A Moment of Doubt Read online

  But escape, as we all know, is a relative thing, if possible at all. I found a seat. I had no popcorn. I just sat there. The film apparently had attained some peak of interest, for it was tangibly quiet in the theater. A lot of oohhs and ahhs were coming out of the sound system. These effects were intended to convey intimacy. But they were loud, and thereby ridiculous. The scene of a woman sucking off a man was basically a quiet one, punctuated only by the kind of sounds you might ordinarily expect from a hushed party of spelunkers feeling its way through a damp cavern. Someone loudly cleared his throat in the balcony, but it was badly synchronized with the opening of a zipper, which was plainly audible. The effect was so theatrical, as if deliberate, that someone laughed on the other side of the theater.

  This business of the Moral Imperative annoys me. In my line of work, detective novels, and in thrillers in general, while the clichés are bad enough, one is constantly grappling with the Moral Imperative. Which is, the bad guy gets his comeuppance in the end, period. Black and white, bad and good, plain as day the justice is meted. One cannot simply allow the criminal to escape unscathed by the vehemence of his own crimes. Either his conscience drives him mad, or the sheriff drives him to jail. Frequently, he’s betrayed and done in by the depravity of his milieu . This is irony. Check out any Jim Thompson novel.

  The variations on this scheme are endless as they are boring. Once in awhile one of my colleagues comes up with a new wrinkle, but it’s usually as annoying as it is unoriginal. The net result remains the same. One way or another, by hook or by crook, the bad guy gets his dessert in the end. The Moral Imperative must prevail.

  No one is prejudiced much, either, about how this comes about. Since Poe let the cat out of the bag we have seen criminals ‘sent over’ by Chinese aristocrats, corpulent aristocrats, cocaine addicts, faggots, little old ladies, Navajo Indians, cowboys, gourmets, guys with scars on their faces from the acid thrown on them back when they were on the force but their revenge must be and will be strictly in accordance with the letter of the law, ex-detectives, divorced people, lonely people, incredibly raventressed, silken slim-hipped hard-fucking/never-fucking beauties, etc. etc. Even an honest cop or two has done the right thing. And of course, the hard-boiled private dick.

  There is plenty of ready psychology available to explain this phenomenon, too. People hardly ever see justice done in real life so they like to see it in fiction, is the most common explanation. The rest of it is just mindless entertainment. And there’s nothing wrong with either, I’m thinking. It’s just that I’m tired of being a part of it. The literature that has resulted from this one little sociological problem is sinking my brain, right here in this porn theater, on a sunny day in California. And, while we’re on the subject, just how is Martin Windrow going to react to being sodomized by a portable whale with AIDS?

  By now the camera has pulled back on the blow-job and we have the interior of an apartment. Behind the sweating couple is a window, and in the window, we can see, is a lovely view of the San Francisco Bay, with just a hint of the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge in the far background. After some simple triangulation, we can see that this blowjob is taking place on a beautiful, clear day, high atop Russian Hill. Moreover, as the camera moves clumsily from one static angle to another, with only one subject in ‘mind’, we notice that this apartment is rather a well-appointed one. There’s quite a nice pseudo-Flemish tapestry to one side of the window, beneath which are a lamp and a table most definitely designed by Mies van der Rohe, displaying a gorgeous ashtray of hand-blown glass with a roach clip in it, atop a copy of Architectural Digest . Things are heating up now in the foreground, between us and the decor, the guy, who is on his back with a pillow under his ass, quite naked, has placed his hands on the skull of the nude lady hovering over him, and begun to squint as he gyrates his hips into her face, so that she violently engulfs the entire and of course not-inconsiderable-by-your-and-my-standards length of his cock, accompanied by sounds not incomparable to those of a laundromat in a singles neighborhood on a Monday night.

  After a lingering not to say infinitely long close-up of this action, during which the camera has a very difficult time keeping its subject within the frame, we get another medium shot, from a new angle. He’s going to come, you can just tell it, and he does, all over her face, which must surely be two of the most diffcult things required of porn actors, taking it out like that, taking it in the face like that, humping it all the way to the bank, some people are just naturally talented, I guess. And that thought is idly recurring to me, when I see that there is also a large bookcase in this well-appointed apartment, beyond the twitching couple, against the wall on the other side of the lovely view. With no more ingenuousness than as if I were actually in a bookstore, I tilt my head to one side, to browse the spines beyond the endless come shot. Wilhelm Reich, Huysmans, Burroughs—Edgar Rice and William S.—, Lenny Bruce, Hemingway, Beardsley illustrations, Henry Miller, A Man With A Maid by Anonymous, Charbroiled Exeunt —that’s an Amber Twilight title. These are some literate Russian Hill dwellers here, I’m thinking . . . Then Lady Chatterley’s Lover , The Bell Jar , Delta of Venus , Th e Story of O , a long row of Nero Wolfe mysteries . . . and—what’s this? About six inches of Martin Windrow titles. A first edition of Th e Gourmet —and the second edition of it! Then Ulysses’s Dog , So Long, Pockface , This World Leaks Blood , and Squeam with a Skew , Heart of Mercury . . . What? Wait a minute. I haven’t even written that one yet. Come to think of it, This World Leaks Blood has been written, but it’s not published yet—is it? I squeezed shut my eyes and opened them again. The bookcase was now out of the shot. The girl in the movie was cooing over her boy’s performance, licking the tip of his cock and trying to get her tongue far enough out of her mouth and around the corner to get at a rivulet of sperm sliding down her cheek, and there’s laughter in the theater . . . .

