Fantastic Metropolis

YOU

Draft 1 / Your suspicions stand confirmed, you have caught Mr. Famous Author in flagrante, the evidence of his plagiarism of your own far better fiction lies revealed

Draft 2 // The circle is closed at last, you have in your unyielding grip the sticky fingers of a literary picklock caught snaking across your doorjamb, the reptilian C.K. Pompas will now be forced to swallow his own tale, disgorging it as your own.

Draft 3 /// You now have the evidence that Pompas has been stealing your stories. It’s all there, in “his” latest piece in the April issue of Unreal City. He has appropriated the body of your work. In his reverse-Midas grip the spirit of your work is nowhere to be seen. Like a true hack he has hacked away at your style and left nothing but the bare bones of your plot strutting and clanking along in pale imitation of the living original. Six months ago the editor of The Hopeless Maze sent back a story of yours accusing you (in an inked scrawl across the first page of your manuscript!) of a weak imitation of a story they had recently published by the renowned C.K. Pompas! The resemblance, you saw, was unmistakable, but it was his that was the “weak imitation.” How could you attempt to prove such an allegation without risking the total alienation of that insulting little twit of an editor who ruled one of the best-paying markets for the sort of stories you liked to write? Apart from an incredible coincidence, the truth had to be that your own story, still unpublished, which you had submitted to various magazines over a period of several months before sending it to The Hopeless Maze, had been read and plagiarized by C.K. Pompas himself.

And now the channel of plagiarism has revealed itself. You had submitted the earlier story to Unreal City four months before its zombified double showed up in the pages of The Hopeless Maze. Both magazines, Unreal City and The Hopeless Maze, are owned by the same publisher and share the same editorial offices on Madison Avenue. Ergo, some editorial assistant at Unreal City, which has just printed this new desecration of your toil, has been copying your work for Mr. Pompas before sending it back, rejected, to you. Pompas’s new story, “The Fourfold Singularity,” winks out at you with brazen whorishness from the pages of Unreal City, / a glistening shell // a grinning adulteration /// a glitzy simulacrum—all vital organs excised—of your own “Double Duplicity” mailed off to UC not six months ago. Your own cast of four central characters, to whom you ingeniously gave equal emphasis throughout, you now find truncated by a relentlessly conventional mind into the aesthetically predictable pattern of one main character lording it over a troupe of marionettes so that the entire point of your conception has vanished.

The difference, however, between the present act of bald-faced piracy and the preceding one (and how many still undiscovered depradations even before that? you grimly wonder) is that bitter experience gave you the foresight to squirrel away in your bank deposit-box a notarized, dated, and sealed copy of “Double Duplicity” before you submitted it anywhere for publication—so that you now have legal proof of your priority of composition! There will be those who say that the “idea” is an old one, that the “plot” has been done before, but not even the most biased judge will be able to deny, in addition to the totally duplicated storyline, the existence of whole paragraphs in Pompas’s version lifted practically word for word from the manuscript of “Double Duplicity.” True, the later versions of “Double Duplicity” you have been sending out have undergone, in places, some extensive stylistic changes, so that there is now almost no sentence-for-sentence similarity between your story / as it now stands // in its present embodiment /// in its latest avatar and Pompas’s insouciant hatchetwork. That fact—of the continual transformation of your handiwork—indicates no more than the underlying dynamism of an evolving Self whereby you molt verbal skins like a snake. The comparison between your legally preserved earlier draft and Pompas’s denatured copy is all that will matter in a court of law.

What will you win by pressing the case? First, immunity from future literary burglary. Second, damages that compensate for Pompas’s financial gains at your expense and for the incalculable harm he may have done to your career. Third, the positive attention of editors to your own work (who cares whether the result of your notoriety or your actual literary quality?). You will mount, therefore, a two-pronged attack. The editors at neither Unreal City nor The Hopeless Maze will give you the address or phone number of C.K. Pompas. The same for the publisher of his latest novel, Megabride, which has leered at you many times from its rack at the local supermarket. Very well. You will outline your case in a letter to the editor of Unreal City (suggesting that someone in that office has been transmitting your work to Pompas), including in that letter a sealed letter to be forwarded to Pompas together with a copy of the copy you kept of the bank-vaulted copy of the plagiarized version of “Double Duplicity.” Knowing it to be a legal matter, the editor will not fail to send off your little packet to Pompas.

