The archivist, p.1
The Archivist, page 1
Praise for The Archivist
“With deftly woven narrative threads and intrigue worthy of Hitchcock, The Archivist is immersive and rewarding. Pickett does for university archives what Raymond Chandler did for LA.”
—Janet Somerville, author of Yours for Probably Always
“Road trip! Famously translated to the screen by Alexander Payne, Sideways deserves to be read and relished. Dour Miles and priapic Jack are the Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty of this contemporary picaresque which is by turns hilarious, poignant, and intoxicating.”
—Jay McInerney, LitHub, on Sideways
“Suspenseful and haunting, The Archivist carried me away. Rex Pickett’s noir novel of obsessive passion, deadly secrets, and the power of creativity unrolls with relentless, tidal force. Join heroine Emily Snow and take a journey into the dark archives. Enthralling.”
—Meg Gardiner, author of the UNSUB series
“Sideways writer Rex Pickett always leaves us wanting more and with The Archivist he delivers. Immersive, wonderful, absorbing, he draws the reader into a geologically nuanced tragic romance that ramifies into something inexpressibly transcendent.”
—James Phelan, author of Patriot Act
“Rex Pickett’s beautifully written and tautly structured novel is a slow burn that builds on every page to its searing, emotional conclusion—along the way the author and his characters descend into the dark chasm that often separates art from truth, and sometimes does not.”
—Charlie Lovett, New York Times bestselling author of The Bookman’s Tale and Escaping Dreamland
“A haunting and sometimes heartbreaking exploration of the truths and power records hold, the insidiousness of their erasure and destruction, and the redemption that can be found in their restoration and preservation…In this shattering thriller, Pickett’s Emily Snow shows that archivists are detectives, and relentless ones, at that.”
—Caryn Radick, digital archivist, Rutgers University
“Rex Pickett, in his novel The Archivist, creates a fictional archives, one populated by archivists who act and speak as real archivists do, and his multifoliate story replicates the process of archival research. The reader accumulates the novel’s multiple streams of action, wondering where the novel will turn next, always working toward a final resolution that reveals itself with surprising force.”
— Geof Huth, chief records officer, NY State Unified Court System
“As deeply, disturbingly immersive as the archive at its heart.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The Archivist is a powerfully engrossing mystery/thriller by author Rex Pickett. A departure from the Sideways trilogy, Pickett gracefully draws the reader into a web of love, obsession, paranoia, betrayal, and the written word. The plot draws the reader in subtly, and shortly thereafter, they are as consumed as Emily in discovering a dark reality.”
—San Francisco Book Review
“The Archivist is one of those novels that is so original and unique that it is hard to put down. Any historian, librarian, or book lover will be pulled in from the first page. Rex Pickett has written a gorgeous tale…This all-consuming novel was a fascinating delve into the dark side of academia.”
—Mystery and Suspense
ALSO BY REX PICKETT
Sideways
Vertical
Sideways 3: Chile
Copyright © 2021 by Rex Pickett
Published in 2021 by Blackstone Publishing
Cover design by Kathryn Galloway English
All rights reserved. This book or any portion
thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner
whatsoever without the express written permission
of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations
in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5385-1963-9
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5385-1962-2
Fiction / Mystery & Detective
CIP data for this book is available
from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
31 Mistletoe Rd.
Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
For Kate
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.
–Julian Barnes, The Only Story
Part I
The Fires Outside
From: San Diego Union-Tribune,
December 17, 2017
LA JOLLA, Calif.—San Diego police have identified the drowning victim at Black’s Beach as Nadia Fontaine, an archivist employed at Regents University’s Memorial Library. Discovered in the early-morning hours on Thursday, the victim was said to have been surfing at night in dangerous conditions. A distinguished member of the Society of American Archivists, Ms. Fontaine was most recently archiving the papers of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Raymond West.
Chapter 1
A Hard Rain’s Got to Fall
8/3/18
All alone. Blissfully. I’m driving down the coast to San Diego to start a new job at Regents University. I’ll be working as a project archivist on the Raymond West Collection, West being a celebrated writer whose work I’m vaguely familiar with.
The coast of California is beautiful, but the state is on fire!
Emily Snow was twenty-seven years old. She drove a three-year-old Mini Cooper S, shaded blue, her favorite color. She loved shifting the gears. Senna, the legendary Brazilian Formula One racer, who died tragically, was one of her heroes. She thought about him. She thought about many things as she drove down the coast of California, after a too brief sojourn in San Francisco and a stint as a cataloger at the Pacific Film Archive, to her new assignment in San Diego as a true archivist in manuscript processing. Prior to Pacific Film Archive, she had worked as a project archivist at the Harry Ransom Center on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, immersed in its incredible collections of famous authors like Ian McEwan, Anne Sexton, and Nobel laureates Kazuo Ishiguro and Gabriel García Márquez, part of whose collection she had been privileged to work on. An archivist’s dream. She adored Austin for its countercultural irreverence, but it was a city she was glad to say goodbye to when things went sour with a young musician by night / tech guy by day named Louis. Emily, no stranger to exploratory relationships, believed in fidelity, commitment. Now, her only commitment was to herself, and the uncertain life that unfolded before her. Like the ocean that stretched dark and white-capped blue to a milky pink horizon whose setting sun seemed to have touched off fires on the far side of the world. A sense of liberation suffused her. She had no ties to the past. All she wanted was to somehow make a difference on this planet going to hell.
