Masques IV
Page 29
Big deal. It doesn’t matter anymore because even the experts admit that the Change is final and there’s no going back.
We don’t want to go back. The Change was painful; a Changeback would be too much to endure. Besides, it would be almost impossible to live in a world where one had to guess what paps and sulci and lesions lurked hidden under the smiling, pink-skinned surfaces of our mates and friends and co-workers.
That’s about all, Peter. It’s about time for the CBS Evening News so I have to close.
I feel better having written to you. I’ll put the letter away here in the box in the attic with the baby clothes that your mother carefully folded away so many years ago.
I just wanted to explain.
To explain and to say that I remain . . .
Your Loving Father
The Secret
Steve Allen
When applied to most people the word “versatile” may call to mind a person who not only writes serious fiction (whatever that is) but humor, not only juggles but yodels, and not only keeps up with politics but can explain them while simultaneously chewing gum.
We might as well let Steve Allen take custody of the word since he can do all those things (I’m not sure about the yodeling, actually) and a great many more. Better, he’s often done them during the same periods of time—not just sequentially—and exceptionally well. Check the record:
Author of mystery fiction (Murder in Vegas; The Talk Show Murders); of story collections (The Girls on the Fourth Floor; Wry on the Rocks); of political viewpoint (Letter to a Conservative); of commentary and appraisal (The Funnymen; Funny People; More Funny People); of personal experience and loss (Not All Your Laughter, Not All Your Tears; Beloved Son: A Story of the Jesus Cults)—and more than three thousand songs.
Steve also created a science-fiction classic everyone who read it remembers, “The Public Hating.” Sixty-five thousand people are crammed into Yankee Stadium to use their collective mind power on a convicted political prisoner . . . and hate him to death. (See? I knew you’d remember.) It’s an apt tale to mention now. The fictional execution is televised on all the networks.
As the original host of “The Tonight Show” (’54-’56), Allen employed his talents as quick-thinking ad libber, pianist, interviewer, and uncanny discoverer of comedians and singers to open up late-night t.v.; as host of the Sunday evening prime-time show bearing his name, his work reached thirty-five million people. His appearances on such staples as “I’ve Got a Secret” and “What’s My Line?” enhanced Steve’s renown as the tube’s best-informed wit (while putting the description “bigger than a breadbox” into the public consciousness), and his PBS program “Meeting of the Minds,” co-starring his actress wife Jayne Meadows, painlessly enhanced that consciousness.
While Allen is getting ready to remind the world he has never been on a box of staples in Bostich’s life, a personal intrusion: After I got out of the army, my similarly silly pal Don O’Brien and I enjoyed taping our ad lib impersonations of Steve and his hopefully immortal “men on the street.” We took turns being the shaky Don Knotts, Bill Dana’s “Jose Jiminez,” the “gosh-I-drew-a-blank” Tom Poston, and my favorite, Louis Nye’s irrepressible “Gordon Hathaway,” the “party doll.” Then I learned that Lynn, my father, was just as crazy about “The Tonight Show” and I began staying up late with my dad. That was the first time we’d ever been really close. It remained that way the rest of his life, because of laughter.
So, “Hi ho, Steverino,” even though “The Secret” is not a humorous yarn. Instead, it’s the kind of thoughtful and surprising story that fits as easily into the woof and warp of a Masques anthology as its remarkable author has fitted into our lives. Here’s the answer, Question Man: the meaning of life. The question?
I didn’t know I was dead until I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.
In fact I didn’t even know it at that exact moment. The only thing I knew for sure then was that I couldn’t see anything in the mirror except the wallpaper behind me and the small table with the hairbrushes on it low against the wall.
I think I just stood there for perhaps ten seconds. Then I reached out and tried to touch the mirror, because I thought I was still asleep on the couch in the den and I figured that if I moved around a bit, so to speak, in my dream I could sort of jar myself awake. I know it isn’t a very logical way to think, but in moments of stress we all do unusual things.
The first moment I really knew I was dead was when I couldn’t feel the mirror. I couldn’t even see the hand I had stretched out to touch it. That’s when I knew there was nothing physical about me. I had identity, I was conscious, but I was invisible. I knew then I had to be either dead or a raving maniac.
Just to be sure, I stepped back into the den. I felt better when I saw my body lying on the couch. I guess that sounds like a peculiar thing to say too, but what I mean is, I’d rather be dead than insane. Maybe you wouldn’t but that’s what makes horse races.
