What Was There Before Now?

“Do you suffer from erectile dysfunction?” The thick red letters challenge Daniel J. Michaels on his way to a job interview. His gaze shifts down, then over. Whoops, caught the eye of that Beyoncé wannabe. Danny’s right hand grasps the subway pole, and he turns away. His left hand distractedly swings his portfolio case. He’s running through potential interview questions: Reason for leaving last job? How do you keep yourself organized and on time? Do you suffer from erectile dysfunction?—whoa, stay focused, man. Danny shakes his head.

He has a killer portfolio, samples of promo material he’s written. But the catch is always: what do you say in the elevator? Small talk, gotta nail that. Weather, no: a distinct lack of imagination. Movie he saw last night, yes: except he’s fuzzy on the plot.

What other small talk? Hobbies, yeah, why not. Interviewers love gabbing about hobbies, a way to show they are caring, personalized employers. Danny struggles to remember what he said his hobbies were. He knows he didn’t write “watching OnlyFans” or “listening to music” or “sharing a blunt with friends” although truth be told those are his main activities nowadays. He used to write “snowboarding” until Sammy tipped him off that this was a red flag to HR about recreational drug use.

But mainly they will talk about his experience and employment history. He hefts the portfolio, heavy with his secret bullet, and all becomes right with his world. This secret bullet, three-in-one, will explain his departure from the previous job, rationalize his hiatus from the work force, and simultaneously showcase his superb command of noun and verb, plot and diction.

Ah yes, his novel.

Well, not really a novel. It’s a book of short stories. And it’s not really his; it’s the work of someone with the same name.

What a stroke of luck he’d found it in a bookstore last week.

On his way to the unemployment office, he’d glanced through the bookstore window and noticed the girl who lived on the floor above his. He’d sauntered in, careful not to look directly at Zahara because he was portraying a Book Lover, someone who regularly stopped by to nuzzle the spines. He’d wandered from the excitable New Releases section to the quietly resigned Listed by Author Alphabetically section.

And that’s when he had seen it—the pale green cover with “Daniel J. Michaels” splashed across the front.

No description of the power of the written word is complete without mentioning the biggest thrill of all: the megawatt jolt of seeing your name in print. Danny’s mouth went dry, his moustache trembled, and he bolted from the store. He rushed home to tell Sammy all about “his” newfound fame. And then they sat around, rolled a fat one, and thought hard. Well, as hard as they could.

As a joke, Sammy went out the next day and boosted the damn thing. He left it on the kitchen table, along with a hand-lettered sign that said, “Interview with Author at 11.” At first Danny couldn’t even touch the book but soon everyone who came by was picking it up and fondling it. A pack of god-damn jackals, they were. So he moved the book to the shelf above the big screen. Sammy noticed the book was gone, but found its new location right away. It was the only book in the apartment.

“Jeez, man,” Sammy said, “keep it visible. Not every day that I find out my roommate’s a celebrity.”

He was the only person who could make Danny laugh and roll his eyes at the same time.

“Seriously, do you know what this book means?” Sammy began to enumerate its virtues. “Number one, parental pacifier. Number two, chick magnet. Number three, your name is on it and no contradictory photo, Danny boy!”

Danny hated it when Sammy called him Danny boy. “So?” he said. “Would you like me to autograph it for you?” Before Sammy could stop him, Danny grabbed the book, pulled the felt pen from the hodge-podge drawer and scrawled on the fly leaf, “To my pal Sammy boy. Stay in School. Don’t do drugs. Daniel J Michaels.”

And now, here Danny was, on the subway a week later, with a copy of “his” book, his résumé, and a portfolio. What if the small talk turned to his book? Danny cracked open the book. Table of Contents. He browsed the list of stories and found the shortest one.

He skimmed the first paragraph. Guy named Joseph and girl named Chiquita. They were at odds. Okay, got it. He flipped to the last page of the story. Chiquita apparently pregnant, but Joseph not there. Some guy named Gary. Whoa. Danny paged backward, flip, flip, flip, glancing to see when the capital J’s disappeared and the capital G’s appeared. There were two pages where both J’s and G’s were present. Aha, a love triangle. Danny sped-read those two pages. Whose baby was it? Damn that two-timing Chiquita. Which guy did she want to end up with? In exasperation, Danny flipped to the second last page of the story. The train shrieked into Union Station.

***

“Did you bring representative pieces of your work?” asked the Marketing Director. “I’d like to see if we articulate the same vision.” He was tall, smooth-shaven, thick around the middle.

Danny handed him the portfolio. “My goal is to successfully articulate the vision.” His theory was that employers always wanted to hear their own buzzwords back, spritzed up with words like “success” and “profit.”

Flipping through more tear sheets, the Director said, “Your work says to me that you enjoy what you do.”

Danny nodded. “Dad always said to me, ‘Son, you must enjoy what you do.’” Warm, convincing, and a bare-faced lie.

“I see you only worked with your last company a year. Why did you leave?”

