The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories (18 page)

“Yeah?”

“The first couple of chapters, actually. So far.”

“And?”

“I mean, hey.”

“Yeah? Really?”

“Sure. I mean, strong start. Strong central character. Right there. The way you establish his difference, you know? The way he's different.”

“You don't think the telepathy stuff is too much?”

“Hell no. Liked the telepathy stuff. Absolutely.”

“Because I wondered if people would think, you know, it doesn't really come together until the abduction.”

“The abduction. Right.”

“And you don't mind that I used your name, do you?”

“Heck no.”

“Because when I thought about Red's best pal, you know, it's not a strictly autobiographical novel. It's more along the lines of a magical impressionism thing. But there are some elements. Write what you know, as they say.”

“Sure.”

“But you like it so far?”

“Absolutely.”

“You're not just saying that, right? Because, you know—” Larsen's voice deepened here, in a distressingly earnest way, “—it took me ten years to write.”

“Ten years?”

“Probably closer to twelve. I wrote in the mornings. Before work.”

“You were doing it this whole time?”

“I'd get hit with an idea just like, boom, divine instigation.”

“And you didn't tell anyone.”

“That was the hardest part!” Larsen's voice trilled up again. “The hardest part! But I wanted to wait until, you
know, until it was done. One hundred percent.”

“Right.”

“So?”

“Okay.”

“The rest I mean? When do you think—”

“Well now, that's a thing, a real thing. It's a long piece, a serious piece of work. And with the way things have been at the office. Boy.”

“How about if you take another week?”

“I was thinking more like late December.”

“December 4 it is. That's a Sunday. We'll have a little party.”

“Right. I'll check my calendar. We may have a thing that weekend,”

“Hey, you're a pal, you know that? I
knew
I could count on you.”

“I
DON'T UNDERSTAND
,” Beth said. “Just read the fucking thing. Get it over with.”

They had just made love, poorly. Midway through, Flem had opened his eyes and caught sight of the garish manuscript on his night table. He felt a spasm in his lumbar, his erection went south, and Beth let out a flummoxed yawn. “I can do it,” he said. “You've just got to help a little.” It hadn't been pretty.

“And to think,” Beth said afterwards, “we once considered filming ourselves.” Now, she was sitting up in bed, stabbing at an ominous-looking chart with a Mont Blanc. “Just do a chapter a night. How bad can it be?”

Flem lugged Larsen's novel onto his chest and glared at his wife. He read aloud,

Chapter Three: In the Belly of the UFO Beast At first, Red couldn't have said where he was. A moment earlier, he had been preparing to make love to Rosetta Stone, the most voluptuous and beautiful coed at Colgate Dental College, listening intently as she gasped at his shining manhood. But now, everything around him was like bright white crystals, as if he had been transported into one of those glass balls where you shake them and it snows
.

“Where am I?” Red exclaimed in confusion
.

The voice that came to him was not of this world. Yet it was the same voice that had come to him so many times before, in times of tribulation, all those times he'd thought he was just imagining things
.

“Relax, Red. You will not be harmed,” the voice oozed from overhead, like an ominous waterfall
.

“Who are you?” Red interrogated
.

“We are from the planet Galaxion,” the voice boomed calmly
.

“Okay,” Beth said. “I get it—”

“No,” Flem said. “I don't think you do.”

Red tried to lift his body, thinking to make his escape. He was, after all, the state champion in the decathelon, a bona fide Olympian, according to coach Hardy. But Red found himself unable to ambulate. He was stuck in place, like a paralyzed mummy
.

“Please don't attempt anything foolish, Red,” the voice from above boomed. “It would be quite . . . useless.”

“What . . . what do you want?” Red raged in rage
.

