Strange Wine (26 page)

He stopped.

Cordwainer stared, not believing what he had heard. Then he whispered, “You killed…Margo Lane…?”

The old man nodded. He started to flicker in Cordwainer’s sight, as though trying to find some hiding place in the power of his invisibility. But he found the courage to stay visible, firmed up and said, “They were in a secret lair built under a lady. That was when I retired. I wasn’t fit to carry the battle to evildoers any longer. I was one of them.”

Cordwainer waited.

“The lady is the lady with the lamp. Whoever it is you’re after, nephew, they’ve taken over the hideout under the Statue of Liberty. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

They sat that way for a while.

Finally, Cordwainer Bird stood, placed a hand on the old man’s shoulder, and said, “They’ve corrupted thousands of good people, Uncle Kent. I’ll make good for you. And for Margo Lane.”

He started for the door. The old man’s voice stopped him. “Who are they, Cordwainer? Who are they, these utterly evil corrupters of truth and good? The Mafia, the military-industrial complex, the telephone company?”

“Far worse, Uncle Kent.” And for the first time he spoke
their
name. “They’re the New York Literary Establishment, dedicated to polluting the precious bodily fluids of all right-thinking readers and anyone else they can sink their diseased fangs into.”

He opened the door. Turning back, he saw the old man vaguely, sitting on the floor alone and helpless, there in the final darkness. “But they’ve ruined their last writer, Uncle Kent. They’ve published their last non-book. Now they will feel the claws of…the Bird!”

And he was gone. In the silence of the white room there was only the pathetic whisper of an old man crying for times that were gone, never to be reclaimed.

“In one evening, the entire New York literary scene was decimated. The unknown avenger who left only a single black raven’s wing feather found his victims and meted out what some have called a peculiarly appropriate kind of justice for each one. Editor Michael Korda was found on a bridle path in Central Park, crushed beneath his horse. Tom Congdon, the Doubleday editor who cobbled up
Jaws
, was discovered nearby in the Central Park Weather Station pond, gummed to death by a school of minnows. Jason and Barbara Epstein of
The New York Review of Books
were found manacled to the wall of their posh apartment, hopelessly insane from having been forced to listen to a Dwight Macdonald lecture playing over and over on a tape loop. Elaine Kaufman of Elaine’s Saloon was found stretched out on the bread-cutting board at Nick Spagnolo’s restaurant, stuffed to bursting with
chicken al limone
. John Leonard and Harvey Shapiro, the former and the current editors of
The New York Times Book Review
had been stripped naked, put in a storage shed where the
Times
stockpiled its newsprint rolls, and had–on threat of what terrible fate we’ll never know–been forced to fight it out with deadly pica rulers. Neither survived. But it was the massacre on Liberty Island, in a secret crypt beneath the Statue, that was most violent and terrible.”

Excerpt from a news story by Pete Hamill,
The Village Voice;
10 February 1976

The little man with the robin’s-egg blue eyes and the straight black hair stood on the deck of the Upper New York Harbor ferry, watching the Statue of Liberty grow closer. He stood near the prow, knowing that in a few minutes he would be diving overboard, knowing that he would be swimming toward a fate and a future that destiny had marked for him.

His thoughts fled backward. To the days in Hollywood and the terrible experiences with illiterate producers, cowardly network officials, tasteless censors, rapacious studio negotiators. To the day when he had done the awful deed that had sent him forever from the Coast and scriptwriting.

He dwelled on the foolish innocence that had led him to believe writing science fiction books was the answer, the release, the freedom. To the disillusionment. And then the attempt to break into what they called “the mainstream” of American literature. To the way they had held him down, paid him insulting advances, buried his books with terrible cover art and a two-thousand-copy sale to libraries. He thought of it all…the publisher who now lay on a slab in the morgue…the butchered book buyer hanging from a Rodin sculpture…the editor thrown from a fourth-floor window…and what lay ahead.

