Robert Reed, page 15
The Visionaries
by Robert Reed
Regarding Mr. Reed’s new story, we’ve been told (by reliable but unnamed sources) that while the manuscript for it sat in your editor’s pile of submissions, Mr. Reed received an unexpected phone call. The call was from a gentleman in Sherman Oaks, California, whose name you might find on our masthead. We were not privy to its contents, but Mr. Reed sent us an email in which he said he was now hiding in his basement with his shotgun in his lap.
We wish Mr. Reed well and we hope the events surrounding this story won’t affect his amazing productivity. (It isn’t hard to type with a shotgun in one’s lap, is it?)
* * * *
Everyone is an unmitigated failure.
And then success comes, or it doesn’t.
When I was still an unpublished author, I wrote a long story about an average fellow wandering through his relentlessly unremarkable life. His world wasn’t particularly different from mine, except for being set in some down-the-road future. The plot was minimal, the sf ideas scarce. Yet something about the narrative felt important to me. Typing like a madman, I produced a 25,000-word manuscript complete with rambling conversations and a contrived terminology. The next several drafts were agonizing attempts to reshape the work, creating something leaner and more salable. But I couldn’t seem to apply even the most basic lessons of effective writing. In the end, I had a novella nobody would willingly read.
But on the premise that I didn’t know squat, I licked a fortune in stamps and addressed the oversized manila envelope to the first magazine on my list of professional markets.
A few weeks later, both the manuscript and a standard rejection note were jammed into my tiny mailbox.
The next magazine yielded the same discouraging result.
The third market was decent enough to include little index cards, one card begging for a plot, while another explained how the golden age of science fiction was twelve—the implication being that if I wasn’t writing for my boyhood self, I was wasting everybody’s precious eyes.
But this was the 1980s, which were something of a literary heaven. There was a surprising number of healthy professional magazines as well as various anthologies and semi-prozines, each of those markets endlessly dredging the muck for worthwhile stories. And I was a stubborn soul, which can be a blessing for any would-be author. The same tired manuscript could circulate for years, and whenever editors changed or new markets opened up, I found myself with fresh targets to bombard.
But in this case, rabid conviction wasn’t necessary.
I won’t mention where I sent my novella next, except to say that the market was tiny, and it died long ago.
The blunt truth is that I have taken, and am now breaking, a solemn pledge to confess nothing, including that little tidbit. But it’s important to take this single risk—for reasons that will, I hope, grow clear in time.
* * * *
Ten days after sending off the manuscript, it returned to my mailbox.
On this occasion, nobody bothered with a rejection slip, and my big paper clip was missing too.
Bastards.
I was still trying to decide which address to write on the next envelope when my phone rang. A voice that I didn’t know asked if I was so-and-so, and when I admitted that I was, the voice introduced himself before inquiring if I would like to sell him my story.
I recognized the gentleman’s name, as it happened.
If you enjoy good science fiction, then perhaps you’ve read his work. Though probably not, since our old voices tend to fade away rather quickly these days, through retirement or death, or simply because tastes change inside the tiny, fickle world of publishing.
As a writer, I had sold absolutely nothing.
And here was somebody who wanted to purchase my work. So I gulped once and blurted, “Yes, of course. Sure.”
“Very good,” he said.
“I didn’t realize,” I managed. “You’re an editor too?”
That earned a breathy silence. Then the wise old author told me, “No,” before adding, “This is a rather unique situation.”
I didn’t have anything to say.
He referred to me as, “Sir,” and then asked when we could meet. “These matters are best done in person,” he said.
I teased myself with images of being carted off to some writerly location, like New York or San Francisco, or maybe Oxford, Mississippi.
But then he promised, “I can be standing at your front door in ten minutes’ time.”
“Where are you?”
“At the Holiday Inn.”
I was as naïve as could be, but this seemed like an unlikely twist in the ongoing plot.
“May I come and make my offer to you, sir?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Very good.”
He hung up, and then I hung up, considering what little I knew about this semi-famous author—the novel and handful of stories that I had read, and what I thought I might have heard about the man.
Did I have time to buy beer?
I settled on running the vacuum and stacking my dirty dishes in the filthy kitchen sink, and then because much of the world appreciates pants, I pulled on a clean-enough pair of jeans.
* * * *
Writing can be very easy or brutally tough, depending on the specific task in question. When I hide my many weaknesses and make a parade of my two or three genuine strengths, I think I do rather well for myself. The trouble is that even after years of practice, I’m still learning exactly what my strengths are.
