Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  At which point she heard the Exceleriter in the next room, her study, clacking away like a set of those grotesque plastic dentures you could buy in novelty stores . . . or like her own chattering teeth.

  “No,” Stevie said. “It’s something else.”

  After all, your ears could fool you. The whine of a vacuum cleaner in another room could sound like an ambulance wail, bacon sizzling in a skillet like rain on a summer pavement. Maybe this typewriterly clacking was nothing but tree branches scraping her study window or squirrels clambering through the uninsulated walls. But, as Stevie well knew, neither of these sounds came accompanied by the distinctive ping! of a margin-stop bell or the smooth ker-thump! of a returning carriage. Her ears had not deceived her. The Exceleriter was working independent of human control, percussing out its alien derangement.

  I left it on, Stevie thought. I forgot to turn it off, a key was accidentally depressed, and it’s been stuck like a broken automobile horn ever since I fell asleep. A mechanical explanation for a simple, although weird, mechanical problem. Of course this explanation still doesn’t account for the thumping regularity of the carriage reflex—but it’s got to be close to what’s going on in there. It’s got to be.

  Stevie did not want to go into her study to check. She wanted the Exceleriter to stop of its own accord. She wanted to slide back into her bed and forget the whole incident. The night—especially a winter’s night—imbued even the simplest phenomenon with mystery. In the morning she would be less prone to extrapolate nonsense from her muddled senses. But the Exceleriter did not stop, and Stevie was now sufficiently awake to know that its possession—its maddening midnight activity—would seem no less mysterious in the bleak light of dawn. Eventually, now or later, she must cross her study’s threshold.

  When she turned on the hall light, the typing ceased. Quick glances into Teddy’s and Marella’s rooms assured her that the children had heard nothing; they lay huddled under their GE blankets, hot-wired for sleep, mercifully heedless of her apprehension. Thank God for that.

  Sighing her relief, Stevie pushed the door to her study inward. In the light filtering in from the hall she saw that the page carelessly left in the typewriter had curled back over the cylinder almost to the full extent of its length. The Exceleriter had advanced it that far. Phalanxes of alphabetical characters covered its pale surface. Stevie strolled cautiously to her rolltop and switched on her brass desk lamp. There, her breath drifting in puffs through the halo produced by the lamp, she fumbled the page from the top of the machine, lifted it into the light, and began to read. . . .

  X

  Tomograms, thermograms, sonograms, mammograms, and fluoroscopic “movies.”

  Although this catalogue reads like a list of options that some futuristic Western Union might provide its customers, these exotic-sounding “grams” are in reality an integral part of the detection-and-diagnosis procedures at the West Georgia Cancer Clinic in Ladysmith.

  Stevenson Crye, 35, of nearby Barclay—her friends call her Stevie—came to know the sophisticated machines that perform these vital diagnostic functions during her husband’s unsuccessful treatment. Although the clinic also has an arsenal of machines designed to cure as well as to diagnose cancer, Mrs. Crye’s husband rejected the possibility of hope in favor of a noble despair.

  “He simply gave up,” said Mrs. Crye Tuesday. “He ran out on us.”

  Early this morning, Theodore Crye, Sr., who died in 1980 at the age of 39, answered this charge. Forsaking the family plot in the Barclay cemetery, Crye returned to the Ladysmith clinic to meet his wife in the same downstairs treatment room where he once underwent radiation therapy beneath the tumor-destroying beam of the Clinac 18.

  Swollen-tongued and eyeless, Crye put a decomposing hand on this floor-to-ceiling unit and detailed its features for his horrified wife.

  “Developed by the Varian Co. in Palo Alto, Calif., the Clinac 18 is known by its manufacturer as a ‘standing-wave linear accelerator,’ ” said Crye. “It speeds electrons around an interior track to shape a beam that eventually generates X-rays.

  “Only X-rays of one intensity must come out of the machine and hit the patient,” Crye continued. “Certain organs can tolerate only so much radiation, and people vary in their tolerance to radiation, just as some people get sunburns more rapidly than others.”

  Clad in her sleeping gown and a pair of powder-blue mules, Mrs. Crye appeared distraught and inattentive through her dead husband’s recital. Dr. Elsa Kensington, director of the West Georgia facility, said that her friend would probably have bolted from the treatment room if not for the calming presence of clinic dosimetrist Seaton Benecke, 26, of Columbus.

