Show Business is Murder

All Said and Done by GREGG HURWITZ

HE WOKE UP with sweat washing over his body in tight chilly shimmers and the paddles of the fan whirring above him like a copter. He jerked out of bed and ran both hands over his face, top to bottom, then down around the back of his neck. They slid on the moistness of his skin, and he felt something less than human. Reptilian.

Crossing the tiny square that passed for his bedroom, he pulled the metal folding chair away from the stack of empty fruit crates. He sank into the chair and faced the small Smith Corona typewriter that sat on a slight angle atop the highest box. BURSTIN’ ORANGE. FLORIDA’S BEST! the crate proclaimed.

He laid the pads of his fingers gently on top of the keys and slid them in the rounded grooves. It was “a laying on of hands,” as his father used to say when he spoke of New Testament tales when there still had been a New Testament or an Old. He felt the power contained in his eight little fingers perched on the starting blocks of eight little keys. A big door. It had always been. Trouble was you couldn’t control what flew out when you opened it. The moon slid into view in the edge of the window as the earth continued its tedious rotation, and the straw-colored light fell patterned across his bare mattress. A big fucking door. He opened it.

It was the summer of the year and every year and yet there were no seasons, just time awash with a blend of the four. It was sometime in the sixties but then time never held when you were really alive or really dead and for the sixteen months of my tour I was both.

He stopped. “I am Janson Tanker,” he said softly to the four walls that he could all but touch from his seat at the makeshift desk. He looked around the room, noticing the spill of the moonlight turned metallic as it passed through the small window splattered with rain and neon. He had New York on his windows, and the rain couldn’t wash them clean of it any more than he could wash the New York from his body with the small sink in the corner.

Do I really want to do this? he thought. It’s not much. God knows it’s not much, but at least it’s familiar. He raised the heel of his hand to his eye and rubbed, his eyelid pulling down in a droop.

We came over in units, but one by one, and we left all together. We left in a big mess-a human meat pie-with the leftovers of all our lives molded together until we could no longer separate whose limbs were whose. They always said that you come out a man, and I supposed that was true, but I never anticipated coming out as bits and pieces of a bunch of men which may or may not have added up to one of whatever I was before. You heard echoes and voices of all the men and you remembered them so clearly you couldn’t distinguish their stories from your memories. And Tom from Minnesota with the girl he’d asked to marry dressed up like Santa Claus (“me not her”) and Jimmie Jankens from Baltimore who had a burn mark on the side of his face from a car engine exploding in tenth-grade shop (“already had a tour once, I told ’em, first when I walk in, and their mouths all drop not knowing my tour was through the shit engine block of a ’62 Chevy”) and Jessie who used to bite the skin off his knuckles when we’d wait in the leaves and you could barely hear his teeth clicking underneath the hammering rain. And which were their lives, their voices, their clicking teeth in the dark and which your own? Couldn’t really tell then, let alone now.

And so I went into the jungle in a season of a year, and I left in a season of another year.

Janson paused for a minute, his fingers straining at the bit. Then the warm, warm rain brought back Henry Wilder running through the wet, and Janson’s head dropped to the edge of the crate. He could close the door if he strained with all his might, if he bent all his energy to ignoring the searing pain it sent through his back. But it was a heavy door in a strong wind; once it opened, even a crack, everything outside fought and clawed to invade the warmth on the other side. And there wasn’t much warmth to spare.

He had let the first breath of air get through, he had let in Jimmie Jankens from Baltimore and the long, ebbless tide of the hours and days, and he knew he couldn’t go on. They were pooling at his feet and rising to his knees, and there was even less space in his mind than in the room. Slowly, he felt the panic gripping his heart with iron fingers again and again, like those decades spent on evening lookouts that still came to him in harsh whispers and the whirring, the incessant whirring of the blades of the helicopter as it moved ahead and out of the world.

He felt the tears pressing beneath the line of his cheekbones and his nose, and then he felt them spill over and down his cheek, but he couldn’t feel the crying, only the moisture. He still wasn’t used to the crying-he had not cried, not once, for the entire sixteen months of his tour or the empty box of the eleven years to follow, but after that he had started and then he didn’t know what it was, much less how to stop it. And so, with the flashing beer signs outside illuminating his room like blinks of a neon eye, with the slow rotation of the haunting fan above, with his forehead pressed tightly to the top of a BURSTIN’ ORANGE fruit crate, Janson Tanker cried more tears of penance for the years when he could not.

