A Thousand Deaths (46 page)

"Can I get you something, honey?" Eileen called from the kitchen.

"Hmm? Oh, no, I'm okay." Courane sat in the living room, staring at the Mango Red teapot. Finally, he took a deep breath and let it out, then reached forward and rubbed the teapot.

Once again, there was a clap of thunder and the genie appeared. "Aha!" cried the towering figure. "You have made your decision at last!"

"Uh uh, sorry. I just needed a little advice."

The genie folded his massive arms across his chest and frowned fiercely. "Asking a question may properly be construed as a wish for knowledge. Free advice you don't get."

"Well," said Courane, shrugging. "I wouldn't want to see you get into trouble. You've been very good to me so far."

The genie's rich, Rex Ingrain laughter filled the living room. "Me? In trouble? With whom?"

"With the Powers That Be, of course. Now, you promised me that I'd know when I knew what to spend my final wish on. But I don't see how I'll know. I must've believed I knew twenty times already today. What would happen if I summoned you forth and wasted my wish on one of these phantom notions? It would be completely unfair to me because my second wish was designed to protect me from that. I'm sure that if the Powers That Be–"

"Yes, yes, I see your point," said the genie, grumbling. "All right, here's what I'll do. I'll know when you know you know, and I'll appear to you at that time. Don't worry about rubbing the teapot. That's not really necessary, to tell you the truth."

"Then why is it such an important part of the tradition?"

The genie grinned, and not in an innocent way. "There's an old adage: Give a man enough teapot, and he'll... he'll—"

"—drown himself?" Courane was just trying to be helpful.

"Something like that," growled the genie. He flashed Courane a glance that had more than a bit of menace in it. "Just relax until I appear to you, mortal." Then the genie dissolved into smoke and flowed back into the teapot.

"How long will that be?" called Courane, but answer came there none. Courane felt a kind of sick dread, because whenever someone told him to relax, it was usually just before something like a sigmoidoscopy.

For dinner they had a huge pizza delivered, with whole roasted garlic cloves, sun-dried tomatoes, andouille sausage, and extra cheese. Courane barely tasted the food, and he said only a few words to Eileen all evening. She seemed to understand how distracted he was by the whole wish business, and he was grateful to her. "I know," he said, "I'll wish that women were given the same educational and employment opportunities as men."

"That would be a good wish," said Eileen. "A wish you could be proud of."

"Nah," said Courane, because the genie hadn't appeared, so Courane knew that he didn't know. Not yet.

It happened in the stilly watches of the night. Courane had set his alarm radio to wake him at 6:00 A.M., but long before that happened, while the world was still wrapped in blackness with only the lonely calls of the nighthawks to disturb the night's peace, a mighty hand shook him by the shoulder. It took a few seconds for Courane to waken and understand what was happening. All he could see in the gloom of his bedroom were gleaming eyes and strong, white teeth.

"Just a second," he said, getting out of bed as quietly as possible. "Let's go downstairs."

The genie may have shrugged.

Courane took the teapot from beneath his pillow. He didn't know if he'd need it or not. A few moments later he sat down at the kitchen table. Courane yawned; the genie waited.

"Hey!" Courane said. "This means I know what to wish for, right?"

The genie gave him only the slightest of nods.

"Some help," muttered Courane. He looked at the teapot, still wondering what the right wish was. And then he knew. The wish gleamed in his mind like a nugget of gold.

He looked up slowly. "Yes," he murmured, "that's it! I wish that everything will work out for the best for everyone."

"This, then, is your wish? Your third and final wish?"

Courane felt cool and comfortable and completely confident for the first time since he'd found the Fiesta teapot. "Yes," he said. "No tricks, no gimmicks, just hope."

"Very well, master," said the genie.

 

The next moment, Courane raised his head from a pillow. "Where am I?" he asked.

"A hospital," said the genie. "I'm afraid all they can do is try to make you comfortable."

"What?" Courane's voice was a dry croak.

"The teapot," said the genie. "You've been carrying it around for weeks. You've even been sleeping with it. It's the radiation. I'm... I'm very sorry, master."

"That's crazy. It's nonsense!" Courane began to cough, and he realized that he was heavily medicated, and that beneath it lurked an immense pain. "The teapot," he said, letting his head fall back to the pillow. "It's been proven... the radiation disperses within two inches of the glazed china. No danger at all."

