VI
The next day, even with Marella back in school and the Exceleriter in perfect repair, Stevie’s work did not go well. She typed the first paragraph of her book proposal for the Briar Patch Press at least seven times, screwing words into and out of the tangle of her sentences as if she were testing Christmas tree bulbs and finding nearly every one of them either forlornly lackluster or completely burnt-out. Nothing seemed to work. Her proposal had no intellectual festiveness. Whoever ultimately tried to read it would conclude by tossing the whole shebang into a wastebasket.
“Yippee,” said Stevie. “What fun.”
She rolled her seventh clean sheet of paper into the machine, stopped about midway down its length, and typed a string of abusive upper-case epithets at herself:
CALL YOURSELF A WRITER, STEVIE CRYE? YOURE AN INCOMPETENT HACK WHO CANT HACK IT. A GRUB, A DRUDGE, A DULLARD, A PENNY*A*POPPER. YOU HEARD ME, A PAUPER. AND NO WONDER, POOPSIE. ALL YOUR BEAUTIFUL THOUGHTS BANG DOWN ON PAPER BELLOWING THE STENCHFUL STIFFNESS OF BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT!!!
Stevie banged the on/off key with the side of her hand and yanked the page out. She could not unclog her brain. This string of alliterative raillery represented her most productive burst of the morning. If only she could achieve such fluency typing news stories and feature columns . . . and, yes, book proposals. Some writers could just let their fingers fly, but she . . . well, she could not unclog her brain. Shitting bricks, Ted had called this kind of labor, but he had always stayed with the struggle until victoriously spent.
It’s the typewriter, Stevie suddenly thought. Typewriters are passé.
This thought amused her. She knew she was rationalizing her failure to get going, using the typewriter as a scapegoat—but, at the moment, the rationalization, irrational as it was, appealed to her. She threw away her last botched proposal page, along with its codicil of free-associational abuse, and left her desk.
At the discolored Dearborn heater, she warmed her back, her hands clasped behind her, her eyes fixed on the recalcitrant instrument of her stuckness. It worked perfectly, but it also frustrated her every effort to overcome her block. It exuded a smug fractiousness. It grinned a bleak analphabetical grin. It withheld the words it had an innate power—yea, obligation—to surrender.
“Typewriters are passé,” Stevie informed the machine.
Over the last few years, lots of writers—some of them only mildly affluent—had begun using word processors, computer systems with display consoles and printer hookups. The Ledger newsroom in Columbus, which Stevie occasionally visited to discuss free-lance assignments with the managing editor, now had more video consoles than typewriters. Reporters could emend their copy by deleting errors, opening up their texts for insertions, moving entire paragraphs from one place to another, all without recourse to strikeovers, ballpoint pens, Liquid Paper, or flaky little tabs of Ko-Rec-Type. Word processors willy-nilly permitted a writer to overcome blocks and increase production. Although these nifty systems now cost about three thousand dollars (at least), you could take investment and depreciation write-offs and so bid a tearless permanent farewell to your typewriter. Stevie envisioned a day when only die-hard sentimentalists and penniless beginners would sit down at their Remingtons, Royals, Smith-Coronas, and PDE Exceleriters. These poor benighted souls would seem as backward and disadvantaged as a court stenographer with a Venus No. 2 lead pencil. And that day was probably not far off.
A fantasy. Stevie did not really believe that a word processor would solve her problem. She was stuck. Whether working with a goose-quill nub or an Apple computer, she would be just as stuck. Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Trollope—all the great Victorian novelists—they had never even seen a typewriter, much less the blank unblinking eye of a word processor, and yet they had produced staggering quantities of work, some of it brilliant. Her problem was not technological, it was emotional and mental.
I’m stuck, damn it, I’m stuck. And I’m stuck because I don’t have any confidence in this stupid proposal. It’s a dumb idea for a dumb book, and no matter how I dress it up or attempt to prettify it, it’s going to remain a dumb idea. A word processor could not possibly play ’Enry ’Iggins to my illiterate Eliza Doolittle of an idea.
