Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  “Ted!” cried the distraught woman. “Ted, don’t!” She screamed again.

  Meanwhile, a creature like a huge white-throated capuchin crept up the length of the treatment couch, lifting the hem of her skirt as it neared her face. Mrs. Crye’s head rolled from side to side, but she could not escape the restraints of her traitorous husband or the knee pressure of the monkey-man astride her.

  “I’m just giving it a special twist here,” Benecke said, stroking her breasts with a furry paw. “I can go in as deep as fifteen centimeters before ‘exploding’ through the life-bearing dark. 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

  Mrs. Crye could no longer hear her own screams. When she opened her eyes, she found that she was alone with Crye’s corpse in a basement detection-and-diagnosis rooms. Her dead husband was explaining to her the purpose and operation of a machine connected to a small viewing console.

  “This unit allows the radiologist to watch a patient’s gastrointestinal tract as it fills with barium sulfate,” he said.

  “I went through all this when you went through it,” Mrs. Crye said. “I went through it all again to write an article on the clinic for the Ledger. Why are you subjecting me to the experience yet again?”

  “Barium sulfate is simply a contrast medium,” Crye said. “It’s used to show up any abnormalities in the GI tract. The examiner views the diagnostic process almost as if watching a movie.”

  “I wrote those words last week, Ted. I took them down from the lips of a clinic radiologist, and I put them into my story.”

  “This machine works on the fluoroscopic principle, but in other parts of the clinic are a thermographic unit, which detects tumors through a heat-sensing process, and an ultrasonic device which employs sound waves to locate and identify cancerous growths. Many other diagnostic aids are available to us here. Of course you’ve already seen the Clinac 4 and the Clinac 18 in the treatment areas.”

  “None of these marvels is worth anything if you will yourself to die,” Mrs. Crye said. “If you surrender to the idea of cancer.”

  Crye turned to face his wife. Out of deference to her wifely sensibilities he was wearing handsome glass prostheses in his empty eye sockets. His complexion, however, still had a sickly cast. “I want a divorce,” he said.

  “You’re dead,” Mrs. Crye reminded him. “You don’t need a divorce. I’m a widow. I can remarry without a divorce decree, and you can —”

  “— rot in hell.”

  Mrs. Crye lowered her face into her hands. “Please, Ted, don’t.” She immediately raised her head again and put her hands on her knees. “Hell is a mental state. I’m the one who’s in it. You’re too good—you were too good—a man to end up in hell.”

  “Even good men can have hellish mental states, Stevie. I want a divorce.”

  “How does a living widow give her dead husband a divorce?”

  “She lets go,” Crye said. “She stops bringing him into the clinic for fluoroscopic examinations. She stops pouring barium sulfate into him. She stops trying to read his goddamn entrails on this little television screen.”

  “Ted, I never —”

  “You’re not a licensed haruspex, Stevie. Becoming a licensed dosimetrist, radiologist, or haruspex requires a lot of hard work. If you won’t give me a divorce, I may have to file a malpractice suit.”

  “But why do you want a divorce? I loved you. I’ve acted as I have because I loved . . . because I love you.”

  “There’s another woman,” Crye said.

  “No, Ted. You’re lying. You’re casting about for excuses.”

  “There’s another woman, Stevie. I’m going to go with her. I want a divorce. Let go of me so that I can go with her.”

  Mrs. Crye crossed the tiny room and gripped her dead husband’s wrists.

  The flesh sloughed away in her hands. “You can hold me, Ted, but I can’t hold you. If it makes you feel better, call my inability to hold you a divorce.”

  She dropped the hose-like lengths of clammy flesh to the floor. “But don’t try to tell me there’s another woman. I refuse to believe it.”

  Gingerly, Crye pushed past his wife, visited all the diagnostic-rooms along the corridor, and returned to the fluoroscopic unit carrying tomograms, radioimmunoassays, sonographic readouts, and a handful of X-rays. He pushed a mobile mammographic unit before him, maneuvered it right up to Mrs. Crye, and scattered the other items across the top of an examination table next to her abandoned chair. His skeletal fingers lifted the results of each diagnostic test to within fifteen centimeters of his wife’s nose.