My next sensation (that’s the only word I can think of to convey my meaning to you) was that there was something pressing on my mind, some nagging matter I had almost forgotten. It was very much like the feeling you sometimes have when you walk over to a bookshelf or a clothes closet, let’s say, and then suddenly just stand there and say to yourself, “Now why did I come over here?” I felt a bit as if I had an imminent appointment.
I went over to the couch and looked down at myself. The magazine was open on the floor where it had slipped from my hand, and my right foot had fallen down as if I might have been making an effort to get up when I died.
It must have been the round of golf that did it. Larkin had warned me about exertion as long as three years ago, but after a fearful six months I had gotten steadily more overconfident. I was physically big, robust, muscular. I had played football at college. Inactivity annoyed the hell out of me. I remembered the headache that had plagued me over the last three holes, the feeling of utter weariness in the locker room after the game. But the cold shower had refreshed me a bit and a drink had relaxed me. I felt pretty good when I got home, except for an inner weariness and a lingering trace of the headache.
It had come while I was asleep, that’s why I didn’t recognize it. I mean if it comes in the form of a death-bed scene, with people standing around you shaking their heads, or if it comes in the form of a bullet from an angry gun, or in the form of drowning, well, it certainly comes as no surprise. But it came to me while I was lying there asleep in the den after reading a magazine. What with the sun and the exercise and the drink, I was a little groggy anyway and my dreams were sort of wild and confused. Naturally when I found myself standing in front of the mirror I thought it was all just another part of a dream.
It wasn’t, of course. You know that. You do if you read the papers, anyway, because they played it up pretty big on page one. “Westchester Man ‘Dead’ for 16 Minutes.” That was the headline in the Herald Tribune. In the Chicago Daily News the headline on the story was “New Yorker ‘Dead,’ Revived by Doctors.” Notice those quotation marks around the word dead. That’s always the way the papers handle it. I say always because it happens all the time. Last year alone there were nine of us around the country. Ask any of us about it and we’ll just laugh good-naturedly and tell you that papers were right, we weren’t dead. Of course we’ll tell you that. What else could we tell you?
So there I was, beside the couch, staring down at myself. I remember looking around the room, but I was alone. They hadn’t come yet. I felt a flicker of some kind that would be hard to describe—an urgency, an anxiety, a realization that I had left a few things undone. Then I tried a ridiculous thing. I tried to get back into myself. But it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t do it alone.
Jo would have to help, although we had just had a bitter argument. She had been in the kitchen when I had gone in to take a nap. I hurried to the kitchen. She was still there. Shelling peas, I think, and talking to the cook. “Jo,” I said, but of cours
e she couldn’t hear me. I moved close to her and tried to tell her. I felt like a dog trying to interest a distracted master.
“Agnes,” she said, “would you please close the window.”
That’s all she said. Then she stood up, wiped her hands, and walked out of the kitchen and down the hall to the den. I don’t know how I did it, but in a vague way she had gotten the message.
She let out a tiny scream when she saw the color of my face. Then she shook me twice and then she said, “Oh, my God,” and started to cry, quietly. She did not go to pieces. Thank God she didn’t go to pieces or I wouldn’t be able to tell the tale today.
Still crying, she ran to the hall phone and called Larkin. He ordered an ambulance and met it at the house inside of ten minutes. In all, only twelve minutes had elapsed since I had tried to look at myself in the mirror.
I remember Larkin came in on the run without talking. He ran past me as I stood at the door of the den and knelt down beside my body on the couch.
“When did you find him?” he said.
“Ten minutes ago,” Jo said.
He took something out of his bag and injected the body with adrenalin, and then they bundled “me” off to the hospital. I followed. It was five minutes away.
I never would have believed a crew could work so fast. Oxygen. More adrenalin. And then one of the doctors pushed a button and the table my body was on began to lift slowly, first at one end and then at the other, like a slow teeter-totter.
“Watch for blood pressure,” Larkin whispered to an assistant, who squeezed a rubber bulb.
I was so fascinated watching them I did not at first realize I had visitors.
“Interesting,” a voice said.
“Yes,” I answered, without consciously directing my attention away from the body on the tilting table. Then I felt at one and the same time a pang of fear and the release of the nagging anxiety that had troubled me earlier.
I must have been expecting them. There was one on each side of me.
The second one looked at the body, then at Larkin and the others. “Do you think they’ll succeed?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.”
