The Tyrant's Novel

  So why don't you just give in and tell a story? he asked me. Without rogue sections like the one you wrote on Carter.

  I said to him, Because there is a way out for you via the mountains.

  McBrien laughed, magisterial in fatherhood, it seemed. And will my child appropriately stay fixed in Sonia's womb? While we hide in caves and travel over stony tracks in trucks with no damn suspension? Settle to it now, Alan. You thought there were exits, but there aren't.

  He pointed to the computer with the maimed A-drive on. Very authoritatively, he said, Save us, Alan!

  I went back to the tale of the McCauley-style barge skipper. The melodrama—up to the point where I had lost my management of myself and began writing the story of Carter—occupied three large computer files, TASK1, TASK2, TASK3. The character A1, the blockade-running son, was bringing in a specific shipment of antibiotics and narcotics for the administrator of East Bay Hospital. But the minions of the Istrian black marketeer hijacked the truck in the mountains beyond Scarpdale, using their boss's hold over A1's sister and brother, bimbo and accountant in turn to the black-market mogul, and nominated in the text as F1 and A2, as leverage over brave A1. And so on. I took up the thread determinedly. There is a simple comfort in work, even if it was a debased task I was at. Its necessity helped me for some thousands of words. But I couldn't bring myself to give the buggers names.

  Thus my task limped along for two days—I wish I still possessed a copy, to show you how deplorable it was. For the fact that I knew it was to take Great Uncle's name helped to make it, more and more, assume the character of his florid prose. I was able to creak out the required two or three thousand words a day, though, at least until I got a phone call from Mrs. Carter. This was a forgotten consequence of my earlier actions—the fact that Mrs. Carter had always had my telephone number and could call at will.

  Alan, she said.

  Yes, Mrs. Carter.

  I felt confident with her, poor woman. I had in my way also released myself from her power over me.

  I've been to the Ministry of War, she told me.

  They told me that, I said.

  I demanded information on Hugo. Like reasonable men, they asked me why the government would go on paying Hugo's wages if he had in fact been deceased all these years. They pointed out that they went on paying wages into the bank account only of men who had a homecoming somewhere in their future. They said you were a novelist, and your fiction making got away with you.

  That's a reasonable argument, I said, not quite knowing whether to hope as energetically as the Historical Corps that she would accept it.

  Yes, she conceded. But for some reason, when they said that, I knew they were lying, and you were telling me the truth now at last. And that you had lied to me year by year, season by season.

  I could find nothing to say to that.

  She went on, As soon as the weather gets cooler, you are to drive me to the place. We are to make every effort to exhume his body.

  No, I said. I can't help you with that, Mrs. Carter. The place is unmarked. There are too many . . . well, it's complicated. It's beyond our means, and it would only distress you further.

  All right, she said. Then I will do it myself. You will see what an old lady can do! And please accept this call as a curse upon your entire life.

  She slammed the phone down.

  A ridiculous threat perhaps. Except that now it was harder to grind forth the melodrama. To ease it out of me, contrary to Captain Chaddock's instructions I drank two-thirds of a bottle of vodka one day and a little more the next. On the third day, McBrien, during his daily visit, said, You look frightful, Alan.

  He took off his suit coat and scrambled eggs for me, and made me herbal tea. It's the least I can do, he told me cheerily, for a man who's making my career.

  He had not mentioned the child, but it remained our most serious motivation. And in the last week he had been reading some of the material on-screen.

  This is good, he boomed, as he read the more recent output. This is right up the big man's alley. Less social realist than I thought. He'll like it. It reads like a fable. The American lefty reviewers will see it in those terms. They mightn't say you're the new Steinbeck, but they'll call you the new Chinua Achebe.

  It's absolute diarrhea, I told him.

  That's probably what we need for a success then, said McBrien. We want a devastating and sudden success. We don't want Ulysses. We don't care if people are reading it in fifty years. Plausibility is all the big man asks of us.

