A Thousand Deaths

by George Alec Effinger

  "Shh, not yet," said Benarcek in a stage whisper. "Lie down and shut up."

  Stevie just couldn't believe it. "The best scene I've had in ten years," he said, "and Courane ruins it. What an asshole." He shot Courane three more times, but of course it did no good.

  From the Desk of

  I liked to think that magic of a quiet sort happened there. Five novels and a lot of short stories had been born in that very room. I was in the middle of a new story at the moment, a kind of wry, ironic tale about a young man without any luck at all. I'd titled it, tentatively at least, "The Man Who Could Work Blunders," an allusion to H. G. Wells's "The Man Who Could Work Miracles." The ending of the story would have to wait, however, until I moved my new word processor into the office and got everything squared away again. I wiped the perspiration from my forehead and looked around hopelessly; the way things were going, that might be several days away.

  "The Man Who Could Work Blunders" was not going to be a great story, no matter what happened. It was not destined to win awards and be reprinted through the decades in collections of great fiction of the twentieth century. I had a reputation as a facile writer, a prolific writer, a writer sometimes blessed with interesting ideas; unfortunately, at the same time I was also kind of a crummy writer. The interesting ideas often died sudden deaths, embalmed in various short stories and novelettes like flies in amber. It was often frustrating to read my pieces; they would begin with hope and wonder, but before I successfully realized my concept, my lack of real talent would make itself felt. The characters then proceeded on to the end without further connection to the point of the whole exercise.

  During the years of my marriage, at the beginning of my career, I used to write at the kitchen table late at night, after my wife had fallen asleep. It was lonely sitting in the kitchen with no company other than the thin buzzing of the clock on the stove. I used to write my stories in a spiral-bound notebook, in longhand. My wife treated me like a creature from another planet when I wrote my first story. Her attitude changed from patronizing to fearful when it sold to a magazine for two cents a word. Not long thereafter, our daughter's illness interrupted my first novel for three months, and the book was ruined forever, at least by my own standards. And my wife, in a gesture of reconciliation, bought me my first typewriter for Christmas; it slowed my output to a slender trickle until I learned how to type.

  Those days were not so very long ago. My wife is no longer my wife, of course, and my daughter is on her own, more or less. All of that had happened in fifteen years. A lot of things can happen in fifteen years.

  Now I live alone in an apartment larger than any we had lived in as a family. There are two bedrooms, the one in the back converted to an office. At first, I had put only my battered old oak desk in the room along with the venerable file cabinet. It had seemed like a stark and lonely place to work, so unlike the warm kitchen. Maybe that's why the stories that came out of that time were also stark and lonely, or maybe there were other reasons. The office didn't remain empty long, however. I needed a bookcase to house my copies of my published pieces; I built it by hammering together one-by-eight pine boards, and I leaned it against the wall beside the oak desk. I filled the bookcase with my books and magazines, and I was surprised by how much I had written.

  Then I needed another bookcase for the reference books relating to the novel I was working on. I added a third bookcase beside it against the longest wall, filled with standard references: the dictionaries and encyclopedia and thesaurus, the baby-name books, the grammar books and foreign dictionaries and travel books and books of quotations. Above the third bookcase were my framed certificates and awards that proved that I'd actually been doing something for the last fifteen years.

  There was a walk-in closet against one of the shorter walls, and beside it the filing cabinet. The fourth wall was taken up by sliding glass doors leading to a small balcony. There wasn't room for much else in the office, but that didn't stop me from acquiring things. Working on two novels and a couple of short stories at the same time, I bought a low table on which to keep the manuscripts and reference material sorted. It sat in the middle of the room, just behind my swivel chair.

  When I made the quantum leap at last and invested in a word processor, everything had to be shifted around again. The daisy- wheel printer could sit on the low table. The computer console itself would just fit on the desk, if I cleared away the books, the piles of correspondence, the divided vertical file, the clock, the postage scale, the radio, and the tax records. That part was easy to think about; finding new locations for all those items would be more difficult.

