Spider Robinson - Very Bad Deaths

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- Chapter 1

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- Chapter 1

2003

Trembling-on-the-Verge

Heron Island, British Columbia

Canada

I was fifty-four years old the first time a dead person spoke to me. Wouldn't you know it? It was the

wrong one.

To be fair, he did manage to save my life. Just for openers.

I don't actually believe in ghosts. I stopped believing in them even before I stopped believing in the

Catholic church, and that puts it pretty far back. Not that many years after I stopped believing in Santa.

It's just that a few decades later I stopped disbelieving in ghosts, too. My wife Susan told me that when

she was in her mid-twenties, at a time when she was awake and not under the influence of drugs, her

dead father appeared to her. She said he asked for her forgiveness, and she gave it.

I never knew Susan to tell a lie unless it was to spare someone's feelings, and she had fewer delusions

than just about anyone else I ever met. She had been dead herself for five years now, and I still hadn't

given up hoping to hear from her. She didn't need my forgiveness, and I'd had all I was ever going to

have of hers, and like I said I didn't believe in ghosts. But still I hoped. So I guess I still didn't entirely

disbelieve in them either.

It was about the time they are traditionally reputed to appear, too, somewhere between three and four in

the morning. Despite the hour, I was, as Susan had been for her own visitation, wide awake and not

under the influence of drugs unless you're enough of a purist to count coffee or marijuana.

This was normal for me. All my life I've been a night owl, and now I had a job that allowed me to get

away with it, and with Susan gone and our son Jesse on the other side of the planet there was absolutely

no reason not to do so. I write an opinion column called "The Fifth Horseman" that runs twice a week in

The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, so basically I think hard for a living. What better

time to do that than the middle of the night, when there's nothing on TV and nothing that isn't mellow on

the radio, nobody comes to the door, the phone doesn't ring, and nobody anywhere in earshot is using a

chainsaw, swinging a hammer, practicing an electric guitar or riding a motorcycle?

And what better place than my office? It's a small outbuilding that was originally a pottery studio, well-

heated, soundproof enough to permit me to scream obscenities in the small hours if that's what the job

calls for, though that's less important now that I live alone. The noisiest thing in it is my hard drive. It

sits a whole six steps away from the house—overgrown cabin, really—which, now that's Susan's not

living in it anymore, is basically just the place my coffee and food come from and go back to, and where

I spend the daylight hours in a coffin of my native earth. The noisiest things in the house are the furnace,

fridge compressor and cat. House and office sit together on a secluded bluff at the end of a long tire-

killing pair of ruts that wind through thick woods, in an out of the way corner of an island that's forty

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minutes by ferry from North America, and contains a bit over two thousand permanent residents, two

sidewalks, and not a single street light or traffic light. The noisiest thing on it in the middle of a

weeknight is generally an owl, or a cat in love with mine.

Given this unusual tranquility, stillness and peace, this near-perfect opportunity for contemplation and

reflection, naturally I play a lot of music. Jazz and blues CDs, mostly. Sometimes I sing along.

Contemplation needs a little challenge, the way cookies need a little salt.

All things considered, I have an ideal existence for someone of my temperament and tastes.

That night, however, the stillness and quiet were lost on me.

That night nothing, anywhere, had any salt, or any other flavor. I wasn't writing a column, or trying to,

or even trying to dream up an idea for one. I wasn't surfing the web, for either research or amusement. I

wasn't reading. The walls of the office were almost totally obscured by a couple of thousand cherished

books; not one contained a line I wished to reread. I wasn't even listening to music. Nearly 300 CDs lay

within arm's reach; not one of them held a single track I wanted to hear. The telephone hanging on the

wall beside my desk connected me directly to everyone else on the planet; I could think of none who

were any use to me.

I was no longer trying to decide whether to kill myself—only how and how soon.

A perfect life without Susan in it simply hurt too much to bear. I had been denying that for over a year

now, waiting doggedly for the pain to recede to a tolerable level. By now I knew it was never going to

recede at all, even a little. Maybe there are no good deaths, I don't know. I know Susan had one of the

bad ones.

I estimated I had at most another day or two in me.

It would call for a bit of cunning. The only thing left I could possibly give my son Jesse that he would

accept from me was my life insurance benefit—and there was an antisuicide clause. So it would have to

look like an accident. I was going over a short list of three finalist methods, weighing their respective

pluses and minuses, when the knock on the door startled me so badly I backhanded a cup of coffee clear

off the warming plate and onto the floor.

