Who Made Stevie Crye? (15 page)
Read Who Made Stevie Crye? Online
Authors: Michael Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #science fiction, #General
XXIX
the angry blatting of a broken Exceleriter.
Stevie groped for and finally found the plastic switch that silenced the alarm on her clock radio. Usually she did not set the alarm on Friday or Saturday nights, but after returning from the upstairs bathroom drugged for slumber she must have inadvertently done so. A weekday habit unconsciously carried over to the weekend. Now she was awake, exhausted by the vivid rigors of her dreams.
You had several nightmares in a row, Stevie thought, still trying to orient. The radio alarm interrupted the last one. For a moment its horrible buzzing reminded you of the sound the Exceleriter made when its cable snapped. A waking nightmare disrupting your bad-dream frequencies. It’s morning, Stevie, a quiet Sunday morning.
What did you dream?
Actually, she remembered her nightmares, just as, earlier that same night, she had remembered her illusory seduction of Teddy. The difference now lay in the reassuring fact that it was impossible to confuse the contents of these newest nightmares with waking reality. Ted slept securely in the Barclay cemetery, Seaton Benecke was not really a capuchin in human disguise, and she, Stevie, had not spent the night in Ladysmith’s ultramodern cancer clinic. She had spent the night in her own big bed, fitfully dreaming.
Time to get up and see what kind of order the Exceleriter had imposed on the sequence and images of these fitful dreams—animated spiritual headaches, call them. Stevie pulled on a pair of stiff, off-brand “designer” jeans, added a long-sleeve flannel shirt, took a couple of swipes at her bangs with a hair brush. Then she tennis-shoed into her study and read through the transcriptions of the nightmares set down verbatim in the previous chapter.
“ ‘Mrs. Crye’?” she said aloud. “Why the hell do you refer to me as Mrs. Crye in every one of my own dreams?”
The machine typed,
A MATTER OF COURTESY, MRS. CRYE.
“It’s ridiculously formal. I don’t think of myself as Mrs. Crye. I certainly don’t dream of myself as Mrs. Crye, not with the formality of the title, anyway. Mockery and condescension, that’s what you’re dealing in.”
NO, MAAM, NOT AT ALL. ITS BOTH COURTESY AND SCRUPULOUS ADHERENCE TO JOURNALISTIC STYLE. DONT BE UNCHARITABLE.
“How can I be charitable toward a thief like you? You invade my sleep. You steal my dreams.”
I RETURN THEM TO YOU, STEVIE. HERE THEY ARE, NEATLY TYPED AND READY TO REEXPERIENCE.
“Wonderful. I can reexperience a rape in which my late husband acted as another man’s second. I can reexperience the symbolic bestiality of that rape. Then I can reexperience my late husband’s request for a divorce. I can also—”
FILE THEM AWAY. FORGET ABOUT THEM.
Stevie started to reply, but silenced herself. She was speaking aloud. The Exceleriter was typing. This approach to the mechanics of information exchange marked an important shift in their relationship. The typewriter was voluntarily acknowledging the legitimacy of speech as a communications method. Not since she had shouted “Stop!” at it had it responded so readily to the spoken word. On paper, however, Stevie’s contributions to this dialogue were conspicuous blank areas of two, three, or four lines. These white spaces gave her the uneasy notion that she did not exist except by the machine’s sufferance. She therefore typed her next response:
It’s not likely I’ll ever forget what you’re doing to me. I don’t want to forget it. I just want it to stop.
YOUR WISH IS MY
Command, thought Stevie. Ever the completist, she depressed the shift-lock key and typed this word in the space left vacant by the Exceleriter. Only an uninked impression appeared on the paper, however, for the machine had stealthily maneuvered its ribbon to the stencil setting. Ever the smart aleck, thought Stevie. You always have to have the last word, even if it’s by refusing to have it.
“You’re up early for a Sunday.”
Stevie looked around. Teddy stood in the door, already dressed and bright-eyed. She turned the Exceleriter off and histrionically put a hand to her breast. Even if the gesture she used to signal her surprise was a relic of the D. W. Griffith era, there was nothing make-believe about her heart’s rapid fluttering.
“So are you,” she managed. “Up early.”
“You’ve been a real go-getter this morning, Mom. I’ve heard you typing the last hour or so.”
Stevie tried to put the dust cover on the Exceleriter, but the long strip of paper on the platen made the cover sit lopsidedly. “I’m finished now. I was just making some notes. Nothing important. Just some notes.”
“Don’t be nervous,” Teddy advised her.
She looked sharply at the boy. “Nervous? Why should I be nervous?”
“No reason, Mom. You shouldn’t be. I don’t want you to think you need to be. There’s no reason to.”
“What are you talking about?”
He came into the study and closed the door behind him. “I want to thank you for what you did last night, Mom. Lots of kids would probably hate you for that, or not understand it, or be embarrassed about it. Not me, though. I’m grateful. I feel better about myself.”
