The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant

by Jeffrey Ford

  “A metal plate?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “My head is a magnet and a beacon. At times it is a bonus, because it allows me to see into situations, to broadcast to the world, but it also makes me forget important things I need to remember.”

  I knew the worst thing I could do was to dismiss Mrs. Apes’s story. It was her reality, and if I wanted to help her with her writing, I had to respect it no matter how incredible it sounded. Still, I had my job to do, so I pressed her a little, hoping to find a focused topic she would be willing to write about.

  “What’s one of the things you have forgotten?” I asked. “For you to feel that there is something missing from your memory, you must have a vague idea what it entails.”

  “I had a daughter,” she told me. “She was a beautiful girl, as sweet and kind as her father was a monster. Four years ago, two years after I was attacked, when she was fourteen, she was hit by a car while crossing the street in front of her school. She was rushed to the hospital and the doctors worked on her for hours, but she finally died from a traumatic head injury. I almost died from grief myself. I’ve always felt I should have seen it coming, should have been there to help her,” she said, but her placid expression never diminished.

  I looked away from Mrs. Apes for a moment and saw the other students of the class had been listening intently. Their various facades of youthful cynicism and cool had melted, leaving their faces looking like those of a bunch of children watching, for the first time, the squadron of hideous monkeys take wing in The Wizard of Oz.

  Mrs. Apes continued. “Anyway, my daughter was taken to the same hospital I had been taken to.” Here she leaned forward and put her hand on my arm. “Do you know that because of our same last name, the x-ray technician mixed up my head x-rays with hers? When the doctor noticed from the first name that the tech had pulled the wrong pictures, he asked for my daughter’s. At one point, he had a copy of each on his desk. That is when he discovered they were identical. The damage, the breaks, the fractures, were a perfect likeness of each other. I mean perfect.”

  I shook my head.

  “Think about it,” she said. “I was forty-one when it happened to me and my daughter was fourteen.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But I believe my visions are leading me to the answer.”

  “What is it you’ve forgotten?” I asked.

  “My daughter’s name,” she said. “I can’t for the life of me remember her name. I call my sister in California and ask her what my daughter’s name was, and she tells me, but before I can write it down I forget it. If I’m not looking at it on a piece of paper, I can’t remember. That loss of memory is agony to me.”

  “Could you write about that?” I asked.

  Mrs. Apes turned very somber. “I’ll try,” she said, “but wait till you see what happens.”

  I took her vague warning under advisement, and wondered if I had done the right thing by trying to get her to write about something so close to her. I had learned through the years that students who dealt with very personal material could have real breakthroughs in their writing, because, very often, it was the confusion caused by the memories of these events that hampered their ability to express themselves clearly. Stories and essays don’t produce themselves, and they aren’t born from typing fingers. The reality of a narrative exists first in the mind.

  She went back to her computer and started working. I had to address some of the questions and problems of other students, and for a while I paid no attention to her. As I made my rounds of the classroom, checking in with everyone and reading pieces of the projects they were working on, I finally came to Mrs. Apes’s workstation. She was not typing but simply staring blankly at the screen. I looked over her shoulder and saw that the monitor was flashing a jumble of letters and symbols that changed with each pulsation. The background color, normally a royal blue, was now pink.

  “Wow,” I said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

  When she laughed the screen went completely blank, and the computer made a sound like it was dying.

  “I told you,” she said. “It’s the plate in my head. Now it’s ruined your machine.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s probably just a glitch. These machines are used by thousands of students every year. The wear and tear probably did it in. Maybe it contracted a virus along the way.”

  “If you say so,” she said.

  “Were you making any progress?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Well, before you forget what you had typed, let’s switch you to another machine.” I walked over to an empty workstation and got the computer up and running for her.

  By the end of the class, Mrs. Apes’s metal plate had beamed three machines into uselessness. She was effusively apologetic but kept telling me that she had warned me. She was the last student to leave, and I stopped her and told her not to worry about the machines, that I would have them fixed.

  “Thank you, thank you,” she said. “You know, I saw in my writing that you’d find a buck in the road.”

  “Gratuities are unnecessary,” I said. “But let’s hope it’s a hundred.”

  She smiled at me and left.

  Later that afternoon, I had the computer tech take a look at the machines that had gone haywire. He turned them on and they worked perfectly.

  “There’s nothing wrong with them,” he said.

  I described what I had seen and explained to him Mrs. Apes’s metal-plate theory. He told me it was possible that the plate might have had something to do with it. “There’s an electromagnetic field around these machines when they are on, and the body generates its own electromagnetic field. I’ve never heard of it happening before though. More than likely she didn’t want to write and just screwed them up herself when you weren’t watching.”

  I hadn’t considered the fact that she might be sabotaging the machines consciously in order not to have to deal with her memories of her daughter. It was an interesting possibility, and it made me decide that during the next class I would have her write about something less personal. If she was going to those lengths to avoid the subject, it might be dangerous to force her to it. I had to remind myself that it was a writing class and not a psych experiment.

