Cruel Devices

by George Wright Padgett

  JGAQUIS PHGENIX WAN GA1ED AT BH MTV FOR LU3K.

  “What’s a Ja-quin?” Billy sounded like a ref citing a foul. “They have to be actual words, Sport, or it doesn’t count.”

  “Joaquin Phoenix? He’s an actor.” Gavin waited for Billy to rescind his accusation, but there was only silence. “He’s been nominated for several Academy Awards. He played Johnny Cash. He was in Gladiator!”

  “Never saw it. Sounds stupid, though. Johnny Cash as a gladiator?”

  Before Gavin could offer a rebuttal, Billy added, “Ah, hang on a second… “ A few seconds of silence passed before he said, “‘Question: Just what unexpected horrors befall a very crazy Mr. Gavin Curtis?’”

  “You just did that in your head? Very funny.” He tried to think of a rebuttal using Billy’s name, but nothing came.

  “I don’t hear you typing anything over there, Sport.”

  The antique device complied beneath his fingertips as Gavin begrudgingly typed the line.

  Q: JUST WHAT UNEXPECTED HORRORS BEFALL A VERY CRAZY MR.GAVIN CURTIS?

  He proofed the line. For the first time, it was error-free.

  “Hey, wait,” he said. “It doesn’t work.” He read the line again, this time searching. “Nope, doesn’t count,” he said with great satisfaction to his editor and mentor. “You left out the K. There’s no K in that sentence.”

  The phone went silent. Gavin imagined Billy scribbling out the sentence to check him, but he was right. A moment later, the wet sound of a raspberry came through the line followed by good-natured laughter. “Guilty as charged, but at least I didn’t make up words. Anyway, how’s the tour going? Where are you?”

  “It’s going as well as can be expected, I guess. I’m in Connecticut for the next day and a half. I think I encountered the entire cast of David Lynch’s next movie an hour or so ago.”

  “Is this to be another episode of the misunderstood artist?” There was a pause followed by an even longer raspberry.

  “Why do I put up with you?” Gavin pushed the chair back from the desk.

  “Because I tell you the truth no matter how much it stings to hear it. I tell you when your prose is too longwinded or self-indulgent. I tell you when a plot point is meandering or ridiculous. But I also affirm you when you get it right, and you get it right a lot.”

  Gavin caught himself nodding in agreement. The adulation was short-lived. Billy said, “But about retiring Damien Marksman, you’re dead wrong.” The older man quickly added the equivalent of a verbal left hook. “You’re not doing another one of those Serpentine stories, are you? I’d rather clean Beverly’s aquarium than read that stuff again.”

  Gavin was reduced to the role of an ex-con presenting himself to his probation officer. “No, but what does it matter to you anyway?” He stood and paced the length of the suite. “What do you get out of all this anyway? Who cares what I write?”

  “What do I get? Beverly gets new furniture, and if there’s any dough left over, I buy new toys for my Harley. That’s what I get—that and the satisfaction of giving something exciting to your readers.”

  “Furniture, huh?”

  “Well, actually, she’s got her sights set on some type of high-tech washer/dryer combo thing, but you know what I mean.”

  “So, furniture and appliances? You should go on tour instead of me. After all, the big finale lighthouse fight scene in Beware the Hemoglobin Hemo-Goblin was all your idea anyway.”

  “Yeah, nice try, Champ, but you’re the superstar. You have to do it. It’s a necessary evil.”

  “’Evil’ is the right word for it, all right, but why is it necessary? If someone likes the book, they should just get it. I just find it strange, this whole preoccupation with wanting to meet the guy who made it.”

  Gavin plopped down on the bed and stared at the ceiling texture. “Let me ask you, do I have to meet the chef that prepares the porterhouse at the steak restaurant? Does it make it taste better somehow? What of the cattleman or whoever raised it? Should I meet them, too? What is this lunacy?”

  There was a pause before Billy calmly replied, “Art is different. We allow art to touch us inside our hearts. It touches us in a deeper way than a hunk of meat in the belly. If it’s good, it stays with us.”