Why did he leave, indeed. How Danny had explained it to Sammy was, “I’ll haul my ass to and from that friggin’ office for a year to get my U.I., but I’ll be damned if it’s one minute more.” But his reason would require considerable editing so that the Director would not suspect that Danny was only looking for work because, a year later, his U.I. had run out, and now he had to work another 52 weeks to qualify.

With a conspiratorial smile, Danny reached into the portfolio case and pulled out the book. “Had to get this out of my system,” he said.

Thump. The book landed on the Director’s desk. “Interesting.” He turned the book to read the cover. “Michaels,” he said. “What Was There Before Now?”

“Ah—” Danny began to answer, then remembered it was the title of the book. “Yeah, so I quit because, jeez, I just had to sit down and write this. I had to try my hand at it. But now… it’s out of my system.” Sammy had coached him well, and the answer was delivered completely naturally.

The Director nodded sympathetically. He opened the book and his glance snagged on the felt-pen autograph. “Hmmm.”

“Oh, that,” Danny said. “That was for a neighbor kid. Sammy. Kids, drugs—you know. Turns out I had plumb run out of copies of my book, so I had to borrow it back from him for today.”

“Has this kid read it?”

“Cover to cover. Said his favorite story was…” Danny paused a moment. “Was the one about Chiquita.”

***

“My idea was they’d see the book, see you were a writer and all, but that’s it. Then you would come back with the book,” Sammy said afterwards. “A surgical strike. But now you’ve gone and left it in enemy territory.”

Danny shrugged. “Someone collects the portfolios of all interviewees, decides which one weighs the most and then hires that guy. And this time, mine will beat everyone, hands down.” He raised his arms in a V, like a champion fighter.

Sammy shook his head no. “Every minute that friggin’ book is in someone else’s hands, that is a minute more that they get, figuring out another reason not to hire you.”

Danny sighed.

After a long and smoky harangue, Sammy decided to go back and boost another copy.

Danny had never acquired the knack of the five-finger discount. A skill like skating backward, thievery is learned early in life or is never properly mastered. “Forced by sheer incompetence to be honest,” is how Sammy described it.

But Sammy had not been able to find the book, much less steal it.

“C’mon, let’s double-check,” Danny said. They loped down to the store, stopping for pizza slices along the way. A little high and slightly overfed, they entered the bookstore and proceeded directly to the “D” section. Soon they recognized their error and headed for the “M” section. Sammy got the giggles. “Shush!” said Danny, aware that Sammy was drawing attention to them. By now they were in the “M” aisle, but had seen not a single copy.

“Ahem.” Someone cleared her throat so close to Danny that he startled. “May I help you gentlemen?”

It was Zahara. She had skin so fine it was nearly translucent. Her hair, long and wavy, was the colour of molasses. She smelled like jellyfruit paradise. Danny was suddenly conscious of his greasy fingers and a faint pepperoni reflux. He held his breath.

“Oh, it’s …you,” she said.

He pondered this. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” She’d never spoken to him when they passed in the hallway at the house.

“I saw you come in here last week to inspect the display,” she said. “At first I didn’t make the connection, you know, with the name on our shared doorbells. Then, I made the connection but wow I simply couldn’t believe it! I mean, here I was living so close to a published author!” She clapped her hand on her mouth. She motioned to him to follow her. “I recommended to my manager that we put it in a Featured Authors section. Showcasing local talent and all.” Underneath the sign “Daniel J. Michaels” was the paragraph from the book jacket.

Sammy interjected, “What, that’s all? How about a banner?”

She turned to Danny, who tugged his friend’s sleeve, shushing him. “If you have a photo to contribute,” she said.

“Oh ah oh,” spluttered Danny. He did freak out one night, about the risk of being unmasked.

Zahara nodded solemnly. “I understand. You’re a very private man, no doubt.”

“Absolutely,” said Danny. Private man. He would savor that later. His advertising experience moved to the fore. “But there are other ways to jazz it up. How about a starburst, for example, one that says something like, ‘support local talent’ or ‘fresh and new’?”

“A starburst?” she said. “Super!”

And that was how the book that was not his ended up stacked on a shaky little table with, as Sammy put it, “signs for new potatoes” proclaiming its existence. It was an unfortunate thought association that Sammy had made because he now found the book to be just as difficult to steal as a twenty-pound bag of Idaho Russets. “That table is always within eyeshot of the checkout,” he said, “and now Suzie Store Clerk has got a thing for you.”

Danny studied his fingernails.

“Yep,” said Sammy, a frown of appraisal on his brow. It was the same sort of look as when he was choosing from the pizza menu. “She told me she’d bought your book.”

Danny tried to picture Zahara reading the book. Stroking the cover, running her finger up and down the binding, bringing it to bed with her? It boggled his mind. And other body parts.

***

“The landlord doesn’t clear snow until it hits the waist-high mark,” Zahara said to Danny on a morning after a heavy snowstorm, when they struggled to find the walkway of their apartment house.

“If it’s my waistline,” said Danny, “he’ll never find it at all.”

