Relentless

prostate thing.”
    “Prostate? You’re only forty.”
    “I’m thirty-four, Hud.”
    “Even worse. Hey. Not cancer. Is it?”
    “No. Just an urgent need to pee.”
    “Thank God. I’ll keep thinking.”
    “I know you will, Hud.”
    I hung up.
    Usually, after such a call from Hud Jacklight, I raced to Penny to share the details. Sometimes, that was the end of the workday for both of us, regardless of the hour. We could not get focused again.
    Hud negotiated exceptionally good deals for his clients. I won’t say that was his saving grace, but it was my excuse.
    With John Clitherow’s promised call due at any moment, I was finally convinced of something I had suspected for a long time: God has a sense of humor, and because the world is wondrous, He expects us to find reasons to smile even on the darkest days.

   When the cell phone rang, the voice of Hud Jacklight still ricocheted through my mind, no doubt destroying brain cells the way free-radical molecules damaged body tissue and accelerated the aging process if you didn’t have enough antioxidants in your diet.
    John Clitherow said, “I’m calling you with a disposable phone. I don’t dare have anything in my name anymore. I’ll throw this away and use a different disposable as soon as I hang up. This will most likely be the only call I can make to you, so I’m pleading with you, Cullen, for God’s sake, don’t write me off as a crank.”
    “You’re not a crank,” I said. “You’re a brilliant writer.”
    “I haven’t written a word in over three years, and if five minutes from now I don’t
sound
like a crank, then I’m doing a piss-poor job of getting the gravity of the situation across to you, because the truth is crazier than a rabid monkey on methamphetamine.”
    “I’ve had some experience of crazy truths,” I said. “Go on.”
    “When Waxx’s review of your new book appeared on Tuesday, Ididn’t see it. I only read it a few hours ago. Been trying to get your number ever since. You didn’t take his criticism to heart, I hope. It’s the bile and vomit of an envious and ignorant man, the stench of which he thinks he has disguised with mordant wit, except that his mordancy is no sharper than a sledgehammer and his wit is not wit at all but the raillery of an intellectual fop, a popinjay who wheezes when he thinks he pops.”
    Survival instinct told me to trust John Clitherow. But though I needed to know what he had to tell me—and perhaps already knew— I was loath to hear it.
    Therefore, in light of recent events, I remained wary, hesitant to say anything against Waxx, lest he be orchestrating this moment, sitting beside Clitherow and listening to my every word. Paranoia had become my default position.
    I said only, “Well, he’s entitled to his opinion.”
    “He has no opinions, not of a considered and analytic nature. He has an
agenda,”
Clitherow said. “And the first thing you must
not
do is respond to him.”
    “My wife told me to let it go.”
    “A wise woman. But letting it go might not be enough.”
    “The thing is, I didn’t exactly let it go.”
    Clitherow barely breathed two words in such a way that they were less an expression of dismay than a prayer for a hopeless cause: “Oh, God.”
    Obeying instinct, I told him about lunch at Roxie’s Bistro the previous day—and the moment in the men’s room.
    When I informed him that the critic had spoken one word, he repeated it before I could. “Doom.”
    “How did you know?”
    He became agitated and spoke faster, words spilling from him in anxious torrents: “Cullen, for three years, I’ve continued to read thebastard’s reviews, missed only a few. He’s as inelegant and as jejune when he praises books as he is when he drops his hammer on them. But what he says about your
One O’Clock Jump
is the first time he’s been that vicious since he assaulted my last book,
Mr. Bluebird
. He uses several identical phrases in both reviews. He says of you, as he said of me, that you are ‘an extremist of the naïve’ and that you’re incapable of understanding that humankind is ‘a disease of the dust.’ He said of us, separately, that we mistakenly believe ‘it is easy to be solemn but hard to be frolicsome,’ which indeed I do believe, and which I’m sure you believe, a belief supported by the fact that for every thousand solemn novels that thud into bookstores, there’s just one that is both meaningful and frolicsome, that has a sense of wonder,