Not hinted at, not suggested, not negotiable, not alterable, notreinterpretable, not maybe or uh-gee-I-thought-, not complex and notto be ignored. The ONE CONDITION was that no one touches my words. Notyou, not the woman who takes your calls, not some idiot copyeditor,not some self-important wannabe writer who thinks he or she can reviseme more succinctly or cleverly, not yo" Momma and notJesusf.u.c.kingChrist. NO ONE. What part of NO ONE bewilders you? NO ONE.
We agreed if the review was too long, too short, too controversial,too anyG.o.ddamthing...you would contact me and! would alter the copy orwithdraw the piece if I didn"t concur that such changes would berequired.
THAT was our deal, Kipen. And you couldn"t even be straight enoughwith me to tell me before you eviscerated my essay, that you weregoing to do it. You had your breathing s.p.a.ce: two full weeks before itwent to press. Plenty of time to say you didn"t have the s.p.a.ce for thewhole thing, or that you didn"t like the essay sections, or that mylanguage was too colorful and you wanted to gray it down a bit more.
We spoke on three occasions after you got the piece, and you madethree requests, two of which I acceded to, and a third we agreed I"dtry to find a subst.i.tute for. I even added the word "then" before thephrase "crossed his legs" to please you.
In short, sonny boy, I trusted you. And you d.i.c.ked me. For a pittance,I allowed you to f.u.c.k me over.
And then you have the temerity, the gall, the nerve, the chutzpah, tocall me with a wingeing soph.o.m.oric Uriah Heep mea culpa that pretendsto have examined my review in its ma.n.u.script form, and compared it tothe published excrescence, and found it to be very little altered.
Hey, kid, this ain"t Tom Brown"s School Days; this the world ofadults, where men and women rely on each other"s ethical credentialsto live together. Who the f.u.c.k do you think you"re jerking aroundhere? I"m enclosing the photocopy of the original, with the G.o.ddamchanges in red. Compare it to the copy of the review as printed, alsoenclosed, so you won"t have to strain yourself. It looks like f.u.c.kingBelgian Lace!!
So go peddle that s.h.i.t-kicking apologia to someone who needs to beconned.
You lied and you short-sheeted me. You conned me. But you"ll only doit once. You have lost a writer who would have broken his a.s.s for you.And don"t alibi yourself by saying, well we didn"t have s.p.a.ce for somuch beside-the-point blather, or...we didn"t have time to call or faxyou or...it was politically incorrect or...n.o.body cares that muchabout a 1955 paperback or...
Or anything.
If you want to publish Harlan Ellison, then G.o.ddam it have the gutsand the ethics to publish Harlan Ellison. Or Pearl Buck, or Cervantes,or Vonnegut, or Lawrence Block, or anyd.a.m.nbody. But if you use theirnames, you weasel, then G.o.ddam it USE THEIR WORDS and not themilquetoast, h.o.m.ogenized, gray c.r.a.p that some imbecile a.s.sistantthinks won"t be above their heads or attention span.
I wrote you a terrific little essay. If you didn"t want it AS IT WAS,G.o.d d.a.m.n you, all you had to do was reject it when I sent it in. Notlie to me, pretend you"d honor my sole condition, and then do with itas you wished, as if it were yours to muck with. It wasn"t! Youhaven"t paid for it, you just used it. We have no contract, we have nodeal between us. I wish I were as c.r.a.ppy as whoever aborted my copy,and took you and the f.u.c.king paper to court for some d.a.m.ned cobbled-upcharge. But I just want shut of you. I fight cynicism daily, and it"sjokers like you who turn me into the creature of popular myth, theRude Ellison with a Vicious Temper.
It"s not often in this life that we are brought face to face with ourbehavior, and are found wanting. Usually, we can find some cheeseballlittle wiggle-s.p.a.ce so we don"t have to admit we are morally bankrupt,or ethically inadequate, or a liar, or a coward. This is one of thosefor you, Mr. Kipen. This one you don"t rationalize. It"s brief, it"sclear, it"s decipherable.
Go live with it.
But don"t bother me again. I try to deal with those who walk like men,not crawl like dogs.
Introduction To
" Tired Old Man"
Of all the peculiar questions asked of writers, particularly by lecture audiences comprising readers and fans- two different life-forms, trust me on this- I" ve always thought the least rational is: " What" s your favorite story?"
I usually ask if the questioner means " of all the stories I" ve ever read by anyone" or " the stories I, myself, have written" ? (Then, greedy little folk, he or she will reply, " Er, uh...both!" ) As if the answer meant anything like what critic John Simon identified as being ""as vast and mysterious as the inside of a noodle."
Yet here is an entire book in which each of us is asked that weird question. Not once, but twice. [This introduction first appeared in MASTER" S CHOICE, edited by Lawrence Block, 1999.]
This is a mugg" s game. I have hundreds of favorites. I" ve read a lot. But when I begged Larry Block to let me have at least three choices, the absolute minimum of favorites I could boil myself down to, he was ectothermic and vastly distant, implacable and hardly tolerable, for a guy who owes me ten bucks from a long-time-ago afternoon on the corner of Christopher and Bleeker Streets. So, of my three all-time favorite stories in this vast and anything-but-distant category- " The Human Chair" by the great j.a.panese suspense writer Edogawa Rampo, " The Ears of Johnny Bear" by John Steinbeck, and " The Problem of Cell 13" by the immortal Jacques Futrelle, who went down with the t.i.tanic, giving up his lifeboat seat to others-I have been forced to bite the bullet (in lieu of Block" s earlobe), and I" ve gone with Futrelle. Because, well, because it" s just so d.a.m.ned fine!