At the same time you will send a copy of all this material, with a cover letter, to the renowned Detective Merkouros, one of the few Private Investigators who specializes in cases of literary fraud and piracy, asking him to try to uncover further evidence of editorial complicity with Pompas and perhaps even physical evidence of Pompas’s cannibalizations of your manuscripts. You have read of Merkouros’s peculiar claims to be a visitor from another dimension. Amusing as this whimsicality of his may be, however, you have been forced to conclude that it is precisely his disarming zaniness, and not any magical relationship to the space-time continuum, that is responsible for his outlandish success as a snoop. You first heard of Merkouros in connection with the Oval Evil scandal, which focused national attention on him at the time. It was Merkouros who discovered that the best-selling book detailing the sexual exploits of the last President of the United States was not a hoax perpetrated upon the ex-President by a group of politicos seeking to compromise the rival party (as the ex-President charged), but was rather a shameless piece of literary exhibitionism on the part of the ex-President himself, who is still suing Merkouros for revealing State secrets even as Merkouros still patiently countersues for the same exact sum, no more, in fact, than the unpaid fee for the investigative services that the disrobed author originally hired him for. How do you expect to pay such an outstanding investigator? Obviously, the sum you will be awarded in pursuing your case to its end should be enticement enough. Meanwhile, you can surely scrape up something for an appropriate retainer.

You must write to Ida about all these latest developments. She will surely be more sympathetic to your struggles this time around than she shows herself to be in this last letter of hers still open on your desk beside her framed photograph. You are certain that if she would only agree, finally, to a physical meeting with you she would come to embrace your sense of reality with much less of the reserve she maintains through the device of a “relationship” with you conducted solely, so far, via correspondence. You hardly expected to become emotionally involved with a woman through a series of interchanges of letters and a snapshot showing mischievous brown eyes, a fine, intelligent nose, and full, ironically curling lips topped by an elegant upsweep of auburn hair. You suspected you were falling hard for this woman, whose essence she conveys through her style, when you began to comb her letters repeatedly for signs that she was more than casually attracted to you. For the first time in your life you were moved to respond to a “Personals” notice in The Village Voice (‘WF, 30, loving, nurturing, challenging, in process of divorce, longs for many-leveled relationship with discreet man, pref. writer or artist, in touch with self in mind, soul, and body.”) and you find that your little initial caprice of writing to a mere box number has developed into a routine of verbal intercourse that / daily deepens its Circean grip // draws you more each day into ineluctable dependency /// each day seems more indispensable to your mental equilibrium.

You have no idea where Ida lives. You write to each other at post-office box numbers. She insists that it’s “safer” that way. She types her letters in italics, then underlines her italics for emphasis! This annoying little tic of hers, plus her use of “+” for and, is not nearly so irritating, however, as her / damnable // presumptuous /// forthright tendency to act as your literary critic. But you accept that as you do the asymmetry in the curve of her nose, as a fault that paradoxically enhances her total allure in the famished eye of your soul. You have reread her last letter at least a dozen times, seeking beneath her sudden intimacies, her swift acerbities, the underlying pulse of her being.

Dear Herman, she writes, to meet you face to face just now (+ I’m sure that the face in your photo merely hints at the depths I wish to explore) might jeopardize the progress of my divorce. Have patience! Or will you, too, turn out to be too self-centered to relate to a woman on the several levels through which her own self seeks expression? Please don’t disappoint me!...

...but I find the story hermetically sealed. The reality barely peeks through the verbal mist. Word should manifest world, don’t you think? You flaunt style like a stripteaser who stops just a hankie short of the final revelation. You might let your characters inhabit a little more of our common ground, a little less of their minds. More matter, less art! said the queen, + for God’s sake, Herman, this is now the third version of the same H.Q. Silver story! When you tell me that you withdrew your last version for further revision after submitting it to The Hopeless Maze…!!! Even Flaubert would finally cut the cord + let baby suck breath in the fog + filthy air. Let go! You seem frighteningly anal-retentive! Frankly, I liked your second version better because you allowed your reader an occasional narrative perch between logocentric abysses. Might I suggest, also, that shorter paragraphs would provide additional needed perches for the hardworking eye?