  Gavin jerked up to a sitting position. “Art? Hmph! You know what I should’ve done? What I should’ve done from the very beginning? I should have hired a surrogate and placed his picture on the back of the book. Then I’d pay him, the actor, to come out once every couple of years to prance around like a prize pony and do all of this traveling as the wonderful Gavin Curtis.”

  “Yeah, that would’ve been the way to do it, but you didn’t, Sport. And why would you want to inflict being Gavin Curtis on anyone else when you don’t even want to do it yourself?”

  Gavin moved over to the window and stared at the parking lot far below. An SUV crept through the lot, looking for an empty spot like a shark circling the water for prey. “Is that some more of the hard-edged truth that you say I like so much from you?” Before the older man could answer, Gavin said, “I ought to kill Damien off. I’m done with vampire warlock detectives. I’m written out. I have no more ideas left for him, no worlds or dimensions for him to conquer, no mysteries to solve.”

  “But he’s immortal,” Billy offered, as if Gavin needed any reminder.

  “Yeah, my mistake.” He watched the SUV circle the lot for the third time and found himself morbidly curious about whether or not a fall from his room’s height would kill a person or just maim them.

  Billy snapped him out of his morbid daydream. He shifted to his wise sage voice. “Alas, it’s the cruelest device of all to betray one’s self into abandoning who or what they really love.”

  Gavin scoffed. “What does that mean?”

  “Just that it can be a nightmare when your dreams come true.”

  “Why can’t you just say ‘Careful what you wish for’ like everyone else?”

  Billy ignored the question. “There was another popular writer—an author of detective stories, in fact—who tried to kill off his main character, but the fans wouldn’t let him.”

  Gavin was pacing again. “How could fans keep the writer from telling the story that he wanted to?”

  “Happens more often than you’d think. You’ve got to dispel this idea that you’re the artist and start to see that you and I are in the entertainment business. People like what you’ve done with Damien Marksman. They’re good stories.”

  “They’re tripe. I want to do something important.”

  Gavin reached for the typewriter keys but pulled back when Billy stunned him by shouting, “Important? Entertaining is important!”

  The old man abandoned his scholarly professor voice. “What you—what we do is important. We help readers escape their humdrum existence into fantastic worlds where they don’t have to worry about their mortgage payment or light bill for a few minutes before going to bed at night.”

  Uh, oh… he’s on a roll now.

  Gavin was the only child of a single mother. There was no father around to lecture him through adolescence, but over the years, William Cavanaugh had come to fill that role. Today, the chastisement meter was set to “stun.” There would be no reprieve now until Billy got it all out or Beverly interrupted him for some “honey-do” that couldn’t wait. Gavin would just have to weather the storm.

  “My dear boy, do you think that a cabbie wants to drive to his patron’s destination if they’re not in the cab? Of course not. He’s providing a service. Everyone has a job to do—a role to play. The cab driver’s job is to deliver people where they want to go. You and I are in the same sort of business. We get to take people places, places in their minds, places maybe they can’t go or don’t think to go by themselves. It’s simple. Don’t overthink it, and don’t screw it up. It’s not just about you.”

  Gavin returned to the chair and looked at the antique on the desk. In an attempt to regain control again over the conversation, he asked
, “Who is it?”

  The question succeeded in derailing Billy’s rant. “Who’s what?”

  “The writer, the one who wanted to kill his lead character, the detective.”

  “Doyle,” Billy answered flatly. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

  “Sherlock Holmes?” Gavin scoffed. “He tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes?”

  “He did kill him off in a short story entitled ‘The Final Problem.’ Doyle ends both Holmes and Moriarty by plunging them down Reichenbach Falls. He said that writing the stories was distracting him from more serious literary efforts. Sound familiar?”

  “Reichenbach Falls?” Gavin said the letters aloud as he typed.

  REE3HESBA3H FVLLS

  “Arrgh, crap!” Gavin exclaimed.

  “What are you doing over there?” Billy asked.

  “Nothing. How do you remember all this stuff, anyway?”

