Alright true believers and truth speakers! Today, BookSpotCentral is kicking off the first of a new monthly feature we are calling Synergy. Basically, one of our contributors offers a single question for our other contributors to give answer to. Beyond that, we go out and get talented outsiders who choose to become BSC extended family to participate.

Sound familiar?

Sure it does. It’s SF Signal’s Mind-Meld. I want to give them some just props for a great idea, as BSC certainly knows how it feels to continually see its ideas with no nod offered. Note that among the first people I approached was John DeNardo over at SF Signal to participate, and he told me he would be pleased to do so in future editions of this feature. They are good people who do some real cool stuff over there, and I just wanted to take the time to thank them for the idea as we kick our own feature off!

So what we have is a combining of the great contributors who bring you BSC on the daily with a group of people that count among them bestselling authors, award winning novelists, editors, and leaders in commentary and opinion in a variety of mediums. We have Synergy. We come together – especially with this edition – as readers. Matt Denault offers up the first question for the feature:

One of the rewarding aspects of talking with other readers of fiction is realizing what a great variety there exists in how people read, in the conceptual lens or lenses we use. We all have a different sense of identity, different life experiences, areas of academic study, professional training, leisure activities or interests that impact how we read. Can you share something interesting about how you read fiction, the elements of story that you focus on that you’ve noticed others may not — ideally providing a few examples — and why you do so (if you know)?

(For example, some readers may bring a focus on gender, sexuality and sexual experience, race, culture, age, class, religion and/or power dynamics. Some readers may feel a heightened awareness of place, a concern with the details and groundedness of a story’s setting. Some readers may find themselves reading with extra care any passages mentioning art, architecture, and other areas of study. Etc.)

It’s a beast of a question and more than one game contributor bowed out when confronted with it. I think you even see those who did answer juggle with it a bit rather liberally – which is perfect for the question! I want to thank everybody who participated, and those who considered to participate who are not represented below. BookSpotCentral.com is proud to present the first Synergy:

    
Lydia Millet - It’s a good question and a complex one, which goes as much to our limitations as readers as to our abilities. I look first for a certain aesthetic sensibility, or range of sensibilities, that is very difficult to define. What I like is cumulative and open-ended, that is, it can be added to at any moment, when I encounter a writer who’s authoritative and powerfully intelligent and offers me an entry into a fresh landscape or idiom. But what I don’t like is predefined for me, and a book can repulse me right away by qualifying into this category. And I honestly wouldn’t say this is bias; I’d say it’s a precise judgment strategy developed over a lifetime of reading literature, and a strategy I need to be able to implement to read well. After all, there are far too many good books out there to read in one puny lifespan, and I don’t want to waste my time on the others. A book may contain any number of technically good sentences and paragraphs—may be, in a sense, perfectly well-written—but if I feel the writer’s interests and assumptions are myopic or parochial I won’t bother reading much further than the first few pages. There’s plenty of upscale writing out there, generally held to be literary, that I find repugnant for its narrow or self-indulgent sensibility. Conversely, a writer may be technically clumsy, sloppy, or simply not language-oriented—Philip K. Dick is a prime example—but if the ideas are vivid and compelling enough, I’m willing to read past the awkwardness of the diction because I’m beholding a playful and intriguing imagination at work. This is how I read so-called genre fiction: for the ideas, for the ontological exploration between the lines and the liveliness of the invented worlds. In a nutshell, I guess you could say I read for thought. If I’m going to step inside someone else’s brain, which is what reading is, I want to make damn sure that brain has something new to offer.

_{Lydia Millet is the author of Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996), George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (Scribner, 2000), My Happy Life (Henry Holt, 2002; Soft Skull Press 2007), a winner of the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, Everyone’s Pretty (Soft Skull Press, 2005) and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Soft Skull, 2005). You can visit her at lydiamillet.net}

    
Felix Gilman - This has been a difficult question for me to answer because as a straight white affluent able-bodied etc male I am pretty much a monster of unexamined privilege, i.e. inclined automatically to consider myself the norm, with no particular conceptual lenses, no “identity,” no agenda, what I see in books being simply what’s there. This is not true, of course. Nevertheless.

I was a grad student in history for a while, with an interest in (popular) cultural history, and then for a much longer time I’ve been a lawyer, so I have a certain professional interest in: bullshit. Or to put it another way: argument, cultural conflict, myth-making in service of the various competing interests out of which a society is constructed; so one of the main things I look for in secondary-world fiction is a sense of social complexity, interest-struggles mediated through cultural narratives and styles and poses. Generally I feel most interested in fictional worlds where this stuff is somewhat arbitrary, inscrutable. (Again: lawyer). One of the things I like most about China Mieville’s books is that sense of thick, contested culture. Gormenghast presents something of a monoculture, up to a point, but is also sort of the ur-text for this sort of thing: the whole trilogy (or at least the first two books) is a vast slow fascinating exploration of the castle’s cultural life, and how it intertwines with its weird and irrational political structures, and how it feels to inhabit or accept or reject both.

Also I suppose I’m that guy who can’t stop nitpicking when writers get legal details wrong, though it doesn’t come up much in SF/F. It’s more of a problem at the movies. The Dark Knight was unusually stupid in this respect, FYI.

_{Felix Gilman is the author of Thunderer and its forthcoming sequel, Gears of the City. He lives in New York. His website is at www.felixgilman.com.}

    
K.J. Bishop – Man, I just read books as they come to me. Different books offer different pleasures. That said, I’m always glad to find subtle psychological insights, and well-depicted scenery and atmosphere turn me on. I enjoy the impression of a calm surface with wild things seething beneath. I don’t tend to focus on any particular issues, only on how individual characters play the cards dealt to them.

_{K.J. Bishop is a half-writer, half-mall rat who lives in Bangkok. She is currently reading a Japanese children’s book called Uranai Nanka Kowakunai (Not Scared of Fate), written by the mother of one of her students. It has an awesome picture of an anteater playing Go on the cover. She is the author of The Etched City, The Crawford and Ditmar award winning novel that was also nominated for the World Fantasy award.}

    
Jay Tomio –

“Jay, what do you think the author was trying to do here?’

“What the *&^$(%@ does that have to do with me?”

I’m very selfish, and I’m very much a proponent of the idea that reader perception, that the reader reality, is in fact what motivates both joy of reading much more so than understanding authorial intent. The latter is merely a step to the former in my mind. Don’t you read books and prescribe characters a certain look, with a certain style in your mind, and then if you ever go back and reread specific descriptive passages and have somebody draw or sculpt them they look nothing at all like the people you have in your mind? If you get ten different people to do the same you’d get something completely different each time. That’s just the surface. Has anybody ever seen Moorcock’s Elric depicted in the Conan comics by Barry Windsor-Smith? Smith is a legendary artist in his field, but he comes up with something rather unlike what you will see on older paperback cover or even other adaptations. This is the beauty, the craft of non-illustrated writing – you paint one canvas that turns into however many people read your book. It’s beyond even inspiration as we do it for all characters whether we are consciously aware of it or not. It’s creation.

I used to know this very cute girl who used to use the line, “ummm. . . back to me” every time a conversation strayed from . . . well herself. It was very cute, and perfectly describes the type of girl a guy in high school would be interested in, and with the education one gets from those experiences I also gained my personal mantra as it pertains to reading. Because of this, I have a tendency to gladly and wrongly think it is impossible – especially in a non-earth fantastic setting – that an author doesn’t try to insert that fourth-door to stride into on occasion. I search for these and find them where they are and aren’t, veiled or blatantly. Matt asked us to point to examples, and finally I have – back to me – found something useful from this online review gig, so I do have a few! I can read a novel that offers as much Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek: an Afterword and I focus on the insertion of his non-self. In an interview I conducted with Jeff he said this when I brought it up:

Because, really, what that’s intimating is that X is not really me. That there is a doppelganger Jeff in Ambergris—my shadow cabinet counterpart, so to speak. And that would mean that everything in Ambergris is mapped to everything in the “real” world. And if that’s true, it ought to be possible, through reverse engineering, to find our way to Ambergris and at the same instantaneous moment for our doppelganger to break through into this world. Are you stepping into a mirror? Or through a window?

I’m not a writer, but the reader in me going back to Huck Finn on the river; or imagining I’m rolling with Snake Eyes, Scarlett, and Stalker on a special mission; to pretending I was once stopped by Polo to give him directions in my and Calvino’s invisible cities. It goes back to tying towels around necks, and pretending you can fly which some would view this as a simple fascination or preoccupation with escapism, but escapism is just one – of many- possible motivations for a grander journey of exploration. That Bastian Balthazar Bux scenario where at first you are reading the adventure, but before you know it, you are a part of it.

When I reviewed Ian Cameron Esslemont’s Night of Knives I offered the thought that two mortals that ascended to godhood in the series, whose machinations seems to be the frame around the frame of both author’s work in the setting were indeed pseudo-avatars of the two authors themselves – Kelanved/Shadowthrone and Dancer/Cotillon. T hese are explorers who literally and figuratively transcended mortality so that they can have more time to do so (explore). While feature characters, they tend to make brief appearances throughout the novels to mold events, and for myself it would just be impossible for me to sit down over years with a friend of mind and create what is perhaps the most ambitious secondary world created, and not have a personal Azath -back door. I don’t even know if it’s true, though I got this in my interview with Erikson:

I think what exists with those two characters is a sense of a longstanding shared history, a trove of experiences. At the same time, it should be clear that each is his own person, and while they are together they are also separate, and this establishes a balance between the two. Maybe in some ways they are the most accurate (not in terms of madness!) composites of the creative side of myself and Cam. We share a world, but we are each distinct as individuals.

There is a preoccupation with this with writers that we see more and more, this touch of reality to bring our fantasy closer to us; to bring reality closer to the unknown. People like Gaiman have made a living doing this, as has the likes of Moore, Moorcock, or Ellis with Planetary. It is never a search for answers – that’s just what we tell people to foot the bill, or to not look too wide-eyed – we search for questions we have yet to ask in truths we know.

