by Peter Straub
“‘Withdraw eight hundred and some few-odd dollars from your personal account and have your bank open a new account for you in the name Arvin Publishing, Inc. Make sure they understand you want checks that look businesslike—nothing with cute dogs or canyon vistas on them. Find a friend, someone you can trust, and list him as co-drawer. When the checks arrive, make one for eight hundred dollars and have the co-drawer sign the check. Send the check to Reg Thorpe. That will cover your ass for the time being.
“‘Over and out.’ It was signed ‘Bellis.’ Not in holograph. In type.”
“Whew,” the writer said again.
“When I got up the first thing I noticed was the typewriter. It looked like somebody had made it up as a ghost-typewriter in a cheap movie. The day before it was an old black office Underwood. When I got up—with a head that felt about the size of North Dakota—it was a sort of gray. The last few sentences of the letter were clumped up and faded. I took one look and figured my faithful old Underwood was probably finished. I took a taste and went out into the kitchen. There was an open bag of confectioner’s sugar on the counter with a scoop in it. There was confectioner’s sugar everywhere between the kitchen and the little den where I did my work in those days.”
“Feeding your Fornit,” the writer said. “Bellis had a sweet tooth. You thought so, anyway.”
“Yes. But even as sick and hung over as I was, I knew perfectly well who the Fornit was.”
He ticked off the points on his fingers.
“First, Bellis was my mother’s maiden name.
“Second, that phrase el bonzo seco. It was a private phrase my brother and I used to use to mean crazy. Back when we were kids.
“Third, and in a way most damning, was that spelling of the word ‘stupidity.’ It’s one of those words I habitually misspell. I had an almost screamingly literate writer once who used to spell ‘refrigerator’ with a d—’refridgerator’—no matter how many times the copy editors blooped it. And for this guy, who had a doctoral degree from Princeton, ‘ugly’ was always going to be ‘ughly.’”
The writer’s wife uttered a sudden laugh—it was both embarrassed and cheerful. “I do that.”
“All I’m saying is that a man’s misspellings—or a woman’s—are his literary fingerprints. Ask any copy editor who has done the same writer a few times.
“No, Bellis was me and I was Bellis. Yet the advice was damned good advice. In fact, I thought it was great advice. But here’s something else—the subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there’s a stranger down there, too. A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. I’d never seen that word ‘co-drawer’ in my life, to the best of my knowledge…but there it was, and it was a good one, and I found out some time later that banks actually use it.
“I picked up the phone to call a friend of mine, and this bolt of pain—incredible!—went through my head. I thought of Reg Thorpe and his radium and put the phone down in a hurry. I went to see the friend in person after I’d taken a shower and gotten a shave and had checked myself about nine times in the mirror to make sure my appearance approximated how a rational human being is supposed to look. Even so, he asked me a lot of questions and looked me over pretty closely. So I guess there must have been a few signs that a shower, a shave, and a good dose of Listerine couldn’t hide. He wasn’t in the biz, and that was a help. News has a way of traveling, you know. In the biz. So to speak. Also, if he’d been in the biz, he would have known Arvin Publishing, Inc., was responsible for Logan’s and would have wondered just what sort of scam I was trying to pull. But he wasn’t, he didn’t, and I was able to tell him it was a self-publishing venture I was interested in since Logan’s had apparently decided to eighty-six the fiction department.”
“Did he ask you why you were calling it Arvin Publishing?” the writer asked.
“Yes.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him,” the editor said, smiling a wintry smile, “that Arvin was my mother’s maiden name.”
There was a little pause, and then the editor resumed; he spoke almost uninterrupted to the end.
“So I began waiting for the printed checks, of which I wanted exactly one. I exercised to pass the time. You know—pick up the glass, flex the elbow, empty the glass, flex the elbow again. Until all that exercise wears you out and you just sort of fall forward with your head on the table. Other things happened, but those were the ones that really occupied my mind—the waiting and the flexing. As I remember. I have to reiterate that, because I was drunk a lot of the time, and for every single thing I remember, there are probably fifty or sixty I don’t.
