“The kid set him off?” the agent’s wife asked. “What do you mean?” But the editor’s face said he would not be drawn; he would talk, but not be questioned.
“I know my side of the story because I lived it,” the magazine editor said. “I’m lucky, too. Damned lucky. It’s an interesting thing about those who try to kill themselves by pointing a gun at their heads and pulling the trigger. You’d think it would be the foolproof method, better than pills or slashing the wrists, but it isn’t. When you shoot yourself in the head, you just can’t tell what’s going to happen. The slug may ricochet off the skull and kill someone else. It may follow the skull’s curve all the way around and come out on the other side. It may lodge in the brain and blind you and leave you alive. One man may shoot himself in the forehead with a.38 and wake up in the hospital. Another may shoot himself in the forehead with a.22 and wake up in hell… if there is such a place. I tend to believe it’s here on earth, possibly in New Jersey.” The writer’s wife laughed rather shrilly.
“The only foolproof suicide method is to step off a very high building, and that’s a way out that only the extraordinarily dedicated ever take. So damned messy, isn’t it?
“But my point is simply this: When you shoot yourself with a flexible bullet, you really don’t know what the outcome is going to be. In my case, I went off a bridge and woke up on a trash-littered embankment with a trucker whapping me on the back and pumping my arms up and down like he had only twenty-four hours to get in shape and he had mistaken me for a rowing machine. For Reg, the bullet was lethal. He… But I’m telling you a story I have no idea if you want to hear.” He looked around at them questioningly in the gathering gloom. The agent and the agent’s wife glanced at each other uncertainly, and the writer’s wife was about to say she thought they’d had enough gloomy talk when her husband said, “I’d like to hear it. If you don’t mind telling it for personal reasons, I mean.”
“I never have told it,” the editor said, “but not for personal reasons. Perhaps I never had the correct listeners.”
“Then tell away,” the writer said.
“Paul—” His wife put her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t you think—”
“Not now, Meg.” The editor said: ‘ ‘The story came in over the transom, and at that time Lagan’s no longer read unsolicited scripts. When they came in, a girl would just put them into return envelopes with a note that said ‘Due to increasing costs and the increasing inability of the editorial staff to cope with a steadily increasing number of submissions, Logon’s no longer reads unsolicited manuscripts. We wish you the best of luck in placing your work elsewhere.’ Isn’t that a lovely bunch of gobblede-gook? It’s not easy to use the word ‘increasing’ three times in one sentence, but they did it.”
“And if there was no return postage, the story went into the wastebasket,” the writer said. “Right?”
“Oh, absolutely. No pity in the naked city.” An odd expression of unease flitted across the writer’s face. It was the expression of a man who is in a tiger pit where dozens of better men have been clawed to pieces. So far this man hasn’t seen a single tiger. But he has a feeling that they are there, and that their claws are still sharp.
“Anyway,” the editor said, taking out his cigarette case, “this story came in, and the girl in the mailroom took it out, paper-clipped the form rejection to the first page, and was getting ready to put it in the return envelope when she glanced at the author’s name. Well, she had read Underworld Figures. That fall, everybody had read it, or was reading it, or was on the library waiting list, or checking the drugstore racks for the paperback.” The writer’s wife, who had seen the momentary unease on her husband’s face, took his hand. He smiled at her. The editor snapped a gold Ronson to his cigarette, and in the growing dark they could all see how haggard his face was—the loose, crocodile-skinned pouches under the eyes, the runneled cheeks, the old man’s jut of chin emerging out of that late-middle-aged face like the prow of a ship. That ship, the writer thought, is called old age. No one particularly wants to cruise on it, but the staterooms are full. The gangholds too, for that matter.
The lighter winked out, and the editor puffed his cigarette meditatively.
“The girl in the mailroom who read that story and passed it on instead of sending it back is now a full editor at G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Her name doesn’t matter; what matters is that on the great graph of life, this girl’s vector crossed Reg Thorpe’s in the mailroom of Lagan’s magazine. Hers was going up and his was going down.
She sent the story to her boss and her boss sent it to me. I read it and loved it. It was really too long, but I could see where he could pare five hundred words off it with no sweat. And that would be plenty.”
“What was it about?” the writer asked.
“You shouldn’t even have to ask,” the editor said. “It fits so beautifully into the total context.”
“About going crazy?”
“Yes, indeed. What’s the first thing they teach you in your first college creative-writing course? Write about what you know. Reg Thorpe knew about going crazy, because he was engaged in going there. The story probably appealed to me because I was also going there. Now you could say—if you were an editor—that the one thing the American reading public doesn’t need foisted on them is another story about Going Mad Stylishly in America, subtopic A, Nobody Talks to Each Other Anymore. A popular theme in twentieth-century literature. All the greats have taken a hack at it and all the hacks have taken an ax to it. But this story was funny. I mean, it was really hilarious.
“I hadn’t read anything like it before and I haven’t since. The closest would be some of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories… and Gatsby. The fellow in Thorpe’s story was going crazy, but he was doing it in a very funny way. You kept grinning, and there were a couple of places in this story—the place where the hero dumps the lime Jell-O on the fat girl’s head is the best—where you laugh right out loud. But they’re jittery laughs, you know. You laugh and then you want to look over your shoulder to see what heard you. The opposing lines of tension in that story were really extraordinary. The more you laughed, the more nervous you got. And the more nervous you got, the more you laughed… right up to the point where the hero goes home from the party given in his honor and kills his wife and baby daughter.”
“What’s the plot?” the agent asked.
“No,” the editor said, “that doesn’t matter. It was just a story about a young man gradually losing his struggle to cope with success. It’s better left vague. A detailed plot synopsis would only be boring. They always are.
“Anyway, I wrote him a letter. It said this: ‘Dear Reg Thorpe, I’ve just read “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” and I think it’s great. I’d like to publish it in Lagan’s early next year, if that fits. Does $800 sound okay?
Payment on acceptance. More or less.’ New paragraph.” The editor indented the evening air with his cigarette.
“The story runs a little long, and I’d like you to shorten it by about five hundred words, if you could. I would settle for a two-hundred-word cut, if it comes to that. We can always drop a cartoon.’ Paragraph. ‘Call, if you want.’ My signature. And off the letter went, to Omaha.”
“And you remember it, word for word like that?” the writer’s wife asked.
“I kept all the correspondence in a special file,” the editor said. “His letters, carbons of mine back. There was quite a stack of it by the end, including three or four pieces of correspondence from Jane Thorpe, his wife.
I’ve read the file over quite often. No good, of course. Trying to understand the flexible bullet is like trying to understand how a Mobius strip can have only one side. That’s just the way things are in this best-of-all-possible worlds. Yes, I know it all word for word, or almost. Some people have the Declaration of Independence by heart.”
“Bet he called you the next day,” the agent said, grinning. “Collect.”
“No, he didn’t call. Shortly after Underworld Figures, Thorpe stopped using the telephone altogether.
His wife told me that. When they moved to Omaha from New York, they didn’t even have a phone put in the new house. He had decided, you see, that the telephone system didn’t really run on electricity but on radium. He thought it was one of the two or three best-kept secrets in the history of the modern world. He claimed—to his wife—that all the radium was responsible for the growing cancer rate, not cigarettes or automobile emissions or industrial pollution. Each telephone had a small radium crystal in the handset, and every time you used the phone, you shot your head full of radiation.”