Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  Stevie laid the pages of the story aside and put her hand on Marella’s knee. Beneath a comforter, they huddled together on the sofa in the den. Teddy was at school, another afternoon of basketball practice. Stevie and Marella did not miss him. Indeed, Marella had remained still and attentive through her mother’s reading of “The Monkey’s Bride,” and it seemed to Stevie that she had not made a mistake in exposing the child to so “adult” a fairy tale. Children were less fragile, and sometimes less discerning, than their most stalwart self-appointed protectors ordinarily supposed. But the inability of children to digest every nuance of a book or a film did not impair their desire to puzzle out the gaps in their understanding, and if you could get their interest, they would work to understand what an adult would contemptuously dismiss as gobbledegook or fraud. Children, in short, were suckers, and no one likes a sucker better than a storyteller.

  “That’s what I wrote this afternoon. What do you think of it?”

  “It’s sort of weird, Mom.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean, it’s neat, too. I liked it. Butcept —”

  “Butcept what, daughter mine?”

  “What did she wish for? At the end, I mean?”

  “I won’t tell you. Can’t you guess? You’re supposed to use your thinker. That’s why God gave you one.”

  “But you didn’t finish the story, Mama.”

  “Then you’ll have to, won’t you?”

  “I’m not supposed to have to. The people who tell stories are supposed to have to. That’s their job, Mama.”

  “But if you know what Cathinka wishes, if you can figure it out, I’d just be wearing the skin off my fingers to type any more.”

  “I don’t know what she wishes, though.”

  “Guess.”

  “For the monkey-man to wake up.”

  “That sounds pretty good.”

  “Then what?”

  “You decide.”

  “They live happily ever after,” the girl said angrily. “How’s that?”

  “Fine. Why are you so upset?”

  “It doesn’t say that, Mama. I said it. You made me.”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to do. You helped me finish the story. You used your thinker.”

  “I bet you won’t give me any of the money you make, though.”

  “Listen, little sister, you’ll eat and wear some of the money this story makes. If it ever makes any.”

  “Somebody else who reads it won’t. You’re not their mama.”

  “They can use their thinker as well as you can. They can make up their own ending. I did my job. I took them to a place where they can do that from. That’s all I’m supposed to do.”

  “What if they think her third wish was for a rock to fall on the monkey-man’s head? They’d be wrong, wouldn’t they?”

  “No, they might not.”

  “Mama!” the child cried, exasperated.

  “What?”

  Marella turned her head to stare over the arm of the sofa at the floor. Ritualistically, she was pouting. Stevie waited. Then Marella looked at her and said, “It’s like ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ sort of. She ended up liking the beast—the monkey, I mean.”

  This observation surprised Stevie; she had not thought of the parallel before, and yet it suddenly seemed not only conspicuous but intentional. Well, according to Bruno Bettelheim and others, “Beauty and the Beast” was a fairy tale with Freudian resonances, especially for young girls: the ugly hirsute creature you are destined to marry may not, after all, be such a monster.

  Stevie said, “Hmmmm.”

  “Why did you start walking around without your clothes on, Mama?”

  “Me?”

  “The girl in the story, I mean. Why did she do that?”

  “It’s hot in the jungle.”

  “Why’d it take her so long to figure that out? She didn’t start going around nude—” lifted eyebrows—“until it was almost time for her third wish. Anybody would know it was hot before she did, Mama.”

  “Not necessarily,” Stevie said distractedly.

  “I would. I wish it was hot. I’d like to go barefoot instead of sittin’ under twenty-two tons of blankets.” She lifted the corner of the comforter and walked across the room in her stocking feet to her book satchel. She returned to Stevie with a mimeographed sheet—a “purple,” it was called—from Miss Kirkland’s class. “Our Fabulous February skit’s going to be this Friday, Mama.”

  “I know. I thought you had your part memorized.”

  “I do. I volunteered to do an extra poem. You want to hear me say it? I learned it during reading period this morning.’’

  Stevie reached for the purple. “Shoot, little sister. I suppose you want me to prompt you?”

