Dan Simmons: The Abominable: A Novel

“Family, maybe?” I suggested.

Again he shook his head. I sensed that it was hard for him to make this request.

“The only family I know about is a grandniece or great-grandniece or whatever the hell she is in Baltimore or somewhere,” he said softly. “I’ve never met her. But Mary and the home here have her address written down somewhere…as a place to send my things when I check out. No, Dan, if I manage to write this thing, I want someone to read it who would understand it.”

“Is it fiction?”

He grinned. “No, but I’m sure it’ll read like fiction. Bad fiction, probably.”

“Have you started writing it?”

He shook his head again. “No, I’ve been waiting all these decades…hell, I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for. For Death to bang on my door, I guess, to give me some motivation. Well, he’s banging.”

“I’d be honored to read anything you’d choose to share with me, Mr. Perry,” I said. I surprised myself with the emotion and sincerity of my offer. Usually I approached reading amateurs’ efforts as if their manuscripts were coated with the plague bacillus. But I realized I’d be excited to read anything this man wanted to write, although I assumed at the time it would probably be about Byrd’s South Polar expedition in the thirties.

Jacob Perry sat motionless and looked at me for a long moment. Those blue eyes seemed to touch me somehow—as though the eight blunt, scarred fingers of his were pressing hard against my forehead. It was not altogether a pleasant sensation. But it was intimate.

“All right,” he said at last. “If I ever get the thing written, I’ll send it your way.”

I’d already given him my card with my address and other information on it.

“One problem, though,” he said.

“What?”

He held up his two hands, so dexterous, even with the left hand missing most of the last two fingers. “I can’t type worth a damn,” he said.

I laughed. “If you were submitting a manuscript to a publisher,” I said, “we’d find a typist who could type things up for you. Or I’d do it myself. But in the meantime…”

From my battered briefcase, I produced a Moleskine blank book journal—its 240 creamy blank pages never touched. The blank journal was wrapped in a soft leather “skin” that had a leather double loop to hold a pen or pencil. I’d already slipped a sharpened pencil into the loop.

Mr. Perry touched the leather. “This is too dear…,” he began, moving to hand it back.

I loved hearing the archaic use of the word “dear,” but I shook my head and pressed the leather-wrapped blank journal back into his hands.

“This is mere token payment for the hours you spent talking to me,” I said. I’d wanted to add “Jake,” but still couldn’t manage calling him by his first name. “Seriously, I want you to have it. And when you write something you want to share with me, I look forward to reading it. And I promise you that I’ll give you my honest assessment of it.”

Still turning the leather journal over and over in his gnarled hands, Mr. Perry flashed a grin. “I’ll probably be dead when you get the book…or books…Dan, so be as honest as you want in your critique. It won’t hurt my feelings a bit.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

I talked to Jacob Perry in July 1991, twenty years ago as I write this foreword to his manuscript in the late summer of 2011.

In late May 1992, Mary phoned to tell us that Mr. Perry had passed away in the Delta hospital. The cancer had won.

When I asked Mary if Mr. Perry had left anything for me, she seemed surprised. Everything he’d left behind—and it wasn’t much, his books and artifacts—had been packed up and shipped to his grandniece in Baltimore. Mary hadn’t been at the hospice at the time—she’d been in a hospital in Denver. Her assistant had mailed the packages.

Then, nine weeks ago, in the late spring of 2011, almost twenty years after my trip to Delta, I received a UPS package from someone named Richard A. Durbage (Jr.) in Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland. Assuming that it was a batch of my old books that someone wanted signed—something that really irritates me when the reader hasn’t asked permission of me to send the books—I was tempted to return the package to the sender, unopened. Instead, I used a box cutter to slash the package open with more than necessary energy. Karen looked at the shipping information and made me laugh by saying that we’d never had books for signing sent from Lutherville-Timonium and she immediately went to look it up online. (Karen does love her geography.)

But they weren’t old books of mine to be signed.

In the package were twelve Moleskine notebooks. I flipped through and saw that each page, front and back, was filled with small, precise cursive handwriting in a man’s strong hand.

Even then I stupidly didn’t think of Mr. Perry until I got to the last journal at the bottom.

The leather cover was wrapped around it, still holding the stub of a #2 pencil, but the leather was now weathered and worn and darkened by the oils transmitted through the repeated touch of Mr. Perry’s hands. He’d obviously transferred the leather cover to each volume during his ten months of effort at writing this single, long tale.

There was a typed note.

Dear Mr. Simmons:

My mother, Lydia Durbage, passed away this April. She was 71 years old. In going through her things, I found this box. It had been sent to her in 1992 by the nursing home where a distant relative of hers, a Mr. Jacob Perry, had lived his last years and where he died. Not really knowing and never having met her grand-uncle, it seems that my mother only glanced at the contents of the box, chose one or two items for sale at her weekly garage sale, and left the rest untouched. I don’t believe she ever opened the notebooks I have included in this package.

On page one of the top notebook there was a note, not to my mother but evidently to a certain “Mary” who ran the assisted living facility in Delta, that asked that these notebooks and a certain Vest Pocket Kodak camera be sent to you. Your address was given, which was how I knew where to send this much-belated package.

If these items were something you anticipated receiving twenty years ago, I apologize for the delay. My mother was absent-minded, even in her middle years.

Since the notebooks were meant to be sent to you, I’ve decided not to read them. I did skim through and noticed that my mother’s relative was an accomplished artist: the maps, drawings of mountains, and other sketches seem to be of professional quality.

Again, I apologize for the inadvertent and accidental delay that kept you from receiving this package in the timely manner that I’m sure Mr. Jacob Perry had hoped for.

Sincerely yours,

Richard A. Durbage, Jr.

I carried the box to my study and lifted out the stack of notebooks and began reading that afternoon and read straight through the night, finishing about nine the next morning.

After pondering his wishes for months, I’ve decided to publish two versions of Jacob Perry’s final (and only) manuscript. In the end, I’ve decided that publication is what he would have wanted after spending the last ten months of his life laboring over the effort. I also believe it’s why he chose me as his primary reader. He knew that I could judge whether a manuscript deserved publication or not. I believe with all my heart that Jacob Perry’s manuscript—this book—does deserve that publication.

A second and very limited edition will show Mr. Perry’s own handwriting and will include the scores of sketches, portrait drawings, carefully done maps, mountain landscapes, old photographs, and other elements that Mr. Perry had added to the text. This version will be of text alone. I think it succeeds in telling the story that Jacob Perry, 1902–1992, wanted me to hear. Wanted us to hear. As his editor, I’ve made only a few spelling corrections and added a very few explanatory notes to his text. I can only trust and hope that, in allowing me to be his first reader and editor, Mr. Perry understands my own hunger to allow others to read this strange and oddly beautiful testament.