Yours,
(signed) Ida Craig

Although stung by / the flipness of her tone // the sharpness of her critique /// her metaphorical crudity, you murmur to yourself, over and over, like a mantra, her promise-laden image of “the final revelation.”

I

I sat aghast! That H.Q. Silver manuscript the boys at UC sent me knocked the struts right out from under me. I get a little famous and Bingo! the woodwork starts crawling with con artists. Soon I’ll be walking around with a lawyer in front of me and a bodyguard in back of me. And the letter that character sent me! That takes the cake. Accusing me of stealing from him!

Slushpile paranoia never went so far. I’d be damned if I was going to answer the clown. If I start responding to nut-letters, when will I get my novels written? The problem was that this particular clown was something special. His manuscript of “Double Duplicity” was almost exactly like one of my earliest drafts of “The Fourfold Singularity.” It had all the verbal excrescences, all the metaphorical dribble and the psychological drool, that I permit myself during the masturbatory stage of composition. As soon as I blue-pencil an early draft and retype the tighter result, I toss the initial indulgence into the round file. God forbid that in generations to come some twerp with a Ph.D. should dig up my drafts and write an incredibly boring work called The Creative Process of C.K. Pompas.

Worse yet, what if some such scholar were to pronounce “for literary reasons” that the drafts were better than the final, published versions? Such things have been known to happen. You can’t yell “Bullshit!” from the grave. And then there are the psychoanalysts who take what you are and reduce you to a porridge of Oedipal fantasies—look at Dostoyevsky!—after which no reader will touch you without wearing rubber gloves.

So I was pretty damned interested in knowing how this H.Q. Silver came up with a version of my story that was as close as I could remember to my actual first draft. Thank goodness no editor had been stupid enough to publish such crap. That was probably because he hadn’t yet tried the literary magazines. Why should he? H.Q. was obviously on the make for the big bucks, and if he couldn’t earn them himself he’d try to squeeze them out of the pros who did.

For me, though, the immediate point was How do I avoid a scandal? I was doing well enough on my own, with Megabride edging toward the bestseller lists, so who needed any negative publicity? Did it do Alex Haley any good? To get to the root of the matter I was prepared to spend a few bucks. Preventive medicine. One thing for sure—I couldn’t afford to ignore this troublemaking slime.

How could he have gotten hold of an early draft of mine? I wondered. Could I solve the mystery myself? Surely I’d written enough detective/horror fiction to work out a likely “plot” to explain what had happened.

Cherchez la femme! Now that’s a useful place to start. What if that bitch of an Ida had managed to get her claws on some of my scraps before “opting for her freedom,” as she put it? The possibility was rather remote. She despised my published work and I never showed her my work in progress. Besides, hadn’t she left the apartment definitively before I started work on “The Fourfold Singularity”? Anyway, Ida had bigger ideas than peddling Pompas papers to keep her in champagne. She was angling for a hefty settlement. Her eye was on the megabucks that soon would be coming out of Megabride. So I put a real detective on her tail, the best in the business. If Merkouros failed to catch her in flagrante, then either she was as pure as the driven snow, or Merkouros should go back to that ridiculous dimension that he bores you by telling you he’s from. Why a hotshot like Merkouros needs a psychological retreat, I couldn’t say. As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t hack it in 3D, your ass is up a tree.

Could Ida, though, in her smart-ass, intellectually superior way, have dropped a hint in that last letter of hers that she was up to something? I hated the thought of looking at it again—it was like walking over hot coals just to skim through it the first time—but I reached behind me into the left-most of my bank of three file cabinets and pulled it out anyway. She had the unmitigated gall to suggest that I had put out a feeler to reconcile with her (wishful thinking on her part induced by the $mell of approaching be$t-$ellerdom), and in the very same breath she could turn around and beat me over the head for the very same success that had caused her to write to me in the first place! I reread that snot-nosed letter carefully, gritting my teeth at the sound of that voice always nagging me to do better, better, better, to climb the heights of Parnassus, to break out of my slick little niche (I had long been banished from hers, God knows) and shoot for the acclaim of posterity. If posterity could fork up a big enough advance, I’d write for it. I’d write for any audience that paid me.

