Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  She would never mention the Exceleriter’s capabilities to Dr. Elsa again. She would never tell Teddy or Marella. She would never tell anyone. She knew what had happened, and she was not insane.

  XIII

  That afternoon, Stevie worked with the Exceleriter as if the complications of the past four days had never arisen. Human being and machine met across the interface of their unique quiddities (Stevie liked the metaphysical thrust of that Latinism), and copy poured forth on Dr. Elsa’s butcher paper at a rate of almost six hundred words every thirty minutes. Anthony Trollope had written a good deal faster, of course, but this speed wasn’t too shabby for a gal who had recently been suffering a nasty block. Stevie took a tranquil pleasure in her recovered—even augmented—fluency.

  By three o’clock, she was within a paragraph or two of completing her submission proposal for Two-Faced Woman: Reflections of a Female Paterfamilias. A shrill buzzing ensued. Stevie’s hands jumped away from the keyboard, but the noise had its origins not in another broken typewriter cable but at the doorbell button downstairs. Thank God. She never liked being interrupted at work, but the doorbell was better than a repetition of Tuesday’s debacle. A jingly SOS, the doorbell rang three more times, and Stevie shouted over it that she was coming, hold on a sec.

  At the front door she came face to face with Tiffany McGuire’s mother, who, gripping Marella supportively at the shoulders, favored Stevie with an apologetic smile. “I’m afraid she’s not feeling too good, Mrs. Crye. The other girls wanted her to stay, you know, but I’d hate it if she brought everyone down sick. I’ve got Carol and Donna Bradley, too.”

  “Of course.” Stevie could see Mrs. McGuire’s Pinto station wagon under the Japanese tulip tree at the foot of the walkway, a bevy of third-grade girls sproinging about in the backseat. “Thanks for carrying her home.”

  But when Marella came into her arms, her heart sank. The child showed a face so drawn and translucent that Stevie could see the blue veins in her cheeks and eyelids, the mortal jut of bone beneath her brow. February was a bad month, of course, but during this past year Marella had frequently come down sick. (Of late she had tried, valiantly, to disguise or mitigate the degree of her discomfort.) It was probably nothing but a nervous stomach. Tuesday, she had contracted a touch of the flu, but today the excitement of spending the night with Tiff—or maybe the small trauma of an argument with Donna Bradley, with whom she had trouble getting along—had caused her upset. A nervous stomach was a funny ailment. Almost any emotional disturbance could trigger it. Stevie wondered, in fact, if Marella had registered her mood that morning at breakfast; the child’s present illness might be a delayed reaction to the disbelief and helplessness that Stevie no longer felt, a kind of sympathetic aftertremor.

  “Oh, you poor kid. Come on in.”

  Mrs. McGuire having retreated out of hearing, Marella said, “I didn’t want to come home. I could have stayed. She got scared, though.” Her frail voice encoded the hint of a forbidden nyah-nyah taunt. “She was afraid I’d throw up on her carpets.”

  “That’s a legitimate fear, daughter mine. I don’t blame her.”

  Marella began to cry. “I’ve done it again, haven’t I, Mama?”

  “It’s all right. Hush.”

  Stevie folded down the sofa bed in the den, settled Marella in with her faithful upchuck bucket and some maze books, and went back upstairs to finish her proposal. Surprisingly, her nagging awareness of Marella’s nervous upset notwithstanding, she resumed work with some of her former enthusiasm and in only twenty minutes had completed the job. Look out, Briar Patch Press, Inc. She used a pair of scissors to separate her draft from the long strip of paper in the machine, rolled out the abbreviated piece, inserted another uncut one to receive whatever the Exceleriter might compose in the hours after midnight, and puffed some air at her bangs. She did not unplug the machine.

  The remainder of the evening she spent caring for Marella, cleaning up the dinner dishes, and thumbing through a battered paperback from Ted’s little library of science-fiction novels, something called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Long before tucking the kids in, she began to anticipate, to build expectation upon expectation. By the time she climbed into bed, Teddy and Marella long since asleep, she understood how hard it would be to join them in slumber. Was the Exceleriter really plugged in? Did it have enough paper? Would she hear it when it began? What would it tell her?

