BOOK ONE OF THE POSTCARDS
Already Open
A novel drawn from a real trip, with a Cold War story underneath it. In the fall of 1976 a mill-town kid from Minnesota crosses Europe on a Eurail pass, carrying his father's copy of Kipling's Kim, an answer he owes a CIA recruiter, and a date: December sixteenth. Somewhere between Luxembourg and Koblenz, a German doctor presses a coin into his hand, and a kid who has never kept a secret starts carrying one.
The Long Way Home
Homer took a war his listeners believed had happened, at a city that really stood, and filled it with gods. I took a trip that really happened and filled it with spies.
In the fall of 1976 I was twenty-two, a mill-town kid from Cloquet, Minnesota, with a Eurail pass, three thousand dollars in traveler's checks and my father's copy of Kipling's Kim. He named me after that book. That spring a man from the CIA had interviewed me in a hotel room in Bloomington. He told me he'd known a Kim once, in London.
I didn't plan the Odyssey. It was already there. Odysseus spends seven years on an island with Calypso, a nymph who wants to keep him. My book has an American girl in Denmark who catches my friends one by one and then tries to catch me. I named her Callie. And at the end of the road there's a woman who set the terms before I left. Two nights on a lake in Minnesota, and then: December sixteenth. Beethoven's birthday. Come find me.
Already Open, the first book of The Postcards, is the story of those three months. The route is real. The friends are real. The postcards are the ones I sent, word for word. The rest is invented around what happened. I wrote it with an AI, Claude, which drafted much of the prose from my memories and notes. I chose every scene and approved every line.
The book ends with my hand raised at her door.
Illustration of a three-month, first-class Eurail pass like the one Kim carried in 1976. Drawn for this site; not a photograph of the original.