I am also oddly affected by even the most blatant of homages and memorials even when I’m not intimately aware of the gravity of them beyond simply recognizing them. Note, affected not just something I tend to notice (as most tend to be rather transparent for just such a purpose). I tend to be very self-referential as a reviewer and there are nods to items that nobody but perhaps ten people who know me would ever notice. I do those to keep myself and that minute audience amused, but when I see them in-book I find an embarrassing remnant of the romantic in me (that weak fuzzy feeling). I don’t even know why and I’ve often actively thought on it, and I can’t get far beyond thinking that there is connection, that they are bonds. When I see Hal Duncan in his novel, Vellum, note things like, “Peake sitting at the table at the corner, working away on his notebooks with all the cartoons scribbled in the margins, all the faces with their hidden caricatures of nobs and lackeys;” – I just love that shit. Same when I read about Matthew Stover’s Caine reflect on his favorite authors of the 20th century. The writer that’s prone to do this the most to me is actually a comic book writer (though to be fair, he‘s a novelist as well). Brad Meltzer just kills me with well-timed, well-placed one liners like the brave and the bold (which I customarily used to cap off in a review of another of his works as an homage itself). There is a selflessness in these examples that contrast the selfishness I noted above. While you move forward and evolve as you pass the read on to readers, the homage is wink in the rear view of all those who were a part of the ride until you explored your own territory. Bridges if you will, connections that enable maps – and who doesn’t like maps?

In my more melancholic moments it isn’t lost on me that the majority of my examples above depict madmen.

_{Jay Tomio is the co-owner and contributor at BookSpot Central, and editor of Heliotrope.}

    
Matt Staggs - I tend to be especially aware of issues pertaining to mental illness, especially when it is portrayed pejoratively or inaccurately. While I can’t think of any particular instances, nothing will jar me out of a good story quicker than when an author refers to a schizophrenic character as having “multiple personalities” or writes about a psychologist prescribing medications. Even worse is when writers perpetuate shameful, lurid or hateful images of people living with mental illness.

I am probably more attuned to these issues than other people for several different reasons. I graduated college with a degree in psychology, and eventually worked for over five years in juvenile and adult inpatient psychiatric settings. I’ve worked hand in hand with people dealing with the burden of psychiatric illness, and I know that they’re not monsters: they’re our moms and dads, sisters, brothers, children and friends. They’re our neighbors and our coworkers. They’re just people. The other reason is that I myself have dealt with psychiatric illness for most of my adult life. I was diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder years ago, and I know what it’s like to live with a condition that’s absolutely out of your control and the havoc that it can wreak on your life. I also know the stigma associated with mental illness, and it can be very painful. Just admitting that you need help and going out to get it can be embarrassing. Fortunately, I have an excellent support system: a loving wife and family, great friends and very effective medication. These can go a long way, but not everyone is so lucky.

_{A publicist specializing in book and author publicity, Matt Staggs has worked with science fiction, fantasy and horror authors like Jeff VanderMeer, Thomas M. Disch, Brian Evenson, James Morrow, David Wellington and Nancy A. Kress. In 2008 he launched Deep Eight LLC, a boutique publicity agency utilizing the best publicity practices from the worlds of traditional media and evolving social technologies. You can visit Matt at Enter the Octopus}

    
Jetse de Vries - As a reader, I like to (almost) have it all: I want to be entertained, but I want to be made to think, to be challenged mentally, and on top of that I like to be surprised.

Furthermore, I think that SF — the genre I’m most familiar with — is continuously improving and maturing. Where in earlier times SF readers might be forgiving if the prose wasn’t very good, or if the characters were little more than cardboard as long as there was a sharp idea or a strong sense of wonder, I think that modern SF readers are increasingly less forgiving in that aspect.

So a good, modern SF writers needs to get it right — or as good as she/he can get it — on almost all counts: the sense of wonder must be grounded in a convincing setting, the groundbreaking technology must be carried forward by compelling characters, and the paradigmatic shift must be embedded in good prose, or even better, be such an integral part of the story that it makes the reader forget that such a thing as an infodump ever existed.

On top of that, SF should reflect the diversity of the real world, both in its settings and in its use of point-of-view characters: the days that almost all protagonists were male, white, middle class Americans are slowly, if reluctantly, being left behind as the cast of characters increasingly include both genders (or even a mix or variation thereof), a variety of sexual preferences, all races, cultures, classes, religions and nationalities. Ideally, of course, but I think we’re moving there.

Having said that, I do recognise that each writer will have her or his own forte: some will be superb at conveying a sense of place, others will create unforgettable characters, and again others will launch mindblowing concepts, and even others will have deftness with gender roles and power dynamics that few can match. But a writer should not just rely on her/his strengths, but make the complete story a quality experience.

Finally, to be totally honest: I like a strong sense of place, living and breathing characters, challenging looks at cultural commonplaces, and superb prose just as everybody else. But for me all these elements work best if they orchestrate the story to bring forward a conceptual breakthrough (in any area: doesn’t need to be scientific) that gives me a completely new look at the world. That will really blow me off my socks.

_{Jetse de Vries is a technical specialist for a propulsion company and travels the world for this, albeit it less frequently nowadays because of the time that co-editing Interzone and his writing is taking up. Other publications include Nemonymous, TEL : Stories, the Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives, and DeathGrip: Exit Laughing, which makes him a sort of late-labelled, experimental pulpster with a wicked sense of humour, drenched in stylistic excess. And all he really wants to do is write SF…}

_{He is currently editing the forthcoming anthology, Shine, coming from Solaris Books. You can visit him In the Plane of the Ecliptic.}

    
Ken – This is a very interesting question and one that I’m finding difficult to answer. I believe that at least some of this difficulty is due to the wide variety of books I read (even though I read primarily within the speculative fiction genre). In some books, I find myself so completely immersed in the story that I have little reaction in manor that this question refers to. Other books seemingly intentionally provoke various reactions, and most fall in between.

I’ve definitely noticed as I mature in my adult life and appreciate the struggles of my wife and other friends that I am increasingly sensitive to various bias such gender, sexual, racial, etc. A seemingly harmless ‘gay joke’ or the often unrealized derogatory treatment of women raises negative flags in my mind.

It’s rare, but as a geologist, I do react to any portrayal of geology and related sciences in books where it is present. Usually my reaction in somewhere on the spectrum of ‘cool, (s)he talked about geology’ to ‘that is totally wrong’.

Another common reaction when reading is based very much on my personality – I almost naturally become a devil’s advocate in any conversation and I naturally search out the exceptions to any rule and find the most mundane inconsistencies or inaccuracies in an argument. It drives my wife absolutely crazy. So, I often find myself treating books that I read with same scrutiny, but as I indicated at the beginning of my response, a well-written book can immerse me so fully in the created world that I move beyond that sort of reaction.

_{Ken is a thirty something fan of SFF who has continual problems with his identity, most notably by having two screen names at this site – Neth and kcf (neither being particularly interesting nor original) – and enjoys bucking the trend of using his actual name. His day job is that of an engineering geologist working in Tempe, Arizona, but his alter ego is an active blogger at Neth Space and frequent poster at several genre-related message boards. It is important to note that Ken has absolutely no qualification to review books beyond a love of reading and a rudimentary ability to write.}

    
Samantha Henderson - I often find myself paying attention to gender in my reading, and more often to place when I am familiar with the place (which sometimes makes me seek fiction set in places I don’t know — I was reading a perfectly good mystery that included a hotel in Hollywood that’s a flophouse, and in the story was a very nice hotel and it send me straight out of the story). One thing I’ve always noticed why reading, however, is whether I can sense the author themselves past their curtain of words. Usually this is a negative: I imagine the author picking and choosing their phrases, and it makes the experience artificial for me. But sometimes, rarely, I am aware of the manipulating scenes and pulling levers and it’s done so well it does work — Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell come to mind. Mostly being aware of the author is like being aware of my tongue, as Linus says. And now I’m aware of it. Yikes!

_{Samantha Henderson’s fiction and poetry has been published in Realms of Fantasy, Chizine, Strange Horizons, Fantasy, and Lone Star Stories. Her first novel, Heaven’s Bones, was released in September 2008 by Wizards of the Coast. You can visit her Samanthahenderson.com}

    
Rob (Val) - Interesting question, a variation of which is usually on my mind when I write a review. I’m going to narrow it down to my educational background otherwise my reply will be a novel. I studied environmental sciences for a total of 8 years and hold a degree in it. During these eight years I was exposed to a wide variety of subjects. Anything from end-of-pipe techniques and soil remediation to ecology, environmental policy and environmental economics. As with any proper education this changed the way I look at the world dramatically. Once it is pointed out to you the enormous impact our species has on the environment is inescapable. I find myself constantly thinking on why a certain place looks the way it does and what our part in it is (a fairly depressing habit, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone).

In 1996 I traveled to the US for a vacation. The flight to Los Angeles took me over some of the most arid parts of the US. Once in a while you could clearly spot a bright green lawn or golf course below though. I clearly remember feeling the urge to go down and slap some people silly for the kind of selfish behaviour that my well turn large parts of the American south-west uninhabitable in the not too distant future. My 2004 visit to the same region resulted in a similar reaction. So when I read Paolo Bacigalupi’s story The Tamarisk Hunter in the collection Pump Six and Other Stories it hit home for me. The Tamarisk Hunter is not the best story in the collection, but even in a collection that contains several excellent environmentally themed stories it stood out to me.

My education influenced what I read and what I like considerably. In my opinion Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is some of the finest science fiction ever written. Robinson’s vision of colonizing Mars goes far beyond the environmental aspects of it of course but the conflict between Reds and Greens, or between the characters of Ann Clayborne and Sax Russell, is a large part of why I like these novels so much. Ann’s character takes it to extremes of course but I recognize a lot in the way she sees human influence on the pristine Martian surface everywhere (even if I don’t dread it like she does). The final synthesis between these two currents make for a satisfying end of the trilogy.

In various novels Frank Herbert takes an other look at the environment. He sees is as a force shaping human society and evolution. In The Dosadi Experiment, extreme environmental pressures lead to the development of a dangerous kind of (mostly) human society. The completely survival driven ethics of this society poses an threat to the wider universe. The way Herbert squeezes a number of highly complex ideas into a relatively short novel make it quite inaccessible. Despite that I think this book beats even his masterwork Dune. Dune contains another variation on the environmental pressure theme of course. In this book he creates a society obsessed by water because of it’s apparent absence on the planet. In Dune Herbert packages his ecology in a classic Messiah story. Perhaps that makes it more accessible. Herbert books are full of well thought through references to ecology and environmental issues. It is part of why he is one of my favourite authors.