  He finished reading and looked up.

  Look, I know you can write differently from this. In the Western manner. But you'll have leisure to do that. And the critics will be disposed to see any broad strokes, any primitivism, as a postcolonial legacy.

  I shook my head and laughed.

  You talk such utter balls! I assured him, with the acids of last night's liquor still tugging at my throat.

  My old friend Andrew Kennedy called to say he had missed me from recent Thursday parties, but of course he understood that I might be hard at some special work, and still grieving.

  You're allowed to go out, aren't you? he asked.

  I believe so, I said.

  I'll pick you up this Thursday from your place.

  I said, I'll come with McBrien.

  Let him come on here with Sonia. I'll collect you from home at five-thirty, Thursday.

  I felt grateful, yet needed a further quarter of an illicit bottle of vodka just to prepare myself. Besides, the text had now become a mere dribble of words. It was particularly on it that Mrs. Carter's idiotic curse seemed to have fallen. As for the rest, vodka ran in my veins like boiling mercury these days. My blood crepitated. I would wake at two and then at three in the morning, my brain weeping, irked at some small noise.

  My God, said Andrew, chirpy at the door on Thursday. You've got two carloads of Overguard down there. A man of some importance.

  Oh yes, I assured him. Every citizen should have such luck.

  You're letting your beard grow.

  Sorry, I didn't get round to shaving.

  You're forgiven.

  I grabbed a jacket and we descended to his Mercedes. His driver, having held the back door for me, ran around the outside of the vehicle to take his seat. We moved out into light traffic, the white Toyota of the Overguard traveling behind us. The other, the limo, would obviously keep watch over the apartment block. Such was the division of Overguard duties for the evening, as far as I could perceive them.

  I have a bit of news, Andrew told me. Louise James is back. She's got a bit of a grant from somewhere to do some research here. She's staying with us. You remember her?

  Yes, I admitted, uncomfortable at once.

  She had once been the young radio broadcaster I had come close to being entangled with. Her father had run a TV current affairs program for Andrew's network, in the days when we were permitted to have current affairs in this country. As well as being threatened by the way our friendship had ended, I began to tremble with an angry suspicion that I'd been brought out to make up some silly gender equivalence at Andrew's party. He could sense as much.

  Come on, Alan, he pleaded. We're all friends. No scenes.

  That made my anger mount.

  To hell with you, Andrew. Am I supposed to see Louise James's tits and be consoled? Is that how you think things work?

  And do you think I flew her from America just for this party? For God's sake, Alan!

  But she and I will round out the couples.

  He shook his head and asked softly, Where does all this irritability come from, Alan? Can I do the right thing by you, whatever I do? I know and respect the scale of your pain. Don't doubt that for a moment.

  You know damn all, I asserted. You're just a habitual stooge, a lackey, a purveyor of sitcoms.

  Fortunately, the driver's window prevented my outbursts from reaching the front seat. I was still controlled enough to be careful that the man at the wheel did not hear.
For even I knew, as did Andrew, that this was something other than me talking, an evil spirit compounded of vodka, loss, and a duty at whose nature he could merely guess.

  I think I should go back home, I told Andrew, as close to apologetic as I could manage.

  He said, Shut up, Alan, and enjoy yourself! I'll get you a drink as soon as we arrive. And don't say anything else until it's safely inside you.

  We traveled on another three minutes in silence, and then, like a child, I began to feel carsick. I swallowed and sweated. At last I said, Andrew, please, could we pull over? I'm not so well.

  The car parked on the edge of a riverside park, a strand of threadbare lawns out of which two palm trees rose. I left the car and leaned against the knobbly hide of one of them, examining its surface intimately with that acidic clarity of a man about to be ill. I saw an Overguard driver watching me from the open door of his drawn-in white Toyota. Fluid and bile and alcohol tore its way out of me. Two or three retches, and then I gasped and gasped, my throat burning. I looked to the green relief of the nearby canal. Andrew had his hand sturdily on my shoulder as my breath returned. When I remembered to look at the Overguard vehicle, Captain Chaddock was making his way towards me, but tentatively, as if he thought this was perhaps too direct an approach, a betrayal of his philosophy of nonovert surveillance.

