Illuminations, p.35
Illuminations, page 35
‘Now, at this point, Sam, I’m guessing that you’re thinking, “Yeah, but what has all this got to do with me?” Is that about right?’
Sam, who had, in fact, been wondering how he was going to handle the whole Spaktoom situation with just guile and lying, merely said, ‘You know it.’ Agent Steel, let’s say, continued.
‘Well, Sam, it occurred to us, through dealing with the upper reaches of the art world, that we might be missing something. I mean, real art, sure, it has its influence, but only on a tiny and well-off minority. You want to reach the average shit-heel on the street, high art’s no good for that, the galleries and salons. For that, what you want, it’s not the upper reaches. It’s the gutter. It’s the dregs of culture, stuff that no one in a million years is ever going to say is art. It’s you, Sam.’
A large fly, its swollen abdomen in brilliant iridescent blue, alighted on Sam’s cold pastrami. Certainly, he could have waved it off, but by then he was in a funny mood. He’d gone already through the five stages of grief about his breakfast, and had reached acceptance that he wouldn’t get to eat it. That being the case, he figured that the blue-tail fly would at least see the most important meal was not completely wasted. Unaware of Sam’s unusually altruistic deed, the disembodied voice went on.
‘And what we’re seeing when we look at comic books – not just yours, everybody’s – what catches our eye is all the super-guys. Granted, there’s not so many of them as there were ten, fifteen years ago, but, all the same, it looks to us like they’ve still got potential. Think about it. Super-guys, we only make them in this country. Christ knows why, but there it is. As symbols go, they’re uniquely American. They’re like our musclemen with sickles, only ours got better undershirts. We’re thinking that, these saps in the long underwear, could be they’d make great propaganda vehicles.’
The fly, using its built-in straw, was sipping Sam’s pastrami like a soda. Having, as he thought, a relatively firm grasp on at least this passage of the creepy dialogue, Sam felt that he might confidently raise a trenchant matter.
‘Yeah, but, see, except American, nobody’s doing costume characters no more. It’s like nobody wants them since the war. Besides, you’re talking to the wrong guy here. Up at Goliath, what we do, it’s monsters, western books, a thing or two for teenage girls – Ellie the Escort and like that – but we’ve not handled costume heroes since we gave up on the National Guard, four or five years ago. Other than Moon Queen, Thunderman and King Bee at American, the super-characters are finished.’
In the following pause before reply, Sam heard the whisper of newspaper pages being turned behind him. He considered that the voice from off might be so bored with this meandering discourse that it was furtively reading Flatfoot Floyd, but then thought differently. More likely the newspaper was a screen held up in front of the guy’s face, so nobody could see that he was talking. Turning pages every now and then would make it all look natural. Sam wished he had a newspaper, or even a brown paper bag with eyeholes. Cloak-and-dagger stuff was tense, but, more than that, it was embarrassing.
‘Not finished, Sam. We beg to disagree. I don’t know if you’ve seen the figures that Sol Stickman’s pulling in with his new Streak book at American, but I have, and believe me, they’re impressive. Maybe three, four times the money that you’re getting from your swishy cowboys and your gibberish monsters. And while you make a compelling argument about your company not doing costume characters, I couldn’t give two fucks because the point of our refined discussion here today is that it will be doing them. Although, I don’t know, we were thinking that you’re going to need a good company name. I mean, Goliath, he was maybe seven, eight feet tall? Sam, we got bigger Harlem Globetrotters than that. And he gets wiped out by some little Jew kid with a slingshot? That ain’t quite the image we were hoping to project. It ought to be a name that’s bigger than Goliath, that sounds unassailable, invulnerable to harm. We’ll leave it up to you, Sam. You’re the wordsmith.’
Wait a minute. What was that, did he just say – ? No. No, no, no. This wasn’t happening. Change what they published? Change the company name? Sam felt the air go out of him like he’d been gut-punched, like there in the deli he’d had a piano dropped on him and nobody had noticed. And the tone the phantom voice had – it was clear this wasn’t a suggestion, a polite request. It was more like his life had just been requisitioned, and he didn’t know if he was going to throw up, have a heart attack or else burst into flames. When words came, they were in a squeaky, pleading babble.
