The Bargain

Fame had become like a spotlight that bleached everything that was human about him. In the dark of the old Victorian house, he saw his reflection through the rain-pattered window. The rain had been incessant for what seemed like weeks.

“You’re early” Eldred declared

“I’m rarely late” He countered from the shadow

“My editor is waiting for my final manuscript due tomorrow” he said as he tapped his pipe in the ashtray.

“He’s the one who may have to wait. You thought you cheated me. You wrote the contract yourself remember? You were willing to lie, steal even to murder for a chance to be read. You summoned me, every word every syllable under the guise of ambition”

“I need just a little more time”

“How ironic, your title “Die Happy” will be remembered as anything but”

His voice measured and muffled by the sound of the rain hammering on windows that echoed off the hard wood floors. Fame and happiness can be like friends or acquaintances. In this case they were not. They were exclusive to one another.

Eldred lit the candle on his desk as his shape cast a longer shadow as he spoke.

“I gave you the words, the very ideas that people believed who you were. Now it’s time for you to pay what is due me, what you so generously offered, your friends, your joy, yourself”

Eldred tried to speak, his throat full of the same pause he had as a child when he was accused of stealing that Captain Hook Pez Dispenser. Eldred again tried, to utter a sound, his voice slipping away evaporating like smoke from his Elder wood pipe.

“You wanted fame and fortune as an author of fables, fiction of the imagination, of books. You wanted every word burned and etched into the minds of your readers, your fans. “Let my name outlive me” saying “I offer my soul to you, in return for me to die happy.”

He had written over twenty short stories and was working on a novel. He sold fewer copies on his first self-published book than it cost to fill up that old 1978 Chevy Blazer with a tank of gas. Rejection emails filled his inbox. One editor had sent a rejection in two words: Competent. Soulless. That night, high on spite, anger and chain smoking, Eldred did what every failed writer eventually does: He got drunk. Drunk on cheap whiskey. Sometimes the forlorn, such as Eldred make pacts. The devil, if he even existed, would be left holding an empty contract. Eldred joked as he signed his name. Blood was irrelevant to him but not to the notary.

“Done,” Eldred mumbled.

At first his unhappiness was ordinary: the fear of the blank page was like of a debt collector, akin to the fear of taxes and bankruptcy. Eldred wrote anyway. Night after night the words became easier; then by weeks end, he kept that payment, the tariff of the taxman at bay. Soon it became fluid. Dialogue flew by in hours. Words in weeks. A month passed and scenes, prose, and character development were all second nature. Becoming effortless, finally the words were perfect.

The following morning in his inbox was a message from a New York agent named Lucien Deville who had “found” his manuscript in the slush rejection pile. Deville had devoured his writing and made it known that it was one of the best stories in recent memory. Giving him the compliment that he, Eldred, could become one of the Titans of this generation. He was offered a substantial and healthy contract. The advance he had been given was already spent. Within six months that novel, The Hermits Tomb, sat atop every bestseller list. Critics called it a masterpiece of dystopian psychological dread. Within three years he had three more books, each darker, each more celebrated than the last. Readers and critics alike praised his eloquence and insight.

Eldred himself felt nothing.

He attended his own book signings wearing his trademark cardigan sweater and smoking his Faulkner like pipe. He donned the smile of a man who didn’t recognize his own face as if contorted or misplaced. The few friends he had had drifted away. Lovers, lasted weeks, if that. They complained he watched them as though he was taking notes for one of his paragraphs, his chapters, his novels. He told interviewers he had never been happier. Fortune was now an iron chain. He would grow rich and recognized, then simply be happy to outlast the bargain.

