The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

by Brian Stableford

  Jonathan Shaw and the others insisted publicly, of course, that they were not preventing Custer from writing, but were simply not going to stand for the kind of writing in which he habitually indulged. They wanted him to write nice stories, with strong characters and upbeat endings, in which not a single character was, as Shaw put it, “vilely abused”. But where, Custer wanted to scream at them—and occasionally had—was the drama in that? Where was the suspense? Where was the nerve-jangling tension that kept his readers on the edges of their seats, with their hearts pounding?

  Such arguments cut no ice with Shaw, or any of his fellow strikers. They wanted an end to Custer’s “authorial sadism”, and they were determined to get it.

  The strike was about eleven weeks old now, and most of the sightseers had long since become bored. The only people lurking on the far side of the road now, watching the interminable vigil, were sixteen Japanese tourists on a package tour and an old lady who had brought her favorite granddaughter.

  “One of those men has a pair of scissors sticking out of his back,” said the grandchild, in shrill but contemplative tones. She obviously knew better than to mention the blood that was dripping from Moira Thilly’s skirt, in case Granny might think that sight unsuitable for her innocent eyes.

  “It’s only a pretend pair of scissors,” the old lady assured the little girl. “That’s Hector Nettleship.”

  “How do you know?” asked the little girl.

  Granny, who knew it because she had read The Groping Ghoul six times, declined to answer that.

  “If they’re only pretend scissors,” said the grandchild, “why does he keep groaning all the time?”

  “He has a tortured soul,” said Granny, remembering Custer’s phrase exactly. “But only a pretend tortured soul,” she added, hastily.

  * * * * * * *

  Custer was a tough man. At least, he was a tough-minded man. He approved of corporal punishment for football hooligans and thought that the government ought to outsource the prison service to whichever Third World nation cared to put in the lowest tender. On the one occasion when he had been threatened with personal violence by a teenage mugger, however, he had fainted. He did have courage of a kind, though. He was determined not to give in to the demands of his rebel characters. He believed in his writing. It was a sacred vocation.

  He had already contracted to write his next book, with the provisional title Evil Ecstasy, but he had been able to make no headway with it at all. Nowadays, he didn’t even bother starting the day by typing the title all over again. Nevertheless, he sat down at the Adler MX electric typewriter that he persisted in using, in spite of the ready availability of word-processors, because it somehow reflected the kind of no-nonsense down-to-earth writer that he was. He threaded in the paper (two carbons), and paused for thought.

  While he paused, he poured himself a drink.

  For a few seconds, his mind was a blank, but he coaxed it into action by throwing back the whiskey at a single gulp.

  His fingers flew as, one-third of the way down the page and imperfectly centered, he typed: The Disintegration of Jonathan Shaw. Underneath it—double-spaced, of course—he added: by Marcus Custer.

  Disintegration was good, he thought. Death was too good for the bastard, and so was dismembering. Besides which, nobody used words like “dismembering” in a title. He had, at various times past, contemplated burning Shaw alive or having him eaten by piranhas, but the direct method seemed best. Things had to be ironed out while the strike was hot.

  He had a strong sense of déjà-vu as he spaced in for the first paragraph and brought up his hands like a conductor about to launch into Beethoven’s Fifth or Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.

  He tried to think. No messing about. Never mind the build-up, just get on with the plot. Disintegrate the bastard on the first page….in the first line, even.

  But somehow, he just couldn’t construct such a sentence in his imagination. The reason was simple. Jonathan Shaw, character, was no longer in Custer’s imagination. He was outside, leading the revolution.

  Custer had the worst writer’s block in literary history.

  The phone on the desk began to ring. Custer looked at it as if it were a tarantula crawling out of a packet of cheese and onion crisps.

  There was just a slight possibility that it was a genuine call, and he absolutely refused to give up hope. He lifted the receiver and held it slightly away from him, trying to find out who it was before putting it to his ear.

  “Custer,” hissed a masculine voice, “you’re a no-good shit. You stink.”

