No, you're not crazy. The timecode reads 5 a.m. I am up obscenely early, and do you want to know why?

Jonathan Lethem called my apartment an hour ago. At least, since I was not the one to pick up the phone, and Janet told me it was just a dial tone after one ring, that's what I'm choosing to believe.

Janet and I went to Jonathan's reading last night at The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, a reading that was packed to the rafters. People were actually standing up in the back because they ran out of chairs. Since Vintage is sponsoring the paperback tour of The Fortress of Solitude, he read several passages out of the book, starting with how "Play That Funky Music" was the bane of Dylan Ebdus' childhood existence, and continuing with the first time Dylan meets Arthur Lomb, the only other white kid at his school. He even gave Arthur a great hurried, nerdish, self-important kind of voice, which was pretty close to how I'd heard it in my head while reading the book. Then he answered some questions about growing up in Brooklyn (also my birthplace, though my family only lived there six more months after I was born), just how autobiographical the book is (not as much as I'd expected), and what music he listened to while writing it (a lot of Marvin Gaye).

Then he had finished, and sat down to sign books. Miraculously, fortuitously, I got a spot near the front of the line, thanks in big part to Janet's quick reflexes. I introduced myself, told him we'd actually met several years ago at a potluck dinner over at John Kessel's house right before Girl in Landscape had been published. He recognized me, or was nice enough to say so. Before the reading, I'd seen him browsing through the store, and as we kept ending up in the same sections he'd dart little glances at me, trying to figure out where the hell he knew me from. At that point, I hadn't wanted to be rude, pressing myself upon him before he was about to read for a roomful of people; I have enough musician friends to know that they're very focused on the performance before they go on, and they're pretty much useless if you try to talk to them then. However, now that the reading was over, and he was signing the four books I'd brought, that was no longer a problem, so I chatted him up.

He asked if I was still writing, and I allowed that I was. He wanted to know if I'd seen the young Dr. Kessel recently, and I told him I had, though I wasn't able to get out that John is my thesis advisor. I mentioned that I'd also be at his NCSU reading on Monday night, and he reassured me that he'd be reading something different, something out of the new collection Men and Cartoons, which, I'm hoping, will be available for purchase there (Quail Ridge is selling the books that night). He finished scrawling his signature on the last book of mine and said it was good to see me again; I said that I'd see him Monday night.

Janet and I came home, watched Kerry trounce Bush in the final debate, gave Becca (one of our adopted hamsters) some antibiotics (we'd taken her to the vet earlier since she has a fairly pronouncable lump on her underside; the vet hopes it's just a fluid-filled cyst that can be drained, but we won't know for sure for a few days), and went to bed around 12:30 (well, I did; Janet was up until 3 a.m.). At 4 a.m., I was jerked awake by the telephone ringing. Janet answered, and immediately hung up, saying it was just a dial tone. I lied awake for the next half-hour, ripped from sleep, unable to return to it, wondering who the hell had called so early in the morning. And then it hit me.

Perhaps after the reading, after Jonathan grabs some dinner at a local Mediterranean place, or maybe someplace more upscale if Vintage is swinging for it, after heading to the hotel and spending some time in the bar, drinking a scotch, watching the Presidential debate through a thin haze of cigarette smoke and light conversation, after going up to his room and flipping through the many cable news channels analyzing the debate, or maybe he's just in the mood for the Cartoon Network, something lighter after the heaviness of political oratory, perhaps after tossing and turning for hours, victim of insomnia, brain racing with ideas for the new novel (he describes as it something light, a romantic comedy with an LA backdrop), perhaps after all that he flips through the yellow pages and picks up the phone.

He knows it's late. He knows he shouldn't call, but he has a sudden need for a friendly voice, someone he can talk to about Brooklyn of the 1970s, about literature, about the gradual but at the same time sudden fame brought on by Fortress, a novel which launched him into household-name status, the newest darling of the New York literary scene. He wants to let out all his uneasiness about being considered a mainstream literary writer while still holding onto his genre roots, amazed that when he is now mentioned, it is only as the author of his previous two novels, and not the five books before those which were firmly entrenched in the tropes of the fantastic. He wants to discuss all of this, and he even goes so far as to dial my number before hanging up, before fully realizing the time.

Yes, I know, it's all speculation. The truth is, it was more likely some drunken frat guy or a third shift line-worker at Glaxo on the other end of the phone at 4 a.m. In all probability, it was a wrong number. But still, I wonder. If quantum theory is correct, and every possible action that can be taken is being taken in an infinite number of alternate universes, it's entirely possible that in one of those universes it was indeed Jonathan Lethem on the other end of the line. Stranger things are possible.

Now Reading:
You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers

Stories Out to Publishers:
10

Books Read This Year:
56

Zines/Graphic Novels/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
30