by Nick Mamatas
“You know why you won’t be having a party? Martial law! You know why there won’t be any champagne? Nothing to celebrate but years of misery to come, my friend! You know why you’ll be wearing three sweaters and struggling to get into a fourth? No heat!” He slapped his hands on his hips. “You know why? It’s—”
“This is one of those Y2K things, isn’t it?” I said.
“It is, yes.” He pulled a business card from his pocket. Bramtolbert Solutions. “Tell me, do you use a word processing program to type up your essays and term papers?”
“Of course I do,” I told him. “But you know what? If it came down to martial law, I think I’d take a leave of absence from college. They go after the college kids first, you know.”
“Oh I do, I do. ‘Four dead/in O-hi-o!’” Tolbert sang. It wasn’t exactly a hip song in the late 1990s, but Tolbert looked even older than some ex-sixties radical might. Seventy maybe, but vigorous in his own way. “But there won’t be any computers—they’ll be the cause of the whole mess. Nor any Internet, of course. You’ll be darn lucky if the phone works.”
“Not really. Phone calls always bring bad news in my experience.” I was feeling morose that day. I hadn’t been laid all semester—living with my parents had cramped my style around campus so bad that I couldn’t even consume the appropriate amount of pornography a boy my age needed.
“You know what perks a man up?” Tolbert asked. “Receiving, or for that matter sending, a thoughtful paper letter, freshly typed.”
“Fine, how much.”
“Twenty-five for one, two hundred for ten.”
“What the hell would I need ten typewrit—” Then I got it. “How many are you on the hook for, buddy?”
Tolbert stopped smiling, but he wasn’t done with his cant yet. “That’s proprietary information. These are factory models; no middlemen. Right out of the warehouse, but you know the economy, a vendor doesn’t pay rent and they have to liquidate the inventory. There’s a significant price break at one thousand units. This is my living, son. Today typewriters, tomorrow napkin holders, the day after that former best-selling novels, now remaindered and selling for a nickel on the dollar. Ever read Rosemary Rogers? She really broke some new ground in the romance genre a few years ago. My wife was all atwitter about it at the time. Rogers let her heroines . . .” he leaned in close and finished sotto voce, “invite guests in through the back door.”
Tolbert finally revealed himself as creepy enough to get tangled up with. “I’m sure your wife is a lovely woman. Good cook too?”
“The best, my friend, the absolute best. Her name’s Aija. She’s a lovely Latvian woman. Ever have gray peas and ham?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a gray pea.”
“You will, my friend, you will.” And I stepped around the other side of the card table and shook his hand.
Selling Olivettis was good for two things—I reserved a pair of them for myself, and it opened me up to a lot of random abuse I otherwise would have only experienced in a genuine correctional or psychiatric facility of some sort. It took Tolbert a few days to realize that I was not exactly a big man on campus—virtually nobody knew me at all as a freshman, a commuter student, and I didn’t participate in any extracurriculars. Nobody wanted to buy a typewriter. Nobody wanted to talk to me except to shout a name or two: “Faggot!” was a perennial, of course, but I would have been called a fag even had I been laying a woman right on the card table. “Grandpa” was a common enough one. “Scoop Brady” I only heard a couple of times, and really had to admire it. Certainly nobody cared about Y2K.
“Why the hell would I care about my term papers if every computer in the world clicked off at midnight?” a girl who recognized me from freshman composition asked.
“You should be selling shotguns and canned goods,” her boyfriend offered. “Hell, I’m ready already. The only thing I can see myself doing with this,” he said as he slid my display model onto his palm and hefted it up like a serving tray, “is putting it in a burlap sack with one or two others and swinging it over my head as a weapon once I run out of ammo.”
“Oh, Craig—” the girl, Yvette or something, said. Yvette, yes. Then and there I decided I would fuck her one day. Just to fuck with her, I told myself.
“I don’t plan on running out of ammo though.” He put the typewriter down. “Good luck to you.”
