The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant by Jeffrey Ford Read Free Book Online

chant the first word that comes into your mind until your spouse, significant other, child, or close friend calls the shrink.

The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant
    What would you expect a fantasy writer to look like? In your mind you see a man with a white Merlin beard and long lithe fingers that spark magic against the keyboard, or perhaps a plump woman with generous breasts and hair so long it spreads about the room, entwining everything like the many-tentacled spell of a witch.
    Picture instead Ashmolean, my fantasy writer, the one whose employ I was in for more than a year. Whatever power of enchantment he possessed was buried behind his eyes, because his description lent itself more to thoughts of other genres. Like one of Moreau’s creatures, he appeared the result of a genetic experiment run amok—a giant sloth whose DNA had been snipped, tortured together with that of a man’s, and then taped and stapled. His stomach was huge; his arms short and hairy; his rear end, in missing the counter weight of the tail, had improvised with a prodigious growth in width. The head was a flesh pumpkin carved with a frown. Vacant, windowlike eyes were rimmed by shadows, and the scalp was as devoid of hair as was Usher’s roof of shingles. Even his personality was a conundrum that might have driven Holmes to forsake his beloved cocaine for the crack pipe. The only “fantasy” I noticed was when he sat at his computer. Then he pounded the keys like he was hammering nails into a wooden cross and gazed at the monitor as would the Evil Queen about to utter, “Who is the fairest of them all?”
    I came to Ashmolean through an ad in the local newspaper. It said: Wanted—clerical assistant devoid of interest in literature or ideas . He told me at the interview that he wanted someone who would not think, but merely to do research. Well, I fit neither of the criteria, but being seventeen and without a college degree, I thought it might be more interesting than selling hamburgers, so I lied and acted as blank as possible. He stopped typing for a moment, which he had been doing continuously through all of his questions, turned, and looked me up and down once. “Welcome to Kreegenvale,” he said.
    Contrary to my job description, I had been a reader and a thinker. Even back in the lower grades, when the other children in my school would go out to the playground with their balls and bats and field-hockey sticks, I would take a book and sit beneath the oak tree at the far boundary of the field where sounds from the adjacent woods would cancel that riot of competition in which society was desperate to inculcate me. In high school, I suppose I could have been popular. There were boys who wanted me for my long hair and slim figure, but the only climaxes I was interested in were those offered by Cervantes and Dickens. I had a few dates, but the goings-on in bowling alleys and the back seats of cars always seemed inelegant narratives, the endings of which could be predicted from the very first page.
    Perhaps things couldn’t have gone any differently for me, seeing as I grew up, an only child, in a house where success was measured by the majority vote of the world at large. Both of my parents had been driven to achieve in school, at work, and in their personal tastes. My father, a well-respected contract lawyer, never discussed anything, but when speaking to me always closed his eyes, pulled on his left ear lobe, and held forth on some time-honored strategy for defeating whatever problem I might bring to him. My mother, on the other hand, though a busy CPA, had always professed a desire to be a writer. Her favorite author could have been none other than Nabokov. In the beginning, I read to please them, and then somewhere along the way, I found I couldn’t stop.
    I read the greats, the near greats, the stylists, the structuralists, and then I read Ashmolean. His works filled and spilled from the bookcases