I got a phone call from Barry Gryme. He wanted to know if I was old enough yet, and I told him no, I am only seventeen, and I don’t go out with married men anyhow (Janice found out he was married), and he said he was divorced.
July 1992
I bought another one of Barry’s books, to see if I could read it all the way through. I got about a hundred pages into it and then I had to stop.
I’ve seen people die. I saw the goldsmith Papa put in the dungeon, when he was almost dead. He had been my friend, and I saw him when they took him out, saw his bones showing through his skin, and the sores on him, and the places the rats had chewed him. I saw a thief whipped to death once. I’ve seen men hanged. It’s horrible, seeing that, but not as horrible as this book, because in this book, you’re supposed to like seeing it, like reading what happens to the people. You can tell the way it’s written you’re supposed to kind of lick it up, like something juicy.
[We tried again. She was in such a downcast mood, we thought she might hear us, but she didn’t. I’m considering sending Puck through to her. She knows him, and possibly she could accept him without headlines resulting: CALIFORNIA GIRL SEES CREATURE FROM OUTER SPACE.
Israfel says be patient just a little longer. I have just about had it with Israfel!]
Christmas 1992
A letter came for me, from Jaybee. I’d almost succeeded in forgetting Jaybee. The letter was gibberish, but frightening gibberish, and it was illustrated with photographs.
At first I couldn’t tell what the photographs were. They looked like abstract art, fascinating compositions, dark, light, black, white, with ribbons of red. Then I saw that the dark was shadow, the light a woman’s breast, the ribbon of red … well, it was blood, wasn’t it? You could see the knife, the edge of it, making a design against the nipple. I began to make out what all of the photographs were, flesh, manacled flesh, cut flesh, an eye, half open, staring unbelievingly into the lens, lips which looked swollen with desire until you saw they were bitten half through.
If you turned them upside down, they were fascinating abstracts. Only when you looked at them closely could you see what was really happening. They were mostly pictures of one woman. Sometimes pictures of several. Well, I knew about that kind of thing. I’d taken a psychology course at school. Knowing about it didn’t make it less sick, less hateful. I burned them. I didn’t know what else to do!
The pictures somehow reminded me of Barry Gryme. Last month he called me to ask if now that I’d started college I was old enough to go out with him. I told him I didn’t think I’d ever be old enough, and he laughed. He said he needed to know what I meant, would I just have coffee or a beer with him, so I said yes, I’d have a beer with him between classes the next day.
He showed up, which kind of surprised me. Seeing him sitting there, I tried to switch gears, tried not to be just a college girl, tried to be me, Beauty, someone who knew things he would never really know. He’s not bad-looking. He is a charming, funny man. He’s full of little jokes and amusing stories. Finally, he asked me what I’ve got against horror writers.
I said there was real horror in the world. Disease and starvation and torture. I said we needed to feel revulsion for these things, needed to be galvanized into action against them and against all poverty and pain and injustice, but that his books merely made us accustomed to horror, as a recreation.
He wasn’t listening. He was looking at my face, at my shape, smiling a little smile to himself, his head cocked. He was thinking about going to bed with me.
I stopped talking. After a moment, he said, well, his books were popular; they made a lot of money, which bought a lot of nice things; people liked being scared to death, so why not?
One of the teachers came by just then and greeted him by name. Barry got up to go speak with him about some seminar he was doing.
I sat there, wondering why not. I knew there had to be a reason, but I couldn’t say what it was. Maybe it was that I knew the world was going to end fairly soon and he didn’t. All his horror was going to come true. Here people were, bustling around, speaking of the dangers, creating committees and movements to Save the Whales, Save the Forests, Save the Rain Forests, Save the Condor. How could these people become what I had seen? But they would.
They would become habituated to horror. They would read it, see films of it. They would soak it up. It would deaden the sense of terror they needed to stay alive. They would catch a kind of leprosy of the spirit, an inability to feel. I mean, I’ve seen some of that already. They had a terror they call the Holocaust, and because people are so determined it mustn’t happen again, they keep banging on it and banging on it until people have stopped paying attention. The more you talk about it, the oftener you see it, the more it loses its power to shock, its power to disgust.
And in the end, unable to feel terror, mankind will go, we will all go down, down, down to happyland.
“Thank you very much for the drink,” I said to him, when he returned to the table. “I’m sorry I couldn’t