...I’m very pleased to see MEGABRIDE getting such attention. Our problem was never my resentment of your success, but my fear of the very limited sort of success that you were more + more willing to settle for. If that’s what you’d really wanted, I would’ve been happy to cheer you on, but underneath you were relentlessly hating yourself for betraying your artistic conscience, for abandoning your love of Language, Style, + Form, + for selling out at 38 to a marketplace you’d always despised. Worse yet, you’ve been trying to deceive yourself (unsuccessfully, as I know) into believing that what you were publishing did have artistic integrity. But worst of all is what your self-hatred did to our marriage. Just as you turned words into wooden tools to make money, you tried to turn me into a piece of furniture, “the little woman” whose “function” was to keep the household running, the feather-headed feather-duster. The whole world of stereotypes that you were furnishing your fiction with you desperately began imposing on our lives together…

...What do I think of MEGABRIDE (+ I thank you for the signed copy)? Do you really somehow still seek my valueless approval? Do you really want the truth about MEGABRIDE, or have you really BADE ME RIG up a critique that should stroke your ego? First of all, I recognize in MEGABRIDE an older short story of yours REMADE BIG. Does the book cry out for recognition as Art? No, the author’s clear message is GI’ ME BREAD. A genuine work of literature should fill my soul with destabilizing visions, BREED MAGI in my skull. You are always precise with words, but I don’t care whether you call a seat a chair or an EDGE A BRIM; what I miss is any urgency of voice; I get just the carefully BRED IMAGE of the impeccable technician. + yet you manage to IMBED RAGE in the book of a sort you are pitifully unaware of. Your elusive heroine, whom the males in the book hate even as they frantically, but vainly, pursue her, is nothing more than a BED MIRAGE that keeps your plot clanking along. Remember how you used to DIG ME BARE? I always wanted an even GAMIER BED, but you saw my lust as GRIME ABED, my sex as A BEGRIMED leer, but what could BE-GERM IDA worse than your fear of your own desire? Do you in DREAM GIBE at me still for having once made you so wet? Did you always prefer me afterward, deodorized + blow-dried? But what would such an ARID GEM BE worth? You give service to a BAD REGIME, C.K.,

+ your hard-boiled style betrays the prisoner within. You’ve developed an acute form of BRIG EDEMA, a swelling of the ego that occurs when the spirit is in chains. You’ve descended, in one easy refusal, from the snowy peaks of Mt. Ida to the blacktop of MEDIABERG. May the light from that lofty RIDGE BEAM down on you once again + , who knows, turn you into a MID-AGE REB? With pleasure would I for less than one thin DIME BARGE in on you while you grit your teeth over this ball-snipping book review, C.K. But can the truth take anything more from us than we both gave up to hypocrisy? So maybe it’s ME I BADGER after all. Meanwhile, the cruddy truth that we both know so well, C.K., is that MEGABRIDE is a MEAGER BID for acclaim, about as weak-kneed as the hackneyed men who trail your insubstantial heroine from bed to bed. Admit it, C.K. MEGABRIDE is A BIG MERDE.

Take heart. I expect to nag you no more. I am about to vanish from the scene. I have but one small request to make of you before parting. Please ask Margie De B. to give me a call. Would you, please?...

I was amazed that she could ask me for any favor after such a self-congratulatory, exhibitionistic hatchet-job. At the same time I was glad to learn that my once-a-week housekeeper, Margie De Bianco, with whom my overly democratic Ida used to be thick as thieves at one time, had no use for her any more. She evidently wanted Margie to continue cleaning up the minor messes she made with her life. Why wouldn’t Margie get in touch with her? Ida was as undemanding an employer as a maid could imagine. Did it have to do with the way Margie seemed so excessively worried about me ever since Ida split? Could it be something stupid, like loyalty? From a 25-year-old housemaid with enough problems of her own—like tracking down a slippery ex for child support?

Loyalty seemed a little far-fetched. Now why the hell wouldn’t she want to vacuum Ida’s floors? I began to suspect, suddenly, that Ida’s message was meant for me, and not Margie. Margie damn well was still vacuuming Ida’s floors, but Ida for some reason wanted me to think they were no longer in touch. But what could they possibly be doing behind my back that would make the slightest difference to me?

