Page 9 of Death of the Author

9 Ting Ting Ting

She’d been editing all day. It was nice to sink into the sea of words and story, to get away from reality for a while. She

had a seasoned editor who loved the book and whose notes were all on point, guiding Zelu to find ways to make an already shiny

book shinier.

She still wasn’t sure why the publishing world had fallen in love with Rusted Robots so completely, but every so often, she would catch a glimmer of how the book moved people. Like an insightful comment from

her editor, or a media question she wasn’t anticipating. These were always pleasant discoveries. Nevertheless, she didn’t

share much of this with her family. It was simply too much to explain. For several reasons. The main reason being that to

them, anything to do with her manuscript had become inextricably linked to her smoking weed.

Three days after the big auction where she sold Rusted Robots and the next two unwritten books in the trilogy, her siblings had all visited the house. It was Saturday, the day of the week when the whole extended family within driving distance got together. She always had fun hanging out with her siblings, their partners, and her nephews, but this Saturday, Zelu was particularly excited because she’d decided she would share her news. She waited until everyone had settled in the living room for a while. The TV was playing some show on Netflix, and the jollof rice and stew their mother had made was already half finished.

Her father sat in his chair with a cold bottle of Guinness. Her mother was on the phone in the kitchen. Amarachi was showing

off her freshly manicured shiny black stiletto nails to Uzo and Bola. Chinyere was focused on whatever was on the TV. Tolu

was watching something on his phone with Chinyere’s sons. Arinze and Jackie were deep in conversation. Family. Zelu was in

the center of all this, literally. She’d wheeled herself into the middle of the room, observing everyone, yet feeling...

disconnected. She had such great news, huge news, mind-blowing news, but she hadn’t shared it yet, and no one had noticed

her. She was alone.

She wheeled out of the room and went to the back porch. It was a warm night, and the crescent moon was just rising. She took

a deep breath and tilted her head back, eyes closed. Even now, she still couldn’t believe it. She chuckled. She really wanted

to tell her family. She wanted them to know that, yes, she’d been fired; yes, her first book had been rejected; yes, she was

paraplegic; yes, she was living at home; yes, she had no marriage prospects. But she’d just sold her art for millions of dollars,

and it was about to be published in several languages around the world and adapted into a feature film.

“Me,” she said. “ I made this happen.”

She reached into her pocket and brought out her vape pen. She took several puffs, exhaling the mist slowly. Enjoying the faintly

earthy smell.

“Seriously, Zelu?” she heard from behind her.

“Amarachi, what do you want, woman?” Zelu said. The fog of her high made her smile wider instead of groan. She chuckled to herself and took

another puff.

“The whole family is here and you’re out back getting high. What the fuck?”

“Want some?” she asked, holding up her vape pen.

“Nope. Time and place and all.”

“Now is now,” Zelu said, shrugging.

“Don’t you want to do better?”

Zelu rolled her eyes. Amarachi was six years her junior, yet she talked and acted like it was the other way around.

“Why are you so dry?” Zelu snapped.

Her sister narrowed her eyes. “Why are you so happy being a loser?”

If it had been any other day, that would have stung, but Zelu laughed loudly. “Are you kidding?”

Amarachi seemed surprised. “No.”

“Well, if it makes you feel better, I finally sold my novel. I was about to go back in after a little relaxation to tell everyone.”

“Liar.”

Zelu leaned back, smiling breezily. “Nope. It’s called Rusted Robots , and I finished it weeks ago. Sold it for a million dollars to one of the best publishers in the world... well, that, plus

another two million for the next two books. It’ll be a trilogy.”

Amarachi narrowed her eyes as Zelu took another hit. She slowly blew a cloud of smoke toward Amarachi, who fanned it away,

disgusted. “Oh, and there’s more,” Zelu said. “It’s going to be a movie, too. More millions for me, just from a studio optioning

the right to adapt it.”

Lightning-fast, Amarachi snatched her vape pen away.

“Hey!” Zelu said, grabbing for it.

“You’ve had enough. You’re babbling nonsense.” Amarachi turned around and started toward the door.

“What the hell are you doing?” Zelu shouted. But Amarachi had already gone inside. Zelu gasped, the fog of her high lifting a bit as adrenaline flooded her system. “Please! I can’t afford another one of those right now, man. I haven’t gotten any of my advance yet. Where are you going?! Oh my GOD, don’t you dare!” But she couldn’t move as quickly as her younger sister. Not with a wheelchair in a house that, despite being made wheelchair friendly over the years, still had bumps, tight turns, and carpeting she needed to navigate. “Amarachi!” she called. But her sister didn’t answer.

Zelu stopped rushing as she remembered. She could afford to take her time. She was high. She had news. But as she wheeled

back into the living room, she didn’t hear voices laughing. She didn’t hear the TV. She suspected some other news had preceded

her entrance. When she rolled in, her family was all staring at her. She could feel their eyes searching her face. Uzo was

already ushering the children out of the room.

