Danger and Delight Grow on One Stalk

This essay was published in 2000 on harlanellison.com.

Danger and Delight Grow on One Stalk:
The Day I Met Harlan Ellison

by Julia Duncan

Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to stay a writer. - Harlan Ellison

If you are never scared, embarrassed, or hurt, it means you never take chances. - Julia Soul

---

In January 1998, I applied to a writer's workshop called Odyssey--six summer weeks in the New Hampshire hills--no kids/house/job/car/money distractions, just writing science fiction and fantasy. And being critiqued by, among others, the authors James Morrow (Only Begotten Daughter) and John Crowley (Little, Big).
Friends and teachers had been urging me to try such a workshop for years, but I never considered it feasible. There were the kids/house/job/car/money issues to worry about, plus the genre stories I write lean toward the literary and experimental, while workshops of the Odyssey type are heavy on mechanics and producing popular fiction. I never would have applied to Odyssey had it not been for one man: Harlan Ellison.
Harlan Ellison is best known for his thousands of stories in the above-mentioned genres, and he's written a ton of good stuff in other genres. Most of his writing goes elegantly for your throat. He's won a bootful of prizes, the admiration, envy, and venom of his peers, and a reputation that's larger than larger than life. As a teacher, he is known--among those interested in such things--to be somewhat unrestrained. Quite a few years ago, for example, he took a student's manuscript outside and set it on fire.
A fellow applicant to Odyssey asked a mutual friend--bestselling science-fiction author and teacher Roger MacBride Allen--what he thought it would be like to study with Harlan. "Fine," he answered. "Unless Harlan decides he doesn't like you. That would be bad."
I had read Harlan's essay in which he admits to telling an elderly man, face to face in a roomful of people, that his fiction was "unredeemable amateurish bullshit" and would never ever get any better.
I knew the story about the man--now an extremely successful writer--who cold-called Harlan and asked why he couldn't sell his work. Harlan said, without having read a word of it, "Because it's crap."
So when I saw his name on the flyer for Odyssey, I knew I had to go.

---

A few months before, an editor had encouraged me to apply to grad school if that was what I wanted to do, and he cautioned me to study with someone whose writing I love. Tough advice: most of the authors I loved are dead or don't teach or are otherwise inaccessible (see kids/house/job/etc. issues above). But also sound advice, I thought: deep admiration for the work of the teacher(s) can only enhance the experience. I have made it a point to read at least one work by every writing teacher I've worked with, and I've found that it is not always true that the more or less I like a writer's work, the more or less value they offer me as a teacher. Still, sound advice if you plan on sinking a lump of cash and years of effort into a graduate degree program.
No easy solution existed for me, no obtainable revered guide. So I had been moaning and groaning to pals and editors at a convention, frustrated over the writing problem, when boom--Harlan Ellison, teaching for the first time in ten years, in godforsaken Manchester, New Hampshire, for a week in the middle of the six-week workshop.
I admired the hell out of Harlan's fiction. Some of his stories have stuck with me for going on thirty years. I also agreed with him on a lot of issues he has addressed in his caustic, uninhibited nonfiction--which implied that I would agree with his critiquing as well. That seemed to qualify him as someone I loved. My opportunity was at hand. The idea scared the shit out of me.
I also knew Harlan Ellison to be an honest man. I do not mean to promise that he will always tell you the truth. But he will always tell you exactly what he thinks and feels--that kind of an honest man. Even if it hurts you, even if it flays you, even if he loves you, he will tell you his flat-out, no-holds-barred, ugly-if-it-is truth.
I knew that if I went to New Hampshire and this brilliant and honest writer told me my work was crap, I would believe him. That scared me. And, again, I knew I had to know. I told my critiquing group that Harlan, at worst, would be the writing patch--as fellow student Steven Prete put it, Prose-zac. If Harlan could convince me I had no talent and should stop wasting time writing, I would have time to clean my house and play with my car. My friends and colleagues challenged me, and I admitted it was a joke. I'm a constitutional writer; that is, even if Harlan flushed my manuscripts down a toilet, I wouldn't be able to stop writing, to hell with the house and the car. My obligation would not die, just my hope--what little of that there was in my writing life at the time. Some days, if Prose-zac existed, I would have popped it like M&Ms.
Earlier in the day that I first saw the flyer for Odyssey, I sat in on a panel discussion nominally about the "courage to create." Two well-known authors and a prize-winning editor, three men whose work I respect, agreed that it takes less courage to create than it does to seek publication. An artist has to keep trying in the face of rejection, struggling to improve while bearing the pain involved. "Writing is a crucible," Dan Simmons said, "and you just have to go through it." Continuing to write and submit stories in the face of constant "no" is much harder than not doing it, and it takes nerve to stick it out. Creating is the easier part.
I wondered, later, how much hotter the crucible could get. Most of my frustration of the moment came from the seeming impossibility of seeing a novel in print. To have worked hard, to be convinced of at least some talent, to have--after producing half a million words of fiction--finally written a book I felt passionate about, without more than a glimmer of success, was bad enough. Did I really want to leave my family five hundred miles behind for six weeks just to be screamed at by a raving genius who, odds would seem to have it, would make confetti out of my stories? Did I have that much courage?
I writhed about for a time, twisting the question in my mind, but the truth is that I knew I had to go two seconds after I saw his name. "Once in a lifetime" ran through my head, followed by "be careful what you wish for."
"Once in a lifetime" won. I applied, got in, and rearranged the lives of my family to go encounter Harlan Ellison.