Hell. California was on fire. Years of drought had laid a thick carpet of tinder. A superbloom had arisen out of a winter of unseasonably heavy rains. All it took were the Diablo winds in the north and the infamous Santa Anas of the east to galvanize the pyromaniacs into action and rip the power lines from their moorings and set the state ablaze. Fires had galloped west through Napa and Sonoma, hurtled surreally in the middle of the night over six lanes of asphalt and torched neighborhoods in Santa Rosa. Winds clocked at over sixty miles per hour drove currents of ash down the coast and caused many of the terrified inhabitants of San Francisco to don masks. The skies to the east were tarnished a brownish red color, as if some malignant force in the heavens had unleashed a virulent poison upon its planet.
Emily was driving away from the blackened ruins of one fire into the rotating cyclonic maw of another that was now burning through the Santa Barbara hillsides when her cell rang.
“Hi, Mom,” she said, finger-wrestling with her earbuds, not wanting to get cited for her third cell violation in the past year. “How are you?”
“Are you in San Diego yet?” Her voice had the querulous intonation of a mother worried for an only daughter.
“No, not yet,”—she glanced out the window at the dark-blue ocean on the stunning Big Sur Drive—“but I’m making my way down the coast now.”
“That’s good. How are you feeling?” her mother asked.
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“I’m okay, Em. It’s not fun in here,” she replied, referring to the assisted-living facility she had moved to after suffering a cracked hip.
“I’m going to get you out to San Diego, Mom.”
“Oh, I hope so,” she said in a hopeful, higher octave. “Are you nervous?”
“About the new job?”
“Being all alone.”
“No, I prefer it. For now.”
Their conversation ground to an awkward halt. Emily was afraid to offer more, as if it would continue to deepen a line of questioning that she found uncomfortable. A private woman, she didn’t like to have to hide her true self, but she wasn’t fond of exposing it either. Maybe that’s what had happened with Louis. She wouldn’t let him in. She wouldn’t let him in all the way. She longed for intensity, but only if it would be reciprocated. She feared he would take that big step inside and consume her like the fires ravaging the desiccated California forests. And in consuming her, he would colonize a part of her that she hoped never to cede. What happened with Louis, dear?” was exactly the question she didn’t want to have to address. There was no confabulating it away.
“I’ll let you know when I get there, Mom.”
“Drive safely.”
Emily clicked her phone to the magnetized car mount. Absently, she played with a music app and tapped around until she located a station that played ’80s rock. OMD, the Cure . . . From a decade before she was born, but the finest in pop music in her opinion, when music still had soul. The skies were darkening now, bleeding crimson. The charnel odor of ash stung her nostrils with the twin traces of death and rebirth. She had recently read an apocalyptic book titled The Sixth Extinction and believed that this is what the planet would look like when rats the size of Labradors, the author doomfully theorized, roamed the earth seeking the last vestiges of humankind. She wondered if the fires could climb over the hills and burn all the cars on Coast Highway 1 and leave nothing but a swath of gray all the way to the ocean, where the waves relentlessly battered the rocky shoreline. The sublime beauty and the horror that was California. Emily Katherine Snow, a girl raised in a small town in Massachusetts, who dreamed expansively when she was young, but now would be remembered by few if the fires incinerated her.
Emily was still floating in the same cloud of fatalism when she wheeled into the parking lot of a marine-themed restaurant in Morro Bay, a tourist town at the southern end of the Big Sur drive that boasted a wharf and a gigantic rock that jutted out of the shoreline like a granitic pustule.
She perused the laminated menu that a young waiter offered her. Debating a cold craft beer, she worried that it would make her sleepy during the stretch of miles facing her ahead.
“Fires are something, aren’t they?” the waiter remarked.
Emily smiled without showing her teeth and nodded, not looking to attract men.
“They’re saying they could make it all the way to Morro Bay.”
“Morro Bay?”
“Where you’re sitting.” He smiled, exposing a mouth of brilliant white.
“Oh. I’ve been on the road.” She looked off, not wanting to encourage him, if encouragement is what he had in mind. Emily wished she could read men better. She knew she was attractive to them, even if she deliberately wore off-putting black brow-line glasses and styled her chestnut-brown hair in a short, ragged, unkempt shag, as if she had cut it herself with a pair of scissors and a pocket mirror. As if, if you thought about it, she were an escapee from a lunatic asylum. She wore a poker-faced countenance and a mannish fashion statement of fleece vests over button-up shirts that made you question whether she was brilliant or crazy. Or both. She aspired to the misimpression. It was another way to armor herself.