  That night I had a late class and some time to kill beforehand, so I went over to the library and asked the librarian to do a search for me on the name or word “Avramody.” I told her I suspected that it might be from some crackpot religion or cult, maybe the title of one of the myriad mediaeval demons. She promised that she would work on it and let me know if she found anything.

  Then I phoned Mrs. Apes’s counselor and asked what he knew about her claims of a metal plate in her head. He said she had never told him anything about it. “Look,” he told me, “she seems like an ordinary middle-aged woman to me, but sometimes that ordinariness is the problem. It wouldn’t be the first time one of our students has invented an interesting past for themselves. She was obviously abused by her husband, maybe she is looking for empowerment through a sense of individuality. She wants to be different and special. Maybe she is reinventing herself now that she is in school. Don’t question it too deeply,” he said.

  My night class let out at 10:30. By the time I got to my car and began the hour and half ride home, it was almost 11:00. Instead of taking the New Jersey Turnpike, which was too fast for me, I always took route 537, a country road that passed through farmland and woods. Just after the midnight news came on the radio, I found my buck.

  Weighing about 250 pounds and carrying a ten-point rack, it came charging out of a blind of cattails on the left side of the road. In an instant, I slammed on the brakes, but the car went into a skid, and I helplessly watched as the corner of my station wagon nailed the huge animal in the side. Upon impact the deer bent in toward my windshield and, for a moment, I could clearly see its eye, brimming with animal fear, looking in at me. Then it flew off my car from the force o
f the collision while at the same time my car stopped. The radio shut off when the car cut out and everything was dead quiet.

  I couldn’t open the driver-side door because the whole left front of the car was smashed back and out of alignment. Instead, I crawled across the seat and let myself out the passenger side. The buck was writhing on the side of the road, kicking only one of its back legs spasmodically. I was shaking and my mind was blank. The animal craned its neck up out of the pool of blood it lay in and looked back over its shoulder at me. That is when I noticed that one of its lower antler points had grown down and into the side of its jaw. The sight of that anomaly made me wince.

  A great rasping sound came up from its chest and turned into high-pitched squeals. It was clear to me that the creature was about to die. “I’m sorry,” I said aloud to it. Its cries became weaker and more breathy, and just before it went limp, the buck made a noise through its mouth that sounded distinctly like a human voice uttering a word. I swear I heard it, a word made up of only vowels. I shook my head and backed away. As soon as I crawled back into the car, I got it started, and drove slowly to the Vincent Town Diner, where I called the police to report the mishap. The officer told me he’d send someone out to fetch the animal.

  For the rest of the drive home, I was jittery, waiting for something else to come dashing across the road. I prayed the car, which was in very bad shape, wouldn’t crap out and leave me stranded in the dark. When I finally pulled into my driveway, I felt like crying. The first thing I did upon entering the house was go upstairs and check on my sons who were fast asleep. Their light, steady breathing diminished the trembling of my hands and put me at ease. My wife was also asleep; I undressed and climbed into bed beside her.

  “I hit a deer on the way home,” I told her.

  “Why?” she asked from sleep.

  I didn’t bother to wake her. Once I told her about the accident she would be unable to sleep for the rest of the night. I just lay there in the dark, trying to get warm by thinking about a vacation we had taken to the beach the previous summer. My method of relaxation worked quite well, and I was eventually able to doze off. Somewhere in my sleep, I relived the accident, saw the wounded deer, and heard that haunting word composed of vowels. In my dream I told myself, “You’ve got to remember this word when you wake up.” But then the morning had come and I had forgotten.

  The accident had left me with a feeling of unreality, as if I had died in it and was now a spirit unaware that he was no longer alive. My wife, who was a nurse, told me to take the day off, and I decided to take the rest of the week off. It was not only that I was afraid of driving again, but more that I didn’t want to leave home. I wanted to stay close to my sons for some reason. They were eight and ten, at ages where a hug had to be requested from them, but when I told them what had happened with the deer, they kept hugging me and touching my face.

  After my wife left for work and the boys had gone to school, I called the college and explained that my car was wrecked, and I had been slightly hurt; although truthfully there was nothing physically wrong with me. Then I called the garage in town to come and tow the car in for repairs. While I was waiting for the tow truck, I decided to make a pot of coffee. At the kitchen sink, while running water into the pot, I looked out the window into the backyard. There, in broad daylight, I saw a deer drinking out of the birdbath. The sight of it sent a wave of fear through me. I walked to the back door, pulled it open and yelled, “What do you want?” There was nothing there.

  I drank my coffee and reasoned that the deer was just a coincidence as we did live in a wooded area very close to the Pine Barrens. Still, a deer sighting in daylight was not a common occurrence. I played music, tried to grade a stack of class papers, watched television, but the entire time I kept trying to remember that word the buck had spoken to me.

