Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  And here comes one of my asshole agents, talking me into writing a book. Said it wasn’t for the few million the publisher was willing to pay, but for what the book would do for me when it came out. Said it was just like picking out exactly the right tie to complement a great new suit. This was the analogy he used, and I was in such a fucked-up zone, I bought into it. Plus, I needed the money. Man, I always needed the money back then. The idea was the book would get people thinking about the old Terence Wood again, people in the business, but the truth was, people in the business were still thinking about Terence Wood, it’s just that they weren’t thinking much. Hah! What a fucking joke . . .

  Wood runs out of time before he runs out of things to write. One of the librarians comes by and tells him they’re closing up, he should think about finishing. He doesn’t know what’s happened to the time. It was light outside, still, when he came in; now it must be like nine or ten; probably the library closes at like nine or ten; probably he should do something with what he’s written. He’s not thinking clearly, but he’s moving quickly, and he’s taking what he can manage of his thoughts with him. To lose it all now would invalidate the effort he put into it. It would be as if he hadn’t even bothered, as if whatever discoveries he’s made in the writing would once again be unclaimed.

  But what can he do with it? He can’t print it out—there’re pages and pages of rambling stuff. There’s no time. Plus, he’s not even sure there’s a printer. There’s no way to save what he’s written on a public terminal, and he doesn’t have a disc or any other place to store it. So, in confusion, he decides to send it to himself. To who he used to be. It’s something, at least. Some place. He can’t just zap all this effort and have it disappear; he’s been conditioned to keep what he writes in case he ever needs it, since boarding school, and already he’s begun to look on these few pages as a kind of lifeline to what he’s left behind. It doesn’t occur to him he could just write them again. Shouldn’t be too hard to call these same thoughts to mind, especially now that he’s had them. They’re his, after all. But he goes the other way and, on an impulse, directs the computer to send it to his old e-mail address. He sees this little mailbox icon in the corner of his screen, is where he gets the impulse, figures there must be some way to send this shit back out there. Someplace else. Why the fuck not, he’s thinking. At least it’s a productive, forward-looking decision. If he ever needs it, there it will be, accessible, assuming his account is still valid. He let it lapse once before for a stretch of about a year, and the Prodigy people didn’t shut him off. He’s thinking, they’re so desperate for customers they’ll even count a dead guy among their ranks, and, anyway, it just gets billed direct to his credit card. If Wood knows Pet and her fuckwad lawyers, those accounts are still open. And if they’re not? Well, at least he tried. At least he didn’t submit to the electronic equivalent of balling up a stack of typewritten pages and tossing them in the trash. At least he meant to do something with it.

  He decides on this course, but then he can’t remember his code. It’s been so long, his e-mail address has gone the way of old PIN codes and passwords. It all strikes him like some ancient cryptography. He never had any trouble with safe deposit keys back when he was still around, back when that was all he needed to keep track of, but these fucking passwords were always a bitch. Now that he’s been so long away from his own computer, from his long distance carrier, from his automated teller machine, the codes have faded from memory. Something to do with the movie he was making, maybe, back when he first signed on. He runs through his few parts, last four or five years, but nothing strikes him. Then he runs through his important dates—birthdays, anniversaries—but still comes up blank. Then he thinks maybe he just used his name, maybe the fact that he was using a stagnant provider like Prodigy would be protection enough from the nuts and fruitcakes out trolling the Internet. Nobody would find him there. Nobody uses Prodigy anymore.

  But it wasn’t just “Wood,” straight out. It wasn’t “Terence” or “Terry” or any predictable rendering of same. No, he realizes now, it was Norman’s own corrosive nickname—“Woodman”—hinting, as it did, at the suspect superpowers that attach to celebrity, and confirming, as it now does, those suspicions.

  Yes. Woodman@prodigy.com. He sends what he’s written and he’s gone. And back. In no time.

  This afternoon at the Stop ’n’ Shop, Anita bought Oreos on sale, three-for-one. She bought them for the bargain, but also for the way they got her thinking about Wood. It doesn’t take much these days to get her thinking about Wood, and today it was just cookies.

