Get Poor Slow

by David Free

  The first side of the record ended. Down on the road a car went by. That had been my life: forty years of thinking things over when things were over. Forty years of seeing things clearly but too late. In his office, during the last two minutes we’d shared on the planet, Skeats had told me I’d wasted my life. He had been dead right, and now he was just dead. Those facts were not unconnected. There are some things you just don’t get to say to another man, especially if they are true. Squandering your life is not a small deal. But it doesn’t happen all at once. The bad news creeps up on you. When I was twenty, I thought the world would care about what I wrote, if I wrote it well enough. The evidence that it never would took a long time to turn irrefutable. By the time it did, it was too late to change my ways. I had less time left than I had heaped on the bad bet. All those hours at the keyboard. All those drafts. All those times in the dead of night when I turned on the light and scribbled down some phrase I thought someone might like in the non-existent future. I needn’t have bothered. I could have stayed in bed all day and jerked off. I could have settled for being third-rate but solvent. It was all for nothing, all that time.

  I got up and flipped the record. Back in the chair I closed my eyes. Maybe every life feels like a waste, when you look at it from the end. And shapeless, too: half-meant and half-accident. You could call my errors self-inflicted, but from the inside they didn’t feel like that. A self I no longer was went off a garage roof one day, and the self I became kept leaping, kept seeking the concrete. I did those things, but it was hard to remember deciding to, or having much choice. In the dark, waiting for Fingle, I recalled no day or moment when I could seriously have changed my fate. That original fall or jump: say I could rewind the tape beyond it, and play things forward again. Would I still go near the edge? How could I not, when I have never known why I did? If I made any deliberate choices up there, I forgot them at the moment of impact. But maybe I thought something like: This is art. Take the leap, and somehow the landing will work. Write, commit yourself, and something will break your fall. It’s worked for others. There will be a public down there. They will catch you. They won’t let you hit the ground. Well, I hit the ground then, and I never stopped hitting it, and I still didn’t know if I chose the fall or the fall chose me. All I knew was that the difference didn’t matter. Either way the result was the same.

  I heard something from the bedroom, or thought I did. I waited to hear it again. Nothing. A trick of the ear. My eyes were still closed. Sleep was starting to want me. A rattling blast of wind. The power dipped out for a second. The record went sluggish then surged back up to speed. Another blast of wind. I sat up sharply. About five variations had gone by. I must have slept through them, because I hadn’t been awake. I listened and heard nothing but more wind. I closed my eyes again. I fell into a dream that seemed to last no longer than two seconds. I was standing at my car, filling its tank from a jerry can. The fuel kept missing the hole and showering the earth. Fumes reared up into my nose and throat.

  I opened my eyes. I was out of the dream and back in the dark room, but somehow the stink of petrol had followed me in. I was still working out what that meant when the night beyond the stippled glass of the front door erupted in a thump of yellow heat. For an instant I saw a vandal’s silhouette through the door’s haze, backlit by jittering flame. Then the shadow surged at the glass and the glass blew in and dropped like a curtain, the smash already half-drowned under the crackle of blazing timber. Here he came, riding into the room on this huge wave of light and noise and splintered glass, with the whole front deck a lake of orange fire behind him. The philosophical portion of the evening was over. Dallas Fingle had arrived, with a plan as barbarous as his prose.

