The Incredible Letterman

The Incredible Letterman.

Jeremy Goldburg stared reproachfully at the Havana '72 cigar resting
on the polished mahogany desk in front of him. It still wasn't moving.
He rubbed his temples impatiently and wrestled with the problem for
another couple of seconds. A plane the size of a box of matches drifted
across his thoughts, within a cloudless patch of sky in his
brown-tinted office window. If the top of the building swayed 1.74
metres in a moderate breeze then surely everything inside the building
would tilt accordingly. He spun the cigar around to see if it was
tilting the other way - it wasn't.

Goldburg Goldman and Goldwill was the largest publishing house in the
world, it was also the most successful and consequently occupied the
tallest building in town. As the most important person in this most
important publishing company, Jeremy Goldburg quite rightly sat on the
most important floor at the very top of this very high building. This
was the reason why, if the building did indeed tilt, he would surely
notice it the most. Then he would be able to tell all his gaseous peers
about how high his office was and thus how important he was. He gave
the cigar a nudge; he would tell everyone it moved anyway.

Downstairs, in a much smaller office, Joe Goldman opened yet another
unsolicited manuscript sent by yet another undiscovered literary
genius. In reality there were no new manuscripts for Joe, there were no
new stories, no new ideas and absolutely, definitely no undiscovered
literary geniuses. Or so he hoped because he hadn't found any for a
very long time. In the course of his search, Joe Goldman had read it
all; horror, romance, fiction, biography, autobiography from beyond the
grave, autobiography from cyber-animated pets from beyond the grave -
he'd read it all. You could read how much he had read by simply
counting the lines on his face. As he threw this latest manuscript into
his out tray, the furrows in his brow dug deeper like the splits in a
perished rubber toy.

The third partner, Joseph Goldwill, was no longer with them having
retired some years ago to the green oblivion of golf courses in
tree-lined suburbia. Nobody's talents last forever and Joseph missed
his last hole with the disastrous launch of 'She stole my heart'. It
was a quiet little story about a security guard that fell in love with
a female shoplifter, splicing together hours of security footage of her
and leaving cryptic notes on the bottom of items he knew she was going
to steal. It was also time for Joseph to go, and Jeremy and Joe told
him so accordingly; well Jeremy Goldburg did anyway.

That was all history now, Joe pulled another manuscript off the heap.
The furrows in his face deepened. He dropped it in his out tray. At
this point he should perhaps have paused a second and wondered where
all the words and sentences he read ended up. He didn't pause, he
picked up another manuscript and a small vein twitched in the corner of
his temple. A casual onlooker might have ignored that vein, shaped like
the broken point of a beautiful blue arrow, yet if you'd known Joe
before you would know that the vein had only just appeared. Joe dropped
the manuscript onto the heap in his out tray and picked up another one.
Jeremy, Joseph and Joe - they'd once made such as great team; now all
they made was money. Joe flicked the manuscript towards his out tray,
it slipped off the heap and he repositioned it. Every book he'd
launched had succeeded. If he ever launched a 'bargain binner' then
he'd sack himself - no need for Jeremy to call him up to his office for
a quiet cigar and a 'chat'.

Somewhere along the smooth glass phallus of the building, a bird flew
against the window. Jeremy Goldburg heard nothing as he picked up the
phone to make another important phone call. Joe picked up another
manuscript and with it another vein popped up on the side of his head.
If every book he'd published was turned back into trees then you'd have
a forest the size of Belgium; that was what he always told his friends
when they asked him how business was going. These days he didn't have
very many friends though, there wasn't time, business was just too
good. He passed his eye over another manuscript; the eye was possible a
little bigger than it had been before. Joe's eye might even have grown
to resemble the golf ball Joseph was vacuously striking into oblivion
somewhere on a green in the centre of green suburbia. Joseph wasn't
thinking about Joe though; he wasn't thinking about anything because
the Valium he took these days told him not to think about anything. Joe
picked up another manuscript; he registered the title without even
reading it.

He spent longer reading 'Letterman' than he had spent reading the
other manuscripts in the pile. Well, he looked like he was reading but
the strange thing was that his eyes weren't really moving across the
words on the paper in front of him. He turned the first page and began
the second. He found himself reading out loud, 'Letterman pressed his
fingers into the desk. Small splinters of wood danced in the air like
fireflies in summer. Letterman reached upwards and pressed his fingers
into his face below the small blue vein in the shape of a letter 'A'.
He slowly ripped away the skin to reveal his name below. Across the
office words burned themselves into the wall like brands on burning
animal hide. Letterman voiced his thoughts in words for all to read,
"Read me, tease me, hurt and bleed me".

In a lift, moving slowly between the twentieth floor and the
twenty-first, a woman heard a faint noise and looked down. Her legs
instinctively slapped together as she read on the floor between her
feet, "Cooeee I can see you". There was a crash like a falling drum as
a photocopier mechanic, three floors below was crushed as the word
'heavy', in cast iron, fell through the ceiling above him. Letterman
didn't stop. A man eating a sandwich stopped in mid-bite as he felt the
word "Yum" being tattooed across his tongue. A woman sitting at a desk
in finance blushed, as the words "Suck me", appeared in moist letters
across the crotch of a man who went out of his way to walk past and
smile at her. Back in Joe's office, Letterman began shaking and, as he
did so, letters of all kinds and colours and shapes and sizes came
clattering and chattering from his mouth. They fell out so fast, you
couldn't even tell if they spelled out words. A heap began to grow upon
which Letterman rose.

High up, on the thirty-ninth floor, Jeremy Goldburg smiled. The cigar
moved a quarter of an inch. Just wait till he told them this at the
shareholder's function on Friday. He smiled again as the cigar moved
back the other way and then stopped smiling as it rolled off the table.
It hit the ground silently. Letterman stopped spewing letters, belched
and then looked up intently from his raised vantage point a couple of
centimetres beneath Joe's office ceiling. He stared up at a light
fitting angrily as though blaming it for his break in literary flow.
The letters 'D-E-A-D' stamped themselves, in blood, on Jeremy
Goldburg's head as it landed with a thud in the wastepaper bin.