“Yeah. But really, if you think the world is going to end in a few months, why even care about money at all?” She flashed me the smile women generally reserve for children and men in wheelchairs who want to prove that they can still fuck, and walked off with Craig.
That was about as friendly as it got, and they were right. So I chucked the Y2K shtick and decided to just sit and start typing. I practiced in the evenings—it takes a bit to adapt to a typewriter after a few years on a word processor—to make sure I didn’t look like even more of a goon than I already did, elbows akimbo, tongue poking out the side of my mouth, pecking away with two lunatic fingers. I got a little faster at it anyway, and decided not to write papers or stories, but quotations. I’d been keeping a Moleskine full of them—some aphorisms, others just turns of phrase I’d stumbled across and wrote down out of admiration.
“She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Who’s that? What did she do? I got a fair number of lookie-loos as I typed up the quotes I’d committed to memory the night before. I laughed, because that line was actually from standard assigned reading.
Once you accept A is A, you’re hooked. Literally hooked, addicted to the System. The one sweater vest–wearing obnoxio who neurotically read and re-read Atlas Shrugged hated that quote. Wonder whatever happened to him. Dead, probably. Good.
I thank thee, Barrett—thy advice was right, / But ’twas ordain’d by fate that I should write.
That sort of thing. Though in college, I was ninety percent autodidact, ten percent passive learner. I had a mind for memorization. The college library wasn’t great, but it was good enough for me. I loved nothing more than finding a reference to a primary source in some textbook, reading that, following one of its footnotes or references to another book or journal, and digging my way through the history of the written word, or at least English as she was writ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Then there was Goodwill, and I always had quarters enough for rotten old paperbacks, mostly shit, but some gems. It was a strange ecology—eating garbage and diamonds as raw material, and then shitting back out…what? I’d crank out the quotes on individual pieces of paper and leave them to the side. People would come over. I even sold a few typewriters. I was becoming a fairly good typist, which pleased my mother who—being old—was sure that typing was still a rare skill owned primarily by women but of use to anyone who “wanted to have a good office job.” She’d worked for six months before getting married, after all, at a home insurance company.
A favorite, though one that is hard to work into everyday conversation, even now: “…the nausea is not inside me; I feel it out there, in the wall, in the suspenders; everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café; I am the one who is within it.”
But now I had my first story in a long time, didn’t I? That bar—Vesuvio—was not one of my usual haunts, so easy enough to experience as an outsider, and without even a moment’s worry about the potential for betrayal it had a complementary genius loci. It made me a little sick anyway, as did the encounter with the undead woman. I would have been perfectly within my rights, and certainly within the realm of common sense self-preservation to just leave and call the police. But I dove in anyway, without much more of a plan than “Go for it!” And there was some grue as well, and despite or maybe because of the terror on the streets, grue equals green. The story could sell. I just needed to dig a little deeper than usual, and given the state of publishing in this post-reanimation times, I wouldn’t have to dig all that deep at all. One of th
e current “best-sellers” is an online serial called I Ain’t Killed Me a Nigger All Day—about a racist “zombie hunter” in the ghetto. But will his black girlfriend be able to make him a good liberal with the power of “the tightness between her thighs”? People send the author money through the website when they can, goods and even obscure “services” when they can’t. I can sit here and steam all I like, but in the end that guy is a finisher, and I’m not. Until today, I couldn’t manage to “go for it.” I had the impulse, but I learned to anesthetize myself.