‘Hey, hold on, I mean, I can’t, it’s, it’s, it’s not my company, it’s my wife’s father’s, Jackie Berman. He’s the guy who owns Goliath. I can’t just … look, please, it’s not that I don’t want to help you, but you’ve got to think of the position that you’re putting me in here. Couldn’t you – I don’t know – couldn’t you take this to American? The costume-hero thing, they’re more experienced than us. Plus, they got all the big names that people already know about, like Thunderman. Couldn’t you—’
‘Sam?’
The word, quietly delivered, was a stopper in Sam’s gushing, spraying bottle. The blue-bellied fly, perched motionless now on the glistening petticoats of Sam’s pastrami, seemed to stare directly at him with its compound gaze impassive, like a traffic cop. It rubbed its hands together in anticipation. When the voice spoke next, Sam found it hard not to imagine it was coming from the fly.
‘Sam, we’re not interested in American. A company like that, they’ve got a lot of money and aren’t so susceptible to our inducements. What we’re looking for, what suits us, is a needy, third-string little operator like yourself,’ the fly said. ‘And besides, the costume heroes at American, they’re playboy millionaires, or they’re from space, or there’s some magic bullshit. How does that reflect our country’s values, Sam? Why can’t good, ordinary Americans, like nuclear scientists, cyberneticists, arms manufacturers, why can’t people like that be super-guys? See what I’m saying?’
The fly broke off briefly, so that it could take a shit, then resumed its intimidating lecture.
‘Anyway, you’re somebody we know, who we’ve worked with before. Remember? Ten years back, we asked if you could turn the National Guard to a red-beater – all those bad guys like Ratski Fatski, Dirty Marx, Ivan Agenda – and back then, Sam, you were real obliging. Think of this as like that, only bigger. Play it right, and this is a much larger opportunity for you, for us, for everyone.’
The talk of opportunity led Sam to think that maybe, after all, the fly was somebody he could do business with. He narrowed his eyes slightly, so it knew to take him seriously.
‘So, what, you’re saying these super-guys, you want them fighting commies?’
The fly nodded.
‘Well, that never hurts, Sam. Never hurts. And that’s another area where you score higher than American. When did you ever see King Bee or Thunderman tackle a communist? So, sure, lots of red bad guys, that’s always a good thing, although this time, reds aren’t going to be our first priority. This time around, tell you the truth, we’re more concerned with atom bombs.’
The fly had lifted off and buzzed away halfway through that last sentence, and so Sam was left to have a conversation about nuclear bombs with the real person in the booth behind him, rather than a magic talking bug. He made the high-pitched, querying noise that people make when told that what they’re being asked to do is in some way associated with atomic weapons.
‘Well, I’m glad you asked. You know what keeps America on top, Sam, ultimately? You know what America’s position in the world is resting on? It’s missiles, Sam. ICBMs with big atomic payloads, and on us having more missiles than the other guy. For that, you need a good supply of weapons-grade material – uranium, plutonium – which in turn will require a whole mess of atomic power plants to produce the stuff. So what you’re going to see through this next decade is a lot of places like that being built, commissioned or whatever. This is a good thing. Atomic power, it’s a good thing, but every now and then you’re going to get a little this, a little that, explosions, leaks, that kind of thing. And all the peaceniks and the liberals will say, “Oh, goodness! This atomic energy is simply too bad,” or, “I lived ten miles from a power plant, and now I got a two-headed baby,” or some shit like that. You see, Sam, what this all comes down to, it’s an image problem.’
