The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King
"Such treffik," the Sikh said. "Worse than Obama, I tell you."
The man dropped the black scarf from his nose. He held it in one hand and reached into the pocket of his raincoat with the other. The woman in the window seat of the bus flicked through her magazine. The man turned to her. Wilson saw his lips move. The woman lifted her head, eyes widening in apparent surprise. The man bent closer, as if to confide a secret. Wilson didn't realize the thing the man had taken from his raincoat pocket was a knife until he cut the woman's throat with it.
Her eyes widened. Her lips parted. She raised a hand toward her neck. The man in the raincoat used the hand holding the knife to push her hand gently but firmly down. At the same time he pressed the black scarf to the woman's throat and held it there. Then he kissed the hollow of her temple, looking through her hair as he did it. He saw Wilson, and his lips parted in a smile wide enough to show two rows of small, even teeth. He nodded to Wilson, as if to say either have a nice day or now we have a secret. There was a drop of blood on the woman's window. It fattened and ran down the glass. Still holding the scarf to the woman's throat, Raincoat Man slipped a finger into her slackening mouth. He was still smiling at Wilson as he did it.
"Finally!" the Sikh said, and the Jolly Dingle cab began to move.
"Did you see that?" Wilson asked. His voice sounded flat and unsurprised. "That man. That man on the bus. The one with the woman."
"What is it, sir?" the Sikh asked. The light on the corner turned yellow and the Sikh scooted through, ignoring a flourish of horns as he switched lanes. The Peter Pan bus was left behind. Ahead, Grand Central loomed in the rain, looking like a penitentiary.
It was only with the cab moving again that Wilson thought of his cell. He took it out of his coat pocket and looked at it. If he'd been a quick thinker (always his brother's department, according to their mother), he could have snapped Raincoat Man's picture. It was too late for that, but not too late to call 911. Of course he couldn't make such a call anonymously; his name and number would flash on some official screen as soon as the call went through. They would call him back to make sure he wasn't a prankster whiling away a rainy afternoon in New York City. Then they would want information, which he would have to give--no choice--at the nearest police station. They would want his story several times. What they would not want was his pitch.
The pitch was titled "Give us three years and we'll prove it." Wilson thought of how it was supposed to go. He would begin by telling the gathered PR flaks and executives that the spill had to be faced directly. It was there; volunteers were still washing oil-coated birds in Dawn detergent; it couldn't be swept under the rug. But, he would say, atonement doesn't have to be ugly and sometimes the truth can be beautiful. People want to believe in you guys, he would say. They need you, after all. They need you to get from Point A to Point B, and that makes them unwilling to see themselves as accessories in the rape of the environment. At this point he would open his portfolio and display the first card: a photo of a boy and girl standing on a pristine beach, backs to the camera, looking out at water so blue it almost hurt. ENERGY AND BEAUTY CAN GO TOGETHER, the copy read. GIVE US THREE YEARS AND WE'LL PROVE IT.
Calling 911 was so simple a child could do it. In fact, children did. When someone broke in. When Little Sister fell downstairs. Or if Daddy was tuning up on Mommy.
Next came his storyboard for a proposed TV commercial that would run in all the states on the Gulf, emphasis on local news and the cable twenty-fours like FOX and MSNBC. In time-lapse photography, a dirty, oil-smeared beach would become clean again. "We have a responsibility to fix our mistakes," the narrator would say (with the slightest southern twang). "It's how we do business and how we treat our neighbors. Give us three years and we'll prove it."
Next, the print ads. The radio ads. And in Phase Two--
"Sir? You said what?"
I could call, Wilson thought, but the guy will probably be off the bus and long gone before the police can get there. Probably? Almost certainly.
He turned to look behind him. The bus was way back there now. Maybe, he thought, the woman cried out. Maybe the other passengers are already piling onto the guy, the way passengers piled onto the Shoe Bomber when they figured out what he was up to.
Then he thought of the way the man in the raincoat had smiled at him. Also of how he'd put his finger in the woman's loose mouth.
