by Jeff Gelb
A week after his forty-third birthday William Bobbick checked into a hospital for the first time in his life. No big deal, just the removal of a small benign growth. It would be done under local anaesthetic and he would be home the next day. Nothing to worry about.
They made him stay in the hospital the night before the operation. It was a rule. Another rule was that he had to let them push him around in a wheelchair, even though he could walk just fine. Most annoying to William was the pink plastic I.D. Brucelet they made him wear.
“We want to be sure who we’re treating,” a nurse explained on the morning of his operation. “You wouldn’t want somebody else’s enema, would you?” And she laughed and checked the Brucelet and stuck him with a needle full of something that produced a cobwebby floating sensation.
Ruth Ann and Terrie were there at his bedside. The way Terrie’s eyes kept straying to the window told William that his daughter would a lot rather be somewhere else.
“You guys don’t have to hang around,” he said, the sedative thickening the words. “This isn’t open-heart, you know.”
Terrie looked hopefully to her mother, but Ruth Ann said, “That’s all right, we’ll stay here until you’re out of the operating room. “
“If you want to,” William said. “But believe me, it’s a piece of cake.”
“If you’re so calm,” Ruth Ann said, “why do you keep fiddling with that thing on your wrist?”
He looked down at the Brucelet as though in surprise. “Was I fiddling? I guess I’m just not used to wearing anything.”
They talked idly for a few minutes about small family things—whether to get the sofa recovered or buy a new one, where to go for their vacation, whose turn it was to write to his parents in Boca Raton. Then an orderly came in wheeling a gurney. He was a friendly young man with compassionate brown eyes. He smiled at everybody, helped Bill ease from the bed onto the gurney, and trundled him off.
Ruth Ann and Terrie went down the hall to wait in the room provided for that purpose. There Ruth Ann read a paperback novel about a courageous frontier woman while Terrie clicked through the channels on the television set without finding anything she wanted to watch.
The minutes passed.
An hour passed.
An hour and ten minutes.
“Why is it taking so long?” Terrie asked.
“I don’t know,” Ruth Ann said. “I want a cigarette.”
“Mom, you were going to quit.”
“I know, but I want one now. I left them in my bag in your father’s room. Will you get it for me?”
“I don’t think they allow smoking here.”
“Don’t nag, Terrie. I won’t light it if it will make you feel better.”
As soon as her daughter left the waiting room Ruth Ann stepped into the hallway and stopped a passing nurse.
“Excuse me, my husband’s been in the operating room now for more than an hour. Is there some way I can find out what’s happening?”
“Doctor knows you’re here. He’ll be out to talk to you. Don’t worry.” The nurse clicked a professional smile on and off and went away on silent rubber soles.
Ruth Ann looked down and saw she was squeezing her hands together until the knuckles were shiny white. She made an effort to relax.
Terrie came back carrying the bag in one hand and gripping something in her fist. “Mom, look what I—”
She stopped talking as a tall, lean man in a surgical gown came into the waiting room. His expression was grave. Mother and daughter stood frozen, staring at him.
“I’m terribly sorry—” he began.
“The operation,” Ruth Ann broke in. “Something went wrong.”
“The operation was never begun,” said the surgeon. “It was one of those inexplicable things that happen. I only got as far as checking for your husband’s I.D. Brucelet.” He looked down at Terrie’s clenched fist and gently pried the fingers open. “Oh, here it is.”
Ruth Ann’s voice was flat and without life. “He was picking at it in his room. He must have pulled it loose somehow when the boy was helping him off the bed.”
The doctor glanced at the name stamped on the Brucelet. “Naturally, we wouldn’t begin surgery until we were sure we had the right patient. I saw his wrist was bare and started to ask him about it. When I leaned over him he went into cardiac arrest. We did everything we could.”
Terrie began to sob. Ruth Ann held the girl close, stroking her short blond hair.
