The Merchants of Zion by William Stamp Read Free Book Online Page B

had dealt with the setback by taking a hard right toward alcoholism. Some days he'd come home early, say hello, then retreat to his study with a decanter and a bucket of ice. The first time this happened I'd gone home, but the next day Helen had instructed me to not leave unless explicitly dismissed.
     
    * * *
     
    It was well after midnight when I got back to my place. Dimitri was asleep and James was gone. I threw my backpack on the couch and grabbed my old tablet. First thing: unit sales. Nothing today, the same as each day of the past month but for a single red spike three weeks ago. Someone had bought a copy of  The Surfeit Appetite of a Man Past His Prime , my third novella. I wondered why they hadn't found the story compelling enough to buy my fourth or fifth novellas, or my second one, which, if I'm being honest, is my strongest work. Downhill ever since.
    The royalty came to less than a dollar. A pathetic sum. I checked the balance on Helen's MTA card. It had more than a hundred dollars on it. Given in a moment of pity, it surpassed my writing income from the previous two years.
    I set the tablet down, feeling depressed. Next to the set of keys I'd given James lay my copy of  The Merchants of Zion , face down and folded open. The front cover's top corner was snipped off—an accident from cutting through the plastic wrapping with a pair of scissors in my senior year of high school. Written by Brian Anderson, it had once been my favorite book, and had followed me from the middle of the country to New York and from one borough to the next. That James would have sneaked into my room to pilfer from my bookshelf didn't surprise me, but I hadn't known he read anything not dripping with overbearing paranoia or stuffed with stock tips.
    I flipped through the pages, saving his spot with my thumb. One of those thinly veiled autobiographical memoirs that catch on with the public from time to time, it had been a bona fide hit—a rarity in the age of the death of the novel. The protagonist of the book was a super-driven, over-privileged college senior who spends a semester abroad in Jamaica. His host family are squatters living in a resort abandoned in the aftermath of the revolution. Brian Anderson was accustomed to a life spent glued to his phone, but they don't have wireless service, let alone the internet, and as a result he meets a cast of characters who challenge his bubbled perspective. He worries less and enjoys life more, falls in love with a local, has his heart broken, et cetera. The title is a reference to the Rastas' unique take on enlightenment and their search for personal liberation. Truly, it's a  bildungsroman  for the twenty-first century.
    Some of my notes in the margins made me grin at my former ignorance: “Who's Kant?” and “The opal ring represents modernity” made me cringe. Present me thought my high school self would have been more clever, but it wasn't so. Would the Cliff ten years hence look back at me and likewise shake his head?
    There was a knock at the front door. I answered, and found James standing in the doorway, carrying a bag from the bodega around the corner. He unwrapped a sandwich, then set it and a cup of soda beside the tablet.
    “How do you eat that shit? It's disgusting,” I said.
    “I disagree.” He went to pick up the sandwich and his elbow hit the cup. Its cap flew off and it tipped over, dumping out the ice/soda mixture. The deluge spread toward my tablet, which I was able to snatch before it spread across the table.  The Merchants of Zion  wasn't so lucky—the soda swept over it like a hurricane across the Gulf Coast. James's sandwich was spared a similar, grisly fate—the waxy wrapping paper curled into makeshift levies.
    “Your pop almost ruined my computer.”
    “What the fuck is pop?”
    I picked up the book by one corner. The soda beaded and rolled off, leaving a sticky smear of corn syrup across the glossy cover. The pages stuck together as I flipped