Writer’s Block
Toni Goodyear
Once upon a time on a dark and stormy night I dreamt I went to Manderley again where someone called me Ishmael and all the knights in the kingdom were…what?
Sitting on the crapper?
Murdering children?
Out raping damsels in distress?
I have no goddamn idea. All I know is here I am again, slogging through the daily torture session, fingers whacking away at the laptop keyboard like some desperate form of masturbation. Hollow words, meaningless crap. My novel still stuck like a dragonfly in mud.
Never mind. Keep going. Don’t analyze, just write.
Stream of consciousness: Shit, shit, shit.
Shit on a shingle…what was that, anyway? Oh yeah, that’s what servicemen in World War II called chipped beef—the hind end of a cow probably—in ugly gray cream sauce served on stale toast. Thirty years later my father was still steamed about it. Once, when they tried to serve it to me in the school cafeteria, I threw up and they had to call my mother to take me home. At least that part was cool.
Maybe fuck is a word that can save me—an entire page of the f-word like a new-world “shazam!,” magically pulling something from nothing, like a rabbit from a hat. Thinking about magic reminds me of my long-dead childhood friend Arnold who grew up to be a Vegas magician and who one day actually disappeared in his twirling cabinet and was never heard from again. That is until his body turned up in a desert canyon with a sign that read Deadbeat Douchebag chained around his neck. But thinking about Arnold doesn’t get me very far with this shitshitshit constipated, deadbeat, no magic, no movement, no hope, no wisdom, no craft, fuckfuckfuck of a novel.
I raise my fingers from the laptop keys and stare out the French doors of my study. So much for stream of consciousness. If I took my paper rantings to a hypnotist would there be a breakthrough? Would some deeply twisted thing slip through the cracks in my writer’s block and straight into my bored mistress of a novel, she who lies there waiting for me to excite and arouse, make her shudder with pleasure?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
My publishers, who keep mumbling about breach of contract if I don’t deliver them Bestseller Number Twelve by next Friday—yes, it’s four months late already—might find it at least mildly amusing that I’m stuck on page six-six-six of this rambling crud-dump of a book, this demon with whom I need to make a new pact. “I’d sell my soul to finish this novel!” I would cry, and in a puff of smoke and he/she/it would be there at my side, whipping a business card out of the air, and voilá, the right words would pour into the keyboard from my curved fingers like they were copper faucets on newly plumbed lines run from endless underground springs, pumps, pumping, pumped.
I need torrents of words. I write spy thrillers that need to be fat enough to sell for eighteen bucks in my paperback-first, signature trade format. And there are other criteria. Things must explode, crash, speed. The violence-drenched plotline must twist and turn like the old Coney Island Cyclone—insatiable suck holes of action are required. Action is college for the kids and filters for that friggin’ swimming pool pump out back, so I must write, write, write. If my old pal Arnold could have pulled money out of hats instead of rabbits he’d still be happily screwing hatcheck girls today.
But it’s not just about money. I’m known, celebrated, somebody. Writing is identity, and my writing is as dead as Arnold. No words, no me. Just terror—and blame. On least on that score I have no confusion; I know exactly who’s to blame. I look past the French doors, past what my wife calls our butterfly garden with its pebbled pathways, cool modern fountains, and riotously colored plants, to the treed fence line that separates my property from my neighbor’s. The sight of his house through the greenery sends a cold shaft of anger up my spine.
Oh, yes. I know damn well who’s to blame.
I hear a click as the door of my study opens. I can tell without looking that my wife, Ellie, has opened it just enough to peer in, checking to see if The Genius can be disturbed. I wave her in without taking my eyes off the yard. A patch of columbine has self-seeded by the base of one of the fountains. Pink bells, willowy.
Ellie comes around behind me and lays her hands on my shoulders. “Having a better day, hon?”
Her voice is quiet, meant to calm.
“The best,” I snap, and she begins to knead. Her touch, loving and gentle, quickly breaks me. I lean my head back against her. “I can’t take this much longer, Ellie. I’ve got to do something about him.”
Instantly, I realize my mistake. I’d meant to say “I’ve got to do something about this,” not “I’ve got to do something about him.” I hold my breath and wait.
Her fingers stop moving. I feel her body stiffen, like it’s pushing back against an ill wind that has suddenly sprung up from a fault line that runs under our house.
“You promised you would never talk about him again. I can’t bear it anymore, Porter. I won’t have it in our lives.”