“I’M TELLING YOU, we got him. This guy’s fucking unbelievable-he’s like from a time warp,” Adam Diamond said, as he slid back from his large glass desk and clicked the fourth red button in from the left.

He tucked the phone against his neck, covering the mouthpiece momentarily. “Janice. Double cap, dry-and I mean fucking dry. If I wanted a latte I’d order one.”

With a deft movement of his shoulder, Adam brought the phone back up and against his ear. “Stable, not stable, who gives a fuck? He’s brilliant. No, of course I haven’t read him. Scott checked him out. Said he’s like Faulkner and-I know, I know. So Faulkner was a failed screenwriter, but Scott’s Ivy. What do you expect? It’s his way of saying he thinks he’s good.”

Adam listened for a while, working a set of jade duo balls back and forth in the palm of his right hand. They clicked now and again, but rarely touched, even when he rested his elbow on the table and raised them in his hand up next to his ear. His eyes didn’t flicker when Janice came in and left his cappuccino on the desk next to a stack of phone messages.

“I’m not talking David Rabe. David Rabe was shit-for Christ’s sake, who the fuck casts Michael J. Fox as a lead? I know… I know, Harvey. No one wants to see another Vietnam film, but I’m telling you I’ve got a longer line of thumbs up than a San Francisco bathhouse. We’re talking Platoon here, Harvey. Okay, I know. But we’ll check him out, get some raw material, see where we can run with it. Rules ofEngagement used Vietnam… Yes, yes it did. I don’t care if it wasn’t the primary line, it was in there and what’d that gross?” He whistled. “Holy fuck. And we’re just talking domestic.

“Where’d we get him? We found him, Harvey. We found him. One of Scott’s friends from his New Haven days runs a soup kitchen lower West Side. Regular guy comes in, always asks for a couple sheets of paper towel from the kitchen. Turns out-this is beautiful, Harvey-turns out he’s been writing on them. Both sides, ink bleeding through and all.

“Scott’s friend’s a warm-hearted liberal from an Upper East Side family, so he goes and buys this guy a shit second-hand typewriter and some paper. Month and a half later, the guy shows up with four sheets, typed. No, no I’m not joking. Month and a half later, only four sheets. So Scott’s buddy reads ’em-What? I don’t know why he brought them in to him. Anyway, so Scott’s buddy reads them and they’re absolute crap, right? Some science fiction shit about a world taken over by machines or something. We’re talking the first Terminator. So he sends the guy on his way and doesn’t think twice about it. One week later, the guy shows up and hands him a sheaf, a fucking sheaf of paper. I don’t know, like sixty, seventy pages. Scott’s friend reads them, goes nuts and calls Scott and Scott drives down-I know, I know. In his cherry-red Z3 to a fuckin’ soup kitchen.”

Adam broke off laughing. “He’s dedicated, Scott. Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, when it’s all said and done he drives down to that soup kitchen if he thinks it’ll yield.

“So Scott gets them, these, however many pages, and they’re gold. No, not gold. Platinum. They’re fucking platinum. Best thing he’s ever read, and keep in mind he’s our novel guy. So I tell him to run it through the loop. All tolled, five reads, all give him four stars on style and writing. Wanted to wait for the big men to make the call on story, just because it is Vietnam. So it’s up to you and me.

“Of course I’m waiting. Don’t worry, no one else even knows where to find this guy. He’s completely ours-he couldn’t find his way to an editor if we left him in the lobby of S &S. We’re waiting until we get the second half. It’s a short novel, only gonna be about two hundred pages, all said and done. We’ll wait on him, then we’ll talk. We’ll talk.”

Adam Diamond hung up the phone. It left his ear for the first time since 8:30 that morning, and it was well after 2:00. His lunch meetings often slid late, but this was late even for him, and he could feel his stomach complaining about last night’s Scotch and this morning’s caffeine.

He leaned over and hit the red button. Fourth one in from the left. “Get Cathy on the line, let her know it’s still Baldoria, but it’s gonna have to be three, not two thirty. You can reach her in the car if she’s already left.”