An unexpected knock in the dead of night is alarming even if you have a clean conscience—or so I

imagine. I had my brain do a hasty search for Things This Could Be That Wouldn't Be Catastrophic. By

the time it reported failure, a small pipe and a gray plastic film can had been rendered temporarily

invisible, and I was up out of my chair, halfway to the office door, and my fist was unobtrusively

wrapped around the trackball of my TurboMouse, a solid plastic sphere about the size and weight of a

cueball. I can only wonder what organ directed all these actions, since my brain was fully occupied in

the fruitless search for harmless explanations. Spinal cord, maybe.

Silly, isn't it? I was planning my suicide . . . and ready to kill in self defense. No wonder humans own

the planet.

The knock came again as I reached the door. It was depressingly loud and firm. I could think of perhaps

a dozen acquaintances or neighbors who might conceivably bang on my door in the small hours, but any

of them would have done so softly, apologetically. They are, after all, all Canadians. There was a short

list of maybe four friends who might feel entitled to whang away that assertively at that hour, secure in

the certainty that I would be both awake and willing to fuck off for a while. But for one reason and

another I was fairly certain none of them could be on-island just now.

That left only discouraging possibilities. A raid of some kind. Someone bringing the news that a loved

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- Chapter 1

one was dead or badly hurt. A neighbor who wanted to tell me my house was on fire. The first home

invader in the history of Heron Island.

Number four was a joke; we did have a full-time RCMP officer on the island, Corporal McKenzie, but

he'd never made an arrest. Numbers two or three would be bad news, but the kind I would want to open

my door to. It was number one that had me hesitating at the threshold.

I had little to fear from a legitimate police raid. Nothing, really, except annoyance and brief indignity.

My house and office were always scrupulously free of any seditious, proscribed or obscene materials,

My hard drive never contained anything remotely questionable whose encryption I did not trust

absolutely. And the contents of the little gray plastic film can, while outstanding in quality, were of a

quantity nobody could reasonably call anything but personal use. By a cheapskate. If part of your job

description is pissing off the powerful in the public prints, you're wise to keep a tight ship at all times.

But one of the things this knock might be was a mistake. Heron Island is about half an hour from

Vancouver. The drug squad, a right bunch of cowboys, loved to make surprise busts. The trouble was,

they were notorious fuckups. You probably read about the time they kicked in the wrong door, and the

20-year-old college student inside was unwise enough to be caught with a TV remote control in his hand

that, in a certain light, looked not too much unlike some sort of Martian weapon; he had to be killed to

ensure the safety of the officers. Who then learned that the guy they actually wanted lived next door, or

rather, used to; he had moved six months earlier. If you missed that story, you must have heard about the

squad that crashed their way into a house they had been surveilling continuously for days, were startled

to find a child's birthday party in progress inside, and were forced to blow the family watchdog into

hamburger, in front of a room full of horrified kids and terrified parents, for trying to protect them.

There turned out to be no drugs or drug users present.

In both cases, an internal inquiry totally exonerated the cops of any improper actions.

If, thanks to some totally typical typo, it was those guys out there knocking on my door, I definitely did

not want to open it with a weapon in my hand, even one as low tech as a plastic trackball.

But what if—as seemed more likely—it was some sort of nutbar out there? An insomniac Jehovah's

Witless, say, or a tourist ripped on acid. Or a belligerent drunk, or the new boyfriend of an old girlfriend

in search of karmic balance. In that case it might be better if I didn't, literally, drop the ball. I'm skinny,

frail, and no fighter: any edge at all was welcome.

Most likely of all, of course, was the secret nightmare of any opinion columnist bright enough to get

published: the disgruntled reader who decides to make his rebuttal in person, with a utensil. There is no

opinion you could conceivably express, however innocuous, that won't piss off somebody, somewhere.

It was comforting to be in Canada, where there are almost no handguns, despite everything the

government can do to keep them out.

But that didn't mean that the guy who was even now knocking on my door for the third time wasn't

doing so with the butt of a shotgun. Or the hilt of a butcher knife, the sweet spot of a Louisville Slugger,

the handle of an axe, or for that matter the tip of a chainsaw. Maybe, I thought, I should forget my silly

trackball and start thinking in terms of turning my half-liter can of Zippo fluid into a squeeze-operated

flamethrower, or some speaker wire into a noose, or—

"Owww," whoever it was out there said. "Cut it out."

