The Essential Ellison

So he talked me into it. That's what friends are for.

We had dinner at an Argentinian restaurant off Times Square; and with my belly full of skirt steak and bread pudding I felt up to it. We arrived at the traditional meeting-place-the claustrophobic apartment of a sometime-editor who had once been a reader for Book-of-the-Month Club-around nine-thirty. It was packed from wall to wall.

I hadn't seen most of them in ten years, since I'd gone to the Coast to adapt my novel, THE STALKING MAN, for Paramount. It had been a good ten years for me. I'd left New York with a molehill of unpaid bills the creditors were rapidly turning into a mountain, and such despair, both personally and professionally, I'd half accepted the idea I'd never really make a decent living at writing. But doing four months' work each year in films and television had provided the cus.h.i.+on so I could spend eight months of the year working on books. I was free of debt, twenty pounds heavier, secure for the first time in my life, and reasonably happy. But walking into that apartment was like walking back into a corporeal memory of the dismal past. Nothing had changed. They were all there, and all the same.

My first impression was of lines of weariness.

Someone had superimposed a blueprint on the room and its occupants. In the background were all the moving figures, older and more threadbare than the last time I'd seen them gathered in a room like this, moving (it seemed, oddly) a good deal more slowly than they should have been. As if they were imbedded in amber. Not slow motion, merely an altered index of the light-admitting properties of the lenses of my eyes. Out of synch with their voices. But in the foreground, much sharper and brighter than the colors of the people or the room, was an overlay/of lines of weariness. Gray and blue lines that were not merely topographically superimposed over faces and hands, and the elbows of the women, but over the entire room: lines rising off toward the ceiling, laid against the lamps and chairs, dividing the carpet into sections.

I walked through, between and among the blue and gray lines, finding it difficult to breathe as the oppressiveness of ma.s.sed failure and dead dreams a.s.saulted me. It was like breathing the dust of ancient tombs.

Bob Catlett and his wife had immediately wandered off to the kitchen for drinks. I would have scurried after them, but Leo Norris saw me, shoved between two ex-technical writers (each of whom had had brief commercial successes twenty years before with non-fiction popularizations of s.p.a.ce science theory) and grabbed my hand. He looked exhausted, but sober.

"Billy! For G.o.d's sake, Billy! I didn't know you were in town. What a great thing! How long're you in for?"

"Only a few days, Leo. Book for Harper. I've been all locked up finis.h.i.+ng it."

"Well, I'll say this for you, the Scott Fitzgerald Syndrome certainly hasn't hit you out there. How many books have you written since you left three? Four?"

"Seven."

He smiled with embarra.s.sment, but not enough embarra.s.sment to slow the phony camaraderie. Leo Norris and I-despite his effusions-had never been close. When he had already been an established novelist a fact one verified by getting one's name on the cover of The Saint Detective Magazine, I was banging off hammer murder novelettes for Manhunt, just to pay the rent in the Village. There had been no camaraderie in those days. But Leo was now on the slide, had been for the last six or eight years, had been reduced to writing a series of s.e.x / spy / violence paperbacks: each one numbered (he was up to #27 the last time I looked), pseudonymous, featuring an unpleasant CIA thug named Curt Costener. Four of my last seven novels had been translated into successful films and one of them had become a television series. Camaraderie.

"Seven books in what-ten years?-that's d.a.m.ned good."

I didn't say anything. I was looking around; indicating I wanted to move on. He didn't pick up the message.

"Brett McCoy died, you know. Last week."

I nodded. I'd read him, but had never met him. Good writer. Police procedurals.

"Terminal. Inoperable. Lungs; really spread. Oh, he'd been on the way out for a long time. He'll be missed."

"Yeah. Well, excuse me, Leo, I have to find some people I came with."

I couldn't get through the press near the front door to join Bob in the kitchen. The only breeze was coming in from the hallway, and they were jammed together in front of the pa.s.sage. So I went the other way, deeper into the room, deeper into the inversion layer of smoke and monotoned chatter. He watched me go, wanting to say something, probably wanting to strengthen a bond that didn't exist. I moved fast. I didn't want any more obituary reports.

There were only five or six women in the crowd, as far as I could tell. One of them watched me as I edged through the bodies. I couldn't help noticing her noticing me. She was in her late forties, severely weathered, staring openly as I neared her. It wasn't till she spoke, "Billy?" that I recognized the voice. Not the face; even then, not the face. Just the voice, which hadn't changed.

I stopped and stared back. "Dee?"

She smiled no kind of smile at all, a mere stricture of courtesy. "How are you, Billy?"

"I'm fine. How're you? What's happening, what're you doing these days?"

"I'm living in Woodstock. Cormick and I got divorced; I'm doing books for Avon."

