I had never written anything like that before, and I have not written anything like it since. It seemed to me that my entire life had assembled in the waiting room of my imagination, so that one memory after another could enter my story’s magical translation machine and appear in the pages I pulled from my typewriter. The Futurians were there, and so were Walter and Charlotte, and Miss Ditchburn who taught Canadian history, and after those people, or before them, I found a blue rug, a wooden table with a glass top, an old woman in a white hat, a ball, a bridge, a pony, a bowl of soup, a wool sock that itched my calf, a haul of scraps which did not, in themselves, amount to a world, or even a coherent suggestion of one, but which gave me hope that there was more, and maybe much, left to salvage from the wreck of what I had originally been. It was, I thought, the opposite of my gloomy search for my lost people on the subway; although now I see that the story grew out of the searching, that it was, in fact, the only form the searching could really take. I wrote for an hour or two a night, all through the summer, and by fall my story gave signs of becoming a book. I wanted to show it to Doris, but I was afraid she would say I was running away again. Also, I worried that she wouldn’t like it. It wasn’t like anything that anyone I knew was writing, or reading. Finally, I called Wollheim and asked if he would look at it. He said he was too busy, but if I liked, I could read some of it to his new club, the Arisian Society. They were much livelier, he said, than the Futurians had ever been. So on a Saturday at the beginning of October, I took the subway out to Forest Hills. Wollheim came to the door in slippers, tweed slacks, and a white shirt open at the collar. “Spinks!” He looked at me mistrustfully. “You haven’t changed a bit,” he said.
Wollheim led me to a big sunken living room with low bookshelves on two walls and windows on the third. His wife, Elsie, was in the kitchen, sprinkling crumb topping onto an unbaked coffee cake. And there, on the lip of the living room’s pit, sat the Arisians: a dozen or so children who slouched in flat-fronted pants and shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and packs of cigarettes rolled into them. They might have been the same age as we had been in 1939, but to me they looked extremely young and not very bright. Two of them were building a house out of crackers while a third thumbed through an issue of Action Comics. They picked at their pimples and gave off a sweet, flatulent miasma. Wollheim introduced me: “The well-known Canadian fan, Leo Spinks,” he said. “He used to edit a magazine called Pickman’s Vault, which some of you may have heard of.” The Arisians nodded noncommittally. “He’s back from the war, and he wants to read us a story. Leo?” I took out my pages and read.
When I finished there was a long silence. Then one of the Arisians said, “Hamburg?” “It’s a port in Germany,” I said. “I know where it is,” the kid said. “I just wonder why the ship would take him there.” “I guess because it’s the closest place to S,” I said. “Is that in Germany?” another kid asked. “No,” I said. “I think more like Central Europe.” “You don’t know?” the kid asked. The Arisians laughed. “Also,” said the first kid, “why a bank messenger?” “Couldn’t they send a cablegram?” “Or send it airmail?” “It’s too important to send airmail,” I said. “They have to send a messenger. They have to send this messenger.” “Why?” “Because they know who he is,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me until just then. But the Arisians were pitiless. “They? They who?” “The bank knows it’s got a king working for it? Hoo-ey!” I waited for Wollheim to come to my defense, but he sat with his hands clasped around his crossed knees, his face a smiling mask. It occurred to me that he was afraid. He was like a man feeding pigeons: he didn’t want to startle them away.