The crystals overhead pulsed like supercharged quasars. “We want merely to guide you,” the voice said. “We on Galaxion have a different conception of life than you so-called humans. We are not interested in you're ‘survival of the fittest.' We are interested in maximizing the potential of all our kind. We have come to earth to observe a few select homo safiens, those of, let us say, extraordinary abilities and aptitudes. We are interested to see if they might be able to maximize their potential. With our help, of course.”

“I don't understand,” said Red, still confused. “But why did you take me away when I was just about to make it with Rosetta Stone?”

The voice from above chuckled in a fashion so eerie it sent shivers like tiny daggers up and down Red's muscled spine. “You would have impregnated her, had three children by her, and gone into insurance sales to support the family. By age 52, you would be dead of cancer, owing to
the free-floating asbesto in your office.”

“What's asbesto?”

But there was no answer from above. In fact, Red found himself back in his apartment, watching Rosetta Stone pounce back into her clothing. He remembered nothing of his experience with the Galaxions, only a vague sense of being different somehow. “Wha, what's the matter, baby?” he queried in confusion
.

“I have never been so insulted in all my life,” Rosetta screeched. Her green eyes blazed like a forest fire ablaze
.

“What did I do?” Red declared, his eyes like the eyes of a deer whose eyes are caught in a set of headlights
.

“Don't you remember? You told me I wasn't your type, and that you were sure I would meet someone someday, but that you couldn't risk your future just for the sake of a lust-based relationship.”

“I said that??” Red proclaimed in confusion
.

But the only answer he received was the slamming of his door, like a crack of thunder inside the eardrum of his heart
.

Beth's head was under her pillow.

“Say uncle,” Flem said.

“Uncle,” she said.

“Proclaim it in confusion.”

“‘Uncle,' I proclaim in confusion.”

“You're going to work with me on this?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Wow. Poor Jude.”

“I
KEEP TRYING
,” Flem said. “It's right by my bedside. Top of the stack. It's just . . . I get so tired.” Even discussing Larsen's novel, Flem found, made him tired. “Like a depression. Like I actually get depressed. All this stuff about the soul of a jazz musician? It's like seeing him naked.” Flem had actually seen Larsen naked, about three years ago, and it had been enough to cause him to find a different gym. “You should read some of this thing. I mean it.”

Dr. Oss nodded smugly. “I'm not sure that would be appropriate.”

“All I'm saying is, before you make any of these generalizations about what it all
means
, you should try reading the thing.”

“What do you suppose my reaction would be?”

“I think you'd understand why all the hubbub, you'd see I'm not exaggerating.”

“And that's important to you? That I view this as ridiculous?” Dr. Oss scratched out a note with his fountain pen.

“Only in the sense that you'd know what I was talking about. I mean, we all have artistic impulses, okay? I took a writing class in college. But that doesn't mean that I'm
going to suddenly go around proclaiming myself some kind of novelist.”

“And this is what your friend has done?”

Flem shifted in his seat. He felt, as he inevitably did under Dr. Oss's simian gaze, that he was being set up. “I mean, he wrote the thing. He keeps bugging me to read it.”

“Yes?”

“He's got this whole inflated sense of himself.”

Dr. Oss tapped at his temple with a felty knuckle.

A chimp, Flem thought. I'm being analyzed by a chimp.

“I'm curious to know why this should occupy so much of your concern.”

“Right. My concern. We're back to that.” Quite unconsciously, Flem began nodding smugly.

Dr. Oss leaned forward. “You seem to be imitating me, Mr. Owens. Is that so?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Flem said.

H
E DID OWE
Dr. Oss something, though, the little chiseler, because he'd discovered the answer right in his waiting room, at the back of one of the glossies he hid behind before his appointments.
Manuscripts Read
, the ad read.
Ten cents per page
.
Quick, professional
. He slipped one of the temps a fifty to copy Larsen's novel after hours and got it to FedEx that same night. “It's all set,” he told Beth. “Done deal.”

The SASE arrived the Monday after Thanksgiving. Flem
let out a whoop. “Stop being queer,” said Belle. She was watching him through the railing of the stairs.

