Tyrannia by Alan Deniro

Sometimes it made it easier to move the text along, toward a vision or instinct that Amar felt within the words, but sometimes this ambiguity was a dull wall, too thick to break. Tunneling underneath the text to the other side was the only option, but it was long and painstaking. This novel was, as Amar feared, one of the latter cases.
    If it could be called a novel. The beginning picked up in the middle of the action, in the middle of a dinner party. In a castle? Amar wondered if, perhaps, the agent had forgotten to send pages, but no—the author had clearly numbered each page of the manuscript with tiny, fastidious numbers and dates, as if the author was trying to assert a timestamp control that was not there in the text itself:
    . . . meeting Mick inside the cathedral was not Mary’s cup of tea. She was afraid of it, how it loomed on the hill, the votive candles in the vestibule. She had been there before as a child. But Mick said it was the only safe place, where his wife wouldn’t discover the true feelings for Mary that he had to keep secret.
    “I have to see you,” he said. “That, or else I’ll leave the city and backpack through Asia. You know, see the world. You may hear back from me or you may not.”
    “Fine. It’s a deal, then,” she said.
    Mick’s wife had learned to read lips when she was in the foreign service. At the kitchen table, she read her husband’s conversation as if it were like a book. As Marigold walked up the hill to the cathedral—it was a pleasant path, lit with daffodils—she had no idea that Mick’s wife was following twenty paces behind. Mick Solon was already there, lighting a candle and stuffing a dollar in the donation box, supposedly for his dead grandmother.
    CHAPTER SIX: Please Don’t Kill Me!
    This was written more than twenty years ago. This was depressing, all the more depressing after the second Scotch. The handwriting was frantic. The pages had stains—from alcohol, no doubt. Writers like this one always drank. Amar converted the cursive to type, page by page, once he entered his handwriting algorithms. It would take a few hours.
    He worked until morning. Decipherment and understanding were two different things, and he was nowhere near understanding when the morning bell rang six times. He could hear his wife wake, shuffle into the kitchen and then the shrine room. He thought about joining her, but would not. One of his project managers from South Africa who always sent him work gave a head’s up that a two volume commentary on the Lotus Sutra, by some Zulu pop transhumanist he’d never heard of, was going to be coming his way in a few days, just a head’s up.
    He was almost falling asleep at his desk, the pages churning with due industry, when his scanner choked and stopped:
    “Larissa paused. ‘Do you really expect me to discuss politics, my lord?’ she said, looking downward. And then her favorite Don Henley song started playing.”
    White paper on the facing page. The scanner was adjusting to the typography differential. A note was caught in the agent’s original scan, pressed in the pages of the notebook. Clean, dark printing, could have been from a typewriter. Creased once in the middle. A logo in the upper center—a seal, to be exact. He recognized that seal. He wished he could have smelled the page.
    He blew up the page and read the note, and then read it again more quickly, as if blurring his comprehension would somehow change the placement of the words into something far more innocuous. Then he grabbed the wastebasket underneath his desk and vomited into it. He could hear his wife chanting, and the crossing guard’s whistle for school’s first shift. His children were second shift but had half-internships that started at nine. They would be waking soon, and his wife would ready them, and Amar started crying.
    Then he paused the scanner and called the agent. He wasn’t even sure what time it was there, but he didn’t care. He waited about a