“What?” Zelu asked.

Her mother held up the vape pen. “Ah ah! What is this? In your parents’ house?!”

Zelu glared at Amarachi in disbelief. This was an all-time low. “Snitch!”

From the opposite side of the room, Tolu laughed.

“ Wooooow ,” Chinyere said, standing up.

“Well, everyone,” Zelu said, wheeling into the middle of the room like she had before. But now her family was focused on her.

“Yes, indeed,” she announced. “Your useless, crippled daughter is high as fuck!”

Her father gasped as her mother shouted, “Blood of Jesus!” before signing the cross.

“Oh my God.” Tolu laughed again, bending over and holding his belly.

Arinze, Jackie, and Uzo were also laughing. Uzo was covering her face with her hand to try to stop herself.

Zelu was on a roll, so she kept rolling. The words poured from her mouth like water. She held up an index finger. “ But! I have some equally amazing news. I sold my novel for a million dollars to one of the biggest publishers in the world, plus

two other books!” She paused, looking at everyone. No one said a word. “And it’s going to be made into a movie, so that’s

even more money! Surprise, I’m gonna be rich!”

It was a great moment, even in her affected state of mind. The pause before anyone reacted was one she’d remember for a long time. In that pause, she was certain her family finally heard her, saw her, understood that all her prior nonsense had been leading down the path she was meant to be on. However, it was only a moment. And when it passed, her family’s only focus was on the vape pen and what was inside it.

“You already cannot walk, why go on and also confuse your brain now?” her mother asked.

Her father took the vape pen and began to examine it. He sniffed it and then put it to his lips.

Chinyere put a hand up. “Dad, don’t—”

The vape pen lit up as he unwittingly took a puff. His eyes grew wide and he violently coughed out vape mist.

“Ah ah! Secret, what are you doing?” her terrified mother shouted. “Are you all right?!”

“Oh dear God, this can’t be happening,” Bola muttered to Uzo. Uzo got up and ducked out of the room to hide the laughs gathering

in her cheeks.

Their mother patted their father on the back. “It’s... like... a joint!” Secret coughed. “But electronic! Chineke! ”

Their mother snatched the vape pen back from him, giving him an annoyed look.

“Mom, Dad, it’s not that serious,” Tolu said. “It’s legal now, too. People use it for anxiety and pain management.”

“Rubbish,” her mother scolded him. “Only people who have lost their minds use it.”

“Whoo!” her father said, patting his chest like it was filled with smoke.

Zelu jabbed an angry finger toward Amarachi, who now stood next to Chinyere, looking smug.

“Why do that here, anyway, Zelu?” Chinyere asked. “It’s disrespectful.”

“Just wrong,” Amarachi echoed.

“Ugh!” Zelu groaned, turning and wheeling back into the hallway. She spent the rest of the evening in her room.

Only Tolu came to check on her. He gently knocked on the door. “Come in, Tolu,” she said.

“How’d you know it was me?” he asked as he opened the door.

She shrugged. “Lucky guess.” It wasn’t. She knew her family well.

She was sitting on her bed, laptop open on her lap. She’d been reading the manuscript with her editor’s notes. Tolu pulled

the chair out from her desk and took a seat.

“That was some shit,” he said.

Zelu looked down at her computer screen, face flat. “Yep.”

Tolu rubbed the back of his neck. “Sorry.”

“Nothing new. I swear, Amarachi probably thinks I shoot up heroin and smoke crack.”

“She’s just trying to help, Zelu.”

Zelu slammed her laptop shut. “Well, she’s a snitch. We’re not ten years old anymore. Yeah, I live at home, but I’m thirty-four,

and she’s twenty-eight! I can do whatever I want. And I was outside !”

“True.”

“And what the fuck is this self-righteous crap!? We’ve all smoked weed before! I’m pretty sure Dad smoked plenty of it in Nigeria! He wanted to try my pen; he was just playing it off

like an accident because of Mom. And you know what, I bet she probably smoked it right in the palace, too!”

Tolu giggled at this, and even though she was still angry, she couldn’t help but join him. They quieted. Zelu’s high had worn

off a while ago, but working on Rusted Robots a little had kept her nerves calm. However, now she was right back to where she’d been when it all happened—low. She sighed.

“Is it all true?” Tolu asked.

She looked up, met his eyes, and grinned. “One hundred percent.”

“Holy fuck,” he said.

She did a self-satisfied shimmy with her shoulders. “Thank you.”

Over the next few days, everyone eventually came around, putting the whole vaping incident behind them. Her parents gently asked her what the book was about. When she told them, they were obviously confused by the plot but didn’t ask any clarifying questions. Her father said, “Well, that’s great. Congratulations.” Her sisters each called and congratulated her, too, though none of them asked for details about the story or the publishing process. Jackie came by in person to apologize for Amarachi, and then he sat with Zelu for an hour to hear how it had all happened.

