Collected Fiction

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, and Werewolves in Their Youth

Michael Chabon

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781504052023
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur Allgemein

Three extraordinary works by the New York Times –bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Moonglow. A trio of acclaimed masterworks of contemporary fiction by multiple award-winning author Michael Chabon, hailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a young American Nabokov." The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: Michael Chabon's "astonishing" debut ( The New York Times ) follows Art Bechstein, a man still too young to know what he wants. He only knows what he doesn't want: the life of his money-laundering father. During the summer after graduation he's finding his own way with brilliant and seductive new friends—erudite Arthur Lecomte, the confounding and mercurial Phlox, and a poetry-reciting biker who pulls Art inevitably back into his father's mobbed-up world. Wonder Boys: Grady Tripp's first novel made him a literary star. Seven years later, he's a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but alienated student named James Leer. During one lost weekend at a writing festival with Leer and debauched editor Terry Crabtree, Tripp finally confronts the wreckage of his past in a "wise, wildly funny" ( Chicago Tribune ) reckoning with the self-destructive decisions of his life. Werewolves in Their Youth: An indelible cast of characters finds themselves at crossroads in this astonishing collection of short fiction. A young misfit fails to protect his best friend from the scorn of their classmates; a kleptomaniac real estate agent leads an unhappy couple on a disastrous house tour; and a heartbroken grifter finds his ex-girlfriend's grandmother is both an easy mark and a source of redemption. "When you read these stories, it may strike you how seldom you come across really beautiful writing" ( USA Today ).

Wonder Boys

To Ayelet

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Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank—but that’s not the same thing.

—Joseph Conrad

The author would like to thank

Mary Evans and Douglas Stumpf,

Tigris and Euphrates of this little empire.

THE FIRST REAL WRITER I ever knew was a man who did all of his work under the name of August Van Zorn. He lived at the McClelland Hotel, which my grandmother owned, in the uppermost room of its turret, and taught English literature at Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a stoop-shouldered wooden suit rack that once belonged to my father. Mr. Vetch’s wife had been living in a sanitorium up near Erie since the deaths of their teenaged sons in a backyard explosion some years earlier, and it was always my impression that he wrote, in part, to earn the money to keep her there. He wrote horror stories, hundreds of them, many of which were eventually published, in such periodicals of the day as Weird Tales, Strange Stones, Black Tower, and the like. They were in the gothic mode, after the manner of Lovecraft, set in quiet little Pennsylvania towns that had the misfortune to have been built over the forgotten sites of visitations by bloodthirsty alien gods and of Iroquois torture cults—but written in a dry, ironic, at times almost whimsical idiom, an echo of which I was later to discover in the fiction of John Collier. He worked at night, using a fountain pen, in a bentwood rocking chair, with a Hudson Bay blanket draped across his lap and a bottle of bourbon on the table before him. When his work was going well, he could be heard in every corner of the sleeping hotel, rocking and madly rocking while he subjected his heroes to the gruesome rewards of their passions for unnameable things.

As the market for pulp horror dried up in the years after the Second World War, however, the flecked white envelopes with their fabulous New York addresses no longer appeared so regularly in the Belleek tea tray on my grandmother’s piano; presently they ceased to arrive altogether. I know that August Van Zorn tried to make an adjustment. He changed the settings of his tales to the suburbs and laid a greater emphasis on humor, and he tried, without success, to sell these tame and jokey pieces to Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Then one Monday morning when I was fourteen years old, of an age to begin to appreciate the work of the anonymous, kindly, self-loathing man who’d been living under the same roof as my grandmother and me for the past twelve years, Honoria Vetch threw herself into the swift little river that flowed past the sanitorium, through our town, down to the yellow Allegheny. Her body was not recovered. On the following Sunday, when my grandmother and I came home from church, she sent me upstairs to take Mr. Vetch his lunch. Ordinarily she would have gone herself—she always said that neither Mr. Vetch nor I could be trusted not to waste the other one’s time—but she was angry with him for having declined, among all the empty Sundays of his life, to go to church on this one. So she cut the crusts from a pair of chicken sandwiches and set them on a tray along with a salt-shaker, a white peach, and a King James Bible, and I climbed the stairs to his room, where I found him, with a tiny black-rimmed hole in his left temple, sitting, still slowly rocking, in his bentwood chair. In spite of his fondness for literary gore, and unlike my father, who, I gathered, had made a mess of things, Albert Vetch went out neatly and with a minimum of blood.