Adam Diamond was remarkably good-looking for a forty-five-year-old man. His dark brown hair lacked even a hint of gray-“distinguished my ass, I want be dead and gone before they call me distinguished”-and it fell in short wavy ringlets over his smooth forehead. He had a cruel face, but it was a learned cruelty. The anger did not flower naturally from beneath the skin, but sat across it, etched in the wrinkles he did not have.

He switched the jade balls from hand to hand, turning his left hand over on top of the right as if to clap. Adam Diamond rarely clapped, however, and when he did, it was to punctuate a command, not to display appreciation. “Clapping is for fools,” his father used to say. “Take what you can from a show and run.” His father was a famous agent, almost a living legend in New York, a city with a lot of names. Then he died, and was just a legend.

IT HURT, IT hurt like excising a cancerous growth, but once he started, he was steeped in blood too far to return, and so he continued. He entered them all, entered the voices one by one, and felt their words as the breath in his throat. Janson Tanker felt as if there were steam running through his insides, but he still had several nights of burning to do before he was spent. He only hoped that the stack of paper, which was shrinking like water leaving a tub, would last until the words ran out.

He had written them, written them one and all-his fallen comrades whom he loved and hated as he did his own flesh. He supposed he was trying to exorcise them or purify them, not that there was much of a difference anymore. He had reassembled them, brought them back from their homes in Heads Creek, Louisiana, and Culver, Texas, from Little Rock, Arkansas, and Detroit, Michigan. Using no discretion (for the war had not either), he plucked them from their homes like babes from a tit and sent them all back to the jungle.

Yet the scariest part was pulling the nails from the coffins and prying open the lids. Was watching the skeletons grow flesh and rise. And Janson resurrected them so precisely, adding even the optimistic shine of their smiles, only to kill them again. And he wished he had only to kill them with bullets.

He went to bed when he faded from his chair to the bare mattress. He wasn’t really sure when that was, just as he wasn’t really sure when his crying crossed from waking to sleeping hours. But somehow he always fell asleep because he always awoke with his mouth shut and his body screaming under the whirring paddles of the fan. The sweat was awful, so awful he didn’t even bother to try to clean his pillow in the little sink anymore because he knew it would be doused again the next night or the next sleep, whichever came first.

Sleep evaded and stalked him. It would slip away, fleeing through a tangled jungle path at night and drawing him inexorably along with it, through a waking hell. And then, just when he got his feet under him and adjusted to the rhythm of his footsteps, it would turn and pounce.

He had come to fear the typewriter. The 1951 Smith Corona typewriter on the stack of crates. He would stare at it, sometimes for hours, with hints of sleep glazing his eyes. Even when he turned away, he always knew it remained, always knew where it was. But after they routed Mai Teng, he knew it wasn’t the typewriter, that he would finish even if he had to write the rest on the walls in his own blood. He wondered what Barry’s friend would think of the skewed type on the sheets that he passed along.

He had a meeting in the morning, somewhere across the city, and his check had run out so he didn’t have money for a bus. He’d have to leave at 10:30 to make sure he got there by noon. He didn’t know what exactly it meant, but Barry said he had a friend who might give him money for his story, and he needed money right now more than almost anything. Barry said he’d pay for lunch if it was a lunch meeting, and Janson would have walked an hour and a half across town just for a decent meal.

He had written up to the very end. He didn’t know how many more pages, but he could feel the door closing. He didn’t think about it consciously, but he knew somewhere inside that he’d have to get through Henry Wilder to put it down, to put it all down. But for now, he couldn’t face the typewriter, so he concentrated on washing his pants and shirt in the sink so he wouldn’t smell at the meeting. He would try to tape the hole in the knee from the inside so it wouldn’t hang open.

He had given Barry the latest segments-the total was now one hundred seventeen pages and two paragraphs on the one hundred eighteenth. The pages were not numbered and he did not consciously count them, but each fresh sheet tolled, somehow, inside his head. Although he turned over the new pages the day before yesterday, he remembered just how he had written the storm, and could still feel it rattling inside him.

