The Plant. Part 19

"It's a good idea," Roger went on. "I suggest you all start keeping diaries."

"If we're really going to crash a bunch of new books into production, I don't expect to have time to wash my own hair," Sandra grumbled. As if she'd been put in charge of editing a newly discovered James Joyce ma.n.u.script instead of World's Sickest Jokes.

"Nevertheless, I strongly suggest you find time for this," Roger said. "Written journals might not be worth much if things turn out the way we hope, but they could be invaluable if things don't...well, let's just say that we don't have any clear idea of what forces we're playing with here."

"He who takes a tiger by the tail dares not let go," Bill said. He spoke in a kind of baleful mutter.

"Nonsense," Sandra said. "It's only a plant. And it's good. I felt that very strongly."

"A lot of people thought Adolf Hitler was just the bee's knees," I said, which earned me a sharp stare from the senorita.

"I keep going back to the thing Barfield said about the plant needing blood to really get rolling," Roger said. "The blood of evil or the blood of insanity. I don't really understand that, and I don't like it. The idea that we're raising a vampire vine in the janitor's closet..."

"And no longer just in the janitor's closet," I added, earning myself dirty looks from Sandra and Herb, plus a puzzled, rather uneasy one from Bill.

"I'd just as soon it didn't sample blood of any kind, that's all," Roger said. "Things are rolling quite enough to suit our purposes right now." He cleared his throat. "I think we're playing with high explosives here, people, and in a case like that, record-keeping can come in handy. Notes and jottings are really all I'm asking for."

"If they were ever read in court, journals about this stuff would probably end us up in Oak Cove," Herb said. "That's the nut-farm old Iron-Guts broke out of, just in case any of you forgot."

"Better Oak Cove than Attica," I said.

"That's comforting, John," Sandra said. "That's very comforting."

"Don't worry, sweetheart," Bill said, reaching out and giving her ankle a pat. "I think they send the ladies to Ossining."

"Yes," she said. "Where I can discover the joys of Sapphic love with a three-hundred-pound biker chick."

"Stop it, all of you," Roger said impatiently. "It's a precaution, that's all. There's really no downside to this. Not if we're careful."

It wasn't until then that I realized just how desperately Roger wants to turn Zenith House around, now that he has the chance. How much he wants to save his reputation now that there's a real chance to save it. I thought again of that rabbit general yelling, "Come back, you fools! Dogs aren't dangerous!"

I believe that, in the days and weeks ahead, Roger Wade will bear watching. The others, too. And myself, of course.

Maybe myself most of all.

"I think I'm ready for a little vacation in Oak Cove, anyway," Bill said. "I feel as if I'm reading you guys' minds, and that's got to be crazy."

No one said anything. No one really needed to.

Dear diary, we're past that point.

I spent the rest of the day recovering my more-or-less normal existence. I removed a long, dull dinner-party scene from Olive's latest Windhover opus and, mindful of the late great Tina Barfield, left in a rough-s.e.x scene that really is rough (at one point a blunt object is inserted in an unlikely place with unlikely, ecstatic results). I tracked down a culinary consultant through the New York Public Library, and she has agreed, for the sum of four hundred dollars (which we can barely afford) to go through the recipes in Janet Freestone-Love's Your New Astral Cookbook and try to a.s.sure me that there's nothing poisonous in there. Cookbooks are invariably moneymakers, even the bad ones, but few people outside this crazy business realize they can also be dangerous; f.u.c.k up a few ingredients and people can die. Ludicrous, but it happens. I went to lunch with Jinky Carstairs, who is novelizing the lesbo-vampire piece of s.h.i.+t we're stuck with (burgers at Burger Heaven, how chi-chi) and had a drink after work with Rodney Slavinksy, who writes the Coldeye Denton westerns under the name of Bart I. Straight. The Coldeyes don't do diddly-d.i.c.k in the U.S. market, but for some reason they've found an audience in France, Germany, and j.a.pan. We share in those rights. Greedy-guts, greedy-guts.

Before meeting with Rodney-who is one gay cowpoke, pardner-I went back down to the mailroom, stepping over a twisted, twined mat of ivy branches and stems to get there. It's possible to do that without actually treading on any, for which I am grateful. The last thing I needed at three in the afternoon was the pained scream of a psychic ivy suffering a bad case of stompie-toes.

Mostly, Zenith appears to be growing up the wall on either side of the janitor's cubby, creating a complex pattern of green and brown, through which the cream-colored wallboard shows in pleasant geometric patterns. I didn't hear it sighing this time, but I could swear I heard it breathing, warm and deep and comforting, just within the range of audibility. And again there was a smell, this time not coffee but honeysuckle. I also have fond childhood memories of that smell; it surrounded the library where I spent a great many happy hours as a boy. And as I pa.s.sed, one strand of ivy reached out and touched my cheek. Not just a touch, either. It was a caress. One great thing I have discovered about keeping a diary: I can be honest here if nowhere else, honest enough in this case to say that that leafy touch made me think of Ruth, who used to touch me in just that way.

I stood perfectly quiet while that delicate bit of stem slipped up to my temple, traced my eyebrow, and then fell away. Before it did, I had a very clear thought, and I'm positive it came from Zenith rather than from my own mind: Find the purple box.