  Andrew whispered, Poor old Alan!

  Wiping my mouth, I broke from Andrew and walked up to Captain Chaddock to forestall him.

  All right, Mr. Sheriff? he asked.

  Thanks, I told him.

  All right in all senses? he persisted.

  Yes, I said.

  He nodded. That McBrien! A bootlegger!

  It's a tummy infection.

  Chaddock smiled in polite disbelief.

  I'll watch it, I told him.

  You must, said Chaddock, and he gave me a minimal salute and returned to his vehicle.

  I turned back to Andrew. My step faltered but he supported me. He was trying to shorten the delay as well, for everyone's sake.

  I got a letter from Collins, I told him. Must show it to you.

  Yes, maybe later.

  As we walked, my back was to Chaddock's white vehicle.

  Don't show any surprise, I said. Great Uncle's given me the job of writing a book to be published in his name. McBrien and Sonia are hostages to it, of course. Now Sonia's pregnant, so there's a little McBrien also a hostage. Isn't that a bastard of a setup?

  Andrew's eyes narrowed as he directed me along. I don't want to know any of this, he insisted. It's not good to blurt things out like that. Come back to the car.

  He seemed very worried, for my own sake as much as anything. It was one of those rare occasions when I saw his sweat show through the well-shaven, blue-pink cheek, and thought, So, you live in fear too.

  They won't let me kill myself, I told him, perhaps too self-indulgently. I've already tried to do it. I wonder could I get an oil smuggler I know to put me in contact with someone who'd shoot me. If I was murdered, they couldn't blame McBrien, could they?

  Andrew did what was necessary, delivering a brisk cuff to the back of my neck. He said, like some old colonel from Summer Island, Pull yourself together, Alan. You're a danger to shipping.

  Leading me to the car and manhandling me in, he gave the order to the driver to proceed. And so, in silence, we reached his house. Grace herself was at the door, since Andrew had had the driver call ahead to her. At seeing me, there was a genuine delight in her face which took all my residual sneers away. At the back of the house, the company around the pool, the McBriens, the Garners, the proudly independent filmmaker Wilf Apple, and his boyfriend, Paul, subsumed me effortlessly. They all spoke to me normally, without an undue or lumbering air of condolence. This was because they were true friends. I accepted a glass of fruit juice spiked with vodka, drank it, and reflected that liquor drunk in company by afternoon light was somehow chemically more benign than the stuff one bolted oneself, in secret desperation, at a sink.

  Nor did Andrew and Grace try to introduce Louise James to me—it was Sonia McBrien who eventually did that, informally, approaching me from the flank. I saw her coming, this woman I had cold-shouldered years ago. I saw her well-coifed black hair, and her jawline that, with maturity, had taken on the look of her father's interrogatory jaw. She looked very American. She could be imagined in one of those shopping malls, inspecting fabrics or testing the consistency of face cream along with the most consummate of American consumers. Yet there were also banked questions in her, and I could sense with panic that she was anxious to raise some with me. To delay her, I congratulated Sonia McBrien on the conception of her child and she smiled with that hapless smile of motherhood and its ruthless process before she drifted away.

  I was hoping to meet you, Mr. Sheriff, Louise James said, smiling in an all-forgiven manner.

  It's good to see you, Louise, I told her.

  I loved that book of yours. Even in the West it's considered kind of groundbreaking . . .

  You don't need to say that stuff.

  She lowered her voice. No, it had all those qualities that attracted me. And, all right, you brushed me off.

  The memory of that day returned to her in the form of an ironic smile.

  Do you know, she asked, that you're the only man who's ever done that?