Suddenly it dawned on me. The trashbasket in my office! I had taken for granted, all these years (it was five years she had been cleaning for me), that my garbage “went” directly down the chute in the hallway into the roach-filled jaws of the building compactor. Could it be that, for some dubious reason, Margie had been swiping my early drafts all this time? She was not the type of person who had any literary interests whatsoever. It was evident from the shape of her body that her spare time was spent on something other than reading in bed.

But what if she supposed that I was somehow a “famous” writer? Might she have heard that all the scraps of a famous writer could somehow be turned into cash? Was she secretly selling the uncensored slobber of my soul, the bubbly that gushes out when I first pop my cork, to some collector? And was he saving it all up to sell to some library—where in future years some twit of a Ph.D. would have a field day reducing me to a heap of amorphous maunderings? The thought of such a long series of unsuspected pilferings–and the possible involvement of Ida —gave me heartburn. If Merkouros could manage to break into Margie’s apartment …

HE

Merkouros passed from lamplight into shadow wandering in and out among the streets of the upper West Side, threading his way delicately among dog turds, glaring at late-night strollers who paraded their pets along Riverside Drive and callously, shamelessly, involved the innocent animals in countless violations of the pooper-scooper laws. Over in his native dimension such things did not occur. There the civic-minded majority (who did not, as here, overlap so confusingly with the criminal element) did not have such laws dictating behavior that to them was as automatic as brushing one’s teeth after dinner. As he huddled against the cool of the April night, shrugging the padded shoulders of his double-breasted jacket against the sight of such wanton defilements, half his head seemed to sink into his trunk, and only a thin white nose and a slicked-back mat of dark hair peeked out above his thick woolen scarf to rebuke the quiet streets.

Detective Merkouros was vaulting from horn to horn of another of those moral dilemmas which he had to run many times through his mental computer to settle to his absolute satisfaction. The renowned C.K. Pompas (who, in spite of his reputation as a detective novelist, knew nothing about the realities of detective work) had requested his services once more. This time it was not to continue spying on the magnificent creature who was divorcing him. It was to protect himself from an elaborate defamation being concocted, he claimed, by an envious obscurity named Herman Q. Silver. The problem was that Merkouros, having earlier studied the same documents—presented to him independently by the aforenamed Mr. Silver—had just accepted a retainer from said Silver to seek further evidence of plagiarism committed against him by Pompas. When Silver had presented his arguments, with supporting texts, Merkouros had undertaken their comparative study and emerged convinced that his new client did indeed have priority. But now Pompas was presenting the equally compelling counter-construction that his earlier incarnations were being resurrected in a devious plot to despoil him of all claims to originality. (There wasn’t an author of Merkouros’s acquaintance who wouldn’t rather be called boring than unoriginal.)

Either one or the other was lying, Merkouros initially concluded. That was, at least, the only reasonable conclusion available to a man born, bred, and trained in Plane 1, his native dimension, where the logical alternatives either/or ruled supreme whether in ethical considerations or in the smooth, efficient flow of midtown Manhattan traffic at rush hour. Gridlock, a concrete parallel to both/and in the field of abstract logic, was in Merkouros’s experience a condition that existed only here in Plane 7. Merkouros had constantly to remind himself that Plane 7 was the world of both/and. Therefore, he thought, When in Rome, etc., so that he was forced to entertain a number of murkier possibilities than the merely aesthetically pleasing either/or. For example, both one and the other were lying; both one and the other were telling the truth; they were both lying and telling the truth at the same time; neither one nor the other was either lying or telling the truth; both one and the other knew each was lying in order to rescue the perceived truth from oblivion, or to conceal it from the eyes of him they demanded should reveal it. ...