The genie almost looked sad. "Normally that is so, master. You are forgetting the Vortices of the Unseen."

"The... what?"

"It is a magic teapot, master. It has been amplifying and intensifying the subatomic danger."

"Then–"

"Try to relax, master. Your beautiful wife and your many friends have been keeping a vigil. They've been by your side constantly since you became ill. They are waiting outside now. You've never enjoyed such a wonderful and meaningful ending. And you leave behind Eileen, who will be taken care of splendidly, thanks to the life insurance policies you so thoughtfully provided. Finally, you will be remembered with love and joy for many, many years. She doesn't know it yet, but your wife is carrying your son, who will grow up to be an honorable man and a strong support for her in her old age."

"Then I suppose everything is working out for the best," said Courane softly. It wasn't what he'd expected, but he hadn't really known what to expect. In any event, a few hours later, surrounded by his grieving wife and loving friends, Sandor Courane passed away peacefully in his sleep.

 

 

 

The Thing from the Slush

 

 

Courane began his brisk stride even before the elevator doors opened completely to let him into the office. By the time the secretary looked up, he was already striding by manfully, purposefully, resolutely across the deep blue shag. The secretary was the only reason for his determined air; there was nothing urgent waiting for him in his little cubicle. The secretary's name was Miss Weber. She was some dish. She had been hired to replace Miss Brant, who had been carried away screaming after being asked to appear in another one of these stories.

There was, in truth, nothing urgent waiting in Courane's office, but that is not to say that what
did
wait wasn't desperate, maniacal, and overwhelming in number. They were manila envelopes, all addressed to Sandor Courane, Associate Fiction Editor,
Awesome Stories.
There were piles of envelopes, and each one had inside, like a gooey cream filling no adult human could safely consume, a short story. Maybe an epic of adventure or suspense or fantasy, but probably not. Probably the envelope contained a dog-eared manuscript—a copy of a copy of a high school English class assignment or some wrenching personal disclosures carved into paper with a Prussian blue crayon—that was neither exciting nor even interesting. It was infrequent that Courane received anything that was in truth even fiction; it was even rarer when he got something Awesome.

The title of his magazine was in some respects a misnomer, but a venerable one. That made it all right.

But all of this did not depress Sandor Courane, because he had come to understand something very important about his job as an associate fiction editor: he had not been hired to ferret out gems of literature. He had not been hired to encourage struggling, talented writers out in the broad, comma-free precincts of our land. Sandor Courane had been hired to do only one thing with the immense mountain of terrible fiction that arrived each day: he had been hired to make it go away again.

What he faced was what is known in the trade as the slush pile. That referred to the vast accumulation of stories which, despite the post office, stacked up and towered up and made mounds in the editorial offices in the same way as mounds were built by the ancient Indians of Ohio, and for much the same reasons. A story may be submitted in one of three ways. An established professional author may send a story to his or her agent, who then passes it on in a nicer envelope with a more, shall we say,
imposing
cover letter (all of which the author will pay for handsomely later, but this is an author/editor story, and we don't want to mix up author/agent stories with it, not without a complimentary Thorazine at least). Or the author may simply send the story directly to the editor, particularly if they are already acquainted professionally or in some other equally transactional manner. Now, the third method, and the most common, is for some poor Joe from Hannibal, Missouri, to package up what he believes to be the greatest short story since H. G. Wells's "The Congealed Prawn." Joe sends his story off with little idea of where it is going or what is going to happen to it once it gets there. He thinks that Ring Lardner and Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley and Maxwell Perkins and Gertrude Stein are going to sit around at the Algonquin and discuss his little bit of literary effluvium. Well, sadly, that is not precisely what is going to eventuate.

They used to say that unsolicited manuscripts were "thrown over the transom." God only knows why. Sandor Courane didn't even have a door on his office, let alone a transom. He was thirty-four years old before he even looked up "transom" in the dictionary; he always thought the phrase had something to do with forming a rewarding relationship with a publisher, like getting married by jumping over a hoe or something.