I say that Albert Vetch was the first real writer I knew not because he was, for a while, able to sell his work to magazines, but because he was the first one to have the midnight disease; to have the rocking chair and the faithful bottle of bourbon and the staring eye, lucid with insomnia even in the daytime. In any case he was, now that I consider it, the first writer of any sort to cross my path, real or otherwise, in a life that has on the whole been a little too crowded with representatives of that sour and squirrelly race. He set a kind of example that, as a writer, I’ve been living up to ever since. I only hope that I haven’t invented him.

The story—and the stories—of August Van Zorn were in my thoughts that Friday when I drove out to the airport to meet Crabtree’s plane. It was impossible for me to see Terry Crabtree without remembering those fey short stories, since our long friendship had been founded, you might say, on August Van Zorn’s obscurity, on the very, abject failure that helped crumple the spirit of a man whom my grandmother used to compare to a broken umbrella. Our friendship had itself, after twenty years, come to resemble one of the towns in a Van Zorn story: a structure erected, all unknowingly, on a very thin membrane of reality, beneath which lay an enormous slumbering Thing with one yellow eye already half open and peering right up at us. Three months earlier, Crabtree had been announced as a staff member of this year’s annual WordFest—I had wangled him the invitation—and in all the intervening time, although he left numerous messages for me, I’d spoken to him only once, for five minutes, one evening in February when I came home, kind of stoned, from a party at the Chancellor’s, to put on a necktie and join my wife at another party which her boss was throwing that evening down in Shadyside. I was smoking a joint while I spoke to Crabtree, and holding on to the receiver as though it were a strap and I stood in the center of a vast long whistling tunnel of wind, my hair fluttering around my face, my tie streaming out behind me. Although I had the vague impression that my oldest friend was speaking to me in tones of anger and remonstrance, his words just blew by me, like curling scraps of excelsior and fish wrap, and I waved at them as they passed. That Friday marked one of the few times in the history of our friendship that I wasn’t looking forward to seeing him again; I was dreading it.

I remember I’d let my senior workshop go home early that afternoon, telling them it was because of WordFest; but everyone looked over at poor James Leer as they filed out of the room. When I finished gathering all the marked-up dittoed copies and typed critiques of his latest odd short story, shuffling them into my briefcase, and putting on my coat, and then turned to leave the classroom, I saw that the boy was still sitting there, at the back of the classroom, in the empty circle of chairs. I knew I ought to say something to console him—the workshop had been awfully hard on him—and he seemed to want to hear the sound of my voice; but I was in a hurry to get to the airport and irritated with him for being such a goddamn spook all the time, and so I only said good-bye to him and started out the door. “Turn out the light, please,” he’d said, in his choked little powder-soft voice. I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together. I left James Leer sitting there, alone in the dark, and arrived at the airport about half an hour before Crabtree’s plane was due, which gave me the opportunity to sit in my car in the airport parking garage smoking a fatty and listening to Ahmad Jamal, and I won’t pretend that I hadn’t been envisioning this idyllic half hour from the moment I dismissed my class. Over the years I’d surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions. I had one fragrant ounce of Humboldt County, California, in a Ziploc bag in the glove compartment of my car.

Crabtree walked off the plane carrying a small canvas grip, his garment bag draped over one arm, a tall, attractive person at his side. This person had long black curls, wore a smashing red topcoat over a black dress and five-inch black spikes, and was laughing in sheer delight at something that Crabtree was whispering out of the corner of his mouth. It didn’t appear to me, however, that this person was a woman, although I wasn’t entirely sure.

“Tripp,” said Crabtree, approaching me with his free hand extended. He reached up with both arms to embrace me and I held on to him for an extra second or two, tightly, trying to determine from the soundness of his ribs whether he loved me still. “Good to see you. How are you?”