Find it I did, exactly where the Barfield woman-or her Ouija board -said I would, way back in the corner on the bottom shelf, behind a pair of huge padded mailers oozing out flakes of stuffing. It is the sort of box that medium-grade typing paper comes in. The sender-one James Saltworthy of Queens-simply taped the box shut and slapped a mailing sticker over the ragland bond brand name and logo. His address is in the upper lefthand corner, on another sticker. I think it's sort of amazing that the post office accepted such a package and managed to get it here, but they did, and now it's all mine. Sitting on the floor of the mailroom, smelling dust and honeysuckle, I broke the tape and lifted the box-lid. Inside is about four hundred pages of copy, I should judge, under a t.i.tle page which reads

THE LAST SURVIVOR By James Saltworthy

And, down in the far corner:

Selling North American Rights Literary Agent: Self Approx 195,000 Words

There was also a letter, addressed this way: TO THE EDITOR-OR WHOEVER SENDS THESE THINGS BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM. As with the Tina Barfield letter, I have attached it. I'm not going to critique or a.n.a.lyze it here, and there's probably no reason to do so at all. Writers who have been trying to get their books published over a long period of time-five years, sometimes ten years, and once in my experience a full fifteen years which encompa.s.sed ten unpublished novels, three of them very long-share a similar tone, which I would describe as a thin coat of self-pitying cynicism stretched over a well of growing despair and, in many cases, hysteria. In my imagination, which is probably too vivid, these people always seem like miners who have somehow survived a terrible cave-in, people trapped in the dark and screaming Is there anyone out there? Please, is anyone out there? Can anyone hear me?

What I thought as I folded the letter back into the envelope was that if ever there was a name that sounds as if it should belong to a writer, that name is James Saltworthy. My next thought was to just put the top back on the box and leave whatever was under the t.i.tle page, good or bad, until I got home. But there's a little Pandora in most of us, I think, and I couldn't resist a look. And before I knew about it, I'd read the first eight or nine pages. It reads that easily, that naturally. It can't be as good as it seems to be, I know that, or it wouldn't be here. And yet a part of me whispers that that might not be true. He is serving as his own agent, and writers who do that are like self-defending lawyers: they have fools for clients.

The pages I read were good enough so I have burned to read the rest ever since leaving the office; my mind keeps going back to Tracy Nordstrom, the charming psycho who is apparently going to be Saltworthy's main character. There's a war going on in my head, the armies of Hope on one side, those of Cynicism on the other. This conflict, I feel, is going to be decided in the two hours between now and midnight, when I really must turn in. But before leaving the typewriter chair in the kitchen for my reading chair in the living room area of my apartment, I must add one more thing.

When I stood up with Saltworthy's purple box under my arm, I noticed that Zenith the common ivy has burst through the wall between the janitor's closet and the mailroom in at least three dozen places. There are ten steel shelves mounted on that wall, plain gray utilitarian things which are now perfectly empty-in my post-Ruth orgy of work, I cleaned them out completely, without finding a single thing even remotely worth publis.h.i.+ng. In most cases it's not even incompetency-boring narration and dull prose- but outright illiteracy. Not one but several of the ma.n.u.scripts which filled those gray shelves were scrawled in pencil.

But all that's to the side. My point here is just that I could see that wall, because the stacks and jumbles of boxes, bags, and mailers are gone. The cream-colored sheetrock has now been pierced by a galaxy of green stars. In many cases the tips of the ivy's branches have only begun to penetrate, but in others, long and fragile snakelets have already slithered through. They are growing along the empty steel shelves, meeting, twining, climbing, descending. Staking out new territory, in other words. Most of the leaves are still tightly furled, like sleeping infants, but a few have already begun to open. I have a strong suspicion that within a week or two, a month at the outside, the mailroom is going to be as full of Zenith as Riddley's cubbyhole is now.

Which leads to an amusing but perfectly valid question: where are we going to put Riddley when he comes back? And what, exactly, will he be doing?

Enough. Time to see exactly what's in James Saltworthy's box.

April 2, 1981

Dear G.o.d. Oh my dear G.o.d. I feel like someone who has dipped his fis.h.i.+ng line into a little country brook and has managed to hook Moby d.i.c.k. I had actually dialed the first five digits of Roger Wade's number before realizing that it's two o'clock in the f.u.c.king morning. It'll have to wait, but I don't know how I can wait. I feel like I'm going to explode. Names and book-t.i.tles keep dancing through my head. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer. Raintree County, by Ross Lockridge. Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious. The G.o.dfather, by Mario Puzo. The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. Jaws, by Peter Benchley. Different kinds of books, different kinds of writers, some good, some only competent, but all of them creating a kind of bottled lightning, stories that millions of people simply had to read. Saltworthy's Last Survivor fits very neatly into this group. No G.o.ddam doubt about it. I don't think I've found a Masterpiece, but I know I've found The Next Big Thing.If we let this get away, I'll shoot myself.

No.

I'll walk into Riddley's closet and tell Zenith to strangle me.