The surgeon looked away. His pale gray eyes reflected the pain of the women. He wiped a hand across his weary face, one finger tracing the pink-white scar that tilted a corner of his mouth.
Food For The Beast
Paul Kupperberg
New York city night, darkly reflected fluorescence and neon on autumn rain-spattered pavement. Darker slicks, like oil in the puddled waters, oozing rivers seeking channels through dirtied cracks between concrete slabs, seeping from the life source to the gutter, mingling with the rush of waters sweeping clean to the gurgling sewer grate.
Fingers dip in the viscous stream, rub together to savor the sensual stickiness between thumb and forefinger. Smell. Bitter and hot, like liquid metal. Like promise cut short by the slash of reality.
Dip again, into the steaming wound this time, feeling the organism’s ebbing heat rising from the life source. Flowing from the source, heat to fuel a heart made to beat faster, stronger for the nourishment it had so long demanded and been denied.
No more denial.
The beast would be fed. Its hunger pangs had been resisted, its cries smothered beneath the drowning voices of conscience and society, forcing it into an uneasy slumber, barely concealed by earlier debaucheries, before it awoke at last, screaming, the ugliness beneath surface beauty revealed. Demanding.
He listened, recognizing with surprise the futility, the self-destruction of resistance. Fighting was painful, a ceaseless gnawing at what he Was. At what he would be.
Howling in discordant concert with the beast, he plunges his hands deep inside the life source and, remembering, drinks in everything it has to offer …
Three years, seven months, and however many weeks and days later, Dave Collins was used to waking up sober. He no longer thought about what it felt like to lay huddled in bed, head throbbing with the grungy residue of the previous day’s alcohol and drugs. Rising only to stagger without conscious thought to bottle or stash for a revitalizing hit of the hair of the dog. The three years plus, the standing up before groups of strangers to simultaneously proclaim and deny his addictions, had succeeded in suppressing the killing habits and needs of a lifetime that had been his daily ritual and desire.
Daylight was no longer a thing to hide from. Collins had thrown away the matched set of crutches that were addiction and a mindless pursuit of empty pleasures. Living now was accompanied by a clear head, without the tight, pained clamp of hangover crushing his thoughts and energies. Clean and sober had washed away fear and uncertainty and, with it, the abuses that bred deeper, more frightening insecurities that lead, in turn, to deeper abuse.
No need to hide. No reason to abuse himself or those inhabiting his particular corner of the world.
He was happy.
“Riley, you’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?”
Just ask him.
“Calm down, will you, Dave.”
Collins crumpled the papers in his fist and shook them at the man blinking uncomfortably at him from behind the cluttered desk. “What should I be calm about, you shit? The fact you’re telling me I’ve lost it, or the way you want to rip my book to shreds?”
“Come on, Dave, you know I’m not doing either,” Carl Riley said, his voice level while his usual pale complexion turned a splotchy red as he tried to maintain his own temper. “This is going to be the fifth book of yours I’ll have edited. I gave you a memo just like this one on all of your other manuscripts after my first readings. It’s only my first impressions, comments, suggestions …”
>
“No, no, Carl, comments and suggestions are one thing, but this …” Collins waved the memo at his editor before smoothing the pages out to read them. “Check this out, man … ‘disjointed narrative … fuzzy characterization … whole sections of chapters four through eleven need to be rewritten … chapters twelve, sixteen, and nineteen are clumsy and get in the way of the story flow…. ‘ Christ, Carl, what’s left? Did you at least like the dedication?”
“Dave, if you’ll just take a seat and cool down, we can talk about it.”
Collins shook his head and crushed the papers into a ball. “Nothing to talk about,” he said, biting off each syllable. “This’s bullshit. I’m not going to let you do it to my book.”