The next story was by a grubby, black-haired, paperboy-looking kid named Wilsey. It concerned a man who thought he had been buried alive and clawed his way out of the crypt, only to discover that he wasn’t alive at all: pure secondhand Lovecraft. Halfway through, I excused myself and went to the bathroom. I washed my face but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to wash my face away, to become nothing, a blank. I found a bottle of prescription cough syrup in Wollheim’s medicine cabinet and drank it. The Arisians were still talking about Wilsey’s story when I came out. Crusted blood under the fingernails was a nice effect, someone said, but would a thousand dead rats really smell like ammonia? Wilsey said they would, in a hollow voice that implied a thousand dead rats were the least of the things he’d smelled. “I wish there was some cannibalism,” another Arisian said. “Why?” Wollheim asked, mildly. “I don’t know,” the Arisian said. “I just think it would add to the effect.” “What do you think, Leo?” Wollheim asked. I remembered something Loveman had told me, long ago: that a poet can’t be afraid to speak. “I think Wilsey’s story is shameful,” I said. “He wants to write like H. P. Lovecraft, and I guess he does an OK imitation. But who was Lovecraft? Do any of you know that he hated the Jews? Do you think that’s something you should be imitating? Do you hate the Jews?” “I’m Jewish, actually,” Wilsey said. “Go easy, Spinks,” Wollheim said. “Don’t tell me to go easy, you coward,” I said. “I saw Belsen. Thousands of unburied bodies heaped up in the street. That was horror. And Lovecraft, the rat, would have liked it.” The Arisians replied, in chorus, that that couldn’t be true. “But it is,” I said. I told them what Loveman had told me. “You don’t know anything. You just want a good thrill. But Lovecraft was a monster!” I was shouting. “And you just sit there!” I stood up. “Don, you asked for my opinion,” I said, “and that’s it. Now I’m going home.” I walked to the door and found myself in the kitchen. Elsie was on the phone, murmuring something to the sea-green handset. “Where’s my hat?” I demanded. Then, apparently, I threw up on the coffee cake and passed out.
Later, I heard that Wollheim was telling people I was dangerous, unreliable, a drug addict, as he’d heard from Michel, and a madman. In retrospect, evidence of my insanity was everywhere: I’d showed up unannounced at Pohl’s mother’s apartment, I’d nearly punched Sam Moskowitz, and I’d been unable to stop leering at Doris! I even heard that Wollheim and Pohl had made up their differences in order to agree that I was a monster. I didn’t care. All I wanted was to finish my story. But, unfortunately for me, the Arisians’ criticism had taken root: Why did the bank send its royal messenger? Where was S? I struggled on, full of doubt; soon the bank messenger was imprisoned in the castle dungeon, and I couldn’t figure out how to free him. When I wasn’t working for Hungerleider, I folded myself into a rickety chair at a too-small table and filled my wastebasket with useless typing. I stopped going to see Doris. She found my number and called to ask if she’d done something to upset me. “Not a thing,” I said. “I just need some time alone.” “Leo, you have plenty of time alone,” she said. “You need time with me.” But I didn’t go back. I don’t know why. Maybe I still wanted too much from Doris, and I couldn’t afford another disappointment. Or maybe I was just stuck in the basement of the castle.
In December 1947, Cyril Kornbluth came back from Chicago. He hadn’t heard about my disgrace and so he knocked on my door early one Sunday afternoon. He invited me to come with him to the Bronx Zoo, where Pohl was apparently going to demonstrate his telepathic control of rodents. I said I was working. “Writing the great Canadian novel?” Kornbluth asked. “Don doesn’t think so,” I said. I told him what had happened with the Arisians. “Wollheim is a rat,” Kornbluth said. “You can’t pay any attention to what he says. Mind if I take a look?” He sat on the bed, a cigarette between two plump fingers, and read my typescript quickly. Then he stood up and cracked his knuckles. “It’s interesting,” he said. “Glad to see you getting away from all that Lovecraftian gunk.” “But what happens next?” “You get up,” Kornbluth said. He sat at my desk, looked at the page in the typewriter, and licked his thumb. Three minutes later, he was finished.
Kornbluth had written:
“Good news,” said the warden. “You’re going to be put on trial.”
“I am?” said the messenger. His heart leaped.
If he had a trial, then at least he could send a message to the conspirators who were surely wondering what had happened to him. He just needed to think of a suitable code. “When will it happen?” he asked, timorously.
“Now,” said the warden.
“Now?”
The warden held out a pair of handcuffs. “I can trust you to put these on yourself, I think.”
