'I've been thinking about home a lot lately,' Bill said, and sipped his drink.
'Home?' she said, and looked so honestly puzzled that he laughed.
'Poor Audra! Married almost eleven years to the guy and you don't know doodley-squat about him. What do you know about that?' He laughed again and swallowed the rest of his drink. His laughter had a quality she cared for as little as seeing him with a glass of Scotch in his hand at this hour of the morning. The laugh sounded like something that really wanted to be a howl of pain. 'I wonder if any of the others have got husbands and wives who are just finding out how little they know. I suppose they must. '
'Billy, I know that I love yo u,' she said. 'For eleven years that's been enough.'
'I know.' He smiled at her — the smile was sweet, tired, and scared.
'Please. Please tell me what this is about.'
She looked at him with her lovely gray eyes, sitting there in a tatty leased-house chair with her feet curled beneath the hem of her nightgown, a woman he had loved, married, and still loved. He tried to see through her eyes, to see what she knew. He tried to see it as a story. He could, but he knew it would never sell.
Here is a poor boy from the state of Maine who goes to the University on a scholarship. All his life he has wanted to be a writer, but when he enrolls in the writing courses he finds himself lost without a compass in a strange and frightening land. There's one guy who wants to be Updike. There's another one who wants to be a New England version of Faulkner — only he wants to write novels about the grim lives of the poor in blank verse. There's a girl who admires Joyce Carol Gates but feels that because Oates was nurtured in a sexist society she is 'radioactive in a literary sense.' Oates is unable to be clean, this girl says. She will be cleaner. There's the short fat grad student who can't or won't speak above a mutter. This guy has written a play in which there ar e nine characters. Each of them says only a single word. Little by little the playgoers realize that when you put the single words together you come out with 'War is the tool of the sexist death merchants.' This fellow's play receives an A from the man who teaches Eh-141 (Creative Writing Honors Seminar). This instructor has published four books of poetry and his master's thesis, all with the University Press. He smokes pot and wears a peace medallion. The fat mutterer's play is produced by a guerrilla theater group during the strike to end the war which shuts down the campus in May of 1970. The instructor plays one of the characters.
Bill Denbrough, meanwhile, has written one locked-room mystery tale, three science-fiction stories, and several horror tales which owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Richard Matheson — in later years he will say those stories resembled a mid-1800s funeral hack equipped with a supercharger and painted Day-Glo red.
One of the sf tales earns him a B.
'This is better,' the instructor writes on the title page. 'In the alien counterstrike we see the vicious circle in which violence begets violence; I particularly liked the "needle-nosed" spacecraft as a symbol of socio-sexual incursion. While this remains a slightly confused undertone throughout, it is interesting.'
All the others do no better than a C.
Finally he stands up in class one day, after the discussion of a sallow young woman's vignette about a cow's examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field (this may or may not be after a nuclear war) has gone on for seventy minutes or so. The sallow girl, who smokes one Winston after another and picks occasionally at the pimples which nestle in the hollows of her temples, insists that the vignette is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class — and the instructor — agree, but still the discussion drones on.
When Bill stands up, the class looks at him. He is tail, and has a certain presence.
Speaking carefully, not stuttering (he has not stuttered in better than five years), he says: 'I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio –anything? Politics . . . culture . . . history . . . aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean . . . ' He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. 'I mean . . . can't you guys just let a story be a story?
No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack.
Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, 'Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories'? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.'
'I think that's pretty close to the truth,' Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.
'I suggest,' the instructor says, toying with his pen and smiling at Bill with half-lidded eyes, 'that you have a great deal to learn.'
The applause starts somewhere in the back of the room.
Bill leaves . . . but returns the next week, determined to stick with it. In the time between he ha s written a story called 'The Dark,' a tale about a small boy who discovers a monster in the cellar of his house. The little boy faces it, battles it, finally kills it. He feels a land of holy exaltation as he goes about the business of writing this story; he even feels that he is not so much telling the story as he is allowing the story to flow through him. At one point he puts his pen down and takes his hot and aching hand out into ten-degree December cold where it nearly smokes from the temperature change. He walks around, green cut– off boots squeaking in the snow like tiny shutter-hinges which need oil, and his head seems to bulge with the story; it is a little scary, the way it needs to get out. He feels that if it cannot escape by way of his racing ha nd that it will pop his eyes out in its urgency to escape and be concrete. 'Going to knock the shit out of it,' he confides to the blowing winter dark, and laughs a little — a shaky laugh. He is aware that he has finally discovered how to do just that — after ten years of trying he has suddenly found the starter button on the vast dead bulldozer taking up so much space inside his head. It has started up. It is revving, revving. It is nothing pretty, this big machine. It was not made for taking pretty girls to proms. It is not a status symbol. It means business. It can knock things down. If he isn't careful, it will knock him down.
He rushes inside and finishes 'The Dark' at white heat, writing until four o'clock in the morning and finally falling asleep over his ring –binder. If someone had suggested to him that
he was really writing about his brother, George, he would have been surprised. He has not thought about George in years — or so he honestly believes.