Shatterday (10 page)

They raised their arms slightly, slowly, and the sleeves of their black robes fell back revealing their hands. Theresa found that she could not breathe, that her chest was convulsing with the pain of her wildly beating heart.

Their fingers did not end in flesh. Metal. Sharp, cold metal; thin and final. This was the answer to how phone calls from the same person could come from distant sources.

There was the sound of movement just outside the door of the studio. The walls shook with the echoes of the cataclysm outside. The roaring was louder now.

And in the moment before the door opened she had the final, petrifying thought that she had been part of it all, had spread the doctrine of irrationality and superstition every night for seven years, had given a platform to every demented True Believer whose wild fantasies might build her audience.

And now her worshipers had come to sacrifice their very own prophet. She felt cold and dead already, could feel the chill slice of the thin, metal fingertips. Her palms were soaked with sweat in expectation of the final performance.

The door opened and they filed in to fill the studio. They stood staring at her as she felt her life clog up in her throat and arteries. They raised their arms and the sleeves fell back from pale flesh and metal fingertips. She waited for the first touch.

And they sank to their knees, lifting their arms in supplication. She began to tremble with the rictus of a scream shaking her like a fever. Now she knew the worst, now she understood:

She was not to die. She had broadcast the word for them, every night for seven years, and she was not to die. She would be their dark priestess. Like the others who had done their spadework, like the others who had spread the word, she was to be kept alive, perhaps forever.

Dark priestess in a world of desolation, ruled by devils, cleansed of humanity. She would not die!

More ruinous than death: to rule forever in Hell. Lovelessly alive; worshiped by eaters of the darkness. To live on, coated always with a cold sweat, through a final performance that had no curtain, no exit lines.

Her scream could have shattered glass, but it didn't; it merely resonated against the metal fingertips of her subjects, her masters.

From the burning world beyond the studio came the wind whisper of the plague of locusts.

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(
Written in collaboration with Haskell Barkin
)

Writers take tours in other people's lives.

And every once in a while the observed becomes an integral part of the life of the observer. Make no mistake, and when the reviews are written and the idle chatter is passed—never permit the deletion: I did not write this story alone. It was a true collaboration between me and one of the most exemplary human beings I have ever known, Haskell Barkin.

We wrote this as a lark, a number of years ago, and it was published in
Playboy
. In that way, Huck—as we call him—helped me realize a secret desire. I had always wanted to see my work in
Playboy
but had been unsuccessful in getting them to consider the stories seriously enough. Not only because
Playboy
is arguably the highest-paying magazine market in the world, but because as times have changed and fiction has waned in importance for that journal, to be replaced by topical nonfiction, the pages allocated for fiction have diminished. They are always hot to publish Cheever or Updike or Le Carré (and with justification because they are excellent), but because those fiction pages are held so dear they are highly selective in whom they permit to occupy that space. Unless one has had a popular success, from which instant name-identification provides an added value for their table of contents, it is strictly the quality of the material that buys a writer the chance at that forum.

Despite my having sent
Playboy
virtually everything of what I considered first rank for many years, including stories that later won awards and became widely anthologized, I could never get the nod. On one occasion they rejected a story titled "Pretty Maggie Money-eyes" on the grounds that the female character was stronger than the male character. As I say, even at
Playboy
times have changed. But for many years I was on the outside looking in. And it galled me. On a low energy level, to be sure, but a burr under my saddle nonetheless.

Then one Sunday Huck stopped by with an idea for a story. He told it to me and suggested we write it together, because he'd never written short stories. "Horse puckey," I said, eschewing harsh language. "Write it yourself, kiddo. It's a terrific idea and you've got the stuff aplenty to write it properly. Never take two people to do a job one can do as well." (This, from a man who has written an entire book of collaborations. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. And while I'm about it, thanks Walt.)

You see, Huck has one of the great antic senses of humor in the civilized world. If anyone ever asked me to define
droll
, I'd schlep them over to Huck's house and point at him. He
is
droll. So I was hardly being humble when I urged him to write the story himself. I was being logical: one hires an expert in matters vitreous when one requires an intricate job of glassblowing … not a window-washer.