I let go of him and took a step backward. He wore the usual Crabtree expression of scorn, and his eyes were bright and hard, but he didn’t look as though he were angry with me. He’d been letting his hair grow long as he got older, not, as is the case with some fashionable men in their forties, in compensation for any incipient baldness, but out of a vanity more pure and unchallengeable: he had beautiful hair, thick and chestnut-colored and falling in a flawless curtain to his shoulders. He was wearing a well-cut, olive-drab belted raincoat over a handsome suit—an Italian number in a metallic silk that was green like the back of a dollar bill—a pair of woven leather loafers without socks, and round schoolboy spectacles I’d never seen before.

“You look great,” I said.

“Grady Tripp, this is Miss Antonia, uh, Miss Antonia—”

“Sloviak,” said the person, in an ordinary pretty woman’s voice. “Nice to meet you.”

“It turns out she lives around the corner from me, on Hudson.”

“Hi,” I said. “That’s my favorite street in New York.” I attempted to make an unobtrusive study of the architecture of Miss Sloviak’s throat, but she’d tied a brightly patterned scarf around her neck. That in itself was a kind of clue, I supposed. “Any luggage?”

Crabtree held on to the blue canvas grip and handed me the garment bag. It was surprisingly light.

“Just this?”

“Just that,” he said. “Any chance we can give Miss Sloviak here a lift?”

“I guess that would be all right,” I said, with a faint twinge of apprehension, for I began to see already what kind of evening it was going to be. I knew the expression in Crabtree’s eye all too well. He was looking at me as though I were a monster he’d created with his own brain and hands, and he were about to throw the switch that would send me reeling spasmodically across the countryside, laying waste to rude farmsteads and despoiling the rural maidenry. Further he had plenty more ideas where that one came from, and if the means of creating another disturbance fell into his hands he would exploit it without mercy on this night. If Miss Sloviak were not already a transvestite, Crabtree would certainly make her into one. “What hotel is it?”

“Oh, I live here,” said Miss Sloviak, with a becoming blush. “That is, my parents do. In Bloomfield. But you can just drop me downtown and I’ll get a cab from there.”

“Well, we do have to stop downtown, Crabtree,” I said, trying to demonstrate to all concerned that my traffic was with him and that I considered Miss Sloviak to be merely a temporary addition to our party. “To pick up Emily.”

“Where’s this dinner we’re going to?”

“In Point Breeze.”

“Is that far from Bloomfield?”

“Not too far.”

“Great, then,” said Crabtree, and with that, he took Miss Sloviak’s elbow and started off toward Baggage Claim, working his skinny legs to keep up with her. “Come on, Tripp,” he called over his shoulder.

The luggage from their flight was a long time in rolling out and Miss Sloviak took advantage of the delay to go to the bathroom—the ladies’ room, naturally. Crabtree and I stood there, grinning at each other.

“Stoned again,” he said.

“You bastard,” I said. “How are you?”

“Unemployed,” he said, looking no less delighted with himself.

I started to smile, but then something, a ripple in the muscle of his jaw, told me that he wasn’t joking.

“You got fired?” I said.

“Not yet,” he said. “But it looks like it’s coming. I’ll be all right. I spent most of the week calling around town. I had lunch with a couple of people.” He continued to waggle his eyebrows and grin, as though his predicament only amused him—there was a thick streak of self-contempt in Terry Crabtree—and to a certain extent, no doubt, it did. “They weren’t exactly lining up.”

“But, Jesus, Terry, why? What happened?”

“Restructuring,” he said.

Two months earlier my publisher, Bartizan, had been bought out by Blicero Verlag, a big German media conglomerate, and subsequent rumors of a ruthless housecleaning by the new owners had managed to penetrate as far into the outback as Pittsburgh.

“I guess I don’t fit the new corporate profile.”

“Which is?”

“Competence.”

“Where will you go?”

He shook his head, and shrugged.

“So, how do you like her?” he said. “Miss Sloviak. She was in the seat beside me.” An alarm clamored somewhere, to tell us that the carousel of suitcases was about to start up. I think that both of us jumped. “Do you know how many airplanes I’ve boarded with the hope in my heart that my ticket would get me a seat next to someone like her? Particularly while I’m on my way to Pittsburgh? Don’t you think it says a lot for Pittsburgh that it could have produced a Miss Sloviak?”

