Let Readers Argue

If I were sitting in a room with an editor, a publisher, somebody from sales or marketing, and they said, “Okay, Peter. How do we sell Lord Atlas?” I think I’d tell them to start with readers.

I can already hear readers arguing with the people in this book.

Not politely, either.

They’re going to get mad at Carson. They’re going to want to shake Suzanne. Some of them are going to enjoy Garrick longer than they think they should. Laura is going to make them wonder whether she sees Carson more clearly than he sees himself.

So if you want to know how I’d sell the book, I’d let the readers talk.

And I’d start with Carson.

Carson

“Carson, I liked you. I liked you almost from the beginning. You get things done. You don’t make a big deal out of yourself. You love your dog, you love your son, and you read Leviathan because you think it’s about whales. Mostly you just want a simple life now. You’ve had enough of the other one.

“And then I find out what the oath means to you. Somalia was a bitch. That asshole on your team was out of line and you did the right thing. I see why that Dirk guy, who's cozying up to your ex and your impressionable son, gets under your skin so badly. He wants to wear the warrior costume without having earned any of it, and you know exactly what it cost to earn it.

"The peanut butter shot was a hoot, and you put that poser in his place. I watch you trying to teach Michael not to be afraid because the team is there. You were a leader. But you were nothing without the team. That's gut wrenching honesty, man. And the fact that you admitted to your son that you were scared. But something about love for your guys saved you. You aren't the stereotype, Carson, and I think that's why we love you.

“Then Garrick kills your son. It was just a football game for charity. Your guys are dead, your son is dead. Laura is gone, and you leave for Montana. What were you running from? And then I got it. You needed some time before you could face what came next.

“Then that guy comes after you at the Motel 6 and holy shit, Carson. The pillowcase over you’re your head. The ghost creature without a weapon but for Diego’s baseball bat. Eighteen seconds and the assassin with the Glock is dead. So that part of you never really went away. You kept it under control, until you had no choice. The assassin thought you'd be easy prey. He was satisfyingly wrong, dead wrong.

“And then you’re holding Emilio, the Motel 6's manager's young son, who got you that bottle of whiskey for your room, whom the assassin saw with a menace before you killed him. A scared kid you barely know, and I could tell. You were thinking about Michael and keeping Emilio alive.

“Then Laura finally finds you in Ely, Nevada, and she’s ready to cut Garrick’s balls off, and you’re the one who says no. Not yet. You want to take her to Montana. You want some wine, a country band, a dance. You tell her you need some time just to be with her.

And that stopped me, Carson. Your son is dead. Somebody just tried to kill you. Laura shows up ready to tear Garrick apart, and you’re the one saying, wait. I want a little time with her first. I want dinner and some wine, and I want to dance.

“You love. You kill. But you're responsible. You don’t overreact. Until you do. And somehow you’re a romantic too. You’re a fucking Boy Scout one minute and a motherfucker with certain people the next. You hate posers, power for the sake of power. You hate entitlement. You're wanting a Mexican lunch after a day at Dog Beach one minute, then you're reading Moby Dick and Leviathan the next.

I kept waiting for you to become a normal, patriotic guy, Carson. Somebody I could size up and be done with. Like, just stay in your lane, buddy. Be the uber-patriot everyone expects you to be, stop making us question that crap. Is wanting entertainment too much to ask? And, you bastard, then I can hear your response: I’m not here to entertain you, buddy. If you can't take me, go find Clancy."

True, Garrick was a bastard. I see it. But shit. You went berserk yourself in a way, didn't you?

“And now I’m looking at you thinking, Carson, why in the hell did you do it? After everything you stood for?

“I liked you the way you were. I liked the guy who wanted to be left alone. I liked the guy who believed the oath meant something. That rules were there for a purpose and liberty was something you earned. And, then, you become the cold-blooded killer that you despised in others.

And now you’re Mr. Liberty. Lawless Mr. Liberty. Why? How are you different from Garrick in the end. That he hires the killers; and you are the killer?

