Are You Happy Now? (29 page)

“You know, the same,” she says elusively. “Business has been slow.” She pauses. “I’m taking an interesting macroeconomics course in the general studies program at the U of C.”

Lincoln meant what are her plans with that dickhead Jerry Cirone, but never mind. While he wants to know, sort of, he doesn’t want to learn that they are planning marriage or swanning off on an exotic trip or still fucking. He and Mary talk listlessly for a few more minutes before she signs off with an admonition: “Don’t slide into depression, Linc.”

The petulance, at least, rouses him out of his lethargy. He spends hours a day on the Internet, first fruitlessly checking the job sites and then wandering aimlessly, following links, pursuing odd facts, Googling everyone he’s ever known. Lincoln decides that depression isn’t really a problem when you’ve got the Internet as a constant distraction. The greater risk is that you’d just sit there, occupied but accomplishing nothing, oblivious to the demands of life until you waste away. Lincoln imagines the Comcast man coming to reclaim equipment after the bill goes unpaid for several months and finding Lincoln at his computer, a desiccated skeleton in a decaying bathrobe, one rigid claw of a hand still resting on the touchpad.

Sometimes, toward the end of the day, Lincoln returns to the constantly updated media job sites and after again seeing nothing suitable, he casually explores sites featuring other categories of work—the law, for instance. Maybe he should go to law school after all. It’s probably not too late. But then Lincoln thinks of the law students he knew at the U of C—pasty drones forever testing each other in tedious arguments. Where’s the pleasure of creation in that? (Besides, he’s Googled his old pal Will Dewey, now
a litigation partner at Mannheim, Rogers & Baer in Washington, and the smug, ageless face that pops up on the firm’s website makes Lincoln shiver.) Or maybe he should make a complete right turn and go into health care. Administrators, nurses, even medical PR positions—despite the recession, openings are all over the job sites. But who’s he kidding? He hates hospitals.

After several fruitless days, Lincoln decides to test the water and applies for a research position with a small financial empire based in the northwest suburb of Arlington Heights. The company responds with some interest, and in a phone conversation with the recruiter, Lincoln makes plans to go for an interview. He asks if the headquarters is near the train station.

“What?” croaks the recruiter, a man whose voice until that moment had been soothing and pliant.

“No problem, I can rent a car,” says Lincoln, clumsily trying to recover.

“You don’t own a car?”

Lincoln slides around the issue and finishes the conversation, but an hour later he calls back to cancel, saving himself what would certainly be a wasted trip. He thinks: In Manhattan, not owning a car is a sign of practical intelligence, not to mention evidence of your concern for the environment; here, they treat you like a homeless person.

Lincoln seriously considers teaching—maybe he can turn his knowledge of books into a gig. One afternoon, he e-mails a résumé to a private school in Indiana that’s looking for an English teacher. But Dean Thornburgh at Foster Prep responds almost immediately with a note, thanking Lincoln for his interest, while explaining that the school insists on at least three years of teaching experience.

Sitting at his computer on this early evening, the rest of Chicago returning in darkness from a day at the office, Lincoln realizes that he’s relieved at the dean’s message. The harsh alchemy of his trauma combined with the deluge of Internet
trivia has brought forth an insight, a small clarity that’s bracing to his fragile confidence: being an editor is the perfect job for him. Coaxing, nitpicking, spotting holes, cutting excess, sharpening logic, recognizing talent, turning cynicism into something productive, acting like a know-it-all. Editing is what he was born to do.

And then he gets a lead. Flam puts him in touch with the young proprietors of a Chicago-based Internet outfit that publishes mysteries and thrillers through its website, iAgatha.com. Flam says their operation is coming along well enough that they are looking to add an experienced editorial hand.

Lincoln calls, and the webbies arrange to meet him at a Starbucks in Wicker Park, near the team’s office. Beforehand, Lincoln visits iAgatha.com and studies the “About Us” section. In photos, the three proprietors, two men and a woman, each ham it up PI style in fedoras and trench coats, and the woman has clamped a curving, Sherlock Holmes pipe in her jaw. At 11:00 a.m., though, no one in the Starbucks near the L station on Damen is wearing a fedora. The place is filled with scruffy young people, pierced and tattooed, sporting hair that looks as if it’s been electrified, all eagerly occupied with things to do or discuss. A month ago, Lincoln wouldn’t have thought twice about mixing with this crowd. Now he feels acutely his difference in appearance, attitude, employment. He takes his coffee to a corner table and wonders what turns these people took that he missed, how he failed to see the signs. After a few minutes, he’s approached by a slender young fellow whose straw-colored hair looks natural enough, but it’s completely flattened on one side, as if he’s just climbed out of bed. “John Lincoln?” he asks tentatively.

