Shuteye for the Timebroker Page 11

In the still pool, he thrashes gently back and forth, wondering how to quell this emotional warpspace he is suddenly traversing. How untasting of the omnipresent fluid of life he was, not to understand immediately that it was not the past that threatened, but the future! How can he deal with it? Perhaps if he could envision the hostile, dreaded future, he might not feel so threatened by it—

  Activating transcription subroutines, the human begins to externalize —into a secretion that others can savor—his story:

  … science fiction … time … human … pause … bafflement … fear … old … oblivious … incomprehensible … amazement … sex … inner … outer … past … mating … memory … captivates … chaotic … deeper … fate … nothing … smiling … dust … forgotten … changes … shattering … wondering … future … threatened … understand … story:

  … time … past … changes … future … wondering … story:

  … time …

  On all my previous collaborations, I felt as if the other author and I split the heavy lifting equally. But this story is an exception. Mike Bishop did at least two-thirds of the work involved here. Will that little fact stop me from reprinting this fine story in a collection of mine? Of course not!

  I do feel that I played a semi-invaluable part in getting this story into print. Mike had finished one draft and was unhappy with it, but could see no place to take it I rejiggered the narrative conceptually, wrote a few hundred words, and away Mike went!

  This might be the one time I functioned as a muse instead of being on the receiving end of celestial inspiration.

  We’re All in This Alone

  [Cowritten with Michael Bishop]

  Bam! The morning newspaper hit the screen. Harry Lingenfelter sloshed coffee onto the mess littering his tabletop: two weeks’ worth of prior editions of The Atlanta Harbinger, all creased open to the same damned page; stacks of unpaid bills and scary envelopes from his wife’s lawyers; dishes crusted with the remnants of sour microwave bachelor meals. Lingenfelter gulped a calming breath and raked the stubble on his jaw with well-bitten fingernails.

  Blast old Ernie! Couldn’t he—for once—plop the paper gently on the grass? Every morning, Ernie Salter nailed the screen door. And every morning since the acrimonious departure of his wife, Nan, Lingenfelter jumped. Nan’s decamping to her sister’s house in Montana, almost a continent away, had not surprised him, but it still rankled. His gut never stopped roiling. In fact, nowadays even the trill of a house finch could unnerve him.

  But what most rankled, even shamed, Lingenfelter was his intolerably foolish preoccupation with a feature in the Harbinger called “The Squawk Box.” How much longer could he indulge his crazy, self-generated obsession with a few column inches in a two-bit newspaper? “The Squawk Box” ruled his waking life. Sometimes it invaded his dreams. Work on his latest Ethan Dedicos mystery novel had almost stalled, even as his deadline neared, and one look at the kitchen—hell, at any room in the house—disclosed the humiliating magnitude of his bedevilment.

  “The Squawk Box” ran daily in the Harbinger. It resembled similar columns in newspapers across the nation. A friend in Illinois had forwarded Lingenfelter copies of a feature called “The Fret Net,” and at airport newsstands he had run across others titled “The Gripe Vine” and “The Complaint Department.” An outlet for pithy bons mots and rants, these columns consisted of anonymous submissions from the paper’s own readers. The Harbinger’s readers generally squawked via telephone or e-mail. An unnamed staff member, self-dubbed the “Squawk Jock,” winnowed these quips down and printed the wittiest. Although the Squawk Jock never interjected private opinion, Lingenfelter had concluded from the evidence of the columns that he had right-of-center leanings and no taste for controversy. You rarely encountered a squawk about abortion, gun control, ethnicity, the death penalty, or religion.

  The clumsy phrasings, the naiveté, and the smugness of the resulting mix usually irked Lingenfelter, but he could not stop reading it. Like the trend of “reality television,” the window that “The Squawk Box” opened onto the citizenry’s collective soul afforded a glimpse of a purgatory where sinners freely uttered their uncensored thoughts, however self-serving or self-damning.

  Lingenfelter had begun reading the column in earnest only after Nan’s departure. Until that point, he had only scanned its entries or, on Sunday mornings, jumped to the highlighted “Squawk of the Week.” But just two days of involuntary solitude had forced him into new patterns of time wasting, and five days of reading the feature from top to bottom had addicted him.