  SIX

  Every writer’s dream. How interesting.

  I could no longer think. But the laughter. The whole theater was laughing. I was laughing, too, it was true, but I had a reason, I was going insane and intended to enjoy myself. But the whole theater? What did they know about BOOK.SUB? Were they an embodiment of the Moral Imperative? Was my conquest of the banal to be paid off in turpitude-awareness therapy? Was some shit-for-brains author out there somewhere orchestrating this whole scenario? I am the shit- for-brains author around here. But even as I stood in confusion, the laughter subsided, and I saw an ostensible reason for it. A couple in the balcony had evidently forgotten themselves, and were fucking passionately against a wall. Apparently they were heterosexual. He, standing, supported her by her buttocks. She clasped her legs around his hips and gripped his shoulders. The entire audience turned in their seats or stood to take in this scene. It was indeed remarkable, if only on account of the degree of lust expressed by it, but in point of fact not much different from what was supposed to be on the screen. This was a penetration scene. People were half in and half out of their seats, looking uncertainly backwards. I turned and looked at the screen. A different man and woman now made eyes at each other over cocktails, in a different apartment. Generic EZ rock suffused their inane dialogue. Glasses clinked, the camera pulled back. A huge bookcase loomed behind them. I quickly averted my eyes. I looked down. Some kind of fluid, leaking along the sloped floor, gleamed in the darkness. The man and the woman grappling in the back of the theater screamed mutually, and the audience applauded. The man, staggering beneath the weight of the woman wrapped around his hips, and the necessary exertion, sagged with her against the wall. She, leaning her head back, made long, sweeping strokes along his back and his head with her arms and hands. I stole a glance at the screen. The scene had changed to a bedroom, and the man and woman of the previous shot were removing each other’s clothes. No shelves of books were in sight. My eyes lingered gratefully on the simple tableau of a man and woman undressing in the banal privacy of their own home. Their bedlamps matched. The room was paneled in a natural w
ood stained beige. A huge, primary-colored football-player-catching-a-pass poster, framed in chrome, hung directly over the bed, between the lamps. The bed linen was carefully made up, with a red quilt on top. The message, when it flashed in the lower left hand corner of the screen, caught me unawares.

  (xsub active) . . .

  This dirty wink was much more obscene than anything going on in the movie. I fled the theater.

  The street was horribly bright. I donned my shades. People drifted past me slowly. A small old woman, with swollen stockinged feet that twisted out of her sandals, and a tattered kerchief tied round her head, smiled at the young man exiting the pornographic theater. Her face was brown as a walnut and wrinkled as dried fruit.

  “Ja get off” she croaked, and pointed a crooked finger at the doors through which I had just exited. Her head did not come as high as my chest, and there wasn’t a tooth in it. She laughed. I recoiled and hurried down the street.

  Several doors from the theater there is a bar, a relic of the old neighborhood, called the Shoe Inn. Narrow and dark, it has none of the glossy blond oak appeal of the newer places up and down the street, and serves no Perrier, but you can get a beer and a shot for a dollar sixty. Martin Windrow drinks there, when he’s in the neighborhood.

  I hadn’t had time to think yet. Even as I downed and chased a shot, This World Leaks Blood , broken into tiny virtually undetectable files scattered about the deepest recesses of the Crow Mignon computer, waited for the opportunity to piggyback another job, to sneak into the computers of Pre-eminent Printing, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There to lie in wait for similar opportunities to publish and distribute itself. Good. A 50,000 copy first edition of so-called quality trade paperbacks @ $4.95. I’d make at least $500. Sell them all, it’s more like twenty grand. Wonderful. But it’s not published yet. This operation had started to mean serious money for everybody, whether they knew they were involved or not. Were my nerves going? Larceny ceases to be a misdemeanor and becomes felonious after the first $500, does it not? What would I get? Eight years? Five? Ten? Would I, like Jean Genet before me, be content to manufacture sabots by day, and cover my head with my blanket, at night, to savour the puissance of my own digestive tract? Cast amorous glances over the iron-pumping denizens of Death Row, during the fifteen minutes of mandatory daily recreation? No. I’d go berserk and perm my hair within a week.