Now, although in Merkouros’s native plane it would have been ethically out of the question for him to accept simultaneous assignments from both of two adversaries, the issue was not so clear in the fog and filthy air of this somewhat antithetical New York. He did not find it too difficult, in fact, to argue the point that here it might be advisable to accept the retainers offered by both Silver and Pompas. First of all, he was low in funds (given the outrageous rentals in Plane 7), but if he were paid by both, he would be able to function more efficiently in the interests of either. (Even both/either was an allowable logical construct here, he marveled.) In addition, he had to remind himself of his primary loyalty to his supervisor, the Police Commissioner of his native New York, from whom he had accepted the ongoing assignment of helping to track down interdimensional “jumpers” who wreaked havoc upon the very quantum fabric of the multiverse in their desperate and eventually futile efforts to evade the law of Plane 1. He had to maintain himself here by living “on the economy”—of Plane 7, that is—in order to keep himself from becoming the object of local suspicion and investigation and thus raising obstacles to his own efficiency. Although he still occasionally tried to promote interdimensional cooperation with the local police, they tended to regard him as a nut who could perform certain magic tricks (like disappearing), and he found that the image of “harmless nut” actually helped him attract more imaginative types of clients to the investigative agency he set up locally to support himself. It was an incredibly good deal, of course, since his Plane 1 salary was still paid to him (the currency would appear counterfeit in Plane 7), but his wife, whom he returned to visit at three-day intervals, spent most of it anyway and even demanded part of what he earned in Plane 7—until he convinced her that the bills were worthless in the absence of an interdimensional exchange agreement.

A further enticement to him to keep Pompas’s retainer was, of course, the opportunity the case might afford him to resume his “deactivated” relationship with C.K.’s soon-to-be-ex wife, the maddeningly attractive Ida Craig. And hadn’t he already learned all about both/and when he had taken on the first assignment from Pompas—to seek evidence of adultery against his wife? Tracking her at a distance proved agonizing, given the fantasies aroused by her beauty combined with his growing conviction of her even more exciting chastity, which he could logically assume of his own wife in Plane 1 but which contradicted all his prurient expectations of human perversity in Plane 7. So he devised, through a combination of ingenuity and dumb luck, a way to get to know her on an intimate personal level without her ever suspecting his real identity or the circumstance that had brought her to his awareness. One night when she was out he broke into her apartment in the normal way, jimmying the lock with a credit card, rather than resorting to his trump card, transvection, by which he could usually position himself at a place back in Plane 1 whose coordinates corresponded to those of the desired re-entry point in Plane 7, after which he could rematerialize inside any locked apartment, for example, without having passed through the door.

The apartment immediately struck him as familiar because he had fantasized for weeks about her lifestyle, daily surroundings, and even about her most intimate thoughts. Her furnishings were more functional than elegant, there were books everywhere (she perpetually took courses at Columbia in literature and anthropology), and the artwork on the walls tended toward the modernistic. Hanging in the living room was an Escher drawing that looked like a whirling town inside a splitting painting inside a funneling art gallery inside the same whorl of a town, and it would have driven him crazy if he had continued to stare at its impossible configurations. He passed into the room where she evidently studied and kept her papers. He was after some clue to her personal relationships that she might so far have managed to conceal even from eyes as sharp as his. It did not take him long to find precisely the sort of thing he had been hoping for. It sat exposed on her desk, to the right of her typewriter. It was a carbon of a letter placing a notice in the “Personals” section of The Village Voice. “...longs for many-leveled relationship … writer or artist …”

Very well. He’d look up her announcement in the Voice and respond as a writer—yes, a writer of extravagant fantasies—who devoted himself utterly to the depiction of many-leveled relationships, who wished to establish such a relationship in real life, and who at the moment was in the process of writing a novel about a detective from a parallel world, Remus Rook, who was stationed in the New York of Plane 7 to apprehend cross-dimensional criminals called “jumpers,” who etc. etc. ... In this way he succeeded in arranging a meeting with her, and she was so taken with the tales that poured out of his multidimensional imagination (actually a rather matter-of-fact recital of things that happened to him on the job) that he soon wound up in the bed pre-heated by his fantasies glued to the feverish body of this woman whose infidelity he managed to endure only at the price of bowing out of his arrangement with C.K. Pompas. On other grounds, too, he succeeded in hushing the dogs of conscience. The both/andry of this world would hardly be comprehensible to his straight-thinking wife, to whom he avoided telling too many tales of the ways of Plane 7. He, however, had decided that the ambiguities of this dimension ought not to be judged by the certainties of his own. Any contradiction on the moral plane between both/and and either/or was purely illusory. The very existence of the multiverse implied the toleration of irreconcilables, so that your modern interdimensional wayfarer did well to embrace the following metalogical proposition—BOTH both/and AND either/or—where either/or would continue to govern his behavior, but only back home. (Logically, therefore, he should have remained in the pay of C.K. Pompas, but the drag of an other-dimensional upbringing was not that easy to shake off all at once.)

