The Intruders by Michael Marshall Read Free Book Online

she’d get back to them. I left a message asking her to do just that. Again.
    “Soon would be nice,” I muttered when the phone had been replaced in my pocket.
    I took the drink through to my study. As the person earning actual money, Amy had a grander lair on the floor below. Mine had nothing in it but a file box of reference material, the expensively distressed table from the store in town, and a cheaply distressed chair I’d found in the garage. The only thing on the table was my laptop. It was not dusty because I made a point of wiping it with my sleeve every morning. It was not nailed shut because we didn’t have any nails. I dimmed the lights and sat. When I opened the lid, the machine sprang to life, not learning from experience. It presented me with a word-processing document in which not many words had yet been processed. This was partly because of the panoramic view of bitterbrush and Douglas firs from the window, which I’d found myself able to stare at for hours. When the snows did come, I knew I might just as well leave the computer shut. It was harder to be distracted in the room at night, however, because aside from a few branches picked out by the light from the window, you couldn’t see anything at all. So maybe now my fingers and mind would unlock and start working together. Maybe I’d think of something to say and fall into it for a while.
    Maybe I’d be able to ignore the fact that after only a month I was bored out of my tiny mind.
     
    I was sitting at the table because two years ago I wrote a book about certain places in L.A. I say “wrote,” but mainly it was photographs, and even that word stretches the truth. I took the pictures with the camera in my cell phone: One day I happened to be somewhere with my phone in my hand, and I clicked a picture. When I transferred it to the computer later, I saw that it was actually okay. The technical quality was so low that you could see through the image to the place, caught in a moment, blurred and ephemeral. After that it became a habit, and when I had enough, I threw them into a document, jotting a comment about each. Over time these annotations grew until there was a page or two of text accompanying each photograph, sometimes more. Amy came in one evening when I was doing this, asked to read it. I let her. I felt no anxiety while it was in her hands, knowing she would be kind, and had only mild interest in what she’d say. A couple days later, she handed me the name and phone number of someone who worked at an art-house publisher. I laughed hard, but she said try it, and so I mailed the file to this guy without thinking much more about it.
    Three weeks after that, he called me one afternoon and offered me twenty thousand dollars. Mainly out of bafflement, I said sure, knock yourself out. Amy squealed when she heard, and she took me out to dinner.
    It was published eight months later, a square hardcover with a grainy photograph of a nondescript Santa Monica house on the front. It looked to me like the kind of book you had to be out of your mind to even pick up, let alone buy, but the L.A. Times noticed it, and it got a couple other good reviews, and, weirdly, it became something that sold a little, for a while.
    The world rolled on, and so did we. Stuff happened. I quit my job, we moved. If I was anything now, I was the guy who’d written that book. Which meant, presumably, I now needed to become a guy who’d written some other book. Nothing had come to mind. It kept continuing to fail to come to mind, with a steady resolve that suggested not coming to mind was what it was all about, that failing to come to mind was its chief skill and purpose in life.
     
    A couple hours later I was in the living room. I’d drunk more beer, but this hadn’t seemed to help. I was adrift in the middle of the couch, mired in the restless fugue state characteristic of those who’ve failed to conjure something out of thin air. I knew I should unpack the box of Web