Wilson thought, Speaking of pranks, it might not have been what I thought it was. It could have been a gag. One they played all the time. A flash-mob kind of thing.
The more he considered this, the more possible it seemed. Men cut women's throats in alleys and on TV shows, not on Peter Pan buses in the middle of the afternoon. As for himself, he had put together a fine campaign. He was the right man in the right place at the right time, and you rarely got more than one chance in this world. That had never been one of his mother's sayings, but it was a fact.
"Sir?"
"Let me out at the next light," Wilson said. "I can walk from there."
For Hesh Kestin
I saw lots of horror films when I was a kid (you probably guessed that). I was an easy target, and most of them scared me to death. It was dark, the images were so much bigger than you were, and the sound was so loud that the scares continued even when you shut your eyes. On TV, the scare quotient tended to be lower. There were commercials to break the rhythm of the thing, and the worst parts were sometimes snipped out to avoid giving complexes to any little shavers who might be watching (alas, already too late for me; I'd seen the dead woman rising out of the tub in Diabolique). As a last resort, you could always go into the kitchen and grab a Hires out of the fridge, lingering until the scary music was replaced by some local huckster screaming, "Cars, cars, cars! No credit check! We'll sell to ANYONE!"
One film I saw on TV did the job, however. At least the first hour or so of its seventy-seven-minute run did; the denouement wrecked the whole thing, and to this day I wish somebody would remake it and carry its hair-raising premise right through to the end. That film has perhaps the best horror-movie title of all time: I Bury the Living.
I was thinking of that movie when I wrote this story.
Obits
Keep it clear, and keep it in a straight line.
That was the gospel according to Vern Higgins, who headed up the journalism department at the University of Rhode Island, where I got my degree. A lot of what I heard at school went in one ear and out the other, but not that, because Professor Higgins hammered on it. He said that people need clarity and concision in order to start the process of understanding.
Your real job as journalists, he told his classes, is to give people the facts that allow them to make decisions and go forward. So don't be fancy. Don't go all twee and hifalutin. Start at the start, lay the middle out neatly, so the facts of each event lead logically to the next, and end at the end. Which, in reporting, he emphasized, is always the end for now. And don't you ever sink to that lazy crap about how some people believe or the general consensus of opinion is. A source for each fact, that's the rule. Then write it all in plain English, unadorned and unvarnished. Flights of rhetoric belong on the op-ed page.
I doubt if anyone will believe what follows, and my career at Neon Circus had very little to do with good writing, but I intend to do my best here: the facts of each event leading to the next. Beginning, middle, and end.
The end for now, at least.
*
Good reporting always begins with the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why if you can find out. In my case, the why's a tough one.
The who is easy enough, though; your less-than-fearless narrator is Michael Anderson. I was twenty-seven at the time these things happened. I graduated from URI with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. For two years after college I lived with my parents in Brooklyn and worked for one of those Daily Shopper freebies, rewriting newswire items to break up the ads and coupons. I kept my resume (such as it was) in constant rotation, but none of th
(If Professor Higgins saw all these parentheses, he'd kill me.)
My parents began urging me--gently, gently--to start looking for some other kind of job. "In a related field," my father said in his most diplomatic voice. "Maybe advertising."
"Advertising isn't news," I said. "Advertising is anti-news." But I caught his drift: he had visions of me still grabbing midnight snacks out of their fridge when I was forty. Slacker Deluxe.
Reluctantly, I began making a list of possible advertising firms that might like to hire a young copywriter with good chops but no experience. Then, on the night before I planned to begin sending out copies of my resume to the firms on that list, I had a goofy idea. Sometimes--often--I lie awake nights wondering how different my life might have been if that idea had never crossed my mind.
