A Moment of Doubt Read online

  “Well.”

  Pause.

  “Ahem.”

  “Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Jameson.”

  “And whom may I say I am pleasing?”

  “Matilde, Matilde Michelov. I’m calling from Crow Mignon Books?”

  “Crow—Oh! Oh yes! A publisher! Yes of course! I’m—I’m abjectly delighted to have, to be—meeting you?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Jameson. I’m calling to suggest to you that we, I should say, I, I very much enjoyed So Long, Pockface , and I would like to do a presentation on it.”

  “Do a . . . ?”

  “To the senior editor. But, of course, I must be certain that we wouldn’t be wasting his time. First of all, I see by the postmark that it’s been 2½ years since you mailed the manuscript to us. Has the book been published?”

  “Are you kid—I mean, no, no, for some reason, I mean, by some incredible quirk of circumstance, it hasn’t.”

  “No one else has been interested, then?”

  “Well, that’s not strictly true, Ms., Ms. . . . ?”

  “Michelov. Matilde Michelov.”

  “Matilde. That’s M, A, . . . ?”

  “A, Sir, that’s correct.”

  “That’s a nice name.”

  “Thank you. Mother liked it, too. Now, you were saying . . . ?”

  “I was saying, due to circumstances out of my control, the property you mentioned is still up for grabs.”

  “Well, Mr. Jameson . . .”

  “Jas, Jas . . .”

  “In a minute, Jas. As I was saying, Mr. Jameson, I’m in a position to offer you $1,500 for So Long, Pockface.”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Ms. Michelov, this is a novel we’re talking about here, not a crossword puzzle.”

  “Mr. Jameson, I certainly understand your concern, but you must take the broad view . . . .”

  “I’m always taking the broad view, Ms. Michelov. We’re talking about money and books here.”

  “Book, Mr. Jameson. A single book.”

  “Surely, Ma’am, surely you can understand, I’ve my life’s blood in So Long, Pockface , I poured my soul into that book . . . .”

  “We’ll discuss the rewrite in a moment, Mr. Jameson, if and after we have an agreement. The figure under consideration was fifteen hundred dollars. American.”

  “Couldn’t you manage two thousand, Ms. Michelov? I’m worried about my landlady. Not that she’s said anything, but she seems so hungry of late, I’d love to be in a position to negotiate an increase in my rent . . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jameson. We have a budget here. We’re perfectly willing to publish quality literature, in fact we’re scouring the country for it, and what a marvelous fluke that we discovered your manuscript. Think of it! Hidden in our office these 2½ years!”

  “Hidden?”

  “With the telephone directories. We have a library of telephone directories in a special room here, the same one in which the janitor keeps all his stuff. Your manuscript was inexplicably tucked away with the California directories, where no one would ever find it.”

  “Why . . . why would no one ever find it there?”

  “Oh, we never call California. Everyone’s so weird out there, we’re all afraid to use a California area code. It’s so intimidating! And all those—those—”

  “Queers?”

  “Yes! Not that I’d ever use a term like that, but . . . .”

  “Oh, they don’t mind . . . .”

  “I prefer ‘gays’ myself. It’s much more descriptive.”

  “I don’t know. ‘Queer’ suits some people better than others, and ‘fag’ works too, I guess, but if it’s descriptive you’re after, how about ‘cocksuckers’?”

  “Well, that term’s not exactly exclusive, Mr. Jameson, if you know what I mean . . . .”

  “No, I’m not sure I do, Ms. Michelov.”

  “I mean, you could call me a cocksucker, if you wanted to.”

  “I’d love to, Matilde.”

  “Would you let me, Mr. Jameson?”

  “Oh, yes, Matilde. Absolutely.”

  “This darn phone . . .”

  “It’s hard . . .”

  “Oh, is it?”

  “And big . . .”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I can get my lips , my mouth , my tongue , around such a big thing . . .”

  “Swollen, thick, stiff, hard, wet . . .”

  “Oh, Mr. Jameson, I’m wet, too . . .”

  “Put the phone down there, Matilde.”

  “Ohhhh . . .”

  “That sounds pretty good.”

  “Mmmmm . . .”

  “Does it feel—hello? Matilde?”

  “Oh! Oh yes Mr. Jameson, I’m here. This is . . . I’m so . . . This is so unusual!”

