Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi Page B

now and then with Ralph; he was only a few years younger than I was, and for a while had been thinking about becoming an agent before he got nervous and went pre-law instead. After Richie moved out, Ralph would keep dropping by. I think I reminded him of times when someone was around to pay attention to him. I didn’t mind. Ralph didn’t want anything other than to be around somebody else. He’s like a lot of old folks that way. Eventually Esteban or Mary would realize he was gone and would come over to get him. Ralph would look at me sadly and follow the one or
the other home. A week later he’d get bored and the cycle would repeat.
    I headed back to the patio. Ralph shuffled along at my feet and sat next to me when I got to my chair. I knuckled him on the head gently, and returned my thoughts to the Yherajk situation.
    For some reason, a memory of my childhood popped into my head: my father, Daniel Stein, sitting at the dining room table with Krzysztof Kordus, a Polish poet who had been sent to a concentration camp during World War II after he, a Catholic, had been caught trying to smuggle Jews out of Poland. Late in life he had emigrated to America, and he hoped that he would be able to publish his poems in English.
    I eventually read the poems when I was in college. They were terrible and beautiful: terrible in their themes of Holocaust and death, beautiful because they somehow managed to find moments of hope in the shadow of that terrifying destruction. I remember feeling the need to go out into the sun after reading them, crying because for the first time I was made to understand what happened.
    I had had relatives who had died in the Holocaust: great aunts and uncles on my mother’s side. My own grandmother had been in a work camp when the war ended. But she would never talk about it while I was growing up, and then she had a stroke that took away her ability to speak. It wasn’t until Krzysztof’s poems that the story was brought home to me.
    The night Krzysztof and my father sat at our dining room table, however, Krzysztof had received yet another rejection letter for his book. He sat raging at my father, for not being able to sell the book, and at the publishers, for not buying the book.

    â€œYou have to understand,” my dad said to Krzysztof, “hardly anyone buys books of poetry anymore.”
    â€œI understand shit, ” Krzysztof said, thumping the table. “This is what I do. These poems are as good as any you will find in the bookstore. Better. You must be able to convince someone to buy these, Daniel. That is what you do.”
    â€œKrzysztof,” my father said. “The bottom line is that no one is going to publish these poems right now. If you were Elie Wiesel, you could sell these poems. But you’re nobody here. No one knows you. No publisher is going to throw money away publishing poems that no one’s going to read.”
    That set Krzysztof off for another ten minutes on the stupidity of my father, the publishing world, and the American people in general, for not recognizing genius when it sat arrayed before them. Dad sat there calmly, waiting for Krzysztof to take a breath.
    When he did, my dad jumped in. “You’re not listening to what I’m saying, Krzysztof,” he said. “I know these poems are masterworks. That’s not in dispute. The problem is not the poems, it’s you. No one knows who you are.”
    â€œWho cares about me?” Krzysztof said. “The poems, they speak for themselves.”
    â€œYou’re a great man, Krzysztof,” my father said. “But you know diddly about the American public.” And then my father told Krzysztof a plan that would thereafter be known as The Trojan Horse.
    The plan was simple. In order to sell Krzysztof’s poems, people had to know who Krzysztof was first. Dad accomplished this by convincing Krzysztof, after much arguing and protestations of humiliation,