In Extremis

by John Shirley

  Eric heard the distinct sound of the gun cocking. His mind’s eye chose that moment to replay the image of poor Donald with his head blown open, gray matter peeking out like mold in an old broken Easter egg.

  “Twelve, eleven . . .”

  “Wait!” He got the cursor moving, found the word processing program, opened it, clicked for a new document.

  “Seven, six . . .”

  He typed, “From the mouth of a gun: the thunder of the world’s contempt for me/ an echo of my denials/ O denials from the reverberating chamber of . . .” Of what? “. . . of a crumbling inward British Museum . . .”

  “Not very good,” said Conrad, reading over his shoulder. “But it’s a start. Don’t try to edit, just continue, let it flow. Or I’ll shoot you someplace very painful. I won’t let you off easy like Donald . . .”

  “What . . . what about typos . . .” Eric’s fingers betraying him, trembling over the keys.

  “Only fix egregious ones. The minor ones can be addressed later . . .”

  He typed onward, writing, “Consider the places I’ve tramped through/ the tramps I’ve placed, in true, upon their backs/ the toys I’ve tripped on, left by hacks/ only to come here, and turn, and see this buffoon . . .”

  “That’s better,” Conrad said. “Insult me, whatever you like. So long as it’s poetry. Don’t worry about poetic forms. Just let it flow. You’re starting to really write it . . . Remember, if you stop for more than a handful of seconds—I won’t tell you how many—I will fire the gun and you will die very badly.”

  “Yes, yes,” Eric muttered. He was excruciatingly aware of the pistol’s muzzle close behind him—he imagined he could smell the gun metal, the oil in its moving parts. All the while, typing, “The oiled machine awaits the tock, the muted thunder of student steps, each step a gun poised at my head . . .”

  He didn’t think much of what he was producing—it was, so far, little better than doggerel—but something, anyway, was flowing out of the muzzle of the gun aimed at his back; something was flowing from pure adrenaline and, really, a kind of desperate automatic writing, and he started to cast about for impressions that had penetrated his fog of misery, of late. “. . . the dust collecting on their awards/ the breached loins that tumble dimwits/ the arsenic and the electronic . . .” Rather sophomoric, he thought, but he could always delete it later when this oaf was in jail. “. . . and Donald’s memories, his thought/ upon the headrest vinyl rots . . .”

  Conrad grunted. “No need to rhyme . . .”

  “I’m in a T.S. Eliot kinda place, with this,” Eric muttered, strangely irritated, scarcely aware he was saying it as his fingers, poised over the keys like birds of prey. “Or Auden. Going into and out of rhyme as mood takes me . . . Rhyming as reference, discarded as I choose . . .” Another half-decent line came to him, and he typed it, then another—and a better one.

  Eric realized, suddenly, that he was feeling a long, rippling, refined rush of pleasure at the release of these lines. He wasn’t yet composing good poetry, but it was gleaming on his mental horizon. He could sense it coming. This psychotic self-indulgent literary parasite had done one worthwhile thing after all—he’d reconnected Eric Boyle with the urgency of his own drives, the imperative of self-expression at its rawest. Eric felt justified in drawing breath, again; felt he was no longer on that hook. Yes he was trapped on his own terrace, held hostage, pinned down under a gun—but for the first time in years he was free. He typed on . . . a page. Two more . . .

  “Yes . . . now that, finally, is rather good,” Conrad said, reading over his shoulder.

  “Quiet, don’t interrupt me,” Eric said brusquely, typing. When Conrad said nothing in reply, Eric was aware, on some level, that the balance of power between them was shifting. But he glanced to his left at their dark reflection in the glass of the sliding back door, and was reassured to see that Conrad still held the gun steadily pointed at his back. Good. He needed it there, for the moment. And so long as Conrad held the gun it didn’t bother him that this pathetic wing nut was reading what he wrote even as he wrote it—normally something he couldn’t bear.

  He typed onward, pausing only to hit save. The words were coming to him in completed lines, now, he had only to write them out.

  He heard Conrad suck air sharply in through his teeth—perhaps a gasp of intense approval. “Amazing,” Conrad murmured. “It’s really . . . it really is . . .”

