The Best of Lucius Shepard (120 page)

“I only saw
it for a couple of seconds. I didn’t have time to get much more than a
glimpse.”

“Okay.” Ed
made the buzzing noise again. “Have you opened the second attachment?”

“Yep.”

“Once I
figured out I couldn’t determine distances, I started looking at the black
stuff, the field or whatever. I didn’t get anywhere with that. It’s just black.
Undifferentiated. Then I took a look at the horizon line. That’s how it
appeared to you, right? A black field stretching to a horizon? Well, if that
was the case, you’d think you’d see something at the front edge, but the only
thing I picked up was those bumps on the horizon.”

I studied
the bumps.

“Kinda look
like the tops of heads, don’t they?” said Ed.

The bumps
could have been heads; they could also have been bushes, animals, or a hundred
other things; but his suggestion gave me an uneasy feeling. He said he would
fool around with the picture some more and get back to me. I listened to demos.
Food of the Gods (King Crimson redux). Corpus Christy (a transsexual front man
who couldn’t sing, but the name grew on me). The Land Mines (middling roots
rock). Gopher Lad (a heroin band from Minnesota). A band called Topless Coroner
intrigued me, but I passed after realizing all their songs were about car
parts. Around eleven-thirty I took a call from a secretary at DreamWorks who
asked if I would hold for William Wine. I couldn’t place the name, but said
that I would hold and leafed through the Rolodex, trying to find him.

“Vernon!”
said an enthusiastic voice from the other side of creation. “Bill Wine. I’m
calling for David Geffen. I believe you had drinks with him at the Plug Awards
last year. You made quite an impression on David.”

The Plugs
were the Oscars of the indie business—Geffen had an ongoing interest in indie
rock and had put in an appearance. I recalled being in a group gathered around
him at the bar, but I did not recall making an impression.

“He made a
heck of an impression on me,” I said.

Pleasant
laughter, so perfect it sounded canned. “David sends his regards,” said Wine. “He’s
sorry he couldn’t contact you personally, but he’s going to be tied up all
day.”

“What can I
do for you?”

“David
listened to that new artist of yours. Joe Stanky? In all the years I’ve known
him, I’ve never heard him react like he did this morning.”

“He liked
it?”

“He didn’t
like it....” Wine paused for dramatic effect. “He was knocked out.”

I wondered
how Geffen had gotten hold of the EP. Mine not to reason why, I figured.

Wine told me
that Geffen wanted to hear more. Did I have any other recorded material?

“I’ve got
nine songs on tape,” I said. “But some of them are raw.”

“David likes
raw. Can we get a dupe?”

“You know
... I usually prefer to push out an album or two before I look for a deal.”

“Listen,
Vernon. We’re not going to let you go to the poorhouse on this.”

“That’s a
relief.”

“In fact,
David wanted me to sound you out about our bringing you in under the DreamWorks
umbrella.”

Stunned, I
said, “In what capacity?”

“I’ll let
David tell you about that. He’ll call you in a day or two. He’s had his eye on
you for some time.”

I envisioned
Sauron spying from his dark tower. I had a dim view of corporate life and I
wasn’t as overwhelmed by this news as Wine had likely presumed I would be.
After the call ended, however, I felt as if I had modeled for Michelangelo’s
Sistine Chapel mural, the man about to be touched by God’s billionaire-ish
finger. My impulse was to tell Stanky, but I didn’t want his ego to grow more
swollen. I called Andrea and learned she would be in court until midafternoon.
I started to call Rudy, then thought it would be too easy for him to refuse me
over the phone. Better to yank him out of his cave and buy him lunch. I wanted
to bust his chops about missing the EP release and I needed to talk with
someone face-to-face, to analyze this thing that was happening around Stanky.
Had the buzz I’d generated about him taken wings on a magical current? The idea
that David Geffen was planning to call seemed preposterous. Was Stanky that
good? Was I? What, if anything, did Geffen have in mind? Rudy, who enjoyed
playing Yoda to my Luke, would help place these questions in coherent
perspective.

When I
reached Rudy’s office, I found Gwen on the phone. Her makeup, usually perfect,
was in need of repair; it appeared that she had been crying. “I don’t know,”
she said with strain in her voice. “You’ll have to.... No. I really don’t
know.”

I pointed to
the inner office and mouthed,
Is he in
?

She signaled
me to wait.

“I’ve got
someone here,” she said into the phone. “I’ll have to.... Yes. Yes, I will let
you know. All right. Yes. Good-bye.” She hung up and, her chin quivering, tried
several times to speak, finally blurting out, “I’m so sorry. He’s dead. Rudy’s
dead.”

I think I
may have laughed—I made some sort of noise, some expression of denial, yet I
knew it was true. My face flooded with heat and I went back a step, as if the
words had thrown me off-balance.

Gwen said
that Rudy had committed suicide early that morning. He had—according to his wife—worked
in the office until after midnight, then driven home and taken some pills. The
phone rang again. I left Gwen to deal with it and stepped into the inner office
to call Beth. I sat at Rudy’s desk, but that felt wrong, so I walked around
with the phone for a while. Rudy had been a depressed guy, but hell, everyone
in Black William was depressed about something. I thought that I had been way
more depressed than Rudy. He seemed to have it together. Nice wife, healthy
income, kids. Sure, he was a for-shit architect in a for-shit town, and not
doing the work he wanted, but that was no reason to kill yourself.