  There she was, wheeling up and down the super-wide aisles with the super-wide carts, when the display grabbed her attention and took her back to the life she used to have. And here she is, now, at her own kitchen table, dead solid center in the life that has claimed her; she’s tidying up after dinner, emptying the contents of one bag into one of the large canning jars she and Nils use for keeping cookies, brushing the left-behind crumbs from the table into a saucer of milk she’s poured for dunking.

  Nils didn’t understand. Of course, he wouldn’t. He joined her in the kitchen to unpack the groceries and remarked at the Oreos. “Tell me, they were giving these away?” he asked, in that way of his. He also enjoys a creme-centered sandwich cookie, but he enjoys them generically and only from time to time. Three bags at once of the name brand needed some explaining, but Anita couldn’t find the words to tell how her ex-husband used to stack his Oreos into a tiny tower and flick them, from the top, into a saucer of milk on the table below. The grand finale to Wood’s routine was when he reached the Oreo at the bottom of the tower and allowed himself the small cheat of putting the saucer on a chair tucked part-way beneath the table and shot the cookie across the messed table top like a hockey puck. Altogether, it was the target practice of a small child, and it never lost its appeal. The milk would splatter all over the place—on his shirt, on the floor, on the chair legs. Sometimes, Anita would wake up the next morning, and there’d be little speckles of cookied milk in corners of the kitchen unlikely enough to suggest that perhaps her husband wasn’t a very good shot. But for some reason, Anita never minded cleaning up after one of Wood’s midnight snacks. There was a maid (a tiny girl named Resa, from Ecuador), but Anita couldn’t leave this chore for her. Always, on those mornings, crawling on the kitchen floor with a wet rag, looking for the previous night’s splatter, she got to thinking how her husband wasn’t like other husbands, how she relished his differences. She couldn’t think how to tell Nils, her new husband, who doesn’t own any differences except, of course, in comparison to her ex-husband, how she still misses the man to whom she was once married, the man with whom she produced her only child. They’d been divorced going on ten years, she and Wood, he’s been gone another few months, and yet she can’t walk past a display of on-sale Oreos at the Stop ’n’ Shop without getting all wistful.

  She builds her own Oreo tower, then picks them off one at a time and dunks each cookie between the pinched fingers of a more refined adulthood. The Oreos never leave her hand, so that when each cookie is nearly soaked through, there’s still a small section of solid crust between her wet fingers. She swallows them whole and marvels at the contrast between hard and soft, then and now.

  Nils is just in the next room watching a tape of today’s Jeopardy!, which goes on too early for him to catch at its original time. Anita Tollander Wood Veerhoven, for some reason, can’t bear the thought of flicking the stacked Oreos across the table to a waiting saucer of milk and making such an elaborate mess and having to explain to her new husband what she’s doing. Actually, the thought alone has a nostalgic appeal; what she can’t bear is the thought of being found out after acting on it.

  Anyway, she convinces herself, like this is better. Like this is basically the same thing, she thinks, dunking, listening to her new husband bark out his Jeopardy! answers from the next room. Like this makes more sense.

  It’s late for Pimletz to be working
. Usually, he puts in his couple hours of not writing around the middle of the day. That’s the routine. Sleep late, read the paper, flip around some of the morning talk shows, sit down at the computer, maybe take a walk, run into town to do his shopping, maybe pick up a video to watch that evening, turn in after the local news. Early mornings, late afternoons, evenings, he doesn’t even bother trying to work, only now that Pet’s on the scene, his habits are up for grabs. She’s got him romping around in the snow, or trying on Wood’s old clothes, or taking wine and cheese in front of a fire she’s had him build and jump-start with a Duraflame brick. (The fires, not incidentally, have forced him to move his writing station from Wood’s great stone hearth to the breakfast nook.)

