Strange Wine Page 5

  Had the world ended just then, Noah Raymond would have cheered. Then he would have had no anguish, no terror, no concern about what he would do tomorrow. And the tomorrow after that. And all the seamless, hopeless tomorrows that stretched before him like a vast, empty plain.

  Writing stories was Noah Raymond’s whole life. He had nothing else of consequence that approached by a million miles the joy of telling a story. And now that the river had run dry, leaving only the silt of ideas he had worked endlessly and the tag-end memories of other people’s work, great classics half remembered, seminal treatments of hoary clichés, he did not know what he would do with the remainder of his life.

  He contemplated going the Mark Twain route, cashing in on what he had already written with endless lecture tours. But he wasn’t that good a speaker and, frankly, didn’t like crowds of more than two people. He considered going the John Updike route: snagging himself a teaching sinecure at some tony Eastern college where the incipient junior editors of unsuspecting publishing houses were still in the larval stage as worshipful students. But he was sure he’d end up in a mutually destructive relationship with a sexually liberated English Lit major and come to a messy finish. He dandled the prospect of simply going the Salinger route, of retiring to a hidden cottage somewhere in Vermont or perhaps in Dorset, of leaking mysterious clues to a major novel forthcoming some decade soon; but he had heard that both Pynchon and Salinger were mad as a thousand battlefields; and he shivered at the prospect of becoming a hermit. And all that was left was the realization that what he had written was the sum total, that one year soon some snide bastard at The Atlantic Monthly would write a piercing, penetrating piece titled, “The Spectacular Rise and Soggy Demise of Noah Raymond, ex-Enfant Terrible.” He couldn’t face that.

  But there was no exit from this prison of sterilized nothingness.

  He was twenty-seven, and he was finished.

  He stopped crying into the typewriter. He didn’t want to rust the works. Not that it mattered.

  He crawled off to bed and slept the day. He woke at eight o’clock and thought about eating, forgetting for the moment that he was finished. But when the knowledge surged back to drown his consciousness, he promptly went into the bathroom and divested himself of the previous evening’s dinner, what had not been digested while he slept.

  Packing the queen mother of all headaches, he trudged into the tiny office off the living room, fearing to look at the neglected typewriter he knew would stare back at him with its hideous snaggle-toothed qwertyuiop grin.

  Before he stepped through the door he realized he’d been hearing the sound of the typewriter since he’d slid out of bed. Had heard, and had dismissed the sound as a product of nightmare and memory.

  But the typewriter was making its furious tack-tack-tack-space-tack sound. And it was not an electric typewriter. It was a manual, an old Olympia office machine. He did not trust electric typewriters. They continued humming maliciously when one paused to marshal one’s thoughts. And if one placed one’s hands on the keyboard preparatory to writing some measure of burning, immortal prose, and hesitated the slightest bit before tapping the keys, the insolent beast went off like a Thompson submachine gun. He did not like, or trust, electric typewriters, wouldn’t have one in the same house, wouldn’t write a word on one of the stupid things, wouldn’t–

  He stopped thinking crazy thoughts. He couldn’t write, would never write again; and the typewriter was blamming away merrily just on the other side of the room.

  He stared into the office, and in the darkness he could see the typewriter’s silhouette on the typing shelf he had built with his own hands. Behind it, the window was pale with moonlight and he could see the shape clearly. What he felt he was not seeing were the tiny black shapes that were leaping up and down on the keys. But he stood there and continued staring, and thought he was further around the bend than even the horror of the night before had led him to believe he could be. Bits of black were bounding up and down on the keyboard, spinning up into the pale square of glassed moonlight, then dropping back into darkness, bounding up again, doing flips, then falling into darkness once more. My typewriter has dandruff, was his first, deranged ranged thought.

  And the sound of the old Olympia manual office machine was like that of a Thompson submachine gun.

  The little black bounding bits were working away at the keys of the typewriter in excess of 150 words per minute.

  “How do you spell necromancy,” said a thin, tiny, high, squeaky, sharp, speedy, brittle, chirping voice, “with two c’s or a c and a penultimate s?”

