Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

used to the breathtaking impermanence of things. The only part of my world that carried on, inalterable and permanent, was Wonder Boys. I had the depressing thought, certainly not for the first time, that my novel might well survive me unfinished. Then I reached into the pocket of my shirt and took out the last inch of the joint Crabtree and I had smoked in the car as we waited for Emily to show up.
    I had just lit the ragged end of it, and was staring down at one of Doctor Dee’s cryptic stick arrangements, when I heard the squeak of rubber soles on wet grass. I looked up to see someone step out from the shadows around the back porch and start across the yard, toward the greenhouse, into the light. It was a man, tall and wearing a long coat, his hands thrust into his pockets. He skirted the corner of the greenhouse and kept walking until he came to the pair of long dull shining bands that cut across the Gaskells’ yard from east to west and that once had borne the young empire builder across the breadth of his miniature domain. I started when I saw the man in the Gaskells’ yard, and for an instant I was afraid—Sara and Walter had been robbed a couple of months before—but then I recognized the long coat, and the stooped shoulders, and the slicked-back hair, black and shining like a pane of the greenhouse. It was my student James Leer, standing between the rails, with his face raised to the sky, as though waiting for a hurtling phantom engine to come and cut him down.
    I was surprised to see him. The students invited to this First Party at the Chancellor’s house were usually conference interns, the typists and telephone clerks, the program staplers and ad hoc chauffeurs. For a talented young writer you could always bend the rules a little, to give him or her the chance to hobnob with real writers, in their natural habitat, and James Leer was indeed talented, but he was not the kind of young man who inspired people to bend rules for him, and I tried to remember if I could possibly have invited him to come myself. He stood for a moment like that, gazing up at the starless sky, then pulled his right hand out of his pocket. There was a gleam of silver glass or metal, the flash of a mirror, at the end of his crooked arm.
    “James?” I said. “Is that you? What are you doing?” I stepped down from the porch, still holding on to the fatty, and started across the grass toward him.
    “It’s a fake,” said James Leer, holding out his hand to me, palm upward. Upon it lay a tiny silver pistol, a “ladies’ model” with a pearl handle, no bigger than a deck of cards. “Hello, Professor Tripp.”
    “Hello, James,” I said. “I didn’t know what you were doing out here.”
    “It’s my mother’s,” he said. “She won it in a penny arcade in Baltimore, in one of those machines with the claw. When she was in Catholic school. It used to shoot these little paper caps, but you can’t find the right kind anymore.”
    “Why do you carry it around?” I said, reaching for it.
    “I don’t know.” His fingers closed around the little gun and he slipped it back into the pocket of his overcoat. “I found it in a drawer at home and I just started carrying it around. For good luck, I guess.”
    The overcoat was a trademark of his. It was an impermeable thrift-shop special with a plaid flannel lining and wide lapels, and it looked as though it had been trying for many years to keep the rain off the stooped shoulders of a long series of hard cases, drifters, and ordinary bums. It emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.
    “I’m not supposed to be here, in case you were wondering,” he said. He shifted his shoulders under the weight of the knapsack he carried, and looked me in the eye for the first time. James Leer was a handsome kid; he had eyes that were large and dark and always seemed to shine with tears, a straight nose, a clear