Heavy Water and Other Stories

window. “For Mudlark Books. It seems that the Ostler Press is also interested. This involves me in some paperwork, which, however tedious… For the record… Matters would be considerably eased… Of course if you…”

Luke sat on a Bauhaus love seat in Club World at Heathrow, drinking Evian and availing himself of a complimentary fax machine—clearing up the initial paperwork on the poem with Mike.

Everyone in Club World looked hushed and grateful to be there, but not Luke, who looked exhaustively displeased. He was flying first class to LAX, where he would be met by a uniformed chauffeur who would convey him by limousine or courtesy car to the Pinnacle Trumont on the Avenue of the Stars. First class was no big thing. In poetry, first class was something you didn’t need to think about. It wasn’t discussed. It was statutory. First class was just business as usual.

Luke was tense: under pressure. A lot—maybe too much—was riding on “Sonnet.” If “Sonnet” didn’t happen, he would soon be able to afford neither his apartment nor his girlfriend. He would recover from Suki before very long. But he would never recover from not being able to afford her, or his apartment. If you wanted the truth, his deal on “Sonnet” was not that great. Luke was furious with Mike except about the new merchandizing clause (potential accessories on the poem—like toys or T-shirts) and the improved cut he got on tertiaries and sequels. Then there was Joe.

Joe calls, and he’s like, “We really think ‘Sonnet’’s going to work, Luke. Jeff thinks so, too. Jeff’s just come in. Jeff? It’s Luke. Do you want to say something to him? Luke. Luke, Jeff’s coming over. He wants to say something about ‘Sonnet.’”

“Luke?” said Jeff. “Jeff. Luke? You’re a very talented writer. It’s great to be working on ‘Sonnet’ with you. Here’s Joe.”

“That was Jeff,” said Joe. “He’s crazy about ‘Sonnet.’”

“So what are we going to be talking about?” said Luke. “Roughly.”

“On ‘Sonnet’? Well, the only thing we have a problem on ‘Sonnet’ with, Luke, so far as I can see, anyway, and I know Jeff agrees with me on this—right, Jeff?—and so does Jim, incidentally, Luke,” said Joe, “is the form.”

Luke hesitated. Then he said, “You mean the form ‘Sonnet’ ‘s written in.’”

“Yes, that’s right, Luke. The sonnet form.”

Luke waited for the last last call and was then guided, with much unreturned civility, into the plane’s nose.

“Dear Mr. Sixsmith,” wrote Alistair,

Going through my files the other day, I vaguely remembered sending you a little effort called Offensive from Quasar 13—just over seven months ago, it must have been. Am I right in assuming that you have no use for it? I might bother you with another one (or two!) that I have completed since then. I hope you are well. Thank you so much for your encouragement in the past.

Need I say how much I admire your own work? The austerity, the depth. When, may I ask, can we expect another “slim vol.”?

He sadly posted this letter on a wet Sunday afternoon in Leeds. He hoped that the postmark might testify to his mobility and grit.

Yet, really, he felt much steadier now. There had been a recent period of about five weeks during which, Alistair came to realize, he had gone clinically insane. That letter to Sixsmith was but one of the many dozens he had penned. He had also taken to haunting the Holborn offices of the Little Magazine: for hours he sat crouched in the coffee bars and sandwich nooks opposite, with the unsettled intention of springing out at Sixsmith—if he ever saw him, which he never did. Alistair began to wonder whether Sixsmith actually existed. Was he, perhaps, an actor, a ghost, a shrewd fiction? Alistair telephoned the LM from selected phone booths. Various people answered, and no one knew where anyone was, and only three or four times was Alistair successfully connected to the apparently permanent coughing fit that crackled away at the other end of Sixsmith’s extension. Then he hung up. He couldn’t sleep, or he thought he couldn’t, for Hazel said that all night long he whimpered and gnashed.

Alistair waited for nearly two months. Then he sent in three more screenplays. One was about a Machine hit man who emerges from early retirement when his wife is slain by a serial murderer. Another dealt with the infiltration by the three Gorgons of an escort agency in present-day New York. The third was a heavy-metal musical set on the Isle of Skye. He enclosed a stamped, addressed envelope the size of a small knapsack.

Winter was unusually mild.

“May I get you something to drink before your meal? A cappuccino? A mineral water? A glass of sauvignon blanc?”

“Double decaf espresso,” said Luke. “Thanks.”

“You’re more than welcome.”

“Hey,” said Luke when everyone had ordered. “I’m not just welcome anymore. I’m more than welcome.”

The others smiled patiently. Such remarks were the downside of the classy fact that Luke, despite his appearance and his accent, was English. There they all sat on the terrace at Bubo’s: Joe, Jeff, Jim.

Luke said, “How did ‘Eclogue by a Five-Barred Gate’ do?”

Joe said, “Domestically?” He looked at Jim, at Jeff. “Like—fifteen?”

Luke said, “And worldwide?”

“It isn’t going worldwide.”

“How about ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’?” asked Luke.

Joe shook his head. “It didn’t even do what ‘Sheep in Fog’ did.”

“It’s all remakes,” said Jim. “Period shit.”

“How about ‘Bog Oak’?”

“‘Bog Oak’? Ooh, maybe twenty-five?”

Luke said sourly, “I hear nice things about ‘The Old Botanical Gardens.’”

They talked about other Christmas flops and bombs, delaying for as long as they could any mention of TCT’s “ ’Tis he whose yester-evening’s high disdain,” which had cost practically nothing to make and had already done a hundred and twenty million in its first three weeks.

“What happened?” Luke eventually asked. “Jesus, what was the publicity budget?”

“On ‘’Tis?’” said Joe. “Nothing. Two, three.”

They all shook their heads. Jim was philosophical. “That’s poetry,” he said.

“There aren’t any other sonnets being made, are there?” said Luke.

Jeff said, “Binary is in post-production with a sonnet. ‘Composed at—Castle.’ More period shit.”

Their soups and salads arrived. Luke thought that it was probably a mistake, at this stage, to go on about sonnets. After a while he said, “How did ‘For Sophonisba Anguisciola’ do?”

Joe said, “‘For Sophonisba Anguisciola’? Don’t talk to me about ‘For Sophonisba Anguisciola.’”

It was late at night and Alistair was in his room working on a screenplay about a high-IQ homeless black man who is transformed into a white female junk-bond dealer by a South Moluccan terrorist witch doctor. Suddenly he shoved this aside with a groan, snatched up a clean sheet of paper, and wrote:

Dear Mr. Sixsmith,

It is now well over a year since I sent you Offensive from Quasar 13. Not content with that dereliction, you have allowed five months to pass without responding to three more recent submissions. A prompt reply I would have deemed common decency, you being a fellow screenplay writer, though I must say I have never cared for your work, finding it, at once, both florid and superficial. (I read Matthew Sura’s piece last month and I thought he got you bang to rights.)

Please return the more recent screenplays, namely Decimator, Medusa Takes Manhattan and Valley of the Stratocasters, immediately.