2 March 2003 | Vol. 3, No. 1

Closet Fiction

by TOM BRADLEY

…There let the pealing organ blow,
To the full-voiced choir below,
In service high, and anthems clear
As may, with sweetness, through mine ear
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all Heaven before mine eyes.
– Milton, Il Penseroso

"I would like to—I mean, I do write what I call closet fiction—"

Dr. Edwine was pontificating at his own reflection in a brandy Alexander puddle (a man his size had no fear of a ladies' beverage redounding poorly upon his masculinity).

"—as radical as that might sound to followers of the public reading circuit. And I really—"

It had become customary to let clients spew their pet irrelevancies for the first few minutes of these meetings, so they could pretend they were still artists even though they were about to become moderately rich. But the day was beginning to fizzle out, and this perfect oaf had yet again sheathed his elongated butt in the same vintage checkered petroleum products he'd worn since showing up in town. They were beginning to smell just like a Sunset Strip glory hole in the hectic days before AIDS. So the long-suffering stylist interrupted him in mid-spew:

"Golan and Globus' people are talking seven figures."

Dr. Edwine just gave off a look somewhat blanker than usual.

"Is the cocktail pianist playing 'I Did It My Way' too loudly?" asked the stylist, reaching out both hands to pat the slightly baggy, orange-bristly cheeks. "Don't be a mensch. Or do be, I don't care. But did you hear what I just said? Seven figures. Siete. Nana."

"—yeah?" Dr. Edwine stared into the brownish spaces over the bar. "Oh. You mean they don't count the two figures behind the decimal point? I always wondered about that."

But still there was no recognizable emotional response. So the stylist just stared at him awhile until social discomfort forced a reaction.

"Hmm," Dr. Edwine said, stroking his admittedly wonderful Arafat-esque beard with the fingers of one hand while tallying on the others. "Oh yeah. Seven. That is sort of a whole bunch of money, isn't it?"

He exerted to lift his voice to some semblance of excitement, or even interest, obviously just to be polite. Here he was, on the verge of achieving about eighty-five percent of every other American's wet dream, and he was only concerned about not hurting his stylist's feelings. It was obvious that this large alien presence on the other side of the table, surrounded by his sugar- and fat-coagulated empties, could never be deflowered. At least not with money.

"That advance you laid on me put us over the top for good," said Dr. Edwine. Then he frowned a bit and added, self-consciously, "Fiducially speaking, I mean."

"Of course," said the stylist, trying not to sigh.

"I mean," said Dr. Edwine, "we've got enough to live off the interest till the four of us die. All we need is about twenty-five, um, kay a year, or maybe thirty, if we move back west and keep our heads down. Matter of fact—"

He shifted in the chair that was about three sizes too small for him, and paused a moment. He was apparently thinking, and that boded ill. Clearly, it would soon be time to deliver the standard apotheosis speech.

"—I already missed my youngest's baptism," said Dr. Edwine. "And, seeing as how there's nothing between here and there except a little sand, I'd like to just grab a plane and—"

"Think of it, Dr. Edwine," the stylist began to recite in a near monotone. "Your words, your very own words, will be distributed thickly and widely enough so that, even in an—um, what declension of the word scenario would a good Latinist use here?"

"What case?"

"Worst.... Never mind. Where was I? Oh, yes. So that at least one copy of you is likely to survive whatever holocaust the big boys in Washington have cooked up for us. From that point on, you will have a crack at immortality. You might even become the divinely inspired author of canonical scripture, if you get some of those enormous relatives you're always talking about to bury a couple copies in a jar, Qumran-wise, in the Utah Salt Flats."

Nothing. Nary a flare of either booger-packed nostril. Christ, not another level-headed one with wholesome values solidly in place. Guilt, the cheapest of shots, but sure-fire in the case of these hicks, would have to suffice.

"Besides," (a much bitchier voice now) "you agreed in writing to pitch in with the promotion. In any case, you'd be obligated on a strictly gentlepersonly basis. After all, it's not you who're taking all the risks."

The stylist let that sink in a couple minutes, shifted on bored buttocks and continued.

"I wasn't going to tell you this, but probably you've already guessed it anyway. You were chosen literally at random. You're the communications industry's equivalent of a sweepstakes winner. The only prerequisite was that nobody, but nobody should be able to accuse us of cronyism or star-currying this time, as they did after our previous efforts with Harvard graduates and rock musicians. For you, Dearie, are as obscure as obscure can be. You're a middle-class male WASP, a Dr. Nobody from the—"

"I believe it's called the Intermountain Wastes," twanged one of the consultants, who were just showing up, unbuckling and peeling off their expensive deerskin driving gloves and flopping them casually on the table, heedless of the accumulations of tan fluid.