  “Are you alone, Ms. Michelov?”

  “I have my own office, Mr. Jameson.”

  “Is the door closed?”

  “Yes, I, I mean I think so! Oh! Oh, who cares!?”

  “Certainly not I, Ms. Michelov, but I was wondering, do you have on a dress?”

  “Not any more! I mean, it’s up around my waist . . .”

  “And stockings?”

  “Yes, and heels. Do you like high heels, Mr. Jameson?”

  “Yes, I do, Ms. Michelov.”

  “There’s one on my typewriter, and one in the ashcan, Mr. Jameson. And I’m leaning back in my chair. What do you think of that?”

  “It sounds rather abandoned, Ms. Michelov. Are you fingering yourself?”

  “Oh! Yes, Mr. Jameson, I’m so wet.”

  “I’m reaching for the olive oil myself, Ms. Michelov. It’s from the olive groves in the hills above Lucca, extra virgin olive oil, Ms. Michelov, the kind that smells so strongly, and I’m liberally slavering a handful all over my immense cock, with both hands, the telephone propped between my ear and my shoulder.”

  “Oh, Mr. Jameson, I’ve switched you to my speakerphone, so that I can massage my pussy and clitoris with one hand, I’m soaking wet, and reach around with my other hand, to massage the crack of my ass, getting it perfectly wet also, oh, I’m nearly spending sir, but I’ve still got time to insert two fingers of one hand into my wet asshole, and two fingers of my other hand into my cunt, abrading the while the hell out of my clit, which is— hsssss!—on fire!”

  “Do it, Ms. Michelov, do it, while I twist and wring my swollen dick like a 14th-century religious candlemaker . . .”

  “Oh! Mr. Jameson, I’ve scraped your manuscript off the top of my desk and onto the floor, and speared the title page with one of my black spike heels—!”

  “Spike it again! Spike it again!”

  “I’m lowering my ass over the speakerphone and massaging it wildly, no doubt you can hear the confused, erratic digital tones as my clitoris slips over the alphanumeric keypad, the prongs of the receiver hook enter my orifices, and—I’m coming! I’m coming! I’m coming!”

  “I’ll sign! I’ll sign! I’ll sign!”

  “Oh! Mr. Jameson!”

  “Oh! Ms. Michelov—Matilde—!”

  “Jas!”

  “Oh!”

  “Oh!”

  And so forth. One could hear the crash of furniture in New York, the jar of pencils, the typewriter, the telephone, the trash can, desk calendar, Rolodex, three or four wind-up toys and a plastic dinosaur, all of it, hit the floor before the phone went dead. Ten minutes pass, I’m having a beer and staring out the window. She calls back.

  “About that rewrite . . .”

  “What rewrite?”

  “Just a few changes, Mr. Jameson. I’ll make a note of them and send it along with the contract.”

  “Do I get paid for it?”

  Silence. Then, “You’re not serious.”

  “I suppose I’m not.”

  “Have you thought of investing in a computer, Mr. Jameson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Can you deal with W
ordStar on a disc?”

  “Wonderful!”

  “Send me the contract.”

  “It’s as good as in the mail.”

  Simple, wasn’t it?

  (xsub active) . . . .

  THREE

  I’m explaining this badly.

  By the time Ms. Michelov wanted the revisions to So Long, Pockface , I was ready. I was ready long before she called, actually. It wasn’t easy, being ready. But what was diffcult was waiting for her to call. Waiting to pounce.

  The research alone took sixteen weeks. Can you imagine? What kind of computer, for example, did Ms. Michelov have at her desk? An IBM XT? Oh, that’s nice. An MS-DOS machine. Anybody out there realize the differences between CP/M and MS-DOS in 1985? Virtually incompatible. Major obstacle. But I’m cool. It’s all theoretical anyway, at first. So, Ms. Michelov. And what sort of machine might you use on an author’s disc formatted by another operating system? Oh, Mr. Jameson, we have translation software, very la-de-da. Really, Ms. Michelov. And an in-house whiz to keep track of it all. Of course, she confides, he doesn’t know a thing about literature. Just computers. He different from us . A perennial problem with technical people. Probably saves him a lot of sleepless nights, I suggest. Oh, no, I don’t think so, opines Ms. Michelov, he mostly works nights, we rarely see him around the office in the daytime. Pause. Excepting Fridays, of course. Fridays? Payday, you ninny. Ah, so. The eagle flies. Whaaaat? she whines. (I’m having second thoughts, sexually, is this what they call triste?) Old saying, pay it no mind, as it were, it’s just that I, as a self-employed person, am unfamiliar with the mores of the American office worker. Vague me, baby. Oohhhhh, she vagues. (Third thoughts . . .) What’s his name? Marvin. Marvin? Marvin Chompsky. You’re. No I’m not kidding either. Chompsky. Anglicized somethingorother. Say, Matilde, today’s Friday. May I have a word with Marvin . . . ? Et cetera.