  “It’s a good read. You should look it up. Anyway, the fans were so outraged, they formed a letter-writing campaign to the editor of The Strand Magazine demanding that Doyle bring him back. He did, and it’s a good thing, too, because after that, he went on to write The Hound of the Baskervilles.”

  “Well, aren’t you a wealth of knowledge, Mr. Cavanaugh, sir?”

  “Be as sarcastic as you like, but just know that you should ‘be careful what you wish for,’ kiddo.”

  “That’s what I love about you. You have the most eloquent way of telling me that I’m completely wrong about stuff. You even managed to work in one of the UK’s most beloved novels, Baskervilles, while delivering the literary equivalent of an elementary schoolyard wedgie.”

  Billy chuckled. “What can I say? I’m a good editor, and you know you love it. So if you didn’t call for help on a new story, what did you call for? Everything okay?”

  Gavin ran his index finger over the warm copper hub of the machine. “I just wanted to tell you that I found the perfect gift.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “No, it’s a real gift this time—something really special, better even than the retirement present. I think that it’s handmade, so it’s obviously one-of-a-kind.”

  “This is for real, not some gag gift? My grandchildren will be at the party, so no X-rated stuff.”

  Gavin pictured Billy waving an admonishing finger in his den hundreds of miles away. “No, nothing like that. You’ll have to get that type of stuff from Beverly.”

  “Hardy har har.”

  “No, it’s something you’ll really want. It’s probably the best gift I’ve ever given anyone. That’s why I called. It’s going to be great.”

  “Hmmm.” The skepticism in Billy’s voice was without apology. “Well, we’ll have to just wait and see, won’t we, then? By the way, Beverly is going to make those cake ball things for me. It took an act of Congress to get her to consent, since she wanted to do a big three-level cake, but she’s going to do it for me.”

  Gavin pictured her in the apron again. “You did that so you could eat more. It’s harder for her to keep track of how many you eat if they’re cake balls.”

  A long laugh on the edge of turning into a raspy wheeze ensued. “You know me all too well. I’ll set some aside for you in case you’re running late.”

  “Running late? I won’t be late.”

  “It’s okay, but you’re always late.”

  “Whatever. I’ll be there on time, you’ll see.”

  “Bye, Sport. Keep typing. Beverly really wants that new washer/dryer.”

  “You’re awful. Bye, Bill.”

  Gavin made his way out to the balcony with the two cigarettes and a book of matches that he’d bummed from the cabbie. The warmth of the July sun felt good. The suite was too cold after his scorching shower. He could never regulate the thermostats of hotel rooms. He existed in a perpetual state of annoyance, the pendulum swinging between “stuffy” and “meat locker cold.”

  He sat in one of the loungers for a few minutes as more cars vied for empty spots in the crowded lot below.

  Yeah, a person would definitely die if they fell from this height.

  He lit his second and final smoke. Ah, yes, and what of Ms. Garner?

  Toward the end of the marriage, he had developed a theory that he had a relationship shelf life of only five or so years—the exception being Billy, of course. He figured that after half a decade, the other participant would have heard pretty much every original thought that he’d ever have. After that, they’d be sentenced to endless reruns of witticisms that had grown stale long ago. Like a carton of milk, once it expired, there was no going back. But now he wondered, was it the other way around? Had it been his interest that had diminished?

  Like someone sifting pebbles from a bucket of sand, thoughts like these bounced around in his mind for a few minutes.

  Finally, he stood, tossing the cigarette butt over the rail. It twisted in a series of acrobatics on the way down until it disappeared from sight.

  In the end, Josephine had gotten the house, which was fine by him. It had always been too gauche for his tastes anyway, though he did miss his writing area in the study. She also took a car and various other prizes that her attorney had won for her.

  Gavin was awarded the beach house in Santa Monica, his current meager residence, his book library, the new sports car, and the busted motorcycle that he had tinkered with since before they were engaged.

  But the main thing that Gavin had gotten from the divorce was the opportunity to get his way again, specifically in the arguments the two were prone to having. He got to be right. He was granted complete control of himself again, and it felt good.