Which brings me to the story of mine own creation I" ve picked from the 1700+ I" ve had published here or there since my first sale in 1955. It is probably in the top first percentile of my own favorites, for a longer stretch of time than most of my " pets" sustain my admiration.
" Tired Old Man" is 5000 words long. I wrote it in June of 1975. It is a story with a peculiar history, which r m inclined to take time to recount here.
First, however, let me warn you. I am not the protagonist, Billy Landress, even though much of Billy" s career parallels mine, and some of the things that happen to him in the story truly occurred...in a sorta kinda way; and some of the perceptions at which he arrives are ones I" ve come to hold as my own. Now, I suppose all that disclaiming will convince those of you who believe in the " he protesteth too much" philosophy that I am Billy. Well, that only goes to show how little some of you understand the art of creating fiction. A writer takes bits and pieces of himself- he cannibalizes himself; and he applies a little meat here and a little meat there, and he comes up with a character that bears a resemblance to himself (because, in all candor, who do I know better than myself?) but is a new person entirely. So don" t get all screwed up trying to fit me into Billy" s shoes.
Back to the story.
I was in New York on a visit. I went to dinner with Bob Silverberg and his then-wife Bobbie, and after dinner we went to a gathering of the old Hydra Club, the legendary writer" s klatsch. It was at w.i.l.l.y Ley" s apartment downtown. It was shortly before that great and wonderful man died and it was good to see him again. The small apartment was jammed, wall-to-wall. And I wandered around saying h.e.l.lo to this old friend or that seldom-seen fellow writer, and finally found myself sitting on a sofa next to a weary-looking old man in an easy chair. Marvelous conversationalist. We talked for almost an hour, until I got up and went to the kitchen to get a gla.s.s of water, where I found Bob with the late Hans Stefan Santesson, a dear friend and ex-editor of mine. I described the old man and asked who he was.
" That is Cornell Woolrich," Hans said.
My mouth must have fallen open. I had been sitting next to one of the giants of mystery fiction, a man whose work I" d read and admired for twenty years, since I" d been a kid and discovered a copy of BLACK ALIBI after seeing the 1946 Val Lewton film The Leopard Man. I was nine years old at the time, and the film made such an impression on me that I stayed on at the Lake Theater in Painesville, Ohio, to see it three times on a Sat.u.r.day. And it was the first time I ever really read those funny words that come at the beginning of the movie (I later learned those were " credits" ); the words that said " Screenplay by Ardel Wray, based on the novel BLACK ALIBI by Cornell Woolrich."
How I got hold of the novel, I don" t remember. But it was the first mystery fiction I" d ever read (excluding Poe, of course, all of whom I" d read by that time). Nine years old!
And in the rush of time as I grew up, voraciously devouring the works of every decent writer I could find, Woolrich (under his own name and his possibly even-more-famous pseudonym, " William Irish" ) became a treasure-house of twists and turns in plotting, elegant writing style, misdirection, mood, setting and suspense. Oh! the beautiful stories that man wrote. The " black book" series: THE BLACK ANGEL, THE BLACK CURTAIN, THE BLACK PATH OF FEAR, RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and (reread many more times) BLACK ALIBI. And DEADLINE AT DAWN, PHANTOM LADY, NIGHTMARE, STRANGLER" S SERENADE, WALTZ INTO DARKNESS. And all the short stories!
Cornell Woolrich!
Jeeeezus, if Hans had said I was sitting next to Ernestf.u.c.kingHemingway it couldn" t have collapsed me more thoroughly. Bertrand Russell, Bob Feller, d.i.c.k Bong, Walt Kelly...all my heroes...it wouldn" t have gotten to me half as much. Cornell Woolrich! I d.a.m.n near fainted.
" But I thought he" d died years ago," I said.
They laughed at me. He was old, no doubt about that, but he was very much alive. He wasn" t writing any more; his mother- whom he" d lived with through all of his adult life, in a resident hotel in Manhattan- had recently died; and he had only recently begun getting out and around.
I was flabbergasted. I" d sat and talked with Cornell Woolrich, one of my earliest writing heroes, and hadn" t even known it. I wanted to find him in that crowded apartment and just be near him for a while longer.
They were bemused by my goshwow att.i.tude, but they were also a little perplexed. Hans said, " I do not remember seeing him here. Where is he?"
And I led them back to the easy chair in the far rear corner of the room. And he was gone. And he was nowhere in the apartment. And no one else had talked to him. And I never saw him again. And I learned later that he had died soon after that night.
To this day, I" ve felt there was something strange and pivotal in my meeting with Woolrich. He could not possibly have known who I was, nor could he have much cared. But we talked writing, and I was the only one who saw or talked to him that night. I" m sure of that. Apparently, no one else saw him in that small crowded apartment in Manhattan.
I firmly do not believe in ghosts or astrology or UFOs or much else of the nonsense gobbledygook that people subst.i.tute for the ability to handle reality. But from the time I left him in that easy chair till the moment I went back to find him, I was right in front of the only exit from that apartment and there was no way he could have gotten past me without my seeing him.