I hadn't seen anything with her name on it for some time. Those who haunt the newsstands and bookstores out of years of habit are like sidewalk cafe Greeks unable to stop fingering their worry beads. I would have seen her name.

She caught the hesitation. "Gothics. I'm doing them under another name."

This time the smile was nasty and it said: you've had the last laugh; yes, I'm selling my talent cheap; I hate myself for it; I'll slice my wrists in this conversation before I'll permit you to gloat. What's more offensive than being successful when they always dismissed you as the least of their set, and they've dribbled away all the promise and have failed? Nothing. They would eat the air you breathe. Bierce: SUCCESS, n. The one unpardonable sin against one's fellows. Unquote.

"Look me up if you get to Los Angeles," I said. She didn't even want to try that one. She turned back to the three-way conversation behind her. She took the arm of an elegant man with a thick, gray mop of styled Claude Rains hair. He was wearing aviator-style eyegla.s.ses, wraparounds, tinted auburn. Dee hung on tight. That wouldn't last long. His suits were too well-tailored. She looked like a tattered battle flag. When had they all settled for oblivion?

Edwin Charrel was coming toward me from the opposite side of the room. He still owed me sixty dollars from ten years before. He wouldn't have forgotten. He'd lay a long, guilt-oozing story on me, and try to press a moist five bucks into my hand. Not now; really, not now; not on top of Leo Norris and Dee Miller and all those crinkled elbows. I turned a hard right, smiled at a mom-and-pop writing team sharing the same gla.s.s of vodka, and worked my way to the wall. I kept to the outside and began to circ.u.mnavigate. My mission: to get the h.e.l.l out of there as quickly as possible. Everyone knows, it' s harder to hit a moving target.

And miles to go before I sleep.

The back wall was dominated by a sofa jammed with loud conversations. But the crowd in the center of the room had its collective back to the babble, so there was a clear channel across to the other side. I made the move. Charrel wasn't even in sight, so I made the move. No one noticed, no one gave a gardyloo, no one tried to b.u.t.tonhole me. I made the move. I thought I was halfway home. I started to turn the corner, only one wall to go before the breeze, the door, and out. That was when the old man motioned to me from the easy chair.

The chair was wedged into the rear corner of the room, at an angle to the sofa. Big, overstuffed, colorless thing. He was deep in the cus.h.i.+ons. Thin, wasted, tired-looking, eyes a soft, watery blue. He was motioning to me. I looked behind me, turned back. He was motioning to me. I walked over and

"Sit down."

There wasn't anywhere to sit. "I was just leaving." I didn't know him.

"Sit down, we'll talk. There's time."

A spot opened at the end of the sofa. It would have been rude to walk away. He nodded his head at the open spot. So I sat down. He was the most exhausted-looking old man I'd ever seen. Just stared at me.

"So you write a little," he said. I thought he was putting me on. I smiled, and he said, "What's your name?"

I said, "Billy Landress."

He tested that for a moment, silently. "William. On the books it's William."

I chuckled. "That's right. William on the books. It's better for the lending libraries. Cla.s.sier. Weightier." I couldn't stop smiling and laughing softly. Not to myself, right into his face. He didn't smile back, but I knew he wasn't taking offense. It was a bemusing conversation.

"And you're...?"

"Marki," he said; he paused, then added, "Marki Stra.s.ser."

Still smiling, I said, "Is that the name you write under?"

He shook his head. "I don't write any more. I haven't written in a long time."

"Marki," I said, lingering on the word, "Marki Stra.s.ser. I don't think I've read any of your work. Mystery fiction?"

"Primarily. Suspense, a few contemporary novels, nothing terribly significant. But tell me about you."

I settled back into the sofa. "I have the feeling, sir, that you're amused by me."

His soft, blue eyes stared back at me without a trace of guile. There was no smile anywhere in that face. Tired; old and terribly tired. "We're all amusing, William. Except when we get too old to take care of ourselves, when we get too old to keep up. Then we cease to be amusing. You don't want to talk about yourself?"

I spread my hands in surrender. I would talk about myself. He may have conceived of himself as too old to be amusing, but he was a fascinating old man nonetheless. He was a good listener. And the rest of the room faded, and we talked. I told him about myself, about life on the Coast, the plots of my books, in precis, what it took to adapt a suspense novel for the screen.

Body language is interesting. On the most primitive level, even those unfamiliar with the unconscious messages the positions of the arms and legs and torso give, can perceive what's going on. When two people are talking and one is trying to get across an important point to the other, the one making the point leans forward; the one resisting the point leans back. I realized I was leaning far forward and to the side, resting my chest on the arm of the sofa. He wasn't sinking too far back in the soft cus.h.i.+ons of the easy chair; but he was back, in any event. He was listening to me, taking in everything I was saying, but it was as though he knew it was all past, all dead information, as though he was waiting to tell me some things I needed to know.