The thunder was still there, and it was all light that didn’t fade and shrapnel still in flight. I waited for the trees to stop shaking-what world what ungodly world where even the trees shake and the soil flies at you and folds under you-and for the rain to stop whipping my cheeks, but I had waited days or months already to no avail. When the ground eats its own progeny, then we’ve all come to judgment day, but I’d seen it all, seen the very ground spread its jaws and pull my struggling comrades down into tunnels and unimaginable torments, seen bodies waist deep in soil jerking with the movement of hands gripping them beneath the ground. And yanked down in a flash of foreign tongue moving vertically even in sound and then a scurrying of footsteps beneath. Always beneath and below. Footsteps in the cellar of my mind, even then in the rain with the shock of the blast still settling over and throughout me.

And the skies opened only with rain.

He knew that he was almost there; he had even allowed one of Wilder’s hands to creep over the edge of the coffin, but he slammed the lid on it. It would have to wait until after his meeting if he was going to get through it.

“I’M TELLING YOU, you would’ve died if you saw him. I know, I know-the suit. Last year Armani. Well he’s a prick. He was a prick when I knew him at Doubleday. That’s right, that’s exactly right. Can’t talk foreign, I want him off my fuckin’ Rolodex.”

Adam Diamond leaned forward and hit the fourth red button in from the left. “Janice. Richard Dawkins. Off the fuckin’ Rolodex, out of the computer. Done.”

“Yes, just like that, Harvey. I trust your judgment, especially when it coincides with mine. Hey-and guess who I’ve got coming in in about…” Adam flicked his Movado out from beneath a cuff. “… five minutes? The guy-the bum guy I told you about. Jaston Tanker. I’ll-”

The green light flashed on his desk, and a female voice crackled through. “We have a security problem, Adam. A homeless man in the lobby won’t leave, says he has an appointment with you, but I have you with Janson Tanker for your twelve o’clock and Michael Weaver for your twelve thirty.”

“Goddamnit Janice,” Adam roared. His voice dropped with the second half of the same breath. “Harvey, I’ll call you back.” He slammed down the phone and stood up, leaning over his desk toward the intercom. “That probably is Jaston Tanker.”

The intercom was silent for a minute. “You mean Janson Tanker, Adam?”

Adam was silent for a long time as he tried to control his breathing. Finally, he spoke, his voice wavering with rage. “Just you push me, you cunt. You push me about an inch further and you’ll be rolling calls the rest of your fucking life. Now get him in here.”

He sighed, and raised the jade duo balls from their box, a blue case with a flowing Asian design. He sat down and rolled his black leather chair to his enormous glass desk.

After a few seconds, there was an uncomfortable knock on the door, and then Janson entered the room. Adam could see how security had mistaken him for a bum; his shirt was so washed out that it had faded to a greenish gray, the color all clothes turned to once they were old enough.

Janson crossed the room, a walking shadow. He hadn’t shaved, but the stubble was as much a part of his face as anything else.

He was probably the kind of guy who grew scruff within seconds after shaving, just to cover his face a little, Adam thought. Not just to make him look tough, but to keep something in. He had the hardest green eyes Adam had ever seen. They reminded him of his father’s.

“Please. Sit.” Adam beckoned Janson forward, indicating the smaller seat on the far side of the desk.

“Tha-” Janson cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said, and sat down. His voice was rich and deep; it had a full rainbow of colors in it. Adam found himself instantly charmed.

“I like you,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Janson replied. He didn’t look shocked (Adam bet it took a hell of a lot more than that to shock a guy like Janson), just perplexed. And more than a little out of his element. Adam tried again.

“I like you. I like your writing. I haven’t read it all, but I took home the first half of your book as a weekend read and I like your style. Reminds me of…” Adam stopped for a minute, studying the Lichtenstein hanging behind Janson’s head. “Reminds me of Faulkner. I’m intrigued. I want to read more, I want to know more. You’ve got a rough style that’s not meant to be polished. I like that. I like the… animal feel. Where’d you get it?”

Janson frowned, biting his lip and pulling it to the side. Adam could see something moving in him like wind through a chime. Discomfort, maybe. “My mother was a schoolteacher,” Janson finally said. “Had me reading early and typing by high school. I had a year of junior college before the war.” He was proud of that. Proud, yet not asking for approval.

“I have always thought,” Adam replied, “that formal schooling is vastly overrated.”

Janson flicked his head back slightly in response, and Adam could detect a slight edge in his eyes. Suddenly he didn’t like him quite so much.