My perspective on the world can work the other way too though. Nothing annoys me more in a fantasy or science fiction novel what an author introducing large numbers of lethal predators without any means to sustain such populations. In his book Monster of God, we’re talking non-fiction now, author David Quammen, ask himself the question why the food chain stops where it does, or in other terms, why there is no predator that hunts tigers. The answer to that question ought to be required reading for any writer who’s novels require serious world-building. Quammen is very good at explaining ecological concepts in terms anyone can understand. My suspense of disbelief abruptly ends reading scenes that violate these concepts. It’s why I never could get into stories like King Kong (insular gigantism my ass) or horror stories that feature all kinds of unlikely monsters.

Call it professional deformation if you will. My education determines for a large part what read an probably for an even larger part what I like. It’s so much part of me that I can’t switch it off to enjoy watching Jaws or read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (you ought to read that book keeping the Victorian cultural framework in mind, it works that way). I can on the other hand loose myself completely in The Forever Hero by L.E. Modesitt Jr., a story partly set on a post-apocalyptic, environmentally degraded earth. I try not to let is surface too much in my reviews, a lot of these things would be completely irrelevant to someone who doesn’t share my background in environmental sciences, but there is no denying it’s influence on my tastes and preferences.

_{Rob/Val is an obsessive reader and frequent contributor to Bookspot Central with the bad habit of telling other people about the books he reads.}

    
Tobias Buckell - When I’m reading I tend to enjoy world-building the most. Some of my favorite novels include wild settings that the characters then navigate, and there are often novels that are well written but with familiar tropes/worlds that I get bored with easily because that sense of ‘newness’ and exploration don’t strike me.

Some of my favorite novels, as a result, are Dune, Rendezvous With Rama, The Integral Trees, Eon, and more recently Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder, and Memory, by Linda Nagata, a book that I really wish had gotten more attention because its just so full of awesome.

I also tend to like first books of series more than their follow ups due to this inclination, as often a new place to explore doesn’t get trotted out in the next book.

_{Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the US, and the British Virgin Islands. He now lives (through many strange twists of fate) in a small college town in Ohio with his wife, Emily. Buckell was a first place winner for the Writers of the Future, and has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Nebula Award. He is also a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop. You can visit him at TobiasBuckell.com}

    
Peter Rios – I blame my entire reading experience – be it comics, novels, fiction, non-fiction, cook books or Chick Tracts – on Clifford the Big Red Dog, Greek Mythology, Super Fudge and Richie Rich.

I’m serious.

I’ve learned over the years from my family that I was constantly reading as a kid. My older sister is seven years older than me. My younger sister is seven years younger than me. For the longest time, I was the middle child of five kids (before my youngest sister was born putting my family at six siblings). So this created a sort of emptiness around me as to sharing hobbies, playtime, etc. with any of my siblings. So I had to make my own entertainment. And that was reading.

My strongest memories include reading Clifford the Big Red Dog and readily accepting the situation of a giant red dog given in those wonderful short stories followed by my discovery of Greek Mythology in an elementary school library. There was a beautiful big red (!) book on the subject full of what seemed to be color-penciled drawings of the various Greek heroes, legends, monsters and more. This was not a children’s readers version, this had all the decapitations, all the baby-swallowing, all the death and misery that comes with the mythology. And I loved every minute of it. On the inside cover, there was a family tree illustrated with various faces of all the characters to be found in the main portion of the book, spotlight the various connections and the ins and outs of everyone from the highest god to the lowest demon. It fascinated me to know that everything was or could be connected in some way or another. I enjoyed those secrets and the development of this magical history that helped to shape beliefs. The hero story unfolded in front of my eyes and I found that I enjoyed this storytelling.

Next came Judy Blume’s Super Fudge followed by comics, particularly Richie Rich comics. With Super Fudge, it was all about imagination, Fudge’s older brother named Peter, watching Superman the Movie and the odd bits of the story that seemed to echo my own life in one way or another especially the idea of embracing your heroes and family. And it was my older uncle who dropped in my hands a whole box of comics. I had been reading Richie Rich up to that point, so they definitely taught me how to “read” and accept comics as entertainment. And with the first group of super-hero comics from my uncle, it was all downhill from there.

So is it any wonder that when I read any work – illustrated or not – that I look for connections. Connections with my own life experiences, connections within the story, connections to other stories. I enjoy seeing how and why things relate, how they inform what I already know and why it all reveals a bigger picture. This isn’t a blanket exercise in seeing what isn’t there, it’s being wowed when those connections do appear and enjoying learning how authors are inspired, how stories continue to inspire and how the cycle keeps going like a giant family tree.

For example, in super-hero comics, I find that they are very similar to Greek Mythology in that comics seem to create their own mythology full of heroes, villains, family connections, etc. Super-hero comics are full of continuity and threads that connect and it helps to develop the larger world in a very puzzle like way. Sometimes the pieces fit, sometimes they don’t, but it’s great to keep working at it.

And with the advent of novelists coming into comics, it’s interesting to see their approaches filter through the comics medium and try and change it, push it, give it a new voice. It can frustrate some of the more strict comic readers, but for me, it just opens the medium and introduces me to new voices to follow.

It’s the challenge. The challenge to see a bigger picture when it’s available. A chance to understand where fiction comes from, where it’s at now, and speculating on its future.

That’s how I read. I accept big red animals, I worship pantheons and I have the imagination of a Fourth Grade Nothing, all of which leaves me as rich as the richest boy in the world.

_{Peter Rios is the Co-Host and Producer of the Comic Geek Speak podcast}

    
Cherie Priest - I absolutely love it when a story refuses to apologize for being what it is — and when it is willing to take itself seriously, despite a possibly hokey, obvious, or overdone premise. I have a real weakness for tales like these, whether you’re talking about superheroes, monster stories, or any other trope at which people tend to roll their eyes. T wo of my more recent favorites are World War Z by Max Brooks, and Fangland by John Marks.

World War Z is a documentary-style mosaic of assorted narratives, collecting individual stories of survival in the wake of a zombie uprising that covers and threatens the globe. With such a set-up you’d expect a corny adventure told in primary colors, but that’s not at all what you get; instead, WWZ is an earnest and sometimes heart-wrenching look at disaster, social dynamics, and politics. It’s got action, sure — and it’s got plenty of wild science and weird violence, but at the core it’s a serious story about people that’s told with hope, planning, and a very straight face. I loved the dichotomy of it — the wacky premise and the rich, thoughtful treatment.

Fangland is a postmodern retelling of Dracula, as presented through the prism of a 60 Minutes-type newsroom and its employees. I’ll grant you, I’ve been disillusioned with most of the Dracula re-dos and updates, but I took a chance on this one and I’m very glad I did so. Fangland takes the beaten-into-the-ground trope of, “Ooh, we’re going to give the count a modern makeover” and turns it into something genuinely modern, but genuinely dense and cool. The archetypes are a little bit shuffled and the setting is all new, but somehow it works — and this Victorian story set against 21st century backdrop succeeds because it’s told with such intense authenticity.

_{Cherie Priest is the author of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, and Not Flesh Nor Feathers from Tor Books, plus two titles for Subterranean Press–Dreadful Skin and Those Who Went Remain There Still (forthcoming). She has three more novels in the works, a gothic fantasy called Fathom (Tor, winter 2008) and two steampunk novels, Boneshaker (Tor, 2009) and Clementine (Subterranean, 2009). You can visit her at Cheriepriest.com}

    
Jason Wood - As someone who considers himself a voracious reader, I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about my own process; or how that might differ from others. I will say that, when reading fiction, I have a great propensity to read works by authors I’m already familiar with. That is to say if I try a new author and the work resonates, I’m quite likely to read their entire catalog shortly thereafter. Whether that’s indicative of some measure of obsessive compulsiveness or more about the comfort of already knowing what I’m getting into remains unanswered. It’s probably a little of both.

One driving force behind my ability to enjoy a work is the insistence of logic. By my nature, and my profession, logical analysis and rational reactions to said analysis are core to my being. As a result, I’m always finding myself assessing the logic of a character’s actions. My enjoyment of a work is tied to whether I think the people are acting logically. Yet, not by how I would act in that situation, but rather whether I feel they are being true to how THEY should act in my mind.

Circling back to the notion of reading multiple works by the same author, I much prefer reading works of fiction that continue to build on the characters in future volumes. Whether it be a series of detective mysteries, or my favorite comic books, or classic mythology, I LOVE reading further adventures surrounding similar people and settings. Nothing is worse than to have thoroughly enjoyed a work only to realize that it’s the last I’ll read of those characters or places. To that end, when I’m looking for new authors to try, I’m much more inclined to pick up a work that I know is already several volumes long and/or I know the author intends to continue the stories.

One last point to make, I’m prone to re-reading my most loved works. Whether it be Stephen King’s The Stand or Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s series or Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum or Melville’s Moby Dick, I have read and re-read and will no doubt re-read again these works countless times. There is no particularly rhyme or reason, although I suspect it’s at least subconsciously driven by a need to reconnect with a work I love after several books that I necessarily didn’t connect with. Almost a mental refresh of just how good fiction can be after a few clunkers.

_{Jason B. Wood is a portfolio manager by trade, but is also a passionate advocate for social media. His blog, The Ponderings of Woodrow, is an analytical and reflexive look at the economic, financial and technological developments that impact our society. A voracious reader, Jason has been collecting and reading comic books for the better part of three decades and co-hosts a comics-related podcast, 11 O’Clock Comics, with three of his friends each week.}

    
Ben Parzybok - I would imagine that much of the time people do not realize that they’re looking at things through a specific lens of perception/understanding. I’m male and white, and so certainly that impacts how I read in ways I will probably never fully grasp. I’ve also traveled a fair amount and lived overseas for enough time that I hope that that the thickness of that lens is somewhat diminished. I grew up poor – I remember one Christmas a box of food was left anonymously outside our door and the bounty in that box – cheerios! fruit leather! – was just astounding and brought my father to tears. And so certainly this also a lens I have on. Another lens that is ingrained into my personality is that I’m a westerner. I grew up in what I consider to be the real West, the West of our mythology. (in Spokane, but also bouncing between small towns in Idaho and Montana) A West outside of the bigger cities, where there’s a tremendous amount of land and a fierce sense of independence. A sense that if things don’t work out – then you pick up your caravan and move on. A sense of pushing outward at the frontier. You get this some in the cities – I live in Portland, now, and while certainly there’s a deep westernness and a weird individualism (in the best sense) in this city, there’s also the deeper vein of tolerance and community that is inherent to cities.