The story-idea was a funny one.

And though I like to think many of my stories have an ample dollop of humor in them, droll is one of the many things I
ain't
.

So Huck went off and a while later he came back with a story of maybe half a dozen pages. I read them, and the skeleton was there, but it hadn't really been fleshed out. So I said, "Well, maybe we can make this a little better. Leave it with me, if you like, and I'll run it through the typewriter again."

Huck opined that would be peachykeen, and I shoved the story into a pending file till I had a little free time.

Ten thousand years later (to hear Barkin tell it), I got around to unshipping the manuscript, reread it, and did a final draft. I gave it to Huck to read, and he sat there laughing not at all. That's his way. Droll, yes; effusive, forget it. When he got finished I thought he'd tell me it was ka-ka. Instead, he smiled and said, "It's terrific; very funny." Go figure it.

So we sent it out to the late A.C. Spectorsky of
Playboy
, with a recommendation kindly added by Ted Sturgeon, who was high in favor at
Playboy
at the time. And a few weeks later they bought it. My first sale to
Playboy
, a secret dream actualized through the direct involvement in my life of Huck Barkin.

Why is he telling us all this?

I tell you all this because writers take tours in other people's lives and the dearest treasure one finds, second in importance only to wisdom and insight, is friendship. I write of friendship frequently. Oh, most of the time you may not recognize it, because I have it dressed up in outrageous garb, but that's one of the most important things in life, as I see it, and I try to examine it as closely as love or courage or the mortal dreads … real friendship. Elsewhere in these pages you'll find a very long tale about friendship called "All the Lies That Are My Life," and though
this
story isn't
about
friendship, it came into being
because
of friendship.

Huck has been my truest friend for a lot of years; going on twenty. The affection I've had lavished on me by Huck and his wife Carol and their daughter Tracy has carried me through many thorny times. He is one of the few people ever to call me out because of my bad behavior and do it in such a wise and loving way that I stopped doing what I'd been doing and changed my manner. Tracy has been a constant amazement to me, growing from a clever child into a remarkable young woman, and all the while providing a handy reminder that not all modern kids turn out to be me-generation nitwits or Texas-Tower snipers. Carol, as architect and self-fulfilling prophecy of female determinism in these most parlous times, has filled my home with light and beauty and loyalty.

It helps. God knows it helps. When a writer spends decades taking nasty sojourns through the brutalized lives of the kinds of people that make interesting fiction, being able to balance it off against a happily married, sensibly oriented, constantly growing, decent and honest family unit helps, God knows it helps.

And how do I repay these limitless kindnesses? In ways I do not think Amy Vanderbilt would have approved: first, I blame the faint cavalier tone of adolescent sexism in this story—however innocent and moronically slaphappy it may be—on Huck. It was
his
fault, Gloria! Second, I used Haskell Barkin's name for an utterly amoral, vacuous and psychopathic character in another story I wrote a long time ago. It is the perfect name for a big blond beach-bum kinda guy. Go sue me. Art sometimes demands rapacious behavior. (Or as Faulkner once put it: "If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the
Ode on a Grecian Urn
is worth any number of old ladies.")

(
Written in collaboration with Haskell Barkin
)

ARLO, GREAT WHITE HUNTER, at midnight, poked a bored finger (attached to a bored hand attached to a bored arm attached to a bored Arlo) toward Fred MacMurray and Madeleine Carroll. It could not be said there was viciousness or even vindictiveness in the movement. But as von Clausewitz said in vol. II of
Vom Kriege
, any positive action, even if ultimately incorrect, is better than indecision, and no action at all. Fred and Madeleine were feigning animosity for one another as Arlo poked the
off
button.

They faded, it was still midnight, and Arlo was horny. So he decided to go shopping.

As a follow-up decision, he decided—since he was going to be in a supermarket anyway—to check the kitchen cabinets, to see what staples were vanishing.

