by Bob Sanchez
and his story file displayed on the screen. He went to the end of the file to begin writing immediately. Tonight he wanted to avoid re-reading what he had already written; it was always pleasant to do, but a most inefficient use of his time.
Mack had bought Chantal (the Attractive Former Nun) a cup of coffee, and that’s where Bob had left the story. Mack found Chantal attractive, and the feeling was mutual, but she was taking their friendship slowly--very slowly.
Bob’s trouble was that he didn’t recognize what he saw on the screen anymore. He paged up through the story, feeling confused and lost. So he ran a search for the phrase “mutual respect,” because he knew that was in the last paragraph he’d written the previous night.
“Mutual respect, my ass,” the A.F.N. said. “I’m meeting some guys back at my place tonight and we’re snorting some coke and going to bed. Be a boring jerk all you want, Mack, but this bride of Christ is gonna party!”
Enraged, Mack slapped her and threw hot coffee in her face, which dripped and was dappled with coffee grounds. She screamed and slid out of the booth and onto the diner’s floor. He kicked her aside on his way to the cash register.
“I’ll pick up the check,” he snarled.
Bob was stunned at the tripe he had written. But when did he write this? How could he? There were twenty more pages that he didn’t recognize, and the heat rose in his face. He had worked so hard to make his hero Mack a likeable and decent man, flawed but honorable. Now Mack drove to Chantal’s apartment and shot one of her boyfriends, cleaned out his wallet, forced himself on Chantal, then went back to his car and ripped up a parking ticket.
Bob’s heart pounded as he highlighted the new material, for he didn’t care where the damned stuff came from. It was out of here!
He uttered an imprecation as he banged the delete key so hard his index finger ached. Nothing happened. Tears began to flow as he stared at the awful words, now white letters against a black background. He flipped the power switch on his computer and went to bed, not caring about the improper shutdown.
The next evening, he discovered that the computer hadn’t shut down after all, and twenty new pages had appeared. He cringed as he read the last paragraph.
Mack took a last deep drag on his cigarette and crushed it into the pavement with his heel. Vapor lamps filled the parking lot with jaundiced cones of light as Franco’s sinister figure approached slowly from his car. There was only one way to resolve this conflict peacefully, and Mack wasn’t going to bother.
He shot Franco between the eyes.
Bob quickly found that the delete key still didn’t work, nor did saving the novel as a new file with a new name. He tried a couple of other tricks to no avail. Should he start the novel all over again? Maybe he could print it out and then retype it in a new file. He couldn’t bear the thought of all that extra work. He decided to give his novel a rest for a few days.
At the next writer’s group meeting, Bob dug into Joan’s artichoke dip, using a broken Frito as a shovel. She was new. “So who’s this Mack guy you’ve been foisting off on the group, Bob? Are you reading any of that stuff tonight?”
“No, but I have been writing,” he lied. “It just needs some polish before I read it at group.”
“You look kind of freaked out,” Joan said, and Bob changed the subject.
Suddenly, Bob’s computer seemed perfectly fine. After two weeks the file had finally closed, e-mails started appearing again, and he could use his word processor. He surely didn’t recall naming his novel SCHIZO, but still he felt an odd satisfaction scrolling down and seeing that lovely phrase, “THE END.”
A couple of days later, he received a fat envelope in the mail. The return address was a publisher’s. He ripped open the envelope and read the letter.
Thank you for sending us SCHIZO, it read. We find your manuscript utterly without redeeming social value. Only idiots, social misfits, and people who read with their lips will find it remotely entertaining. Happily, that is our market. We will pay you a $100,000 advance upon signing the enclosed contract. In exchange for this advance and royalties, you will write a series of ten Mack books, with deliverable dates every two weeks.
Bob smiled. Why not? He thought. They write themselves.
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Rage
DOUR LUDWIG SCOWLED FROM his place of honor, inside a picture frame above the ancient baby grand. Laura’s piano practice went badly, no matter how hard she tried. Für Elise was torture to get right, and the angry German seemed to want to leap off the canvas and berate her. She imagined him banging his fists on the ivory keys and screaming, “Defile someone else’s work, woman! Butcher Bach. Mangle Mozart. Trash Telemann. But leave my work alone!”
She’d graduated from the conservatory with straight A’s in every subject and standing O’s in every performance. She’d gone transcendental with Liszt, mourned a dead princess with Ravel, remembered childhood games with Schumann. Whenever her parents visited, their eyes misted with pride as they listened to her do sweet justice to these masterpieces.
But Herr Beethoven was another sheet of music altogether. Sharps flattened, Moonlight dimmed, Appassionata lost its soul. This great master who once ripped up a dedication to Napoleon now made Laura’s hands quake. When she finished struggling through a sonata, Father mumbled that it sounded like Ludwig on moonshine. “Play us some Mozart, dear,” Mother said gently. “It’s easier.”
“I want to play Beethoven!”
“Of course you do, dear, but he seems to scare you so.”
Father tamped his obnoxious pipe. “You could be world-class, but you have a psychological aversion to playing Beethoven.”
Mother brightened. “You could specialize in Mozart, dear.”
Laura could do many things, she knew. Specialize in Beethoven avoidance. Wait for a marriage proposal. Jump out a window (though she was afraid of heights). But she loved the passion and romantic energy in the great man’s music. She closed her eyes and imagined playing the opening bars of the Emperor Concerto, precisely as he would have wanted it played.