  Most squawks clearly originated with their submitters. Unhappily, some readers plagiarized their submissions, rephrasing ancient jokes or ripping off cartoon captions or the punch lines of magazine anecdotes. Often, the Squawk Jock printed the cloned lines along with the authentic ones, without distinction. (Undoubtedly, the pressure to fill space explained the Jock’s lack of discrimination.) Still, by and large, the kudos and complaints making up each column exhibited the vivid eccentricities of those who had composed them.

  • Our new president has problems above the neck rather than below the waist.

  • A fool and his money are soon dot-com investors.

  • I’m so broke that if it cost a quarter to go around the world, I couldn’t get from the Fox Theater to the High Museum.

  • The latest census shows a lot fewer married couples. Folks have finally figured out that they can fight without a license.

  This last squawk had made Lingenfelter wince.

  But his fascination with these outpourings of the community mind had soon morphed into something unexpected and embarrassing, namely, a desire to join the voluble herd. He wanted to compose a squawk so succinct and biting that the Squawk Jock not only featured it in one of the paper’s daily columns but also showcased it on Sunday morning as the “Squawk of the Week.”

  Having set this goal, Lingenfelter felt sure of success. After all, he had some small cachet as a writer. Three modestly selling mysteries starring his gutsy private dick Ethan Dedicos (with a fourth in progress—slowly in progress, true, but certain to appear to good reviews eventually) all testified to his skill and success. Or so he and his agent almost daily reassured each other.

  From this position of superiority, Lingenfelter had written and e-mailed off a half-dozen brilliant squawks, and then sat back to await the appearance—the next day—of three or four of them. After all, who could more intelligently tap the Zeitgeist? Who could more eloquently encapsulate the furor and the folly of these portentous days at the beginning of a new millennium?

  But neither the next days Harbinger nor any of that week’s succeeding issues had featured his work!

  Doggedly, Lingenfelter repeated the process—with identical results. Subsequent barrages of squawks—all of which he polished to a high gloss using time that he should have spent advancing Ethan Dedicos in his investigations—likewise met with rejection. Clearly, the Squawk Jock found no merit in his work. Given the crap that did make the column, the Squawk Jock may even have hated Lingenfelter’s fastidiously crafted quips.

  As of today, with neither money nor publicity as likely trophies, he had wasted three weeks in this pursuit. What foolishness! No, what quixotic idiocy! But he could not stop. He had to make that jerk—that bitch—that Grub Street hack, male or female—acknowledge the beauty and power of his vision, and feature one of his killer witticisms in “The Squawk Box”!

  * * *

  Opening today’s paper, Lingenfelter could already feel his pulse throbbing. What bloated japes and mindless yawps had crowded out the twelve gems that he had zapped to the Harbinger’s virtual mailbox yesterday? Hope flickered in him, but dimly. Either to forestall disappointment or to fuel himself for another round of squawking, he scrutinized the front page, then studied the traffic reports, obituaries, and crime accounts in the Metro section.

  A small headline on an interior Metro page caught his eye: Airline Employee at Hartsfield / Victim of Gruesom
e Murder. The details of this slaying would have given even the hard-boiled Ethan Dedicos pause. A check-in clerk for Southwest Airlines had been found in an elevator in the North Terminal with the top of his skull cut away and his brain primitively extracted. As a bloody embellishment, the killer had chopped off the ill-fated clerks right hand.

  Lingenfelter mumbled “Jesus” as he peeled back the pages of the Diversions section to “The Squawk Box.” Then he stopped and stared at the ceiling. The bizarre particulars of the airport murder plucked at his memory. He set today’s paper aside and rummaged about for last Sunday’s. In it, he found the “Squawk of the Week,” which struck him as insupportably petulant: Asking the brainless counter help at Hartsfield International for a hand is a waste of time. A prison inmate might as well ask a guard for a massage. An eel of discomfiting coldness wriggled down Lingenfelter’s spine. His nape hair bristled.