  In her flannel nightgown, she tramped to her study to check the setup a final time. She resisted the temptation to turn on the Exceleriter’s electricity; last night it had done that by itself, and if it meant to perform again, it would surely emulate the pattern it had already established. If not, not. Beyond setting the stage, she could not prescribe or direct its untypewriterly behavior.

  Still, her parting instruction to the machine was, “Tell me about Ted. Let him finish his confession. I need to know.”

  XIV

  Awake or asleep? Awake, surely, for in the next room the resourceful Stevenson Crye, mistress of her fate, tamer of typewriters, could hear the businesslike rattle of the Exceleriter’s typing element, a concert muted a bit by the intervening plaster walls. She sat up in bed. By canny prior arrangement, her robe lay within reach, and she quickly put it on. Her powder-blue mules she found beside the bed exactly where she had left them, and after slipping into these hideous knockabouts she lurched over her carpet into the hall, not pausing to turn on a light.

  Her clumsiness Stevie blamed on her excitement, her failure to illuminate either bedroom or hall as an attempt at stealth. In truth, she was afraid to catch the Exceleriter unhandedly clattering away, and her emphatic “Oh, shit!” as she stumbled into her study door sabotaged any last hope of surprising the percipient machine.

  It stopped typing.

  Stevie hesitated a moment. Maybe it would start again. She wanted to catch the typewriter in the act. In flagrante delicto, lawyers called it. Or maybe she wanted no such thing. A kind of prurient ambivalence plagued her—much as a curious child may be of two minds about trying to witness, even from a secure hiding place, its transmogrified parents engaged in an instance of strenuous lovemaking. But the Exceleriter did not resume its unassisted labors, and before Stevie could steel herself to enter her study, she heard a high pathetic moaning from Marella’s room.

  “Hot, Mama. Oh, Mama, I’m so hot. . . .”

  The house was bitterly cold. Even though she had been out of bed only a minute or two, Stevie’s feet had gone numb. How could Marella possibly be hot? Only if she had a fever. Only if this afternoon’s nervous stomach had given way to an ailment traceable to virulent microorganisms. The poor kid. How much did she have to suffer? How long would these weird and exhausting attacks disrupt their lives? Stevie slumped against the doorjamb. A typewriter that worked by itself, and an intelligent eight-year-old daughter who could barely function twelve straight hours without catching a flu bug or an ineradicable angst. That Teddy continued to sleep astonished Stevie and imperceptibly mollified her despair: the only bright spot in this ridiculous pageant of after-hours calamity.

  “I’m melting,” Marella said more clearly. “Mama, I’m so hot I feel like I’m melting.”

  Stevie walked down the narrow hall to lean into her daughter’s double-dormer room, their largest bedchamber upstairs. “Are you awake?” she asked in a whisper. “Or are you talking in your sleep?”

  “Awake,” the girl said weakly. “Awake and hot. Oh, Mama—”

  “I’m coming. Don’t fret. Mama’s here.” Stevie picked her way over the clothes and stuffed animals littering the floor, squeezed between the twin beds at the northern end of the room, sat down on the vacant bed, switched on Marella’s night-light (a porcelain Southern belle in a pleated peach-colored gown), and crooned, “Don’t fret. Mama’s here.” The child shut her eyes against the night-light’s glow and turned her head on the pillow.

  Despite her complaints, Marella had not kicked off her covers. She made no move to squirm out from
under her electric blanket, which came all the way up to her chin. Stevie laid three fingers across her forehead. It felt lukewarm rather than fiery. The girl’s cheeks were soft pink rather than red, her earlobes as pale as the night-light lady’s tiny corsage of porcelain gardenias.

  “Daughter mine, I don’t think you’ve got a fever. You look pretty good. You don’t feel hot.”

  “Hot,” she insisted, her eyes still closed. “Melting.”

