Potboiler

One of Pfefferkorn’s more shameful secrets was that he had once tried to write a popular novel of his own. Fed up with being perpetually broke, he took a few days to sketch the plot—it was a murder mystery set at a small college on the Eastern Seaboard—before sitting down to bang out a quick and dirty ten chapters. His daughter, then thirteen, noticed the pile growing on his desk and beamed with pride. Indeed, it was the only time since publishing his novel that he had gotten any further than the first five pages, and while he detested every word he’d written, he had to admit feeling some satisfaction in seeing any book of his achieve a third dimension.

The problem was the ending. In his zeal to entertain he constructed six distinct, wildly complicated plotlines, giving but the slightest consideration to how they might ultimately intertwine. He soon found himself stymied, spinning in place like a man whose six dogs have all run off in different directions. Frustrated, he reversed tack, stripping away all but one of the plotlines, leaving him with a mere forty pages. Attempts to expand these pages proved ham-fisted and futile. He tried introducing a romantic interest, only to discover, to his dismay, and over his loud mental protests, that his protagonist was a latent homosexual. To increase the suspense he murdered another administrator. He murdered a student. He murdered a hapless janitor. Bodies kept piling up and still he had fewer than twenty-five thousand words. It didn’t take much, he discovered, to kill someone in print, and there was only so much page space one could reasonably fill with gory descriptions.

In a fit of pique he caused the campus quadrangle to be detonated.

After much floundering he threw the manuscript in the trash. His daughter came home from school and, seeing the empty spot on the desk, the dustless rectangle where once their hopes for a better future had lain, ran to her room and locked the door, deaf to his entreaties.

As he sat at his computer, plagiarizing Bill’s manuscript, Pfefferkorn thought often of those days. He regretted having given up so easily. He might have done his daughter proud after all. But there was no sense fretting. She was getting married and he had work to do.

The theft of Shadowgame had begun with Pfefferkorn placing the manuscript in his carry-on, but it was not complete until eleven weeks later, when he finished retyping the text. He would have finished far sooner had he not chosen to fix some of the more infelicitous phrasing. For instance, it was characteristic of special agent Richard “Dick” Stapp to perform difficult physical feats in one fluid motion. Pfefferkorn didn’t care for the expression one bit. It was better to say fluidly, or smoothly—or, better yet, to apply no modifier but rather to plainly state the action in question and allow the reader to envision it. In redacting the manuscript, Pfefferkorn tallied twenty-four instances of movements taking place in one fluid motion, striking all but three from the final text. Two he left in because he felt he owed it to Bill to not eliminate wholesale what was obviously a pet phrase. The third in one fluid motion came when Stapp simultaneously answered his cell phone and floored an attacker, a spectacular move that began with Stapp’s hand darting to his belt clip and removing the phone before proceeding in a sharp, shallow arc up toward his face to answer the call, the resultant jutting elbow striking his assailant in the solar plexus, leaving him—the assailant—“sinking to his knees, gasping for breath” (a phrase that itself cropped up again and again, along with “snapped his neck,” “dove for cover,” and “chambered a round”) while he—Stapp—calmly said I’m gonna have to call you back. In this case, Pfefferkorn decided the phrase meant something: it conveyed that two fundamentally disjointed movements were being carried out with such precision and ease that they appeared harmonious. He doubted that any but the most careful reader would intuit the thought behind the words, but games like this kept him entertained throughout the revision process. They also helped him convince himself that his efforts were not wholly without artistic merit.

He scrubbed out all the shouts, exclamations, declarations, and avowals, leaving in their stead a simple “said.” He mopped up inappropriate tears and scraped down the ugliest dialogue. Names, dates, and locations had to be changed. Last, there was the matter of the non-ending. It was to this, the most daunting task, that Pfefferkorn turned his attention for a full month.