Zelu was glad they all knew now, but enough was enough. She wouldn’t get their admiration, and she didn’t need it. Satisfied

to be left alone, she quickly got back to editing and disappeared into her own world without humankind.

Then the journalist came to the house.

Weeks before, her publisher’s publicity director had excitedly called her to set up a prepublication interview with a venerable

newspaper—the kind that reported real news, not just book stuff. But she’d been so distracted with revising her novel that

she’d completely forgotten about it. She was deep into rewriting a tricky paragraph when her mother showed up at her bedroom

door.

“The reporter is here,” she said.

Zelu resisted the urge to be snippy; her mother wasn’t her maid. “Thanks, Mom,” she said. “Can you tell him I’ll be there

in a minute?” She looked at her computer’s clock and was surprised at the time. An hour had passed like it was five minutes.

“All this publicity for this crazy book you wrote.” Her mother frowned as she looked over Zelu’s wrinkled pajamas. “Put something

presentable on.”

“I was going to, Mom,” Zelu said as she closed her laptop.

“You better,” her mother said as she walked back into the hallway. “Remember, good journalists notice more than your words.”

Alone again, Zelu looked down at herself. She’d taken a shower around 1 a.m. that day , and it was 3 p.m. now. She sniffed her armpits. “Not terrible,” she muttered. She slipped on her long red skirt and Digable Planets T-shirt—a little wrinkled, but they were just going to have to do. She tied back her braids, rubbed some frankincense oil on her wrists, splashed some water on her face and dried it. Her appearance was nothing special, but it was her.

“Hi,” she said as she wheeled into the living room.

He was a little white guy, maybe only twenty-five years old. He slouched comfortably in her father’s chair, legs crossed.

His clothes were casual but expensive; his stylish jeans were rolled up to reveal clean purple Chucks and brightly striped

socks. In his left hand he held one of her mother’s favorite glasses, but he wasn’t drinking the orange juice in it. He smiled

but didn’t get up to greet her. Zelu didn’t like him.

“Zelu Onyenezi-Onyedele!” he said. “So honored to meet you. Seth Daniels.”

Zelu narrowed her eyes at him. He’d pronounced her name perfectly. She shook his hand. Then he reached into his pocket and

put a cell phone on the coffee table between them. “You mind if I record?” he asked.

Zelu looked down at his phone screen. The flashing red dot on the screen indicated that it was already picking up audio. “Do

whatever you need to do.”

He smirked knowingly. “I know I’m talking to a sci-fi writer, but honestly, I don’t fully trust tech.” He reached into his

briefcase and pulled out a yellow legal pad and pen. Retro. Okay, maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. “So, the way I like to

start these things is by just verifying the basic stuff.”

“Cool.”

He read from his notepad. “You’re the child of Nigerian immigrants.”

Zelu nodded. “My mother is Yoruba—that’s a Nigerian ethnic group. And my father is Igbo, another ethnic group. They met in

grad school. They came to the US to start a new life together. Home is complicated.”

He tilted his chin, eyes still on the notepad. “And you’ve been back to Nigeria?”

“Oh yeah,” Zelu said, leaning forward. “I’ve spent whole summers there with my siblings. I can speak some very bad Igbo and

slightly better Yoruba.”

“ Kedu? ” he asked.

Zelu blinked, shocked to hear an Igbo word come out of this guy’s mouth. “ O dimma ,” she slowly answered. What the fuck? This guy learned to say “hi” in Igbo for this!? The suspicion instantly crept back in.

He smirked again, clearly enjoying her obvious confusion. But instead of explaining himself, he moved right on to the next

question. “So, you’re the second of six children?”

“Yep. Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.”

He laughed, clearly getting the old Brady Bunch reference.

“But not really,” Zelu clarified. “I’ve never felt overshadowed for being the first middle child. The whole falling-out-of-a-tree-and-snapping-my-spinal-cord

thing got me all the attention I could ever want.”

He paused and finally looked up from his notes, eyes flitting over her body before quickly snapping back to the page.

“It’s fine,” Zelu said, used to this reaction. “It happened when I was twelve. It was awful, it scarred the heck out of me...

but not so much that I can’t talk about it.” She forced a smile. She hated talking about it and wished she’d never have to

talk about it again. But it was always right there, in front of everything she did.

He nodded, tapping his pen once against the paper. “So, when did you start writing?”

Zelu looked up at the ceiling. What a complicated question. “I think I’ve always been a writer. Even when I wasn’t writing.

Even when I wanted to be an astronaut.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You wanted to be an astronaut?”