  “Then uncover for a minute. I’ve got the sh-sh-shakes, and you’ll g-g-get ’em too.” Trying to jolly the girl out of her obsession, Stevie held her hands out to demonstrate their shakiness. “Brrrrrrr,” she whinnied.

  “All I can move is my head, Mama.”

  “That’s silly,” Stevie replied, panic descending. “Why do you say that? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m trapped. The blanket’s holding me down and melting me, Mama.” Marella revolved her head back toward Stevie and opened her wild luminous eyes. “It’s my fault, it’s all my fault—I’m not any good.”

  “Of course you’re good. Never say that. You and Teddy are the two best things ever to happen to me.” Stevie let her hand drop from the girl’s gossamer-fine hair to the pressure points in her throat. “You’re not paralyzed, Marella,” she said, gingerly touching. “You’re still half-asleep. Push your cover back, you’ll see how chilly it is out here in the cold, cruel world, and everything’ll be okay again. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. I couldn’t. You’re precious to me, daughter mine.”

  “So hot, Mama,” the girl said. “So hot I may’ve already melted.”

  “Try to move. Try to push your cover back.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try to move!” Stevie insisted. “You’ve convinced yourself a bad thing’s happened, and it hasn’t, Marella. It hasn’t!”

  But what if some rare form of paralysis had gripped the girl? Stevie’s inchoate alarm began to solidify into a tumorous knot in the pit of her stomach. None of this was fair. If Marella could uncover herself—if only she would make the small symbolic effort involved in shoving her electric blanket aside—why, her delusive spell would be broken, and they could both go back to sleep. As for the Exceleriter . . .

  “Mama,” Marella said. “Mama, I’m trying.”

  “But you’re just lying there. Surely you can kick these old covers off.” She made an abrupt flicking motion with her fingers, her smile as tight as a triple-looped rubber band.

  Marella began to cry. “Already melted. My fault. So, so hot, Mama. I’m just not any good.”

  “Stop saying that, little sister!”

  “Call Dr. Elsa, Mama. Ask Dr. Elsa why I can’t move.”

  “Marella, we can’t go running to Dr. Elsa with every little problem, especially in the middle of the night. She’s seen too much of me already.”

  “Mama, please—you take the covers off me.”

  Stevie rocked away from her daughter, clutching her face in her hands. She—the so-called adult—was behaving irrationally. Marella might be seriously ill, paralyzed, and here she was refusing to telephone their family doctor, her own closest friend, just because she had made a fool of herself yesterday morning in that forbearing woman’s Wickrath offices. In this situation, Dr. Elsa would be angry only if she failed to call. This was clearly an imperative situation. Stevie stood up.

  “Marella, I’m going to call the Kensingtons.”

  Tears in the corners of her eyes, the child gave a feeble nod. “You uncover me, okay? Before you call. Just for a minute, Mama. I’m still hot. I’ve already melted, but I’m still hot.”

  This refrain enraged Stevie. She grabbed the satin hem of the GE blanket and yanked both it and the sheet beneath it all the way to the foot of the narrow brass bed. Then she began to scream.

  Her daughter’s lower body, from the neck down, consisted of the slimy ruins of her skeletal structure. Her flesh and internal organs had liquefied, seeping through the permeable membrane of her bottom sheet and into the box springs beneath the half-dissolved mattress, stranding her pitiful rib cage, pelvis, and limb bones on the quivering surface—like fossils washed out of an ancient geological formation. Steam rose into the February air from this odorless mess, and Stevie added her breath to it by screaming and screaming again.

  Marella was heedless of her mother’s incapacitating hysteria. “Still hot,” she said. “Oh, Mama, I’m still hot. . . .”

  XV

  Stevie carefully tore the sheet bearing this nightmare from her Exceleriter, draped the long page over her dictionary stand, and, ignoring the cold and the syncopated hammering of her heart, reread every line. The machine—which, to use its own wry terminology, she had failed to catch in flagrante delicto—was mocking her. She had tried to arrange matters so that it would produce copy compatible with her desire for answers about Ted, Sr., but it had spun out another sort of text altogether, a cruel lampoon in which her concern for Marella was translated into domestic Grand Guignol:

  Awake or asleep? Awake, surely, for in the next room the resourceful Stevenson Crye, mistress of her fate, tamer of typewriters, could hear the businesslike rattle of the Exceleriter’s typing element, a concert . . .

