Heavy Water: And Other Stories (4 page)

At five forty-five Hugh Sixsmith ordered a gin and tonic and said, “We’ve talked. We’ve broken bread. Wine. Truth. Screenplay-writing. I want to talk about your work, Alistair. Yes, I do. I want to talk about
Offensive from Quasar 13.”

Alistair blushed.

“It’s not often that … But one always knows. That sense of pregnant arrest. Of felt life in its full … Thank you, Alistair. Thank you, I have to say that it rather reminded me of my own early work.”

Alistair nodded.

Having talked for quite some time about his own maturation as a screenplay writer, Sixsmith said, “Now. Just tell me to shut up any time you like. And I’m going to print it anyway. But I want to make one
tiny
suggestion about
Offensive from Quasar 13.”

Alistair waved a hand in the air.

“Now,” said Sixsmith. He broke off and ordered a prawn cocktail. The waiter looked at him defeatedly. “Now,” said Sixsmith. “When Brad escapes from the Nebulan experiment lab and sets off with Cord and Tara to immobilize the directed-energy scythe on the Xerxian attack ship—where’s Chelsi?”

Alistair frowned.

“Where’s Chelsi? She’s still in the lab with the Nebulans. On the point of being injected with a Phobian viper venom, moreover. What of the happy ending? What of Brad’s heroic centrality? What of his avowed love for Chelsi? Or am I just being a bore?”

The secretary, Victoria, stuck her head into the room and said, “He’s coming down.”

Luke listened to the sound of twenty-three pairs of legs uncrossing and recrossing. Meanwhile he readied himself for a sixteen-tooth smile. He glanced at Joe, who said, “He’s fine. He’s just coming down to say hi.”

And down he came: Jake Endo, exquisitely Westernized and gorgeously tricked out and perhaps thirty-five. Of the luxury items that pargeted his slender form, none was as breathtaking as his hair, with its layers of pampered light.

Jake Endo shook Luke’s hand and said, “It’s a great pleasure to meet you. I haven’t read the basic material on the poem, but I’m familiar with the background.”

Luke surmised that Jake Endo had had his voice fixed. He could do the bits of the words that Japanese people were supposed to find difficult.

“I understand it’s a love poem,” he continued. “Addressed to your girlfriend. Is she here with you in L.A.?”

“No. She’s in London.” Luke found he was staring at Jake Endo’s sandals, wondering how much they could possibly have cost.

A silence began its crescendo. This silence had long been intolerable when Jim broke it, saying to Jake Endo, “Oh, how did ‘Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree, Which Stands Near the Lake of Easthwaite, on a Desolate Part of the Shore, Commanding a Beautiful Prospect’ do?”

“ ‘Lines’?” said Jake Endo. “Rather well.”

“I was thinking about ‘Composed at—Castle,’ ” said Jim weakly.

The silence began again. As it neared its climax, Joe was suddenly reminded of all this energy he was supposed to have. He got to his feet saying, “Jake? I guess we’re nearing our tiredness peak. You’ve caught us at kind of a low point. We can’t agree on the first line. First line? We can’t see our way to the end of the first
foot.”

Jake Endo was undismayed. “There always are these low points. I’m sure you’ll get there, with so much talent in the room. Upstairs we’re very confident. We think it’s going to be a big summer poem.”

“No, we’re very confident, too,” said Joe. “There’s a lot of belief here. A lot of belief. We’re behind ‘Sonnet’ all the way.”

“Sonnet?” said Jake Endo.

“Yeah, sonnet. ‘Sonnet.’ ”

“ ‘Sonnet’?” said Jake Endo.

“It’s a sonnet. It’s called ‘Sonnet.’ ”

In waves the West fell away from Jake Endo’s face. After a few seconds he looked like a dark-age warlord in mid-campaign, taking a glazed breather before moving on to the women and the children.

“Nobody told me,” he said as he went toward the telephone, “about any
sonnet.”

The place was closing. Its tea trade and its after-office trade had come and gone. Outside, the streets glimmered morbidly. Members of the staff were donning macs and overcoats. An important light went out. A fridge door slammed.

“Hardly the most resounding felicity, is it?” said Sixsmith.