---

I had been having chest pain--it turned out to be acid reflux, and it had been developing for about ten weeks. I ignored it until it got pretty bad. I didn't think it was my heart, but it was getting worse by the day, after three weeks away from home, and hurt like hell. Nothing I did improved the situation at all, except for not eating very much. Intermittently, my chest burned at the slightest exertion--walking at a normal pace up a gentle slope or climbing a flight of stairs.
The day Harlan arrived, a walk from the dorm to the classroom about an hour after lunch had set off the pain, and for the first time, it did not subside with rest. I sat in the back of the room, on one of several upholstered chairs, and tried to breathe through the pain, a technique that had been working well. The coordinator of the program, editor/writer Jeanne Cavelos, was team proofreading galleys of her most recent book; I had come to help, but I couldn't even speak. After fifteen minutes or so, the burning finally eased and I sat still, worn out and afraid to move.
Unexpectedly early, Harlan walked in, and he did not disappoint. To an audience of half a dozen students and Jeanne, he played. He toured our classroom, reading out loud and arguing against or for the various writing quotes our teacher had placed around the walls. Harlan is physically a small man, at 5'4", but with the energy of a tribe of children. He can talk for hours; you'll laugh and cry and ask for more. He knows everything, and although he'll wander miles off a subject, he always returns to pick up the thread and weave the entire spellbinding tale. I sat, contented to observe this overheated legend in the flesh. When I laughed, my chest hurt.
He walked all the way around the room and ended up at the front where he'd entered. He said something to Jeanne about receiving and reading the advance bunch of stories we had sent him, then he looked at all the students in the room. "Who's Duncan?"
He pointed right at me. "Who are you?" he said. "Who are you?"
"I'm Duncan."
"I knew it," Harlan said. Harlan fuckin' Ellison, manuscript torcher, came stalking toward me. "I knew you were Duncan."
I thought perhaps he was going to bite me, but he took my head in his hands, kissed it, and said, "You are a writer."

---

The week wasn't all kisses. I learned important lessons about my writing, and about honesty, and about authenticity. Harlan yelled at me some, about stupid shit in my manuscripts, and we talked about subjects from Kafka and Norwegian goat cheese to football and heart surgery. Here's part of what I wrote shortly after the experience of watching Harlan critique: ". . . Harsh lessons, hurled epithets, repeated threats. Yelling. Tears. Pain. And a great deal of laughter and warmth and truth. My suspicions proved correct: The man does not enjoy ripping into people's work when he knows it hurts. He honors his own beliefs, and he does so for the writing, for what matters, for art. He teaches as he creates, and as he lives, honestly, unblinkingly, and passionately. He risks all."
I fell a little in love with Harlan, and with his wife, Susan, too, because they were so concerned about me when I was so far away from home and afraid. After they fussed at me, I had an EKG--all was well--and received a prescription for an anti-reflux drug, but the doctor didn't really take me seriously. My own tolerance for pain worked against me--I wasn't even warned that the pills would take several days to be effective.
Two days later, the pain knocked me over, someone thought I was having a heart attack, and I ended up in an ambulance. The paramedics treated me as though I was a cardiac patient, but by the time we arrived at the hospital, the pain was gone and the doctor treated me like an idiot. The first thing she said to me was, "I think there's been some sort of misunderstanding." I later discovered this is not uncommon with acid reflux; symptoms often recede with oxygen and nitro, and frequent among prescriptions are mind-body techniques such as yoga.
"Learn to relax," the doctor wrote on my discharge slip. I told my classmates later that if I fell down the stairs and broke my femur, they were to drive me to a Boston hospital.