These are the lenses that are ingrained in me via my environment and things outside of my control. Personally I have a different set of lenses that I apply because of who I’ve become. I often skip descriptions of things. I’m rarely interested in landscape or objects – I read for the emotional plot line, listening to body language and tone of voice. This is certainly something I want to keep working on in my own work. I also love to read for fractal-like metaphors. One of my favorite writers, Murakami, seems to do this a lot: The main character may be making spaghetti, which is a metaphor for the man’s life, which is a metaphor for a period of history, and so on, and in each case the metaphor is a broader, larger replica of the original. I love when meaning telescopes out like this, whether its intended by the author or fabricated by my own brain.

_{Benjamin Parzybok is the author of the recently published Couch. He blogs at Secret.ideacog.net}

    
Damon Casporaso - I took the question and interpreted it in my own way, who would have thought. I have a bias in breaking the immersion factor of a world by referencing things in our own world. That includes, books or plays at the beginning of a chapter, a quote from someone of our world, or even using slang that comes from our language. All of these remind me that I am not in the world of the author, but rather just reading a book. One can assume that since I use my reading time to relax and remove myself from the cares of this world is why this is an issue for me. Another thing that I enjoy is a high magic world and it is probably related to that want to escape into the book. I remember being a little kid and reading the Dungeon Masters Guide as well as the Players Handbook just to look at the cool magic items and spells. This could also be tied into the fact that none of my friends or myself ever played a session of D&D so all I had to go on was reading fantasy to quench that thirst along with reading the manuals to the game.

Another issue I used to have was reading a fantasy book where it took place on Earth, just an Earth that had magic woven through it. After reading the Harry Potter books though I think I was broken of that. While I would rather read something in an author built world, I do not turn my nose up at stories that take place on Earth anymore, either part time or full time.

I also really enjoy a story with some sort of love interest, I will really put myself out there and tell you why. I was the victim of a broken heart many a times (by the same girl) in junior high and high school. For some reason this makes me really want to see that movie/book type love story work itself out. Call me soft, but. . .ok, just call me soft.

Violence does not seem to be an issue for me to read, or about sexual acts, but I am a guy should they be? I do not do gory though. I always thought growing up I would have been a doctor, that is until I found out that I can not even watch the television when they are doing surgery, or when I almost passed out in biology class. Take your pick. Also on the same thought, I do not do scary either. I have seen maybe 2 horror films in my life and go out of my way to avoid them whenever possible. Especially true life horror, like things that are not supernatural. No thank you. Maybe it had to do with me living with ghosts, ok maybe not (I do not believe in ghosts), or maybe it just had to do with me being a wuss, who knows.

_{Damon is an owner and contributor at BookSpotCentral.com}

    
Karen Miller - Reginald Hill. I remember a few years ago I was sick in bed, reading one of his novels — I believe it was Deadheads — and some particular turn of phrase he used had me sitting bolt up right feeling such a visceral pleasure from his magnificent use of words. Alas, I really was quite ill, so I don’t remember the particular phrase that so delighted me. I guess you’ll just have to read him! One phrase that is stuck in my brain forever, in a good way, comes from Ricardo Pinto’s fantasy novel The Chosen, one of the finest fantasy novels I’ve ever read. ‘He was a needle, darning in and out of sleep.’ Man, I wish I ‘d written that. Do you know what one of the greatest tests of grand language is? Being a prompt in the theater. As a prompt, you’re glued to a playscript and you hear it over and over and over and over. Sometimes it’s an agony. Sometimes you think, if I have to hear these words one more my time my ears are going to bleed. I won’t say which play that was. But sometimes you can slowly fall in love with a story that way — I’m thinking of Pinter’s Homecoming. And then there are times when the work is so perfect that you can’t possibly hear it too many times. Peter Shaeffer’s Amadeus is that play for me.

Truthfully, I can’t tell you why these elements of fiction are so important to me. All I know is that when I’m with friends talking story, I remember the people, I remember their laughter and their tears, and I remember the wonderful ways they expressed themselves.

_{Karen Miller is the author of the bestselling fantasy duology Kingmaker, Kingbreaker, the fantasy trilogy Godspeaker, and the bestselling tie-in novels Stargate SG-1: Alliances and Stargate SG-1: Do No Harm. last year she wrote Wild Space a Star Wars: Clone Wars novel. Writing as K.E. Mills she is the author of the Rogue Agent series. You can visit her at Karenmiller.net.}

    
Matt Denault - One aspect of fiction that I tend to focus on and appreciate is the sense of play intrinsic to the very unreality of fiction, the delight in human imagination that comes from knowing participation in the creation of a fictional story (in my case, via completing the loop of the story’s creation as a reader and occasional reviewer). On a large scale, that of story groups and genres, this is part of why I enjoy fantastic and speculative fiction, which make no bones about their unreality; it is part of why I enjoy meta-fiction, stories about the creation of story; it’s part of why I enjoy postmodern fiction, which suggests that all we have are stories. I don’t read fiction because I expect it to be “realistic,” as that word is usually understood; that’s what journalism is for. Rather, I read fiction because I expect it to be true to our unique and marvelous human need to imagine and share stories.

At the level of individual stories, my focus on the joy of imagining leads me to enjoy those works that make evident that an author is at play; for example, those that feel structured and architected to set up interesting or unusual themes, conflicts, and dramatic situations. However grim and dour the story situation may be — or however complicated the choice between multiple positive possibilities — we can tell that the author enjoyed imagining it and bringing it about in the story. Similarly, I enjoy a strong sense of narrative presence, unreliable or otherwise, that makes plain that a story is being told. This appreciation is also part of why I enjoy elements of prose such as simile and metaphor: these encapsulate the essence of story, how saying that one thing is something else, or is two things at once, can be (or seem) impossible, and yet be true and revelatory in their wondrous connections. Somewhat more prosaically, my appreciation for the sense of play intrinsic to story leads me to appreciate stories that include scenes of play, of games and fun, or that incorporate puzzles for the reader.

These are some of the elements of story that delight me when I encounter them, yet often I see many of them called pretentious, elitist, or simply unrealistic. Allow me to suggest an alternate interpretation: they are there to evoke delight, to be enjoyed, and to communicate a sense of hope in people’s ability to imagine

_{Matt Denault has reviewed SF&F for BookSpotCentral, and Strange Horizons.}

Jay Tomio – Once again, I want to thank everybody you see above, and several you don’t! Be on the lookout for the next edition of Synergy in February!

    His first idol was Andrew Jackson. He knew the vertical dart between the brows, the jutting chin, the narrow mouth; he knew the windblown coif that perched atop the great man’s forehead like a bird’s nest on a lonesome crag. Jackson’s face was fixed in a somewhat neutral expression and T. spent long hours trying to decide if it suggested idle speculation or a slight annoyance.

    Running his fingers over the faded gray lithograph he imagined the once-president, a moment before the portraitist captured his aspect, being taken aback by a gently unpleasant sight: a horse dropping slow, deliberate pats in front of a government building, for instance, or a manservant picking his nose. But his opinion of Jackson was not diminished by this vision; rather he admired the great man for his composure in the face of the trivial. No passing insult could compel him to emote.

    Jackson’s grave and finely etched countenance came to him in moments of anxiety and calmed his heart. And from Jackson he moved on to Hamilton, whose face was fraught with nobility and feminine grace despite a nose that was far from small. Hamilton had a homosexual way about him that lent an air of refinement to the ten-dollar bill. Jackson, on the more valuable twenty, nonetheless became a ruffian by comparison; Jackson was a more primitive version of the American statesman, a rudimentary model waiting to be superceded by gayer men with cleaner fingernails.

     When he finally learned that Hamilton had, in fact, predeceased Jackson he was still not dissuaded in this. History often stumbled.

     His allegiance to Hamilton lasted for several months. At times he found himself ranking the girls in his class on a scale of one to ten in terms of their resemblance to the former soldier of the Republic. None came close, he lamented; still he saw a trace of Hamilton’s light eyes in the plump face of Becky Spivak and his well-turned mouth on Gina Grosz, a victim of rosacea.

     He needed a trace of the venerable and the upright close to him, in the grainy and familiar everyday. If he could detect an edge of arrogant pride in a skinny girl at a swim meet, say, jiggling a bare foot in the bleachers as she stared coolly at the other swimmers, he was pleased; he was reminded of the potential for all shackled beasts to break from their bonds and rise, their ragged wings beating, into the stratosphere. He clung to a vision of forward motion, the breath of hope that could lift individuals into posterity. He told himself every day of this latent capacity for eminence among humans, to the untrained eye so often hard to see. Rise, my sister! Rise, my brother! Soar.

     Great institutions and the tall columns and white soaring domes that stood for them—these seemed to him the crowning achievement of his kind. Authority inspired him, resting along the eye-lines and in the closed mouths of the long-deceased statesmen. The bills themselves he preferred soft and worn, for when they were freshly pressed they seemed nearly counterfeit. He kept the proceeds from his paper route under his pillow and would touch them before he went to sleep and check for them first thing in the morning when he awoke, sliding a hand between the cool mattress and the weight of his head.

     His mother knew the currency was sacrosanct and after she changed the sheets would replace the pile of bills with care precisely where she had found it. He was six when he started hiding the stash there at night, and at first there had been misunderstandings; once she left the cash on a bookshelf, open to the elements. Upon its discovery T. was horrified. The bills were naked as babes.

     Their confrontation ended in bitter tears and his father was summoned.

     “I get to keep it under there. I get to keep it right there! She tried to put it out there by itself! She can’t take it!”

     “But honey,” said his mother, “I’m not trying….”

     “Angela, let the boy keep his money wherever he likes.”

     As a younger boy, when his allowance was a mere five a week—a single Lincoln, deformed giant with heavy brows and long ears, or five Washingtons with their sly sideways glance—he had a habit of secreting coins on his person, a thick and powerful quarter lodged under his tongue or discreet dimes tucked into the cheek pouches. He never swallowed and he never choked.

     “Such a dirty habit,” said his mother regularly. “Do you realize how many strangers have touched those coins? Bacteria!”

     He did not dignify this with a response.

     Many times she tried to engage him in more serious discussions, for clearly his fascination with the coin of the realm struck her as unhealthy—though not, strictly speaking, un-American. Both she and his father had extolled the virtues of financial institutions since he first started sucking on nickels, but it was only around his eighth birthday, during a brief early flirtation with Grover Cleveland, that he saw for the first time there might be a percentage in it for him.