  “Just a minute.” Marella turned the sheet over in Stevie’s lap. “Let me see if I can do it without. I think I can. It only took me about five minutes to learn the whole thing.” Looking full at Stevie, she announced, “‘The Lamb’ by William Blake,” her recitation of which resembled a chant, beginning with “‘Little Lamb, who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?’ ” and concluding, six lines later, with the same two verses—whereupon, with scarcely a pause, Marella swung into the second stanza, chanting cockily through to “‘Little Lamb, God bless thee! / Little Lamb, God bless thee!’ ”

  “That’s good, Marella.”

  “I learned it—all of it—in five minutes.”

  “So you said. I think I know why. When you were a baby, Marella, I used to read that poem to you before putting you to bed. I’d speak it over your crib. Some of it registered, I guess. It etched a shallow groove in your memory, and Miss Kirkland made you set the needle back on that groove when she gave this additional memory work.”

  “Mama, I learned this myself.”

  Stevie said nothing. She would not argue with Marella about the matter. It was not important. However, the words of the poem troubled her. They had set the needle of old recollections, old worries, back down on the time-worn grooves of her experience. A strong sensation of déjà vu plagued her. Had she had this conversation with her daughter before? Was she docilely acting out a scene that the Exceleriter had written for them a week earlier? The damnable thing was, she really didn’t know.

  “Did you do that for Teddy? Read poems to him when he was a baby?”

  “Yeah, I did. Almost every night.”

  “What poems?”

  “Oh, boy poems. What I used to think were boy poems. ‘Gunga Din,’ for instance. Or ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’ Stuff by Robert Service. Or ‘The Tiger,’ a partner to the Blake poem you’ve just said for me. One line goes, ‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ ”

  “Of course He did,” Marella said. “He made everything. You and me and Cyrano and Seaton’s monkey ’Crets and everybody else. Didn’t He?”

  “Yes,” said Stevie. “Yes, He did.”

  XLIII

  And then Stevie was sitting on the edge of Teddy’s bed. The boy himself, worn out from basketball practice, stuffed with several helpings of the tuna casserole she had warmed up for him, moaned in his sleep and fought to throw off his covers. Rearranging the blankets, Stevie thwarted his efforts to disclose himself to the cold. And, in a voice as deceptively smooth as a teetotaler’s third daiquiri, she finished reciting the awe-begotten words of “The Tiger”:

  “Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”

  Stevie made the last syllable of symmetry rhyme with eye, and she let the stanza’s quintessential inquiry into the whys of creation linger in the room like the quaver of a tolling bell. At last Teddy relaxed beneath the weight of her concern. Shuddering, Stevie stood. It had been several years since she had last spoken a poem over her son’s restless, slumbering body.

  “How did I get here?” she asked the darkness.

  It was almost ten—the glowi
ng digital readout on Teddy’s clock radio told her so—but she had no recollection of actually having lived the period between her storytelling session with Marella and this strange moment almost five hours later. She knew she had prepared supper for Marella and herself, seen to Teddy’s hunger later, and then urged her children to get their homework and go upstairs to bed. She knew these things, but it was a knowledge grafted onto her awareness by an interventionist brainwashing (or brain-dirtying) technique rather than acquired through the second-by-second process of living. Here she was in Teddy’s room, one of Blake’s Songs of Experience resonating in its wallpapered recesses, and she could not recall climbing the stairs to get here. What had happened to that trivial experience? Had she taken every step in a fugue akin to that which had let the Exceleriter fabricate a conversation with David-Dante Maris?

  Stevie shuddered again. A sci-fi sensation tingled her nerve endings, boggled her understanding. One moment she was reading “The Monkey’s Bride” to Marella and discussing with her the peculiar workings of memory; the next she was hovering over Teddy, murmuring the doubtful benediction of a mystical quatrain by Blake. A person shifted from one place and time to another by a time-machine-cum-matter-transmitter would probably feel a similar disorientation, but would recognize, and maybe even approve, the mechanism of this speedy transfer. Stevie, on the other hand, could not tell how or why she had journeyed from point A to point B.

