About the Author by John Colapinto

criminality?
    My re-typing of the seventy-thousand-word manuscript took on a strangely spiritual aspect: I truly felt as if the work were reverting back to me, “its onlie begetter and true author,” to quote the Bard. At a dismal twenty-five words a minute, I would type for two hours every morning before going to work at the bookstore, then I would continue when I got home in the evening, often clacking away at the keys until three or four A.M. I developed cramps in my hands, ghostly aches in my elbows. But as I watched the pages pile up, I felt a mounting excitement, a thrill of accomplishment, that spurred me on, even when exhaustion bowed my back and gripped my neck in nerve-pinching pains. I did not, by the way, change a word. On those few occasions when I thought I might be able to improve on Stewart’s (really
my
) phrasing, I would pause over the keys, mentally trying out variants; but these meditations would always lead me into a dead end. I would realize that the original wording was right after all, was the only possible word choice that blended literary grace with the illusion of colloquial speech. I would admonish myself for wasting time and immediately resume my halting typing.
    On the third Sunday in July, at ten A.M., after an all-night typing session, with the early-morning sunlight just beginning to ignite the delicate twigs of the little trees that grew in the alley outside my window, I punched home the last period on the last page.
    Maybe it was a result of the fleeting delusions that can gather after too many sleepless nights; or maybe it was the heightened emotional pitch to which I had been brought by sifting, day after day, through my painful past. Whatever the reason, in that instant when I arose from the desk, knees cracking, I felt convinced that I truly
was
the author of the freshly minted typescript that lay on my desk. Stewart’s specter, which had seemed to hover in the shadows above my pecking keys, was finally gone. Gone!
    Or just about. He wouldn’t really be gone until I had disposed of his version of the manuscript. I had marked for destruction not only the fair copy from which I had typed my version, but also his notes for the novel, which included near-indecipherable scribblings on yellow legal pads, jottings on the backs of old law school essays, and densely written spiral-notebook pages, plus an accordion-folded printout of a first draft in stunted, squared-off sans serif characters with ugly, irregular gaps between the words. (His other stories and sketches I had decided to save for future perusal.)
    It wasn’t as difficult as disposing of a body, but it proved harder than you might think. I rejected immediately the option of simply stuffing the papers into a garbage bag and throwing them out. The tabloids abounded in tales of squalling babies being plucked from the garbage. I had to know that Stewart’s evidence had disappeared from the face of the earth, without a trace. Fire seemed the only way. Where do you burn five hundred pages? I don’t suppose anyone in Washington Heights would have taken much notice had I simply built a bonfire in front of my building and immolated the stuff right there on the sidewalk, but why tempt fate?
    I ended up walking twenty blocks north, to Fort Tryon Park, the tract of manicured public gardens and untouched forest on the northern tip of Manhattan. Well, not completely untouched. According to the
Times
, the area was a favorite among drug dealers and other miscreants, as a disposal site for potentially incriminating evidence. Just a few weeks earlier, a human torso had been found by some picnickers amid the abundant underbrush. Maybe it was some subconscious association that made me decide on this as the place to dispose of
my
evidence. Who knows?
    On the day in late July when I hiked up to Fort Tryon, the weather was cold and overcast—a strange flash-forward to fall. A good thing. It meant fewer sightseers and strollers. Passing under the