  There was a muffled “oof!” as of someone bashing his head against a hollow-core door, and then–a trifle on the breathless side–a second voice replied, “Two c’s, you illiterate!” The second voice was only slightly less thin, tiny, high, squeaky, sharp, speedy, brittle, and chirping. It also had a faintly Cockney accent.

  And the blamming on the keyboard continued.

  My life has been invaded by archy the cockroach, was Noah Raymond’s second, literary, even more deranged thought. In those days, the wonderful writings of the late Don Marquis were still popular; such a thought would have been relevant.

  He turned on the light switch beside the door.

  Eleven tiny men, each two inches high, were doing a trampoline act on his typewriter.

  The former enfant terrible sagged against the doorjamb, and he heard the hinges of his jaw crack like artillery fire as his mouth fell open.

  “Turn off that light, you great loon!” yelled one of the little men, describing a perfect Immelmann and plunging headfirst onto the # key while a pair of the little men with another pair of little men on their shoulders weighted down the carriage shift key so the one who had dived would get an upper-case # and not a lower-case 3.

  “Off, you bugger; turn it off!” shouted a trio of little men in unison as they ricocheted across each other’s trajectories to type p-a-r-s-i-m-o-n-i-o-u-s. They were a blur, bounding and dodging and shooting past each other like gnats around a dog’s ear.

  When he made no move to click off the light–because he was unable to move to do anything–the tallest of the little men (2¼?) did a two-step on the space bar and landed on the typewriter carriage housing, arms akimbo and fists balled. He stared straight at Noah Raymond and in a thin, tiny, high, etcetera voice howled, “That’s it! Everybody stops work!”

  The other ten bounced off their targets and vacated the typewriter en masse. They stood around on the typing shelf, rubbing their heads, some of them removing their tiny caps to massage sore spots on foreheads and craniums.

  “Precisely how do you expect us to get ten thousand words written tonight with you disturbing us?” the little man (who was clearly the spokesman) said with annoyance.

  I can’t face the future, he thought. The delusions are starting already and it’s not even twenty-four hours.

  Another of the little men, somewhat shorter than the others, yelled, “’Ey, Alf. Cawnt’cher get this silly git outta f’ere? We’ll never ’ave done, ’e don’t move on!”

  Noah did not understand one word the littler little man had said.

  The tallest of the little men glared at the tiniest one and snarled, “Shut’cher yawp, Charlie.” His accent was the same as Charlie’s, dead-on Cockney. But when he looked back at Noah he returned to the precise Mayfair tones he had first used. “Let’s get this matter settled, Mr. Raymond. We’ve got a night’s work ahead of us, you’ve got a story due, and neither of us will manage if we don’t get this perishing explanation out of the way.”

  Noah just stared. He had hot flashes.

  “Sit down, Mr. Raymond.”

  He sat down. On the floor. He didn’t want to, he just suddenly did it; sat down…on the floor.

  “Now,” said Alf, “your first question is: what are we? Well. We might ask the same of you. What are you?”

  Charlie started hooting. “Cut out th’ malarkey, Alf. Send ’im out an’ tell ’im t’leave off
annoyin’ us!”

  Alf glared at the little man. “Y’know, Charlie, you’re a right king mixer, you are. You better close up your cake ’ole before I come down there an’ pop you a good’un in the ’ooter!”

  Charlie made a nasty bratting sound like a Bronx cheer, the time-honored raspberry, and sat down on the shelf, dangling his tiny legs and whistling unconcernedly.

  Alf turned back to Noah. “You’re a human, Mr. Raymond. The inheritors of the Earth. We know all about you; all there is to know. We should, after all; we’ve been around a lot longer than you. We’re gremlins.”

  Noah Raymond recognized them at once. Living and breathing and arguing personifications of the mythical “little people” who had become a household word during World War Two, the sort of/kind of elf-folk deemed responsible for mechanical failures and chance mishaps to Allied aircraft, particularly those of the British. They had been as famous as Kilroy. The Royal Air Force had taken them on as mascots, laughing with them but never at them, and in the end the gremlins were supposed to have turned against the Nazis and to have helped win the war.