For years I thought about that night in New York. And one afternoon I sat down and wrote the first two pages of a story t.i.tled " Tired Old Man," in which I thought I would fictionalize that evening, and pay homage to a writer whose words had so deeply affected me.
But the two pages went into the idea file, unresolved. They stayed there for six years, until June of 1975. I was in the process of writing another story, an idea I" d had a while back. And in looking for the reminder note for that story I chanced upon the two pages of " Tired Old Man." Without my even knowing why, or realizing what I was doing, I resumed the writing on that six-year-old snippet of story as if it had been years earlier, as if I" d never laid it aside.
And as impossible as it had been for me to write it years before, because I hadn" t known how to write it years before, it was that easy for me to start with the very next sentence- as if I" d written the last word of the previous sentence only an instant earlier- and I drove through, all the way to the end, in one sitting.
Marki Stra.s.ser in the story is Cornell Woolrich.
At least, in the impetus for the character. It isn" t supposed to be Woolrich in the story, it" s...well...that" s what the story is about, as you" ll see...but I wanted you to know how " Tired Old Man" came to be written; in memory of that long-ago night of ghosts, and by way of partial answer to the people who always ask me, " Where do you get your ideas?" And, " What" s your favorite story?"
The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ash.o.r.e LEVENDIS: On Tuesday the 1st of October, improbably dressed as an Explorer Scout, with his great hairy legs protruding from his knee-pants, and his heavily festooned merit badge sash slantwise across his chest, he helped an old, arthritic black woman across the street at the jammed corner of Wilshire and Western. In fact, she didn" t want to cross the street, but he half-pulled, half-dragged her, the old woman screaming at him, calling him a khaki-colored motherf.u.c.ker every step of the way.
LEVENDIS: On Wednesday the 2nd of October, he crossed his legs carefully as he sat in the Boston psychiatrist" s office, making certain the creases of his pants- he was wearing the traditional morning coat and amba.s.sadorially-striped pants- remained sharp, and he said to George Aspen Davenport, M.D., Ph.D., FAPA (who had studied with Ernst Kris and Anna Freud), " Yes, that" s it, now you" ve got it." And Dr. Davenport made a note on his pad, lightly cleared his throat and phrased it differently: " Your mouth is...vanishing? That is to say, your mouth, the facial feature below your nose, it" s uh disappearing?" The prospective patient nodded quickly, with a bright smile. " Exactly." Dr. Davenport made another note, continued to ulcerate the inside of his cheek, then tried a third time: " We" re speaking now- heh heh, to maintain the idiom- we" re speaking of your lips, or your tongue, or your palate, or your gums, or your teeth, or- " The other man sat forward, looking very serious, and replied, " We" re talking all of it, Doctor. The whole, entire, complete aperture and everything around, over, under, and within. My mouth, the allness of my mouth. It" s disappearing. What part of that is giving you a problem?" Davenport hmmm" d for a moment, said, " Let me check something," and he rose, went Jo the teak and gla.s.s bookcase against the far wall, beside the window that looked out on crowded, lively Boston Common, and he drew down a capacious volume. He flipped through it for a few minutes, and finally paused at a page on which he poked a finger. He turned to the elegant, gray-haired gentleman in the consultation chair, and he said, " Lipostomy." His prospective patient tilted his head to the side, like a dog listening for a clue, and arched his eyebrows expectantly, as if to ask yes, and lipostomy is what? The psychiatrist brought the book to him, leaned down and pointed to the definition. " Atrophy of the mouth." The gray-haired gentleman, who looked to be in his early sixties, but remarkably well-tended and handsomely turned-out, shook his head slowly as Dr. Davenport walked back around to sit behind his desk. " No, I don" t think so. It doesn" t seem to be withering, it" s just, well, simply, I can" t put it any other way, it" s very simply disappearing. Like the Cheshire cat" s grin. Fading away." Davenport closed the book and laid it on the desktop, folded his hands atop the volume, and smiled condescendingly. " Don" t you think this might be a delusion on your part? I" m looking at your mouth right now, and it" s right there, just as it was when you came into the office." His prospective patient rose, retrieved his homburg from the sofa, and started toward the door. " It" s a good thing I can read lips," he said, placing the hat on his head, " because I certainly don" t need to pay your sort of exorbitant fee to be ridiculed." And he moved to the office door, and opened it to leave, pausing for only a moment to readjust his homburg, which had slipped down, due to the absence of ears on his head.
LEVENDIS: On Thursday the 3rd of October, he overloaded his grocery cart with okra and eggplant, giant bags of Kibbles "n Bits "n Bits "n Bits, and jumbo boxes of Huggies. And as he wildly careened through the aisles of the Sentry Market in La Crosse, Wisconsin, he purposely engineered a collision between the carts of Kenneth Kulwin, a 47-year-old h.o.m.os.e.xual who had lived alone since the pa.s.sing of his father thirteen years earlier, and Anne Gillen, a 35-year-old legal secretary who had been unable to find an escort to take her to her senior prom and whose social life had not improved in the decades since that death of hope. He began screaming at them, as if it had been their fault, thereby making allies of them. He was extremely rude, breathing muscatel breath on them, and finally stormed away, leaving them to sort out their groceries, leaving them to comment on his behavior, leaving them to take notice of each other. He went outside, smelling the Mississippi River, and he let the air out of Anne Gillen" s tires. She would need a lift to the gas station. Kenneth Kulwin would tell her to call him " Kenny," and they would discover that their favorite movie was the 1945 romance, The Enchanted Cottage, starring Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young.