  His days have gone from a string of empty rituals to one of those phony montage sequences in bad television movies. He still accomplishes little, in terms of Wood’s book, but he’s frayed by the changes to his schedule. Pet just keeps him going and going, and she mixes in a generous helping of spontaneous fondling and grinding. Well, for Pimletz it’s spontaneous; it just touches down around him, from nowhere; to Pet, it must be calculated and precisely what she has in mind, but to Pimletz it’s a gift. She’s way into grinding, this Pet, says it gets her off bigger and quicker than the real deal. He’s never heard this, Pimletz, but she likes it when he goes at her through his jeans, hard, says the feel of denim against her trimmed pussy sends her completely overfucking-board. That’s her word for it. It’s wetifying; that’s another one. She’s got all these different words for the things they do to each other, for how they make her feel. When she cleans him off after he comes, it’s a spit-shine. When she pulls him and his jeans down atop her soft naked body, it’s another bushwacking.

  What the fuck does he care? It’s actually easier on him, not to have to worry about staying hard after his inevitably premature ejaculation or spilling himself all over the damn place. Friction is friction, he thinks, grinding, and besides, this Pet’s wired in such a way that he can pump at her pubic bone with a thimble and get her off. So it works out. Let her call it what she wants.

  She’s just thrown him off his schedule, is all. That, and chased him from his cozy fireplace. This last sets him back. He liked the way he had things all set up in there, the way the occasional tap of his fingers against the keyboard bounced off the cold, clammy stone walls like a caved echo. It’s not like he got any work done before Pet arrived, but at least he worked at his not working. Now he has to work at his not working when she’s asleep, and he has to do it in the kitchen. He shuffles in his Wood-stockinged feet to the breakfast nook and switches on Wood’s computer. He’s got his own laptop with him, but the great man left behind this monster flat screen with killer resolution; usually what happens is Pimletz just winds up online anyway, before too long. Wood’s attorney left behind his client’s old Prodigy password, allowing Pimletz to roam cyberspace on the estate’s dime. He does this usually on the fooling-himself premise that he needs to look something up on one of the filmography pages he’s found, or to check the bios on some of Wood’s dead costars, or to make sure he’s got his chronology straight.

  Once he’s online, he’s all over the place—not writing, but making a show of it. He’s got his nook lit by a lone floor lamp, the rest of the cabin is dark, and as he taps at his keys the color of the light changes with what he’s doing. The nook is tinted by reds and greens and yellows, depending. There, on the Prodigy menu, the place goes all rainbow-y on him. Then he looks down and sees his fingernails are blue, the white of his T-shirt lit up like a black-light poster. He doesn’t notice the effect during the day with the abundant sunlight, but here at night, with only a sixty-watt bulb, the effect is enormous.

  The colors on some of these screens leave the small nook area looking like it’s across the street from an all-night diner with a flashing neon sign. But then he thinks it’s more subtle than that. It’s more like watching the people across the courtyard in his mother’s apartment complex, watching them watch television. This is what he used to do as a kid; he used to try to figure out what channel the people across the courtyard were watching from the way the light patterns changed in their otherwise dark apartment. They were always watching something, every night, and always with the lights off. He’d look through his binoculars and guess what was on from the tinted glow on their faces. Then he’d lower the binoculars and cross to the set in his living room and try to find the same channel; the idea was to get the light changes in time with theirs. This was back before cable and all those damn channels that came with it, so it never took Pimletz very long to achieve synchronicity, but he wonders how long he’d have to work through today’s one hundred twelve-channel capability to reach the same end. Plus, you know, what if they had a dish? Then he’d be at it all night.

  He switches off the floor lamp to heighten the effect, and what he gets back is still more of the same. It’s more intense, but essentially the same. There are a dozen sites he can check out before having to start making excuses to himself for not returning to his manuscript, and he means to hit every one of them. There’s a celebrity chat room thing going on with that actress from the X-Files, that alien detective show on Fox, and it’s set for ten o’clock. Pimletz doesn’t watch the show, but the actress is pretty hot, and he’s thinking he might check it out. Soon he’s on to the ESPN sports ticker service to catch the box score to this afternoon’s Celtic game. They’re in Vancouver, of all places, and he’s thinking, Vancouver? It’s the Bruins should be in Vancouver, not the Celtics. Next, he bounces on to a gardening site because he’s been thinking of getting a garden going out back, long as he’s here. He’s checking out the projected temperatures for early spring to see about setting up an appropriate planting rotation, when he starts to hear some strange chime noises coming from the speakers bracketing the screen. He’s never heard these noises before, but he gets that they’re coming together in a kind of tune. It’s a tune he recognizes, but can’t place. Some sixties shit. Hendrix, maybe. The computer chime reduces the song to a kind of muzak, but it’s clear: “Purple Haze.”