“Yeah. Before I was twelve.” She sighed, rubbing her palms over her arms. “I wanted to research rocks and dirt from other

planets, look at comets and asteroids through telescopes, map heavenly bodies, and...” She smiled to herself. “Okay, this

is going to sound strange, but I wanted to be the first human to travel into the sun... and come out, of course. My kid brain was so certain that there were secrets in there, inside the stars.”

“Wow, that’s wild,” he said.

“But I always loved books. My father was an avid reader, still is. Back then, I’d watch him, and before I could even read, I understood how important novels were. So I took pieces of construction paper and scribbled nonsense on the pages, stapled them together, and drew pictures of stars, planets, dogs digging in moon dust, cats dancing on Mars, trees growing in space, and random ladybugs on the covers. Those were the only things I knew how to draw at the time, I guess. I called them ‘space books.’”

He chuckled, scribbling something down. “So, you hold an MFA in literature. I heard you were adjuncting for a while.”

She looked up at him sharply. “Yeah.”

He set his pen down. “Until recently.”

Her back stiffened. How did he even know about that? How was this relevant to Rusted Robots ? She rubbed her forehead, suddenly back in that fucking department head’s office. She’d thought she was done having to explain

this. “Well, y-yeah. Stepping away from teaching gave me the time and space I needed to write.”

“From what Brittany Burke said, it seemed—”

Zelu cut him off, her words coated in acid. “You spoke with her?”

His eyes widened a little. “I did.” He smiled sheepishly. “I was just—”

“Why?”

Zelu had expected to startle him, but his expression settled into something very neutral. “I’m a journalist. Just doing my

job, following leads.”

Zelu sucked in a breath and let it out. She could feel the rage rising within her. Was she naive for thinking that, now that

everyone wanted to talk about Rusted Robots , she could leave all that bad stuff behind? If this idiot journalist had spoken to Brittany or her former students, who knew

what he’d cram into this story? He would forever immortalize the worst time of her life. Brittany had probably been all too

happy to answer every question, at best hoping for adjacent acclaim, at worst hoping to sabotage Zelu’s success before the

book ever hit shelves.

“That was a very bad day” was all Zelu managed to say, voice flat as she pushed herself into the back of her chair.

The journalist nodded in agreement. “From what she said, it was pretty, uh, emotional.”

Something was filling up in her ears. Zelu could hear it, like a piano note pitching higher and higher. “The reason I was

f— uh, um, uh...” Ting ting ting. Higher higher higher. Fuller, inflating.

Stop.

Everything.

She cocked her head. “I’m... I’m sorry,” she said. Her temples ached. The ringing in her ears wouldn’t go away. Like that

day in the tree. She was falling. “Could you turn that off?” She pointed to his phone.

“Oh, sure, sure,” he said. “But... maybe just finish what you were saying, first?”

She tried to smile at him, but she knew the smile didn’t look right. He clearly saw it, too, because he leaned away from her

a bit. “What more is there really to say?”

He hesitated. “Zelu, I...” He still hadn’t touched his phone.

She said nothing. They both sat there, staring at each other, the silence denser than lead.

“Ooookay,” he finally said. He leaned down to touch the Off button on his phone screen. “I think I’ve got enough.”

“Great.” Zelu quickly pushed her chair back from the coffee table, accidentally knocking against it so hard that the orange

juice glass rattled and nearly tipped. He took the cue, rising from her father’s chair and shoving his notepad back into his

briefcase.

Her mother must have been listening from the kitchen. She appeared from around the corner and offered to show the journalist

out. Zelu didn’t follow them. Her head was pounding from the effort of controlling her emotions. After she heard the front

door shut, she wheeled right to her room, locked herself in, grabbed a pillow, and pressed her face into it. That didn’t help.

She threw the pillow onto her bed and just stared at the ceiling as it washed over her. What have I done?

She’d been at rock bottom when she’d started this book. And maybe it was because she’d been so low, because she’d had nothing to lose, that she had been able to produce it. She’d let her mind soar, take

her higher and higher. Now nothing was there to keep her from falling and falling, down, down, down. When she finally hit

the ground, could she survive the impact?

The story came out two weeks later. It was a good article, according to others. There was no mention of Brittany Burke or

the school Zelu had adjuncted at. After that horrible interview, the journalist had emailed Zelu a list of reasonable questions,

which she had no problem typing answers for within a day. She’d thought that would be the last she saw of Seth Daniels.

But the one thing Seth Daniels knew was when a story was worth following. And the one thing Zelu never failed to be was a

story. Eventually, she would become the defining subject of his journalistic career. He’d follow the highs and lows of her

meteoric but all-too-brief rise to stardom. He’d interview most of her immediate family members and loved ones, attempting

to complete the tapestry of Zelu’s inner workings and why she did what she did. And, eventually, when Zelu was gone, he’d

claim to be the one who saw it coming first.