I swivel my chair around to face her. Her normally rosy cheeks have gone pale and tight in what I call the “the bastard fade,” said bastard being me of course.
She is not finished. “Ted Breen has done nothing to you. This obsession of yours is insane, it has to stop. Our next-door neighbor is not the reason you can’t write.”
I know better than to argue. Especially since she’s right. After weeks of ranting, I had promised not to say another word about the cocksucker next door—ah, a good “c” word.
But that’s all she’s right about. Ted Breen is a demon.
I stand and take her into my arms. Her head drops to my shoulder and I feel the warm, sweet breath of her. A woman worth fighting for.
“I’m sorry, Ellie. I misspoke. I’m so damn frustrated. I’m not crazy and I’m not obsessed with Ted Breen. I’m just a little worried, that’s all.”
“You’re not going to do anything, are you?”
“Of course not. Just venting.”
After a long moment, she raises her head to look at me. She wants so much to believe me. “I’ll make us a couple of brandy alexanders?”
I wipe her tears, manage a smile. “Alexanders would be great. Just another half hour’s work, then I’ll come.”
She nods, but I see the shades of dread in her eyes, the muted terror that her normally rational husband has gone ’round the bend.
“I love you,” she says hopefully.
When Ellie’s gone, I lock the study door and pull my new binoculars from my desk drawer. They’re real beauties from the Bird Store, blue-black 76Z Winstock Premiers with Delimore lenses and 11x70 magnification. (This is the kind of detail you care about when you write spy novels for a living.) With these babies, I can see a blue jay take a dump on a mailman’s head halfway down the street. I fiddle with the focus and stare at the house next door.
Our gated subdivision is typical upscale suburbia. Houses are set on five-acre lots with most of the land to the rear, three-quarters of an acre between Him and Me on my eastern side. Mine is a corner lot. Only one side is exposed to neighbors. We keep a manicured front lawn and enough of a landscaped backyard to hold a slate terrace, pool, and outdoor kitchen and seating area, in addition to the butterfly garden outside my study. The rest of the property we leave natural woodland. A row of newly planted cedars on my land will someday deliver full privacy between Him and Me. For now, we can still see one another through the still smallish trees and a decorative fence of wrought iron and brass.
He often keeps his motorized blinds raised, drapes open. With my binoculars, I can see him moving around inside his house. I can also see into his garage. A row of windows at the top of the garage wall that faces the patio at the rear of the house—what the subdivision marketing material calls “the new, natural-light approach” to garage facilities—lets me monitor movements there as well, lights on and off, car in and out. I can also watch him swimming in his pool, cooking on his grill—the man never stops—filling his garbage cans, raking his leaves. Sometimes I can see the naked women who occasionally share his bed but I’m not interested in watching them. Only Him. I can confirm that at such times he appears totally normal: no tail, no cloven hooves, no raw squirrels for dinner. But we all know how that works. Humans are easy to fool.
He’d certainly fooled me when he first showed up on my doorstep four months ago.
“Hi, my name is Ted Breen,” he’d boomed with a wide, toothy smile, thrusting his hand toward me like it was something he’d learned in “How to Be a Great Guy” class. “I’m the new neighbor moving in next door. I thought I’d start right off annoying you by coming over to borrow something.”
He threw his head back and laughed as if he’d just landed a joke that would’ve made Groucho cream.
Okay, larger than life and not too bright, but probably harmless, I thought dimly. Six-footish, maybe in his fifties, solid, no flab, dusty brown hair, clean cut, square jaw. What Ellie would call “handsome enough not to shoot.”
I smiled and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, Ted. Name’s Porter. Welcome to the neighborhood. That’s a nice-looking house you’ve got there. I’ve always liked it.”
“Got it for a great price. Will Barker and I went to school together.” The Barkers were the previous owners. Nice guy, a CPA, with a sweet wife and three kids. “Hope you’ll come ’round when I’m settled. Have a beer, cook some steaks, maybe solve all the problems of the world.” His grin was infectious.
“Sounds like an idea,” I said.
“I was thrilled when the lady down the block told me my new neighbor is Porter Kitredge, the guy who writes those spy novels. I read your books all the time. They’re great.”
Did I cringe? I don’t know. “Thanks. It’s good to know people enjoy them.”
He continued to grin at me.
I hastened to change the subject. “And what do you do, Ted?”
“Oh, nothing as exciting as you. I’m sort of a cleanup man. I bury bodies.”