  Pimletz’s first thought is maybe the music has something to do with the X-Files promotion, maybe it’s a way to get people to visit the site, but then he’s thinking this doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t know much about computers or Internet technology, but he knows the song’s got nothing to do with X-Files. Must be it’s a signal for him, an e-mail alert, but he’s never gotten an e-mail on this machine before. Usually, he gets his email back in the newsroom; he’s got to link up to the Record-Transcript on the laptop he brought up with him, and, in those cases, he is interrupted by what was once a human voice telling him, “You’ve got mail.” He’s never heard these musical chimes, and yet it makes sense to him that they’re a kind of mail call. He’s seen that at other people’s desks, but then, in coming to this realization, he only gets more confused. He can’t think who has his address. He doesn’t know it himself. The lawyer, maybe. Must be he’s got it written down somewhere, or maybe it’s Anita, the second Mrs. Wood, trying to reach out to the third. Could be anyone. Probably it’s just a solicitation from the Prodigy people, trying to sell the user on some new service or pricing scheme. Nevertheless, he wonders at the etiquette on intercepting e-mail, figures it’s not the same as opening a misdirected bank statement. Anyway, it’s not like he’s trespassing or anything, or poaching on someone else’s equipment; he’s here on full authority. He’ll just say he had no idea.

  And so, clueless, Pimletz closes the gardening page window, and the ESPN sports ticker window, and the celebrity chat window, and retraces his steps to the Prodigy menu. He clicks on the tiny mailbox picture that presumably houses his unsolicited message. Ah. There. Yes, indeed, he’s got mail, and, in the beat it takes for it to appear on his screen, he rubs at his legs in excitement.

  It takes him ten minutes to read the document. He’s scrolling down the screen as fast as the Page Down arrow can take him, and when he reaches bottom, he shoots right back to
the top to read it again. It’s more than anything he could have imagined. He reads it a third time just to make sure he’s got all of it, and then he presses the commands to print it out, and to save it, and generally just to keep it at hand.

  Next, he walks to the phone on the kitchen wall and dials Hamlin’s number at home. He’s dialed it only once before (they don’t exactly have the kind of friendship that transcends the workplace), but Pimletz has got the same prefix and the rest of it is the kind of number even he can easily remember: 1717.

  Hamlin’s out pursuing truth, justice, and the American way, his answering machine tells, but Pimletz is welcome to wait for the beep and leave a message of any length, after which Hamlin may or may not get back to him, depending on whether or not he gives a shit.

  “Hey, asshole,” Pimletz says at the beep. “It’s me. Axel. You’ve outdone yourself.”

  Spring

  “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

  —The Wizard of Oz

  Antennae

  This Pimletz knows: he knows Warren Stemble of Asterisk Books has been on him for the manuscript, for some pages, something to show his salespeople and counter his concerns over what was to have been the lead title for his fall list; he knows Hamlin’s dispatches have about dried up, leaving Pimletz to fill in the blanks of Terence Wood’s life or just to leave them blank; he knows Pet has cooled somewhat in her all-over affections, realizing (it had to happen!) that Pimletz might be living in Terence Wood’s house, and wearing his clothes, and sleeping with his wife, and opening his canned goods, and writing his autobiography, but that he is not, in fact, Terence Wood; and he knows that Volpe has been trolling for some kid out of Boston University’s journalism school to take over Pimletz’s job on the obit desk at half the salary and one-third the aggravation and probably twice the result.