The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King
"A little," I said. I could smell her perfume. Some kind of fruit. Fresh pears, maybe. Fresh somethings, anyway.
She sat down at the next desk, a long-legged vision in faded jeans. "When that happens to me, I type The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog three times, real fast. It opens the creative floodgates." She spread her arms, showing me how floodgates open, and incidentally giving me a breathtaking view of breasts snugly encased in a black tank top.
"I don't think that will work in this case," I said.
Katie wrote her own feature, not as popular as Speaking Ill of the Dead, but still widely read; she had half a million followers on Twitter. (Modesty forbids me to say how many I had in those days, but go ahead and think seven figures; you won't be wrong.) Hers was called Getting Sloshed with Katie. The idea was to go out drinking with celebs we hadn't dissed yet--and even some we had went for the deal, go figure--and interview them as they got progressively more shitfaced. It was amazing what came out, and Katie got it all on her cute little pink iPhone.
She was supposed to get drunk right along with them, but she had a way of leaving a single drink but a quarter finished as they moved from one watering hole to another. The celebs rarely noticed. What they noticed was the perfect oval of her face, her masses of wheat-blond hair, and her wide gray eyes, which always projected the same message: Oh gosh, you're so interesting. They lined up for the chop even though Katie had effectively ended half a dozen careers since joining the Circus staff eighteen months or so before I came on board. Her most famous interview was with the family comedian who opined of Michael Jackson, "That candy-ass wanna-be-whitebread is better off dead."
"I guess she said no raise, huh?" Katie nodded toward Jeroma's office.
"How did you know I was going to ask for a raise? Did I tell you?" Mesmerized by those misty orbs, I might have told her anything.
"No, but everyone knew you were going to, and everyone knew she was going to say no. If she said yes, everyone would ask. By saying no to the most deserving, she shuts the rest of us down cold."
The most deserving. That gave me a little shiver of delight. Especially coming from Katie.
"So are you going to stick?"
"For now," I said. Talking out of the side of my mouth. It always works for Bogie in the old movies, but Katie got up, brushing nonexistent lint from the entrancingly flat midriff of her top.
"I've got a piece to write. Vic Albini. God, he could put it away."
"The gay action hero," I said.
"News flash: not gay." She gave me a mysterious smile and drifted off, leaving me to wonder. But not really wanting to know.
*
I sat in front of the blank Bump DeVoe document for ten minutes, made a false start, deleted it, and sat for another ten minutes. I could feel Jeroma's eyes on me and knew she was smirking, if only on the inside. I couldn't work with that stare on me, even if I was just imagining it. I decided to go home and write the DeVoe piece there. Maybe something would occur on the subway, which was always a good thinking place for me. I started to close the laptop, and that was when inspiration struck again, just as it had on the night when I saw the item about Jack Briggs departing for that great A-list buffet in the sky. I decided I was going to quit, and damn the consequences, but I would not go quietly.
I dumped the blank DeVoe document and created a new one, which I titled JEROMA WHITFIELD OBIT. I wrote with absolutely no pause. Two hundred poisonous words just poured out of my fingers and onto the screen.
Jeroma Whitfield, known as Jerri to her close friends (according to reports, she had a couple in preschool), died today at--
I checked the clock.
--10:40 A.M. According to co-workers on the scene, she choked on her own bile. Although she graduated cum laude from Vassar, Jerri spent the last three years of her life whoring on Third Avenue, where she oversaw a crew of roughly two dozen galley slaves, all more talented than herself. She is survived by her husband, known to the staff of Neon Circus as Emasculated Toad, and one child, an ugly little fucker affectionately referred to by the staff as Pol Pot. Co-workers all agree that although she lacked even a vestige of talent, Jerri possessed a domineering and merciless personality that more than made up for it. Her braying voice was known to cause brain hemorrhages, and her lack of a sense of humor was legend. In lieu of flowers, Toad and Pot request that those who knew her express their joy at her demise by sending eucalyptus drops to the starving children of Africa. A memorial service will be held at the Neon Circus offices, where joyful survivors can exchange precious memories and join in singing "Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead."