  So this was the Moral Imperative. Nasty.

  The bar was nearly empty, but two or three of the regulars were there. I’d never spent enough time in the place to achieve this dubious status, and in fact preferred my anonymity. The catbird seat, hard by the front door, was empty and I took it. Next to me sat a woman who had lost her larynx and half her tongue to cancer, yet insisted on continuing to smoke unfiltered Chesterfields. Her vocal chords had been replaced by a marvelous mechanical device strapped across her throat that enabled her to talk by making a buzzing that modulated in pitch just enough to make her intelligible to people who were used to it. Further down the bar sat a red-faced Irishman nursing a screwdriver. He was the bartender due to begin his shift at four o’clock. Beyond him a tall man stood, hard by a glass of whiskey. The current bartender also had a drink, which he kept out of sight beneath the bar.

  I hadn’t yet had time to think.

  In a way, to write a detective novel is an academic nihilism. It is to admit that while the only way to change anything is to change everything, to act is to change nothing. To signal complicity in this is to reiterate that only what has gone before will come after. No one is capable of understanding anything else—they don’t want to. To comprehend these few simple axioms—which, like 2+2, or indivisibility by zero, are as inexplicable as they are irrefutable—and to deliberately violate them, is to domino your efforts into another universe, wherein you discover that you, like everyone else there, must hold a second job. It is on this second job that you, like everyone else, will devote all your efforts to the proposition that 2+2=4. If you demonstrate this complicity all week, every week, they will give you money. If you do not, they will make your life . . . difficult.

  As this familiar canon recurred to me, I had been about to remove my sunglasses. I kept them on, but muttered aloud, agreeing with myself.

  “Really,” I nodded, turning my glass in the pool of beer at its base, “really . . . .”

  The tall man at the other end of the bar had been staring at me. Now he said, “You’re one of them,” and turned to the others and said, “He’s one of them.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Do you think 2+2=4?”

  “Who says 2+2=4?” the woman with half a tongue buzzed.

  “The IRS, for one,” the tall man said.

  “Sonofabitch,” the woman said, “they’re always right.”

  The man in the middle raised a pedagogical index finger and said, “One is truly free when one has learned to respect the rights of others.”

  I raised my glass. “Semper fiduciary.”

  Everyone took a drink in silence, followed by a resentful pause.

  “So,” said the thin Irishman, setting down his glass on the end of the bar while eying the woman, but addressing me. Though his hand shook noticeably, his tone was conversational. “You’re one of these Romans we been hearing about?”

  “Cancer,” the mechanical larynx buzzed, tapping the back of my hand with her forefinger, “although lately here they’ve taken to calling ‘em Moon Children.”

  “That must about explain it,” said the bartender, replacing his drink under the counter.

  “Not really . . . ,” the woman rasped. It seemed that any sentiment she wished to express required her voice to mount a certain threshold of energy in order to suffciently vibrate the mechanical device installed in her neck. This made wistfulness a violent act. Her second disability caused her to spill vodka on her blouse. The bartender gave her a white napkin with a red motto printed on it. If you can read this, you drank it all . She dabbed it at her chin and chest.

  The tall man at the other end of the bar shifted the stare to me. “What do you do?” he said.

  “Leave him alone,” said the woman.

  The tall man shrugged and held his glass to his lips. “I just thought maybe he left his seeing-eye dog outside.”

  “Would he want some water?” asked the bartender, solicitously.

  “A round for the house,” the tall man said.

  The barman smiled. “Of water?” This got a laugh.

  The Irishman turned his head away from the tall man and alternately patted and smoothed the bald spot on the back of it with the palm of a shaky hand. “Sure and always catchin the wave of his mind,” he said demurely, “is me Jimmy.”

  I knew this bar as a good place for Windrow to be drinking in, and in fact had used it several times already. But so distracted was I that at first a rather unsettling thought had not occurred to me. This was that, in fact, in using this place I had made up several characters for the detective to talk to. One of them had been a woman. It had been a long time ago, perhaps as far back as Ulysses’s Dog , or So Long, Pockface . Eight or ten books, each sufficiently indistinguishable from the other that details get mixed up and forgotten, recycled and confused. A problem with forgettable books. But this woman, had she not hennaed her hair, suffered from cancer, smoked Chesterfield cigarettes?

  My new beer and shot arrived. “Thanks,” I said, and toasted the tall man. He returned the gesture silently and sipped his new drink, a whiskey and soda. The Irishman received a new screwdriver, as did the barman, and the woman next to me soon had a second vodka rocks to back up her unfinished first one. Vodka rocks was what the woman drank in . . . Squeam with a Skew ?