Riley felt the color deepen in his cheeks, the back of his neck hot. “We’ve worked together a long time, Dave, going on ten years now. I think you’re a hell of a writer, sometimes almost brilliant… but you fell down on this one. It’s been—what?—almost four years since your last book and I wouldn’t be doing you, me, or this company any favors if I let this one go out the way you wrote it. It’s just not there yet, but I’m willing to work with you as long and as hard as it takes to fix it.”
Collins hurled the wadded memo to the desk. “You got one thing right, Riley. I am a hell of a writer. What you don’t have is my book. Consider it withdrawn.”
“C’mon, Dave …”
But Collins was at the door. “Fuck you, Carl.”
And he was gone.
The August issue of The Metropolitan Review was waiting for him in the mailbox when he returned to his apartment on West 84th Street. Riding up in the elevator, Collins flipped through it looking for the review he had written comparing three novels by first-time writers of what had become known as the “Soho School.” His school. The one he’d been credited with giving legitimacy over a decade ago with the publication of his first novel, Bleecker Still.
The piece wasn’t there. At least not under his byline. Somebody else’s analysis of those novels was there instead.
“Look, I’m really sorry, Dave,” Katie Ollenshaw told him over the phone. “But I tried calling you all last week to talk about it. It’s not my fault you don’t return calls.”
Collins looked down at his answering machine, the small red light blinking with rhythmic incessance. He didn’t remember the last time he’d bothered listening to his messages. “Don’t hand me that, Katie. I don’t need your ‘check is in the mail’ editor’s shit, okay? You had a problem with my piece, you could’ve told me.”
“I tried, Dave,” she said.
“I tried,” he repeated, sarcasm dripping. “Look, what’s an associate editor doing passing judgment on my piece anyway? I don’t even know why I’m wasting my time with you. Just let me talk to Julius, okay?”
Katie’s voice was cold, crackling over the wire. “Julius was the one who spiked the review, Dave. He said it was flat and lacked depth. He said it was a 6,000 word justification of the superiority of your work compared to anyone else who dared write about what you’ve staked out as your turf.”
“You’ve been trying to get your own writers like the moron you reassigned my piece to into that rag since you got there, you snotnosed bitch,” Collins hissed. “Julius’ll be real interested with the way you’re looking to poison his people against him. He’s my editor, honey, not you. Now put him on the line.”
“He was your editor. He handed you to me, thought maybe some new blood’d help wake you up and get your act together. But you know what? I don’t think you’re worth the effort. I think whatever it was you used to have is gone, and what’s left isn’t worth killing a tree to print, you used up old hack,” she said calmly and hung up in his ear.
That was the first time it had reached out to him, its hollow whimper vibrating across staticy silence. Pleading. Begging for release. He knew the sound, half remembered from a time long removed from who he had become. Hadn’t it been stronger then? A howl instead of a whimper. Hadn’t its voice once filled his head, echoing and rebounding from subconscious to infinity, charging him with inspiration and heat? Its presence had made him throb with righteous anger, delicious pain, caused the reflexive lashing out to draw blood and splash it across paper like a demented surrealistic word painting.
What name did the beast call itself?
How did its bloodied rage and self-destructive hunger lead him to fulfillment, satisfaction?
He could not recall. Answers lived, but buried deep beneath the beast itself, made invisible by the present. He pressed the telephone to his head until it hurt, eyes squeezed shut and hand covering his other ear to block out noise. The whimper was there, just barely, just below the threshold of reality.
“Who?” Collins whispered.
But the static hiss gave no answer.
“And that made you angry?” Dr. Raucher prompted.
Collins stared past his therapist’s head, at the floral print hanging across the room from where he sat. Neutral. He had been looking at that print for almost four years and it meant nothing to him. It was just there, a focal point for those times he wanted to avoid Raucher’s eyes. He realized with a start that for all the time he had spent looking at it, he wouldn’t have been able to describe it if pressed to do so outside this office. Pretty lame for a writer who prided himself on his powers of observation.
“David?”
“Yeah, sure I got angry. Two major kicks in the ass in one day, who wouldn’t be? But…” Collins paused, searching, afraid of what he might say next, feeling, irrationally, that saying it would be what made it true.