The answer seemed significant. The two looked at each other. “We must be very certain,” he said. “Would it matter so much to you either way?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “I suppose it would. I mean, there’s work I’ve left unfinished.”
“Work isn’t important now, is it?” asked the first one.
“No,” I agreed. “It isn’t. But there are other things. Things I have to do for Jo. For the children.”
Again the two seemed to confer, silently.
“What sort of things?”
“Oh,” I said, “there are some business details I’ve left up in the air. There’ll be legal trouble, I’m sure, about the distribution of the assets of my firm.”
“Is that all?” the first one said, coming closer to me. Larkin began to shake his head slowly. He looked as if he were losing hope.
Then I thought of something else. “You’ll laugh,” I said, “but something silly just came into my mind.”
“What is it?” asked the second one.
“I would like to apologize to Jo,” I said, “because we had an argument this afternoon. I’d forgotten I’d promised to take her and the children out to dinner and a movie. We had an argument about it. I suppose it sounds ridiculous at a time like this to talk about something that may seem so trivial, but that’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to apologize to her for the things I said, and I’d like to keep that date. I’d like to take the children to see that movie, even if it is some cowboys-and-Indians thing that’ll bore the hell out of me.” That’s when it all began to happen. I can’t say that suddenly the two were gone. To say I was gone would be more to the point. They didn’t leave me. I left them. I was still unconscious, but now I was on the table. I was back inside my head. I was dreaming and I was dizzy. I didn’t know what was happening in the room then, of course. I didn’t know anything till later that night when I woke up. I felt weak and shaky and for a few minutes I wasn’t aware that Larkin and some other doctors and Jo were standing around my bed. There was some kind of an oxygen tent over my chest and head, and my mouth felt dry and stiff. My tongue was like a piece of wood but I was alive. And I could see Jo. She looked tired and wan but she looked mighty beautiful to me.
The next day the men from the papers came around and interviewed me. They wrote that I was in good spirits and was sitting up in bed swapping jokes with the nurses, which was something of an exaggeration.
It was almost a month before I could keep that date with Jo and the kids, and by that time the picture wasn’t even playing in our neighborhood. We had to drive all the way over to Claremont to see it, but we stopped at a nice tearoom on the way and had a wonderful dinner.
People still ask me what I felt while I was “dead.” They always say it just that way, getting quotation marks into their voices, treating it as something a little bit amusing, the way the newspapers did. And I go along with it, of course. You can’t say to them, “Why, yes, I was dead.” They’d lock you up.
Funny thing about it all was that I’d always been more or less afraid of the idea of death. But after dying, I wasn’t. I always knew I’d eventually go again, but it never worried me. I did my best to make a go of my relationships with other people and that was about the size of it. One other thing I did was write this little story and give it to a friend of mine, to be published only after my death.
If you’re reading it, that means I’ve gone again. But this time I won’t be back.
Afterword
In the fall of 1983, a year after I met J.N. Williamson, he suggested that we start a horror magazine. I declined, but I suggested instead that we try a hardcover horror anthology. That became, in 1984, the first Masques. In the course of assembling it, and with the help of William F. Nolan, both Jerry and I expanded our horizons. (I’d known no one else in the horror field, and he’d known few, despite his many published novels.)
To our surprise, Masques enjoyed, among other things:
A poem by Ray Bradbury
A previously-unpublished Charles Beaumont piece
A Robert R. McCammon story, “Nightcrawlers,” which was later dramatized on television’s Twilight Zone
An F. Paul Wilson story, “Soft,” which became the title story of his later collection
A Balrog Award
A World Fantasy
Award nomination (and one for “Nightcrawlers”)
Preferred Choice Bookplan and British paperback editions
As part of The Best of Masques, U.S. and Japanese paperback editions.
So we tried it again, with Masques II (1987), which included a 300-copy limited edition. We had, among others:
An original story by Stephen King
An Alan Rodgers novella, “The Boy Who Came Back from the Dead,” which later won a Bram Stoker Award, A World Fantasy Award nomination (and one for Rodgers’s “Boy,” and for Douglas E. Winter’s “Splatter”)
British, German, Italian, and Spanish paperback editions
As part of The Best of Masques, U.S. and Japanese paperback editions.
By mutual agreement, Williamson did Masques III (1989) with St. Martin’s Press. But now we’re together again. We hope that you’ve found Masques IV a worthy continuation of the series. We also hope that these fictional horrors have put you in mind of the all-too-real ones, such as war, crime, and injustice. So, on with the masques!
—John Maclay
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