Or could it?
Stevie returned to her Exceleriter, rolled in a clean sheet of paper, and imagined the touch of a single button lifting several paragraphs of text out of the machine’s (nonexistent) random-access memory. Another touch and an instance of muddy diction gave way to just the right word. Yet another and the sequence of her arguments rearranged itself in a truly forceful pattern. Her basic idea was not at fault—think of all the dumb ideas that had giggled or panted their way to bestsellerdom—but rather her presentation of it, and she was having trouble with its presentation precisely because this damn machine had no reliable capability for error correction. A word processor would supply that lack.
Impatiently Stevie jabbed the on/off control and let her fingers speak her disillusionment:
TYPEWRITERS ARE PASSE.
The Exceleriter had no key for accent marks, and the word passé looked funny to her without the necessary diacritical symbol. (Did the keyboards of word processors have this symbol? She did not know.) Stevie advanced the paper and tried to think of a synonym that would not require an accent mark. It took her only a moment.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBSOLESCENT.
There. That was very good. Happy with this choice, Stevie typed the sentence twice more, releasing much of the anxiety occasioned by her block. What a gas, belittling the heretofore unhelpful Exceleriter through its own stupid instrumentality.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBSOLESCENT.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBSOLESCENT.
Of course it was a foolish rationalization, but it was also a form of therapy, and, by indulging herself, maybe she could coax herself back into a productive frame of mind. Scapegoating an innocent typewriter made more sense than going after the president of Pantronics Data Equipment with a .22-caliber Röhm RG-14. And no one need ever know, either.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OB
Blaaaaaht! protested the PDE Exceleriter 79. The noise horrified Stevie. Reflexively she lifted her hands from the keyboard and gripped her shoulders. Before she could untangle herself to turn the machine off, however, the type disc reeled off eight more letters and a period without her even touching the Exceleriter. She stared at the result.
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT.
Omnipotent, it undoubtedly meant. The mechanical hangup—the brief Bronx cheer—had not taken place quickly enough for the machine to substitute the requisite m for the b left over from obsolescent. In fact, the Exceleriter had failed to demonstrate its assertion. What it had done, though, afflicted Stevie with an incredulous fear and curiosity. It had typed several letters by itself, and it had somehow typed them in a meaningful sequence. The letters refuted her own self-serving claim and held the implicit promise of an even wider power. No typewriter could perform such a feat without prior programming, of course, but she had just seen it happen.
“No, you didn’t,” Stevie said aloud. “You saw no such thing.”
The pleasant low-level purr of the Exceleriter seemed to confirm this assessment. It was eerie, though, and Stevie shut the machine off. The declaration on her paper—TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT—did not disappear with the hum. It stuck around, a ridiculous joke and a threat. An accident, surely, with a subconscious impetus.
What had happened, Stevie realized, was that she had quickly and inadvertently typed NIPOTENT just before the type disc’s noisy revolt and the machine had printed out these letters after the element righted itself. The Exceleriter had only seemed to be operating independently of her control. As for that particular sequence of letters, it embodied a sardonic Freudian gloss on her failure to get going this morning. She was tweaking herself for her pride, her indecisiveness, her readiness to elude responsibility.
Or maybe the space heater had used up so much of the oxygen in her little room that she had hallucinated the entire episode. Don Willingham at Barclay Builders Supply had advised her to vent the heater, but Stevie had resisted because of the inconvenience and expense. Maybe, though, the propane fumes and the depletion of oxygen in her upstairs study had combined to play tricks on her mind. Had she really heard that raspberry? Had she really seen the type disc spin out those last eight strident letters by itself?
Whether she had or hadn’t, the fact of what she, or it, had written would brook no disbelief. It was there to touch and look at, twenty-some bright, black characters, a graffito as perplexing and impersonal as a scrawled obscenity. What I have written, Stevie thought, I have written:
TYPEWRITERS ARE OBNIPOTENT.