The Manuscript Read Online Free PDF

time that day as he climbed into the passenger side of the long, black vehicle’s front cab. Aldous didn’t smile back. The big man obviously had a lot on his mind. Michael tried a cheerful ‘Hello’ but Aldous merely grunted ominously before gunning the car into mid-morning traffic.
    Welcome to the Big Apple.
     
    ********
     
    Abe shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
    His ass hurt.
    Lately, that had been a recurring theme in his life, however this morning, especially, his ass felt like a hive of bees had stung his rather ample posterior.
    It was an occupational hazard as much as a lack of adequate roughage. He was one of a dying breed of literary agents and spent most of his waking hours sitting. Abraham Sarkins was one of the few who still believed there were talents worth discovering. He actually read everything he got before he sent a rejection letter – or read at least a few dozen pages so he could determine whether he was about to shut down the next Tolstoy or a semi-literate chimp with delusions of grandeur. He realized he was somewhat of an anachronism, but he’d been doing it that way forever and he wasn’t about to change now.
    Most of his contemporaries farmed out the scanning of query letters and first chapters to their overworked, meagrely-paid assistants, however Abraham was old-fashioned, and believed a large part of his professional life had been distinguished by recognizing talent others had overlooked.
    And so he sat, twelve hours a day and up, with a throbbing sciatica and a conviction that he owed those sending him their work at least a cursory personal review before he crushed their dreams. Which he did ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time. It was nothing personal; just the way the business worked, and it had been getting nothing but tougher for as long as Abe had been doing it.
    But every now and then, completely out of left field, Abe would find something that captivated his interest and made him want to read more. That happened about as often as a lunar landing, but the universe worked in an inexplicable manner, and for some reason, as was the case with the remarkable document he’d begun reading last night, Abe was occasionally chosen as the vessel through which genius would flow – or at least as the agent to whom something worth reading was sent.
    He shifted in his seat, trying to mitigate the discomfort.
    Today, not only did his ass hurt, but he was also genuinely mystified.
    Last evening, as he was preparing to leave the office after a long day of fighting with publishers, ass-kissing prima donna authors and shmoozing film producers, he’d been floored by an e-mail sent to his private, unpublished address. The sender was unfamiliar, yet it was worded in such a way that a personality like Abe’s had to at least glance at the attached pages.
    He didn’t want to – normally he’d have summarily deleted it unread – and in hindsight, part of him wished he’d done so and gone home to his two Yorkies. But for whatever reason, likely the mention in the opening sentence of a little-known factoid from Abe’s college days, he’d violated his own rule and taken a peek at the contents.
    That peek had developed into three hours of increasingly engrossed reading, and then the printing of the manuscript for consumption at home. Abe hated reading on his computer screen and routinely printed out any longer documents, to be read in what he felt was a proper manner. Pages flowed differently on paper than on a screen, no matter what new miracle materials it was made with, and he was too set in his ways to start being romanced by technological advents now. He’d waited twenty years before he bought his first answering machine, convinced the innovation was a fly-by-night fad. Even with all the hubbub about eReaders and Eye-Pads, or whatever the hell the kids were so fired up about, Abe wasn’t even close to convinced that paper was dead in the water.
    His thinking returned to the remarkable