The voice was muffled; I could hear it at all only because he was speaking loudly. And the words were

baffling, when I'd thought myself as confused as possible already. Cut it out? I was standing still, frozen

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- Chapter 1

with indecision—what the hell was it I was supposed to stop doing?

"Being so paranoid," he called.

I stood, if possible, stiller. A comedy voice, somewhere between Michael Jackson and a Mel Blanc

cartoon character.

"You didn't used to be so suspicious."

That voice tickled at the edges of memory. Deep memory. Twenty years? No. It felt like more. Thirty,

maybe. Which would make it—

Oh wow. The trackball fell forgotten from my hand to the carpet. I opened my mouth—and hesitated,

caught by a ridiculous dilemma. I thought I knew who he was, now . . . and for the life of me I couldn't

recall his real name. Just what everybody used to call him, and I certainly wasn't about to use that. But

screw names—how could it possibly be him out there? I wanted to fling open the door, and couldn't

bring myself to touch the knob.

"It's me, all right, Slim."

I stepped back a pace. For the first time I began to wonder whether I was having my own first encounter

with a dead person, like Susan's visit from her father.

"You didn't used to be this superstitious, either," he said.

My words sounded stupid to me even as they were leaving my mouth, but I couldn't seem to hold them

back. "How do I know that's you?"

Silence for five seconds. Then: "You never did the Bunny. But you would have."

I gasped, and flipped on the outside light and flung open the door, and gaped like the cartoon character

he sounded like, and still faintly resembled.

"Smelly," I cried. "Jesus Christ, you are alive."

No question it was him. He looked much the same, only balder—but far more significant, he smelled

just as unbelievably, unforgettably horrible as ever. My eyes began to water.

"I wish I could say the same for you," he said. "My god, you're at the end of your rope."

I felt I should be offended, but couldn't work up the energy. "How the hell could you possibly know

that?" I demanded. "You just fucking got here."

He frowned and shook his head. "I'm going to have to fix you, first. And there's no time. But you're no

use to me like this."

"Why would I want to be of use to you? Do I owe you something I'm not remembering? Look—" His

name came back. "Look, Zandor, I ain't broken, and even if I was, I didn't ask to be fixed."

"I don't care. I need you to help me prevent the torture, rape and butchery of an entire family," he said,

and stepped into my office.

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Framed

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- Chapter 2

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file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Nieuwe%20map/074348861X___2.htm (1 of 6)24-12-2006 1:50:07

- Chapter 2

Flashback: 1967

St. William Joseph College

Olympia, New York

USA

I felt like the Wandering Catholic.

Wandering Apostate, anyway. Wandering around the campus on the first Sunday of September 1967 and

of my sophomore year, looking for my room. It wasn't where it was supposed to be. Or rather, it was

where it was supposed to be, Dabland Hall, room 220—but there were two other guys' names on its

door. And two guys with those names inside, already unpacked, totally uninterested in my dilemma.

As I said, it was Sunday. There was no one anywhere on campus to consult. And nothing for it but to

wander the whole dorm, squinting at the 3x5 index card on every single damn door, looking for one that

read Russell Walker/Sean McSorley. The only consolation was looking forward to seeing Sean, knowing

what a meal he would make of this screwup. His sense of humor was almost Krassnerian. I knew he

would have me laughing.

My faith wavered when I finished the whole dorm without finding either of our names.

Could I have missed a card? Certainly. Did I want to recanvass the building for it? Not a whole lot.

Sighing deeply, I checked on my VW—still not broken into, still packed to the consistency of a rubber

brick with my stuff—and trudged uphill to the other men's dorm, Nalligan Hall.

I never did find a card with my name or Sean's. But on the third floor, near the front, I found a door with

no card. Instead there was an envelope affixed to it with scotch tape, and my name, only, was written in

ink on the envelope.

I pulled the envelope off the door, leaving a scotch tape tail, and tried the knob. Locked. The envelope

contained no keys. Just a brief note:

Dear Russell,

Please report to me before checking into your room. Your situation has changed.

Cordially yours,

Ivan Lefors,

Resident Advisor

Room 345

What the hell did that mean? Nothing pleasant, I suspected. My instincts have always been good.

