Martin Amis - Heavy Water and Other Stories

“Now,” said Sixsmith. He broke off and ordered a prawn cocktail. The waiter looked at him defeatedly. “Now,” said Sixsmith. “When Brad escapes from the Nebulan experiment lab and sets off with Cord and Tara to immobilize the directed-energy scythe on the Xerxian attack ship—where’s Chelsi?”

Alistair frowned.

“Where’s Chelsi? She’s still in the lab with the Nebulans. On the point of being injected with a Phobian viper venom, moreover. What of the happy ending? What of Brad’s heroic centrality? What of his avowed love for Chelsi? Or am I just being a bore?”

The secretary, Victoria, stuck her head into the room and said, “He’s coming down.”

Luke listened to the sound of twenty-three pairs of legs uncrossing and recrossing. Meanwhile he readied himself for a sixteen-tooth smile. He glanced at Joe, who said, “He’s fine. He’s just coming down to say hi.”

And down he came: Jake Endo, exquisitely Westernized and gorgeously tricked out and perhaps thirty-five. Of the luxury items that pargeted his slender form, none was as breathtaking as his hair, with its layers of pampered light.

Jake Endo shook Luke’s hand and said, “It’s a great pleasure to meet you. I haven’t read the basic material on the poem, but I’m familiar with the background.”

Luke surmised that Jake Endo had had his voice fixed. He could do the bits of the words that Japanese people were supposed to find difficult.

“I understand it’s a love poem,” he continued. “Addressed to your girlfriend. Is she here with you in L.A.?”

“No. She’s in London.” Luke found he was staring at Jake Endo’s sandals, wondering how much they could possibly have cost.

A silence began its crescendo. This silence had long been intolerable when Jim broke it, saying to Jake Endo, “Oh, how did ‘Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree, Which Stands Near the Lake of Easthwaite, on a Desolate Part of the Shore, Commanding a Beautiful Prospect’ do?”

“‘Lines’?” said Jake Endo. “Rather well.”

“I was thinking about ‘Composed at—Castle,’” said Jim weakly.

The silence began again. As it neared its climax, Joe was suddenly reminded of all this energy he was supposed to have. He got to his feet saying, “Jake? I guess we’re nearing our tiredness peak. You’ve caught us at kind of a low point. We can’t agree on the first line. First line? We can’t see our way to the end of the first foot.”

Jake Endo was undismayed. “There always are these low points. I’m sure you’ll get there, with so much talent in the room. Upstairs we’re very confident. We think it’s going to be a big summer poem.”

“No, we’re very confident, too,” said Joe. “There’s a lot of belief here. A lot of belief. We’re behind ‘Sonnet’ all the way.”

“Sonnet?” said Jake Endo.

“Yeah, sonnet. ‘Sonnet.’”

“‘Sonnet’?” said Jake Endo.

“It’s a sonnet. It’s called ‘Sonnet.’”

In waves the West fell away from Jake Endo’s face. After a few seconds he looked like a dark-age warlord in mid-campaign, taking a glazed breather before moving on to the women and the children.

“Nobody told me,” he said as he went toward the telephone, “about any sonnet.”

The place was closing. Its tea trade and its after-office trade had come and gone. Outside, the streets glimmered morbidly. Members of the staff were donning macs and overcoats. An important light went out. A fridge door slammed.

“Hardly the most resounding felicity, is it?” said Sixsmith.

Absent or unavailable for over an hour, the gift of speech had been restored to Alistair—speech, that prince of all the faculties. “Or what if…” he said. “What if Chelsi just leaves the experiment lab earlier?”

“Not hugely dramatic,” said Sixsmith. He ordered a carafe of wine and inquired as to the whereabouts of his braised chop.

“Or what if she just gets wounded? During the escape. In the leg.”

“So long as one could avoid the wretched cliche: girl impeded, hero dangerously tarrying. Also, she’s supernumerary to the raid on the Xerxian attack ship. We really want her out of the way for that.”

