The Night Listener : A Novel

side. I wanted everyone on my side. So I gave her a crooked smile and lobbed the package into the wastebasket.
    “Hey,” she said, looking mildly affronted. “Aren’t you even curious?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I can’t handle someone else being brilliant right now.” She mulled that over. “Maybe it’ll be shitty.”
    “Then why read it?”
    “I dunno. To cheer yourself up?”
    “It doesn’t work that way. I identify with the shitty stuff.”
    “You do?” She looked utterly perplexed.
    “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “It’s a writer thing.”
    “I guess so,” she murmured, giving me up for lost as she turned back to her labors.
    I was tempted to blame this nonsense on the crisis at hand, but the truth is I’ve always been unsure about my literary powers. My work, after all, was originally intended for radio: grabby little armchair yarns that I would read for half an hour every week on a National Public Radio show called Noone at Night . My characters were a motley but lovable bunch, people caught in the supreme joke of modern life who were forced to survive by making families of their friends. The show eventually became a cult hit; listeners would cluster en masse around their radios in a way that hadn’t happened since the serials of the forties. While this fulfilled me hugely as a storyteller, it left me feeling illegitimate as a writer, as if I’d broken into the Temple of Literature through some unlocked basement window.
    Never mind that the books compiled from those shows have never stopped selling. Or that Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com now use my name in their promotions. In my heart I remain a clever impostor, a sidewalk magician performing tricks for the crowd outside the opera house. A real writer makes star turns at conferences and summers at Yaddo and shows up in the New York Times Book Review as someone to Bear in Mind. A real writer would never have stopped writing when his life collapsed around him. He would have caught every last detail. He would have pinned his heart to the page, just to give his readers a closer look.
    But the fight went out of me when my marriage began to unravel.
    I lost a vital engine I never even knew I had. Those gracefully con-voluted plotlines my listeners cherished had been driven by a bed-rock optimism that vanished overnight. And once that was gone my authorial voice deserted me in the most literal way possible—in the midst of a recording session.
    We were taping that day, as usual, at the local public-radio station, which fed the show, via satellite, to the rest of the system. (As a space-struck teenager I’d kept a scrapbook on Sputnik , so I’d always loved knowing that one of its grandchildren was beaming my stories to the nation.) I hadn’t been able to write for several weeks, but I still had a backlog of five or six episodes that would buy me some time until I could get my head together.
    But ten minutes into the session, when the engineer played back a troublesome passage, I made an unnerving discovery.
    “What’s the matter?” he asked, reading my confusion.
    “It doesn’t sound like me,” I told him.
    He shrugged. “The levels are all the same.”
    “No, I mean… I don’t sound like me.” This time he widened his eyes and deedled out the theme from The Twilight Zone .
    “I’m serious, Kevin.”
    “Do you wanna take a break?”
    “No. Let’s just start from the top of the page.” So I began again, but my voice felt even more phony and disembodied. I found myself tripping over the simplest words as I attempted a lighthearted domestic scene. (The couple that most resembled me and Jess were fighting over the sovereignty of their remote control.) After half a dozen takes I’d run so far beyond my allotted time that the panelists for the next show—a trio of Silicon Valley pun-dits—began to mill about in the control room with obvious irritation.
    Wary of witnesses to my self-annihilation, I apologized to the engineer, took off my headphones, and left the room, never to return.
    The following week, without explanation, NPR began to treat its listeners to The Best of Noone at Night .
    So there I sat, useless, while Anna worked and a flock of winged toasters flapped across the face of Jess’s Mac. That had always been his favorite screen saver, so there was no reason to believe he had left it there as a parting comment. Still, the irony was inescapable.
    Those jaunty appliances seemed the very essence