I hated him so much.
As I reached over to pick up the computer, intent on smashing his image, I realized that it was not my spiritual heart but the physical one that was causing the numbness in my left forearm and the fire in my chest.
I managed to take in half the breath I needed, exhaled with a very audible wheeze, and then inhaled with half the capacity of the breath before.
Clark Heinemann sneered. My breathing became mere puffs. Mira was right about me, but Mira was gone. I had stormed around the apartment for three days cursing the editor and drinking expensive red wine that we could not afford.
My thousandth story, and I was dying, and Clark Heinemann would probably make some snide remark when he heard I was gone.
Just like they used to say in the old movies, everything was going dark. I was dying, and the only witness, the only light left to me, was Clark Heinemann and his sidelong smug indifference.
After a short while that nevertheless felt interminable, darkness overwhelmed the light. I had died hating a man twenty years my junior, a man I had never met or spoken to. I was, for all intents and purposes, dead and gone, but somehow my hatred cohered. The details of my final humiliation floated on a deep well of spite that did not, would not drain away.
Even as my body rotted and festered under the unblinking eyes of Clark Heinemann, the thoughts I had at death survived. One thousand unpublished stories, 26,473 rejection letters, and all those editorial twits that never gave me a break. The only thing left of me was a raging emotion at every publisher of every insignificant quarterly — but most of all, Clark Heinemann.
“Paul Henry is dead,” a young woman’s voice said from somewhere in the void.
I was suddenly back in proximity to the living; aware, seeing the world from a set of eyes that were a bit stronger than mine had been.
“Who?” The man’s voice seemed to reverberate.
“That guy who has sent us a story every six weeks for the past twenty years.”
“You mean Mr. Again and Again?”
“That’s him.”
“What happened? Did some editor finally shoot him?”
“Sixty-eight and overweight. He only lived three blocks from here. He had this younger girlfriend who left him, and so they didn’t find his body for five weeks.”
I was floating over the head of a man in his late forties who looked somewhat like Clark Heinemann. He wore a herringbone jacket, a dark blue shirt, and a yellow and blue bow tie.
“The poor fuck,” Clark said. “I must have rejected hundreds of his bad stories.”
A thousand, I thought.
“What did you say, Carrie-Anne?”
“What?”
“Did you say something?”
“No.”
“Oh well,” said the human stalk to which my hateful consciousness clung. “He wrote all that genre stuff and tried to pretend it was literary. At least I won’t have to make our interns read any more of his ghastly prose.”
You didn’t even read it yourself?
“What?” Clark said.
“Are you hearing things?” the copper-haired young woman asked. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and grass-green lipstick.
“Too much to drink at the PEN Gala last night, I guess,” he said. “Did I tell you? I sat three tables away from Rushdie and Paul Auster. My head’s been buzzing all morning.”
After that Carrie-Anne left the small office. Clark gazed at her posterior as she went, and so I did too. Clark had a desk and a bookshelf, an old IBM Selectric typewriter, and an almost as old Apple Macintosh computer. His windows were open, and there was a breeze; you could see it wafting in the partially drawn window shade.
Alone Clark Heinemann studied the computer screen, perusing a story submission to the magazine. I tried to read the words, but they didn’t make sense. The world was fading again as it had when I died weeks before.
Finally I was once more merely the memory of hatred for anyone having to do with publishing.
The acrid smell of urine, dead skin, and sour breath assailed a nose close to me. I came to consciousness, again attached to Clark Heinemann. This time we were in an old folks’ home sitting before an ancient woman in a wheelchair. She was listing to the side, and her eyes darted around aimlessly, as if searching for something worth seeing. Looking at her, I perceived a memory that must have belonged to Heinemann. It was his mother when she was younger and he was a child. She’d been a handsome woman. Now her once fair skin had darkened and was creased with a thousand wrinkles. Her white hair stood away from her tiny head like dead grass rising up from the weight of the first snow at the onset of winter. The only glimmer of life, even beauty, was in her blue eyes, which looked out from under a creased brow. She peered closely at the space above Clark’s head.
“How are you, Mom?” he asked, and I wondered what I was doing there.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m Clark, Ma, your son.”
“Who’s that on your head?”
“My... my head?”
“Yeah. That fat Negro on top a’ your head. Isn’t he heavy?”
Heinemann waved his hand over his head; it passed right through me.
“Nothing there, Mom. See?”
“I see a Negro on top a’ your head.”
Clark turned away from his mother and looked into a mirror above a sink anchored into the wall of the nursing-home cell. I saw what he saw — him, as pasty-faced and weak-jawed as ever, and my dark countenance hovering just above for only a second and then fading. I was still there, but Clark soon lost sight of me.
“What was that?” he said.
“He’s gone,” Mrs. Heinemann said. “Now, who are you?”
For the next hour or so, Clark sat with his mother, fed her, and told her over and over again that he was her son and that he loved her.
“Will you take me with you to your house?” she asked, emotional craft combined with the eternal despair of an orphaned child.
“You’re happier here,” he said.
“I hate it here. They don’t feed me.”
“I’ll talk to the nursing staff.”
“Will the Negro take me home with him?”
The smell was horrible; the feeling of mortality unbearable. I could sense death descending all around. This reminded me of my own expiration, and I moaned.
“Did you hear something, Mom?”
“It was him,” she said, gesturing at me with an arthritic claw.
It was then that I understood what was happening. I existed only through my hatred of Clark, and then I was called into existence through my name being mentioned or when someone like that old dying woman could see me.
I wanted to get away from Clark and his mother and that building full of people whose souls were crying out as mine was.
Six or seven times during the torture, Clark turned to look in the mirror, but I wasn’t there — or at least he could no longer see me.
When he left the nursing home, I faded again, hoping that this would be the last conjuring, that I would pass over into oblivion.
For a long time I floated in hateful darkness. My feelings about Clark Heinemann had become a physical thing, or maybe metaphysical; they, those angry emotions, had turned into instincts that I could not eschew.
“Miss Stern to see you, Mr. Heinemann,” a voice through an intercom announced.
“Send her in.”
I was aware again, sharing the eyes, ears, and nostrils of Clark Heinemann.
He looked up, and I did too. Mira walked in, wearing her job-hunting medium-gray dress suit.
She was thirty years younger than I. We met when I was teaching a class on fiction at the uptown Y. She still had a great figure. And that outfit really showed it off.