“I know you are, but what am I?” Flem yipped. Belle made a face and Flem made a face right back and skipped to his study.

Dear Mr. Larsen:

Not in thirty years as an editor have I encountered a piece of writing so egregiously misguided. In addition to your style (unremittingly cliché) and pacing (glacial), there are your characters to consider. To call them “cardboard” would be unfair, for they lacked the depth and nuance of cardboard. Your plot, if I may abuse that term, contains so many inconsistencies that two of my heartiest readers, faced with your work, were reduced to bed rest. (To cite just one: Red's mother “meets her mortal coyle [
sic
]” on page 36, yet appears four pages later, serving her “world famous potato salad” and looking “as diafanous as a fresh-picked daffodil.”)

Just Call Me Bones
is surely a labor of love, Mr. Larsen. So, too, was the Third Reich
.

Sincerely
,

Frederick Malyneux

P.S. Find enclosed a check for the balance of your reading fee, which I cannot, in good conscience, accept, as I only got as far as page 103
.

Flem did a little dance of anguish around his study, a sort of panic-stricken fox-trot; he checked the calendar, rooted through his address book, and spent the next hour faxing an excerpt of the novel to a literary critic whose jaw he had reconstructed some years before. He received his reply, via fax, the very next day.

My Dearest Dr. Owens
,

No expert, I, in this business of words (the vagaries of the literary market being something akin, from my perch, to those of Wall Street), but I believe your friend to be in possession a masterpiece. Not since Nabokov, or, perhaps, Kohlschlaunger, have I encountered a writer so deliciously attuned to the conventions of what Eagleton calls the “suburban autodidact.” The wild deviations in tone, the effortless invocation of stereotype, the nearly hallucinogenic syntactical lapses. In short: wickedly, howlingly, funny
.

Yet I would be remiss to leave aside the tale's unexpected rind of postmodern plangency. For so faithfully executed is Red's “story” that one feels, at odd moments, as if the author actually
believes
he is creating an important piece of art; it is this heartrending delusion that illumines and redeems the lacquered semiotic artifice, and redirects the reader to the garish parable itself. Beneath the farce, then
, une tragedie.

The letter went on for six more pages. He glanced at the calendar above the phone. His Ansel Adams series had been replaced by a greasy, shirtless young man with what appeared to be a zucchini squash in his pants; Belle's handiwork.

“I must think,” he told himself. “I must not panic.”

In fact, Flem gave it no thought. “Letting the chips fall where they may,” he announced to Dr. Oss. “What do you think of that?”

“What do you think I would think of that?” the little chimp bastard said.

A
LL
S
UNDAY MORNING
, the phone rang. Flem could hear his daughter, raging away like Lear outside his study. “Why can't we answer it?” she howled. “We can just lie if it's him. We've been lying for a month straight. Come
oooooon
.”

Flem rubbed his temples and, every few minutes, shouted
No!
five times, in rapid succession.

“What's his
problem
?”

“Your father is having a nervous breakdown.”

“Don't tell her that,” Flem snapped.

“Unplug your phone,” Beth snapped back.

“He'll come over,” Flem said. “I know him. I know how he
thinks
.” He burst out of his study and hurried upstairs to the bathroom, the one place where he might be able to
think
. He sat on the toilet,
thinking
. He thought about Larsen, his gummy grin, his puffy expectations. And he realized, as he sat there unproductively, that he was furious. Why should he, Ted Larsen, be the one writing a novel, when it was he, Flem Owens, who possessed the superior imagination, the
joie d'esprit
, or what have you? In a moment of excruciating clarity, he recognized that he was, of all things,
envious
of Larsen.

He made an immediate mental note to never, ever share this with Dr. Oss.

Downstairs, the phone rang. His stomach gave a yelp; his eyes settled absently on the bottle of lye, perched on the shelf above him, with its wonderful black skull and cross-bones. Something like a bell struck inside his head.