"I failed at pornography," he said, "because it put me in a position where I the writer was being manipulated by what I wrote. This is the essence of living in P-ville. It makes people easy to manipulate. It puts people on the level of things. I the writer was probably more aware of this than whoever the potential reader might be because I could feel the changes in me, the hardening of mechanisms, the subservience to lust-making and lust-awakening. You have to be half-mad to be a great pornographer and half-Swedish to expose yourself repeatedly to outright porn without losing a measure of whatever makes you human. Every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism. It reduces the human element. It encourages antlike response. I the writer suffered these things myself. As my child-characters whipped and raped each other around the clock, they began to fall apart in my fingers, and I myself slowly began to fragment. Pornography's limits and stereotypes worked against me from the very beginning and yet just beyond some last line or boundary I could imagine a new kind of P-ville full of characters who never even touch each other. But I'm not going anywhere near it. I'm not half-mad and I'm only one-eighth Swedish so obviously this is the wrong genre for me. The market wasn't very lucrative anyway. Fifteen hundred dollars for a novel-length manuscript. I told them it's not just pornography, it's children's pornography. They said a pussy's a pussy no matter who it's attached to. Genitals always take precedence. If it's a question of mixed categories and genitals play a prominent part in one of the categories, then that's the rate scale you're working with. Listen, I'm happy to be free of it. I can entertain my terminal fantasy with a clear conscience. It's not as though I'm a lust purveyor or incipient totalitarian of the world of letters. I have a fantasy that involves other people's blood being shed but this fantasy isn't part of the thread of my Me. It isn't consistent with who I am and what I do. It's just an isolated aberration, much of it taking place in slow motion. If I was still involved in pornography for kids, then I'd be worried about a thread, a string, a consistency. But I'm free of that category and free of its miserable rate scale. Fi-nance, I get twelve and a half per cent after five thousand copies. Fi-nance is big time. The market's dying except for fì-nance. Daytime dramatic serials are still pretty healthy but I personally shun TV as much as possible. TV is deep space, thin air, no oxygen. There and gone, my words tickling the ears of the walking dead. I'm definitely sticking with financial literature. Fi-nance is solid. There'll always be millionaires and people who want to be millionaires. I'm midwifing this thing very carefully. This is the watershed of my career. Let's face it, I've been turning out a pretty uneven oeuvre. I need a permanent base to express myself from. No more movement or fluctuation. I need to see a long line stretching straight ahead into the distance. The market's spinning slower and slower and the lights are dimming and all the loud sounds are dying out. The great wheel is running down, no doubt about it, but I surprise myself by being philosophical. Even if the financial market dies out with the rest of the market, I maintain a certain fragile hope for my own eventual redemption as a functioning writer. I see empty streets. I see a dead market. I see the dog-boys prowling. There I am at the typewriter. I'm old but still fit. My mind is clearer than ever. I'm at the height of my powers. I'm in firm control of my material. I'm writing terminal fiction and I'm writing not for the market, not for the quick sale, not for the sake of professionalism or my name in print. I'm writing for the survivors, that they may know what it was they survived. I'm writing, if you will, for posterity, that people may understand what went wrong and resist the historical imperative of judging us too harshly. I see tomato soup and saltines."
After a while he lowered himself from the trunk and made coffee. We drank it quietly. Fenig held the large cup with both hands. To drink he lowered his head to the rim, making a small sacrament of the act. It was roughly the middle of the day. I could hear my phone ringing for the third time in the past hour. Fenig poured more coffee. He took his cup to the typewriter table this time. Soon he began to scratch at the keys, first with two fingers, then with his left hand, thumb capering on the space bar, eventually both hands working, ten fingers crashing on the keys, his head moving closer to the black machine, eyes appearing to follow the arc of each metal slingshot hurling ink upon the page.
I went downstairs and fell asleep almost immediately. The telephone rang and I dragged myself over there to lift away the noise. It was Watney somewhere in the British Isles.
"Back finally?"
"Here I am," I said.
"Rang up before, Bucky. Three times exactly. No answer. Odd, I thought. Man's not there. Wonder where, I thought. Wonder where the central figure in this rapidly evolving scenario is off to. Odd, innit? That's what I thought."
"I'm back finally."
"Bucky, I'm contacting you as per our conversation of the twentieth last."
"What conversation?" I said.
"We agreed I'd ring you at a specific time, such and such a day. That's what I've been engaged in for the past hour. In other words I'm carrying out the specifics of our joint proposal as agreed upon. You said then you had no compass bearing on the product. I officially ask if the time is now a bit more propitious for a serious bid on the part of my Anglo-European associates and myself, as far as astrology and the gods are concerned."
"The product is out of my hands completely. I don't have it and I don't know how to get it. Somebody named Hanes has it. Five feet seven. A hundred and thirty pounds. No marks or scars."
"Somebody named Hanes," he said.
"That's right."
"Young. Slender. Fragile. Bored, sort of."
"That's him."
"Alabaster skin."
"That's him," I said. "Very descriptive. I like that. Oh, superb. Too bad he doesn't have an aquiline nose. You'd have a good combination going. But sure, that's him, that fits."
"He's had possession for a lengthy period of time, has he?"
"In terms of days or weeks I don't recall. But I know he's had the product since before you were here."
"Fancy, fancy," Watney said. "Seems I met Hanes in Toronto. He'd been lurking about for days. Dogging my every footstep. He came looking for me with that tarnished angelic look of his. Selling he was. What he called the ultimate drug. Selling outright. Selling shares. Selling European rights. He was flexible he was. See, all my information pointed to you, Bucky. You were the one with possession. I made my way through all of Canada, doing little bits of business here and there, laying groundwork, opening vistas. All the while intending to sneak up on the infamous Bucky Wunderlick and do some fanatical New York promoting. Lay a heavy-handed bid on my old comrade in arms. This boy Hanes came sauntering in with that desperate precious saunter of his. I gave it little thought I did. See, all the rumors in my dossier of rumors located the ultimate drug in your own notorious hands."
"Hanes ran off with it. He was supposed to deliver it somewhere and then negotiate a deal. But he ran off to deal on his own."
"Cheeky little bastard."