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- Chapter 2

"Sean's been drafted," Lefors told me.

"Oh shit."

He nodded. "That's exactly right." He was way too old to be in college. His bearing, his haircut, his

dress, his room, everything screamed that he had, in the immediate past, been in one of the armed forces.

I correctly assumed Vietnam. "He failed one too many courses last year, and last week the draft board

pulled his deferment."

"Oh, the poor bastard—"

He nodded again.

"You don't understand," I said. "I hate to see anybody get shot at. But this is like they drafted Oscar

Levant."

He looked pained, but said nothing.

Does it seem strange to you that I heard the news that way, that Sean didn't phone me? This was a long

time ago. You wouldn't believe what long distance cost, back then. Sean had doubtless written me the

news; for all I knew the letter was even now being delivered to my parents' house back in New Jersey.

I wanted to cry. Sean in the jungle was as unimaginable as Mr. Rogers buying smack. After a while I

said, "So what happens now? Is there, like, a list of guys in the same boat, that I get to select a new

roommate from?"

Now he looked constipated.

"Actually," he said reluctantly, "he's already been selected."

"The hell he has."

This time he looked nauseous. "Look, Russ, I'm going to ask you to help me out, here."

Now I started feeling nauseous. Any time the administration asks your help, it's time to change your

name and move to someplace with no extradition. "Yeah? How?"

"I've looked over your record. You're an unusually tolerant man, do you know that?"

"As a matter of fact I do. Right now, I'm tolerating being dicked around when I should be unpacking in

my new room . . . somewhere."

"The school needs an unusually tolerant man, just now," he said, ignoring my sarcasm. "I'm hoping

you're that man."

I thought I saw light in the undergrowth. "Oh my God. They actually admitted a sixth Negro?"

He paled. "Uh, no."

I snorted. "Sorry—I got carried away there for a minute." Out of a student population approaching a

thousand, exactly five students were black. All male. That's another clue how long ago this was.

"No, this is in regard to a student who's already enrolled here."

"Then what's this about—"

I broke off, blinded. The undergrowth had suddenly burst into flame.

"Jesus Christ. You want me to room with that crazy Serbo-Croatian. With Smelly, That's it, isn't it?"

He had gone from pale to brick red. "With Zandor Zudenigo, yes."

"Son of a bitch," I said. I couldn't even ask why me. He had already told me.

Zandor Zudenigo was a campus legend, and deserved to be. Not for his mathematical talent, which was

rumored to be better than first rate, nor for his striking ugliness, which was of clock-stopping magnitude,

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- Chapter 2

nor even for his habit of wandering around the campus in pajamas, mumbling to himself and writing on

an invisible blackboard. These things, by themselves, would have made him a colorful campus

character, a figure of fun, a kind of mascot. But what promoted him from risible eccentric to worldclass

whackadoo and hopeless outcast was his smell.

No. "Smell" doesn't begin to touch it. Even "stench" is inadequate. Another word is needed. Perhaps

"reek," or "miasma," or possibly "fetor." You could have planted beans in his body odor. Some said it

would show up on radar. Paint discolored as he walked past. Flies dropped from the sky behind him.

This elicited plenty of reaction, of course. But Smelly did not seem to realize it. If someone asked him

why he didn't bathe, he simply stared, blank-faced, waiting for them to say something. If someone

became offended enough to scream at him, he literally failed to notice, didn't even flinch. If someone got

mad and punched him, he didn't seem to notice that, either: simply waited for the blows to stop, and then

walked away as if nothing had happened. Or if necessary crawled.

Hell, in his way, the guy was as weird as I was.

"Okay," I said. "What's our goddam room number?"

It was a pleasure, watching Lefors's jaw drop.

How can I begin to convey to you just how long ago this was?

The Beatles were still together. They would always be together. They'd just performed "All You Need is

Love" and "Hey Jude," live for the whole world, that July. Forget Altamont—Woodstock hadn't

happened yet. Brian Epstein was dead, but Brian Jones was still alive. So was Che Guevara.

There was not a single footprint on the moon, and most adults believed there never would be. All

educated people knew that the Cold War would, in our lifetimes, culminate in an apocalyptic nuclear

exchange that would sterilize the planet. Some of us railed against it, some fought to prevent it, some

accepted it, but none of us doubted it. Nobody, I mean nobody, anywhere, would have thought it

conceivable that the Soviet Union might ever simply . . . stop. It wasn't possible enough to be the

premise of a science fiction story.

