Forget I Told You This: A Novel: Zero Street Fiction
Autor Hilary Zaiden Limba Engleză Paperback – 31 aug 2023
Amy Black, a queer single mother and an aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q. One ink-black October night, when the power is out in the hills of Oakland, California, a stranger asks Amy to transcribe a love letter for him. When the stranger suddenly disappears, Amy’s search for the letter’s recipient leads her straight to Q and the most beautiful illuminated manuscript she has ever seen, the Codex Argentus, hidden away in Q’s Library of Books That Don’t Exist—and to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want her to burn Q to the ground.
Amy’s curiosity becomes her salvation, as she’s drawn closer and closer to the secret societies and crackpot philosophers that haunt the city’s abandoned warehouses and defunct train depots. All of it leads to an opportunity of a lifetime: an artist’s residency deep in the holographic halls of Q headquarters. It’s a dream come true—so long as she follows Q’s rules.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496235367
ISBN-10: 1496235363
Pagini: 308
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.39 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria Zero Street Fiction
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496235363
Pagini: 308
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.39 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria Zero Street Fiction
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Hilary Zaid is the author of the award-winning novel Paper is White. Her short works have appeared in Mother Jones, Ecotone, Day One, Southwest Review, and Utne Reader, and have been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Extras
1 The Letter
In that early evening hour, as men and women
poured from the Q shuttle bus up Telegraph Avenue, I
plunged into the stream of bodies congealing into darkness
and pressed toward the small curiosities shop where,
once a season, I was paid to ink handwritten letters.
That fall, planned blackouts blanketed huge swaths of
the city in shadow. But at the mouth of Temescal Alley, a
smart blue postbox shone wetly in the gathering dusk. I
didn’t know why the U.S. Postal Service had decided to
take its last stand in that enclave of digital hipsters. No
one in the instant, frictionless world wrote letters. But
I missed them. I missed the paper and the ink and the
longing. I missed the unfathomable distances. A witty
graffitist had tagged the postbox in white paint: “This
is not a postbox.” Clever. Turning object into art with
words. I brushed my fingers across the stenciled letters
the way I had once seen a woman skim her fingers against
a doorpost and then touch them to her lips. Six weeks
earlier, I’d dropped a letter in this box addressed to Q,
Department of Arts & Letters, a plea to be chosen for
an artist’s residency at the social media behemoth’s most
elusive division. I’d never heard back.
My phone buzzed twice in my hand. A message from
my mother: When are you coming home? An equally urgent
notice from 1-800-Flowers.com warning me that I had
just seven days left to send an arrangement in time for
Connie’s birthday.
It was October again. The season for haunting.
I deleted the ad, texted my mother Don’t wait, and threaded
my way to the shop.
Set back from the corner of 49th Street, Crimson Horticultural
Rarities was warm and close, its shelves creeping with
exotic plants, driftwood shadow boxes, glittering square-bottled
perfumes, a small blood-colored shop smelling of candle wax and
mineral earth. Customers floated among the tentacled plants, fingering
volumes of botany. There was a density to the air, the soft
gauze of spices brushing your cheeks. I found it deeply soothing.
“Amy!” Greer waved a sheaf of printed pages. I recognized her
by her nose ring and her asymmetrical hair, dyed, this season,
cerulean blue. “I set up your table in the back.” I glanced through
the list of late fall stock—Tillandsia and succulents, cedar eggs
and sandalwood soaps—names I would scribe across ivory card
stock in my careful, fifteenth-century chancery hand. The hand-scribed
cards were part of the vibe, charmingly irregular, a
promise of something real. I could have calligraphed Greer’s
cards at home in my room, or at the Hawk & Pony, but Greer
didn’t like keeping the shop open at night. Years ago, in her first
college apartment, she’d been raped by a man who had climbed
through the window. Now, along with tech stocks and rents,
crime was up. The curbs of Telegraph Avenue glittered every
morning with broken glass. Greer wanted me in the storeroom
so that, on that Fall Festival night, the first night of the year that
she stayed open after dark, she wouldn’t be alone.
I didn’t fear either darkness or solitude. In the tiny, cramped
storeroom of Crimson Horticultural Rarities, my sense of purpose
and my present tense for once slid into alignment: I slipped
back into an Age of Letters, the era in which I should have
been born.