LEVENDIS: On Friday the 4th of October, he found an interstate trucker dumping badly sealed cannisters of phen.a.z.ine in an isolated picnic area outside Phillipsburg, Kansas; and he shot him three times in the head; and wedged the body into one of the large, nearly empty trash barrels near the picnic benches.
LEVENDIS: On Sat.u.r.day the 5th of October, he addressed two hundred and forty-four representatives or the country & western music industry in the Chattanooga Room just off the Tennessee Ballroom of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. He said to them, " What" s astonishing is not that there is so much inept.i.tude, slovenliness, mediocrity and downright bad taste in the world...what is unbelievable is that there is so much good art in the world. Everywhere." One of the attendees raised her hand and asked, " Are you good, or evil?" He thought about it for less than twenty seconds, smiled, and replied, " Good, of course! There" s only one real evil in the world: mediocrity." They applauded spa.r.s.ely, but politely. Nonetheless, later at the reception, no one touched the Swedish meatb.a.l.l.s, or the rumaki.
LEVENDIS: On Sunday the 6th of October, he placed the exhumed remains of Noah" s ark near the eastern summit of a nameless mountain in Kurdistan, where the next infrared surveillance of a random satellite flyby would reveal them. He was careful to seed the area with a plethora of bones, here and there around the site, as well as within the identifiable hull of the vessel. He made sure to place them two-by-two: every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, and every bird of every sort. Two-by-two. Also the bones of pairs of gryphons, unicorns, stegosaurs, tengus, dragons, orthodontists, and the carbon-dateable 50,000-year old bones of a relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.
LEVENDIS: On Monday the 7th of October, he kicked a cat. He kicked it a far distance. To the pa.s.sersby who watched, there on Galena Street in Aurora, Colorado, he said: " I am an unlimited person, sadly living in a limited world." When the housewife who planned to call the police yelled at him from her kitchen window, " Who are you? What is your name!?!" he cupped his hands around his mouth so she would hear him, and he yelled back, " Levendis! It" s a Greek word." They found the cat imbarked halfway through a tree. The tree was cut down, and the section with the cat was cut in two, the animal tended by a talented taxidermist who tried to quell the poor beast" s terrified mewling and vomiting. The cat was later sold as bookends.
LEVENDIS: On Tuesday the 8th of October, he called the office of the District Attorney in Cadillac, Michigan, and reported that the blue 1988 Mercedes that had struck and killed two children playing in a residential street in Hamtramck just after sundown the night before, belonged to a pastry chef whose sole client was a Cosa Nostra pezzonovante. He gave detailed information as to the location of the chop shop where the Mercedes had been taken to be banged out, bondo" d, and repainted. He gave the license number. He indicated where, in the left front wheel-well, could be found a piece of the skull of the younger of the two little girls. Not only did the piece fit, like the missing section of a modular woodblock puzzle, but pathologists were able to conduct an accurate test that provided irrefutable evidence that would hold up under any attack in court: the medical examiner got past the basic ABO groups, narrowed the scope of identification with the five Rh tests, the M and N tests (also cap-S and small-s variations), the Duffy blood groups, and the Kidd types, both A and B; and finally he was able to validate the rare absence of Jr a, present in most blood-groups but missing in some j.a.panese-Hawaiians and Samoans. The little girl" s name was Sherry Tualaulelei. When the homicide investigators learned that the pastry chef, his wife, and their three children had gone to New York City on vacation four days before the hit-and-run, and were able to produce ticket stubs that placed them seventh row center of the Martin Beck Theater, enjoying the revival of Guys and Dolls, at the precise moment the Mercedes struck the children, the Organized Crime Unit was called in, and the scope of the investigation was broadened. Sherry Tualaulelei was instrumental in the conviction and thirty-three-year imprisonment of the pastry chefs boss, Sinio " Sally Comfort" Conforte, who had " borrowed" a car to sneak out for a visit to his mistress.
LEVENDIS: On Wednesday the 9th of October, he sent a fruit basket to Patricia and Faustino Evangelista, a middle-aged couple in Norwalk, Connecticut, who had given to the surviving son, the gun his beloved older brother had used to kill himself. The accompanying note read: Way to go, sensitive Mom and Dad!
LEVENDIS: On Thursday the 10th of October, he created a cure for bone-marrow cancer. Anyone could make it: the juice of fresh lemons, spiderwebs, the sc.r.a.pings of raw carrots, the opaque and whitish portion of the toenail called the lunula, and carbonated water. The pharmaceutical cartel quickly hired a prestigious Philadelphia PR firm to throw its efficacy into question, but the AMA and FDA ran accelerated tests, found it to be potent, with no deleterious effects, and recommended its immediate use. It had no effect on AIDS, however. Nor did it work on the common cold. Remarkably, physicians praised the easing of their workload.
LEVENDIS: On Friday the 11th of October, he lay in his own filth on the sidewalk outside the British Emba.s.sy in Rangoon, holding a begging bowl. He was just to the left of the gate, half-hidden by the angle of the high wall from sight of the military guards on post. A woman in her fifties, who had been let out of a jitney just up the street, having paid her fare and having tipped as few rupees as necessary to escape a strident rebuke by the driver, smoothed the peplum of her shantung jacket over her hips, and marched imperially toward the Emba.s.sy gates. As she came abaft the derelict, he rose on one elbow and shouted at her ankles, " Hey, lady! ; I write these pomes, and I sell "em for a buck inna street, an" it keeps juvenile delinquents offa the streets so" s they don" t spit on ya! So whaddaya think, y" wanna buy one?" The matron did not pause, striding toward the gates, but she said snappishly, " You" re a businessman. Don" t talk art."