  Grisly coincidence? Surely. Anyway, this squawk had no more wit or grace than a dozen others that had appeared last week. The Squawk Jock had spotlighted it only to plug a recent investigative series in the Harbinger on the breakdown of services at the airport and attendant customer frustration. Lingenfelter sighed heavily. Some of his own experiences at Hartsfield had nearly moved him to murder, although not to a murder as complex or gory as this one.

  He laid the old Sunday paper aside and returned to today’s edition. Fumblingly, he checked out “The Squawk Box,” confirming his suspicion that its editor had stiffed him again. As always, it consisted of the banal, tongue-tied, and pilfered submissions of dolts and plagiarists. Two-thirds of these troglodytes, Lingenfelter smirked, had to be the Squawk Jock’s creditors. Or inbred cousins.

  Thirty minutes later, he refilled his coffee cup and slunk into his study. At his computer, he ignored the guilt-provoking icons symbolizing his stalled novel and clicked instead on his Internet connection. The Squawk Jock’s ignorance and pettiness had to have a natural limit. A fresh baker’s dozen of his canniest topical epigrams would sound that limit and result in his first published squawk. One of his efforts might even earn enthronement as “Squawk of the Week”! Gamely, Lingenfelter curled his fingers above his keyboard.

  • Confession is good for the soul, not to mention the prosecution.

  • Marriage institutionalizes love, sex, parenting, and, sometimes, one or both partners.

  • My four-year-old niece has a toy pool table. She shoots peas into its pockets with a plastic straw. The kid really knows her peas and cues.

  • Caller ID is a fine innovation. Now we need another, callee ID, for those of us who forget whom we’re calling.

  • Pity my estranged wife, a designer-clothes exclusivist. She was confined to our home last winter by a swollen dresser drawer.

  • If my mood depended on the regular publication of my squawks, I’d need a truckload of Zoloft just to elevate my feet.

  Lingenfelter savored these recent submissions, as if they belonged in Bartlett’s Quotations. But Sunday had come again, and the Squawk Jock had nixed them all. Despite both the day and the early hour, Lingenfelter knocked back a jolt of Wild Turkey, neat. Granted, he had stolen that barb about Nan’s fussy taste in clothes from Hoosier humorist Kin Hubbard (1868-1930), but the others had all originated with him alone. How could anybody pass them up in favor of crap like—well, like the crap the Squawk Jock preferred?

  The “Squawk of the Week,” for example, struck Lingenfelter as a whimper of no distinction at all: The fat of our great land has rendered us into a nation of grasping fatties. It barely warranted a place in the column, much less in a box at the feature’s top. Lingenfelter poured another shot and tossed it down. Let the dork responsible for that fatuous line relish his brief moment of glory. Alcoholism and altruism alike delude, Lingenfelter thought. A moment later, he twigged to the fact that his words had … yes, squawk potential:

  Alcoholism and altruism alike delude.

  He wobbled off to catapult this saying through the ether and to compose another batch of epigrams for his nemesis. When his phone rang in the midst of this activity, Lingenfelter ignored it on the grounds that his agent—thank God for caller ID—would scold him rather than root him on.

  * * *

  During the following week, Lingenfelter took to meeting his deliveryman, Ernie Salter, at curbside at 6:25 a.m. and seizing the Harbinger right out of his hand. Monday morning witnessed the first of these addled rendezvous.

  A heavyset African American with muttonchop whiskers and a foul cigarillo, Salter hunched forward in his spavined pickup truck and cocked a scarred eyebrow at Lingenfelter. The two had already talked about Lingenfelter’s “Squawk Box” hang-up, and Salter obviously thought him tetched. Dashboard glow shadowed his bulldog jowls and the chest of his faded Olympics T-shirt.

  “No luck last week, eh?”

  “Maybe this morning.” Lingenfelter paged immediately to “The Squawk Box.” Several blocks away—the two men lived in Mountboro, eighty miles southwest of Atlanta—a rooster crowed. As the sky to the east pinked up prettily, Lingenfelter tilted his paper into its sheen. His brow furrowed. Then he refolded the section and thwacked it against the pickup, hard.

  “A moron chooses these things! A spiteful, dyslexic moron!”

