by Steve Toltz
I shrugged.
“Get out of here before I call the police!” the publisher screamed at us.
In the elevator on the way down, Harry shook with fury. “That cunt,” he muttered.
I felt similarly dented, and I didn’t know much about the publishing world, but I tried to explain to him that we had to expect some rejections. “This is normal. It would have been too much to expect that the first place fell all over it.”
At the second floor the elevator stopped. “What are we stopping for?” Harry yelled at me.
The doors slid open and a man stepped in. “You can’t walk down one fucking floor?” Harry shouted, and the man leapt out again just before the doors closed.
On the street it was impossible to get a cab. It was really not advisable to be lingering on the street like this with a known fugitive, but neither of us seemed able to make a taxi materialize just by wishing it.
“We’ve been made!” he whispered.
“What?”
“They’re onto me!”
“Who?”
“All of them!”
He was out of control. He was trying to hide behind me, but the crowd was on all sides. He circled my body like a shark. He was drawing too much attention to himself in his panicked attempt to remain inconspicuous.
“There!” he screamed, and pushed me into a stream of traffic, into a taxi. Cars halted and honked their horns as we jumped in.
I really put my foot down after that. Harry was to stay at home. I simply refused to help him anymore if he insisted on coming along. He put up a struggle, but it was a weak one. The last incident had added seventeen years to his face. Even he could see it.
***
The following weeks were a nightmare. I tripped from office to office in a blur. They were all the same. I couldn’t get over how quiet they were. Everyone spoke in a whisper, and the way they tiptoed around, you’d think you’d wandered into a sacred temple if it weren’t for the telephones. The receptionists all wore the same condescending sneers. Often I sat in waiting rooms with other authors. They were the same too. They all emanated fear and desperation and looked so hungry they would have signed away the rights to their children for a lozenge, poor bastards.
In one of the publishing houses, where I waited all day for two days in a row and still wasn’t granted an audience with the king, a writer and I swapped manuscripts to pass the time. His was set in a small country town and was about a doctor and a pregnant schoolteacher who passed each other on the street every day but were too inward to say hello. It was unreadable. It was almost all description. My spirits lifted when, on page 85, he’d deigned to put in a smattering of dialogue between the characters. His novel was a real struggle to wade through, but he was sitting right beside me so I had to persist, out of politeness. Every now and then we glanced at each other to see how we were getting on. Finally, around lunchtime, he turned to me and said, “This is a peculiar book. Is it a satire?”
“Not at all. Yours is interesting too. Are the characters mute?”
“Not at all.”
We each handed back the other’s manuscript and looked at our watches.
Every morning I endured the four-hour bus ride into Sydney, where I spent the day going from publisher to publisher. Most laughed right in my face. One guy had to come out from behind his desk to do it because my face was too far away. It was discouraging. Also, the publishers didn’t like the idea of my hiding the author’s name from them right up to the day of printing. It made them suspicious. Many thought it was some kind of plot to drop them in the shit. You never met a greasier bunch of paranoid, unimaginative, dull-witted merchants in your life. The ones who took the manuscript seriously, who didn’t think it was a hoax or a prank or a plot, called me the worst possible names. They thought the work was an abomination and I was a dangerous, irresponsible anarchist for trying to peddle it. Before they threw me out on the street, they all said the same thing: this book would never be published, not in their lifetimes. I guess that meant that once they were dead, the world could fall into the toilet for all they cared about it.
Harry took it badly. He flew into fits, accused me of being lazy or sabotaging the meetings with ineptitude. That burned. I was slaving my guts out peddling that book of his, but it was the book they didn’t like, not me. Then, and after the tenth rejection, he started cursing the Australian publishing industry instead of me. “Maybe we need to take this to America. Freedom of expression is big over there right now. They have a thing called the right to free press. They have amendments enforcing it. Ideas are encouraged to flourish. Here the industry’s as stale as week-old bread crusts. This country’s so fucking conservative it makes you want to puke. It’s a wonder anyone gets anything published at all.” He might have had a point. Maybe the local publishers were just scared. He started talking about buying me a plane ticket to New York, but I shot that idea down the best I could. I didn’t want to go to New York. I couldn’t leave my sick mother or Terry, wherever he was. I was convinced that someday, soon, Terry was going to need me, maybe to save his life. I had to be on hand.
Caroline felt no such duty. She and Lionel arrived at my front door in the near-darkness of twilight to say goodbye. They had sold the house and were moving off. Lionel gave me a hug while Caroline stood shaking her head. “I’m not going to hang around and see Terry killed,” she said. “No one’s asking you to,” I said back, although I did think about it. It began to rain softly. She gave me a hug too, though it wasn’t the squeeze I needed, and as I watched her guiding her blind father out into the night, I felt as though I had renounced my humanity. I called out “Bye!” as she disappeared into the darkness, but it was as though I meant, You go ahead, I’m not a man anyway. There’s nothing human about me, so you be off.
A week later I was at Harry’s watching television when Terry called. After giving him an earful, Harry threw me the phone.
“How are you holding up?” I asked frantically. “They’re saying you got shot.”