  “Evidence of the other woman,” Crye said. “Nuclear body scans, sonograms of the internal organs, thermograms taken after she’d spent ten or fifteen minutes cooling off from our last encounter, not to mention several high-speed, low-dosage X-rays of her breasts. These last are especially impressive. Put them all together they spell paramour. . . .”

  The lights in the clinic basement went out, almost as if a generator had failed, and sitting behind the mammographic unit that Crye had just wheeled in was the three-dimensional image of a strange woman. Her insides—from brain to toe bones—were visible as blinding splotches of green, blue, magenta, and yellow. She stared at Mrs. Crye from her Technicolor death’s-head while the horrified recipient of this stare raised an arm and tried to warm the naked body of the corpse in her bed. After fetching the electric blanket’s control from the bottom dresser drawer, she clocked it to its highest setting. Then she climbed into the bed beside her dead husband and snuggled against him to add her own warmth to that imparted by the blanket. Immobile and helpless, he stared with empty eye sockets at the ceiling. His breath was odorless, antiseptic. To die a second time, he would have to improve markedly.

  “Care for some orange juice?” Mrs. Crye asked. “A hot toddy with honey and lemon?”

  “It would seep right through me and ruin the mattress pad. Citric acid has that unfortunate effect on most sorts of bed linen.”

  “I don’t care. I want you better. This has been a demoralizing two years.”

  “You should remarry.”

  “ ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’ ”

  Crye laughed. “ ‘Don’t switch corpses in midscream,’ eh?”

  “Something like that. That’s a ghoulish way to put it, though. I was trying to point out—obliquely—that I married you because I loved you, not because I was single-mindedly looking for a man.”

  “No woman is single-minded when she looks for a man.”

  “Stop it, Ted. I’m just saying that remarriage isn’t the answer.”

  “You should date that Benecke boy, Stevie.”

  Mrs. Crye moved away from her husband. “That’s not amusing. I’d seduce my own son before I dated Benecke.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s an inarticulate Svengali. He once convinced you to help him rape me. And his table manners are atrocious.”

  “He probably uses his salad fork for the entrée.”

  “At lunch one afternoon he let his pet monkey suck blood from a wound in his finger. Dessert, he called it. Teddy and Marella were there.”

  “He’s young yet, Stevie. What else?”

  “What do you want me to give you, Ted? His teachers’ conduct reports? A list of his traffic citations? His last criminal indictment? He’s not my type!”

  “He’s a piker, and you’re elite.”

  “Ha, ha,” Mrs. Crye said. She turned toward her husband again. “Just tell me what you thought you had to pay for, Ted. What so discouraged you that you turned your back on all the marvelous aids, all the helpful people, at the cancer clinic in Ladysmith?”

  “It was time for me to die.”

  “I don’t get that!” Mrs. Crye protested, hitting the bed with her fist.

  Her dead husband summoned a burst of resi
dual élan vital and threw back the covers. Like Karloff in one of James Whale’s Frankenstein movies, he rose from the bed . . . dressed in the suit in which he had been buried. It wanted dry-cleaning and pressing. He strode to the mirror and clumsily tried to straighten the knot in his tie. The room’s darkness proved no deterrent to his efforts, for he could not have seen his bony fingers even with the lights on.

  “And I don’t deserve to share the same bed with you,” Crye said huskily. “I robbed you of any incentive to develop your own talents. I bought you that fancy-ass Exceleriter, but didn’t give you time to use it and thus decided to die.”

  “So I could spend my life in front of a typewriter?”

  “Matriculating in the graduate school of experience, developing your talents, confronting adversity.”

  “You never talked like that when you were alive.”

  “Only toward the last did I even begin to think like that, Stevie. I had to die so that you could step out from my oppressive shadow.”

  “Into the arms of a shade?”

  Crye swung about to face the bed, but one foot did not turn with him. His diamond tie tack glinted in the green-yellow sheen from the arc lamp outside. The knot of his tie was a thumb’s length off-center. A button fell from his jacket and rolled toward the cedar chest. He was falling apart not only inside but out-.

