The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (39 page)

“Hello?” I said.

“I understand you are looking for the violet Kafka,” said the voice.

I was rendered speechless for a moment. Then I blurted out, “Who is this?”

“Am I correct?” asked the voice.

“Yes,” I said. “The one with the story …”

“‘Bright Morning,'” he said. “I know the story. Very rare.”

“Supposedly it doesn't exist,” I said.

“That's interesting,” he said, “because I have a copy of the volume before me as we speak. I'm selling it.”

“How much?” I inquired, too eagerly.

“That depends. I have another client also interested in it. I thought perhaps you and he would like to bid for it. The bidding starts at eighty dollars.”

“That seems rather low,” I said.

“Come tonight,” he said, and gave me a set of directions to his place. The location was not too far from me, directly south, in the Pine Barrens. “Eight o'clock, and if you should decide to participate, I will explain more than the price.”

“What is your name?” I asked.

He hung up on me.

I was altogether elated that this voice had validated the existence of the story, but at the same time I found the enigmatic nature of the call somewhat disturbing. The starting price was suspiciously low, and the fact that the caller would not give a name didn't bode well. I envisioned myself going to some darkened address and being murdered for my wallet. This alternated with a vision of discovering an abandoned railway station in the woods where the angry Kafka of my dreams would be waiting to bite my neck. At seven o'clock, though, I drove down to the money machine in town, withdrew five hundred dollars (more than I could afford), and then headed south on route 206.

My fears were allayed when, at precisely 7:45, I pulled up in front of a beautifully well-kept Victorian of near-mansion dimensions on a well-lit street in the small town of Pendricksburg. I parked in the long driveway and went to the front door. After knocking twice, a young woman answered and let me in.

“Mr. Deryn will see you. Come this way,” she said.

I followed. The place was stunning, the woodwork and floors so highly polished, it was like walking through a hall of mirrors. There were chandeliers and Persian carpets and fresh flowers, like something from one of my wife's magazines. Classical music drifted through the house at low volume, and I felt as though I was touring a museum. We came to a door at the back of the house; she opened it and invited me to step inside.

The first thing I noticed were the bookcases lining the walls, and then I gave a start because sitting behind the desk was what I at first took to be a human frog, smoking a cigar. When I concentrated on the form it resolved its goggle eyes, hunch, and pouch into nothing more than an oddly put together person. But what was even more incredible, it was Bettleman. He was older, with a few days' growth of beard, but it was most definitely him. Not rising, he waved his hand to indicate one of the chairs facing his desk.

“Have a seat,” he said.

I walked slowly forward and sat down, experiencing a twinge of déjà vu.

“Bettleman,” I said.

He looked quizzically at me, and said, “I'm sorry, you must be mistaken. My name is John Deryn.” Then he laughed and the pouch undulated, convincing me even more completely it was him.

“You're not Christian Bettleman?” I asked.

He shook his head and smiled.

I quickly decided that if he wanted to play-act it was fine by me; I was there for the book. “The violet Kafka,” I said, “can I see it?”

He reached into a drawer in front of him and pulled out a thick volume. There it was, in seemingly pristine condition. Paging through it with his long graceful fingers, he stopped somewhere in the middle and then turned it around and laid it on the desk facing me. “Bright Morning,” he said.

“My God,” I said. “I was beginning to think it had merely been a delusion.”

“Yes, I know exactly what you mean,” he said. “I've spent a good portion of my life tracing the history of that story.”

“Is it a forgery?” I asked.

“Nothing of the sort, though, in its style it is slightly unusual for Kafka, somewhat reminiscent of Hoffmann.”

“What can you tell me about it?” I asked.

“I will try to keep this brief,” he said, drawing on his cigar. His exposition came forth wrapped in a cloud. “In the words of Kafka's Czech translator and one-time girl friend, Milena Jesenska, Kafka ‘saw the world as full of invisible demons, who tear apart and destroy defenseless people.' She was not speaking metaphorically. From the now expurgated portions of his diaries, we know that he had a recurring dream of one of these demons, who appeared to him as an old man named Krouch. Of course, knowing Kafka's problems with his father, the idea of it being an ‘old man' admittedly has its psychological explanations.