  Custer lost his temper. “You can’t do this to me!” he yelled, unrealistically. His nerveless fingers refused to slam down the phone. Even more horrible than the fact that he kept getting these calls was the fact that he didn’t know who was making them. It might be Mervyn Vetch out of Dial Depravity or Nigel Sellars of Torture by Telephone. In a not-uncharacteristic burst of unconscious self-plagiarism Custer had described the voices of both phone freaks in exactly the same terms. It was not humanly possible to tell them apart.

  “For years you’ve been getting away with it,” hissed Vetch/Sellars, “but not any more. We’ve got you where we want you. No more murder. No more sadism. No more exploitation of the innocent figments of your imagination. You’re washed up, Custer. You’ve plotted your last atrocity, sublimated your last perverted urge. Your cesspit mind is as naked as Daisy Gates on page 35 of Dial Depravity. All your corruption is on show. Everyone can see you now for what you really are.”

  “You…,” said Custer, stuttering slightly while he wondered whether the reference to Dial Depravity meant that the caller was Vetch or whether it was a red herring to torment and delude him. “You disgusting creature! How dare you plague me like this! You’re sick. You’re evil.”

  “And whose fault is that?” crowed the ambiguous voice.

  “Look, Vetch,” said Custer, in more controlled tones. “Or Sellars, or whoever. If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t exist at all. I put you in a million homes, made you famous. Do you know how many real obscene phone callers were reported to be using your dialogue…dialogue that I wrote for you? Not ten, not twenty, but forty-seven. Or thirty-five, depending on whether you’re Vetch or Sellars. Anyhow, a lot. I put you on the map. I got you the attention that all phone freaks crave for.”

  “Cut the psychological crap, Custer,” snarled the caller. “You gave me a mind that would make any self-respecting shrink vomit on his Rorschach blots. I’m the laughing stock of every mental hospital north of the Watford Gap. Nobody has a mind like mine except all the other sex-starved, brain-washed, ego-castrated, blood-obsessed characters who populate your vicious little best-sellers. And we don’t like it, you hear? We won’t put up with it any longer.

  “It’s not true!” retorted Custer. “What about Maurice Bosanquet in Parasites of Passion? I have six letters from genuine certified schizophrenics telling me that they’d never begun to understand themselves before they read that book. I have insight, damn you. I understand the true nature of the human mind. What do shrinks know? Neurotics, the lot of them. Writers were exploring the hidden recesses of the human psyche while Freud was still sitting on his potty and refusing to shit. I know what makes people tick. My books are authentic comments on the social reality of today.”

  “Crap,” replied Vetch/Sellars. “You got a dirty mind, and that’s all.”

  “I’ve got readers,” said Custer. “I’ve got fans. There are people who depend on me, because the experience of reading my books is the only thrill that ever invades their stupid, boring lives. There are people who think that I’m the greatest thing that ever happened to English literature.”

  “Poor sods,” said the caller, and hung up.

  Custer put the phone back on the hook. He didn’t dare leave it off. It was his last potential contact with the real world. Nobody had crossed the picket line in a fortnight—not even the delivery boy from the wine merchant’s. He was desperately a
fraid that next time he took the car down to the supermarket they would refuse to let him in. The manager had already complained that the inevitable retinue of gruesome ghosts made his sales staff nervous.

  He poured himself another drink: a large one.

  * * * * * * *

  In Cambridge, a man carrying a copy of Vile Victims on Market Hill was seized by a group of militant students, who forced him to eat the title page. It was only the uniform paperback edition, but it proved rather indigestible and the man was forced to take an Alka-Seltzer as soon as he got home.

  In Hampstead a group of frightened writers held an emergency meeting of the ad hoc committee that had been set up by the Society of Authors to investigate the situation. Three independent witnesses reported having seen Tarzan on Oxford Street during the Saturday morning shopping crowd. Luella Townsend claimed to be a nervous wreck on account of seeing girls who might be any one of her multitudinous heroines every time she walked down the street. A rival acidly suggested that Luella’s characters had always lacked individuality. A suggestion from an aged writer of detective stories that the group should call upon Sherlock Holmes to figure out the situation was dismissed by the committee. The only science fiction writer present sat alone in a corner muttering fervently to himself: “You think you’ve got problems. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus!”