This took a beat or two to process—I am, after all, a writer of thrillers. He saw the look on my face and barked another laugh. “I sell coffins for the funeral trade. Housing for dead people. If you want to wipe your hand on your trousers now, go ahead, I won’t be offended. Happens all the time.”
He was right on the money. I did want to wipe my hand. I smiled and shook my head. “Sorry. That seems to be some kind of reflex. Let me lend you something to make up for it.”
“Thought you’d never ask. Just so happens I’m in need of a long-handled tree saw. I want to trim a few branches off that big elm up front and my saw didn’t survive the move.”
“Done,” I said, and stuck my hand out again. This was my redemption move. Show him I’m over it. Unafraid. “Just happen to have one.”
“Done.” He gripped my palm enthusiastically, holding it for a second—or was it two?—longer than he needed to.
It took me three weeks of not writing to realize that was the moment he’d zapped me.
I don’t believe in demons, actually. I don’t believe in spooks. I don’t believe in little green men or great hairy ones for that matter, or that cloned aliens are lunching on lizards in Area 51. I’m a sane, thoughtful, average sort of guy who doesn’t write horror stories or sci-fi and isn’t afraid of the dark. But I know this too: On the physical plane of life there can emerge slits in the fabric of reality, chasms in everyday bedrock, hairline fractures that spread like plague, spider web mazes of compromise. Ellie would say I’m obsessed with identifying the faults at the heart of things. Maybe all writers are.
Ted Breen is one such fault, a fissure I can’t explain—a Jonah, a jinx, a Something Coughed Up from a probabilistic universe of synergies and anti-synergies. From the day we shook hands, my words have been fated to fail like so many idiot sperm heading up a wrong channel after what should have been a pro-creative lay.
And other things have happened, though Ellie would call me mad to say so. Like Breen never failing to dash out of his house with his big Mr. Friendly waves the moment I step into the yard, those giant grins flashing like warning lights. There are repeated invitations to cookouts, steaks and beer, hot dogs and football, all politely declined, so sorry, too busy working. When I try to water my backyard, he sprints to a break in the tree line at the fence and shouts out to stop and chat. Sometimes I can wave him off but sometimes I can’t—he’s quite insistent—and he always tries to put his hand on my arm or shoulder like we’re comrades-in-arms battling the dreaded rye weed, but I stay out of reach. I am not fooled.
I’ve modified my routines. I work in the yard only when his car is gone, retrieve my newspaper only when I’m certain he’s not about. I put my garbage cans out a day early to avoid chance meetings at the curb, and I’ve hung shades on the French doors in my study and all windows facing east. Two months ago, I rented a post office box at the local packaging store to avoid accidental meetings at the mailbox. This worried Ellie a lot, but I told her it was because I want a locked box for general security reasons. It broke my heart to watch her struggling to buy that.
A month ago, she caught me spying. Breen had arrived home at dusk accompanied by two long-legged model-types, one blonde, one brunette, both stunners. He’d let his hair grow long, had it tied back in a kind of pony tail, a baseball cap on his head. I’d doused the lights and pulled the shades in my study, leaving just enough of a peephole for the binoculars to do their work. My heart pounded like a Sousa march; visions of the Witches of Eastwick flooded my mind. Weird book, but a threat that was more believable than most, the simple Power-of-Three focused on One like a needle piercing a voodoo doll.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” Ellie had cried, hitting the lights.
I dropped the shade and the binoculars. She scooped up the latter and stood there with rage and panic distorting her face like in a Dali painting. She had endured my endless ravings but this was something else entirely. I rushed to reassure her. Yes, sweetheart, yes, I would stop this crazy behavior immediately. I would quit obsessing about the neighbor. I would never spy on him again—you keep the spyglasses, hon—nor even mention his name. And yes, yes, certainly, I’d be glad to see a shrink.
That was a month ago. A few days later, driving back from pretending to attend a therapy session, I bought my new Winstock binoculars. They’re a thousand times better than the old ones.
So here I sit again, filling my journal. “Today is the 113th day of NO WRITING, six days to MS DEADLINE, no way found out of the maze.” These benchmarks are noted in caps in the spirit of historical eras, a dying message left behind by an ice-bound explorer on Everest, the final squeaking cry of human courage. To whomever finds this…
I close my laptop. The time has come.
Today is Saturday, and I can tell by the closed-blind stillness of the place that Breen isn’t home. Winds calm, nothing stirring. At three in the afternoon, I watch the mailman wrestle two big manila envelopes into Breen’s mailbox and conclude the oversized box is crammed with mail from the day before. In fact, I hadn’t seen evidence of life since Thursday night after supper, when Breen had dragged his recycling to the curb.