“Lots of kids would hate their mothers for refusing to be back-talked?”
Teddy smiled shyly, but his shyness was conspiratorial. “There’s back talk and there’s back talk. Some kinds are bad, and some kinds are . . . not so bad. You taught me something about myself.”
Dumbfounded by this admission’s implications, Stevie stared at Teddy. She was afraid to say anything. She did not want him to blurt out his meaning (as, in the Exceleriter’s version of their apocryphal midnight talk, she had asked him to blurt out his problem), because she feared this direct approach would deny her the possibility of believing their incest a lie. It
was
a lie, of course, but Teddy seemed to operate under the assumption that the Exceleriter’s disgusting fiction had become a Crye-family
fait accompli
. How could he assume such a thing? What was happening to her?
“Anyway,” Teddy said, “it’s okay, Mom. I’m old enough to handle it. You did me a kindness. That’s all I’m going to say. I won’t mention it again.”
Stevie said, “Mention it all you like. I’m not ashamed of calling you down for sassing me.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Lifting his gaze, Teddy meditatively cocked his head. “Thanks, Mom. I mean it.” His breath sent vaporous plumes into the air, but when he grabbed the door handle and ducked back out into the hall, these plumes disappeared like ghosts at dawn’s first gleaming. What Teddy had said, however, echoed in Stevie’s mind all that long chilly morning.
XXX
Dr. Elsa was as good as her word
. While Stevie stayed at home eyebrow-deep in the hefty combined edition of
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, Teddy and Marella attended Sunday school at the First United Methodist Church three blocks away. After church the Kensingtons took the children back out the Alabama Road to their secluded clapboard bungalow on Scottsdale Lake. As much as she loved those troublesome boogers (Ted’s term of endearment), Stevie appreciated this time to herself. She respected and wondered at Dr. Elsa, herself a busy woman, for arranging matters so that she could have a break not only from her work but from her parental duties. It was not often these days that she enjoyed such blissful autonomy.
Since Tuesday, it seemed, her life had revolved almost totally around the dictates, crass or subtle, of a seven-hundred-dollar machine. Everything she had done, everything that had happened to her, and most of her current preoccupations stemmed from the Exceleriter’s breakdown and subsequent repair. (Put “repair” in quotes. What Benecke had done to the Exceleriter qualified as the spelling of a baleful and far-reaching curse.) True enough, Marella had twice come down ill since Tuesday, and Teddy had rattled her with his puerile smart-aleckisms and his poignant midnight doubts about his masculinity—but even these fairly ordinary family problems seemed inextricably bound up with her difficulties with the typewriter. In fact, only because the Exceleriter had cunningly deceived her was she now having trouble drawing a hard-edged line between real events and wholly imaginary ones. Even as she sat in her kitchen reading the Sunday book reviews, sipping at her third cup of coffee, a machine about the size of a breadbox was shaping her attitudes, influencing her emotions, dictating her behavior.
Don’t think about the blasted thing, Stevie advised herself.
She tried to concentrate on the book reviews. Today’s literary pages—both of them—were devoted to capsule notices of a dozen different midwinter horror novels. These books bore the following titles:
Afterbirth
,
All Creatures Squat and Scaly
,
The Dripping
,
Edema
,
Gravid Babies
,
Lucrezia Laughed
,
Nightscrew
,
The Nimbus
,
The Puppets of Piscataway
,
Scourge
,
Shudderville
, and
The Terror According to Tyrone
. The notices either hailed these offerings as masterpieces of chilling readability or castigated them as the latest throwaways on a summitless heap of opportunistic schlock.
Stevie counted up the reviews. Pans outnumbered raves eight to four, and the raves were by obituary writers and ambulance chasers all too conspicuously eager to abandon their ghoulish beats for a Sunday stroll through an imaginary graveyard or a nonexistent haunted house. The pans, meanwhile, consisted of energetic discussions of the novels’ blatant excesses, shameful borrowings, stylistic shortcomings, unbelievable characters, incestuous thematic resemblances, and delicious cheap thrills. Where were today’s Willie Collinses, Sakis, and M. R. Jameses?
Glancing at the week’s fiction bestsellers, however, Stevie found that four of the novels under review this morning had climbed into the hardcover list. Another two, paperback originals, had attained the second and fifth places on the paperback list. Only one of the horror novels on either of these lists had received an approving review in today’s paper.
Stevie held her coffee on the back of her tongue, bitterly contemplating the narrow eclecticism and salient graph-paper preferences of the American reading public. She wrote nonfiction, of course, but what chance had a regional writer with no predilection for purveying goosebumps of cracking the big-bucks barrier of bestsellerdom? Rightly or wrongly, she graphed her own literary progress in dismaying parallel with the rise and fall of her bank balance. By that standard, the accolades of her editors and a few distant relatives aside, she was a failure even as a hack.
“
Two-Faced Woman: Reflections of a Female Paterfamilias
,” said Stevie aloud, savoring the sound of it.
