Thank You and Good Night

by Ray Succre

  Writing was not an act, but a place. He had conjectured this for many years. Every piece of story or scene was as if a new room in his old, old home, and his comfort within this place, despite the rejection that came along for each of these new stories, was untroubled. These were likely his best works, and it did not bother him that very few individuals would ever see them. His plan was to collect them into book form, and perhaps publish them in his off-time, likely over a summer. In this way, he might let other people decide over time if they wanted to put something of his on a screen.

  He no longer needed to search for a market that might pay him for his work. He had a job now, an invariant sense of employment that did not give enough room for doubt. Emery did not have to fight to keep this job, but simply do his best with it. What an easier place the world was when one simply needed to work hard, when a person was rewarded for his accountability and his tasks. Life was much more wondrous when you were gauged by what you did, and by your fellows, rather than what you did not do, and by that muzzy, opinionated mire of executive presaging and public retrospect. Rejections arrived in the mail, but these were inconstant and he did not stay long in their morass. He taught and paid his expenses and drove his car and loved his family, cooked certain nights away, wrote away the others. These were satisfying and no amount of rejection could dent the iron hide he had developed over the past decades, a mussel-shell material as thick in layers as he had lived in years.

  A pounding emanated from beyond the house and Emery glanced up from the couch, through the glass door and into the back yard. The twilight obscured the shape of the fence, the outline of the bush near one corner, but Emery was able to see the thing when it hit the grass: A massive foot had stamped down into the short grass. A mastodon foot. This was followed by another and after several of these house-shaking pounds of weight against the ground, the animal had passed. Beth entered the living room then and turned on the television. He sat on the couch, staring into the back yard, cigarette between his fingers and a sensation of churning that slowly hovered over his eyes. She caught sight of her husband’s flush complexion as she prepared to sit down on the couch beside him, noticed his blank face and stiff posture

  “You okay?”

  He stared into the back yard, at the footprint the mastodon had left behind, watching as Larry Belmont and Sol Jamison, who now stood near the fence, admired the deep print, occasionally glancing over at him and talking amongst themselves. The Japanese man, the one, entered the shot, waiting with patience, his gut torn open and hat knocked from his head. Eddie Dodder was there, wearing his uniform and boxing gloves, hunks of wood in his shoulders and head. They all existed in the back yard. It was their home. Then there was Maury, there was Emery’s dear mother, Susa. Henry, his father, gave a small wave. They crowded into the yard and watched him with accusing eyes. He attempted to swallow and the action curdled in his throat, stuck there like a ball of plastic. There was a sound. A continuing sound. These people in his yard were not real, not true, not anymore, and he banished them. The cigarette fell from his fingers onto the couch cushion.

  “Oh, damn it!” Beth said, quickly picking this up and brushing the dashed embers from the couch. She looked him over with agitation. He tried to mutter. There was no sound then but the one in his head. While waiting for him to respond, her attention diverted and she turned toward the kitchen to fetch a washcloth.

  A moment of resolve. He quickly lifted his head, flung his arm out and his wrist nudged against her side. She looked down at him on the couch. The pressure in his head began to pound, footsteps of the great beast, stories spilling from his lips but lacking in every word. He simply looked up at her with a shaking lip and deep eyes, an expression that contained both fright and apology.

  “Honey?”

  She didn’t know. The pounding started again. He frowned and, against the resolve of his body, stood up abruptly, his face streaked in red with his veins straining as if trying to pull air through cellophane. The footsteps of the beast were deafening. Her mouth opened and he bent back down, weakly knuckling himself onto the floor, then onto his side at the foot of the couch. His hand tried to reach his chest. The world grew unbearably hot, a tugging of panic from its ream. He rolled onto his back, his red face straining.

  “EMERY!”

  The mastodon’s great foot stepped down on his chest. The crushing pressure forced the air from his lungs. The beast had finally found him and Emery had no saber. As the weight increased and the animal’s cold intention bore down on its victim, Emery looked over at his wife and said nothing.

  Chapter Forty

  The trouble with having a substitute handle his final exams was not so much that his presence was needed, but that the substitute in question, Mrs. Culkin, functioned as an instructor of English 121 and an instructor in Expository Writing, and her expertise was with essays, research papers, and business documents. She had only a vague understanding of the material Emery taught. She ascertained that Emery’s course was, at its heart, a writing course, and treated it as such. Her final exams tended to involve a month-long paper, which would come due just prior to the end of each term. Emery’s final exam was not so traditional, and involved a more real-world situation, with much scrutiny. Mrs. Culkin simply had no experience with how he functioned.

