Strange Wine (6 page)

But writing, like most holy chores, most miracles, needs to be done in the open, so everyone can see that imagination is everywhere, that there are no secrets, no cabals, no runes to be cast.

All you need is talent, and the need to need to do it. If you follow me. And so, to
all
great, original fantasists, I say: Do It!

“Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the night cometh, wherein no man can work.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)

Nineteen years earlier, Noah Raymond had written his last fantasy. Since that time over four hundred brilliant stories had been published under his byline. All four hundred had come from his typewriter. What no one knew was that Noah Raymond had not written them. They had been written by gremlins.

Success had come early to Raymond. He had sold his first story, “An Agile Little Mind,” to the leading fantasy pulp magazine of the period when he was seventeen. It was slug-lined as a
First Story
, and the craft and imagination it displayed made him an instant
cause célèbre
. He sold a dozen more stories in the next two years and came to the notice of the fiction editor of a major slick magazine.

The slick paid twenty times what the pulps could afford; the response was from a much wider readership; and as the fiction editor was sleeping with the anthologist who annually cobbled up the most prestigious collection of The Year’s Best Short Stories, Noah Raymond found himself, four months short of his nineteenth birthday, with a novelette on that year’s table of contents between a pastiche by Katherine Anne Porter and a slice-of-life by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

His first collection was published when he was twenty. Knopf. The promotion manager became enthralled with the book and sent it around to Saroyan and Capote and by special messenger to John Collier. The prepublication quotes in the
Times Book Review
section were awesome. The word “genius” appeared eight times in a half page.

By the time he was twenty-five, because he was fecund, he had seven books to his credit and librarians did not file him under “science fiction/fantasy” but in the “modern literature” section. At age twenty-six his first novel,
Every Morning at First Light
, was selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate and was nominated as one of the finalists for the National Book Award.

His personal papers were solicited for preservation in the Archive Library at Harvard and he went on a critically and financially impressive European lecture tour. He was twenty-seven.

In the month of August, on a Friday night–the 20th, to be exact–at twenty-three minutes to midnight, to be tedious about it–Noah Raymond ran dry. That simply, that easily, that directly, that horrifyingly…he ran dry.

He wrote the last original word of the last original idea he had, and abruptly found himself flensed of even the tiniest scintilla of an idea for a new story. He had an assignment from the BBC to write an original story that could be adapted for an hour-long dramatic special, and he hadn’t the faintest inkling of what he could write about.

He thought for the better part of an hour, and the only idea that came to him was about a mad, one-legged seaman hunting a big white fish. He thrust the idea from him forcibly; it was redolent with idiocy.

For the first time in his life, since the first moment he realized he had the gift of storytelling, the magic gift of stringing words together so they plumbed the human heart, he was empty of new thoughts. No more strange little fables about the world as he wished it to be, the world that lived in his mind, a world peopled by characters full and firm and more real than those with whom he had to deal each day. His mind was a vast, empty plain without structure upon it or roll to its topography…with nothing in sight but gray vistas that extended to limitless horizons.

All that night he sat before his typewriter, urging his mind to dream, to go away from him in wild journeys. But the dreams were empty husks and his mind came back from the journeys as devoid of thoughts as an earthworm.

Finally, when dawn came up over the valley, he found himself crying. He leaned across the typewriter, put his head on the cool metal, and wept. He knew, with the terrible certainty that brooks no exceptions, that he was dry. He had written his last story. He simply had no more ideas. That was the end of it.

Had the world ended just then, Noah Raymond would have cheered. Then he would have had no anguish, no terror, no concern about what he would do tomorrow. And the tomorrow after that. And all the seamless, hopeless tomorrows that stretched before him like a vast, empty plain.

Writing stories was Noah Raymond’s whole life. He had nothing else of consequence that approached by a million miles the joy of telling a story. And now that the river had run dry, leaving only the silt of ideas he had worked endlessly and the tag-end memories of other people’s work, great classics half remembered, seminal treatments of hoary clichés, he did not know what he would do with the remainder of his life.

He contemplated going the Mark Twain route, cashing in on what he had already written with endless lecture tours. But he wasn’t that good a speaker and, frankly, didn’t like crowds of more than two people. He considered going the John Updike route: snagging himself a teaching sinecure at some tony Eastern college where the incipient junior editors of unsuspecting publishing houses were still in the larval stage as worshipful students. But he was sure he’d end up in a mutually destructive relationship with a sexually liberated English Lit major and come to a messy finish. He dandled the prospect of simply going the Salinger route, of retiring to a hidden cottage somewhere in Vermont or perhaps in Dorset, of leaking mysterious clues to a major novel forthcoming some decade soon; but he had heard that both Pynchon and Salinger were mad as a thousand battlefields; and he shivered at the prospect of becoming a hermit. And all that was left was the realization that what he had written was the sum total, that one year soon some snide bastard at
The Atlantic Monthly
would write a piercing, penetrating piece titled, “The Spectacular Rise and Soggy Demise of Noah Raymond, ex-Enfant Terrible.” He couldn’t face that.

But there was no exit from this prison of sterilized nothingness.

He was twenty-seven, and he was finished.

He stopped crying into the typewriter. He didn’t want to rust the works. Not that it mattered.

He crawled off to bed and slept the day. He woke at eight o’clock and thought about eating, forgetting for the moment that he was finished. But when the knowledge surged back to drown his consciousness, he promptly went into the bathroom and divested himself of the previous evening’s dinner, what had not been digested while he slept.

Packing the queen mother of all headaches, he trudged into the tiny office off the living room, fearing to look at the neglected typewriter he knew would stare back at him with its hideous snaggle-toothed qwertyuiop grin.

Before he stepped through the door he realized he’d been hearing the sound of the typewriter since he’d slid out of bed. Had heard, and had dismissed the sound as a product of nightmare and memory.

