The Bazaar of Bad Dreams Read online

  "In nineteen eleven?"

  "Just so. I'd ask if you know what a shirtwaist is, Bill, but since I know you don't, I'll tell you: a woman's blouse. At the turn of the century, I and my partner, Max Blanck, owned a business called the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Profitable business, but the women who worked there were a large pain in the keister. Always sneaking out to smoke, and--this was worse--stealing stuff, which they would put in their purses or tuck up under their skirts. So we locked the doors to keep them in during their shifts, and searched them on their way out. Long story short, the damned place caught fire one day. Max and I escaped by going up to the roof and down the fire escape. Many of the women were not so lucky. Although, let's be honest and admit there's lots of blame to go around. Smoking in the factory was strictly verboten, but plenty of them did it anyway, and it was a cigarette that started the blaze. Fire marshal said so. Max and I were tried for manslaughter and acquitted."

  Bill recalls the fire extinguisher in the hall, with Better late than never printed above it. He thinks: You were found guilty in the retrial, Mr. Harris, or you wouldn't be here. "How many women died?"

  "A hundred and forty-six," Harris says, "and I regret every one, Mr. Anderson."

  Bill doesn't bother correcting him on the name. Twenty minutes ago he was dying in his bed; now he is fascinated by this old story, which he has never heard before. That he remembers, anyway.

  "Not long after Max and I got down the fire escape, the women crammed onto it. The damn thing couldn't take the weight. It collapsed and spilled two dozen of em a hundred feet to the cobblestones. They all died. Forty more jumped from the ninth-and tenth-floor windows. Some were on fire. They all died too. The fire brigade got there with life nets, but the women tore right through them and exploded on the pavement like bags filled with blood. A terrible sight, Mr. Anderson, terrible. Others jumped down the elevator shafts, but most . . . just . . . burned."

  "Like nine-eleven with fewer casualties."

  "So you always say."

  "And you're here."

  "Yes indeedy. I sometimes wonder how many men are sitting in offices just like this. Women too. I'm sure there are women, I've always been forward-looking and see no reason why women can't fill low-level executive positions, and admirably. All of us answering the same questions and sending on the same pilgrims. You'd think that the load would lighten a little each time one of you decides to use the right-hand door instead of that one"--he points to the left--"but no. No. A fresh canister comes down the tube--zoop--and I get a new bozo to replace the old one. Sometimes two." He leans forward and speaks with great emphasis. "This is a shitty job, Mr. Anderson!"

  "It's Andrews," Bill says. "And look, I'm sorry you feel that way, but Jesus, take a little responsibility for your actions, man! A hundred and forty-six women! And you did lock the doors."

  Harris hammers his desk. "They were stealing us blind!" He picks up the folder and shakes it at Bill. "You should talk! Ha! Pot calling the kettle black! Goldman Sachs! Securities fraud! Profits in the billions, taxes in the millions! The low millions! Does the phrase housing bubble ring a bell? How many clients' trust did you abuse? How many people lost their life savings thanks to your greed and shortsightedness?"

  Bill knows what Harris is talking about, but all that chicanery (well . . . most of it) went on far above his pay grade. He was as surprised as anyone when the excrement hit the cooling device. He's tempted to say there's a big difference between being beggared and burned alive, but why rub salt in the wound? Besides, it would probably sound self-righteous.

  "Let's drop it," he says. "If you have information I need, why not give it to me. Fill me in on the deal, and I'll get out of your hair."

  "I wasn't the one smoking," Harris says in a low and brooding tone. "I wasn't the one dropped the match."

  "Mr. Harris?" Bill can feel the walls closing in. If I had to be here forever I'd shoot myself, he thinks. Only if what Mr. Harris says is true, he wouldn't want to, any more than he'd want to go to the toilet.

  "Okay, all right." Harris makes a lip-flapping sound, not quite a raspberry. "The deal is this. Leave through the left door and you get to live your life over again. A to Z. Start to finish. Take the right one and you wink out. Poof. Candle-in-the-wind type of thing."

