Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

“Do it for me and for you, Bran.”

SylviaTheCunt was making sounds like the Titanic going down.

Then Jimmy looked straight ahead. At Leslie.

He didn’t say anything. He just stared.

Leslie took it for about thirty seconds. Then she got up and walked to the side of the room where she stood with her arms folded, watching the screen, still curious, but—once having freed herself of Jimmy’s power—unwilling to let him manipulate her beyond a certain point of tolerable terror.

Now Jimmy was staring at an empty seat.

She’s insensitive, or maybe desensitized; but she’s tough. Which also explains how she could have stayed married to him as long as she did. High-fashion barbed wire wrapped in Spandex.

“Leslie, you did okay in the settlement. But I suppose you rate more than a standard ‘I’m sorry,’ which doesn’t count for shit…”

“You can say that again,” Leslie murmured from the side of the room.

“… so the Corporation is depositing a million in the Bermuda account for you; I’ve signed over ownership of the magazine to your name; Kenny will transfer the chalet at Villarvolard to you… so you can keep that ski bum of yours on the string a little longer; and Missy’ll find a letter in the safe that transfers a substantial block of non-voting stock in The Kerch Corporation to you. Stay out of the business, take the dividends, and try to remember me fondly.”

“Right,” Leslie said from the side of the room.

Now he looked all the way to his right, directly at SylviaTheCunt, who had to know what was coming. There was still a lot in the till, and from what Jimmy had said of her in years past I knew she’d be bolted to that chair till the final farthing had been accounted for; but, for a wonder, she had to know what was on the way.

“To my beloved sister, Sylvia…

“And that’s the first time in over twenty years I’ve said your name without adding the sobriquet. Seems truncated, but these are formal proceedings and I want to do it without flaw so after I’ve finished talking to you—which you’ll sit through right to the last syllable on just the off-chance that I might act like a brother even though we both know I despise you with a pure, blue flame of loathing, and you might be able to cadge a few bucks—where was I? Fouled in my own syntax. Oh, yeah, I was saying you’ll sit through all this maleficent defoedation—Kenny, if she needs help with that, stop the tape and get her the definitions—you’ll find them in something called Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary, in the reference shelf to the left of my typewriter in the office—shit, I lost myself again. Oh, yeah, I remember. You’ll sit through it because you cling to greedy hope like a leech on floating garbage. You figure I can’t be that big a prick after all these years, and so you’ll wait for the last rotten word I’m going to speak to you, sister dearest. And I’m doing this without flaw so that you won’t even have a scintilla of hope that you can contest this will. It’s solid, Sylvia; ironclad, rockribbed, diamond-encrusted solid.

“And the bottom line is that you get zip.

“Not a cent.

“Not a penny.

“Not a farthing.

“Not a grubnik. (Which is worth 13¢ American.)

“Not even a Blue Chip Stamp.

“Nothing is what you get. Nada, nyet, nihil, nil, nihilum! Nothing, because if I have any dislike of women as a species it comes from you. Nothing because if I haven’t been able, my whole life, entirely to trust a woman, it’s because of what you ran on me when I was a kid.

“Sylvia, I don’t think I’ve ever had a chance to tell you how deeply and thoroughly I loathe you. No, that isn’t even correctly put. I loathed you for most of my life, but about twelve years ago I just sort of dropped you out of the universe. You ceased to exist. You were never there.

“I know you can’t doubt that, because you were on the other end of the phone that time when—”

SylviaTheCunt screamed.

“Stop it! Stop him right now!”

Kenny Gross moved in from the shadowy rear of the library and cut off the Betamax. The screen went white. So did SylviaTheCunt. She was on her feet, the veins standing out in her forehead; a dumpy, big-bosomed woman in middle years. Jimmy always said she was one of those pathetic creatures that had been assembled by The Great Engineer in the Sky without a love mechanism in her. It didn’t take a writer to see that. She had the look of old stone walls that had never even been considered for monuments or pyramids or standing circles.

“This is criminal!” she shouted. She clutched her purse to her stomach and kept hitting it with her fist. She wanted to strike out at something more offensive, but that was under dirt now. ‘‘I’ll fight this! I will!”

Missy came around her chair. She towered over SylviaTheCunt and looked down at her, eyes blazing. It may not have been Jimmy reborn, but the spirit had floated out of the grave, off the silent screen, and had entered the body of his most stalwart defender. “You won’t do shit, dolly. You knew what he had for you. You’ve always known. He hasn’t spoken to you for twenty years till now. You’ll fight? It is to laugh, dolly! He left the Corporation to me and I’ll put ten fucking thousand attorneys on it. We’ll block you and tie you up and make you look like the scumbag you are. Wanna fight, dolly? I’m waiting!”

It drained her. Bran came around and took her by the shoulders and took her back to her seat. Missy slumped down, murmuring, “That bitch… she hated him… she never thought he’d make it…” Bran whispered soft things close to her ear and she quieted down.

“For the record I’d suggest you watch the rest of the videotape, no matter how distasteful,” Kenny Gross said to SylviaTheCunt. “In the event you do contemplate any legal action. Or if you prefer, you can wait in the living room and when the tape is finished I can run this section for you alone.”

She stared at him with animosity. She looked around the room at the rest of us, her eyes like slag-heaps. Then she went back and resumed her seat.

Jimmy was really putting us through it. It reminded me of the piece he had written after his mother’s funeral, where SylviaTheCunt had stood up right in the middle of the eulogy he had written and was reading, and had started screaming that Jimmy was defiling her mother’s funeral. It had shattered Jimmy. He could almost have forgiven her anything she’d done to him as a kid, as a young man, as an adult: but not that. She was doing it again.

It was posthumous revenge, but it didn’t ennoble Jimmy in the least. And it was hell for the rest of us.

The attorney started the tape again, and for the next twenty minutes Jimmy rang every charge he could on the woman. How she had brutalized him as a child, with specific deeds that he had remembered with that quirky selective memory of his. Affronts and mean tricks that were almost ludicrous but which, if you remembered how susceptible you were as a little kid, were monstrously cruel. How she had fucked over her own kids, Jimmy’s nephew and niece. How she had beaten down her husband, whom Jimmy had liked even though he wouldn’t stand up to her. How she had become a deplorable human being—racist, bigoted, coarse, provincial and, for Jimmy the most inexcusable of all, bone-stick-stone stupid.

For twenty minutes we all averted our eyes as Jimmy got into it like a ‘lude-stoked jazz musician trying to blow Bud Powell back from the Great Beyond. It was a bravura ugly performance, many riffs, a lot of high shrieking runs and a lot of low animal growls. None of us could look. There are beasts that go right in and suck the marrow, clean the bones to a glistening white.