Finally, he said, "Have you noticed how many of the stories you've written are concerned with relations.h.i.+ps of fathers to sons?"

I'd noticed. "My father died when I was very young," I said, and felt the usual tightness in my chest. "Somewhere, I don't remember where, I stumbled on a line Faulkner wrote once, where he said, something like, 'No matter what a writer writes about, if it' s a man he's writing about the search for his father.' It hit me particularly hard. I'd never realized how much I missed him until one night just a few years ago, I was in a group encounter session and we were told by the leader of the group to pick one person out of the circle and to make that person someone we wanted to talk to, someone we'd never been able to talk to, and to tell that person everything we'd always wanted to say. I picked a man with a mustache and talked to him the way I'd never been able to talk to my father when I was a very little boy. After a little bit I was crying." I paused, then said very softly, "I didn't even cry at my father's funeral. It was a very strange thing, a disturbing evening."

I paused again, and collected my thoughts. This was becoming a good deal heavier, more personal, than I'd antic.i.p.ated. "Then, just a year or two ago, I found that quote by Faulkner; and it all fitted into place."

The tired old man kept watching me. "What did you tell him?"

"Who? Oh, the man with the mustache? Hmmm. Well, it wasn't anything that potent. I just told him I'd made it, that he would be proud of me now, that I had succeeded, that I was a good guy and...he'd be proud of me. That was all."

"What didn't you tell him?"

I felt myself twitch with the impact of the remark. I went chill all over. He had said it so casually, and yet the force of the question jammed a cold chisel into the door of my memory, applied sudden pressure and snapped the lock. The door sprang open and guilt flooded out. How could Marki have known?

"Nothing. I don't know what you mean." I didn't recognize my voice.

"There must have been something. You're an angry man, William. You're angry at your father. Perhaps because he died and left you alone. But you didn't say something very important that you needed to say; you still need to say it. What was it?"

I didn't want to answer him. But he just waited. And finally I murmured, "He never said goodbye. He just died and never said goodbye to me." Silence. Then I shook, helplessly, trembled, reduced after so many years to a child, tried to shake it off, tried to dismiss it, and very quietly said, "It wasn't important."

"It wasn't important for him to say it; but it was for you to hear it." I couldn't look at him.

Then Marki said, "In the lens of time we are each seen as a diminis.h.i.+ng mote. I'm sorry I upset you."

"You didn't upset me."

"Yes. I did. Let me try and make amends. If you have the time, let me tell you about a few books I wrote. You may enjoy this." So I sat back and he told me a dozen plots. He spoke without hesitations, fluidly, and they were awfully good. Excellent, in fact. Suspense stories, something in the vein of James M. Cain or Jim Thompson. Stories about average people, not private eyes or foreign agents; just people in stress situations where violence and intrigue proceeded logically from entrapping circ.u.mstances. I was fascinated. And what a talent he had for t.i.tles: DEAD By MORNING, CANCEL BUNGALOW 16, AN EDGE IN My VOICE, WHITEMAIL, THE MAN WHO SEARCHED FOR JOY, THE DIAGNOSIS OF DR. D'arqueANGEL, PRODIGAL FATHER and one that somehow struck me so forcibly I made a mental note to contact Andreas Brown at the Gotham Book Mart, to locate a used copy for me through his antiquarian book sources. I had to read it. It was t.i.tled LOVER, KILLER.

When he stopped talking he looked even more exhausted than when he'd asked me to sit down. His skin was almost gray, and the soft, blue eyes kept closing for moments at a time. "Would you like a gla.s.s of water or something to eat?"

He looked at me carefully, and said, "Yes. I'd very much like a gla.s.s of water, thank you."

I got up, to force my way through to the kitchen.

He put his dry hand on mine. I looked down at him. "What do you want to be, eventually, William?"

I could have given a flip answer. I didn't. "Remembered," I said. Then he smiled, and removed his hand.

"I'll get that water; be right back."

I pushed through the crowd and got to the kitchen. Bob was still there, arguing with Hans Santesson about cracking the pro rata share of royalties problem for reprints of stories in college-level text-anthologies. Hans and I shook hands, and exchanged quick pleasantries while I drew a gla.s.s of water and put in a couple of ice cubes from the plastic sack half-filled with melted cubes in the sink. I didn't want to leave Marki for very long.

"Where the h.e.l.l have you been tonight?" Bob asked.

"I'm sitting way at the back, with an old man; fascinating old man. Used to be a writer, he says. I don't doubt it. Jesus, he must have written some incredible books. Don't know how I could have missed them. I thought I'd read practically everything in the genre."

"What is his name?" Hans asked, with that soft lovely Scandinavian accent.