My idea as I started this diatribe was to print a dozen copies, tape them up everywhere--including the bathrooms and both elevators--then say see-ya-wouldn't-want-to-be-ya to both the Neon Circus offices and the Cough Drop Queen for good. I might even have done it if I hadn't reread what I had written and discovered it wasn't funny. It wasn't even close to funny. It was the work of a child having a tantrum. Which led me to wonder if all my obits had been equally unfunny and stupid.
For the first time (you might not believe it, but I swear it's true) it came to me that Bump DeVoe had been a real person, and somewhere people might be crying because he was gone. The same was probably true of Jack Briggs . . . and Frank Ford (who I had described as "noted Tonight Show crotch-grabber") . . . and Trevor Wills, a reality-show star who committed suicide after being photographed in bed with his brother-in-law. Those pix the Circus had cheerfully put online, just adding a black strip to cover the brother-in-law's naughty bits (Wills's had been safely out of sight, and you can probably guess where).
It also came to me that I was spending the most creatively fecund years of my life doing bad work. Shameful, in fact, a word that would never have occurred to Jeroma Whitfield in any context.
Instead of printing the document, I closed it, dragged it to the trash, and shut down the laptop. I thought about marching back into Jeroma's office and telling her I was done writing stuff that was the equivalent of a toddler throwing poo on the wall, but a cautious part of my mind--the traffic cop most of us have up there--told me to wait. To think it over and be absolutely sure.
Twenty-four hours, the traffic cop decreed. Hit a movie this afternoon and sleep on it tonight. If you still feel the same way in the morning, go with God, my son.
"Off so soon?" Katie asked from her own laptop, and for the first time since my first day here, I wasn't stopped cold in my tracks by those wide gray eyes. I just tipped her a wave and left.
*
I was attending a matinee of Dr. Strangelove at Film Forum when my mobile started vibrating. Because the living room-size theater was empty except for me, two snoozing drunks, and a couple of teenagers making vacuum cleaner noises in the back row, I risked looking at the screen and saw a text from Katie Curran: Stop what you're doing and call me RIGHT NOW!
I went out to the lobby without too much regret (although I always like to see Slim Pickens ride the bomb down) and called her back. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say the first two words out of her mouth changed my life.
"Jeroma's dead."
"What?" I nearly screamed.
The popcorn girl glanced up at me over the top of her magazine, startled.
"Dead, Mike! Dead! She choked to death on one of those damn eucalyptus drops she's always sucking on."
Died at 10:40 A.M., I'd written. Choked to death on her own bile.
Only a coincidence, of course, but offhand I couldn't think of a more malefic one. God had turned Jeroma Whitfield from can do into can did.
"Mike? Are you there?"
"Yes."
"She had no second-in-command. You know that, right?"
"Uh-huh." Now I was thinking of her telling me to have a Yook, and clicking her own against her teeth.
"So I'm taking it on myself to call a staff meeting tomorrow at ten. Somebody's got to do it. Will you come?"
"I don't know. Maybe not." I was walking toward the door to
"I knew. I could see it on your face when you left."
The thought of Katie looking at my face might have tied up my tongue in other circumstances, but not then. "Did it happen at the office?"
"Yes. It was pushing on for two o'clock. There were four of us in the bullpen, not really working, just hanging out and swapping stories and rumors. You know how it goes."
I did. Those gossipy bull sessions were one of the reasons I went to the office instead of working at home in Brooklyn. Plus getting a chance to feast my eyes on Katie, of course.
"Her door was closed, but the blinds were open." They usually were. Unless she was taking a meeting with someone she considered important, Jeroma liked to keep an eye on her vassals. "The first I knew was when Pinky said, 'What's wrong with the boss? She's all Gangnam Style.'
"So I looked, and she was jerking back and forth in her office chair, grabbing at her neck. Then she fell out of the chair and all I could see was her feet, drumming up and down. Roberta asked what we should do. I didn't even bother answering that."
