Who Made Stevie Crye? (13 page)

XXVI

A tapping awakened her
. Overcome with confusion and guilt, Stevie thought: My Exceleriter is typing away.

What if Teddy, whom she had chosen a vile, unnatural method to comfort and reassure, heard the rattling of the machine’s keys and type disc? He would be terrified. They would look at each other in the dark, and their guilt would commingle with their terror, and the night would swallow them just as Jonathan Edwards’s abysmal Puritan hell engorged the souls of the wicked. She would deserve that fate, certainly—but not Teddy, not her son. In a fit of inexplicable self-indulgence and depravity she had seduced him, stolen his virtue and ruined his life.

And now that goddamn Exceleriter was pounding away, clattering, pistoning along like a little wheelless locomotive. Churning out who knew what heat, stench, and cryptic literary pollutants? If not for the lingering distress inflicted upon her by the typewriter’s demonic behavior, she never would have sought to help Teddy by making him the prime victim of their incest. Never. The very idea would have been unthinkable. It would have never—in a billion years—presented itself to her, even as a farfetched, utterly abhorrent possibility.

Tap-tap; tap-tappa-tap.

She would lift the monster from her rolltop, the altar it had made of her oaken desk, and heave it out the window to the sloping, shingled roof of the front porch. From there it would jump to the sidewalk, there to smash upon the concrete into flinders of metal and plastic. Good riddance.

Typewriter? Call it, rather, tripewriter—for that’s what it was, that’s what it
wanted
to be.

Stevie turned to her side and discovered that Teddy was no longer in bed with her. Had the machine already awakened him? Was he standing in her study watching it spin out its elite prevarications? She moved her hand into the spot where Teddy had been and found the sheet as slippery and cold as a slice of refrigerated ham loaf. Then she recalled that that side of her electric blanket had not been on. Two years ago she had placed its puck-shaped control in the bottom drawer of one of her dressers, and had not retrieved it since. Only in the nightmare from which she had just groggily emerged had that side of the blanket been on.

Therefore, glory be to God and her own guardian angel, she had
not
committed incest with Teddy. She had dreamt that abominable sequence of events. Teddy was asleep in his own room—where he had been all evening since their one-sided argument about TV programs and appropriate weekend bedtimes for smart-alecky teen-age boys. Thank God, thank God, thank God . . .

Nevertheless, the machine was still buzzing. Chattering. As deeply as the kids usually slept, it might yet awaken Teddy and Marella. She had to get in there and see what it had done. Must latch her study door and engage the Exceleriter’s demon in single combat.

Stevie rose, donned her frumpy housecoat, and hurried to catch the machine at its illicit labors. She did. Flipped on, the overhead light failed to halt the Exceleriter in midsentence. It continued to type, invisible fingers furiously depressing the visible keys. The taped-together pages that Stevie had inserted in the machine curled endlessly back over the top of her desk, a banner of headlong narrative that even a Jack Kerouac or a Mickey Spillane would have been happy to wave. Although, that same afternoon, she had taken on the typewriter’s demon in a brief bout of stichomythic debate, this sight stupefied Stevie.

“Stop!” she cried.

The Exceleriter paused briefly, paragraphed, and rattled off another two lines of type. Then it stopped.

That the runaway Exceleriter had obeyed her impulsive command Stevie found amazing. Why should it listen to her? If it chose to obey, it did so primarily to demonstrate the paradox that
it
was in control. Its halting on her rattled say-so only served to heighten her feelings of inadequacy and victimization. She was being typed to scorn, jogged like a puppet, and her dominion over the typewriter’s doings depended on its willingness to submit to her word. It had just submitted, but, in appearing to, it had no doubt had ulterior motives. Perhaps it realized that she could be pushed only so far. That if it continued to type line after defiant line, she would break down, pull its plug, and fulfill her vengeful fantasy of tossing the damned thing out a second-story window. Even for a sentient PDE Exceleriter 79, self-preservation was a powerful motive.

Shivering, Stevie approached her desk. She removed the taped pages from the typewriter to see what it had written. Beneath the line of dialogue that, two nights ago, it had attributed to her husband (“If I appeared to give up, Stevie, it was only because it was time for me to pay”), the Exceleriter had skipped a space and centered the Roman numeral XXV.

What did that mean? Twenty-five, of course—but twenty-five what? Chapters? Lines per half-page? Minutes of actual composition time? It looked like a chapter heading, actually—but the Exceleriter had not had time to progress as far as the twenty-fifth structural unit of
any
narrative. Seaton had done his dirty work Wednesday afternoon, but his machine had not begun systematically undermining her sanity until late Thursday. This was early Sunday morning. Although Georges Simenon might be able to write an entire book in three days (were he still alive), her typewriter had worked only in brief bursts. So those Roman numerals embodied a mystery.

One space beneath this mystery, the text of the Exceleriter’s midnight labors began: “Frightened, Stevie sat up in bed. A figure stood in her doorway. She had a hunch, a briefly bloodcurdling intuition, that it had been standing there for a long time. . . .” Single-spaced, the text beneath the Roman numeral covered four and a half sheets of typing paper, all devoted to a convincing transcription of her mother-to-son talk with Teddy and that talk’s vile aftermath. Of course, there had been no talk, there had been no aftermath. Her subconscious had run amok during a particularly loathsome nightmare, and the typewriter had simply reduced that nightmare to the palpable accusations of print. Yes. She stood accused. Incest was not an approved method of initiating one’s issue into the inevitable arcana of sex. Another disquieting thought struck Stevie.

You remembered your dream, she told herself. You awoke from your dream believing that your talk with Teddy, and that other unmentionable stuff, actually happened. You awoke berating yourself for something you had only dreamt, Stevenson Crye, and here you are berating yourself for the absurd crime of merely dreaming that private enormity. The wonder of this episode is not the terrible nature of your dream, but the fact that you awoke with a vivid memory of it. You never remember your dreams. Why, now, do you begin to?

Because the PDE Exceleriter is shaping, coloring, and reinforcing them. Because it wants you to begin to regard yourself as a slave to the animal portions of your own psyche. That’s why it’s a tripewriter. And that’s why you must refuse to let it gain the upper hand.

“Too late,” Stevie murmured. “Too late for that.”

The chapter detailing her nightmare ran into a one-page section preceded by the centered heading, XXVI. This section began, “A tapping awakened her.”

It recounted her confusion upon awakening, her self-recrimination, and finally her discovery of the Exceleriter clattering, pistoning along like a little wheelless locomotive. This chapter—if you could call it a chapter—ended rather abruptly. Its final words were:

“Stop!” she commanded the machine.

The Exceleriter paused briefly, paragraphed, and rattled off another two lines of type. Then it stopped.