"Marki Stra.s.ser," I said. "What a G.o.ddam sensational story-sense he's got."

They were staring at me.

"Marki Stra.s.ser?" Hans had frozen, his cup of tea halfway to his lips. "Marki Stra.s.ser," I said again. "What's the matter?"

"The only Marki I know, who was a writer, was a man who used to come to these evenings thirty years ago. But he's been dead for at least fifteen, sixteen years."

I laughed. "Can't be the same one, unless you're wrong about his having died."

"No, I am certain about his death. I attended his funeral."

"Then it's someone else."

"Where's he sitting?" Bob asked.

I stepped out into the pa.s.sage and motioned them to join me. I waited for the crowd to sway out of the way for a moment, and pointed. "There, back in the corner, in the big easy chair."

There was no one in the big easy chair. It was empty.

And as I stared, and they stood behind me, staring, a woman sat down in the chair and went to sleep, a c.o.c.ktail in her hand. "He got up and moved somewhere else in the room," I said.

No, he hadn't. Of course.

We were the last to go. I wouldn't leave. I watched each person pa.s.s out through the front door, standing right in front of the door so no one could get past me. Bob checked out the toilet. He wasn't in there. There was only one exit from the apartment, and I was in front of it. "Listen, G.o.ddammit," I said heatedly, to Hans and Bob and our host, who wanted desperately to vomit and go to bed, "I do not believe in ghosts; he wasn't a ghost, he wasn't a figment of my imagination, he wasn't a fraud; for G.o.d's sake I'm not that gullible I can't tell when I'm being put on; those stories he told me were too d.a.m.ned good; and if he was here, how the h.e.l.l did he get out past me? I was right in front of the door even when I came to the kitchen to get the water. He was an old man, at least seventy-five, maybe older; he wasn't a G.o.ddam sprinter! n.o.body could have gotten through that crowd fast enough to slip out into the hall behind me without banging into everyone, and someone would have remembered being pushed like that...so..."

Hans tried to calm me. "Billy, we asked everyone who was here. No one else saw him. No one even saw you sitting on the sofa there, where you say you were sitting. No one else spoke to anyone like that, and many of the writers here tonight knew him. Why would a man tell you he was Marki Stra.s.ser if he was not Marki Stra.s.ser? He would have known that a room filled with writers who knew Marki Stra.s.ser would tell you if it was a joke."

I wouldn't let go of it. I was not hallucinating!

Our host went digging around in the back closet and came up with a bound file of old Mystery Writers of America programs from Edgar Award dinners; he flipped through them, back fifteen years, and found a photograph of Marki Stra.s.ser. I looked at it. The photo was clear and sharp. It wasn't the same man. There was no way of confusing the two, even adding fifteen years to the face in the picture, even allowing for a severe debilitation from sickness. The Marki in the photograph was a round-faced man, almost totally bald, with thick eyebrows and dark eyes. The Marki I had talked to for almost an hour had had soft, blue eyes. Even if he had been wearing a hairpiece, those eyes couldn't be mistaken.

"It's not him, dammit!"

They asked me to describe him again. When that didn't connect, Hans asked me to tell him the stories and the t.i.tles. The three of them listened and I could see from their faces that they were as impressed with the books Marki had written as I was. But when I ran down and sat there, breathing hard, Hans and my host shook their heads. "Billy," Hans said, "I was the editor of the Unicorn Mystery Book Club for seven years; I edited The Saint Detective Magazine for more than ten. I have read as widely in the field of mystery fiction as anyone alive. No such books exist."

Our host, an authority on the subject, agreed.

I looked at Bob Catlett. He devoured them a book a day. Slowly, reluctantly, he nodded his head in agreement.

I sat there and closed my eyes.

After a little while, Bob suggested we go. His wife had vanished an hour earlier with a group intent on getting cheesecake. He wanted to get to bed. I didn't know what to do. So I went back to the Warwick.

That night I pulled an extra blanket onto the bed, but still it was cold, very cold, and I s.h.i.+vered. I left the television set on, nothing but snow and a steady humming. I couldn't sleep.

Finally, I got up and got dressed and went out into the night. Fifty-fourth Street was empty and silent at three in the morning. Not even delivery trucks and, though I looked and looked for him, I couldn't find him.

I thought about it endlessly, walking, and for a while I imagined he had been my father, come back from the grave to talk to me. But it wasn't my father. I would have recognized him. I'm no fool, I would have recognized him. My father had been a much shorter man, with a mustache; and he had never spoken like that, in that way, with those words and those cadences.

It wasn't the almost-forgotten mystery novelist known as Marki Stra.s.ser. Why he had used that name, I don't know; perhaps to get my attention, to lead me down a black path of fear that would tell me without question that he was someone else, because it had not been Marki Stra.s.ser. I didn't know who he was.