The Enthusiast Josh Fruhlinger Josh Fruhlinger & Associates THE ASSOCIATES ARE ALSO JOSH FRUHLINGER Copyright © 2015 by Josh Fruhlinger Cover art by Matt Lubchansky Book design by David Malki ! Illustrations on pages 39 & 201 by Don Sparrow Illustration on page 179 by Catty Donnelly All rights reserved. Tis book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. First e-book edition, 2015. paperback isbn 978-1-936561-34-6 hardcover isbn 978-1-936561-35-3 Production assistance by Make Tat Ting! makethatthing.com Josh Fruhlinger blogs at joshreads.com E-book available at jfruh.com/enthusiast For Amber, who always thought I could do it, even when I wasn’t so sure THE ENTHUSIAST Acknowledgements There are a lot of people without whom this book would not be in your hands and/or e-reader. Primary among them is, of course, my wife Amber, who supported me emotionally, logistically, and (let’s blog, The Comics Curmudgeon, which became more than a vague the process, and when it turned out she actually liked started letting myself believe that writing it would turn out to be critiques, suggestions, and help with some of the narrative corners of the characters. the course of my weird career and life path, they have always encouraged me and talked me up to their friends and never told am extremely grateful for everyone who’s ever been kind enough community that’s grown up around my blog; without their years writing a novel. 7 THE ENTHUSIAST Lots of smart and talented people helped turn my manuscript was my editor and gave me notes and suggestions from the Lubchansky drew the amazing art that you see on the cover (or the endpapers, if you’re reading this in hardcover); Catty Donnelly created the gorgeous train poster that you’ll see in a bit; Don really was overwhelmed by the number of people who chose to contribute would take me to deliver the book was wildly optimistic, and, down. Thanks to everyone for their patience; it’s two years late, cool rewards to backers. for one lucky and generous contributor to become a “patron of the arts” and write a paragraph in the acknowledgements. That When I was first approached in 2012 to fund The , I didn’t hesitate to reply, “I would be honored, 8 THE ENTHUSIAST Mr. Chabon!” It was only after I had been chained in the rat-infested basement of a Baltimore housing project that I began to suspect Josh Fruhlinger’s deceit. I like to think that our frosty relationship has thawed since then, a process that was only helped by Josh’s relocation to Los Angeles during 2014 in search of movie contracts with lucrative “kill fees.” As I have not been fed since last year, I fear my remaining time is brief, but I must use the last of my strength to dedicate this novel to my lovely wife Eek, and our children Squeak and Squeak. to be patrons of the arts. At the end of the book is a big list of 9 THE ENTHUSIAST All four of the railfans from the Internet were standing at the fence when Kate and Mesut got there. Tis was not the plan. Te plan was really quite clever and well thought out, but this wasn’t it. Tey didn’t want to be frst, which would have involved a certain amount of awkward standing around and wondering if they were at the right spot, and also would have given them an edge in establish- ing themselves as de facto leaders of the group, if they wanted that edge, which they didn’t. Tey also didn’t want to be last, because then everyone who was eager to get moving (which was everyone, they were working on the assumption that it would be everyone, that’s why they were here) would resent them. And besides, who wants to be last? Cool people, probably. Kate and Mesut were trying very hard not to be cool. Te actual precise right moment for Kate and Mesut to arrive would have been afer at least one other person had shown up but before the last person had arrived. Tis would have put them in the middle of the group, literally and metaphorically, which is what they wanted. Te metaphorical one. Tey didn’t want to come across as a gang of two. Tey wanted to blend in. 11 THE ENTHUSIAST “What would be really good would be if we arrived at diferent times,” Mesut had said the night before. Kate had invited him to Pickles Pub, a bar near her apartment. It was her favorite place to go, and yet she had a moment of panic about it when she got there and saw him standing out front. It was raining and something about the cut of his pants (narrow) and the length of the sleeves on his jacket (a little short) reminded her that he was European. Europe- ans thought American things were lame, right? Especially Ameri- can chain restaurants? Pickles probably wasn’t famous enough for Germans to know about and make fun of (she imagined Mesut at home with some shadowy German friends, watching a TV show where dumb Americans go to a TGI Fridays and are stupid, with all the Germans laughing uproariously at how dumb the Americans and their restaurants were). Still, there were three or four Pickleses around D.C. and maybe he’d seen another one already. Was there one at the airport? Oh, God, she was pretty sure there was one at the airport. He probably saw it. It had the exact same decor as the one they were sitting in now, except one wall was missing, confront- ing diners with the terminal concourse and Dulles’s dingy carpet. Surely he had seen it. Te jig was up. But once they were inside, Mesut seemed completely uninter- ested in harshly judging the decor, which was all wood paneling and old-timey colored glass. What Mesut was primarily interested in was beer and talking about the next day’s live-site. “They don’t know we know each other outside the message boards,” he said, drinking beer number three, “and I think perhaps we should not tell them that we do.” Tis was going to be the frst live-site where Kate was the lead, and she wished that she were doing it with another Agent. Mesut 12 THE ENTHUSIAST knew in broad strokes what they were up to, of course, but he was thinking about it all engineer-y, or at least all engineer-afer-three- beers-y. He wasn’t showing any signs of intoxication, and yet he was saying things like this: “Ideally, one of the other people should get there frst, then I will show up, then another person, then you, then the last one. Tat way we are seamlessly integrated into their group. Like the teeth of a zipper.” He pulled the zipper of his jacket up and down a bit, in what he appeared to believe was a meaningful fashion. Kate started to explain how hard it would be to hike to a remote location and slot their arrival amongst a group of people whose precise arrival times they had no way of knowing in advance, but the thought of it gave her a headache, so instead she just said, “But we’re meeting four of them. Te way you described it, it sounds like there’s only three.” Mesut looked crestfallen but respectful that she had found a fatal faw in his math. “Another beer, please,” he asked the waitress as she walked by. She was no longer fazed that he wasn’t asking for any particular brand. Even though they knew they couldn’t time their arrival with teeth-of-a-zipper levels of exactitude, they at least had high hopes of not being frst or last. Tese hopes came to nothing when, parked in front of Mesut’s hotel the next morning, Kate began to program their destination into her phone, only to have the sinking realiza- tion that “where the chain-link fence angles of to the east along the Orange Line a quarter-mile north of Addison Road” was not some- thing that Google Maps would understand. She began to worry less that Mesut would think she was a dumb American and more that she was just dumb, in a nationality-neutral kind of way. He made a mufed noise that Kate assumed was judgmental, 13 THE ENTHUSIAST until she saw that he had a mouth full of candy bar and was peer- ing at the archaeological layers of textured sugar making up the half that he hadn’t eaten yet. Tis was, apparently, his breakfast, or maybe an afer-breakfast snack. “Tis is very much like a brand of chocolate bar we have in Germany, except”—he chewed thought- fully—“I think this has less peanut butter?” He looked at the label. “Why is it a ‘Clark Bar’? Who is Clark?” Kate began to think that Mesut might not, strictly speaking, be the coolest kind of European they had on ofer, which was just fne by her. Tey did, eventually, fnd an abandoned gas station on Addison Road where they could park, surrounded by tall grass. From there it was a short hike along the shoulder to the path that led uphill through the woods.