“She’s a transvestite.”

“Oh, my God,” he said, looking shocked.

“Isn’t she?”

“I’ll just bet that’s hers,” he said. He pointed to a large rectangular suitcase of spotted pony hide, zipped into what looked like the plastic covering for a sofa cushion, that was emerging through the rubber flaps on the carousel. “I guess she doesn’t want to have it soiled.”

“Terry, what’s going to happen to you?” I said. I felt as though the alarm bell were still reverberating within my chest. What’s going to happen to me? I thought. What’s going to happen to my book? “How many years have you been with Bartizan, now anyway? Ten?”

“It’s only ten if you don’t count the last five,” he said, turning toward me. “Which I guess you weren’t.” He looked at me, his expression mild, his eyes alight with that combination of malice and affection expressed so neatly by his own last name. I knew before he opened his mouth exactly what he was going to ask me.

“How’s the book?” he said.

I reached out to grab the pony-skin valise before it passed us by.

“It’s fine,” I said.

He was talking about my fourth novel, or what purported to be my fourth novel, Wonder Boys, which I had promised to Bartizan during the early stages of the previous presidential administration. My third novel, The Land Downstairs, had won a PEN award and, at twelve thousand copies, sold twice as well as both its predecessors combined, and in its aftermath Crabtree and his bosses at Bartizan had felt sanguine enough about my imminent attainment to the status of, at the least, cult favorite to advance me a ridiculous sum of money in exchange for nothing more than a fatuous smile from the thunderstruck author and a title invented out of air and brain-sparkle while pissing into the aluminum trough of a men’s room at Three Rivers Stadium. Luckily for me an absolutely superb idea for a novel soon followed—three brothers in a haunted Pennsylvania small town are born, grow up, and die—and I’d started to work on it at once, and had been diligently hacking away at the thing ever since. Motivation, inspiration were not the problem; on the contrary I was always cheerful and workmanlike at the typewriter and had never suffered from what’s called writer’s block; I didn’t believe in it.

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. It was about a single family and it stood, as of that morning, at two thousand six hundred and eleven pages, each of them revised and rewritten a half dozen times. And yet for all of those years, and all of those words expended in charting the eccentric paths of my characters through the violent blue heavens I had set them to cross, they had not even reached their zeniths. I was nowhere near the end.

“It’s done,” I said. “It’s basically done. I’m just sort of, you know, tinkering with it now, buddy.”

“Great. I was hoping I could get a look at it sometime this weekend. Oh, here’s another one, I bet.” He pointed to a neat little plaid-and-red-leather number, also zipped into a plastic sleeve, that came trundling toward us now along the belt. “Think that might be possible?”

I grabbed the second suitcase—it was more what you’d call a Gladstone bag, a squat little half moon hinged at the sides—and set it on the ground beside the first.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Look what happened to Joe Fahey.”

“Yeah, he got famous,” said Crabtree. “And on his fourth book.”

John Jose Fahey, another real writer I’d known, had only written four books—Sad Tidings, Kind of Blue, Fans and Fadeaways, and Eight Solid Light-years of Lead. Joe and I became friends during the semester I spent in residence, almost a dozen years ago now, at the Tennessee college where he ran the writing program. Joe was a disciplined writer, when I met him, with an admirable gift for narrative digression he claimed to have inherited from his Mexican mother, and very few bad or unmanageable habits. He was a courtly fellow, even smooth, with hair that had turned white by the time he was thirty-two years old. After the moderate success of his third book, Joe’s publishers had advanced him a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in order to encourage him to write them a fourth. His first attempt at it went awry almost instantly. He gamely started a second; this novel he pursued for over two years before giving it up as fucked. The next try his publisher rejected before Joe was even finished writing it, on the grounds that it was already too long, and at any rate not the kind of book they were interested in publishing.

