The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All - By Laird Barron Page 0,134
was adding its two-bits to the conversation.
“Yes, weird indeed,” Michael said, brandishing Poe in a similar manner. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”
“I do hope it’s something new,” I said, choosing to ignore their foolishness. “I keep the paperback of Enemy of Man in the bathroom. I’ve read the thing cover to cover twice.”
“Yes, oh yes, you are in luck, mon frère. L’s written a fresh book of essays, the companion volume to Horror of Being. No one other than his agent has even glimpsed the manuscript, but word is, it’s his masterpiece. Distils fifty-odd years of spleen in one raging spume of a satirical opus. It’s called The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. A howling void of blackness, I imagine.” Michael said that with what I swore was a shiver of delight.
“It’s going to do for the antinatalists what Ron Hubbard did for the whack jobs waiting to be whisked to Yuggoth by the E.Ts,” John said.
Time and space dilated. So did the tavern and the heads of everyone inside. John and Michael were Thanksgiving parade floats tethered to chairs, smugly amused by my agnosticism toward all things L. I would see, I would see…
* * *
The next thing I recalled, we disembarked a subway in Brooklyn and were on the Dr. Seuss-angled steps of the Kremlin Bar that wound and wound and rose and rose from the glittery icy darkness of New York winter’s night to the velvety gloom of interiors that had, in their day, seen a lot of blood from the innards of poets, and booze, and bullet holes. Wood creaked beneath our shoes and brass gleamed here and there between folds of curtains, and the space around the bar was at capacity with an audience that buzzed rather than spoke. A living, breathing, telepathically communing Yin-Yang symbol. Intimate and impersonal as an Arctic starfield. Everything smelled of cigarette smoke and liquor and sweet, sweet perfume, and musk. The golden-green light tasted exactly like the last round of mystery mead we’d shared at the nameless tavern.
I’d been in the business a while, but though I recognized an occasional face such as a genre radio show host and a couple of editors and agents and a handful of local authors, most were strangers to me, seldom glimpsed wildlife that had crept from the forest depths to gather in the sacred glade and listen to Pan wheedle on his recorder by the dark of the moon. Literally the dark of the moon as a glance at my watch confirmed the eclipse John mentioned earlier would be in progress at any moment. I was an interloper, a blasphemer, and I half-expected a torrent of white blood corpuscles to gush forth and consume me as a hostile bacterium.
John and Michael shouldered a path to our reserved spot in a corner beneath a green-gold shaded dragon lamp. Its radiance made our hands glow against the tablecloth. Ellen D, famed editor and hostess of the event, came by and said hello and snapped our pictures and bought us another round in recognition of Jack’s empty seat. I just poured the whiskey straight down my gullet, inured to its puny effects, and waited for whatever was coming, to come.
Tom L was not in evidence yet. His table of honor lay near the burnished wooden podium that had propped up many generations of crazed, catastrophically inebriated authors. The table was tenanted by two women, a blonde and a brunette in slinky sheath dresses, and a man in a slinky turtleneck. The man was handsome and clean-shaven the way one can only get with a straight razor. He reminded me of the actor Jan Michael Vincent during his youth before he socked some chick in the jaw for handing his girlfriend an eight ball at a party and tanked his career. I hadn’t thought of Vincent in ages. I looked sidelong at the women some more and decided they were way out of my league no matter how smashed I might endeavor to get. Both wore long velvet gloves and smoked cigarettes with hoity-toity cigarette holders. Neither wore a Dalmatian puppy stole, but that wouldn’t have surprised me an iota.
“Jumping Josephat, that’s W Lindblad!” John said, rattling his puppets in excitement.
“THE W Lindblad?” I said and rolled my eye.
“Is that Jan Michael Vincent?” a woman stage-whispered.
“No way…OMG! The Puppet Master is in the house! Eeeee!” I heard another woman exclaim.