Merkouros’s intense devotion to only three of Ida’s putatively many dimensions soon became apparent to both, with the result that she suddenly banished him from her bed and restricted even their social intercourse to an exchange of letters—in which he would exhaustively catalog for her the countless delights of her body, hoping thus to mesmerize her back into their steamy bed, whereas she would reproach him for “focussing all your sexuality into one narrow point, like a dagger” and for “a rigidly logical mind out of touch with all tender emotion” and for “a puritanical conscience at peace with lust, terrified of love.” Merkouros refused to believe that he had seen the end of her gleaming thighs. After all, she did continue to write to him. Merkouros could in fact not tolerate the idea that he had been permanently excluded from her gardens. All the more reason, then, to welcome this new assignment whereby Pompas wished to prod him in a direction that might bring him into proximity again with Ida.

Pompas had sent him a photo of the suspect housekeeper, Margie. It showed a blonde in a provocative pose, clad in nothing but a bikini, a snapshot he claimed to have found among papers that Ida had neglected to take with her. Merkouros was soon to discover, to his deepening amazement, the true reason for such an unlikely photo’s presence in Pompas’s apartment.

The subject of the pose, Margie De B., lived on 115th off Broadway, a fashionable street in Plane 1 but here, in spite of its bordering on Columbia University, a seedy strip that successfully resisted the light of learning. Merkouros had chosen a time for entry when Margie was scheduled to work at Pompas’s place and when her six-year-old boy would be at school. Several locks and bolts on the door made it impossible for him, however, to break in the normal way. So he tipped up the little black box on his belt, fingered a request for coordinates for a spot just inside the apartment door, then asked it for the nearest point of safe re-entry into Plane 1.

That turned out rather distressingly to be a ladies’ bathroom in Butler Library of Columbia University. It was early in the day, and there was no problem of access to Butler. He waited near the bathroom until he was sure that no one was inside. That was hardly the problem. It was the occasional surprise that awaited him in the plane to which he transvected that often filled him with apprehension. Thus, when he suddenly reappeared in his native plane, finger still pressed to the button of his belt transvector, he found himself inside a toilet-cubicle knee to startled knee with a seated female of indeterminate age. Frowning sternly, he flashed his badge and fumbled his way out without further pointless apology or explanation.

The spatial coordinates corresponding to those within Plane 7 (inside the housekeeper’s apartment) located him, fortunately, in the hallway of the fifth floor of a ritzy hotel on his native 115th Street. Since, however, the floor-level here in Plane 1 was exactly 7.23 inches higher than that in Plane 7, he readied himself at the intersection of the coordinates with knees bent forward so as to land without breaking his ankles. (The many bruises he had suffered during the course of his transvections, one of the occupational hazards of his rarified sort of policework, flashed through his mind as he resigned himself once more to the unexpected.) Pressing the seventh from the left in a line of buttons across the top of his transvector, Merkouros dropped in, literally, with a thump, onto the rug of the darkened foyer of Margie De B.’s unoccupied apartment.

He finally stumbled upon promising ore in the woman’s bedroom, where papers littered a black enamel desk opposite a king-size bed covered with rumpled satin sheets whose reddish violet hue contrasted sensuously with the delicate black underthings that had been tossed on top of them. The room smelled headily of perfume seductively tinged with woman’s sweat. What a contrast to the simple, demure furnishings of the rest of the apartment! marveled Merkouros. The papers cluttering the desk included letters and pulp magazines. One hand-written letter in particular snagged his attention. It was to “Dearest Margie” and with “Undying Love” from “Ida”! It was one page long, in green ink on pink stationery:

“You won’t return my calls. You won’t answer my letters. You won’t tell me what it is I’ve done wrong. What fault is there in me that has soured your love for me so terribly that I must languish without hope day after day week after week starving for one word from you to tell me that you still care, that I am not a monster. You were so sensitive to my most passing mood. I too to yours. You agreed that we had found in each other what no man had ever given. We had taught each other to cast off shame and to explore each other’s nakedness with the passionate delicacy of fingers, lips, and tongue and words of love. Oh Margie, you have cast me out of your bed, but have you also expelled me from the Eden of your heart? Our lovers all fail us and then we find each other. How could we fail each other and still cling to hope?”