The storage closet was hardly the medieval scribe’s public
square, but that’s what the internet was for. I live-tweeted my
location from @illuminated and ducked through the curtained
doorway into the cramped storeroom where anyone who wanted
my services could thus easily find me. An old card table had been
squirreled away among the shop’s overstock. Grabbing a spare
drape from a shelf, I spread the swatch of velvet over the table
to veil the spidery legs and arranged the tools of my trade across
it: a sharpened quill, four square cut-glass bottles of ink—indigo
and sepia, emerald and black. A set of votive candles. Next to
them, I set out my pasteboard placard, penned in clear, black
ink: Love Letters, Hand-Scribed.
The room was no more than a closet stuffed with boxes. But
behind the doorway’s velvet curtain, with candles glowing, I
imagined myself in one of the small, dark cells of the medieval
monks and scriveners, content to do the thing I loved, if only
for myself.
And then, suddenly, I wasn’t alone. Like a thought forming
into words, a man in narrow jeans and a tweed vest pulsed
through the curtains. A glistening beard and mustache clung to
the man’s face like a mask. The flames twitched. A drop of ink
dripped onto the crimson cloth and quivered before the velvet
drank it up.
Could I say I was surprised, when the thing that had just happened
was something I’d imagined long and desperately enough
to feel at that moment like a wish come true?
The man seemed nervous. His dark eyes flicked at the shelving,
at the walls and boxes over my shoulders. In the warm, waxen
light of the votives, his forehead shimmered with sweat. The
shops on the alley had been stables once and, at that moment,
I imagined I could smell the muscular heat and grassy breath
of horses.
The man’s eyes fell on the pasteboard sign at my elbow. He
hesitated, fingering the chain that hung from the watch pocket
in his vest. “I’m disturbing you.” He nodded at the pages spread
in front of me, the bottles of ink. In the silhouette he cast on the
wall, his heartbeat jumped in his neck.
“No. Please.” I smoothed the velvet with my palms and
pointed at the empty folding chair opposite mine. Suddenly, I felt
shocked by my own audacity. I’d never actually written a letter
for another person, for a stranger, for money. I spoke quickly to
hide the tremor in my voice: “Sit down.”
He glanced over his shoulder, but the curtains had already
settled behind him; the parted waters had closed. His hips slid
around the folding chair, a fluid, serpentine movement, like an
animal slithering through a hole. As he sat, he braced his palms
against the table, but he misjudged its solidity—it was only a card
table, covered by a rag. The ink bottles chimed against each other
and his fingers scrabbled to silence them. Living with my brother
in the house, I was used to small, abrupt catastrophes. I put my
hands over the bottles, stilling them, and smiled. I offered him
my portfolio. (I had never handed my portfolio to anyone and,
for a fleeting moment, I shivered with the fear of a new mother
handing her baby to a stranger, the terror that he would flee.
Silly, I chastised myself, considering the storeroom packed tight
with boxes: Where could he possibly go?)
He considered the brown leather cover. On the front, a craftsman
had hand-tooled a capital A in the Insular style—A for the
beginning of all letters; A for Amy. A long time ago, it had been
a gift from Connie.
We’d met in college, Beasts & Bestiaries, Medieval History.
When Professor Lindgren turned his back, Connie tore the
corner carefully from the top of a page and folded it into a tight
square she pressed to the back of my hand. (She was a chemistry
major, used to minuscule notation. Subscript. Superscript.) I had
slept with girls before. But none of them had ever written to me.
We all have a medium through which the world makes sense,
through which it means. It might be music, poetry, or paint. A
medium through which our experience of life is the most perfectly
apprehended. I unfolded the note. I straightened my spine
against my seat. In the outstretched arms and legs of her Ws, I
saw that we would become lovers.
As much as I had once missed Connie herself, I still missed
that: crabbed handwriting and bright, square envelopes; lined
notebook sheets; dark, bottled indigo. The kind of love that
could dye your whole world midnight blue. I still kept Connie’s
first note in an antique pewter snuffbox, the only letter between
us I hadn’t burned.
In that early evening hour, as men and women
poured from the Q shuttle bus up Telegraph Avenue, I
plunged into the stream of bodies congealing into darkness
and pressed toward the small curiosities shop where,
once a season, I was paid to ink handwritten letters.
That fall, planned blackouts blanketed huge swaths of
the city in shadow. But at the mouth of Temescal Alley, a
smart blue postbox shone wetly in the gathering dusk. I
didn’t know why the U.S. Postal Service had decided to
take its last stand in that enclave of digital hipsters. No
one in the instant, frictionless world wrote letters. But
I missed them. I missed the paper and the ink and the
longing. I missed the unfathomable distances. A witty
graffitist had tagged the postbox in white paint: “This
is not a postbox.” Clever. Turning object into art with
words. I brushed my fingers across the stenciled letters
the way I had once seen a woman skim her fingers against
a doorpost and then touch them to her lips. Six weeks
earlier, I’d dropped a letter in this box addressed to Q,
Department of Arts & Letters, a plea to be chosen for
an artist’s residency at the social media behemoth’s most
elusive division. I’d never heard back.