  It's a wonder you talk to me, I said.

  Well, I need to, she said, lowering her voice. I heard about your wife. I am sorry, Alan.

  Yes. Better not probe too deeply into all that. It's all a raw mess.

  I understand. That's not what I wanted to talk to you about. I have a friend at the University of Texas, in the Institute of Regional Studies. That's where my father worked until his death.

  Your father's dead?

  Eighteen months ago.

  Did Andrew know?

  No, we didn't write. And there was no mention in the press. In Texas, he was just another obscure adjunct professor in media studies. In any case, the institute's well endowed with research money. Some of our fellow countrymen and -women have done quite well in Texas, and are anxious to put something back.

  Her vast eyes on me, she lowered her voice further. Is there any chance of your going there? They would make a position for you. They wanted you to know.

  I stared at her incredulously and she became embarrassed, shaking her head.

  Forgive me if this is inappropriate, but I didn't know when I'd get a chance. I think they would simply want you to be a kind of guru in residence.

  I should have been grateful that people in other places were drafting a possible career for me. But I was in my own hopeless bubble of the task, and the idea taunted rather than soothed me.

  And I suppose, I suggested, I would do an occasional commentary spot on CNN, attacking sanctions and being written up as a friend of Great Uncle's?

  She shook her head but took no offense. In fact she seemed to perceive what I had said as a comprehensive argument against taking up such a post.

  It's always fascinating, she said. The reasons people go, and the reasons they stay.

  It's more than fascinating, I told her. I can't leave the land where my wife is buried.

  She bowed her head. Then you do her great honor, Alan Sheriff.

  I thought I began now to see her instinctive method, a good one. To answer, in each case, in a manner some degrees removed from the expected answer. I'd been half hoping she would utter a banal How romantic! so that I could be chagrined at her and thus get her off my back. But she had not permitted me that. Perhaps it was a trick she had learned on the Public Broadcasting Service.

  You're not here, are you, I asked, to look over the National Broadcasting Network for the CIA? For the day they come?

  She laughed shortly. What a cynic you are. I don't deny that I could quickly get a travel grant and money to do just that, even though the job's already done by absolute experts over and over. But I've paid my way here.

  Andrew says you had a grant.
r />   I don't know where he got that from. I'm on PBS wages while I'm here. That's all. Paid leave.

  She looked at me from under her well-plucked eyebrows. Do you think it will be a terrible thing? she asked. The day the Americans come?

  Great Uncle is a frightful fellow, I whispered. Fabulously horrible. But the Americans are not his cure.

  Who is? she asked. It's funny that when you live there you begin to see the American point of view. Not in any way that I would like to be an out-and-out apologist for them. But they restored Europe after World War II. Europe itself wouldn't do it. They feed the Third World, or try to. Would others? Would Great Uncle? They don't get credit for what they call the good stuff.

  Come over to Beaumont, and I can show you some good stuff. Courtesy of the sanctions.

  Oh sure, she conceded. But can you say that Great Uncle doesn't want his people to be hungry?

  I waved my hand. This sort of wave was a national habit. It meant to say, We can't get anywhere by comparing evils.

  I said in fact, I'm sure the Americans will enjoy the programs you make here.

  But she was determined not to be condescended to. She smiled again at me. There was actually an old-fashioned maidenly component in the smile that came more from us than from the Americans.

  The Americans enjoy what they enjoy and believe what they believe, she said. Valiant little PBS cuts a very small quantity of ice.

  Andrew could see that my conversation with Louise James was edgy, and he came up with a bottle of wine to restore her drink and give me a genial promise that he would soon attend to mine. She accepted a further measure of wine, told him what a wonderful party it was and how superb it was for her to see old faces again, to see faces which had meant so much to her late father. Then she went across the patio to reencounter them. Andrew called the housekeeper and whispered my drink order in her ear—the equivalent of, Make it a strong one!