“I quit my job—that caused a sigh of relief all around, I’m sure. From them because they didn’t have to perform the existential task of firing me for craziness from a department that was no longer in existence, me because I didn’t think I could ever face that building again—the elevator, the fluorescents, the phones, the thought of all that waiting electricity.
“I wrote Reg Thorpe and his wife a couple of letters each during that three-week period. I remember doing hers, but not his—like the letter from Bellis, I wrote those letters in blackout periods. But I hewed to my old work habits when I was blotto, just as I hewed to my old misspellings. I never failed to use a carbon…and when I came to the next morning, the carbons were lying around. It was like reading letters from a stranger.
“Not that the letters were crazy. Not at all. The one where I finished up with the P.S. about the blender was a lot worse. These letters seemed…almost reasonable.”
He stopped and shook his head, slowly and wearily.
“Poor Jane Thorpe. Not that things appeared to be all that bad at their end. It must have seemed to her that her husband’s editor was doing a very skillful—and humane—job of humoring him out of his deepening depression. The question of whether or not it’s a good idea to humor a person who has been entertaining all sorts of paranoid fantasies—fantasies which almost led in one case to an actual assault on a little girl—probably occurred to her; if so, she chose to ignore the negative aspects, because she was humoring him, too. Nor have I ever blamed her for it—he wasn’t just a meal ticket, some nag that was to be worked and humored, humored and worked until he was ready for the knacker’s shop; she loved the guy. In her own special way, Jane Thorpe was a great lady. And after living with Reg from the Early Times to the High Times and finally to the Crazy Times, I think she would have agreed with Bellis about blessing the slack and not wasting your breath cursing the drop. Of course, the more slack you get, the harder you snap when you finally fetch up at the end…but even that quick snap can be a blessing, I reckon—who wants to strangle?
“I had return letters from both of them in that short period—remarkably sunny letters…although there was a strange, almost final quality to that sunlight. It seemed as if…well, never mind the cheap philosophy. If I can think of what I mean, I’ll say it. Let it go for now.
“He was playing hearts with the kids next door every night, and by the time the leaves started to fall, they thought Reg Thorpe was just about God come down to earth. When they weren’t playing cards or tossing a Frisbee they were talking literature, with Reg gently rallying them through their paces. He’d gotten a puppy from the local animal shelter and walked it every morning and night, meeting other people on the block the way you do when you walk your mutt. People who’d decided the Thorpes were really very peculiar people now began to change their minds. When Jane suggested that, without electrical appliances, she could really use a little house help, Reg agreed at once. She was flabbergasted by his cheery acceptance of the idea. It wasn’t a question of money—after Underworld Figures they were rolling in dough—it was a question, Jane figured, of they. They were everywhere, that was Reg’s scripture, and what better agent for they than a cleaning woman that went everywhere in your house, looked under beds and in closets and probably in desk drawers as well, if they weren’t locked and then nailed shut for good measure.
“But he told her to go right ahead, told her he felt like an insensitive clod not to’ve thought of it earlier, even though—she made a point of telling me this—he was doing most of the heavy chores, such as the hand-washing, himself. He only made one small request: that the woman not be allowed to come into his study.
“Best of all, most encouraging of all from Jane’s standpoint, was the fact that Reg had gone back to work, this time on a new novel. She had read the first three chapters and thought they were marvelous. All of this, she said, had begun when I had accepted ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet’ for Logan’s—the period before that had been dead low ebb. And she blessed me for it.
“I am sure she really meant that last, but her blessing seemed to have no great warmth, and the sunniness of her letter was marred somehow—here we are, back to that. The sunshine in her letter was like sunshine on a day when you see those mackerel-scale clouds that mean it’s going to rain like hell soon.
“All this good news—hearts and dog and cleaning woman and new novel—and yet she was too intelligent to really believe he was getting well again…or so I believed, even in my own fog. Reg had been exhibiting symptoms of psychosis. Psychosis is like lung cancer in one way—neither one of them clears up on its own, although both cancer patients and lunatics may have their good days.
“May I borrow another cigarette, dear?”
The writer’s wife gave him one.