My phone buzzed twice in my hand. A message from
my mother: When are you coming home? An equally urgent
notice from 1-800-Flowers.com warning me that I had
just seven days left to send an arrangement in time for
Connie’s birthday.
It was October again. The season for haunting.
I deleted the ad, texted my mother Don’t wait, and threaded
my way to the shop.
Set back from the corner of 49th Street, Crimson Horticultural
Rarities was warm and close, its shelves creeping with
exotic plants, driftwood shadow boxes, glittering square-bottled
perfumes, a small blood-colored shop smelling of candle wax and
mineral earth. Customers floated among the tentacled plants, fingering
volumes of botany. There was a density to the air, the soft
gauze of spices brushing your cheeks. I found it deeply soothing.
“Amy!” Greer waved a sheaf of printed pages. I recognized her
by her nose ring and her asymmetrical hair, dyed, this season,
cerulean blue. “I set up your table in the back.” I glanced through
the list of late fall stock—Tillandsia and succulents, cedar eggs
and sandalwood soaps—names I would scribe across ivory card
stock in my careful, fifteenth-century chancery hand. The hand-scribed
cards were part of the vibe, charmingly irregular, a
promise of something real. I could have calligraphed Greer’s
cards at home in my room, or at the Hawk & Pony, but Greer
didn’t like keeping the shop open at night. Years ago, in her first
college apartment, she’d been raped by a man who had climbed
through the window. Now, along with tech stocks and rents,
crime was up. The curbs of Telegraph Avenue glittered every
morning with broken glass. Greer wanted me in the storeroom
so that, on that Fall Festival night, the first night of the year that
she stayed open after dark, she wouldn’t be alone.
I didn’t fear either darkness or solitude. In the tiny, cramped
storeroom of Crimson Horticultural Rarities, my sense of purpose
and my present tense for once slid into alignment: I slipped
back into an Age of Letters, the era in which I should have
been born.
The storage closet was hardly the medieval scribe’s public
square, but that’s what the internet was for. I live-tweeted my
location from @illuminated and ducked through the curtained
doorway into the cramped storeroom where anyone who wanted
my services could thus easily find me. An old card table had been
squirreled away among the shop’s overstock. Grabbing a spare
drape from a shelf, I spread the swatch of velvet over the table
to veil the spidery legs and arranged the tools of my trade across
it: a sharpened quill, four square cut-glass bottles of ink—indigo
and sepia, emerald and black. A set of votive candles. Next to
them, I set out my pasteboard placard, penned in clear, black
ink: Love Letters, Hand-Scribed.
The room was no more than a closet stuffed with boxes. But
behind the doorway’s velvet curtain, with candles glowing, I
imagined myself in one of the small, dark cells of the medieval
monks and scriveners, content to do the thing I loved, if only
for myself.
And then, suddenly, I wasn’t alone. Like a thought forming
into words, a man in narrow jeans and a tweed vest pulsed
through the curtains. A glistening beard and mustache clung to
the man’s face like a mask. The flames twitched. A drop of ink
dripped onto the crimson cloth and quivered before the velvet
drank it up.
Could I say I was surprised, when the thing that had just happened
was something I’d imagined long and desperately enough
to feel at that moment like a wish come true?
The man seemed nervous. His dark eyes flicked at the shelving,
at the walls and boxes over my shoulders. In the warm, waxen
light of the votives, his forehead shimmered with sweat. The
shops on the alley had been stables once and, at that moment,
I imagined I could smell the muscular heat and grassy breath
of horses.
The man’s eyes fell on the pasteboard sign at my elbow. He
hesitated, fingering the chain that hung from the watch pocket
in his vest. “I’m disturbing you.” He nodded at the pages spread
in front of me, the bottles of ink. In the silhouette he cast on the
wall, his heartbeat jumped in his neck.
“No. Please.” I smoothed the velvet with my palms and
pointed at the empty folding chair opposite mine. Suddenly, I felt
shocked by my own audacity. I’d never actually written a letter
for another person, for a stranger, for money. I spoke quickly to
hide the tremor in my voice: “Sit down.”