“You want me to cut the bullshit and tell you why you’re here, don’t you?” Adam asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what I do?”

“No.”

“I’m not really an agent like you’d think of an agent. More of a packager. I put deals together. Books. Movies. People. I like your style, I like your writing. I already told you that. I need the end of your book, then I need to run it through a circuit of editors and producers.”

Janson watched Adam attentively, chewing on the skin underneath one of his fingernails.

“Now, here’s what I can do for you,” Adam continued. “I can run this story through my circuit, and if it goes, it goes. Not small time. I’m talking book deal, publishing, hard and soft cover-I don’t work with anything without a hard release. I’m talking film rights, and we can negotiate for screenwriting credit. It depends what you come up with, how much the studios like it and you, and if you can give them what they want. A publishing deal can get you from twenty-five thousand to a quarter of a million. That used to be more than you could expect for a first-time writer, but first-time writers are hot. Unless you’re John Grisham or Jane Austin, established writers are having a tough time at the movies right now. They’re looking for hot young writers. You’re not exactly young, but you’re new and that’s the biggest word from LA to New York. Film rights go, they can go seven figures.”

Adam watched Janson’s eyes widen. I have him, he thought. He’s mine and only mine until I decide if I’m using him. He continued, tasting the words as they rolled from his tongue. “Now I deal mostly with film rights, but if those go, you can expect a publishing deal. What publisher isn’t going to want to get a book if we get you on line with a big studio? None. More money for you, more money for them.” He paused and let the thoughts sink in, fumes settling over a softly lit meadow.

Adam cleared his throat once. Sharply. “Now before you go picking out the color of your new BMW, I’m telling you now that none of this could go. When it’s all said and done, I’m making you no promises, no guarantees. But I will tell you this.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I want the end of the book, I want you to release the whole thing so I can have people ‘officially’ read it and so I can move it around my office and through my contacts. I want you to sign this-customary procedure. Leaves you with the rights to all profit, the ability to decide your own contract with us or with anyone else. It just gives us the right to read it and says you’re aware we may have other properties with similar themes.”

Janson leaned forward and signed.

You idiot, Adam thought. I could be taking your house right now and you wouldn’t know the fucking difference.

In fact, Adam was moving through proper legal channels just as he’d claimed. He was too far along in his career to risk “borrowing” material, but the simple scrawl of Janson’s signature on the form infuriated him. The trust in simply giving up his name like that, in relinquishing it.

But he had him now, and had him just where he wanted him. He had the full story (and the only copy from the appearance of the first two-thirds of it), and all the time in the world to decide if he wanted to make it hot.

Adam took the form back across his huge desk. “Great,” he said, forcing a smile, though he didn’t feel much like smiling at all. “We’ll be in touch. I’ll have Scott pick up the end of your manuscript from your buddy at your… dinner place. Any questions?”

Janson studied a dirty fingernail. “Yeah.” His eyes were glazed, distant. He raised them. “Are we having lunch?”

“No. Sorry. I have a lunch meeting later. I’m afraid you’ll have to pick something up on your way back,” Adam said. He smiled handsomely and his eyes flashed to the door.

HIS FEET ACHED from walking by the time he got home, but he was good at ignoring pain, and he thudded heavily up the stairs to his tiny room. The meeting hadn’t gone too badly. He remembered the manic nausea that had washed over him when Adam introduced those numbers, that money, so casually. Twenty-five thousand dollars to a quarter of a million. Janson couldn’t think in numbers that big, couldn’t quite get a handle around them and put them somewhere that showed what they were. He didn’t even try.

The lowest number was more than his father had saved in his entire life, let alone earned in a single year. But a lifetime of blue bruises that turned a sickly black was enough to wash some of the green from the dollars floating through his head.

Just one thousand dollars, he thought. That’s not much, not much given the numbers these men talked. Could get me far and away from here and put me up for a few nights in a new town-a town, not a city-until I found work. Somewhere I could see the sky, not just a translucent gray fog, and trees glancing from pools of water standing as still as sleeping shadows. And cool nights with stars laid out like holes clear through to heaven.

He closed his eyes and thought for a minute, his mind catching the image of a wood fire burning in the country somewhere, of smoke moving through the night air along lines as soft as the curves of a woman.

