Borderlands 3

by Thomas F. Monteleone (Ed. )

  ▼

  Rock and Pilgrim Talent Agency was on the other side of the hill, in Beverly Hills, on Canon St.

  I arrived five minutes early. I was ushered into Harry Pilgrim's office immediately.

  Harry Pilgrim was a florid faced, slim man of perhaps fifty years of age who looked much younger. He smiled vividly when he saw me and pumped my hand over his desk. I'd seen him at a couple of the services, but I'd never had occasion to talk to him. Nonetheless, he greeted me as though we were long lost brothers.

  "Don! Don, so good to see you!"

  I played along. "Good to see you, too."

  "Don, I hope we can do some business!"

  "Business? I'm always ready to do business, Harry. Isn't everyone in this town?"

  "Certainly, certainly. More specifically, I wanted you to meet a new client of mine."

  I'd noticed the young man sitting on the couch beside the desk, of course, but I thought maybe it was some sort of assistant who was on his way out anyway. I nodded to him.

  "Hi."

  "Don Edwards, this is Harvey Timmons. Harvey, this is Don Edwards, well known Hollywood television and film writer."

  Harvey Timmons bounced to his feet, full of enthusiasm and shook my hand, his face unable to hide frank admiration, perhaps awe. "Nice to meet you, sir. I've seen your name on shows, lots, and I've always enjoyed them. You're a consummate pro, sir, and I'm sure there's lots I could learn from you."

  He was maybe twenty-five, tops, eagerness shining in his eyes. I felt a little pang. He reminded me of me when I came to Hollywood, still idealistic, still teeming with dreams, the cream of hope still pure and sweet in the milk of my ambition.

  "Uh, nice to meet you, Harvey," I said, shaking his hand. I gave the agent a bemused look.

  Harry Pilgrim just kept on grinning. "It's my considered opinion, Jim, that Harvey here is one of the hottest new talents in town. He just hasn't hit properly yet. You know how that is."

  "You haven't sold anything yet?"

  "I came close. Real close. Mr. Pilgrim says it takes patience. Patience and perseverance. Well, whatever it takes, I'll give, sir. I'm absolutely determined to have a career here!"

  "Great! It's tough, I'll tell you!"

  "Oh, I know. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, right?"

  "Anyway," said Harvey. "I knew you were looking for new, raw talent."

  I was? Nonetheless, I kept my face clear of emotion, and played along.

  "Oh. Yes. Of course. Always looking for new writers, new talent..." I said. "I guess I should read your stuff, huh?"

  The agent tapped a pile of scripts on his desk. "This guy has got some terrific specs, let me tell you!"

  "Okay. Well, give me a couple of the best and I'll certainly take a look at them," I said. "Now, was there something else you wanted to talk to me about, Harry?"

  "Hmmm?" He looked from Harvey to me and then back again. "Oh yeah." He shifted gears again. "In a minute. Let's finish this here, okay? Main reason I called you down here, Don. Besides that of course..." He gave me a funny look. "Was so you and Harvey here could meet, get these scripts... Hoping of course that you guys might hit it off... Have lunch sometime, huh? Maybe even breakfast!"

  Power breakfasts being the 'in' thing these days, of course. "Sure! I mean... Well, I guess I should read the scripts, first."

  "If you could read my scripts," said Harvey, genuinely pleased, "well, that would be just fine with me. I don't know how I come across at lunch or breakfast. Maybe I'm boring, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure I'm a good script writer. And I've got lots of ideas where those came from. I could just go on and on, telling you about my script ideas."

  A glint lighted in the agent's eye. The gleam of filthy lucre? What else?

  "Great, well, I'll certainly look forward to reading them, then." I shook the kid's hand again and he took that as a cue to get lost. Which he did, quite obligingly.

  "Okay, so which scripts should I read?" I said, starting to feel a little better. Well, this wasn't so bad, I thought. Do a little reading for the Church. Maybe that was it... Maybe they were thinking about inducting him for some reason, and I was to evaluate his talent. Nothing so hard about that.