He glanced over his shoulder, but the curtains had already
settled behind him; the parted waters had closed. His hips slid
around the folding chair, a fluid, serpentine movement, like an
animal slithering through a hole. As he sat, he braced his palms
against the table, but he misjudged its solidity—it was only a card
table, covered by a rag. The ink bottles chimed against each other
and his fingers scrabbled to silence them. Living with my brother
in the house, I was used to small, abrupt catastrophes. I put my
hands over the bottles, stilling them, and smiled. I offered him
my portfolio. (I had never handed my portfolio to anyone and,
for a fleeting moment, I shivered with the fear of a new mother
handing her baby to a stranger, the terror that he would flee.
Silly, I chastised myself, considering the storeroom packed tight
with boxes: Where could he possibly go?)
He considered the brown leather cover. On the front, a craftsman
had hand-tooled a capital A in the Insular style—A for the
beginning of all letters; A for Amy. A long time ago, it had been
a gift from Connie.
We’d met in college, Beasts & Bestiaries, Medieval History.
When Professor Lindgren turned his back, Connie tore the
corner carefully from the top of a page and folded it into a tight
square she pressed to the back of my hand. (She was a chemistry
major, used to minuscule notation. Subscript. Superscript.) I had
slept with girls before. But none of them had ever written to me.
We all have a medium through which the world makes sense,
through which it means. It might be music, poetry, or paint. A
medium through which our experience of life is the most perfectly
apprehended. I unfolded the note. I straightened my spine
against my seat. In the outstretched arms and legs of her Ws, I
saw that we would become lovers.
As much as I had once missed Connie herself, I still missed
that: crabbed handwriting and bright, square envelopes; lined
notebook sheets; dark, bottled indigo. The kind of love that
could dye your whole world midnight blue. I still kept Connie’s
first note in an antique pewter snuffbox, the only letter between
us I hadn’t burned.
Recenzii
"Confronting timely questions such as how to preserve free will in a data-driven society while also telling a humane tale about rising above tragedy and disappointment, Forget I Told You This is a memorable novel—an adventure through words and emotions."—Foreword Reviews, starred
"I appreciate how Zaid—in addition to delivering a smart, surreal, and sexy thriller with a perfect ending—gets at the tensions between my generation's love of things we can hold in our hands and the increasingly overwhelming universe of digital media, Big Data, consumer surveillance, and AI—wherein we are fed things more often than we discover them."—Michael Mechanic, Mother Jones
“Forget I Told You This sets our high-tech world of phones and apps vibrating against the beauty and history of pen and ink. Twisty and textured, rich and hyperreal, Hilary Zaid’s world is dense with mysterious invitations. In fact, her novel itself is exactly such an invitation—and I’m very glad I said ‘yes.’”—Robin Sloan, author of Sourdough and the New York Times bestseller Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
“Hilary Zaid has written a gorgeous delight, lush with things not often seen—a sexy midlife heroine, handmade magic, and love letters both as plot and to a certain time and place in San Francisco. I loved every word.”—Claire McMillan, author of Alchemy of a Blackbird
“[Forget I Told You This is] not about Torah, exactly—although Amy reflects that ‘on calfskin curled around two wooden rollers had been tattooed the history of the world’—but anyone who resonates to the sacredness of text and the fragility of memory will feel those ideas being delicately and elaborately explored. Amy’s emotional touchstone is a ‘dark soferet’ [female scribe] she once saw working away in a Jewish museum, ‘murmuring over her sacred words. . . . Because the text was more important than the scribe. That was our tradition.’ Zaid’s first novel, Paper Is White, was about Holocaust historians and survivors, and in this novel, too, memory and forgetting become something absolutely central.”—Amy E. Schwartz, Moment magazine
“Deftly weaving together elements of a futuristic thriller, a family drama, and an ode to illuminated manuscripts, Forget I Told You This follows lonely scribe Amy Black on her quest to discover the mystery behind tech giant Q, a local resistance group seeking her help, and ultimately, herself. The prose is gorgeous, the plot tense, and Amy is a wonderfully flawed and sympathetic character whose intense battle between her artistic ambition, the demands of her family, and her own need for love form the beating heart of this gripping and imaginative novel.”—Erin Swan, author of Walk the Vanished Earth
“Forget I Told You This, Hilary Zaid’s portrait of the artist as a face-blind queer scrivener obsessed with ancient texts takes us to the back alleys of Oakland and the secrets rooms of a social media giant that is god-like in its omniscience and omnipotence—a world very much like the present. In this literary thriller made up of shifting identities and realities, where nothing and nobody is as they seem, one thing is a constant: the penetrating insight and elegance of Zaid’s prose.”—Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade
Descriere
Forget I Told You This is the story of a queer single mother and aspiring artist who finds herself in the thick of a plot to overthrow Big Data.