills I didn’t even recognize. Sometimes we grabbed a mid-afternoon meal on the way to another club, one on each arm dragging me, and kisses on each cheek as we approached the one critical stop, the nearest ATM machine. I had a two thousand dollar a day limit and always used it up, sometimes more, which required a quick stop at the bank.

Then the parties repeated, the clubs, the dealers and hundred-dollar bills flowing out of my pockets again. I’m sure I made up for seven years of solitude and poverty in those few months. I was blinded by their glitter, the drugs and whispers and naked bodies, transformed from a shy recluse into the 'The Playboy of the Western World'. It was as if I was given a race car and driving it a hundred miles an hour and never had a license before. I’m amazed that I caught no venereal disease. At least I think I didn't. Two years later, unsuccessfully trying to father a baby with my true girlfriend, I began to wonder.  

When I crashed the doctors said I was lucky. I'd started off slowly, fine meals in restaurants, just a few pills and lines before the real debauchery began. I'd only been on the extreme regimen for a month. If it had lasted longer there might have been permanent liver damage according to them.

The night I crashed I was driving back to my penthouse alone. I was in some loud nightclub, as usual, and spotted Naomi. She looked exactly like the other high-class hookers I'd been with each night, sparkling in fake jewelry and a provocative dress. I pushed my way through the crowd towards her and tried to greet her with a kiss.

But I was more intoxicated than she was, so she easily held me back with her hand on my chest, a foot away. But I had the burning question inside with just enough mind left to ask it. Did she love me, or was she a spy all along and all the lunches and dinners and sex a deceit, a setup to keep tabs on my book?

There was a tight crowd around us, and this was not the appropriate place for such a question. But she saw my sad, imploring eyes and pulled me out to the back alley. There we began to talk. At first she offered a plausible account. She was sent but she did honestly love me. I might have turned that situation around right then and admit my own love for her. But in my drunken stupidity I asked how much she'd been paid off and blurted out that she'd be a millionaire now if she’d only stayed and married me.

This merited me a well-deserved slap. She told me her mother really had died and she had to leave town right away. Such is fate. She turned with a 'huff' and walked away.

With the brisk air and that sobering slap and the truth revealed, I stormed off to the bellhop and demanded my Porsche. They usually called me a taxi. But that night the anger in my eyes and the speed in my steps scared him and convinced him I was sober. He handed over the keys and four blocks later, at far greater speed, I crashed into the metal post of a stop light, another irony of fate, a ‘stop’ light.

But it was, in my drug-addled state, intentional. I was so angry at myself I swerved the car. The last image I had was of some funeral before the ambulance arrived. Perhaps one soul rising up saves another going down.  

At the hospital, when I awoke a few days later my agent was standing there looking down at me and told me she was taking full control of all my affairs. She’d been letting me party these months, happy with all the money and publicity she was raking in. She rented me my penthouse and moved me out only to free up her own, which was now the site of her own afternoon business deals and nightly paramours.  

But she was shocked when she heard I was in the hospital. I was her golden goose. Her first question to the doctors was whether my brain had been damaged by a trip through the windshield. Of course they had no answer. They said many millions of my brain cells were certainly gone, but that didn't tell them how many of the eighty-six billion were left intact. Only time would tell.  

From then on she assumed a motherly role, visiting me daily, sitting at my bedside for hours, bringing me food, spooning it in my mouth whether I wanted it or not, as if I were a two year old, all the while berating the hospital meals, the nurses and sometimes even the doctors for the slightest inattentions. She was good at that, and I had no other visitors, on her orders.

She was the administrator in charge wherever she went. She saw right through people and knew just when to stop her slights and sharp-tongued reproaches before it produced negative results. Then she'd flip a switch and all of a sudden, she was an expert in fake compliments and smiles, rimming the lip of the cup of her bile with honey, honeyed words, as she handed it to you to drink, always served in just the right portion so you drank it in, poisons and sweets mixed together. And you wondered as she walked away, how she won exactly what she wanted, leaving you with a strange, suspicious, lingering taste in your mouth.  

As I slowly recovered, she gave me long descriptions of a house deep in the woods of Vermont that she'd found for me and bought at great expense. It was as unique as I was, perfect for me, peacefulness and privacy, elegance and ambiance, the place to write my next novel. It was being refurbished as we spoke. She mentioned the costs but said my first book was still doing well and the next even better. All she wanted was a milieu (she used many French words to intimidate others) where I could write my third. She even bribed the doctors to keep me in the hospital until the house was ready.  

Here I told her to slow down. My mind was divided. I wasn't feeling well and I certainly wasn’t her puppet. I was still so sore I told her I wasn’t up to the task, especially alone in the middle of nowhere. I knew I couldn’t stay in the city or return to my shack in Berkeley. I was a millionaire and my face would be recognized everywhere I went. I’d be accosted in a hundred ways.

So then, my agent came up with the idea of a nurse. My nurses here were business-like, overburdened, watched and supervised. Only a few of the younger ones took a moment to chat with me. My agent decided on an especially silent, middle-aged one. She wanted me taken care of with the least amount of distraction. And they had already put me on the spot, my publisher and her. The next installment was already on the billboards as ‘coming soon’, making it a trilogy.

At my bedside she promised me anything I might need. I could only nod. I was flown in by a helicopter the next day. It landed right in front of a mansion deep in some woods. I was carried up two flights of stairs in a gurney by the two pilots and deposited in a very comfortable four-poster bed. The old nurse followed and took the bedroom next to mine, suitcase in hand.

As I lay there, propped up on pillows, taking in the novelty of the new room and its slightly musty smell, I could hear the shrill voice of my agent instructing the pilots as they carried in box after box of supplies, telling them where to deposit each one. Then I heard her footsteps coming my way and with a pat on the shoulder and a solemn pledge that she’d call every week to keep tabs on my progress, she said goodbye.

In a rare gesture of kindness, she bid me to get a good rest as she gently closed the bedroom door. In the semi-darkness of the late afternoon, with the curtains closed, I heard the helicopter fly away, then pure silence. I imagined the nurse must be taking a nap.

But I relished this strange silence. All my life, even in my shack in Berkeley, such a complete absence of sound was a rarity. Only late at night, in the few hours before dawn, would the street traffic cease for a few minutes. Or sometimes on a Sunday sitting amidst the stacks of books in the Doe library such a silence would occur, when the almost imperceptible sound of my own breathing, my own heartbeat, could be heard. To me it was a delectable sensation and comforting, as if I was back in the womb of my mother or floating on some cloud.

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