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 first-person narrator, played up the theme of incest, and added more sex. I wrote in a fever and it took about six hours to do. When I was finished I had to run all the way to class and I walked into the room five minutes late. The teacher was already reading Crabtree’s story aloud, which was his favored way of having us “experience” a story, and it didn’t take me long to recognize that I was hearing, not a garbled and badly Faulknerized rehash of an obscure gothic horror story by an unknown writer, but the original “Sister of Darkness,” the clear, lean, unexcitable prose of August Van Zorn himself. The shock I felt at having been caught, beaten, and most of all preceded at my own game was equaled only by my surprise on learning that I wasn’t the only person in the world who’d ever read the work of poor old Albert Vetch, and in the midst of my mortification, of the dread that stole over my heart as the professor slid each page of the manuscript under the last, I felt the first glow of the flickering love I continue to bear for Terry Crabtree.
I said nothing during the discussion that followed the reading of Van Zorn’s story; nobody liked it very much—we were all far too serious-minded to enjoy such a piece of black foolery, and too young to catch the undertone of sorrow in its style—but nobody recognized it either. I was the one who was going to get busted. I handed my story to the professor, and he began to read, in his manner that was flat and dry as ranchland and as filled with empty space. I’ve never been able to decide if it was his tedious way of reading, or the turgid unpunctuated labyrinthine sentences of Mocknapatawpha prose with which he was forced to contend, or the total over-the-top incomprehensibility of my demysticized, hot-hot-sexy finale, composed in ten minutes after forty-six hours without sleep, but, in the end, nobody noticed that it was essentially the same story as Crabtree’s. The professor finished, and looked at me with an expression at once sad and benedictory, as though he were envisioning the fine career I was to have as a wire-and-cable salesman. Those who had fallen asleep roused themselves, and a brief, dispirited discussion followed, during which the professor allowed that my writing showed “undeniable energy.” Ten minutes later I was walking down Bancroft Way, headed for home, embarrassed, disappointed, but somehow undiscouraged; the story hadn’t really been mine, after all. I felt oddly buzzed, almost happy, as I considered the undeniable energy of my writing, the torrent of world-altering stories that now poured into my mind demanding to be written, and the simple joyous fact that I had gotten away with my scam.
Or nearly so; as I stopped at the corner of Dwight, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and I turned to find Crabtree, his eyes bright, his red cashmere scarf fluttering out behind him.
“August Van Zorn,” he said, holding out his hand.
“August Van Zorn,” I said. We shook. “Unbelievable.”
“I have no talent,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
“Desperation. Have you read any of his others?”
“A lot of them. ‘The Eaters of Men.’ ‘The Case of Edward Angell.’ ‘The House on Polfax Street.’ He’s great. I can’t believe you’ve heard of him.”
“Listen,” I said, thinking that I had done far more than hear of Albert Vetch. “Do you want to get a beer?”
“I never drink,” said Crabtree. “Buy me a cup of coffee.”
I wanted a beer, but coffee was undeniably easier to be had in the purlieus of the University, so we went into a cafe, one that I’d been avoiding for the past couple of weeks, since it was a haunt of that tender and perceptive philosophy major who’d pleaded so sweetly with me not to fritter away my gift. A couple of years later I would marry her for a little while.
“There’s a table under the stairs, at the back,” said Crabtree. “I often sit there. I don’t like to be seen.”
“Why is that?”
“I prefer to remain a mystery to my peers.”
“I see. So why are you talking to me?”
“‘The Sister of Darkness,’” he said. “It took me a few pages to catch on, you know. It was the line about the angle of his widow’s peak lying ‘slightly out of true with the remainder of his face.’”
“I must have remembered that one wholesale,” I said. “I was working from memory.”
“You must have a sick memory, then.”
“But at least I have talent.”
“Maybe,” he said, looking down cross-eyed at the flame of a match as he cupped his hand around the end of a filterless cigarette. He smoked Old Gold then. Now he’s changed to something low-tar and aqua-colored; a faggy cigarette, I call it when I want to make him pretend to get mad.
“If you don’t have talent, how’d you get in?” I asked him. “Didn’t you have to submit a sample of work?”
“I had talent,” he said, extinguishing the match with an insouciant shake. “One story’s worth. But it’s all right. I’m not planning to be a writer.” He paused a moment after he said that, to let it sink in, and I got the feeling that he’d been waiting to have this conversation for a very long time. I imagined him at home, blowing sophisticated plumes of smoke at the reflection in his bedroom mirror, tying and retying his cashmere scarf. “I’m taking this class to learn about writers as much as writing.” He sat back in his seat and coil by coil unwrapped the scarf from his neck. “I intend to be the Max Perkins of our generation.”
His expression was grave and earnest but there was still a slight wrinkling of mockery at the corners of his eyes, as though he were daring me to admit that I didn’t know who Maxwell Perkins was.
“Oh, yeah?” I said, determined to match his grandiosity and arrogance with my own. I had spent