  “Every morning I run a series of ‘output checks’ on the Clinac 18 to make sure its dosage emissions are constant and controllable,” Benecke told Mrs. Crye. “I also make ‘patient contours’—images of the abdominal region outlined on graph paper with a piece of wire—to find the proper dosage for each patient.

  “I plot this amount with a radiation-therapy planning computer. We once did dosage plotting by hand, but it took hours and the need to be exact is so great that the job could be truly nerve-racking.”

  “You’re not Ted,” Mrs. Crye accused her husband’s corpse. “You don’t talk like Seaton Benecke,” she accused the clinic dosimetrist.

  Ignoring his wife’s objections, Crye said, “Benecke discovered that I had a very low tolerance to radiation. Ionization occurred in the tissues through which the Clinac 18’s beam had to pass to reach my tumor, and my body began to fall apart from the inside.”

  Crye then invited his wife to lie down under the movable eye of the Clinac 18. When she refused, he and Benecke firmly placed her on the pallet beneath it. The facility’s space-age acoustics kept her screams from being heard beyond the treatment room.

  “I’m just giving it a special twist here,” Benecke said, turning on the accelerator. “Deepness is what I like. A beam from the Clinac 18 can go down as deep as fifteen centimeters before ‘exploding’ through the tumor-bearing area. That’s what I really like.”

  “I fell apart down deep,” Crye said, a dead hand on his wife’s forehead. “If I appeared to give up, Stevie, it was only because

  XI

  Dr. Elsa was working on Friday in Wickrath’s tumbledown clinic. Although Dr. Sam plied both pills and solace in the Barclay branch of the Kensington practice, Stevie, who had spent the tag end of the night trying to rediscover the gateway to unconsciousness, did not believe she could confide in him. Therefore, after seeing Teddy and Marella off to school, she drove to Wickrath and signed the patient register like any other flu victim or hypochondriac day laborer. Her head ached, but her heart, which barely seemed to be beating, preoccupied her more. The calm of exhaustion had not yet had a chance to settle upon her.

  “Keep showing up this regular,” Dr. Elsa told her ten minutes later, pointing Stevie to an examination table, “I’ll have to start giving you a volume discount. Typewriter break again?”

  “Read this, Elsa.”

  “‘TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT. / TYPEWRITERS ARE —’”

  “No, not that, Elsa. The single-spaced story under it. Read it to yourself and tell me what you think.”

  A minute or two later Dr. Elsa passed the page back to Stevie. “Well, I don’t think Dr. Curry up in Ladysmith’s going to be too thrilled to see I’ve got his job.”

  “Besides that, Elsa.”

  “Can’t afford to alienate my colleagues, kiddo. I’m not the cancer clinic’s director. You’re not planning to send this little ghost story to the Ledger, are you?”

  “Elsa, what do you think of it?”

  “Morbid? Obsessive? Paranoid? I don’t know. You keep trying to get me to play head doctor, but most of what I see is furred tongues, bunions, and broken bones. I haven’t got the lingo, Stevie.” She touched the younger woman’s close-cropped hair. “You’re madly in love with a dead man you don’t respect. The psychological term for tha
t escapes me.”

  “Necrophilia?”

  Dr. Elsa raised an eyebrow. “Not quite, Mrs. Shakespeare. I don’t think that’s a spiritual affliction. What you’ve got probably is. Partly, anyway. And that’s all the Sigmund Freuding I’m going to do.”

  The scuffed linoleum in the examination room, the stoppered bottles of Q-tips and alcohol, the entire rustic ambience of the Wickrath clinic, worked on Stevie’s mood. So did Dr. Elsa’s intelligent folksiness, which perceptibly allayed her depression. She scooted backward on the paper-covered examination table and propped herself upright in the corner. How could you be fearful in a place so cozy, so sloppily antiseptic, so old-fashioned? If only she could stay here . . .

  “Did you notice the opening?” Stevie asked. “The lead?”

  “Very clever.”

  “Well, the first two paragraphs are verbatim from the article I mailed to the Ledger Tuesday afternoon.”

  “Self-plagiarism’s a forgivable crime, I guess.”

  “Do you know what the rest is, though?”