“After all,” he resumed, bringing out the Ronson, “the signs of his idée fixe were all around her. No phone; no electricity. He’d put Reynolds Wrap over all of the switch plates. He was putting food in his typewriter as regularly as he put it into the new puppy’s dish. The students next door thought he was a great guy, but the students next door didn’t see Reg putting on rubber gloves to pick up the newspaper off the front stoop in the morning because of his radiation fears. They didn’t hear him moaning in his sleep, or have to soothe him when he woke up screaming with dreadful nightmares he couldn’t remember.
“You, my dear”—he turned toward the writer’s wife—“have been wondering why she stuck with him. Although you haven’t said as much, it’s been on your mind. Am I right?”
She nodded.
“Yes. And I’m not going to offer a long motivational thesis—the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you only need to say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about the why. Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway…particularly the ones who say they do.
“But in terms of Jane Thorpe’s own selective perception, things had gotten one hell of a lot better. She interviewed a middle-aged black woman about the cleaning job, and brought herself to speak as frankly as she could about her husband’s idiosyncrasies. The woman, Gertrude Rulin by name, laughed and said she’d done for people who were a whole lot stranger. Jane spent the first week of the Rulin woman’s employ pretty much the way she’d spent that first visit with the young people next door—waiting for some crazy outburst. But Reg charmed her as completely as he’d charmed the kids, talking to her about her church work, her husband, and her youngest son, Jimmy, who, according to Gertrude, made Dennis the Menace look like the biggest bore in the first grade. She’d had eleven children in all, but there was a nine-year gap between Jimmy and his next oldest sib. He made things hard on her.
“Reg seemed to be getting well…at least, if you looked at things a certain way he did. But he was just as crazy as ever, of course, and so was I. Madness may well be a sort of flexible bullet, but any ballistics expert worth his salt will tell you no two bullets are exactly the same. Reg’s one letter to me talked a little bit about his new novel, and then passed directly to Fornits. Fornits in general, Rackne in particular. He speculated on whether they actually wanted to kill Fornits, or—he thought this more likely—capture them alive and study them. He closed by saying, ‘Both my appetite and my outlook on life have improved immeasurably since we began our correspondence, Henry. Appreciate it all. Affectionately yours, Reg.’ And a P.S. below inquiring casually if an illustrator had been assigned to do his story. That caused a guilty pang or two and a quick trip to the liquor cabinet on my part.
“Reg was into Fornits; I was into wires.
“My answering letter mentioned Fornits only in passing—by then I really was humoring the man, at least on that subject; an elf with my mother’s maiden name and my own bad spelling habits didn’t interest me a whole hell of a lot.
“What had come to interest me more and more was the subject of electricity, and microwaves, and RF waves, and RF interference from small appliances, and low-level radiation, and Christ knows what else. I went to the library and took out books on the subject; I bought books on the subject. There was a lot of scary stuff in them…and of course that was just the sort of stuff I was looking for.
“I had my phone taken out and my electricity turned off. It helped for a while, but one night when I was staggering in the door drunk with a bottle of Black Velvet in my hand and another one in my topcoat pocket, I saw this little red eye peeping down at me from the ceiling. God, for a minute I thought I was going to have a heart attack. It looked like a bug up there at first…a great big dark bug with one glowing eye.
“I had a Coleman gas lantern and I lit it. Saw what it was at once. Only instead of relieving me, it made me feel worse. As soon as I got a good look at it, it seemed I could feel large, clear bursts of pain going through my head—like radio waves. For a moment it was as if my eyes had rotated in their sockets and I could look into my own brain and see cells in there smoking, going black, dying. It was a smoke detector—a gadget which was even newer than microwave ovens back in 1969.
“I bolted out of the apartment and went downstairs—I was on the fifth floor but by then I was always taking the stairs—and hammered on the super’s door. I told him I wanted that thing out of there, wanted it out of there right away, wanted it out of there tonight, wanted it out of there within the hour. He looked at me as though I had gone completely—you should pardon the expression—bonzo seco, and I can understand that now. That smoke detector was supposed to make me feel good, it was supposed to make me safe. Now, of course, they’re the law, but back then it was a Great Leap Forward, paid for by the building tenants’ association.