  Its first flaw, if you didn’t count torching the house as a flaw, was that I saw him before he saw me. By the time he did, I had covered the boards between us and was arcing my bottle into his face like a nine iron. His crazed momentum doubled the heft of my swing, and my swing had been all heft to start with. The impact was magnificent. Both the bottle and his face exploded, and I took a lavish backspray of warm booze, warmer blood, spit, sweat, spume, glass, teeth. On the downside, the torn neck of the bottle did not remain in my hand. That turned out to matter a lot, because Fingle did not stop coming. My best shot had hardly given him pause. He slammed rampantly into me and rode me to the floor. His supercharged weight pinned me to the boards. I had forgotten how sinewy and furious he was in his proper element. He didn’t even seem to have brought a weapon. So far he was doing fine without one. He had me fully on my back now, in the missionary pose. Hot fluids rained from his face onto mine. The open doorway behind him was a cataract of noon-bright heat. In the writhing light his rearing shadow crazily danced. His face flickered in monochrome, like Nosferatu’s, complete with fucked-up teeth. His hands wanted my throat. I pushed back at his iron wrists. It was equal to pushing back at some blind natural force, like time, like erosion. Glenn Gould played on. Above me Fingle was either smiling or grimacing. He had a beard of black slime. This was as intimate as sex but only one of us was going to like the ending. I doubted it would be me. I was starting to feel my age down there. He was better at this than I was. He was younger and stronger and madder. It was a bad time to grasp how much these things mattered. I should have challenged him to a prose contest instead. But I had, and I’d lost that too. On the turntable the last variation stopped and the coda began: the closing of the circle, the restatement of the theme. I thought I might as well stay alive to hear it. But after three bars I heard nothing but the roar of timber becoming flame, like feral static, like thunderous applause. The smoke alarm got the message and started pointlessly bleating. Fingle’s profane hands were six inches from my throat. His knee was on my one good lung. I opened my mouth to gulp air and tasted a salty rope of his blood and oral slime. I spat and shook my head. The fire was all around us now. We were inside it. It had gone from frightening to fucking ridiculous. The iron roof of the porch groaned and buckled as if being chewed. Rivets blew like rifle shots. Flame doglegged through the open door and turned the curtains into an inverted waterfall of fire. Fingle’s goatee of blood and drool went from monochrome to shocking red. Against the front wall my pillars of unread books were going up like effigies. Catullus, the guys like that, all those classics I had saved for the rainy day that suddenly would never come. Cinders spewed down on us like hot slag. It was hardly a question, any more, of which one of us would die. We were both going to. It would be a miracle if we didn’t. Was that what he wanted? Mutual extinction? I saw that it had been a radical error to leave the evening’s finer points up to him. The fire was vintage Fingle: the epic gesture, void of sense. The halfwit’s version of profundity. I owed it to the world to take this imbecile down with me. Surely that was the best I could now do: consign both of us to the flames, and hope it conflicted with his plans.

  But a wilder option was still open to me. The armchair wasn’t far behind us. The hammer was still on the floor beside it. If I released one of his wrists and reached back there, there was a fair chance I’d find it. But it would be my valedictory gamble. The moment I let go, he would have my throat. If all I found back there was empty floor, I’d be fucked. But I was getting fucked now anyway, pretty much literally. His quivering iron hands were two inches from my throat and his shirt was half off and his knee was on my balls and he was drooling blood into my eye. And his cock was on my belly, and it was rock-hard. Yes: the unforgivable little freak was hard. That settled it. It was high time one of us died. I let go and reached back. The dam broke and his hands came down on my throat: first one, then the other. If I’d known how bad it would feel I wouldn’t have let it happen. A zeppelin exploded behind my ribs, and the flames had nowhere to go. My body wanted to cough and gag and breathe and scream and burst at the same time. When none of these things proved possible it tried harder. A riotous tingling filled my drifting distant limbs. I felt my eyeballs swell towards infinity, like Missy’s. My vision w
ent dark: I saw a night sky full of blooming flak, a deluge of paratroopers opening blotchy purple chutes. Flailing my flung-back hand, I hit and toppled the upright hammer. As I slid away from care, I found the fallen rubber handle and gripped it and swung the head lazily back into the fading world.

