Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows

I walked through, between and among the blue and gray lines, finding it difficult to breathe as the oppressiveness of massed failure and dead dreams assaulted me. It was like breathing the dust of ancient tombs.

Bob Catlett and his wife had immediately wandered off to the kitchen for drinks. I would have scurried after them, but Leo Norris saw me, shoved between two ex-technical writers (each of whom had had brief commercial successes twenty years before with non-fiction popularizations of space science theory) and grabbed my hand. He looked exhausted, but sober.

“Billy! For God’s sake. Billy! I didn’t know you were in town. What a great thing! How long’re you in for?”

“Only a few days, Leo. Book for Harper. I’ve been all locked up finishing it.”

“Well, I’ll say this for you, the Scott Fitzgerald Syndrome certainly hasn’t hit you out there. How many books have you written since you left, three? Four?”

“Seven.”

He smiled with embarrassment, but not enough embarrassment to slow the phony camaraderie. Leo Norris and I — despite his effusions — had never been close. When he had already been an established novelist, a fact one verified by getting one’s name on the cover of The Saint Detective Magazine , I was banging off hammer murder novelettes for Manhunt , just to pay the rent in the Village. There had been no camaraderie in those days. But Leo was now on the slide, had been for the last six or eight years, had been reduced to writing a series of sex/spy/violence paperbacks: each one numbered (he was up to #27 the last time I looked), pseudonymous, featuring an unpleasant CIA thug named Curt Costener. Four of my last seven novels had been translated into successful films and one of them had become a television series. Camaraderie.

“Seven books in what — ten years? — that’s damned good.”

I didn’t say anything. I was looking around; indicating I wanted to move on. He didn’t pick up the message.

“Brett McCoy died, you know. Last week.”

I nodded. I’d read him, but had never met him. Good writer. Police procedurals.

“Terminal. Inoperable. Lungs; really spread. Oh, he’d been on the way out for a long time. He’ll be missed.”

“Yeah. Well, excuse me, Leo, I have to find some people I came with.”

I couldn’t get through the press near the front door to join Bob in the kitchen. The only breeze was coming in from the hallway and they were jammed together in front of the passage. So I went the other way, deeper into the room, deeper into the inversion layer of smoke and monotoned chatter. He watched me go, wanting to say something, probably wanting to strengthen a bond that didn’t exist. I moved fast. I didn’t want any more obituary reports.

There were only five or six women in the crowd, as far as I could tell. One of them watched me as I edged through the bodies. I couldn’t help noticing her noticing me. She was in her late forties, severely weathered, staring openly as I neared her. It wasn’t till she spoke, “Billy?” that I recognized the voice. Not the face; even then, not the face. Just the voice, which hadn’t changed.

I stopped and stared back. “Dee?”

She smiled no kind of smile at all, a mere stricture of courtesy. “How are you, Billy?”

“I’m fine. How’re you? What’s happening, what’re you doing these days?”

“I’m living in Woodstock. Cormick and I got divorced; I’m doing books for Avon.”

I hadn’t seen anything with her name on it for some time. Those who haunt the newsstands and bookstores out of years of habit are like sidewalk cafe Greeks unable to stop fingering their worry beads. I would have seen her name.

She caught the hesitation. “Gothics. I’m doing them under another name.”

This time the smile was nasty and it said: you’ve had the last laugh; yes, I’m selling my talent cheap; I hate myself for it; I’ll slice my wrists in this conversation before I’ll permit you to gloat. What’s more offensive than being successful when they always dismissed you as the least of their set, and they’ve dribbled away all the promise and have failed? Nothing. They would eat the air you breathe. Bierce: SUCCESS, n . The one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows. Unquote.

“Look me up if you get to Los Angeles,” I said. She didn’t even want to try that one. She turned back to the three-way conversation behind her. She took the arm of an elegant man with a thick, gray mop of styled Claude Rains hair. He was wearing aviator-style eyeglasses, wrap-arounds, tinted auburn. Dee hung on tight. That wouldn’t last long. His suits were too well-tailored. She looked like a tattered battle flag. When had they all settled for oblivion?

Edwin Charrel was coming toward me from the opposite side of the room. He still owed me sixty dollars from ten years before. He wouldn’t have forgotten. He’d lay a long, guilt-oozing story on me, and try to press a moist five bucks into my hand. Not now; really , not now; not on top of Leo Norris and Dee Miller and all those crinkled elbows. I turned a hard right, smiled at a mom-and-pop writing team sharing the same glass of vodka, and worked my way to the wall. I kept to the outside and began to circumnavigate. My mission: to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Everyone knows, it’s harder to hit a moving target.

And miles to go before I sleep.

The back wall was dominated by a sofa jammed with loud conversations. But the crowd in the center of the room had its collective back to the babble, so there was a clear channel across to the other side. I made the move. Charrel wasn’t even in sight, so I made the move. No one noticed, no one gave a gardyloo, no one tried to buttonhole me. I made the move. I thought I was halfway home. I started to turn the corner, only one wall to go before the breeze, the door, and out. That was when the old man motioned to me from the easy chair.

The chair was wedged into the rear corner of the room, at an angle to the sofa. Big, overstuffed, colorless thing. He was deep in the cushions. Thin, wasted, tired-looking, eyes a soft, watery blue. He was motioning to me. I looked behind me, turned back. He was motioning to me . I walked over and stood there above him.

“Sit down.”

There wasn’t anywhere to sit. “I was just leaving.” I didn’t know him.

“Sit down, we’ll talk. There’s time.”

A spot opened at the end of the sofa. It would have been rude to walk away. He nodded his head at the open spot. So I sat down. He was the most exhausted-looking old man I’d ever seen. Just stared at me.

“So you write a little,” he said. I thought he was putting me on. I smiled, and he said, “What’s your name?”

I said, “Billy Landress.”

He tested that for a moment, silently. “William. On the books it’s William.”

I chuckled. “That’s right. William on the books. It’s better for the lending libraries. Classier. Weightier.” I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing softly. Not to myself, right into his face. He didn’t smile back, but I knew he wasn’t taking offense. It was a bemusing conversation.

“And you’re …?”

“Marki,” he said; be paused, then added, “Marki Strasser.”

Still smiling, I said, “Is that the name you write under?”

He shook his head. “I don’t write any more. I haven’t written in a long time.”

“Marki,” I said, lingering on the word, “Marki Strasser. I don’t think I’ve read any of your work. Mystery fiction?”

“Primarily. Suspense, a few contemporary novels, nothing terribly significant. But tell me about you.”

I settled back into the sofa. “I have the feeling, sir, that you’re amused by me.”