Stupidly enough, it wasn’t a high school coach or a sports drink commercial that inserted go for it into my backbrain, like a bit of steaming shrapnel. It was Tolbert. I sold a few typewriters—some to professors, a couple to students. The year turned over and I still stuck with the typewriters. Tolbert was right with most of his predictions; there was no martial law and the lights stayed on, but our heating system gave up the ghost, so I did spend my New Year’s at home, wearing three sweaters. A few weeks later I was back in school and got to take my first creative writing course. Like a fool, I volunteered to be the first to bring in my work. Yvette was in the class. My story was pathetic, as most first stories are—it was about a young college kid with a collection of pithy quotations from various sorts of outsider literature. He goes unloved, sees his girlfriend hook up with another boy in the dorms and then, a page and a half later, kills himself. Every young freshman’s first short story, in other words, except for the ones who write sci-fi or stories about shooting up their writing workshops. I was flayed alive by my fellow students, of course, and even the professor got his licks in. All well deserved, mind you, but who could help but cringe when a dozen people gather round and chant cliché, cliché, cliché! We live out our clichés, it’s true.
Near the end of class, when I was finally allowed to speak again, I said, “Well, I’ve just been reading a lot, you know, and it just feels like…it just feels like there’s nothing big to say anymore.”
Yvette, that little chestnut colt, raised her hand. “That’s postmodernism, right?”
The professor clapped his hands once and said, “Yes, yes it is! Postmodernism. All the great things have been said and have been found wanting. So everything now is partial, contingent, and open to revision even as it is being written. But,” he added, with a piercing look at me, “that doesn’t mean we have to fill every story with disconnected allusions and then end with a protagonist suicide.”
I told Tolbert the story afterwards and he just laughed. He didn’t even offer to read the story. Then he finally asked me to come sample that famous Latvian dish so we could properly discuss my future. I’d expected either a blonde mailorder bride in the Barbie mode or an ox in a housedress, but Aija was neither stereotype. She was in her mid-forties with maybe a bit of extra weight, but that made her about half the size of the usual high fructose corn syrup–fed Ohioan. Where Tolbert was hyperkinetic and a jabberer, Aija had a deep and quiet laugh, and when she spoke it brought the conversation to a stop, or would have if Tolbert had come equipped with a pause button. If there were any bookshelves in Tolbert’s house, they weren’t in the living room—Tolbert called it “the TV room”—or the kitchen. The bathroom had a few issues of Consumer Reports, but that was all. Did Aija read in bed while her husband snored away?
“You see, you’re not going to learn anything in college,” Tolbert told me over our plates of gray peas with cream sauce and bacon. We were halfway through a bottle of red Chilean table wine, and I was relieved to see two others on the kitchen counter, waiting for us. “College is an opportunity to network, to meet people. You think anyone from YSU is going to end up editing the New Yorker? Do you need a degree to send a story in to the New Yorker?”
“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t looked into it. I’m not really into the New Yorker. Honestly, I kind of consider that magazine to be the enemy.”
“That just makes it easier, doesn’t it? No ego at stake if they say no. You want to write, just go for it. If you don’t like that pretentious crap–”
“Pretentious,” Aija interrupted. She made us wait while she took a sizeable gulp of her wine. “What exactly is that crap pretending to be?” Aija and I laughed.
Tolbert took the jab like a pro, then ignored it. “Just write a good story and find someone to publish it. Forget the mysteries of life—you think anybody cares about that nonsense? Nobody does. Beginning, middle, end. A little t&a, a little moral, and you’re good to go.”
“Moral t&a,” I said. I shot Aija a look and she returned half a smile.
“Yes, a little moral. ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ That sort of thing. And you need to have some cheesecake, too. It’s only natural, after all. The procreative impulse makes the world go around.”
“We have no children,” Aija announced.
“Why do men strive? For women! Why do women put up with all the crap they do—for men!”
“Lesbians are notorious laggards,” Aija said.
“I’m the first person in my family to go to college. I want to do something with my life.”
Tolbert leaned in. “Major in business,” he said in a hoarse whisper, as if imparting some great secret. “That’s the ticket. Write your own future that way.”
“Did you major in business?”
“School of hard knocks. Self-made man.” He was loud again. “I knew when I first saw you that you had some curiosity, not like those other cud-chewers out there. And you made it work. Literary stuff; much better than Y2K. You didn’t learn that in a classroom.”
