"It's not hunger that gnaws at me, Bucky. It's a strange kind of fatigue. I get this way from not working. I can't get any work done. But it's not really fatigue. It's non-fatigue, worse in every way. I've had an unproductive eight hours at the typewriter and I haven't sold a thing in almost two weeks. There's no worse feeling than the feeling you get from being unproductive. I jabbed away at that machine all day and nothing happened. Same few sentences. Where's your sugar?"
"I don't know. Maybe in that cupboard. But I doubt it."
"Never mind, I'll drink it bitter. I threw my sugar away because it had a little shriveled corpse in it. Roach-family type thing. You get any down here?"
"I haven't noticed."
"I've written millions of words," he said. "Every one of them is in that trunk upstairs. I've got copies of everything I've written since the beginning. Do you want to know when the beginning was? Before you were born. I had my first story published before you were born. When were you born, just out of curiosity?"
"A few weeks from now twenty-six years ago."
"I had my first story published before you were born."
"But nothing lately."
"But nothing lately and that's what counts. It's really fatiguing. All day at the typewriter to type the same few sentences. Were they mediocre sentences? I frankly don't know the answer to that. My response to that has to be that I honestly and truly do not know. Maybe I'll know tomorrow. Maybe never."
"You haven't been pacing," I said.
"I haven't been pacing."
"At least I haven't noticed."
"I haven't been pacing and that's because it hasn't worked lately. I have to change my routine. I have to make an alteration in my format. These things are tricky things. The market's out there spinning like a big wheel, full of lights and colors and aromas. It's not waiting for me. It doesn't care about me. It ingests human arms and legs and it excretes vulture pus. But I understand that. I'm attuned to that."
"Do you hear anything?"
"No," he said.
"Hear that?"
"It's just the kid. Downstairs. The retarded boy. Micklewhite. Her deformed kid."
"What's he doing?"
"Dreaming."
"I've never heard a sound like that."
"That's the way she says he dreams. That's the sound that comes out when he's having a dream. Good thing it's not too loud."
"You were saying something," I said.
"The big wheel."
"I don't remember that."
"The big wheel's spinning out there, full of lights and bright colors and crazy sounds."
"Right, the market."
"Fame," he said. "It won't happen. But if it does happen. But it won't happen. But if it does. But it won't."
"You never know."
"It won't happen. But if it does."
"What if it does? What then?"
"I'll handle it gracefully. Ill be judicious. Ill adjust to it with caution. I won't let it destroy me. Fame. The perfect word for the phenomenon it describes. Amef. Efam. Mefa."
"When do you sleep?" I said.
"I sleep when sleep is feasible. When it's no longer productive to write. I'm working in a whole new area. I guess that's why it's coming so slow. Pornographic children's literature. But serious. Not some kind of soft-core material in a comic vein. Serious stuff. Filthy, obscene and brutal sex among little kids."
"Is there a market?"
"I think this may be the only untapped field in all of literature. Although you never know for sure. Maybe there's somebody working away right now, trying to pre-empt a corner of the market. Once you pre-empt, you're good for years. Send them bird shit wrapped in cellophane, they'll buy it. So I may be too late. There are people typing away all over the place, trying to wedge themselves into little corners of the market. But to get to your question, the answer is yes. Everything is marketable. If no present market exists for certain material, then a new market automatically develops around the material itself. My own brand of porno kid fiction is pretty specific. It has no adults. It is sexy-brutal in a new kind of way. It panders to the lowest instincts. It is full of cheap thrills. It has elements of primeval fear and terror. It has titless little girls saying bad words. It has an Aristotelian substratum."
"If you know this much about it, why can't you get started?"
"I know too much about it," he said.
"No room for discovery."
"No room for discovery and I spent too much time making and taking notes. My energy is pretty much sapped. But the theme lives in my mind. The central motivating force is there. The thrust is a genuine thrust. Little kids sucking and being sucked, fucking and being fucked. No grownups anywhere in sight. Kids obsessed by their magical abilities and appetites. Kids and only kids. Without grownups there's a purity, I feel. The thing is kept pure. Tremendous sadism in evidence. Really vicious stuff. All rendered in terms of the classical forms of reversal, recognition and the tragic experience. But I'll tell you what the clincher is."