Then he put on his stretch Levis and a Swiss velour; went out to his dusty eight-year-old Austin-Healey; headed for the statistically luckiest 24-hour supermarket, The Hollywood Ranch Market; went to Vine Street.

Arlo, Great White Hunter, at midnight plus ten.

•

He trundled the cart with the left rear wheel that did not revolve up and down the aisles for a while (with great difficulty), noting Signs Of The Times and The Advancement Of Man As Seen In His Artifacts:

There was now a boysenberry-flavored yogurt.

Civilization's greatest achievement—Saran Wrap—now came in a roll-package with knobs on the end so you could wind it back up if you rolled out a tot too much.

One-to-one eggs were selling well.

Sesame seed party crackers had fallen off a point or two, but barbecue snax were on the rise. (Good, good!)

He accumulated a carton of corn flakes with very pukey dehydrated peach slices in the box, a can of pink applesauce that resembled tree mess from fairyland, and a package of kosher hot dogs. But as for the main hunt, there was very little to stir the blood or put color in the checks. (Women with machines in their hair—and particularly those wearing snoods with cilia waving—would be restricted to the bathrooms of the world, never even the living room—much less a public supermarket—when Arlo was elected God.)

Just as he turned right at dog food, somewhat abaft of canary seed, he caught sight of a pair of floral-patterned hip-huggers with bell-bottoms, the outline of the lower rolled edge of the underpants barely discernible in relief. A trifle skinny perhaps, this silver blonde with the loose and lacy matching top cut in an octagon far down the spine, but still the pelvic girdle looked highly functional.

Arlo stalked her past detergents, floor waxes and aerosol bombs (staying upwind so the beast would not catch his spoor), trying to decide whether his opening gambit need necessarily be the standard collision of carts, the chancier request for advice about spring vegetables or a go-to-hell inquiry as to whether or not he had seen her on a daytime soap. The latter worked well enough in the Hollywood Ranch at this hour, but it smacked of "the Industry," and when coming on with actresses, it was
always
terra incognita.

Before he could reconcile the tactic, she was joined at the juncture of doughnuts and fruit juices by a man in an open-weave T-shirt (brawny, shaved early in the day). They began discussing what to have for tomorrow's dinner as Arlo scurried past them. A foul oath escaped Arlo's clenched gonads.

•

It was neither May, nor fair, at the Mayfair Market on Fountain and La Brea. A vast wasteland of dozing clerks and Muzak. An empty repository for rows and rows of color-coded commodities. A stalking-ground without prey. A
shandah
. A pure pain in the ass. He wasted half an hour buying a can of Pledge and three tins of sardines in wine sauce. But as ye cruise, so shall ye be cruised: he was accosted briefly and toothily by an aging homosexual with liver spots, who asked him how you tell a fresh cantaloupe.

•

As a last resort, before bed and a Seconal, Arlo did not turn north up his street, but continued ahead to a usually arid desert, the Ralph's on Hollywood past Western. And there, as if the big greengrocer in the sky, he who smiles favorably on all such hegiras, had finally come back into the office and noticed Arlo's button lit on the board, and sent her to him—there she stood, limned by the fluorescents of dalliance, lush in the simplicity of her skintight yellow ochre capris, seen through a glass starkly, wrestling with a grocery cart in the immense front window of Ralph's. Arlo had almost gone shooting past the supermart—it was possible to clock the entire action in the store with a fast pass-down in the parking lot—but now, keeping one eye on the trembling roundnesses produced by her attempted disentanglement of the cart from its insertion into the long line of insertions (oh, lord, insertions!), he did a full three-hundred-sixty-degree turn and plowed to a stop, half on the concrete walk that edged the storefront.

Arlo sprinted into the store, twelve seconds tardy. She had wrenched the cart free from its paramour, next in the line, and she was wheeling it down the nearest aisle, a side-to-side hip-slung movement that was all sinuousness and the music of silks on silks. Arlo was transported. Oh, thank you thank you, Great Greengrocer In The Sky!