After that John Jose Fahey disappeared into the fastness of an impregnable failure. He pulled off the difficult trick of losing his tenured job at the Tennessee college, when he started showing up drunk for work, spoke with unpardonable cruelty to the talentless element of his classes, and one day waved a loaded pistol from the lectern and instructed his pupils to write about Fear. He sealed himself off from his wife, as well, and she left him, unwillingly, taking with her half of the proceeds from his fabulous contract. After a while he moved back to Nevada, where he’d been born, and lived in a succession of motels. A few years later, changing planes at the Reno airport, I ran into him. He wasn’t going anywhere; he was just making the scene at McCarran. At first he affected not to recognize me. He’d lost his hearing in one ear and his manner was inattentive and cool. Over several margaritas in the airport bar, however, he eventually told me that at last, after seven tries, he’d sent his publisher what he believed to be an acceptable final manuscript of a novel. I asked him how he felt about it. “It’s acceptable,” he said coldly. Then I asked him if finishing the book hadn’t made him feel very happy. I had to repeat myself twice.

“Happy as a fucking clam,” he said.

After that I’d started hearing rumors. I heard that soon after our meeting, Joe tried to withdraw his seventh submission, an effort he abandoned only when his publisher, patience exhausted, had threatened him with legal action. I heard that entire sections had needed to be excised, due to aimlessness and illogic and an unseemly bitterness of tone. I heard all kinds of inauspicious things. In the end, however, Lead turned out to be a pretty good book, and with the added publicity value of Joe’s untimely and absurdist death—he was hit, remember, on Virginia Street, by an armored car filled with casino takings—it did fairly well in the stores. His publishers recouped most of their advance, and everybody said that it was too bad Joe Fahey didn’t live to see his success, but I was never quite sure that I agreed. Eight solid light-years of lead, if you haven’t read the book, is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everywhere.

“Okay, sure, Crabtree,” I said. “I’ll let you read, I don’t know, a dozen pages or so.”

“Any dozen pages I want?”

“Sure. You name ’em.” I laughed, but I was afraid I knew which twelve pages he would choose: the last twelve. This was going to be a problem, because over the past month, knowing that Crabtree was coming to town, I had actually written five different “final chapters,” subjecting my poor half-grown characters to a variety of biblical disasters and Shakespearean bloodbaths and happy little accidents of life, in a desperate attempt to bring in for a premature landing the immense careering zeppelin of which I was the mad commander. There were no “last twelve pages”; or rather, there were sixty of them, all absurdly sudden and random and violent, the literary equivalents of that windblown, flaming airfield in Lakehurst, New Jersey. I aimed a cheesy smile at Crabtree and held it, for just a minute too long. Crabtree took pity on me and looked away.

“Check this out,” he said.

I looked. Wrapped, like the two suitcases, in heavy, clear sheeting that was held in place by strips of duct tape, a strange, black leather case was coming toward us, big as a trash can, molded according to a fanciful geometry, as though it had been designed to transport intact the heart, valves, and ventricles of an elephant.

“That would be a tuba,” I said. I sucked my cheek in and looked at him through a half-closed eye. “Do you suppose—?”

“I think it has to be,” said Crabtree. “It’s wrapped in plastic.”

I hoisted it from the carousel—it was even heavier than it looked—and set it beside the other two, and then we turned toward the ladies’ room and waited for Miss Sloviak to rejoin us. When, after a few more minutes, Miss Sloviak didn’t come back, we decided that I ought to rent a cart. I borrowed a dollar from Crabtree and after a brief struggle with the cart dispenser we managed to get the cart loaded, and wheeled it across the carpet to the bathroom.

“Miss Sloviak?” called Crabtree, knocking like a gentleman on the ladies’ room door.

“I’ll be right out,” said Miss Sloviak.

“Probably putting the plastic wrapper back onto her johnson,” I said.

“Tripp,” said Crabtree. He looked straight at me now and held my eyes with his for as long as he could manage, given the agitated state of his pleasure receptors. “Is it really almost done?”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course it is. Crabtree, are you still going to be my editor?”

“Sure,” he said. He broke eye contact with me and turned back to watch the dwindling parade of suitcases drifting along the baggage carousel. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Then Miss Sloviak emerged from the ladies’ room, hair reestablished, cheeks rouged, eyelids freshly painted a soft viridian, smelling of what I recognized as Cristalle, the fragrance worn both by my wife, Emily, and also by my lover, Sara Gaskell. It smelled a little bitter to me, as you might imagine. Miss Sloviak looked down at the luggage on the cart, and then at Crabtree, and broke out into a broad, toothy, almost intolerably flirtatious lipsticked grin.