  Marvin is most helpful, as most computer people are. No matter what you tell them, information—the flow of nibbles, bits, and bytes—is never proprietary. Information is free. Old school, that. Things are changing. But Marvin is seventeen, making forty thousand a year working part-time, reading the electronic edition of the Wall Street Journal while he waits for the accounting department to figure out his latest check-writing scheme, issue him a check he can shoot to his broker, also seventeen years old. They’re into it. Never trust anyone old enough to drink. I upload a pirated, upgraded, latemodel, superfast version of Zork to Marvin, and zap, Crow Mignon Books loses their computer whiz for a week. Not that I’m soliciting complicity, you understand. Maybe a little advance warning, before the crash. But so long as Zork is untamed in New York by one Marvin Chompsky, certain channels are open. Zork is a trojan horse, and I’m Greek. That’s the way it is, you know. In spite of electronic wonders virtually beyond the imagination, I mean, way beyond what I’m trying to pull off with Crow Mignon Books, incredible as it may seem, certain kinds of game-consciousness are still regional to the West Coast. Yeah, yeah. I know all about MIT and the game of LIFE. But you can’t play LIFE on a Kaypro, or even an XT.

  But Marvin, he’s got a mini-mainframe at his disposal there at Crow Mignon Books, he’s the sysop for the whole outfit, and he’s got a user area all to himself. Marvin the sysop has appropriated a sort of memory tithe, in addition to howeversomany eagles fly into his iguana wallet every Friday, by which larceny he has set himself up with this rather mammoth system to use according to his lights.

  This is great, I like it in here. Memory is a warm, comfortable place. None of those insidious messages cropping up in ROM or on the screen, only Time to kill . . . .

  I should mention, too, that, at the time in memory we are considering, Crow Mignon Books were in deep, deep financial difficulties. Chapter Eleven, bankruptcy loomed ineluctable. Only a miracle might have saved them although, consistent with their previous management policy, they wouldn’t and didn’t know a miracle when it hit them. Hit them it did, in the form of mammoth Martin Windrow receipts.

  It seems that, although they had at least three lines of books that netted them millions in annual sales, the board of directors had spun off a massive amount of capital into, you guessed it, a computer company. Chaos reigned in the boardroom. Hell, CHAOS was the name of the computer company. C omputers H old A ll O mni S cience, get it? Kind of a techno-religious outfit. One of their areas of expertise specialized in mortuary software. When Carry On, the holding corporation that owned Crow Mignon, first started to flirt with Chaos, the latter had projected annual sales, based on earnings reported through the second quarter, of $165 million. Six months after Carry On committed all of their cash and repossessables—all that is, with the exception of the $1,500 they intended to advance me against royalties derived from So Long, Pockface —CHAOS Technologies reported a remarkably lame $17 million in sales, canceled their dividend, boding worse prospects for the spring when, according to Silicon Valley market analysis, everyone is out fucking instead of buying computer products.

  As a result, nobody, least of all the board of directors of Crow Mignon Books, all of whom were majority stockholders and officers of Carry On, Inc., having bled the publishing company dry, paid the least attention to the daily goings on of Crow Mignon. What with Marvin stoned on Zork in his exclusive User Area, 11235 (note the Fibonaccian spurt), I had the run of the system.

  Not that I could run it. But with Marvin’s absentminded advice, I hacked it, and how. I modemed in there every night, late, about eleven o’clock, California time, which is two a.m. in New York. Marvin, having studied and sorted his rather intense stock portfolio and sleek routines for manipulating it five or six hours earlier, and having been disassembling or playing Zork ever since, was usually ready to exchange a few desultory words and call it a night, so far as my window into his world was concerned. He built me a little windowing routine by which, when I was in trouble or confused, I could open into his Zork screen and ask him a question. He would simply key out the answer and boot me off the screen if I were slow in leaving. The exchanges generally went like this.