“Yes.”

“I thought so!” the young man exclaims triumphantly, and Lincoln winces at the confirmation that he’s the squarest-looking person in the place. “I’m Jimmy. Come over and let me introduce you.” He leads Lincoln across the room to a table occupied
by Sammy, a stout young woman with a streak of pink flowing through her dark hair, and Wade, another slim young man with colorful tattoos wrapping around each arm. “Sammy for Samantha,” the woman explains.

Lincoln shakes hands around. “Sorry about the mess,” Jimmy says. “We’re just having breakfast.” Plates of muffins, sweet rolls, and other Starbucks treats cover the small table.

Jimmy seems to be the leader of the group, and he provides a bit of background: they are three recent college grads (surprise—all from Loyola!) who came together in school around a shared love of detective stories and police procedurals. “We’re all from cop families,” Sammy interjects. In time, all three tried to write in the genre without having any luck selling their manuscripts to publishers. So they created iAgatha.com to bypass the official publishing world—exactly the sort of model, Lincoln thinks, that Flam says is taking over.

For a hosting and administrative fee, the site allows authors to upload their manuscripts and then sell them as PDFs or print-on-demand books, with iAgatha taking a cut. Jimmy explains that they’ll have the technology in place for e-book versions in a few months. Early on, the iAgatha crew had a stroke of marketing genius by making all first chapters available free—readers found the site and returned to browse. “We’re big on Facebook,” Jimmy crows. “Last month we sold five hundred and eleven books.”

“Is that enough revenue to sustain you?” Lincoln asks.

“Here’s the thing,” Jimmy confides. “We’re selling a lot of ads. We get traffic from all over the world—people don’t come just to read the books, but to talk on our message boards about mystery stories and anything that has to do with crime and cops. That’s a very specific audience that some advertisers want to reach. They started coming to us—publishers, book dealers, stores that sell cop paraphernalia.”

“Gun stores?” Lincoln asks.

“We’re all for gun control,” Jimmy explains, “but they have a First Amendment right to advertise; you understand that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” says Lincoln.

“Now we’ve added a couple of blogs that are drawing even more traffic. One in particular, by Draco DiVergilio, do you know him?”

“No.”

“He’s from Chicago, a big mystery writer, sells a lot of books through regular publishers. That’s not his real name, by the way. But he blogs for us twice a week, all about the mystery genre.”

“He’s very opinionated,” Sammy offers. “Likes to put things down.”

“People love to argue with him,” says Jimmy. “So our traffic is really spiking.”

Lincoln sips his coffee. He’s barely ten years older than these kids, but he feels a gaping cultural divide. They seem pleased by their success, but not entirely surprised. The Dot-Com Bust and now the Great Recession are just blips of history to them, not judgments on greed and mass hysteria. Was this Bill Gates at the dawn of Microsoft? Steve Jobs in his garage building his first computer? “How exactly could you use someone like me?” Lincoln asks.

“Mr. Flam told us you are a brilliant editor,” Jimmy says. “The best book editor in Chicago.”

“Well, I don’t know about that.” Lincoln blushes under the compliment.

Jimmy is all earnestness. “See, we’re thinking about adding an editorial services function to our business. Most of the people who write for us are amateurs. A lot of them don’t want any editing—they think their books are perfect. That’s fine. But some writers want advice, feedback. Sammy and Wade and I, we’re not really qualified to do that. But we thought that if we offered up a real editor, some people would pay for the service. We’d divide the fee—say, twenty-five percent for us and the rest for you.”

“How much would you charge?” Lincoln asks.

“We weren’t quite sure, but we thought maybe charge by the size of the manuscript. A penny for every two words. What do you think?”

