But now his mail was just another pain in the ass in his life. More fan mail than any ten people could keep pace with; book galleys from friends and associates wanting blurbs; endless requests to write stories for anthologies, limited editions, special anniversary issues, charity-this and charity-that; and free stuff ranging from lots of book review copies to handmade quilts to tins of cookies which went instantly into the trash.
(Didn’t people realize that only a true hydrocephalic would scarf up food sent through the mail, wolfing down little treats that could easily be suffused with enough toxins to drop a Tyrannosaur in mid-stride?)
“Mr. Trent, is everything all right?” Betsy’s voice penetrated the thicket of his thoughts.
(Jeezis, have I started drooling yet?)
“Yes,” said Jack. “I’m fine…”
“I was going to answer as much of this as I can get to,” she said, waiting for confirmation.
“Yeah, that’ll be fine. I’m going to go down and take a walk. Get a pack of cigarettes.”
“Oh, okay.” She stepped out of his path. “But you don’t smoke…”
“I was thinking of starting again.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Cold out?”
“Cool. Low sixties.” Betsy chanced a weak little smile.
Jack nodded. His Baseball Forever sweatshirt would be enough. And if it wasn’t, well fuck it, he’d buy a jacket along the way. What good was the money if it couldn’t take your mind off the trivial bullshit in your life?
Down the elevator to a lobby done up in gallery prints by Klimt and handmade carpets from Gaza. Ronnie, the overweight doorman, was waiting for him with his usual mongoloid smile.
“Hey, Mistuh Trent! Howzit hangin’, huh? Howzat latest book doon’?”
Jack smiled and waved as he passed the caricature of a man dressed like a Latin American dictator. He always found it amazing that Ronnie would mention his books. The notion of actually reading a book had never, Jack was certain, sullied the doorman’s forebrow.
He walked down Central Park West toward the 86th Street subway. The air had an edge to it. Football weather. No humidity, and none of the fetid summer-city smells that follow you around like an in-law cadging a loan. Everybody dressed in the latest fall designs, everybody walking fast, looking good. Jack moved under a lackadaisical gait, clearly a man with no place to go.
(You got that right…)
Down the gritty steps to the token booth, he sidestepped the obligatory bum and slipped a few dollars under the glass. He’d never really warmed up to politically correct posturing, and besides, homeless person just didn’t roll off the tongue like bum.
Whenever he needed to take a break, he liked to go down to the village, drift through its shabby-chic neighborhoods and narrow streets, to absorb the life-scenes there. Maybe drop into McSorley’s, catch a Guinness and a slab of cheddar.
(Yeah, that’s the ticket…)
And so he was standing not really near the edge of the platform, waiting for the C-Train. Jack steeled himself at these times, ever watchful for some donut to sneak up behind him and throw him across the tracks to crisp up nicely against the third rail. He never could understand how people could stand right on the edge like they did. He tried to consciously think about Malefaction and how the plot would require several twists along the way. But he knew that was bullshit. His books never happened that way. It was like staring at something and not seeing it until you looked away. That’s how his stories came to him. When he wasn’t even trying, the whole narrative would just unfold like an intricate origami. It would just phenomenologically be, and he’d never questioned it and he knew he never should.
A low-register vibration passed through his Timberland hiking boots. Jack looked up to see the train exploding out of the tunnel, pushing a hot column of air ahead of it. In a burst of noise the train was upon him like a rough beast. Its doors sagged open and he entered into its belly.
As the train lurched forward, Jack found a seat among a familiar collection of New York faces—ethnic types from all the usual places, a few Suits, a few students, some women with their kids in tow. Everybody either buried in a Daily News or a paperback, or working on that numb-head stare Jack knew so well.
(Truly, we are a world of mooks.)
Jack grinned at his small philosophy. At least he could still amuse himself. When that left him, maybe it really was time to just step out that window.
