The Hollow Crown

Everyone loves him. No one has ever met him.

Fong is the face on the boards above the roads. Rooms warm when he walks into them. A crew waits three hours without complaint; a runner who brings him a tea he did not ask for goes out of the room lit from within and tells someone that night that he is kinder than they say. It costs Fong nothing. That is the part no one understands about the warmth - how little it takes from him, and how far it travels from the place it seems to come from.

There is a man named Wen, who feeds him noodles on a wet night and wants nothing from him but that. There is a father in a rented room in a town Fong has never been to, dying the long slow way, alone. There is a country far enough away that no one there has ever seen his face, which he visits, quietly, whenever the crown grows heavy. And there is the hour, very late, when the city goes quiet enough that a man high enough above it can hear his own refrigerator.

He gives the world a face it has agreed to want. He keeps it up the way a man keeps up a car. And somewhere behind it, in a room he cannot find the door to, is whatever is left of him.

The Hollow Crown is a portrait of a man who is adored and unreachable, told from inside his own consciousness and without a single accusation. Nothing is named. Nothing is diagnosed. The reader is given only what Fong can see, which is never quite enough, and is left to notice the shape of what he cannot.

Part of The Unlovable, a sequence of standalone literary novels about people who cannot be reached. The books may be read in any order.