400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  “To type!” I gasped. “You mean...as the old authors did?”

  “Yes, yes. You’ll see your thoughts transformed to printed words. It can be a heady experience for a young lad, as I well remember.” He chuckled at my expression, but I think he scarcely suspected the depth of my awe. To write...to type...to emulate the Master. This would be my life’s work!

  “Are you interested, then?” he asked.

  Without a word I thrust my hand into his and pumped it rapidly. The bargain was sealed. So it was that with the loftiest of intentions, I set forth on the lowest path that fate could possibly provide me.

  My father was distressed when I gave him the news, but he did his best to hide it, and even expressed some happiness. That night he brought out his private stock of absinthe and I had my first taste of that bitter potion. I slept unsoundly, caught between the worlds of wakefulness and dream, yet my thrashings were full of nightmarish images, distant voices growing nearer, and the first intimations of my foolish ambition. I remember, it was on the following morning that my eyes sprang open, and this thought floated from my eyes: I shall learn to type like Strapon Thing!

  With a diligence that surprised my master Coxset, I threw myself into the trade of typewriter repair. For a matter of weeks I had no other thought than to become expert in every task that he passed my way, whether it was collecting and bagging the piles of dust that he scraped from the bars of old Olivettis, or rubbing ink and sewing patches into the faded ribbons which his regular customers brought in for repair. At night I would eat a few bites of my father’s healthful salads of boiled nettle and tender young foxtail, then I would leap into my sack and dream of typewriters with gleaming keys, silver hammers spattering onto sheets of fairy-white paper.

  It was some months later that Dorky Coxset announced a holiday. He was traveling up to Mazmere to visit his widowed sister. It seemed she had contracted a bad case of the languish, and Dorky was concerned for her. He handed me the keys to the shop, in case of an emergency, and said that he would return in three days' time.

  The moment he left me alone, I remembered what I had been intending for months. Taking a few trading stamps from my weekly stipend, I hurried downtown to the Museum and bought myself a ticket.

  On earlier visits I had come to know all the musty lower floors of the Museum, with their cases and cages full of charred artifacts. On this occasion I rushed upstairs to the Special Collection and asked a curator for specific directions to the exhibit I sought. Within moments I stood alone before a dusty plastic cabinet. A lantern flickered at my elbow, so I raised it for a better look at the objects within. My heart pounded like a drum in the vast gallery.

  There were a dozen pages painstakingly restored from scattered fragments, the print retouched by experts in order to rescue meaning from the damaged words. Here it was that I first glimpsed the mystic epic of Don Cujo, the anguished Bernardine saint who drove himself to a mad death tilting at cars, in the company of his faithful but rabid dog, Sancho Dracula. Here also I gazed upon actual pages from the unparalleled prophetic tragedy of humanity’s fall from grace—namely Salem’s Lost, which had been dictated by a blind Strapon Thing to his daughter Orphelius.

  But more affecting than any of these remnants was a slight bit of human script, not typed but actually penned. Discovered on the flyleaf of some decomposing volume, it had been positively identified despite its advanced age and decrepitude as the actual signature of the Master himself!

  The lantern nearly fell from my hands when I realized what it was I beheld. I lapsed into a reverie like that which had claimed me at my first encounter with the Master’s words. My eyes moved again and again over the broken lines of the signature. The scribbles were etched upon my memory—and deeper, upon my very soul. They bound and held me captive.

  When I next became aware of my surroundings, I was standing in the street outside my home. It was quite dark. My fingers twitched in my pocket, still tracing those lines. I gazed up at the window of my father’s study and heard him laughing, reading lines of Thing out loud to himself. I hurried into the house, anxious to let him know where I had been, eager to share my day’s discoveries. But all my anticipations were quickly demolished.

