A Thousand Deaths (40 page)

"Did you see that?" cried Robert Hanson. "Did you see the way he gagged Weinraub? Stevie was all set to say something, and then—"

Justin Benarcek walked slowly toward Phretys, a horrified look on his face. "We're helpless in here," he said. "He's going to do it, isn't he? He's turning this into a reality story. And
you
gave him the idea."

"No," she said, "I swear I didn't. This story was completely uninspired."

Eileen Brant gave a sardonic laugh. "What else is new?" she asked.

"I know your problem, Stevie," said Phretys. "If it were up to you—which, thank God, it's not—this thing would be titled:

 

STEVE WEINRAUB

in

In the Wings
 

by

Sandor Courane

featuring
Eileen Brant
and
Dr. Bertram Waters

with
Justin Benarcek, Bo Staefler, Robert W. Hanson

and
Phretys
as
The Muse

 

"You don't really care about the rest of them. You don't really care about the ensemble's versatility."

Weinraub was livid. "You go to Hell!" he cried.

Phretys crushed out her cigarette on the floor. She smiled at him. "I've been there before, and I'll go again whenever he sends me. No problem. But you've got to get used to the idea, Stevie: you have to find a new act, or your career is over. Now, the rest of you, we have a lot of work to do. Eunestra and I will be guiding him through Chapter One, so keep your wits about you. I want Courane, Brant, Staefler, Jennings, and Waters. Right now. Come on."

The crew went with her through the tunnel. The few of us who stayed behind went back to what we'd been doing. I was reading Steinbeck's
Cannery Row.
That was a job I would have liked to have been in on.

I had just found my place in the book when I heard a pitiful sob from Stevie. I looked up and saw him standing at the door to the tunnel. He was looking after Phretys and the cast. "Take me with you!" he shouted. There was no reply but the echo from the damp walls. I went back to my reading; he made me feel bad, and I didn't want to watch him fall apart in front of me.

I don't know how much later it was, but finally they all came back. Chapter One was finished, and so were they. I've never seen such an exhausted group of people. The only one smiling was Eunestra. Evidently they had had a successful first venture into the Frank Manner. I would hear all about it later from Eileen Brant. I couldn't wait.

Waters and Staefler and the others went to their lockers and started stripping. I read some more. Then there was a shout: "Look out, he has a gun!" To tell the truth, I've heard that line so many times on television and in the movies, I thought it was somebody quoting a bit from Chapter One. I glanced up to see Stevie holding a small nickel-plated automatic against Courane's head.

"Easy, Stevie," I said. These days he and I pal around a lot.

"Just shut up, all of you," he said. His voice was like the snarl of an animal. "This is the guy who killed my career."

"Phretys!" pleaded Courane.

"Weinraub, put it down!" said our Muse.

"No," said Stevie. "Not unless I'm given some guarantees."

"This isn't the way to go about it," said Phretys.

"Weinraub," said Brant urgently, "don't you realize? He's manipulating you again! Right now!"

Weinraub thought that over briefly. "Well," he said, "I'll show him how it's done." He pushed Courane away and shot him four times, three times in the chest, once in the head. The shots rang in the locker room like a great bell at the end of the world.

Courane lay on the floor, motionless, running streams of blood across the tiles, in the kind of unnatural position that can't be mistaken for anything else. Brant was crying; we had never seen her cry before. I was stunned by the whole thing, and I couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. No one else was in better condition.

"There are three bullets left in the magazine," said Weinraub. "Does anyone have a cogent reason why I shouldn't put one of them through my own head?"

"I'll tell you why," said Dr. Waters, who had never been Stevie's best friend. "I wouldn't give him the satisfaction, that's why."

Weinraub hesitated. It sounded like a good reason. He looked down at Courane on the floor and, I think, realized for the first time what he had done. Still holding the pistol, he folded up like a sprig of mimosa. Phretys stood pressed against the tiled wall of the locker room. The rest of us were still paralyzed. It became very quiet; the only sound was Eileen's weeping.

After a long pause, Courane raised his bloody head. "Is that it?" he asked. "Is the story over?"