  It didn't take several days, after all. By midnight of the same day the computer arrived, my office was back in a kind of order. As close to order as it ever was. The only things that still needed to be moved were the small photocopier and my telephone answering machine. On the verge of admitting defeat, too weary to bother about more aesthetic solutions, I brought in another table and set it up in front of the big closet. I put the copier and answering machine there, and told myself that I would never need to use any of the things in the closet; not until winter, at least.

  In the morning I went back to work on "The Man Who Could Work Blunders." It took me a long time to get used to writing my first draft on a glowing screen instead of a sheet of yellow paper. I made a lot of mistakes, hitting keys that did unusual and irrevocable things to my hard work. Slowly I learned how to use my new machine. It was, after all, a labor-saving device. I was able to tinker with my prose until I had it just right; in the past, I had submitted stories with concealed weak spots, things that I knew I ought to change but wasn't willing to retype whole pages to fix. Now I could alter anything, time and again, before I had the printer deliver the final version. Even afterward, if I spotted something else, I could call up that page and make yet another correction; in a matter of seconds, the computer would do for me what used to take a quarter of an hour of tedious work.

  The pertinent question—which I avoided, of course—was if my puny prose and meager career could justify the expense of the computer in the first place. I left that to others to debate; I had work to do. First, I typed into the computer's memory as much of "The Man Who Could Work Blunders" as I had written on my old typewriter. Then I added a few pages of new material. I read over everything and decided that I had to revise a couple of paragraphs. It was so simple. By the end of the day, I was positive that the word processor had already begun to earn its keep.

  It wasn't until the next morning that I learned just how true that judgment was.

  Opening my first bottle of Guinness of the day and putting it carefully on the desk beside the computer, I read over the last page of the story, still displayed in white letters on a green background. I consulted my notes to see what was going to happen next; I needed a scene between my main character and his psychiatrist, which would plant a seed of doubt in the character's mind, but let the reader know that everything that had happened so far was not illusion or hallucination, but absolutely real. It was a tricky bit of dialogue. It would have to be handled carefully. I didn't feel like tackling it, and so I was glad when the telephone rang. But I didn't want to talk to anyone yet either; I let the answering machine take it. By flicking a little switch on the tape recorder, I could monitor the call.

  "Hello," said the answering machine in my voice, "This is Sandor Courane. I'm not able to answer the phone in person at the moment, but if you'll leave your name and number, I'll get back to you as soon as possible. You'll have thirty seconds to leave your message."

  Beep.

  "Hello, Sandy? Rocky." That was Steinschlager, the associate editor of Awesome Stories. "You know we're on a tight schedule, and that cover has already gone to the printer, so I need the rewrite of your Wells piece as soon as possible. We've got your name splattered all over the cover and the contents page of the magazine. We're both going to look silly if the story isn't in it. Call me collect when—" There was an abrupt silence when
Steinschlager's thirty seconds were up.

  So whether or not I liked it, "The Man Who Could Work Blunders" would have to be finished by tomorrow at four o'clock. It would have to be in the mail, on its way to New York, by five.

  I began to write:

  "Now tell me, Mr. Edelman," said the psychiatrist, "just how long have you had this problem?"

  There was something very wrong. I stared at the sentence and wondered what was bothering me so much. I glanced at my notes; everything had been crossed off until #5: scene with shrink. I shrugged. My subconscious mind was trying to tell me something, and I always tried to listen to my subconscious. Actually, it was my subconscious that earned the living; I just did the manual labor. I read back over the last few paragraphs from the day before, thinking that the trouble, as on so many previous occasions, was just a poor transition from one scene to the next.

