Old Coxset’s shop was dark and musty, smelling of dust and machine oil. Everything in the place seemed lightly furred with clumps of greasy lint, much like the innards of the machines he restored to working order. Coxset walked with a perpetual hunch from bending too long over the bowels of his clanking, toneless instruments. The old gentleman proffered a blackened, oily hand and listened politely to my enthusiastic bid for his instruction. I explained that I had always loved the printed word and that no other occupation would serve me so well as typewriter repair.
“Well, now,” he replied, after a moment’s thought, “I know you from the neighborhood and you’ve always seemed a likeable boy enough… but this work is not as glamorous as you might suppose. An apprentice rarely touches a typer ’til he’s been at the trade for three years, and sometimes four. First you must learn to repair the old ribbons and sew new ones from strips of cloth; then there is the mixing of inks from oak gall and the inking of those ribbons, and the winding of them on spools. There’s much reaming of tiny hieroglyphs in dim light, which will give you the poor eyesight of a mool by the time you are my age; add to that plentiful tightening of springs and a small bit of brightwork to be polished on occasion. Yes, it will be a good long while before you venture into the workings of the actual machine.”
I assured him that I understood this perfectly. Merely the presence, the ineffable aura of print, would carry me through years of unrewarding toil.
“It’s not completely unrewarded,” he said. “In return for your services, if all goes well and you prove compatible, I’ll give you a slight stipend—not much at first, mind. And in my spare time, little as there is of it, I’ll also teach you how to type. Would you like that?”
“To type!” I gasped. “You mean… as the old authors did?”
“Yes, yes. You’ll see your thoughts transformed to printed words. It can be a heady experience for a young lad, as I well remember.” He chuckled at my expression, but I think he scarcely suspected the depth of my awe. To write… to type… to emulate the Master. This would be my life’s work!
“Are you interested, then?” he asked.
Without a word I thrust my hand into his and pumped it rapidly. The bargain was sealed. So it was that with the loftiest of intentions, I set forth on the lowest path that fate could possibly provide me.
My father was distressed when I gave him the news, but he did his best to hide it, and even expressed some happiness. That night he brought out his private stock of absinthe and I had my first taste of that bitter potion. I slept unsoundly, caught between the worlds of wakefulness and dream, yet my thrashings were full of nightmarish images, distant voices growing nearer, and the first intimations of my foolish ambition. I remember, it was on the following morning that my eyes sprang open, and this thought floated from my eyes: I shall learn to type like Strapon Thing!
With a diligence that surprised my master Coxset, I threw myself into the trade of typewriter repair. For a matter of weeks I had no other thought than to become expert in every task that he passed my way, whether it was collecting and bagging the piles of dust that he scraped from the bars of old Olivettis, or rubbing ink and sewing patches into the faded ribbons which his regular customers brought in for repair. At night I would eat a few bites of my father’s healthful salads of boiled nettle and tender young foxtail, then I would leap into my sack and dream of typewriters with gleaming keys, silver hammers spattering onto sheets of fairy-white paper.
It was some months later that Dorky Coxset announced a holiday. He was traveling up to Mazmere to visit his widowed sister. It seemed she had contracted a bad case of the languish, and Dorky was concerned for her. He handed me the keys to the shop, in case of an emergency, and said that he would return in three days’ time.
The moment he left me alone, I remembered what I had been intending for months. Taking a few trading stamps from my weekly stipend, I hurried downtown to the Museum and bought myself a ticket.
On earlier visits I had come to know all the musty lower floors of the Museum, with their cases and cages full of charred artifacts. On this occasion I rushed upstairs to the Special Collection and asked a curator for specific directions to the exhibit I sought. Within moments I stood alone before a dusty plastic cabinet. A lantern flickered at my elbow, so I raised it for a better look at the objects within. My heart pounded like a drum in the vast gallery.
There were a dozen pages painstakingly restored from scattered fragments, the print retouched by experts in order to rescue meaning from the damaged words. Here it was that I first glimpsed the mystic epic of Don Cujo, the anguished Bernardine saint who drove himself to a mad death tilting at cars, in the company of his faithful but rabid dog, Sancho Dracula. Here also I gazed upon actual pages from the unparalleled prophetic tragedy of humanity’s fall from grace—namely Salem’s Lost, which had been dictated by a blind Strapon Thing to his daughter Orphelius.
But more affecting than any of these remnants was a slight bit of human script, not typed but actually penned. Discovered on the flyleaf of some decomposing volume, it had been positively identified despite its advanced age and decrepitude as the actual signature of the Master himself!
The lantern nearly fell from my hands when I realized what it was I beheld. I lapsed into a reverie like that which had claimed me at my first encounter with the Master’s words. My eyes moved again and again over the broken lines of the signature. The scribbles were etched upon my memory—and deeper, upon my very soul. They bound and held me captive.
When I next became aware of my surroundings, I was standing in the street outside my home. It was quite dark. My fingers twitched in my pocket, still tracing those lines. I gazed up at the window of my father’s study and heard him laughing, reading lines of Thing out loud to himself. I hurried into the house, anxious to let him know where I had been, eager to share my day’s discoveries. But all my anticipations were quickly demolished.
I had never seen him in such a fury. My appearance threw him into paroxysms. He had been drinking heavily; the absinthe stink was on his breath, on his clothes, and I swore to myself that I would never again so much as sip the stuff. He demanded to know why I was late, but before I could begin to answer he launched into a fantastical attack on the trade which I had chosen to pursue. He insulted Dorky Coxset’s honor and intelligence, insinuating that some dark relationship had sprung up between the old man and myself. Why else would I have so few words to spare for my dear father? Why else would I spend every waking moment away from home? It was as if, he said, I had wed myself to a typewriter, without so much as my father’s blessing.
I realized that his bitterness stemmed from loneliness. I tried to explain that I thought most highly of his trade in weeds but that it had never held any great appeal for me. He howled and threw his empty bottle at the wall near my head. I wanted desperately to bridge the gap between us, but Father rose up with his hands shaped into crablike claws. I tore myself away from him. I fled the house of my birth and ran headlong down the streets toward the only haven I knew: the typewriter repair shop.
For an hour or so I sat weeping at my workbench. Never had I known such emotional extremes in the space of a single day. From the heights of aesthetic ecstacy to the trough of despair.