Relentless

writer. His Catholicism is an implicit part of his novels.
    Over the course of a year, he received a venomous hate letter once a week from an anti-Catholic bigot. He never responded to them.
    When his new novel came out, the same hater reviewed it in a national weekly magazine for which he was a staff writer. The guy did not reveal his prejudice, but he mocked the book and Josh’s entire career in an outrageously dishonest fashion.
    Josh is married to Mary, and Mary said, “Let it go.”
    Women have been saying “Let it go” since human beings lived in caves; and men responded then pretty much as they respond today.
    Instead of letting it go, Josh wrote the editor in chief of the magazine, copying him on the hate letters. The editor defended his staff writer and suggested Josh could have forged the correspondence.
    Emboldened, the bigot wrote to Josh on magazine stationery. The envelopes were stamped with one of the magazine’s postage meters.
    When Josh copied the editor on this new evidence, he received no reply. But a year later, when his subsequent book was published, the review in the magazine was not written by the same man.
    This
vicious review was written by a
different
bigot, a friend of the first one, who began also to send hate letters to Josh.
    Again, Mary told him to let it go. Josh listened to her this time, though ever since he’d been grinding his teeth in his sleep so assiduously that he needed to wear a soft-acrylic bite guard.
    “Neither of those guys showed up at Josh’s house,” Penny said. “They prove my contention—their only weapons were words.”
    “So you don’t think Waxx will come back?”
    “If he were a true nut, wouldn’t he have already shot you?”
    “It would be nice to think so.”
    “Anyway, you can’t report him to the cops. I didn’t see him. Only you saw him. He’ll deny having been here.”
    “It’s just—the whole thing was so freaky.”
    “Clearly, he’s arrogant and eccentric,” she said. “Some little thing you said set him off.”
    “All I did was apologize for Milo nearly peeing on him.”
    “He misinterpreted something. So he’s had his payback. Probably the worst he’ll do now is trash every book you ever write.”
    “Swell.” I locked eyes with her. “You really think it’s over?”
    She hesitated but then said, “Yes.”
    As a truth detector, her double-barreled gaze works both ways. When she did not blink, I knew she was being a straight shooter.
    “Cubby, he thinks you were spying on him, you violated his personal space. So he violated yours. Now, sweetie, let it go.”
    I sighed. “I will. I’ll let it go.”
    Penny’s smile could power a small city.
    Together, we prepared salads, ravioli, and meatballs. Milo never knew that we had indulged in cookies and milk before dinner. But I’mpretty sure Lassie, with her exceptional sense of smell, detected the truth on our breath, because her mismatched eyes said
guilty
.
    Later that night, I had difficulty falling asleep. When at last I slept, I found myself in another lost-and-alone dream: the infinite library with the winding aisles.
    I had been prowling those byways for a while, in anticipation of a momentous discovery, when a serpentine turn in the stacks brought me to a place where the shelves held no books. Displayed instead, in big jars sealed with corks and wax, was a collection of severed heads in preservative fluid.
    From floor to ceiling, onward past another turn and another, men and women peered out of their glass ossuaries, eyes wide but fixed. None wore an expression of agony or horror. Instead, they appeared to be either astonished or contemplative.
    These bodiless multitudes, breathless in formaldehyde, disturbed me for obvious reasons but also for a reason I could not identify. As I began to realize that I knew them—or at least some of them—my heart raced in rebellion against the pending revelation.
    Suspecting that the way ahead would never bring me again to any books, but only to additional heads in jars, I turned back toward the true library out of which I had wandered. Although I hurried farther than I had come, I found only heads behind me.
    I first recognized Charles Dickens, bearded behind a curve of glass, and then Truman Capote. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Heinlein, Zane Grey, Raymond Chandler. The creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Virginia Woolf. Somerset Maugham. Mickey Spillane.
    A premonition chilled mere anxiety into a colder