Abnormal Occurrences (21 page)

And the fact was that he was getting pretty bored with women in general, now that he had them all to himself, and he was getting really tired of living without electricity, especially now that there weren’t many places to go, and he would have liked at least to watch television, and whenever he had a date now he asked the girl why she hadn’t gone in for a career in technology.

“Gee, Charlie,” the young woman would say, “I could have sworn you would have found that unfeminine. Don’t you prefer me as the high-fashion model I am, or anyway was until this current crisis hit the city?”

“I’d rather have my refrigerator turning out ice cubes,” said Charlie. “I’d rather not have to go around my apartment carrying a candle.” And in his annoyance with a situation that he had certainly brought on himself he would erase this person. He had no patience whatever with anybody. He erased the rest of the men, the lame, and the halt, and so on, for aesthetic reasons, and he got rid of more and more females because he was exasperated by their uselessness.

Finally without being full aware of what he had done, Charlie got rid of the last person in town, a tall redhead with green eyes and large teeth, who had made too many jokes for his taste, and then he was all alone in the vast city. A sense of his uniqueness came to him after a day or so, and having taken one of the empty cars that had been abandoned at every curb and driven from one end of town to the other without hearing or seeing anyone, Charlie reflected on his lack of foresight in using the Disintegrator so lavishly, and he understood that such a fool as he should never have had his wish granted. He then turned the muzzle of the Disintegrator on himself and pulled the trigger.

It wasn’t long before people came from other places and repopulated the city and became so involved in their own affairs that the strange disappearance of the original citizenry, never explained, was forgotten except by those periodicals perennially concerned with alien abductions and the Bermuda Triangle.

Some kid found the Disintegrator where it had fallen on Charlie’s disappearance, and he pointed it at his friends, a stray dog, and so on, and pressed the trigger, but aside from the clicking noise, nothing happened. He was still too young to have any really passionate wishes.

Thomas Louis Berger (1924–2014) was an American novelist best known for his picaresque classic,
Little Big Man
(1964). His other works include
Arthur Rex
(1978),
Neighbors
(1980), and
The Feud
(1983), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Berger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Thomas Charles, a public school business manager, and Mildred (née Bubbe) Berger. Berger grew up in the town of Lockland, Ohio, and one of his first jobs was working at a branch of the public library while in high school. After a brief period in college, Berger enlisted in the army in 1943 and served in Europe during World War II. His experiences with a medical unit in the American occupation zone of postwar Berlin inspired his first novel,
Crazy in Berlin
(1958). This novel introduced protagonist Carlo Reinhart, who would appear in several more novels.

In 1946, Berger reentered college at the University of Cincinnati, earning a bachelor’s degree two years later. In 1948, he moved to New York City and was hired as librarian of the Rand School of Social Science. While enrolled in a writer's workshop at the nearby New School for Social Research, Berger met artist Jeanne Redpath; they married in 1950. He subsequently entered Columbia University as a graduate student in English literature, but left the program after a year and a half without taking a degree. He next worked at the
New York Times Index
; at
Popular Science Monthly
as an associate editor; and, for a decade, as a freelance copy editor for book publishers.

Following the success of Rinehart in Love (1962), Berger was named a Dial Fellow. In 1965, he received the Western Heritage Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for
Little Big Man
 (1964), the success of which allowed him to write full time. In 1970,
Little Big Man
was made into an acclaimed film, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway.

Following his job as
Esquire
’s film critic from 1972 to 1973, Berger became a writer in residence at the University of Kansas in 1974. One year later, he became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, and went on to lecture at Yale University and the University of California, Davis.

Berger’s work continued to appear on the big screen. His novel
Neighbors
(1980) was adapted for a 1981 film starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. In 1984, his novel
The Feud
(1983) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; in 1988, it too was made into a movie. His thriller
Meeting Evil
 (1992) was adapted as a 2012 film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilson.

In 1999, Berger published
The Return of Little Big Man
, a sequel to his literary classic. His most recent novel,
Adventures of the Artificial Woman
, was published in 2004.

Berger lived in New York’s Hudson Valley.

In 1966, two years after he wrote
Little Big Man
, Berger stands at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the site of Custer’s last stand in 1876. This was Berger’s first visit to the famous battlefield.

This black-and-white image became the readers’ vision of Berger: dark and esoteric. (Photo courtesy of Gerry Bauer.)

A snapshot of Berger with his friend Zulkifar Ghose, taken in midtown Manhattan in the summer of 1974. (Photo courtesy of Betty Sue Flowers.)

This marked-up manuscript page comes from a story called “Gibberish,” from Berger’s original short story collection
Abnormal Occurrences.

In this 1984 letter to his agent, Don Congdon, Berger tells Congdon that he was mentioned on
The David Susskind Show
, a television talk show.

In this 1997 letter, Berger writes to Roger Donald, his editor at Little, Brown, about characters, props, and plot points in
The Return of Little Big Man.

In 1997, Berger wrote to Congdon about communications from Michael Korda, editor in chief of the publisher Simon & Schuster, and Donald.