Alistair said, “Then let’s kill her.”

“Very well. Slight pall over the happy ending. No, no.”

A waiter stood over them, sadly staring at the bill in its saucer.

“All right,” said Sixsmith. “Chelsi gets wounded. Quite badly. In the arm. Now what does Brad do with her?”

“Drops her off at the hospital.”

“Mm. Rather hollow modulation.”

The waiter was joined by another waiter, equally stoic; their faces were grained by evening shadow. Now Sixsmith was gently frisking himself with a deepening frown.

“What if,” said Alistair, “what if there’s somebody passing who can take her to the hospital?”

“Possibly,” said Sixsmith, who was half standing, with one hand awkwardly dipped into his inside pocket.

“Or what if,” said Alistair, “or what if Brad just gives her directions to the hospital?”

Back in London the next day, Luke met with Mike to straighten this shit out. Actually it looked okay. Mike called Mal at Monad, who had a thing about Tim at TCT. As a potential finesse on Mal, Mike also called Bob at Binary with a view to repossessing the option on “Sonnet,” plus development money at rolling compound, and redeveloping it somewhere else entirely—say, at Red Giant, where Rodge was known to be very interested. “They’ll want you to go out there,” said Mike. “To kick it around.”

“I can’t believe Joe,” said Luke. “I can’t believe I knocked myself out for that flake.”

“Happens. Joe forgot about Jake Endo and sonnets. Endo’s first big poem was a sonnet. Before your time. ‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.’ It opened for like one day. It practically bankrupted Japan.”

“I feel used, Mike. My sense of trust. I’ve got to get wised up around here.”

“A lot will depend on how ‘Composed at—Castle’ does and what the feeling is on the ‘ ’Tis’ prequel.”

“I’m going to go away with Suki for a while. Do you know anywhere where there aren’t any shops? Jesus, I need a holiday. Mike, this is all bullshit. You know what I really want to do, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

Luke looked at Mike until he said, “You want to direct.”

When Alistair had convalesced from the lunch, he revised Offensive from Quasar 13 in rough accordance with Sixsmith’s suggestions. He solved the Chelsi problem by having her noisily eaten by a Stygian panther in the lab menagerie. The charge of gratuitousness was, in Alistair’s view, safely anticipated by Brad’s valediction to her remains, in which sanguinary revenge on the Nebulans was both prefigured and legitimized. He also took out the bit where Brad declared his love for Chelsi, and put in a bit where Brad declared his love for Tara.

He sent in the new pages, which three months later Sixsmith acknowledged and applauded in a hand quite incompatible with that of his earlier communications. Nor did he reimburse Alistair for the lunch. His wallet, he had explained, had been emptied that morning—by which alcoholic, Sixsmith never established. Alistair kept the bill as a memento. This startling document showed that during the course of the meal Sixsmith had smoked, or at any rate bought, nearly a carton of cigarettes.

Three months later he was sent a proof of Offensive from Quasar 13 . Three months after that, the screenplay appeared in the Little Magazine . Three months after that, Alistair received a check for £12.50, which bounced.

Curiously, although the proof had incorporated Alistair’s corrections, the published version reverted to the typescript, in which Brad escaped from the Nebulan lab seemingly without concern for a Chelsi last glimpsed on an operating table with a syringe full of Phobian viper venom being eased into her neck. Later that month, Alistair went along to a reading at the Screenplay Society in Earls Court. There he got talking to a gaunt girl in an ash-stained black smock who claimed to have read his screenplay and who, over glasses of red wine and, later, in the terrible pub, told him he was a weakling and a hypocrite with no notion of the ways of men and women. Alistair had not been a published screenplay writer long enough to respond to, or even recognize, this graphic proposition (though he did keep the telephone number she threw at his feet). It is anyway doubtful whether he would have dared to take things further. He was marrying Hazel the following weekend.