"Shh, not yet," said Benarcek in a stage whisper. "Lie down and shut up."

Stevie just couldn't believe it. "The best scene I've had in ten years," he said, "and Courane ruins it. What an asshole." He shot Courane three more times, but of course it did no good.

 

 

 

From the Desk of

 

 

I liked to think that magic of a quiet sort
happened there. Five novels and a lot of short stories had been born in that very room. I was in the middle of a new story at the moment, a kind of wry, ironic tale about a young man without any luck at all. I'd titled it, tentatively at least, "The Man Who Could Work Blunders," an allusion to H. G. Wells's "The Man Who Could Work Miracles." The ending of the story would have to wait, however, until I moved my new word processor into the office and got everything squared away again. I wiped the perspiration from my forehead and looked around hopelessly; the way things were going, that might be several days away.

"The Man Who Could Work Blunders" was not going to be a great story, no matter what happened. It was not destined to win awards and be reprinted through the decades in collections of great fiction of the twentieth century. I had a reputation as a facile writer, a prolific writer, a writer sometimes blessed with interesting ideas; unfortunately, at the same time I was also kind of a crummy writer. The interesting ideas often died sudden deaths, embalmed in various short stories and novelettes like flies in amber. It was often frustrating to read my pieces; they would begin with hope and wonder, but before I successfully realized my concept, my lack of real talent would make itself felt. The characters then proceeded on to the end without further connection to the point of the whole exercise.

During the years of my marriage, at the beginning of my career, I used to write at the kitchen table late at night, after my wife had fallen asleep. It was lonely sitting in the kitchen with no company other than the thin buzzing of the clock on the stove. I used to write my stories in a spiral-bound notebook, in longhand. My wife treated me like a creature from another planet when I wrote my first story. Her attitude changed from patronizing to fearful when it sold to a magazine for two cents a word. Not long thereafter, our daughter's illness interrupted my first novel for three months, and the book was ruined forever, at least by my own standards. And my wife, in a gesture of reconciliation, bought me my first typewriter for Christmas; it slowed my output to a slender trickle until I learned how to type.

Those days were not so very long ago. My wife is no longer my wife, of course, and my daughter is on her own, more or less. All of that had happened in fifteen years. A lot of things can happen in fifteen years.

Now I live alone in an apartment larger than any we had lived in as a family. There are two bedrooms, the one in the back converted to an office. At first, I had put only my battered old oak desk in the room along with the venerable file cabinet. It had seemed like a stark and lonely place to work, so unlike the warm kitchen. Maybe that's why the stories that came out of that time were also stark and lonely, or maybe there were other reasons. The office didn't remain empty long, however. I needed a bookcase to house my copies of my published pieces; I built it by hammering together one-by-eight pine boards, and I leaned it against the wall beside the oak desk. I filled the bookcase with my books and magazines, and I was surprised by how much I had written.

Then I needed another bookcase for the reference books relating to the novel I was working on. I added a third bookcase beside it against the longest wall, filled with standard references: the dictionaries and encyclopedia and thesaurus, the baby-name books, the grammar books and foreign dictionaries and travel books and books of quotations. Above the third bookcase were my framed certificates and awards that proved that I'd actually been doing something for the last fifteen years.

There was a walk-in closet against one of the shorter walls, and beside it the filing cabinet. The fourth wall was taken up by sliding glass doors leading to a small balcony. There wasn't room for much else in the office, but that didn't stop me from acquiring things. Working on two novels and a couple of short stories at the same time, I bought a low table on which to keep the manuscripts and reference material sorted. It sat in the middle of the room, just behind my swivel chair.

When I made the quantum leap at last and invested in a word processor, everything had to be shifted around again. The daisy- wheel printer could sit on the low table. The computer console itself would just fit on the desk, if I cleared away the books, the piles of correspondence, the divided vertical file, the clock, the postage scale, the radio, and the tax records. That part was easy to think about; finding new locations for all those items would be more difficult.

