Shatterday

continues. And I couldn’t bear to think of some halfassed science fiction hack dredging up a line or two I started and didn’t know how to finish, and writing a whole fucking book off it, the way they’ve done to poor old Robert E. Howard, or ‘Doc’ Smith. They even did it to Poe and Jack London and… oh Christ, Larry, you know what I’m saying. Promise me!”

He waited. He watched that camera and he waited, four months ago. I murmured, “I promise, Jimmy.”

“You take care of me when I’m gone, Larry. You’re the only one I can trust to do it. Keep me alive, Larry.”

And if there was more to that vile videotaped document I don’t remember it. After a while I was sitting there and the lights were on, and everybody else had left the room.

He did it. The clever sonofabitch did it. He figured a way to keep me tied to him. He knew I’d do the job.

I’d make sure there were regular retrospectives of his germinal stories; I’d write the best kind of interesting essays and articles about how significant Kercher O.J. Crowstairs had been in the parade of contemporary American letters; I’d set up seminars at the Modem Language Association conclaves; I’d edit anthologies of his work, putting the stories into fresh and insightful contexts; I’d keep him alive through his seriously considered work.

And in the bargain I’d sublimate my own talent. I’d spend a part of every day living with Jimmy. I’d hear his voice and finally start writing the way he did. And if I ever ever ever figured out what it was I knew about him that made all of his life a he, I’d keep it to myself till the cancer killed me, too.

And at last I know the nature of our friendship.

Say goodbye to Laurence Kercher O.J. Bedloe.

Django

Introduction

I wrote this story on the 8th and 9th day of November, 1977, sitting in the front window of the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore in Boston.

Bill Desmond effected a sound hookup that permitted me to play the wonderful music of the French- Algerian guitar genius, Django Reinhardt, while I worked.

Writing in the window was a promotional gimmick to bring people into the bookstore because the owners of the shop were footing my hotel bill while I was in Boston lecturing.

As I wrote that story, I had the strangest feeling I was being watched from a far distance by someone no longer with us. Understand: I am a pragmatist. I do not believe in reincarnation or messages from Beyond or ghosts or even the Nameless Ones who lie sleeping in Ultimate Darkness. But I had a prickly feeling all that time in the window.

And it unnerved me as I am seldom unnerved when writing. As if someone were over my shoulder, watching anxiously to make sure I did it right.

Consequently, I had the feeling I’d written the story all wrong; that I didn’t really know what I was writing; that I didn’t understand my own subtext.

When the story was finished I offered it to the editors of Galileo magazine who, not coincidentally, also own the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore. They had wanted a story from me for some time, and I’d promised them the fruits of my labors in their windows. I offered the story with trepidation.

While I am occasionally rejected by magazines, even these days, it happens infrequently enough to scare the hell out of me when it seems possible. I suppose one is never inured to the fear of that kind of rejection.

But they liked it, they bought it, they published it, and the story drew sufficient praise to dull my worries. Not enough praise to flense the fear completely, but sufficient to permit my continued arrogance.

When you’re all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have.

It often looks like egomania. I assure you it’s the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified.

It was not until the story was selected—in a blind judging by Poul Anderson, himself an excellent writer, who did not know who had written what—as the winner of the annual Galileo short story contest, from all the stories the magazine had published that year, that my fears were laid to rest.

Success, no matter how complete, no matter how persistent and ongoing, cannot totally shield us from the mortal dreads.

I wish it were otherwise, gentle readers, but the simple truth is that I am in the box with you.

And there is always someone over your shoulder… watching.

He stood in the Portobello Road and screamed up at the closed windows. “Anatole! Anatole, hey! Come to the window! Open up, hey, Anatole! The war’s started!”

London, on that Sunday morning, was filled with the sound of air raid sirens. Unearthly wailing. Foreshadowed sounds. He stood there and screamed louder. Finally, a window on the third floor squeaked up in its tracks and Anatole’s white hair and white face were thrust out into the morning chill.

He stared down at Michel, trying to focus him with sleep-bleary eyes. He worked his mouth to get the mugginess thinned. “Are you insane? It’s very early! Everyone is asleep!”

Then he actually heard the sirens. He had been hearing them for some time, but had not codified the cacophony. Now he heard it. “What is that?”

Michel shouted. “War. It’s the war; come down; I’m leaving!”

“Leaving? Leaving where, you fool?”

“I’m going. Back to France. The war!”

“Don’t be a fool, Michel. We have a concert tonight.”

“Piss on the concert. I’m leaving! Come down now. I didn’t know war had been declared, but I’m off now!”

“What do you expect me to do about it? Do you think I can go off and stop it like Chamberlain? I’m a violinist, not a political person!”

“If you don’t come down straightaway, I’m off without you!”

“We have contracts! The tour! We will be sued, you fool! Stay in England, play your guitar! You’re no young boy, you’re no soldier… they have enough young boys to play soldier… you’re a musician… come back… Michel! Michel! Come back, you idiot!”

But he ran down the road and fought in the underground with the maquis, and he lost the ring finger and the little finger of his fretting hand, his left hand, and he never saw Anatole, the combo’s violinist, ever again. He became a jazz legend.

His name was Michel Herve and he died honorably.

Silver droplets fell on the black river. Spattering and then shattering as moonlight carried the molten silver downstream. He sat by the edge of the river, contemplating onyx. He held his guitar tightly, as he had held the manila rappelling sling during that last suspension traversal before the others fell to their death. He thought about them, Bernot and Claudeville and little Gaston, lying dead at the bottom of the crevasse, and he clutched the guitar more tightly. He wanted to play something for them, but he had lost his sentimentality at least a year before, in the face of withering fire from a water-cooled machine gun; and playing a new composition for broken corpses was beyond him now.

He sensed movement at the edge of the river, almost directly across from him where silt had built up the shore and a crossing was possible. He sat very still, hoping the shadows cast by the trees still cloaked him from the eye of the moon. It was an animal.