Standing by
the drafting table, I saw his waste basket was crammed with torn paper. A
crawly sensation rippled the skin between my shoulder blades. I dumped the
shreds onto the table. Rudy had done a compulsive job of tearing them up, but I
could tell they were pieces of his comic strip. Painstakingly, I sorted through
them and managed to reassemble most of a frame. In it, a pair of black hands
(presumably belonging to a mineworker) were holding a gobbet of pork, as though
in offering; above it floated a spiky white ball. The ball had extruded a
longish spike to penetrate the pork and the image gave the impression that the
ball was sucking meat through a straw. I stared at the frame, trying to
interpret it, to tie the image in with everything that had happened, but I felt
a vibration pass through my body, like the heavy, impersonal signal of Rudy’s
death, and I imagined him on the bathroom floor, foam on his mouth, and I had
to sit back down.

Beth, when I
called her, didn’t feel like talking. I asked if there was anything I could do,
and she said if I could find out when the police were going to release the
body, she would appreciate it. She said she would let me know about the
funeral, sounding—as had Gwen—like someone who was barely holding it together.
Hearing that in her voice caused me to leak a few tears and, when she heard me
start to cry, she quickly got off the phone, as if she didn’t want my lesser
grief to pollute her own, as if Rudy dying had broken whatever bond there was
between us. I thought this might be true.

I called the
police and, after speaking to a functionary, reached a detective whom I knew,
Ross Peloblanco, who asked my connection to the deceased.

“Friend of
the family,” I said. “I’m calling for his wife.”

“Huh,” said
Peloblanco, his attention distracted by something in his office.

“So when are
you going to release him?”

“I think
they already done the autopsy. There’s been a bunch of suicides lately and the
ME put a rush on this one.”

“How many’s
a bunch?”

“Oops! Did I
say that? Don’t worry about it. The ME’s a whack job. He’s batshit about
conspiracy theories.”

“So ... can
I tell the funeral home to come now?”

Peloblanco
sneezed, said, “Shit!” and then went on: “Bowen did some work for my mom. She
said he was a real gentleman. You never know what’s going on with people, do
ya?” He blew his nose. “I guess you can come pick him up whenever.”

The waters
of the Polozny never freeze. No matter how cold it gets or how long the cold
lasts, they are kept warm by a cocktail of pollutants and, though the river may
flow more sluggishly in winter, it continues on its course, black and gelid.
There is something statutory about its poisonous constancy. It seems less river
than regulation, a divine remark rendered daily into law, engraving itself upon
the world year after year until its long meander has eaten a crack that runs
the length and breadth of creation, and its acids and oxides drain into the
void.

Between the
viewing and the funeral, in among the various consoling talks and offerings of
condolence, I spent a great deal of time gazing at the Polozny, sitting on the
stoop and smoking, enduring the cold wind, brooding over half-baked
profundities. The muted roaring of the mill surrounded me, as did dull thuds
and clunks and distant car horns that seemed to issue from the gray sky, the
sounds of business as usual, the muffled engine of commerce. Black William must
be, I thought, situated on the ass-end of Purgatory, the place where all those
overlooked by God were kept. The dead river dividing a dying landscape, a dingy
accumulation of snow melting into slush on its banks; the mill, a Hell of red
brick with its chimney smoke of souls; the scatters of crows winging away from
leafless trees; old Mrs. Gables two doors down, tottering out to the sidewalk,
peering along the street for the mail, for a glimpse of her son’s maroon Honda
Civic, for some hopeful thing, then, her hopes dashed, laboriously climbing her
stairs and going inside to sit alone and count the ticks of her clock: these
were evidences of God’s fabulous absence, His careless abandonment of a
destinyless town to its several griefs. I scoffed at those who professed to
understand grief, who deemed it a simple matter, a painful yet comprehensible
transition, and partitioned the process into stages (my trivial imagination
made them into gaudy stagecoaches painted different colors) in order to enable
its victims to adapt more readily to the house rules. After the initial shock
of Rudy’s suicide had waned, grief overran me like a virus, it swarmed,
breeding pockets of weakness and fever, eventually receding at its own pace, on
its own terms, and though it may have been subject to an easy
compartmentalization—Anger, Denial, etc.—that kind of analysis did not address
its nuances and could not remedy the thousand small bitternesses that grief
inflames and encysts. On the morning of the funeral, when I voiced one such
bitterness, complaining about how Beth had treated me since Rudy died,
mentioning the phone call, pointing out other incidences of her intolerance,
her rudeness in pushing me away, Andrea—who had joined me on the stoop—set me
straight.

“She’s not
angry at you,” Andrea said. “She’s jealous. You and Rudy ... that was a part of
him she never shared, and when she sees you, she doesn’t know how to handle
it.”

“You think?”

“I used to
feel that way.”

“About me
and Rudy”

She nodded.
“And about the business. I don’t feel that way now. I guess I’m older. I
understand you and Rudy had a guy thing and I didn’t need to know everything
about it. But Beth’s dealing with a lot right now. She’s oversensitive and she
feels ... jilted. She feels that Rudy abandoned her for you. A little, anyway.
So she’s jilting you. She’ll get over it, or she won’t. People are funny like
that. Sometimes resentments are all that hold them together. You shouldn’t take
it personally.”

I refitted
my gaze to the Polozny, more or less satisfied by what she had said. “We live
on the banks of the River Styx,” I said after a while. “At least it has a
Styx-ian gravitas.”