  “What I’m saying’s meant nobly. It’s heartfelt, too. It’s an altogether heartfelt lie. . . . Kiss me, Stevie. Show me you believe me by giving me a kiss.”

  Mrs. Crye went to her husband and gave him a kiss. His lips tasted like oyster dip on dry crackers. When she pulled away, though, she was staring into the face of an organ-grinder monkey whose bones shone green, blue, magenta, and yellow in the second-story gloom. The ascot at his throat was white fur. When he opened his mouth, the phosphorescent keyboard of his teeth began to clatter and chime. Mrs. Crye opened her mouth too. The sound that issued forth reminded her of

  XXIX

  the angry blatting of a broken Exceleriter.

  Stevie groped for and finally found the plastic switch that silenced the alarm on her clock radio. Usually she did not set the alarm on Friday or Saturday nights, but after returning from the upstairs bathroom drugged for slumber she must have inadvertently done so. A weekday habit unconsciously carried over to the weekend. Now she was awake, exhausted by the vivid rigors of her dreams.

  You had several nightmares in a row, Stevie thought, still trying to orient. The radio alarm interrupted the last one. For a moment its horrible buzzing reminded you of the sound the Exceleriter made when its cable snapped. A waking nightmare disrupting your bad-dream frequencies. It’s morning, Stevie, a quiet Sunday morning.

  What did you dream?

  Actually, she remembered her nightmares, just as, earlier that same night, she had remembered her illusory seduction of Teddy. The difference now lay in the reassuring fact that it was impossible to confuse the contents of these newest nightmares with waking reality. Ted slept securely in the Barclay cemetery, Seaton Benecke was not really a capuchin in human disguise, and she, Stevie, had not spent the night in Ladysmith’s ultramodern cancer clinic. She had spent the night in her own big bed, fitfully dreaming.

  Time to get up and see what kind of order the Exceleriter had imposed on the sequence and images of these fitful dreams—animated spiritual headaches, call them. Stevie pulled on a pair of stiff, off-brand “designer” jeans, added a long-sleeve flannel shirt, took a couple of swipes at her bangs with a hair brush. Then she tennis-shoed into her study and read through the transcriptions of the nightmares set down verbatim in the previous chapter.

  “ ‘Mrs. Crye’?” she said aloud. “Why the hell do you refer to me as Mrs. Crye in every one of my own dreams?”

  The machine typed, A MATTER OF COURTESY, MRS. CRYE.

  “It’s ridiculously formal. I don’t think of myself as Mrs. Crye. I certainly don’t dream of myself as Mrs. Crye, not with the formality of the title, anyway. Mockery and condescension, that’s what you’re dealing in.”

  NO, MAAM, NOT AT ALL. ITS BOTH COURTESY AND SCRUPULOUS ADHERENCE TO JOURNALISTIC STYLE. DONT BE UNCHARITABLE.

  “How can I be charitable toward a thief like you? You invade my sleep. You steal my dreams.”

  I RETURN THEM TO YOU, STEVIE. HERE THEY ARE, NEATLY TYPED AND READY TO REEXPERIENCE.

  “Wonderful. I can reexperience a rape in which my late husband acted as another man’s second. I can reexperience the symbolic bestiality of that rape. Then I can reexperience my late husband’s request for a divorce. I can also—”

  FILE THEM AWAY. FORGET ABOUT THEM.

  Stevie started to reply, but silenced herself. She was speaking aloud. The Exceleriter was typing. This approach to the mechanics of information exchange marked an important shift in their relationship. The typewriter was voluntarily acknowledging the legitimacy of speech as a communications method. Not since she had shouted “Stop!” at it had it responded so readily to the spoken word. On paper, however, Stevie’s contributions to this dialogue were conspicuous blank areas of two, three, or four lines. These white spaces gave her the uneasy notion that she did not exist except by the machine’s sufferance. She therefore typed her next response:

  It’s not likely I’ll ever forget what you’re doing to me. I don’t want to forget it. I just want it to stop.

  YOUR WISH IS MY

  Command, thought Stevie. Ever the completist, she depressed the shift-lock key and typed this word in the space left vacant by the Exceleriter. Only an uninked impression appeared on the paper, however, for the machine had stealthily maneuvered its ribbon to the stencil setting. Ever the smart aleck, thought Stevie. You always have to have the last word, even if it’s by refusing to have it.