  The steel glanced off something bony and skidded beyond it, the shaft twisting in my hand like a tennis racquet caught on the frame, the grip quivering with a sick electric buzz. The spillway to my lungs surged back open, and I raggedly gorged myself on air. Through a field of opening poppies I saw Fingle kneeling above me, with both hands pressed ardently to his upper face. Blood flowed through them like hose water through the cupped hands of a child. The hammer was still in my hand. The whole near side of his skull hung before me unprotected, proffered, floating there like a fruit, a sweat-matted coconut. Either time had frozen or he held this pose for an epoch, in eerie surrender, as if begging me to take the shot. I took it, with an exuberance I still half-regret. This time the hammer didn’t bounce off. It sank right into his skull, like an axe into a wet log. I hadn’t drunk nearly enough to make that sight forgettable. My own skull sizzled with tender horror in the same place, as if to confirm I was still human. Fingle no longer was, if he ever had been. He crawled away like a sprayed bug, vomiting. The hammer decoupled itself from his dented skull and flipped to the floor. With horrible zombie-like doggedness he struggled to his feet. He put a hand up and felt the wicked sinkhole in his head, then walked backwards in a stunned sort of way until he hit the flaming curtains and donned them like a cape. His sleeves went up fast. The poor dead stooge must have dappled them with splashback while laying down the fuel. When he reeled forward again he was clawing at his lapels, as if things could still be made right by the shedding of his jacket. He was wrong about that. A lot of him was on fire, including his hair. His arms were wings with flames for feathers. Like a great crippled bird he flapped them and staggered towards me. I backed away, not wanting to catch his disease. I retreated to the part of the house that was still part of a house. Soon I could retreat no further. I was up against the door that Missy Wilde was on the other side of. Fingle was up against that door too, in his lumbering symbolic way. He always had liked his metaphors crude. The tackler of the big themes was about to tackle the biggest theme of all. He was no longer a man on fire. He was fire in the rough shape of a man. He sank to his knees, uttering a burro’s shriek that I doubt I will ever get out of my head. I heard it all too vividly, even over the roar of everything else. Then, briefly, he tried to crawl again. I decided that the rest had better happen in private. Watching it no longer felt right. I turned and took my leave through the bedroom door. The handle felt like the face of a hot iron: it flayed my fingers almost to the bone. The room behind it was a cube of mud-thick smog. I couldn’t see the window but I knew where it was. I went straight for it. I didn’t look back. If I’d had any prized possessions, I’d have died getting them. At the window I made the mistake of putting my hand briefly, very briefly, on the blistering sill. When I put the sole of my boot there instead I smelt frying rubber. I took a token last glance back at Missy but saw only a world of smoke. I launched myself out into the arctic air, and staggered to the top of the yard’s slope, and fell down there and watched the rest of everything burn. It didn’t take long.

  14

  Killing Fingle was a good career move, for one of us. Guess which one. Guess what getting exposed as a multiple murderer did for his bottom line. Guess how far into the black I sent him by toasting him alive. The marketers, Jade’s heirs, worked fast. They refashioned the Fingle brand on the fly. Back when he was alive, and guilty of nothing except crimes against prose, they had positioned him as merely ‘powerful’. Now they called him ‘controversial’. They rush-released his novel with that word on the cover. That turned out to be controversial too, which was probably part of their plan. You don’t sell the book, you sell the look. Did I make that phrase up, or did I get it from Jade? The cover is where the fiction starts. You can say whatever you like on it. If the contents turn out to be no good, that’s the next book’s problem, and that book will probably be no good anyway, and so will the next one, until finally, like the man who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island, you create one top-heavy idol too many, and there are no more books at all.

  Did Jade say these things? Maybe she did, on that last night we spent together – that night I had and then lost before the fist of memory could close around it.

  On the plus side, Fingle’s corpse won no literary prizes. You don’t get to kill that many people and still bag the major awards, no matter how morally okay you seem on the page. In the blogs and the book-chat columns, the pundits scratched their heads about his case. The contrast between his off-page evil and his on-page righteousness struck them as ‘ironic’. It struck nobody that inoffensiveness must be a meaningless achievement, if a man like Fingle can pull it off. Instead they spoke of his complexity, his demons: the epic struggle between the regrettable life and the non-regrettable work. Nobody floated the radical thought that he was simply no good. That heresy wasn’t conceivable. In that department Jade’s work was done, and would never be undone. Fingle had merit – the notion had been grafted into the bible of received ideas. He was a touchstone. When people wanted to define quality now, they would think of Fingle’s big creaking symbols on the harbour, blotting out the light of nuance, dropping their ponderous anchors into a cellophane sea.