The letter was three weeks old. It still bore a trace of perfume. Merkouros put it to his nose and let his eyes linger over the intimacies of Margie’s unmade bed. So that was why such a photograph had been found among things that Ida had left behind. And it was this woman, then, this unprincipled, opportunistic, polymorphous sexual charmer that was his, Merkouros’s, rival. But why, then, did Margie break off their liaison? The other papers were irrelevant and unrevealing. The magazines, copies of Unreal City and The Hopeless Maze, had probably been given to Margie by Pompas, because each one contained a story by him. Merkouros proceeded to rummage around in the polished black drawers of the desk. There he found a volume covered in red leather printed with a gold swirl that said “My Diary.” He flipped it open. There were almost no words in it. There were indeed some “entries,” the first dating a few months back, but they consisted largely of … things! One of the first consisted of two chewed pencil stubs taped to the page with an identifying note scrawled beneath: “He’s been working on a new story with these.” Next was a page adorned with three gold-tipped cigarette butts. Penned below was the following commentary: “He loves to smoke these when he’s writing. He said—Margie these help me concentrate. Today he also said—you really do a great job Margie.” The following entry was a note from the master’s own pen—scribbled instructions for what he wanted done in the apartment that day. The last entry, exactly one week old, brought Merkouros’s amazement to something of a climax. Safety-pinned to the page were a pair of scruffy white ankle socks with holes in them. The adoring caption read, “When CK gives himself up to creative ecstasy he paces up and down in slippers and wears out these socks—these are his own cast off in his trashpail—and he never even looks at me, O when will he know I’m alive?”

He was now forced to revise his conclusion about the presence of Margie’s blatant photo in the apartment. Quite obviously, Ida would not have left such an intimate remembrance behind. (What an extraordinary body! thought Merkouros. How extraordinary that Ida, whose embrace he remembered with thumping heart, could be roused by a twin image of her own delectable femininity, as though in the confusion of this dimension all were permitted and there were no boundaries to the anarchy of desire …) How clear it all was! The poor smitten housekeeper had planted that seductive photo in order to induce in her blockheaded employer a twinge of lust. And amazingly, she failed! The self-centered fool did not know what he was missing! To loll in this satin bed among the undulations of those satiny limbs, limbs that like his own knew the snakings and slippages of Ida’s …

That he need not be bound by the strictures of Plane 1 seemed totally obvious to Merkouros as he surrendered, thrillingly, to an irresistible urge, undressed totally, and forced himself into the lacy black panties and black bra that had been left for him on the bed. Slipping under the bedsheet, he convulsively embraced the satin pillows—pillows that had once borne the odor and imprint of Ida’s own body.

After a while, emerging as from a cloud of rapture, Merkouros took stock of himself and felt utterly ridiculous. He feared, also, that at any moment Margie might return. Back in his own clothes again, he smirked and snorted at having become, for one mad moment, a … transvectite? Before leaving, he remembered his original purpose and made one last stab at discovering any manuscript drafts of Pompas’s that might have been hidden in Margie’s desk or bureau drawers, but evidently that sort of goods lacked interest for a woman of such invincibly concrete orientation to reality. Whatever the two women had exchanged, he could not believe that it included anything so impersonal as manuscripts. Besides, he was dead sure that Ida had never had a rendezvous with any Herman Q. Silver.

Merkouros was hooked, embedded beyond recall in the thickening mystery of this mutual charge of plagiarism, and he hungered to get to the tantalizing bottom of things. If one of the two writers had more reason to be lying, he felt it had to be Pompas—who had so much to lose if he couldn’t protect himself. Besides, Silver was such a naive idiot as to forewarn Pompas before engaging a private detective, allowing Pompas plenty of time to cover his tracks. On the other hand, the mysterious Silver did all his business with Merkouros by mail, through a post-office box number, never letting slip his address. Why such reclusiveness?

In the evenings, Merkouros knew, Pompas dined out at a Colombian restaurant in the nineties that was decorated with shrunken human heads. He could find out that very night if the author was hiding anything. He would telephone first to be sure Pompas had left and then let himself in with a key he had once unobtrusively borrowed from Ida. If this didn’t pan out, he would then track down the temporarily invisible Silver.

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).