Old stuff.
He decided that things couldn’t go on this way. Unless he came up with an original idea pretty soon, he might just as well shuffle off this mortal coil.
He thought about buying some rat poison and mixing himself an arsenic cocktail.
More old stuff.
Or climbing a utility pole and grabbing hold of a high-tension wire.
Prosaic. Corny.
Or hiring a private plane to fly him over the New Jersey swamps and then jumping out at two thousand feet.
Ho-hum.
Damn! He couldn’t seem to go on, he couldn’t seem not to go on. So what was he going to do?
He thought about driving over to Pennsylvania, planting certain carefully faked documents inside Grace’s mother’s house, and turning the old bat in to the F.B.I. as a foreign spy.
Commonplace.
On Friday morning he took his cigarettes (the second of the five packs a day he was now consuming) and his latest hangover down to the train station. There he boarded the express for Manhattan and took a seat in the club car.
He thought about hijacking the train and extorting $20,000,000 from the state of New York.
Imitative.
When the train arrived in Manhattan he trudged the six blocks to his agent’s office. In the elevator on the way up an attractive young blonde gave him a friendly smile and said it was a nice day, wasn’t it?
Hackman thought about making her his mistress, having a torrid affair, and then running off to Acapulco with her and living in sin in a villa high above the harbor and weaving Mexican serapes by day and drinking tequila by night.
Hackneyed.
The first thing his agent said to him was, “Where’s the manuscript, Charlie?” Hackman said it wasn’t ready yet, he was having a few personal problems. The agent said, “You think you got problems? What about my problems? You think I can afford to have hack writers missing deadlines and making editors unhappy? That kind of stuff reflects back on me, ruins my reputation. I’m not in this business for my health, so maybe you’d better just find yourself another agent.”
Hackman thought about bashing him over the head with a paperweight, disposing of the body, and assuming his identity after first gaining sixty pounds and going through extensive plastic surgery.
Moth-eaten. Threadbare.
Out on the street again, he decided he needed a drink and turned into the first bar he came to. He ordered a triple vodka and sat brooding over it. I’ve come to the end of my rope, he thought. If there’s one original idea in this world, I can’t even imagine what it is. For that matter, I can’t even imagine a partly original idea, which I’d settle for right now because maybe there isn’t anything completely original any more.
“What am I going to do?” he asked the bartender.
“Who cares?” the bartender said. “Stay, go, drink, don’t drink — it’s all the same to me.”
Hackman sighed and got off his stool and swayed out onto East 52nd Street. He turned west and began to walk back toward Grand Central, jostling his way through the mid-afternoon crowds. Overhead, the sun glared down at him between the buildings like a malevolent eye.
He was nearing Madison Avenue, muttering clichés to himself, when the idea struck him.
It came out of nowhere, full-born in an instant, the way most great ideas (or so he had heard) always do. He came to an abrupt standstill. Then he began to smile. Then he began to laugh. Passersby gave him odd looks and detoured around him, but Hackman didn’t care. The idea was all that mattered.
It was inspired.
It was imaginative.
It was meaningful.
It was original.
Oh, not one-hundred percent original — but that was all right. He had already decided that finding total originality was an impossible goal. This idea was close, though. It was close and it was wonderful and he was going to do it. Of course he was going to do it; after all these weeks of search and frustration, how could he not do it?
Hackman set out walking again. His stride was almost jaunty and he was whistling to himself. Two blocks south he entered a sporting goods store and found what he wanted. The salesman who waited on him asked if he was going camping. “Nope,” Hackman said, and winked. “Something much more original than that.”
He left the store and hurried down to Madison to a bookshop that specialized in mass-market paperbacks. Inside were several long rows of shelving, each shelf containing different categories of fiction and nonfiction, alphabetically arranged. Hackman stepped into the fiction section, stopped in front of the shelf marked “Historical Romances,” and squinted at the titles until he located one of his own pseudonymous works. Then he unwrapped his parcel.
And took out the woodsman’s hatchet.
And got a comfortable grip on its handle.
And raised it high over his head.
And—
Whack! Eleven copies of Love Tender Fury by Allison St. Cyr were drawn and quartered.
A male customer yelped; a female customer shrieked. Hackman took no notice. He moved on to the shelf marked “Occult Pirate Adventure,” raised the hatchet again, and—
Whack! Nine copies of The Devil Daughter of Jean Lafitte by Adam Caine were exorcised and scuttled.
On to “Adult Westerns.” And—
Whack! Four copies of Lust Rides the Outlaw Trail by Galen McGee bit the dust.
Behind the front counter a chubby little man was jumping up and down, waving his arms. “What are you doing?” he kept shouting at Hackman. “What are you doing?”
“Hackwork!” Hackman shouted back. “I’m a hack writer doing hackwork!”
He stepped smartly to “Gothic Suspense.” And—
Whack! Five copies of Mansion of Dread by Melissa Ann Farnsworth were reduced to rubble.
On to “Male Action Series,” and—
Whack! Ten copies of Max Ruffe’s The Grenade Launcher #23: Blowup at City Hall exploded into fragments.
Hackman paused to survey the carnage. Then he nodded in satisfaction and turned toward the front door. The bookshop was empty now, but the chubby little man was visible on the sidewalk outside, jumping up and down and semaphoring his arms amid a gathering crowd. Hackman crossed to the door in purposeful strides and threw it open.
People scattered every which way when they saw him come out with the hatchet aloft. But they needn’t have feared; he had no interest in people, except as bit players in this little drama. After all, what hack worth the name ever cared a hoot about his audience?
He began to run up 48th Street toward Fifth Avenue, brandishing the hatchet. Nobody tried to stop him, not even when he lopped off the umbrella shading a frankfurter vendor’s cart.
“I’m a hack!” he shouted.
And shattered the display window of an exclusive boutique.
“I’m Hackman the hack!” he yelled.
And halved the product and profits of a pretzel vendor.
“I’m Hackman the hack and I’m hacking my way to glory!” he bellowed.
And sliced the antenna off an illegally parked Cadillac limousine.
He was almost to Fifth Avenue by this time. Ahead of him he could see a red signal light holding up crosstown traffic; this block of 48th Street was momentarily empty. Behind him he could hear angry shouts and what sounded like a police whistle. He looked back over his shoulder. Several people were giving pursuit, including the chubby little man from the bookshop; the leader of the pack, a blue uniform with a red face atop it, was less than fifty yards distant.
But the game was not up yet, Hackman thought. There were more bookstores along Fifth; with any luck he could hack his way through two or three before they got him. He decided south was the direction he wanted to go, pulled his head around, and started to sprint across the empty expanse of 48th.