Do you see what I’ve done here? I’ve shifted to big voice, describing similar events in a general way to suggest time passing that night in El Cajon. One person I do remember, a mom came forward in line to thank me. I’d made presents and sent them to her teenage son and daughter. At first she seemed angry, but she was actually a little speechless that a stranger would do something that would make her children so happy.
She hadn’t stepped away a moment before the fire alarms began to wail. Something soft struck me on the chest. Soft thuds pelted down on the signing table and on the carpet around me. With that backdrop of loud sirens, only the few people at the head of the line could see what had happened. Most of the line snaked into the distance. The store staff was busy, far away, at the cash registers.
People who witnessed the evening have since created an online discussion thread. They report that the blond young man—the prankster with the mutilated DeLillo novel—when I’d refused to sign his book he’d left the store with a compatriot, riding a motorcycle. Soon after, the two had come back, parking the motorcycle on the sidewalk directly in front of the store’s main doorway. They’d returned carrying a large mailing tube.
According to witnesses, the two men had swung the tube to launch whatever was packed inside it.
White mice had struck me. The mailing tube had been filled with those pink-nosed, red-eyed, little white mice that pet stores sell to feed snakes. These mice hit me. They rained down on the floor and the table with such force. They weren’t dead, but they were dying. Their bodies twisting slowly. Their necks and spines, broken on impact. Their legs trembled and blood ran from their mouths. People stood in line, stunned. Sirens wailed.
There was nothing to do but apologize for the delay. No one came to help. I started to gather the mice. In my hands, some arched their backs for the last time, twitched against my palms and died. Some were dead but still warm by the time I found them shattered against bookshelves and scattered down aisles. There were so many. I collected them all and carried them to a stockroom to lie in peace.
The young men who’d thrown them had escaped through the fire exits. That explained the alarms. Fire alarms. Once I’d moved the dead and dying little animals to the back, the store fell quiet. Crowded but silent. Some four hundred people still stood in line, and few had had a clear view of what had taken place. Blood smeared my hands and spotted the signing table. In the bathroom I washed. I went back and finished my job.
According to the witnesses, no one realized what would happen until it was too late. No one could stop the action so they’d descended on the motorcycle and torn it to pieces. No police were called. The men escaped on foot. I’m still in contact with the booksellers, and they tell me the miscreants were locals. On occasion, the blond man still continues to drop into the store. He must be nearing middle age.
Since then I collect stories about blood at author appearances. Like the time in Seattle where fans bullied Stephen King into smearing his blood in fifteen thousand books. Or the kid at Tower Records who slashed his wrists with a razor blade while standing next to Clive Barker, shouting, “Clive, this is for you!” Or in New Orleans, at the venerated music venue Tipitina’s, when a young man fell and fractured his skull during my reading of “Guts,” the bookseller later explaining to me that after the decades of punk rock shows and heavy metal mosh pits the club had hosted, a book reading had caused the worst injury the venue had ever seen. That same night Monica Drake had appeared with me, making the crowd laugh so hard that no one noticed when she cut her leg on a piece of stage equipment. We’d all been so jazzed with excitement that none of us noticed how we were slipping around in a puddle of Monica’s blood all night.
Such stories are a comfort.
That, and sometimes reader pushback amounts to payback. A good author bullies the reader, when justified. The author’s job is to challenge and frighten the reader when necessary, at least to surprise the reader. Often to charm the reader into experiencing something he or she would never voluntarily submit to. It should come as no shock that an offended or bullied reader would seek revenge. There is that.
My publisher advised me never to tell the story about the dead mice. They were afraid of copycats. For a while I got bodyguards. I felt like Bret Easton Ellis.
I asked myself, “Is this where I stop?” Now I’ve told the story about the mice.
I didn’t stop.
Troubleshooting Your Fiction
When I played high school basketball, a coach made me wear ankle weights. These consisted of several pounds of lead buckshot sewn into a leather pouch that fastened with Velcro. Only bell-bottom jeans could hide these fat collars strapped around my ankles, and I wore them from waking until bedtime, every day for months.
Later in life I hired a trainer who made me tie a string around my waist and wear it under my clothes at belly-button height. The ankle weights chafed and made my feet sweat. The string left a red groove by the end of each day. But my legs got stronger, and I learned to always (usually) engage my core muscles.
So if you were my student I’d tell you, yes, someday you can go back to using “is” and “has” verbs, as well as abstract measurements and “thought” verbs. You can occasionally use passive voice and summaries. Eventually you can use the received text of clichés, if appropriate. But first I want you not