Well, on this Monday morning there were three hundred and forty envelopes, all filled with hope and tripe in equal measure. You see, all the promising stories, the ones from reputable agents or professional authors with familiar names, all those had been selected from the stack before Courane even arrived, and the Editor himself, who had a large office with a door and a window and a shelf of awards shaped like Robbie the Robot, was chuckling and weeping and being enriched by the new experiences of the human condition, but rejecting most of the truly fine pieces of writing because "they just didn't fit his current needs." His most urgent current need was finding out if Miss Weber, the secretary, lived alone, and all this laughing and crying was keeping him from making any progress at all on that front. But, generously, we will pass over value judgments here, as we did before, because the point of this present tale is entertainment and not enmity. Still, we know of a tiny, neglected bit of the Old Testament, in Leviticus or one of those books nobody ever reads, where it warns against the sins of the editor, and indicates that we writers will have the last laugh. We usually do.

Therefore it was with a deep, heartfelt, weary sigh that Sandor Courane plunged into the pool of literary branch water that had formed in his cubicle. If ever he were to see his desk again, or its contents, or have any hope of paying his rent this month, or of finding out himself about Miss Weber, then he would have to make these manuscripts disappear. In the early days of his employment he toyed with the idea originated by the Italian postal service. When they got too far behind and couldn't deliver the vast backlog of letters and parcels entrusted to their care, they bravely admitted defeat and dumped the entire load into the sun-drenched Adriatic and started over again. But Courane had dismissed that idea; it was unworthy, for he had taken a pledge upon becoming a professional author himself, that he would respect another man's right to make his own depredations upon our common language.

The first envelope was addressed simply to AWESOME STORIES. The nebbish who had sent in this masterpiece hadn't even bothered to look for a person's name on the magazine's masthead. Often, stories were submitted by people who had never even
read
the magazine; it was distressing how often Courane waded through dog stories or true confessions or collections of recipes. But this story seemed at first to belong at
Awesome.
It was a tale about the world after a nuclear holocaust (the author persisted in spelling the word "nucular," a pronunciation he had no doubt adopted from a particular president in recent years). Of course, everyone knows that at least a few stories about this situation have already been written, and even made into movies with special effects and torn clothing, but a good slush pile reader knows that there is really no such thing as an idea too old or too worn that cannot be made fresh and new by a bit of genius. The story was about this guy who wandered around Newark, New Jersey, after everything had been blown to smithereens, and not very much happened. There was nobody to talk to, so the character mused aloud to himself all the time; but, given the circumstances, who can really object to that? The hero fought off a giant sewer alligator that had followed him from New York City, and he fought a pack of mutant rats and a few other things. Then he met a girl. They looked at each other, knowing full well what was going to happen later, off-stage.

"My name is Adam," he said.

"My name is Eve," she said.

End of story. With a motion whose deftness would have brought a gasp from Miss Weber, Courane clipped on a rejection slip:
Your story has been given personal consideration but is not suitable for publication in our magazine at this time. Because of the great quantity of submissions we receive, we are sorry that we cannot respond in a more personal manner.
The writer had thoughtfully included a return envelope and postage and so, just like that, the story vanished from this little corner of the publishing world forever.

Three hundred thirty-nine more to go. Most of the time, Courane didn't need to read the whole story to make a decision; sometimes he could judge from the illiteracy of the opening paragraphs that the remainder of the story wasn't worth bothering about. But the second manuscript he picked up had been sent in by Edmund Schooner Threadwell, a force to be reckoned with. Edmund Schooner Threadwell had a longing to be a writer that surpassed all understanding. He turned out short stories the way vending machines in the supermarket produce plastic eggs with little toys in them. He sent in at least two or three stories to
Awesome
every week. Courane looked at this new one with mixed feelings. Threadwell was marginally talented, but as yet he hadn't written anything good enough to pass along to the Editor for a final decision. Courane had taken to handwriting encouraging comments on the rejection slips, to lift Threadwell out of the mire of slush that surrounded him. What Courane
wanted
to say, his better sense forbade him. He wanted to quote possibly the most marvelous response any critic ever gave an aspiring writer, what Samuel Johnson said to a young man after reading his stuff: "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." Now, some cynical readers will claim that this story created Edmund Schooner Threadwell as just such a mediocre-to-poor writer only so that we could drag in that really neat quotation. Well, it's simply not true, and the ghastly, horrifying events that will occur in the next few pages will bear this out. But there are always scoffers and doubters, and that is the price we must pay for literary celebrity.