  “A paid advertisement for the Clinac 18?”

  “I wish.” Stevie handed the page back. “Look again. The rest’s an exact rendering of a nightmare I had last night, but in journalese. It’s the way Joseph—the Biblical one—would have reported a dream if he’d spent a year at The New York Times.” She paused. “I never remember my dreams. The Exceleriter wrote this, Elsa. It picked my brain and organized what it found there in the form of a news story.”

  “Lots of writers think like that, Stevie. They sit down at their typewriters, and when they’re rattling along at a good clip, it’s as if they’re taking dictation. They’re an instrument through which the words splash down on paper. That’s the subconscious mind working. Same thing’s true of people who speak in tongues, estate auctioneers, and most of the lawyers you’re likely to hear in the Wickrath County Courthouse on Thursday morning.”

  “That puts it in perspective,” said Stevie wryly.

  “I don’t mean to take you down a notch, kiddo. Just noting that you needn’t give your typewriter all the credit. The receptor-conductor’s important, too; essential, in fact. I couldn’t be one if I tried. It takes talent and training.”

  “Elsa, I wasn’t even sitting at the typewriter when it did this. I was in the next room. It typed that page by itself.”

  “Seaton Benecke’s a wizard, all right.” Releasing the page, Dr. Elsa let it waft back into Stevie’s lap. “Typewriter repairman and part-time dosimetrist.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  Dr. Elsa squinted at her visitor. “You’re serious?”

  Stevie held up her evidence. “It stops in the middle of a line of Ted’s dialogue—just as he’s about to explain why he surrendered—because it ran out of room. Alibi interruptus. That makes me as crazy, Elsa, as the crazy way it all got down on paper in the first place.”

  Dr. Elsa hoisted her ample lower body to the edge of the examination table. “What do you want me to do, honey?’’

  “Tell me you believe me.”

  “I believe you believe the typewriter wrote that by itself. That okay for now? The other’s liable to take me a while.”

  “Okay for now,” Stevie said quietly. “You think I’m ready for the funny farm?”

  “Kiddo, they’re not ready for you.”

  Both women laughed. Whether she or Dr. Elsa moved first to abandon the examination table, Stevie could not have said, but they bumped shoulders and hips on the way down. Stevie apologized, noted their common need to get back to work, and then found herself gazing pensively at the broad strip of shiny white paper on the table.

  “Where do you get this stuff?”

  “This? From a medical-supply salesman who comes through here every couple of months. Why?”

  “Could I buy a sheet or two when I’m paying my bill?”

  “What bill? And hell, no, you can’t buy any of this slippery sausage wrap. I toss a sheet every time somebody puts her fanny to it. You can have this piece and a half-dozen more if you want.” Dr. Elsa folded the long sheet from the table into Stevie’s arms and fetched several more from the bottom of an aluminum cart. “Enough?”

  “Plenty, plenty.”

  “What you gonna do with it? Turn your minibus into a float for the Barclay Easter parade?”

  “Shelving paper,” Stevie improvised. “I never remember to buy shelving paper. Don’t you think it’ll do?”

  “Sure,” said Dr. Elsa. “Cockroaches love to go skating on this stuff. Turn your shelves into a regular cockroach roller rink.”

  XII

  She knew what had happened. She was not insane. She had heard the Exceleriter typing and had actually found the unfinished product of its labor. If her machine had been functioning as the printer in a word-processing system, she could have attributed its performance to prior programming—but her typewriter was a desk model, with no expensive hookups or modifications, and it should not have been doing what she had seen it do. Telling Dr. Elsa, dumping her impossible discovery into the minor maelstrom of her friend’s workday, had not shown good judgment. Although their friendship spanned a dozen years, Stevie could hardly expect Dr. Elsa to embrace a report as unlikely as the one she had ill-advisedly sought to foist upon her.

  All you did, Stevie chided herself, was make her worry. She thinks the pressure has finally worn you down. She thinks you typed that page during an episode of fugue and don’t remember doing it.

  Or else she thinks you’re crazy, kiddo.

  Stevie wondered if her insanity lay in failing to . . . well, to fear the machine. An electric typewriter that began to churn out highly detailed versions of your dreams warranted a certain awe. It could remake your life. It could reveal your most shameful secrets. It could destroy you. Cataloguing these melodramatic possibilities, Stevie smiled at herself.