  His students were to first answer two short essay questions, and then each spend up to an hour concocting a single, acceptable scene given various details, and then follow this by the revision of a very short, sample, third act Emery would give them. These three endeavors would demonstrate whether a student had a passing knowledge of the class and amount of the medium covered. The entire examination could be undertaken quickly, or be given much attention, depending on the student. The questions were simple but contained a few layers of insight. The students were to accomplish this process of answering, writing, and revising, right there at their desks, in front of the boss, and in a manner stringently timed for a maximum of two hours. It was designed to simulate writing under pressure while retaining one’s wits. This was not the sort of examination for which Emery’s substitute had been prepared.

  As the questions and sample had been put together several weeks prior, Mrs. Culkin needed only give the components of his final examination, in order, to his students, and then monitor the room. She had modified this, however. Mrs. Culkin had chosen to steer this process in a way he would have never approved. She handed out the examination questions, explained the writing portion (without giving the pertinent details), and then promptly left the room, neglecting to hand out the revision samples, thinking them unnecessary guides, and not an actual portion of the exam. She timed the students, but she had not remained present to dissuade cheating with conglomerate knowledge, and worst of all, she had neglected to administer the third portion of the exam.

  The day had passed and now Emery had the problem of trying to deduce who had known the material, and who had simply talked it out with other students during the exam. Such deduction was subjective, however. He had to change his system much in order to approximate grades based on incomplete exams. His students had answered the two essay questions without problem. They had then each written a scene, as instructed, but due to having not been given the details of that scene, everyone had written something different, which meant that Emery no longer had the central gauge by which he had planned to grade these scenes. What had been a purposely constricting activity in the exam, designed to test his students’ abilities with a particular function, had become an open, creative writing segment. Worse, no one had revised a sample act. This portion was supposed to be a third of the final exam, and it had not been administered.

  Coronary thrombosis. His ticker had choked for a moment, a clog in a pipe, and landed him in the hospital for three days. He had undergone a heart attack, just like his father, and at nearly the same age. Unlike his father, Emery had survived. He was to have a bypass surgery, quit smoking, quit drinking, eat in accordance with a specifically frugal diet,
and possibly, if these things were managed in an appropriate fashion, remain alive for an indeterminate time. He hadn’t had a cigarette in four days and the stress was overwhelming. His lungs pulled at the air as if urging him to thicken it, and his mind drifted into odd tangents.

  Cigarettes clouded into all of his thoughts, and he wanted one so badly he had even found himself smoking in a dream, the third night. Worse was the anger that, until this surrender to health, had been kept at bay by his heavy intake of nicotine. Now that his body was going without this efficient salve for his stress, the troubles of his life seemed suddenly unbearable and confounding. He was short with Beth and Vivian, had told Rebecca over the phone that she had better study harder or else she might end up a prostitute, and had cruelly dismissed much of what his brother said over the phone during the hospital stay.

  His heart had attacked him, though the result of this had been a quick and defeating blow to his sense of mortality. His concern had gained an electric sensibility, and worry over his potential end was a stalwart parasite, but thankfully, it was not yet time for his family to pick out a casket. He was doing well, but nothing felt correct. Everything was off. He incessantly thought of smoking, a needle-like jab at his senses that came on quite suddenly, and often. Due to the withdrawal and sudden change in life, he found it difficult to focus on any particular thing for very long, and was somewhat blocked on page.

  His first hour home, he had sat in his study, occasionally glancing at the spot on his desk where his ashtray had been located only two days prior. He had paid nearly eighty dollars for it, an antique from a South Carolina church during the Civil War. Now, it was in a box in the garage with the others, awaiting the yard sale Beth was planning. The bourbon had been removed from the house as well. Beth had never been much for drink, and had no troubles at all adapting to a life of utter sobriety. Emery could not adjust so leisurely. Despite his foul mood and cantankerous thoughts regarding Mrs. Culkin, and his nicotine-deprived sense of retribution and anger against anyone who had ever bothered him (and especially himself), Beth somehow remained cordial. She attempted to be somewhat soothing when around him. She was trying to help, but the unfortunate nature of Emery’s addicted mind seemed bent on turning him into a discomfited, flaring ass. Adding pestilence to famine, he recognized the whiny surliness of his actions and it only made him more petulant.

  He had work to do however, as the deadline for submitting his grades was quite near, and while the attack had knocked him out of his regimen for only a handful of days, they were the worst possible days to have missed. His students had fulfilled their obligations in the academic arrangement, and after having the work of this brought to his house, he needed to execute his portion of that contract. His students’ averages depended on his final grading, and he was expected to get this completed on time. The deadline for this was nearly at end. Mrs. Culkin had unwittingly stunted his grading process more than the heart attack had.

  “How goes the mountain?” Beth asked, entering the room slowly to check in with her husband and discern his general mood. Was he relaxed, even for a short duration?

  “I’m about half-way up. I think they discerned everything well, in the overall sense of it, but I’d like to strangle the blood from Eve Culkin’s oversized head.”