Lincoln taps his dormant math skills to do some quick calculations on a Starbucks napkin. At that price, a lean, fifty-thousand-word manuscript would bring in $250. But it could take him hours just to give the thing a good read. Double the time to come up with an analysis, make margin notes, prepare a memo, and later look over the author’s rewrite, and you’re probably talking at best twenty dollars an hour after iAgatha takes its cut. At Pistakee, Lincoln was making more than that and getting benefits, too. He’s not in a position to haggle, but he recalls the toll it took on his psyche to deal with the Bill Lemkes, the Professor Fleaces—and they, at least, had nominal claims to writing skills. Who knows what kind of sentences he’d get from that bookkeeper for the car-parts store in Moline who thinks he’s the next Mickey Spillane?

When Lincoln looks up from the napkin, iAgatha’s three proprietors are staring at him with eager, open, absorbent faces, as if he were a Zen master come to deliver Wisdom. “I think you had better make it a penny for every word,” Lincoln suggests.

“Cool!” says Wade, the first time he’s opened his mouth.

And so Lincoln has a new job, barely two weeks after losing the old one.

The iAgatha gang works out of a one-room office in the Flatiron Arts Building, a wedge-shaped structure at the intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee, the bull’s-eye at the center of the arty Wicker Park/Bucktown area. The three principals sit in front of computers at gray, industrial desks scattered around the room. The walls feature three large whiteboards covered with techno-jabberings and lists of names that mean nothing to Lincoln. Two small windows on the east side look down on the busy intersection and across Milwaukee Avenue to Café Absinthe, a veteran restaurant. The bathroom is down the hall.

Jimmy arranges the import of another gray, industrial desk for Lincoln and sets him up with a spare computer, a nifty Mac Pro. “You know, you don’t have to work here,” Jimmy points out. “You can work out of your home.”

“I may,” Lincoln tells him. “But let me just get a feel for things.”

The founders of iAgatha have divided up the work according to skill sets. Wade handles the technology issues. Sammy deals with the writing clients and the blogs. Jimmy sells the ads and does the bookkeeping. On Lincoln’s first day, he and Jimmy puzzle out the wording and design of the announcement that iAgatha now offers editorial services (“Need an experienced editor? We can help!”). With the news and terms posted on the site, they turn to adding Lincoln to the “About Us” section (he chooses not to pose for his photograph in the fedora, which is hanging on an old-fashioned hat rack in a corner of the room). By the time they get back to the home page, iAgatha’s offer of editorial help has its first client, Vijay Sharma, of Jaipur, India.

“What time is it in India right now?” Lincoln wonders aloud.

“We get people at all hours, from everywhere,” Jimmy says matter-of-factly.

Lincoln downloads Vijay’s manuscript, prints it out, and spends the rest of the day reading. The story is set in the waning days of the Raj. An Indian private eye, also named Vijay, gets summoned to the home of a wealthy Indian couple whose handsome teenage boy has been suspiciously disappearing at night. Can Vijay find out what he’s up to? Before the detective has a chance to get to work, the boy turns up dead, apparently the accidental victim of a bizarre sexual ritual. Of course, after pages and pages of sleuthing, Vijay fingers the culprit—an aristocratic British lieutenant, whom he ultimately clubs to death with a cricket bat in an act of self-defense after an epic battle at the local officers club.

That night, Lincoln stays up late on the Internet, refreshing his history of the British Raj, catching up on the Indian caste system, tracking details of the country’s geography and climate. By the time he sends off his three-thousand-word diagnostic memo the next day, he’s already spent almost twenty hours on the book, and three new manuscripts are awaiting his services, one from Prague and two from California.

He gets right to work on the Prague story (Cold War; Czech policeman who’d been a student during the Prague Spring; KGB bad guys) and anxiously watches for the response from Vijay Sharma. In his memo, Lincoln tried hard to restrain his darker impulses and to stay positive, encouraging. But given his experience at Pistakee, he can’t help wondering if he lacks the touch for gentle criticism—he worries that turned loose on a manuscript, he’s like a feral creature that instinctively gnaws flesh. The resolution comes a few hours later. Vijay is thrilled. He’s ecstatic. He’s reread Lincoln’s memo three times, and he’s astonished at the perception, the attention to detail, the wisdom of the suggestions. “Mr. Lincoln,” he writes, “you have truly entered my vision and realized exactly what I want to do with this book. Your empathy is miraculous.” Wade confirms that the message was sent at 3:00 a.m. Jaipur time, which turns out to be a rather normal period of the day for Lincoln’s clients to e-mail their responses. Indeed, in the coming weeks Lincoln sometimes wonders whether he’s providing editing services to aspiring writers or an intense form of sympathetic companionship to very lonely people.