They burst in. Roberta Hill and Chin Pak Soo lifted her up by the armpits. Katie got behind her and gave her the Heimlich. Pinky stood in the doorway and waved his hands. The first hard heave on her diaphragm did nothing. Katie shouted for Pinky to call 911 and went at her again. The second heave sent one of those eucalyptus drops flying all the way across the room. Jeroma took a single deep breath, opened her eyes, and spoke her last words (and very fitting they were, IMHO): "What the fuck?" Then she began to shudder all over again, and stopped breathing. Chin gave her artificial respiration until the paramedics arrived, but no joy.
"I checked the clock on her wall after she quit breathing," Katie said. "You know, that awful retro Huckleberry Hound thing? I thought . . . I don't know, I guess I thought someone might ask me for the time of death, like on Law & Order. Stupid what goes through your mind at a time like that. It was ten to three. Not even an hour ago, but it seems longer."
"So she could have choked on the cough drop at two forty," I said. Not ten forty, but two forty. I knew it was just another coincidence, like Lincoln and Kennedy having the same number of letters; forty past comes around twenty-four times a day. But I still didn't like it.
"I suppose, but I don't see what difference it makes." Katie sounded annoyed. "Will you come in tomorrow or not? Please come in, Mike. I need you."
To be needed by Katie Curran! Ai-yi-yi!
"Okay. But will you do something for me?"
"I guess so."
"I forgot to empty the trash on the computer I was using. The one back by the Thanksgiving dinner poster. Will you do it?" This request made no rational sense to me even then. I just wanted that bad joke of an obituary gone.
"You're crazy," she said, "but if you absolutely swear on your mother's name to come in tomorrow at ten, sure. Listen, Mike, this is a chance for us. We might end up owning a piece of the gold mine instead of just working in it."
"I'll be there."
*
Almost everyone was, except for stringers working among the primitives in darkest Connecticut and New Jersey. Even scabby little Irving Ramstein, who wrote a joke column called (I don't understand it, so don't ask me) Politically Incorrect Chickens, showed up. Katie ran the meeting with aplomb, telling us that the show would go on.
"It's what Jeroma would have wanted," Pinky said.
"Who gives a shit what Jeroma would have wanted," Georgina Bukowski said. "I just want to keep getting a paycheck. Also, if remotely possible, a piece of the action."
This cry was taken up by several others--Action! Action! Piece-a-da-action!--until our offices sounded like a messhall riot in an old prison movie. Katie let it run its course, then shushed them.
"How could she choke to death?" Chin asked. "The gumdrop came out."
"It wasn't a gumdrop," Roberta said. "It was one of those smelly cough drops she was always sucking on. Craptolyptus."
"Whatever, dude, it still came flying out when Kates gave her the Hug of Life. We all saw it."
"I didn't," Pinky said. "I was on the phone. And on fucking hold."
Katie said that she had interviewed one of the EMTs--no doubt using her large gray eyes to good effect--and had been told that the choking fit might have triggered a heart attack. And, in my effort to follow the dictum of Professor Higgins and keep all the relevant facts straight, I will jump ahead here and report the autopsy on our Dear Leader proved that to be the case. If Jeroma had gotten the Neon Circus headline she deserved, it probably would have been HEAD HONCHO POPS PUMP.
That meeting was long and loud. Already displaying talents that made her a natural to step into Jeroma's Jimmy Choos, Katie allowed them to fully vent their feelings (expressed mostly in bursts of wild, semihysterical laughter) before telling them to get back to work, because time, tide, and Internet waits for no man. Or woman, either. She said she would be talking with the Circus's main investors before the week was out, and then invited me to step into Jeroma's office.
"Measuring the drapes?" I asked when the door was shut. "Or the blinds, in this case?"
She looked at me with what might have been hurt. Or maybe just surprise. "Do you think I want this job? I'm a columnist, Mike, just like you."