“Why, Mr. Crabtree,” said Miss Sloviak, in a creditable Mae West, “is that a tuba on your luggage cart, or are you just glad to see me?”

When I looked at Crabtree I saw, to my amazement, that he had turned bright red in the face. It had been a long time since I’d seen him do that.

CRABTREE AND I MET in college, a place in which I’d never intended to meet anyone. After graduating from high school I took great pains to avoid having to go to college at all, and in particular to Coxley, which had offered me the annual townie scholarship, along with a place as tight end on the starting eleven. I was and remain a big old bastard, six-three, fat now and I know it, and while at the time I had a certain cetacean delicacy of movement in the wide open sea of a hundred-yard field, I wore quadrangular black-rimmed eyeglasses and the patent-leather shoes, serge high-waters, and sober, V-necked sweater-vests my grandmother required of me, so it must have taken a kind of imaginative faith to see me as a football star with a four-year free ride; but in any case I had no desire to play for Coxley—or for anyone else—and one day in late June, 1968, I left my poor grandmother a rather smart-assed note and ran away from the somber hills, towns, and crooked spires of western Pennsylvania that had so haunted August Van Zorn. I didn’t come back for twenty-five years.

I’ll skip over a lot of what followed my cowardly departure from home. Let’s just say that I’d read Kerouac the year before, and had conceived the usual picture of myself as an outlaw-poet-pathfinder, a kind of Zen-masterly John C. Frémont on amphetamines with a marbled dime-store pad of lined paper in the back pocket of my denim pants. I still see myself that way, I suppose, and I’m probably none the better for it. Dutifully I thumbed the rides, hopped the B & Os and the Great Northerns, balled the lithe small-town girls in the band shells of their hometown parks, held the jobs as field hand and day laborer and soda jerk, saw the crude spectacles of American landscape slide past me as I lay in an open boxcar and drank cheap red wine; and if I didn’t, I might as well have. I worked for part of a summer in a hellish Texarkanan carnival as the contumelious clown you get to drop into a tank of water after he calls you pencil-dick. I was shot in the meat of my left hand in a bar outside La Crosse, Wisconsin. All of this rich material I made good use of in my first novel, The Bottomlands, 1976, which was well reviewed, and which sometimes, at desperate instants, I consider to be my truest work. After a few years of unhappy and often depraved existence, I landed, again in the classic manner, in California, where I fell in love with a philosophy major at Berkeley who persuaded me not to waste in wandering what she called, with an air of utter, soul-enveloping conviction that has since led to great misery and that I have never for one instant forgotten, my gift. I was pinned to the spot by this touching tribute to my genius, and stayed put long enough to get together an application to Cal. I was just about ready to blow town—alone—when the letter of acceptance arrived.

Terry Crabtree and I met at the start of our junior year, when we landed in the same short-story class, an introductory course I’d tried every semester to get into. Crabtree had signed up for it on an impulse, and gotten in on the strength of a story he’d written in the tenth grade, about an encounter, at a watering place, between the aging Sherlock Holmes and a youthful Adolf Hitler, who has come from Vienna to Carlsbad to rob invalid ladies of their jewelry. It was a remarkable trick for a fifteen-year-old to have performed, but it was unique; Crabtree had written nothing since then, not a line. The story had weird sexual undertones, as, it must be said, did its author. He was then an awkward, frail young man, his face all forehead and teeth, and he kept to himself, at the back of the class, dressed in a tight, unfashionable suit and tie, a red cashmere scarf tucked like an ascot into his raised lapels when the weather turned cool. I sat in my own corner of the room, sporting a new beard and a pair of little round wire-rims, and took careful notes on everything the teacher had to say.