  The trouble was simpler than that, yet more difficult to explain. The main character, whom I had named Charlie Edelman, was named Jim Collins in the preceding paragraphs. I muttered a few words for which I'd never get a nickel apiece. This was the trouble with working on more than one thing at a time; every once in a while, despite all my care and discipline, sometimes things got mixed up. I looked at my notes once again, but I discovered that in the notes the guy was called Charlie Edelman. I was sure that Charlie Edelman had always been in this story, and I was suddenly aware that I had never, anywhere, used a name like Jim Collins. I hated simple, common names like that in stories; I always tried to pick slightly ethnic names, just for variety.

  As I read through the draft of the pages stored in the computer's memory, Charlie Edelman was nowhere to be seen; and this guy Jim Collins was having a hilarious time dealing with his new powers. It was a very funny story. It was even funnier than the way I'd written it.

  Half the bottle of Guinness went down while I tried to understand what had happened. I had fed in the first part of the story yesterday, just as I had written it at my old typewriter. Then I'd gone through and made a few corrections here and there, nothing vital. Somehow I accomplished more than I realized: the story was fresher, tighter, funnier. I thought I understood what happened: without the tedious labor of retyping, I was inclined to do more polishing with the word processor than I ever did before. The damn machine was making a better writer out of me, as well as a more prolific one. I smiled and gulped the rest of the beer.

  The name business still bothered me, though. I could take care of that easily enough; I consulted my operating manual and learned that I could change the name wherever it occurred in the story with a few simple commands. I ordered the computer to edit out Jim Collins and edit in Charlie Edelman. I called up earlier pages to see if I'd done that job correctly, and I was pleased to see that Jim Collins no longer existed.

  I took a short break to crack another bottle of Guinness. In my mind I chose among the possible evil things I could put in Jim Collins's path—no, Edelman's path. I frowned. I sat down at the computer and stared at the last sentence of my story. The psychiatrist had spoken; what did Edelman have to say?

  "Not long, Doctor," said Edelman. "I guess it all began when I made that foolish wish."

  "A wish?" said the analyst.

  "Yes. You see, I had been trying to work up the courage to ask

  To ask what? I wondered. What did this jerk Edelman want: a raise? A few days off? His boss's daughter? I took a swallow of beer and realized that Edelman was, indeed, in love with his boss's daughter. It was hopeless, of course: the girl had been educated at the best schools and was already engaged to marry a prince from a tiny European principality. The only course open to Edelman was wishing and hoping. He was probably tossing pennies into fountains and scouring the evening sky for the first star. The whole point was that Charlie Edelman was a lovable loser, the type who might love the boss's daughter but who didn't stand a chance of winning her on his own. In the past, in more romantic times, the supernatural powers with which Edelman had suddenly been blessed would have led to an entertaining confusion, but in the end the ritzy girl would realize what a marvelous human being he was. Today, however, this was satire; Edelman would not end up with the girl. It would be a miracle if he even kept his job.

  I paused to make a note of my decision. It clarified things even more. The story began to pour out of me. It was easy, even fun, to compose directly on the video display screen. I wasn't interrupted by the need to change sheets of paper. Writing had become a continuous process, a fluid, creative act. The story was paced better because it was one long, coherent piece, rather than bits of exposition strung together like beads on a string. I was startled to learn that writing could be so enjoyable again; it was like the feeling I had had at the beginning of my career, a joy that I'd lost somewhere along the way.

  Nevertheless, there came a point when my skimpy notes did not offer me enough inspiration. I slowed down and then stopped, wondering what was going to happen next. It seemed that I'd written myself into a corner with no way out. It meant reading over the last couple of paragraphs, possibly throwing them away and going off in a different direction. That sort of thing was what the computer was for in the first place; I could wipe out those paragraphs and replace them as often as I liked, and I could save the discarded work in case I decided to go with it after all.

  "Charlie," said Celeste, "what does this mean?"

  "Oh, I've been meaning to tell you about it."

  Edelman wondered how he would explain it to her.

