Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  XXXVII

  The type element on her Exceleriter began to beep.

  Stevie could hear its muffled beeping from beneath her blankets. She had unplugged the machine, but now it was giving her sleeping house and everyone in it a series of juicy raspberries. How could this happen? Stevie opened her eyes and pulled herself through a doughy envelope of linen to her pillow. Here she turned to her back. The beeping was louder. And it did not sound like the noise her typewriter had made last Tuesday. Discontinuous and decidedly more official-sounding, this beeping was like a submarine claxon or the storm-warning siren in a small wheat-belt community. It reminded Stevie at once of old war movies and her girlhood in Kansas . . . that she had just had another disconcerting nightmare. A nightmare she remembered in its entirety. Damn.

  The noise was the kitchen smoke alarm.

  If she did not rush to see what had triggered it, the fiery prophecy of her nightmare might fulfill itself—minus the unwelcome guest appearance of her late husband, first in the garb of an organ-grinder monkey and then in his un-Sanforized birthday suit. Well, Tiny Ted’s absence would be a small blessing if the house burned, if she and the kids were trapped in the conflagration exactly as they had been in her dream. Stevie checked to see that Teddy and Marella were all right, then plunged down the slick wooden stairs to the foyer. She hurried through the unheated dining room to the kitchen, opened the door, flicked on the overhead light. The space heater was not extruding plumes of smoke into the room, and the Sunday newspaper did not lie smoldering under the table.

  Beep! went the smoke alarm. Beep! beep! beep!

  Arms akimbo, Stevie stared at the mechanism, which she had mounted high on the wall above the light switch. Of course, she thought. That damned beeping signals the impending demise of the alarm’s battery. The alarm sounds continuously if it detects smoke. It beeps only when the battery needs replacing. Of course it couldn’t possibly wait for a civilized hour to begin beeping. It had to go into full submarine-sounding mode at . . . Stevie glanced at the digital clock on her wall oven . . . three-thirty in the morning. A Monday morning, at that. Still, she was grateful that the alarm hadn’t awakened the kids.

  She was even more grateful that it had not detected smoke. The house was not going to burn down tonight. But she must disconnect the alarm to stop its beeping. Stevie found a screwdriver in the pantry, pushed a chair over, and stood on its seat to pry the casing off the alarm. She extracted the big copper-colored battery and restored the house to the cold sanctity of predawn silence.

  Well, near-silence. Cyrano was baying lazily at one of the rare passing truckers on Alabama Road. Or maybe at another neighborhood dog. No matter. It was a relief to hear barking instead of beeping. Other sounds included the humming refrigerator, the clicking of digits in the digital clock, and, outside, the limbs of a colossal pecan tree tapping one another like the movable counters of an abacus, telling the lonely minutes as surely as any clock.

  Stevie turned off the light, closed the kitchen door, and returned to the stairwell. On the landing between the first and second floors she looked out the uncurtained window. Briefly, she thought a child—a toddler—had escaped the crib in its nursery and wandered into the night. When this tiny person turned its head toward her, Stevie saw that the trespasser was no human being, but Seaton Benecke’s ubiquitous ’Crets. Stevie and the monkey stared at each other in the starlit darkness, each hypnotized by the other. Finally, willing herself to break the spell, Stevie rapped on the window glass and mouthed an angry command:

  “Get out of here, you vile, filthy beast. Get out of here.”

  Jerseyless, ’Crets bared his canines and screeched an unintelligible obscenity. This sound was audible through the glass, but only barely. Then the monkey fled across the yard and through a pile of leathery brown magnolia leaves to the fence surrounding the Gowers’ house. The capuchin scurried over the fence and disappeared into a border of ragged shrubbery.

  Shaken, Stevie slumped against the landing wall. This time she had not been dreaming. The Exceleriter had not been dictating her experience. She had seen the monkey, and he had seen her. How he could survive in this weather she had no idea, but he was haunting her as stubbornly as the memory of her dead husband haunted her. He was not Ted, of course, but her nightmare had sought to impel her to that abhorrent identification. Ridiculous as well as abhorrent. How could anyone imagine Ted running about the neighborhood naked, scurrying over chain-link fences, inciting Barclay’s canine population to riot? Ted had never been one even for leisurely after-dinner walks.