She laughed. “Come now, you shouldn’t beat yourself up about your weight.” She looked at him with frankness. “I was on the big side once, too, you know. Then I moved out from home. Once there was no one to nag me, I felt a lot freer.”

Danny immediately pictured her a lot freer—of clothes—in her apartment. He scrounged for words. “Freer, huh.” His theory was that women wanted to hear their own buzzwords back, plus words like: “intelligent” and “beautiful.” “What an intelligent analysis,” he said. “And look how beautiful you are now.”

As soon as he had uttered these words, he realized his mistake. There was a subset of females who could tolerate only weakened strains of the buzzwords, and only in a context that was often too tricky to judge. These females, Danny guessed, had once been prey to a manipulator who had laid it on too thick.

“Well, good-bye, Mr. Michaels,” she said, blushing as she began to walk ahead. “Here’s my bus.” She leapt over two snowbanks and was gone.

***

“Mr. Michaels?” The marketing manager offered her hand. “So glad you could find the time to see us again.”

Danny wished his hand was not moist.

“Your portfolio is impressive. On your résumé I see a broad array... hmmm... print, web, TV interview.... Ah, right, you were no doubt interviewed when your novel came out?” she said, tapping its cover lightly with her pen.

“Have you read it?” he asked, smiling.

“Oh dear, no, I have no time for cultural stuff.” She gave a throaty chuckle. “Although I suppose I will make an exception once you join our staff?”

He gave a small jump. Sweet words—but was that a question or a statement?

“No, my reading genre lately has been business how-to,” she said. “I just finished reading a book that compares business to, what, small battles in a campaign of war?”

“Well, it sure beats begging and groveling for customer attention,” he said.

“To my mind, a successful business-client relationship is kind of like, what, a dance?” said the manager. “You take one step, then your partner takes a step? One-two, one-two.” There was that throaty laugh again. She was at least five years older, yet she seemed ready to waltz right down the hallway with him.

The author.

***

“Just an hour of your time,” said Zahara as she moved closer to him.

“I can’t,” he protested. “I have a fear of crowds, you know.”

“You’ve got to get over that, Daniel. Look at how many copies we sold after that big book-signing at the store last week. You didn’t want to do that, either, but it was great!” She blinked her eyes beseechingly.

“But this is different,” he moaned. “They’re students! They’ll ask questions!”

“Ple-ease ….” Zahara trailed her finger along his hairline. She knew it drove him wild. “They’ll be on their best behavior for the local literary colossus.”

Wasn’t that over-complimenting? Oh, who cared. Colossus… Danny felt his spine lengthening.

***

And suddenly, it’s ten minutes before class and the professor is pointing to an empty desk at the center of a firing-squad semi-circle of desks. Danny feels ready to puke. Why oh why did he give in to her? Nipples like pebbles under his fingertips…a soft moan in his ear…Oh, right, that was why. Like a Skinner rat pawing the food bar, he pats his shirt pocket with increasing frenzy. His training is rewarded: one seedy old blunt. He makes a beeline to the parking lot across the street.

He floats back to the classroom on a mellow carpet. The students rustle their knapsacks and guzzle their water bottles. When he appears, they reluctantly stash their phones, eyes darting.

“Mr. Michaels,” the prof says, “We are pleased to have a break in our discussion of western literature. To have a flesh-and-blood writer come to speak to us.”

When he hears the word “break,” it dawns on Danny that, if not for his presence, the class might have to sit and listen to this man go on and on about the impenetrable Jane Austen. Or Yeats, heaven forbid. He has never read Yeats—the name sounded a little like an affliction, like “scabies”—and the thought that he is rescuing the students from a seeping death by Yeats calms him. He was brought in to rescue them. Yes, a rescuer: that’s how Zahara sees him.

A partial transcript of the AMA session was reported in the campus blog.

Q: Who is your favorite author, and why?

A: That’s a little like asking a politician who he voted for. [laughter]

Q: Well then, who is your second favorite author?

A: Yeats. He is a must-read. No-one can call himself well read unless he’s read everything by Yeats.

Q: What’s your favorite story in your new book, and why?

A: I liked the one about Chiquita most. Why? Coz it’s the shortest. [laughter]

Q: Who is the father of Chiquita’s baby?

A: Um. [long pause] I’ll let you figure that one out. You go read the story. You decide and then you tell me, OK? [more laughter]

Daniel feels warm and relaxed. Zahara gives him a small wave. The hour is nearly over.

From the back of the room, a weary man raises his hand. “Mr. Michaels, I hear you’re working hard on a new novel. Adventures of a Big Fake.”

A chill goes down Danny’s spine. There is something about the man. “I—I—” Mental newsflash: Extreme embarrassment is about to occur.

The weary man says, “I hear it’s about a slacker who assumes another man’s identity.”

Through the classroom doorway, Danny sees Sammy in the hall, just as he pulls the fire alarm. The building fills with an ear-splitting noise.

The place erupts in chaos, everyone racing to the nearest exit.

Everyone, except for two. Sammy and Danny bump fists and stroll to opposite exit.

THE END