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, Eric was thinking about Gwen, felt a flutter of hope remembering that they’d never quite finalized their divorce. Realizing that he wanted to see her. That he needed her. Pale, copper-haired Gwen, with her jade green eyes. She’d given him companionship, patience, and every bit of the space he needed to write—just enough encouragement, at exactly the right moments, without trying to prod him onward—and he’d blown it all on some bosomy debutant whose primary means of self-expression was painfully self-aware irony. If he could just get through this alive, he would go to Gwen and say, “See, I wrote poetry again, and it was because I imagined you were in the next room . . .”

  He wouldn’t tell her about the gun. She would never meet Conrad. He must see to that.

  Eric typed on, his fingers beginning to ache. It was all one poem, and the arc of it pulled him like gravity pulling a sled, faster and faster. He heard a faint sob from Conrad, from time to time. There was envy in that sob, and despair, and a little ecstasy: Eric heard it clearly. He typed on . . . starting to make more typing errors . . .

  At last he felt his inspiration flagging, though he had a notion where he was going—and that he’d get there soon. “I think I’m tiring,” he said, pausing. “It must be almost two hours now.”

  “You can go on,” Conrad said. “If you had to, you could produce a whole short book this way. If it’s that or be shot . . .”

  But he sounded less sure of himself now. “I need coffee,” Eric said, correcting a couple of typos. “It’s already made, on the sideboard in the kitchen. Get me a cup. Get yourself some too if you want. It’s been on the warmer for a long time and it probably tastes like motor oil from a Model T.”

  “I’m not going to . . .”

  “You damn fool, I’m writing, for the first time in six years, you think I’m going to stop? I may even read one of your damned theses, so don’t blow it—I’m near the end of this cycle but I need coffee. I’m not going to go over the fence or start howling for the cops. I don’t have a cell phone on me and there are no neighbors nearby. Look, there’s a notebook here, and a pen. You can take the laptop, so I can’t use Wi-Fi. I wrote my first two books with paper and pen, in first draft. You can shoot me when I get back if I’m not still writing! I need coffee to go on!”

  It was an outrageously risky speech but some part of his mind had sussed Conrad out and he knew that the shift in moral authority came at the right moment.

  Conrad growled to himself, then circled around to Eric’s right, keeping the gun on him, his left hand reaching out, taking the laptop. He picked it up very carefully, almost reverently. He backed away, then hurried into the house, footsteps receding toward the kitchen.

  Eric was already picking up the pen, arranging the notebook. He was momentarily afraid he’d lost the thread—but the next lines came to him, as he thought, again, of Gwen, the freckles on her breasts, her quirky admiration for early Gertrude Stein and late Dorothy Parker, the two of them dancing at the Steely Dan reunion, stoned to the breaking point and never breaking. Gwen . . .

  He began to write, the lines flowing out of him in a slightly different rhythm through the medium of a pen. The coffee appeared at his elbow, he paused just long enough to sip twice. Then he set the cup down, to begin writing again, splashed the coffee across the table in his apparent eagerness—spilled it on purpose, really. He ignored the spill, though it discolored the edges of the notebook, and wrote on.

  A page filled in, then half a page more, an anticlimactic climax—and then Eric realized he was done. Quite done. He mustn’t
write anything more, just now. His inner pacing told him clearly he must wait, and let the poem sit before revising. Probably he’d cut the first page entirely. It was a long poem and it was time for a martini and a walk, not more poetry forced out of him—he’d only produce ragtag, tatty ends of things.

  “There—this should be typed into the laptop, at the end of the first document,” he said, with absolute conviction. “You type it as I read it to you. If I type it in, I’ll get lost in revision . . .”

  “Right, right,” Conrad said breathlessly. Conrad used his own sleeve to wipe the spilled coffee up, then put the laptop on the table. He sat down in the other chair, to Eric’s right, setting the gun down on the tabletop where he could get it, out of Eric’s reach. He opened the laptop—it was still switched on. He moved his sunglasses up onto the top of his head. His eyes, Eric saw, were small and gray, rimmed in red, his nose longer than Eric had realized. “Go ahead, Boyle.”