“In the ankle! Who shoots ankles? Look, don’t worry about me, mate. I got a bird who does wonders with iodine. I’m tired, that’s about it. Otherwise I’m OK.”
“You’re famous.”
“Isn’t it wild?”
“It’s going to get you caught.”
“I know.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Look. Maybe I started this thing without too much thought, but I realized pretty quick that I’m doing something here, something I feel is important. Everyone’s on their best behavior. No one’s cheating. No one’s playing dirty. No one’s ripping anyone off. No one’s screwing anyone. Sport’s going through a reformation. Everyone’s taking the ethics seriously.”
“How can you talk about ethics! You’re a cold-blooded murderer! I think you should give yourself up.”
“Are you nuts? This is who I am! This is what I was put here to do!”
“Caroline came home.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. I could hear Terry moving around, dragging a chair across the floor. Then I heard him sit.
“Where is she? Does she know? Can you take her a message?”
“She left again.”
He took another breath, this time deeper, and I waited a full thirty seconds before I heard him let it out. He cracked open a can of something, then swallowed maybe half by the sound of it. He still didn’t say anything. Caroline’s absence seemed to weigh more heavily on both of us than murder.
“So are you going to stop or not?” I asked.
“Listen, Marty, one day you’ll understand all this. The day you believe in something. Oops. Gotta go. Pizza’s here.”
“Hey, I believe in-”
Click.
I put down the receiver and kicked the wall. It’s normal to think that the laws of physics don’t apply when you’re angry, that your furious foot will pass through brick. Nursing my injured toe, I felt extremely agitated. The sound of profound gratification in Te
rry’s voice was enough to put me on edge. He didn’t give me a chance to tell him I’d found my belief. I was doing something important too. He didn’t know I’d been irresistibly drawn to Harry’s book and was instrumental in getting it published. Well, how could he? I wasn’t getting it published. And why not? Terry was doing everything possible to murder those sportsmen, but was I really doing everything I could for the book? The idea began gnawing at me that I didn’t have it in me to go all the way, to go with total devotion down a road on which it was impossible to do a U-turn. Terry was displaying absolute ruthlessness and obstinacy in pursuit of his goal, and I needed to apply the same ruthless obstinacy to follow my path incessantly; otherwise I was just another frightened worthless hypocrite unwilling to put himself on the line for his cause.
I made a groundbreaking decision.
If the next publisher rejected the book, I simply wouldn’t accept his rejection. I would reject his rejection. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I wouldn’t take never for an answer. I’d demand he publish it, and if that meant holding him hostage until it was in the stores, then so be it. It would be easy enough to get my hands on a gun. You only had to open a cupboard at Harry’s or plunge your hand deep into the sugar bowl to find a semiautomatic. Of course, I despised guns and all the baggage that went along with them, like bullet wounds and death, but on the other hand, I liked the idea of breaking another one of the Ten Commandments, especially since I didn’t honor my father either. They couldn’t very well force you to suffer for two eternities, could they?
That night before going home, while Harry was out cold on vodka and sleeping pills, I plunged my hand deep into the sugar bowl. The pistol inside came out covered in sticky crystals. I brushed them off into a cup of tea and drank it. I could taste the gun.
The next day I left my house when it was still dark. Terry hadn’t made a whisper in the world for at least a week and there were no reporters camping in our yard, although their cigarette butts were wet with dew. I took the bus into the city. The office building of the next publisher on the list was across the road from Central Station. Before going in, I studied the train timetable in case I might need to make a hasty getaway. One train or another was leaving every three minutes, if I wasn’t too particular about the destination. I bought a whole bunch of tickets, gateways to everywhere.
The lobby had a blackboard under glass listing the building’s residents in white letters. There, on the fourth floor, was the name of my last hope. Strangeways Publicati ns. The “o” was missing. It wasn’t too difficult to see why. On the sixth floor was a company called Voodoo Cooperative Clothing, while on the second floor resided another company called Ooooops! Stain Remover Inc.
I took the elevator to the fourth floor. There was a bathroom at the end of the corridor. I went inside and hung my head over the toilet bowl for a good twenty minutes, strategizing, before going back out into the corridor and making my way to the door of Strangeways Publications. Before knocking, I reached into my bag. The gun was still there, but the sugar was gone. There was nothing sweet about it anymore.
I knocked. I heard a voice say, “Come in.”
A man was sitting behind a desk reading. Without looking up, he motioned for me to sit down. I was too nervous to sit. My knees wouldn’t bend. They hardened. I looked around the office. It was no bigger than a closet, and was a pigsty. Newspapers were stacked up from the floor to the ceiling. A pile of clothes and a brown suitcase sat in one corner. The window was shut and there was no air in the place. The publisher was in his forties. Whatever he was reading made him smile like a senile goat. There was a toothbrush and a white bowl filled with green water on the desk. The toothbrush made me sick. It had a hair in it.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, looking up.