  After half a decade of having every decision challenged by her, the final confrontation was over salad dressing. The relationship had ended rather anticlimactically. He had chosen to take a stand over Ranch dressing. He had protested that he didn’t want some kind of lite Ranch or yogurt custard imitation, but the real stuff—nice and fattening.

  The night that Josephine stormed out of that restaurant, Gavin ate the most delicious salad of his life. That meal came to symbolize the turning point. He’d taken back control and could do what he wanted when he wanted and go where he pleased. That was also the night that he met Monica Garcia. Had it been out of revenge against Jo that he’d slept with the young, unsuspecting woman—an act of defiance to prove that he could do what he wanted? What seemed clear in the moment had become muddled over time. Now, here he was a few years later, in complete control, but in control of what? Had it been worth it?

  Should he approach Josephine at Billy’s party to say something about her break-up, or would it be better just to leave it alone? He missed being with her. He even missed being annoyed by her. But was he willing to try and reconcile things, to give up being a bachelor, forfeit what he wanted to do for the sake of being with her? Would it be different this time?

  He decided this was too much to contemplate fully sober and returned to the room to dress and go to the resort bar.

  Five

  THE DREAM GAVIN HAD THAT NIGHT was unrelenting. He was drowning. He opened his eyes under water as a mouthful of air bubbles escaped. The river water tasted bitter, and he coughed, expelling more bubbles.

  This isn’t real! he screamed in his mind as he thrust toward the surface. This is a dream! Despite the effort, he sank again as if he were being sucked downward. The flickering light through the top of the murky water grew faint as an unseen force pulled him deeper.

  I’ve gotta wake up!

  Panic took control of his limbs. As he flailed about, sinking ever downward, his arm snagged something like a vine or rope. He managed to grab onto the slick, rubbery line, twisting the vine around his arm, and stopped himself with a jolt. His heart pounded, and his lungs felt as if they were on the brink of exploding from the lack of oxygen. Gavin saw spots.

  Though the undertow no longer pulled at him, the weight of his waterlogged clothing added to the strain of pulling himself up the rope.

  After a few agonizing
moments, Gavin burst through the water’s surface. He gasped uncontrollably as rain pelted him.

  When he came to his senses, he saw that the rope, which turned out to be a green extension cord, was tethered to the support beam of a nearby bridge. He pulled himself along the cord toward the steel structure.

  The distance between the low bridge and river was a mere three to four feet. If he could grab on to the steel undergirding, it’d be a refuge until the storm passed. Gavin heaved toward the structure with all of his might. A few strenuous moments later, he made it under the bridge. His lungs burned with exhaustion as he tried and failed to grab the support beam.

  The extension cord wound tightly around the column, and something that looked like dark seaweed floated atop the water next to it. He carefully rotated himself to the side of the cold concrete pillar. He reached for the stringy object that bobbed about. Fear seized him as he realized that it was a mound of jet-black human hair. Trying to free his hand from entanglement, he pulled back, lifting a young Asian woman’s head from the water in the process. He gasped in shock and let the head hit the water with a splash.

  The extension cord encircled the young woman’s body below the surface, crisscrossing her form. She was strapped to the column with her arms against her sides.

  Gavin was petrified with dread. The anxiety of being in close proximity to a dead body was almost more than he could bear. Maybe he could free her and let her float away. Holding tightly to the extension cord with one hand, he grasped her hair with the other. The dead woman’s eyes were closed, and large, plastic earrings dangled from her ears an inch or so above the surface. The design was of two turquoise dolphins swimming opposite each other in a circle. He lowered her head and cried.

  Gavin tried to move away, only to discover that he had become entangled in the hair again. He splashed frantically to get loose, but he couldn’t break free. Out of panic, he let go of the extension cord. Now his only lifeline was the dead girl’s perm.

  He tried to grab the cord around her neck but instead snagged one of the dolphin earrings. The hoop ripped through the flesh of her lobe. An instant later, he was floating backward away from her under the bridge.