Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Holmes looked up at the clear sky and sighed. This was going to be a long carriage ride.

Can I get you something to help you feel better?” asked James.

“A .40-caliber six-shooter so that I can blow my brains out,” said Sam Clemens. “Or, since I am a devout coward, perhaps some painless poison that tastes like lemonade.”

“Anything other than that?” asked James. He was sitting on a chair by the window a few feet from where Clemens, in his nightshirt, lay in bed. There were medicines and half-filled glasses on the bedside table and a pile of newspapers tossed on the only other chair.

“One doctor says this is just a bad case of the common grippe and he’s predicted every day in the last eleven days that I’d be up and out of this bed on the next day,” said Clemens between coughs. “The other doctor who’s looked in on me says that it’s pneumonia and that at my advanced age . . . fifty-eight . . . I should get my will in order and start getting measured for my coffin. I have the strongest urge to put these two medicos in a pit and see which one comes out alive.”

James smiled at that.

“What brought you and Mr. Sherlock Holmes to the Great Northern Hotel anyway?” asked Clemens, setting down his awful-smelling cigar long enough to drink from a tall glass of colored fluid, grimace at its taste, and pick up the smoking cigar again.

“Holmes chose it,” said James. Clemens had one of the corner rooms which included three tall windows in the curving bay, and James had all three open to the relatively fresh air of downtown Chicago. This hotel was at the corner of Jackson and Dearborn and this was about all that James knew of Chicago geography.

“He overheard a clerk telling a bellboy to take up a fresh pitcher of water with lemons to your room,” added James. “That’s how I knew you were here. I was surprised. When I was told you were ill, I thought I should check in on you.”

“That’s right neighborly,” said Clemens and stopped to cough. It was a deep, phlegmy cough and James leaned back a little more into the fresh air. “I plan to leave for New York tomorrow, Mr. James, if I have to do so in a coffin with a chunk of aged Limburger cheese on my chest for verisimilitude. I may have to ask you to be my pallbearer.”

Clemens coughed and drank from the glass again. He poured more colored liquid from a quart-size bottle into the glass.

“Is that cough syrup of some sort?” asked James.

“Of some sort,” said Clemens and took another long drink. “It’s laudanum. Liquid opium. A gift from the gods. My second doctor isn’t shy about prescribing it by the hogshead barrel. So far it’s the only thing that’s smoothed this cough.”

Wonderful , thought James. Holmes is injecting himself with that new heroin drug every day and Clemens—Mark Twain!—is busy turning himself into a laudanum addict .

“Did you get your business done here in Chicago?” asked James. “You told us in Hartford that you had people to see.”

Clemens snorted. “I made the rounds of interested investors in Paige’s typesetting machine, but they are small-minded, James. Small-minded. They insist on seeing a working example of the typesetter. They are prejudiced in favor of earning their money back with interest.”

“And Paige doesn’t have a working model?”

“He tells me almost every other week that he has a perfect working model,” said Clemens. “But when I rush to see it and get within fifty miles of him, the machine either quits working or Paige decides to dismantle it and improve it in some arcane mechanical way. He’s in Chicago to set up a second factory to produce the things while the first factory has yet to spit out a model that works for more than two minutes at a time.”

“Did you see Mr. Paige while you were here?”

Clemens drank deeply from his glass of laudanum and refilled the glass from the bottle. “He’s been wonderfully attentive, visited my sickroom at least six times, staying hours each time.”

“And?” said James after a silence that had Clemens staring at nothing.

“And do you remember,” said Clemens, glaring at James from under his bushy white eyebrows, “how I said that Paige could convince a fish to come out of the water and take a walk with him?”

“Yes.”

“Well, this time he convinced this particular fish to come out, take a walk with him, climb a tree, and make noises like a parakeet.”

James didn’t know what to say to that so he remained silent, trying to breathe the fresh air from the open windows rather than the odious air from Clemens’s cheap cigar.

“I came to demand—not request, not ask nicely for, but to demand ,” continued Clemens, “that Paige immediately refund me the last thirty thousand dollars I’d put into this project. I need it. I’d borrowed from my little publishing venture to pay for the investment in the typesetter and now circumstances demand that I borrow from the typesetter investment to keep my publishing house afloat. So I came to demand, in no uncertain terms, thirty thousand dollars of the hundred and ninety thousand dollars that I’ve poured into Paige’s bottomless pit.”

“And did he pay up?” asked Henry James.

“It ended with me writing him a check for fifty thousand more dollars,” grumbled Clemens. “So that he can make those ‘last few little improvements’ before the automatic typesetting machine sets the publishing world on its ear and I become a millionaire.” Clemens coughed fiercely and, when he’d caught his breath and drunk some laudanum, said, “I finned myself far up and out of the crick this time. Livy will kill me.”

“I hope it works out,” said James who had never invested in anything save for his own talent.

“Say, where’s your friend Sherlock Holmes these days?” asked Clemens.

“Today he went to meet various people at the White City,” said James.

“Have you seen the Exposition yet, James?”

“Not yet.”

“The White City is yet another thing in this life that I shall never see,” sighed Clemens. Then, without any preamble, Clemens said, “Does Holmes still believe that he might be a fictional person rather than real?”

Taken back a bit, James finally said, “I believe he does.”

“He may be right,” said Clemens.

“Why do you say that, sir?”

“I’ve read the stories in The Strand and the novellas, and the Sherlock Holmes there strikes me as a particularly unrealistic fellow. His adventures sound contrived.”

“You may remember Holmes saying in New York that he wasn’t totally happy with Dr. Watson’s representations of either him or his science of deduction,” said James. “The tales may be true, but written by a mediocre mind.”

“In the past weeks I’ve been thinking,” said Clemens. “I doubt that there is any ‘Dr. Watson’. It’s all that Conan Doyle fellow creating a fictional narrator to relate the fictional tales of a fictional detective.”

“Holmes says that Conan Doyle is his friend Watson’s agent and editor,” said James. “He says that Dr. John Watson shuns the spotlight and that he allows Doyle to represent him.”

“But what if Holmes is a fictional character and this whole assassination plot is part of some melodramatic tale? All make-believe?” said Clemens, coughing more and drinking more of the laudanum mixture. “Where does that leave you and me, Mr. Henry James?”

“How do you mean?” said James, knowing full well what Clemens was leading up to.

“It would mean that we are fictional characters in this instance as well,” said Clemens, staring balefully out from under his shaggy eyebrows. “You chosen as his Sancho Panza . . . or perhaps as his Boswell . . . and me as occasional comedy relief.”