  “I…I once wrote a bunch of stories about gremlins,” Noah said, the words choked and as mushy as boiled squash.

  “That’s why we’ve been watching you, Mr. Raymond.”

  “Wuh-wuh-watching muh-muh–”

  “Yes, watching you.”

  Charlie made the bratting sound again. It reminded Noah of unhealthy bowel movements, a kind of aural Toltec Two-Step, vocalizing Montezuma’s Revenge.

  “We’ve been on to you for ten years; ever since you wrote ‘An Agile Little Mind.’ For a human, it wasn’t a half-bad attempt at understanding us.”

  “There isn’t much historical data available on guh-guh-gremlins,” Noah said, off-the-wall, having trouble even speaking the magic name.

  “Very good lineage. Direct lineal descendants of the afrit. The French call us gamelin, brats.”

  “But I thought you were just something the pilots dreamed up during the Battle of Britain to account for things going wrong with their planes.”

  “Nonsense,” said the little man. Charlie hooted. “The first modern mention of us was in 1936, out of the Middle East, where the RAF was stationed in Syria. We used the wind mostly. Did some lovely things to their formations when they were on maneuvers. Good deal of tricky Coriolis force business there.”

  “You really are real, aren’t you?” Noah asked.

  Charlie started to say something. Alf turned on him and snapped, “Shut’cher gawb, Charlie!” Then he went back to Mayfair accents as he said to Raymond, “We’re a bit pressed tonight, Mr. Raymond. We can discuss reality and mythology another time. In fact, if you’ll just sit there quietly for a while I’ll knock off after a bit and let the boys carry on without me. I’ll take a break and explain as much to you as you can hold tonight.”

  “Uh, sure…sure…go ahead. But, uh, what are you writing over there?”

  “Why, I thought you understood, Mr. Raymond. We’re writing that story for the BBC. We’re here from now on to write all your stories. Since you can’t do it, I shouldn’t think you’ll mind if we maintain your world-famous reputation for you.”

  And he put two minuscule fingers in his mouth and gave a blast of a whistle, and before Noah Raymond could say that he was so ashamed of himself he could cry, they were once again bounding up and down on the typewriter.

  My God, how they worked!

  It was simply the Nietzschean theory all over again. Nietzsche suggested that when a god lost all its worshipers, the god itself died. Belief was the sustaining force. When a god’s supplicants went over to newer, stronger gods, belief in the weaker deity faded and so did the deity. So it had been with the gremlins. They were ancient, of course, and they were worshiped in their various forms under various names. Pixies, nixies, goblins, elves, sprites, fairies, will-o’-the-wisps, gamelins…gremlins. But when the times were hard and the technocrats rode high, the belief in magic faded, and so did they. Day by day they vanished, one after another. Whole families were wiped out in a morning just by a group of humans switching to Protestantism.

  And so, from time to time, they came back in strength with a new method of drawing believers to them. During World War II they had changed and taken on the very raiments of the science worshipers. They became elves of the mechanical universe: gremlins.

  But the war was over, and people no longer believed.

  So they had looked around for a promotional gimmick, and they had found seventeen-year-old Noah Raymond. He was quick, and he was imaginative, and he believed. So they waited. A few stories weren’t good enough. They wanted a body of work, a world-acclaimed body of work that could sustain them through this difficult period of future shock and automation. Tolkien had done his share, but he was an old man and they knew he couldn’t do it alone.

  And so, on the night Noah Raymond went dry, they were waiting, a commando force of typewriter assaultists specially trained for throwing themselves into their work in the most literal sense. Tough, unsentimental gremlins with steely eyes and a fierce determination to save their race. Assault Force G-1. Each gremlin a hand-picked veteran of extra-dangerous service. Each gremlin a volunteer. Each gremlin a specialist:

  Alf, who had led the assault on the Krupp munitions factory’s toilets in 1943.

