Stephen King - Skeleton Crew

“So that’s where the not-so-famous Wilson-Thorpe correspondence stood just before the shit hit the fan. We were like a couple of dying drug addicts comparing the relative merits of heroin and ’ludes. Reg had Fornits in his typewriter, I had Fornits in the walls, and both of us had Fornits in our heads.

“And there was they. Don’t forget they. I hadn’t been flogging the story around for long before deciding they included every magazine fiction editor in New York — not that there were many by the fall of 1969. If you’d grouped them together, you could have killed the whole bunch of them with one shotgun shell, and before long I started to feel that was a damned good idea.

“It took about five years before I could see it from their perspective. I’d upset the super, and he was just a guy who saw me when the heat was screwed up and when it was time for his Christmas tip. These other guys… well, the irony was just that a lot of them really were my friends. Jared Baker was the assistant fiction editor at Esquire in those days, and Jared and I were in the same rifle company during World War II, for instance. These guys weren’t just uneasy after sampling the new improved Henry Wilson. They were appalled. If I’d just sent the story around with a pleasant covering letter explaining the situation — my version of it, anyway — I probably would have sold the Thorpe story almost right away. But oh no, that wasn’t good enough. Not for this story. I was going to see that this story got the personal treatment. So I went from door to door with it, a stinking, grizzled ex-editor with shaking hands and red eyes and a big old bruise on his left cheekbone from where he ran into the bathroom door on the way to the can in the dark two nights before. I might as well have been wearing a sign reading BELLEVUE-BOUND.

“Nor did I want to talk to these guys in their offices. In fact, I could not. The time had long since passed when I could get into an elevator and ride it up forty floors. So I met them like pushers meet junkies — in parks, on steps, or in the case of Jared Baker, in a Burger Heaven on Forty-ninth Street. Jared at least would have been delighted to buy me a decent meal, but the time had passed, you understand, when any self-respecting maître d’ would have let me in a restaurant where they serve business people.”

The agent winced.

“I got perfunctory promises to read the story, followed by concerned questions about how I was, how much I was drinking. I remember — hazily — trying to tell a couple of them about how electricity and radiation leaks were fucking up everyone’s thinking, and when Andy Rivers, who edited fiction for American Crossing, suggested I ought to get some help, I told him he was the one who ought to get some help.

“ ‘You see those people out there on the street?’ I said. We were standing in Washington Square Park. ‘Half of them, maybe even three-quarters of them, have got brain tumors. I wouldn’t sell you Thorpe’s story on a bet, Andy. Hell, you couldn’t understand it in this city. Your brain’s in the electric chair and you don’t even know it.’

“I had a copy of the story in my hand, rolled up like a newspaper. I whacked him on the nose with it, the way you’d whack a dog for piddling in the corner. Then I walked off. I remember him yelling for me to come back, something about having a cup of coffee and talking it over some more, and then I passed a discount record store with loudspeakers blasting heavy metal onto the sidewalk and banks of snowy-cold fluorescent lights inside, and I lost his voice in a kind of deep buzzing sound inside my head. I remember thinking two things — I had to get out of the city soon, very soon, or I would be nursing a brain tumor of my own, and I had to get a drink right away.

“That night when I got back to my apartment I found a note under the door. It said ‘We want you out of here, you crazy-bird.’ I threw it away without so much as a second thought. We veteran crazy-birds have more important things to worry about than anonymous notes from fellow tenants.

“I was thinking over what I’d said to Andy Rivers about Reg’s story. The more I thought about it — and the more drinks I had — the more sense it made. ‘Flexible Bullet’ was funny, and on the surface it was easy to follow… but below that surface level it was surprisingly complex. Did I really think another editor in the city could grasp the story on all levels? Maybe once, but did I still think so now that my eyes had been opened? Did I really think there was room for appreciation and understanding in a place that was wired up like a terrorist’s bomb? God, loose volts were leaking out everywhere.

“I read the paper while there was still enough daylight to do so, trying to forget the whole wretched business for a while, and there on page one of the Times there was a story about how radioactive material from nuclear-power plants kept disappearing — the article went on to theorize that enough of that stuff in the right hands could quite easily be used to make a very dirty nuclear weapon.

“I sat there at the kitchen table as the sun went down, and in my mind’s eye I could see them panning for plutonium dust like 1849 miners panning for gold. Only they didn’t want to blow up the city with it, oh no. They just wanted to sprinkle it around and fuck up everyone’s minds. They were the bad Fornits, and all that radioactive dust was bad-luck fornus. The worst bad-luck fornus of all time.

“I decided I didn’t want to sell Reg’s story after all — at least, not in New York. I’d get out of the city just as soon as the checks I’d ordered arrived. When I was upstate, I could start sending it around to the out-of-town literary magazines. Sewanee Review would be a good place to start, I reckoned, or maybe Iowa Review. I could explain to Reg later. Reg would understand. That seemed to solve the whole problem, so I took a drink to celebrate. And then the drink took a drink. And then the drink took the man. So to speak. I blacked out. I only had one more blackout left in me, as it happened.

“The next day my Arvin Company checks came. I typed one of them up and went to see my friend, the ‘co-drawer.’ There was another one of those tiresome cross-examinations, but this time I kept my temper. I wanted that signature. Finally, I got it. I went to a business supply store and had them make up an Arvin Company letter-stamp while I waited. I stamped a return address on a business envelope, typed Reg’s address (the confectioner’s sugar was out of my machine but the keys still had a tendency to stick), and added a brief personal note, saying that no check to an author had ever given me more personal pleasure… and that was true. Still is. It was almost an hour before I could bring myself to mail it — I just couldn’t get over how official it looked. You never would have known that a smelly drunk who hadn’t changed his underwear in about ten days had put that one together.”

He paused, crushed out his cigarette, looked at his watch. Then, oddly like a conductor announcing a train’s arrival in some city of importance, he said, “We have reached the inexplicable.

“This is the point in my story which most interested the two psychiatrists and various mental caseworkers with whom I was associated over the next thirty months of my life. It was the only part of it they really wanted me to recant, as a sign that I was getting well again. As one of them put it, ‘This is the only part of your story which cannot be explicated as faulty induction… once, that is, your sense of logic has been mended.’ Finally I did recant, because I knew — even if they didn’t — that I was getting well, and I was damned anxious to get out of the sanitarium. I thought if I didn’t get out fairly soon, I’d go crazy all over again. So I recanted — Galileo did, too, when they held his feet to the fire — but I have never recanted in my own mind. I don’t say that what I’m about to tell you really happened; I only say I still believe it happened. That’s a small qualification, but to me it’s crucial.