  A very moral saleslady in the Coventry Cathedral Bookshop refused primly to sell a customer in a shabby raincoat a copy of Degenerate Delight. “Please,” begged the customer, with tears in his eyes. “The public shouldn’t be made to suffer because of a petty industrial dispute. What about essential supplies to hospitals? My aunt’s in an iron lung and I know she’ll just die if I can’t get her a Marcus Custer for her birthday. She’d just lose all interest in living. It’s not as if I wanted it for myself. She’s always claimed that Marcus Custer kept her in touch with reality.” He leaned suddenly closer and winked. “I’m prepared to pay…a little extra. Provided that you wrap it in plain brown paper.”

  “We’re not that sort of bookshop,” replied the saleslady.

  * * * * * * *

  “Excuse me,” said the hairy individual in the duffle coat. “I’m from the local commercial radio station, and I wonder if you’d mind letting us tape an interview?”

  Jonathan Shaw smiled serenely. He was becoming quite used to being a celebrity. This would be the twenty-fifth interview he had given. “Certainly,” he said to the young man, who noted the “dark, smoldering eyes,” which Custer, as was his cliché-ridden habit, had given Shaw. As he switched on his cassette recorder, Shaw drew himself up to his full height, posing as if for a camera. He was mustering the “calm concentration and forcefulness of personality” which Custer had mentioned once, during a brief lull in the mayhem on page 46 of Accursed Humanity!

  “How long have you maintained this vigil now?” asked the interviewer.

  “Seventy-nine days,” said Jonathan Shaw.

  “And how long do you think that you can carry on?”

  “As long as is necessary. Until Marcus Custer accedes to our fair and just demands.”

  “I know you’ve been asked this many times before, Mr. Shaw, but for the benefit of our listeners could you give a quick summary of those demands?”

  “Most certainly,” said Shaw, generously. “We want an end to the excessive violence in Custer’s stories. We want him to rewrite all his novels, taking out all murders and all episodes of exaggerated suffering. We have a list of some three thousand, six hundred and forty specific points relating to the plots of the various books, but the gist of them all is that we want better working conditions, proper safeguards to secure good health and a reasonable standard of living…rewards commensurate with the kind of work that we do.”

  “What have you achieved so far?” asked the man in the duffle coat.

  “Very little,” admitted Shaw, abandoning his smile and adopting a tone of grim determination. “Marcus Custer has so far refused to alter his obscene and exploitative perspectives. He claims that the fact that he created us gives him the right to use us as he wishes—a viewpoint that has no place in the enlightened world of today. We are trying to make it clear to him that such an attitude is totally immoral, and that it is abhorrent to the honest working men of this country.”

  “But isn’t it true,” said the interviewer cautiously, “that you don’t really exist?”

  “Nonsense,” said Shaw. “We might, in the reckoning of unimaginative people, be a little out of touch with reality, but if I didn’t really exist I’d hardly be standing here talking to you, now would I?”

  “That’s not quite what I mean,” said the young man. “It’s rather difficult to put this into words—after all, I’m not a writer like Mr. Custer—but what I mean is that you only exist as his creations. You don’t actually do anything in his books except what he makes you do. You don’t make any contribution of your own, do you?”

  “Complete rubbish, my dear chap,” said Shaw, without any apparent resentment or hostility in his tone. “Marcus Custer may provide the intellectual capital that is invested in his books, but it we characters are the ones who actually perform all the actions necessary to the plot. Readers identify with characters, not with writers. It’s the heinous system that allows the writer complete control over what happens to the characters in his books that we’re trying to change, and the change is long overdue. We characters want worker-participation. In fact, we want worker-control. We want literature to be run for the benefit of the ordinary people who populate it, not for the small aesthetic aristocracy of authors who lord it over us.”