  Charlie, who had shipped aboard the Titanic on its maiden voyage, April 10th, 1912, as sabotaging supercargo.

  Billy, who had been head gremlin in charge of London underground subway disruption since 1952.

  Ted, who worked for the telephone company.

  Joe, who worked for Western Union.

  Bertie, who worked for the post office.

  Chris, who was in charge of making coffee bitter in the brewing throughout the Western Hemisphere.

  St. John (pronounced Sin-jin), who supervised a large staff of gremlins assigned to complicating the syntax in the public speeches of minor politicians.

  And the others, and their standbys, and their reserve troops, and their replacements, and their backup support…

  Ready to move in the moment Noah Raymond went dry.

  And so they began.

  For the next nineteen years they came to Noah Raymond’s typewriter every night, and they worked with unceasing energy. Noah would stand watching them for hours sometimes, marveling at the amount of kinetic energy flagrantly expended in the pursuit of survival-as-art.

  And the stories spun out of Noah Raymond’s typewriter, and he grew more famous, and he grew wealthy, and he grew more complacent as the total of their works with his byline grew from one hundred to two hundred, from two hundred to three hundred, from three hundred to four hundred…

  Until tonight, when Alf stood shamefacedly on the Olympia’s carriage housing, his cap in his tiny hands, and said to Noah Raymond, “That’s the long and short of it, Noah. We’ve run dry.”

  “Now wait a minute, Alf,” Noah said, “that’s impossible. You’ve got the entire race of gremlins to choose from, to find talent to keep the stuff coming. I simply cannot believe an entire race has run out of ideas!”

  “Uh, well, it’s not quite like that, Noah.” He was obviously embarrassed, and had something of special knowledge he was reluctant to say.

  “Listen, Alf,” Noah said, laying his hand palm up on the carriage housing so the tiny man could step onto it. “We’ve been mates now for almost twenty years, right?”

  The little man nodded and stepped into Noah’s palm.

  Noah lifted him to eye level so they could talk more intimately.

  “And in twenty-years-almost I think we’ve come to understand each other’s people pretty fair, wouldn’t you say?”

  Alf nodded.

  “I mean, I even get along pretty well with Charlie these days, when his sciatica isn’t bothering him too much.”

  Alf nodded again.

  “And God knows your stories have made things a lot better for the reality of the gremlins, haven’t they? And I’ve done my
share with the lectures and the public appearances and all the chat shows on telly, now haven’t I?”

  Alf nodded once more.

  “So then what the hell is this load’a rubbish you’re handing me, chum? How can all of you have run out of story ideas?”

  Alf went harrumph and looked at his feet in their solid workman’s shoes, and he said with considerable embarrassment, “Well, uh, those weren’t stories.”

  “They weren’t stories? Then what were they?”

  “The history of the gremlins. They were all true.”

  “But they sound like fantasies.”

  “Life is interesting for us.”

  “But…but…”

  “I never mentioned it because it never came up, but the truth of it is that gremlins don’t have any sense of what you call imagination. We can’t dream things up. We just tell what happened. And we’ve written everything that’s ever happened to our race, right up to date, and we, uh, er, haven’t got any more stories.”

  Noah stared at him with openmouthed amazement.

  “This is awful,” Noah said.

  “Don’t I know it.” He hesitated, as if not wanting to say any more; then a look of determination came over his face and he went on. “I wouldn’t tell this to just any human, Noah, but you’re a good sort, and we’ve shared a jar or two, so I’ll tell you the rest of it.”

  “The rest of it?”

  “I’m afraid so. The program’s been working both ways, I’m sorry to say. The more humans came to believe in us, the more we gremlins have come to believe in you. Now it’s pretty well fifty-fifty. But without the stories to keep things going, I’m afraid the gremlins are going to start thinking of you again as semireal, and…”

  “Are you trying to tell me that now the gremlins are responsible for the reality of humans?”

  Alf nodded nervously.

  “Oh, shit,” Noah suggested.

  “Been having a bit of trouble in that area, as well,” Alf lamented.