  Edelman wasn't the only one who was wondering. I finished my second bottle of stout and decided that it was time to take a break. With any kind of luck, there was a ballgame on television.

  Yes, there was an afternoon ballgame on cable (the Braves at Chicago) and it went into extra innings. After the game, intending to go back to work, I opened my fifth bottle of Guinness and put it beside the word processor. I looked at the clock and remembered that there was some movie I wanted to see; I couldn't recall which film. I frowned at the glowing screen of the computer, which still displayed that last sentence I'd written. During the baseball game, I hadn't come to a decision about how Edelman was going to explain himself to Celeste. I let my breath out in a heavy sigh; I really didn't feel like working. I decided to let the TV Guide decide the matter. If it was a good movie, I'd watch it; if it was a mediocre or bad picture, I'd work. It turned out to be Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke; there was no way I was going to miss that. I loved the way Strother Martin said, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

  So after the movie I watched the local news and the network news, and then I watched the Solid Gold dancers, which led right into my eighth beer and a Muppet Show rerun, my ninth beer and Dynasty, my tenth beer and some country-music awards show. Then came the news again and a Rockford Files rerun, and it was too damn late to work, and besides I was running out of beer. I watched a movie in which George Peppard had amnesia, and another put together from episodes of the old Lone Ranger, because I loved Clayton Moore's voice. I swallowed the last mouthful of the last beer, and then I congratulated myself on my perfect timing: it was now time to go to bed. Being a writer wasn't so bad. After all, I got to make my own hours. I staggered only a little as I felt my way down the dark hall to the bathroom. I would lie awake for a few minutes, thinking over the hitch that had popped up in my story; my subconscious would probably solve the problem by morning. I would begin the day ready to tackle the rest of the story. I could have the whole thing finished by lunchtime, and the word processor would type it out in minutes. It would be in the mail Thursday afternoon.

  I woke up Thursday morning refreshed after a sound night's sleep. I went to the bathroom and stared at my reflection in the mirror. I decided not to bother shaving; I wondered if the great writers of modern literature started their days like this. Did Graham Greene look for excuses to postpone his work? Did Thomas Pynchon watch the Solid Gold dancers? Did John Updike shave every morning?

  I went to the refrigerator and remembered
that there wasn't any beer; I'd have to skip breakfast. I'd run out at lunchtime and buy a couple of six-packs. I rubbed my face with one hand as I slowly eased my way toward the office. The damn computer was still there, and I regarded it balefully, the way I used to regard my dormant typewriter. "It's magic time," I muttered. I dropped into my chair and read what was written on the screen.

  "Oh, Jimmy," cried Celeste, "you won't ever have to wish for anything again!"

  That didn't sound right. The line didn't even ring a bell with me. I was sure that I'd left my characters in some kind of painful dilemma. That's why I'd wasted the whole previous day, because I didn't know how to fix it. Of course, I'd been a little drunk when I went to bed; it looked as if I'd gotten up during the night and finished the story in a burst of energy and creative brilliance. Maybe I should consider working drunk more often.

  I was just a little annoyed that my inebriated self had changed Charlie Edelman back into Jim Collins. I repeated the editing procedure I'd learned the day before, and once more Charlie Edelman was the hero of the story. I ran it all back to where I'd abandoned it during the afternoon, and read everything that I'd done during the night. It was now a terrific story, and Steinschlager would be pleased. Of course, it was a different story than the one I'd foreseen: it went in an entirely different direction. My drunken self had evidently become romantic; in the finished version, Edelman won both Celeste and a better job from her father before he lost his supernatural powers. It was a very amusing story, if obviously derivative. It was no longer a satire of Wells's story, but perhaps neither Steinschlager nor the readers would be familiar enough with the original to complain. By the end of the piece, I had a clear picture of my protagonist: he was the young James Stewart. To make it perfect, Celeste was the young June Allyson. It would have made a great Frank Capra movie.