  That afternoon, when my older son, who rode his bike to school, did not return on time, I felt an ominous reptile uncoiling in my thoughts and I became frantic. I took the younger one, who had been delivered by the bus and, since I didn’t have a car, set out on foot to look for his brother. All manner of horrors went through my mind, and don’t think I didn’t remember what had happened to Mrs. Apes’s daughter. I walked so fast my son had to run to keep up.

  After walking the length of five long blocks at a breakneck pace, we saw him at a distance coming along on his bike. I was so relieved I laughed out loud. When he reached us he told me that he had stopped with some other kids to see a deer that had come out of the woods by the lake. I told him I had seen the same one in our backyard that morning.

  “The one with the weird horn?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “It had a weird horn that grew down instead of up.”

  I told him the one I had seen didn’t have antlers.

  “Two deer in one day,” he said, “good thing your car’s in the shop,” and then he took off on his bike. “I’ll race you guys home,” he called back over his shoulder.

  I was in a perpetual fog for the next few days, only surfacing when the kids said they were going to do something. Then my mind focused into worry. During these days I must have filled the backs of twenty envelopes with combinations of vowels, trying to reproduce the word that eluded me. Finally, on Monday, I picked up my car at the shop on the way to work. It was a white-knuckle drive that morning even though the sun was bright and the day was beautiful.

  When I arrived at work, I found in my mailbox an interoffice envelope from the librarian. Inside was a typed sheet with a yellow Post-It note attached, which said:

  Jeff,

  Next time, how about something a little easier, like who invented Velcro? Anyway, here’s what I found on Avramody. Hope it’s what you were looking for.

  Jean

  I took the sheet back to my office, closed the door, and read it.

  Nicholas Avramody, born 1403, died 1441, lived in the village of Fornapp on the southern coast of England. He had been born into a well-to-do family and was given a classical education by his father who was a cartographer. Around the age of twenty, Avramody left home and gave up his part in his father’s business. He built himself a small home in the nearby woods and began writing a book that was later published, entitled The Honeyed Knot. This work would eventually become a key text for the Puritans, and would figure extensively in the religio-philosophical works of Cotton Mather. The “honeyed knot” was a metaphor for the impossibly complex plot of human existence. For mere mortals, their lives and the reasons for the events in them may seem like a tangled ball of string, but this inexplicable mess is a sweet one because it is the deity’s plan for us. Within the knot, all our lives touch and crisscross and bind together for good but unknowable reasons.

  This philosopher-hermit eventually fell afoul of the church for another belief of his, namely the fact that animals have souls and given enough patience, one can communicate with them. Creatures all have knowledge of the plan, a knowledge we lost in the Garden of Eden. When the locals started going to him for spiritual guidance, the clergy became jealous and started rumors that he practiced bestiality with the various animals of the forest that flocked around his small home. It so happened at this time that a girl in Fornapp was bitten by a bat, contracted rabies, and died. The church fathers told the townspeople that the bat had been sent by Avramody. They incited such fear and contempt of him that he was eventually attacked by an angry mob and cudgeled to death.

  With this knowledge still buzzing in my head, I went downstairs to my class only to be met by Mrs. Apes. She handed me a paper and said, “I did it. I finished the piece you asked for.” As soon as I was able to get all of the students working on their various projects, I sat down with her at my desk and looked at her writing. The piece had been executed very sloppily in pencil and was about four pages long. I got no further than the title, though, because there was the word the buck had spoken to me. I realized now that it did have one consonant, but a soft one that sounds like another
vowel when surrounded by vowels.

  “Ayuwea?” I said to Mrs. Apes.

  She smiled, “My daughter’s name.”

  “It’s unusual,” I said.

  “My mother’s mother was half Ojibwa Indian, and I had heard her name from my mother many times, but never saw it spelled. So when I had my daughter, I named her after my grandmother but had to invent the spelling. I knew she would be a special child and needed a special name.”

  “Does it mean anything?” I asked.

  She shook her head and shrugged. “Something, I’m sure,” she said.

  “I thought you couldn’t remember it,” I said.

  “Well, it was the strangest thing. Last week, after I had tried to write about her in class, I couldn’t get her off my mind. Later that night, I was sitting in front of my television and the name just popped into my head. I remembered it just like I had never forgotten it. I’m sure trying to write about her brought the name to me.”

  So I read Mrs. Apes’s paper about her daughter. It was a loving tribute but nothing I hadn’t seen from a thousand other students who had lost someone close to them and recorded their feelings and memories in writing. As I had suspected she would, Mrs. Apes had made great strides in her grammar and spelling in that paper, but I never got the chance to continue working with her because she never returned to class after that day. The school had no phone number for her and none of the other students knew her or where she lived.

  This is where I thought the story should end. In one way it seemed satisfying that my student had come to some greater understanding of herself. There were loose ends, though, and all of the amazing connections really didn’t seem to add up to much. I decided to pass it off as one huge coincidence that I had somehow helped to generate through a bout of paranoia. With each class that came and went, I held out hope that Mrs. Apes would return and I could continue to work with her.