  Fingle smelled, when he burned, like cooking meat. I should have been ready for that. In a way I was. I knew he was just an animal. How could I not know that? But I wasn’t ready for how much he would smell like meat. He didn’t just smell a bit like it, or a lot like it. He smelt exactly like it. He was it. Death is not as exotic as you think. It doesn’t just happen to other people in other rooms. You start getting that message, once a certain number of corpses turn up in your house. Seneca was one old Roman I did happen to read, before all those classics of mine went up in smoke. You are wrong, he said somewhere, to think of death as something you haven’t had yet. A lot of it has happened to you already. Look at all that life you’ve left behind, all those days you have already lost. So why worry about dying? Seneca said. Most of you is dead already. Apparently this struck Seneca as quite a feel-good observation. I’m fucked if I know why.

  Skeats got replaced by Barrett Lodge. I had seen that coming. After a while, you get so good at reading the past that you can foresee the future. But by then there’s not much of the future left. Lodge’s first order of business was never to call on my services again. I’d seen that coming too. Finally we have found something Lodge doesn’t like. He doesn’t like me. There, as always, he is on impeccably safe turf.

  Jill Tweedy rang me. She wasn’t the only agent or publisher who did, but she was the only one I needed to see. She received me in the Bennett and Bennett conference room. There was a long table with a platter of fruit on it. Tweedy wasn’t eating it, which evidently meant it was all for me. She was all smiles. Last time I’d seen her smile like that, the smiles had been aimed at Fingle, back when he was alive and still the blue-eyed boy. Now the A-game manners and the finger food were for me – the black-eyed boy, with fresh and legitimate bruises to go with my scars, and a thick glove of white bandage on my scorched right hand.

  ‘I think we can start talking about deadlines now,’ she told me. ‘You’ve got your ending now, which you didn’t before. That showdown in your house. A great reckoning in a little room. Get into that fruit, Ray, or I will. Also you’re out of the woods legally, which is nice. Plus you’ve got a clear arc now, personally. It turns out you were the good guy all along. Before, people never really knew what to make of you.’

  ‘They hated me,’ I said.

  More smiles, again not from me. You had to hand it to her. Before Fingle’s body was cold, before it had even smouldered back to room temperature, Tweedy had shoved a hefty pre-emptive advance into my bank account. Strange, that: she had fel
t no such urgency when I was starving and suspect and not so heroically in the news. Nor, back then, had she been inclined to give me nearly so much money. But Fingle was dead now, and I had killed him. And here was Tweedy talking about deadlines, strategies, pages. She thought she had me snookered. Her literary ethics were not a big improvement on Fingle’s. Oddly, she seemed to be betting that mine weren’t even worse.

  ‘There’ll be a synergy here with Tainted,’ she told me, interlacing her fingers. ‘Tainted will help your project, yours’ll help it. I see us selling yours as sort of a non-fiction sequel. The candid story behind the big work.’

  I had no wish to prolong the scene. I said, ‘Here’s something candid. Fingle was Jade’s baby. She created him, out of some very primal clay. The moment she was out of the way, you started claiming the credit.’

  She hadn’t known I knew that. She threw out some flustered but irrelevant words of denial.

  ‘Here’s something else,’ I said. ‘Why did she pull Fingle out of that slush pile? Not because he was any good.’

  ‘That’s politics,’ Tweedy said hastily. ‘People don’t want to read about that.’

  ‘I see. Killing him’s one thing, but saying he couldn’t write would be letting down the side.’ I waited, in case she wanted to register any more token protests. ‘So you don’t want me to be candid about him,’ I said, when she didn’t. ‘Or her.’ I waited. ‘Or him and her.’ I waited. ‘Or her and Skeats.’ I waited. ‘Or the way the business works.’ I waited. ‘You’re not looking for that much synergy.’

  ‘That,’ said Tweedy, ‘isn’t the book we want from you.’

  ‘What a shame,’ I said. ‘But thanks for the money.’

  She said nothing, which probably meant she had got my point already. In case she hadn’t I said, ‘You know what my story is. Either pay me to write it or pay me not to.’