Desperation

He spread his legs even wider, bent slightly at the waist, and let go of his penis so he could massage his lower back. He had been told that doing this helped sus tam the flow a little longer, and he had an idea that it did but he knew he would still have to take a leak again long before he got to Austin, which was the next little Nevada shitsplat on the long road to California. His prostate clearly wasn’t what it used to be. When he thought about it these days (which was often), he pictured a bloated creneliated thing that looked like a radiation-baked giant brain in a fifties drive-in horror movie. He should have at checked, he knew that, and not as an isolated event but as part of a complete soup-to-nuts physical.

Of course he should, but hey, it wasn’t as if he were pissing blood or anything, and besides—Well, all right. He was scared, that was the besides There was a lot more to w’hat was wrong with him than just the way his literary reputation had gone slipping through his fingers during the last five years, and quitting the pills and booze hadn’t improved things as he’d hoped. In some ways, quitting had made things worse. The trouble with sobriety, Joh

The lung, why not. He’d smoked two packs of Camels every day for twenty years, then three packs of Camel Lights for another ten, as if smoking Camel Lights was going to fix everything somehow, spruce up his bronchial tubes, polish his trachea, refurbish his poor sludgecaked alveoli. Well, bullshit. He’d been off the cigarettes for ten years now, the light as well as the heavy, but he still wheezed like an old carthorse until at least noon, and sometimes woke himself up coughing in the middle of the night.

Or the stomach! Yeah, why not there. Soft, pink, trusting, the perfect place for disaster to strike. He had been raised in a family of ravenous meat-eaters where medium-rare meant the cook had breathed hard on the steak and the concept of well-done was unknown; he loved hot sauces and hot peppers; he did not believe in fruits and salads unless one was badly constipated; he’d eaten like that his whole fucking life, still ate like that, and would probably go on eating like that until they slammed him into a hospital bed and started feeding him all the right things through a plastic tube.

The brain. Possible. Quite possible. A tumor, or maybe (here was an especially cheerful thought) an unseasonably early case of Alzheimer’s.

The pancreas. Well, that one was fast, at least. Express service, no waiting.

Heart attack”. Cirrhosis. Stroke.

How likely they all sounded! How logical!

In many interviews he had identified himself as a man outraged by death, but that was pretty much the same old big-balls crap he’d been selling throughout his career. He was terrified of death, that was the truth, and as a result of spending his life honing his imagination, he could see it coming from at least four dozen different directions and late at night when he couldn’t sleep, he was apt to see it coming from four dozen different directions at once. Refusing to see the doctor, to have a checkup and let them peek under the hood, would not cause any of those dis-eases to pause in their approach or their feeding upon him—if, indeed, the feeding had already begun—but if he stayed away from the doctors and their devilish machines he wouldn’t have to know. You didn’t have to deal with the monster under the bed or lurking in the corner if—OU 7 never actually turned on the bedroom lights, that was the thing. And what no doctor in the world seemed to know was that, for men like Joh

Including AIDS, he thought, continuing to stare out at the desert. He had tried to be careful—and he didn’t get laid as much as he used to, anyway, that was the painful truth—and he knew that for the last eight or ten months he had been careful, because the blackouts had stopped with the drinking. But in the year before he’d quit, there had been four or five occasions when he had simply awakened next to some anonymous jane. On each of these occasions he had gotten up and gone immediately into the bathroom to check the toilet. Once there had been a used condom floating in there, so that was probably okay. On the other occasions, zilch. Of course he or his friend (his gal-pal, in 7 tabloid-ese) might have flushed it down in the night, but you couldn’t know for sure, could you. Not when you’d progressed to the blackout stage. And AIDS—“That shit gets in there and waits,” he said, then winced as a particularly vicious gust of wind drove a fine sheet of alkali dust against his cheek, his neck, and his hanging 2 organ. This latter had quit doing anything useful at least a full minute ago.

Joh

He was turning around, zipping his fly, talking mostly to keep the megrims away (they had been gathering like vultures just lately, those megrims), and now he stopped doing everything at once.

There was a police-cruiser parked behind his motor-cycle, its blue flashers turning lazily in the hot desert daylight.

It was his first wife who provided Joh

Oh, not his last chance to publish his work; shit, no. He would be able to go on doing that as long as he remained capable of (a) putting words on paper and (b) sending them off to his agent. Once you’d been accepted as a bona fide literary lion, someone would be glad to go on pub-lishing your words even after they had degenerated into self-parody or outright drivel. Joh

No, what Terry gave him wasn’t his last chance to publish, but maybe his last to write something realJy worthwhile, something that would get him noticed again in a positive way. Something that might also sell like crazy… and he could use the money, there was no doubt about that.

Best of all, he didn’t think Terry had the slightest idea of what she had said, which meant he wouldn’t have to share any of the proceeds with her, if proceeds there were. He wouldn’t even have to mention her on the Acknowl-edgements page. if he didn’t want to, but he supposed he probably would. Sobering up had been a terrifying experi—ence in many ways, but it did help a person remember his responsibilities.

He had married Terry when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-one, a junior at Vassar. She had never fin-ished college. They had been married for almost twenty years and during that time she had borne him three chii—2 dren, all grown now. One of them, Bronwyn, still talked to him. The other two… well, if they ever got tired of cutting off their noses to spite their faces, he would be around. He was not by nature a vindictive man.

Terry seemed to know that. After five years during which their only communication had been through law yers, they had begun a cautious dialogue. sometimes by letter, more often by telephone. These communications had been tentative at first, both of them afraid of mines still buried in the ruined city of their affections, but over the years they had become more regular. Terry regarded her famous ex with a kind of stoic, amused interest that he found distressing, somehow—it was not, in his opinion, the sort of attitude an ex—wife was supposed to have for a man who had gone on to become one of the most dis cussed writers of his generation. But she also spoke to him with a straightforward kindness that he found sooth ing, like a cool hand on a hot brow.