---

I still have no idea whether the reflux was coincidental with the anxiety or a side effect. I had been meditating regularly. I hate to fly, but I had flown to New Hampshire without a twinge in my chest. The pain did not diminish after John Crowley and Jim Morrow and Harlan told me I could write, but only after the correct medication was finally prescribed, weeks later.
I'm still dealing with the chest pain--and still writing without the slightest sign of commercial success--but I have a certain measure of acceptance these days. Whatever else happened in the crucible of Odyssey, I made a friend, an honest, intelligent, articulate man who said to me, "You have talent and need only fortitude."
A charmer who propositioned me across a crowded lunch table in front of his wife. "Hey, Duncan, you fool around?"
A legend who managed, without even trying, to sweep me along in his tide of myth.
Several weeks following my encounter with Harlan, a stranger at the World Science Fiction convention in Baltimore asked me if it was true that Harlan gave an Odyssey student a heart attack. I was distressed until I realized that people love these stories about him.

The entire experience proved worth the pain in a single moment, when Harlan said this about me: "Even when she writes badly, she writes well." I want to get good enough, and brave enough, to stick that on a book jacket some day.

© 2000 JULIA DUNCAN

Stealing Little Girls

This story was sold in 2001 and appeared in the vampire mag "Dreams of Decadence" #19, which was published as part of the nonfiction industry magazine "Chronicle" #267 in September 2006, under the title "Steeling Ligtle Girls." I am not making this up. Not only was I never paid the promised fee for this story, I would not even know it was published were it not for a friend of mine telling me in 2007. In fact, I wouldn't own a copy if said friend hadn't given me his copy of the issue that he'd been given at a convention. (Thank you, Todd!) Editor Lapine claims all this is just business and that probably more people read it in "Chronicle" than would have in "Dreams." As far as I can tell, though, the only thing I got out of this other than public humiliation was being published alongside Shariann Lewitt, because no one ever read the story with the weird title. (Except Todd.)

STEALING LITTLE GIRLS by JULIA DUNCAN

The bucket's tires hummed against the rustic road, the engine labored to get us home.

Loud backbeat kept me awake, holding the needle at fifty-five, keeping us alive-live. Alabama, bama, bam, get me out of Alabama, get me home from Alabam, bama, bama, bam bam.

My head was zonked, it hadda be, a week on the road and couldn't shake my trace. Needed speed, all gone, and still at least a night, sunset to dawn, between us and a safe strike at home. I couldn't even pray no more. I made the girl sit in back so I could keep the gun beside me, under my hand. For all the good.

An hour till night and four to home . . . you've heard the saying on a wing and a prayer? We were down to the wing.

Floor it, floor it, floor it. No, we'll never make it, never shake it, one mistake, one cop stop, we're done. Dustbucket breaks down. Detour. He'll catch us on the road, swoop, we'll die. I'll die. She . . . she . . . pretty little thing . . . worse than die. Live.

God. Another night. I checked the map, took the next exit with a hotel, and lucky me, there was a chicken joint too. Drove through, ordered an entire bird, rolls and coffee, four assorted super-size sodas. The teen in the window, long greasy hair pulled back, wrinkled her nose; maybe garlic wafted from the car, I didn't know, didn't care. Bucket coulda used gas but it would have to wait--my head throbbing already with drums and faded meth, didn't need the fumes too, gotta stay alive-live. Goddamn sun still a fist above the scrub palms, way up, but teasing the dusk is a mistake I'll never make again. Sunset has teeth, dusk has reach.

I got a room, first floor in back, led her inside. No will, lost it already, Goddamnit, compliant and mute. I sat her on the bed, turned on the TV, gave her a soda, carried in all my shit, did the barrier work, laid the oil and the water, put the crosses and the garlic and the pistols around the room. The Gideon open on the dresser--just for luck, to tell the truth, 'cause I was still a little pissed at God.

She would sit for hours, this one, watch anything without the sound. I paid no mind. She sucked the straw and stared. Vacant. Gone already. I checked the door, the window, washed my face, combed my hair wet, changed my shirt, cut up the chicken, gave her a breast. Meat on the bone was one of the few things she'd eat--tidy little bites, methodical, uninhabited. I gave her another soda and sat to drink my coffee. I watched her rip and tear and chew and swallow.

She was six or seven, older than the ones before, and when I took her blood, it was fine, but she herself barely yielded. Ate only flesh and things with lots of sugar, acted like bread was excrement. Her face rigid. I kept a diaper on her in the car, 'cause in the motel she'd get up and use the toilet but in the car, without a word, she'd just piss all over the seat. She never spoke, except for just one word, one single word in all those days on the run.

Blood.

My fault. In my kit was Little Red Riding Hood, an unspectacular choice in hindsight, but she glommed onto that book as if it was the tale of her own salvation from the belly of the beast. Every night, in another ugly motel room, after eating flesh and sugar, and after being given a bath and letting me brush her odd little teeth, she pushed the book at me until I read. If I didn't read word for word exactly, she would slap the page. Just smack it. No expression, no language, just slap. And then, near the end, every time since the first time I read the book, she pointed to a spot of red in the picture, and she said her single word. "Blood."

