A Thousand Deaths (53 page)

Our workshop members visited him regularly, and everybody remarked about how much healthier he was looking. He was eating regular meals for the first time in nearly a year, even though the meals weren't especially appetizing... the cooks, all residents, simply took whatever foods came in as donations and turned them into stews, which most residents chose to eat between slices of bread. Stew sandwiches twice a day, seven days a week; not so different from the stomach-turning foods native to Planet D that George had so colorfully described.

Temporarily deprived of his laptop, he resorted to writing in longhand on legal pads, a writing method he hadn't utilized since he'd been a teenager. During long visits with him while he sat behind a reception desk in a quiet satellite building, I could see he had returned to his old, sprightly, witty self, reminiscing about the dozens of wonderful writers he'd befriended over the years and his misadventures in the publishing world.

These relatively good times didn't last, however. George's health took a turn for the worse as his old stomach ailments began plaguing him again, forcing the Bridge House managers to frequently take him to Charity Hospital, which George hated. He also started souring on Bridge House itself. A librarian friend offered to put him up in a spare bedroom in her Metairie townhouse. He came to a few of our workshops and said he was working some on
Word of Night
and a new novel featuring the character Renfield from
Dracula.
But he started isolating himself again and falling into old, bad habits. The events of September 11, 2001, hit him particularly hard, both because he had many friends in New York City and his agent recommended that he stop work on the fourth Marîd Audran book, saying that no American publisher would be interested in a novel featuring an Arab hero. George had been counting on a lucrative contract for
Word of Night,
and his agent's judgment sent him spiraling back into depression.

When George's librarian friend could no longer house him, another friend, Jack Stacker, stepped in and rented a small efficiency apartment for him in a working-class neighborhood along Elysian Fields Avenue outside the Quarter. Within a few months, George discovered a reservoir of strength and hope and managed to rally. He came back to our workshop early in 2002 and presented us with a big chunk of his Renfield novel, telling us that he hadn't felt this motivated and confident about his writing since he'd been in his mid-twenties. After many years of viewing his writing as a job, a paycheck, he was now having fun again, and the words were flowing once more, quickly and easily and powerfully. He'd finish the Renfield book in a few months, he said, and then he'd go back and tackle
Word of Night
again, his agent's cautions be damned. He was writing stories for anthologies to bring in some fast money. He wanted to become a Zen master of prose, pare down his style to the equivalent of the spare brush strokes of classic Japanese landscape painting. He felt truly alive again.

So, just like Sandor Courane, George was gifted with one last period of lucidity and power, a dying luminescence. Suddenly he was eager to see friends again, meeting Jack and others for lunch during his last week. In his final conversations with them and with Barbara, he told them he was happy, that he felt his best days and his best books and stories were still ahead of him. Would that it had been so. But his body, worn out from decades of illnesses and tumors, operations and self-abuse, had other ideas. Following a late April Friday afternoon outing with Jack, George said he wasn't feeling well and went to bed early. While he was sleeping, his stomach, patched up like an ancient boiler in the guts of a tramp steamer, massively hemorrhaged. He never woke up.

George's obituary appeared in newspapers around the world, in
The New York Times, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The London Guardian
, and
The Cleveland Plain Dealer,
the daily newspaper of his birth city. His greatest fear during the years before his death, when every one of his more than twenty books had fallen out of print, was that he would be forgotten, that the waves would settle over the sunken wreck of his career as though he'd never written at all. However, as Hollywood wags have long asserted, death is a good career move. And George's work is just too darned good to be forgotten. Marty Halpern of Golden Gryphon Press has proven a tireless advocate of George's classic shorter pieces, introducing them to a new generation of readers in two previous beautifully designed collections published since George's passing. Orb Books recently reissued new trade editions of George's most popular novels, the Budayeen trilogy—
When Gravity Fails
, A
Fire in the Sun,
and
The Exile Kiss—
books which never should have fallen out of print. National book columnists have taken note, honoring George by selecting the first two Golden Gryphon collections as notable books of the year.

George's works will continue to delight readers and influence other writers long after his death in a tiny apartment on Elysian Fields Avenue. As a new audience discovers his stories and novels, the bright spark that was at the core of George Alec Effinger experiences a thousand rebirths. And we, his admirers and friends, can hope that, like Sandor Courane's diary, this book will be passed from hand to hand and will cause its readers to ponder. Perhaps, like TECT's imperious and heartless rule, our nation's inequitable patchwork system of health insurance will be found to deserve dismantlement. Perhaps, like at the end of "Fatal Disk Error," a bad and outmoded system will then be replaced with something better and more humane.

I think George and Sandor would both like that.

 

Andrew Fox
 

New Orleans
 

May 2006