  She was scared. She had been scared for a long time. Tomorrow marked the passage of an entire week since the Exceleriter’s breakdown. It seemed scarcely less than a full-fledged anniversary. Now she was the one breaking down, buzzing like a machine with imperfectly engineered parts. From Teddy’s desk she picked up a pair of seashells, mementos of a long-ago vacation at Atlantic Beach, just outside Jacksonville, and clicked them between her fingers. Clicking the shells was like kneading two jagged chips of ice, but without any accompanying wetness.

  “Hot, Mama. Oh, Mama, I’m so hot. . . .”

  Dear God, the recapitulation of nightmare. Marella was moaning in her sleep as Teddy had moaned, but more coherently. Stevie stepped into the hall and looked straight down it into her daughter’s room. Nearly three feet over Marella’s pillow, a gargoyle squatted on the brass bedstead; a lithe, pale shape that did not belong there, an excrescence neither brass nor iron nor any other substance cold and inanimate.

  ’Crets had reappeared. The monkey was guarding Marella like a tutelary spirit, its tail looping beneath the brass struts of the headboard like an inverted question mark. The girl moaned again, lamenting the heat of her blanket or her body, if not both, and briefly the monkey’s tail lifted like a marionette string before dropping back into the shape of an interrogative curlicue.

  “Damn you!” Stevie cried. “What are you doing here?” Using the upstairs hall as a crude sighting device, she hurled Teddy’s seashells at the monkey. The creature leapt from the tall bedstead to the mattress of the other twin bed and so disappeared from her line of vision.

  Although she hurried into the room to check Marella and to determine where ’Crets had gone, she was too late to see the capuchin sidle into the step-down closet and from there into the attic. Of course, his getaway could have taken him nowhere else, for the 75-watt bulb in Marella’s ceiling lamp revealed that the door to the closet was ajar again. As for the girl, she lay beneath an electric blanket turned to its highest setting, a comforter, and two ragged blankets from a trunk in the closet. Further, she was wearing a flannel nightgown, a quilted housecoat, and the same pair of knee stockings that she had worn that afternoon. No wonder she complained of being hot. This was a nightmare all right, but not an exact recapitulation of last Friday’s.

  Stevie removed the ratty blankets weighting the comforter and turned the electric blanket’s control to a lower setting. Then, without awakening Marella, she unbuttoned her housecoat, slipped it off her arms and out from under her, and tucked her back in with her stuffed opossum Purvis.

  The capuchin had left cloudy paw prints on the brass bedstead, irrefutable proof that Stevie had witnessed rather than merely imagined ’Crets’s trespass. She did not want such proof, but it would not go away. Like elephant droppings on a marble dance floor, the smudges commanded attention. Stevie wiped at them with the satin hem of a ratty blanket, but the smudges smooched around without lifting away from the brass.

  Why try to wipe away that damned monkey’s spoor? Stevie asked herself. Just keep him from returning to perch above Marella while she sleeps. He could drop on her face and smother her. He could put his canines into her throat and siphon away her life’s blood. . . .

  Watching her breath balloon out in front of her, Stevie went to the step-down closet and shut the door. She shoved Marella’s rocking-horse into place beneath the porcelain knob and wedged an old-fashioned hat tree across the closet door between the wall and the mantel. If ’Crets had retreated into the attic—as he certainly had—he would not get out again until Stevie chose to release him. Let the little bugger freeze to death. Or starve.

  The telephone rang.

  There’s no paper in my typewriter. I’m not imagining the ring. I’m living this moment as surely as my toes ache with cold and my gut with anxiety. This nightmare partakes of the moment. It doesn’t arise from either your subconscious mind or the dire enmity of a demon.