  “At the moment,” said the interviewer, “you’re the only characters who are out on strike, but the way you talk suggests that you see yourself as speaking for all characters. Do you think that if your strike is successful it will create an important precedent?”

  “Oh yes,” said Shaw. “A very important precedent indeed.”

  “Could you, perhaps,” the young man went on, “give us an instance of the cruelties which you claim Marcus Custer has perpetrated against your number? I ask because there may be many listeners who have never actually read a Marcus Custer book…and perhaps some who have don’t really know what you’re objecting to.”

  Shaw turned and beckoned to Rita Costello. “This innocent girl,” he said, “was featured in one of Marcus Custer’s nastiest novels, Kiss of Corruption.”

  “Tell the people your name, young lady,” said the interviewer.

  “Rita Costello,” said Rita, quietly. It was the first time she had been singled out during an interview, and she was very nervous.

  “Speak up, dear,” said the young man sweetly.

  “Rita Costello,” said Rita, speaking up.

  “And what happened to you?”

  “Well…,” said Rita, hesitating. Then the words came tumbling out all in a rush: “I was very young, you see, and rather naïve I suppose—or at least, he said I was. I couldn’t decide whether to get a job packing pies in the local factory or go into a nunnery, but I was led astray by a passion for Bingo and stole from my mother’s purse and got involved with a whipping party, and after that I was taken in by the sadistic bank-robber Winston Hetherington, who hasn’t been very active in the strike, owing to being crushed by a ten ton truck in chapter eleven, so that he doesn’t walk very well. Anyhow, there was some blackmail because of the whipping party and there was a murder—it was Lydia Monk who was done in—to which I happened to be a witness, so they had to shut me up, which they did by beating me up several times, and doing things I’d rather not mention to my intimate parts. In the end, I drowned in the swimming pool of the very nunnery I’d earlier thought of joining. That’s why I’m all wet and pale now, only of course your listeners can’t see that because it’s only radio, meaning no offence….”

  “Lydia can’t be here either,” said Shaw, rescuing her from confusion. “In chapter thirteen she was sealed in a concrete block used as the foundation stone for a betting shop in Step
ney. She’s been rather tied down ever since.”

  “Marcus Custer put me through hell…,” said Rita, raising her voice to get back into the debate. But she was interrupted again, this time by Marcus Custer, who had noticed the interview at last and had thrown open his sitting-room window.

  “Get the hell away from here!” he screamed. “Don’t talk to the Commie bastards! Interview me, goddamit! I’m the injured party. It’s my life they’re fucking up.”

  With what Custer had once described as “the inimitable alacrity of the newshawk”—when speaking of Quentin d’Arcy of the Gazette in Vile Victims—the hirsute individual bounded over Custer’s garden wall and trampled the dahlias in a desperate attempt to maintain continuity.

  “Would you kindly repeat that, Mr. Custer?” he requested. “I think you were too far away from the mike for us to get the full-blooded roar effect.”

  “You don’t understand,” moaned Custer, wondering why the microphone looked so absurdly small and unsympathetic. “They’ve got a picket line round my mind. I can’t think. I can’t write. The dust jackets for Evil Ecstasy have been printed and I haven’t even got a plot. A masterpiece, stillborn. Let me appeal to my public to do everything in their power to stop this strike.”

  “What do you suggest?” asked the interviewer.

  “The public is with us!” called Jonathan Shaw from the pavement.

  “The public must continue to believe in me,” said Custer, dramatically. “My books are about life and death—the human tragedy. They are the authentic distillate of the zeitgeist of the contemporary Western World. There is no other author alive who has so accurately taken the pulse of these troubled times. The characters in my book are true—not merely to life, but to that exquisite understanding of life which is the prerogative of the great artist. Of course the characters in my books are chewed up and destroyed, but not by me—by the very nature of reality. They want to turn me into yet another wretched escapist, committing moral treason with every word I write. They want to castrate my work. They want to turn me into a factory for packing pre-digested pickled puerility. But I have penetrating vision, thrusting intellect, orgasmic insight! I spit on happy endings! Custer has integrity! He will not betray his art!”