“Actually, I did—”
“Bram, please. Don’t badger our guest.” She went to get the other bottle of wine. I had taken to thinking of the female derriere as “cans”—stupid Updike phrase—and Aija had a good one; round and apple-like. She came back and topped us all off and told Tolbert that there was a message on the machine for him. Tolbert said he had to take the call and I thought I knew what would happen next. We were all buzzed, and Tolbert and Aija clearly had some kind of kinky weirdo relationship. If all media had taught me anything, it’s that housewives were all always horny. Was she going to suck me dry, driven mad by her husband’s borishness, his refusal to understand her continental sophistication? She swung her hips at me and leaned down to whisper in my ear.
“Get the fuck out of here,” she said, her voice a knife. “I’m not saying this to help you; I’m saying this because I’m tired of Bram dragging drowned puppies into my house.”
I wanted to turn around and kiss her, grab a fistful of her hair. Go for it, like Bram Tolbert told me, so I did and she responded with a smoked tongue. Then with both hands on my shoulders she pulled herself free and told me again to go and not to come back. It was a lonely February night and the heater rattled the entire way home. I was up all night, staring at the phone, waiting to see if I’d get some angry call from Tolbert, or a plaintive one from Aija inviting me back. Neither called. Maybe that was their weirdo kink. Bram mentors, Aija tempts, and then they have a good laugh and take a third bottle of wine to bed together and fuck one another silly, Bram with his stocky little body pounding away like an assembly line robot at an auto plant, Aija all sliding curves. And they needed some kid like me as a catalyst.
But Bram was right. He had a horny wife, got business calls late into the night, and for all his bluster seemed to have something I never did: peace of mind. He went for it, and if he hit a brick wall face first, then he knew to go for it in some other direction. Me, all I had was the smell of the dead still on me and three different writing media—foolscap, glowing laptop screen, and blank paper tucked into a typewriter, taunting my silly ass like a middle-aged Latvian woman.
(4)
The next morning I got another call for a driller and took it. Russian Hill. Nice part of town, relatively speaking. Even in the old days, privilege and good health was like a river flowing down the curves of the neighborhood. Down Green Street it was all swinging long limbs in tasteful sundresses, with a che
sty man playing bodyguard for each girl. It got even better on Nob Hill, but then in the Tenderloin, on old Turk Street, the scene changed. Cripples everywhere, from accidents or CP or other defects, stumping up and down the block. Toothlessness, shouting and barking on the street corners, grimy delis and fortified ethnic luncheonettes. Money doesn’t roll downhill, but shit surely does. Needless to say, I spent a lot more time in the Tenderloin than I ever had in Russian Hill.
Funny—Russian Hill is named after a cemetery, a Russian one right atop the hill from back before ’49. That’s how far south the Russians made it with their settlements of the West in the early nineteenth century. The Gold Rush settlers did what San Franciscans always do—dug up the bodies and tore them to pieces, shattered the crosses and tombstones, and then settled down to the business of living without corpses underfoot.
The call wasn’t a surprise. In the poor parts of town, people are used to doing their own dirty work. The grade of the streets is so high that the pedicabs won’t go there, so I hailed a van and paid for my trip with half a flask of Teacher’s. The cabbie was kind enough not to drink it while she drove up to Greenwich Street. The good middle-class people of the world—being the very best sort of person to be, not grimy and ignorant like the proletariat, nor blood-soaked maniacs like the inbred elite—are usually very considerate, so I had hopes that I wouldn’t be facing a reanimate.
It was a kid, seven years old or thereabouts, named Tyler. His parents were ever so nice—both white. She a thin little thing with a prominent nose and bleached hair. He mostly bald, wearing a Stanford sweatshirt that wasn’t as clean as he would have liked it to be. Little Tyler wasn’t a reanimate. He wasn’t even dead yet; he was in his sickbed, and except for his face was covered in both gray blankets and tarps. Someone—mother probably—had with a Sharpie drawn a little set of crosshairs on Tyler’s forehead.
