The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  “I understand,” he said.

  “You have been nicer to me than any man I ever knew when I was walking around in the world,” she said. “You’re a good person, Arnie, and I hated to sell you out, but it means so little compared to my having to remain in this state for even another moment. Listen, I’ll make you a deal, a limited time only though, and I mean it. If you don’t accept, I promise the call will go through. Destroy me. Break the crystal.”

  “I can’t,” said Slackwell.

  “You’re going to end up like this!” she yelled.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Slackwell drank and smoked, wrapped in silence. In his mind, he was now back at the house by the bay, moving from room to room, looking for Ella. He did not know how much time had passed before a knock sounded at the door.

  He didn’t stir but to bring the glass to his lips.

  A moment later, the door burst in, the chain-lock swinging free, splinters of the frame flying across the room. In walked a huge wall of a man, sporting a red Thinktank security-force windbreaker. His head was the size of Slackwell’s display case. He held a handgun straight out in front of him, steadying it with his free hand. The gun was aimed at Slackwell. Stepping out from behind him appeared the section boss, Joe Grace. He was a round fellow with jowls and glasses. His derby sat tilted back on his head and he wore a red blazer with the company’s insignia on it.

  “So, Slackwell,” said Grace, “I believe you have something that belongs to us. You are a pitiable fool to have crossed the company. Please do not resist or we will take it as a sign of aggression and who knows what might happen.”

  Slackwell stubbed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. “Gentlemen,” he said, and nodded.

  “Jolson, he looks like he’s becoming belligerent,” Grace said to the larger man. “Here, use this object he attacked us with that you valiantly wrestled away from him.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a long ice pick with a wooden handle. “Once in the heart, and once in the throat, and don’t damage that head.” He handed the pick to Jolson who took it after returning the gun to its shoulder holster.

  “Turn me off, Grace,” Melody called. “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “What you want is inconsequential. To me you’re a turd in a goldfish bowl. Take him, Jolson. I’ll dial up the removal crew. Too bad you had to make a scene, Slackwell.”

  Jolson advanced with the ice pick, but Slackwell did nothing. The huge man pulled his arm back and aimed for the chest.

  Then Melody cried out for them to stop, and there was a loud popping sound. In his daze, Slackwell looked over at the unit, thinking her scream had shattered the crystal globe, and that’s when Jolson doubled up and fell. He landed on the table, knocking the bottle of bourbon over, and then continued on to the floor. Blood seeped in a puddle from the back of his head.

  Merk stood in the doorway holding the smoking revolver. He then moved the gun to aim at the section boss’s head. Grace uselessly tried to cover his face with his hands, but Merk did not fire. Instead, he took aim at the portly stomach and pulled the trigger. Grace went over backwards, grabbing his midsection. The bullet went clean through him and lodged in the wall. He lay on the floor, howling.

  Merk stepped over the bodies and walked up to Slackwell, who sat staring, mouth open wide.

  “Let’s go, Slack, the removal crew will be here any minute,” he said.

  Slackwell stood up, taking his cigarettes off the table.

  “Arnie, are you all right?” called Melody.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Don’t leave me here,” she said.

  “Take her if you want, but we’ve got to hurry,” said Merk.

  “I’m taking you with me,” said Slackwell. He quietly motioned for Merk to give him the revolver. At first his colleague was reluctant, but finally he handed the gun over.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “The limitless ocean,” he said. “Want to come?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  His hand shook as he pulled the trigger, but to Slackwell the shot was no explosion. Instead he heard a spring breeze in the willows and the sound of a door opening somewhere in the house by the bay. The bullet splintered the glass, jellied the brain, and the glowing liquid bled out onto the floor. As they turned to leave, Merk took the gun from him, wiped the prints off with his shirttail, and threw it at the section boss, who was grunting and wheezing for air. “Float easy, Grace,” he said. Then they ran.

  Slackwell saw all of Lindrethool at once, like a bottled city, in the passenger-side mirror of the old car Merk had bought with a piece of the forty thousand.

  As they drove out past the city limits, into the country where the soot no longer fell, Merk said, “I knew what they were up to when I realized Johnny was packing a 256-B.”

  “I thought you were a company man,” said Slackwell.

  “Yeah, well, once I realized what they had done to the kid, and I had that forty grand in my pocket, it lit the spark in me I needed to want out. They thought they knew me, but no one knows what goes on up here,” he said, pointing to his head. “That’s the only freedom.”

  “But you came to get me,” said Slackwell.

  “After you beat the crap out of me, I knew you were love crazy enough to break through. I checked every hotel I could think of. Finally a woman at the front desk of that one you were in said she’d seen you. My only chance was to chomp down on the coattails of your beautiful delusion and pray for lockjaw.”

  “I thought you were rescuing me,” said Slackwell.

  “Nah, me and your girl, you led us both out.”

  “I did?”

  “Sure,” said Merk. “You’re the goddamn Bishop of Lindrethool.”