But the time for being beaten and used was gone. Now he was committed. What lay ahead, in all its finality and vengeful bloodletting…could not be avoided. They had gone too deep, had entrenched themselves too well. If even The Shadow had been broken by them, it would take a younger, stronger, less squeamish,
new
kind of avenging angel to set things right. The list was long, and only a few of them would be there, under the Statue. There would be more days, and more encounters.

But all that was in the future. The first step was
now!

As the ferry neared the island, the little man stepped to the railing in the darkness, lifted himself, stood poised for a moment, then dropped smoothly and swiftly into the foul waters of New York Harbor, into the maelstrom of a destiny that would certainly be recorded by other writers, perhaps better writers, but writers who would know that Cordwainer Bird was their guardian angel.

It’s Terry Carr, the anthologist again. He’s to blame.

I get in terrible trouble through Terry’s good offices and good intentions. Frequently. This time it was with “Seeing.”

Terry called me one day a couple of years ago and said he was doing a collection of original stories that embodied the horror theme, but set in the future. And future horrors, he suggested, would be very different from those we know today. He asked me to write a story for the book, and said it would be published as a trade hardback by Little, Brown in 1977.

So I dwelled on the problem for a while–the problem of conceiving something not only universally horrible but wholly extrapolative–and decided Terry was wrong. Fear is universal, and what frightens us can be broken down into identifiable categories. Fear of closed-in places, fear of heights, fear of being burned or disfigured; snakes, spiders, pain of all kinds, fear of being ridiculed, drowning, fear of rejection. The usual chamber of horrors. And those would be present in any future time, even as they were throughout the past.

Now the problem resolved itself into my being able to write convincingly about something that frightened and horrified
me
. Unfortunately for my problem, none of the above give me even a moment’s upset. I love cave crawling and tight places don’t bother me in the least. I have climbed up the face of several buildings on sandblasting cables and once made a brief, precarious living hanging upside down in a painter’s cradle, slathering rust-resistant paint on the underside of the Brooklyn-Manhattan Bridge; heights don’t distress me. I won’t stick my hand in a flame like a well-known Watergate conspirator, but fire doesn’t send me into paroxysms of panic. I’ve hunted cotton-mouth and water moccasin and once lopped the head off a knock-wurst-thick rattler in my very own backyard here in Los Angeles, so that tells you how much I fear snakes. Same goes for spiders and other creepy crawlies. I have a very high pain threshold–which is why I usually look like a pile of mud when I come out the other side of a street fight–I just keep working even as I’m being pummeled–and as for disfigurement, well, I wasn’t Paul Newman to start with, ain’t my good looks that makes me the terrific little charismatic figure I are…so that takes care of
that
. I can swim, I’ve been rejected by experts (not to mention four divorces), and as for being ridiculed, well, when you’re prepared to accept the core fact that you’re an asshole, as I long ago accepted it about myself…

So what scares me?

Contact lenses.

I’d rather not discuss this, thank you.

Kathryn LorBiecki told me that we breathe through our eyes as well as our pores, and that having something laid over the cornea was, to me, like suffocating. She might be correct. I don’t know. All I know is that the thought of things in my eyes paralyzes me. And when I realized that, I had the horror…but not the story.

So then I dreamed up the idea of eyes that could see in new and strange ways. The eyes of a mutant. Rare eyes, that would be valuable. And then I remembered Burke and Hare, the Irish laborer and his accomplice who, in the late 1820s, smothered people to provide bodies for sale to Dr. Knox of the Edinburgh School of Anatomy. They were the most famous body snatchers in history, and figures of darkness who seemed just right for my horror story. Which led me to the concept of an illicit traffic in mutant eyes, forever eyes. And that led me to the woman who had such eyes, and her personal torment, and then the Knoxdoctor who would
buy
the eyes, and the customer who would be able to pay a fabulous price for such a black market item…

And there it was.