I reached into my bag, felt the gun, and pulled out the manuscript. I plopped it on his desk and went through my routine. The author, I said, who shall remain anonymous for the moment, was seeking the right publisher for his groundbreaking masterpiece, and because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter, I couldn’t possibly leave the manuscript with him, but if he had an ounce of curiosity and didn’t want to miss out on the most sensational opportunity of a lifetime, he’d really need to look through the manuscript now, while I waited. I had made this speech so many times I said it without thinking. He stared at me the whole time, with half-drunk eyes, smiling that old-goat smile as if he were thinking of bubble baths.
“Well, let’s have a look at her then, shall we?”
He turned to the first page. Through the window behind him I could see a train snake into the station. The publisher flicked to the middle of the manuscript, giggled at something, then put it down.
“A satire, eh? I love a good satire. It’s well written and it’s pretty funny, but to be honest, not really in my line.”
My hand, grasping the gun, was all sweat.
“Thanks for coming in anyway.”
I didn’t move. A minute dragged by. He made gestures with his eyes that directed me out the door. I ignored them.
“Look,” he said. “Things are a bit rough for me right now. I couldn’t afford to publish my own obituary if I wanted to, so why don’t you fuck off.”
I didn’t move. It was as though the air in the room had turned solid and trapped me where I was standing.
“You know what I was reading when you came in? No? Nothing- that’s what! I was pretending to read so I’d look busy. Sad, huh?” When I still didn’t so much as visibly breathe, he said, “Take a look at this.”
A pile of books towered beside his desk, and he picked the top one and handed it to me. I took a look. It was a biology textbook.
“Back in London I was working for the tabloids. That was a long time ago.” He came around and sat on the edge of his desk, his eyes darting around the room. “This is a small publishing company. Nothing too flash. We publish science textbooks. Physics, biology, chemistry, the usual suspects. Me and my wife, we shared this business fifty-fifty. Her money, inherited from her father, and my money, saved through blood and sweat. So ten years we ran our little company, and sure, we had our domestic disputes, and I had my indiscretions, but I was discreet about them, so what was the harm? Look at this. Feast your eyes on the instrument of my destruction!” He motioned to the biology textbook in my hands and said, “Page ninety-five.”
I turned to page 95. It was a picture of the human body, with all the parts labeled and their functions explained. It looked like a booklet of stereo instructions. “See anything unusual?” he asked.
I couldn’t. It looked like a pretty standard human body. Sure, it was lacking some common elements like love handles, wrinkles, and stretch marks, but otherwise it was relatively comprehensive.
“She did it on purpose. She knew I’d be too pissed to check through it before printing.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“The brain! Look at what she’s called the brain!”
I looked. It said “The Testicle.” And where the testicles were, it was labeled not just “The Brain” but “ Stanley ’s Brain.” In fact, now that he’d pointed it out, almost every organ in the human male was a critique of Stanley’s drinking, gambling, and womanizing: the heart, the kidneys, the lungs, the intestines, you name it, she had accompanying notes that described his excessive alcohol consumption, his bad diet, his aggressiveness and poor sexual performance. It went on and on. I could see how this wouldn’t be appropriate for certain schoolchildren.
“She sabotaged me. All on account of me sleeping with a barmaid at our local. OK, I shouldn’t have done it, but to ruin my livelihood! Ten thousand books I can’t sell! And I can’t sue anyone because I signed the approval form. I delivered the book to the printers myself. Of course she lost everything too, but she doesn’t care. That’s how vindictive women are. It was worth it, she says, just to put me in the ground. Have you ever heard such venom? You’re not likely to. Now I’m waiting for the creditors to come knocking. I can�
��t even pay the rent on this office. So as much as I’d like to publish your delightful little satire…”
“It’s not a satire.”
“It’s not?”
“No.”
He looked down at the manuscript and thumbed through it quickly.
“This is on the level?”
I nodded.
“Then this would be a textbook for young criminals?”
I nodded again.
“You could get both of us arrested for publishing this.”
“I’m willing to risk it if you are.”
He leaned back into his chair and said, “How about that.” He looked at the manuscript again, and a little while later he said, “Well, well.”
He closed his eyes a moment before opening them again. The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.
“What made you come to me?” he asked.
“Everyone else said no.”
“Of course they did,” he said, chuckling. That seemed to please him no end.
His mouth widened into a smile, and he jumped up as though answering a call to duty, that smile just kept on widening and widening, until my mouth hurt.
***
I ran all the way to Harry’s and stumbled up the front steps. I was so excited I almost forgot the secret knock. It was too elaborate. Four knocks, a pause, one knock, a pause, three knocks, then my voice saying, “Hey, Harry. It’s me, Martin.” If you ask me, we could’ve done just as well without the knocks, but Harry was inflexible about it. I fumbled the knocks all right: two…pause…three- no, better start again…I heard the ominous sound of a shotgun pumping into readiness. “It’s me, Harry!” I said in a fluster. Realizing my mistake, I ducked down, waiting for the spray of bullets. They didn’t come. A series of clicks and slides. Harry was going through the tedious routine of unlocking the dead bolts. It took longer than usual. He must’ve added a couple of new ones. The door crept open. Harry stood there in his underwear, shotgun in one hand and an ax in the other. His eyes were full of fire and fear. I couldn’t wait. I told him the news.