Sent shivers through me the first time, and after that I called her Red. Had she stopped saying, "Blood," I might have slapped the page myself.

I cleaned up, we bathed. Each night, a little more water before she shook like a wire in a high wind, as if thundered by terror I would drown her. Tonight, she lifted her hands to help me rub in the shampoo. Her thumbs red and raw from constant sucking, they must have hurt, but she sweated it out. My heart raced, toiling like the dustbucket's engine, and I thought it was marvelous how perfect her bony little arms and legs were, how large her damn summer-sky blue eyes, look at her try, try, come back, little girl, come back. That's why I took you, to bring you home.

"Blood."

The woodsman saved Granny again in the end, and I tucked Red into bed. Sticking the book back into the kit, I saw Rudolph with his nose in there, and I remembered the drugstore, buying supplies, tried to count back. The days blurred, fog was rolling in, after dark and I couldn't remember, couldn't think, twenty hours of sleep in seven days, and he's still out there, tracing, racing, God, I'm so so tired.

What day, what night, what fearsome bite? I grabbed the remote stick, brought up the blue TV screen: December 23. Shit. Too long on the road. Couldn't shake the trace. Night. Tonight.

I'm dead. She'll live.

I climbed into the bed, sat next to Red. She had let me do that a couple times, even let me doze on the bed without kicking me in her sleep. So I snuggled close to read Rudolph. Before I opened it, her bony hand shot to the cover. A finger stroked Rudolph's red nose, stroked it again and again and again and again. I froze, except for my slamming heart. Silence. Her hand withdrew. I opened the book.

When I read the final page, the happy ending, the room around us all fuzzy and muted, warmly lit yet cozily dim, dark green walls and drapes fertile and protective, worn wheat carpet and blankets warm and rich. I let my eyes half close, stroked her soft rigid arm. She pointed at a red spot on the Christmas tree in the book's final scene and said, "Tree."

Tree. I hugged her, read the book again, and watched her sleep before the end.

I took the last of the No-Doz and showered. The cold water made me want to scream, and the last watery soda made my stomach hurt. I ran in place to move my blood, cranked the air conditioner, stripped to panties and T-shirt. Red never stirred. All was quiet in the night.

I stuck her finger and squeezed out the drops of blood I needed; she slept. I wrote the coded numbers in the book--levels of the foreign protein had dropped again. I counted twelve days. Three longer than the most ever, so much longer than the week I'd been calling it in my head. God, why? Did he want her more, because she was older, so far gone? Maybe Red was lost. Lost, and me too, 'cause if he found us tonight, would I dare then run straight home? Draw him home? Yet could I, would I, last through night thirteen? No. Lost.

I rinsed the blood away, sat at the table, and wanted to pray. Wanted to, but asked instead. Asked and already knew there would be no answer. I played a game of remembering psalms for a while, and then I made a Christmas tree.

In my kit, I had yarn and colored paper and scissors, stuff to stimulate, draw attention, but mostly useless this shot with Red and her stone face and empty eyes. But I outlined a tree on the green drapes with yarn, cut loops and circles of paper, pinned them up with pins from my sewing kit, until it looked approximately like a sad and shabby but decorated green curtain. Too tired, I didn't care.

Trying to make a five-pointed star from golden origami paper and my hands didn't want to work, and I saw it was almost 4:00 without a hint of whispers and murmurs from the dark.

He was late and hope throbbed in my chest hard enough to hurt, like my shrunken heart was trying to stretch itself to normal size. I pinned up the crooked star and paced, watching Red sleep, hoping with every dragging step that the bloodsucker had lost our trail and we could go home, home, to help, hope, home.

The girl slept, frail, vulnerable, her mind open in sleep to the tracer, to his mind's influence, to his pressure from outside the wall. If he came, she was his, and I, her guardian, her hope, had to stay awake, I had to make it. If God wasn't going to intervene, then it was just me, just Marah, alone, out on the road, on the run, on my own. Me and the big bad wolf. The bloodsucker. Tracer.

I took her from under his nose, I kept her safe, all this time, twelve days, and his fury grew, out there, on our trail, across the south. I could feel it. He wanted Red, he wanted to consume me.

He'd murmured outside every motel room door for twelve nights, needing to be invited in. I'll rape you and I'll eat your heart, he whispered, and I guarded the door from Red's attempts to open it. I stood between them. Me, Marah, so tired, and for some reason I could no longer remember why I refused to pray. I knelt to ask, one more time, to ask--stupid, stupid--why, yes, why. I knelt to pray. Red's keening woke me.