"—of all places. And you've spent your entire adult life in boring, déclassé dumps like Asia, where nothing of any interest could ever happen. You've fewer good connections than a Taiwanese word processor."

"But wait a minute," snarled the other consultant. "If that's the case, then what could the strategy possibly be?"

The stylist turned away from the "author" and began to talk shop.

"This one's not too old. He could just squeeze in under the wire. But he's too decrepit (forgive me, Love) for the Brats. And the public's gotten wise to the dewy youth thing anyway."

"Yes," said a consultant, "I'm afraid generation mongering has been played out for the next few seasons."

"So, in the absence of any fresh ideas," said the stylist, coolly surveying the various vacant brows around the table, "the promo will probably wind up being the industry's final last-ditch effort, in this century, at least, to revive the old McCullough/Doctorow/Irving ruse—"

"You know," one of them said to Dr. Edwine, "where the sheer size of the advance itself constitutes the cornerstone of the whole ad campaign?"

"Huh?" he said.

"—but this time with the Judith Guest twist added."

"You know, Dr. Edwine. Over the transom? The first unagented contract since Ordinary People?"

"Transom, oh yeah," said Dr. Edwine, inspecting a surfboard-sized thumbnail.

"Now, in consideration of the mid-list feel of this number, the advance could only be in the upper-mid six figures, of course. Slightly lower than Helprin's. But it's more than enough to attract attention in these days of deep recession."

As if another indication of his flaccid incorruptibility were needed, Dr. Edwine not only failed to pay attention to this last bit of the conversation, but indicated, through more of his ear-splitting body language, that he'd only noticed one thing so far this afternoon: the cooling of the rapture he'd once been able to elicit from the stylist and associates, his three mentors in grooming and personal hygiene.

The adoration-starved goon now tried to stoke up the original fervor with an obvious attempt to call attention to his personal trademarks. He crossed his legs, exposing about three feet of hound's-toothed shin, and, with audible effort, tried to recreate the smile he'd flashed at himself in the first of uncounted L. A. booze puddles. He succeeded in grunting up only a very sappy approximation.

The stylist wondered if maybe they'd come on a bit too strong, too soon. This was a new world's record: Dr. Edwine was already self-parodying, before things had even gotten off the ground. Everything was lost.

What the hell. At least now they could find out the answer to the question which the three of them had been asking themselves and each other, from the first moment he'd galumphed off the All Nippon Airways 747 with no luggage but a manuscript box. At the secret signal, the gay banter suddenly ceased, and they got more serious than "their Dr. Samuel Edwine" had ever seen them.

The stylist looked at him with narrowed eyes and said, "We're just curious. We're not really part of the firm that's doing your project, as you know. We're just contracted consultants. So we don't give a shit. The nightmare legalities aren't our problem. With the budget those maniacs have allotted, you're guaranteed to make some kind of splash in the media; and whatever happens to your reputation, which is your problem, your presentation-self will now and forevermore be unassailable. It will always reflect well on us, like—"

"—like giant hot sunshine bouncing off wet teeth," interposed one of the consultants in mock rapture, getting a kick in return.

"Whatever. So you can be honest, Dr. Edwine. Your secret's safe with us."

In unison they glanced at the atrocious carbon copy tucked under his enormous arm, which he, in his naïveté, had brought along, thinking they might want to discuss it. Everyone, including Dr. Edwine himself, seemed to wince at the odor, which the thing had retained all this time, of chewed-up vitamin-B complex supplements.

It was the unmistakable scent of an obsolete, FDA-banned, carcinogenic type of capsule no longer available anywhere in the free world outside a certain medium-large salt-flat community, eight hundred miles to the north and east, tucked and suffocating under its own little entrenched temperature inversion, on the near slope of the Rocky Mountains.

"You've read the thing?" asked Dr. Edwine, with something strangely resembling envy in his voice.

"No. But, then, neither has the team of screenwriters who've already done the movie adaptation."

"So," said one of the weird sisters, "are you going to tell us, or do we hit our knees and, um, beg?"

Six mascaraed eyes grazed the author's puckery nylon fly, the final thing holding together trousers purchased, on special, twenty years earlier, from a now-bankrupt Big, Tall and Portly franchise in Utah.

"Dr. Edwine, who really wrote that book?"

