According to mom, Matt's nighttime drives past the house stopped.
I wondered what had been in the envelope Matt tried to give Chrissy. I watched the video as many times as I could stand it. I have to admit, it did look like a manuscript.
Whatever it was, it sat in a puddle for over a minute while Matt reeled and groped around on the sidewalk. It was probably ruined.
And Matt...
My beautiful lover on his hands and knees, with no one to help him. His intentions were probably ruined, too.
We were finally, truly over.
At work, I blazed through the tasks Pam gave me. I never wanted downtime. I worked through my lunch break and brought work home. When my eyes ached from too much reading, I hit the gym and ran on the treadmill until I wanted to collapse.
And that's what I did. I went home, collapsed, woke up, and headed to work.
The hollowness inside of me didn't shrink. It expanded until it seemed to press at the limits of my being. I became less than a shell of myself. I was a fine limning—a suggestion of Hannah Catalano.
One day, I thought, I wouldn't even be that.
I understood how people fall apart.
I understood how dangerous it is to let someone become your whole life, and how powerless we are to prevent it. Never deny me, Matt once said. As if I had a choice.
Pam plopped a manuscript onto my desk at the end of August.
It was rare for Pam to hand me anything; usually I picked through the slush pile myself or found the day's work waiting on my desk.
I slid out the manuscript.
THE SURROGATE, no author.
"What's this?"
"A manuscript," she said dryly.
Ugh. No Mercy Pam. Yes, I could see that it was a manuscript.
"Right," I said. "So... I'll give it a read?"
"That's the idea." Pam lingered. "Oh, it's... by a local lady. She has this marvelous habit of not putting her name on her manuscripts."
Pam leaned over and scribbled JANE DOE on the top page.
I stared at her in disbelief. Holy fuck, was Pam actually letting me read a manuscript by one of her authors? This was a far cry from the slush pile. This was real agent work.
"Pam, I—"
She held up a hand.
"Don't imagine your opinion is vital here. Just read the manuscript. I need confirmation of what I already know to be true."
Pam breezed out.
Okay. Confirmation... of what she already knew to be true. That sounded bogus. I flipped the title page aside.
One of two things had to be happening here. Either Pam wanted to bump me up to the next level of work (and didn't know how to be nice about it), or Pam actually needed a second opinion on this manuscript (and didn't know how to be nice about it).
Either way, I would view this as a test and not let my head explode.
Two hours later, I was still reading the manuscript. My other paperwork was shoved aside. I slouched in my chair and propped my feet on the desk. And I was definitely not reading at work-pace. I was reading at pleasure-pace, lost in the story.
The Surrogate told the story of a future Earth where, for the right price, people could escape life's pain. Exams, divorce, jail time, dental work, messy breakups, anything—no one had to live through it, thanks to The Isaac Project.
The project began as a medical breakthrough in palliative care, and it ended as the most revolutionary venture since the World Wide Web. A client simply downloaded his consciousness into a sleeping cell and uploaded the consciousness of a surrogate, a professional who lived in his body for the duration of the pain. Once the assignment was complete, the client returned to his body and carried on with a pain-free life.
Really, the novel told the story of one particular surrogate—a jaded workaholic who'd spent more time in the bodies of others than in his own eighty-year-old body. The surrogate had no personal life to speak of. He was hollow.
That is, until one job changed everything.
The surrogate was uploaded into the body of a wealthy executive. His assignment was to confront his client's wife with his affair and desire for divorce.