  Eric began to read, and Conrad typed. Twenty minutes of reading, typing.

  Then Eric stopped. They both knew he’d reached the end.

  Conrad looked at him. “Now another. A new poem. At least one more long one.”

  “I’ll need more coffee. Take the laptop and get it. I’ve spilled most of this . . . make sure it’s hot for Christ’s sake . . .”

  He turned the notebook page, wrote out an arbitrary title, “Gwen, and Then”.

  He started scribbling under it, “She’s always been in the house, she’s always been outside, looking in/ I’m a coward, or I’d open the window . . .”

  Seeing he was busily writing, Conrad stood, his movements grudging, then picked up the gun and the laptop—scooped the gun in a way that conveyed a warning. He put the gun in a coat pocket, circled Eric, picked up the cup with his left hand, hurried into the house.

  Scribbling junk poetry, Eric heard the beep of the microwave, Conrad heating up the coffee.

  Eric frowned and scribbled, tried to seem deeply involved. He forced himself not to look up—and then heard Conrad approaching, setting the steaming cup on the table by Eric’s hand, Conrad returned to his seat, laying the laptop down, then the gun. Eric said, “May as well turn off the laptop, save power, won’t need it for a while, Norman.” He scribbled. Conrad started to open the laptop. Eric picked up the hot coffee , taking the cup from beneath—and smashed the cup onto Conrad’s forehead, hard, the hot liquid searing him, the cup cutting his brow—

  Conrad yelled, and flailed for the gun, but he was off balance and he fell sideways, taking his chair over with him. Eric grabbed the gun, leaped back, overturning his own chair—just managing to stay on his feet. He pointed the gun, steadying it as Conrad sat up on the ground, wiping coffee from his eyes with shaking hands.

  Breathing hard, Eric just stood there, pointing the gun.

  “So now what?” Conrad muttered, slowly drawing his knees up, wrapping his arms around them. His pursed lips trembled, like he might burst into tears.

  Eric felt no pity for him. “You know, Norman . . .” Eric’s voice grated in his own ears. His teeth were clenched. “I can shoot one of these things. I used to hang out with Hunter Thompson. We’d get drunk and shoot targets. I got pretty good.”

  Conrad smiled sadly at him. “Sure. You did a lot of cool things. You had a lot of beautiful women too. But you couldn’t write for the last six years—until I showed up here.”“Six years ago, I broke up with Gwen.” Eric shrugged. “Not something you’d want to understand.”

  “You think that’s it? I know what kind of guy you are, Boyle. I’ve studied you. It’s not that. And you are not the true-love kind of guy.”

  “I’m not, no. I just need her. Now turn around and walk toward the fence. There’s a gate in it.”

  “It’s not her,” Conrad said, with taut insistence, fists balled at his side. “You got all insulated in your little world! You needed to get back in touch with life. I gave you that.”

  “You did give me that. I’ve found my way now. Right through the gate! And maybe I’ll let you go. Move!”

  Conrad stared at the gun—then he turned, and walked unsteadily toward the fence. Eric followed, glancing around. A line of tall Italian junipers blocked the view from the road, here. There were no houses close by. No one was walking along the cliffs—no one to see.

  In a couple of minutes, they’d passed through the gate, walked another forty yards over the mossy flat stone to the edge of the cliff.

  “This doesn’t feel like you maybe letting me go,” Conrad said. “I didn’t actually hurt you . . . I gave you your pride back!”

  “You like to enumerate things, Norman, so here you go. First of all, you killed Donald, a guy who was there for me for twenty years. And a good agent is hard to find. Second, you’re a creepy little stalker who freakishly sparked something in me. Third, I can’t have you going about telling people. You’ll come back, for one thing. And—Gwen . . . no. I can’t.”

  Conrad turned to face him. “Listen—I won’t tell anyone. It’d get me in trouble with the police.”

  “I don’t believe you, a twisted little narcissist like you? You’ll tell people.”

  “Anyway—Boyle—it’s not going to work! You were through. Once a writer’s been in the horse latitudes, they need something extreme—like a gun to their head to get out! You’ll just sink back again . . .”

