Shatterday

“I do?”

“Yep. You know it, but you don’t know you know it.”

“That makes no sense. If I knew it, then I’d know it.”

“You know more about me than anyone else, and you have the data; but you don’t know how much I fear it, how frightened I am that it might come out.”

“I’ll never tell.”

“You might. Get pissed off at me sometime in the future; I might screw you; you might let it slip without knowing it.”

“Never. I’ll never tell a living soul; honest to God, you can trust me, Rocco: I’ll take the filthy secret to my grave.”

“No, I’ll take it to my grave. But you might still tell it.”

“If you’re dead there’d be no way you could protect against that, is there?”

He thought about that for a while. This was before he married Leslie. We were good and close friends, whatever that meant. But he thought about it, seriously thought about this terrible thing I knew that he was ashamed of, the one thing in a life like his so filled with things any normal human being might find the cause of sleepless nights, that didn’t bother him in the slightest way. He thought about the knowledge I possessed, this Damoclean sword I held over his life and his career and his work in which he revealed everything. Everything except the one bit of knowledge that made all of his life a lie.

And he said, “I’ll have to figure out a way to keep you quiet after I’m dead.”

“Good luck,” I said, laughing lightly; and then we hit the icy patch and started to spin out.

He looked straight at me, having saved me for last.

“Larry, I herewith make you the executor of my literary estate. You have control of every novel, short story, essay, article, review, anthology and introduction I ever wrote. All those millions of words are in your care, buddy. You’re the one they’ll have to come to if they want to reprint even one of my commas.”

I sat stunned. If he had done me the way he’d done SylviaTheCunt, taken this last chance to purge all the swamp animosity of a lifetime… or if he had done me the way he’d done Leslie, tried to clear his conscience of real or fancied harm he’ d visited on her… if he’ d done me as he’ d done Missy and Bran, paid off for loyalty and friendship and domination of their lives… I wouldn’t have been surprised.

But, oh you malicious wonderful sonofabitch! You did the one thing I cannot bear: you tied me to you forever.

Malicious? Probably not. It was just Jimmy insuring his memory. Going for posterity, and dragging me along with him, kicking and screaming every micromillimeter of the way. What a mind, what a fucking sweetly conniving mind. I couldn’t even condemn him; hate him, yes, revile him, yes, rail at what he was doing, yes—against which I had no defense—but he was merely demonstrating as a perfect paradigm for his whole breakneck plunge of a life… the ugliness of simply being human.

I sat stunned. And the voice of the turtle was heard in the library: “Would you mind cutting it for a minute?”

Turtle, the voice was mine; stunned, I sat in the darkness. The sound of very old, rinkytink music played distantly in the empty concert hall of my head.

Jimmy had set me up to be either his servant or his Griswold.

Poe. Jimmy got the idea from Poe.

He saw himself as Edgar Allan, cut off in his prime from the benefits of posterity’s accolades; he saw me as the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold, but a Griswold who was walled up himself, not free to blacken Poe’s name, a Griswold never free of the sound of the tell-tale heart, Jimmy’s heart, still beating, his will indomitable, his presence felt until the last moment of my own Griswold-trapped life.

We had talked of this. Poe was one of Jimmy’s idols. He was more than an amusing storyteller to me. But Jimmy even had a puppet made of Edgar Allan, had it hanging in the living room as an ever-present reminder of what heights fantasy could reach.

And we had discussed what Griswold had done to Poe.

He had buried him for a hundred years.

What a poor judge of human nature Poe had been. What an ass. But let the critic Daniel Hoffman (Doubleday, 1972) tell it:

Most of all, [Poe’s] own Imp of the Perverse so arranged the history of his career that his literary executor was his most invidious enemy, the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold. This man, an ex-minister, a busybody of letters, an incessant anthologist and publicizer, a failed poetaster fattening on the writings of others as does a moth eating Gobelin tapestries, went to extraordinary pains, after Poe’s death, to present the deceased writer in a manner designed to make his name a household word for the dissolute, immoral, recklessly debauched. Griswold falsified the facts of Poe’s life, and he revised the texts of Poe’s letters, always with this calumnious end in view….

The scoundrel’s punishment is this: he is now known everywhere, if known at all, as the maligner of a helpless genius; whereas had he done his job honestly, he’d have won his proper modest niche among the footnotes by which the nearly forgotten are saved from total oblivion.

How better to keep me quiet? What insanity! I didn’t even know which of the many seamy facts of Jimmy’s life was the one that so paralyzed him with fear of its disclosure! I wouldn’t have talked about him; I wanted to be free of him. I simply wanted to be able to say, when asked, “Yeah, Kerch Crowstairs and I were close friends for over a quarter of a century; he’ll be missed; his like will never come again”; the usual bullshit. That’s all I wanted.

But the crazy paranoid sonofabitch couldn’t even credit me with decent motivations after he was gone. My God, does fear have a life of its own, to keep feeding on the living after the carrier of the plague has gone down the hole?

“Okay, you can start it again,” I said.

Kenny Gross ran it back and hit the play button. Jimmy was in the middle of what he’d been saying when my heart had begun to slam at me. “—if they want to reprint even one of my commas.”

He looked so damned innocent up there.

Just chatting with his best friend; just asking his best chum buddy to take care of his memory.

“Larry, you know I’m not afraid of dying. Not that, and nothing else. Not spiders, snakes, being burned, being crippled, heights, closed-in places, ridicule, rejection… none of them ever got to me. Very high pain threshold, remember? But it’s tomorrow that gets me, Larry. The day after you see this tape. Will they still read me? Will I be on the bookshelves, the Modern Library, matched sets in good bindings? That’s what I’m afraid of, Larry. Posterity. I want a chance to go on after I’m gone. Fifty years from now I want them to come back to my stuff, the way they did to Poe’s, and Dickens’s, and Conrad’s. I don’t want to wind up like Clark Ashton Smith or Cabell or the other Smith, Thorne Smith. I don’t want bits and pieces of my unfinished stories written by the literary vampires. You’ve got to promise me, Larry: nobody will ever touch one of the fragments in my file. I probably won’t know when I’m going to buy the farm, probably won’t have time to get into the file with a blowtorch and crisp all the false starts and half-attempts. I’ve got them locked up, everything that’s not finished, all in one file drawer in the office. Missy has the only other key. Get all that stuff out of there and burn it for me, buddy.

“Pride isn’t part of it… honest to God it isn’t! You remember when we talked about Poe how I said he had the right idea, that it was the work, it was Art, that held the high road, not religion, or good deeds or friendship or patriotism? None of those. The stories, the books. That’s all you can put a bet on. That