Sam was staring hollow-eyed out through the glass of the front window. Customers were entering or leaving through the heavy swing door, shuffling back and forth in front of him, but Sam Blatz wasn’t seeing any of them. In his feverish imagination, he was seeing the white nuclear fireball, its dilation down the thronging avenues, with skyscrapers and cops and dogs and hydrants melted into vapour and sucked up the mile-wide trunk of a great smoke sequoia that blots out the July sky, with shadows of executives and hookers flash-exposed and printed on the brute emulsions of a library wall, with cars and comic books all bursting into flames, and then the flames themselves bursting into flames, and in his thudding heart, he prayed Spaktoom was going to get here first. The best response that he could manage was a tremulous, ‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s all the movies, Sam. All the TV shows and the science fiction stories, where you get a little radiation and it straight away turns everything into a giant monster. Giant people, giant lizards, giant ants. I mean, a giant ant, that’s a Chihuahua with more legs, right? Or some nonsense where there’s been a nuclear war and everyone’s a mutant with their faces falling off. Mutation’s good, Sam. It’s mutation that makes evolution work, but all these negative depictions, what they’re doing is, they’re making people think that radiation’s dangerous, that it’s going to turn them into something ugly and enormous. So, then, we were thinking, what if there were stories where the people get irradiated, but instead of ending up with, like, leukaemia or something, they turn into super-guys? I guess it’s what you’d call a metaphor: atomic energy has made America into a superpower, so maybe it could do the same for individual citizens – that’s basically the point we’re hoping you can get across for us. And don’t you worry about Jackie Berman. Once you tell him how much dough he’s going to make, he’ll come around. You’re a persuasive guy, Sam. That’s one of the reasons why we like you.’
Out beyond the glass, New York was absented in flat ash, right to the horizon. There were no giant ants, no mutants, nothing any more to look at. It was sort of sad, but then Sam shrugged and thought, well, if not him, then someone else would do it anyway, and then the sun came out again and there were still people and automobiles, and he felt OK. He had some questions, sure, but they were more pecuniary than moral.
‘Yeah, but, like, even if I can dream up all these radioactive super-characters, how do I know they’re going to sell? Next to American, we only got a small share of the market. Then there’s the time factor to consider. These new books; changing the company name; it’s going to take a while.’
Through all this, customers, unnoticed, came and went between the green-and-ivory deli interior and the ice-cream-cone day outside, and whenever the door was opened, then the bell would sound its tiny chime, ring-a-ding-ding.
‘You’ve got until next year. That’s non-negotiable. As for the characters, all that you’ve got to do is what you always do: you give our brief to one of the real talents that you got in harness – a Joe Gold, a Robert Novak, anyone except Frank Giardino – and then you sit back and take the credit. And please, Sam, don’t worry your nightmarish little head about whether these books will sell or not. They’ll sell. They’ll sell with such profusion that it will attract attention, and you’ll be a big phenomenon, just like we did with Rauschenberg. That’s why they call it pop art, Sam. It’s popular. Two or three years, the way we figure, you could even beat American. You leave all that to us.
‘Now, Sam, I’ve got to say, you’ve been a real sport about all this. This can’t have been an easy chat we’ve just been having, not from your perspective. I mean, who am I? I come in here, I interrupt your breakfast, how I talk to you could be interpreted as, I don’t know, contemptuous, and I don’t even introduce myself. Crazy coincidence, I know, but my name’s Ted as well. I’m your new Ted. So anyway, we figured it was only fair you got to have a say in this, so that you knew how much us guys appreciate your input. Go ahead, Sam. Tell me how you feel, about me and this whole proposal. Don’t pull any punches. I’m all ears.’
Well, now. This was more like it, treating Sam more like an equal than some little hustler who was so scared of them, he’d do anything they asked and they just had to snap their fingers. This was more like the scenario with Spaktoom. Putting down what had become a purely ornamental knife and fork, he pulled himself more upright in his seat and retightened his necktie. Straight away, he found that he felt more professional and more on top of things, like if a feller could control his neckwear then he could control his circumstances, that sort of a deal. The deli’s customers were entering and exiting, same as before – Sam saw the blue-assed fly depart, out through the door and straight up to the fiftieth floor, it looked like – but he paid all of this no attention as he readied himself to state his position, with the eloquence that only he could muster. He could almost sense that Agent Ted, let’s say, was leaning forward, maybe taking out a notebook bound in human skin so he could jot down Sam’s opinions and ideas. Filled with new confidence, Sam cleared his throat and drew a breath.
‘First of all, oh surreptitious seeker of security, let me say that in Snappy Sam you’ve secured someone suitably sufficient to your subterfuge, so seek no substitutes, señor! You’ve got a platinum-plated promise from a pillar of the publishing protectorate who pledges to provide a plethora of post-atomic paragons to puzzle, please and push pernicious pro-bomb propaganda at pre-adolescents with perhaps presumptuous impunity! Blatz is your boy, so brace yourself to be bedazzled by a bountiful bouquet of brilliance from the boss of badinage! The iteration of ideas and images intended to initiate and influence, insidiously, immature and introspective innocents’ imaginations into interest in intercontinental instruments of infamy is my immediate intention!’