Not a bad title, really. Precolon, it titillated. Postcolon, it dovetailed into the realm of fuzzy sociological jargon, even if the juxtaposition of
female
and
paterfamilias
was supposed to wrinkle brows and pique curiosities. Maybe it would do just that. If the Briar Patch Press, Inc., of Atlanta, Georgia, accepted her book, however, it would receive only a limited regional distribution, and she would be lucky to find her title among the nonfiction bestsellers spotlighted in the
Sunday Journal-Constitution
. The uptown folks at
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post Book World
would never even hear of her. Their nonfiction specialists would be busy reviewing studies of American sexual mores, guides to market investment during the coming depression, the autobiographies of superannuated film stars, and the doomsday scenarios of various ecologists, military leaders, retired politicians, biological scientists, Kremlinologists, automobile executives, Sun Belt evangelicals, and anonymous quasi-literate terrorists who vowed in their prefaces to donate their royalties to the utter annihilation of the corrupt middle class.
So of course people read horror novels. The only other readily accessible medium of escape was television; and even Teddy and Marella, whose very eyeballs sometimes seemed to bristle with teletransmitted dots, could stand only so much of that sanctified diversion. If you wanted to make money, establish your name, and reap the rewards of your labors in this life (rather than in the musty halls of academe or the luminous meadows of paradise), you had to give the people what they wanted. Or you had to make them want what you gave them, an infinitely riskier and more time-consuming enterprise. Stevie scarcely felt she had the time, and a talent for intelligent pandering was not one upon whose development she had ever placed a high priority. The more fool she.
What was going to happen to her book proposal? The Briar Patch Press would sit on it two or three months and then return it with a cover letter praising her style but expressing grave doubts about the “commercial viability” of her subject matter.
Unless your late husband was a minister, a philandering international sex symbol, or a physician in either deepest Borneo or Darkest, Texas (the rejection notice would say), the A.R.P.—American Reading Public—has no overmastering desire to pay cold, hard cash for the down-home tribulations of a modern widow. Feminism is passé in this presidential administration. After all, a woman sits on the Supreme Court and Bo Derek can do anything she damn well pleases.
Two-Faced Woman
, catchy title notwithstanding, just isn’t going to be this year’s
Roots
or
Shogun
. In fact, lady, if we indulge ourselves and print it, most of the copies will end up on discount tables along with omnibus volumes of Willie Shakespeare’s plays, Edgar A. Guest’s poetry, and Jack London’s South Sea tales. And the omnibus volumes, Mrs. Crye, will sell better.
Ah, thought Stevie, staring moodily at the pen-and-ink likeness of a moist-muzzled werewolf illustrating Paul Darcy Boles’s contemptuous review of
The Dripping
; ah, the power of positive thinking. Your proposal’s been gone less than twenty-four hours, to a publisher outside the debris-littered millrace of the Manhattan biggies, and already you’re consigning it to editorial shipwreck. You’re supposed to be relishing this time alone, not worrying about your work or anticipating ugly setbacks. That typewriter upstairs has turned you into one pessimistic, paranoid lady, Stevie Crye.
“I’ve got to get out of this house.”
This statement echoed harshly in her empty kitchen. Stevie collapsed the pages of the book-review section, folding them no more neatly than she usually folded the road maps in her van, and upended this bulging packet into the big wicker basket containing her plastic garbage pail. As if she had just disposed of her pessimism and paranoia along with the book reviews, she brushed her hands together smartly. She would take Dr. Elsa’s advice and drive into Columbus. Shopping, as Arthur Miller had somewhere pointed out, was an established American cultural response to the blues. It was what you did when TV’s pale attraction faded, and you had to come up for air from horror novels like
Gravid Babies
or
The Terror According to Tyrone
.
Stevie turned down the space heater and climbed the stairs to her bedroom to change clothes. Though cold, it was another beautiful day. Navy-blue slacks, a virgin-white fishnet sweater, and her off-white winter car coat—that ensemble ought to make her presentable to the J. C. Penney crowd, even if she was almost a decade out of fashion. What the hell. Warmth was the word, not modishness. The Columbus
beau monde
, bless its collective heart, would never even notice. Half its elegantly coiffed representatives were undoubtedly cruising Atlanta’s swank malls, anyway.
At the top of the stairs Stevie paused. The Exceleriter was not typing. Good. That was a blessing.
But pulled into her study in spite of herself, Stevie went to the typewriter, reread its transcriptions of last night’s dreams, tried to reconstruct the spoken half of her conversation with the machine, and finally removed the long sheet of paper on the cylinder. She cranked in another sheet. Then she folded the Exceleriter’s most recent work into a packet, slipped this into a manila folder, and removed from her files the folder containing its first literary efforts. They were going with her, these stories, these fictions. She had no firm idea why, but they were going with her. She wanted them under her arm, within her sight, tangible testimony that she had not merely hallucinated their reality.