  “I don’t understand why she did that. You sent over instructions and you were very clear.”

  “I’ll come off like a prick if I bring her up on it, too. This is no good for anyone. At least I have good students. There are quite a few this term that… well, that aren’t talented, even a little, but talent or not, most did learn the material, and they seem to have caught the drift well enough to take a test.”

  “Maybe you’re being too critical. It’s only school. They’re kids, mostly. You remember.”

  “Well, I am too critical, but good god, think about the networks these kids will encounter if they make it.”

  “That’s true, I suppose.”

  “Many of them don’t know how to type. This is something that baffles me.”

  “They can’t type?”

  “Nearly half. I’m thinking of making it a prerequisite starting in the spring. I’ll emphasize it by making it biblical. ‘For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If any writer is not willing to type, let him not eat. Sayeth the Instructor, ‘Completion of the typing course with a C or better.’ Modern scripting is specifically formatted around the typewriter. I don’t understand some of these students.”

  The attack had been mild, but this term applied only to the long run. In the immediate realm of his life, the heart attack had nothing about it he would describe as mild. It had been devastatingly painful and terrifying. He was scheduled for a coronary bypass in less than a month, and after the operation, all would be well, if he maintained a good diet and kept off his vices.

  “You know, changing what I eat is not overwhelming, and losing bourbon isn’t as troubling as I would have suspected it to be, but dropping the damn cigarettes...”

  “I know.”

  “It’s like they’re all I can think about.”

  The writer’s block that had surfaced could have been based on his attack and the subsequent dread it had inspired in him, but Emery suspected the cigarettes were a larger culprit. He had never written without a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, without the effects of nicotine pulsing about in his brain. He was gathering up his grades and figures while the withdrawal from his drug continually trickled at the edge of his thoughts. He could manage this leaky-pipe bother, enough to complete the present task, but whenever Emery attempted to write, his addiction’s minor dribble became a floodtide.

  The writer’s block was frustrating though not so destructive as he would have previously thought, and the relief that came from ignoring his scripts for a time had resulted in a certain seed having been planted: Perhaps he did not need to write so much. A project or two every now and then might suffice and let him write as he enjoyed, but perhaps this did not need to occur each night, and possibly not even each week. He did have a different job, after all.

  Emery’s prolificacy had always been a great boon to him, and he had operated at a level far more productive than most. He had been somewhat obsessed in his youth, and perhaps he still was, but the heart attack had given him a notion previously foreign to him: He might no longer need to be as he had been, or compete with himself and his past work. He could settle down and write here and there, and this would still keep him at a general level. Working over a script every so often, maybe one or two a month, would feel as if a slow crawl to him, but he could do that and still have an output comparable to the usual writer.

  He finished his grades and sent them out into the world. The instructor was worried over the repercussions of a D he had been forced to give young Anthony Fascinelli, a student he admired and that had remarkable talent, but who had not taken the course seriously. The worlds of television and cinema were beginning to glance at the grades of those who took scriptwriting courses. This was somewhat of an experiment, to see if the schools could serve as ranching grounds in which these two industries might begin to shop for the few pedigrees in a particular breed. It did not look good. The trade-oriented aspect of his course meant that a low grade could feasibly alter one’s entry into a career with a much more palpable hand than having not done well in basic English or certain other classes.

  The bent of a script was story, in that a good writer could navigate good stories and give insights and reason to the nature of a tale or drama, and make a script of it, but this was not necessarily the initial deciding factor from a network or Hollywood point of view. They first glanced to see if a writer knew what a script was supposed to look like, and if that writer had any experience. Starting out on a career in that world, many of Emery’s students would only be able to claim school as experience, and a D in scriptwriting was an embarrassment if that was to be your trade, especially if that D came from a recognizable name that happened to have been
given five Emmies.

  Emery’s course was strongly pertinent in the formation of careers for those students that planned to enter the realm of screenwriting. His approach was blue-collar, and as real-world as was possible in a classroom, which was only ever a vague pantomime of reality.

  He did not want to give Anthony Fascinelli a low grade, but the young man had spent his term stoned or unavailable, smart-assing with other students, and turning in very little work. The few things he did submit were superb, and he had a raw talent that reminded Emery of a young Larry Belmont. The assignments the student submitted indicated an innate understanding of the medium, but these completed assignments were too few and the days in which Fascinelli showed up for class were utterly noncontinuous. This was a bit of a conundrum to Emery. Should he give the young writer the D, based on his lack of completed assignments for class, or keep a more open mind in grading, due to Fascinelli’s obvious ability to write a script? Emery was in the midst of a talented young writer, a writer that could have aced the course without expending much energy at all, but a student that had fucked-off for most of the term. Which was worse, wasted talent or arrogant disregard? Fascinelli could have used a good punch from Frank Gill.