The most important lesson I ever taught myself is that I’m not in the prediction business. To succeed, all I need to do is catch an interesting glimpse or two of somebody’s future. Not my future, or even my world’s. But somebody’s tomorrow has to be imagined and then grafted into my present, which is always interesting to me, and of course the present has its roots buried deep in the fecund, well-watered past. Which is why science fiction, at least in my head, serves as a perspective where all times blend together in a palatable, too-often predictable stew.
Imagine my honored guest as being male and white. Though even if that happens to be true, I’m not admitting much, since sf writers frequently have testicles and a European heritage. I’ll also warn you that he, or perhaps she, has subsequently died. Although that could be another misdirection—an easy lie meant to keep you safely removed from the truth.
For the purpose of this telling, he was a middle-aged fellow with bright eyes and a trim white beard as well as a considerable weight problem. And I lived in a small apartment at the top of a steep flight of stairs, which meant that to make good on his promise, he had to fight a lot of gravity to reach my front door.
Hearing his gasps, I stepped out on the landing and quietly watched the ongoing drama.
He survived the climb, barely, and once the poor gentleman could breathe again, he shot me with an all-business stare, introducing himself.
I shook a sweaty hand and invited him inside.
This was a weekday evening, as I recall. Sunlight was pouring through the big west window. I had always assumed that writers were endlessly curious souls, but my guest acted distinctly uninterested in the details of my life. He ignored my posters, records, and dirty dishes. He gave my bookshelves a quick glance, probably just to hunt for his own name. Then he collapsed into an old green chair that my mother had donated to me instead of the Salvation Army. I occupied a lumpy sofa with a similar pedigree. He was dressed for comfort, but I can’t remember what he was wearing. I do have a vivid memory of his briefcase, however. It was small and leather and rather expensive looking, sitting in his expansive lap. Beside me was the battered copy of my story, fresh from the day’s mail. I don’t remember any pleasantries. If we made small talk, those ordinary words have been lost to the ages. But he did name my story by its title and then mentioned that he had read it through more than once, and he was prepared to offer me a fair sum to own every last word.
“Own every last word,” was his phrase. I have never forgotten that.
In a rare show of business acumen, I put on a skeptical face, asking what was fair.
“Twenty cents,” he told me.
At that moment, I would have sold the manuscript for any stack of pennies—just so long as I was admitted into the ranks of the professional.
But then he added, “Per word,” and watched as my expression changed, taking a certain joy out of what my eyes and gawking mouth showed him.
I gasped, not quite believing what I had heard.
* * * *
Then my benefactor reached into his briefcase, big hands pulling out a fat manila envelope. With a flourish, he withdrew a stack of one hundred dollar bills, and he counted out fifty of those green treasures, spreading them across the freshly vacuumed, decidedly ugly shag carpet.
There isn’t a novice writer who hasn’t dreamed of his first sale, the scene often accompanied by the clashing of cymbals from an orchestra playing giddily somewhere offstage.
But I doubt any of us envision this kind of moment.
Dumbfounded, I stared at that staggering fortune. For me? For a story that couldn’t find any other home?
“I don’t remember,” I whispered. “What magazine wants this?”
The man hadn’t noticed my apartment, but he had a stern, absorbing way of staring into my eyes.
“Or is it for some theme anthology, maybe?”
“No,” he said, his voice just short of loud, the single word delivered with a rigid backbone.
He took a long wet breath. Sternly, he said, “My methods have to remain confidential. And I have to warn you: We have no intention of actually publishing your work.”
“No?”
He sat back in the old chair. When he stopped staring at me, his eyes lifted. “If you accept our money,” he explained to the ceiling, “then you’re making a solemn and binding commitment. From this day forward, whenever you write about—”
He named my protagonist; “Merv,” I’ll call him.
“Send your work directly to us,” he told me. “And only us.”
“Who is ‘us’?” I inquired.
From the briefcase came a tiny white business card, nothing on it but a P.O. box address and a phone number—the former set at one end of the country, the latter wearing an area code from the opposite coast. “I promise. We’ll pay handsomely for everything of value. But you shouldn’t expect traditional contracts or other paper trails. This is a handshake arrangement. And with the handshake comes my word that as our relationship matures, we will offer you substantial increases in pay.”
“If I write about Merv again.”
“You will,” he assured. “Probably not often, but it will happen. At random intervals, and for the rest of your life.”
“Okay,” I managed. “But what’s this all mean?”
He dropped his gaze, and with a sly smile, he told me that he knew quite a bit more than he would ever admit.