At five, the purple-haired teenager who lives one street over shows up with earbuds in his ears and a cord running down to a shirt pocket. He bobbles his head to what looks like a hard rock beat as he moves Breen’s recycling bin to the back of the house, then rolls out a hose and waters shrubs. Gone for a long weekend? I can’t be sure, but it’s a damn good bet, and I’ve got to take the chance.
I’ll make my move at twilight. Astronomical twilight, that is. Sunset—civil twilight—comes at seven thirty, too risky for my purposes. Nautical twilight, the time of night one gets a star to steer by, isn’t terribly useful for navigating subdivisions. It’s astronomical twilight that brings the darkness that reveals all the heavenly bodies see-able on a given night in a cloudless sky. In our neck of the burbs, this is around ten p.m. Ellie will be out for girls’ night until well after midnight. And what I have to do won’t take long.
I eat a sandwich for dinner, drink a glass of wine, return a phone call to a distant cousin. At ten, I head to my garage, to my small toolbox. I cram a tiny Maglite, a flathead screwdriver, and a small wrench into my pockets.
The route to next door is short and familiar. I have no trouble picking my way to Breen’s property under cover of night, no tell-tale light necessary.
An advantage of McMansion developments from a skullduggery point of view is that while each house has a distinctive look, the infrastructures are identical. I know exactly where to go. On the far side of the rear patio, tucked into the ell formed by the garage wall, is what our subdivision developers call the “Yardman’s Shed,” an attached storage unit just like the one I’ve got at my house. Eleven feet long, nine feet deep, climate controlled, with a sliding door—tight seal, good protection against critters and moisture—that lets lawnmowers, gas grills, and other yard beasts roll easily in and out. Tucked into one corner of the shed is the home’s gas-fired water heater, good to have outside the house in case of leaks.
Most of us in this gated community never bother to lock our sheds. For one thing, there’s no crime here—it’s against HOA rules. And if some disgruntled landscaper did boost a mower or grill, who in this moneyed enclave would need to care?
As expected, Breen’s shed door is unlocked. I enter quietly, slide the door closed behind me, and pull out my little high-intensity Maglite with its tightly focused beam.
Breen’s sleek, stainless steel gas grill—the kind that makes lesser men coo with envy—is already primed with a twenty-pound canister of propane. I see a spare tank inside the cabinet at the bottom of the grill. On the workbench nearby are two more backups. I’m not surprised; I know firsthand that the man makes a vocation of grilling.
What most people don’t know about propane is that it’s heavier than air. If there’s a leak, either from an improperly closed tank valve or a grill knob not fully in the “Off” position, the gas falls to earth and gathers in a deadly cloud at one’s feet. In an enclosed space, the pressure builds and builds. Any electrical event can cause the cloud to spontaneously ignite, with spectacular results. People have had their faces blown off by opening the grill top and hitting the electronic ignition to get started on their Fourth of July hamburgers. On a Philadelphia street, a food truck blew into a thousand pieces, scatter-bombing the neighborhood with hot debris. Twelve people injured, two critically. Cars driving nearby burst into flame from the intensity of the heat. In California, a pickup exploded when the tank in its bed overheated in the sun. A buildup of pressure caused the valve to leak. When the driver tried to tighten it with a wrench, the spark from metal on metal ignited the gas.
These are not freak accidents; about six hundred a year are reported. And when propane blows there’s nothing polite about it. It erupts into a mushroom cloud of flame, at its center a sinister acetylene torch blasting for the sky.
I turn the knob on Breen’s grill ever so slightly toward the open position. That takes care of the tank connected to the grill. I squat to the cabinet below and remove the small wrench from my pocket. I know from my own grill—it’s the suburban-dude’s obligatory apparatus, after all—that a slight twitch of the wrist on a propane tank valve can begin the slow release of gas. For good measure, I twitch the valve on the two reserve canisters on the workbench. We all get our propane tanks from Connors Hardware down the road. Surely, if there was one bad tank valve, there could’ve been more, a kind of a bad-batch phenomenon. Though I expect there will be little left in the way of definitive evidence to worry about. A propane explosion in this shed would soon be joined by the natural gas lines that feed the appliances in our upscale houses.
All I need now is an igniter. I turn my attention next to the water heater. Just above the catch basin at the foot of the heater is the drain valve. I use the screwdriver on the screw in the center of the valve and loosen until I’m rewarded by a steady drip.