No more than moments could have passed, the night still thick, but she stood at the door, the knob in her hand, crying. Groggy, thick, I tried to think, make sense of what I saw. I heard the fluid whisper. Eat your heart. I moved, I tried to jump but only turned toward the door as if stuck in the glutinous atmosphere that can catch and hold your dream-body when you try to run away in a nightmare. I moved, but as if through pudding.

"No," I said, a strangled sound, and Red turned her hand. "No." I pivoted toward the dresser, reaching for the pistol and crucifix there. Red opened the door, and the tracer leapt inside.

I never had a chance.

On me in a breath, my torso caught in his arms, with inhuman strength, he bore me to the bed. Tossed me, vaulted upon me, heavier than flesh. Heavier than stone. Red keened, a sound too thin to attract notice in the dead of night. The tracer pinned my arms, ground his pelvis into mine, and I thought my bones would shatter beneath him. He grinned, too wide, his flesh of stone too pliant. Eyes on fire. Breath of fetid rot. I gagged. Teeth. Showing me his teeth.

Red's keening fell silent.

The vampire grinned into my face and opened his mouth wider. He screamed in my face, a roar to wake the dead, and the blast of rot and burning flesh brought tears to my eyes, scum bubbling into my throat.

The beast rolled off, arms flailing, one smacking my head and setting it ringing. He thumped to the floor between the beds, and I moved, sucked air, got to my knees. Saw Red on the floor too, down there with him, between the beds, caught, trapped, and keening again in little gasps, fragments of cries.

I gasped, swallowed my urge to heave at the scorched meat odor, and I leaped, bounced off the other bed, slammed sideways into the table, and knocked it out of the way. I scrabbled and grabbed for the big gun, the one I liked to keep under my hand in the car.

The beast roared as I spun, and he sprang up, almost flying toward me, blotting out the warm light. Half a second, I pumped the gun, aimed and caught him in the head. He lunged across the bed at me, and I shot and shot and shot.

He collapsed, slumped, dissolving. I emptied the soaker at his head, and the holy water turned his flesh into greasy, running candle wax, gray and brown and gritty, smoking. It made no sound. His thrashing limbs fell still. Wisps of smudge rose from the soup of his head.

The room smelled like burning waste, smoldering garbage, endless rot. My throat spasmed. I gagged and coughed. I found Red still between the beds. God, she was so small and thin, so wasted, a wisp, a child, a little girl, stolen from vampires.

The crucifix she had used to burn the tracer's flesh of stone lay in her pure little hand. "Tree," she said.

I went to pull her out.

"Christmas tree," she said, pointing at my stupid curtain, and she put one bony arm around my neck and squeezed.

I said, "That's right," and we stole away, riding home through the night on a wing and a prayer.

© 2001 JULIA DUNCAN

Ghost in a Glass House

This story was published in the lit annual Gargoyle in 1998 and garnered an honorable mention in that year's The Best of the Rest, an anthology of SF/F/H genre stories published in nongenre outlets.

GHOST IN A GLASS HOUSE by JULIA DUNCAN

I met Simon at Under the Bridge, at a commitment party for Soho and Lisa. Commitment as in lesbian marriage, not mental hospital, though their friends thought the latter more appropriate. Soho was crazy, and Lisa was crazy for marrying her. Most of us were not what you would call completely sane, but that never stopped us from throwing stones.

I sat at the bar, doing a leather-cool, half-lidded stare over beer after beer, thinking about killing myself, talking about Denny whenever one of my friends would sit next to me for more than a minute. Two weeks since she'd dropped her bombshell and left town, enough time for my friends to move on. Barely enough time for me to grasp that there'd been an explosion.

"Two years," I complained to Gem, one of the bartenders. "She was with me for two years. And she told me two hours before their train left."

Gem had heard it before. He fixed me with his big blue eyes and said, "Well, Rena, what do you want?"

"I want her back."

"Honey," he said, "that's not love. Letting her go is love."

I hated Gem. I hated the truth, which was that I would have done anything to get Denny back. "You just want me to keep drinking," I accused him. Despite my tough wardrobe, I was a big tipper when I got drunk, which was a lot lately.

I was drunk when I met Simon. Not quite falling-off-the-barstool stage but on that road. I noticed this man in the crowd, with gray hair and a trim gray beard, green eyes, and old-fashioned clothes, a dark gray suit that looked as if it came from the vintage store on Grace Street. Turns out it did. Simon has a taste for the old--if it lasts, he says, it was made to last. That kind of quality means something to him. Most of what he owns comes from estate sales and vintage stores.