  “I can’t take much more of this,” Stevie said aloud. “I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since last Tuesday.”

  She climbed the remaining steps and went into her study. Her typewriter was unplugged. The strip of paper she had inserted in it before retiring was blank. It had not advanced an inch. That meant that her nightmare had originated in her subconscious, not in Seaton’s malign fondness for “deepness” and “nitty-gritty stuff.” She had only herself to blame, that part of her personality that had not yet come to grips with the death of her husband. Of course, the anomalous presence of ’Crets, an evil phantom on the periphery of her expectations, might have influenced her dream too. Maybe she had concocted such vividly nightmarish imagery not in her own subconscious but from telepathic clues supplied her by Seaton’s itinerant familiar.

  “What garbage,” Stevie said. “What claptrap.”

  Yet it was a relief to find that the Exceleriter had neither dictated nor transcribed her nightmare. She could defeat the machine simply by pulling its plug. No need for Slime-and-syrup cocktails. Now, to put herself back on a wholesome sleep schedule, she must dream pleasant rather than stressful dreams. Right now, she regretted her newfound ability to remember what she dreamt. Why had that happened? She wanted her subconscious to manifest itself only when she was working at her typewriter. That was when the hobgoblins of her nether mind—the hippogryphs, satyrs, and dragons—could safely come out. That was when she needed them. She would need them in the morning.

  Stevie covered the machine. “This is a ruse,” she said. “You’re trying to lull me. I know what you’re up to. Somewhere, maybe at Betty Malbon’s, my nightmare’s on paper, passing itself off as the truth.” She yanked the cover back off the machine. “What do you say to that, huh?”

  Like Tar-Baby, de Exceleriter he don’t say nothin’.

  “Good night.” After haphazardly re-covering the typewriter, Stevie padded barefoot and shivering back to her bedroom.

  XXXVIII

  Teddy and Marella got off to school without hitch or fuss. Blue Mondays were seldom blue for them. Although they professed not to like school, they went off to face the pedagogical firing squads with firm steps and uplifted heads. Their afternoon at the Kensingtons’ had done them at least as much good as had her own little trip to Columbus. Dr. Elsa, no matter how Marella might construe the term, was a brick.

  But Stevie was fidgety. The Monday Blues, she thought: I gottum to the bottom of my sole-worn shoes. . . .

  She sipped a second and a third cup of coffee, going through the Monday Constitution as if it were a document she would later be forced to sign. She read her favorite columnists twice, inwardly arguing that this exacting perusal of the competition was “research.” She even spent fifteen minutes on the boring arcana of the business section. All the financial news was bad. If misery loved company, the U.S.A. was a continental love feast. On the up side of the industrial ledger, though, a notice that two monopolies had agreed to merge. Nice.

  You’re procrastinating, Stevie Crye. You don’t know what you’re going to do today so you’re cravenly putting off going upstairs.

  I’m afraid to plug my typewriter back in, another part of her countered. That’s all that’s craven about my foot-dragging.

  Nonsense. You’re afraid to go to work.

  I’m afraid the Exceleriter won’t let me. I’ll plug it in, and in retaliation for stealing its power overnigh
t, it’ll take complete control of all its functionings. I won’t be able to reassert my primacy. That’s what I’m afraid of.

  Just unplug it again.

  Well, of course. But what if that doesn’t work a second time?

  That’s not very likely, replied Stevie’s Calvinistic alter ego. How could it do that?

  How does it do what it does now?

  By demonic possession, I guess. A ghost in the machine. A force—some sort of intelligent force—invades the typewriter and directs its behavior.

  A consoling explanation. Demons, ghosts, and mysterious forces aren’t usually Georgia Power subscribers. If they can take over an electric machine, they can take over a manual one just as easily. You haven’t forgotten Sister Celestial’s old Remington, have you?

  The Exceleriter wasn’t designed for manual operation, Stevie. Power’s got to be flowing through it.

  Who’s to say this mysterious force you hypothesized can’t generate its own power? In fact, it does generate its own power. It’s something besides electricity that operates the on/off key.

