So in addition to our wanting to see him, we began to say good things about his work.
There isn’t the writer alive that doesn’t believe flattery. The entire strange cursed race thinks that someday their scribblings will have a place in god’s eternal bookshelf.
Our plan was a little vague. We thought that we get him in a hotel room and then just confront him and in some magical way he would pay us back the money he had sucked away.
We choose an older hotel in the French Quarter called the Roosevelt. We rented the big penthouse that had looked over Mardi-gras for almost a hundred years. It was bleak December. We told him to meet us at eight on a Wednesday night. We dressed well, and those of us who had concealed weapons permits from Texas were packing. We had no intention of killing him, just scaring him into the straight and narrow.
Belinda had a tape recorder so we could catch any confessions that might boil to the surface.
He was fifteen minutes late. We were sweating and uncomfortable. We heard the old elevator make its way to our floor. Belinda and a woman named Chandra Lee escorted him to our suite. He was older and thinner than we had thought. We had our chairs arranged in a circle, his was in the middle. He laughed when he saw it. We guessed he wouldn’t be laughing soon.
After he had set down, we all reached under our chairs and pulled out a copy of Mystery Classics, except for me I pulled our five copies—one of each of the editions I had bought. We were expecting fear or guilt.
We were disappointed.
He just asked, “So which group are you? Shreveport? Dallas? No I guess it’s too long for it to be Dallas.”
I said, “We’re Austin and we want our money back.”
“Oh that’s original,” he said, relaxing in his chair, “About as original as your fiction.” Then he laughed.
“Look Bowen, we’re not fooling around.” Said Dr. Ellison.
“Of course you are,” said Bowen, “That’s all you’ve ever done. You’re jerk-offs. What do you want from me? You said you wanted to be published. Well you got your book. It’s big, it’s fat. I bought all of you have discovered the great utility it has for propping things up. You should be as happy as a pig in slop. But no, what you wanted wasn’t to pay three thousand dollars so that your useless names would be printed along side people that would sneer at your ineptitude. But you wanted more. You are disappointed that I am not Satan. You wanted to sell your souls for fame. Well, you don’t have soul, or you could have written something worthwhile. You don’t got shit.”
“No Bowen,” I said, “We’ve got you.”
“You think your first the group that has pieced this together. You’re not, and you’re not the last. But everything I did was legal. I knew this was a confrontation when I walked down here. Night meeting in an old hotel in the French Quarter, the same old clichéd stuff that keep your fiction from selling. I just wanted to see your pathetic faces, look at you, all dressed up, all proper; does it make you feel powerful? Your little chairs all in a circle. Well I’m going now, and you can go back to your lives and tiny dreams.”
“Do you think you are a good writer, Bowen?”
“I’m no Rex Hull, but I’m OK. I’m third-rate, but my ambition is too great. So I look for eighteenth-rate scum to support me.”
He rose.
“No.” said Dr. Ellison, “We are not done with you.”
“Why what are you going to do kill me?”
“Yes.” Dr. Ellison said, “We are. Just because you aren’t expecting it. It is a sign of the triumph of our poor imaginations.
We were on him in a minute. Eleven people can over power a man in his sixties easily. Killing him is easier still.
Taking a corpse through the French Quarter is not a difficult matter when he is small. You simply stand on either side of him and tell on-lookers that he has too much to drink. In fact as we took him to my car, we passed another fellow in the same straights. Perhaps he too was dead.
We took him to my cousin’s restaurant. We sat outside until closing time. My cousin and I had an agreement. He did not ask about things that he didn’t want to hear the answer to, and I treated his life the same way.
We made Mr. D. B. Bowen into jambalaya. The other men butchered him, while I prolapsed the rice and sauce as per the recipe in my story. He was ready at dawn, and we filled up our containers with him and took him to our homes in Austin. Just before we took off, Belinda said, “Well he’s toast now.” I most emphatically denied that he was toast, and took offences at the slighting of my culinary creation. “OK,” she said, “He is not toast.”
We were prepared to be each other’s alibis when the law came by.
It never came.
Bowen did live alone. He was the alcoholic recluse he claimed to be. Eventually the residence hotel he lived in Washington must have noticed that their tenant had not returned.
The others had swore off writing, but I turned out a few tales afterward—some of which sold. I felt my fiction getting better, and attributed it to some endorphin released after revenge.
About six months later, Belinda was listening to Bowen’s speech in the Roosevelt Penthouse. She called me and said that it was very dramatic. The whole thing would make a lovely crime novel. So we broke it into eleven chapters. Each of us did our best. And unlike most of our scribbling before and after, our best was finally good enough. Sure the novel sold as something of a curiosity like Naked Came the Spy, but it did sell. We had a few minutes of fame—woefully short of the fifteen minutes that a man named Andy Warhol had promised our parent’s generation.
The success of the book, plus my modest sales before its publication inspired everyone to try writing again. We had all felt the writing we did on WINT had been smooth and beautiful. We were all able to get agents on the strengths of WINT’s sales, and we were busy turning out novel proposals. But something was wrong.
The quality left our writing. At first we hid this each from the other. All right at first we hid it form ourselves, a writer cannot bear to acknowledge that his best days may be gone—especially if his best days were about a month in length. However, by the time the movie of WINT came out, our writing was as bad as it had been in Mystery Classics; we didn’t know what had happened. Had the crime been enough to stimulate our moribund muses?
Dr. Ellison suggested a different explanation. Over half a century before, certain experiments on planaria learning had suggested that cannibalism lead to the exchange of knowledge. The planaria, a type of flatworm, were tested with a maze and their times recorded. Then the planaria were ground up and fed to a new generation, who could solve the maze in less time than their predecessors. It was speculated that their was a transference of knowledge—probably in the messenger RNA strands of the planaria The experiment was later discredited, as some researched believed that the mazes were contaminated by the smell of the flatworm’s passage and that was the guiding force. However, certain people believed that the experiments were discredited to keep universities form turning into professor-hamburger stands.
Hoc est corpus meum.
Maybe we had eaten Bowen’s talent. Unlike him we were not jaded nor overcome by a desire to be known in a limited genre—we were just people with a burning desire to write, but perhaps nothing to say. Our desire plus his RNA got one more novel out of him. It was sad that he never got the fame, which he like us, had craved. The RNA material must have peaked in us about nine months after the deed and receded nine months afterward.