My G.o.d, what an incredible book. What an incredible story.

February 19, 1981

Editorial Staff and/or Mailroom Crew Zenith House

490 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10017

TO THE EDITOR-OR WHOEVER SENDS THESE THINGS BACK WHERE THEY COME FROM,.

My name is James Saltworthy, and the attached albatross is a book I wrote. Last Survivor Last Survivor is a novel that was set five years in the future when I wrote it in 1977, and now by G.o.d that future's almost here! Looks like the joke's on me. This novel, which has been well-reviewed by both my wife and my department head (I teach 5th grade English at Our Lady of Hope in Queens), has been to a total of twenty-three publishers. I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but since Zenith House is this ma.n.u.script's final stop on what has been a long and exceedingly dull train-ride to nowhere, I have decided to "let it all hang out," as we used to say back in the s.e.xy Sixties, when we all thought we had at least one major novel in us. is a novel that was set five years in the future when I wrote it in 1977, and now by G.o.d that future's almost here! Looks like the joke's on me. This novel, which has been well-reviewed by both my wife and my department head (I teach 5th grade English at Our Lady of Hope in Queens), has been to a total of twenty-three publishers. I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but since Zenith House is this ma.n.u.script's final stop on what has been a long and exceedingly dull train-ride to nowhere, I have decided to "let it all hang out," as we used to say back in the s.e.xy Sixties, when we all thought we had at least one major novel in us.

I would guess that at several of the publis.h.i.+ng houses where Last Last Survivor Survivor visited-sort of like an unwelcome in-law that you get rid of as soon as possible-it was actually read ( visited-sort of like an unwelcome in-law that you get rid of as soon as possible-it was actually read (partially read might be a better way to put it). From Doubleday came the response "We are looking for more upbeat fiction." Cheers! From Lippincott: "The writing is good, the characters distasteful, the storyline frankly unbelievable." Mazel tov! From Putnam's came that old favorite: "We no longer look at unagented material." Hooray! Agents, schmagents. My first one died on me-he was eighty-one and senile. The second was a crook. The third told me he loved my novel, then offered to sell me some Amway. read might be a better way to put it). From Doubleday came the response "We are looking for more upbeat fiction." Cheers! From Lippincott: "The writing is good, the characters distasteful, the storyline frankly unbelievable." Mazel tov! From Putnam's came that old favorite: "We no longer look at unagented material." Hooray! Agents, schmagents. My first one died on me-he was eighty-one and senile. The second was a crook. The third told me he loved my novel, then offered to sell me some Amway.

I am enclosing $5.00 for return postage. If you feel like using it to send my story back to me after you finish not reading it, that would be fine. If you want to use it to buy a couple of beers, all I can say is cheers! Mazel tov! Hooray! Meantime, I see that Rosemary Rogers, John Saul, and John Jakes are still selling well, so I guess American literature is doing fine and forging bravely forward toward the 21st century. Who needs Saltworthy?

I wonder if there's money in writing instruction manuals. There certainly isn't much in teaching fifth graders, some of whom carry switchblade knives and sell drugs around the corner. I suppose they wouldn't believe that at Doubleday, would they?

Cordially,

Jim Saltworthy 73 Aberdeen Road Queens, New York 11432

From Roger Wade's Office Answering Machine, April 2, 1981

3:42 A.M.: h.e.l.lo, you have reached Roger Wade at Zenith House.

I can't take your call right now. If this is about billing or accounting, you need to call Andrew Lang at Apex Corporation of America. The number is 212-555-9191. Ask for the Publis.h.i.+ng Division. If you want to leave a message for me, wait for the beep. Thanks.

Roger, this is John, your old Central Falls safari buddy. I'm calling at quarter of four in the morning, April 2nd. I won't be in today. I've just finished the most incredible f.u.c.king book of my life. Holy G.o.d, boss, I feel like someone put my brain on a d.a.m.n rocket sled. We need to be extremely clever about this-the book needs hardcover pub, a real all-the-bells-andwhistles launch, and as you know, Apex has no hardcover house. Like most companies that get into the book biz, they don't have a clue. But we better. We just better have a d.a.m.n clue. Who do you know at the better hardcover houses? And who do you trust? If we lose the paperback rights to this in the course of getting Saltworthy a hardcover publisher, I'll kill myself. I

3:45 A.M.: h.e.l.lo, you have reached Roger Wade at Zenith House.

I can't take your call right now. If this is about billing or accounting, you need to call Andrew Lang at Apex Corporation of America. The number is 212-555-9191. Ask for the Publis.h.i.+ng Division. If you want to leave a message for me, wait for the beep. Thanks.

Motormouth John, even on the G.o.ddam answering machine, right, Roger? I can't even remember what I was talking about. I'm just giddy. I'm going to bed. I don't know if I can get to sleep or not. If I can't, maybe I'll come in to work, anyway. Probably in my f.u.c.king pajamas! [Laughter] If

not, I'll do a Ma.n.u.script Report first thing on Friday, okay? Please don't let us f.u.c.k this up, Roger. Please. Okay, I'm going to bed.

3:48 A.M.: h.e.l.lo, you have reached Roger Wade at Zenith House.