His mind racing, the messenger closed the cuffs on one wrist, then on the other. The warden unlocked the door to his cell and motioned him out. They made a little procession: first a guard, then the messenger, and, bringing up the rear, the warden of the castle, who hummed a pretty song to himself—it seemed to the messenger that he had heard it before, when he was a child, perhaps. They climbed a flight of stairs and came by way of a little-used door into the courtyard of the castle. It was sunrise; all the castle’s western spires were rose pink, and the eastern ones all blue. Rose . . . the messenger thought. Suddenly he realized what message he could give his friends, as soon as he was allowed to speak. His heart was twisted by a violent hope.
“Wait up,” said the warden.
“Here?” the messenger asked. “Shouldn’t we go on to the courtroom? I’m eager to prove my innocence.”
“Not just yet,” the warden said. He drew his pistol, and shot the messenger in the back of the head.
FIN
“Now come on,” Kornbluth said. “Let’s go watch Fred make a fool of himself.”
I burned my story in the bathroom sink that night. I was done with stories, I thought. I was done with everything. The only thing I could still imagine wanting was revenge.
13.
Three years passed. For two of them I worked in Hungerleider’s shop, then I got a job as a salesman for General Electric. I worked in a showroom on Park Avenue, selling ranges and dishwashers guaranteed to last a lifetime or more, and I was so good at it that in the winter of 1950 the company invited me to join a team that was going down to Mexico, to teach their local salesmen how to sell stoves to the Mexicans. Apparently, people in Mexico still liked to cook on coal stoves, as though the twentieth century had never happened. We were supposed to know the secret that would change their minds. Of course, we didn’t. The GE ranges were so beautiful and modern, so much a part of what Americans wanted back then, that they sold themselves. On the plane to Mexico City, I took the things Michel had told me at Goody’s and tried to turn them into a pitch. What we were selling, I said, when I got there, was the future. People had been dreaming of this stuff for decades, and now here it was, in white enameled steel, with buttons that lit up in different colors, like the controls of a spaceship. It would have been a great pitch if the Mexican people had grown up reading Amazing Stories, but if they had grown up reading Amazing Stories they would have been the same as the Americans, and selling stoves would have been no problem.
When our day of pitches was over, we went to the hotel bar and drank beer with the Mexican team. Ed Armstrong, one of my fellow salesmen, suggested that we find a whorehouse and show them our automatic Calrods—that was the name of a GE stove. It was the kind of joke we had been making all afternoon. What can I say? We were the future, but we were disgusting. I told Ed I was too tired, and walked alone down the Paseo de la Reforma. I got lost, doubled back, passed a hospital and several parks. Finally, thirsty and footsore, I went into a bar to get a drink of water. It was a shabby place, just a counter with a few beaten-up stools and an ice chest full of beer, and bottles of Coke and orange soda. After a while, I realized that the two men next to me at the counter were American. One was tall and skinny, with damp light brown hair pushed this way and that on his head. He had on a light tropical suit and a dirty white shirt. He was talking to a short, swarthy friend who wore a lot of silver jewelry, rings and so on. “It’s no use going to a Chink,” he said. “Even if he writes you a script, no one will fill it.” “I don’t know about that,” the friend said. “What about a Chinese pharmacy?” The taller one laughed. “I went to a Chinese pharmacy, once. I put down the stomach ulcer routine. You know what I got? Powdered rhinoceros horn. I cooked it up, and it nearly killed me. The real mystery, though, is where they find all those rhinoceri. There can’t be enough in Africa to stock every Chinese pharmacy in New York, let alone in China. I asked an acquaintance about this, a jazzman named Clark. He told me they breed them in captivity. But apparently, and this is quite interesting, the rhinoceri won’t mate unless there’s music playing. That was how Clark knew about it. He did a six-month bid on a rhinoceros farm in Rhodesia, playing Glenn Miller to put the lady rhinoceri in the mood.” “Excuse me,” I said. “Is your name Lee?” The tall one swiveled around to look at me. He coughed. “Wel-l,” he said, “that’s a hell of a long way to come for a score.”