Absent or unavailable for over an hour, the gift of speech had been restored to Alistair—speech, that prince of all the faculties. “Or what if …” he said. “What if Chelsi just leaves the experiment lab earlier?”

“Not hugely dramatic,” said Sixsmith. He ordered a carafe of wine and inquired as to the whereabouts of his braised chop.

“Or what if she just gets wounded? During the escape. In the leg.”

“So long as one could avoid the wretched cliche: girl impeded, hero dangerously tarrying. Also, she’s supernumerary to the raid on the Xerxian attack ship. We really want her out of the way for that.”

Alistair said, “Then let’s kill her.”

“Very well. Slight pall over the happy ending. No, no.”

A waiter stood over them, sadly staring at the bill in its saucer.

“All right,” said Sixsmith. “Chelsi gets wounded. Quite badly. In the arm.
Now
what does Brad do with her?”

“Drops her off at the hospital.”

“Mm. Rather hollow modulation.”

The waiter was joined by another waiter, equally stoic; their faces were grained by evening shadow. Now Sixsmith was gently frisking himself with a deepening frown.

“What if,” said Alistair, “what if there’s somebody passing who can
take
her to the hospital?”

“Possibly,” said Sixsmith, who was half standing, with one hand awkwardly dipped into his inside pocket.

“Or what if,” said Alistair, “or what if Brad just gives her
directions
to the hospital?”

Back in London the next day, Luke met with Mike to straighten this shit out. Actually it looked okay. Mike called Mal at Monad, who had a thing about Tim at TCT. As a potential finesse on Mal, Mike also called Bob at Binary with a view to repossessing the option on “Sonnet,” plus development money at rolling compound, and redeveloping it somewhere else entirely—say, at Red Giant, where Rodge was known to be very interested. “They’ll want you to go out there,” said Mike. “To kick it around.”

“I can’t believe Joe,” said Luke. “I can’t believe I knocked myself out for that flake.”

“Happens. Joe forgot about Jake Endo and sonnets. Endo’s first big poem was a sonnet. Before your time. ‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.’ It opened for like one day. It practically bankrupted Japan.”

“I feel used, Mike. My sense of trust. I’ve got to get wised up around here.”

“A lot will depend on how ‘Composed at—Castle’ does and what the feeling is on the ‘ ’Tis’ prequel.”

“I’m going to go away with Suki for a while. Do you know anywhere where there aren’t any shops? Jesus, I need a holiday. Mike, this is all bullshit. You know what I
really
want to do, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

Luke looked at Mike until he said, “You want to direct.”

When Alistair had convalesced from the lunch, he revised
Offensive from Quasar 13
in rough accordance with Sixsmith’s suggestions. He solved the Chelsi problem by having her noisily eaten by a Stygian panther in the lab menagerie. The charge of gratuitousness was, in Alistair’s view, safely anticipated by Brad’s valediction to her remains, in which sanguinary revenge on the Nebulans was both prefigured and legitimized. He also took out the bit where Brad declared his love for Chelsi, and put in a bit where Brad declared his love for Tara.

He sent in the new pages, which three months later Sixsmith acknowledged and applauded in a hand quite incompatible with that of his earlier communications. Nor did he reimburse Alistair for the lunch. His wallet, he had explained, had been emptied that morning—by which alcoholic, Sixsmith never established. Alistair kept the bill as a memento. This startling document showed that during the course of the meal Sixsmith had smoked, or at any rate bought, nearly a carton of cigarettes.

Three months later he was sent a proof of
Offensive from Quasar 13
. Three months after that, the screenplay appeared in the
Little Magazine
. Three months after that, Alistair received a check for £12.50, which bounced.

Curiously, although the proof had incorporated Alistair’s corrections, the published version reverted to the typescript, in which Brad escaped from the Nebulan lab seemingly without concern for a Chelsi last glimpsed on an operating table with a syringe full of Phobian viper venom being eased into her neck. Later that month, Alistair went along to a reading at the Screenplay Society in Earls Court. There he got talking to a gaunt girl in an ash-stained black smock who claimed to have read his screenplay and who, over glasses of red wine and, later, in the terrible pub, told him he was a weakling and a hypocrite with no notion of the ways of men and women. Alistair had not been a published screenplay writer long enough to respond to, or even recognize, this graphic proposition (though he did keep the telephone number she threw at his feet). It is anyway doubtful whether he would have dared to take things further. He was marrying Hazel the following weekend.