The train pitched to the right as it came out of a dark turn and brawled its way into the Museum of Natural History station. Jack absently watched the exchange of passengers in and out, and found himself grinning again as he saw a young woman enter the car carrying his last novel, Malignancy, in its paperback edition. He always checked out whatever people were reading because their preference always gave you a major clue to who they really were. Being on the bestsellers list with every title had never jaded him to seeing his books being read in public. But within the last year or so, he’d begun wondering if he would ever see anyone reading a new R. Jackson Trent ever again.
The girl—(if they’re younger than me, they’re girls. Sorry, ladies…)—sat down on the seat across from him. She looked like a new bohemian: long purple-red hair trussed into a ponytail that shot straight up over head like a geyser, heavy eye shadow, esoteric far Eastern jewelry, a baggy peasant blouse and a Guarani scarf, long black skirt and knee-high boots.
She was not so much pretty or attractive as she was interesting. There was something wrong with the way her features combined to keep her from ever defining the ideal of Hellenist, feminine beauty, but she broadcast a message that said she was intelligent, iconoclastic, artsy-fartsy, and maybe a little bit of a flake.
Looking up, she caught him staring at her. Normally, when caught like that, Jack would instantly beam his attention elsewhere, but the way he was feeling today, he didn’t give a damn. So he held her gaze for a moment, then looked away with feigned languor. As he pretended to be reading the ads running across the tops of the windows, he could feel the heat of her stare.
But he did not look up until she spoke to him.
“Excuse me, but aren’t you R. Jackson Trent?”
Believe it or not, this did not happen to him all that often. Even people who read a lot usually could not ID their favorite writers unless they were making commercials for American Express (Jack had turned them down). And so, it gave him a measure of satisfaction to get made like that in the subway. It was not the total invasion that rock stars and actors grew to loathe, but rather something nice.
Looking again directly into her eyes, he noticed they were also kind of purple.
(Contacts? Who gives a shit—they look great…)
“Yes, I am.”
“Wow, that is very cool. I’ve read all your books. Most of them at least twice…”
Her accent was soft, educated, but still stretched out by the twangy locutions of the American South.
(Georgia? Alabama?)
He wanted to say something, but absolutely nothing occurred to him.
“I’ll bet people say that to you all the time, Mr. Trent,” she said.
Suddenly aware of others in the car looking at them, tuning into their contact, he stood up, stepped across the aisle and sat next to her. Their thighs brushed and she did not shy away from the touch.
“Actually, less than you’d think.”
“Really?”
“Years ago,” said Jack, “I ran into Vonnegut while I was walking up Third Avenue. He was leaning against a streetlamp, looking up at a mural on the side of an apartment building, smoking a cigarette.”
“Did you talk to him?”
Jack smiled. “Yeah. I told him I thought ‘Harrison Bergeron’ was one of the finest short stories I’d ever read in my life. He nodded and asked if he knew me.”
“Why?”
“Because I think he was trying to intimate that I was bugging the shit out of him.”
“You’re kidding…”
&n
bsp; “No. I told him when I was about your age I’d just been elected Secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America—just about when he wrote us a letter to say he was quitting the organization.”
“Did he recognize you then?”
“Yeah, he did. But he also winced at even the mention of having been a member of the ‘Space Faring Whores of Arcturus’.” Jack chuckled. “Hey, I know how he felt now. I quit that thing a couple of years later myself.”
She smiled, and it was a nice smile. “Then what happened?”
“What? Oh, he basically blew me off. I think I blurted out that after 16 books, I’d just had my newest novel, The Apocalypse Man, reviewed favorably in the New York Times and he gave me a bogus smile and said something like: ‘That’s nice, Mr. Trent…and I’m sure it’s a nice book…and I’m sure you’re very nice…and I hope you have a nice day…as a matter of fact, have a nice life.’ And then he looked back up at the building mural, took a drag off his Pall Mall, and summarily ignored me.”
“Jeez, I hope you’re not going to do the same thing.”
