Survivor's Guilt and Other Stories

by Greg Herren

  Don’t worry, though, Barry, she’d closed with, I’m sure something else will turn up soon. I’ll start sending out feelers—don’t get upset! Something will turn up.

  Feelers.

  Something will turn up.

  Great.

  Adding insult to injury, about an hour later I’d gotten an email from an editor about a short story I’d been asked to write for an anthology. I’d gone through two rounds of edits with the editor, making all the changes she wanted…and then, out of nowhere, I’m so sorry I’m not going to be able to use your story after all. But I might be able to use it if I get to do another volume…because yes, of course, by all means, please sit on my work for some more time without paying me for it because maybe you might use it another time.

  Yeah, that and two hundred bucks will pay the power bill.

  I’d stopped myself from writing the blistering, bridge-burning response I wanted to send and just deleted her email unanswered.

  I gave up on getting anything done. If it was only one o’clock, so what? I opened a bottle of Chardonnay and rolled a joint and turned on the television and spent the afternoon turning my mind into mush, trying to forget the fifty grand or so of income the loss of the series meant and wondering how I was going to keep paying the bills.

  There was still money owed to me out there, and it would be spring royalty season soon. But my bank account was dwindling, more going out than coming in.

  And that’s when the joke came to me.

  I should dig out that old manuscript and send it to Hunter’s agent. I bet he could sell it for several hundred thousand, at least, with Hunter’s name on it.

  It was funny, wasn’t it? Trying to pass off my old manuscript as one of Hunter’s?

  What a great joke it would be if I could fool his agent.

  Hunter had been dead less than a year that night.

  Hunter. My old friend and good buddy Hunter Sloane.

  Six-figure book deal within a month, I thought, pouring another glass of wine. If not a bidding war.

  Hunter’s agent, Lester Doheny, had been pestering me about Hunter’s papers since the day they arrived. I knew there wasn’t anything unpublished in there, no secret lost manuscript like Lester was hoping. Hunter hated writing and never wrote anything not under contract. All those papers were just versions of novels and short stories he’d refined down and eventually published. Lester should know that better than anyone. But still, he held out hope.

  People always thought I resented Hunter, his acclaim and success.

  Nothing could be further than the truth. I never resented Hunter. Sure, I envied him. Everyone did. But Hunter was my friend, you know? And he wasn’t, like so many others who hit the jackpot in the game of life, a dick about it. He was a nice guy, and smart. He just made a lot of bad decisions and choices in his life, which was why he wound up dead in his mid-forties. He never gave a thought to the future and never regretted his past. Hunter was all about the present, savoring every second.

  I laughed a little bit as I reached for the pipe for another hit.

  Fireflies was the name of the manuscript. My attempt at the Great American Novel. I’d written and rewritten and paid editors to give me opinions and sent it to agents and used their feedback and no one wanted it. It was the book I’d thought would get me out of the world of ghost-writing books for long-dead authors and turning audio recordings of D-list celebrities into memoirs or writing novels for them for a five-figure check while they banked seven figures and went on talk shows. Oops, signed confidentiality agreements for all of them, so let’s just pretend I never mentioned any of that. I’ve written science fiction, thrillers, cozy mysteries, you name it. Hunter once told me “your blessing and your curse is that you can write anything.”

  The more I thought about it, the funnier it became. But Hunter’s agent Lester would see through it, wouldn’t he? Lester and I could laugh about it over drinks sometime when I went up to New York to sign something for the estate. Hunter only wrote three novels. The second two didn’t sell nearly as well as his first one, but that first one sold and sold and was still selling and won enough awards and got taught at universities and always made lists of great American novels.

  I do miss Hunter, you know. So much.

  Our friendship endured even after I moved to New Orleans, where I could sit in my crumbling yet aristocratic garret in the lower Garden District and write. Hunter was so supportive, giving me advice, reading my stuff and critiquing it with his smart point of view. He never could understand why he was so admired and respected, while the books I published under my own name were virtually ignored by reviewers and awards committees and readers. It drove Hunter crazy I had to ghost-write.

  “It’s not right,” he would always say angrily, “that you have to whore yourself like this. You are just as talented as I am.”

  I just didn’t have his pedigree.

  Hunter found the whole business of publishing ridiculous.

  In my drunken, stoned stupor, I could hear Hunter telling me to do it.

  I stumbled into my kitchen, sat down at my computer, and typed out an email to Lester:

  Lester:

  I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I’ve found a couple of pieces of a manuscript in Hunter’s papers—I just started going through them. I will, of course, keep an eye out for the rest.

  Best,

  Barry

  After I hit Send, I had a moment of buyer’s remorse.

  I could always pretend I never found the rest, couldn’t I?

  I went to bed.

  I woke up the next morning, not certain I’d really done it, that I’d just imagined doing it, until I saw Lester’s response:

  Barry:

  Terrific news! Do keep me posted. If there’s at least two-thirds of a manuscript, I can find someone to finish it. I can’t tell you how thrilled and happy I am! There’s no telling what other treasures you might find in his papers—short stories, even the memoir he kept talking about writing! I’ll put out some feelers to see how much interest there is.