Bobby and Rev. Dr. King were both still alive. Charlie Company had not saved My Lai. LBJ was

president, and it was unimaginable that he would not run again. Nobody knew that Chicago cops were

vicious thugs and Mayor Daley was a monster except black people who lived in Chicago. Paul Krassner

had not yet coined the term "Yippies" for the people who would go there to protest the war.

You could smoke a cigarette just about anywhere except church or schoolroom. Nobody realized they

minded it yet, and the dread dangers of sidestream smoke had not yet been faked. You could smoke on

an airplane. No—here's how long ago it was: you could buy a plane ticket under any name you liked,

with cash, and board without showing ID or passing a metal detector. The term "terrorist" was not yet

commonly heard outside Israel.

That's how long ago it was for the world. Here's how long ago it was for me:

I was entering my sophomore year at St. William Joseph, a Catholic college run by the Marianite order

in Olympia, a medium-sized town in northern New York State. Only my third year as a free human

being. My parents still believed I was a Catholic. And a virgin.

I could still count my lovers on the fingers of one hand . . . and give the peace sign at the same time. I

had been drinking alcohol for a little less than a year, smoking pot for six months. I'd never taken any

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other drug, and didn't expect to.

I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be a lawyer, an English teacher, or an anarchist. One of those.

Long time ago.

Maybe this will convey something. I basically had only two heros, at that time. Ed Sodakis, and Paul

Krassner.

You've probably heard of Krassner. Youngest violinist ever to play Carnegie Hall, at age 6 . . . Lenny

Bruce's roommate, uncredited editor of his autobiography . . . took acid with Groucho Marx. Publisher

since 1958 of The Realist, an underground satirical journal dedicated to outraging as many people as

possible, ideally to apoplexy.

He had in fact just that summer pulled off what was probably his greatest prank. A writer named

Manchester had written a controversial book about the Kennedy clan, and their lawyers had managed to

force the deletion of a few chapters before publication. The Realist ran a piece purporting to be some of

the suppressed material. A dazed Jackie Kennedy is wandering around the plane, in search of a

bathroom where she can wipe her husband's blood from her, when she opens the wrong door . . . and

finds LBJ having carnal knowledge of the corpse, in an apparent attempt to make an entry wound look

like an exit wound . . .

It's probably hard to imagine now, but back then if you merely said—in print—that the president of the

United States had sex with the corpses of his enemies, some people got all upset. A shitstorm of rage

descended on Krassner. There was some talk of having him nuked. He spent the next year on the lecture

circuit, unapologetically reminding audience after outraged audience: "Who are we to judge? It may

have been an act of love."

Anyway, that was one of my heros. The other was Ed Sodakis. Him I don't think you know.

In the Catholic all-boys high school Ed and I had attended, you were required to receive Holy

Communion with the rest of your homeroom at Friday afternoon Mass. That meant that most of us spent

Friday morning lined up for Confession. Terminal boredom, with the prospect of humiliation at the end

of it, the only consolation being that the humiliation would be about as private as possible.

One particular Friday, the apprehension level spiked. A new priest, Father Anderson, had recently

rejoined the faculty, after several years as a missionary in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Rumor made the place

sound worse than the Walled City of Hong Kong. Father Anderson himself looked just terrifying, bald

and hatchet-faced, never smiling, with thunderclap eyebrows. Nobody wanted to get on his line for

Confession, that morning; a Brother had to assign guys to it. Ed Sodakis was one of them. Until that day

he had been, in the judgment of one and all, student and teacher alike, just another asshole. He had no

particular rep, one way or another.

Then he stepped into Father Anderson's confessional, and became immortal.

Outside all went on as before; that is, nothing whatsoever went on. Pin-drop silence. Totally bored

adolescent males fiddled with their neckties and silently struggled to think of anything interesting

besides sexual fantasies, and of course there was nothing. Sound of grate sliding shut. The light above

the left-hand side of the confessional went out. A student pushed aside the heavy curtain and exited,

trying not to look relieved, and failing. Sound of a noisier grate sliding open on the right side. Silence

resumed, for thirty eternal seconds . . . then was shattered by the voice of Father Anderson. He screamed

so loud he required a full chest of air for each word.

"You . . . did . . . WHAT?"

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