“In 1921, when Franz was in the advanced stages of tuberculosis, he attests to his friend Max Brod, as evidenced in Brod's own journal, that this demon, Krouch, is responsible for his inability to write. He feels that every day that goes by that he does not write a new story, the disease becomes stronger. Being the mystic that he is, Kafka devises a plan to exorcise the demon. What he does is utterly brilliant. He writes a story about the vampiric Krouch, ensnaring him in the words. At the end of the tale, F., the figure who represents Kafka, disappears from the story back to the freedom of this reality. One believes upon reading it that the young writer is, himself, trapped, but not so, or at least not in Kafka's mind. This is all documented in a letter to the writer, Franz Werfel. Hence the non-indicative but promising title of the story, ‘Bright Morning.'

“It becomes clear to Kafka soon after that, although he has effectively imprisoned the demon in the words of the story, Krouch still has a limited effect on him when the text is in close proximity. So what does he do? In 1922, at his last meeting with Milena, in a small town known as Gmünd, on the Czech-Austrian border, he gives her all of his diaries. Along with those notebooks and papers is ‘Bright Morning.' How effective Kafka's plan was is open to question. He only lived until 1924, but consider the further life of poor Milena, now the owner of the possessed text: she nearly dies in childbirth; has an accident which causes a fracture of her right knee, leaving her partially crippled for the rest of her life; becomes addicted to morphine; is arrested in Prague for her pro-Jewish writing, and is sent, in 1940, to Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany where she suffers poor health. A kidney is removed when it gets infected, and not too long afterward the other fails and she dies.

“Here, ‘Bright Morning' seems to quietly evaporate for some time until 1959 when the Pearfield Publishing Company of Commack, Long Island, New York, publishes an edition of Kafka containing the story. At the time, the building that houses the small publisher catches fire, burns to the ground, and of the few boxes of books salvaged, one contains twelve copies of the violet edition. Six of them went to local libraries, six to the local USO.”

“And so, it carries a curse,” I said.

“That is for you to decide,” he said. “I acquired this copy years ago from a shellfish harvester who worked the waters of the Great South Bay. He might have said something about a curse, but then people who make a living on the water are usually somewhat superstitious. Another might laugh at the idea. I will admit that I have had my own brushes with fate.”

“You cannot deny that you are Bettleman,” I said.

He stared at me and a moment later the young woman was at the door. “Mr. Deryn,” she said, “the other gentleman is here. Shall I show him in?”

“Please do,” he told her. When she left to carry out his wish, he turned back to me. “I have chosen to only tell you the story behind the story,” said Deryn. “For old time's sake.” Then he smiled and with his middle finger pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. By now, the cigar was a smoldering stub, and he laid it in the ashtray to extinguish itself.

I was, of course, about to make some inane exclamation, like “I knew it!” or “Did you think I could be so easily fooled?” but the other bidder entered the room and saved Bettleman and myself from the embarrassment.

Not only had I recognized Bettleman, but with one glance, I also knew my competition in the auction. I should have been more startled by the synchronicity of it all, but the events that preceded this fresh twist allowed me to take it in stride. He was another writer, working also in my genre, a big, oafish lout by the name of Jeffrey Ford. You might have heard of him, perhaps not. A few years ago he wrote a book called
The Physiognomy
which, by some bizarre fluke, perhaps the judges were drugged, won a World Fantasy Award. I'd met and spoken to him before on more than one occasion at various conferences. What the critics and editors saw in his work, I'll never know. Our brief careers, so far, had been very similar, but there was no question I was the better writer. He leaned over the desk and shook Bettleman's hand, and then he turned to me and, before sitting, nodded but said nothing.

Bettleman, in his affable Mr. Deryn guise, allowed Ford to inspect the book. Once that was finished, the bidding was to begin. Ford wanted to know why it was to start as low as eighty dollars, and Deryn told him only, “I have my reasons.”