  I had never seen him in such a fury. My appearance threw him into paroxysms. He had been drinking heavily; the absinthe stink was on his breath, on his clothes, and I swore to myself that I would never again so much as sip the stuff. He demanded to know why I was late, but before I could begin to answer he launched into a fantastical attack on the trade which I had chosen to pursue. He insulted Dorky Coxset’s honor and intelligence, insinuating that some dark relationship had sprung up between the old man and myself. Why else would I have so few words to spare for my dear father? Why else would I spend every waking moment away from home? It was as if, he said, I had wed myself to a typewriter, without so much as my father’s blessing.

  I realized that his bitterness stemmed from loneliness. I tried to explain that I thought most highly of his trade in weeds but that it had never held any great appeal for me. He howled and threw his empty bottle at the wall near my head. I wanted desperately to bridge the gap between us, but Father rose up with his hands shaped into crablike claws. I tore myself away from him. I fled the house of my birth and ran headlong down the streets toward the only haven I knew: the typewriter repair shop.

  For an hour or so I sat weeping at my workbench. Never had I known such emotional extremes in the space of a single day. From the heights of aesthetic ecstacy to the trough of despair.

  I cast about for some salvation, some flimmer of hope, and my hand strayed across an ink pen. I snatched it up idly, thinking to play a dangerous game of mumblety-pen, imagining my father’s reaction if I were to stab myself with an inky nib. Would he relent? Would he love me again?

  Instead I found my fingers moving as they had moved earlier. On a scrap of paper I signed the name of Strapon Thing, over and over again.

  After awhile, realizing what I had done, I raised the paper to my eyes and scrutinized the signature. It looked exactly like that which I had seen in the museum that afternoon—more so, in fact, for it was fresh and alive!

  I thought of my father and the pleasure that would be his if only he could own a signature of Strapon Thing. I realized that it was in my power to grant him such joy as he had never dreamed of acquiring.

  I tossed aside the scrap of practice paper and headed into the dim recesses of Dorky Coxset’s storerooms. I had never ventured farther than several feet among the leaning stacks of old paper and corroded typewriters, for Dorky did not like me poking about in the dark. This time I brought the lantern along. My search led me into the depths of the storeroom, and quite a maze it was. Beneath layers of dust, undisturbed for years, I found bottles of nearly colorless ink and ballpoint pens whose balls refused to roll. I selected a few sheets of particularly malodorous paper and returned to my workbench, where Dorky had been teaching me the rudiments of typing in the evenings, after more important business was concluded. I also brought with me an ancient Underwood that Dorky had pronounced unfit for repair and abandoned several weeks before, but from which I managed to elicit more than half the alphabet. I thought it lent the proper air of antiquity to my work.

  “My work.” What euphemisms the mind is capable of framing when it diligently stretches to avoid the simple truth!

  For hours I labored over that first letter, filling it with the few scraps of knowledge that I had gleaned of the days before the Turbulation. I filled the missive with mysterious implications and carefully left them unexplained. It would not do, after all, to have Strapon Thing explaining commonplaces to one of his contemporaries. The gist of the letter, if you did not see it during the brief but popular tour of my father’s collection, was merely to thank one of Thing’s readers for his admiring response to The Whining. I also framed, in Thing’s words, my intentions to publish a novel which I hoped my fictitious reader would equally enjoy, an extravaganza which I dubbed Good 'n' E
vil. Then I signed the Master’s name to all this nonsense.

  Already, as you see, the length and breadth of my plans were mapped out in my mind. Once my course was set, it was merely a matter of sticking to it. For in my heart I had resolved that my father would love me again, no matter what deeds I was driven to.

  Late that night I returned home and found him collapsed across the threshold, snoring heavily. I covered him with a blanket and in his hand I placed my letter. Then I crawled into my bag.

  I was awakened at first light by his astonished gasp. He stood at the window, a hand to his head, his eyes red-rimmed but fervent with joy.

  “My boy!” he cried. “Maven, my son, do you know what this is? Where did you find it?”