  At first Bill says nothing to this. He's incapable of speech and not sure he can trust his ears. It's too good to be true. His mind first turns to his brother Mike, and the accident that happened when Mike was eight. Next, to the stupid shoplifting thing when Bill was seventeen. Just a lark, but it could have put a hole in his college plans if his father hadn't stepped in and talked to the right person. The thing with Annmarie in the fraternity house . . . that still haunts him at odd moments, even after all these years. And of course, the big one--

  Harris is smiling, and the smile isn't a bit pleasant. "I know what you're thinking, because I've heard it all from you before. About how you and your brother were playing flashlight tag when you were kids, and you slammed the bedroom door to keep him out, and accidentally cut off the tip of his pinky finger. The impulse shoplifting thing, the watch, and how your dad pulled strings to get you out of it--"

  "That's right, no record. Except with him. He never let me forget it."

  "And then there's the girl in the frat house." Harris lifts the file. "Her name's in here somewhere, I imagine, I do my best to keep the files current--when I can find them--but why don't you refresh me."

  "Annmarie Winkler." Bill can feel his cheeks heating up. "It wasn't date rape, so don't get that idea. She put her legs around me when I got on top of her, and if that doesn't say consent, I don't know what does."

  "Did she also put her legs around the two fellows who came next?"

  No, Bill is tempted to say, but at least we didn't light her on fire.

  And still.

  He'd be squaring up a putt on the seventh green or working in his woodshop or talking to his daughter (now a college student herself) about her senior thesis, and he would wonder where Annmarie is now. What she's doing. What she remembers about that night.

  Harris's smile widens to a locker-room smirk. It may be a shitty job, but it's clear there are a few parts of it he enjoys. "I can see that's a question you don't want to answer, so why don't we move along. You're thinking of all the things you'll change during your next ride on the cosmic carousel. This time you won't slam the door on your kid brother's finger, or try to shoplift a watch at the Paramus Mall--"

  "It was the Mall of New Jersey. I'm sure it's in your file somewhere."

  Harris gives Bill's folder a get-away-fly flap and continues. "Next time you'll decline to fuck your semicomatose date as she lies on the sofa in the basement of your fraternity house, and--big one!--you'll actually make that appointment for the colonoscopy instead of putting it off, having now decided--correct me if I'm wrong--that the indignity of having a camera shoved up your ass is marginally better than dying of colon cancer."

  Bill says, "Several times I've come close to telling Lynn about that frat house thing. I've never had the courage."

  "But given the chance, you'd fix it."

  "Of course--given the chance, wouldn't you unlock those factory doors?"

  "Indeed I would, but there are no second chances. Sorry to disappoint you."

  He doesn't look sorry. Harris looks tired. Harris looks bored. Harris also looks meanly triumphant. He points to the door on Bill's left.

  "Use that one--as you have on every other occasion--and you begin all over again, as a seven-pound baby boy sliding from your mother's womb into the doctor's hands. You'll be wrapped in bunting and taken home to a farm in central Nebraska. When your father sells the farm in nineteen sixty-four, you'll move to New Jersey. There you will cut off the tip of your brother's little finger while playing flashlight tag. You'll go to the same high school, take the same courses, and make the same grades. You'll go to Boston College, and you'll commit the same act of semirape in the same fraternity house basement. You'll wa
tch as the same two fraternity brothers then have sex with Annmarie Winkler, and although you'll think you should call a halt to what's going on, you'll never quite muster up the moral fortitude to do so. Three years later you'll meet Lynn DeSalvo, and two years after that you'll be married. You'll follow the same career path, you'll have the same friends, you'll have the same deep disquiet about some of your firm's business practices . . . and you'll keep the same silence. The same doctor will urge you to get a colonoscopy when you turn fifty, and you will promise--as you always do--that you'll take care of that little matter. You won't, and as a result you will die of the same cancer."

  Harris's smile as he drops the folder back on his cluttered desk is now so wide it almost touches the lobes of his ears.