It didn't take several days, after all. By midnight of the same day the computer arrived, my office was back in a kind of order. As close to order as it ever was. The only things that still needed to be moved were the small photocopier and my telephone answering machine. On the verge of admitting defeat, too weary to bother about more aesthetic solutions, I brought in another table and set it up in front of the big closet. I put the copier and answering machine there, and told myself that I would never need to use any of the things in the closet; not until winter, at least.

In the morning I went back to work on "The Man Who Could Work Blunders." It took me a long time to get used to writing my first draft on a glowing screen instead of a sheet of yellow paper. I made a lot of mistakes, hitting keys that did unusual and irrevocable things to my hard work. Slowly I learned how to use my new machine. It was, after all, a labor-saving device. I was able to tinker with my prose until I had it just right; in the past, I had submitted stories with concealed weak spots, things that I knew I ought to change but wasn't willing to retype whole pages to fix. Now I could alter anything, time and again, before I had the printer deliver the final version. Even afterward, if I spotted something else, I could call up that page and make yet another correction; in a matter of seconds, the computer would do for me what used to take a quarter of an hour of tedious work.

The pertinent question—which I avoided, of course—was if my puny prose and meager career could justify the expense of the computer in the first place. I left that to others to debate; I had work to do. First, I typed into the computer's memory as much of "The Man Who Could Work Blunders" as I had written on my old typewriter. Then I added a few pages of new material. I read over everything and decided that I had to revise a couple of paragraphs. It was so simple. By the end of the day, I was positive that the word processor had already begun to earn its keep.

It wasn't until the next morning that I learned just how true that judgment was.

Opening my first bottle of Guinness of the day and putting it carefully on the desk beside the computer, I read over the last page of the story, still displayed in white letters on a green background. I consulted my notes to see what was going to happen next; I needed a scene between my main character and his psychiatrist, which would plant a seed of doubt in the character's mind, but let the reader know that everything that had happened so far was not illusion or hallucination, but absolutely real. It was a tricky bit of dialogue. It would have to be handled carefully. I didn't feel like tackling it, and so I was glad when the telephone rang. But I didn't want to talk to anyone yet either; I let the answering machine take it. By flicking a little switch on the tape recorder, I could monitor the call.

"Hello," said the answering machine in my voice, "This is Sandor Courane. I'm not able to answer the phone in person at the moment, but if you'll leave your name and number, I'll get back to you as soon as possible. You'll have thirty seconds to leave your message."

Beep.

"Hello, Sandy? Rocky." That was Steinschlager, the associate editor of
Awesome Stories.
"You know we're on a tight schedule, and that cover has already gone to the printer, so I need the rewrite of your Wells piece as soon as possible. We've got your name splattered all over the cover and the contents page of the magazine. We're both going to look silly if the story isn't in it. Call me collect when—" There was an abrupt silence when Steinschlager's thirty seconds were up.

So whether or not I liked it, "The Man Who Could Work Blunders" would have to be finished by tomorrow at four o'clock. It would have to be in the mail, on its way to New York, by five.

I began to write:

 

"Now tell me, Mr. Edelman," said the psychiatrist, "just how long have you had this problem?"

 

There was something very wrong. I stared at the sentence and wondered what was bothering me so much. I glanced at my notes; everything had been crossed off until #5:
scene with shrink.
I shrugged. My subconscious mind was trying to tell me something, and I always tried to listen to my subconscious. Actually, it was my subconscious that earned the living; I just did the manual labor. I read back over the last few paragraphs from the day before, thinking that the trouble, as on so many previous occasions, was just a poor transition from one scene to the next.

The trouble was simpler than that, yet more difficult to explain. The main character, whom I had named Charlie Edelman, was named Jim Collins in the preceding paragraphs. I muttered a few words for which I'd never get a nickel apiece. This was the trouble with working on more than one thing at a time; every once in a while, despite all my care and discipline, sometimes things got mixed up. I looked at my notes once again, but I discovered that in the notes the guy was called Charlie Edelman. I was
sure
that Charlie Edelman had always been in this story, and I was suddenly aware that I had never, anywhere, used a name like Jim Collins. I hated simple, common names like that in stories; I always tried to pick slightly ethnic names, just for variety.