He enjoyed making reservations at the toniest Michelin star restaurants in town with just his name, Eldred. One of his favorites, Chez Lafitte would reserve his white starched cloth table on their upper level with its own private curtain. Surveying the plebeian diners, like a Ceasar at the Colosseum with fork and knife in hand. He especially was fond of the brinier Atlantic oysters over the sweeter Pacific ones. It really didn’t matter as he relished both filter feeders. But his true obsession was for the rarer live sea urchin, eating its four “tongues” while the creature was still alive. He would take dates there; runway models, actresses or artists but soon would become bored by their company, having to order another courtesan with a different hair or eye color. Like ordering another appetizer of Morell mushrooms with butter and Tarragon and then Shitake mushrooms or foie gras. Sometimes he would dine with Lucien Deville or another courting publisher. But mostly he dined alone.

Money arrived in his bank account in buckets from book sales and copyrights derived from Film and Theater Royalties. He finally bought a brand-new black Toyota Tundra with all the bells and whistles. He parked it in his three-car garage to go along with his red 2022 Lamborghini Countach LPI 800 and that old Chevy truck rusting away that he promised he would refurbish one day. He installed an elevator in the remodeled and updated old Victorian telling himself he had won “The Bargain” He toyed with the idea of writing travel blogs as his book tours and vacations took him around the globe. A trap and skeet trip upstate, skiing in Squaw Valley. Partying at his newly purchased cabin on Lake Tahoe. He laughed while popping another bottle of champagne on the Miami beach deco hotel but concluded why? Why write more? He was enjoying his jet-setting life, albeit alone.

The clause in fine print slowly began eroding his brand. It started to be eaten away like termites in rotten wood.

The lie tasted like pure poison.

The doctor said the tumor was inoperable, three months, perhaps six. Eldred snickered to himself in the sterile brick office. Six months. He would die before the clause could be satisfied. The devil had been outmaneuvered after all.

He went home and tried to write his final book. The one that would expose the “bargain” a story so clever it would absolve him. Nothing came to him. Lucian Deville called demanding to find out where the new transcripts were in accordance to their publishing agreement. He threatened to abrogate the contract, having not received even a written word. The pages stayed blank. He turned his phone off. For the first time in a decade his mind was silent. The voice that had dictated bestsellers was gone. He had forgotten and lost all ability, capability and the capacity to write. His deftness to recall any of his wit and sarcasm had all but vanished. He sank down in the old worn leather chair that smelled like rawhide and paramnesia. He tried focusing on the computer screen that was planted on a carved mahogany desk that cost more than the childhood bungalow where he had been raised by his grandmother. This was to be the last testament for Eldred, the boy who had written secret stories under the covers with a flashlight. The young man who once cried at births and anniversaries no longer felt any emotions. His mind and soul was empty.

He had become the book. A tragic character written on faded vellum. That someone who no longer existed. Nothing else remained but vacant hollow recollections. Isolated solitary memories of loneliness.

On the night his doctors had predicted would be his last, Eldred sat once again alone in that Victorian house. Watching the storm clouds devour the sun, it started to rain once again. The pain in his head was now like a white fire seen through a welder’s mask. He poured a final glass of the whiskey he could no longer taste and waited for the shadow to come collect a soul it had never truly owned but leased.

Footsteps crossed the room behind him. Slow. Familiar. Unwanted.

Eldred did not turn to see the face, eyes like wet ink in the glass’s reflection. He stared instead at the stranger in the glass, searching for the boy who had once believed stories could save him. There was only the bestselling author, dying rich and unread by the only person who had ever mattered.

“You’re early.”

“I’m never late. Did you really think a soul could be carved out so cleanly without the body noticing?

“But I only needed…”

“Needed what? Please don’t begin to prevaricate, hoping to buy more time”

“If only…”

“Only? You sold your life in installments. Fame was the down payment. Your own Identity was the monthly note. Your soul was the balloon payment due at the end. The bargain was always the part of you that wanted to be immortal more than it wanted to be human. To be just a man. To be happy.”

He leaned in slowly until their foreheads almost touched the cold glass.

On the desk lay the final manuscript, finished in a single night. Its title page bore no author’s name, only a single line written in the same blood he had used a decade earlier:

How Man Loses Himself.