Bill was his real name, he said. He’d gone by Lee in New York to dodge the law, but here there was no law to speak of. In the heat of the Mexico City winter, he looked luminous and irritable, like a vexed angel. He introduced me to his friend, whose name was Dave, and asked if I could buy them a drink. When I said I could, he said we should go to a restaurant. The place we were in served only beer, and Bill and Dave were in the mood for tequila. They led me down the Calle Durango, to a steak house on the corner of the Avenida Oaxaca. It was two stories tall and full of Mexicans eating steak in the middle of the night. “This place all right with you?” Bill asked. I nodded. General Electric was paying us too much, and I would have spent even more if I’d gone to the whorehouse. “Might as well eat as long as we’re drinking,” Bill said. We got a table on the upper floor, looking out on a round plaza where there had been a market earlier in the day. Now there was just the empty scaffolding for the awnings, and a couple of sanitation men pushing brooms around. To my surprise, Bill remembered some things about me. “This guy was in the real war,” he told Dave. “He must have shot fifty Germans.” I hadn’t said anything of the sort, but I was happy to let Bill lie on my behalf. “He got a medal for killing a German with the butt of his pistol,” he said. “Clubbed him on the head. Kaputt!” They each ordered a porterhouse steak and a tequila and a beer. “We could use a brave guy like you,” Bill said. “We’re thinking of going on a dangerous trip.” He told me that he and Dave wanted to travel south to Ecuador to score a drug called yage, which was supposed to be better than heroin. “Bill wants to go,” Dave said. “I’m not going.” “That’s the kind of friend Dave is,” Bill said. “He’ll eat your steak but he won’t put up with any hardship.” “That’s right,” Dave said. The food came, and he cut into his meat and filled his mouth. “How about it?” Bill asked. “We could head out anytime you like. Hop a plane down to Guayaquil and get a train of mules.” “Mules?” “To head into the jungle,” Bill said. “The reason we’d need a train is that most of them will be killed by venomous serpents. The worst is the fer-de-lance. I know a guy who got bitten by a fer-de-lance, right on his johnson . . .” I wanted to go to bed, but Bill and Dave kept ordering more drinks. Dave ordered a shrimp cocktail and a baked potato. “You better not leave us with the check,” he growled. “We’ve got a whole operation here. Our boys will track you down and take it out of your skin.” “That’s right, we have boys,” Bill said dreamily.
I asked how he had ended up in Mexico, and he told me he’d been busted for heroin in New Orleans, and he’d come here to escape prosecution. “They’ll put you away for life,” he said. “For life and more. They have a prison beneath the regular one, where Cajun witch doctors collect the souls of the deceased prisoners and bottle them up in soda pop bottles. Not like in Mexico. This country is open. A man can do what he wants. What’s more, he can do it with whom he wants. You can do it with gentle Mexican boys, although actually not. Did you know, these Mexicans are some of the most bloodthirsty people on Earth?” Dave got up to use the toilet, but Bill, who seemed, as he spoke, to be releasing himself from some kind of terrestrial bondage, kept talking, about the Aztecs, whose proper name, he said, was the Culhua Me
xica, the people from Culhuacán, where they had learned to farm and build temples and cut out the hearts of anyone they felt like. “That’s the way to do it,” Bill said. “Right to the heart. Rip it out. Feed it to the gods, they’re hungry for our hearts.” Outside, the plaza was clean. Two girls were tugging a man away from the restaurant, or possibly holding him up. “Is he talking about that Aztec shit?” Dave asked. “He won’t stop. With the, what do you call it?” “Culhua Mexica,” Bill said. “That’s the proper name. The problem with you, Dave, is that you don’t want to learn anything. Whereas I am a student. I’m always learning.” Bill told me that he was enrolled at Mexico City College. Most of the classes were crap, but their Aztec specialist was pretty good. “A little fairy called Barlow.” “Robert Barlow?” My heart jumped. “Goes by Bob,” Bill said. “Why, do you know him?”
The Night Ocean Page 29