There were things he could still do. Not many, not skills, but there were things, and a check with four digits on it could get him to a place where he could show just what those things were. Once he didn’t have to bend his back to keeping the door shut, he could bend it to other tasks. And leave the city with its one check a month, its stamps for meals, its pitiful offering of a lifeline which did not include a life.

He swung the door open to find the typewriter staring at him, a metal eye in the middle of the stark room. The odor of his sweat drifted to him as the draft sucked the stale air past him into the hallway. The typewriter watched him expectantly. Not yet, he told it with his eyes. Not yet. He fell on his mattress, exhausted, and watched the rotating fan overhead.

Janson couldn’t write for several days and nights, until he was convinced that it would never come, and that he had lost it all. He had lost the check with four figures on it, the town that was not a city, and worst of all, the demons would forever stay their perch inside him. He watched the fan spin for nights and nights and then, at last, it lulled him to the edge of a cliff where sleep was waiting.

He had no idea when he woke up, but he woke up typing, and there was night all in his room and in his head. He was drenched in sweat, and it took him great effort to pull his clinging undershirt off. His fingers were running, running away from something, and they hammered on the metal keys until they ached with a dull throbbing pain. The ragged skin on the side of one of his fingernails finally gave way. He winced as he typed on. Droplets of blood made their way down under the key and flew up with the key’s release, faintly spraying the sheet. The paper was almost out, and he prayed to a God he no longer believed in that it would hold just that much longer, just until it was out of him.

The wind picked up the rain on its bosom and bore it to my face. It was no longer liquid, but a thick, solid paste smearing my brow and eyes. I was all feet and knees high-pumping and knocking my gear, but I had Henry’s footsteps to pull me through the mud and the brush. The one face from before the war, the one laugh I knew from a time when all laughs weren’t merely crackings of the soul to push the fear out. Again I thought of his footsteps when he blocked for me against Allston and I was the county sweetheart. A two-hundred-eighteen-yard game, and all two hundred and eighteen had been my feet in his footsteps just as they were now, but that was back when boys would be boys and when we loved rather than feared the thickness of soil and turf. I watched his feet sink in the mud ahead of me and pressed my own into the messy mounds they left.

The copter was there just like they’d sent word on the radio, but then they sent all codes and numbers over the radio and all we usually got was fire and brimstone. They were behind us still as they always seemed to be and we could see the spinning blades lowering in the clearing ahead, and suddenly our whole lives narrowed to a single gem-like point. Three hundred yards from the jungle to the clearing. I could feel my soul moving to the clearing with the might of a boulder on a downhill roll. It pushed toward the opening with euphoric longing, with a desire to escape that was red tinged pink around the edges and lit like a forest fire underneath my moving body.

That was when the ground gave and I saw Henry’s knees where his feet had been and then his shoulders and he dangled above the tunnel, the roaring rain crashing on him even through the leaves. The whirring of the helicopter tormented our ears with the full glory of our world just in reach and leaving without us. The ground yawned around him and a furrow opened up and I saw his legs still moving like they were running. One of them appeared beneath him in the tunnel with his gun trained up on us. On his ridiculously kicking legs and my head framed in the light above the tunnel, and with our guns somewhere back in the blast behind us, dropped in tangles of brush and churning soil when we first heard the full promise of the metal bird which would carry us like babies to our rebirth. And it called to us still, deep-throated from the clearing ahead, the only sweet-voiced bird I heard in sixteen months spent in a bird’s habitat.

He stared at me from below, all cruelty in the smallness of his eyes, and jerked once with his gun to indicate my movement, that he wanted me to drop to them, to fall into the earth of my own volition after willing myself to life with a will like steel doubled over. And it called, hovering gently, that it was leaving without us and we had been so close, Henry Wilder and I, to going back shoulder to shoulder and starting to drink away the memories together but alone. We had been strides away that I counted in my mind as I gazed ahead and saw the line of the blades through the bend of the trees and the mist, and Henry was already lost, his legs within their reach and no hope of pulling up and out and free.

I flooded with instinct; it moved through my body like water washing across my grave, and I kicked him, just once, a shove of my boot on his shoulder and I was running before he fell. I didn’t see his face-no, I did not, or even the few hours of sleep that I now steal would be lost-just the surprised face of the underground rat below as Henry’s living body hurtled toward him blocking out the sun and his arms raised momentarily above his face as he stepped back in surprise to avoid the falling man and missing, sweetly missing, me as I fled on fairy’s wings to my bird.

