Jericho Iteration by Allen Steele Page B

that hadn’t been tidied in a week. Books and magazines heaped together near the mattress and the desk. A small pile of printout on the desk, which constituted the unfinished, untitled, unpublished novel I had been writing for the last few years. Tiny mouse turds near the kitchen cabinets. I could have used a cat; maybe it would have straightened up the place while I was gone.
    I swallowed the first beer in a few swift gulps while I peeled out of my muddy clothes, leaving them in a damp trail behind me as I made my way toward the bathroom, stopping only to retrieve Joker from my jacket and place it on the desk while I grabbed another bottle out of the six-pack. The second beer followed me into the shower, where I leaned against the plastic wall and gulped it down, letting the hot water run over me until it began to turn cold.
    I cracked open the third beer after I found an old pair of running shorts on the floor and put them on. It was then that I noticed the phone for the first time. The numeral 9 was blinking on its LCD, indicating the number of calls that had been forwarded to my extension from the office switchboard downstairs. Part of my rental agreement with Pearl was that I would act as the paper’s after-hours secretary, so I sat down at the desk, opened the phonescreen, and began to wade through the messages.
    Most of the calls were the usual stuff. Irate businessmen in suits wondering why their quarter-page ads hadn’t been run in the paper exactly where they had wanted them to be, like on the front cover. A couple of oblique calls to individual staffers, giving little more than a face, a name, and number: press contacts, boyfriends, or girlfriends, who knew what else? I hit the Save button after each of them.
    Most of the rest were the usual anonymous hate calls from readers, which arrived whenever the new issue hit the street, accusing Pearl of running a commie-pinko, right-wing, left-wing, feminist, antifeminist, environmentalist, technocratic, luddite, anarchist, neo-Nazi, Zionist, pornographic, anti-American, and/or liberal newspaper, all of them swearing to stop reading it tomorrow unless we converted to the ideology of their choice. Most of them had switched their phone cameras off when they called, but there was a demented three-minute screed from some wacko with a grocery bag over his head about how the New Madrid earthquake had been God’s revenge against everyone who didn’t support Lyndon LaRouche in the presidential election of 1984.
    You can acquire a taste for this sort of feedback if you have enough patience and a certain sense of humor, but the same could be said of eating out of a garbage can. I erased them all. They could e-mail their comments to the paper if they felt that strongly about them.
    I was about to twist off the cap of my fourth beer when I caught the last message on the disc. Once again the screen was blank, but the woman’s voice on the other end of the line was all too familiar.
    “Gerry, this is Mari. Are you there … ?” A short pause. “Okay, you aren’t, or you’re not picking up. Okay … ”
    Great. My wife—or rather, my ex-wife, once we finally got around to formalizing our separation. She didn’t even want to put her still-pic on the screen.
    “Listen, your Uncle Arnie called a while ago, and … um, he’s mad at you because you didn’t get to the seder last Friday night … ”
    I winced and shook my head. I had forgotten all about it. Uncle Arnie was my late father’s older brother and the Rosen family patriarch. A lovable old fart who persisted in trying to get me to attend observances even though he knew damned well I wasn’t quite the nice Jewish nephew he wanted me to be.
    “Look, I know this is the usual family stuff, but, y’know I wish you’d tell him not to call here …”
    Of course she didn’t want him to call. Marianne wasn’t Jewish, and although she had put up with her share of Rosen seders and bar mitzvahs and Hanukkahs, there was no