  Ernie asked, “How much does the Harbinger pay for a squawk, Harry?”

  “Not a copper cent. You know that.”

  “Yeah, I know that. Do you get your name in the paper?”

  “Every squawk is printed anonymously. You know that too.”

  “No wonder you’re losing z’s trying to crash this market,” Ernie said. “The big bucks. The fame.”

  “Damn it, Ernie. I can get sarcasm from my agent. Or from Nan, long-distance.”

  Ernie’s cigarillo waltzed over to his other lip corner. “Get back to your Ethan Dedicos stories, Harry. I really dig that guy.”

  “You and fourteen other people.”

  “I got to go. Stop squawking. Start writing again.” Ernie let out the clutch, and his clattery old pickup began to roll.

  Lingenfelter trotted along behind it. “I’ll see print yet!” he cried. “I’ll make that jerk sit up and take notice!”

  “Don’t write so damned highfalutin!” Ernie shouted back. “The Squawk Jock hates highfalutin!” Apparently, Ernie’s patience had just run out. Lingenfelter jogged to a bemused standstill.

  But he showed up hopefully at the curb every morning, anyway— to no purpose but the further exasperation of Ernie Salter, who on Friday exited his truck, hooked elbows with Lingenfelter, and walked him back inside. “They ain’t nothing in here from you, Harry. Nothing.” He shoved Lingenfelter into a kitchen chair and poured him a cup of his own god-awful molasseslike coffee. “I’d lay odds. Check it out.”

  Lingenfelter checked. Ernie was right. Another strikeout. No, a whole clutch of mortifying whiffs!

  With a tenderness that reduced Lingenfelter to tears, Ernie gripped his shoulders and squeezed. The massage lasted not quite a minute. Then Ernie said, “Let the damned bug in your bonnet go, Harry,” and slowly clomped out.

  Lingenfelter picked up the Harbinger. On the front page of the Metro section, this: Bank President Found Mutilated / In Abandoned Car Dealership. The headline alone yanked him erect. The story itself shoved a flaming rod down his spine. His hands shook, and the newspaper’s pages rattled as if they were burning.

  A night watchman had found the bank presidents decapitated head sitting on the hood of his new Ford Exorbitant in the roofless courtyard of a car dealership that had just gone bankrupt. The dealer had sold economical imports from Eastern Europe. The watchman found the overweight victims body hanging in the boarded-up showroom like the carcass of a butchered hog. The air conditioning, which should not have worked at all, was blasting away at its highest setting. Meanwhile, an iron kettle next to the SUV boiled merrily over a fire of scrap wood, rendering the man’s internal organs into soap scum and tallow. A pair of severed hands gripped the Exorbitant’s steering wheel, like claw
s. The whole ghastly scene suggested that the culprit had fled only moments before the arrival of the watchman.

  Lingenfelter picked up last Sunday’s paper again. Shaking like a man with delirium tremens, he tore from it the “Squawk of the Week.” He then cut out the story about the bank bigwig’s murder/mutilation, stapled the squawk to its corner, and stuffed both items into an envelope, which he addressed to the Atlanta police department. By now, some law-enforcement official must have noticed the connection between the Harbinger’s featured squawk and the particulars of the killings at both the airport and the car dealership. How many earlier featured squawks had provided a sick human specimen the impetus for murder? How many prize squawks of the future would prod that same wacko to slay again?

  Don’t mail this in, Lingenfelter told himself. Phone it in. You can’t waste time—oh, the irony of that self-admonition—going through the U.S. Postal Service. You need to speak to somebody now! Although he didn’t really want to get involved—a cliché with a shame-engendering edge—he steeled himself to call. Even as he touched the numbers on his keypad, though, he wondered if the police would suspect him. Tipsters sometimes turned out to be perps, and even if the police congratulated him on his civic-mindedness, they would file his name and number for future reference.

  A polite female functionary took his call, promised to pass along his tip, and admitted that several other people had already telephoned with the same concern. In fact, the policewoman said, detectives had noted not only the squawk-as-murder-incitement angle but also the head-and-hands obsession of the killer or killers responsible for these latest mutilation slayings.