  “You’re up early for a Sunday.”

  Stevie looked around. Teddy stood in the door, already dressed and bright-eyed. She turned the Exceleriter off and histrionically put a hand to her breast. Even if the gesture she used to signal her surprise was a relic of the D. W. Griffith era, there was nothing make-believe about her heart’s rapid fluttering.

  “So are you,” she managed. “Up early.”

  “You’ve been a real go-getter this morning, Mom. I’ve heard you typing the last hour or so.”

  Stevie tried to put the dust cover on the Exceleriter, but the long strip of paper on the platen made the cover sit lopsidedly. “I’m finished now. I was just making some notes. Nothing important. Just some notes.”

  “Don’t be nervous,” Teddy advised her.

  She looked sharply at the boy. “Nervous? Why should I be nervous?”

  “No reason, Mom. You shouldn’t be. I don’t want you to think you need to be. There’s no reason to.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He came into the study and closed the door behind him. “I want to thank you for what you did last night, Mom. Lots of kids would probably hate you for that, or not understand it, or be embarrassed about it. Not me, though. I’m grateful. I feel better about myself.”

  “Lots of kids would hate their mothers for refusing to be back-talked?”

  Teddy smiled shyly, but his shyness was conspiratorial. “There’s back talk and there’s back talk. Some kinds are bad, and some kinds are . . . not so bad. You taught me something about myself.”

  Dumbfounded by this admission’s implications, Stevie stared at Teddy. She was afraid to say anything. She did not want him to blurt out his meaning (as, in the Exceleriter’s version of their apocryphal midnight talk, she had asked him to blurt out his problem), because she feared this direct approach would deny her the possibility of believing their incest a lie. It was a lie, of course, but Teddy seemed to operate under the assumption that the Exceleriter’s disgusting fiction had become a Crye-family fait accompli. How could he assume such a thing? What was happening to her?

  “Anyway,” Teddy said, “it’s okay, Mom. I’m old enough to handle it. You did me a kindness. That’s all I’m going to say. I won�
�t mention it again.”

  Stevie said, “Mention it all you like. I’m not ashamed of calling you down for sassing me.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Lifting his gaze, Teddy meditatively cocked his head. “Thanks, Mom. I mean it.” His breath sent vaporous plumes into the air, but when he grabbed the door handle and ducked back out into the hall, these plumes disappeared like ghosts at dawn’s first gleaming. What Teddy had said, however, echoed in Stevie’s mind all that long chilly morning.

  XXX

  Dr. Elsa was as good as her word. While Stevie stayed at home eyebrow-deep in the hefty combined edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Teddy and Marella attended Sunday school at the First United Methodist Church three blocks away. After church the Kensingtons took the children back out the Alabama Road to their secluded clapboard bungalow on Scottsdale Lake. As much as she loved those troublesome boogers (Ted’s term of endearment), Stevie appreciated this time to herself. She respected and wondered at Dr. Elsa, herself a busy woman, for arranging matters so that she could have a break not only from her work but from her parental duties. It was not often these days that she enjoyed such blissful autonomy.

  Since Tuesday, it seemed, her life had revolved almost totally around the dictates, crass or subtle, of a seven-hundred-dollar machine. Everything she had done, everything that had happened to her, and most of her current preoccupations stemmed from the Exceleriter’s breakdown and subsequent repair. (Put “repair” in quotes. What Benecke had done to the Exceleriter qualified as the spelling of a baleful and far-reaching curse.) True enough, Marella had twice come down ill since Tuesday, and Teddy had rattled her with his puerile smart-aleckisms and his poignant midnight doubts about his masculinity—but even these fairly ordinary family problems seemed inextricably bound up with her difficulties with the typewriter. In fact, only because the Exceleriter had cunningly deceived her was she now having trouble drawing a hard-edged line between real events and wholly imaginary ones. Even as she sat in her kitchen reading the Sunday book reviews, sipping at her third cup of coffee, a machine about the size of a breadbox was shaping her attitudes, influencing her emotions, dictating her behavior.