  “That’ll be you, actually, but I doubt you’ll be aware of it,” Eric said—and he fired the gun, three times, rather enjoying it. He made the parasite stagger and dance on the edge of eternity; a vaudevillian dancing off the stage, backwards, into the wings . . .

  . . . Right off the cliff, into the sea.

  Heart thudding, but feeling more alive than he had in years, Eric walked carefully to the edge—and looked over. He could see Conrad’s body, looking gelatinous in the surf, as the waves sucked at it. This time of day, tide was just going out. That body’d head out to sea . . .

  He looked at the gun and thought: Throw it over too. Don’t be stupid. Wasn’t legal to kill him. Not a real case of self-defense.

  But he couldn’t let go of the gun. It was a totem, an object of power to him. It was the lightning rod of his poetry.

  Carrying the gun, he walked back to the house.

  Six weeks later.

  He was unable to reach Gwen. He’d tried phone, internet—her sister said she’d gone on a trip to Europe, to get over Rodney the pomo theorist. She wasn’t even going to check her email, any of that, because she didn’t want to hear from limp-dick postmodern boy.

  Fine. When she came back . . .

  He’d corrected the long poem written under the gun, sent it to his publisher as a short book, together with some of his old uncollected work. He wrote an introduction about the tragedy of losing his good friend Donald. How the police had said it was done by a lunatic fan who’d done away with himself. The cruel irony.

  Then he set to work writing more poetry. He managed a few verses—but they were mere scrapings. He felt the doldrums coming back; felt the angry dullness, the resentment that bound his fingers. Where was Gwen? Why wasn’t she here? Why’d she leave him because of a few infidelities? Why didn’t she come back?

  He sat and stared at laptop, at paper—at nothingness. He couldn’t write. Couldn’t fucking write.

  Then, one morning, he took the gun out, from its hiding place in the unused fireplace. He put it on the desk, next to his notebook. His totem would transmit power to him once more . . .

  But it didn’t. He still couldn’t write. The dithering parasite had been right . . .

  There was only one thing for it. He set up his notebook on the back table, took the pen up in his right hand, then the gun with his other hand. He cocked the gun, and put it to his left temple. He put pen to paper. “Write, in thirty seconds, you bastard,” he told himself. “Or I’m pulling the trigger. Thirty, twenty nine, twenty eight, twenty seven . . . Finger’s tightening on the trigger. I’ll do it, you lazy fuck! It’s better to be dead than empty!
Write! Twenty six, twenty five! Write or die! Twenty four . . .” He felt his finger tighten just . . . fractionally. His heart thudded. His mouth went bone dry. He pressed the muzzle hard to the side of his head. He tightened his finger on the trigger as much as he could without it being quite enough to fire the gun. A micron away. “Nineteen . . . eighteen . . . seventeen . . .” He began to write. It was coming. The lines appeared. It worked! A distant chiming from somewhere . . . he ignored it . . . it was working . . . so close . . . a micron away . . . the writing consumed him. The gun still pressed to his temples, Eric heard nothing but the sound of his pen on paper, and his own breathing . . .

  No answer to the doorbell.

  Gwen gave up on the front door, and went around to the back gate—she could see that Eric’s car was here. He might be out walking. But she knew he liked to sit out back with his laptop.

  She went through the back gate, and saw him sitting rather awkwardly at the table, scratching away on an actual notebook. Maybe she shouldn’t interrupt him. But his last Facebook messages had scared her. When she’d finally read them that morning, it seemed to her that he really was thinking of killing himself.

  And was there something in Eric’s hand, as he scribbled away on the notebook? Was that a gun?

  Was he writing a suicide note?

  She rushed toward him. “Eric!”

  He almost had the line. The one line that would open up the rest of the poem . . . would let it all flow out of him. The gun, the nearness of death, had called it up in him. The tightrope between life and . . .

  Then a voice shouted. “Eric—stop!”

  And the line vanished. It was gone. His hand contracted in convulsive frustration. Not meaning to squeeze the trigger—

  ANIMUS RIGHTS

  Near Jamaica Bay, New York, 1887

  “And why should you go shooting again, Daniel?” Wilamina demanded. “You’ve gone twice this week. You promised me an autumn promenade. The leaves are splendid.”