Page 113 of Bad Words

“Thus the mutant alligator.”

“Yeah, thus the alligator.”

“This idea is important to you. The way people are bent on continuing down a predetermined road.”

“Absolutely.”

“Can you expand on that?”

His leg began to jog, his fingers tracing patterns on the table. I saw him sorting through his thoughts.

I felt a sudden, painful surge of contentment. This would have been a perfect night, I thought, if I could have stopped recording.

“I think resisting inertia is the predominating challenge of being alive right now,” he said. “Obviously the book is preoccupied with how this presents in the context of labor, billions of people clocking into and out of their lives, signing over the majority of their waking hours. But you see it everywhere. It’s easier to keep believing what you already believe than to absorb new information and react to it, and it’s easier to keep scrolling than to put down your phone, and it’s easier to keep gliding along any frictionless surface because that’s a comforting state. People have such a strong aversion to disruption, even when what they’re going through is actually so much worse than change.”

I looked down into my water glass, thinking of myself even a single month ago, warring against what I was beginning to see in the man opposite me. The slowness of my reactions to my parents. My father’s unanswered email.

“And for people who like what they have?” I asked.

“I’m sure they exist. I’m not sure they make for extremely compelling books.”

Parker seemed to have relaxed. I asked him what he thought made a compelling book, and I asked why on earth he’d chosen not to bring back any of his side characters, and in the face of my bewilderment he laughed. “Why? Did you get attached?”

“I didn’t have the chance to get attached, Parker. You wrote them on and off in a few pages apiece.”

He shrugged. “Maybe the gamble of the book is that you’ll like Dave.”

“I didn’t like Dave, that’s true.”

“Maybe this is the critical problem. I assume that if somebody hates Dave, they’ll stop reading. They won’t willingly spend six hundred pages in his company. But you’re held hostage by your job.”

“Am I held hostage by my job,” I said, “or by you, who wrote a six-hundred-page book?”

“Why don’t you like Dave, anyway?” Parker said. “What did Dave ever do to you?”

“He keeps driving. He doesn’t react. Nothing he thinks or feels is ever externalized. I appreciate that you had thematic reasons for him to act like this, but it’s extremely annoying, especially for six hundred pages.”

“Careful, Selina. You’re almost making it sound like I wrote exactly the book I wanted to write.”

We kept talking. He began to smile after my questions, which I didn’t understand. At points we wandered away from the topic to joke around, to laugh. This interview was going to be a nightmare to condense. Outside, people clustered around the nearby bars, and their exclamations echoed up toward us, sounding thin and far away. Eventually we reached the last of my questions.

“I’ll cut this question if not, but would you like to tell the readers of City Magazine anything else about High and Dry?”

“Just that I’m having a launch event at Word in Brooklyn on February fifteenth.”

I looked down at my phone, and the giddy feeling in my chest punctured. Emily sat at his table in my mind’s eye, the bright spot in his life.

“Events aren’t usually the sort of thing we print.”

“Right. In that case…” Parker reached out and hit Stop.

I watched his hand withdraw. “How are the numbers looking for the launch?”

“Not bad. We’re almost at capacity. I’m sure that’s because we got Tessa Hargreaves to be my conversation partner. It should be fun.”

“Oh, that’s exciting.” I steeled myself. I had to do this, had to say it. “It was nice seeing Emily the other day. Is she working the event?”

He paused. “I’m not sure. I haven’t checked in with her in a week or so.”