  This morning, Stevie, the something operating the on/off key ought to be you. Get to work. You have a family. You—

  All right. Stop nagging me.

  Stevie turned off the coffee maker, tossed the morning paper into the trash, and, driven by guilt’s discipline, tormented by the need to confront her typewriter alone, trudged up to her study. The house was empty but for the machine and her. If she plugged it in and it rebelled against her poor human sovereignty, she had no clear idea what to do. Flee the house? Drive to Ladysmith and cloister herself in the regional library’s reading room? Or carry out a brutal demolition of the Exceleriter? No, no; not this last. Why permit her baser instincts to override the lessons of common sense?

  Her room was ready for her. The space heater had warmed the air to almost sixty degrees, and the paper in her typewriter awaited the tangible imprint of her imagination. She must work. To work, she must first kneel and plug in the Exceleriter.

  Stevie knelt and plugged in the machine. She waited. Expecting a burst of typewritten abuse, clackety vilification, she instead heard only silence. No rebellion yet. She was still in control. Somewhat reassured, she turned the typewriter on. It soothing purr mesmerized her.

  She listened for a long time. What would she write? What project concepts could she list?

  An article on Westville for Brown’s Guide. A profile of three young Georgia playwrights for Atlanta Fortnightly. A little theater review for the combined Sunday edition of the Ledger-Enquirer. A historical piece on the Creek Indian warrior Hothlepoya for The Anniston Star. An article about the horticultural work of the Georgia Building Authority for a regional gardening magazine. A semihumorous commentary on the “rewards” of widowhood for Ms. or Cosmopolitan or any other national magazine that might want an upbeat treatment of a downbeat subject. All these potential projects Stevie listed on the sheet of examination-table paper in her Exceleriter. Double-spaced, the list consumed no more than two vertical inches of the page. It seemed a feeble effort, each item hopeless of fulfillment, at least in her present state of mind. All but the last one would require legwork, and the last article was the one she was least likely to sell. Disconsolate, Stevie sat staring at the handiwork of a painful fifteen minutes.

  What now?

  Pick one, put your mind to it, and do it, said Stevie’s Calvinistic alter ego. Long live the Protestant work ethic. Whosoever cheerfully abides by it lives long herself.

  The last one, then.

  That’s fine. Good choice. Think of some interesting headings, organize them, and get to work. It’s only nine-thirty or so. With diligent application you could have a thousand usable words by noon.

  You sound like a freshman English instructor.

  Get to work!

  But by eleven o’clock, Stevie had made no appreciable progress. She had written seven different versions of the same opening paragraph, substituting spry words for colorless cripples, repositioning participial phrases to give the passage a brisk rhythm, and elaborating a metaphor that soon grew as hideously unwieldy as a foam-rubber hunchback. With typewritten XXXs or smeary lines of blue ink, Stevie struck through these successive variants. Now she was staring at the page, simply staring, so jittery with frustration that to stay in her chair required a bona fide exercise of will. She wanted to wash dishes, jog around the block, do anything but what she was doing now.

  Maybe this is the Exceleriter’s revenge, she thought.

  In her bedroom the telephone rang.

  Stevie had never had an answering device. Most of her Barclay friends and acquaintances knew that except in emergencies she preferred them to telephone her in the evenings. Nothing disrupted her thought processes more than a series of daytime telephone calls. Often the caller represented an aluminum-siding company. “We had siding installed in 1976,” Stevie would lie. “No, I don’t know anyone else who’d be interested. All the houses around here are brick.” Another lie, but it usually took care of the aluminum-siding shill.

  But just as often, the caller was a would-be writer who, having seen her by-line in Atlanta Fortnightly or elsewhere, wanted her expert advice on Breaking Into Print. Almost invariably Stevie encouraged and commiserated with these people, even those self-confident aspirants who, without a single literary artifact yet to their credit, knew beyond doubt that their first haiku, essay, novel, film script, or epic poem would eclipse in artistic merit and folksy appeal the complete combined works of William Shakespeare and Irving Wallace. “Write it and send it off,” Stevie told them. “You never know, you never know.” When her own work was going well and the telephone rang, Stevie, groaning, would dutifully answer the summons: It might be a magazine editor with a profitable assignment. You never knew.