* * *

Hartelrode's whole body smelled of vitamin-B complex capsules. He had tried so long and hard to improve himself according to the lights of the people who ran the town and permitted him to mop up their prayer hall, that the oppressive odor had permanently commingled with his sweat and everything it flowed on. All the while he'd failed to realize that his body was the only thing about him the Church Elders approved of, specifically his reproductive powers. It was his behavior and thinking they wanted rectified.

In any case, Sam never had a clue that his friend had written everything down until the last conceivable minute, when the upper portion of Hartelrode lay mumbling and dying in his arms.

The unhappy man had somehow made it to the organ loft and wedged his lower two thirds behind the pipes. He had underestimated his own girth, but enough of him was concealed to make things difficult for whoever would try to find him. When the grimly anticipated time came, the organ's mighty turbofan would circulate his essence throughout the building—an invisible, if not divine vengeance.

"Here's the master key," Hartelrode said. "Short out the air conditioner with a slat or two of that Venetian blind like I showed you. Except be careful. The both of us don't need to bunk here all week. By Sunday a good head of green corpse steam should be built up in this place, just in time for prayer meeting."

His snarl released only a fraction of his terminal resentment.

The first thing he'd done after his wife, Registered Nurse LurLeen, had compelled him with her "bewitching, bottomless booty" to reenter the fold, was to develop a serious heart condition, along with an unnatural animosity toward their neighborhood "bishop." That pious polygamist also happened to double as their landlord. He had promptly housed the family in white slums on the barren foothills along Moroni Boulevard, and he'd set aside this janitor's job in the local prayer hall for Hartelrode, who'd been, by preference, unemployable for fifty-five years. The "bishop" had taken Sam's fat friend aside and explained, in so many words, that the job was forthcoming only because the Church, in the long run, couldn't afford to weaken such good breeding stock (five blue-eyed, blond, baptizable boys already) with malnutrition.

"Don't you care about your sons being indoctrinated?" Sam once asked while helping haul bulk quantities of disposable diapers from the local wholesale warehouse.

"Naw," Hartelrode had said, looking significantly into the beer case and shuffling three separate decks of double coupons and food stamps. "I'll be dead before it gets real noticeable in their behavior."

Since Sam had known him he'd been trying to come up with the perfect way to die. Wanting to be helpful, Sam once suggested skating up a frozen river on a December night and curling up on the ice with a fifth of George Dickel. But Hartelrode dismissed that as too effeminate. Without Sam's assistance, he had eventually lit upon the "final, perfect and right" procedure. It was a regional modification of the method endorsed by none other than Dylan Thomas when he lined up the bourbon doubles and deliberately downed them in rapid succession to induce the massive "insult to the brain" that consummated his lifelong suicide.

"You should have seen what I ate on my dinner break," Hartelrode now burped into the echoing spaces of the choir stalls. He gestured toward a pile of dripping brown paper bags under the organ bench.

"I strung coils and coils of that good moist Idaho Basque mutton sausage along the hymnal rack. Then I humbly knelt down and said my prayers to Beelzebub. I kept my hands folded real pious and chowed down with just my lips and teeth. To add another dimension to the fragrance, I went downtown a couple weeks ago and caught a dose of the gleet. The exploding buboes began to appear only last evening. Want to see?"

But he no longer had the strength to unwedge his body from between the A and B-flat diapason pipes, and Sam was not eager to lend a hand. Hartelrode seemed already to be bloating up.

"Well, anyhow," he grunted, "in the golden register up yonder it can't be tallied against me as adultery, seeing as how I had other than sporting motives. Jesus will be able to tell just how disinterested I was by the perfect way I timed everything. Why, just this morning I finished this baby and submitted the original copy to a newish outfit in the Writer's Market, under your return address, and I sure hope you don't mind, Buddy."

He handed over something vitamin-redolent and barely legible.

Obviously this was supposed to be Hartelrode's dramatic dying act, for at this point the mutton kicked in and his physical condition suddenly deteriorated. His words began to be pinched off at the ends with implosions of agony from his rib cage. His turquoise lips expelled desperate syllables in synch with the few final spasms of a fist-sized, diseased thing inside of him that squished out the seconds in triple time. It was shaped like a pair of outsized, fornicating oysters, and was colored, in Sam's imagination at any rate, like a pound or so of on-special hamburger.

Sam tried to get his friend to be silent, but Hartelrode had some more things to say. Perhaps he'd been indoctrinated more thoroughly than he would ever admit in whatever eternity awaited him—for, somewhere behind his swirling eyeballs, his suffocating brain recalled a few business details that needed hashing over before he gasped his last.