     She broached the subject in the kitchen, leaning across the table to inspect a stack of pennies beside his cereal bowl as he spooned up puffed wheat, then sitting back to cock her neat, honey-blond head and smile at him.

     Beside her his father sat gazing absently out the window, twirling a toothpick between thumb and index finger.

     “I just wonder, sweetie, why you feel the need to have the money with you all the time. On your person. I mean no one’s going to steal it from you, T., if you put it away somewhere. You could keep it all in a piggybank, or something.”

     “A piggybank? Are you kidding me?”

     “What, T.?”

     “Talk about sitting ducks.”

     “No one’s going to break in, T. We have a security system! So it’s just your father and me. Don’t you know you can trust us? Why would I steal from my own little boy?”

     “It’s money,” said T.

     “I would never steal from you, honey. Neither would your daddy.”

     “That’s right, T. I’ve got way richer guys than you to steal from.”

     T. fixed on his father a stern and unwavering eye.

     “Just kidding, son.”

     “How about this: your dad can open a savings account just for you, at the bank. How about that, T.? Your money will be perfectly safe there.”

     “What if I put all my savings in the bank and a robber comes in?”

     His father placed the toothpick carefully on the beige tabletop and reached over to grasp him firmly by the shoulder.

     “Banks are insured against theft, buddy. It’s called the FDIC. So Bonnie and Clyde or not, you’re guaranteed to get your money back. The one damn thing the feds are good for, by God.”

     “David! Language.”

     His father rolled his eyes.

     “Well….” He eyed them both sidelong. “Maybe if you put some in there for me and it doesn’t all get stolen? Then maybe I’ll put mine in too.”

     They exchanged knowing glances that said: such sweet and see-through attempts at extortion! But they did not have the last laugh, for in subsequent weeks T. made several appearances at his mother’s book club meetings, hosted in the sitting room, where the ladies sipped daintily at rose hip tea leaving their freshly bought copies of Brideshead Revisited uncracked upon the coffee table. When he was called upon to return a greeting from one of them—“Well T.! Aren’t you a big man now!”—he would carefully, with a few gagging head pokes like a cat vomiting, open his mouth and rain a wet spew of coins into his cupped hands.

     Soon afterward his father made a modest deposit in his name. The account grew steadily as he tucked away the proceeds from lemonade stands, pet-sitting assignments, driveway car washes, charity walkathons, and occasionally the lowball resale of items appropriated from neighbors or relatives who had incurred his displeasure. His father tolerated his commercial dealings; his mother was more suspicious.

     “You told Mrs. Hitchens you were doing a March for Hunger,” she said once. “She told me after Mass. She said she pledged twenty cents a mile.”

     “Hitchens, Hitchens.…” he mused, stalling.

     “It was either a March for Hunger or it wasn’t.”

     “It was definitely a March for Hunger.”

     “She said you billed her for ten dollars. Fifty miles, T.?”

     “It was over a period of several days.”

     “When did you walk fifty miles?”

     “Over, you know. A period of several days. There was a bunch of us from school. We did laps on the track.”

     “Hmm.”

     “Well, we kind of counted gym class. For a couple of weeks. Double-tasking made it more efficient.”

     “I see. And how much money did you raise, T.?”

     “Like a hundred forty.”

     “All of you, T.? Or just you?”

     “Just me.”

     “For hunger, T.? Who’s so hungry suddenly?”

     “Children, Mom. OK? In Africa. Just for one example. What is this, now you don’t like giving to the needy? You’re supposed to be a Catholic!”

     “So you’re telling me that all one-hundred and forty dollars went to a group that helps starving children? That’s what you’re telling me?”

     “All the funds went to children. Yes. They did.”

     Cheerful and popular, he was also cocky. He did not hesitate to punish adults as he saw fit; he remembered slights and took particular exception to condescension. His youth was no reason to presume him stupid, for stupidity was not the province of the young alone, as he himself had observed through careful study. Indeed there were millions of frail elderly gentlemen, slope-shouldered, weary, and brimful of gravitas, who despite their dignified appearance were dumb as a shot put.

     His own grandfather on his mother’s side struck him as one of these: the poor old fellow was a half-deaf Ukrainian who had immigrated to Florida not long after the war but never mastered English, and who, when he visited them, struggled around the neighborhood feebly waving his walking stick at fast-moving children and cursing at cars in his incomprehensible native tongue. T. tried to treat him with kindness, if not exactly the respect his mother said he deserved; but the codger constantly stymied his attempts at pretend deference, be it through glaringly obvious pee stains on his tan corduroys, a chronic inability to count out change, or the total opacity of the old man’s blithering rage, which delivered itself in seemingly random outbursts of strange syllables.

     He did not rejoice in this—far from it. He liked things to be as they appeared. The young were at least smooth-skinned and straight; the old were flabby and wrinkled. At least, he thought, they should pony up some piece of timeless wisdom to make up for their wretchedness: yet most shambled from breakfast to bedtime in the same dumb state that had taken them through adolescence. A fair number had grown up quite simply dimwits, and stubbornly remained so even in their dotage. He wanted to venerate them, for with their lined faces and dignified bearing they reminded him of august men of state. But then they spoke.

     On the neighborhood black market he was known to have sold purloined bottles of liquor, a dog-eared copy of The Joy of Sex, Super Plus size tampons (a novelty item that inspired great speculation among the local boys), brassieres, and once a Polaroid of Adam Scheinhorn’s naked sister. Her eyes were small as currants in a bleached-white face but the rest of her was so clear that fingers trembled as they held the photo, pinching the frame along the very edge. Oh yes: he knew where value lay.

     Although he learned to put the lion’s share in the bank, throughout high school he also kept a small safe in his room. And on occasions when he felt rebuffed, when he perceived an insult or failed at something he had desperately tried, he would retire there and carefully remove the portion of his stash he always kept nearby. With hands in latex gloves he soothed himself by counting out rare dollar bills—the two, for instance—and old coins that were prized by collectors, including many dark and brittle rounds dating from Roman times. These he would remove from his safe in ritualized style and lay out on a sheet of newspaper spread across his desk, in strict order from least value to most.

     And it was not only the ritual, not merely the repetitious and the pious act of counting that afforded him comfort. He liked to hold and see the legal tender and then bend his head and close his eyes, the metal or the paper in his hands. He would order himself to concentrate until his jaw was aching from clenched teeth and his eyes beneath his eyelids almost hurt; in the still room both his ears would ring and he would feel himself reeling, as though in one position, bowed over his deck, he hurtled through a static night. He reeled, he reeled: he might disintegrate: his mind was pulsing like a heart.

     After such effort he was spent.

     One of his lowest moments in high school came at the hands of a friend’s mother. The friend was Perry, short for Pericles, who was not a first-order friend but one of the less fortunate (prominent teeth, flood pants) to whom he granted favors in exchange for services rendered. They were playing Donkey Kong when Perry’s mother entered the bedroom.

     At first she made small talk, distracting them from Donkey Kong but failing to penetrate; finally she dropped the pretense and called T. away for what she called a “private chat.” Perry rolled his eyes and seemed ashamed, but did not have the upper hand. His mother ushered T. hastily out the door, whereon a large poster of Captain James T. Kirk was boldly tacked, and into the nearby laundry room. There she shut the door behind them, began to fold towels with agitated precision, and asked him in a whisper where he got off, as she put it, “taking” Perry’s allowance money.

     T. nipped this in the bud with a quick denial, but she persisted. Though Perry said he was giving the twenty dollars weekly to T. in exchange for protection from various jocks who had it in for him, she did not think it was “fair” for T. to “extort money on that basis.”

     “It’s more than fair,” said T. “Before I stepped in, Perry got beat up like twice a month. One time they broke a tooth. He had to get new braces and a crown. You don’t remember that? I mean how much did that run you?”

     “The point is, if you’re friends he shouldn’t be paying you for helping him. It’s something you do for your friends for free. Friends help each other, T.”

     “I’d like to do it at no charge to Perry,” said T. firmly. “I really would. Believe you me. And in a perfect world I could. But here’s the situation: I’m not the problem. I’m the middleman here. Those dollars go straight to the guys who were doing the beatings. In return, they keep their hands off your son.”

     “But T.—”

     “Mrs. G., we were lucky they took the deal at all. I mean, they really like beating on him, Mrs. G. It’s basically all they’ve got to live for. They didn’t want to take the bribe at first, but I convinced them. So now they target other kids instead. But if we stop paying them—especially now we’ve had this gentlemen’s agreement and everything was going smoothly—they’ll boomerang on him. They have this thing they do with locker doors? He could lose the use of his pinkies.”

     “If it’s that serious, T., Perry’s father and I should just take it up with the school administration, or maybe the parents of those reprobates who like to hurt innocent little boys.”

     “Sure you could. But I would advise against that, Mrs. G. It would be like killing Perry. I mean socially. It would get out that you had to go in there for him and everyone would be saying one word to him: L, O, S, E, R. Loser, Mrs. G.”

     “I can spell too.”

     “He might not take as many physical beatings, that’s true, but the psychological scars would be lasting.”

     She stared at him, annoyed, gaping slightly, one hand on a stack of towels. He looked her in the eye, affecting an earnest concern for Perry’s wellbeing. In fact the jocks in question had been easy to convince and now received a mere five a week.

     “You’re a slick little bastard,” she said finally, picking up the towels and turning her back on him. She walked out of the laundry room and slammed the door behind her.

     He waited for a few seconds after her leave-taking, drawing deep breaths. Then he summoned his pride, squared his shoulders, and followed.

     In the main there was seldom a reckoning, seldom any conflict. In his early adolescence what impressed him most often was the willingness of people to be fleeced—the ease, almost the gratitude with which they surrendered their assets. On his block, at least, where the housewives had expensive hair and his mother was the sole Catholic, his many good works appeared to offer a welcome relief from the mall and the salon. Almost monthly he collected for the United Way, the Boy Scouts of America, the YMCA or sometimes a church group conducting outreach to the poor and unfortunate. He always dedicated a percentage of the take to the cause at hand: so his efforts, if not entirely selfless, yielded what he liked to call a “positive net effect.”

     And this was the language he used in the confessional, which he visited at intervals to keep his mother happy. His father, once he recovered from a brief but intense bout of spirituality around the time of the wedding, had declined to set foot in the church. This seemed to sadden his mother, and T. felt it was his duty to take up the slack. He was not hesitant to disclose all his activities; for after all, he reasoned, the priest was bound to observe the sanctity of the confessional and must be quite a sound businessman himself, for the local diocese alone had assets in the hundreds of millions. Indeed he was surprised when the priest did not laud him for his strategies.

