“Glad to hear it,” said Todd, who at that moment wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the book was also one of those rare novels that featured a fight between a giant squid and a robot. The more he struggled to recall the book that had literally occupied his life all those weeks, the less he could remember any of it. It was as if that famous eidetic memory of his had been wiped like a cassette tape.

“I know this is an obvious thing to say,” said Carrie, looking at Nora to make sure she wasn’t going to squish her again. “But it’s such an unusual novel, for any author to write. So I’m going to ask it anyway.”

“Fire away,” said Todd, draining the nearest glass to him.

“Where did you get the idea from?”

Todd paused. He lifted his glass to his lips, remembered that he’d just emptied it, then smiled.

“Where does anyone get their ideas from?” he said. “Sometimes they’re just in the air, aren’t they? And sometimes we draw on personal experience, always changing it, always tuning it so it becomes art, not autobiography. But always there is the idea at the core.”

“Yes, that’s very true,” said Carrie. “But you’re talking about ideas in general. I meant in this specific case, where did you get the idea?”

I stole the whole thing from a book that nobody else had heard of, thought Todd angrily, and when I realized I could get away with it, I copied the whole thing out while crapping in a diaper in my own house. You know, like every writer does.

Todd realized that the booze was making him feel a little bit too much like his old self again.

“I honestly don’t know where it came from,” he said, then added, trying not to sound too cautious, “Why? Does it seem familiar to you in any way?”

Carrie, anxious now lest she had gone too far, said, “No! Not at all. It’s just such a fresh concept I…”

She tailed off. Nora smiled a smile that Todd had seen somewhere before. Oh my God, he thought, it’s Endora from fucking Bewitched. Todd smiled back, a Darren eager to please.

“I’m sure Todd doesn’t want to spend all day dissecting his own work,” she said. “We can leave that to the critics. Now who wants dessert?”

*  *  *

By the end of the meal, which had left Todd both dizzy and bloated, he was even more convinced that Nora Franklyn was the ideal person to publish him (the fact that she was the only person who wanted to represent him was long forgotten). He was ready to sign up on the spot and must have indicated as much, because, as the coffee cups were taken away, Carrie said nervously: