Prayers to Broken Stones

A Game of Life and Death

“You begin, Willi, dear,” said Nina. “You go first.” She was leaning forward, and her blue eyes seemed very bright. “I’ve been wondering since I saw the Strangler interviewed on
Sixty Minutes.
He
was
yours, Willi?”

“Ja, ja,
he was mine. He was the gardener of a neighbor of mine. I left him alive so that the police could question him. He will hang himself in his cell next month. But this is more interesting. Look at this.” Willi slid across several glossy black-and-white photographs. The NBC executive had murdered the five members of his family and drowned a visiting soap-opera actress in his pool. He had then stabbed himself repeatedly and written 50
SHARE
in blood on the wall of the bathhouse.

“I think it should receive points for irony,” Willi said. “The girl had been scheduled to drown on the program. It was already in the script.”

“Did you have to repeat the contact?”

Willi frowned at me.
“Ja, ja,
I saw him twice more.”

“Points for irony,” said Nina. “But you lose points for repeated contact. What else do you have?”

He had his usual assortment. Pathetic skid-row murders. Two domestic slayings. A highway collision that turned into a fatal shooting. “I was in the crowd,” said Willi. “I made contact. He had a gun in the glove compartment.”

When he was finished, the three of us went through the ritual of assigning points. Willi went from being sullen to expansive to sullen again. His eyes were small, red embers in a bloody mask.

“Forty-one,” said Nina at last and showed the calculator. “I count forty-one points. It’s your turn, Melanie.”

Books by Dan Simmons

CARRION COMFORT
CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT
THE FALL OF HYPERION
HYPERION
PHASES OF GRAVITY
PRAYERS TO BROKEN STONES
SONG OF KALI
SUMMER OF NIGHT
SUMMER SKETCHES

Then the time comes when it is clear nothing new or important will be done; and one draws out the ledger and begins to itemize what there is, of value, that can be offered to posterity. And here a good deed, and there an act of courage; during this year one worthy story was told, during that decade involvement in an important social movement. If there are babies, that is logged in. If there are books, they are noted. Loving friends. Wives and husbands. Kindness to small animals. A hill bearing your name. But the laurels you counted on, they’ve turned to dust.

Cultural amnesia. Yesterday is buried. Who ever heard of Crispus Attucks or Edward Yashinsky, Bettie Page or Wendell Willkie, Preacher Roe or Memphis Minnie Douglas? Seven people in all the world remember them. Just you and I, and five others.

It is certain no one will remember, when I am gone, that I was a man who first published Lenny Bruce; that I saved two hundred acres of watershed land from developers; that I once singlehandedly caught a car thief and on another occasion deduced the identity of a cat burglar and was instrumental in his capture; that I corresponded with the mysterious B. Traven and published his first book of short stories; that it was I who manipulated Mystery Writers of America into paying authors and editors who contributed to their anthologies.

These things are important to me; but when I go … that they ever happened will pass from the world. The awards won, the escapades mythologized, the love spent so unwisely … it all grows clouded in the mirror, and the mirror is covered with a white sheet, and the ancient furniture is stored away, and one night when it gets cold the old furniture is broken up for kindling. Then who is to say what was important when this one lived, or that one made his mark?

In the ocean of time it is merest chance that saves the handful from oblivion.

It is my ever growing sense that of all the chances thrown to me, lifelines in the ocean of time, that my best chunk of flotsam is that I discovered Dan Simmons.

Oh, yes, that’s the correct word. I
discovered
him.

There is a wonderful record album that Stan Freberg put together, titled
The United States of America
(Volume One: The Early Years). And one of the shticks on that album has Columbus meeting some Indians on the beach, and he tells them, “I’ve found you!” To which they reply, “We weren’t lost.
We
knew we were here.” So Columbus amends his declaration and says, “Well, at least I discovered you here on the beach,” and they kind of agree that it’s pretty dopey, but what the hell.

In much the same way I
discovered
Dan Simmons. All pink and cranky, there on the beach.

It is a story worth telling, for there is an important lesson to be learned from this bit of incidental literary history. And if I set it down, posterity may take note.

The catalyst was Ed Bryant, now a close friend of Dan’s, but unknown to him at the time. Ed and I had been chums for a long stretch; I suppose that’s why I allowed him to enlist me as one of the visiting authors to the Colorado Mountain College “Writers’ Conference in the Rockies.” It was the summer of 1981, it was hot and moist, and I dreaded having to workshop the stories of a group of aspiring authors who seemed more dilettante than the talented people I’d worked with at various Clarion conferences.

The physical set-up of the workshop sessions was hardly conducive to establishing rapport with the students: it was a stuffy classroom, with tablet-top chairs; the uncomfortable, hard-seat kind you suffered with in the third grade. Arranged in rows. There was a step-up platform where the “instructor” sat, facing the assemblage. From on high, one supposes, words of auctorial wisdom were intended to shower down on the groundlings.