     “I can’t believe you’re penalizing me. My economic activities have a positive net effect on the community as a whole,” he repeatedly staunchly, when he was set the heavy penance of ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.

     “They would have a greater ‘net effect’ if you refrained from lying and stealing, Thomas,” said the priest gently.

     T. shook his head. “That’s what we call looking at the glass half empty.”

     When he recalled those years it was in brief flashes; there was no continuous line but only a few vivid moments. His mother back then was different from the mother he left when he went to college. When he got home after school she was always in the house, a steady glowing fixture. She smiled and was interested in him; she had soft pictures of the Virgin on the wall, some of them holding a baby Jesus T. believed might be a stand-in for him.

     She wore a large crucifix beneath the hollow of her throat, which T.’s friends from school decried as “weird” and “foreign.” Their own churches and mothers were unadorned and in their living rooms there were few pictures of anything but water lilies and fall leaves, flocks of geese flying over farmhouses in rolling country.

     But they liked his mother and afforded her a certain respect, for she was pretty and kind and discreet. She welcomed the boys into the kitchen with sodas and lemonade in spring and hot drinks in the winter, and there she drew them into peaceful conversation but never kept them too long. All in all she seemed mainly concerned with her son’s happiness.

     His father commuted into the city for work and returned quite late at night on weekdays; he was dense and silent in the house on weekends, rarely seeking out others to speak to them. He watched sports and worked in the yard and the garage; he always seemed to be turning away to what occupied him. Later T. remembered mainly the sight of his back.

     As he grew up his love became sophisticated. He no longer needed to touch coins or bills; he found his satisfaction in surges of energy, in the stream of contact between machines that processed binary. He learned to like abstract money better than its physical body. The solid house that money built sheltered him and he felt keenly that money was both everything and nothing, at once infinite, open potential and an end in itself.

     Money was commerce and the movement of broad arms. It was how, in the great halls of trade and public service, the walls were so thick that sound could not penetrate and the foundations so strong an earthquake could barely move them. There was the honor and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within—and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums. He gazed upon the paintings steadily and for a moment thought he knew their private beauty as his own, as though it had only ever meant the same thing once, to him and him alone: and as he turned away he felt a hush of air rise in the corridors.

     There was the noble trace of money in the half-imagined bodies of the dinosaurs, looming with arched necks in the shadowed halls of natural history museums, the back-lit shapes of toothy deep-sea fish brought up from dark fathoms below; money in the shining link between the Treasury Building and the aircraft that flew across the continent, the trains that ran through mountain towns, the cabins perched among the pines. There was money in the grandeur of the ranks of the imperial armies as they might march across the deserts underneath the skies, in the great thick cables that ran beneath the surging Atlantic, the intricate and freezing satellites that whirred a thousand miles above the surface of the earth, displaying all the ingenuity and subtlety of humankind as their metal veins ran silver in the moon’s reflected light. It was the alchemy of money then, the shivering power of its quiet numerals, the wish of money that was such a clear command.

     Currency infused all things, from the small to the monolithic. And to be a statesman the first thing needed was not morals, public service, or the power of rhetoric; the first thing needed was money. Because finally there was always a single answer. As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun, as women lived outward and men walked in insulation to the end of their lives: when all was said and done, from place to place and country to country, forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free.

     Of having private gluts of feeling, holding his secrets close, and seeming all the while the whitest of white bread; of being perfectly opaque and seeming transparent; of being merely well-informed and shrewd while seeming like a prodigy—he was guilty of all of these and in all of them excelled.

     By the time he left home to attend college in a small town in North Carolina he had amassed sufficient funds for an account with a discount brokerage firm. He attended classes in deference to the wishes of his parents but all the while his real work was day trading. He was always discreet, and few knew of his enterprise; when he had losses he did not reveal them and of course his wins went unheralded also, which gave him on some days an air of quiet satisfaction.

     The stiff discipline of discretion was part of his training. It was crucial, he believed, to learn which aspects of his character to make available to sight and which to keep hidden. Honesty was seldom the best policy in social intercourse; and when it was invoked as an ideal, he felt, it merely reflected a childish desire for pure simplicity in matters of personal trade. Those who claimed shriekingly that honesty was a sovereign virtue were in fact merely fearful of the complex.

     No, honesty was useful chiefly within the confines of the self, where careful scrutiny of successes, failures, victories and losses was necessary for progress.

     He joined his father’s old fraternity—less out of enthusiasm than to be respectful of his father and ensure his continued goodwill—and there became treasurer and then vice president. He lost no time in making himself well-liked with the fraternity brothers, and while he did not reveal his dealings in the stock market to them he did include them now and then in other less significant undertakings. Quite soon they came to know him as a skillful card counter who graced the blackjack tables of Atlantic City and Foxwoods when he could find time to drive north for the weekend. Typically he invited a few brothers to accompany him, and they told tales of his acumen back at the frat house.

     Both men and women tended to admire him, for he practiced a kindly reserve that invited affection but discouraged any more intimate advance. Men were comfortable with this, relieved by how little he asked, and women deemed him enigmatic and sought out his favors. But he did not want a girlfriend, nor was he willing to engage in the forced aggression and later awkwardness of one-night stands. Instead he held himself apart.

     On evenings when his peers partook too liberally of spirits he alone remained sober, a reassuring presence on the edge of the revels. He was never too close for comfort nor too far away to spring into action, and so could always be looked to for the rapid solution of problems ranging from the merely distasteful (Ian Van Heysen’s dramatic episode of incontinence in the Kappa house dining room) to the outright felonious (Ian Van Heysen’s exuberant vandalism of townie cars during Pledge Week). It was T. who quietly confiscated the keys of brothers unfit to drive, who deftly staunched the flow of blood from flesh wounds caused by gleeful unrestraint; it was he who politicked behind the scenes to dissuade frivolous accusations of date rape, negotiated truces with disgruntled neighbors and bored campus police. It was he who took in hand forlorn and suddenly shameful users of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide who skulked in basement corners, scraping at their sturdy wrists with plastic knives from the dining room and posturing self-murder.

     On one occasion Van Heysen, whose father was a tobacco mogul and major donor to the cancer ward of the university hospital, became fleetingly convinced of his own lack of worth and threatened to dispatch himself by jumping off the roof of the university’s observatory. This was in the small hours of a mild spring morning, following a laser light show set to music. During the show—chiefly intersecting colored lines projected onto the dome of the observatory, which at other times displayed the constellations of the northern night sky—Ian had drunk a fifth of whiskey and chased it with unspecified pills. T. sat with him on the edge of the roof as he mulled over the decision, keeping a firm hand on his shoulder. Even the fact that the roof of the observatory was a mere twenty feet off the ground, above an oleander hedge, did not completely dispel the urgency of the situation.

     After the worst had passed Ian dried his eyes and spoke of philosophy.

     “It’s like, the world is awesome? And also it sucks.”

     “I know exactly what you mean,” said T., nodding and consulting his watch. The Tokyo markets were already closing.

     “Sometimes I wish I was like a peasant or a farmer. Like in Guatemala.”

     “Trust me, Ian. You don’t wish that.”

     “But it’s like, things would be way easier. You just get up and eat beans and then you work all day, like, hoeing shit. Whatever. Then at the end of the day you’re all tired and sweaty and you just take a hot shower and crash.”

     “I’m not sure you’d like the part in the middle there, Ian.”

     “I’m just liked so tired of, I don’t know. Everything.”

     “It’s tough sometimes. Isn’t it.”

     “I have this one dream where my father is a gigantic building? It doesn’t look like him but it is. It’s all gray and gigantic. He’s like a skyscraper in Manhattan. And in the corner of the dream, where no one ever sees it, is this tiny, like, shining mouse. And the mouse, T., get this. The mouse is actually Jesus Christ.”

     “Whoa. Slow down there, Mr. Deep.”

     “I wrote a song about it. It’s called ‘Jesus Squeaks.’ ”

     When they left the roof they were applauded by brothers in the parking lot below. Ian went drinking with them and T. went to sleep.

     He was useful to his small society, and few fraternity brothers who had benefited from his clear thinking could forget it quickly. Sorority girls whose soft, still-shaking hands he had held gently as he persuaded them not to file charges remembered him not with resentment but with tender respect, and Ian Van Heysen, Sr. had been known to show his gratitude to T. with gifts of cognac and Cubans sent by courier.

     That he was mature beyond his years was obvious; and while they placed their trust in him they also knew he stood apart from them, too rigidly controlled to mix his solemn molecules with theirs. He was a father their own age, claiming the loyalty of all and the passion of none.

     But while others looked to the present for their pleasures—holding these four years to be both their first and their last gasp of freedom—he looked to the life beyond, past the confines of the fraternity house with its dusty oak wainscoting, the campus buildings with their wide lawns and white porticos, and the small college town with its crowded hilly streets and dogwoods that bloomed so cloudily in spring.

     He saw beyond what there was, and in the not-yet-existent imagined a great acceleration.

     His parents visited one weekend in October and once in April, always at the same time. His father liked to attend an annual old boys’ fundraiser for the fraternity and his mother liked to pick up an iced tea at the cafeteria and then wander at a leisurely pace through the campus’s Botanical Gardens, holding her purse and gazing at the magnolia trees. She would point at the small, old-fashioned signs on their tidy stakes in the earth, which bore in careful lettering the names of tropical and subtropical plants—Ricinus communis (Christ’s Palm), Alonsoa incisifolia (Devil’s Rattle)—and say how gracious were the stalks, how beautiful the leaves and languid the flowers. As she said this she would bend her head and a wishful tone would come into her voice. Watching her he saw how she envied the plants, so peaceful in the shade, so smooth and green and cool. They grew there and they died there.

     And while his father, as he aged, grew stiffer and more pointed, almost an exaggeration of his younger self, his mother quietly faded. Her warmth rose like vapor and left a still surface; and later, when she had forgotten everyone she knew and even her own name, he would think back to these college gardens and how she had loved them. “I could live here,” she would say, as he walked beside her in the dappled shade and they looked down at irises and lazily floating wasps. “Here, right here, in the waterfalls and the ferns.” She had grown up in a southern climate and the winters were long in Connecticut.