  Today Stevie blessed the interruption. It gave her an excuse to abandon her Exceleriter. Even if the caller was a sales guy or another unpublished genius, she would gladly endure the ensuing spiel. In fact, she was terrified the other party might have the wrong number, not an infrequent occurrence on the Ladysmith-Barclay-Wickrath exchange.

  Two rings, three rings, four—she had to catch the phone before her caller hung up.

  Stevie bolted from her study, leaving the door open, and reached the telephone on its sixth chilly brrrrrr-ring.

  “Hello?”

  (“This is David-Dante Maris, editor-in-chief of the Briar Patch Press in Atlanta. May I speak to Stevenson Crye, please?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Crye, I’m delighted you’re home. Is it okay to talk for a few minutes? I think you’ll find what I have to say, well, interesting.”

  Peripherally, Stevie saw a small white shape flash past her bedroom door on its way into Marella’s room. The capuchin? Tiny Ted?

  “Mrs. Crye?”

  “Yes, sir,” Stevie said. “I’m here.”

  “I imagine it must be a shock hearing from us so soon, but that’s the way we do business at the Briar Patch. We’re not a New York company. That’s our biggest failing to some, our saving grace to others. You, now, couldn’t have done better than to send this material to us, and we’ll do well by you if you can just accede to some, uh, crafty editorial interference.” David-Dante Maris chuckled amiably. “Brock Fowler at Atlanta Fortnightly’s an old University of Georgia buddy of mine, Mrs. Crye. He says you’re turning into a seasoned professional faster than anybody he knows without a journalism background.”

  Shivering, Stevie tried to make sense of Maris’s words. It seemed that her prayers—one of them, anyway—were being answered. “Can you hold a minute, please? I’ve got to get to my kitchen.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Just a minute. I’m freezing up here.” That probably made little sense to D.-D. Maris, but she couldn’t talk while her teeth were chattering. Therefore, after placing her receiver on the bedside table, Stevie hurried from the room. In the corridor she glanced back at Marella’s spacious bedchamber. Sunlight poured th
rough the upper panes of the storm windows and danced in watery patterns on the lime-green carpet—but no ’Crets, thank God; no naked homunculus pretending to be Ted. She had only imagined that troubling blur at the edge of her vision. Unless the intruder had darted into the step-down closet abutting on the attic. Then Stevie would not be able to see him without entering Marella’s room and rummaging about in the dark.

  No time. David-Dante Maris had called her long-distance from Atlanta, and she had put him on hold. Maybe he would think that, on another line, she was concluding a deal with her Hollywood agent, urging her broker to buy a thousand more shares of AT&T, or sending a mailgram to the acquisitions editor of a British publisher in London. Maybe, but not very likely.

  Stevie pistoned down the stairs, burst into the kitchen, and, gasping, grabbed the receiver from the wall phone. “Mr. Maris . . . Mr. Maris . . . I’m back . . . . Sorry I kept you waiting . . . sorry I kept you . . .”

  She stopped. Although she’d heard no dial tone, she was afraid Mr. Maris had taken umbrage at her telephone manners and so severed the connection. Opportunity had knocked, and she had shouted from another room, “Go away. We don’t want any.”

  Oh, no, thought Stevie. That’s not what I meant.

  “Mr. Maris!” she cried. “Mr. Maris, don’t hang up. Are you still there? Please, Mr. Maris . . .”

  XXXIX

  The editor-in-chief of the Briar Patch Press, Inc., again chuckled heartily. “Oh, I’m still here, Mrs. Crye. We’re both still here, me up here in Hot’lanta and you down there in Bucolic Barclay.”

  “Yes, sir, I suppose we are.”

  “Could you drive up today? If you left now, you could be on Peachtree by one. We’ll take a business lunch at Bugatti’s in the Omni. Discuss editorial and contractual matters over veal Parmesan or scaloppine. I recommend the red bean soup as an appetizer, Bloody Marys for some delicious sippin’, and fresh Florida strawberries for dessert. I always enjoy strawberries in February. If you don’t come, Mrs. Crye, I’ll just have our PR gal tote in some Varsity chili dogs. You can imagine with what breathlessness I await your reply.”