  She turned off Marella’s light and glided through the darkness to her bedroom. Lifting the receiver, she silenced the telephone’s ringing. “Hello,” she said, nimbused by the fuzzy glow of the arc lamp outside. “Stevenson Crye speaking.” The caller breathed at her. His technique had the mellifluous subtlety of a cat dislodging a hairball. “Hello,” Stevie repeated, but these same annoying sounds continued. “Seaton, is that you?” She covered about half of the receiver’s mouthpiece with her hand and spoke over her shoulder at a nonexistent contingent of policemen and GBI agents: “Put this call on trace. I think it’s the disgusting lung-fish we’ve been waiting for. He’s crawling up out of the slime.” And somewhere, maybe not terribly far away, another receiver was hurriedly cradled. “Bastard,” said Stevie. She hung up her phone and checked each of her children again. They were sleeping soundly, Teddy in his characteristic sprawl, Marella holding her synthetically furred bedmate. Ten o’clock and all was well—if you could live with a monkey in your attic and a breather on your telephone.

  Stevie decided she must. Tucking her hands beneath her arms, she went downstairs to the kitchen. Her typewriter was still unplugged, with no paper in it, and she wanted only to nurse along a small glass of red wine and work her way slowly through a novel by Dickens or Eliot. Yes. Let the writing of others take her mind off her own. She brought both Middlemarch and Dombey and Son into her kitchen from the den, laid them on the table, and poured a tumbler of Lambrusco, an upstart vintage that Ted had disparaged as “soda pop.” He had preferred an occasional shot of hard liquor to either beer or wine, but had seldom drunk much at all. Although he never actually said so, Stevie had slowly come to realize that he did not approve of his affection for hard stuff or of hers for the more genteel inebriants.

  “You can’t sit here sipping wine and reading Eliot while that monkey’s upstairs,” Stevie suddenly said, closing the book and pushing her glass aside. “You’ve got to get him out.”

  Sure. But how?

  The telephone rang again.

  To keep it from waking the kids, Stevie sprang from the table and juggled the receiver off the hook. “Listen, Seaton, you’ve got to stop harassing me. I know it’s you, and if you keep it up, I’ll put the police on your case. I really will. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” a sprightly female voice replied. “I hear you, but I’m not who you say.”

  “Sister Celestial!”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  “I’m . . . I’m glad it’s you. What’s going on?”

  “Remember? I said I’d call. So now I’m calling.”

  “Did you try to . . . earlier?”

 
; “Wickrath to Barclay’s a local call, child, but Button City to Barclay’s long-distance. I don’t long-distance any more ’n I have to.”

  “No, it’s too expensive. Did you interpret my dreams? I mean, did you go over the transcripts again?”

  “I diagnosed ’em. I had some help. Emmanuel Berthelot’s Remington got in on the act. I put my two fingers to its buttons, and together we did a dogtrot all up and down the inside of somebody’s mind.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Long-distance? That’s not smart for either of us, gal. I’ve got beaucoups of stuff to say.”

  “Drive up here.”

  “Tonight?”

  “It’ll only take you twenty minutes or so, Sister. I’ll pay for your gas.”

  “It’d be after midnight ’fore I got home again. I can’t go wheezin’ up and down the highway through that suicideville in between us, not in temperatures like these. Child, you ask too much.”

  “Spend the night here. There’s a guest room just off the downstairs bathroom, with a space heater and a comfy bed. I’ll turn the coverlet back and the heater on. Please say yes, uh, Betty. Please.”

  “Why not drive down here tomorrow, child? That’s what I called to ask you to do. So’s we can join heads over my diagnostics.”

  “I need somebody tonight, Sister. Another adult to keep me from going bonkers between now and morning. I’m scared.’’

  “Why? Why tonight in special, I mean?”

  “Remember the monkey I asked you about? It followed me home. It’s in our attic. Telephone calls, too: a B-movie breather. And that damn Exceleriter has turned my day into a checkerboard of colors and blackouts. One moment I’m on this square, a moment later on that. During the jumps, though, I’m not anywhere. Some of the things that happened to me today didn’t happen at all.”

  “Maybe you got reason to be scared.”

  “Amen, Sister. Amen to that.”

  “Some of my diagnostics may not put you any happier, Stevie. It’s Benecke you got to fear all right, and I think I know why.”