  Author 126, Hello

  Hello. Password?

  Felch

  That’s a good one. Enter.

  Sir, the Klingons are aboard, Sir.

  Good evening, Mr. Jameson. Are you writing tonight?

  No. Touring. And yourself?

  I’m stuck in level 22. The Princess won’t yield me her key.

  Try plucking the lute.

  I lost the plectrum somewhere between 19 and 21.

  You can grow a plectrum-like thumbnail by remaining alive in level 14 for three iterations. Don’t forget to specify which thumb.

  Thank you. But, Mr. Jameson, will the Princess wait?

  Take the lute with you.

  No more hints, please. By the way. What does Felch mean?

  Forget it.

  Thank you. I’m leaving to grow a thumbnail.

  Marvin, wait.

  Yes?

  Who controls User 6?

  Mr. Compton, the comptroller.

  Oh. He wouldn’t be using just any old password, would he.

  Oh, no way. Have you a thesaurus?

  No, but you do.

  I We do?

  In Formatting and Editing, User 12.

  Oh, yes. Ahem, I quite forgot. They do fool around, in there, I remember their clearing the compatibility of the purchase with SYSOP. A thesaurus and dictionaries take a heck of a lot of memory, Mr. Jameson, very inefficient. Things are much more interesting over in database.

  SYSOP? Why didn’t they just walk down the hall and ask you?

  People carry germs, Mr. Jameson.

  You’re right, Marvin, I quite agree. BBS are a lot cleaner. Although, carrying germs is a lot of work. Someone has to do it, and it might as well be sapient creatures.

  I’m sorry, Mr. Jameson, but changing levels garbaged your transmission. Ah. The jar of hormones?

  I’ll never tell.

  I skipped it before.

  Now al
l you have to do is fend off the spiders for three cycles.

  With pleasure.

  Have you seen the big one?

  What big one?

  Synonym for . . . ?

  WHAT BIG ONE

  He only turns up on the third iteration, just when you think you’ve got that thumbnail grown. Comptroller . . . Synonym for money?

  Right the first time. What big o

  Hey, thanks, Marv. User 12, fire thesaurus torpedo . . .

  Great Spock!

  Big one, isn’t he . . . ?

  It’s a she!

  If you found that out, you’ve already lasted longer than I did.

  Monstrous, hairy . . . Where’s the heart—I left my sword on 23! All I’ve got it this fucking lute!!!

  Bye

  AAAHHHRGG!

  *

 

  Now, Marvin had this hack going, to which I was the willing guinea pig. Today, PRODOS, MS-DOS, PC-DOS, CP/M, MP/M, UNIX, PROLIX—they’re all compatible on any big system, just like any user can program in Pascal, C, Forth— in short, speaking the language he or she speaks, and program away, the Translators look after the small stuff, the details. This of course enters into all sorts of philosophical domains, like if you are GOTOing in Basic, are you IF-THENing in Pascal, or whatever. Like, Total Syntax, if you care. I’m bullshitting here, apologies to the nine of you who know what I’m attempting to discuss, but all this aside, in the times I’m talking about, nobody had this translation thing together. Philosophy really does enter into the picture, as if two composers were trying to express the same idea in music, it really can and does get that deep, but Marvin, he had a compatibility thing going in this network of his.

  Crow Mignon, when they thought about it—and they had, back when they had management who cared about books per se, and by extension the people who write them—had realized that by no means were they in a position to dictate the brand of computer their writers were to write on. That is a very personal decision, akin to telling you who you’re going to sleep with tonight, or capitulating to predestination. One can handle only so much Calvinism. Ever tried to borrow a computer from a writer? He’ll loan you his tractor, his wife, his fifth, his mule—never his computer. Right, let’s don’t forget the recidivist, who won’t loan you his wax stylus, let alone his syntax, because it’s different from what he thinks you should be handling. We’re in a different class, here. Here, we’re talking abject. After all, if we find a writer who can write ( the stuff ), why not cater to him to the extent that his computer can talk to our computer? Moreover, if it can, we save $thousands in typesetting costs, no?