I stand up and stretch my back. Cold water will be drawn into the tank as the water level falls. When the water temperature descends far enough, the water heater’s ignition will spark to light the element and make more hot water.
And blow the Writing-Wrecker’s lair to smithereens.
I make my way back across the yard and return my tools to my toolbox. I turn my television to a late-night movie, Home from the Hill—great old flick—and stretch out on the sofa. A part of me wants to be asleep, mostly to avoid Ellie when she comes home. The rest of me wants to stay alert, listening and waiting. Eventually, the adrenalin crash wins. I drift off thinking that Robert Mitchum was our true American male hero, a guy who made John Wayne look like a sissy.
I bolt awake to an infomercial on how to flatten your tummy. Ellie’s purse is on the coffee table. She didn’t wake me, didn’t shut off the TV because she knew the sudden silence would wake me up.
The mantel clock says four-thirty a.m. A little more than two hours until dawn.
I hurry to my study and peer around the shade. Breen’s muted yellow porch light is on.
In my groggy state, I struggle to register this. A porch light? On?
Just outside its glow I see the outline of a car in his driveway.
A car. Holy shit.
Details emerge as my eyes adjust. Breen’s big-ass Hummer.
Oh God. Breen. What’s the bastard doing home?
I dive for my binoculars and wriggle farther under the shade. I see ambient light, dim, in his second-floor bedroom. Either a small lamp—or spillage from the master bathroom?
The master bathroom. Hot showers.
Oh crap.
I get only this far. A rear section of his house, where the garage meets the kitchen, erupts like the launch exhaust of a Saturn V rocket. Flames soar upward and outward, giant storm clouds bursting into the night sky, roaring pillars of fire. Seconds later there’s another explosion, then a third, and half of the house—including Breen’s bedroom—explodes into flame.
Chunks of siding and brick, joists and furniture careen through the night like meteors from hell, flaming debris slamming into my house, crashing onto my roof. The glass doors of the study shatter as the twisted remains of a refrigerator door punch through the wall to the left of me. I cover my head with my arms and run screaming for Ellie.
We spill into our front yard, clinging and sputtering. Neighbors scurry around with flashlights and sirens shatter the night. Soon, fierce halogen lights split the darkness and firemen drag Ellie and me farther away from our house, wrap us in blankets, and deposit us across the street on the front steps of our grandmotherly neighbor, Mrs. Jameson. We submit without protest, staring numbly at the nightmare around us. Smoke and madness blur time and space.
Eventually, someone says they’ve cut off the gas lines, that there’s nothing to do now but wait for the fires to burn out. Breen’s house is still aflame. Ours has been mostly quenched, the damaged third of it red-smoldering, including my study and the guest bedroom suite closest to Breen. The remainder looks oddly unscathed, like a computer graphic not yet finished.
Ellie and I sit silently, covered in soot, patches of hair charred from burning debris. As dawn begins feebly to break through the fog of grey smoke, I can tell there will be very little left of Breen’s house. Very little left, I’m sure, of Breen.
I’d never meant to kill. I’d only meant to drive him away. His existence next door had reduced my writing life to ash, as I’ve now reduced his.
My wife turns her face toward me with the dazed slow-motion of shock. Beyond the unfocused incomprehension that accompanies all tragedy I see something else—a pure, fearful certainty that we both understand must never, ever be named.
“I had nothing to do with this, Ellie,” I say, my tone quiet, even. “You simply must believe that.”
The glazed look retreats further into itself. Slowly—ever so slowly—she dips her head. Once. Yes, it says. That’s exactly what I must do—for as long as I possibly can.
Mrs. Jameson appears with mugs of coffee. She asks again if we want to come inside, use her bathroom, lie on her beds. I again say no, but Ellis accepts. She stands and turns to follow our benefactress.
“Mrs. Jameson,” I say. “Do you have a pad and pen?”
Her surprise at the request quickly segues to an understanding nod. She takes Ellie into the house and returns a moment later with a spiral notebook and a pen. She hands them over wordlessly, then backs away, like an acolyte making an offering to a distant god.
I remove my blanket and take in the destruction around me. I can barely fathom the devastation I’ve wrought. Breen. Two houses. Ellie. Me. Our marriage doomed, our privileged enclave in tatters. And yet…
I take a sip of Mrs. Jameson’s bracing coffee and set the coffee mug down beside me.
As the strengthening rays of morning sun cut their first tentative path through the murk, I open the notebook and begin anew.