  "That's the guy," said Harry when he left. "That's your assignment, Don. He's really just perfect. The ultimate candidate?"

  "Candidate? What does that have to do with his scripts?" I said.

  The agent looked at me, puzzled. "That's not what we're talking about here, my friend." He tapped his temple knowingly. "That's not what we're talking about at all."

  "Look, you want to tell me what's going on here? I'm kind of in the dark."

  "You've got something to do for the Church, Don. The church has helped you a lot. You know that."

  "Yeah. But I'm still trying to figure out exactly what that is I've got to do!"

  "I would have thought that Jim Hampton made that clear to you when you joined. I would have thought you were smart enough to figure it out. It's in the service, you know. It's there. And it's in the contract you signed, too. You agreed to 'obey the summons to provide the Services necessary to sustain the offering, in whatsoever manner that shall reveal itself.'"

  "You want to stop being obtuse and tell me for God's sake?"

  He shrugged. "Okay."

  And he did.

  ▼

  When I got home, I poured a stiff drink, belted it and called Jim Hampton. He was out, so his secretary said, but he'd call me back. ASAP.

  Well, he didn't. I kept on calling him, and by the time I got to him at his home that evening, on his private office line, the one he'd forgotten I had, I'd had a few more drinks, so I got straight to the subject.

  "What the hell have you gotten me into?" I demanded.

  Silence on the other end. But at least he didn't hang up, like he might have.

  "Like I said, I thought I'd have time to explain." LA confidential, mano a mano style. I'd heard it before. Sorry about that guy. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

  "What do you think I am? I'm not going to do it!"

  "Okay. I understand. But you know, they won't."

  "I'll pay the fine."

  "There's no fine. The penalty is Coventry. Ostracism. None of the Church members will work with you again. Now, that's not all of this town by any means, but it's a significant portion. And I don't have to remind you that this is a small town."

  "And I suppose that means you too."

  "I'm bound by the oath I made."

  "Dammit, why didn't you tell me?"

  "I thought there was a chance you might not take the communion. And I knew how much you needed it. I was watching out for you, believe it or not. It's for the best... You'll get used to it. It's not that hard, believe me."

  "Well, I'm not going to do it!" I said.

  "Fine. That's your option." The voice was stiff and reserved now. "However, do remember... They'll never let you take communion again."

  "How could I... I ever take it again... How can you... Knowing..."

  "Easy," he said. "People out here have been taking it for a long, long time... Whether or not they're in the Church. Goodbye, Don. Let's put the tennis business in your court now, hmmm? Call me sometime."

  He hung up.

  I got another drink.

  ▼

  You've seen the experiment.

  You teach a bunch of planaria, those cross-eyed worms, to remember to do a trick. Go fetch food, or to hit a certain button so as not to get shocked. Something nice and scientific like that. Then you take those planaria, grind them up alive, and quickly feed them to other planaria.

  Bingo. The planaria who've just eaten their brethren know the trick.

  Transfer RNA. Memory.

  Some tribes in South America and Africa and the South Seas would eat their enemies to obtain their power.

  Specially treated grey matter, preserving the genetic structure, the mapping of neurons and synapses that will surge the old electrochemicals in the dance of cre
ation that creates ideas and all the attendant blaze of stories and scripts. Combined with depth psychology, ritual and, yes, perhaps some of that old 'black magic', it created a powerful drug, galvanizing the arthritic typing fingers of burnt-out but greedy Hollywood writers.

  And then, too, there was the sacrificial element. Every little bit of significance helped.

  That was what was on the cracker, of course. That was the 'meat' of the matter. I hadn't realized it (or had I, subconsciously) but what I was wolfing down so greedily all those services were nothing less than the neural pate of promising young writers, ferreted out by agents like Harry Pilgrim and then offered up in a grill for the crackers of the Church's insatiable hunger.