This was going good, he thought. It sounded like Agent Ted Steel, let’s say, was hanging on Sam’s every word, attention rapt like he was in some cockamamie trance, enchanted by a master hypnotist. You could have heard a pin drop. Thus encouraged, Sam continued with his pitch.
‘Mark ye my musings manfully, oh mentor to Machiavelli! Meditate most meaningfully, maestro, on the masterpieces of mentation minted monthly by my mainly molten mind! Sample the startling – some would say spectacular – spontaneous suggestions spouting like spermatozoa, squirting from Sam’s supercharged subconscious, swami! Mutant Mike, a guy you’ll like! X-ray Pedestal Man and Glowy the Boy Nightlight! Extra-Fingers Harpsichord Kid! This stuff writes itself! Real Smart Six-Headed Woman! Damaged Chromosome Crusader! The Untreatables! Suffer me not to stay suspended, shipmate! Simply state your singular selection from my smorgasbord of strontium sentinels, so sooner we can stammer our soft sayonaras. Which is it to be, my taciturn tormentor?’
Evidently, it was a tough choice. Sam almost heard the flywheels of deliberation whirring in the agent’s mind behind him. He knew he could be impressive when he had to be, and so allowed himself a smile of satisfaction in the general direction of his ruined breakfast as he added, ‘Well? I’m waiting for an answer. It’s time you made up your mind, muchacho!’ Denny Wellworth was just going out the deli door, and heard this last part. Shaking his young head, appalled, he hoped to Christ that wasn’t how all writers ended up, where their one friend was a dead sandwich.
As the deli emptied out, Sam sat with his eyes fixed on the now cataracted eggs, and started to feel slightly put out by the agent’s indecisiveness. Suddenly, a disturbing thought occurred to him. Slowly and imperceptibly, he started to rotate his head, one degree at a time, and then, when he heard no command to stop, he turned his upper body so that he could see the booth behind. And then he said, ‘Son of a bitch.’ The asshole had most likely left around the same time as the fly.
Muttering angrily, he gathered up his sunglasses, his rakish hat and shoulder-decorating jacket before striding petulantly out into the morning air. Wouldn’t you know it, as he made his hungry and humiliated trudge across the street, who should be lumbering across the other way but Spaktoom the Impossible. Oh, finally! Spaktoom was about ninety feet tall and a dirty pink, like he was made of melted birthday candles. His tremendous weight left truck-sized, three-toed imprints of compressed concrete and black macadam everywhere he trod, and when he spoke, the interstellar tyrant’s words had got a thick black edge around them to convey their guttural, inhuman timbre.
‘Where is the human known as Blatz the Unbelievable? Spaktoom is told that Blatz is the one earthling who might possibly dissuade him from his frying of your puny globe!’
Sam chewed his options over. He could get another sandwich somewhere else, then take it up to Lexington and eat it in his office. ‘Sorry, pal,’ he said as he walked past the towering abomination and went on along the street, ‘I never heard of him.’
Behind him, he could hear the deli sizzling up as the extraterrestrial enormity commenced its disappointed rampage. It was a pity, but Sam Blatz had bigger things to think about.
15. (September, 2015)
He knew he couldn’t take it any more. He knew that if he didn’t get out of the industry, a step unthinkable only a month before, then, one way or another, it would finish him. It would reduce him to a glyph, a quickly understood cartoon, the way it did with everything and everybody. He would be emotionally compressed, all his development abruptly capped at twelve years old, so that the only way that anyone could grow was laterally. He would come to have the look of someone spiritually taller who’d been stepped on, his complexities boiled down to an alliterative one-word summary, and he’d be Doleful Dan until the day he died. He’d be a giggling porno dwarf, a Brandon Chuff, a Worsley Porlock, or a catastrophic Mr Ocean casualty like Jerry Binkle. One way or the other, an inane grotesque, a sideshow shocker, and he knew, he knew, he knew he couldn’t take it any more.