  “Floating in Lindrethool” was my attempt to write a Twilight Zone episode for the original Rod Serling TV show. Too bad it and Serling are not around anymore, save in the limbo of reruns. For four years, I lived in the town of Binghamton, in upstate New York, where Serling was born and raised. My bathroom window looked out on the cemetery where the Rod was supposedly buried. The town next to Binghamton, Johnson City, was my model for Lindrethool. It existed in the modern world but it was like something out of the forties, always overcast with a lot of abandoned warehouses. Its one remaining industry was the Fairplay Caramel Company, makers of BB Bats. Their smoke stack spewed out a sweet ash like cobwebs of gray cotton candy.

  I visualized this story in black and white, and I think that is why a lot of readers have noted its noir tendencies. The brain in the jar is one of those classic science fiction themes—most notably from the films of the fifties and even early sixties. I combined this rich metaphorical goofiness with another icon of the fifties, Death of a Salesman. Slackwell has some Willy Loman in him, but he is much more fashioned after the characters in a documentary about door-to-door Bible salesmen I saw in college. I don’t remember the title, but I think the film was made by a pair of brothers. Add to this a smog-choked world redolent of the Republican economic mindset, and it’s time to float. Sometimes as a writer, those years of crappy jobs and hangovers pay off as research. My friend, writer Richard Bowes (Minions of the Moon), gave me some good suggestions and a pair of eyebrows, or lack there of, that I used in this one.

  High Tea with Jules Verne

  We politely nibbled currant scones with fresh butter and sipped at lime tea. He sat across from me in a well-stuffed leather chair, crumbs dotting his beard, tea dribbled across his cravat. In his arrogance, he chose to speak only in English.

  “I get my ideas early in the morning, while steeping in a hot bath—you know, the steam, the moment of privacy, the easy access to the genitals.” With the look he gave me, one of disdain buttered with indifference, I could tell I was interviewing a man with a divinely wide seat of intellect.

  “Once, while taking the moment of leisure in hand, my head verily exploded with rushing stars and void, and I was Off on a Comet,” he said matter-of-factly. “
That book came to me deliciously well. Upon sitting down to write at half past five that morning, all manner of boldly gesticulating personalities squeezed their way out of the birth canal at the nib of my pen and darted across the page.”

  “I know this is a question you must get asked all the time,” I said, “but my readers would find me remiss if I did not ask you if your characters were derived from people you know in real life?”

  I noticed a smile form under his beard as he spit tea back into the cup. He put the cup and saucer down on the table between us. He cleared his throat and pointed in the air.

  “Nothing is drawn from real life when it comes to my characters. I forge them in my mind from the raw material of utter nothing. I torture blobs of the stuff into shapes larger than life and then inject them through the nasal cavity with animation. For the most part, they follow my command. Occasionally, one will get away off the writing table and hide in the other rooms of the house. Then it is no end of trouble hunting the rascal down and squishing it.” As he leaned back, he retrieved the pocket watch from his vest and began spinning it by its silver chain.

  “Could you elaborate?” I asked.

  “Very well,” he said, and nodded as if he was anxious for the opportunity. “The Mrs. and I are fond of hunting them for they are nearly as fast as mice and at least three times as wily. My weapon of choice is a croquet mallet and my wife prefers the largest fry pan in the kitchen.”

  “When they are hit do they scream?” I asked.

  “If they have voices they do,” he said. “You see, you must understand, they are as I make them. Once my wife caught one in a trap, a young lad I had created to be a castaway on a desert island. I had made him poorly with no sense of purpose in the adventure, so he fled. We hunted for weeks and could not find him. I began to be concerned that he might have escaped to the outdoors. Then I discovered that the Mrs. had him pinned by his clothing to the inside lid of her jewelry box and was keeping him between life and death by feeding him crumbs of toast and thimbles of water.”

  “Your wife had taken a liking to him?” I asked.

  “Quite a liking, I might say.” For a moment I saw his face redden, but he easily composed himself and went on. “She begged me to spare him, but how could it be? She did the job herself with a hat pin. Then she baked him in a loaf, and we buried him in the garden beneath the yellow rose bush.”

  “Your candor becomes a man of your genius,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I saw a moment of vulnerability and seized it. “Is Science your God?” I asked with as little impertinence in my voice as possible.

  He gave a look as though I had slapped him in the face. “Your readers be damned,” he said in a whisper. Silence weighted the air. The crammed bookshelves, the Persian carpet, the polished wood, the light and dust did nothing. He bit the hairs of his mustache and his eyes grew watery.

  “When I was a boy of six, a magician came to my town. Marlu the Manipulator, he was called. His specialty was performing prestidigitation with doves. Doves flew from his hands, his jacket pockets, his gaping mouth, from thin air. He announced at the end of his first week that the Saturday afternoon show would be the last in his career. For the grand finale to a distinguished life’s work, he promised that he would have his doves lift him bodily into the air and fly him to the moon.”

  “Are you certain that these were doves and not pigeons?” I asked.

  He waved my question away with a look of irritation and continued. “We gathered in the town square and watched as Marlu’s doves swarmed around him. Some wrapped their talons in his hair, some grasped the material of his jacket and trousers. One took his black top hat and one his cane, and all of them beat their wings with the fury of the devil. With a smile on his face, he rose up and up until he was a dot in the blue sky, until he was gone beyond the clouds.”