The teacher was a real writer, too, a lean, handsome cowboy writer from an old Central Valley ranching family, who revered Faulkner and who in his younger days had published a fat, controversial novel that was made into a movie with Robert Mitchum and Mercedes McCambridge. He was given to epigrams and I filled an entire notebook, since lost, with his gnomic utterances, all of which every night I committed to the care of my memory, since ruined. I swear but cannot independently confirm that one of them ran, “At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.” He wore a patrician manner and boots made of rattlesnake hide, and he drove an E-type Jaguar, but his teeth were bad, the fly of his trousers was always agape, and his family life was a semi-notorious farrago of legal proceedings, accidental injury, and institutionalization. He seemed, like Albert Vetch, simultaneously haunted and oblivious, the kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely through a plate-glass window, requiring twenty-two stitches in his cheek.

It was in this man’s class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder—from what I’ve since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. This is in my opinion why writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.

But these are observations I made only later, over the course of many years’ exposure to the workings of the midnight disease. At the time I was simply intimidated, by our teacher’s fame, by his snakeskin boots, and by the secrets of the craft which I believed him to possess. The class covered two stories every session, and in the first go-around I held the last slot on the schedule, along with Crabtree, who, I noticed, made no effort whatever to write down the axioms that filled the smoky air of the classroom, nor ever had anything to contribute to the class beyond an occasional terse but unfailingly polite comment on the banality of the work under discussion that afternoon. Naturally his aloofness was taken for arrogance, and he was thought to be a snob, in particular when he wore his cashmere scarf; but I had noticed from the first how bitten were his nails, how soft and unimposing his voice, how he flinched whenever someone addressed him. He stayed in his corner, in his ill-fitting suit, looking forever pale and faintly queasy, as though our company disgusted him but he was too kind to let on.

He was suffering from the disease, I suspected—but was I?

Hitherto I’d always felt certain of my own ability, but as the weeks passed, and we were burdened with all the inescapable shibboleths and bugbears of the trade of writing—knowing what was “at stake” in a story, where the mystical fairy-fire of epiphany ought to be set dancing above a character’s head, the importance of what our teacher liked to call “spiritual danger” to good characterization—the inevitable overshadowing of my own effort by cool Crabtree’s made it impossible for me to finish anything. I stayed up all night long at the typewriter for the week before my story was due, drinking bourbon and trying to untangle the terrible symbolical mess I had made out of a simple story my grandmother once told me about a mean black rooster that had killed her dog when she was a little girl.

At six o’clock on the last morning I gave up, and decided to do an unconscionable thing. My mind had been wandering for the last hour through the rooms in which my grandmother had passed her life (a year before this I’d telephoned home from some booth in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, and learned that the woman who raised me had died of pneumonia that very morning), and all at once, with the burnt-sugar flavor of bourbon in my mouth, I found myself thinking about Albert Vetch and the hundreds of forgotten stories into which he had poured all the bitterness of his cosmic insomnia. There was one story I remembered fairly well—it was one of his best—called “Sister of Darkness.” It was about an amateur archaeologist, naturally, who lived with his invalid spinster sister in a turreted old house, and who, in the course of poking around the ruins of a local Indian burial mound, stumbled upon a queer, non-Indian sarcophagus, empty, bearing the faded image of a woman with a sinister grin, which he carted home in the dead of night and with which he became obsessed. In the course of restoring the object he cut his hand on a razor blade, and at the splash of his blood upon it the sarcophagus at once grew warm and emitted an odd radiance; his hand was healed, and at the same time he felt himself suffused with a feeling of intense well-being. After a couple of tests on hapless household pets, which he injured and then restored, our man persuaded his crippled little sister to lie in the sarcophagus and thus heal her poliomyelitic legs, whereupon she was transformed, somewhat inexplicably as I recalled, into an incarnation of Yshtaxta, a succubus from a distant galaxy who forced the hero to lie with her—Van Zorn’s genre permitted a certain raciness, as long as the treatment was grotesque and euphemistic—and then, having drained the life force from the unlucky hero, set out to take on the rest of the town, or so I had always imagined, half hoping that a luminous ten-foot woman with fangs and immortal cravings might appear sometime at my own window in the most lonely hour of the Pennsylvanian night.

I set to work reassembling the story as well as I could. I toned down the occult elements by turning the whole nameless-Thing-from-beyond-Time component into a weird psychosis on the part of my firs...