Neon Circus was one of my favorite websites in those days. If you're a connoisseur of snark and schadenfreude, you know it: TMZ with better writers. They mostly cover the local "celeb scene," with occasional prospecting trips into the stinkier crevasses of New York and New Jersey politics. If I had to sum up its take on the world, I'd show you a photo we ran about six months into my employment there. It showed Rod Peterson (always referred to in the Circus as "the Barry Manilow of his generation") outside Pacha. His date is bent over, puking in the gutter. He's got a happy-ass grin on his face and his hand up the back of her dress. Caption: ROD PETERSON, THE BARRY MANILOW OF HIS GENERATION, EXPLORES NEW YORK'S LOWER EAST SIDE.
Circus is essentially a webazine, with lots of click-friendly departments: CELEB WALK OF SHAME, VILE CONSUMPTION, I WISH I HADN'T SEEN THAT, WORST TV OF THE WEEK, WHO WRITES THIS CRAP. There are more, but you get the idea. That night, with a stack of resumes ready to send out to firms I didn't really want to work for, I went to Neon Circus for a little revivifying junk food, and on the home page discovered that a hot young actor named Jack Briggs had OD'd. There was a photo of him staggering out of a downtown hotspot the week before, typical bad taste for Neon Circus, but the news item accompanying it was surprisingly straight, and not Circus-y at all. That was when inspiration struck. I did some research on the Internet, just screwing around, then wrote a quick and nasty obituary.
Jack Briggs, noted for his horrific performance in last year's Holy Rollers as a talking bookshelf in love with Jennifer Lawrence, was found dead in his hotel room surrounded by some of his favorite powdered treats. He joins the 27 Club, which also contains such noted substance abusers as Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. Briggs shambled onto the acting scene in 2005, when . . .
Well, you get it. Juvenile, disrespectful, downright nasty. If I'd been serious that night, I probably would have dragged the finished obit to the trash, because it seemed to go beyond even Neon Circus's usual snark and into outright cruelty. But because I was just messing (it has since occurred to me to wonder how many careers have started while just messing), I sent it to them.
Two days later--the Internet speeds everything up--I got an email from someone named Jeroma Whitfield saying they not only wanted to run it, they wanted to discuss the possibility that I might perhaps write more in the same nasty-ass vein. Could I come into the city and discuss it at lunch?
My tie and sportcoat turned out to be a case of serious overdressing. The Circus offices on Third Avenue were filled with men and women who looked a lot more like boys and girls, all running around in rock-band tees. A couple of the women wore shorts, and I saw a guy in carpenter overalls with a Sharpie poked through his Mohawk. He was the head of the sports department, it turned out, responsible for one memorable story titled JINTS TAKE ANOTHER SHIT IN THE RED ZONE. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. This was (and is) journalism in the Age of the Internet, and for every person in the offices that day, there were another five or six stringers working from home. For starvation wages, I hardly need add.
I have heard that once upon a gilded time, in New York's misty and mythic past, there were publishers' lunches at places like the Four Seasons, le Cirque, and the Russian Tea Room. Perhaps, but my lunch that day was in the cluttered office of Jeroma Whitfield. It consisted of deli sandwiches and Dr. Brown's Cream Soda. Jeroma was ancient by Circus standards (early forties), and I disliked her pushy abrasiveness from the start, but she wanted to hire me to write a weekly obituary column, and that made her a goddess. She even had a title for the new feature: Speaking Ill of the Dead.
Could I do it? I could.
Would I do it for shit money? I would. At least to start with.
After the column became the most-visited page on the Neon Circus site and my name had become associated with it, I dickered for more dough, partly because I wanted to move into my own apartment in the city and partly because I was tired of getting peon's wages for singlehandedly writing the page that was bringing in the most ad revenue.
That first dickering session was a modest success, probably because my demands were couched as tentative requests, and the requests were almost laughably humble. Four months later, when rumors began to circulate of a big corporation buying us for actual strutting money, I visited Jeroma's office and asked for a larger raise, this time with rather less humility.
"Sorry, Mike," she said. "In the memorable words of Hall and Oates, I can't go for that, no can do. Have a Yook."