  Etcetera, etcetera. But the worst, the most tasteless and offensive part of the joke it had played on her, did not reside in these easy satiric jabs, but in the heartless, vividly obscene surprise at the end:

  . . . the slimy ruins of her skeletal structure. Her flesh and internal organs had liquefied, seeping through the permeable membrane of her bottom sheet and into the box springs beneath the half-dissolved mattress, stranding her pitiful rib cage, pelvis, and limb bones on the quivering surface — like fossils . . .

  Etcetera. A climactic passage not merely horrifying but fundamentally contemptuous of civilized human feeling. For some reason the typewriter wished to mock her humanity by blaspheming her love for Marella, by playing upon her deep-seated fears about the child’s mental and emotional well-being, and by depicting Stevie herself as unperceptive and vacillating. In fact, the cumulative portrait of her own character in this disgusting little sketch was almost as ugly as the description of Marella’s ruined body.

  That’s a self-centered way of interpreting this nonsense, Stevie suddenly realized. Besides, the sketch doesn’t make you out a complete Lucrezia Borgia. As far as that goes, it’s probably a modified transcription of the nightmare you were having before you heard this damned machine pounding away and came stumbling over your own furry slippers to behold its treachery.

  You’re angry with yourself for not getting here in time, and you’re angry with the machine for making a gruesome, condescending joke of a relationship you cherish.

  This reasoning had a calming effect. Her heart slowed its thunderous beating, and her hands trembled less from fear and anger than from the cold. She had the sh-sh-shakes.

  Marella, Stevie thought. What about Marella?

  Nightmares slipped through her consciousness like sand through the waist of an hourglass. Once awake, she could never remember them. All she ever retained of her dreams was a mood, whether upbeat, neutral, or despairing. If she had actually dreamed the sequence of images and dialogue typed out on this strip of paper by the Exceleriter, well, the sound of its sinister industriousness had stolen from her even her postnightmare blues. She had focused her entire will on getting from her bedroom to her study undetected by the culprit. She had not succeeded. It had finished its story and turned itself off before she was halfway to her destination.

  Marella! a dogged portion of her consciousness reminded her. Maybe you can’t remember the lost dream that inspired this ghoulish lampoon, Stevenson Crye, but it isn’t really lost, is it? It’s right here under your hands, in stinging black and white. It describes your daughter as a roller-coaster framework of bones over a lava flow of flesh—but instead of going down the hall to see about her, you stand here mentally abusing your typewriter for making up such filth, for portraying you as impatient, self-centered, and wishy-wash
y. Why, at this very moment you’re in the unbelievable process of living up, or down, to its characterization of you.

  “Marella, I’m coming,” Stevie said aloud. “Don’t fret, little sister. Mama’s coming.”

  She groped her way down the dark hall, entered the girl’s room, and picked her way over the clothes and stuffed animals littering the floor. After squeezing between the twin beds book-ended by the dormer windows, Stevie lowered herself to the empty bed and switched on Marella’s porcelain night-light.

  The girl lay cocooned in the bedclothes, scrunched into a question mark in the middle of her narrow mattress. Stevie could not even see her face. In a way, this was a relief. The reality of the moment departed significantly from its imaginary parallel in the typewriter’s version. Marella was okay. Earlier that evening, after all, her nervous stomach had improved miraculously during her and Teddy’s favorite television show, The Dukes of Hazzard, an inane compendium of Good Old Boy humor and silly car crashes. She had gone to bed without complaint and had been sleeping soundly ever since. For these and several other reasons, then, the typewriter’s version was undoubtedly a lie.

  Uncover her and check, Stevie urged herself.

  Her hand went to the satiny hem of the electric blanket, but did not forcefully or even feebly grip it. Her fingers lacked the necessary resolve.