“He removed it—it didn’t take long—but the look in his eyes was not lost upon me, and I could, in some limited way, understand his feelings. I needed a shave, I stank of whiskey, my hair was sticking up all over my head, my topcoat was dirty. He would know I no longer went to work; that I’d had my television taken away; that my phone and electrical service had been voluntarily interrupted. He thought I was crazy.
“I may have been crazy but—like Reg—I was not stupid. I turned on the charm. Editors have got to have a certain amount, you know. And I greased the skids with a ten-dollar bill. Finally I was able to smooth things over, but I knew from the way people were looking at me in the next couple of weeks—my last two weeks in the building, as things turned out—that the story had traveled. The fact that no members of the tenants’ association approached me to make wounded noises about my ingratitude was particularly telling. I suppose they thought I might take after them with a steak knife.
“All of that was very secondary in my thoughts that evening, however. I sat in the glow of the Coleman lantern, the only light in the three rooms except for all the electricity in Manhattan that came through the windows. I sat with a bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other, looking at the plate in the ceiling where the smoke detector with its single red eye—an eye which was so unobtrusive in the daytime that I had never even noticed it—had been. I thought of the undeniable fact that, although I’d had all the electricity turned off in my place, there had been that one live item…and where there was one, there might be more.
“Even if there wasn’t, the whole building was rotten with wires—it was filled with wires the way a man dying of cancer is filled with evil cells and rotting organs. Closing my e
yes I could see all those wires in the darkness of their conduits, glowing with a sort of green nether light. And beyond them, the entire city. One wire, almost harmless in itself, running to a switch plate…the wire behind the switch plate a little thicker, leading down through a conduit to the basement where it joined a still thicker wire…that one leading down under the street to a whole bundle of wires, only those wires so thick that they were really cables.
“When I got Jane Thorpe’s letter mentioning the tinfoil, part of my mind recognized that she saw it as a sign of Reg’s craziness, and that part knew I would have to respond as if my whole mind thought she was right. The other part of my mind—by far the largest part now—thought: ‘What a marvelous idea!’ and I covered my own switch plates in identical fashion the very next day. I was the man, remember, that was supposed to be helping Reg Thorpe. In a desperate sort of way it’s actually quite funny.
“I determined that night to leave Manhattan. There was an old family place in the Adirondacks I could go to, and that sounded fine to me. The one thing keeping me in the city was Reg Thorpe’s story. If ‘The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet’ was Reg’s life-ring in a sea of madness, it was mine, too—I wanted to place it in a good magazine. With that done, I could get the hell out.
“So that’s where the not-so-famous Wilson-Thorpe correspondence stood just before the shit hit the fan. We were like a couple of dying drug addicts comparing the relative merits of heroin and ludes. Reg had Fornits in his typewriter, I had Fornits in the walls, and both of us had Fornits in our heads.
“And there was they. Don’t forget they. I hadn’t been flogging the story around for long before deciding they included every magazine fiction editor in New York—not that there were many by the fall of 1969. If you’d grouped them together, you could have killed the whole bunch of them with one shotgun shell, and before long I started to feel that was a damned good idea.
“It took about five years before I could see it from their perspective. I’d upset the super, and he was just a guy who saw me when the heat was screwed up and when it was time for his Christmas tip. These other guys…well, the irony was just that a lot of them really were my friends. Jared Baker was the assistant fiction editor at Esquire in those days, and Jared and I were in the same rifle company during World War II, for instance. These guys weren’t just uneasy after sampling the new improved Henry Wilson. They were appalled. If I’d just sent the story around with a pleasant covering letter explaining the situation—my version of it, anyway—I probably would have sold the Thorpe story almost right away. But oh no, that wasn’t good enough. Not for this story. I was going to see that this story got the personal treatment. So I went from door to door with it, a stinking, grizzled ex-editor with shaking hands and red eyes and a big old bruise on his left cheekbone from where he ran into the bathroom door on the way to the can in the dark two nights before. I might as well have been wearing a sign reading BELLEVUE-BOUND.