I swear to God, though by then I was all but through to the clearing with footsteps between us that had never turned over faster, I swear to God that even above the angry wind and the cry of the copter I heard his body hit the ground. I heard it then, and I’ve heard it every night since. It comes to me, all echoes in hallways and rapping knuckles against wooden doors. The sound of Henry Wilder’s living body hitting beneath the earth in a jungle that carried the licks of Hell’s little flames on every leaf.

Janson was sobbing now, sobbing so thickly he barely noticed when the “d” went out. The underside of the key was soaked with blood from his split finger, and it stuck. He had to type a “c” next to an “l,” to make a “d.” He had come this far sprinting underwater through blood, and a single damned key wasn’t going to stop him. He saw he was at the bottom of the last sheet of paper, and the words had slowed from a torrent to a trickle, but still they came relentlessly.

They hoistecl me up with strong arms onto my metal bircl, the angel of heaven which woulcl commancl me through the wincls ancl the rains ancl bear me home. Bear me home to the smell of hospitals with forever walls of white ancl to my mother’s kitchen ancl the full breastecl sobs ancl vicarious embrace of Wencly Wilcler, a woman grayecl past the age which she sharecl with my mother to the clawn of a new sunset. Ancl they bore me on, these strong arms, to a forgotten hero’s welcome, ancl to half paracles where they clressecl me in recl, white ancl blue. Because that’s what I was. A

The paper ran out. The stack, the whole stack was out and gone, and with all the tears gone from his eyes, all the sobs racked from his chest, Janson had a word, a single word, left stuck in his throat. He yelled once, a hoarse, frightened choke, and pushed back from the typewriter, sending it and the crates crashing to the floor. Stumbling into the hallway, he found what he was looking for, a crumpled-up page from a newspaper that was lodged in the wall beneath some pipes to keep the cold air at bay. He pulled it out and smoothed it flat on the wall. There was an advertisement on the back side with some blank space at the top, and he ripped out a small segment of the grayish-white paper and returned to his room.

He sank to his haunches and righted the typewriter, noticing, as if for the first time, the blood sprayed through it. Turning the small blank piece of newspaper to meet the keys, he typed his final word.

The weight, a weight he had been living with for so long that he felt it as a part of himself, lifted slowly from his aching shoulders. He left the word in the jaws of the typewriter and fell to his back on the mattress, the rotating paddles of the fan breaking up the neon flickers into dove-like featherings across his face and bare chest. He cried a different cry this time, a softer cry. The tears were just as resonant with pain, but they cleansed him. They fell like a late autumn snow, blanketing Janson Tanker as he fell into an exhausted sleep.

HIS FEET HURT like hell by the time he got there, but he felt better overall. Lighter, somehow. It had been weeks since the exorcism, and although he didn’t have his story (manuscript), he knew that his demons were laid out on paper, and contained in words and sentences.

He grimaced when he saw the security cop, a large mustached man with neat hair flipped back at the front. He felt a wave of disgust as he recalled his “escort” to the street, the cop’s meaty hand closing on his forearm. The humiliation had left a red stain on his cheeks, and the blush returned as he entered the building. He skulked past the cop, both of them pretending they did not recognize each other.

Please let him give me something for the book, he prayed. Anything, even an option fee for the rights like Barry explained. Just don’t let him give me nothing.

The receptionist was much nicer this time, and then he was up and up and being buzzed through, once again, to the office of Adam Diamond.

He was on the phone. “I need the writing samples. Damn right I’m getting aggravated-his new script’s in every office and I don’t have a fucking file on him? Find them. Make it.” Adam hung up the phone, shook his head, and raised his eyes to Janson’s. His left hand twitched around on the desk, searching for the duo balls. “Hello, Janson. Now I’d imagine you’re pretty tense so I’ll cut the bullshit and let you know where you’re at. When I first read your manuscript, I was a little hesitant. We have two rules right now about material: no Vietnam, no AIDS. Now your manuscript was good-I’m not saying it’s not good, I’m not saying you’re not a talented writer. You just have to understand that when it’s all said and done, nobody wants to see another Vietnam movie right now. It’s the material, it’s not you.”