Simon looked so out of place, he fit in. Amused with that thought, and ready to seize any excuse, however slim, I turned around and raised my hand to signal Gem for another beer. "Who's that guy?" I asked when he finally got to me with a bottle. I tossed him a five. "The old guy."

"He's not old; that's Professor Dorcy. Philosopher. Everybody knows him."

I didn't, but Gem knew I dropped out of college in my sophomore year, worked night-shift in a darkroom, didn't know a lot of people called "Professor." Sweetheart, Gem was. I waved him back my change. "What's he doing here?"

"One of Soho's stable of writers," Gem said. "He wrote that piece last month about art and death. Fantastic mind." Didn't thank me for the tip, as usual.

I nursed this beer hunched against the bar, shoulders stiff to protect my little world. Didn't work. I had barely finished off the bottle when a new one arrived, escorted by a clear drink over ice in a cocktail glass, and met by a hand offering bills before I could reach into my pocket.

Turning my head, I was careful to remain stable, anchored against the bar with my arms. It was Professor Dorcy, standing next to me in the space where someone had borrowed a stool. "I'm Simon," he said, not offering to shake hands. "Nice to meet you."

"Rena," I said. "Thanks for the beer, but I'm queer."

"Drink it anyway," he said. "I'm not asking you out on a date."

"Good," I said, or something equally brilliant.

He didn't leave. "Is Rena from Irene?" he asked me.

"Sure is," I answered, drinking.

"Irene means peace; do you know that? It does not suit you," he said, casually. "I would think something like Ireta--angry one. You are very young to look so angry."

I looked down at my bottle of beer, realizing I would look ridiculous trying to toss it on him. He had one hand wrapped around his own drink, protecting it. I shrugged my tense shoulders and told him, "I'm twenty-one."

"How long have you been thinking about killing yourself?"

I turned my head toward him again, still careful to move slowly. "How the hell do you know that?" I asked, thinking one of my stupid friends must have . . . but who had I told? I racked my brain. Must have been drunk. Don't remember saying it to anyone.

"Hobby of mine," he answered, just as smooth as before. "So I am correct. How long?"

I considered that. Simon had an older man sexiness, a trim body, every hair in place, clothes bespeaking exquisite taste even if they were straight out of the fifties, a clean cologne smell. His accent was Boston, I thought. Money, I thought. Reminded me strongly of my parents' country club set. He should have been on the board of the university, not teaching there.

"Since I discovered death existed," I answered him, pulling the collar of my shirt aside and turning slightly so that he could see the small black skull and the word Hellbound tattooed on my chest.

He didn't even flinch. "How are you thinking of doing it?"

I stared at him. His eyes were a strange sea-green, with a hint of gold in the bright fluorescent light from over the bar. I thought it was an amazingly stupid conversation to be having with a stranger, so I gestured with one hand, thumb up, toward the bridge.

He nodded slightly. "A classic," he said and drained his drink. "From this bridge, you'll probably die or pass out when you hit the water. If not, drowning is said to be an easy way to go. Not much of a mess either, at least until your body washes ashore."

"Jesus Christ, what are you drinking?" I asked, shaking my head. That was a mistake, but his comments were so bizarre. What kind of twisted philosophy professor was this guy? I wondered.

"Hoover Dam," he said.

"No, I probably couldn't get up there to jump off."

He smiled, raising his glass. "Water on the rocks."

"Oh."

"Mind if I ask you why now?"

I was still looking right at him. Even through the beer haze, I knew what he meant. "Just found out," I told him, "I'm not a very nice person."

"Weak," he said. "If that were a good reason, the river would be clogged with corpses."

I turned back to my beer, carefully raised it, and took a swallow.

"Must be love," he said. "What did you think of the ceremony?"

Ten minutes into the bonding ceremony earlier that evening, I had decided killing myself was the only thing left to do.

"I think Soho is certifiable, and she's going to make Lisa even more miserable now. What do you think?"

He chuckled low. "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," he said.

"People who drive in glass cars shouldn't have bones," I replied.

He laughed, this time a dry and humorless sound.

I said, "Lisa will never be careful enough to avoid getting hurt."

"Love must be a glass car."

"Is love a good reason?" I asked.

"Rarely."

"Are you some kind of expert?"

"I've considered the topic." When I did not respond, he asked, "May I buy you a cup of coffee, Rena?"

#

We made an odd couple at the bright diner up the street, but not one worth a second glance from a staff used to all kinds. Seat the distinguished gentleman and his crewcut, tattooed, leather butch escort in a booth toward the back, OK?

Simon didn't tell me shit about suicide or what would be a good reason. He bought me coffee and a bran muffin and he listened so hard I had to talk, as if his listening was a vacuum cleaner pulling the dust out of my mind.