“No, not at all. And please, just call me Jack. Mr. Trent is what everybody used to call my father.”
“All right, I can certainly do that.”
She paused, obviously casting about for something to say, but not getting flustered or fan-girl silly. There was a confidence, a control, about her he admired already.
“This one is great,” she said holding up Malignancy. “I really love the way you develop your characters. I feel like I’ve known Sam all my life. And D’Arcy! Wow, she is so deep.”
“Thank you,” said Jack.
“Someday, I’m going to do characters like you.” This was offered up softly, but with determination.
The train grabbed them with the momentum of its stop at 79th Street. They’d jumped a local, and it would be an annoying ride south with all the stops.
“So you want to be a writer?” He looked at her just long enough to assess her age.
(Late twenties? Hard to tell. She could be twenty-two and just livin’ hard…)
“I’ve already sold around 20 short stories, and I’m almost finished my first novel.”
“Really, where’d you sell the stories?” He was expecting to hear the usual litany of we-pay-in contributor-copies-only “literary magazines” and poetry journals like The Sewanee Review, The Pacific Quarterly, The Midwest Chronicle of Fiction, etcetera…
“Well, let’s see…a couple of anthologies—Borderlands and Shadows, and magazines like Omni, Penthouse, New York, Harpers, F&SF, Pulphouse…And some smaller ones too.”
“I’m impressed,” said Jack. And he was.
“Well, that was after a couple years’ worth of rejection slips,” she said.
“Oh yeah,” said Jack. “I know that whole drill. I’ve still got most of mine. Saved them in a file somewhere.”
“So what’re you working now?” she asked, not knowing how her words lanced him.
He paused, before answering. Then simply: “Can you have some lunch with me?”
⟡
They emerged from the tunnels at 4th Street, found an alfresco place that specialized in pastas and soups plus the usual gelatos and cappuccino, and spent the afternoon unloading baggage.
She told him that she was from New Orleans, still lived there, in fact, but was visiting in the city to meet the literary agent she’d just landed, and also pose for some nude pictures for a pro photographer friend of hers who had his brownstone studio up on West 85th. She thought it would be innovative to appear on the jacket of her first novel wearing lace gloves and nothing else. She talked a lot about mystical bullshit and off-path mythic systems, esoteric religions like Zoroasterism, always making sure she explained the arcane significance of each piece of her many jewelry accessories. Despite her young age, she said she’d worked the expected catalog of Weird Writer Jobs: including, but not limited to, dog trainer, nude dancer, dynamite truck driver, gaffer, and a deckhand on a shrimpboat. She claimed her name was Nemmy—short for Nemorensis, the goddess of fertility. The name she used on her stories was Nemmy O. Brand.
“What’s the O stand for?” Jack asked.
Nemmy shrugged, pushed a strand of purple hair from her cheek. “What’s a big O usually mean to you?”
Jack grinned. He liked her. She seemed wise beyond her years, and showcased more confidence in herself than anybody her age had a right to. He listened to her talk about what she wanted to write about and he knew Nemmy had been to that secret place where the Pool of Ideas waited for young writers to come peer into its endless depths.
Jack had known that place well. Not only had he been there, he’d purchased a condo.
But sometime during the last year or so, he’d lost his map.
When it was his turn to explain a few things, he started off with the worst of it. He was on the wrong side of forty-five, and the total number of words written on his new book in the last eighteen months: zero.
(That’s the real big O, sister. May you never know the terror it brings…)
He told her how suicide broke the surface of his thoughts like predatory fins every now and then, even though he knew he was much too much of a chicken to ever act on that kind of craziness.
Then he unloaded some of the more usual stuff: his unending love for baseball; a disastrous marriage now twenty-five years buried; his sibling-free childhood; the long hours alone while his parents both worked; his mother running off when he was sixteen with some guy who sold Timken bearings; his college days at Pitt; the first story he sold; places he’d been; people he’d met. He even told her that the R stood for Randolph and that everybody called him “Randy” in high school and college. Then his agent strongly suggested that an on-the-rise writer should have a strong American handle. He shortened the family name of Jackson, and after all this time, he couldn’t imagine thinking of himself as anyone but Jack.