"You'd be good at it, though. I know it and so do they." I jerked my head toward our excuse for a newsroom, where everyone was now either hunting and pecking or working the phones. "As for me, I'm just the funny-obit writer. Or was. I've decided to become an emeritus."
"I think I understand why you feel that way." She slipped a piece of paper from the back pocket of her jeans and unfolded it. I knew what it was before she handed it to me. "Curiosity comes with the job, so I peeped in your trash before dumping it. And found this."
I took the sheet, refolded it without looking (I didn't even want to see the print, let alone reread it), and put it in my own pocket. "Is it dumped now?"
"Yes, and that's the only hard copy." She brushed her hair away from her face and looked at me. It might not have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but it surely could have launched several dozen, including a destroyer or two. "I knew you'd ask. Having worked with you for a year and a half, I understand that paranoia is part of your character."
"Thanks."
"No offense intended. In New York, paranoia is a survival skill. But it's no reason to quit what could become a far more lucrative job in the immediate future. Even you must know that a freaky coincidence--and I admit this one's fairly freaky--is just a coincidence. Mike, I need you to stay on board."
Not we but I. She said she wasn't measuring the drapes; I thought she was.
"You don't understand. I don't think I could do it anymore even if I wanted to. Not and be funny, at least. It would all come out . . ." I reached, and found a word from my childhood. "Goosh."
Katie frowned, thinking. "Maybe Penny could do it."
Penny Langston was one of those stringers from the darker environs, hired by Jeroma at Katie's suggestion. I had a vague idea that the two women had known each other in college. If so, they could not have been less alike. Penny rarely came in, and when she did, she wore an old baseball cap that never left her head and a macabre smile that rarely left her face. Frank Jessup, the sports guy with the Mohawk, liked to say that Penny always looked about two stress points from going postal.
"But she'd never be as funny as you are," Katie went on. "If you don't want to write obituaries, what would you want to do? Assuming you stay at Circus, which I pray you will."
"Reviews, maybe. I could write funny ones, I think."
"Hatchet jobs?" Sounding at least marginally hopeful.
"Well . . . yeah. Probably. Some of them." I was good at snark, after all, and I thought I could
She put her hands on my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and planted a soft kiss on the corner of my mouth. If I close my eyes, I can still feel that kiss today. She looked at me with those wide gray eyes--the sea on an overcast morning. I'm sure Professor Higgins would roll his eyes at that, but C-list guys like me rarely get kissed by A-list girls like her.
"Think about going on with the obits, would you?" Hands still on my shoulders. Her light scent in my nostrils. Her breasts less than an inch from my chest, and when she took a deep breath, they touched. I can still feel that today too. "This is not just about you or me. The next six weeks are going to be a critical time for the site and the staff. So think, okay? Even another month of obits would be helpful. It would give Penny--or someone else--a chance to work her way into the job, with guidance from you. And hey, maybe nobody interesting will die."
Except they always do, and we both knew it.
I probably told her I'd think about it. I can't remember. What I was actually thinking about was lip-locking her right there in Jeroma's office, and damn anyone in the bullpen who might see us. I didn't, though. Outside the rom-coms, guys like me rarely do. I said something or other and then I must have left, because pretty soon I found myself out on the street. I felt poleaxed.
One thing I do remember: when I came to a litter basket on the corner of Third and Fiftieth, I tore the joke obit that was no longer a joke into tiny shreds and threw them in.
*
That night I ate a pleasant enough dinner with my parents, then went into my room--the same one where I'd gone to sulk on days when my Little League team lost, how depressing is that--and sat down at my desk. The easiest way to get past my unease, it seemed to me, was to write another obit of a living person. Don't they tell you to get back on a horse right away if you've been thrown? Or climb right away to the top diving platform after your jackknife turns into a belly flop? All I needed to do was prove what I already knew: we live in a rational world. Sticking pins in voodoo dolls doesn't kill people. Writing your enemy's name on a scrap of paper and burning it while you recite the Lord's Prayer backwards doesn't kill people. Joke obituaries don't kill people, either.