Holding pride of place on Jeroma's cluttered desk was a large glass bowl filled with menthol-flavored eucalyptus drops. The wrappers were covered with gung-ho sayings. Let's hear your battle cry, read one. Another advised (it gives the grammarian in me chills to report this) Turn can do into can did.
"No thanks. Give me a chance to lay this out for you before you say no."
I marshaled my arguments; you might say I attempted to turn can do into can did. The bottom line was my belief that I was owed a wage more commensurate with the revenue Speaking Ill of the Dead was generating. Especially if Neon Circus was going to be bought out by a major corporate playa.
When I finally shut up, she unwrapped a Yook, popped it between her plum-colored lips, and said, "Okay! Great! If you've got that off your chest, you might want to get to work on Bump DeVoe. He's a tasty one."
He was indeed a tasty one. Bump, lead singer of the Raccoons, had been shot dead by his girlfriend while trying to sneak in through the bedroom window of her house in the Hamptons, probably as a joke. She had mistaken him for a burglar. What made the story such a deliciously fat pitch was the gun she used: a birthday present from the Bumpster himself, now the newest member of the 27 Club and perhaps comparing guitar chops with Brian Jones.
"So you're not even going to respond," I said. "That's how little respect you have for me."
She leaned forward, smiling just enough to show the tips of her little white teeth. I could smell menthol. Or eucalyptus. Or both. "Let me be frank, okay? For a guy who's still living with his parents in Brooklyn, you have an extremely inflated idea of your importance in the scheme of things. You think nobody else can piss on the graves of dimwit assholes who party themselves to death? Think again. I've got half a dozen stringers who can do it, and probably turn in copy funnier than yours."
"So why don't I walk, and you can find out if that's true?" I was pretty mad.
Jeroma grinned and clacked her eucalyptus drop against her teeth. "Be my guest. But if you go, Speaking Ill of the Dead doesn't go with you. It's my title, and it stays right here at Circus. Of course you do have some cred now, and I won't deny it. So here's your choice, kiddo. You can go back to your computer and get humping on Bump, or you can take a meeting at the New York Post. They'll probably hire you. You'll end up writing shit squibs on Page Six with no byline. If that floats your boat, go te
"I'll write the obit. But we're going to revisit this, Jerri."
"Not on my watch, we're not. And don't call me Jerri. You know better than that."
I got up to go. My face was burning. I probably looked like a stop sign.
"And have a Yook," she said. "Hell, take two. They're very consoling."
I cast a disdainful look at the bowl and left, restraining (barely) a childish urge to slam the door.
*
If you're picturing a bustling newsroom like the one you see behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN, or in that old movie about Woodward and Bernstein nailing Nixon, reconsider. As I said, most of the Circus writers do their work from home. Our little news-nest (if you want to dignify what Circus does by calling it news) is roughly the size of a doublewide trailer. Twenty school desks are crammed in there, facing a row of muted TVs on one wall. The desks are equipped with battered laptops, each one bearing a hilarious sticker reading PLEASE RESPECT THESE MACHINES.
The place was almost empty that morning. I sat in the back row by the wall, in front of a poster showing a Thanksgiving dinner in a toilet bowl. Beneath this charming image was the motto PLEASE SHIT WHERE YOU EAT. I turned on the laptop, took my printouts concerning Bump DeVoe's short and undistinguished career from my briefcase, and shuffled through them while the cruncher booted. I opened Word, typed BUMP DeVOE OBIT in the proper box, then just sat there, staring at the blank document. I was paid to yuk it up in the face of death for twentysomethings who feel that death is always for the other guy, but it's hard to be funny when you're pissed off.
"Having trouble getting started?"
It was Katie Curran, a tall, svelte blond for whom I felt a strong lust that was almost certainly unrequited. She was always kind to me, and unfailingly sweet. She laughed at my jokes. Such characteristics rarely signal lust. Was I surprised? Not at all. She was hot; I am not. I am, if I may be frank, exactly that geek all the teenpix make fun of. Until my third month working at Circus, I even had the perfect geek accessory: spectacles mended with tape.