So I began writing, trying to maintain the image of eyes throughout. (Consider the way I’ve described the spaceport.)

And when it was done I sent it off to Terry for
The Ides of Tomorrow
, and he was delighted enough with it to also pick it for his annual “best sf stories of the year” collection.

But. Trouble.

Little, Brown decided to issue it as a “young adult” book from their juvenile division, rather than as an adult trade book. And here was this utterly horrific story filled with dark and terrible visions being put into the hands of tots and acne-festooned teens.

The Virginia Kirkus Service–a review service circulated within the publishing industry, previewing new books–made this wonderful comment about the story:

“Nine stories, both original and horrible–so much so that one might wonder why they weren’t pegged as adult. The opener, by the vaunted Harlan Ellison, tells, in the hyperkinetic mode and diffusely pornographic sensibility which are his trademarks, of a peculiarly grisly sort of eye transplant.”

Great. Just great.

Delighted to find out that my trademark is a diffusely pornographic sensibility. Whatever
that
means.

Well, at any rate, I seem to have achieved the level of horror I was groping for, in my peculiarly diffused pornographic and hyperkinetically modal way. Cha cha cha.

Clearly, all that is left for me, my career as a serious writer having been blighted by association with Terry Carr and the nameless pervert at Little, Brown who (I’m sure with utmost and diffusely pornographic intent) slid this story out of the adult category and into the paws of children…is a future in kiddie porn.

Great. Just great.

“…take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You’ll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips.”

Jack Kerouac,
The Dharma Bums

“I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over.”

Charles Darwin, 1860

“Hey. Berne. Over there. Way back in that booth…see her?”

“Not now. I’m tired. I’m relaxing.”

“Jizzus, Berne, take a look at her.”

“Grebbie, if you don’t synch-out and let me get doused, I swear I’ll bounce a shot thimble off your skull.”

“Okay, have it like you want it. But they’re gray-blue.”

“What?”

“Forget it, Berne. You said forget it, so forget it.”

“Turn around here, man.”

“I’m drinking.”

“Listen, snipe, we been out all day looking…”

“Then when I tell you something from now on, you gonna
hear
me?”

“I’m sorry, Grebbie. Now come on, man, which one is she?”

“Over there. Pin her?”

“The plaid jumper?”

“No, the one way back in the dark in that booth behind the plaid. She’s wearing a kaftan…wait’ll the lights come around again…
there!
Y’pin her? Gray-blue, just like the Doc said he wanted.”

“Grebbie, you are one beautiful pronger.”

“Yeah, huh?”

“Now just turn around and stop staring at her before she sees you. We’ll get her.”

“How, Berne? This joint’s full up.”

“She’s gotta move out sometime. She’ll go away.”

“And we’ll be right on her, right, Berne?”

“Grebbie, have another punchup and let me drink.”

“Jizzus, man, we’re gonna be livin’ crystalfine when we get them back to the Doc.”

“Grebbie!”

“Okay, Berne, okay. Jizzus, she’s got beautiful eyes.”

From extreme long shot, establishing; booming down to tight closeup, it looked like this:

Viewed through the fisheye-lens of a Long Drive vessel’s stateroom iris, as the ship sank to Earth, the area surrounding the pits and pads and terminal structures of PIX–the Polar Interstellar Exchange port authority terminus–was a doughnut-shaped crazy quilt of rampaging colors. In the doughnut hole center was PIX, slate-gray alloys macroscopically homogenized to ignore the onslaughts of deranged Arctic weather. Around the port was a nomansland of eggshell-white plasteel with shock fibers woven into its surface. Nothing could pass across that dead area without permission. A million flickers of beckoning light erupted every second from the colorful doughnut, as if silent Circes called unendingly for visitors to come find their sources. Down, down, the ship would come and settle into its pit, and the view in the iris would vanish. Then tourists would leave the Long Driver through underground slidewalk tunnels that would carry them into the port authority for clearance and medical checks and baggage inspection.