  "Then you'll come here, and we'll have the same discussion. My advice would be to use the other door and have done with it, but of course that is your decision."

  Bill has listened to this sermonette with increasing dismay. "I'll remember nothing? Nothing?"

  "Not quite nothing," Harris says. "You may have noticed some photos in the hall."

  "The company picnic."

  "Yes. Every client who visits me sees pictures from the year of his or her birth, and recognizes a few familiar faces amid all the strange ones. When you live your life again, Mr. Anders--presuming you decide to--you will have a sense of deja vu when you first see those people, a sense that you have lived it all before. Which, of course, you have. You will have a fleeting sense, almost a surety, that there is more . . . shall we say depth to your life, and to existence in general, than you previously believed. But then it will pass."

  "If it's all the same, with no possibility of improvement, why are we even here?"

  Harris makes a fist and knocked on the end of the pneumatic tube hanging over the laundry basket, making it swing. "CLIENT WANTS TO KNOW WHY WE'RE HERE! WANTS TO KNOW WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT!"

  He waits. Nothing happens. He folds his hands on his desk.

  "When Job wanted to know that, Mr. Anders, God asked if Job was there when he--God--made the universe. I guess you don't even rate that much of a reply. So let's consider the matter closed. What do you want to do? Pick a door."

  Bill is thinking about the cancer. The pain of the cancer. To go through all that again . . . except he wouldn't remember he'd gone through it already. There's that. Assuming Isaac Harris is telling the truth.

  "No memories at all? No changes at all? Are you sure? How can you be?"

  "Because it's always the same conversation, Mr. Anderson. Each time, and with all of you."

  "It's Andrews!" He bellows it, surprising both of them. In a lower voice, he says, "If I try, really try, I'm sure I can hold onto something. Even if it's only what happened to Mike's finger. And one change might be enough to . . . I don't know . . ."

  To take Annmarie to a movie instead of to that fucking kegger, how about that?

  Harris says, "There is a folk tale that before birth, every human soul knows all the secrets of life and death and the universe. But then, just before birth, an angel leans down, puts his finger to the new baby's lips, and whispers 'Shhh.'" Harris touches his philtrum. "According to the story, this is the mark left by the angel's finger. Every human being has one."

  "Have you ever seen an angel, Mr. Harris?"

  "No, but I once saw a camel. It was in the Bronx Zoo. Choose a door."

  As he considers, Bill remembers a story they had to read in junior high: "The Lady or the Tiger." This decision is nowhere near as difficult.

  I must hold onto just one thing, he tells himself as he opens the door that leads back into life. Just one thing.

  The white light of return envelops him.

  *

  The doctor, who will bolt the Republican party and vote for Adlai Stevenson in the fall (something his wife must never know), bends forward from the waist like a waiter presenting a tray and comes up holding a naked baby by the heels. He gives it a sharp smack and the squalling begins.

  "You have a healthy baby boy, Mrs. Andrews," he says. "Looks to be about seven pounds. Congratulations."

  Mrs. Andrews takes the baby. She kisses his damp cheeks and brow. They will name him William, after her paternal grandfather. When the twenty-first century comes, he'll still be in his forties. The idea is dizzying. In her arms she holds not just a new life but a universe of possibilities. Nothing, she thinks, could be more wonderful.

  Thinking of Surendra Patel

  Ralph Vicinanza, a close friend who also sold the rights to publish my books in lots of foreign countries, had a way of coming to me with interesting ideas at just the right time--which is to say while I was between projects. I never talk much to people about what I'm working on, so he must have had some kind of special radar. He was the one who suggested I might like to try my hand at a serial novel, a la Charles Dickens, and that seed eventually blossomed into The Green Mile.

