A Dead Man Was Using My Laptop at Five in the Morning

He was supposed to come Thursday.

He came at five-fifteen Thursday morning, which technically counts, the way a man technically counts as on time when he’s standing in your kitchen before you’ve found your glasses. I came down the hall and there he was at my desk in the back bedroom, boots on the floor for once, leaning into the laptop with his top hat pushed back and one ghostly finger working the trackpad like he’d been born to it. A man dead since 1891, refreshing a Kindle Direct Publishing sales report.

“I died asking about ticket receipts, sir,” he said, without looking up. “You knew my character when you let me back in.”

I asked him how long he’d been at it.

“Since two.”

For those of you who came in late, and going by my subscriber count, that’s most of you, here’s the situation. On Tuesday I confessed in this newsletter that I’d rather have a colonoscopy performed by a man with the hiccups than promote my own book. P.T. Barnum showed up to disagree. He disagreed at length. He disagreed for eleven hundred words, and when he left he promised to come back on Thursday and review the download numbers, whatever they turned out to be.

He made that promise before the numbers existed. That was the deal. No hedging, no waiting to see if it was worth reporting.

So here they are.

Tuesday and Wednesday, the Kindle edition of my new book Wicked Imagination was free. Over those two days, 991 copies went out the door.

Eight hundred and fifty of them on Tuesday.

One hundred and forty-one on Wednesday.

Barnum studied that second number for a long moment.

“The house emptied fast,” he said.

“It did.”

“It always does, sir. You have never once seen a crowd walk toward a tent on the second day.” He waved a hand, dismissing Wednesday from the record. “Never mind the tail. Tuesday you filled a hall. I have opened to worse on a Saturday with elephants.”

Eighteen of those Kindle copies left the country. Five to the United Kingdom, four to Canada, four to Australia, two to France, two to Italy, and one — I’ve read this line nine times and it still gets me — one to India.

Barnum read the international list out loud twice.

“Five in the British Isles,” he said, with the satisfaction of a man tasting something expensive. “I always drew well with the English. I sold them a boy twenty-five inches tall and they made him a national treasure. The Queen received him twice, sir. Twice.” He tapped the screen. “And India. You have a reader in India. Do you comprehend what it took, in my century, to put an entertainment in front of a man in India? It took a ship.”

“It took a Wednesday,” I said.

“It took a ship, sir.”

***

Now, I want you to notice something about that number, because he certainly did.

Nine hundred ninety-one.

Nine short of a thousand.

Barnum sat with that for a while. He spun my chair around once, slowly, the way he does when he’s building to something, and then he said: “Nine.”

“I know.”

“Nine souls, sir, and you’d have had four figures to put in the newspaper.”

“There’s no newspaper.”

“There is always a newspaper,” he said. “You simply haven’t written it yet.” He looked back at the screen with the expression of a man calculating how far he’d have to walk. “Nine. I have crossed an ocean for less.”

Then he cheered up considerably, because that’s his whole operating system, and told me about Jenny Lind.

In 1850 he booked a Swedish soprano that almost no American had ever heard sing. He mortgaged everything he had to pay her a fee that made sensible men gasp, and then, before she ever set foot on a ship, he manufactured the audience in advance. Months of planted stories. Ticket auctions turned into public spectacles. By the time she docked in New York, thirty thousand people were waiting at the pier for a woman they knew only from his publicity.

He pointed at me with the trackpad finger.

“I did not find Jenny Lind an audience,” he said. “I told an audience she was coming. And you, sir, after seventy-eight years of standing in the corner of your own life with your hands in your pockets, you finally told them.”

***

I let him have that one for about ninety seconds. Then I did the arithmetic out loud, because somebody had to.

Nine hundred ninety-one people downloaded a free book. Some of them will read it. A good many of them will not. Free books have a way of settling into a Kindle library like a casserole dish into the back of a refrigerator, and some of those copies will sit unopened until the Resurrection.

And in those same two days, out of nine hundred ninety-one downloads, three people signed up to be Back Bedroom Irregulars and one subscribed to this newsletter.

I said that number out loud in my own kitchen and it landed like a dropped plate.

Barnum, to his credit, did not flinch.

“Now you’re thinking like a showman,” he said. “The ticket is not the show. Filling the seat is not the same as moving the man in the seat.” He leaned back. “I filled seats for fifty years, sir. Anybody with a printing press and no shame can fill a seat.”

***

Here’s the part he didn’t gloat about.

Jenny Lind quit.

Ninety-three concerts into the tour, she invoked a clause in her own contract and walked away from the greatest promotional triumph of his life, and he let her go. History remembers the thirty thousand at the dock. History does not much remember that the whole glorious thing had an asterisk on it before the year was out.

He got quiet when he told me that, which for him is roughly the equivalent of another man weeping.

“Every full house empties,” he said. “That was never the question. The question was always what they carry out the door.”

“… carry out the door” — yeah, that slices right into the heart of the matter, and it’s a tough question for me because ever since I was a boy all I’ve really wanted to do was to read and write and tell stories… and I’ve done that. But I haven’t written and told stories that have been read by very many people, a fact that’s started to gnaw at me.

I suppose knowing the Reaper’s always lurking behind us old guys, waiting for a fall down the stairs or an overindulgence in cherry vanilla ice cream with chocolate chip cookies on the side, has something to do with me wanting more than a handful of readers to join me on my final rafting trip down my river of words.

So, yeah, Phineas, I guess I just want a few more companions to carry my stories out the door with them.

***

Then he stood up and made his ask, and I’m letting him make it because I’ve never been able to make it myself.

“You who took the free book,” he said, addressing my kitchen as though it held thirty thousand people at a pier. “The price of it was never nothing. The price was always an honest review. Not applause — evidence. Flattery is humbug and I say that as the century’s leading authority on humbug. If the old man’s book is a fool’s errand, say so in two sentences and let the record show a fool was heard from. If it moved you, say that instead. Either serves. Silence serves nothing.”

He put his hat straight.

“Two sentences,” he said. “I rebuilt a museum from ashes twice. You can manage two sentences.”

The free days are over, by the way. The price of admission went back on at three o’clock this morning, which is as it should be. A show that never charges anything isn’t a show. It’s a rumor.

***

He stopped at the doorway on his way out — I’ve never once seen him arrive, only leave — and looked at the framed quote on my wall. It’s the “there’s a sucker born every minute” line, which he never actually said, and which I bought at a flea market in 1994 for four dollars because I thought it was funny.

He’d turned it to face the wall two weeks ago.

He turned it back around.

“Leave it up,” he said. “Let it watch. We’ll give it something to be wrong about.”

And he was gone, muttering about the encore. Something about August. Something about ninety-nine cents.

“Now that,” I heard him say from somewhere down the hall, “is a price I can work with.”

Lord love a duck.

***

If you’re new here, and 991 of you are, or could be, this is a weekly letter from a 78-year-old man in a back bedroom in Shelby, North Carolina, who has been writing for sixty years and doesn’t intend to stop on anybody’s schedule but his own. Stories, mostly. Some of them are even true.

Chet

P.S. Next Tuesday I plan to share a funny experience in the kitchen that could have been tragic. I lucked out. Stay tuned.