I had been slightly put off the book by what I had been told, but once Ford started making offers, I couldn't resist. I felt like if he were to win, he would be walking out of there with my best plot ever. We two cheapskate writers upped the ante at ten dollars an increment, but even at this laggardly pace, we were soon in the three-hundred-dollar range. Bettleman was smiling like Toad of Toad Hall, and when he stopped for a moment to light another cigar, my gaze moved around the room. Off in the corner, behind his desk, wedged into a row of books, I saw a large bell jar, and floating in it, a delicate, beringed hand. For some reason the sight of this horrid curio jogged my memory, and I recalled, perhaps for the first time something that I had wanted to suppress, that the woman who had fallen off the boat back in the bay and was lost those many years ago, was not a woman at all but a young girl, Lela Ritz. For a brief moment, I saw her naked in the moonlight. Then Bettleman croaked and the bidding resumed.

As we pushed onward, nickel-and-diming our way toward my magic number, five hundred dollars, I could not dismiss all of the tragedy left in the wake of “Bright Morning.” I thought about Lynn and the kids and how I might be jeopardizing their safety or maybe their lives by this foolish desire. Still my mouth worked, and I let the prices roll off my tongue. By the time I took control of myself and fully awoke to the auction, my counterpart had just proposed four hundred and fifty.

He added, “And I mean it. It is my absolute final offer.”

Ford now turned to look at me, and I knew I had him. By a good fifty dollars, I had him.

“Your apple,” said Bettleman, looking at me from behind his thick lenses. Now he was no longer smiling, but I saw a look of sadness on his face.

That long second of my decision was like a year scratch raking for hands in the pool of the Colony Inn. The truth was, I didn't know what I wanted. I felt the margins of the story closing in, the sentences wrapping around my wrists and ankles, the dots of i's swimming in schools across my field of vision. Experiencing now the full weight of my weariness, I finally said, “I pass.”

“Very well,” said Bettleman.

I rose and shook his hand, nodded to Ford, who was already reaching into the pocket of his two-sizes-too-small jeans to retrieve a crumpled wad of money, and left.

Call me a superstitious fool if you like, I might very well deserve the appellation. As it turned out, I never finished the promised story, and the publisher of the collection, Golden Gryphon Press, retracted their offer to do the book. Of all the ironies, they filled my spot on their list with a collection by Ford. He even wrote, especially for it, a story entitled “Bright Morning,” making no attempt to disguise his swiping of Kafka's material. One of the early, prepublication critics of the book wrote in a scathing review, “Ford is Kafka's monkey.” Nothing could have interested me less. I returned to my teaching job. I spent time with my family. I slept at night with no frightening visits from old or thin demons. In the mornings I woke to the beauty of the sun.

A year later, after retiring from my brief career as a fantasy writer, I read that Ford, two weeks prior to the publication of his collection, had given a reading from his manuscript of “Bright Morning” at one of the conventions (I believe in Massachusetts). According to the article, which appeared in a reputable newspaper, after receiving a modest round of applause from the six or seven people in attendance, he stepped out into the bright morning and quietly evaporated, the pages scattering on the wind like frightened ghosts.

This story is for Marty Halpern, editor of the collection you hold in your hands. Without him, you would be holding air. As for the piece itself, I did spend quite a few years as a clammer on the Great South Bay. The sailor did take our picture and then shoot himself in the head. The maids were mother and daughter
and
sisters, and slaughtered livestock as their part-time job. I did throw a book off the overpass, but it wasn't
Mansfield Park,
which I actually liked. Kafka did kick me in the nuts. I did evaporate.

Acknowledgments

I owe a great debt to Michael Swanwick for taking the time from a superhuman schedule to write the Introduction to this collection. There are so many reasons why any writer would be honored by his endorsement, not the least of which, for me personally, is that he is the author of
Jack Faust
, one of my favorite novels, and so many wonderful stories that have influenced my own short fiction writing. The most important reason, though, struck me one night when I happened to be sitting next to him at a dinner party in a restaurant. He asked me if I had ever read Fritz Leiber. I hadn't. He told me about Leiber and
Our Lady of Darkness
. Before this incident, Michael had always seemed somewhat of a conundrum, but in that telling, I witnessed an incredible enthusiasm and genuine excitement for the art and craft of writing that one would be hard pressed to find in the newest of writers. Later on, I thought to myself,
This guy has already written more great stories than five of me could write in a lifetime, won every major award at least once, and yet his passion for the endeavor remains wholly intact
. I count that as a very rare quality.