The Route of Odysseus " You will find the scene of Odysseus" s wanderings when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds."
Eratosthenes, late 3rd century, B.C.E.
LEVENDIS: On Sat.u.r.day the 12th of October, having taken the sidestep, he came to a place near Weimar in southwest Germany. He did not see the photographer snapping pictures of the scene. He stood among the cordwood bodies. It was cold for the spring; and even though he was heavily clothed, he shivered. He walked down the rows of bony corpses, looking into the black holes that had been eye sockets, seeing an endless chicken dinner, the bones gnawed clean, tossed like jackstraws in heaps. The stretched-taut groins of men and women, flesh tarpaulins where pa.s.sion had once smoothed the transport from sleep to wakefulness. Entwined so cavalierly that here a woman with three arms, and there a child with the legs of a sprinter three times his age. A woman" s face, looking up at him with soot for sight, remarkable cheekbones, high and lovely, she might have been an actress. Xylophones for chests and torsos, violin bows that had waved goodbye and hugged grandchildren and lifted in toasts to the pa.s.sing of traditions, gourd whistles between eyes and mouths. He stood among the cordwood bodies and could not remain merely an instrument himself. He sank to his haunches, crouched and wept, burying his head in his hands, as the photographer took shot after shot, an opportunity like a gift from the editor. Then he tried to stop crying, and stood, and the cold cut him, and he removed his heavy topcoat and placed it gently over the bodies of two women and a man lying so close and intermixed that it easily served as coverlet for them. He stood among the cordwood bodies, 24 April 1945, Buchenwald, and the photograph would appear in a book published forty-six years later, on Sat.u.r.day the 12th of October. The photographer" s roll ran out just an instant before the slim young man without a topcoat took the sidestep. Nor did he hear the tearful young man say, " Sertsa." In Russian, sertsa means soul.
LEVENDIS: On Sunday the 13th of October, he did nothing. He rested. When he thought about it, he grew annoyed. " Time does not become sacred until we have lived it," he said. But he thought: to h.e.l.l with it; even G.o.d knocked off for a day.
LEVENDIS: On Monday the 14th of October, he climbed up through the stinking stairwell shaft of a Baltimore tenement, clutching his notebook, breathing through his mouth to block the smell of mildew, garbage, and urine, focusing his mind on the apartment number he was seeking, straining through the evening dimness in the wan light of one bulb hanging high above, barely illuminating the vertical tunnel, as he climbed and climbed, straining to see the numbers on the doors, going up, realizing the tenants had pulled the numbers off the doors to foil him and welfare investigators like him, stumbling over something oily and sobbing jammed into a comer of the last step, losing his grip on the rotting bannister and finding it just in time, trapped for a moment in the hopeless beam of washed-out light falling from above, poised in mid-tumble and then regaining his grip, hoping the welfare recipient under scrutiny would not be home, so he could knock off for the day, hurry back downtown and crosstown and take a shower, going up till he had reached the topmost landing, and finding the number scratched on the doorframe, and knocking, getting no answer, knocking again, hearing first the scream, then the sound of someone beating against a wall, or the floor, with a heavy stick, and then the scream again, and then another scream so closely following the first that it might have been one scream only, and he threw himself against the door, and it was old but never had been well built, and it came away, off its hinges, in one rotten crack, and he was inside, and the most beautiful young black woman he had ever seen was tearing the rats off her baby. He left the check on the kitchen table, he did not have an affair with her, he did not see her fall from the apartment window, six storeys into a courtyard, and never knew if she came back from the grave to escape the rats that gnawed at her cheap wooden casket. He never loved her, and so was not there when what she became flowed back up through the walls of the tenement to absorb him and meld with him and become one, with him as he lay sleeping penitently on the filthy floor of the topmost apartment. He left the check, and none of that happened.
LEVENDIS: On Tuesday the 15th of October, he stood in the Greek theatre at Aspendos, Turkey, a structure built two thousand years earlier, so acoustically perfect that every word spoken on its stage could be heard with clarity in any of its thirteen thousand seats, and he spoke to a little boy sitting high above him. He uttered Count Yon Manfred" s dying words, Schumann" s overture, Byron" s poem: " Old man, "tis not so difficult to die." The child smiled and waved. He waved back, then shrugged. They became friends at a distance. It was the first time someone other than his mother, who was dead, had been kind to the boy. In years to come it would be a reminder that there was a smile out there on the wind. The little boy looked down the rows and concentric rows of seats: the man "way down there was motioning for him to come to him. The child, whose name was Orhon, hopped and hopped, descending to the center of the ring as quickly as he could. As he came to the core, and walked out across the orchestra ring, he studied the man. This person was very tall, and he needed a shave, and his hat had an extremely wide brim like the hat of Kul, the man who made weekly trips to Ankara, and he wore a long overcoat far too hot for this day. Orhon could not see the man" s eyes because he wore dark gla.s.ses that reflected the sky. Orhon thought this man looked like a mountain bandit, only dressed more impressively. Not wisely for a day as torpid as this, but more impressively than Bilge and his men, who raided the farming villages. When he reached the tall man, and they smiled at each other, this person said to Orhon, " I am an unlimited person living in a limited world." The child did not know what to say to that. But he liked the man. " Why do you wear such heavy wool today? I am barefoot." He raised his dusty foot to show the man, and was embarra.s.sed at the dirty cloth tied around his big toe. And the man said, " Because I need a safe place to keep the limited world." And he unb.u.t.toned his overcoat, and held open one side, and showed Orhon what he would inherit one day, if he tried very hard not to be a despot. Pinned to the fabric, each with the face of the planet, were a million and more timepieces, each one the Earth at a different moment, and all of them purring erratically like dozing sphinxes. And Orhon stood there, in the heat, for quite a long while, and listened to the ticking of the limited world.