     He endured the visits only to see her, to know how she was faring and to try to elicit from her some spark of vigor. For her sake he would stand awkwardly by while his father toured the fraternity, always with a jocular handshake for the sons of old peers, always with what seemed to T. like a desperate and transparent need to be one of the boys again. But the chill of his mother’s absence was steadily deepening. Stepping out of the rental car after the drive from the airport she had a measure of distraction in her gaze, as though her true allegiance was elsewhere while she kept this trivial but mandatory appointment.

     And yet she had nothing else; she had no other appointments.

     Whenever his mother was visiting he took her to the town’s only Catholic church for Sunday Mass, and for her devotions every evening when the church was empty. She went to church more now that he was gone, she told him. Once they sat in a pew near the front, and he watched her face as she looked up at the stained glass, where Jesus was pictured in a triptych. On one side he was an infant in the arms of his mother; on the other he was greeting Mary again in his thirty-fourth year, on the way to Golgotha bowed down under the weight of the cross.

     In the tall, central window he was crucified and dying. His crown of thorns had been jauntily fashioned, thought T., bored and ruminating. His knees bled in perfect symmetry.

     “Look at the Blessed Virgin,” whispered his mother. “Look at her eyes. Her face is sad even when he’s a baby. You see? It’s just as sad as it is in the fourth station, when she meets him going to be crucified. She’s always sad, sad and wise. The sadness on the Via Dolorosa is the part I’ve never believed.”

     “You don’t believe she was sad?”

     “A mother wouldn’t be sad if she saw her son in the street like that. On the way to his death at the hands of tyrants, and suffering? With blood running down his face from the terrible thorns? Even if she knew it was for the glory of God and for the salvation of every soul the heavens could ever hold. A mother would never be sad, T. A mother would be screaming.”

     “But she wasn’t any mother. She was the mother of God. Wasn’t she?”

     “Even the mother of God. There’s only one explanation, dear. The Blessed Mother was serene because she was gone. The second she saw him like that she was gone forever.”

     The next morning his parents left for the airport, his mother clutching her purse close to her side. She kissed him quickly on both cheeks before she got into the rental car, her lips cool.

     When he was a toddler, a young boy, even an adolescent she had fastened to his every act: how urgent her love had been, how full. There had been no difference between them, his mother and a refuge.

     But in the past few years her interest had diminished until it seemed almost to equal her interest in other persons, until he was merely another among them. In ceasing to be a child, he thought, he had disappointed her so fully that she came to believe he was someone else entirely. With this new person she could have civil conversations; with this person she could walk, eat, or drive. But he was no longer hers and due to that she was no longer his either.

     Falling asleep at night or walking down a deserted street, craning his neck to look up at the dizzying stars, he made his mind busy by leaving the present behind and situating himself in a moment that was yet to be. As a child he had lived in the present; now he lived in the future; soon, how soon he would live in the past, an older man nostalgic and nodding.

     And yet each was its own delight, each relation to time. In the first long moment of life nothing was recognized beyond the present; there was no past to look back to and no idea of the future yet. In the second moment the present was shed in favor of a future that hovered but never arrived, the promise of a realized self; and then that moment passed too. In the third moment, as life declined, the future disappeared, the present was diminished, and all that remained was the past. He was now in the lucky moment of forwardness—this time now—where seeing the future dawn was how he was sustained.

     Step forward, he told himself, step, step, step, daily into the night, nightly into the day! The unknown shimmers there. There was a paradise still to come.

     He might wonder how much velocity should guide him and how much calculation; he might wonder this with deliberation, a delicious mulling. It was part of the reward to dwell on strategy. Then, for a moment, it would strike him that the future was sad.

     He had already lost something, and in any future it would still be missing—if not his mother’s love, then the fierceness of it. It could not be called back.

     But by the square light of day he did not dwell on this or even recall it. Fleetingly it would come to him, as he did something else: not all things could be perfectly arranged; not all things were correctible.

     This gave him a start of recognition. Then it passed.

     During his four years in college—his only vices coffee, a stiff scotch and soda some evenings before dinner, and the occasional cigar—he produced the results he desired, and was gratified to see how effort and control could yield steady returns. This was no myth; it was a law of nature.

     He studied the words of Adam Smith and William Jennings Bryan and even J. Paul Getty, the parent of such phrases as “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.” He read old texts with great pleasure, particularly those written by certain stalwart Puritans whose parsimony seemed born of a voluptuous and secret greed. He combed through the texts for signs of this sinful covetousness—a pornography of spirit, for nothing was more of a guilty pleasure than the greed of those who believed themselves righteous. He enjoyed the sermons of clergymen like John Wesley, whom he understood to have advised his flock it was by definition quite impossible to serve their God and mammon both—much as no color could be at once pure black and white—and thus no qualms of ethics should stand in the way of a good Christian man who wished to amass great wealth.

     Surely little remained of the Puritan legacy of prudish rectitude, he thought: surely this was now a country of excess, gluttony, lust, and sloth; surely this had grown into a land where obesity reigned and even the poor moved ponderously down the street on big thighs that rubbed fatly together. What had become of the pilgrims’ gaunt and stingy oversight? He knew in part it was the visionary genius of enterprising men, but such entrepreneurs were only the tools of a hungry culture. For the descendants of those gray, upright pioneers had cherished cravings for beef patties with ketchup, deep-fried chicken and vats of ice cream, chemically scented and dyed all the colors of the rainbow, and billions upon billions of gallons of soda. Their thirst had never been quite slaked and so they never finished drinking; and this was the market in all its streamlined functionality—which, precisely where the supply and the demand curves crossed, had swiftly produced a nation of paralyzed giants, fallen across their couches much as soldiers on the field of battle, their arteries hard, their softened hearts failing.

     The market made a fool of you by giving you what you wanted. But this did not make him resent it; it merely earned his respect. From the day you were born you were called upon to discern what to choose.

     If Ian Van Heysen and the other brothers did not often show him that capacity he had so treasured a mere ten years before—namely the tending of all people toward the enigmatic greatness suggested by a dollar bill—they could not be blamed for it. There were times when he stooped to irritation; that he should be the steward of such a wayward flock was occasionally a burden.

     But they were children with handicaps, though these handicaps were not always visible: ease, abundance, overstimulation. He thought of their tendencies toward indolence and abuse as a temporary run through the gauntlet of privilege; they would grow out of their puckishness all too soon. For they were correct in believing this was their last hurrah, and most of them would age fast once the halls of the university pulled away behind them. He himself was disposed to a persistent cheerfulness that flew in the face of his rationality; he knew how fortunate he was. He had always been purposeful. But he could see in the faces of others how many were not so disposed, and likely never would be.

     Before the rest of life there were hijinks, the joys of brash ignorance and selfishness. But he did not begrudge them their entertainment. It was increasingly clear to him that the company of straight men was seldom a pleasure for other straight men. What the fraternities offered was a last gasp of boyhood before the assumption of a purely adult identity, one that for most would bring loneliness. To each other men were useful mostly for business: and it was through their ranks that he must move on his forward trajectory, for they held the reins. But most of them lacked important social skills beyond the manipulation of power; most were unable to muster even the pretense of intimacy with others of their gender. This was particularly true among the wealthier classes, where, absent a clear oppressor, there was little need for solidarity.

     Moreover most men, he suspected, agreed with him, though they seldom admitted it. Their peers were largely competitors; their wives became all they knew, socially. This was why after they married they rarely looked beyond their houses again, unless it was for the purpose of changing wives. Meanwhile, at their sides but otherwise occupied, the wives maintained a wide array of friends.

     And it became clear to him that his early mentors—the founders, the dead sages of the judiciary—did not have modern counterparts in government. The great roofs that had sheltered them were raised now not over heads of state but over the motile geniuses of corporate novelty; these men now wore the mantles formerly worn by the fathers of the nation-state. They held up economies and reshaped them at will. After the robber barons had come the technophile visionaries, the practical philosophers of earning, and they, not the government men, were the new kingmakers.

     He read their bestsellers.

     Meanwhile the discipline of watching stocks, keeping up with his classes and managing the welfare of his peers kept him busy, and he was seldom melancholy. And if, when he was roasted along with his fellow fraternity officers shortly before graduation, he felt slightly needled by the remarks about his stodginess, the allusions to Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons, the denigration of his manhood implied by such terms as monk and eunuch in reference to his lack of prurient interest in the fairer sex, he gave no evidence of such. He laughed at every boyish jab and raised his tumbler of Glemorangie from his seat at the head table, and when the fraternity president dealt him a manly clap on the shoulder during the applause he only smiled and shook his head with good humor, to say: How cleanly have the arrows met their mark.

     Five months after he left the fraternity and the small green town he made his first six-figure profit, not in fact by trading—which he would subsequently give up as a job, though not as an avocation—but by brokering the sale of a derelict apartment building.

     It was a building on a beach in south Florida, owned by an aging heiress whose long-dead father had made his fortune growing sugarcane in the Everglades; T. had met the heiress at school through his father, who had pledged with her son Brad. He visited her after graduation, out of politeness, and she offered him the commission. In this way all the hours of his indentured servitude, his careful stewardship of the brothers and many small defenses of their honor were repaid instantly.

     Shortly before the sale Brad took him on a tour of the old sugarcane plantation, where they stepped over piles of crumbling yellow brick that had once been the walls of a manor house and looked out over a soggy field of cattails. By way of explaining the recent repossession of his BMW—it had left him driving a cheap rental car for which he felt the need to apologize—Brad gestured to the canefields and said, smirking, “Big Sugar belong to Big Mama.”

     On behalf of the mother, and for a modest percentage, T. sold the building to a hotel chain at a price far beyond her original asking.

     Several weeks later the gentle old lady sank into a coma, leaving Brad crowing with glee at his suddenly liquid assets and believing firmly that T.—whom he called “this serious, intense guy,” because T. did not laugh at his jokes—had been his salvation. His patronage, and the praise he repeated in various old-boy circles, would prove vital to T.’s fledgling enterprise.

     Around the same time the nightly news was prone to show millions succumbing to famine, far away in a sandy country. More popular than the news was a sit-com about an arrogant bartender and a frigid waitress, which T. watched every week with a female neighbor. He was living near Wall Street in a bare suite of rooms in a high rise; the neighbor was an emaciated model who got into the habit of dropping by with a bottle of bad wine and a packet of good cocaine exactly five minutes before the program began. The cocaine was for her; he partook of the wine; and there was a tacit agreement for sex when the program ended. The model, doe-eyed, quiet, and with low self-esteem, made no demands on him beyond their weekly appointment. When they passed in the hallway in the days between, she slouched past him with her head down and her doe eyes averted.

