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
“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
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
“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