LEVENDIS: On Wednesday the 16th of October, he chanced upon three skinheads in Doc Martens and cheap black leatherette, beating the c.r.a.p out of an interracial couple who had emerged from the late show at the La Salle Theater in Chicago. He stood quietly and watched. For a long while.
LEVENDIS: On Thursday the 17th of October he chanced upon three skinheads in Doc Martens and cheap black leatherette, beating the c.r.a.p out of an interracial couple who had stopped for a bite to eat at a Howard Johnson" s near King of Prussia on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He removed the inch-and-a-half-thick ironwood dowel he always carried beside his driver" s seat and, holding the 2" long rod at its centerpoint, laid alongside his pants leg so it could not be seen in the semi-darkness of the parking lot, he came up behind the three as they kicked the black woman and the white man lying between parked cars. He tapped the tallest of the trio on his shoulder, and when the boy turned around- he couldn" t have been more than seventeen- he dropped back a step, slid the dowel up with his right hand, gripped it tightly with his left, and drove the end of the rod into the eye of the skinhead, punching through behind the socket and pulping the brain. The boy flailed backward, already dead, and struck his partners. As they turned, he was spinning the dowel like a baton, faster and faster, and as the stouter of the two attackers charged him, he whipped it around his head and slashed straight across the boy" s throat. The snapping sound ricocheted off the dark hillside beyond the restaurant. He kicked the third boy in the groin, and when he dropped, and fell on his back, he kicked him under the chin, opening the skinhead" s mouth; and then he stood over him, and with both hands locked around the pole, as hard as he could, he piledrove the wooden rod into the kid" s mouth, shattering his teeth, and turning the back of his skull to flinders. The dowel sc.r.a.ped concrete through the" , ruined face. Then he helped the man and his wife to their feet, and bullied the manager of the Howard Johnson" s into actually letting them lie down in his office till the State Police arrived. He ordered a plate of fried clams and sat there eating pleasurably until the cops had taken his statement.
LEVENDIS: On Friday the 18th of October, he took a busload of Mormon schoolchildren to the shallow waters of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, to pay homage to the great sculptor Smithson by introducing the art-ignorant children to the Spiral jetty, an incongruously gorgeous line of earth and stone that curves out and away like a thought lost in the tide. " The man who made this, who dreamed it up and then made it, you know what he once said?" And they ventured that no, they didn" t know what this Smithson sculptor had said,.and the man who had driven the bus paused for a dramatic moment, and he repeated Smithson" s words: " Establish enigmas, not explanations." They stared at him. " Perhaps you had to be there," he said, shrugging. " Who" s for ice cream?" And they went to a Baskin-Robbins.
LEVENDIS: On Sat.u.r.day the 19th of October, he filed a thirty-million-dollar lawsuit against the major leagues in the name of Alberda Jeanette Chambers, a 19-year-old lefthander with a fadeaway fast ball clocked at better than 96 mph; a dipsy-doodle slider that could do a barrel-roll and clean up after itself; an ERA of 2.10; who could hit from either side of the plate with a batting average of .360; who doubled as a peppery little shortstop working with a trapper" s mitt of her own design; who had been refused tryouts with virtually every professional team in the United States (also j.a.pan) from the bigs all the way down to the Pony League. He filed in Federal District Court for the Southern Division of New York State, and told Ted Koppel that Allie Chambers would be the first female player, mulatto or otherwise, in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
LEVENDIS: On Sunday the 20th of October, he drove out and around through the streets of Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, in a rented van equipped with a public address system, and he endlessly reminded somnambulistic pedestrians and families entering eggs" n" grits restaurants (many of these adults had actually voted for Jesse Helms and thus were in danger of losing their sertsa) that perhaps they should ignore their bibles today, and go back and reread Shirley Jackson" s short story, " One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts."