“And then I start arguing with myself. I get it. What happens when somebody like Garrick takes freedom to such an extreme that there is no more law? No more team. When people get so greedy for their own selves that their freedom matters more than anything else. That the law itself becomes just a piece of paper. I guess you saw that. When there is no more law, someone has to become the law? Is that why you did it?

"Maybe I even wanted you to do it.

I'm pissed at you. But dammit. I still love you for doing it. Because maybe someone had to do it. And you never backed down from doing what you had to do. I can't decide if it was right or wrong. But that's why I keep thinking about it."

Suzanne

"Suzanne, you were such an interesting, intelligent woman. You were a physicist. You could have done anything with your life. You got your PhD from MIT. You could have had almost any man you wanted. Your parents taught you all that beautiful stuff about who we are in relation to other people, and you believed it.

“And then you got involved with Garrick.

“Okay, he was handsome. He was charismatic. I get that. But why did you keep doing it? He kept seducing you, except after a while it feels like you wanted to be seduced. Like you knew you were playing with fire and kept putting your hand closer to it anyway. Who does that?

“And then you give him the Liberation Manifesto for his birthday. It’s funny. It really is. It’s outrageously funny. And sadly pathetic. You captured it. I wish Ayn Rand were alive to read it.  But once Garrick starts going nuts with it, Suzanne, what are you still doing with him? Why didn't you leave him?

“You knew what you wanted your life to be. You knew what you had promised yourself. And you just kept letting this guy pull you farther away from it.

“Then look what happens. Everything you dreamed about gets wrecked.

“So now I’m wondering about you too. Were you secretly hungry for power yourself? Were you jealous because you had the brains and Garrick got the power? Maybe. I’d probably be pissed too.

“But Jesus, Suzanne. You’re smarter than this.

“You keep letting yourself get pulled back in, and then everything turns to shit and you need Carson to help clean it up. And your plan works, more or less, except Carson’s son gets killed too.

“So what am I supposed to do with you?

“I can respect you sometimes. I can get angry at you. I can feel sorry for you. I’m not sure I can love you the way I love Carson.

“And maybe that’s unfair.

“Because you loved Garrick. Maybe that’s the part I have to sit with. You loved something that was bad for you and you knew it, and you still couldn’t get away from it.

“Who am I to judge that?

“We’ve all done some version of it. Fallen in love with something that made us feel alive even when it was taking us farther away from who we wanted to be.

“And that makes me angry with you, Suzanne.

“It also makes me sad.”

Garrick

“Garrick, you’re harder for me. I have a much harder time finding anything in you I can hold onto.

“You came from Indiana. Your mother struggled. You loved your mother. I get that. Then somehow you become this star professor at MIT, even though you’re not really that great a scientist. But you can talk. Jesus, can you talk. You have a way of getting people to do things, and somehow you get this beautiful, brilliant woman named Suzanne Dreyfus to fall completely in love with you.

“And she’s even making fun of you. She knows your Ayn Rand obsession is ridiculous. She writes this whole Liberation Manifesto partly to poke fun at you because you walk around acting like you’re John Galt.

“Okay. A lot of young men think like that. They think they’re being iconoclastic because they’ve discovered individual freedom and nobody else understands it. But most people grow up a little. They run into the world. Other people start mattering.

“You never really let the world get in the way, did you, Garrick?

“You had this woman who loved you to death, and you were willing to walk right over her for the sake of your revolution.

“And I keep trying to figure out what the hell makes you tick.

“You know what I think? I think you were scared. I think somewhere inside you, you were terrified of what a real man might be, what a real leader might be, what an honest human being might look like. So you had to prove you were above all of it.

“And God, your ideas about freedom make me angry. You really believe you can take everything we owe each other and throw it away because your freedom matters more. You’d sell your grandmother if the theory told you it was necessary.

“Then Carson comes along.

“And he’s almost everything you aren’t.

“That’s when I really start having trouble with you. Because I can understand ambition. I can understand ego. I can even understand getting carried away by your own ideas. But how do you get this far away from love? How do you get this far away from responsibility to another human being?

“Maybe people disappointed you somewhere along the line. Maybe you decided you were never going to need anybody badly enough to let them hurt you again. I don’t know.