“What’s that you’re reading?” he inquired, reaching to turn the book so he could make out its title. She let him. “Raymond West. Lessons in Reality.” He turned the book back so that it faced her again. “Never heard of him.”
“It won the Pulitzer. And some other prominent literary awards.”
“Ah. Got to check him out someday.”
As he walked away, Emily followed his retreating figure with wary eyes, her antennae vibrating. Men were the furthest thing from her mind.
Even though the restaurant was perched at the edge of a vast ocean, she was served an uninspired meal of overcooked fish and limp vegetables. She ate ravenously, her nose buried in Lessons in Reality. West’s prose melted on the page. She could never write like that.
The Santa Ana winds had kicked up when she left the restaurant. She unfolded the collar to her fleece jacket so that it protected her neck as she walked back to her car. A tumbleweed hurtled across the street, reminding Emily of a scene out of a Sergio Leone film where a triad of desperate men faced off with drawn guns in a clichéd Mexican standoff. Overhead, gulls seeking cover cawed invisibly from the now dark and desolate wharf gloomily spangled with fog-blurred lights.
Back in her car, Emily realized she was facing another five brutal freeway hours before she got to Del Mar, an unincorporated beach hamlet north of San Diego where the apartment the library helped her secure was waiting. She reset her Google Maps app and turned the engine over on her car.
The wind buffeted her Mini as the route headed inland. Through the windshield, the fires raged in the foothills to the east of the 101 freeway, growing closer with the high-velocity easterly winds. Even though the fires were in the distance, they were advancing apocalyptically now, slanting and leaping, racing raggedly across the low-elevation mountains like an unapologetic force. Leaping like dragons’ tongues, Emily almost said out loud to herself, recalling a lyrical phrase from a short story she had recently listened to on a podcast. “Love goes where it will; the arrow can only follow,” she mouthed from some distant star in her literary memory. The fires, to her, seemed analogous to that unpredictable and uncontainable life force.
Raymond West’s Pulitzer winner was also an audiobook, and she was listening to it now as the conflagrations lit up her driver’s-side window. West had elected to narrate his own words. His voice had, Emily thought, a slight accent, but she couldn’t place it. It was a gravelly, modulated voice—a man who was no stranger to smoke and drink, she thought. Or was she inflecting his voice with her imagination? She tried to marry his voice to the author’s photo on the dust jacket, to paint an image of the man in three-dimensionality. With his shoulder-length hair, angular face, and rascally smile, he reminded her of the playwright Sam Shepard circa the late seventies.
In an adrenalized, coffee-fueled daze, she blasted through Santa Barbara, where the fires incandesced the night sky with infernos of violent orange. In contrast, West’s voice drawled on, enunciating every word, bringing the dialogue to life with a thespian’s flair. Lessons in Reality was deep, emotional, and soul baring, charting in hypnotic prose the interior landscape of a young man who yearned for experience but who was suicidally beset by fear of failure.
Los Angeles was looming below her now, dotted with pinpoints of lights that stretched to seeming infinity. The coffee had grown cold in her thermos. Her cell hadn’t rung. Louis had texted her when she was at the restaurant, and she had impetuously decided to place a block on all his future texts. She had an image of her hand carving the air and creating a tabula rasa, starting over from a blank page. West’s sonorous voice kept her awake. She marveled at his grasp of language. At times she shuddered in cringe-worthy respect at how personal he could be. The passages where he described the main character’s various romances, his many—often self-destructive—amorous encounters. Hearing their accounting in his own voice, she felt an eerie sense of heightened closeness to him, as if he were narrating directly to her and no one else. Her absorption grew and helped the miles fly past.
Emily paused the audiobook and drank in Greater Los Angeles in all its blazing neon ugliness. The ten-lane freeway was bounded by garishly lit car dealerships, furniture warehouses, cheerless stucco apartment complexes, franchise restaurants, commercial office compounds with their mirrored fenestration and sepulchral cinderblock architecture. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could work, let alone live, here. Emily briefly dated an LA screenwriter she met online. They traded emails and texts for weeks, and then, maddened with desire and almost ready to profess her undying love, she flew out to meet him. Within minutes the magic dissipated. He had said he worked in television, but that turned out to be a fiction when Emily pinned him down to specifics. Her impression of the entertainment business from this intense young man named Vince was that it was a world of desperate carapace-shelled pseudoartists who viciously competed in the concrete-and-glass megalopolis of a sun-drenched hell, cannibalizing one another for connections and an ephemeral moment in the spotlight. As much as Emily loved movies and some select TV shows—mostly British sketch comedies of the past—the people who created them seemed born like vermin to battle its cruel hierarchy to success. Women in particular, she gleaned from Vince, braved an even harsher truth in Hollywood, and always had. Like LA, not for her. She’d felt ashamed that she had let her imagination run riot with this wannabe screenwriter, booked a hotel room in Venice Beach, bivouacked miserably for two days after the magic had evaporated, and flew back to Austin and the emollience of Harry Ransom’s vast library, content to be an archivist.