“So let me get this straight,” said Nemmy. “You’ve got more money than you can count, three houses, traveled all over the world, a wall full of books you’ve written…and you’re still miserable?”
“Don’t talk in non-sequiturs.” Jack sipped on his fifth cup of cappuccino.
“Huh?”
“No Latin in your education?”
Nemmy rolled her violet eyes. “Not even much English. My Dad was a fundamentalist preacher. He said all books of fiction were works of the Devil and fit only for the idlest of minds. But I was just being funny.”
“Funny?”
“Come on, Jack, I’m a writer—of course I’m hip to non-sequiturs. But seriously, you’ve got a lot to be happy for.”
“You’re all full of juice, Nemmy. You don’t know what it’s like to be sweating through a cold night, wondering if you’ve vented all the steam in that pressure cooker we call the subconscious. Believe me, that’s a fucking problem!”
She looked away for a minute, as though watching the endless parade of Village natives and cleverly disguised tourists pass their table. The afternoon was dying off, and the evening grew ever cooler. People in their leather jackets and military greatcoats were starting to look pretty damned warm.
“You know what your problem really is?” she asked.
(That I don’t get laid enough…)
“No, what? Tell me?”
She kind of smirked at him. “If this were a bad movie, this is where I’d say you’re not getting enough leg. And I’d instruct you to come immediately to my loft over Washington Square where I would fuck you stupid.”
(Maybe I should be a screenwriter…)
“You’re so insensitive,” he said. “How do you know that wasn’t exactly what I was thinking?”
Nemmy’s eyes narrowed. All humor leaving them in that instant. “Au contraire, Jack. I know it was.”
(Great, make me feel like more an asshole than I already do.)
“Okay, okay, I give up. What’s my real problem?”
“Actually, you’re kind of cute, even if you are an
old guy…” She downed the rest of her cup. “But I can’t.”
“Really?”
“I abstain from sex every other month—it keeps my ancient energies focused.”
“And this is the wrong month, right? Just my luck.”
She looked at him intently. “You’re problem is simple, Jack. You don’t believe in the ghosts of your childhood any more.”
“What the hell does that mean?” He was prepared to listen to her, but Jesus, he was getting a little tired of the neo-hippie routine.
“It means you’ve lost touch with the things that shaped you, that not only pointed you in the direction you took, but drove you there. Forced you to take the path most people never even notice.”
“Okay, I’m listening. Go on.”
“You know what I mean, Jack. We’re mutants, you and I, and all the people like us. All the poor fucks who have to write, or dance, or paint, or sing, or whatever…”
Jack nodded. “Okay, so far. A little romanticized, but basically true. What else?”
“You tell me, Jack.” She leaned closer to him as though ready to share a government secret. “Take me down the hall, take me back to the times when you were getting shaped.”
Jack drew a deep breath, exhaled. The air was getting downright brisk, almost cold. When Nemmy leaned forward, the edge of the table tightened her blouse against her breasts, and for an instant he could see her hard nipples.
(Knock it off. This is important.)
And it was. He sensed she was onto something that he’d been avoiding. This strange, petite, purple-haired woman-child had thrown the latch on one of the trapdoors to his past, and there was no turning back now. Either he grabbed the lantern she was handing him and headed on down the rickety steps of memory, or whatever he’d been keeping locked up below was going to come up and get him anyway. The catch was thrown, and it was too rusty and too warped to wedge back into place.
“It’s funny, but I’ve always told people my imagination got jumpstarted when I was about seven years old, after I’d found this horror comic called The Unseen on the side of road. Scared the hell out me, but it fascinated me too. From there it was on to dinosaurs and monsters and aliens and bad movies and telling stories and all the other stuff we all did.”
Fearful Symmetries Page 33