“But Suzanne paid for it. Michael paid for it.

“And then you try to kill Carson too.

“Jesus, Garrick.

“At some point you became so powerful that nobody could tell you no anymore. You could turn your own beliefs into everybody else’s reality, even when those beliefs were tearing apart the society you kept claiming to save.

“And by the end I’m thinking, you don’t love society at all. I’m not even sure you like people.

“I struggled with what Carson did to you.

“But I’m glad you’re dead.”

Laura

“Laura, I don’t really know what to fight with you about. You left Solana Beach because you had a life you wanted to go find. You went to MIT. Garrick tried to pull you into his bullshit and you wanted nothing to do with him. Good for you.

“But you left Carson behind.

“And I know you had to go. I know you had your own life to live. But look what happened to him after you left. He was lost for a while. He went off and found his own way through the SEALs, which could hardly have been more different from yours. You became a scientist. He became a warrior. And somehow neither one of you ever really stopped loving the other.

“Then all those years later you come back to San Diego, and Carson comes looking for you.

“And thank God he does.

“Because he needs you. He doesn’t understand what is happening around him yet. You know Garrick. You know what he was trying to do at MIT. You start putting things together with Carson and suddenly that prison job doesn’t look accidental anymore.

“And I love the two of you together because there’s no bullshit between you. You can go back to Mount Soledad where you went when you were kids, except now you’re the grownups. You’re the ones trying to figure out what the hell everybody else has done.

“And then there’s that Green Flash.

“You’ve wanted to see it forever. Carson saw it when he was young and miserable and missing you, and somehow you understand that maybe you don’t get to hunt something like that down. Maybe it comes when it comes.

“Then the football game happens. Michael dies. People die. And you run.

“Okay, Laura. That one I can argue with you about.

“You go all the way to the Galapagos. You don’t even know what happened to Carson. What are you doing there? Maybe you just couldn’t take any more. Maybe I would have run too.

“But then Carson finds his way back to you. Ely, Nevada of all places. You roll into town in that Prius and there he is. And after everything that has happened, the two of you barely need to make a production out of it.

“He says he’s going to Montana. He wants to take you somewhere you can hold each other and dance by the river.

“And you go.

“And Laura, holy shit.

“You show up in Ely talking about cutting Garrick’s balls off and making him watch those kids die while he bleeds out.

“I didn’t see that coming from you.

“And Carson is the one saying, no. I need a little time. I need you. I want to take you somewhere. I want us to eat, drink some wine, and dance.

“That got me.

“Because now I’m looking at the two of you differently. You’re the one ready to kill somebody and Carson is asking for a dance.

“Then somewhere out there you make him stop the car and walk into the desert because you see something in the sky. You spent your whole life wanting the Green Flash, and now you get something bigger than the thing you were waiting for.

Remember what you saw? After the bombing? After the cyberattack on the prison? After Michael died? When you got out of the car?

The big sky a medium for a vast and exquisite painting, an allusion to humanity to love and survive or to die coldly, helplessly, darkly. Once you knew how to look, which was to not look at all but to sense it, a green flash writ larger than the known universe burst into a brilliant and endless painting across the pastel sky.

“You drop to your knees and cry.

“Then you get back in the car and say, ‘Let’s go. We’re going to Montana.' And even you know what is coming next.

“Laura, I think that's when I fell in love with you."

So if somebody in that room asks me, “How do we sell Lord Atlas?” I’d tell them to put these people in front of readers and let the book do its work.

“If they finish it still mad at Carson, still trying to understand Suzanne, still glad Garrick is dead, and still thinking about Laura, then they turn to me and start grilling me for creating these people.

And I’ll probably borrow a line from Carson:

‘Do you want a buttery Chardonnay instead?’”

And if somebody in that room still says, ‘Okay, but what kind of book is this?’

I’d say put it on the shelf next to Slaughterhouse-Five and Jitterbug Perfume for a while.

“Then it gets up and says, ‘I need a beer and a Mexican lunch.’

"After it gets seasick, stick it next to Leviathan for a while.

And after that, tell Ayn Rand to get a real job.