But the typewriter
was
making its furious
tack-tack-tack-space-tack
sound. And it was not an electric typewriter. It was a manual, an old Olympia office machine. He did not trust electric typewriters. They continued humming maliciously when one paused to marshal one’s thoughts. And if one placed one’s hands on the keyboard preparatory to writing some measure of burning, immortal prose, and hesitated the slightest bit before tapping the keys, the insolent beast went off like a Thompson submachine gun. He did not like, or trust, electric typewriters, wouldn’t have one in the same house, wouldn’t write a word on one of the stupid things, wouldn’t–

He stopped thinking crazy thoughts. He
couldn’t
write, would never write again; and the typewriter was blamming away merrily just on the other side of the room.

He stared into the office, and in the darkness he could see the typewriter’s silhouette on the typing shelf he had built with his own hands. Behind it, the window was pale with moonlight and he could see the shape clearly. What he felt he was
not
seeing were the tiny black shapes that were leaping up and down on the keys. But he stood there and continued staring, and thought he was further around the bend than even the horror of the night before had led him to believe he could be. Bits of black were bounding up and down on the keyboard, spinning up into the pale square of glassed moonlight, then dropping back into darkness, bounding up again, doing flips, then falling into darkness once more.
My typewriter has dandruff
, was his first, deranged ranged thought.

And the sound of the old Olympia manual office machine was like that of a Thompson submachine gun.

The little black bounding bits were working away at the keys of the typewriter in excess of 150 words per minute.

“How do you spell
necromancy
,” said a thin, tiny, high, squeaky, sharp, speedy, brittle, chirping voice, “with two
c
’s or a c and a penultimate
s?
”

There was a muffled “oof!” as of someone bashing his head against a hollow-core door, and then–a trifle on the breathless side–a second voice replied, “Two
c
’s, you illiterate!” The second voice was only slightly less thin, tiny, high, squeaky, sharp, speedy, brittle, and chirping. It also had a faintly Cockney accent.

And the blamming on the keyboard continued.

My life has been invaded by archy the cockroach
, was Noah Raymond’s second, literary, even more deranged thought. In those days, the wonderful writings of the late Don Marquis were still popular; such a thought would have been relevant.

He turned on the light switch beside the door.

Eleven tiny men, each two inches high, were doing a trampoline act on his typewriter.

The former
enfant terrible
sagged against the doorjamb, and he heard the hinges of his jaw crack like artillery fire as his mouth fell open.

“Turn off that light, you great loon!” yelled one of the little men, describing a perfect Immelmann and plunging headfirst onto the # key while a pair of the little men with another pair of little men on their shoulders weighted down the carriage shift key so the one who had dived would get an upper-case # and not a lower-case 3.

“Off, you bugger; turn it off!” shouted a trio of little men in unison as they ricocheted across each other’s trajectories to type p-a-r-s-i-m-o-n-i-o-u-s. They were a blur, bounding and dodging and shooting past each other like gnats around a dog’s ear.

When he made no move to click off the light–because he was unable to move to do
any
thing–the tallest of the little men (2¼?) did a two-step on the space bar and landed on the typewriter carriage housing, arms akimbo and fists balled. He stared straight at Noah Raymond and in a thin, tiny, high, etcetera voice howled, “That’s it! Everybody stops work!”

The other ten bounced off their targets and vacated the typewriter
en masse
. They stood around on the typing shelf, rubbing their heads, some of them removing their tiny caps to massage sore spots on foreheads and craniums.

“Precisely
how
do you expect us to get ten thousand words written tonight with you disturbing us?” the little man (who was clearly the spokesman) said with annoyance.

I can’t face the future
, he thought.
The delusions are starting already and it’s not even twenty-four hours
.

Another of the little men, somewhat shorter than the others, yelled, “’Ey, Alf. Cawnt’cher get this silly git outta f’ere? We’ll never ’ave done, ’e don’t move on!”

Noah did not understand one word the littler little man had said.

The tallest of the little men glared at the tiniest one and snarled, “Shut’cher yawp, Charlie.” His accent was the same as Charlie’s, dead-on Cockney. But when he looked back at Noah he returned to the precise Mayfair tones he had first used. “Let’s get this matter settled, Mr. Raymond. We’ve got a night’s work ahead of us, you’ve got a story due, and neither of us will manage if we don’t get this perishing explanation out of the way.”

Noah just stared. He had hot flashes.

“Sit down, Mr. Raymond.”

He sat down. On the floor. He didn’t want to, he just suddenly did it; sat down…on the floor.

“Now,” said Alf, “your first question is: what are we? Well. We might ask the same of you. What are you?”

Charlie started hooting. “Cut out th’ malarkey, Alf. Send ’im out an’ tell ’im t’leave off annoyin’ us!”

Alf glared at the little man. “Y’know, Charlie, you’re a right king mixer, you are. You better close up your cake ’ole before I come down there an’ pop you a good’un in the ’ooter!”

Charlie made a nasty bratting sound like a Bronx cheer, the time-honored raspberry, and sat down on the shelf, dangling his tiny legs and whistling unconcernedly.

Alf turned back to Noah. “You’re a human, Mr. Raymond. The inheritors of the Earth. We know all about you; all there is to know. We should, after all; we’ve been around a lot longer than you. We’re gremlins.”

Noah Raymond recognized them at once. Living and breathing and arguing personifications of the mythical “little people” who had become a household word during World War Two, the sort of/kind of elf-folk deemed responsible for mechanical failures and chance mishaps to Allied aircraft, particularly those of the British. They had been as famous as Kilroy. The Royal Air Force had taken them on as mascots, laughing with them but never at them, and in the end the gremlins were supposed to have turned against the Nazis and to have helped win the war.