Sam was to publish it under his own name, to spare Nurse LurLeen the lasting shame of being widow to a posthumously excommunicated and execrated man. Being a "gentile" who only associated with other secular types, Sam ran no risk of shame, but on the contrary stood every chance of achieving the closest thing to glory and immortality imaginable among the members of his socioeconomic class.

He was anonymously to transfer as much of the royalties as he felt was fair, along with proceeds from sales of auxiliary and spin-off rights, to a trust fund for the kids. Of course, he was entitled to expenses and whatever recompense he deemed right for his trouble.

Hartelrode, in a hoarse, receding whisper, explained that, if they let her in on the deal, the bug-eyed night-station Nurse LurLeen could be relied upon to follow the orders of her "bishop" and use her legal position as heir to quash the publication of the admittedly blasphemous thing. If some bowdlerized version ever did see the light of day, and if the money went through her fingers, she would doubtlessly retain the good financial sense associated with her denomination, and would decline the agent's offer of installment payments to outflank the taxman. She would insist on the full wad at once so she could tithe ten percent off the top. And the five boys, as semi-orphans, would wind up living off the same potato chip and diluted Kool Aid diet that had barely sustained them before their dad went to all this inconvenience to secure them an occasional meal of meat and vegetables. And fruit. And whole grains. And fresh milk.

"Plus vitamin supplements," Hartelrode added. "With iron. "They like Bugs Bunny chewables the best, but they'll tolerate Flintstones in a pinch, if you cull out the maroon Bam-Bams before—"

"Um," said Sam, "I don't think I'll be around. Maybe Nurse LurLeen—"

But in his extremity Hartelrode seemed to have lost the ability to hear voices other than his own. His palsied hands groped at Sam's shirt collar and he desperately searched Sam's eyes for some reassuring glint of intelligence, however tiny.

He gasped, "Did you get all that?"

"Um," said Sam, "is there a phone jack or something up here? Maybe I could fetch an extension and you could sort of repeat some of that important fiduciary stuff to my wife. Her brain seems to—"

But a fit of blood-reeking coughs cut him off.

With what promised to be his antepenultimate breath, Hartelrode's eyes lit upon Sam and, for the first time in this friendship, focused complete attention on him. Then he looked around at the prayer hall for a couple of seconds. Black velvet portraits of the Bambi-eyed "Prophet, Seer and Revelator" hung on all sides. Panic touched Hartelrode's face.

"How do you do it?"

"Do what?"

"How do you get your wife to let you sleep in the car Sundays? She's at least as devout as LurLeen."

"Different faith," said Sam. "The Pope's got controlling interest in all that stuff by Michelangelo. He can't pretend to need my money as much as Nurse LurLeen's boss pretends to need yours. Although I guess they're both as gluttonous for new babies as Moloch ever was, and—"

"If I could've just slept in the car like you," moaned Hartelrode, "none of this would have happened."

"Including the book, don't forget the book," Sam said in a voice intended to be soothing, the voice one uses when saying "there, there" to a baby with night terrors.

Hartelrode soon entered a brief period of death-rattling delirium, during which he popped out and handed over his saliva-ropy dentures, mumbling something about LurLeen's recyclables bin.

"And roses to deaden the clods as they fall," he crooned, chuckled, coughed some more.

And then he definitely died. No doubt about it. The eyes turned to glazed plastic, like a pair of taxidermist's inserts. The vitamin B-enriched sweat flowed its last. Blood and water trickled from the downside ear and soaked into Sam's shoulder.

* * *

At the split second of his friend's death, just before he cleared out of the prayer hall on trembling legs, something happened inside Sam that he was terrified and ashamed even to think about until several months ago. To this day, though the shame has evaporated with time, he is scared to mention it to anybody, even his wife, into whose lap he disburdens every other load of psychic garbage accumulated in the course of his more or less fashionably depraved life.

Sam felt a rush, a hot visitation, when Hartelrode's eyes turned to plastic. It was as if the putatively divine essence of the human spirit were but an impersonal electrical field that can be discharged from one ready vessel to another, even accumulated and stored in some skull-housed wet-cell battery. Or maybe Sam is just a soul-vampire, sucking sustenance from another human being's dissolution.

With death so rampant in the world, this cannibal scavenger talent, cultivated, could in time puff Sam up into a metaphysical, as well as physical, 330-pounder, and he could end up immortal as an angel of either polarity.

Or maybe Hartelrode's book alone will render Sam deathless without his having to drink any more human souls. But he'll believe that when it hits the shops in the spring, and if he ever reads the thing.