  Profile. Young, eager writer... in from Kickbutt, Iowa, to make his mark on the world. Not a whole lot of background, but a hell of a future. I probably hadn't had the talent to have even been considered. Usually I thought that the worst that could happen to these talents were drugs, alcohol, blah blah blah—the usual Hollywood shmear.

  Now I knew that something more evil awaited them... Getting served upon on a cracker with champagne.

  And those bastards wanted me to take care of their 'new' mark.

  No way, I thought.

  Uh uh.

  ▼

  I was dry.

  All I had on my screen was blank space and WordPerfect page parameters.

  Less than a week after the meeting with Harry Pilgrim and Harvey Timmons, I wasn't just dry, either. A couple of my deals had fallen through, and another was teetering shakily.

  The night before last, I'd been impotent with my wife, something that had never happened before. A little sidelight of 'withdrawal' from communion? Maybe. Maybe it was just total terror.

  I didn't have a single new idea, and the old ideas were sticking in my throat like dead bugs in a Roach Motel.

  I sat in my office, out over the canyon, and terror slowly moved through my guts.

  It wasn't just the money, though God knows that was the major part. You get used to money, you get used to the privileged lifestyle it buys, it's damned hard to move backwards. The numbers get into your bloodstream, your sinews; get wrapped up into your ganglia and into your equations of achievement and self-worth. When you consider just how little in comparison it really takes to just survive in lower circumstances, it makes you realize you've got a needle in your head, pumping in those druggy numbers.

  But it wasn't just the money.

  Failure is not a welcome thing in this town. You're like a leper, you get stuck in metaphorical colonies and people laugh at you when your nose drops off in your soup.

  A day later, still cemented in writer's block, brain screaming for communion worse than any junkie's brain ever screamed for heroin, I sat in my office and looked out into the unusually stormy Los Angeles sky.

  Rain was trickling down the window, like watery bars.

  ▼

  "Hello?"

  "Harvey? Harvey Timmons?"

  "Yes."

  "Don Edwards here."

  A wonderful profile, Pilgrim had said. No girlfriend. Lives in a cheap hotel in Hollywood. He's from North Dakota. Not a whole lot of family.

  "Oh... Mr. Edwards... Great! I mean, good to hear from you."

  "Yeah, Harvey. I read your scripts."

  "Yes?"

  "Let's take a meeting. Get to know each other." Pause. Breath. "I think I can use you."

  Just A Closer Walk With Thee by John Maclay

  One of the hallmarks of this anthology series has been the effort to avoid the hoary cliches that we should all be very tired of. But every once in a while I get a story that takes some shopworn icon and turns it inside out, gives it a new spin, and reminds me that there are no tired ideas, only tired writers. John Maclay appears for the second time in this series with a piece that gives new meaning to the word "perspective." He lives in Baltimore where, with his wife Joyce, he continues to operate a high quality publishing company, Maclay & Associates. He's sold more than 100 short stories that have appeared in more than a dozen mass markets in addition to many Small Press publications, and he is, like your not-so-humble editor, a lifelong Orioles fan.

  I'm an old man now, a retired department store clerk, and I live with my wife in a rowhouse with a small back yard. Our two sons are grown, there are a couple of grandchildren, and I've left the scene for a passive way of life. My daily routine consists of helping with the housework, pruning the roses, and a regular schedule of meals, television, and sleep. But to keep myself in shape, and to get out of my wife's hair for a few hours, I take long walks.

  Walking is the best exercise, and if you keep at it, you'll find that you've developed a surprising range. When I first retired, I only took strolls around the neighborhood, and came back with aching feet. But after a while I started walking to destinations, maybe a hardware store ten blocks away, or a fast food place fifteen, and I wasn't too tired. Then the tall buildings downtown seemed much closer, and I didn't see any reason not to go there without the car. So one day I wound up at the harbor, hardly conscious of how I'd got there. I took the bus back, but since then I've walked the round trip, with my body not even reminding me in the evening.