"Okay."
"Their organs are extremely sensitive. Small maybe but developed way beyond our own spigots and drains. I plan to hint that this sensitivity is present in all children. A freshness. An innocence. Kaleidoscopic sex organs. Capable of wild fiery pleasure. What we'd all be capable of if we were as pure and sex-obsessed as these children of mine. They're obsessed beyond belief. I can't wait to start writing. But that's not the real clincher. The real clincher lies in another direction."
"Which direction?"
"I'm trying to remember," he said. "All this coffee I've been drinking is beginning to affect my concentration. We're all junkie dope fiends one way or another. I'm firmly convinced of that. With me it's caffeine. But I don't use instant. I never use instant. I wouldn't drink that stuff for anything. I'd drink tea first and I hate tea. But the clincher is the writing style itself. That's it, that's it. I'm doing it like I'd do a second-grade reader. Simplest style imaginable. Easily understood by any seven-year-old kid. In other words I'm not just writing pornography about kids. I'm writing pornography for kids. A fantastic concept in my opinion. I have no doubt there's enough marginally weird people who'll buy books like this for their own kids. Most people will get the books for themselves, for their cataleptic wives and so on. But there's that book-buying minority that's just weird enough to give their kids pornography for Christmas. I have no doubt of this. I think the son of a bitchll sell. It's my genre and all I have to do is get it down on paper and I pre-empt a corner of the market. I'd like to bang out five quick genre pieces and market them right away. Then I'll get to work on a novella-length piece. Then I'll start a novel. After that I've got a one-acter I want to do about a stockbroker who moonlights as a pimp. Some writers presume to be men of letters. I'm a man of numbers."
"The boy's dreaming again," I said.
Alone now I listened to the sound from below. It lasted more than a moment this time, part of the room's ambient noise, microlife humming in floor cracks, in the air itself. Maybe nature had become imbecilic here, forcing its pain to find a voice, this moan of interrupted gestation. I had never heard a sound so primal. It expressed the secret feculent menace of a forest or swamp, or of a simple plant arching in kitchen sunlight. There seems a fundamental terror inside things that grow, things that trade chemicals with the air, and this is what the boy's oppressive dreams brought reeking to the surface, the beauty and horror of wordless things. I could almost feel the sound under my feet. In the stillness it seemed extremely near, within the room, a dewclaw's mossy flesh touching my ankle. I put on my lumber jacket (symbol of all that's old and wholesome) and ran some tap water, whatever was available, just to hear another noise. Finally everything was quiet and I went to bed. Fenig began pacing then, three steps east, three west, river to river. I slept for a while, very lightly, my surroundings part of the sleep, shaping it in mounds and squares. With my eyes open now I concentrated on various objects within my field of vision. I could barely make out the two candles standing over the sink. The indistinctness of these objects made them seem denser; they were more forcefully present in the near darkness. I slept deeply then, apprehending only myself as object. It was slightly less dark when I woke up, perhaps four in the morning, the room seeming to tremble in the malarial light of that hour. There was no longer any sound of pacing. I turned on my side. Opel was standing in a corner of the room, barefoot, removing her clothes. I lay there watching her, putting her together in my mind as she performed the small acts my eyes could only serialize. I nearly laughed at the way she lost interest in each item of clothing as she took it off, tossing it on the floor or against the legs of a chair, never watching it go, her hands already engaged in the next expert rejection. Her hair was longer now, scattered over one shoulder and deflected at the point of her breast. She had tanned unevenly and her skin was a mass of rash borders and overlapping seasons. No motion she made seemed less than perfect or other than the only motion possible and I wondered at women in their nakedness, how unpreoc-cupied they are with it, while men either cringe or trumpet. Sniffling she took a handful of tissues from a suitcase and approached on her toes over the cold floor. I moved back in the little bed, making some room, and raised the covers high for her entrance.