“But what, Dave?”
“But … what if they’re right, okay? What if the book does suck? What if I can’t do it anymore?”
“Do you believe that?”
Collins shrugged. “I didn’t … no, I don’t … I don’t know. I mean, maybe I’m just too close to it to see what they’re seeing. The thing is,” he started to say, then stopped. But the pause only bought him time, not a reprieve from his thoughts. Raucher would just sit there, waiting patiently until Collins continued. The bastard had no mercy. “The thing is, I spent the last couple of days rereading my earlier books and … Christ! They were real good. Really raw, powerful stuff. I don’t think there was an ounce of deceit or bullshit in any of them, I don’t even think I knew what inhibition was back then. I felt it, it got put on paper and fuck the consequences. The first two sold maybe ten, twelve thousand copies between them when they were first published, but they were really good.”
“I’ve read them,” Raucher said. “They were excellent. But there was a lot of pain in them.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So how happy were you when you wrote them?”
Collins laughed. “I don’t know. Not very, I guess. What’s it matter? It’s the result that counts.”
“I don’t agree. What matters is how you dealt with your life then versus how you deal with it now,” Raucher said. “The financial insecurity, the drug and alcohol abuse, the destructive relationships of then versus the security, the sobriety, and the healthy relationship of today. What you had then didn’t signify a healthy or happy mind.”
“Maybe not, but it was a mind capable of conceiving some good writing that fifteen or twenty years later, I’m still proud to have my name on and that…”He stopped himself dead and shook his head, looking away to the floral print. “Never mind.”
“That what?” Raucher insisted.
He heard the metallic buzz in his ear then. It’s just my heart’s pounding, he thought, my blood shooting through me, like the sound that’s always there, even in the presence of silence. The body’s a machine, its engine makes noise.
“That I’m,” he said softly, barely audible over the rush of blood in his ears, unaware that his fingernails bit into the soft flesh of his palms as he clenched his fists to keep the thought there. This is important. So simple I didn’t even know I knew it. “I’m envious of what I used to be. Of how I used to be able to live before
I was married and how to worry about being a husband and a responsible human being and what I was able to write as a result of it. I mean, I got the feeling reading the older stuff that I get when I read someone else’s work that I wish I’d written, you know? Like it was someone else who wrote it. Not me, but some stranger.”
“I think that’s the point. The David Collins who wrote those books has grown up, changed. A different person did write those books, an immature, unhappy, self-destructive person. Nobody stays the same, Dave. Life is change, and in your case, that change, with your wife’s help and support, has been beneficial.”
Collins realized his fists were clenched into tight balls and it took a conscious effort to loosen them. The same; effort it took to breathe without gasping as fear ran through him, as though the hungry truths lying beneath the even tones of their conversation were a living creature chasing him through dark alleyways. “But if I can’t write,” he said, his throat dry, his voice a harsh rasp. “What’s the point of being this happy, adjusted grown-up if it robs me of my talent?”
“It doesn’t,” Raucher said. “It just means you have to readjust your priorities, write from your strengths rather than from your weaknesses. Well,” he looked at his wristwatch and then back at Collins and smiled. “We’re out of time today. We’ll pick this up next time, okay?”
In the throbbing rush of blood, Collins thought he detected a rhythmic pulse. Over and over, a steady pulsating refrain that came, simultaneously from within and without.
He lies, he lies, it throbbed.
“Mis-tah Uptown!”
Bill Hardin’s voice slashed through the babble of voices and raucous bass jukebox rumblings of the Prince Street bar even before Collins’s eyes could adjust to the dim, smoke-hazed interior from the outside sun. He squinted, searching the press of barfly regulars and downtown trendoids for the source of the voice, finally spotting his friend in a booth at the rear of the bar, waving for his attention. Collins waved back as he started threading his way through the lunch hour crowd.