  In point of amusing fact, a typewriter—no matter how voluble, vulgar, and malicious—had no forum unless you gave it one. It could not saunter from room to room rummaging through your belongings, go to the police chief to denounce your private appreciation of smutty books, or even creep over an inch to upset the bottle of Liquid Paper next to your latest manuscript. A typewriter sat where you put it. If you kept your study door closed and forbade anyone else to enter, it served as your absolute captive.

  Stevie intended to make use of these facts. Why, then, should she fear her typewriter? Although hard to lift, it was not otherwise physically imposing. Its grimy platen knobs and mild keyboard grin conveyed not a flinch of menace. Besides, before visiting Dr. Elsa, Stevie had defanged the machine by the simple expedient of unplugging it. If it wanted to get rid of her or ruin her reputation, it would have to wait until she restored its power. When she did, she fiercely believed that Stevenson Crye rather than the PDE Exceleriter would occupy the driver’s seat. She would turn the machine’s occasional self-sufficiency to her own advantage.

  That was why she had asked Dr. Elsa for those long sheets of slippery white examination-table paper. Since returning from Wickrath, she had not set foot in her study. She had spent the morning scissoring Dr. Elsa’s “sausage wrap” into streamers about eight inches wide—so they’d fit into the Exceleriter. These virgin scrolls lay about the kitchen—on the breakfast bar, the circular oaken table, the seats of her wobbly captain’s chairs—as if she were trying to convert the place into a medieval library. All her manuscripts lacked were words and meticulous illuminations. The words, at least, would come later.

  Teddy came in, dragging his expensive winter jacket and eyeing the paper-filled kitchen.

  “You’re home early,” Stevie said, baffled. The clock on the stove showed only a few minutes after noon.

  “It’s a teachers’ in-service weekend, Mom. We only went half a day.”

  “Oh.” She had forgotten.

  “The elementary school let out early, too. Isn’t Marella home yet?”

  The day’s plans—some of them formulated at breakfast while she wa
s still trying to absorb the implications of her strange discovery—began to take focus again. “Tiffany McGuire’s mother picked her up, Teddy. Marella’s supposed to spend the night there.”

  “She well enough to go?”

  “Claimed she was this morning. If she can go to school, I guess she can go to a friend’s house, don’t you?”

  “ ’Sno skin off my nose.” Before she could tweak Teddy for the slovenly offhandedness of this remark, he added, “I thought you’d be upstairs working, trying to make up for yesterday and all.”

  “Afraid you’ll starve?”

  “No, ma’am.” He looked taken aback, and Stevie regretted snapping at him—the guilt of the neglectful breadwinner triumphing over maternal solicitude.

  More tenderly, she said, “In a way, I am working.”

  “Somebody ask you to do decorations?”

  “I’m going to type on this, Teddy. I’m halving the strips so they’ll roll into my machine.”

  “I thought you typed on typing paper.”

  “These are for drafts. From now on I’ll be using long strips like these for almost all my preliminary drafts.”

  “What for?” Teddy picked up a tightly wound scroll and thumped it against his chin.

  “It’s a psychological thing,” Stevie told him. “When I get to the bottom of a page, I want to stop. If I’ve got a sheet of paper four feet long, though, it’ll take a while to get to the bottom and I won’t be tempted to stop working so often.”

  “Mmm,” said Teddy.

  “Maybe I’ll increase my productivity.”

  Teddy grinned. “And if you don’t, at least you won’t have to buy us a flyswatter this summer.’’ He bopped an imaginary fly on the breakfast bar, tossed the dented scroll into his mother’s lap, and said he was going to Pete Wightman’s house for a patio scrimmage. He had eaten lunch at school. She didn’t need to worry about him.

  After Teddy left, Stevie glanced about the kitchen at her handiwork. The real reason she wanted long strips of paper, of course, was so that the automatic activity of the Exceleriter did not henceforth automatically cease at the bottom of a standard eleven-inch sheet, stranding her in the middle of a crucial, maybe even a revelatory, text. The machine was her captive, her slave, and she would put it to work in the service of her own vital goals. No one she had ever known had ever owned a Ouija board of such awesome potential, and if it could help her plumb her own dreams or establish a spiritual contact with her dead husband, then it must be put to that use.