  “This must have had a great influence on your sense of wonder,” I said.

  “Certainly,” he said, “for on the next afternoon, a body fell screaming from the sky and broke the back of a peasant in the town square. Its velocity embedded them both three feet into the dirt beneath the cobblestones. When some men dug the corpses out, they found that the body of the great Manipulator was a fake made of wax. More than a dozen people had heard it screaming in its descent.”

  “To change the subject now,” I said, “what is it you are presently working on?”

  “A novel entitled The City at the Center of the Sun,” he said.

  “Could you grace us with a snippet of the plot?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, looking toward the ceiling, “it only came to me this morning in the tub. I saw a fellow, a rough and ready American named Dick Web, who travels in a cannon ball, shot by a gun the length of a train, to the sun. This cannon ball has a window, and he can study the stars. I want to be able to name in this novel all of the stars that I know. Let’s see there’s …”

  “Yes,” I interrupted, knowing his inclination to wax taxonomic, “he goes to the sun and finds a city inside it. Then what happens?”

  “Well, then he discovers that the city’s citizenry are humanlike automata. While wandering the crowded streets of the city, he runs into a female who is the image of his dear, departed mother. She takes him on a tour of the city and introduces him to her lover who turns out to be an automaton Captain Nemo. The Nemoton, as I call it, is the proprietor of a small zoo that houses a rare beast with the power of mental telepathy …”

  “It sounds splendid,” I told him.

  “I hate it,” he said.

  “Very well,” I countered, “could you give us an idea as to how much mail you get each day from your readers?”

  “A veritable avalanche. People ask for autographs, for reviews of their books, for me to read their reams and reams of dribbling prose riddled with imagination as shriveled as a scrotal sac in cold, cold water. They tell me of their personal lives, their problems, their most intimate moments.”

  “Answering these missives must be a drain on your time,” I said, mustering a look of sympathy.

  “Not at all,” he said with a frown. “I throw them in the fireplace. Only once did one blow back into the room as I emptied the waste basket. I picked it up and started reading. It was from a woman who was reproaching me for my books. Because of my novels, her husband had been digging in their basement, hoping to uncover a hidden passageway on a veritable Journey to the Center of the Earth. She asked him what he expected to find there, and he told her a lost race of wise and kindly people.”

  “Some do see the literary phantasm as a dangerous illusion,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “I struck up a correspondence with this woman. Eventually she told me that her husband was lost underground, digging toward the axis mundi. The basement is nearly filled to the ceiling with dirt, and her husband is somewhere in a slowly moving capsule of space, displacing dirt in front of him and throwing it behind, blocking his escape as he goes. In her last letter, she thanked me for having written my books.”

  “I must ask you about the wonderful inventions that inhabit your novels. If you were a machinist or mechanic and not a writer, what an amazing world we would live in.”

  “And if I were a fisherman,” said Verne, “every day would be a battle with the fierce, flesh-tearing squid in the boiling waters off Madagascar. And if I were a gardener, my every hour I would be plucking the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and hiding behind the hedges as God walked in billowing robes. And if I were a blind man, I would be a constant point of darker blackness in the night, a hole into which everything would pour and be devoured.”

  “Have you any inventions in your new novel?” I asked.

  “So far, only a pair of spectacles one might wear in order to look through solid objects.”

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  “Yes,” he admitted, “it came to me after a dinner of rare lamb. A certain miasmatic disturbance fogged me into this prophecy of future technolo
gy.”

  “Does your character Dick Web wear these glasses in order to read the hidden souls of automata?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he said with a smirk. “He wears them to see through the iron undergarments of the gear-work ladies of the city at the center of the sun.”

  “Is there anything a man of your eminence fears?” I asked.

  “I fear only one thing,” he replied, “the fall of the true body of Marlu. I have dreams of his clavicle splitting my head on a sunny morning on the streets of town. Then the doves will take me up and wing their way above the gaping maw of a dead volcano. I will be dropped and, after falling for days, will strike upon the head and kill that woman’s husband who would have, at that precise moment, broken through the last wall of dirt and into the land of the wise and kindly ancients.”

  With this said, the great writer rose and brushed the crumbs from his beard. “I must be off,” he said in an apologetic voice as precise as an invention for the vivisection of love. “My play, Dr. Ox, is premiering tonight, and I must begin the preparations for my journey to the theatre.”

  I tried to shake his hand, but he bowed slightly instead as a way of putting me off.

  “Kindly show yourself out,” he added, and then turned and left the library.

  On my way out through the shadowy corridors of his home, I came across a shelf holding a large bell jar filled with clear blue water. At the bottom lay bleached sand and a diminutive reproduction of a toppled Roman column. Tiny star fish dotted the dunes, and floating midway in that Caribbean liquid was the body of a miniature man—a homunculus with a beard and open eyes betraying a profound sense of will. On a piece of masking tape affixed to the top of the jar, lightly written in pencil, were the words: Nemo, do not feed!