  Ralph called not long after I finished the first draft of Lisey's Story and while I was waiting for that book to settle a bit (translation: doing nothing). He said that Amazon was launching their second-generation Kindle, and the company was hoping that some hot-shit bestselling writer would help them out in the PR department by writing a story that used the Kindle as a plot element. (Such longish works of fiction and nonfiction later became known as Kindle Singles.) I thanked Ralph but said I had no interest, for two reasons. The first is that I've never been able to write stories on demand. The second is that I hadn't lent my name to any commercial enterprise since doing an American Express ad back in the day. And Jesus Christ, how bizarre was that? Wearing a tuxedo, I posed in a drafty castle with a stuffed raven on my arm. A friend told me I looked like a blackjack dealer with a bird fetish.

  "Ralph," I said, "I enjoy my Kindle, but I have absolutely no interest in shilling for Amazon."

  Yet the idea lingered, mostly because I've always been fascinated by new technologies, especially those having to do with reading and writing. One day not long after Ralph's call, the idea for this story arrived while I was taking my morning walk. It was too cool to remain unwritten. I didn't tell Ralph, but when the story was done, I sent it to him and said Kindle was welcome to use it for their launch purposes, if they liked. I even showed up at the event and read some of it.

  I took a certain amount of shit about that from portions of the literary community that saw it as selling out to the business side, but, in the words of John Lee Hooker, "That don't confront me none." As far as I was concerned, Amazon was just another market, and one of the few that would publish a story of this length. There was no advance, but there were--and still are--royalties on each sale (or download, if you prefer). I was happy to bank those checks; there's an old saying that the workman is worthy of his hire, and I think it's a true saying. I write for love, but love doesn't pay the bills.

  There was one special perk, though: a one-of-a-kind pink Kindle. Ralph got a kick out of that, and I'm glad. It was our last really cool deal, because my friend died suddenly in his sleep five years ago. Boy, I miss him.

  This version of the story has been considerably revised, but you'll notice it's firmly set in an era when such e-reading devices were still new. That seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? And bonus points for you Roland of Gilead fans who catch references to a certain Dark Tower.

  Ur

  I--Experimenting with New Technology

  When Wesley Smith's colleagues asked him--some with an eyebrow hoicked satirically--what he was doing with that gadget (they all called it a gadget), he told them he was experimenting with new technology. That was not true. He bought the Kindle purely out of spite.

  I wonder if the market analysts at Amazon even have that particular motivation on their product-survey radar, he thought. He guessed not. This gave him some satisfaction, but not as much as he hoped to derive from Ellen Silverman's surprise when she saw him with his new purchase. That hadn't happened yet, but it would. It was a small campus, after all, and he'd only been in possession of his
new toy (he called it his new toy, at least to begin with) for a week.

  Wesley was an instructor in the English Department at Moore College, in Moore, Kentucky. Like all instructors of English, he thought he had a novel in him somewhere and would write it someday. Moore College was the sort of institution that people call "a pretty good school." Don Allman, Wesley's only friend in the English Department, explained what that meant.

  "A pretty good school," Don said, "is one nobody has ever heard of outside a thirty-mile radius. People call it a pretty good school because they have no evidence to the contrary, and most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all."

  "Does that make you a realist?" Wesley once asked him.

  "I think the world is mostly populated by shitheads," Don Allman responded. "You take it from there."

  Moore wasn't a good school, but neither was it a bad one. On the great scale of academic excellence, its place resided just a little south of mediocre. Most of its three thousand students paid their bills and many of them got jobs after graduating, although few went on to obtain (or even try for) graduate degrees. There was a fair amount of drinking, and of course there were parties, but on the great scale of party schools, Moore's place resided a little to the north of mediocre. It had produced politicians, but all of the small-water variety, even when it came to graft and chicanery. In 1978, one Moore graduate was elected to the US House of Representatives, but he dropped dead of a heart attack after serving only four months. His replacement was a graduate of Baylor.

  The school's only marks of exceptionalism had to do with its Division Three football team and its Division Three women's basketball team. The football team (the Moore Meerkats) was one of the worst in America, having won only seven games in the last ten years. There was constant talk of disbanding it. The current coach was a drug addict who liked to tell people that he had seen The Wrestler twelve times and never failed to cry when Mickey Rourke told his estranged daughter that he was just a broken-down piece of meat.