Shatterday

And my heart contracted in my chest as I realized that in some way Bran Winslow had sold himself to Jimmy, had denied his own career, to add a few more chapters to the myth of Kercher Crowstairs. I didn’t want to know what Jimmy had had on Bran, that could make him, seemingly willingly, put aside his own work, to become a secret shadow of the public Kerch.

To me, it was unthinkable. The more I thought about it, the more often the word unthinkable burned in the darkness. Unthinkable: Jimmy was many kinds of a man, but blackmailer wasn’t one of them. Unthinkable: Brandon Winslow was as fiercely committed to his art as was I, as was Jimmy…

Unthinkable!

No one has that kind of charisma. I simply wouldn’t go for it. There had to be something deeper, something more potent. It was unthinkable that a writer of Bran Winslow’s sincerity and dedication would simply give over his life to Jimmy; it was unthinkable that Jimmy’s fever could be passed on to another writer—possibly a better writer, a more important writer, an intrinsically more valuable, a worthier writer—to cause him to deny the song of his own Muse. But now that I’d thought it, as unthinkable as it had seemed…

Kercher Crowstairs refused to acknowledge the night.

He had a quote from Thomas Carlyle taped to the molding of the bookcase right over his typewriter:

Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the night cometh, wherein no man can work.

He refused to cower against the fear of scaled or furry or fanged creatures moving toward him. in the night.

He was a sharpened stick.

He was in motion, no sitting target.

He did not play poker, yet he never sat with his back to the door.

But such a level of energy has to dissipate itself before it can consume another writer. It has to! Sheer force of will, massed totality of personality, unleashed waves of charismatic power… no one has that. No one! Unthinkable goddam you Kerch Jimmy!

What the fuck did you have on Bran Winslow to turn him into your Uncle Tom? Your Stepin Fetchit? Your coolie laborer? Second sax in your brass section? Make-work creative typist?

Oh, Jesus, Jimmy, this is most hateful; and I don’t even know what was behind it.

Poor Bran.

Damn! Stop that! Stop thinking that way. There was a reason, a solid, good reason. There had to be. No writer can do that to another writer who knows how good he is, who has the books in him crying out to be released. No one. No damn you, no one!

My head was swimming. I felt sick to my stomach.

“Can you hold the tape,” I heard myself saying; and then as the film vanished and white screen appeared, I bolted out of my chair and rushed for the toilet.

That dyspeptic old fart Nelson Algren got three out of four. He wrote: “Never play cards with a man named Doc. Never eat in a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”

Close. Very close.

But he missed a fourth:

“Never let anyone catch you down on your knees puking into a toilet bowl.”

Especially not a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

I should have locked the door. But the bile was pushing as if it were spring-loaded; I barely had time to get into the can before I felt it coming like the Sunshine Express. Down on my knees, loving the toilet bowl, and then the river of fire.

Leslie was in there, right behind me, trying to hold my forehead, for Christ’s consumptive sake, with me hurling and heaving like a boa constrictor that’s swallowed a Peterbilt. I shoved at her, ineffectually, as she continued to play Lady Bountiful to my bounty.

I flailed my free arm behind me, trying to get her to back off. I think in that moment I realized just how insensitive she is. There’d always been hints… such as her revelation at a group dinner many years before that she had, as a child, thrown a hamster into a window fan… and then, of course, she’d stayed married to Jimmy; that had to indicate more than a soupcon of the obdurate.

But the level of insensitivity it takes to force someone in the most degrading condition known to humanity to think that he’s being watched while he glops up his guts, no matter if it’s misguidedly interpreted as “concern” or “out of love,” is a bestial level whereon one finds only flagstones or spent shell casings. Back off!

After a while I got up, filled the sink with cold water, put my face into it completely, and lay there for quite a length pf time, allowing the spittle and other nastiness to float away on the tide. My eyes were burning. I could not, thank God, see my face in the water.

I emptied the bowl, washed thoroughly, gargled as best I could with icy water, and reached for a towel. Leslie was standing there with one in her outstretched hand.

I took it. “Thank you very much.”

“How do you feel?”

“Dandy. Just dandy.”

“That was awful.”

I looked a surprised look. “Oh, really? It usually brings down the house. The awestruck expressions of the crowd are usually upon me.” Back the fuck off!

“My God,” she said, “you know you’re even starting to talk like him?”

Have you never perceived that before, my love? Have you never caught on that my interior monologues are never in my own voice, never the way I write or speak? They are pure Jimmy. That quick-silver turn of the phrase, all that heat and color; not the plodding, methodical, reasonably reasoned wise uncle with good, solid thinking of Laurence Bedloe, but rather the bold, sure spring of the tiger, and I believe in you. Never caught that, eh? How sad, how sorry: if I were to write up the relationship between the Recently Departed and Larry Bedloe it would be in the assumed voice of Kerch Jimmy. You didn’t pick up on that? You’re simply not paying attention.

“The hamster isn’t the most awful I’ve ever heard,” I said, “although it is in the top tenth of a percentile of the most awful.”

“What are you talking about? Are you okay?”

“The most awful, I guess, was something Missy told me. She said that when she was a kid Down South they used to take baby ducks and chicks, and they’d bury them up to their no-necks in the dirt, and then they’d run the lawn mower over them. Now that is yucchh.”

Her face was all pulled out of shape. “I’m calling the doctor.”

There was a set of silver-backed military brushes on the counter. I picked them up and started brushing back my wet hair. I looked at her in the mirror and said, “Very good idea. You call the doctor. Make it a voodoo doctor, if you can get Inboard to clear a line to Haiti. Get a specialist in resurrection. Tell him we’re not sure Jimmy is completely all the way dead… that he seems to be clinging ferociously to life… your life, my life, Bran’s life…”

She started to cry. I put the brushes down and turned to her; but I didn’t take her in my arms, usually pro forma. I just stared at her. She had the heels of her hands in her eyes and she was