The Daffodils that Entertain LEVENDIS: On Monday the 21st of October, having taken the sidestep, he wandered through that section of New York City known as the Tenderloin. It was 1892. Crosstown on 24th Street from Fifth Avenue to Seventh, then he turned uptown and walked slowly on Seventh to 40th. Midtown was rife with brothels, their red lights shining through the shadows, challenging the wan gaslit streetlamps. The Edison and Swan United Electric Light Co., Ltd., had improved business tremendously through the wise solicitations of a salesman with a Greek-sounding name who had canva.s.sed the prost.i.tution district west of Broadway only five years earlier, urging the installation of Mr. Joseph Wilson Swan and Mr. Thomas Alva Edison" s filament lamps: painted crimson, fixed above the ominously yawning doorways of the area" s many houses of easy virtue. He pa.s.sed an alley on 36th Street, and heard a woman" s voice in the darkness complaining, " You said you" d give me two dollars. You have to give it to me first! Stop! No, first you gotta give me the two dollars!" He stepped into the alley, let his eyes acclimate 10 the darkness so total, trying to hold his breath against the stench; and then he saw them. The man was in his late forties, wearing a bowler and a shin-length topcoat with an astrakhan collar. The sound of horse-drawn carriages clopped loudly on the bricks beyond the alley, and the man in the astrakhan looked up, toward the alley mouth. His face was strained, as if he expected an accomplice of the girl, a footpad or shoulder-hitter or bully-boy pimp to charge to her defense. He had his fly unb.u.t.toned and his thin, pale p.e.n.i.s extended; the girl was backed against the alley wall, the man" s left hand at her throat; and he had hiked up her ap.r.o.n and skirt and petticoats, and was trying to get his right hand into her drawers. She pushed against him, but to no avail. He was large and strong. But when he saw the other man standing down there, near the mouth of the alley, he let her garments drop, and fished his organ back into his pants, but didn" t waste time b.u.t.toning up. " You there! Like to watch your betters at work, do you?" The man who had done the sidestep spoke softly: " Let the girl go. Give her the two dollars, and let her go." The man in the bowler took a step toward the mouth of the alley, his hands coming up in a standard pugilist" s extension. He gave a tiny laugh that was a snort that was rude and derisive: " Oh so, fancy yourself something of the John L. Sullivan, do you, captain? Well, let" s, see how you and I and the Marquis Q get along..." and he danced forward, hindered considerably by the bulky overcoat. As he drew within double arm" s-length of his opponent the younger man drew the taser from his coat pocket, fired at pointblank range, the barbs striking the pugilist in the cheek and neck, the charge lifting him off his feet and driving him back into the brick wall so hard that the filaments were wrenched loose, and the potential fornicator fell forward, his eyes rolled up in his head. Fell forward so hard he smashed three of his front teeth, broken at the gum-line. The girl tried to run, but the alley was a dead end. She watched as the man with the strange weapon came to her. She could barely see his face, and there had been all those killings with that Jack the Ripper in London a few years back, and there was talk this Jack had been a Yankee and had come back to New York. She was terrified. Her name was Poppy Skurnik, she was an orphan, and she worked way downtown as a pieceworker in a shirtwaist factory. She made one dollar and sixty-five cents a week, for six days of labor, from seven in the morning until seven at night, and it was barely enough to pay for her lodgings at Baer" s Rents. So she " supplemented" her income with a stroll in the Tenderloin, twice a week, never more, and prayed that she could continue to avoid the murderous attentions of gentlemen who liked to cripple girls after they" d topped them, continue to avoid the pressures of pimps and boy friends who wanted her to work for them, continue to avoid the knowledge that she was no longer " decent" but was also a long way from winding up in one of these redlight wh.o.r.ehouses. He took her gently by the hand, and started to lead her out of the alley, carefully stepping over the unconscious molester. When they reached the street, and she saw how handsome he was, and how young he was, and how premierely he was dressed, she also smiled. She was extraordinarily attractive, and the young man tipped his hat and spoke to her kindly, inquiring as to her name, and where she lived, and if she would like to accompany him for some dinner. And she accepted, and he hailed a carriage, and took her to Delmonico" s for the finest meal she had ever had. And later, much later, when he brought her to his townhouse on upper Fifth Avenue, in the posh section, she was ready to do anything he required of her. But instead, all he asked was that she allow him to give her a hundred dollars in exchange for one second of small pain. And she felt fear, because she knew what these nabobs were like, but a hundred dollars! So she said yes, and he asked her to bare her left b.u.t.tock, and she did it with embarra.s.sment, and there was exactly one second of mosquito bite pain, and then he was wiping the spot where he had in injected her with penicillin, with a cool and fragrant wad of cotton batting. " Would you like to sleep the night here, Poppy?" the young man asked. " My room is down the hall, but I think you" ll be very comfortable in this one." And she was worried that he had done something awful to her, like inject her with a bad poison, but she didn" t feel any different, and he seemed so nice, so she said yes, that would be a dear way to spend the evening, and he gave her ten ten-dollar bills, and wished her a pleasant sleep, and left the room, having saved her life, for she had contracted syphilis the week before, though she didn" t know it; and within a year she would have been unable, by her appearance alone, to get men in the streets; and would have been let go at the shirtwaist factory; and would have been seduced and sold into one of the worst of the brothels; and would have been dead within another two years. But this night she slept well, between cool sheets with hand-embroidered lace edging, and when she rose the next day he was gone, and no one told her to leave the townhouse, and so she stayed on from day to day, for years, and eventually married and gave birth to three children, one of whom grew to maturity, married, had a child who became an adult and saved the lives of millions of innocent men, women, and children. But that night in 1892 she slept a deep, sweet, recuperative and dreamless sleep.
LEVENDIS: On Tuesday the 22nd of October, he visited a plague of asthmatic toads on Iisalmi, a small town in Finland; a rain of handbills left over from World War II urging the SS troops to surrender on Cheju-do, an island off the southern coast of Korea; a shock wave of forsythia on Linares in Spain; and a fully-restored 1926 Ahrens-Fox model RK fire engine on a mini-mall in Clarksville, Arkansas.