  “I...I thought you might be interested in it, Father,” I replied, erasing all guile from my face and voice. “Dorky Coxset has a new client, a gentleman from the country—a very secretive gentleman—who has asked us to retype a number of old papers belonging to his grandmother. In exchange, he promised that we may keep what we wish of the original manuscripts. Dorky’s collection of antique stationery is quite well-known, I suppose. But he’s been too busy to do any typing himself. He said that if I did the work, I could have my pick of the paper.”

  “But my boy, my boy, this is no less than an original Strapon Thing!”

  Before I could express my amazement, my father threw his arms around me and tried to draw me into a jig. I reminded him of the fragile paper which he held, and we set it safely aside before continuing with our celebrations. To my displeasure he insisted on opening another bottle of absinthe, while asking me again to tell him the story of the letter’s origin. He was very curious about the mysterious gentleman.

  “Do you think there might be more letters from Strapon Thing in his grandmother’s collection?”

  I nodded. “Undoubtedly. He mentioned reams of pages like this one, and not merely correspondence. He thought there might be an entire novel somewhere in the mess. Perhaps it is the one mentioned in the letter—Good 'n' Evil.”

  My father stumbled backward and sat down hard on the floor, with a loud hiccup and a spill of absinthe. His face had gone white. His mouth moved peculiarly. I wondered if he might be hallucinating. The absinthe had strange properties. But after awhile I heard him say, “Incredible fortune. But we must have these pages inspected. The Dean of the College will want to see them, and Professor Tadmonicker. Do you have these pages at the repair shop?”

  “No, Father,” I stated quite honestly, and then went on boldly into fabrication. “The gentleman insisted that he apportion them to us a few at a time, so that he might have the opportunity to organize them, and so that we would not become burdened by the work. He was a peculiar fellow; I did not entirely understand his reasoning but he was most particular on these points.”

  My father sat deep in thought. “A gentleman. Good family. Grandmother. Money. Perhaps they had a shelter-one that worked, I mean. Old money. Who knows what might have been preserved? And no wonder they are reclusive. Still, it would be excellent to meet this man. We shall have to see if it can be arranged at some point. Don’t be too brash with him, Maven. He mustn’t be frightened off. Go at it gradually but see if you can’t talk him into a meeting.”

  I swallowed my doubts and nodded in order to please him.

  I left my father perusing the letter, marveling at its excellent condition, and I swore to bring home whatever pages I finished copying. The grand scheme had been hatched; now the living monster issued forth.

  All day I worked at my bench, ignoring the insistent knocking of Dorky’s customers. My typing had improved greatly in the several weeks I’d been at it; my fingers fairly flew over the ponderous keys of the old Underwood. The only thing that slowed me was an uncertain knowledge of the days before the Turbulation. This troubled me for some time, until I recalled that the Master had been known not chiefly for his correspondence, but for his fiction!

  Refreshed by this insight, I embarked on my first major undertaking—an original manuscript of the epic, Ik! Only scattered fragments of the tale had been discovered. I had no fear that the forgery would be denounced on a comparative basis.

  By nightfall, I was ready with a slender sheaf of pages purporting to have issued from the Master’s own Underwood. Weary and expectant, I approached my father’s house only to find it the scene of great excitement. White-bearded gentlemen in dark coats thronged the doorway, arguing with tremendous energy, stamping at the dust of the street as they made their points. I thought that fully half the staff of the College must be present in our house, and I noticed also several foreboding old men and women in the distinctive striped frocks of Museum custodians and the Prior Historical Society. Hoping to pass unnoticed among them, I slipped the forgeries under my jacket and hurried toward the door. But my father, standing in the second-story window, noticed my approach and called out loudly, “There you are, Maven! Have you brought more treasures from the Master?”

  Instantly the professors and historians converged on me. I was nearly crushed by the excited crowd until a strong hand rescued me and a powerful voice said, “Stand away from the lad, can’t you see he’s frightened? And no wonder. Come along, boy. This way. Your father awaits, and he’s not the only one.”

