Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

So whenever Marvin went out to book hotel rooms, reserve restaurants, or pay for something, it was never done directly under his name. Gordon handled all of it. Part of the reason was that Marvin came from wealth and rarely carried money himself, but the bigger issue was his age. Who the hell would let a twelve-year-old casually book private rooms or move around with several girls without raising questions If it’s direct, they don’t mind; if it’s indirect, then they have possible deniability.

Marvin had no intention of creating stories or rumors about a twelve-year-old boy constantly being seen out with girls. That was why Gordon’s identity and paperwork were used instead. Not only were his credentials far more confidential, but if anyone ever decided to seriously look into things, Gordon’s name would appear first during any follow-up investigation.

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******

”Amy,” he said.

”Yes?”

”Clear my Friday morning as well.”

She looked up. ”Cleared for what?”

”Thinking,” he said.

She wrote that down too, though the notation felt slightly absurd. She had learned that it was not.

---

While *Ready Player One* was conducting its first week of existence in the world, its predecessor continued to do what it had been doing for the better part of year — sell, in quantities that continued to surprise everyone involved except the person who had written it.

*Kung Fu Panda* had been, from its initial publication, a book that defied the categorization that the publishing industry had tried to place it in. It was a children’s book — that was the form, the format, the shelf placement. But it was a children’s book that contained, embedded in its accessible narrative and its striking visual design, a philosophical architecture that operated at multiple levels simultaneously.

On its surface: a panda learning kung fu, a story of self-discovery and unlikely heroism, the triumph of the outsider. This was the story that six-year-olds read. This was the story that parents read to their children at bedtime. This was the story that had made the book an immediate and consistent bestseller in the children’s category, a staple of school reading lists and library collections, a fixture on the shelves of pediatric waiting rooms across the country.

Underneath that surface: a serious engagement with the philosophy of Zen Buddhism and Taoist thought, rendered in language simple enough for children to follow and images vivid enough to carry the ideas without the language having to labor. The concept of *wu wei* — effortless action, the idea that the highest skill is the skill that does not announce itself as skill — threaded through the story with the light touch of something that could be received as simply narrative and felt as something more. The relationship between master and student, between tradition and innovation, between the path that is chosen and the path that chooses: all of this was present, available to the reader who brought the capacity to receive it.

This was what the adult literary establishment had recognized and the children’s book critics had not quite known what to do with. The book’s reviews in the children’s publication space had been warm and enthusiastic and had praised its accessibility and its heart and its beautiful illustrations. The reviews that had appeared in more general publications — when general publications reviewed children’s books at all, which was not their habit — had been occasionally startled into a different kind of attention.

*The Atlantic* had published a piece in the spring of 1997, eight months after the book’s initial publication, that had done more than any other single piece of writing to shape the adult literary world’s understanding of what the book was:

**THE CHILDREN’S BOOK THAT IS NOT ONLY A CHILDREN’S BOOK**

*”It is possible to read* Kung Fu Panda *as a charming story about a panda. It is also possible to read it as one of the more lucid popular introductions to the philosophical tradition of Zen Buddhism published in the English language in the last two decades. These readings are not in competition. The genius of the book — and we use the word with full awareness of its freight and its obligations — is that it sustains both simultaneously, each level supporting rather than undermining the other.*

*The illustrations — Meyers’ own, executed in a style that draws on traditional Chinese ink painting while accommodating the visual vocabulary of contemporary Western children’s publishing — are not merely decorative. They are philosophical documents. The image of Po in his earliest training, straining against the discipline of the form, failing with complete conviction, captures something about the relationship between effort and achievement that the accompanying text states in words but the image communicates in the visual language of posture and expression and space. The image of Shifu watching his student with the attention that the book calls ’seeing without looking’ is a representation of a concept that most philosophical writing requires paragraphs to approximate.*

*Four and a half million copies sold in the United States. The book has now crossed four million in the international market, with the majority of those sales in Japan and China — markets where the philosophical tradition being drawn on is not an import but a living inheritance, and where the book’s reception has consequently carried a different quality of recognition. We have received correspondence from readers in both countries describing the book as ’the most accurate rendering of these ideas in a form accessible to children that has been published in the West.’ This is not a small thing.*

*Marvin Meyers wrote this book at the age of nine. He illustrated it himself. He negotiated its publication terms through his parents and a lawyer who has described the experience as ’the most unusual negotiation of my professional career.’ He has since written an EP of original music that has sold six million copies and a novel of speculative fiction that the gaming and technology industries are treating as a prophetic document.*

*We are not certain what the correct framework is for discussing a person like this. We are certain that the existing frameworks are inadequate.”*

The Japanese market had responded to *Kung Fu Panda* in a way that Marvin had anticipated and the publishing industry had not. The book’s sales in Japan had exceeded one and a half million — extraordinary for a Western children’s book in any period, unprecedented for one published so recently. The reception had not been the mildly curious appreciation of an interesting cultural import but something more like recognition: a Western child had engaged with the philosophical tradition of the East with a seriousness and an accuracy that Japanese readers found neither patronizing nor superficial, and they had responded accordingly.

The Chinese market had followed, with an additional one point two million sales and a reception that carried a similar quality of recognition. The Chinese press had published several pieces examining the book’s philosophical sources and their accuracy. One prominent Beijing cultural critic had written a column that concluded: *”This book was not written by a Western child who encountered our philosophy and liked it. It was written by someone who has lived inside it.”*

This column had been forwarded to Marvin’s attention by the Chinese publisher. He had read it, made a notation in his journal, and said nothing.