In the new year he sent Sixsmith a series—one might almost say a sequence—of screenplays on group-jeopardy themes. His follow-up letter in the summer was answered by a brief note stating that Sixsmith was no longer employed by the
LM
. Alistair telephoned. He then discussed the matter with Hazel and decided to take the next day off work.

It was a September morning. The hospice in Cricklewood was of recent design and construction; from the road it resembled a clutch of igloos against the sheenless tundra of the sky. When he asked for Hugh Sixsmith at the desk, two men in suits climbed quickly from their chairs. One was a writ-server. One was a cost-adjuster. Alistair waved away their complex requests.

The warm room contained clogged, regretful murmurs, and defiance in the form of bottles and paper cups and cigarette smoke, and the many peeping eyes of female grief. A young woman faced him proudly. Alistair started explaining who he was, a young screenplay writer come to … On the bed in the corner the spavined figure of Sixsmith was gawkily arranged. Alistair moved toward it. At first he was sure the eyes were gone, like holes cut out of pumpkin or blood orange. But then the faint brows began to lift, and Alistair thought he saw the light of recognition.

As the tears began, he felt the shiver of approval, of consensus, on his back. He took the old screenplay writer’s hand and said, “Goodbye. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Opening in four hundred and thirty-seven theaters, the Binary sonnet “Composed at—Castle” did seventeen million in its first weekend. At this time Luke was living in a two-bedroom apartment on Yokum Drive. Suki was with him. He hoped it wouldn’t take her too long to find out about Henna Mickiewicz. When the smoke cleared he would switch to the more mature Anita, who produced.

He had taken his sonnet to Rodge at Red Giant and turned it into an ode. When that didn’t work out he went to Mal at Monad, where they’d gone for the villanelle. The villanelle had become a triolet, briefly, with Tim at TCT, before Bob at Binary had him rethink it as a rondeau. When the rondeau didn’t take, Luke lyricized it and got Mike to send it to Joe. Everyone, including Jake Endo, thought that now was surely the time to turn it back into a sonnet.

Luke had dinner at Rales with Joe and Mike.

“I always thought of ‘Sonnet’ as an art poem,” said Joe. “But sonnets are so hot now I’ve started thinking more commercially.”

Mike said, “TCT is doing a sequel
and
a prequel to ‘’Tis’ and bringing them out at the same time.”

“A sequel?” said Joe.

“Yeah. They’re calling it ‘ ’Twill.’ ”

Mike was a little fucked up. So was Joe. Luke was a little fucked up too. They’d done some lines at the office. Then drinks here at the bar. They’d meant to get a little fucked up. It was okay. It was good, once in a while, to get a little fucked up. The thing was not to get fucked up too often. The thing was not to get fucked up to excess.

“I mean it, Luke,” said Joe. He glittered potently. “I think ‘Sonnet’ could be as big as ‘—.’ ”

“You think?” said Luke.

“I mean it. I think ‘Sonnet’ could be another ‘—.’ ”

“ ‘—’?”

“ ‘—.’ ”

Luke thought for a moment, taking this in. “ ‘—’ …” he repeated wonderingly.

New Yorker
, 1992

DENTON’S DEATH

S
UDDENLY DENTON REALIZED
that there would be three of them, that they would come after dark, that their leader would have his own key, and that they would be calm and deliberate, confident that they had all the time they needed to do what had to be done. He knew that they would be courtly, deferential, urbane—whatever state he happened to be in when they arrived—and that he would be allowed to make himself comfortable; perhaps he would even be offered a last cigarette. He never seriously doubted that he would warm to and admire all three at once, and wish only that he could have been their friend. He knew that they used a machine. As if prompted by some special hindsight, Denton thought often and poignantly about the moment when the leader would consent to take his hand as the machine began to work. He knew that they were out there already, seeing people, making telephone calls; and he knew that they must be very expensive.