  I looked up into the face of my benefactor, and thus had my first glance at Professor Tadmonicker. He was a tall, thin man with stern eyes and a sharp nose, his grey hair parted neatly down the middle and his white beard tugged into two tapering prongs. I thanked him for rescuing me, but he was busy clearing the way. The stairs and hallway of our house were almost impassable.

  There was slightly more room in my father’s study. Apparently only the most select visitors were allowed in the presence of the Master’s writing. My father grabbed me by the elbow, asking urgently if I had brought any more pages for him. I produced the sheaf which I’d hidden under my jacket and he pounced upon it with a shout, holding it up for all to see.

  “Here! Here!” he cried. “My god! Look at this, Tadmonicker! Lickman, Swope, excellent Troubor! These are manuscript pages from Ik!”

  The scholars pressed forward without regard for each other. My father distributed the pages and each man sank back to study his prize with extreme care.

  “There’s no question about it,” one of them pronounced after a moment. “This is authentic. The prose itself is evidence; who else could have written such lines?”

  “This is a great day for literature,” said another. “The future is all the brighter for these discoveries.”

  Only Professor Tadmonicker seemed doubtful. “But the ink is still wet,” he said with a glance in my direction.

  I stammered under his scrutiny, prepared in that moment to admit the whole scheme. But my father, unasked, came to my assistance.

  “It’s the humidity of the evening air,” he said.

  “No, Father,” I began. He silenced me with a pinch in the ribs.

  “Now, Maven,” he said.

  “Let the boy speak,” said Professor Tadmonicker.

  I was acutely aware of my father’s trembling grip and the Professor’s steady gaze. But what was the Professor to me, compared with a father’s love?

  “I only meant to say, the gentleman who owns these pages says they have been stored in a damp trunk. There was recent flooding in his home. Some of the pages were destroyed. Those he salvaged have begun to seep, some of them.”

  “There you are,” my father said.

  In fact, this momentous duplicity had passed almost unnoticed by the other guests, who were busy reading aloud lines of “classic prose” from the pages which I had typed that very day. I was filled with embarrassment to hear my own words read aloud; at first they sounded awkward and improbable to me.

  “Beautiful! My god, the sound of the words—it’s undeniable, this is Thing at his best.”

  The other scholars echoed this opinion and began to elaborate on the unmatched quality of the language. I began to doubt my own doubts. I tho
ught that perhaps I had been too critical of my creation. Surely if these gentlemen found such merit in my work, I could hardly argue its nonexistence. It was not inconceivable, after all, that I might have had the soul of a poet within me, awaiting the opportunity to announce itself. For a moment I regretted that no one would ever know it was I who had typed these lines; but my regret soon passed.

  Doctor Swope announced, “These will have to be carefully treated by the preservationists, then copied and distributed to all the world’s centers of learning. There is much of worth here apart from the prose—there are clues to the origins of our society.”

  “All in good time,” my father said quickly. “But do not forget, gentlemen, that as my son’s guardian, I am the legal owner of these pages and any that may be forthcoming. You may not copy them without my permission, nor without paying a fee for the privilege.”

  The scholars were scandalized. “A fee! What kind of a fee?”

  My father considered this carefully. “A sizeable one. The value of these pages is immeasurable “

  “But they are a cultural treasure!” said Professor Lickman. You owe it to the world to share them freely.”

  “And so I shall. But the world must pay for the privilege. I may put them on display, which will require a suitable facility and the hiring of trained guards. All this will incur great expense, therefore I must charge the public for admission. My life has been greatly upset by this discovery, you must admit. Surely I deserve some remuneration for my troubles. I cannot have people flocking into my house at all hours simply because they consider it their cultural privilege to view these pages.”

  The scholars announced their outrage but my father was not to be dissuaded. Presently they fell to haggling with him over prices. Professor Tadmonicker alone refrained from the argument. I noticed that he kept looking in my direction and his expression was not one to inspire confidence. I managed a weak smile, then asked, “Isn’t it wonderful? The prose, I mean?”