“Hypnotism,” Father declared. Laura found it hard to believe that a man swinging a watch fob like a pendulum before her eyes would do anything to help conquer her phobia. But Father was Father, and his wallet was his wallet, so Laura agreed to try.
The next day, she had trouble finding the hypnotist’s office, which was in a back room of the Pink Shear’s Styling Academy. The smell of bubble gum-scented skin care products, the painful screech of Britney-somebody, the errant apostrophe in “Shear’s”--none of this inspired confidence in Laura.
“You have nothing to fear from Beethoven,” the hypnotist said in soothing tones. “You are getting sleepy...”
She went home feeling she had wasted Father’s money, and pounded out a Chopin scherzo and a Joplin rag. They were wonderful pieces she knew cold, but they left her feeling empty. Above her, Ludwig’s face looked even darker than usual; his glower cast a pall over Laura’s living room. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought his eyes had fixed on her. How could that sourpuss have written Ode to Joy?
The thing to do, she decided, was clear. Laura stood up and turned the painting around to face the wall, then sat down to play--to try to play--the Pathétique sonata. Even with the sheet music in front of her, every note rang false, like a spoon on a row of water glasses. “Dummkopf,” she heard, and then looked up to see the irascible genius facing her again. Once again she turned the picture, with no better results. She ripped the painting off the wall, huffed into the kitchen, and dumped it into the trash. By the time she returned to her piano, the painting was back on the wall. Was she going mad? “Ich hasse dich! I hate you!” But Ludwig turned a deaf ear to her vitriol.
Days went by without Laura sitting down at the piano or looking at the painting. For something to do, she enquired about a job at Starbucks; she didn’t need it, didn’t really want it, and didn’t get it. “I’ll have a grande latte anyway,” she said, and paid the barista. Leave a penny
, take a penny, the sign at the register said. She took a penny.
On arriving home, she tried to look straight ahead as she passed the piano.
“Harrumph!” She stiffened at a sound like that of an ancient throat--she wasn’t alone. It couldn’t be Father, who wouldn’t enter her house without knocking, and whose throat-clearing wasn’t like a death-rattle. And surely it couldn’t be--she slowly turned and locked gazes with Ludwig.
“What do you want, old man?” Laura asked as she sat down on the piano bench. “A penny for your thoughts.” From her jeans she extracted the only coin in her pockets. In the kitchen she found a roll of tape and walked over to the painting. She stuck the penny to the frame. His face remained full of sturm und drang, just the way he was painted. She relaxed enough to laugh at her foolish imagination. Moving eyes? Raspy throat? It was oil paint on canvas, no more.
Then, a voice only felt but not heard: “Danke. My lost penny.”
“It’s from Denver, not Berlin.”
“Machts nichts.”
She shrugged.”Well, you’ve found your penny, Herr Beethoven, and I’ve lost my mind.”
His stormy look did not change. “You know what to play.”
“Nein. It’s too difficult.”
“Bitte.” Ludwig’s voice softened. “You can play anything.”
Yes, she could. She straightened her back. The fingers flew over the keyboard with elegance and passion as Laura began his Rage Over a Lost Penny.
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Nothing that Needed Eyes
NO GOOD WOULD COME from disturbing this old house, I thought, applying my crowbar to an ancient oak plank. Still, there could be money squirreled away somewhere in this mess. Rusty nails creaked and snapped; the board popped up to expose a shallow dirt cellar crawling with centipedes and roaches.
Nellie Westhaver had lived here alone, at first pitied and then ignored by the townsfolk for the shiftless husband who had held lots of odd jobs and fast women until he and some mini-skirted trash named Luann disappeared for good and good riddance, probably on the Greyhound to Boston. He’d left his rattletrap Buick behind, but Nellie didn’t drive.
I’d recently spent ten years’ worth of medium security in Walpole and didn’t have a dime left to my name. Crazy Nellie had been my next-door neighbor, the type who never answers the door, fills every room with newspapers going back to Genesis, and lets you know she’s dead when she starts to smell. The house dated back to Revolutionary times, with its low ceilings and stone fireplaces in every room and not a single wall or doorway plumb or true. Not having many job prospects as an ex-con, I decided to see if the old bat had hidden any cash.
The stench had finally told her fate last week--masked EMTs carried her body out feet first on a stretcher, and police closed and padlocked the door. Already I hear Seven-Eleven wants to buy the lot.
Evidently, someone had made half an effort to tame the terrible odor, but the place still smelled like air freshener overpowered by death. Rot gnawed at the wood while mold spores and silence filled the air. Old Look magazines and Lowell Sun newspapers sat in dusty stacks. A small TV with rabbit ears looked like it hadn’t been used since Lawrence Welk died. At the window, a fly struggled in a spider web as a daddy-longlegs sidled up to suck out its juices. I knew how the fly felt, an inmate at the mercy of a sadistic prison guard.
Home improvement for this house would have to start with a match, but I’d never torch it because I’d be the number one suspect. This was the first place I’d ever broken into, the first place I’d ever been arrested, back in my juvie days when Nellie and Ashton still held backyard cookouts and enjoyed sipping martinis and electrocuting moths with their luminescent bug zappers.
Nellie’s bed