  When you walk like that, it becomes automatic, and your mind sort of rolls on too. Sometimes you develop patterns of thought, but usually they're random, and unattached to the things you see. And if you're old like I am, you think of things you may have forgotten for sixty years, feeling them come back as fresh as if they were only yesterday. Then you have to come to terms with them again, though your age and the rhythm of the walk makes them more like a movie, something to be watched and not judged.

  Because you'll come to judgment for them soon enough, before God. Even if they're horrible... one horrible thing. Even if, as though your automatic feet and mind have drawn you there, you come to the scene.

  ...Repressing, I think it's called. You do something you should be punished for, to put it mildly, and you're never found out. Then you think of confessing it, but you're too afraid. Then you go through hell about it inside yourself, yet gradually that hell fades. Then you build a life in spite of it, because that's the only thing to do. Finally it becomes like something someone else did, a part of history. Anyway...

  The River Road is the shortest way downtown. I grew up near it, on a street of houses that had been built for textile workers before the Civil War. The cotton mill was down along a rushing stream, and the road follows that. There's a lot of history along the road too, since it's surprising how many things built by man don't get disturbed unless they need to be. For example, there's the half circle of a dam, now useless without the millrace. And the small stone drainage tunnel, on a bank above the road, under some long since torn up railroad tracks...

  I saw the tunnel again when I started walking the River Road. I must have driven by it many times, but that's not real like walking. Though it's surrounded by a big city, the road isn't much traveled, and it's lined by woods, so a walker can stop, look, and think. And since then, since the first day I noticed the tunnel again, I've thought about it many times. Since then... flashback, I think it's called...

  I'm seventy-two now, so I was a dark-haired twelve then, in 1930. My father worked long hours at the mill so my mother wouldn't have to, and his reward was a boy he must have hated. Mother kept me scrubbed clean, dressed me in clothes the other boys made fun of, and generally kept me out of touch from the normal things. I got to know what women were like, but less as a man than as one myself. Mother told me you never kissed one unless you were married. It's a common thing, a woman grasping too much, trying to make her son such a fine man that he isn't one at all. In short, girls were a mystery to me.

  I sang in the church choir, too, wearing one of those elastic red skirts and a blousy white top. It was Gospel, and we sang those old hymns that, if you think about the words, are very strange. "Just a Closer Walk with Thee." And the one about the garden, where you walk with Jesus and have an experience that can
only be described as... So the church, too, may have helped, in the way it aroused yet twisted the normal urges of a boy of twelve. May have... helped?

  It was a hot August day, one of those when nature is burstingly, almost sickeningly full, like a turgid thing. I was walking the River Road, with a vividness in my young mind that made me notice every pebble on the dusty shoulder, every tree and vine in the humid woods, and every ripple in the stream below. It was a Saturday, and the hymns were playing in me, the ones I'd sing the next morning in the brick church I could see in the distance above the bluff. I imagined myself in a hot country, the one whose clay buildings we used to make with blocks in Sunday school.

  That's when I saw the boy.

  He was walking towards me, alone, out of those strange waves the heat makes in the air. If I'd believed in visions in the here and now, I'd have thought he was sent, somehow. He was eight or nine, blond, was wearing only bathing trunks, and was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, from his smiling face to his smooth, tanned skin and bare feet. I knew I shouldn't be reacting as I was, that it had something to do with the heat and with forces inside me I'd been taught not to know. But there was really nothing I could do.

  Then we met, and I started to walk with him. He must have thought I was an innocent playmate, an older boy he could trust, as we explored the woods and skipped rocks into the stream together. But all the time, I felt it building. And when we returned to the road, and decided to search out the wet, dark—

  —repressing, I think it's called, since I know now what the symbol was—

  —tunnel, my head was pounding and my veins seemed about to burst from what was pent up in me. I found myself staring into the boy's blue eyes, noticing his parted red lips, and he looked not so much like a... girl than like the picture above the altar at church, the picture of the crucified Jesus that the zealots seemed to like so much. I suddenly longed to kiss those lips, and at the same time to inflict that pain, though even then another voice was telling me I had the act, the act I was about to perform for the first time, so very, very wrong. But there was nothing, nothing I could do to stop it.