LEVENDIS: On Wednesday the 23rd of October, he corrected every history book in America so that they no longer called it The Battle of Bunker Hill, but rather Breeds Hill where, in fact, the engagement of 17 June 1775 had taken place. Re also invested every radio and television commentator with the ability to differentiate between " in a moment" and " momentarily," which were not at all the same thing, and the misuse of which annoyed him greatly. The former was in his job description; the latter was a matter of personal pique.
LEVENDIS: On Thursday the 24th of October, he revealed to the London Times and Paris-Match the name of the woman who had stood on the gra.s.sy knoll, behind the fence, in Dallas that day, and fired the rifle shots that killed John F. Kennedy. But no one believed Marilyn Monroe could have done the deed and gotten away unnoticed. Not even when he provided her suicide note that confessed the entire matter and tragically told in her own words how jealousy and having been jilted had driven her to hire that weasel Lee Harvey Oswald, and that pig Jack Ruby, and how she could no longer live with the guilt, goodbye. No one would run the story, not even the Star, not even The Enquirer, not even IV Guide. But he tried.
LEVENDIS: On Friday the 25th of October, he upped the intelligence of every human being on the planet by forty points.
LEVENDIS: On Sat.u.r.day the 26th of October, he lowered the intelligence of every human being on the planet by forty-two points.
At Least One Good Deed a Day, Every Single Day
LEVENDIS: On Sunday the 27th of October, he returned to a family in Kalgoorlie, SW Australia, a five-year-old child who had been kidnapped from their home in Bayonne, New Jersey, fifteen years earlier. The child was no older than before the family had immigrated, but he now spoke only in a dialect of Etruscan, a language that had not been heard on the planet for thousands of years. Having most of the day free, however, he then made it his business to kill the remaining seventeen American G Is being held MIA in an encampment in the heart of Laos. Waste not, want not.
LEVENDIS: On Monday the 28th of October, still exhilarated from the work and labors of the preceding day, he brought out of the highlands of North Viet Nam Capt. Eugene Y. Gra.s.so, USAF, who had gone down under fire twenty-eight years earlier. He returned him to his family in Anchorage, Alaska, where his wife, remarried, refused to see him but his daughter whom he had never seen, would. They fell in love, and lived together in Anchorage, where their story provided endless confusion to the ministers of several faiths.
LEVENDIS: On Tuesday the 29th of October, he destroyed the last bits of evidence that would have led to answers to the mysteries of the disappearances of Amelia Earhart, Ambrose Bierce, Benjamin Bathurst and Jimmy Hoffa. He washed the bones and placed them in a display of early American artifacts.
LEVENDIS: On Wednesday the 30th of October, he traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he waited at a restaurant in Metairie for the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, now running for state office, to show up to meet friends. As the man stepped out of his limousine, wary guards on both sides of him, the traveler fired a Laws rocket from the roof of the eatery. It blew up the former KKK prexy, his guards, and a perfectly good Cadillac Eldorado. Leaving the electoral field open, for the enlightened voters of Louisiana, to a man who, as a child, had a.s.sisted Mengele" s medical experiments, a second contender who had. changed his name to avoid being arrested for child mutilation, and an illiterate swamp cabbage farmer from Baton Rouge whose political philosophy involved cutting the throats of peccary pigs, and thrusting one" s face into the boiling blood of the corpse. Waste not, want not.
LEVENDIS: On Thursday the 31st of October, he restored to his throne the Dalai Lama, and closed off the mountain pa.s.ses that provided land access to Tibet, and caused to blow constantly a cataclysmic snowstorm that did not affect the land below, but made any accessibility by air impossible. The Dalai Lama offered a referendum to the people: should we rename our land Shangri-La?
LEVENDIS: On Friday the 32nd of October, he addressed a convention of readers of cheap fantasy novels, saying, " We invent our lives (and other people" s) as we live them; what we call "life" is itself a fiction. Therefore, we must constantly strive to produce only good art, absolutely entertaining fiction." (He did not say to them: " I am an unlimited person, sadly living in a limited world." ) They smiled politely, but since he spoke only in Etruscan, they did not understand a word he said.
LEVENDIS: On Sat.u.r.day the 33rd of October, he did the sidestep and worked the oars of the longboat that brought Christopher Columbus to the sh.o.r.es of the New World, where he was approached by a representative of the native peoples, who laughed at the silly clothing the great navigator wore. They all ordered pizza and the man who had done the rowing made sure that venereal disease was quickly spread so that centuries later he could give a beautiful young woman an inoculation in her left b.u.t.tock.
LEVENDIS: On Piltic the 34th of October, he gave all dogs the ability to speak in English, French, Mandarin, Urdu, and Esperanto; but all they could say was rhyming poetry of the worst sort, and he called it doggerel.
LEVENDIS: On Sqwaybe the 35th of October, he was advised by the Front Office that he had been having too rich a time at the expense of the Master Parameter, and he was removed from his position, and the unit was closed down, and darkness was penciled in as a mid-season replacement. He was reprimanded for having called himself Levendis, which is a Greek word for someone who is full of the pleasure of living. He was rea.s.signed, with censure, but no one higher up noticed that on his new a.s.signment he had taken the name Sertsa.
s.h.a.gging Fungoes
XVIDARKLIBERATION.
" It was suggestion, the use of the power of the mind, that made [Val] Lewton" s films so terrifying. [...] He led [us] up to the door of terror and commanded [us], "KNOCK!" "