I must have told him everything. How I came out and my entire family disowned me, down to great-aunt Ethel, who wasn't sure what lesbianism meant but was fairly sure it had something to do with communism. How I haven't spoken to any of them in four years. How my lover before Denny left me for a guy and was married and pregnant within two months. How my best friend, River, died of AIDS. How I dropped out of school because of soaring debt and my full-time job hadn't slowed the soar one bit, and wouldn't as long as I kept tipping bartenders like a maniac. How the love of my life professed undying love continually while she had her fingers in another pie so deep that they had already rented an apartment together in a different city, and how the stupidest thing of all, the thing I just could not stand much longer, was the overwhelming need to have Denny back, not to see her happy, but to have her. In my bed, in my arms, mine alone. My possession.

How it made me loathe myself.

When I was done, Simon didn't speak. He looked at me for a long, long time without opening his mouth, until finally I said, "So aren't you going to try to talk me out of it?"

"No," he said.

"Why not?"

He sighed and picked up his coffee cup. "Most of the people I talk to change their minds while they are telling me about themselves. They decide that they want to live, glass houses and all. They find sympathy for themselves."

"Not me," I said.

"Yes, I sense that about you. I think that you are mentally ill."

He said it in all seriousness, as if it needed saying--was it not obvious from the topic we had been discussing since he walked up to me at the bar that I was mentally ill?

I played along, toying with one of my skull earrings. "Really? Why is that?" I asked.

"Because you don't value your life."

I answered him, "What value? How do I know that, if I don't jump off the bridge tonight, I won't get hit by a bus tomorrow? Or that I won't get drunk some night, get in my car, and kill someone? Here it is after all, ho-hum, the your-whole-life-ahead-of-you bit."

"Hm? No. Quite the contrary, I'll walk you to the bridge if you're serious."

He was, to judge by his cold eyes, quite serious. It took me a minute. I sipped coffee. I ran through my possibles, my limits, my sore spots. I even thought about those few seconds of flight, and then . . . pain over. Done. Oblivion.

"You're on," I said.

Rain drizzled down steadily, but we walked slowly to the bridge. For once I was free from caring how wet my carefully preserved leather jacket was getting. Simon didn't seem to even notice the rain.

We didn't speak until we got halfway across on the walkway, on the east span. I looked down at the water for a minute. It looked dark and cold and disturbed in the rain. The cars going over the bridge made a sound like ghosts in a tunnel. I shrugged out of my jacket and handed it to Simon. He took it. Then I thought it might be nice to wear it down, and if I didn't die when I hit the water, my old companion would help me sink to the depths. But I couldn't bring myself to reach for it back.

"Denny," I said to him. "Denise Applewaithe. In Norfolk. Call her?"

He didn't nod, but I figured he would do it. I turned and climbed the railing, crawled across the beams, threw my legs over the other side, and twisted to catch the edge with my feet. It was easy to hang on there, and I did for a moment, watching Simon's eyes darkly assessing me. I let go, bending my knees and shoving myself away.

I fell backward, with the rain, out of the sky, and though I couldn't see it, I sensed the river waiting to embrace me and carry me away. With a great sense of relief, I watched Simon and the bridge recede against the flat, dark gray sky. I surrendered to the coming embrace.

I spun and twisted, my head reeled, I couldn't breathe, I was blind. There was no pain, only confusion and heat.

I heard squealing brakes, shouting, footsteps on metal decking, ghosts in a tunnel. I felt drops of water hitting my head.

Simon held me.

For an instant, against my cheek, I felt skin and muscle slide, hard and slick, pulsing with heat, and my mind was filled with the color of blood and the smell of oily yellow smoke.

Then I heard Simon speaking, the sounds of his words humming meaninglessly from his chest into the bones of my face crushed against his white cotton shirt. I smelled wet wool and wet leather and the undertone of rot from the river far below. My mind went blank in shock.

Simon took me home.

#

He gave me towels in a sumptuous half bathroom right off the foyer of his house, disappeared, and brought back a soft robe. He left me alone to change--my reflection in the mirror looked strange with this regal dark blue robe and all the rings and skulls and things in my ears--then he returned to escort me into a living room full of antique furniture and Persian rugs. He sat me down in front of a gas fireplace; I accepted brandy only because he placed it into my hands.

"Are you sorry you're not dead?" he asked very quietly, as though asking if my drink was acceptable.

I nodded.

He paced slowly around the room with his own small snifter of brandy. "May I ask you a few questions?"

I nodded again.

"Were your parents wealthy?"

I was confused. I nodded anyway.

"Can you tell Mozart from Bach?"

I nodded again.

"Do you know what carpe diem means?"

"Of course. Seize the day." At last my mind began to move again. "What are you?" I asked. "How did you . . . do what you did?"