  Talk soon,

  Lester

  I can find someone to finish it rankled.

  Why would Lester ever consider asking ME to do it?

  Because Hunter was the only person who ever believed in you.

  That was the moment I decided that I was going to revise Fireflies in Hunter’s style and send it to Lester.

  Fuck you very much, Lester.

  Because even after all this time, after so many times…it still stung to be dismissed like that.

  If I hadn’t lost that ghostwriting gig. If the short story hadn’t been pulled. If Lester hadn’t been such a dick in his email to me.

  If, if, if.

  I pulled up the old manuscript and started reading.

  I spent the day reading the electronic file, making notes. Fireflies was a much better book than I remembered…some of the rejections it got had been pretty nasty.

  And undeserved.

  It would be so easy to make it look like Hunter wrote it.

  I shut down my computer and went to bed, completely believing I would wake up the next morning and change my mind.

  But the next morning…I shouldn’t have done it, I told myself not to do it, but I opened Lester’s email again and read those words one more time as I drank coffee and ate my morning oatmeal. There was a dull throbbing behind my eyes.

  I was going to teach Lester a lesson.

  I was going to teach the whole goddamned industry a lesson.

  And so I started revising the manuscript, refreshing Hunter’s writing style in my mind by thumbing through his books. It was particularly galling to realize my style—the style I’d always wanted to use—was actually very similar to Hunter’s.

  Hunter had hand-delivered Fireflies to Lester twenty years ago, and told me later that night over a joint, “I told him he could thank me later for giving him his next big star.”

  He’d turned it down, of course.

>   Lester wouldn’t remember it, not after twenty years.

  After about a week of nonstop work, I was nearly finished. And I got another email from Lester.

  Hi!

  Any luck finding more pieces of the manuscript? I’ve put out some feelers, and I think we might get over seven figures for this. There’s a LOT of interest. We might even have to take it to auction.

  Thanks,

  Lester

  PS. You’ll be hearing from a writer named Jack Sapirstein. He’s an associate professor of literature, and he’s interested in writing a critical biography of Hunter, isn’t that great? But he’ll need access to Hunter’s papers.

  That scared me into almost stopping. If I let someone have access to Hunter’s papers…then I’d have to admit…yes, that was when I should have pulled the plug.

  But I was committed to it, wanted to see what Lester would say.

  I could always admit it was mine if he liked it.

  The next morning, I emailed him the revised manuscript. I sat there, my cursor over the Send button for a long time. I remembered Hunter, saying over and over You’re just as talented as I am, you should be even more successful than me, you can write anything, any style, any voice, which is both your blessing and your curse.

  I got up and walked into the living room and looked at the bookcase with copies of all the books I’d written. The three trade paperback novels under my own name, published by a small press for a couple of thousand dollars up front, ignored by reviewers, selling just enough copies to earn the advance back but little more than that, falling out of print quickly. The shelves and shelves of ghostwritten books, mass market paperback thrillers and cozies and space operas and romances, using house names or pseudonyms, the slutty private school girl books, the hypnotic eye of a Real Housewife staring at me from another spine.

  I walked back to the computer and hit Send.

  I could have told Lester the truth when he called the manuscript “Hunter’s crowning achievement.” I could have stopped Lester from taking it to auction. I could have admitted the truth before it was bought for seven figures. Even then I could have not signed the contract as Hunter’s literary heir…but it was an awful lot of money, and my own agent wasn’t having any luck finding ghostwriting gigs for me and I didn’t know what else I could do. The money I had set aside was running out so much faster than I’d thought.

  I was going to run out of money for the rent in about three months.

  Seven figures.

  Just because it had Hunter’s name on it.

  I’d never have to worry about money again.

  I signed the contract, telling myself that was the end of it. It’s not like I could find another manuscript. It was a one-off, my revenge on the publishing industry and all the snubs thrown my way all those years, being told I wasn’t good enough.

  I was just as good as Hunter. I was. And now I’d finally proved it, even if I was the only one who knew.

  Jack Sapirstein was the only fly in the ointment.

  He kept emailing and calling. I was running out of excuses for not giving him access to Hunter’s papers. He was persistent. And I was beginning to think he didn’t believe that Hunter wrote Fireflies.

  That made him dangerous.

  The first part of the advance was already in my bank account.

  I thought about moving out of the country and just disappearing. Lester could just have the money wired into my account whenever royalties or other payments were due. I started planning.

  Jack Sapirstein wasn’t going to go away.

  The only reason I answered the door was because I was expecting a package of advance reading copies.

  “Jack Sapirstein,” the man standing there said, sticking out his hand. He was very short, no more than five feet four at most, with a thick head of long hair parted in the center and falling to his shoulders. His teeth winked at me through a forest of facial hair, and his brown eyes were shrewd, intelligent, piercing. “I took a chance on just showing up.” He pushed past me into my apartment.

