If the secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis
THIS IS THE STORY of the death of Rockwell Kingman. Like every success story, it begins with a need. In this case, the need was money. That need had driven me into the dark recesses of my mind, where I turned down a littered alley, stepped through an unmarked door, and walked up a flight of broken stairs to the dingy office of Murder While You Wait. I was ashamed of that excursion now. Kingman had become an embarrassment — more than an embarrassment. The mere fact of his existence as a figment of my imagination was a shameful offense against everything I stood for — or, at least, an offense against everything that I wanted to believe I stood for — or, at the very least, an offense against everything that I wanted to stand for and wanted everyone else to believe I stood for, foremost among them my darling Albertine, who had been so repulsed by the idea of the existence of a Rockwell Kingman in my mind that she had banished him without even meeting him. What a relief. I was grateful to her, because I wanted to get rid of the bastard, too. I didn’t care where he went or what he did. I just didn’t want him around me anymore. I didn’t want anyone to know that he had come from me, that he was my idea, my issue, my spawn. I suppose that I could have pushed him back into whatever corner of my mind he had sprung from, and I suppose that if I had been strong and vigilant enough I could have kept him there, but he would still be there, blowing something up every now and then to remind me that he was there, waiting, ready, pacing his dingy office, chain-smoking, with a sign pinned to his back that said RENT ME. No, that wouldn’t do. He would have to go. He really would have to go, but —
But?
But he still represented a chance to make some money, and even if I could manage to sell the hotel to Lou we were going to need money. When our debts had been paid, there wouldn’t be much remaining from the proceeds of the sale, and we would have to have an income in Manhattan. There it was, the same damned need that had led me to Rockwell Kingman: money. Suddenly, inspiration struck. Inspiration is one of the black boxes of the human mind, the precise workings of which are still unknown, but I suspect that the process goes something like this: two ideas grow individually to such a size that each of them begins to shudder with the great energy in it, and if they move near enough to each other, the energy arcs between them in a jolt of electromagnetic radiation sufficient to light the I’ve-got-it lamp in the conscious mind of the person to whom all of this is happening, and to make him shout “Eureka!” or something similar in his own tongue.
“What a great scam,” I muttered. I had found a way. I could make money and still travel the high road. Well, not quite. I could make money and still appear to be traveling the high road. Close enough.
I went to the kitchen for some coffee, hoping that I would find Ray waiting for me. He was.
“I think I’ve got something,” he said.
“Really?”
“Maybe.”
“In that case, pour yourself some coffee, and let’s get to work.”
We took our coffee upstairs to my workroom. I sat at my computer, and, putting myself at some personal risk, said, “Shoot,” and typed while Ray read from the piece of paper in his hand: “I took a couple of shirts and a pair of pants to the dry cleaners to get them cleaned, and the dry cleaner said, ‘Hey, these are bloodstains here.’ I couldn’t believe it. He said he would try to get them out, but I killed him anyway.”
When he finished, I said, “Powerful stuff, Ray. Let me read it back to you.” I read what I had on the screen: “‘There is grandeur in the smallest lives; I’m convinced of that. There is something to be learned from even the smallest and most banal occurrences of everyday life; I’m convinced of that, too. Consider the encounter that led to the writing of this book. I had taken a couple of shirts’ — and so forth, and so on, just as you said, up to — ‘He said he would try to get the stains out, and I said thanks and left. On the way home, I became troubled by the thought that I had left him with a mistaken idea of me, because the bloodstains that he supposed he had seen were really just some spots of tomato juice that I’d spilled on myself. After considering all the angles and implications’ — actually, maybe we’ll put in a few paragraphs about the angles and implications next time through — ‘I decided to let him persist in his error. It allowed him to believe in his professional competence, and, measured against the dubious standards of our time, it made me more glamorous and more graceful — or at least less clumsy — than I actually was.’”
Ray sat for a moment, mentally comparing what I had read with what he had written. Then he said, “You left out the part where I kill the guy.”
I chuckled indulgently and said, “There are enough killers in the world, Ray.”
“But won’t I be remembering — ?”
“Oh, yes. You’ll explore all those memories, Ray — in your rough drafts. Everything. All those hideous urges and heinous acts that have made your past so colorful.”
“Swell.”
“But then we will excise them in the revision process, because, to tell you the truth, Ray, they do you no credit.”
“Yeah,” he said, shamefaced, letting his head droop.
“Don’t worry,” I said, with the reassuring steadiness of a seasoned captain of a leaking launch. “When I get through with your memoirs, we’ll have the killer in you hidden behind a seamless facade of conventional behavior. No one will ever know the evil that lurks within the heart of Manuel Pedrera.”
“Whoa, thanks, man,” he said with a sigh.
“Don’t thank me, Ray,” I said. “Pay me.”
I extended a hand toward my laser printer, from which a flyer for my new business, Memoirs While You Wait, would have emerged on cue if the delinquent accounts department at Babbington Light and Power had not at that precise moment suspended our electrical service.
[to be continued]
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