     “Hey,” he said once, for an experiment. She nodded almost imperceptibly and shrank back against the wall.

     He regarded the arrangement cautiously, grateful for her favors but reluctant to take them for granted, and his caution proved well-founded. After an episode in which the bartender proposed to the waitress and was refused, and before an episode in which the waitress spied on the bartender’s date with another woman, his neighbor was found in her kitchen with open veins. The man who discovered her was apparently her boyfriend. She was carted off to rehab and would never return to the building.

     For a week or two T. watched the program alone; then he stopped. He thought of the model with remorse and slight wonder: but there was no place for him in any of it.

     He called his parents’ house a few days after she left. His mother could barely muster the energy to speak to him, preferring only to listen. This had become commonplace between them. She claimed that she liked him to call, that she wanted to hear what he was doing: but when he did call the conversation was purely one-sided. He recited a litany of his activities into the receiver, falling into a rhythm defined by her silences; for when he asked what was new in her own life he would invariably hear, “Oh, you know, dear. Nothing much.” This he would counter with a further inquiry—“Well, then, what have you been doing?”—but this would meet with the same answer, until he gave up asking. It was as though nothing much stretched through her days, nothing much united and guided them: in the whole of her experience there was never event.

     His father was always busy or sleeping or engrossed in a television show, and did not come to the phone at all.

     Soon he decided he needed a change. It would have to be New York or Los Angeles, since these were where both life and business happened; and so he moved to southern California, where he incorporated for the purpose of buying and selling real estate.

     He liked the curving drive up the rocky coast from the angels to the Franciscans, sweeping past on his left the wide-open Pacific, on his right the rolling hills of chaparral that cost a thousand dollars per square foot. He liked the fact that speculators tended to ignore the foreshortened future of the hills, their promise of imminent collapse by mudslide, quake or fire.

     And when he struck out east across the inland empire to the desert of Palm Springs, the air conditioning in his S-Class raising goose bumps on his skin, he felt a legion of tycoons riding shotgun. He could almost detect their quaint presence in gas stations along the barest stretches of the freeway. There behind the counter, where sparkles in the white formica leant an air of yesteryear, sat a disheveled Howard Hughes bent over a bottle of milk; or there beside the newspaper rack stood William Randolph Hearst, paging though a tabloid. He grew to see greatness in open space, which fostered the illusion of a last frontier; for out West, where there were few monuments to the founders of the Republic, there was instead a breathless intuition of novelty.

     At twenty-two he had an office in Santa Monica and two assistants much older than he, one in her mid-thirties, the other fifty-three. What might have seemed an awkward age discrepancy to someone of different character made no impression on him; he knew only that all the job applicants in their twenties had been incompetent. Various could not spell, add, or type, two did not remember his name after he shook their hands, and one came into the room wearing earphones, which she did not take off until several minutes after he began speaking to her; a dumpy woman with large, frizzy hair told him she enjoyed Primal Scream Therapy. If he had even briefly thought to find himself the proud employer of a secretary young, smart, coy and possibly wearing bright lipstick, this vanished when the interviews began.

     Finally he was satisfied with his choice of amanuensis; that she was almost his mother’s age was to him unworthy of note, since she was smart and came to respect his own efficiency, first in planning, then in making money. He knew that when she took the job she believed it might not last, but within weeks she trusted him and was even somewhat deferential. She hired for him a second woman, also competent, who handled contracts and bookkeeping.

     The two were quiet and kept to themselves, though on occasions such as holidays or his birthday they would step forward with small tokens. Further they sent a rare orchid on his behalf for Mother’s Day, without needing to ask; on Angela’s birthday and Christmas they delivered Bonsai trees and shiitake mushroom logs. This seemed to please her and made T. feel, for his part, that he was treating her well. He kept Susan’s and Julie’s birthdays and anniversaries of hire on record and made sure never to overlook them. He knew Susan was married and had a daughter who was in a wheelchair; he knew Julie had an old and incontinent cat named Bookchin and shunned Christmas in favor of a holiday called Kwanzaa. He had never heard of this holiday before he met her.

     “It’s a Swahili word. It celebrates the African-American community,” she told him.

     “I see,” he nodded, though he was confused since Julie was a Caucasian Protestant from Milwaukee.

     “I personally observe it as a gesture of solidarity.”

     “Very thoughtful,” he said. “Are there, uh, certain special days? Rituals?”

     “Basically it’s a harvest festival. To celebrate the crops.”

     “African-American harvest,” he said, nodding.

     She and Susan were his only intimates in the city; he trusted them, in part for their capable hands and in part for the puzzle of their willingness to labor indefinitely in menial positions, which linked them to him in a pact of loyalty.

     What wings lifted him then, what banks shored him up along the river of work? Not the mechanics of the deal: rather it was the faces and the words of those he moved through and past and with in seeking his object, the nuance of his own approach in knowing and predicting the impulses and calculations behind them, that captured his interest. In pitching his company’s plans or services it fell to him to read the tics and quirks of investors as he sat across from them in restaurants, county commissioners as he rode the elevator beside them, urban planners across tables in well-lit rooms. He caught the small tells that accompanied a lie, the fluster and the cover-up that followed an inadvertent truth, the way these varied among persons: but he was most astute in that he gave the appearance of being caught up in his own velocity when in fact his mind was carefully fixed on the other.

     Although always watchful, always wedded to the close observation of detail, he pretended otherwise. He projected a confident nonchalance, an air of serene neutrality, and with this attitude would casually make reference to vast sums. The rules for his own comportment were few and simple, and first among them was, always speak as though unimpressed by large figures; always convey the impression that the grandiose is commonplace.

     And so it will be.

     In time he planned to leave development and begin to forge a path elsewhere. It wasn’t that he needed to be well-known—he would be happy to be the gray eminence behind a publicly traded logo—more that he wanted to have a hand in the revolutions of the market itself, in the ebb and the flow. But he needed to make connections. That other people found a community easily struck him as mysterious; the city was a wide network of generic streets and buildings, among which small figures were suspended in casual segregation. The space between them was air and metal. Mainly it was air, though also concrete and sheetrock and glass.

     How was this air to be bridged?

     Finally he joined an exclusive racquet club whose monthly membership dues would have paid the rent on a small mansion; a dully middle-class clientele would be no use to him. He hired a racquetball instructor and went to the courts four or five times a week; when he was competent he wrote his name down on lists. His games were played with older men mostly, who shook his hand with a too-firm grip beforehand and afterward wore their white towels around their necks and talked to him at their lockers while they sprayed their armpits for too long with powerful deodorants. He averted his eyes from their stocky and hairy bodies as they changed, the deep tans that looked like plum-colored bruises in the hollows of their sagging chests. He walked with them out to the parking lot. One showed him a motorcycle; another tried to interest him in sex. Most had wives and girlfriends and business cards, and some of them had capital to invest.

     One of the younger players, name of Fulton, was blustering and arrogant and tried hard to impress. He spoke in jocular terms of his wife’s intimacies and wanted T. to be aware of the dimensions of his new power yacht, anchored over in the Marina, which had platinum bathroom fixtures; he made sure that T. knew the cost of his redwood cabin in Tahoe.

     “What the hell do you do for fun, man?” asked Fulton, after a game T. had played neatly but without much vigor. “All work and no play.”

     “I’m a dull boy,” said T. “Granted. But if you’ve got cash sitting around you’re not doing much with, I can make you more than a ten percent return on your money. Far more.”

     “Color me hooked,” said Fulton. “Wanna pick up a beer?”

     Over the beers T. pulled out a copy of his business plan and prospectus, at which Fulton barely glanced. He pitched the current project steadily—the purchase and renovation of an industrial park on a Superfund site—and Fulton nodded generously, though in fact, T. suspected, he understood almost nothing. But he liked to use words that implied he was in the know, and to be treated as though he was not faking it.

     Still, T. assumed it was a waste of time until three beers in.

     “Get your lawyer to write up the whole deal and fax it to my guy,” said Fulton. “But we gotta go in slow till I see what you’re made of. Few hundred K to start.”

     They stayed at the bar for some hours. T. had the nagging suspicion there was still something to be secured, details to hammer out. It had been so easy it seemed impossible. Likely the man had no money, finally, and was playing him.

     At last the drinks trailed off and it was time to go, and it dawned on T., as they walked along the sidewalk back to the parking lot, that though Fulton had almost nothing to say, what he chiefly wanted was someone to listen.

     When they reached a white Cadillac, one of a fleet of personal vehicles Fulton apparently owned, he turned the key in the ignition to show T. the dashboard in the dark, a vast expanse of red and indigo lights. Rap music blared: it turned out that Fulton, despite several racist remarks at the bar, enjoyed gangsta rap. “When I’m called off, I got a sawed off. Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off,” he recited loudly, tapping the steering wheel.

     T. tried to take his leave with a handshake, but Fulton insisted on a high-five.

     He spent his evenings and his sleep alone and was satisfied: what he loved was to ride in after these quiet nights, these black nights of deaf and solitary thought, into the world of day, where sound enfolded him and he could scramble over chaos to order again. He liked to be away from people and then suddenly face to face: all in a rush they would converge, burning with self-interest like pillars of fire. He listened to them and learned to know the difference between what was said and what was meant, and—save with men like Fulton, who had no interest in concealing themselves—this was the key to all lesser insights. What people valued and professed to value were quite different objects, and he made constant note of this, always refining his study.

     There was variation, of course, but there were many common replacements. When they said they wanted passion, they meant the feeling of novelty; instead of what was beautiful, they wanted what affirmed; instead of a challenge, an easy victory that others believed to be hard-won. Instead of God, a father who showed his love; instead of Jesus, a friend who proved his love; instead of faith, a mother who loved them with a love that never changed.

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_{How the Dead Dream was published by Soft Skull Press in January of 2008. Born in Boston in 1968, Lydia Millet moved to Toronto, Canada with her Egyptologist father and teacher/librarian mother two years later. She received a Master’s in Environmental Policy at Duke University and moved to New York in 1996, where she worked as a fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council. In 1999 she went freelance and moved to Tucson, where she now lives and writes full-time on an isolated spread in the desert. She is the author of Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996), George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (Scribner, 2000), My Happy Life (Henry Holt, 2002; Soft Skull Press 2007), a winner of the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, Everyone’s Pretty (Soft Skull Press, 2005) and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Soft Skull, 2005)}

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