Adam’s last sentence struck Janson like a blow. Realization settled in, fluttering like a black sheet over his expectations. It’s the material, it’s not you. It echoed until it pounded in his ears. When he could finally hear again, he was not surprised to find that Adam had not stopped speaking.

“-and a more likable protagonist. I mean, are we supposed to like this guy? It’s tough to sympathize with someone who kicks an old friend to the wolves, you know what I’m saying? We need more of a stud for the hero. When it’s all said and done, every guy who reads this book’s gotta want to be him, every chick’s gotta want to fuck him. Stupid? Of course. But that’s how this industry runs. It’s a stupid industry because it caters to a stupid populace.

“Now don’t be discouraged. This went a long way-what with it being (I assume) your first piece, and you having no professional editor. Everyone likes your style, likes your writing, just not the material.” Adam leaned forward and recited, again, the phrase that he had uttered across his desk to countless writers. “It’s the material, not you they don’t like.” It had an aged quality, the phrase, as if it had been stored in oak wine barrels, only brought out to be savored from time to time. Adam hoped it didn’t sound as rehearsed to Janson as it did to himself. As trite with repetition. His fingers dug the jade balls out of their intricate case, and the chimes sang to him quietly as he spun them in his hand.

Janson was quiet. And cool nights with stars laid out like holes clear through to heaven. It slipped away, it all slowly slipped away like sand through an hourglass and suddenly he was pale and thin and so, so tired. His mind filled as if with the rust-tinged water from the sink in the corner of his room, and he saw his years unfold slowly before him, a series of small checks on the first Wednesday of every month, checks that stretched about three weeks wide. The town that was not a city was whisked away by the short deft movements of Adam’s hands. Whisked away. And yet the city remained.

Adam saw Janson’s green eyes go dull and he worried, for a moment, that he would have a crier on his hands. He shifted in his large leather chair, rolling to his left side, and casually checked the clock on his desk. It was 12:57. He had a one o’clock.

He tried to soften his voice, but it sounded effeminate even to his ears. “When it’s all said and done, we think you’re talented, Jaston. I will personally read anything you write. I just think you need to shift your subject matter around a little. Vietnam is out, it’s old. Nobody wants to see another Vietnam film, read another Vietnam book. You know what’s huge right now?”

He leaned forward, imparting a precious jewel of knowledge, a stock market tip, the secret password. Even the air seemed to wait on him as the clock on his desk moved silently to one o’clock. “Women’s road movies.” Adam was quiet, letting the magnitude of his pronouncement settle around the room. “They’re selling left and right this year. I think if you work in that direction, with your talent, we could really go somewhere.”

There was a moment of awkward silence that stretched an eternity in the distance between the two men. Janson waited for the watch to flick out from its cover. It did. Adam cleared his throat. “I’m really sorry, I’ve got another meeting right now.” Another silence.

The bastard’s going to make this difficult for me, Adam thought. “Any questions I can answer, anything I can help you with before you leave?”

“Yes,” Janson said. “My name is Janson, not Jaston.” He rose to his feet, running a hand up the scruff on his neck and along the ridge of his jaw. He leaned over the desk and plucked his tattered story from the other papers. A memo floated loose from atop the stack and fluttered down like a feather to Adam’s desk, but neither man turned his eyes to the distraction. They kept them locked, until Adam felt that his would bruise on the hardness of Janson’s. Janson squinted slightly, and Adam felt him looking over and through him before he turned.

“Oh yeah. I forgot to tell you. There’s a part missing at the end of the manuscript. Maybe even just a word.”

“Yeah,” Janson said. “There is.”

The door clicked softly behind him as he exited, and Adam’s breath left him in a rush of relief. He felt better with the door between them.

JANSON WALKED OUT onto the crowded New York streets and filled his lungs with the moist New York air. Clutching his story tightly under his arm, he turned into the crowd, losing himself in the bustling sea of elbows and shoulders. It was a long walk to his apartment and an even longer walk home, and his feet ached with each touch of the concrete. The buildings rose in firm spires about him, and as his feet pattered on the sidewalk, somewhere, miles and mountains away in a lost town, a wisp of smoke curled from a country fireplace and made its way sleepily up the chimney to the darkened sky above.