Fantastic Metropolis

Inside Pompas’s apartment, which looked eerily familiar (as if the photographic impression of her recent domestic surroundings could have rubbed off Ida’s skin during their embraces), Merkouros found his way into the writer’s office. Flicking on the light, he sat in Pompas’s swivel chair and turned to face the row of three file cabinets. The left-hand one was stuffed with typescripts of stories, correspondence with editors, working notes and news clippings, financial records and personal letters. The file marked “The Fourfold Singularity” contained only the final typescript, as published, and no early drafts. No early drafts appeared, in fact, in any of the manuscript folders.

Merkouros then opened the top drawer of the middle file cabinet. That, too, was bursting with manuscripts—of stories he did not recall reading (and he thought he knew Pompas’s oeuvre to date pretty well). How great was the added surprise, then, when he came upon a file marked “Double Duplicity”! It contained an exact copy of the typescript that Silver had sent to him also—but in addition it bulged with three earlier typed and heavily hand-corrected drafts of the same story. Original drafts, not photocopies! Why would Silver have been foolish enough … All this was mentally exhausting. Merkouros began to feel extremely tired. He decided to finger through other files in the same drawer, however, and was shocked to discover that every one of them contained multiple drafts of stories that all bore the name Herman Q. Silver as author! Merkouros felt extremely disturbed. He had determined that Silver and Pompas were one and the same man, and that they were locked in some sort of deadly combat with each other. Should he, Merkouros, now write to “them” separately and tell them to stuff it?

He decided, first, to lift samples of the incontrovertible evidence from each of the file cabinets. Did each know he was also the other? Merkouros wondered. All this Jekyll and Hyde stuff was much too asinine, much too depressing. Merkouros reached into his own file cabinet, the one on the right, and deposited in the topmost drawer all the filched evidence. He would write to Pompas/Silver tomorrow, since just now he was much too tired and needed a good long snooze.

Merkouros walked in the dark into the bedroom, eased himself onto the edge of the bed, and drowsily removed all his clothes. The lacy nightgown lay neatly folded under the pillow. Carefully opening it out,

SHE

finding the edges by touch, she pulls it down over her small breasts, her narrow waist and full hips, and lies back for a moment staring into the dark at the doom of another night of abject loneliness, the pillow beside her no longer bearing traces of Margie’s musky odor, redolent now only of her own tears. In her mind’s darkness, she can read the letter that has finally come: “... can’t help it, please forgive, I’m hopelessly in love with him—nothing else means any …” She suddenly has the fantasy of bringing together all her ex-lovers and would-be lovers into this sultry receptive darkness with her. Here in this bed all would embrace each, and each all, in total acceptance, in tender recognition, in tropical abandon, and each would heal all of the curse of shrunken identity, of self-made isolation, through unstinting gifts of knowledge, love, and passion. But what more is left to hope for? In the dark, groping toward the bathroom, toward the plastic container of capsules which she has specially prepared for herself, “laced” like her nightgown, or like Margie’s tiny underthings, with the promise of utter loss of self, with the certainty of all-quenching oblivion

/Shortly you will have exposed that thief in all the nakedness of his Silver-derived glory, consigned him to all-quenching oblivion, but all this agitation has given you a world-class migraine. Those capsules must still be in the bathroom cabinet, where you last saw them

//I hadn’t heard from Merkouros for days since he wrote back in his clipped, almost reluctant way agreeing to handle the case. My head was positively splitting from all this damned anxiety. I know I’d had almost a full container of aspirin capsules in the medicine cabinet. Where in the hell did they disappear?...

///Before leaving Pompas’s apartment, Merkouros used the john. He was so nervously exhausted by his discovery that he thought he saw Ida staring back at him from the medicine cabinet mirror. His head pounded unmercifully. Opening the container of headache capsules, he shook a couple out into his palm. Sniffing, he suddenly recognized the almond-like odor of potassium cyanide. Frowning, he flushed all the capsules down the toilet. There was no point, he decided, in trying to determine whether Pompas was hoping to do in Silver, or Silver Pompas.

THE END

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“Megabride” first appeared in the January 1990 issue of Florida Review and was later reprinted in Daniel Pearlman’s collection The Final Dream & Other Fictions* (Permeable Press, 1995).