He had stopped pacing and stood with his back to me for a moment. In front of him was a stand displaying a doll in a glass case; he may have been looking at it. I could see that it was in ornate ethnic Chinese costume. The case had carved black trim and a tassel of bright red serving as a doorpull.

Finally, Simon turned around. I found the strength to look at him; he had not grown horns or begun to breathe fire. He looked relaxed, though slightly eager, and he gestured vaguely with his snifter. "Don't you think why is a more important question?" he asked.

"What do you want from me?"

He smiled at me, for the first time a genuine smile, full of pleasure. His sea-green eyes glimmered in the false-fire light, green and black like the bottom of the river. "I want your life," he said.

I blinked. "What?"

He answered slowly and steadily. "Your life. What you threw into that river tonight. Say your life was that vase over there." He pointed to a beautiful vase enameled with red roses. "You throw it over the edge. I catch it. You owned it--you had the right and the power to destroy it. But now I have it in my hands, intact. Who owns the power to destroy it now?"

"Are you saying that you want to kill me?"

"Not right away."

Chills ran through me, deep into my gut, up the back of my scalp. Warmth followed. No fear, just that odd liquid excitement that happens half an instant before orgasm.

"You could be dead right now, free from pain," Simon said. "I'm offering you what you want, just in a different mode."

I looked around, reflex, checking for weapons. Death I did not fear, but more pain wasn't on my agenda. There was plenty of material at hand, from lamps to just-for-show fireplace tools. "What do you mean?" I asked.

He did not answer right away. Instead, he refreshed his drink, collected a cigarette from a box near the bar, and chose a chair. He lit the cigarette with a gold lighter from his pocket and savored the first puff. Then, looking into the fireplace, he elaborated.

"I offer what you want: freedom from pain. In exchange I wish to own the rest of your life. Your body and your mind, all that you are now, living, but as if you were that vase."

"Without pain."

"Without pain," he said, as serious as he had been when he offered to walk me to the bridge. "An example. Think of your Denise."

I had to think of her as soon as he mentioned her name. And it was as if I was thinking of someone I didn't even know. I stared at Simon.

"Trade to me what you are willing to throw away--trade it for the loss of your pain. If I'm lying, you can always go leap off that bridge."

I finished the brandy sip by sip, also watching the fire. Twenty minutes went by according to the clock on the wall before I said, "And if not?"

"The bargain will hold," he answered without hesitation, softly, like a caress. "I will own your life."

"Not my soul?"

"Souls bore me," he answered, his eyes afire. "I desire other things."

"What are you?" I whispered.

"If I can give you what you want," he answered, "does it matter what I am?"

I let go for the second time that night. This time, I got what I wanted.

#

I never even went back to my apartment for my stuff. My landlord kept it for a while, then he gave it all away.

Word went around. Friends came to see me. Campus gossip said Professor Dorcy had acquired a sex slave, that he had hypnotized me somehow and was holding me prisoner. My friends checked my arms for needle marks and my back for whip scars, and when there weren't any, they tried for an hour to pry something out of me or to get me to leave. Muir couldn't keep his eyes off Simon's things.

"This doll is exquisite," he said. "Look at her eyes." He made Sandy look at the doll's ink-black eyes.

Sandy said, "She looks like she's afraid of something."

"Where did he get all this stuff on a teacher's pay?" Muir muttered. "What a collection."

Sandy stared at my hair, growing out, and my ears, full of empty holes, and she couldn't help herself. "He can't be that fucking good," she told me. "Rena, you've sold your soul."

I told them I had lost my bones. They went away muttering, "Certifiable."

What could I have told them? That a ghost in a glass house feels no pain?

I saw Denny one night, downtown. We had eaten dinner at one of those gorgeous new restaurants opening up in the old warehouse district, and we were walking into a nearby hotel when Denny got out of a cab right in front of us. She looked just like always, slim legs in tight jeans, black car coat, red hair bright and teased, strong hands. I stopped and looked at her, interested. She glanced my way for a brief second, as people do on the street; I hadn't thought she would recognize me. My hair was curled; my dress was low cut; my heels were so high, I leaned on Simon's arm as we walked. The diamonds dangling from my ears were worth more than I made in a year when I lived with Denny.

Then her head whipped around, and she stared. Her face went dead pale and her mouth came open in a little "What?" motion. But she said nothing, and I felt nothing as we went on our way inside.

Simon did not lie. A property of his mind, I am like a vase, like a gas fireplace, pretty and warm but untouched by the flame. Another possession, his to enjoy, his to destroy. He did not lie. Sometimes I beg him to hurt me, but I never feel any pain. When he kills me, I will thank him; I died some time ago and am no longer throwing stones.

© 1998 JULIA DUNCAN