  “I’m sorry to be so pushy.” He flashed his teeth at me again as he sat down on my battered old sofa, which I was donating to Goodwill. “But I’m impulsive and was getting frustrated with our email exchanges and I thought, hey, what the hell, I haven’t been down there in years, so why not?”

  He was younger than I’d thought he’d be, maybe in his early thirties. I’d checked him out online, of course, but couldn’t find any pictures. He’d published a lot of pieces on Hunter and other gay writers of the late twentieth century in academic journals, considered himself an expert—wrote with the kind of arrogance that set my teeth on edge.

  “This really isn’t a good time—”

  He cut me off before I could finish. “I’m not a beat around the bush kind of person,” another flash of teeth, “but I have to see his papers. I have to.”

  “They’re really in no condition for an academic to look at—”

  “He wanted to leave his papers to Columbia,” he cut me off again.

  “He never said anything about that to me.” How did he know what Hunter wanted to do with his papers?

  “And he never wrote any book called Fireflies.” That flash of teeth again as he crossed his short jean-clad legs and leaned back into my sofa. “You know it, I know it, and the whole world is going to know it soon.”

  I felt sick to my stomach, could barely breathe. I heard myself saying, “I was his best friend, you’re being ridiculous, I certainly knew him better than you did,” even as I wondered if Jack was—I don’t know—maybe one of Hunter’s boys? Hunter had always liked his men to be young, preferred them to be for hire. Hunter wasn’t interested in having a relationship, it was only about sex for him. He usually liked his young men to have an Eastern European, almost Slavic look to them, bright blond hair and pale skin and blue eyes and tall.

  Jack was totally the wrong type for Hunter.

  So how could he know?

  “I should think Lester would have noticed,” he was saying, “But all Lester sees is dollar signs. Did you write it? Is that where the manuscript came from?” And he started telling me things he noticed in the manuscript that weren’t Hunter-like, and about how he wasn’t really interested in writing a biography of Hunter but he’d wanted to see Hunter’s papers and Lester, whose daughter he’d dated in college, told him about the new manuscript and he knew it had to be a fake so he wanted to see the papers because he knew Hunter kept a diary and if there was no mention of the manuscript in the diary—

  The diary.

  My palms were sweating.

  I didn’t think anyone else knew about the diary.

  I interrupted him. “How—how do you know so much about Hunter?”

  His eyes narrowed, and he brushed the long hair out of his face with his fingers again. “Because I don’t look like a Jan or a Stefan or an Alexi?” He laughed. “Yeah, I knew Hunter. And I also know he didn’t have a manuscript stashed away somewhere.” He shook his head. “Did you really think you’d get away with this?”

  “What do you want? Money?”

  He got right in my chest, tilting his head to look up at me. “I don’t want anything from you. I just wanted to see for myself the kind of person who would try to profit off a dead man. You were supposed to be Hunter’s best friend.” His voice was dripping with contempt. “Yeah, Hunter told me all about you, the best friend, the only person he could really trust, the guy with all the talent who was so unappreciated and unrecognized and what a crime it was that you didn’t get the glory you so deserved—”

  As he spat each word at me my mind disappeared back within itself, my skin crawled and the hair on the nape of my neck rose.

  I don’t remember hitting him.

  I don’t, and I’ve tried in the hours since I did it. I don’t remember knocking him down and sitting on his chest with my hands around his neck.

  I don’t remember.

  When I came back to myself, I was sitting on his ch
est. His face was reddish-purple, eyes bulging. His hands fell limply away from my wrists. Drool was running from one side of his open mouth. There was blood beneath his head, his hair smeared into it.

  I don’t remember killing him.

  I also don’t remember the next hour or so. I was in a panic, of course, that much I do remember, as I tried to figure out what to do, ideas rushing through my mind, coming and going so quickly I couldn’t make sense of them, couldn’t decide which was the right one.

  None of them involved calling the police.

  Who knew he was coming here? Did he take a cab or an Uber? Was there a rental car parked out on the street that could be traced here? Did Lester know? Was there a lover, friend, family member who knew he was coming to New Orleans to confront me?

  Someone had to know.

  I couldn’t get away with it that easily, could I?

  I found the car key in his jeans pocket, and when I clicked the key fob there was a corresponding chirp from the street. I slipped out the front door. It was a Honda Accord, with a rental license plate. In the trunk was a suitcase. A shoulder bag in the passenger seat contained a folder, with a printout of a reservation at a French Quarter hotel—idiot, you never rent a car in New Orleans if you’re staying in the Quarter—a laptop and phone charger. I grabbed the shoulder bag, locked the car, and went back inside.

  I had to get rid of the body.

  I had to get rid of the car.

  How? Where?

  There was an old rug in my storage attic I’d been meaning to throw away. I sealed his head inside a garbage bag, using duct tape to close it around his neck. I rolled him into the rug, tied it with twine, and dragged it over to a corner of the living room. I got out my bleach and my bucket and cleaned the floor where he’d bled, making sure to pour the bloody water down the sink and scrub out the sink with bleach.