“And who’s ‘us’?” I asked again.
My benefactor set the business card on top of the hundreds and then sat back in that awful old chair.
“I don’t understand,” I confessed.
With a shrug, he said, “But you’re a bright youngster. From what I see, you’re even a little bit clever. Keep filling the pages with words, and there might actually be a modest little career waiting for you.”
That was heartening news, I thought.
“But you’re never going to publish my story? Ever?”
The old writer’s patience frayed a little. “Here’s one very good lesson, son. One freelance writer to another: If somebody offers to buy your very worst work, and they pay you real money, and on top of that, they swear that the world will never see what you have done ... well, you should take their charity, my boy, and smile while you do it.
“Am I understood?”
My benefactor had a talent for predictions.
As promised, I gradually built up a small, tidy career as a writer. Within six months, I’d made my first professional sales—a little story to a failing anthology, another to a minor magazine. One of those efforts was noticed in larger circles, and through it, I managed to sell my first novel—a rambling, exuberant, and exceptionally youthful stack of pages for which I was paid a fraction of what my unreadable novella had earned. But long before my novel’s pub date, my various monies ran out and my talents with short fiction were proving uneven at best.
Ask any writer: Careers often begin with long droughts.
After I sold a third story, I went blank. I went cold. I forgot how to write, or I was too self-conscious after my little successes to work effectively. Whatever the culprit, the only way to pay my rent was to bring “Merv” out of his strange little box, inviting him to take over my brain for as long as he wished.
But even Merv proved to be a difficult muse.
When I wanted him, the man wasn’t there. I would sit and sit and sit, my butt going numb in an office chair that I’d bought second-hand from Goodwill. In those years, I wrote on a manual office Royal typewriter—a chunk of steel as reliable as the sunset—and my paper was the cheapest stock I could find, and my little desk was another worn-out gift from home. I would type Merv’s real name again and again, but that did nothing. Retyping the original story seemed to help, but I eventually decided that was just a byproduct of wishful thinking. Weeks and months would pass, and then during some moment devoid of significance, I would see or hear something that wasn’t entirely real. Usually a disembodied voice would call me Merv, or sometimes a random face would swim into the corner of an eye, or maybe I’d feel somebody’s fingers slipping inside a phantom pocket, hunting for a set of cold car keys. And if I happened to be close to my Royal, I’d begin transcribing whatever decided to reveal itself to me.
Most of the time I managed only a few disjointed pages.
The “Merv” stories felt about as urgent and genuine as what I did when I wrote well—immersed in the images, lost to time. But unlike my sf work, there never was that delicious sense of the profound, much less any trace of an authentic plot line. And afterward, rereading the raw manuscript, the whole mess always felt contrived, cluttered, and pointless.
Like the dream you enjoyed at dawn, the experience enthralled until the moment you opened your eyes.
Around the fourth time he slipped inside my skull, I began wondering if Merv was real.
That story began and ended with my protagonist sitting before an enormous television, and I did nothing but describe what he was seeing and hearing on an ever-shifting, seemingly endless array of channels.
Seven pages was the sum total of that effort. But somebody must have liked what I did, because as payment, I received a sealed plastic package containing three thousand dollars in cash.
What if I was seeing the future?
Yet this was a rather anemic gift, as mind-bending wonders go. I had no control over when the magic would strike, much less any influence in Merv’s motions, words, or thoughts. Imagine a video camera wielded by a stranger, and worse still, a stranger who had never used a camera before. The views kept leaping from this to that and back again, no rhyming reason to the mess and not a single landmark looking even a little familiar. In those seven pages, the longest pause came when Merv picked up a cold beer, barley and hops swirling against my tongue as well as his. Then I felt his belch and heard somebody say, “Excuse you.”
I didn’t recognize her voice or know her name. But Merv turned to look at a girl pretty enough to earn a long stare from me. I’m going to call her “Mary.” But Merv didn’t stare. He barely gave his companion a glance. I heard him grunt, “Sorry,” before flipping over to a screaming commercial for some kind of computer game. Over the roars of exploding tanks, he added, “Excuse me for living, darling.”
On his finest day, Merv was an unrepentant male animal.
Yet some cosmic purpose—maybe just to serve as the punchline for a god’s joke—had connected the two of us in this fundamental way.
Perhaps other people had this odd gift, I reasoned. Perhaps millions of us did. But few of us enjoyed that very peculiar habit of sitting alone in front of a typewriter, looking at bare white paper, begging images and compelling words to find their way into an otherwise empty brain.
* * * *
