I hadn’t considered what would happen with the publication of my story “Shootout on the Wild Westside” in the fall edition of Black Rook Review. Clark wrote a moving testimonial to me, “...a writer who never gave up; who died working on his next story.”
I was dragged through a series of interviews, to a dozen public readings, and finally to a publishing house that wanted to put out a collection of my multi-genre tales.
Clark and Mira didn’t stop having sex until the seventh month of her pregnancy, and then, and then... they decided to name their son Paul Henry Heinemann.
Clark became an expert on my work and often gave talks about me.
...Paul Henry was a complex man who was ahead of his time. He wrote fiction that was destined to outlive him. He selfishly used his time for the one thousand stories he crafted over thirty years.
He wasn’t a happy man. He wasn’t nice or good or caring or even very friendly. He hated editors like me because we couldn’t see his value...
And after talks in Cincinnati, Seattle, Boston, LA, and twenty other towns and cities, he’d meet some young woman writer and make love to her the way he would to Mira when he got home.
I hated him then, because I had never cheated on her. Maybe I didn’t treat her as well as she deserved, but at least I was faithful in my mediocrity.
When Clark came home I never rested, because he’d made a career out of me and so talked about me and my work almost every day.
And when he wasn’t dealing with me directly he was calling out to his son, “Paul Henry,” and I was forced into the life I never had, paying for my small-minded, selfish ways.
And then one day Mira found a letter in a pocket of the brown corduroy jacket that Clark wore when on the road. It was some love letter that a young woman secreted for him to find, so he would think of her when he was far away.
The fight went on for hours. Mira cried, and Clark tried to explain, then to apologize, and then to say he had no excuse. She told him to get out, and instead of being happy about his misery, I felt, for the first time since the heart attack, real pain. Their pain was mine. I couldn’t escape it. My consciousness was melding with their emotions.
At one point Clark and I saw Paul Henry standing in a doorway that led down a hall to the boy’s bedroom.
Clark told his son to go to bed.
“What’s that man doing on your head, Daddy?” the four-year-old asked.
After putting his son to bed, Clark returned to the living room, and Mira kissed him.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“Seeing you with our son,” she said. “I’m still mad but I forgive you.”
Later that night, Mira and Clark came in to say good night to my namesake, kissing him and promising strawberry pancakes in the morning to make up for all that yelling.
I wasn’t looking forward to what was going to happen next. When they had even the tiniest spat they made up for it with marathon sex sessions. I was going to experience Clark’s rolling doughy body making Mira cry out for him as she’d never done for me.
But that didn’t happen. Clark and Mira turned on Paul Henry’s night-light and departed, somehow leaving me in the room with their son.
Alone, the boy dutifully picked his teddy bear off the short chest of drawers next to his bed and squeezed it tightly.
He had golden skin and similarly colored curly hair.
He seemed to be thinking about something when he said, “You look so sad.”
He seemed to be talking to me.
This was a surprise. Even those people who rarely saw me, usually senile and near death themselves, never addressed me directly. They would ask Clark who I was and why I was there.
“You,” Paul Henry said.
“Me?”
He nodded. “Why you look so sad?”
“I do?”
“Uh-huh. Why?”
“Because your mother used to be my girlfriend, but then I, I died, and now she loves your father.” I didn’t want to say all that, but somehow his questions demanded answers.
“And so you’re sad because you love my mommy?”
“No.”
“You don’t love her?”
“No, I don’t,” I said, surprised at my own answer.
“Then why are you so mad at my daddy?”
“Why do you say I’m mad?”
“Because when I see you and you say things, it makes him upset. I don’t think he can see you, but he knows you’re there. He knows it, and he gets mixed up.”
I felt something give, like a tether pulling out of the soil.
“I guess I was mad at your father because he never published my stories when I was alive.”
“Oh,” my young namesake said, and I felt another tether give. “Maybe you could forgive him if I said I was sorry he didn’t do that. I could tell my daddy that you were mad, and then he would be sorry too.”
There was a breeze suddenly blowing through the room, and another tether pulled out of the firmament of my hatred. There was a light shining somewhere, and I realized that most of my existence after death had been swathed in darkness.
Everything was becoming light.
Paul Henry was talking, and I might have responded, but I was only aware of the light shining and the darkness that was dissipating, the strong breeze, and the weightlessness I felt from the tethers loosening.
“Will you come back?” Paul Henry asked. It was part of a longer conversation that another part of my mind had been having with him.
Before I could answer, the wind picked up, drowning out all other sound, and the light became excruciatingly bright. I was still there in the room with Paul Henry, as the world turned and Mira called out Clark’s name in ecstasy.
I would, I realized, always be there, and that was a relief so profound that time ceased and my antipathies turned into silver-scaled fish that darted away somewhere, leaving me once again breathless.
The Sin of Dreams
July 27, 2015
“So, who’s paying for all this?” Carly Matthews asked.
“There are a few investors,” Morgan Morgan replied. “A man who owns the largest cable and satellite provider in China, a so-called sheikh, the owner of two pro teams in the US, and a certain, undefined fund that comes to us via the auspices of the White House.”
Morgan gestured broadly. Behind the milk-chocolate-brown entrepreneur, through the huge blue-tinted window, Carly could see center city LA, thirty-two stories down. The San Bernardino Mountains stood under a haze in the distance. The summer sun shone brightly but still failed to warm the air-conditioned office.
“Government money?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” the director of New Lease Enterprises replied, looking somewhere over the young scientist’s head.
“What does that mean?”
“Someone close to the president has called together a small group of billionaires and shared with them the potential of our research. He has also, unofficially, given NLE’s holding company, BioChem International, access to the Justice Department and three constitutional experts.”
“What does the Justice Department have to do with neuronal data analysis?”
Morgan Morgan, executive vice president and principal director of NLE, gazed at the twenty-three-year-old postdoctoral student. Her pleasant features and youthful expression belied the razor-sharp mind that, his advisors assured him, her published articles so clearly exhibited.
“What business does a black hip-hop promoter from the Motor City have running a subsidiary of a biological research company?” Morgan asked.
All the fair-skinned blond scientist could do was raise her eyebrows and shrug.