Thinking about dead wives, while McNihil stood in the middle of this heavily past-filled space, took his good mood down a few degrees. Guilt had a way of doing that. Turbiner had loved his wife (And didn’t I love mine? thought McNihil glumly), enough to scrape close to the bone a couple of his savings and investment accounts, all to pay off whatever debts she’d had when she died. Thus buying her a quiet grave, free from the reanimating forays of the bill collectors.
Aufersteh’n, my ass-right now, lyrics about the desirability of resurrection weren’t striking McNihil the right way. His wife, when she had died… he hadn’t done as well by her as old Turbiner had. Though he’d meant to, and there was still a chance; it still might happen. Guilt could be bought off. All it took was enough money. More money now than before; he hadn’t been keeping up with even the interest payments on his wife’s debts. The numbers kept ticking upward, compounding like hammer blows, one after another. It would take a lot to pay it all off now, to set his dead wife sleeping in the ground along with the late Mrs. Turbiner, dreaming the endless, empty dreams of the really and truly dead. And I’m good as retired now, thought McNihil. To come up with that kind of money, he’d have to find some way of going back full-time with the Collection Agency, plus hustle up every kind of on-the-side gig he could manage. Instead of doing little favors for old writers that nobody read anymore.
“I’ll make some coffee.” Turbiner was already in the flat’s kitchen area, on the other side of the counter, rinsing a glass pot out at the sink. “That okay by you?”
“Sure.” Horizontal slices of sunlight fell across McNihil’s face, from the barely opened blinds at one side of the flat. “I wasn’t planning on hanging around very long.” He held up the package. “Like I said on the phone, I just wanted to drop something off for you.”
“Yeah, so I see.” Turbiner fiddled with the coffeemaker’s pieces, rinsing them off and putting them back together, watching his hands at work rather than glancing back at McNihil. “It’s amazing, the kinds of things people walk around on the streets with, these days.” The old man turned a thin smile toward his visitor. “What a world we live in.”
McNihil sat on the couch, moving aside a stack of papers and cascading books to make room for himself. He started taking apart the package’s wrappings, figuring that it would take Turbiner a while to get around to it. That was one of the ways you could tell when somebody was really old. Or older than me, thought McNihil. They all acted as if they had forever to do things, rather than a rapidly diminishing remainder of time. He wondered if it was just wishful thinking on Turbiner’s part.
“So what is it you got there?” Gurgling and hissing noises came from the kitchen area; Turbiner had come back around to the flat’s larger open space. “Anything cool?”
The old man knew what was inside the package; it wasn’t a secret. Turbiner himself had been the one to tell McNihil about what was going on in the Gloss a little farther to the north, about the kid ripping off his old copyrights, selling them to the collectors’ market that still existed for that sort of thing. McNihil would’ve despised those sorts of people, even if he’d never worked for the agency. How could you be into something, into it enough that you wanted all you could get of it, and not want to pay for it? Really pay, not in terms of paying lots of money for it, but just making sure that the money went to the right person. The person who’d created it. Written it, composed it, sung it… whatever.
True bastardliness, McNihil had always figured, lay with people-and he’d encountered more than a few of them-who’d shell out nearly the same amount or even more to a pirate, some copyright rip-off specialist, rather than see the same money or even less go to the rightful creator. He’d had a lot of time recently to think about stuff like that, and had started to formulate a general theory of evil, pieced together from those things that he’d just instinctively gotten pissed off about before. The way he saw it now, there were certain people who loved the art-the music, the books, the pictures, whatever it might be-but who actively hated the creators of the same. Hated them from envy, jealousy, spite-from just that gnawing, infuriating sense that the creators could do something they couldn’t, could make something happen on a page or a canvas or with the sequence of one pitched sound after another. The basic criminal mentality says to itself, Why should that person have something that I don’t have? Where’s the justice, the fairness, in that? And thus thievery and vandalism are justified, not only by the brain, but deep in the outraged heart of anyone who can’t get over the notion that he’s not the center of the universe.
So they don’t steal things-McNihil had thought this before-just so they can have them. That would be too simple. When he’d been working for the agency, he’d encountered too many idiots who could’ve easily paid for their stolen desirables. They stole to prove that they could steal, that they had the right to steal. And to punish anyone, particularly the creators, all those smug writers and musicians and artists, all those busy, talented hands and mouths and brains, the possessors of which swaggered around as if God loved them more than those who burned with a righteous envy. To steal from the creators was an act of justified vengeance; it showed them that they couldn’t get away with that infuriating shit. It proved that the books and the music and the paintings and everything else really belonged to the thieves, that it was all theirs by right; in some strange way, the thieves and not the creators had brought it all into being. So it wasn’t really thievery at all, then, was it? It was the returning of stolen property to its rightful owners. Or such was the belief of the thieves, written upon the cracked tablets of their souls.
“Here’s your coffee.”
McNihil heard the voice behind him, and glanced over his shoulder. He saw Turbiner shoving aside a stack of papers on a low table and setting down a nominally washed mug; steam rose from its glistening black contents. Turbiner straightened up somewhat creakily, and headed back into the kitchen area.
“Thanks,” said McNihil. His attention dropped back into present time, into this shuttered space. He’d stopped halfway through unwrapping the package he’d brought for the old man, and had been sightlessly gazing at the crammed bookshelves on the other side of the flat. They stretched from floor to ceiling, running the whole extent of the flat’s longest unbroken wall, and were stuffed with old paperbacks and a few hardbounds. Some of them were Turbiner’s own books, the ones he’d written, including various translations; the rest were the ones that other people had written, that Turbiner had read along the way, that bit by bit he’d constructed the world inside his head from.
Not a particularly nice world, but one that McNihil was comfortable living in. It’d become real for him when he’d had the work done on his eyes, as though the contents of Turbiner’s head and books had seeped out into the larger universe and taken it over. Or maybe it’d been the real world all along, the one that Turbiner and all the writers like him had seen in its true lineaments, and the surgery had merely been an extraction, the removal of some kind of invisible cataracts that had prevented it from being seen in all its dark, annihilating beauty.
He and Turbiner had talked about this before. A little flashback unreeled through McNihil’s brain:
“You see, that’s the way it is, when you’re talking about noir.” Turbiner had been kicking back with the single malt, an inch of Bruichladdich with a stable polymer ice-cube substitute drifting in the glass. “It’s a literature of anxiety. Somebody’s always getting screwed over.”