The real payoff for readers was in Curtiss Bruno’s office. Wearing a striped shirt and a tie and looking like an incurable office politician, he nevertheless held a hand over his mouth as if to say: “Maybe I’d better shut up before I spill too much.” Oh, Curtiss, why bother? I could tour an electronic version of the not-quite-completed winter catalogue—with listings of fiction, visual arts, poetry, and nonfiction. All categories carried dates older than the Web area itself—MCI was apparently relying on imaginary contributors to prime the pumps. “Ivana diTommaso’s” background just seemed too _New Yorker_-ish. She had “grown up in Bologna, Italy, and Grosse Pointe, Michigan” and had “developed from a quiet film student” to “one of America’s fine short story writers.” If she existed, the electronic catalogue at the Library of Congress had yet to note it when I made a short detour by way of my software’s task-switching capability. Not that I trusted the catalogue. A branch of Random House had published my first book, _The Silicon Jungle_, yet it was missing from the LC catalogue that day; and for all I knew, maybe the librarians had also neglected the accomplished Ms. diTommaso. I charitably allowed for the fact that she just might exist. Her story, “The Legend of Wendell County,” told how a county records keeper had become a community grandmother who, not content to record births, deaths, and divorces, tried her hand at marriage counseling and other social workish pursuits—until one day she lost her way in winter and turned into something else, a ghost. The bottom of the page carried an authentic-looking “© 1994 Ivana diTommaso.” I moved on. “The Tree House” was a story from Katy Rudder, a member of “the first Peace Corps class ever assigned to China, where she is teaching English at Leshan Teachers College in the Sichuan Province.” Based on what I was reading, MCI’s artistic tastes—or its ad agency’s—were corporately wholesome. And so were its contributors. I doubted that Gramercy would have been the best place for the young Burroughs or Kerouac. Perhaps this would change, maybe Gramercy would grow more adventurous with time, but right now I wasn’t sanguine in that regard. The nonfiction area was a real loss with just one title, of a harmless, theological type. I doubted that this would be the place for, say, Seymour Hersh or Robert Caro. Like the writing, the art looked competent and maybe much better, but, again, safely within corporate parameters.