---

*Marvin 1* had crossed six million units in the months since its release, moving with the consistent and slightly uncanny momentum of a release that had found its audience and continued to find more of it without the conventional mechanisms of radio saturation or aggressive marketing intervention that usually explained sustained commercial performance.

The label’s analysts had been studying the pattern for months. Their reports consistently identified the same anomaly: the EP was not following the normal decay curve of a successful release. Instead of the sharp opening peak followed by steady decline that characterized most chart-topping releases, it was demonstrating a pattern of sustained, almost flat performance that suggested new listeners were encountering it continuously — through word of mouth, through the specific networks of recommendation that existed in the early internet’s music communities, through the kind of person-to-person transmission that predated streaming algorithms and operated on pure enthusiasm.

Every track had achieved platinum certification. The lead single had crossed multi-platinum. The album as a whole was tracking toward diamond status — a certification that required ten million units sold and that had been achieved by a handful of artists in the entire history of the certification’s existence.

The music press had continued to grapple with the phenomenon:

*Rolling Stone* had published a long piece in October under the headline **SIX MONTHS LATER: WHY MARVIN MEYERS ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE:**

*”The conventional narrative of the prodigy — burst onto scene, generate enormous excitement, fail to sustain the initial promise, recede into the middle distance of ’whatever happened to’ — has been running on Marvin Meyers since his EP landed in July. The narrative is wrong. Not slightly wrong. Comprehensively wrong.*

*Six million units. Six months. No decline. No sophomore slump — because there isn’t a sophomore release yet, which means the first release is still carrying all the weight and doing so with an ease that suggests the weight is not, in fact, weight at all.*

*We have spoken with everyone we can reach who has insight into this phenomenon — label executives, radio programmers, music journalists, the people who run the early internet music communities that have become one of the primary vectors for the EP’s continued discovery. The consistent answer is: we don’t fully understand it. The music is genuinely excellent. The production is extraordinary for any artist and incomprehensible for a debut. The voice is — and this is the word that keeps appearing — *true.* It has the quality of something that is not performing authenticity but simply is authentic, and audiences, perhaps more than in previous eras, can tell the difference.*

*The one-hit-wonder conversation lasted approximately three weeks before the evidence made it untenable. We are now having the conversation that should have been had from the beginning: what does it mean that an eleven-year-old is one of the most commercially successful and critically respected musical acts of 90s? What does it mean for the industry? What does it mean for music?*

*We don’t have complete answers. We have one partial answer: it means the music is real. Real music finds its audience. It found six million of them and it is still finding more.*”

*Billboard* had published its own retrospective:

*”At six months, the numbers for* Marvin 1 *are not the numbers of a debut release. They are the numbers of a catalogue release — the kind of sustained, multi-year commercial life that attaches to records that have been completely absorbed into the culture. The EP is not a debut anymore. It is simply part of the landscape, the way certain records become part of the landscape within months of their release because they have done something that cannot be reversed: they have become the soundtrack to experiences people are having, and those experiences will always carry the music attached to them.*

*Marvin Meyers is twelve years old. He has made a record that people will carry with them for the rest of their lives. Not because of marketing. Not because of industry machinery. Because the music is genuinely and powerfully good.*

*Grammy nominations are not a question. Grammy nominations are a certainty. The question is how many.”*

---

Marvin set down the last of the morning’s press coverage at eleven-fifteen and sat in the study’s morning light with the stillness that occupied him when he was assembling a picture from its component pieces.

The picture was this:

*Ready Player One* had arrived into a cultural moment that was not yet ready for all of it — the adult literary establishment giving it sixes and sevens for its philosophical density in the characterization, the gaming and technology communities receiving it as something close to revelation, the teenage readership that occupied the space between these responses consuming it with the hunger of people encountering fiction that spoke to their actual lives for the first time.

*Kung Fu Panda* had established something that the new book was now inheriting — a reputation, across multiple demographics and multiple international markets, for work that operated at more levels than it appeared to. Children’s book. Philosophical document. Cultural bridge between East and West. Four point five million domestic, four million international, and still moving.

*Marvin 1* had done what it had done, and was still doing it. Six million units. Multi-platinum and climbing. The Grammy nominations that everyone was now treating as a certainty. And in six weeks, ’My Heart Will Go On’ would arrive in retail and add another dimension to the public profile that the EP had created.

And now Steven Spielberg had read *Ready Player One* and wanted to talk.

Marvin understood what Spielberg had seen in the book. He understood it because he had put it there deliberately — not the film rights pitch, which he would not make and did not need to make because anyone with Spielberg’s visual intelligence would make it themselves the moment they encountered the material. The OASIS was a filmmaker’s dream: a world in which any visual environment was possible, in which the grammar of cinema had been absorbed into everyday experience, in which the pleasures of screen storytelling had become the dominant mode of human entertainment. Spielberg would see this. Spielberg would call. Spielberg had called.

The phone call on Friday would not be a courtesy. It would be the beginning of a negotiation that Marvin had anticipated and for which he had already, in broad strokes, prepared.

He picked up his pen and opened the notebook that lived in the right-hand drawer of the desk — the one he used for long-term planning, distinct from the daily operational notebooks that Amy managed and the creative notebooks where music and writing took their initial forms. He turned to the section he had last written in three weeks ago and read what was there.

Then he added three lines.

Then he closed the notebook and put it back in the drawer and went to find Amy because there were seventeen items on the operational list for the day and the Random House call was at two and the morning was not going to manage itself.

---

While Marvin was reading his reviews in the San Marino estate, the world was doing what it always did — conducting its affairs in parallel with his without particular awareness of the small, dark-eyed boy who was paying attention to all of it.

*****

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